<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1_2x-new.png 2x" alt="1" width="37" />The People Who&rsquo;d Vote on War
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> If events in Iran spiral into a larger conflict, it&rsquo;s Congress that must vote to authorize war.
By now you&rsquo;re aware of the U.S.-Israeli airstrikes over the weekend that reportedly took out Iran&rsquo;s supreme leader and dozens of senior commanders &mdash; a dramatic escalation that&rsquo;s now spread throughout the Middle East.
That said, the Constitution is unmistakeable: Both the House and the Senate would have to pass an authorization before any prolonged conflict became formal war. That&rsquo;s the system.
Cold comfort, considering the &ldquo;incorruptibility&rdquo; of our elected representatives.
Take Rep. Kevin Hern (OK-R), for instance. On Jan. 22, 2026, he filed paperwork revealing he&rsquo;d sold up to $500,000 of UnitedHealth stock. Three days later, UNH crashed 20% after the Trump administration proposed slashing Medicare Advantage payment rates.
The timing was, as one headline put it, &ldquo;super suspicious.&rdquo; The transaction date? Dec. 23, 2025 &mdash; a month before the disclosure, meaning Hern actually missed the January rally. Still, the optics were bad enough to make news.
Tracking congressional stock trading has now become one of America&rsquo;s least favorite pastimes. Every filing brings a fresh round of questions.
While much of the attention focuses on stocks and suspicious timing, in the case of Rep. Ilhan Omar (MN-D), an equally interesting story lies in the sprawling ecosystem of LLCs, venture capital and business valuations that populate these financial forms.
Particularly when valuations balloon overnight.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2_2x-new.png 2x" alt="2" width="37" />Rose Lake Capital and the Phantom Winery
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> In May 2025, Rep. Ilhan Omar filed her annual financial disclosure for 2024. Among the listed assets: Rose Lake Capital LLC, valued between $5 million and $25 million. 
This represented a dramatic increase from the previous year's filing, which listed the same company between $1 and $1,000.
Congressional disclosure forms report assets in ranges rather than exact figures, but even using the most conservative math &mdash; $5 million compared to $1,000 &mdash; that's a 500,000% increase in a single year.
Rose Lake Capital is co-owned by Omar&rsquo;s husband, Tim Mynett, and his longtime business partner Will Hailer. The firm&rsquo;s website describes it as focused on &ldquo;unique global opportunities&hellip; in more than 80 countries working across business, politics, banking and diplomacy.&rdquo;
The site once listed an impressive roster of employees, including a former ambassador to Bahrain. But as scrutiny intensified in late 2024 and 2025, the company scrubbed its website of team members&rsquo; names and biographies.
Here&rsquo;s where the numbers get interesting. In June 2024, court filings claimed Rose Lake Capital had a bank balance of $42.44. Six months later, the same firm would be valued up to $25 million on Omar&rsquo;s disclosure form.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> The second major asset on Omar&rsquo;s disclosure is eStCru LLC, a California winery. Its reported valuation: $1&ndash;5 million in 2024, up from $15,000&ndash;50,000 the previous year.
According to reporting by the Minnesota Reformer and Rhode Island Current, the winery has a truly bizarre origin story.
Mynett and Hailer had been paid in grapes by a former political consulting client (more on that in a moment). The business partners hired a Sonoma winemaker and sought investors for a wine venture.
In fall 2021, D.C. restaurant owner Naeem Mohd was approached with what seemed like an incredible opportunity. Invest $300,000, the pitch went, and receive $900,000 back in just 18 months &mdash; a 200% return. If payment was late, 10% monthly interest would accrue.
Mohd was advised by attorney Faisal Gill, himself a Democratic political operative who previously worked with Mynett on campaigns for Minnesota&rsquo;s Attorney General Keith Ellison. On Gill&rsquo;s advice, Mohd wired the funds.
&ldquo;I trusted Tim,&rdquo; Gill told the Rhode Island Current. &ldquo;If it was not for Tim, the deal would have never happened.&rdquo;
Eighteen months came and went. Mohd eventually received his $300,000 principal back &mdash; about a month late &mdash; but no profits, no interest. He filed a lawsuit in California seeking at least $780,000, claiming the pair &ldquo;fraudulently misrepresented&hellip; that eStCru LLC was a legitimate company.&rdquo;
Mynett and Hailer denied wrongdoing. Hailer blamed pandemic woes, telling the Minnesota Reformer: &ldquo;EStCru LLC like many wineries is living invoice to invoice, sale to sale to stay afloat given the economic conditions of the industry.&rdquo;
Yet somehow, between 2023 and 2024, this invoice-to-invoice operation apparently increased in value by at least 20-fold, depending on which ends of the disclosure range you use.
Today, the winery&rsquo;s website shows no functioning purchase portal. Its last social media post dates to January 2023. The listed phone number doesn&rsquo;t work. The intellectual property is reportedly for sale.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3_2x-new.png 2x" alt="3" width="37" />A Sordid Pattern Emerges
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Before Rose Lake Capital and eStCru winery, there was the E Street Group &mdash; a political consulting firm Mynett co-founded with Hailer in 2018. The firm&rsquo;s website consisted of a single landing page and accepted new clients only by referral.
During the 2019&ndash;2020 election cycle, Ilhan Omar&rsquo;s congressional campaign paid E Street Group $2.78 million, making the firm the campaign&rsquo;s second-largest recipient of funds, behind only the Minnesota Democratic Party.
The spending was legal. But it drew scrutiny because of who was being paid, how much and when.
In August 2019 &mdash; while the payments were ongoing &mdash; Mynett&rsquo;s then-wife filed for divorce, alleging that he was having an affair with Omar. Both denied the allegation, but they married in March 2020, shortly after finalizing their divorces.
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) &mdash; the independent agency that enforces U.S. campaign-finance law &mdash; reviewed complaints alleging the payments improperly mixed campaign and personal expenses. The agency ultimately found no legal violations.
After the 2020 election, Omar severed all campaign ties with the E Street Group. Even so, the episode left lingering questions about optics and Omar&rsquo;s judgment.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Tim Mynett is Omar&rsquo;s third legal husband. But her marital history has been the subject of extensive reporting and investigation, though many key facts remain disputed or unproven.
<ul>
<li>In 2002, Omar religiously married Ahmed Abdisalan Hirsi (not legally). They had two children but separated in 2008 and obtained a religious divorce</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>In 2009, she legally married Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, a British citizen. They separated in 2011</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Omar reunited with Hirsi in 2012 and had a third child</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>She divorced Elmi in 2017, then legally married Hirsi in 2018</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>She filed for divorce from Hirsi in 2019 and married Mynett in 2020.</li>
</ul>
The most explosive allegation &mdash; that Omar married Elmi, who some claim is her brother, to commit immigration fraud &mdash; has been investigated by multiple outlets. None found rock-solid proof.
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Omar&rsquo;s hometown newspaper, spent months investigating, ultimately reporting it &ldquo;could neither conclusively confirm nor rebut the allegation.&rdquo;
Much of the evidence was sourced from social media posts that were subsequently deleted. Screen grabs exist, but verification has proven impossible. Plus, Somalia &mdash; Omar&rsquo;s birthplace &mdash; had limited government record-keeping during the civil war era, making definitive proof elusive in either direction.
What is documented&hellip;
In 2019, Minnesota&rsquo;s Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board found that Omar filed joint tax returns in 2014 and 2015 with Hirsi &mdash; while she was legally married to Elmi &mdash; a violation that resulted in a reimbursement around $3,500 to her campaign committee, plus a $500 penalty.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4_2x-new.png 2x" alt="4" width="37" />Minneapolis and Net-Worth Controversies
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Allegations against Omar don&rsquo;t exist in a vacuum. Minnesota &mdash; and Minneapolis specifically &mdash; has been rocked by revelations of massive fraud recently, especially involving state and federal programs.
The &ldquo;Feeding Our Future&rdquo; scandal, centered in Minneapolis&rsquo; Somali community, allegedly defrauded federal child nutrition programs of approximately $250 million during the COVID-19 pandemic. Federal prosecutors have described it as one of the largest pandemic fraud schemes in the nation.
Though Omar did sponsor the MEALS Act of 2020, which temporarily eased oversight rules on school meal programs, there&rsquo;s no evidence Omar knew of or profited from the subsequent fraud.
FBI Director Kash Patel has called the $250 million child nutrition fraud &ldquo;the tip of the iceberg.&rdquo; State and federal authorities estimate potential losses across various Minnesota fraud schemes could exceed $9 billion. Much of this involves child care assistance fraud, Medicaid fraud and pandemic relief fraud.
Omar has faced criticism for her response &mdash; or lack thereof &mdash; to the fraud revelations, particularly given that much of it occurred in her district.
Her defenders note she&rsquo;s not accused of any connection to these schemes. Her critics argue that as the representative for the affected communities, she should be demanding accountability.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Last month, President Trump claimed on Truth Social that federal investigators were &ldquo;looking at&rdquo; Omar&rsquo;s finances, suggesting her net worth had reached $30&ndash;44 million. The number spread quickly &mdash; and, in all likelihood, inaccurately.
That rough figure comes from adding the maximum disclosed values of the two businesses tied to her husband: Rose Lake Capital (up to $25 million) and eStCru winery (up to $5 million).
When Omar entered Congress in 2019, it should be noted, she reported a negative net worth, largely due to student loans and other debts.
Today? Quiver Quantitative, which aggregates congressional disclosures, places Omar&rsquo;s net worth over $18 million. That figure isn&rsquo;t definitive, but it highlights the real issue &mdash; the public is left guessing.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/3FSKXnmd0c1pBH7oLckajL/02d1f9fe9e84ca4e06d25e57ba3ea0ec/FMF-Issue-030226_1_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" /> Courtesy: Quiver Quantitative
Omar&rsquo;s office says her husband, Tim Mynett, is one of several partners in his business ventures, meaning his actual stake could be far smaller than the headline valuations suggest. But the disclosures don&rsquo;t say how much he owns. No percentages. No clarity.
That omission isn&rsquo;t illegal.
But other members of Congress, including Reps. Cory Mills and Suzan DelBene, routinely disclose exact ownership stakes in closely held businesses. Omar does not. The result is a filing that complies with the letter of the law while frustrating its supposed purpose: transparency.
At the same time, Omar&rsquo;s congressional salary &mdash; $174,000 a year &mdash; does not explain the appearance of eight-figure household wealth on its own.
That gap isn&rsquo;t proof of wrongdoing. But it does warrant explanation.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5_2x-new.png 2x" alt="5" width="37" />The Accountability Question
Lawmakers are allowed to trade stocks. They&rsquo;re allowed to hold private businesses. And they&rsquo;re allowed to report those interests in vague ranges and move on.
If they get caught late filing, they pay a fine smaller than some dinner receipts and keep going. That&rsquo;s not a real deterrent.
Kevin Hern&rsquo;s UnitedHealth trade wasn&rsquo;t transparent. It came to light because the STOCK Act (2012) forced disclosure &mdash; weeks later and after the trade was already done.
Ilhan Omar&rsquo;s disclosures present a different problem. Not necessarily suspicious timing, but suspicious opacity. Companies that appear dormant on paper suddenly carry multimillion-dollar valuations. Ownership stakes aren&rsquo;t specified. Numbers jump, but explanations don&rsquo;t follow.
The public is left squinting at paperwork that technically complies with the rules while failing to answer the obvious questions.
Congress, meanwhile, likes to tell itself that disclosure equals accountability. It doesn&rsquo;t. Disclosure without enforcement is theater. 
The paper trail is there. What&rsquo;s missing is a system that insists on straight answers &mdash; and hard consequences.
P.S. In case you&rsquo;re wondering how Rep. Ilhan Omar might vote, if the matter&rsquo;s brought before Congress:
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/1q5NWUn8rvkAueqIHsKOpT/3958db153a8b3ef3a4cfd2f48b210962/FMF-Issue-030226_2_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
It&rsquo;s also fair to point out that Iran and Somalia have two very different historical interpretations of the Islamic faith. In Iran, the dominant branch of Islam is Twelver Shia &mdash; the state religion for centuries &mdash; whereas in Somalia almost the entire population adheres to Sunni Islam.
On less metaphysical matters, the market is rebounding at the time of writing. The S&amp;P 500 (+0.10%) and Nasdaq (+0.40%) have flipped into green territory. And the Big Board&rsquo;s just a fraction of a percent in the red.
Predictably, the price of crude&rsquo;s up 5% to $70.45 for a barrel of WTI. While silver&rsquo;s getting slammed &mdash; down 5.50% to $88 &mdash; gold is up 1.25% to $5,314.50 per ounce.
As for crypto, it&rsquo;s taking news from the Middle East in stride. Bitcoin&rsquo;s up 5.75%, approaching $70K; Ethereum&rsquo;s bounced 6% to $2,035.

FMF-Issue-030226(Featured)

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Paradigm Pressroom’s 5 Bullets is a daily e-letter covering the economy and the markets, reaching 120,000 paying subscribers of the renowned financial publishing firm Paradigm Press.

Paradigm Pressroom's 5 Bullets

The War Vote Roster

<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1_2x-new.png 2x" alt="1" width="37" />It Was Four Years Ago&hellip;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> We neglected to note a crucial anniversary yesterday in the annals of the U.S. dollar&rsquo;s demise as the world reserve currency.
On Saturday, Feb. 26, 2022, Joe Biden announced what were touted as &ldquo;crippling&rdquo; economic sanctions against Russia. The Russian invasion of Ukraine began two days earlier.
Washington froze the dollar-based assets held by Russia&rsquo;s central bank &mdash; $300 billion worth. The &ldquo;thinking,&rdquo; if that&rsquo;s what you want to call it, is that the move would put sand in the gears of Moscow&rsquo;s war machine. Biden bragged that &ldquo;the ruble is almost immediately reduced to rubble.&rdquo;
&ldquo;Joe Biden crossed a critical red line on Saturday and the world will never be the same,&rdquo; our Jim Rickards said in this space the following Monday. Already, he knew the score&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/1pxNQYZQh5tAkbZAjXbT3h/168644122300c5594f02fa6e14dad7c9/FMF-Issue-02-27-26_1_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
For the next 12 months, the Biden administration and the corporate media gaslighted the American public about how Ukraine was totally winning and Russia was on its last legs.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> But on the one-year anniversary, the mainstream had to bow to the inevitable: &ldquo;How Biden&rsquo;s Shock-and-Awe Tactic Is Failing to Stop Russia,&rdquo; was Bloomberg&rsquo;s headline.
&ldquo;Sanctions have inflicted damage, but they haven&rsquo;t induced Putin to stop the war &mdash; raising wider questions about a tool that&rsquo;s become increasingly central to U.S. foreign policy.&rdquo;
Russia&rsquo;s economy shrank in 2022 &mdash; but not by nearly as much as Western economists guessed. From there it went on to experience a wartime boom &mdash; notching a higher GDP growth rate than the United States.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> And it wasn&rsquo;t just about Russia: The moment the sanctions were imposed, dozens of governments around the world on less-than-friendly terms in Washington began wondering Are we next?
And they acted accordingly &mdash; trying to get out from under the thumb of the U.S. dollar.
The dollar&rsquo;s share of global currency reserves took an unprecedented one-year drop &mdash; from 55% in 2021 to just 47% in 2022.
A one-year drop of eight percentage points is &ldquo;equivalent to 10 times the average annual pace of erosion in the USD's market share in the prior years," said a report from Eurizon SLJ Asset Management. Eurizon&rsquo;s researchers attribute the plunge to Washington&rsquo;s &ldquo;exceptional actions&rdquo; against Moscow.
On the flip side, global central banks began accelerating gold &mdash; an asset that, as Jim Rickards always reminds us, &ldquo;cannot be stolen, frozen or seized provided it is in safe storage.&rdquo;
The jump in this chart that began in 2022? There&rsquo;s no coincidence. The number was down in 2025, but still way higher than any year before 2022.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/5fQUOsNqW6owQCkV4nmqBf/ec2efdbd0ebf0622b70204b9ce2adc56/FMF-Issue-02-27-26_2_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
This buying will keep a floor under the gold price for years to come. (More about the gold price&rsquo;s near-term prospects in Bullet No. 2.)
Sometime in the 21st century the dollar will lose its role as the globe&rsquo;s reserve currency &mdash; as the British pound did in the 20th century, the French franc in the 19th, the Dutch guilder in the 18th and so on.
The best defense will likely be&hellip; gold. Certainly that&rsquo;s been the case so far in the dollar&rsquo;s slow-motion dethronement.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2_2x-new.png 2x" alt="2" width="37" />Another Week, Another Gold Milestone?
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Gold is on track for another record weekly close &mdash; up $46 as we write to $5,229.
Interesting pattern here &mdash; a potential close over $5,200 this week, after a close over $5,100 last week and a close over $5,000 the week before.
That&rsquo;s bullish. Even a close over $6,166 at day&rsquo;s end would be bullish according to analysts who pay heed to Fibonacci numbers.
Silver is screaming higher &mdash; well past that $90 barrier we&rsquo;ve been watching all month. At last check the bid is up over $5 to $93.44.
And the mining stocks are inching still higher into record territory, the HUI index approaching 970.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> As for the stock market as a whole, it&rsquo;s another red day on top of yesterday&rsquo;s post-earnings letdown from Nvidia.
The S&amp;P 500 is down 0.6% to 6,866. The Nasdaq&rsquo;s losses are steeper, the Dow&rsquo;s steeper still. Bloomberg is trying to chalk it up to &ldquo;persisting concerns about an AI bubble&rdquo; &mdash; but if that were the case the Dow would be holding up better than the tech-heavy Nasdaq.
Among the big movers today is Netflix &mdash; up 12% on relief that the company is backing out of its proposed takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent of HBO and CNN among other assets.
<a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/sorry-no-usd20k-pickup-truck-for-you#2">We said in early December</a> this blockbuster deal might never come about. It was evident the Trump administration favored a rival takeover bid by Paramount Skydance. PSKY kept raising its hostile bid to a point where yesterday WBD said the offer was superior to that of Netflix.
Game over. Now the Ellison family will control CNN and CBS News and TikTok &mdash; every one of those acquisitions the result of government pressure. Very healthy for civic discourse in our country!
PSKY shares are rallying even harder than NFLX &mdash; up 22% as we write. WBD is down 2%.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> The big economic number today is an inflation reading that came in hotter than expected. The producer price index jumped 0.5% last month, while the typical Wall Street economist figured on 0.3%.
Assuming wholesale prices feed through to the retail level, that means a coming uptick in consumer inflation. As such, futures traders assign only a 50-50 likelihood the Federal Reserve will cut short-term interest rates before midyear.
➢ Lest we forget, the latest crypto rally had no staying power: Bitcoin is back under $66,000 and Ethereum has sunk well below $2,000.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3_2x-new.png 2x" alt="3" width="37" />Don&rsquo;t Try This at Home
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> In another instance of traders hedging their bets against a U.S. attack on Iran while markets are closed this weekend, crude is up $1.54 to $66.75.
Iran&rsquo;s foreign minister says yesterday&rsquo;s U.S.-Iran talks in Switzerland &ldquo;made very good progress&rdquo; and more talks are in the works next week. The only headline news from the Middle East today is the State Department authorizing the departure of nonemergency government personnel from Israel.
Any reaction in the oil price to a U.S. attack will be sharp &mdash; but potentially short-lived, says Paradigm trading pro Enrique Abeyta.
Consider Russia moving into Ukraine four years ago: &ldquo;Despite sanctions and hostilities, Russian oil continued flowing to global markets, often at discounted prices.
&ldquo;Prices may spike initially, but they often settle once traders assess actual supply disruptions rather than worst-case scenarios.&rdquo;
Ditto for the impact on the stock market: &ldquo;Stocks did fall sharply at first,&rdquo; Enrique says of events in 2022. &ldquo;Within months, however, many major indexes had recovered a significant portion of their losses.&rdquo;
Looking forward, &ldquo;the key question for long-term investors is not whether volatility will rise for a few days. It&rsquo;s whether the event changes the long-term trajectory of corporate earnings and economic growth.
&ldquo;In most historical cases, the answer has been no.&rdquo;
And it&rsquo;s hard to trade around short-term volatility: &ldquo;These trades are complex. They require precise timing and a deep understanding of options pricing.
&ldquo;For most investors, trying to trade around geopolitical headlines is more likely to cause stress than generate profits.&rdquo;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4_2x-new.png 2x" alt="4" width="37" />Cuckoo Cocoa Prices
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> The wholesale price of cocoa has collapsed. Your retail price of chocolate will be slow to follow suit.
Cocoa futures traded under $3,500 per metric ton all the way from 1980 up until 2022. They soared beginning in 2023 and went vertical in early 2024.
It was supply and demand at work: Extreme weather and widespread crop disease hit cocoa farms in West Africa hard. Now crop yields are rebounding, sending prices down 68% &mdash; approaching pre-2022 levels.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/6f9ZChvEi9PWxOavm7Gb9T/aae22f2993bdd315213d17f3f0c418fb/FMF-Issue-02-27-26_3_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
But don&rsquo;t expect the price of your chocolate fix to come down anytime soon.
&ldquo;Manufacturers are still working through inventories purchased when cocoa was trading at elevated levels,&rdquo; says the Demography Unplugged Substack.
&ldquo;Analysts expect those higher-cost stockpiles to last until at least mid-2026. And given the extreme volatility of West African agriculture, producers remain cautious about cutting prices too quickly.&rdquo;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5_2x-new.png 2x" alt="5" width="37" />Mailbag: Your Bank Wants Your Passport
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;I don't usually start my emails off this way, but this is a FRESH, STEAMING PILE OF B***S**T!!!!&rdquo; a reader writes after <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/your-bank-wants-your-passport">yesterday&rsquo;s edition</a>.
(And to be clear, she&rsquo;s talking about the policy &mdash; not your editor&rsquo;s analysis of the policy!)
&ldquo;You are absolutely right, Trump's latest tease about signing an executive order mandating banks to collect proof of citizenship is just another excuse to subject legal citizens to more government surveillance. And it shows just how much Trump knows about the daily lives of the &lsquo;little people.&rsquo;
&ldquo;You hit the nail on the head when you suggested, &lsquo;If the goal is to encourage self-deportations, the simplest and most effective way to do that is to strip illegal migrants of welfare benefits.&rsquo;
&ldquo;Right?
&ldquo;If he were really serious about encouraging illegal immigrants to self-deport, that executive order would require them to show proof of citizenship to cash a check or put money on a Visa gift card at Walmart, not at the banks.
&ldquo;Thanks for elevating my bloo&hellip; er, keeping us informed! Kinda gives 5 &lsquo;Bullets&rsquo; a whole different connotation. 😄&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;I bet <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/not-since-covid-has-this-happened#4">the new super duper &lsquo;Real ID</a>&rsquo; will not be enough,&rdquo; chimes in another.
&ldquo;I needed my birth certificate for a SECOND TIME at the Oregon DMV, my Social Security card, two pieces of proof of address (recent bills or bank statements with my name and address) to get my &lsquo;Real ID&rsquo; in Oregon.
&ldquo;A few months back I tried to freeze my credit due to suspicious activity and was told my &lsquo;Real ID&rsquo; was not sufficient to prove I was who I said I was!&rdquo;
Dave responds: Yeah but the state has your biometric data now and the feds can ask for it at any time. Because it&rsquo;s about their convenience, not yours.
That&rsquo;s it for this week. Come back tomorrow for an interesting glimpse into how people are using AI &mdash; and where they&rsquo;re located.

FMF-Issue-02-27-26(Featured)

Under the Dollar’s Thumb

<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1_2x-new.png 2x" alt="1" width="37" />Your Bank Wants Your Passport
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Because the U.S. government can&rsquo;t keep track of who&rsquo;s in the country legally and who&rsquo;s not, U.S. citizens are expected to submit to more financial surveillance.
Really, that&rsquo;s the gist of this news story&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/1LfsPNPaZVrFogwrf2RO7R/0246de9ec13c5f3db23b403a20be6e7c/FMF-Issue-022626-_1_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
&ldquo;The Trump administration is weighing a possible executive order or other action,&rdquo; says The Wall Street Journal, &ldquo;that would require banks to collect citizenship information from customers, a new front in the administration&rsquo;s crackdown on immigrants living in the U.S. illegally, according to people familiar with the matter.&rdquo;
And that&rsquo;s not just if you&rsquo;re opening a new bank account. Your existing account might be subject to closure if you don&rsquo;t cough up a passport, birth certificate or other documents.
The article continues: &ldquo;The action, which is primarily under review by the Treasury Department, could ultimately task banks with asking for an unprecedented new category of documents, such as passports, from both new and existing customers who want to maintain a bank account in the U.S.&hellip;&rdquo;
It&rsquo;s another step on the way from &ldquo;land of the free&rdquo; to &ldquo;show me your papers.&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Don&rsquo;t get the wrong idea. This is not about Donald Trump. Nor is it about illegal migrants. It&rsquo;s about whatever&rsquo;s left of your freedom and financial privacy.
Your editor is no Johnny-come-lately to the cause of financial privacy. In 1998, the FDIC under President Bill Clinton proposed a series of sweeping &ldquo;Know Your Customer&rdquo; requirements for banks.
As the now-defunct Defend Your Privacy website <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19990428075925/http:/www.defendyourprivacy.com/faq.htm">explained</a> it&hellip;
<blockquote>It would require banks and financial institutions to set up customer profiles, then notify government investigators if you "deviate" from your profile. It would require banks to determine the customer's "sources of funds," determine the customer's "normal and expected transactions," monitor customer transactions and identify transactions that are "inconsistent with normal and expected transactions" and report any "suspicious activity" to federal investigators.</blockquote>
I remember writing my congressmembers at the time &mdash; Illinois Rep. Henry Hyde and Sens. Peter Fitzgerald and Dick Durbin &mdash; urging them to sponsor legislation curbing the proposed rules. The backlash from millions of Americans like me was enough to prod the FDIC to withdraw its proposal after a 90-day comment period.
Unfortunately&hellip; the 9/11 attacks gave the feds a new opening to get their way. The rules were written into the 2001 Patriot Act. The control freaks and power trippers never give up.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> There&rsquo;s a line of thought defending this new proposed rule: It would encourage those in the country illegally to &ldquo;self-deport.&rdquo;
That is, even with the vast growth in the number of ICE and CBP personnel, it&rsquo;s nowhere near enough to remove everyone in the country illegally. Shutting them out of the banking system would encourage them to leave the country on their own.
OK, fine. Let&rsquo;s take that at face value. If the goal is to encourage self-deportations, the simplest and most effective way to do that is to strip illegal migrants of welfare benefits.
And yet&hellip; the budget bill that ended the most recent partial government shutdown includes $5 billion in &ldquo;refugee and entrant assistance&rdquo; &mdash; cash benefits, health care, daycare, job programs.
&ldquo;After the staggering level of welfare fraud exposed in Minnesota, why on Earth would ANY Republican vote to fund more refugee welfare programs?&rdquo; wondered Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky). &ldquo;This is D.C. insanity at its finest.&rdquo;
In the House, Paul&rsquo;s fellow Kentuckian Thomas Massie offered an amendment to strip this funding from the bill &mdash; only to be shot down by GOP leadership.
The Republican-controlled Congress passed it, Donald Trump signed it&hellip; and $5 billion is going down a black hole.
Why would they take a step that obviously encourages people to stay here illegally &mdash; and at taxpayer expense?
The only answer that makes sense is also the one that&rsquo;s most disturbing: The aim is to exploit a crisis atmosphere such that people willingly submit to growing levels of surveillance like this new show-your-papers proposal.
It was a terrorist attack 25 years ago, it&rsquo;s illegal migration now.
And while it might begin with submitting more papers to your bank, it might well end in a harrowing scenario I spelled out just over a year ago. <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/what-if-trump-breaks-this-promise">You might want to revisit it today</a>. Word to the wise&hellip;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2_2x-new.png 2x" alt="2" width="37" />Markets Today: NVDA, &ldquo;Technical Issues&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> The mainstream reaction to Nvidia&rsquo;s earnings amounts to: Is that all there is?
&ldquo;Nvidia&rsquo;s Blockbuster Results Fail to Dazzle Investors,&rdquo; says a representative headline in the Financial Times.
The numbers were great &mdash; a 94% leap in profits, record fourth-quarter sales. But as our colleague Greg Guenthner often reminds us, it&rsquo;s not about earnings but rather the reaction to earnings. NVDA is down nearly 4.7% as we write. That&rsquo;s proving a drag on the S&amp;P 500 (down over three-quarters of a percent) and the Nasdaq (down 1.5%).
&ldquo;This is completely normal,&rdquo; trading pro Enrique Abeyta observes on the Daily Feed section of the Paradigm mobile app.
&ldquo;When you have well-established trends in a market, the ability to &lsquo;surprise&rsquo; is diminished and incremental information becomes confirmatory as opposed to revelatory. This may not drive the stock - or the overall market - in the short run but is BULLISH for the intermediate and long term. Great numbers are great numbers. Don't overthink it.&rdquo;
&ldquo;This isn&rsquo;t about beating the quarter anymore,&rdquo; adds analyst Davis Wilson, also on the app. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s about proving the AI cycle has years left. Demand looks strong through 2026 and 2027. But investors want visibility through 2030. That&rsquo;s a high bar.&rdquo; Regardless, &ldquo;AI infrastructure spending isn&rsquo;t rolling over. It&rsquo;s still ramping. I suggest you own the stock.&rdquo;
➢ Reminder: The Paradigm mobile app gives you access to instant insights like these throughout the day. I learn a lot from it, so I know you will too. <a href="https://d2z65klgtz99km.cloudfront.net/PPG-App/">Download here</a>.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> As we suspected yesterday, $90 is proving to be a powerful ceiling on the silver price. It&rsquo;s back down to $87.15 as we write. But gold is holding its own at $5,184.
For the record: Amid $90 silver yesterday, CME Group reported &ldquo;technical issues&rdquo; that halted trading in metals and natural gas for over an hour.
Not surprisingly, the halt touched off rumors that the exchange was running into trouble delivering physical silver to buyers who wanted actual metal instead of cash settlement &mdash; as well as accusations of shenanigans during the time of the outage.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/7xP9YqVz02sMCzUQDJW9BV/3fc2038a62624ee875adccc1533ce72a/FMF-Issue-022626-_2_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
Perhaps litigation will reveal in the fullness of time whether anything untoward was happening. Until then, you might wish to review <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/the-truth-about-gold-manipulation">our latest deep dive on precious-metals manipulation</a> published earlier this month.
Crypto is trying to stage a rebound &mdash; Bitcoin over $67,000 and Ethereum over $2,000.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3_2x-new.png 2x" alt="3" width="37" />Oil, Iran and &ldquo;the Politics&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> If the Reuters newswire is to be believed, Saudi Arabia is upping its oil production if a U.S. attack on Iran disrupts the global oil trade.
Citing &ldquo;two sources familiar with the plan,&rdquo; Reuters says the kingdom would raise oil exports by about a half-million barrels a day &mdash; as it did last year when Washington bombed Iranian nuclear sites.
Today&rsquo;s the day that more &ldquo;indirect&rdquo; talks between U.S. and Iranian officials are taking place in Geneva, Switzerland: The foreign minister of Oman is literally passing messages between U.S. representatives in one room and Iranian representatives in another room.
The talks are taking place amid the backdrop of this Politico story back home&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/4YBmSjC3II2oQYoRknNbvE/ab9384050cd00651a026576d1212804b/FMF-Issue-022626-_3_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
&ldquo;Senior advisers to President Donald Trump would prefer Israel strike Iran before the United States launches an assault on the country, according to two people familiar with ongoing discussions,&rdquo; the story begins.
&ldquo;The calculus is a political one &mdash; that more Americans would stomach a war with Iran if the United States or an ally were attacked first.&rdquo;
So it&rsquo;s come to this: &ldquo;The war is so unpopular, Trump officials are openly saying they&rsquo;re planning to use Israel to goad Iran into attacking U.S. military assets,&rdquo; tweets the independent journalist Max Blumenthal.
Gee, <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/jim-rickards-software-stock-scare#3">if troop morale was already bad</a> on the sewage-strewn USS Gerald Ford before this news broke&hellip;
Of course, all of this assumes Tehran would take the bait. And that&rsquo;s no sure thing.
In the meantime, a barrel of West Texas Intermediate is up over a buck to $66.59. Yes, it&rsquo;s been higher this month &mdash; but not much higher.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4_2x-new.png 2x" alt="4" width="37" />Comic Relief
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Yes, AI has immense world-changing and wealth-making potential&hellip; but there&rsquo;s also an underlying truth here.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/6S4mMyPYwxO7kGQMsfpQB3/5c9eaa679e362cbbea1b2a5e60eb3223/FMF-Issue-022626-_4_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5_2x-new.png 2x" alt="5" width="37" />Mailbag: The Great Taking
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> We got a lot of response to <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/a-recipe-for-immediate-civil-war">yesterday&rsquo;s first two </a><a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/a-recipe-for-immediate-civil-war">Bullets</a> about The Great Taking and Roth IRAs.
&ldquo;I enjoy your writing and read 5 Bullets every day. Thanks for your research and willingness to present different points of view,&rdquo; a reader writes.
[As always, there&rsquo;s a &ldquo;but&rdquo; coming&hellip;]
&ldquo;I disagree with your view that The Great Taking will not happen because of the extensive destruction it will cause. Have you read David Rogers Webb's book? It is well researched and very scary.
&ldquo;The laws putting The Great Taking in place were written years ago and are still in force, so my assumption is that the algorithms making it possible have already been written into the Federal Reserve's financial code. It will be like what happened to silver <a href="https://rudeawakening.info/posts/how-the-machine-ate-itself">as outlined by your colleague Nick Riso</a>. The two scenarios are not exactly the same, but you can get an idea of how it would happen.
&ldquo;Unless we stop it now, before it gets triggered, by changing the law ASAP, The Great Taking will be so fast and so automated that no human will be able to stop it once it starts. Also, remember that a Great Taking has already happened once in the United States. We call it the Great Depression. David Rogers Webb explains how it was orchestrated in his book.
&ldquo;I think we need to raise national awareness and a hue and cry.&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;My understanding is that as long as you are not using margin in your equities account, the broker must segregate your holdings from their own,&rdquo; chimes in another.
&ldquo;They can only commingle your funds with theirs if you have borrowed against yours. So in case of insolvency, your non-margin funds are safe. See SEC Rule 15c3-3.
&ldquo;Since IRAs cannot be margin accounts (at least at Fidelity. I don't know about others), they cannot be commingled with a brokerage's funds, so they are safe.
&ldquo;However, money in a bank is a different story. Your money in your bank account is legally an unsecured loan to the bank. In case of bankruptcy, the bank will do a bail-in and pay the secured creditors first, and you will be last on the list to receive anything back. So you are dependent on FDIC insurance for the first $250,000, and can lose the rest.
&ldquo;A bank bail-in actually did occur with a small Midwestern bank, as I understand it. But with Silicon Valley Bank, all the big investors were fully rescued (against the rules) because it would have wiped out all of the venture capital money and well-connected individuals.
&ldquo;Please correct me if any of this is incorrect.&rdquo;
Dave responds: If the premise of David Rogers Webb and Justin Haskins is correct, everything is on the table &mdash; the niceties that you cite notwithstanding. Relatively few people have margin accounts, so that&rsquo;s not a very big pile of money in the scheme of things.
As for your description of the banks, spot-on.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Speaking of big piles of money, here&rsquo;s something I concede I did not contemplate when assembling yesterday&rsquo;s missive. Chew on this&hellip;
&ldquo;Your reasoning for The Great Taking being unlikely is incongruous with your reasoning for the likelihood for the raid on Roths to occur and the key phrase is &lsquo;at least for wealthier Americans.&rsquo;
&ldquo;If the &lsquo;All your stonks are belong to us&rsquo; scenario of The Great Taking is limited to the top 1%, Denninger's &lsquo;dirty civil war&rsquo; argument goes away.
&ldquo;If you think the roughly $2 trillion of Roth IRA balances would get the attention of Uncle Sugar, the $20&ndash;25 trillion of publicly traded stocks and fund shares; $5.5 trillion of government and corporate bonds; and $4 trillion of bank accounts, money markets and CDs held by the top 1% would be utterly irresistible in an emergency.
&ldquo;They could even let the 1% keep their $12&ndash;15 trillion of private equity and $5 trillion in pension and retirement accounts as a consolation prize.
&ldquo;I am sure the 99% would not take up arms in defense of the 1% having their accounts bailed-in to address the next major crash. It is the rich who should be taking the Great Taking seriously.&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;Are Roth IRAs really subject to the SECURE Act&rsquo;s 10-year withdrawal rule?&rdquo; a reader inquires.
&ldquo;Meaning my children will have to take all the money out of their &lsquo;inherited&rsquo; Roth accounts and pay taxes on those distributions? Thank you for your clarification.&rdquo;
Dave responds: Yes. &ldquo;Under the 10-year rule, a non-spouse beneficiary is required to fully withdraw the balance of the inherited Roth IRA by the end of the 10th year following the original owner&rsquo;s death,&rdquo; affirms the SmartAsset site.
Your children can structure those withdrawals however they want &mdash; a lump sum at any time, monthly or annual withdrawals spread evenly across all 10 years, whatever. But it&rsquo;s gotta be done.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;Taxing Roth withdrawals?&rdquo; writes our final correspondent.
&ldquo;Next you will tell me when I get Social Security income, I will pay tax on 85% of the money I put into it.
&ldquo;Oh wait, never mind. They do that already&hellip;&rdquo;
Dave: That&rsquo;s a brilliantly succinct summation of yesterday&rsquo;s Bullet No 2. Well done!

FMF-Issue-022626-Featured)

Your Bank Wants Your Passport

<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1_2x-new.png 2x" alt="1" width="37" />The Biggest &ldquo;Underground&rdquo; M&amp;A of 2026
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> There&rsquo;s a scene that plays out at big industry trade shows that most people never hear about. The main floor is all noise and spectacle &mdash; gleaming displays, flashing lights, cocktail receptions.
But down the hallway, in a private suite with a closed door and two suits standing outside, that&rsquo;s where the real business gets done. That&rsquo;s where billions of dollars change hands.
2025 was that kind of year for the global mining industry.
According to the law firm White &amp; Case, the aggregate value of global mining M&amp;A hit $93.7 billion last year &mdash; the highest annual total since 2012.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/5SGql76X0CYw00msucOiqW/dd44a7b5b1433bce15c9c9cf7bce6f57/FMF-Issue-03-03-26_1_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
That wasn&rsquo;t a fluke. It was the inevitable collision of three forces building for years:
<ul>
<li>Surging demand for critical minerals</li>
<li>A Washington policy environment determined to reduce dependence on foreign supply chains</li>
<li>And over $1 trillion in private equity dry powder looking for a home.</li>
</ul>
The policy piece is the one most investors are still underestimating.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> On Jan. 14, 2026, President Trump issued a presidential proclamation directing negotiations under Section 232 on critical minerals &mdash; invoking a national security authority typically reserved for steel and aluminum.
The official list of covered minerals &mdash; 50 in 2022; expanded to 60 in 2025 &mdash; includes zinc, gallium, germanium and dozens of others essential to defense, energy and technology.
The message to the market was hard to miss: Washington considers these materials a matter of national defense, not just industrial supply.
Rebecca Campbell, global head of mining and metals at White &amp; Case, foreshadows: &ldquo;In 2026, strategic partnerships between governments, government agencies and the private sector are likely to be the backbone of growth M&amp;A in the sector.&rdquo;
Translation: The deals getting done this year won&rsquo;t just be driven by commodity prices. They'll be driven by geopolitics.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> China, in particular, currently acts as the world's predominant critical minerals refiner &mdash; and has already weaponized that position by restricting exports of gallium and germanium in recent years.
For mining companies sitting on domestic deposits of these materials, that geopolitical pressure is doing something remarkable: It's making them acquisition targets almost by default.
For a major mining conglomerate that needs these minerals and can't reliably source them from China, buying an American producer outright is faster, cheaper and safer than building a new mine from scratch.
Bain &amp; Co., the global management consultancy that tracks dealmaking across every major industry, captures the mood: &ldquo;The next wave of dealmaking will be bigger, more complex and far more decisive in determining who wins the forthcoming super cycle.&rdquo;
Global M&amp;A across all sectors surged to near-record levels in 2025, with megadeals above $5 billion accounting for the lion&rsquo;s share of value growth.
Which tells you something important: In a buyout boom, the big money doesn&rsquo;t get spread around evenly. It concentrates. And the investors who captured it weren't the ones who owned a little of everything &mdash; they were the ones already holding shares of the right target when the announcement hit.
But targeted companies don&rsquo;t announce it in advance. Deals are assembled quietly, in private suites, on encrypted calls between lawyers.
By the time a buyout hits the wire, the easy money is already made. Unless, of course, you know what to look for before the announcement.
[Editorial Note: Chinese smelters are warning that escalating tensions in the Middle East could disrupt global supplies of a key rare mineral.
Iran ranks among the world&rsquo;s top 15 producers &mdash; and Seatrade Maritime News reports the Strait of Hormuz is now &ldquo;effectively closed to almost all international commercial shipping.&rdquo;
If trade flows remain constrained, availability of this mineral could tighten suddenly.
That matters here at home. President Trump recently invoked Section 232 authority, designating this mineral as &ldquo;critical to national security.&rdquo;
In the U.S., a single mine accounts for roughly 70% of domestic production. Even before developments in Iran, James Altucher&rsquo;s proprietary models outlined a scenario where shares of the company involved could deliver gains as high as 925% in the months ahead.
Given the potential for supply disruption, James and his team have updated their projections. Under certain conditions, his analysis now indicates upside that could reach as much as 2,464%.
Of course, outcomes depend on how events unfold. But if a supply shock takes shape, the opportunity may not remain overlooked for long.
<a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2512377">You can review the full details here.]</a>
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2_2x-new.png 2x" alt="2" width="37" />The 60/20/20 Portfolio
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Per market cap, the largest bank in the world just moved its gold target higher.
JPMorgan Chase (JPM) raised its 2026 forecast from $5,055 an ounce to $6,300, even after last month&rsquo;s 11% pullback &mdash; a drop that ranks among the sharpest in modern gold history, comparable to declines in 1980 and 1983.
The bank&rsquo;s view hasn&rsquo;t changed. &ldquo;Even with the recent near-term volatility, we remain firmly bullishly convinced in gold over the medium term,&rdquo; its analysts wrote, pointing to what they describe as a structural shift in capital toward real assets.
The bigger call is even more striking. JPMorgan outlines a path to $8,000&ndash;8,500 gold if household allocations rise modestly.
Private investors currently hold about 3% of portfolios in gold. A move to 4.6%, they estimate, would create meaningful new demand in a market already constrained by limited mine supply and steady central-bank buying.
By historical standards, gold ownership remains low. Western investors on average hold less than 1%.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Last fall, Morgan Stanley&rsquo;s chief investment officer Michael Wilson suggested rethinking the traditional 60/40 stock-bond mix in favor of a 60/20/20 model, with 20% allocated to precious metals.
According to CNBC, JPMorgan strategist Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou said households are substituting &ldquo;duration risk&rdquo; in bonds with gold exposure &mdash; a shift away from yield sensitivity toward purchasing-power protection.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/5Fk8EHui782VS46OIBUA8i/26d8dd8b982c4c1c54ac867e040f9289/FMF-Issue-03-03-26_2_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" /> Courtesy: Sbcgold.com
Central banks are reinforcing that trend. Net purchases have doubled since Russia&rsquo;s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, as reserve managers diversify away from the dollar.
Gold is up more than 170% over the past five years. JPMorgan argues the drivers behind that move &mdash; reserve diversification, inflation concerns and fiscal strain &mdash; are not exhausted.
We&rsquo;ll see how that thesis lines up with the latest market action below&hellip;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Today&rsquo;s session: Equities are selling off hard as energy prices spike and inflation expectations reset. The surge in WTI crude &mdash; up 6.35%, near $77 per barrel of WTI &mdash; underscores how precarious supply risk has become, and it&rsquo;s feeding through to risk assets from tech stocks to crypto.
As for the three major U.S. stock indexes, each is down about 1.5% with the Dow, S&amp;P 500 and Nasdaq at 48,200, 6,785 and 22,400 respectively.
The price of gold today suggests the dollar&rsquo;s strength and rate expectations are moderating safe-haven demand. The yellow metal, in fact, is down 3.95% to $5,103.60 per ounce. At the same time, silver is getting hammered: down almost 7% to $82.65. (Buying opportunity!)
As for digital assets, Bitcoin and Ethereum are down 1.30% and 3% respectively; at the time of writing, priced at $68, 250 and $1,975.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3_2x-new.png 2x" alt="3" width="37" />Critical Minerals: Optimus Prime
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;If you are bullish on Optimus and the future of robotics, you are a mining bull too. You must be, because without these weird metals, none of it can happen,&rdquo; says Paradigm editor and resource-investing expert Matt Badiali.
Tesla began mass production of its Optimus humanoid robot at its Fremont factory on Jan. 21 this year. Elon Musk has committed to selling them to outside customers by 2026 &mdash; eventually, a million units a year. The rollout is no longer hypothetical.
Optimus, however, requires a staggering list of raw materials: tin, manganese, copper, dysprosium, lithium, cobalt, terbium, graphite, tantalum and more. &ldquo;The bad news,&rdquo; Matt notes, &ldquo;is that few of these come from the U.S.&rdquo;
<ul>
<li>Tin: Recycled only, no mined supply</li>
<li>Dysprosium and terbium: No domestic production</li>
<li>Manganese, graphite and tantalum:</li>
</ul>
And China controls most of it. &ldquo;China mines or refines the bulk of these metals,&rdquo; Matt writes. &ldquo;China built that industry out over a decade or more. And so it holds the keys to those metals today.
&ldquo;China boxed out the world, so everyone else is spending whatever it takes to catch up.&rdquo; When demand soars and supply doesn&rsquo;t follow, prices go up &mdash; and right now, demand is soaring. &ldquo;As investors, we need to jump on that train. It&rsquo;s a great way to make money.
&ldquo;The disconnect for investors,&rdquo; Matt says, is &ldquo;they all want to own Tesla, but don&rsquo;t know a thing about the companies that produce the materials needed for the Optimus program.
&ldquo;If you are a tech bull,&rdquo; he concludes, &ldquo;it makes sense to invest in the metals that drive the development and production of technology.&rdquo;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4_2x-new.png 2x" alt="4" width="37" />AI Bros Are Butthurt
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> There&rsquo;s a strange social expectation surrounding the AI boom: Not only must we accept it, we must rally round it. 
&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t really remember a boom with such active hostility to it,&rdquo; says William Quinn, co-author of Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles.
Quinn contrasts AI with past breakthroughs like electricity and automobiles, which stirred fear, yes &mdash; but also wonder. AI, he suggests, is &ldquo;notable, perhaps unique, for the lack of enthusiasm.&rdquo;
(Mr. Quinn might profit from a brief detour into the early 19th century &mdash; specifically, the chapter that introduced the word &ldquo;Luddite&rdquo; into the English language. But I digress.)
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang &mdash; with a net worth of $164.1 billion &mdash; says criticism of AI has been &ldquo;extremely hurtful,&rdquo; arguing the technology is taking &ldquo;a lot of damage&rdquo; from &ldquo;doomer&rdquo; narratives.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/2LJ2Mm3biXlSYYca9HMyNE/16d06245172a6b662d33e88632c20f18/FMF-Issue-03-03-26_3_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
Sam Altman has similarly expressed frustration at what he sees as surprisingly slow &ldquo;diffusion&rdquo; and &ldquo;absorption&rdquo; of AI into daily life.
The hesitation isn&rsquo;t imaginary. A 2025 Pew Research survey found about 60% of Americans want more control over how AI is used in their lives, while just 17% are comfortable with it being concentrated in the hands of a few tech billionaires. (Honestly, that much?)
Even more telling: Industry estimates suggest that by mid-2025, only about 3% of global AI users were paying for premium AI services.
If this is a revolution, it&rsquo;s a very bumpy one. And when even the users won&rsquo;t open their wallets, maybe the problem isn&rsquo;t insufficient gratitude &mdash; it&rsquo;s simply unresolved doubt.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5_2x-new.png 2x" alt="5" width="37" />AI vs. a Six-Figure Invoice
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;My company has been using Perplexity.ai to disentangle the international regulatory framework that makes it difficult to export radioactive substances from Australia to an overseas company,&rdquo; writes a new contributor &mdash; in response to Saturday&rsquo;s 5 Bullets roundup issue: &ldquo;America&rsquo;s ChatGPT Map Tells a Story.&rdquo;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/48fIo7fJyRNKZrLBcsIYnl/a8e82c4be66504127c9fbc2326468ee5/FMF-Issue-03-03-26_4_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" /> It&rsquo;s not just who is using AI&hellip; It&rsquo;s why. <a href="https://sherwood.news/tech/the-way-different-states-use-chatgpt-could-tell-us-a-lot-about-their/">Click to view the interactive map</a>
&ldquo;We have been totally amazed by the clarity and depth of the information this has provided my company,&rdquo; he continues. &ldquo;We have saved weeks of research and high-competence work.
&ldquo;Had we hired one of the major consultancies and international law firms, we could have incurred a six-figure invoice for a result that would likely be inferior.
&ldquo;AI is clearly a massive productivity revolution.&rdquo;
Emily: We dare not ask which radioactive materials&hellip; Thanks for writing in!
Yes, AI can dismantle export controls, draft legal briefs and compress weeks of research into an afternoon. But revolutions are rarely judged on capability alone.
They&rsquo;re judged on whether ordinary people feel empowered by them&hellip; or replaced by them. The verdict is still pending.
Take care, reader! Join us tomorrow for another round of 5 Bullets.

FMF-Issue-03-03-26(Featured)

The Underground M&A of 2026

<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1_2x-new.png 2x" alt="1" width="37" />&ldquo;The Great Taking"
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;Hi Dave, I'd like someone to write about this,&rdquo; says a reader&rsquo;s email.
The reader links to a recent opinion piece on the Fox News website by Justin Haskins of the Heartland Institute with the provocative headline: &ldquo;Wall Street Could Seize Your Retirement Savings In the Next Financial Crash &mdash; and It&rsquo;s Perfectly Legal.&rdquo;
Here&rsquo;s the essence of the piece&hellip;
<blockquote>Beginning in the 1970s, at the request of powerful Wall Street and banking institutions, state lawmakers quietly adopted a series of changes to the Uniform Commercial Code, a body of law enacted in all 50 states. These changes effectively allowed financial institutions to reassign direct ownership of most securities away from individual investors, including those holding retirement accounts and traditional brokerage accounts&hellip;</blockquote>
<blockquote>Under Article 8 of the Uniform Commercial Code, if a brokerage firm collapses during a financial crisis, secured creditors, including banks, may seize securities used as collateral in lending arrangements with broker-dealers. This can include customer securities, such as stocks and bonds, if they were pledged as collateral for those loans.</blockquote>
<blockquote>As a result, during the next major crash, investors could lose their entire portfolios if their broker-dealer pledged customer assets to obtain financing.</blockquote>
Back to the reader: &ldquo;My concern is even if my Roth or trading accounts were entirely in cash that Schwab might try and not give me access to funds in the event of a crash. Is this an accurate statement, or is this not possible?&rdquo;
And down the rabbit hole we go&hellip;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Haskins is flogging a new book that &mdash; unless I&rsquo;m missing something &mdash; appears to be a ripoff of The Great Taking.
Published in 2023 by a former hedge fund manager named David Rogers Webb, The Great Taking lays out more or less the same dire possibility <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/wall-street-could-seize-your-retirement-savings-next-financial-crash-its-perfectly-legal">that Haskins is now</a>: Because the stocks you own aren&rsquo;t legally held in your name, you&rsquo;re at risk of losing them amid a financial crisis if your broker owes a bunch of money to a counterparty and doesn&rsquo;t have the ready funds to pay up.
(And yes, your cash instruments like T-bills and money-market funds would also be at risk&hellip;)
As doomy as my outlook can be at times, I&rsquo;m not hugely concerned about this.
I think Karl Denninger of the Market Ticker blog has it right: &ldquo;If you did this you&rsquo;d get an immediate dirty civil war.&rdquo;
<blockquote>Every bank, every financial institution and all of their employees and families, every lawmaker and their families, every cop who tried to get in the way and everyone else from rich to poor would be targeted and everyone would be shooting, stabbing, looting, burning, raping and similar.&nbsp;</blockquote>
<blockquote>Infrastructure would be attacked&hellip; nobody would have power within hours or days and all supply chains would collapse since all firms hold said securities and bank deposits too and their operating capital would go &lsquo;poof&rsquo; &mdash; thus they could pay neither suppliers or employees. There would be no gas at the local station, no food in the store within hours and every truck would stop when it ran out of the fuel in its tank. Everyone, everywhere, would get in on robbing or whacking someone simply because they'd have to in order to survive&hellip;</blockquote>
<blockquote>All government funding goes to zero instantly as no bond auction can be paid nor can any refunding be completed &mdash; and since employers can't pay employees there are no tax deposits either &mdash; and every business shuts down immediately as it has no employees showing up when they can't be paid.&nbsp;</blockquote>
<blockquote>Never mind that the cops would instantly turn on said politicians because their pensions and similar retirement will be stolen just like everyone else's and the agencies would be unable to pay them thus they'd be rather likely to either sit at home trying to defend their own or turn on the people they allegedly "protect"...</blockquote>
Politicians and central bankers aren&rsquo;t the sharpest knives in the drawer &mdash; but presumably they&rsquo;re capable of seeing one or two steps ahead when their own personal safety is potentially at risk.
So The Great Taking doesn&rsquo;t particularly keep me up at night.
But as long as the reader brought up Roth IRAs&hellip;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2_2x-new.png 2x" alt="2" width="37" />The Trouble With Roth IRAs
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> When it comes to Roths, there&rsquo;s a greater-than-zero likelihood the feds will change the rules to your disadvantage sooner or later. I&rsquo;ve been writing about this for over a decade, though not recently.
&ldquo;Holders of Roth IRAs may be in for a rude shock,&rdquo; warned Steve Forbes in 2013.
&ldquo;Their contributions have been made with after-tax dollars, with the promise that the ensuing benefits would be exempt from federal income tax. Slapping a special &lsquo;emergency&rsquo; levy on these assets will become an irresistible temptation for politicians as the pot of assets gets bigger.&rdquo;
In 2019, a Democratic Congress passed and Donald Trump signed something called the SECURE Act. One of its key provisions did away with the &ldquo;stretch IRA.&rdquo;
Under the old rules, your kids could inherit your IRA and &ldquo;stretch&rdquo; out the withdrawals over many, many years &mdash; even as the nest egg would keep compounding tax-free. But under the SECURE Act, they have to clean out the account within 10 years of your death.
Uncle Sugar wants his revenue and he doesn&rsquo;t want to wait around.
(And to be clear, these new rules apply to both traditional and Roth IRAs.)
So chew on these possibilities specifically for Roths, hypothesized a few years ago by former colleague Nilus Mattive: Perhaps &ldquo;politicians will eventually remove the tax-free benefit on earnings within Roth IRAs&hellip; at least for wealthier Americans.&rdquo; Or they could impose &ldquo;a limit as to how much of a balance can be maintained before taxes kick in again.&rdquo;
I get the appeal of Roths, and I get the appeal of converting traditional IRAs to Roths as you get older: Pay the taxes up-front to minimize your taxable income in retirement. But I don&rsquo;t trust anyone in the Beltway to keep up their end of the bargain. For better or worse, only a small portion of my and my wife&rsquo;s retirement funds are in Roths. Your mileage may vary.
Anyway, these Roth scenarios seem a lot more plausible than All your stonks are belong to us.
On to the markets today&hellip;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3_2x-new.png 2x" alt="3" width="37" />Countdown to NVDA
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> The software scare might not be over &mdash; but for the moment it&rsquo;s no longer a drag on the broad market.
Yesterday the headlines shifted back to hardware: Meta announced it&rsquo;s buying six gigawatts&rsquo; worth of AI computing power from AMD. The deal is valued at over $100 billion and could lead to META owning up to 10% of AMD shares. That was enough to lift the S&amp;P 500 by 0.8% and the Nasdaq even more.
Today the hardware vibes continue: Nvidia reports its much-awaited earnings after the closing bell. At last check, the S&amp;P is up nearly a half percent to 6,919 and the Nasdaq is up nearly 1%.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;I expect another beat-and-raise quarter from Nvidia,&rdquo; says Paradigm analyst Davis Wilson.
&ldquo;Nvidia still trades around 24X forward earnings &mdash; a multiple you&rsquo;d expect for a mature consumer brand, not the backbone of global AI infrastructure. Hyperscalers are still spending. Supply is still constrained.&rdquo;
From today&rsquo;s share price of $195, Davis expects a post-earnings bounce to $205. &ldquo;A shot in the dark,&rdquo; he concedes, &ldquo;but with all the negative sentiment already baked in, I believe a move to the upside is more likely.&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Don&rsquo;t look now but silver has recovered a $90 handle for the first time since its sickening plunge from $120 at the end of January.
The white metal is up over $3 to $90.39 as we write. But don&rsquo;t get too excited yet: As we&rsquo;ve said more than once, $90 is the resistance level Paradigm options analyst Nick Riso believes will stay in place for a while.
Gold keeps backing and filling, meanwhile &mdash; up $46 to $5,188. Crude continues to hover over $65. Crypto is trying to stage a rally but Bitcoin remains under $67,000 and Ethereum under $2,000.
Not much market reaction to the State of the Union speech that we can see. Then again, it didn&rsquo;t make much news.
The president rehashed a few of his previously announced economic initiatives. Democrats sat on their hands throughout until it was time for the Two Minutes Hate against Iran, then they clapped like trained seals. Erika Kirk looked on approvingly as the president threatened to wage a war that her deceased husband <a href="https://x.com/charliekirk11/status/1935058728253825410">vehemently opposed</a>. Axios and Politico pimped fake news about how Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) was going to sit with the Democrats. <a href="https://x.com/RepThomasMassie/status/2026454773981999107">(He did not.)</a> The Democrats trotted out another ex-CIA officer for their party&rsquo;s response to the speech &mdash; same as last year.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4_2x-new.png 2x" alt="4" width="37" />JPM and Epstein
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Does Bloomberg think it has some sort of huge scoop here?
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/1TVmq2XQIkcWTeAAfHStMA/d8d98c7407662ffcec0320330a3fd6a3/FMF-Issue-02-25-26_1_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
&ldquo;Five years after JPMorgan Chase &amp; Co. sought to rid itself of Jeffrey Epstein,&rdquo; the story begins, &ldquo;the convicted sex offender was once again moving money into the bank.
&ldquo;In February 2019 &mdash; six months before he died in a New York jail cell &mdash; Epstein used one of his trusts that had been kicked out of JPMorgan half a decade earlier to wire $150,000 to his girlfriend&rsquo;s brokerage account at the bank. After it landed, the money made up the bulk of the funding in the account.
&ldquo;The transfer is just one example of the myriad ways Epstein stayed connected to the biggest U.S. bank after it dropped him as a client in 2013, dozens of emails and other documents recently released by the U.S. Department of Justice show.&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Whatever. We already knew JPM continued playing footsie with Epstein after supposedly washing its hands of him in 2013.
As we chronicled throughout 2023, the government of the U.S. Virgin Islands sued JPM &mdash; asserting that the bank not only &ldquo;turned a blind eye&rdquo; to Epstein&rsquo;s activities on Little Saint James but that it &ldquo;actively participated in Epstein&rsquo;s sex-trafficking venture from 2006&ndash;2019.&rdquo;
The pretrial documents also alleged JPM facilitated Epstein&rsquo;s withdrawals of physical cash &mdash; far beyond the $10,000 threshold that banks are required to report to the U.S. Treasury &mdash; &ldquo;while also being aware that Epstein paid his underage sexual assault victims in cash.&rdquo;
And the whole thing got swept under the rug when the Virgin Islands government <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/the-irs-expands-its-target-list?vid2=f7584bb8d0f8b4ef03ea4a2a79cb9ffebd5601637dfb4b221b21055bfe10aa56fb9565c7166c12ea93687031263ed97489aead8f437e4ddd1cfcbcd5e6a6bb06&amp;utm_campaign=FMF_Issue_07.23.25&amp;utm_source=Iterable&amp;itbl_templateId=18703461&amp;itbl_campaignId=14330136&amp;utm_medium=Email#3">agreed to settle</a> the case for a $75 million payment from JPM &mdash; about 0.18% of the bank&rsquo;s revenue the previous quarter.
(Given everything we subsequently learned about <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/jpm-epstein-and-the-virgin-islands#2">Epstein&rsquo;s relationship with leading Virgin Islands politicians</a>, it was no surprise.)
Bloomberg&rsquo;s review of the latest Justice Department document dump does reveal that JPM filed suspicious activity reports on more than $1 billion in transactions between Epstein and &ldquo;current, former and non-JPMC&rdquo; customers between 2003&ndash;2019.
Alas we still don&rsquo;t know what came of those reports. Probably the circular file or the electronic equivalent&hellip;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5_2x-new.png 2x" alt="5" width="37" />AI and Electricity (Continued)
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;Funny you mention it,&rdquo; a reader says after our Stargate update in <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/jim-rickards-software-stock-scare">yesterday&rsquo;s edition</a>.
&ldquo;I was just at an energy conference in San Diego last week. One of the seminars about energy and AI highlighted Stargate, specifically a site under development in New Mexico called &lsquo;Project Jupiter.&rsquo;
&ldquo;Since most of the &lsquo;hyperscaler&rsquo; data centers can't get gigawatts of energy fast enough &mdash; and it could take YEARS to connect to the grid &mdash; they're now going &lsquo;behind the meter&rsquo; (BTM). That means generating their own power on site, typically with natgas turbines mounted on flatbed trucks and some lithium-ion batteries for backup power/peak shaving. Elon's xAI was the first to do it as the &lsquo;Colossus&rsquo; site near Memphis. Took FOUR MONTHS to get up and running!
&ldquo;50 GW of these BTM projects were announced last year.
&ldquo;Anyway, Project Jupiter is estimated to cost $165 billion. But it's also expected to generate 14 million tons of CO2 per year with the natgas turbines. Which would erase ALL of New Mexico's &lsquo;emissions&rsquo; cuts over the last 20 years.
&ldquo;I guess &lsquo;climate change&rsquo; isn't that big of a deal anymore? Funny how it fell out of the headlines as soon as AI came along&hellip;&rdquo;
Dave responds: Pretty much. For years, Silicon Valley flattered itself with delusions that its growing data-center energy needs could be met by &ldquo;renewables.&rdquo;
The delusion persisted throughout the 2010s even as video streaming, hard-core gaming and crypto mining added more and more electric demand.
Nobody noticed at the time because as Mark Mills of the National Center for Energy Analytics has pointed out, that new demand was offset by energy-efficient light bulbs and refrigerators.
But those were one-time savings. Once people started using AI in earnest, there was nothing to offset the skyrocketing demand. By 2024, we screamed from the rooftops that AI was <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/the-monster-that-ate-the-power-grid-ai">the monster that ate the power grid</a> even as the mainstream remained clueless.
And so Big Tech&rsquo;s best and brightest had to start accommodating nuclear power &mdash; consoling themselves that at least it didn&rsquo;t generate any of those dreaded &ldquo;carbon emissions.&rdquo;
But the required nuclear buildout is going to take years, and AI can&rsquo;t wait that long. As you point out, Elon has settled on natural gas as a speedy solution. Others will soon follow suit.
Yes, investment implications abound. We&rsquo;ll be eyeing them in the weeks and months ahead&hellip;

FMF-issue-022526(Featured)

A Recipe for “Immediate” Civil War

<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1_2x-new.png 2x" alt="1" width="37" />Autonomous AI&hellip; and Software Stocks
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> To hear the mainstream tell it, the stock market fell out of bed yesterday because of a 7,000-word blogpost.
An outfit called Citrini Research issued a report on Substack. It&rsquo;s written as if it were June 2028 &mdash; looking back on the events of the previous couple of years. The firm promoted it on social media like this&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/4y1RJREkS0aOuZHwtjr1ul/6f270b220429aa23e6af4a8530f3a74f/FMF-Issue-02-24-26_1_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
The gist of Citrini&rsquo;s &ldquo;retrospective from the future&rdquo; is that AI has wiped out many high-paying white-collar jobs &mdash; cratering consumer spending and thus cratering both the economy and the stock market.
That&rsquo;s not exactly a novel take on things.
Nearly three years ago, the writer John Michael Greer spun a similarly harrowing scenario: Huge portions of suburbia are hollowed out, Rust Belt style, as AI takes over scads of once-desirable white-collar jobs.
But people weren&rsquo;t ready to hear Greer&rsquo;s message about AI back then. People were still oohing and aahing over how you could use ChatGPT to summarize the plot of the latest White Lotus episode in the style of a Shakespearean sonnet.
People are ready to hear Citrini&rsquo;s message in early 2026 &mdash; especially on Wall Street, where narratives have already taken hold that AI is about to wipe out the software business as we&rsquo;ve known it for decades.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> And so the software stocks &mdash; already on their heels &mdash; took another hit yesterday.
From a peak of $110.08 in mid-December, the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF (IGV) slid 26.6% as of last Friday&rsquo;s close. It slid another 4.75% yesterday to lows last seen in late 2023.
Non-software companies named in Citrini&rsquo;s scenario also got hit hard: DoorDash fell 6.6%, American Express 7.2% The fallout spread to the rest of the market, the S&amp;P 500 declining 1%.
So how much of this is real and how much is hype?
For perspective we turn today to Jim Rickards. We tout James Altucher as our AI authority at Paradigm &mdash; but Jim brings his own perspective to AI, complete with a book published in late 2024 called MoneyGPT: AI and the Threat to the Global Economy.
Yesterday &mdash; just as the Citrini report was going viral &mdash; Jim wrote to his Strategic Intelligence subscribers about how the worst still isn&rsquo;t over for the software stocks.
The reason? &ldquo;AI applications have made a quantum leap in terms of their capabilities.&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> No longer do AI bots simply answer questions using their code. &ldquo;They write their own code,&rdquo; Jim says.
&ldquo;And this is not just a case of cut-and-paste code modules plugged into certain routines. That technology has been around for decades. This is a case of writing original code based on minimal prompts from the user.
&ldquo;Some cases go further. Once the AI-bot is granted access to your computer and to the internet and with a minimal prompt, it will not only write code but apply the code on the internet to perform tasks, order goods and download open-source software without instructions based on inferences about what the user wants.
&ldquo;We&rsquo;ve all experienced cases of writing an email or ordering goods only to be bombarded with online advertising about items related to the goods we just purchased. This is a kind of marketing performed by sellers and advertisers using access to our preferences obtained by scanning our output.
&ldquo;These new AI systems go much further in the sense that they&rsquo;re not working for the advertisers. They&rsquo;re working for us &mdash; and they&rsquo;re using their own inferential methods to figure out what we want and how to get it.&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> This is the essence of &ldquo;autonomous AI&rdquo; or aAI &mdash; as Jim demonstrated during the Paradigm All-In Summit earlier this month alongside James Altucher and Enrique Abeyta.
&ldquo;It&rsquo;s the cutting edge and it&rsquo;s coming fast,&rdquo; Jim says. &ldquo;But it may be coming too fast for legacy software companies.
&ldquo;We may not even need coders and off-the-shelf software anymore. Our apps will write their own code. New jobs in the industry won&rsquo;t be for coders. They&rsquo;ll be for concierge types who can help customers manage this brave new world of aAI.&rdquo;
If you have a traders&rsquo; mentality, you might consider something like IGV; surely it&rsquo;s due for an oversold bounce.
But as Jim sees it, that would only be a short-term play. Longer term, he says, &ldquo;Goodbye to software &mdash; and to software company stocks.&rdquo;
[Editor&rsquo;s note: Jim has worked with many AI programs from restricted government systems he can&rsquo;t talk about. But the most reliable system he uses is a financial AI that just detected a huge signal for an important mining stock.
Even better, Jim says this signal is perfectly timed for Donald Trump&rsquo;s State of the Union speech tonight. &ldquo;The stars are aligned for a major announcement that could send this stock to the moon,&rdquo; says Jim &mdash; <a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2511047">as he shows you when you click here</a>.]
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2_2x-new.png 2x" alt="2" width="37" />In Other AI Developments&hellip;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> The oh-so-ballyhood &ldquo;Stargate&rdquo; project is barely out of the starting gate &mdash; and hopelessly stalled.
We chronicled the announcement shortly after Donald Trump&rsquo;s second inauguration &mdash; a White House gathering featuring OpenAI&rsquo;s Sam Altman, Oracle&rsquo;s Larry Ellison and SoftBank&rsquo;s Masayoshi Son.
Together, they and the president were touting a four-year $500 billion AI project &mdash; sprawling data center construction that would generate 100,000 jobs.
But the details were fuzzy, to say the least &mdash; starting with where the funding was supposed to come from. Would any of Stargate ever come to pass?
<a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/stargate">Your editor likened Trump&rsquo;s photo op</a> to Bill Clinton taking credit in 1993 for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal that came to naught.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Fast-forward 13 months: One data center is under construction and no staff have been hired.
That&rsquo;s according to an extensive report from the tech site The Information &mdash; which characterizes Stargate as a &ldquo;shelved idea.&rdquo;
It seems the three principals have been squabbling over responsibilities and how the venture should be structured.
OpenAI couldn&rsquo;t secure the financing to meet its goal of locking down commitments for 10 gigawatts by the end of 2025. As such OpenAI has turned to outsourcing its vast and growing needs for computing power from Amazon Web Services, Google, AMD and the chip startup Cerebras.
<a id="3"></a>
The only meaningful sign of accomplishment so far is a groundbreaking last October on a one-gigawatt data center in Central Texas.
If there&rsquo;s a sudden and unexpected lurch of forward progress in 2026, we&rsquo;ll let you know&hellip;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3_2x-new.png 2x" alt="3" width="37" />Oil&hellip; and Sewage
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> The oil price continues to hover over $66 a barrel as the windup to a U.S. attack on Iran is taking a very odd turn.
The headline news is mostly about the president&rsquo;s frustration with his generals telling him there&rsquo;s no quick, &ldquo;surgical&rdquo; Venezuela-like action the U.S. military can take with Iran. (For his part, the president denies those reports.)
But the real eyebrow-raiser has to do with the aircraft carrier USS Gerald Ford. The Ford has arrived in the Mediterranean Sea &mdash; presumably to function as a one-two punch along with the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Arabian Sea.
The Wall Street Journal reports that morale on the Ford is low. Typical &ldquo;peacetime&rdquo; carrier deployments are six months. The Ford is already at eight and on track for 11.
Worse, social media has erupted with reports that the toilets on the Ford are badly backed up &mdash; complete with stomach-turning pictures evidently sent by the sailors aboard to family and friends back home.
It&rsquo;s inspired much online mirth, to be sure&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/1MQrpCCjm9vRnP5S5rKOfn/5f63b80563e0bafce3da401dc6196c22/FMF-Issue-02-24-26_2_.png" alt="pub" width="444px" />
But the rumors of a stealth mutiny are less funny&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/8IEZcLYr6AiwBcaHZ9lWW/0901f12e540fb9bd128e5371e65b75ea/FMF-Issue-02-24-26_3_.png" alt="pub" width="435px" />
In other peculiar developments, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says he might order huge amounts of pizzas for Pentagon staff at random intervals &mdash; just to throw off the &ldquo;Pentagon Pizza Report&rdquo; account on X that tracks the &ldquo;popular times&rdquo; data on Google Maps for pizza joints in the area, presumably as a tip-off to U.S. airstrikes.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> In the meantime the major U.S. stock indexes are recovering a fair chunk of yesterday&rsquo;s losses.
The S&amp;P 500 is up three-quarters of a percent and back within 10 points of 6,900. The index has been range-bound since Thanksgiving &mdash; unable to break decisively over 7,000, or even notch a closing high over 7,000.
The tariff news today is that the 10% tariff Donald Trump announced Friday and raised to 15% Saturday has now taken effect and is 10%. FedEx sued the government for a refund plus interest on the tariffs struck down by the Supreme Court Friday. (Expect the case to drag on for years.)
Precious metals sold off hard earlier today, but have since pared those losses. Gold sits at $5,159 and silver at $87.85. Crypto is moribund with Bitcoin a little over $64,000 and Ethereum well under $1,900.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4_2x-new.png 2x" alt="4" width="37" />Comic Relief: But What About the Dow?
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Have to say, this is an unusually skilled use of AI-generated imagery&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/2RSc1Z2y3JCCdPj7l7GGTa/c757287e0b0747342292680c0fc834b0/FMF-Issue-02-24-26_4_.png" alt="pub" width="416px" />
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5_2x-new.png 2x" alt="5" width="37" />Mailbag: Iran, Partisanship
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;There is no way Trump or any U.S. president will be the first to use nuclear weapons, particularly against a country that doesn&rsquo;t currently possess nukes,&rdquo; writes a longtime reader who&rsquo;s also a retired Marine colonel. (We&rsquo;re circling back to <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/countdown-to-war">a topic that came up last week</a>.)
&ldquo;The use of nukes would be an easy way to lose the high ground of moral authority. When I was at the U.S. Army War College many years ago, an instructor suggested that the U.S. would not use nukes against North Korea even after they used the weapon first. I was sure we would in retaliation, and I still am.&nbsp;
&ldquo;His rationale was that we had sufficient conventional means to destroy them without using nukes ourselves. I&rsquo;m not so sure now, as they have increased their nuclear capabilities significantly since then.&nbsp;
&ldquo;But Iran doesn&rsquo;t yet have nuclear weapons, and the whole point is to keep them from getting them, and maybe a little regime change. Overdramatizing a particular outcome and use of fearmongering is a good way to lose your argument.
&ldquo;Still love the 5!&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Meanwhile another reader strikes back at a contributor to <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/sorry-you-cant-have-your-money-now#5">last Thursday&rsquo;s mailbag&hellip;</a>
&ldquo;To inform the aptly implied &lsquo;rube&rsquo; who has obviously never served in the military &mdash; Iran could easily &lsquo;conventionally&rsquo; defeat the U.S. &lsquo;armada&rsquo; and even capture it wholly intact.
&ldquo;Those forces are on the shoestring end of a very long and complex supply chain that could be easily severed multiple ways. leaving ships without fuel, food and water. This could end with them being captured and towed to port as POWs and war prizes.
&ldquo;Otherwise, swarm attacks could disable or sink all the vessels exactly as war-gamed many years ago. In case of attack, all U.S./NATO bases up to 2,000 kilometers will be damaged or destroyed (not just functionality but smoking craters). This does not even come close to the asymmetric attacks that could cripple or decimate (90% U.S. casualties) this country.
&ldquo;Rubes like this are a direct threat to not only you and me but the entire planet by their whole stupidity, ignorance and hubris. Might I suggest he take a combat tour in Ukrainian trenches (plenty of room) before he spews any more stupidity.&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;Dave, where can I find articles you wrote critical of the Biden administration, including the president&rsquo;s mental competency, border policy and fiscal matters in the archives?
[Evidently the reader took exception to <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/scotus-v-sotu">yesterday&rsquo;s edition</a>?]
&ldquo;Just trying to get a handle on what emotion you are trying for in your current writings on Trump versus those on Biden.&rdquo;
Dave responds: You&rsquo;re wondering whether I was critical of the Biden administration?
Well, let&rsquo;s see&hellip; there were all the annual censorship-and-financial-cancellation issues that I wrote during Biden-time. <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/todays-5-bullets-is-packed-with-misinformation">(Here&rsquo;s the one from 2024.)</a> And there was the forceful opposition I expressed to Biden&rsquo;s jab mandates. <a href="https://5minforecast.com/2021/09/13/permanent-state-of-emergency/">(Here&rsquo;s the first of many.)</a>
That should be enough to get you started. If it&rsquo;s not enough, write back and I&rsquo;m sure I can direct you to more.
I took a lot of flack during the 2024 campaign cycle from people who thought I was pro-Trump. Now he&rsquo;s back in power and I&rsquo;m getting it from the other side.
I mean, it comes with the territory but it does get a little old after a while&hellip;

FMF-Issue-02-24-26(Featured)

Jim Rickards: Software-Stock Scare

<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1_2x-new.png 2x" alt="1" width="37" />You Heard It Here First
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> We begin the week with a hearty congratulations for every financial pundit who beclowned himself by saying there was no way the Supreme Court would rule on tariffs last Friday.
Such as&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/2lJL0fco7bvEDEEFoW2kg6/18a61e039278e85fd7b1fa91f2d916bf/FMF-Issue-02-23-26_1_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
As the thinking went, the nine justices usually sit in the front row for the State of the Union address &mdash; which is tomorrow night. Why would they risk the spectacle of the president berating them on live television, especially if the ruling caused market turbulence for which he would blame them?
Well, as you certainly know by now, the justices did rule on Friday &mdash; striking down much of the Trump tariff regime by a 6-3 margin. And there was no market turbulence to speak of.
At least the fellow who blew that forecast fessed up &mdash; and to his credit didn&rsquo;t delete the old tweet.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" />It&rsquo;s fair to say readers of this e-letter saw what was coming months before the corporate media caught on.
Way back on May 9, 2025 <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/unconstitutional">we alerted you</a> to the flurry of lawsuits by small-business owners challenging the tariffs. We profiled a couple of those owners, including Emily Ley. Her Florida-based firm called Simplified relies on imported materials from China not available domestically. She&rsquo;s written tariff checks to Uncle Sam totaling $1.17 million between 2017&ndash;2025.
We also alerted you to the likelihood the Supreme Court would (1) take up the matter and (2) strike down many of the 2025 Trump tariffs on constitutional grounds: Tariffs are taxes and taxes must originate in the House of Representatives.
Sure enough, that&rsquo;s what the majority opinion says&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/2QjaCUVDnNQ34uNPrwAY2u/6ccd0c0a3f68c70e3132715f5e138d3d/FMF-Issue-02-23-26_2_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
Emily Ley&rsquo;s specific case did not make it to the high court. But she&rsquo;s elated nonetheless.
&ldquo;When the Supreme Court ruling came down,&rdquo; she writes on her Substack page, &ldquo;I felt something unexpected &mdash; relief, and deep gratitude. We made it. It required serious financial maneuvering and tightening things up at Simplified in ways I didn&rsquo;t anticipate, but we got through it. Now we wait for our case in the Court of International Trade &mdash; this ruling will guide the outcome of ours &mdash; and we celebrate.&rdquo;
But maybe not for long. Now comes the fallout&hellip;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2_2x-new.png 2x" alt="2" width="37" />Tariff Ruling: The Fallout
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;The decision erases nearly three-fourths of the new tax revenue the Trump administration hoped to raise from tariffs,&rdquo; says a dispatch from the Tax Foundation.
Specifically, we&rsquo;re talking about the tariffs the Trump administration levied citing the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 &mdash; which garnered $134 billion in revenue for the government last year. That includes the &ldquo;Liberation Day&rdquo; tariffs and the fentanyl tariffs targeting China, Canada and Mexico.
The ruling did not address the tariffs levied under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 &mdash; which affect industries like steel, aluminum, autos and heavy trucks. Those will remain in place.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/3CKZ6WDDLRY26lfUfcs1Km/df7c9f3d0b791950239e313ae30c386f/FMF-Issue-02-23-26_3_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;In the near term, uncertainty remains as the president could pursue other discretionary trade powers to impose tariffs,&rdquo; adds the Tax Foundation.
Paradigm macroeconomics maven Jim Rickards has said as much for months: &ldquo;Trump has many other statutes that he can use to support the same tariffs,&rdquo; he said in his 2026 outlook we issued at year-end 2025.
Trump did exactly that after the ruling on Friday &mdash; instantly reinstating the across-the-board 10% tariff he imposed last spring. Instead of relying on the 1977 law the Supreme Court said was off-limits, he resorted to a different 1974 law.
(On Saturday he upped the tariff to 15%, without saying why.)
Rick Woldenberg &mdash; CEO of the company that was the lead plaintiff in the case decided by the Supreme Court on Friday &mdash; seems resigned to that prospect.
"If the government is bound and determined to try to harm us through excessive taxes,&rdquo; he tells the BBC, &ldquo;I'm sure they'll find a way.&rdquo;.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Perhaps anticipating that&rsquo;s what Trump would do, the Supreme Court punted on the question of whether Uncle Sam has to issue refunds to companies that paid the tariffs.
In the final analysis, &ldquo;the Treasury will not pay refunds,&rdquo; Jim Rickards told his Strategic Intelligence readers after the ruling Friday. &ldquo;It will argue that the court&rsquo;s interpretation cannot be applied retroactively.&rdquo;
As Jim sees it the ruling &ldquo;will not have any material impact on the Treasury, the deficit or our trading partners... Economic life will go on much as before.&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Still, there&rsquo;s that near-term uncertainty businesses must wrestle with.
Case in point: SGAmmo, an Oklahoma-based online retailer of ammunition. In an email to customers Friday afternoon, owner Sam Gabbert talked about what the ruling means for them.
He took pains to say his email &ldquo;is not meant to be political, partisan or in any way support or oppose U.S. government tariff policy. That said, tariffs are relevant to the ammunition industry in terms of cost and product availability, as many raw materials used to manufacture ammunition in the United States &mdash; as well as a significant portion of finished ammunition products &mdash; are imported.&rdquo;
Thus, he said the Section 232 tariffs on copper are unaffected by the ruling. &ldquo;Those tariffs have contributed to increased input costs for domestic manufacturers, due to the 50% tariff on copper-portions raw materials used to make brass cases and bullet jackets.
&ldquo;Depending on how trade policy evolves in the coming months, certain imported finished ammunition products could potentially see short-term cost shifts relative to domestically produced products, though the degree of any impact will depend on numerous variables. At this stage, it is too early to determine with certainty how today&rsquo;s ruling will affect ammunition prices or availability&hellip; It may take three&ndash;six months before the net effects become clear, and unexpected developments are certainly possible along the way.&rdquo;
In the meantime, there&rsquo;s more to be said about those refunds. Read on&hellip;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3_2x-new.png 2x" alt="3" width="37" />Bad Look
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Then there&rsquo;s the whole matter of how the family of a senior Trump official potentially stood to profit off the Supreme Court ruling.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/4RZdmgJUyJHevmDmfSaAMT/0ef862756994e11541d0847c154e39bd/FMF-Issue-02-23-26_4_.png" alt="tweet" width="540px" />
After the ruling on Friday, social media blew up with links to <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/cantor-fitzgerald-trump-tariff-refunds/">an article</a> published by Wired last summer.
The background: Trump&rsquo;s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick used to run the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald. After joining the White House last year, he handed control of Cantor to his sons.
Over the last year, Lutnick has been the architect of the Trump tariff regime. Meanwhile, Cantor was positioning its clients for the likelihood the tariffs would be struck down in court.
From the Wired piece&hellip;
<blockquote>In a letter seen by Wired, a representative from Cantor said the firm was willing to trade tariff refund rights for 20&ndash;30% of what companies have paid in duties. &ldquo;So for a company that paid $10 million, they could expect to receive $2&ndash;3 million in a trade,&rdquo; the representative wrote. &ldquo;We have the capacity to trade up to several hundred million of these presently and can likely upsize that in the future to meet potential demand&hellip;&rdquo;</blockquote>
Basically, Cantor would lend companies 20&ndash;30 cents for every dollar they&rsquo;re owed in refunds. The companies would grab the quick cash and wait for the legal process to play out. That could take years &mdash; but Cantor&rsquo;s patience would pay off because at the end of the process it would collect 100 cents on the dollar.
Nice work if you can get it.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> For its part, Cantor is now throwing its salesman under the bus &mdash; saying he &ldquo;erroneously&rdquo; believed the firm would pursue such a scheme.
&ldquo;Cantor Fitzgerald has never executed any transactions or taken risk on the legality of tariffs,&rdquo; a spokesman tells the Semafor site. &ldquo;Any report suggesting otherwise is completely false.&rdquo;
Even if that&rsquo;s true, the optics are awful.
As Semafor writer Liz Hoffman points out, &ldquo;Cantor has clearly benefitted from its ties to Lutnick, becoming a big underwriter of deals aligned with the administration&rsquo;s crypto, AI, energy and national security agenda.&rdquo;
And that&rsquo;s on top of Lutnick&rsquo;s proven lies about his relationship with the late financier and sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein. The newest Epstein files show he visited with Epstein long after Lutnick said he&rsquo;d cut ties.
Needless to say, Lutnick remains on the job this morning&hellip;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4_2x-new.png 2x" alt="4" width="37" />&ldquo;If History Is Any Guide&hellip;&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Before we move on to the markets today, we give the final word to Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.
Gorsuch was Trump&rsquo;s first appointee to the court. He&rsquo;s often considered part of the court&rsquo;s most conservative wing, along with Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas.
<blockquote>For those who think it important for the Nation to impose more tariffs, I understand that today&rsquo;s decision will be disappointing. All I can offer them is that most major decisions affecting the rights and responsibilities of the American people (including the duty to pay taxes and tariffs) are funneled through the legislative process for a reason.</blockquote>
<blockquote>Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And, yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design.</blockquote>
<blockquote>Through that process, the Nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people&rsquo;s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man. There, deliberation tempers impulse, and compromise hammers disagreements into workable solutions. And because laws must earn such broad support to survive the legislative process, they tend to endure, allowing ordinary people to plan their lives in ways they cannot when the rules shift from day to day.</blockquote>
<blockquote>In all, the legislative process helps ensure each of us has a stake in the laws that govern us and in the Nation&rsquo;s future. For some today, the weight of those virtues is apparent. For others, it may not seem so obvious. But if history is any guide, the tables will turn and the day will come when those disappointed by today&rsquo;s result will appreciate the legislative process for the bulwark of liberty it is.</blockquote>
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5_2x-new.png 2x" alt="5" width="37" />Markets Today: Is It Really About Tariffs?
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> The financial media are flailing about &mdash; trying to tie the tariffs to both a rally on Friday and a sell-off today.
The narrative on Friday was that the market was &ldquo;relieved&rdquo; by the Supreme Court ruling - sending the S&amp;P 500 up 48 points to close at 6,909.
The narrative today is that Trump&rsquo;s Saturday announcement of a 15% tariff has touched off &ldquo;confusion&rdquo; that somehow didn&rsquo;t exist on Friday &mdash; sending the S&amp;P 500 down 66 points as we write to 6,843.
What if &mdash; just hang with us here &mdash; what if the action Friday and today had little or nothing to do with tariffs and is just a continuation of the choppy action we&rsquo;ve seen going back to the start of the year?
It&rsquo;s a safe bet that Nvidia&rsquo;s earnings &mdash; which the company will report after the closing bell on Wednesday &mdash; will do much more to set the direction of the major indexes in the coming weeks than tariffs.
In any event, stocks&rsquo; losses today are precious metals&rsquo; gains: Gold is up over $100 at last check to $5,213 and silver is up $2.74 to $87.26.
Bitcoin is losing its grip on the $67,000 level that&rsquo;s held most of this month &mdash; now $65,552. Ethereum has sunk below $1,900.
Crude is inching past $67 for the first time since last summer despite word that U.S.-Iran negotiations will resume on Thursday.
No major economic numbers are due this week: It&rsquo;s all about the State of the Union and Nvidia earnings.
We have a full mailbag, but in light of the tariff news it will have to wait until tomorrow. Catch you then!

FMF-Issue-02-23-26(Featured)

SCOTUS v. SOTU

<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1_2x-new.png 2x" alt="1" width="37" />Sorry, You Can&rsquo;t Have Your Money Now
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Hopefully you&rsquo;ve never had to deal with this and never will, but&hellip;
Imagine you have money tied up in an investment and one day the managers of that investment tell you that if you want to pull your money out &mdash; say, to cover a child&rsquo;s college education, or meet a big unexpected medical bill &mdash; you&rsquo;re out of luck.
You&rsquo;ll get your money back, maybe, on the managers&rsquo; schedule.
Keep that in mind as you read the first two paragraphs of this story from the Financial Times&hellip;
<blockquote>Private credit group Blue Owl will permanently restrict investors from withdrawing their cash from its inaugural private retail debt fund, backtracking from an earlier plan to reopen to redemptions this quarter.</blockquote>
<blockquote>The New York investment group on Wednesday said investors in Blue Owl Capital Corp II would no longer be able to redeem their investments in quarterly intervals but that the company would instead return investors&rsquo; capital in episodic payments as it sells down assets in coming quarters and years.</blockquote>
To be sure, this isn&rsquo;t the first problem to emerge in the &ldquo;private credit&rdquo; market &mdash; loans that were once the province of banks but are now dominated by players like Blackstone, Apollo and KKR.
Private credit was how the auto parts maker First Brands financed its operations &mdash; until it filed for bankruptcy last fall.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> If you&rsquo;re old enough, you might be asking yourself &mdash; Wait, didn&rsquo;t something like this Blue Owl thing happen with the 2008 financial crisis? Like, really early on?
The answer is yes: More than a year before Lehman Bros. went belly-up in September 2008, cracks in the system emerged in the late summer of 2007.
Bear Stearns liquidated two hedge funds exposed to $20 billion in sketchy &ldquo;collateralized debt obligations.&rdquo; The home lender American Home Mortgage filed for bankruptcy. CNBC&rsquo;s Jim Cramer broke into a crying jag on live television, begging the Federal Reserve to &ldquo;open the discount window&rdquo; and cut the interest rate it charged banks for temporary loans.
Good times.
Most important for our purposes today, it was at that time in August 2007 that the giant French bank BNP Paribas froze $2.2 billion in investor assets held within three hedge funds exposed to subprime mortgages.
But don&rsquo;t take it from us. Take it from Mohamed El-Erian, one of the smartest guys in mainstream finance, formerly CEO of Pimco and formerly president of Queens&rsquo; College, Cambridge.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;Is this a &lsquo;canary in the coal mine&rsquo; moment, similar to August 2007?&rdquo; El-Erian tweeted this morning.
&ldquo;There&rsquo;s plenty to think about here, starting with the risks of an investing phenomenon in advanced (not developing) markets that has gone too far overall (short answer: yes), to the approaches being taken by specific firms (lots of differences, yet subject to the &lsquo;market for lemons&rsquo; risk).&ldquo;
Don&rsquo;t get the wrong idea: El-Erian says the risk from private credit isn&rsquo;t anywhere on the same scale as subprime mortgages in 2007&ndash;08. But while the risk is smaller, it is no less real.
Those early subprime tremors in the late summer of 2007 were enough to drag the Dow Industrials down 8.3% in the space of four weeks.
Looking back on those events almost two decades ago&hellip; and mulling over the frozen investor funds at Blue Owl now&hellip; well, it&rsquo;s not out of the realm to expect a similar hiccup in the stock market sooner or later, probably sooner.
Which is exactly what Mason Sexton, editor of The Map, warned about on Tuesday in his livestream event titled The Prophecy 2026.
The catalyst could be almost anything. It could be trouble in the private credit markets. Yesterday, we explored the market risk stemming from a U.S. attack on Iran.
It doesn&rsquo;t really matter: What matters is that as Mason sees it, the potential for big trouble begins tomorrow and continues into the first days of March.
Why is he so certain about the timeline? And what protective measures does he think you should take? <a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2510385">Take the time now to watch </a><a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2510385">The Prophecy 2026</a>. By the time we get to the weekend, he says it could be too late.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2_2x-new.png 2x" alt="2" width="37" />Iran and the &ldquo;TACO Trade&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> In the meantime, Iran still looms large over markets &mdash; oil trading at its highest in over six months.
A barrel of West Texas Intermediate traded as high as $66.65 this morning amid reports from CNN and the like saying a U.S. attack could be underway by Saturday.
Then Donald Trump said, &ldquo;Maybe we&rsquo;re going to make a deal. You&rsquo;re going to be finding out over the next, probably 10 days.&rdquo; With that, the price pulled back slightly but is now even higher at $66.78.
So now what? &ldquo;The TACO trade is real,&rdquo; says the Armchair Warlord account on X &mdash; referring to the expression &ldquo;Trump always chickens out.&rdquo;
&ldquo;Trump talks a big game until the markets start to believe him, whereupon he reliably beats a hasty retreat and pivots to a new distraction from the Epstein files. The moral hazard here is that Trump has done this so many times that by this point global markets don't actually take him seriously and so they're reacting late and weak to what are objectively very concerning developments.&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> This much is certain: The administration has still made next to no effort to sell the American people on the necessity of a war that might entail substantial U.S. casualties. They can&rsquo;t even come up with credible talking points.
Asked yesterday what&rsquo;s the point of an attack if Trump said Iran&rsquo;s nuclear program is already &ldquo;obliterated,&rdquo; the best that White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt could summon was, &ldquo;Well, there&rsquo;s many reasons and arguments that one could make for a strike against Iran. The president had a very successful operation as commander-in-chief with Operation Midnight Hammer. As you know, as you just said, totally obliterated Iran&rsquo;s nuclear facilities.&rdquo;
Next question: When might the president make the case for war to the American people? Perhaps the State of the Union address to Congress next Tuesday? Leavitt begged off, saying she won&rsquo;t &ldquo;engage in a hypothetical.&rdquo;
Speaking of Congress, Reps. Ro Khanna (D-California) and Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) are teaming up on a War Powers Resolution aimed at preventing Trump from launching airstrikes without congressional authorization. Khanna says he&rsquo;ll force a vote next week.
&ldquo;War with Iran would be catastrophic,&rdquo; says Khanna. &ldquo;Iran is a complex society of 90 million people with significant air defenses and military capabilities. We also have 30,000&ndash;40,000 US troops in the region who could be at risk of retaliation. Congress must do its job and stop this march to war.&rdquo;
We&rsquo;ll give the last word for now to the Armchair Warlord: &ldquo;As ever, use strict informational hygiene and consider source bias and attempts to box in U.S. decision-making through planted reporting from controlled outlets and journalists.&rdquo;
Presumably he&rsquo;s referring to Axios reporter Barak Ravid &mdash; whose imminent-war dispatch we mentioned off the top of yesterday&rsquo;s edition. And it&rsquo;s why we also mentioned Ravid&rsquo;s history in Israel&rsquo;s version of the National Security Agency, known as Unit 8200&hellip;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> After modest gains yesterday the major U.S. stock indexes are posting even more modest losses today. 
As we write they&rsquo;re all down by less than a quarter percent. The big earnings report comes from Walmart &mdash; which reported strong sales growth even as it says consumers are spending cautiously. The news elicited a glass-half-full reaction from traders, sending WMT shares up 1.75%.
The big economic number today is the trade deficit &mdash; including full-year 2025 figures. Despite all the tariffs, America&rsquo;s trade gap registered $901.5 billion last year &mdash; down only microscopically from the year before.
<a id="3"></a>
Precious metals are looking positively quiescent by recent standards &mdash; gold inching its way back above $5,000 and silver up a little over a buck to $78.18. The main cryptos languish where they were 24 hours ago, Bitcoin a little over $66,000 and Ethereum at $1,922.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3_2x-new.png 2x" alt="3" width="37" />NYC&rsquo;s Big Budget Raid
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> We&rsquo;re just putting this on your radar for future reference&hellip;
Earlier this week, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani laid out his plans to close the city&rsquo;s huge budget gap. What made headlines was the prospect of raising New Yorkers&rsquo; already sky-high property taxes.
But there was something else he put on the table that got almost no attention &mdash; raiding the fund that&rsquo;s set aside for the health care of retired city workers.
&ldquo;We do not want to have to turn to such drastic measures to balance our budget,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But faced with no other choice, we will be forced to.&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Don&rsquo;t get the wrong idea: Maybe it&rsquo;s starting in New York. But it won&rsquo;t stay in New York.
Way back in 2010, the Pew Center on the States issued an eye-opening report that found state governments had $3.35 trillion in obligations to retirees &mdash; pensions, health care and other benefits &mdash; but only $2.35 trillion on hand.
A day of reckoning is inevitable &mdash; higher taxes, benefit cuts or both &mdash; but so far, states and municipalities have managed to put it off.
After tax revenue cratered amid the 2008 financial crisis, states and municipalities shored up their finances with huge federal handouts from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Even bigger handouts came in the aftermath of the pandemic via the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.
But that money&rsquo;s gone now. I&rsquo;ve done a cursory search for a more recent version of the Pew report &mdash; as well as a similar report issued by scholars at Northwestern University and the University of Rochester &mdash; but nothing of consequence turns up.
Still&hellip; New York&rsquo;s budget fix is a reminder that the problem is still out there. We&rsquo;ll be on the watch for similar troubles elsewhere &mdash; just in case they&rsquo;ll be coming to a town near you.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4_2x-new.png 2x" alt="4" width="37" />Comic Relief
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Well, this puts the question of &ldquo;Is the gold in Fort Knox still there?&rdquo; in another light&hellip;
<a id="5"></a>
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/727uaal1BpocffuSG0iycp/23fadf3c15681922ba9da2a3381a09c6/FMF-Issue-02-19-26_1_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5_2x-new.png 2x" alt="5" width="37" />Mailbag: &ldquo;Chicken Little&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;Wow Chicken Little. Alarmist Much? Trump uses Nukes? Seriously??&rdquo; a reader writes after yesterday&rsquo;s mailbag.
&ldquo;Explain to us rubes how Iran could enjoy &lsquo;conventional military success.&rsquo; We'd own the skies and sea in 24&ndash;48 hours. There won't be a land invasion so how does Iran achieve &lsquo;conventional military success.&rsquo;
&ldquo;To be sure&hellip; Iran still probably maintains a healthy supply of fixed and mobile launching ballistic missiles. No downplaying that potential threat. They pose a danger to our Middle East bases and our fleet.
&ldquo;BUT&hellip; enough of a threat that Trump would order NUKES?
&ldquo;Stock market will be fine once the operation is over. Buy gold and silver for the short-term pop both will enjoy. Won't last long. The war or the pop!&rdquo;
Dave responds: To be clear, I was citing nearly year-old reporting by the independent journalist Ken Klippenstein. His source was &ldquo;a retired senior military officer who has been briefed on the planning.&rdquo;
Don&rsquo;t dismiss his reporting lightly. He&rsquo;s gotten a number of interesting scoops in the last year. Among them are the &ldquo;manifesto&rdquo; of Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. More recently he got his hands on a Homeland Security memo warning what could happen if ICE agents confront suspects in vehicles &mdash; before the Renee Good shooting in Minneapolis.
Meanwhile, be wary of claims that U.S. victory will be quick and certain.
&ldquo;Iran will be able to almost immediately detect U.S. aircraft and Tomahawk launches,&rdquo; tweets the military analyst Will Schryver -- &ldquo;and, depending on where in Iran is being targeted, from launch to strike will take anywhere from 30 minutes to three-plus hours.&rdquo;
At the same time, &ldquo;Iranian [short-range ballistic missiles] can hit US bases in the region within five&ndash;seven minutes. Therefore, Iran can very conceivably achieve multiple significant strikes against U.S. targets long before U.S. munitions hit ANY targets in Iran.&rdquo;
To be sure, &ldquo;Iran will get hit hard for a week or two,&rdquo; he acknowledges. &ldquo;The question is can they be disarmed such that they cannot inflict severe damage against the U.S.?
&ldquo;The pain threshold for Iran will be MUCH higher than it is for the U.S./Israel. One disabled carrier would be catastrophic.&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> In the meantime, reactions continue to pour in to Mason Sexton&rsquo;s The Prophecy 2026 event.
&ldquo;Yes, it was controversial!&rdquo; one reader allows &mdash; but he says he kept an open mind about Mr. Sexton&rsquo;s &ldquo;research process and result.&rdquo;
&ldquo;Great work Mason,&rdquo; says another reader. &ldquo;See you've got lots of gray. I'm 84 now and still kicking. Was great to see you&rsquo;re still highly active. Great report.&rdquo;
We&rsquo;re keeping the replay of Mason&rsquo;s event online for less than 36 more hours. Tomorrow marks the start of the window in which he expects some sort of market dislocation &mdash; the kind that people might talk about for years to come. <a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2510385">Give it a look right now while there&rsquo;s still time</a>.

FMF-Issue-02-19-26(Featured)

Sorry, You Can’t Have Your Money Now

<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1_2x-new.png 2x" alt="1" width="37" />&ldquo;Major War&hellip; Very Soon&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Crude is up 4.4% &mdash; over $65 a barrel &mdash; as the war drums beat louder in the Middle East.
&ldquo;The Trump administration is closer to a major war in the Middle East than most Americans realize. It could begin very soon,&rdquo; says an Axios article by Barak Ravid.
&ldquo;A U.S. military operation in Iran would likely be a massive, weeks-long campaign that would look more like full-fledged war than last month's pinpoint operation in Venezuela, sources say.&rdquo;
Ravid&rsquo;s byline carries the authority of someone who served in Unit 8200 &mdash; Israel&rsquo;s version of the National Security Agency.
Seeing the latest developments this morning, my mind rewound to <a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2510087">Paradigm&rsquo;s exclusive event yesterday with Mason Sexton, </a><a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2510087">The Prophecy 2026</a>
There, he said the stock market looks &ldquo;extremely fragile&rdquo; with the potential for many familiar names to tumble 30&ndash;40%.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> And then it hit me &mdash; something Mr. Sexton said during an event we convened with him almost a year ago.
Last March he was expecting a steep downdraft in the market &mdash; which is exactly what happened in early April.
The catalyst turned out to be the president&rsquo;s &ldquo;Liberation Day&rdquo; tariff announcement. But as Mason explained at the time, the market was primed for a fall and the catalyst could have been anything. One day I mused over the myriad possibilities. One of those possibilities was&hellip;
&hellip; Donald Trump unleashing the U.S. military on Iran.
I cited the independent journalist Ken Klippenstein: &ldquo;President Trump&rsquo;s menu of options for dealing with Tehran now includes one he didn&rsquo;t have in his first term,&rdquo; he wrote: &ldquo;full-scale war&hellip;
&ldquo;While a range of military options are often provided to presidents in a passive-aggressive attempt on the part of the Pentagon to steer them to the one favored by the brass, Trump already has shown his proclivity to select the most provocative option.&rdquo;
Klippenstein said even nuclear weapons are on the table &mdash; according to &ldquo;a retired senior military officer who has been briefed on the planning.&rdquo;
Escalation to nukes would happen one of two ways: &ldquo;One, with the CENTCOM commander &lsquo;requesting&rsquo; the use of nuclear weapons, mostly to stave off Iranian conventional military success; and two, in a &lsquo;top down&rsquo; order, that is, by the president, mostly as a &lsquo;demonstration&rsquo; to &lsquo;signal&rsquo; to Iran.&rdquo;
And here we are, almost a year later.
Whatever the catalyst, Mason says the window for the coming market downdraft opens this Friday. Anytime between now and Tuesday, March 3 is when he expects something will throw the market for a loop.
If you want to see why he&rsquo;s so certain, you owe it to yourself to watch a replay of The Prophecy 2026. <a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2510087">Click here to start watching immediately</a>.
More about Iran in Bullet No. 2&hellip;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2_2x-new.png 2x" alt="2" width="37" />So Much for Negotiations
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Really, you don&rsquo;t need Axios to see which way the winds are blowing. 
When we left you yesterday, U.S.-Iran talks in Geneva, Switzerland ended with Iran&rsquo;s foreign minister saying there was a &ldquo;clear path&rdquo; to a deal. But we were awaiting word from the U.S. side.
Then Vice President Vance piped up. &ldquo;It was very clear that the president has set some red lines that the Iranians are not yet willing to actually acknowledge and work through.&rdquo;
Exactly what those red lines are, he didn&rsquo;t say. Zero uranium enrichment? Surrender all medium-range missiles? Those are Israel&rsquo;s red lines &mdash; and they&rsquo;re non-negotiable from Tehran&rsquo;s viewpoint.
Speaking of Tehran&rsquo;s viewpoint, the English-language social media feed of Iran&rsquo;s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is on fire&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/5btw0CoWc4abuyVk0QLJbE/3827c28c1901b8d86046fb4a8c59b598/FMF-Issue-02-18-26_1_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> It will be several days before a second U.S. aircraft carrier arrives in the region &mdash; but war might well start before then.
Even with only one U.S. carrier battle group in place, &ldquo;the U.S. has now positioned in the Middle East a formidable array of assets to prosecute an air campaign against Iran,&rdquo; tweets the military analyst Will Schryver.
As Schryver sees it, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will likely force the issue: &ldquo;the magnitude of the force the U.S. has now concentrated to the region will not be seen again within Netanyahu's lifetime &mdash; and probably never.
&ldquo;Therefore the Israelis have to make this happen NOW. And I doubt there are any limitations to what they might do to ensure they get the war they're looking for.
[Recall also that Israel launched its attack on Iran last year even while U.S.-Iranian talks were underway.]
&ldquo;So Trump has backed himself into a corner from which there is no escape. He has congregated all the air and naval power the U.S. can assemble without perilously denuding its force posture elsewhere on the planet.
&ldquo;And, short of the Iranians prostrating themselves and bathing his feet with tears and kisses, there is simply no way Trump cannot USE the large force he has gathered to make war against Iran.&rdquo;
That&rsquo;s even if he loses the substantial portion of the MAGA base that&rsquo;s wary of U.S. intervention overseas&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/4VxPM2RWJEb5wEPpI82z3N/e2064be167f3677927da2bc330d14041/FMF-Issue-02-18-26_2_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
Exactly what Washington&rsquo;s objective is, we still don&rsquo;t know. Ravid&rsquo;s article sheds no light.
But Schryver says air power alone won&rsquo;t be enough to disarm the Islamic Republic. To be continued&hellip;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3_2x-new.png 2x" alt="3" width="37" />Software Insider Buy
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;After months of watching beaten-down software stocks get hammered, insiders are finally stepping in to buy their own shares,&rdquo; says Davis Wilson of our sister e-letter The Million Mission.
The collapse in software stocks this month has been one for the ages. The Salesforces, ServiceNows and Intuits of the world have been smoked on the narrative that AI is going to render many of their products obsolete.
Earlier in February, Paradigm trading pro Enrique Abeyta said many of these names were so beaten down that they&rsquo;re worth &ldquo;aggressively buying.&rdquo;
Which brings us to this week: &ldquo;Yesterday,&rdquo; writes Davis Wilson, &ldquo;a filing revealed that ServiceNow (NOW) CEO Bill McDermott entered into an agreement to purchase $3 million worth of company stock on Feb. 27.
&ldquo;At the same time, he and several other top executives, including CFO Gina Mastantuono, terminated their 10b5-1 trading plans, which typically allow insiders to automatically sell stock over time.&rdquo;
It brings to mind a saying attributed to Peter Lynch, the legendary manager of the Fideilty Magellan Fund: Insiders sell their shares for any number of reasons but there&rsquo;s only one reason they buy &mdash; they expect the price will go up.
&ldquo;Academic research consistently shows insider buying is one of the most reliable signals investors can follow,&rdquo; says Davis. &ldquo;Insider purchases tend to predict future outperformance, especially when multiple executives buy shares around the same time&hellip;
&ldquo;I view this as a signal that it&rsquo;s time to start nibbling at ServiceNow and other beaten-down software names.&rdquo;
[&ldquo;But what about Mason Sexton&rsquo;s forecast?&rdquo; you wonder. We&rsquo;ll address that in today&rsquo;s mailbag section&hellip;]
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> For whatever it&rsquo;s worth, the software names are rallying today &mdash; leading the broad market higher.
The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF (IGV) is up 1.75% &mdash; and that&rsquo;s helped give the Nasdaq a 1.1% boost. The S&amp;P 500 is up three-quarters of a percent, back within spitting distance of 6,900. The Dow is the laggard, up a half percent.
Gold is back within $12 of the $5,000 mark while silver is up 5.5% to $77.48. But crypto is moving the other direction, Bitcoin now under $67,000 and Ethereum still under $2,000.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4_2x-new.png 2x" alt="4" width="37" />Comic Relief
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> The best humor has a foundation in the truth&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/7rUBTZlVqtv1BZYA8pZuag/acec41e565c354794f87bb14f3be5859/FMF-Issue-02-18-26_3_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5_2x-new.png 2x" alt="5" width="37" />Mailbag: About Mason Sexton&rsquo;s Prophecy&hellip;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> We got a couple of similar inquiries after yesterday&rsquo;s edition &mdash; specifically about <a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2510087">Mason Sexton&rsquo;s </a><a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2510087">The Prophecy 2026</a><a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2510087"> event&hellip;</a>
&ldquo;The information presented this afternoon is likely to adversely affect many of the stocks that you have recommended to your customers. Will you be alerting your customers in a timely manner?&rdquo;
Another: &ldquo;Since the edge of the cliff begins to be in view in three days on Feb. 20, what should we expect for changes to Paradigm's stock recommendations?&rdquo;
Dave responds: This is an important question &mdash; especially if you&rsquo;re a newer reader of Paradigm Press publications.
The short answer: We don&rsquo;t enforce a &ldquo;company line&rdquo; among our team.
True to our name, we ask only that our editors bring a rigorous paradigm to their work &mdash; a model of how the markets and the economy operate.
The last thing we want is for them to censor or second-guess themselves. You&rsquo;ve paid good money for your subscription(s) and you deserve the editors&rsquo; unvarnished, no-holds-barred opinions.
On those occasions when their opinions diverge, we respect your intelligence enough to weigh those opinions and come to your own conclusions.
At times, we&rsquo;ve even leaned into these divergences &mdash; as with our &ldquo;gold vs. Bitcoin&rdquo; debates pitting Jim Rickards against James Altucher in 2018 and again last year at the Paradigm Shift Summit in Nashville.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Now, specifically as it pertains to Mason Sexton&rsquo;s outlook: Perhaps this won&rsquo;t surprise you, but none of our other editors uses his one-of-a-kind methodology.
That said&hellip; all of our other editors are on alert &mdash; at all times &mdash; for events and hazards and black swans that might alter the thesis behind their buy recommendations.
After all, they know it&rsquo;s your money on the line. Often it&rsquo;s their money too.
Continue to follow the guidance of the publication(s) you subscribe to, as long as the ideas of the editor(s) continue to ring true for you. Their research is thorough and well-considered. They wouldn&rsquo;t be on our team if they weren&rsquo;t.
Thanks for the inquiries &mdash; and the reminder not only that we must earn our readers&rsquo; trust, but that we must earn that trust anew every day.

FMF-Issue-02-18-26(Featured)

Countdown to War

<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1_2x-new.png 2x" alt="1" width="37" />An &ldquo;Extremely Fragile&rdquo; Market
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> It was a little unnerving watching Paradigm&rsquo;s latest livestream event this afternoon. It wrapped up only moments ago.
&ldquo;The market is extremely fragile right now,&rdquo; said Mason Sexton, a market veteran of nearly 50 years experience with a history of uncannily accurate calls.
&ldquo;And it would not surprise me at all if stocks were to fall 30&ndash;40%.&rdquo;
The process could begin as early as this Friday. At the very latest, you&rsquo;ll want to position yourself for a jolt before Tuesday March 3.
If that&rsquo;s enough to grab your attention, <a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2509777">you can watch the replay of our event called </a><a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2509777">The Prophecy 2026 </a><a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2509777">right here</a>.
If you&rsquo;re skeptical, that&rsquo;s understandable. After all, the S&amp;P 500 is only 2% off its all-time high &mdash; a lofty level that&rsquo;s barely a month in the rearview.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> But you could have said the same thing in the spring of last year &mdash; right before the S&amp;P collapsed nearly 19%.
Here&rsquo;s a chart I pulled straight from Mason&rsquo;s presentation&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/4Lm26pd8yDSSjVUR2WntZ0/63cd760dae307cfade1d945b75a10d39/FMF-Issue-02-17-26_1_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
Maybe you recognize that big tumble as the reaction to Donald Trump&rsquo;s &ldquo;Liberation Day&rdquo; tariffs.
Mr. Sexton warned his readers that the period from March 20&ndash;24 would act as a &ldquo;last hurrah&rdquo; for the market before a &ldquo;surprise shock.&rdquo; Then on March 31, he warned the market would enter a &ldquo;death zone&rdquo; during the first week of April.
Then came the tariff announcement on April 2. The bottom fell out. In two trading days, the S&amp;P 500 lost $5 trillion in market value &mdash; the sharpest drop since COVID.
How did he see it coming? His methodology is unique &mdash; but he&rsquo;s used it to successfully call major turning points in the market for many decades. COVID&hellip; the financial crisis&hellip; the dot-com bust&hellip; the crash of 1987.
You get the idea; you dismiss his warnings at your own risk.
Again, time is limited in which to act. The danger window opens this Friday, Feb. 20. The last possible opportunity to take protective measures is Tuesday, March 3 &mdash; and by then it could be too late. <a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2509777">So take the time to check out </a><a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2509777">The Prophecy 2026</a><a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2509777"> right away</a>.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2_2x-new.png 2x" alt="2" width="37" />Missing the Point Much?
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Leave it to CNBC to miss the real news from one of its own exclusive interviews.
Last week the network spoke with David Einhorn, founder of Greenlight Capital &mdash; who rose to fame betting against Lehman Bros. before it went bankrupt during the 2008 financial crisis.
CNBC&rsquo;s article about the interview began with Einhorn&rsquo;s expectation that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates this year more than most experts expect &mdash; which gives him confidence in his gold bets. &ldquo;I think by the time we get to the end of the year, it&rsquo;s going to be substantially more than two cuts.&rdquo;
But the real news is that Einhorn thinks gold is on its way to eclipsing U.S. Treasuries as a global reserve asset.
He cites the massive accumulation of gold by central banks since 2022 &mdash; something we&rsquo;ve cited ourselves regularly. Here&rsquo;s one of those charts we can&rsquo;t show often enough&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/7zHuuTaVUEgsTsy94VTDvz/ad78c5bcf353b0866607b03db8f73c51/FMF-Issue-02-17-26_2_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
"The Chinese have decided they want to, sort of want to compete on a currency basis,&rdquo; said Einhorn. &ldquo;The central banks around the world are buying gold. Gold is becoming the reserve asset as opposed to Treasuries, or it's kind of mostly even at this point.&rdquo;
In addition, Einhorn said U.S. trade policy is &ldquo;very unstable&rdquo; and that Uncle Sam&rsquo;s debt load is becoming unmanageable.
Einhorn&rsquo;s firm has had gold positions for the better part of a decade &mdash; ever since the Midas metal bottomed around $1,050 an ounce in late 2015.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> As for the immediate action in precious metals, it&rsquo;s another down day.
No one noticed amid the recent volatility, but on Friday gold notched its first weekly close over $5,000 an ounce. But selling hit hard yesterday in electronic holiday trading and it&rsquo;s continued with the resumption of COMEX trading today.
At last check, the bid is down to $4,861. And silver is under $73, testing its lows at the start of this month.
The choppy action in crypto continues &mdash; Bitcoin a little over $67,000, Ethereum under $2,000.
As for the major U.S. stock indexes, not much to say: The Dow is flat, the S&amp;P is down about a quarter-percent and the Nasdaq down about a third of a percent.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Oil prices are easing on reports of progress in U.S.-Iran talks.
After a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, Iran&rsquo;s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said the two sides came to terms on &ldquo;guiding principles&rdquo; for future negotiations. &ldquo;The path for a deal has started,&rdquo; he said.
So far, no comment from the U.S. side. And Araghchi didn&rsquo;t get into details about whether Washington is insisting that Tehran give up its medium-range ballistic missiles &mdash; something Tehran will never do because it would amount to unilateral disarmament.
Amid that backdrop, a barrel of West Texas Intermediate is down nearly 1.5%, barely over $62. That&rsquo;s at the bottom end of its trading range for the last three weeks or so.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3_2x-new.png 2x" alt="3" width="37" />Racing Toward Trump&rsquo;s Nuclear Deadline
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> This is a performative stunt &mdash; bringing in the military seems like gilding the lily &mdash; but it does underscore the White House&rsquo;s commitment to nuclear power.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/1BW9EnMrsegAuaqxaQcMMG/6ec756977a68b0838df8ec3d0848c9d9/FMF-Issue-02-17-26_3_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
&ldquo;The U.S. military airlifted a miniature nuclear reactor for the first time, part of President Trump&rsquo;s push to deploy nuclear power across the United States,&rdquo; says The Wall Street Journal.
&ldquo;Three C-17 transport planes flew components of the Valar Atomics Ward 250 unfueled nuclear reactor from March Air Reserve Base, Calif., to Hill Air Force Base, Utah, on Sunday.&rdquo;
The privately held Valar Atomics is one of the companies hoping to make hay with &ldquo;small modular reactors&rdquo; that can be built at their own factory and transported anywhere to produce electricity &mdash; in contrast with the 94 mega-reactors currently in operation around the United States.
No taxpayer funds were involved in this stunt; Valar picked up the cost of the flight. The firm plans to test the reactor at a site near the air force base. If all goes well, it could generate up to five megawatts &mdash; enough to power 5,000 homes.
A likely first customer would be the military. Pentagon official Michael Duffey says the reactors could provide power to a military base without relying on the grid &mdash; while overseas, the reactors &ldquo;would mean U.S. forces could operate without concern that an enemy might cut fuel supplies.&rdquo;
<a id="4"></a>
Donald Trump will be watching the progress of the testing closely. He&rsquo;s set a goal of getting three small reactors &ldquo;critical&rdquo; &mdash; that is, running all its nuclear systems smoothly &mdash; by July 4.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4_2x-new.png 2x" alt="4" width="37" />About Epstein and Fort Knox&hellip;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> We&rsquo;re seeing a lot of people on social media making way more out of this 2011 email to Jeffrey Epstein than they should&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/5SABxBueJEJHrBHigYR0Po/4f5e6c454d9c6a772175b2c84aa66886/FMF-Issue-02-17-26_4_.png" alt="pub" width="300px" />
So, let&rsquo;s back up a bit. It is true that a month before this email, Dominique Strauss-Kahn resigned as chief of the International Monetary Fund amid allegations he sexually assaulted a hotel maid in New York.
Later that summer (after this email) the charges were dismissed amid questions about the accuser&rsquo;s credibility. But the scandal was enough to derail Strauss-Kahn&rsquo;s ambitions to run for president of France in 2012.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> In no way, however, does this email constitute smoking-gun evidence that &ldquo;the gold in Fort Knox is gone.&rdquo; 
The cut-and-pasted article came from The European Union Times &mdash; a website that 15 years ago was notorious for articles that were either clickbait or outright fabrications. I remember it well.
The fabrications that got the most circulation were republished from a site called &ldquo;What Does It Mean.&rdquo; Most of them were bylined &ldquo;Sorcha Faal, as reported to her Western Subscribers.&rdquo; And while that byline doesn&rsquo;t appear in the email, the article follows a familiar pattern &mdash; &ldquo;shocking&rdquo; information attributed to one or another Russian intelligence service that&rsquo;s never confirmed by another news outlet.
As the Grok AI engine summarizes, &ldquo;they are classic hoax-style pieces blending real news snippets with wild, unsubstantiated claims about secret Russian intelligence, impending global catastrophes, anti-Western conspiracies, etc.&rdquo; (It&rsquo;s a poorly kept secret online that &ldquo;Sorcha Faal&rdquo; is a pseudonym for someone named David Booth.)
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Still, the question remains: Who forwarded this fabricated article to Epstein and why?
The sender&rsquo;s name is redacted. The only text above the forwarded article is the letter &ldquo;T&rdquo; &mdash; which might be the sender&rsquo;s signoff or perhaps it means something else.
Was the sender gullible enough to think the article was legit and worth Epstein&rsquo;s attention? Did the sender think the article was bogus and sent it to Epstein for a good laugh? Or was the email validation of Look, this article is proof that our diabolical disinformation campaign is working!
(I mean, you can&rsquo;t rule out that last one completely&hellip;)
Anyway&hellip; the question isn&rsquo;t whether the gold in Fort Knox is &ldquo;gone.&rdquo; It&rsquo;s whether the U.S. Treasury still has legal possession.
<a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/fort-knox-fake-out">We explored that matter in depth last year</a> once it was evident that nothing would come of the Trump-Musk chatter about an audit of Fort Knox.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5_2x-new.png 2x" alt="5" width="37" />Mailbag: The 144-Year Cycle
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> We heard from a couple of readers for whom our guest essay yesterday resonated: Mason Sexton unpacked a recurring 144-year cycle in financial history.
&ldquo;Brilliant!&rdquo; says one. &ldquo;An eloquent presentation and detailed explanation of what is going on. Looking forward to Tuesday to find out how to ride the wave in this major transition.
Thank you so very much for including me.&rdquo;
&ldquo;Impressive and thought-provoking,&rdquo; says another. &ldquo;It gave structure and understanding to the seeming chaos and uncertainty of our time. This long-term overview of the patterns seen in society, economics, innovation, power and governance give a valuable framework for making one&rsquo;s own long-term financial decisions.
&ldquo;One can look at Warren Buffett&rsquo;s recent restructuring of his vast wealth with greater understanding and appreciation. Thank you for this valuable input.&rdquo;
Dave responds: You mean the fact Berkshire Hathaway was sitting on a record amount of cash at the time Buffett retired as CEO a few weeks ago?
On the one hand, that might be a function of Berkshire&rsquo;s sheer size nowadays: An acquisition target would need to be worth tens of billions of dollars to make a difference. Few companies that size are reasonably priced and willing to sell.
On the other hand, the famous &ldquo;Buffett indicator&rdquo; &mdash; the total value of the U.S. stock market divided by GDP &mdash; sits at record levels.
Buffett once called this indicator "the best single measure of where valuations stand at any given moment." And at the current given moment, the stock market has never been more richly valued relative to America&rsquo;s economic output.
So yes, that&rsquo;s important context for Mason Sexton&rsquo;s The Prophecy 2026 event &mdash; which, again, wrapped up just a short time ago. Time is short, given his outlook for an ominous market window that opens this Friday.
<a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2509777">So give it a look right away if you haven&rsquo;t already</a>.

FMF-Issue-02-17-26(Featured)

An “Extremely Fragile” Market

<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1_2x-new.png 2x" alt="1" width="37" />Friday Flashback
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> On this day six years ago, the U.S. stock market was reacting badly to a spike in COVID-19 cases in China.
In America, the first infections had yet to be reported. The lockdowns were still weeks away. At this juncture, uncertainty loomed large.
&ldquo;Health experts question the timeliness and accuracy of China&rsquo;s official data, saying the testing system captured only a fraction of the cases in China&rsquo;s hospitals, particularly those that are poorly run,&rdquo; said the Financial Times.
The major U.S. stock indexes took a spill that day. Nothing major &mdash; but mid-February turned out to be the top in the S&amp;P 500.
One expert had the foresight to tell his clients to get out before the carnage.
From a peak of nearly 3,400 the S&amp;P began a sickening slide below 2,200 on March 23.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> March 23 was the day everything turned around &mdash; and that same expert had both the methodology and the moxie to call the bottom.
On that day, he recommended 13 stocks &mdash; all of which could have made you a fortune if you&rsquo;d acted on his recommendation. At the time, however, his work was available only to private clients paying up to $10,000 a month.
Perhaps in hindsight the turnaround was obvious: On March 23 the Federal Reserve announced it was embarking on an epic spate of bailouts and money printing &mdash; or as your editor put it that day, &ldquo;the 2008 playbook, on a cocktail of steroids, Adderall and meth.&rdquo;
But at that moment, fear was still rampant. The market opened down big-time that morning. As of midday, the Dow had surrendered all its gains in the last three years.
It took a reliable system and nerves of steel to act on that day.
But when you&rsquo;ve built up a track record like Mason Sexton&rsquo;s, it&rsquo;s not hard. His string of brilliant calls stretches all the way back to the early 1980s &mdash; when he called a bottom that marked the start of an epic 18-year bull market in stocks.
Along the way, he also called the crash of 1987&hellip; the start of the global financial crisis in 2007&hellip; and the end of that crisis in 2009.
Oh, and more recently, he anticipated the market freakout after Donald Trump&rsquo;s &ldquo;Liberation Day&rdquo; announcement last year &mdash; and the rally that followed.
This month, he&rsquo;s stepping forward with a chilling forecast &mdash; an event poised to begin exactly one week from today, Friday Feb. 20.
To get the word out, Mason is convening an urgent live briefing this coming Tuesday Feb. 17 at 1:27 p.m. EST.
Why the odd time? You won&rsquo;t know if you don&rsquo;t watch.
<a href="https://signups.paradigm-press.info/2509606">Signup is free</a>. We&rsquo;ll email you with everything you need to know to be ready for Tuesday.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2_2x-new.png 2x" alt="2" width="37" />Mr. Market Is Reacting Abnormally
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> The major U.S. stock indexes are little moved today despite cooler-than-expected inflation numbers. The Labor Department says the official inflation rate is now running 2.4%.
That&rsquo;s a drop from 3% over the previous four months. So of course the mainstream is chattering about how inflation is steadily returning toward the Federal Reserve&rsquo;s 2% target, clearing the way for the Fed to resume cutting short-term interest rates.
But hold on: The official inflation rate was even lower &mdash; 2.3% &mdash; in April of last year before racing higher to 3% in September.
Seems a bit early for the Fed to declare a victory lap and resume cutting rates.
Thus, stocks aren&rsquo;t reacting with the big rally you might expect whenever the inflation numbers come in cooler than expected. The S&amp;P 500 is up less than 0.2% to 6,845. The Dow&rsquo;s performance is little better, while the Nasdaq is slightly in the red.
➢ Congratulations are in order for Rickards&rsquo; Insider Intel readers, who on Wednesday collected a staggering 1,125% gain playing call options on the mining giant Rio Tinto.
Precious metals are gamely trying to rally after the latest smackdown yesterday. Gold is up 1.2% to $4,979 while silver is up 2.5% and just over $77.
(More about yesterday&rsquo;s slam below in the mailbag section&hellip;)
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> For once, oil is not rallying going into the weekend. Instead a barrel of West Texas Intermediate is flat at $62.79.
For the last two Fridays, traders bid up crude because they didn&rsquo;t want to get caught with their pants down if U.S. forces attacked Iran while the markets were closed for the weekend.
But after still another face-to-face meeting between President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu on Wednesday, the outlook is murkier now.
&ldquo;We have to make a deal with Iran, otherwise it&rsquo;s going to be very traumatic, very traumatic. I don&rsquo;t want that to happen, but we have to make a deal,&rdquo; Trump said yesterday.
Asked about a timeline for a deal, he said, &ldquo;I guess over the next month&hellip; They should agree very quickly.&rdquo;
As we keep emphasizing, much hinges on whether Trump will capitulate to Netanyahu&rsquo;s demand that Tehran give up its ballistic missiles with a range of over 186 miles. Tehran will never do that; its medium-range missiles are its insurance against regime change.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3_2x-new.png 2x" alt="3" width="37" />A High-Conviction Crypto Bet
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Crypto looks moribund with Bitcoin just under $69,000 and Ethereum at $2,049. But spirits couldn&rsquo;t be brighter at Bitcoin Investor Week in New York.
Among the speakers: Real estate mogul Grant Cardone, who sold a $75 million private jet last week to buy more Bitcoin.
&ldquo;Each of these speakers has access to information most investors never see,&rdquo; writes Ari Goldschmidt of Altucher&rsquo;s Investment Network, who&rsquo;s our eyes and ears at this event.
&ldquo;They talk to institutional buyers. They meet with regulators. They understand the flow of capital behind closed doors.&rdquo;
On the Paradigm mobile app yesterday, Ari peppered readers with updates like this one:
<blockquote>Matt Hougan, chief investment officer at Bitwise, one of the largest crypto ETF companies. Matt speaks to a lot of financial advisers about cryptocurrency through the course of his work.</blockquote>
<blockquote>A surprising thing he's seen: The temporary 50% drops in crypto doesn't bother financial advisers at all. More sophisticated advisers will ask about how to value Bitcoin and what it should be worth. Bitcoin is 10% of the global store of value (gold) market today. If you look over the last 20 years, the size of the gold market has increased 10X. If that happens again and Bitcoin stays 10% of the gold market, we&rsquo;re looking at $700,000-plus per bitcoin.</blockquote>
&ldquo;Walking out of the conference,&rdquo; says Ari, &ldquo;I can't help but feel optimistic about the opportunities ahead for crypto. For what it's worth, I've been a buyer of the recent crypto market sell-off, buying small amounts on dips like we're seeing today.&rdquo;
The next big conference on our radar is PDAC &mdash; the metals-and-mining gathering held yearly in Toronto, coming up March 1-4.
Our own Byron King and Matt Badiali will be in attendance and they too will be posting regularly with insights straight from the conference floor on the Paradigm app. If you don&rsquo;t have it yet, you don&rsquo;t know what you&rsquo;re missing: <a href="https://d2z65klgtz99km.cloudfront.net/PPG-App/">Download it at this link</a>.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4_2x-new.png 2x" alt="4" width="37" />Comic Relief
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Yeah, after this week&rsquo;s circus on Capitol Hill, we can&rsquo;t resist&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/5IG9SEzDXRYRLyWfQhSLIC/9a4d75540679b2bee968d63532631f01/FMF-Issue-02-13-26_1_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5_2x-new.png 2x" alt="5" width="37" />Mailbag: Gold (and Oil) Manipulation
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;I would like to thank you for this well written article on &lsquo;The Truth about Gold &ldquo;Manipulation.&rdquo;&rsquo; Very informative and illuminating. WOW,&rdquo; a new reader enthuses after <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/the-truth-about-gold-manipulation">yesterday&rsquo;s edition</a>.
&ldquo;This is something I always suspected was going on but I never really saw proved or really talked about in any kind of detail like this before.
&ldquo;It reminds me of a time in recent years where the price of oil per barrel shot up an incredible amount in a period of a year or two. The actual supply and demand for oil during that same time period showed that the price of oil should have remained steady or even went DOWN slightly and not up at all !!
&ldquo;Similar dynamics were at play there too with the price of oil I am sure.&nbsp;
&ldquo;I will be looking for your 5 Bullets articles going forward. Keep up the excellent work please with more like this.&rdquo;
Dave responds: Thank you for the kind words, and welcome aboard. Oil has been routinely manipulated ever since the advent of modern-day oil futures in 1983.
Energy industry journalist James Norman told the story well in his 2008 book The Oil Card. Every so often I have occasion to revisit Norman&rsquo;s thesis and findings &mdash; most recently <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/3-million-acres#2">at the conclusion of the &ldquo;12 Day War&rdquo; last year</a>.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> While we&rsquo;re at it, we might as well examine yesterday&rsquo;s precious metals sell-off.
It commenced at precisely 11:10 a.m. EST. There was no obvious breaking-news catalyst that would instantly tank gold from $5,050 all the way below $4,900 (with an even more extreme move in silver, natch.)
Colleague Adam Sharp at The Daily Reckoning surmises it was a reaction to a Bloomberg exclusive that began thus&hellip;
<blockquote>The Kremlin has set out proposals that could see Russia embrace the dollar again as part of a wide-ranging economic partnership with the Trump administration, according to an internal Russian document reviewed by Bloomberg.</blockquote>
<blockquote>The high-level memo, which was drafted this year, details seven points where, in the Kremlin&rsquo;s view, Russian and U.S. economic interests could converge following a deal to end the war in Ukraine. It sees the two countries working together to champion fossil fuels over greener alternatives as well as joint investments in natural gas, offshore oil and critical raw materials plus windfalls for U.S. companies&hellip;</blockquote>
All else being equal, what&rsquo;s good for the dollar is bad for gold.
Of course, it all hinges on, as the story says, &ldquo;a deal to end the war in Ukraine.&rdquo; And how likely is that?
And is it really that good for the dollar?
Today Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov addressed the issue, however obliquely. Depending on whose translation you want to believe, he said that even if a deal comes about, the dollar&rsquo;s credibility throughout the Global South is already shot.
<blockquote>If the United States abandons this practice of restricting the use of the dollar, then the dollar will have to win competition with other alternative currencies, with national currencies that are increasingly widely used in the world.</blockquote>
Back to Bloomberg&rsquo;s story. In the final paragraph we learn that Bloomberg&rsquo;s source for this &ldquo;confidential Kremlin memo&rdquo; is&hellip; Ukrainian intelligence.
If there&rsquo;s a link between this story and the slam in precious metals yesterday&hellip; well, there are a lot of sketchy someones who were motivated to let the story drop and position themselves ahead of its release. Alas, we&rsquo;ll likely never know.
The lesson for gold bugs is the same lesson for any asset in which you have long-term conviction, be it a blue chip stock or the thinnest-liquidity crypto: Ignore the short-term noise and hold on tight.
Which is where we&rsquo;ll leave it for the week. Back tomorrow with our Saturday wrap, including some, er, unusual events in New York City. Then while the markets are closed Monday you won&rsquo;t want to miss our Presidents&rsquo; Day special, packed with some spooky historical recurrences.

FMF-Issue-02-13-26(Featured)

Six Years Ago: Peak Fear

<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1_2x-new.png 2x" alt="1" width="37" />The Truth About Gold &ldquo;Manipulation&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> For most of this century, it existed only in the realm of &ldquo;conspiracy theory.&rdquo; Now in 2026 it&rsquo;s broken into mainstream headlines.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/1aQNHjyseFG8Js7NqDPBqy/66e09dfeb708badc4bdda1ad73d7f80c/FMF-Issue-02-12-26_1_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
It&rsquo;s right there in the Financial Post, a venerable Canadian outlet that&rsquo;s been publishing since 1907.
<blockquote>Gold bugs spent years predicting bullion would hit its present value of around US$5,000 per ounce, but now that their predictions have borne out, some are airing a long-held grievance that it should be trading even higher, but for unlawful manipulation by big banks and Western governments.</blockquote>
<blockquote>Others write this off as a nonsense conspiracy theory. But with gold prices swinging wildly &mdash; to their highest-ever price in January of US$5,600 per ounce, only to crash 16% in the waning days of the month and then recover back above US$5,000 on Tuesday &mdash; the decades-old debate about what makes the yellow metal rise or fall is rearing its head again.</blockquote>
The article quotes the multibillionaire mining investor Eric Sprott: &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to call them &lsquo;The cartel&rsquo; &mdash; the major American banks and Canadian ones, too, by the way &mdash; thought gold was kind of their whipping boy; that they could sell it and knock it down.&rdquo;
It&rsquo;s good to know Mr. Sprott hasn&rsquo;t changed: Your editor interviewed him in early 2013. In a few words, he described the suppression scheme like this&hellip;
&ldquo;The Western central banks are surreptitiously supplying gold [to the global market] by leasing theirs out.&rdquo;
There&rsquo;s a lot packed into those few words. More than many people wish to contemplate. The Financial Post article quotes a fellow who runs a firm that helps precious metals miners fund their operations: He said it&rsquo;s a &ldquo;conspiracy theory&rdquo; &mdash; even though he conceded he&rsquo;d never really looked into the matter. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a rabbit hole.&rdquo;
Well, yes. But it&rsquo;s a hole worth jumping down today. Doing so will offer clues about what happens to the dollar price of gold from here. Let&rsquo;s go&hellip;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2_2x-new.png 2x" alt="2" width="37" />Deathbed Confessions
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> More than a decade ago, Paradigm&rsquo;s own macro maven Jim Rickards began opening readers&rsquo; eyes to how the powers that be manipulated the gold price.
The short version: Central banks leased gold bars to commercial banks&hellip; which then proceeded to sell the bars to buyers in Asia. The bars, meanwhile, never left the vault. (Too costly and complicated to transport.)
The slightly longer version: Chinese leaders relentlessly accumulated gold for years, aiming to approach or equal the amount held by the U.S. Treasury and the central banks of Europe.
In doing so, they hoped to be assured a &ldquo;seat at the table&rdquo; along with the Americans and Europeans whenever the global monetary system broke down and the powers that be hashed out a new system.
For years, Western movers and shakers went along &mdash; enabling China&rsquo;s accumulation via that leasing scheme. Those Asian buyers included the People&rsquo;s Bank of China.
&ldquo;The gold price must be kept low,&rdquo; Jim wrote in his 2014 book The Death of Money, &ldquo;until gold holdings are rebalanced among the major economic powers, and the rebalancing must be completed before the collapse of the international monetary system.&rdquo;
His research and documentation were peerless. &ldquo;Get the annual report from the Bank for International Settlements,&rdquo; he told me over dinner one evening. &ldquo;Read the footnotes. I understand it&rsquo;s geeky, but it&rsquo;s there. They actually get audited &mdash; unlike the Fed and unlike Fort Knox.&rdquo;
Of course, this was an era when Western leaders still thought they could keep the Chinese under their thumb. Later on we&rsquo;ll get into what&rsquo;s changed&hellip;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> But first, it&rsquo;s worth revisiting the deathbed confession of Bart Chilton.
Chilton was appointed to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission by President Bush in 2007 and kept on by President Obama. In 2014, he left government to join the uber-connected global law firm of DLA Piper.
He was colorful and charismatic, with trademark cowboy boots and shoulder-length hair that were out of place in D.C. Fond of the limelight, he joined Russia&rsquo;s state-run English-language news channel RT in 2018 as host of a daily business news roundup called Boom Bust.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/5eFTuxCSINV0iSUYmCvegk/d3877f0c3b8243dee751c9138728b2db/FMF-Issue-02-12-26_2_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" /> The telegenic Bart Chilton, in his element
His TV career didn&rsquo;t last long. He died the following year of pancreatic cancer at age 58.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Perhaps knowing his time was almost up, Chilton granted a candid interview a few weeks before shuffling off this mortal coil.
His questioner was an ex-Wall Streeter named Chris Marcus, who now runs an advisory firm called Arcadia Economics.
In so many words, Chilton confirmed that at one time JPMorgan Chase controlled about 40% of the global silver market. It was after JPM took over the collapsing Bear Stearns in 2008. The two firms&rsquo; combined position was way over limits set by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The CFTC granted waivers and extensions to JPM, during which time JPM actually acquired more silver.
&ldquo;They did ultimately get down to the position [limit],&rdquo; he recalled. &ldquo;But it was at that time that they were so large, that I made the comment about how large a particular bank was in the market. Which sort of shocked people. And it shocked me, quite frankly, that it was so large.&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Upon further investigation, &ldquo;we did uncover a lot of evidence that would lead to a manipulation case, or an attempted manipulation case,&rdquo; Chilton went on.
We&rsquo;re talking voicemails, text messages and a trail of trades. Chilton and crew recruited a forensic economist to dig deeper. Four years this went on. At Chilton&rsquo;s behest the CFTC kept it going for a fifth year, commissioning another forensic economist.
In the end, the evidence was compelling, but not enough to nail anyone to the wall.
&ldquo;We just didn&rsquo;t have the traders, and we didn&rsquo;t have the market participants dead to rights. But we had lots of stuff. And we had real stuff that would have played really well in court&hellip; But the damning part had to be backed up by other requirements of evidence under the law. And we didn&rsquo;t get all of that.&rdquo;
Presumably Chilton was talking about a case big enough to take down the people in JPM&rsquo;s C-suite &mdash; and not the grunt traders periodically <a href="https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-jp-morgan-traders-convicted-fraud-attempted-price-manipulation-and-spoofing-multi-year">prosecuted</a> by the Justice Department for appearances&rsquo; sake.
At the time of Chilton&rsquo;s interview, JPM controlled 45% of all derivatives contracts &mdash; futures, options and whatnot &mdash; linked to precious metals. And Citi controlled another 30%.
Now? As of Sept. 30, 2025, JPM&rsquo;s share has shrunk to 27% &mdash; with Citi and Goldman Sachs each controlling about 24%. You can decide for yourself whether that constitutes progress.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3_2x-new.png 2x" alt="3" width="37" />Still More Evidence
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> A luminary in the precious metals space also came around to the manipulation thesis in 2019.
He&rsquo;s Frank Holmes, longtime manager of the U.S. Global family of mutual funds and ETFs, specializing in precious metals and natural resources.
&ldquo;Gold price suppression (&lsquo;fixing,&rsquo; &lsquo;rigging,&rsquo; &lsquo;manipulating&rsquo; or however else you want to think about it) is not just a conspiracy theory,&rdquo; Holmes wrote his investors in May 2019. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a well-documented phenomenon, with real actors and real ramifications.
&ldquo;The best people to speak to about this subject are the folks at the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, or GATA.&rdquo;
For well over a decade, most investment pros dismissed the GATA crowd as cranks of the first order. For Holmes to take their arguments and documentation seriously? That was a sea change.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> For evidence of rigging, Holmes directed his clients&rsquo; attention to a tumble in the gold price in 2018&ndash;19.
Gold rallied from November through February, peaking at $1,343. &ldquo;Ordinarily,&rdquo; he wrote, &ldquo;you could expect inventory in the bullion-backed SPDR Gold Shares ETF (GLD) to continue to climb at least until then. But that&rsquo;s not at all what happened.
&ldquo;Three weeks before the price of gold peaked, the holdings in the GLD curiously began to fall, and by March 4, the ETF had lost approximately 57.8 metric tonnes. And because the GLD is the largest gold ETF in the world&hellip; such selling will naturally impact the price of gold. Sure enough, the yellow metal soon fell below $1,300. What gives?&rdquo;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/7aE9fs0kNHWW3DHculiM27/c8de2a2fef09e4ebf9c2fd43ff0648a8/FMF-Issue-02-12-26_3_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
Back to the Bank for International Settlements, mentioned above. In its monthly statement for February 2019, &ldquo;the BIS was still actively trading gold swaps [contract in which two parties exchange cash flows], which it uses to gain access to the metal held by commercial banks. Specifically, the bank placed as much as 56 metric tonnes of gold swaps into the market in February.
&ldquo;If you ask me, that amount is remarkably close to the 57.8 tonnes that fled the GLD in the first quarter of this year [2019].&rdquo;
But enough history. Let&rsquo;s bring it up to the present&hellip;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4_2x-new.png 2x" alt="4" width="37" />The Game Remains the Same
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Here in the mid-2020s, the players have changed&hellip; but the game remains the same.
Back to the Financial Post piece, and Eric Sprott&rsquo;s description of how it works&hellip;
<blockquote>The banks, he said, manipulated gold futures, which are contracts that allow people to speculate about the gold price at a future date. Such trades can be settled in one of two ways. One is to deliver physical gold on the agreed-upon day; the other is to make a cash payment based on the difference between the contracted price of gold and the spot price on delivery day.</blockquote>
<blockquote>In practice, gold bugs say traders at the big banks figured out a way to game the system. They would short gold or bet on gold futures below the spot price. By executing this strategy at a large scale, they affected market sentiment, and eventually the large number of low-priced gold futures would drag down the spot price of gold.</blockquote>
<blockquote>In that way, the big banks made reams of money and suppressed gold prices in the process.</blockquote>
<blockquote>&ldquo;It works as long as no one asks for delivery,&rdquo; Sprott said.</blockquote>
In theory, someone could stand for delivery with the intention of calling BS on the whole scheme.
But as Jim Rickards has reminded us for years, there are powerful disincentives to do so.
&ldquo;Most major participants in the gold market (banks, dealers and hedge funds) are regulated by one or more of the Federal Reserve, U.S. Treasury, SEC or CFTC,&rdquo; Jim wrote a decade ago. (And he&rsquo;s been a lawyer for banks, dealers and hedge funds, so he&rsquo;d know.)
&ldquo;Applicable laws contain strict anti-fraud and anti-manipulation rules, including jail time in cases of willful and knowing violations.&rdquo;
In other words, standing for delivery with the intention of squeezing the shorts could easily open you up to prosecution.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5_2x-new.png 2x" alt="5" width="37" />Target $10K
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Gold&rsquo;s big rally in the mid-2020s &mdash; up 150% in two years even after the recent pullback &mdash; leads to the obvious question: Have the manipulation schemes broken down?
&ldquo;That&rsquo;s where the gold bug&rsquo;s theory begins to dovetail with a more commonly held view of what drives gold prices,&rdquo; says the Financial Post piece.
&ldquo;All the countries used to be united on gold policy,&rdquo; says Chris Powell of the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee &mdash; recalling the history of the 2010s recounted above. &ldquo;Gold is the only alternative to the dollar and the central banks are no longer united on letting the U.S. rule the world.&rdquo;
It comes back to one of those charts we can&rsquo;t show often enough: Central banks around the world started loading up on bullion in 2022 after Washington responded to the Russian invasion of Ukraine by freezing $300 billion in dollar-denominated assets held by Russia&rsquo;s central bank.
Leaders of every government on less-than-friendly terms with Washington thought the same thing: If it can happen to the Russians, it can happen to us.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/7A3vivkZkuVjjZkLDcFs6P/0e8c6b77250019d9dd265e411952e52d/FMF-Issue-02-12-26_4_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
All that central-bank gold buying has an effect of keeping a floor under the gold price.
So where&rsquo;s the ceiling?
Well, as Jim Rickards pointed out during a 5 Bullets guest essay in December, &ldquo;Mining output has been flat for the last six years&hellip; gold is getting harder to find and more expensive to mine.&rdquo;
At the same time, &ldquo;private institutional investors have gold allocations of below 2.0% of total assets. If that expanded to a mere 4.0% allocation, there&rsquo;s not enough gold in the world at today&rsquo;s prices to fill those orders.
&ldquo;That dynamic alone could send gold prices above $10,000 per ounce in the year ahead.&rdquo;

FMF-Issue-02-12-26(Featured)

The Truth About Gold “Manipulation”

<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1_2x-new.png 2x" alt="1" width="37" />First They Came for Small Businesses&hellip;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" />It was one of the gravest injustices of the COVID lockdowns six years ago.
Countless small retailers across this country were deemed &ldquo;non-essential&rdquo; and ordered to shut their doors.
Meanwhile&hellip; big-box giants Walmart, Costco and Target thrived. And of course, Amazon.
From small towns to New York&rsquo;s Chinatown, many of the small businesses never recovered. Chinatown is uniquely telling. Once the province of small landlords, it fell into the hands of developers.
The result? &ldquo;Gleaming new storefronts, with $400 jackets and $700 shoes, all curated and lit up like sculptures,&rdquo; wrote the author and critic Naomi Wolf in 2024. &ldquo;Little art galleries, selling $12,000&ndash;25,000 works of modern art to wealthy, young, hip collectors. Chain bubble tea shops. Chain hotels.&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Something very similar is happening right now &mdash; this week &mdash; in the realm of AI.
On Monday, the Financial Times reported that &ldquo;Donald Trump&rsquo;s administration intends to spare companies including Amazon, Google and Microsoft from forthcoming tariffs on chips as they race to build the data centres powering the AI boom.&rdquo;
The biggest of the hyperscalers would win this exemption provided they commit to investing in chips made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
Which they&rsquo;d probably do anyway, right?
&ldquo;The new scheme would allow TSMC to allocate exemptions for its U.S. customers from this next set of tariffs. The carve-outs would be tied to the scale of the Taiwan-based group&rsquo;s investments in the U.S.&rdquo;
The details are still fuzzy but this much is clear: Large entrenched companies will get a break on their chip costs. Smaller firms hoping to compete will be cut off at the knees &mdash; forced to pay the full load of the tariff.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> This morning&rsquo;s Wall Street Journal brings a similar story: The same three AI giants &ldquo;are looking to sidestep President Trump&rsquo;s $100,000 H-1B visa fee, potentially leaving the brunt of the new policy to hit smaller startups.&rdquo;
As you might know, H-1Bs are the visas set aside for highly-skilled foreign workers. The Trump administration announced the new fee last September to address criticisms that Big Tech was using H-1Bs to fire U.S. citizens and hire cheaper foreign replacements.
The big guys &ldquo;generally plan to find workers in categories that don&rsquo;t have to pay the fee, including existing H-1B visa holders, students and people on other types of visas, according to people familiar with the companies&rsquo; plans&hellip;
&ldquo;But many smaller companies, including startups in specialized areas such as artificial intelligence and health care, can&rsquo;t easily navigate the policy changes or invest in alternatives that are cheaper than the $100,000 fee but still more costly than the status quo.&rdquo;
&ldquo;It would be prohibitive for us to pay the $100,000 fee,&rdquo; says Jennifer Ide of the Georgia-based health care startup Rimidi &mdash; which has all of 20 employees.
It&rsquo;s as if her firm, and countless others like hers, has been deemed &ldquo;non-essential.&rdquo;
Whatever your opinion of the H-1B visa program, something stinks when the system is designed for the biggest companies to circumvent it while small fry are hung out to dry.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> That&rsquo;s a problem when you consider that world-changing innovations rarely come from big lumbering incumbents in their industry.
They don&rsquo;t come from the Microsofts, Amazons and Googles of the world.
They come from the scrappy startups, the proverbial kid tinkering in his garage.
They come from a Microsoft releasing MS-DOS for the first personal computer in 1981&hellip; from an Amazon disrupting the business of selling books in 1995&hellip; from a Google that instantly made people forget about inferior search engines like Lycos and AltaVista in 1998.
So if you care about America keeping its competitive edge in technology&hellip; or &ldquo;winning the AI race with China&rdquo;... what&rsquo;s happening this week is cause for concern.
From an investing standpoint, it&rsquo;s downright discouraging: Among the trio of Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet-Google &mdash; we&rsquo;ll throw in Meta as well because it&rsquo;s also pouring gazillions of dollars into data centers &mdash; only Alphabet&rsquo;s share price outperformed the S&amp;P 500 last year.
Developments like these make our jobs harder at Paradigm Press. Ferreting out the small publicly traded companies with potential to change the world becomes harder when the playing field is tilted in favor of giant incumbents.
Of course, we welcome the challenge and will double down our efforts on your behalf.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2_2x-new.png 2x" alt="2" width="37" />About Those Job Numbers&hellip;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Mr. Market is of two minds when it comes to the January job numbers.
The numbers came out this morning &mdash; five days behind schedule because of the most recent &ldquo;partial government shutdown.&rdquo;
The wonks at the Bureau of Labor Statistics conjured 130,000 new jobs for the month &mdash; way more than the typical Wall Street economist who was expecting 70,000. The official unemployment rate ticked down to 4.3%.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> The initial reaction was positive: &ldquo;Dow jumps 200 points as strong jobs report eases economy concerns,&rdquo; said a CNBC alert. &ldquo;The S&amp;P 500 is set for a record after a much stronger-than-anticipated U.S. jobs report,&rdquo; was Bloomberg&rsquo;s take.
Then it dawned on someone: If the job market is holding up OK, that means it&rsquo;s less likely the Federal Reserve will resume cutting interest rates, right?
At last check, all the major U.S. indexes are in the red: The S&amp;P 500 is down a quarter percent to 6,923. The 7,000 mark will likely have to wait for another day. The Nasdaq and the Dow are both down a little over a half-percent.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> But hold on: The January job numbers don&rsquo;t tell the whole story.
This is the one report each year when the Bureau of Labor Statistics performs revisions to the previous year&rsquo;s numbers &mdash; and the year before that, too.
It turns out that the U.S. economy generated 1.2 million jobs in 2024 &mdash; instead of the previously estimated 2 million.
And in 2025, the total was a mere 181,000 &mdash; revised down from 584,000.
Now as we&rsquo;ve pointed out a couple of times in recent months, the fact the U.S. border has been effectively sealed since last spring changes the calculus when it comes to new jobs: In years gone by it took at least 150,000 new jobs a month to keep up with population growth. But without an influx of immigrants, the number could now be as low as 30,000.
But last year&rsquo;s revised total works out to a tepid 15,083 jobs per month.
So maybe there&rsquo;s something to this &ldquo;cooling labor market&rdquo; chatter after all. We&rsquo;ll be on the lookout for further signs.
Elsewhere, precious metals are on the rally tracks again today &mdash; gold only $10 shy of $5,100 and silver up $3.50 and over $84 for the first time in nearly a week.
No joy in crypto-land, however &mdash; Bitcoin a little over $66,000 and Ethereum sinking toward $1,900.
It&rsquo;s a dangerous juncture here: In my mind, $67K is an extremely important level for Bitcoin,&rdquo; Greg Guenthner writes his Trading Desk readers. &ldquo;This marks those prior cycle highs back in late 2021. If it can't hold this level, look out below!&rdquo;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3_2x-new.png 2x" alt="3" width="37" />Red Lines in the Middle East
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Oil is back on the high end of its year-to-date trading range this morning &mdash; up $1.73 as we write to $65.69. Some sort of U.S. attack on Iran is looking inevitable now.
Israel&rsquo;s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is at the White House today &mdash; his seventh visit to the United States since Donald Trump returned to the presidency 13 months ago.
The visit was originally scheduled for one week from today. Last weekend, the Israeli government asked to move it up after widespread media reports that Trump&rsquo;s enthusiasm for airstrikes is lukewarm: &ldquo;It&rsquo;s really the Israelis who want a strike,&rdquo; a U.S. official told the Axios site. &ldquo;The president is just not there.&rdquo;
The revised timing of the visit is resonant with many Iranians: It was on this day in 1979 that the Iranian Revolution toppled the Shah &mdash; 26 years after he was installed in an American-engineered coup.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Leave aside for the moment the matter of Iran&rsquo;s nuclear program. Netanyahu is also demanding that Iran give up its ballistic missiles.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/47IixE730BNgbYiOHyaXQJ/f5fc2b703d53374ea59721b1f61395e8/FMF-issue-02-11-26_1_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
There were conflicting reports yesterday about whether Trump has agreed to go along with Netanyahu and demand the Iranian side surrender its missiles &mdash; which pose a potential threat to Israel but not to the United States.
As we&rsquo;ve mentioned a couple of times in recent days, this demand would be a nonstarter for Tehran.
Really, it would be for any government. In Iran&rsquo;s case, those missiles serve as a deterrent against an Israeli and/or U.S. attack. If the mullahs agreed to give them up, they&rsquo;d be overthrown in a heartbeat.
Assuming the mullahs stand their ground&hellip; and depending on who you believe&hellip; airstrikes could be underway as early as 10:00 p.m. EST tonight.
Or perhaps the president will wait for a three-day weekend while the markets are closed.
In the meantime, there&rsquo;s been no effort to sell the American people on the urgency of airstrikes &mdash; and no discussion of what the objective would be. Full-on regime change? Kill the ayatollah? Bomb the nuclear sites Trump already said were &ldquo;obliterated&rdquo;?
Little wonder that on social media, an old tweet of the late Charlie Kirk is making the rounds.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/5UdkuHyMTegOaNvMGyhX6I/892556b8f4c25e768a00d5ec040da24c/FMF-issue-02-11-26_2_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
Trump said yesterday he might send a second aircraft carrier to the Middle East &mdash; but people who follow these matters closely say it would take six&ndash;eight weeks to arrive.
As the Jerusalem Post headline suggests above, Netanyahu would act long before then &mdash; forcing Trump&rsquo;s hand. To be continued&hellip;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4_2x-new.png 2x" alt="4" width="37" />Comic Relief
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> He might not be wrong&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/2xzeWfDv3a5mxsgSDY9QkL/ceda728cb5f862b2d4a0b6c69db67084/FMF-issue-02-11-26_3_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5_2x-new.png 2x" alt="5" width="37" />Mailbag: Blackouts&hellip; and Nuclear
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> After <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/blackout-nation-an-update">yesterday&rsquo;s warning</a> about the vulnerability of the power grid to blackouts, a reader jotted a one-sentence email&hellip;
&ldquo;Nuclear would eliminate all blackout risk, but the climate people will not give any ground.&rdquo;
Dave responds: Yes and no. There are definitely some folks in the climate-change crowd who reject nuclear power even though it generates no &ldquo;greenhouse gases.&rdquo; It&rsquo;s as if they watched The China Syndrome as kids and were scarred for life.
But reality has set in for many others. The Silicon Valley giants know that nuclear is the only non-fossil fuel source that can possibly help them achieve their ambitions &mdash; hence, for instance, Microsoft&rsquo;s deal to reopen the non-damaged Three Mile Island reactor that shut down in 2019.
And there&rsquo;s California Gov. Gavin Newsom&rsquo;s flip-flop &mdash; agreeing to keep the Diablo Canyon plant open beyond its planned 2025 shutdown date &mdash; knowing it&rsquo;s essential to keep the grid up and running.
All that said, it takes time to build new nuclear plants. None in the United States is in the construction stage right now &mdash; which means none will likely be completed before large swaths of the country fall into the &ldquo;high risk&rdquo; category for blackouts. Consider yourself warned&hellip;

FMF-issue-02-11-26(featured)

First They Came for Small Businesses

<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1_2x-new.png 2x" alt="1" width="37" />Blackout Nation: An Update
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> At the risk of sounding like a broken record, you need to start preparing for the likelihood of regular electric blackouts before the end of this decade.
We began sounding the alarm about the fragility of the power grid in the summer of 2022. In many regions &mdash; particularly the Upper Midwest &mdash; too many coal and nuclear plants were being shuttered&hellip; and there wasn&rsquo;t nearly enough solar and wind capacity coming online to replace it.
(Your editor, based in the Upper Midwest, bought a generator that summer &mdash; just in case.)
And this was before AI burst into popular consciousness when ChatGPT 3.5 was released later in 2022. By 2024 we were regularly warning that AI could become <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/the-monster-that-ate-the-power-grid-ai">&ldquo;the monster that ate the power grid.&rdquo;</a> Only last year did the mainstream start picking up on the story.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> It was down to the wire last month during the big winter storm that blasted everywhere from Texas to the Northeast.
On Monday Jan. 26, the biggest grid operator in the country &mdash; serving 67 million customers in 13 states &mdash; said 24% of its deliverable power that day came from coal.
Old-economy, dirty coal &mdash; without it, 20% of the demand in its territory that day would have gone unfilled &mdash; resulting in blackouts.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> The situation won&rsquo;t get better and will likely get worse between now and 2030.
That&rsquo;s according to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation &mdash; which a few days ago issued its annual &ldquo;Long Term Reliability Assessment.&rdquo;
The one-sentence takeaway: If you live anywhere in the red areas on this map, you&rsquo;re at &ldquo;high risk.&rdquo;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/7FWruYIh5ilFsHS88i2WDz/43a445bf07944776e73b8bc2b483eda7/FMF-Issue-02-10-26_1_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
Let&rsquo;s dig into a few details, region-by-region&hellip;
<ul>
<li>PJM, a 13-state territory stretching from New Jersey west to Illinois: This is a region that includes &ldquo;Data Center Alley&rdquo; in northern Virginia &mdash; the highest concentration of data centers in the world. PJM is already at &ldquo;elevated risk,&rdquo; which flips to &ldquo;high risk&rdquo; by 2029. From the report: &ldquo;Current projections for resource additions do not keep pace with escalating demand forecasts and expected generator retirement&rdquo;</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>MISO, a 15-state territory stretching from Minnesota to Louisiana: &ldquo;Elevated risk&rdquo; next year, &ldquo;high risk&rdquo; in 2028. From the report: &ldquo;Projected resource additions do not keep pace with escalating demand forecasts and announced generator retirements&rdquo;</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>ERCOT, the Texas grid: Currently &ldquo;elevated risk,&rdquo; also slipping into &ldquo;high risk&rdquo; come 2029 like PJM. The report warns that &ldquo;continued rapid load growth outpaces projected resource additions in later years.&rdquo;</li>
</ul>
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Do you detect a pattern here? None of the issues we began warning about in 2022 have been addressed in any meaningful way.
The three regions listed above aren&rsquo;t the only ones that will slip into the red &ldquo;high risk&rdquo; category before the end of the decade. You can review NERC&rsquo;s report for yourself <a href="https://www.nerc.com/globalassets/our-work/assessments/nerc_ltra_2025.pdf">right here</a>.
And the report might be underselling the risks: NERC says California is at a &ldquo;normal&rdquo; level of risk&hellip; but Paradigm energy authority Byron King says &ldquo;on any given day, about one-third of California&rsquo;s non-solar electricity is wheeled in from outside &mdash; either the Pacific Northwest or the Rocky Mountains.&rdquo;
Both of those regions, you&rsquo;ll note, are in the red.
What to do? You can attack this issue from a couple of angles:
<ul>
<li>First, there&rsquo;s personal preparedness. If you don&rsquo;t have the funds for one of those Generac &ldquo;whole house&rdquo; generators, garden-variety gasoline-fired generators are much more affordable and can keep essential loads running. Do it right: Have an electrician install a transfer switch and breaker interlock. Then test your backup system at least three times a year so you&rsquo;ll know what to do step-by-step once the lights go out for real</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>As for how to invest&hellip; Last year, Paradigm readers started reaping the profits from this phenomenon as share prices of &ldquo;independent power producers&rdquo; that aren&rsquo;t regulated utilities began to soar. On May 7, we offered a rare free pick in 5 Bullets &mdash; Constellation Energy &mdash; which rose 34% by year-end. Meanwhile, Enrique Abeyta pinpointed a special trade for his paid readers, garnering 177% on Talen Energy.</li>
</ul>
Shares of the independent power producers have pulled back in early 2026 &mdash; potentially serving up an attractive new entry point. Keep an eye out in your paid publication(s) for ways to play the trend as the year goes on.
Unfortunately there are no ETFs comprising only independent power producers &mdash; but those companies do make up a meaningful slice of the State Street Utilities Select Sector SPDR ETF (XLU).
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2_2x-new.png 2x" alt="2" width="37" />The Rules Are Changing (Climate Regs)
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> On the margins, action by the White House might help alleviate the electricity crunch described in today&rsquo;s Bullet No. 1.
Today&rsquo;s Wall Street Journal has a front-page story telling us the Trump administration plans to junk the Obama administration&rsquo;s &ldquo;endangerment finding&rdquo; &mdash; which asserted that so-called climate change poses a threat to public health and welfare.
The finding, which dates to 2009, has been a key facet of what our Jim Rickards has long called the &ldquo;Green New Scam.&rdquo;
&ldquo;Expert climate change predictions have been wrong for 50 years,&rdquo; Jim wrote his Strategic Intelligence readers in December. &ldquo;Every year, the science experts claim the world will be flooded in 10 years and 10 years later they&rsquo;re wrong every time.&rdquo;
Ever since that 2009 finding, the EPA has exercised sweeping new powers beyond just keeping the air and water clean. Carbon dioxide came under its purview, and thus the agency has been tightening fuel-economy standards for vehicles and &mdash; relevant to our discussion today &mdash; capping carbon emissions from power plants. It&rsquo;s one reason why so many functional coal-fired plants are shutting down.
The final revised rule will be made public later this week. &ldquo;This amounts to the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States,&rdquo; EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin tells the Journal.
From the vantage point of early 2026 it&rsquo;s hard to say exactly what the impact will be. And it&rsquo;s likely that the climate-change crowd will take the Trump administration to court.
But we figured it&rsquo;s worth putting on the record today&hellip;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3_2x-new.png 2x" alt="3" width="37" />Party Like It&rsquo;s 1999
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;When you strip away the fear and compare today&rsquo;s conditions to those in early 2000, it&rsquo;s clear the market is NOT at a top like the one before the dot-com collapse,&rdquo; says Paradigm trading pro Enrique Abeyta.
As we noted last week, a sell-off in software stocks like Salesforce has revived fears of an &ldquo;AI bubble&rdquo; &mdash; and chatter that we&rsquo;re in for a rerun of the dot-com bust, in which the Nasdaq crumbled by 78% starting in early 2000.
But &ldquo;the market is behaving very differently today,&rdquo; says Enrique &mdash; &ldquo;and many of the signals that defined that era are notably absent.&rdquo;
For one thing, the Nasdaq has not experienced the hyperbolic rise that it did at the end of the dot-com bust &mdash; an 80% surge in only five months.
Indeed the Nasdaq has been consolidating since mid-2025. &ldquo;Blow-off tops don&rsquo;t happen in markets that are correcting internally,&rdquo; Enrique says. &ldquo;They happen when everything rises together, relentlessly, regardless of earnings, growth or balance sheet strength.&rdquo;
For another thing, the Federal Reserve is not raising interest rates &mdash; which it was throughout 1999 and early 2000. Assuming Kevin Warsh is confirmed by the Senate as the new Fed chair, rate cuts are in the offing later in 2026.
&ldquo;Markets typically do not experience catastrophic tops when monetary policy is easing,&rdquo; Enrique says. &ldquo;Liquidity acts as a cushion. It supports risk assets, absorbs shocks and extends cycles longer than many expect.&rdquo;
And there&rsquo;s a third difference, perhaps the most important, he points out: The most notorious-dot coms &ldquo;were burning cash at staggering rates and financing growth almost entirely through debt issuance and equity dilution. When capital markets closed, those business models collapsed overnight.
&ldquo;Fast-forward to 2026 and the picture could not be more different. The companies committing the largest capital expenditures today are among the healthiest and most profitable enterprises on the planet.&rdquo;
That includes the four biggest hyperscalers &mdash; Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon. &ldquo;The major technology leaders funding AI infrastructure are generating massive free cash flow, posting strong margins and operating with fortress-like balance sheets.&rdquo;
Bottom line: &ldquo;Against this backdrop, I feel more bullish than I&rsquo;ve been in years&hellip; This environment feels far more like 1999 than 2000.&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Maybe today is the day the S&amp;P 500 will notch its first close over 7,000.
At last check, the index is up a little less than a quarter percent to 6,980. The Nasdaq&rsquo;s gain is similar. The Dow is powering still higher into record territory, up a half percent and approaching 50,400.
Precious metals look positively sleepy by recent standards &mdash; gold down about $50 but still holding the line on $5,000 and silver down about two bucks to $81.30.
The major cryptos are little moved from this time 24 hours ago &mdash; Bitcoin a little under $70,000, Ethereum a little over $2,000.
Crude is inching higher at $64.54.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Steady as she goes for the nation&rsquo;s small-business sector.
The National Federation of Independent Business is out with its monthly Small Business Optimism Index. The headline number for January is 99.3, down slightly from December&rsquo;s 99.5. But it&rsquo;s still above the long-term average of this survey, which goes back more than 50 years.
On the portion of the survey where respondents are asked to identify their single-most important problem, taxes are in first place &mdash; cited by 18%.
&ldquo;Taxes ranking as the top issue is typically a sign that other, less consistent issues (labor quality, inflation, poor sales, etc.) are not currently in a bad state,&rdquo; says the NFIB&rsquo;s report.
But good help is still hard to find in many places: &ldquo;Quality of labor&rdquo; was cited by 16%. The cost and availability of insurance comes in third at 13% &mdash; the highest that category has registered in over seven years. Inflation was cited by 12%.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4_2x-new.png 2x" alt="4" width="37" />Copper: Still Attractive
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;Without a significant reduction in demand or a massive increase in supply, we will see a big squeeze in copper,&rdquo; says Real Wealth Insider editor Matt Badiali.
<a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/teslas-loss-your-gain">Last month</a>, as copper crossed $6 a pound for the first time, Matt helped us spotlight the red metal&rsquo;s investment potential in the context of sturdy global demand for electric vehicles.
Since then, the price spiked over $6.50 at the same time gold and silver reached their manic highs &mdash; only to fall back.
But copper is hanging tough, still a little under $6, because the long-term story remains so compelling.
&ldquo;As we enter the age of AI and massive data center buildouts,&rdquo; says Matt, &ldquo;copper is more important than ever. And the supply/demand curve points to even higher prices.&rdquo;
Analysts at S&amp;P Global expect over the next 14 years, global copper supply will fall 23.8% short of demand. According to their recent report, &ldquo;The widening disconnect highlights copper's dual role as both enabler and potential bottleneck for the energy transition and digital transformation.&rdquo;
&ldquo;In other words,&rdquo; says Matt, &ldquo;if you&rsquo;re a tech bull, you&rsquo;re also a copper bull. The limited copper supply creates a &lsquo;systemic risk&rsquo; for AI.&rdquo;
As before, Matt says the simplest way to play it is with a basket of copper mining stocks &mdash; the Global X Copper Miners ETF (COPX).
But he&rsquo;s keeping an eye out for juicier opportunities: &ldquo;The setup in copper is so good today that we can move further down the food chain in this sector. We can take more risks and make larger gains without the fear of a price collapse.&rdquo;
If you&rsquo;re one of Matt&rsquo;s paid readers, keep an eye out for a recommendation or two along those lines. If you&rsquo;re not among them, Real Wealth Insider is currently closed to new subscribers &mdash; but we&rsquo;ll let you know when it reopens.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5_2x-new.png 2x" alt="5" width="37" />Paper Money as Floral Arrangements
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> From the central bank of Kenya comes a warning to stop using the country&rsquo;s banknotes as faux flowers for Valentine&rsquo;s Day.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/6vclYRXgXU7w2Z7sl8gUdi/0e511e4bdc07a8157b5e33530e7f38da/FMF-Issue-02-10-26_2_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
Apparently it&rsquo;s become something of a Valentine tradition there &mdash; &ldquo;popularized by celebrities and online influencers, who share videos of themselves presenting such bouquets during celebrations,&rdquo; reports the BBC.
The Central Bank of Kenya does not approve &mdash; issuing a notice on social media last week reminding citizens that defacing the paper currency comes with a penalty as steep as seven years in prison.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> The news coverage we see of this story begs the question: Is the purchasing power of the Kenyan shilling so pitiful that it&rsquo;s useful mostly for fake floral arrangements?
We&rsquo;re pretty sure the blue banknotes used in the picture above are 200 shillings each &mdash; about $1.56 U.S. at the current exchange rate. And that exchange rate has been very stable since mid-2024.
So they&rsquo;re not worthless by any stretch. We&rsquo;re not in Zimbabwe-dollar territory here.
Indeed, the central bank says the problem comes when the paper currency is put back into use after being folded, rolled, glued, stapled and otherwise altered: Apparently it gums up ATMs and cash-counting machines.
Meanwhile, a website called The Punch tells us that &ldquo;Kenya is one of the world&rsquo;s leading producers of flowers, and the announcement has been welcomed by some who argue that fresh floral bouquets are more appropriate Valentine&rsquo;s Day gifts.&rdquo;
See guys, here&rsquo;s your subtle reminder that Saturday&rsquo;s the day. Get your flower order in early. You&rsquo;re welcome.

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