Done Deal (Huge “Birthright” Decision)

The “Birthright” Hinges on This

On the one hand, it’s just another case of the Trump administration reversing a Biden administration initiative. On the other hand, this reversal could change everything.

At stake is the fate of 245 million acres of federal land supervised by the Bureau of Land Management. For perspective, that’s an amount of land equal to the size of Texas and New Mexico combined.

As The New York Times frames it, the Trump administration aims “to repeal a Biden-era rule that sought to protect millions of acres of public lands from the twin threats of climate change and industrial development.”

Rescinding the rule “would prioritize the use of public lands for oil and gas drilling, coal mining, timber production and livestock grazing.”

As Interior Secretary Doug Burgum sees it, rescinding the rule “protects our American way of life and gives our communities a voice in the land that they depend on.

“The previous administration’s Public Lands Rule had the potential to block access to hundreds of thousands of acres of multiple-use land — preventing energy and mineral production, timber management, grazing and recreation across the West.”

Rescinding the rule lies at the heart of the “American Birthright” agenda.

That’s the name our own Jim Rickards gives to the Trump administration’s plan to exploit the vast mineral bounty on federally owned land, a trove valued as high as $150 trillion.

Here’s what makes this rule change such a huge deal: The Biden administration’s move in April 2024 made conservation a priority equal with that of development. That was a first in the nearly 80-year history of the Bureau of Land Management.

“The Biden administration unlawfully placed conservation above all else,” says a statement from Rich Nolan, president of the National Mining Association.

“This new rule reinstates the balance of federal land use intended by Congress, ensuring that our vast resources can meet today’s soaring energy needs and become the secure mineral supply chains for American industry.”

Rescinding the Biden-era rule is the clearest sign yet that the “Birthright” agenda is moving into Phase II — opening up a vast new array of profit opportunities that Jim Rickards is tracking for his readers.

In fact, Jim is so enthused by the possibilities that over the weekend he released a revised and updated video — complete with a free stock pick he believes “has market-beating potential over the next 12 months.” You won’t even have to watch until the end to see the pick: Click here and all will be revealed within only three minutes.

The Epstein Shutdown, Continued

In a desperate reach for “reasons” behind every little market move, CNBC tells us: “Stocks Rise to Start the Week on Hopes Strong Earnings Are Ahead, Shutdown Will End.”

Huh?

Earnings season is ramping up, yes, but the only “Magnificent 7” company reporting its numbers this week is Tesla, the smallest of the bunch. Most of them won’t issue their quarterly figures until next week.

That said, Apple got an upgrade this morning from the analysts at Loop Capital Markets. They say AAPL is a buy because iPhone demand is picking up. That’s enough to boost Apple’s share price by nearly 4% on the day to all-time highs.

As for the “partial government shutdown,” the only indication it will be over soon is a CNBC interview with National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett. “There’s a shot that this week, things will come together, and very quickly. The moderate Democrats will move forward and get us an open government, at which point we could negotiate whatever policies they want to negotiate with regular order.”

In the meantime, the House remains in recess. House Speaker Mike Johnson has designated this week as a “district work period.”

The House has been out of session since Sept. 19 — more than a week before the shutdown began — so that Johnson can avert a vote on the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Before the shutdown, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) was only one vote shy of gathering enough signatures for a “discharge petition” that would force a vote on full release of the Epstein files in the government’s possession.

He’ll have enough signatures once the House returns to session and a new representative who won a special election last month is sworn in. “They’re afraid of me signing and being the 218th signer to the Epstein petition,” says Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-Arizona).

And so the “Epstein shutdown” is now in its 20th day, a length eclipsed only by the shutdowns of 2018–19 and 1995.

Whatever the reasons, real or imagined, the U.S. stock market is starting off the week strong.

The S&P 500 is up 1% at last check, resting at 6,730. That’s less than 25 points away from the all-time high on Oct. 8. The Oct. 10 market freakout over Donald Trump’s threats of 100% tariffs on China — which he now concedes are “not sustainable” — is but a distant memory.

Remarkably, shares of Amazon are up three-quarters of a percent despite a massive failure of the company’s AWS web-hosting services. The outages have affected everything from Amazon itself to Venmo, Snapchat and the major airlines. And they’re not over yet: Several services that came back online during the morning, like Apple Music, went down again.

Exactly what the problem is, Amazon is not saying: “We continue to investigate the root cause for the network connectivity issues that are impacting AWS services such as DynamoDB, SQS and Amazon Connect in the US-EAST-1 Region,” says the AWS status page. “We have identified that the issue originated from within the EC2 internal network. We continue to investigate and identify mitigations.”

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Gold Rebounds, Dimon Won’t Rule out $10K

Can the pullback in gold really be over after only one trading day?

As we check our screens, the Midas metal’s spot price is up nearly $96 on the day at $4,343 — exceeding last Thursday’s record. Friday’s beatdown? It’s as if it didn’t happen.

That said, silver still has work to do. It’s up 57 cents as we write at $52.43. But that’s still two bucks off of last Thursday’s record. Likewise for the mining stocks; the HUI index is up 2.7% to 654, well below Thursday’s record close at 687.

➢ Elsewhere in the commodity complex, oil starts the week down another 37 cents at $57.16 — another five-month low. As for digital nondollar assets, they’re staging a weak recovery from last week’s sell-off — Bitcoin at $111,456 and Ethereum a hair over $4,000.

It’s as if Satan just endorsed virtue. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon won’t rule out $10,000 gold.

“This is one of the few times in my life it’s semi-rational to have some in your portfolio,” he said last week at a conference held by Fortune magazine. (In other news, Fortune is still in business. Once part of the Time-Life empire, it’s been owned by a Thai billionaire since 2018.)

“I’m not a gold buyer — it costs 4% to own it,” he allowed — referring to the storage fees for large amounts of metal. “But it could easily go to $5,000 or $10,000 in environments like this.”

Fortune’s write-up of Dimon’s appearance did not elaborate on what he meant by “environments like this.” A lack of confidence in the dollar as the globe’s reserve currency? A lack of confidence in “safe” U.S. Treasuries because of Uncle Sam’s continuing debt binge? Something else? Let your imagination run wild…

We mention this item only because Dimon is the bete noire of gold bugs — widely blamed for harnessing the power of the country’s biggest bank to help suppress the silver price, among other sins. If he won’t rule out $10K gold, our own Jim Rickards’ outlook starts to seem downright… tame?

About the Fort Knox Audit…

As the Trump 47 presidency enters its 10th month today, a timely reminder…

That said, we never held out much hope it would happen in the first place — for reasons we spelled out back in June.

Mailbag: Avoidable Armageddon

“I don’t want to say that ‘you are doing it wrong,’ but in the event of nuclear war, you want you and your family to be painlessly vaporized in the attack,” a reader writes after last Wednesday’s edition.

“Survivors will live in a hellish place where life will once again be ‘brutal and short.’

“It is really hard to fathom the idiocy of driving a country like Russia to desperation (and therefore reaching for the nuclear bombs). But we haven’t had smart people running our country for generations now, so I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. 

“It sure seems like the folks in the 1950s and 1960s at least knew enough about the realities of war to try to avoid it. Thanks for all you do!”

“Great article, Dave, on the prospects for nuclear destruction,” says another correspondent.

“How funny it is the number of people, young and old, who are destroyed due to the ego of one or two individuals.

“Why Trump just can't say ‘OK, we will encourage Ukraine NOT to become a NATO nation’ is due to his ego. Not sure any of the ‘tools’ that work for him has ever suggested this is actually how you can end the war in Ukraine in one day.

“I know I am oversimplifying this, but damn.

“Love your stuff.”

Dave responds: We can only hope that Trump’s periodic references to his uncle John Trump, an MIT professor, are true.

“Nuclear is so powerful. My uncle explained that to me many, many years ago,” he said in a speech once. On another occasion, Trump said his uncle warned him about “things that are happening that could be potentially so bad for the world in terms of weaponry.”

It’s not much to hang onto, but it’s… something?

Best regards,

Dave Gonigam
Managing editor, Paradigm Pressroom's 5 Bullets