Make IRAN Great Again?
Gold Resilient
The market reaction to Washington’s entry into the Israel-Iran war on the side of Israel began… quietly. Too quietly.
The reaction in stocks… bonds… commodities… the dollar… all muted. The price of crude spiked 4% when trading opened for the week last night, only to give it all up.
Gold is up $15 as we write to $3,383 — a very modest move, especially by recent standards.
In a dispatch to a select group of his subscribers on Friday, Paradigm’s macro maven Jim Rickards passed along a chart from the Financial Times.
“What do you think is the highest-performing major asset this year so far?” he asked rhetorically. “It’s gold!”
Gold’s jump in the first half of 2025 reflects what was already a world full of uncertainty going into this past weekend.
“Relax if you don't own gold yet,” Jim advises. “This rally is just getting started. Central banks are the big buyers. The retail frenzy stage is still $5,000 away. So there is still time to get involved if it suits you.
“Remember — I recommend 10% allocation to gold in your portfolio but higher or lower percentages have a place depending on risk tolerance. So season to taste.”
Lately, gold mining stocks have been outperforming the metal itself.
The gold price has moved sideways for the last two months. Meanwhile, the HUI index of mining stocks jumped 10.3% during the same time span. This outperformance continues today — gold up a third of a percent while the HUI is up 1.6%.
Individual names in the sector have exploded far higher than that during 2025. Year-to-date, Helius Minerals grew 509%... Goldgroup Mining has done even better, rising 523%... while BCM Resources leaped 660%.
Little-known names like these are already moving partly in response to the Trump administration’s plans to tap the vast mineral bounty lying beneath federal lands, valued at up to $150 trillion. Those plans lie at the heart of Jim’s “American Birthright” thesis.
That said, Jim believes the real mining boom “hasn’t even started yet.”
As readers of Jim’s Situation Report already know, Jim believes Donald Trump will make a decisive move tomorrow. “And when this event unfolds, it will unleash Phase II of the American Birthright.”
See, when natural-resource stocks go on a tear, the most lucrative gains usually come during Phase II.
Jim’s seen it more than once during his career: “I’m talking about gains that could be 10X… 20X… and I’m not kidding, even 100X bigger” than the examples we just cited.
Readers of The Situation Report are already clued in to three specific investments Jim believes will generate those Phase II gains — starting when the president makes his move tomorrow. If you’re not among them, you can follow this link and Jim will start getting you up to speed.
Make IRAN Great Again?!
Seems an awful lot of Orwell references are flying around the interwebz the last 48 hours…
Then again, maybe Kafka is more appropriate?
After the U.S. airstrikes on Saturday night, the president said Iran’s nuclear program was “completely and totally obliterated.”
Which sounds like the objectives of the airstrikes were met. War’s over before it began, right?
But then he also said Iran “must now make peace.” And he didn’t lay out what he envisioned as the terms of a peace.
On the Sunday morning talk show circuit, Vice President Vance went out of his way to say “we’re not at war with Iran, we’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program.”
But if the program has been “completely and totally obliterated”... war’s over before it began, right?
Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth both emphasized that Washington’s issue is with Iran’s nuclear program and the objective is not “regime change.”
And then the president beclowned both of them late in the afternoon…
Wow.
Does it seem to you as if America is great again (MAGA)? Or healthy again (MAHA)?
No? Well, too bad, so sad. Donald Trump has bigger fish to fry than your well-being, peasant.
What’s old is new again: “To wage war on Iran,” writes the independent journalist Aaron Mate, “Trump and his allies have employed the traditional Iraq WMD playbook of ignoring or manipulating the available evidence to fear-monger about a foreign state marked for regime change.”
However, there are a couple of new twists…
“Unlike the Iraq war, where the fraudulent case for invading was mostly concocted in-house, Trump has outsourced the job to Israel, while not even pretending to care about public opinion or congressional approval,” Mate continues.
There’s a lot to unpack in that one sentence.
We said in Friday’s edition it seemed the White House put more stock in the assessment of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency than of its own intelligence services.
That impression has since been confirmed by independent reporters, both left- and right-leaning.
At the leftist Grayzone site, the fearless husband-and-wife team of Max Blumenthal and Anya Parampil report: “An official in the administration of President Donald Trump has told The Grayzone that CIA Director John Ratcliffe and U.S. CENTCOM Commander Gen. Michael Kurilla have become vehicles for Israel’s Mossad and military as they seek to manipulate the U.S. into attacking Iran. The Trump official referred to Ratcliffe as ‘Mossad’s stenographer.’
“According to the official, Ratcliffe and Kurilla have pressured Trump to join Israel’s war more directly by regurgitating overblown briefings they received from the Israeli military and Mossad director David Barnea — but without informing the president that the intelligence was derived from a foreign third party.”
Concurs Sean Davis at the conservative Federalist site: “I have also been told by current and former senior national security officials that CIA claims about Iran’s nuclear progress come directly from Mossad — ‘verbatim talking points’ was one phrase I heard — and don’t include U.S. intelligence on the matter.”
Meanwhile, the American people and their representatives in Congress just don’t count.
This isn’t the first time a U.S. president has cut out Congress from having any say in a major military campaign — not even a mealymouthed “resolution” or “authorization.” Barack Obama did the same with Libya — a regime-change op, we’ll remind you — in 2011.
Trump apologists who objected to an American air campaign last week are justifying it this week by making the excuse that no ground troops are involved. “One and done,” tweeted former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida). “Trump the Peacemaker!”
Whatever you need to say to feel better about yourself, dude…
As for the public, this much is clear: It’s not 2001 or 2003 anymore.
We conclude this foray into Orwell (and/or Kafka) with an observation from historian and author Stephen Wertheim. Apparently we’re supposed to believe that Iran’s leaders are so crazy that they’d try to nuke a nuclear-armed Israel… but also so rational that they won’t retaliate against American targets after an American bombing.
Which brings us to whatever’s next…
Blockade the Strait of Hormuz?
Understandably there’s much buzz about whether Tehran will move to blockade the Strait of Hormuz — the slender waterway through which about 20% of global oil trade moves.
Iran’s parliament voted yesterday in favor, but the final decision lies with the country’s supreme national security council.
Yesterday Secretary of State Marco Rubio pleaded with Beijing to lean on Tehran to prevent that outcome. "I encourage the Chinese government in Beijing to call them [Iran] about that, because they heavily depend on the Strait of Hormuz for their oil."
Someone needs to inform Rubio of what we mentioned three weeks ago: A rail line just opened for business linking China to Iran by way of four other countries.
No, it can’t fully substitute for China’s seaborne oil imports from Iran: The line runs through several of the central Asian “stan” countries — “prone to instability, conflict and terrorism,” says the South China Morning Post. Also, not all of the tracks are the same width — which adds up to “time-consuming and expensive cargo transfers.”
Still, all told, Iran accounts for about 7% of China’s oil consumption. China can probably handle the hit from a closure of the Strait.
As the day wears on, the Iranian military has lobbed missiles at the giant U.S. airbase in Qatar.
Qatar’s defense ministry says there’ve been no injuries. The oil price has tumbled 4.4% from Friday’s levels — back to $70.59 at last check.
At this time, the narrative seems to be that Tehran sought to stage a performative retaliation that didn’t really put anyone at risk — much as it did in early 2020 after Trump ordered the drone assassination of Gen. Qasem Soleimani.
By the same token the major U.S. stock indexes are all in the green — the S&P 500 up two-thirds of a percent and back over 6,000.
Gold is holding onto its modest gains; silver is outperforming, up 20 cents and back over $36.
We daresay the story isn’t over yet. As Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute tweets, “Israel will continue to strike Iran and vice versa, and as long as that is the case, the Israelis will continue to put relentless pressure on Trump to join the war in various ways.”
The bottom line is what I’ve said more than once this month: However many hedges against geopolitical risk you hold in your portfolio, it’s probably not enough.
That means oil, gold, silver, copper, uranium — tangible wealth and the companies that produce it.
Grim Chuckle
The meme-o-verse has obliged with a visual representation of what your editor was describing earlier…
Mailbag: MAGA Betrayal
As an expanded war loomed Friday — we cited the legendary journalist Seymour Hersh as saying Washington would enter the fray over the weekend — a reader wrote in…
“One is reminded of the quote, attributed to Emma Goldman, as Trump’s betrayal of his MAGA voters seems nigh: ‘If voting changed anything, they would make it illegal.’”
Dave responds: Key word there is “attributed.” We did the research on the eve of the 2020 election and as near as we can tell, neither Emma Goldman nor Mark Twain ever said it.
Doesn’t make it any less true. Or as the economist and podcaster Tom Woods is wont to quip: No matter who you vote for, you always end up with John McCain.
Best regards,
Dave Gonigam
Managing editor, Paradigm Pressroom's 5 Bullets
