It was January 2000. AOL had just announced it was buying Time Warner in what was then the biggest merger in history. Fourteen dot-com companies had bought Super Bowl ads, one of them starring a sock puppet that sold dog food.

The US economy was growing at one of its fastest paces ever; GDP was up nearly 5% the year before— and that’s real growth, before adding inflation, which itself was just 1.4%.

Unemployment was 4%, the lowest in thirty years. And there was no other country on the planet that could come close to rivaling America’s dominance.

Best of all, the federal government was running a surplus… a real one. It was so strong that, even excluding the Social Security surplus, the government took in $86 billion more than it spent.

So the Treasury didn’t need to borrow any money. Naturally it still held bond auctions, because when you issue the global reserve currency, you have to give investors a safe place to park their money. But Treasury was retiring more debt than it issued, and even started buying its own bonds back early.

And after wondering what “the meaning of the word is is”, Bill Clinton bragged that the country was “on track to pay down nearly $300 billion in debt” by the end of the year.

And in the middle of all that, the 10-year Treasury yield hit 6.79%.

In other words, investors wanted a 6.79% annual return to hold extremely safe US government bonds… at a moment when America was on top of the world and the government’s finances were in their best shape in decades.

That interest rate was not a crisis. After all, the government didn’t have to borrow to keep the lights on or the military funded or Social Security solvent. So they didn’t really care.

The Treasury’s interest bill was shrinking as a share of tax revenue every single year.

Imagine that.

Fast forward to earlier this week, and after a hot inflation report and with oil back above $100, the same 10-year yield briefly crossed 5%.

The reaction was instant panic.

Imagine being able to go back in time for a moment… back to January 2000. Imagine talking to an economist back then. You explain that you’re from the future, and that in 2026, the national debt is $40 trillion and growing faster than the economy. The foreign central banks that used to buy America’s debt are dumping Treasuries and buying gold instead.

You explain that there are wars in Ukraine and Iran, socialism is creeping back into American politics, and Congress can barely function.

You then ask the economist from January 2000 to guess where they think the 10-year yield would be, given all of that bad news.

They’d probably guess 10%, maybe 12%, and they’d be amazed to hear it only just crossed 5%.

So why did it take so long?

Because after the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed cut rates to zero… and left them there for seven years. There were a few ceremonial hikes, but when COVID arrived, the Fed slashed rates right back to zero.

It was able to do this because the Fed conjured trillions of dollars out of thin air… and used that money to buy bonds and suppress yields.

The 10-year was so low, in fact, that the federal government could issue those notes at less than 0.5%.

For thirteen years money was essentially free, and an entire generation came to believe that was normal. It wasn’t, and that era is clearly over.

Think about what an opportunity that was: when you can borrow at 0.5%, $2 trillion in debt costs just $10 billion a year. Investing that money at even a measly 1% means the government would be making money on its debt.

A 1% hurdle rate is not particularly high. But Congress couldn’t manage even that much.

Despite racking up tens of trillions in debt, there’s realistically nothing to show for all of that money: the national debt has quadrupled since the financial crisis, while the economy has only doubled.

Now, each year, much of the national debt matures, and the Treasury doesn’t have the money to pay it back. So they have to issue new debt to repay the old debt.

Problem is, the new debt is issued at much higher rates. They were paying 0.5% on the old debt. The new yield of 5% is TEN times the interest on the same amount of debt.

And with an average maturity of about six years, most of the $40 trillion rolls over within just a few years… which means before long the annual interest bill will reach $2 trillion per year.

Add nearly $3 trillion for Social Security and Medicare, and that’s the vast majority of tax revenue.

Literally everything else, including the military, roads, and light bill at the White House, is funded with more debt.

In 2000, the government could shrug at a 6.79% yield because it was paying debt down. Today everyone’s panicking at 5% because Congress borrows $2 trillion a year and can’t stop.

So, is Congress going to suddenly find its inner fiscal discipline?

I’m not holding my breath.

That leaves exactly one way to get the 10-year back down, and it’s the same way the Fed did it back in 2020: conjure more money out of thin air and make capital infinite.

And as the world discovered shortly after in 2021 and 2022, the consequence of that policy is inflation.

P.S. In 2000, a 6.79% Treasury with 1.4% inflation was a fantastic deal. Today’s 5% Treasury with the inflation that’s coming is a losing one.

Real assets are where you come out ahead: gold, energy, and industrial metals rise when the dollar falls. The profitable, debt-free companies that produce them are what we research in Schiff Sovereign’s Strategic Assets.

You can learn more about Strategic Assets here.

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On Sunday afternoon, the power went out at ExxonMobil’s refinery in Channahon, Illinois, a southwest suburb of Chicago.

Oil refineries run at tremendous heat and pressure, so whenever the power goes out, all that heat and pressure has to go somewhere. It’s basic physics. Hence why the plant burned it off through the flare stacks, with black smoke visible for miles.

The power came back around 7 p.m., but the plant stayed down, and as of Monday ExxonMobil still hadn’t said when it would restart, likely up to a week.

Bear in mind this is a plant that processes about 275,000 barrels of crude a day— close to 10% of the region’s fuel supply.

But that’s not what caused the highest diesel prices ever.

Even before this refinery was taken out of commission, the national average price of diesel went above $6 a gallon last week for the first time ever. Filling up a long-haul semi truck now costs more than $1,000.

It’s important to note that a barrel of crude oil is almost useless until somebody turns it into something. A refinery cooks the crude and breaks it apart into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, heating oil, the raw material for plastics, etc.

Everyone knows about the squeeze on oil due to the war with Iran. But the shortage of REFINERIES is another issue.

Sure, the wars have taken a toll on refineries and other fuel plants. Iran bombed Bahrain’s only refinery, shut ever since. It also wrecked half of Shell’s Pearl GTL in Qatar, the world’s largest plant for turning natural gas into diesel, jet fuel and lubricants. Ukrainian drones, meanwhile, have cut Russia’s refining by roughly a third.

And the rest of the world’s refineries can’t pick up the slack.

US refineries are already running at almost 98% of capacity. There’s no spare refining capacity, and that’s because governments have treated refining as the enemy of humanity for the past decade.

For example, ten years ago Britain had six refineries. Then the UK government announced a ban on new gasoline and diesel cars and piled punitive taxes specifically on refineries, and today Britain is down to four.

I guess the “Just Stop Oil” fanatics are happy now. They actually declared victory last year and hung up their hi-vis (oil-based) vests, and quit (oil-based) gluing themselves to things, because “no new oil” had become official government policy in the UK.

California, meanwhile, imposed a new penalty tax on refinery margins, and then passed climate change regulations for refineries that are virtually impossible to achieve.

Unsurprisingly, in the past year, California lost two refineries: Phillips 66’s in Los Angeles and Valero’s in Benicia near San Francisco. That’s 17% of California’s refining capacity.

Then Newsom panicked and changed his tune, realizing that California fuel prices would surge. He suddenly promised to “work closely with refiners.” He directed his own energy commission to pause the punitive refinery tax for five years. He even pushed legislators to consider paying hundreds of millions of dollars to Valero to keep their plant open.

Too little, too late. The refiners left, or idled their plants. You can only bite the hand that feeds so many times before they take action.

But of course, everyone will pay for Newsom’s idiocy, because diesel moves everything. So much of American imports arrive at California ports (like the Port of Long Beach), and trucks haul it across the country from there. Trains do the rest.

And nearly every big truck and freight train runs on diesel, which is now a lot more expensive in California. So the cost of Newsom’s lunacy is paid by every consumer.

Harvest is starting across the Midwest right now, and everything from tractors to grain dryers burns fuel. Phosphate (another critical fertilizer ingredient) is mined and hauled with diesel.

So the farmer pays $6 a gallon, the trucker pays $6 a gallon… and consumers reimburse these costs in the form of higher prices.

And let’s not forget, winter is coming.

Heating oil is diesel by another name (it comes out of the same refinery), and about 5 million American homes heat with it, more than 80% of them in the Northeast. One Gulf oil executive warned last week of “a very difficult winter coming in Northwest Europe. This is only the beginning.”

Bottom line, the power outage at Channahon is a problem. But it’s a small problem compared to the larger war on refineries.

With the spare refineries gone, even the slightest issue at remaining refineries now shows up in the price of diesel, food and everything else that moves on a truck.

Unexpected disruptions from war and power outages are one thing.

But governments deliberately villainizing refiners and chasing them out of town, for the crime of creating the energy the world desperately relies on, is another.

Their green policies and ESG mandates also helped drive a decade of underinvestment in the physical things civilization runs on: ships, mines, oil fields, smelters… and refineries.

Now the world is in the midst of a destructive war. When there is no spare capacity, every disruption has to be resolved by price, and the companies that own the scarce, strategic assets collect the difference.

And owning a piece of those companies yourself is the best way to protect yourself from higher prices and inflation.

P.S. That’s the whole point of Schiff Sovereign’s investment research newsletter, Strategic Assets: profitable, low-debt companies that own or move real things, bought while they’re still cheap.

Two oil tanker owners we featured when nobody wanted them are up more than 180% and 130%— one of them runs the ships that haul diesel— and our palm oil grower is up nearly 140%.

If you’d like to see the full research, you can learn more about Strategic Assets here.

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Last week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent sat down for a fireside chat at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and told the room what the plan is for the national debt.

“We don’t have a revenue problem,” he said. “We have a spending problem.” Contain the spending, add 3% growth, and America can “grow our way out of this.”

That’s a nice idea… and, it’s possible. The key part there is the spending freeze: arrest the growth in federal spending, and the deficit will eventually melt away.

The problem, of course, is that Congress won’t even cut obvious fraud. So I don’t think taxpayers should hold their breath for sudden fiscal responsibility.

The growth side of his approach is feasible. But what does “grow our way out” of the debt actually mean?

The national debt is now a little over $40 trillion. Meanwhile the entire US economy— everything produced by every business and every worker in the country over a full year— is about $32.5 trillion.

This means the debt is 123% of GDP, i.e. the all-important debt-to-GDP ratio is 123%.

That ratio is the key indicator that bond investors watch. And it’s the number Secretary Bessent is talking about when he says the US can grow its way out of debt.

The whole point is to bring that percentage down, from 123% today to something more like 80% or 90%.

Notice what he did NOT say. He didn’t say the debt would shrink. He didn’t say the deficit would go away. Growing your way out means the debt keeps getting bigger… it just grows at a slower pace, while the economy grows at a much more rapid pace.

Specifically, the US national debt has been growing at an average 6.7% per year over the past few years… which means ‘growing our way out’ will require the US economy to expand by at LEAST 7% per year, just to make a dent in the debt-to-GDP ratio.

Now go back to Bessent’s number: he’s talking about 3% growth.

And when he says 3%, he means real growth, i.e. the economy producing 3% more goods and services than it did the year before. That means more cars, more houses, more software, more oil… more actual stuff.

But we just established that the economy will require 7% growth in order to fix the debt challenge.

So where, exactly, is the other 4% supposed to come from?

It comes from inflation. In short the economy produces 3% more stuff, but the stuff costs 4% more. In total that gets you to more or less 7% GDP growth, while the debt increases by 6.7%.

And with that, you have a tiny improvement to America’s dismal debt-to-GDP ratio.

This is already the path that they’re on; in the last year, America’s total (i.e. nominal) GDP growth was 6.5%. Of that, only 2% was real growth, i.e. the production of more goods and services.

The rest, about 4.5%, was from rising prices.

So “growing our way out” is really just a polite way of saying inflation. And the government is effectively telegraphing a 4% inflation target. As it happens, that’s about where inflation already is right now.

In other words, the plan is to make everything else more expensive faster than the debt grows, and to call that a fix.

Four percent a year doesn’t sound like much. But it compounds, and at that rate a dollar loses about a third of its purchasing power in ten years.

The solution is to own the stuff they can’t conjure out of thin air.

A government can print money by the trillion, but it can’t print an ounce of gold or a barrel of oil, or anything else that’s real or critical to the economy.

That’s why real assets tend to hold their value when the currency is losing value… and why the businesses that produce those assets— gold miners, energy companies, copper producers, chip makers, etc.— often do spectacularly well.

P.S. Real assets are the whole premise of Schiff Sovereign’s investment research newsletter, Strategic Assets: profitable, well-run companies that produce the things a government can’t print, researched while they’re still cheap.

We locked in gains of more than 10x on a small silver producer we featured last year, and a gold producer has gone up 5x yet still trades cheaper against its earnings than the day we wrote it up. Two oil tanker owners we covered when nobody wanted them are up more than 150% and 110%.

The subscription comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. You can learn more about Strategic Assets here.

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At a time in my life which now seems centuries ago, I was once a young lieutenant, barely a year out of West Point, and I had recently been assigned to lead an electronic warfare platoon.

Whenever my unit wasn’t deployed or in the field, most of my duty days were spent in a top-secret facility called a SCIF— the kind of place that was guarded by military police and didn’t have any windows.

But every Tuesday morning at 9 a.m. sharp, my unit would formally assemble at the brigade motor pool to conduct routine PMCS checks— Army-speak for vehicle maintenance.

September 11, 2001, started like any other Tuesday morning.

Being on time in the Army is considered late, so naturally we all showed up to the motor pool around 10 minutes early.  And the regular business after the formation only lasted about 5 minutes.

But in that brief 15-minute window, from the time we were milling around the motor pool to the time I was going back to the SCIF, the entire world changed.

I was about to walk into the building when one of my sergeants approached me and said, “Sir, I don’t know if you heard, but terrorists just flew planes into the World Trade Center.”

My reaction was disbelief. This dude is crazy. But the look on his face suggested he was serious.

I mumbled some meekish “whaaaaat” sort of reaction and exhaled a pfff of confusion, but then walked inside where the military police at the desk were refreshing CNN.com. I saw the screen. Images of carnage in New York. It was real.

After handing over my little Nokia bar phone, I was buzzed in and walked down one of the halls where someone had set up a TV— an old-school cathode ray tube mounted on a big rolling cart, just like the ones my teachers used back in middle school.

NBC was on. The chipper, perma-smile morning crew was still trying to anchor the horrific news coverage and doing their best to make sense of what was happening. Then legendary news veteran Tom Brokaw took over and brought those of us in the room— and the rest of America— up to speed.

Everyone over the age of 35 or so has their own version of this ‘where was I’ story about 9/11.

They’re called ‘flashbulb memories,’ and they’re forever emblazoned in our brains. It made me realize that my dad wasn’t kidding around when he once went into vivid detail about the moment he heard that JFK had been shot.

We’ve experienced a few others over the past 25 years.

Many of us remember where we were when we heard about the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. I certainly do— my best friend called me and told me to turn on CNBC. It was Sunday September 14, 2008… and they were broadcasting live footage of Lehman Brothers employees filing into their office with cardboard boxes to clean out their desks.

The global financial system nearly collapsed the following day.

Similarly, many of us remember where we were when we first realized that COVID was real.

All of these flashbulb events over the past quarter century— with today being the 25th anniversary of 9/11— are reminders that the world can change in an instant.

Even if you’re too young to remember 9/11, you probably at least remember the pandemic. Everything changed, practically overnight.

To be frank, there will be others. We may see a day similar to the September 2008 financial crisis, when Americans tune in to see the bond market collapsing and Treasury yields surging… because foreigners are dumping their US government bonds all at once.

The irony is that a large part of America’s $40 trillion national debt… and hence the challenges with deficits, inflation, etc… is in large part due to the seismic shift after 9/11.

Before 9/11, America was in solid shape. The federal government was running a small budget surplus. And while the economy was slowing a bit and working off its hangover from the excesses of the tech boom in the 1990s, life was good.

But America went to war less than four weeks later on October 7, 2001. It lasted for twenty years and cost trillions upon trillions of dollars. Spending surged. The bureaucracy expanded. The surveillance state exploded.

And it all kicked off a borrowing spree that continues to this day. With the national debt now in excess of $40 trillion, more than 125% of GDP, America’s standing is waning rapidly.

Yes, there’s plenty of good news today and cause for optimism.

But the reality is that foreign ownership of US government bonds is falling. Even allies are starting to diversify. And it’s not hard to understand why: the US debt situation is a complete disaster.

So if this trend continues, we could absolutely experience another flashbulb-type event, where the whole world witnesses, in real time, the loss of America’s primacy.

The reaction will be similar to what most of us experienced on 9/11: total disbelief.

To be clear, nobody dies when yields spike, and a bond market crash is nothing like watching the towers fall. But the disbelief will be identical, because almost no one thinks it can happen here. It’s not supposed to happen here.

But it can. It just might. And if it does, just like the other flashbulb events—  9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, and the pandemic— the world could change dramatically in just 15 minutes.

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In July, the Canadian uranium miner Cameco stopped producing at its mine in northern Saskatchewan (known as ‘Cigar Lake’) for two weeks.

Cigar Lake itself was fine, nothing was wrong with the mine. The problem was their sulfuric acid plant— a crucial ingredient in processing uranium ore— broke down.

Normally they would have just bought sulfuric acid from somewhere else while they fixed their company-owned acid plant. But this year that’s not so easy.

About half the world’s seaborne sulfur moves through the Strait of Hormuz, and since the war with Iran began, those shipments have almost completely stopped. China, the world’s largest exporter of sulfuric acid, restricted its own exports in May to make sure they had enough.

So a simple mechanical problem at an acid plant caused a two-week shutdown of the world’s largest uranium mine.

Two weeks is a really long time for a huge mine like Cigar Lake to have an unscheduled shutdown; that’s because uranium is already in critical supply— there simply isn’t enough uranium being produced right now to keep up with demand.

The math is easy: miners produced roughly 155 million pounds of uranium in year. Reactors burn about 185 million pounds. So there’s already a significant deficit.

For the past several years, the deficit between uranium production versus reactor demand was covered by stockpiles that had been building up over decades. So the nuclear industry effectively burned through its uranium ‘savings’.

But those stockpiles of uranium are now basically depleted… which means that nuclear power companies will need to rely on uranium production in order to meet their needs.

This is a problem… and one that we can quantify.

Because uranium is literally THE most important resource for a nuclear reactor, the reactor companies tend to line up their uranium supply needs years and years in advance through forward contracts and term agreements.

There’s no black magic here— it’s a pretty predictable quantity. A 2GW nuclear plant, for example, already knows exactly how much electrical capacity they have, so they know how much fuel they need to serve their customers… hence they can forecast their future uranium needs.

For this year at least, US nuclear power companies have more or less the amount of uranium that they anticipate needing. But next year they’ll be in a deficit… and one that grows each year.

By 2030, US nuclear power companies will be short 40% of their anticipated uranium needs. By 2033, they’ll be short 91%. Basically all of it.

Big deal, right? Existing uranium producers can simply mine more.

But that’s not really happening… at least, not at current prices.

Kazatomprom (based in Kazakhstan) is the largest uranium miner in the world. And their management is deliberately pulling back on production right now.

The company believes that it’s simply not worth mining and selling uranium at the current price. Why bother producing at your full potential now when they KNOW the price is going to rise in the future, hence they make a LOT more money in the future if they mine less now.

OK well, the big shortage in the 2030s is still a few years away. So the industry has time to start more mines and bring new uranium production online.

Well, that’s easier said than done.

A company called NexGen Energy discovered a major uranium deposit in Saskatchewan back in 2014. They finally got their construction license this March, started building in August, and expect their first ore in 2030.

In other words, SIXTEEN years from discovery to production— and that’s about average for the industry.

You can’t just turn on uranium production like a light switch; it takes years and years to make most things happen in business, and uranium mining is no different.

This is common across many real assets— there has been years of underinvestment. Very few new uranium mines. Very little oil & gas exploration. Not enough new shipyards, refineries, smelters, etc.

It takes several years… plus a lot of risk capital… to discover a new resource deposit and bring a mine to life. Years.

Demand can grow much more quickly. Just look at the increase in electricity demand (thanks in large part to data centers). When electricity demand surges, but the supply of the fuel required to generate electricity is stagnant, the end result is higher prices.

And not just higher electricity prices— higher prices for the fuel as well, i.e. higher natural gas prices, higher uranium prices, and even higher coal prices.

(Coal is especially interesting— it was basically chased out of town. NO ONE wanted to invest in a new coal mine thanks to Greta Thunberg. Yet the International Energy Agency now expects coal-fired power generation to rise this year to make up for energy imbalances. Stagnant supply meets rising demand.)

That’s tough news for anyone with an electricity bill. But you can also be on the other side of it and make money from this trend.

When supply and demand is so fundamentally unbalanced, the companies that produce these scarce resources tend to perform extremely well.

This is the primary investment ethos for our investment research newsletter, Strategic Assets.

We look for the most critical resources that the economy runs on; we find sectors where there has been chronic underinvestment and focus on undervalued yet successful companies with great management and balance sheets.

Energy has been good to us. Two oil tanker owners we featured when nobody wanted them are up more than 150% and 110%.

A small South American oil producer we featured last month has no debt and sells every barrel at the wellhead to one of the largest oil companies on earth— so shipping is someone else’s problem. A typical new well takes years to pay for itself. This company’s fastest did it in 37 days.

Learn more about Strategic Assets here.

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It’s so simple, how could no one have thought of this before?

The man currently polling in second place to become the next President of France has put forward an ingenious solution to tackling France’s national debt, currently standing at around 117% of the country’s GDP.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon says, “All we have to do is take the 18% held by the Bank of France and chuck it in the fire.”

This is the guy who has a real shot at running the second-largest economy in the eurozone, and he’s telling voters that roughly €636 billion of what their government owes can simply be erased.

And the voters like the sound of it. Of course they do, who doesn’t love getting something for nothing?

Quick economics lesson for the brilliant man who wants to lead France: the Bank of France bought those bonds with euros it created for the purpose… the European Central Bank’s own explainer says buying bonds “creates money in the banking system.”

Normally those euros come back out of circulation as the debt gets repaid. Mélenchon’s plan skips that part: the government ‘throws the debt in the fire’ and doesn’t pay it back. So the central bank eats the loss… meaning that the €636 billion conjured out of nothing stays in the system.

This creates inflation, plain and simple.

Goods and services cannot be created out of nothing. Euros can. So when there’s suddenly more money in the system relative to the same amount of goods and services, the end result is inflation.

The other obvious implications is that France would still owe the rest of its debt… and those lenders will have seen that France is willing to default. I wonder what that would do to French bond yields?

Or maybe they’ll rest easy with Mélenchon’s assurance that “I’m not going after private creditors, not at this step in any case.”

Why do French voters even care about the national debt? Because they’ve been feeling the consequences of idiotic fiscal policy for years.

Interest alone costs the French government more than its entire defense budget. There’s no taxing their way out, either: the French are already the second-most-taxed people in the developed world, at about 44% of GDP.

So every fix takes some benefit away from taxpayers. Last year’s plan canceled two public holidays, froze pensions, and cut civil-service jobs… and the prime minister who proposed the solutions was thrown out.

The plan before that raised the retirement age from 62 to 64 brought the biggest protests France had seen in decades; that plan has now been suspended to keep the current government alive.

Meanwhile, growth was less than 1% last year, and unemployment is at its highest since 2020.

And here comes Mélenchon with a plan that costs nobody anything: delete a portion of the debt and go back to spending as if everything is OK.

However dumb the solution, at least the French are talking about the problem.

The US government crossed $40 trillion in debt last month. That’s roughly 123% of GDP, worse than France.

America gets away with it, for now, because the dollar is still the world’s reserve currency. Central banks hold a lot of their strategic financial reserves in US Treasury bonds, so Congress has always had a line of foreigners waiting to lend it money no matter how large the deficit.

But that line of foreigners is now getting shorter. Foreign holdings of Treasuries fell by $72 billion in June alone, China’s are at their lowest since 2008, and so far this year foreigners have bought just 7% of the new debt the US government issued.

The reasons aren’t a mystery: a dysfunctional government that can’t even pass a budget or eliminate fraud from its spending, while increasingly weaponizing access to the US dollar system.

When the foreign buyers stop showing up, America finds itself with France’s problem. Automatic cuts to Social Security are only six years away. Interest on the debt is already larger than the defense budget.

Extreme government spending is already pushing inflation higher… and socialists are everywhere now promising to spend even more.

These people genuinely believe that money is something you can conjure out of thin air with no consequence.

But whether they cancel the debt, or simply continue to ignore it, the consequence ultimately comes back to inflation.

That’s because conjuring money out of thin air, or borrowing from future generations to spend today, doesn’t produce one more barrel of oil, one more bushel of wheat, or one more pound of copper. It just produces more euros and dollars.

America has been here before.

Through the 1970s the US government ran deficits for Vietnam AND a historic expansion of welfare spending… then cut the dollar’s last link to gold in 1971. They created new money to cover the difference.

Consumer prices doubled over the decade, and the Dow finished 1979 where it started 1970, which after inflation was a loss of about half in real terms.

Meanwhile, gold went from $35 an ounce to $850. And oil went from about $3.40 a barrel to nearly $30. The world’s most important (and scarce) resources not only held their value, but they dominated. And the companies that produced them did far better.

Over roughly the same stretch, Barron’s index of gold mining stocks rose more than 1,200% while the S&P 500 managed 43%.

The new money has to go somewhere, and it flows into whatever the government cannot create more of.

Today, a lot of the companies that produce those real assets like metals, energy, food, and the ships that carry them, are still cheap.

We find them for subscribers of our investment research newsletter, Strategic Assets.

Gold and silver moved first, as central banks started diversifying out of the dollar. A small silver producer we featured in April 2025 rose more than 10x in ten months. A gold producer has gone up 5x, yet it’s earning money so fast that the stock is cheaper against its earnings today than the day we wrote it up. It pays a dividend, too.

Now the rest is showing life. A zinc producer we featured is up more than 150% in under a year. A tin miner is up more than 230% and trading at all-time highs. Two oil tanker owners we bought when nobody wanted them are up more than 150% and 110%, and one just reported the best quarter in its history.

Learn more about Strategic Assets here.

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