It was a good week to be on a government payroll and a bad one to be paying for it. Here are a few of the most absurd stories from the last several days in case you missed them.

Too tired to go to work? The Australian government has your back!

Michele Duffy, 63, advises students at Victoria University in Melbourne. She asked to work from home two days a week to cut the “physical fatigue” of commuting. She has no medical condition precluding her from going to work in person; she just doesn’t feel like it.

Her employer, the university, disagreed. Her job is dealing with students face to face, and somebody has to be at the desk when they walk in.

Finally Ms. Duffy’s manager offered that she could work from home one day per week, on Fridays, the quietest day.

That wasn’t good enough for Duffy. So she took the university to the Fair Work Commission, Australia’s workplace tribunal. Since 2023, the tribunal can overrule employers who turn down such flexible-work requests.

The tribunal agreed the university was within its rights to refuse Duffy’s request… but then ordered them to comply regardless.

“I do not consider that it was necessary for Ms. Duffy to establish that there was a medical reason [for her to stay home],” the commissioner of the tribunal wrote.

The next logical step in this slippery slope is employees who can demand to be paid when they don’t feel like working at all!

One man, five government salaries, and nobody noticed for three years

Speaking of shamming at work, Kashim Chowdhury, 55, went on trial in London this week, accused of holding five full-time government jobs at once.

Over three years, prosecutors say, he worked his way through eight employers in a chain of overlapping government jobs, among them an east London council, the Home Office, the environment department, the UK Health Security Agency and the Department of Health.

All of these were work-from-home jobs; the man claimed he needed to work from home to look after his sick mother.

At the peak, in 2023, he was drawing five full-time salaries at the same time.

His managers rated his work “largely ineffective” and “exceptionally poor”. Yet he was never fired and the paychecks kept coming.

Apparently it’s perfectly acceptable to be exceptionally poor at your job if you work for the British government.

The only reason he finally got caught is because a government data-matching exercise called the National Fraud Initiative flagged his name… not because any of his managers did the obviously right thing and fired him.

Clearly if one man could hold five of those jobs at once, do all of them badly, and go three years without anyone noticing, then none of those jobs needed doing in the first place.

Update: California’s bullet train money went to a tiki bar

If Britain looks bad for paying the same guy to do multiple jobs, California really raises the bar of incompetence and largess.

I recently went through where the first $15 billion of money for California’s non-existent bullet train went. What I couldn’t work out was why nobody had audited any of it. The inspector general, whose job that is, said his office was half-staffed. Now he has found the time to read the consultants’ expense claims.

On September 15 he reported that four consulting firms, the accounting firm KPMG among them, had billed about $600,000 in travel that state rules or their own contracts didn’t allow. That was more than half of everything he looked at. The claims included first-class flights and car rides to a night club until 2:30 in the morning, a cigar lounge in Washington, DC, a tiki bar and an escape room.

One legal consultant billed for about 30 trips between Denver and Sacramento in a year: $40,800 in travel costs, plus $86,500 in billable hours for the time he spent getting there. That is roughly $4,000 a trip before he did any legal work.

Voters approved this train in 2008 for $33 billion, with service by 2020. The current estimate is that it will cost up to $231 billion and be finished by 2040.

$26,450 per student, and 62% of them still can’t do math

And while we’re talking about California, the state released its annual test results on Thursday under the headline “New Statewide Data Shows Continued Progress for California Students.”

Progress??? Their own report shows only 49% of students met the state’s basic English standard, and just 38% met the math standard. Both are still below 2019. Among low-income students, 61% fell short in English and 73% in math.

Governor Gavin Newsom’s statement called the results “important evidence that our sustained investments are making a difference.”

Here are the investments, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, the legislature’s nonpartisan budget staff: about $143 billion on K-12 schools in the year these tests were taken, roughly $26,450 per student.

The state’s answer is to spend 7% more this year, about $28,250 per student.

It’s a great plan! When has spending more money ever failed to produce solid results in California?

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In January 2021, two months before US inflation took off, a reporter asked Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell how much inflation the Fed was willing to tolerate.

Powell acted like he’d never heard of inflation— like it was crazy to even ask. He dismissed the notion of inflation entirely and said it was “far away and unlikely.”

Then he doubled down. “Frankly,” the Fed Chairman bizarrely claimed, “we welcome slightly higher inflation.”

Yes, of course, the central economic problem of our time: too LITTLE inflation. What a joke.

A few months later prices started climbing faster than Americans had seen in years, and Powell found his new favorite word: “transitory.”

As inflation rose, he kept saying it was “transitory”, and it took inflation hitting 5% for Powell to finally admit that it was “probably a good time to retire that word.”

Prices finished 2021 up 7%, the most since 1982. The Fed still didn’t raise interest rates until March 2022, and by just a quarter of a point. Even with 7% inflation, the Fed wasn’t taking it seriously.

But then they suddenly panicked. Their attitude on inflation went from “huh?” to five alarm fire in a matter of months, prompting the Fed to jack interest rates up from near zero to 4.75%. It was the fastest pace of rate hikes since the 1980s.

By early 2023, Jerome Powell had a lot of explaining to do. So when he sat in front of the Senate Banking Committee on March 7 that year, plenty of people were asking if his abrupt, panicked rate hikes were going cause problems in the banking sector.

No, said a clearly unworried Powell. “I think nothing about the data suggests to me that we have [raised rates] too much,” he said.

Literally three days later, Silicon Valley Bank, the 16th-largest bank in America, collapsed… specifically because of those rising interest rates.

Remember, when you deposit money at a bank, they don’t just keep your cash sitting in a vault. They either loan it out to someone, or invest it in bonds— especially US government bonds.

The thing about bonds is that they lose value when interest rates rise. So when Jerome Powell rapidly hiked interest rates, banks were sitting on big losses in their bond portfolios.

But it’s sort of like owning a stock that’s down: you haven’t actually LOST money unless you sell. In the meantime you’re just sitting on a paper loss, or what accountants call an “unrealized loss.”

Yet that’s what killed Silicon Valley Bank.

By the end of 2022, SVB was sitting on about $15 billion of unrealized losses— which made it technically insolvent.

Customers figured that out and panicked. They pulled more than $40 billion out in a single day (nearly a quarter of its deposits), and regulators shut the bank down the next day.

Two more banks went under shortly after… all because rising interest rates caused banks to suffer huge unrealized bond losses.

But rates are MUCH higher today, so banks’ unrealized losses are growing.

According to the FDIC, the federal agency that insures bank deposits, those losses added up to $327 billion as of June 30. The next quarterly report for Q3 (which ended September 30) hasn’t come out yet. But it will almost certainly be MUCH worse.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury hit 5.35% recently. That’s up from 4.4% back in June, when the last FDIC report came out.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting this is going to bring down the banking system. In fact, at the moment, it will NOT. Banks as a whole have enough equity to absorb those losses.

But a rapid increase in unrealized losses will likely drag down bank stocks and force executives to cut costs, and the interest banks pay you is always one of the first things to go.

Once these unrealized losses hit the banks’ Q3 and Q4 financial statements, I’m betting you’re probably going to see a cut in the interest rate your savings account as banks shore up more capital.

So it’s worth considering other options for your cash deposits.

For one, the federal government likely pays more than your bank does: a 90-day T-bill, which is a three-month loan to the US Treasury, pays about 4.1% right now. Even the 28-day T-bill pays almost 4%.

Then there’s the option of moving some money overseas.

I don’t mean a secret Swiss bank account from a spy movie. Foreign banks report their American customers to the IRS, and having a foreign account is not about hiding money.

The real reason to have a foreign bank account is far more practical: it puts a portion of your savings in another jurisdiction. It’s a useful asset protection measure… with the added benefits of better service and higher interest rates.

We research a number of foreign banks for members of our Plan B Confidential service. One sent its bankers to our Plan B conference in Panama City last month, where they opened accounts for attendees on the spot.

It’s a private, safe, well-capitalized bank. That means it has plenty of its own money to absorb losses, which is exactly what Silicon Valley Bank ran out of.

It also pays 4% interest on a savings account.

And you can open the account remotely. That’s very rare these days. US reporting rules have made Americans such a compliance headache that many foreign banks won’t take them at all, and the ones that do usually want you to show up in person.

You can learn more here about Plan B Confidential, which comes with a Rolodex of vetted service providers, from immigration attorneys to tax advisors to private bankers, including, of course, our contacts at this bank.

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In 1938 the airline business was brand new— only 35 years had passed since the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk.

Hardly anyone had even seen an airplane. A coast-to-coast round trip cost about $260, half the price of a new car, so passengers were mostly very wealthy.

The airlines were small, and during the Depression they were losing money. Congress was afraid they would undercut each other into bankruptcy, and the country would lose an industry it needed for its mail and its defense.

So lawmakers created the agency that became the Civil Aeronautics Board. For the next forty years, the Board set the airfare on every interstate route in America. They even decided which airlines were allowed to fly those routes.

The idea was well intended; they viewed airlines as an element of national security that needed protection.

But whatever good intentions the Board started with, by the 1970s it was just a soulless bureaucracy that stifled competition and said “no” to everything new.

An airline that wanted to CUT its prices needed the Board’s permission. So did anyone who wanted to start a new major airline.

Between 1950 and 1974, 79 new airlines applied to the Board. Zero were approved.

The consequences were obvious; remember, the Board only regulated interstate routes, so the public could see the difference.

For example, in 1965, a California airline called PSA flew Los Angeles to San Francisco for $11.43. Because the route was within the state, it was unregulated.

Meanwhile, the cheapest ticket from Boston to Washington— about the same distance, but across state lines and hence regulated by the Board— was $24.65.

In other words, federal regulation more than doubled the fare.

By the late 1970s Americans were hurting. The Arab oil embargo of 1973 had nearly quadrupled the price of oil, which stayed high. It was the decade of stagflation: prices had nearly doubled in ten years, inflation was running near 9% by the fall of 1978.

President Jimmy Carter was looking for anything he could do to bring prices down.

He understood that more competition means lower prices. “Of all our weapons against inflation,” he told the country in a televised speech on October 24, 1978, “competition is the most powerful.”

That same day he signed a law phasing the Board out, and by 1985 it no longer existed.

Sure enough, within six years the average airfare had fallen, even though inflation was still raging elsewhere in the economy.

And this was Jimmy Carter… hardly a free market champion.

Yet he kept doing it. In 1980 alone he deregulated banking, trucking, and the railroads, calling it “the capstone of my efforts… to get the federal government off the backs of private industry.”

Ronald Reagan beat him that November… and in his second week in office finished Carter’s phase-out of federal price controls on oil, and continued deregulation from there. Two presidents who agreed on practically nothing agreed on boosting competition.

Nothing on that scale has happened since. For forty years the pile of rules has kept growing, and you pay for it every day.

Start with the airlines, where the ban on competition outlived the Board. No foreign airline may carry passengers between two American cities. Europe opened its domestic routes to airlines from other EU countries in 1997. Comparable fares there are well below America’s.

Under the Jones Act, a 1920 law, anything shipped between two American ports must travel on an American-built ship owned and crewed by Americans. Fewer than 100 large oceangoing ships qualify.

No American yard has built a liquefied natural gas tanker since 1980, so no American-built ship can carry Texas gas to Boston. New England consequently buys its winter gas from overseas instead.

Ironically, after hurricanes pummeled Puerto Rico in 2022, the government suspended the Jones Act so a foreign tanker could bring diesel to the island; this suggests that politicians already know how cumbersome and expensive the Jones Act is.

Hospitals need permission to exist, too. In 35 states medical facilities can’t open or expand without state approval, and states with these laws have about 30% fewer hospitals per person.

The National Association of Home Builders found that regulation adds about $132,000 to the price of a new home. Hardly any of that has to do with safety or quality.

Want to build a power line, a pipeline, or a mine? Consulting firm McKinsey estimates $1.5 trillion of investment is stuck in federal permitting.

Want to cut hair? That takes nearly a year of state-mandated training. One in five American workers now needs government permission to do their job.

And right now the government is keeping cheaper cars out. Chinese companies build a decent mid-size SUV for around $20,000 that American automakers would have to compete with. So Chinese cars face a 100% tariff, and the Commerce Department, citing national security, banned cars with Chinese-linked software. Americans pay more as a result.

The pattern is hard to miss: wherever the government gets involved, prices go up.

It has happened every single time the government stepped in to make something more affordable— education, housing, child care, healthcare.

Competition and technology are the only forces that have EVER brought prices down for good, and almost every rule in that pile exists to stop one or the other.

America got rich on competition yet has spent forty years legislating it away.

A real overhaul of the rules would do for the whole economy what Carter’s law did for airfares. Clear them away and the country will build more, make more, start more businesses…

None of this is difficult. Jimmy Carter did it with a signature. But the politicians refuse, and waiting on them is not a plan.

And that’s exactly why it makes sense to have a Plan B.

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The two most recent inflation reports both showed the same thing: prices in the US are 3.4% higher than they were a year ago.

And the politicians could hardly contain themselves.

After the first report, the White House’s top economic adviser, Kevin Hassett, declared that inflation is “clearly decelerating.” After the second, Jason Smith, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, announced that “more relief may be just around the corner.”

I’m not sure that anyone views price hikes at any level being good news. Normal people don’t want prices to rise more slowly; they want prices to stop rising, or better yet, to come back down.

But that’s never going to happen; even the Federal Reserve’s own goal is for prices to keep rising 2% a year.

Bear in mind that prices are ALREADY almost 30% higher than they were before the pandemic.

Now, there are solutions to this. In fact we often write about how real assets— gold, energy, productive technology, and the metals that build everything— are safe havens from inflation.

A government can print money by the trillion, but it can’t print an ounce of gold or a barrel of oil.

But there’s another way to beat inflation that most people never consider: go where your money goes farther.

America has become one of the most expensive countries in the world.

The typical American rental now lists for nearly $2,000 a month, and in larger metropolitan areas, rent is much higher. The median home price is now over $400,000 in the US, and with mortgage rates over 7%, not to mention a hefty down payment, affordability is difficult.

Housing costs may not be your biggest bill; it might be healthcare, child care, or several things at once. Priorities differ, but everyone knows what they spend their money on.

And whatever that is for you, there are places around the world where it costs a lot less.

In Cebu, a coastal city in the Philippines, a two-bedroom condo rents for $450 to $700 a month. A private doctor visit costs $10 to $25.

You could live the way you do now and keep the difference… or you could pay a little less than you do now and get a LOT more: a modern condo with a pool, a housekeeper, dinners out several times a week.

And you don’t have to pack up and move to give yourself that option. You don’t even have to buy property.

All you need is a legal residency, i.e. the right to live in another country whenever you choose.

It’s a smart idea to set one up now, while countries still make it easy. If you decide later that you do want to go, you already have it.

But the rules don’t stay easy. Residency programs change constantly; thresholds rise, rules tighten, and some get eliminated entirely.

Panama used to have all sorts of easy ways to get residency; there was even a visa for investing in reforestation.

The most accessible route has long been the Friendly Nations visa, which applies to citizens of countries with economic or diplomatic ties to Panama, including the US. In 2019, all it required was registering a company in Panama and depositing as little as $5,000 in a local bank account.

Since 2021 it has required a $200,000 investment in Panamanian real estate, the same amount in a Panamanian bank, or a local employment contract.

I still think Panama is one of the best options out there.

Home prices have definitely gone up since we held an event there in 2023; we heard as much at our conference in Panama City last month. But they’re still quite modest compared to the US.

Retirees who become residents also get a permanent discount card for the rest of their lives— meaningful cuts on everything from flights and restaurants to medical care and entertainment.

Mexico isn’t the bargain it once was. The peso has strengthened, and a dollar buys more than 10% fewer pesos than it did at the start of last year.

But Mexico is still right next door, residency is easy to get, and the cost of living is low by any developed-world standard.

In Europe, Greece is the most accessible entry point for anyone wanting residency, and the cost of living there is well below American levels.

And in the Philippines, where that Cebu condo is, roughly $3,000 a month buys a life that looks upper-class back home: a full-time housekeeper who cooks, regular dinners out, private doctors, and a secure building with a gym and a pool.

A residency in one of those places, set up before you need it, is a great cost of living focused Plan B. And it works like insurance.

You don’t call an insurance company while the roof is on fire; you shop around for quotes, figure out the best mix of price and value, and make the decision in a calm and peaceful setting.

The low costs and the easy rules aren’t likely to stay this way, so it’s better to think about doing this now.

Inflation isn’t going away, no matter how many victory laps the politicians take. But a residency in a country where your money goes farther gives you the right to go live there whenever you choose.

It’s a unique way to beat inflation.

P.S. The right residency depends on your age, your income, and how much time you actually want to spend there.

Our flagship service, Plan B Confidential, covers the programs I mentioned here and many others— what each one costs, how to qualify, and what it takes to keep it— along with on-the-ground reports on living costs, healthcare, and real estate in places like Mexico and the Philippines. Members also get our Rolodex of trusted service providers.

Click here to learn more about Plan B Confidential.

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It all started because the students wanted better quality education… and more teachers.

Many schools in France are overcrowded. Some lack teachers. Buildings are crumbing.

So, two weeks ago, students at a high school outside Paris blocked the entrance to their own school to protest these conditions. And the movement caught on; students at hundreds of other schools did the same.

By last week the protests had turned violent, when students (and then a bunch of people who clearly didn’t look like students) began setting fires and fighting riot police.

More than 5,000 people have been arrested so far, most of them teenagers, and 24 schools have been burned or ransacked.

Sure, this is a country where torching cars and burning down buildings is a national sport.

But it’s worth pointing out that France spends 57% of its ENTIRE economy on government. The average for rich countries is about 43%, and only Finland spends more.

So here’s a question the French might want to ask: what do you get for all that government?

For that kind of money, you’d expect the basics to be covered… like teachers. But France actually cut 3,000 teaching jobs this year, and plans to cut more next year.

At one high school in a poor suburb north of Paris, math, English, humanities, and gym classes have been canceled since the school year began because there’s nobody to teach them.

One student complained of being forced to take exams required for graduation without having had a teacher in the subject!

Yet the government spending 57% of GDP doesn’t buy proper education. Nor does it buy law and order. A protest by high school kids turned into nationwide riots, and the French state couldn’t stop it. Hundreds of students, school staff, and police officers have been hurt.

France has been here before. France’s 2005 riots began in a poor region just north of Paris, after two teenagers hiding from police were electrocuted in a power substation. The suburbs burned for weeks.

The same suburbs rioted again in 2023— and they were among the first places the school protests spread this fall.

Nearly a third of the people who live in that county are immigrants, the highest share anywhere in mainland France, and three times the national average.

France spent decades importing immigrants by the million and never bothered to integrate them. Twenty-one years after the 2005 riots, NOTHING has been fixed.

What’s crazy is that French people are demanding even MORE government to fix these problems that haven’t been fixed by their already gargantuan government.

How do they plan to pay for any of it? The French are already the second-most-taxed people in the developed world, at about 44% of GDP. Yet even that doesn’t cover the spending, so the government borrows the rest. France’s national debt is now 119% of GDP.

On October 1, in the middle of the riots, the government presented next year’s budget. It expects interest on the debt to cost more than €90 billion. That’s far more than the €65 billion it plans to spend on schools, and more than it spends on its entire military.

In other words, France now pays more to its lenders than it spends on its schools OR its soldiers… and the interest bill is still growing.

Naturally, with multiple crises hitting at once, the hard left is ready to exploit the chaos.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon is a hard-left politician and one of the top three candidates in the polls for next April’s presidential election. As the protests turned violent, Mélenchon declared that the students were harmless and said the police response had “an obvious racist aftertaste.”

Mélenchon’s answer to France’s problems is MORE government. He wants to raise the minimum wage and lower the retirement age to 60.

(Remember, France already tried to fix its bankrupt pensions by raising it from 62 to 64. That caused riots too, so the plan was suspended.)

And his plan for the national debt is to simply cancel the part that France’s central bank holds.

Bottom line, France pays for more government than almost any country, and it barely even seems like an exaggeration to say its society is collapsing in real time.

France has done everything wrong, from borrowing to immigration, and now it can’t even do the basics.

But while France may be a more aggravated case, the similarities to the US are hard to ignore.

The US government owes more than $40 trillion, roughly 123% of GDP— worse than France. Interest on the debt is already larger than the defense budget.

America gets away with it, for now, because the dollar is still the world’s reserve currency. Foreign 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.

At peak (in 2011), foreigners owned nearly half of all marketable US Treasury bonds. Now their share is down to about 30%.

China in particular has cut its Treasury holdings in half since 2013, and they’re now at their lowest level since 2008.

When the foreign buyers stop showing up, America finds itself with France’s problem: lenders charge more, interest eats up more of the budget every year, and there’s less money left over for the basics.

France shows how quickly a society can devolve. And that’s exactly why it makes sense to have a Plan B.

P.S. You don’t have to wait around to see whether America ends up like France.

Schiff Sovereign’s flagship research service, Plan B Confidential, covers second residencies and citizenships, foreign banking, and legal tax strategies, with boots-on-the-ground reports from all over the world, so you can put the pieces in place before you’re scrambling.

Click here to learn more.

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[Editor’s note: This letter was written by Schiff Sovereign’s CEO, Viktorija, who is originally from Lithuania but splits her time between Mexico and Panama.]

The first thing I noticed at Seoul’s Incheon airport was the luggage.

People had just left their suitcases sitting there— against pillars, next to benches, by the exits— and wandered off to the bathroom or to grab a coffee. Nobody looked back.

Forget about thieves for a minute; just try leaving an unattended bag in a US airport, and watch the place go into lockdown while the bomb squad swarms in.

A few days later I was in a small local café when the woman next to me stood up, left her phone face-up on the table, and walked off. She was gone for several minutes.

When she came back, she picked up her phone like it was nothing.

South Korea is a high-trust society. When you’re on the ground, you feel it before you can explain it. People here just assume that everyone else is going to follow the rules, and they’re almost always right.

It’s not just the obvious stuff, like Korea’s ultra-low murder rate. It’s little things too.

Last year, for example, passengers on Seoul’s metro left around $300,000 on the trains— lost wallets, money that fell out of people’s pockets, etc. About three-quarters of that cash was returned to the rightful owners. Crazy.

The Seoul subway, by the way, is the best I’ve ever been on— and I’ve been to more than 100 countries. It’s spotless, the trains show up when the sign says they will, and a ride costs a little over a dollar.

I’ve been to Seoul before, but this time I was blown away by how much had changed. The whole city feels like living in the future.

At one café, my espresso was made by a robot. At my hotel, room service arrived on a robot that drove itself down the hallway, stopped at my door, and handed over the tray.

And nobody else seemed to find any of this remarkable.

The factories are even farther along. South Korea has more robots per factory worker than ANY country in the world— about four times as many as the US.

Korea needs them. It has the same problem as America and nearly every other rich country, only worse: people aren’t having enough kids. Korea’s birth rate is one of the lowest in the world, and its working-age population is already shrinking.

But instead of waiting around for the worker shortage to solve itself, the Koreans are building machines to do the work.

I think about economic growth a lot; it’s a big part of my job at Schiff Sovereign. And South Korea’s is remarkable, if you know the backstory.

In 1960, South Korea was poorer than Ghana. Today it’s about fifteen times richer.

And the Koreans haven’t let up. South Korea puts more than 5% of its ENTIRE economy into research and development every year; only Israel spends more.

Most of that money comes from private companies. But the government keeps raising the bar too: this year’s research budget is the biggest in the country’s history.

It’s not just robotics— it’s everything from semiconductors to medical research.

In fact medical treatment is a booming industry; about two million foreigners came to Korea for medical treatment last year, which is a record. Most of them, admittedly, came for skin treatments and cosmetic work.

But Korea is also world class in regenerative medicine— stem cell treatments that repair damaged tissue, anti-aging therapies, etc. This is serious medicine, not spa tourism.

Korean regulators approved a stem cell treatment for worn-out knee cartilage back in 2012… and more than 35,000 patients have received it since.

Since last year, Korean law has also allowed patients with severe or rare diseases to receive new cell-based treatments that haven’t finished the full approval process.

It’s amazing what can happen when a country allows science and medicine to advance instead of stifling them.

To me, it all sounds a lot like America in the 1950s.

America back then was an exciting, high-functioning, high-trust society. People had a strong work ethic and shared values, and they made intelligent decisions for the future.

When America had just become the world’s dominant superpower, the Eisenhower administration built the federal highway system, and Congress paid for it with a tax on gasoline instead of borrowing the money.

Around that time, roughly 75% of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing. Today it’s less than 20%.

Frankly I think that if you’re thinking about cutting-edge medical care, Korea ought to be be on your radar.

But ultimately, Seoul is a reflection of what a high-trust society with shared values looks like… and of what a country can become when it does rational, sensible things to focus on a better future.

P.S. Finding places that work is a big part of what we do. Schiff Sovereign’s flagship research service, Plan B Confidential, covers second residencies and citizenships, foreign banking, and legal tax strategies, with boots-on-the-ground reports from all over the world.

Click here to learn more.

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It was a big week for creative problem-solving. Britain fixed a failed government energy company by starting a second, Canada is balancing its budget by renaming the spending, and Boston paid $335,000 to call itself racist and failed. Here are a few of the most absurd stories in case you missed them.

Britain fixes its failed government energy company with a second one

Before the 2024 election, Britain’s Labour Party promised that a new state-owned company called Great British Energy would help families save up to £300 a year on their energy bills.

So far electric bills have increased instead.

Not to worry. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced his fix: create a SECOND state-owned energy company to basically do the same job as the first.

After all, when one state-owned enterprise fails miserably, the only logical solution is to create a second state-owned enterprise and expect a different result.

Canada’s plan to balance the budget: change the definition of ‘spending’

We’ve long said that when the deficit and inflation numbers become bad enough, politicians will simply reinvent the way they calculate these figures.

Canada has now done just that.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has promised to balance Canada’s gruesome budget deficit. But his plan is to change the definition of the word ‘spending’.

Carney’s big idea is to only count day-to-day operating costs as ‘spending’. And anything else that he deems to be an ‘investment’ won’t count.

We all understand the difference. In your own household, the electric bill is considered an expense. Purchasing shares of Newmont Mining is considered an investment.

Now, my wife has tried to stretch this definition a time or two by insisting that a beach vacation or pretty necklace is actually an investment.

Carney is applying this same logic to an entire national economy. It’s completely subjective and inconsistent, plus it lacks any transparency.

Giving money away on woke priorities? Not an expense! It’s an investment in community! Paying Canadians to turn in their completely legal firearms? Not an expense! It’s an investment in safety! (more on this below)

Carney has now reinvented the math, making Canada look just as ridiculous as WeWork when then CEO Adam Neumanm spoke of his company’s “Community-Adjusted Earnings”.

Canada’s last line of defense is the gun owners it’s disarming

Mark Carney isn’t done with his insanity. He recently told the New York Times that it’s his job to look at the “extreme tail risk” that Donald Trump orders military action against Canada.

According to Carney himself, in the absurd likelihood of a US invasion, US forces would overrun Canada’s defenses within a week, possibly within two days. After that, Carney will be counting on “small groups of irregular military or armed civilians” to fight on with ambushes and sabotage, like the Afghan mujahedeen against the Soviets.

The trouble is that Canada has banned more than 2,500 makes and models of “assault-style” firearms since 2020, and the government is paying gun owners to hand them in.

So apparently Canadians are expected to fight house to house with hockey sticks… until the government comes for those too.

Boston paid $335,000 to call itself racist… and failed

If any place in America can say it made the right call on slavery early in its history, it’s Massachusetts. The state’s chief justice declared slavery finished in 1783; he cited the state constitution that “all men are born free and equal.”

Yet the city government in Boston has still chosen to put itself on trial more than two centuries later.

In 2022 local politicians set up a task force to study reparations for slavery, with one member positively giddy that the research would give it the “evidentiary pool from which to argue for [reparations].”

So the city spent $335,000 of taxpayer money to hire a Tufts University team led by historian Kerri Greenidge.

She came with all the right awards. Her 2022 book The Grimkes, about a slaveholding family that produced two famous abolitionist sisters, had been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won a prize from the American Historical Association.

Apparently if you write about slavery, no one bothers to check whether it’s accurate. They just give you awards.

But it turns out Greenidge’s book was “riddled with factual errors.” It cites letters held at the University of Michigan which don’t actually exist. It references other historians’ research that doesn’t exist. In short, it’s about as accurate as a Hollywood adaptation.

Ms. Greenidge naturally clapped back and claimed that pointing out her errors is an “attack on Black women [in] academics…”

So, Boston was willing to spend taxpayer money to call its own taxpayers racists, and the expert they hired turned out to be another race grifter with no credibility.

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Michael Walters had just started his first full-time job out of university when he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a blood cancer.

His doctors in Auckland, New Zealand, tried several rounds of chemotherapy, radiation and immunotherapy. None of it worked.

Then they told him about CAR-T, a treatment that takes a patient’s own immune cells out, re-engineers them in a lab to attack the cancer, and puts them back in.

A hospital in Melbourne, Australia, quoted him as much as $600,000, far more than his family could pay.

So in late June, Walters flew to Shanghai, where the same therapy costs a fraction as much.

It’s not that the Chinese invented it; CAR-T is an American technology.

But China is running the exact same playbook that Japan used on American technology after World War II— copy the American invention, perfect the manufacturing, and flood the market with cheap, state-subsidized products.

CAR-T’s big breakthrough came in 2012 at the University of Pennsylvania, where a 6-year-old became the first child to beat leukemia with it.

China took it from there. Its regulators let hospitals launch their own trials with far less central oversight than America requires, and by 2017 China was running more CAR-T trials than the US.

“China has basically done to CAR-T cell therapy the same thing that it’s done to other industries, which is, they’ve industrialized it,” said Dr. Sairah Ahmed, who runs a CAR-T program at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

According to Ahmed, CAR-T costs $150,000 to $230,000 in China, versus $550,000 to $850,000 in America. She has even advised some of her overseas patients to go to China for it.

Michael Walters did his CAR-T in China. And on August 18, he learned his lymphoma was in complete remission.

In 2021 China opened CAR-T to foreign patients, and now they’re flying in from all over. Walters’ hospital alone has treated patients from 12 countries.

To be clear, we’re not lamenting this at all. If China can take American research and sell the treatment for a fraction of the price, that’s a win for humanity.

But it also highlights how China has been working on its global image as a tourism hotspot.

Citizens of dozens of countries can now visit China for up to 30 days without a visa. Nearly 23 million foreigners entered China in the first half of this year, up 20% from a year earlier.

With their medical advances, they’re trying to push into medical tourism as well. It’s the same idea: open the doors and bring in foreign money.

It’s strange when you think about it— advanced medical tourism in one of the world’s most authoritarian regimes. No one had that on their bingo card 20 years ago.

Because that’s the crazy thing about China— while foreign tourists are arriving in record numbers, any Chinese national with the means to leave is moving out of the country.

Moreover, wealthy Chinese are flooding overseas “citizenship by investment” programs in places like Antigua and St. Lucia in order to quickly obtain a second passport.

They’re not stupid. They know their wealth and prosperity exists in China only as long as the government says it does. They know their freedom exists only as long as the government says it does… which is really to say there’s no freedom or prosperity at all.

They know they’re only one misstep away from being disappeared like Jack Ma, the Alibaba founder who criticized state regulators.

Or tennis star Peng Shuai, who disappeared after accusing a senior CCP official of sexual assault.

Or real estate mogul Ren Zhiqiang, who disappeared after speaking out against China’s COVID policies.

Or countless others.

Wealthy Chinese can also see the crumbling fiscal facade. Behind the modern skylines and futuristic robotics, they know that China in deep financial trouble, especially at the regional and provincial levels.

By Bloomberg’s count, 21 of China’s 31 provincial governments have budget deficits exceeding 100% of tax revenue. It would be like the US government having a $6 trillion deficit every single  year.

Last year China’s general government deficit (national, regional, local) was roughly 10% of GDP… which is just absurd.

And local tax officials are now turning their sights on China’s rich (and eventually middle class) to make ends meet.

According to Bloomberg, Chinese tax authorities have formed special squads to hunt down the wealthy; sometimes an entire team is assigned to target a single individual.

Often these tax bills are not even based on the law, or any sensible calculation of taxable income. Instead it’s just demands and extortion: give us money, otherwise we’ll confiscate your assets and send you to a reeducation camp.

All of this is prompting wealthy Chinese to hit the exits, or at least prepare their Plan B’s.

China certainly does have some shiny bright spots. But they’re vastly outweighed by an authoritarian government of central planners.

America’s government is also weighed down by debt and bureaucracy, and some American politicians are already proposing similar ideas: wealth taxes, plus exit taxes on anyone who gives up their citizenship to escape them.

The difference is that America’s problems can still be fixed with some rational thinking. China needs a time machine. Nobody can go back and reverse the one-child policy or undo decades of communism or vote the Communist Party out of office.

But hoping the politicians come to their senses is not a plan, and that’s exactly why it makes sense to have a Plan B.

P.S. The Chinese families rushing for foreign passports now are doing it in a hurry, with a tax bill already on the table.

Schiff Sovereign’s flagship research service, Plan B Confidential, covers second residencies and citizenships, foreign banking, and legal tax strategies, with boots-on-the-ground reports from all over the world, so you can put the pieces in place before you’re scrambling.

Click here to learn more.

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Eight years ago in the summer of 2018, an automated monitoring system at the US government’s Social Security Agency flagged a questionable transaction and immediately forwarded it to a human worker at the agency to investigate.

It took more than a year for a Social Security employee to look into it. And it was painfully obvious— Social Security was paying too much ‘supplemental security income’ to the recipient.

In fact, the guy receiving the benefits check every month was legally obligated to report this overpayment… but he did not.

The Social Security employee then contacted the recipient to question him. No response. The employee tried a second time. No response.

Then, in the words of Social Security’s inspector general, “the employee took no further action.”

The government worker just shrugged and closed the case. There was no attempt to recoup the overpaid money. The recipient continued to be overpaid. No follow-up.

Today, eight years after the waste was discovered, literally nothing has happened to correct the mistake.

And that’s just one case.

It comes from a report that the inspector general just released, in which he audited 100 random transactions that had been flagged by the same automated monitoring system.

Every single one of the 100 flagged transactions were all similar instances of waste or outright fraud.

Yet out of the 100 flagged transactions, Social Security employees simply ignored 63 of them. 17 were marked ‘complete’ when they were not complete. Only 20 out of the 100 were actually handled properly.

That means that Social Security failed to fix fraudulent and/or wasteful overpayments 80% of the time.

Bear in mind that, in total, the automated monitoring system has flagged over 400,000 cases of potential waste and fraud. At a similar 80% failure rate, that’s potentially billions of dollars that taxpayers are flushing down the drain.

And that’s only for Supplemental Security Income; it doesn’t count fraud and waste from the actual Social Security retirement checks. Or Medicare. Or Medicaid. Or anything else for that matter.

Everyone knows about the rampant fraud at Minnesota’s infamous ‘Learning Centers’. And fraud like that requires courageous people to put their safety at risk to document the fraud.

In this case, Social Security’s own internal system flags nearly EVERY SINGLE CASE of fraud and waste. And yet the agency still did nothing 80% of the time.

So taxpayers are essentially footing the bill TWICE— once for the overpayment, and then more money to pay lazy workers who do nothing about it.

Social Security is hardly alone. Earlier this year, Vice President JD Vance said his anti-fraud task force had found 186,000 dead people collecting food stamps.

In January, the FCC’s inspector general found phone companies billing Lifeline, the federal program that pays for low-income phone service, for 94,000 dead customers in California.

And by the government’s own accounting, improper payments— money sent to the wrong person, in the wrong amount, or for the wrong reason— come to about $3 trillion since 2003.

None of this is secret. Yet nothing ever changes.

When the inspector general asked why Social Security employees didn’t work the alerts, he said the agency bureaucrats “could not provide an explanation.”

I’d say the explanation is pretty obvious. They’re either in on it, or they don’t care. Either way it should be grounds for termination.

Unfortunately it’s impossible to fire anyone who works for the federal government.

Remember when the executive branch tried mass layoffs across more than a dozen agencies last year? 20 state attorneys general sued. Judges issued injunctions. And the job cuts were tied up in court for months, with taxpayers footing the legal bills.

A private company full of workers being paid to do nothing would quickly go bankrupt. The federal government just piles on more debt to cover it, and then pretends the exploding debt is consequence-free.

Well, the bond market disagrees.

The 10-year Treasury yield has skyrocketed past 5.25%, its highest level in decades. And one of the reasons is that bond investors are tired of lending to a government that operates like this.

We’re supposed to believe that ‘democracy’ will deliver us from this, that voters will hold politicians accountable and elect a Congress that will cut the deficit. I’m not holding my breath.

Given the astonishing rise in yields, it looks like the bond market is going to hold Congress accountable. As yields continue to rise, borrowing will eventually become so expensive that Congress will be forced to cut spending.

Maybe that happens when government bond yields hit 6%. Maybe 8%. Maybe 10%. Nobody knows for sure. But there is an interest rate that will be so high, Congress will be forced to take action and cut spending.

When those cuts do finally come, they’ll be far more painful than what it would take to fix this now.

Seriously, cutting the deficit today should be simple: fire the people who ignore the alerts. Stop the fraud the government already knows about. It should be pretty easy.

But at the moment, no one seems interested in any meaningful cuts… which means the bond market will keep pushing yields up.

In finance, whenever bond investors get tired of loaning money to governments and push yields higher, they’re known as ‘vigilantes’. In this case, vigilante justice for Congress can’t come fast enough.

P.S. When the bond market finally forces the issue, spending cuts will only be part of the answer.

A government that can’t borrow cheaply prints the difference, and that inflation comes straight out of your paycheck and your retirement account.

That’s what a Plan B is for. Our flagship service, Plan B Confidential, is built for exactly this.

It covers everything from real assets that hold their value when the dollar doesn’t, to foreign residency and second citizenships, offshore banking, and legal ways to cut your tax bill, all backed by boots-on-the-ground research from countries around the world. You can learn more about it here.

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Earlier this year, Paramount agreed to buy Warner Bros. for $110 billion.

As with any merger that size, the US Justice Department reviewed it to make sure it wouldn’t hurt competition or consumers. Federal regulators approved the deal a few months later, and that should have been the final hurdle.

But not in the State of California.

California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta decided to insert himself into the transaction, arguing that the merger would mean higher prices and fewer movies in theaters. Bonta is a lawyer and career politician… but apparently he has some special knowledge about the film industry that no one else possesses.

And so, by July of this year, Bonta had decided that out of all the other problems on his desk— massive violent crime, fentanyl deaths, uncontrolled fraud— the one issue that needed his attention the most was a movie studio merger.

Paramount asked Bonta what it would take to make him happy. The company offered a binding commitment to release 30 films per year in theaters, and to keep both of its Los Angeles studio lots open. Bonta wouldn’t even engage in negotiations.

Instead he sued Paramount to block the deal. “There is no debate here,” he said.

Asked about reports that Paramount might leave California over the fight, he called it “a desperate last-ditch effort to try to blackmail my office.”

A week later, a judge froze the merger.

But the real risk his lawsuit created was for Californians. Paramount is the last major studio still headquartered in Hollywood, and Bonta was giving it every reason to take its headquarters, its jobs, and its taxes to another state.

And that’s what Paramount started to do: move.

State officials in Tennessee wrote to Paramount CEO David Ellison and invited the company to move there. Paramount’s board signed off on a relocation plan, with the headquarters going first.

They event started shopping for 400,000 square feet of office space in Nashville.

It was literally a Plan B for Paramount. And they worked swiftly to build it.

Ellison then set October 1 as the deadline for a settlement; either California would negotiate, or Ellison would leave the state.

So at that point they had both their Plan B (a relocation to Tennessee) AND a clear red line under which circumstances they would execute it (no settlement by October 1).

This is really a great example for how to think about a Plan B: Paramount decided in advance that they would leave California if the state rejected their Warner Bros. acquisition. The company knew exactly where it would go, and identified the specific instance that would set the whole plan in motion.

Attorney General Bonta called it “blackmail”. But he’s an idiot who has never run a private company in his life. Honestly, he’s such a moron that he thinks he can freeze a perfectly legal and valid deal, sue a company, insult the executives… and still expect them to remain in the state.

Eventually Governor Gavin Newsom had to step in… a moron in his own right, but smart enough to realize that Paramount was actually going to leave. Newsom also realized that Bonta would almost certainly lose the lawsuit and come away with nothing.

So the governor pushed his own attorney general aside and worked behind the scenes to get a deal done.

Last week, with Paramount’s deadline just days away, California finally settled. Paramount now expects to close the merger within weeks.

And what did Bonta get for all of the trouble he caused?

Paramount agreed to spend an extra $1.5 billion on US production over five years. That’s $300 million a year, a big fat 1% on top of the roughly $30 billion a year it already spends on content.

It also agreed to keep both studio lots open and release the same 30 films a year it offered before he sued. So essentially no real additional benefit.

Bonta tied up months of time in federal court, all on state taxpayers’ dime, haggling over how many movies Hollywood should release each year. They ended up with essentially the deal Paramount offered before the lawsuit, plus 1% additional spending on movies.

It’s genius.

But Paramount was in the driver’s seat because the CEO had a Plan B. He could see the writing on the wall and recognized that he needed another option if things continued to get worse  in California.

It’s a great way to think about risks and having a Plan B, and the thinking doesn’t change with size: decide in advance where your red lines are, and put the pieces in place while things are calm.

This includes options like having a second residency already lined up or legally approved (just like Paramount’s proposed move to Tennessee). That second residency might be out of state, or even out of the country.

Other options include having some assets outside of your home jurisdiction— like a foreign bank account, or even precious metals stored abroad.

This way, if your red lines get crossed, you’ll already know exactly what to do, and be able to execute with ease.

P.S. Understanding and executing on your options is exactly what our Plan B Confidential service is for. Every month it covers second residencies and citizenships, foreign banking, and legal tax strategies, with boots-on-the-ground reports from more than 120 countries and a Rolodex of vetted service providers for when you decide to act.

Click here to learn more.

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Every September, world leaders take turns at the podium of the United Nations General Assembly in New York and give pointless speeches.

If they really cared about CO2 emissions, they’d skip the event entirely, because the only thing coming out of their mouths is lies and hot air.

But a few days ago when it was Argentina’s turn, President Javier Milei spoke honestly and boldly.

He told the auditorium the UN “has become a useless organization whose only purpose is to sustain a caste of fatally arrogant parasites masquerading as well-intentioned bureaucrats.”

He then piled on a heap of charges to prove his point.

Milei said the UN “allowed chaos, violence and international terrorism to flourish,” and that it had “sheltered bloodthirsty dictatorships and regimes that stone women in the streets.”

Of course, this type of hypocrisy is nothing new for the UN.

We’re talking about a body that has appointed China, Cuba, and Venezuela to their Human Rights Council.

Then Milei turned to the pandemic. He said UN agencies pushed lockdowns that were “a global experiment in social control disguised as science,” which he said is why Argentina quit the World Health Organization.

“There’s no shortage of words or resolutions. What is lacking is consequences.”

He’s right, and the proof is the people in that very room who run  the place.

The United Nations, along with other ‘supranational’ bodies like the EU and NATO, has become a sort of retirement home for failed politicians who destroyed their own countries with terrible ideas and worse execution.

In June 2024, after running his country into the ground, Belgian prime minister Alexander De Croo came out of a national election with barely 5% of the vote.

He resigned that night and left behind a deficit so large that the EU opened disciplinary proceedings against Belgium.

Yet while Belgian voters threw him out for being incompetent, the United Nations made de Croo the head of its its development agency (UNDP) with a $5 billion annual budget to advise poor countries on how to manage their finances.

It’s the same job the UN gave to former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark in 2009, a few months after voters threw her out.

Then theres António Guterres, former Portuguese prime minister who was thrown out of elected office by the voters. The UN then elevated Guterres to the unelected office of running its refugee agency. And he later became Secretary General in 2017.

Speaking of former Portuguese politicians, António Costa resigned as prime minister of Portugal in November 2023, hours after police arrested his chief of staff in a corruption investigation.

Police found more than €75,000 in cash inside the prime minister’s official residence, stuffed in envelopes hidden between books and in champagne crates.

Prosecutors put Costa himself under investigation, after which EU leaders decided he was fit to be President of the European Council, the group of the EU’s 27 national leaders that sets the bloc’s direction.

Former British prime minister Gordon Brown was thrown out of office by his voters in 2010. The UN subsequently invented a brand-new title for him: “Special Envoy for Global Education.”

And another ex-prime minister who was ousted from office, the ridiculously unpopular and failed Keir Starmer, is reportedly waiting in the wings for his fancy (and unelected) EU/UN post. Rumor has it that he wants to be the next secretary general of NATO… or even of the UN.

This is the pattern that Argentina’s president has correctly identified: incompetent politicians who couldn’t manage their own countries are often put in charge of global organizations.

Unsurprisingly, the UN’s track record looks exactly like you’d expect.

Last year the world had more armed conflicts than in any year since it was founded in 1945; ironically, the UN was founded “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” Great work!

The UN passed nine rounds of sanctions to stop North Korea’s nuclear program. North Korea carried out six nuclear tests anyway.

UN peacekeepers have spent 20 years trying to keep Hezbollah’s weapons out of southern Lebanon. Hezbollah armed itself anyway.

In 2015, it promised to end extreme poverty by 2030. Poverty is still everywhere.

The UN is also a gigantic financial failure. All of these ex-politicians rake in pretty serious salaries, in addition to massive benefits ranging from security details to tax-free earnings. It literally pays to be a failed politician.

Partly as a result of such lavish spending, the UN is now in serious financial straits…

In January, the UN’s secretary-general even warned of the organization’s “imminent financial collapse” and “race to bankruptcy”.

The same guys who want to tell developing nations how to manage their finances can’t manage to stay afloat themselves.

The biggest irony is that these are the same politicians that their respective democratic nations already threw out. Yet now they’ve all been elevated to jobs where they can’t be fired, don’t answer to voters, and were never elected by anyone.

Milei was right: what is lacking is consequences.

The only real consequence the UN may ever face is bankruptcy… and that can’t come fast enough.

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