Handre

Economic Historian. Storyteller. Free-market Pamphleteer.

[Handre @Handre]

https://t.co/1ijgCINfNo

[Handre @Handre]

A great take from one of the most honest gold investors out there.

Ronnie is a great follow for anyone interested in gold, mining, and macro.

[Ronnie Stoeferle @RonStoeferle]

Our IGWT Active Aurum signal is on defensive, and the tape agrees. My gut: gold below 4,000, silver below 50 very soon... plenty of turmoil in macro, too. In Viennese: “Es crasherlt a bisserl” (it’s crashing, just a little). But the night is always darkest just before the dawn.

[Ronnie Stoeferle @RonStoeferle]

1/
Some loose thoughts on the current macro setup and what it means for #gold 🧵

Gold is under real pressure. Silver and the miners are underperforming and show no signs of strength yet.

My take: we’ll see a capitulation low over the next few days.

[Handre @Handre]

My one friend told me that at the investment fund he works at, they read The Economist for research and macro🤣🤣🤣

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

The Economist has been anti-human for the past few decades. It is no longer worthy of respect.

[Handre @Handre]

Which way, modern nation-state?

The evidence is clear: reduce production costs and risk, and people produce more. Cause and effect work as reliably as gravity, not ideology.

From 1960 to 1997, Hong Kong ran a flat tax below 15 percent, minimal licensing, and near-zero tariffs. A fishing village became one of the wealthiest places per capita on earth. John Cowperthwaite, the Financial Secretary who refused to even collect GDP statistics because he feared politicians would use the data to justify intervention, drove that transformation through deliberate restraint. The government stepped back. Wealth flooded in.

Compare that to Argentina. In 1930, Argentina ranked among the ten wealthiest nations globally. Over the following decades, its government imposed price controls, nationalized industries, taxed exports, and printed currency to cover deficits. By 2001 the country defaulted on $132 billion in debt. Real wages collapsed. The government did not run out of bad ideas; it ran out of other people's money.

Ireland cut its corporate tax rate to 12.5 percent in 2003. Foreign direct investment poured in. GDP per capita grew faster than any other EU member through the mid-2000s. Critics called it a race to the bottom. The Irish called it employment.

Between 1984 and 1991, New Zealand slashed tariffs, privatized state enterprises, deregulated financial markets, and abolished agricultural subsidies that had consumed 40 percent of farm income. The short-term pain was real. The long-term result was a competitive, diversified economy that no longer required permanent government life support.

France ran the opposite experiment. Its 75 percent top income tax rate, introduced in 2013, lasted two years before even the socialist government that passed it admitted the revenue projections were fiction. Capital left. Gerard Depardieu took Russian citizenship. The tax raised less than 200 million euros against projections of 500 million, then disappeared quietly in 2015.

Capital moves toward places that respect contracts, maintain sound money, and leave producers enough margin to reinvest. Every country that built sustained prosperity did so by making production cheaper and safer. Every country that destroyed prosperity did so by making production more expensive and more uncertain.

The pattern repeats across centuries and continents because it reflects how humans actually respond to incentives, not how politicians wish they would.

[Handre @Handre]

My point is more about how laptops and phones will evolve and what the market will demand going forward. No doubt there will be privacy minded people who want to run “their own” LLM models, but those people are 0.1% or maybe even 0.01% of the population. Apple and Samsung wont be producing phones for them.

I needed a beast of a computer to render 3d triangles for me in 2013, now I dont even need a computer, I can do it from my iphone 13, but the actual rendering gets done in a data centre.

[Handre @Handre]

FYI to anyone who hasn't realized this yet: AI plus data centers means all storage and data processing happen off-site.

Five years from now, your phone, laptop, and PC will be a screen with a battery attached.

Don't overinvest in something that will soon be obsolete.

[Handre @Handre]

@BitcoinPilotGuy @mises Boom!

[Handre @Handre]

Why does everything a government touches turn to shit?

Every tax, regulation, and price control produces an economic consequence its architects either ignore or actively conceal from you.

Murray Rothbard's Power and Market, published in 1970, tears apart the intellectual cover governments use to justify intervention. Rothbard builds the case like this: no form of state interference improves on the voluntary exchange economy. Every intervention distorts prices, misallocates capital, and ultimately harms the very people the policy claimed to protect.

Take price ceilings. New York City imposed rent control in 1943 as a wartime emergency. Eight decades later, landlords still face legal caps on rents, and the city faces a perpetual housing shortage. Capping prices below market rates destroys the incentive to supply. Investors channel capital elsewhere, housing stock deteriorates, and you pay more for less under the table through bribes, key fees, and "finder's fees" to brokers.

Rothbard also categorizes interventions. Autistic intervention forces you to act or refrain without directly involving your property in exchange. Binary intervention forces an exchange between the state and a private party. Triangular intervention forces exchange between two private parties on state-dictated terms. The specificity matters because each category produces distinct distortions, and grouping them all as "regulation" lets politicians dodge accountability for the specific damage each one causes.

Then there is the calculation issue. Governments do not possess the price signals needed to allocate resources correctly. Mises already proved this in 1920, and Rothbard extends the argument: intervention actively destroys the information system that makes optimization possible in the first place.

Free market thinkers after Rothbard have added data, case studies, and formalized models. None have overturned the logic. Governments intervene, prices lie, and you bear the cost.

[Handre @Handre]

@porterstansb Ok, let's see!

[Handre @Handre]

@KeyboardChuck Good luck with that! Not even 0.1% of the population will do it.

[Handre @Handre]

Which way, modern nation-state?

The evidence is clear: reduce production costs and risk, and people produce more. Cause and effect work as reliably as gravity, not ideology.

From 1960 to 1997, Hong Kong ran a flat tax below 15 percent, minimal licensing, and near-zero tariffs. A fishing village became one of the wealthiest places per capita on earth. John Cowperthwaite, the Financial Secretary who refused to even collect GDP statistics because he feared politicians would use the data to justify intervention, drove that transformation through deliberate restraint. The government stepped back. Wealth flooded in.

Compare that to Argentina. In 1930, Argentina ranked among the ten wealthiest nations globally. Over the following decades, its government imposed price controls, nationalized industries, taxed exports, and printed currency to cover deficits. By 2001 the country defaulted on $132 billion in debt. Real wages collapsed. The government did not run out of bad ideas; it ran out of other people's money.

Ireland cut its corporate tax rate to 12.5 percent in 2003. Foreign direct investment poured in. GDP per capita grew faster than any other EU member through the mid-2000s. Critics called it a race to the bottom. The Irish called it employment.

Between 1984 and 1991, New Zealand slashed tariffs, privatized state enterprises, deregulated financial markets, and abolished agricultural subsidies that had consumed 40 percent of farm income. The short-term pain was real. The long-term result was a competitive, diversified economy that no longer required permanent government life support.

France ran the opposite experiment. Its 75 percent top income tax rate, introduced in 2013, lasted two years before even the socialist government that passed it admitted the revenue projections were fiction. Capital left. Gerard Depardieu took Russian citizenship. The tax raised less than 200 million euros against projections of 500 million, then disappeared quietly in 2015.

Capital moves toward places that respect contracts, maintain sound money, and leave producers enough margin to reinvest. Every country that built sustained prosperity did so by making production cheaper and safer. Every country that destroyed prosperity did so by making production more expensive and more uncertain.

The pattern repeats across centuries and continents because it reflects how humans actually respond to incentives, not how politicians wish they would.

[Handre @Handre]

Whenever a ceiling is placed on government spending, bureaucrats treat that number as a target rather than an arbitrary maximum, and the effect is usually the opposite of the intended one.

Intervention attempting to stop further intervention causes more intervention.

[Handre @Handre]

@RonStoeferle Such an awesome guest!

[Handre @Handre]

Keeping Starlink out of rural people's hands is vital to the ANC's survival. They need their voters/victims as poor and dumb as possible.

If Elon backs down from this proposal, it would actually help the process of getting Starlink into South Africa.

Feel free to contact me for more advice, @Starlink

[The Common Sense @CommonSense_ZA]

US Ambassador Leo Brent Bozell III says that, as he understands it, Elon Musk offered to put Starlink free in 500 South African schools and pay for it in perpetuity. He says the government instead asked for 30% of the company, and calls that demand preposterous. Full episode available on our YouTube channel.
#SouthAfrica #Starlink #ElonMusk #Schools #Government

[Handre @Handre]

@ConCaracal @RubyGold ANC apologists don't do introspection.

[Handre @Handre]

@Jonathan_Witt My dad told me he asked the Doctor who was head of faculty where my mom studied music what he did his doctor's thesis on, and he said it was about music used in children's television programs in the 1980’s🤣

[Handre @Handre]

@GadharSean Would be great to get that tested.

[Handre @Handre]

Things your economy can get away with:

✅ An imbecile as a president.
✅ Government shutdowns.
✅ Cutting government spending by 80%.

Things that will kill your economy within a decade:

❌ Open borders + Welfare
❌ Overtaxing productive citizens while subsidizing the unproductive.
❌ Price controls
❌ Bureaucratic overreach.

[Handre @Handre]

It is not virtuous to give away money if that money is not yours.

[Handre @Handre]

@CarlosDelicto Efficient capital allocators. At the very least, better than the government.