Mark J. Valek

The current monetary system is not sustainable.

#Bitcoin #AustrianEcon

[Mark J. Valek @MarkValek]

A new era of monetary rivalry unfolding?

As the East is doubling down on #gold to challenge the US dollar's supremacy, the West is considering to embrace #Bitcoin as a strategy to secure monetary dominance...

[Mark J. Valek @MarkValek]

The East could use #Gold to check the West.

The West could use #Bitcoin to checkmate the East.

[derHelper🥕🐇 @derHelper]

Ich: „Ich möchte 10.000 Euro abheben.“
Bank: „Wofür brauchen Sie das Geld?“

Ich: „Es ist mein Geld.“
Bank: „Rechtlich gesehen ist es ein Darlehen an uns.“

Ich: „Dann möchte ich mein Darlehen zurück.“
Bank: „Gerne. Bitte drei Tage vorher anmelden.“

Ich: „Drei Tage? Für mein eigenes Geld?“
Bank: „So viel Bargeld haben wir nicht in der Filiale.“

Drei Tage später.

Bank: „Hier sind Ihre 10.000 Euro. Wofür brauchen Sie die?“
Ich: „Für ein Auto.“

Bank: „Warum überweisen Sie nicht einfach?“
Ich: „Weil ich bar bezahlen will.“

Bank: „Das wirkt verdächtig.“

Eine Woche später. Der Kauf ist geplatzt.

Ich: „Ich möchte die 10.000 Euro wieder einzahlen.“
Bank: „Woher stammt das Geld?“

Ich: „Von Ihnen.“
Bank: „Dafür brauchen wir einen Herkunftsnachweis.“

Ich: „Sie haben es mir vor einer Woche gegeben.“
Bank: „Das können wir nicht nachvollziehen.“

Ich: „Und wenn ich es einfach zu Hause behalte?“
Bank: „Dann verliert es jedes Jahr an Wert.“

Ich: „Und auf dem Konto?“
Bank: „Auch. Aber dort sehen wir es wenigstens.“

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Atomic veterans describe what nukes feel like

[sparbuchfeinde @sparbuchfeinde]

Der Staat nimmt mehr als 1.000 Milliarden Euro neue Schulden auf.

Uli Hoeneß: „Eines ist sicher, die ganze Inflation hat nur mit dem Öl zu tun.“

ARD-Börsenexpertin Anja Kohl nickt zustimmend.

Brilliante Analyse im ÖRR. https://t.co/tdlsfuKiP0

[Thierry from arvy 🇨🇭 @ThierryBorgeat]

🚨 Everyone is watching the wrong bubble.

And missing the greatest opportunity in 40 years because of it.

While the crowd argues about AI and crypto, the real story is the asset sitting in every "safe" portfolio on earth.

Bonds.

The 1981 top printed 14% yields. The 2020 bottom printed 0%. That was 39 years of falling rates, and it ended in a single Covid panic.

Covid was the turn. Rates hit zero, the system flooded itself with liquidity, and the 40-year bull in bonds quietly ended in the very moment everyone felt rescued.

That's reflexivity in the Soros sense. For four decades, falling yields lifted every asset, which convinced everyone yields would keep falling, which lifted assets again. Belief and reality reinforced each other all the way down to zero. Then the loop turned. And here's the part almost no one has grasped: a turn this big isn't the end of the game. It's the start of a far better one.

Here's why I'm genuinely excited.

For 40 years, falling rates lifted everything together. Correlations converged. The tide carried every boat, so owning the whole ocean beat knowing which boat was seaworthy. Index beat judgment. Skill was a rounding error.

That era is over, and what replaces it is the best environment for active investing in two generations.

When the secular tide reverses, dispersion comes roaring back. Winners and losers split apart violently. Suddenly the things that were invisible for 40 years, valuation, balance-sheet quality, real cash flow, pricing power, decide everything. The gap between the great business and the mediocre one stops being a footnote and becomes the whole return.

This is the world that made Buffett, Lynch, and Templeton. It's the world before 1981, where picking actually paid. It's coming back.

And it arrives at the most lopsided starting line imaginable, which is exactly what makes the opportunity so rich.

Concentration at a record. A handful of names carrying the entire index. Record IPOs listing at peak valuations and getting forced straight into peak index weights through mechanical, price-insensitive buying. The passive bid that everyone treats as ballast has become the marginal price-setter at the worst possible altitude.

JPMorgan's own Guide to the Markets makes the setup clear. Map starting valuation against subsequent ten-year returns, and today's level points to roughly zero percent per year from the S&P over the coming decade.

Sit with that. Zero from the broad index for ten years.

Now flip it over. If the average is zero, the spread around that average is enormous. Some things compound beautifully. Others go nowhere or worse. A flat index for a decade isn't a dead market. It's the richest hunting ground for active investors in living memory, because the distance between right and wrong has never paid more.

The whole architecture of modern investing was engineered for the era that just ended.

- Buy stocks and chill. Built on a discount rate going one direction. Down.
- The 60/40. Built on bonds rallying whenever equities fell.
- Just buy the ETF. Built on a 40-year tailwind no one managing money today has ever seen reverse.

That's the trap. And the mirror image of every trap is an opening for the people who see it first.

Strauss and Howe gave this moment a name. The Fourth Turning. The last of the four cycles, the Crisis, when the institutions built for the old era meet the conditions of the new one. These turns feel like danger to everyone clinging to the last playbook. They are the launchpad for everyone holding the next one.

The tide is turning. The old map is worthless.

And the greatest opportunity of our generation is hiding in plain sight, inside the thing everyone still calls safe.

[Mark J. Valek @MarkValek]

@_itzsammy Billionaires exist, because we have an unbacked monetary system.
No Bitcoin Billionaire will ever exist.

[Joe Li₿ertarian @JoeLibertarian1]

This is a great quote.

[Lawrence Lepard, "fix the money, fix the world" @LawrenceLepard]

Super fun conversation with Nathan and Mark. Today’s action suggests we could be entering another correlation of 1 event. There is a reason why Warsh continues to remind people that his views apply to “normal circumstances” and not emergencies. He sees the incoming emergency and wants to cover his ass. The Fed put lives and a stock swoon will certainly hit the strike price. His Volcker act will evaporate and Von Havenstein will emerge. Aka, The Big Print

[BTC Sessions 😎 @BTCsessions]

Having fun yet?

S&P is currently at 7,377, and @LawrenceLepard named 7,300 as the level to watch.

He and @MarkValek lay out what they expect next: stocks rolling over, the Fed forced to print, and why they think gold and Bitcoin are near the bottom.

Full episode below.

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

Tonight’s outcome isn’t about placing faith in Democrats or socialist principles; it’s about holding Republicans accountable for betraying their promises.

All Republicans had to do was:

1. put Americans First
2. not start another war
3. prosecute sex traffickers

[Ronnie Stoeferle @RonStoeferle]

Gold below $3,900, silver below $50, and gold’s worst October since 2008.

Ugly tape, but look under the hood:

• Managed money net long in silver: 3,321 contracts (42,756 in July ‘25)
• Only 10% of miners above their 200-DMA
• Miners’ debt: 8% of assets

The speculators left. The metal didn’t, it moved east. 👇
https://t.co/YrYrHoebOn

[Titus Gebel @titusgebel]

Ludwig von Mises is probably the best economist / philosopher of the German speaking world. However, precisely because he destroyed the leftist illusions, he was never popular. In today’s Germany, there are exactly zero public streets and places named after him. For comparison, 391 are named after Karl Marx.

[Mark J. Valek @MarkValek]

@si_magazin 8,5/10 klingt durchaus hawkisch.

Stellt sich die Frage, wer wäre denn hypothetisch eine 10/10? Paul Volcker, Helmut Schlesinger oder Ludwig von Mises? In allen Fällen würde mM die relative Bewertung von Knot DEUTLICH niedriger ausfallen.

[Handre @Handre]

Scottish gambler John Law was born in Edinburgh in 1671, the son of a goldsmith banker. His father died when he was a boy, and Law grew up to trade his inheritance for the card tables of London.

In 1694, he killed a man named Edward Wilson in a duel, received a death sentence, and broke out of prison to flee to the Continent. He spent the next two decades gambling across Europe and studying banks.

Scotland rejected his plan to fund the country with paper money. France said yes. Louis XIV died in 1715 and left the crown buried in debt, and in 1716 the Regent, Philippe d'Orléans, let Law open a bank that issued notes.

Law then folded Louisiana trade, tax collection, and the royal mint into the Mississippi Company and sold shares on promises of colonial riches that nobody had found. To keep buyers coming, the bank printed notes. Shares climbed from about 500 livres in 1719 to about 10,000 by early 1720, and the word "millionaire" entered the language.

Then the state enforced the fiction. After converting to Catholicism, Law became Controller General of Finances, banned most payments in gold and silver, and made it a crime to hold coin above a small sum. Citizens who wanted out of paper lost the right to leave. When holders rushed to cash in, the bank had printed far more notes than it held in coin.

In May 1720, the government decreed a cut in the value of notes and shares, panic forced a reversal within a week, and crowds fought in the rue Quincampoix. Law lost his post that spring and fled France in December. He died broke in Venice in 1729.

The recipe never changes: print to fund the favored project, lock the exits, and punish anyone who tries to leave with their savings.

[Handre @Handre]

In 1961, eight central banks agreed to suppress the gold price, and markets spent seven years proving that governments cannot repeal scarcity.

The London Gold Pool launched in 1961, assembling the United States, Britain, West Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland into a coordinated intervention scheme. The goal was simple: keep gold trading at $35 per ounce, the price fixed by Bretton Woods since 1944. The mechanism was also simple: When private demand pushed gold above $35, the Pool sold from member reserves into the London market to crush the price back down.

This worked while the dollar retained credibility and stopped working when it didn't.

The United States ran growing budget deficits through the 1960s, financing both the Great Society and Vietnam simultaneously. Dollars flooded Europe. Foreign governments and private traders converted those dollars into gold at $35, understanding that the dollar supply was expanding faster than Fort Knox's gold supply. France, under de Gaulle, became particularly aggressive about redemptions, shipping dollars back to Washington and demanding bullion in return. He called dollar hegemony an "exorbitant privilege," and he was correct.

By 1967, the Pool was hemorrhaging reserves. The British pound devalued in November, triggering a speculative panic. In March 1968 alone, speculators demanded 1,000 tonnes of gold. The Pool collapsed on March 17, 1968. Members suspended operations over a frantic weekend and introduced a two-tier system: official transactions at $35, private markets free to find their own level.

You know where this ends. Nixon closed the gold window entirely on August 15, 1971, defaulting on America's international obligations and unleashing the inflationary decade that followed. The London Gold Pool was seven years of governments lying about how much money they had printed, enforced by selling other people's gold until the vault ran dry.

[Daniela Cambone-Taub @DanielaCambone]

In Gold We Trust

[Quinten @QuintenFrancois]

2017:
Jamie Dimon - “I’ll fire any employee who touches crypto”

2026:
JP Morgan adds Bitcoin to their Long-Term Capital Markets Assumptions paper and predict it will be the best-performing asset of the next decade.

[*Walter Bloomberg @DeItaone]

GOLDMAN SACHS ON GOLD: ESTIMATES CENTRAL BANK PURCHASES OF 79 TONNES IN AUGUST, WELL ABOVE THE PRE-2022 AVERAGE OF 17 TONNES

[Paul Brandenburg @docbrandenburg]

Einer der mutmaßlichen ukrainischen "Nordstream 2" Attentäter wird in Deutschland NICHT angeklagt, weil die Ukraine ihm "keine Aussagegenehmigung" erteilt.

Deutschlands „Rechtsstaat“ ist eine Verarschung seiner Insassen. Kein Polizist, kein Staatsanwalt, kein Richter sind mit ihrem System nach solchem Hochverrat noch legitim.

[Marie @kripp_m]

….ein CDU-Delegierter auf dem Deutschlandtag der Jungen Union fordert die Entlassung von Friedrich Merz