The Final Act in a Terrible Play

If you don’t follow me on Twitter, you’ve been missing out on some good stuff. With the brith of our third child a couple of months ago, it’s been increasingly hard for me to find the time to sit down and write longer posts, so I’ve been putting more and more content on Twitter. Last Friday, Brent Johnson of Santiago Capital, asked me to provide additional thoughts on my recent turn to being far more bullish gold. Normally I would’ve written it in a piece, but being pressed for time I put together a Twitter thread.

There are 32 posts in there and I suggest you read the whole thing. More important than the thread itself; however, was the unprecedented and totally surprising response I received. As I explain in the tweets, I intentionally avoided talking about markets for nearly half a decade for a variety of reasons, and so I was blindsided by the enthusiastic and exceptionally positive response. It led me to do quite a bit of soul-searching, and ultimately convinced me that the time is ripe for me to start commenting about financial markets again. Not only because I think we’re at or very close to a major inflection point, but because people want to hear it.

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Donald Trump Finally Comes Out of the Closet

The firing of Steve Bannon is in my opinion the most significant event to happen during the Trump administration thus far. Moreover, it will have massive reverberations across the U.S. political spectrum for years and years to come. I wasn’t planning on writing today, but this news is so incredibly significant I find myself with little choice.

Taking a step back, part of the reason I was immediately able to see through the Trump con was due to my upbringing in New York City. The guy was constantly in the news my entire life, so I had a pretty decent understanding of where he was really coming from and what makes him tick. The mindset of your typical NYC-based billionaire real estate developer is filled with all sorts of perspectives and priorities, but thoughts of populism are not amongst them.

Trump used populism to get elected, and then as soon as he won, immediately appointed some of the most destructive oligarchs imaginable to run his administration. The reason I warned about this incessantly at the time, is because I learned the lesson from the Obama administration. People = policy, and the people Trump was elevating were almost unanimously awful. Irrespective of what you think of Bannon, him being out means Wall Street and the military-industrial complex is now 100% in control of the Trump administration. Prepare for an escalation of imperial war around the world and an expansion of brutal oligarchy.

The removal of Bannon is the end of even a facade of populism. This is now the Goldman Sachs Presidency with a thin-skinned, unthinking authoritarian as a figurehead. Meanwhile, guess who’s still there in addition to the Goldman executives? Weed obsessed, civil asset forfeiture supporting Jefferson Sessions. The Trump administration just bacame ten times more dangerous than it was before. With the coup successful, Trump no longer needs to be impeached.

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