Gold delivered 9% compounded annual returns since 2000, while silver surged 150% and copper 45% through 2025, but Rule warns 2026 won’t repeat the manic 2025 performance despite remaining favorable for natural resources.
Rule sold 25% of his junior mining portfolio in 2025 to recoup all capital invested since 2020 plus capital gains tax, demonstrating discipline to sell when thesis is met rather than holding greedily as silver juniors rose 400-500% while silver only doubled.
Rule plans to exit silver soon after speculating on the price pop, noting the question shifted from “when” prices increase to “if” they can rise further, with most narrative benefits already captured.
25% of physical silver now trades in Dubai representing a structural demand increase, while China produces 60-65% of world’s refined silver and export controls are disrupting global markets.
Silver lease rates spiked from 3.5-4% to 40% causing severe market disruptions, while industrial demand remains inelastic up to $135/oz due to critical applications in solar, germicides, and water treatment.
US dollar lost 97% purchasing power since 1913, and Rule predicts a further 75% loss in the next decade as governments inflate away debt obligations similar to the 1970s, prompting him to save in gold while maintaining liquidity in dollars.
Copper demand driven by 1 billion people urbanizing without electricity requires addressing 30 years of underinvestment in just 5 years, with new mine costs rising from inflation and regulation creating long-term supply constraints from decades of underinvestment and lengthy permitting.
Coal demand hit record highs in 2025-2026 driven by reliable energy needs in developing countries like India and Madagascar, though best opportunities are in diversified commodity companies rather than pure coal plays.
Indonesian nickel market disrupted by environmental concerns and government action with costs rising 25-30% for responsible mining, causing nickel stocks to shift from no bid to strong bid in the last 30 days.
Exxon offers 2.75% dividend yield trading at 25-30% discount to net present value at $60 oil with production growth from Ghana investments, while Canadian oil producers present undervalued opportunities.
Glencore leads copper sector picks with strong assets but emerging market political risk, while Amarillo offers value as smaller producer with 30+ years of reserves and built mine, and Alphamin exposes investors to Congo’s political risk as rare pure-play tin producer.
Putin’s public threat to place missiles in Cuba and Venezuela, echoing the Cuban missile crisis, triggered serious U.S. actions in Venezuela as a bargaining chip against NATO expansion in Ukraine.
Trump’s strategic interest in Venezuela extends beyond oil to removing the Middle East’s ability to weaponize oil in geopolitics, while China as Venezuela’s top oil customer and lender creates a complex quagmire for U.S. policy.
Rubio installed as Venezuela viceroy aims to shift China’s Venezuelan oil purchases from yuan to USD, though the Venezuelan government may resist this neocon’s approach that complicates U.S.-China relations.
Gold surged from $400 to $875 in six weeks during 1979 after the Russia-Afghanistan invasion, demonstrating how geopolitical tensions drive precious metal prices beyond inflation concerns.
China’s recent ban on silver exports representing 60% of the physical market, combined with fundamental shortage from solar panel demand, is expected to drive silver prices significantly higher in 2026.
The platinum-to-gold ratio hit a 23-year low in mid-2025, with potential supply disruptions from Russia and South Africa positioning platinum for significant price increases.
Armstrong’s computer model projects a panic cycle in 2026 with high volatility in January and April, driven by geopolitical events and potential capital controls on gold and silver.
The copper-to-gold ratio at all-time low reflects shift to AI, data centers, and war, with gold outperforming as geopolitical hedge while copper expected to catch up later.
Sovereign defaults likely in Europe as soon as war starts, materializing when no buyers appear for next debt tranche rather than just from high debt levels alone.
During WWII capital controls, Europeans bought gold miners as alternative to physical gold, boosting mining stocks when direct metal ownership was restricted.
Corruption in Ukraine involves Zelensky’s inner circle stealing and wiring millions to UAE, raising questions about U.S. support for a puppet of NATO and EU with rigged election and low approval.
NATO’s continued existence as Cold War relic relies on promoting narrative of imminent Russian threat to justify its salaries and pensions despite changed geopolitical landscape.
NATO experienced military defeat in Ukraine while US faces economic defeat by China, with next phase of World War III expected to involve aggressive US moves in Central/South America to form a Western Hemisphere sphere of influence including Venezuela, Mexico, and Cuba for energy security.
Middle East produces 80% of global hydrocarbons but consumes only 50%, making Qatar a critical neutral player that US, China, and Europe all need for stability to avoid wider confrontation.
US possesses world’s highest volumes of natural gas, oil, coal, and nuclear reactors, plus potential 10 million barrels per day from southern Western Hemisphere, creating foundation for energy-based geopolitical dominance.
Russia as energy superpower holds vast reserves of uranium, coal, and rare earths, with Ukraine conflict being essentially a civil war in pro-Russian regions, giving Russia significant long-term advantage through energy resources.
Gold is replacing US/European debt as neutral reserve asset for settling international trade imbalances among BRICS countries, requiring significantly higher USD price (consolidating around $4,000 per ounce) to fulfill this role.
Gold to oil ratio serves as leading indicator of significant changes in energy and global trading markets, with behind-the-scenes deals creating positive feedback loop between gold and oil pricing.
Natural gas is ideal grid fuel being both base load and dispatchable with quick response, while nuclear provides steady power at 90%+ capacity factor and is potentially immortal with proper maintenance.
Wind and solar destabilize grids as intermittent, entropic resources requiring dispatchable backup when offline, with battery fantasy unrealistic since batteries need recharging every 4 hours and cannot provide base load power.
Data centers will be powered by off-grid, dedicated natural gas power plants in regions like Western Canada, Permian, Qatar, and Malaysia because existing grids cannot expand quickly enough to meet AI-driven energy demands.
EU consumes 38 exajoules of hydrocarbons but produces only 5, while US produces 20 more exajoules than it consumes, making EU a vassal state to suppliers like Qatar and US when it bans domestic drilling.
EU cannot sustain heavy industries (steel, cars, cement, asphalt) while relying on Qatar and US energy imports, facing populist revolts and political/physical riots without policy reversal.
EU energy turnaround requires restarting Russia energy relationship, legalizing fracking, salvaging German nuclear plants, resuscitating North Sea oil/gas with Norway/UK, reopening Netherlands’ giant gas field, and welcoming external investment.
Questing for knowledge, beauty, or adventure brings purpose, excitement, and joy to life by devoting time to learning, appreciating aesthetics, or seeking new experiences.
To turn life into a quest, choose unique and incomparable values and ideals, structuring life around them while embracing uncertainty and regaining a sense of wonder and curiosity.
Escaping mediocrity through a quest for knowledge involves overcoming obstacles, rising above indignities, and achieving new heights driven by an insatiable desire to learn.
Creating beauty often requires suffering as a fundamental principle, involving the transformation of one’s body or character into art or producing music, poetry, stories, or cinema.
Reactivating aesthetic senses by dedicating daily time to appreciate beauty helps in finding pleasure in the natural world and tuning into the beauty created by individuals.
Living a meaningful life involves valuing the present moment and finding peace of mind through letting go of unhealthy attachments, practicing mindfulness, and living intentionally.
Current market valuations are exceptional even for a fourth turning, with CAPE ratio, Q ratio, market cap to GDP, and price to sales/earnings all at extreme highs, creating a big problem and compounder of trouble that historically precedes major corrections.
Financial crashes in fourth turnings are features, not bugs that help reduce inequality by bringing down asset prices, as demonstrated by the 1929 crash before World War II when the Gini coefficient showed wealth redistribution.
The top 10% account for half of all retail spending, creating a K-shaped economy with unbalanced capital spending where asset price corrections could reduce inequality by allowing younger investors to buy in at better valuations.
AI-generated content reduced click-through rates to original content sites by 50% after Google’s AI summary feature launched, threatening the web economy by taking creators’ work without compensation and potentially filling the internet with AI-generated mush lacking new ideas.
The overbuilding of data centers and compute power for AI may have less long-term value than previous infrastructure booms like railroads and the internet due to rapidly obsolescing hardware that won’t be usable as long.
Neil Howe predicts the fourth turning climax in the 2020s, featuring accelerating inflation and financial repression to redistribute wealth, following patterns from the American Revolution, Civil War, and World War II.
Inflation during fourth turning climaxes wipes the slate clean of nominal claims held by the rich, opening opportunities for the poor and allowing resource redirection to military, defense, and employment during crises.
Financial repression through low interest rates and regulation continues in the 1940s and 50s after the fourth turning climax until the Treasury-Fed accord in 1954, when the Fed gains independence and raises rates.
Fourth turnings involve less consuming and more producing as the economy restructures to address inequality and authority issues, with trust-busting and extreme economic restructuring where the public sets price limits and government takes control of key industries.
Price discrimination and monopoly-like behavior are rampant, with companies charging different prices based on consumer habits, representing another form of monopoly pricing that typically gets addressed during fourth turning restructuring.
China has a timeline to resolve issues in the Western Pacific before Xi Jinping passes from power, while geopolitical conflict with China and Russia are recurring themes in fourth turnings that drive long-term changes in authority and equality.
Civil wars occur when one side fears an outcome may permanently take away their expected future for their class, culture, people, or tribe, requiring immediate action to avoid being forever diminished.
A deadlocked Congress and Supreme Court could kick off a fourth turning crisis, with government coming to a halt as two sides refuse to cooperate, while Capitol Hill and Wall Street become key battlegrounds for America’s future.
Democracies vastly outperform autocracies in wartime due to focus on a single objective and ability to mobilize popular support, while dictators must balance the enemy and their own people.
The breaking of institutions that no longer work, sidelined by Trump, will continue with focus on populism and authoritarianism to get things done, despite concerns about straying from the constitutional republic based on legislative rather than executive focus.
Mental health is strongly correlated with the fourth turning cycle, with renewed sense of purpose and roles potentially reversing the current worsening trend of happiness and general mental health as people unite for greater good.
There’s an inverse correlation between population density and neighbor familiarity, with dense urban areas showing least neighbor knowledge while rural residents know neighbors better as they may need to rely on them during crises.
Regulations impose limits on what, how, when, and by whom production can occur, forcing entrepreneurs away from highest valued opportunities toward lesser value options, creating a cumulative effect where each subsequent innovation builds on these compromised foundations rather than optimal ones.
The real cost of regulations isn’t compliance expenses but the unrealized potential value—the entire world of innovations and wealth that would have existed without restrictions, placing the economy on a lower value trajectory through missed opportunities that compound over time.
Entrepreneurs bear the uncertainty of production by speculating on what, how, when, and who should produce, imagining novel production methods and goods that can benefit consumers more than current options through leaps forward in various directions with mixed success rates.
Promoter entrepreneurs learn from existing successes and failures to create new combinations and reimagine production techniques, aiming to satisfy future consumer wants through what Mises described as the imaginative force driving the market process.
Prosperity measures the ability to satisfy wants by producing valuable goods (not just stuff), requiring continuous reinvestment in the economy’s structure to maintain or increase productive capacity as the true metric of wealth generation.
Even mainstream economists like Swedish social democrat Assar Lindbeck acknowledge regulations are costly and destructive, confirming that prosperity originates from imaginative, risk-taking entrepreneurs rather than redistribution mechanisms.
The Thielverse and PayPal mafia have shaped the bipartisan modern surveillance state, characterized by mass surveillance of American citizens and AI-driven crime prediction.
There’s an extreme distribution of AI throughout the US government, influenced by the Thielverse network connected to Peter Thiel.
SpaceX, a major Space Force contractor, is affiliated with Starlink, which has covert uses including aiding the Ukrainian military and sneaking satellites into Iran.
The “smart wall” on the US-Mexico border uses surveillance and drone technology to intercept unauthorized crossings in both directions.
The US government defines border zones extending deep inland, sometimes called “constitution-free zones”, where surveillance technology can be extensively deployed.
Oracle, a significant military contractor, influenced the Trump administration, coordinating the replacement of HR McMaster with John Bolton as national security adviser.
The Thielverse philosophy, influenced by Curtis Yarvin, advocates for complete privatization of the state and installation of a CEO dictator.
The PayPal mafia, connected to Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, has had a profound impact on US government policy and technology implementation.
Palantir, founded by Peter Thiel, has contracts across various government agencies and is developing autonomous warfare systems.
The vision of Thiel, Musk, and Yarvin is being marketed under different names to gain public consent, including efforts to combat corruption in the national security state.
The Deep State in the UK, including the permanent bureaucracy, civil service, and Bank of England, holds unaccountable power that influences government decision-making, often against elected officials’ policies.
The Bank of England governor exerts independent economic power with significant implications for the public, and is criticized for failures in financial stability, the pensions industry, and inflation management.
Unelected technocrats in the Bank of England, Treasury, and civil service promote a worldview of net zero, mass migration, high tax and high spend, and Keynesian economics, which are not neutral and influence policy decisions.
The technocrats’ worldview is not accountable to the public, yet it drives key policy decisions shaping the UK’s economic and social landscape.
Former Prime Minister Liz Truss suggests that public institutions, such as the Bank of England, may sabotage initiatives that conflict with their vested interests, highlighting an ongoing struggle between elected officials and permanent state structures.
The lack of public accountability for technocrats and institutions like the Office of Budget Responsibility underscores the tension between democratic governance and bureaucratic influence.
US banks flipped from net short to net long positions in precious metals after Thanksgiving 2025 following a COMEX issue, as governments began hiring banks for mercantile banking to secretly accumulate metals through OTC markets, creating a hidden hand of daily buyers that fundamentally decouples physical markets from Fed interest rate policies.
BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) are building physical gold vaults for a new gold settlement layer to challenge Western monetary systems, while the US focuses on securing critical minerals like copper for manufacturing and military infrastructure in what Josh Phair calls an Axis vs. Allies resource control battle.
China implemented export restrictions on critical minerals requiring special licenses and destination monitoring effective January 1, 2026, while the US may counter with silver export curbs via taxes, tariffs, or outright bans as both nations compete for resources essential for AI, drone, and data center wars.
Desperate arbitrage operations saw jets flying silver across the Atlantic as credit lines and trade lines for trading firms and banks became tapped out amid silver prices in the $70s and gold above $4,000, with refineries backed up processing material.
Real-world signals of China’s supply throttling include widening regional premiums, sudden changes in delivery promises, specific product types disappearing, and bid-ask spreads widening during extreme volatility with 10+ minute quote pulls and missed settlements.
The US imports 80% of its silver (mainly refined) while exporting concentrates; tariffs may incentivize exporting more raw material and keeping refining and fabrication domestic, benefiting US refiners and mints as China’s licensing system restricts raw material exports while allowing some finished goods.
December 2025 physical shortages caused retail panic with armed trucking companies unable to move metal easily due to year-end inventory cleanouts and audits, leading to vanishing supplies at retailers as governments accumulate through wholesale channels.
The Phair-Sinclair Ratio, comparing US foreign debt to stated gold holdings, currently sits around 35,000 and predicts gold could reach $35,000/oz by the end of the decade as the West faces critical shortages of strategic minerals and the US government takes on more foreign debt.
AI-generated content is creating synthetic influence campaigns by stealing snippets from various sources and aggregating them without crediting authors, distorting market signals and making it harder to distinguish genuine intelligence from manufactured narratives.
Geopolitical tensions between the US and China are driving long-term changes in silver supply chains, with the US flushing out Chinese influence in Latin America while China hoards resources, positioning strategic metals as the new oil of 2026.
Bid-ask spreads and premiums disconnect from spot prices during extreme volatility periods, with persistent pressure on markets signaling potential breakdowns as physical demand from government buyers overwhelms traditional pricing mechanisms tied to Fed interest rate policies.
The financial industrial complex (asset managers, private equity, venture capital, commercial and investment banking) weaponizes media, technology, and military to subordinate countries, corporations, and individuals through fractional reserve banking, Pentagon budgets, and intelligence operations that siphon funds from real estate and stock markets back into the system.
The US dollar became the world’s reserve currency after WWII through IMF currency conversion, World Bank reconstruction lending, and military-industrial complex enforcement via overt and covert wars, forcing countries to peg currencies to the dollar and creating artificial dollar demand.
The US abandoned the gold standard in 1971 to continue the Vietnam War and perpetuate a debt-based Ponzi scheme, converting the dollar into a tool forcing countries to buy US treasuries while the financial elite captured government through military-industrial complex, insurance companies, and financial lobbies.
The corporate class borrows at 0% through quantitative easing while average citizens face 40% interest on credit cards and payday loans, with government extracting debt into the US stock market and productizing individuals through debt subordination.
The Bank for International Settlements orchestrates currency wars to extract assets from populations and lend them back to the US government, with operations designed to strategically weaken the dollar, asset strip Americans through stock markets, bankrupt government through bond markets, and reset the world into regional blocks.
The transition to a multipolar world involves regional blocks controlling their own currencies, breaking free from the dollar peg, and strategically weakening dollar dominance through the eurodollar, petrodollar, and Japan carry trade mechanisms.
Countries like China and Russia pursue de-dollarization and alternative currencies while the US innovates with crypto products like stablecoins, though retail treasury demand remains insignificant compared to institutional and central bank demand.
Wall Street manipulates Bitcoin price through derivatives, ETFs, and Bitcoin treasury companies that centralize ownership using short-term price manipulation, media, and index fund inclusion to discourage self-custody and maintain control.
The Trump administration enabled Wall Street to build constructs like derivatives and ETFs to manipulate Bitcoin price while taking out or co-opting exchanges and banks in the sector, subordinating Bitcoin to debt markets, equity markets, and tax incentives.
Self-custodying Bitcoin and running your own node enables participation in network governance during block size wars and competing implementations, allowing individuals to compete against centralized entities like Coinbase and BlackRock.
Bitcoin provides sovereignty at individual, corporate, and country levels by giving control over wealth and spending, offering escape from government jurisdiction and potential wealth taxes through self-custody and global spending without centralized systems.
The government’s asset-stripping through stock markets converts US debt into fiscal dominance short-term while perpetuating stablecoins as short-term debt, building a programmable surveillance state integrated with social credit scores and artificial intelligence for resource acquisition negotiations.
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