Private credit markets are experiencing gating events with Blackstone and BlackRock restricting investor withdrawals, mirroring Bear Stearns 2007 behavior that preceded systemic collapse.
Rising global bond yields act as “kryptonite” to over-leveraged markets, causing lower bond prices that devastate insurance companies holding 60-70% of portfolios in bonds.
Legal frameworks exist to fleece investors during institutional failures regardless of account size ($10,000 to $1 billion), with FDIC insurance unlikely to function in full-scale crisis.
Naked paper sales and derivatives have suppressed gold/silver prices since 1975, with JP Morgan paying $920 million fine for manipulating silver markets from 2005-2013.
Physical silver market faces 450 million ounce annual deficit driven by industrial, military, and medicinal demand for 99.99% fine silver, with supply being melted down and future availability uncertain.
Physical gold and silver are only assets without counterparty risk or bankruptcy potential, serving as real money and last safe havens during financial system collapse.
Dollar lost 95% of value since 2000 when measured in gold, demonstrating precious metals’ role as stable measure of currency devaluation despite nominal price volatility.
Holter recommends investing in precious metals “whatever you don’t want to lose” and predicts new all-time highs for both gold and silver by end of 2026, with current corrections being temporary blips similar to 2008-2009 and 1987 events.
The information state represents a third form of political regime distinct from authoritarianism and democracy, governing by controlling digital codes and protocols, engineering public compliance, and monopolizing attention rather than through force or citizen contestation.
The information state dictates user experience on social media by adjusting public perception and conditioning people to see certain outcomes as inevitable, exercising more direct control compared to the indirect pressure on media institutions characteristic of 20th-century analog propaganda systems.
The information state is simultaneously more powerful and more brittle than analog propaganda systems, having emerged from Cold War Pentagon research and been reconsolidated under government auspices post-9/11.
James Beniger’s 1986 book “The Control Revolution” argues that the industrial revolution overwhelmed human organizational methods, requiring information technologies to control production processes and allocate goods to markets and consumers.
The internet, a military technology with roots in 17th-century cybernetics, has become the essential medium for all discourse, blurring boundaries between truth and falsehood and military and civilian, generalizing features once specific to espionage as described by Kennan and Moynihan.
Artificial intelligence, described as a 20th-century electrical technology magnifying the nervous system, functions as a global system extending human decision-making and cognition, though its impact on human agency remains less clear than the effects of the electrical world.
Digital swarms like Anonymous and 4chan express extreme, incoherent beliefs without direct anchoring to individual identity, allowing for rapid mass formation and manipulation of public attention through spectacle and outrage.
Anonymous’s DDoS attacks on targets like Scientology became symbols of the group’s power but were exogenous manipulations of the swarm—commandeering users’ computers to simulate mass participation—not reflections of its underlying social formation.
The velocity of digital message proliferation destabilizes settled political identities and movements, while anonymity of online interactions allows extreme, less tethered beliefs to emerge, enabling digital swarms to shift focus without obligation to follow through on original political programs.
The internet has swept away effective counterweights to propaganda such as local media and civic associations, accelerating the decline of institutions like journalism and labor unions that were already in trouble before its rise.
Digital speed and velocity have accelerated the decline of civic institutions and the rise of nihilism, rapidly replacing mechanisms of political sovereignty like voting and journalism with opaque algorithms governing the public sphere.
Technological mediums, particularly the internet, have vastly accelerated the decline of civic life by stripping away effective counter-responses and replacing institutions with global digital simulations of society, redefining the distinction between state and private power as social media platforms are now directly influenced by government.
Greg Mankiw’s 2006 blog post revealed economists focus on last 20-30 years of work, treating Mises’ 1949 “Human Action” as irrelevant like physicists ignoring original Newton texts.
American Economic Review article analysis showed 90% citations from 2000+, with only one 1960s econometric paper pre-1970, demonstrating extreme recency bias in mainstream economics.
Top five US economics programs (Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Chicago) offer minimal history of economic thought courses, with MIT’s “Classics of Economics” taught by history department, not economists.
Harvard’s popular course “Using Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problems” teaches economics through data applications without requiring prior theory knowledge, further severing connection to historical foundations.
Austrian economics papers cite 50-60% from last 25 years and remainder from previous century, maintaining balanced acknowledgment of past intellectual contributions versus mainstream’s presentism.
Grove City College offers more history of economic thought courses than Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and Chicago combined, including specialized Austrian economics sequences before and after Marshallian revolution.
Hayek’s intellectual production structure involves original scholars generating ideas, public intellectuals translating for masses, and funnel filtering important knowledge to shape public opinion through amplification.
Applied expertise benefits society even when few possess knowledge, as experts progress by keeping good ideas and discarding bad, while applied public opinion matters when mass error prevents social progress.
Counterintuitive truths (from Smith, Menger, Hayek) must be relearned each generation since few are experts in everything, requiring continuous education to correct erroneous intuitions.
Intellectuals filter ideas by worldview, not truth, evaluating independently and amplifying minority views fitting their narrative, creating disconnect between expert consensus and public belief.
Intangible capital accumulates through time/resources devoted to discovering new knowledge, leading to economic growth via non-rivalry and standing on shoulders of giants principle across generations.
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