<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1_2x-new.png 2x" alt="1" width="37" />Friday Flashback
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> On this day six years ago, the U.S. stock market was reacting badly to a spike in COVID-19 cases in China.
In America, the first infections had yet to be reported. The lockdowns were still weeks away. At this juncture, uncertainty loomed large.
&ldquo;Health experts question the timeliness and accuracy of China&rsquo;s official data, saying the testing system captured only a fraction of the cases in China&rsquo;s hospitals, particularly those that are poorly run,&rdquo; said the Financial Times.
The major U.S. stock indexes took a spill that day. Nothing major &mdash; but mid-February turned out to be the top in the S&amp;P 500.
One expert had the foresight to tell his clients to get out before the carnage.
From a peak of nearly 3,400 the S&amp;P began a sickening slide below 2,200 on March 23.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> March 23 was the day everything turned around &mdash; and that same expert had both the methodology and the moxie to call the bottom.
On that day, he recommended 13 stocks &mdash; all of which could have made you a fortune if you&rsquo;d acted on his recommendation. At the time, however, his work was available only to private clients paying up to $10,000 a month.
Perhaps in hindsight the turnaround was obvious: On March 23 the Federal Reserve announced it was embarking on an epic spate of bailouts and money printing &mdash; or as your editor put it that day, &ldquo;the 2008 playbook, on a cocktail of steroids, Adderall and meth.&rdquo;
But at that moment, fear was still rampant. The market opened down big-time that morning. As of midday, the Dow had surrendered all its gains in the last three years.
It took a reliable system and nerves of steel to act on that day.
But when you&rsquo;ve built up a track record like Mason Sexton&rsquo;s, it&rsquo;s not hard. His string of brilliant calls stretches all the way back to the early 1980s &mdash; when he called a bottom that marked the start of an epic 18-year bull market in stocks.
Along the way, he also called the crash of 1987&hellip; the start of the global financial crisis in 2007&hellip; and the end of that crisis in 2009.
Oh, and more recently, he anticipated the market freakout after Donald Trump&rsquo;s &ldquo;Liberation Day&rdquo; announcement last year &mdash; and the rally that followed.
This month, he&rsquo;s stepping forward with a chilling forecast &mdash; an event poised to begin exactly one week from today, Friday Feb. 20.
To get the word out, Mason is convening an urgent live briefing this coming Tuesday Feb. 17 at 1:27 p.m. EST.
Why the odd time? You won&rsquo;t know if you don&rsquo;t watch.
<a href="https://signups.paradigm-press.info/2509606">Signup is free</a>. We&rsquo;ll email you with everything you need to know to be ready for Tuesday.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2_2x-new.png 2x" alt="2" width="37" />Mr. Market Is Reacting Abnormally
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> The major U.S. stock indexes are little moved today despite cooler-than-expected inflation numbers. The Labor Department says the official inflation rate is now running 2.4%.
That&rsquo;s a drop from 3% over the previous four months. So of course the mainstream is chattering about how inflation is steadily returning toward the Federal Reserve&rsquo;s 2% target, clearing the way for the Fed to resume cutting short-term interest rates.
But hold on: The official inflation rate was even lower &mdash; 2.3% &mdash; in April of last year before racing higher to 3% in September.
Seems a bit early for the Fed to declare a victory lap and resume cutting rates.
Thus, stocks aren&rsquo;t reacting with the big rally you might expect whenever the inflation numbers come in cooler than expected. The S&amp;P 500 is up less than 0.2% to 6,845. The Dow&rsquo;s performance is little better, while the Nasdaq is slightly in the red.
➢ Congratulations are in order for Rickards&rsquo; Insider Intel readers, who on Wednesday collected a staggering 1,125% gain playing call options on the mining giant Rio Tinto.
Precious metals are gamely trying to rally after the latest smackdown yesterday. Gold is up 1.2% to $4,979 while silver is up 2.5% and just over $77.
(More about yesterday&rsquo;s slam below in the mailbag section&hellip;)
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> For once, oil is not rallying going into the weekend. Instead a barrel of West Texas Intermediate is flat at $62.79.
For the last two Fridays, traders bid up crude because they didn&rsquo;t want to get caught with their pants down if U.S. forces attacked Iran while the markets were closed for the weekend.
But after still another face-to-face meeting between President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu on Wednesday, the outlook is murkier now.
&ldquo;We have to make a deal with Iran, otherwise it&rsquo;s going to be very traumatic, very traumatic. I don&rsquo;t want that to happen, but we have to make a deal,&rdquo; Trump said yesterday.
Asked about a timeline for a deal, he said, &ldquo;I guess over the next month&hellip; They should agree very quickly.&rdquo;
As we keep emphasizing, much hinges on whether Trump will capitulate to Netanyahu&rsquo;s demand that Tehran give up its ballistic missiles with a range of over 186 miles. Tehran will never do that; its medium-range missiles are its insurance against regime change.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3_2x-new.png 2x" alt="3" width="37" />A High-Conviction Crypto Bet
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Crypto looks moribund with Bitcoin just under $69,000 and Ethereum at $2,049. But spirits couldn&rsquo;t be brighter at Bitcoin Investor Week in New York.
Among the speakers: Real estate mogul Grant Cardone, who sold a $75 million private jet last week to buy more Bitcoin.
&ldquo;Each of these speakers has access to information most investors never see,&rdquo; writes Ari Goldschmidt of Altucher&rsquo;s Investment Network, who&rsquo;s our eyes and ears at this event.
&ldquo;They talk to institutional buyers. They meet with regulators. They understand the flow of capital behind closed doors.&rdquo;
On the Paradigm mobile app yesterday, Ari peppered readers with updates like this one:
<blockquote>Matt Hougan, chief investment officer at Bitwise, one of the largest crypto ETF companies. Matt speaks to a lot of financial advisers about cryptocurrency through the course of his work.</blockquote>
<blockquote>A surprising thing he's seen: The temporary 50% drops in crypto doesn't bother financial advisers at all. More sophisticated advisers will ask about how to value Bitcoin and what it should be worth. Bitcoin is 10% of the global store of value (gold) market today. If you look over the last 20 years, the size of the gold market has increased 10X. If that happens again and Bitcoin stays 10% of the gold market, we&rsquo;re looking at $700,000-plus per bitcoin.</blockquote>
&ldquo;Walking out of the conference,&rdquo; says Ari, &ldquo;I can't help but feel optimistic about the opportunities ahead for crypto. For what it's worth, I've been a buyer of the recent crypto market sell-off, buying small amounts on dips like we're seeing today.&rdquo;
The next big conference on our radar is PDAC &mdash; the metals-and-mining gathering held yearly in Toronto, coming up March 1-4.
Our own Byron King and Matt Badiali will be in attendance and they too will be posting regularly with insights straight from the conference floor on the Paradigm app. If you don&rsquo;t have it yet, you don&rsquo;t know what you&rsquo;re missing: <a href="https://d2z65klgtz99km.cloudfront.net/PPG-App/">Download it at this link</a>.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4_2x-new.png 2x" alt="4" width="37" />Comic Relief
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Yeah, after this week&rsquo;s circus on Capitol Hill, we can&rsquo;t resist&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/5IG9SEzDXRYRLyWfQhSLIC/9a4d75540679b2bee968d63532631f01/FMF-Issue-02-13-26_1_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5_2x-new.png 2x" alt="5" width="37" />Mailbag: Gold (and Oil) Manipulation
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;I would like to thank you for this well written article on &lsquo;The Truth about Gold &ldquo;Manipulation.&rdquo;&rsquo; Very informative and illuminating. WOW,&rdquo; a new reader enthuses after <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/the-truth-about-gold-manipulation">yesterday&rsquo;s edition</a>.
&ldquo;This is something I always suspected was going on but I never really saw proved or really talked about in any kind of detail like this before.
&ldquo;It reminds me of a time in recent years where the price of oil per barrel shot up an incredible amount in a period of a year or two. The actual supply and demand for oil during that same time period showed that the price of oil should have remained steady or even went DOWN slightly and not up at all !!
&ldquo;Similar dynamics were at play there too with the price of oil I am sure.&nbsp;
&ldquo;I will be looking for your 5 Bullets articles going forward. Keep up the excellent work please with more like this.&rdquo;
Dave responds: Thank you for the kind words, and welcome aboard. Oil has been routinely manipulated ever since the advent of modern-day oil futures in 1983.
Energy industry journalist James Norman told the story well in his 2008 book The Oil Card. Every so often I have occasion to revisit Norman&rsquo;s thesis and findings &mdash; most recently <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/3-million-acres#2">at the conclusion of the &ldquo;12 Day War&rdquo; last year</a>.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> While we&rsquo;re at it, we might as well examine yesterday&rsquo;s precious metals sell-off.
It commenced at precisely 11:10 a.m. EST. There was no obvious breaking-news catalyst that would instantly tank gold from $5,050 all the way below $4,900 (with an even more extreme move in silver, natch.)
Colleague Adam Sharp at The Daily Reckoning surmises it was a reaction to a Bloomberg exclusive that began thus&hellip;
<blockquote>The Kremlin has set out proposals that could see Russia embrace the dollar again as part of a wide-ranging economic partnership with the Trump administration, according to an internal Russian document reviewed by Bloomberg.</blockquote>
<blockquote>The high-level memo, which was drafted this year, details seven points where, in the Kremlin&rsquo;s view, Russian and U.S. economic interests could converge following a deal to end the war in Ukraine. It sees the two countries working together to champion fossil fuels over greener alternatives as well as joint investments in natural gas, offshore oil and critical raw materials plus windfalls for U.S. companies&hellip;</blockquote>
All else being equal, what&rsquo;s good for the dollar is bad for gold.
Of course, it all hinges on, as the story says, &ldquo;a deal to end the war in Ukraine.&rdquo; And how likely is that?
And is it really that good for the dollar?
Today Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov addressed the issue, however obliquely. Depending on whose translation you want to believe, he said that even if a deal comes about, the dollar&rsquo;s credibility throughout the Global South is already shot.
<blockquote>If the United States abandons this practice of restricting the use of the dollar, then the dollar will have to win competition with other alternative currencies, with national currencies that are increasingly widely used in the world.</blockquote>
Back to Bloomberg&rsquo;s story. In the final paragraph we learn that Bloomberg&rsquo;s source for this &ldquo;confidential Kremlin memo&rdquo; is&hellip; Ukrainian intelligence.
If there&rsquo;s a link between this story and the slam in precious metals yesterday&hellip; well, there are a lot of sketchy someones who were motivated to let the story drop and position themselves ahead of its release. Alas, we&rsquo;ll likely never know.
The lesson for gold bugs is the same lesson for any asset in which you have long-term conviction, be it a blue chip stock or the thinnest-liquidity crypto: Ignore the short-term noise and hold on tight.
Which is where we&rsquo;ll leave it for the week. Back tomorrow with our Saturday wrap, including some, er, unusual events in New York City. Then while the markets are closed Monday you won&rsquo;t want to miss our Presidents&rsquo; Day special, packed with some spooky historical recurrences.

FMF-Issue-02-13-26(Featured)

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Paradigm Pressroom’s 5 Bullets is a daily e-letter covering the economy and the markets, reaching 120,000 paying subscribers of the renowned financial publishing firm Paradigm Press.

Paradigm Pressroom's 5 Bullets

Six Years Ago: Peak Fear

<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1_2x-new.png 2x" alt="1" width="37" />The Truth About Gold &ldquo;Manipulation&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> For most of this century, it existed only in the realm of &ldquo;conspiracy theory.&rdquo; Now in 2026 it&rsquo;s broken into mainstream headlines.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/1aQNHjyseFG8Js7NqDPBqy/66e09dfeb708badc4bdda1ad73d7f80c/FMF-Issue-02-12-26_1_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
It&rsquo;s right there in the Financial Post, a venerable Canadian outlet that&rsquo;s been publishing since 1907.
<blockquote>Gold bugs spent years predicting bullion would hit its present value of around US$5,000 per ounce, but now that their predictions have borne out, some are airing a long-held grievance that it should be trading even higher, but for unlawful manipulation by big banks and Western governments.</blockquote>
<blockquote>Others write this off as a nonsense conspiracy theory. But with gold prices swinging wildly &mdash; to their highest-ever price in January of US$5,600 per ounce, only to crash 16% in the waning days of the month and then recover back above US$5,000 on Tuesday &mdash; the decades-old debate about what makes the yellow metal rise or fall is rearing its head again.</blockquote>
The article quotes the multibillionaire mining investor Eric Sprott: &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to call them &lsquo;The cartel&rsquo; &mdash; the major American banks and Canadian ones, too, by the way &mdash; thought gold was kind of their whipping boy; that they could sell it and knock it down.&rdquo;
It&rsquo;s good to know Mr. Sprott hasn&rsquo;t changed: Your editor interviewed him in early 2013. In a few words, he described the suppression scheme like this&hellip;
&ldquo;The Western central banks are surreptitiously supplying gold [to the global market] by leasing theirs out.&rdquo;
There&rsquo;s a lot packed into those few words. More than many people wish to contemplate. The Financial Post article quotes a fellow who runs a firm that helps precious metals miners fund their operations: He said it&rsquo;s a &ldquo;conspiracy theory&rdquo; &mdash; even though he conceded he&rsquo;d never really looked into the matter. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a rabbit hole.&rdquo;
Well, yes. But it&rsquo;s a hole worth jumping down today. Doing so will offer clues about what happens to the dollar price of gold from here. Let&rsquo;s go&hellip;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2_2x-new.png 2x" alt="2" width="37" />Deathbed Confessions
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> More than a decade ago, Paradigm&rsquo;s own macro maven Jim Rickards began opening readers&rsquo; eyes to how the powers that be manipulated the gold price.
The short version: Central banks leased gold bars to commercial banks&hellip; which then proceeded to sell the bars to buyers in Asia. The bars, meanwhile, never left the vault. (Too costly and complicated to transport.)
The slightly longer version: Chinese leaders relentlessly accumulated gold for years, aiming to approach or equal the amount held by the U.S. Treasury and the central banks of Europe.
In doing so, they hoped to be assured a &ldquo;seat at the table&rdquo; along with the Americans and Europeans whenever the global monetary system broke down and the powers that be hashed out a new system.
For years, Western movers and shakers went along &mdash; enabling China&rsquo;s accumulation via that leasing scheme. Those Asian buyers included the People&rsquo;s Bank of China.
&ldquo;The gold price must be kept low,&rdquo; Jim wrote in his 2014 book The Death of Money, &ldquo;until gold holdings are rebalanced among the major economic powers, and the rebalancing must be completed before the collapse of the international monetary system.&rdquo;
His research and documentation were peerless. &ldquo;Get the annual report from the Bank for International Settlements,&rdquo; he told me over dinner one evening. &ldquo;Read the footnotes. I understand it&rsquo;s geeky, but it&rsquo;s there. They actually get audited &mdash; unlike the Fed and unlike Fort Knox.&rdquo;
Of course, this was an era when Western leaders still thought they could keep the Chinese under their thumb. Later on we&rsquo;ll get into what&rsquo;s changed&hellip;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> But first, it&rsquo;s worth revisiting the deathbed confession of Bart Chilton.
Chilton was appointed to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission by President Bush in 2007 and kept on by President Obama. In 2014, he left government to join the uber-connected global law firm of DLA Piper.
He was colorful and charismatic, with trademark cowboy boots and shoulder-length hair that were out of place in D.C. Fond of the limelight, he joined Russia&rsquo;s state-run English-language news channel RT in 2018 as host of a daily business news roundup called Boom Bust.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/5eFTuxCSINV0iSUYmCvegk/d3877f0c3b8243dee751c9138728b2db/FMF-Issue-02-12-26_2_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" /> The telegenic Bart Chilton, in his element
His TV career didn&rsquo;t last long. He died the following year of pancreatic cancer at age 58.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Perhaps knowing his time was almost up, Chilton granted a candid interview a few weeks before shuffling off this mortal coil.
His questioner was an ex-Wall Streeter named Chris Marcus, who now runs an advisory firm called Arcadia Economics.
In so many words, Chilton confirmed that at one time JPMorgan Chase controlled about 40% of the global silver market. It was after JPM took over the collapsing Bear Stearns in 2008. The two firms&rsquo; combined position was way over limits set by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The CFTC granted waivers and extensions to JPM, during which time JPM actually acquired more silver.
&ldquo;They did ultimately get down to the position [limit],&rdquo; he recalled. &ldquo;But it was at that time that they were so large, that I made the comment about how large a particular bank was in the market. Which sort of shocked people. And it shocked me, quite frankly, that it was so large.&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Upon further investigation, &ldquo;we did uncover a lot of evidence that would lead to a manipulation case, or an attempted manipulation case,&rdquo; Chilton went on.
We&rsquo;re talking voicemails, text messages and a trail of trades. Chilton and crew recruited a forensic economist to dig deeper. Four years this went on. At Chilton&rsquo;s behest the CFTC kept it going for a fifth year, commissioning another forensic economist.
In the end, the evidence was compelling, but not enough to nail anyone to the wall.
&ldquo;We just didn&rsquo;t have the traders, and we didn&rsquo;t have the market participants dead to rights. But we had lots of stuff. And we had real stuff that would have played really well in court&hellip; But the damning part had to be backed up by other requirements of evidence under the law. And we didn&rsquo;t get all of that.&rdquo;
Presumably Chilton was talking about a case big enough to take down the people in JPM&rsquo;s C-suite &mdash; and not the grunt traders periodically <a href="https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-jp-morgan-traders-convicted-fraud-attempted-price-manipulation-and-spoofing-multi-year">prosecuted</a> by the Justice Department for appearances&rsquo; sake.
At the time of Chilton&rsquo;s interview, JPM controlled 45% of all derivatives contracts &mdash; futures, options and whatnot &mdash; linked to precious metals. And Citi controlled another 30%.
Now? As of Sept. 30, 2025, JPM&rsquo;s share has shrunk to 27% &mdash; with Citi and Goldman Sachs each controlling about 24%. You can decide for yourself whether that constitutes progress.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3_2x-new.png 2x" alt="3" width="37" />Still More Evidence
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> A luminary in the precious metals space also came around to the manipulation thesis in 2019.
He&rsquo;s Frank Holmes, longtime manager of the U.S. Global family of mutual funds and ETFs, specializing in precious metals and natural resources.
&ldquo;Gold price suppression (&lsquo;fixing,&rsquo; &lsquo;rigging,&rsquo; &lsquo;manipulating&rsquo; or however else you want to think about it) is not just a conspiracy theory,&rdquo; Holmes wrote his investors in May 2019. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a well-documented phenomenon, with real actors and real ramifications.
&ldquo;The best people to speak to about this subject are the folks at the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, or GATA.&rdquo;
For well over a decade, most investment pros dismissed the GATA crowd as cranks of the first order. For Holmes to take their arguments and documentation seriously? That was a sea change.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> For evidence of rigging, Holmes directed his clients&rsquo; attention to a tumble in the gold price in 2018&ndash;19.
Gold rallied from November through February, peaking at $1,343. &ldquo;Ordinarily,&rdquo; he wrote, &ldquo;you could expect inventory in the bullion-backed SPDR Gold Shares ETF (GLD) to continue to climb at least until then. But that&rsquo;s not at all what happened.
&ldquo;Three weeks before the price of gold peaked, the holdings in the GLD curiously began to fall, and by March 4, the ETF had lost approximately 57.8 metric tonnes. And because the GLD is the largest gold ETF in the world&hellip; such selling will naturally impact the price of gold. Sure enough, the yellow metal soon fell below $1,300. What gives?&rdquo;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/7aE9fs0kNHWW3DHculiM27/c8de2a2fef09e4ebf9c2fd43ff0648a8/FMF-Issue-02-12-26_3_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
Back to the Bank for International Settlements, mentioned above. In its monthly statement for February 2019, &ldquo;the BIS was still actively trading gold swaps [contract in which two parties exchange cash flows], which it uses to gain access to the metal held by commercial banks. Specifically, the bank placed as much as 56 metric tonnes of gold swaps into the market in February.
&ldquo;If you ask me, that amount is remarkably close to the 57.8 tonnes that fled the GLD in the first quarter of this year [2019].&rdquo;
But enough history. Let&rsquo;s bring it up to the present&hellip;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4_2x-new.png 2x" alt="4" width="37" />The Game Remains the Same
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Here in the mid-2020s, the players have changed&hellip; but the game remains the same.
Back to the Financial Post piece, and Eric Sprott&rsquo;s description of how it works&hellip;
<blockquote>The banks, he said, manipulated gold futures, which are contracts that allow people to speculate about the gold price at a future date. Such trades can be settled in one of two ways. One is to deliver physical gold on the agreed-upon day; the other is to make a cash payment based on the difference between the contracted price of gold and the spot price on delivery day.</blockquote>
<blockquote>In practice, gold bugs say traders at the big banks figured out a way to game the system. They would short gold or bet on gold futures below the spot price. By executing this strategy at a large scale, they affected market sentiment, and eventually the large number of low-priced gold futures would drag down the spot price of gold.</blockquote>
<blockquote>In that way, the big banks made reams of money and suppressed gold prices in the process.</blockquote>
<blockquote>&ldquo;It works as long as no one asks for delivery,&rdquo; Sprott said.</blockquote>
In theory, someone could stand for delivery with the intention of calling BS on the whole scheme.
But as Jim Rickards has reminded us for years, there are powerful disincentives to do so.
&ldquo;Most major participants in the gold market (banks, dealers and hedge funds) are regulated by one or more of the Federal Reserve, U.S. Treasury, SEC or CFTC,&rdquo; Jim wrote a decade ago. (And he&rsquo;s been a lawyer for banks, dealers and hedge funds, so he&rsquo;d know.)
&ldquo;Applicable laws contain strict anti-fraud and anti-manipulation rules, including jail time in cases of willful and knowing violations.&rdquo;
In other words, standing for delivery with the intention of squeezing the shorts could easily open you up to prosecution.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5_2x-new.png 2x" alt="5" width="37" />Target $10K
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Gold&rsquo;s big rally in the mid-2020s &mdash; up 150% in two years even after the recent pullback &mdash; leads to the obvious question: Have the manipulation schemes broken down?
&ldquo;That&rsquo;s where the gold bug&rsquo;s theory begins to dovetail with a more commonly held view of what drives gold prices,&rdquo; says the Financial Post piece.
&ldquo;All the countries used to be united on gold policy,&rdquo; says Chris Powell of the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee &mdash; recalling the history of the 2010s recounted above. &ldquo;Gold is the only alternative to the dollar and the central banks are no longer united on letting the U.S. rule the world.&rdquo;
It comes back to one of those charts we can&rsquo;t show often enough: Central banks around the world started loading up on bullion in 2022 after Washington responded to the Russian invasion of Ukraine by freezing $300 billion in dollar-denominated assets held by Russia&rsquo;s central bank.
Leaders of every government on less-than-friendly terms with Washington thought the same thing: If it can happen to the Russians, it can happen to us.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/7A3vivkZkuVjjZkLDcFs6P/0e8c6b77250019d9dd265e411952e52d/FMF-Issue-02-12-26_4_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
All that central-bank gold buying has an effect of keeping a floor under the gold price.
So where&rsquo;s the ceiling?
Well, as Jim Rickards pointed out during a 5 Bullets guest essay in December, &ldquo;Mining output has been flat for the last six years&hellip; gold is getting harder to find and more expensive to mine.&rdquo;
At the same time, &ldquo;private institutional investors have gold allocations of below 2.0% of total assets. If that expanded to a mere 4.0% allocation, there&rsquo;s not enough gold in the world at today&rsquo;s prices to fill those orders.
&ldquo;That dynamic alone could send gold prices above $10,000 per ounce in the year ahead.&rdquo;

FMF-Issue-02-12-26(Featured)

The Truth About Gold “Manipulation”

<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1_2x-new.png 2x" alt="1" width="37" />First They Came for Small Businesses&hellip;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" />It was one of the gravest injustices of the COVID lockdowns six years ago.
Countless small retailers across this country were deemed &ldquo;non-essential&rdquo; and ordered to shut their doors.
Meanwhile&hellip; big-box giants Walmart, Costco and Target thrived. And of course, Amazon.
From small towns to New York&rsquo;s Chinatown, many of the small businesses never recovered. Chinatown is uniquely telling. Once the province of small landlords, it fell into the hands of developers.
The result? &ldquo;Gleaming new storefronts, with $400 jackets and $700 shoes, all curated and lit up like sculptures,&rdquo; wrote the author and critic Naomi Wolf in 2024. &ldquo;Little art galleries, selling $12,000&ndash;25,000 works of modern art to wealthy, young, hip collectors. Chain bubble tea shops. Chain hotels.&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Something very similar is happening right now &mdash; this week &mdash; in the realm of AI.
On Monday, the Financial Times reported that &ldquo;Donald Trump&rsquo;s administration intends to spare companies including Amazon, Google and Microsoft from forthcoming tariffs on chips as they race to build the data centres powering the AI boom.&rdquo;
The biggest of the hyperscalers would win this exemption provided they commit to investing in chips made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
Which they&rsquo;d probably do anyway, right?
&ldquo;The new scheme would allow TSMC to allocate exemptions for its U.S. customers from this next set of tariffs. The carve-outs would be tied to the scale of the Taiwan-based group&rsquo;s investments in the U.S.&rdquo;
The details are still fuzzy but this much is clear: Large entrenched companies will get a break on their chip costs. Smaller firms hoping to compete will be cut off at the knees &mdash; forced to pay the full load of the tariff.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> This morning&rsquo;s Wall Street Journal brings a similar story: The same three AI giants &ldquo;are looking to sidestep President Trump&rsquo;s $100,000 H-1B visa fee, potentially leaving the brunt of the new policy to hit smaller startups.&rdquo;
As you might know, H-1Bs are the visas set aside for highly-skilled foreign workers. The Trump administration announced the new fee last September to address criticisms that Big Tech was using H-1Bs to fire U.S. citizens and hire cheaper foreign replacements.
The big guys &ldquo;generally plan to find workers in categories that don&rsquo;t have to pay the fee, including existing H-1B visa holders, students and people on other types of visas, according to people familiar with the companies&rsquo; plans&hellip;
&ldquo;But many smaller companies, including startups in specialized areas such as artificial intelligence and health care, can&rsquo;t easily navigate the policy changes or invest in alternatives that are cheaper than the $100,000 fee but still more costly than the status quo.&rdquo;
&ldquo;It would be prohibitive for us to pay the $100,000 fee,&rdquo; says Jennifer Ide of the Georgia-based health care startup Rimidi &mdash; which has all of 20 employees.
It&rsquo;s as if her firm, and countless others like hers, has been deemed &ldquo;non-essential.&rdquo;
Whatever your opinion of the H-1B visa program, something stinks when the system is designed for the biggest companies to circumvent it while small fry are hung out to dry.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> That&rsquo;s a problem when you consider that world-changing innovations rarely come from big lumbering incumbents in their industry.
They don&rsquo;t come from the Microsofts, Amazons and Googles of the world.
They come from the scrappy startups, the proverbial kid tinkering in his garage.
They come from a Microsoft releasing MS-DOS for the first personal computer in 1981&hellip; from an Amazon disrupting the business of selling books in 1995&hellip; from a Google that instantly made people forget about inferior search engines like Lycos and AltaVista in 1998.
So if you care about America keeping its competitive edge in technology&hellip; or &ldquo;winning the AI race with China&rdquo;... what&rsquo;s happening this week is cause for concern.
From an investing standpoint, it&rsquo;s downright discouraging: Among the trio of Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet-Google &mdash; we&rsquo;ll throw in Meta as well because it&rsquo;s also pouring gazillions of dollars into data centers &mdash; only Alphabet&rsquo;s share price outperformed the S&amp;P 500 last year.
Developments like these make our jobs harder at Paradigm Press. Ferreting out the small publicly traded companies with potential to change the world becomes harder when the playing field is tilted in favor of giant incumbents.
Of course, we welcome the challenge and will double down our efforts on your behalf.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2_2x-new.png 2x" alt="2" width="37" />About Those Job Numbers&hellip;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Mr. Market is of two minds when it comes to the January job numbers.
The numbers came out this morning &mdash; five days behind schedule because of the most recent &ldquo;partial government shutdown.&rdquo;
The wonks at the Bureau of Labor Statistics conjured 130,000 new jobs for the month &mdash; way more than the typical Wall Street economist who was expecting 70,000. The official unemployment rate ticked down to 4.3%.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> The initial reaction was positive: &ldquo;Dow jumps 200 points as strong jobs report eases economy concerns,&rdquo; said a CNBC alert. &ldquo;The S&amp;P 500 is set for a record after a much stronger-than-anticipated U.S. jobs report,&rdquo; was Bloomberg&rsquo;s take.
Then it dawned on someone: If the job market is holding up OK, that means it&rsquo;s less likely the Federal Reserve will resume cutting interest rates, right?
At last check, all the major U.S. indexes are in the red: The S&amp;P 500 is down a quarter percent to 6,923. The 7,000 mark will likely have to wait for another day. The Nasdaq and the Dow are both down a little over a half-percent.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> But hold on: The January job numbers don&rsquo;t tell the whole story.
This is the one report each year when the Bureau of Labor Statistics performs revisions to the previous year&rsquo;s numbers &mdash; and the year before that, too.
It turns out that the U.S. economy generated 1.2 million jobs in 2024 &mdash; instead of the previously estimated 2 million.
And in 2025, the total was a mere 181,000 &mdash; revised down from 584,000.
Now as we&rsquo;ve pointed out a couple of times in recent months, the fact the U.S. border has been effectively sealed since last spring changes the calculus when it comes to new jobs: In years gone by it took at least 150,000 new jobs a month to keep up with population growth. But without an influx of immigrants, the number could now be as low as 30,000.
But last year&rsquo;s revised total works out to a tepid 15,083 jobs per month.
So maybe there&rsquo;s something to this &ldquo;cooling labor market&rdquo; chatter after all. We&rsquo;ll be on the lookout for further signs.
Elsewhere, precious metals are on the rally tracks again today &mdash; gold only $10 shy of $5,100 and silver up $3.50 and over $84 for the first time in nearly a week.
No joy in crypto-land, however &mdash; Bitcoin a little over $66,000 and Ethereum sinking toward $1,900.
It&rsquo;s a dangerous juncture here: In my mind, $67K is an extremely important level for Bitcoin,&rdquo; Greg Guenthner writes his Trading Desk readers. &ldquo;This marks those prior cycle highs back in late 2021. If it can't hold this level, look out below!&rdquo;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3_2x-new.png 2x" alt="3" width="37" />Red Lines in the Middle East
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Oil is back on the high end of its year-to-date trading range this morning &mdash; up $1.73 as we write to $65.69. Some sort of U.S. attack on Iran is looking inevitable now.
Israel&rsquo;s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is at the White House today &mdash; his seventh visit to the United States since Donald Trump returned to the presidency 13 months ago.
The visit was originally scheduled for one week from today. Last weekend, the Israeli government asked to move it up after widespread media reports that Trump&rsquo;s enthusiasm for airstrikes is lukewarm: &ldquo;It&rsquo;s really the Israelis who want a strike,&rdquo; a U.S. official told the Axios site. &ldquo;The president is just not there.&rdquo;
The revised timing of the visit is resonant with many Iranians: It was on this day in 1979 that the Iranian Revolution toppled the Shah &mdash; 26 years after he was installed in an American-engineered coup.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Leave aside for the moment the matter of Iran&rsquo;s nuclear program. Netanyahu is also demanding that Iran give up its ballistic missiles.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/47IixE730BNgbYiOHyaXQJ/f5fc2b703d53374ea59721b1f61395e8/FMF-issue-02-11-26_1_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
There were conflicting reports yesterday about whether Trump has agreed to go along with Netanyahu and demand the Iranian side surrender its missiles &mdash; which pose a potential threat to Israel but not to the United States.
As we&rsquo;ve mentioned a couple of times in recent days, this demand would be a nonstarter for Tehran.
Really, it would be for any government. In Iran&rsquo;s case, those missiles serve as a deterrent against an Israeli and/or U.S. attack. If the mullahs agreed to give them up, they&rsquo;d be overthrown in a heartbeat.
Assuming the mullahs stand their ground&hellip; and depending on who you believe&hellip; airstrikes could be underway as early as 10:00 p.m. EST tonight.
Or perhaps the president will wait for a three-day weekend while the markets are closed.
In the meantime, there&rsquo;s been no effort to sell the American people on the urgency of airstrikes &mdash; and no discussion of what the objective would be. Full-on regime change? Kill the ayatollah? Bomb the nuclear sites Trump already said were &ldquo;obliterated&rdquo;?
Little wonder that on social media, an old tweet of the late Charlie Kirk is making the rounds.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/5UdkuHyMTegOaNvMGyhX6I/892556b8f4c25e768a00d5ec040da24c/FMF-issue-02-11-26_2_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
Trump said yesterday he might send a second aircraft carrier to the Middle East &mdash; but people who follow these matters closely say it would take six&ndash;eight weeks to arrive.
As the Jerusalem Post headline suggests above, Netanyahu would act long before then &mdash; forcing Trump&rsquo;s hand. To be continued&hellip;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4_2x-new.png 2x" alt="4" width="37" />Comic Relief
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> He might not be wrong&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/2xzeWfDv3a5mxsgSDY9QkL/ceda728cb5f862b2d4a0b6c69db67084/FMF-issue-02-11-26_3_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5_2x-new.png 2x" alt="5" width="37" />Mailbag: Blackouts&hellip; and Nuclear
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> After <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/blackout-nation-an-update">yesterday&rsquo;s warning</a> about the vulnerability of the power grid to blackouts, a reader jotted a one-sentence email&hellip;
&ldquo;Nuclear would eliminate all blackout risk, but the climate people will not give any ground.&rdquo;
Dave responds: Yes and no. There are definitely some folks in the climate-change crowd who reject nuclear power even though it generates no &ldquo;greenhouse gases.&rdquo; It&rsquo;s as if they watched The China Syndrome as kids and were scarred for life.
But reality has set in for many others. The Silicon Valley giants know that nuclear is the only non-fossil fuel source that can possibly help them achieve their ambitions &mdash; hence, for instance, Microsoft&rsquo;s deal to reopen the non-damaged Three Mile Island reactor that shut down in 2019.
And there&rsquo;s California Gov. Gavin Newsom&rsquo;s flip-flop &mdash; agreeing to keep the Diablo Canyon plant open beyond its planned 2025 shutdown date &mdash; knowing it&rsquo;s essential to keep the grid up and running.
All that said, it takes time to build new nuclear plants. None in the United States is in the construction stage right now &mdash; which means none will likely be completed before large swaths of the country fall into the &ldquo;high risk&rdquo; category for blackouts. Consider yourself warned&hellip;

FMF-issue-02-11-26(featured)

First They Came for Small Businesses

<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1_2x-new.png 2x" alt="1" width="37" />An &ldquo;Extremely Fragile&rdquo; Market
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> It was a little unnerving watching Paradigm&rsquo;s latest livestream event this afternoon. It wrapped up only moments ago.
&ldquo;The market is extremely fragile right now,&rdquo; said Mason Sexton, a market veteran of nearly 50 years experience with a history of uncannily accurate calls.
&ldquo;And it would not surprise me at all if stocks were to fall 30&ndash;40%.&rdquo;
The process could begin as early as this Friday. At the very latest, you&rsquo;ll want to position yourself for a jolt before Tuesday March 3.
If that&rsquo;s enough to grab your attention, <a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2509777">you can watch the replay of our event called </a><a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2509777">The Prophecy 2026 </a><a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2509777">right here</a>.
If you&rsquo;re skeptical, that&rsquo;s understandable. After all, the S&amp;P 500 is only 2% off its all-time high &mdash; a lofty level that&rsquo;s barely a month in the rearview.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> But you could have said the same thing in the spring of last year &mdash; right before the S&amp;P collapsed nearly 19%.
Here&rsquo;s a chart I pulled straight from Mason&rsquo;s presentation&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/4Lm26pd8yDSSjVUR2WntZ0/63cd760dae307cfade1d945b75a10d39/FMF-Issue-02-17-26_1_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
Maybe you recognize that big tumble as the reaction to Donald Trump&rsquo;s &ldquo;Liberation Day&rdquo; tariffs.
Mr. Sexton warned his readers that the period from March 20&ndash;24 would act as a &ldquo;last hurrah&rdquo; for the market before a &ldquo;surprise shock.&rdquo; Then on March 31, he warned the market would enter a &ldquo;death zone&rdquo; during the first week of April.
Then came the tariff announcement on April 2. The bottom fell out. In two trading days, the S&amp;P 500 lost $5 trillion in market value &mdash; the sharpest drop since COVID.
How did he see it coming? His methodology is unique &mdash; but he&rsquo;s used it to successfully call major turning points in the market for many decades. COVID&hellip; the financial crisis&hellip; the dot-com bust&hellip; the crash of 1987.
You get the idea; you dismiss his warnings at your own risk.
Again, time is limited in which to act. The danger window opens this Friday, Feb. 20. The last possible opportunity to take protective measures is Tuesday, March 3 &mdash; and by then it could be too late. <a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2509777">So take the time to check out </a><a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2509777">The Prophecy 2026</a><a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2509777"> right away</a>.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2_2x-new.png 2x" alt="2" width="37" />Missing the Point Much?
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Leave it to CNBC to miss the real news from one of its own exclusive interviews.
Last week the network spoke with David Einhorn, founder of Greenlight Capital &mdash; who rose to fame betting against Lehman Bros. before it went bankrupt during the 2008 financial crisis.
CNBC&rsquo;s article about the interview began with Einhorn&rsquo;s expectation that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates this year more than most experts expect &mdash; which gives him confidence in his gold bets. &ldquo;I think by the time we get to the end of the year, it&rsquo;s going to be substantially more than two cuts.&rdquo;
But the real news is that Einhorn thinks gold is on its way to eclipsing U.S. Treasuries as a global reserve asset.
He cites the massive accumulation of gold by central banks since 2022 &mdash; something we&rsquo;ve cited ourselves regularly. Here&rsquo;s one of those charts we can&rsquo;t show often enough&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/7zHuuTaVUEgsTsy94VTDvz/ad78c5bcf353b0866607b03db8f73c51/FMF-Issue-02-17-26_2_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
"The Chinese have decided they want to, sort of want to compete on a currency basis,&rdquo; said Einhorn. &ldquo;The central banks around the world are buying gold. Gold is becoming the reserve asset as opposed to Treasuries, or it's kind of mostly even at this point.&rdquo;
In addition, Einhorn said U.S. trade policy is &ldquo;very unstable&rdquo; and that Uncle Sam&rsquo;s debt load is becoming unmanageable.
Einhorn&rsquo;s firm has had gold positions for the better part of a decade &mdash; ever since the Midas metal bottomed around $1,050 an ounce in late 2015.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> As for the immediate action in precious metals, it&rsquo;s another down day.
No one noticed amid the recent volatility, but on Friday gold notched its first weekly close over $5,000 an ounce. But selling hit hard yesterday in electronic holiday trading and it&rsquo;s continued with the resumption of COMEX trading today.
At last check, the bid is down to $4,861. And silver is under $73, testing its lows at the start of this month.
The choppy action in crypto continues &mdash; Bitcoin a little over $67,000, Ethereum under $2,000.
As for the major U.S. stock indexes, not much to say: The Dow is flat, the S&amp;P is down about a quarter-percent and the Nasdaq down about a third of a percent.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Oil prices are easing on reports of progress in U.S.-Iran talks.
After a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, Iran&rsquo;s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said the two sides came to terms on &ldquo;guiding principles&rdquo; for future negotiations. &ldquo;The path for a deal has started,&rdquo; he said.
So far, no comment from the U.S. side. And Araghchi didn&rsquo;t get into details about whether Washington is insisting that Tehran give up its medium-range ballistic missiles &mdash; something Tehran will never do because it would amount to unilateral disarmament.
Amid that backdrop, a barrel of West Texas Intermediate is down nearly 1.5%, barely over $62. That&rsquo;s at the bottom end of its trading range for the last three weeks or so.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3_2x-new.png 2x" alt="3" width="37" />Racing Toward Trump&rsquo;s Nuclear Deadline
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> This is a performative stunt &mdash; bringing in the military seems like gilding the lily &mdash; but it does underscore the White House&rsquo;s commitment to nuclear power.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/1BW9EnMrsegAuaqxaQcMMG/6ec756977a68b0838df8ec3d0848c9d9/FMF-Issue-02-17-26_3_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
&ldquo;The U.S. military airlifted a miniature nuclear reactor for the first time, part of President Trump&rsquo;s push to deploy nuclear power across the United States,&rdquo; says The Wall Street Journal.
&ldquo;Three C-17 transport planes flew components of the Valar Atomics Ward 250 unfueled nuclear reactor from March Air Reserve Base, Calif., to Hill Air Force Base, Utah, on Sunday.&rdquo;
The privately held Valar Atomics is one of the companies hoping to make hay with &ldquo;small modular reactors&rdquo; that can be built at their own factory and transported anywhere to produce electricity &mdash; in contrast with the 94 mega-reactors currently in operation around the United States.
No taxpayer funds were involved in this stunt; Valar picked up the cost of the flight. The firm plans to test the reactor at a site near the air force base. If all goes well, it could generate up to five megawatts &mdash; enough to power 5,000 homes.
A likely first customer would be the military. Pentagon official Michael Duffey says the reactors could provide power to a military base without relying on the grid &mdash; while overseas, the reactors &ldquo;would mean U.S. forces could operate without concern that an enemy might cut fuel supplies.&rdquo;
Donald Trump will be watching the progress of the testing closely. He&rsquo;s set a goal of getting three small reactors &ldquo;critical&rdquo; &mdash; that is, running all its nuclear systems smoothly &mdash; by July 4.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4_2x-new.png 2x" alt="4" width="37" />About Epstein and Fort Knox&hellip;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> We&rsquo;re seeing a lot of people on social media making way more out of this 2011 email to Jeffrey Epstein than they should&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/5SABxBueJEJHrBHigYR0Po/4f5e6c454d9c6a772175b2c84aa66886/FMF-Issue-02-17-26_4_.png" alt="pub" width="300px" />
So, let&rsquo;s back up a bit. It is true that a month before this email, Dominique Strauss-Kahn resigned as chief of the International Monetary Fund amid allegations he sexually assaulted a hotel maid in New York.
Later that summer (after this email) the charges were dismissed amid questions about the accuser&rsquo;s credibility. But the scandal was enough to derail Strauss-Kahn&rsquo;s ambitions to run for president of France in 2012.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> In no way, however, does this email constitute smoking-gun evidence that &ldquo;the gold in Fort Knox is gone.&rdquo; 
The cut-and-pasted article came from The European Union Times &mdash; a website that 15 years ago was notorious for articles that were either clickbait or outright fabrications. I remember it well.
The fabrications that got the most circulation were republished from a site called &ldquo;What Does It Mean.&rdquo; Most of them were bylined &ldquo;Sorcha Faal, as reported to her Western Subscribers.&rdquo; And while that byline doesn&rsquo;t appear in the email, the article follows a familiar pattern &mdash; &ldquo;shocking&rdquo; information attributed to one or another Russian intelligence service that&rsquo;s never confirmed by another news outlet.
As the Grok AI engine summarizes, &ldquo;they are classic hoax-style pieces blending real news snippets with wild, unsubstantiated claims about secret Russian intelligence, impending global catastrophes, anti-Western conspiracies, etc.&rdquo; (It&rsquo;s a poorly kept secret online that &ldquo;Sorcha Faal&rdquo; is a pseudonym for someone named David Booth.)
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Still, the question remains: Who forwarded this fabricated article to Epstein and why?
The sender&rsquo;s name is redacted. The only text above the forwarded article is the letter &ldquo;T&rdquo; &mdash; which might be the sender&rsquo;s signoff or perhaps it means something else.
Was the sender gullible enough to think the article was legit and worth Epstein&rsquo;s attention? Did the sender think the article was bogus and sent it to Epstein for a good laugh? Or was the email validation of Look, this article is proof that our diabolical disinformation campaign is working!
(I mean, you can&rsquo;t rule out that last one completely&hellip;)
Anyway&hellip; the question isn&rsquo;t whether the gold in Fort Knox is &ldquo;gone.&rdquo; It&rsquo;s whether the U.S. Treasury still has legal possession.
<a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/fort-knox-fake-out">We explored that matter in depth last year</a> once it was evident that nothing would come of the Trump-Musk chatter about an audit of Fort Knox.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5_2x-new.png 2x" alt="5" width="37" />Mailbag: The 144-Year Cycle
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> We heard from a couple of readers for whom our guest essay yesterday resonated: Mason Sexton unpacked a recurring 144-year cycle in financial history.
&ldquo;Brilliant!&rdquo; says one. &ldquo;An eloquent presentation and detailed explanation of what is going on. Looking forward to Tuesday to find out how to ride the wave in this major transition.
Thank you so very much for including me.&rdquo;
&ldquo;Impressive and thought-provoking,&rdquo; says another. &ldquo;It gave structure and understanding to the seeming chaos and uncertainty of our time. This long-term overview of the patterns seen in society, economics, innovation, power and governance give a valuable framework for making one&rsquo;s own long-term financial decisions.
&ldquo;One can look at Warren Buffett&rsquo;s recent restructuring of his vast wealth with greater understanding and appreciation. Thank you for this valuable input.&rdquo;
Dave responds: You mean the fact Berkshire Hathaway was sitting on a record amount of cash at the time Buffett retired as CEO a few weeks ago?
On the one hand, that might be a function of Berkshire&rsquo;s sheer size nowadays: An acquisition target would need to be worth tens of billions of dollars to make a difference. Few companies that size are reasonably priced and willing to sell.
On the other hand, the famous &ldquo;Buffett indicator&rdquo; &mdash; the total value of the U.S. stock market divided by GDP &mdash; sits at record levels.
Buffett once called this indicator "the best single measure of where valuations stand at any given moment." And at the current given moment, the stock market has never been more richly valued relative to America&rsquo;s economic output.
So yes, that&rsquo;s important context for Mason Sexton&rsquo;s The Prophecy 2026 event &mdash; which, again, wrapped up just a short time ago. Time is short, given his outlook for an ominous market window that opens this Friday.
<a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2509777">So give it a look right away if you haven&rsquo;t already</a>.

FMF-Issue-02-17-26(Featured)

An “Extremely Fragile” Market

<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1_2x-new.png 2x" alt="1" width="37" />Blackout Nation: An Update
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> At the risk of sounding like a broken record, you need to start preparing for the likelihood of regular electric blackouts before the end of this decade.
We began sounding the alarm about the fragility of the power grid in the summer of 2022. In many regions &mdash; particularly the Upper Midwest &mdash; too many coal and nuclear plants were being shuttered&hellip; and there wasn&rsquo;t nearly enough solar and wind capacity coming online to replace it.
(Your editor, based in the Upper Midwest, bought a generator that summer &mdash; just in case.)
And this was before AI burst into popular consciousness when ChatGPT 3.5 was released later in 2022. By 2024 we were regularly warning that AI could become <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/the-monster-that-ate-the-power-grid-ai">&ldquo;the monster that ate the power grid.&rdquo;</a> Only last year did the mainstream start picking up on the story.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> It was down to the wire last month during the big winter storm that blasted everywhere from Texas to the Northeast.
On Monday Jan. 26, the biggest grid operator in the country &mdash; serving 67 million customers in 13 states &mdash; said 24% of its deliverable power that day came from coal.
Old-economy, dirty coal &mdash; without it, 20% of the demand in its territory that day would have gone unfilled &mdash; resulting in blackouts.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> The situation won&rsquo;t get better and will likely get worse between now and 2030.
That&rsquo;s according to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation &mdash; which a few days ago issued its annual &ldquo;Long Term Reliability Assessment.&rdquo;
The one-sentence takeaway: If you live anywhere in the red areas on this map, you&rsquo;re at &ldquo;high risk.&rdquo;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/7FWruYIh5ilFsHS88i2WDz/43a445bf07944776e73b8bc2b483eda7/FMF-Issue-02-10-26_1_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
Let&rsquo;s dig into a few details, region-by-region&hellip;
<ul>
<li>PJM, a 13-state territory stretching from New Jersey west to Illinois: This is a region that includes &ldquo;Data Center Alley&rdquo; in northern Virginia &mdash; the highest concentration of data centers in the world. PJM is already at &ldquo;elevated risk,&rdquo; which flips to &ldquo;high risk&rdquo; by 2029. From the report: &ldquo;Current projections for resource additions do not keep pace with escalating demand forecasts and expected generator retirement&rdquo;</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>MISO, a 15-state territory stretching from Minnesota to Louisiana: &ldquo;Elevated risk&rdquo; next year, &ldquo;high risk&rdquo; in 2028. From the report: &ldquo;Projected resource additions do not keep pace with escalating demand forecasts and announced generator retirements&rdquo;</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>ERCOT, the Texas grid: Currently &ldquo;elevated risk,&rdquo; also slipping into &ldquo;high risk&rdquo; come 2029 like PJM. The report warns that &ldquo;continued rapid load growth outpaces projected resource additions in later years.&rdquo;</li>
</ul>
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Do you detect a pattern here? None of the issues we began warning about in 2022 have been addressed in any meaningful way.
The three regions listed above aren&rsquo;t the only ones that will slip into the red &ldquo;high risk&rdquo; category before the end of the decade. You can review NERC&rsquo;s report for yourself <a href="https://www.nerc.com/globalassets/our-work/assessments/nerc_ltra_2025.pdf">right here</a>.
And the report might be underselling the risks: NERC says California is at a &ldquo;normal&rdquo; level of risk&hellip; but Paradigm energy authority Byron King says &ldquo;on any given day, about one-third of California&rsquo;s non-solar electricity is wheeled in from outside &mdash; either the Pacific Northwest or the Rocky Mountains.&rdquo;
Both of those regions, you&rsquo;ll note, are in the red.
What to do? You can attack this issue from a couple of angles:
<ul>
<li>First, there&rsquo;s personal preparedness. If you don&rsquo;t have the funds for one of those Generac &ldquo;whole house&rdquo; generators, garden-variety gasoline-fired generators are much more affordable and can keep essential loads running. Do it right: Have an electrician install a transfer switch and breaker interlock. Then test your backup system at least three times a year so you&rsquo;ll know what to do step-by-step once the lights go out for real</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>As for how to invest&hellip; Last year, Paradigm readers started reaping the profits from this phenomenon as share prices of &ldquo;independent power producers&rdquo; that aren&rsquo;t regulated utilities began to soar. On May 7, we offered a rare free pick in 5 Bullets &mdash; Constellation Energy &mdash; which rose 34% by year-end. Meanwhile, Enrique Abeyta pinpointed a special trade for his paid readers, garnering 177% on Talen Energy.</li>
</ul>
Shares of the independent power producers have pulled back in early 2026 &mdash; potentially serving up an attractive new entry point. Keep an eye out in your paid publication(s) for ways to play the trend as the year goes on.
Unfortunately there are no ETFs comprising only independent power producers &mdash; but those companies do make up a meaningful slice of the State Street Utilities Select Sector SPDR ETF (XLU).
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2_2x-new.png 2x" alt="2" width="37" />The Rules Are Changing (Climate Regs)
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> On the margins, action by the White House might help alleviate the electricity crunch described in today&rsquo;s Bullet No. 1.
Today&rsquo;s Wall Street Journal has a front-page story telling us the Trump administration plans to junk the Obama administration&rsquo;s &ldquo;endangerment finding&rdquo; &mdash; which asserted that so-called climate change poses a threat to public health and welfare.
The finding, which dates to 2009, has been a key facet of what our Jim Rickards has long called the &ldquo;Green New Scam.&rdquo;
&ldquo;Expert climate change predictions have been wrong for 50 years,&rdquo; Jim wrote his Strategic Intelligence readers in December. &ldquo;Every year, the science experts claim the world will be flooded in 10 years and 10 years later they&rsquo;re wrong every time.&rdquo;
Ever since that 2009 finding, the EPA has exercised sweeping new powers beyond just keeping the air and water clean. Carbon dioxide came under its purview, and thus the agency has been tightening fuel-economy standards for vehicles and &mdash; relevant to our discussion today &mdash; capping carbon emissions from power plants. It&rsquo;s one reason why so many functional coal-fired plants are shutting down.
The final revised rule will be made public later this week. &ldquo;This amounts to the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States,&rdquo; EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin tells the Journal.
From the vantage point of early 2026 it&rsquo;s hard to say exactly what the impact will be. And it&rsquo;s likely that the climate-change crowd will take the Trump administration to court.
But we figured it&rsquo;s worth putting on the record today&hellip;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3_2x-new.png 2x" alt="3" width="37" />Party Like It&rsquo;s 1999
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;When you strip away the fear and compare today&rsquo;s conditions to those in early 2000, it&rsquo;s clear the market is NOT at a top like the one before the dot-com collapse,&rdquo; says Paradigm trading pro Enrique Abeyta.
As we noted last week, a sell-off in software stocks like Salesforce has revived fears of an &ldquo;AI bubble&rdquo; &mdash; and chatter that we&rsquo;re in for a rerun of the dot-com bust, in which the Nasdaq crumbled by 78% starting in early 2000.
But &ldquo;the market is behaving very differently today,&rdquo; says Enrique &mdash; &ldquo;and many of the signals that defined that era are notably absent.&rdquo;
For one thing, the Nasdaq has not experienced the hyperbolic rise that it did at the end of the dot-com bust &mdash; an 80% surge in only five months.
Indeed the Nasdaq has been consolidating since mid-2025. &ldquo;Blow-off tops don&rsquo;t happen in markets that are correcting internally,&rdquo; Enrique says. &ldquo;They happen when everything rises together, relentlessly, regardless of earnings, growth or balance sheet strength.&rdquo;
For another thing, the Federal Reserve is not raising interest rates &mdash; which it was throughout 1999 and early 2000. Assuming Kevin Warsh is confirmed by the Senate as the new Fed chair, rate cuts are in the offing later in 2026.
&ldquo;Markets typically do not experience catastrophic tops when monetary policy is easing,&rdquo; Enrique says. &ldquo;Liquidity acts as a cushion. It supports risk assets, absorbs shocks and extends cycles longer than many expect.&rdquo;
And there&rsquo;s a third difference, perhaps the most important, he points out: The most notorious-dot coms &ldquo;were burning cash at staggering rates and financing growth almost entirely through debt issuance and equity dilution. When capital markets closed, those business models collapsed overnight.
&ldquo;Fast-forward to 2026 and the picture could not be more different. The companies committing the largest capital expenditures today are among the healthiest and most profitable enterprises on the planet.&rdquo;
That includes the four biggest hyperscalers &mdash; Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon. &ldquo;The major technology leaders funding AI infrastructure are generating massive free cash flow, posting strong margins and operating with fortress-like balance sheets.&rdquo;
Bottom line: &ldquo;Against this backdrop, I feel more bullish than I&rsquo;ve been in years&hellip; This environment feels far more like 1999 than 2000.&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Maybe today is the day the S&amp;P 500 will notch its first close over 7,000.
At last check, the index is up a little less than a quarter percent to 6,980. The Nasdaq&rsquo;s gain is similar. The Dow is powering still higher into record territory, up a half percent and approaching 50,400.
Precious metals look positively sleepy by recent standards &mdash; gold down about $50 but still holding the line on $5,000 and silver down about two bucks to $81.30.
The major cryptos are little moved from this time 24 hours ago &mdash; Bitcoin a little under $70,000, Ethereum a little over $2,000.
Crude is inching higher at $64.54.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Steady as she goes for the nation&rsquo;s small-business sector.
The National Federation of Independent Business is out with its monthly Small Business Optimism Index. The headline number for January is 99.3, down slightly from December&rsquo;s 99.5. But it&rsquo;s still above the long-term average of this survey, which goes back more than 50 years.
On the portion of the survey where respondents are asked to identify their single-most important problem, taxes are in first place &mdash; cited by 18%.
&ldquo;Taxes ranking as the top issue is typically a sign that other, less consistent issues (labor quality, inflation, poor sales, etc.) are not currently in a bad state,&rdquo; says the NFIB&rsquo;s report.
But good help is still hard to find in many places: &ldquo;Quality of labor&rdquo; was cited by 16%. The cost and availability of insurance comes in third at 13% &mdash; the highest that category has registered in over seven years. Inflation was cited by 12%.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4_2x-new.png 2x" alt="4" width="37" />Copper: Still Attractive
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;Without a significant reduction in demand or a massive increase in supply, we will see a big squeeze in copper,&rdquo; says Real Wealth Insider editor Matt Badiali.
<a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/teslas-loss-your-gain">Last month</a>, as copper crossed $6 a pound for the first time, Matt helped us spotlight the red metal&rsquo;s investment potential in the context of sturdy global demand for electric vehicles.
Since then, the price spiked over $6.50 at the same time gold and silver reached their manic highs &mdash; only to fall back.
But copper is hanging tough, still a little under $6, because the long-term story remains so compelling.
&ldquo;As we enter the age of AI and massive data center buildouts,&rdquo; says Matt, &ldquo;copper is more important than ever. And the supply/demand curve points to even higher prices.&rdquo;
Analysts at S&amp;P Global expect over the next 14 years, global copper supply will fall 23.8% short of demand. According to their recent report, &ldquo;The widening disconnect highlights copper's dual role as both enabler and potential bottleneck for the energy transition and digital transformation.&rdquo;
&ldquo;In other words,&rdquo; says Matt, &ldquo;if you&rsquo;re a tech bull, you&rsquo;re also a copper bull. The limited copper supply creates a &lsquo;systemic risk&rsquo; for AI.&rdquo;
As before, Matt says the simplest way to play it is with a basket of copper mining stocks &mdash; the Global X Copper Miners ETF (COPX).
But he&rsquo;s keeping an eye out for juicier opportunities: &ldquo;The setup in copper is so good today that we can move further down the food chain in this sector. We can take more risks and make larger gains without the fear of a price collapse.&rdquo;
If you&rsquo;re one of Matt&rsquo;s paid readers, keep an eye out for a recommendation or two along those lines. If you&rsquo;re not among them, Real Wealth Insider is currently closed to new subscribers &mdash; but we&rsquo;ll let you know when it reopens.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5_2x-new.png 2x" alt="5" width="37" />Paper Money as Floral Arrangements
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> From the central bank of Kenya comes a warning to stop using the country&rsquo;s banknotes as faux flowers for Valentine&rsquo;s Day.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/6vclYRXgXU7w2Z7sl8gUdi/0e511e4bdc07a8157b5e33530e7f38da/FMF-Issue-02-10-26_2_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
Apparently it&rsquo;s become something of a Valentine tradition there &mdash; &ldquo;popularized by celebrities and online influencers, who share videos of themselves presenting such bouquets during celebrations,&rdquo; reports the BBC.
The Central Bank of Kenya does not approve &mdash; issuing a notice on social media last week reminding citizens that defacing the paper currency comes with a penalty as steep as seven years in prison.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> The news coverage we see of this story begs the question: Is the purchasing power of the Kenyan shilling so pitiful that it&rsquo;s useful mostly for fake floral arrangements?
We&rsquo;re pretty sure the blue banknotes used in the picture above are 200 shillings each &mdash; about $1.56 U.S. at the current exchange rate. And that exchange rate has been very stable since mid-2024.
So they&rsquo;re not worthless by any stretch. We&rsquo;re not in Zimbabwe-dollar territory here.
Indeed, the central bank says the problem comes when the paper currency is put back into use after being folded, rolled, glued, stapled and otherwise altered: Apparently it gums up ATMs and cash-counting machines.
Meanwhile, a website called The Punch tells us that &ldquo;Kenya is one of the world&rsquo;s leading producers of flowers, and the announcement has been welcomed by some who argue that fresh floral bouquets are more appropriate Valentine&rsquo;s Day gifts.&rdquo;
See guys, here&rsquo;s your subtle reminder that Saturday&rsquo;s the day. Get your flower order in early. You&rsquo;re welcome.

FMF-Issue-02-10-26(Featured)

Blackout Nation: An Update

<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1_2x-new.png 2x" alt="1" width="37" />Flying Cars (Sooner Than You Think)
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> For the better part of 15 years, it&rsquo;s been the most damning indictment of the digital age: &ldquo;We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.&rdquo;
So read the subtitle of a 2011 report from Founders Fund &mdash; a venture capital firm co-founded by Peter Thiel.
(Recall this was a time when X was still called Twitter and tweets were limited to 140 characters.)
The report&rsquo;s thesis? Computers were getting faster, cheaper, better. But in the realm of &ldquo;real stuff,&rdquo; human progress was nearing a standstill.
As Thiel summed it up to an audience at Stanford University in 2012, &ldquo;Whether we look at transportation, energy, commodity production, food production, agro-tech, nanotechnology &mdash; that with the exception of computers, we&rsquo;ve had tremendous slowdown&hellip;
&ldquo;I believe we are in a world where innovation in stuff was outlawed. It was basically outlawed in the last 40 years &mdash; part of it was environmentalism, part of it was risk aversion. And all the engineering disciplines that had to do with stuff have basically been outlawed one by one.&rdquo;
Thiel was not alone in the early 2010s&hellip;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not denying that the changes in digital IT over the last three decades have been breathtaking,&rdquo; wrote the demographer Neil Howe, also in 2012. &ldquo;They have been.&rdquo;
But progress otherwise during his boomer lifetime, he suggested, was much slower than during the life of, say, Dwight Eisenhower, born in 1890.
&ldquo;When he was a child... you needed to know Morse code to communicate faster than a horse could run, and (in fact) horses were the only mode of ordinary street transport. Children routinely died from bacterial infections. And Lord Kelvin, one of the greatest scientists of that age, declared that &lsquo;aeronautical travel&rsquo; was impossible.&rdquo;
By the time Ike was president in the late &rsquo;50s, &ldquo;he was inside in a Boeing 707... dictating memos on the deployment of hydrogen bombs, sugar-cube vaccines for polio and plans to put a &lsquo;man on the moon&rsquo; while flying at 35,000 feet over a nation whose vast, affluent, homeowning, car-driving, union card-holding middle class would have been utterly inconceivable in the presidency of William McKinley.
&ldquo;Meanwhile I get up every morning and drive basically the same silly internal-combustion car that people drove 50 years ago through the same suburbs on the same interstates to the same buildings powered by the same nuclear plants and hydroelectric dams that Eisenhower&rsquo;s peers saw fit to build.&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> That was then. This is now. People privy to Thiel&rsquo;s thinking say he&rsquo;s changed his tune. 
As recently as last summer, Thiel gave an interview to The New York Times in which he continued to lament the lack of progress outside the digital realm.
But during a recent edition of the Provoked podcast, co-host Darryl Cooper said he attended a private talk given by Thiel. Apparently Thiel now believes AI has the potential to bring about a transformation in all the realms where there&rsquo;s been middling progress for the last 50 years &mdash; energy, transportation, agriculture&hellip;
Cooper did not specify what brought about Thiel&rsquo;s change of heart. A couple of different web searches on your editor&rsquo;s part come up dry. Whatever Thiel is saying, he&rsquo;s saying to a limited audience.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> But perhaps what he&rsquo;s saying is along the lines of what Paradigm&rsquo;s top editors were saying during our All-In Summit held last Thursday.
To recap, it was all about &ldquo;aAI&rdquo; &mdash; or autonomous AI.
Jim Rickards, James Altucher, Enrique Abeyta&hellip; They all see AI melding with advanced robotics and a revived U.S. manufacturing base. The sort of combination that could bring about flying cars sooner than you think.
And to be clear, this convergence is not something they see coming in the 2030s. They see three catalysts building here in the first quarter of 2026&hellip;
<ul>
<li>Donald Trump is set to sign an executive order accelerating the development of aAI. Target date: Any day now</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Elon Musk is preparing a one-of-a-kind aAI product rollout &mdash; an autonomous robot called Optimus that will re-shape every industry you can think of. Target date: No later than March 30</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, is set to unveil the company&rsquo;s newest superchip that will power aAI &mdash; and he&rsquo;ll name the tiny software company Nvidia is partnering with to make it all happen: Target date: Nvidia&rsquo;s annual GTC event, also known as the &ldquo;Super Bowl of AI,&rdquo; on March 16.</li>
</ul>
If you&rsquo;re a Paradigm Mastermind Group member, you&rsquo;re already hip to the changes that are coming and how to profit. Still, you won&rsquo;t want to miss a follow-up live session featuring the Mastermind team tomorrow at 1:00 p.m. EST. At that time they&rsquo;ll walk you through all the special reports they issued last week and even take your questions. Watch your inbox for a link.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2_2x-new.png 2x" alt="2" width="37" />Chop on the Surface, Calm Underneath
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Beneath the choppy action in the major U.S. stock indexes, a different picture emerges.
&ldquo;We are witnessing a clear rotation out of the highflying mega-cap tech names and into a much broader area of the market,&rdquo; says Paradigm analyst Zach Scheidt &mdash; who works on several publications including Altucher&rsquo;s True Alpha and Rickards&rsquo; Insider Intel.
&ldquo;We&rsquo;ve seen stocks like the Mag 7 absolutely tear higher over the past several months. It makes sense that these names need a break. And the fact that capital is rotating rather than disappearing means that the overall bull trend is still intact.
&ldquo;If anything, the market is becoming healthier as participation expands. As noted in the recent research from Bespoke regarding market broadening, the rally is no longer relying on just a handful of names to do the heavy lifting.&rdquo;
Consider the following stats:
<ul>
<li>57% of S&amp;P 500 stocks are currently outperforming the broad market index</li>
<li>4 of the S&amp;P sectors closed at 52-week highs at the end of January</li>
<li>91 stocks are already up 10% or more year-to-date.</li>
</ul>
&ldquo;While the Mag 7 names take a breather, small-cap stocks are holding up remarkably well,&rdquo; Zach continues. &ldquo;The Russell 2000 (IWM) remains firmly above its 50-day moving average, signaling that risk appetite isn&rsquo;t vanishing, it&rsquo;s simply moving to other areas of the market that haven&rsquo;t gotten the same excitement as the Mags.&rdquo;
In addition, Zach concurs with trading pro Enrique Abeyta&rsquo;s remarks here last week: The software stocks are deeply oversold after last week&rsquo;s bloodbath and liable to bounce big.
➢ Congratulations are in order for Altucher&rsquo;s True Alpha readers, where Zach and James Altucher recommended an up-and-coming tech name on Jan. 6. Today they urged readers to sell for 220% gains.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> In the meantime, Friday&rsquo;s bounce in the major indexes is extending into a new week.
At last check the S&amp;P 500 is up nearly two-thirds of a percent and less than 25 points away from 7,000. The Nasdaq is up nearly 1.2%. The Dow, which breached the 50,000 level for the first time on Friday, is also in the green today &mdash; but just barely.
Gold has roared over $100 higher to $5,074. Silver is up a blistering 7.2% to $83.25. Bitcoin has recovered the $70,000 mark and Ethereum is approaching $2,100.
Two big economic numbers are coming later this week &mdash; the January jobs report on Wednesday (delayed a few days by the latest &ldquo;partial government shutdown&rdquo; and the official inflation rate Friday.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> The oil price is drifting higher even though a U.S. attack on Iran did not transpire over the weekend.
When we left you on Friday, traders were once again positioning themselves for that possibility &mdash; bidding crude up in the event of a weekend attack when markets were closed.
Ordinarily we&rsquo;d see a pullback as a new week begins. Instead, a barrel of West Texas Intermediate is up over three-quarters of a percent, back over $64.
Perhaps that&rsquo;s because of something that did transpire over the weekend &mdash; an announcement that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will pay a call on the White House Wednesday.
For the record, this will be the seventh time he&rsquo;s visited Trump in the United States since Trump&rsquo;s return to office just over a year ago.
His demands are already clear: In a statement, Netanyahu&rsquo;s office said any U.S. negotiations with Iran &ldquo;must include limitations on ballistic missiles and a halting of the support for the Iranian axis.&rdquo;
That&rsquo;s a nonstarter for Tehran: &ldquo;Missiles are never negotiable because they are a defense issue,&rdquo; Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told Al Jazeera on Saturday.
SpaceX IPO Plans
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3_2x-new.png 2x" alt="3" width="37" />SpaceX IPO Plans
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> The SpaceX IPO is still on track for late spring or early summer after Elon Musk&rsquo;s announcement that SpaceX is acquiring xAI.
Musk made it official a week ago today &mdash; although users of the Paradigm Press mobile app got the scoop days earlier from our Ray Blanco, in attendance at the SpaceCom event in Orlando.
As we mentioned last week, combining the company will make it easier for Musk to pursue his goal of orbiting data centers &mdash; using 24/7 solar power that doesn&rsquo;t compete with homeowners and businesses for scarce electricity back on Earth.
&ldquo;xAI was burning about $1 billion per month,&rdquo; Ray tells us. &ldquo;They need SpaceX for orbital infrastructure. SpaceX needs guaranteed launch revenue. Space data centers solve both problems.
&ldquo;There will be other players doing the exact same thing &mdash; moving compute to space, with Google and Amazon as potential competitors from within the U.S.&rdquo;
As for the timing of the merger &mdash; the combined firm could be valued at $1.25 trillion &mdash; Ray says one possibility is June 8-9, which marks the conjunction of Jupiter and Venus.
&ldquo;It might sound like a weird reason to pick a date,&rdquo; Ray allows, &ldquo;but this is classic Elon Musk style. Remember in 2018 when he tweeted about taking Tesla private at $420 per share (a classic cannabis reference)?
&ldquo;Since SpaceX is a space company, Elon might like a date that occurs during a rare planetary alignment.
&ldquo;Another option is that Elon does it as a birthday gift to himself, on June 28 (Musk's 55th birthday). Either way, the IPO could raise up to $50 billion, which would smash Saudi Aramco's $29 billion record IPO raise.&rdquo;
In the pages of Altucher&rsquo;s Investment Network, Ray and James Altucher have pinpointed several ways to profit from SpaceX&rsquo;s IPO before it ever happens.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4_2x-new.png 2x" alt="4" width="37" />Bread and Circuses
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> The latest Jeffrey Epstein revelations opened an ugly window into what the power elite really thinks of the plebes.
It has to do with the already-disgraced Jes Staley &mdash; a 34-year veteran of JPMorgan Chase who moved on to become CEO of Barclays in 2015. He resigned in 2021 amid ongoing disclosures about his cozy relationship with Epstein.
The most recent Epstein document dump includes a jaw-dropping email Staley sent to Epstein ahead of the 2014 Super Bowl.
The context is that a few days earlier, protesters fought with military police in Brazil&rsquo;s most populous city, Sao Paolo. They were upset with the government&rsquo;s lavish spending on stadiums to host the 2014 World Cup.
Aside from that, the three-sentence email speaks for itself.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/2BlxIIci5CwPpYTrurQGms/f7bf7abe89b7b388a2be41c3819356e0/FMF-Issue-02-09-26_1_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
Brings to mind the late George Carlin&rsquo;s rant about how &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a big club, and you ain&rsquo;t in it.&rdquo;
And in light of how last night&rsquo;s Super Bowl halftime show became another touchstone in the culture wars, this part of his routine seems especially relevant&hellip;
<blockquote>That&rsquo;s all you ever hear about in this country is our differences. That&rsquo;s all the media and the politicians are ever talking about: the things that separate us, things that make us different from one another.</blockquote>
<blockquote>That&rsquo;s the way the ruling class operates in any society: They try to divide the rest of the people; they keep the lower and the middle classes fighting with each other so that they, the rich, can run off with all the ****ing money.</blockquote>
<blockquote>Fairly simple thing&hellip; happens to work.</blockquote>
And he said that in 1992!
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5_2x-new.png 2x" alt="5" width="37" />Mailbag: Silver, MAMA Stocks
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> A new week&rsquo;s mailbag begins with a one-sentence inquiry&hellip;
&ldquo;Do you believe confidence exists that silver can go higher than its recent high price and above in the near term of six months?&rdquo;
Of course confidence exists. The question is among whom?
In all seriousness, many smart observers of the precious metals space, both inside and outside Paradigm, believe silver could easily reach $150 by year-end &mdash; certainly next year.
Six months is a tighter timeframe, though. We&rsquo;re talking Aug. 9. Expecting silver to reclaim $121 by that time? It&rsquo;s certainly possible, but I wouldn&rsquo;t want to bet on it.
But I&rsquo;m nonetheless hanging on to my Sprott Physical Silver Trust (PSLV). I&rsquo;m playing for the long haul and I&rsquo;m willing to exercise patience. But that&rsquo;s just me. If you&rsquo;re sitting on hefty silver profits even after the recent whacking and you need to meet current expenses&hellip; you might well come to a different conclusion.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> After last week&rsquo;s mention of how our label of the &ldquo;MAMA&rdquo; stocks never got traction last year &mdash; Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon &mdash; a reader weighed in&hellip;
&ldquo;Since your MAMA acronym didn&rsquo;t catch on, how about adding a couple of hyperscaler-related companies, Nvidia and Oracle, and going with the Al Bundy-inspired acronym of NO MA&rsquo;AM?&rdquo;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/4TYtcpDTUzbyvqv90kD1h0/490135b2ebddc9f352d247c302e3a7f5/FMF-Issue-02-09-26_2_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
Dave responds: And I thought my mind went off on weird tangents!

FMF-Issue-02-09-26(Featured).png

Flying Cars (Sooner Than You Think)

<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1_2x-new.png 2x" alt="1" width="37" />39 Days Before NVDA Tips Its Hand
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> I&rsquo;m still shaking my head over what happened yesterday during the Paradigm All-In Summit featuring Jim Rickards, James Altucher and Enrique Abeyta.
There they were &mdash; our three most high-profile gurus, guys who frequently disagree about the direction of the market, the direction of the economy, even what to have for lunch.
But they were &ldquo;all in&rdquo; on a single big theme.
And I do mean big &mdash; the imminent convergence of AI, advanced robotics and the revival of U.S. manufacturing. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s going to be the biggest transformation to America&rsquo;s economy in 50 years,&rdquo; said Jim.
They were also all-in on a tiny software company partnering with Nvidia to make it all happen.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> But at the same moment 20,000 of your fellow readers were being clued in to this transformational wonder, mainstream financial media were zeroed in on near-term noise&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/I1WxzhmfmW7AbZEwFydMh/cd8167fe42417909797a4e420f07e9af/FMF-Issue-02-06-26_1_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
&ldquo;Big Tech stocks have sold off heavily,&rdquo; said the Financial Times, &ldquo;after the companies unveiled plans to spend $660 billion this year on AI, as investors fret that the &lsquo;breathtaking&rsquo; capital expenditures are outpacing the earnings potential of the new technology.
&ldquo;Amazon, Google and Microsoft are set to lose a combined $900 billion in market value since filing their quarterly earnings over the past week.&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Perspective, please: The Nasdaq Composite is down a not-so-whopping 6% from its late-October peak. If it were at all-time highs, no one in the media would be carping about an &ldquo;AI bubble.&rdquo;
&ldquo;Look, I know a thing or two about bubbles,&rdquo; Enrique said during the summit yesterday. &ldquo;I was managing money when the dot-com bubble burst. I shorted it on the way down and made lots of money for my clients.
&ldquo;What we&rsquo;re seeing today in AI is not how bubbles peak.&rdquo;
Which brings us to an eye-opening chart Enrique shared during the event. We&rsquo;ve shown it in the past here in 5 Bullets as well &mdash; comparing the Nasdaq Composite&rsquo;s performance during the dot-com boom and the current AI-fueled boom.
It sets the starting point of the dot-com boom with the launch of the Netscape web browser in December 1994. And it sets the start of the current boom with the launch of ChatGPT 3.5 in November 2022&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/7daUPtoIFlTu0CB2hpFtcM/55c9fe163550c965fda75f004275b7f9/FMF-Issue-02-06-26_2_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
In both cases, we&rsquo;re looking at a gain of over 100% in a little over three years.
&ldquo;Notice how much this bull run compares to the one 30 years ago,&rdquo; said Enrique. &ldquo;Imagine if this same situation plays out over the next handful of years.&rdquo;
If AI were nothing more than chatbots like ChatGPT, then yes &mdash; AI would be due for a hard reset.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> But as our trio of experts took pains to point out yesterday, AI is about much more than chatbots.
&ldquo;We&rsquo;re really talking about the next wave of AI &mdash; and that&rsquo;s robotics and automation,&rdquo; said James Altucher.
Call it &ldquo;aAI&rdquo; or autonomous AI.
To some extent, aAI already happening. Here&rsquo;s a startling stat we learned during the All-In Summit: A decade ago, the typical Amazon worker handled about 175 packages. Last year, the total was 3,870. That&rsquo;s AI solving real-world practical problems.
But with a new aAI effort called Project Trinity, those leaps in productivity are coming to every industry &mdash; again, AI melding with automation melding with a revival of the U.S. factory sector.
And our experts all agree it&rsquo;s got the backing of three powerful forces&hellip;
<ul>
<li>Donald Trump, set to sign an executive order any day now</li>
<li>Elon Musk, set to roll out his Optimus autonomous robots by the end of this quarter</li>
<li>Jensen Huang, the Nvidia CEO, set to unveil the company&rsquo;s newest superchip that will power aAI on March 16.</li>
</ul>
That&rsquo;s just 39 days from now. Oh, and Huang is also set to name the tiny software company Nvidia is partnering with to make it all possible.
So you have 39 days to position yourself for the biggest economic transformation in 50 years.
Profit potential, you ask? Perhaps 2,566% &mdash; unfolding in a matter of weeks.
If you&rsquo;re a Paradigm Mastermind Group member, you have full access to a suite of special reports released yesterday &mdash; naming this company and laying out a host of other lucrative aAI plays. <a href="https://my.paradigmpressgroup.com/subscription/pmg/reports">Access here</a>.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2_2x-new.png 2x" alt="2" width="37" />About the AI Spending Spree&hellip;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Life comes at you fast, doesn&rsquo;t it, Financial Times?
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/5Y3KQqhnStHq95fAYZi8nl/1eaec8b3548e9269b3795cf9d2b5fe6d/FMF-Issue-02-06-26_3_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
Amazon is down 8% today because its AI spending plans are more ambitious than Wall Street analysts are counting on. But the gloom is not extending to the tech sector as a whole, as the Nasdaq is up nearly 1.2% at last check.
The S&amp;P is up nearly 1.3% to 6,885 and the Dow has rallied 1.8%.
Actually, just about every asset class that took a beating this week is rallying into the weekend&hellip;
<ul>
<li>Gold is up 3.5% to $4,944</li>
<li>Silver is up 7.8% to $76.38</li>
<li>Bitcoin is back over $68,000</li>
<li>Ethereum is within sight of $2,000 again.</li>
</ul>
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Let&rsquo;s return to the AI spending spree before we move on&hellip;
Four of the &ldquo;Magnificent 7&rdquo; stocks are the hyperscalers pouring money into data centers (and the electricity to run them and the water to cool them).
A year ago we tried to label them the MAMA stocks &mdash; Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon &mdash; but it didn&rsquo;t catch on. All four of them have now reported their quarterly numbers. Looking at the reaction in each of their share prices, only Meta was rewarded by Wall Street for its spending plans. Hence the doomy headlines of the sort we mentioned in Bullet No. 1.
On the Paradigm Press mobile app, trading pro Enrique Abeyta posted the following yesterday&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/465iuyqqCn47XYecNKwT39/e64cc84d912ec1e4bdaea78ca2382607/FMF-Issue-02-06-26_4_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
He also pointed out a major difference between today&rsquo;s hyperscalers and the dot-com darlings of the late 1990s: The MAMA stocks generate profits hand-over-fist. The most buzzy dot-coms like Global Crossing and Level 3 had way more publicity than profits.
And even if the Street continues to punish the hyperscalers, all that money they&rsquo;re spending will flow toward companies like Nvidia, Broadcom and Credo.
Enrique&rsquo;s bottom line: &ldquo;This is NOT how the AI bubble bursts. We see a huge disconnect right now and would be buying aggressively.&rdquo;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3_2x-new.png 2x" alt="3" width="37" />War Drums
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> For the second Friday in a row, traders are bidding up oil in the event of a U.S. attack on Iran while markets are closed for the weekend.
Checking our screens, a barrel of West Texas Intermediate is up 1.2% and back above $64.
As we&rsquo;ve mentioned more than once, there&rsquo;s been a pattern during both the Biden and Trump 47 administrations &mdash; big military action launched during the weekend, when U.S. markets are closed.
<a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/morning-in-america-if-only">In one instance</a>, U.S. forces launched airstrikes against &ldquo;Iran-linked&rdquo; targets in Iraq and Syria as soon as the stock market closed on a Friday at 4:00 p.m. Eastern.
The idea is to short-circuit any instant market freakout. By the time trading reopens Monday morning, everyone&rsquo;s had a chance to catch their breath and they&rsquo;re less inclined to react with extreme buy or sell orders.
Today, &ldquo;indirect&rdquo; talks between American and Iranian envoys are underway in Oman. But any talks will go nowhere as long as Washington dictates terms that Tehran views as suicidal.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/2N6oKWZ0UB4RII5ZXl2xAh/2cc9bf6833327c45403f894098edadf0/FMF-Issue-02-06-26_5_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;They should know that if they start a war this time, it will be a regional war,&rdquo; Iran&rsquo;s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said last Sunday.
&ldquo;Sounds bad, but you can&rsquo;t exactly blame Tehran for threatening to set the Middle East ablaze,&rdquo; writes Andrew Day at The American Conservative.
&ldquo;Trump has demonstrated a strong preference for military action to be quick and achieve specific objectives so he can avoid American casualties and long, chaotic wars. The Iranians know this, and their provocative rhetoric is meant to prevent another attack on their country, not to antagonize Washington.&rdquo;
Amid that backdrop, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s really the Israelis who want a strike,&rdquo; a U.S. official tells the Axios site. &ldquo;The president is just not there.&rdquo;
He&rsquo;s probably &ldquo;not there&rdquo; because of these poll numbers. Even Republican support for military intervention in Iran is barely 50%...
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/1bFOAK5n71uqS299WMfrjI/e3ab921e043cd834d414a4ab87085565/FMF-Issue-02-06-26_6_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> On the one hand, it seems unlikely the Trump administration would order an attack on Super Bowl weekend, right?
On the other hand, the Winter Olympics open tonight &mdash; and Washington has a habit of instigating geopolitical trouble around the Olympics, as we&rsquo;ve chronicled previously&hellip;
<ul>
<li>Summer 2008: Shortly before the Games opened in Beijing, Washington&rsquo;s puppet leader in the former Soviet republic of Georgia invaded a rebel province, hoping to re-annex it. Georgian forces killed and wounded scores of Russian peacekeepers. As the games began, Russian tanks rolled into Georgia and quickly restored the status quo ante</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Winter 2014: As the Games were underway in Sochi, Russia, the Obama administration engineered a coup in Ukraine &mdash; ousting a democratically elected pro-Russian leader. From there, a low-grade civil war raged in Ukraine for eight years until&hellip;</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Winter 2022: During the games in Beijing, the Biden administration blew off Moscow&rsquo;s demands that Ukraine never join NATO and that U.S. weapons systems targeting Russia never be deployed in Ukraine. Moscow launched its &ldquo;special military operation&rdquo; four days after the closing ceremonies.</li>
</ul>
Yes, all of those examples involved Russia. Then again, an extended U.S.-Iran conflict might well draw in Moscow (and Beijing) on the side of Tehran.
Russian and Chinese leaders might tolerate the toppling of Venezuela&rsquo;s strongman Maduro. In contrast, &ldquo;Russia and China simply cannot permit Iran to fall,&rdquo; writes the military analyst William Schryver.
For them, Iran possesses &ldquo;inherent geostrategic importance&rdquo; as well as &ldquo;strategic importance to the emergence of the multipolar world for which Russia and China are the vanguards and strongest components.&rdquo;
On that less-than-cheery thought, we move on&hellip;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4_2x-new.png 2x" alt="4" width="37" />Comic Relief
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Wow, and people call me cynical. Here&rsquo;s Ryan McMaken from the Mises Institute&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/CcMVdvL4BX3ZHUVYtL33l/3f5e319ed0ca050ea00111c2c394aa32/FMF-Issue-02-06-26_7_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5_2x-new.png 2x" alt="5" width="37" />Mailbag: Silver Smash
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;Thank you, Nick Riso, for the great article,&rdquo; a reader enthuses after we spotlighted our able colleague&rsquo;s deep dive into <a href="https://rudeawakening.info/posts/how-the-machine-ate-itself">the meltdown in silver</a> a week ago today. &ldquo;It was both informative and educational!
&ldquo;One question: Is there not an ability to stop trading in a particular stock or the entire exchange similar to the financial markets? Should there be (you will always have events that can crush a market be they internal or external)?&rdquo;
Dave responds: Well, there are &ldquo;circuit breakers&rdquo; &mdash; a specific crash band for individual stocks. Typically it&rsquo;s a 10% or greater move in five minutes, although that can vary from one exchange to another.
&ldquo;But I can't say intelligently whether that's &lsquo;right&rsquo; or &lsquo;wrong,&rsquo; Nick tells us via email.
"It's a metaethical question there. Maybe it will be in the future with more automated trading, but maybe not. It's complicated.&rdquo;
You didn&rsquo;t get an easy answer, dear reader, but you got an honest one! As purveyors of investment recommendations we must deal with the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be.

FMF-Issue-02-06-26(Featured)

39 Days Before NVDA Tips Its Hand

<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1_2x-new.png 2x" alt="1" width="37" />Beyond &ldquo;Critical Minerals&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> On the heels of announcing a critical-minerals stockpile Monday&hellip; the Trump administration is convening a critical-minerals summit today.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio is joined by Vice President Vance and delegates from over 50 countries for an event called the Critical Minerals Ministerial.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/7vbMoikcdmVrNR2zwD3Wx6/7da0fe66312e5b99ec9dafd6bee90565/FMF-Issue-020426_1_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
Events like these are not where big decisions get made. They are where governments telegraph their intentions. As the State Department announcement puts it, &ldquo;This historic gathering will create momentum for collaboration to secure these critical components vital to technological innovation, economic strength and national security.&rdquo;
The meeting comes &ldquo;at a time when China has shown it can leverage its dominance in the field,&rdquo; adds the Financial Times &mdash; particularly in the realm of rare earth elements.
<blockquote>Rare earth minerals are used across a range of critical industries including autos, electronics, defense and energy. China dominates the refining and supply of the group of 17 metallic elements. The minerals consultancy Project Blue estimates that China currently controls 66% of the global mined supply and 88% of the refined materials.</blockquote>
<blockquote>Last year China exploited this dominance by imposing restrictions on the exports of some rare earths, raising trade tensions with the U.S. The Trump administration has since sought to support domestic suppliers, including by acquiring a stake in Nevada-based MP Materials, and diversify sources of certain metals to reduce dependency on China.</blockquote>
In China, the summit is the top business story on CGTN, the English-language state broadcaster. Note the &ldquo;cutline&rdquo; with the view from Beijing&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/4NZhXF39iAbJ22RqZLQsRU/8835f66d5cd859aa70af7398fd97f293/FMF-Issue-020426_2_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
To be sure, it&rsquo;s not all about rare earths. The U.S. critical-mineral stockpile announced earlier this week is likely to include everything from gallium to cobalt to lithium &mdash; essential for industries as diverse as automobiles, aerospace and energy.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> The U.S. government taking equity stakes in companies was mostly a 2025 story. 
The headline companies included MP Materials, Intel, U.S. Steel&hellip; and in early 2026, USA Rare Earth.
Paradigm Press readers have fared very well as our editors had the foresight to anticipate both the policy and the potential beneficiaries of that policy.
Several of our publications recommended MP Materials, or options on MP Materials. Altucher&rsquo;s True Alpha readers benefited the most, with 918% gains on MP call options.
Several of our publications also recommended USA Rare Earth &mdash; notably the Paradigm Mastermind Group, a showcase where several of our editors can unveil their most cutting-edge ideas.
In fact, USAR was the focus of a one-of-a-kind event we hosted five months ago called the &ldquo;All-In Summit.&rdquo;
It&rsquo;s a rare moment indeed when macro maven Jim Rickards, AI authority James Altucher and trading pro Enrique Abeyta are &ldquo;all in&rdquo; on a single buy recommendation &mdash; and not just any buy, but a screaming buy. Their consensus on USAR delivered 191% gains in a little over two months.
As it happens, they&rsquo;ve reached consensus again.
As before, action in Washington, D.C. is central to the story. And this time the opportunity could prove to be even more lucrative. (The potential upside is as much as 2,166% in the coming weeks.)
This initiative brings President Trump back together with Elon Musk&hellip; with essential input from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
If you&rsquo;re a current Paradigm Mastermind Group subscriber, you&rsquo;ll get the scoop on this new &ldquo;All In&rdquo; recommendation tomorrow afternoon. Watch your inbox.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2_2x-new.png 2x" alt="2" width="37" />Overreaction Much?
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Software stocks are getting smoked &mdash; so much so they&rsquo;re starting to look like a buy.
Yesterday the AI startup Anthropic announced it&rsquo;s adding a set of legal tools to its assistant called Cowork. If the tools live up to their promise, much routine legal research and drafting can be handled by AI.
The news crushed the share prices of companies that provide legal software and/or databases &mdash; Thomson Reuters, LegalZoom, the London Stock Exchange all fell 12% or more. Then the selling spread to software stocks in general &mdash; the Salseforces, ServiceNows and Intuits of the world.
And that proved to be a drag on the market overall &mdash; the Nasdaq ending yesterday down 1.4% and the S&amp;P 500 down 0.8%.
The selling sent the S&amp;P 500 Software Sector ETF (IGV) down so hard, its relative strength index tumbled beneath 20.
As you might be aware, RSI can be a valuable tool: Readings over 70 suggest an asset is overbought and due for a reset. Readings under 30 suggest it&rsquo;s oversold and primed for a rebound.
So for IGV&rsquo;s RSI to sink below 20? &ldquo;This has happened only two times in the 25-year history of the ETF,&rdquo; says trading pro Enrique Abeyta. &ldquo;Both times it was higher by double digits in 90 days.
&ldquo;We think this particular sell-off makes no sense and would be aggressively buying high-quality software stocks right now.&rdquo;
[Editor&rsquo;s note: Enrique originally shared this tidbit on the Daily Feed section of the Paradigm Press mobile app &mdash; where all day our editors are peppering readers with instant insights like these.
The app is also your one-stop shopping source for the buy and sell recommendations of all your paid publications. No more sifting through email to find the most essential info! <a href="https://d2z65klgtz99km.cloudfront.net/PPG-App/">Download here</a>.]
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;I'm looking for signs of capitulation today in some of these tech wrecks,&rdquo; Greg Guenthner writes his Trading Desk readers.
&ldquo;This software sell-off is getting a little ridiculous. I'm not saying that these stocks should magically zip back to their highs. But we should see if we can get some sign of an oversold bounce here.&rdquo;
In the meantime, however, the software sell-off has dragged down the S&amp;P 500 another half-percent on the day &mdash; under 6,900 now. The Nasdaq is off another 1.5%. But the Dow is in the green, up over a half percent.
Bitcoin broke to 52-week lows in the last 24 hours, sitting now a little over $73,000. Ethereum is holding the line on $2,100 for the moment.
Crude is hanging in there at $63.51, smack in the middle of its trading range the last week or so. We&rsquo;ll cover precious metals separately in Bullet No. 3.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Now that the latest &ldquo;partial government shutdown&rdquo; is over, the Labor Department says the January jobs report will be five days late.
Originally it was supposed to come out on Friday; now it won&rsquo;t be till next Wednesday. In the meantime, the payroll firm ADP says private employers added 22,000 jobs in January. That&rsquo;s way less than the typical Wall Street economist was expecting. Worse, the growth came only in one category, &ldquo;education and health services.&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Oh, about the shutdown: Congress passed and the president signed a bill funding most of the government through Sept. 30 this year &mdash; except Homeland Security. That&rsquo;s still pending an agreement on how ICE agents are to conduct themselves going forward.
Curiously the bill includes $5 billion in taxpayer aid for refugees who aren&rsquo;t in the country legally &mdash; and yet, all but one Republican voted &ldquo;yea.&rdquo;
<a id="3"></a>
The one Republican was Kentucky&rsquo;s Thomas Massie, who introduced an amendment stripping that funding &mdash; only to be shot down by House Republican leadership, presumably on orders from the White House. Go figure&hellip;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3_2x-new.png 2x" alt="3" width="37" />Silver Crash: Now It Can Be Told
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Another day, another round of gyrations in the precious metals.
Gold was within sight of $5,100 overnight but at last check it&rsquo;s clinging to $4,900. Silver surpassed $90 this morning but now it&rsquo;s barely over $85.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> When it comes to silver, &ldquo;the $90&ndash;100 zone now represents a massive wall of resistance, not because of any technical chart pattern, but because that's where thousands of retail traders are trapped in losing positions, waiting for any opportunity to exit at something close to breakeven.
&ldquo;Every rally toward those levels will be met with heavy supply.&rdquo;
So writes colleague Nick Riso. Nick is one of these incredibly smart behind-the-scenes guys we&rsquo;ve got at Paradigm that most of the time you never hear about. His knowledge of the internal plumbing of the options markets is second to none.
And make no mistake, he says it&rsquo;s the options trade that took down silver last Friday from $121 at its peak to $73 at its trough.
&ldquo;Every crisis has a moment where the machinery breaks down completely,&rdquo; he writes &mdash; &ldquo;where whatever thin veneer of order had been maintained simply vanishes. For silver on Jan. 30, that moment arrived at 12:55 PM.&rdquo;
You can read the entire blow-by-blow, before and after that moment, <a href="https://rudeawakening.info/posts/how-the-machine-ate-itself">here</a>. Yes, it&rsquo;s long. But it&rsquo;s thoroughly digestible and totally worth your time.
Nick also takes a wrecking ball to the conventional wisdom about how the appointment of Kevin Warsh as Federal Reserve chair figures into the story. It is not the mainstream narrative about how Warsh is an inflation hawk. Rather it&rsquo;s something else. Again, <a href="https://rudeawakening.info/posts/how-the-machine-ate-itself">go read</a>.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4_2x-new.png 2x" alt="4" width="37" />Comic Relief
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Whoever came up with this nailed all the buzzwords and gobbledygook. Like, perfectly. If you&rsquo;re ever on LinkedIn, you&rsquo;ll recognize it immediately&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/6X2vR8Dy20cdj2UK9EpvA9/64dee4862449f69821d78d3aaefcd737/FMF-Issue-020426_3_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5_2x-new.png 2x" alt="5" width="37" />Why We Do What We Do
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;You guys have been delivering value to me for a while and I want to share my gratitude for allowing me to sign up,&rdquo; says a reader who reminds us why we do what we do here.
&ldquo;You guys have consistently provided emails and text updates and I am feeling like I am making progress in my personal life because of the endless value that has been provided. So many people should listen to this but as you know not everybody is on the same page so we gotta do what we can with what we got.&nbsp;
&ldquo;I'm excited for the summit coming up and I look forward to hearing from you guys then.&rdquo;
Dave responds: We&rsquo;ve stepped up our game around here in recent months when it comes to making sure our paid publications keep readers posted about all of the open recommendations. We&rsquo;re heartened that you&rsquo;ve noticed.
And we have more improvements in the works. Stay tuned!

FMF-Issue-020426(Featured)

Critical Minerals Ministerial

<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1_2x-new.png 2x" alt="1" width="37" />Project Vault
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> We mentioned it briefly yesterday and it deserves more attention today &mdash; the critical-minerals stockpile the Trump administration has in the works.
Project Vault, it&rsquo;s called. The seed money comes in the form of a taxpayer-backed loan from the U.S. government&rsquo;s Export-Import Bank &mdash; plus another $1.67 billion from the private sector.
&ldquo;The model mirrors the country&rsquo;s emergency oil reserve,&rdquo; says the Mining.com site, &ldquo;but focuses instead on materials such as gallium and cobalt used in products ranging from smartphones to jet engines.
&ldquo;The project spans the automotive, aerospace and energy sectors and underscores Trump&rsquo;s broader push to rewire U.S. supply chains away from China, the world&rsquo;s dominant producer and processor of critical minerals.
&ldquo;More than a dozen companies have reportedly signed on, including General Motors Co., Stellantis NV, Boeing Co., Corning Inc., GE Vernova Inc. and Alphabet Inc.&rsquo;s Google. Commodities traders Hartree Partners LP, Traxys North America LLC and Mercuria Energy Group Ltd. will handle purchases to fill the stockpile.&rdquo;
Vault&rsquo;s ambitious scope is exemplified by the two CEOs who were on hand for yesterday&rsquo;s announcement at the White House &mdash; GM&rsquo;s Mary Barra and mining billionaire Robert Friedland, the founder of Ivanhoe Mines.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/5MjVldXA80YHdGGUUuGY1y/99503d86ab5a9db20c6e9a7f5af38132/FMF-Issue-02-03-26-_1_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
The U.S. government already has a national stockpile for military purposes; this one, we&rsquo;re told, is for civilian applications.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> The mere appearance of the words &ldquo;critical minerals&rdquo; in a headline tends to give a boost to the rare-earth names &mdash; and this week is no exception.
As mentioned here yesterday, shares of USA Rare Earth Inc. (USAR) soared when Bloomberg broke the story ahead of the White House event.
USAR already got a lift last week when the Commerce Department took a 10% stake in the company &mdash; one of many equity stakes the U.S. government has taken in private firms during the Trump 47 administration.
Long before any of these headlines broke, however, the diverse analysts at Paradigm Press saw USAR&rsquo;s potential.
Macro maven Jim Rickards, AI authority James Altucher and trading pro Enrique Abeyta &mdash; they have vastly differing approaches to the recommendations they issue their readers.
But they were &ldquo;all in&rdquo; about USAR during a livestream event on Aug. 7, 2025. As such, we called it the &ldquo;All-In Summit.&rdquo;
USAR shares soared from around $14 at the time of that recommendation well past $40 &mdash; a 191% gain, to be precise. At the very peak in mid-October, Paradigm Mastermind Group readers were urged to sell half their position and let the rest ride. After this week&rsquo;s bounce, USAR trades near $26.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Of course, readers are curious when the next all-in recommendation is coming.
But as we said here last week, it&rsquo;s not often these three guys are on the same page. And the last thing the Paradigm leadership team wants to do is force agreement where agreement doesn&rsquo;t really exist just so we can sell more subscriptions.
(Would we sell more subscriptions by doing so? Yes. Would we have satisfied long-term customers who&rsquo;d renew those subscriptions? Probably not.)
And yet&hellip; in the same way all three of them anticipated developments from Washington that would benefit USAR big-time&hellip; they now see an effort coming together that&rsquo;s far more ambitious than Project Vault.
They&rsquo;re all hearing the same rumblings from their sources. Two of the world&rsquo;s most powerful men &mdash; Donald Trump and Elon Musk &mdash; are in on it. And so is the world&rsquo;s most valuable company, Nvidia.
There&rsquo;s no working name for it yet &mdash; so for the time being we&rsquo;re calling it Project Trinity.
Jim, James and Enrique have identified the one company they believe will benefit the most from this initiative. This single investment could be the key to locking in a potential 2,566% return over the next few weeks.
If you&rsquo;re a current member of the Paradigm Mastermind Group, watch your inbox for the recommendation Thursday afternoon.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2_2x-new.png 2x" alt="2" width="37" />Gold-Silver Rebound
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> The rebound in precious metals today is a sight to behold.
After a Sunday-night plunge to nearly $4,400, gold is now $70 away from reclaiming the $5,000 level &mdash; which, we&rsquo;ll remind you, marked a record high last week before the dizzying run-up to $5,600.
Silver, meanwhile, is up a wild 11.4% on the day to $88.10.
During the big sell-off on Friday, we mentioned in real-time that the mainstream had latched onto a handy explanation &mdash; Donald Trump&rsquo;s nomination of Kevin Warsh as Federal Reserve chair. (Supposedly he&rsquo;s going to be an inflation hawk, resistant to Trump&rsquo;s entreaties for lower interest rates.)
We pooh-poohed the mainstream claptrap: The metals had run up too far, too fast. A correction was coming sooner or later. If Kevin Warsh weren&rsquo;t available for the mainstream to point to, it would have been something else. As our Enrique Abeyta would remind you, Warsh wasn&rsquo;t the reason for the sell-off, but it was the excuse.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;The real reasons for the gold and silver price plunge had to do with hedge fund traders taking profits, automated momentum trading, stop-loss algorithms, trend following and some panic,&rdquo; affirms Jim Rickards.
<ul>
<li>Profit-taking: &ldquo;Hedge fund traders don&rsquo;t really care about gold as money. For them, it&rsquo;s just another commodity like coffee, soybeans or lumber,&rdquo; says Jim. &ldquo;Imagine a hedge fund trader who bought gold on Dec. 31, 2025, at $4,340 per ounce using five-to-one leverage. With gold at $5,355 on Jan. 29, the unleveraged profit was 23%, but the leveraged profit was 117%! Time to cash out and take your money off the table</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Automation: &ldquo;Once some traders start to cash out and the price starts to go down, computers tell others to do the same. They follow suit and the price goes down more</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Stop-loss algorithms: &ldquo;At that point, the stop-loss algos kick in. Traders preset a maximum loss, and when that threshold is hit, the computers automatically close out their position. That drives prices even lower. At this point, longs are getting margin calls on the futures exchange (or from OTC dealers like Goldman Sachs) and they sell their positions for cash to settle up with the dealers. Selling begets selling.&rdquo;</li>
</ul>
At that point, &ldquo;trend-following traders jump on board. Panic selling from all sides is not far behind.&rdquo;
Looking ahead, Jim says all the factors that sent gold to $5,000 will in time send it to $10,000 &mdash; starting with the steady purchases by central banks around the world and mining output that&rsquo;s been flat for the last six years.
&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t panic,&rdquo; he concludes. &ldquo;If you have not invested in gold yet, or if your allocation is small, it&rsquo;s not too late to invest. The drawdown last Friday offers a better entry point today. The biggest gains are still ahead and will happen sooner rather than later. The time to invest is now.&rdquo;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3_2x-new.png 2x" alt="3" width="37" />SpaceXAI
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Last week&rsquo;s hot rumor is this week&rsquo;s confirmed news.
&ldquo;SpaceX has acquired xAI to form the most ambitious, vertically integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth,&rdquo; Elon Musk announced yesterday.
Paradigm tech-inevesting pro Ray Blanco heard the rumors all day Thursday at the SpaceCom event in Orlando &mdash; and tipped off readers via the Paradigm Press mobile app.
Musk&rsquo;s rationale: The merger will make it easier to pursue his goal of orbiting data centers &mdash; with 24/7 solar power that doesn&rsquo;t compete with homeowners and businesses for scarce electricity back on Earth.
Depending on who you believe, the combined company is worth about $1.25 trillion. There&rsquo;s no way to know for sure, given that neither entity was publicly traded; plans for a SpaceX IPO are still supposed to be on track for later this year.
(Or maybe Musk will fold everything under Tesla &mdash; as colleague Davis Wilson <a href="https://million-mission.com/posts/ticker-symbol-elon-coming-soon">speculated</a> last month.)
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> What the broad stock market gained yesterday, it&rsquo;s losing today.
As we write the S&amp;P 500 is down more than a half percent to 6,934. While the index poked its nose over 7,000 last week it hasn&rsquo;t been able to close over that level. The Nasdaq&rsquo;s losses are steeper, the Dow&rsquo;s narrower. Walmart just surpassed a $1 trillion valuation, rarefied air usually occupied by tech-adjacent companies.
Elsewhere, crude is consolidating just under $63. Crypto&rsquo;s woes are not over &mdash; Bitcoin now under $77,000 and Ethereum at $2,250.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4_2x-new.png 2x" alt="4" width="37" />Epstein
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> There&rsquo;s not much we can say about the new Jeffrey Epstein revelations that others haven&rsquo;t already, except&hellip;
The hits keep coming for Peter Mandelson, the longtime British politico who had to resign as ambassador to the United States last fall because of his relationship with Epstein.
Today brings word that he&rsquo;s now giving up his position in the House of Lords. Really, this is egregious&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/524OtTl1NXG8tszMpZk9gk/0a193a7e4e6a7be04d95053f3d0645ee/FMF-Issue-02-03-26-_2_.png" alt="pub" width="497px" />
&ldquo;For all the newfound insistence that Epstein files are devoid of major revelations, they sure are destroying the reputation and standing of a lot of very powerful people,&rdquo; observes the journalist and civil libertarian Glenn Greenwald.
On this side of the pond, there&rsquo;s former Treasury Secretary and former Harvard President Larry Summers &mdash; who &ldquo;paused&rdquo; his public appearances last November after his correspondence with Epstein was made public.
&ldquo;A key revelation,&rdquo; Greenwald continues on X, &ldquo;is how Epstein's known offenses were irrelevant for his standing among global elites.&rdquo;
Word. And there&rsquo;s a different sort of impunity at work, too&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/2vPbV9tyCy7tqRUWKheLDS/8843a450c4a99f0cfbbb8d8992f161b2/FMF-Issue-02-03-26-_3_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5_2x-new.png 2x" alt="5" width="37" />Comic Relief
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> OK, we&rsquo;re a day late, but&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/74P3xMGMxLCxfOHa63nGZK/9eb913188cc5fa85bd123d096686f742/FMF-Issue-02-03-26-_4_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />

FMF-Issue-02-03-26-(Featured)

Project Vault

<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1_2x-new.png 2x" alt="1" width="37" /> OK, time to take a deep breath&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/6F3aqFAnj4yc3rtji2HO1Q/450be07446bebb2358430119be46d29d/FMF-Issue-02-02-26_1_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
Yes, precious metals got whacked on Friday. They&rsquo;re getting whacked some more today.
Let&rsquo;s try to get some perspective as we look at our screens this morning. Gold is just under $4,700. That level was a record high way back on&hellip; Jan. 19. Two weeks ago.
Silver is a little over $80. That was a record high way back on&hellip; Dec. 28. Barely a month ago.
Meanwhile on X, author Lawrence McDonald reminds us that Microsoft&rsquo;s share price is no higher today than it was in&hellip; March 2024.
Netflix shares trade today for the same price they did in November 2024. And by the same token you&rsquo;d be at breakeven on Tesla shares held since [gulp] November 2021.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> The metals had gone up too far, too fast. A reset was inevitable.
What do Paradigm&rsquo;s top experts have to say now? Macro maven Jim Rickards weighed in Friday evening on the Paradigm mobile app&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/2xLzcsU5ZsvEa5yX1N89fF/c8caa6f656e170531a5f94ae6cadc6d1/FMF-Issue-02-02-26_2_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
Trading pro Enrique Abeyta is in broad agreement: &ldquo;Despite the dramatic move last week and the volatility, we are likely to see in coming weeks, the multiyear bull market in silver is not at all over,&rdquo; he writes in our Truth &amp; Trends e-letter, set for publication later today.
&ldquo;In fact, it may still be in its early innings.&rdquo;
None of the factors that drove silver over $50 last year has changed: Supply is tight. Demand is growing. Confidence in fiat currencies both here and abroad is eroding.
The factors that drove silver from $50 to $120? Those did change. The first wave of price appreciation attracted the &ldquo;momentum&rdquo; crowd &mdash; people who don&rsquo;t care about supply or demand or other factors.
&ldquo;These investors do NOT care about the long-term reasons to be bullish silver,&rdquo; Enrique says. &ldquo;They only care that the price is going up.
&ldquo;&hellip; and when the price stops going up? They sell.&rdquo;
Simple as that. If you&rsquo;re into silver for the long term, Jim and Enrique say hold on tight. Your patience will be further rewarded.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2_2x-new.png 2x" alt="2" width="37" />Markets Today: Rare Earths and Oil
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> As a new week begins, the momentum crowd that&rsquo;s ditching silver is suddenly discovering rare earths.
&ldquo;President Donald Trump is set to launch a strategic critical-minerals stockpile with $12 billion in seed money,&rdquo; reports Bloomberg &mdash; &ldquo;a bid to insulate manufacturers from supply shocks as the U.S. works to slash its reliance on Chinese rare earths and other metals.
&ldquo;The venture &mdash; dubbed Project Vault &mdash; is set to marry $1.67 billion in private capital with a $10 billion loan from the U.S. Export-Import Bank to procure and store the minerals for automakers, tech firms and other manufacturers.&rdquo;
As always in situations like these, the details are fuzzy. How much of this is new and how much of it is a continuation of Trump administration initiatives from last year? (We chronicled many of these initiatives here in 5 Bullets &mdash; and many Paradigm readers profited from plays on MP Materials and similar names.)
In any event, investors are bidding up many of the big rare earth names today. USA Rare Earth, for instance, is up 11.5%.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> The broader stock market is starting the week in the green.
At last check the S&amp;P 500 is up over half a percent to 6,980 &mdash; challenging last week&rsquo;s peak. The Nasdaq&rsquo;s gain is a bit stronger, the Dow&rsquo;s stronger still.
The big economic number of the day is the ISM Manufacturing Index &mdash; which roared higher in January from 47.9 to 52.6.
Numbers over 50 suggest the factory sector is growing &mdash; under 50, shrinking. This figure has spent most of the last three years under that 50 watermark, so we&rsquo;ll be on the lookout for a sustainable rebound.
Speaking of economic data, the Labor Department says there will be no January jobs report this Friday, owing to the &ldquo;partial government shutdown&rdquo; that began over the weekend.
Crypto is in a world of hurt &mdash; Bitcoin a little over $79,000 and that&rsquo;s up from the weekend lows. Ethereum sits under $2,400.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Oil prices have cratered nearly three bucks to $62.23 because U.S. forces did not attack Iran over the weekend.
When we left you on Friday, the price action suggested traders were positioning themselves for some sort of renewed conflict.
But no attack took place: U.S. media report that the Pentagon wants to get more air defenses into place first, while Iranian media report that President Masoud Pezeshkian has ordered new negotiations with Washington about Iran&rsquo;s civilian nuclear program.
Back stateside&hellip; there&rsquo;s a merger to report in the energy sector, creating a major player in shale oil: Devon Energy is combining with Coterra Energy in a $58 billion all-stock deal. DVN shares are up more than a half-percent as we write while CTRA is down over 2%.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3_2x-new.png 2x" alt="3" width="37" />Space Is Vast&hellip; But This Is Bigger
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;I&rsquo;m thinking about how major shifts happen. The world transforms quietly while we're looking elsewhere. By the time most people notice, the change is already complete,&rdquo; muses Paradigm tech-investing pro Ray Blanco.
&ldquo;I think we're in one of those moments right now &mdash; and it's not just AI or the breakthroughs happening on the ground.&rdquo;
Ray couldn&rsquo;t help being awed in this way attending the SpaceCom event in Orlando &mdash; which wrapped up on Friday.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/mHCeebTtMjF3Buhy82ipw/44c40597bcbc9c85c75b5561ab91a125/FMF-Issue-02-02-26_3_.jpg" alt="pub" width="540px" /> Our man in Orlando&hellip;
&ldquo;Something bigger is taking shape overhead,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;A new layer of infrastructure beyond our planet &mdash; intelligence, connectivity and industrial capability that's already reshaping how the economy works.
&ldquo;We call it &lsquo;space,&rsquo; but that word feels too small for what I've been witnessing here. It's infrastructure that will be as fundamental as railroads were when they were built or the internet.
&ldquo;Most investors will recognize this shift years from now after it's already happened. You're learning about it today while the foundation is still being poured.
&ldquo;Generational wealth is made by those who see the trend before it becomes obvious. That's the difference between watching wealth being created and creating it yourself.
&ldquo;This has been an incredible three days not only for my current research, but for my understanding of where breakthrough tech is headed next.&rdquo;
Ray will share more of his takeaways with his readers in the days and weeks ahead, so keep an eye out.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4_2x-new.png 2x" alt="4" width="37" />Aliens and Markets
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Here&rsquo;s a problem we hadn&rsquo;t started thinking about yet &mdash; disruptions to the markets caused by disclosure about aliens.
But a former analyst for the United Kingdom&rsquo;s central bank is thinking about it.
Helen McCaw is her name and she&rsquo;s dashed off a letter to Bank of England chief Andrew Bailey. The Times of London got its hands on the letter.
&ldquo;The United States government,&rdquo; she wrote, &ldquo;appears to be partway through a multiyear process to declassify and disclose information on the existence of a technologically advanced nonhuman intelligence responsible for unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs).
&ldquo;If the UAP proves to be of nonhuman origin, we may have to acknowledge the existence of a power or intelligence greater than any government and with potentially unknown intentions.&rdquo;
Hmmm&hellip; McCaw attributes far greater &ldquo;intelligence&rdquo; to government than is deserved.
Be that as it may, she speculates that disclosure might spur a rush toward safe-haven assets including bonds and gold.
On the other hand, she said precious metals might lose their luster if all of a sudden there would be an influx of metal arriving from outer space.
Beyond that, she speculates &ldquo;there might be extreme price volatility in financial markets due to catastrophising or euphoria, and a collapse in confidence if market participants feel uncertain on how to price assets using any of the familiar methods.&rdquo;
She left out the part about government insiders trading on inside information &mdash; which seems like the surest outcome of all!
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5_2x-new.png 2x" alt="5" width="37" />What Goes Into the Mailbag?
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;Hi, I&rsquo;m quite disappointed you didn&rsquo;t feature my reply about 9/11,&rdquo; a reader writes.
&ldquo;You guys should consider incorporating a few more reader responses in your daily 5 Bullets.&rdquo;
Dave responds: Sorry to disappoint in this instance &mdash; although we&rsquo;re heartened to see that you follow our scribblings so closely!
There are many variables that go into deciding which reader emails we include in the issues, and which don&rsquo;t make the cut.
If there&rsquo;s a lot going on in the news and the markets &mdash; which has been the case lately &mdash; we&rsquo;ll tend to showcase less reader mail unless there&rsquo;s a truly hot topic.
Other variables include informational value, entertainment value and whether the reader&rsquo;s musings inspire a tangent on my part.
In your own case, I didn&rsquo;t want to get too far afield from our financial beat. We had a longtimer write in response to my issue-length exploration of <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/usd1-5-trillion">the military-industrial complex</a>. He had a handful of interesting points and then proceeded to assert that 9/11 was an inside job.
I wasn&rsquo;t about to suppress that portion of his email but neither was I going to open up a days-long debate about it. So I briefly said my piece and dropped the matter.
The exclusion of your email had nothing to do with whether you had something worthwhile to say &mdash; and I encourage you to keep writing!

FMF-Issue-02-02-26(Featured)

Gold & Silver: What Changed

FMF-Issue-01-30-26(Featured)

Elon’s Long Game

<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1_2x-new.png 2x" alt="1" width="37" />Don&rsquo;t Give up on Silver Yet
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Silver surpassed $120 today. It doubled in less than two months.
A picture of silver&rsquo;s chart right now could easily go next to the word &ldquo;hyperbolic&rdquo; in the dictionary.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/5kzn3iW2kwDmm9Wwq2MivL/e82a68fa4bf345a40db931a2842507d6/FMF-Issue-01-29-26_1_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
Yes, it will pull back at some point.
(Checking our screens, &ldquo;some point&rdquo; might be starting today &mdash; the bid now under $110.)
Precious metals guru Don Durrett &mdash; one of the voices outside Paradigm we follow most closely &mdash; figures $85 is the new floor.
Which we&rsquo;ll point out was a record only a month ago.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> But after that inevitable pullback, silver is on track to soar even higher.
Within the Paradigm stable, commodities trading veteran Alan Knuckman says based on the charts, he sees a &ldquo;blow-off top coming &mdash; maybe $150 or $200 an ounce.&rdquo;
Macro maven Jim Rickards &mdash; who ignores charts and focuses on fundamentals &mdash; arrives at a very similar conclusion: He wouldn&rsquo;t be surprised to see $200 silver this year.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Even big mainstream Wall Street firms &mdash; which typically hate precious metals because the metals don&rsquo;t generate fat commissions &mdash; are giving silver its due. 
Bank of America&rsquo;s chief of metals research Michael Widmer sees a peak anywhere between $135 and&hellip; brace yourself&hellip; $309.
The high end of that range is based on the gold-silver ratio &mdash; literally the price of gold divided by the price of silver. Here&rsquo;s a very long-term chart of the ratio going back a century&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/55rp0crTtDQXDN2JPsCwLy/ea2833acea8fc1e7a7d912fac480edf3/FMF-Issue-01-29-26_2_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
This morning the ratio sits at 46:1 &mdash; down dramatically since last fall. But in 1980, the ratio sank as low as 14:1. Based on gold&rsquo;s price at the start of this year &mdash; $4,326 &mdash; that&rsquo;s how Widmer arrives at his $309 outlier.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> If you really want to have fun with this ratio, a silver price of $714 an ounce is not out of the question.
Consider that Jim Rickards is on record projecting a gold price of $10,000 an ounce &mdash; perhaps even by late this year. That&rsquo;s totally plausible when you consider it&rsquo;s already well over $5,000; it wouldn&rsquo;t even have to double from here.
Yesterday, colleague Adam Sharp ran the numbers at The Daily Reckoning: Assuming a $10,000 gold price&hellip; and a gold-silver ratio of 14:1&hellip; well, that&rsquo;s how you get $714 silver.
Yes, that&rsquo;s a far-out projection. But even if silver rises to a level only half of that lofty figure&hellip; well, that gets you very close to the $309 figure that the mainstream won&rsquo;t rule out.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2_2x-new.png 2x" alt="2" width="37" />Is the TSLA-to-ELON Transition Underway?
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> For years, critics said Tesla was not a technology company &mdash; just a car company with extremely pricey shares. As of today, the claim no longer holds water.
Tesla issued its quarterly numbers yesterday after the closing bell. The 61% drop in profits was overshadowed by two announcements&hellip;
<ul>
<li>TSLA will sink $2 billion into Elon Musk&rsquo;s private artificial-intelligence firm xAI</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>The company will wind down production of the Model S and Model X at its Fremont, California plant; the factory floor will be converted to making Optimus robots.</li>
</ul>
Last Friday, colleague Davis Wilson at our sister e-letter The Million Mission served up a cheeky proposition: Musk would <a href="https://million-mission.com/posts/ticker-symbol-elon-coming-soon">consolidate all of his sundry businesses under the Tesla umbrella</a>, perhaps changing the ticker symbol to ELON.
Hmmm&hellip; The Tesla investment in xAI seems like a big step in that direction, no?
In the meantime, Wall Street is reacting badly to the slew of announcements, sending TSLA down over 3% as we write.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Elsewhere, you might call today&rsquo;s action on Wall Street a Tale of Two Hyperscalers.
Meta and Microsoft also reported their numbers late yesterday. Both companies beat the estimates of the typical Wall Street analyst. Both projected huge increases in spending on AI during 2026.
And that&rsquo;s where the similarities end. Unlike Meta, Microsoft&rsquo;s spending projections were higher than Wall Street&rsquo;s expectations. With that, MSFT shares are getting clobbered &mdash; down nearly 12% on the day. META on the other hand is up 7%.
It seems the Microsoft news is weighing more on the major U.S. stock averages than Meta&rsquo;s: The S&amp;P 500 is down nearly 1.5% on the day, back below 6,900. The Nasdaq is down 2.5%, while the Dow&rsquo;s losses are about three-quarters of a percent.
Crypto is selling off, too &mdash; Bitcoin under $85,000 and Ethereum approaching $2,800.
Crude, however, is up over two bucks &mdash; above $65 for the first time since late September. There&rsquo;s no new news about U.S. strikes on Iran, but traders continue to price in a growing likelihood.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll admit my mistake,&rdquo; Jim Rickards says after the Federal Reserve&rsquo;s latest policy-setting meeting.
Jim was anticipating a cut of a quarter-percentage point and a badly split vote among the Fed&rsquo;s Open Market Committee of 8-4.
In the event, the FOMC kept the fed funds rate steady at 3.75% and there were only two dissenting votes, both by Trump appointees favoring a cut.
&ldquo;The decision to pause rate cuts had nothing to do with the economy and everything to do with politics,&rdquo; Jim writes his Crisis Trader readers today.
&ldquo;Donald Trump wants lower rates. He has practically declared war on the Federal Reserve to get them. Even when the Fed cut rates as they have in recent meetings, Trump complains they did not cut them enough.
&ldquo;This meeting was Jay Powell&rsquo;s way of poking a stick in Donald Trump&rsquo;s eye. In this effort, he was happily joined by almost the entire board.&rdquo;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3_2x-new.png 2x" alt="3" width="37" />Gold, Central Banks and Tether
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Gold is getting smacked along with silver &mdash; tumbling from a peak of $5,575 to below $5,300. As it happens, $5,300 was a record high only yesterday.
The World Gold Council is out with its final report on central bank gold demand in 2025. It fell 20% from 2024 levels &mdash; but is still much higher than at any time before 2022.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/7wOa7jarGxtGlhM7p0a2MO/9c20656edb0dcd05a842bc14dfa33b5c/FMF-Issue-01-29-26_3_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
As we never tire of pointing out, the buying spree began in 2022 when the Biden administration froze the dollar-based assets of Russia&rsquo;s central bank. Government leaders around the world started wondering if it would happen to them too if they did something to offend politicians in D.C. Gold can&rsquo;t be frozen or seized as long as it&rsquo;s in safe storage.
The buying has eased off, but it continues at a healthy clip. As such, central banks continue to keep a floor under the gold price.
Meanwhile, investor demand for gold soared 84% according to the World Gold Council&rsquo;s calculations. &ldquo;The drop in central bank demand was completely overshadowed by the increase we have seen in investment demand,&rdquo; says WGC market strategist John Reade.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Also doing its part to fuel demand &mdash; the stablecoin firm Tether.
&ldquo;We are soon becoming basically one of the biggest, let&rsquo;s say, gold central banks in the world,&rdquo; Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino tells Bloomberg.
El Salvador-based Tether has accumulated about 140 metric tons of gold and is adding another one or two every week &mdash; most of it held underground in Switzerland. Bloomberg calculates over half its stash was acquired last year. Only one central bank in the world, Poland, acquired more.
Most of it is for the company&rsquo;s own reserves; the rest supports a gold-backed stablecoin.
Might the firm dial back its purchases? &ldquo;Maybe we are going to reduce, we don't know yet,&rdquo; Ardoino says. &ldquo;We are going to assess on a quarterly basis our demand for gold.&rdquo;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4_2x-new.png 2x" alt="4" width="37" />On Site at SpaceCom
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;This is the big one. NASA, U.S. Space Force and a who's who list of space companies, from big defense primes to scrappy startups, are all here,&rdquo; says Paradigm tech investing specialist Ray Blanco.
Ray is in Orlando for an event called SpaceCom &mdash; which kicked off last night.
&ldquo;Four thousand attendees,&rdquo; he reports. &ldquo;250-plus exhibitors. Three days of boots-on-the-ground intelligence gathering. &ldquo;My goal is simple: Find the space investment opportunities before they get priced to the moon so we can go along for the ride!&rdquo;
Of course, Ray has to do his due diligence on readers&rsquo; behalf once he gets back home. But here&rsquo;s something that caught his eye right away.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/1Yve4HKJuBmsMkQvqdCuho/5d6d990a98aa1a63fdea47b047509488/FMF-Issue-01-29-26_4_.jpg" alt="pub" width="540px" /> &ldquo;An aircraft carrier in space&rdquo; [Ray Blanco photo]
It&rsquo;s an orbital carrier. &ldquo;A startup called Gravitics is building them &mdash; think aircraft carriers in space &mdash; and funded by a $60 million U.S. Space Force contract. They expect to launch their first test carrier next year.
&ldquo;If China attacks our satellites in space, we can bypass waiting for launch and deploy from an orbital carrier already in space instead of having to wait on launch from the ground. This enables satellite replacements or defenses in hours instead of weeks. The company is also developing transfer vehicles to move the satellites to their final orbits.
&ldquo;There are commercial applications for satellite constellations as well and the company is also developing space habitats. Gravitics is a private company today but it could become a future opportunity.&rdquo;
In-between presentations, Ray is posting regularly to the Daily Feed section of the Paradigm Press mobile app. It&rsquo;s the only place you can see his regular updates from Orlando today and tomorrow &mdash; along with scads of instant insights from our team of experts. <a href="https://d2z65klgtz99km.cloudfront.net/PPG-App/">Download here</a>.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5_2x-new.png 2x" alt="5" width="37" />Mailbag: Pelosi, Gold Gain
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Your editor inadvertently raised a reader&rsquo;s partisan hackles in <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/the-only-safe-haven-left">yesterday&rsquo;s edition</a>.
&ldquo;Where were you when Pelosi was pulling off all her insider trades? Did you profile her like you did Hern? Apologies if I missed it.&rdquo;
Dave responds: Oh, let&rsquo;s see &mdash; how about right off the top of <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/todays-issue-is-not-about-pelosis-trades">this edition in 2024</a>? I imagine there are others, but deadline is approaching.
I&rsquo;d never heard of Kevin Hern until yesterday. I didn&rsquo;t notice what party he belongs to, nor do I care, nor did I even mention it. I just thought it was interesting on its own&hellip;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;With gold going parabolic in the last few days (using a personal modification on one of Jim's Rickards&rsquo; recommendations) I've realized gains in excess of what I usually make in a year working my job, and it's still January!&rdquo; a reader enthuses.
&ldquo;So I've got to be thinking, when the IRS demands I estimate how much I'm going to make this year, what am I going to tell them, and what happens if I am wrong in either direction? I've never made enough to have to pay upfront before. What do other traders and investors usually do?
&ldquo;I tried seeing a tax accountant and they did not have too much to offer in the way of advice for avoiding giving up the maximum amount possible from short-term gains. But I'm still considering going to see them to help with taxes this year. I've a feeling I'm going to need the help.&rdquo;
Dave responds: As you&rsquo;ve probably figured out by now, identifying investment opportunities is our stock in trade &mdash; &ldquo;personal finance,&rdquo; not so much. And especially not tax planning.
There are just too many permutations to the tax code that affect people in too many different ways.
Please, please consult a tax professional. Especially if you file quarterly estimated taxes. And ideally someone committed to making sure you pay only what you owe and not a cent more!

FMF-Issue-01-29-26(Featured)

Don’t Give up on Silver Yet

<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1_2x-new.png 2x" alt="1" width="37" />Trump, the Dollar and &ldquo;Safe Havens&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> When it comes to the value of the U.S. dollar, Donald Trump is channeling Alfred E. Neuman, the mascot of the old MAD magazine: &ldquo;What, me worry?&rdquo;
Asked yesterday in Iowa whether he was worried about the dollar&rsquo;s recent drop relative to other major currencies, he said, &ldquo;No, I think it&rsquo;s great.
&ldquo;I mean, the value of the dollar, look at the business we are doing. No, the dollar is &mdash; the dollar is doing great.&rdquo;
And just like that, what had already been a precipitous slide in the U.S. dollar Index since mid-January turned into a rout &mdash; as seen in this candlestick chart from the good folks at StockCharts&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/7ktB4fFtpKWODmECvQVj6D/f6fbc37574e8f114fb2b7f5d3dbff241/FMF-Issue-01-28-26_2_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
And gold sailed to crazy new heights. Again. At last check the bid is up another $96 to $5,275.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Even before Trump piped up yesterday, the International Monetary Fund said it was making contingency plans for a global run on the dollar.
On Monday, IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva said her organization is bracing for a rapid sell-off of U.S. dollar-denominated assets.
&ldquo;At the fund, one muscle that we are building is our ability to hypothetically present scenarios of unthinkable events and then figure out what to do,&rdquo; she said during an event in Belgium. Asked if one of those unthinkable events is a run on dollar assets she said the IMF runs &ldquo;all kinds of scenarios.&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Unfortunately, when it comes to insulating the global financial system from such a shock, the IMF has no &ldquo;muscle.&rdquo; It&rsquo;s the proverbial 98-pound weakling.
Georgieva&rsquo;s proposed solution is for the European Union to issue its own bonds, on top of those issued by individual EU member states. Because the EU is such a big market, EU bonds would supposedly provide investors an alternative to traditional &ldquo;safe haven&rdquo; assets like U.S. Treasuries and gold.
The idea is a nonstarter. For one thing, leaders of major EU nations like Germany and the Netherlands are dead-set against it.
And even if someone in EU leadership could herd cats and rally everyone around the notion&hellip; who&rsquo;d want to invest in the bonds of a region whose best economic days are behind it?
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Which leaves us all with the existing safe havens for scary moments &mdash; U.S. Treasuries and gold. But one of those safe havens is not like the other.
U.S. Treasuries were an outstanding safe haven from the 1980s all the way until 2020. Interest rates were falling steadily &mdash; which pushes bond prices higher. Treasuries were the ideal &ldquo;40&rdquo; component of a 60/40 portfolio: When the 60% of the portfolio devoted to stocks underperformed, the 40% devoted to bonds acted as a shock absorber.
But long-term Treasury rates bottomed in 2020. They&rsquo;ve been climbing steadily since. They don&rsquo;t even respond to moves by the Federal Reserve.
Over the last 40 years, every time the Fed has cut short-term interest rates, long-term rates have fallen in sympathy.
No longer: Since September 2024 the Fed has cut short-term rates from 5.5% to 3.75%. But the yield on a 10-year Treasury note has risen from 3.6% then to 4.25% today.
Higher bond yields, lower bond prices. The whole world knows that no one in Washington, D.C., either Republican or Democrat, will do anything about Uncle Sam&rsquo;s gargantuan $38.5 trillion debt. Medium- and long-term Treasuries are a loser now.
Which leaves gold. Yes, it&rsquo;s setting records day after day. Yes, it&rsquo;s up a nosebleed 23.2% year-to-date already. Yes, it&rsquo;s bound to correct sooner or later before the next leg up.
All we can say at this point is that if you don&rsquo;t have your full gold allocation yet &mdash; Jim Rickards recommends 10% of your investable assets &mdash; that you dollar-cost average. Buy a little bit every week or every month until you get to your 10%. That way you&rsquo;re sure to &ldquo;buy the dip&rdquo; now and then without trying to guess exactly when the gold price will turn up or down.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2_2x-new.png 2x" alt="2" width="37" />Market Miscellany
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Next, a quick follow-up to Bullet No. 2 in <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/nvda-and-goog-smart-moves">yesterday&rsquo;s edition&hellip;</a>
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/5XUFbnpylEIHVYAD53NZw9/d13509b1ce91b8857432e057508d57a8/FMF-Issue-01-28-26_3_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
After yesterday&rsquo;s vicious sell-off in the major health insurers &mdash; UnitedHealth tumbled 20% by day&rsquo;s end &mdash; they&rsquo;re enjoying a very modest oversold bounce, UNH up 2.5% as we write.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> As for the broad stock market, the major U.S. indexes are doing what they usually do ahead of a Federal Reserve policy announcement &mdash; treading water.
The S&amp;P 500 poked its nose over 7,000 briefly this morning but has since pulled back to 6,990 &mdash; up less than 0.2% on the day. The Nasdaq is up over a third of a percent while the Dow is flat.
Among the big newsmakers are Amazon &mdash; which just announced its second round of job cuts in the last three months, 16,000 positions this time. AMZN shares are flat on the day ahead of the company&rsquo;s earnings release next week.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;Big day for chip stocks,&rdquo; says Davis Wilson of our sister e-letter The Million Mission.
&ldquo;Semiconductor heavyweights ASML and SK Hynix jumped Wednesday after delivering strong earnings, reinforcing that demand across the chip supply chain remains red-hot.
&ldquo;Adding fuel to the rally, China approved sales of Nvidia&rsquo;s H200, pushing NVDA shares higher early in the session and easing fears around export restrictions.
&ldquo;Between ongoing memory chip shortages and relentless AI-driven demand, the semiconductor trade is back in the spotlight &mdash; and investors are paying attention.&rdquo;
Davis posted this nugget on the &ldquo;Daily Feed&rdquo; section of the Paradigm Press mobile app &mdash; where you can get all-day access to instant insights like these. In addition, you get buy and sell alerts for all your paid publications without having to sift through gobs of email. If you haven&rsquo;t already downloaded the app, <a href="https://d2z65klgtz99km.cloudfront.net/PPG-App/">you can do so right now at this link</a>.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> We touched on gold earlier. Silver&rsquo;s gain is not as strong today &mdash; up $1.25 at last check to $113.33.
While silver is in territory that seemed unthinkable only a few weeks ago&hellip; it&rsquo;s been consolidating this week in a volatile range between $102&ndash;117. It&rsquo;s gold that&rsquo;s been playing catch-up &mdash; ending last week just shy of $5,000 and now within sight of $5,300.
As for digital assets, not much to say: Bitcoin is a little under $90,000, Ethereum a little over $3,000.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Crude is over $63 for the first time in four months as Donald Trump issues new threats against Iran.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/6DiQtPs9hFJc2uZskgIT9V/3c046b79c8c6034322e59785169cebe5/FMF-Issue-01-28-26_4_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
Why any of this is necessary when he told us last summer that U.S. bombing had &ldquo;completely obliterated&rdquo; Iran&rsquo;s nuclear sites, he did not say.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3_2x-new.png 2x" alt="3" width="37" />85 Seconds to Midnight
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> The &ldquo;Doomsday Clock&rdquo; is closer to midnight than it&rsquo;s ever been.
Regularly since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has published a clock symbolizing the risk of nuclear Armageddon.
Throughout the Cold War, the clock never got closer than two minutes to midnight. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it&rsquo;s been <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/90-seconds-to-armageddon">90 seconds or less</a>, as seen on this infographic from Statista&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/7EeWkgLKJRIr2dEkOLwYgd/fb935162b25617bd102c21ddc5355519/FMF-Issue-01-28-26_5_.png.jpg" alt="pub" width="540px" />
In recent years, the editors of the Bulletin have updated the clock every year during January. This week, they inched the clock forward from 89 seconds to 85.
Among their reasons: The last remaining nuclear arms treaty between the United States and Russia is set to expire one week from today. The &ldquo;New START&rdquo; treaty of 2011 kept a cap on the two sides&rsquo; nuclear arsenals &mdash; each country allowed 1,550 deployed strategic warheads and launchers.
New START will be the second major arms agreement junked under President Trump; during his first term he walked away from Ronald Reagan&rsquo;s Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons from the continent of Europe.
And so next week will mark the first time in over 50 years that there will be no bilateral treaty limiting the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals.
The relevance to the markets and the economy, you ask? None &mdash; except there won&rsquo;t be any markets or economy for us to talk about if the Earth is pockmarked with smoldering radioactive craters.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4_2x-new.png 2x" alt="4" width="37" />Ditching TikTok
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> The new &ldquo;Made in America&rdquo; TikTok is so awful, hordes of users are walking away.
The market research firm Sensor Tower tells CNBC that the daily average number of users deleting the app has spiked 150% since the platform came under U.S. control last Thursday.
We&rsquo;ve chronicled the complaints in recent days: An intrusive new privacy policy&hellip; top users reporting zero views of their videos&hellip; claims of censorship&hellip; or the app just being either slow or unavailable.
And it seems users are seeking out alternatives&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/33qlpktPVC2hwYb0X7WuFh/46ff0c864ed45c72a41b4c341ba3f0dd/FMF-Issue-01-28-26_6_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
&ldquo;This is a textbook case of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect">Streisand effect</a>,&rdquo; says an observer on X. &ldquo;When platforms tighten censorship, users don&rsquo;t disappear &mdash; they migrate. TikTok&rsquo;s trust problem is becoming a growth engine for competitors, and UpScrolled is capitalizing on that moment perfectly.&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;I was one of the few Republicans that voted NO against the TikTok Ban,&ldquo; says a tweet from former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia).
[She was one of the few in either party to vote no, as a matter of fact&hellip;]
&ldquo;And now that it&rsquo;s been sold apparently people are getting censored for posting about Epstein and other things. People loved TikTok but they are leaving in droves because banning people&rsquo;s speech is worse than spying on them.&rdquo;
For its part, TikTok&rsquo;s new U.S. management says there are no rules against sharing the name &ldquo;Epstein&rdquo; in direct messages &mdash; a not-very-clever dodge that fails to address the claim that posts are being restricted.
This fiasco is a fitting conclusion to a sorry saga that was years in the making.
Two final observations, originally shared in <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/shut-up-and-obey">an issue-length exploration</a> of TikTok a year ago&hellip;
<ul>
<li>No one in either party tried to sell the American people on the urgency of either banning TikTok or bringing it under U.S. control. The politicos just did what they wanted, the people be damned</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>There will be more TikToks in the future: The law that forced the TikTok sale gives the president the authority to ban any website or app at his discretion if it is owned by a person or company in a &ldquo;foreign adversary country.&rdquo;</li>
</ul>
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5_2x-new.png 2x" alt="5" width="37" />Mailbag: 1968&hellip; and 2026
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;This was a fantastic report,&rdquo; says a very late-arriving reader email responding to <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/the-boomer-freak-out-of-2026">our Dec. 18 edition</a> &mdash; exploring a weird historical pattern that suggested that the tumultuous events of 1968 might reverberate during 2026.
(I suppose they already are?)
&ldquo;I remember very well all these events and you are spot-on. You missed the Newark riots, that I must admit was well done in the movie The Many Saints of Newark.
&ldquo;Dave, you are very good at this and you are one of the only nonpartisan reporters left. Thank you very much for sharing these insights.&rdquo;
Dave responds: After publishing that issue, I ran across <a href="https://www.chicago68.com/c68myths.html">a startling but credible claim</a>: At the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, &ldquo;an estimated one in six protesters was an undercover agent for the police, the Army or Navy or the FBI.&rdquo;
Doing some further digging, it turns out the estimate originates with a former Army intelligence offier-turned-whistleblower named Christopher Pyle, who turned his Ph.D. dissertation into a book called Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics, 1967&ndash;1970.
A 1978 CBS News broadcast also arrived at the one-in-six figure, citing Army sources.
Obviously not all of those faux &ldquo;protesters&rdquo; were agitators or provocateurs&hellip; but it doesn&rsquo;t take very many to stir up trouble.
Something to think about in light of events unfolding on our screens this month&hellip;

FMF-Issue-01-28-26(Featured)

The Only Safe Haven Left

<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-1_2x-new.png 2x" alt="1" width="37" />The &ldquo;Lag 7&rdquo;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> If recent history is any guide, this week should be the biggest week of earnings season. 
In mid-2023, Bank of America analyst Michael Hartnett coined the term &ldquo;Magnificent 7&rdquo; &mdash; applying it to a select group of tech-adjacent megacap stocks.
In alphabetical order they&rsquo;re Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook), Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla.
The Mag 7 were the engine powering the broad stock market during 2023 and 2024. Typically, five of the seven would report their quarterly earnings in the same week. Wall Street waited breathlessly for the numbers and conference calls. Financial media devoted as much hype to these weeks as they did to Federal Reserve meetings.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> And then came 2025.
Wall Street still waited breathlessly and the media still devoted oodles of airtime and bandwidth.
But the juice was gone. The S&amp;P 500 rose 16.4% for the year&hellip; and only two of the Mag 7 outdelivered the broad market.
Alphabet (GOOG) sailed 65% higher, while Nvidia (NVDA) rose 39%. The rest underperformed an S&amp;P 500 index fund. Jokes started to abound about the &ldquo;Lag 7.&rdquo;
This week, four of those underperformers report their numbers &mdash; Apple, Meta, Microsoft and Tesla.
Alphabet used to be part of this frenzy every January, April, July and September. This time, however, it&rsquo;s sitting out &mdash; waiting to report its numbers until next week. Nvidia, for its part, has always reported several weeks after its Mag 7 brethren.
Smart move in both cases. If you&rsquo;re crushing it, best to report your numbers when they won&rsquo;t get lost in the shuffle of everyone else&rsquo;s numbers.
And so the &ldquo;biggest week of earnings season&rdquo; no longer has the razzle-dazzle it once did. Heck, CNBC thought it was worthy of &ldquo;Breaking News&rdquo; this morning when old-economy stalwarts Boeing and General Motors reported their numbers.
Times change&hellip;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-2_2x-new.png 2x" alt="2" width="37" />Health Care: Crack in the System
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> The big story on Wall Street today is the first obvious crack in an unsustainably costly U.S. health care system &mdash; not that the media are framing it in those terms.
&ldquo;The Trump administration is proposing roughly flat rates for Medicare insurers next year,&rdquo; reports The Wall Street Journal. 
Oops &mdash; Wall Street analysts were counting on an increase between 4&ndash;6%.
With that, Mr. Market is mercilessly punishing the big providers of Medicare Advantage plans: CVS Health (CVS) is down 10.8% at last check... UnitedHealth (UNH) down 18.5%&hellip; Humana (HUM) down 19.3%.
Your editor has been writing about the staggering costs of the American health care system for over a decade &mdash; <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/health-care-on-trial">most recently over the holidays</a>.
Health care took up barely 6% of all federal spending in 1970. Today that share has swelled to over 35%.
Something&rsquo;s got to give.
Perhaps Wall Street is starting to wake up to that reality, given the price action in the insurance stocks today. The Trump administration will make a final call on the compensation those companies get in April.
If you&rsquo;re on a Medicare Advantage plan right now &mdash; more than half of Medicare beneficiaries are &mdash; it&rsquo;s not too early to start thinking about what your world would look like if the system can no longer sustain these plans and your only option is a more costly Medicare supplement or &ldquo;Medigap&rdquo; plan.
At present one major health care provider &mdash; Mayo Clinic &mdash; already turns away patients who have only Medicare Advantage coverage.
Many others are likely to join Mayo&rsquo;s ranks if events continue on their current trajectory&hellip;
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> As for the broader stock market, it&rsquo;s a mixed bag: The S&amp;P 500 is up a half percent as we write to 6,984.
If that number holds by day&rsquo;s end, it would be a record close. The Nasdaq, meanwhile, is up nearly 1%. But the Dow is down three-quarters of a percent, dragged down by the aforementioned UNH.
The action in precious metals so far this week has been dizzying &mdash; up huge Sunday night, down huge last night, up substantially (but not huge) today. Checking our screens gold is about 12 bucks shy of $5,100 while silver is over $108.
&ldquo;Volatility is likely to stick around,&rdquo; colleague Sean Ring writes in today&rsquo;s Rude Awakening. &ldquo;Scalpers will sell overbought rallies. Those sell-offs may overshoot. Price may spend time carving out a messy range while positioning resets.&rdquo; (If you want the play-by-play of everything behind the whipsaw moves of the last 48 hours, <a href="https://rudeawakening.info/posts/silver-shellacking">Sean&rsquo;s your guy</a>.)
Crypto is gamely trying to stage a comeback, Bitcoin back over $88,000 and Ethereum at $2,967.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Crude is up 1.7% as the war drums beat louder in the Middle East again.
&ldquo;The U.S. is weighing precision strikes on &lsquo;high-value&rsquo; Iranian officials and commanders who it deems responsible for the deaths of protesters,&rdquo; reports Middle East Eye, citing &ldquo;a Gulf official familiar with the discussions.&rdquo;
Judging by the U.S. bombing of Iran last year and the kidnapping of Venezuelan strongman Nicol&aacute;s Maduro this year, Donald Trump is keen for lightning-quick action &mdash; and no U.S. casualties.
If that&rsquo;s not a viable option this time, The Jerusalem Post reports that Washington is considering a blockade on Iranian oil shipments, similar to the one imposed on Venezuela late last year.
But that too comes with considerable risk, as the military analyst Will Schryver tweets&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/3ra3da9U457Wa1iQhafooe/ef1c2745699a74c3b7d67a3f5a64dd36/FMF-Issue-01-27-26_1_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
Amid these cross-currents, a barrel of West Texas Intermediate fetches $61.66 &mdash; on the high end of its trading range this month.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-3_2x-new.png 2x" alt="3" width="37" />Division and Dissension at the Fed
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Paradigm macro maven Jim Rickards is sticking his neck out.
This morning the Federal Reserve began one of its policy-setting meetings held eight times a year. At the conclusion of that meeting tomorrow afternoon, Jim expects the Fed will cut the benchmark fed funds rate another quarter percentage point to 3.5%. (It was 4.5% as recently as last summer.)
This expectation is far outside the consensus. Looking at the action in fed funds futures this morning, traders assign a 97% probability the Fed will &ldquo;pause&rdquo; its recent rate-cutting cycle and hold the rate steady at 3.75%.
Note well: Jim has had a near-perfect record calling both the direction and magnitude of Fed rate moves for the last four years.
At issue this time is &ldquo;Powell&rsquo;s loss of control of his own board,&rdquo; says Jim. Powell favors a quarter percentage point cut, and so do some of his colleagues. But other members of the Fed&rsquo;s Open Market Committee favor a steeper cut of a half percentage point, while others favor leaving the rate where it is now.
&ldquo;The result,&rdquo; says Jim, &ldquo;may be an 8-4 vote in favor of the 0.25% rate cut where the four dissenters are of two different minds &mdash; some supporting a larger cut and some supporting no cut at all.
&ldquo;This nuance will be lost on everyday Americans and the media. All they will see is a large dissenting vote.&rdquo;
Fed chairs have long exercised an iron grip over the other committee members. But now the level of division and dissension is its highest since the 1980s.
The fact Powell is a lame duck only adds to the sense of things flying apart. He&rsquo;s running only three more meetings until his term as chair is up in May &mdash; and that&rsquo;s assuming he doesn&rsquo;t quit early under pressure from Donald Trump.
&ldquo;That can only unsettle markets more than they already are,&rdquo; Jim concludes.
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-4_2x-new.png 2x" alt="4" width="37" />&ldquo;New and Improved&rdquo; TikTok (Continued&hellip;)
When we left you yesterday&hellip; we took note that under the platform&rsquo;s new U.S.-based majority owners, users were complaining about both an intrusive new terms of service (collecting data on everything from precise location to the user&rsquo;s mental health) and the suppression of news from the &ldquo;For You&rdquo; tab.
Now come accusations that posts about the late financier and sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein are being censored &mdash; which, of course, California Gov. Gavin Newsom glommed onto for partisan advantage&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/64TBX86clEnvy75rioz1CE/22f75d7b82de1c9b381c457b461c31a8/FMF-Issue-01-27-26_2_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
Elsewhere we see widespread complaints that the platform simply isn&rsquo;t available. The Downdetector site tells the BBC it got over 663,000 reports of issues from U.S. users of TikTok starting on Saturday and continuing through yesterday. Other users noticed the videos they uploaded had less visibility than before or were even &ldquo;stuck at zero views.&rdquo;
For its part, TikTok&rsquo;s new U.S. management said yesterday that users might notice "multiple bugs, slower load times or timed-out requests" that it blamed on a power outage at a data center owned by Oracle (which now owns 15% of TikTok).
"While the network has been recovered, the outage caused a cascading systems failure that we've been working to resolve together with our data center partner." it said.
And yet, TikTok seems to be working just fine in the rest of the world, where China-based Bytedance retains majority ownership. Go figure&hellip;
<img src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5-new.png" srcset="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/bullet-5_2x-new.png 2x" alt="5" width="37" />Mailbag: $1.5 Trillion
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;Wow Dave, this issue was exceptional,&rdquo; a reader writes after <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/usd1-5-trillion">last Friday&rsquo;s edition</a> exploring the underbelly of the military-industrial complex.
&ldquo;You have addressed most of these points in past issues but this was an extremely well-done piece. It ought to be used as a primer for any class on recent history. No buts. Surely there will be some simpletons who read it as an attack on some of their heroes &mdash; ignore them. You're doing good work, keep it up.&rdquo;
&ldquo;Outstanding 5 Bullets on Jan 23, Dave &mdash; one of your best over the past year,&rdquo; says another. &ldquo;Great to see a little bit of Bill Bonner and libertarian philosophy carried over from Agora into Paradigm Press. Now if you could just convince Jim Rickards and Buck Sexton to read it!&rdquo;
&ldquo;Excellent commentary!&rdquo; enthuses a third. &ldquo;Needed to be spelled out &mdash; you did that very neatly. As good as Chris Campbell &mdash; only different. Thank you.&rdquo;
Dave responds: Love Chris, so that&rsquo;s high praise indeed!
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> Not everyone is in accord: &ldquo;Maybe Dave Gonigam is a good managing editor, but he is an awful columnist.
&ldquo;I think I made it to Bullet No. 3 this time &mdash; and that was a struggle.&rdquo;
Dave: I appreciate the very specific feedback, laying out your objections so systematically. It will undoubtedly enable me to do a better job in the future.
<img class="intrinsic" style="float: left; display: block;" src="https://media.paradigmpressgroup.com/fmf-assets/Paradigm_Logomark_left.png" align="left" /> &ldquo;Really good post &mdash; spot-on regarding the assertions,&rdquo; writes our final correspondent &mdash; a longtimer who&rsquo;s not afraid to rake me over the coals now and then.
&ldquo;AND... one thing caught my eye. You presume al-Qaida was responsible for the attacks. Is that so?
&ldquo;Gotta call bull*** on that one, and I imagine you would too if you didn't fear being cast as... god forbid... conspiracy theorists.
&ldquo;Well, I'm an unapologetic conspiracy theorist and conspiracy factist... the Wuhan shots... the rigging of multiple financial markets, especially silver... the Maidan shenanigans... the ballot fraud in the 2020 election. The list goes on for quite a while. My track record of correct calls is pretty much unblemished.
&ldquo;Later you say, correctly: &lsquo;Sept. 11, 2001, was also the day many conservatives abandoned their suspicions of Big Government.&rsquo;
&ldquo;YEAH... THAT WAS THE PRECISE DESIRED EFFECT. Mission accomplished.
&ldquo;Cheney's dead now and I guess it's unseemly to continue my cheering, but what an interesting story he might have been loose enough to tell under the influence of truth serum.
&ldquo;It was an inside job, and only the willfully ignorant or those with an interest in perpetuating the con could possibly disagree, given the overwhelming mountain of evidence.
&ldquo;Most can't admit the truth re: 9/11. It would set their worldview on tilt. I get that and I sympathize, but the truth is the truth, no matter how uncomfortable or inconvenient it is... to coin a phrase.
&ldquo;Again, your analysis is dead on.&rdquo;
Dave: Thank you. I think the already-known and widely acknowledged facts about 9/11 are damning enough &mdash; particularly the involvement of high-level Saudi Arabian officials, <a href="https://www.axios.com/2025/11/21/911-families-lawsuit-links-saudi-officials-to-plot-despite-princes-denial">about which we continue to learn more</a> 24 years later.
And yet the whole time, U.S. presidents have bowed and scraped before King Fahd, King Abdullah, King Salman and now Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Obama and Trump aided and abetted a Saudi Arabian genocide in Yemen &mdash; for which someone in Yemen might, one day, decide to hold the American people at large responsible and carry out a large-scale attack on U.S. territory. And the whole cycle would begin anew&hellip;
But on one point I&rsquo;m in full agreement: Every new crisis, whatever its origins, is <a href="https://paradigmpressroom.com/post/9-11-the-financial-crisis-and-covid">an excuse for a new power grab</a>. And so it goes.