Gold and silver are not acting well in a period of rapidly rising geopolitical risks. We have an Iran War, Strait of Hormuz blockade, rising volatility. In the old framework, that setup should be close to ideal for gold. But once you understand what is now driving gold, this move makes perfect sense. Something fundamental changed after the US and Europe froze Russian reserves in 2022. For decades, surplus countries parked their excess savings in US dollar assets, mostly Treasuries. The freezing of Russian reserves combined with the current administration's explicit push to discourage foreign countries from parking excess savings in US financial assets, forced surplus countries to rethink where they store reserves. And those countries haven't changed their domestic policies that generate the excess savings, so those savings have to be placed somewhere. The result is that gold and silver have increasingly become the obvious “neutral” reserve assets. That’s why gold decoupled from the three factors that used to explain it…real interest rates, volatility, and liquidity. Now reserve accumulation flows have become the primary driver. That shift has a consequence I don’t think most investors have thought through. If gold is now primarily driven by reserve flows from surplus countries, then gold has become pro-cyclical. Reserve growth is driven by export revenues, trade surpluses, economic growth in surplus economies. When the global economy is strong and surplus countries are generating large export revenues, their excess savings grow, their reserve accumulation accelerates, and gold catches a bid. When that surplus generation is disrupted, the bid weakens or reverses. This is exactly what is happening with the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. The GCC countries are major reserve/gold buyers and now their export revenues are collapsing. They likely need to liquidate some reserves to cover fiscal obligations, and gold is one of their most liquid assets. Even if the reserve sales aren’t excessive yet, the market can see their reserve accumulation has stalled and probably reversed. That flow, which was a meaningful source of gold demand, has gone to zero at best. There are also secondary effects on other surplus economies. China is the world's largest oil importer. An energy shock of this magnitude slows Chinese growth, and compresses Chinese surpluses, which slows Chinese reserve accumulation. That same growth shock ripples through Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and the rest of Asia. The whole chain that has been driving gold higher, surplus countries generating excess savings that need a home outside the dollar system, is being disrupted by an event that in the old model would have been unambiguously bullish for gold. This doesn't mean the structural case for gold is broken. The dollar standard is still ending. Surplus countries still need an alternative to Treasuries and gold is still the most obvious destination. But it does mean gold is going to be more volatile along that structural trend than most people expect, and the volatility will correlate with global growth and surplus generation rather than with the old drivers. Gold rallies when surpluses expand. Gold sells off when surpluses contract. Even if the reason for the contraction is rising geopolitical risk that, under the old model, should have sent gold to the moon.

I found a wallet in a shopping cart at Walmart. It had $400 cash in it. No credit cards. Just a driver's license. The address was twenty minutes away. I drove over. It was a run-down trailer park. I knocked. An elderly woman answered. "Did you lose this?" I asked. She gasped. She grabbed it and checked the cash. Then she hugged me. "This is my rent," she cried. "I took it out in cash because I don't have a bank account. I thought I was going to be evicted." She tried to give me $20. "No ma'am," I said. "But do me a favor? Make me a cup of coffee. It's a long drive back." We sat at her tiny kitchen table. She told me about her grandkids. Honesty isn't just about doing the right thing. It's about protecting someone else's peace of mind. Anonymous

Contra

You suck as a brand as an airlines. Never once have I felt that this brand cared about me as a customer. I was always another money making machine to you. Not surprised to what happened. It was long coming.

If you make money at the cost of the customers you will see your fate one day. I feel what happened to @IndiGo6E in the last week or so is what they have always deserved.

Message from Pieter Elbers, CEO, IndiGo.

Ethically @IndiGo6E should not be in business and the top management should be behind bars. #Indigoairlines .

Breaking news: #Pakistan army and @SAfridiOfficial celebrate Pakistan’s win over India in regions of Pakistan where there is no internet or live tv. #IndianCricket #IndiaVsPakistan #PakistanCricket #PakistanArmy #BREAKING

Never thought that Switzerland was so stupid.

Sadly true.

damn it... can't believe she said it .. on his face 😳

“Bahawalpur.” I still have chills in my heart from when I first heard that town’s name in late January 2002. For the 23 years since, I have reported on how Pakistani intelligence and military leaders have used that city — Bahawalpur — in the southern province of Punjab as a base for its homegrown domestic terrorists. When I heard India bombed training camps in Pakistan this week in Operation Sindoor, in response to a Pakistani terrorist rampage in India’s Kashmir state, I had one city’s name on my lips: Bahawalpur. Did India bomb Bahawalpur? It did. I knew then India was striking actual hubs for Pakistan’s homegrown domestic terrorism. Why do I know? My friend, WSJ reporter Danny Pearl, went to Bahawalpur in December 2001 with a notebook and a pen. Gen. Pervez Musharraf had just promised he was shutting down Pakistan’s militant groups after a strike by Pakistan’s terrorists against the Parliament in India, and Danny reported on the militant offices in Bahawalpur. He literally knocked on their doors. Dear Dr. @yudapearl, this story is a window into Danny’s reporting enterprise. And because people will wonder: Danny was no cowboy. This was a calculated low-risk reporting trip because no journalist had been targeted for kidnapping in Pakistan. Around that time, Danny sent me an email: “I’m anxious to go to Afghanistan, but I’m not anxious to die.” What did Danny learn? The militant training camps were open for business in Bahawalpur. On Jan. 23, 2002, Danny left a home I had rented in Karachi, Pakistan, for an interview. I learned Danny’s fixer, Asif Farooqi, had arranged an interview for Danny through a man named “Arif.” Danny didn’t know it but Arif was the PR man for a militant group, Harkutul Mujahadeen. What was Arif’s hometown? Bahawalpur. The police launched a manhunt to find Arif in Bahawalpur. We learned Arif’s family faked a funeral for Arif. Police found him trying to board a bus in Muzaffarabad, across the country by Pakistan’s border with Kashmir. It is another town India said it bombed terrorist training facilities. Arif had handed Danny off to Omar Sheikh,a British-Pakistani dropout from the London School of Economics, radicalized in the 1990s in London mosques. He went to Pakistan to train in these militant training camps. Then he kidnapped tourists in India. He was caught and jailed but on Dec. 31, 1999, he was traded for hostages in the hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight 814. Omar Sheikh was freed with Pakistani terrorist leader Masood Azhar, whose family was allegedly killed this week by India’s air strike in Bahawalpur. Did Pakistan jail Omar Sheikh and Masood Azhar when they returned to Pakistan with a third terrorist, freed from India’s jails? No. Pakistan’s military and intelligence gave them safe passage. They used them as weapons against India. But in fact these domestic terrorists have waged war against innocents in Pakistan, like civil society activists, Benazir Bhutto, Punjab Governor Salman Taseer, schoolchildren and countless others. Their extremism has ruined Pakistan, and Pakistanis can’t blame America for creating the mujahideen to fight the Soviets in the 1980s. Pakistan has had a duty to dismantle those terrorist bases — for even the safety of its own people. What India is doing is a strategic attack on terrorist bases Pakistani military and intelligence should have eliminated but never did in their obsession to take over Kashmir. You will see parallels in the propaganda messages against India and Israel. Like Hamas, Pakistani terrorists crossed a border to kill. Now, Pakistani propagandists call themselves victims of their “fascist” “colonizer” neighbor. It’s the Reverse Uno strategy of moral inversion, just like @stoolpresidente got from the Temple student who won’t take responsibility for promoting the “HATE THE JEWS” sign. Don’t fall for it. Nations, communities and people must own up to their extremism, from Bahawalpur to beyond.

During @JustinTrudeau tenure, Canada’s relationship with 3 of top 5 economies in the world went sour. Starting with Meng Wanzhou, to attacks on temples in Canada baseless acquisitions on India and finally unable to stop human trafficking to the US. Whose next? Japan or Germany

Here’s the thing: Indians are rising. And that is actually why anti-Indian sentiment is rising. Not because Indians are so weak, but because Indians are once again becoming strong. CEOs of companies. Leaders of countries. Founders and investors. Doctors, writers, professors. Not just slumdogs. Millionaires. Now, I know what people will say. Not all Indians are doing well. More than a billion are still poor! And of course that’s true, and will be for a while. But Indians abroad have risen as individuals: And India is now rising as a country: Indeed, India is the fastest growing large economy in the world over the last decade: And I think Indians have a lot of headroom left. Where does it end up? We don’t know, but if even 5% of 1.4B Indian nationals are at the same level as the ~5M strong Indian American diaspora that currently produces ~6% of US tax revenue, that’s ~70M people capable of producing ~72% of current US tax revenue. So I think it’s at least possible that India returns to its historical level of relative prosperity: As a plausibility argument, recall that before America was even a twinkle in anyone’s eye, Marco Polo sought out China and Columbus risked his life to trade with India. So those civilizations were giant economic centers for thousands of years. And are becoming so again. This perspective demands a different approach. Not the victim mindset where Indians mimic Western wokes in whining piteously upon every slight. But a mature, tit-for-tat morality befitting a rising people where you cooperate with those that cooperate, ignore what is best ignored, and (proportionately) punish only when necessary. Because even from a purely realpolitik standpoint, constant cancellation doesn’t work. Recall that wokes tried that for the last decade, and all it got them was epic political defeat. They overused the penicillin called anti-racism, and now we have antibiotic-resistant actual racism. Indians will need different tactics. And that starts with moving from victim mentality to Vedic mentality, if you'll permit the poetic license. Because India isn't just a rising civilization, it's a returning civilization. And wokes are proven losers, but Indians can be winners.

Two kinds of fools - those who take religion literally, and those who think it has no value. @naval

Inspiring conversations. 🙏🙏🙏

CBC are back by terrorists and promote fake news. #CBCNews the piece on bots and India government is a propaganda they want us to believe. Shame on you CBC.

CBC did an entire hit piece on Daniel Bordmen, and about how him being retweeted by bots was some how a threat to Canadians. But let me point out all the topics they wrote about, and how misinformed they are ! Mini 🧵

Some quick thoughts on Bitcoin & crypto right now. 1. We're still in a bull cycle - don't panic sell. 2. Saylor will keep buying as long as MSTR trades at a premium to NAV. 3. Don't try to play the coin rotation game - buy and hold your favorite coins and exit when you hit your profit target. Don't be greedy. 4. There will be a really bad bear market after this cycle peaks, which is not now, IMHO. 5. Large investors currently provide exit liquidity for many early investors - they will hold the bag during the bear market cycle. Be grateful.

It’s that time of the year again. Spend time with friends and family and get questions about Bitcoin. #bitcoin100k #HappyThanksGiving2024