I do not understand, in 2026, why anyone is shorting anything, and I have, over the last several years, watched a generation of intelligent, well-credentialed, technically sophisticated investors set fire to their capital on the short side of a market that has been telegraphing its direction with the subtlety of a marching band, and the only explanation I have ever been able to construct is that none of these people have read a single page of monetary history written before 1990.
The setup is not subtle. The federal government is running a 7% structural deficit with no political coalition in either party willing to address it. The Treasury is issuing debt at a pace that will push publicly held debt-to-GDP past 130% within five years, which is the level at which, historically, every government in recorded history has either inflated its way out, defaulted, or both. The Fed is, regardless of what it says in public, the marginal buyer of that debt, and the only mechanism it has to fund the purchases is the creation of new dollars. The money is being printed. The debt is being monetized. The currency is being debased. And asset prices, which are denominated in the currency being debased, are doing the only thing they have ever done in any country that has ever tried this, which is going up.
Every country that has run this experiment has produced the same chart. Weimar Germany in 1922 and 1923 produced one of the most violent equity bull markets in recorded history in nominal terms, as the mark collapsed and the Berlin exchange repriced upward by orders of magnitude. Argentina, across four separate inflationary cycles since 1975, produced in each cycle a nominal rally that outran every short thesis published, while the peso lost 99.9% of its purchasing power. Zimbabwe in 2007 and 2008 produced an equity market that rose so violently the exchange had to be closed because the calculations could not keep up. Turkey, right now, in front of the entire world, has produced a Borsa Istanbul up 1,400% in lira terms while the lira has lost 85% against the dollar, and every short of Turkish equities has been carried out in nominal terms even when they were right in real terms.
The lesson is not that asset prices are going up because the businesses are getting better. The lesson is that asset prices are going up because the unit they are measured in is getting smaller, and any investor who positions short against this dynamic is betting against the will and capacity of a government to debase its own currency, which is the single most reliable bet you can lose in 4,000 years of recorded monetary history. The government always wins. The government always debases. The currency always loses purchasing power. The assets always reprice upward in nominal terms, on a path the shorts always insist is unsustainable and that always, somehow, sustains.
You can short individual frauds. You cannot short the market. You cannot short the currency itself without being on the wrong side of the largest force in modern capital markets, which is the slow, politically inevitable destruction of the dollar’s purchasing power against everything that cannot be printed. The shorts have been wrong for five years. They will be wrong for the next five. The only investors who will, in real terms, preserve and grow their wealth are the ones who understood, early, that the game is not about being right on valuation, it is about being on the right side of monetary debasement, and the right side has always been owning real assets, productive businesses, scarce commodities, and the one monetary metal that has functioned as money continuously for 5,000 years, while the people on the other side continue to insist this time is different. This time has never been different. The math is the math. The shorts will continue to lose. The owners will continue to win.