What the G20, Werner, and Warsh tell us about America’s new monetary playbook

via Kane McGukin at the Mesh Point

In every transition, there are road signs along the way. Matt Dines has been one of the more accurate minds of late on the monetary and geopolitical transition we are living through.

His and Camron Otsuka’s commentary earlier this month on Mine Print Hash, post the G20 meeting in North Carolina, sheds a lot of light on major sticking points that will pave the way for both future policy and monetary frameworks. This will not happen overnight, but at the same time we’ll likely look back and say, “man, the world changed fast.”

A few highlights that matter:

1. The Financial Stability Board (FSB). Just as Great Depression meetings brought new entities for the next cycle, G20 meetings post-GFC brought the FSB for the same reason. New rules to pave the way for stability in a new economic era (2009 Pittsburgh summit). According to Dines FSB brings AI into the mix, plugging it into the Basel Accords, the last of which, Basel III, an update required because of the financial behaviors and shortcomings that caused the GFC.

As Dines points out, all we need now is a final agreement so all parties can play nice around the new rails, i.e. stablecoin/Bitcoin/SOFR rails. Global stablecoin arrangements will take final shape after the announcement of a Bretton Woods 2.0. Something I’ve discussed many times over, and something that feels nearer and nearer by the day. The most important point? Bessent has basically championed this from day one.

As Werner’s model suggests (see point four), Bessent opposes the state picking winners directly, but supports guiding private capital toward strategic ends. Video referenced in Samson’s post.

2. Bringing forward the private sector as a way to grow our way out of this. What’s critical to understand here is that during the GFC, entities and individuals were overleveraged. To combat this, the central bank expanded its balance sheet to take on all the underwater debt. Today, the script is flipped. The private sector is relatively unlevered, and the central bank is overlevered. This is important because the only way to grow an economy is to guide credit towards productive use cases. Regardless of opinion, this has been the underlying basis of the early-stage beginnings of all successful economies and empires for centuries (see Werner). For those keeping score at home, these are the breadcrumbs we’ve been given to better understand where monetary and fiscal policy are going (Office of Strategic Capital).

3. G20 is bringing in banks and private institutions, which is a paradigm shift in how credit allocation works. This is the announcement. We are going to run a different playbook for our monetary framework from now on. This is the only way out. The only way back to some state of “normal”. This is exactly what Werner lays out in the Princes of the Yen. An in-depth study of Japan and other great banking empires. Our “new approach” will be one that has succeeded many times in the past. Including during the creation of America. Why? Because this style best achieves rebuilding the US’ industrial capacity – think modernization of infrastructure. Today’s infrastructure and infrastructure for the 21st-century is inherently digital. That’s why capital formation is being directed and pointed at all things AI and digital. This is why all these related industries are points of “national security”. This is what is meant by “Hamiltonian policy”, a notion we’ve discussed before.

In short, exactly as Dines pointed out, you’re going to have to pick sides – US or China. This is what is meant by the new multi-polar world. Believe it or not, for the first time in more than two decades, “we’re actually trying to accomplish something”.

4. Credit expansion is the only way to get growth (PofY), which is why Main Street over Wall Street matters. See the Foundry School to better understand the government’s refocus on centralizing and deploying capital into productive use cases. Centralize the steering of credit, decentralize who receives it.

The key to the entire process is Matt’s highlighting of Richard Werner’s work. Richard wrote the Princes of the Yen, which outlines not only the rise and fall of the great Japanese financial system, but more importantly, the foundations of how dominant banking and financial systems work. A means by which the US economic system has drifted far away from over the last thirty to fifty years.

In simple terms, the keys are state-directed capital and credit allocation to productive uses. That’s all that matters for a budding or dominant economic system. Without it, one dies. Without it, one meanders toward financial engineering practices that eventually kill the entire system. Proper credit allocation (capital formation) is representative of early-stage and highly successful/functioning economic systems. Financialization is the sign of an aging or failing financial system. If you strip out all the complexity and jargon, it’s as simple as this.

As Werner points out, the Quantity Theory of Credit is the origin of all successful banking models that have worked for thousands of years. It started in early Asia before moving through Europe, Germany, Japan, the US, and now back to China. It was the basis of China’s rise as they’ve built out the Belt and Road system over the last decade-plus. It has allowed them to pull economic power and global sway away from the US by way of state-directed capital aimed at globally and systemically important supply chains. By doing so, China created a vast decentralized product and manufacturing hub for the world; for anything and everything at a low price. On the contrary, the US chose the more deadly path. Centralization, consolidation, and a reduction in the number of banking entities. All the while increasing the amount of financialization, leverage, and risk in the fewer and fewer nodes within the system.

https://x.com/CaitlinLong_/status/2099689636738281700

The core thesis, unlike what we’ve seen in the US over the last two decades, is decentralization. In short, you have the combination of centralized capital flows towards a decentralized private sector, which forms the basis of growth. You conquer, so to speak, in numbers.

This is a major paradigm shift from what we’ve become, but it is what we are finally seeing the US wake up to and begin to move back towards.

That’s why it feels so chaotic and out of sync. It’s different than anything we’ve seen in the last 70 to 100 years or more. It is what Hamilton implemented in the US to found our great and successful American experiment. It is what we reimplemented in the 30s to 50s to extend US dominance. But it is what we moved away from post-1971 with the creation of petrodollars and a heavy reliance on financialization and incentivization of lack of productivity (service). It is what stablecoin dollars, Bitcoin, and a SOFR based system are meant to hopefully replace. The brokenness of petrodollar and eurodollars. These steps are an attempt to revert back to something that works – productivity.

Instead of growth, for decades, we’ve implemented policies that promote fewer and fewer entities in industry and banking. The exact steps that choke off growth and kill economic systems. It also leads, as we’ve seen, to a vicious cycle of bad policy design that encourages less competition. All of which only exacerbate the problem.

Eventually, you end up right where we are. In an unproductive and overly financialized economy without the ability to provide because you’ve outsourced everything for the sake of profits, quarterly numbers, and inflated margins for analysts to bicker over. At some point, you wake up and realize the amount of power you’ve given away to others by centralizing your resources and profits into fewer and fewer hands. That’s when you realize those providing to you have decentralized their resources, profits, and state-directed capital into real economic power that eventually unseats you from number one.

For a financial system to work, the entire system must depend on the quantity of credit, as Werner lays out, and if you follow the Japanese story, which I believe we are only 25-30 years behind, then Kevin Warsh is no different than the last Central Bank prince whose specific role was to change the regime. Unfortunately, if we choose to extend, the only option is to become the carry trade for others to piggyback off of. As we see, that game can unproductively go on for decades.

As Dines notes, the QE period is over. The only move to sustain is to provide credit to those who have capacity (Main Street) and guide it into productive use cases (21st-century infrastructure).

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Yesterday, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland won Saxony-Anhalt, which shouldn’t really surprise anyone, but is being treated by the media like some kind of Black Swan event, blindsiding us all.

The AfD won 43.8% of the vote, more than doubling its result from five years ago and crushing Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU, which came in at 17.2%. Apparently, if it wasn’t for mail-in voting they would have had a majority.

As it stands, they’re within three seats of an outright majority (maybe they can follow the Liberal Party of Canada playbook and induce a few other MPs to defect).

Naturally, practically every headline describing the result contains some variation of the words “far right”.

We’ve been through this before.

A few years ago I wrote “What Does ‘Far Right’ Even Mean Anymore?” and came up with a working definition:

“Far right” is basically anything that contests the Establishment narrative.

That definition has held up remarkably well.

Because if you listen to the political establishment and its media organs, there are basically only two possible views around the problems facing Western countries.

The first is to double-down on what we’ve been already doing, irrespective of hard data showing that the policies of the last decade have made Canada the poorest performing country in the entirety of OECD nations, not to mention that the track we’re on will keep us there out until 2060…

On CNBC, Joe Kernen reminds Dom LeBlanc of some stark economic realities in Canada

“Minister LeBlanc, this is the last thing Canada needs. And I’m not sure whether you have a good feel for, for changes that need to be made in the economic approach of Canada.”

“The OECD projects… pic.twitter.com/YEyKacDVrY

— cbcwatcher (@cbcwatcher) August 25, 2026

Here in Canada that means some variation on the policies we’ve pursued since 2015, many of them mirroring the European model: historically unprecedented immigration volumes, an ever-expanding temporary resident population, increasingly cumbersome restraints on energy and resource development, and a kind of managed degrowth dressed up as environmental stewardship.

Door #2 is that anyone who has an issue with this is a “far-right extremist”, or more recently “a maple-MAGA”. 

There is apparently no middle ground.

Stipulate that immigration is a overall a good thing but that the volume and calibre of the migrants matters? Far right.

Suggest that a country has both the right and obligation to decide who gets to live there and optimize for higher quality immigrants? Far right.

Expect that people who immigrate to this country should integrate into it, obey its laws and be a net contributor economically, instead of a perpetual drain? 

Careful now. You don’t want to sound like you’re “noticing things”.

Which raises an interesting question after yesterday’s result in Germany:

When will there be an Alternative for Canada?

How Canada’s immigration system used to work

Canada was the first country in the world to adopt a merit-based immigration system, in 1967.

The underlying concept was remarkably simple: select for people who were likely to succeed here.

Education. Language. Skilled work experience. Age. Adaptability. Ability to support yourself.

There were family reunification and humanitarian streams alongside it, of course, but the economic immigration system was unapologetically selective and we unabashedly skimmed the cream across all ethnicities, countries, races and religions.

For awhile there, we had it: The Golden Age of Multi-Culturalism – and Canada was, in fact, a classically liberal paradise. For a while.

This is the system under which my parents, my wife, her mother-in-law, our daughter and my entire extended family came to Canada.

All immigrants. Most of them non-white.

It works fine.

For decades we brought in skilled, educated and motivated people from everywhere. While they retained homages to their cultures and religions, they also worked hard, obeyed the law, they opened businesses, raised families, integrated into Canadian society and, over a generation or two, became part of our “Canadian Mosaic”.

What Changed

That basic architecture continued for decades and eventually evolved into Express Entry, which was launched under the Harper government in January 2015. Express Entry actually made the selection process more competitive, ranking eligible candidates against one another instead of simply processing qualified applicants in chronological order.

What changed after 2015 wasn’t that Canada suddenly abolished the points system, but the Trudeau Liberals made changes to the volume and the pathways.

Permanent immigration targets climbed from roughly 250,000 to 280,000 annually during the Harper years to nearly half-a-million annually by 2024. At the same time, international students, temporary workers and other temporary residents expanded far faster (places like Conestoga College became veritable “diploma factories”).

And somewhere along the way, “temporary foreign worker” stopped conjuring up an image of an agricultural worker filling a seasonal shortage and started meaning practically everybody behind the counter at Tim Hortons.

The Temporary Foreign Worker Program was never designed as a mass pipeline for cashiers and fry cooks, but successive rule changes, plus a much larger companion program that does not require a labour-market test, made low-wage service jobs a normal use of temporary labour.

What makes it worse?

As many of those living in the GTA area are aware: home invasions are up, car thefts are up, assaults are up, so is firebombing Christian churches and anti-Semitic violence. The streets of Canada’s major cities are routinely taken over by Islamic and far-left extremists who openly hate this country and pine for it’s downfall…

Islamist in Canada: “I don’t consider myself Canadian, Canada is a racist colonialist project like Israel; they will be destroyed within 25 years.”

Canada is falling. pic.twitter.com/JakiJUTx3h

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) September 5, 2026

(One wonders, why is she here then?)

And when non-citizens commit crimes, get caught, get released again, commit more crimes, and eventually, finally are convicted…

The final catalyst: The immigration discount on criminal sentencing

This may ultimately be the issue that causes the pot to boil over.

Canadian citizens watched citizens getting tackled by cops grocery stores for not wearing masks,  people got tazed at outdoor hockey rinks. The federal government imposed martial law and seized your bank accounts for donating to the Freedom Convoy.

And now,  they open the news and encounter an endless procession of home invasions, carjackings, sexual assaults, human trafficking cases and violent crimes where some variation of the same phrase seems to invariably appear:

“The accused was already out on release for previous unrelated charges.”

…and they end up being released again, and people can’t help but notice, that many such cases turn out to be, “Brampton men” (IYKYK).

17 Accused in Peel Police Extortion Network Investigation Were Not Canadian Citizens

Peel Regional Police say 17 men who are not Canadian citizens have been arrested in connection with an alleged international criminal network known as “For Brothers,” accused of targeting… pic.twitter.com/h6IPYBe4BH

— Toronto Crime Watch (@CrimewatchTO) May 25, 2026

This has become common enough that Ottawa has finally had to respond. This year the federal government enacted more than 80 changes to Canada’s bail and sentencing laws, specifically targeting repeat violent offenders, home invasions, human trafficking, auto theft and accused persons carrying numerous or serious outstanding charges.

So the problem wasn’t  some imaginary, shared hallucination that came out of a far-right echo chamber.

More corrosive still is the perception that non-citizens who commit crimes have been receiving so-called “immigration discounts” precisely because they are non-citizens and the Supreme Court, in R. v. Pham held that judges may consider the immigration consequences of a sentence.

This has lead to examples such as:

• A Kitchener man who battered his girlfriend was given a conditional discharge to avoid deportation to India
• An Ontario court of appeal reduced the sentence of a man convicted of assault and multiple probation violations by one day in order to prevent a “potentially devastating immigration consequence”. The Crown did not object.
• A foreign resident on a work permit who was working as a Bell Technician who exposed himself to a woman in who’s apartment he was servicing was granted no jail time because doing so would result in deportation. The man feels “stigmatized” and laments that he had to leave the area.
• Finally, this guy, who was caught in a Peel Regional Police sting operation, because he thought he was soliciting sex from a 15 year-old minor. He was convicted, then argued that his immigration status should not be impacted by his sentencing because he still wants to bring his wife to Canada (who presumably still wants to be with him, for some reason). Justice Paul O’Marra concurred,
  

  “A conviction could lead to severe collateral consequences, such as jeopardizing his immigration status, delaying his citizenship, and preventing him from sponsoring his wife, which would likely result in their separation”

Uh, yeah, no shit. That a conviction could lead to severe collateral consequences is the entire point of having a legal system.

The far-right extremist in me can’t help but notice, can’t restrain myself from wondering out loud…

Do we really want anybody here who can’t govern themselves accordingly before they even become a citizen?

Shouldn’t this be the most obvious filter available?

By all means, come to Canada, build a better life, work hard and follow the fucking rules.

Otherwise, don’t come, or get deported.

Too simple.

But try explaining the optics of that to a Canadian citizen who has just watched the state demonstrate zero reluctance to use its full powers against him and tell him that noticing the discrepancy makes him “literally Hitler”. 

At what point does “far right” simply mean “normal”?

One of the more revealing moments in CNN’s coverage ahead of yesterday’s German election came when correspondent Fred Pleitgen described the AfD’s supposedly radical immigration platform.

‘The AfD openly calls for mass deportation of undocumented foreigners and foreigners who have committed crimes”

The CNN dude says “mass deportation of foreigners who have committed crimes” like it’s a bad thing. https://t.co/zvFjiKEMpV

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) September 6, 2026

Narrator’s note: “undocumented foreigner” is someone who is there illegally.

When a person enters your country as a guest, commits a serious crime against somebody who lives there, they should, as a consequence, lose the privilege of remaining.

Holding this opinion will get you branded  “far-right” extremist.

I suspect a fairly large percentage of Canadians would consider it common sense.

Living in Canada should be considered a privilege for non-citizens, and citizenship should mean something. It should be earned through some combination of productivity, commitment, integration and time.

None of this has anything to do with race, religion, ethnicity, gender or sexual preference.

In fact, Canada’s old system demonstrated precisely how unnecessary those criteria are.

This is where the “far-right” branding becomes dangerous

The problem with reflexively branding every objection to the current system as “far right” isn’t simply that the label eventually becomes meaningless.

There is a much worse consequence.

For starters, you eliminate the legitimate middle.

People who simply say “immigration levels are too high” get called racists.

People who say temporary workers shouldn’t displace Canadian teenagers from entry-level jobs are deemed xenophobes.

People who think convicted non-citizen criminals should be deported are branded as extremists.

Eventually some of those people stop caring what you call them.

That’s when some truly unhinged egregores can arise.

I’ve been warning about this phenomenon for years, including in my book, Unassailable: when legitimate grievances are declared impermissible, they don’t just go away.

 They go underground, they tend to mutate, and they resurface as increased polarization, siege mentality and, eventually, real extremism.

We’re already seeing the emergence Canadian groups openly espousing ideas that really are extreme, including ethnic cleansing, as though removing entire populations based on their skin-colour is the only remaining solution to problems the political system refuses to confront honestly.

Somewhere there has to be a rational distinction between “we need to go back to merit-based immigration, at numbers we can assimilate” and whatever the fuck this is. pic.twitter.com/EdJ3J6yFSW

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) September 1, 2026

As I lamented in my earlier “Canada Was A Liberal Paradise” piece, racism in Canada was for the most part, a thing of the past.

It was over.

Aside from the fringes and the individual Archie Bunker types, Canada was, for a brief, bygone age, a largely colour-blind meritocracy.

Then we made race central to practically everything again: post-nationalism, colonialism. Settlers on stolen land – this isn’t coffee house Marxism by purple haired they/them’s from affluent families anymore – it’s literally baked into the curriculum, it’s being taught in our schools and our universities by an academia overrun with Fabians and Malthusians.  

Meanwhile, any criticism of immigration policy is synonymous with racial animus.

Is it any wonder that there are populist backlashes occurring in Germany, Ceuta, France, the UK?

The Alternative for Canada is not what you think.

I’m not here to tell you that some manner of nationalist, populist party is going to save Canada – I don’t even think the AfD or any of these reaction movements will “save” their own respective countries.

The reason is that I think this is part of a much wider issue: the collapse of the global debt-based monetary system and a Fourth Turning-style destruction of our Industrial Age institutions. The dysfunction we see here in Canada and abroad isn’t the result of the wrong political party or bad policy tracks. Those are symptoms of something much larger.

Populations vote in the wrong political parties, who embark on horrifically bad policy tracks, because there is no workable or tenable solutions to the current problems. Only emergent, alternative systems that are better suited to operating in world’s network-shaped topology and hyper-accelerating pace will persevere, and a big part of that is just staying out of the blast radius of the failing machinery  (much more on this in my new book, The Blueprint: Survive and Thrive in an Overclocked Timeline – my premium membership already has access to it)

However intractable the problems of building a global financial system atop debt-based money, the situation is even more acute here in Canada, where the older generations still believe everything the CBC tells them, and the younger ones are indoctrinated to hate this country from pre-school onward.

In other words, Canada is cooked, and the “Alternative for Canada” is not having a different party in power, it isn’t having some establishment outsider like Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke entering politics (although that would be refreshing), or a firebrand like Kevin O’Leary taking over the CPC (which also would be awesome).

Nor is it becoming “the 51st State” or merging with the US (although anybody who’s ever read Dianne Francis’ book on the topic would find themselves agreeing with a lot of it. It was written before the rise of Trump and TDS infected the majority of the Canadian “Elbows Up” contingent).

For our cousins out in Alberta, it’s not even separation.

All of these things might forestall the inevitable, add a decade or two onto the long descent of The Industrial Age – but the real solution in an era where politics is just institutionalized grift and the masses are intentionally dumbing themselves down, the way forward is through radical personal sovereignty, critical thinking skills, financial independence, and optionality. Lots and lots of optionality.

The Alternative for Canada is you.

If you’re thinking about ways to acquire more personal agency in a chaotic world, check out the executive summary of my forthcoming book The Blueprint, free when you sign up for The Bombthrower mailing list.
We’ve also created Ready.ca, a meeting ground for politically homeless Canadians.
Follow me on X here.

Bitcoin maximalism is over. Bitcoin “culture” is over. Bitcoin influencers are over. Every popular hardcore Bitcoin figure has disgraced themself in some way.

Bitcoin will remain, beneficially stripped of the cult around it.

— nic carter (@nic_carter) August 2, 2026

If I could sum up the above list in one pithy tweet, it would be the opening image of this mornth’s edition, by way of Nic Carter, who also found himself excommunicated from The Bitcoin Cathedral for indulging in shitcoinery.

Sign up for the Bombthrower mailing list here and get an executive summary of my new book: The Blueprint Survive & Thrive In An Overclocked Timeline. Sovereign Capitalist members get early access to the full book here.

Written by Bryan Lutz, Contributor at The Sovereign Capitalist:

The FUD is back, baby.

Bitcoin is down nearly half from its 2025 high. And now, the obituaries are out of cold storage and back in heavy rotation. Sentiment surveys are scraping levels we haven’t seen since the 2022 crypto-winter, and the financial press has rediscovered its favorite genre: the Bitcoin post-mortem.

And this time they’ve got a chart to wave around. The Dow just had its best year against Bitcoin since 2022 – the Dow/BTC ratio has more than doubled off its August 2025 low, from 0.36 to 0.84.

Here it is. We’ll even draw the red line for them:

Anyone holding through it felt every point. If you wanted to write the “Bitcoin is finished (again)” piece, this is the chart you’d lead with.

Notice what the line still hasn’t done, though.

It hasn’t touched 1.0.

After the worst sentiment stretch in years, after a ~45% drawdown, after twelve months of losing to the most boomer-coded stock index on earth, the entire Dow Jones Industrial Average still cannot buy one Bitcoin.

Against thirty of America’s biggest companies, the coin wins, with change left over.

Flip the fraction.

If that seems impossible, it’s because you’re reading the fraction the way CNBC wants you to read it:

Bitcoin

───────

$$$$$$$

Bitcoin as the numerator, dollars as the denominator, and the numerator just got cut in half. Case closed, right?

Wrong fraction. As Mark Jeftovic laid out in It’s the denominator, stupid, the entire point of Bitcoin is that it isn’t the thing being measured. It’s the thing you measure with. Put the index where it belongs:

  DOW

───────

BITCOIN

Now extend the chart back a decade and hit the log button, which is a one-click jailbreak for fiat-denominated brains:

In 2014 it took more than 40 Bitcoin to buy the Dow. At the 2015 extreme, 84.

Today: 0.83.

Measured in the new denominator, the Dow has lost roughly 99% of its value in twelve years, and the “comeback” everyone is celebrating shows up on that chart as a wiggle at the bottom of a cliff. Bitcoin just took its worst beating in years and gave back approximately none of a decade of relative gains.

That’s what deflationary money does. It hits different.

It’s about the maths

The Dow is priced in dollars, and dollars multiply, inflate, depreciate, and then die… which is the business model for the whole fiat system. M2 only ever pauses on its way up, every crisis gets solved with more of it, and index earnings get marked up in the same shrinking units.

Bitcoin’s supply schedule, meanwhile, doesn’t attend FOMC meetings. The halvings keep halving. Twenty-one million, take it or leave it.

Run the numbers since January 2000: the Dow is up 361% in dollars. M2 is up 394%. Divide one by the other and the twenty-six-year bull market vanishes: measured in the money itself, the index has gone nowhere. Every point of “Dow 52,000” that isn’t printer output rounds to zero.

So, the fraction has a numerator inflated by an expanding money supply, sitting on top of a denominator that does not expand. Run that equation for a decade and the line on the chart is the only possible output. The drawdowns – 2018, 2022, this one – are volatility inside the trend. And that trend is division between fiat money and Bitcoin.

A Dow’s comeback measured in a shrinking yardstick must sprint just to stand still. This year, it’s rallied hard in dollars. In Bitcoin terms, it clawed back a rounding error.

Same story, slower clock.

If this framework sounds familiar, it should. Gold holders have been living it since 1971, just at a different tempo.

In 2001 the Dow cost 42 ounces of gold. Today, with the Dow at nominal record highs and the algos doing victory laps, it costs 12.7 ounces. Two-thirds of the index’s gold-denominated value, gone, during a quarter century of “stocks always go up”.

Yes, gold and Bitcoin diverged this cycle. Gold at $4,142 while Bitcoin sits in a drawdown. They have different volatility profiles, and different adoption curves. Yet, they share the same denominator maths. One asset is the incumbent hard money, the other is the challenger still crossing the chasm. The DOW index can’t outrun either of them over any window that matters.

“Stocks at record highs” is mostly the yardstick shrinking. It is always has been.

Deflationary Money Still Undefeated this Decade

Here’s the thing about extreme bearish sentiment: it’s a report on the emotional state of leveraged tourists, not on the asset. Nothing about Bitcoin(or gold) changed this year. The supply schedule didn’t change. The halvings didn’t change. The $300+ trillion in bonds denominated in a melting currency didn’t change, except to get bigger.

The only thing that changed is the price, quoted in the old denominator, and the old denominator’s entire job description is to go down.

So, the mainstream news cycle might be right about one thing:

Deflationary money doesn’t win every year.

However, it does win every decade, and it’s undefeated.

“You just wait until the next bear market…”

Last month, I talked about how many of the legendary investors I’ve long followed as well as many of my contemporary financial commentators (speaking specifically of the contrarian ilk), are almost unanimous in the opinion that the AI trade is well into bubble territory and stocks in general are overvalued. Hell, even I think that and I’m personally “all in” on AI and have a fair bit of equities exposure to it (not a tonne, but it’s there, and the biggest winners in the TSC portfolio lately have all been AI stocks and HPC stocks).

Angela sent me this Diary of a CEO interview with Jeremy Grantham – another legend – and she said it was scary. At his peak he managed something like $165B AUM, but he’s down to $80B or $90B now (he also says the only reason he’s still counted as a billionaire today, personally, is because they include the money he’s given away. Grantham has donated over 90% of his net worth to the Grantham Foundation, which invests and incubates primarily green-tech innovation to combat climate change.

Although Thomas Braziel, whose name you might recognize as a notable distressed asset investor who specializes in crypto i.e. Mt Gox claims, FTX, put out an interesting analysis of Grantham’s green tech foundation’s filings – and surmised that what he’s saying on the talk-show circuit isn’t lining up with where he’s actually allocating the foundation’s …money )

Grantham occupies an exalted perch in the pantheon of institutional investors, so when he opines on something, it tends to get picked up on, which one may find somewhat quizzical, given his lifetime batting average isn’t really in the same league as the likes of Buffet, Munger, Klarman, et al.

His lifetime average returns? The closest analog could be the lifetime average of the GMO Global Asset Allocation Composite, which he co-founded.

Their number? 8.43%. And 0.8% of that was because of a one-time litigation settlement received in 2024

Warren Buffet’s lifetime batting average is pushing 20% (19.8%).

The S&P itself, 10%.

In case you’re wondering how somebody became a billionaire by lagging the major index by 200bp over their entire career, it’s because Grantham is proficient at one thing in particular: not losing money.

The TL;DR from the DOAC interview? A lot of people are about to lose a lot of money.

When Stephen Bartlett told him he was invested in SpaceX, Grantham dead-panned, “Good luck with that”.

Bitcoin? “It’s a zero”.

The interview went a bit viral and I saw a lot of “Billionaire says Bitcoin is worthless” headlines in the mainstream financial press. Grantham has since been on a punditry tour (perhaps in promotion of his latest book, “The Making of a Permabear” – yes, really); and the soundbites that are being repeatedly teased out from them are his “Bitcoin is a zero” sermons, in one case getting into a somewhat heated exchange with Joe Kernen on CNBC – where Kernen, incredibly, makes some of my points far less diplomatically than I have here.

At least it’s not just Bitcoiners getting into scraps! pic.twitter.com/pfJyXM3ZFc

— JOEY (@JoeyTweeets) June 26, 2026

After Grantham trotted out the usual “no use case”, “there’s no there there”, “it’s a bubble”, Kernen straight-armed Grantham in the face with his underperformance over the past two decades,

“You’ve done a great disservice to anybody who’s listened to you over the last twenty years”.

Grantham’s response and attempt at a defence, combined with something else he said in the DOAC interview, are all leading up to my point here, while being 100% oblivious to it:

To Joe Kernen: he said “We’ve been in a bull market since 2009, let’s see how all this stuff holds up when the next bear market hits”

To Steven Bartlett: he cautioned how Amazon sold off a staggering 92% during the Dotcom bust.

During the drive to Hamilton for a board meeting, I listened to this short Alex Hormozi clip and his analogy (which he cribbed from Brian Johnson) hit me full force and I finally had a working metaphor that explained what I’ve been trying to articulate about these living legends of finance.

That they’re underestimating the significance of fiat debasement is true, but it doesn’t really explode in your brain as much as make your eyes glaze over.

The analogy is fish are swimming around in water. Some of them become experts at swimming. They train their entire lives, they practice every day, they study the expert swimmers of yore, and they analyze nearly every aspect of the water they inhabit: it’s PH levels, alkaline, currents, flow – everything.

They know how a slight variance in one factor impacts the others – they know “which way the current is going”.

But over time, the water heats up; they may pick up on this, but they’re never quite prepared for what it means beyond a certain point.

When that point arrives, the water evaporates – and now it’s gas. Steam.

Setting aside for our purposes how this would fry the fish, imagine they’re still alive, but now they’re trying to apply everything they know about swimming in water to this new environment, which is gaseous, not liquid.

They would be flailing and flapping around like the proverbial “fish out of water”.

What happened?

They were never wrong about their fluid dynamics.

The physics changed and they had no model for the new reality.

Hormozi’s short clip was applying this metaphor to AI – which is certainly among the key drivers of the “monetary physics change” that we are now undergoing.

But the point of no return, when the phase shift started, was – I believe, and as Raoul Pal has always said – the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009.

That was when the water started turning to gas.

Grantham’s own yardstick measures the current bull market from then – when the central banks stepped in, when The Big Print started and when interest rate suppression and credit expansion became permanent features of the global monetary system (I would argue that the process started in 1980-82, and the GFC was a major tipping point).

Yes, Amazon came off 92% when the dotCom bubble burst. But anybody who had bought, even at the high right before that, is now up about 4,642.7 %

On the new Sovereign Capitalist site, we can model all this out interactively (see below).

On its surface, Grantham’s fixation on loss avoidance serves a purpose (recall Buffet’s top rules of investing: number one is “Don’t lose money”, number two is “See Rule number one”).

If I ever experienced a staggeringly huge life-changing windfall in one moment, I would carve out a “retire your bloodline”-type allocation and hand it to a guy like Grantham (more likely it would be Vito Maida  over at Patient Capital, here in Canada).

But being good at preserving capital has its own opportunity cost, which is far more pronounced now that we’ve traversed the inflection point into the Exponential Age.

The world has transitioned from flat to hyper-cubed – the architecture is completely different now, and the linear measuring stick known as fiat money is ill equipped for the task of describing it.

To Grantham’s point “you just wait until the next bear market”, there won’t be a next bear market, not until we change that measuring stick.

Until the monetary regime change happens – that “change in physics” – any drawdown, no matter how deep, will be papered over with incessant Big Prints until the system itself completes its metamorphosis.

Today’s post was an excerpt from The Sovereign Capitalist my recently relaunched premium service. This goes beyond a dashboard, it’s more of an operating system for high agency net-producers.  All members get access to the full pre-release version of my new book: The Blueprint – Survive & Thrive in an Overclocked Timeline.

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There was a version of this country that worked.

This was a country that used to punch above its weight across all key metrics and in a large part, did so espousing classical liberal values.

Multiculturalism here was both uncontroversial and functional. People came from everywhere, integrated, and got on with building lives, businesses and contributing to that overall ethos Canadian culture.

Minority rights and gender equality stopped being fights and became defaults.

Ontario, the most populous province, ran one of the cleanest grids on the continent for half a century on the back of CANDU, a reactor we designed ourselves. Peaceful, homegrown, zero-carbon, clean energy, and nobody lost any sleep over it. In fact, most people probably weren’t even aware of that.

By every classical liberal measure that actually mattered, Canada was a success story that inspired the rest of the world.

I want to be precise about the word “liberal”. The small-l, “classic” version meant open markets, open minds, equal treatment, and a state clueful enough to stay out of the way. That Canada earned its stature honestly.

Then, in 2015, the big-L Liberals took over the small-l idea. They have spent a decade undertaking what looks like something between a “controlled demolition” and act of subversion.

Start with energy, our single largest missed opportunity

We can’t build pipelines. A country sitting on one of the largest energy endowments on earth cannot get its own product to its own coast or even to its own citizens. In 2017 the Trudeau government changed the rules and moved the goalposts on the Energy East pipeline which resulted in its cancellation.

Canada is sitting on the fourth largest oil reserves on earth, after other political temperate zones: Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Iran, and we import between 500K – 600K barrels per day, nearly all of it, from the United States (“Elbows Up!”)

When Germany came knocking in 2022, Chancellor Scholz flew here and asked, practically begged, for us to sell them natural gas. Russia has just invaded Ukraine, and that put the Germans (which had wisely demolished their own nuclear power grid) into an awkward spot of having to buy energy from Putin.

Our answer?  There has “never been a strong business case.” Maybe we could interest the Germans in some solar panels and windmills. They went and signed a fifteen-year deal with Qatar instead. Qatar. Not exactly a human-rights exemplar, especially during Pride Month.

We did eventually sign an LNG deal with Germany, off the West Coast, in May of this year. Four years late, for volumes that would have looked modest in 2022. Better than nothing. Slower than everything.

None of this was an accident of incompetence. It was ideology. A decade of WEF-flavoured talking points, degrowth dressed up as climate virtue, and a governing instinct that treated Canadian resource wealth as something to apologize for.

Ottawa’s own reports spelled out the anti-capitalist drift in black and white (Bombthrower covered one here). When the environment file is handed to a former Greenpeace activist pinned to the far left of the spectrum, the pipeline math and the LNG math and the nuclear math all start to make a grim kind of sense.

Speaking of nuclear. The recent strategy was supposed to prove we still build things. “10 New Nuclear Reactors!” Oh boy.

Read past the headline. The plan is:

• two reactors under construction …by 2035, and
• five more “planned” (or “under development”) by… (checks notes)… 2040.

Planned. Under development. Unserious.

Meanwhile…. over in China,  they’re projecting roughly 200 gigawatts of total capacity, which means about 100 new reactors, finished and powered-on by 2040. They finish a reactor in about five years, and they a couple dozen under construction simultaneously. We are going to have started two.

We invented the CANDU. We are now a rounding error in the industry we helped create.

On Indigenous affairs, honesty requires two things at once

Most people can only manage one.

The first is that the historical record is genuinely damning. Broken treaties. Mishandled reserves. The residential schools. Generational neglect. Like slavery in the United States and elsewhere across the world, our treatment of First Nations casts a long shadow, and pretending otherwise isn’t helpful.

The second is that none of us alive today built that system. Nobody alive today bears any culpability for it. How could we?

The dichotomy between responsibility and duty was always so cogently captured in a lecture I remember in college, given by the late Jack Richardson: the great Canadian producer. I remember it well, but I’ll paraphrase:

“When you’re the producer on a record, your job is to deliver the master to the label – full stop.

Anything that gets in the way of that: the bass player dies of a heroin overdose, somebody burned the studio down, the lead singer’s wife left him and now he’s out on a ledge…

…all kinds of things can go wrong and none of them may actually your fault, but every single one of them is your problem.

You have to deliver the fucking record. That’s on you“.

That is exactly where reconciliation should sit. Something we did not cause and still have to remedy… somehow.

But nothing that we do are actual remedies.

Instead of the hard, unglamorous business of clean water, functioning services and honoured agreements, we got theatre: Never-ending land acknowledgements read off laminated cards. Streets renamed, it seems deliberately, to incomprehensible text strings. Empty gestures that move no needle on any stated goal and instead breed the exact resentment they claim to be healing.

A growing share of the public has stopped seeing any of this as a lingering injustice to be addressed but now views it as a permanent guilt-management industry to tune out.

The elephant in the room: Immigration

Immigration was our masterpiece.

For decades we skimmed the cream of the planet. Skilled, educated, motivated people from every culture and country, selected through a points system that drilled down on simple KPI: can you come here, integrate, and build something? Successful applicants kept their heritage, celebrated it, added it to the mix, …and got to work.

We took people on humanitarian grounds too, generously so, but never more than we could economically and culturally absorb.

That gave us extraordinary dynamism. Entrepreneurs and investors who arrived with nothing and hit it out of the park. Chamath Palihapitiya came as a refugee from Sri Lanka and became one of the most influential venture investors of his generation.

Prem Watsa came from India and built Fairfax into a company that earned him the “Canadian Warren Buffett” tag honestly.

Legends, both. We could use as many of those as the world will send us.

Then we changed the filter.

The points system asked whether you could succeed here. The volume model, switched on after (guess when?) 2015, asked almost nothing. The targets stopped being calibrated to housing, services, and absorption capacity, and got calibrated to two different things instead: cheap imported labour for the mega-employers who lobbied for it, and a river of tuition to turn colleges into degree farms selling permanent residency with a diploma stapled to it.

The numbers got loud. Population grew faster in 2023 than in any year since the 1950s, almost entirely through immigration, into a housing market that was already broken. We’ve all seen the graph, I don’t need to repost it. By 2024 Ottawa was admitting north of 480,000 permanent residents a year, with temporary-resident inflows stacked on top that pushed the real figure far higher.

Then, even the Capital-L Liberals blinked. In late 2024 they slashed the targets and Justin Trudeau conceded, in his own words, that they “didn’t get the balance quite right.” Permanent-resident targets came down to 395,000 for 2025 and 380,000 for 2026, with brutal cuts to international students. Mark Carney, having replaced him, kept the lower numbers. Governments do not reverse that hard, that fast, on policies that are working.

Here is the part that gets people shouted down for raising, so let me be clear here:

This is a screening argument, and nothing else.

When you select immigrants, you screen. At least you’re supposed to.

Skills, language, education, and yes, background. When you stop selecting and simply move volume, you stop screening, and you get the entire Bell-curve of humanity – and quite possibly the wrong tail of it. That includes people from low-trust societies who carry their grievances and factional conflicts across the border with them, and it includes the criminal minority that any large, unvetted inflow will contain.

Ethnicity is beside the point here. The removed filter is the entire point.

The failure compounds when institutions respond to the predictable problems by looking away or dismissing credible criticisms as racism. When a serious crime involving a recent arrival gets softened in the media coverage, or when the judge sentencing a convicted violent criminal dials back the penalties in order to avoid deportation, ordinary people notice. They are not stupid.

People start rumbling about “two-tier” justice systems and “immigration discounts” for criminals, and they are correct.

True story: Racism in Canada had been all but eradicated.

This is reason I bothered writing any of this. Because it’s Canada Day. And I see too many reactions to what has happened in this country get boiled down to the lowest-IQ filter that exists: racism.

For what now seems like a bygone Golden Age, racism in this country was basically over.

Structural racism had been excised from the systems and institutions while garden variety cultural racism was confined to relatively few fringe dwellers. Every few families had one of those Archie Bunker type uncles and nobody really took them seriously.

The overwhelming majority of Canadians, born here and immigrants alike, simply did not organize their lives around skin colour. That was the win. That was paradise. We had it.

Some may say we always sorted ourselves, that Little Italy and Little India prove it (“Checkmate, multiculturists!”). They actually prove the opposite. Ethnic neighbourhoods are on-ramps: the first generation clusters for the food and the familiarity, the second scatters to the suburbs and marries out (including inter-marriage with other groups); and the whole thing runs on choice and empties itself by design. A multi-generational bakery on a corner is culture. A Tim Horton’s staffed with TFWs is policy. The paradise ran on the former and its destruction happens on the latter.

Look at where a decade of dismantling this has left us.

For starters, racism is back from both sides, with a twist:

Structural racism came back, only this time wearing progressive branding. Job postings openly signal racial and other identity preferences. Criminal sentencing now weighs a defendant’s race, background and immigration status.  A system that largely made race irrelevant has spent the last decade making it central again, then acts astonished at the reaction.

And because of that reaction cultural racism is now, also back with a vengeance. Resentment festers among perfectly normal people, including fully integrated immigrants from the earlier waves who did everything right and now watch the standard collapse behind them. That Archie-Bunker racism, the crude ambient kind we had mostly shamed out of public life, is back and being said out loud. Grassroots organizations that used to sit at the crank-fringe are growing past it. Social media runs on lowest-common-denominator rage bait, and a lot of it is now straight-up racist.

We spent forty years turning down the temperature on race in this country and it worked. Then, in the name of turning it down further, we cranked it al the way back up.

The title isn’t a joke, it’s the truth.

A classically liberal paradise is precisely what we built. Open, tolerant, prosperous, boringly functional, (“peace, order, good government”) the envy of people who had to flee places that were none of those things. The small-l achievement was real, and it was ours.

The big-L party inherited it, mistook the inheritance for a mandate to undertake a mass civilizational social engineering project, and spent a decade trading competence for platitudes, energy for symbolism, selection for volume, and hard-won racial peace for a fresh cycle of division marketed as inclusivity.

We had this one in the bag.

Now, not so much.

Happy Canada Day.

If you’re a net-producer, high agency Canadian interested in joining a like-minded group for the politically homeless in Canada, check out Ready.ca

The data shows the opportunity cost of avoiding bubbles in the modern era.

Jeremy Grantham built a career calling bubbles. With his AUM ranging from the 65B to 120B level over his career, he’s been fairly prescient about avoiding them on behalf of his clients, and in the process became a billionaire himself.

In a recent appearance on Diary of a CEO, he cautioned about Amazon’s 92% drop during the dotCom bust, and he’s now warning about the AI bubble (as are many others). In a now viral clip on CNBC, he got into it with Joe Kernan and laid into Bitcoin using all the usual objections: “no use case”, “headed to zero”, and “not worth a bucket of spit”.

At least it’s not just Bitcoiners getting into scraps! pic.twitter.com/pfJyXM3ZFc

— JOEY (@JoeyTweeets) June 26, 2026

But if you actually look at the data, you would have been better off holding through bubbles instead of handing your wealth over to Grantham’s GMO Fund to protect you from them. And this remains true vs. most assets and across nearly all time frames.

You can see for yourself in this interactive widget I put together for the next Sovereign Capitalist newsletter (due out in a few days). Plug in an invetsment amount, pick an entry point: right before the DotCom bubble blew, or on the eve of the Global Financial Crisis, right on up into the pandemic: Grantham’s GMO lagged everything including simply indexing the S&P500.

Jeremy Grantham is making rounds sermonizing about Bitcoin and bubbles.

But if you look at the actual data, anybody following his advice would have been a lot worse off, across nearly every time frame over the last 30 years. pic.twitter.com/HgJenRBtsL

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) June 27, 2026

When The Monetary Physics Change

In the letter, I get into why this is the case: why are “the perma-bears” (in Grantham’s own words, and the title of his new book) may be looking at the wrong measure, and the wrong axis when it comes to figuring out what’s overvalued and what, if anything, is truly headed to zero (I’ll give you a hint: it’s not Space-X and it sure isn’t Bitcoin) but I’ll lay out the analogy here (which was admittedly cribbed from Alex Hormozi, who swiped it from Brian Johnson).

Hormozi used it in the context of how I is changing the world. This is true, but it also applies to the inexorable debasement of the monetary layer through debasement.

Here’s the analogy of “when the physics change“:

A school of fish are swimming around in water. A few of them become experts at swimming. They train their entire lives, they practice every day, they study the expert swimmers of previous eras, and they analyze nearly every aspect of the water they inhabit: it’s PH levels, acidity, currents, flow – everything.

They gain an intuitive feel for how even a slight variance in one factor impacts the others – they know “which way the current is going”.

But over time, the water heats up – they may pick up on this, but they’re never quite prepared for what it means beyond a certain point.

It’s the point that puts them wrong-footed, the phase-shift: the water evaporates – and now it’s gas. Steam.

Setting aside for our purposes how this would fry the fish, imagine they’re still alive, but now they’re trying to apply everything they know about swimming in water to this new environment, which is gaseous, not liquid.

They would be flailing and flapping around like the proverbial “fish out of water”.

What happened?

They were never wrong about their fluid dynamics.

The physics changed and they had no model for the new reality.

The measuring stick of fiat currency is the water that is boiling away.

I’ve been saying it forever, it’s the denominator stupid.

People like Grantham don’t even look at it. Over the course of the Diary of a CEO interview I don’t think he mentions it once. In his “The Making of a Perma-Bear” book, he mentions inflation in exactly three places, and always with respect to their effect on P/E multiples. In the third instance he only mentions to acknowledge that during the pandemic, multiples went the opposite direction he would have expected, given the higher inflation.

Go take a look at the data, plug in some numbers and starting dates for yourself. You’ll see exactly what the phase shift looks like.

More in this in the next edition of my premium newsletter The Sovereign Capitalist.

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Two inexorable realities have come into sharpened focus over the last month or so. Both are themes we have been exploring and monitoring – one, since practically the very beginning of this service, the other, over the last year or so.

The first is the unsustainable nature of the global monetary system: we are not unique in calling that out – it’s practically a trope and has been for a long time.

The other is the existential necessity to win the new arms race – which is less about kinetic weapons now and more about computation, information and 5GW.

In the past, when the Soviet Union put as astronaut into space before NASA, it was a humiliation and a psychological defeat – but the USA arguably still held strategic advantage where it counted at the time, which was here on earth, with more nuclear missiles, tanks and military bases than the USSR.

The US space program kicked into overdrive, and NASA was able to slingshot past the Russians, and over time and across more dimensions, the Soviets never caught back up or retook the lead – in anything.

To this day, Russia’s resurgence onto the world stage – articulated through concepts such as Neo-Eurasionism or “Third Rome” (basically their version of “Manifest Destiny”) – is more than anything, an aspirational framework for “getting up to speed”, while rationalizing their inability to do so in traditionalist, volk-ish trappings.

Their high priest of this quixotic mix, is “Fourth Political Theory” author, university professor and philosopher, Alexander Dugin – whose other titles include “Last War of the World-Island” and – perhaps most tellingly, although least known of his works here in the West – “Katechon and Revolution”.

The word “Katechon” (from the Greek: ὁ κατέχων / τὸ κατέχον which translates loosely as “the Restrainer”) is important in the Russian collective psyche because it contains a massive “tell”.On its surface, it’s supposed to encompass Russia’s “state messianism” and symbolize its opposition to The West – their “Antikeimenos”.

The day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Dugin posted on Facebook “Now we are in a war of the spirits. Katechon vs. Antekeimenos”.

Antikeimenos (from the Greek: ὁ ἀντικείμενος) is the term St. Paul uses in Thessalonians 2:4 for the figure of the Antichrist. It appears exactly once in the Greek New Testament, in that single verse. The literal sense is “the one who opposes” or “the one set against”.

And therein lays “the tell” – what the Russian collective psyche is admitting to, and trying to come to grips with, and it is this:

If we reframe the Cold War as the first technological contest between Great Powers, Russia has to confront the fact that they lost – and they’ve never been able to recover from it.

In the contemporary pantheon of international relations and political economy, absolutely nobody today thinks of Russia as a “great power”. When you peel back the ideations of “The Fifth Empire” or “The Soviet Union 2.0”, you get to that underlying underdog mentality – trying to recapture super-power status.

They lost the space race. Then the Cold War, and now they can’t even beat the Ukraine.

That was supposed to be an overwhelming military victory, but the Ukrainians, mainly through wholesale adoption of drone warfare, have managed to give the invaders a rough time of it, even penetrating deep into Russian territory using high-altitude balloons to deliver suicide drones.

Make no mistake, all that financial support from the West aside, the Ukrainians have been able to stave off complete defeat through technological means and because cheap, sophisticated weaponry (drones) completely upended the conventional battlefield.Such are the travails of an erstwhile great power that has lost a technological competition. You can bet today’s incumbents – namely the USA and China – understand these stakes, and neither of them has any intention of losing:

• AI
• Energy
• High Performance Computing (which leads us into)
• The Space Race 2.0
• Quantum Computing

This is why the “catastrophic climate change” narrative has been rather suddenly sunsetted in The West (at least, the non-Euro west): we need more energy, including nuclear – lots, and lots of nuclear.

It’s why White House Asset Management (WHAM) is pumping money into quantum computing companies (including, from our wish list: D-Wave, which we hadn’t yet pulled the trigger on).

It’s also why China has moved further out on the interventionist side of the state capitalism spectrum, with mandated “Capital Reallocation” programs where the government has issued structural directives forcing state-owned pensions, insurance funds, and enterprise pools to funnel trillions of yuan directly into equities, while the state-backed “National Team” continues steady, strategic purchases of domestic ETFs to put a floor under major indices.

The Chinese debt overhang on bad real estate loans is even larger than what we had here in the run up to the GFC, so regulators there are pulling out all the stops to keep the balloon duct-taped together:In early 2026, Beijing quietly abolished enforcement of its strict “three red lines” policy. Developers are no longer required to report monthly data regarding debt-to-equity, cash, and asset metrics, freeing up fresh credit channels.

They’ve backstopped an additional 7 trillion yuan under a new “property project whitelist” mechanism, which extends developer loan maturities by up to five additional years to stave off defaults.

Commercial and state banks are aggressively financed to help local governments buy up unsold, completed housing inventory directly from developers to convert them into subsidized public housing (this is a nominally communist country, so why not).

To top it all off, we’re seeing capital flight restrictions – going so far as to prevent technology transfers to the West via acquisition (we covered last month how Meta’s acquisition of Manus was blocked and reversed by state authorities).

Any rational observer of finance and economics knows that all world economies, including The World Economy, is levitating in mid-air buoyed by stimulus, signal suppression and pure white-knuckled will.

In prior years, when all the financial commentators and contrarians were waiting for this to hit a wall, we all marvelled (at least I did) how the system was kept on the rails at all costs – because too much was riding on it to let rational economics and market restructuring take their course.

That was before AI. Before it became apparent that not being number one in this technological arms race had civilizational consequences, like joining Russia as another “also-ran”.

Once again, the contradictions and distortions that this imperative amplifies are bubbling to the surface.

On one hand – all rational analysis of the market is screaming “overbought”. Practically every financial commentator I came up following is looking at this and making comparisons with the dot-com bubble; the AI high flyers now look a lot like Global Crossing, Nortel, L3, VA Linux before they all imploded.

My X feed is absolutely jam-packed with people posting screenshots of 7-figure trading accounts that were ostensibly amassed in under a year trading HPC, AI, chip makers, memory, and now quantum (again).

Zerohedge has remarked on the circular nature of the AI economy more than once:

Note that the above-linked article (from which the screenshot came) is a Tyler Durden original, it is not a repost of somebody else’s article.

Tyler has this annoying trait: he’s always early and he’s often right.

Yet it’s possible the man himself buried the lede (from that screen cap):

“The Infinite Money Glitch”

By all rational and financially coherent measures, the equities markets are overvalued, beyond bubble levels and primed for a catastrophic drop on the order of, pick one, 50%, 75%, 90%. Yes. 90%. We’ve been pumping since 2008 folks. Even further if you go back to the beginning of the equities supercycle in 1982.

After the dot-com bust, we were in a bear market for two years. When the GFC finally hit, it was straight down for a good 18 months. When COVID was coming, the banking system was starting to crack up under the hood (the reverse repo situation in late 2019) but when it came unglued in March, it was about two weeks before the monetary bazookas were unleashed and everything reversed hard of the March low.

What happens after that is instructive:

The Regional Banking crisis erupted, and was even larger in nominal terms than the GFC when it came to the amount of assets tied to bank failures. The Fed threw the taper overboard, did a massive liquidity injection and after a failed attempt to pick and choose winners in terms of which banks to save, caved in to public uproar and backstopped everything.

Liberation Day, Japan-ageddon, Israel/Iran/Gaza barely perturb the trajectory.

If you switch out of linear mode for that long-term chart, and go to logarithmic – you should recognize the pattern:

It’s the same as Bitcoin, which is the same as gold during the Weimar Republic and it’s the same signal being broadcast from every one of those charts.

We should acknowledge that the Nasdaq took 15 years to recover from the Dotcom shakeout, which is a long time to be underwater if you bought in at the tippy-top.

But I believe two things have changed since the GFC:

The first is that tech, despite taking the biggest hit, almost by definition when the Dotcom bubble blew, also became the apex asset class from here on out.

If you look at the long-term chart for the Nasdaq, it basically went parabolic for the first half of the equities supercycle, and formed a double-bottom from the Dotcom crash to the GFC

After that it blasted off and has left everything else in its dust:

This makes perfect sense, because tech is the asset class of choice in a world driven by acceleration and tachyosis.

We can’t put Bitcoin in that chart because it’s basically a divide by zero error. But if we take the commonly held, first market price ever for Bitcoin, which was $0.10, it pencils out to an absurd value. Call it 77,719,900% and leave it there.

It’s not uncommon to hear criticisms of Bitcoin that are simply “all it does is follow tech”.

Yeah, no shit. That’s because it is tech.

The other thing I believe about all this, is Raoul Pal’s theory that after the GFC, the world’s central banks got together and made a deal to never let anything like that happen, ever again.

Which means that central bank balance sheets will grow in perpetuity, and stock market will never have a meaningful bear market – for the remainder of the duration of the current monetary system:

That’s from Raoul Pal’s “Everything Code”, it goes on:

• They don’t understand valuations are a function of debasement.
• They don’t understand why technology rises and valuations can keep rising.
• They don’t understand why crypto is being adopted and is the fastest horse in the race.
• They don’t understand why the dollar keeps rising.
• They don’t understand that energy transition is real and is crucial for the world economy.
• They don’t understand why rates won’t remain high.
• They don’t understand why GPT4/AI is the biggest humanity-scale event since the splitting of the atom.
• They don’t understand why this is all so fucking deflationary. They want their sticky inflation. They will not get it.
• They don’t understand why nothing in their world makes sense.

We understand it. Because we know the cheat code, which is:

Put the chart into logarithmic view.

Look at the X axis.

Then own the assets that are outpacing everything else on that scale.

That’s it.

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If you are new to the Equibit story, please read The Assassination of Equibit, originally released in 2023.

A recurring and particularly damaging element in the campaign against Equibit Group founder Chris Horlacher has been the repeated disruption of his access to banking and payment systems — commonly referred to as de-banking. These incidents have not only created severe operational challenges but also appear designed to isolate him financially while he pursues justice in the Canadian courts.

Major Incidents of Financial Interference

Revolut / Lead Bank (2025–2026)

Chris maintained two U.S. business accounts with the fintech platform Revolut. After months of normal activity, both accounts were frozen without any notice being provided to Chris. One suspension occurred shortly after Revolut had upgraded the account to a custom “Enterprise” plan based on the company’s foreign exchange volumes. Despite multiple support inquiries, Revolut provided almost no meaningful explanation, citing only a vague “security review.” Both accounts were ultimately terminated with no right of appeal, causing significant disruption to business operations.

TD Canada Trust – The Norm Bailey Case

In early 2026 Norm Bailey, a hopeful member of one of Chris’s clients, attempted to send a legitimate payment for a membership fee. TD Bank blocked the transaction and subjected Norm to aggressive interrogation by a senior representative who only identified himself as “Phil.” Norm later described the ordeal in an email to Chris, whom he had recently met at the Anarchapulco 2026 conference:

“Subsequently, three days later we were contacted by a mystery figure in the TD organization who only identified himself by his first name… He proceeded to drill us on what the wire transfer was for… After a lengthy question period and listening to his repeated accusations that we were taking part in a scam he suddenly said he was closing all my accounts at TD… We were in serious shock. Ive been with them for 65 years… We were both very close to having a heart attack.”

Under extreme duress, Norm and his wife were pressured into admitting the payment might be related to a “scam” and promising never to do business with the Horlacher-linked entity again. Only then were their accounts restored. Norm explicitly stated that “our lives were in danger due to the stress we were under.”

CIBC – Suspicious Inquiries

Chris has received multiple calls from individuals expressing interest in his client’s services but who refused to provide their full names or the name of their employer. One such call originated from the CIBC toll-free number 1-866-639-5014, which was recorded by Chris. These interactions appeared structured to entice Chris into performing regulated money transmitter activities without proper licensing — a potential entrapment scenario.

Broader Pattern

These events are not isolated. They form part of a sustained pattern of financial and institutional pressure that has intensified around key milestones in the Equibit lawsuits. Clients and business associates have reported unusual scrutiny whenever Horlacher’s name or associated entities are involved. Traditional banking relationships have become unreliable, forcing Chris to operate with reduced access to essential financial infrastructure.

This type of economic isolation is a hallmark of Zersetzung — the Stasi’s strategy of quietly undermining a target’s ability to function normally so that their struggles appear self-inflicted.

Why This Is So Concerning

Access to banking and payment systems is fundamental in a modern economy. When financial institutions appear to act in coordination — or at minimum show unusual responsiveness — to pressure someone engaged in litigation against intelligence agencies, it raises profound questions about:

• The independence of Canada’s financial sector
• Potential weaponization of “risk management” and “compliance” processes as tools of retaliation
• The practical ability of citizens to challenge powerful state actors without facing extralegal consequences

Chris has been personally out-of-pocket hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs while simultaneously fighting to maintain basic financial functionality.

Further Reading & Evidence:

• Router Sabotage via TR-069 Protocol
• DNS Man-in-the-Middle Attack
• Microsoft Unauthorized Access Incidents
• NASA HPCC Honeypot Probe

The combination of technical surveillance, financial de-banking, and institutional obstacles paints a disturbing picture of alleged multi-domain harassment.

If you believe financial institutions should remain neutral and that litigants deserve protection from economic retaliation, please share this post and help bring greater awareness to these issues.

Stay tuned to equibitlawsuit.com for more updates on the Equibit lawsuits against CSIS and related actors.

If you are new to the Equibit story, please read The Assassination of Equibit, originally released in 2023.

Chris Horlacher has documented multiple sophisticated intrusions through his Microsoft ecosystem. These incidents go well beyond ordinary malware and align with key moments in his legal activities. They indicate a close collaboration between Microsoft and the Five Eyes to deliver undetectable spyware onto targeted devices in order to steal information and interfere with the normal functions of the computer.

Key Incidents of Unauthorized Access

• July 19, 2025 – Unauthorized Sharing of Sensitive Memo
  A confidential memo was suddenly made publicly shareable via OneDrive using Chris’s own Microsoft account. He did not perform this action. During the event, his computer’s built-in screen recorder was disabled. Luckily Chris was able to capture the event with his cell phone’s camera.

Watch the incident:

• August 27, 2025 – Spontaneous File Movement
  A critical security report analyzing router compromises was mysteriously moved to the desktop.
• October 27, 2025 – Camera Roll Breach
  OneDrive logs showed someone browsing the Camera Roll folder containing images taken directly by the device, as well as two files related to psychology that provide insight as to the hacker’s identity (more on that in later posts!)

Watch the Camera Roll intrusion:

Mass Windows & BIOS Updates – Highly Suspicious Timing

On August 18, 2025, immediately before a strategy call with his lawyers about upcoming discovery sessions, Chris’s computer began installing an unusually large wave of updates — including Windows, BIOS, and more than a dozen other components. He described it as one of the largest simultaneous update pushes he had ever experienced. Call quality then rapidly deteriorated and the connection was terminated exactly when the discussion turned to sensitive topics.

This event is especially concerning in the context of Bill C-22, Canada’s proposed Lawful Access Act. Part 2 of the bill would require electronic service providers (including software and operating system vendors) to build and maintain technical capabilities to facilitate authorized access to information by law enforcement and CSIS. Critics argue this could effectively compel companies like Microsoft to enable mechanisms for delivering signed updates or payloads that Windows would trust by default. Because Microsoft-signed updates are automatically trusted by the operating system, they represent a powerful and nearly undetectable vector for delivering targeted tools to specific users.

For more on Bill C-22:

• Department of Justice Backgrounder
• Michael Geist Analysis

Nightmare Eclipse Zero-Days and Browsergate

These incidents occurred against the backdrop of major Microsoft security controversies. In 2026, researcher Nightmare-Eclipse (also known as Chaotic Eclipse) publicly released several high-impact Windows zero-days, including exploits targeting Windows Defender and privilege escalation mechanisms. Some researchers have speculated that certain vulnerabilities may have been known internally for extended periods before public disclosure.

Additionally, Browsergate exposed serious allegations against LinkedIn (owned by Microsoft). According to a detailed report by Fairlinked e.V.:

• LinkedIn allegedly injected JavaScript that scanned users’ browsers for over 6,000 Chrome extensions.
• The script reportedly collected detailed device telemetry and extension data without clear user consent or prominent disclosure in the privacy policy.
• This allowed LinkedIn to build extensive user profiles, potentially identifying competitors, corporate tools, and other sensitive software.

The revelations led to privacy lawsuits and widespread criticism. You can read the original report here: BrowserGate.eu

Broader Implications

These events demonstrate deep access into Chris’s systems, precise timing aligned with legal activities, and the ability to manipulate core operating system functions. When combined with other documented technical attacks, they highlight growing risks around proprietary platforms and the potential for state-level exploitation.

Further Reading & Updates:

• Additional technical evidence and interviews in the Media section
• Ongoing lawsuit developments at equibitlawsuit.com

This case raises important questions about digital privacy, corporate responsibilities, and the balance between security and individual rights. Share this post if you believe these issues deserve greater public scrutiny.

Stay tuned to equibitlawsuit.com for more updates on the Equibit lawsuits against CSIS and related actors.