Everything About the World Is About to Change

There’s a downside to being right.

I occasionally note that I’ve been correct on a variety of Big Thought topics going back at least 15 years.

For instance: I foresaw back in 2011 the emergence of the increasingly destructive Red/Blue divide in America. I called the rise of a new hard currency backed by China and Russia back in 2012.

I called the rise of liquified natural gas and OLED video displays back in 2010/11, back before there was even a single LNG facility in America, or before there was even any talk of OLED in the US media.

More recently, I called Trump’s 2016 victory the day after he made his speech accepting the Republican nomination, and I called the bottom of the crypto market right as it bottomed in early 2023.

And 15 years ago, I told my subscribers to buy gold—early and often—because the road forward was going to push the precious metal to highs few people thought were realistic.

Sometimes being right is good.

Gold is a great example. People who bought when I recommended it at $1,000 per ounce are sitting pretty. Similarly, I recommended that subscribers at the time buy a particular emerging LNG company and a maker of silicon wafer fabrication plants that were quite likely to be big winners in the LNG/OLED trajectory.

Both were.

But sometimes being right means you come across as a prophet of doom, and people don’t like that.

Back in the day, no one wanted to listen to me predict that Red and Blue America would soon hate each other with such passion that they’d begin seriously talking about states seceding from the Union. Yet here we are.

No one wanted to listen to me say that China and Russia would one day look to undermine the dollar, and that they’d have the power to do so. Yet countries all over the developing world are increasingly eager to put some of their foreign currency reserves into a new reserve currency not tied to an American government that has shown its willingness to use the dollar as a cudgel (for example, by shutting Russia out of the US-led financial system).

Humans generally don’t like that kind of bad news outlook. They want an upbeat story arc.

The Hollywood happy ending… and they all lived happily ever after, swaddled in rainbows and blue skies, and Leprechauns raining down golden pennies from the heavens above.

Not many want to hear about the road the perdition.

We all have enough meshugas in our life so why does anyone want to read about the darkness ahead? 

Maybe because seeing the darkness before it’s here helps you prepare for when it arrives…

But honestly, all of that is just preamble to the real point of today’s dispatch: The Big Schism.

That’s humanity’s next stop and my next Big Thought topic.

To be clear, this is not a US-only issue. This is global.

But the US is quite likely to serve as a crucial fissure in The Big Schism, because America’s role as Pied Piper to the World gives others the cover to follow—good, bad, or heinous.

All over the planet right now, the Old World order we’ve all known since the end of World War II is breaking down at an accelerating pace.

Governments are moving away from neoliberalism and toward a nationalistic “Me first!” form of governance that seeks closed borders and self-reliance on everything consumers and business might want to buy.

Like I said, this isn’t just a US thing. I see this happening in Europe as well, and elsewhere.

Societies are increasingly hateful toward those who are not local. They’re increasingly callous and unsympathetic to anyone who doesn’t look like them, talk like them, pray like them… or who is a woman.

Legal norms are collapsing. Accepted freedoms are fading.

Global and local institutions are crumbling as governments dismantle the infrastructure the world built in the post-war years specifically to prevent the pre-war years that inevitably led to yet another pointless shoot-up conflict.

Changes to the climate are precipitating mass migration from darker-skinned countries into lighter-skinned countries, and bringing with them the roots of religious friction now on the rise—giving those pigment-challenged societies even more reason to rebel against the interlopers. Yet, way too many non-believers think the changing climate is a hoax, despite the science and despite the increasing tenor of death and destruction Mother Nature is meting out these days.

The global monetary system is disintegrating right before our eyes and will look very much different before this decade is out. Heck, it could look very much different before the current Trump administration ends.

As I’ve been writing—and as a number of Trump admin officials have been plainly stating—Trump wants a weaker dollar. Part of his Rule-by-Crisis agenda specifically aims to undermine America’s longstanding “strong dollar” philosophy. He sees a weak buck as a way to rebuild American manufacturing.

Maybe that works.

Then again, the cost of success will be a decline in global perceptions of King Dollar, which will lead to the world increasingly moving away from the dollar and toward a world centered on bilateral trade in local currencies. I won’t bog down today’s dispatch with the impacts of that, but I will say that most Americans don’t understand the benefits King Dollar brings to their life, and they’re not prepared for what happens when the dollar is no longer king of the currencies. (Hint: Hyperinflation.)

And amid all of this, we have extreme Western debts with no way out of that situation.

We have extreme wealth distortions (there is not a single, viable, or logical rationale for anyone to have amassed multiple tens and hundreds of billions of dollars; that so many have speaks to a breakdown in government independence and taxation policy).

We also have the rise of artificial intelligence and robotics, which is already disrupting societies and economies.

I mentioned this in a recent dispatch, but there are now “dark factories” or “lights-out factories” where AI-powered robots are working 24/7—basically in the dark—with just a skeleton crew of techies making sure all is copasetic, and a small collection of blue-collar workers who might be moving things around as necessary. (There’s a Japanese company, for instance, running a dark factory that can operate for as long as 30 days before a human needs to check in.)

As those factories become increasingly common from here on out, job opportunities for humanity quickly shrink.

All of this—extreme debt, a monetary system in transition, Mother Nature, migration, technology, politics and political power at home and abroad, societies taking sides against one another—represents a puzzle with no obvious solution.

In the future that lies ahead… wealth is likely to be found in assets and in parts of the world very different from where its lain in the recent past.

There are always opportunities… even when—perhaps especially when—there’s “blood in the streets.”

But you need to know where to look.

There’s not much time to prepare. The future that I’ve described is already taking shape.

I’ve already taken steps to prepare my own portfolio for what lies ahead—for where the opportunities will be… and I want you to be prepared too.

That’s why I’m putting together my very first, in-person Future of Wealth Summit—specifically designed for this extraordinary moment in history and how to grapple with what lies ahead. With the big financial shifts already in play.

Some assets win in the world that lies ahead… others, not so much.

If you’re going to survive the reset and reckoning to come this decade… you’re going to need to know which is which.