The Yankee Tiger is Coming

March 30, 1979. Eleven o’clock in the morning—on the dot. Ireland cut a cord that had been wrapped around the country’s economy for 150 years.

The Irish pound, or punt, as the island’s currency at that time was known, was pegged one-for-one to the British pound. Had been that way since 1826 when the Irish simply used the British pound outright, and after the punt’s inception in 1928.

Every Dublin shopkeeper took sterling at the till along with punts. Every British interest rate move was, whether Ireland liked it or not, an Irish interest rate move. Monetary policy in London was Ireland’s monetary policy, whether it made sense or not.

But that morning…

Ireland sloughed off the leash.

Crisis ensued.

Breaking the peg was like breaking a mirror: 15 years of grinding pain. Public debt above 120% of GNP, unemployment above 17%, and 450,000 Irish packing their bags for New York, Boston, and London.

Then again, all the post-mortem research showed that Ireland had avoided a worse crisis that would have unfolded had it stayed tethered to the beast across the Irish Channel.

What post-pound Ireland was experiencing was 50 years of accumulated policy rot the peg had been hiding—protectionism, fiscal incontinence, industrial atrophy, a colonial architecture no one had bothered to dismantle.

The sterling link had been a painkiller on a broken bone. Taking it away didn’t cause the fracture. It revealed the fracture.

That, though, was the beginning of the beginning—that AA moment when an alcoholic realizes they’re the source of their own pain and the source of their own healing.

By the mid-1990s, the Celtic Tiger was roaring. (“Celtic Tiger” was the nickname for Ireland’s extraordinary economic boom beginning in the 1990s, when decades of economic malaise gave way to rapid growth, foreign investment, and a suddenly very wealthy little island.)

By 2020, Ireland’s GDP per capita had exceeded that of the UK.

And that, dear reader, is the American path forward.

I’ve been writing for several years now that a crisis is coming to America in the 2027/28 time frame. Could be fiscal. Could be political. Could be social.

Could be D: All of the above.

What I can tell you is that many of the pieces on this board are already in motion:

• Debt that will cross $40 trillion this year, an amount that keeps growing ever larger and ever faster at this point simply because of interest costs and government now overspending the annual budget by $2 trillion.
• Debt-repayment costs that now exceed $1 trillion, larger than every item in the budget except Social Security. It, too, keeps growing from here.
• Countries all over the world are packing on more and more gold instead of more and more dollars.
• Countries all over the world, as well, are building new financial plumbing architecture purposefully designed to bypass US dollar systems. Not before countries don’t trust the dollar… because they don’t trust American politicians anymore.
• The political chasm is so wide in America that as much as 25% of the country wants a national divorce; nearly 30% think states should be able to secede if supported by local voters.
• State election officials of both the blue and red variety are so concerned about midterm-voting chicanery that they’re calling it out now and putting in place plans and rules to stop it before it happens.

This is what America steamrolling toward crisis looks like.

And it’s the focus behind Day One of the Future of Wealth Summit I’m hosting in Dublin in October—an intimate gathering at an ancient, seaside hotel where the message of the day is simple: How to prepare your portfolio for the upheaval.

But… there’s also Day Two.

And to me, that’s the day you don’t want to miss.

Crises lead to rebirth.

The gangrenous rot is cut from the system. A healing takes place.

A healthier body emerges.

That’s America in the 2030s.

I have the timeline already laid out. I won’t detail it here because, well, I don’t want to ruin the reveal for those who join me at Future of Wealth in Ireland.

What I will tell you is that the crisis will be no fun. No crisis is. Ireland’s a great example. That crisis gutted the country and crushed the economy while the healing took place.

But then came that Celtic Tiger that roared and wowed the world.

The Yankee Tiger is where we’re headed—a country that no longer has to babysit the world. A country that is wealthier than now, and more sovereign.

A country where the dollar takes care of Americans instead of catering to the world.

And in that transition are important opportunities to protect the wealth you’ve already collected, and grow your wealth in the rebirth that comes.

See you in Ireland…