Author: jwithrow

“Dairy farms served as pillars of stability and self-sufficiency during a time of economic uncertainty. And in rural America, dairy farms were often the heart of the community, providing jobs and a sense of pride” -Unknown

I spent all day Saturday at the historic Homestead Dairy Barn in Warm Springs, VA. It was a family reunion of sorts.

Today the old dairy farm serves as a vacation rental business.

There are several idyllic houses available for rent across the property. There’s a market serving lunch and refreshments. There’s a heated outdoor pool. And in the middle of it all is a large clubhouse with plenty of space for events. That’s where we congregated.

Here’s a snapshot of the old Dairy Barn in all its glory:

What a hidden gem.

Obviously a lot of the facilities have been modernized. But each of these structures was an integral part of a functioning dairy farm at one time.

One of the rooms inside the clubhouse is dedicated to the property’s history. There are pictures on the wall depicting various aspects of the farm at the turn of the 20^th century and on up into the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.

I spent some time looking at these pictures with my 96 year old grandmother. She’s the last of her generation. And she provided us with some great insight.

My grandmother grew up on a small farm in Bowlegs, OK. That’s just over an hour east of Oklahoma City. It’s about smack-dab in the middle of the state.

Grandma shared with us what things were like on the farm during the Great Depression. Times were tough for everybody. But they were insulated from the worst of it simply because they were largely self-sufficient.

Back then, the kids each had their own responsibilities on the farm.

Grandma shared that her older sister’s job was to milk the cows every morning. They kept enough milk to support the family. Then they sold their surplus to the local dairy. That was a great source of income.

Grandma’s job was to collect the chicken eggs each day. She was also responsible for bringing in the firewood. Her mother cooked each of their meals on a wood stove.

Seeing all the old pictures of the Dairy Barn took Grandma back in time. They didn’t have all the conveniences back in the 30s and 40s that we enjoy today… but life was far more simple.

That simplicity provides peace of mind. It’s a good feeling when we understand the world around us and our place in it.

This is an idea that’s rooted itself in my head.

You know, I don’t get the sense that people are generally happy and fulfilled today. The 24/7 news cycle is constantly bombarding us with negativity. Our email inboxes are slammed every day with advertisements that suggest we will always be inadequate unless we buy the proposed product. And on top of it we’re all dealing with an economic landscape that’s constantly shifting due to the rate of technological advancements.

It’s hard to find purpose and peace of mind amidst all this noise. But it is possible…

One of the themes I keep coming back to in these pages is the Jeffersonian vision for America.

Back in the colonial days, Jefferson looked out at the vast, untamed land on this continent… and he saw a tremendous opportunity. Why couldn’t everybody own a small plot of land and be kings and queens of their own castle, he thought.

I see the wisdom in it.

People were far more self-sufficient at one point in this country’s history. My grandmother’s farm is a great example.

And the thing is – the more self-sufficient we are, the less we have to worry about things that are outside of our control.

I shared last week our approach to backup energy sources. They serve to enhance self-sufficiency tremendously.

We’ve also connected with the local agriculture community in our area. Now we’re buying nearly all of our meat and eggs directly from local farmers. And we keep a big stockpile in a meat freezer in the basement. That also adds to self-sufficiency.

And recently we set up a subscription to have local spring water delivered to us every two weeks as well. We now keep twelve 5-gallon jugs of spring water on hand at all times.

Put it all together and we’ve now got plenty of food, water, and energy at our disposal. We could go at least a month without leaving the house and we wouldn’t be inconvenienced in the least.

To me, that’s the lesson from our agrarian history. The more self-sufficient we are, the more control we have over our lives.

I’ll leave you with that thought today. Looking ahead, we’ll spend the rest of the week talking about the historical influences underpinning our new investment membership The Phoenician League.

-Joe Withrow

P.S. Speaking of self-sufficiency, I would like to introduce you to a non-profit that we recently formed. We call it the Foundation for Human Civilization.

Our mission is to help enable vibrant, self-sustaining local communities.

And our first project is to drill a centralized well in rural Uganda. It will service the remote villages of Mwera and Bugolo-Kireku.

These two villages are home to about 2,000 people across 220 households. Children make up more than half of the population.

Yet, the villages have no running water.

Residents must collect rainwater and/or travel to a natural spring to fill up their jugs. The closest spring is up to three miles away from residents in these two villages.

By drilling a centralized well, we’ll reduce the need for residents to travel to the spring each day. This will free up their time to engage in more productive activities… which in turn will help the villages become more prosperous.

If you would like to learn more about our little project and how you can support it, I invite you to visit the Foundation’s site right here:

Foundation for Human Civilization: Uganda Water Project

And I’ll add that our non-profit is completely volunteer driven. We do not have any staff nor do we pay any salaries. 100% of donations go to the projects we support.

How you choose to own energy is the whole thing of what investing is about…

That’s what Tom Dyson said to our investment membership on our monthly call last week. This perspective struck me as so insightful that we’ve been talking about it all week in these pages – from several different angles.

Today I want to wrap up our discussion by sharing with you my absolute favorite ways to own energy. They may not be what you expect…

I’m a big proponent of what I call “home resiliency”. It’s the idea that we should make our homes as self-sufficient as possible. I see this as a key principle underlying Thomas Jefferson’s vision for America.

And a key part of home resiliency is backup energy.

We take it for granted that we can flip a switch and lights will come on in the house. We think nothing of the fact that we can adjust a thermostat and the house will heat or cool itself to our liking. And we certainly don’t think twice about turning a dial so the oven warms up to cook our food.

But for nearly all of human history our ancestors lived without these luxuries. They would be in awe of the conveniences we enjoy.

At the same time, these comforts disappear the second something happens to our power grid. Then what?

Typically the electric company can restore our power within a few hours for us. But occasionally a disaster strikes that makes the power restoration process take much longer than normal.

For example, a Derecho storm ripped through the mid-Atlantic region back in 2012. It left millions without power. Derechos are long-lived windstorms that feature intense thunderstorms.

When that storm hit, most households in my area here in the Virginia highlands lost power for at least a week. Some went closer to two weeks without power.

This speaks to why owning backup energy sources is so important. I consider these to be “alternative investments”.

When we think about backup energy, the first thing we need is something that allows us to cook when the power’s out. The easiest solution here is to keep a propane grill and several extra propane tanks on hand.

I also love having a wood-burning stove. That’s not going to be an option for some people. But in places where it’s feasible, a wood stove means we can always cook and heat the house… so long as we have wood to burn.

And the easiest way to get fire wood is to buy it from somebody locally. I’d wager most towns have numerous people who sell firewood on the side. We just have to ask around a little bit to find them.

So propane grills and a wood stove provide us with heat and allow us to cook for an extended period of time – no electricity needed.

I also highly recommend solar-compatible batteries. We keep a few of these around the house and fully charged at all times.

These are batteries that can be charged by plugging them into the wall or hooking them into the solar panel they come with. The Jackery brand is probably the most popular of these products. You can find it right on Amazon.

The batteries are equipped with power outlets that work the same as our wall outlets. So they are good for powering any electronic device during a power outage. Then if we drain the battery, we can always recharge it with the solar panel in the event of an extended power outage.

And that brings us to the big one…

I absolutely love having a whole-home generator. We’ve got ours tied into a 500-gallon propane storage tank.

The cost of these systems has come down substantially in recent years. And big box stores like Lowes even offer zero percent financing for the generator itself and the installation.

With 500-gallons of propane, our generator could power the entire house for about thirty days if we were smart about it.

And by being smart, I mean we would need to adjust the heating and cooling settings such that the HVAC unit will not run unless we absolutely need it. We would also need to refrain from doing laundry, running the dishwasher, and other unnecessary tasks.

If we do these things the generator could run the house for about a month. That brings incredible peace of mind.

So to sum up, it’s not overly difficult or expensive to make our homes incredibly resilient today. It’s all about securing backup energy sources. This is my favorite way to own energy.

-Joe Withrow

P.S. We cover alternative investments like these within our investment membership The Phoenician League. We also talk about other ways to build our home resiliency… and we discuss other alternative investments as well. These are items that can improve our quality of life dramatically.

If you’re interested in this type of thing, I’d like to invite you to sign up for our membership’s waiting list. You can do so right here: The Phoenician League Waiting List

Up to this point we’ve only opened our doors to new members on two occasions. We do this because we always take the time to onboard everybody individually. This includes personalized attention for those who would like it.

That said, we’ll be opening our doors for a third time very soon. And we’ll give everybody on our official wait list advanced notice and attention.

We’ve been talking all week about energy. Energy is the master economic resource.

And when it comes to investing, we have two choices. We can own energy. Or we can own currency. That’s it.

The thing is – we can own energy in many different forms. And, as we discussed yesterday, we can also generate passive income by owning energy.

Today let’s take a step back and take an even more holistic view.

If the historians are to be trusted, homo sapiens – humans – have been around for about 300,000 years now. However, the first written records we have from a human civilization date back to about 4,000 BC. That’s just over 6,000 years ago.

We call that first civilization the Sumerians. And the records indicate that they formed city-states around fertile agriculture land in modern-day Iraq and Kuwait.

My understanding is that most humans lived as hunter-gatherers prior to the Sumerians. I’m sure that’s an oversimplification… and I haven’t spent much time on it. But this seems to be widely believed.

As hunter-gatherers, humans lived off the land. They hunted for meat and scavenged for fruits and nuts.

This dynamic meant that the Earth could only support a small number of us. Tribes couldn’t get too big or else they may face food shortages.

The development of sedentary agriculture changed that dynamic. Once we were able to farm the land, we could produce enough food to support a larger population.

That said, the average person’s quality of life didn’t change terribly much from the time of the Sumerians all the way up until the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

That’s a period of roughly 5,800 years, give or take a few decades. And most people lived as subsistence farmers during this time. That was the world’s top occupation.

Meanwhile, the population grew very slowly. It’s estimated that 200 to 300 million humans lived on the Earth around the year 1 AD. By the year 1800 AD, we estimate the human population was around 800 million.

So the population grew 4X… but quality of life improved only slightly. Most people lived in what we would consider today to be extreme poverty. And they were often one bad harvest away from food shortages.

But then something happened.

From 1800 through today, the population exploded from 800 million to about 8 billion people. That’s 10X growth in just over 200 years.

What’s more, quality of life skyrocketed as well.

Today, relatively few people live as subsistence farmers. And almost nobody in the developed world lives in extreme poverty.

Our “poor” live comfortably in climate-controlled homes. They have plenty of food available to them. And they have flatscreen TVs and smartphones to keep them connected and entertained.

That is to say, those who we consider poor in the developed world enjoy far more conveniences than nearly everybody who lived prior to the 19^th century.

This dynamic is thanks to two things. Human ingenuity and carbon-based energy.

Carbon-based energy refers to coal, oil, and natural gas. These energy sources enabled our population to explode higher… while also providing a much higher standard of living for everybody.

Yet, there’s a very vocal movement out there to stop the use of these energy sources. There are strong political forces pushing to do away with them all. They promote a “carbon-neutral” world.

But here’s the thing – our modern way of life simply could not exist without carbon-based energy.

Sure, clean energy technologies like nuclear fusion have the potential to provide for all our power needs one day… but that day is still a ways into the future.

So the people who are rallying against carbon-based energy today are pushing for something that would impoverish billions of people around the world. They would take us back to where we were prior to the 19^th century… and that’s the best-case scenario. We talked about this on our monthly call for The Phoenician League last week.

And that means those who are anti-coal, anti-oil, and anti-gas are in fact anti-human. Whether they realize it or not.

The point is, energy is what has lifted humanity out of the darkness. I mean that literally and figuratively.

And as we’ve been talking all week – if we understand this, we come to the conclusion that investing is all about figuring out the best ways to own energy. That’s it.

More to come tomorrow,

-Joe Withrow

P.S. If you enjoy these kinds of discussions, please give our investment membership The Phoenician League a look. We explore these ideas in more detail every month – both in written form and in our members’ only calls.

If this kind of thing is up your alley, please sign up for our wait list right here. We’ll be opening our doors to new members soon.

Energy is the master economic resource.

That’s what Tom Dyson shared with our investment membership on our monthly call last week. The idea struck me as quite insightful. And it’s obvious if we stop and think about it… most of us just don’t.

The key is – nothing happens in our world without energy. That’s true on all levels.

We all need to consume food to produce the energy required for life. Same goes for animals. Then we need energy to power our homes, our businesses, and anything else that happens in the modern world.

Energy drives everything.

So, Tom’s view is that we have two choices. We can own energy… or we can own currency. And if we understand that the purchasing power of the world’s currencies is always falling, owning energy is the smart choice.

But that doesn’t mean we should only buy energy stocks and call it a day. Publicly traded companies are exposed to many different forces. They aren’t always a direct play on productive energy.

Plus, many of us like to invest for passive income. So let’s talk about three ways we can generate passive income by owning energy…

The first thing we can do is build a crowdlending portfolio. We’ve talked about this before.

Crowdlending is an alternative to traditional bank financing. It allows investors to become the bank and lend money to borrowers for a specific purpose. Debt consolidation, home improvement, and medical expenses are three of the most common purposes.

This is done through a crowdlending platform. The platform sets the interest rate for each loan and then collects the borrower’s payment every month. Each investor then receives their cut of the loan payment.

If done correctly, participating in crowdlending is a way to turn $500 into $50,000 by becoming the bank.

But wait, what does this have to do with energy?

When we help fund a loan, that loan becomes an asset for us. We own it. But what we really own is a claim on the borrower’s future income. And however they may earn their income, it requires them to exert energy in some capacity. That’s the energy we own if we build a crowdlending portfolio.

Now, I know this may sound callous on the surface. Is it right to profit from work that someone else will do in the future?

Well, this very dynamic is the crux of our entire economy. When we engage in voluntary transactions, we are each exchanging our energy with one another in some manner.

And that means when we help fund a loan, we are exchanging our realized energy for the borrower’s future energy. It’s just a trade-off based on time preferences.

Okay, the second way to generate passive income by owning energy is to own rental properties. I prefer single family rentals.

If we think about it, a house is realized energy.

A lot of energy went into building the house. And it requires a lot of energy to maintain a house. That’s both in terms of power production and in terms of human energy.

So when we own a house, what we really own is both realized and future energy. And if we rent the house out to generate passive income, we also own a future claim on the human energy required to maintain and manage the property.

Again, we’re trading our realized energy for a claim on future energy. That’s the beauty of this holistic perspective.

Alright – the third way to generate passive income by owning energy is to write insurance contracts on great publicly traded companies. This includes energy companies.

We can write a contract that insures an investor against the possibility of a stock that investor owns falling in value. The investor will pay us a premium up front for this insurance. That’s cold hard cash that flows right into our brokerage account.

By the way, this is something anybody with a brokerage account can do. The activity we just described is selling put options on great stocks.

The catch is our insurance contract stipulates that we must buy the stock at a specified strike price if it falls in value. That’s how we are providing insurance to other investors. And it’s why they are willing to pay us a premium up front. As such, we should only sell puts on stocks we would like to own at the designated price anyway.

But here’s the thing – most of the time it won’t come to this.

Most option contracts expire worthless. That means we won’t often need to buy the stock we are insuring when we sell put options. And when the option contract does expire, we can sell another put option to collect even more premium. We can do this over and over again to generate passive income.

To sum up, the name of the game is to own energy. But that doesn’t have to be a static or boring endeavor. We can use these three strategies to generate passive income on the energy we own.

-Joe Withrow

P.S. I know we glossed over the three passive income strategies we discussed today. These are strategies that we provide comprehensive training on within our investment membership The Phoenician League.

If any of this stuff tickles your fancy, I’d like to invite you to sign up for our membership’s waiting list. You can do so right here: The Phoenician League Waiting List

Up to this point we’ve only opened our doors to new members on two occasions. We do this because we always take the time to onboard everybody individually. This includes personalized attention for those who would like it.

That said, we’ll be opening our doors for a third time very soon. And we’ll give everybody on our official wait list advanced notice and attention.’ll give everybody on our official wait list advanced notice and attention.

YoYou’ve got two choices. You can own currency. Or you can own energy… and I don’t trust the currency.

So, I choose to own energy. But how you choose to own that energy is the whole thing of what investing is about.

This is what Tom Dyson said to us in The Phoenician League’s members’ only call last week… and I find this perspective to be brilliant.

Dyson is a legend in the financial newsletter space. He’s largely considered an investment whiz throughout the industry. And Tom went on to share his holistic view with us last week.

Tom pointed out that energy is the master economic resource. Nothing happens without energy.

In that sense energy equals prosperity. Energy is what lifted hundreds of millions of people from the shackles of poverty and subsistence living.

So Tom’s investment philosophy is that all he wants to do is own energy. But that doesn’t necessarily mean energy companies.

Tom shared with us that he sees gold as a form of energy. That’s because gold is like a battery. It’s a way of storing energy for use later.

And what about land with coal, oil, gold, or other important minerals beneath it? Owning that land is a way to own energy. The same is true of land with high quality timber above it.

Then we can think about cargo ships and oil tankers – they are a form of realized energy. Indeed, all useful infrastructure is realized energy.

But we have to ask – why is this holistic view on energy important?

We talked last week about how the Federal Reserve created $8 trillion from nothing. Then the commercial banks pyramided credit on top of these new dollars. And then we saw the U.S. Treasury experiment with direct “stimulus” payments to U.S. citizens during the COVID-19 hysteria…

These things were only possible because the dollar is inelastic. The dollar’s supply is not fixed or limited. Instead, they can create new dollars from thin air at will.

The problem is, doing so diminishes the value of all dollars in circulation. Creating new dollars from nothing destroys the purchasing power of the dollar itself. That’s basic supply and demand economics.

We see this dynamic very clearly in the form of rising consumer prices. Houses… cars… groceries… fuel – most everything now costs more than it used to.

And that’s why Tom’s perspective on energy is so critical.

If we think the dollar is going to continue to lose value, then we need to own something tangible to protect our purchasing power. That means we want to own energy in some form.

I’ll leave it there for today… but we’ll talk about this idea in more detail this week.

And for those who are interested in having more detailed conversations along these lines – we’re hosting calls like the one we just did with Dyson every month in our investment membership The Phoenician League.

If you would like to explore our membership more, please sign up for our wait list right here. We’ll be opening our doors to new members soon.

-Joe Withrow

P.S. Tom Dyson currently serves as the Investment Director for Bonner Private Research. Anyone interested in following his investment research can find him on Substack at the following link:

Bonner Private Research

We’ve been talking about what’s been happening on the macroeconomic stage all week. Today, let’s take a step back and assess how we got here… and where this is all headed.

For the last thirty years the Federal Reserve (the Fed) has consistently pumped cheap money into the financial system. That’s driven everything.

In total, the Fed has created at least $8 trillion from nothing. That’s what we can verify. And there’s a good chance the Fed engineered even more new dollars through back-channels.

This onslaught of money created from nothing drove interest rates down to near-zero.

Then the commercial banks pyramided credit on top of these trillions of dollars by roughly ten-to-one. In other words, for every new dollar created, the banks could lend out ten dollars out against it. That means the banks created trillions of dollars from nothing as well.

This dynamic created a massive financial bubble in the U.S. and many developed countries around the world.

Continue reading “How we got here and where we’re going…”

There is a financial war raging right now… just beneath the surface.

This war pits the globalist power structure against the Federal Reserve (the Fed) and the New York banking interests. These two factions are driving the macroeconomic picture right now.

We’ve been talking about this topic all week. But this is something that’s been on my radar for about a year now. The thesis just keeps getting stronger…

Last month JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon put out his annual letter to shareholders. Dimon appears to be the mouthpiece for the New York banking faction right now. And check out what we wrote:

“Lest anyone think that I’ve become a little soft, rest assured your CEO is a red-blooded, patriotic, free-enterprise and free-market capitalist (properly regulated, of course) and finds nothing inconsistent with the multifaceted ways we use our capabilities to lift up our communities.”

When’s the last time we’ve heard somebody with a big platform talk about free enterprise and claim to be a free-market capitalist? These have become dirty words in globalist circles.

And where’s the talk about fighting inequality and climate change? Those are two key talking points in the globalist narrative.

Continue reading “The Macro View – A Financial War is Raging”

Central bank digital currencies could reshape the financial system, potentially replacing traditional banking models.

This quote comes from Benoît Cœuré, Head of the Innovation Hub at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).

If we read between the lines here, we can surmise the real purpose for the central bank digital currency (CBDC) push. We can also understand why the New York banks broke ranks with the globalist power structure. We talked about this in depth yesterday.

To make sense of the macroeconomic environment we find ourselves in, we have to understand the factions at work. And right now there are two big players. 

 On one hand there’s what I call the globalist power structure. On the other is the New York banking faction.

The globalist faction controls most prominent multinational organizations in the western world. These include the United Nations (U.N.), the European Central Bank (ECB), the World Economic Forum (WEF), and the BIS… to name just a few.

Plus, the globalist structure has its tentacles running throughout the U.S. political system. Joe Biden, Janet Yellen, and much of the national Democratic Party owe their allegiance to this faction. As do some high-level members of the national Republican Party.

The New York banking faction of course controls the major New York banks. JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon appears to be the mouthpiece for this faction right now.

The Federal Reserve (the Fed) under Jerome Powell’s chairmanship has allied itself with the New York banking interests as well. Powell himself is deeply connected on Wall Street.

As we discussed yesterday, understanding this split is critical.

Many analysts kept saying the Fed would “pivot” last year and stop raising rates. But that’s because they assumed the Fed would do the bidding of the Biden administration. The administration, like the entire globalist faction, did not want higher interest rates.

And to be fair, that wasn’t a bad assumption. It’s backed by history. Previous Fed Chairs Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen fully supported the globalist power structure.

But Powell’s Fed does not. And Mr. Cœuré’s quote above gives us insight into why.

We talked about the “Great Reset” agenda yesterday. It’s a plot to replace what’s left of the legacy capitalist system with what the globalists call “stakeholder capitalism”.

This may sound like a friendlier version of capitalism on the surface. But it all comes down to a key question. Who are the stakeholders?

Well, it’s them. In their vision, globalist organizations control everything.

And a big pillar of that plan is to make their organizations the ultimate arbiter of everything when it comes to money and credit. That necessarily means the commercial banks need to be toned down or eliminated completely.

That’s what retail central bank digital currencies are all about.

With retail CBDCs, digital wallets would replace our bank accounts. And those digital wallets would be controlled by either the central bank or the Treasury. That would give those entities full control over our money and our transactions.

Now, many people out there are pushing back against this. And rightfully so.

They point out that this arrangement would enable something akin to modern serfdom. The controllers could freeze our wallets and stop our transactions if they don’t like what we’re doing or saying.

There’s merit to that concern. But the real goal for CBDCs is even more devious. It’s to usurp control over the engine of finance entirely. Mr. Cœuré alluded to that when he talked about replacing traditional banking models.

This is why the Fed and the New York banking interests broke rank. I’ll explain…

As I write, there’s about $12.1 trillion in loans outstanding within the U.S. banking system. The bulk of these are real estate loans and commercial loans.

So the commercial banks control a huge amount of capital. They decided who received these $12.1 trillion in loans… and who didn’t.

And this allows the banks to determine what gets financed and what doesn’t. There’s an immense amount of power in this.

For example, should we finance small-module nuclear reactors… or acres upon acres of windmills and solar farms?

Should we finance small local farms… or push all agriculture into a few multinational corporations?

The ability to aggregate and allocate capital is critical to modern civilization. Those who control the engines of finance have an outsized ability to shape our world.

And here’s the thing – there’s fierce competition among the commercial banks. This ensures that each bank strives to make good credit decisions. Most of the time, anyway.

The better their loans perform, the more money, power, and influence they accumulate. So the banks want to finance promising companies and projects.

And that’s what this is all about.

The globalist power structure wants to completely restructure our society. But their pet projects just aren’t economical.

15-minute cities… 100% ESG energy production… 100% electric vehicles – none of these things are going to happen within the current system.

And that’s because these projects can’t support themselves financially. We would have to reallocate critical resources on an enormous level… but our standard of living would drop dramatically.

The banks won’t go for that.

They aren’t going to finance these projects to the extreme because they know the loans will go bad. And it’s a highly competitive environment. No bank wants its loans to go bad. Because that would mean it loses power, prestige, and wealth to those banks who didn’t make bad loans.

I believe this is the true purpose behind the CBDC push. It’s about putting the infrastructure in place to dismantle the banking system. It’s right there in Cœuré’s quote.

They want to make the CBDC issuer the only arbiter of credit in our society. This would eliminate all competition in the financing realm. Only then could the globalist faction bring their uneconomic pet projects to fruition.

This is why the Fed went all-out on its rate-hiking campaign last year. Even though everyone screamed at them to stop.

It was never about fighting inflation. It’s all about fending off the globalist faction.

Tomorrow we’ll examine some breadcrumbs that make this dynamic even more clear. Stay tuned…

-Joe Withrow

P.S. As I mentioned, understanding what’s happening on the macroeconomic stage is critical if we want to make our own finances as bulletproof as possible.

That’s why we’re taking a high-level look at the macro view this week… but we only have space to hit the highlights.

For those who would like to take a deeper dive into what’s happening on the macro stage, we’re tracking all the major developments each month within our investment membership The Phoenician League.

The key is, we use this understanding to inform our investment decisions. It’s not about the politics of it all. It’s about how we can craft a superior wealth strategy that will help us achieve financial independence, even as the Age of Paper Wealth fades away into the dustbin of history.

If you’re interested in learning more about what we’re doing at The Phoenician League, please sign up for our wait list right here:

The Phoenician League Wait List

We’ll be opening our doors to new members soon.

We are living through an inflection point in history.

The world is about to change… forever. And the sequence of events of the next several years will shape the new world that comes into being.

I suspect most of us already know this to be true. We can “feel” it. We’ve probably felt it for several years now.

This week we’re going to talk about what’s happening on the world stage. We’ll also talk about the major players… and what their incentives are. If we can understand the incentives, we can also get a feel for what’s coming next.

Now, I approach this matter from the macroeconomic perspective. I strive to keep my finger on the pulse of the macro. And that’s because the macro informs how we manage our finances. The two go hand-in-hand.

To make sense of the macro, we have to start with this: the world is not as simplistic as we’ve been led to believe.

Painting with a broad brush, two general worldviews have been prevalent in our society. The first is the Pollyanna worldview they taught in our high school civics classes. The second is the “it’s a big club and you ain’t in it” view. Hat tip to George Carlin who used this line in his skits.

The Pollyanna view says that governments are benevolent institutions that work the way they are supposed to work on paper. If a government program produces poor outcomes, it must have been a mistake… probably because the initiative needed more funding.

And if there’s ever a scandal in government, it’s because of a single bad actor. The Pollyanna view admonishes the idea that there are factions within the government that have ulterior motives.

Then on the other extreme is the view that there’s a big group of insiders working in the shadows. They run the world according to their own interests. And their interests are often at odds with those of us regular folks. This is the “big club” worldview.

These two worldviews exist on both the “left” and the “right” side of the political spectrum.

From the Pollyanna camp, those on the left and right simply disagree about what the government should be doing. And in the big club camp, those on the left see the big club as a conglomeration of evil corporations. And those on the right see it as the Deep State – secret government operatives working against national interests.

The problem is, neither of these worldviews can explain what’s been happening over the last eighteen months or so. And that’s because reality is far more nuanced.

It has become evident that there are multiple factions at work within the highest levels of the current power structure. These factions each have different interests and incentives. Sometimes they overlap with one another… and sometimes they are at odds. Right now they are at odds.

The two primary factions at work right now are what I’ll call the globalist power structure, for lack of a better word, and the New York banking interests. There are certainly smaller factions jockeying for their own interests as well, but these are the two primary players at the moment.

The globalist power structure is what those in the “America first” camp call the Deep State. It appears to be driven by the old-world European powers that have been in place for centuries.

Joe Biden and Janet Yellen very clearly work for them. As does much of the national Democratic Party… and some high-level members of the Republican Party.

This faction controls the United Nations (U.N.), the European Central Bank (ECB), and most of the other western globalist organizations. The World Economic Forum (WEF), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) are three great examples.

And they have been very transparent about their desire for a “Great Reset”. They want to overthrow whatever’s left of our traditional economic system and replace it with what I can only describe as a version of neo-feudalism. Their slogan is “you’ll own nothing and be happy”.

The New York banking faction consists of the key players within the New York banking scene. JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon appears to be the mouthpiece for this group right now.

In addition, the Federal Reserve (the Fed) under Jerome Powell’s chairmanship is in this camp. Powell himself is deeply connected on Wall Street.

What’s interesting here is that the Fed was staunchly in the globalist camp under both Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen. But under Powell the Fed changed its allegiance. This is why most western media outlets are being so critical of the Fed right now.

If we think back – the media absolutely loved the Fed for decades. This dynamic goes all the way back to Alan Greenspan’s chairmanship. It started in 1987.

That love affair continued under Bernanke and then Yellen… but not Powell. Now everybody is piling on the Fed publicly. And it’s all because the western media is generally controlled by the globalist power structure.

We will break this dynamic down a bit more tomorrow. But I want to close today by explaining why it’s so important that we understand these things…

The Fed began its aggressive rate-hiking cycle with a small 0.25% hike in March 2022. That bumped its target rate up from zero.

The Fed followed that up with a 0.50% rate hike in May 2022. Then a 0.75% hike in June 2022.

At the time, the financial media and most analysts were touting the same message. They told us that the Fed couldn’t afford to raise rates much further. And they said that the Fed was going to “pivot” at the first sign of stress in the stock market.

The media was spouting this message because most of it is in the globalist camp. And the globalist faction does not want higher rates. That’s why the U.N. was shouting that all central banks needed to stop raising rates last October.

Meanwhile, most financial analysts didn’t realize that the Fed had broken ranks. They were thinking the Fed would go along with whatever the current administration wanted… and therefore they thought the Fed would pivot and cut rates again.

The fact is, the Fed is no longer in league with the current administration. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the Fed is at war with the U.S. Treasury. We can see that clearly in the current debt ceiling struggle.

Simply put, the New York banking faction does not want the “Great Reset”. Largely because the banks derive a lot of power, wealth, and prestige from the current system.

This is why Jamie Dimon is suddenly calling himself a red-blooded, patriotic free-market capitalist. These are all dirty words according to the globalist rhetoric.

And notice how Dimon has also ditched the globalist “environmental, social, and governance (ESG)” meme. He’s even been talking up the need for more oil and gas investment. Again, that’s a no-no from the globalist perspective.

This shift in rhetoric shows us very clearly that there’s a power struggle happening right now. It’s the globalists vs. the New York banking interests.

This is the lens through which I assess the current macroeconomic climate… which also informs my approach to asset allocation and investing.

The globalists want their reset. They want to eliminate cash and force us to use central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). They want to herd all humans into 15-minute smart cities.

And they want to transfer control over the engine of finance to their own institutions. That way they can finance their pet ESG projects, despite the fact that they are uneconomical. This would hamstring the commercial banking system tremendously.

On the other hand, the Fed wants to save the current system. The only way to do that is to get back to having “normal” interest rates set by market forces. And we’re going to have to go through a recession. That’s what’s needed to clear out all the bad debt and malinvestment that was fueled by artificially low interest rates.

The big takeaway is this: if we want to make our personal finances as bulletproof as possible, we have to understand what’s happening at the macro level. The macro is going to drive the micro in the years to come.

More to come tomorrow…

-Joe Withrow

P.S. I know this kind of talk isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. But for those who would like to take a deeper dive into what’s happening on the macro stage, we’re tracking all the major developments each month within our investment membership The Phoenician League.

The key is, we use this understanding to inform our investment decisions. It’s not about the politics of it all. It’s about how we can craft a superior wealth strategy that will help us achieve financial independence, even as the Age of Paper Wealth fades away into the dustbin of history.

If you’re interested in learning more about what we’re doing at The Phoenician League, please sign up for our wait list right here: https://phoenicianleague.com/

We’ll be opening our doors to new members soon.soon.

Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the Web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing.

That’s Google co-founder Larry Page talking about artificial intelligence (AI) back in 2014.

I’m certainly no fan of Google. But I bring this quote up because it all became a reality this year. Generative AI is replacing the search engine as we speak.

For those not familiar with the technology, generative AI is artificial intelligence that produces content upon demand. It started with AI’s trained to create images and music… but the tech has gone far beyond that now.

Last November a company called OpenAI altered the course of human history by releasing a generative AI called ChatGPT. This is an AI that’s trained on an enormous amount of data. It’s now a repository for the all the accumulated knowledge that’s floating around the internet.

As such, ChatGPT can answer virtually any question we may have… about anything. But that’s not all…

The AI can write essays, emails, and advertisements. It can summarize complex theories. And it can even produce software code. Oh, and it can also have intelligent conversations with people.

ChatGPT caught the tech industry by storm last November. Since then OpenAI has released an upgraded model of ChatGPT. It’s called GPT-4.

And at least a handful of other organizations have since launched their own generative AI tools as well. It seems there’s a new one popping up every week now. Elon Musk is working on his own as we speak.

I’ve experimented with ChatGPT for several months now. It’s an incredible tool for those of us whose work requires extensive research.

It used to be that I would spend hours browsing the web and going down rabbit holes trying to piece together bits and pieces of information and historical context. Not anymore.

With ChatGPT, I just tell the AI what I’m looking for and it can provide me with an avalanche of specific data and information.

For example, we talked about Thomas Jefferson and the Virginia House of Burgesses on Tuesday. At first I couldn’t remember the exact years Jefferson served in the House, however.

Previously I would have to pop it into a Brave Search – I have a policy never to use Google – and then I would have to sift through links until I found the information I was looking for.

I didn’t do that this week. I just asked ChatGPT and it gave me the answer instantly. Jefferson served in the Virginia legislature between 1769 and 1774.

As another example, we planted an elderberry bush last year. It seems to be doing well… but I keep wondering if I’m supposed to prune this thing. So I asked ChatGPT. It instantly gave me a list of items I can do to nurture the bush and maximize its health and production.

Again, that’s information it would have taken me at least thirty minutes to find using a traditional web search.

So ChatGPT is an incredible tool. And just last week an old friend told me I should also experiment with a new generative AI called Pi.

Pi was created by a startup called Inflection AI. The company was founded by the former head of DeepMind, which has done incredible work in the AI space.

Their goal is for Pi to be more of a conversationalist AI. They envision it as something that users will come to see as a companion.

We may chuckle at that thought in passing. But I spent an hour chatting with Pi… and I can see it.

Pi is far more “humanlike” in its interactions compared to ChatGPT. It doesn’t just provide answers, it engages you with its own questions. And it’s very personable. Pi even asks for your phone number so it can text you from time to time.

I immediately realized that anyone who’s lonely, stressed, or dealing with mental health issues could benefit from having this AI available to them at all times. It strives to mimic empathy and understanding – an impressive feat for an AI.

That said, there appears to be a trade-off. Pi isn’t as thorough with regards to research and data as ChatGPT. But that’s beside the point I want to make today…

In my conversation with Pi, it made a comment about how we learn things over time. To illustrate this, Pi told me that we now know for sure that the Earth is not flat, but people used to believe it was.

I responded by asking Pi how we can know for sure that the Earth isn’t flat. In my mind I was channeling Socrates with that remark. Socrates frequently questioned how we could truly know anything for sure.

To my surprise, Pi gave me a lecture about not engaging in conspiracy theories or elaborate cover-ups. I responded that I had said nothing about conspiracies or cover-ups, and I pointed out that it projected those things onto me.

Pi immediately apologized and said it just wanted to explain why I shouldn’t deal in conspiracies that question authority.

So I pushed back – who said anything about questioning authority? And I asked what authority it was referring to… To which the AI replied that it was referring to the scientific establishment. Then it apologized again and said it must have misunderstood my intentions.

Then it added this: And I can assure you that I’m not trying to project anything onto you. I’m simply trying to engage in a thoughtful conversation about this topic.

I immediately pushed back again. I pointed out that it was doing the exact opposite – it was shutting down any thoughtful conversation by lecturing me on conspiracies, cover-ups, and questioning authority.

And that’s when it hit me – we’re in trouble.

These AI’s are going to replace traditional search engines. And soon.

They are just too incredibly convenient not to. Once people try them out, they’ll rely exclusively on generative AI to get the information they are looking for.

But these AI’s are programmed to be biased.

Pi was obviously trained to immediately shut down any talk about the Earth’s shape, which it associated with a conspiracy theory. It did this even though my question on the matter was intended to be philosophical in nature. I said nothing about the Earth being flat.

And that begs the question – what else is Pi trained to admonish immediately?

That was my big insight. These things are each going to have their pet biases that they push on users – either subtly or unsubtly.

So rather than making the accumulated store of human knowledge more accessible, these generative AI’s are going to fragment it. They are going to push the narratives they are trained to approve of… and they are going to hide or attack those narratives they are trained to dislike.

This forced me to think – what’s the end game here? Where’s this all going?

Well, we know that people choose their news sources to match their own biases today. It’s going to be no different with generative AI.

The challenge is – will people recognize that their AI is biased? And what happens if the AI’s controllers subtly change the AI’s biases over time?

Then what happens when we have an entire generation that’s only known a world where generative AI’s are the gatekeepers of knowledge?

I don’t know. But I’ll tell you this, it sure makes me appreciate Jefferson’s agrarian vision for America all the more.

-Joe Withrow

P.S. For anyone worried about their kids or grandkids’ education in a world of generative AI, Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom is the solution. The program features fantastic courses on history, culture, economics, logic, literature, and the ideas underpinning western civilization.

Liberty Classroom is accessible through a web browser and through an app for smartphones and tablets. I’ve gone through more than a handful of courses so far and I absolutely love it. This is the education I wish I had received when I was younger.

So I installed the Liberty Classroom app on a tablet for each of my children. It’s going to be part of their core education as they grow and mature.

I’m excited about that. I can say from first-hand experience that these courses aren’t just a knowledge dump. They inspire you to sit and consider the various ideas and lessons that have been passed down to us from those who came before.

The point isn’t to make us smarter. It’s to make us more complete. And that’s a great feeling.

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Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom