Category: Insights

Over the last few days, I’ve laid out the multi-decade chain of events that led to the inaugural Phoenician League Investment Summit last week. We’ll wrap up that story today…

It all started with my experience working in corporate banking in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. That opened my eyes to the fact that the financial system is not exactly what they portray it as.

Around the same time, this OB/GYN from Texas named Ron Paul was running for president, and he kept talking about gold, Austrian economics, and the monetary system. 

At first, I had no idea what he was talking about. So I started buying these books written by the economists he would name-drop in the debates… and it wasn’t long until my worldview cracked open.

At that point I had no choice – I quit my banking job and moved up to the mountains. From my quiet mountain home, I kept learning about economics, and I began to study investing also. That’s how I discovered the financial newsletter industry… and I was hooked.

I can’t tell you how many different investment newsletters I subscribed to. And I read them religiously whenever a new issue came out. 

Then, one day, I found a curious advertisement in one of them. The ad said that this particular publishing outfit was looking for an analyst to join the company.

At first I just skimmed over it and kept reading, as my eyes are trained to do. But then it hit me… maybe you should answer the ad. 

Continue reading “From Corporate Banking to The Phoenician League”

I mentioned earlier this week that the inaugural Phoenician League Investment Summit was the culmination of a multi-decade chain of events.

It all started on the floor of Wells Fargo’s loss mitigation department in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. That’s where I learned the importance of incentives… and I started to see the financial system for what it truly is.

At the same time, a gentleman by the name of Dr. Ron Paul was running for president. I’d tune into the debates, and this guy kept talking about gold, Austrian economics, and the boom-bust cycle – all things I’d never heard about before.

That was curious to me. I happened to hold a finance degree from a large public University, but this guy obviously knew something about the financial system that I did not.

Continue reading “Austrian Economics: How Ron Paul Changed My View of Money”

After Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, I found myself working in Wells Fargo’s loss mitigation department. The office building was located in an obscure part of town… and it happened to be right beside Wells Fargo’s foreclosure building. 

It’s funny – the bank had this gleaming office tower downtown. That’s where I thought I would be working. 

But as I’m navigating into work on my first day using those old Garmin GPS devices, I quickly learned that I was mistaken. They had these two buildings out in this old industrial center where nobody would see them. I’d never been to that part of town before… because there’s no reason to go there.

I was 25 years old at the time, and my job was to manage a portfolio of mortgage loans that were never going to be repaid. Roughly $100 billion worth, if my memory serves.

I remember it vividly – customer default letters would pour in by the cartload. There was one guy whose entire job was to haul in the cart full of letters every day. Then another guy’s job was to sit there and scan every single one of them into the computer system.

And keep in mind, the floor was a massive cubicle farm. In each row you had two computers to a cubicle, back-to-back, and then a crappy cardboard divider, and then two more computers. 

I think there were six rows… and that setup stretched out for at least 100 yards. It was like a football field full of worker bees.

Continue reading “Inside Wells Fargo Loss Mitigation After the 2008 Crisis”

Friends,

We have been working hard behind the scenes for months now to put together something new: the inaugural Phoenician League Investment Summit… and I couldn’t be more excited about how it came together.

This is a virtual event that will feature sixteen independent speakers who will host sessions on various topics across four days. But these aren’t unrelated sessions – they all lay out what I see as a comprehensive strategy for building wealth in the economy we actually live in, not the one Retirement Incorporated pretends we have.

The Summit will kick off on Tuesday, October 6^th at 1:00 PM Eastern, and it will run through Saturday, October 10^th. We have organized it by day, with each day’s sessions geared towards a larger theme.

Day One is about laying the foundations. It will open with a session detailing how the structures of the Western world are shifting right now, and then it will feature sessions on gold, Bitcoin, and infinite banking.

Day Two is about markets and macroeconomic analysis. The daily sessions will assess the big picture, and they will analyze where we are in this economic cycle – from the perspective of independent professionals who are deep thinkers on the subject matter.

Day Three is about alternative assets and building cash flow. Those sessions will drill into real estate, mortgage notes, music royalties, and other investments geared towards creating passive income.

Day Four is about protection, optimization, and synthesis. It will feature sessions on tax strategy, privacy, and internationalization. And I’ll close things out on that day by tying every session of the week into one coherent picture.

I’ll highlight the daily speaker lineup and session topics for you in a series of emails to come. For now, please mark your calendar for that week of October 6 through October 10. The sessions will be free to attend – we’ll get started at 1:00 PM Eastern each day.

And please know that every one of our speakers is someone that I know personally. These are people that I’ve worked with and I’ve done business with. In some cases, they are people that I trust with my own investment strategy and my family’s future.

So you won’t find any fluff or sponsored content here. These are real practitioners who actually do the things they’re going to talk to us about.

I’ll be sending out more information over the next few weeks — who’s speaking each day, what they’re covering, why I think it matters… all of it. And I promise – this is going to be a killer event packed with big-picture thinking and actionable strategies that you won’t find anywhere else.

To get your free access pass, just go to: https://go.phoenicianleague.com/summit-2026

More to come…

-Joe Withrow

The helicopter came in low over the Catoctin Mountains on Friday afternoon… but the men aboard had no idea why they had been summoned.

It was August 13, 1971. Fifteen of the top economic officials in the United States government were being flown to Camp David for a weekend meeting whose purpose had not been explained to most of them.

And they were sworn to secrecy. They were told not to tell their staff where they were going. They weren’t even permitted to tell their wives.

Curiously, the Secretary of State had not been invited. Neither was the President’s National Security Advisor. Whatever was about to happen, it was not going to be discussed with the diplomats first.

Now, Treasury Secretary John Connally already knew the plan. So did Paul Volcker, the Undersecretary for Monetary Affairs — a tall, chain-smoking technician who had spent years watching the international monetary system grind slowly toward the moment that had finally arrived.

Once the helicopter touched down at Camp David and the group had settled in, Connally got the meeting started.

“The British want three billion,” he stated ominously. “In gold.”

President Nixon immediately turned to Volcker. “Paul, can we cover it?”

“We can cover Britain,” Volcker answered. “We can’t cover what comes after Britain.”

The reality is that the run on the gold window had already started. Switzerland had recently taken some of its gold out of the US Treasury. And French president Georges Pompidou had sent a French warship across the Atlantic to collect France’s gold and carry it home. Everyone knew that was theater… but it was effective theater.

Volcker had spent his career defending this system. He understood better than anyone in the room what the British request signified — and it wasn’t about the money.

Continue reading “The Nixon Shock: How the US Ended the Gold Standard in 1971”

The man took a deep breath as he stepped into Chase National Bank on a foggy Manhattan morning. He knew he was in for a battle… and a small fortune was on the line.

It was September 16, 1933, and Frederick Barber Campbell arrived at the bank bearing his receipts. They designated him as the owner of twenty-seven bars of gold bullion, each one marked and numbered – and sitting in a vault beneath Wall Street.

The contract was explicit. It stated that Campbell was the owner of those exact bars of gold, and that he could take possession of them upon request at any time.

Campbell’s bars were worth roughly $135,000 at the official exchange rate. Today, they would be worth $28.7 million.

“Good morning sir,” Campbell greeted the teller as he approached the counter. “I’m here for my bullion – here are the receipts.” He sized up the young man as he pushed his gold receipts across the counter.

He could see that the teller was immediately distraught. “Sir, I’ll have to go get the manager. Please wait just a minute,” the teller replied.

Campbell had done business at Chase National Bank for thirty years. He knew the staff, and they knew him. The bank considered him to be an important customer. But Campbell also knew that everything was suddenly different… and America was at a crossroads.

The teller quickly returned with an older, gray-haired gentleman who immediately explained the situation. “Sir, I’m sorry but we can’t release the gold…”

“I have the receipts right here,” Campbell cut him off immediately. “This is a legally binding contract that says I own those specific gold bars, and that I may take possession of them at any time upon returning the receipts. I’ve already paid a hefty storage fee for the service.”

The manager winced as he chose his next words. “I know that, sir. But the gold is no longer yours to take. It isn’t ours, either. The President issued an order – we have to turn over all our gold to the US Treasury.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Campbell countered. “Just because the President writes something on a piece of paper doesn’t mean he can do whatever he wants. This is clearly unconstitutional and you know it.”

The manager shook his head, visibly sympathetic. “Sir, I’m sorry but the only thing we’re authorized to do is credit you with dollars at the exchange rate of $20.67 per ounce of gold. We will credit your account.”

“Dollars? Gold is what makes dollars have value. If you take away the gold, what good are dollars?” Campbell was incensed. He knew this wasn’t the bank manager’s fault. But his 27 bars of gold represented his life savings.

The manager offered another apology and said there was nothing else he could do. Campbell stormed out of the bank in disgust… but he didn’t let it go.

Continue reading “Executive Order 6102: The Man Who Sued to Get His Gold Back”

The cable came in from London, and Benjamin Strong already knew what it would say before he read it.

The year was 1924 and Strong had quickly become the most powerful banker in America. But it wasn’t J.P. Morgan’s kind of power, where everything hinged on a private fortune.

No, Strong’s power was something newer. And something far greater.

Benjamin Strong had been tapped to run the Federal Reserve Bank of New York when it opened its doors in November of 1914. The public didn’t realize it yet because of how the Federal Reserve (the Fed) had been packaged and sold as a populist reformer’s institution… but Strong now sat at the one lever in the entire American financial system that could make money cheap or scarce across the whole country.

On the surface, it didn’t look like that was the case. Per the original structure, the public was led to believe that the Fed’s board of governors down in Washington would call the shots. But by 1924, everyone plugged into the American engine of high finance knew that the true lever of power resided in New York.

The man on the other end of the cable was Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England. Strong had been expecting his telegram.

Continue reading “A Little Coup de Whisky and the Fed’s Immediate Betrayal”

Friends,

When we last spoke, I left you with a question…

If the conventional financial playbook is broken — and if “retirement planning” was never a strategy, but rather a lucky passenger riding a four-decade tailwind that’s now gone… well, where does that leave us? 

Let’s explore that question more together today.

Have you ever noticed that certain institutions seem to endure no matter what the economy does? 

We’re talking about the institutions that survive the same crashes that wipe out so many others around them. They’re still standing after wars, currency crises, depressions, and decades of inflation. 

Meanwhile, we read about bank failures every few years… and we watch fortunes that took a generation to build evaporate in a single downturn.

So it begs the question – what separates the enterprises and families that last centuries from the ones that don’t?

After being immersed in the finance space for two decades, I’ve come to the conclusion that it isn’t luck. And it isn’t picking the right stocks at the right moments, either. 

Here’s the secret you’ll never hear on CNBC: the world’s most time-tested financial model is actually quite simple. It rests on three basic planks.

Continue reading “What the oldest fortunes all have in common”

Friends,

Let’s talk about the conventional retirement planning model. And let’s suppose it’s the only paradigm somebody knows.

It calls for 30+ years of discipline. That’s 30+ years of doing exactly what the financial planner told you to do — max out the 401(k)… hold the index funds… and wait. 

Let’s suppose you went that route and you had socked away $1 million in your retirement accounts by 2020. You were a millionaire. Do you know what that same one million dollars buys today?

Roughly $680,000 worth of the same goods and services that it could purchase six years ago.

Your account balance didn’t fall. But $320,000 in purchasing power disappeared. Silently. Without a single line item on your statement to explain it.

That’s the insidious nature of inflation – the invisible tax. And it’s the most consequential concept in personal finance that the mainstream financial industry will never show you on a slide.

And that’s because explaining inflation honestly would require admitting something the industry cannot afford to admit — that the conventional financial playbook was never actually a strategy. It was a lucky passenger riding a four-decade tailwind of falling interest rates.

Here’s what I mean…

Continue reading “The Invisible Tax: Why $1 Million Isn’t What It Used to Be”

Friends – I hope the summer is treating you well. 

It’s been a warm one up here in the mountains of Virginia, but I’ve quite enjoyed it. We have spent quite a bit of time down at the river. Here’s a shot of our little access point:

It’s funny – summer doesn’t quite feel as special to the Withrow kids, who have been homeschooled from Day One. 

I’ve explained to them how, to me, summer represented my only childhood experience of pure freedom. It was a temporary reprieve from the government school that insisted upon regimenting and surveilling every aspect of my life from early September through early June… 

But it just doesn’t register with them. They cannot imagine a world in which they did not have nearly complete agency in their own life and their own decisions.

I’m thankful for that. And I’m forever grateful for those brave homeschool pioneers who blazed the path forward for us here in the United States – back when homeschooling was much more of a dicey proposition.

And speaking of American history, we’re going to take a short break from our American System essay series for the next two weeks or so. We’ll resume – and hopefully complete – the series shortly thereafter. 

But in the interim, I want to take some time to shine the light on the world of personal finance and investing… which was originally my impetus for embarking on the American System series in the first place. I’m fascinated by the history of it all, but my ultimate responsibility lies in the investment world.

To that end, we’re going to get back on the investment beat for the next few weeks. And it will culminate with our next Phoenician League strategy session on July 22^nd. There, we’ll take what we’ve learned on the macroeconomic front and put it all together from a self-directed investment standpoint. 

Specifically, I’m going to walk you through the complete investment framework that I’ve spent the last decade building — the one I use to manage my own money in this new financial era that we are entering.

It’s a system built on five pillars. And the key is that they work together, as one architecture, rather than the piecemeal, one-off approach most people end up with.

We’ll get into how to build a foundation in hard money that can’t be inflated away… how to generate monthly cash flow from actual assets, not paper promises… how to think about owning stocks intentionally instead of just parking money in funds and hoping for the best… and how to keep more of what you build through smart tax and protection structures.

And I’ll show you exactly how to implement all of it — including who can actually help you get each piece in place. Because in my experience, the investment framework isn’t the hard part. The hard part is knowing who to trust… and that’s a gap I’ve spent years closing.

The session will be free and open to everyone. If you’d like to join us, you can get more information at: https://phoenicianleague.com/session

See you there!

-Joe Withrow