The Dollar Isn’t Dying. It’s Tightening.

I am, in many ways, an intellectual child of the 2008 crisis.

At the time, I was working in service at a luxury auto group out in the Hamptons. I dealt with high net worth clients every day. People I assumed had everything figured out. Then almost overnight, that assumption collapsed.

What began at the top spread quickly. Friends, family, entire communities found themselves out of work or scrambling to stay afloat. I watched the news as what was National was, in fact, Global. Unemployment checks, extensions and schemes, stimulus programs, emergency policy responses, and near zero interest rates became the new normal.

To explain what happened, and why, there was also no shortage of politically charged explanations. 

I grew up in a conservative household, so the framing was familiar. This was the result of liberal spending, deficits, and government excess. I was more left leaning myself, a real punk rocker, and that explanation felt incomplete. What about corporate greed and Wall St? They get a free pass?

I found Milton Friedman around that time. He was the first to break through. While I tried to despise what he was saying, the core of the message got through due to his uncanny ability to communicate and articulate so effortlessly; The first concept I understood was, “no free lunch.” 

This was scary because, at the time especially, I saw nothing but free lunches served up as a political panacea. I was beginning to understand this would only make the problem worse! But, what was the problem?

But then I came across something that shifted my perspective.

There was this supposedly insane rich guy named Peter Schiff at Occupy Wall Street holding a sign - “I’m the 1%, let’s talk.” He took on any assertion, question, ridicule, etc and pointed the sentiment and conversation to where he believed it belonged - the system. The Federal Reserve. Central banking.

That stuck with me. Though I didn’t have much affinity for the wealthy at the time, here was someone redirecting the focus away from class resentment and toward the Federal Reserve. The most powerful part - he didn’t downplay the problems with disparate wealth or the corporate shenanigans etc. He simply asked who gave them the money to do these crazy things in the first place? To paraphrase his point, “If everyone at the party is too drunk - why is no one questioning the bartender who is pouring the drinks?”

I started researching his videos. I came across his multitude of interviews from 2003 leading up to the current crisis where he pointed out, accurately and in real time, what was about to happen and what did happen. All while Ben Bernanke, then chair at the Federal Reserve, was pronouncing there were no risks in sight.

I was now quite curious. If someone like Schiff was able to spot this all in advance, how did he do it? That led me to Ron Paul, who in turn pointed to Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, and the broader Austrian framework through the Mises Institute.

At that point, I was firmly a gold bug. Schiff’s influence was real. The narrative was compelling. Sound money versus fiat distortion. 

But it was reading Mises that clarified the core issue.

The problem wasn’t simply policy. It was the denominator; money and credit.

How else could every segment of the economy break at once?

From there, experience started to refine theory.

I have lived through meaningful ups and downs so far. Enough to understand that markets do not move in straight lines. COVID was a defining example. Repo market stress in late 2019 signaled something was wrong. I promptly moved to cash that November. Then, as the March collapse unfolded and policy response became unprecedented, I moved back in.

That was not ideology. That was the conditions of the time.

This is an important distinction. One overlooked by those who base their concrete investment decisions on ideological foundations. Most importantly: Ideology serves no place in your decision making. The market simply doesn’t care and the universe shall not bend to your wishes and will often subvert your expectations in this regard. 

While I agree that should you believe something is wrong, you should make an effort affect change it, for the average retail investor that’s not the point of the exercise. I was, and am, simply on the lookout to make a return. That is what a retail investor can, or cannot, achieve. That is it. 

How things are is what concerns me, however they “ought to be” is a matter for a different domain. One cannot make an is from an ought, afterall.

When I first was feeding this interest the temptation to confuse the two was enormous. I was going to buy gold, get rich, witness the return to sound money, and see the world change. To make a long story short; it’s just gotten worse. Much worse.

A major influence during this time was Robert Wenzel of Economic Policy Journal. I corresponded with him almost daily. If there is an intellectual debt in how I think about markets, it is primarily owed to him. His framing was simple and practical. If the boom creates the bust, why position yourself permanently for collapse. Ride the boom. Step aside when conditions change. This being said, there is nothing to be shy about when it comes to political / policy intrigue. As a matter of fact, it’s often quite useful when disciplined. 

This approach stuck.

There have been times I have been long equities. Others, where I have been accumulating hard assets. Some, I have been in cash. The constant is not the asset. It is the framework.

For instance, recently, I was positioned heavily in mining equities. Silver, uranium, gold. It was an extraordinary run. I have been engaging in the endeavor since December of 2015 in earnest. Scooping up value for seemingly pennies. In particular one could buy GDXJ in the mid teens and, while tranching in, watch it move aggressively higher reinforcing your conviction.

At the same time, the narrative became unanimous.

Good ol’ Peter Schiff was making victory laps and could be spotted after years of absence on Fox News. Headlines turned supportive. Even the mainstream began talking about gold seriously. Most interestingly, discussions of the dollar losing reserve status were becoming quite commonplace. The 

And then something small, but important, showed up.

APMEX was offering physical silver at effectively zero premium over spot. In a market supposedly defined by shortages.

I screenshotted it, sent it to my brother, and promptly sold all the equities and paper I had. GDXJ at the time was $142 and other positions held similar runs.

Precious metals were slammed days later. Silver had a 37% move in a single day from high to low, Gold 14.7%. It seemingly recovered. Schiff talked about how it’s a great time to buy. And then, weeks later, GDXJ would spike as high as $157. But not long after, it is 35% lower back near $100. 

Why did I sell when everything looked so strong? I learned immensely from Rick Rule; one of the greatest resource investors I have ever come across. Since he is consistent in his reasoning for purchase, and spells that out, there is no shame or inconsistency when it comes time to sell. 

Investing or even trading where appropriate, properly understood, is not done so in the way most people frame it. MAKE MONEY! It has been about preserving wealth through cycles and growing it. That’s an extremely difficult thing to do; so why risk just handing it back? The concern is always with profit all too often. No one pays attention to the potential, or reality, of loss which is far more damaging.

I know. I know. Simply making a new high and having $0 / 0% premium over spot does nothing. Didn’t I see what others were saying, “Inflation, war, government debt, etc.”

I get it. But most importantly, the signal beneath the noise is not any of these things: 

It was dollar funding; i.e. dollar “shortage”.

What the Market Is Actually Saying

There is a growing problem in contemporary market commentary, particularly among those aligned with Austrian economics.

This being said, the high level critique is correct. The system is distorted. Intervention compounds itself and, to Schiffs point, cannot be stopped. The addict requires the dose and at higher and higher levels. Credit expansion has by all means replaced real savings. There really is zero turning back.

But the interpretation of current conditions is often wrong: We are told inflation is inevitable and that the dollar is collapsing. Gold therefore must rise.

Yet when you look at the actual behavior of markets, you see something different.

Commodities are not steadily rising, though they have been. Yet now, they are being liquidated. Note the choice of words there. Not sold. They are being liquidated. A 37% range in silver in one day, and such moves shared across other commodities, is not just a short squeeze or selling pressure. It’s outright liquidation. 

But why? Look around. Credit conditions are not loose and in fact they are tightening everywhere. The dollar is not weakening. It is growing in strength, often lately very aggressively.

What is happening is that funding markets are showing stress, not abundance.

These are not the conditions of an inflationary breakout. These are the conditions of a system short of dollars relative to its obligations.

That is the key: RELATIVE to its obligations. I’m not saying there are trillions of dollars, I’m saying it’s a squeeze relative to obligations in the here and now. At that point, any asset may be put up for sale to get the dollars required to satisfy them.

That is a funding problem, not a printing problem.

Where the Austrian Framework Still Holds

I am not saying that the Austrians are wrong. I’m saying they are right, but some are not appreciating the current system and how that impacts things in the short to medium term. In the long run, for sure, the system is dead. 

No one can deny this system is built on credit expansion. That, interest rates have been suppressed for decades upon decades at this point. Capital has been drastically and direly misallocated. Further, policy intervention does not resolve these issues. It bandaids some symptoms, brings about others, and extends and exacerbates the underlying malignancy. One that will surely kill the patient. 

On this, there is alignment.

The Missing Mechanism

A credit based monetary system does not move in one direction. It expands, and it contracts. When it contracts, it does not feel like inflation. It feels like a shortage of money.

In a global system built on dollar liabilities, that shortage expresses itself as a shortage of dollars. This is what most commentary misses.

When conditions tighten, participants are forced to raise dollars. They sell what they can. Commodities, equities, even gold. This is the liquidation we are seeing. It is also the reason it could be “forecasted” ahead of time (oil shock, cross-currency basis widens, dollar rising, commodity liquidations, etc). 

Prices fall not because value disappeared, but because liquidity is being demanded elsewhere. It is the Austrian cycle being laid bare. The capital structure is malformed and attempting to adjust; in that process, the dollar in our case rises.

Gold and the Reality of Liquidity

Gold’s role is misunderstood in these moments. 

The standard narrative is that money printing leads to inflation, and inflation leads to higher gold prices. Ipso facto. That’s it. While that relationship exists, it is by no means linear. In periods of stress, which to the point of many who understand gold as insurance such as Simon Mikhailovich, gold is often sold to obtain dollars. That’s why it works so well as insurance. 

Not because its long term role has changed, but because it is liquid. So instead of acting as an immediate hedge, it can act as a source of funding.

That is not a contradiction. It is a reflection of the system it exists within.

The Dollar Paradox

The most persistent misunderstanding is the belief that a broken dollar system leads to a weaker dollar. In reality, the opposite tends to occur. A system built and asymmetrically leveraged on dollar liabilities creates enormous global demand for dollars, especially during stress. So many of these dollars are “outside of the system” via the Eurodollar it forces the question, do policy makers / central banks truly have control. The answer is no. They can only react.

As demand rises for funding then, so does the dollar. Not because the system is strong, but because it is strained and constrained. Paradoxically, that strength creates further instability.

Debt becomes harder to service. Global trade tightens. Financial conditions worsen. 

Credit expansion requires further credit expansion to sustain and the system feeds on itself.

We have to stop looking at this problem so nationalistically, given the Eurodollar, it’s become global to be sure. Global with no one truly at the wheel. So the only thing that can be done is give the addict the “fix” and try to keep the ponzi going.

As Mises wrote, 

“There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.”

Sadly, he won’t be wrong. But, a concept Rick Rule would point out when applicable, inevitable does not equate to imminent.

All About Positioning

This is where positioning matters.

When I sold into strength, it was not because I abandoned the long term thesis.

It was because the conditions no longer justified the price.

For instance UEC below two dollars was undervalued. At twenty five, without a fundamental shift to support that move, it was not. 

GDXJ at $150 and prospects for the metals themselves looking reminiscent of April 2013 didn’t thrill me. I can always buy again, hopefully at a discount value. B

In all cases, the reason I bought to begin with, a discount, suddenly wasn’t there. So let’s just say I wouldn’t have jumped out of bed to buy more.

The same applies broadly and will always apply. The only exception being physical holdings which are ultimate insurance and allocation should never be out of hand to where the impact matters.

Bottom line: Markets do not move on ideology. Once again, the universe doesn’t care what you want or believe. They move on liquidity, positioning, and conditions.

And when narratives become crowded, especially ones rooted in certainty, they tend to mark turning points.

Intervention Changes the Timing, Not the Outcome

This being said, Policymakers respond to these pressures. Swap lines are opened. Liquidity facilities expanded. Rules adjusted. Each action is designed to relieve immediate stress but none of them resolve the underlying structure. In fact, they preserve it.

Which means the cycle continues. The long term critique from the Austrian perspective is not wrong. But the path is not an immediate collapse. It is a sequence. 

Tightening and easing. Expansion and contraction. Through it all, the dollar is a currency that is both overextended and indispensable. The dollar is not about to be dethroned.

If anything, it is more likely to strengthen given what is likely to be further, and greater, coming stress. This being said; it is precisely that strength that will create the pressure that eventually forces change.

Not suddenly.

But gradually, as the cost of dependence becomes too high.

Then suddenly. But things will be far worse economically and geopolitically as that stress is borne. The system is unstable for sure, but not yet collapsing.

But keep in mind that Dollar strength is often a signal of stress, not health.

If you understand that, you stop trying to prove a point and start positioning for reality.

The Saylor Strategy? Desparation.

The Illusion Breaks: Bitcoin, Recession, and the Final Act of the Stimulus Age

Bitcoin is tired. Stocks are rolling over. And the recession scare isn’t just back; it’s metastasizing.

But here’s the real story: the entire scaffolding of post 2008 financial engineering is creaking under its own weight. Governments that promised infinite stimulus and central banks that hallucinated stability have run out of tricks. What remains is debt, leverage, and a fragile belief that someone else, somewhere, still has control.

That belief is dying.

Look no further than MicroStrategy; or rather, Strategy, as it now styles itself in a branding exercise that smells more of desperation than innovation. Michael Saylor’s corporate Bitcoin cult just issued a 10% perpetual preferred share offering. That’s two points higher than the one they sold barely a month ago. Why? Because dilution through convertible debt ran its course, and now they're stuck paying nearly junk-tier dividends to keep the game going.

This isn’t innovation. It’s survival.

Their underlying business? Functionally irrelevant. Strategy is a Bitcoin ETF in corporate cosplay, sitting on billions in unrealized crypto gains while treading water with a balance sheet that looks increasingly like a leveraged time bomb. If Bitcoin falls too far, they will be forced to sell coins simply to make interest payments. If it falls further, they’ll have to sell all the more. The moment the market stops buying their desperation offerings, they’re cornered. And all of it: every press release, every tweet, every policy proposal to have the U.S. Treasury “strategically” hit the bid and HODL is about propping up the one thing that can’t be allowed to fall… the price.

Because price is the only story left.

The Collapse of the Commercial Use Case

Bitcoin was supposed to be a revolution. A peer-to-peer cash system, stateless and resilient. Today, it’s a NASDAQ tracker in a black hoodie.

The institutions have arrived, yes. But they didn’t bring innovation. They brought options desks, structured products, and index flows. They brought in the professional rounders. In a world awash in speculative financial “assets”, Bitcoin has become just another yield-bearing asset, one whose underlying utility has stagnated while its price narrative gets leveraged to infinity.

Meanwhile, the real world, the commercial world, continues to shrug. Ask El Salvador, where Bitcoin was crowned legal tender four years ago and now barely registers in day-to-day transactions. The government just walked back key elements of the Bitcoin law: it’s no longer considered currency, can’t be used to pay taxes, and the state-run wallet is being phased out. A recent poll? 92% of Salvadorans haven’t used Bitcoin in the past year. After four years.

And still, the true believers keep doubling down. Michael Saylor is knocking on the White House door with a 40-page plan proposing the U.S. government acquire up to 25% of the Bitcoin network via daily Treasury purchases. He wants the government to borrow Eurodollars, that is, real usable currency, to buy a digital asset that, commercially, no one uses.

This isn’t monetary reform. It’s a bailout disguised as strategy.

What the Market Really Wants

The irony is brutal: the free market already solved this problem decades ago. The Eurodollar system, born without government coercion, was the world’s first digital ledger-based currency. A fluid, decentralized medium of exchange used in real transactions by real businesses across the planet. The commercial world didn’t need Satoshi to tell it what it needed. It wanted mobility, flexibility, and dynamism. It got them.

Bitcoin, by contrast, became obsessed with store of value mythology. It tethered itself to gold bugs, Fed critics, and inflation truthers who never noticed that the real problem wasn’t as simple as fiat: it was the fundamental substitution of price action for productivity.

Now, in its moment of supposed triumph, Bitcoin is chained to the fate of the very financial system it was meant to escape. A leveraged derivative of NASDAQ liquidity, sensitive not to monetary innovation but to interest rate expectations.

The Global Contagion and the End of Stimulus Illusions

This isn’t just an American problem. It’s not just a Powell problem, or a Trump problem, or even a Bitcoin problem. This is systemic, synchronized failure. The entire post-2008 global economy was built on a single assumption: that governments and central banks could paper over structural decline with debt, asset bubbles, and institutional optimism. That assumption is now collapsing in real time.

China, once the great engine of global recovery, is sputtering under the weight of its own contradictions. A 29-month streak of falling producer prices. Imports down 8.4%. Oil demand is back to lockdown-era levels. Consumer prices in outright deflation; even after trillion-yuan “stimulus” packages. Beijing is throwing everything it has at the problem, and the result is less than nothing. Every new bazooka only confirms that the last one failed. Every rescue package is proof of a deeper, more intractable crisis. The world’s second-largest economy is trying to spend its way out of a silent depression that it can no longer deny; and has no one left to sell to.

Europe? The Berlin Bazooka fizzled before it left the barrel. Growth projections are quietly being revised lower, while governments tiptoe around austerity ghosts they swore they buried. And Japan has returned to form, clinging to yield curve control and praying the rest of the world doesn’t notice.

There’s a reason El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has quietly unraveled. There’s a reason MicroStrategy, excuse me, Strategy, is issuing 10% perpetual preferred shares like it’s 2008 all over again. The common thread isn’t volatility or interest rates or “transitory” disinflation. The thread is desperation.

Everyone is leveraged to a story that is starting to no longer sell.

The free market didn’t cease to grow. It was never allowed to. Growth was replaced with simulation via “stimulation”. With narrative. With spreadsheet hallucinations and machinations from central banks and endless PowerPoints from monetary visionaries who never had to turn a profit. Now, the simulation is breaking. And the cracks aren’t isolated; they’re global, they’re widening, and they’re being papered over with ever-higher piles of debt that produce ever-declining returns.

The question isn’t whether we’re heading into a recession. We’re already living through the consequences of a global economy that can’t seem to remember how to produce real value and instead relies on price manipulation and speculative “capital allocation”; i.e. trading.

So what comes next?

Likely another round of rate cuts. More “emergency” liquidity. Perhaps even a white paper on how blockchain will save the bond market. But the commercial system, the real economy, knows better now. It’s not just beginning to see through the illusion. It’s starting to buckle against it.

This necessary revolt, when it comes, won’t be led by tech billionaires or central bankers. It will begin at the checkout counter, in the factory, in the labor force participation rate no one wants to talk about. The old models are dying. The new ones haven’t been born yet. But the clearing process is inevitable.
Until next time: Stay skeptical. Stay liquid. Stay out of the narrative.

The Global Echo of Labor and Leadership: Economic Fragility Unveils Political Collapse

The global economy narrative continues to unfold, one of unraveling promises. Major governments around the world, from Canada to France and Germany, are succumbing to abrupt political turmoil, and the threads connecting these collapses are far more significant than budget deficits or parliamentary squabbles. At the heart of the upheaval is a shared failure: the inability to address the systemic economic fragility that has long been masked by superficial assurances and unsustainable policies. Beneath the veneer of optimism, voters are grappling with a stark truth: the economic recovery promised after the supply shocks of recent years never materialized.

In Canada, rising unemployment and stagnant GDP growth have pushed the Trudeau government to the brink. The resignation of Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, citing policy disagreements over runaway spending and looming U.S. tariffs, has thrown Ottawa into chaos. Unemployment now nears 7%, a stark reminder that economic performance is failing to meet the rhetoric of its leaders. While politicians tout disinflation and declining interest rates as signs of progress, citizens feel the crushing weight of lost purchasing power. For them, the economic story isn’t about inflationary trends retreating; it’s about the absence of a pathway to regain what was lost. The labor market, with its lack of hiring and increasing layoffs, serves as a daily reminder that their prospects are dimming, not improving.

Across the Atlantic, France’s political landscape mirrors this economic discontent. Emmanuel Macron’s government, already battered by multiple reshuffles and snap elections, faces escalating pressure as jobless claims surge. Payroll growth stalled last year, and recent months have seen the largest increases in unemployment benefits claims since the pandemic. The Bank of France’s downward revision of growth forecasts only solidifies the public’s frustration. Voters see the widening public deficit, now projected at 6.1% of GDP, as the natural outcome of a government trying to buy time with spending while ignoring the structural rot beneath.

Germany, too, finds itself in a familiar quagmire. Dependent on global demand and deeply intertwined with China’s struggling economy, Germany has endured a protracted, shallow recession for years. Despite promises of avoiding economic contraction, Chancellor Olaf Scholz faced a no-confidence vote this week, signaling the end of his government. The parallels between Germany’s plight and its European neighbors are striking: labor markets turning sour, unemployment climbing, and political leadership refusing to acknowledge the severity of the economic crisis.

What unites these cases—and others across the globe—is the labor market’s pivotal role in exposing deeper vulnerabilities. It isn’t just layoffs, though those are beginning to rise. It’s the absence of hiring, the slowing income growth, and the realization among workers that the opportunities to rebuild their financial stability are vanishing. The labor market weakness is not isolated; it is global, and its ripple effects are reverberating across economies once deemed resilient.

Energy markets echo this malaise. Gasoline prices, which should rise seasonally at year’s end, have instead stagnated. Inventories are swelling, a sign not of oversupply but of weak demand. The absence of a seasonal price rebound highlights the same underlying truth: economies are not expanding. Commuters drive less, businesses cut back, and households tighten budgets in a silent acknowledgment of economic stagnation. This lack of demand, mirrored in labor data, signals that the global economy is not simply slowing—it is recalibrating to a lower baseline of activity.

Central banks, once seen as saviors in times of economic stress, are now playing catch-up. Rate cuts from the Bank of Canada and the European Central Bank signal not recovery but retreat, a tacit admission that growth has not rebounded as promised. To be abundantly clear, these actions are not harbingers of economic strength but desperate attempts to mitigate further declines. The faster central banks cut rates, the clearer it becomes that their economies are in trouble.

Voters, however, are no longer content to endure these cycles of promises and disappointments. They have shown remarkable patience through years of supply shocks and price illusions, tolerating inflation and diminished purchasing power on the condition that better times would follow. But as labor markets weaken and the narrative of recovery unravels, that patience has run out. The political turmoil we see today—from Canada’s budget battles to France’s government collapse and Germany’s leadership crisis—is the natural result of unmet expectations. Dare I say the same of recent U.S. elections?

The common cause here is that governments misread the situation, believing that spending and rhetoric could buy time and confidence. But the bond markets and labor statistics have been flashing warnings all along, signals that went unheeded in favor of maintaining appearances. Political leaders doubled down on policies that ignored the structural issues, and now they face the consequences of those choices.

The story is the same across borders: a weak economy breeds political discontent. In each case, the public deficit is not merely a financial issue but a reflection of deeper systemic failure. When leaders insist on painting an optimistic picture while reality worsens, they lose credibility. The public may not always grasp the technical nuances of economic data, but they feel the effects in their daily lives. As job prospects dry up, purchasing power declines, and the promise of recovery fades, people are no longer willing to accept the status quo. 

Mises was right regarding Economics and the Citizen.

The broader lesson is clear. Political upheaval is downstream of economic failure, and economic failure is now a global phenomenon. The instinct to call for bold action from governments and central banks is misguided; it is precisely such interventions—endless monetary manipulation, fiscal overreach, and centrally planned illusions of control—that created the fragility we see today. True recovery requires stepping back, not doubling down. It requires allowing markets to correct, unsustainable imbalances to unwind, and the natural process of economic recalibration to take place. Any attempt to intervene further only deepens the distortions and delays the necessary reckoning. The solution is not bold action but disciplined restraint, a path that demands far more courage than the reckless interventions that have brought us to this precipice.