Highness is a thing. It’s not just a title for royalty, it’s a critical distinction, a mark of life, a bestower of meaning. When you go for low, you operate in another realm entirely.
America goes for low in a big way these days. Robert Duvall’s 2009 movie Get Low was, appropriately, about death. Death goes low in most cultures—to the grave, at least, if not regions beyond. But there’s much more to low than just its final destination.
If you watch a movie from the 1950s or earlier, most of the middle or upper class persons wore suits or nice dresses. In real life, people dressed that way for plane or train travel. Now, you’ll see people in pajamas, sweats, or barely-there attire in Walmart. And speaking of barely there, have you seen women’s bathing suits these days? Me, neither.
Rather than neatly cut and combed hair, we have the haystack-in-hurricane look, Gordian knots, neon red, or just whatever the cat dragged in. Ink and metal—which are inherently fine, but mundane—incredibly and increasingly stand in for the much more miraculous human epidermal layer.
Public discourse, movie dialogue, and talk show banter take place at what used to be the lowest gutter level 70 years ago. F-bombs are all-purpose filler words. Body parts and actions are described in the crassest of terms. Even non-repulsive language sounds barely literate—filled with “like,” “you know,” improper usage, and/or the dropping of Ts or otherwise incomprehensible diction. Respect for opposing views is all but gone.
All this might sound like snobbery given the thou-shalt-not-judge zeitgeist now prevailing, but that’s not the intent. This rapid-fire listing of degradation is provided simply to give evidence of change, as well as document its retrograde trajectory and cost in human life.
Of course, all this might be expected. Humans were once believed to be the highest creations of an omnipotent, omniscient being, tragically marred by rebellion. This gave people the context (at least at the human level) of immense nobility coupled with high fallibility, yielding a life purpose of reestablishing the lost relationship with the divine, helping and bettering one’s fellows, and systematic suppression of personal rebellion and its destructive effects.
Now people are regarded as simultaneously the most divine and malignant development of time and chance, with no meaning or purpose outside of what one assigns oneself and pursues. For most people, such meaning is no easy matter to determine, so they look for it in the herd. If it’s good enough for others, it must be good enough for them. Strange, then, that the herd’s path is so often downward.
This subject is the major matter of our time, though it is suppressed or ignored by the vast majority of people. It’s too large to address adequately here, but this copy is provided to prompt thought on what matters, what’s important, what’s high.
We’ve noted many times in this space the below content creators’ obsession with highness—high values, high character, high motives, high discipline, high effort, high veracity, high thinking, high aspirations, high information, and much more in the lofty regions. And yes, very importantly, high money.
If you likewise aspire to highness, join us each week for a shared journey into the bright blue. We aspire to follow the eagles, not Icarus. And if we occasionally lose a few feathers in the trees or the crags, the aspiration is ever upward.
Join us. Begin by reading or listening to the publications below. True and greatest height in human endeavor is best achieved—and certainly best enjoyed—in concert. Not in a herd. In a collegial assemblage of diligent seekers and thinkers willing to challenge and substantively assist one another.
Key Takeaways:
- Breaking the dollar
- Failures can hide in times of plenty
- Is the Fed still in control?
- What will gold do next?
The McAlvany Weekly Commentary: Stocks Cavalier… Bonds Concerned
David and Kevin discuss Stanley Druckenmiller and George Soros this week. Those two investors “broke the [British] pound” by shorting it back in the early 1990s. David wonders if a similar thing could happen to the US dollar today, and mentions (without recommending) a counterintuitive way in which some astute investors might already be doing this. From there, the hosts discuss economic developments in China in the wake of its recent liquidity injection into its economy. Both dire straits in China itself and difficulties in one of China’s chief oil sources, Iran, affect China’s economy and growth prospects. Given that the situation in Iran is being strongly influenced by Israel, David concludes that, “Israel’s decisions are central to global energy market stability, and there is a knock-on effect to global economic stability.” The hosts also discuss China’s increasingly aggressive incursions into Taiwanese airspace and waters, saying that an invasion is not a matter of if, but when. In the event of such a war, China would certainly have allies, and the hosts talk about the strange bedfellows that are developing in that regard, and how alliances—inadvisable or otherwise—can draw nations into war and even cause world war.
Credit Bubble Bulletin: Accelerating Wall Street and Subprime Booms
Doug shines a light on Wall Street’s pleading of danger while enjoying record profits. “For a quarter when Wall Street trumpeted the narrative of mounting economic weakness and the need for aggressive rate cuts, they sure enjoyed quite an earnings windfall,” he notes. The articles he cites in support of this windfall are persuasive. He then turns to the “increasingly powerful non-bank players inflating Bubbles in ‘private Credit’ and leveraged lending.” Year-to-date returns for such non-bank players are up sharply for institutions including KKR, Blackstone, Apollo Management, and Carlyle Group. In the light of such clear data, “It’s illogical to assert that the policy rate is significantly below some hypothetical ‘neutral rate’ with Wall Street enjoying a historic boom.” Doug then lays out the ways in which loose credit allows many adverse financial situations to remain out of sight and out of mind. If, as Warren Buffet asserts, you tend to discover who’s been swimming naked only when the tide goes out, then such discovery is naturally more difficult when the tide is in. And the logical corollary is that the longer the water remains high, the more swimmers will be encouraged to dive in sans culottes.
Hard Asset Insights: The Specter of Fiscal Dominance
Always one to educate as he informs, Morgan explains the complex concept of fiscal dominance in simple terms this week. “Fiscal dominance occurs as a country’s fiscal policy dominates monetary policy once debt and deficits get so large that the central bank can’t use traditional monetary policy to effectively control inflation.” Thus, though higher government debt is typically deflationary, there comes a point of diminishing—and then reversing—returns. At least three Fed governors believe we’re there. Even as the government takes on immensely more debt, the neutral interest rate (the rate that neither stimulates nor restricts the economy) goes up. Thus, the most compelling reason for the Fed to lower rates is to make the government’s payments on its debt affordable. This brings up an important point: “What very few are apparently even considering…is the price potential for gold and silver if, as HAI suspects, the Fed continues to cut rates aggressively not because slowing inflation ‘allows’ it but because the U.S. fiscal debt and deficit problem demands it, despite inflation.”
Golden Rule Radio: Waiting for the “Perfect” Opportunity
Miles’ chart summary opens the program this week, as usual, and, in short, everything’s up except palladium. Gold and silver continue their upward journey as they provide stability in a turbulent world. Rob then joins the conversation and the two hosts put current gold patterns in recent historical context, concluding that gold could well continue its stair-step advance in like fashion to its recent activity. Alternatively, gold could pull back a bit before it continues up. Miles gives some reasonable expectations for prices if that possibility occurs. Given these alternative scenarios, how should a precious metals investor proceed? The hosts give some important advice on how to invest going forward.
Photo: ESA/Hubble, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
