I know you’re saying this as a joke, but art theft and related crime has been on the rise since the pandemic. And there has been quite a lot of art recovered from dying old mobsters and conmen.

Here’s the current FBI case list, and it’s WILD:

https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/violent-crime/art-crime/art-crime-news

More Than 50 Years After Theft, Stolen John Opie Painting Recovered and Returned to Rightful Owner

The FBI was contacted in December 2021 by a Washington County, Utah, accounting firm acting as a trustee for a client who died in 2020. [An old mobster] The client had hired the firm to liquidate his residences and personal property. While appraising the painting for auction, it was discovered to likely be an original Opie stolen in 1969 from a private residence of the Wood family in New Jersey.

From a case in February of this year:

According to Acting United States Attorney John C. Gurganus, Dombek, Boland, and Joseph Atsus were part of a larger nine-person conspiracy which lasted over 20 years and whose goal was to break into multiple museums and other institutions and steal priceless works of art, sports memorabilia, and other objects.

Tariffs only go to the government when people can actually afford to pay them.

When Tariffs jack up the costs of goods in a supply chain exponentially higher than they’ve even been, small to medium sized business can’t afford their now Tariffed supply chain and don’t pay.

That’s how the money disappears. Whatever industry Tariffs are added to is now an industry that small to mid size companies can no longer afford to manufacture in. Which lowers the total value of that market as the profits smaller businesses had are now captured and destroyed by Tariffs.

Without Tariffs, the supply chain is affordable. With Tariffs, it’s destroyed and doesn’t magically come back. Soy bean market? Literally no more future profit potential now that our largest buyer has gone elsewhere.

Tariffs just effectively convert long term viable market wealth to short term government wealth in a time when markets are already suffering.

In no reasonable calculation will the gains of any Tariff offset the long term losses in the market those Tariffs destabilize. There’s literally hundreds of years of historical evidence supporting this as the outcome.

Well said. Additionally, the Dollar also gets weaker when there’s more of them that have been printed AND those new dollars aren’t being spent. We printed a whole lot of money in 2020 and after, and now basically none of those Dollars are being spent:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1V

I don’t think the US is going to break apart, but it’s very likely the current administration twill try to invent a new US currency to hide the failing Dollar.

Their recent Crypto scams indicate they are trying to mint an actual US Dollar Crypto coin, which would be even worse than the US splitting apart imo. Mostly because that would turn existing dollars into Micky Mouse bucks that have no actual value. The US becomes a Peter Piper Pizza place you can never leave because they run on US dollar “tokens” instead of the rest of the world that runs on real currency.

100%, thats why a lot of companies are trying to buy houses / cars / etc. For the last few years the writing has definitley been on the wall.

I do have one recommendation for an asset that requires no maintenance, but a lot of people aren’t going to be happy when I say Bitcoin and Ethereum are worth investing in now more than ever.

Both are fairly simple to own, you don’t need to buy a whole coin, just a fraction, and self-owned wallets are still legal. (Which let’s you stake your crypto for a nice 5% or more return). I’ve made 12% staking Cardano, beating nearly every bank savings account in existence. It’s very easy to do the same with Ethereum.

Crypto in general is certainly full of scams, but the foundational tech and the coins that come from it are certainly worth holding now more than basically any other currency. All currencies are basically tied to the Dollar for dumb and complex reasons, so crypto is literally the only thing that will not lose value as the dollar does.

Not much maintenance to hold it either. Just do research to be secure with your wallet. I hate Coinbase, but they are certainly the best at getting you started. Diversifying into crypto is likely safer than any other physical asset too at the moment as there will always be a buyer. (Not as easy for a car to become liquid)

And a note: for anyone that wants to argue about crypto, please understand I see it as something that is both a currency AND commodity. So know that I belive it has the strengths and weaknesses of both. Most crypto debates categorize crypto as either one or the other to focus on the weaknesses in each. Yet crypto has a return better than any other investment in the last 10 years, likely because there’s value in something that works as both a currency and commodity.

Anyway, it’s probably not the answer you wanted, but Crypto, specifically Bitcoin and Ethereum are a great way to diversify against uncertainty when bluechip markets are now as uncertain as crypto ones.

Next best after that is appliances, but same issue with maintenance.

It’s a bit complicated, but in short, today is a bank holiday both for the US and for Japan. And the Japanese Yen carry trade is likely unwinding in that time.

Last Friday, the stock market fell pretty hard as well as the crypto markets. This means people were selling what they had of each at a very high rate. When that happens, financial institutions have a bunch of mechanisms to absorb that loss and redirect it.

But one of the biggest mechanisms to do that, the Japanese Yen Carry Trade, has been unwinding over the weekend.

This is not only a bad thing, but is also what caused the 2008 crisis to accelerate.

Here’s a quick overview of what that is, and what’s happening to it now:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/unwinding-yen-carry-trade-dawn-new-monetary-era-harshad-shah-bgnvf

For thirty years, the Bank of Japan (BOJ) maintained an ultra-loose monetary policy, with interest rates often at or below zero. This created a perverse incentive for the global financial community: borrow massive amounts of Japanese yen for almost no cost, convert it into other currencies like the US dollar or euro, and invest those proceeds in higher-yielding assets abroad—US Treasuries, European bonds, Brazilian debt, Asian equities, and real estate. This trade was the quiet lifeblood of global asset prices. It suppressed borrowing costs for governments and corporations worldwide, inflated valuations, and encouraged risk-taking.

So, the Yen Carry Trade was a way for big institutions to safely buy Yen and convert it to other high yielding assets. When the market is going down, as it was on Friday, instutions would buy Yen at less than 0% interest then divert it to high yield assets that would offset their losses. In short (and simple example), if the stock market fell 10%, they’d buy Yen, then use it to get some high yield assets at above a 10% return.

But! The Yen carry trade ALSO “inflated valuations.” Companies could use this trade to hide the actual value of their assets. Usually through combining a bunch of other instruments, including some illegal mechanisms that are still legal in the US like naked short selling.

So, the Yen carry trade let Wallstreet inflate their valuations to lure in investors. AND offset losses when they were being too risky.

So the question is: how much longer can they pretend to be valued higher? How much longer can they offset losses and still keep going?

Seeing as how the Japanese Yen Carry trade is a key to both, it’s a critical tool needed for companies not to collapse back to their actual value.

And as of this weekend, that tool no longer works. As the BOJ (Bank of Japan) raised their interest rates to a level never before seen. Because:

Japan is now confronting persistent, above-target inflation. This economic sea change has forced the BOJ to cautiously abandon its yield curve control policy, allowing Japanese Government Bond (JGB) yields to rise. The 40-year JGB yield’s surge from 1.5% to 3.4% in just two years is not a mere statistical blip; it is one of the fastest and most significant monetary shifts in the modern era.

The implications are profound. For a Japanese pension fund or insurance company, the calculus has fundamentally changed. Why shoulder the currency risk and geopolitical uncertainty of US Treasuries when you can now secure a attractive, risk-free yield at home in your own currency? The logical, and indeed necessary, response is repatriation.

Repatriation = Permanant death of the Yen carry trade.

So in short, the tool every major US institution has been using to inflate their own values and cover their losses will likely no longer be working as of today. And that’s after a very rough Friday for them. The tool they usually use to recover from that kind of loss is now broken.

Since it’s a bank Holiday, we won’t know until tomorrow, but with how high silver and gold prices are getting, that tends to indicate smoke before the fire. The last time Japan raised their rates like this it was followed by the 2008 crisis, and the 1998 crisis before it.

So whatever happens next likely isn’t great, but that will depend on how honest Wall Street has been since Covid. And from what I can see, they have basically created another “Big Short” situation as they never learned the first time.

Imo, outside the above, and in addition to it, ETFs are a time bomb just like mortgages were in 2008. There is very likely a looming ETF crisis similar to the mortgage crisis with just a matter of time before they explode, and something like the Yen Carry Trade unwinding could cause it.

If that happened, a depression event is almost certain. As ETFs have secretly replaced everyone’s 401ks in the last decade. So instead of losing an overpriced mortgage, if there is an ETF bubble, and it pops, people lose their retirements.

Which is something that very much could be starting tomorrow. Depending on how many other tools are left to contain what the Yen carry trade was doing. AND how fraudulent ETFs are. But that’s a very big other conversation.

In short - Wallstreet has one less cheat code to prevent their bullshit from leaking out into the market and rest of the world like it did in 2008. We’ll know tomorrow how needed those cheat codes were.

Comparing to prior economic situations?

YES. I just did that.

Default rates?

https://www.currentmarketvaluation.com/models/buffett-indicator.php

Sure. Those are pretty bad right now too:

The average risk of default for US public companies reached a post-global financial crisis high of 9.2% at the end of 2024 and is predicted to remain elevated throughout the year, according to forecasts by Moody’s Asset Management Research team.

Business default rates are now as high as they were in 2008 post crisis.

M3 and defaults are what you see change when the crash is happening by the way, not before. But when it does keep crashing, I sincerely doubt we’ll have any real numbers until months or years later seeing as how inflated the last two jobs reports were under Trump.

How about the Buffet index?

One of the men who has become the richest from Wallstreet has spent the last several months and years selling most of his stocks. The Buffet index is one he invented to determine how volilalitle the market is in comparing the US stock market value to GDP.

Basic math says getting a stock market valuation at 100% of our national GDP is impossible, but with the power of decades of defecit spending, we can definitley inflate stock prices above the maximum capacity of what our country is capable of spending in a year. Now to 217%. (The Buffet Index).

Which is why Warren Buffet is selling large portions of his stocks: he thinks there’s problems in the markets. Especially when they’re valued at more than twice what we can make as a nation in a year. Anything above 100% is basically bullshit made up value.

For all intents and purposes, the market is already crashing like I’ve said. It’s just a matter of how many dead cat bounces we have left.

I moved no goal posts. You failed to explain your previous statement in anyway. You just linked a bunch of material with no explanation as to how that material supports anything.

Maybe describe what would qualify as informative?

I thought describing the hole in the ship making it sink, how that hole is being repaired, and how the supplies to keep repairing it are running low was a pretty informative take on whether there’s a hole in the ship or not.

And I don’t feel those supplies will stay strong now that literally no one in the world wants to trade with us because of Tariffs.

I mean, as far as informative goes, the scene in Ferris Buellers Day Off where the class sleeps through Ben Steins economics lecture was on how Tariffs were an excellerent that helped cause the Great Depression. Now we’re doing that again why exactly?

Can you explain any of the current US trade policies in a way that makes sense?

If you want informative: the people making all the decisions are making the wrong ones without any guardrails or adults for the first time in 100 years of US history. The last time this same thing happened, almost exactly, it was followed by the great depression at the start of Black Monday, when the US stock market collapsed. A collapse we are very likely seeing the start of due to the sudden move towards massive liquidity last week.

All further compounded by massive unemployment, a decrease in the value of the dollar, inflation, and yeah, Tariffs.

Idiots doing all that at once is new. And the last time they did it the same way, the country took a World War 2 to recover.

You know I can link you a bunch of books that claim Bigfoot is real? That doesn’t mean it is. That requires looking at the ideas presented in those books and analyzing them for truth, rather than copying and pasting them as if that means they are.

I’m sorry, but just because you’ve been convinced economics is some kind of fantastical force of oppression instead of math that figures out slopes doesn’t mean it is. Sure you can point me to the flawed articles that did that to your brain, but that doesn’t mean any form of math has that kind of power. That is a truly insane thought.

Your perception of what economics is entirely dictated by sources you trust but can’t elaborate on further.

Please elaborate why you believe these sources if you want anyone to be convinced they should be believed.

whereas the foundation of modern economics study is based on extensively justifying the violence of those who fund their “science”.

Please prove this statement. It is wildly inaccurate. Specifically, write out the actual logic you are implying with it because it is very obviously unsound.

Do you feel all of calculus is about having sex with kids?

Not joking. Isaac Newton, the inventor of modern calculus was also super into the arcane, specifically alchemy, and believed immortality was achievable through having sex with enough kids. He literally wrote papers on it. In addition to calculus.

Should I therefore not use Calculus because Newton practiced the belief that having sex with kids could make him immortal, and being the inventor of Calculus, used it to make that happen for him?

Do you understand why this is so illogical? It is the same logic you are applying to an entire classification of math that you clearly don’t understand aside from whatever history of it you have cherry picked for blame that should very much be directed elsewhere.

The only thing we underestimated is how much of this country the financial industry was willing to destroy to stay solvent. “Too big to fail” was actually “too big to stop.” The enshitification of all things in the last decade is what was collectively given up in exchange for US financial solvency. This leaves the US with no products of worth, just propped up businesses that are capable of canabalise other businesses faster than everyone else. The problem is that game of musical chairs ends when there’s nothing left to canablise. Look at the mega mergers happening now, and you’ll see that there’s not many bodies left to eat.

I don’t think you understand what Economics is my dude. It’s just the study of commerce and goods changing hands between people. Something people have done for the totality of human civilization.

Saying all of economics is corrupt is like saying all of math is corrupt. It’s literally just measuring the velocity and rate of change of goods in the form of graphs and predicting where they intersect. That’s 90% of economics.

Whatever you believe it to be is wildly inaccurate. Just because there’s a single part of economics you don’t like, doesn’t mean the sum total of all that knowledge is bad or corrupt. That’s such an incredibly bad and completely illogical take. It’s like saying math isn’t real because you just learned about imaginary numbers.

I provided advice on what to do if you have money in this failing economy to try and keep it. I have no control over the powers that be, and just pointed out clear red flags that suggest how messed up our economy is. Red flags that real economists care about, but seem to upset you?

Nothing you said was supported by facts, just your opinion. I have no idea how I upset you by providing a clear warning on how fucked everything is, and is about to be worse.

What exactly are you upset at? The exact indicators and red flags I pointed out, or the fact that I’m pointing them out again now that things have gotten worse?

I seriously don’t get your take. If anything, it proves that clearly explaining how bad things are leads to people taking it poorly. Not usually for the wrong reasons you have, but poorly nevertheless.

Hey there. I’ve got an economics degree and work in business. I’ve been literally telling people how we’re in a massive bubble, propped up by fraud and snake oil for years now. The economists you’re thinking about on TV have been enshitified just like everything else in the US. It got so bad someone created a Jim Cramer ETF that collected all his stock advice but did the OPPOSITE of what he said. That ETF had a 12% return in 2024.

So the advice you are hearing from “economists” is advice they were paid for. Real economists have seen the writing on the wall for years. We’re spectacularly fucked. Like there’s almost complete red flags across the board, and the stock market is likely captured and fraudulent and has been since 2008.

Nvidia’s price is just propped up by all the AI investment, and it’s worth is propping up others like Microsoft. The whole thing is an obvious ponzi scheme as total value in the market exceeds our GDP by 218% now. This literally means the stock market is at least 118% inflated bullshit.

Inflated because the SEC has taken 17 years to roll out the CAT system to prevent fraud that was created as a response to the 2008 crisis. 17 years, and the “fix” TV hosts cheered was so great in 2008 to prevent another crisis is just now as of 2025 kinda being used. I say kinda because it’s not fully integrated, doesn’t need to be used, and is currently reporting billions of fraudulent failures and trades nearly every day.

The system has been captured and tortured for years and anyone that knew what they were looking at and were vocal about it were laughed at by experts paid to disagree. I’ve been saying all the above for years, and people thought I was insane. Now you think all economists are insane because they’ve been paid to sane wash the bullshit I’ve been talking about for years.

The problem isn’t economists, it’s that you believe the people on TV are the experts instead of industry plants. Actual experts, they get ignored. All the time. Because they can’t compete with the amount of idiots on TV saying the opposite.

So no offense, but stop listening to the people on TV who call themselves expert economists, expert investors, etc and just listen to someone who’s actually experienced in that field. My opinion has been discarded for years as I’ve made hand over fist betting against our economy. Advice I’ve freely shared yet always been ignored because it goes against what the TV says.

Anyway, here’s the next 3 years:

Massive recession turns into a depression. Starting now, but this Monday is going to be a pretty rough day for the stock Market. Maybe not another Black Monday that started the original crash in 29, but we’re getting close.

Likely by this November, if not tomorrow, a stock market crash will happen. It’s completely propped up, so just a matter of time until the money runs out. Seeing the dip in stocks and crypto at the same time last week screams massive liquidity crisis (big companies needing more liquidity to prop up the current ponzi scheme of AI.) And there’s not many places left where liquidity can be found.

Anyway, the value of the dollar has already decreased by 10% this year. Which is an astronomically fucked thing for no one to be talking about.

So just FYI, whatever savings you do have, consider converting some of it into property / vehicles / assets with value as they will each retain their worth as the value of the dollar looses it. Advice you’ll never hear on TV, but is actually viable if you want your money to have any of the same value it has now as idiots ruin everything.

I don’t disagree. At all. But seeing how violent our government is treating us, the moment for the collective action you’re talking about has passed. Unfortunately that leaves guns, which admittedly, is stupid we have. But we literally have them for this very reason: to protect against tyranny. And seeing as the literal definition of that is happening in our government, I feel the time we had to try actual meaningful civil disobedience is long past. What you don’t understand is that any disobedience is basically now seen as terrorism. So if we’re going to be arrested as terrorists and disappeared with no due process then there’s no room left to be just civily disobedient.

I love these comments. You know that there’s 2x as many guns in America as there are people right? Most of these protestors own guns. It’s just protesters won’t be the ones to start the violence.

But when it does start, they will certainly be the ones to finish it. We have the second Amendment for this reason, and using it too soon to placate those outside our country is stupid. Be patient. America will solve its own fascist problem the way it solved it before.

How about supporting them until that happens instead of getting mad peaceful protestors are trying to remain peaceful as long as they can. Even if they aren’t using them, they still have guns. So just a matter of time before they do start using them. Kirk, two attempts on Trump, and two dead CEO’s so far.

There’s a line that will be crossed eventually. Until then, protesting is the best way to show the country how much of us are sick of this shit. The last Kings protest was the 3rd largest in American history. And when it comes to guerrilla warfare, the thing you’re championing, getting an idea of what your numbers are before engaging the enemy is basic strategy. Don’t look at it as a protest, look at it as a show of force of how many Americans want to use their guns to defend against Tyranny.