Why Now Is The Most Dangerous Time For Your Savings In 50 Years
Inside Today’s Issue
Essay: The First Step Toward A Monetary Reset
Inflation Expectations Rise
AI Leaders Call For A Pause
Trump Gives Support For Crypto Bill
Chart Of The Day… 10-Year Treasury Yield
Today’s Mailbag
As I’ve been warning could happen since March, yields on the 10-year Treasury bond are now trading above 5%.
The 10-year U.S. Treasury bond yield jumped to 5.005% in the minutes after the August inflation report hit the wire last Friday – the 10-year traded above the 5% level again this morning. Both times, as soon as the yield broke above 5%, there was a massive intervention in the market forcing yields lower. I suspect the Fed is actively suppressing rates. Or it could be the Treasury issuing more short-term bills and buying longer term bonds.
My new book 2029 The End Of America: Why The Age Of Paper Money Is Ending And How To Survive The Coming Global Monetary Reset explains exactly why this is a very dangerous situation, not just for investors, but for our entire country. I write on page 29:
When Powell raised the federal funds rate from zero to 5%, he did not just cool the economy — he tripled the United States government’s annual interest expense. Net interest on the national debt went from $345 billion in October 2020 to $981 billion in October 2025. That is more than the entire defense budget of the United States of America… The next time inflation breaks out — and it will break out, because the structural forces driving it have not been addressed and the monetary expansion of 2020–2022 has not been meaningfully reversed — the Fed will face a choice Paul Volcker never faced: it will have to choose between fighting inflation and keeping the Treasury solvent. It cannot do both. And because no democracy in the history of the human race has ever chosen Treasury-solvency-and-austerity over inflation when the choice was forced upon it in a moment of crisis, the Fed will choose inflation.
What’s happening today — in the markets, with the Iran War, and in our politics — is almost exactly what happened the last time there was a huge, global monetary reset, which was in the early 1970s when the U.S. defaulted on its promise to redeem dollars for gold.
That decision unleashed a new, global fiat monetary regime that’s seen asset prices soar while wages stagnated, destroying the middle class in America. It led to a decade of much higher inflation rates and much higher interest rates from 1971-1981. By the time the 1970s monetary reset was over, long-term rates were 15% annually, high-quality stocks were trading at six times earnings, and the dollar’s purchasing power had fallen by more than 50%.
Could that really happen again? Absolutely.
Last year, the federal government ran a deficit of almost $2 trillion, spending 34% more than it collected. The government, already supporting unprecedented debts, is running a deficit that is 6% of GDP — during peacetime and with full employment!
This hasn’t happened since the 1970s.
And look at our politics. Who reminds you of President Richard Nixon more than President Donald Trump? Trump issued roughly 225 executive orders in the first year of his second term, and, like President Barack Obama (!), is using law enforcement to settle political scores. He’s the most “imperial” president we’ve had since Nixon. (Obama! was the most insufferable.)
The difference between 1971 and today is that the federal government is vastly larger and the spending is even more out of control. Today, all state and local governments combined spend around $3.7 trillion annually. That’s only half of federal outlays: the federal government spends more than the other 50 states, combined.
And then there’s the war.
In October 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on Yom Kippur. The Arab oil producers answered with an embargo, and oil ran from $3 a barrel to nearly $12 in a matter of weeks. America’s involvement in this war was never about Israel. It was always a war over the dollar. The Saudis had threatened to stop pricing oil in dollars after Nixon broke the gold promise in 1971. The war, and the secret petrodollar arrangement that ended it, kept oil priced in dollars for 50 years and allowed America to run endless trade deficits financed purely with paper money. That deal ended in 2024. And look whose oil industry is being destroyed in this war: Saudi Arabia’s. That’s not a coincidence.
There’s one other major similarity between today and the early 1970s that no one is talking about yet: the urgent need for entitlement reform.
In the 1972 election year, Congress and Nixon gave Social Security recipients a 20% across-the-board benefit increase.
