Tag: economy

No Kings: Summer of Love Redux?

In 2020, the world was in Lockdown. We all remember navigating new normals, but what faded from the collective mind is the impact that season had on our capital city.  

Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, Denver’s economy was booming. The city was widely considered a regional economic powerhouse, one of the strongest and most dynamic economies in the US, with steady growth, low unemployment, and a diversified industrial base. 

After Covid, housing and other costs of living, which were already an issue before the lockdowns became a crisis for many residents. Between December 2019 to December 2024, consumer prices (all items, including food and energy) rose nearly 46%, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Unsheltered homelessness increased 200+%, according to data from the Common Sense Institute. Homicides increased 35% and violent crime was up 30% by 2023, according to data from the FBI. 

Before the pandemic, light rail cars were packed at rush hour and restaurants on 16th Street had hour plus wait times. Then in 2020, Denver was in lockdown. And the city fell. 

The trains often run empty now, as the laptop class became accustomed to working from home. That impacts the city’s transit and parking revenues, the restaurants and retail shops, the bars and nightlife. 

Licensed restaurant establishments decreased 22% between 2019 and 2024, according to data from the Denver Department of Excise and Licenses. More than 200 Colorado businesses closed in 2024 alone, and 82% of them were in Denver, as reported by Axios.

Perhaps few remember the violence, the property damage, the historic buildings vandalized, the sweeping encampments in Civic Center Park. The economic impact of lockdowns, while devastating, pales in comparison to the social and cultural impacts. 

I’ve often theorized that the people don’t remember because they weren’t there. Out of sight out of mind for the insufferable white collars attending zoom meetings on their Pelotons. 

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Bill to Audit U.S. Gold Reserves Introduced in Congress

In a small step toward ensuring transparency and protecting U.S. economic stability, legislation to fully audit U.S. gold reserves was introduced in Congress last week.

H.R. 3795, titled the Gold Reserve Transparency Act of 2025, is sponsored by U.S. Representative Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and co-sponsored by Representatives Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), Addison McDowell (R-N.C.), and Troy Nehls (R-Texas). According to a press release by Massie’s congressional office, the bill would require “the Comptroller General to conduct and publicly release a full audit of gold reserves held by the United States. The Comptroller General’s audit will include gold held in ‘deep storage’ locations such as Fort Knox, Kentucky.”

The press release continues:

The Gold Reserve Transparency Act of 2025 further requires the Comptroller General to conduct subsequent audits of the nation’s gold reserves every five years. In addition, the Comptroller General is instructed to report on the sufficiency of measures currently in place to ensure the physical safety of the gold reserves, to provide a full accounting of encumbrances against the gold reserves, and to document any sales, purchases, disbursements, or receipts over the past 50 years that have affected the gold reserves.

In a post on X, Massie stated:

In February, President Trump said he wanted to go to Fort Knox to “make sure the gold is there.” This bill provides the full disclosure President Trump seeks.

A full audit of U.S. gold reserves — as well as of the Federal Reserve — is long overdue. In a 2015 article titled “Has the Federal Reserve Sold the Gold at Fort Knox?” The New American reported on indications that the U.S. mint could not account for U.S. gold reserves and that the Federal Reserve secretly misused them, amid calls at the time to conduct an audit. The article reported:

There are many who claim that the Federal Reserve doesn’t want a proper audit because the gold is not there, at least not all of it. Some groups believe that as part of its effort to manipulate the economy, the Federal Reserve has sold the gold.

Not until 10 years later did this issue gain widespread attention, after Elon Musk and U.S. Senators Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) highlighted the lack of transparency at Fort Knox.

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Hotels See Significant Boost In Revenue Following Marijuana Legalization, New Study Shows

A new study exploring the impacts of adult-use marijuana legalization on the hospitality industry finds that “hotel revenue increases by 25.2% (or $63,671 monthly) due to dispensary legalization, with the effect continuing to grow even six years after legalization.”

The research article, published in the journal Production Operations and Management (POMS), draws its inferences from a review of data from Colorado, which authors say saw “a 7.9% increase in room night bookings and a 16.0% rise in daily room rates,” though impacts varied based on a number of factors.

“These findings are relevant for professionals in marketing, operations management, hospitality, tourism, and public policy,” the study says, noting that the “rapid expansion of the marijuana business presents both opportunities and challenges for the hotel industry.”

“On the one hand, recreational marijuana dispensaries could become attractions that entice travelers to visit places they might not otherwise explore. For instance, around 12% of US tourists have reported positive experiences with marijuana-related travel… On the other hand, the lingering social stigma surrounding marijuana could negatively affect businesses, including hotels, located near these dispensaries. This concern is underscored by a Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade (OEDIT 2019) report, which found that about 10% of US leisure travelers view Colorado as a less desirable destination because of recreational marijuana.”

Despite the apparently polarized feelings around traveling to jurisdictions where marijuana is legal, the study found that hotels seemed to perform better following the policy change.

Comparing hotels in Colorado to hotels in New Mexico, where cannabis was illegal during the study period, the team’s analysis found that “on average, monthly hotel revenue increases by 25.2% upon the legalization of recreational marijuana dispensaries, which is equivalent to a substantial increase of $63,671 per hotel.”

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Number Of Zombie Properties Increase In 30 US States

The number of zombie homes – vacant properties abandoned by owners during the foreclosure process – rose in 30 U.S. states and the District of Columbia in the second quarter of this year from the previous quarter, real estate data analytics company ATTOM said in a May 29 statement.

Zombie homes, which can fall into disrepair and negatively impact the value of other properties in the neighborhood, are a sign of distress in the housing market and the broader economy.

As Naveen Athrappully reports for The Epoch Times, among states with at least 50 zombie homes, North Carolina saw the largest percentage increase in these properties year-over-year, with their numbers rising by 52.5 percent during this period.

This was followed by Iowa and Texas, both seeing an over 50 percent jump in zombie properties. South Carolina and Kansas were the next on the list.

According to ATTOM’s analysis, Peoria County in Illinois ranked at the top in the list of U.S. counties with the highest zombie foreclosure rates.

Broome County in New York came in second, followed by Cuyahoga County in Ohio, Baltimore City County in Maryland, and Indiana’s Marion County.

On a positive note, things looked better from a nationwide perspective, with only one out of every 14,207 being zombie properties in Q2, which ATTOM said was a low rate, indicating the strength of the post-pandemic U.S. housing market.

“Thankfully, we’re not seeing a lot of homes sitting vacant due to pending foreclosures, which is good for families, neighborhoods, and the market,” said Rob Barber, CEO of ATTOM. “However, foreclosure filings have shown a recent uptick—with April seeing a 14 percent increase compared to the same month last year.”

“So far, buyers seem to be scooping up these repossessed homes relatively quickly, so they aren’t sitting empty,” he added. “Nobody wants to see a return to the days of the 2008 housing crisis when vacant, blighted homes were common in many parts of the country.”

Meanwhile, the number of property foreclosures had risen by 11 percent in the first quarter of this year from the previous quarter, breaking away from the trend of three consecutive quarterly declines, ATTOM said in an April 11 statement.

“While levels remain below historical averages, the quarterly growth suggests that some homeowners may be starting to feel the pressure of ongoing economic challenges,” Barber said.

“However, strong home equity positions in many markets continue to help buffer against a more significant spike in distress.”

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Trump’s $795M Data Power Play Sends Palantir Soaring 140%–But Here’s the Hidden Risk

Palantir (NASDAQ:PLTR) is riding a wave of government contracts as the Trump administration ramps up efforts to centralize and analyze federal data. Since Trump signed an executive order in March calling for more interagency data sharing, Palantir has quietly become the go-to vendor for building that digital infrastructure. The company has landed more than $113 million in new and extended federal contracts since Trump took office including a blockbuster $795 million deal with the Pentagon last week. Palantir’s Foundry platform is already in use at Homeland Security and Health and Human Services, and engineers were recently embedded at the IRS to begin building a unified, searchable database for taxpayer records. Talks are also underway with the Social Security Administration and Department of Education, suggesting more agencies could follow.

Investor enthusiasm hasn’t lagged. Since Trump’s re-election, Palantir shares have surged more than 140%, fueled by the prospect that the company may now become the digital backbone of the U.S. federal government. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)a Musk-led initiativehas been instrumental in Palantir’s rise, with several DOGE members having ties to Palantir or Peter Thiel-backed ventures. The company’s tools are now being used to connect data points ranging from immigration status and bank accounts to student loans and disability claims. In April, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) awarded Palantir a $30 million contract to track migrant movements in real time another sign of how fast the government is scaling its use of Foundry.

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Did Smoot-Hawley Cause The Great Depression?

Americans are taught in school that the Smoot-Hawley tariff legislation of 1930 greatly exacerbated the Great Depression and sent the world spinning off into a decade of debt deflation and economic contraction.

This seems to make sense until we remember that the history of the United States over the past century was written largely by progressives. In fact, the Great Depression began in 1920 with a decade of falling prices for farm products, a deflationary wave that eventually engulfed the real estate sector and the entire US economy.

What is missed by many discussions of Smoot-Hawley during and after that period, is the fact that the economic collapse of the 1930s was already a given with or without the new tariff law. The impetus behind the political decision to raise tariffs was a misguided reaction to the collapse of agricultural prices, but the force behind this deflationary wave was primarily “positive” factors such as new technology and innovation. The deflation that began after WWI decimated farm communities and eventually led to the collapse of real estate prices, particularly Florida real estate.

Support for protectionism was the consistent refrain from the corporate and farm lobbies in Washington in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was supported by members of both political parties. But the real underlying cause of the powerful political push to raise the existing tariffs even higher at the end of 1929 may be found in the substantial changes that were occurring in the American economy.

Many historians and economists blame the level of tariffs after World War I and particularly during the Great Depression for making more severe the economic contraction and unemployment following the 1929 market crash. The passage of the Fordney-McCumber Tarif Act in 1922 symbolized the unique Republican penchant for trade protectionism — and currency inflation — that stretched decades back in time to the party’s inception in the 1850s.

In his 2005 book, “Making Sense of Smoot Hawley,” Bernard Beaudreau argues that the imposition of tariff protection for U.S. industry in 1930 was simply a continuation of the policies implemented by the Republican Party after they returned to power in 1920. Beaudreau cites the rising productivity of U.S. factories, the spread of electrification throughout America, and the continued influx of cheap foreign-produced food and manufactured goods as the chief cause of the deflation during this period. Bread production, for example, became automated in the 1920s, contributing to a decline in bread prices.

Imports were still perceived to be a threat by the American manufacturers of that day, despite already high tariff levels. Underemployment was the result of the lack of demand and thus falling product prices that resulted in the 1930s. American industry became too efficient too quickly, resulting in a global surplus of goods and an equally dangerous lack of demand. Air-conditioning and improved transport helped to leverage the future value of Florida swamp land into a towering speculative bubble that collapsed two years before the Great Crash of 1929.

A century before the invention of such things as “artificial intelligence” or AI, American workers worried about technology taking their livelihoods. Senator Reed Smoot (1862-1941), Republican of Utah, said of Smoot-Hawley: “To hold the American tariff policy, or any other policy of our government, responsible for this gigantic deflationary move is only to display one’s ignorance of its universal character. The world is paying for its ruthless destruction of life and property in the World War and for its failure to adjust purchasing power to productive capacity during the industrial revolution of the decade following the war.”

The onset of the Great Depression from the summer of 1929 on brought the unemployment rate from 4.6 percent in 1929 to 8.9 percent in 1930. Congress sought to correct this imbalance by limiting imports via the Smoot-Hawley tariff. While there is little doubt that higher tariffs made the Great Depression worse, higher levies on imports may not have been the primary factor. Indeed, the introduction of electricity and other innovations drove strong growth in many sectors of the economy, but not on the farm.

This alternative view of the role of Smoot-Hawley in turning the market crash of 1929 into the Great Depression of the 1930s is important to understanding the narrative of the 1920s. Following the Great Depression and World War II, the U.S. position regarding tariffs changed dramatically, in part because much of the industrial capacity of Europe and Asia was destroyed by the conflict.

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Ours Is A System Of Fraud, Swindles, And Corruption

But all bubbles pop, and there are no tricks left to fund both the greed of the few and the needs of the many.

Every society / economy is a distribution mechanism that distributes:

1. Gains

2. Losses

3. Risk

4. The costs of securing the sources of gains.

As a general rule, markets / economies don’t really care who ends up with the losses, and this is why markets / economies are fundamentally pathological structures: the single-minded focus is to maximize gains and minimize costs and losses by distributing them to others by any means available.

As a general rule, societies have to manage the distribution in a slightly less pathological manner to keep the status quo from being overthrown by those forced to bear the costs and losses. As Mao famously observed, “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” and so the sociopaths sluicing the gains into their own pockets and dumping the costs and losses on the economically / politically powerless without regard for social stability find the way of the Tao is reversal as those getting the crumbs eventually have nothing left to lose.

In other words, markets / economies are embedded in a social structure, not the other way round. And the social structure has to balance the distribution fairly enough to keep the majority from concluding they have nothing left to lose by throwing their lot into overthrowing the status quo.

We can gussy this structure up with a lot of theorizing and references to Plato, Marx and Machiavelli and hundreds of other players in the longstanding drama, but these are the fundamental forces in play: do the sociopaths have enough political and financial power to channel most of the gains to themselves and dump the costs and losses on others, or is the system capable of enforcing some limits on the sociopaths?

I submit that the United States is in the firm grip of the single-minded few focused solely on maximizing their gains and distributing costs and losses to others by any means available. The social and political restraints that placed modest limits on the aggregation of power and wealth into the hands of the few have crumbled, and this structural collapse has been hidden behind flimsy billboards hyping the latest in distractions: AI, tariffs, stablecoins, Rich Mom fashions, etc.

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Liberal Boomers lined up for Carney—now their grandkids are lining up at the food bank

In 2021, 5.8 million Canadians lived in households struggling to put food on the table. By 2024, that number shot up to nearly 10 million.

Newly released data from Statistics Canada shows that food insecurity in this country has taken a horrifying leap, with a staggering 72% increase in just three years.

Among children, the picture is even bleaker. Nearly 2.5 million Canadian kids—one in three—now live in food-insecure households. That’s not some distant tragedy in a far-off land. That’s right here, in your neighbourhood, in your kid’s classroom.

And while families are rationing groceries, Liberal Boomers just handed the reins to Mark Carney—the unelected high priest of net-zero—who’s promised to keep punishing farmers, truckers, and the energy industry with his anti-energy policies. 

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The Media Kept Rooting For A Tariff-Driven Recession. The Data Keep Disappointing Them

The propaganda press has spent the last few weeks desperately trying to convince Americans that there was an impending recession due to President Donald Trump’s pro-America agenda that included levying tariffs on countries ripping off the United States.

“Companies buying foreign products pay the tariffs imposed on them — and, as a result, face higher costs that are typically passed on to customers,” one Associated Press article read.

NBC News warned that “Trump’s new tariffs will hit lower-income households the hardest.”

CNN said, “Trump’s tariffs will be bad for you. And you, and you, and you, and you.”

Another CNN headline read: “Trump chaos has already damaged the economy. It may be too late to fix it.”

MSNBC went with an op-ed titled “Trump’s tariffs are incoherent and destructive.”

The examples are endless. But on Thursday, that narrative crumbled.

Axios, citing newly released data, reported that there are not signs “of recessionary or inflationary conditions implied by business and consumer surveys.”

The data, according to Axios, show “steady retail sales and a surprising drop in wholesale prices in April.” Data also reportedly indicate that “spending at restaurants and bars, among the few service-sector categories in the retail sales report, rose by 1.2% in April.”

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Germany’s Fiscal Suicide

Germany’s general state debt spiral should be a constant feature in daily headlines. Its prominence should force policymakers into a radical fiscal turnaround. Yet while Germany is working under immense pressure to ban the AfD, forming alliances with left-wing extremists and eroding the political culture, on the other side of the Atlantic, preparations are underway for the approaching storm.

We live in record-breaking times. In the first quarter of this year, global debt surged to a record high of $324 trillion. This milestone becomes significant when compared to global GDP, which currently hovers around $110 trillion. Governments worldwide now owe 100% of GDP — an alarming reality, as no modern state has ever managed to free itself from the ensuing fiscal bind once this threshold is reached. Debt levels of 80-90% mark the “point of no return.”

The Tipping Point of the Debt Spiral

At this scale, debt reaches a critical mass. It inevitably forces an escalating debt service burden that drains scarce capital from the private sector to finance bloated social funds, ultimately leading to the same scenario we faced 15 years ago during the last severe sovereign debt crisis. Back then, Greece’s impending default sent shockwaves across credit markets. Central banks intervened with trillions, and governments stepped in to rescue debt-laden pension funds and banks with taxpayers’ money.

Greece’s national debt stood at 143% at the onset of this crisis, and it is now about 155% — no debt consolidation has occurred. The southern European countries are, quite frankly, sinking into a swamp of debt. Italy, with 140%, Spain at 120%, and France’s budget deficit at 7%, leave much to be desired. On average, the EU’s debt-to-GDP ratio is now approaching 95%, closing in on the global benchmark of 100%.

Bond Vigilantes Lurk in the Markets

We must now prepare for the moment when a tipping point in bond markets triggers a series of sovereign defaults. This will occur when a growing crisis of confidence among investors, banks, and investment funds translates into a sell-off cascade in the bond markets. Let’s keep an eye on interest rates: if they rise with high volatility and market volume, general unrest is on the horizon. We have already witnessed the emergence of “bond vigilantes” this year — critical bond investors who pull the plug when debt levels rise. On the day it was announced that Germany would borrow about a trillion euros over the next four years and issue corresponding bonds, the interest rates on German bonds surged by more than 40 basis points.

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