Bill Bonner on the illusion of "free" money

Plus Chinese-style "struggle sessions" in modern American culture, the coming financial "katastrophenhausse" and plenty more...

Good afternoon gentle (ahem...) folk.

Ok, so last week got a bit dark. A tad “gulagy.” A smidge “holocausty.” 

A few Dear Readers wrote in to politely, delicately mention that, fascinating though it surely is, totalitarianism is not exactly the light, poolside reading they prefer of a weekend. 

The quotidian, intra-week march is full enough of deadbeat politicos and their inane ideas, puerile policies and large-font, paint-by-numbers “plans” for the future. 

Illiterate legislation... innumerate budgets... immoral edicts of every conceivable stripe (and some which seem positively inconceivable, too)...

We are conscripted to engage in such ideological trench warfare Monday through Friday... Why suffer the very worst of these cerebral aberrations on the weekend, too?

Our Gentle Readers are correct, of course. After all, not every essay you skim makes reference to Hitler, Stalin and that abominably banal desk-killer, Adolf Eichmann, all within the space of a casual 4,000 words...

But some do. And last week’s installment was one of them. So, there you have it. 

(Masochists, mental defectives and other students of history who wish to revisit the column in question may do so here: Hannah Arendt’s Warning, Critical Race Ideology and the Coming Totalitarian Nightmare.)

That being said, and taking a somewhat livelier, upbeat, damned-near-effervescent approach to this weekend... let us begin by observing how satisfying it is to see the little red “alert” icon once again hovering over the upper righthand corner of our United Airlines app. It’s like a siren, singing us t’ward foreign shores... (hmmm...)

Yes, patient Reader-cum-Listener, we will shortly resume our annual migratory pattern, flying north for the summer, journeying from our home here at the southern tip of the Americas to the very Heart of the Empire.  (Or at least to its belt-buckle; we’ve family in Texas, so will hole up there for a spell before deciding where next to roam.)

One thing we’ve noticed when mentioning our upcoming, Stateside sojourn, is how the news is met, almost universally, with a word of caution...

“Well, just be prepared for a culture shock,” one concerned family member worried aloud when we announced our imminent arrival.

“It’s not exactly the same America you left,” fretted another friend. 

“Things have changed... and not all for the better,” forewarned a third.

But wait! We (sometimes) read the news. We (occasionally) skim the headlines. Is it really as bad as all that? Neighbor pitted against neighbor... friends and family now foes... streets, communities, cities divided? 

Or is it all a big media smoke and mirror job, distracting good folks, who have better things to do, from what it is they’d rather be doing? 

One can’t help but sense a little political prestidigitation at play here... a case of the ol’ pay-attention-to-the-vast-social-divide-while-we-sneak-in-a-corporate-tax-hike kinda caper.

We could be wrong, of course. Maybe it really is all that bad. Society coming apart at the seams, and all that. But then, this was supposed to be a bubbly, optimistic communiqué! 

Sheesh! There’s just no pleasing some folks...

In other news, this week I caught up with Bonner Private Research founder, Bill Bonner, for a conversation that took us through both time and space...

From the Calchaqui Valley, here in Argentina, to the Blackwater Valley in Ireland... 

From Chinese-style “struggle sessions” in modern American culture, to Venezuelan-style inflation on the horizon for us all...

From the bone-headed, mal-evolved ideas of the Dark Ages, to the coming katastrophenhausse looming large in our future...

We spoke about everything from the illusion of free money to the advent of free market money, from Dogecoin to Ford Motor Company, from bad ideas to real wealth and plenty more besides...

I hope you enjoy my conversation with Bill. Listen in on your favorite podcast platform, or check it out, right here:

Introducing…

Next up, as part of our little “Flaneur the World” project, we thought it might be fun to include, each week, a photo of the café in which we’ve lately been scribbling. To our eyes, cafés are like windows into the soul of a city. Any city. One sees all modes of life pass through their hallowed, caffeinated halls. The businessman sipping his espresso, newspaper in hand and schedule in mind; the fashionista teen, selfie-ing away in the corner, oblivious to anything beyond the scope her own iScreen; the young, baggy-eyed mother, somnambulantly loading up on rich brew before dropping the kids off at school; and the aspiring novelist, wading through oceans of doubt in the never-ending quest to form but a single, perfect sentence.

This first snap was taken at the nearby Birkin Café, just by our apartment here in Palermo Chico. (Tosone is the shoe store next door). A fellow flaneur, dapperly attired, escapes into the rich texture of a favorite novel. This is a common sight in Buenos Aires, a fantastically literary city, where readers sit - with actual, physical books - and while away the hours, immersed in the imagined worlds of Borges or Cortázar or Ocampo… or some other classic from further afield. The Porteños (people from Buenos Aires, a “port” city) read deeply, richly, exultantly. To them, great literature is a way of life, a celebration of the human mind and spirit. Along with wine and steak, it also forms part of the holy trinity that drew us to these here shores in the first place, and which has kept us coming back ever since…

Until next week,

Cheers!

Joel Bowman

April, 2021 ~ Buenos Aires, Argentina