Stuff That Interests Me

You might call it the cable that changed history.In the mid-19th century there were various attempts to lay cables across the Atlantic Ocean between Britain (Ireland) and the US. It took several failures, numerous bankruptcies and over ten years before they got it right. But eventually they did and on July 27 1866 Queen Victoria broadcast a message to US President Johnson. Here’s what it said: Osborne, July 27, 1866To the President of the United States, WashingtonThe Queen congratulates the President on the successful completion of an undertaking which she hopes may serve as an additional bond of Union between the United States and England.Johnson replied:Executive MansionWashington, July 30, 1866To Her Majesty the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and IrelandThe President of the United States acknowledges with profound gratification the receipt of Her Majesty's despatch and cordially reciprocates the hope that the cable which now unites the Eastern and Western hemispheres may

Thousands of years before the dawn of civilisation, as prehistoric man hunted and gathered his way through the Stone Age, he came across 6 metals - the six native metals, which occur in nature in a relatively pure state: silver, tin, lead, iron, copper and gold. He found gold in river beds - nuggets, mixed in with sediment, relatively easy to collect and shape.Man adorned himself with it - as well as with bones, teeth, precious stones and shells. This was long before the Bronze Age and the discovery of smelting, when he started using copper, tin and lead.The oldest records we have of man using metal are fragments of gold in Spanish caves inhabited by Paleolithic Man, dating back perhaps as much as 40,000 years. The first records of man using copper came tens of thousands of years later. Lead, tin and iron’s first use came even later.The beauty of gold - dense, glimmering, shining - as well as its imperviousness no doubt captivated Stone Age Man the same way it does his 21st century descendants. We are t

With the entire crypto sector crashing – I thought I should give you some thoughts on bitcoin this morning.Needless to say, it’s not pretty.At all.Faith in crypto has been battered, in most cases, quite rightlyThis time last year, bitcoin went on one its monster runs above $60,000. It then had one of its monster crashes. I can’t remember if it was in Moneyweek or on Twitter, but somewhere I suggested that a reasonable target for the correction might be $20,000. $20,000 was the old high from the 2017 boom and bust and an obvious pivotal price point.But the correction stopped at $30,000, or just below. The conclusion I drew – and on current evidence wrongly drew – was that, as bitcoin matured, its volatility was declining. The 90% corrections of previous bull markets were now 50-60% corrections.Bitcoin had a second run above $60,000 in the autumn, followed by another of its humongous corrections, and lo and behold, $30,000 held again (actually just below, but I use r

Did you buy a Peloton in the lockdown? I know a couple of people that did. I nearly did. I certainly looked at them online and lusted after one. But then I didn’t get round to buying one. Can’t remember why not. It might have been the waiting list. It might be because I don’t have anywhere to put it…The tech bubble has well and truly burstA Peloton, by the way, is an indoor exercise bike that comes with an app with loads of classes built in, so you can have someone shout at you while you cycle. They do treadmills and things as well.Peloton Interactive (Nasdaq:PTON) was one of the go-to stock darlings of the Covid tech boom. It IPO’d in September 2019 at $29 a share. The IPO price was probably a bit high because over the next month the stock fell by a third to $20. It rallied a bit, but at the height of the Covid panic in March 2020 it sunk even lower to $17.Then people like me started wondering how we could exercise during a lockdown. Over the next nine months

There are about 65 million people in the UK and 60 million acres of land – almost enough, in theory, for an acre each. (It’s not quite that simple, of course, and not all acres are equal.) Yet about two-thirds of the land – 40 million acres – is owned by fewer than 6,000 people. Land is the most basic form of wealth there is, so if there is a more telling statistic about the unequal distribution of wealth in this country, I’d like to know what it is. And it’s been that way since 1066.Today, so distorted is our system of taxation, many landowners actually receive subsidies for for land. The rest of us, meanwhile, must pay council tax. The largest landowners, whether families or institutions, exploit tax loopholes. Some families pass land from one generation to the next via the tax avoidance vehicle that is the trust, while the rest of us must pay inheritance tax.The complexity and inconsistency of our tax systems are to blame for so much wealth

Stock markets have taken quite a tumble this past week or so, and there has been a great deal of noise about the end of the tech bubble. Even with some 70%-plus corrections, many tech companies’ valuations remain extraordinarily high. What seems to have gone rather less reported is the extraordinary battering that metals have taken too. Whether base or precious, ferrous or platinum group, Russia-centric or dispersed, they have been walloped. The reason? Their nemesis has risen…The US dollar is the most important price in the worldWe have have been fretting about the US dollar for some time now. A year ago in June, over at Moneyweek, we wrote that “everything hinges on the direction of the dollar” and then in November we warned investors to “beware - the most important price in the world is rising”.We were worried, first, it would rise and then that it was rising. Well, talk about risen.The US dollar has been, of late, doing its best impersonation of

I was lucky enough to attend the Students for Liberty conference, LibertyCon 2022, in Prague last weekend.Oh, my goodness. What a beautiful city is Prague!I’d never been before, but I shall be returning ASAFP.While there, I heard a talk by Li Schoolland, a Chinese-American business woman, who is the Director of External Relations Asia Pacific for the Acton Institute. She fled China in 1984, having survived Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution.She made the case that China, not the US, is the “paper tiger”. What did she mean and what does it imply for investors and the Chinese economy?China is in troubleThe expression “paper tiger” is used to describe something that appears powerful or threatening, but is in fact weak and vulnerable. The term was made famous by the notorious chairman of the Chinese Communist Party and founder of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong, in 1957. He said: “All the reputedly powerful reactionaries are merely paper tigers.

When I look at the things fossil fuels have made possible for mankind, I sometimes shake my head and wonder why we loathe them so much.The energy created by fossil fuels have opened up so many possibilities for so many people. We can go just about anywhere, quickly and safely. It really is possible to experience the whole world. The trading opportunities that have opened us mean the whole world can be brought to us, without our having to leave our warm, safe, well lit homes. We live longer, better, safer lives thanks to fossil fuels. We can communicate with anyone anywhere. We have instant access to unlimited information. Billions have been brought out of poverty thanks to this unique, low-cost, reliable energy source. We enjoy lives and luxuries even the most decadent figures in history from Marie Antoinette to Caligula could never have dreamed of. Life expectancy has rocketed, As Alex Epstein says, and poverty has plummeted.We still have a long way to go, of course. Perfection has not yet been attained

It’s a touchy subject, to put it mildly, but today we consider UK demographics. What will the UK population look like in 2035? Very different from today is the answer, if primary schools are anything to go by. Some Sunday morning food for thought. Listen now. Get full access to The Flying Frisby at frisby.substack.com/subscribe

Listen now | A surprisingly reliable 18-year cycle in the UK property market says house prices will crash in 2026. Dominic Frisby explains how it works. Get full access to The Flying Frisby at frisby.substack.com/subscribe

An independent Scotland could become the richest country on earth. I’m not joking. It has all the necessary ingredients. Let me explain.Each year the World Bank, the IMF and the CIA each independently publish a list of the richest countries in the world - as measured by GDP per capita at purchasing power parity.The UK sits at a rather disappointing 26th but topping those rankings, year after year, you have the likes of Qatar, Luxembourg, Singapore, Brunei, Norway and Switzerland.(I’m discounting Ireland because its figures are distorted by the number of corporations domiciled there)Some of these nations have got on that laist thanks to their oil. But oil isn’t everything – otherwise the likes of Saudi Arabia (17th), Russia (57th) or Iran (65th) or Venezuela (don’t know) would feature.Others have got there because they are financial or commercial centres. But the same regulatory options that have enabled them to be so are open to other countries - they have just not been adopted.T

Listen now | House prices have soared in recent years. But what, asks Dominic Frisby, if you look at them using a more durable form of money – gold? Get full access to The Flying Frisby at frisby.substack.com/subscribe

Here’s something to contemplate this Sunday morning: where are rates going?In many ways it’s the most important question in finance - the biggest question in investing: what is the future price of money going to be?Policy makers are caught between a very big rock and a very hard place. Official UK inflation stands at 8.5%. It’s higher if you use the traditional RPI as a measure. But real inflation is much higher still. Official measures only look at the price of goods and services, which are mostly prone to the deflationary forces of increased productivity. If you include things like house prices and financial assets inflation is much, much higher - over 10%. The same argument applies pretty much everywhere across the developed world.Looked at another way, money is losing value at over 10% per year. The same salary in a year’s time will effectively be 10% lower in that it will buy you 10% less . The purchasing power of your savings will be 10% lower. The already extraordinarily la

If you want to listen to this article, you can via the button above. “Look at what they do, not at what they say.”If you are seeking truth of any kind, this is a great maxim to live by - particularly when it comes to politicians. And lovers.And indeed mining CEOs.My advice today is to apply the maxim to your author, because there is a marked divergence between what I say on the subject of gold mining companies and what I actually do.We’ll start with what I say…Here’s why everyone believes that gold miners are a leveraged play on goldTalk to any grizzled goldbug who remembers the 1930s – there must be one or two that were there at the time – and one or two more that have read about them. In the US, the story went as follows. After the stock market crash of 1929, the US sunk into an economic recession that became known as the Great Depression. In order to fund a government stimulus programme, the President, Franklin D Roosevelt, confiscated his citizens’ gold

Commodity prices have started to cool – with the exception of one industrial metal that is in short supply but is an essential ingredient in almost everything. Dominic Frisby looks at copper.The Substack picks are here See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Get full access to The Flying Frisby at frisby.substack.com/subscribe

Was that the high? The pound moves in an eight-year cycle, and in its next cycle, it may have nowhere to go but down.Click here to view the charts at frisby.substack.com See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Get full access to The Flying Frisby at frisby.substack.com/subscribe

Commodities from gold to oil have fallen dramatically after weeks of strong gains. What might be next for commodity prices? Check out The Flying Frisby on Substack See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Get full access to The Flying Frisby at frisby.substack.com/subscribe

In which I look at the commodities Russia produces, how markets have been affected by its invasion of Ukraine and subsequent sanctions, and what the investment implications are for youSubstack is here See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Get full access to The Flying Frisby at frisby.substack.com/subscribe

Today’s Special Report is about one of my biggest single positions. It represents one of the largest investments I have ever made. It is a gold miner, a “late stage development play” that is on the verge of becoming a mid-tier producer. Within three years, it is going to have three producing mines.More here See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Get full access to The Flying Frisby at frisby.substack.com/subscribe

The price of gold has come within a whisker of its record high. Dominic Frisby looks at where it might go from here.Substack is here See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Get full access to The Flying Frisby at frisby.substack.com/subscribe