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On July 9, 1807, after Napoleon’s crushing victory over an entire coalition of European nations, the King of Prussia was forced to sign the Treaty of Tilsit, formally putting an end to the conflict. The peace treaty was devastating for the Prussians; they were forced to pay heavy tribute and war reparations to
It wasn’t even twelve months ago that America’ political, economic, and cultural tectonic plates started to shift—finally in a positive direction. Joe Biden’s deteriorating mental condition was put on display for the world to see in his one and only Presidential debate; at the time this looked like the final nail in the
It turns out that “Liberty and Justice for all” might just still exist in the Land of the Free. While most of the news yesterday was focused on the nuclear Twitter war between Elon Musk and Donald Trump, the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in favor of common sense. The story began
Last week when I wrote about America’s new stablecoin legislation (bizarrely called the “GENIUS Act”), a number of readers wrote in asking me to clarify a comment that I made about the Bitcoin company ‘Strategy’, i.e. formerly MicroStrategy. I explained in the article that I am pro-crypto and have been since the early
Jamie Dimon is one of America’s most prominent and successful CEOs; he built JP Morgan Chase into a $4 trillion juggernaut, so it’s fair to say that he understands global finance in a way that most people– and most politicians– do not. On Friday, Dimon sat down for a 30+ minute live interview
Peter Schiff isn’t just my partner at Schiff Sovereign– we’ve been close friends for many years. And we generally see eye-to-eye on most things going on in the world. But one area where we disagree is crypto. Not to put words in his mouth, but Peter is pretty vocal in his criticism of
Germany’s “Iron Chancellor” Otto von Bismark didn’t pass the world’s first modern Social Security system out of the kindness of his heart. The year was 1889, and Bismark was fighting hard against the rising tide of socialism; the second volume of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital had been published just a few years earlier
On August 24 in the year 410 AD, a large army of Visigoths entered the city of Rome and rampaged through the streets for three full days. They ransacked public buildings. They destroyed monuments. They looted wealthy homes. And they stole just about anything and everything that wasn’t nailed down. Only some churches
Last week I wrote an article about the bizarre US tax liabilities of Leo XIV, the new American Pope. The basic idea that, as a US citizen, the Pope is required to file and pay US taxes on his worldwide income… even though he is a head of state, and even though he
Well, that was fast. It only took five days after Moody’s downgrade of the US government’s sovereign credit rating for investors to throw a fit. The result was yesterday’s meltdown trifecta in which ALL three major markets– US stocks, US bonds, and the US dollar– lost significant value. I wrote about this extensively
In the year 1980, a young computer science grad student from the University of Washington named Burrell “Bud” Tribble accepted a job at a hot tech startup you might have heard of: it’s called Apple. Tribble went to work directly for Steve Jobs on Apple’s most ambitious project at the time– the Macintosh.
Nearly 2,000 years ago around the year 75 AD, the Greco-Roman historian Plutarch sat down to write his most ambitious work yet– a collection of biographies of the 48 most famous and influential figures of antiquity. It was called Parallel Lives, and this two-volume series covered everyone from the mythical founders of Rome
I still can’t get over the fact that there’s an American pope… and that his friends refer to him as ‘Bob’. Bob. It just makes him seem like a regular dude who’d be drinking a beer and shouting at the umpire at a Cubs game. Something else that makes the new Pope seem
In the year 428 BC, ancient Athenians imposed a special tax called the eisphora that targeted local business investments in the city-state. It was expensive and highly unpopular among investors. And wealthy Athenians simply stopped investing in local businesses to avoid the tax. This is almost an iron-clad lesson of history: whenever governments
One of the most mysterious villains in the history of cinema was the fictitious character ‘Keyser Söze’ from the movie The Usual Suspects. No spoilers here, but there’s a scene where they describe his rise in the criminal underworld. According to the story, Keyser Söze realized that “to be in power, you didn’t
