GUALFIN, ARGENTINA – Kavanaugh… Kavanaugh… Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh in the morning. Kavanaugh in the evening. Kavanaugh at supper time. It’s Kavanaugh 24/7.

And so the mud wrestling – wretched, tawdry, and disgraceful – continues.

But today, we turn away… back to our beat: money.

Unearned Money

The Dow ended the day up nearly 200 points yesterday. From CNBC:

“The biggest risk factor [in the market] is a trade war and we’ve dialed that down a bit,” said Mike Bailey, director of research at FBB Capital Partners. Bailey noted, however, the market may be going too high, too fast right now. “I’m not calling for a major correction or a bear market, but I think we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves here.”

We also saw an article from our old friend Mark Hulbert yesterday. He warned that it’s more important not to lose big than it is to win big:

…beating the S&P 500 (SPX) during bear markets is far more important than during bull markets, for two reasons. The first is mathematical: Big losses require even bigger gains to recover, and at some point, the required gains become so large as to become improbable. So if you lag during bear markets, you have to beat the S&P 500 by a lot during bull markets to come out ahead over the long term. […]

The second reason why it’s more important to limit bear market losses is behavioral: It’s the rare investor who can tolerate big bear market losses. All too often, investors end up throwing in the towel during the latter stages of a bear market and so miss out when the market recovers.

In other words, if you’ve stuck with the stock market so far, congratulate yourself on your gains (and kindly forget that we advised you to get out long ago).

But it is probably wise to move out of stocks now. A single big loss will undo a lot of small gains.

But before we leave the world of politics completely, let’s give a final salute to the wraslers… and the whole cast of the Culture War Reality Show.

That is, we call upon the gods to put a pox on all their houses. For it was a pathetic show, where all the participants – accusers, accused, senators, and news spinners – brought dishonor and ridicule upon themselves and made the nation an international laughingstock.

Most observers see in these tawdry displays an “us versus them” agenda, where right-thinking blue-staters are out to put one over on God’s “chosen people” of the red states, or vice versa.

Of course, there is that element to it. But the real meaning of it can be found closer to our beat – that is, by following the money.

As lottery winner Jim Hayes put it, unearned money “can really screw up your life.” Our overly simplistic prognosis for the U.S. republic: Unearned money has really screwed it up.

Kavanaugh Carnival

Hayes won $19 million. The security guard dutifully pledged to spend it carefully. But in a matter of weeks, he was off on a bender of drugs, alcohol, and big spending.

Then, when the money ran out, he turned to robbing banks to keep the good times going. Now, he’s in prison reflecting on his good fortune. If it hadn’t been for prison, he says, he would have died from an overdose.

But for America’s insiders, elites, cronies, and Deep State apparatchiks, it’s hardly worth lifting up a hotel seat cushion to find a measly $19 million.

They got $4 trillion – fed into the bond market by the Fed to fatten the whole capital structure. And now, fat and sassy, the last thing they want is for the public to notice the larceny behind the insiders’ good fortune… or to bring it to a halt.

Always looking for the bright side, we have struggled with the Kavanaugh carnival. It is hard to find one.

On display last week and this week was the hideous face of the privileged, snivelly elite… with no recognition or remedy for the fundamental unfairness they have wrought. Antagonists, protagonists, and sideline gawkers – all seem to have brought the nation down a notch.

But perhaps some good will come of it… for they have certainly helped reveal the corrupt, self-absorbed vanity of America’s elite.

And perhaps we will begin to have a better idea of how it came to be – that is, of how fake money took Americans’ eyes off the ball… and onto trivial absurdities.

When the money goes, everything goes.

Show us a nation that debauched its currency, and we will show you one where the debauch leaked into every aspect of public life like an overflowing sewer.

In Germany, during the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic, for example, college professors were reduced to picking through trash for something to eat… and pretty girls from good families sold themselves on street corners for one American dollar.

Lions in the Arena

Money measures what things are worth – especially the two most important things in a modern economy: time and money itself.

Falsify the money, and everything gets bent into a new shape… and everybody starts wearing wigs and phony mustaches.

One pretends to be defending the Constitution from the Bolsheviks. Another pretends to be defending the fair sex from its hoggish ravishers. One pretends to fight terrorism. Another professes to be stimulating the economy.

Then, people have no way of knowing what is really going on. They have no way of separating villains from heroes. They cannot keep their eyes on the shuffle… or connect the Fed’s fake money to their own feelings of having been dealt a bad hand.

They cannot possibly take the time to understand why the Fed’s dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model is a fraud.

What is the typical citizen to think? What can he do?

He turns to the arena to watch the lions devour Christians…

…to Facebook, where he can catch up on the latest cat photos…

…or to Washington, where the mud just gets deeper and deeper, and the wraslers aim for lower and lower blows.

Regards,

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Bill

TECHNOLOGY INSIGHT: HOW TO UNBREAK THE INTERNET

By Jeff Brown, Editor, Exponential Tech Investor

It was only 1989 when a proposal was made for an information management system – the earliest formal structure for what became hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), otherwise known as the backbone of the World Wide Web.

It may feel like the “internet,” as most people call it, has been around for as long as we can remember. Yet it was less than three decades ago when Tim Berners-Lee made that first proposal.

Over the last three decades, no other figure has been more central to the World Wide Web than Berners-Lee. His titles and honors are too long to mention, and he remains a director of the World Wide Web Consortium, which oversees the future development of the web.

And he believes the internet is broken.

Its original purpose was to create a worldwide network that could operate unencumbered, free, and without gatekeepers. Precisely the opposite has happened. Berners-Lee has correctly stated that internet giants like Facebook, Google, and even Twitter have become so dominant that they can control which opinions and ideas are most featured online.

Unknown to most users of the web, these giants track, collect, and analyze everything we do on the internet. Every website we go to, every link we click on, every purchase we make, and everything we search for is logged. All of that data we produce is packaged and sold to the highest bidders. We are, unknowingly, the product.

But fortunately for us, Berners-Lee is trying to do something about it. For more than a decade, he has been working with a team to develop a new technology called Solid that allows consumers to maintain all their data in one place. It enables consumers to use that data, by permission, with any kind of internet application.

At a practical level, it means that we wouldn’t have to type or enter in any information again when we begin to use new applications. Only the data we wish to make available to an application will be used.

It also means that consumers will get paid for the content they produce. Information we share about our lifestyles – things we like to do, things we’re interested in, etc. – is information that advertisers are willing to pay for. It allows them to target ads about products they think might be interesting to us.

Today, Google, Facebook, etc. are capturing 100% of that advertising revenue.

In the future, I envision that the tables will turn. Consumers will receive 70%, and tech companies that facilitate ad buying will collect just 30%.

Just days ago, Berners-Lee and his team announced a new startup, Inrupt, to help accelerate the adoption of Solid technology as the new World Wide Web.

This is part of a massive movement toward decentralized, distributed networks where no authority or authorities have control. It is what drives the blockchain technology community to reinvent how the internet and all of its applications function.

The goal is to tear down the walls that these gatekeepers have created on the internet and return control to the four billion people who use it.

And whether it’s Berners-Lee and his team or any number of early stage, innovative companies developing the tech to solve these problems, I’ll be doing whatever I can to make the new internet a reality.

The best part: It’s going to happen far faster than anyone thinks. That’s precisely what happens with exponential growth.

– Jeff Brown

P.S. Before you go, I’d like to put something else on your radar. I recently uncovered what I believe will be the biggest tech story for at least the next five years: the 5G network buildout. It will require $2 trillion in private investment spending through 2025… making it the largest private infrastructure spending project in history.

And that makes 5G one of the single best investment opportunities of the next decade. But investors need to position themselves now, while the buildout is just getting underway.

To see how, go right here. Just be sure to do it before midnight tonight. After that, the special video presentation I prepared will be taken down for good.

FEATURED READS

The Scariest Month for Investors… Along With All the Others
October is notorious for stock market crashes. The Crash of 1929 and 1987’s Black Monday both happened in October. Is October the scariest month for stocks… or is the fear overhyped?

A New Requirement in California Boardrooms: Women
California just passed a new law. By the end of next year, corporate boardrooms in the Golden State must have at least one woman on the board of directors. The penalty for failing to comply? Hundreds of thousands of dollars…

How to Make a Fortune in Tech
The technological innovations of the last two decades were just a warm-up for what’s to come. That’s the message from Jeff Brown, Bill’s go-to tech expert. The next 10 years will deliver technology we never dreamed possible… and reward smart investors with a fortune.

MAILBAG

After Friday’s Diary, “The Public Burning of Brett Kavanaugh,” there are strong words for our editor…

Your comments about Ms. Ford are unwarranted. How can you know what sort of trauma her experience with Kavanaugh caused that kept her silent about her experience and unwilling to seek out help at that time? Would you speak of a soldier with PTSD – who goes into combat oftentimes without necessarily thinking that his behavior may not be in sync with his true morals – with the same words that you scathed her inability to respond, according to your perfect ideal of how she should have responded?


– Maralissa T.

Excuse me, the stakes are not trivial. We got a look yesterday into the most partisan nominee ever. We need a jurist, not a whiny, left-wing-conspiracy-spouting, self-righteous “victim” of those “bad, awful Democrats,” whom he plans to punish whenever there is a Supreme Court vote.

If he does get confirmed, it will not be long before he is removed when the truth comes out. And it will come out. There are too many people with long memories from the D.C.-area high schools and from Yale who know what a low-life Kavanagh always was and, I suspect from his performance, still is.


– Mary L.

As a woman, and one who has been assaulted, I haven’t been more insulted. You might want to consider that your subscribers might be women and that we’re a little sick and tired of not getting our due respect.


– Whitney G.

It amazes me that you can imply that Dr. Blasey Ford is somehow using yesterday’s hearing to her advantage… and then turn around with a straight face and use the whole story to your own advantage to continue promulgating the argument you’ve been making for weeks.


– Shaun D.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT…

Of all the trends that Bonner & Partners tech expert Jeff Brown follows, this has him the most excited.

That’s because one piece of technology is poised to unlock $12 trillion starting on November 14. And if you’re an investor, there’s a way to profit. Go right here before midnight to find out.

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