American Consequences - September 2020

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But virtually everything I wrote over a decade ago has come to pass. And what I see is that both the response to COVID and the rise of Black Lives Matter movement are nothing more than what happens in every historical situation where you have a government that begins to behave like ours with its monetary policy. It leads to a tremendous centralization of power and it leads to a degradation of civil society, and in both cases that’s what you have here. You have a government that’s well overstepped its constitutional authority to tell people to remain in their homes. And of course you have the societal breakdown where people genuinely believe that they can’t get ahead in American society because of the color of their skin. You’re not allowed to say this anymore, but I find those ideas absurd and feel genuinely bad for people. When you tell a whole segment of your society that their own initiative and efforts aren’t going to count, you’re lying to them, but more importantly you’re giving whole swaths of them this limitless excuse to not try their best and to not participate in society in a normal way. And that’s why you see the rioting and all the other things that have happened. So even though the micro-causes of all these things may be due to specifics, the reality is that this entire genre that we’re living through is completely a normal part of what we have done with the monetary base. Ron Paul: With all the news and the markets being so rocky, when you

think about the political situation, the economic situation, the runaway deficits and all, where do you come down emotionally in a sense that you end up with a bit of optimism because we can correct these things? Or do part of your investors or your writers, do they talk about why you have to move out and go overseas? I mean, there’s all types of reactions to this. But I always work hard at it, and some days it’s more difficult. I’d like to think that if we did the right things, we should be optimistic. But where do you come down on this side of optimism and pessimism? Porter Stansberry: Well, given that my two mentors in business were Doug Casey and Bill Bonner, I have to say that compared to them I’m a wild-eyed optimist. Though I’d like to believe that I’m a steely-eyed realist. And what I will tell you, Dr. Paul, is once you understand what is behind the collapse in civil society, once you understand what’s behind the soaring valuations in the stock market, the soaring price of gold, and so on, it actually becomes pretty easy to make a lot of money. And if you look at the track record of our advisories, we’ve done incredibly well over this 10-year period because we had a very good sense of what was going to happen in the markets. Our primary financial strategist is Dr. Steve Sjuggerud, and he has been calling uniformly for market upside. Originally, he called it the Bernanke Bubble, and then he predicted what he’s calling the Melt Up. But what he’s saying

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September 2020

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