Foreign Buying of US Treasuries Just Fell 88% in a Single Month

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Aimon Black / Sovereign Man) August 19, 2026

If you were to head to Bloomberg, CNBC, or Yahoo Finance this morning and see virtually all green across the board in US markets, you wouldn’t think it’s a sad day for America.

And yet, despite stocks being up and investors positively effervescent, it is indeed a sad day, because today marks the first real capitulation by the Treasury Department.

 How Medicare Became a Slush Fund

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man)  August 18, 2026

Four years ago this month, Washington passed a law and named it, with a straight face, the Inflation Reduction Act.  Bizarrely, their plan to ‘reduce inflation’, which had been caused by excessive government spending, was for the government to spend even more money. It’s genius!

Breaking Down Comrade Mamdani’s 30% Discount

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) August 14, 2026

When Walmart founder Sam Walton passed away in 1992, his family fortune made him the wealthiest person on the planet... by far. His Walton Family Enterprises was worth $23.8 billion— nearly four times as much as Bill Gates at the time. And if he were still alive today, Walton would be the second-richest man in the world, just behind Elon Musk... and ahead of Zuckerberg, Ellison, the Google guys, etc.

That’s a pretty impressive feat for a guy whose core business is basically being a gigantic grocery store.

Even America's Enemies Trusted It With Their Money. That's Over

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man)August 12, 2026

At 4:15 in the morning on November 4, 1956, Soviet artillery opened fire on the city of  Budapest. And the subsequent firestorm was nothing short of devastating.

Two weeks earlier, students and factory workers had risen up against the Soviet-installed puppet government in Hungary. They pulled down Stalin's statue, rampaged across the city, and even managed to push Soviet forces out of Budapest.

The Tax Collector Now Gets a Cut of What He Finds

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) August 11, 2026

Arguably the most famous man on the planet throughout the 1700s was the famed writer Francois-Marie Arouet, known to history as Voltaire. He wasn't just a celebrity writer and philosopher, however; Voltaire was also a wealthy capitalist and nobleman who almost single-handedly turned the impoverished region of Ferney into a highly productive watchmaking hub.

Central Banks Choose Between Gold and Dollars. Gold Is Winning

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) August 10, 2026

Every country on earth keeps a rainy-day fund: a pile of emergency savings, managed by its central bank, set aside for wars, crises, and currency runs.

These stockpiles of cash around the world are known as a nation’s “reserves”, and the people who manage those funds are called reserve managers.

The Biggest Winners Of This War Don't Pump A Single Barrel

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) July 28, 2026

How much do you think it would cost to send a supertanker, one of the giant ships that move the world's crude oil, through a narrow stretch of water that is full of mines, where missiles hit two tankers in early July, and where a crew member has already been killed?

Last month, one shipowner agreed to make that run— through the Strait of Hormuz— for nearly $470,000 per day.

Why They Won't Even Fix the Easy Stuff

Notes From the Field By (Simon Black / Sovereign Man)  July 27, 2026

The Department of Transportation's headquarters campus in Washington spans two complexes covering 1.8 million square feet across 11-acre of prime DC real estate. In the private sector, such a trophy office property would fetch north of $1 billion per year in rental income.

Yet for the federal government, two-thirds of the space sits empty according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the federal government's own internal watchdog. This is based on real data; the GAO toured the department's buildings last fall and counted the empty desks.

US Taxpayers Subsidized The Greatest Heist Of The Cold War. The Grocery Bill Came Later.

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man)   July 23, 2026  

In the summer of 1972, a Soviet official named Nikolai Belousov stepped off a plane in New York City with a shopping list.

The Soviet Union had just finished its worst harvest in over a decade and was on the verge of starvation... and Belousov was tasked with the nearly impossible mission of buying enough wheat to feed an entire nation.

Why Britain's New Marxist Leader Suddenly Loves Oil

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) July 21, 2026

On November 27th in the year 176 AD, Marcus Aurelius promoted his 15-year old biological son Commodus to be Co-emperor of Rome.    Marcus Aurelius never realized it, but he was sealing Rome’s fate… and essentially marking an end to the Empire’s golden age.

The Latest Flashing Exit Sign for the US Dollar

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man)  July 13, 2026

Washington has a comforting story about Social Security: yes, the trust fund is running out of money, but not until 2032. That leaves six more years to form the commissions, schedule the hearings, and study a problem that has been obvious for decades.

But last week, a man who used to run the numbers for Social Security itself explained why even a measly six years is optimistic.

America Turns 250 At 125, It Looked Like the End

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) July 3, 2026

On the afternoon of September 6, 1901, President William McKinley stood in a receiving line at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, shaking hands with a crowd of well-wishers.

One of the people in the crowd was a young man named Leon Czolgosz... who was patiently waiting with a revolver wrapped in a handkerchief. When he reached the front, he fired twice into the president's abdomen.