America Turns 250 At 125, It Looked Like the End
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.
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.
McKinley died eight days later, and, Czolgosz, an unemployed factory worker, went to the electric chair without a trace of remorse. He insisted it was his duty to strike down a symbol of oppression.
Czolgosz wasn’t a crazed madman, but rather a product of his time. The America of 1901 was 125 years into its history— the exact midpoint between the Declaration of Independence and today.
And despite the US economy already being the largest in the world at that point, the year 1901 did not feel like a nation striding confidently into the American Century.
The US financial system lurched from panic to panic, and to a great many observers, the young republic looked less like a rising power and more like a country unraveling.
The rich versus poor divide was growing, and violent socialist movements spread. Political assassinations, terrorism, and bombings became a recurring feature of public life.
The political violence did not end with McKinley’s assassination, either. Followers of the Italian anarchist Luigi Galleani waged a years-long bombing campaign against judges, politicians, and businessmen.
It peaked at noon on September 16, 1920, when a horse-drawn wagon packed with explosives detonated in front of the headquarters of J.P. Morgan on Wall Street, killing thirty people and wounding hundreds more. The case was never solved.
Many of these anarcho-socialists were immigrants, which poured gasoline on the raging blaze of backlash against widespread immigration.
In 1907 alone, more than a million people passed through Ellis Island. Immigrants were arriving faster than anyone knew how to absorb them, and people were getting tired of it.
Congress passed legislation that imposed a literacy test on immigrants, then banned entire countries. At first, people from Asia and the Middle East were shut out. Subsequent legislation set strict quotas, slamming the door on the southern and eastern Europeans who were considered undesirable.
Yet the instability continued... as did the government’s push to consolidate power.
After the Panic of 1907 nearly brought down the financial system, Congress used the scare to establish the Federal Reserve in 1913. This was the first step toward money that could be printed at will.
Also in 1913, the Constitution was amended, giving Congress the power to tax income.
The income tax (16th Amendment) was sold to the American people as a tax on the very rich that would only affect the top 2% of US households. Idiotic socialists at the time believed the lie and supported the amendment; after all, the rich should pay their fair share.
Within decades, three quarters of Americans were paying income tax.
With a new central bank and tax power in place, Washington then raced to join World War I (despite being an ocean away), and borrowed on an unimaginable scale to do it.
Frankly it all looked pretty bleak.
And yet, while all the bad news and turmoil was ongoing, America was simultaneously producing miracles.
Henry Ford put the country on wheels with the Model T and the moving assembly line. Motion pictures went from novelty to industry. Radio turned from a tinkerer's hobby into a machine that could broadcast to every home in the nation.
These were American breakthroughs that rewired the entire global economy and powered better times ahead.
Seventy-five years later, America's 200th birthday looked little better. In 1976, the economy was mired in stagflation that “experts” had previously sworn was impossible.
Oil shocks had humiliated the country at the gas pump. American dominance looked spent in the wreckage of Vietnam, and the nation had watched President Richard Nixon resign in disgrace.
Terrorism was back. Plane hijackings were somewhat commonplace. Crime rampaged across the cities.
And yet what followed was the personal computer, the Internet, the longest peacetime expansion in the country's history, and a comeback almost nobody standing in a gas line in 1976 would have believed.
Which brings us to the 250th birthday, today.
Political violence is back in American life. Immigration is once again a major issue. Fraud and corruption are rampant (and hardly anyone pays the price). And Washington's finances are in worse shape than at any point in the country's history, with the national debt larger than the entire economy.
Yet at the same time, American companies are building artificial intelligence, next-generation nuclear power, robotics, and biotech breakthroughs that could rewire the global economy even more than the assembly line and the Internet did. Chaos and invention have always lived side by side in the US, and they still do.
America was born out of revolution, and it has endured a civil war, two world wars, a depression, a decade of stagflation, and repeated financial panics.
Every one of those episodes brought years of real pain, but every time, the country that looked terminally ill came back stronger than ever.
There is an old saying in politics (usually credited to Winston Churchill, though apparently first quipped by an Israeli diplomat): Americans will always do the right thing... after exhausting all the alternatives.
Apocryphal or not, that is the pattern: the right thing comes eventually, but the pain comes first.
America is not just a country; it is an idea, and it may be the most extraordinary idea human beings have ever assembled. It stands on the shoulders of giants— Greek thought, Roman law, Judeo-Christian values, and free-market capitalism, fused with a conviction about individual liberty balanced by personal responsibility.
Betting against that idea has been the worst trade of the past 250 years.
To be clear, having a Plan B is not a bet against America either. The concept is not to hide in a bunker with canned food and guns because the end is near.
The point of a Plan B is to be honest about the road between here and the recovery: more inflation, higher taxes, and a stretch of instability, and to make sure you have the options available to come at it from a position of strength.
At 250 years, I truly believe the best days are still ahead. But there will be some rough ones in between.
To your freedom, James Hickman Co-Founder, Schiff Sovereign LLC
Why China Just Overtook The US With The Most Powerful Supercomputer
Why China Just Overtook The US With The Most Powerful Supercomputer
Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) July 1, 2026
Yao Tongbin was one of the most important scientists in Maoist China. He had earned a doctorate in metallurgy in England, spent three years at a research institute in West Germany, and left it all to return to China in 1957.
He spent he next 11 years building China’s first-ever modern missile program, with unparalleled knowledge and experience he had accumulated in the West.
Why China Just Overtook The US With The Most Powerful Supercomputer
Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) July 1, 2026
Yao Tongbin was one of the most important scientists in Maoist China. He had earned a doctorate in metallurgy in England, spent three years at a research institute in West Germany, and left it all to return to China in 1957.
He spent he next 11 years building China’s first-ever modern missile program, with unparalleled knowledge and experience he had accumulated in the West.
But when he came home for lunch on the afternoon of June 8, 1968, a gang of thugs from a rival political faction was waiting for him. They beat him to death in his own apartment. He was forty-five years old.
Yao’s crime was that he was educated, expert, and Western-trained— exactly the kind of man that Mao’s Cultural Revolution had taught the country to hate.
From 1966 to 1976, Mao turned China against its own educated class, rooting out political opposition and handing a the power to young revolutionaries.
Professors were dragged before their students in dunce caps and beaten mercilessly. Universities shut their doors. Millions of educated young people were shipped off to work camps. And engineers were ranked near the bottom of the social order.
China spent ten years treating intelligence as a crime, and the country paid the price for a generation.
Meanwhile, over in the West at the same time that Mao's Red Guards were beating engineers to death, American technological geniuses developed the world's first microprocessor and lit up the first nodes of the internet... effectively giving birth to the digital age.
It was a night-and-day difference between the US and China. China was actively, stupidly making itself worse off, while the US was developing the technology that would change the world forever.
America remained the epicenter of technological innovation for decades; in fact, the unofficial ‘scoreboard’ of the world’s most technologically advanced nation was whoever could build the fastest supercomputer.
And the answer was obviously the United States... until Japan shocked the world in 1995 and beat the fastest US supercomputer. America quickly reclaimed the top spot, only to be bested by Japan again in 2002.
The two great technological powers jostled for #1 for the next several years until the unthinkable happened in 2010: China developed the world’s fastest supercomputer.
For the past sixteen years, those three powers— America, Japan, and China, have traded the trophy. And China just retook it from the US again last week.
This is a symbolic, albeit critical competition— especially now as there are so many challenges to America’s economic, military, and geopolitical leadership.
Why is America falling behind? Because of its own soft “Cultural Revolution” driving out competence and rewarding the people who build nothing.
During COVID, the government and media conspired to destroy the careers of anyone who questioned Tony Fauci.
Shortly thereafter, the DEI cult took over. From transgender Bud Light influencers to absurdly woke Disney movies to mandatory diversity quotas in corporate boardrooms... and it went all the way to the most powerful institutions in America.
Joe Biden promised a female running mate as his Vice President, and a black woman as a Supreme Court justice. His obsession with diversity over merit resulted in two extremely unqualified people in some of the nation’s highest offices.
The end result has been predictable across the military, public health, medicine, and the media, institutions that increasingly selected for ideology over competence.
Mao destroyed his most capable people on purpose, and it cost China a generation. America is now doing the same thing to itself in a softer way.
But regardless of the tactics, any country that pushes out people who can design the chips, fly the planes, run the labs, and keep the lights on, is shooting itself in the foot.
Here’s another interesting example—
On a recent, private call for our top-tier Total Access members, we spoke with a really unique American entrepreneur based in Africa who sees this DEI rot every single day.
China, he told us, runs a "full court press" in Africa. The Chinese government fights for its businesses and helps them invest aggressively in the strategic resources that China needs back home. Food production. Energy. Water. Minerals.
Meanwhile, as China rapidly scoops up critical resources and builds relationships on the continent, the US-funded Western NGOs are busy with DEI and climate change initiatives.
He told us about one particular NGO, a group that pulled out of a critical agricultural investment over concerns that there weren’t enough women involved and too much CO2.
The difference in priorities between China and the West could not be more obvious.
Now, none of this means that China takes over the world. America has faced down a rising manufacturing rival before. It absorbed Japan's challenge in the 1980s, and it out-produced and out-innovated the Soviet Union as well.
The United States still commands the deepest capital markets on earth, enormous pools of talent, and a genius for inventing and building that no rival has ever matched.
China's problems, by contrast, are far greater.
It shares borders with fourteen countries, including North Korea, Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan. It doesn’t have trusted relations with a single one of them.
China is the largest oil importer in the world by a wide margin and has astonishingly thin per-capita reserves. It is lean on water and quality farmland. Its regional governments are buried under mountains of debt.
And it is, quite bizarrely, facing a massive demographic crisis of its own making (from years of its idiotic one child policy) while simultaneously and precariously trying to keep a population of 1.4 billion people under strict authoritarian control.
Plus, let’s be honest— a centrally planned economy will not deliver maximum innovation. Yes, America has its own idiots in office. But for every Lizzie Warren and AOC, China has plenty of its own morons in government service who make painfully idiotic decisions.
America’s problems are gargantuan, yes. But at their core, they are completely fixable. Three simple approaches would dramatically move the needle. Quickly.
Cut the federal deficit by reducing obvious fraud and exercising common sense restraint.
Boost economic productivity by eliminating pointless federal and state regulations.
Focus exclusively on merit rather than DEI credentials.
Those three are very simple and straightforward, and they would dramatically move the needle. And that’s before tackling other challenges like Social Security, immigration, and election reform.
China might have temporarily taken the top spot in supercomputing. But this is still America’s race to lose.
The plan is maddeningly simple. Unfortunately, if history is any guide, Congress will probably do nothing until there’s a bad-enough crisis to force them to act. And that’s why it makes so much sense to have a Plan B.
To your freedom, James Hickman Co-Founder, Schiff Sovereign LLC
PS: That conversation with the investor in Africa came from a private call for our Total Access members. Total Access is the top tier of Schiff Sovereign membership, built for those who value global networks of like-minded people.
Members get all of our research — Plan B Confidential, Strategic Assets, along with the deepest second-passport discounts we can negotiate, events, boots-on-the-ground explorations, and a network of people quietly building their own Plan B.
The World's Gold Is Quietly Leaving London and New York
Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black Sovereign Man} June 29, 2026
In December 1916, with German and Austro-Hungarian armies closing in on Bucharest, the Romanian government made a decision that must have felt entirely sensible at the time.
Romania had gambled its way into the Great War a few months earlier, sending its army across the Carpathian Mountains to grab Austro-Hungarian Transylvania, believing that Germany and Austria-Hungary were too exhausted to stop them.
The World's Gold Is Quietly Leaving London and New York
Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black Sovereign Man} June 29, 2026
In December 1916, with German and Austro-Hungarian armies closing in on Bucharest, the Romanian government made a decision that must have felt entirely sensible at the time.
Romania had gambled its way into the Great War a few months earlier, sending its army across the Carpathian Mountains to grab Austro-Hungarian Transylvania, believing that Germany and Austria-Hungary were too exhausted to stop them.
But Romania’s gamble fell apart in weeks. German and Austro-Hungarian were exhausted. But not so exhausted to allow Romania to waltz across the border and grab territory uncontested.
The Central Powers quickly reacted, beat the Romanian army all the way back to Bucharest, and then converged on the capital. The King of Romania and his court fled the country just before it fell.
Just before surrendering, however, Romania’s Prime Minister Ion Brătianu made a bold decision to seal up the country’s gold reserves. He ordered more than 90 tonnes of gold to be loaded in over 1,700 crates onto seventeen railcars, and had it shipped to the one ally Romania was certain it could trust: Russia.
The arrangement made sense on paper. Tsar Nicholas II was Romania's wartime partner, and an overland route to ship the national gold reserves to Moscow seemed far safer than risking German submarines on the sea route to London.
Fortunately the crates arrived safely; Russian officials locked the gold securely inside the Kremlin and provided a written guarantee that the gold remained Romanian property.
But the Russian Revolution broke out only months later. The Bolsheviks seized power, arrested the Tsar, and eventually murdered him and his family. In January 1918, Leon Trotsky severed ties with Romania and declared its gold "untouchable for the Romanian oligarchy."
It’s been more than a century, and Romania is still asking for its gold back from Russia. The gold is worth ab
ut $12 billion today and has never been returned.
For most of human history, a king kept his gold where he could see it. It sat behind his own walls, in his own keep, guarded by his own men. The idea of loading your treasure onto a ship and sending it to a rival capital for safekeeping would have struck any medieval monarch as total insanity.
The King of France did not store his gold in London. You did not hand a rival your treasury to seize the moment relations soured.
What changed first was London. By the nineteenth century, Britain ruled an empire that spanned the globe. Its navy went unchallenged. And the British pound was redeemable for gold.
The City of London sat at the center of world finance and ran the deepest gold market on earth.
For foreign governments, keeping gold in the Bank of England's vaults was not a surrender but an upgrade. The metal was safer behind Britain's guns than behind its own, and given the advances of British finance, the gold could be sold, lent, or borrowed against in an afternoon.
The gravity of financial power shifted to New York a century later as Nazi forces conquered Europe. Allowing your national gold reserves to be confiscated by Hitler became a much greater risk than shipping everything to America.
So country after country scrambled to move their gold before German tanks crossed the border.
America was the safest vault on earth: a nation with an ocean on either side, an economy the war had only strengthened, and a bright future ahead of it.
After the war, the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement pinned the dollar to gold— and pegged every global currency to the US dollar. And from then on New York (and London to a lesser degree) were the obvious places for foreign governments to hold their gold reserves.
A country could settle international debts without moving a single ounce, just by having a clerk slide its bars from one stack to another within the same vault.
The arrangement held for eighty years because the US remained the most powerful, most trusted government in the world. But now that trust is vanishing quickly.
According to a recent report published by the World Gold Council, the number of foreign central banks storing gold in New York or London slipped 17% and 11% respectively. And that’s just in a single year.
And the number of central banks bringing their gold home (or at least moving it to neutral third-party vaults) nearly tripled. Gold, for the most part, is going home.
They’re also buying more of it, with central bank gold purchases running at roughly double the historic rate for the third year in a row.
To fund those purchases, central banks are selling US Treasuries... or letting them mature without reinvesting.
Over the past year, gold passed both US Treasuries and the euro to become the single largest reserve asset on earth. And for the first time since 1996, central banks now hold more gold than US Treasuries.
Central banks almost never sell gold. On the rare occasion that some country does sell, it’s usually because they’re in a genuine crisis (like Turkey selling gold to defend a collapsing currency).
Or, as was the case with the British government in the late 1990s, they’re the dumbest people alive.
Absent that kind of emergency or stupidity, governments and central banks “hodl” their gold.
Bottom line, these countries are not shipping their gold out of London and New York to sell it. Just the opposite. It is proof they intend to hold the metal for a very long time, and that they are willing to give up using it as a financial instrument.
None of this is about the gold price on any given morning.
Over the last few weeks, gold slipped below $4,000 an ounce for the first time since November.
Since last fall, as retail investors entered the market driving the price of gold sharply higher, we warned that a pullback like this was likely.
But we also said that nothing about the thesis was changing. The US was still spending far beyond its means and weaponizing the dollar. Washington was still dysfunctional— full of AOCs and Elizabeth Warrens. Therefore global central banks were continuing to diversify their reserves.
We’re not fanatical about gold. But it’s clear that the long-term catalysts to drive prices higher are not going away anytime soon.
The world is more fractured than it was even a few years ago, and dollar dominance is slipping.
So what does everyone own instead? China is pushing for international use of its yuan... and you can see a flicker of it in the payments data. But it is not a real alternative.
The one asset every central bank on earth can hold without worrying who controls it is gold. Plus they all have confidence that gold will still have strategic value 5, 10, 20+ years from now.
That’s why these central banks view $4,000 gold as a reasonable entry point to accumulate more, and they likely will not miss the chance to do so.
To your freedom, James Hickman Co-Founder, Schiff Sovereign LLC
P.S. The same opportunity is open to everyone else. As gold sold off, so did shares in the companies that dig it out of the ground. Even at gold's all-time highs, many of these producers traded at low multiples while selling their gold for far more than their projections ever assumed.
Their costs stayed roughly fixed, so margins exploded, and some have started paying dividends or raised the ones they had. At $4,000 gold they are still enormously profitable, yet fickle investors are dumping them as if the gold story is over.
It is not. Nothing has changed about why central banks buy, and so far they have moved only a small share of their reserves into gold.
If you want to learn more about these gold companies, and other real assets we research in our newsletter, Strategic Assets, click here.
Get Ready for “Business Friendly Socialism”
Get Ready for “Business Friendly Socialism”
Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) June 22, 2026
On New Year's Day in the year 1829, a 29-year-old young lady from Washington DC named Peggy Timberlake married John Eaton— a powerful senator from Tennessee. Eaton was also close friends with the incoming president Andrew Jackson.
Peggy, on the other hand, was rumored to be somewhat of a harlot. She was openly flirtatious and allegedly promiscuous, and her wedding to Sen. Eaton came only a few months after the mysterious death of her first husband.
Get Ready for “Business Friendly Socialism”
Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) June 22, 2026
On New Year's Day in the year 1829, a 29-year-old young lady from Washington DC named Peggy Timberlake married John Eaton— a powerful senator from Tennessee. Eaton was also close friends with the incoming president Andrew Jackson.
Peggy, on the other hand, was rumored to be somewhat of a harlot. She was openly flirtatious and allegedly promiscuous, and her wedding to Sen. Eaton came only a few months after the mysterious death of her first husband.
The elite “power wives” of Washington DC considered Peggy scandalous and immoral, and so they simply refused to engage with her. They would not attend any event where Peggy would be present. They would not invite her to their parties. They spoke ill of her behind her back.
So when Andrew Jackson made Sen. Eaton his Secretary of War in March of 1829, the snub against Peggy became a federal problem.
President Jackson, whose own late wife had been savaged by similar gossip during the brutal 1828 campaign, took the shunning of Peggy as a personal insult. And he actually demanded that his cabinet bring their wives into line and accept her.
Jackson’s cabinet could not (or would not) demand this of their wives. And for more than two years, the so-called “Petticoat Affair” consumed federal attention.
It finally ended in the spring of 1831 with something America had never seen: Jackson’s entire cabinet resigned except for the Postmaster General. The Secretaries of State, Treasury, etc. all left. Even Eaton as Secretary of War resigned.
In short, a dispute over whether the power wives of Washington were willing to invite another lady to dinner had resulted in the effective dissolution of the executive branch.
Nearly two centuries later, that remains almost unimaginable. High-level resignation is something the American government simply does not do.
In its entire history exactly one president has resigned— Richard Nixon, in 1974, and only to avoid impeachment.
Only two vice presidents have resigned, including Spiro Agnew in 1973 due to pending criminal charges.
American politicians only give up power under extreme duress— likely a family emergency... or the imminent arrival of a criminal indictment. It is a “from-my-cold-dead-hands” political culture. We even treat a President declining to seek reelection as a major event.
In Britain, by contrast, prime ministers resign all the time. When they lose the confidence of their party, they step down... and the machine produces another.
I used to think that was a genuine strength— that American politics might be healthier if resigning were less taboo.
Keir Starmer is the perfect illustration. By this spring his net approval had collapsed to the lowest rating recorded for any prime minister since Ipsos began measuring in 1977.
Failure didn’t bother him. In fact Starmer’s government kept criminalizing criticism— Britain now jails its own citizens for anti-migrant posts while the actual migrant criminals walk free and receive taxpayer assistance.
Even last month, with dozens in his own party urging him to resign, Starmer remained defiant: "The country expects us to get on with governing. That is what I am doing and what we must do as a cabinet."
What finally forced him out was not voters. Yes, his own party helped push him out after disastrous local elections cost Labour more than a thousand races last month.
But underneath that sat the bond market.
Investors had been dumping British government debt for weeks, and in early May the yield on the 30-year gilt spiked to the highest level in decades.
Bond investors want fiscal restraint. And they had concluded that Starmer would respond to his electoral beating by spending even more money.
So naturally, investors sold their UK government bonds... and the British government’s borrowing costs soared.
This is nothing new; less than four years ago, then Prime Minister Liz Truss resigned after just 44 days because the bond market didn’t like her economic plan. Bond yields surged and the British pound went into free fall.
Calm returned only after Truss resigned in disgrace.
The sad irony is that Starmer's likely successor is worse. Andy Burnham— the longtime mayor of Greater Manchester— campaigns on what he calls "business friendly socialism", which makes as much sense as “vegan wolf”.
He also wants more borrowing, higher taxes, and bringing utilities and "public essentials" back under state control.
Bizarrely, Burnham has complained that Britain is "in hock to the bond markets," as though the people lending to the government should simply hand over their capital with no questions asked.
(Given Mr. Burnham’s penchant for nationalization, he may in fact get his way. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more wealth tax proposals in the UK.)
The actual solution is embarrassingly simple. You are only “in hock to the bond market” if you borrow. Balance the budget, live within your means, and the bond market gets no vote at all.
Yet basic fiscal responsibility is an impossible idea— and it tells you everything about the modern Western politician. This most certainly will not improve under a "business friendly" socialist.
Ultimately, the last institution still imposing any discipline on government is not the voter— it's the creditor. And the United States, with its own debt arithmetic getting worse every year, is approaching that the same line.
One day the bond market will start calling the shots in Washington too, voters' wishes be damned, and it will do it through higher yields and a weaker dollar.
To your freedom, James Hickman Co-Founder, Schiff Sovereign LLC
P.S. In the US, the bond market is already voting, with higher yields and a weaker dollar. And the bill lands on anyone holding those dollars.
The sensible hedge is to own real assets no government can print.
Real assets are tangible things with intrinsic worth— gold and silver, energy, productive land, and the companies that own them— and because no central bank can conjure them into existence, they hold their purchasing power while paper currencies lose theirs.
That's what Schiff Sovereign's investment research newsletter, Strategic Assets, is built to find: companies trading at low multiples of current free cash flow, carrying little or no debt, with strong earnings and a catalyst the market hasn't priced yet.
You Weren't Crazy 17 Years Ago. You Were Early
You Weren't Crazy 17 Years Ago. You Were Early
Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) June 19, 2026
20 years ago, if you recognized how deep America's problems were, it was easy to feel like you were the crazy one.
Banks were handing out mortgages to people who plainly couldn't afford them. Wall Street bundled those mortgages by the millions and sold them on as some of the safest investments around. And the whole structure rested on the assumption that home prices would never fall, so a bank could simply sell the home for more in case of a default.
You Weren't Crazy 17 Years Ago. You Were Early
Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) June 19, 2026
20 years ago, if you recognized how deep America's problems were, it was easy to feel like you were the crazy one.
Banks were handing out mortgages to people who plainly couldn't afford them. Wall Street bundled those mortgages by the millions and sold them on as some of the safest investments around. And the whole structure rested on the assumption that home prices would never fall, so a bank could simply sell the home for more in case of a default.
Chief among the “experts” selling this fiction was Ben Bernanke, then chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, who said in 2005, "We've never had a decline in house prices on a nationwide basis."
In March 2007, with subprime loans already going bad, Bernanke, by then Fed Chairman, told Congress the damage "seems likely to be contained."
That May he said he didn't expect "significant spillovers… to the rest of the economy."
As late as July 2008, weeks before the two mortgage giants collapsed into government hands, he called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac adequately capitalized and in no danger of failing.
Then on September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed the largest bankruptcy in US history, and the structure came down. Prices fell, those homes were suddenly worth less than the loans against them, and the safest investments around turned toxic.
By 2009, Washington was spending, bailing out, and printing at record scale, and the obvious question was how long it could possibly go on.
That was the world the very first Sovereign Man letter dropped into, in June 2009, exactly 17 years ago.
We wrote about a real man named William "Bud" Post who had gone flat broke, on food stamps, with lawsuits, jail time, and bankruptcy behind him. What made it strange was that in 1988 he'd won $16.2 million in the Pennsylvania lottery.
Bud, we wrote, is the United States of America.
America hit its own lottery after World War II, coming out the only major economy left standing, the dollar enthroned as the world's reserve currency. And like Bud, it spent the next several decades certain the money would never run out.
LBJ got bogged down in Vietnam while building the Great Society. George W. Bush entered two wars and told Americans to go shopping, and Obama, fresh off the bailouts, was promising universal healthcare.
It was the steady avoidance of every hard choice. We called it winner's syndrome: "we've been winners for so long we don't know any other reality."
In 2009, that was an unpopular thing to say.
The consensus treated the crisis as a stumble the economy would walk off, and calling America structurally broke got you labeled a crank.
We didn't say it was a death sentence, though. We argued the opposite, that clear thinking could still save America: take the hit, let failing businesses fail, restructure, and come out stronger.
"Unfortunately," we wrote, "there are no near-term indications of rationality in Washington."
17 years later, that is more true than ever. If anything, Washington has gone backwards.
For example, Social Security's own trustees now project the main retirement trust fund runs dry in 2032, after which scheduled benefits get cut by roughly 22% automatically.
That’s not some distant future where maybe at some point someone will have to start thinking about a solution. It is 6 years away.
And the fixes are no secret; the trustees themselves lay out the options, from higher payroll taxes to benefit cuts.
But they've ignored it for so long that simply hearing a few members of Congress acknowledge the scale of the problem now feels like progress, even though acknowledging it is a long way from fixing it.
We were early; the reckoning we kept warning about has taken longer to arrive than we thought.
But early isn't wrong: everything that first letter described is more true today than it was in 2009. Washington could still choose to fix it, exactly as it could have back then. It simply has to want to, and seventeen years of evidence says it doesn't.
Your Plan B, fortunately, doesn't require Congress to find its courage.
And that was the entire reason this company was founded.
That was the promise at the end of that first letter: while the country may be on a slide, clear thinking could still save you, "and that's where we come in."
That's still exactly what we do.
Sovereign Man grew into Schiff Sovereign, and one daily letter became a full body of research.
Every month, our co-founder James Hickman gives his in-depth view of the world in the Macro Brief, mapping where the debt, the dollar, and global events are heading. He points to specific real assets that can protect your savings; the gold, energy, and resource businesses that hold their value as the dollar slips.
It’s available to members of Premium
Members of our flagship membership, Plan B Confidential, get even more.
This is the original idea the first letter was built on: don't put all your eggs in one basket, and don't hand one government the keys to your entire life. Plan B Confidential is the playbook for second citizenship so you always have another way out, foreign residency so you always have another place to live, offshore banking so your savings aren't trapped in one banking system, and the legal tax strategy that lets you keep as much of your money as possible.
It's built on boots-on-the-ground research across more than 120 countries.
And because so much of the threat from a bankrupt government printing money and draining the value of your savings is financial, we've zeroed in on real assets through our investment research newsletter, Strategic Assets.
A real asset is something with worth of its own, the kind of thing people need no matter what the dollar is doing: gold as a store of value, energy, the metals that build everything. A government can print money by the trillion, but it can't print an ounce of gold or a barrel of oil, so real assets tend to hold their value, and often climb, exactly when paper money is falling apart.
And for readers who want it all, we offer Total Access.
Members get everything we publish, from the macro analysis to the investment research, and all the international strategies in between.
But Total Access members also get the community: other members who they meet at in-person events, conferences, dinners, and most recently, small group boots-on-the-ground trips around the world.
From a superyacht along the Croatian coast to a trek through the Patagonian Andes, members explore the world together, and finally find their tribe in each other.
That's the part we could never have planned 17 years ago.
Back then, we wrote to a handful of people willing to question what everyone else accepted as obvious. You were one of them, or you found your way here since, because you see the world through that same lens.
That's what built this. Not us. You.
Here's to the next chapter.
The Schiff Sovereign Team
Congress Passed 133 Broadband Programs. Its Big Idea Is A 134th
Congress Passed 133 Broadband Programs. Its Big Idea Is A 134th
Notes from the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) June 15, 2026
There are things that a free market will never do, and it’s usually for very good reasons. Running fiber-optic cable down a twelve-mile dirt road costs a fortune, and the handful of households scattered along that road will never pay enough in monthly bills to justify the cost of laying the cable.
That’s why private companies don't bother laying fiber in rural areas: the math doesn't work.
Congress Passed 133 Broadband Programs. Its Big Idea Is A 134th
Notes from the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) June 15, 2026
There are things that a free market will never do, and it’s usually for very good reasons. Running fiber-optic cable down a twelve-mile dirt road costs a fortune, and the handful of households scattered along that road will never pay enough in monthly bills to justify the cost of laying the cable.
That’s why private companies don't bother laying fiber in rural areas: the math doesn't work.
But living out in the country is a choice— one that plenty of people gladly make. Some people value the space, the quiet, and the empty horizon far more than same-day Amazon delivery or 1 gigabit Internet.
And most people typically know about these trade-offs before they move out to the country. Urban and suburban conveniences are just that— conveniences. They are not inalienable “rights”. No one is entitled to fast internet.
Yet Congress has decided at least 133 times that fast Internet, is, in fact, a right. And one that they have decided to provide with your money.
Its biggest program is the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program, known as BEAD. It was created in 2021 as part of Joe Biden’s staggering infrastructure bill, and over $42 billion was allocated to wire up rural America.
Five years later it has connected almost nobody. The first BEAD-funded household in the entire country came online only this spring— a single home near Ogallala, Nebraska, hooked up in May 2026. About a hundred more followed in rural Louisiana. That was the triumphant achievement of five years and ridiculous money spent: a couple hundred connected homes.
BEAD is far from alone. In 2023, the Government Accountability Office— Congress's own watchdog— set out to count the federal government's broadband programs and found more than 133 of them, scattered across 15 separate agencies.
These programs are largely similar yet have no coordinated plan to prevent overlap, or wiring the same stretch of dirt twice.
The GAO told them to sort it out. When it checked back in 2025, most of the work hadn't been touched.
So what do you do about 133 overlapping programs and a flagship that spent billions to connect a couple hundred homes?
If you’re the United States Congress, you add a 134th broadband program!
On June 3, the House Rules Committee advanced next year's Agriculture spending bill with fresh loans and grants for the US Department of Agriculture's ReConnect program— the 134th rural broadband fund, stacked on the $42 billion one that barely works and the 133 others nobody can keep track of.
A private company that spends so much money to connect a couple hundred homes would be bankrupt, and its executives likely facing criminal charges. A federal agency that does it gets a sequel.
What makes it worse is that the problem was already solved by the free market.
Anyone at the end of a dirt road can order a Starlink dish online and have high-speed internet running within about a week— no federal fiber, no years-long wait, no act of Congress.
For that $42 billion price tag, the US taxpayer could have bought a Starlink dish for every one of the top-end estimate of 12 million unserved households in America AND prepaid their internet service for the next five years.
So where did that money go?
It is egregious. The government borrows $2 trillion a year to do this sort of garbage, and acts like a single dollar cut from the budget would throw single mothers out on the streets. They literally wail that “people will die”.
And half the country thinks the answer is to collect more in taxes!
Keep in mind, this $42 billion is part of the legitimate spending — not the $600 billion a year the Treasury Secretary estimates is lost to outright fraud, the $186 billion in improper payments the government admits to, or the hundreds of billions in legal graft on top.
All that borrowing and waste gets paid for one way or another— a weaker dollar, higher taxes, more inflation.
You can’t change any of that. But just like those people without internet on a dead-end road, you do have a choice.
That choice is a Plan B.
The tools to route around Congress already exist.
Owning real assets— gold, silver, energy, productive technology, and the well-managed businesses that produce them— protects your purchasing power when the government reaches for the printing press.
Moving some savings into stronger jurisdictions, establishing a second residency, and taking every legal step to cut your tax bill all mean that no single government's incompetence has total claim over your life.
None of it requires predicting the next crisis. It benefits you, and gives you options, no matter what happens next.
To your freedom, James Hickman Co-Founder, Schiff Sovereign LLC
Congress passed 133 broadband programs. Its Big Idea Is a 134th. | Schiff Sovereign
Social Security Is Officially Six Years Away From Running Out Of Money
Social Security Is Officially Six Years Away From Running Out Of Money
Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man June 11, 2026
Every spring, the US government performs one of its rare acts of radical honesty: the Social Security Board of Trustees publishes an annual report stating, in plain language, exactly when the program will run out of money.
It arrives without a press conference and with barely any news coverage — just a few hundred pages of actuarial tables quietly uploaded to a government website.
Social Security Is Officially Six Years Away From Running Out Of Money
Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man June 11, 2026
Every spring, the US government performs one of its rare acts of radical honesty: the Social Security Board of Trustees publishes an annual report stating, in plain language, exactly when the program will run out of money.
It arrives without a press conference and with barely any news coverage — just a few hundred pages of actuarial tables quietly uploaded to a government website.
The 2026 edition came out on Tuesday; it is the 86th annual report. And its headline finding is that Social Security's main retirement trust fund — formally Old-Age and Survivors Insurance, or OASI — is now projected to run out of money in 2032. That's one year earlier than last year's projection.
In other words, the fund that pays benefits to America's retirees is six years away from running dry.
Last year the program collected $1.449 trillion, mostly from payroll taxes, and spent $1.609 trillion.
That $160 billion shortfall was covered by draining the trust fund, whose reserves fell from $2.72 trillion to $2.56 trillion over the course of the year. The program's costs have exceeded its non-interest income every single year since 2010.
And when it runs dry in six years, they estimate that payroll taxes will cover 78% of scheduled benefits. So the tens of millions of retirees who depend on the program would face an automatic 22% benefit cut on day one.
And it deteriorates from there.
Here's the part that really boggles the mind: the solutions are already published. The report itself spells them out — raise the payroll tax from 12.40% to 16.65%, or cut everyone's benefits by 25.2%, or cut benefits 30.3% for future retirees only. Social Security's own actuaries even maintain an entire catalog of scored reform options, with the financial impact of each one calculated for Congress's convenience.
The Trustees practically beg lawmakers to act "sooner rather than later," because every year of delay makes the eventual fix more painful.
And yet there is no serious legislation pending, no emergency commission, not even a hearing on the calendar. The date just keeps creeping closer.
What actually happens when the fund hits zero? It affects far more than retirees.
Option A is that Congress does nothing and retirees absorb a 22% cut on day one. That would be political suicide, which makes it an unlikely outcome.
Option B is that the government borrows the difference — hundreds of billions of dollars per year, on top of roughly $2 trillion annual deficits and a national debt north of $50 trillion by then.
And they'd be borrowing at a time when foreign central banks have already been reducing their Treasury purchases. Coaxing the market into absorbing that much new debt means paying higher yields, and higher Treasury yields ripple into everything: mortgage rates, auto loans, business credit.
Option C is that the Federal Reserve steps in and effectively prints the money. We all saw how that works during the pandemic, when the Fed created roughly $5 trillion out of thin air and the result was 9% inflation.
Then there's the option that may be the most realistic of all: Congress waits until the fund is nearly dead and then rams through a major payroll tax increase. The report prices out procrastination, too — deferring action pushes the required payroll tax to 17.30%, nearly five percentage points above today's rate, carved out of every paycheck in America. And the longer they wait, the bigger that bite gets.
And it doesn’t really matter how young you are, or if you’re not depending on Social Security for retirement.
If retirees take the cut, that 22% reduction in purchasing power for 70 million Americans ripples through the economy.
Or if interest rates increase to coax more borrowing, everyone pays higher interest rates.
Or if the Fed prints, everyone pays through inflation.
Most likely it will be some combination of all three.
Which is exactly why it makes sense to have a Plan B — not a bunker in the woods, just rational steps to ensure your retirement doesn't depend on the US Congress finding its courage.
That can mean maximizing tax-advantaged retirement structures, so that you're building your own income stream instead of relying on a government IOU.
It can mean establishing legal residency in a country where the cost of living is a fraction of what it is in the US, and where even a reduced benefit check funds a comfortable retirement.
And because the most likely "solutions" all point toward higher rates and higher inflation, it means owning real assets — gold, productive businesses, energy — that hold their value when the government reaches for the printing press.
None of this requires predicting exactly which option Washington chooses, because a sensible Plan B works under all of them.
The point is to put it in place now, calmly and on your own terms — so that when 2032 arrives, you're not scrambling in a crisis like Congress.
To your freedom, James Hickman Co-Founder, Schiff Sovereign LLC
When Leaving Your Home State Becomes a Duty
When Leaving Your Home State Becomes a Duty
Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) June 9, 2026
In the year 1863, at the height of the Civil War in the United States that must have seemed at the time like an irrecoverable national death, a former bookkeeper turned entrepreneur built an oil refinery in Cleveland’s up-and-coming industrial area in order to capitalize on the market for kerosene.
His name was John Rockefeller. And within twenty years he would control close to 90% of the oil in America. And his Standard Oil would become the largest and most powerful company ever seen.
When Leaving Your Home State Becomes a Duty
Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) June 9, 2026
In the year 1863, at the height of the Civil War in the United States that must have seemed at the time like an irrecoverable national death, a former bookkeeper turned entrepreneur built an oil refinery in Cleveland’s up-and-coming industrial area in order to capitalize on the market for kerosene.
His name was John Rockefeller. And within twenty years he would control close to 90% of the oil in America. And his Standard Oil would become the largest and most powerful company ever seen.
The trouble was holding it together. Standard Oil was comprised of a complex network of subsidiaries, and you practically had to be an engineer just to understand the structure.
The problem was that, in most states, a corporation wasn't even allowed to own another corporation.
That restriction sounds strange today, but back then the corporation was still a young, distrusted creature of the state, chartered to do one thing— for example, run a railroad or a bank— with privileges no ordinary person enjoyed.
Industrialization was minting a handful of staggeringly rich men— the titans a later generation would call “robber barons”— and the public watched them swallow up entire industries. People feared that letting one corporation own another corporation would stack company on company until the combination was beyond the reach of any single state.
So Rockefeller ran his empire through a workaround.
On January 2, 1882, he and eight fellow “trustees” signed the agreement creating the Standard Oil Trust, a small group of men who held the stock of some forty companies— refiners, pipelines, and distributors— and ran the whole thing as a single entity.
Great idea, but it was fragile. The trust had no real legal home, and the states Standard Oil operated in were beginning to notice.
In 1892, Ohio's attorney general hauled the company before the state Supreme Court and successfully argued his case; the court agreed, and ruled that Standard Oil had no right to hand itself over to out-of-state trustees. Consequently, Rockefeller had to cut all ties with the trust. And it appeared on paper that the whole arrangement was broken up.
Rockefeller went shopping to find a friendly state government that would let him keep control. And back in the late 1800s, there was exactly one place to do that.
New Jersey, hungry for revenue, rewrote its corporation law in 1888 and 1889 to let state-chartered companies own as many subsidiary companies as they wanted.
Under this new New Jersey law, for the first time a giant could put its whole empire under one legal roof— for a modest fee to the state.
It was purpose-built for the kind of company Rockefeller had. So in 1899, he reincorporated the entire empire as the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey: a single holding company that owned everything.
Initially, other states felt betrayed.
In 1905 the muckraker Lincoln Steffens branded New Jersey a "Traitor State" for getting rich by selling friendly charters to the monopolies while other states were trying to rein in those same monopolies.
New Jersey had made itself the best place in America to be a big, successful company, and it was eating everyone else's lunch. That is, until New Jersey's own governor, Woodrow Wilson, ruined it. In 1913, in his final weeks as governor before leaving for the White House, he pushed through seven antitrust laws aimed at the very corporations the state had courted for a generation.
(Of course Wilson was just warming up. That same year he'd help ruin the whole country with the Federal Reserve and the federal income tax.)
Companies shopping for a friendly charter then shifted to Delaware, which had quietly copied New Jersey's law in 1899. New Jersey repealed Wilson’s anti-trust laws within a few years, but by then it was too late; Delaware had become the gold standard.
(Now Delaware has screwed it up and companies are redomiciling in Texas and Wyoming.)
Over the next century New Jersey became one of the most heavily taxed and regulated states in the country, and today it carries the highest corporate tax rate in the nation.
Yet Rockefeller's old empire kept its New Jersey home through it all.
When the Supreme Court broke Standard Oil into 34 companies in 1911, the largest piece was Standard Oil of New Jersey— which became Exxon, then ExxonMobil. And they remaind incorporated in New Jersey for 127 years.
Until now.
Just a few weeks ago, ExxonMobil shareholders voted 71% to move the company's legal home from New Jersey to Texas.
Perhaps the final straw came in 2022, when New Jersey's attorney general sued the company, along with the other oil majors, for allegedly “deceiving” the public about climate change.
Apparently it’s a private company’s responsibility to preach the Green Gospel to the world. Courts disagreed, and a judge threw out the lawsuit in 2025.
But the message was unmistakable: the companies that produce the energy powering modern life were no longer welcome in New Jersey.
New Jersey was joining a pile-on that had been building for years. In 2021, a tiny activist fund called Engine No. 1, holding a tiny amount of Exxon's stock, won three seats on its board. That hedge fund’s big idea was that the largest oil company on earth should pump less oil.
But Exxon refused to be run by people who wanted it to shrink. It beat the activists back— and its shareholders finished the job, voting the company out of New Jersey for good.
Granted, the move was almost ceremonial.
A company's legal home and its actual headquarters aren't the same thing: Exxon has been headquartered in Texas since 1989, while only its legal state of incorporation remained in New Jersey.
The vote didn't move a single desk. It just made the paperwork match a reality that had been true for decades— and fully aligned the company with a state that treats a profitable energy producer as a value creator, not a defendant.
And that is actually the point.
Exxon didn't bolt in a panic. It had watched New Jersey turn hostile for years. Slowly, over time, it weighed its options and prepared. The move wasn't impulsive— it was calculated long in advance.
This is not disloyalty, any more than New Jersey was a "traitor" for once being the friendliest place in America to do business.
Both were rational moves dressed up as betrayal (just as ExxonMobil is now being blasted for leaving New Jersey). You cannot expect to keep a company, or a person, or their capital, in a place that punishes them for succeeding.
In fact, for Exxon it was more than rational; it was a fiduciary duty. A board is legally bound to do what's best for its shareholders.
And as a father, I’d say a man owes his family the same kind of obligation to prepare— to study the world honestly and rationally, to line up options early, and to keep them ready, so that if the day ever comes, the groundwork is already done.
That is what having a Plan B actually means.
To your freedom, James Hickman Co-Founder, Schiff Sovereign LLC
It Was a Win/Win Deal So of Course They Rejected It
It Was a Win/Win Deal So of Course They Rejected It
Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) June 8, 2026
On November 6, 1906, an American entrepreneur named Augustus E. Staley incorporated his cornstarch manufacturing business in Decatur, Illinois— the first city that Abraham Lincoln came to when he first moved to Illinois at the young age of 21. Staley’s A.E. Staley Manufacturing Company made cornstarch... which is hardly sexy by modern business standards. But over time his company was a huge success and grew it into a major Midwest food processor.
It Was a Win/Win Deal So of Course They Rejected It
Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) June 8, 2026
On November 6, 1906, an American entrepreneur named Augustus E. Staley incorporated his cornstarch manufacturing business in Decatur, Illinois— the first city that Abraham Lincoln came to when he first moved to Illinois at the young age of 21. Staley’s A.E. Staley Manufacturing Company made cornstarch... which is hardly sexy by modern business standards. But over time his company was a huge success and grew it into a major Midwest food processor.
Like a lot of companies back in that day, Staley ran a "Fellowship Club" for his workers. And in the year 1919, some of the members of that club formed an intramural sports team to play what was then a strange and relatively new game called gridiron football.
The game was starting to become a lot more popular. And both the sport, and the team, took off.
By 1920 the Decatur Staleys had already won a state championship and had become a charter member of the brand new league that would become the National Football League. Shortly after the team, now professional, moved to the city of Chicago and renamed itself to da Bears.
What started off as a little intramural team survived everything the twentieth century threw at it: the Great Depression, World War II, brutal riots, political violence, domestic terrorism, and the gangland chaos of Al Capone's Chicago.
For more than a century, though, the Bears stayed true to the city of Chicago. But everyone has a breaking point, even the Chicago Bears.
Late last week, the Bears' board of directors voted to advance a stadium development project across the border in Hammond, Indiana... signaling what could very well be their permanent departure from Chicago.
For more than fifty years, the Bears have leased Soldier Field from the city of Chicago. Five years ago, they decided to build their own stadium, paying $197 million for a nearby 326-acre parcel.
Da Bears further earmarked $2 billion of private capital to build a stadium on that site.
But the organization is not stupid. They know Illinois is broke. The state's pension system is $143 billion in the hole (the worst in America), and Chicago faces a $1.2 billion annual shortfall.
So before sinking billions into the ground, the team wanted assurances that politicians wouldn't tax the new stadium to death.
They asked for reasonable concessions— the sort of deal that any large business negotiates with cities and states before making major investments.
This is totally normal. Cities routinely grant some property-tax certainty or minor tax breaks, and in exchange they get billions in private investment, jobs, tourism, and a new tax base. Everyone comes out ahead.
This, after all, is the entire basis of capitalism: You win AND I win.
The medieval world was a zero-sum game, where one side got richer only by taking from another; capitalism's radical idea is that the pie itself can grow, so everyone can win if they work together towards a common goal.
Sadly, that remains a foreign concept on the political left.
The tax negotiation required Illinois lawmakers’ approval, and the legislature had five years to get it done. Yet they never did. After this spring’s legislative session ended last week without the Bear’s tax deal getting done, the team finally made the decision to move on.
It’s just a short drive across the border to Indiana. But the business environment is completely different. Indiana runs a budget surplus, sits on $2.5 billion in reserves, and carries a coveted AAA rating.
And it only took Indiana’s legislature a couple of months to pass a variety of incentives— worth up to $1 billion. Illinois is squeezing the team. Indiana is rolling out the red carpet.
It’s not hard to understand why: billions in private construction, thousands of jobs, and lots of new tourism dollars.
Illinois could have had that. But the Left simply does not want to do win/win deals.
Governor JB Pritzker, himself a billionaire heir to the Hyatt Hotel fortune, said he "wasn't willing to give up billions of dollars of taxpayer money in order to give it to a billionaire-owned family, or team."
Think about that. They’d rather lose the team— lose the tax base, lose prosperity, make the city worse off— than make a single concession to the Bears, simply because the owner is a billionaire.
This is what I call Billionaire Derangement Syndrome.
It was the same thing in 2019 when New York progressives (led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) chased Jeff Bezos out of town. Amazon was considering New York City for its “HQ2” location, bringing billions in investment and tens of thousands of highly paid jobs.
But AOC wasn’t having any of that; Bezos, one of the world’s richest men, would have benefited from the deal, so AOC killed it... then took a victory lap to celebrate hollowing out the city’s tax base.
In the end, Bezos and Amazon did just fine. New York City has suffered. The Bears will be just fine. Chicago will suffer.
The Left only knows chaos and destruction. And their endless affliction with Billionaire Derangement Syndrome is one of the great risks to American prosperity.
There was once a time in America when successful people were admired as proof that anyone willing to build something could rise.
Now, across much of the Left, “the rich” are enemies of the state to be taxed into the ground, driven out town, or, as the activists chant, imprisoned or even ‘eaten’.
This derangement drives away the very people and capital that create prosperity and pay for everything that politicians claim to care about.
When the place you live starts treating productive people and their money as enemies to punish, rather than partners to welcome, the rational move is to think about your own Plan B.
To your freedom, James Hickman Co-Founder, Schiff Sovereign
P.S. Our flagship research service, Schiff Sovereign Plan B Confidential, is built for the practical, legal steps to diversify across borders before you ever need them. Inside, we cover second residencies and citizenships, international banking, legal tax reduction, and real-asset strategies — all drawn from boots-on-the-ground intelligence in more than 120 countries. Because the time to give yourself options is while you still have them.
Europe Just Bragged About Losing to Gold
Europe Just Bragged About Losing to Gold
Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) June 4, 2026
When the euro launched on January 1, 1999, it was sold as the future. It would be a single currency to knit Europe together — to wipe out the exchange-rate friction between member states, complete the continent's single market, and bind a dozen squabbling nations into one economic bloc with one money.
And in the grander ambitions of its architects, it was meant to do something more: to grow up into a true global currency, the first serious rival the US dollar had faced since World War II.
Europe Just Bragged About Losing to Gold
Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) June 4, 2026
When the euro launched on January 1, 1999, it was sold as the future. It would be a single currency to knit Europe together — to wipe out the exchange-rate friction between member states, complete the continent's single market, and bind a dozen squabbling nations into one economic bloc with one money.
And in the grander ambitions of its architects, it was meant to do something more: to grow up into a true global currency, the first serious rival the US dollar had faced since World War II.
Last week, the European Central Bank published its 2025 report card, with ECB President Christine Lagarde celebrating “an opening for the euro to enhance its global appeal.”
The report bragged that the euro remains the second most used currency in the world, as well as the second most held in reserve, behind only the dollar.
The key word is “currency.”
Because in reality, 2025 was the year that gold took the top spot, making up 27% of global reserves held by governments and central banks. That pushed US Treasuries into second place with 22%, and the euro into third, making up 15% of global reserves.
A metal that pays no interest and earns no yield is now the biggest slice of global reserves, up from just 20% a year earlier.
The world is, in fact, trying to diversify away from the dollar. Central banks have spent years quietly trimming their dollar exposure, looking for somewhere safer to park their national savings.
But they are not choosing euros.
Then why, the ECB may counter, was 2025 a record year for international borrowing in euros?
Because there is more debt in everything than ever — global debt keeps smashing new highs, so a record pile of euro IOUs is less an achievement than a symptom of the times.
But to give credit where it's due, the euro is genuinely in first place in one market, according to Lagarde: "The euro became the leading currency in the green and sustainable international bond market."
That's the debt Europe sells to bankroll the very net-zero crusade that gutted its own economy. So the euro's crowning achievement of 2025 was becoming the world champion at borrowing money to make itself poorer.
If you ever needed one sentence to explain why nobody wants this currency, there it is.
Because leading the world in the things that make you poorer is the entire European model. Across the continent, governments spent two decades waging war on their own cheap energy in the name of net zero — turning their backs on nuclear power that supplied a third of Europe's electricity in 1990 and barely 15% today.
They saddled themselves with some of the highest power prices in the developed world and watched their industry pack up and leave. They threw open their borders, then aimed their police and courts at the citizens who objected.
The result is a continent so hollowed out that Mississippi, the poorest state in America, now produces more wealth per person than France or Italy.
But sure, this is the euro’s moment...
Meanwhile, central banks added roughly 850 tonnes of physical gold in 2025, a slight step down from the record-shattering pace of the prior two years, but bought at the highest prices in human history.
Poland led the gold-buying pack last year, followed by China, Turkey, and India.
But for a stretch of 2025, the single biggest gold buyer on the planet wasn't a country at all — it was Tether, the company behind the world's biggest dollar-backed stablecoin.
In the third quarter alone it bought more gold than any central bank on earth, and by the end of January it was sitting on roughly 148 tonnes — nearly 4.8 million ounces, worth about $22 billion — enough to rank among the top 30 gold holders in the world, ahead of the likes of Australia and South Korea.
This is exactly why the gold story is far from over.
The extra gold central banks have bought since 2022 laid the foundation for a price that has nearly tripled since — yet even that represents only a modest reallocation out of US dollars.
So what happens when they move even another 5% of their $10 trillion in reserves into gold?
With no single currency able to replace the dollar, and the reasons to diversify only growing, gold looks set to keep climbing as the world's largest reserve asset.
To your freedom, James Hickman Co-Founder, Schiff Sovereign LLC
P.S. Everyone from central banks to a stablecoin giant is racing into gold — which is why it's trading near record highs. We think owning the companies that produce it beats buying bullion at the top.
That's the whole idea behind Strategic Assets, Schiff Sovereign's monthly investment research. We hunt for profitable real-asset businesses with clean balance sheets, real catalysts, and a low multiple of free cash flow.
And it's working. We've seen it multiply the value of several precious metals companies, with others still in the buy range today. The same setup is now lining up well beyond the metals — in energy and other real assets — as nations around the world scramble to secure the critical resources a fragmenting world runs on.
The Funky Math Behind How The US Economy Could Double In Size. Overnight
The Funky Math Behind How The US Economy Could Double In Size. Overnight
Notes From the Field B James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) June 2, 2026
It was September 2006— roughly two years before the 2008 financial crisis annihilated much of the global economy. But Greece was already in deep trouble. Unemployment was hovering around 9%. Youth unemployment was a staggering 25%. And government finances were in the toilet, with official debt-to-GDP at 100% and annual budget deficits at nearly 8% of GDP.
The deficit issue was especially troubling; as part of the Eurozone, Greece was legally obliged to keep its annual budget deficit below 3% of GDP. But the government was simply incapable of doing so.
The Funky Math Behind How The US Economy Could Double In Size. Overnight
Notes From the Field B James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) June 2, 2026
It was September 2006— roughly two years before the 2008 financial crisis annihilated much of the global economy. But Greece was already in deep trouble. Unemployment was hovering around 9%. Youth unemployment was a staggering 25%. And government finances were in the toilet, with official debt-to-GDP at 100% and annual budget deficits at nearly 8% of GDP.
The deficit issue was especially troubling; as part of the Eurozone, Greece was legally obliged to keep its annual budget deficit below 3% of GDP. But the government was simply incapable of doing so.
Yet if they didn’t significantly reduce their deficit-to-GDP ratio, Greek politicians faced the prospect of EU bureaucrats from Brussels taking charge of the government and imposing austerity.
So, rather than cut spending and reduce the deficit, the Greeks cooked up a creative way to magically increase their GDP—overnight.
And on September 26, 2006, the Greek National Statistical Service announced they were changing the way they were calculating GDP; among other things, the Greek government would include “illegal activities like drug trafficking and prostitution” in their GDP estimates.
Laughter and facepalming ensued immediately around the world as global economists collectively groaned at the Greek government’s desperation.
And yet, they still went through with it: poof. Overnight, Greece’s GDP magically grew by 25% because of the change in their calculation.
Frankly this idea is not uncommon in economics; plenty of countries have seen overnight surges in their GDP simply by changing the way they count economic activity.
Italy famously increased its GDP by nearly 20% overnight back in 1987 when they started including estimates of their shadow economy in the GDP numbers.
Nigeria ‘rebased’ its economy in 2014, nearly DOUBLING its GDP. One day it was a $270 billion economy, and literally the next day it was a $510 billion economy.
Ghana did the same in 2010, increasing its GDP by 60%.
But the world record goes to west Africa’s Guinea-Bissau, which, in 2005, increased GDP by a whopping 142%. Overnight.
Now, sometimes these updates aren’t completely ludicrous. Econometrics is an imprecise field that often relies on outdated modes of information gathering.
More importantly, statistical agencies over-concentrate their efforts collecting data on has-been industries while ignoring ‘new economy’ sectors. And this can seriously distort the picture.
That’s why, even in the United States, government agencies occasionally make changes to their econometric methods. Measuring an economy as dynamic as America’s absolutely has to change from time to time. And they have.
In 1999, for example, the Bureau of Economic Analysis began classifying software as a long-term asset (rather than an expense), immediately adding about 0.4% to the prior year’s GDP growth.
In 2013 the same agency went even further and began counting R&D expenses, artistic content, and more in GDP calculations. This change added $560 billion to the US economy.
To be fair, these were not political mandates or desperation moves. Instead, they were necessary adjustments to reflect changes that had taken place in the US economy; it makes sense to include R&D in GDP calculations when so much of the economy is R&D.
Typically, these adjustments to US methodologies take place every few years. And, as of yet, the US government has NOT yet updated its measurements to include AI.
And this is what may ultimately lead to a Greek, Ghana, or even Guinea-Bissau boost to GDP.
Economic activity from AI is extremely difficult to measure. Sure, there are sales of Nvidia GPUs and data center spending.
But think about all of the things that people are doing with AI—things which have economic value, but the government has no credible way to count.
Here’s an easy example: every time I’m at the grocery store, I browse the meager selection of children’s books for my kids. I almost never buy anything, though, because most of them are garbage… so the resulting economic activity is very low.
Lately I’ve been using AI to create my own books for the kids—which they seem to be enjoying very much. But since no dollars actually changed hands (i.e. I make the books myself), there is no economic activity recorded in this case either.
This is a critical point to understand, so I’ll say it again: in both situations, i.e. me NOT buying a book at the store, versus me creating one with AI, no recorded economic activity took place.
And yet, when I make my own books, something of economic value IS being created. I value them. My kids value them. The books have some value, hence value is being created.
I’m just one guy. Hundreds of millions of people are doing the same thing. And none of that value is being recorded, i.e. none of it is showing up in the GDP numbers.
It turns out the US government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis is already considering ways to incorporate AI into the GDP numbers.
And frankly that impact could be dramatic… for a couple of reasons.
First, because the impact of AI really IS dramatic. And growing. But second—because the US government REALLY needs to cut its deficit-to-GDP and debt-to-GDP ratios.
And since, like Greece, they seem to have no interest in actually cutting spending and reducing the debt, they’ll use AI as a way to suddenly boost GDP.
So don’t be surprised if we wake up one day and are told that the US economy is now $50 trillion because of AI… and hence America’s debt-to-GDP level immediately falls to 80%.
I suppose counting the economic value of cat memes and unicorn stories is better than drug traffickers and prostitutes. And it would be an interesting way for the US government to dramatically improve its fiscal condition overnight.
To your freedom, James Hickman Co-Founder, Schiff Sovereign LLC