America Keeps Threatening the Lenders It Can't Afford to Lose

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) September 24, 2026

Late last week, Congress and the White House established a new law authorizing the President to impose tariffs of up to 100% on any country that ranks among the five biggest buyers of Russian oil or gas.

This law had broad, bi-partisan support and passed by a whopping 86-11 margin in the otherwise deadlocked Senate, and 262-159 in the House of Representatives.

"Chuck The Debt In The Fire" Is Officially A Real Solution

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man) September 9, 2026

It's so simple, how could no one have thought of this before?  The man currently polling in second place to become the next President of France has put forward an ingenious solution to tackling France's national debt, currently standing at around 117% of the country's GDP.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon says, "All we have to do is take the 18% held by the Bank of France and chuck it in the fire."

Doing The Math: Interest Expense Is Going To $2 Trillion Annually

Notes From the Field By James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man)   September 17, 2026

It was January 2000. AOL had just announced it was buying Time Warner in what was then the biggest merger in history. Fourteen dot-com companies had bought Super Bowl ads, one of them starring a sock puppet that sold dog food.   The US economy was growing at one of its fastest paces ever; GDP was up nearly 5% the year before— and that’s real growth, before adding inflation, which itself was just 1.4%.

They Called Refining a Dying Business. Diesel Just Hit $6.

Notes From the Field By James Hickman 9Simon Black / Sovereign Man) September 16, 2026

On Sunday afternoon, the power went out at ExxonMobil's refinery in Channahon, Illinois, a southwest suburb of Chicago.  Oil refineries run at tremendous heat and pressure, so whenever the power goes out, all that heat and pressure has to go somewhere. It’s basic physics. Hence why the plant burned it off through the flare stacks, with black smoke visible for miles.

"Grow Our Way Out of Debt” Is Code for Inflation

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

Last week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent sat down for a fireside chat at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and told the room what the plan is for the national debt.

"We don't have a revenue problem," he said. "We have a spending problem." Contain the spending, add 3% growth, and America can "grow our way out of this."

25 Years Later— A Reminder That The World Can Change In An Instant

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

At a time in my life which now seems centuries ago, I was once a young lieutenant, barely a year out of West Point, and I had recently been assigned to lead an electronic warfare platoon.

Whenever my unit wasn't deployed or in the field, most of my duty days were spent in a top-secret facility called a SCIF— the kind of place that was guarded by military police and didn't have any windows.

Here’s An Obvious Example Of A Critical Resource Shortage

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

In July, the Canadian uranium miner Cameco stopped producing at its mine in northern Saskatchewan (known as ‘Cigar Lake’) for two weeks. Cigar Lake itself was fine, nothing was wrong with the mine. The problem was their sulfuric acid plant— a crucial ingredient in processing uranium ore— broke down.

The Candlestick Makers Are Back, and This Time They're Not Joking

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

In 1845, the French economist Frédéric Bastiat petitioned parliament on behalf of the nation's candlestick makers. They were being ruined, he wrote, by an unscrupulous rival that was flooding the market with light at a price no honest candlestick maker could match.

Your Mortgage Is Now Competing With Google and the Pentagon

Notes From the Field by James Hickman (Simon Black / Sovereign Man)  September 1, 2026

Hardly a week goes by without another data center announcement, and the projects have gotten so big that they're now measured in gigawatts.

A gigawatt is a billion watts of electricity. Running around the clock, one gigawatt is enough to supply about 800,000 average American homes— and a single large data center is now built at that scale.

Breaking Down $15 billion Spent on California's Train to Nowhere

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

In November 2008, California voters approved a ballot measure to build a bullet train from San Francisco to Los Angeles.  It was supposed to be fast enough to make the journey in under three hours. And passengers could hop on by 2020, for a total cost of $33 billion.

Eighteen years later, there is nothing to ride.