Argentina’s Javier Milei is racking up some solid wins, with the fiscal basket case seeing its first monthly budget surplus in 12 years.
Apparently, it took Milei just nine and a half weeks to balance a budget that was projected at 5% of GDP under the previous government. In US terms, he turned a 1.2 trillion-dollar annual deficit into a 400 billion surplus. In 9 and a half weeks.
How did he do it? Easy: he cut a host of central government agency budgets by 50% while slashing crony contracts and activist handouts.
For perspective, if you cut the entirety of Washington’s budget by 50%, you’d save a fast 3 trillion dollars and start paying off the national debt.
It turns out it can be done, and the world doesn’t collapse into chaos.

Sovereign debt is eating the world. Lining up a financial crash that could make 2008 look like a picnic.
How did we get here?
In short, governments and central banks deluded themselves into thinking that unlimited deficit spending financed by unlimited money printing won’t do what they’ve done for literally millennia — plunge the economy into stagflation.
They are, of course, wrong. And we’re seeing the catastrophe unfold before our eyes.
From Nixon to $33 Trillion in Debt
The story begins in the 1970s when Nixon broke the global gold standard, unleashing permanent deficits worldwide. But the latest chapter starts in 2008 when central banks bailed out the financial system by effectively printing trillions of dollars.
At the time, everybody knew that much printing

Governments worldwide are trying to replace cash with CBDCs, and people worldwide are starting to wake up, but we need a lot more.
A CBDC is a government-run crypto-token that replaces the national currency with a tracking ledger—a list of who owns what—that lets government surveil, control, and mandate every dollar you spend. 
They could prevent you from buying the wrong thing, whether raw milk or gas stoves, or self-defense. They could stop you from donating to the wrong person, as we saw with the Canadian Truckers. They could even force you to buy whatever a government bureaucrat tells you to. 
On top of the Soviet-style surveillance state, a CBDC is an existential threat to the banking system, to the US dollar and would give central planners push-button

The past few weeks, major countries have been moving away from the US dollar, raising doubts about the dollar’s long-dominant role in the world. Eight weeks ago, it was just pariah nations like Iran or Russia trying to de-dollarize. Now it’s Brazil, France, even Saudi Arabia—the lynchpin of the decades-long “petrodollar” arrangement.
If the dollar does lose its position as the global reserve currency, it will be catastrophic for the American economy. Catastrophic for the American people on whose backs 80 years of reserve status were built. And it will subject billions of foreigners, for whom the dollar has meant decades of being bullied, to history’s greatest bait and switch.
Dollar at Risk
In late March, Saudi Arabia announced it will price oil in Chinese yuan.

One popular critique of bitcoin is energy cost per transaction. This doesn’t begin to capture bitcoin’s massive energy savings compared to fiat currency.
Bitcoin’s cost per transaction is well known, and often critiqued; one article in Wired magazine called bitcoin “[a] big middle finger to earth’s climate.” This is because bitcoin’s security, redundancy, and architecture are more energy intensive than traditional payments relying on a single point of failure.
Comparing the energy of a single transaction barely scrapes the surface of the dollar’s carbon footprint, which includes the entire financial infrastructure supporting fiat—8.4 percent of GDP in the US alone, slightly behind manufacturing. This includes 80,000 bank branches, 470,000 ATMs in the US alone, and

With its $700 billion bond-buying expansion in response to the COVID crisis, the Federal Reserve has thrust itself into the limelight. Like a sixteen-year-old with a credit card, the Fed is salivating over what money-printing powers it shall seize next. How is the prudent investor to respond?
First, what the Fed’s already done: pushed interest rates to zero and expanded into “unlimited” buying of assets, now reaching to corporate bonds and local government bonds. These bring the same concerns we had in 2008: trillions in new money to dilute the spending power of current savers, along with the risk of “moral hazard” where government covers the losses for corporate, and government, irresponsibility.
What’s more concerning is what the Fed might do next. Proposals are