We’ve had a front and center seat of the disconnect in the price of physical metals and the paper price, especially in silver. The coronavirus has spurred a panic across all markets, and this panic has caused people to pour into metals despite the crashing price we saw in the physical spot price of silver.

Dear Reader, Few hardworking middle-class Americans fully understand how deeply entrenched they are in the stock and bond markets. Chances are, you or someone you’re close to is invested in assets with a highly unfavorable risk-to-reward profile. I’ve tried to cover...

It’s the oldest trick in the book: the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released wonderful-sounding employment numbers, only to revise them lower later on. It works every time as the stock-market indexes jump for joy even though investors should know by now that it’s all smoke and mirrors.

If you want to know what’s really going on under the hood of the stock market, what you need to be watching is the bond market. You can read the reviews on a restaurant, but if you want an idea of how good it is, see how many people are lined up for lunch or dinner.

We’re in a world where the fundamentals for Western civilization have been collapsing while the attempt to backfill it has been sustained through debt and advancements in technology. Certain standards of lifestyle have become efficient and require less capital than in the days of the 1950s era, for instance.

The unraveling of a history’s greatest enterprise, American democracy and the free-market system, is more apparent than ever today. Riots, a pandemic, economic turmoil and bitter political divisions are telltale signs of a nation and a world in decline.

All markets have a bag of tricks that they use to lure traders in and out at the wrong time. Head-fakes are among the most obvious tricks, but commentators often ignore long periods of sideways price action. That’s what Bitcoin’s doing now, and it may be the market’s most devious trick yet.