Why I Trust These 14 People In Finance and the Economy (Part 1 of 3)

(Part 2 to Come: Two Categories of “Experts” I Don’t Listen To, and Why; Part 3: What I’ve Done Repositioning Myself Financially)

Today I begin a three-part series, on who I follow, regarding money, investing, finance, DeFi, and the economy. I wasn’t really into “following” people, but when you see a massive change happening in the world, and you want to preserve your savings and investments as you see that “there’s nowhere to hide,” you might get very motivated to learn, and learn fast.

What I won’t do, is play ostrich. We all know what happens to ostriches, who bury their heads in the sand.

The kind of information I want, cannot be had by watching CNN, and MSNBC, where all the liars who lie for a living say a lot of words I do not find valuable, reassuring the American people that everything is fine, we’re trying to go for a “soft landing.”

Ditto US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, and other economists paid by the government. (That said, I watched Powell’s testimony to the Senate this week, and I had this deja vu–and finally realized it was that he sounded exactly like someone speaking at a funeral.)

My next Substack blog post will be “Two Categories of Experts I Don’t Listen To, and Why,” which is equally important, and then a third part will be, “How I’ve Been Repositioning Myself Financially,” as my retirement plan would shatter, if I played ostrich. That third part will include some commentary on changing our money mindset. It’s hard to say who is more stressed in this climate, the poor, or the rich. Obviously the poor, who have no assets, are deeply distressed, leaning into credit and suffering greatly as gas and food prices soar.

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But I’ve found making money to be much easier than keeping it. And I am in daily contact with all my friends and colleagues who have significant net worth, and their anxiety is formidable, too. I find each of my friends to have big blind spots regarding this big beast that is global economics and geopolitics, and I also find them to have valuable insights, as I continue to research in most of my free time.

These are some of my favorite people to listen to, as they have great insights, and they are rather “contrarian” to the views put forward by the Liars Who Lie For A Living (Powell, Yellen, JP Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs executives) but I’m also going to give you some caveats about their quirks and limitations, which you can accept or dismiss as my own editorializing:

1. Mark Moss. I’m putting him first, because he’s my favorite. This guy understands macro economics and history, and leverages many data points in U.S. and world global economic history, to make his points. He draws on white boards and has a great tech setup to show you charts, as he makes inferences from them. He does excellent research before presenting new topics, a couple of times a week.

For instance, last week he did a comprehensive review of why he thinks the real estate market will see a correction rather than a crash. I think he missed a few converging data points which could be the “perfect storm” leading to more like a crash of 25% or even 50% of the value of real estate, and demand grinding to a halt–but, I’ve not seen anyone be so comprehensive in his precise analysis, showing exactly why he thinks we’ll see a big slowdown rather than the crash some think is coming.

Except for Patrick Bet-David, who predicts more of a real-estate crash in this outstanding video, and includes some data points Mark Moss neglected.

2.  Stansberry Research. I don’t necessarily buy their products, and if you opt into their email list, you’ll be a constant target of long sales letters, etc. But Daniela Cambone, a fairly young interviewer on their YouTube channel, can get any guest easily, on the show, because it gets 100k’s and sometimes 1M+ listeners.

(Daniela is an exception to my general perception that the Millennials aren’t my favorite group to follow, in investing, due to their lack of experience. That’s because she’s the interviewer, rather than the expert. Too many YouTube crypto analysts just started investing a few years ago, and have stars in their eyes, because everybody made money from 2017 to 2021, which gave them a false sense of their own self-importance.)

Daniela is a brilliant interviewer, and asks great questions to guide her senior-level interviewees to make complex subjects accessible to the layperson who hasn’t spent a career in the world of macro economics and finance. Many guests are used to talking with traders and economists and hedge fund managers, so they use a lot of jargon that can be daunting.

Be patient with the process, as you begin listening to her interviews, and google definitions as needed! Many of the people who follow, in my list, are often featured on the Stansberry Research show.

Daniela interviewed Lawrence Lepard, on May 25, someone I really like to listen to, who believes gold will soar to $5k per ounce, and is bullish on the future but thinks we have to let this entire bloated, corrupt system crash, so we can build something better, with the Millennials leading the charge because they’re not afraid of the tech and lean into it.

If you’re looking for a hopeful, positive outlook, Lepard is your guy, even if it’s just to avoid falling deep into curating every negative outcome potential and hard-coding it, as if we’re guaranteed every negative outcome. (I’m sure a lot of the things we worry about WON’T actually happen.)

Just last week, Daniela interviewed a man named Simon Dixon who is one of the executives of Celsius, a CeFi crypto company in an epic crisis right now. We should all hope they come out of it, as they will show the way for other important crypto projects like them. Celsius was being pitched as a low-interest quasi savings account or a fractional reserve bank–where you can withdraw like a bank, but keep the keys to your coins, but if BTC’s price falls by more than 50% there could be a margin call forcing liquidation. So you can see how Celsius is in crisis (BTC’s price having fallen well over 50%), but last week, media announced that Celsius has been able to pay back something north of $100M dollars to the entity that loaned it to them.

I mention that July 7 interview with Simon Dixon not just because we should all watch the Celsius crisis unfold, for what it means about the future of crypto–but also because at the end of the interview, he talks about the recent death of his father, who lost everything in the stock market.

Dixon talks about (this is my summary and editorializing) how we are not our money, there is always a way to pivot and rebuild, and that many of us are going to have to manage ourselves, emotionally, as the crisis rolls out. Many of us have become very attached to our hyperinflated assets. We never really earned that asset inflation, but there is going to be as big an emotional upheaval–actually bigger, and it matters more–for both those without assets and those with assets, in the coming period, bigger than the financial upheaval.

So, changing our mindset and reminding ourselves that people can and do recover, will help us even the keel, in this uncertain economic climate. Because on his father’s deathbed, Simon’s father was not talking about his losses in the stock market. He was talking about his love for his family.

3. Jim Bianco. He’s flinty in general, and really crusty about crypto, everyone considering getting involved in crypto should listen to some of the BTC maximalists AND some of the haters. He thinks that BTC will see a low of $12k, because all the leverage is being squeezed out of the market right now. (All the people and institutions who borrowed money, to buy their holdings, are forced to sell, or forced into a margin call.)

If you think I’m a BTC maximalist, or a rabid member of the Cult of Crypto, you’ll be surprised I like listening to Bianco, but I like balanced perspectives, not cultthink. He’s more bearish on BTC and crypto than most of the rest of this list, though there are a couple of them who don’t like the entire crypto space and see it as a “fad.”

4. Rick Rule. He backs away from any conversation about crypto, because he “knows what he doesn’t know” and says he’s too old to learn new tricks, so he sticks to what he’s put his 10,000 hours in on. He’s a commodities / natural resources guy, and I’m exploring that space to figure out what funds are really strong, in oil/gas, gold/silver, uranium, copper, lithium, etc., funds with great management and good potential in parts of the world where regulation is less likely to wreck them.

Rule is a super entertaining interview, every time, a Libertarian like most if not all of these others, and has spent 40 years studying natural resources and even putting on an annual conference about it. (Moved it to Florida this year, after two years that they had to hold it online.) He told me he’d come on our mastermind for a Live, soon.

5. Raul Pal. A Brit who runs a macro-economic show called Real Vision with several really sharp interviewers; he’s humble enough to admit when he doesn’t know what will happen in the future, which makes what he does claim, that much more credible.

I like listening to interviews of him on other YouTube channels, at least as much as I like listening to Real Vision interviews. I do not ever hear him reference the World Economic Forum or the actions of the elites, which makes me wonder if he covers for them or discounts them.

6. Jim Rickards. He’s a crusty old guy, very interesting to listen to, and he hates crypto. Listen to him for his other content and perspectives, and to keep your crypto-love in check so that it doesn’t push the boundary into “mania!” I invest in BTC, ETH, and a handful of other projects I think are strong; but I hedge my bets, and diversify my investing, too.

7. Danielle DeMartino Booth. She used to work for the Fed, but now she writes a research publication called Quill she charges big bucks for. She’s probably got an IQ of 200, so she may talk over your head sometimes, but she’s so unflinchingly objective about the economy and its history and the history of the Fed, that I’ve listened to her for probably 40 hours and I can’t tell if she’s liberal, conservative, libertarian, or what. I literally search for new interviews she’s done, I love her perspectives so much.

8. Michael Saylor. Nobody is more interesting to listen to, he’s just as brilliant as DeMartino Booth, but brings complex content down to accessible metaphors and relatability – and he’s the biggest Bitcoin bull you’ll ever listen to. He is the longest-running CEO of a public company (25 years), he took mainstream media hits for refusing to close down in March 2020, and he talks about the potential and possibilities of Bitcoin in ways most people don’t understand, that go far beyond just “preserving store of value.”

Take a grain of salt listening to Saylor because he really wants mass BTC adoption so that his net worth comes out of the tank. (He bought a lot of BTC at its current price at this writing, $20k, and he also bought some at $50k. As did yours truly–we all thought it was just going up, from there!)

His company MicroStrategies is the first public company to put BTC on the balance sheet, to the tune of $1B, and more, ongoing, by leveraging his own company!

9. Robert Kiyosaki. He always calls himself an “old guy,” and he’s one of the few over the age of 70 still actively researching and broadcasting content as well as investing in BTC primarily, in the crypto space. His book Rich Dad Poor Dad changed my life, 30 years ago, and should be required reading in high schools but never will be. And if you listen to 6 of his talks, you’ve probably absorbed everything he’s got to say, but he’s bold and sassy and an “unapologetic capitalist.”

10. G. Edward Griffin. He wasn’t in the world of finance but wrote an expose on the Federal Reserve. He’s always a good interview at nearly 90 years old, exposing the bankster cartel of the central banks. He just helps keep the conversation grounded, and focused on the most important points.

11 & 12. These two guys both go by an alias, and have YouTube channels of their editorializing on broad-ranging news across various sectors of the economy. Do not listen to them before bed, or you might not sleep. I wouldn’t 100% believe everything they say, they’re just doing a lot of personal research like I am, and delivering many disparate data points to those who follow them: I Allegedly, and Jeremiah Babe.

13. I like Kerry Stevensen, the interviewer on a show called Small Caps, and I really like an interview she did on July 5 with well-known trader Gareth Soloway. They talk about how there had to be a flush-out of the ballooning, bloated crypto space.

Soloway thinks about 20 to 50 crypto projects are viable and will go any kind of distance. Like our own Coach Felipe, he thinks from tracing the charts, that BTC will go as low as $12k before beginning to rebuild, wrung of the leveraged investors. He points out that today’s $20k BTC price point was the all-time high in 2017. He shows a chart that tracks BTC just like Amazon did, which didn’t have a profit for 16 years, but has come into total global dominance (investing favors the patient!). Kerry talks about a use case that is evolving in a project called RUSH.gold, to be able to buy gold but use it as money, with even a credit card attached to your account, which is very exciting, for those who think gold is a dead asset because we’re too technologically advanced for it.

Soloway believes the Fed is pushing us into recession, but that a full-blown depression will be 5 years away, as they do cycles of QE and QT (quantitative easing where they print money and lower interest rates, and quantitative tightening, as they raise interest rates).

As with many of the analysts, he thinks gold will surge, though for reasons we’d all love to avoid, even if our gold price stays low. (That is, gold soars when the markets and the economy tank.) He suggests that you review a company’s or a fund’s balance sheets and make sure they have enough cash to get through two years, before considering investing in this climate. This is exactly the kind of thing that the YouTube crypto influencers do NOT talk about, which is a good segue into who I don’t follow, and why.

14. Kitco News, and the interviews by the brilliant Michelle Makory. She’s another one who can get anyone on her show, due to the size of her audience, and keeps her interviews tight and useful. This news outlet gets criticized by being too liberal, but I don’t see it–Michelle interviews all the Libertarians, and lets the truth bombs land where they will.

My next article will be two categories of influencers and economic / crypto influencers I don’t follow, because if I did, I would have lost a lot of money.

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