The Flying Frisby - money, markets and more

If you prefer to read this piece, you can do that here. Live shows coming upIf you have not seen my lecture with funny bits about gold, we have two more dates in London lined up for Feb 14 and 15. Please come.And I am taking my musical comedy show, An Evening of Curious Songs, on a mini tour in the spring with dates in London, Somerset, Hampshire, Surrey and Essex. This is a really fun show.Here are the dates and places.* London, Crazy Coqs, W1. Wednesday March 20th. On sale now.* Bordon, Hampshire. Saturday March 23. On sale now.* Guildford, Surrey. Friday April 5. On sale now.  * Bath, Somerset. Saturday April 6. On sale now.* Southend, Essex . Sunday April 14. On sale now.Buying gold?Interested in protecting your wealth in these extraordinary times? Then be sure to own some gold bullion. I use The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high, you can deal with a human being. I have an affiliation deal with them. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

If you prefer, you can read or listen to this piece here.Live shows coming upIf you have not seen my lecture with funny bits about gold, we have two more dates in London lined up for Feb 14 and 15. Please come.And I am taking my musical comedy show, An Evening of Curious Songs, on a mini tour in the spring with dates in London, Somerset, Hampshire, Surrey and Essex. This is a really fun show.Here are the dates and places.* London, Crazy Coqs, W1. Wednesday March 20th. On sale now.* Bordon, Hampshire. Saturday March 23. On sale now.* Guildford, Surrey. Friday April 5. On sale now.  * Bath, Somerset. Saturday April 6. On sale now.* Southend, Essex . Sunday April 14. On sale now.Buying gold?Interested in protecting your wealth in these extraordinary times? Then be sure to own some gold bullion. I use The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high, you can deal with a human being. I have an affiliation deal with them. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

It’s that time of year again. Time to get out the crystal ball and tell you precisely what is going to happen in the next 12 months. Here are 15 predictions for 2024.Remember the rules of the game: I score 2 points for a direct hit, 1 for a good call, zero for a miss and minus one for a “David Lammy on Mastermind” fail. As I do every year, I shall come back and mark my homework next December.New years are fairly arbitrary things. January 1st rarely marks an actual turning point. Trends that were trends in the autumn and winter tend to continue into January, February and beyond, until they dissipate and run out of steam. There are occasional dramatic events, but life is mostly a gradual process. It’s only when you jump back or forward 12 months that things look so different. This time last year the S&P500 was struggling to the point that many saw a meltdown coming. We got no such thing - in fact, quite the opposite. The stock market rose 25% in one of its best years ever. 20 years ago, if you could step forward and see, I don’t know, the state of our institutions, or the demographics of your capital city, you’d risk having some kind of cerebral haemorrhage. Change is gradual, it is the incremental effects of tiny change compounded over time that are so formidable. We’ll start, however, with an ongoing gradual process that I don’t see reversing in 2024.1. The Great Decline goes on. It may not feel like it in this Great Decline, but life generally, believe it or not, is getting steadily better, at least from a technological point of view.But technology is subject to the improving forces of competition and free markets, our systems of government are not. They are from a different era and should be obsolete, but they persist. They are not improving but stultifying.The prediction: everywhere the state’s tentacles reach remains a drain on productivity. Our once great institutions continue to fall apart, like zombie meth addicts, stumbling towards dysfunction. (I’m going to write a song called Nothing Works Anymore). The New Woke Religions of Climate Change, the NHS and White=Bad endure, exhausting resources and minds. The ordinary worker desperately trying to improve his lot is bled dry by taxes, inflation, housing costs and the voracious state monster. Fiat loses yet more of its purchasing power. The South Africanisation of everything continues. 2. Gold to new highs. $2,400 here we come.It’s not all bad, however. This is a good year for the anti-fiat trades. Gold breaks out. Finally.3. Bitcoin goes to new highs as well. The barrier that is the all-time high at $69,000 falls. The ETF, the halving, the money printers and the tech itself all play their part. If there is one thing bitcoin has taught me, it is never to underestimate how high it can go.4. But ethereum, for reasons that escape me, outperforms bitcoin. I wrote what is generally agreed to be one of the first books about crypto. But the industry has moved so fast, I am mostly baffled by it. What are most of these coins actually for? But one observation I have made is that ethereum always seems to move later in the cycle, and by more. Why should this time be different?5. The US dollar trends sideways. The US dollar has been trending sideways for over a year now, frustrating bull and bear alike. It should be lower. I’m in the US at the moment and it feels very expensive: food is almost twice as expensive as in the UK, I’d say. But the dollar is the best house in a bad fiat neighbourhood. Prediction: it continues to range-trade.6. Sterling has problems. According to my eight year cycle of the pound - something in which I am steadily losing confidence - this should be the year the pound hits rock bottom. What is the catalyst? Gilt issues, perhaps. Unsustainable deficits. Something political is another likely answer, given this is an election year. On which note …7. The Tories are eviscerated.They had their chance and they blew it. Come the General Election this year, the voters are unforgiving. Few vote Tory. But voters also know that Labour is just as bad, so Labour does not win by anything as much as it should. There are lots of protest votes and no votes. The SNP is similarly annihilated. The shortcomings of our political system are there for all to see. But nothing that needs to changes. (See prediction one)8. Uranium keeps on going up. There’s a supply squeeze. We have been warning about it. Regime change in Russia could fix it. Don’t see that happening. Taking out the old highs at $140/lb is not so impossible. But let’s aim low to avoid disappointment. Uranium hits $125/lb in 2024.9. Fast and processed food companies have problemsThe food industry has got two problems on its hands. One is the weight loss drugs, the most famous example of which is Ozempic. A lot of people are taking it and that means a lot of people are eating a lot less. Two is the rise of anti-seed-oil narratives. More and more studies are showing the link between seed oils and obesity, cancer and other modern illnesses. This narrative is spreading. At some point the mainstream will start regurgitating it. There could be legal suits.West-centric fast and processed food companies have a problem on their hands. Those that market into developing markets less so, as they will continue to have that outlet. Timing the short will be everything.Tell your mates.10. A good year for the Japanese yen.It’s as cheap as it’s been for a very long time. That’s something that reverses in 2024. My pick of the forex trades, for reasons of Frisby’s Flux, is long the yen against the pound, but there are opportunities against the dollar too.11. The S&P500 has an decent yearBut nothing like the year it had in 2023. We see gains somewhere close to 10%, perhaps a little bit below.12. Smallcaps make a welcome returnAfter several years of underperformance, small caps start to outperform large again.13. House pricesThe UK housing market is caught between a rock and a hard place. It stays there. Atrophy and stagnation, many sellers refusing to reduce prices, buyers reluctant to pay up, lots of gazundering. But no meltdown yet.14. Tears of the moon keep on crying. Can silver stage a meaningful rally above $30 in 2024? Nope. It’s silver. You really should subscribe to this amazing publication.15. Liverpool win the league.Finally your Bruce-y Bonus sports prediction. Liverpool win the league, Sheffield United, Burnley and Luton all go down. That’s it. Thanks very much for reading and supporting the Flying Frisby. Have a wonderful 2024!Live shows coming upIf you have not seen my lecture with funny bits about gold, we have two more dates in London lined up for Feb 14 and 15. Please come.And I am taking my musical comedy show, An Evening of Curious Songs, on a mini tour in the spring with dates in London, Somerset, Hampshire, Surrey and Essex. This is a really fun show.Here are the dates and places.* London, Crazy Coqs, W1. Wednesday March 20th. On sale now.* Bordon, Hampshire. Saturday March 23. On sale now.* Guildford, Surrey. Friday April 5. On sale now.  * Bath, Somerset. Saturday April 6. On sale now.* Southend, Essex . Sunday April 14. On sale now.Buying gold?Interested in protecting your wealth in these extraordinary times? Then be sure to own some gold bullion. I use The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high, you can deal with a human being. I have an affiliation deal with them. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

Shortly after my father died, I remember saying to my eldest daughter: where do thoughts go? What happens to them?My father was a writer, so many of the thoughts he had he wrote down and preserved in some way. But what happened to all the ones he didn’t record over the course of his life? Is that it - they are just gone?Studies suggest a typical person has 7,000 thoughts a day. Others put that number ten times higher at 70-80,000. That seems a lot to me. (Some people, from what I can see, don’t even reach double figures). 80,000 thoughts/day would work out at close to one thought per second. It depends how you define what a thought is, I guess. Many thoughts are repetitive: we have the same thought over, often because we forget we have had it. But whether 7,000 or 70,000, we have a lot of thoughts. So …Of those many thoughts you have each day, how many do you actually recognise or acknowledge? A tiny percentage. Of those thoughts you do recognise, how many do you then articulate or speak aloud in some way? Again a tiny percentage. We are at a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage.Of those thoughts that you articulate, how many do you actually record - perhaps write down? Of those you record, how many do you act on and and turn into something? An even tinier percentage.So, of all the thoughts we have, a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage get recorded, and an even tinier percentage actually become something. Now let’s extrapolate that over a life. A typical lifespan is 27,000 days. That makes 189 million or 1.89 billion thoughts over the course of your life (depending on whether you are a 7,000 or 70,000/day person). Now let’s extrapolate this across human history - all the thoughts that every human being has had ever. 117 billion lives have been lived, google tells me. 117 billion multiplied by 189 million or 1.89 billion is a lot of thoughts.  What happened to them all? Where did they go? Where are they now? Is there some ethereal warehouse up the street where they are all stored?If those thoughts are now gone - unrecorded, unacted upon - what, then, was the point of having them?Recording my thoughts has always been something that’s obsessed me rather. Even as a child, I used to keep a diary and try to record as many of the things that I thought (the interesting ones, at least) as possible, especially as I worried I might never have that thought again. I’ve got piles of notebooks, not to mention the notes and voice files in my phone and on my computer. But I never go back through them and I doubt anyone else ever will, so I may as well have not bothered. Those thoughts are going to disappear, even though I wrote them down and attempted to preserve them. What was the point of having them?Park that thought for a moment, while I ask you a question. Why Christianity and Judaism succeeded where other religions failedOf the plethora of religions that existed around the Middle East three or four thousand years ago, why did Judaism survive, but none of the others? Is it because the Jews are God’s chosen people (as my Jewish friends constantly like to remind me every time I bring this question up)?Or is it because the Jews wrote theirs down? Other religions were passed on orally. Even better: the Jews inscribed their Ten Commandments in stone.Why did Christianity supersede all the pagan religions of Northern Europe during the Dark Ages? The Northmen were the superior force militarily, surely their pagan religions should have conquered too. With the likes of Odin, Thor and Loki, or the druidic religions of the Celts, many of those pagan religions were much cooler than Christianity. Why did Christianity conquer? Because the bible was written down. Pagan religions and traditions were passed on orally. It’s a much less reliable way of transferring thought.So you can see then both the power of preserving thought and the influence it can have on history. Please subscribe to this amazing publication.Do thoughts exist?Do thoughts have matter? This is a question that occupies the minds of philosophers far more profound than me. Thoughts must have some kind of matter, runs the argument, because it takes energy to have them. If we do a lot of thinking, we get tired. The brain uses at least 20% of the body’s energy, even though it makes up 2% of the body’s mass. Perhaps a thought is just a little parcel of energy.But, I ask again, what happens to thoughts after we have them? If we don’t record or articulate them in some way, are they just gone? Or is there some kind of ethereal depository where all thoughts get stored? Some kind of collective human consciousness warehouse that we haven’t discovered yet.I’m one of these people that thinks most invention is discovery. Just as Alexander Fleming did not invent penicillin, he discovered it, so did, say, Thomas Edison (and many others) not so much invent the lightbulb as discover the technology that makes lightbulbs work. Did man invent the wheel or did he discover it? My friend Low Status Opinions, who, as well as his brilliant Substack, writes jokes for famous comedians, says the act of writing a joke is not invention, rather it is pulling back the sand to see what’s there. The veteran commodities speculator Peter Brandt says something similar: a trade is a process of discovery. You place numerous trades, you manage your risk, and you discover which work.Today, with digital technology, our lives are taken out of the material world and into cyberspace. Of course, there are huge data centres that make it all function, but in a way this ethereal, digital world of the Internet, with all its social media, better represents our thoughts and the preservation of them than the paper and material world that preceded  it.So is there some depository or warehouse of thoughts that we have not yet invented/discovered yet?The idea that we only use 10% of our brain’s capacity has been largely dismissed, but we definitely have latent brain power than we don’t use. Taking psychedelic drugs perhaps unleashes latent potential. There is “acquired savant syndrome”, when you can acquire often extraordinary scholarly capacity after a traumatic head injury. The most famous example of this is Jason Pladgett who was mugged and badly beaten up, then woke up to find he now had an ability to understand complex maths and physics that did not previously exist; he developed an astonishing ability to draw complex geometric shapes he had no previous understanding of. So there is for sure some untapped potential in our minds. I wish I knew how to tap into it without risking long-term damage. There are a gazillion ideas I have had for stories, shows, businesses, products, that I would love to realise in some way. Then again genius is 99% perspiration. Having the idea is the easy bit. But a Scottish audio producer friend had this to say when I bemoaned how ideas disappear. “Nature wastes nothing,” he said with the power only a Scottish accent with its articulated consonants can have. (It’s why they make such good football managers). “Nature wastes absolutely nothing. Everything gets used in some way.” He’s right. Nature is not like governments or corporations which can be incredibly wasteful. Nothing in nature gets thrown away. Everything gets used (it’s why I am so pro free markets and so anti-regulation and government. The free market is the closest economic rendition of the natural world that we have).Yes, nature wastes nothing. The process of thinking and having ideas, even if those ideas appear to disappear if we do not record or act on them - there is a purpose to it, even if we have not yet discovered what it is. What though?I guess if there’s a moral to today’s piece, it’s this: don’t keep your thoughts to yourself.What do you think? Where do thoughts go? If they disappear, what is the point of having them? Just for the few we do act on? Let’s discuss.Happy New Year! Thank you so much for reading and supporting this Substack.Until next time, Live shows coming upIf you have not seen my lecture with funny bits about gold, we have two more dates in London lined up for Feb 14 and 15. Please come.And I am taking my musical comedy show, An Evening of Curious Songs, on a mini tour in the spring with dates in London, Somerset, Hampshire, Surrey and Essex. This is a really fun show.Here are the dates and places. * London, Crazy Coqs, W1. Wednesday March 20th. On sale now.* Bordon, Hampshire. Saturday March 23. On sale now.* Guildford, Surrey. Friday April 5. On sale now.  * Bath, Somerset. Saturday April 6. On sale now.* Southend, Essex . Sunday April 14. On sale now.Buying gold?Interested in protecting your wealth in these extraordinary times? Then be sure to own some gold bullion. I use The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high, you can deal with a human being. I have an affiliation deal with them. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

I am very happily surprised by the success this Substack, the Flying Frisby, is having, and by the way it is growing.I’d like to say it’s all down to you. A lot of it really is: for reading and supporting this letter. Thank you.A lot of it is down to me too for writing it. Aren’t I wonderful?But a lot of it is down to the platform itself. I think Substack is great. I have encountered some of the most brilliant writing on here, stuff I don’t think I ever would found otherwise - either because it would have been in too remote a corner of the internet for me to have ever come across it, or because, without this platform, it might never have got written in the first place. In a virtuous loop, this centre of good writing is leading to more good writing. Free thought is leading to more free thought. Everywhere blossoms. It has become the most fertile platform for philosophy, commentary and the arts. It has created a virtuous circle. Hobbies are becoming livelihoods. Isn’t that great? With free everything, the internet devalued content. Substack reverses that. It’s OnlyFans for highbrow people.I used to think I was a brilliant forecaster of trends. I now realise it’s just that if I am thinking it, a lot of other people are thinking it too. But I’ve found I am putting more and more time and effort into Substack, both as a creator of content and a consumer of it. If I am, others are too. The platform will grow as a result, while both creator and consumer, buyer and seller, will benefit. On the other hand, I only have so much time. With more of it expended here, I find less time available for my other endeavours (and there are lots of them). I’m supposed to be writing a new book for example. How often when I sit down to write do I find myself knocking out a Substack instead. Creating content is addictive. When readers like it all sorts of dopamines go offMy career, if you could call it that, has taken a surprise turn as a result of this Substack, which I only started it as a result of a chance conversation in the pub.This is all a lot of pre-amble to say how much I am enjoying writing this letter, how surprised I have been by its success and how grateful I am to you for both reading and supporting it.Thank you very much.I wish you all a wonderful 2024.DominicPS If you missed my piece, How To Change Your Social Status, I made a video verson of it here:PPS And if you fancy a festive LOL, here’s me entertaining the masses at the Free Speech Union Christmas Bash. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

Here are all the links mentioned in the vid:* An Evening of Curious Songs on Tour* Show about gold in London Feb 14/15* Buy gold - Pure Gold Co* Bitcoin guide. If you prefer to read this article, you can do that here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

As long-time readers/sufferers will know, at the beginning of the new year I like to make some predictions for the 12 months ahead. The bolder the prediction, the more entertaining the copy, though the less likely it is to actually happen. Herein lies the eternal conflict at the heart of so much market commentary. What is more important: getting lots of eyeballs or being right? Today we mark our own homework. We look back at last year’s effort and we count up the points. The scoring system: 2 points for a direct hit, 1 point for a nearly right, 0 for a fail and minus 1, if the prediction is David-Lammy-on-Mastermind-level bad. (For those readers not familiar with David Lammy, he is a UK politician from the “everyone who does not agree with me is a Nazi” school of philosophy, who appeared on one of the UK’s flagship quizzes and was really, really bad). I like this exercise because it demonstrates just how much perspective can change over time. While we can change strategy as events develop, the copy from last year stays and back then things looked very shaky. The stock market was imploding, and the end was nigh. Now it all looks rather better.Next week I’ll put together some predictions for 2024, but here’s how 2023’s batch panned out. Subscribe to The Flying Frisby.* Brent crude oil, then at $80, to hit three figures. We felt commodities would have a good year with China’s re-opening increasing demand. It didn’t. The highest Brent got was $95. Zero points.* Copper would go to $4.80/lb, we said, on the same theme, and we were wrong about that too. It got to $4.30. Not quite Lammy-on-Mastermind levels of failure, but a big fat zero nonetheless. * Yield becomes a thing again. “With choppy, uncertain markets, but sticky inflation, investing for yield rather than capital growth becomes a much bigger theme in 2023.” It seems painfully obvious now, I can’t believe it wasn’t a year ago, but a lot of investors, particularly those with lots of capital, have been quite happy to take safe 5 or 6% yields. Two points.* S&P500. Things looked very dicey in the stock market this time last year. Many were declaring end of days. We said no such thing. It was “a classic recessionary bear market”, we argued. It looks obvious now. It wasn’t then. The S&P500, 3,800 at the time, would get back towards its old highs of 4,800. It has done just that. We are at 4,770. A big fat two points.* Emerging Markets outperform, we said. They didn’t. Zero. * Biotech becomes a thing again too, we said, thinking that after so many years of underperformance, perhaps it was due some time in the sun. Nope. While it has been extremely strong these last two months, it was flat over the year. Zero. (Don’t worry the predictions get better).* European banks have a good time of it too. They did. Up somewhere between 15 and 20%, depending on which measure you use. Even Deutsche Bank is up. Two points.* Bitcoin has a good year. Hard to think it was $17,000 a year ago. ”There are so many reasons to be bullish about bitcoin, yet sentiment could not be worse.” It’s tripled. Two points.* Silver, on the other hand, “fails to deliver yet again.” While many this time last year were saying $30 was on the way, we bitterly observed that “If you can count on anything in this cruel world, it’s that silver will let you down”. It began the year at $24 and, one year on, that is where we remain. $26 was the high. Two points.* US dollar. “Up and down” range-trading was our prediction for the US dollar, and that is what we got. Though the US dollar index ended the year at 101, we tentatively ventured that it would end higher than the 102 where it started. Just the one point. * Central Bank Digital Currencies. Delighted to be wrong about this one, as they are evil. “A nation with a population greater than 15 million rolls out its first CBDC,” we said. No nation did. (Nigeria doesn’t count, as it already had one). Zero points. (Here’s my comic song about CBDCs, if you haven’t already seen it).* Ukraine. Dominic Frisby is your first port of call for Ukraine War analysis, I know. But my outlook was “The Ukraine War will not end before October. There will not be a nuclear war and Vladimir Putin will still be Russia’s president by year end.” Even though Hamas took it off the front pages, it goes on. Two points. * Gold. It “retests its old highs around $2,080. But then it finds a way of being frustrating. It always does. It’s gold.” That is where we are. Two points.* Finally, sports. Man City win the league, I said, and they did. (At that point Arsenal were way ahead). Got that right, but the relegation I got wrong: Southampton, Wolves and Bournemouth were for the chop, but no. Wolves and Bournemouth both managed to stay up. Leeds and Leicester went down. One point.A grand total of 16 points. Not great, but not awful either. Kind of like my school reports.I hope you had a very Merry Christmas. I wish you good fortune, health, wealth and prosperity in 2024. May you make good decisions! May we all make good decisions.Thank so much for being a subscriber to the Flying Frisby. I really am very grateful.Subscribe to the Flying Frisby .Buying gold?Interested in protecting your wealth in these extraordinary times? Then be sure to own some gold bullion. My recommended bullion dealer is The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high. You can deal with a human being. I have an affiliation deals with them.Live shows coming upIf you have not seen my lecture with funny bits about gold, we have two more dates in London lined up for Feb 14 and 15. Please come.And I am taking my musical comedy show, An Evening of Curious Songs, on a mini tour in the spring with dates in London, Somerset, Hampshire, Surrey and Essex. This is a really fun show.Here are the dates and places. * London, Crazy Coqs, W1. Wednesday March 20th. On sale now.* Bordon, Hampshire. Saturday March 23. On sale now.* Guildford, Surrey. Friday April 5. On sale now.  * Bath, Somerset. Saturday April 6. On sale now.* Southend, Essex . Sunday April 14. On sale now. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

You can, if you prefer, watch this article in video form here:I was having a coffee with an Anglo-Italian friend of mine the other day, and he began telling me about his grand-parents. They were “contadini”, which translates literally as “peasants”, though the term peasant does not have such pejorative connotations in Italy as it does here. They called themselves “mezzadri” or “sharecroppers”. A landowner allowed them to work his land, in exchange for half of everything they produced on it. The other half they got to keep. Selling that half of the produce was how they got money. My friend’s family had been doing this for generations, never actually breaking above that status to become landowners themselves.There are many parallels to the mediaeval serf, who had to work the land of his lord in exchange for his subsistence and protection. Just as the serf was the descendent of the Roman slave, so was the contadino the descendent of the serf, though contadini were not as subjugated, except by their circumstances.It is not so different to the plight of the young western worker today, particularly at the lower end of the pay scale, who has, by the time you factor in inflation and other taxes, half of everything he earns taken from him by the state, and is unable to buy a place to live. In any case, in 1966 Grandad left Italy and the peasant existence, followed by Grandma in 1967, and they came to work in England. With union law quite protective at the time, most Italians in the UK found themselves either setting up small businesses or working for other small businesses belonging to friends or family, especially in the catering industry. (My grandad, who was also Italian, ran a sandwich shop in Victoria). They were paid in British pounds, and largely in cash, on which they are unlikely to have paid much Income Tax. While the British pound was not exactly a beacon of fiscal rectitude, it was a lot better than the Italian lira, which suffered numerous devaluations and became something of a laughing stock currency. This meant that the money Grandad and Grandma were paid in kept its value, at least on a relative basis.Several years passed. My friends’ grandparents worked hard and saved. Then in 1970 they went back to Italy and bought themselves an apartment. It may only have been an apartment, but for the first time in the family’s history they owned property. They carried on working in the UK and by 1976 they were able to buy some of the land on which they had previously been contadini. Their social status had changed - from peasant to landowner.It was a common thing among Italian emigrants throughout the 20th century. When they went back home, they had so much more money than those who had stayed.They hadn’t had particularly good jobs in England. They were waiters. They were only able to do what they did for two reasons: one, the money they were paid in and saved in was so much stronger than the Italian lira; two, operating in the cash economy and receiving much of their income in tips, which were not taxed back then, they did not have 50% of the produce of their labour confiscated, whether by landowner, lord or state.There is an important message to this story, both about how society works and about how you should position yourself.The unspoken crime of the 20th and 21st centuriesActually, there are many crimes, let’s just say this is a big one. Not only are workers fleeced by the amount of tax that they have to pay (most of which is then wasted on government incompetence or worse), they are fleeced because the money they are paid loses its value.  Owning property has been one of the few ways by which ordinary people have been able to protect themselves against the extraordinary currency debasement of the 20th and 21st century. As I constantly argue, property prices are a functon of money supply, and property is unaffordbale as a result of relentless money supply growth. So much newly created money goes into property, that houses have become financial assets, an effective hedge against currency debasement. As house prices have gone up, it feels like wealth has been created, but it is just an illusion. All that has happened is that property owners have been had that part of their portfolio shielded from the debasement. Storing your wealth in property proved a much better place to keep it than cash, be it sterling, lira, euro or dollar. Plus your main home goes untaxed, so you don’t get fleeced that way either.My Italian friend described his confirmation some 35 years ago. One family member gave him a gold sovereign. Another gave him twenty newly minted pound coins, which my friend still has in the original packaging. Which has kept its value? Those pound coins might have some collectors’ interest, but £20 buys you a heck of a lot less now than it did 30 years ago. The sovereign meanwhile has kept its purchasing power, as gold always does.When you work, you expend energy. The money you are paid for your expended effort is in effect stored energy to be used at some later stage. It is essential to an honest and functioning society that that expended energy keeps its potential. But it doesn’t.What can we do? We can’t change the system. But we can change ourselves.Consider all the work that you have done over the years. Imagine if you had converted what you were paid for it straight away from fiat into strong currency - be it gold or house. The value of your labour would have been preserved too, instead of eroded. With the cumulative savings, you’d be able to turn around today and buy things that were previously out of your reach, just as my friend’s grand-parents did.Now imagine that for all the work you’ve done over the last 10 or 15 years you had been paid in bitcoin. Or, on being paid in fiat, you had immediately converted the money into bitcoin. You would be extraordinarily wealthy now, so wealthy your entire social status would have changed. There are many who have done that. They converted their salary into bitcoin as soon as they were paid. Because they saved in a strong currency, they are now able not to work at all, if they don’t want to. They could probably buy the company they worked for. They can buy houses in a market that is otherwise affordable. There is a whole movement of people who are doing just that now. They will transform their lives as a result.Weak money weakens youYou will not change your life or your status, if you keep your wealth in crap currency.  Crap currency keeps you down. It makes you weak. Crap currency is a way of keeping people down. Many will think this is deliberate, a tool of suppression. It certainly used to be. Serfs were not allowed to handle gold or silver specie, once upon a time. Fiat has a similar effect, though by the back door.There are some economists who argue that it is good to have a weak currency. A weak currency attracts investment they say, especially from overseas. It might well attract investment, because people with stronger currencies can buy you and your country, you and your country’s labour and assets on the cheap. Why do you think so much of the UK is now foreign owned?Europe and the UK both look so cheap to Americans at the moment, because of the relative currency strength. I have American friends who tell me they thought London was supposed to be expensive. It is if you live here and you are paid in pounds, but if you have a strong currency it isn’t.A weak currency makes you weak. A weak currency makes your country weak. Switzerland has maintained the strength of its franc. Ordinary Swiss people have status, as result - a status that is above the status of someone from somewhere with joke money. There is a hierarchy among nations. It comes with the currency.  With a weak a currency you lose status globally, you fall down the global hierarchy. Imagine being an Argentine or a Venezuelan or a Turk. Argentina was once one of the richest countries in the world. Venezuela was extraordinarily wealthy in the 1980s. The Turks were once the Ottomans. Now they are all low status. Italy used to be the richest country in the world, as did Britain later on. With the serial devaluation of its lira, it became a laughing stock. The UK has become a weak nation, a nation in decline. Our money is weak. One of the first jobs of government should be to protect the value of the currency, because then you are protecting the value of your citizens’ labour. By defending your currency, you are defending your people. You are empowering them. But when your currency is weak, you weaken your people. Inflation is not just theft, it is debilitating. It is stealing from your people, weakening them, devaluing them, and taking away their power.The take-away from of all of this: save in strong currencies. You might live in a country with a weak currency. Not all of us cannot up sticks and go and live in Switzerland or El Salvador. But you can still convert your weak currency into strong, be it gold or bitcoin.Save in strong currencies. Over time it will change your life. And your social status.My friend, meanwhile, finds himself unable to buy a property in the UK. He has recently taken a leaf out of his grand-parents’ book, and emigrated, at least digitally: he’s putting everything he earns into bitcoin. Let’s see how he gets on.If you are considering buying gold, my recommended bullion dealer is The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high. They deliver to the UK, US, Canada and Europe, or you can store your gold with them. I have an affiliation deal. More here.Here is my latest piece on bitcoin, and my guide.If you are looking for Chrissie pressies and stocking fillers, then here is your place. This is a public episode. 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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theflyingfrisby.comIt is now almost 15 years since Satoshi Nakamoto announced his new invention, bitcoin, to the world. Since then it has grown and grown.  Like most things online, bitcoin has divided people. It has its admirers and it has its detractors. They argue with as much vitriol as the political left and right. But the admirers have won: if bitcoin was going to die, it would have died by now. It hasn’t. It’s thriving. It has more than 100 million users and its market cap is roughly $750 billion.The most common reason I hear for not wanting to invest is, “I don’t understand it.”So what is bitcoin? It is a new system of digital money for the internet. You might call it cash for the internet.Unlike pounds or dollars, this money is not issued by a government. Instead it is issued by an international network of computers, according to an open source protocol. There is no government involvement in bitcoin. It is apolitical money. Its value is determined by the market: what people are prepared to buy it for.Then people demand to know how it works. Fine. You explain the blockchain, decentralised ledgers, the problem of double spending, Byzantine generals, mining and all the rest of it, and a glazed look comes into their eyes. They go away shaking their heads and decide they don’t understand it.Most people don’t know how the combustion engine works. They still use cars and buses. Most people don’t know how hypertext transfer protocol works. They still use the World Wide Web. Most people don’t understand what simple mail transfer protocol is. They still send and receive emails. Almost everybody, including the Governor of the Bank of England, does not understand how our modern system of money, banking and credit works. I struggle to find a single politician who can explain how money is created. We all still use money. You do not need to understand how it works in order to use it. All you have to understand is that it does work.Bitcoin does work. As I say, if it didn’t, it would’ve died by now. But it hasn’t. It’s thriving.To give you an idea just how robust bitcoin is, the network is more powerful than the world’s top 500 supercomputers combined. The protocol has been studied and verified by about a gazillion nerds. The technological superiority of bitcoinOne thing that distinguishes this apolitical money from pounds or dollars or euros - money issued by government - is that there is a finite supply: 21 million coins. Governments cannot tinker with bitcoin’s money supply with political objectives in mind and create more of it. A finite and limited supply means bitcoin’s value is likely to increase, unlike the purchasing power of government money, which decreases as more and more of it gets created. (If you dispute this, ask yourself what a pound buys you today compared to ten, twenty or fifty years ago).Each coin is divisible to 8 decimal places. The smallest denomination is the satoshi or sat . There are thus 100 million satoshis to a bitcoin. A dollar would be around 2,500 sats. A penny would be about 35 sats, one cent about 25 sats. This means you can send micropayments which amount to 1/35th of one penny. Try getting a bank to process a payment of that size.Micropayments open up so many possibilities for economic growth.Imagine if, instead of getting a like for your YouTube video or Twitter, Insta or Facebook post, you got a sat. A meaningless amount to the person paying it. But a million sats instead of a million likes would be over $400. Not bad. Micropayments will dramatically enable the internet of things. It is a huge growth area. The Internet is, broadly speaking, a borderless medium. I can communicate with pretty much anyone in the world instantaneously, as long as they have an internet connection. But if I want to cross borders in the real world, this is a time consuming process, requiring visas and passports and security checks and all the rest of it. If I want to send money to other parts of the world, this too can be a burdensome process, requiring forms, forex conversion, customs declarations, money laundering enquiries, and goodness knows what else. If I wanted to send a payment to someone else in the world of, say, 10p it is just impossible. This limits the possibilities of government money.Government currencies are also limited by national borders, by population and economic size. Even the US dollar, which is the reserve currency of the world, is limited. Try opening a US dollar account outside of the US. It is problematic. If you are living in remote, rural Africa or Asia, it is well nigh impossible. It is hard enough, getting a bank account in your own currency. But with bitcoin, you can send to anyone anywhere, huge value transactions or tiny value transactions, and the transfer is frictionless and almost instantaneous. Technically, it is a superior form of money to government currency. It is backed, as I say, by a rigorous computing system and not by the whims of central bankers and politicians who have other agenda in mind than maintaining the soundness of their money. Their careers not least.So we are talking about a technically superior form of money, the purchasing power of which is likely to increase rather than decrease, which has far greater scalability. Why use something like the pound as a savings vehicle, then? It has lost a third of its value to inflation just since 2020. With the potential of bitcoin to become the default medium of exchange on the Internet and in the Internet of things, and with its potential for it also to become the default savings vehicle of the Internet - both for individuals and for corporations - the potential of bitcoin is simply immense. Why would you not want to have some exposure to something with such extraordinary potential?For me, the risk is not owning bitcoin. The risk is surely not owning it. How to investThe UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, in its lack of wisdom, makes it very difficult for UK citizens to buy and invest in bitcoin. However, there is a means by which you can get exposure through a regular broker, and quite legitimately, without having to go down the rabbit hole of exchanges, wallets, cold storage and all the rest of it. You can let somebody more competent and experienced than you do all the heavy lifting for you. You can buy it in your ISA, your SIPP or your regular brokerage account, FCA or not.

Good Sunday morning to you,Today’s piece is all about decision-making and the decline of family in the west.Before I crack on, I just wanted to flag a couple of things.Wearing my comedy hat, I’m taking An Evening of Curious Songs on a mini tour in the spring - shows in London (Crazy Coqs), Somerset, Surrey, Essex and Hampshire. Tickets make great Christmas pressies, so please take a look.And my new album, It’s ALL True, is out. CDs also make great Christmas pressies for errant uncles, so check that out too in the DF shop.So to today’s piece - Why so many bad decisions?I’ve recently been looking at my family tree on one of those ancestry websites, and I was amazed to see just how big some of the families were in 19th and early 20th Century England. Having nine or 10 brothers and sisters was not unusual.Today, families are much smaller. All sorts of reasons have been proffered for that. Matt Ridley argues that families get smaller as people grow wealthier and live longer. In poorer countries, you might have lots of children, knowing that a significant number will not make it through pregnancy, childbirth and early childhood, let alone the teenage years. With the longer safer lives we now have in the west, you can have two or three kids and know that the likelihood is that they will make it safely to adulthood. Stat of the day: in 1850, life expectancy in Britain was 40 for men and 42 for women. Today it is double that. Be grateful you are alive in Britain today - you get to live twice as long.But when parents themselves are asked why they don’t have more children, the most commonly given reason is cost. People ca no’t afford to have more kids. The biggest expense of bringing up a child - government aside (the state takes half of everything you will ever earn) - is somewhere to live. We can no longer afford to buy the large homes our Victorian ancestors built to house their families, so just putting a roof over their head is problem enough. I’ve written endlessly about house prices being a function of cheap, debt-based, fiat money, and it’s quite easy to, therefore, attribute declining family size to fiat.The average cost of raising a child to 18 is now over two hundred grand. Add in school fees and you can double that number. To age 18, you say. Most kids now stay at home well into their 20s. If you look at who has big families today, it is most unusual to see an ordinary middle-class family with five or more kids. It tends to be only the very rich, who can afford it, the very poor, who get state aid and thus can also afford it (especially if housing is covered), or the very religious. On that note, my friend Simon Evans argues, and I’m paraphrasing, that we have smaller families because religion has died. One primary purpose of religion is to get you to reproduce, he suggests. Without religion egging us on, many of us will take the sex, but we might forego the added burden of having to bring up the ensuing children.There’s probably something to all of these explanations. But, whatever the cause, families have got much, much smaller. That is indisputable.My parents divorced when I was just a few months old. I hardly saw my father at all when I was young due to various court rulings, and that led him to set up an organisation called Families Need Fathers. He wrote about his divorce at great length and to considerable acclaim. My mother worked and I went to boarding school. So I never grew up with lots of brothers and sisters or a big family. It’s a life I’ve never known, without wishing to sound sad, one I’ve always wanted and wished for. How I would love to have been one of HE Bates’ Darling Buds of May (I imagine we all would, though tral life is never as idyllic as fiction).I only ever knew one of my grandparents, the other three died either before or shortly after I was born. That’s that life expectancy thing again. So I’m always quite envious when I see, for example, those Asian families with several generations - nanny and grandad, mum and dad and the kids, and perhaps even their kids - all living under the same roof. I know it’s crowded, but it’s also kind of idyllic, particularly if you have a big enough house. When I travelled round Latin America, I adored those large Spanish Colonial homes built around a courtyard. Different parts of the family could occupy different apartments, so they had some privacy, but at the same time they were always close together.I once to listened to an audiobook about willpower and decision-making. I’m afraid I can’t remember the name. (This always happens to me with kindle and audiobooks. You don’t look at the cover every time you open it to remind you, so you forget what it is you are reading or listening to). Nevertheless, the author argued that we make different decisions when we are being monitored. For example, if you believe in God and you believe God is all-seeing, the decisions you make will be informed by that. You will be less likely to sin, for example, if you think God is watching. The same applies to CCTV. Similarly, if you have a large family about you, they monitor and look after you, you are answerable to them, secrets are harder to keep, and that informs the decisions you make. This is, especially, the case when choosing a partner. Old school families will even have made that choice for you - and they will have often looked for different qualities than you might look for. They are bound, for example, to be thinking more about the long-term good of the family, stability, family alliance, the likely durability of the relationship, the sort of characteristics in a partner that might be good for you - that kind of thing - rather than hotness factor, which might be your main priority, certainly as a young person. Broadly speaking, a decision taken by someone with a strong family infrastructure around them , where brother, sister, mum, dad, uncle, aunt, nan and grandad all have some input, and so their cumulative wisdom is all added, is, more often than not, going to be a better decision than one made by somebody with no family around them .As you know, the Great Decline of Britain and Western Europe is something that preoccupies me a great deal. I wonder how it is so many bad decisions seem to be made at every level of society, particularly at the top. And such short term decisions too. (I’m not saying I only make good decisions, by the way. I make bad ones. Lots of them). But I would like to venture a possible explanation: the decline of family. We make more bad decisions without the added wisdom that comes with the infrastructure of family around us. If you extrapolate that from the personal all the way up through society to a national level, the same dynamic is in place.So the tentative conclusion of this article is this: the decline of family has led to worse decision-making at every level of society.How now to explain the decline of family?I blame high house prices. And I blame high house prices on fiat. Therefore: fiat leads to bad decision making at every level of society.And, by the way, I’m sure declining family size also explains the west’s inability to defend itself, its culture and and its history.The Flying Frisby is made possible by you, the reader. Please consider becoming a subscriber. This is a public episode. 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