Bill Bonner

Bill Bonner

Bill Bonner founded Agora, Inc in 1978. It has since grown into one of the largest independent newsletter publishing companies in the world. He has also written three New York Times bestselling books, Financial Reckoning Day, Empire of Debt and Mobs, Messiahs and Markets. A man of many talents, his entrepreneurial savvy, unique writings, philanthropic undertakings, and preservationist activities have all been recognized and awarded by some of America's most respected authorities.

Articles by Bill Bonner

What Went Wrong With the 21st Century?

Lydian gold stater minted under King Croesus ~540 BC.

POITOU, FRANCE – “So how much did you make last night?” “We made about $15,000,” came the reply from our eldest son, a keen cryptocurrency investor. “Bitcoin briefly pierced the $3,500 mark – an all-time high. The market cap of the entire crypto market shot up, too… with daily trading volume also rising.

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How Dumb Is the Fed?

Crash

Bent and Distorted. POITOU, FRANCE – This morning, we are wondering: How dumb is the Fed? The question was prompted by this comment by former Fed insider Chris Whalen at The Institutional Risk Analyst blog.

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No “Trump Bump” for the Economy

Consumer Confidence Cartoon

POITOU, FRANCE – “Nothing really changes.” Sitting next to us at breakfast, a companion was reading an article written by the No. 2 man in France, Édouard Philippe, in Le Monde. The headline promised to tell us how the country was going to “deblock” itself.

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The Fed Will Blink

Dow Jones Industrial Average Index, Daily, Sep 2016 - May 2017

GUALFIN, ARGENTINA – The Dow rose 174 points on Thursday. And Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said we’d have a new tax system by the end of the year. Animal spirits were restless. But which animals? Dumb oxes? Or wily foxes? Probably both.

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Central Banks Have a $13 Trillion Problem

Dow Jones Industrial Average Index, September 2016 - May 2017

GUALFIN, ARGENTINA – The Dow was down 118 points on Wednesday. It should have been down a lot more. Of course, markets know more than we do. And maybe this market knows something that makes sense of these high prices. What we see are reasons to sell, not reasons to buy.

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Farewell, Welfare State

Otto von Bismarck

The tweet was never sent and never received: “Lying Otto von Bismarck set us up for bankruptcy! What was he thinking? Sad!!” Instead, Mr. Trump said last weekend that, far from trying to curb the promises and cut the costs of the welfare state, he was nearly ready to unveil a plan to replace Obamacare with something better: a plan that would provide “insurance for everybody.”

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Trump’s Trade Catastrophe?

Larry Summers

It is worse than “voodoo economics,” says former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. It is the “economic equivalent of creationism.” Wait a minute – Larry Summers is wrong about almost everything. Could he be right about this?

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A Trade Deal Trump Cannot Improve

Alice Meets Red Queen

BALTIMORE – People can believe whatever they want. But sooner or later, real life intervenes. We just like to see the looks on their faces when it does. By that measure, 2017 may be our best year ever. Rarely have so many people believed so many impossible things.

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How You Become a Crony

Goldman Sachs Group

BALTIMORE – Who’s the biggest winner so far? “Government Sachs!” Fortune magazine reports that the winningest person since Trump’s election is Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

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Fake News? It’s All Fake!

the addled cannibals

BALTIMORE – In January of this year, the Empire Herald reported that a “meth-addled couple” had eaten a homeless man in New York City’s Central Park. Later, Now8News reported that a can of cookie dough had “exploded in a woman’s vagina”; the woman was alleged to be shoplifting.

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The Reign of Bubble Finance

Ross Wilbur

Financialization Genius BALTIMORE – When we left you last time, we were in the middle of describing the crooked hind leg of crony capitalism. We used billionaire businessman Wilbur Ross – Donald Trump’s pick for the Department of Commerce – for illustration purposes. Not that there is anything wrong with Mr. Ross. He plays the game, just as everyone else does. He’s particularly good at it.

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Good Money and Bad Money

Stock Market Cartoons

OUZILLY, France – Last week’s U.S. jobs report came in better than expected. Stocks rose to new records. As we laid out recently, a better jobs picture should lead the Fed to raise rates. This should cause canny investors to dump stocks.

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Too Early for “Inflation Bets”?

Bonds Long Term

After 35 years of waiting… so many false signals… so often deceived… so often disappointed… bond bears gathered on rooftops as though awaiting the Second Coming. Many times, investors have said to themselves, “This is it! This is the end of the Great Bull Market in Bonds!”

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The Fed’s “Hothouse” Is in Danger

Federal Funds Rate

RHINEBECK, New York – It is a beautiful autumnal day here in upstate New York. The trees are red, brown, and yellow. Squirrels hop across the lawn, collecting their nuts. Unseasonably warm the last few days, rain showers are moving in from across the Hudson, driven by a chilly wind.

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The Point of War Is Not to Win

In time, everything goes away. We are confident, for example, that it won’t be too long before the market cracks (please don’t hold us to this forecast, but don’t forget if it turns out to be correct!). U.S. corporate profits are falling. GDP is sinking. Productivity has slumped for the longest period since the 1970s.

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Governments Will Lose Their War on the Markets

DELRAY BEACH, Florida – The markets continue to dawdle. Not much conviction in either direction. We’ve already looked at the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. So let’s move on – using our new lens to look at another of the feds’ fake wars. No war was ever officially declared against the markets.

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Evacuate or Die…

BALTIMORE – Last week, we got a peek at the End of the World. As Hurricane Matthew approached the coast of Florida, a panic set in. Gas stations ran out of fuel. Stores ran out of food. Banks ran out of cash.

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The Dying Middle Class

As expected, Ms. Yellen smiled last week, announcing no change to the Fed’s extraordinary policies. For the last eight years, she has been aiding and abetting the largest theft in history. Thanks to ZIRP (zero-interest-rate policy) and QE (quantitative easing), every year, about $300 billion is transferred from largely middle-class savers to largely better-off speculators, financial asset owners, and the biggest borrowers during that period – corporations and the government.

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Credit Crisis in Waiting

Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton

Clowns in the Coliseum DUBLIN – The presidential debate began long after our bedtime, here in Ireland. So we got up this morning, rubbed our eyes, and watched the highlights. “Lowlights” is perhaps a better way to describe it:

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Politics and Violence

Elizabeth received a strange letter from her congressman. “We have to be on guard against our enemies… and not be afraid to name them.” A brave, forthright stand? But wait, he didn’t name the enemies. That left us wondering: Who are our enemies? Muslims, Jews, Arabs… Russians, Iranians, North Koreans… capitalists, the Deep State, Yankees… liberals, conservatives?

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A Different Candidate?

French for Trump OUZILLY, France – There are two ways you can destroy a country: pull down its money or build up its military. Usually, they go hand in hand – one hand ruining the economic body, the other attacking the soul.

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Great Causes, a Sea of Debt and the 2017 Recession

NORMANDY, FRANCE – We continue our work with the bomb squad. Myth disposal is dangerous work: People love their myths more than they love life itself. They may kill for money. But they die for their religions, their governments, their clans… and their ideas.

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Don’t Bet on Deflation Lasting Forever

Japan’s stock market crashed in 1989. Since then, the no-luck Japanese have had sluggish growth, recession, and on-again/off-again deflation. For more than a quarter-century, the gears of Japan, Inc. have turned slowly. But will it last forever?

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Get Ready for a New Crisis – in Corporate Debt

OUZILLY, France – We’re going back to basics here at the Diary. We’re getting everyone on the same page… learning together… connecting the dots… trying to figure out what is going on. We made a breakthrough when we identified the source of so many of today’s bizarre and grotesque trends. It’s the money – the new post-1971 dollar. This new dollar is green. You can buy things with it.

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Janet Yellen’s Shame

wallet

n honest capitalism, you do what you can to get other people to voluntarily give you money. This usually involves providing goods or services they think are worth the price. You may get a little wild and crazy from time to time, but you are always called to order by your customers.

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Follow the Money

PARIS – It’s back to Europe. Back to school. Back to work. Let’s begin by bringing new readers into the discussion… and by reminding old readers (and ourselves) where we stand. US economic growth: average annual GDP growth over time spans ranging from 120 to 10 years (left hand side) and the 20 year moving average of annual GDP growth since 1967

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Cash Bans and the Next Crisis

Kenneth Rogoff

Money sometimes goes “full politics”. Take poor Kenneth Rogoff at Harvard. He wants a dollar with a voter registration card, a U.S. flag on its windshield, and a handgun in its belt – the kind of money that supports the Establishment and votes for Hillary.

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How is Real Wealth Created?

An Abrupt Drop. Let’s turn back to our regular beat: the U.S. economy and its capital markets. We’ve been warning that the Fed would never make any substantial increase to interest rates. Not willingly, at least. Each time Fed chief Janet Yellen opens her mouth, out comes a hint that more rate hikes might be coming.

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How Does It All End? Part II

Low Rates Forever, Nothing much is happening in the money world. The press reports that traders are hanging loose, wondering what dumb thing the Fed will do next. Rumor has it that it may decide to raise rates in September, or maybe November… or maybe not at all.

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How Does It All End?

In 1900, a survey was done. “What do you see coming?” asked the pollsters. All of those people questioned forecast better times ahead. Machines were just making their debut, but already people saw their potential. You can see some of that optimism on display today in the Paris Metro. In the Montparnasse station is an illustration from the late 1800s of what the artist imagined for the next century.

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Party Like It’s 1999

OUZILLY, France – The farther you get from the big city, or the international press… the closer you get to reality. The myth and claptrap disappears as distance shortens. Imagination gives way to fact. Gone is global warming, for instance. Instead, you find – as we did when we drove to Nova Scotia for a summer holiday in the 1990s – that it will be “75 degrees in Halifax again today… No relief in sight.”

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Why Americans Get Poorer

OUZILLY, France – Both our daughters have now arrived at our place in the French countryside. One brought a grandson, James, now 14 months old. He walks along unsteadily, big blue eyes studying everything around him. He adjusted quickly to the change in time zones. And he has adjusted to the French culture, too – he likes gnawing on a piece of tough local bread. But when she has trouble getting the little boy to sleep, our daughter asks Grandpa for help.

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A Nation of Crooks?

Apples to Oranges. PARIS – The stock market seemed chilled last week, like a corpse waiting for an autopsy. Monday morning, gold was falling in Europe… as investors anticipate a higher dollar. But we’ll return to the markets, the dollar and the absurdities wrought by our money system, tomorrow.

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Unsound Money Has Destroyed the Middle Class

DUBLIN – When you start thinking about what money is and how it works, you face isolation, shunning, and possible incarceration. The subject is so slippery – like a bead of mercury on a granite counter top – you become frustrated… and then… maniacal. You begin talking to yourself, because no one else will listen to you. If you are not careful, you may be locked up among the criminally insane.

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The Real Reason the “Rich Get Richer”

  Time the Taskmaster DUBLIN – “Today’s money,” says economist George Gilder, “tries to cheat time. And you can’t do that.” It may not cheat time, but it cheats far easier marks – consumers, investors, and entrepreneurs.   Tempus fugit – every action…

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The Day They Killed the Dollar

LAS VEGAS – It was 113 degrees outside when we rolled through Baker, California, a few days ago. We drove along in comfort, but our sympathies turned to the poor pilgrims who made their way to California in covered wagons. How they must have suffered!

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Three-Ring Circus

Speculator’s Market LOS ANGELES – Stocks were up again… Whoa! Hold on just a cotton-picking minute. Honest investors are getting out of the stock market. There have been net withdrawals of $80 billion from U.S. equity funds so far this year. Who’s buying?

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Helping Robots Find Jobs…

When the cost of capital goes down to zero, a company with access to that cheap – or even free – money can afford to pay almost an infinite amount of money to get rid of its employees and hire robots.
“Zero-interest-rate policy is really a full robot employment program.”

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Fat People for Trump!

BALTIMORE – One of the delights of being an American is that it is so easy to feel superior to your fellow countrymen. All you have to do is stand up straight and smile. Or if you really need an ego boost, just go to a local supermarket. Better yet, go to a supermarket with a Trump poster in the parking lot.

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Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan Returns to Gold

Under a gold standard, the amount of credit that an economy can support is determined by the economy’s tangible assets, since every credit instrument is ultimately a claim on some tangible asset. […] The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit.

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Planet Debt

She is a low-interest-rate person. She has always been a low-interest-rate person. And I must be honest. I am a low-interest-rate person. If we raise interest rates, and if the dollar starts getting too strong, we’re going to have some very major problems.

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Mooning the Elite

Dow up 269 points. Was that all there was? Is the “Brexit” scare over? We don’t know… but we’re going to take a pause today. Instead of trying to connect the new dots, we’re going to take a look at the old dots we’ve already strung together

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When the Deep State Controls All Wealth

Helicopter money

The feds got out the knife in 1971. They changed the money system itself. They severed the link between gold and the dollar – and between value and price. It was so subtle almost no one objected… and so clever almost no one saw what it really meant. It took us more than 40 years to figure it out.

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The Fed Doomsday Device

Debt is just the flip side of credit. As debt goes bad, credit disappears. And then the system that created so much credit-money will go into reverse, destroying the nation’s money supply.

The money supply (actually, the supply of ready credit) will shrink – suddenly and dramatically. And what should have been a minor, routine pullback in the economy will become a catastrophic panic.

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Janet Yellen’s $200-Trillion Debt Problem

More than $10 trillion of government bonds now trade at negative yields. And another $10 trillion or so worth of U.S. stocks trade well above their long-term average valuations.
And there’s more than $200 trillion of debt in the world. All of this sits on the Fed’s financial applecart. Does Janet Yellen dare upset it?

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A Market Ready to Blow and the Flag of the Conquerors

The U.S. is too big, too varied, too much of everything. You can’t fix a single view of it, even in your mind.
But now our problems, challenges, and discontents are big. They are national and international. We cannot see them. We cannot understand them.

Instead, we draw their measure from the news media – based on a flag that flutters and sags, depending on which way the wind is blowing.

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Stocks Set Another Valuation Record

Believe It Or Not… There Actually Is Some Downside Risk BALTIMORE – Not much action in the stock market last week. A few little steps ahead to over the 18,000 line for the Dow. Then a few little steps back. Currently  the index sits at 17,732.   Th…

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Is It Our Duty to Fight When the Deep State Asks?

  Hero or Traitor?   And it’s one, two, three, What are we fighting for? Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn, Next stop is Vietnam; And it’s five, six, seven, Open up the pearly gates, Well there ain’t no time to wonder why, Whoopee! We’re all gonna di…

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What Congress Really Thinks of Voters

  Battle of Wits  BALTIMORE – On Wednesday, the Dow rose over 18,000, for the first time since April. Hillary is riding high, too. She is a pro. She has the entire Deep State behind her – including almost every crony and zombie in the country – and a…

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Janet Yellen – Backtracking Again

  Muhammad Ali Could Take a Punch BALTIMORE – You had to admit. Muhammad Ali could take a punch. Unlike Donald Trump, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, he was a real war hero. He stood up and faced his enemies on the draft board, rather …

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The Real Reason We Have a Welfare State

  From Subject to Citizen BALTIMORE – June 5th, the Swiss cast their votes and registered their opinions: “No,” they said. We left off yesterday wondering why something for nothing never works. Not as monetary policy. Not as welfare or foreign aid. N…

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Free Money Leaves Everyone Poorer

  Destroying Lives BALTIMORE – A dear reader reminded us of the comment, supposedly made by Groucho Marx: “A free lunch? You can’t afford a free lunch.”   Groucho dispensing valuable advice Photo via imdb.com   He was responding to last week’s Diary …

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Swiss Referendum: The new World of Bread and Circuses

Swiss Referendum Minimum Income

9 out of 10 workers could be permanently replaced by robots. The working classes of Rome were put out of work by “robots,” too – slaves captured in Rome’s many successful conquests. Given the Swiss initiative for the minimum income, welcome to the world of bread and circuses!

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Grasping Parasites and Bernie the Underdog

The system changed in 1971, when President Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard. Since then, the powers that be no longer depended on Congress… or savers…or voters… to raise the funds they needed. What about Bernie Sanders?

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Economy “Improves”, Americans Get Poorer

  No Surprises BALTIMORE – We were not surprised by the big news last week. We saw it coming. Figures from the Conference Board research group revealed productivity sinking for the first time in three decades. We promised to explain why it was such a…

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A Thank You to the Jackasses Running the Economy

  Rolling Back 200 Years of Growth BALTIMORE, Maryland – The press reported mixed financial news on Thursday. House sales, oil, unemployment figures… up, down… the news left investors puzzled.   Two of many symptoms of the much-bewailed “populist bac…

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The Power Elite: Bumbling Incompetents

Is there any smarter group of homo sapiens on the planet? Or in all of history? We’re talking about Fed economists, of course.
Not only did they avoid another Great Depression by bold absurdity…giving the economy more of the one thing of which it clearly had too much – debt. They also carefully monitored the economy’s progress so as to avoid any backsliding into normalcy.

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Time to Raise the White Flag at Gualfin?

  Who Cares What Voters Want? BALTIMORE, Maryland –  There were two newsworthy developments last week, neither of them really important – the first because it won’t happen, the second because it won’t matter. First, the Fed let it be known that it ha…

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Are Investors Idiots?

  Black-and-Blue Crash Alert Flag Let us  begin the week “on message.” The Diary is about money. Today, we’ll stick to the subject.  Old friend Mark Hulbert has done some research on the likelihood of a crash in the stock market.   Ye olde tattered C…

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Revolution at the Ranch

  Alarming News BALTIMORE, Maryland – An alarming email came on Tuesday from our ranch in Argentina: “Bad things going on… We thought we had the originarios problem settled. Not at all. They just invaded the ranch.”   Originarios on the march… Photo …

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How the Deep State’s Cronies Steal From You

The relentless growth of Leviathan: Total Pages of Code of Federal Regulations from 10000 in 1950 to 170000 in 2014. Federal tax rules – from 400 in 1913 to 74,000 in 2012. Aggregate word count of Dodd-Frank regulations doubled.

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Pareto’s Wily Foxes

  Smart Money Fleeing Stocks DUBLIN – The Dow dropped 180 points on Tuesday – or about 1%. And another clever billionaire says he is looking elsewhere for profits. Reuters:   “Activist investor Carl Icahn on Monday said there was a chance the stock m…

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The Long-Buried Secret of Napoleon Bonaparte

  Family Secrets DUBLIN – The smart money is getting out while the gettin’ is still good. That’s the message we get from reading the recent headlines.   Here’s the Financial Times:   Redemptions from stock funds have hit nearly $90 billion this year …

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Trump’s Biggest Deal

A reader asks Bill Bonner “Trump is the only candidate that might have a chance to get us out of the financial and economic mess the United States is in.” Is he really?

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The Fatal Conceit

Bonner shows that Hayek’s Fatal Conceit is valid today: central economic planning is literally impossible – there can be no centrally planned rational economy. Individual planning is distinct from central planning, in that the many individual plans pursued by self-interested individuals mesh and create a spontaneous order.

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Heretical Thoughts and Doing the Unthinkable

  Heresy! NORMANDY, France – The Dow rose 222 points on Tuesday – or just over 1%. But we agree with hedge-fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller: This is not a good time to be a U.S. stock market bull.   Legendary former hedge fund manager Stanley Druck…

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Staying Home on Election Day

  Pretenses and Conceits The markets are eerily quiet… like an angry man with something on his mind and a shotgun in his hand. We will leave them to brood… and return to the spectacle of the U.S. presidential primaries. On display are all the pretens…

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A Trump Landslide in November?

  Objective Reality After spending three weeks with objective truth at the ranch, we are now forced to return to the world of myths, delusions, and claptrap. Yes, we are in Buenos Aires looking at a TV! And there they are… talking about the world of …

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100 Years of Mismanagement

  Lost From the Get-Go There must be some dark corner of Hell warming up for modern, mainstream economists. They helped bring on the worst bubble ever… with their theories of efficient markets and modern portfolio management. They failed to see it fo…

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Fighting Recessions with Hot Air

   “Prepping” for Recession GUALFIN, Argentina – Stocks are going up all over the world. Meanwhile, it appears to us that the U.S. economy is going down. Go figure. For instance, a labor-market index created by Fed economists… and closely watched by …

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Why All Central Planning Is Doomed to Fail

We’re still thinking about how so many smart people came to believe things that aren’t true. Krugman, Stiglitz, Friedman, Summers, Bernanke, Yellen – all seem to have a simpleton’s view of how the world works.

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Argentina – The Times, They Are A-Changing

  Our Argentine “Ranch Rebellion” Is Over… for Now… BUENOS AIRES, Argentina – Not much action on Wall Street yesterday. The Dow sold off slightly. Gold and oil were up a bit. How about here in Argentina? “Everything has changed. Everything.”   Mauric…

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Yes, the Dollar Should Be Backed by Gold…

  A Return to Gold BUENOS AIRES, Argentina ­– “What if you were appointed to head the Fed? In your first week on the job, what would you do?” The question was not exactly serious. Neither was the answer. “We’d call in sick.”   Sorry boys and girls, y…

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A Fatal Flaw in the System

  The Hard Rocks of Real Life BALTIMORE – The Dow dropped 174 points on Thursday, the biggest fall in six weeks. Not the end of the world. Maybe not even the end of this year’s bounce-back bull run. As you’ll recall, stocks sold off at the beginning …

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Going Into Debt to Invest Into Debt…

  Bankers Hate It When You Hold Cash In an extraordinary turn of events, last week we were contacted by our local bankers. Since we were turned down for a mortgage in 1982 (our business finances were thought to be “too shaky”), we have had little tru…

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Rotten to the Core

  Poison Money BALTIMORE – We live in a world of sin and sorrow, infected by a fraudulent democracy, Facebook, and a corrupt money system. Wheezing, weak, and weary from the exertion of trying to appear “normal,” the economy staggers on.   Staggering…

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A Tribute to the Jackass Money System

  A Witless Tool of the Deep State? Finance or politics? We don’t know which is jollier. The Republican presidential primary and Fed monetary policies seem to compete for headlines. Which can be most absurd? Which can be most outrageous? Which can ge…

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Federal Devolution

  Leaning Into the Wind BALTIMORE – During our lifetime, three Fed chiefs have faced a similar challenge. Each occupied the chairman’s seat at a time when “normalization” of interest rates was in order.   Recently, we remembered William McChesney Mar…

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Are We Becoming a Nation of Silver-Haired Crooks?

  A Salutary Effect BALTIMORE – “Ike and Dick Sure to Click” was an exciting election slogan. Their Democratic opponents, Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kefauver, had their snazzy campaign jingle, too: “Adlai and Estes… They’re the Bestes.” Surely, the me…

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