Here’s the audio of this week’s Wheels Up! episode with. Bill Meyer over at KMED FM in Medford, OR. We got into “supervised self-driving,” the taxes called “tariffs” and some other things, too:
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Bad, sad news from the Ukrainian front:
‘On the one hand, [US] leaders know that the war is lost and that Ukraine will have to be abandoned. Common sense therefore leads them to want to get out of the war. But on the other hand, the same common sense makes them realise that withdrawal from Ukraine will have dramatic consequences for the Empire that withdrawals from Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan did not have. This is indeed the first American strategic defeat on a global scale.
‘Unaware of the extent of the military defeat, [European leaders] do know, however, that their own economies have been paralysed by the sanctions policy, especially by the disruption of their supply of cheap Russian energy. Cutting the European continent in half economically was an act of suicidal madness.
‘The war is impoverishing the continent. But above all, as a major strategic failure, it is delegitimising leaders who are incapable of leading their countries to victory.
‘US leaders are finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish between internal and external issues. The army fires on boats leaving Venezuela, bombs Iran, enters the centres of Democratic cities in the United States, and sponsors the Israeli air force’s attack on Qatar, where there is a huge American base.
‘Any science fiction reader will recognise in this disturbing list the beginnings of a descent into dystopia, that is, a negative world where power, fragmentation, hierarchy, violence, poverty and perversity intermingle.’ — French historian Emmanuel Todd
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/10/emmanuel-todd-the-defeat-of-the-west-in-its-current-phase.html
I’m proud to be an Americlown
Where at least I’m told I’m free
And I won’t forget the Ukies who died
Who gave that right to me
— Lee Greenwood, Dog Bless the U.S.A.
Trouble in the shady backwaters of the car biz:
‘Hot on the heels of the spectacular implosion of subprime auto lender Tricolor, last month’s mega bankruptcy was that of First Brands, an auto parts supplier with $5.8 billion in outstanding leveraged loan debt.
‘[Tricolor’s] name is a none too subtle reference to the Mexican flag, and appropriately so as the company was almost exclusively targeting illegal aliens as its customers.
‘Now it appears that First Brands had far more liabilities than previously known as a result of extensive rehypothecation of debt. [This has caused] a blistering meltdown, which has seen the company’s debt trade from par to the teens in hours.
‘As the WSJ first reported last week, and investment bank Jefferies confirmed today, the company’s advisers are now “investigating whether receivables may have been pledged as collateral more than once.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/creditors-bankrupt-first-brands-say-billions-simply-vanished-amid-debt-rehypothecation
OY VEY GEVALT! If you’ve read the history of previous booms, panics and crashes, you know that bubbles start to pop when fraud and chicanery are detected in the dark underbelly of the bubble finance mechanism. When all collateral other than T-bills becomes tainted, the bubble implodes.
Or as dear ol’ Uncle Warren Buffett quips, “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” đ
Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter
Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley
And itâs a hard, and itâs a hard, itâs a hard, itâs a hard
And itâs a hard rainâs a-gonna fall
— Bob Dylan, A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
Smells like 2008 to me. The problem becomes we are waiting for the ball to drop and it is impossible to forecast. AI stock has created an unattainable bubble in the Stock Market, but it wonât be Sam Altman or Larry Ellison feeling the effects when it popsâŚit will be Main Street. We canât live everyday anticipating turmoil. It is going to happen when it happens.
Just lost a vote yesterday on a non-profit board. Our investments were in a conservative 30% equities / 70% fixed income mix, which earned a solid 8 percent year to date. But when the broker said a 50/50 mix earned about 20 percent YTD, everyone’s eyes turned green with envy. The vote tally to raise our risk profile was 5-0. I voted ‘present.’ đ
Yep, greed is what gets us into these messes. I play the Stock Market. I have nothing of value in there that I canât afford to lose. I have family members who have their entire fortune tied up in it. It terrifies me, because I know when the SHTF they are going to be knocking on my door.
Same here. Fully invested = huge risk because it can end with a crash. I will tell you my hypothetical scenario: interest rates go up like the 1970s – which no one expects. I do expect because of this chart:
https://i.imgur.com/9Aaabrb.png
With gold through the roof, the Fed now has no option to lower rates – which will only cause gold to go higher. In the late 1970’s gold went to record highs, and so did interest rates – gold pays no interest, but bonds do.
Itâs not turtles, itâs fraud all the way down. The only assets I have in paper were forcibly put there by former employers, so theyâre stuck in IRAâs. Even within those I went self directed, so itâs mostly in cash and gold and silver ETFâs.
I recognized early on that the whole thing was a rigged game, they fatten up the cattle with brewers grain/high yields, then slaughter them when theyâre fat enough. Much easier to pump and dump paper, especially when youâre free to print your own, than to grow a good company selling something people need or want.
Even worse, once they slaughter enough cattle, the cattle will clamor for the communist government to take over, and they will forcibly convert all those retirement âtax deferredâ accounts into government IOUâs.