The Rise Of The Degenerate Economist
Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance
I was invited to do an interview with a pretty well-known media outlet a day or two ago, and while emailing them back I was wondering to myself both: one, how the hell did they find my email, and two, what the hell do they want to talk to me for, of all people?
I mean, sure, last year the stocks I was watching for the year absolutely crushed the S&P 500 by more than 50%, but with me one has to assume this is just a flash in the pan. And who honestly cares about what some guy is writing on Substack, right? After all, there are “serious” old, crusty fucks in suits on CNBC from firms with names like Carnegie, Jeeves, and Snotwick Securities, touting riveting securities like Microsoft and talking about credit spreads and bond auctions. Who cares what I have to say?
That is when it dawned on me: Substack is now doing for the financial world what it did for the world of mainstream media news over the last election cycle. Over the last several years, independent journalists and commentators—people like Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Glenn Greenwald, and others—walked away from legacy institutions and built direct relationships with audiences on Substack, pulling massive readership and influence with them.
The audience followed the credibility. Eventually, even the establishment had to acknowledge it, which is why you now see moves like CBS partnering with Bari Weiss’s Free Press, folding independent voices back into the system after Weiss, Substack and company already proved where the real leverage and trust lives in media.
Just like the media world started to bend and then eventually break on the rock that is objective truth in the world of politics—with huge shifts in eyeballs and visitors—the financial world is now experiencing the same thing.
I’m not going to lie: after a couple years of attrition, my subscriber growth has picked up significantly, and in general it just seems like there is renewed interest. And then there’s the most important thing: I’ve actually been right about shit. So has the rest of the “conspiratorial” Austrian school who predicted massive moves in gold, which is now beating the S&P going back to 2000. At the same time, most financial media was backing the wrong horse.
And it isn’t just that a small group of us predicted this year’s insane run-up in metals—it’s that the mainstream media: 1) hardly said a word about it 2) never had any true Austrian economists or...(READ THIS FULL COLUMN 100% FREE HERE).