- The “Subversive” story that’s a tale as old as time
- A big-name triad, a backroom deal and a blockbuster return
- The four-year degree is on life support
- Panic!: Made in America
- What’s easier than an EMP attack?… A helluva way to save Social Security… And more!
“We believe members of Congress have more information than the rest of us, and if they can trade on that information, we should be able to do the same, and now we can,” promises Christian Cooper, portfolio manager at Subversive Capital Advisor.
Last fall, we tipped you off to plans for Subversive to join forces with the data firm Unusual Whales to launch two ETFs keyed to that promise — one named after former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California), and the other after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
Yesterday, both began trading at $25 a share. Both trade this morning slightly above that mark.
In the spring of 2021, Unusual Whales first came on our radar when it noticed that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul had loaded up on Microsoft call options — shortly before MSFT won a juicy Pentagon contract.
Fast-forward to the present… and “NANC will only focus on equities purchased or sold by members of Congress who are registered members of the Democratic Party and their spouses,” says the Financial Times, citing filings with the SEC. Meanwhile, “KRUZ will focus on Republican members and their spouses. Both ETFs carry a 0.75% management fee.” (A little steep, no?)
Each ETF has about 400 holdings. Cooper notes that NANC tends to be “tech-heavy” while KRUZ has a big presence of energy and… gambling? (So much for family values…)
If you want to take a flier on these ETFs, help yourself. You might get some slight outperformance compared with the broad stock market. This week, however, we at Paradigm Press have our eye on a much more lucrative opportunity that’s keyed to backroom dealings in Washington.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
“For decades, the rich and powerful have found ways to anticipate and profit from big changes to the law — and made a fortune for themselves in the process,” observes Paradigm’s VP of publishing Doug Hill.
For instance, ponder a meeting that took place in September 1933 about 25 miles outside of London at a place called Chartwell House.
Chartwell House, as seen from satellite imagery today…
“This is the secret location where three of the best-connected insiders in the history of the world brokered a deal that made millions of dollars,” Doug says.
In attendance were Winston Churchill, the U.K.’s former finance minister and future prime minister… Jimmy Roosevelt, the son of the new U.S. president Franklin D.… and Joe Kennedy, the father of JFK who the following year would be named as the first chairman of the SEC.
The purpose of the meeting? “Kennedy wanted to meet with Churchill to secure the import licenses to distribute whiskey and gin across America,” Doug says.
Mind you, by this time more than 20 states had already ratified the 21st Amendment — repealing Prohibition. It would be only weeks before the required 36 states signed on. “Kennedy wanted to move BEFORE the law changed and millions of dollars flowed into the newly legal alcohol industry.
“Between them, Kennedy, Roosevelt and Churchill had the connections and network to not only know the law was about to change — but to set themselves up to make a KILLING when it did,” Doug goes on.
For his part, Churchill began accumulating stock in U.S. distilleries. And after securing U.S. import rights, Kennedy plowed $118,000 into his new line of business — a grubstake that by 1943 had become $8.5 million.
“That’s a 7,103% return, in a single decade, right through the middle of the Great Depression,” Doug points out. “That gave the Kennedy family the incredible resources that’d propel JFK to the White House a generation later.”
Which brings us to the present opportunity — a government insider-access play far more lucrative than a gimmicky ETF.
Tomorrow, Doug will debrief Paradigm’s own venture-capital veteran James Altucher. James is on the trail of a major government decree that’s transforming a tiny startup into one of America’s fastest-growing companies.
A flood of sales is about to hit this one firm — and you have the potential to jump in before those sales start to hit the bottom line. In fact, if you move quickly enough… James says you have the potential to 56x your money.
James and Doug invite you into the Insider’s Suite for an exclusive briefing tomorrow at 1:00 p.m. EST.
Stocks are slipping today, and the mainstream is attributing it to [spins the wheel] earnings.
“Dow Slides More Than 150 Points on Fears About the Profit Outlook This Year,” says CNBC in a headline that could be written — well, just about anytime during earnings season. (If you’re a newcomer, we never tire of marveling at how the financial media always find a “reason” for every little blip and blurp in the markets.)
So yeah, at last check the Dow is in danger of slipping back below 34,000. The S&P 500 is down more steeply — over three-quarters of a percent — but it continues to hold the line on the technically important 4,100 level. The Nasdaq is down 1.3% and back below 12,000.
Adding to the general anxiety, perhaps, is a Bloomberg story that says used-car prices are back on the rise — a development that “has the potential to dent hopes inflation is headed lower even as the Federal Reserve hikes interest rates.”
Among the big movers today is Google parent Alphabet — down 7.5% after the reception to Bard, its AI competitor to ChatGPT, proved underwhelming.
Precious metals keep licking their wounds from last week — gold at $1,877, silver at $22.39. Crude is up modestly after the Energy Department’s weekly inventory numbers, once again knocking on the door of $78.
Signposts of progress? “Companies are increasingly dropping four-year college requirements for their jobs and putting more emphasis on experience,” reports Washington, D.C’s all-news radio station WTOP.
That’s according to a survey of HR managers by Intelligent.com. During the last year, over half of the companies surveyed have nixed the degree requirement for at least one category of job… and a third have done so for “senior level” positions.
“For so many jobs, it is an arbitrary requirement. And it does eliminate people needlessly who could be great employees,” says career coach Stacie Haller, who helped carry out the survey.
Among the industries where a degree is valued least now? IT, retail, construction, health care, social services.
Sadly, your editor’s former profession of journalism is not on the list — and I think we’re all worse off as a consequence.
According to the Pew Research Center, newsroom employment plunged 26% between 2008–2020. That’s a lot fewer people covering our city councils and county commissions and school boards and especially our state capitals — which are now appallingly under-covered for the amount of influence they wield over our lives.
It’s a simple story: Unless you work at the most elite level, the pay sucks (and the hours frequently suck worse). That’s always been the case — journalism is a labor of love. But no amount of love can overcome the burden of a five-figure student debt.
Once that’s grafted onto the bargain, the whole thing becomes untenable.
By one estimate, more than half the reporters in the country back in the 1950s had (at most) a high-school degree. They learned their skills on the job, mentored by veterans who understood that a tutoring role came with the territory.
There’s no reason it can’t be done that way again. Take it from someone who’s been there: There’s nothing about the work that demands the “rigors” of a four-year degree.
“This surveillance balloon heading toward the center of the country — wow!” says a reader email that came in two or three days ago.
“I remember one time there was a Trojan Horse somewhere. I also remember hearing that a well-placed nuclear blast could knock out a significant amount of the power grid.”
The 5: Meh.
I’m still way more concerned about the American government spying on the American people than I am about the Chinese government spying on the American government.
It’s getting so predictable now, as journalist Matt Taibbi wrote to readers on his Substack page Monday: “One, declare a crisis. Two, spread panic. Three, take emergency measures. If you do this over and over, you end up with permanent crisis, permanent panic, permanent emergency rule. So long as new crises keep evoking unconscious fear and anxiety, the legitimacy of the political establishment is continuously justified.”
That’s because the real “crisis” from the power elite’s point of view is the loss of public faith in government.
Result: Our institutions “are pumping the internet full of tales from the bottomless well of panic narratives they craft, many about foreign subversion or domestic extremism. The idea is to get the public in a place where it will spend days terrified of a foreign balloon flying overhead, or obsessing about the nature of the balloon’s mission, or raging at the government’s impotence against the balloon or whatever…
“In America, the ritual of panic has now become more important than real-world governance. We became a world power building cars, planes, light bulbs. Now we make panics, and tending to them is the first business of state.”
That’s the charitable interpretation. There’s a less charitable interpretation out there — and while I don’t buy it, I can understand why some people do…
As for a nuclear blast at the perfect altitude, perfect latitude and perfect longitude to knock out the power grid nationwide — aka an electromagnetic pulse or EMP — it seems like a lot of effort relative to the payoff.
Wouldn’t smuggling a nuke into the Port of Los Angeles be just as disruptive? And way easier?
And in any event, “the severity of an [EMP] attack is often presented in nearly apocalyptic terms that are simply not supported by the available data,” wrote Jeffrey Lewis at Foreign Policy in 2013.
Assuming a nation-state did try to pull it off, however, the nuclear physicist Gordon Prather once observed that the blast will be such that we’ll have way more to worry about than just the power grid going down.
“Where would Social Security be if there wasn’t a cap on ‘contributions’?” a reader muses.
“The cap for 2023 is $160,200. There are millions of people making more than that amount — all of it untaxed for purposes of Social Security The millionaires in Congress are $14,000 above that limit. How much revenue would no cap generate?
“I know the argument that that money would be better used elsewhere — but remember this is to save Social Security! ‘We’re all in this together.’
“Don’t get a big head when I say I love The 5!”
The 5: As we mentioned most recently last month, it wouldn’t surprise us at all if the debt-ceiling circus concludes later this year with some sort of Social Security reform. Look for some combination of a higher retirement age and tax increases. For their part, Democrats are keen to reimpose payroll tax over $400,000.
But as we’ve said for as long as the Dems have pushed this notion — at least since 2019 — such a move would forever alter the original bargain that came with Social Security. The higher taxes you’d pay during your working years would not translate to higher benefits in retirement.
No longer would it be a social-insurance scheme. It would be just one more welfare giveaway. Helluva way to “save Social Security,” eh?
Best regards,
Dave Gonigam
The 5 Min. Forecast
