You guessed it – the word for the day is perdition.

December 29, 2025

Bubbles bubbles, everywhere there are bubbles. What to make of the daily record setting highs in gold and especially in silver? Nothing goes in a straight line like silver unless something in the market is broken, and the silver market is most certainly broken.

Today, silver and gold are selling hard, and metals across the board are blinking red with no apparent catalyst. We’ll call it year-end profit taking and an opportunity to start off the New Year with a resolution to buy when the dust settles.

No Place to Hide

There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about the gold price, simply because gold is a hedge against not only the dollar, but all fiat currencies as well as the global central banking system. Our current monetary system was designed to fail. If they’re honest, financial experts will tell you that our debt based monetary system is more like a Ponzi scheme.

The dollar, which was historically backed by gold, was simply a derivative of gold. In the late 1960’s, France began exchanging their dollar holdings and taking delivery of gold from the U.S. Treasury. Because the United States was running large trade deficits, it was only a matter of time before countries like France would exchange the entirety of their surplus dollar reserves for gold and the Treasury would run out of the barbarous relic.

The End of the “Petrodollar”

Today the dollar is an irredeemable Federal Reserve note that can be used to pay debts, both public and private, and up to 2024, the dollar was the only currency that Saudi Arabia would exchange for oil. The demand for dollars, and hence the value, was maintained by the agreement with the Saudis and the dollar became the “petrodollar” for 50 years. That agreement expired in 2024.

We live, work and feed ourselves under the rules of a debt based monetary system. All dollars in our system were borrowed into existence from the commercial banking system. Money is supplied in the economy when you borrow money to buy a car or a house, or when you use a plastic card to buy things you probably don’t need. All of that money is borrowed into existence, it’s literally created out of thin air, and it all carries interest.

Warren Buffet is famous for calling derivatives “financial weapons of mass destruction”. He’s also well known for belittling gold as an investment, he calls it a “magical metal”, but he failed to tell you that the dollar itself is a derivative. Of what you ask? The answer is debt. Bubbles in assets are driven by record debts, both public and private. When more debt is created as a result of government deficit spending, the resulting inflation is to be expected simply because more money is created for all of you to bid up prices on everything you buy.

Are you kidding me? We’re borrowing money to pay the interest on previously borrowed money??

We’ve reached the point where the government has to borrow money just to pay the interest on previously borrowed money. Think about that for a minute. This is what I call the road to financial perdition and we’re standing on the edge of the rim of a volcano about to blow. There is no offramp except with true money which is physical gold and silver. A new monetary regime will likely be a digital derivative backed by gold, but it won’t be a substitute for true money.

Total Household Debt Hits Record $18.59 Trillion in Third Quarter

Total Public Debt is at a record high:

OH MY! The $38 Trillion National Debt is far less than unfunded future debt obligations!

Below is a recap of the Financial Report published by the Cato Institute. Read it and weep for the dollar.

Here are key takeaways from the Financial Report (all figures are in net present value terms over the 75-year horizon) with additional details below:

• Total unfunded obligation: $73.2 trillion.
• Medicare and Social Security are responsible for 100 percent of the unfunded obligation.
• Current policy is unsustainable as debt would exceed 500 percent of GDP by 2098.
• Closing the fiscal gap will require annual deficit reduction of 4.5 percent of GDP, assuming Congress acts immediately.

The US government’s unfunded obligation totals $73.2 trillion. The unfunded obligation is the difference between the present value of projected non‐​interest spending of $433.1 trillion (see Figure 1) and the present value of total receipts of $360.0 trillion over a 75-year period. Present value means that future cash flows have been discounted to adjust for projected interest rates. The discount rate reflects the expected rate of return taxpayers could have received over the next 75 years if they invested the 2023 value in US Treasury bonds.

What’s the Federal Reserve going to do about it?

And therein lies the problem. The dollar is an irredeemable fiat currency borrowed into existence. The bond holder, or debt holder, once paid, can’t take dollars to the U.S. Treasury and convert them to gold. And what if the buyers of government debt, or mortgage-backed commercial debt for that matter, don’t have the money supply or the stomach to buy more treasuries or non-government debt such as commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) to keep the Ponzi going? They buy commodities, farmland or gold.

On December 11th, the Fed began buying debt to the tune of $40 billion per month. How long this “quantitative easing” lasts is anyone’s guess. They can call it anything they want, but gold and silver are telling us they have a problem. The Fed window is where debt goes to die. We’ll leave it at that.

Remember the Bubbles?

Buffet made his fortune buying value stocks. He’s bought banks and in 2020, he threw in the towel by buying a gold miner. Whether it be a value stock such as Apple, or a pure play gamble on future returns in chip manufacturing, he knows that NVIDIA, Apple, and Barrick stockholders can’t all sell at the same time and take their cash to the Treasury window to buy gold. The stock price of NVIDIA is a bet on potential future returns and dividends, not their present value in cash.

Berkshire Hathaway Total Portfolio Value: Approximately $267,334,499,000 as of September 30, 2025. 

• Apple Inc. (AAPL): 22.69% of the portfolio
• American Express Co. (AXP): 18.84%
• Bank of America Corp. (BAC): 10.96%
• Coca-Cola Co. (KO): 9.92%
• Chevron Corp. (CVX): 7.09%

Where are we headed? Remember the word for the day?

The dollar is an irredeemable currency backed by nothing except the full faith and credit of the United States of America. That would be American citizens, the U.S. military, and the most powerful debt-based economy the world has ever seen. The dollar isn’t dead yet, but its reserve status is threatened by China, Russia and the rest of the “BRICS” nations. They’re replacing their holdings of dollars and treasuries with gold and silver as part of their new currency system.

Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com has produced two interviews in the last few weeks that are worth noting. Both are published courtesy of Zerhedge.com and the first interview with financial analyst Edward Dowd of phinancetechnologies.com was posted on December 14th.

We’re at the Beginning of a Credit Destruction Cycle, Ed Dowd Warns

When the Fed buys treasuries, it’s the same thing as credit (or debt if you prefer) destruction:

The second interview with financial writer and precious metals expert Bill Holter (aka Mr. Gold) was posted on December 26th.  At the beginning of December, Mr. Gold warned about the record setting silver prices and said, “It’s pretty clear and pretty obvious that something behind the scenes is breaking.”

“This Is the Finale of the Great Financial Reset”; ‘Dr.Gold’ Warns They’re Gobbling Up All the Physical Supply

UPDATE Added December 31, 2025: A third interview with Martin Armstrong is included below. He has a slightly different take on the future of the dollar, rightly linking the value of the dollar to the productivity of the American people.

“This Is a Perfect Storm”: Martin Armstrong Warns ‘War Is Coming’

Armstrong sees a bull market for gold, silver and other metals for years ahead.  One big reason is shortages in the metals. Armstrong says, “I don’t see these shortages going away. The bull market is more likely to go into 2032.  It will be volatile, and then you’ve got war coming. Once you get into war, prices are going to go up even more. It’s all a mess. This is a perfect storm.”

Below is a post that was published here on April 5th, 2023 when gold closed at $2,011 per ounce. Today’s closing price was down $200 to settle at $4,352, a price correction of 4.41%. Volatility is to be expected after the runup over the past year, and I won’t be making any recommendations except to say that I expect more of the same for gold and especially silver in 2026.

Happy New Year!