| By Bill Bonner Wednesday, March 10, 2021 YOUGHAL, IRELAND – This is a wacky week… with more exotic mysteries and marvels of modern money madness. And today, we look at NFTs… non-fungible tokens. By “non-fungible,” they mean they are one-of-a-kind. And by “token,” they mean… well… it’s not necessarily anything at all. Oh, and by the way, the “blockchain” is involved, too. The “token” is placed on the blockchain, where it will be safe and sound; you won’t have to worry about anyone stealing it… if there were anything to steal. Iconic Importance And that is where it gets interesting, because you can tokenize practically anything. You could take a picture of yourself clowning around in the garden, for example, and put it on the blockchain… and there, it will be forever… an NFT… like a wedding ring resting at the bottom of the ocean. Most often, NFTs have some iconic importance. One company, for example, takes an image – of, say, LeBron James dunking a basketball – and turns it into an NFT. Note that there may be millions of photos of LeBron James dunking the very same basketball… even the same photo that became your NFT. But you… and only you… have the tokenized, encrypted, blockchained version with your number on it. | Recommended Link | Trump Tweets About Tech Expert Jeff Brown After he was banned from Twitter, Donald Trump’s retweet of Jeff Brown’s appearance on the Glenn Beck Show disappeared forever. But Jeff Brown’s new presentation explaining his thoughts on the “Great Reset,” and what it means for ordinary Americans, can still be seen for now. | | | | Wild-Eyed Wonders What it is worth is not the subject of today’s Diary. Because the answer to that is obvious – nobody has a clue. Our subject today is merely the wackiness… weirdness… and the wild-eyed wonders of a late-stage Bubble Epoch. Yesterday, for example, the headline news was this, from MarketWatch: Nasdaq soars 3% as falling bond yields fuel tech bounce; Dow back above 32,000 Fall in bond yields? Really? Checking, we find that the 10-year Treasury yield fell from 1.59% on the 8th of March to 1.55% on the 9th. That this 0.04% one-day drop would trigger a 3% rise in the Nasdaq is nutty enough. But when the money goes bad, everything gets a little nutty. Tesla (TSLA) stock, for example, rose nearly 20% yesterday – adding more than $100 billion to the value of the company. Maybe investors are imagining how a 0.04% decline in auto finance rates will trigger millions of news sales! More likely, they’re anticipating all the fancy new automobiles people will buy with the “stimmy” money they’re getting from the feds. Even more likely still… they know that a lot of that stimmy money will be used to buy Tesla stock. [Featured: Urgent briefing about China's next move] Performance Art But back to the NFT… Once you have the LeBron James… NFT… which you might have paid $200,000 for – after all, it’s the only one! – then, it might be cool to destroy it. We got the idea from that great, pull-your-leg artist, Banksy, after his own leg was just pulled by a company calling itself Injective Protocol. In 2018, Banksy famously destroyed one of his own works, “Girl With Balloon.” It was being sold at auction… But as soon as the hammer came down, a shredder built into its commodious frame suddenly ripped it to pieces right in front of the whole assembly, including the woman who had just bid $1.4 million for it. She graciously accepted the now-shredded – and now-cooler-than-ever – painting, renamed by the unidentified Banksy, “Love is in the Bin.” Sotheby’s, the auctioneer, said it “marked the first time a piece of live performance art had been sold at auction.” | Recommended Link | | Get Ready for a Potential Blitz of Gains Next Week See this blitz of gains? They come from a strange phenomenon legendary former hedge fund manager Larry Benedict calls “the 7-day blitz.” This market phenomenon is happening next week… Which is why Larry is hosting a free online webinar tonight at 8 p.m. ET to help you prepare. He will even give you the ticker you need to trade during the event… no strings attached. (By clicking the link, your email address will automatically be added to Larry’s RSVP list.) | | | -- | Morons in Flames Last week, Injective Protocol – a blockchain company, according to CBS News – took a big step forward in the nuttiness of the late Bubble Epoch genre. It bought a Banksy 2006 work entitled “Morons (White)” for $95,000. The (master) piece shows a crowd at an art auction gawking at an ornate frame, in which it is written, “I can’t believe you morons actually buy this sh*t.” Then, Injective Protocol made a digital version of it and turned it into an NFT… before destroying the original Banksy work, calling the destruction “BurntBanksy.” This destruction, they live-streamed on Twitter. And lest the clin d’oeil be missed, the person who set a match to Banksy’s “Morons (White)” painting was wearing a mask… and a shirt with the “Girl With Balloon” on it. Now, in its post-physical, digital form, “Morons (White)” is supposedly worth $380,000. [Featured: ATTN. Gold Owners — Major Announcement] Expensive Amusement But “What is something like that worth?” is a question that could only be asked by someone who is not in on the joke. As we pointed out yesterday, for a company, earnings are a drag… They bring the company down to Earth. And for an NFT, any attachment to the real world threatens to break the spell. A real Banksy has value. Based on the example above, an NFT of it is four times more valuable. But at least the show is amusing. People pay for amusement. And the betting at this stage of La Bubble Epoch is that they will pay more and more – for amusing tokens, both fungible and non-fungible. Shares in Tesla, for example. As we recently covered in these pages, Tesla’s share price cannot be explained as a function of expected earnings. It must have some additional, token value. | Recommended Link | | Stocks Falling? Do This Immediately Americans were living through one of the strongest economies in recent years. And yet, the stock market recently erased multiple year's worth of gains. Americans lost millions. It's rumored that was just Act 1... As you'll see at the end of an urgent public message just released online... What comes next will be a political and financial crisis. | | | -- | Sillier and Sillier As silly as it is, the “silly season” is probably going to get sillier and sillier… as the feds add another $1.9 trillion to last year’s $3 trillion “stimulus”… to be followed by another trillion-dollar infrastructure boondoggle… and perhaps, another few trillion on a Green New Deal. Prices – for NFTs… Tesla… techs… cryptos… SPACs – might go much higher. And all of the silliness – in the art world, as well as the financial world – must be financed by the Federal Reserve’s “printing” of its own fungible tokens, of equally mysterious worth. All we know for sure is that it will take trillions more of these “dollars”… most as electronic tokens, some as paper tokens… to keep the bids coming in. And then… some joker strikes a match, and it all goes up in smoke. Regards, Bill
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MAILBAG Inflation is on dear readers’ minds today… In my 50+ years of adult life, it appears to me that inflation does not uniformly change everything in short order; it rotates through the economy. Over the last two years, some things I’ve seen inflated double digits are beef, gasoline, rent, and home prices, and real estate taxes. This would be about half my living expenses. If my income rises some similar percentage, then my marginal tax bracket will rise, almost doubling. So, inflation is already exceeding 5% and will rotate through the rest of the economy as time goes on, making the 5% look desirable. – Michael N. Maybe we haven’t noticed inflation in our purchases yet, but we WILL in the very near future. Gasoline prices, where I live in Texas, have already gone up from $1.90 to $2.40. But I think that is because of the supply-demand equation, not inflation. But, when the inflation does get to be a problem for the no-nothings in charge, we don’t have to guess what their first inclination will be: price controls. That is always the first weapon of choice for someone with power, and with no economic understanding. – George L. Since we can no longer trust the government to tell us the truth (about anything), I expect inflation to be ravaging the countryside and the lives of Americans like a true viral pandemic, long before the government and its media lapdogs admit that we have a real problem. In other words, when it’s obvious and painful to everyone, politics will no longer allow Jerome Powell or his monetary progeny to speak honestly about it. And yes, I agree completely that it is more than a monetary phenomenon. The coronavirus lockdowns are a very good example. I believe the longer they go on, the more inflationary they will be. Politics can indeed be highly inflationary. – Brien A. Are politics more inflationary than the numbers? How are you protecting your wealth from the inflation Bill sees coming? Write us at feedback@rogueeconomics.com. IN CASE YOU MISSED IT… Brace Yourself Our country is falling apart. And it’s about to get much worse. The siege of the Capitol… the riots and protests… the political division… that’s all nothing compared to what’s coming next – as soon as hours from now. The most important thing you must do, right away, is this… Protect your wealth while you still can. Click here to learn what’s going on – and how you can prepare. 
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