Firstly, I explained in last weeks article why I’d sold my oil stocks three weeks prior. My view was the oil shock people needed to prepare for was not another spike higher, but a shock to the downside. And here we are. Oil is now back to 2022-2025 levels and despite the flip flopping that is almost certain to come, for now, oil is not the place to be.

The second topic I broached was gold. In Friday’s episode of the show, I explained that the correction in the metals was a textbook 50% retracement, and that despite the extreme pessimism now surrounding gold and silver, I saw the pullback as a major opportunity rather than something to panic over. My view was that the bottom was close. At the time, gold was trading near $4,100. Now it is back above $4,350.

Both calls turned out to be right at the right time. And hopefully, hearing them gave you a clearer insight into how I invest. My strategy is to get the big moves right, not obsess over the minutiae. I am not interested in chasing every little move, and I certainly do not chase consensus. I avoid it like the plague. Instead, I ask the most important question of all: what are we missing and where are we being misled. So now I want to frame gold and oil in the greater context, the financial reset.

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Hey everyone,

This is a call for questions that you may have for me. If you have a question you'd like me to answer on the Parallel Systems show, please leave it in the comments section below. I'll do my best to get through as many as possible. Whilst I can answer most types of questions, for obvious reasons please avoid requesting specific financial advice. If your question is related to financial decisions, framing it more generally will mean it's more likely to be answered.

Take care,

Mike

To leave a question, become a paid subscriber of the Parallel Systems Broadcast, were you can also take part in members only livestreams, receive Mike’s audio newsletters, and exclusive articles.

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As a special thank you to Founding Members, I am now adding an exclusive new benefit: a Monthly Investors’ Mastermind recording, where I share my deeper market analysis, key risks, opportunities I am watching, and companies on my personal watchlist.

This is designed to give Founding Members a monthly market overview from my own contrarian l…

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Today oil spiked +4% on the news Iran had fired ballistic missiles at Israel, with many assuming a new phase of escalation had begun. Within hours, the entire move was erased.

Oil has erased ALL gains made since open, now trading near $94, after Iran announced an END to military operations against Israel

Personally, I wasn’t surprised to see the move fade. Nor am I surprised that the price of oil is down 18% in three weeks. To explain why, I am going to start with a question: How often in finance does a view with near-complete consensus amongst analysts, media commentators and retail investors actually turn out to be correct?

I’ll answer it for you. Somewhere between rarely and never.

Which is why for me, as a contrarian investor, consensus is one of the biggest warning signs of a coming shift. By the time mass participation shows up in any important narrative, you are usually very late in the game. The story has already traveled from insiders, to analysts, to commentators, to the media, and finally to the public. That is normally when I start looking for the trap.

Firstly, we need to remind ourselves that the mainstream media are not genuine purveyors of news. Their job is to drive narratives into the public mind through repetition until the narrative becomes embedded. So when they are all talking about the same thing, in the same way, at the same time, you had better believe you are being misdirected somewhere. The trick is figuring out where, and to what degree

As an investor, when the public, the press and the analysts all line up behind the same investment idea, I become extremely sceptical. Something else is almost certain to happen. Think back to 2025. That was supposed to be the year of Bitcoin. Finally, as if by magic, it had the backing of BlackRock, the ETFs were approved, institutional money was supposedly flooding in, and the President was literally shilling for it. How could it fail?

There was almost total consensus around the narrative. This was not confined to the mainstream media or the usual crypto cheerleaders either. A number of people in the gold and silver space had also become converts, including some I respect, like Luke Gromen, who argued that Bitcoin might even become a new reserve asset for the United States.

That is how big the Bitcoin narrative was early in 2025.

Then what happened? The price collapsed in November and Bitcoin finished the year as the worst-performing major asset of 2025. Right now, halfway through 2026, it is the worst-performing asset class of this year as well. Michael Saylor is selling. Luke Gromen admitted he sold most of his BTC in December 2025, although he said he plans to buy back again later.

So this is what I mean about consensus, and how easily it can wrong-foot people. Especially when the consensus narrative plays directly into their own biases. None of us are immune to this, which is why we need to be doubly careful right now regarding oil.

Case in point, we had a similar situation with the gold and silver miners in January 2026. Given the massive outperformance of metals in 2025, the miners had been on a tear. But what had begun as a fringe idea which only those of us in the precious metals space believe in had, by January 2026, become a crowded space. It was around this point I began warning people to be extra cautious. The returns had already been explosive and I could see my old friend Mr Consensus walking back into the room.

By January, it was almost impossible to find anyone who was not predicting another major leg higher in the miners. Few, if any, were worried about declines at that point. In terms of the investor psychology cycle, I could see we were either at, or very close to, euphoria. That moment when people forget about risk and throw caution to the wind entirely. Even the mainstream media were beginning to talk favorably about metals, which is always a major red flag.

Fast forward to February and we saw one of the worst single-day declines in silver in history. The miners were crushed and right now, many individual companies are down 40–50%. In other words, the exact opposite of what people were expecting to happen is what transpired. Those who were buying close to the top are now trapped, needing a $100 gain in their companies just to break even. And here’s the thing. It is not that people are stupid, or that they have no good reason to believe what they believe. In terms of silver, we know about the huge supply deficits. We know about the geopolitical reasons why supply is likely to be constrained. We understand the inflationary narrative. But if things were that simple, that we just buy at any price and it works out, we would all be rich.

The simple fact is that true contrarianism is about questioning narratives, even our own. We can be right in the long term and wrong in the short term, and as investors, the key is not making the kind of mistakes that damage our long-term wealth accumulation. Buying into a narrative that everyone else is also buying into, at the same time, for the same reasons, is one of the fastest ways to lose money I know of.

Smart investing is about finding asymmetry. That usually means buying something before the crowds are aware of the narrative and before they have all piled into the assets attached to it. Two of my best returning stocks in 2025, for example, were lithium companies.

Lithium, you say? What the hell did lithium do?

Exactly. Most people have no clue, which is the point. The price of lithium had collapsed around 90% in three years, and many of the underlying stocks had been crushed by a similar amount. I saw opportunity there precisely because the narrative was so dead. The consensus view was that there was a huge oversupply of lithium, prices would remain depressed for years, and the whole space was basically uninvestable.

That was consensus too, just at the other end of the spectrum. Instead of everybody believing a sector could only go up, everybody believed it was hopeless. For me, that is often a good sign the bottom is close. In terms of the companies I bought, the first was Arcadium Lithium, which was taken over by Rio Tinto just months after I bought it, leading to a 100% return. The other was Albemarle, which has risen more than 200% since that time. As usual, the ‘experts’ were dead wrong.

My point being that consensus to the downside or consensus to the upside, it does not matter. It is almost always wrong at the point where it matters most. That is why consensus is one of my key indicators as an investor, both for opportunity and for risk.

Which brings us back to oil.

Right now, we are at yet another one of these consensus crossroads, because almost everybody is certain oil is going much higher. $150 a barrel. $200 a barrel. Maybe more. And on the surface, that view makes complete sense. The US has effectively forced the Strait of Hormuz shut for three months now, with 90 days being the key deadline by which supplies shipped prior to the closure are expected to be exhausted.

In terms of the reality of the closure, we can see the daily shipping traffic data, so at least on that front, we know we are not being completely lied to. They really have collapsed the flow of oil out of the Strait, along with a whole host of other critical resources, including phosphate and urea.

Next we have inventories, and this is where things become far more murky, because you and I cannot verify how much oil nations are actually holding. We are simply told. If we accept the official story, we are now hitting critically low levels across numerous countries. Again, that makes complete sense given what we know about the Strait. But can we be sure the numbers we’re being given are legitimate? The truth is, we actually have no way of knowing that.

What do know they lie to us about numbers all the time.

Jobs data, inflation numbers, crime statistics, polling, growth figures — pretty much everything they can lie about, they do. So when the same people who have spent years cooking the books and lying to me suddenly tell me inventories are critically low and prices are about to explode higher, I do not immediately say, “Well, that settles it then.” I ask what they want me to believe, who benefits from me believing it, and what I am not supposed to be looking at.

For those who think this is all a little bit too much, don’t forget that a few years ago we were told the hospitals were overflowing. We were told they were packed with sick and dying people infected with a deadly virus. We were shown charts, models, experts, daily press conferences and constant terrifying headlines. This wasn’t location-specific either. Literally every major G20 nation played along on such a scale it still beggars belief.

I saw first hand the reality of that data following a somewhat humorous occurrence involving my friends father, who was so terrified of covid that, after a night of heavy whisky drinking, he convinced himself his hangover was the deadly disease and that he was about to die. So he called himself an ambulance for himself at work and off he went to the allegedly overflowing hospital, having said the magic C word. So busy was this hospital that, after confirming to him that no, he was not dying, he was simply hungover, they told him: “But just to make sure, we’ll keep you in for a few days.”

Yes, my friends. The hospital was literally so empty that he was allowed to just hang around there for days. When I went to pick him up after his four-day stay, it felt like something out of a horror film. The abandoned hospital. This was after they had turned away anyone and everyone who was not ill with “Covid”, while happily allowing the man with pretend Covid to enjoy a four-day hotel stay! Clearly, this was part of that specific hospital’s data-fudging operation.

And of course, this was not some isolated experience. Videos were surfacing everywhere showing the same empty hospital phenomenon, while the media and medical establishment were telling the public the precise opposite. We were told the hospitals were overflowing and that people were dying in car parks because there was just so much…damn…covid. The reality was empty wards and doctors planning their next TikTok dance.

My point is simple. When you control the data and the media, you can make reality look however the hell you want. You can impress a narrative upon the world. You can create the appearance of crisis through theater, charts, modelling, press conferences, expert panels and official statements, while the actual reality sits somewhere else entirely. Now, the Strait of Hormuz closure is clearly real. They have closed it. That much we know. But that is the only part we know for certain. Everything else is a hall of mirrors.

So let’s look at what we might be missing in the oil story, and why the consensus view of higher prices is not the safe bet people think it is. In fact, it could well be that people are preparing for the wrong shock entirely.

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Over the past 12 months, the South Korean stock market—the KOSPI—has risen 210%. To put that into context, it would have taken roughly 11.5 years invested in the German stock market, more than 20 years in China’s, and over 30 years in Britain’s, to achieve the same returns the KOSPI has delivered in a single year.

So what exactly is this silent Korean economic miracle which has ballooned the South Korean index to over $4 Trillion dollars in market cap? The reason for the KOSPI’s mania comes down to two single companies sitting directly inside America’s AI bubble: Samsung and SK Hynix.

Both are major suppliers of the memory chips needed for AI data centres, especially high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, which is used alongside advanced GPUs to train and run large AI models. SK Hynix is one of NVIDIA’s key suppliers, with demand for its HBM and other memory products being driven by the AI data centre boom.

Together, Samsung and SK Hynix make up almost 60% of the entire KOSPI, which has 800 companies in the index! That means the South Korean stock market is now even more hyper-concentrated than the S&P 500, with the whole edifice now almost entirely dependent on the broader AI mania. Essentially, the KOSPI is a ponzi sat within a ponzi: a stock market bubble built on a semiconductor bubble, built on the US data-centre bubble, built on the greatest debt bubble in human history.

Samsung alone is up over 450% in just 12 months. Foreign capital, domestic institutions, retail traders, and ordinary citizens have all piled into the index in a greed driven feeding frenzy trying to capture some of the outsized returns. This doesn’t end well, and the signs are there that the bubble is approaching its pin. Something we can see in the erratic daily volatility being thrown off by the KOSPI.

As we know, the final stage of all bubbles is delusion — the point where greed overwhelms all sense of proportion. That is exactly what we are now seeing in South Korea. What comes next is exhaustion: the moment when no new buyers can be found, and the most recent buyers become panic sellers.

So what makes me think we are there?

Well, how about this: Koreans are now cancelling life-insurance policies at a loss to buy semiconductor stocks. Savings-bank deposits have fallen below 100 trillion won for the first time in four years. Commercial bank time deposits have dropped another 12 trillion won since February, while margin debt on Korean equities has climbed 500% in five years. Domestic investors have already poured roughly $25.3 billion into South Korean equities this year alone.

Like any bubble, the leverage has created violent upside volatility, but that works both ways. When the reversal comes, the same high-octane buying that pushed prices vertically higher will flip into forced selling, panic, and liquidation, smashing prices violently lower.

Retirement assets are rapidly concentrating in “Sam-Nix” — Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix — as individual investors chase higher returns. Combined retirement pension reserves at the country’s five largest securities firms surged to 108 trillion won (approximately $72.1 billion), with the DC plan segment, where participants direct their own investments, jumping 56% year-over-year. While AI-driven demand for high-bandwidth memory has fueled the rally, the recent whiplash in chip stocks and the emergence of bond-blended ETFs that skirt risk-asset limits are amplifying the danger for retirement savers. Financial advisors warn that as retirement nears, the priority should shift from short-term gains to whether a portfolio can withstand a market shock without forcing retirees to cut living expenses.

This is classic mania, and like all manias, it ends in destruction. The fact this one is so intimately connected to the broader AI bubble is crucial, because when the KOSPI pops, the crisis will not remain contained in Korea. The underlying stocks driving the move are not some isolated Korean story; they are core components of the global AI trade itself.

If the KOSPI falls, the S&P 500 falls. The same narrative, the same capital flows, the same data centre buildout, and the same absurd valuations are holding both markets together. Korea may be the most extreme expression of the bubble, but America is the mothership. When one breaks, the other will follow.

The last time a major market moved as violently upwards as the KOSPI, in such a short space of time, was the NASDAQ going into 2000. What followed was an 80% collapse and a lost decade for technology stocks. Prior to this, we had Japan’s Nikkei bubble, in which the Japanese stock market index was rising 30–40% annually, year after year, based off of a similar frenzy built around a narrative related to technology, economic supremacy, and limitless growth.

When that bubble burst, the Nikkei fell 80%, Japan’s debt was taken to 230% of GDP, and the index took a gruelling 34 years to break even with its peak valuation in 1990. In truth, neither the S&P 500 nor the Nikkei ever truly regained their old all-time highs. Valued in gold, both are still down 80–90% from their previous all time highs. What actually happened is that inflation finally caught up and papered over the collapse through nominal returns.

I am certain the KOSPI is heading for the same fate. As is the S&P. Both are telling the same story. Hyper-concentration in a handful of stocks is one of the clearest signs of a bubble top. And the recent S&P 500 “all-time high” was achieved with some of the narrowest participation in market history, meaning the index is being dragged higher by a tiny group of mega-cap names while the broader market underneath is already unraveling.

Clearly, we are in the late stages of a fiat hyperbubble. One created through 5,000-year-low interest rates, obscene debt expansion, a series of artificial crises used to justify currency creation, and a massive dose of fraud and narrative crafting to explain the sudden emergence of silly numbers. As always, the excuse is a new “miracle” technology that supposedly changes everything, justifies any valuation, and makes all previous rules irrelevant.

We’re at the proverbial: ‘But this time is different, guv’nor’ stage.

Is it really? Right now we have NVIDIA “valued” at 16% of U.S. GDP. That alone tells you how cooked the markets really are, and how absurd the narrative has become. The bubble is now so large that when it bursts, it will drag the global economy into the gutter. Around 95% of their revenue is now tied to the data-centre rollout. Before this, it was mostly crypto mining equipment.

Of course, both are crucial to building out the mark-of-the-beast financial system they are seeking to implement once they enact a controlled demolition of the current debt Ponzi. But this can only be done once the infrastructure for the replacement system is in place, which explains the desperate scramble to build out the technocracy at breakneck speed.

The Technocracy Complex

This is why companies like NVIDIA, Tesla, Microsoft, Samsung, AMD, Palantir, Oracle, Apple, and the soon to be listed SpaceX — which I will collectively refer to as the technocracy complex — need constantly expanding revenues. This is the only way to stop the entire fake financial structure from unwinding.

In truth, these revenues should be called public grants, because they ultimately emanate from the state, paid for by you, the taxpayer. Not only through taxation, government contracts, and printed currency that gets added to the ‘national debt’, but also through forced participation via your pension, which is automatically funneled into the companies share price.

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Welcome to our Members Q&A, where I answer questions submitted by you — the Parallel Systems community. As always, Part 1 is available for free subscribers, while Part 2 is exclusive to paid members.

We had some great questions as always related to precious metals, wealth preservation and living through a financial reset. If you’d like to sub…

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“It is the very error of the moon,
She comes more near the earth than she was wont.
And makes men mad.”
(Othello, Act V, Scene ii)

I recently wrote an article on the Grand Solar Minimum, but it almost wasn’t released, given that even I struggle to fully comprehend the scale of the lie we are being told around our climate, and, more to the point, its implications. It is one thing to suspect that the public is being misled. It is another thing entirely to sit with the full weight of what that means: that whole populations may be being prepared for the wrong crisis, while the real one unfolds above our heads, in the behavior of the Sun, and the great cycles that govern life on Earth. Once we understand the kinds of challenges past Grand Solar Minimums brought with them, the picture becomes even more bleak, and suddenly things start to fall neatly into place.

The intentional destruction of our food and energy systems in the name of combating “climate change” takes on a much darker hue when viewed through this lens. I do not think anyone reading this believes we are looking at a simple error, a scientific misunderstanding, or a failure of policy. We are looking at an intelligently designed deception — one intended to break civilization apart and, in the process, potentially wipe out vast swathes of humanity.

That is a difficult thing for many people to comprehend. It’s so great, your mind instantly tries to reject it. And yet, at least within my community, the piece was extremely well received. In the days after publication, many people reached out to thank me for focusing on the solar cycle and to share their own thoughts, concerns, and observations about the GSM. I think it resonated because it gave people a framework for understanding so much of what they have already lived through. The depopulation agenda. The control of food, water, and energy. Weather modification. Financial resets. All of it suddenly viewed through the lens of an inescapable natural cycle.

If correct, it opens the door to the realization that perhaps an entire field of knowledge has been lost — one that needs to be explored if we are to understand how we got here, and what may be coming next. I am certainly not claiming to be an expert in this field. But in this article, I want to share some of the things I have learned over the years in relation to these cycles, to help explain why I take them seriously — not just as an investor, but as a human being trying to make sense of the times we are living through.

The Knowledge We Were Taught to Forget

I did not come to this subject recently. For years, I have been concerned with the solar cycle — not only the Grand Solar Minimum, but the smaller 11-year solar cycle. What interests me is not simply whether temperatures rise or fall. It is the wider context in terms of the effect of solar activity on agriculture, finance, markets, social mood, human behavior, conflict, and the rise and fall of civilizations.

For most of human history, the Sun, Moon, planets, seasons, eclipses, and cycles were not viewed as unknowable and unintelligent matter. They were our planets governors. From ancient Babylon to the Renaissance Italy, astrologers were highly sought after by the priestly class, not because they were fortune-telling entertainers, but because they were trained interpreters of the great sky clock above us. Perhaps because I spent my early adulthood studying ancient religions and belief systems, it was never difficult for me to accept that the planets above us — along with the Sun and the Moon — have a significant effect on life here on Earth, far beyond the parts that can be easily measured by science.

The modern world, however, has been trained to sneer at such ideas. We are taught to view the subject of astrology as primitive or ridiculous, as though it is absurd to suggest that the Sun — the source of all life on Earth, the driver of heat, light, climate, seasons, crops, oceans, atmosphere, and biological rhythms — might also influence human beings and human behavior. Along with the rest of that vast expanse above us. But let’s be clear, we are the anomaly. No civilization before ours looked up at the sky and declared the Sun or the Moon or the planets largely irrelevant to life here on Earth. It's my view that the truth about these cycles and their impacts is being censored from us, because knowledge is power, as the saying goes. Indeed, the deception around the Grand Solar Minimum shows us just how much power resides in deceptions related to the cosmos.

Many of you will be aware that modern psychology is nothing more than a secular reinterpretation of Greek and Roman mythology. Those myths were not merely entertainment. They were maps of human nature. They described desire, rage, pride, fear, courage, temptation, madness, love, discipline, ambition, destruction, renewal, and the forces that move through both individuals and civilizations. In this way the ancients did not see the sky above us as dead space. Nor did they associate their gods with planets because they were stupid, or because they literally thought a man with a spear was sitting on Mars or Neptune. They understood the planets as energetic forces moving through creation.

Mars, for example, was not merely a red light in the sky. Mars represented war, aggression, courage, blood, iron, conquest, and masculine force. Venus was not merely a bright star-like object near the horizon. Venus represented beauty, desire, fertility, attraction, pleasure, temptation, and union. Saturn represented time, limitation, discipline, decay, harvest, judgement, and death.

In other words, the ancients looked at the heavens and saw a living pattern. They believed the same forces visible above us were also moving through nature and through the inner life of man. The planets were not separate from earthly life. They were part of the great clock above, showing when certain energies were strengthening, or weakening in the world below. That is why mythology, astrology, psychology, agriculture, metallurgy, medicine, and religion were once far more connected than they are today. The ancients were not trying to separate everything into dead categories. They were trying to understand the whole pattern.

Modernity shattered this way of seeing. In its place came scientism: the belief that man is separate from nature, God doesn’t exist (less man create him), and the sum of what’s ‘real’ is what can be measured, and controllable. This is dead materialism — a worldview with no soul. The logical endpoint of this is man transformed from divinely created being, in the image of God, to field cattle. Expendable, and ultimately replaceable by AI or post humanoid robots.

Of course, this is merely the narrative we are being given — one that has been culturally engineered since the early 1900s. A century of industrialized killing, spiritual destruction, and descent into complete materialism as the guiding principle of mankind. But it has become increasingly obvious to many of us that while we were taught to forget ancient wisdom and accept the narrative of man as beast, the parasite class retained much of the old knowledge. They did not discard it. They preserve it, and now weaponize it against the masses, who have been taught to believe it was all superstition — while being led, willingly, toward their own annihilation.

Gold, Silver, and the Planetary Metals

To better understand the kind of knowledge the ancients possessed, one need look no further than their understanding of the correspondence between metals and planets. The Sun was associated with gold. The Moon with silver. Mars with iron. Venus with copper. These were not random symbolic pairings pulled from thin air. They reflected a worldview in which matter, mind, nature, and the heavens were bound together. Take gold. The ancients associated it with the Sun thousands of years before modern science told us that gold is forged in the death of stars. Supposedly, they had no knowledge of astrophysics or supernovae, and no way of knowing how gold came to Earth. And yet they placed gold under the sign of the Sun: the immortal metal, incorruptible, radiant, untarnished, and solar in every quality.

Venus, of course, embodied the divine feminine — both as a planet and as the goddess herself. The metal ascribed to Venus was copper, an association that goes back thousands of years. And guess what “the science” discovered in the mid-1900s? Women show significantly higher serum copper levels than men, largely because oestrogen increases ceruloplasmin, the main copper-carrying protein in the blood. Copper also rises during pregnancy. So once again, we find the ancient understanding of planets, metals, and their correspondence with mankind to be advanced in ways we can barely grasp, with copper sitting in direct relationship to fertility, femininity, hormones, and the biological rhythms of the body.

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Hey everyone,

With everything that’s going on I am planning another Q&A session to be recorded this weekend, so please let me know in the comments section below if you have a question you’d like me to answer on the show. I'll do my best to get through as many as possible. Whilst I can answer most types of questions, for obvious reasons please avoid requesting specific financial advice. If your question is related to financial decisions, framing it more generally will mean it's more likely to be answered.

Take care,

Mike

To leave a question, become a paid subscriber of the Parallel Systems Broadcast, were you can also take part in members only livestreams, receive Mike’s audio newsletters, and exclusive articles.

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Right now, I am typing with muddy fingers after two weeks spent getting the farm ready for summer. My wife has handled most of the planting, whilst I have been focused on Operation Woodstore — a plan to stack four years’ worth of firewood by the end of 2026. I thought I was in good shape going into this year, thinking I had at least two and a half years’ worth already put away. Then the winter hit, and it hit hard. It was a bitterly cold season, the worst I have lived through, and we burned through the stores far faster than I expected. Meanwhile, my garden became a skating rink—one that didn’t melt for almost four months!

Watching that happen brought one subject immediately back to mind: the Grand Solar Minimum. I have been discussing its importance for years, but it is one thing to write about cycles in the abstract and another to watch it unfold in your lifetime. Whether that’s a financial reset, the collapse of the global economy, or a major solar event like the Grand Solar Minimum. And now, as we move toward 2030, it appears the shift may already be underway. That is certainly the opinion of Professor Valentina Zharkova, the world’s foremost expert on Solar Minimum and past guest on my podcast.

In her view, we are now in the first stage of what will become a mini ice age, caused by the GSM. It should last until around 2050, with each year becoming progressively colder from here on out. During this period, food growing seasons across much of the Northern Hemisphere are likely to shorten by one to two months, whilst cosmic radiation, volcanic activity, earthquakes, and ozone depletion all intensify alongside it. Fun times!

Whilst this might sound apocalyptic, we shouldn't forget, that it is a natural cycle, and one humanity has lived through many times before. Roughly every 350 years, the sun enters a much deeper and longer decline in activity, marked by an extreme drop in sunspots. That is very different from the normal 11-year solar cycle, which rises and falls between a solar minimum and a solar maximum. A Grand Solar Minimum is what happens when that rhythm breaks down for decades and solar activity remains abnormally weak throughout.

What has made this harder to recognize is that we have only just come off the peak of the ordinary 11-year cycle, in which the sun became more active, which is why we saw those dramatic displays of northern lights across so many countries. But that spectacle masked the more important reality: the underlying trend is toward cooling, not warming. At the depths of the Grand Solar Minimum, even the normal 11 year cycle produces next to no sunspots. This prolonged weakness can last for 30 to 50 years.

Historically, these are periods of great hardship: famine, disease, war, resource hoarding and financial disaster. That these are all relevant topics already, in 2026, is no accident. Heading into the Oort Minimum in the mid-1300s, Europe experienced the collapse of its banking system, with the Bardi and Peruzzi banks collapsing in quick succession. To put that into context, it would be like the BIS, the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, and the ECB all folding simultaneously. It was a financial catastrophe the likes of which the world had never seen, and has not been seen since.

Then temperatures plummeted and crops began to fail. Famines became widespread, destroying the immune systems of the populace right around the time the Black Death suddenly appeared. Fast forward 50 years and 50% of the European population was dead. Kind of strange how the greatest financial crisis in history occurred right before a mass depopulation event, spurred on by an unstoppable natural event in the GSM.

Accident? Based on my own study of the historical record, I believe there is clear evidence that what took place during the 1300’s was a pre-planned reset. Which perhaps makes more sense when you consider how, coming out of that period, the land and property of the masses — with entire families wiped out by plague — had been gobbled up by a small cabal of oligarchs, who somehow survived the mass kill-off. That the financial disaster and depopulation took place during a Grand Solar Minimum is something worth thinking about.

The Black Death was so extreme that it’s surprising even to scientists who are familiar with the general details. The epidemic killed 30 to 50 percent of the entire population of Europe. Between 75 and 200 million people died in a few years’ time, starting in 1348 when the plague reached London. The pandemic moved fast: It often killed a host within days of their first developing the high fever, the telltale rash, and the repellent buboes or swellings in the armpits and groin, which turned black and burst, expelling pus and bacteria. The disease spread through families, houses, villages, towns, and cities with terrifying speed and staggering mortality. This tragedy launched a socioeconomic and evolutionary transformation in Europe that changed the course of history.

— New American Scientist, The Bright Side of the Black Death

A financial collapse. Depopulation. Mass asset seizure. A Grand Solar Minimum. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Indeed, given what we are witnessing in our own lifetime, the question must be asked: could it be that these episodes of financial collapse — when the system is gutted and property is swept upward to the banking elites — are deliberately timed to coincide with major solar events? Celestial windows in which the old order can be collapsed, the plebeians below looted and killed, and power consolidated over the remnants. Is that what we are living through now?

Turning our attention back to the Oort Minimum, the official narrative has long held that the great Florentine banks — above all, the Bardi and Peruzzi — fell because of bad loans to Edward III. But that story is a cover-up, and there is ample evidence to show it. More recent historical work points instead to something far more sinister: an intentional implosion of the world’s largest banks and a controlled demolition of the old order, orchestrated by Venice. In other words, it was an act of terrible subterfuge — a power and wealth grab enacted through the premeditated collapse of Europe’s largest banking houses. That this attack on humanity was aligned with the Grand Solar Minimum is, to me, an indicator of intelligent design. The timing is the tell. Financial collapse, famine, plague, mass death, and an asset transfer all converged at once. This is better understood if one knows something of the geostrategy of the time period.

Florence may have appeared to be the financial center of the age — the New York of the fourteenth century, home to the great visible banking houses. But Venice was the real command center. Home to the most parasitical oligarchs who made their money manipulating kings, emperors, and rival bankers alike through a tight-knit financial conspiracy that rigged markets, controlled the flow of gold and silver bullion, and dominated the issuance of credit. From roughly 1275 to 1350, Venetian finance sat at the heart of a vast international bubble in currency speculation. And when that bubble was intentionally burst in the 1340s, it did not merely wipe out a few overextended lenders. It bankrupted Florence, shattered the wider economies of Europe and the Mediterranean, and helped usher in one of the greatest periods of catastrophe in recorded history.

The European credit system did not just freeze up, it collapsed — causing a cascade of defaults and mass bankruptcy. Historians like Fernand Braudel have demonstrated that the Venetian oligarchs deliberately brought down the financial order, and used the crisis to remake the world according to their own luciferian ideology. This included intervening in foreign politics to block the rise of strong territorial states and sovereign national governments.

Venice had deliberately ensnared all the surrounding subject economies, including the German economy, for her own profit; she drew her living from them, preventing them from acting freely. . . . The Fourteenth-century saw the creation of such a powerful monopoly to the advantage of the city-states of Italy . . . that the embryo territorial states like England, France and Spain necessarily suffered the consequences.

—Ferdinand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism

What was being crushed, then, was not just finance, but the possibility of a rival political model altogether. The aim was to enshrine their model of forced scarcity and perpetual war, especially amongst Europe’s ruling structures, so they could indebt them, and eventually take them over. Of course, usury would be paired with blackmail, intrigue, and man-made crisis.

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Welcome to our Members Q&A, where I answer questions submitted by you — the Parallel Systems community. As always, Part 1 is available for free subscribers, while Part 2 is exclusive to paid members.

We had some great questions this week related to precious metals, wealth preservation and living through a financial reset. If you’d like to sub…

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Hey everyone,

With everything that’s going on I am planning another Q&A session to be recorded this weekend, so please let me know in the comments section below if you have a question you’d like me to answer on the show. I'll do my best to get through as many as possible. Whilst I can answer most types of questions, for obvious reasons please avoid requesting specific financial advice. If your question is related to financial decisions, framing it more generally will mean it's more likely to be answered.

Take care,

Mike

To leave a question, become a paid subscriber of the Parallel Systems Broadcast, were you can also take part in members only livestreams, receive Mike’s audio newsletters, and exclusive articles.

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Right now, there’s a lot of talk about the fall in gold and silver, but it’s a misdirection. The real story is actually far better for metals holders than they’re making out, and far worse for the debt ponzi than they’re willing to admit. Because in recent weeks, we’ve seen everything fall: metals, stocks, bonds, commodities—everything except energy, for obvious reasons. So far as I can tell, few people are offering a coherent explanation for why this is happening, especially when it comes to gold. The main criticism people have is that gold isn’t responding positively to the geopolitical turmoil unfolding in the Middle East, even though it’s supposedly a safe haven.

The FT even went so far as to say gold is no longer working! Titling a recent article on gold ‘Tumbling gold price puts ‘haven’ status in doubt’. And no, they didn’t make one on Uranium, Copper, Bitcoin or Bonds questioning why they too—are selling off hard. Ask the experts in the metals space and you will be told for the 106,500,000,022nd time….the drop in miners and metals is pure price manipulation! Others argue the metals were in a bubble and it has just burst.

All are wrong.

To begin with, gold hasn’t failed in its duty to act as a safe haven. People seem to have forgotten that it was already up 70% in 2025, and another 25% in 2026, before the recent pullback. For a pet rock that supposedly has no utility, that’s quite the feat. Of course, the reality is that this is the financial reset in motion, and as it speeds up, so too does the fiat price increase of gold. As does the volatility.

As for the price manipulation argument, it’s not really worth discussing because everyone already knows the markets are manipulated. But if price manipulation alone could explain gold and silver’s recent declines, then how do we make sense of gold rising 100%, and silver over 200%, in the 12 months before that? Did they fall asleep at the wheel? Did they let it run up, only to crush it again? It doesn’t make sense.

Yes, the markets are manipulated, but manipulation does not mean total control. And a lot of people use it as a cover for their own bad decisions, poor risk management, or the crappy advice they gave their audience. Put simply, if you truly believe the market is rigged, then your approach should reflect that reality. You should be more cautious, not less. And I am talking about leveraged positions here. If you’re speculating in miners in a market you know is manipulated, then managing downside risk is essential.

Especially heading into a financial reset when at any point, they could pull the plug. And right now, we’re seeing a lot of signs that this financial Titanic is already taking on water. Hence why I wanted to write this article.

In the words of Bob Dylan:

Come gather ‘round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
And you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’

So back to gold.

Clearly the assertion that it failed to respond to the Iran crisis is incorrect, as is the excuse of price manipulation. Gold had already responded to Iran—it sniffed out the crisis long before it even arrived. This is nothing new, it’s what gold does. As to why this happens, I believe it’s because the men behind the curtain always know what’s next in the script. The biggest financial players load up ahead of time, so it’s there when they need it. Right now, they need it.

Gold behaved the exact same way going into the 2008 GFC: it rose 35% in 2007 and another 25% in 2008, and then fell 23% in the crash that followed. To be properly protected, you had to be in gold before the crisis, given that during a liquidity squeeze, everything falls together. That is actually one of the reasons they like to own gold, as we shall see.

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When it comes to making sense of the grand theater of global geopolitics, Iran serves as an excellent case study. This is especially important given the chaos that is taking place the Middle East right now, and the impact this is going to have on global energy production and food. But first, we need to discard the simplistic narratives fed to us the mainstream media—about Iran ‘the adversary of the West’. The false dichotomies that even the alt-media are pushing of East versus West, the U.S. Empire versus BRICS. By this point, the multi-polar narrative should be recognized for what it is: a scam. Another season in a scripted reality TV show.

There’s a term for this kind of deceptive fakery from the pro wrestling world, coined back in the 1980s. This was a time before the internet, when many people genuinely did believe the pageantry and rivalries they were witnessing on TV and at shows were real—yes, people really were that gullible. It’s called Kayfabe. And to maintain it, pro wrestlers would literally stay in character in public, even refusing to be seen near their on-screen rivals, just in case it gave the game away. The idea that much of geopolitics is Kayfabe sounds absurd. But Iran’s history proves just that. In my opinion it’s impossible to make sense of what is happening in the Middle East, without this history I am going to share with you.

The nation’s capture began in 1901 with the creation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (a forerunner to BP), which was granted a 60-year lease to explore, drill, and extract oil. While the full extent of Iran’s reserves was unknown at the time, they would prove to be among the largest in the world, cementing the nation’s importance on the global chessboard. Historically a powerhouse as the home of the Persian Empire, the nation still bore the name Persia in the early 1900s. Soon, it would become Iran—a prized asset valued for its oil.

Initially, the spoils were shared between the oil companies and the ruling dynasty, but such deals rarely endure. While many are familiar with the last Shah of Iran, it was his father who was first installed in 1925. A military general, he overthrew the ruling Qajar dynasty—the very dynasty that had made the original deal with British entrepreneur William Knox D’Arcy to create the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Reza Shah’s coup was staged with MI6 backing after the Qajars attempted to renegotiate the original terms to secure a greater share of the oil profits.

The Rothschilds and the Capture of Iran

Behind D’Arcy stood the Rothschild family. His fortune was nearly depleted by the exorbitant exploration costs, and by 1905, he was on the verge of abandoning the project. At this critical juncture, a financial lifeline arrived, primarily from the French branch of the family, Baron Alphonse de Rothschild. This vital capital—organized through a “Concession Syndicate” that included D’Arcy, the Burmah Oil Company, and funds channeled from the Rothschilds—sustained the drilling operations until the commercial oil strike in 1908.

The Rothschilds already controlled vast swaths of Russia’s oil. Prior to the Russian Revolution that eliminated the Romanov dynasty, the family controlled almost all of Russia’s oil through the Caspian and Black Sea Oil Company, owned by Alphonse de Rothschild of France. One can speculate as to who was actually behind the Romanovs’ deposition, but what we do know is the oil remained in Rothschild hands until 1911 when they sold their company to Royal Dutch Shell.

The Rothschild brothers, co-owners of the Rothschild Brothers Banking House in Paris, began taking an interest in Russian oil fields in the late 1870s. However, the official registration of their firm, the Caspian-Black Sea Oil Industry and Trade Company (hereafter shortened to “the Caspian-Black Sea Company”), didn’t take place until 16 May 1883, on the basis of the bankrupt Batumi Oil Industry and Trade Company. The brothers chose to focus mainly on the foreign market and by the end of the 1880s had already become the leading exporters of Russian kerosene.

—The Rothschild Pages of Azerbaijan’s Oil History

Aware, perhaps, of the catastrophe that was coming Russia’s way, the Rothschilds sought to diversify out of Russian oil just prior to WW1. Despite this, they went on to become major shareholders in Shell, so in essence, they retained a stake in Russia’s oil anyways—only the risk was now spread. Once Iran’s oil came online, the Rothschilds were quick to swoop in. The 1925 coup, officially attributed to the British Government—which had bought out D’Arcy—was in fact a Rothschild coup, given their control over the Crown and the Bank of England.

I classify the period from 1900 to 1945 as a reset. In these few decades, a series of world-shaking events toppled multiple dynasties and consolidated incalculable wealth and resources into the hands of a small group of families. Hundreds of millions died, and the world witnessed World War I, World War II, and the Great Depression. The imperial dynasties of Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary were destroyed, the Federal Reserve system was created, and trillions of dollars in wealth were consolidated. This orchestrated chaos was the mechanism through which a small group of families seized control of the world’s energy resources, the military-industrial complex, and the soon to be consolidated global financial system.

Many of these events were clearly scripted. Evidence of this can be seen when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, and the Bank of England immediately transferred the nation’s gold reserves—which it was holding for safekeeping—directly to an account held by the German Reichsbank. This funded the next stage of the war, a war Britain would soon enter against the Nazis. Meanwhile, you had the two Warburg brothers, Max and Paul, working for opposing central banks. Essentially, the elites played all sides and profited immensely from the war. They also rearranged the global chessboard ahead of the next epoch of history. One they intended to write.

Of course at the time, the narrative was constructed in a way that ensured the public bought in. Framed as an existential battle between the good guys and the bad guys... hmm, sounds familiar. Despite the many facts that have been brought to light that contradict this narrative, many today still believe it, which is about as foolish as believing the one we’re being given about the present day Iran conflict. So let’s continue the story where we left off, with the installation of the first Shah of the Pahlavi dynasty—Reza Khan.

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Hi everybody,

Welcome to the latest edition of the audio newsletter. It’s been a little while since I recorded one of these, so I carved out some time to give you a full overview of the problems now emerging across the system. I’ll walk you through how I’m reading the tea leaves, why I see a lot of parallels with the build up to the 2020 ‘pandemic’, and why I think the war is a smokescreen for the financial systems continued dismantling. I also answer the question: why is gold selling off along with everything else right now?

In this issue, I cover:

• Why the private credit bubble is being paired with war

• U.S. cooking the books on jobs numbers

• Why we’re living through 2008 and 2020 combined

• The ongoing financial reset

• Why gold is selling off despite the crisis in Iran

• Stagflation and why the localized economy will survive

As always, thanks for your continued support!

Take care,

Mike

CONSULTATION WITH MIKE

For more than four years I’ve been guiding clients towards positioning themselves and their families to protect their wealth during the high-risk environment we are now in.

From managing the Great Taking and asset confiscation, to protecting pensions and 401(k)’s — this is where I specialize. I also support people with creating a Plan B, analyzing risk, and preparing to become more self-sufficient.

As such, if you would like personal, one-to-one support to secure your wealth, now is a great time to book. The consultation can be booked via the link below.

Book a Consultation with Mike

As a paid member, you’ll unlock weekly articles on wealth preservation and finance, my exclusive financial newsletter (released roughly twice a month), full access to the entire archive, and the ability to join the conversation with commenting privileges on every post. Your support makes this work possible — and gives you direct access to the insights, analysis, and community that matter now more than ever.

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The risks of the current oil and energy price shocks to the financial system are far greater than most people realize. The $2-4 quadrillion derivatives market is an opaque bundle of deceptions. So big and unwieldy that even those who created it admit to having no real clue of the true scale. For a long time the BIS told us it was around $600 trillion dollars globally. Then they upped it to around $1 quadrillion. I think it’s far larger. But it doesn’t actually matter, $1 quadrillion is an insane number. It is more than the value of global GDP, which is to say the combined value of all goods and services in a single year PLUS the total value of all assets in existence. Everything. The whole lot.

Meaning any chaotic unwind of the derivatives complex would be a worldwide catastrophe on a scale never before seen in history. It is by far the most vulnerable and dangerous part of our financial system, given the notional value has been allowed to balloon to such a tremendous amount, that it’s become a doomsday device. An unsolvable math equation that can be weaponized against the entirety of humanity save for the 0.01% who sit atop the global power structure.

In 2002, mega-investor Warren Buffett wrote that derivatives were “financial weapons of mass destruction.” At that time, their total “notional” value (the value of the underlying assets from which the “derivatives” were “derived”) was estimated at $56 trillion. Investopedia reported in May 2022 that the derivatives bubble had reached an estimated $600 trillion according to the BIS (Bank for International Settlements), and that the total is often estimated at over $1 quadrillion. No person knows for sure, because most of the trades are done privately.

—Ellen Brown, The looming quadrillion dollar derivatives tsunami

To get a sense of scale, here’s a useful image comparing what stacks of $100 bills totaling different amounts would look like, going right up to the mythical $1 quadrillion number.

As you can see, it’s an absurd number, and impossible to truly grasp without a point of reference. What many people didn’t know, until fairly recently, is that it’s our assets that are being used as collateral to underpin the grotesquely large derivatives complex. Our retirement accounts, our private pensions and brokerage accounts, our bank deposits, their mortgaged property. Essentially, everything we entrusted to the system, has been put up to ensure that should the derivatives complex implode the rotten core of the power structure, the mega banks responsible for the disaster, those who made the bets, survive whilst everyone else drowns.

Your assets, their collateral.

On the other side of it all assets everywhere are owned by the financial cabal itself. Every company, every bank deposit, all factories and land encumbered with debt. The whole enchilada save for the assets that were owned outright prior to the collapse. Which would be a tiny pool of asset comparatively speaking. This process is something we have come to know as the Great Taking, following my friend David Rogers Webb expose in his 2023 book of the same title. It is something I have written on extensively since, charting the evolving financial collapse and looking for the icebergs ahead of us capable of releasing the financial beast that would see the Great Taking unfold.

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Over the past two weeks we’ve had multiple days where every asset class got dumped together. Stocks, bonds, gold, crypto—everything but oil. This is a bad sign, so why is nobody talking about it? Looking at the responses of others, it feels like everyone is psychologically invested in believing this financial juggernaut will just keep-on-a-going, including those in the gold and silver mining space, given the recent run up in prices. For those with sunk cost, it’s tempting to believe the message from the top that everything’s fine! The grown-ups are handling the financial system, nothing to see here. Now run along back to your little Epstein investigation.

On top of the pre-existing chaos, we now have a daily war narrative to occupy us. Picking apart the reality of the narrative is difficult, given the sheer amount of misinformation and altered digital content out there. Personally, I am avoiding it, the same way I avoided the previous slew of mega narratives. Instead, I prefer to focus on the financial reset I’ve been talking about for years. And prior to the Iran situation, things were already moving from bad to worse on this front, and have been since late 2025—which is probably why they picked this moment to bomb a new country.

When all else fails, they take you to war.

Under the cover of the new crisis, we’re seeing a string of negative news regarding the economy, private credit and the AI bubble, being snuck through the revolving door of mainstream media. This is something I predicted in a recent episode, where I discussed how the Iran war, while serving plenty of objectives, would also act as a smokescreen for something much bigger: the next stage of the financial reset. Put simply, the financial system is dying and they’re running out of time before it implodes. Their objective, of course, is to seize that moment, weaponize the collapse by controlling the demolition, and then usher in a new financial order. So this is what I want to focus on today: the coming crisis, and why I think 2026 is the year we will look back upon as the one it all fell apart.

The 2008 Playbook: A Familiar Script

The last six months have many parallels to the months leading into the 2008 GFC, especially when you look at the debt bubble sitting in private credit. Contrary to what most people think, these things don’t just blow up overnight. Crises are a process. During the GFC, the first major crack appeared a full year before the market actually crashed when, in 2007, the subprime mortgage market started to wobble. At that point, subprime borrowers—the ones whose mortgages had been chopped up and sold as “safe” investments for banks and insurance companies to greedily hoover up—started defaulting on their loans faster and faster. This wasn’t a stock market problem yet; it was a credit market problem. The stock market kept rallying right through the bad news. The same thing happened prior to the Covid crash, by the way.

The first clue that things were worse than they were letting on came between June and July 2007, when two Bear Stearns hedge funds loaded up with mortgage-backed securities and CDOs blew up. This was the real wake-up call. It proved that all those “sophisticated” financial products built on these trash mortgages weren’t the pristine assets they were sold as. Of course, today we all know they were the financial equivalent of dog-shit wrapped in cat-shit, stuffed into a box with a fancy bow and sold to the market as AAA investments. Behind the scenes, the unraveling was already underway, and within weeks of the Bear Stearns fund blow ups, the froze redemptions on a third fund. Meanwhile, the financial propaganda media, along with the Fed, did their best to calm everyone down, calling it a localized issue rather than the start of the systemic crisis that it truly was. They were lying, obviously, but it worked. While the market was trying to price in the risk of something bigger, most investors still bought the “contained” story. Ok, now I am really am getting de-ja vu.

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Hey everyone,

Over the past two weeks, there have been several developments related to the Great Taking that I want to share. First, a quick FYI: the book’s author, David Rogers Webb, recently sat down with Daniela Cambone for an interview, where he provided an update on the current status of the Taking and shared how his thinking is evolving as we head into Spring 2026. This interview followed my late-2025 article titled Europe Prepares To Cross The Rubicon - Risking EU Wide Financial Collapse, which explained how Europe’s plan to seize frozen Russian assets was directly linked to the Great Taking.

This transpired when something patently obvious, but completely overlooked by us all, hit me smack in the face. Those assets could only have been frozen at all because Russia chose to hold them in dematerialized form at Euroclear. In other words, Russia stepped directly into the Great Taking trap — and effectively set it for themselves. To put it another way, despite Russia’s obvious collision course with the West being charted long ago, it still chose to hold 60% of its foreign reserves at Euroclear—foreign sovereign debt—fully knowing this would effectively erase its property rights over those assets. The question I posed was: why would they do that?

For those who still believe the East offers a genuine alternative — not merely the opposing side of a Hegelian dialectic — consider the following. Russia placed its sovereign assets, and the assets of its citizens, with a foreign CSD without altering the ownership structure to secure full legal control. Why would they do that, knowing the West was likely to move against those assets at some point? But wait, the plot thickens further still...

For the first time, I can reveal that the Great Taking also exists in Russia. Yes, my friends, Russia’s own CSD — the National Settlement Depository (NSD) — operates under the exact same legal framework as Western depositories. Russian citizens’ assets are also pooled and held as security entitlements, not true ownership.

According to a 2021 Market Profile Russia document issued by the NSD:

—99.9% of securities in Russia are already held in dematerialized, book-entry form.

—The actual investor — the person or entity that buys the shares — holds only a beneficial interest, not direct title.

—NSD uses the concept of a nominee (nominal) holder: the depository itself (or a registered nominee) is listed as the “owner” on the official register.

—Purchasers of securities receive the same inferior “beneficial ownership” offered in the West.

—Parallel Mike, Are They Going To Use Seized Russian Assets to Trigger the Great Taking?

Of course, the entire “will-they-won’t-they” saga around the proposed plan to seize and outright confiscate Russia’s frozen assets to backstop relatively minor loans to Ukraine revealed a great deal to the public. It was certainly more than just kabuki theater. It’s a part of the systematic dismantling of the old system, ahead of collapse. The narrative also had embedded within it the elephant in the room: that nobody truly owns their securities anymore. When they’re held in dematerialized form at a Central Securities Depository like Euroclear, they can be taken at any point—legally. Because you don’t really own them; they do.

In my article I speculated that much of the drama surrounding Russia’s assets was designed to intentionally weaken the system itself by massively eroding trust at the sovereign in CSDs—the fallout from which is only just beginning. Beyond this, it was also revelation of the method. It was a quiet announcement that we can and will seize assets. And if they can do that to a sovereign nation who actually legal protections, what chance do we have when we have zero legal protections? In fact, legally speaking, the system has been wired for the exact opposite: not only to not protect you, but to ensure that when the time comes, all assets can be taken — and those who do the taking will be protected from YOU.

The reality is this: you will have absolutely zero legal recourse — save for litigating against your broker, who themselves don’t have the assets and never did. What Europe and the U.S. have done with Russian assets is relevant precisely because it is a dry run of the Great Taking itself. But returning to David’s interview, it was the aforementioned articles that spurred his recent updates, though David discusses much more than just the situation with Russian assets. I highly recommend checking it out if you’re interested in his thoughts on what is happening.

The second thing I wanted to alert you all to is the ongoing pushback against the Great Taking at the state level in the U.S. So far, a number of state legislators have sponsored and progressed bills seeking to reform the UCC, specifically Article 8. Don Grande is doing a great job heading the small legal team that is helping to drive forward these bills. On this front we have some good news: just last week, with the help of Representative Cody Maynard, Oklahoma passed a bill in committee by a 6-1 vote. Idaho is up later this week, followed by Tennessee and Utah, with those dates yet to be confirmed. All it takes is one single state to successfully enact reforms and a domino will be pushed that leads to a nationwide recognition of the subversion at play.

While there is a long road to go, it’s imperative that those of you in these states get behind the hearings wherever possible. You can do this by reaching out to your state representatives to alert them to your grave concerns and explain why this matters. If your state isn’t doing anything yet, pester them. Get on their radar. Beyond that, you need to be talking to your friends, family and local community. In fact, this is the most important thing and something we can all do. They need to understand what the Great Taking is, and what this means for their retirement accounts and encumbered property. Even if these legal fights don’t succeed, we should give those who are willing to listen the chance to prepare. With so much rot and corruption being showcased right now, I get the feeling people are becoming more receptive to hearing the truth about the financial system and its criminality.

Speaking of which, I wrote extensively on this in my third article in the Great Taking Revisited series, published last December, when I broached the question, “How can you protect yourself from the Great Taking?”. This is the most comprehensive guide available on the topic detailing what you need to do to prepare not just for a potential taking type even, but for a systemic collapse of the financial system more broadly. Something which I think many of us now feel is unavoidable at some point in the very near future. As such, if you haven’t read it, you should definitely take the time to explore it. The hour is late. And right now, we can see clearly how trust in the old system is being deliberately, systematically dismantled.

It appears right now they are weakening every pillar that holds the structure up so that when the plunger is finally pulled, the entire edifice collapses like a pancake — with zero resistance. I don’t need to remind any of you about the outrageous financial bubbles they’ve inflated while simultaneously burying the world in unpayable debt. The objective all along was to build a system so fragile, so grotesquely over-leveraged, that one precisely targeted shock would be sufficient to trigger a total meltdown. We saw a preview in March 2020. We saw it again during Trump’s first weeks in office, when the sovereign debt market — supposedly the most liquid market on earth — froze under stress. That should never happen. Yet it did. And in doing so, it exposed the hidden brittleness engineered into the system.

When this leverage finally unwinds, they don’t intend of saving the current system. Collapse is the goal and such a catastrophe will vaporize banks, the stock market, and potentially even central bank operations. This is not a loss for them, however, given it is precisely this kind of unwind that will trigger the Great Taking itself. After which they have all the chips at the poker table, and you walk away with nothing.

Beyond the intentional destabilization of the financial system, however, a more subtle vulnerability is now being deliberately put in place ahead of the Great Taking — and it is just as critical. Right now, trust itself is being shattered. The corruption, the hypocrisy, the graft, the two-tiered justice system — it’s all being paraded in plain sight. Public faith in governmental and financial institutions has cratered. This credibility crisis isn’t accidental. The more corruption is exposed, the more confidence drains from the entire structure. And that is the point.

Relentless instability and a constant barrage of negative headlines are meant to provoke panic, trigger irrational decisions, and fracture whatever confidence still remains. When a populace no longer trusts the economy, the government, its institutions, the justice system, or the media, there is nothing left to defend. At that point, society doesn’t need to be destroyed from the outside — it collapses from within. So no, this is not merely about destabilizing markets. It is about deliberately demolishing the very idea of a stable, fair society — clearing the psychological ground for what comes next.

Of course, nothing is set in stone. This strategy could backfire spectacularly. Raising awareness of the Great Taking is one of the most effective ways to snap people awake to what is truly at stake. It is also one of the most important ways of protecting those we care about so if you find this information valuable, please share it with those who remain unaware — people still have time not only to understand what is happening, but to act on it. At some point, that window of opportunity will close, however. For all of our sake, we need as many people as possible to be readied for the harder times ahead. If people wind up owning little to nothing, I can guarantee you, they won’t be happy. God help us all if that situation is where we wind up.

In closing, it’s a nice coincidence that I am writing this update today, because just this morning I literally said goodbye to David having spent the last two days with him. During the visit, we had plenty of conversations about the current trajectory of the financial system, what we foresee in the immediate future, the impact of AI, and, of course, the Great Taking itself. I look forward to sharing some of these insights in my upcoming audio newsletter, which will be released next week for paid subscribers.

Until the, I hope this finds you all well,

Mike

CONSULTATION WITH MIKE

For more than four years I’ve been guiding clients towards positioning themselves and their families to protect their wealth during the high-risk environment we are now in.

From managing the Great Taking and asset confiscation, to protecting pensions and 401(k)’s — this is where I specialize. I also support people with creating a Plan B, analyzing risk, and preparing to become more self-sufficient.

As such, if you would like personal, one-to-one support to secure your wealth, now is a great time to book. The consultation can be booked via the link below.

Book a Consultation with Mike

A word of warning: this is not my typical post. It is a discussion around prophecy, the occult, and how recent world events relate to these themes. While many of you know me for my financial work, I also have a background in Theology and the study of belief systems, so this topic interests me a great deal. For those looking for discussion on metals and the markets, I will be back tomorrow with my members-only Q&A.

The release of the Jeffrey Epstein files is an important moment, but not for the reasons one might hope. Clearly, this has nothing to do with justice—at least not the justice of a healthy, human society. Justice is a process: deliberate, accountable, and bound by law. This, by contrast, is a data dump, a chaotic spectacle unleashed on an undiscerning public already reeling from decades of psychological operations, cultural erasure, and social atomization. The agencies that released the files have not presented a case for prosecution; they have simply thrown three million jigsaw pieces into the public square and told the crowds to have at it.

JUSTICE: the process or result of using laws to fairly judge cases, redress wrongs, and punish crimes.

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A week ago I released a video titled “The Mother of All Crashes.” Because over 24 hours, silver delivered exactly that. It was the metal’s worst single-day decline (peak to trough) since Silver Tuesday in 1980, when the Federal Reserve and CME cornered the Hunt brothers by forcing the market into sell-only mode. Silver plunged roughly 50% in a single session. Last Friday’s drop wasn’t quite that catastrophic—but it was still one for the ages. From the January 29 peak to the January 30 low, the metal fell a massive 39%. Ouch.

Mike Tyson has a famous quote that perfectly captures what many gold and silver miner investors experienced that day:

“Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the mouth.”

Tyson said it during an ESPN interview before a fight, when asked about his upcoming opponent’s comments regarding how he planned to beat him. The point Mike was making was as follows: feeling confident and having a well-laid plan is easy when conditions are calm—but in the heat of battle, when real pressure hits, most people unravel.

Warren Buffett made a different, but equally relevant point to last weeks carnage:

“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.”

His observation wasn’t about shock, but exposure. Rising markets hide mistakes. Falling markets reveal them. It doesn't matter what market we're talking about, when the trend turns, you see who was actually managing risk and understood what they owned, and who was simply riding momentum without discipline.

Both lessons were on full display during last Friday’s crash. Many investors were punched in the face—left in a state of shock, unsure what to do. And many more, including a number of the “experts,” were caught swimming without their pants on, having put little to no emphasis on risk management despite the huge run-up in prices throughout January.

Talk about the old 1-2.

In the days the followed we saw a number of squirmish videos surface along the lines of, “Well…nobody could have seen this coming.” Granted, by statistical standards, the peak to trough decline was exceptional. It qualified as a 7-sigma event—something with roughly a 1 in 1.28 trillion probability. To put that into perspective, it’s like being asked to pick one exact second out of 40,000 years—and getting it right on the first try. Yet while the magnitude and speed of the crash were rare, the character of the move was not. Meaning there was no real excuse for being caught wrong-footed.

Manipulation? Yes, of course the markets are manipulated. But we already knew that. It’s not new information. And in any case, it’s not as if we’re buying government bonds here. Owning junior and mid-tier miners without factoring in their tendency for sudden, vicious pullbacks is like stepping into a boxing ring without factoring into the equation you are going to get hit. In short, you set yourself up for failure—and that’s on you. Not the silver smashers.

Volatility In Metals & Miners

For a long time silver has ranked up there as one of the most volatile assets in the world. Moves of 20% in either direction are routine and often occur far more frequently than in other asset classes. Considering that a 20% directional move is widely accepted as the threshold for a bull or bear market, silver—strictly speaking—enters and exits at least one bull and bear phases each year. Gold is quite different in this regard, with the physical metal experiencing something like a 20% decline rarely. Despite this, it still has volatility investors have to contend with.

What must be understood about gold and silver miners is that any volatility in the underlying metals will be magnified dramatically. These companies act as leveraged plays on gold and silver, meaning even modest moves in the spot market can produce large swings in mining stocks. In this sector, 20–50% moves are routine, and during powerful bull phases it is not uncommon for miners to rise several hundred percent within a single year. But this volatility cuts both ways. Drawdowns of 75–90% are far from unusual. Look at almost any junior gold or silver miner over a decade, and the chart resembles the jagged profile of a steep alpine mountain pass.

For the uninitiated, this behavior can be deeply confusing. They expect miners to rise with the metals for years on end. Yet sharp drawdowns are not anomalies in this space—they are a defining characteristic. Anyone seeking to succeed in resource equities must first get to grips with this reality. Only then can an effective strategy be built for navigating the lucrative yet dangerous world of gold and silver miners. These are not buy-and-hold investments, and treating them as such is a costly mistake.

For most of January, I had been preparing for a potential sudden correction, which is why I was advising people to take money off the table when it came to their miners. In gold and silver mining equities, the distance between exceptional gains and sharp losses can be measured in days, not months. I had actually begun warning those I work with in mid-December, when I advised my coaching clients to gradually reduce exposure and lock in profits, reinforcing that message as January progressed.

None of this invalidated my bullish thesis on either metal. I remain very bullish on both, especially gold, which I buy irrespective of the paper price at this point. But I’m talking about the physical metals here, held as wealth preservers during the reset. Miners are a different animal altogether. When prices rise rapidly and sentiment becomes euphoric, risk should be reduced—not increased. Otherwise you end up walking away with nothing. Despite this, in the weeks leading into the pummeling, I noticed a surge of enthusiasm for mining stocks, with many people taking new positions at what turned out to be the worst possible time to do so.

Clearly, extreme consensus around a single outcome is a warning sign we should all watch for. When too many people share the same belief—that prices can only go up—something else usually happens. In those conditions, you should be ready for the snapback. This was one of the reasons I was prepared ahead of the crash and why I decided to write this article: to share a few key lessons I have learned over the years I've been investing in miners, lessons that helped me take profits consistently. For those who intend to own gold and silver mining equities—during what may prove to be the last great bull run this side of the reset—it is essential to properly understand the sector: its risks, its potential rewards, and how to engage with it in a way that ensures you are not crushed by its volatility.

As in the 1970s, I expect that in the years ahead a large wave of precious metals investors will pour into mining equities. But history is clear: most will not walk away with profits, despite the mega bull market we are likely to live through. And of those who do, only a tiny minority will capture the life-changing gains that will be available—briefly. Some will fail because they never truly understood the nature of this sector. Others will fail because they trusted the wrong voices. And many more will fail for a simpler reason—they buy at the wrong time, sell at the wrong time, and allow emotion to dictate their decisions when it matters most.

It does not have to unfold this way, however. If last Friday caught you off guard, this article is for you.

Let’s begin.

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