Wednesday, 12 January 2022 — Melbourne, Australia

By Callum Newman Editor, The Daily Reckoning Australia

[7 min read]

Dear Reader,

We’ve been looking at land these last few days.

As I showed you on Monday (Karl Marx Stole My Land), land and land prices are crucial to every aspect of the economy — yet very few economists pay them proper attention.

But as we explored yesterday (Is Everyone Benefitting but You?), if you DO put land at the heart of your analysis, everything we’re seeing in today’s markets makes sense.

Property, stock, and commodity prices are pushing to new highs because we’re entering a critical part of the land cycle. Understanding that helps explain everything.

Not only that, but it also helps predict what’s coming next.

And that’s why today we’re revealing five smart moves you can make with your money to capitalise on what’s happening.

There’s never been a more important — or urgent — time to have a clear plan.

There are plenty of people out there claiming we’re on the verge of economic Armageddon. Yet markets keep roaring higher.

There’s risk out there, for sure. But there’s also huge opportunity.

Make the right moves today — whether that’s in property, stock, or commodity markets (or all three) — and there’s no doubt there’s money to be made in my mind.

Potentially, a lot of it.

But you need to be smart.

And you need a clear plan.

Which is why you should make time to watch this special video presentation.

Join me, Catherine Cashmore, and our Publisher — and we’ll share five shrewd moves you can make with your money today to position yourself for potential gains in 2022 and beyond.

We’ll walk you through every one of these moves now.

Stocks, property, commodities –— the lot. You’ll walk away with a bucketload of ideas and a clear game plan you can use to position your money moving into 2022.

This whole event is free.

We’ve never shared it with our readers before.

And to watch along, all you need to do is make sure you click here now.

You might be surprised to hear how positive I am about real estate. You only need to take a look at the financial press to see why…though, the connection is not always obvious.

The Australian Financial Review reports this morning:

‘The dividend shower for shareholders of Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton is set to continue in the coming months, with the mining giants each expected to declare dividends of some US$8 billion thanks to a resurgent iron ore price.’

What does this tell us? BHP and Rio Tinto are crazy profitable still! That means they can pay huge wages and dividends. (By the way, I hammered the point in The Daily Reckoning Australia to buy these two for income late last year.)

For today, however, I believe that this astonishing wealth being generated is going to flow back to Western Australian mining towns and Perth property.

My colleague Catherine Cashmore reported yesterday this as well…

‘The McGowan government is set to pump millions into the economy once the state borders open. 

‘They’ve committed to spending $65 million attracting tourists and migrants.

‘The idea is to promote WA as a “safe and welcoming” destination.
It’s a campaign aimed at doctors, nurses, secondary teachers, backpackers, skilled migrants etc.

‘International students will be offered monetary support for accommodation and money will also be spent attracting “blockbuster international events”.

‘This will produce the necessary boost to population growth to spur real estate prices higher.

‘It’s all going to feed into the land boom we’ve been forecasting since 2019.’

All those mild, even bearish, calls on property tend to relate to Sydney and Melbourne. The mainstream press forgets that half the Australian population lives in the other states!

They have not had the same big runs as the two biggest cities. That means they have room to move up higher.

Indeed, one thing leads to another. Melbourne and Sydney are not cheap. That means people eventually ditch them to get better bang for their buck elsewhere.

I have two old school mates who have moved to Queensland in the last few years.

But the secret of the land cycle is that it’s not just about property. It drives returns in the stock market too.

If you own bank shares, you’re essentially buying mortgage debt. It’s basically how they make their money.

I could go on for a long time about all this. Instead, I urge you to tune in right now for the five ‘smart money’ moves you should be making today!

Until then…

Callum Newman,
Editor, The Daily Reckoning Australia

By Bill Bonner Editor, The Daily Reckoning Australia

COVID struck our family last week, the fully vaxxed and the unvaxxed alike. Joe Biden calls it the ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’. Apparently, the virus had not been informed.  

The local doctor was called to the scene.  

‘The Covid will have to run its course,’ he said. ‘But I’ll give you some amoxicillin and prednisone to help prevent secondary infections.’ He charged $50 for the home visit.

Was this a good way to handle it? We don’t know. Some of the family, unvaxxed, took nothing and hardly noticed their infections. Others, vaxxed, took the meds…and were up and about in 24 hours.  

One other, young, unvaxxed, took the meds but still has had lingering fevers, night sweats, sleeplessness, and other annoyances. 

A daughter and her husband had already had the disease; they — the veterans — were untouched in the recent assault.

Overall, the virus did its business. We did ours. All ended well. We are all on the mend. Many thanks to Dear Readers for their good wishes…and recommendations.

A highly mild variant

We have no more insight into modern medicine than Joe Biden, but it seems logical that an over-70, vulnerable person might want to get vaccinated. He might have something to gain…and much to lose.  

As for young, healthy people…they have little to fear. And getting vaxxed apparently won’t help their relatives survive either. Just the contrary. We probably got the virus from an already-vaxxed family member. And the Omicron version, especially, seems indifferent to vaccines.   

An article in the Wall Street Journal this week tells us that 90 days after you get the shot, you’re more likely to get the Omicron virus than if you have never gotten vaxxed at all. In other words, the vaccines might make it more likely that you’ll kill your grandmother.

Still another article, in the Daily Caller, tells us that the Omicron is actually less of a threat to the over-70 crowd than the regular flu:

‘Before the Omicron variant, an average vaccinated 75-year-old had about a 0.5% chance of dying from COVID-19 if contracted, according to The New York Times. The typical death rate from influenza for the same age cohort, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reviewed by the NYT, falls in a similar range between 0.6% and 1.3%.’

This morning, the CDC is calling for new masks to prevent the spread of Omicron. But shouldn’t it be encouraging us to unmask completely, so that we can all get the fairly benign Omicron and finally be done with it?

You’d think someone would ask.

And remember, the lockdowns cost the global economy trillions of dollars of lost output. For those who live on less than $5 a day, that cutback could be disastrous. Ultimately (though no one knows for sure), government policies in reaction to COVID may damage more lives than they improve…especially among the poor.

But today, we save our scorn for the Fourth Estate — the newshounds. As we will see, they no longer ask the important questions. Instead, they bark on command.

Conflicting interests

Sometime in the ‘90s or early 2000s, the mainstream press became the lead propagandist for the whole elite class who control US public policies. It saw its role as no longer to enlighten or to clarify…but like Pravda, to push the party line and discredit anyone who ventured beyond it.

Here’s a trifling example. Reuters (whose chairman is also on the board of Pfizer):

‘Two officials presenting arguments on Friday to the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to block vaccine mandates ordered by President Joe Biden's administration have tested positive for COVID-19 and will make their cases remotely, their offices said.’

What is the connection between challenging mandatory vaccinations at the Supreme Court and coming down with COVID-19? As far as we know, there is none.

But the media loves to tell us stories about anti-vaxxers who die from COVID. They do so as a subtle warning…stepping outside the box of elite opinion can be deadly. 

And now, the media has a two-decade history of not asking questions, but merely telling the public what they want it to believe. Terrorism…recession…market collapse…snowmaggedon…weapons of mass destruction…the Plague — it mongered scare stories, each one bringing more decisions for the deciders to decide…and more money for the elite to spend.

Yes, each scare comes at a price. Each brings a response — a new law…a new regulation…a new program and trillions of dollars of new, ‘printing press’ money’ — lockups, shutdowns, taxes, interest rate fixes, mandates — and another step further away from the consensual democracy that the mainstream media claims it is so eager to protect.

The elite clearly came out ahead. As owners of the US’s stock and bond capital, it saw its wealth increase by more than US$30 trillion since 2009. But the average citizen got, relatively, poorer. Wages stagnated while the rate of GDP growth per capita was cut in half.  

Shouldn’t the press have asked some questions?

• The ‘stimulus’ measures clearly don’t work; why do we continue with them? Where is the evidence that government planners can make an economy work better?
• Why does it make sense to start a war with Iraq…to send our soldiers to Afghanistan…to make war against an unknown group of people — terrorists — for unknown reasons…and at unknown costs?
• How come we are still putting people in prison for drug crimes…when there is no evidence that it does any good…and much evidence that it does much harm?
• Why are we using the public’s money to bail out big, rich Wall Street investment firms?
• What, exactly, is the rationale for making a federal case out of COVID-19? Wouldn’t it be better to treat it as a regular health matter…better addressed by doctor and patient?
• How come killing George Floyd was such a big deal, but not a peep about killing Ashli Babbitt?

The press asked none of these questions. It did not ask Power for Truth…nor speak Truth to Power. Instead, it became a shill…no longer questioning the government, but parroting its claims and assertions, no matter how absurd. It became a partner to power, not the public’s gadfly.

Saw something…said nothing

Reporters sat in the front rows for the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ malarkey…never asking the obvious question: ‘What business is it of ours if Iraq has weapons of mass destruction? Don’t we have WMDs too?’  

Then, for 20 years, the Pentagon was allowed to waste money and lives in Afghanistan. Did any major American publication even question it? Nope, the press went along with the gag…from start to finish…even as the failed generals retired and took their comfy seats at lobbying firms, defence contractors, think tanks, and hedge funds.  

The media also sat on its hands as the ‘see something, say something’ terror alarm turned the US into a country of timorous snitches. It cheered spending US$6 trillion to protect Wall Street’s bonuses and kept its eyes wide shut as the entire US economy was corrupted and rigged up for the benefit of the elite. And it fell in line immediately with the Capitol riot as an expression of ‘white supremacist terrorism’.

Is it any wonder Donald Trump’s ‘fake news’ charge stuck? Is it any wonder that by the election of 2020, the press had lost credibility…and the public could believe whatever damned fool thing it wanted?

More tomorrow…on one of the US’s most disappointing presidents…and the Inauguration Speech That Was Never Given.

Regards,

Bill Bonner,
For The Daily Reckoning Australia