“Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic
door and a lost kingdom of peace.”

— Eugene O’Neill

Dear Reader,

Back in 2009, author Jeffery Tucker gave me one Bitcoin. He was sitting in my office, incredulous, and wanted to prove to me it was a real thing. He opened a wallet, gave it to me. It might have cost him a dollar at the time.

Imagine my chagrin over the years… Bitcoin hit $67,000 last November.

“Dude,” I remember asking him in 2015 or so, “where’s my Bitcoin?” He didn’t know. I didn’t know.

Millennial Bitcoin millionaires were popping up like the ivy I can’t extinguish on this one side yard section of my house in Baltimore.

Alas, my moment of FOMO (fear of missing out) is or has been strangely extinguished itself today.

This morning Coinbase reports, “Bitcoin plunged as much as 10% to an intraday low of $20,166.” That’s a 70 percent dive since last November, or 10 percent a month, give or take. I’d still be up a small pile if I could find the darn key. But still, sometimes it’s better to just let the speculators do their thing.

I do believe once the fantasy of cryptocurrencies is over we’ll still have the valuable tech of blockchain. Similar to how websites and email were the productive detritus of the Tech Wreck back in the early 2000s.

Bitcoin is only one victim of the market selloff. The Dow is down 14.2 % YTD. The S&P is down to “bear territory”; it has dropped 21% since January 1st.

Everywhere you look, inflation gets the blame.

As a consequence, the Fed is expected to announce .75 interest rates today to tackle inflation. That would be the highest rate increase in 28 years.

And so, the “long emergency” continues.

“What it means to all of us… what the macro trends are telling us,” James Howard Kunstler said to me in this week’s Session, “We’re unlikely to enter this trans-human digitized nirvana of Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum.”

Sounds like a crazy statement without some context. I may even chortle a bit, if I didn’t actually understand what he is saying. I’ll let Jim, author of World Made By Hand, speak for a bit:

“What reality is really telling us is that we’ve got to drastically downsize our activities, the way we make things and the way we move things, the way we sell things, the way we inhabit the landscape. All these things have to become more concentrated, smaller, finer, and more local. 

“Anything that’s organized at the giant scale is likely to fail, whether it’s a giant empire or a giant state university, or a giant Ivy League university or a giant corporation, these things are all headed into failure.” 

“The things and institutions and companies and endeavors that are going to survive are going to be the things that are smaller and more nimble. We’re going to have tremendous problems with food. The North American economy is going to become much more internally focused as globalism withers, which it is doing very rapidly right now, and unraveling. All those economic relations that created this kind of final orgy of techno industrialism in the last 25 years, all those relationships are now breaking and the world’s going to become a larger place again, and our economies are going to be much more domestically oriented.

“The fossil fuel age, that I call the techno industrial age, is an extremely ephemeral phase of history.”

Mr. Kunstler goes on for a bit, but he gets to this point, too, apropos of the selloff in cryptos: “The idea that we’re going to digitize all the money in the world. That’s probably not going to happen. If they try to make it happen, it’s going to create not only a giant economic failure, but probably a political upheaval.”

Follow your bliss,

Addison Wiggin
Founder, The Wiggin Sessions

P.S. “I applaud your June 14th column by Jim Kunstler,” reader Michael responded. “Few are brave enough these days to tell the truth, especially in these heady days of rage. Yet, the truth needs to be said. Perhaps this is a sign that people are finally waking up and placing patriotism and common sense over financial gain. Keep up the good work.”

“Yesterday’s podcast with Jim, and today’s missive feel like a punch in the stomach, but sadly, I don’t disagree with much of it,” reader BT responds. “I’d like to come back as a historian to study this period of time – I think they’ll be looking at it a thousand years from now. Keep up the good work!”

To hear and see Jim express his views click here or click on the image above.