Although Trump has achieved many spectacular successes in his second term, he has made two big promises he can’t possibly keep. The first was to bring back affordability to the broad middle class.  Anyone who believes this must be living on some planet with an all-powerful ruler who generously provides everyone with low-cost homes, apartments, childcare, senior care, pet care, car repairs, college tuition, groceries and insurance. Trump’s second promise is that he will wind down the Iran war quickly. This ranks right up there with George W. Bush’s ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech in 2003, when major combat operations in Iraq turned out to have been far from over.  Few took him seriously at the time, just as few believe Trump is close to bringing the mullahs to their knees.

Far from surrendering, they reportedly have been pondering whether to attack Israel’s Dimona reactor, a key facility in the nation’s nuclear weapons program.  The town of Dimona was hit by a powerful missile over the weekend, but if Iran targets the reactor, that could conceivably release radioactive material into the atmosphere, threatening not only to kill all human life in the region, but throughout the world. If Israeli were to retaliate proportionately, the destruction this could cause lies beyond imagining.

The Annihilation Trade

I usually try to focus on investable issues in these weekly commentaries, but they are less-than-trivial in comparison to a nuclear threat that could annihilate mankind.  No one doubts that Iran’s leaders are fanatics who are capable of doing anything to avoid defeat. This threat is not going to go away, nor are oil prices going to retreat any time soon. With interest rates rising, a pumped-up stock market and feverish global economy are facing a perfect storm.  If you are looking for a trade, there is probably no time in the last hundred years when it was safer to short into rallies.  Concerning the steep plunge in gold and silver quotes last week, rest assured that it was engineered by white-collar thieves desperate to shake loose as much supply as they can before investors come to their senses and stampede into the only form of money left in this world that hasn’t been hocked six ways of Sunday.