Friday File: Alphabet’s Reprieve, Celsius’ Recovery, and the Warm Embrace of Gold

It’s weeks like these when I think, “I just don’t own enough gold.” Clearly, lots of other folks feel similarly, with the shiny yellow metal hitting new highs again this week, tickling that $3,600/oz level.

The world is awash with populist politicians who are desperately trying to give their citizens the feeling that they deserve to get something for nothing (or that some “other” has been keeping the spoils of modern life for themselves, and we’re going to “take it back”, whether that “other” is evil billionaires or dangerous job-stealing immigrants), and flailing away in the search for ways to pay for that “something for nothing”… but really, the way you pay for more government services without raising taxes is mostly by borrowing, and the way you keep the borrowing train going is by devaluing the currency in which you borrow that money over time.

From a global perspective, that’s been the bargain of the Pax Americana for 50 years: we get to borrow cheap from the rest of the world, by being the controller of the global currency and persistently (though usually slowly) inflating the value of that currency away… and we spend that money both buying the stuff the rest of the world produces, helping the export-led economies develop, and building a giant (and often insanely wasteful) military, so nobody else has to.

And this week, with President Trump doing his typical “art of the deal” negotiations in recent months to try to force the Fed Funds rate to go down, and the word from Treasury Secretary Bessent that Trump wants to try to do something radical to address the “national housing emergency” in the next few weeks (by last count, I think that’s nine “national emergencies” declared so far this year), my little finger twitches on that “buy more gold” button just about every day.

Sure, there is a housing affordability emergency, which is no doubt part of the reason that we’re seeing the economically toxic idea of “rent control” coming back as a major political urge (I understand the urge, but the real-world evidence is overwhelming that it makes things worse, not better)… but we’ve at least seen things turn a little bit recently in the housing market, with home prices moderating in most places, and with some houses that were “frozen” by high interest rates gradually beginning to come onto the market (some people …