“Uncertainty is an acid, corrosive to authority. Once the monopoly on information is lost, so too is our trust. Every presidential statement, every CIA assessment, every investigative report by a great newspaper, suddenly acquired an arbitrary aspect, and seemed grounded in moral predilection rather than intellectual rigor.”

-Martin Gurri, Revolt of the Public

The world has changed drastically since the 1970’s. New information is no longer scarce, it is overwhelmingly abundant. Anyone can be a political pundit or an investigative journalist with a smartphone and a Facebook account. …

How do you measure fear itself? Fear is a powerful market force. If one could somehow quantitatively measure fear itself, one could theoretically gain an advantage over the market’s cycles. As Warren Buffett once wrote in a 1986 shareholder letter:

What we do know, however, is that occasional outbreaks of
those two super-contagious diseases, fear and greed, will forever
occur in the investment community…Therefore, we never try to anticipate the arrival or departure of either disease. Our goal is more modest: we simply
attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy
only when others are fearful.

As the world experiences a literal super-contagion in 2020, fear has become more dominant than ever in markets. In fact, the notorious “Fear Index” also known as the Volatility Index (VIX) has reached historic highs following the lockdowns in March. …

2020 has brought fires, floods and hurricanes across the world alongside novel forms of climate change denialism. Consider Patrick Moore, a so-called scientist with a significant Twitter following who claims:

“Any effect of CO2 on temperature could easily be overridden by other factors. The long historical record does not support CO2 as some kind of control knob as NASA claims. They’re not in sync.”

To support his contrarian claim, Moore posts a compelling visual of CO2 levels vs. global temperature, albeit without citation. …

As of 2019, the Census Bureau recorded a population of 8.3 million for New York City. Compared to the populations of the top ten cities in the United States, New York City is by far the largest.

Considering the population rate from 2010–2019 however, growth has been modest. Compared to other large U.S. cities, New York City’s rate of population growth has been relatively meager.

From 2016 to 2019, New York City’s population has been decreasing. While 2020 Census numbers are not yet published, NYC’s population has likely suffered a drastic decrease after the coronavirus shock. …

Bitcoin cannot be created on a whim, unlike dollars, yen, euros, etc. Similar to gold, creating new bitcoins takes work.

Instead of relying on central bankers to determine money supply, Bitcoin is decentralized. Miners record transactions that are verified by a global network of nodes¹ enforcing Bitcoin’s protocol. As of writing, 18.5 million bitcoins are in circulation, having been mined as a reward for computational power securing the network.

Only 21 million Bitcoin will ever exist.

After its initial creation on January 3rd, 2009, anyone with a basic computer can participate in Bitcoin’s democratic network. As outlined in the Bitcoin white paper, mining “is essentially one-CPU-one-vote.” While all computers possess a CPU that is technically capable of mining, network competition quickly began to heat up as Bitcoin’s popularity surged. …

Bitcoin is the monetary base of the Internet. Unlike national currencies, new bitcoins are created by a fixed and finite supply.¹ In an era of unprecedented monetary expansion Bitcoin’s value proposition is unique. There will only be 21 million bitcoins amid increasing trillions of dollars, pesos, yuans, etc.

Instead of relying on central bankers to determine money supply, Bitcoin is decentralized. Global miners timestamp blocks of transactions² that are verified by a global network of nodes³ for a protocol maintained by hundreds of developers⁴ worldwide. Bitcoin’s first block was mined with the following cryptographic message in 2009:

“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for…

According to USA Today, “With a few strokes on a computer, the Federal Reserve can create dollars out of nothing, virtually ‘printing’ money and injecting it into the commercial banking system, much like an electronic deposit.” To provide stimulus after the 2008 Financial Crisis and now the coronavirus shock, global central banks such as the Federal Reserve have been printing unprecedented amounts of money.

Known by such terms as money printing, monetary expansion, quantitative easing, etc., central banks issue new money in exchange for assets such as government bonds, mortgage backed securities, and now corporate debt. As a result trillions of new dollars, euros, yen, yuan, etc., …

The 2020 Index of Economic Freedom, published by the Wall Street Journal and Heritage Foundation “measures the degree to which a country’s laws protect private property rights and the degree to which its government enforces those laws.” Countries like Singapore that score highly on the Property Rights Index have greater GDP per capita on average, and vice versa.

In practice, would you be motivated to work hard if your savings could be unjustly confiscated at any moment? In many developed countries like the United States, democratic rule of law protects against such scenarios. …