By Doug Casey

International Man

May 16, 2025

International Man: What's your perspective on the claims Elon Musk and others made about the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) during the campaign, and how would you assess the actual progress they've achieved since then?

Doug Casey: I hate to sound pessimistic, because the idea of DOGE was excellent, but it's not making much in the way of progress.

By Charles Hugh Smith

OfTwoMinds.com

May 14, 2025

If you want to escape immiseration, that option is available-upgrade to Premium.

I propose we set aside the conventional economic measures (GDP, unemployment, corporate profits, etc.) in favor of a more real-world metric: how many times we're hectored to "upgrade to Premium" to regain services that were once part of what we already paid for.

I submit that this metric is a far better measure of what's really going on in the economy than abstractions like GDP which say nothing about our real-world quality of life or whose getting the lion's share of the spoils.

By David Stockman

David Stockman's Contra Corner

May 14, 2025

It might be all over except the shouting. We are talking about the last chance to meaningfully curtail the nation's headlong plunge into fiscal disaster. Since the Dems are hideously obtuse and feckless on the fiscal front, the only remaining hope was that the GOP would finally screw-up the courage to take sweeping bites out of Federal spending and borrowing in the process of enacting the Donald's "one big beautiful" reconciliation bill.