We’re in the late stages of the largest set of financial asset bubbles ever blown in human history. They dwarf the 2000 dot.com bubble, and are several times larger than the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) housing bubble of 2008/09.
This set of bubbles encompasses sovereign debt, unfunded liabilities, housing, and the stock market, which is singularly focused on the shiny lure and promises of AI.
It’s an everything bubble.
If our bubbles were a bagel:
The creaking and popping sounds are getting harder to ignore. Nationally, more than half of all homes are experiencing declining ‘Zestimates.’
Meanwhile, some reality is starting to sneak back into the AI bubble, as evidenced by the September euphoria over Oracle’s decision to enter a $300 billion deal with OpenAI has turned into a big fat negative just a couple of months later.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin is selling off, and the leveraged stock “play” on Bitcoin, Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy (MSTR), is not sneaking out the back door as much as it is running shrieking right out the front door.
When these nested bubbles burst, and they always do, retail investors will be very poorly positioned given their passive investing approach and “all in!” stance.
How to Survive (and Thrive)
You can’t time the bubble’s burstings perfectly, but you can manage risk. Paul Kiker’s approach:
Develop a sound and comprehensive strategy and stick to it.
Stay mostly invested, but keep one foot near the exit.
All of the above make a strong argument that it’s time to set aside passive investing approaches in favor of a risk-managed approach. To schedule a free, no-obligation meeting with Paul Kiker’s team at Kiker Wealth Management to go over your portfolio and strategy.
People constantly report back that Paul’s approach and recommendations were exactly what they needed to hear.
To schedule your initial meeting, please visit PeakFinancialInvesting.com, complete the simple form, and a member of Paul’s team will contact you within 48 business hours to arrange the first call.
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Just a quick point about property taxes. Lower real estate values will not lower real estate taxes. If the school and town budget does not decrease, or if someone else doesn’t pick up a larger portion of those budgets, the real estate taxes will not go down. If everyone’s real estate values are cut in half, the mill rate would have to double so that the money needed to pay for the school & town budget can be collected.
I am a realtor in NY, not Mass, so I am not questioning you, just curious. If everyone’s values goes down and mill rate doesn’t go up so less taxes are collected, how do they continue to run the local government and schools? Are they just forced to manage to do with a smaller budget?
Microstrategy currently got over 650k BTC, and always adding more with borrowed currency… If it goes bankrupt and creditors liquidate the BTC (not everybody is a HODLer) it will accelerate deflating that bubble.
Between the 3th and 4th of December Peter Schiff will debate CZ at a Binance conference, Michael Saylor will be there as well… Will he finally have the balls to pick up the repeated challenge to debate Schiff? I doubt so, but if you’re convinced of your convictions there should be no fear to expose them with who simply disagrees.
Besides, Schiff recently publicly called Microstrategy a scam while renewing his offer to debate… If it will happen, boy will I have popcorn & beers ready!!!
Simple enough, they don’t revalue properties. They keep the old assessments despite changes in the market.
You are however, I believe, quite correct in the fact that Schools and local gov. salaries and expenses drive property taxes.
In Florida they could not raise your proper taxes more than a small amount per year. This was nice when my house value went up 4X before the crash in 2008. The property taxes would have been cost prohibitive had my neighbor and I traded homes resulting in that cap being removed when titles changed.
I am fortunate that I was able to realize the gain and move elsewhere. I checked my zillow values and they are still going up here. My 1st rental is now at 4X what I paid and zillow thinks it’s a 2 br, it’s a three.
My home and other two rentals are at double. However zillow thinks mine is a 1200 sf 3/2 when it’s a 2500 with 4/3 and two kitchens and two more acres of land. I might be sitting at triple here also.
I picked a very depressed real estate market that I believed in because the area is awesome and suffered due to mills leaving for China. I figured it could only goo up.
The first great step has been taken to address the childhood vaccines causing autism - brain damage (another one of those defining away a problem situations).
The CDC has just updated its website correcting information about the link between the childhood vaccines and autism. This is called going in like a needle and out like a plow.
Bobby can’t just go in like a wrecking ball because all that would do is create incredible push back - and probably jeopardize this once in a lifetime opportunity. Taking this step is an excellent strategy. Tenderizing the subject matter.
Would love to have an interview with Gavin de Becker on PP, Chris! I’ve bought 4 of his new book, Forbidden Facts, and will probably buy some more before Christmas.
When my parents we living in a NW Illinois town the selectively re-assessed values during the run up prior to 2008.
My mother made spread sheets showing how the assessments tracked with how long you had lived there and whether or not you worked for the town or county.
For stock bulls, yesterday’s reversal was as ominous as it was mystifying.
Nvidia’s quarterly earnings report bolstered the case that the AI-driven rally has longer to go, and investors reacted accordingly, pushing the Nasdaq 100 up as much as 2.4%.
Then, out of nowhere came the most dramatic intraday reversal in the US stock market since April. The Nasdaq ended down 2.4% at its lowest level in more than two months, leaving bewildered Wall Street traders scratching their heads about what exactly caused it all.
The bottom line is, markets already seem to reflect all the positives from the AI frenzy, and then some. Investors can’t shake the feeling that it’s all gone too far, and something’s going to crack, either in tech or the broader economy.
One of the key lessons to come out of the Great Depression was that it takes a lifetime to recover from a full-on systemic financial collapse. My sister-in-law’s father, who lived through the Great Depression, almost 60-years later, was still placing an arm around his dinner plate, guarding his food.
The Great Financial Crisis and Crash of 2008-09 was a full-on systemic financial collapse. Followed, just 10-years later, by another full-on systemic financial collapse in 2020. This crisis was covered over by COVID, the COVID Lockdowns, Spike Proteins, and Stimulus Checks. Now, today, in 2025, just 5-years later, we are in another full-on systemic financial collapse covered over by AI. That is three (3) full-on systemic financial collapses in just the lifetime of one generation.
Nothing will ever be the same again. Nobody is going to recover. Ever.
Eventually, you price yourself out of the markets. You cannot have a First World economy without cheap energy – in all its forms – real coal, real crude oil, real natural gas, real minerals, real rare earths. When countries run out of cheap energy they revert quickly to Third World countries, and right quick. Look at Germany since the United States took out the Nord Stream Pipeline. Eventually, countries price themselves out of existence in their own sweet way – they collapse.
