• Media Disinformation Becomes Profitable

• Cryptocurrency Valuations Rise as AI Valuations Come Back to Earth

• Blockchain Emerges as the Income Layer of a Post-Labor, AI-Driven Economy

• The Accelerating Shift to Alternative Health, Media, Finance, and the Road to Free Alternative Energy

Since 2011, I have begun each new year with the publication of my annual predictions article. Over the years, I have made some pretty bold calls. While several have already come to fruition, others, like my 2025 bitcoin forecast, were simply ahead of their moment.

After accurately predicting that bitcoin would surpass $100,000 in 2024 (when it was only trading at around $45,000), the crypto bellwether failed to reach my $171,000 target in 2025. That said, nothing fundamentally has changed. If anything, regulatory tailwinds, renewed quantitative easing, and growing corporate treasury adoption have only strengthened the case to own bitcoin.

I also prophesied last year that 2025 would bring the constitutionality of the accredited investor rule into serious national contention. While the issue has not yet dominated mainstream headlines or debate stages, 2025 nonetheless marked a year of material and undeniable progress.

On August 7, President Trump signed an executive order directing the SEC to actively consider reforms to the accredited investor definition - an explicit acknowledgment that all Americans should be afforded the same opportunity for portfolio diversification long enjoyed by the financially privileged. In parallel, a landmark lawsuit filed by Investor Choice Advocates Network (ICAN) directly challenged the legality of the accredited investor rule itself, forcing the issue into the judicial arena for the first time in a way that policymakers, regulators, and courts will no longer be able to ignore.

But my most precise prediction of all was that traditional industry titans - long the arbiters of our diets, healthcare, media, entertainment, and investment choices - were nearing a moment of historic displacement. See: Welcome to 2025 and The Alternative Era - by Dara Albright

In 2025, models that once lived on the fringe moved decisively into the mainstream. In terms of user growth, alternative industries outperformed - not because they were subsidized, protected, or politically favored, but because they realigned incentives away from intermediaries and back toward consumers. Alternative medicine scaled faster than conventional pharmaceuticals as patients increasingly rejected perpetual symptom management in favor of holistic and preventative care. Independent and creator-led media captured attention and advertising by optimizing participation and critical thinking instead of enforcing centralized narratives. Crypto wallets expanded faster than traditional brokerage accounts as investors migrated toward decentralized systems that reward engagement, transparency, and autonomous research.

The Alternative Economy: 2025 by the Numbers

Health
Complementary & Alternative Medicine (CAM) gained widespread adoption in 2025, reaching $193B–$242B globally and compounding at 22–28% annually, with projections exceeding $2T by the mid-2030s. Growth was driven by consumer migration toward prevention-first care, including nutrition, mind-body therapies, herbal medicine, and digitally enabled wellness. By contrast, pharmaceutical revenue growth remained in low single digits, driven not by improved health outcomes but by pricing power, patent extensions, and the use of artificial intelligence to produce even more artificial drugs.

CAM is also benefiting from regulatory tailwinds. The expansion of the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement reflects growing recognition of the failures inherent in centralized, pharmaceutical-first care. MAHA-aligned proposals - such as Congressman Eric Burlison’s patient-centered framework that includes a proposed $150 monthly “Wellness Purse” for health food, supplements, and fitness - explicitly reorient incentives toward prevention and holistic care, marking a clear break from the chronic-dependency model.

Media
Media followed a similar divergence. In 2025, trust in legacy outlets hit historic lows while independent and creator-owned platforms expanded - without subsidies or regulatory protection. Podcasts, subscription journalism, and decentralized media gained share as legacy outlets faced declining ad revenue, subscriber losses, and accelerating newsroom layoffs. According to Winterberry Group, creative and content investment is growing 2-3 times faster than traditional media spend, confirming a fundamental shift away from centralized narrative control toward performance-driven, audience-aligned models.

Finance
Finance tracked the same trajectory as individuals migrated toward crypto and prediction-market platforms. The 2025 Chainalysis Global Crypto Adoption Index reports approximately 950M global crypto users, up from 560M the year prior. Crypto wallet revenue is now growing 31–32% annually, nearly 3X the 11% YoY new-account growth at Interactive Brokers, one of the fastest-growing traditional platforms.

The growth of prediction markets was even more remarkable, with user bases estimated to have expanded 3 to 4X - from roughly 4 million users in 2024 to as many as 15 million in 2025 - while total trading volumes surged an estimated 400% year over year, potentially reaching $40 billion. Together, these trends underscore a broader shift toward financial systems that price information in real time, reward participation, and reduce reliance on centralized intermediaries.

None of my forecasts relied on clairvoyance, crystal balls, or a DeLorean with a flux capacitor. Instead, they were grounded in methods far more dependable than folklore - methods that hide in plain sight and are available to anyone willing to use them.

First, I subscribe to the Abraham Lincoln approach to foretelling, often attributed to his oft-quoted line: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” This method requires nothing more than the conviction to actively shape a future one envisions rather than passively waiting for one to unfold.

It should be noted, that while many credit that quote to Lincoln, there is a good chance he never uttered those words at all. Without the ability to time travel back to the 1800s and verify the quote firsthand, the best one can do is rely on what has been reported.

Which brings me to the second - and most effective - forecasting technique: questioning the reports emanating from legacy media. The media apparatus has become so deceptively inaccurate that predicting the future is often as simple as inverting the mainstream narrative and allowing reality to assert itself.

It turns out that media contrarianism can be a pretty powerful trading tool. When media narratives detach from fundamentals, markets misprice assets. And because truth always wins, the louder the media pushes a distorted narrative, the more profitable the resulting information asymmetry becomes.

Nowhere was this dynamic more visible than in 2025, when legacy media once again got tariffs - and the broader economy - spectacularly wrong. As markets pulled back from February all-time highs, Chicken Little journalism went into overdrive, manufacturing an economic doomsday narrative that prompted many investors to prematurely liquidate assets. In April, I explicitly cautioned against relying on agenda-driven media - a warning that proved prescient as markets went on to soar to record levels. See: The Sky isn’t Falling - Stop Depending on Unreliable News Sources and Antiquated Economic Barometers and Why I am Doubling Down on Economic Optimism - Even as Markets Slide

Over the past year, the gap between media narrative and observable reality widened beyond denial. As legacy institutions clung to control through messaging and “story management,” alternative models quietly strengthened - gaining users, capital, and credibility as incumbents hemorrhaged trust, relevance, and pricing power.

None of this can be shrugged off as a temporary trend. This is all evidence of a decisive shift away from centralized systems and toward the alternative economy. The organic outperformance of alternative health, media, and finance in 2025 offers a clear preview of what lies ahead - which brings me to my 2026 predictions, my boldest and most optimistic to date.

My 2026 Predictions

Prediction 1: An AI Valuation Reset Will Propel Crypto Outperformance

I feel that a reset in seed-stage AI valuations will be the catalyst that allows cryptocurrencies to outperform the S&P 500. There is no logical justification for $1B+ AI seed rounds - especially when many are untethered from revenue, defensibility, or proven utility. These valuations don’t just defy fundamentals; they expose structural flaws in modern capital markets that deny everyday investors meaningful participation in innovation upside. I mean, what’s next – trillion-dollar IPOs?

The pattern is also eerily familiar to the early dot-com era, when internet stocks surged simply for adding an Amazon affiliate link to a web page and pawning it off as a “partnership.” Likewise, slapping “AI” onto a pitch deck won’t be enough to sustain inflated valuations.

As capital rotates away from speculative AI excess, cryptocurrencies stand to benefit in two important ways:

1. Cryptocurrencies will be valued more on core fundamentals - such as user growth, network utility, and their role as a hedge against monetary debasement - and less on short-term technicals. As fundamentals reassert themselves, institutionally imposed correlations will weaken, and investors will increasingly recognize digital assets as important portfolio diversifiers.

2. Corporate balance sheets will continue to absorb Bitcoin. I predict that more publicly traded companies - including members of the Magnificent Seven - will add Bitcoin to their balance sheets. This trend has already begun and is likely to accelerate as more corporations seek treasury diversification amid concentration risk, valuation fragility in public equities, and ongoing currency debasement.

This is not an indictment of artificial intelligence. AI will undoubtedly transform productivity, automation, and the global workforce. But the current capital structure surrounding AI is riddled with weaknesses - most notably accuracy constraints, centralized data control, and a profound lack of originality.

AI is notorious for providing incorrect data. Just recently, I had an argument with ChatGPT because it adamantly refused to acknowledge RFK Jr as the Secretary of Health and Human Services, a role he has held for nearly a year.

This is where blockchain becomes indispensable. Distributed ledgers provide verifiability, provenance, and accountability - the very attributes AI lacks as it scales. As jobs become increasingly commoditized by machines, it will be human creativity that emerges as the scarcest - and most valuable - skill.

In a world where technology can draft legal documents, diagnose illness, and rebalance investment portfolios in seconds, it will be the visionaries, storytellers, and critical thinkers who retain true economic leverage and job security.

In short: blockchain will supply the truth. AI will supply the speed. And, humans will supply the vision.

Prediction 2: Blockchain Will Replace the Wages Lost to AI

For those agonizing over artificial intelligence displacing jobs and hollowing out the human workforce, I have very good news to share. Beyond truth and verification, blockchain provides the missing income layer required to sustain consumption, economic growth, and long-term retirement security as AI transforms the modern workforce.

Blockchain innovation enables the emergence of two new types of earnings streams that I call Participatory Returns and Consumptionary Returns. These new sources of capital together form the foundation of Participatory Consumption Economics (PCE), a macroeconomic framework designed for modern decentralized, post-labor, AI-driven economies.

• Participatory Returns represent income generated from the measurable economic value individuals create through engagement such as data, attention, interaction, and influence - value that technology can now capture, quantify, and monetize at scale.

• Consumptionary Returns represent the compounding wealth effects created through economic participation itself such as spending, loyalty, and contribution to market growth. Unlike conventional consumption, which results in economic leakage, consumptionary returns recycle value back to households and enterprises, driving sustained personal, business, and national prosperity through continuous reinvestment.

Distinct from the failing, depression-era Keynesian theory, PCE recognizes a fundamental truth of the 21st-century digital economy: every act of participation - every search, purchase, step, interaction, and contribution - produces computable economic value. Through tokenization, blockchain finally makes it possible to capture that value and return it to the very individuals who create it. In this model, participation itself - through everyday activities such as learning, playing, exercising, and engaging with brands - becomes a new, quantifiable form of income.

PCE also redefines consumption. No longer are consumers the endpoint of the economic food chain. Instead, PCE introduces a revolutionary return channel that allows consumption to regenerate household savings while simultaneously supporting corporate growth. In this model, capital no longer moves linearly or depends solely on wages to fuel demand. Rather, it circulates through a continuous, robust economic engine - enabling consumers to both consume and produce value on an ongoing basis, independent of employment levels. In doing so, PCE stabilizes labor-dependent economies while fostering enduring prosperity for all.

Prediction 3: Participatory Consumption Economics Will Rescue Broken Healthcare, Retirement, and Education Systems While Strengthening and Democratizing Capital Markets

Healthcare costs outpace wages and inflation. Retirement access is increasingly inadequate and inaccessible for those who need it the most. Universities saddle students with debt for skills the market no longer values. Capital markets funnel gains to late-stage public equities while shutting households out of early-stage value creation where real wealth is formed. These are not policy failures - they are failures of a macroeconomic framework divorced from how value is created in the modern economy.

Participatory Consumption Economics offers a permanent solution to America’s faltering healthcare, retirement, and education systems that decades of legislative Band-Aids and Federal Reserve interventions have proven incapable of fixing - while simultaneously fostering healthier, more dynamic, and broadly accessible capital markets.

PCE begins by identifying the actual root cause of socioeconomic decline: America remains anchored to a depression-era, wage-dependent macroeconomic theory that modern technology is rapidly obsoleting.

Healthcare, retirement, and education were all designed for a production-driven, wage-based economy in which employment served as the central economic engine. For more than a century, wages funded household consumption, employer-sponsored benefits delivered healthcare and retirement security, and workplace retirement plans became the primary gateway into capital markets. As a result, economic stability - at both the household and national level - became entirely job-contingent.

That model is now collapsing. Labor’s share of GDP has steadily declined. Job tenure has shortened. Gig work has surged. Automation and AI are rapidly displacing wage-based income, particularly across the services sector.

In today’s digital, platform-driven economy, value is increasingly created through networks, data, engagement, automation, and capital - not factory labor or even traditional services.

Under these conditions, stimulus spending, deficit expansion, and prolonged interest-rate suppression no longer catalyze productive growth. Instead, they inflate asset prices, distort risk, erode household balance sheets, and deepen inequality.

Participatory Consumption Economics is the first macroeconomic framework to recognize that modern technology enables participation - not just employment - to function as an economic driver, and that consumption no longer destroys savings but regenerates it.

By realigning income, savings, and capital formation with participation, PCE reconnects households to healthcare access, retirement security, education funding, and early-stage wealth creation - without reliance on perpetual fed intervention, tax hikes, or job dependency.

Prediction 4: The Rise of Alternative, Democratized and, Yes, Free Energy

The energy sector is poised to follow the same decentralization arc already reshaping finance, media, and healthcare. Grid fragility, accelerating AI growth, geopolitics, and demands for transparency are converging to mobilize a new wave of energy innovation that will reexamine long-standing constraints around energy access, production, and ownership.

As a result, I believe that we will see breakthroughs in energy models that will increasingly challenge the assumption of permanent scarcity. I would not be surprised to see ideas once dismissed as impractical - or even absurd - regaining relevance, from Nikola Tesla’s vision of wireless energy transmission to Henry Ford’s 1921 proposal for an “energy currency.”

Tesla’s vision of free, wireless energy stalled in part due to capital constraints, as financiers like J.P. Morgan prioritized profits over abundance. Ford’s vision failed primarily because the technological infrastructure to measure, verify, and distribute energy-based value did not yet exist.

What a difference a century makes. Today, blockchain and cryptographic consensus make it possible to measure, verify, tokenize, and exchange energy without centralized intermediaries. This is also where energy could converge with Participatory Consumption Economics.

Under PCE, households could become far more than passive end users, they could emerge as energy producers, optimizers, and beneficiaries. Imagine the possibility if Tesla was correct, and energy can ultimately be made free and globally accessible, without centralized meters, by tapping into the Earth’s natural electrical properties and transmitting power wirelessly. Now combine that with a blockchain-based evolution of Henry Ford’s vision - one capable of measuring, verifying, and exchanging energy-derived value without a centralized exchange. Energy would become an abundant, participatory resource, capable of generating enduring household wealth.

Although I am not betting that this particular scenario is what will unfold, I am predicting that humanity is moving toward a future of abundant, natural, and increasingly monetizable energy, whether incumbents welcome it or not. For there is one thing I know for certain: if the mind can conceive it, mankind will achieve it.

And once energy is liberated, every downstream system - finance, manufacturing, healthcare, food, housing, and even money itself - will be forced to evolve.

Tesla was silenced for trying to free energy.
Ford was ignored for trying to free money.
Blockchain makes both inevitable through participation.

Prediction 5: Information Asymmetry Becomes Highly Profitable and Politically Exposing

As media narratives continue to diverge from economic reality, information asymmetry is becoming a durable source of alpha in traditional markets as well as an increasingly powerful profit engine in rapidly proliferating prediction markets.

New York City’s Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA) offers a textbook case of narrative-driven mispricing. Despite extensive historical evidence showing that similar right-of-first-refusal regimes in San Francisco, Minnesota, and Washington, D.C. resulted in liquidity freezes, stalled transactions, declining asset values, and worsened affordability, mainstream coverage has largely framed NYC’s COPA as a housing breakthrough rather than the capital-markets risk that it is.

That disconnect is already creating pricing distortions - particularly for REITs and institutional capital exposed to New York City multifamily assets. And the risk does not stop at city borders. As the chart below illustrates, NYC-focused REITs have averaged losses exceeding 20% over the past year. These losses are not confined to a handful of niche NYC vehicles; they are embedded across many of the most widely held REIT ETFs, with some carrying materially higher concentration than investors may realize. Because NYC-focused REITs are woven throughout index funds and target-date portfolios, COPA’s impact automatically transmits into retirement accounts nationwide. An estimated 40–60 million U.S. savers now hold indirect exposure through 401(k)s, pensions, and passive vehicles - effectively importing a proven localized housing policy failure into retirement portfolios across the country.

Fortunately, advances in fintech and regulatory easing have enabled REIT alternatives to emerge. Tokenized real estate structures and Reg A+ real-estate-backed private credit offer investors modern ways to bypass region-specific regulatory shocks, diversify geographic exposure, and reclaim control from policy-concentrated risk embedded in traditional vehicles.

Prediction markets make profiting on media disinformation, like COPA narratives, even more compelling. While users on Polymarket are not yet betting directly on COPA outcomes, they are actively pricing the likelihood that Zohran Mamdani will implement a citywide rent freeze before 2027.

These crypto-native platforms allow participants to trade directly on policy outcomes and future events, with market prices functioning as real-time probability signals. In doing so, they introduce an entirely new dynamic to both trading as well as politics. Incentive-aligned crowd intelligence has repeatedly outperformed institutional punditry and narrative-driven analysis - while also revealing what voters actually want, not merely what they are told to believe.

As the movie Trading Places famously demonstrated, a single false orange crop report can turn billionaires into paupers and paupers into billionaires. Media misinformation functions as the modern-day fake orange crop report. The difference today is that individuals no longer need a seat on an exchange to trade against the distortion and capture the spread between perception and reality.

Information asymmetry, amplified and priced by prediction markets, will do more than transfer wealth. It will expose flawed policy in real time, force accountability, and draw an increasingly visible line between political regimes that destroy economic value and those that create it.

We live in fascinating times. As the alternative era accelerates and decentralized innovation scales, I’m confident humanity will experience the greatest democratization of prosperity that the world has ever seen. And since creating the future is the best way to predict it, this isn’t a forecast - it’s a foregone conclusion.

The architects of tomorrow’s economy aren’t waiting for permission. They’re already building the participatory consumption infrastructure, questioning inherited systems, and rejecting economic models that no longer reflect reality.

The game has changed. The rules have broken. And legacy institutions are betting everything on a fake orange crop report, convinced it is inside information.

With that, I’ll close by channeling my best Eddie Murphy from Trading Places and wish all my readers a Merry New Year.

The best is truly yet to come.

Not because it created a new mandate.

Not because it rolled out another government savings plan.

But because it confronted the real reason 401(k)s have been failing everyday Americans: dysfunctional markets.

The reality is that early-stage growth has long been exiled from public equity markets, and not even the strength of the U.S. capital markets combined is able to produce enough public assets for real diversification.

Trump’s Executive Order exposes what almost no one in Washington has dared to admit: Wall Street is failing retirement savers.

In recent years, Americans have been sold the comforting fiction that their 401(k)s -restricted to narrow, homogeneous, cookie-cutter menus - have been delivering the strongest possible returns. In truth, their plans have been locking them out of the very asset classes where real wealth is built and risk-adjusted returns are maximized.

Fortunately, now that this 401(k) illusion has been shattered, a new blueprint for real retirement security can finally emerge.

The Data Doesn’t Lie

• 10 stocks make up 35% of the S&P 500 and nearly half of the NASDAQ-100.

• The number of U.S. listed companies has been cut in half since 1996.

• $40 trillion in mutual funds and ETFs chase the same 10 - 50 names.

• The “Big Three” asset managers already control $22 trillion - on track for $30 trillion by 2040 - concentrating holdings in a way that drives correlation up and diversification down.

Diversification doesn’t come from repackaging the same dwindling pool of public stocks and bonds. Nor does maximum appreciation occur when IPOs arrive as billion-dollar behemoths well past their prime.

According to Cambridge Associates, PitchBook, and Prof. Jay Ritter (UF), cumulative pre‑IPO returns have historically outpaced post‑IPO gains by roughly 6:1. Late‑stage venture/private‑equity investors often realize 250 - 400% cumulative gains before the IPO, while public investors buying at the offering typically see only 30–60% over comparable windows. In today’s market, most of the growth curve is captured well before companies go public.

If your idea of diversification is shuffling the same seven mega‑caps across more funds, and if you think that 60% beats 400%, then I have a bridge - and another index fund - to sell you.

Since 2011, I’ve been sounding the alarm on America’s broken public markets. While many misdiagnosed America’s widening wealth gap as a tax-code problem, I’ve argued that the real culprit is defective market structure. And in recent years, true diversification has slipped even further as vital alternative asset diversifiers were instead used as political pawns.

In 2022, the diversification crisis escalated into an outright war on digital assets. The Biden Labor Department didn’t just signal skepticism - it staged an ambush. Just one day after announcing a “study” of digital assets, it issued a crackdown on crypto in 401(k)s. This wasn’t guidance - it was financial intimidation. Fiduciaries were put on notice: offer digital asset exposure, and face a possible federal investigation.

Not even the bipartisan SECURE Act 2.0 offered much hope. Branded as “retirement reform,” it piled on mandates, inflated costs, and centralized control - while doing virtually nothing to address the structural flaws undermining retirement investing. I outlined its absurdities in SECURE Act 2.0 Raises Questions But Offers Few Solutions, including the $70 million earmarked just to plan a superfluous government-run database.

What none of these policies touched was the real crisis: public markets had become monopolized, over-indexed, hostile to micro-caps, and severed from the entrepreneurial economy they once fueled.

For too long, the nation’s most promising growth companies have stayed private well past their prime IPO window - delivering their best risk-adjusted returns to venture capitalists instead of to everyday Americans via one’s retirement portfolio. And when public markets lock out earlier-stage growth, 401(k)s become nothing more than an exit strategy for the financially privileged.

The real wealth disparity solution isn’t to tax the rich into oblivion - it’s to stop forcing retirement savers to bankroll the exit plans of America’s elite.

That’s why, in 2020, I praised the Department of Labor’s move to crack open the door to private equity in defined-contribution plans. My infographic at the time - and the chart below now - confirms what we all know to be true: real wealth creation happens before the IPO, not after.

Opening 401(k)s to private equity, alone, should have been a unifying win for savers. Instead, disingenuous talking heads tried to frame the DOL’s 2020 lifeline as a threat - just as some are doing now with President Trump’s latest Executive Order.

But you should know that the loudest critics aren’t safeguarding your retirement savings - they’re protecting the tollbooth they built around your money. Their panic reveals the truth: the balance of power is shifting back to those who contribute most to this nation - we the people.

This Executive Order Changes Everything

Here’s where this EO shatters expectations: unlike the 2020 DOL directive, it doesn’t confine alternatives to managed funds or “wrapper” products. Instead, it explicitly opens the door to direct access - within employer-sponsored retirement plans - to private equity, private credit, real estate, and digital assets1. The same vast array of investment opportunities that institutions and public pensions have enjoyed for decades now belongs to every American worker.

And it goes further: the EO instructs the SEC to actively consider reforms to the accredited investor definition - yes, that “unconstitutional” rule that has locked most Americans out of alternative assets for more than 40 years. If the SEC follows through, we could finally dismantle one of the most restrictive barriers in U.S. capital markets history.

It also directs the DOL to create safe harbor protections, ending the litigation paralysis that has handcuffed fiduciaries and kept retirement savers boxed into outdated 60/40 allocations.

This isn’t just policy evolution - it’s a structural shift that could democratize capital access on a historic scale. If implemented fully, it could redefine the architecture of 401(k) menus, replacing mutual-fund monopolies with genuine multi-asset platforms.

Senator Warren, the darling of mega banks, wasted no time denouncing the Executive Order as a “giveaway to billionaires.” She could not be more wrong.

Billionaires already have private equity, venture deals, pre-IPO allocations, and boutique yield instruments. Trump's EO doesn’t empower them.

It empowers us.

It empowers the retail saver who wants more than a 60/40 mix of the same seven tech stocks and a handful of bond funds.

It empowers the fiduciary who wants to offer truly diversified options without risking their license.

It empowers the innovators who will shape the next century, and the entrepreneurial spirit that built America in the first place.

Proof in the Numbers

Since September 2014, a traditional 60/40 portfolio (60% S&P 500, 40% bonds) achieved an 8.79% annualized return with a Sharpe ratio of 0.63.

The diversified alternative portfolio - 40% S&P 500, 10% Bitcoin, 10% private equity (Series A–D), 20% private credit, and 20% public credit - delivered a 14.95% CAGR with a Sharpe ratio of 1.09 over the same period.

That’s a 70% improvement in annualized returns and a 73% boost in risk-adjusted performance - exactly the type of outcome Trump’s Executive Order could make possible for every American worker.

The math is clear: when you remove the regulatory barriers that keep retirement portfolios trapped in a handful of public-market assets, performance potential jumps and volatility risk actually drops relative to returns.

The Path Forward

We now stand on the cusp of a new financial future. One where:

• Modern retirement vehicles provide direct access to high-quality alternative assets.

• Everyday Americans can hold real estate, private equity, private credit, and digital assets inside their employer tax-advantaged plans.

• Advisors can meet their fiduciary obligations without fear, offering products that truly guard against systemic volatility.

• TradFi (Traditional Finance) will still flourish - because true diversification means embracing both traditional and alternative products.

It’s been over 30 years since diversification became a fiduciary mandate, yet the Elizabeth Warrens of the world still treat it as a privilege reserved for the wealthy.

That era is ending.

Mark my words: a new retirement architecture is coming - one that restores freedom, fairness, and opportunity to the people who’ve been excluded for decades, without destabilizing the public markets we still rely on.

This Executive Order is not the finish line.

It’s the rise of a retirement system that finally works for everyone.

The U.S. capital markets are failing you.

And it is not because of tariffs, fiscal policy or wars waging on foreign soils.

They are failing you because of a defective, undemocratized, homogeneous stock market structure that benefits a few select businesses and investors at the expense of everyone else.

They are failing you because of an unconstitutional accredited investor rule that prohibits 90% of you from having access to the same asset appreciation and portfolio diversification as the wealthiest ten percent.

They are failing you because the Self-Regulatory Organization that is tasked with educating investment advisors is neglecting to properly train them on alternative asset portfolio diversifiers.

And the capital markets will continue to fail you unless the stock exchanges, once again, become viable breeding grounds for successful small cap IPOs, and until all alternative investment products are available to all.

The good news is that many regulatory obstacles that prevent equal access to portfolio diversification are finally being eliminated through rule amendments and legislative changes.

The better news is that innovation is ensuring that superior alternative asset portfolio diversifiers are affordable and easily accessible to all.

And the best news is that no one has to wait to start generating better risk-adjusted returns.

A growing number of SEC-qualified alternative investment products are already available - even to small retail investors. And a handful of publicly listed stocks, operating outside the sphere of influence of the market’s three main orchestrators, offer a compelling way to lower portfolio correlation and reclaim true diversification.

Highlighted below are a number of portfolio diversifiers can help provide all investors with protection from a monopolistic and rapidly shrinking stock market that is failing everyday American investors.

TODAY’S RETAIL PORTFOLIOS ARE NOT AS DIVERSIFIED AS WE ARE LED TO BELIEVE

Before I dive into some of these portfolio diversifiers, it’s critical for both investors and financial advisors to confront an uncomfortable truth: most retail portfolios today are far less diversified than they appear.

Regardless of how assets are allocated across stocks, bonds, mutual funds, or ETFs, a portfolio built solely on these traditional assets is often dangerously exposed -especially during periods of market volatility.

These portfolios offer no protection from systematic risk (market-wide risk), which cannot be diversified away. And due to the ongoing decline in the number of U.S. listed companies, even idiosyncratic risk (company-specific risk) - once easily mitigated through broader stock selection - has, too, become undiversifiable without an increased allocation to alternative assets.

Let me explain with a few eye-opening charts.

Publicly-traded stocks, bonds, mutual funds and most ETFs are all byproducts of a diminishing pool of listed companies.

There are presently about 4,300 U.S. listed companies in total - down from approximately 8,000 in 1996, and on a trajectory to be well under 2,000 within the next 50 years.

Even more concerning is that as the number of listed companies continues to decline, the average market capitalization of those remaining keeps surging - eroding market diversity, amplifying systemic risk, undermining economic resilience, and concentrating power in the hands of a small clique of mega-corporations.

And that is only part of the story.

Equity ownership is increasingly concentrated in a much smaller subset of actively traded stocks. Of the roughly 4,300 listed U.S. companies, only about 250 see daily trading volumes exceeding 5 million shares.

Active portfolio managers engage with only a sliver of the market - just 0.7% to 2.8% of listed stocks, on average. Most actively managed mutual funds only hold between 100 and 120 stocks, while small-cap or sector-specific funds often narrow that exposure to just 30 to 70 names.

The concentration is even more extreme within passive funds that closely mirror major indexes. Just 10 stocks now make up about 35% of the S&P 500’s weight. Even more astonishing is that 7 of those 10 stocks account for nearly 50% of the NASDAQ-100.

This isn't a pool - this is a goldfish bowl. And with a near-perfect positive correlation between these two indices, investors in both are essentially buying the same concentrated exposure, dressed up as diversification.

And it is not just NASDAQ and the S&P 500 that have grown in correlation. As the chart below illustrates, there are diminishing diversification benefits of holding multiple index funds due to overlapping S&P 500 constituents.

As the top 10 stocks grow in dominance, the U.S. equity markets will only become more fragile, more volatile, and even more dependent on the performance of the corporate elite. For everyday investors, that means that the lack of diversification will only intensify, and the market swings will be bigger than ever.

Furthermore, fixed-income investors won’t find diversification among publicly-traded corporate bonds either. Out of the approximately 4,300 listed companies, maybe 1,000–1,200 have issued bonds at all. Of those, only about 300–400 companies have bonds that are actively traded daily. Even inside that group, the top 50 issuers dominate the bond liquidity.

To put things into perspective: nearly $29.1 trillion in mutual funds, $10.4 trillion in ETFs, and an additional $8–10 trillion in direct retail capital - 93% of which comes from the wealthiest 10% of Americans - are all largely chasing the same 10 stocks and 50 bonds.

What was once the hallmark of American capitalism - broad access, open competition, and dynamic markets - has been hijacked by a concentrated few who suppress innovation, strangle competition, and capture the lion’s share of the gains.

At the center of it all are just three firms - BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street - which collectively manage an estimated $22 trillion in U.S. equity assets. If current trends continue, their combined U.S. equity holdings would surpass $30 trillion by 2040, giving them control of more than half of the entire U.S. stock market’s capitalization. This is not capitalism. This is a financial oligarchy wrapped in the veneer of free markets.

As it is, the Big Three are the largest shareholders in 40% of all publicly listed U.S. companies and 88% of S&P 500 firms. This already gives them extraordinary influence over corporate governance and market direction.

Furthermore, because they employ complex hedging strategies, the Big Three are positioned to profit regardless of whether markets rise or fall.

When the Big Three are content, the market follows. Take the COVID-19 crisis, for example: as their largest equity holdings were deemed “too essential to close,” the Big Three poured capital into those positions - driving stock prices higher while countless small businesses, selling the exact same “essential” products, were forced to shut their doors. The result? An unequal recovery - not powered by competition, but orchestrated by an oligopoly.

And when they’re displeased - say, by the threat of tariffs cutting into the profit margins of mega-corporations built on overseas sweatshop labor - they don’t hesitate to retaliate. They dump or short positions, triggering massive sell-offs that ripple through today’s hyper-correlated indexes - taking down the retirement portfolios of everyday Americans in the process.

As the markets rebounded, the April sell-off proved to be a buying opportunity for deep-pocketed giants like the Big Three, who scooped up stocks at discount prices. Meanwhile, most Americans - especially those nearing retirement - were left with sinking portfolios and rising anxiety.

This isn’t just a market distortion - it’s a structural threat. When a handful of firms can move entire markets, profit on both sides of volatility, and dictate which companies survive or collapse, the very foundation of capitalism is compromised.

BEATING THE OLIGARCHS

Interestingly, the recent market correction didn’t impact all assets equally. Equities backed by passionate consumers-turned-investors (“investumers”), along with decentralized assets like Bitcoin, showed notable resilience - outperforming both the S&P 500 and NASDAQ. It underscores a critical truth: true diversification - away from institutional dominance - may be one of the last remaining safe havens when systemic shocks hit.

Fortunately, the rise of asset tokenization and a potential wave of investumer IPOs offer a path forward - one that would dramatically expand the universe of investable assets, genuinely democratizing access to U.S. capital markets and narrowing the wealth gap in the process.

As the above chart illustrates, the number of publicly listed U.S. companies per million people has steadily declined since its 1996 peak - while wealth inequality has soared. If America is to remain the free nation, as envisioned by our founding fathers, this trajectory must change.

Fortunately, as indicated by the dotted lines, a better future is within reach. Through investumer-led IPOs and the tokenization or fractionalization of traditionally inaccessible assets - real estate, rare wine, art and so much more - we have the tools to dramatically expand the universe of investable assets. This concurrent transformation could not only reverse the decline in market access, but also catalyze a historic reduction in wealth inequality, breaking the cycle of consolidation and exclusion that has defined the past three decades.

While the tokenization and investumer revolutions are still unfolding, investors don’t have to wait to benefit. The following portfolio diversifiers already offer the potential for stronger risk-adjusted returns - even for small retail investors - marking a hopeful shift toward a more inclusive and resilient financial future.

• Retail Private Credit: As traditional lenders pull back and interest rates remain elevated, private credit markets have exploded - offering direct lending opportunities that bypass Wall Street intermediaries. Once the domain of hedge funds and institutional investors, private credit is now increasingly accessible to small retail investors through tokenized platforms and fractionalized debt offerings. Modern financial providers, like Worthy Wealth, offer everyday investors an opportunity to receive up to 15% in annualized returns via an innovative SEC-qualified bond product. As an added benefit, Worthy users can also effortlessly accumulate higher yielding fixed-income products through Worthy’s digital round-up savings app.

• Pre-IPOs: I recently published an article on how Newsmax (NMAX) - an OTT (Over-the-Top) media platform - set a new precedent for modern IPOs and “investumer” stocks. In a market where hot offerings are usually reserved for venture capitalists, private equity, and the ultra-wealthy, the Newsmax IPO broke the mold. With a minimum investment of just $500, Newsmax gave everyday investors - its own loyal customers - early access to a high-growth opportunity before its record-setting two-day surge, all amid broader market volatility. But this was more than just an IPO - it was proof of concept. It showed that a mobilized consumer base can become a powerful investor community, potentially paving the way for a new era of small-cap IPOs fueled by brand loyalty and retail conviction. That said, caution is still warranted. Most Reg A+ IPOs don’t follow this playbook. The key is to look for offerings with truly engaged audiences and experienced underwriters who can anchor valuations in reality - not hype.

  👉 See: How a Next-Generation Media Company Revived the Small IPO and Galvanized a New Breed of Enthusiastic Investors and Capital Ideas Podcast Episode 26: Inside the Newsmax IPO and How Reg A + Can Democratize Wall Street.

• Publicly-Traded Investumer Stocks: In addition to Newsmax, there are also two other already publicly-trading investumer stocks that I like for their impassioned retail investor-bases: Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. (DJT) and GameStop (GME). While it’s true that Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street have recently accumulated positions in DJT and GME through their index-tracking strategies, the strength of the retail conviction in these names enabled them to outperform the broader markets during the recent volatility - proving that investumer stocks can provide meaningful protection from some of the Big Three’s market shenanigans.

• Stocks that Provide Indirect Bitcoin Exposure: Beyond its vast and passionate “investumer” base, GameStop (GME) holds something else of growing strategic value: Bitcoin on its balance sheet. Increasingly, companies are diversifying their treasuries by replacing fiat or low-yield assets like Treasury bills with deflationary assets such as Bitcoin - a move viewed by many as both savvy and forward-thinking. For businesses, Bitcoin serves not only as a store of value but also as a hedge against the risks embedded in their own operating models. For investors, it offers a simple, indirect way to protect against inflation and currency debasement - while gaining Bitcoin exposure through public equities. Several publicly traded companies now hold Bitcoin in their treasuries, including Tesla (TSLA), MicroStrategy (MSTR), Marathon Digital (MARA), and the newly listed, Draper Associates–backed Fold (FLD) - the first publicly traded Bitcoin financial services firm helping individuals and businesses earn, save, and spend Bitcoin.

• Holding Crypto Directly: I’m also a strong advocate for holding cryptocurrencies directly - especially Bitcoin. Even a modest allocation has consistently outperformed the now-obsolete 60/40 portfolio. In an era of monetary debasement and institutional distortion, Bitcoin isn’t just a portfolio diversifier—it’s a portfolio essential.

Best of all, many digital and alternative assets can now be held in tax-advantaged retirement accounts. If you’re curious about innovative strategies for integrating alternatives - like private equity, private credit, or even multiple cryptocurrencies -into your retirement plan, feel free to reach out.

I also welcome collaboration with innovators building platforms that expand retail access to alternative investments.

It’s been more than 30 years since diversification was made a mandate for fiduciaries under the Prudent Investor Rule. So why is it still a privilege for everyday Americans?

Let’s restore freedom, fairness, and broad participation in our markets.

The time is long overdue.

👉 Have thoughts on this post? Ideas? Drop a comment or send me a message. I read every one.

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The information provided in this article is for educational and informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, or as an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any securities. The strategies and themes discussed may not be suitable for all investors and should be evaluated in the context of each individual’s investment objectives and financial circumstances. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The author may hold positions in, or have financial interests related to, the companies mentioned. All opinions expressed are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.

It was in donning this particular cap that I first came to not only appreciate the profound impact that IPOs have on shaping the global economy - determining which inventions reach the masses, what jobs are created, and how wealth is ultimately distributed - but also to realize the integral role that marketing plays in this capitalistic process. See: Reg A – It’s More Than Just Tropical Vacation Music – It May Just Be the Catalyst for the Next Small Cap IPO Boom and The Evolution of Securities Marketing and its Impact on Issuers, Intermediaries and Investors.

The fact is that an IPO - or any investment for that matter - does not sell itself. Even Steve Jobs had to hit the pavement, pitching Apple stock to investor after investor, in what is called an IPO roadshow. And the selling doesn’t end simply with a listing and a ticker. Over the next 44 years, even Apple’s CEOs were out peddling Apple stock at investment conferences or in meetings with institutional investors known as non-deal roadshows.

Achieving a successful IPO can be challenging - even for high profile, large cap companies. For lesser known small-cap issuers, especially those using the Regulation A+ exemption, this feat can be next to impossible.

Known as the mini-IPO, Reg A+ was introduced in 2015, as part of the JOBS Act, to offer companies a viable public offering on-ramp so that smaller issuers could raise capital with reduced expenses and a streamlined regulatory process.

Although Reg A+ provides a much more cost-efficient way for smaller companies to go public, because many of these businesses lack sufficient marketing funds or infrastructure, they typically fall short of the financing sought. Furthermore, out of the few Reg A+ issuers fortunate enough to complete their raise and indeed become public, many struggle to survive trading in a marketplace dominated by passive managers, algorithmic traders and abusive short sellers. And when their stock is not getting hammered by apathetic traders, public companies are depleting their capital reserves on costly and overly burdensome regulatory requirements - all at the expense of innovation and sales.

With the exception of the Reg A+ being used, quite successfully, for real estate investing, the Reg-A-mini-IPO has been a real letdown. According to Barron’s, Reg A+ offerings have underperformed by approximately 23 percentage points, compared to small-cap benchmarks like the Russell 2000 Index and the S&P SmallCap 600. Even more disappointing is that a significant number of Reg A+ offerings have been delisted altogether.

These statistics underscore the reality that in order to blossom as a publicly traded company, small businesses need much more than a reconstructed on-ramp. They require a renovated “highway” that is not rife with potholes, antiquated traffic controls and high-speed racecars, constantly trying to run them off the side of the road.

Not many companies can endure these treacherous driving conditions. But Reg A+ issuers are particularly vulnerable. Because these offerings typically have smaller floats, scant marketing budgets and rely on antiquated investor-relations (IR) strategies, they have, unfortunately, become easy targets for market manipulators - particularly abusive shorters.

The fact is that it takes really deep pockets to thrive in today’s public markets. Not only are listed companies continuously spending more and more to meet ever-expanding regulatory burdens, but they also need to allocate more and more capital to investor-relations (IR) just so that they can stay one step ahead of the vultures who are constantly trying to drive their stock price down for no fundamental rhyme or reason.

According to XbInsight, the research arm of IR Magazine, the average annual IR budget in North America is a shocking $799,000. And this doesn’t include the millions more for IR staff expenses as well as the cost of the CEO’s time for reviewing SEC filings, or to be out on the road, marketing the company’s shares.

In 2024, traditional IPOs raised, on average, $170 million per offering - 42 times more than the average mini-Reg-A-IPO of just $4 million. Larger companies can justify allocating millions of dollars, or 1.5% of its IPO proceeds, to the expense of being a publicly traded company. On the other hand, spending 67.5% of a $4 million raise, primarily on IR, is not even remotely plausible - nor would it be ethical. And it would be fiduciarily derelict for an adviser to recommend that a client invest in a company that expends far more money promoting its stock than its actual products.

Without a war chest of IR capital, today’s public company must find other ways to build an impassioned investor-base that can offset the detached traders who seek to exploit them through short sale loopholes.

You may have heard of GameStop Corp (GME), a company that found loyal and enthusiastic investors in its own customers.

Although it is often mocked as a meme stock, the reality is that GameStop possesses something that even most of the deepest-pocketed large caps never will: a vast and fervid “investumer” base. As defined in 2014, investumers are a modern breed of retail investors who invest in the companies that make products that they consume.

With retail investors commanding nearly 70% of its cap table and with over 55 million customers, GameStop maintains one of the most formidable investumer bases on the planet - powerful enough to cause abusive shorters to suffer billions in loses and drive large hedge funds out of business. See: Good Money, Dumb Money, Smart Money, Brilliant Money and Cheese

By comparison, only 10-15% of the typical S&P 500 stock is directly held by retail investors. Because the vast majority of large caps are owned by institutions - many of which are quantitative funds that couldn’t distinguish between a company’s product or dog poop - not even the most well-heeled S&P 500 company, with all of the marketing money in the world, could buy the genuine investumer zealousness retained by GameStop.

This might also help explain why stocks with a smaller concentration of institutional ownership have been outperforming the S&P 500 in recent weeks. Since April 2nd, the institutional-monopolized S&P 500 lost over 5% while investumer stocks, with few institutional holders, like GameStop, saw significant gains.

Case in point: GameStop (GME) is up over 18% since April 2nd. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that GameStop also has a treasury filled with bitcoins, but I’ll save that story for another article.

Trump Media & Technology Group Corp (DJT), another investumer stock, which is only 12% institutionally owned, is up over 15% since April 2nd.

But believe it or not, the best performer of all came from a recent Reg A+ IPO, also with shares primarily concentrated in the hands of retail investors, that had the audacity to go public during recent market turbulence - even as some of the larger and most-highly anticipated issuers delayed their IPO debuts.

On March 28, 2025, OTT (Over-the-Top) media platform, Newsmax announced the successful completion of its initial public offering under Regulation A+, raising the maximum allowed of $75 million through the sale of 7.5 million shares at a public offering price of $10 per share.

Newsmax's stock commenced trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol NMAX on Monday, March 31, 2025 - just days before the markets began to nosedive. The stock opened at $14.65, a respectable 44.6% increase from its offering price, and became the first-ever Reg A+ IPO to result in a direct NYSE listing.

While this alone would be an extraordinary accomplishment for a Reg A+ IPO, more remarkably is that over its first two days of trading, NMAX soared over 2500% to reach $265, accomplishing the largest two-day opening gain for an IPO in U.S. market history.

Although the stock has fallen from its peak, now trading at around $26, NMAX is still up 165% from its offering price - in spite of the recent market tumult.

As someone who has sported the IPO marketing hat, what I find most fascinating about Newmax’s offering is not only how it was able to defy all odds in getting to the public markets, but how it was able to build a solid investor foundation without the marketing muscle from the likes of a J.P Morgan or a Goldman Sachs.

It turns out that Newsmax had something that not even the two largest investment banking firms in the world could provide: a rapidly expanding ardent viewership.

As one of its 40 million viewers, I was intrigued by how Newsmax would use its media platform to publicize its offering directly to its viewers - particularly during programming that would garner a substantial number of eyeballs.

Through its dedicated investment portal, NewsmaxInvest.com, everyday Americans discovered how they could participate in a pre-IPO offering - something typically reserved for venture capitalists, private equity firms or ultra wealthy individuals.

Its minimum pre-IPO investment of just $500 enabled Newsmax to convert many more viewers into shareholders, allowing the company to benefit from a larger and more diversified investor-base. Click here to read how more expansive and diverse investor bases bring greater market stability and help make sure that stocks are valued based on fundamentals as opposed to isolated market events.

Based on the after-market performance, I suspect that Newsmax’s offering was oversubscribed and that the company obtained a very respectable conversation rate.

Even if Newsmax was able to get just 1/2 of 1% of its viewership to purchase the 50-share minimum, its initial public offering would have been oversubscribed by more than 30%.

14 years ago, I suggested that Facebook, with its 800 million users at the time, use a similar playbook for its IPO. See: How Facebook’s IPO Could Transform the Capital Markets

Instead, assuming it would be far more efficacious, Facebook took the conventional IPO path and went public with Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs as well as a handful of other prominent underwriters. But not even the big guns could prevent Facebook’s IPO from being a dismal failure, taking over 14 months for Facebook’s IPO investors to finally break even. See: “Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda” – Lessons Learned from Facebook’s IPO

Only time will tell if Newsmax discovered a winning marketing formula for future IPOs and smaller cap stocks in general. In the meantime, I believe that with its historic IPO, Newsmax has demonstrated not only the promise of OTT as the future of media, but also OTT’s ability to galvanize investumers. As a result, maybe, just maybe, Reg A+ could become the great facilitator of small business capital formation after all - instead of prey for market manipulators.

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In the piece, I emphatically stated that the proverbial economic sky is not falling - despite the recent market turmoil or what the well-synchronized headlines would have you believe.

Even today, with the market down, significantly, on tariff fears, I am doubling down on economic optimism. In fact, for the reasons listed below, I am more confident than ever that the United States of America is on a path to unprecedented prosperity.

Reason #1: Nothing has Fundamentally Changed in the last Two Days to Justify this Sell-off

Stocks didn’t suddenly report massive losses in the last two days. Companies didn’t suddenly stop making products. Consumers didn’t suddenly stop buying products. The only thing that changed was that one nation, on a planet of 195, decided to look out for its own interest by announcing a “reciprocal tariff” initiative.

Today’s market drop is reminiscent of June 2016, when the S&P 500 tanked on news that the United Kingdom, in looking out for its best interest, voted to withdraw from the European Union.

Nine years ago, the British Exit (referred to as Brexit) sent stocks around the world into a tailspin - even those companies domiciled on the other side of the planet with no exposure whatsoever to the U.K.

Just like Brexit, today’s market decline demonstrates the repercussions of a global financial system that is monopolized by algorithmic traders and detached shareholders who are selling stocks with complete disregard for company fundamentals.

And just like after Brexit, today’s market will recover.

When falling stock prices are market driven and not due to company fundamentals such as earnings falling below expectations, they have tremendous resiliency and tend to rebound quickly. Following Brexit, the S&P 500 ended the year with gains of nearly 12%, and it is presently up over 150% since its Brexit crash.

Instead of panicking about the market volatility that you have no control over, you are better off seizing the opportunity to buy on dips and explore ways to diversify your portfolio with alternative asset classes that provide more stability and less broader market correlation.

Reason #2: Today’s Non-diversified U.S. Equity Markets Cannot Stop the Colossal Economic Expansion that Decentralized Innovation Has Put into Motion

Although you do not influence the direction of the stock market, the unfortunate reality is that there are three companies that do: BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street. These three passive investing firms, which use an undisclosed quantity of algorithmic trading to buy and sell stocks, hold the largest shareholder positions in 40% of all listed U.S. corporations and 88% of S&P 500 firms alone.

Let me explain why this is so problematic.

It is not in a nation’s best interest to relinquish control of its capital markets to anyone, let alone to robots who are more interested in a company’s trading patterns than in its products and services. These types of investors do not create jobs, foster innovation or help communities flourish. In fact, because their inverse ETFs increase in value when stocks decline, they are actually betting against the very companies that are in the markets to provide real macroeconomic value.

Many people may not realize just how paramount it is for companies to possess vast and diverse cap tables. When just three behemoth companies control the majority of a company’s shares, they have the ability to collapse a company’s market capitalization, within seconds, with just one sell order. On the other hand, when a company has a much larger pool of smaller direct investors, a single sell order has minimal to no impact. The same holds true for indexes at large.

More expansive and diverse investor bases will not only bring greater stability to markets, but it will also help ensure that stocks are valued based on their fundamentals as opposed to isolated market events.

As discussed on a recent episode of Stinchfield Tonight, the lack of company diversification in the S&P 500 index is equally as troubling. With just seven companies now comprising an unprecedented 35% of the S&P 500, and with listed companies diminishing in general, there simply aren’t enough publicly-traded stocks to absorb the hit caused by the downward readjustments of algorithmic passive investors (quantitative funds).

Fortunately, decentralized innovation has emerged to create the greatest asset diversification opportunity in the history of mankind. Real-World Asset Tokenization, in particular, is poised to foster an endless supply of non-correlated investable assets that will more than make up for the accelerating dearth of publicly-traded companies.

The sweeping macroeconomic benefits of mass portfolio and investor-base diversification cannot be overstated. As the portfolios and cap tables of American investors and businesses become increasing more diverse, the nation will be rewarded with better products, stronger businesses, more jobs and greater confidence in the capital markets.

Reason #3: Tariffs Do Not Cause Depressions

Right now, the markets are trading on sheer anxiety. Last week, the media insisted that tariffs would lead to a recession.

Since a mere recession hasn’t instilled enough fear, this week we are being told that tariffs cause full-blown depressions.

Going viral on social media is a scene from the movie, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, depicting Ferris' classmates being taught that the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, a bill which increased tariffs on imported goods, worsened the Great Depression.

Just because you see something in a movie, does not make it true. Otherwise, every frog would be a prince, every DeLorean would be altering the space-time continuum, and every sports team would be victorious following of a 30-second half-time inspirational pep talk.

The reality is that the Great Depression was caused by…

Anyone? Anyone?

The Great Depression was caused by the stock market crash of 1929 - which was a direct result of a giant consumption bubble that was intentionally ruptured by a relatively young, Federal Reserve.

During the 1920s, both consumption and the stock market soared - thanks to a new invention in mass media, called the radio, which transformed the face of advertising, fueling a period of profound consumerism and decadence.

In 1929, during a period of zero inflation, the Federal Reserve needlessly raised interest rates to astonishingly high levels in its attempt to restrain the stock market boom. As a result, industrial production plunged, causing a 30% decline in GDP (from 1929 to 1935) and skyrocketing unemployment.

In case you needed additional proof that tariffs were not the culprit behind of the Great Depression, look no further than to a previous tariff bill, called the Fordney-McCumber Act. This tariff bill raised the average import tax more than twice that of the Smoot-Hawley Act.

Do you know what followed the Fordney-McCumber tariff Act?

Anyone? Anyone?

The 1922 Fordney-McCumber Act was immediately followed by one of the most prosperous periods in America’s history known as the roaring twenties.

Reason #4: American Communities will Reap the Rewards

The final reason that leaves me optimistic during this time of market tumult is that I believe that America’s communities will be the ultimate beneficiaries.

Long before the U.S. markets catered to global interests, there were thriving regional stock markets and community banks that served local entrepreneurs and investors.

Instead of a handful of robotic juggernauts trading global tickers, actual human beings would invest in the small businesses that enhanced their community or, at the very least, produced goods that they were passionate about consuming.

Because of the ties to the community or product, individual investors were markedly connected to their investments. They cared about the business and, in many cases even had a personal connection to the business owner. This bond cultivated a breed of long-term investors as opposed to short-term traders.

The average holding period of a publicly-traded stock, today, is a mere five and half months versus the 6 to 8 years it was during the 1950s and 60s - an era when local economies were booming.

While, in recent decades, market globalization and one-sided tariff arrangements have certainly created an enormous amount of wealth for some, it did so at the expense of the vast number of America’s small businesses needed to strengthen our local communities.

As the capital - that was once allocated to our neighbors - moved into offshore investments, regional businesses suffered, and investors became increasingly detached from their investments. As a result, towns across the country deteriorated -economically as well as morally.

If Trump’s tariffs help eventuate the restoration of communities across America, then today’s temporary market volatility - no matter how extreme - will have been well worth it.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be personal financial advice. Please obtain independent financial advice before making any investment decision based on the information contained on this website.

I have already seen about a handful of individuals, on facebook, announce their rush to sell their assets and liquidate their retirement portfolios in preparation of the sky collapsing on their heads.

And I can sympathize with their concerns. Based on the sheer despair echoed throughout every economy-related article popping up on my newsfeed, one would think it was the year, 1933.

Having gone down the rabbit hole of America’s fiscal regulatory history, I can assure you that 2025 is the very antithesis of 1933. But I will reserve that mind-blowing discussion for a subsequent article.

In the meantime, I am going to use this piece to illustrate why I believe that today’s chicken little legacy media has it all wrong when it comes to the economy, and why investors need to stop taking agenda-driven journalism as gospel. Doing so is putting people at risk for making very unsound investment decisions that could harm their retirement plans, their children’s education and their family’s entire financial future.

Let me start by stating, emphatically, that the sky is not falling. And, even more significantly, the media is very well aware of this fact.

How could I be so sure? Well, let’s just say that when it comes to economic projections, the legacy media does not have the best track record. Well, what else would you expect when forecasts are predicated on ideology and flimsy data as opposed to objective reality?

There is no credible reason for journalists to be so pessimistic about today’s relatively small market declines when they had the complete opposite reaction, in 2022, when the markets lost more than twice as much. As of this writing, the S&P 500 is currently down 8% from its February 19th record high and NASDAQ off 12.5% from its peak.

Just look at CNN’s January 2023 headlines which were fresh off the heels of the S&P 500 losing 19.6% and the Nasdaq Composite plummeting 33.5%. There was no hint of doom following the worst market performance since the 2008 global financial meltdown. Instead, CNN was encouraging its shrinking readership to be “cautiously optimistic” about the economy. The media outlet also praised the 2022 job growth as “extraordinary” (of course, this was before the employment numbers were revised downward by over 18%). CNN even went so far as to use a made-up word, “slowcession,” to avoid using the “R” word.

There were no falling sky alarms, during the previous four years, as inflation was incinerating 25% of our purchasing power; or as 401(k) hardship withdrawals surged 182% to reach new heights; or as consumer debt soared 18% to historic levels; or even as millions of more Americans slipped into poverty.1

On the contrary, tone-deaf media hacks like Paul Krugman were doing everything they could, especially during the big election year, to convince us that the economy was “Goldilocks Perfect” - even if it meant manipulating the economic data.

To paint a picture of a rosier economy, such propagandists were excluding the most inflationary and essential products as well as relying on pre-revised employment numbers to persuade the public that inflation was decelerating and that jobs were being added when, in reality, the exact opposite was transpiring.

So, after years of being fed blatant lies, forgive me for being skeptical of today’s sudden synchronized shift in negative economic sentiment - especially considering that these media “experts” are all using the same skewed data and toeing its same old agenda: to protect a 112-year-old centralized financial power structure that is in the midst of being obsoleted by decentralization.

No matter how the media attempts to spin the antiquated government data or dodgy consumer sentiment surveys, the fact is that, by definition, America is not currently in a recession. Given that the media made it vogue to use made-up terms, I am going to suggest that the nation is experiencing what I call a “purge-cession” - an economic clean-up necessary to clear the path for unprecedented prosperity.

A recession had long been defined as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. Although the U.S. GDP growth slowed during the fourth quarter of 2024, it still grew 2.3%.

Since the official U.S. GDP numbers for the first two quarters of 2025 are not expected to be released until April 30th and July 30th, respectively, any talk of a present recession is pure speculation at best and fear mongering at worst.

It is worth reminding readers that, in 2022, when the U.S. actually did experience two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, the media reacted with the exact same feigned optimism that it held toward the 2022 tanking stock market.

In fact, here’s a link to a 2022 CNN article celebrating the second consecutive GDP contraction because it could have been lower while, at the same time, framing the long-standing “two quarter rule” as an “unofficial indicator of a recession.”

It was pretty obvious, to anyone paying attention, that CNN and other obliging media outlets received the 2022 White House talking points memo containing instructions on how to couch the indubitable RECESSION to coincide with the administration’s unilateral changes to the definition of the “R” word. The former administration strategically removed the very specific “negative two quarter GDP” standard and loosely redefined recession as a very nebulous “broad-based contraction that affects many sectors of the economy.”

If you’ve never read Ayn Rand, you may not realize the significance of replacing the objective with the subjective. This is a cute little communist tactic that gives government the power to shape a narrative as well as escape accountability.

The absence of a well-defined economic yardstick gives an obedient media the license to report based on interpretation as opposed to objective reality. This shields the government from taking responsibility for its fiscal negligence while allowing an economy to self-identify as recessionary or not.

And that, my friends, is exactly how two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth and a 25.5% drop in the S&P 500 (from its 2022 peak to trough) does not constitute a recession; but how positive GDP growth with a 10.5% decline in S&P 500 (from its 2025 peak to trough) signifies an apparent economic apocalypse.

This brings me to my next point. Why is the S&P 500 still being viewed as a viable leading economic indicator at all?

Let’s be honest (unlike CNN), because the S&P 500 index is no longer the same diversified benchmark that once embodied the broader Main Street American economy, it has become less of an economic gauge and more of a measurement of just how dysfunctional and disproportional the U.S. public equity markets have become.

Today, just three industries (Tech, Healthcare and Financial) and seven magnificent companies (all members of the trillion-dollar market cap club) dominate the S&P 500. In fact, although they represent a mere .00002% of all American businesses, America’s seven most magnificent companies now comprise an unprecedented 35% of the S&P 500.

What’s worse is that only three investors (BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street) control the vast majority of the S&P 500 shares, collectively owning 88% of all S&P 500 companies. If that wasn’t bad enough, these hegemonic investors also just so happen to be the global leaders in passive investing - with all three utilizing quantitative investment strategies (the extent of which they refuse to disclose).

Quantitative funds, which are far more interested in a company’s trading patterns than in its goods and services, now control over 35% of the U.S. market - 44% more than funds managed by human beings, made up of flesh and blood, who possess real thoughts and emotions, and who actually buy consumer products.2

Even slight downward readjustments of the Mag Seven, by quantitative funds, are going to wreak havoc on the U.S. equity markets. This lack of “investor-base diversification” is an existential macroeconomic problem that is exacerbated by the fact that publicly traded companies, in general, are becoming a dying breed. Today, there are half as many listed companies as there were in the mid-1990s - many of which are rapidly losing all commonality with the mainstream American consumer.

In recent years, the collective revenue generated by the Mag Seven have gradually been shifting away from consumer products and gravitating towards business services. Although these services provide higher margins, this revenue repositioning is turning the S&P 500 into a better measurement of global innovation and advertising trends than a snapshot of the consumer-driven U.S. economy.

Even Amazon - a company categorized as a “Consumer Cyclical” - is increasingly generating more and more revenue from its non-consumer facing divisions like web services and advertising.

And although Telsa still serves consumers, it is, unfortunately, starting to look more like a political poll than any sort of an economic barometer.

To be clear, the S&P 500 is not the only “leading” economic indicator that is failing to accurately gauge the direction of the economy. Nearly every conventional economic metric, presently used, is either fundamentally flawed or on the cusp of being obsoleted by modern innovation - especially when it comes to the data released by the government.

Let’s start with the CPI index put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Would it surprise you to learn that this consequential inflation metric, which is used to dictate life-altering fiscal policy, is months behind modern methods that use decentralized innovation to gather data?

Or would it shock you to discover that the government’s data is so deficient that it is often not even trusted by other departments within its own government? Check out my January 2023 podcast interview (especially starting at the 17:40 mark) with Stefan Rust, CEO of Truflation, an economic data provider that utilizes blockchain technology to deliver real-time, pinpoint accurate economic metrics including inflation.

What about the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index, another heavily relied upon leading economic indicator? The media has been giddy concerned over its recent decline, inflaming citing inflation fears. Given the media’s reputation for deceit, it begs questioning whether or not consumer sentiment is indeed deteriorating and whether or not inflation is factually on the rise.

Truflation, which again is months ahead of the government figures, shows true inflation to be down over 17% from a month ago and 40% lower than it was a year ago.

As far as consumer sentiment is concerned, according to Truflation CEO Stefan Rust, “There is a big difference between what people say and how they think and feel.”

That was a lesson that pollsters learned all too well in 2016.

Fortunately, everyone will soon learn exactly how consumers are feeling as word on the blockchain street has it that Truflation will be launching its own consumer sentiment index - one based precisely on a consumer’s state of mind.

Before you allow tales of a falling sky push you into investing hibernation, it would behoove you to explore these more sophisticated, real-time economic data tools. This may just be what saves you from waking up to find that the only thing that fell was your net worth.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be personal financial advice. Please obtain independent financial advice before making any investment decision based on the information contained on this website.

Given the acceleration of innovation in the financial services sector, it should come as no surprise that the investment advisory business is one that will be most impacted by this alternative uprising.

Not only is the alternative asset universe evolving and proliferating, but the vehicles being used to hold and custody these next-generation alternative assets are advancing at unprecedented rates.

These financial product modifications will reimagine retirement planning and transform portfolio construction – particularly for retail clientele - who now, more than ever, require greater portfolio diversification and an even vaster array of alternative assets.

Although the majority of financial advisors have now come to view alternative assets as a core component of wealth management, 2025 will be the year that their allocation models start to become bolder, more creative, and quite frankly, far more effective in generating better risk-adjusted returns.

Below are five key reasons why all financial advisors will be recommending next-generation alternative assets and how these changes in their allocation models will fuel the growth of advisory AUM, retail portfolios and the economy at large.

1. Alternative Assets are vital to enhancing Sharpe Ratios

The Sharpe Ratio is a commonly used metric that analyzes risk-adjusted returns. Essentially, the higher the Sharpe Ratio, the better the risk-adjusted return. And diversification has long been proven to enhance the Sharpe Ratio of a portfolio.

Unfortunately, portfolios comprised solely of traditional assets like stocks, bonds and mutual funds are rapidly becoming less and less diversified over time. The reason is simple. These traditional assets are all derivatives of the same small diminishing pool of publicly-traded companies.

Not only are there now half as many listed companies in the U.S. than there were in the mid-1990s, today’s stock market indexes are dominated by just a tiny subset of the public companies that remain - making proper diversification even more difficult to achieve with conventional assets alone.

In previous decades, the contribution of the top seven stocks to the market capitalization of the S&P 500 have hovered below 20%. Since 2020 this number has skyrocketed. Today, the Magnificent Seven - Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOGL), Meta Platforms (META), Microsoft (MSFT), Nvidia (NVDA), and Tesla (TSLA) - make up a staggering 35% of the market cap of the S&P 500.

And that’s not all. The Magnificent Seven also represent a substantial weighting in other popular indexes such as the Nasdaq 100, Russell 1000 and FTSE All-World. In fact, the Magnificent Seven now make up nearly 23% of the MSCI World index and according to Goldman Sachs’ prime brokerage, they account for approximately 20.7% of hedge funds’ total U.S. single stock net exposure, which is the highest level on record.

With the Magnificent Seven infiltrating our domestic and international mutual funds, ETFs, bonds and even our private hedge funds, it is becoming virtually impossible to diversify away from them without next-generation alternatives such as fintech-centric private credit and equity as well as decentralized cryptocurrencies and RWA tokenization.

As the chart below illustrates, having added a 5% allocation of bitcoin to a traditional balanced portfolio, in 2015, would have increased its Sharpe ratio by a staggering 35% while more than doubling its compounded annual growth rate.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg, for it is not simply the quantity of assets that is improving, a much better quality of alternative investable products is also emerging. In fact, many of the newer alts coming down the pike will utterly defy conventional risk-reward paradigms, ensuring even more pronounced Sharpe ratio surges in the future.

2. Next-Gen alternative assets offer greater rewards for lower risk

Thanks to fintech and blockchain innovation, even venture investing is about to become more rewarding and much less risky. Innovations in venture financing are on the cusp of bringing products, like Income Venture Units, to the mass market. These novel venture investments contain the upside potential of a startup along with quarterly dividend payments that are backed by real-world assets (RWAs).

Imagine being able to invest in an early venture, while receiving twice the dividend yield than the average utility stock, secured by a real-world asset such as real estate.

Imagine the magnitude of innovations that would ensue, the sheer number of jobs that could be created, and the economic growth that would follow simply by allowing venture investing to become safer and more prevalent.

Now imagine if you didn’t have to imagine this at all, for the reality of this day is coming.

And it is not just growth investing that is getting a makeover. The fixed income market, too, will soon be unrecognizable with the mainstreaming of products such as bitcoin bonds (bonds issued by entities to purchase bitcoin) as well as crypto mining equipment leasing. Products like these will ensure that the more risk averse investor gains diversification through indirect exposure to cryptocurrencies while also satisfying their income needs.

Next-gen alternatives such as these will become important components of modern portfolios, for they will not only enhance Sharpe ratios, but they will also play an essential role in enabling financial advisors to outperform the market.

3. AI is making it impossible for financial advisors to compete simply by generating alpha

When it comes to wealth management, every financial advisor aims to generate alpha (outperform the market) while taking the lowest risk possible. This skill is what gives them their edge in an ever-increasing competitive landscape.

In recent years, conventional investment advisors have found themselves having to compete with robo-advisors and fintech platforms. Now advisors must contend with the most formidable opponent of all: the AI Agent.

Artificial Intelligence is transforming how alpha is generated by uncovering hidden patterns in vast datasets, improving prediction accuracy, and automating decision-making. In doing so, AI will enable not only financial advisors, but all investors, to consistently outperform the market.

This will have enormous implications for the financial services industry and for equity markets in general. In one fell swoop, AI will transform traditional stock markets into nothing more than index trading platforms - leaving traditional market investors even more vulnerable to systematic risk and causing advisors to seek new ways to add value.

Financial advisors will be forced to differentiate themselves by offering non-correlated investment products that can only be found in next-generation alternatives as well as by providing emotional-based financial services - something AI is incapable of delivering.

Accordingly, in order to stay competitive, instead of alpha, advisors will need to focus on the behavioral aspects of finance such as retirement and college planning. This is something they will not be able to do effectively without first understanding new web3 earning techniques that redefine how money is acquired and amassed as well as the developing infrastructure used to facilitate the transfer and storage of alternative assets.

4. Modern Retirement Vehicles will play an integral role in the mainstreaming of alternative assets

Advisors are about to realize that in order to succeed, they will need to familiarize themselves with the emerging bitcoin-based insurance products, innovative custodial solutions and most significantly, the next-generation retirement and savings vehicles.

With all three pillars of America’s existing retirement infrastructure failing to prevent a growing epidemic of senior poverty, it was only inevitable that a superior savings solution would materialize.

Advisors - and the world - will soon be introduced to the REdefined Contribution Retirement Plan, a more sustainable and economically accretive retirement resolution that will not only guarantee a nest egg for each and every American, but it will do so without policymakers having to raise the retirement age, increase payroll taxes, cut promised retirement benefits, or even disrupt existing workplace plans.

Since the REdefined Contribution Retirement Plan will be able to custody alternative assets, in accordance with existing law, in addition to driving immediate economic growth, the REdefined Contribution Retirement Plan will play an integral role in the mainstreaming of alternative assets.

Furthermore, because the REdefined Contribution Retirement Plan can effectively provide a viable savings supplement for the 57 million Americans without access to an existing workplace plan and for the millions more who are financially unprepared for retirement, it creates an extraordinary market opportunity for financial advisors to significantly expand their retail client base as well as their AUM - particularly at a time when the regulatory climate will favor the servicing of retail investors.

5. There has never been a more favorable regulatory climate for alternative assets

Like magic, with changing of the guard, many of the regulatory bottlenecks that stood in the way of retail investors from accessing alternative assets are rapidly vanishing.

America went from a regime that sought to create a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) and use its securities enforcement arm to prevent retail investors from holding decentralized alternatives to an administration that is prohibiting a despotic CBDC and, instead, exploring the creation of a national cryptocurrency stockpile as well as a regulatory framework to foster a stable digital assets industry. Read: Between the Lines of Biden’s Executive Order on Digital Assets

America also went from having a Department of Labor (DOL) with the expressed desire to “dedicate sufficient investigative resources to [what it deems as] risky investment practices involving illiquid and hard-to-value assets” to an administration whose DOL has a proven track record of strengthening retirement portfolio diversification with private alternatives. Read: Why Americans Should be Cheering the Labor Department’s Recent Move to Open 401(k) Access to Private Equity

With a pro-alternative-asset administration back in the White House, and with some of the most notorious anti-fintech regulators having had exited the SEC, financial fiduciaries will now be able to recommend next-gen non-correlated alternative assets to retail investors without fearing the wrath of overbearing regulators targeting them for doing nothing more than adhering to the diversification mandates as codified in the Uniform Prudent Investor Act (UPIA).

The days of advisors being apprehensive about alternative assets are over, and the time for employing them to fulfil fiduciary responsibility has begun - just as Mark Yusko, chief investment officer of Morgan Creek Capital Management, predicted on my podcast (at the 4:10 mark), nearly four years ago, when he stated that “in less than 5 years, it will be fiduciarily derelict for fiduciaries to have zero exposure to digital assets.”

Next-generation alternative assets are here to stay. And they will not just produce better fiduciaries and generate greater risk-adjusted returns for retail clients. These assets hold the key to ensuring America’s standing as a leading global innovator and economic powerhouse.

In all my years of practicing this fine art of crystal-gazing, I have never felt more hopeful about the future and the promise of decentralized innovation.

2024 began with a few Decentralist wins against rogue regulators, but it ended with some of the most glorious victories of all time - assuring that a fascist Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) will not see the light of day in the United States of America anytime soon, and that Gary Gensler will no longer have the ability to continue stonewalling the very innovation needed to foster economic prosperity and narrow the national wealth gap. See: Recap of Last Week's Battles in the War Between the Centralists and Decentralists

Thanks to these triumphs, I feel more optimistic than ever that, after a 5-year derailment, the two-thousand twenties will roar as was prophesied in January 2020. See: How 2019 FinTech Trends May Have Laid the Groundwork for Another Roaring Twenties and Recap of 2020 Bizarro World and Some Really Bold Investment Predictions for 2021.

While I have made a number of accurate financial predictions over the years, I have often shied away from committing to price targets - that is until last year when I predicted that bitcoin, then trading in the $44K range, would reach $120,000 in 2024.

After scaling to $106,147 in 2024, bitcoin fell just short of my $120,000 target. As much as I would have loved to have had the bragging rights, I believe that bitcoin is just weeks away from hitting my mark. I predict that, in 2025, bitcoin will far surpass $120,000. And, with Trump’s vow to establish a U.S. bitcoin strategic reserve, its longer-term outlook is even more auspicious - especially with other nations likely to follow suit. In fact, I can envision a day when a $120,000 drop in the price of bitcoin will be barely discernable on a chart. That is how high bitcoin can ultimately soar in non-hostile regulatory climates.

2024 was also a year that saw some of the most notorious crypto antagonists exiting the public square with their tails between their legs. This brings me to my most precise forecast of 2024.

Last year I predicted that media hacks, like Paul Krugman, would spend the election year desperately trying to paint a picture of a booming economy - even as credit card debt rose to record levels and over a million more Americans fell into poverty. In addition to his column in the NY Times, Krugman’s 2024 X feed is filled with tone-deaf rants glorifying a flagging economy and literally mocking those in financial despair.

But you can forget about giving Krugman a piece of your mind as he has since disabled the comment feature on his X feed. I guess when you are a Nobel laureate, reading the room is beneath you - as is acknowledging lapses in judgment like declaring that the internet’s impact on the economy will be no greater than that of the fax machine’s, or like lambasting an appreciating bitcoin as the dollar hemorrhages purchasing power.

Since the day when Krugman predicted that “blockchain would die and bitcoin would collapse,” the cryptocurrency market has grown over 2,500% with bitcoin soaring over 1,200%. Meanwhile, during that same timeframe, the dollar had lost over 25% in purchasing power.

Fortunately, readers of the NY Times need not worry any longer about making poor financial decisions based on Krugman’s unsound economic convictions as the erroneous oracle retired his pen a few weeks ago.

Speaking of term limits retirement, this brings me to my 2024 prediction that Elizabeth Warren would lose her Senate seat to a pro-crypto candidate.

Cryptocurrency activist and attorney John Deaton certainly gave Warren a run for her money - exposing her for stifling the innovation that she so clearly doesn’t comprehend, and for neglecting to question Gary Gensler about his private meetings with disgraced FTX founder San Bankman-Fried. However, at the end of the day, Warren held on to her seat.

In hindsight, instead of Warren, I wish I would have gone with predicting that big-bank crusader Sherrod Brown would lose his re-election. I would have had much better odds with Ohio than with Massachusetts, the state known - and often ridiculed - for banning its residents from participating in the IPO of the most valuable U.S. company of all time, Apple. You can click here if you would like to read more about why certain politicians decree outperforming assets, like bitcoin, and hot IPOs, like Apple, as hazardous while deeming the devaluating dollar and ebbing Treasuries as “risk free.”

Fortunately, with folks like Gensler, Brown and Krugman put out to pasture, archaic pro-centralist voices that pander to legacy industries have become the minority - paving the way for their worn-out defective theories to be replaced with alternative solutions that actually work.

And the timing could not be more pivotal as America no longer has the luxury of wasting time trying to solve problems with the same ideologies that created them.

This is the perfect segue into my 2025 predictions…

2025 WILL IGNITE THE ALTERNATIVE ERA

Traditional industry titans that have, for the last century, dictated our diet, our healthcare options, our news and entertainment and, of course, our investment choices are on the cusp of epic displacement. Instead, the alternative fraction of every industry will rise and reign, thanks to decentralized innovation.

Granted, I have been predicting the decentralization and democratization of every industry for quite some time (see: Decentralization will Shape the Future of Humanity and 2022 Predictions So Obvious They Should be Called, Certitudes). However, it is the shift in political winds that will now make decentralization an unstoppable reality and the alternative world open for business.

Alternative Health

Holistic remedies will no longer play second fiddle to prescription drugs simply because pharmaceutical companies have more lobbying dollars. Holistics will soon be affordable to all through modern types of healthcare coverage, made possible by decentralized innovation.

Food will be healthier not only because harmful ingredients - which are banned in most parts of the world except for the U.S. - will finally be removed from supermarket shelves, but because individuals will be economically incentivized to consume healthier foods.

The emergence of web3 platforms, such as Fruits of the Amazon, which will compensate users for learning how biodiversity prevents illnesses and ensures a cleaner environment, will soon enable individuals, across the planet, to monetize a much more wholesome lifestyle.

Mahatma Gandhi, who once said, “it is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver,” never envisioned the emergence of a technology that could simultaneously deliver both.

Alternative Media

Just like AltHealth, AltMedia will not be playing second string to conventional media anymore. Instead, web3 media will ensure that we-the-people are accorded a louder voice and a more honest accounting of current events. Most transformatively, web3 media will make certain that whether individuals are creating or consuming content, they are compensated by receiving a piece of the ad revenue action.

I realize that it may be difficult, right now, to imagine a world that rewards truth instead of suppressing it, but I promise you that day is coming.

Alternative Finance

Anyone who still thinks that alternative finance is not the future of finance has not been paying attention for the last decade and a half. In fact, we’ve reached the point in humanity’s timeline where alternative finance can simply be called “finance.”

Innovation is fueling an endlessly proliferating universe of alternative assets. Not only is this unleashing the greatest diversification opportunity in the history of mankind, innate to many of these novel investment products will be exceptionally high Sharpe Ratios, enabling investors to take far less risk for much greater returns.

You are going to start to see modern investment products utterly defy conventional risk/reward paradigms.

Even venture capital investing will become less risky with the development of innovative venture financing structures, like Income Venture Units, that have the backing of real-world assets and pay quarterly dividends. Products such as this will finally enable start-ups to attract the funding needed to innovate, expand, create jobs and drive economic growth - all while mitigating capital losses.

The alternative future also brings many more ways for investors - even the more risk averse investor - to include cryptocurrencies in their portfolios.

Products like Bitcoin bonds (bonds issued by entities to purchase bitcoin) as well as crypto mining equipment leasing have emerged to provide indirect exposure to cryptocurrencies while satisfying those who seek fixed income.

I remain more confident than ever that asset tokenization will bring an unprecedented opportunity for individuals to not only hedge their portfolios with a growing number of non-correlated assets, but they will also be able to monetize their existing physical possessions. See: Get Ready to Protect Your Investment Portfolios with Tokenized Collectibles.

Most of the non-correlated alternative assets referenced above will be appreciating in alternative retirement vehicles. In fact, much like the 401k emerged from the most unexpected place (a tax loophole), expect an alternate retirement vehicle to similarly surface that not only transforms how tomorrow’s retirements are funded, but also guarantees that they are indeed well capitalized without taxpayer subsidies or eating into corporate profits.

And, don’t be surprised if this new nonconventional retirement vehicle becomes known as the “REdefined Contribution Plan” because of the way in which it reconceives the match contribution system. Most significantly, don’t underestimate the REdefined Contribution Plan’s ability to fuel unprecedented economic prosperity.

This retirement solution is big - likely as big as or if not bigger than the advent of the assembly line. I will refrain from stating anything more at this time, but you can expect details to be published in the very near future.

The Epic Impact of the Alternative Realignment

The shift to the alternative world will have epic implications causing many traditional players to either adapt or perish.

While less nimble legacy business will be able to merge to avoid bankruptcy, existent regulators will have a much more challenging time acclimating to the alternative world.

Existing self-regulatory organizations (SROs) will be forced to become more knowledgeable about modern assets as well as more inclusive so as to ensure that the alternative fraction of finance is appropriately represented. Otherwise, alternative SROs, more proficient in fintech and digital assets, will emerge to support a rapidly evolving financial services industry. When it comes down to it, an SRO without the “S” is not an SRO at all. Instead, it is nothing more than an incognizant competitor with unrestrained regulatory power.

The egregious leadership imbalance in today’s most known securities’ SRO will no longer be tolerated. The existing setup not only disenfranchises fintech businesses, but it also keeps financial advisors from fulfilling their fiduciary responsibilities and prevents retail investors from achieving better risk-adjusted returns.

I implore you to take a look at the licensing exams presently given to members of the securities community. The dearth of educational content related to digital assets and fintech is embarrassing. Now, if the objective is to keep financial advisors in the dark about modern asset classes, then, indeed, the existing exams serve their purpose. However, if America’s capital markets are to remain the envy of the world, then it needs to bring its financial services industry into the 21st century. And that simply cannot be accomplished without providing registered representatives and investors, at large, with greater knowledge of contemporary investment products and strategies.

The SROs are not the only regulatory bodies in grave need of reform. The Securities & Exchange Commission, itself, has become one of the worst offenders of financial injustice. Particularly in recent years, the SEC has been grossly abusing its qualification and enforcement powers to pick winners and losers. And, instead of protecting investors, the SEC uses its unconstitutional accredited investor rule to prevent the masses from capitalizing on innovation. These actions have stymied economic growth and helped exacerbate the national wealth gap.

America can no longer afford to have a rogue regulator allocating the bulk of its taxpayer budget to frivolous enforcement actions while its corporate finance department struggles to qualify offerings and issue comment letters out on time. Nor can the nation continue to marginalize its citizens of lesser means.

Enforcement actions for minor infractions have become a flagrant waste of taxpayer dollars. This is money that should have been allocated to economically accretive initiatives such as creating a regulatory framework for digital assets and allowing more innovative companies to participate in the public markets.

The SEC can immediately be made infinitely more efficient simply by swapping its enforcement and corporate finance budgets. Perhaps this is something that can be accomplished under the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

As far as the accredited investor rule is concerned, hope is on the horizon. Investor Choice Advocates Network (ICAN), a nonprofit public interest litigation organization, dedicated to breaking down barriers to entry to capital markets, is doing tremendous work in fighting to reform the unjust accredited investor rule. ICAN is presently seeking a judicial order compelling the SEC to respond - after over two years of absolute silence - to ICAN’s 2022 petition, urging the agency to modernize its definition of an accredited investor. See ICAN's Fight to Reform the Accredited Investor Rule.

On the legislative front, Senator Tim Scott recently introduced a bill that would expand the accredited investor definition through the creation of a retail-centric qualification exam, thereby increasing opportunities for everyday investors to build wealth and for American businesses to access new sources of capital.

I expect both of these initiatives to finally bring the constitutionality of the accredited investor rule to the forefront of national debate in 2025.

Until there is widespread discourse, most Americans will never realize how the discriminatory accredited investor rule restricts their business financing, diminishes their investment returns, undermines their retirement plans, raises unemployment and thwarts economic growth.

Equally essential as open dialogue is the matter of choice. And what is choice if not an alternative between two or more options.

So, for those who, for whatever reason, fear the arrival of the alternative era, it is important to understand that no one is forcing alternative products on anyone. Instead, people will merely have the opportunity to make their own choices.

They will have the ability to choose between natural remedies or the synthetic drugs which come with a list of side effects more harrowing than the ailment itself.

They will have the ability to choose to eat a more wholesome cuisine, or they can opt for the lab-made processed foods - some of which presently contain the identical chemicals used to produce cleaning supplies, batteries and glue.

They will have the ability to choose to view the video footage captured by firsthand eyewitnesses, uploaded to a decentralized media platform, or they can choose to watch scripted segments (most sponsored by big pharma), filmed in a controlled studio, featuring paid journalists relaying their version of a current event.

They will have the ability to choose to diversify their retirement portfolios with non-correlated assets from an ever-expanding and continuously improving product universe, or they can choose to confine their investments to the equities and derivatives of the select few public companies which had been cherry-picked by the government.

Finally, industries will be able to choose to be truly self-regulated by tactful tech-savvy colleagues, or they can choose to remain regulated by the very adversaries that their innovation continues to disrupt.

Welcome to 2025 and the alternative era - where everyone will get the future they choose.

George was a 30-something fat, bald, unemployed, fake importer/exporter, with magnificent hands, who lived with his parents and spent many an afternoon treating his body like an amusement park.

George attributed his lack of success to one primary character flaw: bad instincts.

When it came to making a decision, George would consistently make the wrong one - even when it came to choosing something as simple as what to eat or what to wear.

One day George had an epiphany. If every instinct he had was wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.

It was in that moment that George pursued a life of opposite.

No sooner than when George ordered a chicken salad on rye with potato salad and tea - instead of his usual tuna salad on toast with coleslaw and coffee - did his entire life begin to turn around.

He got dates with women who were way out of his league.

He landed a bigtime job working for the NY Yankees.

And he even moved into his own place where he could go to town on himself without putting his mom in the hospital.

You are probably wondering what George Costanza’s new lease of life has to do with investment portfolios.

The answer is everything.

In fact, George’s opposite philosophy may not only be the solution to building wealth, but also to better health and greater happiness.

Now, I am in no way intimating that people do the opposite of their every instinct.

In fact, I am suggesting the very opposite of that.

Most individuals, save George Costanza, benefit by actually following their gut instincts. And being that our gut instincts are often at odds with what the government prescribes, I think it would be perfectly logical to explore the opposite of what is advocated by the government.

Particularly in recent years, the government has been devilishly wrong about nearly every issue most pertinent to the well-being of the people that it claims to serve.

Whether you chalk it up to poor judgment or something more nefarious, the fact is that government recommendations have been counter to our best interest - not to mention common sense.

The government’s recommended food pyramid proved to be detrimental to our health. Contrary to USDA advisement, individuals should have been eating a lot more meat and fats and a hell of a lot less bread and cereal. Although the profits of pharmaceutical and certain food companies would have suffered, we-the-people would have enjoyed a much better quality of life devoid of the multitude of chronic health conditions caused by the FDA-sanctioned ultra processed foods.

Sure, this “mishap” enriched a select number of S&P 500 companies. But it did so at the sacrifice of the blood and organs of a trusting populace.

The government’s mask guidelines turned out to be another “miscalculation.” Not only was masking - even double masking - ineffective in protecting against covid19, the masks ended up causing a host of avoidable health conditions such as rashes, styes and even developmental issues in young children - not to mention a proliferation of bacterial infections during a time when antibiotics were in short supply.

The government also “erred” in its gross underestimation of criminal activity. By assuring the public that the number of violent crimes was decreasing when, in fact, it was escalating, the government gave people a false sense of security. This “blunder” proved to be particularly hazardous to young females who mistakenly believed it would be safe to jog alone or be without self-defense products like pepper spray or keychain alarms. Lives could have been saved had individuals realized that they needed to be more vigilant.

The government also abysmally “misread” the economy. When inflation signals became glaringly evident in 2021, U.S. Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen dismissed them, promising the public that the risk of inflation is '“small” and “manageable.”

In the three years since Yellen assured that inflation wouldn’t become a problem, it has soared to unprecedented levels and Americans lost over 20% of their purchasing power.

If the government hadn’t concealed inflation by suppressing key money supply metrics misperceived the warning signs, it could have mitigated mass economic hardship by tackling inflation when it first reared, and by informing the public on ways to prepare.

Manufacturers could have used forwards to lock in commodity prices which could have helped keep the cost of goods from rising so astronomically. Likewise, people could have braced themselves for looming inflation by stock-piling necessities, refinancing mortgages, postponing vacations and putting more money aside for a rainy day.

The truth is that government “lapses” have widespread repercussions that cause tremendous pain and suffering. They are also what led me to reach my own “Costanza moment.”

Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus

There is a saying in Latin, “Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus” which translates into, “false in one thing, false in everything.”

If the government can be this “misguided” about food, healthcare, crime and economics, I can’t help but wonder what else it is getting wrong.

I now find myself questioning the government’s judgment on everything - particularly its investment guidance.

The more the government cautions individuals against alternative investments such as private equity, private debt and cryptocurrencies as well as alternative retirement vehicles like self-directed IRAs, the more strongly I believe that these non-conventional financial products are the keys to financial independence and mass prosperity.

Until the government starts showing even a glimpse of judiciousness, I have decided to “costanza my portfolio” by avoiding investments that the government contends to be “safe”, like its Treasuries, and instead seek investment opportunities that are the very opposite.

Articles Referenced in this Post

You can watch it at the link below.

When I shared this fascinating and unoffending podcast on facebook, it was removed within seconds.

I was told that it went against facebook’s “community standards on spam.”

Over the years, I have shared hundreds of my articles and podcasts on facebook, and I have never once been accused of spam.

Not once.

Curious as to why I would suddenly be labeled a spammer, I decided to repost the SAME EXACT PODCAST episode under a different title.

The original title, “Exploring Whether Blockchain Technology is Evidence of Divine Intervention,” was changed to “The Interesting Timing of Blockchain’s Emergence.”

Wouldn’t you know it, the same podcast under the new title was not considered spam by facebook.

Clearly, facebook’s “algorithms” had no issue with the term, “blockchain.”

Nor did it have any problem with the message, “Check out my latest podcast episode.”

It appears that, for some reason, facebook was triggered by sharing a link that included the phrase: DIVINE INTERVENTION.

I am hoping that someone can explain to me what facebook finds so offensive about these two innocuous words which are used to describe uplifting events that provide hope to millions of people across the globe.

If you have any idea, please let me know in the comment section.

Leave a comment

In the meantime, whether it is through my work or in my personal life, I will keep looking for signs of DIVINE INTERVENTION.

I will also continue posting any findings on facebook - without any regard to the social media platform’s retaliation.

I, for one, would prefer to live in a physical world with purpose than exist in a meta-verse of trivialness.

Episode Highlights:

4:35 - Bitcoin emerged from an unknown creator to bring positive change in the world

5:24 - First Bitcoin block is referred to as the Genesis Block

7:07 - Message in the Bitcoin Genesis Block condemns centralized finance much like Jesus had denounced the money changers

8:40 - Blockchain, the Bible and truth

10:31 - Reference to cryptography in the Bible

13:27 - Blockchain’s mission to ensure that AI is not centralized

14:55 - Dangers of a central bank digital currency (CBDC)

16:50 - How blockchain keeps the Fed in check

19:20 - Humanity’s battle between the centralists and decentralists

26:03 - Embedded in decentralized innovation are the virtues of freedom and inclusiveness

27:46 and 40:45 - Why blockchain emerged at precisely this moment in history

28:48 - Blockchain and Revelations

43:48 - How listeners could use this information to benefit spiritually as well as financially

46:38 - How blockchain can be used to keep government economic data honest (47:07 - Truflation)

About The Decent Millionaire Podcast

The Decent Millionaire podcast (short for decentralized millionaire), hosted by fintech pundit Dara Albright, is an episodic podcast series that helps people discover the unprecedented wealth creating potential of decentralization, web3 & Participate2Earn Economics (P2E Economics for short). Whether you are an individual looking to learn how web3 can make you healthier, wealthier and wiser – without investing a dime; or whether you are a policymaker, financial professional or economist seeking to understand how this new macroeconomic framework will foster economic expansion, narrow wealth gaps, raise literacy rates, improve the healthcare system and ensure ample retirement savings for all, this is the podcast for you.

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Since that piece was published, candidate Kamala Harris has officially committed to a 28% corporate tax rate - a 7% increase from where it is today. Based on last year’s figures, this would amount to an additional $29.4 billion in tax revenue, presently .08% of the national debt.

Now, I’m sure that $29.4 billion would certainly benefit the FOGs (“Friends of Government”) like those who received millions of taxpayer dollars to study cow burps. However, if this figure were to be divvied up among the populace, each American would receive just $88 - barely enough to pay for one week’s worth of groceries.

To put this number into a more relatable context, adding $29.4 billion to a nation that is $35 trillion in debt is the equivalent of someone with a personal debt load of $25,000 getting a $20 annual raise.

That $20 would barely cover a meal at a fast-food restaurant, let alone one monthly loan payment.

Comparatively, given the government’s $16.8 billion daily spending habit, every single penny of that additional $29.4 billion would be depleted in a matter of mere hours.

42 hours to be exact.

Hence, anyone with basic math sense can see that raising the corporate tax rate to 28% will do nothing to help the millions of Americans who, at this very minute, are struggling to decide whether to put gas in their cars or feed their kids.

This is very simple arithmetic. There is no way that anyone running for high office doesn’t know how trivial a 7% corporate tax increase would be to the everyday American.

It makes one wonder whether this corporate tax hike is an earnest economic plan or just another campaign tactic, hoping that a few more “tax the rich” soundbites will resonate with mathematically incognizant and financially illiterate voters.

I think that the answer lies in the latest proposal to tax the unrealized capital gains of the uber wealthy. For, the only thing more absurd than taking money from job creators in exchange for no economic benefit to the populace is to tax money that doesn’t even exist at all.

Taxing unrealized capital gains is as nonsensical as taxing lottery tickets simply because they might be worth millions of dollars in an upcoming drawing.

It is a good thing that Elizabeth Warren is currently too busy desperately fighting to hang on to her senate seat. Otherwise, I’m sure she’d be insidiously drafting legislation to tax Powerball purchasers in the 1 in 292,200,000 chance that their numbers come in.

But I digress.

Taxing unrealized capital gains is not just ludicrous, it is downright chilling. Handing government the power to tax unsold assets sets a very dangerous precedent - even if it is just initially aimed at the 10,660 U.S. citizens who fall into the centimillionaire category (those with a net worth of $100 million or more).

According to the Department of Treasury, “the proposal would impose a minimum tax of 25% on total income, generally inclusive of unrealized capital gains, for all taxpayers with wealth (that is, the difference obtained by subtracting liabilities from assets) greater than $100 million.”

If you think that baseball card and wine collections would be excluded the asset count, you’d be wrong. Not only are collectibles included in the asset count, but the proposal also grants the Secretary of the Treasury and/or delegates the authority “for determining the basis of assets in cases where complete records are unavailable.”

So, how much taxpayer money will the U.S. receive for this gross infringement?

Well, according to the Treasury it is estimated that the unrealized capital gains tax on America’s centimillionaires would generate, on average, about $50.3 billion per year.

That amounts to just 71.8 extra hours of annual federal spending. That’s the big financial score to the U.S. treasury (insert eyeroll).

Aside from the FOGs, the other groups who would benefit the most from this harebrained idea would be accountants and, especially, lawyers as this plan will undoubtedly invite a plethora of litigation focused on asset valuation disputes.

With all due respect, this tax proposal is not an economic solution, it is a complete farce - and a very perilous one. Once empowered and precedents are set, there will be no stopping the government from taxing the unrealized capital gains across all brackets. This would unquestionably trigger annual market crashes as individuals are forced to liquidate assets, each year, just to pay their tax bill.

It doesn’t make sense that anyone, sincere about fixing the economy and helping the middle class, would risk pulverizing retirement portfolios in exchange for just a few extra days of spending each year.

Once again, this has all the markings of a campaign strategy designed to lure disenfranchised voters with false claims that the wealthy are the cause of their financial woes.

Indeed “blaming the rich” is still foolishly believed by some to be an effective way to galvanize the electorate. However, these individuals will be sorely disappointed when they realize just how few voters are still falling for the dissipated “tax the rich” campaign slogan.

The vast majority of Americans, today, view the government - not the wealthy - as the cause of their financial demise. Only the people buying bridges in Brooklyn from shysters believe that corporate price gauging is what caused a 25% loss in their purchasing power over the last few years.

Americans are suffering. They don’t want scapegoats. Nor do they want disingenuous tax proposals. They just want real economic solutions so that they can once again afford essential living expenses.

Inflation has opened people's eyes and made them see that America doesn’t have a tax problem; it has a spending problem. And it is one which is exacerbated by regulatory constraints that restrict local businesses and innovators from accessing the necessary capital that could actually fix the economy.

We have reached a critical economic juncture where America can't simply tax its way out of this economic mess.

America’s only chance of survival is to innovate and “entrepreneur-iate” its way out. And it can do so by returning to the very formula that enabled this nation to emerge as the world’s greatest economic superpower in the first place: granting all Americans the freedom to finance and capitalize from the innovation and ingenuity of its fellow citizens.

Amending some of today’s unjust securities rules (such as the SEC’s accredited investor rule) that prevent everyday Americans from investing in local privately held businesses is a quick and easy fix that could easily be implemented right now.

This would provide homegrown businesses with the essential (and far more cost-effective) capital to produce more goods and to hire more personnel. The injection of supply into the economy will help conquer inflation while the production will create actual jobs - not the phantom ones contained in fake government labor reports.

Candidates, who are proposing futile taxation policies instead of employing the proven remedies already at their disposal, are not serious about repairing the economy. And the more they spew divisive and illogical “tax the rich” rhetoric, the more they prove it.

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It’s the time for the ideologues to break out the “businesses aren’t paying their fair share of taxes” tirade.

However, those still campaigning on this prevarication are about to discover just how self-defeating this once effective political soundbite will be in 2024.

Here’s why…

The current corporate tax rate is 21%.

Trump has proposed bringing the corporate tax rate down to 15% while the Biden FY 2025 budget would raise it to 28%, and in the past, Harris has proposed returning to a 35% rate.

Last year, the U.S. federal government received $420 billion in corporate tax revenue which - based on its $16.8 billion daily spending habit - was wiped out in just 25 days.

Using last year’s figures, and assuming Harris adheres to her original 35% corporate tax proposal, Harris’ tax hike would add $58.8 billion more in revenue while Trump’s cut would reduce it by $25.2 billion.

Hence, the parties are essentially quibbling over a maximum of $84 billion in supplemental corporate tax revenue. This equates to just 5 days of federal spending.

Yes, the incessant berating of America’s businesses and pitting citizens against each other comes down to just 5 freaking days of additional spending!

Sure, this tactic may have helped galvanize voters in the past. However, once today’s more circumspect electorate start peeling back the economic onion, and realize that the 35% corporate tax rate won’t even buy one week of federal spending, they will feel like they’ve been propagandized.

They will assume that candidates pushing this narrative are either economically inept, or worse, that they are deceptively leaving out the inconvenient mathematical details.

And, voters - especially young Gen Zers - want to see that math! I have two young Gen Zers - one who will be voting in his first election this November. My kids, as well as their friends, are leery of politicians who sow discord because they can’t articulate the financial particulars.

Because Gen Zers - unlike their predecessors - don’t get their information from “news tickers” scrolling across their cable station, their minds aren’t wired to focus on headlines. Instead, they are conditioned to pursue the story. That is why as opposed to letting a “journalist” interpret an event for them, Gen Zers are more inclined to search social media for the raw video footage and make sense of it themselves.

They are also more apt to visit the U.S. debt clock on the internet to see for themselves just how much businesses are actually paying in taxes.

Because of the way that Gen Zers seek and digest information, it is imperative that politicians are forthcoming with facts - especially economic data.

Candidates will no longer be able to conceal that in addition to paying $420 billion in corporate taxes, businesses also spent another 50 billion dollars and squandered 1.14 billion hours on tax preparation.

Yes, you read that correctly. During the course of just one year, American businesses eat up 1.14 billion hours - equivalent to an astonishing 130,000 years - just to file their tax returns!

If anything, voters should be demanding an explanation as to why it takes the government just 25 days to deplete what it collectively costs businesses over 130,000 years to prepare for!

Any candidate who is still splitting hairs over tax percentages and berating job creators, instead of addressing why tax regulations have become so onerous that businesses require 130,000 years just to file returns, is not doing the American people, or mankind, justice.

Words cannot even begin to describe the amount of progress that civilization can make in 130,000 years. To put it into perspective, the picture below illustrates the extent of innovation that existed 100,000 years ago. Please note that this is not an actual photograph, as the camera would not be invented for at least another 129,792 years.

I seriously do not know how anyone can look at this picture and not think about all of the life-saving inventions that could have transpired, or the number of global crises that could have been resolved if those 1.14 billion hours of brainpower was allotted to innovation and problem solving instead of to tax preparations.

The shame of it all is that there are actually politicians who are so fixated on scapegoating businesses for their own failed economic policies, that they are incapable of recognizing all that humanity has lost.

For these partisans, no matter how much time and capital that America’s businesses contribute in taxes, it will never be enough.

But what they don’t seem to realize is that even if Harris could tax corporations 100% of their profits, all that would do is buy the government an extra 202 days of spending.

Let that sink in. All of America’s 2023 corporate profits combined amounts to only about 6 months of federal spending!

Although the economic impact of tax hikes would be inconsequential, the inverse is true for tax and regulation cuts.

The economy would exponentially improve if instead of burning resources on tax expenses, businesses were incented to put those funds towards employing and innovating.

In fact, if companies had allocated just one quarter of last year’s total $470 billion tax burden to workforce expansion, at today’s average annual salary of $60,000, nearly 2 million new full-time jobs would have been created and 72% more Americans would now be fully employed.

Even if corporations neglected to hire one single employee, but instead redirected those tax expenditures to innovating, it would still result in substantially more economic value than the money going to the federal government.

The reason is simple. Innovation - not government - is the engine of economic abundance. In fact, according to economists, a staggering 85% of economic growth is fueled by innovation alone. This is why some of history’s greatest bull markets and most roaring economies have all coincided with new innovation - particularly, an invention in mass media.

Imagine how much more prosperous - not to mention, safer - all Americans would be if instead of stealing precious innovating hours from businesses, the government just adhered to its mandate to “provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

Fortunately, thanks, in large part, to Gen Z voters, it is looking like common sense will prevail and the preposterous “businesses aren’t paying their fair share” narrative will finally be retired once and for all.

Then, maybe just maybe, instead of wasting breath, fighting over a few meaningless percentage points, the parties can begin uniting over ways to prevent America’s innovators from moving offshore so that today’s most consequential innovation, like blockchain technology, can empower the next economic boom and ensure American prosperity for generations to come.

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It is a time for celebration, for reflection, and for setting dreams into action.

Yet, with approximately 60% of students taking out loans in order to pay for college, for most it is also the commencement of a life-long debt shackle.

According to NerdWallet, 2024 high school grads are expected to enter the labor force, on average, with $37,000 in college debt.

Because most high schools in America are neglecting to teach even basic financial literacy skills, today’s graduates have no comprehension as to how fast that debt will accrue thanks to one of the oldest and most rudimentary financial concepts called, interest.

Shockingly, even though mankind has been paying interest on loans for over 4,000 years, a startling number of today’s adults are unaware that there is actually a price for borrowing money. According to a recent poll by Beyond Finance, 35% of Americans, across all demographics, confessed to not knowing the term "interest" in a financial context.

Given that the majority of Americans are critically unprepared for retirement, it should come as no surprise that the very same poll also revealed that almost half of the American adult population have no idea what a 401(k) is.

Financial nescience of this magnitude makes it impossible for anyone - especially today’s graduates - to comprehend the integral role that insolvency plays in making personal life decisions. It also prevents them from being able to conceptualize the global repercussions of their aggregate debt and widespread retirement savings shortfalls.  

Today’s grads will soon discover that it’s their financial obligations, not their college degree, that will establish their career path; and that it is their debt load, more so than their biological clocks, that will determine when they can start a family - if they can afford to have one at all.

They will also soon realize that it is their collective debt, as opposed to their cumulative votes, that will frame government policy as unsurmountable national debt will always be an impediment to innovation, prosperity, and freedom - regardless of who they elect.

One can only hope that Blackrock will already have funded the construction of enough safe spaces to console today’s impact-activated pupils by the time they figure out that it was their fiscal recklessness that did far more damage to the environment than pollution ever could. For, it was their pervasive indebtedness that diverted funds away from clean energy innovators and into the hands of rapacious creditors.

The reality is that the innovation that fuels human advancement depends on investment from the people, which is created when a person’s income exceeds her expenses. The freedom for citizens to use their surplus capital, to invest in and capitalize on the ingenuity of their fellow citizens, is what enabled America to emerge from a vast farmland into a leading global innovator and the greatest economic superpower in the history of the world. This very basic and proven formula for economic success should have been taught in elementary school.

However, instead of receiving these fundamental building blocks of investment and fiscal management, most of today’s grads squandered their early schooling being mathematically victimized by common core, a national “educational” initiative that deliberately overcomplicates straightforward arithmetic by forcing kids to spend indispensable learning hours wondering why numbers add up, instead of just tallying them.

So that our youth need not waste any more of their precious time over-scrutinizing simple digits in order to grasp the profound repercussions of college debt in today’s stagflationary economy, I’ve crunched the numbers using real math. The same irrefutable math that, despite enabling our forefathers to construct mankind’s most magnificent bridges, tunnels and architecture, is suddenly being canceled for no earthly reason. See: Everything Wrong in the World Today Comes Down to One Single Math Equation.

Without accounting for fees, at a 6% annual interest rate, one’s $37,000 student loan will ultimately cost $49,293 if paid off in 10 years or a staggering $63,619 if paid off in 20 years.

However, with the costs of living now exceeding starting salaries for college graduates, it begs the question whether monthly student loan payments can be made at all.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the median annual wage for bachelor’s degree holders across all fields is currently $60,000. After taxes, this amounts to approximately $3,853 in monthly take home pay.

Unfortunately, $3,853 falls far short of the average monthly expenses for a single individual, under 25 years old, living in the U.S. that the BLS tells us has now reached $4,432.

To make up for the monthly $579 deficit, many newly college grads will resort to credit cards, thereby paying an extra 25% annually just to afford basic necessities. After just one year of post-graduate credit card charging, another $8,685 will have been added to one’s debt pile. After only 4 years, that initial $37,000 debt load will have already doubled.

With college debt far outpacing real wage growth, it becomes more and more unlikely that today’s graduates will ever break free from their debt shackles – let alone build nest eggs.

Particularly with Social Security teetering on the brink of depletion, America cannot afford to support another influx of negligent retirement savers.

To make matters worse, in addition to being financially distressed, today’s college graduates are also wretchedly ill-prepared to enter an interminably technologizing workforce.

Innovation is revolutionizing vocations at such a breakneck pace that it has become virtually impossible for universities to effectively train students for inbound positions. As a result, students are graduating college without having acquired the skills now sought by employers.

Due to inflation, technological advancement, and dare I say, academia greed, a college degree that once cost a few thousand dollars, and would last throughout one’s entire career, now cost 20 times as much while possessing a shelf life of 5 years at best.

And with innovation evolving at accelerating speeds, it won’t be long before that 5-year shelf life shrinks to mere months.

The dire macroeconomic consequences of rapidly depreciating college degrees cannot be overstated. As the value of a diploma wanes, the onus to educate will cumulatively shift from university to employer. Instead of focusing on sales and product development - the departments that drive revenue growth and job creation - businesses will be forced to reallocate more and more resources to bridging the skill gaps that our colleges are failing to fill.

Consumers and retail investors will be the ones who suffer the most from escalating corporate upskilling expenses. These expenditures will either be passed on to consumers - who are already withering under record inflation - in the form of price hikes. Or they will eat into corporate profits causing stock prices to tank and 401(k) values to plummet, effectively turning today’s retirement crisis into another financial meltdown.

As someone who would never trade my college years for all the money in the world, it truly pains me to pen this article pointing out the devolution of America’s university apparatus. For even as the degree becomes worthless, I still believe that the college experience remains invaluable.

Despite it having become a financial albatross, college serves as a significant steppingstone toward self-discovery.

Neatly sandwiched between childhood (when one’s attributes and talents are first revealed) and adulthood (when one’s gifts are able to be monetized), college allows one’s strengths and confidence to blossom before plunging into a dog-eat-dog work culture.

But let’s be honest. Not even the strongest of economies - let alone an already flagging one - can survive with a majority of its labor force having pledged a lifetime of indebtedness to banks and the federal government in exchange for a few short-lived skills and some self-assuredness.

Today’s fragile U.S. economy will never withstand the infiltration of another underskilled and insolvent generation. This is something that policymakers seem to acknowledge as evidenced by their recent attempts to introduce legislation that would coerce retirement saving - albeit through economic erosive business mandates.

Unfortunately, despite being hundreds of pages in length, none of these retirement bills have put forth a viable long-term solution. This is because instead of addressing the actual root of America’s retirement crisis, these makeshift laws accomplish nothing except perhaps enable politicians to buy themselves a few more years in “public service.” Read: America’s New Retirement Bill Raises Many Questions but Offers Few Solutions.

Americans cannot afford any more of these regulatory band-aids. America’s educational failures and retirement ails are not little boo boos that get better with mommy kisses. They are symptoms of the fatal disease, known as Keynesian Economics, that politicians are too scared to confront, let alone cure.

Keynesian Economics is a failed macroeconomic theory that has put modern nations in peril with its gross misconception that personal savings and fiscal responsibility are detrimental to an economy - all based on the archaic assumption that saving and spending are diametrically opposed.

This core principle of Keynesian Economics is premised on a 300 year-old theory called, the “paradox of thrift” which suggests that if individuals collectively increase their savings then aggregate demand will fall - ultimately resulting in decreased consumption, saving, earnings and economic growth.

Anyone who has been following fintech recognizes that there are countless examples of ways in which modern innovation has invalidated the “paradox of thrift” hypothesis. In fact, multiple well-established fintech use cases have proven that saving and spending can indeed function concurrently, thereby discrediting this central tenet of Keynesian Economics.

For the great American experiment to prevail, it will require the seamless transition to a technologically conducive and sustainable macroeconomic solution. One that will ensure workforce readiness as well as ample retirement balances for the masses - without sacrificing higher learning or the personal consumption necessary to fuel economic growth.

Fortunately, this macroeconomic panacea will be an imminent reality.

Keynesian Economics destroyed the American dream. Participatory Consumption Economics (PCE) will restore it.

Participatory Consumption Economics (sometimes referred to as P2E Economics and short for Participate-2-Earn) is a modern-day macroeconomic solution that, by leveraging blockchain and fintech innovation, will bridge national skill gaps and deliver GDP expansion while simultaneously ensuring that all Americans retire comfortably - and without government assistance or cost-prohibitive employer mandates.

Blockchain, for example, has introduced educational solutions that make incentivized learning a reality. Through P2P (Professional-2-Pupil) and L2E (Learn-2-Earn programs), students can reap real financial rewards as they improve their financial literacy skills and receive training on the latest technological advancements directly from innovators and financial experts. High Schools and Universities can easily integrate with these P2P/L2E programs in order to provide their students with bleeding-edge, monetizable courses that will ensure students receive the latest digital skills as well as the funds needed to help offset college costs.

Furthermore, fintech savings apps with roundup features, like Worthy, make certain that some of the money used for college tuition and general cost of living expenses can accumulate in savings-style accounts that earn attractive annual returns that outpace inflation.

Most significantly, at the heart of Participatory Consumption Economics is a groundbreaking consumption-based retirement framework that I refer to as, the REdefined Contribution Retirement System. This novel retirement structure will ensure that policymakers will be able to swiftly, easily and inexpensively resolve all of America’s retirement problems without ever having to raise the retirement age, increase payroll taxes, cut promised retirement benefits, or even disrupt existing workplace plans.

Participatory Consumption Economics will make certain that all of America’s future graduates enter the ever-evolving workforce appropriately skilled and with capital reserves instead of debt. The REdefined Contribution Retirement System will ensure that our graduates continue to amass wealth throughout their lifetimes - and without their collective savings triggering an illusive “paradox of thrift” or causing what Keynesian’s refer to as “economic leakage.”

We can, and will, resolve all of America’s educational and retirement challenges - so long as we don’t use the same flawed macroeconomic doctrine that created them.

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For those following my coverage of humanity’s great war between the Centralists and Decentralists, I have some big news to report.

Although it may not feel like it, the Decentralists scored some major victories this month.

In fact, I believe that when history is written, it will depict May 2024 as the Decentralists’ D-Day moment which turned the tide and laid significant foundations for the epic defeat of centralists everywhere.

The month began with a Capital Markets Subcommittee Hearing on May 7th entitled, “SEC Enforcement: Balancing Deterrence with Due Process” where Centralist sympathizer and SEC enforcement cheerleader Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) failed miserably in his efforts to smear decentralists.

While Sherman’s verbal attacks may have resonated with his fellow projectionists, his attempts to portray the crypto industry as “a garden of snakes” accomplished nothing except to expose the Centralist Playbook as well as his own self-serving motivations to the rest of the world.

In his hubris, Sherman may have also inadvertently made a admission that could lead to the dismissal of every SEC crypto enforcement action alleging unregistered securities offerings.

In stating that “the SEC ought to be given clear and absolute jurisdiction over crypto by Congress,” Sherman admitted what the crypto industry has been arguing all along: that without congressional approval, the SEC does not have the legal authority to oversee cryptocurrency innovation.

I hope Sherman’s concession reverberates within every crypto defendant’s pleading and throughout every judicial ruling. We simply cannot have a federal agency freezing assets, shutting down businesses and destroying livelihoods simply because it self-identifies as a regulator with proper jurisdiction.

After unwittingly saying the quiet part out loud, CeFi’s favorite congressional propagandist, save Elizabeth Warren, should have done himself a favor and stopped talking.

But he did not.

Instead, Sherman uttered the most laughable statement of all, “the crypto industry has all the money.”

Because I realize that math is hard, I created the chart below so that Rep. Sherman could visualize the size of the cryptocurrency market in proportion to other asset classes in the U.S.

That negligible red dot - that many won’t even be able to see without putting on their readers or enlarging their screen - represents the entire scope of the global cryptocurrency market. Clearly, the crypto market does not have all the money. Comparatively speaking, it barely has any of the money.

Sherman’s outlandish remarks did not stop there.

He went on to lament that the crypto industry makes “money by literally making money” - as if this was some sort of a human atrocity.

Making money by literally making money is what the government does day in and day out. The only difference is that when the crypto industry “makes money by literally making money”, it does not create rampant inflation and ensure the redistribution of we-the-people’s wealth to elitists like Rep. Sherman.

Without any basis in fact, Sherman went on to accuse the crypto industry of “spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to influence congress.”

According to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan political transparency group, the cryptocurrency industry spent $25 million in 2023 on its lobbying efforts, and a grand total of $56.44 million since 2019.

While that tiny red dot in the image above has not spent anywhere close to hundreds of millions of dollars trying to influence congress, can you guess what industry has?

If you guessed the Securities & Investment Industry, you would be correct. In 2023, alone, the Securities & Investment Industry spent $147,132,294 trying to influence congress - nearly six times as much as the crypto industry had spent. Math may be complicated, but it is certainly not subjective. $147 million is and will always be a lot more than $25 million.

Now, if you can, try to guess the top industry that gives money to Congressman Sherman?

If, once again, you guessed the Securities & Investment Industry, then you are batting a thousand.

According to OpenSecrets, not only is the Securities & Investment Industry Sherman’s largest contributor, most of Sherman’s donations come from PACs - not even individuals. In fact, a mere 1.86% of Sherman’s donations were from small contributors of less than $200.

Although Rep. Sherman purports his motive to be protecting retail investors, the money trail reveals that Sherman is far more financially incentivized to shield the Securities & Investment Industry from disruptive crypto innovation - at the expense of small retail investors.

Never forget what I wrote about lawmakers who decree outperforming assets like bitcoin and hot IPOs as hazardous while deeming their devaluating currency and ebbing Treasuries as “risk free.” These people are not trying to help you protect your wealth. They are trying to assure theirs.

The video of the entire hearing is embedded below. I implore everyone to watch it. In addition to Sherman’s fabrications and blatant hypocrisy, you will hear some shocking accounts of SEC overreach from Nick Morgan, Founder and President of Investor Choice Advocates Network (ICAN), a nonprofit public interest litigation organization that provides pro bono representation to small investors and entrepreneurs who could not otherwise afford counsel in SEC proceedings.

Morgan’s opening statement - chronicling how the SEC’s disregard for due process has ruined the lives of ordinary businesspeople who were not even accused of harming anyone - should awaken every single American as to how federal agencies are being weaponized against them.

Any Hearing that draws public attention to SEC abuses - such as making false statements and misrepresentations against a defendant in court as well as using its “gag rule” to restrict free speech - I consider a win for the Decentralists.

While Chairman Wagner’s Hearing will hopefully result in reining in the rogue agency, some of the Decentralists’ greatest victories occurred during the latter part of the month.

The Ethereum ETF Arrived!

In late May, the SEC bit the bullet and qualified eight spot Ethereum ETFs.

Finally, retail investors everywhere can buy ETH. Just kidding. They’ve been buying it now for 8 years via the very cryptocurrency exchanges that, lo and behold, the SEC has been aggressively trying to destroy through enforcement actions.

That said, the SEC’s approval of Ethereum ETFs should drive significant investment not only into ETH, but, more importantly, into the Web3 universe. Since funding the Web3 universe will be instrumental in enabling more individuals to build wealth outside of traditional methods, the Ethereum ETF is a huge score for the Decentralists.

A U.S. Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is Looking Less and Less Likely

The best news of all is that a U.S. Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is looking much less likely.

On May 23rd, by a bipartisan vote of 216 to 192, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 5403, the CBDC Anti-Surveillance State Act, sponsored by Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN). This legislation will halt unelected bureaucrats from issuing a CBDC. As I’ve been writing for years, a CBDC is the greatest threat to freedom that individuals face today. Just so you are aware, here is a list of the 192 nays who deserve to be voted out of office and never let near power again.

In addition to reiterating his recent pledge to never allow the creation of a central bank digital currency, the month ended with Presidential frontrunner Donald Trump stating that he supports the right to self-custody while vowing “to keep Elizabeth Warren and her goons away from your bitcoin.”

Now, I wouldn’t lose too much sleep over Elizabeth Warren coming for your bitcoin as it looks like my January 2024 prediction that Warren will lost her re-election bid to a more crypto-friendly candidate may actually be coming to fruition.

Her challenger, Crypto Attorney John Deaton, is most definitely giving Warren a run for her money. If you look at Warren’s X feed, nearly every response to her posts is a scathing rebuke against everything she stands for. Deaton’s X feed, on the other hand, is filled with admiration and offers to donate. It’s truly remarkable.

While a Deaton upset would give the crypto industry a strong voice in the senate and one less vote for a CBDC, I believe that a Trump administration could see Commissioner Hester Peirce, aka Crypto Mom, being elevated to SEC Chair - a move that would surely help foster innovation and fuel the US economy.

Although, at times, it feels like democracy is taking one step forward and two steps back, the truth is decentralization is rapidly permeating throughout every fiber of humanity.

Keep the faith. The Centralists have already lost the war. And they know it. Here’s how you can be sure: if the Centralists were even remotely confident in their triumph, their attacks would be grounded in actual facts and their arguments substantive - not illogical and misleading. Remember, the more relentless their vilification and the more farcical their declarations, the greater their fear and the closer the Decentralists are to victory.

Indeed, what we are are witnessing today is a new spin on the Mahatma Gandhi quote: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, [then they resort to straw grasping,] then you win.”

We are at the straw grasping stage. Enjoy it.

Well, evidently, it was all just empty rhetoric.

Recent indicators - on both sides of the Atlantic - denote that inflation is far more problematic than had been anticipated.

Previous blather of “soft landings” is quickly being replaced with fears of stagflation, an economic quandary that the Decent Millionaire has been warning about for two years. See: https://decentmillionaire.substack.com/p/decentralization-will-shape-the-future

While words may move markets, it is data that transforms them.

What today’s data clearly affirms is that the conventional methods of tackling inflation have utterly failed us.

As it stands, Americans have already lost over 25% of their purchasing power in the past few years. And, the situation is not much better overseas. In the UK, the British pound has lost around 30% of its value during the same timeframe.

Until a viable solution is introduced, higher costs of living will continue to plague every single consumer, business and investor.

Some maintain high hopes that bitcoin - with its fixed supply of 21 million coins shielding it from the catastrophic consequences of endless central bank money printing - will emerge as the great inflation conqueror.

Although transitioning to the “bitcoin standard” may very well be what ultimately defeats man-made inflation, the fact is that right now bitcoin, as a sole portfolio diversifier, is simply not enough to protect today’s investment portfolios from inflation-caused market downturns.

This is because, thanks to growing institutional adoption, bitcoin no longer holds the allure of being a non-correlated asset class.

Even though institutional buying helps elevate the price of bitcoin, the tradeoff is an increase in correlation to other asset classes, thereby diminishing bitcoin’s efficiency as a formidable inflationary hedge. See: https://decentmillionaire.substack.com/p/get-ready-to-protect-your-investment

The reason is simple. Institutional investors employ similar investing playbooks, follow homogeneous trading algorithms and rely on the same unreliable government data. Hence, when stock markets are tanking, institutional investors tend to adjust their portfolio holdings in unison. In many cases, they liquidate their better performing assets like bitcoin - not due to weakening fundamentals - but rather in order to cover shortfalls in their declining equity positions. As a result of institutional homogeneity, even the most negatively correlated assets can quickly become positive.

Fortunately, even as bitcoin loses some of its inverse correlation appeal, more efficacious blockchain use cases are emerging to protect individuals from uncontrollable inflation.

Whether it is being used to tokenize inflation-resistant collectibles such as rare wine; introduce more accurate inflation metrics; or even to engineer novel inflation-proof stablecoins, this next-generation of blockchain ingenuity is proving to be powerful weaponry in civilization’s war against inflation.

Readers who are interested in learning more, as well as earning financial rewards, are welcome to join our upcoming complimentary Learn2Earn webinar where blockchain leaders from dVIN and Truflation will introduce some of the most exciting new blockchain use cases that are being employed to combat inflation and shield individual wealth from purchasing power erosion.

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Indeed, hundreds of millions of dollars is quite a generous reward for the division of the SEC that was just caught, red-handed, “abusing the judicial process” and “deliberately perpetuating falsehoods.”

I am referring specifically to the SEC’s lawsuit against DEBT Box, a little-known cryptocurrency firm that had its assets unilaterally frozen by Biden’s securities directorate last July.

For those who haven’t been following the DEBT Box saga, let me fill you in, because this one is truly a stunner.

Accusing DEBT Box and various related individuals of securities fraud, the securities arm of the administration that preaches about democracy, obtain a sealed, ex parte temporary restraining order (TRO) to freeze not only the company’s assets, but also those of individuals who allegedly received assets from the company.

This TRO - which was obtained without any prior notice and without the accused being present in court to defend themselves - also included a court appointed out-of-state Receiver. I’m not talking about a piece of stereo equipment or the kind of receiver who catches a ball made of pigskin. This is the kind of Receiver who has the power to take control of and liquidate one’s business.

But that’s not even the worst part.

It turns out that the SEC obtained its asset-freezing, business-grabbing TRO by brazenly lying to court.

Fortunately, the SEC’s deception resulted in a blistering judicial ruling where the agency was not only ordered to pay the legal fees of DEBT Box, but also had its motion to dismiss DENIED without prejudice - meaning that the SEC will not be able to refile the same charges at a later date.

If you thought that sanctions as well as a scathing rebuke of the SEC’s conduct would restrain the disgraced regulator from further egregious overreach, you would be dead wrong.

In fact, it appears that its DEBT Box debacle has only empowered the commission to double-down on tyranny.

Within just days of the DEBT Box ruling, the SEC was back to castigating its favorite cryptocurrency target, Ripple Labs. In a new filing, also shrouded in secrecy, the SEC demanded nearly $2 billion dollars from Ripple Labs as well as its founder and CEO.

According to the now unsealed motion, the regulator is seeking a staggering $1.95 billion in “penalty fees” - of which more than half is for disgorgement and interest.

The problem with this extortionate demand is that in order to collect disgorgement penalties, the regulator would need to demonstrate that individuals suffered financial losses. However, the SEC has failed to identify even one victim.

Not one.

Couching the ludicrous sums of disgorgement money that a government collects from its citizens, in the absence of any victims, as “fines” is in and of itself a grave injustice.

The time has come to label these draconian fines and penalty fees for what they truly are: wealth confiscation.

Chillingly, this blatant wealth confiscation is not limited to merely one rogue three-letter federal agency.

Look around.

It is becoming glaringly obvious that wealth confiscation has become the core mission of nearly every federal department that exists today.

The federal printing press has confiscated over 20% of our purchasing power in just the last few years alone, in the form of inflation.

At the same time, the Department of Labor is being weaponized to ban retirement accounts from actually accessing the very assets that would protect savers from government-manufactured inflation.

And don’t get me started on the IRS. Even children are are sobbing about wealth confiscation via taxation. Just look at this video circulating around social media!

While the IRS develops its plans to hire - and arm - nearly 87,000 new agents, it has made repeated attempts, in recent years, to mandate cryptocurrency disclosures - regardless of whether or not a taxable event has even been triggered.

I hate to break it to you but these locked and loaded IRS agents are being employed to seize your wealth - not to make sure that you receive your tax refund on time!

Some politicians, including Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, have even introduced proposals to confiscate wealth by taxing unrealized capital gains. Such initiatives could progress into the greatest wealth grab in American history as citizens would be forced to liquidate even unrelated assets, at fire sale prices, just to muster up enough cash to afford the tax liability on investments that have grown in value.

Imagine being forced to sell your home simply because you hold appreciated Apple stock in a brokerage account. And to avoid being indicted in certain states like NY, you better make sure that your house is sold below market rates. Heaven forbid you sell at a premium, you could risk being “fined” 2,400% more than the value of what a court dictates your property is worth!

Fortunately, decentralized innovation has emerged to safeguard we-the-people from these tyrannical wealth seizures - because the only thing worse than giving government agencies the power to take away your money, is paying them to do it.

PREVIOUS DECENT MILLIONAIRE ARTICLES REFERENCED IN THIS POST:

Ever since the accredited investor status became an appanage of the investing elite, America’s wealth disparity has escalated to unprecedented levels.

Read my 2018 article, published in RealAssets Adviser Magazine, detailing how fintech and regtech have been working to narrow America’s wealth gap: Renaissance of the retail investor: Individual investors are about to play a much bigger role in the investment industry

It doesn’t take a economic genius to figure out that national wealth gaps will intensify when politicians deny lower and middle class citizens the same wealth building opportunities afforded to its upper class.

Nor does it take an investment wiz to know that money accrues when it is invested in assets before they appreciate - not after. I mean even legislators, who can’t seem to balance a budget, understand the fundamental concept of buying low and selling high.

Despite this knowledge, those with governmental power, have cultivated a capital markets system that literally forces the vast majority of its citizens into buying high and, very often, selling low.

Because onerous and costly regulations make it nearly impossible for small emerging businesses to thrive as publicly-traded companies, today’s most promising ventures wait until after they have already ballooned to multi-billions of dollars in market capitalization to list on a public stock exchange.

Because these companies are mushrooming in the private markets where only accredited investors can partake in their peak growth, most - if not all - of their appreciation occurs in the coffers of venture capitalists instead of in the retirement portfolios of everyday Americans.

By assuring that only accredited investors are allowed to invest in these privately held pre-appreciated businesses, the government has forced its serfs lower and middle class citizens into serving as the exit strategy for America’s financially privileged.

This is not some new revelation.

Government officials are well aware that the unjust accredited investor definition is not only disproportionately harmful to minorities, but also a deterrent to economic growth, job creation and innovation.

Check out: ICAN’s Petition for Rulemaking – Replacing Net Worth and Income Requirements Under Rule 501(a) to Reduce DEI Barriers

One doesn’t have to look any further than to the myriad of comment letters informing the SEC of the economic perils should further restrictions be made to the accredited investors definition.

Given the countless documented warnings, it begs the question, why are Biden and his SEC so hell-bent on curtailing the number of accredited investors? I mean, with this much of a paper trail, it’s not like they’ll ever be able to legitimately claim plausible deniability.

Do they not care about the broader economic consequences - let alone their personal political careers?

There is no valid explanation for why the White House would “strongly oppose the passage of H.R. 2799,” a bill, just passed by the House, which would allow many more individuals to qualify as accredited investors.

This legislation, sponsored by Congressman Patrick McHenry, Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and known in fintech circles for his equity crowdfunding advocacy, would add clients of registered advisors to the definition of accredited investors - provided they do not invest more than 10% of their net worth or gross income into private securities.

Although, I don’t believe that a government should ever have the authority to cap the size of an individual’s personal investment, McHenry’s bill is a step in the right direction in that it could add tens of millions more individuals to the elite accredited investor club - well more than doubling its current size - and in the process bring hundreds of billions of dollars to job creators and to transformative innovations such as renewable energy.

It seems illogical that an administration, overseeing a struggling economy and claiming to prioritize equity and greener energy solutions, would repel a bill that would foster economic growth and advance its core agenda.

Nor does it make sense that this regime’s SEC Chairman would have the audacity to question whether accredited investor exceptions are warranted at all.

At a recent Small Business Capital Formation Advisory Committee meeting, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler flat out stated, “Any discussion about the definition of an accredited investor raises the question about when it may be appropriate to have exceptions to this basic bargain at the heart of our capital markets. In essence, when is it appropriate that investors get—or not get—that full, fair, and truthful disclosure that President Franklin Roosevelt worked with Congress to embed in the securities laws?”

Gensler’s remarks make it clear that he not only wants to reduce the number of accredited investors, he wants to outright eliminate them!

But Gensler doesn’t just stop at calls to condemn accredited investors to a life of investing servitude, he also has the audacity to accuse private issuers of being unscrupulous.

I don’t recall Peter Thiel complaining about Mark Zuckerberg’s lack of public disclosures while making more than a billion dollars and over a 2,000,000% return on his venture investment into Facebook. Nor can I remember hearing any other accredited investors crying foul when they were realizing over 40,000% on their money from selling their pre-IPO UBER and Dropbox shares to retail investors.

Despite Gensler’s defamatory assertions, businesses do not raise private capital in order to deceive investors. They do it because going public too early would subject their companies to abusive short sellers, limit their future financing options and impede their growth - which, in turn, would accomplish nothing but stifle job creation and decimate retirement portfolios. These truths denote a deep-seated failure in market structure - not a reflection on the thousands of upstanding entrepreneurs who raise private capital each year.

No, America’s emerging companies are not the ones hurting investors. Mr. Gensler needs to look no further than his own mirror to identify the true source of investor harm.

Gensler uses the full power of his enforcement arm to prosecute companies for what Gensler (not Congress) deems to be unregistered securities offerings - without any regard to the damage he is causing all of those with a vested interest in the growth of these businesses. This type of government lawfare not only bankrupts innocent businesses, causes layoffs and thwarts innovation, it injures the investors who, prior to the SEC interfering, were unscathed and without grievances.

Under the Gensler reign, the SEC is failing at its core mission to protect investors. Instead, and to the detriment of the nation, the regulator’s only successes appear to be in churning out victims.

Until something changes, so long as this government views private issuers as criminals and their investors as prey, accredited investor restrictions will continue to exploit smaller investors, suppress economic growth and exacerbate America’s wealth gap.

I am excited to announce that in the coming weeks DWealth Education will be launching new educational initiatives designed to ensure that all Americans have the ability to invest their own money where and how they choose. Subscribe below to receive updates.

I also encourage you to visit ICANLaw.org to learn about the noble work that Investor Choice Advocates Network (ICAN) is doing to break down barriers of entry to capital markets and push back against SEC overreach.

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Episode highlights include:

• How the rise in renewable energy capacity results in wasted energy;

• How green data centers quash the “bitcoin is bad for the environment” narrative;

• How AI, the recent bitcoin ETF qualifications as well as growing institutional adoption of crypto will impact our energy resources;

• How bitcoin miners, AI and web3 developers can readily shift to greener solutions.

Resource links related to this episode:

One month into the new year and I am already well on my way to reclaiming the physique I had in 2003 - all due to Paul Krugman’s desperate attempts to convince the public not to believe their lying eyes as they deplete their savings to pay more money for less items - including their food!

Average American purchasing power has been eroded by 22.31% since Jan 2020, according to Truflation, publisher of the first daily, unbiased, real-market inflation and economic data. And that doesn’t even account for “shrinkflation,” a term used to describe the reduction in size of consumer products - like less chips in a bag or fewer squares on your toilet paper roll.

Despite the harsh economic reality, Krugman continues to extol an economy that is declining far faster than ancient Rome's.  

Reading Krugman’s X feed, one would think that America is presently experiencing one of the greatest economic expansions since the internet-created boom of the 1990s.

According to a recent tweet by Paul-the-Internet’s-impact-on-the-economy-will-be-no-greater-than-the-fax machine’s-Krugman, “So 2023 was a miraculous year for the economy: high growth with inflation falling all the way back to the Fed's target, rising real wages . . .”

However, if you read through some of the responses, you’ll see that the people aren’t exactly living in Krugman’s economic utopia.

Nor are people buying into Krugman’s fairytale that today’s economy transcends even the idealistic Goldilocks economy.

Although Krugman’s condescending tweet is correct in that this is no Goldilocks economy, I believe that there is another fable that more accurately depicts the present economic environment. I call it, “The Little Red Riding Hood Economy.”

The Little Red Riding Hood economy is one where consumers and retail investors are being deceived by a Big Bad Wolf whose true intent is to swallow their financial resources whole.

The Big Bad Wolf has a sordid history of restricting smaller investors from amassing wealth by prohibiting them from investing in higher yielding alternative investment products. However, since banning investment access, alone, will never amount to nearly enough wealth to satiate the Big Bad Wolf, more devious measures need to be taken.

And what better way for the Big Bad Wolf to devour the remaining financial resources of others than by caballing them into spending more and saving less?

In fact, because consumption makes up more than 70% of GDP, getting consumers to spend more and save less just so happens to be the very goal of every Keynesian economist like Paul Krugman.

Unfortunately, while this spend more / save less mindset has benefited an elite few like Mr. Krugman, it has been detrimental to the majority of Americans who can now barely afford a $1,000 emergency, or to the growing number of America’s seniors who are falling below the poverty line.

Although, unconstrained government spending has unleashed unprecedented inflation in recent years, it has been the decades of forsaking saving for consumption which has now led to a self-inflicted retirement crisis that, without a viable solution, will cause an economic collapse that will make the 2008 financial meltdown look like the roaring 1920s.

Thankfully, just like in the 1990s, innovation will save the masses from financial devastation – not to mention, from a wolf in grandma’s clothing.

Modern blockchain and fintech innovation are delivering much more effective ways for individuals to earn, invest, save, and even to conquer inflation. As a result, everyone – no matter their present financial condition – will be able to outpace escalating costs of living and improve their retirement outcomes.

Feel free to join us for a very special complimentary Learn2Earn webinar, on February 20^th, where you can be compensated while learning how blockchain and fintech can be used to protect your money as well as enable you to build a nest egg - even during these challenging economic conditions.