Featured Voices

Jim Puplava has made a decades-long career of interviewing hundreds of notable experts on the economy, energy, precious metals, geopolitics, agriculture and other sectors that impact our future. 

The outlook he has developed as a result of all this input is less than sanguine. Jim concludes that economic growth will be constrained both by world governments' chronic addiction to spending more revenue than they take in, and by the systemically-rising costs of fossil fuel-driven energy.

In terms growth, he sees political leadership becoming less and less relevant in its ability to effect outcomes. In fact, he declares the price of oil as now being more influential in stimulating or depressing sovereign economies than central bank interest rates. In his words, "oil is the new Federal Funds rate".

Forty years ago, a group of researchers at MIT ran a study to address the question of how humans would adapt to the physical limitations of a finite planet. That study became the book Limits to Growth.

It should have been a starting point for a critical discussion at the national -- or even global -- level. It could have led to the birthing of many practical and then-implementable initiatives that mighthave brought our unsustainable demographic, industrial and consumptive behavior under better control. But sadly, the book instead became a lightning rod for controversy. And decades later, the issues it warned of loom larger than ever.

In this interview, Chris discusses our collective failure to act on this book's message with Jorgen Randers, one of the authors of Limits to Growth and Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update as well as a new book, 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years.

While there are some differences in opinion between Jorgen and Chris, particularly on the acuteness of our resource predicament, both agree that continuing to pursue the status quo will result in a poorer quality of life for most of the world's denizens. We increasingly appear to be facing a future shaped either by design or disaster, and unless we actively decide to intelligently change our behavior, the latter outcome will prevail. » Read more

I want to take the lowest risk approach to the future. So much is riding on it.

Personally I feel that the scientific progress we have made over the last few hundred years is astounding. I don’t want to lose that. I think that is a gift to the future and I don’t want to run the risk of a collapse that could destroy all that we have.

Even if you think the collapse is a low probability -- let’s say it's 5%, 10% probability -- it is an asymmetric risk. The downsides of not treating it seriously are huge.

I mean, you buy fire insurance for your house even if it is a 0.1% probability that your house will burn down in your lifetime. But the consequences are so negative that you do it. And when you are talking about the accomplishments of all civilization, you need to buy insurance and treat that with the respect it deserves.

Tom Murphy -- associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego -- has mapped the distance between the earth and the moon to within a millimeter, and built instruments to study colliding galaxies. We feel comfortable saying he's a pretty smart guy, as well as an optimist about what human ingenuity and technology can do for the advancement of society.

In 2004, he became intrigued with the global energy situation and brought his disciplined, empirical approach to bear. He set out to determine which new sources were going to pick up the slack once fossil fuels began becoming scarce. Looking back, he says the theme underlying his findings was "disappointment."

The math showed him that there simply will not be nearly enough BTU yield from alternative energy sources to meet the rising global demand. In fact, if anything, his investigation made him realize how few minds today are truly aware of the extraordinary energy throughput we are getting from fossil fuels. » Read more

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."

- Frederic Bastiat

Bill Black is a former bank regulator who played a central role in prosecuting the corruption responsible for the S&L crisis of the late 1980s. He is one of America's top experts on financial fraud. And he laments that the US has descended into a type of crony capitalism that makes continued fraud a virtual certainty - while increasingly neutering the safeguards intended to prevent and punish such abuse.

In this extensive interview, Bill explains why financial fraud is the most damaging type of fraud and also the hardest to prosecute. He also details how, through crony capitalism, it has become much more prevalent in our markets and political system. 

A warning: there's much revealed in this interview to make your blood boil. For example: the Office of Thrift Supervision. In the aftermath of the S&L crisis, this office brought 3,000 administration enforcements actions (a.k.a. lawsuits) against identified perpetrators. In a number of cases, they clawed back the funds and profits that the convicted parties had fraudulently obtained.

Flash forward to the 2008 credit crisis, in which just the related household sector losses alone were over 70x greater than those seen during the entire S&L debacle. So how many criminal referrals did the same agency, the Office of Thrift Supervision, make?

Zero. » Read more