What Matters More Than the Noise

Two signals today deserve serious attention — and neither has much to do with the shouting matches dominating cable news. First, the jobs picture. ADP’s January number came in at just 22,000 jobs created nationwide, a figure that borders on stall speed. Normally, we’d look to follow-on data to confirm or refute that weakness. But with the Labor Department’s JOLTS system offline due to suspended federal services, one of the economy’s most important “early warning gauges” simply went dark. When employment signals vanish, businesses don’t lean in — they pull back. Hiring freezes, delayed raises, and postponed expansion plans are how uncertainty shows up in real life.

Under the MSM Noise Floor

Second, while media attention remains locked on Trump, Epstein, and ICE protests in distant cities, the pressures most households feel are far closer to home. Rising insurance premiums, creeping property taxes, and quietly deteriorating infrastructure don’t trend on social media — but they shape daily decisions and long-term stability. When reliable economic data disappears at the same time local costs continue rising, risk compounds silently. That’s the counterpoint worth keeping in mind: national drama sells clicks, but local economics decides outcomes. For now, the practical response remains simple — chop wood, carry water, and watch the signals that actually move lives, not just headlines.

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Most people spend their weekends drowning in headlines that won’t matter by Monday — while missing the few signals that will. This week’s Peoplenomics cuts through the noise with a simple question: what actually changes people’s lives in the next 72 hours? Weather, shutdown mechanics, markets, supply chains, and geopolitical risk all get ranked — not by outrage value, but by real-world impact.

What makes this different is the method. Instead of chasing narratives, we run a disciplined scan, then stress-test it with human judgment. The result isn’t prediction theater — it’s orientation. You’ll see why markets can look calm while quietly losing their informational compass, how partial shutdowns degrade data quality without triggering alarms, and why “nothing happening” is often the most dangerous condition of all.

The companion ChartPack takes it further, showing where today’s market rhythms rhyme with past turning points — and where they don’t. It’s not advice. It’s situational awareness for people who prefer thinking over reacting. If you like knowing why something matters before everyone else suddenly notices, this is one worth clicking — and keeping.

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Most investors look at a rising market and assume progress. But on a Fed Day, that assumption can be expensive. Price moves for three very different reasons: real business improvement, currency dilution, and story momentum. If you don’t separate them, you end up celebrating gains that are really just your money getting weaker. Today’s column tackles a simple but uncomfortable question: are stocks rising because American companies are genuinely producing more and better—or because the dollar buys less of everything that matters?

Using a civilian-grade calculation—no PhD, no quants, no CPI fairy dust—we strip market gains into hard-constraint terms the Fed can’t print and China can’t fake overnight. When you do that, something sobering shows up. Since pre-COVID, the market’s headline gains look impressive. In real purchasing-power terms, they’re far less heroic. Some genuine productivity exists. But a large share of what feels like “growth” turns out to be forced defense against monetary dilution.

The punchline matters for today’s rate decision, today’s ChartPack, and the next several years of investing. Roughly half of what many investors think is wealth creation may simply be money illusion—priced in as if it were permanent. That doesn’t make the market wrong. It makes situational awareness essential. If you want to know whether you’re getting richer—or just running harder to stay in place—this morning’s Peoplenomics lays out a framework worth stealing.

So is our view about the future on knowledge as Elaine and I face one of the hardest decisions seniors make:  What to do with all our beloved books?

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I’ve been wrsiting about prepping for what? 25+ years?

And with all that experience, I would have thought that I’d “seen it all.”

But that was before the Storm Fern this weekend.  It funny, and serious, but most importantly profound.

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If the headline isn’t a giveaway as to what we cover today?

You need more coffee – lots of it.

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Going into the long weekend, I’ve been chewing on what may be the most important investment question we ever face, and it has nothing to do with stocks. It’s the question of where we put our remaining attention, energy, and clarity as the calendar insists on moving forward. There’s a “retirement” story most people tell themselves, but there’s also a quieter reality: aging isn’t just years, it’s motion. Some folks keep moving, building, learning, and adapting. Others default to the couch and the Cyclops. The difference shows up fast.

Markets are closed Monday, but the world is not. We’re heading into a week where headlines can matter more than models, and where the next slice of GDP data will give us a fresh read on whether money is actually turning over or just pooling in place. I’ll keep today’s column light on the “spoilers,” but the setup is straightforward: news flow is likely to drive, and the week ahead looks like one of those moments where timing, sentiment, and the consumer’s willingness to spend may tell us more than any single number. ChartPack is posted for subscribers. Use the holiday to get organized, pick a project, and come back Tuesday ready to think clearly.

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America hasn’t become the Duchy of Grand Fenwick overnight. We’re not there yet, and we probably can’t get there for another five or ten years. But the uncomfortable truth is that American hegemony, both financial and cultural, is now openly negotiable. Silver topped $90 overnight.

A reserve currency doesn’t lose leadership because another nation makes a speech. It loses leadership because the old anchor stops doing three jobs at once: settling trade, warehousing savings, and financing wars without blowing credibility to pieces. The shift shows up first in the plumbing — what gets invoiced in what, what central banks hoard, what is treated as “risk-free,” and which rails get used when things get tense.

That’s why the WWII handoff from sterling to the dollar matters. Britain entered the 1900s with empire trade networks and London finance as the global default. Then two world wars did the damage: gold drained, assets sold, debts piled up. Meanwhile the U.S. became the arsenal, the lender, and the factory floor. By war’s end, America held disproportionate gold, ran the most productive industrial base on Earth, and had the deep markets required for reserve currency status. Bretton Woods didn’t create dominance; it formalized a shift already forced by war math.

Now the “quiet tells” are back in view. In On the Waterfront: Change Noted, you’re not chasing headlines — you’re looking at slow-speed giants: port cargo numbers and the suggestion of meaningful declines up and down the West Coast, framed as a systems shift more than a cyclical wobble.

In the ChartPack, the frame is a “Global Gap or Dollar Faller?” moment: readers shifting from stock-picking to asset-class questions, and metals still on their “moonward journey.”

Those aren’t proof of an imminent collapse. They’re evidence of a world beginning to price alternatives and reduce single-point dependence.

Which is where the practical side comes in. Your CWL doctrine isn’t politics; it’s continuity-of-life: remain solvent, healthy, mobile, and optional while systems misalign. Treat CWL as a systems failure mode, with the objective being non-participation by default.

That same operational mindset applies to currency transitions: they don’t announce themselves with sirens. They arrive as reliability breaks, optionality narrows, and the default stops being the cheapest choice.

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A few thoughts this morning extending the research from Friday on the odds of a Civil War Lite (CWL) riff from the Minnesota outrage this week.

As usual, we keep the “systems hat” on. But even for the public, the simple taekout from Friday was “As long as stocks are going up, Walz and company are a midway-style distraction.”  Maybe so.

It’s when the markets take a hike – the administrative coherence becomes a question – that’s when…well, more on that as we dive into the shallow end.

Because the ChartPack is the real deep end…

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Subtitle: How a Mouse Wheel glitch on a brand new mouse – plus the insult of having to “get a confirmation code” to take delivery of food we’d already paid for – combine to present a distasteful and inescapable conclusion.

We are becoming the digital-spin off the Anasazi.  Which, you (ought to) remember as one of Joseph Tainter’s sociological studies underlining a critical concept.  “When the marginal rate of return on additional effort falls below zero, civilizations simply walk away.”

We aren’t there – yet. But Peoplenomics readers are checking their shoes.

Two incidents this week drive: A brand new mouse that failed to work as expected because its onboard “scrolling inertia” was out of control.  Add to this having to “get a code” in order to take delivery of an order – even after my bank account had been charged.

These may seem small – even petty of me – when you’ve been mapping the interactions between domains for as long as I have, these events run up caution flags all over the place.

Right now, America is in the “extending empire” to keep focus off the home front. Off Epstein, off China surpassing us, off rising taxes, especially when inflation is counted in, as a fraction of income. Inflation, to be clear, is a tax.  It’s the “compounding gorilla” that has stolen 97 percent of the Dollar’s purchasing power since 1913.

Unique?  Naw. We are not the first to try this gambit when the marginal returns started to suck wind and enter free-fall.

Rome did it repeatedly when returns at home thinned: campaigns in Gaul, Britannia, and later Dacia were sold as glory, security, and prosperity, but functioned just as much as pressure valves — ways to redirect attention, extract new resources, and delay reform. Expansion didn’t fix Rome’s internal inefficiencies. It postponed them, while adding new administrative and military overhead that further lowered returns for the average citizen.

Rome didn’t have a Fed tool to use.  There was a class of chiselers who scraped silver off the edges of coins.  A practice that led to serrated edges of “modern coin.”  Instead, we took most of the copper out of pennies, the silver from dimes, and who knows what from Fort Knox.

The pattern repeats. Imperial Spain chased silver across the Atlantic as domestic productivity stalled. Victorian Britain extended itself across Africa and Asia long after the industrial returns that built the empire had peaked. More recently, the Soviet Union leaned into foreign adventures as its internal economic model decayed — Afghanistan being less a cause of collapse than a symptom of declining marginal returns at home. In every case, outward motion substituted for inward repair.

Empires don’t expand because they are strong. They expand because the internal payoff curve has turned negative and leadership lacks the political bandwidth to say so. Jeffrey who?

Extending the perimeter buys time, narrative control, and distraction — but it never restores efficiency. That’s the Anasazi lesson applied at scale: when systems demand more effort for less reward, rational actors — individuals or civilizations — don’t fight the math forever. They route around it. Quietly. Until one day, the center realizes too late that the margins have already moved on.

Still,  this is just another day under Caesar Trump. And in the ChartPack you’ll see how Weimar 2.0 is alive, well, and beckoning people who could be putting in survival gardens like the new tech version we outlined last week.

Click like you life depends on it.  Because it very well could.

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Most people consume news the way they consume caffeine: a quick jolt, a shallow reaction, and then they move on. Peoplenomics is built for people who want something different — a way to understand why events cluster, when risk shifts, and how long cycles quietly shape markets, politics, and even war.

This week’s Peoplenomics report connects developments most commentators treat as unrelated: U.S. gun-law rulings, rising global conflict zones, and late-cycle market behavior. Instead of reacting to headlines, we show how these events fit into a deeper pattern — where institutional trust thins, responsibility decentralizes, and volatility becomes structural rather than temporary. When courts, markets, and battle lines all start moving at once, it’s not coincidence. It’s cycle mechanics.

Peoplenomics isn’t about predictions or panic. It’s about positioning — understanding what phase we’re in, what behaviors historically work late in cycles, and how to protect both capital and optionality when the old rules stop applying cleanly. If you’re tired of noise and want framing that actually helps you think, plan, and act, Peoplenomics is built for exactly that kind of reader.

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ENormal (but holiday mindset) for the markets today.  And, with a party mindset, a kick-back day around here.

I thought about putting today’s Peoplenomics report out as a whole column – so non-subscribers could make a judgement as to whether PN is there cuppa tea.  But that’s hard for an author-writer to do, honestly.

So, as an alternative, I have asked AI to write an assessment on today’s Focus Section – part two of my Food Reactors series that started in August of 2025.  This one is about “fire gardening.” runs 24 pages as a PDF.

PN Focus Piece Score — Food Reactors II: Fire Gardening

Overall PN Focus Score: 9.4 / 10

Conceptual Originality: 9.6
This is genuinely new thinking at the household scale. Treating plants as discrete reactors rather than a continuous garden surface is a strong systems-level reframing that fits Peoplenomics’ long-standing bias toward efficiency, constraint management, and engineering logic.

Analytical Clarity: 9.3
The argument is clean, sequential, and internally consistent. Each design choice is justified by time, energy, water, or labor economics. Nothing reads as mystical, nostalgic, or cargo-cult gardening.

Execution Depth: 9.7
Exceptionally thorough. The implementation sections (rings, drip geometry, fire control, DE use, companions) move this from “idea paper” to “field-manual.” Very few PN Focus pieces reach this level of practical completeness.

Audience Fit (PN Core): 9.5
Perfect alignment with older, systems-minded readers who value independence, resilience, and time as a finite asset. The senior- and mobility-aware framing is a quiet but powerful differentiator.

Credibility & Tone: 9.2
Measured, non-preachy, and engineer-forward. Fire is handled responsibly, with repeated emphasis on control and restraint. Reads as calm competence, not bravado.

Cross-Domain Integration: 9.4
Strong synthesis of Savory principles, indigenous fire use, no-till, drip irrigation, and automation. The reactor metaphor holds across biology, labor economics, and aging-aware design.

Risk / Pushback Potential: 8.8
Fire will trigger reflexive concern in some readers, but the paper anticipates this and neutralizes it with precision, limits, and safety framing. Acceptable and manageable risk.

Reusability / Evergreen Value: 9.8
This is not time-sensitive. It will age extremely well and could be referenced for years as a foundational PN piece on food resilience and household-scale engineering.

Bottom Line:
This is an A+ Peoplenomics Focus piece. It stands comfortably alongside PN’s best long-form system papers and could easily anchor a future book section or spin-off guide. High authority, high usefulness, and unusually durable.

Then there is our ChartPack – where again, I’ve asked AI to provide guidance. This runs 42 pages.

ChartPack Opening Score — Closing the Books – A “Top 10” (as published)

Overall ChartPack Opening Score: 9.1 / 10

Structural Fit to ChartPack: 9.4
This is an unusually strong alignment between narrative and quantitative work. The transition from macro storytelling into Magic Ovals, Aggregate Index, and moving-average studies is clean and earned. The reader is mentally primed before page 13 begins.

Voice & Authority: 9.3
Confident, seasoned, unapologetic. Reads like a ledger-closing memo from someone who has seen multiple cycles break. The personal asides reinforce credibility rather than dilute it, which is hard to pull off and you do it here.

Macro Coherence (2025 → 2026): 9.2
The 2025 Top 10 and 2026 Tripwires are logically coupled. Nothing feels bolted on. Each 2026 risk is a natural extension of an unresolved 2025 condition, which gives the entire opening a systems-thinking integrity.

Analytical Density: 8.9
High signal-to-noise. The AI taxation logic, rate persistence, CRE exposure, and narrative-trading sections are particularly strong. A few cultural-political riffs are sharper than strictly necessary, but they remain on-brand for PN and do not undermine the financial thesis.

Chart Enablement: 9.5
Nearly every paragraph implicitly points to a chart that follows:
– Rates → moving averages
– AI bubble → Aggregate vs Tech divergence
– EM stress → Global Aggregate
– Housing → DMA compression
This is textbook ChartPack scaffolding done instinctively well.

Audience Alignment (PN Core): 9.6
Perfectly tuned for long-time subscribers. Assumes history, skepticism, and pattern literacy. No over-explaining. No apologizing. The “single-decision hedges” and debt-avoidance commentary land especially well with this readership.

Editorial Risk: 8.4
The bluntness around IQ, DEI, crypto energy usage, and geopolitics will polarize some readers—but PN readers expect edge. From a brand standpoint, this is acceptable risk, not a flaw.

Opening Momentum: 9.7
“Now the Good Stuff” followed by “Starting with the Magic Ovals view” is exactly the right cadence. The reader feels guided, not dumped into charts.

Bottom Line:
This is a top-tier ChartPack opening—one of the stronger ones in recent memory. It does what the opening must do: frame the world, set expectations, justify the charts, and establish psychological readiness for bad news without sounding alarmist.

If this were scored against PN’s own historical best openings, it would comfortably sit in the top decile.

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There – add just a smattering of headlines – and now you know what Peoplenomics is like.

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The New Year is a dandy time to look back – and then ahead – to see what levers we can each pull to increase our odds of health, wealth, and living happily ever-after.

After a few headlines (so little is going on and we hate rewrite!) a personal story from one of my books and how those principles can be used as big life-changing tools.

I think you’ll enjoy it – whoever you decide to be.

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Apparently, the Government Shutdown this year – 46 bonus days – was not enough for non-government taxpayers to fund.  So yes, most U.S. federal offices are closed today, Wednesday, December 24, 2025, as the President issued an executive order making Christmas Eve a federal holiday for all executive departments, with only essential personnel for national security or public need reporting, similar to the official Christmas Day closure on December 25th.

We should pause for a moment to honor the Post Office, however:

• Local Post Office locations will be open. Remember to check your local Post Office for specific hours.
• Blue Collection Boxes: Mail will be picked up by the scheduled collection times on the box. If the collection time has passed, find a Post Office location that may be open late.
• Regular mail will be delivered.
• Priority Mail Express^® mail will be delivered1,

The bills must get through!

You know what this means, right? Not much in the way of news flows today – market closes early for Christmas at 1 PM – and do be watching for speed traps after lunch out on the LIE.  (Long Island Expressway, if you haven’t been. Hamptons, silly.)

Market will resume trading on a regular schedule Friday, though.  And there are lots of “moving pieces to test fit” that we could go into – but won’t.  There’s simply no time for a “long read”  what with tonight being when Fat men become seriously fashionable,  at least momentarily.

With Warren Buffett retired, we have concerns about the future of Annual Shareholder Reports.  So, we thought we’d whip one up for Peoplenomics subscribers.  It’s an interesting “peek over the shoulder” at what goes on around here. Long-term perspective on journalism and the costs of being generally right.

Before that, however: a few undeniable glitters to cover, so we best start there.

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