Debt, War, and the Tangled Web

Mark Thornton opens with Sir Walter Scott’s famous “tangled web” line, using John Law’s Mississippi Bubble and Richard Cantillon’s response to frame today’s financial disorder: national debt, a bond bear market, dollar manipulation, trade war, stock-market fragility, and overseas conflicts. 

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On Side B, Thornton discusses the Fed’s first rate hike in three years, the debt trap facing the Treasury market, the energy shock from the Persian Gulf war, the declining global trust in the dollar, and the AI data-center boom as this cycle’s “skyscraper curse” signal. He closes by arguing that gold’s resilience and central-bank accumulation point toward a growing loss of confidence in the paper-money system.

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