To begin with a review of 2020 skwealthacademy predictions stated on my news site here, we actually have to rewind a little further back than 2020 and start with an article that I wrote in October of 2019 titled “Why the US China Trade War is Bullish for Gold Prices,” in which I stated, “people that have never lived in China or visited China for extended periods of time tend to be clueless about how strong the societal pressure is to conform to behavior that uplifts national pride. Even China’s national gold strategy is intimately linked into promoting the glory of their nation”. I further outlined why gold and silver prices found their footing in August 2018 and then stated numerous reasons why gold and silver prices would continue climbing for all of 2020, including the fact that “China shifted [its] long-term strategy to cut the US out of their long-term economic strategy, which no longer would require multiple agreed upon concessions to their gold price suppression scheme, a factor that I believe certain members in the Chinese political power structure had granted to the petrodollar banking cartel over the last decade that led to suppressed gold (and silver) prices. In addition, I think the realization of the severity of this trade war also expedited the time lines for China’s long-term banking and financial strategy to become completely independent of the SWIFT system. I believe that part of their shift in strategy, as a consequence of the escalation of this trade war, included more aggressive support for the pricing of the asset – gold – that will provide the backbone to their OBOR (One Belt One Road) plan to link the economies of more than sixty nations in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Europe.” Finally, I concluded, that beginning that October 2019, China would be “expediting the timelines of their strategies to underpin a higher, steady gold price”. And since the time I published that article gold futures price has risen from $1,490 to $1,880 at mid-December 2020.
Then in the last month of December 2019, I warned, in an article I published titled, “Don’t Be Distracted from Reality by the Overinflated US Stock Market,” against complacency of a bloated US stock market manufactured by Central Bankers pumping “trillions of dollars into the US banking system every week via the overnight repo market as well as term US Treasury purchases.” And in case anyone missed that warning, I issued another warning on 6 February 2020, specifically discussing 14 global stocks that presented a great opportunity to short them in this article and this one, due to their overbought nature that included a mix of retail, transportation, real estate, automotive and tech stocks, and just one month later, in March 2020, presented a chart with the share prices of the 14 stocks, 13 of which had plunged by 20% to 37% in just a few weeks after I published those articles, yielding high double to triple-digit yields on all thirteen put option strategies, depending upon the expiration date and strike price of the put contracts exercised. Of course since the Q1 2020 crash, Central Bankers reflated all global stock markets again, including US stock markets, so just join my patron community for potentially another list of stocks to short at the start of 2021. That same month, in March of 2020, I also published an article that explained why gold and silver futures prices had soared and started to significantly diverge from physical gold and silver prices by analyzing and explaining data extracted from the COMEX issues and stops report, an article that ZeroHedge also republished that garnered over 330,000 reads on their website. At the end of 2020, the divergence that I noted in Q1 2020 remained strong in precious metals with futures gold prices at $1,876 an ounce with 1-ounce gold US American Eagles selling at a premium of nearly $125 higher at near $2,000 per coin for any amount less than $20,000, and futures silver prices at $26.00 an ounce at 1-ounce silver US American Eagles selling at a whopping premium of 14.5% at $29.77 for 500 ounces or less.
The next month in April, I wrote an article titled “Improve Your Wealth During the Lockdown”, in which I addressed the necessity to improve your mental health and to build a strong mind to deal with the negative psychological impacts of the lockdowns imposed upon us by the ruling class. At that time, little did I know that my 15-day travel lockdown would morph into a nine month and counting travel lockdown. I also urged all precious metal deals to “stand your ground” if the CME artificially plunge gold and silver futures prices lower by raising initial and maintenance margins on futures contracts later in the year, an act they executed very strongly after Q3 2020 when gold rose to $2,060 and silver challenged $30 an ounce in futures markets. In May, I pondered whether a US Presidential Executive Order could stop the disturbing trend of big tech censoring and silencing all views that dissented with the mainstream narrative. Very sadly, by the end of the year, we realized that the answer was a resounding, “no”. This is why in 2021, you’ll be able to find my podcasts, under the tag “skwealthacademy” on the k.im platform and here at podbean, but increasingly less on YouTube. Also in May, I broached the topic of why no one in the entire financial media anywhere in the world ever publicly discussed the oddity of the largest denominated Chinese yuan note of being equivalent to only a paltry US$14 or US$15, especially given the explosion of a middle class in China that has much more expendable income than it possessed just a decade ago. In this article, I speculated that the reason for this extreme oddity was a movement by the PBOC, with eventual yuan gold backing to plummet the current exchange rate of the yuan: USD that was 7.2: 1 at the time I published the article to as low as 3.5 to 4:1. Since then, the yuan was strengthened significantly by nearly 11% to just 6.5 yuan to the USD, so perhaps I was on to something with my explanation.
In September, I wrote about the extremely low ROI of an MBA education, though young adults for some inexplicable reason, love to go back to school and seek very low utility education, whenever the economy is poor. I also wrote a quick primer, given the devastating economic effects of continued, disproportionate economic lockdowns enforced by politicians and the police state across the world, of how to avoid the road to serfdom, using some inspiration from both FA Hayek and David Goggins. Lastly I also warned TikTok millennials to stop day trading on Robinhood or risk losing it all, and provided the reasons why they should stop, but I doubt any of them listened to my warning.
In August, to address the burgeoning disinformation about the danger of the virus spread by the mass media, I wrote an article titled “The Public Health Disaster of Sweden’s No Lockdown Policy” (of course, with a deliberately sarcastic title to prevent the big tech platforms from censoring it) and used data provided by the US Centers for Disease Control and the public health agency of Sweden, US Centers for Disease Control and Folkhälsomyndigheten, to create two charts that clearly presented the deception that had been taking place the entire year. This article, too was published on ZeroHedge’s front page. And to wrap up the year as we approached a Merry Crisis-Mas and a Hellish New Year holiday season, I uploaded the last skwealthacademy podcast of the year titled, “Use the Extreme Adversity of 2020 to Crush Self-Imposed Limitations and to Soar to New Heights”, in which I stressed the need to dwell in discomfort to learn about our real character and to develop the type of mental strength that will be necessary to thrive in the next five years.
Finally, after my review of 2020 skwealthacademy predictions that were on point, were there items I was wrong about in 2020 on my skwealthacademy news site? Of course, there were a few items from which to choose, but perhaps the most egregious was this urging of Americans at the beginning of the spread of the virus from Asian nations to the West, “Americans, I Recommend You Panic About the Virus”, in which I fell victim to the Chinese propaganda released about the true danger of the virus (and to this day, many still don’t realize that we’ve been fighting coronaviruses, which are the origins of the common cold, for centuries). However, the real lesson learned from this absurd article I penned was that supreme awareness of the dangers of confirmation bias does not mean we will not become its victim. Let me just repeat this as this point is extremely important, as I frequently hear people, especially podcasters with millions of viewers, smugly point out confirmation bias of their podcast guests to imply that they will not fall victim to it because of their awareness, only to spread disinformation repeatedly because they fell victim to confirmation bias. So I reiterate this point – supreme awareness of confirmation bias does not mean we will not become its victim.
In the beginning, I did not perform a lot of research into the virus and only read all the media reports originating out of China about its lethality and allowed my confirmation bias about the virus to make me fall for the Chinese propaganda hook, line and sinker. However, I am proud to state, that by the next month, after a few weeks of intensely researching this subject, I reversed my position, and published a report regarding “The Real Reasons Behind the Lockdown”, which continue to manifest at the end of the year, as US parasitic politicians squabble over providing a $600 one-time payment to Americans they have economically devastated, hardly enough to pay one week’s rent in most of the coastal metropolitan cities in America, while they vote with no discussion to hand over trillions of dollars to the richest people in America that are not in need of help. Note that US politicians believe $600 per working American is sufficient restitution for destroying millions of American’s ability to earn an income for an entire year, while they handed out at least $29 trillion to a few wealth bankers during the 2008 global financial crisis (I know the original bailout was “only” $700 billion but it eventually became a bloated $29 trillion over the next few years).
And even in the proposed $900 billion 2020 year end “stimulus” bill, the majority of the $900 billion has not been allocated to Americans most in need, but again to sectors of American society least in need. For example, the bill provided $284B for debt forgiveness of recipients of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), but we already know that many small business owners most in need received zero money from the PPP while multi-millionaire fraudulent business owners, like celebrity preacher Joel Osteen, received $4.4M from the PPP. So in this $900B “stimulus” bill nearly one-third has been allocated to providing debt forgiveness to the uber wealthy that stole money from taxpayers through the PPP. It also has allocated money to the big pharma industry, an industry that definitely does not need handouts, in order to distribute virus vaccines that nobody wants because of the impossibility of producing a high-safety vaccine with proper trials and testing in a condensed six-month period of time. And to add insult to injury regarding this underwhelming “stimulus” bill that declares to the US population “let them eat cake” by giving crumbs to the people most in need, the US ruling class voted, behind closed doors, for the past couple of years, to hand out trillions of dollars to banks to relieve their liquidity problems since September of 2019 in the form of the overnight repo markets and term Treasury purchases.
Thus, to summarize all my predictions for this past year and looking forward to new predictions for 2021, it will always be business as usual with bailouts not for the poor, but for the rich, and economic lockdowns not for the rich, but for everyone else. If you’ve visited my news site this past year and have enjoyed the above articles, as I receive zero advertising revenue for my labor, please consider contributing at https://patreon.com/skwealthacademy or https://www.gofundme.com/f/skwealthacademy to help support my continued efforts, as a one-man operation with an occasional assistant (when I can afford to pay one) to bring truth to the world.
