by Jon Little intern Niko Moretti
Trump’s Wrecking Ball Economy: Gaslight, Bankrupt, Repeat
America is quietly slipping into economic chaos, and the working class is taking the brunt of the damage. The evidence has been building all year, but now the numbers are impossible to ignore. As of July 2025, the U.S. has recorded 446 large corporate bankruptcies—already 12% higher than during the depths of the pandemic in 2020. In July alone, 71 major companies went under, the single worst month since July of 2020. Yet this historic bankruptcy wave is barely making a ripple in the mainstream press.
The White House, of course, is doing everything it can to bury the news. After months of mass layoffs, collapsing earnings, and companies shuttering across consumer retail and industrial America, Trump’s response has not been to acknowledge the problem but to fire career economists at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and replace them with political loyalists. When the message doesn’t match his delusional “America is thriving” storyline, he silences the messenger and cooks the data. This isn’t policy—it’s propaganda.
Tariff Tantrums: How Crony Capitalism Picks the Winners and Shoots the Losers
The bankruptcies themselves tell the bigger story. Household names that once defined American consumer life—Rite Aid, Party City, Forever 21, Joann’s, Claire’s—are now carcasses of a collapsing consumer sector. Many of these companies were limping after years of higher interest rates and weaker sales, but what turned a slow bleed into a body count was Trump’s tariff war 2.0.
Tariffs are now at their highest effective rate since 1935, hovering at 17.3%. On paper, Trump touts them as protection for American jobs. In reality, they’ve become a blunt instrument of crony capitalism. Multinationals like NVIDIA and AMD landed sweetheart “Chinese revenue-sharing” carve-outs to shield themselves. Meanwhile, small-cap businesses—the backbone of nearly half the country’s workforce—have no such lifeline. They’re forced to foot the bill, pass costs on to customers who are already broke, and in many cases, simply close their doors. Tariffs are supposed to save American industry. Here, they’re accelerating monopolization and gutting the little guys.
Swamp Fever: Washington’s Greatest Growth Industry Is Corruption
While factories shutter and retailers collapse, Washington insiders are thriving. Congress is busier front-running policy than fixing it. Insider stock trades have consistently lined up with tariff announcements and Fed shifts, keeping lawmakers fattened while their constituents suffer.
Meanwhile, Trump’s Cabinet runs less like a government and more like a syndicate. Tariff exemptions are currency, international policy is a bargaining chip, and every crisis is just another monetizable “deal.” This isn’t draining the swamp—it’s filling it with gold-plated sewage.
The Job Market Jenga Tower Is About to Collapse
The next shoe to drop? Jobs. Youth unemployment for 20- to 24-year-olds has surged to 8.1%, the highest level in four years and eerily similar to 2008. Entry-level workers are being replaced by AI, while small firms—still employing 62 million Americans—are reporting “poor sales” as their #1 problem. Historically, that metric is a flashing red warning light for rising unemployment.
Industrials and consumer companies have led the bankruptcy wave; now they’ll lead the layoffs. The result will be a jobs crisis Trump won’t be able to hide—though you can expect him to try.
The Fed’s Stagflation Trap: Damned If They Cut, Dead If They Don’t
As if bankruptcies and job losses weren’t enough, inflation is already back. Producer prices spiked nearly one percent in a single month—the sharpest jump since 2022—while core CPI drifted back above 3%.
That leaves the Federal Reserve boxed in. If they begin easing this fall to shore up the labor market, they’ll reignite inflation into 2026. If they stand firm on rates, they risk pushing bankruptcies and layoffs into outright depression territory. Either way, the “soft landing” story has been incinerated, and Trump’s tariff chaos is the lighter fluid.
Dalio’s Victory Lap: The Big Swing Is Now Fact, Not Theory
Ray Dalio saw this coming from miles away. His “big swing” thesis argued that America was headed toward a perfect storm of expensive debt, trade wars, geopolitical chaos, and monetary instability. At the center of it all stood a hollowed-out working class and a financial elite gaming the chaos for profit.
Look outside: bankruptcies at pandemic-plus levels, tariffs strangling small businesses, inflation rising even as growth collapses, corporate carve-outs protecting insiders while workers drown. Gold’s resilience in the face of volatile rates is proof that the smart money knows America is in the middle of a stagflationary revaluation. Dalio didn’t predict this crisis—he mapped it, mile marker by mile marker.
Bottom Line: “America First” Was the Slogan—Workers Last Are the Reality
Trump promised to put America’s workers first. Instead, he’s engineered a landscape where small businesses are forced into bankruptcy, young workers are canceled in favor of AI, inflation is reborn, insiders get rich, and the middle class is gaslit with fake statistics.
This isn’t the revival of American greatness. It’s the systematic erosion of America’s workers, industries, and communities. And it’s happening in plain sight.
Commodities Set to Run.
Gold. Oil. Silver. Copper. Uranium.
Graddhy explains, “To get out of the rat race one needs hard work, strategy, stamina, mental balance, discipline, huge sacrifices, maximizing income, minimizing consumption etc. And to bet on the right market. This chart is setting up again and gives you which market to go for. COMMODITIES”
This is once in a generation opportunity. We like oil, gold, silver and copper.
Our target price for Silver by Christmas is $45 and then quick move to $51 or a 32% move to the upside.
The Only Safe Haven Left: Gold and Silver Don’t Lie
When politicians doctor data, when central banks lose control, and when corporate bankruptcies soar at Depression-era pace, there are precious few assets you can trust. Stocks are vulnerable to manipulated narratives. Bonds are shackled to a Fed that is boxed into stagflation. Even cash itself is being hollowed out by inflation’s slow theft.
But gold and silver don’t lie.
Dalio’s Big Swing thesis is playing out exactly as he warned: bankruptcies spiking, rates colliding with inflation, elites carving exceptions for themselves while workers are crushed. In this environment, hard assets are not a luxury—they are survival gear. Gold and silver don’t care what the Bureau of Labor Statistics “revises.” They don’t bend to sweetheart tariff carve-outs. They don’t vote, they don’t spin, and they don’t gaslight. They simply hold value, through every cycle shift and every political stunt.
That’s why central banks around the world keep buying gold. That’s why silver, the most undervalued precious metal in history, continues to trade at a fraction of its long-term ratio versus gold. And that’s why the smart money is moving into metals before the next act of this crisis unfolds.
The bottom line is blunt but clear: in Trump’s America—where workers are last, corporations are coddled, rates are unstable, and inflation is back—gold and silver are the one form of financial honesty left.
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Editorial Note: often times Life imitates art. This indie folk song by The Mountain Goats is one of the most hauntingly beautiful (painful song) , says it all
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