"Motorcycles, Gold, And Infinite Money"
by John Wilder
When I was in 8th grade. I decided I wanted a motorcycle, a dirt bike that I could take back up on the Forest Service and BLM roads. This was before the Internet, and there were hundreds of miles of roads and trails... right behind my house. The best part was that no driver’s license was required on federal lands.
I announced I was saving up to buy a motorcycle at dinner. I had a few hundred dollars in my savings account that had been on receive-only mode for birthday and Christmas money since I was five. Ma Wilder became enraged, “You’ll do no such thing! Your uncle died in a motorcycle crash! Why buy one when you can use his?”
I kid. With a goal in mind, I started saving everywhere I could, and within a month I’d managed to get a quarter of the way there to my goal. To be honest, at least part of that money likely came from the illegal drug trade. I mean, why else would I find $50 in cash secured via a rubber-band to some suspicious oregano-looking substance in a Kodak™ film canister at the school?
I did the right thing, and turned it all in to the school secretary and after 30 days they gave me the cash. Shockingly, no one had showed up to claim that it was there, perhaps since possession with intent to distribute at a school was probably a pretty big deal back then. No mention was made of the final disposition of the organic products, though the school staff seemed pretty mellow and called me Dr. Feelgood for the rest of the school year.
Back then, money meant cash in a jar under the bed or something rubber-banded to a film cannister containing substances of unknown origin. It was tangible, untraceable, and not some glitchy app with a trendy name promising me riches if I swipe right on a meme coin. Fartcoin, that makes sense as investment, right? It has to be more stable than Zitcoin. If I were asked to describe the economy at the end of the third quarter of 2025 in on sentence, I‘d say: “Gold is glittering like it is auditioning for a role in Tarantino’s briefcase, and stocks seem to be high on their own supply.
Let’s take those in order. Gold just hit $3,806. Per ounce. Let’s look closer at what could be causing this: Part of it is because the dollar is cratering under a mountain of printed funny money. The other part is because central banks are whispering, “Screw the digital dollar, give me something I can bite.” The dollar is wheezing like Jerry Nadler (who is the number one search engine hit when I searched for “short fat democrat”) after a flight of stairs. The dollar is down 5% year-to-date against a basket of currencies. But gold? It is up 42% in the last year, because in 2025, we still haven’t figured out how to print gold.
Think about it: why hoard ones and zeros when you can stack bars? Central banks from Beijing to Basel are buying gold like it’s Black Friday at Fort Knox. Yes, that same United States Bullion Depository which I’ve been told is still totally full and how dare you ask because why don’t you trust us? And let us be honest, gold is pretty, far prettier than staring at a ledger full of debt that your grandkids will pay off with their kidney sales to overseas oligarchs. Remember: nothing says “economic stability” like elements that outlast empires. So, gold is up.
In other news this week, here’s the real clown show: Nvidia® just announced a $100 billion investment in OpenAI©, who will promptly funnel cash to Oracle™ for data centers, so they can buy...more Nvidia™ chips to power the data centers. I have no idea how this isn’t the definition of a Ponzi scheme, because it’s a feedback loop so incestuous it makes European royalty blush. I mean, they’d blush if those genes hadn’t disappeared along with their chins and ability to clot blood. Nvidia©’s market cap? $4.47 trillion, equivalent to 13% of the $37 trillion national debt. All so you can have ChatGPT®. Tell me this is not an asset bubble?
The S&P® 500 is up 22% year-to-date which is a “totally not a bubble ready to blow-off” number. I was pretty happy that my individual retirement account had beaten that. Genius investing? I wish. No. It’s just inflation, with everything from eggs to ETFs doing moonshots as money chases it around. Nvidia™ is the poster child. I almost bought some in April when it was around $100. Today, it was north of $170. I’m sure that this is totally not a bubble built on recycled cash. But it’s also not growth: this is a daisy chain of delusion, where pets.com© high-fives Alta-Vista™ and Cisco® into oblivion. Sign me up.
Speaking of which, I having saved up a big chunk of money I was stuck at home on spring break. On Wilder Mountain, fourteen miles from the nearest town, that meant that after the books were read and the models were made, I had to do something. On the north side of the house, however, there was a huge block of ice left over from compacted snow during the winter – in places it was two feet thick. I was bored. I poked around in the garage and found a five-foot-long iron rod, pointed at one end, about an inch and a half in diameter.
If you have never been in 8th grade and so bored you decided to take a harpoon and smash ice for an afternoon, well, you’ve never lived. It was, actually, fun, especially kicking it out of the shadow of the house into the bright spring sunshine where it glittered and glistened as it melted away.
However, it had a weird impact on Ma Wilder. She thought I was trying to help, not realizing I was just bored and being destructive in a socially acceptable way. She talked with Pa, and, proud of my industriousness, they offered to stake the rest of my motorcycle purchase. So, don’t give up. If the Trump economic policy is thrashing around aimlessly breaking stuff hoping that something good will happen, then, heck, maybe we’ll all get motorcycles? I mean, there are a lot of uncles, right?"
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