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THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE ECONOMIC APOCALYPSE Cartoon published 10/15/2025 Although Trump is doing his best to turn around the disastrous economic policies of Joe Biden, worries continue. Grocery prices are ridiculously high. Young people cannot pay off their college loans because well-paying jobs are hard to come by. Buying a home has become an impossibility for all but the rich. Las Vegas symbolizes what’s happening across the country. The city caters to the rich high-rollers. It has now become way too expensive for an average person to visit. Cheap buffets of the past now cost a fortune. Vegas strips away money with resort fees, parking fees, and 10 dollar bottles of water. The casinos are tighter than ever and the crowds are dissipating. Homelessness is rampant. The Four Horseman featured in my cartoon portend economic ills. Gold is at an all-time high and likely go higher, but who benefits? Well, average folks can’t afford gold and if they had some they probably sold it long ago to pay the bills. Most of the gold belongs to the rich and big banks. Gold is the money of kings and it has long been acknowledged as a store of value. When the dollar was backed by gold it maintained its buying power over many decades. Unbacked by gold and subjected to endless printing, the dollar is doomed. The only thing that keeps the dollar propped up is its world currency status, which means it’s supported by oil and war. Eventually other nations (such as the BRICS countries) will discard the buck in favor of their own gold-backed currency. Higher gold prices portend doom for the dollar and even though we are told the US has the largest gold reserves, Fort Knox remains unaudited. Who knows how much gold is really there? Gold-painted tungsten bars, maybe. Silver is known as the poor man’s gold, but the poor are unlikely to own much silver either. It has certainly hasn’t been a good investment—year after year the big banks have shorted it on the COMEX—sometimes illegally. Paper silver tethered real sliver and buyers seldom took delivery—they accepted cash payment instead. That may be changing now that silver has gone over $50 per ounce. If it weren’t for collusive shorting, it might even be much higher. After all, there are 19 ounces of silver for every single ounce of gold in nature, but the current gold/silver ratio does not reflect that. If it did, silver would be around $200 right now. If you missed out on the gold surge, you might still have time to buy silver, but then again, people are too used to seeing silver get crushed by the shorts—and many industries use silver in manufacturing. They don’t want higher silver prices, either. The stock market bubble continues to expand despite wars and rumors of war, tariffs, economic weakness, and a government shutdown. Over a decade ago, Martin Armstrong predicted the DOW would hit 40,000 and many laughed, but he was proved right. He made that prediction because he knew money had no other place to go. It’s not like there’s money to be made through savings or money market accounts–no–people are forced to gamble on the the stock market, and only insiders know for sure which stocks to buy. Investors keep the bubble expanding, but many Americans aren’t in the stock market. The top 10 percent in America in terms of wealth owns nearly 90 percent of the stocks. The top 1 percent owns 50 percent of the stock market. It takes money to make money and the rich continually get richer while the middle class is destroyed. Such a disparity does not make a sound economy. Which brings us to Bitcoin. It’s another place for money to go, but unlike silver and gold, it’s really not a store of value—as evidenced by the sudden, sharp drop last week. It might be worth a lot one week and much less the next week. Some say Bitcoin is alternative money, but it doesn’t meet the criteria for a medium of exchange. Unlike gold or silver, one cannot hold it in one’s hand. It’s stored on a computer bank somewhere. If you lose your password or wallet key, that’s that. Electricity goes out? Tough luck. Hackers and scammers abound in the world of digital ‘currency’ that is not currency. Maybe the entire idea of digitized ‘coins’ is a means to accustom us to central bank digital currency, which will lead to complete enslavement. It’s why I drew Bitcoin as portending death. The one thing all of the horses have in common is this: They are all predicated on the dollar. People say, what’s gold, silver, a stock, or bitcoin worth today? They mean dollars—and those debt dollars are rapidly losing value. Gold, silver, stocks and Bitcoin aren’t going up—the dollar is going down and it won’t take much to prompt its collapse. It should collapse and be replaced by a currency backed by precious metals. If you have any money left at all it might be wise to put a real silver coin or two in your stock drawer. Think of it as a store of value, unlike what the debt dollar has become. — Ben Garrison