Summary: Inflation fears showing up in government bonds<br> How liquid is your ETF when everyone wants out?<br> Biden's "most radical departure from prevailing economic policies"<br> <br> <br> <br> The McAlvany Weekly Commentary<br> with David McAlvany and Kevin Orrick<br> <br> Broken Promises & Unforeseen Events<br> February 23, 2021<br> <br> The reality is we don’t learn from our mistakes. We just move on and hope the next time is different. Texas had four million people in the dark just a few years ago. And the only thing that is really different today is the scope and scale of the crisis, and I think that’s basically what we’re looking at in terms of the financial markets. We haven’t learned much. All we’re looking at is repeating, but with different scope and scale in view. — David McAlvany<br> <br> Kevin: Welcome to the McAlvany Weekly Commentary. Now, I’m Kevin Orrick, along with David McAlvany. <br> <br> Just watching the news and just listening to the chatter right now, I’m thinking there’s an awful lot of promises being made. Promises are fine until promises are broken.<br> <br> David: And sometimes promises are not broken in a nefarious way. They can just be an expectation that was created and then not completely fulfilled.<br> <br> Kevin: I was looking up from the Cambridge English Corpus, actually it was on the internet, but it says, “The fault may lie in a broken promise, not in the promise keeper’s intention, but the unforeseen event beyond the promise maker’s control.” I think about unforeseen events, we can build a very large dependent infrastructure and immediately when it gets a little cold or a little icy in an unexpected way, it can shut everything down. Yeah. I think about our friends in Texas.<br> <br> David: Yeah. And family too. It was a stressful week full of uncertainty and raw exposure to extraordinary challenge.<br> <br> Kevin: Did your father-in-law lose any of his cattle?<br> <br> David: Yeah. Unfortunately there was a little bit of that. So the Texans that we know are a tough lot and they tend to take loss in stride. My in-laws did lose some cattle, but as always the vulnerability concentrates, it seems, at the far ends of the life spectrum.<br> <br> Kevin: Well, and Texans are about as close to Alaskans as they come. Remember when we went up to Homer, Alaska? It seems like every day these guys are facing some sort of event, and it doesn’t matter, liberal, conservative, it really doesn’t matter the bent, these people are very independent. Now Texans have a little bit of that too.<br> <br> David: Yeah. I mean, resilience, independence, an ability to take care of themselves. I mean the independent streak across the state in Texas reminds me of many of the friends I have in Alaska. Except my friends in Alaska seemed to expect every day to be a direct struggle with some aspect of nature and its ferocity and its intensity.<br> <br> Kevin: They’re pretty resilient people.<br> <br> David: Last week’s energy debacle was a wake-up call for anyone mindful of areas of system dependency. And ironic, perhaps that Bitcoin was making new highs even as the lights went out across the second largest state in our country.<br> <br> Kevin: Isn’t that amazing. It really doesn’t seem to apply right now to the news. There still is that greed impulse that’s going on in a lot of the markets.<br> <br> David: Well, and of course it’s a solid reminder that infrastructure has its vulnerabilities and frailties, along with anything that is sort of next in line or dependent on that infrastructure, even when it’s well engineered.<br> <br> Kevin: I think sometimes we forget the cost, when there is an emergency, of things that we just take for granted.<br> <br> David: Well, you got a decline in power supply that hits the energy spot market. And if you own that fabulous electric vehicle, thinking of a Tesla,
