In 1947, a physicist in a cramped New Jersey lab demonstrated that a tiny piece of germanium could amplify an electrical signal. They called it the transistor.
It went on to crush two superpowers and launch the American century.
In this month’s Macro Brief, we trace the arc — from the personal computer, the internet, and now AI — and show how every "unstoppable" rival America has faced followed the same trajectory.
Japan’s economy looked invincible in 1988. The Soviet Union’s military looked formidable in 1985. By 1991, Japan's bubble had burst and the Soviet Union had ceased to exist entirely.
The parallels to China right now are almost eerie. And the same cracks — demographic freefall, a property bubble, an energy supply chain that just got shattered in real time — are already widening.
Meanwhile, America is doing it again. The companies building the most advanced AI systems on earth — the technology that will define the next era — are overwhelmingly American.
And China, for all its manufacturing muscle, is running into the same wall the Soviets hit: it's hard to innovate with a political commissar looking over your shoulder.
But America's fiscal house is in far worse shape than it was in the 1980s. The deficit is running at over $2 trillion a year. Interest on the debt now exceeds the entire defense budget. And the political class — to put it diplomatically — is not exactly Reagan and Volcker.
In this month’s Macro Brief, we walk through what needs to go right, what happens if it doesn't, and why the turbulence ahead is exactly what a Plan B is designed for.
Plus, we revisit two investment opportunities in energy and precious metals positioned for what's coming.
You can read the full Macro Brief here.
The Invention That Won Three Wars On a freezing December morning in 1947, in a cramped laboratory at Bell Telephone in New Jersey, a physicist named William Shockley and two colleagues demonstrated that a tiny piece of germanium could amplify an electrical signal. They called it the transistor. It was arguably the most consequential invention…
