Letter to Santa

Dear Santa… Forgive my lateness in writing.

I know that Christmas Eve is tomorrow, and by now you’ve probably packed the sleigh, filed your flight plan with the FAA, and coordinated airspace deconfliction with NORAD.

F-15s – in full afterburner! – escort Santa Claus. Courtesy the-ugliest-person-in-the-world-pic.blogspot.com/2023/01/santa-claus-aircraft.html

That’s why I’m sending you this email, versus snail-mail. It’s fast and easy, and it helps that you’ve long been a subscriber to Paradigm Press, so we have your address on file. One angle on this, though, is that I’m also sharing this letter with about 98,000 other subscribers who receive the Morning Reckoning. No secrets here, eh?

I have a request for your Santa-bag (see below). But in keeping with the Letters to Santa Form Manual (North Pole Publishing Co., 1996 ed.), I know that I first must explain how I’ve been a good guy this past year and deserve more than the proverbial lump of coal.

Although… as a geologist, I’m okay with a lump of coal. I would just ask that you identify the mine or geologic locality, so that I can label it properly for my collection.

Anthracite coal from near Lehigh, Pennsylvania. BWK collection/photo.

Looking Back at 2025

A year ago, in December 2024, so-called “President Joe Biden” was still in the White House. And c’mon, Santa, you know as well as anyone that the guy was in severe mental decline. The country was run by the Deep State, meaning a cabal of powerbrokers in Washington, D.C. where it’s all about grift and so-called “interagency consensus.” Biden himself was being handled by a shady Committee of Governance that worked the backrooms and controlled the Autopen.

It was in that context that I looked ahead and predicted that the Second Coming of Donald Trump to the White House would be a total immersion experience of Trump-Trump-Trump. In fact, last December I spoke at a conference in Baltimore and described the Man from Queens as the political equivalent of a supernova; a man of boundless energy who always aspires to be “the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral.” (Okay, I borrowed that line from Alice Longworth’s description of Theodore Roosevelt. But apt is apt; some things are timeless.)

Well, Trump 2.0 didn’t disappoint, although I was just kidding about the “funeral” thing; I didn’t want any visits from the Secret Service.

A year later and yes, Trump has definitely moved markets. You name it, Trump moved it. Right out of the gate, recall his inauguration speech in the U.S. Capitol Building, where he talked about the U.S. retaking the Panama Canal and annexing Greenland, as well as transforming Canada into the 51^st state. Wow, that p!ssed some people off! “Elbows up,” as they say in Ottawa.

In April we had Trump’s asteroid-level tariff rates that immediately created bedlam in markets. While in other domestic matters, he just plain triggered people into TDS apoplexy with everything from gold gilt in the Oval Office, to that new White House Ballroom, to adding his name to the now-Trump-Kennedy Center. Ha! His enemies wanted to erase him from history, and here he is transforming the architecture of the nation’s capital.

Internationally, look back at how Trump dealt with the war in Europe (defund and ignore), war in the Middle East (B-2s hit Iran), possible war in Asia (trillion-dollar defense budget), and lately even how he ordered U.S. forces to grab Venezuelan oil out on the high seas. Wow, yes, that man has moved markets!

All of the foregoing is cultural and political, though. Here at Paradigm Press my job is to find ways to help readers make some money or at least preserve their wealth in turbulent times. So, from the very beginning of 2025 I predicted that it would be a great year for gold, silver and platinum. Indeed, when it comes to the long-term decline of the dollar over the past half century, not even Trump can fight that tape.

Hey, some people still call gold a “barbarous relic,” but remember that in the end, barbarians wrecked Rome! In other words, gold is the great truth/lie-detector of monetary policy.

Also, I consistently forecast good days ahead for copper, rare earths, and other critical metals like antimony and tungsten. Hey, Santa, those calls were NOT exactly easy-peasy no-brainers; plenty of smart money bet against the rise. But I – and my colleagues here at Paradigm – pounded the table for these ideas and wrote extensively about them.

Indeed, Santa, this is my 51^stMorning Reckoning of the year, and an awful lot of them have involved explaining to readers why they should buy into hard assets, particularly precious metals and other scarce industrial elements. If you want metrics, here are some numbers:

Gold was $2,640/oz at the beginning of 2025; it’s just over $4,500: up over 70%.

Silver was $29/oz or so at the beginning of 2025; it crossed over $70 this morning: up almost 142%.

Platinum was $900/oz at the beginning of 2025; it’s over $2,200 today: up about 144%.

Copper was $3.00/lb at the beginning of 2025; it’s over $5.55 today: up about 85%.

Tungsten and antimony prices are harder to nail down because of differences in chemistry and what actually gets sold, but it’s fair to say that overall, prices for both metals way more than doubled in 2025. And note that China-China-China controls these resources big-time, and they can shut off the supply pipeline in about one day.

Similarly with rare earth prices, it’s difficult to toss out quick numbers because the overall mix includes 17 distinct elements from the periodic table. And there’s that China-China-China issue of dominant industrial control. But it’s fair to say that U.S. and other Western plays did well; see MP Materials (MP), or Ucore (UURAF).

Along these last lines, Santa, did you watch our livestreamed Paradigm Press summit from Jekyll Island, Georgia back in April? I specifically discussed several companies that had immense upside, such as…

Contango Ore (CTGO), an Alaska gold miner that was then trading at about $13; its share price is now over $29, and the company just announced a merger deal with a silver explorer, Dolly Varden Silver (DVS). Both companies are superb, future-facing mining plays.

Your editor last July, at Contango’s Johnson Tract site in Alaska. BWK photo.

I also mentioned another Alaska play called Trilogy Metals (TMQ), then trading at about $1.50 per share. I said that I expected the Trump administration to approve a road-permit that would allow the company to develop its massive copper-lead-zinc (and more) deposit at a site called Ambler. Eventually, in October the Trump administration came through and approved the permits, and Trilogy shares now trade at over $4.80, or about a triple.

Again, I mentioned Ucore at Jekyll Island; then trading in the $0.80 range and now up at about $4.40.

Also in 2025, and on more than a few occasions – at Jekyll Island and in other articles – I laid out a uranium producer with a strong rare earths angle, namely Energy Fuels (UUUU). Great assets and great management team, all located in the heart of America, out in southeast Utah. The company’s share price has moved from under $4.00 to about $15.50.

Then there was the Paradigm summit in October, in Nashville. And wow, our team knocked some balls out of the park with that one.

I won’t just give away the names, Santa, but if you watched the livestream, you heard me discuss a high-grade antimony exploration play in Slovakia; an excellent copper development company in Brazil; and that phenomenal helium play in northern Minnesota, where they’re drilling and finding large amounts of elemental helium out of billion-year-old rocks. Amazing stuff.

So, if anybody asks, “What have you done for me lately,” my reply is… “Sell some shares and pay your taxes.”

We Had Some Fun, Too

But 2025 wasn’t all work-work-work, of course, Santa. We had fun in the context of explaining the markets, if not the world, to our wonderful readers who make all of this possible.

Hey, do you remember my Morning Reckoning from April 1^st, about my time in the Navy when I transported that… umm… very unconventional… umm… “item” from North Island, California to that… umm… “place”… in Nevada? Yes, Santa… As you well know, based on flying out of the Polar region, there are some things that we former military Airedales just cannot publicly discuss, even many decades after the fact, except perhaps in the context of plausible, fictional deniability on April Fool’s Day.

Also looking back, one of my most popular articles in 2025 concerned my visit to Fairbanks, Alaska last July, when we had breakfast together at Soapy Smith’s restaurant. Then after a quick run around the operations at Kinross Gold (KGC), I headed to that truly spellbinding antique auto museum and toured the superb collection of American cars from about 1900-40.

Wow, Sanat, it was just wall-to-wall, gearhead eye candy, and fascinating to compare the original price tags for cars to today’s stickers if priced in gold. I had a lot of nice reader mail on that one.

Another article that generated feedback was about my dinner with Donald Trump, Jr. at an energy conference in Florida. That was a unique opportunity, and I discussed with readers what seemed appropriate to discuss.

Your editor on the south coastline of Iceland, at “Diamond Beach,” holding ancient glacial ice. BWK photo.

Then there was that trip to Iceland last fall to meet those academic guys and talk about geology and deep earth geophysics. It offered great insight into the tectonic energy and mass transfer that cooked up some of those ore deposits in Greenland (speaking of Greenland…). And 50,000-year-old ice tastes like… well… fresh water.

I could go on, but you get the picture. And really, to me it’s all about using my job with Paradigm to learn new things so that I can deliver more and better-informed content to our subscribers.

The Christmas Wish

Now if you see fit, Santa, here’s my Christmas wish. It’s just one item, but entirely appropriate considering what has happened in the markets, so I’ll just lay out the basics for you:

I’d like you somehow to get Congress or the Treasury Department and IRS to index capital gains to inflation.

That is, when you sell assets that you’ve held for a year or less, you create what’s called a “short-term capital gain,” generally taxed at the same rate as your ordinary income, anywhere from 10% to 37%. But gains from the sale of assets you’ve held for longer than a year are known as “long-term capital gains,” typically taxed at lower rates than short-term gains and ordinary income, from 0% to 20%, depending on your income.

The problem is that we’re currently in an inflationary time. Heck, Santa, cumulative inflation over the past five years is over 30%. So, if you bought something for, say, $1,000 five years ago, the equivalent cost today might be $1,300.

But let’s say that you sell that long-term holding for, say, $1,500. You might owe 20% tax on the long-term $500 gain, or $100; but really, if you allow for inflation, you’ve only gained $200 in real terms ($1,500 minus $1,300). So that $100 tax hit is like a 50% tax rate.

Indexing gains has been a vexing political issue for many years, but also, it’s fair to say that inflation has been more or less under control since the 1980s. Well, it’s not so much under control now and looking ahead. President Trump inherited a spending machine on steroids, and he’s spending big-time as well, following in the footsteps of previous big-spending presidents, and of course Congress can barely pass a budget, let along reduce spending. So, the dollar is doomed, right? Just a question of how long and how bad it’s going to be.

Those above-mentioned price increases for gold, silver, copper, etc. are not due to anything inherent in the metals themselves. Elements are elements; they’re immutable. It’s their value in dollars that changes. Clearly, the 2025 melt-up moves in metals signal not just classic supply-demand (i.e., tight supply, growing demand), but also a decline in global confidence in the U.S. currency, and global-scale repositioning of metals as places to park and preserve wealth.

This ongoing dollar decline alone will play a large role in 2026 and beyond, with continuing increases in metal prices, as well as share prices for solid mining plays. And surely, many shareholders will smile at the upward trend in what they see on their account statements. But still, the foundation of that increase will be inflation.

So my Christmas wish for you, Santa, is to index those capital gains to inflation and spare people from what is, basically, an unfair level of over-taxation when they sell.

That’s it, Santa, other than to say thank you for reading… and also, if you are free on Monday afternoon (Eastern Time), January 19, 2026, you and all Morning Reckoning subscribers are invited to listen in to a discussion about metals, mining, energy and other investment angles in Argentina and South America.

The host for this event is our old friend, Joel Bowman, who writes from Buenos Aires, and his panel will include the esteemed scholar of hard assets Rick Rule; as well as a wonderful, brilliant old friend and long-time writer from the Agora Financial days, Eric Fry; and yours truly, your humble editor.

Again, here’s the sign-up link for the January 19^th “End of the World Summit,” and be sure to mark your calendar.

Thank you for reading, Santa, and best wishes on your Christmas Run this year, and for whatever unfolds in 2026.