Editor’s Note: Make time for this today – Porter’s
explosive new documentary exposes the President’s plans to replace the U.S. dollar. If you have retirement savings, a stock portfolio, or a family depending on you financially,
you need to watch it right now.
In the early 19th century, whale oil was among the most valuable commodities on Earth.
It lit the lamps of America. It lubricated the machines of the Industrial Revolution. Entire coastal economies like New Bedford, Nantucket, and New London thrived because of it.
The scarcity was real. Whales were finite after all – and the expertise to hunt them, process them, and bring the oil to market took decades to develop.
That scarcity underpinned an entire monetary ecosystem.
Then in 1859, Edwin Drake struck oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania.
Kerosene arrived. It was cheaper, more abundant, and much more powerful.
The whalers didn't disappear overnight. The compression was gradual – and then suddenly catastrophic. Within two decades, the whaling industry had effectively collapsed.
The scarcity hadn't disappeared. It had migrated. And the fortunes built on whale oil migrated with it – to the men who understood where scarcity had moved.
This is what a great repricing looks like.
A friend of mine, financial writer Garrett Baldwin, has a phrase for what happens to the people who don't move in time. He calls it the "flooding layer."
The idea is simple – every time the scarcity underpinning an entire industry evaporates, it creates two groups of people:
Those who own the new chokepoint. And those standing in the flooding layer – watching everything they built get washed away.
The brutal truth is that the people in the flooding layer almost never see it coming. Not until the compression is irreversible.
For a more recent example, let’s look at Kodak.
In 1988, Eastman Kodak employed nearly 150,000 people.
It was one of the most valuable companies in America. Its business was built on a form of scarcity that seemed unassailable – the chemistry, the film, the paper, the processing infrastructure required to capture and develop a photograph.
That scarcity evaporated when the smartphone put a camera in every pocket.
Kodak didn't fail because folks stopped taking pictures – it failed because the scarcity that underpinned its entire business model migrated.
In 2012, Kodak filed for bankruptcy.
That same year, Facebook acquired Instagram – a company with 13 employees – for $1 billion. Instagram had captured the value that Kodak lost.
The scarcity had migrated from chemistry to connectivity and the people who understood that got very rich. Those left standing in Kodak's flood plain did not.
Today I’d like to show you that we’re living through
another great repricing – one that is already making millions of dollars for those who understand where the scarcity is migrating once again.
To understand what’s unfolding we have to rewind to a secret deal that’s profoundly shaped everything about our lives, for more than half a century.