Hola Libertinus,

Imagine rebalancing your portfolio while dodging chickens, motorcycles, and actual rivers of goat blood.

That was West's week in Kathmandu.

Meanwhile, back in the land of latte activism and subsidized surrealism, Zack covers France’s latest descent into postcolonial performance art: a queer-friendly theater turned refugee squat turned hygiene disaster. It’s part two of our deep dive into The Population Bomb, and let’s just say… the plumbing has failed.

So grab a drink, settle in, and let’s take a tour of two very different kinds of dysfunction…

🗞️ DISPATCHES

Watching the World Burn from the Himalayan Foothills

I recently returned from a trip to Bangkok and Kathmandu.

Bangkok is on the Western tourism radar enough that while it is definitely different than any cities in the West, it is easy enough to navigate.

It also helps that the Thai government and people seem to realize how much money they bring in from tourism/expats and seem aligned in making the country accommodating to outsiders.

Most of the places I've traveled - Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Bangkok, and even Johannesburg to a certain extent - offer immense value to the Westerner.

A good, often times superior, quality of life compared to Western nations, all at a fraction of the price.

Kathmandu is a different story.

Congested winding roadways barely large enough to fit a single car but crammed with the machinery of motorcycles, buses, and anything else with an engine, inextricably intermingled with the biomass of pedestrians, goats, chickens, and dogs, all precariously traversing the chaos en route to their destinations.

Daily open air cremations and pools of blood in the street leftover from animal sacrifices.

A republic with corruption at such a scale that monarchy, even one marred by brutal violence only a generation ago, seems a better alternative to the people; but with a military that remains in the politicians' pockets, an unlikely future.

It's a different world far away from the social, cultural, and political constructs that dominate our lives in the West.

And yet I could still feel the ripples originating from a space of only a few square miles within Washington DC all the way over in the foothills of the Himalayas.

I overheard a British tourist staying in my hostel yell at his phone "Donald Trump fucked us!"

I gleaned from his conversation that he was funding his trip in Nepal with stock holdings that were rapidly depreciating as he spoke.

In early April, while I was in Kathmandu, Trump unveiled tariffs at a unprecedented scale.

And then withdrew them - wait, no the tariffs are back - wait, scratch that, tariffs off again - wait, what is happening now?

The only thing more chaotic than the financial markets that week was the winding, writhing streets of Kathmandu.

And yet I found myself in a very different emotional place than the angry Brit.

I felt a sense of calm, more calm than usual, maybe even a sense of equanimity.

But how?

How could be be that I, someone to tracks financial markets more closely than the average bloke, was emotionally indifferent to the whipsaws that had become the norm in the markets that week?

Because I had anticipated this, and had prepared my portfolio accordingly.

Dear reader, I do not have a crystal ball.

I was not gifted with the foresight of a soothsayer, or the divination of a priest.

And no, I am not saying that I specifically predicted the politically induced highs and lows of the markets of that week in early April 2025.

I just anticipated what I always anticipate - that government mismanagement will lead to economic problems.

The only thing I did that week was to rebalance my portfolio to get it back in line with my target allocations.

I sold gold, which was soaring, and bought stocks which were floundering under the weight of tariff uncertainty.

When stocks recover and hit new highs, I will sell them and buy up whatever asset in my portfolio is suffering the most at that point in time.

Or, if stocks don't recover, I will sell whatever asset in my portfolio is overvalued in relation to all of the others.

I also have a healthy cash allocation, so none of this will disrupt my lifestyle, and if somehow every other asset in my portfolio is down, I will go on a buying spree.

I've back tested my passive portfolio with historic data and understand the math that drives my portfolio's success over long periods of time.

I have a pretty good sense of the numbers I can expect my portfolio to generate.

But in Kathmandu I got to experience the benefits of a well diversified portfolio in a way that spreadsheets can't articulate.

The emotional sensation of equanimity.

The knowledge that whatever craziness was happening in the world of politics and economics, I was going to be just fine, and that my portfolio will actually benefit from all of this.

And I didn't need to sacrifice a goat in a Nepalese temple to receive these benefits.

For as much as people talk numbers and percentages in investing, I took this as a reminder that the actual lived experience of running a particular portfolio is far more important than whatever numbers are on a spreadsheet.

This isn't a bait to reveal some magical portfolio allocation that will solve all your problems - that doesn't exist.

It is just a recounting one man's lived experience of running a passive portfolio that includes fixed allocations of multiple uncorrelated assets.

These benefits can be yours too if you're willing to unplug yourself from the financial talking heads and start thinking critically about your financial risk management. ~West

The Avant-Garde Theater of Ideological Collapse (The Population Bomb—Part II)

Paris, December 2024.

A Red Cross-sponsored conference called “Reinventing the Welcome for Refugees in France” gets hosted at the famed La Gaîté Lyrique, one of the capital’s trendier publicly-funded arts venues.

Once a 19th-century opera house...

Now hosting taxpayer-funded events like "LOUD & PROUD," a four-day celebration of queer culture, and "TRANS*GALACTIQUE," a daring interstellar tribute to gender identity so immersive it surely required a pronoun guide.

The topic of the day was refugees, though.

With a focus on Ukrainians.

The attendees were mostly well-fed NGO professionals on expense accounts, fully prepared to nod solemnly at PowerPoint slides about human dignity.

But perhaps unexpectedly, they were joined by 250 West African migrants.

These youth self-identified as "unaccompanied minors" and they did something unexpected:

They refused to leave.

Claiming they had nowhere else to go after being evicted from their makeshift camp in Parc de Belleville, they demanded shelter.

So overnight the avant-garde venue became a refugee camp.

Perhaps ironically, part of the theatre's mission includes being "a refuge of expression for the unheard." Wish granted.

Support from the Left came quickly. Food, mattresses, volunteers. Language classes. Legal counsel. Posters. Manifestos. A full-service occupation.

Full of theoretical frameworks.

Antiracism. Decolonization. Structural inequality. Oppression. The usual.

They even hosted a "Decolonial Film Festival" in solidarity.

Not in the theater itself, of course—too many actual migrants for that to feel safe and inclusive.

But from a safe distance, college-educated Marxists cast the occupation as a moral sequel to the Algerian War and Senegalese independence—an abstract, academic exercise in postcolonial solidarity.

And let's not forget the Right!

This incident gave their narratives plenty of "supply."

Talking heads on conservative news cried “invasion” and they branded the street in front of the theatre a no-go zone.

To be fair, a local café owner claimed the migrants made rape and death threats.

Let's not pretend like the situation was pretty...

The population swelled to 446 "teenage" boys. (Many looked conspicuously older.)

There were no showers, only four toilets, and no plan beyond demanding their due from their "former colonizers."

By February, Gaîté’s staff invoked their legal right to peace out from what they called an environment of “unbearable promiscuity.” (Quite prude for the French!)

Conflicts were erupting. Hygiene was gone. Disease was spreading. "Everyone is sick," one occupant said.

And the theater!

It was supposed to be a refuge for the unheard. A place where aesthetics met activism. Where digital creators and affluent, intersectional artists could trade zines over low-carbon oat lattes and debate privilege while imbibing organic pét-nat.

Unfortunately, with events cancelled and their revenue (and employees) gone, the theatre's finances collapsed. You know, capitalism and all that. Theaters run on tickets, not ideology, after all.

That's the rub, isn't it?

The cultural class that fetishizes the oppressed... collapse when the oppressed actually show up.

So where are they now?

After 99 days, the occupiers were evicted by riot police.

It was quite the scene!

The Left got to #resist and virtue signal. “These youths are the shadow of France’s colonial past.” Human shields shouting "shame" during the confrontation.

The Right got their talking points. “The country is overrun with undesirables!” Their particular flavor of identity politics, on display.

The media got plenty of must-see news cycles.

I'm sure NGOs got additional grants and social capital.

And the youths?

Not to be blunt, but does anybody care at this point?

They no doubt disappeared into the bureaucratic maze.

Which brings us to France.

And to the West more broadly.

Honestly, to most of the first world.

Because we're facing a demographic time bomb.

Globally.

The developed world now needs immigration to sustain their welfare states.

Young bodies are required to feed a collapsing demographic curve.

Replacement level is about 2.1 children per woman—anything less, and a population starts to shrink. First the schools, then the pensions, then the entire civilization.

Japan’s fertility rate is stuck at 1.26.

South Korea? An apocalyptic 0.72—the lowest ever recorded.

Italy and Spain hover around 1.2 and 1.3, respectively.

China? Already under 1.1 and falling off a cliff.

Germany, the UK, Canada, the U.S.—all below replacement.

And yet all of them—except China—are clinging to the same problematic model: import people to make up the gap.

Because without immigration, the math simply doesn’t work. Not for pensions, not for health care, not for GDP.

We spent the 20th century sterilizing the Global South. Yet now we need their children to keep the lights on?

We can't even talk about the issues around integration without ideological knives coming out on both sides.

It's an ideological battleground where one side screams “decolonial justice” and the other stokes panic about "civilizational decline."

But if you want a functioning welfare state (and everyone does, despite what they say), you need bodies. Preferably young ones. Preferably working-age. And since birthrates are plummeting, so there’s only one place to get them.

But despite the public-facing rhetoric, both sides of the political spectrum know the machine only runs if the borders stay cracked open.

Yes, the Right is particularly two-faced on the matter.

Every industrialized nation is playing this game, just to stay afloat.

Even the Congressional Budget Office openly admits the immigration surge between 2021 and 2026 will be a net positive... at least on paper.

Their July 2024 report estimates it’ll bring in $1.2 trillion in new federal revenue by 2034, mostly from payroll and income taxes.

Costs?

Around $300 billion in new outlays—Medicaid, SNAP, school lunches, and the interest on the debt it takes to fund it all.

So yeah, overall it’s a net win for Washington.

Funny how that works.

So no, this entire issue isn't about ideology, compassion or cruelty.

It’s about keeping the Ponzi scheme running for one more decade.

Because without new bodies, the math breaks.

And that’s the part no one wants to say out loud.

Because once you say it, you have to admit the obvious:

There’s no plan. No infrastructure. No assimilation strategy. No endgame.

Just more short-term thinking, more can-kicking...

Just like every other fiscal disaster we’re papering over with more and more debt.

And instead of a public narrative for a multi-ethnic society grounded in shared values and a coherent future?

Empty rhetoric where architecture should be.

But eventually, you need plumbing.

Just ask the Gaîté Lyrique. ~Zack

That’s it for this week.

Two continents, two very different crises—both brought to you by the miracle of modern statecraft.

Whether it’s the emotional equanimity of a rebalanced portfolio in Nepal or the avant-garde tragedy of our demographic delusions, one thing is clear:

There’s no cavalry coming.

But if you’ve got a rational risk model, an eye towards the signals, a working passport, and the ability to rebalance under pressure, you’ve already lapped 99% of the field.

Sic semper debitoribus,
~ West & Zack

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