You are a free subscriber to Me and the Money Printer. To upgrade to paid and receive the daily Capital Wave Report - which features our Red-Green market signals, subscribe here. It's Just As Relevant TODAY As It Was THENThe reality is... nothing ever changes... so says the Sage of Baltimore...
Dear Fellow Traveler: H.L. Mencken was a Baltimore newspaper columnist, essayist, and professional contrarian who spent the first half of the 20th century writing about American politics, economics, and public life… He inspired my high school AP Composition teacher, Dr. Vince Fitzpatrick, who, in turn, unleashed me… Fitzpatrick worked in Baltimore as the curator of the Mencken Collection at the Pratt Street Library. I spent most of high school soaking up Mencken’s writing… and would still argue he’s still my primary editorial influence. Mencken wrote with such clarity that he became one of the most quoted writers in the English language. He’s been dead for 70 years. His words still describe what’s happening today more than most people in our timeline. Let me walk through 10 of his classic lines and how I apply them to markets... But before we begin… Someone will share this article and say, “These quotes are more relevant today than when they were written.” I need you to understand something... That’s flat out wrong. They are exactly as relevant as they were in 1918, 1926, 1936, 1949, and 1956. The reason they feel like they were written this morning isn’t that the world has gotten worse. It’s that nothing has changed. The pattern of American chaos has never broken.
Mencken wrote this during World War I. The hobgoblins in 1918 were Bolsheviks and German submarines. The hobgoblins in 2026 are a rotating cast of whatever is most useful on any given news cycle. The mechanism hasn’t changed in over 100 years. You identify something scary, make it scarier, then offer yourself as the solution. That was the plot of my book The Man with the Big Red Balloon, a satire that turned too real. The formula works… Fear is the one product that doesn’t need marketing budgets.
This was published three years before the 1929 crash… It came as the entire country was leveraged to its eyeballs, buying stocks on margin. In 2021, the same people bought meme stocks and monkey JPEGs for the same reason. Mencken described the constant of finance and greed.
This is the most efficient summary of monetary policy out there... The entire financial system runs on the shared agreement that money means what we say it means. The Fed prints it, and the Treasury borrows it. The repo market refinances trillions of dollars of it every morning. The whole thing works right up to the moment someone asks what any of it is worth.
Here’s the line explaining every bailout, every emergency facility, every time the Fed expanded its balance sheet, and everyone applauded. If we really dug into it, I’d argue that no one really wants a free market. They would learn the advantages they gain when someone else has their fingers on the scale, and that if someone takes their hands off, it gets really fair, really quickly.  People are now accustomed to having a government and a central bank that catch them when they fall. It’s going to require a massive event and now safety net to get people to think differently… and that is where things get very fair… really fast.
Every time the government catches them, the next fall gets bigger, because why would you bother being careful when you know there is a net?
This was the quote at the front of The Man With the Big Red Balloon. It’s the most honest quote about government that I’ve ever read, especially those asshats who tell us that we have to do something… (cede control) for the children… In finance, every emergency intervention in history has been sold as a way to save the system. TARP was saving the system. QE was saving the system. The Bank Term Funding Program was saving the system. Every single time, the people doing the saving ended up with more power and more control over how capital moves through the economy. The system did get saved. It got even more centralized…
What does the Fed do? That’s what only 6% of Americans know… But should they even bother knowing, since everything they do is centralized insanity? They cut rates and raise rates. They print money and stop printing money. They buy bonds and then sell bonds. They expand the facility, talk about shrinking the facility, but then really expand it again… Every solution creates the next problem… and every patch creates a bigger crack. Mencken didn’t know about quantitative easing, the Standing Repo Facility, or the basis trade, but he understood the process of how institutions solve problems… They’re terrible at it. They do it badly, confidently, and in a way that guarantees they will be needed again. There is no money or power in actually fixing something to its finality… Look at how much money people rake in over in California, “solving homelessness” - when the whole problem keeps getting worse and worse. Fixing something is bad for NGOs. That’s the whole comedy… It’s a big money game.
This is the kind of quote that gets you called a crank until you calculate what the intelligent man receives in exchange for his taxes. He receives a financial system in which the rules apply to him but not to institutions that are too big to fail… or should I say… too big to end? He receives a housing market where rates are too high to buy and too low to unlock existing inventory. He receives an inflation rate calculated by people whose salaries are not affected by it. Mencken was not anti-government because it was fashionable. He was anti-government because he could add numbers...
This was written during the Great Depression, when the government was trying to rescue the banking system and pretending it knew how banking worked. That was 90 years ago. The current problems involve a central bank that spent a full year calling inflation “transitory” before executing the fastest rate-hiking cycle in four decades, only to be surprised when banks started failing, and private credit was distorted by terrible policies and false incentives... The talent for holding office has not improved. Their confidence, however, has only gotten louder.
Every cycle produces the same illusion. Asset prices go up, and everyone feels rich. Asset prices go down, and everyone feels poor. The real standard of living changes far less than the feeling, because wealth was never really about the number. It was about the comparison. That’s why bull markets make people do stupid things. I’ve studied this long enough to know it’s not necessarily about greed… It’s sometimes just the terror of being the guy who didn’t buy Nvidia at $140.
This quote aligns with everything I teach my daughter. I constantly tell her that her real identity and character are measured by what she does when no one is looking. Mencken’s quote here is a reminder of what really matters. In markets, this applies to the entire regulatory framework of the modern financial system in one sentence. Banks behave well when the regulators are watching. They stop behaving the moment the regulators look away, and the incentives fuel distortions. Private credit grew to $3 trillion because no one was required to look. The conscience of the market is only as strong as the enforcement mechanism, and the enforcement mechanism is currently looking for its next job in the private sector. Let’s Wrap This UpA lot of people in Baltimore love Mencken because they think he could see the future. He didn’t… he just saw human behavior and the present, clearly, in 1920… The present hasn’t changed.
The actors rotated, and the instruments got more complex. The balance sheets got bigger… But the market behavior… fear, greed, confidence tricks, panicked interventions, and the quiet exploitation... is identical. People will share these quotes and say, “Wow, it’s like he is writing about today.” Mencken never wrote about today. He wrote about “Always.” Nothing ever changes. Stay positive, Garrett Baldwin About Me and the Money Printer Me and the Money Printer is a daily publication covering the financial markets through three critical equations. We track liquidity (money in the financial system), momentum (where money is moving in the system), and insider buying (where Smart Money at companies is moving their money). Combining these elements with a deep understanding of central banking and how the global system works has allowed us to navigate financial cycles and boost our probability of success as investors and traders. This insight is based on roughly 17 years of intensive academic work at four universities, extensive collaboration with market experts, and the joy of trial and error in research. You can take a free look at our worldview and thesis right here. Disclaimer Nothing in this email should be considered personalized financial advice. While we may answer your general customer questions, we are not licensed under securities laws to guide your investment situation. Do not consider any communication between you and Florida Republic employees as financial advice. The communication in this letter is for information and educational purposes unless otherwise strictly worded as a recommendation. Model portfolios are tracked to showcase a variety of academic, fundamental, and technical tools, and insight is provided to help readers gain knowledge and experience. Readers should not trade if they cannot handle a loss and should not trade more than they can afford to lose. There are large amounts of risk in the equity markets. Consider consulting with a professional before making decisions with your money.
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