Through his company, 13D Global Strategy & Research (founded 1983) Sokoloff publishes two legendary investment newsletters: What I Learned This Week, and What The Markets Are Telling Us.

Along with the investing advice and macroeconomic analysis in the newsletters (subscribers include George Soros and Barton Biggs) are references to classical learning, interesting books, and cultural trends like loneliness.

Sokoloff’s appreciation for history partly comes through his background. His father was an aristocratic Russian doctor who lived through the Russian Revolution but escaped for a new life in the US. His mother’s family lost most of their money in the Great Depression.

Sokoloff is a longtime student of Eastern philosophy. His 2005 book Personal Transformation: An Executive’s Story of Struggle and Spiritual Awakening, carries a Foreword by the Dalai Lama.

Sokoloff believes we’re at the start of a long term trend of where the balance of power moves from capital to labor, or at least from wealth creation to wealth distribution. But what he’s most worried about now is debt.

During the pandemic, central bank bailouts and much higher government spending led to a piling up of debt in an already highly indebted world economy. Sokoloff believes government money printing will bring a fall in the dollar’s value and a rise in gold prices and gold mining sto

Sokoloff observes how central bank actions led to the debt-fuelled stock market euphoria of the late 1920s. The same thing is happening today: artificially low interest rates created an assets boom that’s been driven by debt. Now, it can only end badly, like in 1929.

The more debt that is added to the system, the less productive the debt becomes. Government stimulus doesn’t do much for the underlying economy, and further debt only makes it more fragile. Sokoloff also predicts a plummeting of real estate prices, particularly in prime cities li

We’ve entered a deflationary era in which the only way out is government and household austerity. People will return to having substantial savings like in the past. In the US during World War Two, savings rates were 25%. Pre-Covid they were 8%.

Bottom line: Sokoloff became a prolific reader when he started going deaf as a young adult. He retreated into a world of ideas. He has his hearing back, but the deafness acted like a filter, letting him focus on long-term trends. Only a fool would ignore his insights.