It’s disgraceful. 

The United States, a country that once stood for personal freedom, yet demanded personal responsibility from its citizens and politicians alike, is broken. 

I barely recognize it anymore. 

Since 2010, I’ve been warning everyone who would listen about the United State’s looming debt crisis in my documentary, The End of America. 

Now, 16 years, and $22 trillion in additional debt later… 

We’re very near the $40 trillion mark in total national debt: 

This massive debt… annual deficit increases… along with looming unfunded pension obligations, are spiraling this country toward insolvency. 

And as I’ll show you, the soaring price of gold right now is a very clear warning of this. 

Congress cannot possibly finance its legislatively mandated spending: 

Mandatory spending plus interest is locked in at around 37% of GDP before a single discretionary dollar is spent.

It’s inevitable that the government will be forced to print trillions of dollars to finance its growing obligations and borrowing costs. 

This has the potential to trigger a technical U.S. Treasury default… which would mean catastrophic losses for long-duration bond investors.

It’s happening right now in Japan, where the 10-year bond yield has tripled over the last year. It has cost investors over $200 billion. 

And that’s what happened in Great Britain in September 2022, costing investors around $700 billion. 

In both cases, the bond markets sold off after the governments announced plans to both increase spending and cut taxes. Following the same logic at home…

I believe it’s now certain America will soon experience a financial reckoning, much like we saw in 1973-1974.

After the U.S. abandoned the gold standard in August 1971, Congress passed huge increases to spending, including linking Social Security payouts to meet the inflation rate.

In the 10 years following the August 1971 break with gold, the size of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet grew 174%, from $70 billion to over $190 billion, as it bought enormous amounts of Treasury bonds with newly printed money. 

This set off the roaring inflation of the 1970s, which wiped out long-duration Treasury bonds.

That meant a stock market decline of more than 50% between 1973 and 1974. The sell-off in financial stocks was even more intense. 

For banks, which must hold Treasury securities as reserves, the technical default (printing money to finance government debt) was catastrophic.

The price of gold, in the meantime? Soared from $35/ounce to $455 by the end of the decade. That should sound familiar… 

Today, we’re witnessing the largest gold bull run since the 1970s, and for an important reason: 

Central banks around the world are recognizing this massive risk that U.S. Treasury bonds pose to their bottom line. So they’re dumping Treasuries… and buying gold hand-over-fist. 

Put simply, gold is money again. And it’s the greatest monetary shift we’ve ever seen. 

I warned anyone who would listen to get into gold over a year ago. And I’d bet the ones who did are enjoying some incredible returns. 

But this is just the beginning of this wealth shift – and I have a new gold recommendation that I believe everyone should consider immediately.

In short, if you don’t own gold right now, you’re making a big mistake. But if you really want to protect and potentially grow your wealth during these dangerous times…

Click here to see the absolute best way to invest in this global gold rush right now.

Good investing, 

Porter Stansberry

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This Month’s Bonus News

Forget the Chips, Buy Memory: Why AI Money Is Moving to Storage

Written by Jeffrey Neal Johnson. Published: 1/22/2026. 

What You Need to Know

• SanDisk is capitalizing on a structural shortage of semiconductor wafers, which has significantly increased the pricing power of its enterprise solid-state drives.
• Western Digital is seeing renewed demand for its high-capacity hard drives, which serve as the primary storage vaults for massive artificial intelligence datasets.
• Institutional investors are increasingly targeting the memory sector as the industry realizes that data storage capacity is the next major infrastructure bottleneck.

While the stock market has spent the last two years obsessed with logic chips and GPUs, a meaningful rotation is underway in the hardware sector. The compute trade — bets on the processors that let AI models think — is taking a breather, and smart money is moving aggressively into the hardware that stores the data.

That shift was visible in January 2026. SanDisk (NASDAQ: SNDK) surged roughly 90% on heavy volume, hitting an all-time high near $459. Its former parent, Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC), rose about 23% over the same period, continuing a rally that has more than doubled the stock price over the past 12 months.

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The catalyst is a dawning realization among institutional investors: AI is not only about processing speed — it’s also about storage capacity. As models grow, the bottleneck is shifting from processors to storage drives. The infrastructure build-out has entered a new phase, creating clear opportunities for two of the largest U.S. memory names.

Supply Shock: A Capacity-Constrained Market

To understand why SanDisk and Western Digital shares are rising, look at the supply chain. Semiconductor manufacturing is capacity-constrained. A fab can only process a limited number of silicon wafers each month; those wafers are the canvases upon which chips are printed.

Currently, global manufacturers are under heavy pressure to produce High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), the stacked memory used directly on NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) GPUs to enable rapid calculations. To meet insatiable HBM demand, production lines have been reallocated, dedicating much of their capacity to HBM.

That reallocation has created a supply gap for standard NAND flash and DRAM—there simply aren’t enough wafers available to produce conventional storage chips.

• The supply shock: With fewer machines producing standard memory, global supply has declined sharply.
• The demand spike: Data centers are consuming a disproportionately large share of high-end memory capacity.
• The result: A classic squeeze. With supply down and demand up, manufacturers have regained pricing power and can raise prices without significantly reducing demand.

SanDisk: The Hot-Tier Speed Engine

SanDisk, fully independent following its spin-off from Western Digital in early 2025, is a primary beneficiary of the need for speed. In data centers, SanDisk supplies the hot tier: fast solid-state drives (SSDs) used when data must be accessed instantly.

The bullish case for SanDisk centers on an AI training requirement called checkpointing.

During training, models must save progress frequently—often every few minutes—to protect against power failures or crashes. If a model crashes without a recent checkpoint, weeks of work and millions in electricity could be lost. That process requires immense amounts of ultra-fast storage to write data instantly, and SanDisk’s enterprise SSDs are widely used for that task.

Financials reflect the surge in demand and operating leverage. Because SanDisk has significant fixed costs to run its factories, once those costs are covered, additional revenue from higher pricing flows directly to the bottom line. That helps explain why earnings are rising faster than revenue.

• Revenue growth: Fiscal 2026 revenue is projected at $10.45 billion, a 42% year-over-year increase.
• Earnings expansion: The shortage has supported margin expansion. Earnings per share (EPS) estimates have moved from roughly $2.99 in 2025 to a projected $13.46 for 2026.

Operational clarity has improved as well. The company has streamlined its branding, consolidating consumer products under the SanDisk Optimus line—signaling to investors that it is now a focused, pure-play flash memory provider.

Western Digital: The Cold-Tier Vault

If SanDisk is the sprinter, Western Digital is the marathoner. As a leading hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturer, Western Digital supplies cold-tier storage.

AI models are trained on datasets that run to petabytes of video, text, and images. Storing all that training data on fast SSDs would be prohibitively expensive, so companies keep it in data lakes on cost-effective HDDs.

Western Digital owns much of the infrastructure for these massive digital reservoirs.

Analysts covering Western Digital have recognized the company’s duopoly power with competitor Seagate (NASDAQ: STX):

• Citigroup raised its target to $280 on Jan. 20, 2026, an increase of more than 25%.
• Rosenblatt Securities raised its price target 21% to $270 the same day.
• Bank of America lifted its target 13% to $257.

For investors who prefer stability over high beta, Western Digital offers an attractive income component. The board recently approved a 25% increase to the quarterly dividend, raising it to $0.125 per share.

Looking ahead, the company is protecting its technological lead with HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording). Conventional drives are approaching physical limits—the magnetic bits are so small they risk instability. HAMR uses a tiny laser to briefly heat the disk surface during writes, allowing data to be packed more densely. That innovation enables drives exceeding 40 terabytes, helping WDC remain relevant as data generation accelerates.

The Memory Supercycle Is Just Beginning

The AI trade hasn’t ended; it has moved downstream. Constraints on silicon wafer capacity are expected to persist through 2026, suggesting the current pricing power for memory manufacturers may be structural rather than temporary.

Investors face two clear paths. SanDisk offers high-beta exposure to aggressive growth and rising earnings estimates, driven by immediate AI processing and checkpointing needs. Western Digital offers a steadier, income-generating option, supported by expanding data archiving demand and HAMR technology.

As the memory-chip shortage tightens its grip on the global electronics market, the floor for these stocks looks higher. In 2026, storage is increasingly becoming the new compute.

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See Also: The day the gold market broke (From Behind the Markets)