The Year of Living Dangerously and Beautifully

Exactly one year ago today, I was doing something beautiful. Along with amazing friends, I boarded a private jet bound for the lagoons of Guerro Negro, Mexico. These lagoons are the birthing waters for majestic grey whales, gorgeous beasts that actually permit you to get up close and personal with them, including petting their rubber-like skin and even literally kissing them. It was an epic adventure I hope I’m privileged to experience again.

Now, I was reminded of this year-ago day via my iPhone’s photo feed, as its smart algorithm seems to somehow know what I need to see that took place “on this date” in years past. The confluence of my whale experience and the technological reminder of that day got me to thinking about the past 12 months, not just in my own life, but also in the life of the world and the financial markets, and how they could best be described.

The description that came to mind borrows from the wonderful 1982 film, “The Year of Living Dangerously,” starring a young Mel Gibson, who delivered one of his smartest and most thoughtful performances. If you’ve never seen this film, I highly recommend it, as it portrays a young Australian reporter trying to navigate and make the world aware of the political turmoil in Indonesia during the rule of President Sukarno. For more on Sukarno and his regime, check out this unclassified CIA briefing from 1964.

Of course, I’m an optimist at heart, and that shunts my worldview to not only describe the last 12 months as the year of living dangerously, but also the year of living beautifully.

Just think about this for a moment. One year ago, the big news on the global economic stage was President Trump’s trade war. I describe it as such, because the notion that other nations are “treating us very badly” and that the solution to this situation is taxes levied on the American people (which are what tariffs actually are), was causing a lot of market volatility throughout the world.

A few weeks after my March 2025 whale trip, on April 2, the president took to the White House Rose Garden and announced “Liberation Day” reciprocal tariffs, declaring a 10% baseline tax on imports from all countries, as well as much higher tariff rates for dozens of nations that run trade surpluses with the United States.

The market reaction was fast and furious, as stocks plunged and volatility spiked. The president soon issued postponements of these policies, modifying them greatly in the weeks and months that followed. The result was the smart money regaining confidence that Mr. Trump was listening to the message being sent by markets, and that the worst of the policies would be averted.

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled those tariffs unconstitutional based on the emergency provision the president cited as the legal grounds for imposing these tariffs. Still, the tariff threat, and the tariff damage, to the economy has been done. And while the inflation situation hasn’t reflected higher prices due to tariffs (at least not yet), the economics of tariffs, harmful as they are, are not the reason I oppose them.

I oppose tariffs on moral grounds, as punishing U.S. companies and the nation’s citizens for their production and consumption choices in order to raise revenue for the U.S. Treasury and influence citizen behavior is profoundly wrong. Full stop.

Fortunately, President Trump backed off on the dangerous imposition of radically high tariffs, but the trepidation and uncertainty over this issue remains an unknown that markets have to deal with.

On the flipside, on July 4, the president signed into law the deregulation and tax cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which among many other positives will make many of the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent. The law also introduces new tax deductions, including a higher standard tax deduction, larger child tax credits, a 100% bonus depreciation that businesses will be able to take for qualifying new equipment, immediate expensing for domestic research & development costs and a 20% deduction for qualified business income (QBI) for pass-through entities.

I hope we get more of this big-beautiful-style policy and less of the dangerous tariffs in the year ahead.

Another huge event over the past 12 months is the bias from ending wars around the world to beginning a new war with Iran. President Trump consistently touted how he ended multiple wars in the first few months of his presidency. Now, we have new, much bigger and very likely much more consequential conflict taking place in the Middle East.

Regular readers to the column and to my newsletter advisory services will likely know that I think the action taken by the president to “decapitate” the Iranian regime was not only necessary in principle, but also decades overdue.

An Islamic theocracy that murders its own citizens, sponsors terrorism through its proxies all around the globe, promotes and funds radical Islamic teachings and even suborned the attempted murder of my friend, author Salman Rushdie, for the “crime” of writing a novel, has no legitimate standing on the world stage. And preventing said regime from acquiring apocalyptic nuclear weaponry is objectively in the interest of the entire free world.

If you ever get the chance to fly private, I can unequivocally recommend it.

Still, actions have consequences. The surge in the price of oil and the volatility amongst the chaos that the Iran war has caused has sent markets on edge, and rightly so. In this year of living dangerously, the Strait of Hormuz has effectively been closed, with ships barely trickling through the waterway responsible for transiting some 20% of the world’s crude oil. Yet as I wrote last week, opportunity lives in chaos.

Whenever you have change, you have adaptation, and adaptation can be a beautiful thing. Or as military strategist Sun Tzu tells us, “In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.” Keep this foremost in mind while assessing future investment allocations.

From a personal perspective, the supreme pulchritudinous change in this year of living dangerously and beautifully has been assuming my new role as the editor of Forecasts & Strategies.

Since 1980 (coincidentally just one year after the Islamic regime’s takeover of Iran), Forecasts & Strategies has been helping investors protect and grow their money. Under the expert stewardship of my friend and founding editor Dr. Mark Skousen, this advisory service has helped investors like you acquire what I think is the most important thing a human life requires — freedom.

I always say that “money equals freedom.” By this I mean the more money you have, the more freedom you can enjoy, because money allows you the freedom to be able to do what you want with the one finite resource that nobody can ever get back… time.

In the years to come, I will continue providing the best advice I can, advice aimed at the supreme moral good of achieving more freedom.

The reason why I am so confident I can do so is because that’s precisely what I’ve done throughout my three decades of writing about and making sense of markets, geopolitics, philosophy and the confluence of these three critical attributes that have a direct effect on your freedom.

So, here’s to another year of living dangerously and beautifully!

Why would we want it any other way?

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Don’t Surround Yourself with Yourself

Move me on to any black square

Use me anytime you want

Just remember that the goal

Is for us all to capture all we want

Don’t surround yourself with yourself

Move on back two squares

Send an instant karma to me

Initial it, with loving care…

— Yes, “I’ve Seen All Good People”

Through references to chess, and specifically the movement of the Queen’s Bishop, prog-rock masters Yes wisely remind us that when we surround ourselves with those who think the same way we do, we can get trapped in a confirmation bias that stunts our ability to win the game.

So, always try to take a couple of steps back and be sure you are grounded and fully aware of your circumstances. It’s only then that we can move forward toward our goal of capturing all we want.

Wisdom about money, investing and life can be found anywhere. If you have a good quote that you’d like me to share with your fellow readers, send it to me, along with any comments, questions and suggestions you have about my newsletters, seminars or anything else. Click here to ask Jim.

In the name of the best within us,

Jim Woods