“I have never had a bad Christmas.” That thought struck me this Christmas. I have been lucky. Christmases past have always been good memories for me. When growing up, we lived on a farm less than three miles away from my grandparents’ farm. We went there for Christmas. Their house was one of those Montgomery Ward catalog-ordered put-together homes. It was actually pretty good as, though it has had a remodel, it is still there today.

I was reminded recently how much I looked forward as a kid to mail order catalogs, Sears was my favorite. I would dog-ear the corners of pages of what I wanted for Christmas. I was spoiled, as I often got it. Grandpa and Grandma were both German, and she made goose for Christmas. Had a phone call with our German friends in Dresden earlier this week and they were having goose there for Christmas dinner, saying that it was a German tradition. I may have to find a goose for next year. Even during the ag depression of the 1980s we managed to have a good Christmas.

The other set of grandparents came to our house, staying with us, when I was young for Christmas. He worked as a telephone installation technician constructing telephone offices for ITT. They would move from town to town wherever the company needed him to put the guts in a new telephone office — all over the country and Puerto Rico. They would come home to Iowa whenever the company had an office to build locally. He worked on offices in Royal, Everly and Primghar. I got to go stay with them one summer when he was working on a telephone office in Illinois. They could be counted on for the best presents. In my 10-year-old view of things, I thought that they were rich.

That was back when the middle-class was well paid. He had got his electrical training working in the U.S. Navy during WW II, wiring B-24 bombers in Idaho. His grave is in the military cemetery in Springfield, Missouri, near where he had retired.

My wife is responsible for the success of our Christmas today. It is a well-managed operation with no detail left to chance. Santa may check his list twice but she does it three times at least. Lucky for them, being naughty is not necessarily the definitive disqualification on her list for the grandchildren. Our new great-granddaughter just had her first Christmas here. She is a gift. In my Christmases past and present she is the seventh generation that I have known. My time has been overlapped by sharing life with three generations before me, come and gone, and now three after me. I hope that you all had great Christmas’s too.

Moving from reminiscence to the real world, take a deep breath. It has been an eventful year. In 2025, I recommended turtling up, and I am not ready to stick my neck out yet. We did two things right … we grew a record crop of corn and owned silver, gold and platinum. I have no plan on selling the metals yet. My son had the FSA measure the bins, and if their calculation is right, our near 500 acres of corn yielded 270 bpa, up from his initial 262.5 bpa estimate. If so, that brought our breakeven down to 3.89 bushel. With that kind of yield, the current price of corn is profitable.

Not a lot of farms made money in 2025. Sometimes being lucky is as good or better than being smart. Our luck was due to agronomic conditions, but investment in fertility and drainage helped the luck out. I favor growing corn over soybeans again next year.

Watch out for the cattle market in 2026. A half of beef bought from the family feedlot cost us over $2,500 when processed. That is roughly $5 per pound which is not a bad deal. Supply may not change much, but demand is vulnerable.

My general view is both the U.S. and world economy is debasing. The U.S. now adds $1 trillion in debt every few months. “The U.S. is adding $1 trillion in debt incredibly fast, averaging about every 100 to 150 days in the 2020s, a much quicker pace than previous decades, with a recent $1 trillion increase happening in just 71 days during a government shutdown in late 2025, highlighting an accelerating trend of deficit spending.” It takes close to $1 trillion every year to maintain our military superiority with the rest of the world and another $1 trillion to pay the interest on U.S. debt. That is a hell-of-a financial responsibility to carry.

Congress is going to spend more on healthcare, President Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome” and “Golden Fleet” will each cost big money, and the Supreme Court is likely to rule tariffs invalid, creating an administrative chaos as refunds are requested, disrupting the revenue stream. At some point I think that there will be a reset where the dollar is devalued in order to shrink the debt. That could have something to do with stablecoins as a new mechanism of quantitative easing. I am researching that scenario.

In preparation for an economic reset, historically this is not unprecedented, and we have history to guide us. In a reset, cash devalues while “things” don’t. Debt should be minimized but may devalue. Holding cash is not advised either as it certainly devalues. Our family’s primary asset is farmland. There is likely a reason why farmland values have held as well as they have. Land can become a haven for asset protection. For that matter, at some point, the same may be said of all commodities in their role as an asset class. A reset could support commodities, including ag. That said, I am not ready to call major lows in corn and soybeans, but if another round of weakness materializes (fifth waves), my confidence in major lows forming would increase. Food is a safe haven over cash.

The stock market is making new historical highs while consumer confidence being tracked is making new historical lows. That is the bifurcation in our economy called the K-shaped economy. Those few in the top 10% of the K are in a heyday, growing stunningly wealthier, while the larger majority of Americans in the bottom half that has no assets, living paycheck to paycheck or on SNAP are failing to make ends meet. They think that capitalism has failed and they are in deep s**t with no way out. The fan is blowing. AI is the wind.

Another risk is that while the expansion of this writhing fundamental quagmire shows no sign of pausing, we have the most unstable political leadership in our country’s history. Congress is defunct as the legislative branch having become dysfunctional. Note the rats leaving the sinking ship in record Congressional retirements. The Supreme Court adds to the destabilization by upsetting laws that have long been precedent and giving the executive branch cart-blanche new powers. That means conditions are ripe for advancing authoritarianism. Mostly though, this is because it depends on one man who is seen by some as the second coming but by many others as, kindly putting it, mentally and emotionally unstable … undermining confidence, financially and geopolitically, domestically and abroad. Fascinating isn’t it in preponderance of how this is going to all work out. Happy New Year!