Who is TDV
The Dollar Vigilante (TDV) is a joint-venture publication founded by two respected free-market speakers and analysts in the financial sector, Jeff Berwick and Ed Bugos. Both Jeff and Ed consider themselves financial freedom fighters and have written extensively in the past about the ongoing and impending collapse of the US dollar based financial system. They joined forces to publish TDV, a publication and community for dollar crash survivors.
Jeff Berwick - Chief Editor
Anarchist. Libertarian. Freedom fighter against mankinds two biggest enemies, the State and the Central Banks. Jeff is the host of Anarchast, an anarcho-capitalist video podcast and is a contributing editor at many of the world's largest financial and precious metals related websites including LewRockwell.com, The Daily Reckoning, Whiskey and Gunpowder, Kitco, Gold-Eagle, Safehaven.com, Market Oracle and is a speaker at many of the world's most important hard-money investment and freedom conferences including Libertopia, the San Francisco & New York Hard Assets Show, the PDAC held in Toronto, the Silver Summit and the Cambridge House conferences in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Montreal and Saskatoon.
Jeff's background in the financial markets dates back to his founding of Canada's largest financial website, Stockhouse.com, in 1994. In the late ‘90s the company expanded worldwide into 8 different countries and had 250 employees and a market capitalization of $240 million USD at the peak of the “tech bubble”. To this day more than a million investors use Stockhouse.com for investment information every month.
Jeff was the CEO from 1994 until 2002 when he sold the company and still continued on as a director afterwards until 2007. Afterwards, Berwick went forth to live on and travel the world by sailboat but after one year of sailing his boat sank in a storm off the coast of El Salvador. After being saved clinging to his surfboard with nothing but a pair of surfing shorts left of all his material possessions he decided to "live nowhere" and travel the world as spontaneously as possible with one overarching goal: See and understand the world with his own eyes, not through the lens of the media.
He went on to visit nearly 100 countries over four years and did and saw things that no education could ever teach. He met and spoke with a plethora of amazing people, from self-made billionaires to some of the brightest minds in finance – as well as entrepreneurs from a broad range of backgrounds and locations from tech companies in southern China to resource developers in Mongolia, Thailand, Russia and Chile. He also read everything he could find on how the world really works… politically and financially. A pursuit he continues to this day.
He expatriated, long ago from his country of birth, Canada, and considers himself a citizen of the world. He has lived in numerous locales since including Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Bangkok and currently lives in Acapulco, Mexico and is building a home in Cafayate, Argentina. In essence, everything he writes about here for TDV he has done or is doing.
As well, during his travels, both real and virtual (through the internet), he met some amazing people who have a similar shared vision of what is currently going on in the world and enticed them to come aboard TDV and provide their own brand of analysis.
Ed Bugos - Senior Analyst
Ed Bugos, with a strong background in Austrian economics, is one of the world's most sought after and respected mining analysts. Based out of the global epicenter for gold mining exploration and financing, Vancouver, Canada, he has been writing publicly since the late ‘90s and is a well known critic of government interventions, central banking and the Federal Reserve since 2000, starting as the original contributing editor for Safehaven.com. Ed founded goldenbar.com in 2001, a website publishing his gold & currency digest portending the collapse of the strong dollar policy and the rise of the secular bull market in gold and commodities. He was one of the first to make the call for $2,000 gold (he now is calling for $5,000-$10,000 gold), back when it was still struggling with $300 per ounce and it was a sin to own it.
From 2000 to 2006, Ed’s advice produced annual compounded returns of more than 20 percent following a conservative strategy that involved no leverage and included no junior companies (see the "What is TDV" section to see a full accounting of Ed's track record since 2000).
Ed is most famous for his prescient call to sell all gold stocks near the end of 2006 and into 2007, just months prior to the crash in gold stocks precipitated by the financial system collapse of 2007-2008. We know of no other gold analyst who recommended buying from 2000-2006, selling during 2006-2007 and then returned to a bullish stance during and after the gold stock market crash.
Since March 2009 Ed has been a private research analyst with Strategic Energy Research & Capital to provide its institutional clients with “precious metals equity research.”
But, being concerned by the rapidly declining political landscape and loss of freedoms in the western world, Ed was looking for a way to get his research and thoughts out to the public. He joined The Dollar Vigilante in July, 2010.
Other Regular Contributors
Private Parts (pseudonym) - Dispatch from Within the Belly of the Beast
And rounding out the batting order we even have access to an inside source on the ground in Afghanistan. He is a former US military NCO (non commissioned officer) currently working one or two hours per day, at most, for $150,000+ per annum, for one of the multitude of contractors the United States currently employs to occupy that land. We have given him a pseudonym to protect him because what he will be revealing to you each month would certainly get him fired if it were to be discovered. We call him Private Parts and he will have a monthly “Dispatch from Within the Belly of the Beast” where he will regale us with real-life stories of how American taxpayer dollars are being spent – or, as is much more apt, mis-spent in the ever expanding “war on terror”.