Dear Reader,
Happy first day of September.
Today I want to talk about a very surprising place that Bill Gates parks most of his personal money — and the profound lessons it holds for every investor right now.
The place is Republic Services (SYM: RSG).
The old Republic Industries.
The garbage company.
He owns $25 billion worth of that stock.
It's his single largest personal position outside of Microsoft.
And I think the reasons why tell you everything you need to know about investing in the world we're entering.
Why a Billionaire Bets Big on Garbage
We've been talking a lot lately about inflation.
About how long bonds are dangerous — you get a fixed coupon while inflation keeps moving, and over 25 years a million dollars becomes worth about half a million in real terms.
So how do you protect yourself?
Bill Gates' answer is Republic Services.
It's a stable, inflation-resistant, cash-generating business.
Revenue growing at nearly 10% a year.
Earnings growing at 12.5%.
Pro tip: whenever you see the top line growing at one rate and the bottom line growing faster, that tells you management is obsessively focused on operational efficiency.
That's a very good sign.
Why Garbage Is a Great Business
Here's something most people don't think about.
Landfills are one of the scarcest resources in America.
They are heavily regulated, extremely difficult to permit, and once you have one, you essentially have a monopoly in your area.
It's a deep economic moat.
And the underlying business — waste and recycling — is not going out of style.
I don't care what AI does.
The garbage still needs to get picked up.
Every week.
Every month.
Every year.
It's more reliable than razors.
It produces steady cash flow.
It pays a solid dividend.
And it balances out the high-growth volatile sectors — the Mag Seven, the chip stocks, the AI plays — with a heavy, physical, essential industry that just keeps grinding out cash.
The Bigger Lesson
Gates isn't just picking a stock.
He's making a statement about how to construct a portfolio for an inflationary world.
His other major holdings tell the same story.
Deere & Company.
Ecolab.
AutoNation — a stock I've owned for many, many years.
These are all businesses that can raise their prices to match or exceed inflation.
That's the key question you need to ask about everything you own right now.
If inflation is running at 4% or 5%, can the companies in your portfolio raise their prices above that rate?
If they can't, you're not building wealth.
You're treading water at best.
The Era We're Entering
Ladies and gentlemen, we are entering a fundamentally different era for America.
It's similar to what happened after World War II with the Treasury-Fed Accord — when the government suppressed interest rates to manage its massive wartime debt load.
That accord held from 1942 until it finally broke in 1951.
What we're entering now is called fiscal dominance.
That's a fancy way of saying that the fiscal authorities — the Treasury, the government — are gaining more control over interest rate policy than the Fed itself.
We've had Fed dominance for the past 25 to 30 years.
Now the balance of power is shifting.
And in a world of fiscal dominance, the inflation playbook matters more than anything else.
Find businesses that can raise their prices ahead of the inflation rate.
Own real assets that appreciate with it.
Stay away from fixed-income instruments that get eaten alive by it.
Bill Gates figured this out a long time ago.
While most people are still just catching up.
The Rule Nobody Acts On
Now go back and read that second rule again.
Own real assets that appreciate with inflation.
Everybody nods at that one. Almost nobody does anything about it.
So let me spend an extra minute on it, because the Treasury-Fed Accord I just mentioned is not the only time Washington has done this to savers.
It's the second time.
On January 30, 1934, by decree, the government repriced gold from $20.67 an ounce to $35.
Overnight, every paper dollar in every American wallet lost roughly 41% of its gold value.
Not by war. Not by markets. By signature.
The Treasury booked a $2.81 billion windfall on the revaluation — money it did not have to tax anyone to collect.
The savers paid for it.
Then came the rate suppression I just described. And when it finally broke in the 1970s, gold went from $35 an ounce to $850 by January 1980.
A 2,329% move.
The dollar's purchasing power over that same decade? Cut by more than half.
Both times, the mechanism was identical. The government needed its debts to get cheaper in real terms. And the people holding paper absorbed the cost.
Which brings me to a number I can't stop thinking about.
The United States Treasury still owns 261.5 million ounces of gold.
And it still carries that gold on its own books at $42.22 an ounce — a price Congress fixed in 1973 and never updated.
That is fiscal dominance sitting in plain sight, on a government spreadsheet, waiting.
And Washington has started to move.
On May 21, 2026, the board of the Export-Import Bank of the United States voted — unanimously — to approve a federal loan of nearly $3 billion to build a gold mine on American soil.
The federal government does not underwrite gold mines on a whim.
I've put together a full report on what's happening here, and on the one small company sitting at the center of it — the company that loan is meant to build.
Have a wonderful day.
I'll see you tomorrow.
"The Buck Stops Here,"
P.S. Gates protects himself with businesses that can raise prices. That's rule one, and it works. But rule two is the one that pays when the government finally gets serious about its own balance sheet — and after that Ex-Im vote in May, it has. Don't wait until it's front-page news. Read the full report here>>>
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Written by Dylan Jovine