Super Terrific Happy Day 2.0 Highlights

February 17, 2026

At Super Terrific Happy Day 2.0, speakers examined the forces shaping today’s financial and geopolitical landscape, from monetary policy and market structure to national security and capital allocation. While each speaker approached these issues from a distinct perspective, a shared theme emerged: markets are increasingly driven by emotions, policy intervention, financial engineering, and money flooding the system rather than discipline or fundamentals.

While each speaker addressed different themes, several common threads ran through the conversation. These themes do not reflect a single perspective or viewpoint but rather offer a shared recognition of how monetary policy, market structure, and geopolitics are intertwined, and how those dynamics shape both opportunity and risk for investors.

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Cross Cutting Themes

Current economic and financial system is unsustainable due to a loss of discipline in monetary and fiscal policy. Multiple participants argue that emergency tools such as QE have become permanent features, distorting capital allocation, inflating asset prices, and eroding trust in institutions. The absence of external constraints (whether through monetary backing via gold, fiscal restraint, or credible rules) has allowed short‑term political and financial pressures to direct long‑term (in)stability.
There is a growing divergence between financial markets and underlying economic reality. Speakers highlight how passive investing, distorted CPI measurements, and headline labor statistics obscure real stress beneath the surface for the majority of households. Asset prices increasingly reflect flows, liquidity, and policy support rather than fundamentals, contributing to a K shaped outcome in which financial assets thrive while purchasing power and opportunity deteriorate for much of the population. This gap is not cyclical, but structural.
Geopolitics and national security concerns are primary drivers of the investment landscape in the current moment. Several speakers argue that monetary policy, reserve currency status, defense strategy, and capital flows are now tightly intertwined, with financial tools increasingly used as instruments of state power. The transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world raises the probability of capital controls, fragmented markets, and policy decisions driven by strategic necessity (rather than economic stability or efficiency).
Liquidity is a dominant force in markets, even as confidence in the system weakens. While human behavior and narratives matter, speakers repeatedly return to money supply, investment appetite, and policy support as the key determinants of asset prices in the near to medium term. Markets may remain buoyant despite deteriorating fundamentals, reinforcing the complacency created by free-flowing money printing.
Investors should be long‑term stewards of capital. Rather than benchmarking success solely against indices, speakers advocate positioning for a world defined by scarcity, geopolitical realignment, and declining trust in financial abstractions. This perspective favors hard assets, industrial capacity, and strategic partnerships—such as with Japan—over financial engineering or narrative‑driven growth. The underlying question is not how to optimize returns in the current system, but how to allocate capital responsibly as that system evolves.

Key Insights from our Speakers

Speakers did not focus on predicting near-term outcomes, but on understanding the structural forces at work and their implications for long-term investors. What follows are key insights from our speakers that, taken together, offer a coherent framework for thinking about risk, resilience, and responsibility in an evolving system.

Tom Hoenig, former President & CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas & former Vice Chairman of FDIC

“When you misallocate resources, you do not just cause inflation but affect productivity and trade off the future for the present.”

Tom Hoenig argues that the U.S. monetary and fiscal framework has lost discipline, rendering the current system increasingly unsustainable. He criticizes the Federal Reserve’s reliance on emergency tools such as quantitative easing during non‑emergency periods, warning that once deployed, these measures become politically and institutionally impossible to reverse. In his view, the result is chronic capital misallocation—short‑term relief at the expense of long‑term stability. Hoenig is skeptical of financial innovation that substitutes for discipline, including stablecoins, which he sees as adding fragility rather than resilience. He points to the mid‑1990s as a model for reform, advocating deliberate deficit reduction, balance‑sheet restraint, and the reintroduction of external constraints. For Hoenig, trust—not innovation—is the missing ingredient in monetary policy.

Mike Green, Portfolio Manager & Chief Strategist at Simplify Asset Management

“By choosing to mechanically invest in passive vehicles, we have not invested passively.”

Mike Green frames passive investing not as neutral, but as a powerful mechanical force reshaping markets. He argues that automatic buying and selling tied to fund flows—rather than fundamentals—has distorted price discovery and amplified asset inflation. The real risk, in his view, will surface when flows eventually reverse. Green also connects the rise of passive investing to broader social dynamics, suggesting that official economic statistics understate financial stress and mask declining opportunity. He interprets passive dominance as a symptom of people feeling a loss of control over their economic lives, rather than a purely rational investment choice.

Luke Gromen, Founder & President of FFTT, LLC

“The U.S. is a constant Rube Goldberg machine of ad hoc interventions.”

Luke Gromen analyzes the global monetary system through a national‑security lens, arguing that a reserve‑currency regime in which one country can print money while others must expend real resources is inherently unstable. He contends that policies such as quantitative easing are perceived by geopolitical rivals as strategic threats, and that actions like freezing foreign central‑bank assets represent a form of financial warfare. Gromen warns that the U.S. increasingly relies on improvised interventions to sustain the system, increasing the likelihood of capital controls, geopolitical fragmentation, and policy decisions driven by strategic necessity rather than economic efficiency.

Tom McClellan, Editor of The McClellan Market Report

Market outcomes are ultimately driven by liquidity—how much money exists and the willingness to invest it—despite behavioral and narrative influences.

Tom McClellan emphasizes that asset prices are governed primarily by the interaction between money supply and investor appetite. While he acknowledges behavioral biases, he maintains that liquidity conditions, including quantitative easing and yield‑curve dynamics, remain the dominant forces shaping markets. His outlook suggests continued upward pressure on assets even as bonds struggle, with the Federal Reserve settling into a form of equilibrium. McClellan views the recent increase in gold as part of the cycle, highlighting how psychological forces interact with liquidity rather than replacing it.

Dr. Pippa Malmgren, Founder & CEO of Geopolitica Institute

Today’s instability reflects a deeper struggle between institutional rule-makers and populist forces questioning who truly benefits from those rules.

Pippa Malmgren frames current geopolitical tensions as part of a systemic conflict between a “priesthood class” that writes and enforces rules and populist movements challenging their legitimacy. She argues that this struggle underlies seemingly disparate events, from intelligence controversies to space infrastructure and the war in Ukraine. In her view, the global order is transitioning from unipolar to multipolar, with technology, finance, and coercive power becoming existential battlegrounds. Political overreach by entrenched institutions, rather than isolated shocks, is what triggered the current period of instability.

Dave Iben, Co-CIO & Lead Portfolio Manager at Kopernik Global Investors

Investors must adapt to a world in which money can be created without constraint by focusing on underappreciated assets rather than consensus narratives.

Dave Iben approaches the current environment as an investor reckoning with the long‑term consequences of financial engineering and persistent money printing. He warns that relying on historical assumptions is dangerous in a system untethered from traditional constraints. Instead, he emphasizes following the “direction of the river,” particularly when it flows toward misunderstood or overlooked opportunities. His perspective reinforces a focus on hard assets, commodities, and mining—areas dismissed by the mainstream but increasingly relevant as confidence in financial abstractions erodes.

Andrew McDermott, Founder & President of Mission Value Partners

“The negative views about Japan say more about us as an investment industry than it does about Japan.”

Andrew McDermott presents Japan as a misunderstood strategic and investment opportunity. He argues that the yen is historically undervalued on a purchasing‑power basis and that Japan’s challenges stem less from governance failure than from deliberate national policy choices. McDermott contrasts Japan’s long‑term industrial competence with U.S. corporate short‑termism, highlighting Japan’s quiet dominance in critical manufacturing, nuclear technology, and defense‑related supply chains. He also notes that Japan’s substantial asset ownership places its debt burden in a more comparable position to the United States. In his view, Japan is the United States’ most important security partner in Asia, and the greatest opportunity lies in partnership rather than confrontation.

So What?

What these discussions really underscore is something Kopernik has believed for a long time: markets today are being driven more by emotions, liquidity, policy intervention, and financial engineering than by fundamentals or discipline. That can work for a while, but it also creates significant mispricing and risk when confidence eventually erodes.

For long-term investors, the challenge is not to anticipate the next policy decision or market inflection point, but to remain grounded in what can be known and controlled: owning real businesses, paying less than what those businesses are worth, and insisting on a discount that accounts for all the risks. In this environment, discipline and stewardship matter more than ever.

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