Kind: captions Language: en inflation is a very simple concept it's just the money supply expanding and so the more money there is right that's what you're inflating that's where the word literally comes from over time the government has been very successful in changing the definition of inflation to fool the public as to its source because if the public understood what inflation was they would know that it's not caused by grocery stores you know when Kamala Harris says it's greedy grocery stores that are causing inflation if you understand that inflation is an increase in the money supply well you know it can't possibly be the grocery stores because they don't have a printing press they can expand the money supply but if you think that inflation is rising prices well yeah the grocery store keeps raising my prices so they're causing inflation they're raising prices because the government created inflation that the the prices are going up in response to the inflation that's been created uh so but by by changing the definition of inflation the the government not only confuses the public as to who's creating it but now they're able to blame it on other factors like greedy corporations or Putin uh you know that was you know Biden kept talking about Putin and Putin was causing the the inflation there's only one source of inflation in America and that's the Federal Reserve but the reason the Federal Reserve is creating all that inflation is because the government is running massive deficits and so the Federal Reserve is financing those deficits by buying those bonds with the inflation it creates the money that it prints and so the the best way to look at inflation is a tax right inflation is what we pay for the government that we don't pay for with the income tax or the Social Security tax or a sales tax basically the deficits the federal budget deficits we end up funding them by inflation and those deficits are about to Skyrocket they've been skyrocketing and so the inflation tax is going to be much bigger in 2025 than it was this year regardless of what the FED is trying to tell us how do we look at the FED signaling that they're going to bring rates down which we know they do because inflation has come under control that's the public messaging how do we reconcile that that they're messaging that with you saying no no no this is them giving up this is capitulation uh and what you're looking at is not what they're saying how do we reconcile those two views well the FED is now focused on employment the economy which has clearly uh come under a lot of pressure recently is very close to officially I think falling into recession I think we've been in recession pretty much the whole time I just don't even believe the numbers the way the government uh manufactures them so I don't think we've ever had a strong economy I just think that that's just been a a statistical you know anomaly and even if you look through the statistics you can actually see a lot of the inherent weakness that is being masked by a lot of these superficial numbers but when the FED stopped hiking rates it was because Banks started to fail if you remember what happened with signature Valley Bank or uh Signature Bank Silicon Valley Bank a few Banks started to fail as a result of rising interest rates and then the FED really backed off and of course they had to have a big bailout program to prevent a lot more Banks uh from suffering a similar fate but that's really when the rate hikes stopped and so the FED kind of kept rates where they were but kept implying that look we're going to cut eventually we just need enough proof that inflation is going back down to 2% % and they said we're not going to wait for 2% we just have to believe that it's going there now of course the reason they're not going to wait for 2% is because it's never going to get to 2% and they probably know that but at this point the jobs numbers are getting so bad right the the non-farm payroll report that we had the most recent one was horrible and now the government fested up and came back and said you know 88,000 jobs that we claimed were created oh we made a mistake they're they're not actually there and I think they made a bigger mistake I think there's actually a lot more jobs that they're pretending were created that aren't really there and in fact the only reason that we have more jobs now than when Biden was uh elected is because so many people have two or three jobs that's where all the jobs are coming from it's Moonlighting and the people that now have two or three jobs they don't want all these jobs they they they'd like to be able to support their family on one job but unfortunately the gone up so much the grocery bill the utility bill the insurance everything is now so expensive because of all this inflation that people have to work multiple jobs and now Joe Biden wants to claim credit for creating those jobs but the public blames him for the fact that people are forced to to work those jobs uh but I think it's the weakness in the economy that is prompting the FED to cut rates which they're going to do here in September they've now prepar the markets for these cuts and they're not going to just do one and done this is going to be the beginning of as many rate Cuts as they can get away with and I think ultimately they're going to return to QE they've already uh reduced the size of their quanitative tightening program and I think that was the first step to reversing it and going back to QE which is inflation creation QE is just you know another word for inflation just that you know it's it's it sounds better it's like it's a euphan but that's really what it is but the FED has to pretend that it's it's finished the job on inflation it can't you know be honest and say look we still have high inflation and it's going to go up but you know we don't care so they have to pretend that the 3% inflation that we have now is going to go down to 2% but you know we've been at 3% now for over a year right we went down from nine to about three but there's no indication that we're going from 3 to two in fact if you look at the the market indicators on Friday when pal you know delivered his statements his Humphrey Hawk his uh Jackson H speech on that day gold was at a new record high the gold price was above 2500 I mean as we're speaking here I think it's around 2520 and the US dollar Index on Friday sank to a thir 1mth low so when you see a weak dollar and when you see surging gold prices that's an indication that monetary policy is too easy and that inflation is going up not down in fact the only reason that inflation came from 9% year-over-year to 3% was because we got a 24% rise in the value of the dollar that happened and after that big rise in the value of the dollar then prices started to come down because the dollar was so much more valuable relative to other currencies that brought down commodity prices and that brought down the CPI but now the dollar has already fallen 10% from its peak and it looks like it's going to fall a lot more this weak dollar is going to be a huge uh Tailwind for inflation and record high gold prices are telling you that that's exactly what's going to happen yeah this is the part that I want people to understand uh is that if you you are trying to track inflation yourself if you're trying to understand how prices are going up there is a lot of manipulation that's happening behind the scenes to control the Public's perception of the CPI number including uh that a rise or lower in the value of the dollar is going to have an impact on CPI um how they calculate CPI excuse me which has changed over time that's also going to impact things uh and what I want people to understand and please correct me if you think that I'm delusional about this is that the government is doing um slight of hand they're manipulating the numbers they're doing slight of hand so that they can um basically I'll be aggressive here and use the word steal money from the people not have to get people to vote so that they can keep doing just absolutely outrageous amounts of spending because they can get your dollars from you without having to ask for them by simply driving uh pricing power down or purchasing power excuse me um through inflation by printing the money now yeah well you know the way politicians get elected is they promised the voters something for nothing that's that's what people vote for it's like what are you going to give me if I vote for you what's in it for me what do I get right it's not like people are saying you know leave me alone I Just Want to Be Free People want free stuff it's if if if you're in office what am i g to what are you going to give me that I don't now have right because that's what people are voting for they're voting for stuff free stuff and so that's you know inherently the problem with democracy and that's a whole different podcast I mean that's you know we we should be a republic and and not you a democracy this is the inherit flaw in that type of system and we're just demonstrating it all over again not like we we need to there's history is littered with examples of failed democracies for the same reason that that we're failing now but the politicians want to get elected and so they want to give voters something for nothing well how do they do that well they create inflation right they they they they give voters stuff that they don't make them pay for through taxes see if the government said okay we're going to give you uh Health Care education and and here's the bill right we're going to raise your taxes so that you can get this benefit the people would like well I forget I don't want that you know I don't want my taxes to go up but when they say look we're going to give you this stuff and your taxes aren't going to go up right you're getting it for free then that sounds great or we'll just tax the rich to pay for it well the problem is they can't get enough money from the rich to pay for all these promises so where do they get the money well they just create it so that's inflation and so instead of taking your money they just take your purchasing power and so now everything you want to buy is more expensive and the difference between what prices would have been without all those government programs and how much higher they are as a result of those programs that's your tax right and but the the people don't know that they're paying a tax they just think they're paying prices and and they blame the business and the government it's it's great for the government because now the government can say you see capitalism is bad see these greedy businessmen are gouging You by jacking up your prices when when they're not they're simply passing on the higher costs that that they themselves have to pay to stay in business and those costs are going up because of the inflation that the government is creating but you know the government obviously too since they create inflation they they want to lie about how bad it is they don't want to acknowledge it so the way it's measured doesn't come close to capturing the true increase in the cost of living they've changed the methodology for the CPI over the years to make the number smaller or little they did the same thing with unemployment unemployment is only low because we changed how we measure it there are lots of people today who are unemployed who we don't count but if you go back in the past those people that we don't count today used to be counted a a and so the main reason that unemployment is low now is because so many people that we used to count as unemployed in the past we don't count them anymore in fact we have a lot of those people now that you know if we if we still counted unemployment the way we counted it before 1994 we'd have unemployment above 10% right now so there's no way anybody would be able to claim we've got low unemployment if it was 10% so you you you take three qus of the unemployed and you don't count them anymore and oh it's only 4% and now Biden gets to brag about how low the unemployment is meanwhile we've got a lot of people who are unemployed who are not in the statistics and the same thing with inflation inflation is a lot higher than the CPI uh reveals and so even even if we can get inflation down to 2% it wouldn't be 2% it'd be four or five% and right now they're saying it's 3% because it's probably 6% so it's not even close to the 2% Target that the FED claims it has yeah which is Uber devastating to people's wealth creation uh in ways that they don't fully understand and this is why the slide of Hand Works is because people don't understand um how it's actually playing out let me ask you why can't we just raise rates and solve the problem of inflation well first of all in order to really solve the inflation problem it's going to take a much bigger increase in rates than what the FED has delivered and but the problem is we have so much debt that that's impossible go back to Al um to Paul vulker in the 1980 I mean we have a bigger inflation problem now than we had in the 70s and to bring that inflation to an end required 20% interest rates whoa now what would happen if interest rates went to 20% now I mean we got up to 5% right imagine if they got up to 20% well we've got a $35 trillion national debt that's financed with treasury bills even if we had to finance that at 10% that's $ three5 trillion dollar a year in interest on the debt the US government only collects about $4 trillion doll a year in taxes in total so we have so much debt imagine what would happen to all these corporate bonds if their debt uh you know matured and they had to refinance it at 20% or you know anywhere close to that or home mortgages they got up you know 10% or 12% or 14 something like that I mean we now have so much debt that if you tried to raise interest rates high enough to get rid of inflation everything would collapse which is why they're not going to do it we are stuck with inflation because the alternative is a political non-starter because if the FED actually got rid of inflation you would have a a financial crisis that would make a n 2008 look like a Sunday school picnic and you would yeah really really fast I just want to say something and then you can pick that back up because we use words like inflation and I think the that people get lost the what you're saying is we our debt is so high the only option the government has is to take your money via inflation but but once people understand that yes you still if you have $100 in your bank account it's still $100 I understand that but it buys $90 worth of goods then $80 worth of goods 70 so on and so forth and so when you say that the only option the government has I want to make sure people hear the only option the government has is to take your money uh because once you're like whoa whoa whoa wait a second that's not what I want then people start thinking in the right way all right cool now that the audience has that in their that point but the point is that they they can't raise interest rates high enough to fight inflation without creating a financial crisis and so that's why they didn't do it that's why they stopped at you know five and a quarter because the only way that interest rates slow down inflation is by slowing down debt they have to get people to borrow less and save more but even though the FED raised interest rates nobody borrowed less you know the the deficit spending at the federal level went up household debt went up credit card debt hit all-time record highs so the FED never actually got to restrictive monetary policy they never got to a situation where interest rates were so high that governments and individuals stopped borrowing and started saving but also if interest rates got to that level um nobody could afford it we'd have a complete economic implosion and the government would have to default on its promises including its treasury bonds but it would have to tell people on Social Security that they're not going to get the money that they were promised and and so none of this is politically viable so what the politicians are choosing is just to have endless inflation and and that takes them off the hook because they don't have to cut Social Security they just give you the Social Security benefits and you just can't buy very much because everything costs money right they don't default on the bonds they pay everybody with money they print so instead of H honestly um telling people we don't have the money to pay you and so we're going to have to pay you less than we promised they pay everybody off but the net effect is you get less because the money buys less so you lose through inflation instead of through a an honest default but that is always the path that the politicians want to go down because they never have to accept responsibility for creating inflation they're always going to blame it on somebody else and that's why I know that price controls are coming I mean I talked about this long before Kamala Harris proposed it that we were going to get price controls because ultimately that's all the government's got is to blame the businesses and to pass laws to stop people from Raising prices but that never stops the inflation it just causes the inflation to go underground into the black market because legally you can't buy anything because the prices are too low and so there's a shortage of everything that you need and in order to buy the things that you need you have to go and buy it from a criminal because they're the only ones who will sell it to you but now you got to pay through the nose because you know the guy who's selling you illegal food risks going to jail if you want to indulge in a glass or two of alcohol but don't want to feel crappy the next day you should try zbiotics zbiotics the pre- alcohol probiotic drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic it was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking when you drink alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut it's this byproduct not dehydration that's to blame for your rough next day just remember to make zbiotics your first drink of the night drink responsibly as always and you will feel your best the next day go to zbiotics get 15% off your first order when you use impact at checkout zbiotics is backed with 100% money back guarantee so if you're unsatisfied for any reason they'll refund your money no questions asked remember just head to zbiotics tocom impact and use the code impact at checkout for 15% off thank you to zbiotics for sponsoring this episode and all of our good times if you're a small business owner there is a hidden cost to success your time every hour spent managing finances is an hour not spent growing your business but that ends today with found found is business banking designed for small business owners just like you found consolidates your entire Financial ecosystem into one streamlined platform banking expense tracking invoicing and tax planning all in one place no hidden fees no minimum balances just pure efficiency over half a million small business owners have already reclaimed their time with found sign up for found for free today at F n.com impact found is a financial technology company not a bank banking services are provided by Pont Bank member FDIC founds core features are free they also offer an optional paid product found plus yeah uh this all gets crazy really fast let me ask you a super pointed question do people want to be lied to well you know maybe it's like like the Matrix I mean people can't handle the truth or that's that was uh uh the Jack nich A Few Good Men they can't handle it but look nobody wants to tell the truth to the voters because you know again you know shoot the messenger it the truth is not pretty the truth is the government has over promised the government has made too many promises that the taxpayers can't keep and and so we need to come clean and be honest and we have to tell our creditors we borrowed too much money we can't pay you back we got to tell people on government pensions on Social Security on Medicare we don't have the money we can't give you what we promis but no politician wants to fess up because the minute you do that you you know you're not getting the vote and so everybody wants to pretend that nothing's going to get cut and so everything gets cut through inflation uh but you know they have to try to say where they're going to fix it but you know even Donald Trump Donald Trump doesn't want to cut Social Security in fact he wants to increase social security benefits because he wants to eliminate the tax on social security which is like effectively raising Social Security benefits so you there there he hasn't identified anything that he's going to cut or eliminate talks about waste and ab abuse but but everybody talks about that uh but nobody wants to cut anything Donald Trump talks about increasing the defense budget well where's that money going to come from right so both candidates want more government and so they're going to end up with more inflation regardless of what they're promising and of course you know Donald Trump is partially responsible for the inflation under Biden because a lot of the money that is being used to bid up prices now was printed when Trump was President because Trump ran enormous deficits Biden is just running even bigger deficits than Trump trump set the record for the most amount of deficit spending by a president in a single term and Biden is going to break that record when it by the time his term is over and before that Barack Obama he set the record for the most debt under any president but that's because he had eight years but now presidents are doing in four years what it took Obama eight years to do but this thing is just spiraling that's why we've got all this inflation it's not a coincidence it's cause and effect and when the bot Administration tries to say well you can't blame us for inflation because they've got inflation in Europe well because they made the same mistakes in Europe they they did the same thing they printed a bunch of Euros they had their own QE program they called it their asset purchase program they kept interest rates at zero in fact they even had interest rates negative so all these central banks uh were operating from the same flawed Playbook they all created massive inflation in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and then up the Annie with covid and now the whole world is is is reaping the Whirlwind as all those inflation chickens come home to roost does inflation matter if every government in the world is doing it of of course it matters I mean it on a relative basis that's what's keeping you know the dollar from collapsing against the Euro or against the Yen or against the pound because all central banks are inflating but that doesn't mean we're off the hook that means we're all suffering together right everybody is experiencing Rising prices even if the exchange rates don't fluctuate very much because they're all sinking at the same rate but it means everybody is getting poor you need more dollars you need more Euros you need need more pounds to buy you know a basket of goods all right so R Paul when we did the debate between you and him uh said that inflation was preferable to default because it happens more slowly and that was what I had in the back of my mind when I said do people want to be lied to it seems like um there might be some truth to Yes dear government please lie to me take my money slowly don't tell me you're doing it so that this plays out over a long enough time frame that sort of everybody gets used to all the money that they've lost um do you agree that that's a better strategy or do you think that in reality default is a better strategy well the the best strategy is is is not to get into that predicament in the first place and and that's you know one of the reasons to be on a gold standard so governments can't run up that kind of debt but if the idea is well we'll just inflate the debt away slowly the the problem is that you know it speeds up it's like you know well we'll just get a little bit pregnant you know it's it it doesn't work that way it's you know it starts off slow until it's fast right once you start going down that road it's ultimately gonna going to be a disaster but I always think at any point being honest and having a legitimate restructuring of debt is better than constantly creating inflation to try to repudiate it you know you know in secret right just to try let let's you know because every time the government creates inflation they wipe out a good chunk of the debt we have 35 trillion in debt if they create 10% inflation that eliminates three and a half trillion of the debt but the problem is by the time they do that the actual size of the national debt has gone up by more than the three and a half trillion because of how much debt we're adding to it every year and eventually the higher inflation causes an increase in interest rates and that is the problem because all that debt has to be refinanced constantly because much most of the debt is short term it's not like the government borrowed money for 30 years or 50 years it they borrowed money for 30 days 90 days a year and so they have to constantly refinance it and as rates go up because inflation pushes rates up even though you're wiping out some of your debt through inflation you're accumulating so much more because the government is borrowing the money to pay the interest on the debt but I just think that a an honest default is preferable and at least with a default who loses money in a default well if the government defaults on the bonds the losers are the people who own the bonds and a lot of US government bonds are owned by you know very wealthy individuals who are clipping coupons and have money invested in in treasuries the average America doesn't own any treasuries um but wealthier people do uh and so they're going to lose they're not going to get back um 100 cents on the dollar but if we just decide to create inflation so that the people who own treasury bonds don't lose anything well then everybody suffers yes the people who own treasury bonds they still lose something because inflation is you know reducing the value of of the principal that they get eventually and it's reducing the value of their coupon but now you hit everybody now you hit the poor you hit the middle class you hit people don't that don't own any treasuries that never loaned any money to the government um and what's about that I mean the people who should take the losses are the people who made the loans to a government that was too broke to pay them back right that that's the people and you know as far as um government commitments yes if the government has to cut Social Security benefits okay yes people that were going to get those benefits are going to lose those benefits or have less benefits but you know uh that's necessarily better because there a lot of wealthy people that get Social Security I mean I'm I I I qualify for Social Security I mean I'm 61 I'm not taking it yet but I think I'd be able to start getting it a couple of years but I you know it's better for me to lose a lot of my Social Security then some young kid uh who's struggling to get by has to pay higher inflation so I could I could get my Social Security benefits so the government should have a way of reducing Social Security benefits so that the people who you know who are who are going to get the benefits uh they get the loss as opposed to just spreading the loss on everybody well there is a way to to reduce entitlements without needing to vote for it and that's CPI manipulation which is almost certainly happening um so okay you're you're making a what I'll call values based argument there may be a moral argument in there as well but for me to know if this is just values just the way you see the world or if you have a uh objective moral standard what what is your Northstar when you lay out your argument well I think I think that is the moral way to go you know if if but anchored by what human flourishing uh least number of people get wrecked like what what is the metric by which you say that's a moral argument to do de default well it's it's the honest way to do it right I you know the government can't uh meet be honest at all times no matter what that means we're going to be honest well it's honest and you know the the the the the people that took the risk uh bear the consequences of that risk you know people who loan money are the ones that don't get fully repaid right the people that lent out the money but they're going to lose I mean if there's inflation they still lose right it's not like they're they're getting out scott-free but inflation just spreads the losses among a bro broader population but in many cases it hits hardest the people that could least afford it so why do we want to create inflation if it's going to create a real hardship for a lot of poor middle class people just so we can avoid wealthy people uh taking a bigger hit you know I mean you know I'm just trying to map totally understand I'm trying to map how you think through um this argument so uh because uh when I look at it the way I would think through this is for me the moral way to look at life is what leads to the largest amount of human flourishing for the largest amount of people uh I can Define human flourishing but for now let's just all assume that it it's roughly well-being uh and if you look at this from a well-being perspective I have a hypothesis that if you were to default that you would have an uprising that there would be literal Bloodshed that there would be a real problem it would be way more violent way more abrupt whereas doing it the way that they're doing it now which which I hate and I think the government has a moral obligation not to do this but when you compare the two things I have a feeling that slow and steady theft from everybody actually ends up with a um people don't Revolt as much they like being lied to it just works and so it's why I think the government does it this way and I still think it's horrendous well I until it gets out of hand because it only works for so long well then let me ask a question really fast so that you can be very pointed with this uh do you believe that the um is there a conceivable way for productivity to rise so much that we can eventually pay for the debt before inflation eats Us Alive or is this a runaway feedback loop and there is no conceivable way for anything to happen other than collapse at the end of this well it's more likely the the the ladder I mean it's more likely that it's going to run out of control just because of the you know the nature of what we're dealing with just the the the size of the debt the exponential growth and and what happens to to interest on on the debt see the problem with this you know well let's just have a little inflation every year is that it allows the government to continue to compound the problem because it's able to you know hide the the consequences and so it keeps getting bigger and bigger and so ultimately you have to default to avoid hyperinflation and if you don't default then you get hyperinflation you destroy the currency and if you think uh people are going to revolt from default it's going to be worse when the money is completely worthless right so that's an even more dangerous way to go and that's an evitably where you end up if you continuously inflate inflate instead of dealing with the undering problem because if you actually default that basically you know brings it to an end okay we can't do this anymore it's like you're in this giant hole and if you can keep on inflating you can keep on digging the hole deeper if you have to default that's the end of the hole digging right okay the game is over right everybody it everybody knows now what's been going on you've had to be honest you've had to confess the problems and now we can we can move on but that never happens uh when you paper it all over by creating inflation now is it possible that there's some kind of get out of jail free card that's waiting in the wings that is going to grow productivity so dramatically in such a short period of time that we can actually grow our way out of the debt and I would assign a nonzero probability to that so it's possible and the only thing that is on the horizon that potentially could do it would maybe be artificial intelligence if it could be uh you know implemented if it if it has the the ability and we can effectively do it somehow fast enough that we can now automate so much of the production process and the AI could come up with because it's more intelligent than we are could come up with even better more efficient ways of doing things and we could maybe create enough you know robots that were intelligent that could do a lot of work um that maybe we could produce so much stuff that the economy can grow so fast that we can actually reduce the debt relative to the economy and we can service it and repay it I mean I suppose that that's possible but I I don't think that's the most likely scenario I mean I I do think that that that there's a lot of potential there uh in in in enhanced productivity coming from artificial intelligence and and Robotics and more automation I think this is all good stuff that is going to increase uh the standard of living of humanity over time but I don't know that it can lead to the results that we would need fast enough to deal with this C you know to to to to mean that we we don't have a crisis that we don't have to you know deal with it because the numbers are just just too staggeringly big at this point um I think to to to grow your way out of it even with Incredible growth yeah so the AI Revolution I think is a very um interesting thing that people are holding on to it's probably part of why some very smart people are not sounding the alarm Bell as hard as I think they should um but walk me through why what will happen if the government starts raising rates again will inflation come down because I've heard you put forth that even if you raise rates inflation will go up which is you're the only person I've heard say that well if you just raise rates the way they did yes because those higher rates uh are part of the cost structure of businesses I'm a business and I have all sorts of costs I have raw materials I have rent I have labor costs and I have interest maybe I borrowed some money to you know build out the business to buy some Capital Equipment and so I have debt and the interest on that debt is one of my costs and if my interest goes up well you know my costs have gone up so that's something I'm going to pass on to the consumer with higher prices and that's especially True For Real Estate if I own some rental property most people who own rental property have a mortgage on the rental property and as their mortgage rate go up because if you own a bunch of rental property you probably didn't have a 30-year fixed rate mortgage you probably had you know a mortgage with a five or seven-year term and they reset and you have to re you know get at higher rate so if I'm a landlord and my interest expense has gone up well how do I recover that I I raise my rent and I get it from my tenant so higher interest rates are just another cost just like raw materials and and and and L and wages that get built into pricing structure so higher rates you know bleed you know end up being higher inflation and that's going to happen I mean rates are higher now than they were when they were zero and so that's going to affect prices but also the US government has this massive amount of debt that has to be financed at higher interest rates and the higher interest rates are the bigger the de deficits are because all the money that goes to pay the interest is borrowed and so as interest rates go up the deficits go up and that means there's more uh debt and now you're going to have to print more money to monetize it and so there's going to be more inflation and also those Rising deficits are going to put downward pressure on the dollar which we're now finally seeing for a while higher rates were supporting the dollar uh but now that's not the case anymore and the dollar is starting to fall and it's going to fall a lot more because of the enormity of the deficits and as the the low yielding debt matures Even If the Fed is cutting a bit you're still getting debt that was borrowed at 25 basis points maturing and now has to be rolled over at three or 400 basis points so the debt is exploding because of higher interest rates which is you know putting more downward pressure on the dollar which puts upward pressure on on consumer prices uh but if they raised interest rates high enough to really cause a decline in aggregate demand because people stopped borrowing money and if we had an increase in our savings rate if people actually were like hey interest is so high I'm GNA earn some interest I'm gonna put my money in the bank I'm not going to go spend it I'm gonna earn some of this High interest then that would help fight inflation but we never even got close to that point because the savings rate is near an all-time record low and debt is at an all-time record high so what does that tell you that interest rates are too low and so when pal comes and said we've had this Tight money for a long time money never got tight it was less loose but it was never tight that's why the debt kept growing and that's why the inflation problem is going to get a whole lot worse all right is there enough money enough runway for inflation that they can just keep grinding inflation grinding inflation grinding inflation until they have paid off the debt me you you don't pay it off I mean you wipe it out right you make it so eliminate the debt so it's not a burden anymore right it doesn't go away um but I don't see how they do that um without impoverishing uh the whole country uh in in the process because they they'd have to create so much inflation in order to do that because the debt is now so big and it's rising so rapidly right it's Rising by maybe $3 trillion dollar a year so even if you had 10% inflation the debt would just stay the same in theory but it wouldn't stay the same because the the budget deficits are going to go up but you just have to create so much inflation that I mean the public is not going to be able to survive uh the amount of inflation that that they would have to create to wipe that debt out in in any kind of meaningful way um is there any reason why I understand that this would draw a lot of ey people would get weird but I've seen people get over amazingly bizarre stuff is there a fundamental mechanism that would stop the fed from saying we're going to give the US government uh loans at one rate and we're going to give everybody else loans at a different rate well if they're buying treasuries see the the the only way the FED can monetize debt it has to go into the market and buy treasuries so I don't see how it could it could buy them from the government because it doesn't actually buy them directly from the government because it's not allowed to do that in its Charter right they they can't they because they didn't want the Federal Reserve to be able to directly monetize debt so they they they were afraid of that in fact when the Federal Reserve Act was initially passed it wasn't even legal for the Federal Reserve to hold us treasuries even if they bought them in the secondary Market they couldn't do it they were prohibited from holding them because they didn't want the FED to be able to help the government go into debt they changed that in the you know soon after the Federal Reserve Act was created to help the government Finance the first world war they gave the Federal Reserve the ability to hold treasuries and so then the Federal Reserve goes into the market and it it works through primary dealers right it goes through Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley to buy its treasuries it doesn't go treasury direct right it has to go through these middlemen so I don't see how it's possible because they they they can't differentiate uh whose bond is whose right they they're just buying in the market um okay so this is probably just my naive and I don't understand something but it seems pretty trivial for the government to go hey everybody uh guess what we're going to default just kid uh the fed's going to buy it from you but the fed's going to buy it from you at a discounted rate so if you're holding bonds treasury right now instead of giving you the five and a quarter percent that we promis we're going to give you one and a quarter but we are going to buy it uh and if I'm listening to this podcast and I'm a government agent I'm like that is a great idea uh that seems inevitable because that is missing the point here even though the Federal Reserve the US government pays interest to the Federal Reserve it gets the money back right because the the Federal Reserve has to pay its profits back to the US government in the tax 100% the FED is allowed to earn a certain return on its capital and then everything it earns in excess of that is given to the US government now the problem is now yes they're earning interest but they're all the FED is also losing a fortune on its Bond portfolio right now so the FED is not making money anymore to pay the US Treasury like like they used to uh but they they do get the interest back just like when the Federal Reserve pays interest to the so-called Social Security trust funds it it just takes the interest right back it just Yanks it right out of the trust funds and spends it so it's it's it's a much bigger burden in the short run when the public owns the treasuries because now that's a net drain on the current expenses of of the government because they actually have to pay the interest to a third party right that they don't get it back but the real problem though is going to be the dollar status as a reserve currency because as the rest of the world wakes up to the reality of endless inflation and endless money Printing and knowing that the government uh is not going to honestly deal with the debt we're never going to cut back government spending we're just going to keep creating inflation then there is no uh justification for the dollar to be the reserve currency and it won't it will lose that status and that is going to accelerate uh the the spiraling of inflation out of control because one of the reasons that we've been able to print so much money create inflation and haven't had an even bigger impact on our prices is because a lot of that money has been exported you know we have a trillion dollar a year trade deficit so these are Goods that we didn't have have to produce that come into the country every year and we send our money out we we we we take dollars that we print and we send them to China we send them to Japan we send them all around the world and they send us back real stuff so that keeps the supply of goods up and the price of goods down because we get the goods and the rest of the world gets the inflation they get our money but now what do they do with that money they loan it back to us they buy bonds they buy treasury bonds they Buy corporate bonds or they buy real estate they buy stocks right they buy these Financial assets um uh but that's helped keep asset prices High that's helped keep interest rates low but when they don't want these dollars anymore because they're not the reserve currency then all those dollars are going to come back and they're going to be bidding up consumer good prices people are going to try to buy what they can they can take home but more importantly too all the good stop coming in so if we can no longer import a trillion dollars worth of stuff every year what's going to happen to prices prices are going to Skyrocket because we're not going to have stuff and so there's G to be a lot less stuff yet everybody's going to be trying to buy stuff that's not there so the prices of the stuff is going to go way up yeah uh maybe temporarily because then we'd bring manufacturing back but I don't want to derail on that well take a that's going to take Tom that's going to take a long long time you just can't bring manufacturing back snapping a finger it's going to take years maybe decades uh because you have to rebuild the factories rebuild the supply chains uh train the workers where's the money going to come from to do this and if we already have a huge government with lots of Regulation and lots of taxes it's going to be very difficult I mean that's where the AI could really come in and be helpful if we had to you know start over again and rebuild our industrial base uh but again this is going to be a very difficult process that is going to take time and in the meantime a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money and that's going to put a lot of pressure on a lot of pres uh politicians to do things that are going to be very harmful and very destructive to that recovery yeah I just think that the um the way that this will probably play out is something like this uh we keep inflating we're just going to gobble up as much money as we can by lying to you you're going to feel that something is wrong but you won't know exactly what it is despite all these podcast where I'm trying to walk people through exactly what is happening uh but people aren't going to on mass they are not going to understand what's happening they are going to get hypert tribal because they feel like something is wrong uh apparently the DNC is going to play the role of blaming business people uh and then there the economy is going to turn to trash for reasons we are going to get into great detail on in a minute uh and people are going to revolt there is going to be um if if like this all goes well there will simply be massive tribal divisions between the left and the right and we'll seesaw the government back and forth until people do uh slowly get away from the dollar um but I think this will all be a feeling and it won't be a thing that The Logical brain will engage in to your point about an honest default that's never going to happen that's logic everyone's going to steer by emotion uh and it's going to Manifest this political violence that that's how I think this will actually play out because people can feel something is wrong but it is way too hard to wrap their head around things like how the government manipulates CPI to get more money from you uh yeah okay I want to go back to this go ahead I said the public already knows that that that things are wrong right that that's they just know something feels wrong but they don't know what it is yeah the politicians and a lot of the people in the financial media who still don't get it you know they they they look at these you know phony statistics at and accept them on face value and and then they look at the public and the public is so pessimistic you know Biden's approval rating is so low uh people are pessimistic and they don't understand why they say you know don't they understand how great everything is why you know why why aren't they giving credit to the bid Administration for this great economy and that's because the economy is not great they're blaming B for the lousy economy because the economy actually is lousy the statistics don't tell the truth uh if you just accept them on face value which is why you shouldn't do that you always have to look beneath the surface to find out what's actually happening and if you take the time to do that and you don't just accept what amounts to propaganda but you actually look at it then you understand why the public is so upset right because we have high unemployment we have high inflation and we don't even have any e economic growth we we actually have a Contracting economy if you actually counted uh GDP and we're going to get more GDP data later this week but if you honestly reported uh the economy it would be contracting it is not growing that is the problem yeah nonetheless people think emotionally they do not think logically and because of that it becomes a question of who's going to better steer their emotions so uh people are upset with Biden but they have pulled a a flip on the American people that is unreal to behold moving everybody over to kamla Harris and everybody's like yeah word like I can feel the enthusiasm now coming out of that camp it people are excited they're revitalized they believe it and I'm looking at the the words that she's saying and the economic policies that she is um proposing that they are terrifying and people are here for it they are super excited by it and so my thing is okay hold on as somebody who actually wants to see people go somewhere that is that leads to human flourishing I'm just like wait there is a lot of excitement for policies that will not lead to in my estimation human flourishing and it was very easy for the government to the DNC very specifically to um pull a fast one like to just be uh hey here's a new shiny object so what do you make of that to me it is that that is the most human story ever I I I I think all this has been manufactured by the media I can't believe that Harris is really as popular as everybody claims I mean she was the most unpopular vice president in history uh before she got the nomination and so I don't see how she can go from being you know so unpopular to being popular that the reason that Biden was unpopular was because the economy was lousy well I mean she's a big part of that the economy is just as lousy as it was and so how they could just think aha this is great we got Harris and in fact Harris is simultaneously claiming that Biden omics is a huge success but now we need to elect her because she's going to solve all these problems well what problems if Biden omics was such a success there should be nothing to solve she's talking about all the things that she's going to do if she's elected well why aren't they doing those things right now why didn't Biden do those things you know why why AR you know what I mean mean I don't know how you could you could fool the public I mean the voters are dumb but are they really that dumb uh you know that she's going to somehow be an agent of change that we have great policies but vote for me because I'm going to save you from all the problems that you you now have uh without accep responsibility for having created those problems in the first place so you know I I I I don't see how she's just popular I mean I think these polls you know I don't know I mean I don't know how they're running these polls who they're polling who they're not polling I mean I know the media wants Camila Harris to win and and so I think one of the ways they think that they can help her win is by convincing everybody that she's so popular so that they just jump on the bandwagon and so maybe they found a way to uh create these polls so that they're skewed more towards a Harris you know I don't know I just it just seems hard that that Biden would be so far behind and then all they do is is flip at to Harris and now all of a sudden she's got a lead or a big lead in Trump's Trump's behind especially given the assassination attempt which I think really elevated Trump to almost you know like a living folk hero and I think a lot of people that maybe didn't didn't like Trump have got to you know at least you know be impressed with the way he handled that situation and so I think that would have turned people and now that you got a Robert Kennedy Jr you know throwing his support behind him I mean that's got to deliver some voters to Trump that you know he didn't even had before and now he's got those voters so you know I would think that that Trump would have a big lead over Harris uh especially given you know how bad the economy is and how much they want change I don't think that they're really going to be dumb enough to believe that voting for four more years of what they've got now is change and in fact if anything it's going to be worse because Harris is likely to be even more uh to the left of Biden and just look at you know the guys she picked for vice president president I mean about the most liberal guy that she could have found from the most liberal state it wasn't even like the Democrats needed uh Minnesota I mean they had that one in the bag uh but Minnesota you know that's you know some you know mg govern was from Minnesota uh Mondale I mean a lot of real left-wing uh uh politicians have have hailed from from Minnesota uh so I think the the Harris Walsh uh you know do is even worse than than Biden Harris so you know things are just going to get worse uh if the public votes for you know more of that now you know think the the problems are going to blow up under Trump too but Trump Trump's got a better chance of workable Solutions in the aftermath because at least he may be advised by people who believe in capitalism and believe in the free market and want to try to restore it Harris is going to be surrounded by socialists who are going to use the Crist as an excuse to blame it on capitalism to tell the people that capitalism doesn't work and we need to reinvent the C the country under a socialist economic model uh because this proves that capitalism doesn't work right so I don't want people running the country who who who don't even believe in capitalism right which and obviously Harris doesn't you know that's why she wants price controls but she was raised by a communist I mean you know the Apple doesn't fall far from the tree and plus she was taught communism since she was a little kid you know so she never she never you know grew out of it yeah I think that the important thing for anybody trying to predict the future here is to understand that humans are an animal designed to use emotions to steer in an incredibly complicated world and I don't think it's a matter of the public being dumb I think it's a matter of we are emotional creatures if you selectively damage the region of the brain brain that generates emotions people cannot make decisions it's not like they have a hard time making decisions they can't do it so emotions are fundamental to our ability to make a decision now you have this incredibly clean narrative with um kamla Harris with uh she's not Joe Biden and so it's new it's changed no one's going to think about oh she's been there for a long time if because it's not even her it's the party on the DNC that really does whatever that Blobby sense of party is um and so they they they have the narrative they need to trigger the emotions and this is the reason that I think they both Trump and Harris have doubled down on their VP being like core to their base is that's where we are going meaning the tribal split is becoming extreme because people can feel something is wrong and this is you and I and other uh very successful cap cap have got to accept the system as it is today is broken for the average person young people feel completely alienated they're not even engaging they're not even seeking romantic Partners like it's just a level of apathy that is utterly terrifying and so you have this split in these camps they're doubling down the economy isn't working in the way that it should because of the debt away over spending money printing is the problem it's not the free market the free market in my estimation is not the issue but we have a an economy that we call capitalism that is leaving a lot of people out in the cold and because of the manipulations it is so complicated that the average person who is steering by emotions is not going to be able to identify how the magic trick is even being done so they can just tell something is wrong [ __ ] you guys burn it down uh whatever normal is got to go and so I'm going to go with Harris and if she saying that she's going to stop you from gouging me which is clearly happening because of what I see uh at the pump what I see in the grocery stores then great I'm here for that that is what's going to happen and so if she wins or loses or Trump wins or loses I think it will be by a razor thin margin because the country is effectively split in half well I think if Harris wins it's the the votes that are going to put her over the top are uh the the immigrants particular the illegals that are here that are able to vote because remember Donald Trump is promising to deport the illegal immigrants and and and Harris wants to you know not only give him Asylum but you know you know give him all kinds of freebies so if you're an illegal alien and you're in this country you're voting for Harris now of course you're not even supposed to vote right the whole thing is if you're not an American citizen legally you can't vote but they're voting anyway so I think that Harris is going to win the overwhelming number of the illegal votes and and so if she wins that's going to be the only reason I I just can't see an honest election where just uh American citizens are able to vote I can't see how Harris wins that election um because you know Trump is not actually promising to cut any government programs he should be right that that's what we need to do but he's not promising to cut anything right a and so he shouldn't be alienating anybody you know if he was running an honest campaign look we got to cut Social Security he may risk losing some votes of people who are getting Social Security but he's not he's not promising that at all he's promising to raise Social Security he's not saying we're going to we're going to cut uh you know so uh a Medicare no he's you know he's talking about you know no tax on tips which is a tax cut for a lot of people so Trump is not saying vote for me I'm going to take away any of your government benefits so he's promising more government also it's just that at least he's different everybody now the economy is so bad people are struggling everybody is going to vote to throw the bums out who are the bums it's Harris and it's Biden and so Biden's taking himself out of the game but Harris is still there they got to throw her out she's got to be fired right so the electorate is going to get rid of Harris if it's a fair election if it's an honest election um so the question is if if she does win is you know it's because you've had these these these illegals voting where they somehow rigged the system and you know they they they found some votes uh you know and she was able to win because I I I don't I don't see how she would win given the realities of how bad things are and a lot of people could just remember what things were like when Trump was President it wasn't that long ago he was President four years ago everybody you know knows things are a lot worse today than they were four years ago so if it's a litmus test on are you better off today than you were four years ago very few people could say yes most people are going to say no I was better off four years ago and so I'm voting Trump right and so that's what's going that's what should happen you know in a in in a fair honest election and not that you know things are going to get better under Trump things are going to get worse regardless of who wins the election but the voters don't know that they're not smart enough to realize Trump says I'm going to get rid of inflation on day one the voters might believe him even though he can't do it he's not going to do it with the policies he's proposing but it sounds more believable than than Harris doing it how is Harris going to get rid of it she was there when it when it happened I mean Trump could say look when I was President inflation was 1% right te technically you know according to the CPI right that's where it was and so now it's much higher uh and so it's easier to you know to to hang that on on on Biden Harris uh so you know he should win but again the problem is nobody would win an election telling the truth if Donald Trump says look I'm going to solve the problems that we're going to have massive cuts to government spending and people who are getting checks from the government you're going to get smaller checks I got to cut Social Security I got to cut government pensions I got to cut defense I don't I don't think you win on that ticket on on that you things have to get really really bad see Malay in Argentina he was able to win on that because things have been so bad for so long the public finally decided that you know what let's try that we've tried everything else we've tried all these Government Solutions and none of them have worked so maybe let's try capitalism right let's get rid of all this government because it can't be can't get any worse and let's try it this way let's try cutting government instead of expanding government and let's try Freedom instead of social ISM and you know and so they're trying it and and and hopefully they stick with it because it's going to work but Americans we haven't had enough socialism yet to be sick of it you know we still don't get it we still think the government can solve our problems and don't recognize that all the problems we want the government to solve the government created okay why specifically um actually before we get to that let me ask I'm going to preempt the comment section uh how on Earth are illegal immigrants going to vote they well they just show up at the polls of vote right they don't they don't do we have evidence of that or do we just have a because obviously that voting I don't know that how do we know that they are and in some states too you know they could get an ID they can get a driver's license without proving they're a citizen or whatever and then they go and they have an ID and they vote but you know people I mean that that's one of the reasons that so many illegals are coming into the country when when when the the Democrats look at all these illegals as new voters that are just coming over right just you know coming across the border they think Ah that's another guy that could vote for me um and and so that that's what's going on I mean who knows how many illegals voted in the in the the 2020 election okay I think that's going to be a very divisive um theory that you're putting out there help me I don't even think it's controversial at this point I mean I mean it's kind of like a fact that there coming here and they're voting that's why there was a bill they're trying to stop the illegals from voting but the Democrats don't want to stop them from voting because they're getting the votes Peter I think that might not be controversial in your audience but this is very controversial as you go out to a broader audience like there is a violent Kickback I don't know if you saw um Elon Musk had a tweet and hey for all of his divisiveness this one seemed uh abnormally divisive where he said hey the master plan is to get these guys ultimately a path to citizenship so they can vote and people still had uh just a a flip out over that like that he was being assine that's absolutely outrageous and why would they ever suggest that and uh so I again this may break evenly along party lines but I think that that is that's one of the more controversial statements you have thrown out in this interview thus far do you have anything if people wna if people want to look into this is there somewhere that they can go that um shows data not just sort of gut sense well I mean I know that that that there a lot of people vote and they're not necessarily getting checked for IDs there a lot of places that you don't even need an ID to vote and there are ways that you can get IDs and not be a citizen but in order to vote in a federal election like the states could make any laws they want for their own elections for their local uh you know you know positions if they want to allow you know just illegals to vote or just you know anybody they can let whoever they want vote in in their own state but when it comes to a national election for a president for congress uh you got to be an American I mean I I can't even vote for the president even though I am an American citizen I live in Puerto Rico and so none of the American citizens who live in Puerto Rico are allowed to vote now if if we if I move back to the US then then I can vote but I can't even vote and I'm I'm actually an American but now we've got a lot of people who aren't even Americans because they happen to be uh in one of the 50 states they may be able to get to the polls and vote and some of them they don't even have to you know they vote vote you know on a ballot right they just they just vote you know on the mail they they get a ballot in the mail and they they send it in uh but I I I don't think that there is enough going on to uh prevent people who shouldn't be voting from but hopefully in this election maybe there'll be more of that maybe maybe you know uh people are kind of on to this and they want to make sure uh that the votes that are cast are are are legal votes but you know the big problem too and you thought that was controversial you the problem is democracy itself which we're not even supposed to be if you are familiar with the US founding documents read the uh the Declaration of Independence read the Constitution read the Bill of Rights the word democracy does not appear once in either of those documents you know we're not supposed to be a democracy the the only thing that's in the constitution is Republic it says in the Constitution that every state in the Union shall be guaranteed a republican form of government in the Bill of Rights there is no right to vote right you have freedom of speech freedom of press there's all kinds of freedoms there is nothing in the Constitution that says anybody has a right to vote because nobody had a right to vote voting was considered a privilege and the states decided who could exercise that privilege there were all sorts of qualifications when our country was first established there were all sorts of things most most States you had to be 21 right Most states you had to be male um uh and a lot of States you know all pretty much you had to be mail uh but then you had to you know have property you had to pay a tax you had to pass a literacy test there was all sorts of things that limited who could vote because the idea wasn't just everybody voting the idea was we wanted good government how are we going to get good government well we have to limit the people who are allowed to vote because if we let everybody vote we're going to have idiots in government because you know the average person is you know going to vote for some idiot because they're not you know going to know and so they tried to restrict voting but of course we also had all sorts of laws to protect the minorities from the majority so even if uh bad people got elected the the government the Constitution limited what the federal government could do anyway so even if the population elected somebody that wanted to do something chances were he was prohibited from doing it by the Constitution because the Constitution was written uh with very limited powers for the federal government the federal government's powers are few and defined yet now the government does just about everything it wants because the judges don't really enforce the Constitution uh the way it was supposed to be enforced they let the government get away with all sorts of stuff and now all the protections that the founding fathers created to protect America from the evils of democracy you know they called it mobocracy those protections those checks and balances no longer really exist and so now we've got everybody voting and so we've got this horrible economy because people are voting for free stuff I forget who said this but they I think it was the to the teville that said that an election is an advanced auction on the STA on the sale of stolen goods and that's what people are doing they're voting for uh to to receive the goods that the people they vote for steal from other people and give to them but you know that is the inherent problem is that we're we're we're not the the Republic that we were meant to be we've become more of a democracy we're not a direct democracy where you know people don't vote directly for every law we still have Representatives that vote for us but the way those Representatives uh are getting elected is just what you know one man one vote every you know one man one woman I mean the only people who can't vote legally are are people who are under 18 but there are a lot of Democrats that want to lower that they want to they want to you know the the age should be higher I mean 21 when they when when the states had 21 as the age when a man was 21 in 1800 he had a wife he had a few kids he' probably been in the workforce for five or six years um you know I mean you know he had a lot more experience than an 18-year-old today who's never had a job and lives with his parents you know so I mean people shouldn't be voting when they're 18 I mean it it it should be probably 30 at a minimum wowza okay well let's drill down how uh what does the what would you want to see actual regulations put around as it relates to voting I'm going to guess it isn't men only I hope not well it doesn't make back in 1790 women voting didn't make sense it was an easy way to eliminate a bunch of uninformed voters because women didn't work women stayed at home uh they took care of the house and so you know they didn't necessarily you know know who to vote for they might just vote for whoever their husband was voting for it's a very different world today so if I were trying to create criteria for who should vote and who shouldn't vote sex would not make sense to use that as you know only males or I you know it doesn't sex is not something that should matter because women are just as likely to be out in the workforce and you know and and and knowledgeable about you know various issues as the men might because it's the sex roles are very different today than they were a couple hundred years ago so that wouldn't be a factor but age would still be a big factor I think the the voting age should be a lot higher certainly we should have literacy tests I mean you should have to be able to read and write I mean you have to you know to be able to vote um you know I like you know property the property qualifications to say Hey you know you have to have accumulated some property have some skin in the game I mean people think oh well you I it why why should you know the poor people or people that don't own property or you know why shouldn't they be able to vote the whole idea is just to have good government not to have everybody voting look I would rather have qualifications for voting that excluded me right that I didn't even meet the qualifications but I knew that the people who met the qualifications were a good group of people who were going to exercise the privilege to vote in such a way that we were going to have good government that good government would benefit me even if I didn't get a chance to vote for it I'd rather have that than have everybody vote where my vote gets canceled out by some idiot and then we end up with really bad government so I'd rather have good government that I don't vote for than bad government that I do vote for but the key is too if you have a government that really can't do anything right right then I don't even have to worry because if the government is just there to uh protect individual rights private property my right to life liberty just to protect me from people who would infringe on my rights then even you know what Ma what difference does it make if I Can Vote or not you know because the government can't really do anything the reason that people want to vote now is because they want the government to give them something they want the government to take money from the people who didn't vote for them and give it to to the people who did but once you take that power away from government if the government can't give anything to the people who vote for them well then there's nothing in it right all we want is good honest government and you don't get that with one man one woman one vote I mean that there is no historical precedence for for getting that the the key is to restrict it and if you look at how America was first founded that that the the Senators weren't elected by the people they were appointed by the state legislatures that that that that that changed around 1900 they amended the Constitution so that the people could elect the Senators but that wasn't how it was uh and even the president everybody knows about the electoral college but it wasn't supposed to be a rubber stamp we were supposed to vote for electors and then the electors were supposed to decide who the president vice president was going to be right they weren't pledged there was an actual real convention and they would they they they would they were supposed to be smarter than the people and then they would they would pick they they you know who who who would be there but we had so many checks and balances that they couldn't do things we had the Supreme Court that would strike down if they wanted to do something that was unconstitutional the Supreme Court would strike it down they rarely strike down anything anymore because there's so many holes in the Constitution now based on the way they uh you know they redefine the necessary improper clause or the Commerce Clause or all these things which basically uh negated the Constitution and made the whole thing meaningless because of uh you know how they've they haven't even they call it interpreting but they're really ignoring it is what they're doing uh they're trying to allow the government to do things that are clearly prohibited by by the Constitution uh so but now you know you have all this stuff that's being done you know and you have you know everybody just getting elected and people keep thinking oh it's so important that everybody vote no it's not I mean why would you want some idiot to go vote right and just cancel out cancel out your vote uh if if if they're G to vote you people are going to vote for socialism I don't want that right I mean socialism is pretty appealing to people who don't know anything right it's very easy to vote your way into socialism the problem is you can hardly ever vote your way out of it usually you have to fight your way out of it right you need to you need a you need an armed Rebellion uh but a lot of the most tyrannical governments I mean Adolf Hitler was it was elected right I mean how do you think he came to power a lot of these tyrants you know are people vote for them right and and and and and and then they end up with with with with with this horrible government so I you know that's not the type of the government I like where you just vote yourself into a socialist totalitarian uh Society I want I'd rather have a monarchy than that I mean I actually think a a constitutional monarchy is probably a better form of government than just having a democracy and I don't think if if the framers uh would never would have gone for democracy they would have they would have made George Washington a king fact they they offered to make him a king he didn't want to be a king and so we had a republic and that's why you know Benjamin Franklin when he was asked what kind of government did you create for us Mr Franklin he said a republic if you could keep it and that if you can keep it part wasn't necessarily because he thought it might become a monarchy he was afraid that it might uh devolve you know into a democracy and they knew that didn't work right they they they they were unlike today's uh uh rep you know government officials they understood history they studied the failed democracies of ancient Greece they knew that that didn't work uh so you know they they they they created a republic and that worked for a long time in America I mean we thrived uh as we kept democracy in check uh we saw the greatest expansion of living standards for the masses in the 19th century we've never had economic growth since with all of our uh new technology we've never had the economic growth that we had in the 1870s the 1880s 1890s 1900s this is before everybody was Voting and back then we didn't have an income tax we didn't have a Social Security tax we didn't have a minimum wage we didn't have any of this stuff we didn't have any of these government programs government was Tiny federal government was an afterthought and and and we became the most prosperous nation in the history of the world it was only after we started voting for all this big government right that that we've created all these problems and that we've seen such a dramatic decline in our in our living standards especially on a relative basis relative to the rest of the world I mean countries that we are we're way ahead of uh we're now behind I think we're going to have a hard time getting people to wrap their heads around inflation going to a constitutional monarchy is probably outside the scope of uh where we'll be able to influence people those are really interesting things to think about just to plant my own flag uh so I don't get swept up in some of those things uh I would I I am hyper paranoid about people um that manage to convince themselves that they're smart enough that they want to tell people how things should go so um I get it I understand that democracy is is going to have deep and abiding flaws um but yeah I think that saying these people can vote these people can't vote in in a very restrict the property was where you lost me I'll be really honest uh that that is a prop qualifications were were pretty common you know owning property that's how you become feudalistic man that that's how you get this permanent underclass of people that really do fall under the tyranny of people who are going to vote selfishly as everybody does and so you rob the one thing from people which is the ability to express their voice in a nonviolent way to say this is the thing that I want and even if it's just a uh a yard stick to to see the screaming of a a a group of people that feel that they're not being heard it's like if you don't let them vote and have that tally at least marked you're you're going to have problems I think anyway I know we can go back and forth oh God Peter you made such good points I heard them all but I want to get us back to something a little more tangible and and today right now uh so some ideas that are being floated economically right now are to tax unrealized gains I found that terrifying uh a $25,000 credit to first-time home buyers how could that go wrong that sounds great but um I have thoughts uh medical debt forgiveness again sounds amazing um but I I have uh feeling that that goes wrong um what there there's a sort of General thing that groups those three things together which is they all sound awesome they sound like they're going to make things better for people that are struggling why won't those things or maybe they will but my thesis is those will actually make things worse for people that are struggling how could that ever be true well first of all just giving people money to buy houses um you know again apart from being unconstitutional which which it is uh it's just going to increase housing demand people are going to take that money and use it to bid up houses and so prices are going to go up and so if you know if the problem is that housing prices are too high giving people money to buy houses is just going to make those prices even higher so it is a foolish uh misguided policy that is going to worsen the very problem that they're trying to solve I mean the the real solution is to get the government out of the housing market completely uh they they they've been very involved in it for a long time really started under FDR but all these programs to make homes more affordable have backfired and made them a lot more expensive which is exactly what the government does so that that is the worst possible uh policy other than maybe this tax on unrealized gains which number one again would also be unconstitutional because they want to try to tax unrealized gains as if they are income but they are not income they are unrealized gains that is not income income is a realized gain you have to sell something and receive more than you paid for it to have income that is subject to tax under the 16th Amendment see the reason we have a 16th Amendment is because the the Constitution basically prohibited an income tax a direct tax unless it was apportioned and the government you know didn't want to apportion it for all sorts of reasons because the founding fathers didn't want direct taxes they wanted direct taxes in emergencies like a war so they made it very difficult for the government to lay a direct tax which is a tax that the people have to pay directly to the government as opposed to an excise tax which they thought the government would run on which is like a sales tax you know tax on Alcohol Tobacco gas you buy a product the tax is there you pay it easy you don't need an accountant you don't need to you know file a return you don't need to you know you know risk going to jail right it's very simple to pay an excise tax so that was how the government was supposed to run well when they initially wanted to impose the income tax the politicians said look we'll tax uh the rich and the middle class won't have to pay taxes anymore we'll get rid of the tariffs that you guys have been paying and we're going to tax the carnegies and the the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers this income tax and so that's how we got it because the public voted for a tax they didn't believe they would ever have to pay but of course now the middle class pays taxes that nobody nobody would have imagined Carnegie and Rockefeller and Vanderbilt would have paid the initial tax was I think capped at 4% on on the billionaires right it was a tiny little tax but the 16th Amendment is what authorized it but it has to be on income so the only direct tax that can be constitutionally levied without apportionment is an income tax so now if the government says we're going to try to tax the unrealized gains that you have on an asset that you own that is not an income tax that is a property tax they're taxing your stocks they're taxing real estate they're taxing the asset that has appreciated so that is completely unconstitutional but now let's assume that do it anyway right and the Supreme Court for whatever reason doesn't strike it down it would be a complete disaster to impose that type of tax because it would destroy the economy because anybody that owns these appreciated assets would be forced to sell the assets to pay the tax and you would destroy the accumulated capital of the country I mean the the key capitalism is capital you want to allow Capital to accumulate because that's you know what drives the economy that's what helps produce all the goods and services is the fact that we have Capital but if we have to destroy the capital so that we could pay a tax to the government we're just you know turning all that Capital into consumption so it would be highly inflationary it would be very economically destructive lots of people would try to figure out how to get the hell out of the country uh nobody would want to start a business here anymore nobody would want to own assets here anymore I mean it would be a horrible tax economically uh even you know the apart from the fact that it's illegal to actually do it but and again if they do pass something like this remember it's the camel's noes Under the Tent that's always how a new tax is sold it's sold to the voter with a promise that you won't have to pay it here is a new tax that some rich guy is going to pay and it's not going to cost you anything oh okay yes I'm I'm I'm in favor of that but then once they they get it passed it rapidly changes uh so that now the very people who were told they wouldn't have to pay the tax are the ones that pay the most the middle class suffers the biggest burden from a tax that they never were even going to pay and in fact the withholding tax didn't even start until the second world war so even though we passed the income tax in 1913 nobody had taxes withheld from their pay until 1943 and that was because we were fighting a war and so the government said hey we need to do this temporarily because you know we got to fight this war we need the money and so we got that temporary withholding tax and of course we still have it here it is 2024 and people are still having taxes withheld from their pay but again this is why I mean if we tied voting to taxation that would be that would be another way you could do cuz people it's it's very easy to vote for a tax that you're not going to have to pay cuz that's really like voting for theft a politician says yeah vote for me and I'm going to steal money from this rich guy and give it to you well okay right whose vote do you lose well I I lose the vote of the rich guy but there's not as many of those uh as as there are the people who are going to get the stolen money and so that's what happens but the the all these policies that she's that she's proposing on top of the you know the price gouging I mean there is no price gouging uh the prices are set by supply and demand I mean that I mean the prices are what the prices are I mean especially supermarkets I mean supermarkets grocery stores are highly competitive they have razor thin margins nobody can gouge because they would go out of business I mean you go shop someplace else I mean every Supermarket is trying to give the customer the best deal they possibly can you know so prices prices are low but the reason they've gone up is because the government's created inflation and prices have got to go up when the government creates inflation I mean if the supermarkets or grocery stores didn't raise their prices they'd go out of business and in fact that's what these price controls would do they would result in a lot of grocery stores going out of business especially in the inner cities in the communities where they have higher costs uh you know there's higher Insurance higher crime higher minimum wages I mean those are going to be the first stores to shut down and uh and so you know the food's not going to be there right there's not going to be any you know again you're going to have to wait in line for a long time because they're going to end up rationing what food they have left uh and to the extent that you really want to get something you're going to buy it illegally on the black market uh and you know it's going to cost a lot more so everything that she has proposed is just going to make the problems worse you know the high cost of housing the high cost of food is because of the government creating inflation and everything uh Harris wants to do is to create even more inflation and she in fact that was the biggest irony was the inflation reduction Act was an act to increase inflation like I mean if I mean there's no truth in legislating right if there was I mean they would they'd all be in jail for the inflation reduction act because it's false advertising it's lying the inflation reduction act increased inflation because it they expanded the money supply they voted for the government to spend more money that the Fed was going to have to print right so that was that was the cre inflation creation act in fact it was really the green New Deal relabeled so the public would would would would would accept it and now they want to claim credit hey we passed the inflation reduction act yeah that was just the title right in fact if you want to know what a government bill is going to do just read the title and then it's the opposite like if they pass tax simplification it's going to make taxes a lot more complicated they they tend to put a title on a bill that is the opposite of what the bill is actually going to achieve that's good times why why are price controls impossible to do well like if they were going to go in this and really try to be nuanced and and understand I'm dealing with a company that has razor thin margins um we don't want to crush these small businesses we know most people are doing it right we just really want to make sure um that everybody's taken care of why fundamentally does that still go wrong well first of all in order for the government to you know try to figure out what the price should be of any given item because first of all there's so many different items on the shelf right so some government bureaucratic board is going to have to be appointed and they're going to have to figure out what the price of a banana should be or what you know what what the price of you know a can of Coca-Cola should be or you know all these different items who's going to do that how much is that going to cost and then how are the supermarkets going to comply with these rules and regulations how are they going to prove to the government that the prices they're charging are you know within what their requirements are all of this is going to cost a lot of money to administer where's that money going to come from where where are the grocery stores going to get all the money they're going to have to hire a bunch of people now to fill out forms and to keep track of numbers and to get the permission from the government to char where are they going to get all that money they got to raise their prices so anything that the government does that imposes more regulation on a business is going to result in in in higher prices for whatever business is being regulated but also they don't need to do that they can't do that we already have something called supply and demand and we have competition those things together set prices and it prevents somebody from ripping off the customer because while I don't think everybody is smart enough to vote I do think everybody is smart enough to shop you see the the people who want everybody to vote think the people are a bunch of idiots and the government has to protect them from everything I think they're smart enough not to shop at a grocery store that's overcharging right so you know you're a consumer right you have choice there's a free market and if one grocery store is too expensive you won't shop there you'll go someplace else right in fact you got the internet now you can shop around you can see where the prices are the best so it's competition that is going to make sure no one gets ripped off when the government comes in everybody gets ripped off everybody gets ripped off by the government you know instead of kamla Harris worried about non-existent price gouging by the free market she should worry about the actual gouging that's being done by the government on the people the people are being gouged with inflation and taxes and they have no way around it right the government creates it in the free market it's all voluntary nobody can exploit me no one can gouge me because nobody owns my business I can take my business anywhere I want I'm going to go to the company that offers me the best deal the highest quality the lowest price that's where I'm going right and the market is going to make sure but with the government when they have power and they have the guns I don't have a choice right I have to pay their inflation tax no matter what if they tax my income I even if I get a lousy deal I can't opt out right I I'm paying the tax I'm being forced to pay that tax so the government takes my money by force a grocery store gets my money because I volunteered to give it to them they didn't force me they didn't come to my house with a gun and force me to shop at their store and pay their prices they convinced me to stop at their store because they had the best prices or they had the the cleanest miles or the shortest line or whatever it was that caused me to go to that grocery store I went there voluntarily I could have gone to any other store but I chose the one that I went to I'm not going to choose the one that's ripping me off right nobody is that dumb but the government somehow thinks we're all that dumb and we're all going to make dumb decisions unless they come in and protect us yet we're all smart enough to vote right we're we're too dumb to know where to buy groceries but we know how to pick the president see I I think it's the opposite we're smart enough to know how to buy groceries but everybody shouldn't be picking the president all right if we know that we're in an everything bubble and it is destined to burst because of what's going on with the debt um inflation interest rate that whole conundrum uh and the policies that are on the horizon are not anything that's going to save us from that in fact from what you're saying there is no saving us from that other than an honest default which isn't really saving uh how do people navigate this moment well what do people do in a inflationary environment with terrible government policy yeah well I mean the advice that I've been given to people for Years first of all when it comes to Goods that don't perish I've been advising people even before the pandemic I've been saying this consistently is just stock up on things right everything that you need right uh let's say razor blades right they don't go bad right if you you know if if you buy the razor blades that you're going to use over the next five or 10 years you just buy them and put them in the you know in in a in a storage uh closet or something then you could just use those razor blades instead of going out and buying new ones because the new ones are going to keep getting more and more expensive so you might as well stock up on them um you know bars of soap or cleaning detergent or certain food items that you know that have a long shelf life if you buy the things that you need in the future but buy them now they're you know it's like it's like an investment I mean if if if if I buy a can of beans and a year from now that can of beans is 20% more expensive than it was if I buy it now it's like a 20% return on my investment right and I don't pay taxes on that this is Doomer prepping are is that really your go-to advice right now or is if I'm honest I thought the answer was going to be something like getting gold and other things that are resistant to inflation but we went to buy razor blades and canned beans Peter this is not the answer I was expecting a lot of people don't have enough money to buy gold right so like you know let but then can they buy a bunch of beans and razor blades well they they know what they're going to need I if if if you know that you're going to want things why wait till the price goes way up if you have a little extra cash you could just you know keep a bigger supply of those things in your house now obviously if you've got a lot of extra money if I've got $110,000 at the end that I didn't spend I'm not going to buy $10,000 worth of beans and razor blades now I can start buying some gold and silver because I could use that to buy food or buy razor blades in the future because those prices will go up too see if razor blades are 20% more expensive in the future gold might be 20% more expensive too or maybe 30% so I could use my gold in the future to buy razor blades or I could sell my gold and I could use the cash uh to buy Raaz so you you you can protect yourself from inflation by buying the goods that you need now or by buying things like gold and silver that will go up in value and you'll be able to use them to buy more expensive Goods you don't want to save cash you don't want to take your dollars and put them in a bank and spend them a year from because they'll buy a lot yet less a year from now than they would buy right now so either spend those dollars right now on Goods or turn them into real money that you could save instead of fiat currency like gold or silver which you could do you that's why I've got shift gold I mean I'm telling people all the time you know give us a call at shift gold buy some precious medals if you have any savings if you have money that you haven't spent problem is so many people have nothing left over they can barely get by they got credit card debt uh you know so for those people you know just buying some extra things at the market you know that that might be all they could do just to have a you know good supply of stuff uh that not only could it get more expensive but it could be out of it they could they could be shortages of some of these things especially if we end up having having price controls now if you have even more money right if you have hundreds of thousands millions of dollars that you want to protect right now you need a bigger plan now you need a a bigger strategy and that's what I do at my asset management company Europe Pacific Asset Management when you have inflation inflation destroys paper assets and it transfers wealth from creditors creditors to debtors right debtors win when you have a big run of inflation and creditors lose we talked about that earlier the US government wants to wipe out its debt with inflation well when the US government wipes out its own debt it's also wiping out everybody else's debt so the debtors win with inflation the creditors lose the people who own the debt who loan the money they're the losers so you want to have a portfolio that will protect you from inflation so what don't you want to own in your portfolio you don't you don't want us bonds you don't want municipal bonds you don't want treasuries you don't want corporate bonds none of the interest rates that you are earning on those bonds will come anywhere near returning the purchasing power that you lose to inflation so you want to get rid of all those things and you want to have a portfolio of assets that will retain their value and what I've been recommending and what I do is I look around the world for companies that I think represent good investment value that pay high dividends to their shareholders which would be me and my clients who own the stock and I want companies that have pricing power that can raise raise their prices when inflation raises their costs they can pass those higher costs onto their customers and their customers won't leave right because what some things that happen with inflation is you have to raise prices high enough and you lose your customers because they can't afford your product anymore well I want businesses that are selling products that people need so they're going to buy them no matter what I mean they may buy a little less but they're going to give up something else because they need those products so you want to own businesses that are selling goods and services that are in real demand that consumers are going to keep buying even if the prices go up and then your dividend is going to go up so you'll have cash flow that will go up to help with your rising cost of living and the stocks that I'm buying are almost all outside the United States because now I have the added benefit of earning foreign currencies that I believe are going to appreciate dramatically against the US dollar especially once the dollar really loses its Reserve currency St status and you see a huge decline in the dollar not just absolute terms like it has been falling but in relative terms where the dollar really starts to fall against the other Fiat currencies and the last piece of that puzzle is when the dollar loses its status as the reserve currency I think that basically removes a giant burden from the rest of the world because while America benefits from this status with a huge subsidy the rest of the world bears that cost they have to pay us we live beyond our means but that means that the rest of the world collectively lives beneath its means to make it possible we consume stuff that we didn't produce they produce stuff that they don't consume but when the dollar crashes then we're we're going to consume a lot less in America but the rest of the world's going to consume a lot more in particular the emerging market so I think there's a lot lot to be gained because as Americans see their standard of living decline you're going to see a lot of other people in the world particularly in those emerging markets that are going to see their standard of living rise right because now they're going to be able to buy Goods with their money instead of us treasuries or whatever else you know their governments have been recycling uh their Sur you know their trade surpluses into so you want to own companies that are going to profit uh from that and so I'm building these portfolios dividend paying portfolios of real ass assets that I think will preserve wealth I think a lot of people are going to get wiped out a lot of people in my generation uh that have large portfolios that they're living on where they're clipping coupons on their Muni bonds and on on corporate bonds I think they're going to get wiped out I think inflation is going to completely destroy them uh that's why they should get rid of their dollars while they can't sell out these assets while they can and get a portfolio that is you know positioned to deal with the level of inflation that I see coming all right so if you're um the dividend side I understand but if you're getting um foreign currency into your portfolio I'm assuming you're only doing that in foreign currencies that you have reason to believe are not going to inflate their currency at the same rate that the US is what are currencies that you have that level of faith in well all the currencies are going to uh be infl so it's not a question of you know you know even the Swiss frank right the dollar is very close to hitting an all-time record low against the Swiss frank but they have they have um inflation in Switzerland you know when when we went off the gold standard uh you could buy 23 it cost you 23 cents to buy a Swiss frank in 1971 and now it cost uh about a120 to buy a Swiss frank so you know it cost five times as much the dollar has lost 80% of its value relative to the Swiss frank but even during that period time the Swiss frank doesn't buy what it used to so it's a question of I'm investing in currencies that I think will lose value more slowly than the dollar which means they'll appreciate versus the dollar but I'm still investing in companies in those countries that I believe can raise their prices and when you own a business you own the real assets of that business uh a a and so those assets maintain their value what you don't want to own is the bonds of that business because then you get wiped out to inflation but if you own the business which means you own the plant and Equipment uh you know the the the the the intangibles the patents you know what whatever they have that's real you own that and so if the government just prints money well then you know you don't lose any of that you know the prices of all that stuff just goes up to reflect the fact that there's more money but if you own bonds you get you know completely screwed when they create inflation you you know in fact a lot of people look at treasuries and they say oh treasuries are a safe haven not from inflation they're not a safe haven from that you're right in the line of fire right you're you're you're ground zero right the people who are going to lose the most to inflation are people who think they're playing it safe in us treasuries they're get wiped out to inflation okay um a couple mile markers so one that would be true of treasuries if and only if the r of inflation is higher than the return that you get uh otherwise I would expect that to sort of be on par that you're sort of Treading Water um how do you What specific examples can you give us of uh currencies that um you are happy to be intaking flows in understanding that it's a differential between how much the US inflates and how much they inflate yeah I mean look the country the currencies that are probably the best you know the the the Singapore dollar uh the Yan and South Korea the the Scandinavian currencies uh the Frank uh but you know we we we've got income coming in in in Euros in Pounds I mean these these currencies are still experiencing inflation and so I expect that that's going to continue we also have uh earnings coming in from Southeast Asia from a number of currencies you know in Thailand the Philippines Malaysia I mean you know uh we're earning income our businesses are selling products in these markets um and so all those all those uh dividends when we get paid we you know we convert them to Dollars to give them to our customers but obviously the lower the dollar is the more dollars we get when we convert uh the the dividends and the companies you know if it's a multinational company and if it's based in in in the UK we're getting pounds but that company's earning may not be in pounds if you know let's say It's a UK company but 80% of its sales are outside the UK so then you got to look at you know where you know where are the sales coming from because that's where they're earning uh earning their income but I think that the dollar is going to lose value relative to that basket of currencies especially when it's no longer the reserve currency because we enjoy this privilege and so the dollar has an artificially high value based on that status and so when that status is lost it's going to be huge and when you talk about you know I'm in treasuries and I'm getting three or 4% and inflation is three or 4% well it's not three or 4 perc if the government says it's three or 4% it's eight or 8% so you're not you're not you know Treading Water you're actually going down but I think we're going to see a sudden spike in inflation that is completely unanticipated by the by the bond markets where all of a sudden we can go from single digit to double digit inflation but where the first digit is not a one so all of a sudden we have a couple of years where inflation's 30 or 40% you know and and that wipes out bonds almost completely like you just destroy the value in just a couple of years you just wipe out the value of bond portfolio um because you just get a sudden and unexpected burst in inflation and you know you're locked into your yield right you got a threeyear treasury a big drop in the dollar yeah if we have if we have a a precipitous drop in the dollar let's say the dollar uh dollar Index right now is at 80 right not excuse me at at a 100 so let's say 101 let's say the dollar Index got cut in half over the next couple years down to 50 which could happen right it's never been that low the all-time record low is about 70 but if you saw a precipitous drop in the in the value of the dollar because there was a you know a run on the dollar and there was you know people were worried about treasuries um then you could could see a massive increase in in in prices in the United States very quickly I mean you've seen that in other countries you you see that when they're their currency gets clobbered and then they have massive inflation you know and especially with the us we import so much stuff we we we we rely so heavily uh on Imports yeah but this is a confidence game so I'm just curious what you think uh would shake the global markets belief in the dollar is this something like bricks uh where hey they're like let's let me just run a pretend scenario you tell me if I'm on the right path here uh China announces um hey we faked you guys out with not buying gold for a month but now we're actually buying at three or four times the rate we're going to be announcing a uh new brics currency that's pegged to Gold uh and Russia and a bunch of other countries are like 100% of our purchasing of petrol is going to be in this new petrol bricks dollar whatever uh and people like oh God it's it's all happening and now the value of the dollar goes down is it going to be something like that well you know they always say it's never a problem until it's a problem right well of course then it's a crisis but if you look at anybody that's had a sovereign debt problem or currency problem it it it comes on very subtly look I'm I'm here in Puerto Rico and for years and years Puerto Rica was borrowing a lot of money and it was obvious that they were borrowing more money than they could pay but the bond market didn't care uh the lenders kept loaning Puerto Rico more money and so Puerto Rico kept spending it and borrowing more and and then all of a sudden you know the market started to worry about the ability of Puerto Rico to repay its debt and so people didn't want to loan more money to Puerto Rico and the people who already loaned their money wanted it back and then there was a crisis and Puerto Rico defaulted on the debt right you know same thing happened Greece you know that Greece had a a big problem but they were broke for a long time before anybody cared I mean it's like you know you can keep on borrowing money until you get that that that point and there's going to come a point in time where the world doesn't want to loan any more money to a bankrupt nation that has no ability to repay its debts the only way that we can pay our debts is by creating inflation which doesn't count right I mean people think well the US government will never default which you know I I you know they might again that's better than inflation but we have defaulted in the past in 1971 we defaulted on our commitment to pay gold we had made a promise to the world we told the world if you have 35 Federal Reserve notes whenever you want you can get an ounce of gold that was the deal we made with the world our Federal Reserve notes were like IUS for gold for real money and in 1971 Nick and told the world we're defaulting on that promise if you own Federal Reserve notes you can't get anything for them anymore so that was a real default so it's not like we haven't done that before we we've done it but most people just assume that because we have a printing press there's no point in the US government ever defaulting will just print money well at some point the world is going to realize that yes America is going to print a whole bunch of money and that means the bonds I have are going to lose a lot of value because the dollars that denominated are going to lose a lot of value and so now everybody wants out of the dollar right all these dollars all these treasuries that are owned all around the world and not just treasuries but corporate bonds you know any any paper that's dollar denominated people no longer want to own it they want to get rid of it before it loses too much value and now of course everybody's trying to dump dollar denominated debt at the same time and so it collapses and it it you know it happens very quickly right that old saying how did you go broke well slowly at first and then all at once and so we have a crisis we have a sovereign debt crisis we have a currency crisis it's something like you know the emperor has no close I don't know when this moment is going to hit because it's already overdue you would have thought that that somebody would have come to this conclusion a while ago now there are some people who have like like I have but there's not enough of me I'm in I'm in such a small minority that the fact that I don't trust the US government and I don't want to buy the bonds that's not enough to break the market but there's going to be a critical mass when enough people it doesn't have to be the majority of people but a large enough minority uh come to this conclusion and that's it the game is over yeah it's uh very interesting that people have not come to that conclusion yet uh it feels like it's because there's so much momentum around the dollars just used everywhere Petro dollar Etc uh so many nations own that debt it sort of like the whole idea that everybody talks their book uh it behooves everybody that holds US dollar debt uh US dollars to not see the music stop uh and so this feels like something that we would be able to see coming this is why I'm a little surprised that people aren't more concerned about dollarization it felt like what happened uh when um we put sanctions on Russia that that was just like a starting gun to something very bad because if I'm a foreigner looking at that I'm like huh if they don't like my policies or something that I'm doing then they could just freeze billions of dollars of assets I don't like the sound of that uh and I'm going to unwind it but uh that unwinding process is excruciatingly slow it is happening but it's very very slow which tells me that it isn't easy uh which tells me that um uh this could be naivity and I'm certainly willing to entertain that but it feels like they're going to be this Confluence of things adding up and as long as you uh don't just keep holding your breath as it gets weirder and weirder that you really will have a long off-ramp with which to exit you were an early exit ramper you took one of the first ones it feels like more and more people are taking it whether to bitcoin if you're somebody like me or gold I also hold gold um but there are people that are losing faith in the government that's for sure uh and then finding other ways to get out um one thing like the exit ramp that you're talking about it's been a very very long one in fact I think it's been so long uh that's part of the problem because there's a lot of complacency that's been built up over the years because people including me have been warning about these problems and the inevitable consequences for a long time yet to a lot of people hey the Dows at an all-time record high um everything is fine and so there's nothing to worry about you know when when Ross perau uh you know got as many votes as he did he ran on a campaign about you know the debt is unsustainable and it was only a couple of trillion back then uh but here it is now 35 trillion and people think well you see well what's the problem why can't it go to 100 trillion it got to 35 trillion uh and so people just have a false sense of complacency that it's gone on for this long so it's going to go on forever and you know it won't nothing that's unsustainable is going to go on forever the fact that it's gone on as long as it has though uh has gotten people to to believe that but it just means that you know we're that much closer to the collapse and and when it happens it's going to be even worse because we're collapsing from a a much higher level right we have a much bigger bubble now uh and so it's far more catastrophic when the air comes out than would have been the case had it happened 10 years ago 20 years ago and in fact the the more catastrophic it obviously is the more pressure there is on the powers that be to delay it even more because it's like so bad I mean you know we you know and you know we we we keep saying well you know it's our dollar your problem and and to an extent it is everybody's problem but the longer they stay with it the bigger that problem gets and we certainly accelerated it by weaponizing the dollar I mean as if people didn't have enough economic reasons to dollarize Biden gave them a big political reason to do that by weaponizing it by threatening sanctions and to kick you off a swift or to confiscate your treasuries so pretty much we we told the world get get rid of your dollars right I mean that's what you know which is the dumbest thing that we could have done because that's the only reason that the whole thing isn't imploding because the world has been dumb enough to to stockpile our dollars and we just gave them another powerful incentive not to do that so we know it's happening uh the question is when will the pace Quicken and I think as the dollar starts to fall and it's just started now and the dollar Index is off about 10% from its peak uh which is Set uh you know a little over a year ago a year and a half ago uh and again we're close to an all-time record low against the Swiss frank we only have to drop another maybe seven and a half percent to hit an all-time record low and that's going to be the first currency I think that the dollar hits a record low in but it's not going to be the last more currencies but I think once the dollar Index really starts to break down maybe the breaking point is 80 maybe it's 70 somewhere around there but once the dollar starts to fall faster and when inflation rears its head in a bigger way in the US but the FED doesn't do anything about it because we're in recession and the unemployment rate is up and the world kind of you know comes to this conclusion uh that you know you know we can't pay inflation is never going away and you know the last man you know stuck with dollars is is is the loser right right now people that the central banks around the world are slowly divesting of dollars because there's no real urgency right the dollar is not crashing and so they could slowly work their way out of the problem but as the dollar starts to fall more it creates a bigger sense of urgency that I better get out because the longer I sit here the more I'm going to lose and so that's going to accelerate the rush to get out of the dollar which is why eventually it's just going to implode because now so many people want to get out and there's nobody to get in to take the other side of the trade when that um Unholy hell begins to break loose in the US what does that look like from a sector's perspective what sectors are most vulnerable uh where are we going to start making Investments like for instance are we going to then start investing in manufacturing at home uh what is that moment look like as we start to build our way back out of it well remember the we have built this consumer focused Economy based on the Dollar's Reserve status you know better than 70% of our GDP comes from Americans just spending money and they spend a lot of that money on on Imports and so when the dollar crashes those Imports are just not coming in anymore and so all of these stores are just going to have empty shelves and so when there's empty shelves they they don't need their employees anymore right so I mean this whole service sector economy is going to be the hardest hit by the dollar crash like because that that the consumption is going to come to an end and that's the line share of our phony economy it's all based on services and and that's where you're going to see the biggest hit now if you're manufacturing right if you're manufacturing stuff that you can export you you're going to benefit from that you know yeah your costs of your costs will go up your labor costs are going to collapse right because the wages that you're paying your workers have crashed because the dollars have crashed your raw material costs you know they could go up uh because they're you know you're globally you know you're when you're a business you're competing globally for resources raw materials but labor is pretty much you know captive right so if if I'm a worker and I'm in you know Illinois and you know my choices for employers are there I can't go to Japan if they have higher wages I can't just up and move to Japan I just got to accept you know the kind of the best job that that's within my reach so wages are going to come way down in America on a global scale and so that will help a lot of businesses become more productive you know uh factories that and so maybe companies that now are producing goods and selling in America they'll start shipping those goods abroad and selling them to foreigners and and making them here so that that will help uh so those Industries will do better that's why if I was going to be investing in the US I would want to invest in businesses that produce products or services that are in demand outside the United States that can be sold exported uh so that that part of the economy is going to do better unfortunately that's a smaller part of our economy right so much of it is based on you know distribution of imports uh and even a lot of you know service sector jobs where they're not selling Goods where they're providing products a lot of the the the the stuff that they they use in the provision of those services are imported um and of course energy is just going to go way up because even the energy that we produce ourselves if the dollar crashes most of the energy that we produce we're just going to export it to other countries because those people can can pay more right you know we don't just compete with one another we compete with the whole world and so right now we're at a competitive Advantage with the world we've got strong dollars and we outbid a lot of people for resources a lot of resources we get because we could pay more because the dollar is worth more but when the dollar collapses all of a sudden we're going to get outbid for a lot of things that we used to be able to afford so it's going to be very disruptive uh to go back to reality but you know in the long run of course the sooner we do that the better because the longer it takes the worse it's going to be right it's like we're in this giant hole and we just keep digging and digging and digging eventually we're going to have to be you know confronted and get out of this hole so let's stop digging right that's the first rule of holes right when you're in one you stop digging well that's what we have to do as of now we're continuing to dig this Grand Canyon of holes and we're making it even deeper how do you evaluate the companies that you invest in you talked about one they're going to have to pay dividends uh two ideally if they're American they're exporting something that's still going to be in demand post uh any sort of um crash in the dollar uh but what specifically are you looking for like if you were going to create a fund and you had to come up with a way to identify these types of companies what are the three to five characteristics that they have beyond that they pay a dividend yeah well personally I don't do all this myself I have a whole team of portfolio managers that work for me at europacific Asset Management I have specific portfolio managers that manage each individual fund right and so these guys are out there and they're doing that kind of research but it is like a basic a value oriented Warren Buffett kind of stock picking style to really get familiar with the business it's you know balance sheet uh its prospects for the future you know look at all these various you know qualifications that you could look at and you know first we have computer models that screen all the universe of stocks like for certain uh criterias that would evidence that we're getting a good price right you can you can relay the price of the stock stock to all sorts of metrics based on revenue or cash flow or earnings or or or booked value and try to narrow your Universe to a subset of stocks that meet some type of criteria that you think would indicate that there's potential value there but then do a deeper dive into the businesses into the industries I mean I kind of have a bigger picture look at like what kind of uh sectors do I think will be the best to invest in and so I kind of let my team hey like this sector whether it's metals and Mining energy you know consumer a nony you know non-cyclical defensive stocks or pharmaceutical stocks hey I like this sector find the best stocks you know you guys are experts in in in in portfolio analysis or you know individual stocks so find me stocks and I think we have a great team of stock Pickers uh a value oriented stocks you know I mean people think hey the stock market is a great investment it can be it could it but depends on what you pay if you overpay it could be a very bad investment now of course people have been overpaying for stocks in the US for a long time and the prices keep going up anyway so so far so good but you know that that can come crashing down I think it will come crashing down more so in real terms than nominal terms because if they create enough inflation stock prices are never going to have a meaningful decline in dollars where you're going to have the meaningful decline is in dollars and so that can really destroy the value of your portfolio uh so I want to invest in in companies that actually represent good investment value just like you know if you're in the real estate market you know you're not g to you don't want to buy real estate if the rental income isn't there you know you want to try to find uh income producing real estate where you can buy the property and you get a good enough return on your investment in in the rent so I look at dividends on stocks now some companies if they have a lot of earnings they have the potential to increase their dividend in the future so I'm not only concerned about today's dividend but what about tomorrow's dividend because some companies may have to cut their dividends in the future if they don't have enough income so you don't want to just have companies that are paying dividends but companies that are retaining enough income and investing in a growing business so they can continue to pay those dividends in the future and in fact increase those dividends in the future a very complicated game as you get deeper into it um but that all makes a lot of sense as the local gold bug what is your thinking on the price of gold we're at I think you said uh 2520 roughly right now 2 uh 520 um we going up from here we going down what's your prognostication yeah I I think gold is still early in an incredible bull market um the first big bull market from gold you know was when it went from $35 in 19 um 71 to $850 in 1980 I mean think about the the size of that increase in a relatively short period of time and especially when if you look at where the price of gold was before that when the country was established in 1789 when the Constitution was ratified gold was $20 an ounce it was still $20 an ounce when we formed the Federal Reserve in 1913 and it was still 20 yeah wow and it was still $20 an ounce when we got into the Great Depression in the 1930s but then Roosevelt after he made it illegal for Americans to own gold devalued the dollar and it became it was $35 to buy an ounce of gold and it was still $35 until Richard Nixon devalued the dollar in in in you know early 1970 and so the official price of the dollar right now on the books is like $42 an ounce but that's the official price but the the real price is $2500 so we had this big move from $35 to 850 then the price of gold really came down for 20 years uh in 1980 80 2201 gold was under 300 it was 270 I think in January 1st of uh 2020 21 of 20 2001 then we went on a big move for 10 years we went from um 270 to 1900 in 2011 we pulled back to a low of 1,050 in 2015 we finally broke through the 2011 High really this year I mean we we we got above it briefly during covid briefly and we came right back down but really the high was you know close to 2000 we didn't really take that out until this year 20 24 and now the FED is about to throw gasoline on the gold Fire by cutting interest rates and then going back to QE so I think that we're about to explode higher in the price of gold um you know 10,000 20,000 maybe more uh you can also relate the gold price to the Dow Jones it's you know the Dow's been around for a long time in 1929 the peak of the Dow was 20 ounces of gold in 1932 the Dow was 1 ounce of gold that's taking the Dow and dividing it by the price of gold uh the price of gold got the Dow got back up to $20 20 oun of gold in the mid1 1960s and then got down to 1 ounce of gold again uh in the early 1980s uh it got up to about 42 43 ounces of gold in 2000 at the peak of the the bubble um right now it's about 16 I think it's about 16 to one um and so I think the Dow is going down close to one to one again uh you know just say two to one uh you know just to keep it safe so if you were going to say the Dow is going to be worth 2 ounces of goal the Dow is 40,000 so that if the Dow stays where it is that means gold can go to 20,000 and the Dow just stays where it is but it's a moving Target I mean the Dow fall to 20,000 then gold only has to go to 10,000 the Dow can go to 50 the Dow can go to 100,000 and then gold has to go to 50,000 to' be two to one but you're going to see a a a huge rise in the price of gold relative I think to stocks but it's going to be even worse relative to bonds I mean because bonds are going to get obliterated right at least you know stocks will will have some value but I think gold is very underpriced and I think Gold's going to be remonetized I mean gold hasn't really been uh the reserve it's been the dollar and as I said earlier I think the dollar is going to lose its status as the reserve currency now one of the reasons that a lot of people are very complacent and don't think that's going to happen is they don't think there's another currency that could take its place they say well the Euro the Yen the pound or the Chinese R&B none of these currencies would make sense to be the reserve currency and I agree none of those currencies should be be the reserve currency either but what everybody overlooks is the elephant in the room which is gold gold can be the reserve asset just the way it was before it was the dollar and again the only reason that the world accepted the dollar as the reserve initially was because it was backed by gold and redeemable on demand in gold at a fixed quantity so even when we were on the dollar standard we were still de facto on a gold standard we just trusted the US government to keep its word which turned out to be a big mistake um so I think that when the world goes off the dollar standard it doesn't go on the Euro standard or the Yen standard that makes no sense it's going to go back to the only standard that works and that's a gold standard and to remonetized and everybody else owns it why why would that be true why does remonetized what is remonetized exactly and why does it equal a higher price well that means that governments back their currencies with gold so instead of having big Forex reserves of dollars or Pounds or Euros they have big gold reserves right and and that's what's backing up your currency and if you're and if you want to even go one better you tie your currency to a fixed weight of gold and and what that does is that's going to restore confidence Ence in the money because right now money has no real value it's just Fiat it's just paper you can just print it and it it deres its value from the fact that we all believe it has value now also governments mandate its use and they require the payment of taxes in it so that's also part of why we all believe it's going to have value but at the end of the day it's a belief system because there's no intrinsic value in the in the paper at all there was when it was backed up by gold but now it's backed up by nothing and so when there's a general loss of confidence in Fiat currencies which could easily happen uh how do you re-instill confidence how do you get the public to have confidence in something where they've lost confidence back it by goal I mean the way some countries now let's say it's a South American peso some country and the people lose confidence what do they do they have oh we're going to back it by dollars we're going to have a peg we're going to Peg the currency to the dollar to try to instill some confidence that we're just not going to print because we're going to P Peg it to the dollar well you know when big when the Euro or the Yen or all these currencies when people don't confidence them they're not going to Peg it to anything you know they're not going to Peg it to the dollar so they have to Peg it to Gold but that could stop the presses and reins the confidence because even even if the governments try to stop the presses the velocity of money could pick up dramatically if nobody has confidence in it it becomes like a hot potato right the minute you get your money you want to spend it you don't want to hold on to it for any length of time even for a day because you're so afraid of how much value it's going to lose during that day and so then everybody wants to get rid of the money that that's really what happens with the hyperinflation and how do you how do you how do you change that Dynamic well introduce gold uh and say okay now the currency is gold and we we have real money backing it up and then that could create some confidence when the confidence is on Peter as always this is incredibly enlightening where can people follow along with you well I'm pretty easy to find um you know I'm on the internet I do a lot on social media particularly on X that's my uh the platform where I tend to post a lot of my thoughts you know in real time as I have them fact I've done now a couple of the spaces a lot of people have tuned into those uh so you know my Twitter hand is you know Peters shf you'll see me there I've got little just over a million of followers now and so you can you can join that that that group and follow me there but I'm also on Instagram and Facebook and my YouTube channel is still growing more slowly I have about 5 and I think 880,000 uh people who uh subscribe to the YouTube channel it's a good place to watch my podcasts I do one or two of them usually per week uh and so you can you know there live now so I I do the podcast live so you can watch live as I do it or you could just tune in on anytime on the YouTube channel and just watch it you know after the fact you can also listen to it on shiff radio.com uh it's you know or the podcast the Peter shift sub podcast anywhere that they have podcasts you can download it a lot of people are listening to it but I think it's a great uh a great place to hear my my thoughts as far as um if you want to do business with oh I also have a new news newsletter now we have a free newsletter that comes out at shifts sovereign. comom you can go to that website my last name sovereign. comom it's almost a daily letter it's free a lot of good information uh we have a premium letter that's you know I think it's eight n bucks a month something like that shift Sovereign premium so you you can take a look at that you get you know there's a free trial so if you don't like it you you can cancel no questions asked uh as far as becoming a a client of mine uh I mentioned shift gold uh you know I recommend highly that people if you don't own any gold or silver that you buy some it's not an investment it's a form of savings it's an alternative to saving dollars or Euros or Yen or any other Fiat currencies you want to you want to keep your dry powder in gold and silver if you keep it in a fiat currency it'll be all wet it won't it won't buy you very much uh so everybody should have some gold and silver you should have some physical gold and silver that you have control and possession of and and that's what we sell and you don't need to buy rare coins numismatic coins uh if you want to be a coin collector you can do that but if you're just looking to have gold as a store value as an inflation hedge uh then you just want bullion you want bullion bars and coins and and and we'll help you get the right ones there if you have a bigger portfolio and you know you want to have Investments if you want to generate returns if you want to get income on your Investments right which you don't get from physical gold then you want to contact my Representatives at europacific Asset Management so we can go over your port folio and you know we're a registered investment advisor and we could take your current portfolio whether it's in a taxable account an IRA type account and get it into the type of Investments that I believe will endure and Thrive during the inflationary times that lie ahead I think most people are completely ill-prepared uh you know they're they're in uh the indexes in the US they they may be their 6040 portfolio they've got a lot of overpriced US tech stocks uh they got a bunch of money in in in US dollar donated bonds I think these portfolios are going to get destroyed uh the way they did in the 1970s you know people that followed the investment prescription of the 1960s that worked great in the 50s and 60s it was the nifty50 it was the Xerox and the Polaroids and all these stocks they got decimated in the 197s uh but if you if you if you had a portfolio of resource stocks gold and silver oil if you invested in Japan in in emerging markets in uh the late 60s ear you know you you you killed it during the 1970s so I think this is going to be the 1970s on on steroids and you know another thing that happened too as a result of the 1970s that's why so many women ended up working in the 1980s and the 1990s you know they didn't work in the 50s and 60s married women because their husbands could afford to support them but they lost so much money due to the inflation of the 1970s that now one paycheck couldn't support a family so now you had all these women that had to join the labor force to earn the money that their husbands lost they lost it to inflation they lost it to taxes that and that's been part of the the degreg in our standard of living you know a lot of people when they think oh we haven't you know we haven't uh suffered a crisis we have because we've destroyed a family we have two people that have to work and now they don't even have one job now we have two people working four or five jobs and they can't even make ends meet not only do you have the husband and wife both working and both working second and third jobs but they have no savings and they have massive credit card debt you didn't have that people didn't have credit card debt in the 1950s 196 they had savings so people are not you know are overlooking the the financial collapse that has happened uh and we're just living off of extra labor and extra debt but this whole thing is is is going to implode but you definitely want to do what you can right I I can't stop this from happening it it's pretty much inevitable I could just brace for the impact of the collapse and I can protect to the best of my ability the value of my assets right my savings I could get them out of Harm's Way I can get them into quality stocks around the world get good dividends so that's what you should do and so you contact me there at europacific asset management at europ pac. is the site there's a phone number there you can you know just call us up or send us a an email or something and and somebody will get back to you and start you know going over uh the way that we can help you know improve your portfolio and get it uh in into the types of uh assets that that did very well in the 1970s and that I think will be even do even better in in the decade ahead I love it brother thank you as always for your time I really appreciate it everybody out there if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace if you like this conversation check out this episode to learn more you could ask yourself what do we celebrate my income isn't going up as an individual I'm not making more money but this guy's got $200 billion the US doesn't know pain like we have no idea there's a world where we Embrace technology where we say we're not going to be fearful of loss but we're going to