PBD Podcast - Will Bitcoin Replace Gold? w/ Peter Schiff | PBD Podcast | Ep. 393

Episode Date: April 11, 2024

Patrick Bet-David, Tom Ellsworth, and Brandon Aceto are joined by Peter Schiff. Peter David Schiff is an American stockbroker, financial commentator, and radio personality. He co-founded Echelon Weal...th Partners in Canada. He is involved in other financial services companies including Euro Pacific Asset Management, as an independent investment advisor, and Schiff Gold. Protect yourself against Central Bank control with - American Hartford Gold: https://bit.ly/3QzMjHd Learn more about American Hartford Gold: Text "PBD" to 65532 or call 866-939-6984! MERCH: Buy two PBD Podcast or Valuetainment mugs, get a third FREE! Use promo code "pbdmugs" at checkout: https://bit.ly/3TBAMsq PBD LIVE W/ TULSI GABBARD ON APRIL 25TH: ​​Purchase tickets to PBD Podcast LIVE! w/ Tulsi Gabbard on April 25th: https://bit.ly/3VmuaRm MINNECT: Connect one-on-one with the right expert for you on Minnect: https://bit.ly/3MC9IXE Connect with Patrick Bet-David on Minnect: https://bit.ly/3OoiGIC Connect with Chris Cuomo on Minnect: https://bit.ly/4caZvfJ Connect with Adam Sosnick on Minnect: https://bit.ly/42mnnc4 Connect with Tom Ellsworth on Minnect: https://bit.ly/3UgJjmR Connect with Vincent Oshana on Minnect: https://bit.ly/47TFCXq CHOOSE YOUR ENEMIES WISELY: Purchase PBD's Book "Choose Your Enemies Wisely": https://bit.ly/41bTtGD BET-DAVID CONSULTING: Get best-in-class business advice with Bet-David Consulting: https://bit.ly/40oUafz VT.COM: Visit VT.com for the latest news and insights from the world of politics, business and entertainment: https://bit.ly/472R3Mz VALUETAINMENT UNIVERSITY: Visit Valuetainment University for the best courses online for entrepreneurs: https://bit.ly/47gKVA0 TEXT US: Text “PODCAST” to 310-340-1132 to get the latest updates in real-time! YOUR NEXT 5 MOVES: Want to be clear on your next 5 business moves? https://bit.ly/3Qzrj3m ABOUT US: Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller “Your Next Five Moves” (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/pbdpodcast/support

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Starting point is 00:00:34 earn up to 50,000 Aeroplan points. Conditions apply. Offer ends June 3rd, 2024. Visit tdaeroplan.com for details. 32nd. Did you ever think you would make it? for details. Yeah, he's at some kind of a conference. Anyways, folks, episode 393 with the one and only Peter Schiff, known as one of the biggest advocates of Bitcoin worldwide. Everybody knows him.
Starting point is 00:01:21 He just goes around every day trying to get people to buy Bitcoin more. He's not a fan of gold at all, for whatever reason. We can't get him to support gold. But obviously, if you know who he is, it's the complete opposite story here. He is a renowned investor, stockbroker, former bank owner, and political candidate known for his accurate predictions of the 2008 financial crisis from 2007 to 2009. He was pretty much spot on in everything he talked about. And some of the questions I want to ask him today is the fact that how similar it is,
Starting point is 00:01:50 how different it is. Is it more unpredictable today because of the amount of quantitative easing and tightening we've done and the manipulation by Fed and all these other things where it's tougher to predict? We'll talk about that today. And then aside from that, Schiff is a staunch advocate for gold as a store of value, and he has run for United States Senate, amplifying his views on fiscal policy. He's a very notable critic of Bitcoin, very notable critic of Bitcoin and emerging financial
Starting point is 00:02:22 technologies. He's maintaining his skepticism about his long-term view. We're going to see if we can get him to be a little bit more positive today. A little bit of a less doomsday, more optimism, more future looks bright. But the man is a New York Times bestselling author. The real crash, I believe he wrote. And just somebody that a lot of people pay attention to. He's fair and he is very bold about his beliefs and he's got conviction. You got to respect this. So with that being said, Peter,
Starting point is 00:02:48 it's great to have you on a podcast. Patrick, nice to finally be here in your beautiful studio. Thanks for inviting me. But you know, I'm not a critic of technology. I embrace technology. So don't confuse technology. You're always bashing it, dopey. No, I'm not. I never bash technology. Like I'm sitting here saying, we're doing this with technology. This would be very hard to do if we were like biblical time. Of course. This is real technology. We're making progress, Peter. This is good. We're making some progress. By the way, to respect, can you go like this, please? Is that gold? What you have this bracelet, this is actually pure 24 karat gold. Get out of here, that looks sick.
Starting point is 00:03:31 Yeah, there's about four ounces of gold in there. It's made by a company called Mene. And so this is all gold. It's probably about $12,000 worth of gold. But the bracelet probably sells for around $14,000 because they only mark it up a little bit, but it's pure gold. But you know the bracelet probably sells for around $14,000 because they only mark it up a little bit but it's pure gold. The same thing are these cufflinks. See these are all 24 karat gold cufflinks. This is a 24 karat gold mene ring. Now did she buy it or you bought it and you said, babe this is the one I want? No, no, no. I actually have another wedding ring that's made of platinum but I sometimes wear this one. I switched it up just so I could show you now this this also I'm wearing my my Rolex
Starting point is 00:04:06 Date just date date, which is the president. It's this is this is um 25 no no forty five thousand dollars. No, it's 18 karat gold. Okay, right So the goal there's about five or six ounces of actual gold in here because it's it's alloy But you know you wouldn't melt this down for the goal because the watch is too valuable but you can melt down the mene jewelry. I mean pretty I mean a Year from now, maybe a six months from now the the gold in this jewelry will be worth more than the current price of the jewelry But the point of all is gold that I'm wearing is gold is a real metal Gold has actually uses they they made this Rolex out of gold for a reason.
Starting point is 00:04:45 They didn't make it out of tin, they didn't make it out of copper. Gold has properties that are highly valuable, that are very unique to gold, and that's what gives gold that value. I mean, gold is used in electronics, it's used in medicine, in dentistry, in aerospace. It is the most useful metal on the periodic table. The problem is it's very scarce. There's not a lot of it, and so it's very valuable. But what, you know, our forebears discovered a long, long time ago, thousands of years ago, is that it makes great money. And so, unlike other commodities, gold is ideal for money, and that is the case the case in fact I think that we are in the process of remonetizing gold right now. I think foreign central banks are preparing for that
Starting point is 00:05:30 That's why they've been major buyers of gold the last year or two They are trying to replace their dollars with gold and I think the world is going back toward a gold standard You think so good thing. Yes, you think we're going back to the gold standard. We have to it's the only thing that works I mean you can't have a monetary system without yes. You think we're going back to the gold standard? We have to. It's the only thing that works. I mean, you can't have a monetary system without money. We have a fiat-based system right now that's based on nothing. That's why we have so much inflation. Look, we're doing this interview today.
Starting point is 00:05:55 We got the CPI numbers that came out earlier this morning, which is the government's whitewashed version of inflation. And the March number came out at up 0.4 which matched the up 0.4 from February. You annualize those two months you're looking at 5% inflation. We're headed in the wrong direction. We're not going down towards 2. In fact the next three percentage point moves in the CPI will more likely be up to 8 then down to two. Yet everybody is trying to figure out when the Fed is going to cut rates next. That's not the question. The question is why cut it all?
Starting point is 00:06:32 Why did they stop hiking? Interest rates are still too low. Monetary conditions are too easy. They're not tight. That's why we have this surge in inflation. The only way that you can reign in inflation with tighter money is if you stop the borrowing and stop the spending But government spending is at record highs Deficits are at record highs consumer household debt is at record highs credit card debt is at record highs Everybody keeps borrowing and spending Despite the higher interest rates, which shows you they haven't been hiked enough. Meanwhile, manufacturing is at a recession. It's been in one for years. We're not producing stuff. We're just printing money and spending it. Our
Starting point is 00:07:17 trade deficits are at record highs. So the inflation problem is getting worse, not better. The real reason the Fed stopped hiking rates was not because it won the inflation fight Because it realized if it kept fighting it was gonna cause a financial crisis that already started a little over a year ago when some Of the banks started to fail because of all the bonds mortgage-backed securities treasuries that they own, you know for years when Americans were Refinancing their mortgages down at 3% and everybody said this is great for Americans because they have these low mortgages I was warning for years that this would cause a financial crisis when interest rates eventually rose
Starting point is 00:07:57 Because the banks were gonna be stuck with all this underwater paper We basically have a completely insolvent banking system right now, thanks to 10 years of 0% rates, and when the Fed kept interest rates so low, it encouraged a massive increase in government spending. The government is spending like $7 trillion a year and financing about $3 trillion of it with borrowing. And so everybody is leveraged up to the hilt because the Fed kept rates so low for so long now It can't raise them because raising them to an appropriate level would pretty much bankrupt the nation
Starting point is 00:08:31 So instead it's pretending that it's it's won the inflation fight and that it can cut rates The markets haven't figured out where we are We are on the precipice of a much greater economic crisis than the one we had in 08. Yeah, I mean, you know, obviously a lot of the things you just talked about will go through to address. You caused a lot of different questions for me. Rob, I don't know if you hear static. I hear a lot of static on mine. Do you guys hear any or no? Do you hear static Tom or no? Okay, I hear it on my end, So maybe we can check on that but some of the things I wanted to talk to you about on today's podcast and I'm sure
Starting point is 00:09:09 Brandon I said to who's with us national security background bachelors in national security masters in national security Been with us. He's got his own content channels. Well done Tom over here with us Background, you know, he's done a bunch of different things probably ex exited and sold, raised money for two billion plus dollars in the last 30 years. Silicon Valley type of a guy came in, we did great things together. We'll talk stuff about Bitcoin, gold and collectible cards. We'll talk about that. Interest rates, deflation and inflation, the idea of going back to gold standard, what would that look like?
Starting point is 00:09:42 What would need to happen to go there? Does it need to be doomsday before we go there? Will bricks go to gold standard, what would that look like? What would need to happen to go there? Does it need to be doomsday before we go there? Will bricks go to gold standard? They keep threatening that that may be taking place. How different of an effect is today's war with Ukraine, Russia, Israel, Hamas on the world economy than others we've had in the past before? Oil prices are moving a little bit, which is kind of interesting seeing what's going on there.
Starting point is 00:10:02 What will the effects of that be? The way we're going right now, is it more of a Japan direction we're going? Are we more going to what Japan did when you're talking about 0% interest rate over 10 years? Japan did that I think for 17 years. The first time they raised their rates was a week ago or something or two weeks ago if I'm not mistaken. Japan just did that. They have a big inflation problem in Japan too. So we'll talk about that. And then women in workforce, you said something about the fact that women in workforce kind of hurt the economy because they raise the prices in home. I didn't say that that's how the media spun
Starting point is 00:10:36 what I said, but we can talk about that. Yeah, we'll talk about that as well. And then difference between Bernanke and Powell and again, a bunch of other stories. But before we get into it, let's first go to our sponsors. I thought it was very appropriate to have American Heartford Gold be the sponsor of the podcast today. Go ahead, Rob. So, look, I've been in the financial industry since 9-11, the day before 9-11, and I've owned stocks, bonds, mutual funds, real estate, crypto, gold, you name it, I've owned it.
Starting point is 00:10:57 But the one thing that's a very important part of my portfolio all these years is gold. I love having a percentage of my net worth in gold that I have access to in case of many different things. That's why we chose to work with our new sponsor, American Hartford Gold. If you have retirement funds that you cannot afford to lose, American Hartford Gold will ship physical gold or silver directly to your door. Also if you have retirement funds that you can't afford to lose, now is the time to call American Hartford Gold a precious metal dealer you can trust.
Starting point is 00:11:26 They have the finest products, amazing customer service, and a buyback commitment. They've earned a five-star rating from thousands of reviews and an A plus from the Better Business Bureau. Tell them I sent you and they'll send you up to $5,000 worth of free silver on your first order. So click on the link in the description or call 866-939-6984 again, 866-939-6984. So a few things. Obviously we'll put the link below as well.
Starting point is 00:11:51 I have something in here in this case that I'll show you throughout the podcast. I'll show it to you when we get to it. I want to know which of these three you would want to have. So we'll cover that. But a couple things here. So Peter, for the audience that doesn't know you if for the audience that doesn't know you I started off with Morgan Stanley Dean Whitter My background and I know your background. I think it was with Lemons in the 90s Take a minute or two and share a little bit about your background on how you got into the financial industry
Starting point is 00:12:18 Well, I pretty much have been in it all my life ever since I got out of college you know, I went to UC Berkeley in the 1980s and my first job was actually in commodities and commodity options. I didn't stay in that too long because, you know, too many people were losing money. It's very difficult to make money in options. And so I got a job at Shearson, Lehman, American Express, and I was working for a division of the company that was called Lehman Brothers. I think, you know, because Shearson had bought Lehman, and then American Express ultimately bought him. But I was there, and I wasn't too happy in that environment either. I was kind of like a square peg in a round hole. And so I decided to start my own broker dealer and I did that in the early to mid 1990s.
Starting point is 00:13:14 And I owned, I bought a company, basically was just a shell company, didn't really have any customers, but it was a nickel bD $5,000 broker dealer. At the time it wasn't even FINRA, it was the NASD. It was before they switched over to FINRA. So I bought that BD, renamed it Euro Pacific Capital and I built it up over the years. And I worked there ever since. I actually sold the BD a few years ago,
Starting point is 00:13:42 part of my move to Puerto Rico. And my two main businesses now are Euro Pacific Asset Management, and Euro Pacific Asset Management isn't a broken dealer, we're a registered investment advisor, so we manage money. I manage portfolios on a fee only basis, not on a commission basis, and I also run a family of mutual funds the Europe Pacific funds Which you could buy directly from us at the website Europe act comm or you can buy my funds no load at any discount broker I have a a
Starting point is 00:14:15 emerging market fund a gold fund a foreign dividend payers fund a foreign value fund and a foreign bond fund and then another business I started in fund and a foreign bond fund. And then another business I started in about 2011-12 is Shift Gold. I actually started it as Europe Pacific Precious Metals. It became Shift Gold. About five or six years ago, I sold the company to Gold Money, You know and I just recently bought it back and I you know gold money also The guy that runs gold money also started mene, which is where I got all this gold jewelry So that's how I got involved with the name, but I but I love their love their jewelry my fact My wife has a lot more of it, but then I do But I bought gold money. I mean I bought shift gold back So now I have shift gold and I have Euro Pacific asset management are my two main businesses I had a bank for about ten years
Starting point is 00:15:09 That's a whole another story the government basically took it away from me as a result of the media falsely accusing it of You know, they accused me of using my bank to help Organize criminals launder money and evade taxes I sued the published the media company in Australia for defamation and I won a judgment there. It turned out that not only did they have no evidence that any criminals use my bank, in fact they couldn't name one. We asked them in court, can you name one person that has even used the bank to evade taxes, let alone launder money or commit crimes. They didn't have a single customer. Who was behind it? Who was behind it? I don't know. I think it was a political smear.
Starting point is 00:15:50 They, you know, they, they, they, they... Was it close to when you ran or no? No, no, no. This is a few years ago. I think the Australian government was trying to get more regulations, more AMO regulations on Australian companies. And so they tried to pretend that all these Australian companies that were doing business with me Were doing business with a shady company, but I didn't do anything shady We did everything by the books my bank had 65 employees 30 of them
Starting point is 00:16:15 Were in compliance only had one person in marketing and in fact when I when I when we sued the company and I got All their evidence from Discovery, what they didn't destroy, I found out that they actually misrepresented or outright lied about everything they had. Every former employee they talked to, every customer, every referral agent, everybody said that my bank had the strictest compliance of any bank they knew that we asked so many questions that other banks didn't ask that it took four to six weeks to Open up an account so they had all this information yet. They lied to their audience They lied in print and pretended that my bank didn't do any due diligence that we were just waving through criminals
Starting point is 00:16:58 They accused me of having all these criminals as customers We didn't have any of those criminals as customers. The whole story was made up by the media. What really bothers me is that one of the reporters is Charlotte Grieve. She won a reward award for best journalist of the year for the 60 minutes broadcast that was removed for the internet because it was defamatory. Get out of here. And they won't retract the award. And you know, this is interesting. After I won the lawsuit, the media company found out that I was going to put up the unedited interview that they did with me for 60 minutes, because it took me two years to get it. They wouldn't give it to me. I
Starting point is 00:17:41 had to get it in the trial through discovery. And so they went to court to get an injunction to prevent me from publicizing the unedited interview because they only wanted people to see the way they edited it to make me look guilty when the actual interview showed I was innocent. So they went to court and they tried to stop me and they told the judge that the public has no right to know the inner workings of a broadcaster and they ended up withdrawing their case and I won because the judge said do you really want me to rule because it could be very embarrassing to your journalists and harm their careers if you forced me to
Starting point is 00:18:17 rule and I wish you would have ruled they ended up dropping it but look the whole it's called nine entertainment in Australia, and nothing they do. I'm sure that what happened with me is typical. It's all fake news. You can't believe anything. This guy Nick McKenzie is considered the greatest journalist in Australia. He's a complete fraud.
Starting point is 00:18:41 And Wikipedia, when I sued and I won this judgment the Wikipedia editors won't even allow it on his page. This guy? The media yeah that guy. The media is whitewashing his reputation. He's an outright liar and you know when they did the interview too right they they contacted me and they said hey we want to interview you about gold and inflation and the economy and I agree to the interview and the Minute I sat down they're asking me about my bank and they're making false Accusations about my bank and all these criminals who supposedly have accounts and I'm like, you know So they entrapped me if they induced me by fraud and then they edited the whole thing and the article which
Starting point is 00:19:23 Judge ruled the article wasn't defamatory. They had the article, which a judge ruled the article wasn't defamatory, they had an article in The Age, and then the New York Times wrote a story, follow-up, but they had an article in The Age and the 60 Minutes broadcast, and the judge said the broadcast was defamatory, but the article was not. That was a bad ruling. I didn't appeal it because I ended up winning a judgment against The Age anyway. I'm going to sue them again for injurious falsehood, but there's at least 40 to 50 false statements in that article Maybe they're not defamatory, but they were lies and you know what was so frustrating is for two years
Starting point is 00:19:57 They pretended that they can prove their allegations were true despite the fact that they knew they were false I actually won seven consecutive judgments in a row. They kept coming up with these BS defenses and then the judge kept throwing them out and ordering them to pay my costs. I mean they just dragged it out. I follow the story. I think they ended up paying you $3.60, a third of what you used for legal fees. But I want to get into issues. But I lost the bank. My bank was worth tens of millions of dollars. I got nothing. That's the part about They took over my bank I had it was a hundred percent reserve bank we had no debt no loans I had millions of dollars in cash Above what the deposits were?
Starting point is 00:20:37 This NBA season make every three-pointer alley-oop and buzzer beater even more exciting with fan duel Download the app today to see why we're North America's number one sports book. 19 plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling Tom, call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connexontario.ca. They took over the bank 21 months ago, almost 22 months ago, and over that period of time,
Starting point is 00:21:00 nobody has gotten their money out, not a single person. One of the customers just killed himself because he's of the financial Condition he's in because he hasn't been able to get his money. Meanwhile in the year before the government took over my bank 75% of the customers got their money back. I sent that back over 200 million dollars No problem. I mean no other bank could have withstood that kind of run, but we were a hundred percent reserved bank So I was able to do it. But nobody would have yanked their money out of there if it wasn't for all these false
Starting point is 00:21:29 allegations. And the minute the allegations came out, I lost my deal with American Express that I had to issue cards all around the world. I had just got that. I lost a lot of important corresponding banking relationships. I lost my account with the Federal Reserve. I mean, one domino after another because people were afraid to do business with me
Starting point is 00:21:49 because I thought I was banking them all. Very annoying. You know, they destroyed my business. Very annoying. And again, so for the people that didn't know your background, you've been around, you've done a lot of things, lots of experience in finance. I wanna get into this.
Starting point is 00:22:01 I wanna get into issues, okay, and get your take on this. Peter Schiff, this is a story from a week ago. Peter Schiff warns of far more devastating outcome than 2008 global financial crisis as he slams Jerome Powell's misguided optimism. Peter Schiff warns that rising gold prices should prompt the Fed to raise interest rates if it truly follows data stating if the Fed really was data dependent, the rising gold prices would cause it to raise interest rates if it truly follows data stating if the Fed really was data dependent, the rising gold prices would cause it to raise interest rates. Can you break this down on what you meant on this statement here?
Starting point is 00:22:33 Yeah, well, rates are too low. I mean, gold is telling you that. Gold is breaking out to new highs. To the average person, can you break down what you mean by that? Gold is telling you rates are too low. Average person listens to this and says, what do you mean by that, Peter? Well, you buy gold as an alternative to U.S. dollars or U.S. treasuries. Foreign central banks are selling their dollars and buying gold.
Starting point is 00:22:57 And why are they doing that? They're foregoing the interest that they could otherwise earn on treasuries to own a non-interest bearing asset like gold. Well, the main reason to do that is if you believe inflation is going to be higher than that interest rate, that means you have a negative yield and you're gonna lose purchasing power if you stay in dollars or in treasuries and so they are selling and they are buying gold. Look, the price of gold in the 1970s went from $35 an ounce to over 800.
Starting point is 00:23:29 That's not a coincidence that that happened during the year or the decade of all this inflation. And what gold is doing... Also when we got off gold standard. Right, but that let us print a bunch of money. But it wasn't gold that was going up. It was the dollar that was going down like for example oil prices in 1970 were about three dollars a barrel in 1980
Starting point is 00:23:53 They were $30 a barrel, but the difference was in 1970 we paid in gold in 1980 We paid in paper, and so it wasn't that the oil price was going up It's the money that we were using to buy oil was losing value and so we had to pay more dollars to buy the same barrel of oil. I mean that's why you mentioned women working. This was my comment on women, you know, in the workforce. The main reason that so many women entered the workforce during the 1970s was inflation eroded away the value of their husband's paychecks. And so because inflation caused the husband's paycheck to lose so much purchasing power, his wife had to get a job to make up the difference. Now part of it was also
Starting point is 00:24:40 rising taxes. There was a lot of bracket creep during the 70s where inflation pushed people into higher brackets But it's not like oh women were just all liberated and all wanted to work They were liberated when they didn't have to work They got forced to work because it was the only way to pay the bills now the comment I made more recently is that That's how we basically got through that time period. We had a spare That's how we basically got through that time period. We had a spare laborer. We had somebody who could come off the bench onto the field and help out.
Starting point is 00:25:09 And that's how families were able to survive because they now had a second breadwinner. But now you don't have that because most families, the husband and wife, already work. So what are people doing now? How are people surviving this inflation? Well, look at the jobs reports that we get every month We have all these jobs that are being created two hundred thousand three hundred thousand What they don't tell you is these are all part-time jobs We are net losing full-time jobs and they're going to people who already have jobs
Starting point is 00:25:39 So people are working second and third jobs Moonlighting is at an all-time high in America because that's the only way that people can pay the rent or put food on the table. People don't want these jobs. The creation of these jobs is not a good sign, it's a bad sign. It's not a sign of a strong labor market, it's a weak labor market. In a strong labor market, you can make it on one job. In a weak labor market, you need two or three three jobs and that's what's going on tom you know the fred data uh... fred and i'm speaking of saint louis
Starting point is 00:26:09 you know as has been out over the last couple months showing the uh... the increase in second jobs and they only showed around like five and a half six percent when i dive into it they're really talking about w two jobs and that they can identify as a full-time position They're not talking about like a 1099 like you're driving an uber or Lyft with the family car So it's very interesting that the data is backing up exactly what you say when you look around you see what people are doing They're having to supplement the house with basically
Starting point is 00:26:38 Hustling second and third jobs that they know don't normally want to do and the other way they're doing it is with debt People are taking on debt. I mean, even though credit card interest rates are at an all-time high, you would think, okay, people will borrow less because it's so expensive. No, they're borrowing more. Yeah, we're up over 1.1 trillion now, right? Yeah, I mean, and so that's what's also helping
Starting point is 00:27:00 the spending is that people just borrow and spend if they can't earn enough. Can I ask you to just rewind just a second in what we were looking at was? Where you said of a far more devastating outcome, and I appreciate everything you've said Underlying it. What does that outcome look like to the average person that's listening? What would that more devastating outlook look at we saw an in 08, 09, the market crashed, housing prices went down, unemployment skyrocketed. Those are the things that people can see, feel, and touch. When you say more devastating outcome than 08,
Starting point is 00:27:31 what does that look like? We have to appreciate the fact that really, in earnest, it started in 2001, 2002, after the dot com bubble burst, right? That's when the Fed first lowered rates to 1% I mean Greenspan made a lot of policy errors in the 90s as well And that's kind of why the stock market bubble got as big as it did But the policies really You know went to you know the sublime in
Starting point is 00:28:08 went to the sublime in 01 and 02 with the rate cuts that gave way to the housing bubble, which led to the 08 financial crisis. But every time the Fed creates a misallocation of resources, malinvestment bubble, every time it pops, instead of allowing the market to fully correct for all the mistakes that were made in the past. Right? The recession, as far as the business cycle goes, this boom bust cycle, the boom is where the mistakes are made. The bust is where they get corrected.
Starting point is 00:28:39 And you have to allow the market to do its job. But in the short run, that's painful because people lose their jobs, they lose money, and the voters don't like that. So there's always political pressure on the government, the Fed, to try to fight a recession when the recession is the cure. So fighting it simply makes the disease worse. But what they do is they keep creating more inflation, and it's kicking the can down the road and postponing the inevitable pain.
Starting point is 00:29:08 But every time they do that, they make the underlying problem worse and therefore the ultimate pain to resolve it, right, worse. And so my point is we are now at the final crossroads point is we are now at the final like crossroads where the Fed has to pick pick the lesser of two evils right so on the one hand it can fight the inflation that it created that it with QE and all this expansion of its balance sheet it can fight the inflation but to do that means interest rates have to go much higher than they already are. They have to go high enough to force massive cuts in spending on the government level and on the household level. But our whole economy is based on spending right now.
Starting point is 00:29:55 It's a bubble. And so they have to create a massive recession. It's not that recessions are necessary to fight inflation. It's just that what's necessary to fight inflation will also cause a recession because of the underlying nature of the economy. And this recession, which will have a housing market crash, a stock market crash, will result in a wave of defaults and failures. There can't be any bailouts like we did in 08. So when a bank fails, they can't bail it out. They have to let it fail and they have to allow the depositors to lose money. There's no money to bail out the depositors. They have to lose.
Starting point is 00:30:33 The government has to tell people on Social Security and Medicare, we just don't have the money to make the payments. We're not talking about making cuts for people in the future. The cuts were, the checks were sending out right now, we don't have enough money. We gotta make those smaller. Social Security, the so-called trust funds, are already selling Treasuries right now. Social Security already takes in less than it puts out. It's insolvent. So the government has to tell government pensioners, we can't make the pensions because we're broke. We actually have about a three trillion dollar a year
Starting point is 00:31:10 Deficit right now, maybe closer to four. I mean even if they massively increase taxes on the middle class I don't think there's there's enough they could do it So they have to make these deep cuts to government spending and of course that's gonna be very problematic for people who were counting on Social security or who lost their savings in the bank In fact, if the Fed really fights inflation Social Security or who lost their savings in the bank. In fact, if the Fed really fights inflation, we probably can't pay the interest on the national debt because right now we're spending about a trillion dollars a year on interest on the national debt. If the Fed, let's say, raised interest rates to where they need to be,
Starting point is 00:31:41 given the short-term nature of the debt, within a few years we could be spending three or four trillion on interest on the debt, which can consume 100% of tax revenue. And of course, we can't cut Social Security, cut Medicare, right, and pay the Chinese a hundred cents on the dollar. I mean, that's just not gonna fly. So we would have to default. We would have to tell our creditors, we can't pay you what we owe you. Well, maybe we'll pay you, you know, some discounted rate. So all these difficult things are gonna have to happen if the Fed really does what it needs to do. But politically, that's like a non-starter to force all those, you know, tough choices on the politicians. So the other choice they have is, okay, we're just gonna allow inflation to keep
Starting point is 00:32:24 continuing. Now they can't say that, they have to pretend that oh, we've done enough, it's coming back down, but they've really conceded the war because they know that fighting it will do too much collateral damage. So we're gonna have runaway inflation. Inflation is gonna keep getting worse. Ultimately, that's gonna destroy the dollar's role as the reserve currency. And people are going to see the value of their social security benefits eroded anyway. The bondholders are not going to get paid. They're going to get inflated away.
Starting point is 00:32:55 So the real losses that inflation is going to impose on all the government creditors, including people that own dollars, but all government creditors are going to suffer more through inflation than they would through devaluation or depression, whatever we would have if we defaulted. But the politicians would rather create the inflation because the pain and the damage will be pushed to the future a little bit and they can always point the finger at somebody else. The government always blames inflation on the private sector, they blame it on greedy
Starting point is 00:33:30 businesses, they blame it on Putin, they blame it on everybody but themselves, but there's only one source of inflation and that's the government and it's the government plus the Federal Reserve working in tandem with the government. Peter, let me ask you this. How, and you know, this question goes to everybody, but how different, specifically you Peter, how different is, you know, typically it's like, well, if we print six trillion dollars of money, the price of gold is going to go to the roof. Like, oh, that makes sense. Rob, can you pull up the history of price of gold,
Starting point is 00:34:02 you know, what do you call it, the link I just sent you, right? When you pull this up, you'll notice, okay, gold prices are super high right now. Okay, where are they at? $2300. It's still less than what it was in 1981. Well, that's inflation adjusted. But what I'm saying is, I get that but $2,600 was in 1981 versus
Starting point is 00:34:26 today you know it is it is what it is right 2400 2300 okay so well if we keep printing shouldn't the non-duplicatable assets continue to grow in my mind gold with all the amount of money we printed should be at $6,000 should be a $5,000 well it will be. Now, when you go back and look at that chart, obviously in 1980, gold got overextended, as markets often do. Gold went from $35 up to $850 or so, and then it pulled back down. But it never went anywhere near the $35 where it started.
Starting point is 00:35:03 And it did bottom out in 2000 you 200 and change, you know, that's when the Bank of England sold most of their gold like right on that low, right? They got rid of a lot of a lot of their gold but but since then then the gold went on a run from under three under 400 up to 1900 in 2011 so it had a big big move and nineteen hundred in two thousand eleven so it had a big big move and now you know it's just been going sideways for about ten years away why aren't any of these things trigger no it's triggering it now yes i think we're at the beginning of another sharp lineup
Starting point is 00:35:36 just like that one that's going to take the price of gold probably ten thousand twenty thousand dollars an ounce so you're gonna see it it's just that you that it's not linear. It went sideways for a while. A lot of the inflation went into the financial markets. Why do you think that the stock market went up so much in America? Inflation did that.
Starting point is 00:35:54 It wasn't the real productivity of US companies. It was inflation moving into the financial markets. It went into the stock market, went into the bond market, went into the real estate market. Now it's moving into the real economy and it's moving into gold. And so you're going to see a much bigger move in the price of gold. Rob, can you pull up the, so actually, if you can do me a favor, put that right next to, I don't know, put S&P 500, okay? Put a history of S&P 500, history of S&P 500, and let's see what the right there.
Starting point is 00:36:27 If you can click on that and click on something that shows you right there, the Investopedia, and let's look at how S&P 500 has done return. Maybe this is just telling you a history like what it's about. Go back and put return in the title. So then go to history right there well it shows like in a chart what it looks like not shows it like that maybe go to price of Bitcoin history of price of Bitcoin is out to do anything the reason why I'm showing you this is again I'm really and you got to realize we just did an
Starting point is 00:36:59 American Hartford Gold sponsorship so it's not like you're in an environment where right there so what's that is that Bitcoin 2010 nine cents okay yeah yeah then it goes to $26.90 $123 1238 in 2014 drops down to 50 bucks then it goes to 350 900 then it goes to 20,000 that's what December of 2018 drops to 10k goes up to 69 drops to 18k Goes back up to 74 if you compare now go to 2010 with gold Go to 2010 with gold and 2010 with gold So it was 1678 to what 22 2300 Even if you look at this with the stock market and gold and Bitcoin it's it's getting hammered against other things why is
Starting point is 00:37:52 the gold is well gold isn't getting hammered in fact if you compare gold I know to the to the Dow probably S&P too but since the year 2000 right low over the last 24 years gold is beating the S&P But that's an unfair comparison though. It's just this this set this Millennium this century But you know over the last two and a half years gold has been beating Bitcoin Bitcoin is down over 20% In the last two and a half years relative to gold in fact Bitcoin even though it made a new high in dollars in the aftermath of these NFTs I mean the ETFs it didn't make a new high in terms of gold and
Starting point is 00:38:31 So Bitcoin has already started and has been in a bear market in gold for two and a half years And so we'll see but you know I and again I think Bitcoin is just you know Rob pulled this up forget about Bitcoin then go to everybody I've heard about Bitcoin go to average price of a home in America in 1981 Because this is when gold was at 2,600 No, no in 1981. Yeah, that's when it was that's when gold got to about 800 was the peak in 1980 81 800 They don't know that chart right there show 26. Okay. Listen, I mean, I don't know What is this is this. Is this
Starting point is 00:39:05 like inflation adjusted in today's dollar? Go back to the chart with Goldrop? So what is this? Is this go to 81? They must be putting it in today's dollars to adjust for inflation. That wasn't the nominal price. So do gold nominal price 1981. Gold nominal price 1981 gold nominal price 1981 gold prices okay let's look at that right there well that can't be a product chart of gold that's not gold okay Rob go to 1981 home price oh that was just the year 1981 that was the chart one-year chart just go long-term gold chart like long-term historic gold chart. You'll see it long-term gold chart Is that good go to that one right there go to the second one, let's see what the second one looks like
Starting point is 00:39:57 Yeah, there you go. So go to 80 Well, you got to get more years go to go down and increase it I mean it like no make it like all time or third unit to make it a long What is that all data there's it 1980 that little spike so go to 81 is right there 800 800 said okay so let's go from 800 that chart but that's not really a chart of gold going up that's a chart of the dollar going down you know when the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, the price of gold was $20 an ounce. Now it's moved up over a hundredfold from 20 to 2300. That means the US dollar has lost better than 99% of its value. But may point this out, the price of the dollar, the price of
Starting point is 00:40:39 gold was $20 an ounce in 1800 and and so a hundred and and and thirteen years later when they started the federal reserve the dollar was still was still twenty hours the price had remained the same so the dollar had preserved its value uh... from the birth of the republic until the creation of federal reserve he was the money printing that destroyed the value of the dollar this is what i'm trying to find out that this is good and and i need your help to understand this better. Average price of home, 1981 Rob, just Google 68,900. Okay, what is the average price of home today? Oh, I don't know, 400 grand? Okay, average price of home in 2024.
Starting point is 00:41:20 2024, let's see what comes up. $400,000. That was right. It was a good guess. Yeah, very good guess. But how much was it back then? $69,000 to $400,000. No, no. How much was it in the beginning? You said? $69,000.
Starting point is 00:41:34 $69,000. In what year? 81. Oh, okay, 81. So, an ounce of gold was at the peak. $800. So, divided by $800, that was 8.6 ounces of gold. So actually, houses were pretty cheap because it was 81,000 divided by 800 is like 100 ounces of gold. So today,
Starting point is 00:41:57 if you take 100 times 2350, that's 235,000. So yeah, right now- It's down by $5,000. So yeah, right now... It's down by $160,000. Houses are cheaper today because gold was at an extreme price point there. But yeah, houses are a little bit less expensive. But in gold, they're less expensive. Again, the point I'm trying to make is when it comes down to finances and dollars, everybody could be... No, they're more expensive.
Starting point is 00:42:24 Excuse me. They're more because it takes... what do I say, it's 400,000. It'd be around 200,000. 400,000 divided by 2350. You need 170 ounces of gold to buy a house, whereas in 1980, it was only 100. So, houses have gone up, but you know, one of the reasons that the houses have gone up is because the government has subsidized them with artificially low interest rates, but also the houses they make today are you know the average house probably got more square feet, probably has more bathrooms. I agree, but why isn't the price of gold catching up to stock market, to houses, to bitcoin, it's getting crushed on every single measurable
Starting point is 00:43:06 thing we can look at. It's not crushed if you just go back to 2000. It's been beating a lot of those assets, but it's now starting to accelerate. It just broke out. So we can have this discussion a year from now, and maybe gold is $5,000 an ounce or higher and then it won't be getting crushed right because gold is going to catch up and And move to where it needs to be the reason gold has been under priced for so long is people don't perceive
Starting point is 00:43:36 The nature of this problem. They think everything is okay And so it's mispriced You know, so there are a lot of assets that get mispriced right this as warren buffett said in the short run uh... it's uh... it's a voting okay i'm sure he's a long run it's a weighing machine let me show you this i got questions for you so here we got a kilo of gold right what is a kilo of gold go for today i don't know how many ounces in a kilo i forget what is it all the ounces in a
Starting point is 00:44:02 so this is two point two pounds is a kilo So that's a lot of gold right so this is right now seventy seven thousand dollars right so you giving that to me No, I'm not my gives a prop. It's a prop We can really you can really hurt somebody with this with the weight of it, right? I know you should see how much my bracelet weighs yeah, so I get a workout with this so that right there Let me have me your bracelet for a second. Well. I guess I have to take the clip off. It takes a while to keep it secure. I don't know if I touched anything or not, but...
Starting point is 00:44:38 Okay, so you have this here, which is kilo of gold, right? You got these collectible cards, one of ones. Each of these are between a million dollars to, I don't know, half a million dollars to a million dollar cards, all these, each of these, yes. What kind of cards are those? So one of them you got Joe Burroughs one of one,
Starting point is 00:44:56 National Treasures, RPA, you know, with its Jersey in it's sign. This one is a 1932 Babe Ruth, 33 Gaudi Babe Ruth PS Ruth PSA 8 and this is one of Zion's biggest cards It's a 105 PSA 9 BGS 9. So each of these are between half a million dollars to a million dollars So you have choice you got a million dollars of gold. You have a million dollars of collectible cards But you got a million dollars of Bitcoin on this phone when you carry. Okay Do you see the argument on how they sell Bitcoin transferable? If you had a choice between a million dollars between the Bitcoin in your
Starting point is 00:45:33 wallet, the gold or the collectible cards, what do you choose? Well, I don't know that much about the collectible card market. I figure that the spreads are probably pretty wide there, and the market is very dependent on the collector demand. I mean, whether there are people who want to buy those cards or not, I mean, it's a unique market. I have a good friend of mine in Puerto Rico who's made a ton of money on cards. Now he's in jerseys. He's buying the jerseys of the players. But look, I don't know that market, so I would just take the gold.
Starting point is 00:46:04 I mean, the gold is pretty stable. I think the price is going a lot higher, very liquid. I don't have to worry about a lot of different factors that might impact the value of those collectible cards. But I would take those cards over the Bitcoin. You would take the cards over the Bitcoin. Well, I don't think the Bitcoin has any real value at all. I think it's just a speculative mania. I mean, sure, there are fools out there who will buy Bitcoin who don't understand that it has no value, and as long as there's a supply of greater fools, the fools that brought bought earlier can sell out to a greater fool who buys later. But you know, this is
Starting point is 00:46:37 Do you think Michael Saylor and Blackrock, they're fools? This is a blockchain letter, you know, like a chain letter only with a blockchain. It's a digital ponzi or a pyramid. Do I think Michael Saylor is foolish? I don't know, you know, why Michael Saylor does what he does. I mean, obviously he levered up his balance sheet to buy a bunch of Bitcoin. He'd been selling his own shares in MicroStrategy stock, which obviously went way, they did go way up because of this position he's taken. I mean, ultimately, I think MicroStrategy goes bankrupt. I mean, I think that's how... You think so?
Starting point is 00:47:15 Yeah. I think eventually the Bitcoin is going to crash and the creditors are going to end up with the company. I mean, that's what I think is going to happen at the end of the day. And I think one of the reasons that he keeps buying Bitcoin with more borrowed money is to help prop up the price. I mean he is one of the major buyers and you know they just suckered in a new group of people in these ETFs who are just pure gambling. Because if you're buying Bitcoin on an ETF you can't even make the argument that someone's buying it to use it as any kind of currency. You're simply
Starting point is 00:47:47 gambling on the price because you don't even have the keys, you don't have custody of it, you're paying some Wall Street firm to hold on to your Bitcoin. So the people who are buying these ETFs, these are not the die-hard, you know, crypto fanatics, the maxis, the gold diamond hand, you know, HODLers. These are, you know, more short-term traders who will just jump on a fad if they think they can make some money. And you know, now you've got a very significant percentage of the float of Bitcoin now in these ETFs. But unlike, you know, the old grayscale Bitcoin trust, which were that where the Bitcoin went in and they didn't come out
Starting point is 00:48:26 They were trapped which is why it traded at a 50% discount when people wanted out When the speculators who bought these ETFs decide they don't want them anymore and they sell those ETFs have to take their Bitcoin And sell them into the spot market There won't be enough liquidity to absorb that selling. The price is going to crash and what's happened in prior Bitcoin crashes is all of a sudden the supply of Tether just increases and Tether comes in, people come in and use Tether to buy up a bunch of Bitcoin. But when these ETFs get the sell orders from their customers who decide to get out of the trade, cut and run when they're down 20 or 30 percent, and they decide, I want out of this trade,
Starting point is 00:49:10 and now BlackRock or all these companies have to go into the market and sell Bitcoin at the market that day to settle by the end of day in U.S. dollars. No tether. They can't send tether to their customers. I think it's going to be the biggest crash we've ever seen in Bitcoin. This smart money has been selling their Bitcoin to these ETFs ever since they launched. Brandon, what do you think? Young guy, what do you think about this? So Peter, would you agree that over the course of history that security has been a valid commodity just in general like security? Well keep well mean keeping things secure. Yeah, I'm protecting yourself protect. Well sure I mean there's a whole business in protection Right people value
Starting point is 00:49:54 Protecting things yeah always been valuable about transportation ease and speed of transportation. Yes, of course transportation is valuable So I think that's the argument for Bitcoin is that you know I'm of the mindset it's not something you all in on but it's exposure like a five percent exposure something that you could store safely in transport easily i'd like to see on that i understand that you can easily transfer big point the reason it's so easy to transfer is because you're transferring nothing so bomb transferring nothing i think you know i i could do it yet the speed of
Starting point is 00:50:24 light nothing. So if I'm transferring nothing, I could do it at the speed of light. If you want to transfer gold, you're transferring a physical object. But what you can do with gold is you can tokenize it. I can take my gold and put it in a vault and the vault owner can tokenize it and say, hey, this token is evidence of your ownership and if you send the token to somebody else, they own it. I can send my digital gold token across the world cheaper and faster than you can send Bitcoin. So you don't need Bitcoin to do that. And of course, there are 20,000 other cryptocurrencies. There's nothing special about Bitcoin other than the fact that it's called Bitcoin. And it was kind of the first one,
Starting point is 00:51:06 and so you have kind of the biggest network that right now all believe that it has value. But there is no actual value behind that belief. It's just based on everybody else believing a lie. And the question is, how much longer will everybody believe it? And you don't need everybody to stop believing. You just need a significant percentage of the believers
Starting point is 00:51:29 to change their mind. And then you also run out of buyers. In fact, one of the reasons that they got these ETFs is they were out of buyers. They didn't have any more buyers in the real world, so they had a sucker in Wall Street. They had to get some of the money that was invested into these ETFs. You think that's the reason?
Starting point is 00:51:47 Yeah, of course. That's why all the people in Bitcoin, their full-time job is to find new buyers. No, I don't think that's the case because- They have to pump up the market. Because think about it. So the argument some people are making is actually the opposite. The argument they're making is that those guys got in either from, okay, let's say the reason why you're saying it is one, yeah, they're trying to really promote us, they got to go find the money, okay, let's put that as one of the options.
Starting point is 00:52:13 Two is fear of missing out. FOMO, oh my God, let us get in before this thing goes to 250,000. We better get in there, right? Like what some of Larry Fink and these guys are talking about. Three could be this is their way of getting in to have control over it. This is their way of getting in to be able to have influence over it. It's not like Wall Street sees an easy way to make a quick buck. There's a bunch of fools who want to buy Bitcoin and they can charge a fee.
Starting point is 00:52:37 You know, Wall Street will sell the public whatever the public wants. They've got no morals really. It's just like they'll make a buck any way they can. And that's what's going on But you know the FOMO is real But remember three years ago when Bitcoin first got up near 70,000 right and everybody was saying it's going to a million They had the laser eyes for a hundred thousand. They were buying Super Bowl ads was non-stop I mean the biggest advertisers on networks like CNBC are crypto companies non-stop advertisement
Starting point is 00:53:06 Then you got you know El Salvador, you know getting involved in in Bitcoin You got the NFT market you had all this hype and what happened to Bitcoin agree with NFP It went from 60 almost 70,000 down to 16,000 The only thing that caused it to go back up was all the speculation over the ETFs and then the launch of the ETFs. So now you've got this new thing, but it's the same old hype again. The same people are back on television, $1 million Bitcoin, pie in the sky predictions. Meanwhile, it's not going anywhere. They're hyping up this halving, this halving. That's another bunch of BS. We're getting ready for another big dump.
Starting point is 00:53:45 It's all about pump and then dump. And when they pump it up, yes, they generate that fear missing out, and people get suckered into it. But I think, as I said, the guys that own it now, in these ETFs, even though one of them has actually got HODL as the symbol, these are not HODLers.
Starting point is 00:54:02 In fact, if you look at where the money came from to buy the Bitcoin ETFs, a lot of it actually came out of gold. The gold ETF saw huge redemptions in the few months following the launch of the Bitcoin ETF. I think some gold people that got tired of waiting for gold to go up did FOMO into the Bitcoin ETF. I think a lot of people that own gold stocks, that's why, you know, gold stocks were getting crushed. I was watching gold stocks go down about 15% after the Bitcoin ETFs were launched when gold didn't go down
Starting point is 00:54:36 at all. It's like, why is this? Why aren't people selling off these gold stocks? It was probably, all right, well, let me sell my gold stock. I'll buy this Bitcoin ETF. So that money is not there forever Especially when they start to see gold really going up the gold stocks. Gee, maybe I shouldn't have switched Maybe I need to go back You know, it's gonna be like a roach motel your money checks in but it doesn't check out because when you try to sell If enough people try to sell the bottom is gonna drop out because they have to go into the market I know actually too
Starting point is 00:55:07 I think one of the things that's been supporting Bitcoin temporarily is a lot of hedge funds are shorting Micro-strategy stock and buying Bitcoin. So that's some of the Bitcoin buying is because of micro strategy selling but When they unwind those trades because micro strategy stock collapses They have to buy back their microrategy stock collapses, they have to buy back their MicroStrategy shares, and now they have to sell their Bitcoin. So that's another big potential seller of Bitcoin, is the closing out of the MicroStrategy shortfall. What percentage of your portfolio is gold right now?
Starting point is 00:55:38 Well, if you count my gold stocks, it's a lot. I mean, I basically keep approximately 50 percent of my personal stock portfolio in precious metals, mining stocks. And the other half is in more traditional, although my second largest allocation is the energy sector uh... but i have a more traditional value-oriented dividend approach it's almost all non u s stocks when i own a few u s stocks but not many it's mostly it's mostly foreign stocks uh... that are in that
Starting point is 00:56:16 in that one more foreign stocks than u s dot co by far but only why why is that well what are the reasons i want to get out of dollar right so these foreign companies have most of their revenues that are Not dollars, so I like that and they're they're not priced in dollars on the exchanges In general you take a foreign company with the same earnings as a US company It trades at a lower PE and has a higher Dividend so US stocks have a premium because people just assign a higher value to them and I think that will change
Starting point is 00:56:46 because people just assign a higher value to them and I think that will change. Also, I have exposure to emerging markets and if you look at emerging markets and you look at the history of emerging markets, they're about as cheap as they've ever been in relation to developed markets. But also, if you look at the U.S. market over the last 10 or 20 years, it is so outperformed the rest of the world. But our GDP, we're a smaller part of the world's GDP than we used to be, but our market cap is a much larger percentage. So our stocks are very overvalued and I think we are headed for a unique currency crisis, sovereign debt crisis, so I want my investments to be out of harm's way. I'm very worried about the US. Okay, so great, fair enough with your
Starting point is 00:57:23 mindset on that. So a question for you with this. A story just came out, the wealth of the top 1% just hit a record-breaking 44 trillion dollars, right? 44.6, this is the all-time ever, you know, and you've read the story, you've seen it, it's not something that we're not seeing. If you pull it up, Rob, go all the way to the bottom, the most important thing to see is there, right there. So check this out. So You go pre 2010. It was 15 trillion So it's growing steadily and in 2020 we dump a bunch of money into the market and we're printing money, right? What does that money go to to the wealthy? Of course within three years the net worth of the top
Starting point is 00:58:04 1% goes up fifty percent. Okay from thirty trillion to forty four point six trillion The way we judge Peter and this is the part. I'm 45 right? I don't know how old you are. You look great I don't know how old you are. I'm sixty one. Okay, you're sixty one. You and Tom are in the same age Okay, and Brandon you're 28 right 20 or wins. 20, yeah, he wins for sure. Well, here's the thing though, because sometimes people watch, they make decisions based on what you and I say. They'll make decisions based on what you're doing with your portfolio. If you were to say the last 10 years, how much has your net worth increased based on your philosophy with the way you've been investing? Your net worth the last 10 years with your investments? Well you know it's hard to say I mean my
Starting point is 00:58:48 investment portfolio has gone up in fact you know the non-gold portion over that time frame has done better now my gold stocks did very well from 2000 to 2010 11 but over the last 10 years I have bigger winners in the other half of my portfolio than I do in the gold stocks. But I have a much larger portfolio also because I've earned a lot of money over the last 10 years, and most of it I didn't spend. And of course I've lived for the last seven years in Puerto Rico, so I've paid no income taxes.
Starting point is 00:59:24 That's different though. that's allowed me. Yeah, yeah. But obviously, had I had all my money ten years ago in the Magnificent Seven, I'd be a lot richer than I am today. And I mean, I'm rich enough, but I would have more money had I concentrated in those names. I did not do that. But you know, when you look at this chart of that wealth, most of that wealth is all artificial. It's all on paper because of what we claim stocks are worth. But most of these Americans, if they tried to sell their stocks, the market would crash. So you say you have all these billionaires
Starting point is 01:00:02 whose wealth is a function of the price of their stock If they actually tried to sell that stock It wouldn't be that high. So this is all Inflation from the Fed created this and a lot of this wealth is not because people You know really created value for the economy They're just benefiting from the price level, the inflated asset price level caused by the Fed. And a lot of this policy, this low interest rate policy, caused a lot of malinvestments and misallocations
Starting point is 01:00:37 of resources that otherwise would have lifted the living standards and the wealth of the middle class and the poor. But because of Fed policy, the middle class got poorer and the rich got richer, but not because they deserve to get richer. I've got nothing against somebody in a free market system who gets rich because that's a function of how much value they've added to society. They've created products, provided services that people want, that people value, and that they voluntarily buy. And so the wealthy entrepreneur is a hero because he's done well. He's taken the means of production, the resources, land, labor, and capital and combined them in a way to add value to society. But the Federal Reserve rewards people simply
Starting point is 01:01:21 for owning an asset and just inflating its price and now allows them to lever it up and borrow against it. You know what this tells me? But you know what this tells me when I look at this? That Tom Brandon jump in anytime on this one here, Peter, anytime. When I see something like this, here's what I'll say. I'll say, okay, next time they're about to print money, I don't agree with it. I think it's a terrible decision to make. Guess what? Whatever you do, go equities. Whatever you do. If you go equities, if they're
Starting point is 01:01:49 printing money, the money has to go to the capitalist. The money is going to go to the guys who are producing, you know, business. Unless, Patrick, unless the dollar finally cracks, and if the dollar starts to fall, you want to go equities, but you want to go international equities You want to go commodities you want to go equities that are you know that own? Resources are in that space what needs to happen for the dollar to crash though. We keep talking about Gold is two years gold has already broken out. But remember when we started this you go back to 1971, right? It was 360 yen of the dollar
Starting point is 01:02:26 now it's about a hundred fifty so uh... you could buy four deutsch marks with the dollar deutsch mark doesn't exist anymore uh... but the swiss frank i was about twenty three cents back then and now it's what a dollar right so the dollar u.s. dollar has lost a lot of value uh... since nineteen seventy one against some other fiat currencies.
Starting point is 01:02:45 It's actually gained value against other currencies. But I think that we're getting ready for a major dollar decline. The gold breakout, I think, is going to signal it. Remember, the dollar lost when gold went way up from 2001 to 2011. The dollar index went from 120 down to a record low of 70 So the only thing that saved the dollar was ironically the oh eight financial crisis But I think gold is telling us that the dollar is going down again and this time it's going down for the count You know, I think it's gonna be knocked off its pedestal
Starting point is 01:03:20 I don't think it's gonna lose its status as the reserve currency. What's going to be replacing it though? Gold. Gold. I mean, the dollar replaced gold. Before the dollar was the global reserve, it was gold. And when the dollar first became the reserve, it was because it was not only backed by gold, but redeemable in gold. Actually, the Federal Reserve Note was an IOU for gold. The dollar was defined as a weight of gold. Actually, the Federal Reserve Note was an IOU for gold. The dollar was
Starting point is 01:03:45 defined as a weight of gold. If you had 35 Federal Reserve Notes, the government owed you an ounce of gold. Now, it used to be 20 until, you know, Roosevelt devalued, but we were on a gold standard. We went off the gold standard in 1971, and so I think what's going to happen is the world's now going to reject the dollar the way we rejected gold, and it's going to go back on the gold standard and that's why all these central banks are buying gold because they want to back their currencies with gold and not dollars. You know what level of a massive crisis would need to happen for us to go back to gold? And if we go back to gold we have
Starting point is 01:04:22 more things to worry about than gold. No, no, no. It's war, it's... No. Going back to gold is a good... The gold standard is a good thing. I mean... No one's saying it's not a good thing. We agree there.
Starting point is 01:04:32 I mean, even Alan Greenspan, when he was Fed chairman in a congressional hearing, admitted that the economy did better under a gold standard than with the Federal Reserve. And his personal preference as Fed chairman would be to go back to a gold standard and abolish the Fed. But he said, but the public doesn't want that because the public wants something for nothing. They want a free lunch. See what gold does... I don't even think it's the public that doesn't want that, Peter. Well, gold is like, you know, the chaperone at a prom, right? Gold, you know, keeps the politicians honest. On a gold standard
Starting point is 01:05:07 You can't run big deficits. So if politicians want to provide a program they have to pay for it They have to raise taxes that they want to raise spending. They don't have to do that on a fiat standard. So the politicians love Fiat money, but the people should love gold. If you believe in freedom and prosperity and individual liberty and constitution, you want to restrain government with gold. You want honest money. But the politicians don't want that. So if we just return to gold on our own, that would be great. But I agree, the politicians will not go back on a gold standard until they have no alternative. Things are going to have to be so bad. Inflation is going to have to be so rampant. There's going to be crime. There's going to be
Starting point is 01:05:50 rioting, looting, shortages. Things are going to get bad before they finally give in. We're going to do all the wrong things until we run out of wrong things to do before we do the right thing. And again, it'll be when they're screwed either way, right? Once they realize they're not going to get reelected no matter what they do. Things are so bad that they might as well do the right thing. So yeah, we may not go back on a gold standard in America until things are really, really bad. That's unfortunate. But going back on a gold standard is a good thing. It's not a bad thing. I don't think anybody's arguing that,
Starting point is 01:06:26 if you look back through history, having money tied to physical value is a bad thing. No one's gonna argue. No, a good thing. Well, money, the definition of money is the most marketable commodity. So money itself is supposed to be a commodity. It's supposed to have its own use.
Starting point is 01:06:44 Yeah, yeah, and once upon a time it was salt salt or we get the praise, is he worth his salt? Well, that's where salary comes from. Correct. Because the Roman soldiers got paid in salt. So we're on the same page. Once upon a time you have a physical item that's tied to money. Money is the physical item, even if it's a dollar that you had reserved. Got it, got it. What we're talking about is a couple things here. Cataclysmic effect in the economy you're You're basically talking about almost like a nuclear Winner is what it would take to get there and the other argument
Starting point is 01:07:13 Well, why didn't the Fed just keep raising interest rates and keep the government from spending? Wait a minute The government is not you could raise interest rates to 50% and the government's still going to try to spend. It's just whether they could sell those T-bills around the world to gullible other governments. If the Fed was truly independent and had not monetized debt with quantitative easing, if the Fed did raise interest rates, it would force the government to cut spending. It would have no choice. The reason the government has been able to get away with this is because the Fed has made it possible Right the Fed has been complicit in the growth of government by refusing
Starting point is 01:07:52 To be the independent central bank that it should it is Accommodating the government and enabling the government to take on all this debt Well, but the other side you went to consumers consumers spending as well, but consumers we all know they got these these Inflated dollars during the stimulus everybody a bunch of dollars were printed not really printed But you know what I mean the money supply was expanded because they said okay Here's here's everybody's stimulus checks, and I think credit cards went down and touched mid six hundred billion level credit cards United States. But then the consumer spent that right right back up. Yeah. To one point one trillion, where it is now with highest interest rates
Starting point is 01:08:33 on record and fee structures that are in there. And then then when they're tapped out at Christmas, buy now pay later was up there. They use that. And then we saw 40 percent delinquency rates as it took them in four months not six weeks to pay off yeah none none of this none of this credit would be available in a free market
Starting point is 01:08:52 it doesn't appear to be that there's a deterrent in place so how do you force because one of the things you said and i don't disagree with it but how do you force the consumer and government simultaneously to stop spending it's not when they've got this complete willingness? How do you distance them enough? If the Federal Reserve allowed interest rates to rise to where the market would place them, credit card lending would stop. The banks would not be extending the credit. They couldn't afford it.
Starting point is 01:09:18 You know, there'd just be no profit in the business. There's only profit because they could still borrow at five or six percent from the Fed and loan to consumers at 21 percent and there's enough margin in there to you know eat up what they lose. Make up for delinquencies and make a good business. But if interest rates went up to ten, twelve percent, they couldn't. And the other thing is, remember all these things. Can I interrupt you? Was that the argument you made at the end of the financial crisis? You made a prediction about credit cards that would also happen in 08-09 that didn't actually happen, but was that... It would have happened, but the government bailed everybody out. But you're making that same point, I'm saying. Is that right?
Starting point is 01:09:55 Well, it should. Look, the government has undermined the financial system with its subsidies and guarantees, right? All the bank deposits are guaranteed by the government. The banks do all sorts of reckless things because of the government that they never would do in a free market. And artificially low interest rates are a big part of that. But there are other things that the government does that distort the markets and that lead to excess consumption.
Starting point is 01:10:21 Remember, we have this phony economy that's based 70% on consumer spending. and consumers can only spend if they can keep borrowing. And so they're facilitating that. And, you know, one of the really dangerous things with these credit cards, and I've been talking about this, is, you know, once you have so much credit card debt that you know you can never pay it back, once you realize that you can't pay it back, your incentive is just to keep running it up even higher, because you know you're never pay it back. Once you realize that you can't pay it back, your incentive is just to keep running it up even higher
Starting point is 01:10:48 because you know you're just gonna go bankrupt and so you might as well go out with a bang. So if I owe 100 grand, I might as well owe 200 grand because I'm spending money that I know I'm never gonna pay back, which is a moral hazard in and of itself because now I wanna start buying as much stuff as I can on credit
Starting point is 01:11:04 because I know after I go bankrupt I won't be able to buy anything so I might as well buy because when you go bankrupt with a credit card debt They don't go and repossess all the stuff that you bought you get to keep everything you bought Right the credit card debt isn't secured by all the merchandise that you bought or the vacations that you took So, you know, it's free money as far as a lot of people are concerned. So the moral hazard there is enormous as people are running up debt. And they did the same thing with student loans and now it's even worse. I mean, the government, the reason that college is so expensive is because the government guaranteed student loans. You know,
Starting point is 01:11:38 before the government started doing that, college was cheap. Even Ivy League colleges weren't that expensive and they never really raised prices. I mean you can go back in time, you know, maybe every 50 years Harvard would raise his price a little bit or Yale would raise his price, but you know the price would be the same for decades. But what happened in the 1960s, late 1960s, they lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. Well 18 is when you start college So now all the politicians started to try to buy the votes of the students by promising government aid Guaranteed student loans because like in my dad's generation You know he worked
Starting point is 01:12:16 Let me finish they lowered they lowered this a very important point you're making they lowered voting age from 1960 No, no 21 they passed they passed it with a it was the what amendment lowered the voting age from 1960? No, no. From 21 to 18? They passed the... What amendment lowered the voting age? 21st Amendment? But they lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, right? And so, now politicians wanted to get 18-year-olds to vote for them.
Starting point is 01:12:41 And they're going to college. So they said, hey, we're going to make it easier. My dad and all of his friends friends who didn't have a lot of money, my grandparents were lower middle class, so my dad worked his way through college. He had a summer job waiting tables and that was common. People worked their way through college and then they graduated with no debt. Well, what the politicians told the kids is why should you have to work over the summer? You're young, go to the beach, travel around Europe.
Starting point is 01:13:07 We'll guarantee loans. We'll get banks to loan you money so that you can go to college. And then you'll pay back the loans after you graduate when you have a good job and have a high salary. And so the students loved it. They voted for the politicians who provided it. But the real winners were the colleges
Starting point is 01:13:24 because the minute the colleges saw that students had access, their customers, to all this government money, they started jacking up prices. And then as they raised prices, the government kept raising the loan limits that they would guarantee and then it was just a spiral. And so college costs went through the roof because of government subsidies. Now it's even worse because now they want to forgive the student loans and so now the message they're sending to students is borrow as much as you possibly can because you're never gonna have to pay it back and the college is like this is fantastic we
Starting point is 01:13:59 could really jack our prices up now because no one gives a damn what we charge because no one's gonna have to pay. I mean pretty soon they might give you a free car when you enroll in a college. I mean it doesn't matter because no one's gonna have to pay the debt off. It's just gonna be, so it's an even worse moral hazard. You know, now you see these liberal, I mean these left-wing politicians complaining about all the student debt. It's their fault.
Starting point is 01:14:23 If it wasn't for the government college would be cheap and nobody would have borrowed any money they enrich the university is a diverse the bureaucracies there at the expense of the students of their parents uh... but you know that i've been at work but they corrupt the government corrupts everything they get involved in people what make nixon eventually sign off on this thinking this is a good idea well never first of all he thought it was temporary. He really did.
Starting point is 01:14:46 In fact, he said that in his initial speech. There's two things he did that he thought was temporary. One is a gold standard, the other one is this. Well, let me tell you. So look, Nixon, he tried devaluation twice. So he devalued the dollar officially twice, and he raised the price of gold from $35 an ounce up to about $42 or for whatever it is. It's an odd number. But Nixon had a real difficult choice to make, and unfortunately he took the politically expedient one. What he could have done, because gold prices needed to rise. So he could have devalued the dollar officially by a much greater amount, which would have been very embarrassing
Starting point is 01:15:25 for him to do. Or he could have allowed the economy to deflate, allowed prices to come down so that the gold price didn't have to go up. But a massive deflation would have been, you know, a very difficult thing, right? Because we had printed all this money to fight the Vietnam War, to go to the moon, the war on poverty. So we either needed to devalue the dollar or have deflation and a depression. And so Nixon didn't want to do either of those and so he took the third option which was, you know, I'm gonna basically just go off the gold standard completely. And so he didn't have to make one of those two choices but I think he opted for something even worse, which ushered in all the inflation. I mean, we had all that inflation in 1970s for a reason. It's not an accident that we went
Starting point is 01:16:13 off the gold standard in 71, and then we had a decade of massive inflation. And now we're gonna have a decade of even more inflation as the world goes off the dollar standard. I'm still flabbergasted by this. Do you understand what would have happened if the laws would have stayed at 21 instead of 18? If what? I would... You mean voting age?
Starting point is 01:16:36 Yeah. Rob, can you check to see how many... No, it's the 26th Amendment. Yeah, see, I you remember my image of an easy twenty how many people under the age of twenty one voted in the last election how many people under the age of twenty one voted in twenty twenty yet and what are we talking about my son role you'll screw up but you know here live
Starting point is 01:16:59 it let me make a key point when when twenty one was initially the voting age in most states which is you know going back to 1790 right you had to be 21 to vote most people only went to school until they're around 12 maybe 11 or 12 so that by the time you're 21 you've been working for 10 years most 21 year old men because it was just men who were voting wow they had kids they were married they had a family they were
Starting point is 01:17:24 in the real world right they had They had real world experience. They had experience, you know, with government and running businesses or having jobs. Compare that to an 18-year-old today who's never worked a day in his life and lives with his parents. And so if we were going to have a voting age consistent with the voting age we had when it was 21. I mean, forgetting about gender, I mean, open it up to men and women. But if we were going to have a voting age where the voter had the same level of real world experience today as a 21 year old did 200 years ago, the voting age would probably have to be in the 30s. And personally, I think that's where it should be. And I would be in favor of that even if I was 18 myself Because I wouldn't want my vote canceled out by a bunch of idiots
Starting point is 01:18:14 So I want people out there in the real world before they vote and I would also raise the age People are going to Congress at 25. That is much too young We shouldn't be in Congress at 25 maybe 35 or 40. Raise those ages, because again, those ages came in in a different era. You can't just go from your parents' house to Congress. I mean, there are people that are in Congress that have never worked a day in their life. Yeah, I'm looking at this right now. I'm looking at this right now. Rob, if you can go and see who controlled Congress in 1971.
Starting point is 01:18:39 Let's go type in who controlled Congress in 1971. You know who the left needs to think? That guy right there, Carl Albert, okay? Democratic, House speaker, can you Google who that guy is? That is one of the biggest victories for the left right there. Are you kidding me? This guy, who is this guy? Let's see.
Starting point is 01:19:00 The little giant. Carl Albert was on American politics, I'm sorry, I'm 46, someone's on 1970s. The left would lower the voting age again if they could. This guy's 5'4 tall. Albert was affectionately known as the little giant from Little Dixie. Albert held the highest political office of any Oklahoman in American history. This is an MVP for the left. This guy's an MVP for the left to be able to pull something like this off and forcing Nixon to sign thinking it's not going to be a big deal long term.
Starting point is 01:19:29 Do you know how powerful this is what they, by the way, for me when it comes down to voting, I take this very personally because I don't think it's about age to me with voting. I think it's earning the right to vote by a certain amount of behavior you do to earn the right to vote. Meaning, I'm okay with a 16-year-old kid voting if he paid, made $40,000 in income that year, paid, say, I don't know, $10,000 in taxes, you deserve to vote more than a 32-year-old that's never paid taxes. I want the concept of somebody contributing to society that's doing something. We used to have those type of requirements. People had poll taxes, literacy tests, property taxes, all sorts of things. Because remember, the whole idea, we're not a democracy, we're a republic. Nobody has a right to vote, it's a privilege. And the whole idea is good government. The goal is to get good government, not everybody voting.
Starting point is 01:20:25 And if you get better government by restricting the electorate, then that's better than having everybody vote and have bad government. And so, you know, if you look at the rights that you have, you know, life, liberty, happiness, property, voting is not a right. I mean, nobody has a right to vote, right? That is a privilege, and that privilege can be restricted. Because why do you think when you're born, one year olds can't vote, two year olds can't vote, if you had a right to vote, it would start at birth. And if you go to jail, you lose your right to vote. If you're an ex-felon, you can't vote. Now they can't take away your freedom of speech,
Starting point is 01:21:02 they can't take away your freedom of religion, they can't take away your freedom of religion, your real rights stay with you. You can lose privileges. The government can't take away your right, but they can take away a privilege that they've granted you. So voting is a privilege and we have to give it out discriminatorily. We just can't let any moron vote. The left thinks we just want everybody to vote
Starting point is 01:21:26 Why if everybody's gonna vote for an idiot? Why do we want everybody voting? You know and most of these people are voting for whoever promises the most free stuff It's like an advanced auction on the sale of stolen goods. That's what it that's you know it is what you see here Interesting very interesting points which you see here, Pat, think about this. What year was Lyndon Johnson's great society? 64, 65? Yep. And what did he do moments after the Kennedy funeral?
Starting point is 01:21:57 He started the Vietnam War. Actually, he funded full escalation from cooperating and working with French advisors. And that's what they accused Barry Goldwater, who would have been a great president if he was elected in 64. They scared the electorate that he was going to escalate the war and then LBJ got in and did exactly that. Correct, LBJ went from cooperating with French advisors, because the French were there first, by the way, that were escalating rhetoric. So anyway, so here you have great society starts under him And we have the Vietnam draft and one of the arguments of this bill was old enough to fight old enough to vote Yeah, and that and that if I'm gonna send you to Vietnam at age 18
Starting point is 01:22:39 Shouldn't I be able to vote for the men in government? That's what great campaign that are sending me. Yeah, but you know what that makes as much sense as too old to fight be able to vote for the men in government that are sending me to fight? But you know what? That makes as much sense as too old to fight, too old to vote. Fighting and voting are completely different things. An 18-year-old is very qualified to fight, right? But not qualified to vote. Now, I'm against the draft, so I'm starting, I'm not, I think the draft is unconstitutional too.
Starting point is 01:23:02 But I recognize that 18, 19, 20-year-olds have developed physically, but they haven't developed mentally yet. So voting should start later. Look, we tell people you can't drink until you're 21. So I can send you off to war, but you can't have a drink, right? When you come back you can't, you know, I'd rather have people drinking earlier than when they're voting. But the worst thing in the war on poverty was what john linden johnson did uh... with uh... of families aid the families of dependent children he started a whole program where
Starting point is 01:23:33 young girls got paid if they had children without a father and destroyed all the homes and that's why especially african-americans correct you have so many african-american kids growing up without fathers if if they had a father, their mother would get less welfare. Right, right. That's what I'm getting to. You start with Lyndon.
Starting point is 01:23:50 He destroyed the black family with that welfare program. And so I'm getting to. So you have the Great Society, Pat, then they moved the voting age. Look at the victories for the left and look how big that jury is. You've got to give them props. By the way, props to them as a strategist. Good for you. But you know what? This is also interesting. We fought two wars. A war in Vietnam and a war in poverty, and we lost both.
Starting point is 01:24:10 Not only did we lose the Vietnam War, but poverty won the war on poverty. Poverty was higher when the war ended than when it began. Because the very programs that they created to fight poverty created more poverty. That's how government works. That's right. This is the smallest middle class we've had in a long time. The rich keep getting richer, the poor keep getting poor, and these are byproducts of policies that started by this guy named Lyndon Johnson. By the way. One of the worst presidents ever. Tell me your thoughts on what's going on with Ukraine and Russia economically. I know obviously we can talk about it politically. I'm talking economically. What are your thoughts on that? The impact
Starting point is 01:24:43 that's having on us today versus previous wars we've had? Look, I said this from the very day that that thing started, that war started. I said it was a mistake, I said it was gonna last for a long time, it was gonna be another quagmire, and that we could have avoided it. The easiest thing to do if we did not come to uh... the aid uh... of of uh... of the ukraine if we had not provided zelinski with the money in the weapons to fight he wouldn't fought and he would have cut a deal with russia which would have been no problem for us
Starting point is 01:25:19 i don't believe that putin is some kind of adolf hitler looking to take over europe and that we we can't appease him But once we came into it he now had the means to continue a war that he probably can't win but now Thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands? I'm not sure what the the death toll is on both sides But a lot of young men and women
Starting point is 01:25:45 have needlessly died in a pointless war i mean they built up uh... salinski is if you some kind of george washington and as if this is some kind of you know freedom fight if you look at the heritage uh... index of economic freedom
Starting point is 01:26:00 before the war started russia ranked higher than the Ukraine. The Ukraine was less free than Russia and it's even less free now because of the draconian laws that have been passed by Zelensky ever since this war started which is enriching who knows the military industrial complex which is making a ton of money off of this unnecessary war is helping to run up our budget deficits and cause even more Inflation to be created. I'm more concerned with the needless loss of life
Starting point is 01:26:32 And I don't know how many more people are gonna die for nothing But I said at the time that this is just gonna go on and I think early on They don't I think they had like a peace deal that we sabotaged I think they were gonna they were gonna start it sabotaged. I think they were going to start it and we sent the head of the UK down there to talk Zelensky out of it. And so we created this almost like a wag the dog kind of situation. I mean, initially, we blame Putin for everything bad that was happening in this country and turned him into this big boogie man. And so it was a convenient scapegoat for the politicians to blame stuff on the war. But no, I think the whole thing is a mistake.
Starting point is 01:27:11 I mean, not that I think Putin's this great guy that we should honor. Look, I mean, you got two countries that are relatively unfree, that have a lot of corruption. There's more corruption probably in the Ukraine than there was in Russia. It's no accident that some of the bribe money that Hunter Biden was taking and sharing with the big guy was coming out of Ukraine. I mean, he was doing all kinds of shady deals in the Ukraine. So we've got no dog in this fight. We shouldn't even be involved. Europe shouldn't be involved.
Starting point is 01:27:41 I mean, let Russia and Ukraine figure it out. And the biggest problem was what we did with NATO. Because when the Cold War ended, we should have disbanded NATO. What a waste of money. The only reason we had NATO was because there was a Soviet Union. And so once the Soviet Union went away,
Starting point is 01:27:59 why didn't we just say, okay, great, we don't need NATO anymore? Because now NATO had its own bureaucracy, all these people who had a vested interest in keeping NATO going. It's like, they say nothing, nothing, you can't, a government program lives on forever. We have government programs that were started a hundred years ago to do something that doesn't exist anymore, but the program is still there, because once you create the agency or the department, it has a life of its own. And so instead of dismantling NATO, we started to invite all of the former Soviet block countries
Starting point is 01:28:31 to join NATO. So now NATO is getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and Russia is not a part of it. And we're getting all these countries into NATO to go against Russia. And now the Ukraine, which is right on Russia's doorstep, now the Ukraine which is right, you know on on on Russia's doorstep now Oh now the Ukraine is gonna join NATO and Putin is like, well, hey, you know, I can't you know, this is too much Right, we can't you know, and so we pushed them into this we but we shouldn't even have NATO What is the point of it? We're wasting all this money. We can't even afford it We're borrowing the money to pay for NATO
Starting point is 01:29:03 Now, how do you feel how do you feel about what's going on with Israel and Hamas and the way we're handling it today? Well, I know for you, you're a son of a, I believe, Jewish immigrant from Poland, if I'm not mistaken. Poland, Russia, yeah, all four of my grandparents came from Eastern Europe to the United States around 1900, you know, around that time frame. So yeah, so I'm a second-generation American, but my family is Jewish and yeah, I have a lot of sympathy Not just because I'm Jewish for what's happening in Israel. I think Israel is in a very bad position and I think Hamas put them in that position and I think it is not an accident
Starting point is 01:29:40 Hamas, you know, Israel was getting ready to do a deal with saudi arabia peace deal and i think they sabotage that deal with this attack because this attack and they made it so brutal and and i think i don't know if you've even seen you know what was done uh... to families and children they made it so brutal that israel had no choice but to have in all out
Starting point is 01:30:03 response to this brutal attack that they knew within the media could spin that and turn Israel into the villains and somehow they're you know Hamas or the Palestinians are the good guys and Israel now has been made to be the bad guy to first of all to blow up that whole deal they had with Saudi Arabia but it's unfortunate that you have so many people now they think that Israel, modern Israel, is worth the Nazi Germany. I mean it's the nonsense that is out there, you know, in the media vilifying the Israelis and and most of, I mean yeah, are there some Palestinians who are, you know, innocent good
Starting point is 01:30:49 people? Sure, there's some of them, but there's a lot of them that would kill any Israeli they had a chance to kill. I mean, that's what they believe. I mean, they think, you know, that we're, you know, heathens or blasphemers. I don't know. I mean, they don't like Jews. I don't know. I mean they don't like Jews They don't think they they don't like Christians very much either, too
Starting point is 01:31:08 But I think I think Jews are higher up on the pecking order of People that they dislike to wipe out. No, it's funny too. They also I think they also don't have a lot of tolerance for homosexuals, you know So they're very intolerant group You don't my Palestinian yes. Yes. Yeah. Palestinians. Yes, yes. How is that impact in the economy? Historically, when you think about war, when it comes down to some people saying, well, there's a lot of people that want war to continue because it helps with certain military industrial complex. You being somebody that's run for office before, you sound like you
Starting point is 01:31:44 study history, what's happened with America office before, you sound like you study history, what's happened with America, obviously you've been in the financial industry for a while. How do you look at war? Is it gamified in a way to make money on the back end? Yeah, I mean look, free people would never go to war with one another. Governments go to war, and they have alternative motives. and one of them obviously is there is a military industrial complex. War is a very profitable business if you make weapons and these companies donate a lot of money to politicians to you know to perpetuate a war so they can keep selling their overpriced weapons and sometimes they'll sell weapons to both sides and they don't care right?
Starting point is 01:32:25 I mean it don't alarm everybody, but they make a lot of money This is part of the problem with the system that we have now with this big government that they can do all this stuff but you know sometimes Tyrants, you know will will have wars because they don't really give a damn I mean they they're just trying to expand their empire get more territory but free people don't war with each other they trade with each other they engage each other wars are destructive there are no winners right there's just losers it's just who loses the least
Starting point is 01:32:58 wins the war but you know the way canesians look at economics always a stimulus all all this war spending is gonna to help the economy. You know, there are a lot of people who think that we got out of the Great Depression because of all the money we spent to fight World War II. No, we didn't get out of the Depression until World War II ended. It was the end of all that military spending that caused the economic boom. During the war, it was very austere.
Starting point is 01:33:24 I mean, there was a shortage of everything. I mean, people, you know, didn't have anything. And women worked. They went, they actually worked during the 40s because their husbands were out fighting the war. And they were just, you know, all this, all of our resources were diverted to wartime production. So there was very little left for consumer goods. But it's, it's destructive. I mean, if, if, if, if you blow something up, I mean, that's a bad thing. I mean, people say, oh, we have a natural disaster. Oh, we just had a flood or an earthquake, and these buildings got destroyed,
Starting point is 01:33:56 and so that's good for the economy, because we get to rebuild it. No, it's bad for the economy, because we have to rebuild it. Before, we had the buildings, and we could have done something else. It's the broken window fallacy of economics. Henry Haslett talked about it. Like, if somebody throws a rock through a window,
Starting point is 01:34:14 the Keynesian says, well, that's going to stimulate the economy, because now I have to buy a new window, and that's good for the window guy. Yeah, but if my window wasn't broken, I could have taken that money and bought a new suit of clothes. But now I can't buy the clothes because I had to replace my window. So now that the tailor loses out. But you don't see the tailor's lost income. You just see the gain to the window repair man. So it's the seen versus the unseen. But at the end of the day, all I have is the same window
Starting point is 01:34:41 I had before and I don't have a new suit of clothes so you're always worse off when something gets destroyed and Wars about destruction And so it's it should be avoided at all costs. That's what's particularly problematic. There was a peaceful solution Yes with the Ukraine had to have ceded some territory to Russia if Yes, but who can so what I mean most of them are Russian anyway in the territory that they want they all speak Russian you know they they identify more with the Russians than the Ukrainians anyway what what difference does it make to us where the Russian border ends and the Ukrainian
Starting point is 01:35:17 border begins do we care you know but now you know look at all this money look at all these people who have died it's it's horrible yeah it's gonna be interesting to see how long these last will this be another afghanistan we're gonna go twenty years or this is how big the left was i love you saw this might my my biggest tweet although it's not called a tweet anymore to post zelinski
Starting point is 01:35:40 spoke before a joint session of Congress. And this was the first, via the internet. It had never happened before. It was the first time this had ever happened. So we're giving him this honor, right? And so he shows up to the camera wearing his t-shirt. And so I see that. I say, gee, you know, he's talking a joint session of Congress, the United States.
Starting point is 01:36:04 Can't he, like, put on a suit and tie or at least, you know, his dress uniform or something? I mean, a short-sleeved t-shirt? So I tweet out, I said, doesn't the president of the Ukraine own a suit? And that tweet, that's, yeah, yeah, that was that tweet was like the most popular tweet that day And it was all because of the whole left started You know hammering me 88 000 comments. Yeah, that's crazy. It was crazy I mean way more comments. They look only 7.3. Thousand likes but look at the impressions
Starting point is 01:36:41 It's way it's like 20 million impressions It was it was what it could be the biggest tweet ever. And my count wasn't even, I didn't have a million followers like I did now. And it was like, they were saying, hey, he's in a battle. I mean, come on, he's in a war. No, he wasn't. He was in a studio with professional lighting and makeup. And so he could have put on a long sleeve shirt,
Starting point is 01:37:06 he could have put on a dress uniform, a jacket and tie, add a little respect. Look, nobody has more contempt for Congress than I do. I've testified twice and both times I wore a suit and tie, right? Because out of respect for the institutions, not the men and women who are currently there, I don't respect them at all, but I respect Congress and so I'm gonna show up Dressed appropriately and this guy is the head of a country I don't care if he's you know, he wears his t-shirt when he's out with his troops But if you're gonna address our Congress show a little respect, you know That's all and it was like if he was actually under fire if he was in a foxhole, like dodging missiles, okay fine,
Starting point is 01:37:45 yeah don't put on a suit. But if you're gonna, you know, have your beard trimmed, if you're gonna have professional lighting and makeup and you're all set up, if you're gonna do all that, then you might as well put on a suit, right? What the hell? But the left coalesced around this, like he became their hero, right? This Zelinsky, oh you can't say anything bad against Zelinsky. I mean, they crucified me. You should have seen all the articles that were written about me. It was amazing. I've never got so much hate on one thing than that little tweet. Doesn't he have a super? That's all I said. And I love it. That's actually a very fair question to ask, because you're representing
Starting point is 01:38:23 a president, a nation, a country. But before the nation that you're begging for money. You're coming here, help me, give me money. Peter's thoughts. You know, yourself as a very big fan of Biden and going into 2024, what do you think is going to happen this year with Trump and Biden? All right, well, I mean, I think Trump's gonna win. You think Trump's gonna win? And so far my track record is pretty good because I thought he was gonna win in 2016
Starting point is 01:38:50 and I thought he was gonna lose in 2020. So the reason I thought he was gonna win in 2016 was because he tapped into a vein that I knew was sensitive. The government, the Obama administration was pretending the economy was good, but the voters knew it wasn't. The statistics didn't tell the real story. Average Americans were hurting and the media and Obama were telling them that things were great. Trump came out and said, I feel your pain, kind, you know, kind of like Clinton did initially on the economy's stupid, but he identified,
Starting point is 01:39:28 even though he's rich, he identified with the common man in their plight. And he said, look, I know things are bad, I will make America great again. We've lost all of our productive jobs, I mean, you're hurting. And I knew that that was a winning message. And he was able to beat Hillary Clinton, who was basically in four more years. I mean, you're hurting. And I knew that that was a winning message.
Starting point is 01:39:45 And he was able to beat Hillary Clinton, who was basically four more years, the establishment, the status quo. So I thought that Trump would be able to win, given the real nature of the economy, because people back then were saying there's a disconnect. Why do the voters not realize how good the economy is? It's because the economy isn't good and the statistics are the disconnect, not the voters. Well, by 2020, Trump really hadn't delivered on his promises. He'd been an officer for more years, four years, and despite all the hype about how it was a booming economy,
Starting point is 01:40:19 it really didn't improve. We continued to run big deficits and inflation was there and so we didn't have as big a move, but he actually might have won. It's just, you know, I mean who knows if he actually won or lost that election, but the way the votes ended up, the way they got counted, he lost. But I think this year is very similar, only worse, than 2016 in that the economy is even in worse shape than it was then, and despite the media telling everybody how great it is and trying to wonder why it's not reflected in the polls. And in fact, not only is Biden the least popular president in history ever since they started doing these polls, but where he scores the lowest is on the economy. So if the economy is really so good, why
Starting point is 01:41:09 does he score so low? Because he's getting, normally if you're the president, if the economy is good, the voters will give you credit, whether you deserve it or not. But if it's bad, they blame it on you. And Biden is getting the blame for the lousy economy, and Trump is coming in and recognizing how bad it is and Compared to how things were when he was president There are a lot worse now people are struggling a lot more the cost of living has exploded Over the last few years and so they they want to go back to the way it was when Trump was president now That's not gonna happen if we elect Trump, but the voters don't know that.
Starting point is 01:41:45 They just think, well, it'll be a magic solution. We just put Trump in there and these problems are going to go away. And, and then they're not, but at least that's what the voters are going to hope. Because the one thing they're not going to want to do is vote to continue what we got, because what we got is awful. And so they're going to vote for change. They're going to want to throw the bums out. And the leader, the head of the bums is Biden
Starting point is 01:42:08 How ugly things gonna get In what respect like this divisive games all this stuff. How ugly things gonna get the election well, well, you know, I mean Things seem to be getting worse and worse the divide. I mean, I you know, I see that you know, I've in you know My my lives I see people who were friends for years, don't even talk to each other anymore. Even though they used to be Democrat, Republican, those political differences were okay. I mean, they could still be friends, but it became so polarizing That you can't even be friends anymore And and it's mainly I think it's mainly I don't know from the that the left
Starting point is 01:42:55 And I'd like to call them liberal and if my wife watches this I mean, I'll make a point because she'll be happy is that the left isn't really liberal liberal means small government Liberal means the government stays out of liberal. Liberal means small government. Liberal means the government stays out of things. That's where it got started. But Roosevelt, when the women started to vote, he basically started talking about liberal policies because the liberals were very charitable, but with their own money, not with other people's money. And so he started calling government welfare liberal when it wasn't. It's only private charity is liberal. Government charity is is theft. So they're
Starting point is 01:43:31 not really, they're not liberal in the classic sense. Like the founding fathers were all liberals, but they were for small government. They were for sound money and they didn't want welfare or Social Security or any of this stuff that is now associated with being liberal. But the left, everything that they kind of do economically has to do with feelings and emotion and their heart. And so they look at, here's somebody that's poor, oh, the government needs to solve this problem by creating a program and spending money. Now if you're a conservative libertarian, you still feel for that person who's poor, but you recognize that that government
Starting point is 01:44:12 program is actually going to make it worse. It's actually going to trap him in poverty. It's going to make it so he's always poor. You see the unintended consequences of the government action. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The Democrat doesn't realize that those good intentions are leading to hell, but their conservative Republican understands it. And so he's not in favor of these programs because he's rationalized that at the end of the day they do harm. But the Democrat doesn't know that.
Starting point is 01:44:43 He doesn't think past, behind, the the immediate this guy's poor and needs money right and so the the the Republican doesn't necessarily think the Democrat is a bad person it's just that they don't understand they don't get it they're not they don't get the economics they're just missing the connection so yes they're just they're just misinformed they're wrong missing uh... the connection so yes they're just a work they're just misinformed they're wrong but the democrat looks at the republican he's mean
Starting point is 01:45:09 he's heartless he doesn't want this program he must be a bad guy uh... so the left the left will just think that the right is mean and evil people uh... and you know the the the right of the simple the left is just misguided in and and misinformed but now you know you've got you've got it so crazy because of this new you know politically correct um woke uh ideology that has now captured the left and actually it turned it into something far worse
Starting point is 01:45:40 than it's ever been and far more polarizing. And I think even maybe a lot of it's splintering a lot of people on the left. I mean look at like Bill Maher, look at some of the stuff that that he says and he you know he's a Democrat but now he's starting to sound more libertarian on a lot of things because he's getting pushed out of that spectrum by the the woke stuff. He'll still vote for Biden. He'll still vote for Biden. Last one I'll at least. Reverse market crash. What happens if Powell Q3 starts lowering interest rates and he lowers it three times? What happens to the market? Well, first of all, you know, instead of trying to figure out when the Fed's going to cut rates, we should be asking, well,
Starting point is 01:46:22 why have, why did they stop hiking them? We need higher rates. It's obvious that we need higher rates. Inflation is still way above their so-called 2% target. And first of all, where did this 2% target come from? The only time they ever started talking about a 2% target is when we were below it. So if you go back to before the 2008 financial crisis, no Fed chairman ever talked about a target for 2% inflation. The only reason they started talking about a 2% target was when it was 1%. So they were looking for
Starting point is 01:46:54 an excuse to create more inflation and so they said we need 2%. But the way they got that 2% number, it came out of New Zealand. And the New Zealand Central Bank was the first central bank to have an official inflation number, but it wasn't a target, it was a ceiling. The New Zealand Central Bank, by law, had to keep inflation below 2%, not at 2%, but below it. So 1% was fine. A half a percent was fine. If you had a half a percent inflation, it didn't mean you had to try to raise the rate to 2%. It just meant that you didn't have to fight the inflation
Starting point is 01:47:33 because you were good, because you were below 2%. The idea that we need 2% inflation is a lie. Why? Why do prices have to go up 2%? I'd rather them go down 2%. Everybody wants prices to go down. That's how our standard ruling goes up. We can buy more things with less money So the Fed made this whole thing up to justify An inflationary monetary policy we can do QE We can keep interest rates at zero because inflation is still below 2%
Starting point is 01:48:02 Forgetting about the fact that it never was because the whole CPI is a lie anyway, it was always above two percent, but now they've created so much inflation, we're so far above two percent and we're never going back down there. We're just going higher and higher and higher. So we need higher interest rates. If the Fed actually delivers the rate cuts, it's going to throw gasoline on the inflation fire
Starting point is 01:48:23 and it's going to get worse. And you know, ironically, if you raise interest rates a little bit, but not enough, you actually make inflation at least worse. Because if I'm a businessman, I got costs. I got raw material costs. I got labor costs. I got rent. How do I recover these costs? Well, I've got to pass them on to the customer in higher prices Well, what if I have debt a lot of businesses have borrowed money. Well interest rates go up. Well, that's another cost
Starting point is 01:48:54 That's part of my cost of doing business I got to pass that on to my customers or what if you're a landlord and I own property but I also have a mortgage on the property and now my mortgage rate goes up because commercial real estate isn't tied up with a 30-year mortgage. Most of that mortgage is five, ten-year maturity, got to be refinanced. So I'm a landlord, all of a sudden my interest costs have gone way up. What am I gonna do? I got to raise my rents. So rising interest rates are just part of the prices that are rising that need to be passed on to consumers The Fed needs to raise rates much higher than that because they have to bend the demand curve
Starting point is 01:49:32 They got to stop the borrowing and stop the spending and they got to increase savings investment and we're not even close So the Fed cuts rates now plus I think that'll really clobber the dollar and accelerate the dollars fall which of course you know pushes up commodity prices faster it prop you know pushes up the prices of all of our imports because now the dollar had you know is lower value versus uh... the currencies of our trading partners i think it'll be a mistake for the feds start cutting rates
Starting point is 01:50:00 uh... so they might not do it brandon way but but but they don't want to stop talking about it because the other thing they don't want to stop talking about it. Because the other thing they don't want to do is tell the markets the truth that they should be raising rates. Because the whole market is propped up now based on the expectation of these rate cuts. Like they're coming, they're coming, they're waiting for these cuts. They may be waiting for Godot to get these cuts, but the key is when are they going to
Starting point is 01:50:22 hike rates? That's what they should be doing and they need to go a lot higher because what they've done so far is completely inadequate Powell keeps saying we have restrictive monetary policy Gold is telling you we have loose monetary policy and if you look at all the accumulation of debt You don't have all this debt with tight money all this debt is being accumulated because money is still too easy. So Peter, what about the other side of that though, like in a deflationary death spiral as they call it, like in Japan or what's happening in China right now, like the arguments that prices start going down, businesses have to lower their prices and they start laying people off, and
Starting point is 01:51:01 that's a whole difficult situation to get themselves out of, like what we saw Japan after the bubble we Saw our scene in China right now. So what about like inflation versus deflation? Well, I mean first of all Japan is not having that Japan has inflation I mean even the way they reported it's in the forest that you know that they kept yes But the idea that deflation is bad is nonsense I mean if you look at the CPI in the US in 1800 and they look at it in 1900, prices were down 50% over a hundred years.
Starting point is 01:51:31 So that's a hundred years of deflation, yet we had the Industrial Revolution. The most prosperous period of time in America as far as economic growth was actually between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the First World War. So during that period we've never seen a period since where we had more economic growth than we did then. And so that was with falling prices. There's nothing wrong with prices coming down because every businessman, if I'm a businessman, I want to lower my prices because I'll sell more stuff. So I'm always trying to figure out how can I cut my prices? How can I be more efficient? How can I ring some costs out of this?
Starting point is 01:52:11 manufacturing process so that I can lower my prices and make more money because you you do greater volume at a lower price and As long as my margins can stay the same or improve Then everybody wins from from lower prices. Now sure, I'd like to just jack my prices up, but I have competition, so I can't do that. So how do I get people to buy from me instead of my competitor? By lowering my price, not by raising my price.
Starting point is 01:52:38 So I have to become more efficient to do that. So capitalism is an engine for falling prices. And that is good, the consumer wins. So this is an engine for falling prices and that is good that consumer wins. So this is all a bunch of nonsense that we need rising prices and that somehow if prices go down it's gonna be a disaster. I mean think about that right now prices have gone up so much in the last two or three years. Wouldn't it be good if they went down? Yeah. But the Fed is not talking about prices going down. They just want prices to rise more slowly, but that means they still go up. So if prices
Starting point is 01:53:09 are too high right now, why do I want them to go up? I mean, I want them to come down, but that's totally off the table because what the government is really trying to do is inflate because inflation is a benefit to debtors. Inflation transfers wealth from creditors to debtors, right? Because you inflate away the value of the obligations. Mm-hmm. The world's biggest debtor, I mean, maybe the universe is biggest debtor. I don't know if there's a, if you can, if there's life on another planet, I doubt there's any entity that has more debt than the United States on that planet.
Starting point is 01:53:43 But, so, we have, the US government owes more than anybody. Yeah, so it has more to gain from inflation than anybody Oh, it constantly pursues inflation as a policy So aren't we isn't that like a built-in thing though with the reserve currency that you have to be at a deficit so that you could Supply the rest of the role with your currency. No because we were the reserve currency in the 1960s, 1970s, most of the 1980s, and we had trade surpluses during those years. So we don't have to. Have you ever heard of Triffin's Dilemma? What's that? Triffin's Dilemma. So it's the argument that like we're serving two purposes at once, where we're trying to give the rest of the
Starting point is 01:54:22 world enough money for the world economy to function because it needs dollars. Well they don't really need dollars. What's a dollar? It's just a piece of paper. Well it's what the rest of the world uses for everything. Well they're going to stop doing that. But ultimately you have to realize that those dollars represent IOUs.
Starting point is 01:54:39 That ultimately those dollars are spendable in America. And we basically get everything repossessed. I mean we have been exporting our inflation. We're now the world's biggest debtor nation. As late as the 1980s we were the world's biggest creditor nation and we've dissipated that wealth and now we were you know we're in the hawk up to our eyeballs But the reality is we can't make good these IOUs because we don't have the productive capacity anymore. We don't have the factories.
Starting point is 01:55:11 They used to be here, but because the dollar has been the reserve currency and we've been able to rely on that, we've been able to buy stuff that's manufactured in China as opposed to having to manufacture it ourselves. And it's a lot easier to print money than manufacture goods. And so we outsourced all that manufacturing to China. But what did we give them for their goods? We just gave them pieces of paper. But at the end of the day, when they want to buy something with that paper, there's
Starting point is 01:55:40 nothing to buy except our financial assets. They can buy our real estate. They can buy our stocks But then you know, that's just prices go up and inflation, you know runs rampant because right now that money is just sitting in Treasuries or something like that But if the Chinese spend it and they go and they buy a house or they you know buy stock They pay the American those dollars those dollars go back into our economy meeting up prices And so we exported our inflation for all these years. It's gonna it's gonna come back like a tsunami Well, but that's part of the reason though So like if you're a Chinese citizen
Starting point is 01:56:13 Obviously, it's a safer bet to invest in America rather than you know investing in Chinese real estate where they've overbuilt by like the size of the population There's that many empty houses or can't trust the stock market market It's hard to even get your money out of the country so, you know I guess that's the argument for why you want to be outside of China and like in the dollar and it makes it I mean Isn't the dollar sort of like oxygen to the world economy or no, I I think it's more toxic I mean, I think you know, the world has gotten addicted to this system and they're weaning themselves off of it But I think it's a major mistake. I think one of the reasons there's these global economic imbalances is because of the dollar being the reserve currency. We've basically
Starting point is 01:56:57 What's the word I'm looking for, but we've exploited or you know, we've taken advantage of that position that we were in, and we've run these huge deficits and allowed our economy to, you know, really, you know, change and restructure away from manufacturing to just services. And that is unsustainable because we can't pay for our imported goods with our services. And that is unsustainable because we can't pay for our imported goods with our services. We need real goods that we can export. I mean, some services you can provide and export but clearly not enough. You need to make real stuff and we can't do that. And we now owe so much money to so many countries. mean we're in debt to every country and you know The countries that we owe money to are a lot poorer most of the most of the cases than we are, right?
Starting point is 01:57:51 so that I mean you we owe a lot of money to people and We can't pay all we could do is go deeper and deeper into debt. And so the question is You know how much longer? Can we borrow money when the lenders know we can't pay? And I've talked to people who say, well, we don't even have to pay the money back. And I would say, well, do our lenders know that? I mean, how is it a loan if we don't have to pay it back? I mean, we run the national debt the way Bernie Madoff ran his business.
Starting point is 01:58:22 That's why I used to joke that instead of putting him in jail, we should have made him Secretary of the Treasury because he has a lot of experience in running a Ponzi scheme because that's what we're doing. Every time they have one of these Treasury bond auctions, and there's auctions all the time now, why are we doing that? We're holding auctions so that we can repay the maturing debt. We don't have the money to repay the people who loaned it to us. We have to find new borrowers to lend it to us so we can pay them. And if we can't go deeper into debt, then we can't pay off. That's why whenever we get to the debt ceiling, they always say, well, if we don't raise the debt ceiling, we're going to default. That's an admission that it's a Ponzi scheme. They don't say, well, if we
Starting point is 01:59:03 don't raise the debt ceiling will raise taxes We'll cut spending. We'll find a way to pay Legitimately, they say if we don't raise the debt ceiling We're not gonna pay back any of the people who loaned us money and it's ironic because they keep saying America always pays its bills. So we have to raise the debt ceiling No, we have to raise the debt ceiling because we never paid our bills. If we paid our bills, we wouldn't have any debt. The reality is, in order to keep not paying our bills, we have to raise the debt ceiling. And of course, we will keep raising the debt ceiling. That's not the key. The key is, when do the foreigners refuse
Starting point is 01:59:38 to raise the lending ceiling? When do they say, we're not lending you any more money? And I think that's coming soon at the way the cost, you know, right now it's about a trillion dollars a year to pay the interest on the national, forget about the 35 trillion in principle. It's a trillion a year in interest. So interest expenses are the third biggest lie on it, but past the fence in another couple of years, it'll be number one. It'll be bigger than Social Security or Medicare. Passing entitlements. Yeah, and a few years after that, interest will consume 100% of government tax revenue. Which means all of our taxes will go to just paying interest on the debt, not paying down the principal, just the interest.
Starting point is 02:00:22 Assuming the rates are the same. Yeah, or or they go up which they should well the crazy thing and and there's no money for anything else The government is just a conduit to take money from the taxpayers and pay our credit So obviously it can't get there and the lenders know that it can't get there. They got a stop-lend. That's what dude That's why they're buying gold right now. They can read the writing on the wall. I mean, they wrote it and they don't want to wait for that moment. They want to preempt it. They're getting quietly out of dollars and they're buying as much gold as they can. Well, why is there still massive demand though at all the Treasury auctions? Because we've never had a problem selling Treasuries and some would argue that, well, I mean, Treasuries are the preferred collateral in the world and they're
Starting point is 02:01:04 collateral for pretty much any serious yeah I mean there is you know and then the argument is you know we're the cleanest dirty shirt in the hamper which I don't buy I mean I think there's you know there's cleaner I think they're all dirty that's true but I think that there are a lot of governments that have better financial positions than the United States and so you know you could buy their bonds but they say all the bonds the market is not as liquid It's not as big. Yeah, because we have so much debt But I don't know what the you know, aha Emperor has no close
Starting point is 02:01:36 Moment will be but look it always happens right? I mean, I remember, you know the subprime trade when we were short the market and I mean, I remember, you know, the subprime trade when we were short the market and When subprime started to blow up and a couple of big lenders failed I had expected the bonds to collapse but they didn't they stayed above par and You know because people still hadn't figured it out but when it collapsed it only took a few days and then they went to zero and you know, I live in Puerto Rico and took a few days and then they went to zero. And you know, I live in Puerto Rico and Puerto Rico went through a debt crisis, were basically defaulted, but for years and years and years Puerto Rico was borrowing all this money and it should have been obvious that they could never pay it back, but they didn't care. All these funds wanted to load up on Puerto
Starting point is 02:02:20 Rican bonds. They were triple tax free. They were tax free in the U.S. They were tax free in all the states. So all these bond funds wanted to put these Puerto Rican bonds, they were triple tax free, they were tax free in the US, they were tax free in all the states, so all these bond funds wanted to put these Puerto Rican bonds in their portfolios, and they didn't really care that Puerto Rico obviously, you know, just doing the math, had no way of paying it back, but they kept borrowing and borrowing and borrowing until all of a sudden people cared and then it was a crisis. Same thing happened in like Greece, I mean, you can get away with it until you can't. And the same thing is gonna happen with the United States, just taking longer, but we're gonna be able
Starting point is 02:02:53 to refinance the debt until we can. And when we can't, then it's a crisis. And it's not like, oh, we have time to fix it. If you wait for the market to do it, it's too late. So we should already be looking forward to that and drastically cutting spending, raising taxes, doing something to correct this imbalance. But no, we're going to wait until the market causes a crisis. And you get Greece. Yeah. Although I think we we're gonna be worse. I mean, you know And because the Greece didn't have the reserve currency, you know Greece's whole economy wasn't built on this
Starting point is 02:03:33 On this premise, you know our economy would not look like this but for the reserve status of the dollar Well, then well then Greece is a good example because it shows you without any alternatives how fast and how bad everything can get yes It can it can go from everything seeming. Okay to a Collapse look I mean sometimes you just look superficially like you could you know termites can eat The wood in a house right up to the paint and you could be staring at a house It's about to collapse and you don't realize it until it collapses, right? Uh, and so we have a a facade, you know, people think the economy is in good shape because everybody is spending money
Starting point is 02:04:14 uh, but they don't look at what's really going on beneath the surface where the money's coming from and And and the sustainability of the dead and the money printing Uh, but all of a sudden, you know, it's going to be like the emperor has no clothes. And there's probably other people that can see it, but they don't admit it, they don't acknowledge it, but at some point something is going to happen and it's all going to implode. You know, and of course they're going to say, oh, nobody could have seen this coming. It came out of left field, 100 year flood,
Starting point is 02:04:45 just like they did with the 2008 financial crisis, nobody could have predicted it. When of course it was easily, easy to predict it. What was hard was predicting when. It's easy to see what's going to happen, you just don't know when because a lot of things could happen to intervene to extend it. And that's the same thing that's happening now. The crisis that we're going to have is obvious. It's more obvious than the 08 financial crisis. It's just taking longer for it to manifest, but it's going to be a lot worse as a result of how long we've kicked the can down the road. Because by doing that, we just allow all the problems that we need to fix to get worse. Got it.
Starting point is 02:05:29 Great conversation, Peter. Really enjoyed it. Thanks for coming out. Is there anything you want to drive the audience to? Is there a website that you want them to go to? Is that the one, Rob? Well thanks for asking. So that is the Shift Radio.
Starting point is 02:05:44 So I do my own podcast. I don't have a fanciest studio. Although I built a beautiful... You look like an actor in that picture. I can fix up. I got to get my desk. But I built a standalone studio that's actually larger than this in Puerto Rico. And we also use it for music recording. But that's the Peter Shift Show podcast. I do one or two, sometimes three episodes in a week. So you can go listen at SchiffRadio.com, which is what that is, or you can go to my YouTube channel and listen to them there.
Starting point is 02:06:15 I do them live now, so it's video on YouTube. But the important sites to remember are my asset management business. That's Europac.com, E-U-R-O-P-A-C.com. That's my Puerto Rican-based registered investment advisor. So if you have a brokerage account, a portfolio, you know, we can manage it for you, get it out of, you know, overpriced U.S. assets, build a diversified portfolio of value stocks, dividend-pay paying stocks, get
Starting point is 02:06:45 you involved in the mining sector. You're back on the Peter Schiff show. That's the Europeac.com website. Get a ride, Rob. I mean, what are we doing, Rob? Seriously. You can give us a call. You can fill out that little form, the sign up, free report and stuff, and one of the
Starting point is 02:07:02 reps will get ahold of you. It's a fee based model. We manage accounts. You could transfer in, you know IRAs as well I also run if you click on funds, you know services look at mutual funds We have five mutual funds that I manage that you can actually buy those funds at any of the major Discount brokerage firms you can buy them all load, and that means I'll be managing your portfolio through those funds, wherever you have them. And then the other website is Shift Gold, which is my last name, shiftgold.com, and that's my precious metals business, and I recommend that everybody owns some physical precious metals. I regard that not as an investment, as a form of savings, it's an alternative to saving
Starting point is 02:07:52 dollars or euros or yen. It's a good store of value, although right now I think it's still unique because I think gold and silver are underpriced. So I do think that there's a big repricing of those metals that's going to take place. So normally, gold and silver would be a store of value, but I actually think you can generate a lot of value by buying them now because I think eventually a lot more people are going to buy them, but it's going to be at much, much higher prices. So you can make money in gold and silver.
Starting point is 02:08:23 You can make even more money, I think, if you're going to go into the mining sector you're taking more risk but I think you have significant upside if I'm right because what's hurt the miners over the past you know 10-20 years you know the cost of mining gold has gone way up most gold stocks are making less money mining $2,000 gold than they did mining $500 gold. And that's because the energy costs and the labor costs and other costs have gone up so much and so gold stocks have kind of been an ironic victim of inflation because inflation is driven up mining costs faster than the gold price. Well I think gold is about to
Starting point is 02:09:01 catch up. I think gold is going to soar in relation to other prices, and that's going to deliver a windfall to these mining companies. And in fact, a lot of their gold that they don't even think has value because it costs too much to extract it, all that gold is suddenly going to be very valuable because it's going to be worth digging it up because the price is going to be so much higher. So I think that people can make tremendous gains in the gold stocks, especially the junior miners. And so I have a gold, a gold fund, the Europe Pacific Gold Fund managed by Adrian Day. You can buy that
Starting point is 02:09:36 anywhere or you can... We'll put all the links to all of that below. Everybody will be able to fund. We'll put every single one of those links below and I trust those guys know how to sell as good as you know how to sell. they give it a call and learn more they will be available Peter Thank you so much for coming out gang take care everybody. We will do this again. I believe tomorrow morning We have sage steel here with us We're gonna ask her about what she thought Joe Rogan's dreams really were take everybody bye bye bye

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