PBD Podcast - Will Bitcoin Replace Gold? w/ Peter Schiff | PBD Podcast | Ep. 393
Episode Date: April 11, 2024Patrick 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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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.
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,
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
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,
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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?
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
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
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
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
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?
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.
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
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.
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
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They've earned a five-star rating from thousands of reviews and an A plus from the Better Business
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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.
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
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.
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,
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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?
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They took over the bank 21 months ago,
almost 22 months ago, and over that period of time,
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
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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,
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
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.
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
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,
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
$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,
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.
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
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
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
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...
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,
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
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.
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
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?
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
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
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,
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
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
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,
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
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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?
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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,
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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?
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.
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
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
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,
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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?
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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
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?
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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?
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
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.
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,
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,
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
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
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
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.
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
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,
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,
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
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
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,
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.
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,
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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,
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
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
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%
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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?
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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