Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Stories of Week 6/19: Recession Coming, Uvalde Coverup, Ukraine War Sanctions, Fed Policy, & More!

Episode Date: June 24, 2022

Krystal and Saagar talk about the coming recession, Uvalde coverup, Krystal on Maher, Putin mocking Biden, war sanctions, primary results, Fed policy, & more!To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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out. Good morning, everybody. Happy Monday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. Lots of stuff that is breaking this morning. First of all, we have some new comments from some of our leaders, including President Biden, about whether or not we might be heading towards a recession. Very telling comments indeed. We also have a new union, Apple Store Workers Outside of Maryland. Big deal. Forming Apple's very first union, So that is exciting. We'll give you those details there and whether or not the fact that the economy is sliding off of a cliff may

impact that wave of labor organizing. We also have some, I mean, you just can't make it up, the stuff that continues to come out of Uvalde. Cover up. Now they are. I mean, it really is like a whole of state cover up at this point from the governor all the way down to the local officials trying to keep the public from ever seeing body cam footage. But we do have some sources within the investigation revealing some important details, some new lies about exactly what went down on that horrific day. We're also learning more about just how screwed up the airline system is. Price gouging, scheduling flights that they know they have no prayer of ultimately staffing. We also have Pete Buttigieg in a position to potentially do something about

it and basically not acting. So we'll take you through that. You guys probably also saw President Biden taking a spill off his bike. It appears to be fine, but raising new questions about whether or not he should run again in 2024, if that's the Democrats' best chance. And we also have some new troubling developments in Julian Assange's case. They're continuing, you know, the U.S. and the U.K. government continuing to push for him to be extradited here. So we've got all of that for you. Also, Peter Zaihan going to be back here again. Of course, there are a lot of things that he can get into, but we want to focus in particular on how we may be entering a new phase where inflation is a lot higher than it used to be as globalization sort of is going away in certain respects. So it would be interesting to talk to him. But we wanted to start with these latest comments.

With regards to the recession, we heard from Janet Yellen. She's, of course, the Treasury Secretary, about whether or not she thought there would be a recession and also how long she thinks inflation is going to hang around. Let's take a listen to that. I don't think a recession is at all inevitable. Chair Powell, clearly inflation is unacceptably high. It's President Biden's top priority to bring it down. And Chair Powell has said that his goal is to bring inflation down while maintaining a strong labor market. That's going to take skill and luck, but I believe it's possible. I don't think a recession is inevitable. Prices are going to go up before they go down, right? Again, most economists expect

the inflation rate to move up to around 7% by the end of the year. Does that sound expect in the months ahead that the pace of inflation is likely to come down. Although, remember, there are so many uncertainties relating to global developments. So there's a lot to read between the lines here. I mean, first of all, it's never a good situation when you're using language like, well, it's not inevitable. It's like, OK, so what are we talking like a 5% chance it, a 1% chance of avoiding it? So there's that. And then there's also the fact that, you know, in spite of the fact the Fed's taking some pretty extraordinary action now, increasing the level and the pace at which they're lifting interest rates, there's still every expectation that inflation is going to continue at least through this year. And what

does that mean? That means the Fed will continue to act and potentially continue to escalate those actions. Ultimately, since that's basically the only thing that we're doing to tame inflation, that means they are coming after, you know, you, your ability to buy a house. They've said outright they want to get wages down. They want to cool off the labor market. We'll get to in a little bit when we talk about unionizing. I mean, that is part of what has enabled a lot of the activism across the country. So yes, of course, we have to get inflation under control because it is devastating working class people. But when we only lean on the Fed to do it, we leave a lot of things off the table. And by the way, where we are at this point, a lot of that, you know, to the extent that the extra stimmy checks in the accounts and whatever help to spike inflation, a lot of that is burned off. There are a lot of other issues that we're facing that are causing inflation.

The Fed has nothing to do with it. Yeah, I mean, we see that all in the credit card data. We see it in all the increased borrowing and the cooling off of the housing market. Even in terms of demand, Americans are beginning to curb both restaurant and gas use, meaning that quality of life is declining. And I'm not saying it's a right, but anytime that you have to have to diminish your quality of life

in order to make basic ends meet, viral videos going around of people saying, I gotta choose between food or gas this week. I mean, that is a horrific position in order to be in. You also see that the talking point originated with Biden himself. Let's put this up there on the screen. He did his first sit-down interview, finally, with the Associated Press, only 30 minutes. But actually, he was pressed on inflation. Here's what he said. First of all, it's not inevitable whenever it comes to the recession. So we see

that that bled into the Treasury Secretary's comments. Secondly, he says, quote, we're in a stronger position than any nation in the world to overcome this inflation. Then he pivoted to defending himself and saying that we have the strongest job market since World War II, and that we have 3.6% unemployment rate and talked about wages. I don't know why they continue to go to this post-World War II talking point. You know, this is a good parallel, actually. Consumer sentiment post-World War II was actually terrible. We had very high inflation a good parallel, actually. Consumer sentiment post-World War II was actually terrible. We had very high inflation at that time, and Truman nearly got kicked out of office for it because there was massive chaos in the labor market. Because once again, global

events, you come out of a crisis, it spikes huge problems, and it sparks real questions like, what exactly are we going to do as an economy, and how are we going to conduct commerce coming out of this? And Biden doesn't have an actual answer for that. And this just gets to what you're pointing to. There's only two ways really to quote unquote solve inflation. You can induce a recession, which is basically what the Fed has decided to do, or you can try and deal with many of the supply side factors. Well, guess what is much, much harder to do both politically, but would actually solve the key problem in the future because this is the thing, even with inducing a recession. Recession to the extent that it can, quote, solve inflation, that just means that you're going to reduce demand for everything across the board and hurt all business.

Okay, I mean, I guess that means the price is down, but, you know, 1979 was a miserable year. 1980, we actually went into one of the most painful recessions since the Great Depression in 1981, which is a direct result of the Federal Reserve. And to the extent that inflation was even, quote, solved after that, it was mostly a result of the global cooling off on the oil markets and learning how to deal with OPEC, the Iranian Revolution, and all of that. So even there, the Iran-Iraq war probably had more to do with solving inflation than the actual Federal Reserve. I'm reading a book about the 70s right now, so very well read up on this. Well, yeah, and Sagar will be talking more about

that in his monologue, the parallels are, we've both been pretty fascinated by the parallels lately, because even within like the left group in fighting, there were parallels, and there's just a lot of strange parallels going on. But yeah, I mean, there was one other detail in this interview with Biden that's a little bit of an aside. But I think the audience would be interested in it, which is remember how they hung the portrait of FDR in the White House. And this was a signal of like, I get it. And I get the challenge. And we're going to have a new, new deal.

And I'm taking on the mantle of Roosevelt. Well, you learn in this interview that he actually had nothing to do with it. It was, I guess, John Meacham that hung it there. And he looked at it and said, why Franklin Roosevelt? Not that I don't like Franklin Roosevelt, but why put that big portrait of Franklin Roosevelt? And Meacham said, no one ever inherited that kind of big circumstances and dire, more dire straits than he did that last time. And I said, oh, that's encouraging. So anyway, apparently Biden never really embraced this FDR thing. I think that's pretty clear at this point. But go ahead and put this next tear sheet up on the screen because this article, I really recommend people actually go and read the whole thing. It's

from David Lynch at the Washington Post. Fed's interest rate hikes may mark start of tough new economic climate. And I'll read you a little bit of this. So they said, for 40 years now, the formula for U.S. economic growth has been the same, cheap money. And that has been led by the Fed. Consumers could borrow easily to buy homes and cars. Companies, whether profitable or not, could tap bond investors for cash to fund their operations. Washington could afford to bail on both Wall Street, Main Street by running eye-popping budget deficits made possible by borrowed funds. Now, with the end of that easy money regime, you're in a very, very different era. So, I mean, you remember not that long ago, the sort of conventional wisdom was

stock market only goes up. And you can understand why people felt that way, because we had a crash during the coronavirus crisis, but it was very short because immediately the Fed leaps into action to backstop everything. And so even as much of the economy was on hold, I mean, people were at home, there was very little that was actually happening. The stock market kept going up and up and up. So you were seeing these twin headlines of like, you know, massive unemployment, massive numbers of people filing for unemployment claims, and yet stock market at record levels. So there was just very recently this assumption that, oh, you can't lose, right? I mean, this thing is, it was fake. It was

completely divorced from any kind of reality. It was backstopped and propped up by the Fed. Now that's being pulled back. And so we're going to talk in a minute. Of course, crypto has taken it on the chin. But you had asset bubbles in basically every category. Now the air is coming out of the tires in every single way. That is leading to a very new reality. I mean, you've had, they say now the total value of debt that's considered distressed by S&P global ratings has nearly doubled over the past month to $49 billion. That includes securities for companies that you know and have heard very much about, Rite Aid, Bed Bath & Beyond, they mentioned. So, you know, this is a pretty extraordinary shift.

And I think it really remains to be seen how the economy handles it because we've had effectively zero interest rates for the Fed more or less for quite a while now, certainly the last decade. The amount that they have propped up these asset classes has been extraordinary. By the way, that's part of what Fed inflation, I know everybody loves to talk about what went to consumers and regular working class people, but there was far more money, trillions of dollars, that was injected in to backstop the markets. That fed inflation, ultimately. It also fed massive inequality. And so now as they try to unwind that, it's going to be, you may not have benefited from

that on the way up, but it is going to be pain all the way around if the only way we can get out of this cycle is for the Fed to trigger a recession, which is where we're headed. Yeah, and I just – emphasizing again, there's actually a decent quote here by the chief research officer at Barclays Bank where she's like, look, the truth is that the economy – this economy is designed to run off of low interest rates. And so we are reshaping the fundamentals of all of the Fortune 500 companies and the way that they are going to have to behave all the way from the fact is now that higher interest rates mean that they are going to have to spend more in paying down their debt. Two, they're not going to be able to freely borrow in order to invest in any of their actual resources, in capital, both in equipment. Their expenditures are going to be able to probably going to go down as a result of this.

This also means, though, that they have to protect their stock price. To protect their stock price, there is only one way to do that whenever money is expensive to borrow. You have to cut cost, which will mean you have to either cut wages or not give wage increases to keep pace with inflation, or you have to fire people. And unfortunately, I think that's the direction that we're going to be heading in. And it really is a result of government policy and of the Federal Reserve. It will have broad impacts on everybody's retirement portfolios, on your ability to borrow. More importantly for all of you, I think we're listening to the show, is just the sheer ability in order to get hired and the labor market mobility that we saw over the last two years, which was extraordinary. And we're about to get to the labor

movement. It could cripple the labor movement. You know, if you see unemployment tick up, which is the explicit goal of the Federal Reserve right now. Well, what does that mean? I mean, it means that you're going to have less of a competitive of a job market. So you put all that together and it's a grim picture for people. I don't think there's another way to say it. There's no doubt about it. And, you know, all that, the froth and the excess that were in the markets that fed things like these zombie companies, which are losing money every single quarter. But because they can borrow money so cheaply, they're able to make their interest payments and kind of continue to limp along. You had the massive growth of these SPACs,

special purpose acquisition companies. These are, they call them blank check shell corporations, you know, that avoid a lot of regulation, a lot of those sort of spectacularly failed. And so because you had these massive trillions injected into the market in this way, you created all of these things that now are being pulled back dramatically. And I don't think anyone knows exactly how this is going to play out because we've never been in exactly this place before, even though there are a lot of parallels with the 70s. We've not ever been exactly in this place before. And Sagar, something you've been pointing to is the consumer sentiment. I mean, if you just ask the American people how they're feeling about things, it is not good at

all. Go ahead and put this up on the screen. You can see the best sentiment here they show in this chart, they say was in 2000. And this goes back to, it looks like about 1950. Yeah. The worst sentiment is now. Yeah. Right now. So worst sentiment now than even during, you know, financial crash 2008, 2009. And the 1970s of high inflation. And the 1970s. This is literally the worst consumer sentiment on record in the United States.

And people just don't seem to grapple with that. It's why Putin's price hike doesn't land. It's why best economy since's price hike doesn't land. It's why best economy since World War II doesn't land. Unless you are speaking to that sentiment, you are not going to be a successful politician. And Biden, the administration, they have no answer for this. They continue to just be dawdling. They don't appear in step with the broad problem of Americans. We've been saying this now for what, a year? It's like, I don't appear in step with the broad problem of Americans. I've been saying this now. We've been saying this now for what, a year?

It's like I don't know how long it takes to learn, and I get these stupid leaks coming out of the White House. Jeff Stein had a story over the weekend about how one idea was to give people gas rebates in order to spend on gas, which would have been a problem given that you don't deal with supply. But they couldn't even do that. Why? Because we don't have enough semiconductor chips in order to make that happen. So even their stupid idea is not actionable because of a supply problem that they also – and Congress refuses to address. It's too perfect. And then there's also just – this is another thing that Jeff Stein tweeted.

They've been considering this for four months. Oh, my God. Four months. And they're still apparently considering it. It's like, shit or get off the pot. I mean, honestly. It doesn't matter.

I mean, think about this, not just on this, a student loan debt, like all these things, they float them, they think about, they agonize them.

It's like, Jesus Christ, people are suffering now. Take, even if it's experimental, like, I mean, this is part of what FDR did.

It was like, we're just gonna throw everything against the wall. We're gonna figure out what works, what doesn't work, but we're gonna act. We're against the wall. We're going to figure out what works, what doesn't work, but we're going to act. We're going to try things. We're going to be creative and think outside the box. And I think that more than anything has hamstrung him.

Because if you look at the trajectory of his entire career, what has he always done? I mean, he's always tried to locate himself in the safest, most centrist part of the Democratic Party. And there's no answers there for a situation like this. I mean, that's why his only move here, he put on his op-ed of, oh, here's my plan, et cetera, et cetera. It boiled down to, eh, leave it to the Fed. Leave it to the Fed. That's it. And the only thing the Fed can really do is trigger a recession that massively hurts you and doesn't even deal with the real core of the reasons that we ended up in this situation in the first place. It is a sad, sad state of affairs, ultimately. Yeah, that's right. Let's talk about Uvalde. So, some new and interesting revelations. Let's start with the first and the foremost, which is that,

let's put this on the screen, Uvalde and Uvalde Police have hired a private law firm to fight against being required to release body camera footage and other records related to the school shooting. They say that files could be highly embarrassing and involve emotional and mental distress. I mean, I think it probably caused more emotional mental distress whenever little children were killed because you weren't doing your job. And the city is now working with this law form to not just release body camera footage, which, I mean, I guess you could make an argument about that, but this is specifically about all records related to the mass shooting. This is a letter that they were actually given in response to public information requests. Obviously, reporters and everyone else across

Texas has been trying to FOIA body camera footage, photos, 911 calls, emails, text messages, criminal records, and everything. And they are blocking every possible thing that they can, because the city has not voluntarily released one scrap of information as a result of this. And here's the thing, which is that the city is now actually asking Ken Paxton, who's the attorney general, who we'll get to, for a determination on what information is required to release to the public, which apparently is the standard practice in the state of Texas. So the Texas AG now has the ability to determine which and any, if all, records should be released. They're hiding and

fighting behind this lawsuit. Meanwhile, the Texas Attorney General and the governor have the ability right now in order to release all of this to the public, which it certainly should be, in order to make these gentlemen be held to account. Remember that guy, Pete Arradondo, the chief of Uvalde's CISD police? He remains completely unavailable to the public. He's been dodging reporters. Their hope is all of us will just completely move on. At the same time, the San Antonio Express doing some great journalism here, let's throw this on the screen, they have a source which says that the police never tried to open the door to the classrooms where the Uvalde gunmen had kids trapped. Now, we had some indications of this in the official timeline that was given eventually

that came out on how they were all holding outside, about how eventually Border Patrol had to ask and go and get the key in order to try and enter the classroom. But this makes it official. Surveillance videos show they did not try even once in order to open the door to the classrooms where the gunman had the kids

trapped for 77 minutes. There also are major questions here. Why was that door unlocked in the first place in addition to the back door? Remember, originally, the cops tried to blame a teacher. They were like, oh, a teacher put a brick or something in the door while they went to go get their cell phone out of their car. No, surveillance video and the lawyers of the teacher contested that. And it's been confirmed now that she actually closed the door. She didn't do anything wrong. And they show also that perhaps the classroom door had been both unlocked during the classroom, but also the school door. And all of this just points to not only total and gross incompetence on behalf of the police officers, but now full-fledged cover-up by the state.

No, that's right. And it's at every level. And remember this dude, Pete Arradano, he's now on the city council. Yes, right. So he's involved in making these decisions at the city level as well in terms of how they're going to approach this and what they're ultimately going to release. But it sure appears like from the bottom all the way to the governor, we're going to get to the AG and the governor in just a moment, they want to completely stonewall the actual details of what happened that day coming out.

And we have already seen so many lies that they have had to pull back. You just have to wonder, like, what else could they possibly be hiding? Because this is complete insanity. I mean, this thing about the door, I'm just, I'm beside myself. Because Arradondo, remember his lawyer came out and said, oh, no, he was trying every key, and with every key was just prayerful and hopeful that it would unlock the door. Well, the way he said it, it made you think, right, that he was trying the keys on the door to the classroom the gunman actually is? No. According to this source, he was trying the keys on a different classroom door to see if he could find a master key that might unlock all of the doors, okay?

The doors, remember the gunman went into one classroom and then there was an adjoining door, so he was able to get into two classrooms and massacre almost all of the kids and the teachers that were in those two rooms. Well, one of them, it appears like, had malfunctioned and was unlocked. Because remember, these doors were all supposed to automatically lock once they're closed. Now, it looks like the way the gunman was able to get in is because one of these locks, the back door lock malfunctioned. Now one of these classroom door locks malfunctioned. So he was able to waltz right in. They're saying in the investigation that he would have been unlikely

to be able to lock that door himself from the inside. So the whole time the cops were standing outside the door, it was unlocked. All they had to do was turn the doorknob. I mean, that's just, I can't even believe every time we get a new revelation, I just cannot believe the callous, cowardice failures of every single one of these people. It's mind-boggling. And a police source actually says, surveillance video confirms that the officers all had access to a crowbar tool that could have opened the door to the classrooms. Right, so even if it was locked. Even if they wanted to. If you wanted to, you could have gone in there even if it was locked. Even if it was locked, they could have tried to blast away in there. They could have tried to open the door. They waited 77 minutes. I mean, all of this is just a massive screw-up.

Not even screw-up. I mean, willful, almost, incompetence. I don't even think we know the half of it yet. Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, the lengths they're going to to keep the body camera footage and all of this from coming out, I don't think we even know the half of it.

And one of the experts they point to as well said this is kind of the problem with the body-worn cameras. You know, the idea is this, like, police accountability. But in reality, oftentimes, it's the police departments themselves who basically get to decide what gets released and what doesn't. So, of course, in a situation where you had sketchy behavior or outright violations of their code of conduct or even illegal behavior, somehow the police department finds a way to say, oh, we'd love to, but we can't release that particular footage.

And, you know, that's part of the story of what's going on here, too. And then in terms of Ken Paxton, let's throw this on the screen. The Texas Attorney General says, well, God always has a plan whenever he's asked about the Uvalde shooting. Look, I just think that it points to this guy needs to step up for Texas. Him and Governor Abbott need to have a full-fledged actual investigation, get all of the records and the police footage, everything out, edit it together, and explain to the citizens of Texas what went wrong here. And this is not throwing everybody under know, everybody under the bus.

It's the people who are responsible. Root them out of government, throw their asses out of office, appoint new people. Frankly, Evaldi PD should probably be disbanded, at the very least, Evaldi CISD. And the state should step in. And, you know, we- Defund the Evaldi police, that's what you're saying? Well, I didn't say defund it. I said, take, take it away and put, you know, put some new people in there. And in the meantime, the Texas Department of Public Safety should step up. You know, even apparently the school itself has yet to reopen. I mean, there's just so much that needs to actually happen down there. And I think a lot of it is being forgotten. And I, unfortunately, you know, look, what happened is that we had a national

conversation or whatever about gun control. We have a supposed deal which may come by the end of this week. Looks like that's falling apart. Yeah, right. That looks like it's falling apart, which at the Texas GOP convention, as I said, you know, John Cornyn, I thought he was going to face some trouble over this. And he was booed on the stage and is apparently getting significant pushback over the red flag provisions of the law. But all of this has foregone that a lot of the public, I think, is still very interested in this. But I think the national media and the conversation is continuing to pass these kids by. And these are really the

most direct way that we can at least hold the people responsible for what they did. The very, very, very least that could possibly be done. And just to read you the whole Paxson quote here, because he got asked specifically by a pastor, what he would say to the victim's families. He says, I'd have to say, look, there's always a plan. I believe God always has a plan. Life is short no matter what it is. Come on, come on. And then the last piece of this is I think we did our best to give the governor, Greg Abbott, credit for admitting, you know, saying he was furious about the way that he had been misled because originally he came out and disseminated the lies that were being fed to him.

And you all know how that original timeline just completely fell apart. Multiple lies, multiple shifting storylines. So he says he's ultimately livid. We'll go ahead and put this piece up on the screen. So the Texas Tribune and ProPublica have submitted about 70 requests to state and local agencies for emergency response documentation surrounding the mass shooting at Robb Elementary. Most likely will not be released publicly for months if ever. Greg Abbott's office specifically and the Texas Department of Public Safety, the U.S. Marshal Service, and the city of Uvalde are asking the state's attorney general for permission to withhold records that may offer tangible answers to the contradictory

accounts. So again, whole of government cover-up from the local officials, the police department, the city council, all the way up to now we know the governor of Texas and the U.S. Marshal Service trying to block the release of records that would finally tell us the truth of what actually happened that day after being fed so many lies. Yeah, they need to, like I said, stand up for Texas, stand up and show the country, you know, what really happened here and try and take charge of the situation. So I just think it's such a catastrophe. We had a viral moment, Crystal, schooling some people on the Bill Maher real-time experience. Do you want to describe it for people before we throw to the clip? Yeah. So

as you guys probably know, I flew on to LA over the weekend and I went on real time with Bill Maher. It's such a, it's, I don't know why that just stresses me out. It's a very different audience. Yeah. There's a live audience and you fly all the way out there to do it. And you know that you got to be super, super punchy to get your points in because- It's like TV. Yeah, and you know it's also gonna be combative and confrontational, which stresses me out too. And we're so used to having the time and space- To talk.

To talk and go down any avenue we want and think out loud and kind of like, you know, and have things taken in good faith and all those things. And like this, you gotta be on and on. So I was extremely stressed out going into this. But ultimately, we talked some about January 6th, and that conversation was fine. I wanted to talk about some of the more underlying issues because that's what we do,

and there wasn't really the time and space for that. Then we got into inflation and I got very combative, I guess, with the, in my mind, very simplistic explanation that this is all just about the money that was given to working class people. And the point I wanted to make, which I think is something that you guys are familiar with watching this show, is, okay, we can talk about that. And I'm not dishonest enough to say that that has nothing to do with the inflation we're facing. But we just completely ignore the trillions of dollars that went to the top that helped to fuel inflation. Somehow that's fine. But God forbid you get a STEMI check in your bank account. So that was the point I was trying to make. And that was also the moment that has gone now at this point actually super viral. So let's take a look at that. Well, I mean, part of this inflationary problem is because we put too much money into the economy. There's way too much government spending, and that's why we have inflation.

So that's a large part of that. It's just basic economics. That is not basic economics. We had this thing called a pandemic. We had a supply chain crisis. And oh, by the way, there's a war in Ukraine. It's played a role. It's played a role.

So to act like the only reason we have problems now is because people got a little bit of money in their bank account is just not honest. And you, a little bit of money? They got more than we spent in World War II. So you don't act like the pandemic. But hold on, hold on. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on. Don't act like, you said don't act.

Don't act like we had to react to the pandemic exactly the way we did. We had to spend $6 trillion on the forever flu. Okay, but how about the trillions that the Federal Reserve shot at Wall Street? For some reason, people don't get upset about that. And that fueled the trillions of dollars the Federal Reserve shot at Wall Street to backstop the stock market and the bond market. No one gets upset about that, even though that was a massive factor in inflation. I don't know what you're talking about. What do you mean shot at Wall Street?

What are we talking about? We're talking about buying assets, buying stocks, buying bonds, buying treasury bills so that they expand the balance sheet. This is during the crisis, the coronavirus crisis. When the stock market crashed, that is what the Fed did. They went into action. They shot trillions of dollars. But the stock market didn't crash during. Now it's crashing. It's crashing now. It crashed and the Fed came in and backstopped it. That's what happened. It crashed and we never heard about it? No, it crashed. Go back and look at it. It fell off a cliff. When? The treasury bond market stopped functioning and the Fed took extraordinary action. It's never taken in history. I don't remember that. Somehow no one gets upset.

What made the first week of the pandemic? Somehow nobody gets upset about the rich people who got tons of money and tons of support, way more than working class people did. But oh my God, people were able to feed their kids and they had a little bit of money in their bank accounts. It was the worst thing in the world. That is one small part of the inflation story. And it is, by the way, not the only thing that we can deal with to get out of this mess. Well, gas prices, gas prices, we can largely attribute to an administration that's been waging war on the fossil fuel industry. That's ridiculous. And now more than ever. I mean, that's the U.S. U.S. production. OK, U.S. production is up. Well, it will be at record levels next year. OK, well, the fossil fuel companies themselves are flush with cash, but will not invest in new

drilling because they would rather give it to their shareholders. That's the truth. So there's a lot going on there. That's very stressful. Also, the stock market crash in March of 2020. Like what? What are you talking about? Well, I actually, I get why you might have forgotten because the Fed leapt into action.

But that was such a seminal moment that really determined our trajectory everywhere since. Because remember, the politicians, they were actually, it was unclear that they were going to do much of anything for anyone at the time. Remember, we were, I mean, we were beside ourselves. I'm like, they may not act at all. And then once the market crashed, that's when they were like, ah, shit, we got to do something. And of course, the overwhelming amount went to the top, as it always does. But they had to sweeten the deal with some stuff for regular people. Remember, at the time, there were all those stories about senators who sold everything they had, who sold a bunch of their stock before the crash so they could avoid the

fallout. So the crash ultimately was very short exactly because of what I tried my best to explain there in a very short period of time of the extraordinary action that the Fed ultimately took. And that's why you ended up with these dueling headlines of, oh my God, the stock market's at record levels. But meanwhile, unemployment is also at record levels. The reason you had that dueling reality is because of the Fed's actions there. And so, if you don't understand that history, you're going to have a hard time understanding what's unfolding before us right now. Yeah, I just think that, I don't know how you could have forgotten that crash. I mean, crash, even today, the headlines are all largest stock market crash since the 2020 crash of coronavirus.

Actually, I just looked. 2020 market crash even has its own Wikipedia page. And actually, at the time, there were Black Monday 1, Black Thursday, and then there was Black Monday 2, where they specifically talk about how on February 17th, that's when the Asian markets began to crash as a result of the reports coming out, not only of China, but South Korea and initial lockdown procedures. That's what triggered massive market sell-off. March of 2020 leads to the eventual discussion

around stimulus checks, of lockdowns. April of 2020 is when all of this gets solidified into place. By May, it's largely forgotten and cheap capital floods the system. But that was a pivotal economic time. I mean, we are going to study that period. Economists are going to study that period for decades. That is equivalent to quantitative easing post Great Recession, equivalent to Great Depression type monetary policy. And yeah, like you said, I guess I could forgive Bill for not remembering it. But even,

yeah, I mean, with great respect to Jamie Kirchick and all of that, this is the issue with not understanding markets, both oil markets and stock markets, as to the exact mechanisms. Because if you want to sit there and talk about demand inflation based upon stimulus checks and overstimulation, fine, yeah, we can have that conversation. But to what extent is it part of the current solution? Actually, not really, as we pointed out here. The stock market and the demand inflation, that stuff is mostly gone. Consumer demand as a result of stimulus checks and savings and all of that has tapered off. The current solution and to what we're grappling with is an extraordinarily different and difficult time that doesn't have a lot to do with what happened in March of 2020. So, yeah. It just reminded me.

Discussion. Yeah. And I think it also, it reminded me where I'm so used to existing in this ecosystem. Yeah. It's different. And, you know, and I know that you guys who watch regularly, like you're very aware of this history. We talk about this stuff a lot. We've gone out of our way to really dig into kind of the workings of the Fed this year. We read a lot. Because it's so central.

Like we've really tried to challenge ourselves to understand on a deeper level what's happening in the oil markets, what's happening with inflation, what some potential solutions are, you know, what the truth is and what the talking points from both sides. We're not perfect. We really try to understand in depth what's happening here. But a cable news format just doesn't allow for that. It does not allow for that. How long was that segment? Like seven minutes? On YouTube, all it said was seven minutes. I don't even know. I think the entire panel discussion they said was 30 minutes.

It felt like it was nothing. And we covered, you know, three or four different topics within that time period. And you got, you know, obviously a lot of crosstalk and getting cut off and all that stuff. So to try to make a nuanced point and, you know, explain the trajectory of how we got here and all these pieces that are going on, it's just – and that's on real time. You have way more space than you do in like a cable news segment. Yeah, that's why I don't do cable. So that's why the American people are being fed a very non-nutritious diet in terms of understanding these seminal moments that really have been instrumental in getting us to where we are

and determining where we're going to go next. And that market crash and the response to it was an absolutely crucial one. So listen, I had a great experience. I'm really grateful for them having me on and giving me the ability to do my best to explain the world as I see it and some of the things that we talk about on this show.

So I'm extremely grateful for that. Bill couldn't have been nicer. After the fact, they do a little, you know, little like get together on the patio, open bar, whatever. So I got to chat with him a little bit and that was really nice as well. But I will tell you the other thing that was funny, which I've never done this to myself.

I really have never done this to myself before, but I had such a hard time gauging whether I did well and got my points off or not. And so I, I really, and I hate watching myself back. I really should have watched myself back. Cause if I did, I would've been like, okay, I did, I did. Okay. I got my points across, but I tortured myself that night. Like, oh man, I think you like these certain moments in, I was replaying my, you should have said this, you should have said that, maybe you came off in a bad way, like, maybe you're too aggressive. I really, really was torturing myself. And I've been thinking about why that is, because I really genuinely normally don't do that. Even when I

have actually performed kind of poorly, I'm usually like, ah, what are you going to do? But I think it's because I really did put, feel a sense of responsibility to represent us and represent this community and like the way that we look at things and try to put that out in the world a little bit. So I really, like I felt this pressure to do that, not just like for me to do my best, but to try to represent what we're doing. I totally get what you're saying. I would also be incredibly stressed out. I was really stressed. Because yeah, like you said, I mean, I see these people,

I know these people, I've known Jamie for a long time. I don't know Bill, but I do know their worldview. And it's so dramatically different than all of us that dealing with it and confronting it on national television, which is, I mean, look, I'm not gonna say it's a forte because you came up more in cable, so you're used to more of the time, but not having the ability to explain myself and have to

hit the talking points is the thing I hated most always about Cable. And having to return to that after having the freedom here of talking in the way that we do would be very difficult. And I don't think there would be another way to do it than the way that you did, which is to have to be combative. I mean, to the extent that we ever cut things off on this show, it's because of studio time. Like literally because we're like, we have to get out of here in order to produce our show on time. That's it. It's not because, you know, I often feel that they restrict it artificially in order to induce these results. I really do think it's suboptimal at the best for discussion. The first thing I noticed when I shifted from cable news to YouTube and to independent media is that you just have so

much more space and so much more attention from the audience to lay out more complex arguments and points. I write a monologue for cable News. It was like, I can hit one point. I can hit it a few times. That's the best you're going to do. With this, obviously, you guys know how we write our monologues. Yeah, like eight minutes. We put a lot into it. They go in a lot of directions.

We try to make them, you know, complex and nuanced and really try to get at whatever it is that we're trying to explain. So, in any case, I think it was useful. Judging by the reaction, which has been extraordinary. Yeah, it went very viral. I think it was useful to go on even though it really stressed me out. But I am also

extremely, extremely grateful for the time and the space and the attention from you guys and the you know, and what you guys give back to us also allows us to kind of bring our best to the show. So thank you for that. I agree.

Putin, completely defiant. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. You know, he's mocking President Biden and the West over the so-called Putin inflation at the so-called Russian Davos. And his quotes here are very directly going after President Biden, even though he did not name him. He said with U.S. officials regularly referring to the Putin's price hike, he said, quote, they already call inflation with my name. He also suggested the current generation in Russia has the same fate as the Russian 17th century Peter the Great in terms of how he sees himself returning and strengthening territory.

And he said of the Putin price hike in particular, he said, who is this for? Who believes this? So if you see the speech that Putin is giving, he's mocking President Biden to his domestic population. But I think it's also worth spending a little bit of time in terms of what the rest of what he said, which is he's casting himself as Peter the Great, returning directly to Russian imperial ambitions of the days of the Tsars, just like in that initial speech before he launched the invasion of Ukraine. And he's painting that very much to the domestic population of Russia, who, by all accounts, currently support him. I mean, there's no—yes, there were protests in Russia. Hasn't been a protest in a long time, to be honest.

We covered them all at the time. Certainly, a certain segment— And the Western press was very enthusiastic about covering those. Yeah, I thought it was great. Yeah, and if there were more, I feel confident we'd be hearing about them. Oh, absolutely. So I think that the domestic populace has probably been ground down. The Russian opposition cannot really credibly—

from what I have seen, even the Russian opposition is painted in a very difficult corner because they oppose the war, but they are unable to get around the domestic populace who is asking them, yeah, but the West wants to wage economic war on us. So they are in a very, very tricky situation. Even if Navalny, you know, was out of prison, he would find it hard. And he's actually given interviews in the past specifically about how one of the biggest obstacles to him is that Putin is able to weaponize like Western, at least not aggression, obviously, but Western attitudes towards Russia and how Navalny himself by being painted as like this Western figure finds it difficult to operate actually in Russian circles. So I think the fact that Putin is mocking us, that mocking President Biden continues to speak as if he's the next Peter the Great.

And also the actions, as I talked about in my monologue previously, you don't cut off Germany and Italy if you need the cash. Like you – if you really need that cash in order to keep the war going, you're not going to do anything about it. Ruble is having its best year of any currency on the globe. And at the same time. They actually are in a position now where the ruble is so strong that they actually need to weaken it a little bit. They need to bring the value down because it's causing other problems for them. He made some other comments here that I think are worth highlighting as well. They show that he, you know, after,

I think, some genuine concern probably from him and his regime at the beginning of us launching these extraordinary sanctions, he seems to feel pretty comfortable with where they are. And like we just said, I mean, the numbers bear out that for him personally and his regime, they're good for now. He says the people behind sanctions didn't manage to take Russia by storm. The state worked professionally. Citizens were united and responsible. Gloomy predictions about the Russian economy's future didn't come true. True.

The economic blitzkrieg against Russia never had any chance of success. And the weaponry of sanctions is a double-edged sword, which, of course, is a not very veiled threat. European countries dealt a serious blow to their own economy all on their own. Hard to deny that. He claims the EU will lose $400 billion from the sanctions. No idea whether that's true. The EU has lost its political sovereignty. He goes on to say its elites are dancing to someone else's tune, harming their own population. Europeans and European businesses' real interests are totally ignored and swept aside. So yeah, I mean, he seems pretty cocky, frankly, about exactly how they have weathered the sanctioned storm. And I was talking to Yegor, and he was telling me that in terms of the sort of Russian domestic population,

after a lot of angst and anxiety and deep concern about how this was going to affect people, and I think, I mean, it definitely has hit ordinary Russian citizens much harder than the regime. But he said at this point the Russian war on Ukraine has somewhat faded to the background of public life. There isn't the same level of anxiety about what this is going to mean and what this is going to do. So, you know, this is Putin basically saying, listen, I'm fine. You're not hurting me. We're good to go for the long haul. And working both through military action and through, again, much of which is unconscionable, the food blockade, whatever, butemate on the battlefield or continued Russian advances on the battlefield, the more desperate that global populations become. And again, this hits the global south the hardest because our sanctions on Russian banks make it basically impossible for those nations, even if they want to, to be able to buy Russian grain and fertilizer.

And we already had regions that were decimated by the climate crisis that were already struggling with crop yields in these years. So you have a massive food crisis in part because of Russia's unconscionable actions and then in part because of our response to the war. So that's where we are. It's a lot of misery. And not that this would be easy to bring to a close or anything like that, but I think everybody should be interested in trying to do what they can to push this thing to an end through a negotiated settlement so that there can be peace in Ukraine, so that it's not the whole story of inflation, but it is part of it at this point. So we can start to get prices under control. And most importantly, so we can avoid a conflict with a nuclear superpower, because that would be a good thing to do.

And domestically, well, President Biden, they're sticking to Putin's price hike. The White House Twitter feed, I just looked at it for the last three days, has been tweeting almost nothing but Putin's price hike. We put together a super cut just to show you how cringeworthy it is whenever they're trying to sell this to the general population. Let's take a listen. I'm doing everything in my power to blunt Putin's gas price hike. Today's inflation report confirmed what America's already know. Putin's price hike is hitting America hard. Let me start. Let me start with the Putin price hike. So because of the actions we've taken to address the Putin price hike, we are in a better place than we were.

You know, Putin, Putin's price hike, inflation. We expect March CPI headline inflation to be extraordinarily elevated due to Putin's price hike. We have to address the Putin price hike, gas hike. It has, since he started amassing troops earlier this year, the price at the pump has gone up 75 cents. We're doing everything we can to minimize the Putin price hike at home. You know, you can barely make it up, Crystal. It's just they never end Putin's price hike over and over and over again.

And, you know, we're about to talk about this in the gas block, but who's buying this? Like, Putin is mocking you over it. And I guess, look, you know, we shouldn't take that as affirmation, but it just seems to be a joke both to the American people, to probably the West, obviously to our adversary, Vladimir Putin. And it's just – it's not landing, and it really just absolves President Biden of point that there is no doubt the war in Ukraine is one contributing factor to inflation, both food prices and gas prices in particular. But the way that they act like they have no control, they have no say, no agency over their own government's policy. I mean, this is one area when it comes to foreign policy where, first of all, the president has obviously a lot of bandwidth to act on his own. And second of all, where you've had an almost unanimous bipartisan consensus about our actions, our economic warfare with regard to Russia.

And so they act like this is just a one-way street. And again, Putin is taking direct action in terms of the food blockade that is in and of itself wrong and damaging. But they just act like, oh, we can't do it. We have nothing to do with this. We can't do anything about it. When, in fact, they've taken extraordinary action. You know, we continue to, I think we just sent like our 12th package of arms. So we are directly involved in this conflict.

So to pretend like, oh, Putin's price hike, nothing we can do, is also extraordinarily disingenuous. Yeah, well, the media isn't making anything. The media is not making things. This is actually very interesting. So FAIR, they do phenomenal media analysis, took a look at the way that the media covered Russia's invasion of Ukraine versus our own invasion of Iraq.

And lo and behold, the way that the media has covered these two invasion stories, invasion wars, has been radically different. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. So what they did is they examined the front page of the New York Times from April 1st to April 30th, 2022, and compared that to May 1 to May 31, 2003. So this is like the exact same point in these two wars, the Iraq War and Russia's war on Ukraine. And they found incredibly disparate coverage. The media has covered Russia's war on Ukraine

dramatically more than they covered our own country's invasion of Iraq. I mean, it should be the complete opposite since our country invading Iraq inherently is directly about our citizens. Not to say Ukraine, what is happening there doesn't matter. Obviously, we've covered it a lot too. But this disparity is insane.

So to give you the numbers, Times front page had 179 stories in that one month timeframe on Ukraine. 79 of those were, so 179 stories on the Times front page and 79 of those concerned the Ukraine invasion. So 79 out of 179, that's 44%. All but three were located at the top of the page where editors, of course, put the stories they consider to be most important. Fully 75% of all top-of-the-page stories were about the Ukraine war. Not a single day went by without a Ukraine story being published on the top of the page. And on 14 different days, only stories about Ukraine were published on the front page.

So really overwhelming front page, top of the page coverage by the New York Times. On the other hand, so 44% of the front page has been Ukraine during this time period. When it was the Iraq invasion, only 18% of the front page stories were about the Iraq invasion. Only 41, 32 of those were at the top of the page with nine below, and only 25% of all top-of-the-page stories were dedicated to the Iraq War. There's a lot more here, too. In particular, they get into how much the Times covered stories of civilian deaths when it came to Ukraine versus our invasion of Iraq. They said that 14 of those front page stories in that one month talked about civilian deaths as a result of the Russian invasion. All of those were at the top of the page. When it came to Iraq, there was only one story about the civilian deaths that were being caused

by our own military. So 14 top of the page stories in one month about civilian deaths. And listen, civilian deaths deserve coverage. I'm not saying those shouldn't have been covered. What I'm saying is when it came to our own civilian body count in Iraq, one story, that was it. Yeah. And I just think, look, for those who are like, why are you drawing on moral equivalence, all of that, the Iraq war matters on such a meta level that it's difficult to underscore. I will always remember there's a quote where George W. Bush in 2006 was pressing Putin on instituting democratic reforms. At the time, nobody really knew how things were going to work out with Putin. He was mayor of St. Petersburg. He seemed like this all-over-the-place politician. He was the very first person in order to call George W. Bush after 9-11 and to express sympathy.

He also visited Crawford Ranch in November of 2001. There were a lot of theories that Putin was going to be an ally. He eventually turned against the West completely in 2007. But 2006 was a great preview, which is that George W. Bush said, you need to institute more democratic reforms. And he said, he actually speaks great English, but through an interpreter, he said, we do not want the type of democracy that we see you've given to the people of Iraq. And I have also seen this also. So I've spoken with people who have, you know, engaged in these bilateral talks with the Chinese. And one of the things that always comes up is that, you know, our Taiwan, not military

ambassadors, but like attaches, whatever the diplomatic thing is, they'll have bilaterals with their Chinese counterparts. And every single time they're like, hey, you know, you shouldn't do anything in Taiwan. They're like, oh yeah, like what about Iraq? Tell us about Iraq. They bring it up constantly. The North Koreans do the same thing. Every single time they will have a negotiation with them. We're like, hey, listen, you give up your nukes, your country's going to prosper. They're like, oh yeah, how did that work out for Muammar Gaddafi? Because he gave up his nukes in 2003, and then you decapitated him, and he got sodomized on television before he was killed and his country was bombed. He's like, so we have no incentive

in order to trust you. They also always bring up Saddam Hussein. Their point, apparently, to the negotiators is, well, if Saddam actually had nukes, it would have been better off whenever you invaded him. The point that I think we're always coming down to is the rest of the world has not forgotten about Iraq, even if a lot of other people have. And in terms of media coverage and more, whenever the Russians and the rest of the world or India, China, and others that aren't buying necessarily all of the West, they remember all of this very vividly. So if we don't have a genuine, honest accounting, especially when you have the people in America who are pushing hardest for war with Russia and more or whatever, you know, under the guise of a no-fly zone and all of that, those are the people who beat the drum for the Iraq war. Shouldn't that count for something in terms of their analysis, like a real accounting of what went wrong the last time that we listened to them?

So that's why I think media coverage on this is dramatically important. And I've made the case before, I really do believe this. It matters more on foreign policy than anything else because the world is a big place. We're not there on the ground in Ukraine or in Iraq or in Afghanistan. So we are really dependent on the media to shape our worldview of both what's happening and what matters. And so imagine if instead of this number of stories about the civilian suffering in Ukraine, imagine we had that about, oh, maybe Palestine or maybe Yemen. Let's take Yemen as a great example, because then when Biden is going hand in hand on bended knee to MBS to beg them for more oil production, people would be able to see the

false morality of thinking that that is somehow better doing business with that regime than the Russian regime. And it's clearly, you know, clearly these are both nefarious regimes that are doing bad things in the world. But we're blinded to what's happening in Yemen because, you know, I'm not saying they never cover it, but is it anything like what we see with Ukraine coverage? Of course not. And so, yes, that really shapes the way people feel about these countries, the way people think that we should ultimately respond. Afghanistan is the perfect example because you're talking about literally the same country. And when it came to Biden ending the war, there was overwhelming coverage about the civilian population

and their pain and their suffering and how we needed to be there for them. We needed to basically stay forever, keep this war going forever so that we could protect the civilian population. Well, now that we're gone and they've moved on and we, by denying them their own central bank reserves, are helping to contribute to mass hunger of all the countries on the planet,

Afghanistan is one of the worst in terms of hunger and starvation right now. We are directly complicit. Not a peep. Where are the stories of civilian humanitarian heartache on the front page of the New York Times over that? So that's why these comparisons really matter. And it's just extraordinary that when our own country invaded a sovereign nation on false pretenses, they did not cover it nearly as much or the civilian toll hardly at all. The contrast between how they're covering the Ukraine work, it is night and day. It really is. No, that's right.

Good morning, everybody. Happy Thursday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. Lots of big stories that we want to talk to you about this morning. First of all, the New York Times actually forced to admit that our sanctions on Russia have completely backfired.

Their word is boomeranged. So they have some new numbers there that are pretty interesting. We also had some primaries this week down in Georgia and Alabama. A little bit of tea leaves reading some contradictory indicators about the state of the Republican Party and Trump and all of that stuff. And also, this is pretty stunning. Ron DeSantis actually ahead of Trump in a new New Hampshire theoretical primary poll. So we will break that down for you. Also, some other interesting moves on DeSantis's part.

I just I can't believe we continue to learn more and more horrifying details about just what occurred in the Evaldi massacre. The very latest news is that that chief of the school police unit has actually been asked to step aside for now. Finally, I don't know what took so long. So we've got the details there. Also an interesting moment from Elizabeth Warren, of all people, kind of calling out the Fed and really in a very succinct way, demonstrating how limited what the Fed is going to be able to do in order to get inflation under control and get our economy back to where we would all ultimately like it to be.

And then we've got some interesting thoughts from MSNBC on gas prices. Yes. But we wanted to start, Sagar, drumroll. We finally have the date. It's finally happening. The date, the announcement, the link, it's all over, people, after I've gone to war for all of you. We're coming to Atlanta Center Stage Theater, Atlanta, September 16th, 7.30 p.m. Okay, so here's how it's going to work.

As we promised, the presale is going live today. It will be in your email. There will be a Ticketmaster link, and we're going to give you a password. You have to be a premium member for the first week in order to be able to buy tickets. If you're a Lifetime member, here's how it's going to work, just to make sure that the seating and all of that works out properly. Go ahead and buy tickets, send us an email, we'll refund the cost. As we promised, Lifetime members get VIP access. I do also want to say, because this is what they've warned me,

if you are worried that this is going to be the only show, it is not the case. It is first of many. We have to go through this process and announce on this particular one before we can go ahead and book other venues. We sort of have to demonstrate the desire for people to come and see us before we can book other venues. Yeah, just to give people a peek behind the curtain, venues and other people won't do deals with you

unless you can show that you can sell tickets elsewhere. Hence, we were able to get a nice deal with this venue, Center Stage, thank you, Center Stage, Atlanta. So go ahead, buy tickets, show the world that people can show up for Breaking Points Live. It's going to be fun. We're going to have Crystal, me, we're obviously going to have friends,

special guest appearances at various different locations. And for those of you who are in other parts of the country, don't worry. We are coming. We have the map, all of that and stuff laid out. So don't worry as if this is the only one. Right. This is not your only chance. I am excited about going to Georgia, though. Yes. That's part of the reason why it's fun. Right. We timed it specifically to be, you know, right in the heat of election season and just before some of the biggest races in the country are unfolding in Georgia right now. So to get to go to Atlanta City I haven't been to for a hot minute. I'm pretty excited about that. I have not been to Atlanta.

You've literally never been? I've never spent time in Atlanta. Like, traveled. I've, like, obviously spent time in the airport. But that's basically it. I started college at Clemson University in South Carolina. And it's not that far from Atlanta. In fact, a lot of times you would fly in and out of Atlanta.

Atlanta Airport would be like the cheapest one to fly now. So I spent a bit of time there when I was in college, and I've been back since, but I haven't spent a lot of time there since. So anyway, excited to go down to Georgia. We're coming to Atlanta. We're coming to other battleground states. We're coming to major metropolises. Don't worry. We are coming.

For those of you who are in the area or, you know, whatever, within a couple hundred miles, go ahead and buy tickets. Show the world, like we said, premium subscribers are the people who get the first shot at all ticket sales, not just this one. And for the lifetime members, you guys have guaranteed seats no matter where, no matter what. As I said, buy the ticket, send us an email. We'll refund you the entire cost. So go ahead and tell us. Yeah, it's going to be exciting. We've been working on this for over a year. You know, we were worried with COVID like a year ago. Well, but last time.

Think about the last time we did one of these. The very last thing that her and I did was that book show. It was March of, what, March 2020, I want to say. In retrospect, probably should have done it. It was like March 19th or something. It really was. It was in Brooklyn. It really was like the last moment before everything shut down for COVID. And there is no doubt it was circulating the virus so much more widespread than certainly we realized and that much of the country realized at that point.

But we got in right under the wire. Had an amazing time. You know, that show, it actually, even though we probably, in retrospect, it was risky to do. We had so many people share with us that that was like, you know, they really sort of held on to that for a long time because it was the last thing that they did and went out in public and did before everything shut down. So anyway, it's been a lot too long, and we're excited to get back out and get to be face-to-face with people because there really is nothing like that, just like direct human connection. Oh, I absolutely love that. I love meeting people, and especially getting everybody together anytime that we were able to do that. It's been two years, you know, and the show has grown so much. So, I mean, there's so many people who've never even had that opportunity in the last two years in order to even

just meet us and have fun. And I've been studying other people and how they do live shows and live podcasts. So, we've got some fun things planned, I think. Yeah, it'll be good. We had some great innovations in our last one. We're just going to keep building on that. And now we have more production value, and thanks to our premium members and all of that, we can bring in some more people, and we can really invest in the show. It's going to be a fun experience. And then just like the New York show, we're going to have the premium subscriber. They're going to be able to vote on all the topics, the stuff that we cover, and a lot of it will be made available on YouTube for everybody at a later date.

So don't worry. You're not necessarily going to lose out. And like I said, get excited. If you're in the area, go ahead and buy tickets. We're really excited. Go ahead and tweet it out. Post it on Instagram or whatever. We'll retweet it. We'll put it on Instagram. And let's sell this thing out so we can prove to the world that we can also buy tickets or we can sell some tickets here at Breaking Points. Indeed. All right, let's get to the news.

All right, with all of that out of the way, let's get to the show. Go ahead and put this first tear sheet up on the screen from the New York Times. Lo and behold, New York Times even forced to admit, here's the headline here, Western move to choke Russia's oil exports. Boomerangs, they add in the caveat, for now. The subhead here says, with China and India buying the Russian oil shunned by the West in an effort to force an end to the Ukraine invasion, Moscow is earning more now than it did before the war. OK, let that sink in.

You are paying more at the pump, in theory, in part, to punish Putin. In reality, we are punishing ourselves. And because the oil price has spiked to such astronomical levels, he is literally, his regime, literally making more money from oil and gas than ever before. The Chinese and the Indians have stepped in. They are happy to buy oil at a discount. This is something that we have been covering here. There's another twist, though, that I learned in this article, which is that, you know, you feel like, okay, we've shut Russian oil out of our system. We're not buying any Russian oil. Of course, we're buying Saudi oil and all sorts of

other sort of criminal regimes. But put that aside, it turns out even that is not true because in particular, they trace to the Indian market. There's a lot of people who are happy to buy that discounted oil in India and resell it to us at a premium and exploit the arbitrage. So we're not even not buying Russian oil. We're just buying it at a more expensive price. So congratulations to everyone for thinking that this was a great idea. And again, what we've said from the beginning is a lot of these effects were really predictable. They were really predictable. I mean, you don't have to look back at distant history to see that, first of all, our sanctions regimes have not been effective in terms of, you know, forcing countries to comply with our will. That's number one. Oftentimes, they end up punishing the ordinary

citizens of those countries and not the regimes. They end up playing into the hands of those autocratic leaders who can say, hey, your problems aren't with me. Your problems are with the West, who wants to destroy you. And that's exactly what has happened here. So it really is, you know, so bad at this point that even The New York Times has to admit it, Sagar. Yeah, absolutely. And President Biden is actually making a mistake. He is trying to tie the high gas prices directly to the situation in Europe. And he actually framed it that way.

He's like, for all the Republicans who are criticizing me, are you saying that we were wrong to stand up to Ukraine or support Ukraine and stand up to Putin? He's directly tying the two, which could spell big political disaster for him in the future. Let's take a listen to a speech yesterday. So for all those Republicans in Congress criticizing me today for high gas prices in America, are you now saying we were wrong to support Ukraine? Are you saying we were wrong to stand up to Putin? Are you saying that we would rather have lower gas prices in America and Putin's iron fist in Europe? I don't believe that. And you know what? If it was actually working, there would be a debate. We could have a debate. I still would be opposed. We've talked about that. But there would be a debate if this was actually, you know, degrading Russia's ability to prosecute this war.

That is the opposite, the literal opposite of what is happening. So it's just dishonest at this point to tell the American people like, oh, you're paying high gas prices, but this is helping Ukraine. This is not helping Ukraine. It's not helping us. It's we've us. We've effectively imposed sanctions on our own citizens. And the Russians are laughing as we've talked about those comments from Putin previously. I mean, just mocking the Biden administration and their policy. The latest from New York Times, that article we had before, Alexei Miller, who's the head of Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, quipped at an economic conference, the same one that Putin spoke at in St. Petersburg last week, that he bore no ill will against Europe because even as the continent's imports of Russian natural gas fell by, quote, several tens of percent, prices rose several fold.

Here's the money quote. Quote, I won't bend the truth if I tell you that we bear no grudge. It's like, yeah, we're good. You did nothing. Putin actually spoke last night at the BRICS conference. So for people who don't remember, the BRICS was like a concept made up in 2008. It's like Brazil and Russia, India and China, as well as other some developing countries. And at that, he actually vowed, number one, in order to reroute all Russian exports to BRICS countries, including China and India, the two largest markets, not only oil, but everything else. But number two, and this is even more important,

is they are working on a unified currency or type of system in order to be able to trade oil off of the US dollar. So either price it in yen to ruble, in rupee to ruble, and find some medium exchange. So they're moving themselves off of that. They're working to try and create an alternative oil market, which they will unambiguously pay much less in China, India. And as you said, probably just rip us off in the interim. I guess I can't blame them. I probably do the same thing. Oh, I don't blame China and India at all. Not at all. So you put that together. It's not working. As we said on the battlefield, Ukraine is continuing to suffer. I mean, they are urging people in the east in order to leave. There has

been a tremendous amount of civilian and military casualties. We don't know what the Russian casualties are. We do know that many of these cities remain besieged and that overall the military picture for Ukraine is not good. So on the battlefield, things are not working out. I do again want to present the counter argument, and this is what everybody says. Yeah, but in two or three years, the Russian oil business is going to really suffer because they won't be able to get the parts that they need. And my response to that would be, okay, so number one, are we supposed to pay $5 a gallon for two to three years in order to secure the integrity of Eastern Ukraine? Because that seems kind of crazy. Number two is that in two to three years, the military situation will be completely different. Russia has the benefit of not

having sky-high gas prices right now and a rapidly evolving situation on the battlefield. At this point, we have shipped everything to Ukraine that we possibly could, absent being able to get into an actual war. If they can't get it done with what we've sent, it's not going to happen. Let's just be honest here. And so we then need to move things towards a diplomatic situation. And my problem, and we're about to talk about this with Germany, is that there is no appetite in the West for considering the grand strategic picture. We need to align the incentives for President Zelensky to know that he will remain secure in power, that he will remain and continue to have Western aid, and that all of that will be there if he continues with negotiations, frankly, even more. And instead, the opposite incentive is that the

more bravado and stuff that they present, the higher the amount of dollars that gets sent over to the Ukrainian regime. So we really do need to consider grand strategic for what we're trying to do here. I mean, just to put it really simply and directly, we have higher gas prices. We have a worldwide hunger crisis caused in part by this war, in part because Russia's unconscionable actions,

in part because of our own response. There are a lot of developing world nations that are unable to purchase the grain and fertilizer from Russia that they normally depend on and are especially depending on now because of our bank sanctions on Russia makes it effectively impossible. So we've got gas crisis, food crisis, Ukraine is losing, and Russia richer than ever. Tell me what part of this policy is working. Tell me what part of the policy is working. I mean, and then to your point, you're like not allowed to say that or people freak out. If you say, hey, we need to figure out how do we get to the negotiation? How do we wrap up this war in the interest of everyone, especially the Ukrainians?

You think they want to be at war for three years? You think they have time to wait around for the sanctions to start to bite three to five years from now? I don't think so. So when you say anything that contradicts the, you know, mainstream bipartisan consensus of we just need to keep sending in the military and we need to keep trying this economic warfare, which is completely boomeranged. Even the New York Times is admitting it. You get massive backlash. And that just happened in Germany in a pretty interesting instance. Let's go ahead and put this tear sheet up on the screen.

So this says, Schultz advisor turns heads with appeal to consider the future Russian relationship. That's really all that he said is, hey, maybe we should think about whether we want to make Russia a pariah state. This is my interpretation of his words. I'll tell you his exact words in a minute. And massive backlash. So here's this article. They say German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's top foreign policy aide raised eyebrows Monday night when he suggested Europe should focus more on preserving long-term relations with Russia and less on the specifics of German tank shipments to Ukraine. In a rare public appearance, Jans Plotner, do you think that's how you say it? I think it's, yeah, probably Jans. Jans, Jans, I don't know. A long-standing architect of Berlin's Russia policy argued that the debates over Germany's military support for Ukraine, which is frequently criticized for being too hesitant and slow, were, quote,

driven by a feverishness that misses the bigger questions in many cases. No lies detected. Specifically, he pointed to a long-running saga over whether Germany should supply the Ukrainian military with so-called martyr infantry fighting vehicles, which Schultz has so far refused to do. Here's the quote. You can fill a lot of newspaper pages with 20 martyrs, but larger articles about what will actually be our relationship with Russia in the future are somehow less frequent. And that's a question that's at least as exciting and relevant, which could be discussed and where there could also be a public discourse. He also called for a softer approach toward China and argued Ukraine should not be granted any rebates on its bid to become an EU member just because it was under Russian attack. He said just because you are under attack, you don't automatically improve on the rule of law. OK, so he didn't even say don't send, you know, this martyrs, whatever these things are.

He didn't even say, hey, we need to focus on, like, we need to have a warm relationship. He just said, hey, maybe we should be discussing this. Maybe we should be exploring this in some newspaper articles. Massive backlash. Had to walk back the comments. There was a whole freakout over it. The West was very upset with him, and Washington was very upset with him. Here is the basic truth. They have a lot more to lose than us, so maybe we should follow their lead. No? They have, what, they lose than us. So maybe we should follow their lead. No, they have, what, they're like a couple hundred, I think like a thousand miles, whatever, away from Russia. They fought several wars with Russia. I'm going to presume that they know what's better for their security than we do.

Maybe that's a crazy thing. You know, there's a lot of talk of allies and allyship here in the United States. Aren't you supposed to listen to them and be like, what do you guys want? Tell us what it is. Why are we imposing our will on a situation that has negative impact on us quite literally whenever it comes to that? Also, the energy situation in Germany is a catastrophe. If you care about the climate, Austria, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands are resurrecting coal-fired power plants as of right now in order to move towards bringing more energy domestically. So as a result of denuclearization and reduced natural gas imports from Russia,

Germany and Austria and the Netherlands, Germany being one of the largest, I think the largest economy in continental Europe, is now going to have to produce significantly more coal-fired energy in order to meet their goals, which is terrible for the climate. Also, people don't know this, coal is very expensive. It's actually not cheap anymore compared to many of the other instances or many of the other alternatives. So consider this. People are paying sky-high gas prices, and the energy that they're going to use in order to heat their homes in the middle of the summer and then come winter, because we all know that's going to happen, in order to heat their homes in the winter and cool their homes right now is going to be filthy coal-powered energy. So consider the broader impact of that. Like, that is a catastrophe. And listen, the Germans have made a grand strategic decision that they want to continue some sort of commerce relationship with the Russians. I think that that is broadly the Germans' business. To the extent that I make fun of them, it's for taking offline their nuclear power plants

and for saying that they don't want to do so. So maybe they'll consider some of that, I guess, though. The Greens, you know, if the German Greens don't denounce this more than they denounce nuclear, they are truly full of shit. But whenever you consider the broader implication, we have to have energy here in America. We're going to talk a lot about that today with the gas tax and oil. They need it in Western Europe as well. These are still developing countries. These are developed economies. Like, they have a certain standard of living in order to meet the most basic baseline.

Yeah. And on top of that, you consider, you know, peace between the great powers on the continent. Yeah. All of that seems very important. I'm not saying the situation in Ukraine isn't important. We have to take stock of what it all is, what's happening, consider the Ukrainians' interests, and ours. And we should never subjugate our own interests under what is for Ukraine first. Well, it's not clear to me that the policy we're pursuing is good for anybody.

Yeah, I don't think it's good for anybody. But I'm saying even if it was, I would still have to tell you. It's been good for the Chinese. They're getting a good deal on gas. It's been good for the Indians who are getting a good deal on gas and are able to sell it back at a premium to us. So I can't say it's not been good for everybody, although, you know, India also one of the countries that will be impacted by the rising price of food. So, I mean, that's not costless either. But, you know, I do want to say one thing about the gas tax holiday that now has been proposed, has been pushed by the Biden administration before we move on here.

And Sagar's going to be talking about, we're also going to be talking to Skanda, who's done a lot of thinking about how we could get gas prices under control in a very sort of like thoughtful and nuanced way. But Biden has decided to lean into this gas tax holiday idea, which, number one, is not likely to have much of an impact on what you pay at the pump at all. So it's, like, impotent. Number two is basically a subsidy to the very oil companies that have, like, you know, had these massive record-breaking profits, but the only thing they want to do to it is, like, make rich people even richer. So, number two, it's a subsidy to them. And number three, he has to get this through Congress. Congress already said this isn't even, it's not going to happen. So what are you doing? I mean, you're proposing this policy that's like an impotent subsidy to the oil and

gas companies that's not even going to pass. What we're talking about here with Ukraine, while of course Putin's price hike is in everything that's going on with inflation or with the gas markets, it is true that our ban on Russian oil is certainly having an impact on the cost of gasoline. This is something that is completely in your power. And, you know, he likes to pretend like we can't do anything about it or that if you're arguing against it, you hate Ukraine, when the reality is it has had the polar opposite effect of what was intended. And I just wish they would be honest about that. Hey, we tried it. It didn't work. Let's try something else. How about that? I completely agree. I mean, at the very least, give some people some hope somewhere. But if you say that this is all tied up with Ukraine,

like you're not going to like what the answer to that question is a year from now, whenever you're like, hey, how much longer do you want to pay $5 a gallon at the pump in order to make sure that the border of the Donbass is slightly different than it is than one year ago? I mean, these are not questions, you know, we didn't live in democratic societies in World War I absent the United States. And a lot of those countries found out the hard way in terms of their domestic politics that a lot of people were like, yeah, why are we spending millions of people to die in order to make sure that the French border moves a thousand feet? These are all questions which have to get democratically resolved. And if you are a supporter of the Ukrainians, the last thing that you probably want is for the US domestic populace

to turn against it and just say, you know what? Peace at all costs. We don't care anymore. If this is going to be the impact that we have over here. And I very much see that that could be the case, both on history and, look, it doesn't take a genius politically in order to figure that out. At the same time, we're getting some more official details that are supposedly accurate about what happened with the Uvalde massacre. In particular, a Texas police commander says that after analyzing the response, analyzing body camera footage, which by the way, they are blocking the public from getting access to any of these details. So we're just having to take

these people's word for it. So grains of salt on all of this. But according to their timeline, they are saying that these officers could have neutralized and taken out this mass murderer in three minutes. Three minutes. Let's take a there were a sufficient number of armed officers wearing body armor to isolate, distract, and neutralize the subject. The only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers from entering room 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander, who decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children. That's what it comes down to. That's what it comes down to. That is what it comes down to. You see those photos, Crystal? Those guys, they had semi-automatic rifles. They had body armor. They had ballistic shields.

Ballistic shields. They had, I mean, fully what they needed. They had the thing to pop open the door. And also, by the way, it turns out the door was unlocked, so they didn't even need that. But if they did, they had it. Right. I mean, all of that.

And just to give you guys an idea of how insane things were, let's throw this on the screen. Eva Mireles called her husband, she was one of the teachers who was killed, her husband was a police officer, said she was shot and she was dying. And when he tried

to save her, he was detained, had his gun taken away, and he was escorted from the school. Now, at the very least, we have some good news right now, which is that Pete Arredondo, the guy who was the head of the police department of Uvalde CISD and made the call to not go in and to take down the shooter, has been relieved, placed on a leave of absence as of yesterday. However, he remains crystal on the city council. And listen, I mean, I don't really know how the law works. I think it's a good reminder right now, by the way, the Supreme Court says a

cop has no obligation to protect you. So you should actually keep that in mind. Given everything, I do not see how, at least in moral justice, that the man who made that call, Pete Ardondo, should not be prosecuted in some form. And if that is not allowable under law, somehow needs to be civilly held accountable for what has happened here. Because you could see those officers outside. You could also see the border patrol guys. By the way, everybody's lined up. They're all G.I. Joe'd out. No disrespect since those guys are actually the ones who went in and killed the gunman. But I'm saying the guys who were there on the scene, you could see the picture. You could see the timestamp up in the corner, had everything

they need. I've had a lot of cops message me saying I would have gone in with my service revolver, or my service pistol. Yeah. No body armor, nothing. I would have gone in. That's my job. That's what I signed up for. And yeah, I don't know. I mean, you see the photo and you see these stories about Eva Morelis, his husband. I can't imagine. I mean, imagine him. What is that guy going through? And he was not just a police officer. He was a police officer for that school district. Yeah, right. And they stopped him and took his weapon and forced him out of the school.

He was the actual, the one good guy with the gun that wanted to do something. Poor guy. And they did, I can't imagine how he goes forward. I mean, it's just so horrifying to imagine. And some of the details they released an official timeline that had some of the dialogue between these officers. And there is a massive statewide cover-up trying to block journalists and the public from having access to these records on their own. But according to what they're telling us here, you've got, you know, first of all, the three minutes, within three minutes, they could have taken this guy out. That's number one. Number two, they have at 1156, an officer asks, he says, y'all don't know if there's kids in there?

If there's kids in there, we need to go in there, this DPS agent says. The officer replies, whoever's in charge will determine that. So it's this like bureaucratic blame shift. It's not my responsibility. It's not my call. I'm just going to defer to ultimately, I guess, Pete Arradondo. Then at 1223, Arradondo says, we've lost two kids. The walls are thin. If he starts shooting, we're going to lose more kids.

I hate to say we have to put those to the side right now. Basically saying we have to sacrifice all of the children that are in those two classrooms. That's our only option here. That's all we can do. At 1227, he actually says, people are going to ask why we're taking so long. We're trying to preserve the rest of the life. There were kids, and this teacher too, by the way, who were bleeding out on the floor. There were other kids who had not yet been shot. We know this at this point. One of the teachers died on the way to the hospital. A few minutes could have saved that life. Some of them have been crippled for life.

Yeah, that's exactly right. Nothing. 1228, he said, we have master keys and they're not working. The door was unlocked and they had the crowbar thing to pop it open even if it wasn't. And then finally, at 1230, he said, okay, we've cleared out everything except for that room. We're ready to breach, but that door is locked. And when he finally, finally allows the Border Patrol agents to go in, he's like, you all can do it if you want to. I mean, it was no, it wasn't like, get in, we got to go.

I guess if you guys want to, you can go in. It's completely, it is just so astonishing. And then the fact that, you know, there's this cover of not allowing the public to see for themselves after all of the lies and the manipulations that they've been caught in, one after another. There was another piece of this saga, which is Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who at this point is also implicated in those decisions to keep records from the public. But, you know, he was very angry publicly about the lies that he had been told initially. And they released his handwritten notes saying, you know, what they told him specifically had happened, including some of the things that we know now are blatant lies. Arradondo was in that room. And when Abbott was being given this list of lies, could have spoken up at any time to clear up the record. No, none of that ever happened.

So it is unconscionable. You know, the other piece of this is they are planning on now demolishing this elementary school, Robb Elementary School. Go ahead and put this last piece up on the screen there, guys. Which, you know, I understand. I certainly wouldn't want to send my kid there again, but you damn well better get all the evidence out of that school before you demolish it, especially when you've got like a pretty clear reluctance to show the public anything. And then the news we get is, oh, we're just going to demolish the school right away. Okay.

Some cover up vibes, you know, basically here. Listen, I, I, it's difficult to find and summon the words. Yes, it is. These guys need to be held account in the strongest possible way. I was actually thinking about it. 150 years ago in the frontier days of the old west, Arredondo and the guys who held this up would have got what's coming to them. That's the know, that's the region. And these kids are dead and the elementary school is now going to get demolished. You know, the city itself is going through this horrific trauma. The attorney general seems to be nowhere, not doing anything. I don't know why somebody can't just stand up. It's God's plan. I don't know why somebody can't stand up for taxes. I don't know why, you know, somebody needs to pay is really the only answer that comes out of here.

Some interesting comments from Elizabeth Warren recently sort of grilling Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. And as you guys know, some of the backdrop here is, of course, that because Washington is unwilling to act with regard to inflation, food prices, gas prices in particular, they've punted this thing to the Fed. As we've gone over a lot, the Fed is very limited in what they can do. Basically, what they can do is trigger a recession. I mean, that's effectively they're openly admitting we've got to get unemployment up, we got to get wages down. So the one thing that Washington has landed on to do to deal with what is, you know, mostly a supply chain driven inflation crisis is to hurt you and your pocketbook. So Elizabeth Warren, I think, here does a very effective job of drawing out that reality and what the Fed actions can do and what they cannot do. Let's take a listen to that. Chair Powell, will gas prices go down as a result of your interest rate increase?

I would not think so, no. OK. And that matters because gas prices are one of the single biggest drivers of inflation. Energy prices overall drove a third of the inflation last month, but the Fed's tools, as you say, have no impact here. So let's look at another necessity, food. Price of groceries is up nearly 12% this year. Americans feel the pinch. No matter how much groceries cost, people still got to eat. Chair Powell, will the Fed's interest rate increases bring food prices down for families?

I wouldn't say so, no. Okay. So a Fed increase won't bring down these prices. So she goes on to press him on, what will it do? And, of course, the answer is spike unemployment. So it will cause you to lose your job, cause your wages to go down and potentially trigger a recession. So you can't get gas prices under control. You can't get food prices under control. This is what you can do. And so, you know, Sagar, I was looking at some you're like, yeah, their policy with regards to gas prices is literally to increase them through the Russian oil ban, as we covered earlier, and to lean on the Fed to effectively trigger a recession.

That's their policy. So it's a miracle anyone approves of what they're ultimately doing here. Yeah, and look, Powell destroyed so many of these talking points by Biden. He was like, no, it's not going to have any effect on food. No, it's not going to be effect on gas. They're like, what about inflation? Is that a result of Putin? He's like, we had high inflation before the Russian invasion. So he is doing all he can. He has only control over interest rates. It's the president who has control over fiscal policy and other policy that actually do something about this inflation, some of which he refuses to do other than a stupid-ass

gas tax holiday, which won't even happen. So consider that. At the same time, here's what the elites want to do. They basically want to destroy the U.S. economy in order to bring inflation under control. Let's throw this on the screen. Here's what Larry Summers is saying, and he's just saying the quiet part out loud. I don't want to target him specifically because this is what they all secretly believe. We need five years at 6% unemployment or one year at 10% unemployment,

great recession level unemployment in order to bring inflation under control. And you know what? He's not wrong. He is not wrong that in the current toolkit, considering that the Fed was the only policy instrument, that actually is the only way in order to do that. The problem is that 3% unemployment we're at now to 6% is, I don't know, tens of millions of people in this country? 10% unemployment? I can't even begin to describe our current economic condition and what that would mean for millions of not only workers, but their families and their dependents. People forget the

fallout from the Great Recession. A lot of people just never went back to work. A lot of people had to drop out of the labor force, or they had to find underemployment, cash employment, or work in two jobs, lost a lot of benefits, lost their house, bottom fell out of their retirement portfolio, underemployed up until the day that they could finally get Social Security earlier. You think that's not going to happen at five years at 6% unemployment? Millions would drop out of the workforce. Millions of people would opt for early retirement and near poverty wages. And by the way, it's not like the price of gas would go down either. To the extent that gas drops, it'll drop to maybe $4. And that would not be based on supply, which is what we need to deal with. It would be based on the fact that people are too poor to drive. Right. I don't want to live in that country. Correct.

And this is the thing, too, is that even if the Fed triggers a recession and causes 10% unemployment, it's not clear that their actions alone will actually get inflation under control. I mean, Powell is admitting it there. Like, no, this isn't going to really deal with gas or food prices, which are the most painful parts of inflation for most people. But something that Skanda has been writing about and also that Dave and Dan has been writing about is it's not just that the Fed will crush demand. And by crush demand, that means hurt you, right? Your ability to spend money. Your ability to spend money. So your wages will be hit.

You may lose your job, destroy your ability to buy all those things. Right. So not only is will the Fed's action do that, but it's actually not true that the Fed won't do anything on supply. will have some effects of less investment. And that means, you know, less building, less houses being constructed, these sorts of things that so, you know, if inflation is a mismatch between supply and demand, you're crushing demand, yes, but you're also going to cause some issues on the supply side, which could exacerbate the problem. So it's not even clear that the Fed's actions alone, without legislative action, without our government actually functioning, and without Biden stop his idiotic policy with regard to Russia also, which is exacerbating the situation, they could actually make things worse. This is something that David Dan has been writing over at the American Prospect. We can put this tear sheet up on the screen, sort of drawing this out.

And he says the Fed's crushing investment right when we need it. He writes, the Fed strategy might not cure the disease. It's hard to attribute inflation entirely to an economy running hot. When there hasn't been any economic stimulus in 15 months, fiscal policies now turn sharply negative. What looks to be the greater problem is a simple shortage in physical capacity to sustain a decent standard of living. The main pockets of inflation right now are in fuel, which is rising because of supply shocks from Ukraine, a bottleneck in refining capacity, food also stunted due to war, and housing damaged by a decade of underbuilding. Investment is needed to deal with all of these categories, but thanks to

the Fed, investment is now harder to do. Indeed, researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco recently concluded that problems other than demand account for about two-thirds of current inflation. And the only tool we are using is targeting demand, again, the thing that hurts you when that is not even close to the majority of what's going on here. Well, David is right. I mean, we have to transform the American economy and the American stock market. We have to build more warehouse space in order to be more comfortable with inventory. We need more manufacturing capacity here in the U.S. so that we don't rely on globalized just-in-time delivery. We need the ability in order to build resilience into the economy. And that costs

money. And that means investment dollars. When you don't invest and you don't have the capital to borrow, well, you're going to have to cut costs. And when you cut costs, you both cut investments and you cut jobs. And then when demand goes down, you have further revenue that's coming in the door, which affects your ability to borrow. So you're only becoming leaner. And shareholderism means that we're going to try and squeeze even more values out of the stock. The best way to do so is what? Cut even more jobs, cut more investment. So at the time when America needs investment more than ever, we are effectively choosing the opposite. And I think we should all take Chairman Powell's words to heart, which is he is admitting to us it will not affect us.

That's right. And the sad thing is we had a lot of years at 0% interest rates to do this investment. And instead, companies bought back their own stock and issued dividends, and they didn't do the investment. The federal government completely hamstrung. They didn't do the investment. So that's the other piece is we had this window of a decade to set ourselves up for the future so that, you know, and reshore job, reshore capacity, all of those things. And we lost it. So it's, it is, it is, guys, I really think it's going to be ugly. I'm very concerned about where we're headed right now. I think it's going to be bad, unfortunately, as well.