Peak Prosperity - Can a Market Meltdown Be Avoided?

Episode Date: February 13, 2025

Trump’s bold actions could well lead to a recession simply due to cutting off flows of fraudulent, unnecessary, and/or wasteful spending. At the same time inflation is still kicking around, so the Fed is less likely to re-spike the punchbowl. The result? Stagflation possibly, which is the worst outcome for the average person.Click here for Peak Financial Investing

Nothing in this program should be considered investment advice. It is for educational purposes only. Please hit pause and read this disclaimer in full. So the question is, and what I'm hoping is that Doge pulls out all of these inflationary pressures and Trump actually goes through and allows the consequences, unfortunately, that are going to impact all of us to wring this inflation out of the system. The question is, is will he actually follow through with that? The following is the audio version of a video released at peakprosperity.com.

Visit peakprosperity.com to watch the video and to find other insightful content such as articles, discussion forums, and exclusive subscriber-only content. Hello, everyone, and welcome to this edition of Finance U. I am your host, Chris Martinson of Peak Prosperity, also peakfinancialinvesting.com, here again with Paul Kiker of Kiker Wealth Management. Paul, so good to see you. How are you doing, buddy? I'm doing good, Chris. It's good to see you, and what a time to be alive. I mean, what a time to be alive.

We talked last week, which was decades ago in Lenin speak, right? But there's so much going on, I think everybody needs to be aware that there's both opportunities and risks in all of this. But here's the subtext. I want to talk inflation today, gold, obviously, because there's been some things there to discuss. But in particular, these moves that are happening with Doge, with Trump, across Treasury, cutting USAID's funding, turning off magic honeypot spigots of cash. It has a number of effects that we should talk about. Some we can't really calculate. We don't know how much the government's going to cut, but that will be deflationary, recessionary, all on its own.

But the other part, Paul, I really want to talk with you about is the impact that's going to have on people's psychology. So I have never seen people as hopping mad as I have on TikTok, talking to them personally, when they finally saw just how revolting that system was. People taking money, taxpayer money, and just setting fire to it and putting it in their own bank accounts. It was, I don't know, what are you seeing on your end? I'm worried about that. Listen, we have a faith-based money system. I think the faith took a ding and that could have impacts that are kind of hard to calculate. Yes.

Yes. So I'm going to pick on Renee because I know she's going to be watching our video from a component perspective. Let's hear from Renee then. Yes, this morning she picked me up, dropped the truck off to get the oil changed, and she had watched the press conference with President Trump and Elon Musk last night. And I mean fighting mad and upset, understandably so. You know, driving down the road, and I was like, oh, you're a little loud there, but fired up and frustrated. And everybody that I'm talking to are just ridiculously frustrated.

They're making sacrifices in their family to pay the taxes that they're getting out there. They're doing it the right way, and to find out that you've got these grifters that have been so embedded within the federal government that have foolishly wasted our tax dollars, foolishly for their own ideological benefits, but even more so, it looks like circling those funds back to them for their own power and benefit. And everywhere I go, anybody who's aware of this is fighting mad. Now, there are some that are out there that are sticking their heads in the sand, and the only thing that they're grabbing hold to is Trump derangement syndrome and just listening to whatever, you know, the propaganda that they've been so embedded with over time. But anybody who loves the truth is so furious about

this that that's all they can talk about. Yeah, well, it is infuriating. You know, Paul, I show this in my other life that's not strictly financially related. I show this video of this social experiment that's done with monkeys, right? And they feed monkeys these cucumbers and ask them to perform this task. They're happy. And the problem comes in when you feed one of the monkeys out of the pair grapes instead of cucumbers. Well, the guy who's getting cucumbers gets pissed off, right? They throw them at the researchers and they shake the bars of the cage they get very mad even though they were both happy with both getting cucumbers well we just found out that we've been getting less than cucumbers and they've been feeding themselves whole bunches of grapes it's

deeply unfair and that creates a lot of social friction because monkeys are social animals we're social animals as a social being unfairness just doesn't work. It shatters relationships really quickly, right? If you have a team and you treat people unfairly relative to each other or how they should be treated, you're going to break your business. It's just common sense. Yes, it is. And to bring trust back into the system, not only are we going to have to rebuild this, Chris, I think that the consequences of those who have been receiving benefits in a fraudulent way at the expense of the American people need to suffer consequences to the point that 50% of the population maybe considers it was too severe. 25% thinks that it wasn't enough, and 25% thinks that it needs to be, you know, that it was a little egregious.

And I also think, I believe that any politician, any elected official that has set this system up to line their own pockets at the expense of the American taxpayer should have every, forfeit every asset that they have, every asset to their trust fund kids, you know, and more often than not, I'm not a big believer that the children should pay the, suffer the consequences of the decisions of the parents. But in this case, it's so egregious because there are so many American families that their kids have had a much harder standard of life because of the taxes that they're paying. And not only that, you know, just the wrapping of the monopolies, the small businesses that weren't able to get started, the raising of the barrier of entry. I believe that

this should be a generational move. Now, what do you do with it? Take it away from them. You can't distribute it to the rest of the people, apply it to the national debt, but strip their pensions, strip their assets, strip everything once it's proven. And it needs to be public and clear. Absolutely. Fully transparent, very public. Now, you said children shouldn't suffer for the sins of their parents, but neither should they be richly rewarded for the sins of their parents, but neither should they be richly rewarded for the sins of their parents. So I don't consider it punitive if you say the parents got ill-gotten gains and they tried to hide it in their kids' bank accounts.

There's nothing wrong with taking that back, right? Because it was ill-gotten gains. It wasn't, it's not, it's not the same as punishment the way I see it. No. Well, and if you go back now, I don't even know how I could, sure, I could do a quick Google search here to look, but you remember Bernie Madoff years ago before the 2000s? Oh, yeah. So, if I remember correctly, and I'm 99% sure because I followed the impact of that, and this was memorable to me, there were individuals who had participated,

invested with Bernie Madoff, who harvested their gains and took them well before his fraudulent scheme was revealed, and their assets were clawed back, if I remember correctly. So, that's a situation where if the children have benefited from it, you know, it needs to be pulled away. They've had an unfair advantage at the expense of all of the American taxpayers. And, you know, I think the consequences should be severe and one that's talked about for generations to make sure that there is no elected official in the future that will ever consider doing that, along with checks and balances in place. Consequences have to be part of the game, obviously, right? So I think about this from, say, the environmental perspective, right?

So if the boardroom and the executive leadership suite of, say, Dow Chemical, knew there was a chance that if they were dumping these PFAS forever chemicals into the Ohio River, if they knew that a decade or two later, there was a chance that that would be uncovered, which it would have been, they knew it because they were trying to hide it. If they knew that a decade or two later, there was full clawbacks for their whole family structure, they make different decisions. Oh, yeah. Right?

Absolutely. That's why we're seeing this huge fight tooth and nail laws, activists, judges, like let's not have the public looking into what's been going on inside the treasury database so the treasury department according to an article that was just uh penned in an op-ed by five former treasury secretaries larry summers what a cad um janet yellen all those people right ruben they said listen you don't understand there's been like this gnomish permanent like bureaucracy that's just been running this unaudited unaccountable and we should really keep it that way because they're the experts i'm like

you know they just said the quiet part out loud which is like we've just been doing this whole thing with nobody looking over our shoulder for 80 years right no audits paul the chance that there is not fraud is 0.00%. Zero. It's humans. Unaudited humans with a magic checkbook commit fraud. It's just how it is. You're right. And here's what makes it worse.

The further you're removed from the person that you're stealing from, the easier it is to steal. That's just human nature. So I was in a situation on a nonprofit booster club. An individual had to face people that were there but still ended up stealing large sums of money in relation to the budget that was within the program. Thought they were going to get away with it until somebody like me comes along and starts asking questions and looking at the details. This happens in churches on a regular basis. It happens everywhere. I mean, in my 26-year career, I mean, the one requirement that I have if I'm going to serve on a board is, is there an independent audit and are there checks and balances in place? And there are some organizations that don't have those in place that are running well,

but that's the minority out there because if you leave it open, all I can think about is when you look at what's going on in the government, who are they really going to answer to, right? I mean, they're so detached from the daily lives of the individuals that it makes it easier for them to still and have this grift taking place. And all I can think about is what are the knock-on effects, okay? So all this money has been funneling back to Politico and some of these others. How many of these institutions are being propped up because of those funds that are coming in? How many other individuals who were so convinced that they were not going to be caught in this situation get caught up in this, you know, measuring contest.

My net worth is greater than yours. And because they've got these funds coming in that they think they're protected by these judges that want to cover it up, right? I mean, that's all they're wanting to do. If you're a judge that's wanting to cover this up, you have to be completely corrupt. Because, you know, you have to bring things into the light. You have to put the evidence out there, and then you have to weigh that evidence. And you're wanting to hide this evidence? Okay. So, you know, my question is, is how much deflation is going to ripple through the economy as these schemes are pulled aside? And how many corporations out there,

you know, you look at, you know, Nancy Pelosi and how great some of the stock trading records are out there. Well, I'm not, I'm just speculating, okay? So what if you have the ability to direct some of these funds and you're spending egregious amounts of money to some of these corporations for insider trading information for your own benefit, right? And that's artificially inflating the earnings of some of these companies. I don't know if that's the case, but I'm starting to wonder, you know, how far do these little strings go down and how does that unfold? I can't remember the details, you may, but the data came out that apparently in some of these

research grants, the government, what the government was funding, their administrative expenses were much higher. And the private foundations were nearly half what the government was going to administrative expenses for these research grants. So that tells you there that that was just, you know, egregious and foolish. Just let's throw this money out there. And it has to stop. I mean, otherwise, it has to stop, and they're discovering it, but we also have to fix the system and put checks and balances in place and raise the consequences to the point that only a full idiot that didn't care about their family or anything would attempt to cross that threshold.

We've got to make the pain of crossing that threshold so severe that the fear overcomes our human nature of trying to be a fraud in an elected political position. And that'll come. But, Paul, in between here and there, we're going to discover the severity of this fraud. So I think Elon Musk in that same Paris conference he started with, he said something, I'm paraphrasing here, he said something like, the amount of fraud we're about to unleash and discover here will make any other prior sets of frauds just in the private sector look like child's play. Oh, wow. I didn't hear that. Yeah. So it's going to be magnificent, but of course it is. Now there's three levels of fraudery that's been going on

here. One, just they've been overpaying themselves to do like work that you and I, or any reasonable business person would say that was unnecessary, wasteful, just stupid work, right? Two, we know that they've, um, they've actively been funneling money within and around and back and forth to each other. Okay, fine. There's been some, maybe some overt fraud in that. But then there's the third one, which, you know, Milton Friedman would tell us about, which is because they were overspending so badly, they created inflation, right? And every time you get inflation, it's because the government is overspending money. That's where it starts. It's not because you overspend money or me. We can't do that. It's because the government spends money it doesn't have.

And it gives it to all these NGOs and consultants and, you know, all that stuff. OK, now, and that makes the crime a little easier for them, because you say, you know, if you're not really connected face to face to the person you're stealing from, makes it a little easier maybe. Well, inflation is just this thing they can all sort of vaguely shrug and pretend like they had no part in it at all, but they did. And this is fascinating. So we just got to inflation. By the way, this is what we're going to talk about here today. Remember Peak Financial Investing. If you want to talk to Paul and his team, go to peakfinancialinvesting.com, fill out a simple form, get in the queue because they're very busy these days, but they'll make time for you as soon as they possibly can get a portfolio review so you can figure out how you're going to manage what we're talking about here today,

because this is something. Paul, this is from January 2025. We have the BLS Consumer Price Index. It was a little shock, a little higher than they expected. All items came in at 3% year over year. I think they were expecting it a little less. They said food is up 2% year over year. So the law, um, you know, they're going to have to make some of that up, but car insurance, 11.8% year over year airfare, 7.1% year over year. So if you drive a car, want to fly anywhere, even according to the USBLS, it's a lot more expensive right now. And again, this is because the government is overspending. And if you look at it, this is all on a year over year basis, those numbers. Let's look at it on a six month basis, right? And here we can see that this is compared to six months ago for all

items. Inflation is now higher than it was on a rate basis than it was six months ago. All items X shelter. So that's X rent, X shelter, much higher than six months ago. All items, less food and energy. So this includes shelter, all items higher, all items, less food and energy so this includes shelter all items higher all items less food energy shelter much higher all items less food energy shelter and use cars just carve that out as a thing higher the only thing that's down is rent um so if you own a home you're not doing as well on that basis compared to rent but still look even the overall height of rent compared to everything else on here. Very high. So this says inflation's going the wrong way. Now, this was the January report, Paul. I want you to listen to somebody here and see if you hear what I hear. This is the January report. So I'm just going to remind everybody listening to this.

The inflation report for January, Trump took office on January 21st. Let's listen to how a prominent Democrat goes around talking about this. Americans want most. Meanwhile, Americans woke up this morning to bad news for their bank accounts. They woke up to a grim reality that Donald Trump is not going to keep his promise to lower costs. They woke up. Americans woke up to an era of Trumpflation. And unfortunately, that's the January report. So the era was at most 10 days old, right? That's a 10 day old era. Second of all, even if you say the president had anything to do with inflation for the month of January, having just taken office on the 21st of January, two thirds of that belongs to Biden. This is the sort of gaslighting and nonsense we've had to put up with for way too many years. I think this is why people are angry,

Paul, because he is just like Chuck Schumer should know better. He knows better. He's just lying to us and wants us to absorb it. And it makes me angry. Absolutely. Let me show you something here that is perfect to follow right behind that. So Zero Hedge article out today, Biden inflation up so i thought this was great of course this is not yeah we this is the article from zero hedge that they put in there uh the other partner in crime is obvious fed chair pal and his pals pumping markets in desperation in the election so look at this right here this is the cpi year over year we're working our way down and then all of a sudden for whatever reason

powell comes out and panic cuts in september and then inflation takes off again you can't tell me that that chuck schumer doesn't know that and just so you guys know this is the article buying inflation up stock slumps with cpi with uh cut hoaxes cpi sores and jam yep and that just gives you the information i mean the data that they assume americans are so stupid and they have such control over the media apparatus which hopefully the funding to their media mouthpiece is being cut that we're actually going to believe that this is all trump oriented at this point oh that that's that's about like the the judge that wants to uh stop the uncovering of what's taking place right now that's just that's lying and he knows he's lying that's like

chuck schumer he's looking us straight in the eye paul and he says my two pair beats your full house and you wonder if they've got a shotgun under the table pointing at you you know when they say yeah all right well so here if he was being honest though here's what i would want him to say i would want him to say look over the last four years when biden was in office we had some pretty nasty inflation okay and and we know that this is because the government overspent and i look forward to working with the new administration to figure out how to reel this in because we understand just how painful this is for people who are not somehow accumulating high seven digit portfolios on $174,000 a year salary. Like me, he would have said new cars up 19% used cars up 21% in just four years, right?

Food away from home up 25%. Electricity nearly 30%. Gasoline 34. Home prices almost 40%. Auto insurance 60%. And of course, a dozen eggs is up 238%. He would have said, wow, I am so sorry. This is a failure of leadership.

I was in power and mistakes were made. And we would like to do what we can to make it right for you. To say that Trump, that we have a new era of Trumpflation because of the January report. It's insulting, Paul, how much he thinks, how little he thinks of us. It is. But, you know, Chris, it's a spirit. I mean, from my perspective, one of the teachings that Christ and the Bible gives me is if we confess our sins, he'll be faithful to heal us and forgive us from those. There's a spirit of individuals out there like that, especially those who want to cover up their secrets. They are unwilling to admit any error whatsoever. I don't know if it's their pride that causes them to do it, but they will burn the world down to keep their secrets, you know, in the closet. And then when you find them out, they're going to turn around and blame you for, you know, I saw something on Twitter yesterday that there was this girl that says that

these judges and these Democrats that are screaming heavily are acting like a boyfriend that's caught cheating or a husband that's caught cheating. You know, the wife grabs the phone, goes in the bathroom, and he's beating on the door, you're invading my privacy, you're invading my privacy. And he comes out and shows, what's this, you know, and then closes the door and goes back in there. And the whole time he's trying to turn it around saying, well, you know, you invaded my privacy. The reality is, I'm called, right? You're called. And that's what it appeared. That's what it looks like to me. It's that same spirit of those individuals who can't change their ways because they refuse to admit that they've done anything wrong. Not good people. I just want to

take a quick break right now to tell you about my Information Scout service. At Peak Prosperity, I'm holding this really important role of being your Information Scout. Now, what does that mean? First, I do what I do because, as we all know, this world is really crazy right now. We don't know if our food's going to continue to be stocked in the stores. We don't know if the grid's going to stay up. We don't know if the war's going to break out. So being resilient is more important now than ever.

And the first element of being resilient is knowing what you need to know, having that right information. So listen, you can get a news aggregator service. That's not what I'm offering here. I go in and I find the data, and I'm going to present you that data, and I'm going to hang it on these things called frames to make it simple and easy. The feedback I love the most that I get from my subscribers is that I save them time. They understand what's happening in the world. They feel more comfortable knowing what's going on,

even if they don't always like the results of what they've just learned. But most importantly, they take action as a consequence. So it's time for you to become resilient. It begins by being well-informed, and that's the service of me being your personal information scout in this complicated, fast-moving world. Now, let's get back to our program. Paul, I mean, every time I see numbers like this, I'm a little bit shocked. I know it was bad, but when you see it actually laid out like this, this is bad, right? I mean,

if you're on a fixed income, if you are on a fixed income, like the cost of living adjustments were up. I know we had a pretty big year. They had an 8% increase in one of those years. But the other years were like, what was it this year? 2% or something? I just, if you were on fixed income Social Security, you did not keep up with this table, guaranteed. No, not at all yeah this is uh this is shocking it is shocking and it hurts the worst of us chris it hurts it hurts the

elderly it hurts those on a fixed income budget you know one thing that we've seen is is the whatever the social security cost of living adjustment is it does not reflect the actual cost of living. And either, you know, property and casualty prices increased dramatically, and then also the young. So, we're handicapping, or not handicapping, we're putting a burden on our elderly that we have a responsibility to take care of and make sure that they're okay and are young. And it's only the top 10 to 15% that are able to absorb these price increases. But even some of those that have much larger incomes and their debt levels are low or they're debt free are still making changes in the way that they're living because everybody's feeling it. Some, it's put a little bit of a hamper on

your lifestyle. Others, it's absolutely decimating it. Well, Chuck Schumer just said, listen, if you had accidentally voted for Kamala and her team, we would have continued that gaslighting. We would have had more of this. This is what the program would have been. I don't know how Trump is going to necessarily deal with this because it's hard to get this to sort of turn around. But I do know that that this pain right here did help sway the election because we were being gaslit. No, no. It's just, you know, they didn't talk about it. So I was just did an interview with Tucker, Jeffrey Tucker, and he was talking about how, like today, you wake up in the New York Times front page. How is Trump going to deal with all this inflation? They never talked about it when

it was under Biden. Right. And so I guarantee you, no matter how bad inflation is or not, they're going to keep trying to stick him with that because they know it's painful, but they're going to try and stick him with Biden's inflation. Right. Team Biden. It wasn't really Biden because we all understand that he was not mentally capable of executing anything, right? He wasn't really in charge. But whoever was running that show was creating a lot of inflation. And now we find out, really, it's insult and injury or injury on top of injury.

They were running a corrupt scam the whole time, lecturing us about the need to, you know, be better citizens or something while they were just stuffing pot, their pockets with our money. Right. Absolutely. Well, and only that, you know, their narrative was, Hey, the economy is great. How come? And this is, you know, what was it? The economy is great. Why is it the average person doesn't understand it? And they're trying to tell us how great it is during that period.

They're just completely boring and not listening to people. It's like, this is how you need to think. And that's why they were booted out. Yeah, I read that Wall Street Journal article. I have it. I saved it. I'm saving this for posterity because I couldn't believe what I was reading. They said, you know, these young people today, they actually have it a lot better than they understand.

But for some reason, they just don't really appreciate how strong the economy is. Yeah, that's right. That's exactly what it was. Yeah. No, it wasn't all that strong. And so so, Paul, here's my guess. Now that there's a new sheriff in town, there's a lot of people who are just liars at the BLS, et cetera, and all this. And so Trump came out and I think there's a representative, Luna, and now you got Kash Patel maybe coming in. And all of a sudden, wouldn't you know it? The FBI said, oh, oh, we found 14000 more JFK file pages that we were supposed to turn over in 1992. Magic.

You know, we found them. I'll bet you anything the BLS is going to be finding fewer jobs and more inflation than they used to because they were cooking the books for the regime. And I think that's what I think that's how it's going to go. there's more pain coming because we've been dishonest. But anybody listening to this, you already knew that, right? You already knew things weren't as good as advertised. That's gaslighting, right? That's right. And the good part about this is maybe there was somebody in the FBI that is a good player,

that's a good character, because there are good people within bad organizations. Absolutely. And they're keeping their head down. And now they know that there's going to be consequences, that that light of truth is going to be shined upon each department in the dark. They can stand up and say, hey, I know where this is, and I know where that is. Those are the people that we need to lead to the top, right, that have tried to speak, but, you know, done the right thing, refused to go along and purge out all of the self-centered,

narcissistic, fraudulent individuals, those who do not love the truth. You know, and the interesting thing from my perspective, and it's hard to gauge, so when I talk about how interesting this time is, what are the knock-on effects, okay? One of the things that i'm seeing is there is complete cognitive dissonance between what is being revealed within within doge what this administration is doing and and what market participants are doing so scott rudner goldman sacks um flow guru basically stated that that retail investors have been piling in and buying this dip,

you know, these little dips we've been having at record numbers. I mean, I am seeing such fear of missing out right now. And to me, it seems cognitive dissonance because if Trump pulls this excess foolish money out of the system, that in itself is going to be deflationary. You take deep seek and technology, that is all deflationary. Now, maybe we stop that deflation somewhat with some tariffs and equalize the playing field and manufacturing comes back here, but in the short run, like we talked about before, how much money is artificially supporting profits of these big corporations? So in the midst of all of this panic buying, the market's basically just been consolidating for a period of time. You take the Russell 2000, and I can kind of show some charts here if I pull these up, but this is fascinating to me because you had the market start to sell off this morning,

and then all of a sudden you had the dip buyers come in, and this seems to be retail. Well, they came in in the first minute. Like 9.30, the futures were down, and 9.31, the buying began. Absolutely. So what this is is a daily chart of the S&P 500 candlesticks, and I've got quasi-resistance up here, prior resistance that technically becomes support.

But we're essentially back to mid-November where we are with all of this energy that's been spent buying. Now, it's possible, okay, that everybody's anticipating a Goldilocks and maybe we hold here and we break out, you know, like we did here and move a little bit higher. But what's interesting to me is we're going sideways. This is different than what occurred in 2017 under Trump's election, where it was pretty much a rocket ship higher. So we're seeing distribution. This may pull some of the liquidity out of the system. And I'm not saying that this market is topping right now,

because we're just going to have to wait and see what happens. My thesis has been that this is going to be very similar to the year 2000 that we have some weakness during this period a little bit of euphoria and we reach out to some highs and then the realization of what's taking place under the economy and the fact that we're going to have some deflation or resetting of the system which is what is occurs. And this is a chance for those investors who are disciplined, who are prudent, that are focused on paying attention to fundamentals and adaptive and has risk-managed strategies are finally going to be rewarded for choosing the path less traveled and not joining in the grift and the speculation and the, you know, complete unwillingness to understand

the risks in context of history where the markets are now. So, Paul, we haven't topped out yet, I don't think. And I'll tell you why. It's because of the German DAX plows on another 277 points today, closes at an all-time new record high, and obviously up just massively from just under 15,000 there at the October 23 lows, now up, you know, at 22,300, called 22,400. It just keeps going up. And, Paul, Germany is a hot mess.

It is a basket case. It is a disaster zone. They are shedding jobs. Their productive economy, every time you look at it, like their engines of prosperity, all of their heavy manufacturing industries are not just in sort of down, they're in depression territory, down 17% compared to 2017, baselining it to 100 from there. It's astonishing how bad it is. And yet this is happening. Somebody broke this market. I don't know what they did, but this, I will say it's the central bank. Some central bank broke the markets. This is going to keep doing this. Probably momentum players just piling in,

because that's what you do, because it's just the momentum, you know, algos say it's going this way until it actually fully breaks. And by the way, I'm going to, Paul, I have to blame, I don't want to be a blamer, but the central banks have a lot to answer for in here. I think that if we could get an audit of the Fed, and I'm talking transaction level detail, I would be very curious to find out if they have been against the provisions in the Federal Reserve Act. There is nothing in there that allows them to monkey around in stock markets, but I'd be willing to bet a fairly sizable stack of Benjamins that they have been. And again, they'll have their rationales for it, Paul, like it was important and think what would have happened if we hadn't done that, you know, all that stuff. But it's all self-serving junk. You know, at the end of the day,

you get the same chart you always get, which is why are there so many billionaires and centimillionaires now and everybody else is struggling? It's because these raccoons couldn't help themselves and they started just monkeying with markets. I like free markets. Sometimes they go up. Sometimes they go down. But a non-free market, Paul, gives you misallocations of capital. It does. And those are just waiting to be exposed by something at some point in time, and that's when losses happen.

That's right. I don't know. This doesn't smell right to me the german market does not something's wrong i haven't quite got it worked out yet but we know what's interesting is the dax has has been a mystery to me so over the weekend i started trying to dig in and figure out why in the world the dax is doing what it's doing and i haven't finished it i got sidetracked trying to keep up with all the stuff coming out of doge and what's going on markets in our portfolios but i think some of it has to do with the makeup of the stocks that are inside of there that are a little bit more international like sap and some of these others

that have been on a tear very similar to like last year i have a chart that i was trying to replicate but it wasn't approved to show for public, that last year there were the lowest number of stocks that outperformed or matched the S&P 500. So you had your Magnificent 7 that kept the markets going. And throughout history, going back to 1985, this has only been met in 1998, 1999, right before the technology bubble burst. So we have all the signs that we're in the same similar type of environment. And that cap weighting of the indexing may be what's distorting the DAX in relation to the underlying German economy. But I can't say that for sure now. I'm digging into that. So maybe I'll have a report next week on it.

Can I turn back to inflation real quick? Because I want to have a moment of silence for our UK friends. So as bad as it's been here, it turns out, according to Truflation, that as of since January of 2020, inflation up 38.61% for the average UK citizen lost 38.45% of purchasing power. This is bad. This is really, really bad. lost 38.45% of purchasing power. This is bad. This is really, really bad. So just to make the numbers round,

so exactly what the government policies did was go into an individual making $100,000 a year and said, for the next year, you're going to have to work the exact same, or next four years, you're going to have to work just as hard as you have in the past, but we're only going to pay you $62,000 a year. So that's a pure pay cut to put that in perspective.

$100,000 four years later has purchasing power of $62,000. History, you know, isn't an exact match. You know, sometimes it rhymes all that. But this is interesting. I'm wondering if past is prologue on this. So this is comparing inflation today in the dark line compared to the lighter blue line, which is the inflation from the 70s. So you hear a lot of people now going, oh, you know, inflation's coming down. I think we're out of the woods. But then again, you know, it could be totally different this time. But isn't that kind of an eerie parallel? And all that would be required, Paul, for it to be a perfect parallel is some sort of an energy crisis, an oil crisis, you know? Or a dollar crisis as well. So I've been watching that really closely and there are many who argue that the inflation

is cyclical. And once it gets embedded into the system and spikes up again, behavior feeds on that inflation. So the question is, and what I'm hoping is that Doge pulls out all of these inflationary pressures and Trump actually goes through and allows the consequences, unfortunately, that are going to impact all of us to wring this inflation out of the system. The question is, is will he actually follow through with that? Right now it looks like he will, but we'll have to see.

That is highly possible, and that's going to wreck the markets if that inflation surges back again. Well, so let's go there real quick. You mentioned the dollar. We're going to turn to a dollar expert right now, because I think we got a complete, well, I think it could be a sign from God. So let's listen in. This is Janet Yellen talking about the dollar. And over a longer time horizon, how concerned are you about the potential impact of the dollar status as a world reserve currency? The potential impact of the dollar status as the world's reserve. The potential impact of the dollar status as the world's reserve. The potential impact of the dollar status as the world's reserve.

I'm sorry, Paul. I had to spring that on you. That's from my file, Great Moments in Treasury Secretariedom. Wow. Sometimes things happen as a warning to us if we're aware, you know, pay attention, but we'll only see it in the hindsight. That's pretty interesting. So anyway, maybe there's a dollar crisis coming. I don't know.

I really hope not. I mean, don't get me wrong if for those of us, not a recommendation, you have talked to advisors that are positioned for the potential outcome of the collapse of a dollar, but I really hope that that does not occur. And I hope that's something that we don't have to implement our strategies to, because it'll be an equal opportunity bringer of misery for all individuals. So I'm hoping that Elon Musk and Trump and those that are in there now will bring everything to light, bring trust back into the system, and somehow lay a foundation that we don't have to worry about that as a real risk. Yep. Can we talk about this? Oh, absolutely. So the dollar, the dollar has already suffered a bit of a crisis because back in a year ago,

a dollar would buy you one two thousandth of an ounce of gold. and today it buys you one 2,920th of an ounce of gold. So that's a $1,000 erosion in just a year. That's basically, you know, it's a 50% increase in the price of gold over the past year. That's speaking to dollar crisis right there already all on its own. Yes, it is. Of some kind. Yes. Of some kind. Yes. Well, and if you've got all your currencies paid together, then the dollar can be strong relative to some of the other currencies,

but if they're all falling in relation to gold at a faster pace, especially gold and euros, I don't have that chart on this computer. But it's at all-time highs too, right? But it's at all-time highs too. So right? But it's at all-time highs, too. So gold is the one asset class that seems to be maintaining its purchasing power relative to fiat currencies. Yeah, so that's sort of the behavior over the past year. More recently, Super Bowl happens Sunday, Sunday night. I'm watching gold futures in the overnights at about 945, around between 945 and 10. Somebody, Paul, stepped in and sold massive quantities of both gold and silver. And we call him Mr. Slammy in my line of work. Mr. Slammy shows up and just what's called destroys the

bid stack. So there's a bunch of people bidding. I'll pay this much for gold. There's a bunch of people ask saying, I want this much for my gold. That's the whole bid stack right there. And it has a very tight range. But in the overnight markets, Paul, there might be 10 buyers and 10 sellers. It's thin. And when somebody steps in and says, I got 500 sell orders, and I want them all executed in this one-minute window, which is how Mr. Slammy rolls, that's usually your signal.

And I've seen this play enough times. I went to bed going, OK, I'm going to wake up tomorrow. Gold's going to be down several hundred dollars and it's going to carry on. And these things usually last about two weeks. OK, so we wake up that morning and and boom, eight o'clock. They just start coming right in here in number one and slamming it. This is eight o'clock when the U.S. markets open up, slamming into it. But mystery of all mysteries, Paul, it went that way. So then

all night long, they were working on it hard. And this is a whole day of trading here yesterday. Yeah. And then last night they were working her over good. And then eight o'clock, the U.S. markets open up and slam. Oh, no. Went the other way. These are called failed slams. And that's a pretty significant failure right there. They worked very hard to get that under 2,900 an ounce and to get some momentum to the downside. They keep trying. They keep trying.

But the forces and the buyers that are starting to wake up. And what's interesting is we don't even have retail jumping on it yet. Discount or premium on a lot of your physicals, and we pay attention to that. There is no retail euphoria on this at all. They're not going to crack the market. When retail joins along with these big buyers that are buying physical metals, my opinion is that they won't even be able to pull off what they did in their chart there.

It's going to be shorter and shorter and shorter. And ultimately, at some point, they're going to have to give up. Yeah. So I don't know if you heard this yet. Did you realize this, that South Korea's mint has temporarily suspended sales of gold bars to retail people? There's no gold. They ran out.

No, I did not know that. That's big news. That is big news. And so people have been asking me, like, Chris, you know, what will the end times look like for gold? Right. Not the not the biblical end times, but like, what does it look like? And you would think that it would be, you know, gold's marching up in price and it gets higher and higher. And then you start hearing lots of rumblings that their supply tightness. No, in South Korea, you have to live with this crazy thing, Paul, where they will look you with a straight face and say, gold is $2,920 an ounce. Oh, I'd like to buy some. You can't get any.

Right? Yeah. And so the spread between, you know, what you could buy gold for, normally the spreads would start to blow out. The official price is $29.20, but it costs you $29.80 and maybe $3,000. The spreads start blowing out to buy that ounce. Nope. The spread went to infinity all at once.

They just said, yeah, we don't have any more. The normal market way for this to clear is for the price to go up. People start selling and supply shows up. They didn't. They just stopped sales. That's right. So that's a sign right there. That's a big sign.

You know, what's interesting, and I'm anticipating that we're going to see some consolidation for gold for the next three, four, five, or six months. So one of the strategies, not a recommendation, I'm just sharing kind of educational purposes strategy for people who need exposure to some physicals that don't have it. I'm saying, hey, let's consider averaging over the next four to five months. You know, whatever you're going to put in, break it into five months. But if we happen to get a 10% decline

for whatever reason, then double your purchases and speed that up because the long-term forces that have gotten gold to here are still there. They're still under the surface. And that's another sign, because we've not seen that happen before. I don't know the last time I recall, I don't know that I ever recall someone saying, a country like that saying that they're not, they don't, they're not going to sell it to retail. Do you? You've been in the gold markets for a while. No, no, it's very rare.

I mean, things would get tight, but you could buy it. Delivery might have been stretched out a few weeks, but they didn't just stop. And speaking of 10% price movements, did you catch this? The SGE, the Shanghai Gold Exchange, as of today, February 12th, limits the gold price increases to just 10%. So for whatever they were seeing in the Shanghai Gold Exchange, they decided, Paul, you know what? We ought to put in some circuit breakers on this. So they have limit up days now coded in. Whoever the regulators are, they're like, you know what? We're going to limit daily price increases to 10%. We never get those in gold. 2% is the magic like, you know what? We're going to limit daily price increases to 10%. We never get

those in gold. 2% is the magic limit, you know, that they've set in the U.S. markets, right? Yeah. So the fact that they've set that there ahead of time when we've not had 10% moves and the gold price tells me that they're anticipating that that could be a potential at some point in the future. So what do they know that we don't? Because that's the Shanghai exchange directed by the administrators from a government level, correct? Yep. And by the way, it's one of the largest gold exchanges, if not the largest gold exchange now, because the Chinese are very gold happy, all that. So that's big news. So, Paul, there's so much big news popping right now.

So, by the way, I just want to consider this as an idea. People should think this through. Maybe, you know, I don't know. Matt Smith writing here says, buckle up. There's a massive move happening in the gold market that almost nobody's talking about. Of course, we have. Huge physical deliveries. Yep.

Shortages in London. Yep. Blowing out, you know, lease spreads, all of that. Gold flowing into the U.S. at record levels. Yep. Shortages in London. Yep. Blowing out, you know, lease spreads, all of that. Gold flowing into the U.S. at record levels. Yep. Someone with deep pockets is scooping up the gold, likely the U.S. Treasury or Fed. And, quote, Paul, the idea here is that who has the power to force London to cough up 500 tons is probably not a family office. So the idea is it must be the government, right? Because who else could actually get that to happen? So Matt Smith continues, quote, well, why the theory? They're

preparing for a full on gold audit, meaning they're reshoring gold that maybe they might have leased out. And once audited, that gold could form the backbone of a new monetary system. It could signal a seismic shift in the dollar status and value but let me start here end quote um let me start with this the idea paul if we do have an audit of fort knox the chance that all that gold is there is zero so i'm sure some is there but all of it zero why because bureaucrats have been doing everything in their power to prevent an audit it's too expensive. Think how hard that would be. Somebody would have to open the vault and count and write the number down.

Since the 70s, we've wanted a gold audit, and they've said no. So I'm pretty sure I know why. Yeah, and with what we've seen so far with what Doge has discovered and something that's easily audited, if it was implemented, I can only imagine what they would find if there's the audit of Fort Knox. Yeah. Are there tungsten bars in there? Are the bars the actual purity they're supposed to be? Are they just missing with little slips of paper saying IOUs from the Bank of England? We don't know.

We don't know. But that could explain some of what we're seeing. Well, one thing we do know is retail hasn't been the big buyer of gold, which has been driving these prices up. It's been the central banks of the world. So they turned from net sellers, what, back in the 90s, I think, 2002 is when they hit their bottom, but they've accelerated quickly around the world.

You've got the BRICS that have proposed a 40% backing of the unit, if that's ever rolled out with gold. They're a digital currency for the BRICS, yep. Yes, the unit digital currency, and they've got the BRICS pay system that they've been working, so they're constantly monitoring in that direction. And the reality is if the sanctions and the foolish behavior of the Biden administration and weaponizing the SWIFT system, I can't remember the acronym for the SWIFT banking system, but it's an acronym for the infrastructure, you know, cutting them, Russia and several others out of the SWIFT banking system. We forced them to move in that direction. So, you know, the U.S., if they're going in that direction without stop and somebody knows that,

then we have to put ourselves in a position where we can match that from our currency or our currency is essentially worthless. So imagine this. So we saw this. It was another presser. And by the way, we've had more press conferences in like the last three days under Trump than we had in four years of Biden. And we all know why Biden couldn't actually, you know, cogently converse. But I saw one with Scott Besant, the new Treasury Secretary, and he said, we're going to monetize or leverage or somehow use the asset side of the balance sheet, the American balance sheet. Gold would be on the asset side of the balance sheet. Now, there are other things. So maybe I'm connecting too many dots. But I mean, can you imagine, Paul,

if all of a sudden they said, hey, listen, we're having a little trouble scaring up, you know, the treasury bond issuances, you know, we get it. You know, people have not, you know, we haven't been operating with full faith, right? And so to get people back and excited, listen, we're going to sell two different issues of bonds, normal treasury bonds, give us Federal Reserve notes. At some point in the future, you get interest in Federal Reserve notes back, but there'll be a second issue. And these, you can either take, you know, Federal Reserve notes back. But there'll be a second issue. And these you can either take, you know, Federal Reserve notes back or it'll be denominated in gold, right? So those would be gold-backed bonds. You would get a lot of excitement, quick prediction. The interest

rate on those is going to be a lot lower than the interest rate on the Federal Reserve only. And now the Federal Reserve, as a private entity, as a reminder, Federal Reserve is about as federal as Federal Express. They're going to have to now actually operate as if they had a product that was competing in a marketplace. Yes. And that would change everything. Yes. Yes. They'll hate it, but it would be great for us.

Yes. It would be incredible for the individuals. And I would tend to one rather buy the, it would be incredible for the individuals. And I would tend to one rather buy the gold back bond if that was an option. But, you know, and this is just off the top of my head, just thinking you'd have to pay me 10 percent more at a minimum. And that's in a five year maturity to have the one that's not gold backed. If I had the opportunity of one that I could swap out for gold or two on the other. Because we just don't have enough information at this point in time to see whether the Trump administration is going to follow through and at some point not turn on the printing presses again.

I hope that he's not. But I was a little surprised in 2016, but I think this is a completely different presidency at this point. I think in hindsight, we were very fortunate that he didn't win the 2020 and set up in a position now to where he really understands and had the time behind the surface and survived everything they put him through to bring the truth back out, bring all those secrets out of the closet, stick them in front of the American people, and then let us have some justice for a change.

Full confession, I was very dismissive of Trump's capabilities as recently as this past summer, because his first administration, Paul, what I saw was he brought on, he didn't bring on the A-team, he brought on a lot of people, he had a lot of Goldman Sachs bankers, and da-da-da, it wasn't so good. The quality difference of Scott percent. He really impresses me. This guy knows what he's talking about. Very smart, very well read. A lot of history.

Tulsi Gabbard, who just got confirmed. We're going to have a very different flavor as the director of national intelligence. Robert F. Kennedy looks like he's got a good shot. Fingers crossed. Knock on wood. He gets in total game changer. Like he's come. He's he came this time. It's totally not Trump one and Trump two. You can't even compare them

at this point. Right. And how, how wonderful is it that you've got former Democrats that are, have joined this administration that they, they've thrown their party affiliations behind because they want what's best for the American people. Right. I mean, that to me, it gives me the most amount of hope and just bringing to the light, like pulling out, pulling the curtains back and let's audit, let's put before the American people, let's tell the truth and let's stop treating them like a bunch of idiots that can't handle the truth because we can handle the truth. We're resilient and people want the truth. They're tired of being lied to. Absolutely. And they're tired of being talked

down to. I think that's probably one of the things that I've enjoyed the most with the people that I'm talking to and having consultations is they understand they can ask me anything, right? They can ask me anything. I'm not going to be offended by it. I'm going to have conversations them and we're going to be able to to show them the data about where they are and say here's your option a or here's option b you know the choice is you this is what i would do if i was you but if you're comfortable with this risk then head down that path and and choosing the path of discipline instead of transitioning and saying you you know, talking about everything except for the concerns they have and belittling their concerns. In a lot of cases, I believe our industry has been so taught to sell that the advisors can't have the conversation because they're not students of the market. They're selling products instead of understanding

why they're doing what they're doing, right? But we'll let the back office somewhere else handle that. And so people want the truth. And that's one of the things that I'm discovering more and more. And as they're finding the truth and hearing some of what's going on, there's a lot of anger because they're realizing, like Renee was, I've made sacrifices. I've had to do

and out things because of my taxes and the increase in the cost of living and everything else. And these people have been lining their own pockets at our expense. You know, that's angering. And I think we're going to see a lot more of that over the next six months if they continue to lay this information out. Paul, I want a clawback over the last four years, and I want a refund, right? I never signed up as a taxpayer to be a participant in a fraudulent system. And like you said, you know, if you participate in a fraudulent Ponzi scheme, you should expect clawbacks, right? I don't, I mean, this is, honestly is this is as big as the events that kicked off the Boston Tea Party that kicked off the revolution as far as I'm concerned.

Right. You know, and then you got all these people, mostly Democrats now, but a few Republicans going, hey, you know, I don't know. You know, we shouldn't really kick out King George because maybe the new guys are worse, will be worse than him. You know, I'm like, no, no, I think we just needed the change. It was overdue. Now we're going to get the change, right? And so I see you looking for something there. But if we do get into this stagflation, I've got that, I want to talk about like how would we invest given the things that might happen?

So stagflation, again, is the for people who don't know, is a combination of low or negative economic growth, but still persistent inflation. It's actually it sounds kind of sounds fun, like a stag party, like a little stagflation. It's the worst of times. OK, it's terrible. People losing their jobs and stuff gets more expensive and um yeah so so samantha leduc on uh on x says uh retweeted something from wind smart winfield smart who i follow as well this that's from a 2021 chart but i'm sure nothing has changed much because it's looking at the asset class returns of the stagflation 1970s now I don't know if this chart is for all of the 70s or just the period of four or five years we had pretty bad stagflation. So, Paul, I don't

know. But if you look at this, the best thing to be involved in was gold. Second best was commodities. Value was finally higher than growth. Then corporate bonds, then T-bills, then long-term treasury bonds, then small did better than large, and the worst performer out of all this was the S&P 500. Yeah, so you had the nifty 50 back then, which is very similar to the mag seven today that cracked, and I think it was 73, 74 when inflation surged again. And I would assume, I'm thinking that that may be year over year return on gold because gold, if I remember correctly, went from, I can't remember what it was on the low, but it was below 100 up to 800 at its peak. Of course, inflation had backed off a little bit during that period of time. So I'm curious in the window. But it's interesting that

value, everything balanced out of that nifty 50 into the real assets that we have to have. And I know we've shown this chart a thousand times, but if you go back, commodities in general are below where they were January 1st, 2008. So there's unbelievable amounts of upside potential there. And we're starting to see commodities are now a target in our portfolios. And we're taking our time to move in because if we do have some deflation, that may be something that temporarily goes down in the short run. But from a long-term standpoint, that's where your opportunity is. And your passive investing is not going to make the adaptation to shift over into those. Modern portfolio theory is not going to make an adaptation to shift over and overweight those categories until all of the gains are done.

Because what most of your modern portfolio theory and institutions do is they don't even allocate to an asset class until it's had three years of outperformance relative to something else. So they're going to be three years behind the curve in just the standard cookie cutter approach. That's where those that are adaptive, and I believe that active management is going to come back, whether it's this year, next year, or the year after. And that diversification will unbelievably reward those investors who are investing in a manner that has been historically proven to stand the test of time over long economic cycles. Well, I'm glad you teed that up perfectly for me, because look at the worst performer, right? S&P 500. If we compare that now, also from Samantha LaDuke, I found this chart,

which is that passive funds is now represent more than half of all mutual fund and etf assets um this is just passive so these are people just passively you know uh throwing money in and it's been this way since look at this just like long slow march just like just more and more it's like ruler straight, Paul, more than half, 54% now just passively flows in to things like the S&P 500, right? And so this has been okay because from 03, it's been nothing but central bank interventions, constant expansion, making sure the market goes up and to the right. 75% of all equity weighting is now in that S&P 500 or U.S. markets, right, relative to international. It's just been an astonishing period. And I think they've got everybody

pretty well convinced that that's sort of the new permanently high plateau, right? They do. And Mike Green's done a wonderful job, you know, basically laying out a thesis and a theory. And I love Samantha Ledeep's work as well. So she's sharp. But his argument is if we're over 50%, this is passive flows. As long as employment's good, people are investing in the S&P 500

over international investors because this has been the only game in town are investing in the markets. They're price-incensive buyers. They don't care what the valuations are. They don't care how little the cash flow is. They don't care if they're paying 200 years' worth of a company's earnings inside of there because that's what has worked. They're looking in the review mirror in hindsight bias. And you're also set up to where a lot of your 401ks have automatic enrollment, and they're going to pick a fund like that because it has low expenses.

And this is just a behemoth of money flow that's causing the larger stocks to outperform relative to the others. Now, there's a couple of things that are going to break this, and it's going to end ugly. Okay? But before we get to the end of this, let's talk about the active investors. So, you know, active investors have struggled over this period of time where the government has stepped in. They may have knocked it out of the ballpark from 2000, 2003. They may have knocked it out of the ballpark in 2008. But active is going to be fundamental. They're going to pay attention to sustainable businesses. They're going to pay attention to cash flow, time value of money. They're going to deploy that capital in what are the best businesses. But the problem is,

is they've not been able to overcome these passive price insensitive buyers. Okay. That just comes in at the first part of the month, every month we're in this period of time where pensions are making contributions. I believe that's artificial. That's not artificial. It's real support for these markets where it is. But when you've got over 50% of those funds going into passive, let's say you've got 10% of those out there that are left that are active. Well, they can't collude together. That's the argument that Mike Green has been making with, it was on one of Grant's conversations. But so they can't collude together, okay?

They're not going to communicate with each other and say, hey, we're all going to shorten video. The government's not going to allow them to do that. And none of them manage enough money individually to overcome those passive flows. So it's immediate ruin if they took their whole book and shorted against that. That would be a foolish game. So this is going to continue to build. And one of two things are going to happen. The baby boomers are going to enter their distribution phase. That's one thing that's going to cause it. Right now, they've not had to do that. Okay. The second thing could be that we actually have a recession

and unemployment goes up. One, that's going to stop some of those flows that are going into passive. And then two, it could be liquidations because of unemployment and higher inflation where people just can't make their ends meet and they have to sell some of those funds. So we're in a situation now where that boat is tilted to where everybody is over 50% on that side. And when everybody is on that side, the few that are left are going to be well rewarded for that rebalancing when it occurs. And we don't know if it's going to be, you know, that stagflation that occurs that causes those flows to reverse, but that's a behemoth that's

really hard to overcome. And it's driving valuations and your, your larger magnificent seven, because what is it? 30, I think I'm underestimating. 35% of every dollar that goes into the S&P 500 goes to the Magnificent 7, regardless of how expensive they are. They're price-insensitive buyers. So I would like to, I wonder what Mike Green, Professor Plum, thinks about this. That's his handle over there on Twitter, X. Because there's another passive buyer out there, drives me nuts, which is stock buybacks by corporations. Drives me nuts because they say, oh, we're returning money to shareholders. Like, no, there's a mechanism. It's called a dividend. So if you want to return money to shareholders, cut them a check, okay? That's

how you do it. What they're doing in most cases, from my perspective, far too many cases, Paul, is they give lots of stock options to their C-suite, which dilutes the outstanding shares. And then they buy those back with what should be dividends going to tax to, sorry, to shareholders. So anyway, but they're almost automatic too. And so if there is a reversion of the mean, corporate profits have been super juiced by all this money printing and everything and all the inflation. But if those ever revert to the mean, there's a second, I'll call it automatic purchaser that disappears from the markets, too.

So it's all one big bubbly thing, and it's all been fine with the central banks printing like crazy. So I guess, you know, the real question is, is there anything that would get them to stop printing? You know, that's a good question. Profits getting squeezed. So let's say the Biden administration was for capital at the expense of labor. So labor being middle class, capital being the top 5%. So if the Trump administration is actually for labor, okay,

so years ago the Democratic Party used to be for labor and the Republican Party was perceived to be for capital. That seems to have switched, especially you look at all the effort the Biden administration put into keeping the markets up. Fiscal irresponsibility, what we talked about last week with Janet Yellen having nearly $10 trillion in short-term maturities when they could have taken advantage of low yields, all of that was really good for capital.

So if we get into a situation, if this administration follows through and implements policies at the expense of capital that's really good for labor, that's going to reduce the ability for these companies for buybacks because they're not going to have the profits left over to put back in there. Now, we don't know if that's going to happen right now, but that is a sign of something that would stop those buybacks from being the behemoth in the market of where they are. I mean, the buybacks are such a big impact on the market. There are a couple of things that we have to pay attention to. We're very careful on first of the month. If you're going to rebalance something, try to catch the first five days of the month because that's when passive funds hit the market. And then try to sell before you

get into a blackout period if you need to re-diversify or get some liquidity for clients because those buybacks are support for the market and the numbers are large in relation to history and supply and demand. Just means that's, you know, taking shares off the market, and hey, and it incentivizes the C-suite. So I think it was prior to 1982, if I remember correctly, buybacks were considered illegal, or they were illegal. They were. buybacks were considered illegal or they were illegal, but they were, but you know, and I think they should be outside of shareholder approval across the board for a specific circumstance because it's what is it? Um, Charlie Munger said, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. So if the large majority of your C-suite and your highly compensated employees

are rewarded based on the performance of the stock, but yet they get to make the decision to use the profits to buy back that stock. That creates artificial demand to inflate that stock, which lines their own pockets. No different than what the politicians have been doing or government bureaucrats have been doing through USAID. Yeah, if you want to return money to shareholders, cut them a check. It's called a dividend. It's called a dividend. It's an awesome thing. It works beautifully.

So, yeah, yeah, I get all that. So, Paul, that's all the time I have today. I've got another interview popping up here in a few minutes, but any last words here as we close out today? No, the one thing that I would say is just be diligent, know your plan. I do encourage people, make sure you've got some emergency funds in place. Consider harvesting some of the gains that you have in there. This is not a time to be swinging for the fence. This is a time to be building the foundation. I have no clue. I could build the argument that this market could keep running all the way through the end of the year, but take advantage of this because there are times to be prudent, the prudent for see danger and hide themselves. Things are moving so fast in the government.

This is a completely different era. Don't be complacent about it. Pay attention. You know, a lot of stocks are consolidating sideways. Maybe they're consolidating sideways before they take off, you know, but look for opportunity, look for value. If you've been in this passive game up to this point, this is not a recommendation because you have to have a consultation, then good for you, right? You've not suffered the consequences that some that have been paying, you know, not knowing what to do. Okay. That's how we've developed, play the game by the rules that are forced upon us. But seriously consider the path ahead. Make sure that you put yourself into a resilient position and seek some, you know, some counsel

from individuals that have been paying attention to this for some time. You know, you've done a great job, Chris, of warning individuals and getting that information out there. So I encourage people to really, you know, take your next steps with fear and trembling. Don't get caught up into fear and emotion. Emotional decisions can get us into trouble. You know, make good logical long-term and develop a plan on how you're going to adapt depending upon how things unfold. And if you don't know how to do that, you know, there are individuals like us, we'd be honored to be able to kind of help you stress test your situation. Well said. And thank you for doing that, everyone. That's

Paul Kiker of Kiker Wealth Management. Again, go to peakfinancialinvesting.com. Fill out a simple form if you want to talk to Paul and his team about your own particular, very unique special situation, because they're all different. So, Paul, thanks for your time today. And hey, have a great weekend. Thanks, Chris. You too. Many blessings.