Peak Prosperity - Chemtrails, Tariffs, and Tinfoil

Episode Date: May 1, 2025

Episode 29 of the Signal Hour discusses geoengineering, economic strategies, and potential shifts in environmental and economic policies.Click Here for Part 2

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 Signal Hour. It is live, and I am here with Evie Botello. Hey, Evie, how are you? Hi, good afternoon. Good to be here, everybody. We're grateful to be spending this afternoon with you. Aka Evie Martinson as soon as her name gets changed officially. So today we got a lot to

cover. Of course the signal hour is when we are finding the signal within the signal. So much is happening so rapidly, so quickly. It's really important that we try and find the, well, what should we even pay attention to? This is actually super packed information day. We're going to have to talk about how somebody wants to dim the sun, but we have now confirmation sort of such as it is that maybe something called chem trails or at least atmospheric aerosolization spraying programs have been in actually happening. So Evie, we are going to have to, we're gonna have to get our tin foil hats on squarely today.

All right. Yeah. I got mine right here. For the second half of this public show, starting at 1.30 Eastern time, we're gonna bring in Peter St. Ange. We're gonna talk about economics. Really excited to have him on the program here

to talk through, well, what's going on with the economics really excited to have him on the program here to talk through Well, what's going on with the economics tariffs all of that? I think point of view that there's some real economic pain Coming and it was gonna happen anyway, but it's been kicked off and we're gonna have to talk about that So Evie I want to start also with the idea that Part two of this so we always do this signal hour has a public component, private component for our subscribers and it's always at that same link above there. We have a discussion going on.

So for people who are subscribers, if you're watching this back at peak prosperity, you just watch the whole show uninterrupted, but click that join the discussion button down below, maybe with a second tab so that you have two tabs open one to watch one to comment And leave anything you want for comments. We will be going through those there. We're also going through Comments here live and that's when my eye looks over to the side a little bit I'm even reading the comments live and even if we don't get a chance to talk about your comment We do see it we read them after the live cast is over so please feel free to communicate with

us tell us what's on your mind and how you feel about some of the topics we are discussing today. I'm so happy that you've chosen to spend your afternoon with us or evening whatever it is where you live and what you got Chris well we're gonna start right here Evie which is this oh dim bulbs dimming the Sun so this is this is just sort of exploded out not now as you know we've had people talking to us about chemtrails for a long time what they call chemtrails now we're gonna have to leave aside any of the conclusions, right, the assumptions, the the motivations, right? Like oh they're doing this to make us stupid or whatever those stories are. Let's just, if we can just

back up, we like to go to first principles on the show. First principle is is this happening? Yes or no. Are things being sprayed up there? Now we can assign motives. They want to do it to block the sun because they believe the climate change is real and they somehow think that just like doctors thought, oh, we'll take fat out of cookies. It's really stupid first order thing. Oh, let's block the sun. What could go wrong? Right. Oh, we have a worldwide metabolic disorder to mix metaphors. Weird. Okay, so but this just popped up. Okay Hmm. Whoa, not a conspiracy theory any longer. So right Wow, that's really different

The mission to dim the Sun how controversial geoengineering technique could cool the planet using existing aircraft Look, that's it then the Daily Mail, right? And they have their little picture of a FedEx plane. And notice on the left over there how solar geoengineering sounds very official, official, very scientific. And they got charts over there on top right. Nobody even knows what those are.

Chemicals in the stratosphere are going to cool the planet, they say. And so CO2 warming is slowed. Oh, so we fly planes that release CO2 plus chemicals to offset the. This is getting dumb. Wait, what? This is getting really dumb. Oh boy. All right.

Wait, can we just all agree before we start doing this? Like these are our skies too. And how do we know that they have the best information or the best data? Well let's assume that they're successful and they managed to put chemicals in the stratosphere, okay? First question, if we don't like how that turned out, if it turned out that had unanticipated consequences, how do we get them back out of the stratosphere? Correct! And just like if we put something in our bodies how do we get it back out again what's in my arm yo yeah what's in my arm yo exactly okay well carrying on so I wanted to point out so this is all new

to you because I just slapped all this together right yeah I haven't seen this you haven't seen any of this so you're coming in cold this isn't exactly a new idea. See that? Oh my gosh. January 1980. Okay. The stratospheric aerosol modification by supersonic transport operations with climate implications. That's the title of this. It's a NASA document, right? Yeah and it goes on to say it is shown that a fleet of several hundred supersonic aircraft operating daily at 20 kilometers is that what that is? 20 kilometers. kilometers could produce about a 20 percent increase in the concentration of large particles in the stratosphere aerosol increases of this magnitude would reduce

the global surface temperature by less than 0.01 percent or 0.01 Kelvin. Yeah, right, right Kelvin's Whoa, so well anyway, they're talking about this a long time. This is supersonic. So that's not exactly we have subsonic planes So I don't know why they were NASA was excited by the idea of supersonic aircraft Winging around at 20 kilometers, which is pretty high. Mmm, you know Go yeah, and by the, a fleet of several hundred. Okay. So, but they're talking about blocking the sun in order to dim things off. So I need I need this to make sense. Okay, so step one of the program, as far as I understand it is, pour huge

money, public money into solar farms. And then step two is block the sun. money, public money into solar farms. And then step two is block the sun. Wait, what? That doesn't make any sense. Does it? All right. Not totally clear.

All right. So this was a big deal. So RFK junior gets on Dr. Phil and they just have audience asking questions. I don't know where they handpicked these people from, but every single one was like, how bad are vaccines? When are you going to figure out autism? When like they were just wailing on this, right? Really? Oh, but this is what we call, this is common knowledge alert. So we have to be aware of common knowledge is when everybody knows

that everybody knows something. And there's nothing more commonifying than having people in a live studio audience standing up and asking the question that's been rattling around in our own brains. Like, do we know what causes autism? Are we looking into it? If we haven't been, why not? These were all sorts of questions. But Evie, this I found very telling. Here we go.

My name is Emily, and my biggest concern is the stratospheric aerosol injections that are continuously peppered on us every day. Bromium, aluminum, strontium, it's sprayed in our skies all day long. And I know you've talked to Dane Wiggington about this. He seems to be one of the experts in the field. Is there a question?

Yes, how do we stop it? How do we stop it? That is not happening in my agency. We don't do that. Listen to the parsing. That's not happening in my agency. So he's not denying it. We don't do that.

I love how he starts. It's done, we think, by DARPA. Oh. He just threw him under the bus. Oh, he did. Oh, hold up. Did that just happen? I think that just happened. That's kind of awesome. Did that just happen? I think it did. I think it did. That's not happening in my agency. That's DARPA. And a lot of it now is coming out of the jet fuel. Yes, sir. You know, those materials are put in jet fuel. We, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop it.

We're bringing on somebody who's going to think only about that, find out who's doing it and holding them accountable. Yes, sir. Whoa. Okay. That sounds pretty good if you can execute that. So this, what I like about this is this is very testable, right? So the idea that if there are things like heavy metals, she mentioned barium strontium. These are metals. They're elements and they add them to the jet fuel.

Is that what he said? Well, that's what he said. So this is an interesting theory. So the idea some people had this idea that this, by the way, this is a very honey potted poison weld area. Like there are people coming in, putting in legitimate disinformation all the time. Right. And usually the motive they're spraying these neurotoxins to make us stupid. Right. You might say, well, you can't test that, but you can test for if, is there aluminum

in the air? That's easy. Barium? We can test for this. If it's there in quantities you shouldn't be anticipating, then you ask the next question, which is how did it get there? And then the next question, which is, well, what's the effect of that on us? Exactly.

Like if people are showing up with high levels of it in their bodies, then maybe, you know, maybe it is actually uh in levels that are really damaging for human beings so i thought this was big deal big deal that's a big deal that's not happening in my agency that's darpa right he just tossed him right under the right under the bus okay so um you know this is this is the plan right now. Once all the cows are gone, we'll be fine. Right. All right. Shoot. This is not a new idea. So remember that other thing 1980. Look at this from 1990. 1990. Okay. Title of this one is stratospheric Wellsbach seating for reduction of global warming. There it is. Okay. 1990. They thinking about this. Grant date. 5003186. Wow,

90, 91 it was when the grant was filed. It's by the Hughes Aircraft Company. Proposes seeding the stratosphere with Wellsbach materials, aluminum oxide, thorium oxide to reflect sunlight and reduce global warming. Suggest suggests adding particles to jet airliner fuel for dispersal via exhaust at high altitudes. Yeah, but not notice here that they filed it on August of 1990. And just basically six months later, they got it was granted. So this is a granted patent. So somebody holds a patent on mixing various metal oxides in with jet fuel and this would reflect sunlight and reduce global warming. Okay? So this is way too much to read but again just pointing out there's research on this you know this

is again nano-sized metal and metal oxide particles for more complete fuel combustion. Hey if we put the right stuff in there it also would be able to get better fuel efficiency. Right. Never mind what happens when look at the read those out the in yellow what do we got? In yellow it says magnesium calcium strontium barium cerium titanium zirconium iron ruthenium osmium cobalt rhodium iridium nickel palladium platinum copper silver gold Tin zinc aluminum and mixed metal particles and then it goes into all those oxides that he just mentioned a couple Yeah, so they're just like oh, you know, this is science. Let's just mix in

Nano metals we might get a few extra percent out of our jet fuel. Sounds good. What could go wrong? By the way, so I had to go and search. I'm like, well, do any of these metals actually show up? Magnesium, calcium, aluminum. Do we see any of these in jet fuel? And like, oh, yeah, there they are. Oh okay tell us about um well you got jet fuel, JP-5 and JP-8 different different types of grades of jet fuel. Mm-hmm. Right and all of them have this stuff in there but those are everything I put in yellow is a is a metal that was just listed in that prior thing we saw there. Right. Wow. So because we're detecting 9360 parts per billion

right which is 9.3 parts per million that's pretty big quantity of aluminum in JP8 for instance right jet fuel a not detected ND right so jet fuel a is pretty clean on this compared to everything else right but if you're using any of these others out here a little dirtier. But at any rate, that's what's already detected. And so yeah, it could easily be that this stuff has been put in jet fuel for a long time. Because, well, maybe it's better jet fuel efficiency, or maybe it's because somebody thought, you know what we should do? We should start blocking the sun. Right. And since we're flying planes all over the place anyway

Yeah, what I'm concerned about is that you know there there's probably data about how many parts per million is you know gonna be damaging or whatever ends up in the soil and our rainwater and You know our skin our air that we breathe blah blah blah But what about places where there's a lot of air traffic where they're getting way more of this than potentially other places and so it's you know when and and who knows who else is doing this right is it all the companies is it private jets too are there specific airplanes that have been created for this purpose. And so how do you measure this on a huge scale globally? I don't know. I don't know but I like this. Oh great. I can't. Travis says preventing global warming by burning jet fuel.

My heroes. Seriously. My area very rarely has crisscrossed lines in skies I'm in rural Minnesota, western, Minnesota. Excuse me all farmlands low airplane traffic to No Air Force bases nearby either. Am I just lucky? Well, this is a good question and we're gonna get to this directly Viv because We also live in a very low, we're not over a lot of flyways. You get a jet every so often, but we're not a flyway. If the program has been to mix these things in

with normal jet fuel and allow regular airline traffic to sort of carry the weight of this program so you don't have to do special flights to spray stuff, well, then we would expect to see a lot more of this crap forming over areas where you have a lot of congested airline traffic so that's a good observation right there I think it's I think it's reasonable. So how about this one Evie? Sure. This is from look at this April 28th so now they're out with it now they're just now they're just talking about this is in the telegraph

And if we don't do something about it, it'll continue Boeing 777s could cool the planet if you don't mind acid rain remember who used to care about acid rain looking Now we don't care. That was in our childhood climate change, but but oh now we need data centers So I guess we don't care about that. Yeah, whatever. It's old news. Stratospheric aerosol injection technique could put brakes on global warming study finds, but with damaging knock on effects. So there's a little for those listening, it's showing a little diagram of what happens with an airplane spraying particles, the aerosol reflection that happens,

and then of course the acid rain that then falls on everybody. Well, I'm wondering why they're saying triple sevens is, and I don't know, is it because they can fly at 42,000 feet so they just want it higher? So is this a plane that you know enough of that flies at a certain altitude that's higher than average because you want to put it up as high as possible? And by the way that sulfur should note, sulfur is obviously a very big thing. I didn't highlight it because it wasn't a listed metal but it's already in fairly high quantities in between strontium and tin there. Oh right, yeah look at that. You know sulfur's in there. You could always add more sulfur, make it a

higher sulfur, right? So isn't that funny how things just go by the wayside though? Remember we used to care about acid rain or nuclear plants or whatever. Just like, yeah. But when it's in service of the current narrative, this whatever the crazy people think up at the top, suddenly all their branding in their old stories like climate change and nuclear. And that just falls by the wayside. Yeah. Right.

And they highlight whatever is like you're saying in the best and highest good of their narrative and who cares what else is going on. I find that really disturbing actually because we never actually finish, you know, we don't finish solving our problems like they bring up some issue and then you never hear the rest of the story. My brain hates that actually. I don't know about other people but Benny says San Francisco Bay area constantly sprayed frequently at night too. Wow that stinks. Yeah and I guess we might be... Max says we're talking about

this 30 years after it started. Correct. Correct but we're talking about it now so yeah this is kind of how it is these days. Oh yeah, there we go. You know, actually, it's funny that you're doing this because just today this morning, I was looking outside and being like, wow, the sky is so blue. We don't have any of these, you know, congested looking skies. Yep. I know.

Not that it's always like that though, because we do get some of this sometimes. I know. But today's always like that though because we do get some of this sometimes I know I know but but but today is a particular I remember I'm old enough that I remember 9-eleven happened and for three days There was zero Airplane traffic and it was like old skies again. They were blue Yeah, and all of this now, I wonder if the scientists weren't measuring and said, oh my gosh We must have had like this incredible heating event They're like quick get the planes back up there and let's put extra strontium in there this time or whatever they're doing.

Right? No. Because that would have been a grand experiment, right? That's not what's happening. In any rate, this is kind of what it looks like all the time now. Mardrake said, well, hi, you crazy kids from Canada, the land of WEF tyrants. Oh, hey, yeah, good to see you too. Thanks for joining us.

Yeah. Good to see you too. Thanks for joining us. Yeah Sorry, sorry day anymore. So this is this is to the earlier question we had which is this I just took this screenshot off Of flight aware just minutes before we came on and that's just how many planes are in the air this moment Right, and so you can clearly see here I'll get my little laser pointer anything that you're gonna see more see more of this chem trailer activity if you're in cross one of the major flyways, right? Going from LA or San Francisco, right? Yeah. But we appear on the East Coast, relatively few here. Yeah. But you see, they all come this way. This is, this is the European corridor right here. We're right there. So we don't see it quite as much. It's true. But look at poor Boston and like.

Yeah, what's interesting is right here. Rhode Island. This is where we grow crops mostly. And it's really just like saddled with these things. And as you know, and as I know, like there's a difference between how fast our garden grows on sunny days versus cloudy days. This is true.

It's just true. You can't just dim the sun. Oh, and then, oh my gosh, I wonder why there are so many cases of autism. It's just true. You can't just dim the sun. Oh, and then, oh my gosh, I wonder why there are so many cases of autism. It's like- We don't know. It must be something. There's something out there. We don't know.

Let's just keep experimenting with this stuff. What could go wrong is like the question of the decade for us here in the US. Nano particles sprayed into the atmosphere of metals and heavy metals. What could go wrong, right? Yeah, sounds good to Yeah. We're just conducting a mass experiment on ourselves. Well, Florida is considering...

Alright, wants to ban airplane chemtrails, in quotes, proposed five-year prison term, a hundred thousand dollar fine for blocking the Sun in the Sunshine State. This is by the Washington Times, following Tennessee, who I guess has already decided that they don't want these either. Wow. Yeah. And that just came out. Let me just see if I can. I mean, this is just what it looks like now, right?

You just see it. People have been like, it's just, you know, it's just these persistent things. And for a long time, I was thinking, OK, you know, contrails are just a thing. And they seem to just be normal planes. And people like this is definitely a chemtrail. And sometimes they go to flight aware and I'd find out it's just a commercial flight. Right. Right. But if somebody has been either purposely putting junk into jet fuel

as a contaminant, right, or they've been less diligent about taking contaminants out because again, it's serving some purpose. It is. Somebody's saying, this is important that we have this happening. Right. And we had other people, we had a jet engineers saying, listen, the jets we had 40 years ago, their engines were not as efficient, meaning not as high pressure, not as, you know, so maybe it's something about how we burn jet fuel created more persistent or better conditions for forming just contrails. Right. high pressure, not as, you know, so maybe it's something about how we burn jet fuel

created more persistent or better conditions for forming just contrails. But now it's kind of like, okay, now we're gonna have to look into this a little bit more because RFK Jr. came out and said, you know, maybe Darpa, maybe there's Pans. You were kind of on the fence about this for a long time because there were people that were saying,

hey, you should check this out, but they had the whole narrative that went along with it, which is like they're trying to hurt us. Well, this should be fairly simple. And this was what bothered me as a scientist. It's like, if you think this is true, what you do is you do the science on it. So if there's barium and strontium and other heavy metals sprayed in the atmosphere, all you have to do is take what's called a spectrograph reading between us and the sun.

So every atomic element has absorption lines. And that's how we know it's our Sun when we point the telescope at a different star and it's it has a different composition of things so it has a different fingerprint there are these absorption lines black lines that exist across your spectrums like well we know exactly what our Sun looks like that's been well mapped if there are new absorption spectra then show it. Right. Or collect the rain and show me the barium in there.

Now, Mike Adams has actually started to do that where he's not the absorption spectra, but he's like taking some rain and putting it into his machines and saying, wow, this is loaded. He does very high end lab work, right? So GC mass spec and saying, wow, there's lots of heavy metals in there.

Now, what we don't know, is that just normal industrial processes? Is that like drifting around? Is that like from brake linings of cars coming in? That part's unresolved. But for sure we have toxic sort of metal loads all over the place now. I can't believe this. This is ridiculous to me. Like, they care about climate change so much and they care allegedly they care about our planet but they're willing to poison the air and the soils with this stuff they don't actually really care about no they don't they lie all the time they don't all right sad well we're gonna have Peter St. Onge on in just a minute I just wanted to take a quick peek this week a

peak again what are we up to my fat peek this week. A peek again, what are we up to? My fat pipe this week, we talked about Spain's blackout, the Amazon Tmoo tariff additions into the cart. Amazon has since denied it. Tmoo has put it right on there. D'oh Canada! We talked about the Canadian elections. Poor Canada. I'm sorry Canada. We're so sorry. We're thinking of you. And crumbling pharma tales. If you want to see the rest of that Dr. Phil thing with RFK, it gets lots of problems for Pharma cropping up right now. So we'll see how they react. I had a big interview on FinanceU and you can go to Peak Financial Investing or Peak Prosperity, find it. And this is about how Trump is resetting the world economic order. Really cool macroeconomic story by Adam Rosenschwag of Gehrig and Rosenschwag talking about how really the stage is set for commodities to shine. But this is a larger context and what we're going to

get into with Peter is, well, wait a minute, Trump is reorganizing and descent are reorganizing the global economic order. And this had to happen anyway, is our point of view, right? Because things got a little out of hand and it was gonna reset probably better on our terms than somebody else's terms. That macro story, super important for everybody to understand. And then finally, we took part two of last week's signal hour and we went into the economic realignment and also pink

oil. And we talked about AI as well, which was really an interesting conversation. Well that's a whole bigger conversation that we're really going to have to dive into at some point here. So great. Yeah. Now just give me one second because I got to come to right here and we'll pull this up.

So we are about to bring... Peter St. Ange. So glad to have you. Great, great, great guy. And we've done some work together in the past. It's always been fantastic. Peter, we're bringing you in. Hey, it's so good to see you.

Wow, that is a crazy shirt you're wearing. You know, there's a backstory here. When we started doing the daily videos, we did not know how to put dates on the video because we had no idea what we're doing, right? We were just shooting on an iPhone, like hit record on the iPhone, post it to X, Twitter back then. And we didn't know how to put dates on and I had, you know, I was doing daily videos and so I wanted to communicate to people that this is like a different video than yesterday. And I didn't have any way to do that. And

I only own two color shirts because I was a standard American male, so white and blue. And so we went out and bought like a whole bunch of shirts to make it real clear that this is a different video. And once I started doing that for a while, people, you know, they would like tune in for the shirt, like forget the content. It was just the shirt. And so now it's a thing. So I go around in public and every so often, I'll get somebody who's like, Hey, nice shirt, man. Like, it's a brand, I gotta do it. Give me a break. Yeah, maybe you should start a clothing line, huh?

It's had its impact, because I was in a store the other day and I was like, I bet Peter would like this shirt. You know, I'm thinking about shirts for you now. Can I just send you some from time to time? 100%, man, yeah, no, I absolutely need new shirts and I'll even, you know, pimp the show, do the whole routine.

I got Christmas shirts. I need I need like St. Patrick's Day. I need every festival out there. I need more shirts. All right, we'll send some your way. What's your size? Small, small. I've been losing weight.

My wife is Japanese and she cooks Japanese stuff because I was getting fat. So she doesn't let me eat anything fun Excellent. I like her already. Um, so this is where you can follow Peter St Ange the prof stange at Twitter X now and also prof stange comm so I Peter I want to talk about how maybe somebody had to do something here. And let me pull this up. I think I can do this. Yeah, so I'm just going to spotlight this up for a bit.

How about this clip right here? The U.S. is on an unsustainable fiscal path. The U.S. federal government is on an unsustainable fiscal path. And that just means that the debt is growing faster than the economy. I have the sense this worries you very much. Over the long run, of course it does. You know, we're effectively we're borrowing from future generations. It's time for us to get back to putting a priority on fiscal sustainability.

All right, Peter, what's going on with that? Yeah, so I think that was from last year when Biden was still in office. Yep. And that was like the first time that Jerome Powell had ever said anything negative about the out of control spending. And of course, Jerome Powell was a big reason why spending was out of control. So I think debt since COVID, debt is up something like 12 trillion. So that's 50% increase in debt. The economy did not grow 50% since COVID.

So he's absolutely right that it's unsustainable. He fails to mention that he's a big reason why it's unsustainable. But yes, we're absolutely unsustainable on debt. This was a big reason why Doge had to happen. You know, we have two ways to fix it. One of them is crisis, which is the traditional way to fix it, is that politicians just keep kicking the can down the road until bond markets can't handle it anymore. They don't absorb the spending. And then at that point, the government essentially has to fund itself with new debt. And at that point, you're off to the races, you get the hyperinflation, the currency collapses, and then you go to something hard, which is traditionally gold. So that's the, you know,

sort of physics forces you to fix it. And then in theory, we could fix it voluntarily. That's what was so exciting about Doge as a concept is that you could actually parachute in, try to cut spending. Now, Trump gets a lot of flak over spending, but in his first term, every single year, Trump proposed massive spending cuts, like in the order of $200-300 billion, which is a lot of money back then, something like 7% of the budget. He proposed massive cuts every single time Congress blocked them. in fact, they turned them into spending hikes. So I remember before the election, you know, I know a lot of libertarians and they were saying, well, okay, I accept that Trump's not as bad as the other guy, but he's not great because look at him on spending. And you say, no, that's not Trump.

Trump has always tried to cut spending. The Democrats just came out with a sort of this press release that they're trying to push now, complaining about all the money that Doge is blocking. And their framing is obscene. They're saying this is money that's owed to the American people that Doge is holding up. That's a hell of a framing right there. This is money that was stolen from the American people that Doge is trying to return to them. But at any rate, they tallied $430 billion that they say Doge is blocking. So these are big numbers. Now, the overall government spending is still increasing because a ton of that is on autopilot. A lot of it is if you're taking old debt that had

2% interest rates and then you're replacing it now with five percent debt because the Fed hiked rates you have a massive outlays on investment expenses. You just have inflation. Inflation continues. That grows the budget alone. The budget that we're currently working with is actually Joe Biden's last budget. Trump has not had the opportunity to put a new budget yet. It's like pretty much six months delayed in Washington. So yes, overall spending is growing, but the thing with the economy that I think people have to keep in mind is that the economy itself is trying to grow. The reason it's trying to grow

is that 320 million people wake up every morning, they try to make tomorrow better than yesterday. All right, so if you simply, you don't need like the free market paradise to get the economy growing, right? You don't need, you know, minimal government, Milton Friedman's watchman, government, you don't need that. All you need to do is stop putting the boot on the throat of the economy, just ease up

a little bit, and you're going to get growth, right? Because the natural state of the economy is to grow. This is why markets work in the first place is why free markets work. So what we're seeing right now is the economy is back to growth. The federal government, it is proving very, very difficult to cut spending.

Congress has not lifted a finger to try to help Trump. Trump has been, how to put it, he's been pushing the envelope on a number of spending mechanisms and legal mechanisms to try to get, you know, money for the border wall, money for mass deportations, and to actually cut spending. But you know, until Congress really steps in, we're not going to see huge numbers on spending cuts, which means that the unsustainable fiscal path that Jerome Powell complains about, that's going to see huge numbers which means that the unsu path that Jerome Powell c going to continue. Well, me ask you about this. Uh mentioned this. So I don'

this, but this from the H showing that it took 220 trillion in total federal debt and 11 trillion got added since 2020. This is out of date now because it's actually added closer to 13 trillion by now. So this feels like an unsustainable trajectory to me. Jerome said laying it all on our grandchildren's feet, right? Somebody had to do something. That's what I want to get to, right? This was going to to do something. That's what I want to get to, right? This was going to break at some point, wasn't it?

It was going to break at some point. And you know, there have been many, many golden ages throughout history, hundreds of them. And you can go back and look through what brought each one down. And the universal is the money, they break the money, the government starts finding some way to counterfeit money for itself. Either does that by shaving the coins, which is, you know, that was in the Roman Empire. Once the Chinese invented paper money in about, was it about 950? They had woodblock prints, right? You would put the money on it, you'd put some ink on it, you'd stamp it, right? Once they invented that, it was really off to the races. At that point, it accelerated. In fact, that's why the Mongols took over the world, is because China imploded so badly because of hyperinflation.

But the moral of the story is that every great empire, every great civilization that has collapsed has been because of the money. And really, if we put a date on it, one important number is 1931. So that's when FDR broke the dollar. It was called at the time the rubber dollar, the idea that the dollar would be elastic for the economy. It would grow or shrink according to economic needs.

Of course, this was propaganda. Really, what they were just trying to do was permanent inflation. That made it worse. on that chart you have. That would have been one of those kinks. But really, the explosion was since Richard Nixon. So Richard Nixon broke the very last link between gold and the dollar. Before Nixon, other countries could turn in their dollars for gold. And as long as somebody could do that, there was some guardrail

on how much money they could print. Once Nixon broke it, temporarily, by the way, he said, in his famous press conference, he said, I've temporarily instructed the secretary of treasury to suspend. So, you know, there's nothing so permanent as stealing your rights, but there we go. That's really, you know, when you look at that huge jump

in that curve, that was since Richard Nixon, and we have not yet found a way to fix that. One fun way that I like talking about, you know, so in theory, you could fix it on the inside without the crisis. You could do Doge. Congress is fighting that. But anyway, Congress could wake up one morning and start cooperating. The other way you could do is with some kind of a balanced budget mechanism. Congress has tried this many, many times. Of course, you can't trust Congress as far as you can throw them. There was a recent survey that found that 2% of Americans, 2% think that Congress is

clean. So, at any rate, you can't trust them. So they drive a truck through it. They put all these little bells and whistles in there that they can drive around. What you could do in theory is have some kind of a balanced budget amendment to the constitution. I like Warren Buffett's idea, which is that if Congress cannot pass a balanced budget, all of them have to resign with a lifetime ban from politics. So that's Warren Buffett. So I love that one. But of course, Congress is not going to pass that. So that leaves you with the sort of dirty way to do it, which is just default. Walk away. You issue brand new debt for the widows and orphans,

you know, so for solidarity, for American pensions, you shaft the Chinese, you shaft Wall Street. You could probably bring the debt down by about 25 trillion if you did that. The beauty of it is that if you default, nobody will lend you money again because they can't trust you. So not only default, do it over and over and over. Do it so many times that you were locked out of the debt markets, at which point you have a balanced budget amendment and 25 trillion in your pocket. So that's my personal favorite. But that would, of course, crash the banks banks which you may also argue is a is a good thing

So many of course so many excellent points as expected from you Peter, but this okay I mean to me this is always the chart that just drives me nuts because GDP on the bottom in red is things That's what you buy with your money and money equivalents. Debt is just a claim on future money. And here you can see something clearly went off the rails right around that temporary suspension of 1971. That's where these lines really started to depart from each other. This is the little wiggle that almost destroyed the world. That's the great financial crisis in about five quarters of what they call negative debt growth. And I feel like that's what they're desperately afraid of is we can't have our feel like that's what they're desperately afraid of is we can't have, our system can't sustain

what you're talking about, which is negative debt growth. And so I'm a little worried that something might break here, but let's be clear, we're over a hundred trillion in debt. The United States, that's about a third, little over about 30% of total debt in the world, in developed countries, and we're about 6% of the population. So we're already levered to the hilt.

And we're the world's consumer. And Trump is just saying, let's throw a spanner into that and see what happens. I'm just wondering how you see that playing out. Yes, interesting question. And it goes back to, you know, during 2008, I think what really sparked the 2008 crisis is so the gasoline is that our banking system because of fractional reserve, it's permanently bankrupt, right? They permanently owe money that they don't have. You put your money in the bank, you think it's sitting in the vault. That's been lent out to Argentina, like hedge funds and,

you know and whatever, distress government debt in Argentina or something. All right. That money is not there. It is permanently bankrupt. And people don't understand this. Right. Like grandma, when she puts her money in the bank, she does not think that she's investing in a hedge fund. OK, so that's the gasoline. But in 2008, the spark was really the failure to bail out Lehman Brothers.

So Lehman Brothers was a huge, I guess it was investment bank, it was way over leveraged, owed much, much more than it had. And Wall Street had been bumping along for really a century on the assumption that if anything goes wrong, the government will jump in and bail them out. George W. Bush, to his credit, one of the few things he did that was honorable in his life was that he refused to bail out Lehman. That is what set it off. That was, I think it was September, I don't know, September 18th or something. When you look at the numbers, boom, that was the explosion. And because Wall Street, the entire structure of Wall Street, all of the counterparty,

the relationships, the debts, the assets, those were all predicated on the assumption that if anything goes wrong, it'll get bailed out. Now, if you do that, and then you suddenly withdraw that guarantee, the whole thing is going to reprice. And in fact, it did collapse. the whole thing is going to reprice and in fact it did collapse. I think that that's part of the reason why Trump picked Scott Basant and not Harold Ludnick. For those who do not follow, you know, cabinet members, Harold Ludnick is like a bull in a china shop, right? He is a wild man.

He's like, he is more out there than Trump. He's awesome. He's like, yeah, get rid of the whole income tax, screw it. He's a wild man. I love him, but he's a wild man. Scott Besant is, he sounds presidential, right? He's very, he's super chill.

He could do one of these like apps on the phone that puts you to sleep, right? He's like, well, you know, we have some concerns in the economy. He's just super chill. And I think there was this kind of horse race when Trump, after he won, who was going to run Treasury, and he went with Bascent. The interpretation of the time was that Trump anticipated doing a bunch of things that were going to cause 2008-style

chaos in the financial system, and he needed Bascent as somebody to kind of calm everybody down. So I think that that's very much a live risk. I love him for it, right? I think like in 2008, I wanted them to just let it all crash, right? Let it go bust, let Warren Buffett go and buy up banks for pennies on the dollar, wipe out the employees, the management, all the rest of it.

So I'm rooting for it, but it does raise the risk that we could get a 2008 crisis. Now, what's changed between now and 2008 is that Wall Street learned its lesson in 2008. Back then, they were working the phones, right? They were pressuring Congress things, telling them, this is going to be the Great Depression. You're going to be blamed for it. It was just, I mean, it was full core press, like Congress, and I've talked to congressmen who said that like, you couldn't walk around Washington. These lobbyists were like on every street corner

staring you down. But what happened since then is that Washington or Wall Street learned its lesson and it lobbied its way to getting this stuff permanent. So at this point, the bailouts are in the system. And we saw that in 2023, when we started having bank collapses, the bank crashes in the early phase of 2023,

so Silicon Valley, there were a bunch of them, Signature, those were bigger than the early bank crashes in 2008. But what happened is magic poof, it disappeared. The reason it disappeared is because the Fed and the Treasury effectively put out unlimited lines of credit to the banking system. The collateral was whatever assets they had, they could put fictitious values on it.

It didn't matter what the market value was. Just tell us what you bought it for, right? Which could be three times what it's worth today, but that's fine, we're gonna lend you on that. Now that would be fantastic if you go to the bank and get that done, but of course, you don't have the lobbyists they do. So that makes me think that's more clear.

Those FDIC limits, on Silicon at least, they paid past those, right? Because those were hedge funds whose money was at risk. Yeah, that's one of the big questions now is that if hedge funds go under, you know, it's a very bad look to bail out hedge funds. Washington traditionally has not done that in the 2008 crisis. They did not. The hedge funds hung.

OK, it was the banks who got bailed out. So that's an open question. The whole hedge fund theory has gotten bigger than it was back then. And so that's that's very much a live question. And I suspect that what they're going to is they're gonna weigh the sort of public relations hit on the one side, and then they're gonna weigh the systemic. What they might try to do is to bail out the counterparties of the hedge funds so the money's not actually going to the hedge funds.

So it's good to have strong lobbyists in DC. But so if you kind of sum that up, I think there's a good chance that we could be looking at a 2008 style hit just because Trump is breaking so many things that need to be broken. However, given what happened in 2023, I think that a lot of the bailouts, it's not a question of like Trump choosing to bail out, a hedge fund or something.

I think a lot of that is just baked into the system at this point where the sort of systemic risks to banks are all basically pre-bailed out. Are we trending into the great taking territory or do you mean something beyond that? Because I know that the legal machinery has already been put in place to assure that the piping remains liquefied and unfrozen.

I don't think we're close to the great taking. And the reason is just because that affects property rights. It affects, you know, foreigners would obviously not invest in the U S foreigners at this point on something like 62 trillion of net assets in the U S. That's why during the tariffs, we've been seeing so much market movement is because foreigners have been pulling their money out. So I think if only because they're concerned about the impact on foreigners, I don't think that we're going to see really big moves to things like titles, who owns what. Once you see that,

when you look at countries that do that, for example, like Democratic Republic of Congo, where land doesn't really have tenure, nobody puts money in there anywhere, right? It just empties out. So I don't think that we're in that territory. I mean, in theory, if it gets big enough, yes. But at the moment, I think what we're looking at is more sort of slow motion bailouts, like what happened in 2023. If we get either some kind of crisis that's on the scale of 23 with those bank crashes or something more serious, then I imagine that we're basically going to do an autopilot version of 2008 where we get three trillion of capital flooding in, however much it takes. But they can print an awful lot of money.

In that chart you showed earlier, you had this elbow at, or an inflection point at 2008. And what was interesting in 2008, I think, is that policymakers learned a very dangerous lesson, which is that they can bail out banks and it doesn't turn into inflation. The reason it doesn't turn into inflation is because the banks take the money and they plug the holes in their balance sheets. The money doesn't flow back out of the banks to be spent out in the open. And so the problem there is that traditionally they had been reluctant to bail out financial crashes because they were afraid that the money would flow back out

and go into inflation and then that looks bad for the Fed. They could theoretically lose their authority from Congress and inflation is too bad. Instead, what 2008 told them is that you can basically dump as much money as you want into distressed banks. Don't dump it into healthy banks because the healthy banks will lend it on. Dump it into distressed banks and it'll stick there

and it won't show up in inflation, which means that there's no cost to the Fed of doing it. Meanwhile, something else that happened right around the same period is Japan's debt. So Japan debt to GDP ratio is something like 250%. In US terms, that would be on the order of 70 trillion. It's about twice what ours is. And Japan has not crashed.

It's still chugging along. Slow, yes. The debt payments in Japan are about a quarter of the budget. They would be half if rates were normalized. So Japan's not in great shape, but it also hasn't collapsed. And for a long time, people have warned in the US that if debt gets too high, we're gonna have this crash. Japan, on present trends, we're not gonna hit

like 75 trillion of debt for 20, 30 years. In other words, we're still very much in the Japan zone where apparently you do not collapse. So there are some special reasons why Japan's been able to hold up so well, partly domestic, like Japanese own most of that debt. So maybe it's a little bit different here with all the foreigners who own stuff.

But I think that that is concerning because it tells policy makers that they can write checks for as many trillions as their heart desires. Well, but let me test that. I know nothing about this because I have not read the documents. I've only been sniffing around the edges. And so I've heard about this Mar-a-Lago Accord.

Maybe you know more about this. But what I picked up so far is that somebody is talking about, okay, tariffs are being used as leverage. There may be some currency pegging, but this dot three here, this third bullet point, debt swap mechanism, maybe converting offshore treasuries swapped out for zero coupon, 100 year non-marketable paper, that's a full on default.

If the A, is that, have you heard this? And B, if that happens, who's gonna lend us money ever again. Yeah. Yeah, I'm I'm a huge fan of defaults, especially on foreigners. Okay, you know, the one way to really rebalance things with China is just cancel either cancel all their treasuries, you could literally cancel them or turn them into zero coupon, which is pretty close to the same thing. China, by the way, I've talked about this

on a couple of videos, but China actually owes us more than we owe them. There's these debts left over from the 1940s, which were denominated in gold. And of course, gold went up a bunch. So they actually owe us more than we owe them. And for some reason, previous administrations had not been pursuing that. They'd been pretending that it doesn't exist. And so, you know, Trump, this is something I talked about, because when the Tariff War first started, people said, yeah, but China might, you know, go for the, you know, headshot and dump treasuries. And I said, well, sure. I mean, if they're gonna play dirty,

then Trump can play dirty and just seize all their treasuries and then they can't sell them. In fact, they don't exist. So yeah, I mean, there are some exciting things that could happen. Right now, Trump is trying to cut a deal with China. Both sides want a deal.

China's in a lot of pain. I've got a video coming out on this tomorrow. China's in a lot more pain than it looks like. They've dumped about 1.4 trillion into hiding the pain. They've instructed brokerages that if people sell too much, let us know. Okay? So China can do things that we can't do

in this country to hide the pain, but there is a lot of pain in China. There are thousands of companies, manufacturers that are going under. China wants a deal. Trump wants a deal because he wants it to be tactical. He wants tariffs on there to motivate Chinese companies to move to the US, which they're already doing. He wants some degree of tariffs, but he also doesn't want this massive tariff war because

that causes a problem for our economy because a lot of American manufacturers are using Chinese components. If you're making an RV or hot tubs, if you buy a hot tub, they're almost all made in America because they're big and clunky and they use a lot of parts. Almost like a ton of the components for those that are coming from China, right? So there are a lot of U.S. manufacturers, car manufacturers, airplane, the whole nine yards who use Chinese components. So neither side wants an ongoing trade war. And there are a number of things that Trump can do. There's that, right? He can seize their treasury. Something else he can do is deny Chinese companies access to US markets. He's already got the legal authority to do that because it's a non-market economy, right? They get

government subsidies and government privileges. I'm sure you can concoct evidence that there was some dual use collaboration on military, whatever you need. The point is that, you know, he can find the crime on DSO. He could shut off U. S. Capital Marxist Chinese companies, which, you know, that's really how they get access to cheap capital. So there's a number of things that he could do if the Chinese really want to play hardball. But's a number of things that he could do if the Chinese really wanna play hardball. But how would, what does that mean, Peter, in the context of this, which is, this is just from 2022,

$950 billion of trade deficit. How do you default on your obligations? Tell China, go pound sand, we're not paying that stuff back, we think you owe us more. But oh, let's just keep this whole thing in flight and please accept these new dollars, which in China is about a third of this story, roughly. So a third there, a third to Europe, a third to elsewhere. But $900 billion a year means we need people to be accepting our dollars as our number one export, do we not? People will still accept the dollars.

As long as the dollars have a market value, people will take them. I'm not repudiating them. I mean, it's irrelevant. You know, countries repudiate debt all the time. You know, it happens about, I don't know, every year or two, some country or another repudiates debt. It has no impact, not on the currency. You currency is going to be determined by how much demand there is for importers, how much supply there is from the central bank. Defaulting on debt, that'll affect the demand for your debt. Nobody will want your debt. True. You'll have to pay a higher interest rate if you want people to buy your debt. But in terms of your currency, that's a completely different animal. Nobody will care. The Chinese importers will still take it because dollars at that point will still

have some value. Maybe it's 5% less than it is now, but they'll still take them because they can buy U.S. farmland, they could buy U.S. equities, they could sell it on to somebody else to import oil, for example, from Saudi. So they'll definitely still take dollars. else to import oil, for example, from Saudi. So they'll definitely still take dollars. Okay. Well, how about this? What is the chance of this happening? So Trump writing when tariffs cut in, income tax will be substantially reduced. We'll see about that. He focused on people making less than 200 grand a year. He thinks it's going to be a bonanza, massive jobs being created. How would you score this so far? And what's the likelihood here? So the big question is Congress. And to do things

like this, right, to swap out, like to start collecting a bunch of tariffs, and then use that to get rid of income taxes. He's floated that a couple times. Unfortunately, you need Congress. And for the moment, he is not Augustus. And so he does actually have to work through Congress. If Trump were running the entire country, like the Congress just quit, then I think he could absolutely do it. And I think he wants to do it. But in fact, Congress is in the way. In terms of, you know, sort of grading him so far, we just had negative GDP numbers come

in today. And that was the first time since 2022. Remember, Joe Biden had a deficit or had a recession there and then the media defined it out of existence. So it was the first time. And what was striking about the number today was it was actually a blockbuster number. It was absolutely on fire. It went negative because companies were importing stuff ahead of time to try to get in under the tariffs. And the way that GDP is calculated that that that automatically subtracts from GDP.

And the reason they do that is because eventually it's going to be sold and yada yada. But anyway, for now, it's bizarre that it's doing that way. Yeah, this massive surge. When you control for that, what really happened is we've got economic growth right now between four and a half and five percent and overwhelming. That is consumer spending. Consumer spending is currently going at about a nine percent annual rate, which is like China level, the old China.

The big thing that's driving it, though, is investment. Trump has brought an epic amount of investment in the country. So you've already got announced deals of about $5 trillion since Trump took office. Put that in perspective before COVID investment, gross investment in the entire economy was $4 trillion. So he doubled that. Trump claims he's got $8 trillion that he's working on. All right, so between double and triple the investment. The way fundamentally that you grow an economy is not more spending, it's more investment. And what's driving a lot of this is the tariffs. So companies are moving production to the U.S. in order to get under the tariff umbrella. They're basically saying, you know, Trump is, I have no idea what he's going to do next. He's a massive business risk.

So let me get out of this whole tariff game. Let me get out of the firing line and I'm just going to move my factory to the US because remember that even Chinese companies, they produce in China, but they're greedy. They're capitalists. They want money. They don't particularly care where they're produced. A lot of them have already moved out to Vietnam or Mexico. They're not nationalists.

They don't care. Maybe they like China. Maybe they don't. It's got nothing to do with it. It's a business question. And so a lot of those companies, you've got Taiwan Semiconductor at 65 billion. You have Apple at 500 billion that they're investing in the US instead of China. But you're going to have this rush of Chinese companies who are leaving. So China is already dumping money in the companies to try to bribe them to stay. They just passed a law just today in fact say like with a bunch of freebies for small business and access to capital. China is literally bribing its companies to stay. Other countries don't do that like Taiwan, Japan, Korea. Those companies are

moving here. Samsung I think it's 65 billion they're putting in. So you have this massive investment boom in the U.S. now because of the tariffs. So I've been relatively skeptical on the tariffs. I've been saying, look, reindustrialization is cool, but it'll take years and years. And of course, what's actually happening is, you know, for Samsung to stand up in American factory, they can do it pretty quick because they do this for a living. Elon Musk stood up his Gigafactory in Austin in 13 months. So a lot of, and in the meantime, over that year that it takes to set up the factory,

you've got massive job growth because you have to build the thing. So the Taiwan Semiconductor, they have $165 billion project in Arizona, they're seeing 40,000 jobs to build that. You multiply that by all of the announced investment and you're looking between four, sorry, 800,000 to 2 million jobs to build it. And then once it's built, now all that stuff is going to produce in the US. They're not going to build a factory to produce for three months, right? Once it's here, it's going to stay here. And we saw that in autos.

So Subaru, Honda, there's a lot of Japanese car companies that they moved production to the US to get under the tariff umbrella decades ago. And once they're here, they stay here. They've got supplier networks. They've got relationships. A company like Honda, their shareholders are very, very happy that they're on the inside of the tariff umbrella. So I think so far,

the numbers have actually been absolutely astounding. Even on inflation, inflation was flat again this month. So it's two months now that Trump has reported flat inflation, in other words, zero, actually slightly negative. Under Biden, his last number was 5.7% annualized on inflation. So to be honest, so far, I know the media wants it all to be, you know, their keyword

is chaos. And, you know, every time the stock market goes down, they're out there cheering. And the stock market goes down because the companies on the stock market aren't really American. They're globalized. So they get hit with tariffs, too. But at any rate, the media wants him to fail. But the actual economic numbers are astounding. I did not expect an investment boom of that magnitude.

Well that's very good news. And probably Europe's going to be angry about this because they're just they're going to be hemorrhaging companies to us because of their self-imposed energy problems, which are now magnificent with Spain sort of leading the way, showing us how it's not to be done. Yeah, Spain is leading the way and Canada is not far behind now with their new globalist tool. Yeah, yeah. Now, now from a congressional standpoint, my concern, Peter, has always been, has always

been this, that I think that this is what has to happen for us to really pull off this global international realignment of the dollars role and everything and I know the Congress is busy Well, you got your Jamie Raskins out there telling countries if you you know deal with us Well, we'll remember and we'll be will punish you because we're Democrats. That's what we do. We're punishy sort of people. I'm a little worried that, you know, we have to, if the midterms flip, this could just be stasis and we don't need that. This is a very big ambitious plan that needs to really hit on all cylinders, I think.

Yeah, Democrats are stabby. Right. I think that's kind of the subtext here on Trump is that that's part of the reason he needs these deals. Right, he is chasing deals. India, I think is about to announce soon. He wants deals with Europe, with China, with Japan and Korea. He wants these deals because he can take the hit right now.

Right, stocks are down, what I think about 7% since he won the election anyway. He can take the hit now. He can take the negative GDP. Now he can take those headlines. But the midterms, you know, traditionally for an election, people are going to remember the three months before the election. And so he's got basically a year to sort this stuff out. And the investment numbers are really good. He needs some kind of normalization in trade. They have to settle down to numbers 20 25% like kind of kind of reasonable numbers where trade can still flow.

You don't have supply chain jams like we had back in 2020, right? He needs all that drama to sort of relax in about a year from now. So I think that's part of his strategy is go hard early on, try to get some big wins. His traditional style is promise 100 and then declare victory at 20. So that's almost certainly what he'll do. But it would be nice to get some real victories in there where we can actually see some help for exporters, for agricultural farmers, for example, a lot of countries lock out US exports. So that and manufacturing, I think are the two that he's really promised.

He does need big wins there, which is part of the reason I think the trade war is not gonna go on that long. I think we're probably looking about, he would like to get it wrapped up in six to nine months. Okay, well, Peter, that's all the time we have for today, unfortunately, because we keep going. Tell people how to follow you, where they find you, please. I do daily videos over on X at P-R-O-F-S-T-O-N-G-E, and then I also do a weekly newsletter, profstnange.com.

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for your time today and your expertise. Love it. Thank you for being with us Thanks for having me on guys. All right so Now we're gonna be turning to Well, here's where we end up Evie. It's time for us to go to part two of this We're gonna be closing this down on the public side and we'll be going back to our subscribers There's a common knowledge alert. We have to talk about You and I had some meetings with some people talking about the NPCs out there, non-playable characters, and what this means.

There's some important stuff we have to go through. And also, interestingly, WTC 7, World Trade Center 7, back on the table for a discussion. We got to talk about it. Yeah, I'm excited about that. Yeah, and I'm not going to relitigate the whole thing. Obviously, it's a deep piece of expertise, not expertise, but I know a lot more than I probably should.

But I have to also come through and talk about what that means in the scheme of what happens when all this common knowledge breaks across land all at once. That could have some real sociological impacts. So that's what we're going to be doing. But for everybody else who's been out here on the public side, thank you very much for being here. Adios, amigos. We appreciate you spending time with us

this afternoon. And remember, Signal Hours, Wednesdays and Fridays, one o'clock Eastern. Thank you for being here. Thanks for the comments. Hit the like button and subscribe if you found this helpful.