Peak Prosperity - Inflation, Deflation, and The Great Wealth Transfer

Episode Date: October 17, 2024

In this live discussion at Porcfest 2024, Chris Martenson and Jeffrey Tucker critique the economic and monetary policies of recent years, highlighting inflation, taxation, and government manipulation. They explore the lasting consequences of these policies on purchasing power, healthcare, and generational wealth.

Thank you. Visit peakprosperity.com to watch the video and to find other insightful content such as articles, discussion forums, and exclusive subscriber-only content. I'm just going to begin by saying that I think we have lived through hyperinflation. The lowest estimate on purchasing power loss over four years is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They say that the dollar has lost 25 cents over four years, which is devastating. But I don't know. Does that fit with your experience at all? I'm not seeing that at all. A much more precise estimate that I saw about just groceries alone showed 35%.

That seems a little closer, but depending on what you're buying, it could be 50%. It could be 75% or more. It's really quite devastating, but even over four years this is roughly similar to what happened between say 1978 and 1980 uh or that during that during that period it's a very close approximation of the the change in the way they calculated it has actually been devastated it affects everything inflation affects inflation adjustments. There's no easy way to find out the truth about economic data anymore. They report retail sales and factory orders and real prices. You're invited to do the conversion yourself. You can, but you cannot use official inflation statistics. We don't know how bad the inflation is, essentially. This isn't the problem.

Well, the good news is the BLS told me that my health insurance went down over the last four years by 0.5%. Anybody else's insurance go down by 0.5%? No. I just wondered if I had a bad plan. Now, we're in this, what Brett Weinstein calls the Cartesian crisis, where you can't trust anything anymore. And maybe that's the point, Jeffrey. Maybe the point is that they're throwing us such malicious BS that we're supposed to lose trust and faith. I mean, it feels intentional at this point. It's so bad. The health insurance duplication thing is a fascinating one because the way they calculate this,

you have to understand, is that they calculated what you spend against what you consume, right? So if you're paying your premiums every month but you're not consuming health care and then suddenly you get sick and so you suddenly consume a lot of health care, the government's looking at that and going,

well, that's kind of like deflation, really. Because now you're eating up a lot of services. So before you were paying but not getting any services, now you've got vast services, so the consumption of those services should count against what you pay. So your health care spending is, in effect, declined. That's what they say.

And the economics of it are complicated, right? Because in the health insurance, you're paying these premiums, which you may or may not use. And the way you do use them, you pay what's called co-pay to visit the doctor, which is really a sales call. And they bring out all the prescriptions you should have and all the tests you should take. And they try to up-sale you, and you could find yourself consuming a lot. But it's not a normal market.

It's a vastly truncated and strange market at work. And then you've got the additional competition. You've got, ever since Obamacare, there's these huge deductibles. So you're responsible for the first $1,000 or $2,000, $3,000. Afterwards, the insurance kicks in and covers the cost. So anyway, the BLS is looking at all

this stuff. And incredibly, during 2020, during the epic pandemic of death and destruction, the health care spending went down by a third so the stories are gonna have a hard time explaining that one um so basically people stopped going to the doctor because they were afraid the hospitals were closed everybody was screaming about covid you didn't know what the hell was going on so you just you know took your

chances you'd rather be sick at home. It's so funny when I look back at these days. We all have our own stories. But mine was sometime in late March. I'm just sitting there astounded that everything's been shut down and the world's in a weird, freaky panic about the respiratory virus. And I just couldn't understand why property rights were being violated. You know, the domestic capacity restrictions, you have a house party with more than 10 people,

you get a visit from the public health police. And it was crazy times. And then the media was all in like, oh, you have to stay home and use DoorDash all the time. And what's the problem? Just stream your movies. And so on it went. And what?

Were you waving at me? Okay. But anyway, my brother called me. He lives in Central Texas. He goes, these are weird times, right? When you say so. I said, yeah, certainly is. He goes, the thing I don't understand

is my office is right across the street from the hospital. And it has been for the last 20 years. I've never seen the parking lot completely empty during the day. What's this about? And I said, I don't quite believe you. So he pulled out. I didn't know what the hell was happening.

He pulled out his iPhone and showed me a picture. He said, look, nobody's here. I said, well, it's a hand-in-day. But nobody's using health care services? That's right. Well, then three years later, people are sick as dogs, right? I mean, it could be vaccine injury, but it also just could be lack of exposure, lack of vitamin D, too much drinking, liquor,

depression, sadness, isolation. But anyway, everybody's, and this is still true today, everybody's sick as dogs. And so healthcare spending went way up, right? Now suddenly now some labor is oh give me my diagnostics i seem to have cancer you know whatever so health care spending soars but the premiums you kept paying the entire time the bls looks at that goes ah there you go massive price declines right sorry to belabor this point, but I find this just utterly bizarre.

Well, so they're lying about a lot of things. So how many people here feel like inflation is higher than advertised? All right, we're done. Any questions? Well, so the bad news I have, it's either that or worse news. So the bad news is that more inflation is on the way because the Federal Reserve is now down to, I believe,

the end of the road. We've been kicking this can for a very, very long time. And it worked really well, reasonably well when the world just had to take it. Often it was said when I was growing up, the United States doesn't really export much. We do. We export dollars, lots of them. And we have this thing called the trade deficit that if our trade deficit was a country, it's the 19th largest economy in the world. It's very robust. And it's amazing, right? So we're exporting all these dollars. And we don't even know how many are overseas. We really don't't because they're supposed to add all these things up but we don't even know that anymore we have this wonderful little bill that got passed a while ago s fast 56 which allows the federal government to hide its expenditures

from the public if they deem it in the national interest what's in the national interest well everything so we don't even know what so i track it very loosely. The CBO tracks it, says we're going to have a $1.9 trillion deficit this year, up from $1.5 trillion just a few weeks ago. Mostly student loan stuff. But when you actually look at how much new debt got thrown into the market this year, it'll probably be closer to $2.2 trillion. So what's that $300 billion doing? Eh, it's secret spending. On what? Well, probably went to Ukraine.

Then where? It's probably in Zelensky's latest house on the Gold Coast of Egypt. We don't know. But it's somewhere. So we're spending like literally at blow off rates right now. And so the Fed's going to have this real Hobbesian choice to make. Do they defend the bond market? And that's where if the bond market blows up, that means we have a treasury auction failure. Literally, from a monetary financial standpoint, that's a lights out extinction level event. Or they have to let the dollar go. And what do I mean?

I mean, how do you defend the bond market? Well, people aren't showing up. China doesn't want our bonds. Russia doesn't want our bonds. Saudi Arabia doesn't want our bonds for reasons. But you still have to float out 300, four hundred billion of those a month. What do you do? Well, somebody has to buy them.

So the Fed buys them. With what? Well, with cash. Where'd they get the cash? Well, they printed it out of thin air. They clickety-click on a keyboard. Okay. So then they take that cash.

That cash is real. It goes out, dilutes all the other cash that exists out there. And so that toasts the dollar. Or they can say, wow, the dollar is really getting toasted. We're going to have to raise interest rates, which toasts the bond market. So that's the choice. Save the dollar, save the bonds. Everybody the Fed actually has as a main client. Remember, of course, you all know this, right? It's a private cartel. It's privately owned. Capital stock is owned mostly by Citi and JP Morgan, 75% by just those two banks. Those are their main clients of the Fed. And if the bond market blows up, those two clients take it in the shorts. No bueno,

not going to happen. So I think we all just have to be prepared for the idea that the Fed's going to print. The CBO just two days, three days ago now estimated that the Fed balance sheet in the next 10 years is going to have to go from about its current seven-ish trillion, it's going to have to go all the way up to nine and a half trillion. I think they're wrong. I think it's going to do that within two years easily. And that's going to lead to lots and lots of inflation. So visit your federal silver and gold dealers up there. Yeah, right. Just keep in mind that between 2020 and 2022, the Federal Reserve created about $7 trillion, something like that. That's a remarkable

amount of money printing in such a short period of time. At its peak, it was 26% per annum. And we've never seen anything like this. We don't know what the effects of that are going to be. And at that time, they said that when the inflation started roaring in January 2021, it was pretty soon after the money printing. I mean, you would normally expect 18 months. But don't forget, they distributed it with helicopters, right? It was really just plugging it directly into your bank accounts, business and individual. We didn't saw nothing like that in 2008, where they printed a vast amount of money,

but then sucked it back out again by paying the banks to keep the money in the Fed to keep the powder dry. It never became hot money on the street. This is mega hot money on the street. This is mega hot money on the street. So nobody knew what was going to happen. And Janet Yellen, already in January and February of 2021, was saying this is really transitory,

which is a funny word that is not a normal word because it sounds a little like temporary but if right but it actually means a transition transition from what to what and there's no question there was some transition taking place but it's not the same thing as temporary and then ever since then for the last four years and you know every headline every every month the CPI comes out, the headline is inflation's cooling, inflation's calming, it's relaxing, it's getting better. The bad days are gone. Things are getting better.

Every month for four years, they've been saying the same thing. But we look back and we've always lost half of this domestic purchasing power. Unbelievable. And so that's how hard the tooling is going on. We look back and we've always lost half of this domestic purchasing power. Unbelievable, you know? And so that's how hard the tooling is going on. And even now they're saying, well, you know, we've licked inflation. It's such nonsense. I follow the CPI, PPI every month for these.

You have to dig down into the numbers very carefully, compare them against real-time data you get somewhere else. You can see the fraud, the fakery taking place all over the place. Less so on the PPI, but the CGI is so wildly manipulated. Rents are miscalculated. We mentioned health insurance miscalculations. There is so much else. And it can't account for so-called shrinkflation at all. Quality changes are not in there at all it doesn't account for hidden fees

food away from home is up quite a lot but you know you go to your restaurant now and look at your bill it's really weird you'll see you know extra charges well there's a service fee I was at one place and I paid an extra, I don't know, it was like $4 entertainment fee. And I said, and this is fine, but I don't recall really being entertained. I mean, I'm just asking. And she said, well, oh, it's the music that we're

playing on the... I said, why would you charge you for the music? You're like, well, we have to pay for that stuff. So, you know, so... Now, is that part of the food away from home CPI? I don't think so. Or, you know, the old days, you'd order... Well, and the substitution of more expensive ingredients

for cheaper ingredients. You notice people go to the restaurants now and you order a salmon, but it looks like for all the world, like a plate of pasta with a tiny piece of salmon in it. There's a reason for that. There are subsequently expensive ingredients for the cheaper ones.

And the fascinating thing to me, I'm intrigued by this, that the price of the liquor at restaurants and bars now is just beyond belief. I paid $25 for a glass of wine the other day at Watch Hill in Rhode Island for $25 for a glass of wine. And you know what it's like in the old days? You don't say, how much is your glass of wine here? You know, you don't like shop and compare and decide. I mean, mostly

we have an inelastic demand for liquor and beer and wine. It's habitual. I want another glass of wine. I want a cocktail. What these restaurants have discovered, and again, God bless them, but they discovered the profit margins on wholesale

liquor and wine and beer are extremely high. So when the inflation hit, the prices didn't go up a whole lot. I think maybe over four years, they're up about 10%, relatively low inflation. You'll know this if you go to a liquor store. It's like, well, that's not so bad. Well, if restaurants figured this out, they'd buy wholesale at very low inflation rates because there's a lot of room to absorb the price pressures. And then they observe the inelastic demand for the stuff at the retail sector

and charge you a crazy amount. And all the better for restaurants because after a couple of cocktails, you don't care about your bill anyway, right? So a lot of restaurants have just become bars over the last two years. That's how this thing is playing itself out. Well, now, so Lenin said, listen, you want to beat the capitalists. It's very simple. First, you ruin them with inflation. Then you ruin them with taxation. And then you ruin them with deflation. And then the whole thing's done. So I'm having, I'm really hard pressed to find out, like, right now, it's very

difficult for me. I'm constantly checking myself because what I see them doing, which is the UN party, but I'll pick on team Biden because they're in charge, but it doesn't matter to me much at this point. The UN party is busy destroying my country, right? We don't have verifiable elections, full stop, haven't for a long time. Nobody says boo about it. Neither party. We don't have a border, right? In fact, worse, we're bringing in people en masse who happen to be military age males, many of them dumped out of prisons. I know because I went all the way up into the jungles of Darien Gap to see it firsthand. It's astonishing. Our monetary policy is absolutely destroying the next generations down. So Ben Bernanke decided, you know what? Really unfortunate

if house prices went downward. You know what we'll do? We'll 1% blowout rates, make mortgages really cheap so houses will go up in sympathy. This would be good for everybody. Well, no, it's not good for people starting homes, households. It's ruinous to the next generation. So we are a nation that doesn't care about its borders, doesn't care about its money system, and doesn't care about its youth. So I'm hard pressed to say, wow, esprit de corps, yeah, let's fire up a draft. People will be really thrilled by that. So I'm glad you're mentioning Ben Bernanke's 2008 policy, because in many ways- Didn't I call it the blowout session?

Yeah. That's a really important turning point in the history of modern 21st century monetary policy. And the funny thing about that is that my memory of that was that everybody thought Bernanke had accomplished some magical trick. He had saved the system at zero cost. In fact, didn't he get a Nobel Prize for that? He was on the cover of The Atlantic for sure. Hero, they said.

Yeah. The Courage to Print. No, it's just The Courage to Act. That was his book. So what was the cost? And I have to say, Chris, I've never heard anybody say, this is why I adore you.

You say this, you drop these jibs of truth. Your point that if we had allowed the housing bust to take place, then young people could have afforded homes. But instead, they pursued the sort of New Deal sell thing that the recession is caused by low home prices. So the goal is to raise the home prices, restore the bubble. That's what they attempted to do, and they more or less did. But in the course of this, they drove down real interest rates to negative territory for the next 12 years.

Well, unbelievable. And that was monetary vandalism. Yeah, and so what is the consequence of an interest rate that is not real? Well, unbelievable. And that was monetary vandalism. The so-called structure of production was divided between short-term projects and long-term projects, miniature investments that are quick to the consumer versus long-term capital, building things, large companies making things with a payout in 20, 30 years. Negative interest rates means you never have to make a profit. And if you're good for the credit, there's an infinite amount available. So who gets the money under a 2008 negative interest rate kind of situation?

It's the well-heeled corporations. The big shots have infinite resources. Who are they in 2008? Digital companies, media companies, very corporations you know the heavily capitalized so they went crazy with expansion that's why between 2008 and 2020 uh there appeared at millet millions and millions of of six-figure jobs paying people for their college credentials with no work to do whatsoever except drip poison in each other's ears

and invent things like ESG, DEI, and so on. That's where all this comes from. A bunch of idle hands doing the devil's work over 12 years. So they ruin the culture. All this is all generation of assholes. Thanks, Ben Bernanke. Yeah. Getting fast sounds bloody.

How did he become so successful? That's not that complicated. I took out a large student loan and hung around the university for four years. Drank a lot of liquor, you know. Had a lot of sex. Got a piece of paper. Snagged my ideal job.

And I've been using a mouse jiggler ever since. I bought a mouse jiggler ever since. They were best sellers during the lockdowns, right? This was a thing you attached to your computer to kind of move your mouse around so that on Slack it looks like you're busy. Unbelievable. Well, the private

just fired a bunch of... They fired a bunch of people for using mouse triggers. I think it was like they fired eight people. Well, I'm sorry. Amazon sold millions of mouse triggers.

Actually, we should just call the whole of Jen whatever that is. Z? Yeah, yeah. He's called a mouse-a-ghost. That's all they do. And they thought that this is what life was. Get the credential.

Be fancy. Get cozy with HR. Do nothing forever except go to fucking meetings. Go to meetings. meetings that show off. It's got so bad that all of like was meetings for years. You know, nobody's doing anything. If you ever run out of time, nobody's actually doing anything.

And everybody's didn't pay vast amounts of sums to that. What the hell? Well, it didn't last. But anyway, this is the distortions all caused by 2008. It wrecked the culture. It wrecked the economic structure. And that's how media became so gargantuan and all these tech companies blew up.

It was a massive distortion. And people look at this and say, capitalism really sucks well you can put whatever label you want on it but it's not capitalism if you're running a vast well credit-based welfare state for the haute bourgeoisie courtesy of the central bank. You know, that's not capitalism. I don't know what it is. It's our new system, which is a ruling class system. We use paper money

to make every life really happen for the ruling class. This isn't a pandemic, like what do we do about pandemic wealth? Let's throw the working classes in the forge on the virus and have it deliver groceries

to our resource set and the rest of us will sit at home. Oh, I'm sure that's not cruel? No, that's humanitarian. That's responsible. Really? So every day of the New York Times,

stay home, don't travel, sit in your apartment, watch Netflix, read the New York Times, play Wordle with your friends. You know, that's how to be responsible. How am I going to get through this? You just click a button. This is how things work.

This is a class-based exploitation. Marx explained the system really well. He explained the system that emerged after 2008, but especially during the pandemic response. You want to understand what happened during the pandemic response, read Karl Marx. I'm sorry, but it was exploitative of the people who actually did the work and committed the people who hadn't worked in 12 years to continue to not work except at home. But Elon Musk took over Twitter. He said, all right, that's it. Everybody's coming back to the office. I'm done paying people not to work at home. And then eventually he fired four out of five employees and he said he worked better than ever. That's our future. Yes. Yes, indeed. All right. So if the program, if you believe this,

let's just explore this hypothesis that we're under an actual assault, that somebody's trying to wreck us. And the model would be inflation, taxation, then deflation. So everybody knows that the inflation is really bad. They even say openly now that to be middle class in San Francisco, poverty line is 108,000 per year for a family of four officially. Right. So we know now that that the poverty line is actually closer to 65, 70 thousand dollars in most metropolitan areas for a family of four and median incomes below that. So we're already, the inflation's already doing its work. Well, the next part is going to be taxation. This caught me, this caught me wildly off guard. This was like warning sign, Evie and I discussed,

should we get our passports renewed? Kind of bad, right? It's an election year, team Biden, I won't say Biden because obviously he's senile, but his team decided that in an election year, team Biden, I won't say Biden because obviously he's senile, but his team decided that in an election year, the really cool thing to do would be to announce a proposed massive increase in taxes, capital gains to 44.6% from its current 20%, eliminating the 1031 real estate transaction, depletion and depreciation allowances for oil and gas, corporate taxes up. All of his major donor classes basically getting it right in the shorts.

I'm like, who does that in an election year? And why? Well, if you read Rules for Rulers or watch the cute little 19-minute thing, everybody should on YouTube, Rules for Rulers explains how this all works. In a revolution, the people who got you to power aren't the same ones who keep you in power,

so you often line them up against the wall and you shoot them. Wow. So he just shot all his major donors right in front of everybody in an election year, which tells me one of two things. They're confident they're going to win the election somehow, or there won't be one. But they just put the warning shot across the bow that taxations are coming after everybody, including they eliminated carried interest. I mean, this was Wall Street, corporations, real estate, oil and gas. Astonishing to me. But then how do you ruin with deflation at the end?

Everybody knows that the Fed's going to bail the market out. They bailed out assets, my whole adult life. Stocks go up into the right. Stocks get a little wiggly and surprise. Somebody steps in the futures market, buys mass quantities right at the trend line. It's been astonishing. I guarantee you everybody in here knows in their heart of hearts the Fed's going to rescue the market. But one day they're not going to. And everybody's going to be positioned as if they're going to. That's the deflation. And when the dust settles, you will find out, they will call, they'll write books about it.

The great wealth destruction of 2024 or whatever. Actually, if you're paying attention, what just happened was ownership, control and ownership of all the prime assets changed hands. That's the game. That's the game that's playing out right now.

Can you talk about the housing markets, actually, what's going on? I mean, it's not possible for a median income to even think about buying a house in the world. What's happening there? Well, if you,

all the realtors I've talked to said, wow, it's all these cash offers just keep showing up. It's all cash offers. Where do people have all this cash from? Well, many of them have the cash because they invested in NVIDIA

or whatever, whatever. But there's a few. But a big chunk of these cash offers are coming from major corporations. And even if they don't look like they're coming from major corporations, Blackstone has figured out how to create a bunch of LLC shell companies. And it's a little shell company that buys it, but actually controlling interest accumulates back up. So right now, they are accumulating massive amounts of controlling interest

at the institutional level. So these are people who you're in competition with in a real estate deal. The problem is their cost of capital is three points less than yours. It's very, very hard to make that one down. So in the cash offer, you're not paying the interest rates. You're not taking out a 30-year mortgage, right? And so you don't know. And best yet, you're not subject.

You don't have to have a portfolio or mortgage insurance on that. Right. In Florida, you can't even get insurance anymore. A lot of people are selling homes because the insurance companies have walked and they cannot get insurance. Auto insurance just went up 19% last year and people can't afford insurance. So if you can't afford the insurance, you can't drive, you can't have a home. You can't have a mortgage. You can't participate.

Yeah. Yeah. if you can't afford the insurance you can't drive you can't have a home you can't have a mortgage you can't participate yeah yeah so you don't have to have the home insurance if you own your home outright but if you do then you're having your stock paying not just property taxes but every increase in interest if you can get it and if you can't get it what do you do you sell right and that's really happening now? Yes, it is. So if this all, they try and pretend like it's accidental. They just shrug like the Romans looking at a meteor, you know, going across the sky. They're like, wow, what could that be? They shrug and say, wow, yeah, auto insurance went up 19%. What are you going to do? Right.

Well, why did it go up 19%? Is it because we had too many vaccines out there? Is it because, you know, offender vendors, $12,000 to fix now? Right. Well, why did it go up 19 percent? Is it because we had too many accidents out there? Is it because, you know, offender vendors, twelve thousand dollars to fix now? Right. So Nick, who works with me, his daughter getting a learner's permit and she's going to get her first license. Sixteen in Georgia. Obviously, no accidents. Hasn't had a chance. Five hundred dollars a month is is the lowest quote they could find, and they went to four separate places. $500 a month, so that's $6,000 a year,

which even if you totaled a $60,000 car every year, right? That says they're basically, their calculations are every 12 kids, 10 or 12 kids, is going to total a brand new SUV. It doesn't happen. The statistics don't bear that out. So you're saying it's the cost to repair it's something i i have to wonder if it isn't that the that the so a good friend of mine kenny mcelroy he runs very large portfolios of multifamily and he said about three years ago he started walking away from deals they did the exam at 600 deals couldn't find one to really to

look at and they passed on them all after their due diligence because he said the dumb money kept walking in the room these were insurance companies they were thrilled with a three percent cap rate so they were in there buying all this commercial real estate and they didn't care and they were price insensitive i think they just got crushed on commercial real estate i think their portfolios got shredded and they're passing it on so i'm remembering now uh sorry to go back to this car car repair issue but but uh 2020 was very strange because they're all the car retail places just shut down and the man manufacturers stopped ordering parts i started stopped ordering cars because everybody was staying home and the highways were empty right yeah and so then they and and and so what it you know what

happens to the car repair places most of the car a lot of the people didn't know how to repair cars just went on to some other kind of work because they're kind of handy they're good a lot to pick so by the time the cars were newly available uh it was a funny period too because they couldn't get chips for their cars and and many cars were shipped reverting back to power uh manual steering and you know that kind of stuff because they couldn't get chips to run the cars um uh but and then the supply chains were all broken and the parts weren't available so that that caused the the the cost of repair and and the people who work employees so the cost of repairing these things went through the roof. And the weights are there.

This is very strange for me. And I haven't had a car in shop in years. But apparently, now that you take your car to the shop, you're looking at a week or two weight, if you're lucky. And the prices are through the roof. So you're saying that the insurers are paying for these repairs and now they're looking at the bills and saying, you know, this is not insurable. This is too expensive. The smallest thing happens, you might as well just replace it, right? Well, it's either that or the insurance companies are actually reflective of something closer to

the true reality of inflation because they have to deal with the actual prices as they are to get things done. Now, how does the growth of the EV market affect this? Because now these are very difficult. People don't know how to repair them, right? Well, yeah, I mean, they're very expensive. Well, at least Teslas were exceedingly expensive. I don't know. I think we could solve this,

just like weld some steel I-beams on the front of these things and call it a day if everybody had a pair one in the front one in the back probably be okay um so well if we could um so these are all inside the country problems right this is okay we're going to take a gun out we're going to shoot ourselves in our left foot look can we talk outside the country for a bit because we used to be just yeah dictating to the world and the bricks have done some amazing moves in the past couple months here yeah uh before we do that i i really want to explain something i wonder if you agree with me about this uh we have a language problem these

days we talk about the dollar because we're dealing with a a dollar that's epically weak in terms of goods and services domestically. At the same time, the dollar has never been more strong internationally. So it seems to me, I wonder if you agree with this, the ideal thing to do now is to earn dollars but don't spend them here. You want to spend them practically anywhere else in the world. Well, this is two things. I consider the dollar the roach motel in this story right now. And so it could be that the dollar is actually on its very last legs and you will be watching it strengthen. And part of the reason for that is because it's been this big, giant international capital flows goes by this complicated thing called the carry trade,

right? Where I borrow dollars, I go to Japan, and then I buy yen and buy something over there, and I'm getting this carried interest kind of a thing. And it's been a big game, and there's trillions of dollars. So those people who have those trades are going to have to unwind them at some point. And when they do, they're going to have to sell those other currencies and buy dollars it i mean the united states could have had a neutron bomb and be lifeless and still the dollar would go up because programmatically it has to so so there's that forces on on rave right now and the second thing is that when we say the dollar is strong it's really against a basket with really very few currencies in it.

It's got the euro principally, it's got the yen, and then it's got a little bit of the pound, what's remnant of the pound in there, and et cetera. And so it's got a few things in there. But it's not really, I think we'd have to look at the value of the dollar against things

to understand its actual value right now. Gold, silver, oil, things like that. I think that's the stage that we're going to come into and have to look at. But there are trillions of these out there. And Saudi Arabia apparently just undid the petrodollar deal, although I can't get my hands on the deal. A lot of people reported on it.

But I'm pretty sure it's right because that deal expired on June 9, 2024 because it was signed June 9, 1974. That was the Kissinger deal. It was a brilliant piece of work, by the way. It really was. And I think it was real because on June 9, the United States made an overture to Saudi Arabia

and tried to wrap it in the context of Israel, but I don't think this was the case. They said, hey, Saudi Arabia, chill. Tell you what, what if we signed a mutual defense pact that would obligate us to come to your aid if you're attacked? That's what the Biden administration proposed, was obligating us militarily to a Middle Eastern country that's maybe not the highest on human rights

and other things we care about, ostensibly. I find it really bad to get to foreign entanglements where we are obligated for something, a world that's known for its murky dealings and false flag attacks and shifting alliances, and it's really messy over there, right? So I don't think they would have obligated us or tried to obligate us

without being worried about that deal going away. Because this is a huge thing if if the sod if the petrodollar deal is undone wow that's it whole new regime within a year or two everything's going to be wildly different um so uh the but what is your outlook for for for bricks and the idea that we've got all these countries now that are this way we're going to get off the dollar as soon as possible. Do you think there's a real, and the reason what incentivized this

was of course was the de-dollarization that it did to Russia. We just cascaded all the assets. Yep. Which would suddenly just broadcast to the world that the dollar is a political currency and comes with strings attached, namely comply with the U.S. empire or we're going to we're going to make the currency worthless, right?

Yeah. So people keep talking about it like it's going to it going to happen. It is happening. February 28th, 2022 is the day the United States weaponized the dollar and seized Russia's foreign reserves, meaning they weren't really reserves. So from that date to now, I want you to look at a couple of charts. They're amazing. They're astonishing because I've been tracking the gold market like a hawk for 20 plus years. One of the charts that's the most reliable is the inverse of interest rates. So negative real interest rates and gold track each other really, really well. So when interest rates go positive, it's more attractive, gold goes down.

So gold has been playing like a dollar unit and all people care about what's my yield. So if interest rates are negative, gold's going up. Anyway, you flip them, match them up, and it's been like this. I have two lines going together. February 2022, they part. First time in decades, just blew apart.

Second thing, the price of gold has been going up since 2022, strongly. The amount of gold in the GLD tracking trust, we're just supposed to have a lot of gold in it. Price is up, tonnage has been going down, or millions of ounces going down. So gold has been hemorrhaging out of that so-called tracking trust ever since then as well. I don't think they have the gold. I think that what they have is they have notional representations that are supposed to mean they have gold, but it's probably rehypothecated gold. So Finland Central Bank wanted to earn a few extra shekels, so they loaned their gold out to the market, but it didn't go anywhere. It went on a troll from you know vault a to vault b and then it goes back when the lease is up

regardless the tonnage has been leaking out um and so we've had now massive amounts of like the flood of gold has turned into a torrent from west to east it's been astonishing so if you can read these signs already it's very very obvious that that the East and Russia, by extension, the BRICS, they are just flooding away from the dollar right now. Let me ask you a question about this decision to cost the dollar-based Russian assets. Would you say that even from the point of view of an American ruling class elite, that that was a mistake? Yes. Yeah. It was a mistake? Yes, yeah. That was a huge, huge error. And maybe a turning point

as the dollar as a low reserve currency? It was probably one of the largest blunders, political blunders of our lifetimes. Yeah. No question.

Because what an exorbitant privilege it is to be able to print money and have people just take it. And better yet, that they have to take it because you have to use dollars in order to buy oil on the open market.

That's extraordinary. So you'd want to preserve those two things more than anything. And I don't think we have anybody that even understands that. So when you, you know, the Peter principle, I think they're going to have to call it the Janet principle, rename it.

Because she is a moron. I don't know, your treasury secretary. Oh my God, she's unimpressive. uh that's who's supposed to be like guiding us at that level just just hatred of putin was that it blinded them as to the long-term anxious american past i struggle if if you said was this in it was this an, could you think of something, Chris, worse to damage the United States? Yeah. I would be hard pressed. Yeah.

It feels intentional. It's so stupid. But maybe it's just that stupid. I don't know. I struggle all the time. Yeah. I mean, we, but this, this pertains to a lot of areas, you know, it's sometimes it's hard to separate the evil and the suited. And many policies. You know? I feel this way about almost everything, and they make free slots. Because there was so much evil, but there was so much stupid. And I'm still trying to figure out what was what.

Well, I'm a big... Okay, why not both, right? But i'm a big piece and not okay why not both right um but i'm a big fan in my business that we if we have captured territory let's say we figure out a better way to like you know load content on the site it's captured i hate going backwards we went we lost all this captured territory in terms of public health we lost what is herd immunity what is a case what's an infection like we no longer understood risk adjustment. We didn't understand age stratification, like all this stuff that was brain dead simple prior to COVID. How do you get that stupid that quickly? I don't, you know, there's that. And I have in my mind of scenarios that could explain some of that. I mean, basically my, my view in short is

that what they were trying to do was keep seroprevalence levels in the population as low as possible for as long as possible so that when the vaccine came out, it could save everybody. Or at least the perception that herd immunity could not be obtained any other way. And that was partially the reason for social distancing and masking and the general hysteria. So that's my theory about that. And that's also why the elimination of therapeutics from the market. You want no other cures being available. Everybody had to rally around the vaccine in a rush to get it. But there's certain aspects of the pandemic response I cannot fathom. The number one of which was the attack on the public schools, which are the beachfront property

for progressive ideology for the last 140 years. That's right. And so suddenly they shut them down and discredited them among vast numbers of the population, therefore increasing private school enrollment and causing homeschool

to not just be mainstream, but mandatory for two years. It's the weirdest thing. And I don't entirely understand it, except by reference to the teachers' units. And you think about it like this. It's like, do you want to get paid and work, or would you rather get paid and not work?

You know, and that might be the whole explanation, but it was not in the interest of the ruling classes to do what they did to education. Now, I go with these explanations from time to time because they feel good. But then I'm like, OK, we've just flipped a coin and it's come up heads 50 times in a row. All was damaging. They never accidentally got something right in this story. Yeah, Phil, that's true. So the odds are kind of stacked against this being just a long, colossal series of errors. So now we have to come up with maybe a different organizing principle. You know, I thought for a while that one thing that they might have done right was liberalize telehealth.

But then somebody pointed out to me that psychiatric meds have never been more popular. So this allows you to get all your patients massively addicted to pharma expenditures at virtually zero cost. So actually, in fact, telehealth is kind of a catastrophe for the public health. Yeah.

And at a great spoon, it's a big pharma. Now, I totally agree with that. I agree with that. Okay. Yeah, whatever pharma wants, pharma got in this story. You know, this is the great part about COVID for me was I actually wasn't an anti-vaxxer. And I kind of, I bet you, yeah, in 2019 prior, you asked me, I would have been like net positive for sure. Right. I probably would have argued it because that was the orthodoxy, you know, my medical degree taught me that. So now that I've been here and I've dug into it, I've discovered I'm not actually anti-vaccine, but oh boy, am I anti-aluminum adjuvant.

That stuff is nasty. Right. And it's horrifyingly obvious once you dig into it just how nasty it is and we've known it for decades decades and decades and still somehow we can't marshal to do anything about it and the closest i can get is the pharma act because you know what you give a kid who's just been born has no immune system and you shock them with some aluminum or her with some aluminum right there in the neonate ward, and you give them their hep B vaccine in case they're doing any mainlining drugs or having risky sex, you know, because that's what it's for. And now you've gotten them onto something that statistically has a high likelihood

of creating a lifetime customer for eczema creams and inhalers and maybe meds and all of that. I guarantee you there's a CFO spreadsheet in some pharma office that says exactly that. Yeah, I remember the very first time somebody screamed at me, you're an anti-vaxxer. I was stunned because number one, the main thing that stunned me was I didn't even know what that was. I had to actually look it up. I didn't know they existed. I had never had questions about vaccines in my entire life. And now there's a picture of you and Jenny McCarthy right there on the wall.

Now, I knew for sure the coronavirus vaccine was going to be a placebo at best. Because, yeah, you can look at it. My mother used to tell me when I was a kid, you know, there's no vaccine for the common cold. Everybody used to hear that. It was a cliche. And why is that? It's because it's too quickly. An unstable pathogen, like she can't vaccinate.

I knew this for sure. Fauci, by the way, about a year after the vaccine, wrote a rollout sentence in a journal article. You know what that? Oh, yeah, for own bias. This guy's magic. He does everything.

Well, it's hard to change this, you know. But, yeah, what a disaster for the vaccine industry that put everything that was mRNA shot that turns out to not work. I mean, you say it turns out not to work. I read Virology for Dunnings at the beginning of the pandemic. I knew for sure this thing was not going to work. How could you be shocked by that?

And my friend Tom Harrington, the only person I ever knew who read the EUA at the Alpen. Right? You read it. Because you have, I don't know, a computer. And you pointed out that they never promised it would do anything. Other than, I think it was something like lesson symptoms for a Fortnite.

You know, that was the extent of what the UA was for, and you knew for sure this is baloney. But to split the whole reputation of the entire vaccine industry and pharmaceuticals themselves, all on something that was certain not to work for any cellular defective data. Sounds like an insane thing to have done. Well, this is an example of they just went too far. Because once we found out how bad, not just you being very kind, these vaccines not only did nothing, but they did harm.

Yeah. Right? Sure. And we know this is in the data now that's starting to leak out into what we call common knowledge. You know, I'd make it that two later saline tubes or something like, why would they, where's the meds? That's crazy. Well, that is a big mystery because normally in, in vaccine development, you're looking for an antigenic fragment, right? So let's say the virus is 10,000 units long. You're looking for units of six and eight to carve out of there and make your vaccine around. A C. epitope,

it's on the surface. Your body can see it. Make antibodies. You're good to go. They use the whole spike protein. Yeah, not one of them, not two of them. All six major vaccines, all of them use the whole thing. And it's the spike protein that's the toxic component on this that's very bad. Now, why did that happen? Because I can't imagine six independent development teams all saying, I know, let's use a 1,281 amino acid thing. Like, that's a dumb decision. It makes it hard. It's tricky to do. It's harder to work with. Why would you do that? And then you have now this very weird situation there have never been a normal fda approval of an mrna technology even though the stuff had been under uh testing and development for 30 years

though right and so they had to use this mrna this this uh eua this fancy thing it was basically pre-approved by uh uh by the military you know with with the FDA just rubber stamping everything. And somebody pointed out earlier, causing all sorts of resignations from the topics with the FDA, said, we're out of here. But now, this is what I don't understand.

Now, mRNA vaccines are being just ran through day after day. I think we've got one for the birdie flag now now right oh don't get me started on that yes this is somebody asked earlier about disease x that it's the bird flu um h5n1 we we probably came out of the spurl facility in it in a just outside of atlanta and it's another manufacturer you know made for market kind of a thing bird flu had never transmitted to mammals right now it's in mammals all over the place ever since you know 2021 when they started messing with this thing so

that's probably coming up next um and worse they've got this they're testing this in japan keep an eye on this they're doing something called a self-replicating mrna vaccine now so very quickly the mr mRNA goes into your body and then your body turns that into a protein. It does something called translation. But you can also encode a protein that does something called transcription,

which will take that mRNA and copy it. So it makes a protein that will start copying the thing that makes more copies of the protein that copies the thing. And so it's just going to self-amplify so they can save money we don't have to give as much yeah just we can give less can they control how much is produced where it's located or what it does can they turn it off the answer is no to all of those and they're doing their first mass human trials on it in japan i

think this week yeah and this is despite uh i don't know if you watched the interview with Christopher, CDC director Redfield. Did you watch that interview? Which one? I watched two. There was one in a moment where he said the thin RNA technology is actually very dangerous and he would never give up the patients. Yes, I did see that.

That is an amazing thing for the forward directors of CDC, which was the director at the beginning of the pandemic. He was never an mRNA guy. He was never part of the deep state data function machinery and is excluded from all the media, of course, and he's this year about it.

But now he's in public with this direct attack on mRNA as a pathology. But anyway, the FDA doesn't care. They're just a brutallyed all over the place. By the way, libertarians need to kind of upgrade and enhance their understanding of what it means, court agency to be captured.

And I say this actually as a self-criticism. And I think maybe a lot of libertarians over several decades have shared this. I used to think the problem with the FDA was that they were risk averse and using bureaucratic methods to keep valuable products off the market. And so we need to get rid of it and just have a free market, but it's not so everybody can get clues out of it. The last four years have shown something very different. A market would never allow these products. And the FDA is fully captured, owned by Big Pharma. And they're putting approvals on very dangerous things

you would never take if you had a market-based approval process in place. So it's exactly the opposite of what I thought. It's fascinating. Hey, do you think we should take... Well, gosh, we've only got a couple of minutes left. Should we go buy gold? Yeah, buy gold, buy gold. It's exactly the opposite of what I thought. It's fascinating. Hey, do you think we should text Wolfgang Schwarzschild? We've only got a couple of minutes left. Show me about gold.

Oh, yeah, buy gold, buy gold. Ooh. Go. Sorry, I thought I'd go back to something you said at the beginning about that money critic. I read something, a little fast, out of him three, four days ago. First time in history, the interest on the debt is approaching a trillion dollars so printing causes inflation and and the fed has to lower interest rates for the federal government in order to pay the interest

on the debt so if they lower interest rates that's going to spur the economy to run hot and if the economy runs hot inflation's going to higher. It sounds like it's a death spiral in reverse. I don't see a way out of this really personally. I mean, the Fed is desperately right now trying to find a way to lower rates. They really are. Why would you do that? You know, the idea of countryside, the humanitarian policy, as they used to call it, is that you lower rates to keep to get out of a recession.

OK, they've been saying we're in boom times. Everybody's laughing. John Tracy, for God's sake, the economy has never been stronger, according to Daniel. Why would you use down to lower rates? And I think the answer is probably what you said, in part, I think as you answered this night,

to lower the cost of servicing the debt with the federal government itself. The other is just to, you know, excite the heroin addicts on the Wall Street. You know, every time the Fed does anything exciting, you know, right? Yay! Buy, buy, buy! So, you know, and they want to create that environment as we go into November.

Yep, and by the way, the monthly Treasury statement for May was $103 billion in interest payments. And if you annualize that 12 times 103 call it 1.2 trillion already that's our run rate incredible unbelievable so my second point has to do with just getting back to what you said about gold um bold has an inverse relationship where bold likes real rates down uh when you you know, when gold goes up, you usually see rates falling. Well, I just looked at the one-year rate of gold

in the last 12 months, and it's 20.9 and stuff. And the 10-year is up 14% in one year. So it's broken. It's very broken. That is cash hemorrhaging. By the way,

just from Switzerland, just January, just to Shanghai, their Shanghai Gold Exchange was 125,000 kilobars in just that one month. So that's 125 tons that went just out of that one source to Shanghai. And it's just that gold goes in, never comes out. Sure. One way.

Gold prices in real times, and if so, what data would you use to determine that? Which real terms are we talking about? I mean, adjusted part inflation. Yeah, my problem, I don't know what real inflation is. We have to make guess. Right, yeah.

We don't know. Nobody else. I wasted two days last week trying to figure this out. Yeah. It's on purpose. I can't do it at all. I can't either. The real thing is like an acre of land.

Yeah. Yeah. Eventually we won't be talking about the dollar price of gold. We'll be talking about the gold price of dollars. Right. We'll flip the whole thing. We won't care. And it will merely be how many ounces do you have or not that's that's where we're at in this story um first i want to thank you for your videos that

came out during uh thank you you're welcome all right thanks what i've been hearing, and these are just whispers, and you might have more knowledge about this related to COVID, is increased Creon diseases in the general public. Have you seen any of this data? Is any of that true? It is true. And part of the problem, so there's a lot of good work by Douglas Kell and Pretorius out of South Africa,

that the spike protein as it's configured in the shots, unfortunately, has six what are called zipper sequences. It creates what's called amyloid plaques. And so there's a problem. You know, we've seen all these clots that are being found in dead people now, increasingly live people, too. They're pulling them out. And these big, they're called calamari clots. Very being found in dead people now, increasingly live people, too. They're pulling them out. And these big, they're called calamari clots. Sorry, they're gross, but they're really disgusting. And they're very resistant to being broken down because they're not ordinary clots.

And so part of that prion disease is the same thing. It's a protein misfolding dysfunction. And we know that these shots come with a protein misfolding instruction set in them yeah that's really bad it it's really bad yes it's no that that's a good good yes it is it is and again why why did they use the whole thing why would these sequences in there why why why it's just the whole thing's a big mystery but didn't it get a little result i know we're out of time but but it was shocking to me that reuters reported that the pentagon was busy psyoping the philippines to try and chase them off and get in vans that was okay uh yeah pentagon because they were not using mra type calling yes yeah that's what this is all about

you know and this is amazing to me because I was interviewed in something like April of 2021 and the guy was on the I've never been like a conspiracy guy you know and I've always been kind of allergic to conspiracy theory especially right where you've been because I used to think I knew what was true and what was not I had an infallible love of this

you're a crazy person I never trust myself when it were but who was not at an infallible level. You're a crazy person. I couldn't trust myself when he wore it. He felt a lot of phone call with the guy. I mean, we were doing a Zoom thing. He said, don't you think in the end this is all about that thing? And I said, no. That don't have anything to do with anything.

He looked to me like you've got a lot to learn buddy so three years later it was all about the back not just the back, the mRNA technology that's why they took J&J off the market it's going to give you a stomachache or whatever the thing was and then AstraZeneca is now

taking it off the market because of vaccine injury or whatever the thing was. And then AstraZeneca is now, you know, taking off the market because of vaccine injury. Give me a break, AstraZeneca. Meanwhile, Moderna and Pfizer are busy making all the new, the new God.

And FDA is over stamping all the new RNA technology, platform technology. This is all about creating the new firmware out for the human body. Thank you. That's it. All right. Thank you.