Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 2/1/24 Mike Swanson on the Troubling State of the American Economy

Episode Date: February 5, 2024

Scott talks with Mike Swanson about where things stand with the economy and where current trends are heading. They discuss Fed policy, the boom-bust cycle, the national debt and more. Discussed on the show: The War State by Michael Swanson Why The Vietnam War? by Michael Swanson Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises by Ray Dalio Wall Street Window Mike Swanson provides investment advice at wallstreetwindow.com and is the author of The War State: The Cold War Origins Of The Military-Industrial Complex And The Power Elite. He also works with the Neopolis Media Group, a group of historians, educators, authors, researchers, and free speech advocates who endeavor to provide original and engaging content, including The Ochelli Effect, and The Lone Gunman Podcast. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Moon Does Artisan Coffee; Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton show you guys on the line i got my friend mike swanson well first of all he's a brilliant genius economist type and secondly a very successful investor and also a great revisionist historian of course author of the war state

which you guys have all read by now. And why Vietnam, which, I just punched myself in the leg because I haven't read it yet because I've been so busy, but I know is probably the best history of the origins of the Vietnam War from the inside scoop

from all of the papers that Mike got his hands on showing the internal communications inside the Pentagon is there deciding the policy and all of that. Welcome back to the show, Mike. How are you, dude? Oh, good. That really hurt by the way.

way. I gave myself a dead leg and I'm going to have a bruise. One day I'm going to read that thing. I can't wait to read it. Honestly, I just, I can wait because I have to wait, but otherwise I don't want to wait. But I've been told that it's great and that I'm an idiot for putting it off. Well, if you read my book, then read Gareff Porter's book. That's all you need because his mind ends in 1961 and his is pretty does a lot about the Kennedy era mostly oh there you go so he kind of picks up from where you leave off huh yeah great and that's perils of dominance by gareth of course um you know what's going to happen is after the book is done just like everything else in my life after my next book is done i'm going to uh i've been thinking about this for a long

time i want to do we'll have to find some kind of lull in the news to try to focus on vietnam for like a month or something i got so much i want to catch up on and read about and especially with you and gareth but so much more too and well we've covered it over the years send me an email and i'll give you like a list of two or three other books that that are worth reading too his book is really the best revisionist book of the johnson administration too and the reasons for him escalating the war that's out so far i mean it's it's uh not that many people have have studied that like you is yeah well i do have the whole grip on my shelf here of uh quite a few i want to read i mean there's the classics the bright shining lie and the best and the brightest which i've never read

either of those yet um but uh i've got quite a few more here too so anyway i know it's a hell of a story but um listen the reason i got you on the show is um because i've got regime uncertainty and i saw your headline today at wall street window dot com Tom, where you dispense all of your brilliant economic and investment advice, and you say that the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee did meet this morning, and they decided to hold right where they're at, which I guess means, I don't know what. What does that mean? Well, we're in an interesting moment, and one of your assistants that set up this interview, he asked me a question about what's the money supply doing. And I went to look at that because, honestly, it's not something I track frequently because it comes out so delayed that I can't use it to make trading decisions. But when I look at that, it shows that the money supply actually put in – it's been going down a little bit over the past two years. It surged, of course, in 2020 when the Fed took interest rates to zero and the COVID stuff had all the shutdowns and just the deficit exploded and inflation exploded.

But the Fed then began to raise interest rates in 2022 and the money supply has slowly come down since then until October. And now it's starting to go back up. And the Federal Reserve in October, basically a couple Fed officials came out and said, we may not have to keep raising interest rates. We're probably at the peak of this interest rate hiking cycle. And a lot of people around the world trading the global markets began to buy bonds. And bonds trade opposite to their yields. So them doing that help to actually lower things such as the mortgage rate and the rate of interest, corporations pay when they take out debt and so forth before the Fed has even lowered interest rates.

So financial conditions of ease, the money supply has actually been creeping up since October. and the Fed in the December meeting then predicted that it would lower interest rates three times this year. And the first meeting was in January. The next meeting's in March. Then there's one in May. And the problem is that the economic conditions don't really justify lower interest rates. And I explained that in two ways. First, the inflation exploded in 2020 through 2022, or really 2021, 2021, and in 2022, and in 2022, the Federal Reserve said, we don't want things to go back through the way they were in the 1970s. Stagflation, the Wall Street Journal had a couple articles.

in May, June that year that were basically leaks and I think direct quotes from Jerome Powell in which they said that we're going to have to raise

interest rates a lot and keep them there even if it means a recession until inflation completely goes away and even after it goes away we may have to keep them this high

at a higher level in order to prevent people from getting the idea that we're just in a stagnationary environment. So what's happened is that inflation rate has come down. The CPI now is floating around 3%, right above 3% and on an annualized basis. The Fed's target is to get that down to 2%. It's not there yet. But despite being not there yet, they've already set the stage for lower

rates. So on that view, I don't think it's justified. Secondly, the other reason the Fed would lower rates is if we're in a recession and the unemployment rate hasn't gone up. The GDP is around 3% the last quarter and the economists and the Fed itself isn't projecting it's going to be negative this quarter. So these are reasons to think there's. no justifiable basis for lowering rates and increasing the money supply and make some people, myself included, speculate that, well, it's an election year. And there's been years past where the Fed lowered rates during election years to make whoever the president was happy. And they did that when Nixon was president, when Johnson was president. And maybe that's one of the

reasons they're so hell-bent on setting the stage of lower rates. Whatever the case, the meeting came in January just the other day. They didn't lower rates. They said they're not lowering rates in March either, or suggested they won't. They want to see more improvement in the inflation data is what the chairman said. But they have still set the stage on doing it in March. Today, the stock market sold off yesterday after they said they're not going to lower rates. And this morning in the Wall Street Journal, there were two articles in there.

One, justifying lower rates, claiming that the Federal Reserve has these economic statistical systems that say interest rates are too high. and then another article saying that the political situation has the Fed not wanting to lower rates too early but also not wanting to do it in the fall really close to the election so therefore they should do it in the spring so they've basically justified lowering interest rates in May all right so yeah I mean it is all politics right that's the lens I look at it all through is too much price inflation on the shelf, it's going to really hurt Joe Biden for the election. But a crash and a recession is going to really hurt Biden for the election. Yeah. So they're trying really hard to do what they call this soft landing thing, right? Which I think I don't read Krugman, but I bet if I did, he would say we did it, right? We had to do all that stimulus to make up for the lockdown inflicted depression there. And so that created, yeah, sorry, some bubbles and some pretty high inflation, but then we raised up the rates and these technicians with their technocratic technical abilities here, they raised it just enough to pretty much lick inflation.

You're right. It's at three, not two. But hey, good enough. And so go ahead and get things back to what they would call normal now. Whereas if they kept going, they might cause... a real correction all the way type of a crash and a panic and would hurt the incumbent. So did they not stick the landing here, Mike? Maybe that's what you're complaining about. They did such a good job of inflating and then deflating, but without going so far that they blew the whole thing up like they usually do. Well, I think that's a good concise analysis of what's going on. In fact, I'm not sure the chairman, Jerome Powell, I'm not sure, he's set to be on 60 minutes this weekend on Sunday and no one really knows what he's going to say, but at some point, and it may be this week, weekend, which I would expect it to be in the spring, but maybe he's going to do it early, and that is declare victory and make the argument you just made, but the inflation rate is not gone below 3%.

So to me, it's really premature if he does it this weekend. But the Fed statement they released even suggested that it said something like we just need to see it going towards the 2% target. You not even get there, you know, just go towards it and make sure it's going towards it. So even if they don't get there and get the 2.8, you know, annualized by May or they'll probably just declare victory and say we got the soft landing. and we've done a good job and really cheerlead things. And the effect of this, and I do think it is going to help the stock market stay afloat into the election. And if you go back, you know, we're about the same age

and started really paying attention to these things in the late 90s and after that. but if you look at when Clinton was president there's a cycle of interest rate hikes in the 93-94 period and then again 96 to 98 in which interest rates went up slightly and then were cut without a real recession happening and the bubble back then would just get further and further stimulated so to me this This may be similar to those periods before 2000, before that bubble popped, where in the 90s there was two hike cycles like we just have gone through, which didn't crash things, but the bubbles inside got bigger. And that's what I really worry about, not this year, but in the future, and I'm not sure when it's going to matter. if it's going to be next year, the year after, the year after that.

But we've got the U.S. debt to GDP is at 125% and that's higher than it was after World War II. It's the highest in American history. This is the size of the federal debt. The interest on the debt is exploding. It's set to go past a trillion dollars in itself. And these are things that are at historic levels, but they're not problems now, but I think they're likely to become

problems when the next recession actually does hit. So I think that's what we're facing in the future. But this year, I guess you're just going to keep things propped up. And I don't really think much is going to happen in the markets. Okay. So, you know, I don't know the numbers, man. I can't do all yield curves in this and What do I know about that? But I do the historical analogies, right, of the 2000 crash and the 2008 crash. So you mentioned where Greenspan did have sort of these smaller boom-bust cycles in the Clinton years. Pretty much nobody noticed, right?

Is the dot-com bubble and housing bubble kept growing and growing anyway? And then in 2000, the NASDAQ and the Dow crashed, but the housing bubble kept going. And they kept building that up. That didn't crash until 08. and that was what brought down the whole god dang everything as everyone remembers the massive crash of 08 but so there's a couple different sort of historical metaphors i'm reaching for in there in terms of like the time period we're in now how that compares you just made a good comparison there to like mid 90s slight corrections and then keep going um kind of a deal and then maybe 2007 is fresher on people's mind you have some bad news bear sterns and layman brothers and things like this i know we're seeing stories about boy the commercial real estate market sure is sweating uh they've got bad debts come and do and you know bazillions of dollars worth the underwater skyscrapers and all of this stuff and um

so i i wonder uh you know i guess you're saying you think that is what they're doing now essentially holding where they're at, maybe even further cuts, that they've decided we're not going to allow there to be a crash. We're going to go ahead and keep stimulating as of now. You think they'll be able to put off the crash for another couple of years, you say. But then, in other words, we are right where we were in 06 or 07, where the punishment is coming, but they're kicking the can down the road, essentially. Yeah, in 2006, the real estate market actually peaked that year, and it didn't matter, you know, to the markets, really, till the fall of 2007, the Bear Stearns, there's a Bear Stearns hedge fund that crashed, I think it was in July, just went, you went under July 2007, and then, of course, the bank. didn't fail, you know, until 2008, across the board. And this year, you know, we saw, I'm sorry, last year in March, there was a regional

banking crisis with small banks across the entire country. Several went under. The Silicon Valley Bank in California went under. But across the board, regional bank stocks crashed 30% overnight. and the Federal Reserve created an emergency lending program where they could lend any amount of money they'd want for zero percent interest and bailed out the entire regional banking system or put a floor underneath it. And that program's still going on today. So that was a crazy emergency measure, you know, that they didn't do anything like that in 2008 even.

So they're propping things up. And the crisis I'm describing or worried about is the federal debt really becoming a problem. Of course, we've heard about that all our life, and it hasn't been a problem yet. But historically, when a country gets to debt to GDP over 125%, it eventually becomes a problem. Well, they had to downgrade the rating of America's debt, right? Yeah, they did that 2017 or 18. Yeah. And another economic indicator or statistic that's linked to it, which proved to be true in the 2000s, is the current account deficit.

So the U.S. current account deficit. That's just the annual shortfall of congressional spending? The current account deficit, it measures a country's credit and debt with the rest of the world. Okay. So back in the 2000s, we were always told China owns all the debt. China owns all the debt. And we have this giant trade deficit. Well, the current account deficit got over 6%.

And historically, when a country's current account deficit gets over 5% of GDP, There's an economic crisis, and back then it happened. You know, we ended up with an economic crisis with the housing crash and the banking crash. But interestingly, I was reading a book, you know, years later that was by the head of the Bank of England, and he made the comment that the central bankers around the world thought, oh, the U.S. has this current account deficit problem, and therefore it's going to have a debt problem like I'm worried about, and the dollar would fall as a result, and that's not what happened. Instead, the housing market blew up, and there is a debt problem there. So it's, you know, there'll be something that'll happen as a result of all this. Yeah. Hey, guys, I've had a lot of

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Visit Spexavers. next eye exam. I exams provided by independent optometrists. Well, you know, I remember Ron Paul saying that there's so many bookkeeping tricks in the government where the agencies owe each other even trillions or hundreds

of billions. And then also the Federal Reserve, you know, the government owes the Fed quote unquote and pays interest on the debt to the Fed. And Ron Paul's going, we could just wipe all of that off with a pen and stop doing that. It's a huge amount of, you know, and I take this personally just because, you know,

and whatever, every single individual in this country should. Like, think about all of the money that they take from you, how hard you work for what they deduct out of your check. You don't even get to look at it before they take it away, you know? And then to think that you're just paying the interest on the debt between government departments? Or to some sovereign, you know, monarchy or whatever dictatorship overseas somewhere, or whatever government overseas somewhere whose central bank is sitting on some American bonds? And your whole life, you pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars, whatever it is, the bounty on all of our heads under the IRS,

that we have to pay through the nose. And it's not even going to kill people, much less help feed some poor old lady. it's just going to pay the interest on the debt to some corporation or some foreign government. It's as much an insult as it is anything else. It's unbelievable that they would treat us this way. You're telling me we're paying a trillion dollars. The people of this country are paying in real money. A trillion dollars or interest.

Pardon me. A trillion dollars worth of just interest payments on the debt per year. are starting this year right around here is that right um so it's headed towards a trillion by the end of this year in november i'm looking at an article right from the heritage foundation right do i sound like a raven lunatic now that really is completely insane and intolerable right the the interest on the debt um is as big it's it's approaching the size the defense budget is is But it's, it makes up, according to this Heritage Foundation article, 40% of all personal income taxes are now going to the interest on the debt. Let's think about that.

And back in October of this year, the, there was a minor correction in the stock market from July to October. And the treasury bonds were falling in value two and the yields were spiking. now they're all doing the opposite bonds around but in October they they had been falling for over two years and they made a short-term bottom in October which looks like something of a panic bottom but when that was happening there are articles everywhere in the financial media about this about the debt's getting bigger the interest is getting bigger and it's a problem and this is why the yield on the 10-year bond is now over 5%, now it's below 4%. But what I'm trying to say is in October, this was actually being talked about a lot.

Now it's gone as a story, you know, as a meme or a talking point or whatever. It's going away because the market is, the stock market's rallying, the bond markets rally. So, but it'll come back one day, you know, in a year or two. but because it's exploding and what's going to happen when there's a recession it'll just explode even more and then and that's when I think we'll really get in trouble but I don't know when that recession's really going to happen or even yeah like you're saying they're backing down and deciding on continuing an inflationary policy for now which just means that later they're going to have to raise the interest rates even higher

and this is something that we have been talking about you know the experts have been saying me, including you, on the show for years is that's the real problem, is they're sort of kind of getting away with it now. But if interest rates were allowed to go up to their free market level or anything like that, they'd be completely bankrupt. The interest on the debt would be far more than the military budget or the welfare state budget or the running of the government budget at all. Yeah. I mean, it's like there, to me, like this whole 2% CPU. inflation target. I mean, there's some people that would argue that's, you know, you shouldn't even, that's a target they made up like 20 years ago, you know. And now they're

basically saying they just, they have, they say they have a mandate to get to that target, but now they're talking like, they just want to approach it. Yeah. It's just like, okay. Yeah. Well, so, I mean, if you're the king of the Treasury Department, over here. What could we ever do about this? You just print the money to pay off the debt and then lob some zeros off the end. I mean, that'll lead to a Kami revolution. We've seen that or a fascist one. And yet, well, what would happen if they just repudiated it? I think that was what Murray Rothbard said is they should just say, hey, if you're a U.S. government bondholder, sorry, sucker, we're starting over and then just what are you going to do about it and just move on from there? But I don't know. Do you have any kind of proposal for, like, how this could be wound down, other than we could completely abolish the warfare and welfare state and then just pay it all back, pay it all down, but it doesn't sound like that's going to happen either.

Well, I mean, the only way to get rid of the situation is, unfortunately, to print it away. Like, after World War II, the U.S. debt to GDP was 110%. at its peak and now it's like 125% well the rest of Europe was heavily indebted too and the Soviet Union they solve this problem by simply devaluing their currency by like 90% one day by surprise England you know had inflation for like 10 years and so one perhaps one way what they may actually be trying to do. I haven't seen this written somewhere, but it's possible that they may be thinking, we're going to take care of this over 10 years and just have these little boom and bust inflation cycles that slowly inflated away over a decade or two decades,

meaning that right now, you know, the feds raised interest rates and trying to handle us, you know, and stops. Now they're stopped. And we've come out of a period where inflation officially was like 8% annualized in 2022. I mean, the grocery store prices went up a lot more than that. I think they, like, doubled, you know, from where they were in 2020. The prices of everything is skyrocketed. And that was two years of inflation, basically, 2021, 2022. And they may be thinking, well, we'll just try to have two or three cycles like that.

And inflation will cut the size of the debt away. But that's the only sort of program I can think of to try to make this. This not so bad thing to go through, but it seems like a far-fetched idea. If it would even, I don't think it would work, but. I mean, what do you think they're going to try to do? Or they just think it'll be fine, right? I saw Yellen saying, well, we expect the national debt to get up to 50 trillion by, I forgot. I think she said 2030.

That can't be right. Does she really say that? I think it was. I'm not sure. I've had to go back and look. but I mean in our in our lifetime that that 2030 though I'm not sure that it's probably correct that this problem I'm talking about about the interest on the debt exploding and this and that are life just about as long as I can remember we've been told 2030s when the crisis is going to happen with Social Security and Medicare and all these kind of things and and that's what they have been saying and still are saying so back in the fall when I was reading about this more actively this problem the CBOE was basically saying 2028 2030 somewhere in that time frame this will be a problem but

they're not projecting a potential recession and before then and if there is recession the which I think is likely at some point before those years then this will be a problem earlier than they're predicting earlier than 2030 basically yeah crazy well so to switch back to the nearer term like in the yeah in the politics of the thing i mean essentially all austrians are saying all the time including you and i think me right now not that i'm really an economist but i agree with you smart guys a lot that like if we're not in the middle of a recession we're in the middle of an inflationary bubble that's going to cause a recession soon and in this case it sounds like because of the all the inflationary bubble activity from the printing during the lockdown era and the aftermath of that

and then refusing to allow a real correction since then that and they're going to try to prevent it from happening before the election it sounds like too of course does that mean then that this time a year from now they're going to go ahead and jack up interest rates by four points and crash the economy like they did to Andrew Jackson and blame it all on Donald Trump? Well, I'm not I'm not sure like I'm not sure what's going to happen next year so I think there's two possibilities. One, the economy is kind of like it is now. Nothing really, you know, nothing really changes except they've lowered interest rates too quickly without defeating inflation and then the inflation will come back and then they have to raise interest

rates again like you just suggested the other scenario would be that we're just actually about there will be a recession you know we don't see it now but it could start in the summer, maybe it starts after the election, but there will be a recession, and inflation will probably come down a little and hit their target, but they'll end up lowering rates too much again as a result of the recession, and then the recession will make the deficit explode, and then we'll have a huge massive problem as a result. So either outcome, you know, it's going to be next year or after the election will be shaky one way or the other i think yeah all right well so assuming people listen to this show aren't already just living in their

car in the walmart parking lot completely inflationarily priced out of a decent place to live and let's say people still are in their house or renting one maybe have a little bit of money what should they do now to protect themselves protect what money they may have that hasn't already been inflated away well I'm not

so I've got I mean I'll just say what I'm doing I've I became a couple more cautious last year about the stock market when those regional banks blew up I actually

got bullish on the stock market at the end of 2022 but in March when those banks blew up I sold half the stocks I owned I didn't sell everything but I sold half and moved what I sold into CDs and bonds just getting interest even though I think one day

that's all going to be a problem but I also got 14% of my money in gold and silver not gold and silver stocks but bullion as protection and if the bond market does blow up and the debt's a problem at some point there's a book that came out a year or two ago called big debt crises And it's a study of 200 years of financial history.

What happens when these situations occur? And the average, the base case is, and it is the U.S. dollar will fall 50% in value. That's actually what happened in the 1970s, over 10 years. And to me, that's the biggest risk. It's not you're going to lose your bank account or, even the stock market falling, it's that the U.S. dollar falls in value as a result of a debt crisis. So the value of your money, as an investor goes down,

the average person will experience another big bout of inflation for two or three years. But the value investments, your stock market account may not go down in value that much. but the real value because the dollar is going down would fall so historically

when a country's currency goes down to value the price of gold against it goes up two and a half times so my solution is to own physical gold and silver to mitigate that risk

but as far as like trying to make a lot of money or trade this stuff I don't see much to do this year, except be very cautious. What about buying land? Is that as good of an inflation hedge as gold, or that's too caught up in the boom-bust cycle? But they both are, right? As long as the government's printing money, they got their prices boomed.

No, actually, that's a better solution in a lot of ways a better solution than what I'm saying. And that's to invest in land or real estate. But I would suggest that the time to do that would be... After the next crash. Yeah, yeah. Not when the debt's blowing up, though. Then it's kind of too late. But the time to do it would be if there's the start of a recession,

like if you see the stock market, the next time the stock market goes down in a year, 20% or something, and interest rates are cut, then by take out loans, Buy real estate, buy land, because if I'm correct, and there's another inflationary problem, if you got your interest rates locked in and you're buying real estate, even if it's not gone down, but the mortgage rates are locked in at a low level before interest rates go up the next time, you're getting a deal. And then if inflation explodes, you're really getting a deal. So, yeah, that's probably a good solution or a good way to, a better, that might be the best way to actually try to make money out of it, this whole thing.

Not the stock market, not even gold or silver, but buying real estate, you know, if you can, if that opportunity comes. Yeah. Well, you know, I'm just too lazy to do that. well you know a buddy of mine has a vert ramp in his backyard in that little bitty neighborhood over there off airport boulevard not to blow out the spot or anything bert dogs welcome but there's this little old lady or used to be i think still is little old lady who owned about a dozen of these little houses in this neighborhood and they're starting to tear them down and replace them with newer modern weird looking things instead but point being at least according to the story way I heard her husband died back in 1960 something or 70 something but he had set her up owning you know maybe it was only a half dozen maybe it was just one block both sides of one block

of these little you know pyramid beam clapboard little things you know and she's that's how he took care of her for all these years for decades and decades after he died she was okay because she owned this little grip of houses and these people paying not extraordinary rents at all i bet they were three and four and five hundred dollar rents for most of the time i'm sure they're higher now but um seems like i don't know sure gold too whatever but would she have been able to live off of that if he'd made the same investment in shiny metal as in those houses

that she could keep collecting rent from, you know? Well, I mean, probably not. I mean, that's the thing. If you have real estate like that, you're making income. And if you buy the real estate and when interest rates are low and then interest rates go up and there's inflation, I mean, you're getting a great, you know, you're just buying at a great time. I mean, it's, I mean, it's like, look, it's like when the shutdown. happen in 2020, I thought about buying a house as an investment. It was like 250,000 and now it's worth 400. I mean, that's, that was the right time to do it. Oh, you're telling me. You know,

the prices over here went completely insane in Austin, Texas. And the population of Austin got gentrified right out of town by all the people coming, you know, buying houses sight unseen from other places fleeing the lockdowns but riding on free money that they got on the way you know yeah pretty crazy all right well hell um you know how the world doesn't blow up by the i'm sorry but hopefully the world doesn't blow up the next 12 months either yeah i mean that'd really scrub the stock market if new york city gets nuked you know um yeah uh you know you know you know, I'm always, I'm not an investor because I don't have any money, but I'm always trying to figure out, you know, where we are in the boom-bust cycle and what these cooks over at the

Fed are trying to do to prevent the consequences of the last thing that they did and whatever, it's an endless cycle over there. And, you know, hopefully be of some help to people listen and trying to figure out what to do with their money. But as always, I can't recommend your website highly enough. It's wall street window.com the great Mike Swanson and he's got

well you heard him he says well I'll tell you what I'm doing you can tell you what to do I'll tell you what I'm doing I'm investing in this that and the other thing and I'm being real careful about that and that's the way he talks about all that

and he does you know little articles lots of news and also these great short YouTube videos explaining what he does at Wall Street Window get it he's just showing you exactly what he's doing

as he does his business trying to make money and trying to stay afloat in this insane quasi-free market economy that we're stuck in here so please everybody check that out wall street window dot com and of course the great books the war state and why the vietnam war thanks very much mike oh great talk with you scott the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 fm in l a p sradio com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and libertarian institute.org.