Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 4/22/22 Mike Swanson on Inflation and Economic Bubbles

Episode Date: April 29, 2022

Scott interviews Mike Swanson about our current economic situation. Swanson starts by pointing out the historic nature of the economy in the middle of 2020 when interest rates and commodity prices were extremely low. Swanson explains how the inflation and volatility we are seeing today are the direct effects of early pandemic policies, not quick market reactions to the war in Eastern Europe as the Biden Administration wants us to believe. Swanson then focuses on the different sectors within the economy and gives his outlook on how they will act differently going forward. Scott and Swanson also discuss the political forces that are boxing politicians in while leaving everyday Americans confused and worried.  Discussed on the show: WallStreetWindow.com Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country by William Greider 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: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. 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 dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton show hey guys guess what on the line i've got mike swanson and he's from wall street window dot com and he is of course author of the war state which is a great history of the

early Cold War, the last Cold War, I mean, after World War II in the Truman Eisenhower and Kennedy years. I think you'll find it highly educational. And now I have to turn around and look at my bookshelf and hope that it's right there within my line of sight. The new Vietnam book is called, nope, it's covered up by a picture of Ron Paul that my friend and his daughter made for me. Hang on. It's right there with the best and the brightest on my shelf. Why the Vietnam War, nuclear bombs, and nation building in Southeast Asia, 1945 through 1961. One day I'm going to read this thing.

Welcome back to the show, Michael. How you doing, man? Oh, doing good. Great to talk with you today. I've been looking forward to reading this book for years, and now it's been out for like a year, and I still haven't read it. I'm still excited to read this.

I really want to know what's in here, man. I really... Yeah, just read the conclusion, and you'll get the Cliff Notes version. And you'll see what's new in it, too. I'll at least... You know what? What? Now that I'm paging through it, these pages look pretty devourable. I was intimidated by the

thickness, but you got very large print. Oh yeah, yeah. No, I do that. Two paragraphs a page, man. I can do this. Yeah, yeah, it's big. Yeah, that did it make it easy to read for people. Yeah, man. Okay, I just talked myself into it. I'm at least reading the last chapter, like you say there. All right, I'm an idiot. Hey, you know what I left out? Well, I said Wall Street. window, but what I didn't say was you are a very successful hedge fund manager down there in Mordor on Wall Street there back when. And then now you just sit around giving good investment advice to regular schmucks. And as people know, you're a sponsor of this show. So for Patreon listeners, I won't be charging you for this one. But, you know, I'm not here to sell your wares so

much as to ask you, what the hell is going on, Mike, with the economy? And what are people to do? their money's being inflated right out from under them. Prices are going completely crazy. What should I stockpile in what order or which country should I move to? When is the bubble going to burst? And the real economic problem is going to start. Well, the financial markets, the economy, they can seem to be so complicated. And really, you know, there are no economists that can,

consistently accurately predict, you know, is the economy going to grow or shrink over the next quarter or six months or whatnot? So what I'm going to try to do is keep it, make one point and go off after that, the most, you know, one real important point. And that is what is happening? What's the most important thing happening? And I would say that is the simple fact that interest rates were taken to zero in 2020, in March of 2020, and the Federal Reserve started and announced this unlimited, unlimited bond buying operation. They were doing that to make sure they could keep rates low because in the bond market itself, there are all these corporate bonds and junk bonds of corporations that, you know, they trade on the market and they could fall from people

selling it fearful that, you know, these companies might go bankrupt or it's not, you know, the bonds aren't worth what they're priced at and so forth. So they prop the market up. And at the same time, you know, the stock market had crashed into that. The S&P fell 35%. And commodities also, made an all-time low right after that March with the shutdowns and everything to freeze-up of the economy. And oil even went negative for a few days in the futures market. So what essentially happened that spring was the ultimate low in interest rates in our lifetime and really in human history. And these are global rates, not just the United States. It's like the global interest rate hit an all-time low. And at the same time, commodity prices, when compared to the value of the

U.S. dollar, they also hit all-time lows in the history of the U.S. dollar. So everything that's happened, I think the most important factors in the economy and everything that have taken place is that rates have gone up and inflation has only gone up because I believe that the, you inflation is really driven by rising and falling commodity prices and what causes that could be another story. But I think that's the biggest determiner of whether you see the food go up in your grocery store is whether agriculture prices are going up. So these aren't just short-term changes that are going on for a couple weeks or that were started, you know, when Russia invaded Ukraine, but really something that is the result of what happened in 2020, you're the end

point, and I think it's going to go on for years, unfortunately. So I think the economy in the financial markets were living in some strange combination of what happened in the 1970s, and in the financial markets, with a lot of it, what happened in March 2020, where you see this big bubble that's kind of... topping out or slowly starting to flate in real speculative pockets of the financial markets. So, Mike, I mean, when you bring up the 70s there, that's where you have this big stagflation and all that. So it's inflationary, but it's not even a bubble of artificial prosperity. It just sucks for everyone.

That I think is different, right? If you were making a metaphor to the 90s, you would have said that or to the Bush years or even to the Obama, Trump years. you would have said that as far as, you know, I mean, obviously, especially like the Clinton or Bush years as far, because both of them ended with these giant collapses. In 2020, you did have this massive recession that was forced by the lockdowns, essentially. And so that was sort of like the stand-in for 2008 and the crash there in a way. So now this is the consequence of that stimulus. But you're not telling me this is a lot like the W. Bush years.

You're telling me this is a lot like the Gerald Ford years, so I think. So what exactly is the difference? Yeah, it's tricky. What I'm trying to argue is to separate the economy, what we experience from what's going on in the stock market. So when it comes to the economy, I think it's like the 1970s where you do have a lot of inflation. and, you know, interest rates are going to go up. And I think it's like 1972, what we're living in at the moment. If you go back to that year, that's when inflation actually started to become noticeable

and a social issue was in 72 and 73. So I think that's what the similarity that we're living in. economy, you know, you had a recession in the middle of the 1970s where economic GDP growth went negative, but it wasn't like a Great Depression or 2008 even. So I think we're probably going to see some sort of recession like that. And then at some point to end the inflation, they're going to have to raise interest rates above what the inflation rate is. And they're officially telling us it's like 8.5% on the CPI. I'm not, you know, it's likely higher than that because they do monkey with the stats.

But at some point, you know, rates are only, they're not even a percent yet of the federal funds rate. So we got, it's going to take them years to get the rates high enough. I mean, they might, you know, there's, the feds claiming they're going to get it to three, about three percent in a year. But, I mean, that doesn't even get us there. So it's going to take a lot of time. But the similarity I see with the Clinton and Bush years is the stock market being a financial bubble.

Because in 2000, we had the internet stocks. And now it's the, you know, the NASDAQ went up a whole lot. Well, importantly, right, in 99, 2000, when the markets crashed, the housing bubble continued on. And it didn't come down. until 2008. So we had that correction, but it was really the housing bubble had begun under Clinton. And it was only, you know, they delayed because after the dot-coms crashed, they just kept bundling money into housing. But then that turned out to have an end point to, as we all saw. But, you know, man, so if the funds rate, that's the overnight rate that's dictated by the central bank.

there for when banks loan each other money. If they have to raise that up higher than the nominal or, you know, the declared or even the real rate of inflation, then that's just in order to essentially end the inflation, cause the recession in order to then start all over on the same damn stupid process again. If you're telling me that's what it's going to take, that the interest rate has to be higher than the inflation rate, then that's just not going to happen. because Paul Volcker's dead and ain't nobody going to dig up his corpse

and make him the Fed chairman who's willing to do that who's willing to cause and also when Paul Volker did that when the national debt half a trillion bucks or something like that before Ronald Reagan got his hands on that budget him and his Democrats in Congress

at the time so but they can't do that now because if they have to pay interest on the debt at 15% a year or something like that that'll be more than the entire federal budget just right there just to pay interest on the debt which is now

you know 20 trillion if not 30 trillion depending on how you count it right so um that'd be enough to completely bankrupt the government right there um so they're just that's just not going to happen so is that where you're telling me is that

there's no correction coming they're just going to keep inflating and and oh I guess the other major part of this of course right is the reserve ratios or didn't they just like get rid of those altogether and the bank's going to just loan out as much money as they want right now and all that artificial bank credit expansion is just why do they even need to borrow money from each other when they can all just create money themselves all day? They're going to announce the end of that. They haven't impaired and slowly eliminate that quantitative easing and debt expansion.

They haven't started to do that yet. They keep saying they're going to announce them doing that soon. But, yeah, again, you know, if you look at real estate is why I think it's like the 1970s. As you pointed out, you know, real estate prices crashed around 2006 is when they peaked. And then, you know, they fell and there was a big crash in 2008. But in the 70s, real estate went up. It didn't crash. In fact, real estate was among the best things one could invest in. because inflation remain higher than the Fed funds rate.

So I think what you just said is what the problem is, you know, the debt is so big, rates are so low that they can't take them to that rate to stop inflation because of all these problems now. But I think if you have inflation like you had in the 1970s of five to 10% officially a year, after 10 years, the debt basically is inflated away, and then they could raise the rates high enough to take out and end this whole thing. Oh, good. We just got to get to the point where they're lopping zeros off of the dollars.

Yeah, that's basically what I think this is going to do. But slowly. So now, wait a minute. So you're telling me, am I reading you right then? I'm living in a town where a $300,000 house is now going for $700,000. And you're telling me, yeah, go ahead and buy now. Because still, they're just going to keep inflating and inflating and inflating. This is not the top of the bubble, not even near it. $600,000 and $700,000 for a house. We're going to be laughing in 10 years because the house that you bought for $600,000 now,

that was $300,000 a year and a half ago or whatever it is. will be worth a million and a half or more than that or some kind of crazy thing because that's how badly they're devaluing the currency. Is that really right? Well, yeah. I mean, I believe that if you look at the, I think, you know, as far as investing, and it's like, I think it's like the 1970s. If you go to the 1970s, real estate was among the best things to invest in. Inside the stock market didn't perform better than the rate But you see what I'm saying, like, if you live in Austin right now, it feels like you've got to be at the height of the bubble. This ain't the height of the bubble.

It's going to be two, three times, four times. It's just going to keep on like this? Well, I mean, I don't, I would say there will likely be small corrections or pauses. Yeah. I mean, I do think, you know, my guess is I'm bearish on the stock market. I think, you know, referred into it like March 2000 or summer 2000, you know, I think the NASDAQ can go down, you know, with 30% or something. It doesn't really matter to people if you're not invested in it. But most likely whenever there is some sort of correction in the stock market, probably that's when there'll be a recession or weakness in the economy, finally.

And I would think that's when real estate might pull back a little bit, but I would think it would pull back 10% or something, not like what happened from 2006 to 2008. And the problem is the cost to build these houses keeps going up. So that wasn't really happening, you know, in the bush years. Now, you know, the cost of lumber went up. I mean, yeah, it'll pull back or it has a little bit from where it was last year. But as far as, you know, I mean, it makes it tough if you want to build something, but it's a tradeoff. You know, if you buy a house now, you're buying before mortgage rates go higher. But, you know, if there is some softness in the economy, then the housing price is.

might dip a little bit, but, you know, it's... But not like 08, not where... Yeah, right, right. Okay. Hang on just one second. Hey, guys, I had some wasps in my house. So I shot them to death with my trusty bug assault 3.0 model with the improved salt reservoir and bar safety.

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at Scott Horton.org. Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom, real history, real economics, real education. Wow. I mean, obviously, this raises the question of homelessness. You know, my rent just went up 100 bucks. I know because of the property tax assessments came due. and so everybody's property taxes went up every single taxing jurisdiction in the country is going to take full advantage of this and reassess everybody's properties raise everybody's taxes and that means people are going to be thrown out of their homes renters and owners alike are going to be thrown out of their homes i mean they have been and they're going to continue to be and then so this is i mean i'm really worried about overall just the you know the soviet union's been gone for so long people don't know

know people think this is capitalism which is kind of right they don't know there's crusty old gold standard types who would blame a lack of free market capitalism for our problems they don't even understand that on the basic level this is capitalism and that means they want socialism and if only the government would buy all the houses and give them away to everybody then everybody would have a place to live instead of all having to live under bridges by the thousands and thousands and millions across the country. What is the upper limit on the amount of homelessness that we can have before, I don't know, arson fires just start breaking out everywhere.

The Arab Spring breaks out in the USA, you know? Well, that's a huge problem is when you have, I don't think what's just starting, you know, when you have high inflation, it causes political. instability and one of the most disturbing books I ever read was about that I'm not I don't I think this is like the 70s not the Weimar Republic but I read a book about the inflation in in Germany you know in the 20s and stuff and one of the disturbing things in the book was that the German people had no real understanding of what was causing the inflation, which

was their war debt, and being in Germany back then, it was owed to all these foreign countries, and they couldn't simply anyway, that was the main cause of it. And it started during World War I

actually, the high, the inflation in Germany, it just got worse and worse. But the people didn't understand that was the cause of it. And they're like 10 things they were blaming it on. None of them really were the cause. One of the things was, oh, farmers are hoarding goods and not bringing into the

cities, so making food prices go up. Oh, it's a conspiracy of currency speculators, or it's a conspiracy of the communists or Jewish people. And so anyway, just group after group, a conspiracy of bankers. or it's economic war being done, you know, by the former allies, and not the central bank of Germany, you know, with printing because of the war debt. That was the cause. So in Turkey, they've had a lot of inflation over the past couple years, four or five years.

And it's sort of the same thing there, that the leader of Turkey Erlon was blaming the United States for causing this. And now, you know, we have this, see this war that started with Russia and Ukraine. And the initial, one of the initial reactions was to blame the inflation on that, to say, you know, the war is causing shortages and ingrained and wheat and energy. And that's the cause of inflation. Yeah, it does make it a little worse. but it's not the cause.

It started before that war began. So the point is inflation causes social instability and hardship and also a lot of confusion of what is the cause and people leaders will blame that, you know, Biden's not going to say the Fed and debt is causing it. And I don't know what, you know, the Republican who runs will say is the cause either. They're probably just blame it on him. So

you know, how do the American people react to it? What are they are going to desire? Yeah, it is it's, are they going to understand? Are they going to listen to Ron Paul like I did, you know, when, when

Clinton and Bush were president? I don't know. You know, are they today, are they going to listen to your guests or you know people at the mesas institute i don't know they will man uh yeah it's a really bad thing i forgot who it was maybe haslett said something about the ravages of inflation but

not one man in 10 000 understands what's the cause and so then as you're saying with the german example here and the turkish example just think of all the different people in american society that there are for people to blame besides the Fed when they don't understand. And it's another reason for everybody to hate each other, you know? Yeah. And it makes people think that capitalism, which you and I would define as, you know, private property owners keeping what they legitimately earn or, you know, come into possession of and trading voluntarily, to them means all this crooked corruption and endlessly rise

prices and I saw a viral tweet yesterday about a guy who the house across the street from his parents was selling for like $175,000 when he went off to college and he thought, great, I'll go to college, I'll get a degree, I'll come home and I'll buy a house like that. He came home to buy that house or buy a house just like that and maybe even that one and then it was now going for $500,000 or $600,000 or something and it just sold for a million dollars. And he just is saying and then it concludes with, you know, FU to all of the adults who made it this way in our society and this way, meaning capitalism, where rich people bid up prices and make it where poor people like me can't have houses.

And then the only conclusion was we need communism, where the government seizes all the houses and gives them away to everybody so that it's fair now instead of the way it is. and, you know, these are, this is, you know, it's obviously kind of ignorant and ridiculous binary thinking, but again, they never heard of this gold standard argument, you know, this anti-central banking argument from free market types. That's some wingnut thing. They don't know about that. All they know is this is the way it is, and the opposite of this is socialism, and so that's what they think they want. Yeah, that's why, like, when we started the conversation, you know, all this stuff. can be complicated and you know i got i might be wrong about what the stock market's going to do but uh the one thing that's the most important factor is that rates went to zero you know in 2020 that's that's the that's the one thing that is the most important thing for people understand and that

explains you know i wish i could tell that kid or person that you saw doing this look at what rates went they went to zero what do you think's going to happen because the problem uh one of the things that happens is bonds go up and down uh bonds go up and value and rates go down so when interest rates go up the value of treasury bonds corporate bonds they fall and this is a big problem for people that have investments, IRAs, it doesn't matter if you got $5,000 in your retirement account, or a billion, you know, people historically, since 1980, which seems like all of human history to people, bonds have been in a bull market, and they've been told, look, put half your money in the stock market, you know, or 40 or 60 percent, put half,

or 40% in bonds because when the stock market falls, the federal lower rates and bonds go up and it's diversification. But when bonds go down, people can't invest in something that was as stable as they had been. And when you do have your money in these bonds, you're losing money, you know, because you're not getting the yield of, you're getting such a low yield

I mean you're telling me that like yeah what people need to do is get into the real estate bubble because that's probably the longest lasting bubble but you're going to end up upside down and lose your shirt there too just hopefully later yeah yeah basically I mean that's

well I'm not this is I'm not I'm not doing that myself I'm buying cold and silver so that's that's my solution I had a good portion of my money in CDs last year and they came due and I'd put it in gold and silver so but I'm too lazy to go run around and try to be a landlord yeah man well um all right so but here's the thing right uh you know

the way this always works and obviously as an economist I'm a great anti-war guy but I read some Bart. And I'm pretty sure it's the central banking chapter and For New Liberty where he says it very simply that, you know, what happens is they build up the bubble and then at some point they realize, oh no, this inflation is really getting out of control. We got to try to break the bubble and let the air out slowly here. But then that doesn't work. The needle always pops the bubble and it's always a catastrophe and that's just how it is. There's nothing they can do about it. But that, you know, and so then this is the cycle. That's why they call it the business cycle. It's the central banking inflationary bubble cycle, and it just keeps happening over and over and over again is because of that.

But so I see what you're saying now about the rate of inflation being so high and interest rates so low, the Fed rate's so low. But if, I mean, they must already be at the point. They already are at the point of saying, uh-oh, this is a problem and, you know, the Rothbard point of panicking and deciding they need to try to start breaking the bubble now, but you're just saying at this rate, sorry for the turn of phrase, at this rate, it'll take them forever to raise rates high enough to make that difference. Years, unless you just got rid of the current leadership and they came in and just some new guy came in like crazy and just raised rates, what, to 15% or something, and deliberately completely crashed the economy into the ground? I mean,

Politics isn't going to allow that, but that's what you're saying it would take for them to really prick this bubble now, if I understand it. Well, when you say the word bubble, I'm... Yeah, I don't know what I'm talking about. You go ahead. Yeah, yeah. No, when you when you say the word bubble, I'm not, I'm saying there are bubbles in the financial markets, but that real estate is not one of those bubbles. to me, the bubbles we have today are highly valued technology stocks. But even when housing prices are like doubling and tripling in just the space of a couple of years? Well, I think they're not a bubble because of this rate of inflation. I see.

So like sort of they are, but just inflation's going to beat out their bubbleness anyway eventually? Yeah, yeah, basically. But companies, companies, though, such, I'll just use Netflix as an example. So Netflix, I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but they have billions of dollars in debt, and they don't turn a profit. So they have to, they finance their existence through issuing corporate bonds that they had to pay an interest on. Now, the problem is, because they don't turn a profit, and they've got to keep going to the bond market, higher rates will increase their expenses, their borrowing costs, and hurt the company could drive it into bankruptcy. And there are thousands of companies like that, not all of them, but thousands. And many of the popular technology stocks are like that.

So that's, to me, that's a bubble that's likely to be bursting slowly. And Netflix crashed this week. He's crashed in January and it's crashed again. Facebook fell 25% a day in January. So there's stocks crashing. But to me, that's just a bubble in the financial markets. And I consider NFTs and a lot of the. the crypto market to be a similar thing, but stuff like real estate, you know, I'm not about trying

to promote, you know, telling people to do it. I mean, like I said, I'm buying gold and silver, but things in the real world that have some economic function, I don't think are as much of a bubble as highly indebted companies or NFT art, for example. Yeah. All right. Well, so gold and silver that's a good old standby um their prices aren't up that much but they more or less you know hold their value it's a safe place if not a great place to speculate it's a safe place to hold whatever uh excess wealth somebody might have right yeah i mean in in march of 2020 the s and p fell about 35 percent and gold fell about 10 so and and i believe it's going to go up anyway so so I think there's limited downside to the to the precious metals I guess the danger

and housing and real estate that got people in trouble isn't so much that the prices fell but that they had to go that they went in debt to to you know buy the houses and then the prices fell it's you know it's being in debt that um well in some ways you might we've you know one of the implications of all this stuff I'm saying is being a debt now might not be a bad thing if you're getting in before rates go up and if the value of the dollar is going to go down anyway so

but you don't want to go in debt at the end of this so if you go back to Volker a long time ago time goes by but that William Greider book about the Fed Reserve or the few books about the Fed, Fed, Secrets of the Temple, that's what it was called. Right.

One of the big, you know, he wrote that, I think when Bush, the first Bush was president. But anyway, one of the big, he was attacking the Fed for having raised rates. Right. And bankrupted all these farmers in the early 1980s. And what happened was, you know, farmers, they borrow money. money to, you know, for machinery, for crop, for seeds, and they're heavily indebted businesses. Right. And all these small farmers, they were borrowing money when Volker jammed interest rates up.

Right. They were all being encouraged that now is the time for you to take out huge debts to buy your neighbor's farm and to buy all brand new tractors. And to, because, you know, on economies of scale, the, the, you got to get new. computers and all these things or you're not going to be able so everybody was just it was like a huge fad at the time was go ahead and get up to your eyeballs in debt now interest rates have never been lower and times are changing and farming and you're going to be left behind so they all did that and then vulgar jammed them with the interest rates and they all were completely screwed a whole generation

millions of people oh yeah and I know this because my grandma was a farmer so uh and what happened was gold and silver they topped out in 1979, 1989, but so did corn prices and wheat prices and all these agriculture prices and they went in a bare

market for a decade. And so these farmers had all these debts and then their crops are going down in value. You know, their businesses, so they're making less and less revenue and thousands, millions of them went bankrupt. And that was a big,

I mean, I think a couple movies are made about that when Reagan was president, about the dying farmers. So that's a warning to us today for like the real estate story. You know, if you buy real estate now and you're borrowing rates, you know, before mortgages go up, that's, you know, I think that's okay. That's good. but if you do it when the time does come when they really say we're raising rates to 10% or something you know i think there'll be a couple years from now you don't want to be doing anything after that you know you don't want to be doing this stuff in real estate or gold or silver or whatever when the last year of this inflationary cycle is over because then you would you will get caught

holding the bag and that's probably when there will be a really deep procession is the process of that's the real busting of the bubble i think that you're you're talking about yeah well you're bumming me out well it's a it's a good it's a crazy time we live in it's just shake your head at it yeah man all right well listen uh everybody that That's the great Mike Swanson. He's at Wall Streetwindow.com, and he'll help you protect whatever assets you have not had inflated out from under you yet.

So thank goodness for that. Thank you, Mike. Thank you. Good talk with you. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org,

and Libertarian Institute.org.