Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/18/26 Charles Goyette on the Economic Mess the Government Has Gotten Us In

Episode Date: September 22, 2026

Charles Goyette returns to the show to talk about the terrible, unsustainable and outright destructive economic situation the US government has gotten us in and the many ways the Trump administration is making everything even worse. Discussed on the show: Empire of Lies by Charles Goyette “Beware: Monetary Geniuses At Work” (Libertarian Institute) “Our Currency Icons and America’s National Character” (Libertarian Institute) Charles Goyette is a New York Times Bestselling Author and award-winning talk show host. Read his book Empire of Lies, published by the Libertarian Institute. Sign up for the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom at scotthortonacademy.com For more on Scott's work: Check out The Libertarian Institute: https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott's other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott's books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/43D82oY (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/4eMQblu Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/4a5fKvx Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott’s full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tax Attorney Matt Sercely https://agoristtaxadvice.com; Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.com; and Crowdhealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/ (use promocode Horton) You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/ or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Audio cleaned up with the Podsworth app: https://podsworth.com Use code HORTON50 for 50% off your first order at Podsworth.com to clean up your voice recordings, sound like a pro, and also support the Scott Horton Show! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yes, sir, it's the Scott Horton show brought to you by expat money. That's expatmoney.com slash Scott. Ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest reporting to the American people. What's going on in this country? We're dealing with Hitler revisited. This is the Scott Horton show. Libertarian foreign policy, mostly. When the president visit, that means that it is not only...

We're going to take out seven countries in five years. They don't know what the fuck they're doing. Negotiate now. End this war. And now, here's your host, Scott Horton. Hey, look, you guys, it's Charles Goyette. You know, my podnet anti-war radio back when, and also the author of Empire of Lies.

He wrote some good books before that, too, but this is the one that you want, Empire of Lies. You know what it is? It's kind of provoked, and enough already all rolled into one. in my 300 pages. I can't write like that. It's really good, though. And I think I told you guys before.

Oh, hi, Charles. Welcome the show. Scott's great to talk to you. Yeah, I remember those days when we were doing anti-war radio was just you and me. Good times. Pretty thin, but we did good work.

We did. Yeah. Well, there's a side story there, but maybe I'll remember to tell it in a minute. But I wanted to say that I said this before the last time I interviewed you, you know, when the book came out, but that was like a year ago. It was so cool reading Empire of Lies because I could tell, and believe me, man, no offense

taken. I could tell you had not been reading my books and watching my show this whole time, and this was not, you know, there are a lot of people in the world who learned a lot of stuff for me, and I can sometimes hear a little echoes like, oh, they might have got that for me a little bit there, somewhere, whatever. and I could tell that you just didn't. You had not been, you know, up with my stuff. And so then, but what you did was you wrote the exact same thing that I wrote

about the terror wars and about the Cold War with Russia and all of that, only all in a smart guy order with everything all, like, written well instead of just a timeline the way I do it. And it was so good. And you make all the same points as me only like with different examples. society. It's just, it's great because it made me feel like, hey, see, I am smart because Chuck says I'm right. And didn't even know that that was what he was saying when he was saying it. So anyway, thanks for being so great, dude. Yeah, and thanks for publishing my book. You know,

when it was time to bring it out, I thought, well, you know, I ought to call Scott and see if the Libertarian Institute will bring this book out. And he said, yeah, I'll bring that book out. Let's do it. So anyway, thank you for that. I wonder how many people read your book and and they're like, man, I didn't even have to read enough already and provoked. I could have just read this Well, don't tell them the other way around. Don't tell them if they read your book, they don't need to read mine. No, no, no, that's not true either. No, no, no, because that's the whole thing is it's like a really great remixed version of the same thing, kind of.

Right? We're like, I say Cobar, you say flight 800, but we're still, you know, on the same thing. Well, Scott and I had used to talk a fair amount and did some radio stuff together, and I remember introducing him at a conference once, and I called him. I remember when I called him really late at night because I was looking for some obscure reference for something on a prior book that I was trying to write and I couldn't think of it. And I thought, oh, it's really late. But I'll call Scott anyway. He'll know the answer.

And I called him and he knew the answer. And I said, thanks. Go back to sleep. That was a long time ago. But during the whole, you're right, during this whole period, I kind of dropped out of the public debate when I wrote this book. I wasn't conferring with anybody, really or talking with anybody. And so it just shows great minds, I guess. That's the theory anyway.

And you know that conference was 2010 and the speech was the case against the case for war with Iran. Wow. And why we really should not attack Iran because it would be really bad. I can see that all the really important people were listening. No, actually. Or they weren't pointing and laughing and saying, what is this guy? I know Gareth Porter. That's what I know. All right.

Enough. I'm going to ask you questions about economics. Okay. How's economics doing lately? Oh, we're in deep trouble here. We're very deep trouble. I asked, you know, I asked Ron Paul years ago, I said, how will you know, is there an indicator you have in mind for when the whole house of cards starts to tumble? And he says, he said, yeah, the best one I can think of is when, you know, foreigners begin

to refuse to fund our debt. Uh-huh. That he said, now things are getting into serious territory. And of course, he was right as he generally is. is. So we're at that point now. Foreigners are, look, everybody knows they're adding gold to their central bank reserves. They're creating bilateral, unilateral settlement systems so they can bypass the U.S. and the weaponized dollar. This is going on all over the world. And it's kind of reached a peak now. And the U.S. Treasury is definitely worried about it because the United States is the biggest

debtor in the world. How do we fund our debt? We're dependent. on the kindness of foreign strangers. Think about that. We've got to depend on people in Japan to loan money to Washington, D.C., so that we can run our empire. It's absolutely crazy. So what's going on now, Scott,

in kind of a thumbnail description, is Japan's having its own problems. And the Treasury Secretary, Scott Besant, is like a lot of people in Washington. They're terrified. They're terrified that Japan will start selling their U.S. Treasury instruments, their bonds and bills and so on.

And they have a lot of them. They have $1.1 trillion. So we've got $40 trillion visible debt. Japan has loaned us $1.1 trillion. And we need more creditors as our debt goes up, as our deficit spending continues, we're running a $2 trillion deficit this year. So we need more creditors, not fewer.

So the last thing they want is to see Japan tend to its own domestic problems and support the yen by selling dollars to buy yen. They're terrified of that. So what do they do? They intervene in Japan's currency market, and they use a device basically that has to do with basically using a repo facility without getting into the weeds on it. They're basically lending money against Japan's treasuries so that Japan doesn't sell its treasury. So the point is to keep Japan in the game of funding the U.S.

Okay. With that picture in mind, let me give you an idea what these schizophrenics are doing with their other hand over here. At the same time, they're desperately trying to kick Japan loaning money to the United States. At the exact same time, with the second breath, Besant launches this economic doomsday program of his to further weaponize the dollar and to force countries around the globe not to use U.S. dollars to invest in U.S. instruments, to count on settling in the U.S. SWIP system and so on, to make life hard for anybody that's involved with Iran in any visible way. So on the one hand, they've got to keep people loaning money to the United States, and at the other hand, they shoot themselves in the foot by declare a war on

anybody that still uses the dollar or owns treasuries, but doesn't bow to America's political wins. So this is typical government schizophrenia. I don't have to tell you that. But I mean, it's an egregious case and it's kind of an end of empire case too. Man. Okay, so there's a lot there, but I want to try to parse a thing because I'm not sure if I understand it right, but like clearly Russia, Iran, you know, whatever other countries, particularly, you know, China and Brazil, I don't know exactly how much they resent us, but they got, they're big enough countries to kind of have their own, you know,

medium strength interests there. But obviously, you know, Russia and China and some other more adversarial States have a real good reason. Iran, they have a real good reason to be in the bricks and to use their own currencies or other currencies in order to essentially evade American pressure. We use the dollar as a weapon against them, as you said. Then you got Japan. Japan doesn't hate us. Japan, they're only at risk of getting out of treasuries because they're worried about the price. So here we're printing money and devaluing our currency in order to prop up their currencies. So they spend the money that we give them on our debt or on their own debt so that they don't start selling their own debt or so they don't.

They don't sell our debt that they hold our U.S. treasuries and buy yen with it. And Besant says we're going to do whatever we have to do to support them. So whatever they've dumped into these repos and this intervention in the market so far, that's only the beginning. Well, so I guess my question is, how much does the first category of nations trying to evade the dollar system and go around it is leading to the loss of confidence in the dollar that's leading Japan to worry and consider even selling their treasuries in the first place? Or is it all just because of all the money they printed for COVID and all of that crap? Yeah, it's basically, if you believe the reports, Japan is only concerned about the Japan domestic situation. So, you know, things are changing fast in Japan. Japan's at a crisis. Of course they are. They, you know, Japan buys Japanese government bonds. It's an endgame sort of a thing.

So they're concerned about supporting the yen. And the only resources that they have are the most substantial resources that they have to buy yen is by selling U.S. treasuries to buy the yen. But their focus is entirely, not entirely, but largely on supporting their own currency the yen. But look at how this game works. You mentioned Russia. You know, a few people know. Yeah, go ahead. How much has the BRICS intervention in turn, you know, organized turn against the dollar

actually hurt it versus because of the real inflation by Washington? Yeah, not much yet. It's coming. Nobody likes it. It's hard building an alternative currency. It takes a long time to be able to build a World Reserve currency. But the trend is their friend. And the trend is that people want out of the U.S. dollar.

And I'll give you an example. And people don't even realize that Russia was a major creditor of the United States. And I don't remember what they owned at the top. They probably owned $500 billion of U.S. government instruments. They've dumped all those because they know, of course, that they will be frozen, they will be taken away. They've seen ample evidence of the way we play the game. But a better example is China.

China was America's only a few years ago, China was America's number one foreign creditor. And they own something like $1.2 trillion of U.S. Treasury instruments. That's a lot of loaning money to a government that needs it very, very badly, our government. So they loaned us $1.2 trillion, but they see the handwriting on the government. the wall, right? They know that we freeze assets wherever we want. We make promises and we break them. The dollar is not a neutral, dependable currency. It is a weapon of our foreign policy. They know

they're very vulnerable. So in the last few years, they have dumped half of their dollar holdings. At a time that the United States debt has grown like topsy, that we need more creditors, they've dumped half of their dollar holdings. So they still have $600 billion plus that they could sell, when it's convenient for them. But the share of foreign holders of U.S. Treasury instruments, U.S. Treasury debt since 2012 has dropped from 34% to 12%. Somebody wrote, a guy Rolf Richter that I follow a lot on the financial pages, says, treasuries have become broadly unappetizing to the rest of the world, U.S.

Treasuries. So this is what Ron Paul was telling me years ago. You know, we would come to a crossroads like this, and it would be very clear that people have had a belly full of the United States and its whims and caprices and and uh, and, uh, hegemony and foreign policy. And that at some point, they would realize that the dollar isn't their friend. Yeah. Mmm, Moondos artisan coffees. Explicitly, Scott Horton show flavored coffee from Moondos artisan coffees. Get it, they hate Starbucks, because Starbucks supports the war party. But Moondos artisan coffees, they support peace. And, um,

So here you go. Scott Horton Show flavored coffee. It's part, what, Sumatran and part Ethiopian, all mixed together and taste so good in the morning and also in the mid-afternoon if you start getting sleepy. Scott Horton.org slash coffee. Get you some. Hey guys, if you sign up for my substack at Scott Horton's show.com, then you get all the shows a day early and without ads. Pretty good, right? Scott Horton'show.com. So, yeah, you have a tough intersection of economics and politics there, right? Where essentially, most of these governments are not going to make the political decision to turn against the U.S. when it's not in their economic interest to do so. Right.

We're making it the perfect storm. We're making everybody resent us and want out right at the time that the government is debasing and destroying the currency and making it, make sense on the bottom line to go ahead and do so as well. You know, Washington doesn't know what to do. Basant doesn't know what to do. The rest of Washington doesn't know what to do. Besant says we're going to keep this Japanese program going, but they introduced this program to clamp down on anybody doing business with Iran.

And I think they had a couple names where one was Operation D-Day. The other one was, you know, walk the plank or something like that. But they've only barely begun to implement it. So they started clamping down on an Egyptian bank in the Gulf and stuff. Well, who's supporting Iran? China. Of course. Yeah.

But they haven't dared lift a finger against China. But anyway, the Assad has basically said, we're just testing the waters on this ferocious program we're going to implement. And the D-Day, to make it, they're really going to go wide with it now. They're going to get serious about this is some date next week, the 27th or 24th or something. of this month, they're going to really clamp down and get serious. Bad time, bad idea. So Trump says the bond market is very unfair.

You know what they're doing is they're trying to charge a higher interest rate and the thing. And then now the Fed has raised the federal funds rate a quarter of a point. And, you know, I don't know, Chuck. But there's been forecasts and other forecasts that have, you know, played out and come true to different varying degrees over the times. And, you know, we might have thought that there would have been a dollar meltdown back the last time we went through this in the Obama years. I know you wrote a book about it then. Like, oh, man, how can anybody continue to trust the dollar? It's the beginning of the end.

I'm saying you're wrong. I'm just saying you're way ahead of the curve. but this is clearly kind of, you know, the situation that we're getting into now. But then the way I understand this stuff is very amateurishly, but as it's been, I think, explained to me, is we have a real rock and a hard place situation here where they cannot raise interest rates up high enough to defeat inflation. Because if they do, they completely, you know,

detonate the national debt in Washington. Yeah. The interest payments on the debt. and where they already are, I believe, the last time I saw the line chart, this may have changed. The last time I saw the line chart, the interest on the federal debt was bigger than the military. Sure. Medicare and Medicaid, the only thing they're in the budget was Social Security. That may have changed now.

And if they went ahead and did like a Paul Volker thing and say, no, no, no, we're going to force a recession in order to lick this inflation, then, well, they just can't. That was back when the national debt was less than a trillion dollars in the early 19. or late 70s, early 80s, right? Yeah, and they can't, you know, they can raise interest rates a lot, compounds their own problem, exactly, as you said, they're between a rock and a hard place.

If they don't, then, you know, then nobody wants to loan money to the United States government. So they have a hard time borrowing. If they do raise interest rates, they shut down the global economy. At some point, it affects the stock market and so on. So, yeah, they're between a rock and a hard place.

and there is no visible way out. And yet they don't understand that. Clinton came into office saying, you mean a bunch of guys, bond traders are going to determine the success of my presidency? And at least Clinton understood, you know, that there's some fundamental economic truths. And yet Besant doesn't say that. So he comes out the other day. He says, nobody, basically said, we're bigger than the market.

He said, I am the how. You know, you want to bet. You'd never want to bet against the house. I am the house. And so he tries and he works and he labors mightily to try to drive interest rates down. They perversely just keep going up. He may think he's the house, but it's the global economy and it's willing creditors and willing lenders that determine real interest rates and not a bunch of guys around a table in Washington.

Yeah. Now, so in the rest of the world stuck in a rock and hard place situation, too, with the dollar, because every other central bank also just prints money all day. They don't know what they're doing either. You know what I mean? They're all, I don't know if they ever red canes, but they don't really need an excuse to just print money. And so back in Obama years, they were like,

oh, yeah, well, we're going to create a market basket of currencies. And it's like, yeah, made out of what? Rupings and rubles. Yeah. Work, right? So, but then you mentioned that the Chinese have been buying a bunch of gold up, And I guess, I don't even know. I think they even officially announced this, right,

that they're working to try to build a new global currency based on gold. And then I says, oh, well, that sounds like actually that could work. Because assuming that it's verifiable about the holdings supporting the thing, then it doesn't really matter which political government. Well, I guess depending on how much you trust their stability over the long term. But that's the kind of thing that could really stand against something like the dollar. And because obviously the dollar sucks right now, but it's just every other currency sucks worse, right? Or no? You know, I read a long interview in one of the financial magazines years ago by, I guess the second deputy director of China's central bank. And I got done with it.

And I thought, oh, my God, this guy must have gone to school with, you know, like Janet Yellen. And all the days was awful. And it turns out they actually did go to school. And they learned at the same Keynesian church. as all these other guys. It sounded exactly like U.S. Treasury officials talking. But one thing about China is they're very patient, and they're working on this thing, and they're taking their time, and they are the world's largest gold producer now. They are the world's largest gold buyer now. There's good reason to think that when they announce their official gold reserves,

they're not even close to reality that they have much, much bigger gold reserves. the United States has penalized. The United States penalizes Americans for owning gold. In fact, the editor, one of my, in fact, my first book, I wrote about how they do that and they go, that's not possible. Can you demonstrate that? I go, yeah, look at any prospectus for any gold fund, you know, describes how the Treasury treats gold ownership, gold profits at an injurious rate.

But they have encouraged their people to own goal. They own more gold than they officially report. I mean, they understand there's a difference between the paper dollar and the gold dollar. And, you know, the way I like to describe the central bankers is that they basically know the game of preting money and creating inflation, creating artificial credit, artificial currency, artificial money. They know the game and they don't mind fleecing their own people. But they just, they've reached the point where they don't want to be fleeced by us anymore. So if we're going to have 10 or 12 percent inflation, nobody wants to sit on $500 billion that erodes. by $50 billion or $40 billion over the course of a year.

So they're beating feet out. And they're not trying to be visible and they're keeping some on the accounts and nobody wants to be seen to be the first guy rushing for the door, and everybody dumps it once before they can unload everything they have. But they're all working methodically to try to lighten up and reduce their exposure. I think it's very wise.

It's good advice for the American people too who have all their wealth denominated in U.S. dollars. The game ain't going on forever. It doesn't last forever. And these are the signs that it's starting to break up. You think there's a real risk of like a global crack-up boom where even Australia and everybody just races to dump their treasuries as fast as they can. And all those dollars all come floating home.

And we have Wymar-style price inflation and just craziness like that. Yeah, basically I do. But I don't think it'll quite work like that. When it gets the point where everybody will do that, you know, before the dollars even get home, it's kind of like game over. You know, it is kind of a crack up boom. When people wake up and they realize that the currency has been dishonest all these very years,

and they realize that everybody else with even more money and bigger reserves than they have has caught on, then everybody races to turn, you know, paper money into tangible assets of one sort or another. So, yeah. Well, so, man, I've read some Austrian economic stuff. and some Rothbard and this and that, but I also read William Greerter, the Washington Post guy. Yeah. And his version of Jekyll Island is called Secrets of the Temple.

It's about the Volker years there. And one of the things that he talks about is like the push and pull between. So Carter appointed Volker. Volker comes in to wage this war on inflation by jacking interest rates way, way up. Reagan comes in, which of course forces a terrible recession, which helps, you know, change the regime from Carter to Reagan. then Reagan comes in and it's like, hey, enough of this, man, I want to get reelected. So I want economic good time.

So he starts cutting taxes in the, never mind the morality of the thing from the point of view of the money managers. Cutting taxes is inflationary because cutting taxes is stimulative toward business. And anything good for business means essentially the more they do, the more loans that they take out. which is all, in great part, new money and new artificial bank credit expansion. And so continuing to compound the problem of the inflation that they're trying to defeat. So the central bank is telling Reagan, no, stop doing that. We're trying to cause a crash. We're trying to strangle the economy almost to death to shake off all of the bad stuff

and get a good reset here. and you by doing anything stimulative and inflationary are preventing the reset that we're forcing everyone to go through all this pain in the first place to try to accomplish. And then they eventually backed off by, I think, 82, and then things were back on the upswing by reelection time in 84.

But so the thing of it is, right, is that you have kind of contradictory policies, at least at that time going on between the Fed and then the executive branch, the political branches of government, well, not that the Fed isn't, but you know what I mean. And so here you have, the way it was reported was Trump agreed with the new Fed chair.

And in fact, the way I read it, I have no idea if this is true. I think it was the Wall Street Journal, said that the entire Federal Reserve Board wanted to raise the interest rate by a quarter point. And then Trump said, at least, that he talked to the new chair on the phone and told him, go ahead and vote with them. Yeah, you can't win, so the numbers are against you.

Yeah, but so in the scheme of things, I guess, I don't know how much a quarter point is. I know that the last time they started raising interest rates back in 2006, it led to the crash of 08. Not that it was the wrong thing to do. It was the bubble that was the wrong thing, and it was the terrible crash that was the correction. But we got some huge bubbles now,

and I've read some things that have said, The only real growth in the economy is in the AI sector, and that ain't real growth. Man, I mean, some of it is, but a lot of it's not. And so I wonder if you can help me place myself, where in time do I exist now, Charles, in the boom bus cycle? And what is the tension between the national government stimulative policies and the Federal Reserve's now opposite policies, at least to a degree there? Yeah, we'll see how work.

does go in along, it should be a little bit concerning if you buy the whole federal central bank story, which you and I don't, but if you buy the whole thing of the managed currency and the central bank is a watchdog, yada-da, you'd think it's a little bit surprising that the new appointee is conferring with the president about what he should do and how he should vote about interest rates. I mean, that's Nixon stuff, you know, when Nixon was, you know, saying, we've got to goose this economy now. The 72 elections coming up. And Arthur Burns goes, yeah, yeah, we had times running short. We better give a goose to the economy.

And it reminds me of LBJ had one of the, it might have been William McChesney Martin. I can't remember. One of the Fed chairman fly down to his ranch, and he grabbed the guy and he threw him up against the wall for raising rates and earned LBJ's reelection. So, yeah, where we are in the picture, it sounds like Warsh is talking a fairly good game.

I'm not really persuaded that when the economy begins to break down. All these guys are from Wall Street. You know, when the economy begins to break down, when Wall Street feels enough pain, when the money center banks that created the Fed in the first place to serve their interests begin to suffer, then the Fed always does what they want them to do. And, you know, the real story to me is when they talk about, you know, squeezing inflation out of the system, are they doing anything on the other side of the balance sheet? Are they cutting spending at all. And of course, they're not quite the contrary. You know, Trump wants to add $500 billion to the military budget and he wants to give every breathing warm-blooded America

and $5,000 for every man, woman, and child, or every man and woman in America that cost to $1.3 trillion. So they have, I mean, they just have no sense. They're just, you know, this is the contradictory nature of states everywhere. You know, they got pressure from these guys that they serve their interest, that they got cronies over here and they serve their interest, and it doesn't all converge into a one coherent policy. So maybe the Treasury is getting serious. I think they're talking, you know, they're trying to put up a good face, but, you know, when the stock market breaks, interest rates keep going up in the stock market, correct breaks, and people say, why shouldn't I take 5% treasuries with no risk in hopes of getting a better return than

risky stocks? When the stock market breaks, when the stock market breaks, and people, they're going to be. And, they will run to its rescue. And when the bank starts screaming, they will run to its rescue, as they have always done. In the words of Patrick Henry, I know no way to judge the future, but by the past.

And that's what the Fed has done since the day it was created. Hey, guys, it's fun raising time at the Libertarian Institute. We don't do this very often, but we got to do it. It's our 10-year anniversary this month, September of 2006.

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I smell a rack. They're gonna, all the failouts, man, are coming. Yeah. And, you know, every time this happens, it just drives me crazy, man. I know it bothers you too. They always go,

Oh, man, see, laissez-faire free market capitalism failed. And so now we need, because of these bailouts, they prove that free market capitalism doesn't work. And now what we need is a stimulative policy. And it's just like, ah, jeez. I mean, they pulled that in after the crash of 08. You would have thought, if you listened to the TV and read the papers, you'd have thought that Ron Paul had been the president for the last year. Yeah. And they thought that the new deal never happened.

that in fact, it's right now, it's the 1930s, and we just had the 1920s of roaring free market, laissez-faire capitalism, which also wasn't, and was highly regulated and highly influenced by, especially the New York Fed at the time with its stimulative and inflationary policies that led to the bubble and the crash of 29. But anyway, that was the narrative they told me in seventh grade

was we had a total free market in the 20s, and that led to the terrible crash. So then, Jesus, came, the archangel Gabriel came and possessed the body of Franklin Roosevelt and saved America by turning us commie. And everybody knows that. And then, but somehow in the 2000s, we had a laissez-faire free market system that led to the crash of 08. I guess there can only be one explanation. And that's it, Charles. You know, guys like you and me that really believe in a free market, free economy, I hate to use the word capitalism because it's been so misused in so many times

and places, as you kind of alluded to. But for those of us that believe in free markets and free economies and perhaps you could call it capitalism, you couldn't help but want to kind of cheer on the Occupy Wall Street guys that were standing out there in the middle of the street in Manhattan, looking up at the top floor with signs saying, jump, jump, because those guys were getting bailed out while they were losing their houses, moving back in with mom and dad. So, yeah, you know, it's always the fault of capitalism and free. markets and honest money, but we never had honest money and we never had free markets.

We never had real capitalism during all of these incidents, but it's always an excuse. And of course, where does the fault lie in telling that story of the American people? It lies with the media. You know, they're basically co-opted by the state. They're state's lapdog press. And so they tell the story the way the state wants them to tell the story. Oh, you had too much of this free market capitalism stuff. You've got to fix the economy.

Can't let people suffer. Yep. I remember there was an AP story about Venezuela where they said, you know, America has now banned the export of the paper that Venezuela needs to print their money with great questions about how they're going to be able to afford the terrible rising prices. If they can't print enough money to buy all the stuff that they need. Isn't that funny? And I'm like, yeah, that's exactly what AP news reporters and editors think about how the world works.

I don't know the person about it. You need more paper. We just had, don't have enough paper. I mean, they're in a fix. And everything. It's not like they're totally interested in. Well, most of them are. Yeah.

All right. Wait, I wrote down things I wanted to ask you, too. Oh, yeah. So, well, I don't. I guess back to the previous question on the boom bus thing. I know a guy who owned a construction company in the W. Bush years. And he told me the story. He says he read the Wall Street Journal.

And in 2000, I guess six, or maybe it was seven, he read that Ben Mernacki has raised the federal funds rate a quarter point. And he went, oh, okay. And he sold all his bulldozers and sold his company. and then he sat back and waited until everything crashed, and then he bought all this stuff back and went back to work again, maybe waited a little while. But he knew because he had just read,

I don't even know if he had read Rothbard or just he had read GEDward Griffin, and he just knew what happens, man. There's a bubble, and then they pop it. And then there's a bubble, and then they pop it again. And this is how you know is when the Fed raises the funds rate a quarter point. It's on. And I know that Rothbard says this in Chapter 11 of For a New Liberty, that when they try to prick the bubble and create a soft landing

and let the air out kind of slowly, it never works. It always pops and leads to a giant crash. But it kind of seems like they got away with a soft landing kind of a thing with the way that they did the lockdowns and then all the bailouts after the lockdowns and all of that crash. Well, we got the Biden inflation from it. I mean, after that, like, yeah,

when they started dialing back some of the inflation from the COVID thing. That hadn't led to a big crash yet. But maybe we're just further on that path now. Yeah, this is what I would watch. And I'm not pretending to know. So manage your own portfolio the way that you think. But here's what I would watch is these AI companies now are starting to realize they've thrown a lot of good money after bad. And they're already looking to the government to more or less bail them out, you know, to limit competition, to designate a couple of them that can survive and be supplemented or blessed by the state and continue to and continue to continue to operate and some of them will have to be regulated out of business.

So there's this hue and cry to get the government involved now in managing AI and it's always driven by the guys that want to be the survivors of the thing and to keep the competitors out. So that's what's going on now. But I would watch I would watch for a crash in the AI market. That'll take the whole stock market down. It'll become really grim. And then, you know, when I was a kid, if I went to the gas station and pumped up my bicycle tire and I pumped in too much and it blew it up, I wouldn't think I could pump in more and make it work again.

But that's what they always do. So if they blow up this bubble now, in the calamity that follows, they'll try to blow it up again. And certainly they'll direct the money. They'll try to direct the money, their credit, the resources elsewhere, but it'll be the same game. It'll be another one. But this has all the signs to loop back around Ron Polligan, this has all the signs of being the last one. You know, they've blown up one bubble after another from the housing bubble, the dot com bubble before that. They blow up one bubble after another and they come in and they reinflate and they bail out the banks and so on.

This one, though, is a little bit bigger and a little bit different. It's qualitatively different because, as I said at the beginning, we're dependent now on the kindness of foreign strangers. to fund the debt. The debt has gotten so big that it can't be funded domestically except by just outright printing money. That's an endgame scenario. So they can't, they're having a hard time borrowing it. People are fleeing overseas. People are fleeing. Wolf Richter's headline, as I mentioned, is the treasuries have become unappetizing to foreign governments and foreign central banks. So when they try to reinflate things and they try to get people back in the treasury game they're going to have a very hard time. Everybody, everybody basically knows that the debt can't be

paid. You know, Jeffrey Goonlock's thought of as the Bond King, you know, he says what I've been saying, a lot of people have been saying that there is no honest way that the debt can ever be contained or controlled or paid right now in the United States. And he came out, said it the other day. I was glad to him, glad to hear him say, it just can't be paid by any honest means. And the rest of the world sort of realizes that. And so they, you know, it's every man for himself. All right. And meaning that then they're, I mean, do they have other options besides just creating trillions of new dollars to buy up the debt, tens of trillions even than just lot zeros off and just completely, you know, hyper the end degree, try to start over somehow? Or just repudiate the debt and say, sorry, if you own, screwed. That's a more favored position that, like, it's your fault for investing in the butchers of everywhere. Right. I keep having these these.

discussions with people that think that the social security system should be solved. And I said, you lent your money to your known good brother-in-law and he ran off to Vegas with it. What do you mean? They should be solvent. No, no, it's my money I paid into it. Well, the money is gone. Look, we're talking. I think it's going to, I think they will respond to the crisis with a number of different

things. Right now there's talk, not loud, but talk about having to do something about Social Security besides, besides mean testing it. There are people saying you're going to have benefits are going to have to be cut by 23 or 24 percent to keep the thing together. That's huge. That's a huge cut for old people living on Social Security. That's one thing. Welfare payments of elderly Israelis, right?

Yeah, you could cut that. Oh, you won't do that. There are repressive means that they can use. You know, I mean, they could do anything they want. They can say, you can keep your 401K. but we've instituted new rules that 25% of every guaranteed deposit in a bank or a 401k or other instrument has to be invested in U.S. Treasuries. In other words, they force people to loan them money and they do it by law. And that is one of the, you know, there's endless, you know, there's currency controls.

You can't take money out of the country. There are all kinds of means. It gets really ridiculous. I don't want anybody listening to your show to think this is this is what's going to happen in the foreseeable future. But if you look what happened in Russia in the in the communist revolution in 1917, they started going around Linens henchmen started going around to people and torturing them for their gold. And soje Nietzsche had wrote about this. He said he said if if you had gold and gave it to them that didn't get your free pass.

They tortured you some more because they thought you were holding out on them. And if you said you didn't, then they tortured you some more because they were sure that you did. So this is how desperate they get. I mean, all these things funding the government become existential for the creatures of the government. And that's an extreme case. And I don't think anybody's going to go around. You know, I mean, you take all American people's gold now and it wouldn't even make a dent in the scope of the problem that we're facing now. It's so out of control.

It's so huge. So I'm not saying that'll happen, but it just shows the intensity with which the government tries to solve its problem, its existential challenges. It will do anything. Well, how loudly do you scoff when they say, no, man, don't worry because the AI is going to increase productivity so much that we're just going to produce our way right out of this. Yeah. So maybe they're right. But it sure means a lot of unemployment too, right? and unemployment means, you know, reduced tax revenues from people that aren't paying in

and increased social spending and the deficit widens and widens. So, you know, everybody's looking for, you know, a magic solution, you know, everybody's looking for, you know, the dot-com things can bail us out of all of our troubles and, you know, we're going to, you know, we're going to, green spans come up with new ways that we can loan money to unqualified people for mortgages and stuff, and that'll solve the housing problem. There's always a way out. Here's the way out. It's like the nation's in a hangover.

Here's the way out. The way out of the Sunday morning hangover is don't get too drunk on Saturday night. You know, it's forethought. And then Sunday morning, oh, you know, what do I do now? You shouldn't, you know, do something different next Saturday night. And it's the same thing with the United States. You know, everybody wants an easy solution. You warned them.

You warned them again. You warned them again. You tried to get them to stop. And they wouldn't do it. And they kept spending and spending and spending and running. and running up the debt, and now they want a solution. There's nothing painless now. We're at the point there's nothing painless.

Okay, but now on top of this, you also have these extraordinarily high fuel prices and trade wars that they're increasing prices, but that's not inflation. Right. In fact, those I would consider, I think, to be deflationary pressures because of the restrictions of supply and the rising costs of doing business. And God, when, you know, diesel is this high and all this, I got an interview coming up with Larry Johnson about this. He's been following the diesel crisis.

I mean, this is how everything gets where it's going in our country. Charles is through 18 wheelers, man. Driven on diesel fuel. And so it seems like the war with Iran and as well as, like, Trump, I don't know exactly what to make. of this, I guess I can't figure it's really going to last beyond Trump's term or whatever, but he's like saying, look, I don't want to even trade with Canada at all. Screw them. And the Canadians, like, we're going to try to apply for associate status with the

European Union. These seem to be, you know, deflationary pressures for lack of a better term. I don't know what you'd call them, but head wins for sure against even all the monetary expansion and the artificial bubbles when it just seems. seems like these are so destructive and counterproductive policies here. So what do you think about that? I guess if you want to parse it into the war and the trade wars. Well, one thing is I try to be intellectually sound about this. And I sometimes fall into the conventions which people talk about inflation.

But I try to walk the straight and narrow and agree that it's not when a price goes up. If there's a freeze in Florida and the price of oranges goes up, that's not inflation. Inflation is an increase in the supply of money and credit. It's an engineered fact in our lives. So oil prices are not inflation, but they prove to be inflationary in the common parlance. In other words, when the Fed sits down again, when the next CPI report comes out, and it's called consumer price inflation, when the next CPI comes out, they're going to look at it and they'll look at the effects of $100 a barrel oil again.

And it's going to, I think it's pretty clear we're going to be over 4% in the Fed's highly contorted understatement of real inflationary or price increases, but we'll be over 4% in the next report next month. Then they react to it. Somebody's going to have to react to it in some way. And if Warsh is true to what he has said, if Warsh was against QE, he makes some good noises about some of these excesses. So that means another hike in interest rates, maybe a 50 basis point hike when inflation comes in at over four in the next CPI. So I think the stock market is very, very vulnerable here. And I think the general American prosperity is very, very vulnerable.

And if you're depending on the Trump administration, you listen to these guys, oh, I'm not worried about it. You don't like the gas prices. Forget about it. Quit your bellyache and gas prices will come down when we win this war. It's just like they talked their book and talked their book, talked their book. By this point, the whole the whole maggot coalition is fractured. Nobody believes him anymore.

I mean, I guess there are some diehards. But the whole thing is on the ragged edge now. It's on the bubble edge. And it doesn't matter what he says. Trump comes out with these inane things. He said, gee, if we spend a billion dollars on bananas from Brazil, we're poorer. You know, we could have not bought those bananas and we'd have a billion dollars more. I mean, this is just insane stuff.

And he's always been economically ignorant. When he first ran for president, he can't be. Come on the Harris shit right there, dude. Yeah. I know. It's insane. When he first ran for president, he said, well, I'm, you know, I'm the king of all debt. And here's what I'm going to do.

You know, and I'm going to refinance the federal debt. And people, all the, you know, all the establishment, the economists start scratching their heads. The Wall Street Journal started running in a torres. You mean, you're going to, you're going to unload low interest bearing debt so that you can refinance it at higher rates. Is that really what you're going to do? Oh, well, he stumbled around and he, you know, he really, he had no idea what he's talking about. And he's been displaying that same confusion to this day. I mean, it's, you know, every time I turn around, he's talking about how many trillions of dollars or hundreds of billions of dollars we brought in and all this new.

And I go, where is the money? And when a congressman, two baddies on the left, because they won't take any question from anybody. When a congressman asks facade and congressional testimony, now where's all this money going? What bank has it? Who's getting it? Is it go to the American people? Where? Give us a kind of, you know, track this money for us.

You keep talking about all this money that we're taken from Venezuela. Where is it all? I don't have to answer that. You could, you know, you ask the war department or you ask commerce or, you know, and they, you, You know, it's all Pam Bondi answers, you know, shut up, she explained. You know, so. That's crazy. Yeah, it's crazy.

Scott Horton's show is brought to you by Matt Sersely, tax attorney. Let's say you run a small business or you're a high salary professional and you're looking to protect your revenue from the revenues who would rather take it and spend it on helping foreign countries kill people or something like that. Well, what you do is you contact Matt Sersley. an attorney, not a CPA, and so you can discuss all of your business with him in complete confidentiality. And he will help you construct your taxes in such a way where you pay the absolute minimum. That's agoristtaxadvice.com for Matt Sersley, agoristtaxadvice.com. Hey guys, me here for crowdhealth at join crowdhealth.com slash horton. And what it is is it's a replacement for insurance. It's not insurance. It's crowdsourcing instead. And who could possibly

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Beware monetary geniuses at work. Rehabilitating Nixon, not so fast. And that's the same one again. And then our currency, icons, and Americans' national character. I really like this one. These are all at Libertary Institute.org. I mean, this is just unbelievable.

Look at this. But this is what I wanted to focus on. It's something you didn't even write. It's something that you quote in this article that I didn't know about. This is a guy Thomas Carrot, who's been writing for us at the Institute for a while here. And he says, of the roughly 1.48 million wallets that bought the Trump coin after its launch, the blockchain analytics firm Nansen found that 98,9505 of them, nearly two out of three, out of every three, were underwater by the end of June 26. Their combined losses came to 3.81 billion.

Meanwhile, Trump made $636 million in royalties from the coin, part of roughly $1.2 billion in crypto income for the year. And so he sums up, he says, nearly a million of his supporters lost close to $4 billion so that he could book $600 million. Yeah. This is, I mean, man, I'm sorry, but like, imagine this is Barack Obama or Kamala Harris. It's scandalous.

It's a most absurd thing. It's hard to even fathom how the cynicism with which he's willing to absolutely rape his own supporters, the people who believe in him the most that they're going to buy his trump coin, you know, and just get away with, God, well. You know, the biggest stories of our time, I think of a guy like Seymour Hirsch, who's been a great reporter, broke the Milai story, broke the Abu Ghraib story, wrote something honest about the Nord Stream pipeline. All of his stories that earned him national, global reputation, all of them have been hiding in plain sight. And I told something that the other day, I said, these stories are all hiding in plain sight. Well, what's hiding in plain sight now? I said, the extent of the plunder by the Trump family, you just can't believe it.

He said, why don't you write a book about it? I said, you know, by the time I got it done, he'd be out of office and in prison or dead or whatever happens to, you know, ex-presidents, you know, and it's too big a story for one man because this plunderer is going on at such a scale, at such a scope, that one person couldn't possibly get a handle on it. I used to say, you know, they're stealing everything in Washington. They're stealing everything that isn't nailed down. But they're stealing the stuff that's nailed down, too.

And it's all hiding there in plain sight. And we're starting to get a little bit of a peek at it. I've been telling friends, I think I told this to you about a year ago that I've been betting people that Trump wouldn't finish two years of this term, of this second term. Now, I'm running a little short on that bet. I don't know we've got four or five months left. But I always thought it was a good bet because you could pay off in so many ways. You know, there are bad guys that have been trying to take him out repeatedly. He's got health problems, obviously.

There's the possibility of impeachment. surely. And one of these days, I think when the extent of the which the plunder and the cronyism is widely known that, you know, that things are going to come crashing down, my wife slipped into her office this morning with a cup of coffee and a dunker and came out on fire because Trump was going to tear down the Kennedy Center. Well, you know, I mean, that's just a small piece of the deal. They refuse to put his name on it. And so he wants to tear the whole thing down.

I mean, if you compiled all these stories about what the Trump people are doing and the family is doing and, you know, the foreign influences that are buying their islands or running the islands for their weddings and the way their cronies are being enriched and Jared's making money hand over fist. And if you could assemble all that and shove it in the face of the American people, they will have had enough, in my view. Yeah, I mean, it seems like there's got to be a limit somewhere. But, you know, Glenn Greenwald did that idiot Jubilee thing where you sit there and you got a debate 20. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But anyway, the only thing that I learned out of watching a small part of that was that when it came to these kind of corruption stories, like, don't you know that the Qataris or the UAE gave his son a billion

dollars or whatever. They didn't, which I don't know the details of this stuff either. I'm really bad on it too. But they had never heard of any of this stuff at all. Yeah. You have a pretty good handle on it. Yeah. I saw that same part.

They hadn't even heard of those accusations before. So that's a real problem. It's the lap dog press. Yep. Just the silos of information. Because honestly, like, I'm just not willing to hear it from Democrat-leaning women on TV anymore. I don't give a goddamn what they think. And even if they're right,

I take the side of whoever is evil that they're accusing just because I hate them so much after the last 15 gigantic, you know, Democrat-leading media hoaxes. Like, I still hate them more. So who's going to break the story? You know, my experience has been. Who's going to propaganda? Who's going to promote it and get it out there? People who no one's willing to listen to anymore, you know?

I get a lot of what aboutism still. You know, so if you talk about, if you talk about Trump. plunder, they go, well, what about Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation? And I go, yeah, you're right. You didn't like that. Why would you like this? You don't want to, you don't want people to tolerate that. But it's still, you know, knee jerk. It's kind of a mechanical response of what aboutism. And it's very disappointing. And if that continues, then you never hold your guys accountable. You only hold the other guys accountable and that never gets you anywhere. Yeah. And look, I can, you know, As a libertarian, I know you're the same way.

They're like, we don't have any particular allegiance to these sides or parties at all. It doesn't bother us in the slightest to call balls and strikes however we see them. But like, it's easy to see how anyone would prefer the right to the left or even vice versa, really, depending on how you pick your issues. And then, but so people ought to at least be aware of how much that skews their bias when they're just so desperate to argue in defense of their own side. and against the other, that like, you know what I mean? These aren't really partisan issues, man.

Yeah, war is not a partisan issue. It shouldn't be a partisan issue. And the people that defend the war and read the mainstream press about it, you know, even they have got to at some point understand that we've declared victory 12 times already. Isn't that enough? If you win the war 12 times in six or seven or eight months, can't you come home? But when you face the stark reality that, no, you can't come home, even though you've declared victory 12 times,

there's something to miss there. And we've obliterated their nuclear weapons program that they didn't have, but we still have to be there. Why? Well, because we need to obliterate the nuclear weapons program that they don't actually have. I mean, it's just like, this is like schizophrenia. It's, you know, it's just crazy times.

Well, yeah, and it puts the last generation in a weird relief, too, where, like, I think Darrell was joking on our show that. W. Bush must just be kicking himself. I could have just said, like, no, I said mission accomplished. It is to accomplish, and he could have just turned on like that. Yeah.

I didn't know you could do that. If you think about it, they spent more time selling the Vietnam War, Bush and those guys, the White House Iraq group and all of their fabulations and stuff, they had to spend a long time, you know, setting us up for their war. It was a lot of work. But when this was, Trump didn't even bother. You know, he woke up one morning. and there was BB sitting at his bedside going,

I'm going to nominate you for the Nobel Prize. And he goes, okay, who do you want me to bomb? Have you noticed, by the way, Scott, have you seen that Trump has now taken to identifying himself as a war hero because he ordered the launch on Iran? He's now a war hero? Is that stolen valor or what? He's serving his country, man.

Oh, yeah. I got to tell the people an important thing or two. The first one is that Charles Goyette is he, the executive editor of the Libertarian Institute, and you can find his great archive at Libertarian Institute.org, and his latest here is Beware monetary geniuses at work, and they're not that smart, they will hurt you.

But then also, importantly, crucially, you might even argue right there above, you can see it's our 10th anniversary at the Libertarian Institute this month of September 2006, and we are celebrating that 10th anniversary by asking you people to give us your money, you know, that of our first. which you may be able to afford. And considering that a lot of listeners this show are under the

influence of Austrian economics, that means that they all own gold and Bitcoin and therefore have gigantic fortunes in these terrible inflationary times. And I would just remind all you Austrians out there that under the theory of marginal utility, the more tens of thousands of dollars you have, the less value any one unit of those tens of thousands of dollars is worth to you. But those tens of thousands of dollars are worth an enormous amount to those of us at the Libertary Institute so that we may take those dollars and convert them into pro-freedom propaganda against the warfare state, against the welfare state, and the regulatory state, and the central banking inflationary regime and all their depredations.

I mentioned the domestic police state as well. And you guys know us, we've got a reputation. We've been doing this great work this whole time. and it's all at Libertarian Institute.org slash donate if you've got it in your heart and within your bank account to help support our great work here. We also very graciously and gratefully take donations of $5 and $10 and $20 too and whatever you guys can do to help support our institute. And especially for you old people, you've got these weird IRAs that mandate that you donate to nonprofit organizations every year for tax purposes. We're at 501C3 for you. And so check us out.

all the information you need there. Libertarian Institute.org slash donate. And unless you got anything to add to that, Mr. Goyette, I think I'll let you go. Well, I think that was very well said. And thank you, Scott, for having me on. And thank you for all the work that you've done putting this whole institute together

just makes a big difference. Cool, man. Thanks very much. And that's Charles Goyett. Everybody, check them out. Libertarian Institute.org. The Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom.

Roberts & Roberts Brokerage, Inc., Moondos Artisan Coffee, Tom Woods Liberty Classroom, and APS Radio News. Subscribe in all the usual places, and check out my books, fools errand, enough already, and my latest, Provote, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. Find all of the above at Scott Horton.org, and I'm serializing the audiobook of Provote at Scott Horton Show.com and Patreon.com slash Scott Horton show. Bumpers by Josh Langford Music, intro and outro videos by dissident media, audio mastering by Potsworth Media.

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