Shaun Newman Podcast - #360 - Tom Luongo & Alex Krainer 3.0

Episode Date: December 21, 2022

One is a former research chemist, amateur dairy goat farmer, libertarian & economist whos work can be found on sites like Zero Hedge & Newsmax media The other is a Croatian national, former hedge fund manager, author, contributing editor at Zero Hedge. We discuss the banking industry, Russia/Ukraine & world politics. Let me know what you think Text me 587-217-8500

I'm Alex Craneer. This is Sarah Swain. This is Terry Clark. This is Tom Corsky. I'm Trish Wood. This is Dr. Peter McCullough. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks.

Happy Wednesday. Hump Day, man, Christmas, right around the corner just a few days away. So wherever you're at, I hope you're getting to slow down and enjoy some time with friends' family. Certainly on this side, you heard yesterday with the Tuesday mashup, me and twos did the old Festivus. We had a little bit of fun and well, we're going to take

a little bit of a break. We're going to take a week off. We're going to let go hang out with families, that type of thing. So next week, no Tuesday mashup. So if you're a Tuesday mashup fan, you're going to have to wait until, I think it's the new year. That'd be, I think it's, what would that be, folks? Here I am, and I don't even have it pulled up.

So we won't be on the 27th. We will be back on the third. January 3rd, the mashup will be back. Same format that you've all come to know and love and cherish all that good stuff. So either way, we're going to slow down on this side. Next week, there's certainly podcasts coming out. Don't worry. I've got a couple canned archive interviews that are going to come out and then one other

for the week as well. So no worries. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, the will be shows coming out. But we're going to try and slow up and we're going to, you know, go spend some time with friends and family and enjoy the holidays and Christmas and all that good stuff, spend some time with kids and hopefully not freeze our butts off and hopefully it's stuff snowing so we don't have to shovel the driveway eight times a day. At least that's what it kind of feels like.

Either way, you know, these gents who are back on have become a recurring guests for each month. Tom and Alex have become fan favorites. So before we get there, let's get to today's episode sponsors. Blaine and Joey Stephan. That's Guardian Plumbing and Heat. they're looking for workers. So what makes them different is their team works seven days on, seven days off schedule, 12-hour shifts, no night shift, no on-call.

So basically, you don't work. No, I'm kidding. So basically they work half the month, get paid for the whole thing, and also offer traditional five and two schedule for their installers. They're in the process of moving buildings too. Heck, by the time this is aired. I mean, they got to be getting close. I don't know what's taking them so long.

It's like, you know, it's like they got a bunch of stuff or something. But they moved from Highway 17 over towards another episode sponsor's HSI group. So they're kind of over on the east side of town there. Either way, they got great benefits, awesome wages, great team. They're looking for plumbers, HVAC, tax, installers, and apprentices. So, you know, if that interest, you go to guardian plumbing.com, where you can schedule your next appointment at any time. The deer and steer.

The old Norman and Kathy James family built butcher shop on the north side of Highway 16 and Range Road 25. Well, it's been around for years now, 1995 till now. The difference is it's now under the name deer and steer. They can do all your custom cutting and wrapping. And so if you're, A, if you're looking to get an animal in, deer and steer, if you're a guy who's got the itch to become a butcher, or woman for that. matter or maybe you're doing it elsewhere and you're staring at Alberta going man I'd like to get out there I don't know what I do they're they're looking for people as well and I feel like this is

going to be a growing theme here as we go along and and the economy is barreling forward on on a bunch of different things out here out west so if that is something up your alley and you like uh you know you like dealing with food or food you like dealing with meat animals uh you know heck I even got to go uh lend my hand to it I thought it was a pretty cool little little deal Either way, give them a call 780870-8700. Jim Spanerath and the team over at Three Trees, Tap, and Kitchen, they got to, if you go in and buy a meal right now, they're going to give you a card to the person who paid, and if you take the card, you can open it, and you take the card back in in January, they open it up,

and you get that much percentage off one of the meals you buy. And so it's a cool little game they got going on there, anyone who pays for a tab gets one, and I got one sitting in my, my, my, uh, I got one sitting in my, uh, in the vehicle waiting for January. I'll take mellow up for a meal here, a date night probably. And when I do a date night, you gotta do, don't do like me. Call, book a reservation, 780, 874, 7625. That one's bit me in the ass twice.

And you think I'd learn, but sometimes I just, I like, you know, the old Russian roulette. Like, we'll just see. We'll just see. Either way. They got great food, as twos would say, too. You know, he always gives me a hassle because he's gone over and ate there, and he's like, man, why don't you ever talk about how good the food is? If you go to three trees, folks, the food is exceptional.

All right. Eggland, back in 1957, we all know the history. They started as a John Deere equipment dealer with a staff of six. You know, when you do things consistently and you add in time 60 plus years, they now have three allocations, Vermillion St. Paul, and Lloyd Minster, and they got a staff of 130. They serve a cell, John Deere, Brandt, Brent, Bobcat, Dangleman, AA trailers. And if you need more info, look,

no further than aglant.ca. You can see their full inventory. One man who's been busy here, and I believe is going to be slowing down as Gartner, Wade Gartner, that is. The amount of snow that has been dumped, I chuckle every time I come here and the boys are out shoveling and everything else.

Well, if you're looking for an office space in 2023, I suggest given way to call, 7808, 5025, whether you're looking for a small office, such as this guy, or if you need to, you know, bigger space, you've got a couple of unique little space, spaces here in this building and elsewhere through upway, Mr. give them a call and, you know, get into a new space.

Start out 2023 on the right foot. Man, 2023 around the corner. Now let's get on that tail of tape. Brought to you by Hancock Petroleum for the past 80 years. They've been an industry leader in bulkfields, lubricants, methanol and chemicals delivering to your farm commercial or oil field locations. For more information, visit them at Hancock, Petroleum, ADATCA. First is a former research.

Research chemist, amateur dairy goat farmer, libertarian, and economist whose work can be found on sites like Zero Hedge and Newsmax Media. The second of Croatian National, former hedge fund manager, author, and contributing editor at Zero Hedge. I'm talking about Tom Luongo and Alex Kramer. So buckle up, here we go. I'm Alex Craneer, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. It wasn't the debate.

Did they win the third place match? Yeah, yeah, yeah, they did. They did. They won the third. Number three. Number three. We're number three. Hey man.

Given, well, I mean, given the way that World Cup laid out, like I didn't think anybody was going to beat Argentina anyway,

so. Well, yeah, no, they were, Argentina was awesome. Look, for a tiny little country to be in the top three,

you know, nobody can complain. No, you really can't. I thought Morocco played their fucking hearts out, too, honestly.

Yeah. They really did. And I think a lot of people were pulling for you. but uh oh i know i know i was like uh yeah thank you guys well welcome to the sean newman podcast today i'm joined by uh alex craneer to longgo um boys thanks thanks thanks for thanks for well you know i learned from last time you know last time i said why haven't i hit the record but all the best things happen when we're not when we're just sitting around so um

you know this cast of characters I, this has been a ton of fun, gentlemen. The last one, people just, you know, couldn't wait to have you back on. They want me to do this every week, and I'm like, we'll do it once a month. We're going to shoot for once a month, and you guys have busy schedules, I know for sure. And I appreciate you giving me time, you know, give you guys an opportunity to, to what everybody knows and loves, that you guys go back and forth. It's like you're playing in a band the way you two go back and forth.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, the first time you've ever tuned into these two. Alex was on episode 327. Tom was on 21 solos. They were together on 336, 349, and I think 360 now, I think, is what we're at. So either way, thanks for hopping back on, gents, and doing this. Now, Tom, you were all fired up here 10 seconds ago. What is going on and where do you want to start?

All right. Well, this morning's news is, it's really funny. It's like yesterday I post a, I put out a post yesterday talking about, you know, taking a victory lap gloating. I mean, honestly, I was just really kind of almost rude about it, about how after the FMC meeting on Wednesday were Powell raised 50 basis points. And then on Thursday when the ECB then had to finally admit they have an inflation problem in Europe. Like we couldn't see, like everybody couldn't see this. The, you know, the market. markets finally started to react in such a way that, yes, Virginia, in fact, there is an inflation problem in Europe. And there's nothing that this next scarf wearing obsessed lawyer from France can do about it as the head of the ECB. She's screwed. She's beyond, she's so far behind the curve. It's not funny. And it's very clear that Powell's got her dead to rights. And then what happens this morning? For those of you who aren't like market geeks like me and Alex, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the big news of the day is that the Bank of Japan, which kind of invented quantitative easing and central bank destruction of the currency and all of this stuff, you know, going back into the 1990s,

finally capitulated today saying, well, we're going to stop doing what's called known as yield curve control, which is just another way of saying we're going to buy the long end of the yield curve in order to keep to the 10, the 30 year bonds, stuff like that, in order to keep rates from rising. We're going to trash the currency. in order to maintain a particular rate on the long end of our yield curve, as opposed to allowing interest rates to rise and fall with the markets. Corota came out today, the head of the BOJ, the Bank of Japan, and said we're going to widen that range from plus or minus 25 basis points or 0.25%

to 50 basis points or 0.5%. All of a sudden, no one expected this. Everybody's freaking out today. The markets are, you know, are freaking out. the Nicky's down 700 points, the Dow is down a few hundred. The euro has flopped all over the place, and treasury yields are off about 10 basis points, or 0.1%. Putting in, just continuing the sell-off in treasuries, that Powell was explicit that he wanted at the last FOMC meeting. He's like, look, I want rising rates on the long end. Get over yourselves. Believe me, I'm not going to pivot.

I'm going to continue raising rates and people get it through your fat heads that I'm not your savior. Then I'm not pivoting. Like, get it through your head. And, you know, LaGarde gave him, you know, finally, Lagarde had to admit that, yeah, Powell's right. He's not coming to our rescue. So now why? And everybody is like, and so the markets are finally starting to catch up to all the stuff that Alex and I have been talking about in multiple podcasts now for close to a year. And that's where we are today.

So it's kind of a, it's even worse, it's even more of a victory lap this morning than it was, say, two days ago. Because the way I read this is, originally when Corota came out last summer and said, I'm going to double down on doing yield curve control while the Fed was raising rates, that was his way of saying, I'm going to trash the yen in order to help Powell get a stronger dollar to attack the euro. okay, which he was very successful in helping Powell do, brought the euro down from $1.22, down the 95 cents. Then we've had this little bit of a correction in the euro after the coup against the UK. You know, they're destroying the United Kingdom and the pound in order to prop up the euro.

And then Corota comes out today and says, well, actually, now I'm going to reverse completely and say, I've got an inflation problem too. and I need to allow rates to rise, which is exactly what the ECB did not want to hear. So this is, again, as always, the Bank of Japan acting as the Fed's wingman in global capital markets. And to me, this is just, like, this is the funniest freaking thing I've heard. I've seen in weeks. I mean, this is better than Ron White's farewell tour that he's doing before he retires. This is fantastic.

Sorry. To me, this is just, you know, this stuff's funny when he reads. really know how it works. Well, it's funny. I think Tom said it. I think Tom said it best. We weren't recording just quite yet. He's saying all this.

And then he goes, and Sean has no fucking idea what he's talking about. And I go, Sean has no idea what's talking about. Do you care to bring it down to a level? Or maybe there is no level where Sean's like, hmm, I gotcha. Because, you know, I go back, Tom and Alex, for that matter, to what you guys talked about probably the first time I had you two together. And that was, you know, this is why I have you on. So you can disseminate it down to the Moines who sits there and goes,

wow, that was a lot of acronyms and a lot of holy crap. And Tom's really excited. And I'm trying to figure out what that means on an actual level that I can make sense of. So just to see, you know, that's the opening overture. Now we'll explain everything. Okay. How's that? That sounds great.

Why don't you give it? Why don't you take a stab at the next part of it and enjoy it? No, because I'll have a, I have a question for you. Please, you take it. But I have a question for you after that, because I genuinely don't know this. Okay. So the way I see this is this, right? If I'm correct in all of my assessment that the Federal Reserve and J. Powell are at war with Davos of the ECB, right?

If I'm correct about this, and I'm still willing to bracket that I'm not correct about it. But every day the data just keeps piling up on my side of the. ledger, but I'm willing to accept the fact that I still may be wrong because I'm a scientist. That's the way things are. Now, if that's the case, then the one area of the world that cannot afford a significant rise in the bond yields, okay, which is then commensibly a fallen bond prices is the European Union. Their banks are all zombies. The ECB has been at negative interest rates, nominal rates for years, which has destroyed the euro's capacity to ever become a reserve currency to challenge the dollar. It's all to keep the European banks from completely imploding.

And so they've kept this fiction in place that because the ECB has a low inflationary environment, a lower inflationary environment than the United States, and this is all a lie, but for years it wasn't, then they can then keep interest rates in Europe lower than that in the U.S. So if the U.S. 10-year rate was trading at 2%, and the German 10-year rate was trading at negative 0.5% at one point, literally like two years ago. So now, that's a lie in a world where the U.S. has an inflation rate of 7%, and Germany has an inflation rate of 10%. The bond yields at this this kind of moment in time are a vote of confidence or no confidence

against the EC, against the central bank and the governing body that is in charge of taking, being a steward of the currency, right? So a mixture of whatever the treasury, you know, in the European Union, whatever you would consider the treasury, along with the central bank, those guys, those institutions together, they're effectively going to be, our confidence in them is going to be reflected in the bond yields. The higher the yields, the lower the confidence. Well, so the idea, in this environment where Germany has energy prices skyrocketing, businesses shutting down left

and right, and they're doing rolling blackouts and everything else, and they reported 10% inflation rate, CPI rate, and they're shutting down all the farms and all of this stuff. to think that the German debt, the German bonds of a similar maturity to U.S. treasury debt, certainly at the long end of the yield curve, the benchmark 10-year rate, the one that everybody looks at as the health of the real proxy for the health of a particular economy, should be trading at a significant discount, significant premium, sorry, in price to the U.S. debt is just offensive. But Lagarde's been able to hold it at somewhere between 1.6 and 1.9 percent lower. than the U.S. commissary U.S. debt for a year, which is a lie. And she's just been doing it by manipulating markets and shuffling crap around on various central bank balance sheets within the Eurozone.

Now, when you think about it from that perspective, I've been that the Fed's been aggressively raising rates in order to put Lagarde behind the eight ball, or as one metaphor, or as another metaphor, or to expose the fact that she's fronting like she's got kings in the hole when she's really got like, you know, two seven off suit or, you know, a Doyle Brunson for fuck's sake. And, you know, and Powell's holding aces and just flop the set. Like if you're a poker guy, you understand what I'm talking about. Like, it's just all a big massive fucking bluff is all it is, right? And then when you add in the Bank of Japan, which has always been a vassal state for the United States post-World War II and the Bank of Japan's monetary, policy for the most part does exactly whatever it is that the United States wants them to do.

Well, if the Fed is at war with the ECB, then you have to assume that the Bank of Japan is at war with the ECB as well as the Fed's proxy. And so any big policy changes by the BOJ should be looked at from that framework. How does this help the Fed? Or if it doesn't help the Fed, did the Bank of Japan just go off the reservation and is declaring independence. Well, my rate on this this morning is that Japan is not declaring independence, that Corota is still, you know, Powell's

wingman, while they go while they go, well, they go guard hunting, for lack of a better term. That's the way I see it, and kind of layman's terms. Alex. Okay. Well, that makes sense. But my question is this.

Some bank or banks have been resorting to the Fed's discount window and it's been going up, right? Yes. The month of December. Yes. What does that mean?

Do we know which bank this is? They're mostly small banks with less than a billion dollars in capital from what I understand. Okay, so it's not a G-Sip. Yeah, no, these are all, what I read, I read an article and some stuff about this this morning. Good. I'm glad you asked that question because I didn't know. anything about this. I was looking through this stuff this morning. We were talking about it in my community about this. And it turns out that the most of the banks, it was an article on Zero Hedge

this morning, I think about it. And it is mostly almost all of the banks that have been bellying up to the discount window, which would be the, when that happens, Sean, just for, so you understand, that's like the bank saying, we're broke and you can bend us over now and go on a bank run again. So we don't have any money. Okay. It's the, it's the last thing. It's the last thing a bank ever wants to do is to have to go to the discount window and ask for some for some emergency liquidity from the Fed okay it means that the bank doesn't have enough money and reserves to cover its obligations okay rather it everybody would rather they use the repo or the reverse repo window to get whatever they want as opposed to going directly to the discount window but apparently

reading really carefully through this Alex it looked like with the um with the relative rates that are available to the smaller banks, it looks like the discount window was just the better choice by, I think, somewhere between 70 and 80 basis points. And because of that, that's why that's happening. They could go into the repo markets and the, or they can go to the discount window and the discount window happen to be cheaper. So it's telling you that there's a little bit of stress within the American banking system, but, you know, how much is anybody's guess? Because these are all small banks. It's not like JP Morgan is billing up to the discount Do we get to find out at some point which banks exactly these are?

Or what is the deal? I think we will. If we haven't, if it's not out there already, I think we will. But from what I understand, as of right now, the best information we have, you know, pending on pending any later release, we will, I think we will eventually find out. Okay. So you may not find out for 90 days, right? The big question, the big question.

And I think I know your answer already. you don't you don't yeah yeah so just you know like for for for for the benefit of the viewers and listeners basically if there wasn't a central bank the banks who went to the discount window for emergency liquidity would basically be experiencing a bank run absolutely at that point right so the fact that we have now this these banks resorting to the to the fed discount window to the tune of about six billion dollars which is small but it's a rising trend uh you don't think that this will twist fed's arm and cause them to pivot i know your answer already but i wanted you to say it fair enough Alex no i don't actually i don't think

that this is big enough yet i think that um i think that um i I think that the Fed has plenty of liquidity available on both sides of the, both sides of the, the, the, the ledger. They've got a massive balance sheet of treasuries that they could sell. They've got a massive reverse repo excess reserves that they could loosen to the market. And then they've got the discount window. So I think they just have plenty of room here. And I think they're willing to take a lot more than just a little bit of pain.

I don't even think this is like, I don't even think this is a hang nail yet. I think for the Fed to pivot at this point, it's going to have to be like a stab to the gut. It's going to have to be a, you know, a spleen, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not, that's not, I don't think that's even likely to happen, you know. I don't think we're looking at JP Morgan or city going down. I don't think we're there. But no, I think a lot of the smaller banks are going to get rolled up just like every other financial crisis.

Well, exactly. And this is what, this is where I was, was wanting to go is. Are they going to simply take this opportunity to shake down the banking sector? The regional banks? Maybe. Get rid of smaller banks? As always, every financial crisis always winds up with a smaller, more consolidated banking sector. It's possible.

Again, I've never argued at any point here that JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are the good guys here. They're just the better guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. And so if they're, if they can play the game, where they can, you know, roll up some of these smaller banks that have better, that really have better asset quality than they do? Because that's what they did during 2008. Like a lot of banks were full, were, were, were rolled up and sold off by the FDIC who still had plenty of quality

assets on their balance sheets and then were handed to the big banks in order to shore up their balance sheets. It was all very corrupt what happened in 2008. Yeah. Now, do we think a repeat of that's going is likely? Oh, sure. Are these people still both? absolutely. Are they are, are, are they our friends? Absolutely not. Like, you know, we should never, for a moment, think that they are on our side. But when it comes down to, you know, you know, when it comes down to hook or crook, like at some point, I'd still rather them and some of the regional banks surviving this than what Klaus Schwab and company have planned for us. Absolutely. Absolutely. In the states, Tom, how many different, you know, here in Canada, I just think

could probably rattle off the four or five big banks in Canada. And then I, I guess, never really thought about how many, not independent, but small banks, yes, are out there. How many in the United States? I don't even know. It's thousands. I mean, we have, you know, we have, we have, there's at least 100 credit unions here in Florida.

I mean, not even regional banks, but just credit unions. There's at least 100 of them. Right? And credit unions are almost fully, or almost fully chartered banks to this point here in the United States. If I'm not mistaken, it's going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 to 6,000 banks in the United States. We have a ton of banks in the United States.

And they're the ones that do all the local lending. So they don't want to roll up too many of them because J.B. Morgan doesn't want to. Look, at the end of the day, J.B. Morgan has no interest in funding a bridge refit in Alachua County Florida. Like, that's for a local bank. That's for a local credit union to finance. That's for us to figure out locally, you know, to pull the capital and get that done. They don't want that business. Like, they're not interested in that.

But what they are interested in is surviving to the point where they can continue to be the conduit for global capital. And for the big projects, for the oil for the LNG terminals and for, you know, and for big oil exploration projects and, you know, car manufacturing facilities and that kind of thing. Big projects. That's what they want. And the Fed is, of course, they're buddy in that, right? I mean, that's what the Fed's for. Now, the question is whether or not what everybody, what's really been discussed on Capitol Hill or on Wall Street or wherever is, okay, how much of the, you know, we can't do this where only we survive. If we're going to do this and we're going to, you know, keep the commercial banking sector alive, I mean, we can't eat everything.

I don't think they want to eat everything again. I think that will there be a consolidation of the banking sector here in the United States? Certainly this. Yeah, I do. But, you know, will it be, you know, will they all still wind up, well, it still wind up looking the same as it did previous to this? That I don't know about. I do firmly believe that in the age of the secured overnight funding rate or financing rate, Sofer versus LIBOR, I think there's a different, I think it's a much different world.

And I don't think it's a world that anybody's really heavily contemplated yet as to what the banking sector is going to look like in the United States on the backside of this fight against Davos. I've been ceding out some nascent ideas, been asking people here and there and some of my people are being going around and asking varies. I mean, one of my guys, Bill, and literally asked Daniel D. Martino Booth about the potential for SOFER to re-regionalize the Fed funds rate. And she was like, you know, she was like, she hadn't even considered it yet. And that's where a lot of the, where, that's where we're. Wait, wait. Right. Tom, sorry.

Did you say re-regionalize Fed funds rate? Mm-hmm. What does that mean? We'll go back to the original charter of the Federal Reserve. Remember, there's 12 regional banks. Previous to FDR in the 1930s, each of the 12 Federal Reserve banks, Minneapolis, Atlanta, St. Louis, San Francisco, New York, et cetera, all set different institutions. interest rates based on the regions that they controlled.

Okay. FDR rolled that up at the behest of New York and San Francisco to create one monolithic Fed fund rate in the hands and basically in the hands of the New York Fed, which is when you stop to think about that is no different than the way the euro is creates a, a monolithic exchange rate for all of your. labor, regardless of their efficiency, which is how Germany has been able to run roughshod all over Europe and consolidate all the capital of Europe under its rubric, under its balance sheet, you know, as opposed, and bankrupting Greece and Italy and Portugal and everybody else in the process. Well, guess what? Same thing happened here in the United States. New York and California got rich and Mississippi and Arkansas stayed poor after the after FDR was. done destroying the original charter of the Fed. So if all I'm asking, and it's the question I know you know the answer to, but is it possible that with our own debt indexing rate like SOFER, could we get

back to this, you know, where we have a market interest rate and that, you know, banks in Mississippi bid for capital at a couple of half a point lower than the banks in California do. And that gives the opportunity for investment capital to go to Mississippi and build an auto parts plant as opposed to get another military industrial project out in California or Texas or Florida or wherever. And that's the point. That was the original point of the 12 regional banks. And that didn't last because New York and California had too much power and then consolidated power within the Fed. Again, another reason why we should all hate the Fed, okay, because it was always going to wind up where we are today.

So now the question is, are we going to, you know, after we've reached, reach this crescendo, this kind of apotheosis of central banking, right? Are we going to, on the backside of this, start to see a decentralization of the national central bank's power, because we've all come to realize just how dangerous it is. Yeah, okay. And that's, in the long run. That's where I interrupted you. So what is there, what's the consensus? So what's the feedback? Is, is, is, is, do, do people think that is happening? I don't know. I'm just throwing the idea out there and so far no one's even entertained the idea other than myself and the people around me at this point. I mean, unless they talk about it inside the Mariner Eccles building, the Federal Reserve,

which I don't know, but we're just speculating here because it would be fun because it would be interesting to see if that's possible. And these ideas didn't come from springhole cloth out of the back of my head. They came from members of my community that are literally involved in regional banking here in the United States and trying to reestablish proper regional banking based on net interest margin and classic, you know, classic banking. And, you know, we don't have that. We have this massively distorted banking system that's all based around whatever the Fed's going to do next. And we need to get the Fed out of this process of setting risk and allow the market to do that. And I think Powell absolutely wants that to happen. I think that's why he's doing what he's doing.

And I think this is ultimately comes down to an ideological fight between are we going to allow the private sector to distribute and and do capital formation? Or are we going to allow or is it going to be the public sector through the central banks and, you know, the technocrats over in Europe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, I think that's right. I think that's, I think that breaks down from a from a layman's level, just to really think about it. Capitalism versus communism, guys. To try to bring it to the layman's level, because.

this is extremely important stuff, except that it sounds a little bit obscure and ethereal, you know, like what the hell does any of this means? Right. And so, you know, you guys are aware of Richard Werner's work, more or less, right? Yep. Okay, so something extremely interesting that Richard Werner has been writing about and presenting about. And this is like he explains how Germany became this exporting powerhouse, right? Which until just a few years ago, I think maybe 10 years or so, Germany was the number one exporter in the whole world, even though it's just Germany, 83 million people.

And so basically here's the deal. Basically, Germany has this very distributed banking sector. in which the vast majority of banks are small regional banks that operate as non-profit banks. So they are 70% of the banks in the German banking industry are non-profit banks. They just serve as conduits to regional, local, small and medium-sized businesses. And now, here's the effect of this after two to three generations of this. Germany is the number one leader in the world in the so-called, yeah, I'm going to be a little bit all over the place, but, you know, it's an important point. basically Germany has 1,000 or had 1,200 of these global leader companies, which are companies that occupy either first, second or third spot in the market share in whatever it is that they export.

Right. The second place in the world for global market leaders is the United States. with about 350 of such companies, right? Which are, you know, produce some widget, sell it to the world, and they have first, second or third spot in the share of the marketplace. So Germany was far in a way ahead of everybody in the world with these companies that are, you know, like maybe they produce some little thing that you're, you're, you're not even aware of because maybe it's some part that goes into an airplane or in a marine diesel engine or whatever.

But the way this happened is because these small and medium-sized enterprises across Germany were served by these small local regional banks, where the bank managers had a very close relationship, with the entrepreneurs, with the managers of the company, and supported their business, right? Where they needed funding, they got funding if their business seemed sound. They would even extend to them 100-year loans. You'd get a loan, and you had 100 years to pay it back.

So this is where you go from, let's say entrepreneurship and human ingenuity because you know some some engineer in some company thought he could make build a better mousetrap and that got funding and over time that turned into a huge business success prosperity economic growth to the point where all together it made Germany the number one global exporting superpower and 100 to 100, 1,200 of their companies global export exporting I don't know exactly what the terminology Werner uses but they're like global champions or something like that so

these extremely successful companies that are the engines of local economic development and, you know, economic growth and prosperity and, you know, raising the living standards. So this is where, you know, the banking sector being structured in a certain way directly translates into this economy being extraordinarily successful. And the reason why the Chinese are now as successful as they are, because they copied the German model. And they They have something like 10,000 or 20,000. I don't even know how much of these local and regional banks that support local and regional, small, medium-sized entrepreneurs and companies that end up being very successful exporters. So, you know, if the Fed under Powell is getting back to this kind of banking, you know, not the kind of banking that's supporting, you know,

speculative investing derivatives, tsunami of capital going into real estate, but actually supporting industry and entrepreneurship and, you know, activity where people actually build useful stuff and make it really good and then export it around the world and bring in the bacon, that's very, very extremely important. And this is where, you know, people who, people who might want to start businesses have ideas, think that can be successful, we'll find support. And imagine, imagine, imagine if you wanted to do something and you had a, you had the option of getting a hundred year loan. I mean, that, you know, like that, that changes everything. Then you have like three, maybe two or three generations of these entrepreneurs perfecting their thing.

Right. This is how you get to the Jetsons from where we're at. Right. It's fascinating. Alex. I know I think it's a really important point. Thank you. Because I didn't have and I think and I'm I'm staying quiet on this side but you boys are laying it out rather well. Truthfully, I didn't realize that there's a whole bunch in there. Alex Tom that I had zero clue on I guess or maybe never cared to think on it that much. Um, you know there it's funny, I just don't look at the, don't look at, like, I don't see somebody going and starting a bank out my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, I don't hear of a guy going, hey, I'm going to start a bank, uh, this is what we're going to do. I, I don't hear that. I hear a lot of companies, uh, in the area I'm at, never a bank, ever. Um, and so to, to, to hear you to talk about the banking as an industry and how it works, it sounds almost like every other industry out there. It's just dealing of money. And with, money comes a lot of power. Well, you're right, Sean.

But the thing is, we can't do, without banks, without the agglomeration of capital, right? Either we are all an island or we form communities, right? And when we all are, when everybody is using their time in the most comparatively advantageous way for themselves, we invariably wind up making a profit. right if I'm good at what I do and Alex is good at what he does and you're good at what you do and we all do that for a living because there's a market for what we do whatever it is shoes do the basic Robinson Crusoe economy or variation thereof but you wind up with is everybody at the end of the day has a little bit of profit right be it you know stored berries from the day before or sword wood from cutting it down or you know tan and leather from killing your cows or whatever it is right and you have this you have this profit well at some point as a group as a community, we go, well, we have all this profit. What are we going to do with it? Well, let's build something bigger than what, then what any of us individually can build? Well, what do we need? Well, we need a dock over on the river so that our fishermen can, you know, easily, you know, bring in their catches at the

end of the day, or we can get a dock on both sides. We can cross the river to go to the other side to go cut wood on the other side of the river. Banking is no different than that basic idea of everybody getting together and pooling capital and time in order to do the thing, that we, that the actually needs. What the bank does is we all deposit our profit in terms of money, in form of money, into the bank. And then the bank takes our savings and goes, well, you know, and then people who have ideas go to the bank and go, hey, I've got this great idea to build, to do a, to build a tool and die shop, or, you know, I want to open a car repair shop or a tire changing business. And I need some capital in order to get this thing built. I don't have it, but I have

the idea. And here's my business, my business plan. And the bank goes, sounds good. I can, What do you think your internal rate of return is going to be? Well, he says, I don't know, 9%. And the bank goes, looks at your business plan and goes, yeah, that seems reasonable. We can loan you the money at 6%. You build the thing at 6%. They loan it at 6. The investors, the savers in the bank at 3%.

The bank takes 3%. The business makes 3%. And everybody wins. That's the way it's supposed to work. Okay. And what Alex was describing, I think, The German model, and certainly the Chinese model to a lesser extent, or maybe even to a greater extent, I think is also subsidized by the way the European Union is structured through the euro,

because capital is constantly flowing into Germany because its banking sector and because its labor efficiency is greater than the price that the euro commands on the open market, because the euro's exchange rate is an amalgam of all of the labor efficiency. efficiencies of the entire European Union, right? And the entire Eurozone, all 19 countries. Well, if Germany is better is above average and, you know, then what the euro trades at, well, then they're going to get a net benefit, a small net benefit. They're going to be selling the product of their labor at a lower price in euros. And it's kind of, that's what mercantilism is. It's high protection tariffs and those weak currency. Well, you don't see it that way with Germany,

but that's exactly what happened. And that actually allows them to fund this banking model that can be zero profit and nonprofit. I don't actually think that's a particularly sustainable model. I think it kind of sounds good, but it's not really real, unless all those community banks are actually credit unions where the depositors are actually shareholders in the bank like we have here in the United States. Then it's a different story.

Then at the end of the year, the credit union, you know, distributes in some way the profits of the bank back to the owners of the bank, either in the form of subsidized loans, better rate of return on CDs or whatever it happens to be. Okay. As long as that's the model. But if the model is just, you know, hey, we're not going to make any money and we're going to do,

but we can get this because the government is actually, the whole structure in which my business operates is being subsidized by a weak currency, which is exactly what the Chinese have done. Okay. And we've allowed them to do because of this maniacal desire here in the United States. to hold on to the global reserve currency for geopolitical power purposes. If Powell is clearly

trying to reverse that trend, he's made it abundantly clear that he doesn't want the U.S. dollar to be the global reserve currency anymore. So, yeah, that whole process is what's actually happening and is embedded in all of the Fed's policies

since June of last year. And Powell's talked about this since the day he took over the Federal Reserve. But he's been cock-blocked, at every turn by Congress and a political class that is all in for the globalists to want to do away with private formation of capital. And that's the fundamental fight that's going on out there. And I see it as clear as day. And it seems obvious to me at this point. But it's hard for people to get over their inherent biases. Everything the Fed has done previously when, you know, globalists like, Yellen and Bernanke were in charge of it. And, you know, too many people just keep saying, well, the past is prologue, and I'm going to go by what I've seen in the past, and I'm going to analyze the world that way.

And I keep saying, well, I don't think the past is prologue when personnel is far more important in setting policy. Personnel is policy. Private equity, Powell, is not the same as globalist Yellen and shitbag, ivory tower, academic, academician Bernanke. Just don't see it. I mean, Powell's been at odds with Bernanke. since 2007

when he was a member of the fed when he was an out large member of the federal reserve port. Boy,

everybody stunned in the silence. I'm wondering, I want to take, I want to go back in time. You talked about 12 regional banks

in the United States. Wanted Roosevelt, you mentioned that New York and I believe San Francisco put pressure on them. But what was the

theory of rolling it into centralizing it and not having the region the regional communism like I do it seriously FDR was a communist okay the United States has been under attack by the global like I'm sorry

by common turn since the 1920s it's nothing common turn didn't end it just went underground they ended it officially in 1947 or 43 whatever the hell it was I'm actually not being facetious here like I'm not kidding Uncle Joe McCarthy wasn't wrong about there being communists in Hollywood. His methods were just a little

unsavory and he was a bit of a drunk. But, you know, let's not kid ourselves. Everybody was in the tank for globalism when it was to their advantage. And it was to their advantage up until the moment when the whole system broke in 2008. And, you know, we've been running this like ridiculous monetary policy since then to coordinate central bank policy amongst all the major

central banks to keep the system from imploding. And eventually the it came down the pike. Well, our goal here is to get rid of the central banks because we can't pay off all the debts. Like the debt pile is too big and the promises we've made to all the all the Muppets and the Roobes, i.e. you and me are too big. We can't pay them back, but we want to stay in power. So we're going to, you know, we're going to sell them. We're going to sell them. We're going to sell them. of, you know, communism as the way out of, you know, the excesses of capitalism. The whole purpose of this, all of this shit is to prove to the, is to prove to the generations coming behind me, you, me, and Alex that capitalism is fundamentally broken and that Marx

was right. But they've put their thumb on the scale to prove that, okay, by acting like a a bunch of shitbags. When the truth of the matter is, is that the only thing that's, when the truth of the matter is, is that it's actually the vestiges of private capital formation that can easily strike back and undo all this shit. All they have to do is raise interest rates a couple of points, and the whole thing collapses, which is exactly what Powell is doing right now. Fun.

I mean, I hate to be like flip about it, but I really do see it that way. And the whole thing collapses. What do you mean? Raise it a few points. The whole thing collapses. The whole edifice of all of these credit money-based asset prices. Like all of our asset prices,

asset prices today. Stocks, bonds, cars, real estate, blah, blah, blah, all based on this leveraging up of all this credit money, not real money, not base money, credit money, right? Like, that's the money that gets multiplied 100 times after the Fed prints $1,000 and then a million dollars makes it into the frigging world in the form of credit, loaned out over and over and over again. And then once the Fed starts, and you can do that when the interest rates were at zero percent. and the cost of money, holding money through time or leveraging it up through time is nothing. But when you raise the cost of capital to 5%.

Now all of a sudden you've got to pay 5% on that money, ooh, now you've got to come up with 6% every year, as opposed to 0.1% to be profitable. Meaning the amount of leverage you can engage in at 5% is far lower than at 1% or half a percent. or in the case of the ECB, negative 0.6%. That's the problem. So raising interest rates crushes the leveraged offshore dollar markets and the assets that are all based on credit money. They're all based on moving credit money around.

The credit collapses. We're back to base money, which is what's happening now. M2 in the United States is falling. The liquidity in the offshore dollar markets is falling rapidly. everybody because the because at this point every variable rate interest payment out there that's denominated in dollars is now 5% or 4.5% higher than it was a year and a half ago. So that money might have been lent out at 2% these credit revolvers that these companies have. Now it's 6.5% or 7% now all of a sudden they've got to go out and they've got to they've got to have they've got to have

they're going to make 7% on their money you know and as in their business has to make 7% or they can't even cover their loans, no less their dividends or anything else. Because that's just the way it is, because they've got to pay their loans back. And so as those loans are getting paid back, those dollars are getting destroyed. They're not flowing around the economy. The amount of money that's out there isn't the more important. What's the matter is the flow is all that matters. The amount of dollars actually flow through the system is what determines the value of asset prices at the margin, not the amount of money that's

actually sitting in reserves. Once those reserves starts to flow, well, then bank reserves start to drop. I mean, everything starts to go bad. And the loans and at those interest rates, people stop paying on their debts. And then now this is the bank problem. Now the assets that are, now the loans that are a bank's asset, remember, a bank's balance sheet is completely backwards from that of you and me. Our savings are our assets and our loans are our liabilities. Well, for the bank, it's the exact opposite. The loans are their assets and our savings in their in their accounts are their liabilities. So if the loans go into non-performing status or what's known as NPLs or non-performing loans, the banks, the bank's capital drops. People lose confidence in the bank.

They want to pull their money out. And then there's a bank run. And then they got to go to the discount window and blah, blah, blah. And then, you know, dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria. financial crisis the world that's what we're dealing with right and we've created the most perverse fucking economy in 2000 years since the fall of the Roman Empire

yeah yeah it's gotta end and when it ends and whoever goes first to to break the system to their advantage is going to win and whoever has the biggest stick at the table and we have the biggest stick at the table

going first. Everybody else is fucked. And then the Fed will be fucked. But, you know, as everybody, as the people who can escape this vortex of a collapsing dollar market, the global south, the the de-dollarization is happening with Russia and China and India and all these guys, all that will, they'll escape, you know, to a greater or lesser extent. The ones who got out early who really went first, like the Russians, are going to be fine. It's not going to be easy for them, but they can get out of it.

Because they've got a national pool of savings that's off the charts. And they produce all the things that everybody needs. Right. Am I wrong about any of this, Alex? Oh, I don't think so. I don't think so, Tom. I entirely agree. I think that we're finding ourselves at such extremely interesting juncture in history.

and, you know, unfortunately, what can you do? You can just like try to connect the dots, interpret the picture and hope that you're right because you can't really know for sure. But I think that the way you connect the dots and interpret the picture is probably the most likely scenario. I certainly hope so because it also implies light at the end of the tunnel. And I'd go back to something that you said that I think is extremely important to understand about banking is that it's meant to serve the economy, not the other way around. And so you put it in terms of profits. I would put it in terms of surplus because I think maybe it's intuitively more digestible.

But basically what happens in any community that does something, you know, like, okay, so I don't. know I read somewhere that at the basic level maybe at the nomad level you know that it takes the labor of 21 persons to maintain a community of 23 persons so essentially everybody has to work and then you know as people settled down and invented agriculture they started producing a huge amount of profits I mean sorry not profits surplus Now, having surplus, you know, you have stores of grain and stores of dried meat and fish and whatever. You have animals that you raise that you can, you know, you can use them for milk and cheese and meat and whatever you need, eggs. Now that means that not everybody has to work anymore.

There's enough. That means that there's surplus. And so the community, if you know, like a squad of men can go and say like it would be a great deal, great, it would be a great investment to build a bridge to the next valley. Then we can plant some crops over there or we can build the road to the town where we can trade. Then, you know, those men can go and do that, build that bridge, build that roads, the dwarf on the on the river, whatever. and increase further the prosperity of the community. So basically, what the banking industry should be doing is basically serve as a conduit, practically infrastructure,

part of the social infrastructure of an economy, to serve as a conduit to disperse this surplus, which is the only kind of real capital. You know, you can print any amount of money, but the society is wealthy to the to the extent that it has that surplus so that you can you can even invest it in infrastructure in further improvement of the productivity and so forth not everything is taken up by mere subsistence and survival and so the healthy banking industry should merely serve as a as a conduit to allocate that surplus to investments that will further improve the community's prosperity and productivity. And so this obviously entails decisions about how to invest and where to invest. And, you know, the Davos model, you see that they're investing into building out this

control matrix to subjugate everybody. you know like so they they use the surplus that we produce and they allocated into producing the vaccines vaccine certificates the passes the you know now they're you know Europe has just passed the measure to start introducing the individual carbon tracking something I don't even understand what it is exactly, but, you know, the idea is that every resident of a European country would be paying his or her carbon tax based on how much, based on the size of their carbon footprint or whatever. So imagine, imagine. Instead of, you know, allocating this social surplus to things that will make people's lives better,

the banking industry which has been hijacked by the Davos crowd is allocating it towards us building a prison for ourselves. So this is where, you know, the money and banking can serve for the benefit of the society or it can serve for our final and complete enslavement, not to mention things like the military, industrial conflict a complex uh waging war everywhere building out empires and so forth so you know i think that the way tom lays it out uh jay powell setting dynamite under the eccb that's under control of the davos crowd is welcome news so that's good stuff And then hopefully, you know, over time, we can get back to the point where bankers serve their communities and help them make the communities more prosperous and more productive. Simple stuff. It should be simple. It's just kind of, we just got so used, so inert to this state where banking is this industry that makes some people extremely rich.

that lends you money when you don't need it, then yanks it away the day you do need it. And who couldn't care less about what your business is, whether your business is good and healthy and useful and has a long-term life cycle and a lifespan ahead of it. It's gotten completely perverted. Absolutely. And it's perverted the whole rest of the society and every relationship in the society. So it has to go. So it has to go. And that's why I pray that Tom's very compelling,

that Tom's very compelling and probably spot-on interpretation is actually right. When you, sorry, when you talk about them monitoring your carbon foot, each individual carbon footprint, I had one of the listeners on Twitter suggest the Oxford 15-minute cities and the different zones. I assume that fits right into what you're talking about, Alex. Have you seen that? Where they're going to have...

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I saw that. I think that's part of it, because I'm not sure how that gels with the carbon footprint, but I do know that based on these UN Agenda 2030, 2050, and a whole range of other policy white papers that they have published in the meantime, time. I recently read something called Absolute Zero. They actually intend to

fix us all in place in some kind of like a feudal arrangement where you live in a certain place and you can move around to the distance within, you know, like you can go to the 15 minutes. Yes. Cities, yeah. They can't go farther than that without permission.

They want to end completely all air travel. They want to completely dismantle and and phase out airports construction consumption of red meat they want to end consumption of beef and and and um and um goat milk no lamb lamb yeah and uh and steel production for all furnaces have to have to be switched so i mean it's it's completely mental it's completely mental but you know like thanks to the thanks to the financial system that we

have here in Europe a very narrow minority very narrow quote-unquote elite of social parasites who are inbred degenerates get to play God with the whole rest of the society okay and they say you know like they they reckon yeah we got to tie this down because you know, they don't, they don't want too many, you know, hungry, disenfranchised, angry people roaming their towns. They want us fixed in place. Yep. And they want us completely dependent on their matrix, you know, where, you know, like, if you've

exceeded your quote of this and that, you don't get no more. You have to be, you have to be well-behaved. Where they can, you know, like, if you're inclined to bring your truck to 10 Downing Street and block the streets of London that they can simply switch of your bank account and then you're cold and hungry and you can't buy medicines for your children. So this is, you know, like this is what's happening in the block that is run by the Davos people. It's absolutely insane, right? And you can see it's really, it's really clear, right? Like what they've done, let's let's give you a perfect day.

Let's go back and think about the last five years. What started the Yellow Vest protests back in France back, what, four or five years ago now? It was the 25 cent tax on diesel fuel, right? The 25 cent tax on diesel fuel, the main reason why they were, well, the French were so, the French peasants were so angry was because they literally said, look, you people told us to stop driving gasoline powered cars or petrol powered cars and just, and to move to diesel because diesel's got a lower carbon footprint. and it's better for the environment, it's more fuel efficient, and blah, blah. So we did all that.

And now you're making diesel fuel impossible for us to run our lives on. Now you're making that too expensive. And now you want us to push us all into electric vehicles. Well, now that they've destroyed electricity production and the cost of electricity production in the Eurozone, guess what? Now you're not allowed to even drive your EVs around.

Now they're going to tax you extra. Before they've even rolled out the entire EB infrastructure, They're already telling you how much extra you're going to have to pay. After they subsidize the first wave of EV electric vehicle buying, now they've trapped all those people with these insane prices on these cars. And now they're telling them, well, the grid can't handle it. So you're going to have to not drive your EVs around. Clearly what they're trying to do is to end individual transportation.

Their war on the automobile will not stop until all car construction is completely destroyed. It's why they're going after every aspect of the car, the automobile supply chain, which is one of the longest supply chains in the entire global economy to go from all the think about all the little parts that go into a car. Think about the coordination of the millions of people. It takes literally tens of millions of people to make one Ford F 150. Yeah. Okay? Yeah. You've got rubber plastic, this, that caught.

I mean, I remember going to the Alachua County Fair here in Gainesville 10 years ago. I was working 15 years ago. Whoa. It would be almost 20 years ago now when I was actually a member, I was actually canvassing for the Libertarian Party back then. So it would be almost 20 years ago. And right next to our table was a table from the cattle industry, from Ford Motor Company, explaining how the Ford Motor Company uses every aspect of the cow. Because this area of Florida is heavy cattle country. Like five minutes out, you're literally five minutes outside the city of Gainesville, it's all cow farms. And all the way north into Columbia County. in all the surrounding counties to Lachville County. We produced a lot of cattle here in North Florida. And so it was very important at the Alachua County Fair to explain to the cattle farmers how important the Ford Motor Company is to your business.

Because we boil down the hooves to make plastics to do this. We use the leather. Every aspect of the cow goes into your car. Just a car. Okay. The supply chains, this is where I absolutely recommend everybody sit down and listen to old lectures by Murray Rothbard on the brilliance of a ham sandwich. He used to give his ham sandwich lecture all the time about how the free market coordinates the time and

labor and capital of millions of people to produce the ham sandwich that you sit down at the local diner and have the local bring a whole that lunch. And you'd be sitting right next to a guy who we were both enjoying the same frigging ham sandwich for lunch. And we have completely different political views completely. Under any other circumstance, we would hate each other. And yet, our time is all coordinated through the free market peacefully to produce the exact

same things that we all want. Rothbard was brilliant at explaining all this. I absolutely recommend if people go back to the Mises Institute, listen to those old lectures by Rothbard about this stuff. It's fascinating. Or read Leonard Reed's old article called I pencil for fuck's sake. Written from the perspective of the pencil,

the humble pencil and the thousands of people that it takes to produce him. Okay. Once you see the economy from that perspective, you will never, ever, ever be seduced into thinking that the state could ever produce anything as simple as a fucking pencil. No less, coordinate all our capital through time in order to produce all the basic goods and services and all the distractions that they, that Yuval Harari thinks that we need in order to keep all the useless eaters from revolting.

This fucking guy is absolutely evil in every goddamn way, manner, shape, and form. He has no fucking clue as to how the food that gets to his table, actually, that allows him to pontificate on such fucking evil even exists. Yeah. This is the world we live in.

And this is the world these fucking people want. As far as I'm concerned, Jerome Powell's looking at that going, you know what, fuck you. Down with Davos, raise the fucking rates. We're not fighting inflation. Yeah.

And everybody who still thinks that the Fed is fighting inflation with raising interest rates just doesn't get it. Because the big, the game is so much bigger than that. It's the future of the man. The game is huge. And I think that the Davos people are doing tremendous damage to things that they don't, I don't think that they understand them. Because I, you know, like, I've taken time. I've taken several hours of my life that I'll never get back anymore to listen to lectures by you, well-knowah Harare and to listen to speeches by Klaus Schwab and their interviews and read some of

their articles and the and the thing that jumps out of you out at you from from all that is that these people are not really smart they are really really staggeringly stupid I mean I'm sorry but I was I you know like Klaus Schwab got to some position where people look up to him, where he shakes hands with Biden and Macron and Justin Trudeau and all of these people, right? So it's got to be something up there. So I want, you know, like I wanted to find a trace of something that he says that, you know, maybe it's demonic, but maybe it's smart. Maybe you can say like these people are so clever. I couldn't find any trace of it, but I could find plenty of evidence that the man is an absolute idiot.

I can tell you, Ale, it traces everything. It confounded me to the point where I try to understand how do these things even happen. And my best explanation is that these people are very powerful. They have practically unlimited resources. So what do they do? They go to experts who want their money and resources, right? And then they give them presentations about this and that. Like, we can create these carbon tracking technologies where you will know exactly everybody's carbon footprint.

If you spend five minutes thinking about it, you realize that the whole idea is completely ludicrous. But obviously, somebody sold themselves to them like, we'll do this for you. And they did, in fact, give tens of millions of dollars to a whole bunch of these startups that, gave them these promises of, you know, they will invent these matrices of whatever. I can't even begin to understand it because if you start thinking about this carbon tracking, it's like an impossibly complex thing. You're going to have to cut it in a way that it will just be distortions, compounding into distortions until the whole thing falls apart because it'll be so,

it'll be so incoherent, it'll make the pandemic response look like, like well-engineered response. What's funny is, what's funny, Alex, is that, you know, I remember, you know, a few months ago, Whitney Webb did a whole deep dive on Klaus Robbins. She came to the conclusion that, like, like a lot of people finally figured out, which is that he was made by Henry Kissinger back in the 70s. Right. And that this was always the plan of the Club of Rome types in order to just sell it, and he was going to be the salesman of all this. And, you know, and when it was easy to sell to the, the rapacious assholes on Wall Street who go, ooh, we can, well, we can give that the carbon credit trading to Goldman Sachs because they'll love that

because then they can, they can take their VIG off of it. See, when everybody was going to make money off of this, it was easy, it was easy to sell. But when they closed the trap and they closed the loop and said, oh, by the way, the end state of this is that you're not going to get the trade carbon credits anymore because there aren't going to be any capital markets. They're like, we'll hold what the fuck. I thought we were all in this together. That's, I think, when this shit really began to change. I really do.

And I think that happened in the middle of the second Obama administration. And then I do believe at a certain level that some people probably backed Donald Trump and hoped that they could get him into power and then use Trump and Brexit as a means by which to start pulling this thing apart at the seams. Because remember, everybody wants to believe that Wall Street is a monolith. Everybody wants to believe the city of London is a monolith. We know for a fact that that's not the case. There are plenty of non-Davos city of London banks,

and we know that there are plenty of non-Davos American banks. And so the fight over getting rid of Trump, over not allowing any more than Jay Powell and John Williams into the New York Fed, and they hated that thing. And they go back and read the, just go back and Google John Williams' appointment to the New York Fed. You will find 100 articles in all of the classic, you know, high important, the important financial press,

the economic times, the financial times, the Guardian, the New York Times, blah, blah, blah, blah, all decrying the fact that John Williams was fucking ass from a hole in the ground that should not be appointed to the New York Fed. When Kamala Harris and John McHan have told this story before fist bump on. on the floor of the of the of the of the of the Senate to block judy Shelton being added to the federal reserve that was a big tell why because

judy Shelton old gold bug was going to introduce the idea of gold back treasury notes to get us out of to throw our treasury gold down at the yield curve to try and fix our fiscal position here in the United States none of this is also beyond the pale but doves can't have that because the United States needs to be destroyed because we are the last true bastion of any I mean not the only one, but the major bastion of commercial banking in the world. And clearly there was an ideological shift under the Trump administration away from the Fed being a globalist institution to an American focus institution. And now what you're hearing in the headlines everywhere is that it's

all the U.S. is fault for everything that's happening. Powell's a bet is is evil. The U.S. is the only ones trying to get us involved in a war with Russia. That's bullshit. The EU wants it just as badly as everybody else does. The old London money wants this shit. They're all aligned on this and they've all fought this and they've and they've seduced every fucking leftist

that is that the good lefties like that guy's like Garland Nixon and Pepa Ascabar and others who are so anti-American empire in their thinking that they can't see that the European Union is actually worse

and that the European Union isn't a vassal state in this respect. They really are a co-conspirator with the evil globalist within the American power structure. That's what we're dealing with here. We're not dealing with countries. We're dealing with factions. And these factions transcend, you know, the flag. Exactly. This is very important. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Jans, you know, we've been going for some time here. And you've brushed a couple different things that I'd be curious to hear you boys talk about. You know, anytime you bring the listener up to speed on Ukraine, I think, is always welcomed. You got China reopening and, I don't know, the different stories there, you got protests all

over the world. You know, every time you come on, I get the same, you know, Brazil or Peru or, you know, people wanting to know about those. I had a listener asked about decentralizing Russia. I don't know. There's a whole. I saw that on your Twitter feed yesterday, Sean. There's a whole, I mean, I could steer this thing in any which way.

And I come to this point, and I go, okay, you've just given me a history lesson and a warp speed, if you would, on banking. And I'm like, okay, well, that, that, now where do we go? And the thing is, is, I don't know. I'm going to throw it back to you two on what do you think is most prevalent here? You know, we're days away from Christmas, so I appreciate you guys doing this right before Christmas. But what is sticking out to you on the world stage right now? Obviously, the banking side of it and what's happened here this week. But, you know, as far as protests go, the war in Ukraine, pardon me.

China, like these are all tops we've talked about on and off. now for a couple of months. What's sticking out to you? Yeah, Alex. Well, the war in Ukraine is sticking out to me, but by a bit, because there's so much stuff sticking out. You know, the European price caps, carbon tracking, I'm seeing the beginnings of the new,

fear-mongering campaign about you know how in China they ended these this zero lockdown policy and now they're going to go back into they're having they're having cases of COVID

go up again and hospitalization and people are dying because there's some kind of a new SARS-COBA I mean I just saw one piece of news about this I think maybe on Twitter but it's looked a lot like fear porn starting to gather momentum. Let's go back to Ukraine. I think that we've had a series of interviews

of Ukrainian officials, interestingly not Zelensky, but the defense minister and the chief of general staff, General Zaluzni, and all of these interviews primarily to the British media. So I thought that was interesting because the gist of it is that we can win, say the Ukrainians, but we need everything you got, all right? We need everything. Airplanes, anti-aircraft, defense systems, all kinds of everything, tanks, armored personnel carriers, and so forth. Or else, we're done. Okay. So, you know, when you, when you boil it down to the essence, what they're saying is, we're done. We've lost. The only hope of us winning against Russia is if we expand it to an all-out war between Russia and NATO. And so all this appears in British press. And, you know, I, you know, I'm on record for saying that,

the British foreign policy establishment. So, okay, not the British people, not the legitimate institutions of British democratic government and so forth, but a, let's call it a covert cabal that's running the British foreign policy are probably the prime movers behind this war. And they are running the strategy, they're running the agenda. And so now they have this, little public relations campaign seated in British media to try to move the public opinion towards let's go all in to help the Ukrainians fight for their freedom and democracy

and all that. I don't feel it. You know, I live here in Europe. I don't feel that anybody has any appetite for going to war against Russia. And I don't know if this public relations campaign will be able to reverse this. I think it would have to be a really spectacular false flag attack that could be credibly blamed on Russia to maybe galvanize the public opinion to saying, okay, let's now go to war let's, you know, all send our children to die on the Eastern Front fighting Russia.

Absent such a miraculous development, I think that Ukraine is done. It's finished. And so what does that mean? You know, that's extremely interesting to ponder. That means, I think, that over the next few months, we might see a ramp Ukraine, landlocked. We might see millions of Ukrainians as refugees in Poland and Germany and France and the UK, primarily. We might see Poland face a perfect storm of economic decline, social decline, and some sort of a, you know, because the Ukrainian Nazis, the far right elements of of the political spectrum in Ukraine, they're kind of, you know, clustered in Western Ukraine towards Poland. And this is the area of Ukraine which Poland wants to reclaim, or at least part of the Polish leadership wants to reclaim very badly, right? They might take political risks and military risks

to try to get that done. Well, these Ukrainian Nazis hate the Poles only slightly less than they hate the Russians and the Jews, right? And so I don't know what kind of a mess Poland has coming its way, but I think it's going to be a huge mess. So Russia is going to consolidate its gains in Ukraine and probably extend them. Ukraine is going to have to sign some kind of a truce with Russia that they're going to hate. And then you're going to see escalating recriminations among these Nazis. We're going to see conflict with the Poles, which anybody's guess what shape that's going to take. but very likely we're going to see Polish intervention in Western Ukraine.

And I think that that's going to destabilize Europe to the point where we're likely to see the beginnings of the end of the European Union and crisis of hyperinflation and probably the whole block falling apart. I agree with you, Alex, in many ways. I think my, my, the, that's one angle on this, and I don't, I don't disagree with that that's not one path. I think that is one path. One of the things that people have to think about here very carefully is that the Russians really want Odessa back. They need to finish this in such a way. And Kissinger came out this week and said, hey, we need to, we need to negotiate a settlement with the Russians here.

And he knows that. but he's not offering anything new. He's offering basically the status quo ante, which is that the Russians get to keep the areas of Denska and Lugansk, which the separatists fought for and got one in 2014, and they get to keep Crimea, but the Russians don't get to keep anything else. That's a non-starter.

And it's clear that Kissinger is not playing with a full deck, but he's desperately trying to start the process. you saw that Ukraine then turned around and called him a Putin apologist and everything else. If the Ukrainians really do think that they're done without a massive influx of foreign intervention. Well, let's talk about a couple of things. One, there's a big buildup of U.S. and Polish forces on the border between Poland and Belarus, and there's a big buildup of Russian and Belarusian forces on the border west of Kiev. So are the Russians and the Belarusians, you know, trying to bind down a whole bunch of NATO forces in the north in order to start a southern campaign in the south to take Odessa and Nikolaev?

Is that what's on the table? It's a good question because we all know that if the Russians take the whole north coast of the Black Sea that gives them access to the Danube River system, the polls then want to move, and then the negotiated settlement is that, order to keep the, if the Russians take that, then the poll, then the negotiated settlement is that the polls then move into, as you said, northwestern Ukraine, take Leviv and all of that area that they've always wanted back, that they're still angry that they lost after World War II. The Hungarians get to take parts of Transcarpathia. The Romanians get to take part of Ukraine as well. And the big thing, this is something that we've been discussing within my community is the idea that the Russians can somehow create a land bridge between Odessa and Hungary directly through

Moldova, meaning the Hungarians push east and get parts of their, which creates a potential for the Russians to get that whole corridor. Then all of a sudden, Hungary is no longer a landlocked country within the surrounded by the European Union. And that gives Hungary an unbelievable amount of power that it doesn't currently have. I don't know that if we're not all talking out our asses here. I don't know if this is schizo posting or whatever you want to call it. But this is clearly the way the map settles out. Whether the Russians have the ability on the ground to do this or not is also still very much up in the air. They haven't proven to anybody yet that they can take this kind of territory. But then again, everybody's lying about how much the Ukrainians have actually

lost. So if the Ukrainians really have lost the numbers that, you know, people like Doug McGregor and others have, you know, believe that they've lost upwards of 100,000 troops. And the Russians have, you know, refilled their lines to the point where they have enough people, artillery, personnel, and whatnot that sometimes in 20, some point in 2023, that there's not a, if not this winner, which I don't think is going to happen, to be honest with you. I think this is going to happen. It's going to happen in 2023. That though the Russians will this continue to wait everybody out, and as the whole thing continues to collapse, they make their move on Odessa and Nicolaia. And then we see what happens after that. I think that's one of the likely outcomes.

I also, I mean, because it's clear that that would be a way by which to really destroy the European Union. Now, the other side of this is Italy. No one's really talking about this. I keep bringing this up. Erdogan in Turkey is off the reservation. He's now making overtures that he wants to meet with Assad. Syria. I'm in 10 years.

Right? Let's really think about this one. Erdogan is going to block, ultimately, he's going to block Finland and Sweden becoming, or Norway and Sweden, becoming members of NATO. Because he's not going to get anything from the West that he wants. Okay. They'll keep playing games exactly.

the way we all predicted they would the minute they started asking for this. Erdogan's going to play games. Erdogan has been offered the gas hub into Eastern Europe by Putin. He wants it. The way he gets that done is to

make nice with Syria. So the Russians can finally go home and end the situation, end their operation in Syria. You've got Vuchits in Serbia trying to stop the EU from starting another war and enforcing the Russians to help Serbia intervene in Kosovo.

Now, I don't know that scenario as well as I should, and I'm sure, Alex, you can speak to this far more, far better than, honestly, I have members of my community who can talk about the whole Serbia-Kosovo thing. It's still actually really confusing to me. But I think I understand the basics, which is that the EU wants to destroy Serbia and by constantly breaking it up and trying to make, put pieces of the former Yugoslavi into the EU, it just, you know, know further puts pressure on Serbia. Serbia is the crossroads for um for trade through Greece into into Serbia and then into parts east into Hungary and the other members of the the visigrats right so like all of this is all in play and if and if Turkey is makes nice in

Syria and they really do build out that infrastructure remember that the Italians can then start to unlock all of the North African gas and the gas wells. From what I understand, the Italians have capped because of EU, stupid EU rules. Like 30% of their, they could, they have gas wells that could easily produce for them 30% of their annual need. And all of a sudden, Italy isn't in an energy deficit anymore, especially with the ending of the Civil War in Libya and Algeria and all of the stuff, that all that gas starts to flow again and starts coming in through Turkey, all of a sudden, Italy can leave the European Union and be a gas exporter to the rest of the Rump EU. And it's not Germany who's in charge of gas distribution by the Nord Stream pipelines.

It's Italy. That changes the entire game board. So the European Union is being broken up bit by bit through all of this stuff. And I don't have a good answer as to how it's all going to play out, but I can just see the pieces on the board moving. And these are all things that are in play for 2023. So, and Putin's aware of all of this. Putin doesn't act like a guy who's in danger of being overthrown, even though I keep hearing very credibly from, you know,

from Martin Armstrong that he is very worried about hard-on in Russia forcing Putin's hand into doing something stupid because they're constantly being pressured with all of these stupid drone attacks and attacks within the Russian border

to try and get the Russians to act dumb and overreact. And so they can get the Russian versions of our neocons to take power from Putin and flip the game board. And, you know, flip the game board.

and do something dumb like New Kiev, now we have the war that they've been begging them, that we in the West, or our leadership in the West, have been begging the Russians for for over a year. Yeah. And that should be the big worry on everybody's, on everybody's plate, as to whether or not Putin can continue to ride herd over all of this

and stay in power through the end of next year. If Putin is still president of Russia by this time of next year, than so much of Davos's plans for their future collapses. Because they're real gambit at this point, guys, is you have to realize that they have made it abundantly clear to the world, that you can either accept our globalist takeover of the world on our terms, or you can have nuclear war. And that's your choice.

That's clearly what they're putting on the table here. Yeah. And I don't, I don't make light of this. I'm not even like, this is real. And it's slowly beginning to dawn on everybody, that that's what we're being pushed towards. Now, when you see that coming down the pike,

and you see enough, if I can see this, then people who are far closer to the corridor, the power can see it. And they have to be making very specific moves to try and thwart this from happening. So, it's going to come down to everybody making the right decisions at the right moment, at the right time. And that's not something you can predict at this point.

Because it's going to come down to the individual decisions by individual men under unbelievable amounts of pressure. And we're all just sitting here waiting to see what happens. And I'm trying really hard not to light another cigar before this thing ends. You know what I mean? Like smoke them if you got them, boys. goes like what do you when you analyze it when you come down to that conclusion what else are you going to do you know and i've got you know i got i got i can't tell you how much i've got to write between now and christmas to get all the you know for all the things i've got on my on my plate

right and we're all in that position right of having to like serve our communities as best as possible i don't and don't get me wrong so i'm happy to have done this today because i think it was important that alex and i and we sit down and we hashed a lot of this stuff out very very timely very important. So I don't want to scare anybody, but unfortunately, I kind of have to because that's the situation. Because if we understand it properly, then we now can get these ideas into the zeitgeist and try and get them somehow possibly get it, you know, derailed in some way, matter, shape, or form. Because, you know, what else have we got? Now, I don't think that that ultimate outcome is the likely scenario. I think they want to threaten us with

this, but not actually go there. Because if they do go there, nobody wins in that scenario. Like, they don't win either. So that's the ultimate game of brinksmanship that's happening here. Yeah. I think it's going to be an ugly

three to four years worth of continued freaking war and provocations in various theaters. And it's going to continue to do this and make us feel like we're once, you know, that we're, you know, we're once, we're three seconds from midnight. And, uh, I, but, you know, I hope I'm wrong. I hope I'm both right and wrong, I guess, is the way I want to put it. That it doesn't actually come to the past, but we have to go through another three years worth of, really, are we doing

this? Christ on a crutch. What do I do? Like, I got my, I got roofers coming tomorrow to put a new roof on my house and I'm almost wondering myself, like, does it matter? Like, you know what I mean? No, what you should do, what you should do is get them to, fix your roof, but then try to convince them that what does it matter whether I pay you or not? No, as I already told my contractor, the goal here is to make sure that it gets done so that it all the money stays local. Like, you know what I mean? Like, I want my community to be, to be strengthened. Like, I want my guys, I want guys who do good, good work capitalized so that they all have jobs and they all have, you know, and we all have a stronger sense.

of community because that's how we're going to get through this. So I'm happily, you know, I'm in a position where I can afford to get a new roof on my house. That was not the case five years ago. So here we are. Well, look, if I can, if I can hedge the talk with a little bit of optimism, I think since a lot of what happens depends on how stable Putin is in power, I think it's very stable. And I think that I think that, I think that,

Putin and the people who are around him, his core team, very much understand what's a stake and they will not take the bait. They will not allow themselves to be provoked into an uncontrolled escalation. And we've seen that. We've already seen them do this, you know, because you saw that, you know, the NATO kind of maneuvered Turkey into downing. Russian helicopter in Syria. And the Russians simply didn't respond

because they were keeping their eye on the ball. They needed Turkey as an ally in the region. So rather than retaliating, they let it go. We saw some terrorist group down an airplane full of Russian passengers flying from Egypt. Yes. They didn't respond. They had something like eight or nine of their diplomats around the world

assassinated since their intervention in Syria. They didn't respond. So they know what they're fighting. They didn't respond to the IL20 shootdown over Syria in 2018, which they knew that the French and the Brits were behind. And they concocted a fairy tale that they got even got the Israelis to admit they were the bad guys. That's how good the Russian diplomats are. Exactly. Exactly. So, you know, that that tells you that they understand perfectly well what what the stakes are and that

they will not allow themselves to be provoked into an uncontrolled escalation over some slight that, you know, in the greater scheme of things, you know, you can take a punch in the face here and there. If it doesn't knock you out, you just carry on your fight to win, not to respond to every, you know, to every offense. And, you know, the team that's in charge is clearly laser-focused on defeating the Western Empire. and defending the new multipolar order. And I think that every thinking person should welcome that. I think that people are still largely confused about the meaning of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

I think there's a good percentage of the population who still think that this is the fight between the good and evil, meaning that the Ukrainians are fighting for freedom and democracy, blah, blah, blah, blah, and that evil Russians are, you know, invading unjustifiably using violence and all, you know, everything bad. It's not like that. It's not like that at all. I'll tell you, Alex, it's funny. Merkel, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel coming out last week or week before and saying, look, the Minsk agreements were nothing but a time buying exercise so that we could arm Ukraine to fight the Russians eventually. that's effectively a Kansas Beli.

I mean, I sat down and my partner in Gold Goats and Guns, Dexter White, has not been charitable to Putin at all. He has been absolutely, you know, up until that moment, he's been, look, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was unjustified under international law. And he was really not wrong. And then we were chatting about this the other day and he's like, after she said that publicly, now it may have been that everybody knew that that was the case. But she said it publicly now. And now how else do you interpret that statement other than that's a full justification for Putin to have invaded Ukraine? Like NATO effectively said, yeah, we were arming Ukraine to fight the Russians eventually. Yeah. Yeah, that's a Kazas Beli from the Russian's point of view. That's a big share from someone who is literally one of the biggest critics of

Putin and of the Russian position from an international law perspective, from a claustive perspective, even from a military a military perspective. And for him to say that to me was stark. Because I said, and but I said to him,

even during conversation, I said, of course that was always the, and he's like, I know, but they never admitted it publicly. Now that she's admitted a public, what does that even mean? Why did she even do it? So she did it to rubbed to her to try and get them to attack and go off half cocked and he's like Jesus I guess that's what we're dealing with

yeah yeah yeah the only the only thing I would say is that you know people have to wise up to look at things for what they are rather than for what they tell you they are because you know like even if Merkel never said what she said that was the state of things. It was damn obvious based on the pattern of behavior of everybody involved. It was obvious. So why do you only reconsider your position when you're told so by the people who have been deceiving you for eight years straight? I can answer that question really simply and that ultimately, you know, if there was going to be any kind of,

kind of negotiated settlement, up until her saying that, the Russians had not a leg to stand on for any of the territory they took in negotiations. And it's been Dexter's position and rightly so. Tommy, you just clicked yourself to mute. Yeah. The, um, that his position was that if there was going to be a negotiated settlement, they didn't have a negotiated leg to stand on from any kind of international law legal perspective.

He was taking a very nuanced approach to this. from the position of all the players at the table. It's a fair argument. It's not, you know, it's a fair argument. I'm, of course, taking a position. I'm thinking, I agree with you, Alex. I think that, you know, and I, and I, he and I've argued publicly on multiple podcasts about this,

that, you know, from my perspective, I'm like, yeah, that's nice, but the real politics of the situation is clearly NATO wanted this fight. Clearly, this is what's going on. And if you're from the Russian's perspective, you're like, I don't give a shit at this point. I don't give a fuck.

Fuck you people. You're trying to kill our country. I mean, now you're out there and you've got, you know, you've got MI6 adjuncts like that, that the bitch that was saying, oh, this is what the partitioned Russia is going to look like. They've been publishing those frigging maps for 20 years or more. Like, it's not like that any of this is lost on the Russians that they're trying to, you know, destroy the country so they can, you know, partition it, break it up so they can take all its mineral wealth. Like, it's so obvious.

So like, you know, at the end of the day, like all that legal stuff is nice, but no one cares at this point because none of the rules actually matters. They've kind of been my point for a long time because ultimately at the end of the day, where everybody's arguing from everybody's like playing the rhetoric game, while the reality is that it's might makes right. Yeah, exactly. And like, you know, at the end of the day, I'm like, dude, I'm Italian. Like, you punch me in the nose enough freaking times. Like, that's it. I kill your children. That's the way the Russians are acting at this point.

And maybe, you know, and maybe it is a drunken bar fight between angry Slavs at the end of the day. But, you know, okay. Or maybe it's much bigger than that. And much, and maybe it's about more than that. And, you know, it can be, it can be all of those things at the same time and still be accurate. So it's just, you know, I'm not, again, this is not me trying to like, I'm not, This is just putting it all out there in the panoply of perspectives on this. It's a very complicated situation.

And, you know, we'll see how it plays out. And I don't know that, again, until the Russians proved to me that they have the military capacity to take Odessa, I remain skeptical that they're going to do anything other than faint like they are. and then eventually someone will come to the conclusion that we're going to have to negotiate peace, which would be the preferred outcome at this point for everybody. But I don't think that that negotiation happens until the European Union starts to break up. I think that the logic of this conflict imposes that the Russians have to go all the way, not just the Russians, but the Russian-Chinese alliance, they have to go all the way

because otherwise all they get is maybe two, three decades of peace. Just the time to allow the West to regroup and to rearm. Because, you know, this obsession with breaking up Russia is the fight between the Western Empire trying to take hold of all of the earth and countries that are able to resist resisting

and so if Russia fell we are in the end game it's a dark age it's a dark age for centuries it would be the dark ages for centuries for all of us and I mean when I say dark ages I mean like really dark because you see where the Davos people

are taking this you know I mean for God's sakes they in Canada, they they euthanized 10,000 people in the last how much year or two? When did they check the law?

When did they bring the law? Yeah, Maid came in in, I believe, 2015 is a year will get elected. So it's somewhere between 2015 and 2016. The stat you're looking for is in 2016, it was a thousand people used the maid service, so we're euthanized, killed.

And in 2021, I believe, is the year. It was 10,000. So it's already up from a thousand. Okay, so 2021, it was 10,000, not the 10,000 for the whole six years. No, no, no. That's insane. I think this is how many what, 30 million people?

38 million. That's like the leading cause of death in Canada now is euthanasia. Probably not. You know, the point is that these things tend to grow with accretion. People get used to it. Then the definitions kind of, metastasize and broaden and now it's like you have trouble going up and down the stairs in your in your flat well we can just take care of that for you and you'll never worry about that again

well and and here's here's the here's the here's the crazy thing Alex on Tom all right like I've interviewed Rupa supermania on it and you know like they're trying to push for mentally ill to be put in there so that they can access it. They're trying to push for mature minors so they can have access. I don't even know what that is. You know, I just, I don't think that exists. Mentally ill, you know, then you tie that into what William Mac,

Dr. William Macas has talked openly about, and that is that in Ontario, they were lightly saying, if somebody doesn't want to be vaccinated, that maybe you give them medicine, like psychiatric, you know, like maybe they're mentally unwell. And you're like, and then you tie that into, made and you're like like I'm not what you know at times that folks I'm one for the conspiracy theory and let's let's see what it is and let's kind of dig in there

but when you start just like saying aloud what is going on in Canada right now you're like holy crap this gets dark you talk about dark this is dark dark real fast it's stuff that just a few years ago you you you know you might find in in some dystopian sci-fi movie but this is real and this is you know like this is just the start. Where are they taking it? Is it going to be like the moment you become a net consumer of capital rather than

a net producer of capital, we just reserve the right to switch you off? Logan's run. Get rid of everybody over the age of 30. Yes. There you go. What's really scary is actually actually what's really scary is you all know I'm a huge Philip K. Dick fan

and reading all those dystopian novels of Dick's and his short stories over the years. One of the things that always stands out to me, and it's one of his lesser works, Martian Time Slip, it reminds me the main character, most of Dick's

characters were all of these, were these middle-aged men who were all going through massive emotional distress and enwee, because they were sold one world. And they were sold one thing and then they were on a life path that left them empty and, you know,

either a work in marriage or just a bad job or whatever it is. And In Martian Times Slip, this poor guy is a plumber effectively on a dying, on a barely subsistence Martian colony, just going through the motions, right, of his life. And I'll never forget this, reading this book at like 14, and this guy has got a master's degree who can't get a job as a plumber because we've got, we had, because he predicted then, we'd have degree inflation where you had to get a master's degree to even be able to have a basic level job, right? And the overwhelming sense of ennui of depression and schizophrenia that these men were dealing with because the world had now devalued them to the point where they weren't even functional as in their basic capacity as caregivers as heads of household or anything else. And that's endemic. Like that's all through Phil Dick's uvra. And it's that more than anything else he predicted was where we were going to want.

wind up. And that's exactly the world that Davos is making for us today. And all the men who are standing up and saying, you know what, fuck you, we're not going to do that. We're not going to live like that. We're not going to live like fucking ants. They're not going to live. They're the ones that are on the list. Yeah. Okay. Those are the ones there are the men who are sitting here right now. Those are the ones that they, that they want to grind into paste. They need to grind them. It's that vision of the boot stamping on the human face forever. This is what wins if Russia falls. So that's why, you know, I think that people who don't understand that need to pay closer attention

because nobody in the West cares even a little bit about Ukraine's freedom and democracy, which is, by the way, fiction because Ukraine. is a fascist country. Zelensky has completely done away with all opposition media, opposition parties. He has armed thugs and assassination gangs going around taking care of collaborators or whoever they don't like. They have killed their political opponents, journalists, you know, all of the things that are being written about, Russian Putin is actually rampant in Ukraine.

It's just that Ukraine is now fighting the empire's fight. So, you know, the lens gets to be promoted and they get to be presented as the good guys. But you know, like with everything else we get from our media, the truth is exactly the diametrical opposite. Yeah. And it's just, it's just deep psychological. projection. This is what they're doing. So now we have to put,

we have to take that and shadow project that on to somebody else. It's a classic kind of union shadow projections. There's nothing. What's interesting also, Alex, is that to bring this right back to the beginning of the conversation about the Fed and Powell and all of this stuff is the following.

When I talk, when I go through this for people and they go, okay Tom, if you're right about all this and the Fed is going to take this all the way to its natural conclusion. It means it's going to be bad for everybody. It means we're not going to avoid a deep recession or if not a depression here in the United States. It's not going to be easy. We're all going to have to, it's going to be bad. I'm like, yeah, I didn't say it was going to be easy,

folks. But I got news for you. We've lived in this life of false prosperity for so many years, thanks to all this credit-based inflation. Now we have to come back. And I keep saying over and over again. Like, why is everybody so scared of deflation? Yes, deflation invariably comes with war and this and that and everything else. Sure, but at the same time, it also means tribes get smaller, communities get stronger because as the, as deflation takes hold, of course, the psychopaths are going to run wild. Those who have no moral compass will prey on the weaker. That means the weak have to band together and get stronger. And that to find deep reserves within themselves that they didn't have before. This is how, we get through stuff like this. This is the cycle of history. How did the Russians come out of the

1990s to be where they are today? They had to hit rock bottom. I hate to say it. It's horrible. It is what it is, but we have been placed in this situation. Now the deflation allows us all to find those inner reserves of strength that we didn't even know we had. We either sink or swim in this moment. And it's why I keep telling everybody, we know, well, how do you get out of this. And I'm like, it's not called gold, goats and guns for a fucking, for no goddamn reason. These are the ways you get out of this. You bring it back down to the brass fucking tax. You bring it back down to savings, basic investment, and defense of your assets. And you look at your balance sheet that way. You look at your relationships that way. You look at your business that way.

You look at every aspect of your life that way. And you figure out ways of strengthening your local community, whatever that happens to be. And I don't know if... Amen. You know, and I was, it's, it's one of the things that I'm asked all the time by new patrons and, and by people, it says, Tom, like, I live here wherever the here is. It's bad. It's getting worse. What do I do? Do I stay where I am? Or do I, you know, expat somewhere else? Or I go somewhere else? I'm like, I don't know what that answer is for you, because I don't know your life. But all I can ask, All I can really say to you is if your local community is strong, if your connections to your friends and your family are solid, then you may be better off just toughing it out where you are, regardless of how bad it is, because that's how you're going to get through this. It's the people around you that you've invested your real capital and your time and your energy and your and your emotions and the depth of your, and their passion, that which is, which makes you, you,

you and makes you valuable to them. That's how you're going to get through it. I don't know how else to tell you. And if you don't have any of that, well, then yeah, get to a free and jurisdiction that, you know, you might be able to find like-minded people to build that community with. But if you're, if you're an island, then do that. But if you're not an island, it's why I stayed in Florida.

I seriously thought about going like 19 different places in the world. And ultimately, we said, no, I think we're right. We're best right where we are. You can build, Tom, you can do exactly what you're saying, even if you don't have it. You can build it. You just got to start talking to people and communicating and find them. They're all, they're sitting around everywhere. Everywhere around you, they're sitting there.

And they're waiting for somebody to take the lead, Sean. Yes, they are. They're all waiting for it. They can all feel something's coming. They all see the strangeness going on. They just got to start to band together and start to talk to one another. And all of a sudden, you have a little community awfully quick. You don't got to go looking on the other side of the world for that.

I agree. Like, dude, I'm not a terribly religious man, right? I mean, I've got, you know, we can have the spirituality talk another day. But when it comes down to on a daily list, I don't go to church on Sunday. I was raised Catholic, but I don't go. But I'm thinking to myself, you know, dude, if I need to find like-minded people in this moment in time, where am I, where else am I going to find those people? I know where they are.

They're the people of faith that are, like, going out and, you know, fixing people's plumbing and raising cows and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and the rest of shit that we do in this lot in this agricultural community that I that I basically live in. You know, the people who are, you know, I need somebody who's going to fix my roof. How did I find this guy? I called a friend of mine who also supplies me with cows. Like, you know what I mean? And does the road work to keep my to keep my, uh, my private road from, you know,

kind of, you know, swallowing my car every other year after all the rains. Like this is what we did. do. And this is how you build a community. And, you know, and then, and that money, we all keep each other alive. And, you know, when I go to the feed store, I make sure that, like, I sit down and I chat with the guys over there and, you know, make sure that I buy my local feed here, even though I might be able to get a better price somewhere else. No, I'm going to, I'm going to make sure that money stays here in my hometown to make sure that people are solving. And that's that. Yeah. Because they're, they're doing the work every day to make sure that I stay fed.

Any final thoughts, Alex, or Tom, for that matter. I appreciate, you know, as always, you two giving me time, and I hope the listeners enjoyed another installation of Tom and Alex on here, riffing as they go. I want to say Merry Christmas to both you, you know, because we will not talk until the new year, I assume. It's been, you know, I don't know what to say about, you know, the podcast leads me in very, very interesting.

directions and certainly it started with Tom who introduced me to Alex and then now of course we've this is the third installment of this and so Merry Christmas to you both and wish you all the best here in the new year and everything else but if there's any final thoughts you got Alex here's the time and place and then I'll let you guys get on with your day okay well thank you and Merry Christmas to you as well and to all the listeners and viewers who are who celebrate my I think that it's extremely important to always cultivate optimism. So I always like the final note to be optimistic. And this is not, you know, contrived fake optimism.

I really genuinely feel this way because I like that Tom mentioned how Russia got out from where it was at the end of the 1990s to where it is now. nations when they're allowed to develop in liberty do rise up from the ashes like the phoenix you know it's it's a it's a war and cliche but it does happen again and again and again through history and the united states is definitely one such nation that has shown incredible resilience uh it has incredible dynamism in its in its economic system which is uh broad, diverse, well-developed, that is going to happen. United States is a very special, I'm not American, right?

I'm Croatian. I don't live in the United States. So it's not, I'm not talking my book. But the United States is extremely important to the rest of the humanity. And I think that that transformation is going to happen. Of course, when you're in the depth of the doldrums, when you're at the stage where you're about to hit the bottom, it's very difficult to see this. But, you know, there's a beautiful Confucian saying that says that when a big tree breaks, it breaks with terrible noise and destruction. But seeds, they grow without noise. And so what you get is that what we're experiencing now is the collapse. of these systems that have led us into misallocation of wealth, into, let's say, misguided

economic development. And this is now coming apart. And people are mesmerized. And everything looks like shit. And so it's very easy to succumb to pessimism and to think like, fuck, it's all done. We might not even be able to survive this. And some people won't. But let's keep it in perspective, you know, even in World War II, you know, the Russians took a lot of casualties.

But, you know, Germany, let's say France, UK, you know, we're talking about 1.3% of the population. For the UK, we're talking like 0.7.8% of the population for the United States. So it's like even when things are really bad, it's like a relative. relatively small percentage of the population that suffers really, really bad. But we're at a point of inflection where things are going to be hitting the rock bottom and then rapidly improving. You know, like that improvement happens rapidly. So Russia, at the end of the 1990s, so this is just 30 years ago, was, no, sorry, 20 years

ago was at the end of the one of the deepest and longest recessions recorded in the 20th century. It lost between 3 and 4 percent of its population. It was dramatically bad. Vladimir Putin rightly says it was one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century. Maybe he said it was the greatest tragedy of the 20th century because he understood that it had other ramifications. that the war in Ukraine was coming and so forth. Anyway, today Russia is a force to be reckoned with. It's reached the levels of prosperity. It has never had before.

It is stronger than ever. And the United States will have the same turnaround, I'm sure of it. So I think that people who are looking at this shit show today actually have a lot to look forward to. And there is light at the end of the tunnel. and if Tom's interpretation of what's going on up at the Fed is correct, and I believe it is, then that's one crazy curveball that's going to take down this dystopian Davos project. And I believe that Russia and the United States will become allies again like they were throughout the 19th.

century. And that's very important for both nations. I think it's important to the entirety of humanity, to be honest. Exactly. If those two countries can finally

find their way back and keep the Europeans from driving them apart, which is what they've been doing for 150 years, then yeah, then the second half of the 21st century, which I'm not going to say, I was going to look a whole lot better than the first half.

Yep. Well, boys, I appreciate you giving me some time yet again, and look forward to, you know, continuing this chat on into 2023 as I'm sure events will continue to unfold. Either way, thanks again, and, well, happy holidays, Merry Christmas. Appreciate you doing this, you know, as we close in right before Christmas time. So thanks again, and, yeah, we'll catch up. you in the new year. Great pleasure. Thank you, Tom. Thank you, Sean. And until the next

happy occasion, Merry Christmas and all the best in 2023 and beyond. Sincerely. Absolutely. You guys be well. Take care. Bye.