Shaun Newman Podcast - #979 - Luke Gromen

Episode Date: January 7, 2026

Luke Gromen is a macroeconomic analyst and researcher with over 30 years of experience in equity research, sales, and thematic analysis. He is the founder and president of FFTT, LLC (Forest for the Trees), an independent research firm he established in 2014 to provide institutional and individual investors with in-depth insights into global economic trends, bottlenecks, and interconnected macroeconomic themes, often by "connecting the dots" across siloed data sources. Tickets to Cornerstone Forum 26’: https://www.showpass.com/cornerstone26/Tickets to the Mashspiel:https://www.showpass.com/mashspiel/Silver Gold Bull Links:Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/Email: [e-mail] Grahame: [phone]Bow Valley Credit UnionBitcoin: www.bowvalleycu.com/en/personal/investing-wealth/bitcoin-gatewayEmail: [e-mail] Prophet River Links:Website: store.prophetriver.com/Email: [e-mail] the code “SNP” on all ordersGet your voice heard: Text Shaun 587-217-8500

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The Cornerstone Forum returns March 28th at the Calgary Weston Airport Hotel. The big news of the week, Premier Daniel Smith, going to be there speaking alongside, or I guess in the same grouping of Martin Armstrong, Tom Longo, Alex Craneer, Vince Lange, Mattair, Chad Prather, Karen Katowski, Sam Cooper, Tom Bodrovics. And yes, twos will be making appearance as well. Well, grab your tickets down in the show notes, there's the link, or go to showpass.com backslash cornerstone 26. That day is shaping up to be, well, hopefully the best cornerstone forum yet.

And I know with all you lovely people who are attending, I think it is going to be the best one yet. If you're listening or watching on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Rumble, X, Facebook, Substack, make sure to subscribe, make sure to leave a review. If you're on Substack, consider becoming a paid member. And supporting the SNP, you get a little behind-the-scenes action of not only my life, but some of the things going on in the podcast world. All right, let's get on to that tale of the tape. Today's guest is a macroeconomic analyst and researcher with over 30 years of experience

and equity research, sales, and thematic analysis. He is the founder and president of FFTT LLC, an independent research firm. I'm talking about Luke Grohlman. So buckle up. Here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Today I'm joined by Luke Grohlman. Sir, thanks for hopping on.

Thanks for having me on, Sean. I'm excited to be here. Happy New Year to you. Yeah, well, happy New Year to you as well. You come very highly recommended from a bunch of different guests I've had on here. But before I guess we get into anything specific, First time on the show, Luke, tell the fine folks a little bit about yourself. Sure.

So I've been in investments for 30 years and I guess over 30 years now, which is a little frightening, but started off in investment research as an analyst, and then I was a founding partner or an early partner, excuse me, in a firm called Midwest Research that were pioneers in bottoms up fundamental research. What we found, we started off doing, maybe let me back up a second. When I started in the business in the mid-90s, investment research consisted essentially of calling the company, the CFO, the investor relations person, the CEO, having the analysts do that and then report back and then the sales force would call investors and that was that was how the how the institutional research business essentially work. What we started finding in that late

1990s as for a number of different reasons, a business cycle turned down is that when things start going bad, the management started lying to you. And so our analysts would call the CFO and say, hey, Joe, how is business? Hey, business is good. Feel good about the quarter, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then three days later, Joe would come out and pre-announced the quarter that they had missed, that sales had been disappointing, and the stock was down that we had a buy recommendation on. So we realized this wasn't a very good setup. So what we started doing was we created from scratch a bottoms up fundamental research business, where we still talk to Joe, the CFO, we still talk to the IR person, we still talk to the CEO, etc. But now we also talk to

Joe's suppliers and we talked to Joe's competitors and we talked to private competitors and we talked to and we would build a mosaic basically of a bottoms up intelligence and we would pick up on trends before other people and in that business in that at that firm I was one of the founding editors of I was not a founding partner but I was a founding editor of a weekly piece that summarized these bottoms up fundamental data points because before long, we were talking to thousands of different private contacts around the world in retail and consumer industries, industrial, tech, health care. And I would aggregate these into a sort of bottoms up macro thematic piece that became very widely read. A group of us in 2006 left Midwest research. We sold that business of First Tennessee Bank.

in 2001, worked for FTN Midwest through 01, and then in 06, a group of about 20 or 25 of us left and formed Cleveland Research Company doing much of the same type of work. And there too, I was the editor of a weekly piece that was summarizing this bottoms up work. And so I have a very deep experience in connecting dots, for whatever reason, the way my brain works. My clients say I'm very good at connecting dots. And so I like to read. I can read fast. I retain a lot. I retain it for a long time. And I'm good at connecting dots. And that's what I did for clients in each of those firms, at each of those prior to firms. And into the 08 crisis,

we helped clients a whole lot. You know, personally, I was all in cash by fourth quarter of 07 based on what we were seeing, you know, the S&P 500 in October of that year traded in an all-time high. Shortly thereafter, by luck of the draw, the things we were hearing, I went to all cash my own investments, was sort of telling, you know, everyone that would listen, client, relatives, hey, something wicked this way comes. And so I got a lot of experience, not just putting together data points, but seeing how it tracks with, you know, seeing how it tracks in markets, seeing how it plays out in markets, which is really important. because knowing is just half the battle.

The second battle is, you know, how do you make money with it? How do you help clients with it? And then into and after the 08 crisis, it helped a lot of people. The markets became much more central bank and macro-driven after 2008. And I began spending much more of my time doing that by 2014 and went to my partners at Cleveland Research Company, said, hey, I want to do macro-thematic work full-time. They said, hey, great. And I said, I have one caveat.

I want to be able to write whatever. I want to write because I feel like as crazy as things have been up till 2014, I think they're going to get a lot crazier. And I need to be able to say what I need to say. And from a sort of market and marketing perception, positioning standpoint, you know, they're really known for very excellent deep bottom and bottom bottoms up fundamental research. I want to do more top down stuff. So we parted ways amicably. I hung on my own shingle as FFTT, Forest for the T, is what that stands for, and I aggregate large amounts of publicly available data in a unique manner trying to identify what I call developing economic bottlenecks. And perfect example of what

that is in the housing crisis. Sector selection is really key to securities, to investment outperformance. You could have bought the best home builder in America in 2005, and you only would have lost 90% of your money instead of 95% of your money or 98. percent of your money. And so what I'm looking for are the thematic and fundamental drivers to cross a number of different themes, primarily U.S. centric, but looking for sectors that are going to either benefit from or be hurt by these developing economic bottlenecks. So that was a little longer than I planned, but that gives you a sense of a 30-year career and call it three or four minutes. Well, you can't, it's a podcast. You go as long as you want to go, Luke. Nobody's going to stop

you on this side. When you start connecting dots, here we sit in 2026. You just had Maduro, right, falling back to the United States, some people applauding, some people not. I'm not worried about the applauding or not with you. If you want to get into that, you have Adder. But when you're connecting dots and looking at 2026, what do you see them? I think 2026 is going to be a bit of an exciting year, a spicy year. And I thought that before, you know, I thought that as I was kind of closing up the books for 2025, I'm like, whew, this is going to be an interesting year.

And we didn't have to wait long for it to start to get interesting. Wake up on Saturday morning. And it's like, okay, here's this going on. Now, as I connect the dots, this is one of these situations where, in my experience, you can start to see the what, but you don't know exactly. how it's going to formulate yet.

I've equated it in the past to the movie Jaws, right? Famous famous movie Jaws where, you know, we start the movie seeing the girl swimming and, okay, whatever. And she washes up on the beach. And everybody's like, oh, I think it was just a boating accident. You know, and then, you know, sadly, the little kid gets crunched and they're like, oof, well, you know, that's not good. And then they catch a shark and they're like, hey, we got it.

Everyone go back in the water. And, you know, the guy's like on the sidewalk, hey, this isn't the shark. The bite radius doesn't match. There's something bigger out there. He's like, well, don't say anything. So it's a little, and then finally, only at the end of the movie, do we see the shark and they're, oh gosh, we're going to need a bigger boat. And I feel there are a few times in my career where I felt like, okay, well, we've seen, you know, we're seeing sort of swimmers wash up on the beach. And, you know, people are like, well, it's just a boating accident.

And I feel like that's kind of where we are heading into 2026. And what I mean by that is across a number of different sectors, right? Japanese 10-year bond yields are over 2% for the first time in like 30 years and like rising. That's a problem. I don't know how it's going to be a problem, but it's a problem. Tech, you know, you've got AI disruption where we're starting to see, again, these sort of swimmers washing up on the beach of, hey, this formerly untouchable white-collar career that gets paid a lot of money,

just had AI do its job for it in like 30 seconds. That's a problem. That's fundamentally incompatible with our debt-based monetary system. Because when lawyers start getting fired because AI is, you know, they still have mortgages to pay, they still have car loans to pay, et cetera.

The geopolitical side is obviously still a problem. And I would argue, hotter now than it was 72 hours ago. The U.S. deficit side, quietly for all of the cheering, you know, that we got this time a year ago about Doge. Doge failed, as we thought it would at the time. If we'd have been sitting here a year ago, would have told you like, it's a joke. It's not going to happen. Reshoring, you know, we just saw the U.S. ISM manufacturing index.

It's actually down. New orders are down. There's not reshoring happening right now. And if new orders are down, it's not happening for the next three to four. or five months. There's some concerns about an AI bubble within the financing side of that. And the U.S. deficit side, I guess to tie back to that is, is even with record tariffs, U.S. true interest expense, which is the interest we're paying and the entitlements that we're

paying, that's basically the things that are on and off balance sheet that look like interest on debt, there are 100% of receipts. With receipts, with the stock market at all-time highs, with the, employment still very good, and with, with tariffs aiding those numbers, which means we really can't service anything more than entitlements and interest without printing money. And then you've got sort of what I would call accelerating resource constraints, tightness, wars, whatever you want to talk about it. And I think part of that is some of what fed into Venezuela this weekend.

But when you take all of these things, these are all sort of swimmers washing up on the beach. And I know they're not good. And I know, but I don't know how they're going to interplay with each other. I don't know how quickly you're going to interplay with each other. But they leave me with a sense of concern about, you know, it really comes down to one question, which is, are the authorities going to go to sort of hyper-printing fast enough or are they not? It basically sets up a situation where anything less than monster printing is tightening by the authorities. And so that's kind of where I'm sitting at as I sit here in 2026 for the moment.

Okay, you rattled off, I think, one, two, three, four, five, six, I think six things. Japanese bond yield, 2% first time in 30 years. AI and the growth of it, which I think everyone has seen. Yep. Geopolitics in general just being hotter than it's been. I don't think anybody can argue that, especially with Venezuela, right? Like, I mean, we were talking about that in December and some of the things going on offshore of it. And has that heated up?

Nobody's going to argue that. the U.S. deficit growing, printing money, okay, reshoring all these tariffs and the idea of bringing everything back to America not happening and accelerating resource constraints, which I mean with everything getting hotter, that makes once again complete sense. So, if you were staring at one of these, you'd be like, okay, what does that mean? And I go, all right, now I got six of them in front of me. What does that mean, Luke? It means I'm glad I do what I do and not what

a lot of our policymakers, not sitting in their seats. What is... Sorry, I guess using the Jaws analogy, right? Okay? If we're at the stage of everybody washing up on the beach, oh, it was a boating accident, it was a couple of those.

That would mean we're into we're going to catch the shark that actually isn't the shark, which means you come to your final point of they're either going to print a ton of money or they're going to put constraints on it and try and tighten the noose or tighten the screw or whatever you want to tighten and that would be the false shark the false jaws is is that you're like one of these two things happens and if that happens then what does the average person expect to see i i think to me you know something i've been saying for over gosh

probably six years now, at least, has been that Bitcoin's the last functioning smoke alarm of liquidity. And so when Bitcoin goes from 120,000 down to 80,000 pretty quickly the way it did, and it's bounced back up to 92, 93, something like that today, 1,000, I think Bitcoin is warning something very wicked this way comes. And I think there's an order of operations to this year, you know, as you're looking at this as the average person, I think there's an order of operations to this year that, as I sit here today, that we're most likely to see, which is, you know, policymakers think they have the shark, right? Look at, you know, just jump on X or jump on whatever and look at all the chest thumping around, hey, you know, we're back, you know, we grab them.

America can just do things, blah, blah, blah. And I, that ain't the shark. That's not the, that's, that's not the shark that's washing things up on the beach. And if anything, these actions might actually make, If it's, if we're using that metaphor, they're making the actual shark bigger, faster, stronger. But we can touch on that in a bit. But I think there's an order of operations of a whoosh down in terms of, you know, one of these factors, whether it's Japanese bonds, whether it's deficit, right? So Japanese yields going up is going to put upward pressure on U.S. yields, downward pressure on the global financial market.

at some point. I don't know when, but it will. It's a, it's a virtual certainty. When does that happen? I don't know, probably in the first half of this year. AI disruption. I'm watching this happen. And there's a great quote by the physicist Albert Bartlett, where he says the greatest shortcoming of the human race is the inability to comprehend the exponential function. And this, so this is not only things where I can't comprehend it either, but 30 years in markets, I can tell when there's an exponential function, and I just know, I compare the exponential function to the expectations and markets, and people are too complacent. They're like, oh, it's going to be fine. There's something coming on the employment front.

You know, that's where this is starting to show up. We're already seeing it. Sort of the swimmer washing up on the beach as it relates to AI creating deflationary job pressures is unemployment, 20 to 25-year-old college graduates. It's already 7%. you take that 7% number forget 7 you take it to 5.5 or 6 across the broader U.S. economy kaboom you're going to have a problem you're going to have a deflationary whoosh before you hop into the rest of them then let's go back to the Japanese bond yield for a second as a man who does not have 30 years staring at this what is this significance of the bond

yield at 2% the first time in 30 years like you have a sports guy on this side, once upon a time. And, you know, like, they just said, Sidney Crosby, first NHL player to ever get 50 points in overtime. I'm like, who cares? Who cares? Right? Like, I mean, it's just another useful stat for people that like stats of the NHL. Now, I'm not saying that of the Japanese bond yield,

but I'm like, make it, make, break that down for me on the importance and the ramifications of it going to 2% and how that is going to impact not only Americans, but the North America as a whole. You know, I sit here in Canada. I go, well, how's that going to impact me? Sure, sure. No, it's a great question. Back in the late 80s, Japan had a bubble and then it burst.

They, as in response to that, cut rates to zero percent. They're central bank, the bank of Japan. That began to touch off something that came to be known as the yen carry trade, which means financiers around the world would go borrow in Japan in yen at zero percent and then take the proceeds and bid up assets elsewhere around the world, American stocks, American bonds, you know, all kinds of stuff. And that went on for almost 20 years. Borrowing yen, you have to hedge the yen, that's a little bit technical.

But the bottom line is, for a layman, Japan was a bank funding lots of asset markets and around the world and asset prices. And as a result, given the importance of asset prices to America and consumption in particular, but more broadly around the world, now the rate going up in Japan, it's not so much that 2% matters. It's that it's gone from zero to 2%. Which means there will be less people using the yen to buy up assets around the world. Think about it in this terms. Bank of Canada cuts rates to zero. Everyone goes out and, you know, we know what's happened to home prices in Vancouver and Toronto and this and that. Now, imagine the Bank of Canada raises rates from zero to one to two.

When does, when do the house? housing markets in Vancouver and Toronto go boom. I don't know. But, you know, if everyone's highly levered, you know, if everyone has put 10% down on their house or 5% down, it means two things. Number one, we don't know when home prices are going to start to fall and when the housing market's going to lock up. But we know it will eventually. And maybe it's not till two and a half. Maybe it's not till 3%. The other thing is de facto, if everybody only put 10% down on their houses, when home prices start to fall, whatever rate that is, every homeowner in those cities that has 10% down and home prices drop 15%. You now are in negative equity position.

Now, I'm not saying that's going to happen. But that's a metaphor I would say is we don't basically, Japan was the lender to a whole bunch of borrowing activity in asset markets around the world for 20 to 30 years. Nobody really knows the number. And that's sort of just the first side of it. The other side of it is as Japan cut rates to zero, well, if you're a bondholder in the U.S. or a bondholder in Japan, excuse me, or an asset holder, you've got to go look elsewhere for acceptable returns. And they did because Japan's a creditor country. They run trade surpluses with basically everybody.

And so Japan has what they call a net international investment position, which is just if you take the total amount of assets owned by Japanese and subtract the amount of Japanese assets that foreigners own in Japan, if that number is positive, that's a positive net international investment position. If it's negative, foreigners own more of Japanese assets than Japanese own a foreign asset. The net international investment position in Japan is roughly positive 70% of GDP. In other words, there's probably $3 trillion, $4 trillion that the Japanese have invested abroad. And at some point, I don't know if it's 2% on the 10-year yield in Japan or 3%.

They go, you know what? That's acceptable for me now. I'm pensioner. They're a very old country. I'm going to bring the money back. Well, what do you have to sell to bring the money back? you have to sell American assets, you have to sell Canadian assets, you have to sell European wherever that money is, and a lot of it's in America, they start repatriating that capital.

So you've got a double whammy for risk markets at some point of, hey, everyone, you know, part of what has supported asset markets across the West and in the U.S. specifically has been this yen carry trade. Hey, borrow cheaply, buy assets, earn a positive spread. Well, now the spread is shrinking. And then number two, this net international investment position where the Japanese at some point will take the, you know, it's essentially the Bank of Japan is bribing Japanese to bring their money back home. And at some point they'll take the bribe. And I don't know if it's 2% or 2.5% or 3. Who knows? And we don't know which one breaks first, but we know with very high certainty that both of those two things are bad for asset markets in America. We know with certainty that

asset markets in America are the key marginal driver to consumer spending in America. We've done work that shows that if you look at U.S. consumer spending, which is two-thirds of our GDP, if you look at the annual growth of U.S. consumer spending, net capital gains plus taxable IRA distributions, individual retirement account distributions, are 200% of the annual growth in consumer spending. In other words, if stocks fall in America, there is no American consumer growth. There is no GDP growth. The U.S. then goes into a recession.

And things start to unwind very fast there. So that's why the Bank of Japan, that is like the way to think about Japanese bond yields at 2% is, you know, every time they go up a little higher, they're pulling Jenga blocks out of the bottom of the giant, giant levered financial. financialized economy and market system. Thank you. Honestly, that helps explain why that's one of the six. Okay. Yep.

That doesn't sound good. No, it's not good. Then, okay, now go to AI growth. You're talking about youth unemployment rate

and how at 5% it isn't good and it currently sits at 7. I think, am I saying that correct? I would know that overall employment. If overall employment hit five, it would be a problem. What I'm saying is, is that there's this view that AI is just, it's going to be positive and productivity driving.

And yes, eventually. But everyone's skipping over sort of the first part, right? It's, we saw this when China entered the WTO. When China entered the WTO, they were the first AI productivity miracle, right? It was, hey, corporate America is like, let's send our job. to China, we'll reduce manufacturing, we'll send our factories to China. We can make a lot more cheaper, faster, et cetera. Okay, great. This is just AI. It just, you know, same thing. We hear the same thing that AI is going to do, except it's doing it to more white-collar employment. Okay.

Manufacturing employment in the United States fell 35% in the seven years after China went into the WTO and has never recovered. Never. It's bounced off the bottom, dead cat bounces, we call it, but it's never recovered, not even close. So this view that AI is going to drive productivity is correct. But it's like the movie The Princess Bride, right? It's like you keep saying that word. I don't think it means what you think it means. Higher productivity means doing more with fewer people.

And so when you look around and people say, wow, look at the productivity AI is going to drive in all these white collar employment areas. New York Times did an article last year. in 38 of 50 United, 38 of the 50 U.S. states, manufacturing used to be the biggest employer in 1990. Now it's health care, and it's mostly health care administration, which is uniquely suited to be AI. And it's a very good paying job. Okay, so what? Well, so what is all these people have mortgages. And when they lose their jobs from AI, they're going to stop paying their mortgage. They're going to stop paying their car loan. And we know how this goes.

because we saw that happen, manufacturing workers did it, and we know how that played out in the early 2000s. And so this productivity miracle is first going to drive, I think, an unemployment increase in high-paying white-collar jobs at a time when all these white-collar high-paying jobs, they have no idea what's coming for them. They have been untouchable, and they were told, hey, don't go into blue collar because that's dirty,

and that's whatever, go, you know, borrow a bunch of money, get a degree, go into white collar, and you'll be set for life. And you're not going to be set for life now. It's good. These are the, and I don't know if these machines are going to take in the first next year. I don't know if it's six months. I don't know if it's 18 months. But I know markets are forward looking. And I know they're going to look forward six to 12 months and they're going to start discounting things ahead of time before it really shows up. And my point on the youth employment is the first place we would see this right the first swimmer to wash up on the beach are going to be the kids you hire out of college because they don't know anything and you got to train them well

who is best suited to being disintermediate by AI the young expensive relatively college kids that don't know anything and you're seeing it youth unemployment's already seven percent amongst college educated kids that's the leading indicator of where it's going to go for mid level, high level. And when that happens, then here too, we have another dynamic of when you lose your job and AI is taking everybody's job, you know, you're 45, 50 year old white collar person. What do you do? You got a mortgage. You got kids in college. You got it's a very, very deflationary. And again, it's an exponentially deflationary dynamic that is very reminiscent of the mid-2000s that, you know, there's just still all this happy talk and

triumphalism around productivity and look what this AI can do. And it's like, yeah, and look what this AI can do. Very few people looking at the second derivative, but having lived it here in the in the Rust Belt of America, this is so familiar to me. I mean, it's so familiar. Literally, I'm hearing American companies and execs and white-collar people say the same thing that American blue-collar workers were, you know, when China started taking their jobs. Yeah, but the quality is not as good. Yeah, but they can't do what I do. Yeah. Not yet, but soon.

Okay, geopolitical side. It's hotter now than it's ever been. How does that translate into one of the six data points you're like, this is going to impact? It reduces confidence. At the end of the day, we're now in a world where if you don't hold it, you don't own it. And we've seen that multiple times, right? So we froze Russia's FX reserves. And I'm not going to get into the, you know, what's right, what's wrong.

You know, you got a lot of chest thumping this weekend. I was like, we're powerful. We can do what we want. You're right. And so can Russia. And so can China in their backyards. And we now have at least two examples of, hey, you had a legal claim to those assets and we just took it. first with Russia's FX reserves in 2022, and now with what's happening in Venezuela, right?

If we nullify or void any of these claims, okay, great. But then why do I want to own assets in anywhere that I can't physically defend them? And why is that important? Well, remember that net international investment position number I told you about for Japan. and that a positive number means you own more foreign assets than foreigners own of you, and a negative means foreigners own more assets in your country than you own of theirs. By way, again, by Japan's 60 or 70% of their GDP positive, right? So they own a lot of foreign assets.

America has a net international investment position of negative 85% of GDP. foreigners own $26 trillion gross of assets in America, $60 trillion net, $57 trillion net, or gross, excuse me, gross, right, of, of assets, but $26 trillion net. Now, what happens, foreigners already saw it once, 2022. too. We froze Russia's dollar assets, the Europeans as well. The Canadians froze truckers assets. Now we've got, hey, we don't like what Venezuela's doing. I'm not saying there's things down there. I think we probably should have intervened long ago, right? Politically, whatever. And now we're into like strike three in Anglo-American legal jurisdictions and America has $26 trillion of foreign money sitting in its asset markets.

I know what I would do. If I was a foreign country, if I was a foreign sovereign asset manager, I would be I take it out and I put it into gold and I bring it inside my borders, full stop. And I probably do some Bitcoin too, maybe, maybe, just on the margin, but mostly gold. and then I also start you know I also start seeing things like we saw last over the weekend Indonesia came out and said hey the West has been plundering our nickel forever

we're confiscating it okay so now what are we gonna go to war with we send troops to Indonesia too to grab their stuff it triggers there's no there there's just this complete lack of second derivative thinking we America is living in a glass house and throwing stones at everybody

the West, more broadly, is living in a glass house and throwing stones at everybody. And this is another one of these examples. Like, how do I know exactly how this is going to play out? No, I don't know. Is it good? Does it make me want to put more money? Like, we're going to do the wrong thing or something's going to trip off. And they're not going to give you a heads up about capital controls ahead of time.

You're going to go home on a Friday. You're going to come in on a Sunday night and they're going to be in place. And maybe there'll be a geopolitical thing that happens. But basically, the music has stopped. And foreign asset managers have to look around and go, where do I want to be? And up until five years ago, the answer was easy. It was America. It was Switzerland.

Well, the Swiss are like literally trying to cut rates to get the money out of there because it's making their currency too strong. Their manufacturing sector is suffering. And if you asked me five years ago, I said, oh, Canada would be a good place to diversify. Now, I'm not put my money in Canada. And I love you guys. Don't get me wrong, but your leadership has shocked me in the last five years. Like I was, I'm not, you know, Europe. Would I take my money to Europe? Same thing. Like, no. Would I put my money in America? Yes, as an American citizen. Because oh, by the way, we have the Second Amendment. So there's,

you know, I can feel like I have at least some, you know, you know, however silly that is, I'm not putting it in Russia. I'm not putting it in China. Maybe I put some in Singapore. Maybe I put some in the UAE, maybe. But $26 trillion, a lot of it is from people that we are trying to pinch or we may pinch. So what happens to American asset prices is everyone says, I thought I could trust the Americans.

And I'm not saying they can't trust them zero. I think they still trust. I still think we're relatively trustworthy, but we're not relatively trustworthy relative to America in 2020, 2015, 2010, my whole lifetime. And some of that's just the long cycle of where we are with debt and great power competition, et cetera. There's now a real threat. The Americans will grab your stuff, especially if you do the wrong thing, right? politically, if you do something we don't like, we'll just grab your stuff. That's what we have said.

You can say, well, Russia shouldn't have invaded. Maybe Russia shouldn't have. But it's no different than what we did in Iraq. It's no different than what we just did in Venezuela. Well, we're powerful. We can do that. You're right. And they can say, fine, give us back our money now.

And then that brings a very critical decision point. If America says no, that's the end of the dollars or reserve status. If America says yes, says yes, then Mark, Mark. are going to go down until we print a lot of money. And this is the type of second derivative strategic stuff that the leaders in our country save one or two just aren't thinking about. Why would they? They've never had to think about it before.

But that to me is what, to me, that's as a market practitioner, as someone with 30 years of experience in markets. And it's interesting because you look around basically every major. asset, sovereign bonds, stocks, America, foreign, they are all breaking down against gold. If you look at the charts, in other words, gold is outperforming everything in the last year, everything. So then the simple thing, if you're a simple man, is to go into precious metals, is to look at gold. You haven't said silver. I, you know, I've been watching the silver skyrocket.

You know, I always go in Canadian dollars because, you know, I sit here in Canada, right? And so I was sitting there before Christmas going, I think he's going to hit $100 Canadian, right? And I joke on this show. If you were in person, Luke, I give you a one ounce silver coin from silver gold bull. And I remember giving one to the premier of Alberta and it being somewhere between $38 and $42 Canadian. and that was less than three years ago, and now it's over $100 Canadian. Now, it's falling down just slightly. So I think it was, you know, forgive me folks for not having the exact stat rate in front of me.

It was at 98 on New Year's Eve. But like, if you're a simple person, which I am, you go confidence, like, I'm just going through it all. All the things you've been talking about. It's confidence. It's like the confidence in the world is gone. So when confidence goes, where do people put their money back into? Something they trust, which is going to be precious metals, correct? Yes, is the short version.

Exactly. I mean, it's interesting. People say, I had a buddy ping me today. He goes, hey, I'm surprised stocks are up on this, on his Venezuelan news. I said in dollars, they're down in gold. They're down a lot in silver. silver is up 7% today gold's up 3% stocks are up 2% yes and p 500 which is heavily tech by the way so that's not just like you know that's that's that's not that's the go go stuff is losing to gold

and silver in response to this that's a perfectly rational response and I think for the average person you know I'm asked I'm often asked for the average person what should they be doing because I've been doing this 30 years I talk with a lot of different high level pros I talk the mass market people. This is the trickiest environment I've ever seen. If you're, if you're, you know, an average person, you know, you wouldn't, you wouldn't strap on a helmet and shoulder pads and go out there and try to play with the Toronto Argonauts, right?

You're going to get hurt. Well, Toronto Argonauts, maybe the Buffalo Bills, maybe not. Right? Yeah. I'm talking to cheek. You're not going to do that, right? So they're pros. The pros are looking at this going, holy cow.

it's very tricky. We are at the end of a 100-year debt cycle at the sovereign level that is rolling over. We are at the end of a 50 to 60-year currency system. We are in geo-rising power, right? The Thucydides trap, whatever you want to call it. We are at unprecedented rate of AI tech disruption that humans have never seen ever, ever, ever before.

And we're into a resource constraint issue around certain things. And like you put all these together and you just go, for the average person too hard buy me gold buy me silver you know and oh by the way you have confiscation issues you have low trust issues around the world of assets um and i think when when i have sort of lay people ask me hey how would you advise the average lay person to invest i always go back to what i call the jacob fugger allocation so jacob fugger fugr famous uh um um um um uh merchant, I think he was Dutch, that was at his time, I want to say in the 1500s, but

one of the wealthiest people in history as a percentage of the global economy. He was like Elon Musk turbocharged as a share of the, and he advised a very simple allocation, 25% cash, 25% gold, and I would see a gold, silver, maybe a little Bitcoin in there as well for the average person, 25% equities. And I, for the equities, it wouldn't be speculative. They would be sort of blue chip franchises that pay a dividend, and then 25% real estate. And it would probably be more productive real estate stuff. You can generate some sort of cash flow on Timberland, whatever. And then you rebalance over time.

One goes up a bunch. You sell it, moving into the others. And that was his strategy that allowed him to preserve wealth for a long, long time. It's the baseline for Ray Dalio's all-weather portfolio. And I think for this time and day, I think if anyone comes out and says, hey, here's what's going to happen. I know. Like, I would run in the opposite direction, including me. Like, I can see these factors.

And I've been doing this long enough and have been through a number of different crises to know, okay, this isn't good. And I felt this spidey sense tingling before. And I've learned to trust it. But I don't know how exactly it's going to play out. I mean, they could come in and just start printing right away. there could be capital flows here or there what i don't know but this covers you and in sort of there's basically what you're trying to do is take the tails off here there's only two ways there's only two ways you really lose as an investor right it's the deflationary crash

and it's the hyperinflation where your currency goes and gets crushed that's it those are the everything else you know up your down you or whatever but you got to when you go through these extreme situations especially, you need to take those two tails off. And that's what this does. You know, you have a deflationary crash. Your gold's going to do great. Your cash is going to do great. Your stocks are going to get whaled, waylaid, and your real estate's probably also going to get hit. But you're fine, right? You make it to the other side. Similarly, let's take it to the other extreme, hyperinflation. Currency falls dramatically. It doesn't have to go to zero like five more Germany. Not a lot of people know that inflation ran three to 400 percent in Israel for three

four years in the middle of 1980s. Let's just say it does that. Your cash is going to collapse in real value. Your gold's going to go to the moon. Your real estate will do okay. Not really, but it'll do okay. And your equities are going to do really well. Same thing. You get to the other side. Like at this point, it's not about you're trying to get to the other side of these factors. You're trying to just survive. This is very, very, very, it's going to be very, very tricky year, I fear. Just for the audience here in Canada, I pulled it up real fast as you were talking, because you'd rattled off how much silver it increased. It's at 10678 Canadian, so it's back over $100.

And if you were wondering about gold here in Canada, 61.27. So like, when you're looking at the charts of those two specifically, because we talk about it an awful lot here, they're just like on this mountain peak. you know, like it's just going up and up and up. On your end, you know, like you look at the loss of confidence. Because, you know, anytime I've had like Martin Armstrong just comes to mind an awful lot of him talking about, you know, gold isn't tied to, I forget how he puts it. I'm about to butcher it and then Luke's going to correct me.

But, you know, he's like, it's tied to confidence. Like when people lose confidence, they move it into gold. And so when the gold price is increasing, what are that the signal of is a loss of confidence in the world in things that should. should normally make sense. And so when you're looking at gold and silver going to the moon in my world, I don't know what the moon actually is on a price. Maybe you have like, oh, it's going to go way higher than this. I don't know. You just look at that and you're like, it makes sense. And it's because of what's happening in the world. And everybody's losing confidence everywhere of everyone because of the things that are happening. And the US is a big driver of that. Absolutely. And it's

it's one of these long cycle things, right? We've all heard the fourth turning and where we're living it. And part of the fourth turning is the confidence in institutions that had been well respected, the confidence is lost in those things. And so whether, you know, the tricky part about all this is, is, you know, whether it's the United States government, the Canadian government we were talking about before, whether it's, it's the rise of other great powers, which begins to hurt confidence that there will be continued peace, whether it is our health agencies.

The last five years, our health agencies have not covered themselves in glory with how things have been handled. I don't trust them at all. I didn't trust him before that, but I really don't trust them after it. So we're now into the situation where, like, them saying, don't worry, trust us. It's only going to throw gas on the fire. Correct. Because we're now five or six.

We got this covered. You could trust us. You can trust us. Sure. No, I don't trust you anymore. I'm good. I'll take my chances on my own. So that's what we are.

I mean, I saw a survey the other day. I don't know who did it, but it was one of the big national surveyors in the U.S. And it shows long-term trust in the U.S. government and government officials going back, I think, to Eisenhower. And I think under Eisenhower in the early 50s, early mid-50s, it was, as you would expect, it was like 80%. And it has fallen precipitously to, I don't even know, 30, 40%, 40%, lowest it's been ever. But importantly, in the past, we had declines, right? During the Vietnam War, we had a decline into the 70s, and then it bounced back under Reagan, almost there's no bounces anymore. it is like dropping someone off a building and boom like splat there's there's no bounce and there's

been no bounce for going on 10 years in the united states so it's not like this oh don't worry confidence will bounce back that is a chart of like we're done we don't trust you anymore and these types of things take decades to regain trust and they don't happen without usually some sort of, you know, culmination event within the fourth turning. So that's exactly what it is. Martin Armstrong is dead right. Gold is just nobody else's liability. Gold is just a 0% yielding bond of infinite duration, right?

It lasts forever. It's a 30-year bond is a finite duration, 15-year, 10-year bond. Gold is a 0% yielding bond of infinite duration and finite issuance. Whereas sovereign bonds around the world, Canada, U.S., Japan, Europe, etc. They are 4%, 5% yielding, 2% yielding bonds, a finite duration, right? They have a certain time, and infinite issuance. In governments, you know, they're the IOUs of governments that trust is collapsing for good reason around the world. You know, choose gold. For my money, yeah, on the margin, absolutely. Gold over sovereign bonds has been a fantastic.

fantastic, fantastic trade for 10 years now. We've been shouting it from the rooftops. As soon global central banks stopped buying U.S. Treasuries on net in 2014, 12 years ago. And since then, long-term treasuries against gold have dropped 85% already. Like so we, I think they're going to continue heading down because we can see there's just the, the central banks lost trust in sovereign debt 10 years ago, 12 years ago, and now the masses are. And what does it? that mean for gold prices? You know, for me, I go, I go back to a chart. I've shown multiple times for clients who put it up on X recently. If you go back 60 years and you chart the market value of gold in dollars of the U.S.'s official gold, we're going to assume we have it all,

and then compare that to the foreign held treasuries of the United States, foreign assets of the United States. Foreign held treasuries. The treasuries held by foreign creditors of the United States. Excuse me. And look at that percentage. The long term, the long term percentage is around 40%. The gold has collateralized the United States foreign debt by about 40%. In 1980, when there was an honest to goodness dollar crisis, that number hit 130%. That was a gold bubble. That meant we could have literally sold, you know, foreigners could have demanded gold for their treasuries, taking their gold home, and we still would have had a third of our gold left over. That's a gold bubble. The U.S. foreign debt was 130% gold backed. Today, after this record running

gold, everyone's like, oh my God, monster running gold, it's never going to repeat. That number is 12%. With gold at 4450, as we sit here in American dollars, today, it's at 12%. Gold would have the rise another 3x just to get back to the long-term average. And by the way, I would argue there was it, there wasn't less confidence in 1980 in the 1970s than there is today. I would, you know, I would say it's, at the very worst, the level, a low level of confidence is similar today to the 1970s based on when I talk to my parents and, you know, my parents' friends, etc. It might be worse today. I don't know. We'll see. But that to me suggests gold could go way higher still. It's still early.

I hate to even make you speculate on this, but when you say way higher, like, what does way higher even mean? Like, is that double where it's at? Is that an extra $1,000 to where it's at? What is way higher? Oh, just to go back to the long-term average, you'd have to triple. Just to go back the long-term average. If you had an honest-to-goodness dollar crisis, you could be up six to eight-x from here.

an honest to goodness real trust crisis a war any of these things goes badly like and one of them's going to go badly at least i think you know the odds of us getting through this without you know getting nicked like the the time of good choices is gone there's all just varying degrees of bad choices and then there's some really awful choices if i don't have you address what you think the shark is what jaws actually is by the time we end this conversation. I'm going, I wonder what he thinks the actual shark is. And maybe you've already explained it in here. But if you were to draw back to where we started from with the jaws, people are floating up on shore. Everybody thinks a boat an accident. They're starting to go,

oh, well, it's actually over here. This is the little shark. What do you think the actual driver, the actual problem child, is going to be? Western sovereign debt and therefore Western currencies and specifically the dollar the dollar system since 1971 that we've all grown up in is dying and that's the shark and so why what does that mean western sovereign bonds governments what i said before the u.s deficit position is such we have record or near record receipts near record tariffs and even despite that the united states interest expense plus it's payments to its baby boom and retirees is about 100% of receipts. If we have a recession, receipts go down 20%.

We're going to have to either default on our debt, default on the baby boomers, or print a whole lot of money just to pay the interest and interest-like obligations. And that's the shark. And some versions of the same hold true in other parts primarily of the West. And why I say Western sovereign debt and therefore the currency, the shark is a decision that has been faced many different times in Latin America over the last 20, 30 years, 40 years, which is do you save your bond market or do you save your currency? In other words, rates would start to go up in that case. We don't have the receipts to pay the debt. at some point, not too far when your debt is as high as it is in the West, that triggers a death spiral where you start moving toward interest expense being more than your receipts.

Once you have to print the money to pay the interest, you're done. And that's, we've been highlighting that entitlements are just interest-like obligations. You're already kind of done. But when you have to print just the print just to pay the interest on your debt, you're done, that's hyperinflation that's like that's and I don't I shouldn't even say hyperinflation because it triggers a whole bunch of word right that's it's it's too hyperbolic a word I don't need the word so I shouldn't even say it anyway the shark is the decision are you going to let rates rise to levels that trigger a death spiral in the United States in Japan who might

might be the first to face the choice in Canada in Europe or are you going to print money to cap bond yields to buy as many bonds as you need in which case the release valve is the currency inflation takes off this is the shark that western sovereigns are facing and it's a choice

Argentina's faced Venezuela's faced it Latin America has faced a number of different times Russia faced it in the late 1990s Southeast Asia faced it the bond market or the currency and that's i don't know which one they choose i think they probably choose to save the bond market and throw the currency under the bus they're going to print money are they not no they're going to print money i i mean it would be a shock to me if that wasn't the answer that has been the answer from governments in the west for i don't know as long as i've been

staring at i've once again not been staring on as long as you i don't have the technical back background and just a simple guy. And the simple guy sitting here says they're just going to print money. They're going to print money. But the order of operations is really critical, right? Because ultimately, if rates start to rise first, everything else asset prices are going to drop first. Golden silver might even drop in price as that happens. They're going to drop less than stocks. They're going to drop less than everything else. Remember, gold and silver are purchasing power in real terms. If stocks go down 50%, they don't print fast enough, and gold, and silver go down 20%, you're winning.

This is all about winning in real terms at this point. And ultimately, I think they will print, in which case stocks will go up 100%, and gold and silver will go up 200%, 300%, respectively. So that's, I think, how you have to think about it at this point. So once again, I don't know, as I listen to you, I go, if you're just trying to, and I know I hate to oversimplify things,

but it's like, so why wouldn't people just, and there's probably a really good reason for not doing this, move their money, their assets into gold and just be done, and just go, it doesn't matter what happens in the next four years. Take your time frame. even if they drop, they're going to drop less than everything else. That's what I'm hearing. And if they rise, they're going to rise higher than everything else. Now, there's probably a very good reason not to do that, but I'm curious your thoughts on why people just don't move a huge chunk, if not

a vast majority of everything, into that. I think ultimately having a big chunk in gold is actually prudent right now. 25, 30% of your of your liquid net worth should probably be in gold bullion in a place you can trust. If you own gold bullion and you're storing it

at the Canadian Mint, why you ask the truckers how that went. That ain't your gold. That ain't your gold. People say to me all the time, Canada has no official gold. We sold it all. Maybe. Maybe.

You guys got a lot of gold mines, don't you? How are you guys doing on rule of? about taking private property over the last five years? What would stop the Canadian government in a pinch from grabbing gold mines, from nationalizing them? America's nationalizing stuff. If you want to own gold, you've got to own gold, which means you've got to find an independent vault.

You've got to take physical delivery. That's what that means. And yes, I think that is prudent at this point in time. For the average person, I wouldn't do more because, again, like I said earlier, I don't know how this is going to go. There's a way that's going to, I don't know everything, right? Like, it's possible AI comes up with some ability to, you know, I don't know, create goal out of lead with alchemy using fusion, right? And, you know, I don't think it's very likely, but is it possible? Sure.

Is it possible we put up capital controls and we build a wall basically with with China and Russia and they use gold and we use a Bitcoin and Bitcoin. you know, gold falls against Bitcoin, sure. I don't think, there's a whole bunch of reasons why I think these things are very impractical. But having done this 30 years, the way I deal with that is just position sizing, right? To me, 20 to 30, 25, 25, 30 percent of your liquid net worth and physical gold bullion, I think is prudent based on what I'm saying. 65, 70, 85, 90 percent, look, FDR here in America, it was illegal for Americans to own.

gold from 1933 to 1974. Now they you didn't have to turn it in. They said you did it was a crime not to but you know we're Americans right. We're like half you but you couldn't take it anywhere

you know so if you got 80% of your money in gold and they make it illegal to own for 30 years there's ways around that but then now you've got to make a business decision of do I want to turn myself into a felon technically I think it's complete BS but by you know de jure you're you're a felon for still owning it you know and oh by the way that means

you're going to have to deal with some unsavory types to move it probably unless you're really rich and can you know put it on a jet and not declare it and you know a private jet and book yourself somewhere there's things you can do but that's why I that for me 25 30 Yeah, 25, 30%, you go, that, if you've got that of your worth in it, you're fine. You don't have to be, but you don't have to outrun the bear. You just have to run the slowest. Somewhere Nick Morianos is listening to this. And I'm like, well, I got a whole bunch of questions I feel like that are coming from my audience on private vaults, on just the independence of what Silver Gold Bull can do.

Because once again, they become one of the title sponsors of the show. And one of the things that I admire about their leadership group is I think they have answers to a lot of these questions and fears of people. And you're just reminding me, it's probably time that I had them back on to explain to people, yeah, we can do a lot of this for you. Because I just sit here as a layman and go, I want to oversimplify everything. I see the craziest the world. It's like, let's just simplify this down to what I should be doing and don't do this. And it's funny. Gold comes up an awful lot.

You actually see it on the independent media, if you would, all over the place. Everybody's talking about gold now, right? The CBC or the Fox News or CNN isn't talking about gold, but the undercurrent, everybody's talking about it. No, absolutely. You know, one of my wisest friends, he's in his mid-80s, he's been doing this a long time. And he's been saying for a number of different years that, you know, A, all roads lead to gold. And even before then was saying there are eras of wealth accumulation and eras of wealth distribution, wealth destruction. And we are in an era of wealth destruction and distribution.

And so if you understand sort of the meta, and that's when you run through the six things I list, ultimately that's all that says. an era of wealth distribution or destruction. It's things are going to be messy. How are they made messy? I don't know. But like, they're going to be messy. Okay. All roads lead to gold. If you were to look at one positive you think coming in 2026, you got anything you're like, I think people should pay attention to this. A positive. Well, you know, it's for me. I always look at things that was just sort of what is and, you know, what's what's normal for the fighter's chaos for the fly. So just don't just don't be a fly, right? Be a spider. So what's positive? Look, I think that some of the disruption that we're going to see is

absolutely going to be positive, right? With there are AI things. There are scientific there are scientific discoveries that will happen faster because of it. These things are great and positive without it down. So there's going to be, you know, it's another reason why want to be 100% in, you know, in gold, right? There's going to be some really interesting things happening as well to this. I think, you know, Sir Winston Churchill famously, apocryphly said, you know, the Americans always do the right thing after they've exhausted all the alternatives. America has now exhausted all its alternatives. We've been doing the wrong thing for 20, 30, 40 years. And, you know, some of what we just saw last weekend is big picture, America realizing, okay, we've been doing

the wrong things. And now we need to start doing the right things. And, you know, and the right things are rebuilding infrastructure in this country. And so one of my bigger investments is a private equity, electrical infrastructure company. Their order book is full for years to come. And, you know, they're just making, they're bending metal for any type of their generation agnostic, right? So, you know, whether you're generating nuke, solar, wind, coal, gas, they don't care. They're making, you know, they're selling components.

into electricity supply chains. I think electricity, you know, demand is going to continue to rise. I think the supply chain supplying into that are going to continue to have very good years, pricing power. So, yeah, I don't want to leave the impression. Everything's a mess. I think within all of that, right, it's kind of like, you know, look, if you were a guy who owned a weapons plant in 1941 in America, or 1942 in America, you were getting rich

and there was a lot of really crazy stuff happening. Not all of it very good. In fact, very little of it very good, to be honest. It's probably a bad metaphor because I don't think we're going to that type of total war. And the tale of that type of total war is the fattest it's been, right? We're closer now to that type of event

than we've been in my professional lifetime, unfortunately. so yeah that's what I'm positive about is well I'm glad you put it that way because like in the chaos there is going to be ways to make gains that's what you're talking there's always bull markets so that's positive yes yep yep absolutely absolutely I see you got a book in your back uh if people were wanting to buy your book follow you find you where would they go uh oh thank you yeah so that's my mr x interviews one and two they're on amazon they are a Socratic method reads that are a hypothetical foreign creditor of the United States and me interviewing them, kind of talking through the different thought processes.

I think they were published in 2018 and 2020. So they're a little dated, but I've been getting good feedback lately that they were fairly prescient and I think it offers some views around where things could go. In terms of following me, you know, for either mass market or institutional research products. They can go to fFTT-lc.com, or they can check me out on X at Luke Gromman. Luke, appreciate you hopping on and doing this, and I hope it happens again. I've enjoyed the conversation.

You've definitely got some interesting insights that I think people would be interested to hear more about in the future as the year progresses or years progress. Either way, thanks for hopping on today. Thanks for me on, Sean. It was great to be here.