TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #644: America is a Corporate-Controlled Crime Syndicate with Gerald Celente

Episode Date: July 26, 2025

Marty sits down with Gerald Celente to discuss the looming commercial real estate collapse, banking sector vulnerabilities, the decline of the US dollar, Trump's pivot to supporting Bitcoin, and the systemic corruption of political leaders worldwide. Gerald Celente on Twitter: https://x.com/geraldcelente Trends Journal: https://trendsjournal.com/ STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/VJ2dABShBz Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Coinkite https://coinkite.com Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Gerald, I'm bummed we only have 20 minutes, but let's make the most of it. Welcome to the show. Oh, thanks for having me. Like I was saying, I was just catching up on some recent interviews you've had in the last couple of months, most recently with Clayton Morris. And I think just

jumping off since we have 20 minutes, I think we could talk about Bitcoin and crypto on the back half but something i've actually been paying attention to which you mentioned on that show was the aftermath of covid stimulus and particularly with commercial real estate real estate markets broadly and the exposure that banks have how's that looking as we're halfway through the year right now actually we have an article in this week's trends journal and then if you go to trendsjournal.com you could you'll you'll see them and And Europe's commercial real estate market is still in the doldrums. You've got to look at the data.

Let's go back. You go to Castle Systems with a K. Look at the office occupancy rate in the United States. It's about 49.7%. Everything changed after COVID. Look at the office vacancy rate. before covid 2019 it was around 11.4 percent now it's around 20 percent again you only have a 49 office occupancy rate so here's the deal

when they launched a covid war and remember don't forget covid's going on so every time you masturbate you better sanitize your hands remember all the crap they made up yeah and and when you're outside stand six feet apart because the wind blows exactly in straight lines inside outside six feet and when you go into a restaurant you better put that mask on all right i'm your politician i'll tell you what to do but when you sit down and eat you could take the mask off because covid knows that you're sitting down and eating and it doesn't go to that level all right this is the crap they made up they scared the hell out of all the morons who swallow political crap so get you can't go to work work out of your house

okay so now people are working out of the house week after week month after month year after year and they're saying to themselves i've been getting up at 5 30 in the morning and driving an hour and a half on the lie to go into new york city i've been on the subway a night in calcutta i'm not doing that now i'm getting up at uh seven o'clock in the morning and having breakfast and i zoom on to work now i'm the guy that has and let's say 10 floors in a building i don't see these people anyway they're in these cubicles you stay home i don't need all this office space i don't have to spend the money so now this is five years later the leases are coming due yet five and ten year leases the leases are coming due and they're not renewing like they

used to you got a number of the banksters try to force people to come back into work five days a week because they're losing the dough let's go back to 2023 three banks failed signature first Republic and Silicon Conman Valley Bank. Three banks. Down went the equity markets and up went gold prices. That was three banks? You're going to

start seeing a lot of defaults on loans. Big time. And the crap that they're spewing out, well, we're going to convert these buildings to condos and apartments, right? No, you're not. Buildings built within the last

50 years, they're not convertible. The big empty spaces. Let's go back to 2024. Midtown Manhattan, 50th Street. A building that sold for over $300 million in 2006 went up for auction. They sold it for $8.5 million. They got to knock the thing down and rebuild something they could do. So there's going to be a banks go bust an office building bust.

Commercial real estate is, again, the facts are there. And the facts are showing that warehouses, as of last week's Transjournal, the vacancy rate is rising. When COVID happened, they started warehousing, bringing all those products in. Remember those days? so there's going to be commercial real estate bust and again the big thing that's going to go down are these office buildings and they're going to be defaults on loans one after another and that's going to bring down much of the banking system yeah i think i saw a headline this week two buildings alone in denver that went for over

100 million dollars i believe in 2019 just sold for 3.2 million collectively yeah and the mainstream media is barely reporting on this. The question I have is how much exposure do the banks have versus private lenders? Mostly the banks.

You're pushing it into private lenders now, but it's mostly the banks and it's mostly small and medium sized banks that have the majority. Which is great. So more consolidation in the banking sector. Do you think this is part of the reason why Trump's berating pal to lower rates he can sort of see the writing on the wall or is one variable of the writing on

the wall berating in the lower rates to create some sort of liquidity injection to stave off the bleeding or is the lost cause at this point that's not a lost cause and he'll do everything he can to prop the markets up because that's he's invested in you know and it's his game and and the team you know they were they were all it's the it's the uh yeah this is running the country you know the corporations so they'll do everything you can again when people think that he doesn't have power over jerome powell the fed head they better grow up let's again we only put the facts in the trends journal let's go back to 2018 the dow had its worst december since the Great Depression. What did Trump do? Calls in power, January 2019, lowers interest rates.

What happened? Equity, Dow went up 22% that year. So he's going to do everything he can to profit now that going back, the lower interest rates fall, the deeper the dollar falls. The deeper the dollar falls, the higher gold prices go. Gold is dollar based. So as other currencies go up, It's cheaper to buy gold from other countries. And number two, it's the beginning of the death of the dollar. Much of the world has had enough of the United States' geopolitical and economic hegemony. So this is going to bring down the dollar. And again, the facts are all there.

The dollar has had its worst year this year so far since 1973. Now, what happened in 1973? oh uh it took us off the gold standard oh and what else oh the yom kippur war where um the arab nations cut off oil coming into the west and a barrel of brent crude the price quadrupled 1973 we're having the worst year in the dollar since then so again the dollar is going to go down when interest rates go down and we believe that trump is going to do everything he can to lower interest rates again he's the markets are propping up uh you know now they came out with a deal with the 15 tariff with japan then cook markets went way back up again the s&p nasdaq

keep breaking new records you know so he keeps changing his mind hey we're going to put 145 tariff on china right yeah well that's what's that's what's like unnerving to me somebody's been following markets not as long as you but for my career is like this berating to lower rates and inject liquidity when markets are at all-time high and you have not only equities at all-time highs but you have gold bitcoin right below all-time highs and is it when you say the beginning of the death of the dollar how do you see that playing out mechanically do we have an incredible weimar like melt up in all assets and it's just hold on to anything that's hard well again we don't give financial advice gold is number one for us and um and that's one of the reasons why

it's going i'm telling you the world is that enough again you know we write the facts you know there's a this isn't this week's trends uh trends journal go um this isn't it here is this here here we go on fox news the little warmonger clown boy who couldn't fight his way out of a paper bag lindsey graham warned that president trump will put 100 tariffs on india china and brazil if they buy oil from russia and that trump would do you ready a whoop it a whoop it on your eggs a little fat little slobby clown jerk a little warmonger freak lindsey graham that they keep quoting over and over and over and over and over he goes on these three countries account for 80 of russia's crude exports which is helping to fund the ukraine war if they keep buying cheap

russian oil to allow the war to continue we're going to tear the hell out of you and we're going to crush your economy because what you're doing is blood money hey they got sunk how about the blood money that the united states has sent into ukraine to keep flooding the killing fields and you're going to do something you can fight your way out of a paper bag you little clown so what i'm saying is you're talking about the death of the dollar this is among the reasons why who the hell is this guy to say with china india and and and uh japan what was the other country china uh india and brazil should do who the hell are you to tell them what to do and so we've had enough yeah they've had enough but what's next do you see it being a bricks

currency you see going back to a gold standard i think it's going to go back to a gold standard but then there's the other reality like it or not and it's the digital world i mean china is is cbdc you don't you don't give cash you don't give cards you put your hand out there or whatever you know and boom it's the it's the digital yuan and china's 1.4 billion people it's the future they're going to go digital coins even though they say with this genius act whether it's stupid they may be called it they said we're not going to go cbdc in america yes we are the whole world is going digital it's digitized again every time i go out now it's such a pain in the neck you go to a bar people are on their phones they're talking to you you know you're walking

down the street like this young people totally digitized and and so it's going to be a digital world they're going to make up something we got a new digital coin it's worth this amount of amount of money and we just got rid of our debt all right it'll make up something yeah no it's been refreshing i was living in texas recently moved back to the philadelphia area where i'm from and spending a lot of time down the jersey shore where it's a ton of cash only bars and restaurants and it feels good to to have to come with cash and not have to do tap to pay everywhere but to that point like with the genius act so i'm not sure how much you know about this show but we're bitcoin focus show we've been around for eight years and that's something

we've been warning about as well like stable coins are big theme and meme right now the the politicians are saying we need stable coin proliferation it's going to drive demand for treasury markets and as you mentioned i think it's already been proven that these stable coins are hyper centralized they're going to be able to be uh you're going to be able to whitelist blacklist prevent people from spending with certain merchants whatever it may be um and they're they're sort of marketing it as the anti-cbdc when it's just cbdc with a different name and different different sort of cloak whereas i i believe in the shows about bitcoin it is truly distributed centralized governments can't control it so if you're operating in the world of digital

currencies like bitcoin is the only thing you should be paying attention to well we've been bullish on bitcoin for nearly a decade and then when trump got into office we became very bullish and um you know there's one article after another in your trends journal about it we'd be going on and on and on again it's not what you like what you want what you wish for it's what is that we turn forecasters we don't take positions on things and say this is good this is bad say this is what it is and here's an article in in this week's trends journal on the economic update and it's called the Trump card. The headline on CNBC Monday was, quote, Trump media builds $2 billion Bitcoin hoard as cryptocurrency swells president's net worth. They wrote that Trump's media and

technology group said Monday that it amassed some $2 billion in Bitcoin and related assets, and that, quote, President Donald Trump's highly lucrative pivot to cryptocurrency continues to grow his net worth while in office so i went back and we said about will he lower interest rates he's interested in making dough and again this is the trump that back in the day when he was president he was anti-bitcoin but he got over 100 million again we only go by the facts got over 100 million dollars from the crypto people and when he's running for office in tens of uh millions of when he got his inauguration he's into it his family's into it his political team's into it so that things are going to keep going up and again you go by what it is uh yeah we get some

of our past articles trump's family claws deep into cryptos now focuses on bitcoin mining trump's media company announces plans to raise 2.5 billion to buy crypto that was in june again on and on and on uh so it's going to go up and yeah this is what he said in 2019 i'm not a fan of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies which are not money and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air in 2021 he said bitcoin just seems like a scam so again you know it's we have trend forecasters it's not what you like what you want it's what is and the what is is that this thing is going to keep exploding and you can see why he likes the coin but speaking of i was gonna say speaking of trends since we only have like five more minutes left like interesting not only bitcoin equities

markets maybe residential real estate can scream again if you lower interest rates inject liquidity it seems like we're going back to uh not an era but like just uh sort of business as usual in terms of the haves versus the have-nots people with assets really uh the wealth gap really expanding and so like socially if we turn it back on turbo inject all this liquidity send asset prices screaming and you have the common man on the sidelines looking by like are there any social trends you're looking at in terms of what the reaction may be to to this moving forward it's it's i call us plantation workers of slave landia and the the billionaires run the world again there was a once upon a time there was this guy

called mussolini the merger of corporate and state powers is called fascism that's his definition and that's they're in full control and they're going to do everything again they can to build up the equity markets in the economy and um but again then there's the geopolitical things going on you know with the wars going on the israel war and and uh will they bomb you iran again if they bomb iran you're going to see here let's go back to when the united states when trump bombed iran when did he do it on a saturday night saturday yeah right when the equity markets were closed and then what did he do on monday oh we got a peace deal if he did that on a monday and bombed them oil prices would have skyrocketed so we don't know where this thing is going to go

and and here's the other thing we're looking at a dot-com bust that they've over invested this is your trends journal when it used to be a quarterly now it's a weekly this week's two of 200 pages 202 pages no ads dot com this this is fall of 1999 dot com overload will short circuit many high expectations for huge profits in internet commerce entertainment and a wide array of dot com services following the holiday season many of today's high-flying internet stocks the hottest ipos and newly emerging ipo wannabes become their deep descent from their overvalued heights and we said they like it crashed by the second quarter of 2000 it did in march they over invested the in the internet revolution just had

begun a few years earlier and they were making up stuff same thing with ai trends are born they grow their mature, reach old age and die. AI was only born three years ago. You don't invest all your money in the few companies that were born a few years ago. Again, you got to make connections between different fields. Let's go back to 2000. Before China got into the World Trade Organization, they officially got in two weeks after 9-11. 10% of Chinese 18-year-olds went to college. Today, nearly 70%. What does that have to do with AI? Everything.

Young people are totally AI addicted. This is a country of 1.4 billion, considering we have, what, 340-something million in the United States. China's investing heavily in AI. Look what happened last January with DeepSeek. Nobody ever heard of them before. Now, the Chinese AI companies' sites are the most used in the world. No, we don't need $100 million to do it.

We only needed $6 million to do it. No, we don't need these big chips. We could use it with smaller chips. The trend has just been born. They've overinvested in the NASDAQ, in the AI sector. We're going to see a dot-com bust. Something like that could bring down the markets and crash everything out. Again, people forget this.

Again, we call this, right? The NASDAQ dropped 80%. You know what changed it? 9-11. Yep. Everybody forgot about that. Little Georgie Bush, the guy with a pair of cojones, small in the mouth, well, if he has any, we're going to get that guy with some big line and get him a reward. 90% of the American people swallowed the crap coming out of that little daddy's boy's mouth. A little jerk, a little moron. Longest war in American history, only cost a couple of trillion bucks. Forget about it. Started under false pretenses. another line oh by the way osama bin laden you know you how you know created osama bin laden the cia right jimmy carter the peanut farmer got everybody looks up to the scumbag that

deregulated the airline industry when the airlines used to be fun yeah only four owner oh yeah oh brzezinski oh his daughter does the clown show on msnbc oh that brzezinski that slimeball piece of scum brzezinski we gotta stop those russians from going into afghanistan the russians were going into afghanistan to stop the taliban from taking over afghanistan back then was a very advanced society culturally spiritually very advanced The artwork was Terrific The Taliban came in

You know who we supported The Mujahideen Created by Jimmy Carter That was Osama Bin Laden That was his first job Brought to you by the United States And that slimeball May he rot in hell

Arrogant I'm a national peanut farmer Carter this is also the bastard that allowed interstate banking back in the day the banks were only in bank of america was in california yeah then he allowed it was only in trust state banking now you got the banks all they own a couple of banks own everything that's the muzha hardeen that's osama bin laden the osama bin laden that we learned to hate we had to fight them uh yeah all right yeah yeah people have no idea about this hey did taylor swift get laid last

night that they know about that some guy gets what kissing a girl and jerking off on tv that was all the big news on cnn oh the palestinian genocide no we won't talk about that why are you anti-semite all right yeah no it's uh it is crazy that that people are I think what you're referencing is the Coldplay kiss cam That's all anybody's been talking about for the last week I don't even know what a guy is and what the hell do I care Oh Jeff Bezos got married All in the news

Week after week after week With this chick with these fake boobs Like a platform they can walk across They're so big I gotta give a shit about this That's the news Journalism is dead Again that little scum

But by the way when I talk about politicians This is a T-shirt you could get if you go to Trends Daryl. Daryl, you are a character, sir. I'm loving this conversation. Yeah. This is a T-shirt that I did in 1992 when Bill Clinton ran for office. Slick Willie. Yep.

I even had sex with that woman, Monica Whiskey. She always slept with my girl. Oh, yeah. All right? These are the freaks running the show. You know what this guy's worth now? Google it up. $140 million. Civil servant.

Civil servant. Oh, yeah. Took the jobs. NAFTA. I'm in Kingston, New York. Gantt News for shirt factories. Shirt factories all over here. Oh, we didn't have rust belts. Rust belts... get the manufacturing out of here.

Get cheap labor down there. Give me some money. I'm going to pass this thing, all right? Hey, I can talk to Goldman Sachs, all right? They give me $300,000 an hour. An hour. What are you, any bullshit for free? Gave us Glass-Steagall Act.

Sent our manufacturing to China. Again, I told you, 1970, And the 10% of 18-year-olds went to college, now 70%. China didn't have the heavy industry technology, the high-tech technology, until Bill Clinton let them get into the World Trade Organization. And now China is going to be leading the world. So to end it, because I know you've got to go, is there any optimism for the United States, individual Americans?

No, unless we have a third party. It's a crime syndicate running the show. I was the assistant to the Secretary of the New York State Senate. I got a picture when I picked up Reagan, put on a bunch of them. I'd been with presidents, prime ministers, and princes. At one time, I was on the other side. I wouldn't know what I know if I wasn't on the other side. It's a freak show.

The freaks are running the show. Don't believe me? How about that guy that used to be the prime minister of the UK, Boris Johnson? The best cartoonist in the world could not come up with a little freakier guy than him. How about that little warmongering little piece of scum that's running Germany now from BlackRock, Mertz, borrowing a trillion dollars to build up the military? Oh, these are the Germans, World War I and World War II. Yeah, we got to stop the Russians.

We only killed 25 million of them in World War II and Operation Barbarossa. Look at a little scumbag over there in Macron, the little cut zone, with a pecker like that if he has one at all in his old ladies. Look at the little jerk stormer in the UK. how about drawing an f of u and a c in it too okay look at the little clown show that people look up to these morons we need a new system man and without it it's finished that's why we focus on bitcoin here i think separate money and state yeah take it out of their hands yep do it in a way that's digital consent over the internet i think you need to

defund them yep uh it's one of the sayings here is fix the money fix the world so gerald i know you got to go hopefully we can do this again at some point this was love to thanks so much thank you for what you're doing and again we've been bullish on bitcoin for nearly a decade