TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #663: The Canary in the Coal Mine for Credit Markets with Ed Dowd

Episode Date: September 20, 2025

Marty sits down with Edward Dowd to discuss the Federal Reserve's rate cuts, an impending housing and stock market crisis driven by the end of illegal immigration-fueled economic stimulus, the collapse of subprime auto lender Tri-Color, COVID vaccine injuries continuing to impact the economy, and how the recent assassination has diverted attention from accountability efforts. Ed Dowd on Twitter: https://x.com/DowdEdward 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: Bitkey https://bit.ly/TFTCBitkey20 Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Obscura https://obscura.net/ SLNT https://slnt.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. Crazy times, sitting down again with head down. And I think we're going to ease into it with somewhat benign information. Maybe it's not benign, but I think the least controversial topic of the week, which is the Federal Reserve finally cutting rates 25 bps. And you were telling

me, that you think this is a slap in the face to Trump? Well, look, the prediction markets are expecting 25. Our math was showing they should have done 50. That was our call. I don't care that I'm wrong, because I've said to people, if they do 25, it's kind of a thumb in the eye of Trump. They're probably going to be doing more cuts as we roll forward. Housing starts and permits came out today.

They were a disaster. We've been predicting a real estate housing crisis. We put out a report in January that talked about that, that people can buy. And our conviction in that call is only just getting, you know, more convicted, I should say. And today the data is bad. My partner, Carlos, called me this morning. He said, I'm updating the dashboards, and this is pretty bad. So the housing market is rolling over.

People can't afford to own homes. the millennials can't buy from the boomers it's a disaster and the boomers you know keeping their prices high think and they you know anecdotally on maui i have a friend who's a real estate photographer his business is booming why is it booming nothing's selling but people keep firing their real estate agent and relisting and he keeps getting to you know go reshoot and or relicense his photographs so he's having a great time while no one's selling any homes yeah i think like you said you retweeted it but i recorded a melody right yesterday and it seems pretty clear i very much like people like her who actually get in their car and drive to go see this

these things and one of the cities that was a topic discussion is the city i just moved uh moved away from which is austin texas moved back home to the philadelphia area but i mean it was very clear to me when i was down there for the last four years that they were overbuilding um like to a degree that was astonishing both downtown and in the sprawl and so a couple like the housing data and just anecdotally to your point i'm a millennial um father with children with friends who are fathers and mothers with children in a similar situation and nobody's moving to buy these houses the prices are simply too high and then you factor in the jobs revision and it seems clear i guess that's my big question like have we been in a

recession for the last two years? You know, we think we have. So we made a call that ended up technically being wrong. We were looking for a recession at the end of 23, beginning of 24. That's what all our early economic cycle indicators were telling us. They had worked for the last 60 years, and then suddenly we were wrong. So we asked ourselves, hey, have the laws of economic fundamentals changed, or is something else going on? And we eventually figured out there was a new economic variable that really isn't talked about uh and it's the elephant in the room it was illegal immigration when you when you when you drop uh 20 million people into a country over a four-year period and and you fund it via deficit spending because that's how they did it that's why we were

running eight percent uh uh you know uh debt to gdp deficits which are crisis level deficits we last time we ran those types of deficits was during the great financial crisis we ran for two years in 2023, 2024. And there were two things going on, unprecedented government job creation and importing illegal immigrants. And that was all funded via direct payments from the U.S. government and Washington through the NGOs. It created a false juiced economy. A lot of signals were sent to decision makers that were wrong, some of which are multifamily housing developers. The crisis is not a single family home crisis that's coming. It's going to be a multifamily home crisis, structures with five or more units. We have not seen this type of

overbuild since the 70s, when the baby boomers were leaving colleges and getting their first jobs before they bought homes. So we have multifamily housing crisis, which is also going to drag down single family home prices. And we've had a, you know, there's an overbuild right now and high inventory in single-family homes. The homebuilders are struggling to sell their inventory. And no one can afford these homes. And with the cessation of the illegal immigration flow that started under Trump, so that's at zero now, and the deportations are not that high yet, but self-deportations are quite high. Lacey Hunt, an economist, thinks there's been about 1.2 million people that have self-deported. I think there's only been a couple

hundred thousand of actual deportations. But the second derivative on that is chilling. And a lot of the flow of funds to these illegals has been stopped or curtailed. So a lot of these people are leaving. So the juice that went into the economy in 23 and 24 that kept us afloat and kind of prevented a recession is all gone now. And now we're left holding the bag. And Trump Trump is going to have a housing recession coupled with a stock market bubble. So we have a dot-com bust, like, you know, 2,000 dot-com bust coming and a housing crisis at the same time. So it's going to be ugly. It's not apparent yet to the average Joe because, you know, the stock market is at new all-time highs based on seven AI stocks, eight AI stocks.

And if you look at the Value Line Geometric Index, which is 17,000 issues, it has not gone above the 2022 highs. So the average stock has not done well in this market. And it's an unprecedented bubble of epic proportions. And it's not a question of if, but when it blows. And we think it's sooner rather than later. Trying to call it top is a fool's errand. Well, you won't know the top until it breaks. we've never crashed from all-time highs so you'll get a high you can get a sell-off of 10 to 15

percent then a counter-trend rally and if we get and then then if the counter-trend rally doesn't go back to new all-time highs and the bear market has begun so we won't know we're in a bear market until we see some price action telling us that but we think it's coming soon well let's dig into these details starting with the effects of the closing of the border and self-deportation you were tweeting about you quote tweeted the tricolor story which i wasn't aware of until a couple days ago when i recorded with melody right and she was under the impression that this is a canary in the coal mine potentially first domino to fall in credit markets in terms of liquidity crunch yeah there's it's one of many but you know this tricolor auto was basically lending to a large

part of their book was lending uh giving loans to illegal immigrants that didn't have it's coming out now they didn't have like licenses and or documentation and they just gave them money to go buy cars and uh that's all gone puff because uh you know any kind of ponzi like this needs constant new illegal immigrants to keep it going so the growth it's called a growth ponzi and once the growth stops, it's exposed. And they just went tits off bankrupt. And there's a lot of banks that were lending to TriColor Auto to finance these loans. And now they're holding the bag. And they're going to have to write off these loans. And this starts to send a chilling effect throughout the credit system. Credit's going to start to tighten. It already has.

And additionally, Tri-Colorado, you know, probably sold a lot of these loans in the asset-backed market, and a lot of these bonds are sold as AAA, and I'm hearing that they're not trading like AAA bonds anymore, obviously. Here's the tweet that you quote-tweeted. As you mentioned, the bondholders are scrabbling, and I think the second paragraph is very telling. In Dallas, the regional bank Triumph Financial has dispatched teams of employees to use car lots where they're identifying and whisking away to safe locations of vehicles they believe are collateral in their loans. In Midtown Manhattan, a boutique investment firm that built a position in Tricolor's asset-backed bonds, Clear Haven Capital Management, has been calling other bondholders, urging them to band together and fight to keep big banks away from the assets that belong to them. Those banks include J.P. Morgan, Fifth Third, Bancorp. they've begun to forensically examine their own collateral who ascertain the magnitude of the losses and this is an area of the market i mean i think you've been on top of it but not

where i would expect this to start subprime auto lending yeah so this is gun poof uh the real estate market uh has been floated by illegal immigration not so much in home purchasing but you know, putting a floor on rents. And when you have rent floors, you know, owners of homes that rent to other individuals or multifamily housing can kind of get by with their economics. Well, that's all going the wrong way. And new tenant rents started plump, which is a quarterly series that's really not that well followed. We talk about it in one of our real estate reports. It's been plummeting since the fourth quarter, and that started right around when Trump got elected.

So there were a lot of self-deportations when Trump got elected, and new tenant rents started collapsing. New tenant rents are a canary in the coal mine for all tenant rents, which then lead into shelter and prices of homes. So it's beginning. And you can see it's starting to show up in the housing starts numbers and the permit numbers. Permits peaked in 2022. New permits for single-family homes peaked in 2022. They've been rolling over. We have an unprecedented gap between homes for sale and homes sold. Normally, that time series closely follows each other, and the gap is about 500,000 homes right now.

So how does that close? You know, that closes with prices coming down. And, you know, I think, you know, you talked to Melanie. When did you talk to her? Yesterday? The day before? Two days ago, yeah. Yeah. She was talking about, and you were talking about, the inability for people to make the math work. And what's happened is home prices spiked after COVID. And part of that was due to the Fed. I don't know if people know this, but the Fed went in and bonded an unprecedented amount of mortgage backs right after COVID. And they took that supply out of the market. That gave liquidity to other lenders to reloan and started a housing, mini housing boom when rates were low before they started their interest rate spike. And that caused just – that's what we're seeing now is this overbuilding from that liquidity event. And then interest rates have gone up. That makes mortgages unaffordable for the average person. Then you have the insurance costs, which have doubled since COVID. You have property taxes, which are up a lot.

And then if it's condos, HOAs have doubled. People can't make the math work to buy a new home. And so the only way to readjust this and make the math work is price. And people right now are slowly – it's dying on them that the prices that they're listing, they're not going to get because no one can afford it. um and i think there's a lot of people hoping that it solves on the rate side of things it's two-part equation price or rates and i think many are convinced and under a state of amnesia that that the fed beginning their rate cut regime will lead to a lower 30-year mortgage rate lower 10-year bond um lower 10-year u.s treasury yield 30-year u.s treasury yield but as we learned

last year, that's not a foregone conclusion. And I think that brings up the sort of profundity of this particular Fed meeting, really the lead up to this meeting over the last year with Trump berating him before the election, continuously berating him after Lisa Cook getting kicked out, Stephen Mirren getting put in, and the Fed signaling that they want to add something to their dual mandate make it a tri-mandate if you will with implicit yield curve control yield curve controlled by any other name and so what effect do you think that has if any on the housing market particularly well this this is something people don't understand about fed monetary policy it takes 18 to 24 months for uh that uh to get into the system it doesn't happen immediately and it

doesn't benefit the economy, there's a time lag. And just like when they raise interest rates from 0% to 5.5%, it really doesn't start to hurt the economy and cool inflation until 18 months later. And that started happening during the 2024 election. May of 24 was 18 months after the Fed rate hike cycle. So these cuts, and people got to remember, they started cutting interest rates in 07. And they cut all the way down to the bottom in 09, went to zero. And home prices went straight down. And, you know, there's an 18-year housing cycle. And we're back, you know, since 2007. We're 18 years from there. And here we are. And it's not going to—and not only that, they're behind the eight ball because the payroll numbers are fraudulent. So they should have been

cutting a lot last year. And they didn't. And so real yields are still around 1.5%. And that's a problem in inflation. We're predicting inflation will print a sub 2% number before the end of the year CPI. Now, everyone says, oh, CPI is fake. Yeah, it is fake, but it's rate of change. And that's what people in the bond markets care about. And everybody's over-allocated stocks and under-allocated bonds because it's been a massive, unprecedented bond bear market for the last three years. And one of our favorite asset classes is the 30-year treasury. And to your point, everyone said, oh, the 30-year, they're not going to be able to sell those. Well, in a slowing recession deflationary scenario, which we see coming,

The 30-year traditionally goes up quite a bit in price, down in yield. And you just mentioned the third mandate, yield curve control, which we – you win both ways. The economy slows. You make a lot of money on the long bond. And even if you're wrong there, the Fed is going to come in and do yield curve control and bail you out because this is a national security issue. And this is – we have $37 trillion in debt that needs to be refinanced. We have too much on the short end. And the government is going to force the U.S. institutions and U.S. citizens to own these bonds.

And that's why there's this stablecoin push, as you know, to fund the deficits. This is a national security issue. And don't bet against the government to force you into treasury securities. So, freaks, this rip of TFTC was brought to you by our good friends at BitKey. BitKey makes Bitcoin easy to use and hard to lose. It is a hardware wallet that natively embeds into a two or three multi-sig. You have one key on the hardware wallet, one key on your mobile device, and Block stores a key in the cloud for you.

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are um riptard bullish out there they think that the economic policies put forth by trump and besent and crew are really reorienting the economy to springboard moving forward um whether it's Tariffs, deregulation, what's happening at the Fed with the explicit intent to merge the Treasury and the Fed to enact this yield curve control, and then on top of that, really leaning into energy and AI, which is going to lead to a productivity boom that sort of helps us thread the needle

to achieve escape velocity and make sure that the markets keep churning. I'm guessing you'd not believe any of this. Well, they're not necessarily wrong, but it takes time for these things to happen. So let's talk about these trade deals. We have a European trade deal announced. We have a Japanese trade deal announced, right? Well, those both have to be ratified by their respective parliaments.

So their agreements, memorandums of understanding, they're not ratified yet. And oh, by the way, trade needs to be rebalanced, but there's going to be pain along the way because tariffs are not inflationary. They are in the short term, but in the long term, when you look at the whole economic, the impact economically in the micro level, they're deflationary. We wrote about this several months ago. And you're going to see a margin squeeze on America's corporations because they're not going to be able to pass the prices along. And that's going to cause them to shed employees. This is all coming. So Trump has the right idea, but there's pain and a valley in between his policies taking effect.

And the AI boom is classic. It's just like the dot-com, telco, dark fiber buildup boom. It's a lot of speculation and hype. There's no revenues there. And the productivity isn't going to come for five, six years from now. And, oh, by the way, most of the AI giant companies that we're going to want to own don't even exist yet. Because if you think about what happened during the dot-com boom, the only one that came out of that that went on to glory was Amazon. Facebook, Google, Apple really didn't exist until after the cheap broadband was utilized.

And that's what's going to happen. Pricing for AI is off the charts ridiculous. And it's going to have to be recapitalized at much lower prices. So all the people who made these investments initially are going to get wiped out, as usual, in the bubble. And that's not a bad thing. That's the way capitalism works. During the, you know, there was a railroad bubble where everybody invested in building out the railroads.

And the first investors, the speculative investors, all got wiped out. And then we had the railroads built. And then everything was recapitalized at much cheaper prices. And then the productivity boom came later. So people aren't wrong. It's just that they're wrong in the next two years. And it's going to be a very painful problem. So we've seen gold screams all-time highs. Bitcoin is, I believe, about 5% below its previous all-time high.

How do you think these hard assets, neutral reserve assets fare? Well, you know, it's tough because if you look at what gold had to run up into the great financial crisis and then corrected 50% once the margin call came. I don't know if gold is going to go down 50%. It'll have a pullback, but long-term, you want to own gold because they're making gold money again. We all know that the dollar reserve system at some point is going to become renegotiated. Again, the call on that is not imminent, but gold will have a pullback, I think. I wouldn't worry about it. I wouldn't panic.

I'd buy more. uh bitcoin as you know and we've talked about this is unfortunately very uh highly correlated with risk assets and unless it decouples this time which i don't know if it will it if if we get this the uh the financial asset correction i'm predicting bitcoin will participate in that makes sense um which is it's funny because i'm just using pattern recognition sentiment indicators like everybody like not everybody obviously um yourself and others are ringing the alarm bell and that but there's many people are convinced that we're going to 250 300 in bitcoin by the end of the year and who knows maybe that's the blow off top and

that's when it may be and maybe maybe bitcoin decouples but if you want to go with historicals it won't until proven otherwise and i'm sure you've you've heard the meme floating around I'm like never doom, and I'm a big just generally never doom. But when it comes to financial analysts covering these subjects, there's a growing contingent of people who don't want to hear any of the negative analysis and would call somebody like you a doomer. Well, I'm not a doomer. And we were – myself and other economists that have been doing this for a long time were wrong about the recession in 23-24. But the problem is when you blow – when you avoid the pain that should have come then and you blow a bubble like they did with illegal immigration, you've misallocated capital. The Fed made bad decisions.

Corporations made bad decisions and the capital market made bad decisions. So when this all corrupts and equilibrium is restored because that's what markets are, they eventually reach their equilibrium, there will be a lot of pain. Now, I'm not a doomer. This pain is good. Lower home prices are good for the millennials and Gen X that are younger. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Now, obviously, I don't want people to lose their jobs, but that's just – this reset, not great reset, but this financial reset is basically a passing of the baton of generational wealth from boomers back down to the generation below that's actually doing the work. and and you know look i'm my my fear is uh we get more of the same if we have a uh you know

correction what do we expect the fed will do what it does do unprecedented monetary policy the trump administration you know might do things that harm the younger generation long term by bailing out the boomers again so this is a generational uh kind of battle that's been going on and the boomers um you know they've been bailed out since the great financial crisis well on that to that point if this crisis does materialize we have correction housing market stock market and the government and the fed were forced to react what in your mind would be the most advantageous way to react to this particular crisis compared to 20 2008 yeah i don't know what they're going to do, yield growth control, I think, is on the table. And they're talking about

it. And if you've been watching what they're doing at the banks, Jamie Dimon has been saying, hey, you need to loosen up the capital ratios on treasuries so that the banks can buy more treasuries. And there's a reason that Jamie Dimon knows the game. He knows that financial repression is coming. And it's not pretty when it happens. And the problem is the system. The system relies on constant inflation. Bankers' creed is inflate or die. That's why we're at the point now where even a mild recession could take down the whole system, because there's just so much leverage and financialization of the U.S. economy, which was hollowed out over the last 30, 40 years of these NAFTA trade deals and exporting all the jobs overseas.

So we have this kind of financialized economy where a lot of people's wealth is in their home, which, you know, a home is a place where you live. Your wealth should be other things like, you know, savings and productivity and jobs. And it's been basically a Ponzi speculative financialization of our economy. Yeah. It's funny observing the Silicon Valley types that are really bullish on AI and they're wholly convinced that it's going to lead to this productivity boom, which I think it will eventually, to your point, years down the line. used it certainly made us more productive more efficient able to do more with less here at the media company and that's a fund that i work for but in terms of it being widely implemented within corporations across the country immediately to create that productivity boom it doesn't seem

um doesn't seem like it's going to happen that quickly and then you just look at forward pe ratios and they're above.com levels right now which is something that for some reason or another doesn't get brought up often enough, I think. So it's in the point that this doesn't seem sustainable. It's not sustainable. And if you do the math, historically, when we get to these types of dividend yields on the total stock market, the 10-year forward projected returns, which we wrote about in February, are zero.

What that means is if you buy in your 401k a basket of the S&P right now, including dividends, 10 years from now, you're projected to get back to even. That implies there's a big drawdown in between now and year 10, and that's happened like clockwork. It's not a timing tool. It can be like that for another year, but when it happens, it's going to be pretty epic. Yeah, and the other signal that I've been following,

the indicator I've been following is the credit spreads between corporate debt and the Fed's fund rate, which have compressed to levels of complacency that are very worrying as well. Yeah, no, we've done the math on that. It's in our report we put out in January on predictions of a deep world value recession. We looked at these credit spreads. And when you look at them, when they're super tight like this, historically, they go much wider. I mean, that's just the math.

They're like two standard deviations below normal. And we just know how this works. The rubber band goes the other way, and it's going to go quick and fast. asset. This session is designed to help you understand what that means for this bull run and beyond. Register now for early access to a new on-chain metrics report from Check On Chain at unchained.com slash tftc. Sup freaks, this report was brought to you by our good friends at Obscura. Obscura is the first VPN that can't log your activity by design. Instead of empty promises, Obscura fully embraces the Bitcoin or don't trust verify mantra. They can't log your

traffic even if they tried. Obscura believes that user data is toxic waste. In addition to private payments via lightning you can sign up with an account without having to give any personal identifying information it's a beautiful thing it's the vpn i use every day it's incredibly fast you can go on streaming sites with it they don't they don't say hey you've got a vpn it just works so go to obscura.net use the code tftc25 for 25 off an annual subscription obscura.net use the code tftc25 for 25 off an annual subscription it'll be interesting to see and that's what i I mean, with midterms next year, too, just think of the chaos that could unleash. But I said this to somebody else, I think, off air.

No, I said it on air with Tom Luongo last week, who is very bullish on the economic policy. But I think the Charlie Kirk assassination does sort of de-risk the sort of importance of midterms for the Republicans specifically, because I think they've been focused solely on the economy, make sure that it doesn't implode so that we can get to midterms and make sure that we hold the House or get the House and the Senate. But now with this Charlie Kirk thing, I don't think the importance on the economy is as severe or as imperative as it was last week, early last week. now well apparently they're again we have to look at polling numbers but anecdotally people are saying they're leaving the democrats because they've lost you know a lot of normal democrats who aren't high media consumers who just are watching what's going on and hearing some of some of the people that they thought were friends saying abhorrent things are running running center to, to, to write. So that needs to show up in the poll numbers because right now it's anecdotal.

Um, the, the, the worry of course is, um, uh, this Charlie Kirk assassination. And, you know, Charlie Kirk interviewed me three times. He's a wonderful human being. I personally, I was you know, I'm 58 and I've marveled at his communication skills and his ability to create what he did from such a very young age. I mean, he was a phenom in 18, 19. And he just built something that, you know, quite frankly, I was in awe of. He was quite an individual. And I'm sad that he's gone. But when you step back and analyze this, my biggest fear is that this is the beginning of, you know, a divide and conquer strategy. I've said forever that this is a class issue not a um us versus left versus right black versus white hispanic muslim

this is this is a class issue and we are at the end of a grand cycle and uh you need to focus on who's really in charge and the divide and conquer strategy has been well used throughout the millennium it's this is nothing new no it's not i was telling you before we hit record i think um my strategy is that recognize we're in the fog of war and to not make any knee-jerk reactions um you know i did tweet some stuff the day of and the day after but i think over the weekend took some time to take a step back and recognize what you said hey there's probably some ulterior or in the aftermath there's going to be ulterior motives to really divide and draw a wedge between people yeah there's going to be all sorts of narratives

that are spun out of this and the key to focus on is whatever narrative is coming out if it's about dividing ignore it and remember this is a class issue and when i say class i'm not talking about someone with 10 million dollars i'm talking about the oligarchs the super ultra wealthy the you know the the uber 0.01 percent that control the lion's share of the wealth of the globe you know that's funny how easy people riled up and we forget i mean especially not to you know i mean covid i think the implications of the aftermath of covid reaction to covid i think ended probably i would say 2023 but 2023 really um so we're not too far after that and people are getting spun up into another mess psychosis right now absolutely and here's the other thing people

I mean, look, we stopped doing a lot of new COVID research at the end of 24 because we did it for free, and free doesn't work as a business model. And, you know, the science is now coming out and proving definitively that these vaccines are a disaster. The problem is it was a mass poisoning event, and we're left with the bill. And the bill is continued disability increases. We're running around 6 million above where we were pre-COVID. When you and I were talking, we were at 3 million. So the damage from the vaccine continues, and it's going to cost the country a lot of money. And it's also, you know, I hate to say this.

I put out a tweet talking about a new concept called volatility of thought. There's a lot of psychological and psychiatric issues that have been caused by the vaccine. uh that was shown in our uk uh you know personal independent payment system but they go they get down into different claims psychiatric claims went off the hook starting with 21 22 23 they're just exploding so there's there's neurological issues uh so we have any you know a population that's getting sicker that also isn't thinking straight yeah i discussed this with jessica rose when she was on a couple of weeks ago but and again haven't been able to verify it yeah but it would not shock me at all i saw one study that was um that was observing the brain brain matter of people who

had taken the vaccine and it was essentially the effect that the study showed you're gonna have to verify it was that people were essentially being lobotomized it was graying out the front frontal cortex of their brains which wouldn't shock me at all uh you know look um the anecdote look there's there's the math which we've proven something's going on in the population and then there's anecdotes and we all know people that uh not everybody the good news it's not everybody but we all know people that have changed and they're not thinking straight yeah well that gets another Another thing we discussed before we hit record last week, there was a lot of very positive momentum toward the direction of getting accountability and letting the public know that these vaccines are, were not safe and effective, are not safe and effective with the Maha hearings on the Hill last Monday. Um, and I was extremely optimistic, um, Monday, Tuesday after those, those hearings, because it was quite obvious that, um, anybody standing up for the vaccine that Jake, I forget his last name, the guy from Stanford got his, they mopped the floor with them and the data they brought, the arguments they brought were pretty clear cut and dry to me.

And I think many others who, even others who are skeptical of the narrative around the COVID vaccine not being safe and effective. You know, before the Charlie Kirk assassination, let's go back a couple of weeks. Trump, without that true social statement about Operation Warp Speed maybe not being as great as he thought, that was a huge sea change in the Trump mindset that he was willing to. And that gave me hope that Kennedy had his support. And also the attacks on Kennedy proved to me that they're scared of what he's coming up with behind the scenes. You know, it's hard for us to know what's really going on because, you know, when you're head of HHS, you're not communicating what's going on. So we only had to like, you know, crumbs to go on, some of which were new mRNA vaccines being approved. But when I saw Kennedy being attacked and the ferocious blitzkrieg against him, that's when I'm like, Bobby's doing the right thing.

And then Trump put out that that that that tweet. And then we had the hearings. And I think that Scott, I think the last doctor that presented the other side, his name was Scott, last name Scott, maybe Jake Scott was his name. But he got like you said, he got he got wiped, wiped out by by everybody else. I was super optimistic that, oh, the truth is finally going to start to come out. And then, boom, it's gone. No one's talking about it anymore. Charlie Kirk, you know, on Wednesday, the hearings were Monday, Tuesday, Charlie Kirk. And now no one's talking about it.

Everyone is enraged about this assassination. And, you know, I find the timing a little too convenient personally. Do you think, I mean, obviously the momentum in terms of public attention on this topic has waned significantly, understandably so, in the wake of Charlie Kirk, but do you think it's completely stomped out? I mean, there was hearings this morning as well, I believe. No, no, it's not, because this has happened before. People don't remember, but we were getting a lot of traction in COVID truth about the mRNA vaccines in 2022, and then the Ukraine war started and wiped it off the map. So the COVID story has been wiped off the map a couple of times, but the bad news is the reason it's not going to get wiped off the map is the damage continues to grow, and more and more people are realizing how bad this is. And I think there was a Rasmussen poll that came out recently that 54% of Americans believe that they know somebody who's either been injured or died from the COVID vaccine. So we're over the tipping point now. And that's the sad part of this is they're not going to be able to get away from the COVID story because the damage continues to steamroll and slowly gather moss.

And it's not only that Rasmussen poll, it's like people who know people have been injured or died from the vaccine. I think the other sort of negative externality of the vaccine is becoming blatantly obvious to people is the turbo cancer. Maybe that I don't know if that's considered an injury in these in these polls. But I think if you look at the rates of colon cancer in men in their 30s, the amount I know, multiple people, some of which got cancer and died within a few months, some that got it and started at stage four. And I think it's becoming so big that you can't ignore it. And also the birth, the birth rate dip. That's a problem that's going to that's going to continue for a while. Look, I said this years ago and I still believe this.

You know, this what happened during COVID with these vaccines is one of the greatest crimes against humanity. uh you know and 70 60 70 percent of this country was poisoned to one degree or another it's a mass poison not only this country but yeah the glow and i mean talk about sort of black swan events for the financial could the if there is accountability and the big pharma companies are held to account anthony fauci's had held to account like what effect does that have on pharmaceuticals obviously it will leak in the media too trump and rfk have um then it goes far as to ban advertisements for pharmaceutical drugs on tvs but they made it so you have to um verbally utter every potential side effect which is going to make it very

expensive and unlikely that, um, pharma ads actually get on, get on air. Um, but there's going to be some financial consequences, um, for these companies. But then as you mentioned for the country overall, as we have to take care of the people have been negatively affected by these vaccines. Yeah. So the, the, the, the budget of, of, uh, the Medicare expenses in the U.S. is going to continue to rise. Social Security is saving money because of the death of the older people from COVID and the vaccines. So they're saving money on Social Security, but the disabilities and the continued care of those who are injured is only rising. The implications of a COVID reckoning, I think are so scary. And that's why it's kind of the elephant in the room.

And they don't like to talk about it that much. It's because corporate America would be liable. Fortune 500 companies mandated this. So it's not just the pharmaceutical industry. It's a lot of people. So they're very hesitant to open up the floodgates of litigation because It would it would cripple the economy. And I said that pre-Trump election 2024, that my biggest fear is that they try to memory all this because there's so many vested interests that don't want to talk about this because it's it's just a giant mess that has huge economic implications. and what yeah that's what i'm just thinking through that like you think there's i don't want to laugh because it's not funny but the only solution like open the floodgates and say hey um we fucked up crime against humanity poisoned tens of billions of americans half the country 60 in the country um but you're not allowed to sue these companies because

it would triple the economy they could try that i don't think it'll work i think i think uh the problem the problem is this this isn't going away and there's a reckoning coming and i i don't know when and you know i think you and i have been shocked the you know this this vaccine should have been pulled in february of 2021 on the fair's data alone i mean we had a swine flu vaccine to kill 25 people, and they pulled the freaking thing. The VAERS has got, you know, 16,000 U.S. deaths, or even more now, and globally, like 34,000. And, you know, that's an underreporting factor of 40, anywhere from like 20 to 50, let's call it 40.

So in the U.S. alone, it's probably 800,000 to 1.2 million people dead, who knows. But the point is, and then, of course, the disabilities and the injuries, they should have been pulled in February of 21. The signal was there. And then people like me should never exist. As an internet phenomenon, I should not have existed if things were working properly. And here we are. It's 2025, and we're still not having a national conversation about this.

It's absurd. It really is. And I think it's a message. It just doesn't show how broken the institutions are across the board. Yeah. I think, whereas COVID, Charlie Kirk, again, fog of war, but I think one thing that's clear is that the institutions, particularly the universities, have indoctrinated a generation or part of a generation with overtly Marxist-Communist views, and they've become completely detached from reality to a certain extent. And I think that's exacerbated by the economic situation as well, where people are more willing to get on the path of either radical right or radical left sort of political views because they're not getting any help from the moderates that exist in the system today. And I think across the board of the institutions, pharma, financial, university, education, it's become clear that it's completely bankrupt across the board.

And that's why when it comes to COVID, the vaccine specifically, like if we get accountability, like we need the national conversation and like a period of it's blatantly obvious that all these institutions are corrupt at their core. We need to do something different. well the other thing there is more need in national conversations because there's still so many people who don't know why they're sick and if you don't know why you're sick you can't treat it i mean there are protocols to clean up the spike protein i don't know which ones are the best i'm not the doctor but if you don't know what what's causing your ailment and you can't take proactive action you're going to go to the doctor and go i got this i got that they're going to give you you know more pharmaceutical drugs to hide the symptoms rather than cure and you know

uh i'm a hopeful person i believe that the bodies of you know god gave us this body it's very resilient and i think people were aware of what was going on they could heal themselves yeah i completely agree um how are you positioning yourself obviously you talked about 30-year treasuries um sort of the the ugly uh duckling in the pond that Well, 30 years are for people that would be like an institutional client that likes to speculate. The average Joe should be in three-month T-bills just waiting to buy cash equivalents. The average Joe should be just – I've been saying this the last two years. Fortunately, I was early like Warren Buffett, but have some dry powder in your portfolio to take advantage of bargains when they come.

And don't be over-levered. But, you know, I had a I had a consultation, you know, I do some consulting on the phone and somebody who was a real estate investor asked me what I thought. And he's I said, well, what's your leverage profile look like? He's got a lot of rental property income. He's like, I don't have any leverage. And I said, that's fabulous. You know, and you should probably think of relevering in the bottom of this market and expand your empire. And he's like, oh, that's a good idea.

So, like, if you have leverage, reduce it. If you have a portfolio, raise some cash. I'm not going to tell you, you know, I'm not going to tell you to get out of everything. It's up to you. And if you don't have gold, get some. And so with Tricolor going down, where should we be looking next for the knock on effects from that? Well, the banks have been extending and pretending. They've been hiding the commercial real estate losses.

The Fed put out a statement about that in November of 2024. The New York Fed did a report saying the banks are extending and pretending. So there's huge losses on the banks' books right now. The Federal Reserve came in. People forget this, but in 2023, we had a duration problem, meaning everybody's bank bond portfolio was underwater because they raised interest rates. And there was a deposit of flight. The Fed came in and lent money to the banks against their losses and shored up the system. That was duration interest rate risk.

What they're not going to do is lend money to banks to bail them out of credit risk. And the credit part of the cycle is coming. This tricolor is probably going to set off a knock-on effect. It'll start slowly. It's already been going on behind the scenes, I think. Japan has issues. So that's that's a black swan event. None of us can predict. Japan goes tits up. They're in trouble. They have a currency crisis brewing.

You know, I follow this guy on Twitter who said that Bank of Japan has been doing interventions every night for the last 45 days. So, you know, we got issues. And there's a lot of there's a lot of insolvent banks. And the question is, when do the credit markets care? And I think they're going to start caring soon. Sup freaks. Guess what? We launched a browser extension. It's called Opportunity Cost and it helps you see the true cost of everything in Bitcoin. Convert prices to Bitcoin as you browse the web. Opportunity Cost automatically displays fiat prices in Bitcoin or Sats, helping you think in a Bitcoin standard. It works on Amazon, Zillow, X, your bank account, QuickBooks. You can convert everything to Bitcoin. It's really cool. It's also 100% open source MIT license. We don't collect

any data all of the conversions happen in your browser on your local device it's a great way to recalibrate your life and begin thinking in sats go check it out at opportunitycost.app that's opportunitycost.app as it pertains to the real estate market is are the banks going to have the biggest problems this time around or the from what i understand a lot of it well i think banks hold mortgages on their balance sheet uh you know because they you know they got higher yields in treasuries. So there might be some issues. Definitely, there'll be some regional bank issues. The big banks will gobble them up. It's the shadow banking system, these private credit funds, private equity. I think Melanie was saying that there's a lot of different lenders

that stepped up. Those are the ones that are going to go. But the problem is the banks are exposed to them because they lend to them. So let's say you're a private credit fund. Where do you get your where do you get your leverage you get it from a bank so the banks are on the hook they're just not as direct as they were last time and so they'll they'll just have to assume their assets right yeah i mean so it's it's an indirect problem yeah yeah it is uh definitely feels like weird so there's a lot going on here mentioned the uh the numerology of the markets before we hit record, a bit demonic, approaching 6-6-6-6 on the S&P. And just when you consider everything that's going on,

not only economically with the employment numbers, inflation slowing down, the P.E. ratios that we're seeing, but socially with Charlie Kirk, the COVID vaccines. We've talked about this before, and I feel very comfortable talking about it with you. I mean, it feels very clear that we're in a spiritual battle right now, actually wrote a newsletter about it last night. And I think while a lot of our discussions and many other discussions I have in the show focus on the data and sort of policy decisions, I think

many people need to begin thinking more spiritually, like what are we actually doing here? And what type of world do we want to live in? I don't think you can solve the problems by manipulating policy and trying to push the data one way or another. I think we have to have a sort of societal confrontation with what we're doing as a society yeah look there's there's cycles you mentioned spiritual uh battle there is i mean there uh you know the secular uh secular secularism of this country which started in the 60s and with us now um people don't have an inner compass anymore uh and their idea of what's wrong and right has been distorted And, you know, let's be let's be honest, the intelligence agencies have been working this like, you know, to the best of their ability.

We're getting rid of the Smith-Muntz Act under Obama. So as a country, we've been propagandized. Media doesn't tell the truth and they're not on the hook for it. You know, we have literally the media is an apparatus of the government. And we know about Operation Mockingbird. And to think that went away, you've got to be naive. And if you believe most of anything that comes out of the media, I don't know what to tell you. And also, we have to be very leery of the quote-unquote alternative media because you don't think the CIA has figured out a way to infiltrate that and get control.

And there's been scandals lately of big influencers getting paid to promote stuff. So there's – I'm currently not paid by anyone to promote anything. I get paid by selling my economic research. I don't get paid by telling you how to vote or think about something. I'm just giving my raw opinion. But there's a lot of influencers out there that are getting paid. I'm getting paid, but by advertisers to push Bitcoin products. Yeah, that's called sponsorship.

You're not getting paid to push a tweet on India or Coke. No. And not disclose it. it's about it's it's about disclosure yeah and that's the uh that was i mean obviously fog of war but like this whole like bill ackman hampton story um bb netanyahu trying to pay um media organizations and influencers to talk a certain way about israel uh it's very clear that's definitely happening in alternative independent media i mean if you're just if you have more than two brain cells and you're aware you just yeah look at the uh the road shows that some people

go on and the shows that they'll go on on that road show and they're turn out to be the same oh yeah no this is um we're in the fog of war and just step again i like yourself was a very emotional the first two days and I made a point of not saying what I actually how I felt and so it's called about having some discernment and self-control but when you feel yourself enraged or emotional step back realize you know this is this is what they want they want you to think emotionally and just come back to the 30,000 foot view this is a class issue that's it And when you think that way and you say, what do I have in common with an oligarch worth $100 billion? Absolutely nothing.

And that's – again, this is rhyming with the conversation I had with Jessica. If and when the next economic crisis materializes, I think that's going to be really – that's going to determine obviously where we go for decades. But in 2008, it was bail out the boomers and screw the millennials and all that. But I think this time around, it's going to be a decision. Do we bail out the boomers yet again, or do we give the millennials and the zoomers a chance to actually do something with their lives and build wealth? Well, the other thing is historically there's precedence for this. If you look, when wealth gaps like this get created, and they take a long time to manifest, and we're at one now, they're settled one of two ways. There's an existential threat to the owners of the wealth, like the French Revolution, or there is a reset, like the Great Depression and the big new deal, the New Deal economics.

They share again with the middle class. those are the only two options you have so it's going to be interesting to see how they go I think it should be very interesting for people to understand why do they want to create a digital control grid system

because they want to avoid the French Revolution and they want to probably not give you a good new deal so this whole digital currency thing Palantir 24-7 surveillance that and the obsession with that that is that is a real thing and they they probably don't want to

give us a new deal is my guess and they're racing to get that uh you know get that uh that system in place and that's why you have to resist any kind of calls for like we saw pam bond you talk about hate speech which is you know charlie kirk said that was nonsense anything that curtails our speech no anything that gives us less choice and options like digital currencies no um i'm i'm i'm a freedom loving individual and i know what's coming and they're gonna try that i mean this is these these people cannot admit that the system is that they screwed it up and in the collapse they're gonna blame everybody but themselves and try to control and take everything but ed alex carp stood up in la last week at the all-in summit and promised us that palantir is not

surveilling or spying on individual american citizens we'll never do that i don't believe that for i don't believe that for a second because you know we have that we have them on record saying crazy things uh and these people you're gonna you're gonna remember these people live in bubbles and they all talk amongst each other and they're just they're super wealthy and they think it's a chess game they really do yeah well and it's just like i was sitting there and i was watching that and i mean like for a second i was like oh wow maybe i misunderstood palantir and then it's like wait a second you like literally use metadata to track and identify and then ultimately uh target people with attacks like there's how do you how can you do that without

surveilling people and it's uh it's like blatant in your face gaslighting if you will and i think palantir i mean this is i've talked about this with whitney webb and she gets a lot of backlash for it but you have sex to the right which i'm um i sort of sympathize with to a certain degree like in terms of you got to be optimistic can't always be dooming but um if you look at the paypal palantir tesla mafia that is now sort of in control in terms of the influential cognoscente behind the trump administration from the tech sector they're not really working on on things that they give us more freedom at the end of the day no they're not and look i'm not in the black pill community i think there's always hope but there's also such grand

systemic cycle things out of our control going on that you know you do what you can but you know also build you know i was talking to katherine austin fits better in maui a couple weeks ago and you know i agree with her build and i said this years ago build build new systems build uh build new communities and like you're doing and uh you know just kind of don't get too you know freaked out by what's going on that you can't control try to control what you can no i really appreciate katherine i've never had her on the show i know she's highly skeptical of bitcoin and thinks it's a cia project um it's unfortunate to me that she does because i i think if i could sit down with her for an hour and sort of walk her through how it's pretty obvious that

it's not um she would be a bitcoin advocate but no i guess why i do what i do it's like we need to create these opt-out options for for people to escape the system that they're trying to trap you in um that's one of those and and i think a current she talked about a currency that i talked about a couple years ago but the currency of personal relationships will become more important and trust and integrity uh in a world where there's not that that seems to be lacking quite a bit and surround yourself with people that you can trust and like uh that have the same values and and and you know my friend group is pretty well vetted so no one would say anything stupid about charlie kirk but if if i i said openly on twitter that and any acquaintance says anything

stupid like that you know i'm not gonna i'm not gonna like scream at him just to say like i can no longer associated with you just kind of quietly walk away you know you don't give it energy you just you just don't give it zero energy like you're no longer worthy of my interactions now that i said that an hour ago on rabbit hole recap the show i just did that like that's i think to your point of recognize we're in the fog of war recognize they're trying to divide to divide us because that you're not giving your energy to those people because that's what the evil side feeds off of is that negative you don't want to yell at them you don't want to you don't want you don't want to hurt them but you just you just you give them zero energy and that's that's how that's

how you stop this they want they want energy the people that are angry want you to engage with them they want to argue they want to yell at you but if you know nothing hurts these people more than being ignored yeah develop the courage to ignore ed thank you for coming back on the show i think uh timely timely week for for an update with ed dowd so i appreciate your time and uh yeah stay frosty out there everybody it seems like uh i mean it doesn't seem it's very obvious that things are are foreshadowing to i think some singularity at some point in the future and it's gonna it's gonna involve many things financial social um liberty oriented things so i think uh keep a clear mind

thank you for having me on and marty great to be here all right peace and love freaks thank you for listening to this episode of tftc if you've made it this far i imagine you got some value out of the episode if so please share it far and wide with your friends and family we're looking to get the word out there also wherever you're listening whether that's youtube apple spotify make sure you like and subscribe to the show and if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms that goes a long way last but not least if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free make sure you download the fountain podcasting app and go to fountain.fm to find that five dollars a month get you every episode a day early ad free helps the show gives

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