TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #670: Why Central Banks Are Bringing Gold Home with Vince Lanci

Episode Date: October 13, 2025

Marty sits down with Vince Lanci to discuss China's strategic gold accumulation through Shanghai warrants, the global dedollarization movement, how gold is being positioned as high-quality liquid collateral to compete with US Treasuries, Bitcoin price suppression through ETF derivatives, and the parallels between gold and Bitcoin market manipulation. Vince on Twitter: https://x.com/Sorenthek Vince’s Substack: https://vblgoldfix.substack.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: Bitkey https://bit.ly/TFTCBitkey20 Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Obscura https://obscura.net/ SLNT https://slnt.com/tftc CrowdHealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.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 probably should be that's i think this was the uh the most enlightening pre-record conversation i've had we should record that shit for your for your premium people right we should have we should have i you know i do that when i'm with tom longo we hit the tape before we hit the tape

i hit the tape on my phone i go let's go we argue about something like music or some uber shit you You know, Tom is Tom is one of my favorite crazy uncles, recurring crazy uncles on the show. He's totally he's totally. Yeah. Yeah. We definitely we definitely riff off of each other from different angles. I look at it from finances. I try to explain the world. He tries to explain the world from ideology. And together it's like we're both right or we're both just, you know, lying to each other. Who knows? All right. So I'm with you. Do you do you pick up what he's putting down in terms of England still controls the world? the crown of the world the the the he needs a focal point and that focal point this is not going to be a negative statement he seems to focus on a focal point and then he sees the

tentacles coming out i don't see the focal point it may not be the king of england or the crown remember you know two years ago it was davos and wef and the biden junta that was his that was his expression and now he's gravitated towards the crown i'm like you know what i mean when you look at things through the lens that i study it and analyze things which is like him um and that is all you do is you find out who benefits and who suffers and you just keep and you just keep eliminating people until you find out the one guy who's there and i don't know that it's the crown per se but there's definitely a one thing that he said that's really true is that europe in general is a plantation a long time ago he was talking about this way europe's a plantation they've you

know feudalism and the people that are in power want to stay in power and the europeans are still colonizing they're still trying to protect their colonies and i guess if you want to put a focal put on it you can call it the crown you call the people that operate the crown i i think i think i know from a friend of mine who's in uh who's a banking executive here that there's an ideological split and it's everywhere and the ideological split is the the uh european old money i mean they don't have anything there i mean i'm not i'm not anti-europe like he is uh but you know they're doubling down on let's say ideology or wokeness and germany's got no manufacturing anymore yeah okay no no i i i agree with him like it's it's probably not that in six months

you and i will talk about this again and he will say well i know who's pulling the strings of the crown now you know he just keeps going off the line right he was like i hate biden i hate biden because of this. And I'm like, yeah, you're right. He goes, and then he, I will look at Europe and England in terms of trade. I'll say, well, this is what's going on here. That doesn't make sense. Italy's getting screwed, yada, yada, yada. And then I'll say, well, that's because the ideology is driving all the policy. Like I would say the ideology influences policy because I still, I still believe that people can at least be semi-rational. He, he you know he's kind of dragging me that way but he's like no no ideology determines everything

with these people and it's it's sad pathetic but it's true like i'm looking at things differently now like for example domestically kamala harris right i don't care about the politics i'm not a political person well i i identify her as what you would call a third generation feminist so there is there's there's you know real feminists then there's their their children and there's a third generation why are you feminists because my mom was kamala's third generation i'm like well where did she get this training i found that yesterday kamala i'm listening to like the day kennedys which is like um uh they have a song called are you familiar with the band yep all right so california who browse right it's about jerry brown you know the hippie who wanted to run for

president when reagan won and uh and and i'm reading the lyrics and yes it's pretty funny it's really cool and then you know i mean where's jerry brown now boom i did one of those things on chat gpt and that kamala harris's came up and his name came up in his bio she was attorney general for california for seven years under him and i'm like oh that's where you got it and they just got off the deep end those people anyway all right cool um so i agree with him on a lot of things and when i disagree i let him know and it's usually minor stuff uh or when i don't agree or disagree i just sit back and just watch him froth and we have fun he brings on to kind of give him a sounding board to do his thing yeah it's uh great we we typically for some reason

we always record on the late friday afternoon right where we do record and that's like him after a week of screaming at people and dissecting things and i don't know if i get him at his most tired point or when he's distilled his thoughts most clearly but they're always incredible conversations if if if they're not distilled clearly i see the picture of the uh of the guy from um it's always sunny in philadelphia with the map i'm like whoa like i'll say okay time out could you pause this what the fuck are you talking about tom and then other times i'm like i'm like that sounds stupid but it's not wrong that sounds it's not wrong oh shit he might be right and i just i just walk away going all right i guess i have to look at it that way though yeah i will

say he he definitely dragged me towards his viewpoint um in terms of this for lack of a better term intercabal squabble like changing the reference rate yeah that's right that's what it is intercabal it's that's a good phrase you should get a dot com on that or something like dot io intercabal squabble the only thing that i've identified that i think that that um uh and i'm saying it to you and i'll say it to him but i haven't said it to him yet but i'm saying it to He has become so patriotic – I'm very patriotic – but he has become so patriotic that everything Trump does is viewed as good for us. And I have said that as well, meaning Trump's an accelerationist. Whether he's good or bad, I don't care.

We're going to get to where we have to get faster because of him. But I don't think he's the 3D chess people that some person – that people do. I think he's a people pleaser. He just wants to be liked, right? oh yeah he's a would you say people pleaser yeah that's right he's got a personality disorder and that's and i'm not saying that lightly he's got he's a narcissistic personality disorder i studied him and and uh when i was in new york city for years as as one of the things to look at and uh yeah and it becomes a people pleaser he's constantly pulling

and thank god because he doesn't get married to an idea and he can change gears if he's wrong on the other hand it really kind of makes it look like he's out of his mind yeah yeah it is uh this guy i was watching uh scott adams he did his daily show uh yesterday and he was highlighting like the hamas israel deal that was signed who knows the full stick but nobody thought he could do that and right i think he's catering to like the people-pleasing nature of like oh you're right well and that's something that tom actually pointed out he goes like his like this is me and you versus tom and his part conversation tom do you know what trump does on thursday he dumps some ideas to get them distracted he does something else on monday it's

brilliant and i'll say tom look he tries stuff if it doesn't work he moves on to something else because he wants to keep the press on him in positive light he's like oh no he's got a plan but no he doesn't tom you know anyway the point is the the result is the same but i i agree with you that's uh that's that's true right people pleaser uh who like right now he's he's not like you know the economy he's talking about the funny thing is is because he's screwing up on let's say he's being perceived as screwing up on terror i mean look he's not making he's not getting more popular right he's losing popularity so what's he doing he goes well where can i pivot to next oh shit let me work he's working on things all the time and you know and if gaza works his popularity

goes up i mean look after the midterms he's done uh in terms of uh influence so he he's he kind of recognizes that yeah no i mean last point on this but like he did have msnbc abc cbs sort of giving him flowers and obama while not explicitly mentioning him in the tweet did say that was a good thing that this peace deal is coming so it seems like he is dragging people in his direction but one thing that trump is famous for is being a big fan of gold uh this is your expertise and why i wanted to bring you on obviously is gold i think it's still trading over four thousand dollars right now so we're screaming i told you we've had two people right now i'm a fucking idiot don't don't record that turn that mic off uh let me see where what i see here yeah trump and gold

that's your scott beset thing and that's where bitcoin comes in like that you don't announce you're going to create an spr or for bitcoin you just buy it yeah uh gold's 4019 jesus christ whenever i see gold up 40 i go all right what did trump do today you know like the guys that deal just blow up or something yeah he called out china he said china's not uh not back on the table china's not cooperating with the rare earth metals deal that they want to do right that's right he says right stocks are down gold is up what's the dollar doing and dollars down yeah oh and the market's acting recessionary and yeah he's he i think i just saw something come across the that he's threatening to do more tariffs.

Yeah, Trump threatens China tariffs. There you go. Doesn't take much to get gold going right now. And by the way, with the context of Bitcoin, I do want to say something to your audience about that because having lived through the repression of gold price, all your people are smart enough and they know how it's happening.

But I just want to confirm it and give them details of how it's being done because they're keeping a lid on it to accumulate it. That's what they're doing. They're trying to wash people out. That's what they're doing. And I'm not even paranoid. Anyway, all right.

I'm ready for you. All right. We'll get to that later. Let's focus on gold first. Like I was saying, I've had two people on the last three months caught my eye. Actually, probably the last two months caught my eye two months ago. The chart of the Shanghai warrants going up parabolically. What is happening there?

I'm sorry, what? what is happening there are we starting now yeah okay we've been recording for 11 minutes oh nice cool all right so um okay uh shanghai warrants all right so the fact is and i know you know this and your people know this as well but the fact of the matter is a shanghai shanghai has been adding warrants which are claims on gold uh in the exchange now generally speaking the Shanghai warrant float is, I'm going to make a number up, but it's going to be giving an idea of the scale. If you have the chart for your people, that'll help them as well. About four, like four on a scale of one to 104, you know, 4,000 warrants or 400 warrants, but it's a small

number and it's very regular. And it goes like this. If you're looking at a chart, if you have chartists out there, it'll go sideways. And what that is, is that those warrants in general are tied to people arbitraging the physical to the futures in China. That's all it is, right? There's not a lot going on there. But a couple of months ago, it starts to ramp. And there you go, that's it. Yeah, it starts to ramp. So it starts to ramp before 2025. It starts to ramp, frankly, when Trump started doing the tariff thing. And it's getting aggressive now. Now, I've been watching this for a couple of months with interest, but no conclusion. And just to stay with the facts of that for a second there,

what they're doing is they're locking up gold. That gold is being locked up. And China has been importing gold hand over fist. And they advertise that now because they're broadcasting to their BRICS partners, their junior partners that say, we've got the gold, we've got the gold. We're telling you, we've got the asset that allows us to get off of treasuries, which allows us to get off of dollars. And they're doing that. But what are they using the gold for is really what, I think there's probably only three people who have a clue, at least publicly, that are talking about it. One of them, I hope, is me. Another is Eric Young. He and I friends. We've come to the same conclusion from different points of view. And there's

someone else out there I'm not going to mention because I don't know. But here's the situation. And it has to do with gold and the yuan, the Chinese currency, and it has to do with trust. So in the West, we recently changed gold to a tier one asset per Basel III. And that means, right so everyone knows that terminology here all right good so we change it to tier one basel three and we did that uh because what it does is it allows the piggy bank of your gold to be recognized on your balance sheet so my balance sheet now now now recognizes the asset for at its full value used to be tier three tier three only 50 percent of its value is recognized so if i needed 100 you sold it it was the structure was made for you to sell gold they make it tier one

you don't have to liquidate it. So you hold it and you get the full benefit on your balance sheet. And when you do that, if you're, let's say you're a central bank, well, I don't know if it applies to central banks yet, but it offsets your losses. You have a bigger piggy bank. You have a bigger savings account, but you can't touch it. You can't monetize it. You can't loan it. You can't leverage it. It's just a pet rock, which is what they want. Because if you let the pet rock out, it becomes a potential replacement for the dollar and for treasuries so that's basil that's basil three and tier one the next level above this is where china comes in the next level above basil three and tier one is what's called hqla that's a high quality liquid asset if you're not if

they're not familiar with that i'll explain it very very very quickly hqla means not only is a tier one, but it's so liquid, it's so robust and so continuous that we trust it to be used as collateral in financing. HQLA, so essentially, what is HQLA? Treasuries, the biggest bond market in the world, right? And the argument was made in Europe that gold is not HQLA for various reasons. And, you know, depending on how you slice and dice the technicals of it, maybe it's not but if you slice it nice and technical another way it is the world gold council uh put out a

report and i read that report and that report said gold is not hqla and i went oh shit so it's just a pet rock still it's just all pet rock and i moved on and then i went back to this chart that you showed and i went what the hell are they doing with that and then i talked to a couple friends And I said, oh, shit. And I did, then I did some, what I did then was I did some, I did deep dive research on the BRICS behavior at their summit this year in May. And that summit, which did not get a lot of press this year, there wasn't a lot of hype for various reasons, but I wrote five articles on it.

And one of the articles was, I identified from piecing together articles everywhere, I'm talking to two sources in mainland China, from talking to someone in Hong Kong, that China, to assuage fears of the other BRICS people, had said, look, we want you to use the yuan for currency. And let's say you're a Saudi Arabian. You're like, OK, I'll use it. I'll use it. But you know what? I may not trust the US, but the US dollar is better than the yuan. What are you backing it with? Well, we're backing it with our economy. We're not going to back it with gold. But I'll tell you what we will do. We'll do something the U.S. doesn't do, we'll let you convert it into gold freely. No problem. And the Saudi

Arabians said, everyone, I'm just, for instance, they said, that's great. Where will the gold stay? This is like five years ago. Where will the gold stay? Well, it'll stay in China. They're like, no, that's not going to work. We don't want, right? We're just, we just ended this problem with the U.S. Everyone's pulled their gold back. And so China comes up with a plan and the SGE, which is the Shanghai Gold Exchange. That's their physical exchange. They create an international division, SGE International, SGEI. And the SGEI starts partnering with vaults in various BRICS countries, and they create a network. So I'm Saudi Arabia. I give them my oil. They give me Yuan. And I say, you know what? I want to convert this into gold. Will you make me a market? And they do,

china and the one you want gets converted to gold where's the gold go it goes into their vault so in a sense in a crypto way they've decentralized the or in non-crypto you say they diversify the geographic risk of ownership of the physical metal but they're still accounting for it uh in a in a you know it's it's like it's like old school blockchain it's like you know Fred Flintstone chain. And so that made the Saudis and the other countries in the BRICS more comfortable holding yuan. I could convert it to gold.

I could see the gold. I don't have to worry about it going anywhere. I don't have to worry about it. I don't have to worry about an accountant going in and auditing them to an extent. And they gradually got more comfortable with it. At the same time, they got less comfortable with the US treasuries. Right. And so at the BRICS summit, the Chinese had homework, and their homework was to internationalize the yuan and to internationalize gold ownership.

And this is what they announced. Hong Kong, Singapore, the Golden Card, or I'm not sure if I named that or they named that, but there's like a Golden Card, or Singapore, Macau, all along this area, the Shanghai Cooperative Organization. organization. And they're saying all these vaults are now connected, which means you can arbitrage back and forth, which means every country can have their gold close enough to see, to visit. And I went, this is great. I see what they're doing. They're making sure people are trustworthy in gold. And I said, well, what are they doing about the volatility in gold? Right? Well, because the US can spoof it lower. Anyone can spoof it lower. It's not that deep. Well, turns out they solved that too. I don't know if it's going to work, but they solved that.

their solve was the gold will be carried on everyone's balance sheet according to a moving average, not according to the price at the end of the day. So 200-day moving average. And let's face it, over the long run, gold holds value because it's gold, right? I mean, there's no synthetic gold yet, at least not in large size yet. Okay. So they create the network of alts, And I go, all right, this is for the BRICS summit. They address the concept of price volatility. I go, all right, that's good. And then I read something, I wrote on it, and I went, oh, shit, this is what they're going to do next.

And this is what they're going to do. They announced that they're going to be partnering with vaults in countries that need to build infrastructure. So you're thinking about the African BRICS countries, right? Why? Well, I'm a country in Africa, Ghana, and I've got a shit ton of gold, and it's just sitting there. And if I want to use it, I have to give it to the IMF, and they give me treasuries, and I borrow money, and I build a road, right?

But I want to do business with China. China is building roads and airports and cutting deals because they're just colonizing economically. We know that. China says, you can use your gold. so i'm an african country that needs an airport built to simplify it and i've got gold i put it in the vault which is in the system of the shanghai exchange setup and then china loans me the money on the gold directly not through treasuries not through some swap deal the gold is there, trying to trust them. And then I take the yuan, and I go back to China, and I say,

build me an airport. And so what they've done is they created project financing. Now, I had gotten that far with this. I'm like, OK, this is really good. They're unlocking the buying potential of gold. You own stocks. I own stocks. Can you borrow money against it and do stuff? Yeah. And if you use your leverage smartly, you're fine. I went, all right. So they're going to unlock gold, Well, then that makes it a high-quality collateral asset. I went high-quality collateral asset, HQCA. And then I read this report, high-quality liquid asset. I went, oh, shit.

And then I went back to my bond days. And I went, what is an HQLA used for? Now, I'll use a word that everyone knows, repo. If you want to get something done in the world, you pledge your treasuries into repo, which is theoretically you're selling them and you buy them back as collateral. and they give you money. And that's what the repo market is. It's, I have an asset, that's high quality asset.

It's a treasury. Here, loan me the money. I'm going to build the road and I'll pay you back on the back end. I mean, that's what we do with treasuries. And the HQLA pool is, I think it's more, but I'm going to throw you a lower number,

$17 trillion, $20 trillion. And of that pool, between, depending on how you measure, between 50 and 70% is US treasuries. And none of it is gold. It's treasuries or sovereign bonds that we deem are high quality enough. Chinese bonds aren't high quality enough. The Brits won't even buy the Chinese bonds.

But anyway, I'm going to pause for a second here because I'm talking a lot. Is there anything you want to say? You know, I don't want to try to keep going. I mean, yeah, because this is, we've been covering this, not this specifically, but this idea of this diversification away from the dollar treasury. system and what are the mechanics that's one thing i've been saying for years as a bitcoin is like all these countries should just skip to bitcoin instead of some bricks back currency because they're not going to be able to trust each other which is like what you're getting

into now like who wants to buy chinese bonds who wants to buy russian bonds who wants to buy saudi bonds that's exactly right they're working around it right they're working around it and i think china's end game to that point is eventually they'll get everyone to buy chinese bonds whether whether it be stablecoin Chinese bonds, but that's the point is they want everyone to own Chinese bonds. But they're just replicating what the US did probably a little bit better, using it in a more decentralized way. Yeah, but I agree. That's what they're doing. So here I'm going high-quality collateral asset. I went, oh, yeah. And I went, oh, shit, now you're competing. Gold's going to compete with treasuries. Then I went back to my European

analysis and i went wait a minute but it's not hqla so it can't be repo then i called a friend of mine on the mainland i go are you guys going to use this as a repo asset so you can unlock the financing of that poor country in africa that wants to do this or wants to do that or so saudi arabians can load money to the country in africa in gold you know using gold as collateral because they have a ton of money and uh he basically said yeah i said well how do you do that this is where I was a little bit not wonkish enough. He goes, well, you get it. You turn it into a high-quality liquid asset.

We designate it for our half of the world as HQLA. And then we put it into repo. And then I went, oh, and I went back to the chart. And then I talked to a friend of mine, Eric. Eric Young. And he's popular on Twitter, King Kong. and i went eric hqla you need to be to become repo and i think they're doing that for all this mind stuff and this project stuff i go where's the goal he went that's what the warrants are for

they're locking the goal down and at some point that's this again this is theory we're not sure yet. It's conjecture. At some point, we believe they're either, reasonably speaking, they're either testing the system out. They've tested things before, and I've seen them test it. They're either testing the system out, stress testing it for wards or whatever, or they're accumulating it to put it in the Hong Kong vault, which just opened. You put that in the Hong Kong vault, and what do you have? Hong Kong is the buffer zone between China and the rest of the world. And you have your Switzerland, your gold. And that's where your first repose will be, he and I concluded separately, coming from different points of view. So China is going to,

I believe, has a very good chance or intensive, they have to, otherwise the gold just is still a pet rock. They need to unlock its leverage and buying power. Now that everyone trusts it, Now that everyone's in the process of trusting Yuan, in the process over there, they want to say, okay, now you can borrow Yuan against your gold and you can see the gold and you can build an airport. And it's like, great, let's do it. And they drop the Neo-Keynesian concepts and they do this, which is a hard money concept, and they're going to start doing it. That's what I think is going to happen. And I wrote almost like a short academic style paper on it, a St. Joe's Prep style paper, right? um and uh um i had to drop that in since since we figured that out um

like it's the jesuits um so so i i look at all that i go why the hell else would the warrants be going a lot of people are saying they're doing this they want to do the 3d testing no the warrants are rarely used because they're about arbitrage they're just like shfe which is the futures exchange it's kind of like comex versus LBMA, COBEX London, COBEX London. It's going back and forth, but then it just starts ballooning and it's not going anywhere. I mean, ultimately, it just makes the price go up,

but I think they're getting ready to do that. Now, I want to add one anecdotal piece. It started happening before the end of the year, right, in that chart you have, and it's since ramped up even more. What else happened at the end of the year? the u.s started repatriating gold u.s started silver to the car right okay u.s starts repatriating gold now did we buy the gold or we're just bringing gold back that was ours i don't know i mean i actually do know but it's not important what's important is that the u.s is now emptying

london of its gold to get its collateral but you have to like zoltan pozar it's a crisis of collateral you need to have the collateral there you need to say this is my gold if you're going to borrow it it needs to be there if you're going to borrow against it needs to be there so the u.s starts calling the gold back and i also noticed that that when u.s is calling the gold back gold's not being bought by china i have a chart when the u.s buys china does it when china buys the u.s does it so there's there's your what's the word you use cabal there's your cabal squabble it's your cabal squabble that's exactly it it's the war of the roses but it's a it's a it's a divorce course but again i'll give you that chart it's it's it's visually interesting but i talked to

someone in the political side and i i think he's well connected uh but what he said to me is that makes sense i said why don't we start bringing gold back and my theory was we started bringing gold back because we figured out we needed we needed for something i didn't know what for right uh you know if you talk to uh one person it's we're gonna have gold bonds we're gonna have a gold standard talk to all the bugs right no we're not gonna have gold bonds that's my opinion i'd like it to happen judy shelton i respect her and i think she's right at one time i agree with her but i think gold bonds are would undermine the regular treasury market oh i guess the gold bond you know why would we sell people bonds with gold and we could just sell them paper

the second one is gold standard no we can't go back to gold centers it's the it's the end of the world if we do that it's you can't do it um in my opinion um a use for gold well yeah the Commercial banks can start throwing it into blockchain and stable coins, and they create a new ETF type of product, the new product. Like, all right, that's good. But there was more bought than should have been bought or delivered. Some of it was going on the COMEX. Some of it wasn't. It was going to the Treasury.

And so I talked to my friend. I said, do you think that's related? He goes, oh, yeah. He goes, I think the U.S. finally paid attention to what they were doing and said, well, if they're getting theirs, and there's a chance that gold becomes a competitor to the U.S., if I want to finance a project in Africa, I may need gold too. So let's get all our gold back. And so we ramped the gold back. You saw Trump flip-flop. We're going to tariff gold and silver.

We're not going to – I mean, those are just – sorry, like him or don't, those are idiotic things to do. but they work because when he does them, when he does them, the market tells him if he's right or wrong immediately, you know, he's instant feedback. 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. This is an incredible hardware device for your friends and family, or maybe yourself who have Bitcoin on exchanges and have for a long time, but haven't taken a step to self-custody

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patented technology special operations approved it has free shipping as well so go check it out well that's what i was going to ask because i mean when it comes to repatriation of gold at the end gold at the end of last year like one of the main narratives is like people are flooding it into us vaults because of the pending tariffs so where the tariffs just uses a mechanism to flood it back or was it just some narrative control yeah excuse the the i mean i knew let's just start with the tariffs on gold. Silver's a different story, but it's tariffs on gold. You cannot tariff gold because gold is the, and Bitcoin's going to be as well, but gold is the intentional, unintentional loophole to avoid sanctions. Everyone does it. So this is gold. Well,

is it money? No, it's gold. It's a good, I'm buying a good from you, right? It's a good, it's barter. You're giving me a jet and I'm giving you gold, it's barter. And so that avoids to monitor that avoids the sanctions but because gold is used for nothing and it's a brick it's gold so it's money it may as well be money it's not good for anything else and so that's a loophole that exists in the world russia uses it we use it i'll give an example as a martin arms for an example uh when japan looks at the u.s and says it's not hypothetical it is in the 90s when japan has it you know there's supposed to be like a trade relationship you have to buy this much from us we have to buy that much from you well what japan does is japan used to go like this all

right uh we're not buying enough stuff from the u.s what are we going to buy cars no let's buy some gold you buy american gold it's a it's a money laundering operation you know you buy american gold you take it it counts as an import it counts against your trade deficit and then you take the gold and you put it back in London and you get out of it. It's a laundromat. So gold is used that way. Gold is used to satisfy the legal fine print on trade deficits. And that's where that went. So they're not going to tax or tariff gold. And to put it simply, one of the words that I use a lot is mercantilist, but I don't want it to be like a catchphrase. But the bottom line is if you look at the concept of mercantilism, you tax imports of what you make, and you don't tax imports of

what you need. And we need gold. We need silver. We need lithium. You don't threaten the tariff lithium. And so gold is that loophole item that allows us to circumvent tariffs. And we don't close it because it's kind of like an honor among thieves. We all do it. So the tariff being a reason to bring gold home? No, that's complete horseshit. It was complete horseshit then. I saw it then. And it's complete horseshit now.

In fact, like a month or two ago, didn't Trump do that? Didn't Trump say we might tax the gold and gold went crazy? I mean, I know he did that, right? He said, we're going to tax bullion. And the bullion banks were like, whoa, you can't do that. Because all they do is take gold, put it in a safe, short it against it, and take the money, and then go out and buy Aussie bonds or something.

Buy, you know, Nvidia. so uh he changed that right away that was rule 282 changed that right away for gold and uh there will be no tariffs on monetary gold your gold chain they might tariff that but once it's melted down they can't tariff it anymore and that's it so gold will not be tariffed gold's money for them anyway yeah i mean and tying this all together too i mean before we hit record so we got to touch on the russian war because that really ties into this too is that the catalyst for this big movement and sort of we've been prepping for this for over three years but that was really the treasury freezing in 22 was the last straw it was it was it was and last straw is a good way to

look at it because because our biggest trade partner china raised concerns with us after the financial crisis they're like okay we owe most of you we own a lot of treasuries and you're printing all this money and they were convinced that everything would be all right and during that time around 2014 with the whole ukrainian thing was this the geopolitics of it right uh russia said you know what the u.s is meddling we don't want to deal with this anymore we don't want our treasures and they started de-dollarizing and they tried to bring this is from someone who was involved in the conversations uh that they they russia approached china and said and said we're de-dollarizing. Are you going to de-dollarize? And China's like, no way. You're out of your mind.

We can't do that. We're not going to do that. We're still too tied closely together. And then so China, little by little, is selling treasuries, but nothing crazy. But they're buying gold. And it's not public. They're not really saying we're buying gold. They're just buying it. And then they get into the World Trade Organization. A little bit more time goes by. In 2022, the US sanctions and Europe sanctions them for invading Ukraine. Now, for anyone who's not familiar, and I know that you are, just briefly, Russia had most countries that use dollars, and every country does use dollars, has dollars in this global network called SWIFT. And SWIFT is essentially a big network of ATMs. And that money's in there, and your assets are there,

and it's basically all treasuries. And you borrow against the treasuries, and you do what you have to do. Throughout most, I'm not a historian, throughout most wars, nobody seizes anybody's money. They don't do that. So Russia invades Ukraine, and the US and Europe just decide to freeze all their assets, essentially confiscating their assets. Now, right or wrong, justified or not, every other country out there that has money in it says on the BRICS side, it's like, you know what? These guys have been keeping the price of gold down. They've been keeping the price of oil down. We can't make any money. We live off natural resources. We're poor. And they just took all the wealth from Russia on nuclear power. They can do that to us anytime they want. And they started

knocking on China's door and saying, OK, we're ready. Let's do it. And it started to accelerate. And China started buying gold very publicly to show them they meant business. And in 2022, the rest of the world outside the G7 said the only reason to own treasuries was because of the guarantee that the U.S. would never take it from them as a counterparty. And that made it more beneficial than gold with the interest rates. And after this, that's no longer worth it. How can we work another type of collateral, like treasuries, into our system to substitute for treasuries? And everyone's awareness had been raised up because of crypto and Bitcoin.

And all of a sudden, we also have the inflation in the US. People become aware of it and try to start selling bonds and buying gold. And they all start doing it. Even just to bring it to present day, the last time Brazil bought gold was in 2021. And now Brazil just bought, I forget how much, 15 and a half tons this month. They haven't bought gold in five years, four years. And so now they're buying. So countries are de-dollarizing even more.

Even the countries that are our friends are repatriating their gold from us. Serbia, whether they're friends or not, it's hard to say. But yeah, that's a great chart. That's a great chart. Yeah. I pulled this up because the inflection of 22, particularly on the gold part of the chart is pronounced. So we'll see. Is that share of reserves? Yeah, that's actually an important point. So a lot of people will look at that. So that's what's that showing. Gold is in the process of eclipsing US treasuries as a share of the central bank reserves, right? Okay. I have

something to add to that it's not it's not me it's it's bank of america did a study about six months ago and what they were trying to figure out is at least publicly they probably already knew like if central banks are buying gold to the word they use is diversify out of the dollar how much gold should they buy to have an optimal diversification of their portfolio the bank of america did the analysis and uh they said it's not efficient frontier but it's similar to it they said the optimal amount of their reserves in uh in gold for all the central banks that report to the imf is 30 and it's currently at 20 so as a percentage you should have 30 gold maybe 50 dollars and 20 other currencies and so they optimize and they're

basically doing a trade wait how much trade do i do that i need gold for that's going to go up and i had that report and i broke it down i shared it with with subscribers then you go into chat gpt and you say how much what is that and it was like 1.9 trillion dollars in gold now are they going to buy it overnight no they're going to buy it over time and it's probably then goldman sachs comes out with a report that says we're not going to say what we think the optimal amount is what we think they're going to be buying from three to five years and i went okay they're going to buy two trillion dollars worth of gold over three to five years, what does that do to the market? It drives the price to potentially $10,000. It just does

if they do it, depending on how patient they are. And every time, to your point of before we started, every time Trump says, I'm not putting up with China, what does gold do? It rallies because a central bank somewhere says, oh, shit, let's buy a little bit more. So yeah, I mean, that's it. The dollarization started with the Russian war, and it accelerated something that was already on the table to happen. And it's not going to go away. We're talking about a decade of this, probably. Sup, freaks?

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why ETFs have anchored new five and six-figure price floors, and why long-term hodlers remain firmly in control. Download now, and you'll also get access to the online event featuring James check, Bitcoin has crossed the Rubicon. Get the report at unchained.com slash TFTC. That's unchained.com slash TFTC. Two things I wonder. First, like bringing back to geopolitics with a US perspective, like did Trump and Besant more specifically come in understanding this dynamic at play and really try to reorient things with this incoming administration rather quickly to sort of combat or rearrange their side of the chessboard to be in a better position or were they caught off foot.

And then two, with the gold price running like it is, Bitcoin was at an all-time high last week, like do animal spirits get engaged in like a FOMO trade where a number of countries or individuals, institutions, whatever it may be, realize they're offside, underexposed and in russian to to bitcoin and gold bitcoin i knew this oh yeah anything part of this debasement trade okay so so the first the first what was the first question again because that was interesting that was an interesting interest on the geopolitical side where right

right are we cut off yeah or to percent because obviously you had that famous percent interview at the manhattan institute where he's talking about the global monetary reordering that he wants to be a part of um like it in my mind it's like okay he seems to know that something's going on he wants to be in that position um but you look at the the volatility of trump's positioning throwing things out there backing away pivoting somewhere else like do they actually know what's happening are they flat-footed yeah i i think we'd have to have like a you know sit down and have a beer or pizza or something and say all right what are they doing in their room together And, you know, some people are like, you know, it's a master plan.

And some people are like, he doesn't know what he's doing. And I personally think from the study that I've done of him, you know, over the years in the 90s and always when I was in New York on Wall Street, I personally think that Trump will find someone that he likes to listen to, that he will, who knows how to not be alpha, but be like a consigliere. And this time it's Besant. And I think Besant said, this is where we're going. This is where they're going.

We want to get there. Let's take care of this or that first. And so eventually, Trump's like, I want to make America great again. I understand that we need to do manufacturing. We're going to do that. Tell me the plumbing of this. And so Besant does that. And he basically says, eventually, we're going to have to have more gold.

We're going to have to have something. We're going to have to solidify the dollar. It's all about the debt that we have. We're going to have to monetize the debt. And this is where I think it's a combination of prepared and flat-footed. This is where I come in. It sounds like a compromise, but it's really not. Prepared in the sense that I think there are smart people like Scott Bessette who know

what's going on and know the end game, right? Flat-footed in the sense that because we are the global reserve currency and because we've been able to screw up for decades and get away with it, that incumbency, you're the champ, you always get the extra vote. I think that has made us complacent. And so even someone as sharp as Scott Bessett, I think he's sharp, might say, yeah, this is going to be a problem, but we can come back to that. We can always buy time later on. And the reason I'm not just making that up is because I had a conversation with the CEO of Scottsdale Mint. And so he's very heavily involved in the industrial side of metals, copper and silver. And we were talking back and forth.

And we were talking like you and I are talking now. And it's like, you know what? Why do we not care about copper? For example, China has been taking scrap copper out of the US for years. And we both concluded we don't care about it because we have copper or because we've just got bigger fish to fry right now, right? Same thing with silver. China has been going into Latin America and buying silver in raw form before it gets to the exchange so the supply never hits. So it's like pre-mining

silver. He's like, yeah, they're doing that. It's called silver concentrate. They go, why do we not care? We're like, well, because silver really isn't that important. It's important to us. We're in a little bit of a bubble. So Josh said, but copper is important. Everyone's talking about copper.

Even if the price isn't doing the crazy stuff, And sure enough, he comes back from an event right a month before they list silver as a critical mineral. And he says, for some reason, the federal government has mobilized to protect our copper supply now. This is what he shared with me, what I can share that he told me. We have a big processing plant for scrap in Atlanta. I forget the name. They're locking it down.

They're not letting any silver, you're still talking about copper, they're not letting any copper leave anymore. they're making sure all the roads lead to this plant they're centralizing that's what the government's doing right they centralized he goes we're serious about copper now and then the tariffs came out i went oh so to my point as half-cocked as it is i think we are smart enough to know what's going on i think we do know what's going on and we think we have all the time in the world and somebody sounds an alarm and they go let's lock that plant down so i i think when that happened you also saw a start of repatriating gold and silver and therefore i believe that we're playing catch-up but we always can play catch-up because of our positioning does that make sense yeah no

as it pertains to copper it makes a ton of sense considering the sort of expansion of the energy grid that's necessary yeah yeah it has been deemed necessary i think it's critically necessary but right mothers may have another opinion but it seems abundantly clear that even without even before the ai boom the data center boom it was clear to me i've been talking about it since 2018 it was very anti-esg energy is good cheap abundant energy equates to human flourishing like we should be expanding our grids our grids are unstable and i think luckily for us this administration recognizes that now and has made it a point to really lean into the energy sector specifically and copper is a huge part of that you need copper throughout that whole supply chain

that's right you know um the the copper story is interesting because in there you could see how trump screwed up but reaffirmed it uh he initially said uh about right where right when he remember how copper had that spike he made an announcement that we're going to tariff all copper imports and i immediately called josh why how would we tariff copper imports he goes well we don't really need to buy copper because we have our own raw copper what we don't have is we don't have uh fabrication facilities we don't have the manufacturing and we're okay fine i go but it still doesn't make sense and sure enough a couple days later, he said, and now this is, this is, it probably didn't hit the press this way, but

this is the fact. We tariffed finished goods in copper. So you and I, we go buy a copper weather vane over in, you know, Africa and we bring it back, it gets tariffed, right? But then they made a carve out. And this is to your point about energy. The carve out was semi-finished copper goods we're not going to tire and so a semi-finished copper good is an electric cathode because we don't make them and we need them to your point about energy so we were like nope you can't bring that weather vane in here you can't bring in that copper kettle here cathodes oh yeah you can bring them all in we want them all and so copper is you know that important and i think uh i think uh it's become obvious uh that we need to we need it so that's like the point of the spear

whatever copper does other things will do and uh i agree with you yeah it's very interesting times are you optimistic about our ability to navigate these this reshuffling of the board politically on the monetary side? I'm violently neutral, meaning I will wake up and say, yes, this can happen. And then I'll wake up and say, this doesn't make sense. And right now, more than this doesn't make sense side. So the yes, this can happen side goes like this. It's pretty simple. It goes, all right, we need time. We're going to have 5% inflation for the next five years give or take i'm just making a number up everybody that inflation is going to be used to retool the economy we'll build manufacturing and then we'll export our

deficit by buying things because we can't get anyone to finance our deficit we have to sell things right i'm with you this is best that we need cheap energy we need a weak dollar and we need to build stuff i'm like we can do that that's me right that's me and i see i see the energy getting cheaper i know trump's cutting deals with saudis he's saying look he pumping the oil you know at the right level i'll keep the shale people out of your noses i'll take care of canada's you know sands oil we'll keep that out of the market and you can just get all the market share at the lower price and you and russia wick will be happy all right so because we can do more to your point we can do more with cheap energy than most anyone else can if you're a patriot and you believe in

the american spirit that's right and then and then the data centers and then i see the data centers and i go all right we need to build data centers need to build data centers and i go i go well aren't we just building data centers where's the demand coming from and i'm not even getting into the fact that the energy grid's not going to be able to handle it all the stuff that I think that you're focusing on. I'm not even getting into that. I go, well, wait a minute. Didn't we just alienate everyone in the world? They're not going to buy our treasuries. They don't want to use gold. Every good that's made these days is a commodity. What are we going to sell them? Uber Eats? Our delivery system is the premium.

and and so i get depressed and then of course it's zero hedge right zero hedge post something and it shows uh in posting something like this every other day for about a month but the thing they post when they talk about fundamentals they're right and they say okay uh this ties it with nvidia ties it with you know everyone's talking about the circle jerk now that's been going around for years, but now they're talking about it. My concern is, based on my pessimistic side and based on the data that Zero Hedge is showing, is that companies are now extrapolating out. We're not going to do 2027 earnings. We're going to do 2035 earnings. And you're seeing these lines for data centers going out, projecting forever. And I go, and this is me positively

going, that's crazy, but maybe it can happen. And then I read a line that makes me think it's not going to happen. And the line is, and the line is, this is why I'm worried about 10% inflation. And the line is, I'm not a doomer. The line is, everything's humming along. We're creating an asset bubble by spending money to build data centers, and our stocks are getting driven up because of the projected future potential earnings. And that's fine. And we can do that in a world where everyone's on our side, but they're not. So are you telling me this is like the Tyler thing, the zero exit? The line's going up like that. Are you telling me we're not going to have a recession for the next 15 years? Because that's what you're projecting. And I went,

oh, shit, we're going to have a recession. We have to have a recession because the rest of the world is going to have a recession at some point. And it's going to affect us. And we can't raise rates. We're going to lower rates. So my conclusion is, we're not going to, I mean, this is like today, call me tomorrow, maybe I'll be in a good mood, right? We're not going to get there. Even if Trump executed everything perfectly, there's no successor to Trump who's going to be like him. There's no, you know, maybe, maybe J.D. Vance is, I don't know. But the bureaucratic deep state is still entrenched like a tick, you know, in a deer. They're not going to go anywhere.

They're going to wait it out. And I think the first recession we get, because we're running a 1970s style bubble, first recession we get, we can't afford to cut. we're going to have to um we can't afford to raise we're going to have to cut we're cutting in a bubble right now right we're cutting in an economic borderline boom right now depending on how you look at it and the last time we did that materially was in 1973 1974 the u.s was on this mind this is where we are now 1973 1974 the u.s was monetizing its debt we're doing that again right now, by the way. We're not doing it at the Fed, but we're monetizing our debt. It's really ugly what we're doing. Another conversation. But in the 70s, we were paying

for all the Vietnam veterans coming home. We were trying to fend off communism, civil rights, a lot of social safety net and welfare monies being spent, spent, spent. We're financing Vietnam. We're still paying for Korea. And so we're cutting rates in the 70s, 72, 73, 74. At 73 and 74, The stock market does very poorly, but the gold market is at the highs. But then they cut rates. In 75 and 76, the stock market explodes. Everything is great again. 76 is the bicentennial.

I was like eight years old. And everyone was so happy. The bicentennial, everyone was like, yeah. And then 77, all goes in the shitter. they stopped lowering rates to paint the turn as the expression goes inflation came back and between 77 and 79 77 and 80 it was nothing but inflation so that's where we are now either we're in 1974 and we're cutting rates to get the economy going or if trump doesn't succeed it's 1977 and we're going to have asset commodity prices high and data centers that no one's using they'll

become skateboard parks so right now i'm pretty right now i'm pretty pessimistic but thank you for letting me go off on that that's it's important because i mean one thing i'd bring up is like have we been in a recession in real terms for a while because if you look at like inflation data here's in cpi it's not tracking real inflation right um and then like how bad does it get like i posted yesterday a passage from when money dies and the corollaries to like why more republic vibes are yeah are very high right now and it's that's behaviorally they they are very high behaviorally sure and like everybody's on robin hood every every zoomer thinks are the best stock but not every zoomer but and it's definitely a growing trend of zoomer

stock traders giving advice we saw that with wall street bets obviously yeah but back then we tolerated because it was stimulus there's no stimulus now they're still doing it no and to your point about like the debt like in the rates like i worry like lowering rates right now like we just cut 25 bps the tenure is still above four and i i think that's one thing people had collective amnesia after the initial rate cuts from last year right where they just assume like oh the fed funds rate goes down and bond yields will follow that doesn't seem to be really materializing at all that that that's right um i'd like to speak to that for a second if you don't mind yeah uh during the qe era we all got

addicted to, Fed lowers rates, bond yields drop, and therefore, we have to buy stocks because nothing gives us any interest anymore. Money market rates down, bond yields down, I'll just buy stocks. But we're not in the QE era anymore, at least not from the Fed side. And so when you're not in the QE era, you're in what I call the anti-Goldilocks era. So the Goldilocks era was QE from the 90s. Well, QE started in the O's, but from the 90s through the mid-O's, we had deflationary tailwinds, disinflationary tailwinds pushing us up. Goods were getting cheaper. Technology was being implemented.

You know, everything at Walmart was the prices are dropping at Walmart every day, like low prices every day. You don't hear that anymore because now we've gone from disinflationary tailwinds from technology from developing supply chains to inflationary headwinds. And when you have inflationary headwinds, meaning other people are buying commodities that we need, or restricting our access to them, like oil in the 70s, when you have that happen, you have inflationary headwinds hitting the economy. And with inflationary headwinds, you can't lower rates without causing a bubble. Actually, I just lost my train of thought on that.

The Fed can't, oh, the deficit and the debt? Yeah, oh, this is a bond market, right? When you have an anti-Goldilocks situation and you have the inflationary headwinds, when you lower the Fed funds rate, the bond market vigilantes, and they're back, they say, wait a minute, you're not done fighting inflation. If you're lowering rates too soon, we're going to make the inflation come out the other end. And so that's really what's happening, though. You're going about 4%.

There's two ways. Again, another Zoltan Pozar statement. There are two ways to fight inflation at the monetary level. One is by raising short-term rates, which we've stopped doing. And two is by letting long-term rates rise. So like you said, Powell cut September 17th last year, and the bond market dumped yields, climbed. The bond market did a, I call it a seesaw.

The bond market did that. That's yields. Drop, raise. I was like, that's bad. That means that inflation is not out of the market yet. And sure enough, he cut again, and the bond market didn't do it as badly, but the bond market's not happy. And that's the rest of the world going, oh, look, another reason to not own American bonds.

And they're selling them. And I think if he cuts again, we're going to have one of these. It's kind of like a mini version of what went on in the UK. People start selling dollars, bonds, and stocks and taking their money back. That's the real risk. If you want to watch anything as a reason to buy gold or as a reason to buy a crypto or Bitcoin, if you want to watch anything, you want to watch how the market reacts to when the Fed cuts. And it has not been approving of the Fed cuts. I don't think he's going to – I think it will be a mistake if he cuts again.

I do. But does he have the political will to not cut? That's the question, right? because that's where you have trump coming in as well in the china shop but he's a short timer too maybe he can hide and wait it out for six months yeah right i mean what is he cuts 25 basis points recently right he talks extremely dovish and then like two weeks later you know gold rallies 100 dollars i'm like oh this is bad like he's going to cut again and stocks are up and stocks start to tail off then he starts talking oh well i was just readjusting the rates that he's doing that

whole Fed speak thing. And I go, you're cutting into a boom. We're creating a boom. Related to what we're trying to do here is China, every step of the way now, saying things like, oh, you're spending $500 billion on Stargate? Oh, we did it for $5 billion. Now, whether they're lying or not, it's not the point. The point is, they're putting propaganda out saying that we're paying too much they're saying our assets are overvalued and that's petrifying to me they never did that before i think the bond market is telling us we should not be lowering rates i agree yeah well staying on this topic of government debt and inflation before we hit record right inflation is not geopolitical there are these inflationary headwinds across the world for different purposes

you said here in the u.s manufacturing japan defense europe defense and social safety nets china right social safety net so the inflation trade is not isolated to the united states no it's not it's and and it's actually like we're we're the last we're probably gonna be the last to really debase or cut but uh yeah you're right it's not only the united states and if you go around the world, Trump's policies, which would have happened anyway, right? So under Biden, we pulled out of Afghanistan. If you look at Pax Americana, of us being a cop on every corner of the world, we can't

pay for that anymore. And in some places don't even want us. So we're kind of like the tide of American military is receding. We're retrenching. Call it Monroe Doctrine. Call it whatever you want to call it. Call it America First, whatever the reasons are. So we pull out of Afghanistan, butchered by Biden, and then war starts, Gaza war starts,

Ukraine war starts. And I see us not doing what we normally do, meaning in Gaza, we really let the Israelis off the leash. And that's, I know it's another whole can of worms to talk about, but we really just said, you know what, we'll let them fight it out and we'll make it a hockey fight. And then we say, what's Trump say? We're not going to spend money on NATO anymore. And the math is very simple.

Speaking as a Tom Luongo person, but from my expertise, or lack of a better word, one of the things that Europe is very proud of is over the last 50 years, they're proud of their social safety net. They're proud of their welfare state. they're proud of free college. They're proud of no homelessness. And to Trump's point, that's because they have a defense budget of zero or 1%. And we have a defense budget of 5%, probably more. And so we have been, since communism, even, you know, we have been the, uh it's like a a few good men like the uh you would eat me on that wall type of thing you know

and we have been there saying okay you can you can we're subsidizing their welfare state and so trump says we want to spend less and now you do the math and they're like everyone's gone from maybe it's one to three percent of gdp now it's five to six percent so call it five call it two to five that's a lot of money and you're doing it right after you just let millions of people want your country to be attached to your social safety net? What do you think? You're driving down labor. You're not driving down labor. You're driving down welfare. So Europe's got to spend more money. They can't even spend on their manufacturing. Germany's done. Italy's probably going to be the next leading country in Europe, if you can call it that. Then you go over to Japan

and they're like, hey, listen, Taiwan, we don't have a good history with China. We don't want to have that blow up on our face and u.s say well we're we're we said we're pulling out there's a there's a pack like a pack like asian i forget what it's called but japan's ramping up their their military spending all the things that we didn't want europe to do because we're worried about the nazis coming back or about imperial japan coming back well now we have to let them do it right so japan's spending on that right and everyone's got big debt from buying flat screen tvs with money they didn't have. So Japan's spending on military, Europe's spending on military and a safety net. And the US, we're not spending, I mean, we are, but we're not spending on military.

We're not spending on a safety net. Well, we are a little bit. We're spending to become a producer of goods again to compete with China. So we're spending, Europe's spending, everyone's spending. It's a race to the bottom one way or another. And China, which has had to spend to begin with to get their economy out of their own recession. And this isn't me talking, but I've read the work. I forget his name. Eric Green, I think. T.S. Lamar analyst. I had a conversation with him about a report that he put out. And I'm like, completely naive American, right? I'm like, they're communists, even though they're not communists. They're communists. What do you mean they don't spend enough money helping people? He goes, oh, no. Oh, no, no. When they

went capitalist they went full capitalist they're like you live in the country we're not giving you a dime you better move to the city and get a job that was part of their urbanization plan i guess so what does that mean he goes well it's not working anymore people aren't moving anymore and there's there's a high level of poverty right there's there's also they have like like 50 college graduates or students or young men are unemployed it's it's it's bigger than ours for sure. And I said, so what does that mean? He goes, well, he goes, they're actually working up the plans to add welfare for the rural areas. He goes, they're going to be spending a lot. They're creating a welfare program. They have no social safety net. And so I went, so China's

going to spend on social safety net? He goes, yeah. I go, so now every country's spending for different reasons. And every country is going to monetize their debt. And it's a race to the bottom. It's like Santa Claus, you know, you've got a 16-year-old kid. He knows there's no Santa Claus. You know there's no Santa Claus. But as long as you're doing technology, you keep giving him gifts. And that's where we are right now. And I think I happen to know now that I've studied it that we're monetizing our debt already, which means we can't pay off our debt so we're printing money.

We're printing, not at the Fed level, at the Treasury level. And in doing that, we're weakening the dollar intentionally. So that's it. Yeah. everyone's spending everyone's spending no one no one can be austere yet that comes after the crash possibly that's it when do you think the crash will be if there is one yeah i get it stuff like that i i don't i don't know i'm very i'm very i see that i see the fork in the road and it's like i don't know when it will be but i'll know what will cause it so it'll be

it'll be uh you'll see information like let's look at the current events right you'll see information accumulating that oh people are golden sacks which has been ai stocks all the way is now saying circle jerk you know client finance and everyone say oh it's just like 2000 i said well it's not yet because people still believe i'll start to say crash if i see a day where stocks are down and gold is up. Not because gold's better, but because people are going to put their money into gold because stocks are down. They're not going to buy more stocks. So when I see things like that, I'll be concerned. I'll tell you what the warning shot across the bow was that I'm looking for to happen again to maybe think there'll be a crash. The warning shot

across the bow was, I think it was, I don't know, in April or May, when Europe, to defend itself, said, the US is no longer American exceptionalism. The US is weak. And therefore, because of its debt, we're going to sell our stocks. And instead of putting it in bonds, we're going to repatriate our currency. And that's where your crash comes from. So for example, Japan is a huge investor overseas, huge. And they've got problems now. They've always had problems. But the solution to their problems now is to repatriate currency. It's to sell your investments in Europe and bring your money back for yourself. That's what they need to do to shore up their currency. Imagine if they did that with US Treasury. I think they're the largest holder, maybe number two.

But they financed the world. So as countries, I'm Europe. I need to rebuild my infrastructure. you can't use dollars to build a road you need euros and so it's sell my u.s stocks don't put it in bonds this time don't put in dollars put in euros bring it home and so when the dollar gold so when the dollar bonds and stocks drop at the same time i get petrified and we had i think a shot across the bow and i think it was april or may and when i see that happen i pay attention so when that happens then i'll say marty we should get short and of course we get our asses handed to us but you get how it works yeah that's it no it is uh in the last six months i've described the period that we're living in as equally exhilarating and unnerving

because it's just impossible to tell yeah yeah but it's exactly special So you – the guy with one foot in a bucket of coals, the other foot in a bucket of ice, and you say, how are you doing? He says, on average, I'm okay. That's where we are. That's where I feel like. And so let's talk about Bitcoin. I mean, you talked about it earlier, about like a lot of the moves that have been made in the last couple of years with the ETFs. I think the options on the ETFs, futures going 24-7 soon, I believe, if not already.

uh you think these markets and particularly the derivatives are being used to hold the price down so the government can accumulate yeah i do and i'm not a paranoid full hat wearer i'm a person who never believed that but i understand how it works now um there's only two things a nation does that it doesn't let its people do one kill you you can't kill yourself they can put you to death and two, make money. Nations, anyone who's a hardcore, I'm not a hardcore Bitcoin person, but a nation needs to have sovereign money.

That's sovereign wealth. And that's very like the charterless concept. You print the money, you give it to them, you take it back in tax, you create that circle, right? And then you skim off the top and you run it. Bitcoin was becoming a threat, whether it's made by someone or not, I don't care.

it has a life of its own now. It is a Trojan horse in many ways. And what the US does, not all governments, what the US does is, if it catches it early enough, it'll kill it, the threat to the dollar. If it doesn't catch it early enough, it'll just use rhetoric and propaganda and fund it. And if it survives that, then it won't actively attack it. Maybe like a CIA assassin goes out to kill Bitcoin. I mean, you get my point, like a regime change. And then if it can't do that, and this is where the US is really smart, it co-ops. So when you create the ETFs, I think I know that people do not value the liquidity network that the US has big enough. And so I'm going to exaggerate, but I'll make a point. 70% of all

the Bitcoin transactions were outside of the US. The liquidity was not in the US. You create, finally, the spot Bitcoin ETF. And without doing anything intentional, without funding it, without manipulating it, you make the liquidity pull the US. And so the US may not own the Bitcoin, but the US controls the Bitcoin. You raise margins, you change T2, all these things, and you create, you control the liquidity pool. So if you can't kill it, you demonize it. If you can't demonize it, or vice versa, you co-opt it.

So what the US does is it takes everything it cannot control. Like, you can write a paper on this. Everything it cannot control, that's an outside force, and it co-opts it. And that's what we do with Bitcoin. Now, I'm not even into the manipulation part. In 1974, there's a WikiLeaks email out there that essentially says what I'm about to say. In 1974, after the US went off the gold standard and the price of gold started to move higher,

the US and the UK, London, were trying to keep the price of gold down. Why? Because they were cheating. They were printing more dollars than they had of the gold. And they had this thing called the London Gold Pool Scheme, et cetera, et cetera. But then they came up with an idea, simple idea. And it's in the email. We're going to create a futures exchange for gold.

Why? Because it's in the email. If you can create a futures exchange, then you can reduce the demand for physical. Because over time, people will take convenience over authenticity. right i'll take the knock off and when you get them with electronic bank accounts it grows more and more and a generation goes by and your grandparents are dead and they're like uh i don't need it all just it's the next best thing that's gold and you do that and over time you set up the market structure because you don't want gold to go up you make it a tier three asset you

make the margins higher and then you have these banks called bullion banks those are the custodians of Bitcoin now, the bullion banks say, all right, the government wants gold to go down. They're happy when it goes down. They're lending us money at zero. We'll rehypothecate. And so rehypothecation, which was invented for gold bulls, not for bears, is used by bears to sell five, 10 times as much gold as out there. And the reason it works, Marty, the reason it works is because the U.S. liquidity pool is so big that the trading, you look at the U.S. price, you trade on the U.S. hours.

You don't trade in the off hours. We become the market. And in becoming the market, and the futures price becomes more important than the spot price, the derivative price becomes more important than the spot price. then you can influence the market lower by just selling paper. You don't need the gold. You don't need the gold. Just get the paper. And that goes on for years.

And then they come up with other schemes. And I don't mean, these are just traders who want to make money. I would have done it if I was in that seat. It's like, wait a minute. You want it to go down? Fine. I would approach the Fed in 1993, just like the Boeing banks did and said, you guys have gold sitting in Fort Knox doing nothing?

Give it to us. We'll give you 50 basis points for it. We'll take the money. We'll take the gold. We'll short it. We'll take the money. and we'll go buy something else. Greenspan was like, great idea. It happened. Great idea. Clinton, who was the president at the time, was like, great idea. It'll keep the bond players

from freaking out because bond players would buy gold as a substance. And so they did it successfully for 30 years. And a generation goes by like an elephant tied to a stake with a thread. He doesn't know he can pull the stake out of the ground. And it goes on and on. And that's why Bitcoin is gold 2.0. They're doing the same thing. Are they doing it to buy it? Yeah, they're doing it to buy it. Are they doing it to make it the dollar? No, they're not going to do that. Then you lose sovereign money. And little by little, there's no liquidity in the world anywhere for Bitcoin except here now. I mean, and other nations like China, although they should have it and they probably do have it, they've shied away from it because the US has a monopoly

on it now. And so the rehypothecation has gone from bullion banks selling futures and taking the money and borrowing to custodian banks like JP Morgan or BlackRock or however they do it, going, I'll have your Bitcoin. I'll give it to you in five days. You basically take five orders for Bitcoin and you sell. It's rehypothecation all over again. So every time someone buys a Bitcoin at the BlackRock level, they're slamming a future. And you know why that works? It works for the same reason JP Morgan makes money when silver goes up. JP Morgan has all the silver in the world, hypothetically, in their vault. They have the Hunt Brothers silver. It's been passed down to them. But they're not long silver. Their short future's against it. And if the shit hits

the Fed, they just want to honor the contract. Isn't that what Bitcoin places are doing? That's what they did. We don't have the Bitcoin. So we're not going to honor the contract. So it's happening all over again. And they've got Bitcoin under control. And it'll go up in price, but there's no one who's going to challenge the US on it right now, at least not yet. So I hope that makes sense. Yeah, I will say like anecdotal observation. And I haven't really been really thing about this until you started um walking through that explanation is probably like probably been a few years but there was a point i've been in bitcoin for 12 years and it was like a meme and something that you came to expect is that when asia woke up the price would move

i was like oh asia's up yeah and uh that doesn't happen anymore Right. It's not as prominent as a meme as it was five, seven, ten years ago. I used to trade the Japanese-U.S. hours for gold. And I used to trade the ARB. And it was a very, very low profit margin, high transaction thing. It did okay. But during that time frame when China was stimulating,

when China was stimulating, all the base metals were gone. iron, copper, aluminum, and then eventually silver and gold would go up. And I would be able to like kind of front run it, right? So when China said, we're going to print money, and then Bitcoin comes on the scene, it's like iron, Bitcoin, aluminum. Why is Bitcoin going up? I called a buddy of mine. He goes, well, that's because every time they print money, the banks want to make sure they

don't have too many yuan in their pocket. So they buy something that can go up. So Bitcoin was a, what do you call it? Like a safety valve for these guys. and they're not doing it anymore i mean yeah well to your point not even pushback but like just a different perspective in terms of the ability to combat this manipulation which i think whether you call them i think you can define anything as manipulation buyer sellers exist right right uh it's just the market dynamics the way they exist with the large custodians like

blackrock which really they're custodying with coinbase and you layer on futures and options on top of that you can easily manipulate the price using those tools but i think where bitcoin has the opportunity i think this week we have a great example of how to combat it is it's so much easier to take delivery and actually use it and custody it and i think if we see more things like square announced this week where they're enabling four million merchants to shuffle to immediately sweep a percentage of their their cash flows in the bitcoin that they can then withdraw from uh their square terminals or business portals um that's what needs to happen if you want to combat this manipulation so that's why here at this show and i advise anybody getting

into bitcoin i think etfs are good if you want exposure you don't have a self-custody and you don't need to use the bitcoin right but highly encourage people to take bitcoin in self-custody get it off the exchange yeah to prevent this manipulation so you're talking about jack when you say square right yeah okay he has been on a on a on a not a red but he has been on a thread for about i don't know maybe three to six months it's not enough that it's a store of value it has to be a currency am i am i paraphrasing that right yes and and and he's so right marty meaning what i just said to you about how the u.s co-op something what they do is they ring fence the liquidity so the liquidity is all there and they don't let it out and so you take i mean look

bitcoin's about network right you take the network and you make it a walled garden and if it's not a currency if it's not out there it doesn't build its network and if it doesn't build its network it becomes an asset it becomes the pet rock that's what it does i'm not saying gold was ever something you could you couldn't do that but you know you could do it with silver at one time but you take this thing that uh is indestructible right unless there's no energy for like you know no power for like 50 years that's indestructible that's as easy to use you know you think about whether it's fast enough or not i don't care the point is if it doesn't proliferate it doesn't get used it gets used as a store of value but it doesn't get used the analogy that i've used with

with my people is the joe dimaggio baseball card okay so so the joe dimaggio baseball card let's say there's only 10 of them in the world right and there's only 10 in the world and nobody cares about it well it's a store of value but you can't do anything with it because it's locked into the SEC. They securitized money. They made money a piece of art. They made money an asset. They made it a humble. I don't know if anyone's old enough in your group. You know what a humble is? You know those little stupid glass figurines that your grandparents have in a china cabinet? Well, they all have serial numbers on the bottom. They're all one of a kind. They're all special, and they're all worth money. And if you have to sell them, you'll get some

decent money for them. But you can't go around with a Humble. They stay in the China closet. The ETF is a China closet for Bitcoin. And it's going to go there and it's going to fall out of existence. It's like the landline. The first landline was built. Who needed it? But when the network gets built, the last person in the world who doesn't have access to a phone would pay a million dollars to use it because he wants to be connected. the first person wouldn't pay anything. And I think Bitcoin, if you want to make the case that the government's involved, it's like, you know what? How about this? The government's involved in Ethereum because they want to make sure that Bitcoin doesn't proliferate. I mean,

I'm just taking the side of a maxi in that point of view. No, the idea is to own it, lock it down. The idea is to, instead of, and I know the maxis are like, oh, but it's a Trojan horse you know what it it maybe it's a trojan horse but it's going to take 100 years for that trojan horse the state's not going to let it survive until the state itself is dead the state does two things it kills people and it prints money and it will not give up either of those two things and if it does give up those two things that's because it's not a state anymore yeah that's interesting i'm focusing on dorsey and you think of like the uh prominent billionaire ceos um or executives pushing bitcoin i think you have him and then sailor juxtapose

sailor it's digital capital why would you ever sell it and you have dorsey is like no this is cypherpunk digital cash that we need to be right in the economy i respect the hell i'm friends with both of them and i agree more with jack in the sense that like this is supposed to be used as money it was in the white paper i'm not getting full roger murr here but i think it is a better money at the end of the day and this whole focus on treasury companies and using it as digital capital um is catering to those who like to co-opt it and it's like no we shouldn't look stellar who is is is brilliant in his own right he knows what he's doing he knows that the path is, I want the price to go up. And if I have to work with the government, I'll do

that provided I play well in the sandbox. Whereas Jack, in my opinion, it's probably pretty obvious he's an idealist. And so he wants to, he's not an anarchist, maybe he is, I don't know. But he wants a more fair distribution based on merit and not based on incumbency. And so this is the bucket of calls in the hot and the ice, right? It's true. I mean, that really is true. And I think at the end of the day, I've seen what they did with gold for 30 years. Can they do that with Bitcoin? I think they can. At least I think they can, unfortunately, it's because maybe you can't destroy it, but our liquidity pool is so big and so important, even if it is on the way down, that all you have to do is critically limit the on ramps and off ramps or structures that you're

controlling them and then half the world's going to be like nah i'm not going to use it i mean i'm an optimist but i'm also a realist yeah but do you would you agree with what i said earlier in terms that the ability to combat that suppression is much easier with bitcoin due to the fact that it's digital oh yeah absolutely absolutely you know there's i think i think this is like a monetary philosophy point here i think the main difference in terms of uh gold and bitcoin i mean there's many differences but the main difference is that people look at gold as a store of value that's money because it's a thing and if you really understand bitcoin i'm not saying that i do but i understand monetary theory if you understand money from a chartless theory

then you understand that that um money should be nothing it's basically just an accounting ledger and gold is nothing it's just that there is an obsession with it you know because because it it's it's i guess it's like a marxist comment like capitalism itself uh makes it that but but like what's his name uh richard was it richard spencer the guy who was on your call to talk about richard warner right he is a completely different tip it's probably like a rock and roll guy right he's like a white nationalist out of oh is he really i think he was some deep state psyop white nationalist here in the u.s listen i'm not elon musk all right i'm just kidding i'm just kidding don't ban me um yeah so richard warner

talks about qe talks about you know all these other things and one of the things he said is that you know banks at the commercial level can create money and and i did get to some things after that and what i did into was there's a paper by the bank of england out there and the bank of england was like written in uh i don't know 2014 i think maybe and that and that paper the bank of england said yes because warner was right like yes it was at spencer again yes um money is created from nothing and we don't want you to know that it's not just created from nothing from central banks it's created from nothing at the commercial bank level and what they have is they have essentially what's called the charlatan asset the the charlatan is that there was a big fight

between the keynesians and these other guys but maybe german guys i don't know but the charlatan asset was like no no money is just a ledger account of you only owing me a favor and and so uh basically it's kind of like it dovetails into mmt as well and then the other side, the Keynesian side, not Neo-Keynesian, was like, well, money needs to be tethered to something real so that we can make sure we don't overprint or debase. And so the Keynesian side won, which became Neo-Keynesian. But the charlatan side is what Werner's talking about. And you know what? That's what Bitcoin is. That's really what it is. It's like Bitcoin is like, you know what? let's take the bitcoin you know ledger nano and let's let's put it in a gold casing like an iphone

and let's put it in an etf and let's make everyone worship it let's make it shiny like oh no no it's a workhorse get it out there because that's what money is money is a workhorse now i'm not a proponent of mt but i am saying that you know there are aspects of bitcoin that make it that make it i mean i'm a gold book okay there are aspects of bitcoin that when the world is ready for it will whether it's bitcoin or a successor when the world is ready for it it'll be ready for it's you know you can't get away from the physicality of it all yet yeah it's i'm obviously i'm full-on in it been in it for 12 years completely incorporated into my business but we have like i i think it's going to be ultimately successful just because particularly for cross

border payments like i have some contractors that work outside yep the united states and they demand to get paid in bitcoin and like it was unprompted uh i think obviously they know uh we're a company focused on on bitcoin specifically but i was surprised a couple months ago this new contractor started and he yeah i was like all right send me the invoice i was thinking it was going to be an international wire transfer it was a bitcoin invoice i was like oh sweet i can pay you i i think you know we were talking about this before as well i think i think um uh bitcoin's going to find a niche that can't be crushed cross-border europe is scared to death of it right um uh black market i'm not trying to demonize but you know things that you got to

get around stuff like like you use with gold and i think it's going to thrive in that niche and then there'll be an opportunity like a calamitous event or a nation and it'll become the surrogate currency and then it'll never go there's your trojan horse you can't assuming that you can't kill it if you can't kill this it will survive and it will survive like a in a good way a virus it won't go away it'll be there and then a good product that's indestructible all it needs is time and an opportunity and something will happen and they'll go from your contractors to a small country going you know what oh jesus we we train with our partners across the border here all the time and they're sanctioned and i'm sanctioned let's create a zone

between my country and your country or the border and let's just use bitcoin just do that and then after a while it organically spreads i i you know that's that's the whole run the whole run is time you know and time usually means one or two generations i have to be dead and you have to be old uh i think uh many bitcoiners myself included recognize that as well i think it's uh it's a multi-generation thing and that's that's a funny when i hear people deride and besmirch bitcoins like oh it's not used as data day-to-day currency where can i spend it's like what other monetary asset has launched and been completely ubiquitous within 17 years like it's not survived yeah i mean just that's that's the whole point of a network if you can create a network even if it's not being

used even if it's not being used but it exists all it needs is an opportunity but using gold for example shanghai has had gold for 15 years and it survived and then it saw an opportunity and boom it took market share this is what it's all about surviving and taking market share yeah bitcoin is a survivor and that's why it eventually wins yeah i think the other thing we have in the bitcoiner camp in our in our favor is we're very good at memeing we're very good at would you admit would the gold bugs admit that uh we've helped the sound money cause materially in the last 15 oh yeah yeah yeah i mean look i i i tried to reach out to you early on not you specifically but you know your group and i was like listen would you stop shitting on gold

it's the same thing i mean yours might be gold two point of a i would like create memes of like the old guy means right uh black and white cookie you know a seinfeld joke look to the cookie type of shit shut up you old man and and then and this is where i started to hate sale because i knew that that fucker excuse my french was just um was just trying to say hate gold because he just wanted to go up and he was going after the demographic it was a smart move but he was i'm like people like i'm i'm gen x right so gen x up to boomers are like bitcoin no way i'm just lucky you know um but yeah it's like it's like we're just not it's it's new tech we're not familiar with it give us a give us a break

you know i've been very consistent throughout the years on this show i love our gold bugs we're ideologically and philosophically aligned we need to work together right well i mean that's it you know it's like the uh speaking of memes it's like the uh what is it the splinter and ninja turtles beam you know we raised you and now you're and now you're going it's usually ron paul a lot it's like yeah yeah exactly it's a ron paul beat it's exactly ron paul Vince this has been great thank you for doing this I can't believe it's taken us this long

I appreciate you having me on this is fun I know you by reputation I know you from we're mutuals on X but yeah this was fun very pleasantly surprised I wasn't negative

but I'm pleasantly surprised I hope you are as well the fact that we went to the same high school if you're ever back uh in philly let me know we'll have to get a beer and a pizza somewhere yeah yeah have you have you have you uh have you been to the uh the jjo in a while have you been to the prep in a while not uh not in a few years i need to get back fabulous it looks fat people unbelievable what they've done unbelievable anyway all right memories yeah well hopefully this is the first of many well uh i'm sure there'll be plenty to talk about

as things evolve moving forward yeah actually absolutely thank you for having me on marty and oh if if i just want to just drop is that okay yeah yeah i so i have a newsletter on on substack and it's vbl gold fix victor boy larry gold fix at substack.com and it is as you would guess it's predominantly monetary and it's predominantly gold and silver because well that's what's been moving lately. But when those markets are not at the front of everyone's mind, I'll talk about geopolitics, which I do all the time. Look, if you understand gold, you understand geopolitics, you understand inflation, and you understand economies. And my background is in the bond market and fundamental analysis. And so therefore, I will talk about Bitcoin. I do get some good

research on Bitcoin as well. And I cover it. I cover it as well. But that's not a sales pitch. I guess what I'm saying is I'm a gold guy who hedges his gold with Bitcoin, not a Bitcoin guy. So that's it. You can find me on Twitter as well, just VBLGhost. Like I said, we love our gold bugs here at TFTC. So thank you for adding to the list of gold bugs that have come on the show. And we'll link to all that in the show notes. So if you guys are interested, check out the show notes.

You can check out the sub stack and great follow on X as well. Thanks, buddy. Thank you. That's all we got today, freaks. Peace and love. Okay. 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.

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