The David Knight Show - INTERVIEW: Will Neo-Mercantilism Bring Down the Potemkin Economies in China & US?

Episode Date: February 8, 2024

Tony Arterburn, DavidKnight.gold — The petrodollar is officially dead, commercial real estate is collapsing in both US & China and Trump's campaign rhetoric about massive tariffs of 60% against China, 10% against other countries. What is mercantilism, and is it back in fashion?Money is only what YOU hold: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverFind out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.comIf you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-showOr you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7For 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to TrendsJournal.com and enter the code KNIGHTBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

Want to own part of the company that makes your favorite burger? Now you can. With partial shares from TD Direct Investing, you can own less than one full share, so expensive stocks are within reach. Learn more at td.com slash partial shares. TD, ready for you. All right, welcome back. And joining us now is Tony Ardaban of Wise Wolf Gold.

And Tony's kindly set up davidknight.gold, which will take you to Wise Wolf. And let him know that you came through us. Thanks for joining us, Tony. It's great to see you, David. Thanks for having me back. Well, thank you. What's on your mind now with the economy? Well, you know, I just listened to you this morning.

The elites get so much wrong, the mainstream, the powers that be. You go back to the 70s, and you've played this before with, like, Leonard Nimoy talking about the great ice age that was coming and its global cooling. Then it was global warming, and then it's climate change and acid rain. They always have some crisis that never comes to pass, and they miss the actual crisis or huge historical events as they happen they don't they can't believe it they don't understand how to cover it i'm going back to the fall of the soviet union how many networks were talking about that that there was an imminent collapse coming nobody saw that coming not in the mainstream they just again there's some other and they have another narrative there's another uh mission that they have and it's not to

to let you in on what's to come. I think that's our job to talk about things on the periphery. And again, they missed the banking crisis of 08. What about the weapons of mass destruction? They never do actual journalism, never talk about the things that matter. And I think one of the things that's coming across my research is the upcoming systemic banking crisis. It's international in scope. I mean, you have German banks talking about a real estate bubble bigger than 08 in their holdings. You even have Janet Yellen coming out and saying banks are becoming quite stressed because of their commercial real estate holdings.

And we have these giant vacancies. And, you know, Gerald Salente has been talking about that for years now, just since the scandemic, since the lockdowns. That's right. These empty buildings all over the United States and in the West. And this is coming to a head, I think. And I think that you go back to the Great Depression, as you know, between 1930 and 1933, was 9 000 estimated banks that closed in the united states that was the that was the beginning of the banking crisis in the great

depression uh we're a year out now from silicon valley bank uh following the ftx collapse we're a year out from that and of course one of their periphery banks was silvergate i used to wire silvergate uh for my Bitcoin transactions. They no longer exist. So there's fewer and fewer banks that handle cryptocurrencies. That's to me, that's the beginning of what is to come here in our Western economies with these banking, the stress on the banking system. So I wanted to bring that to your attention because nobody in the mainstream is bringing

this up. And I think it's in the mainstream is bringing this up. And I think it's on the horizon. That's right. And when you talk about it, what was it, Silvergate? There was like two or three bank failures. And one of them was not even a bank failure. They were basically pressured at Silvergate. They were pressured because of their connection to crypto to shut down.

They were not insolvent. No, no, they were not. And it was just that it touched FTX and it was in the periphery of that. And I think that was a lot of what they do is they pick winners and losers. I think this was more of the consolidation. They'll use this crisis to consolidate into the major banks. And this will be the backbone of central bank digital currency. That's the real 4D chess. I agree. The mainstream people, to quote our Buckminster Fuller, people cannot get out of the way of what they don't see coming.

That's right. They don't see what's coming. What they're going to do is I had a friend who used to play risk together, you know, and if he was losing, he'd just nuke the board. He just knock all the pieces off. And that's what they're going to do. They're going to just nuke the board, knock all the pieces off and then set them up the way they want them to be when they come back.

You know, yeah, I own this property now and that one and that one and that one. It's interesting. On American Thinker, there was a headline. I thought it was very good. With Evergrande's liquidation, of course, Evergrande is this gigantic real estate company in China. With their liquidation, and that's what they've decided to do. They're so bankrupt. They've got assets of 245 billion, but they got, which are probably inflated.

But assuming that they even have that much in terms of assets, they have $300 billion in debt. And so they're going to liquidate it. And he said, what's even more important than that is the fact that it's emblematic of a lot of things like that that are happening throughout China and that China's economy is so heavily based on real estate and the same thing happened with them that has been happening as Gerald looked at the lockdown so this is going to destroy New York well that's what it did with China you know the lockdowns and

the throttling of all commercial activity, but especially the lockdowns, kicked off this crash in real estate. And this article is about the analysis of a Chinese economics writer who talks about this. I thought it was interesting, Tony, that their economy only grew 3% in 2022 and grew 5.2% in 2023, some of the worst showings that they've had for three decades. Now, if we would have something, if our economy was growing at that rate or better, the Federal Reserve would throttle it. They would say, it's going to overheat the economy. We're not going to allow that. It just shows you how managed everything is and managed to the advantage of China. It truly is a patimpkin economy and it was the globalist who built that patimpkin village yes yes it's fascism textbook fascism and a

completely controlled economy i think what people tend to forget is that in a real estate crisis what you're looking at is actually a currency crisis because every time you create a commercial real estate loan in the modern era is there's a currency creation there. That's a creation of currency itself. When you get a home loan, that's new currency that's created by the banks. It didn't used to be that way. We had something called fractional reserve banking. But as I've mentioned many times here on your show, since 1980, there's 52 times more currency in the world today than in 1980. That's because of the amount of currency creation.

And the real estate market is tied directly to that. It's why in the United States, we have to continually goose the market, lower interest rates, get people to take out loans because you need more currency flowing through the system to prop it up. And it's no longer about profit or production. It's all debt. And we're sitting on the biggest debt bomb in the history of mankind. And it's all over the world. It's systemic. And I think the Chinese have overbuilt. Their economy is suffering. Yes, they're pulling away from the U.S. hegemony and the sphere of the dollar. They're pulling away from that. The BRICS

nations are strengthening. But all of these economies are weak. I mean, the U.S. is, to channel Dennis Miller, I think he talked about being the valedictorian of summer school. Like, we're the best of the worst. Like, we've got, you know, you have Paul Krugman saying, we have the best economy ever. The Bidenomics is working. These people are delusional. We're sitting on massive debt, economic weakness, supply chains have been so disrupted, they're almost broken. And you see these sell-offs around the world. It's not going to end well. And I think the central banks, while this is happening, and you don't see this talked about by the mainstream at all, they're buying gold. And I think they're planning for what they themselves have set in motion, which is the great reset. I agree. Yeah. When you look at what is happening in China, I saw several articles, people talking about mercantilism, you know,

that's now the thing we've always talked about how, well, you know, China is really kind of a, a fascist economy. Uh, they say that they're communists and, you know, but you've got to work with them and give them partial ownership in order to establish a business within China. They tightly protect their borders, which is characteristic of mercantilism. We're going to put up all kinds of barriers for imports to come in, and then we're going to export things to people. So it is classic mercantilism. And then you also have an aspect of colonialism there with the Belt and Road Initiative. And these things are not really working out well for them. And they're really kind of showing their problems.

You know, the Chinese economy has been built on slave labor and currency manipulation and intellectual property theft, you theft, piracy. So piracy and slavery and mercantilism. It's sort of like we're back to the Victorian times or whatever, the different empire. But it can't go forever. And it's one of the things that people are talking about mercantilism. That was really kind of an Adam Smith phrase that he coined in contrast to the invisible hand of a real marketplace. And the thing about it is that at first it looks like it's really working well until it doesn't.

That's kind of where the Chinese are right now. And then to pour fuel onto this dumpster fire of the Chinese economy of piracy, slavery, and mercantilism comes Donald Trump. And he's talking about 60% tariffs on China. What's that going to do to the economy? If you suddenly, that's going to be more disruptive than the rapid increase in interest rates that the Federal Reserve did, isn't it? I mean, just all of a sudden reset all the deck, you know, if you were to come in like that. Well, we'd have to call Ben Stein.

I mean, it wouldn't be Smoot-Hawley anymore. 50% tariffs from the 30s, 60% tariffs. Well, you know, China used our old playbook. I mean, let's be honest. They used the old American, you know, empire, the beginning of the 20th century. We were economic nationalists. We were the arsenal of democracy and the manufacturing marvel of mankind. We had tariffs. We set that

in place. That was something that Alexander Hamilton set up. You have all four presidents on Mount Rushmore supported tariffs. Every figure on our paper currency supported tariffs. We built the country on tariffs. And yeah, you've talked to some great history about the tariff of abominations in the South and how the South was agrarian and the North was manufacturing. And yeah, you've talked about some great history about the tariff of abominations in the South and how the South was agrarian and the North was manufacturing. And there was a battle between that because of pricing. But in general, the United States was built on tariffs and protecting our base manufacturing. You know, Hamilton had read Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations.

He just didn't agree with the complete free market. And, you know, it's the theory. And so China's used that. And if you go and look at their tariffs are massive on imports, but they push politically for free trade. It's a very symbiotic relationship that they have with the United States. It's almost like they're parasitically making sure, like they're siphoning off as much wealth as they can and letting things kind of collapse, looking for other inroads. And that's the Belt and Road Initiative, in my opinion. That's the future that they've planned on. They don't see the United States as the future. They see their influence and the United States waning. That's going to there's going to create a vacuum. I think that's what they're planning for.

But they have overbuilt and I think their timeline has been disrupted because you and I both know you can have central planning all you want, but that doesn't really solve all your problems. You can make huge mistakes in judgment. And I think they have. I think they've overbuilt, they've overborrowed, and they've used the United States to the point where the United States is weakening. And then you end up having a Donald Trump figure, which I believe in tariffs. But the way he handled a lot of that in his administration, I just scratched my head. I didn't really understand it. Some of the ways he was setting that up, he talked about negotiation and he would put a tariff on, they take it off. I think we need, you know, we look at modest tariffs across the board. You don't want to. And that's the key thing. That's the key thing.

You know, the key thing is that he would think that he could do something that radical and that fast. I mean, it's like, you know, to jump that quickly is going to be such a shock to the system. It'd be total chaos because people would not be able to react quickly enough to it. When you look at what the Federal Reserve did, rapidly raising interest rates and successive things, 75 basis points at a time, you know, three quarters of a percent each time when they did that very rapidly, what did it? It caught the small banks and many others in a bad place that they couldn't get out of it, cause some of those bankruptcies that we saw, uh, this would do much more than that now, some of the people are looking at it say, well, after all, this

is Donald Trump, he probably won't follow through with anything that he says so good news is it's trump and he's he's throwing out radical stuff here but they said the fact is that he can throw this stuff out and only a couple of writers have really reacted to the insanity of changing rates that rapidly right regardless of whether you're pro-mercantilism and pro-protection or free markets or whatever, to change it that radically, nobody's really even talking about that. And they said that shows that there's a real constituency for doing that. Now, in terms of what made it more effective for Thomas Jefferson, he said, we've eliminated all internal taxation and we've only got it at the borders. But that was because they had a government that was small enough to fit into the constitution so if your government as ron paul has said for the longest time he said it really doesn't make that much

difference what your taxation base is as long as it's really really small and if it's really really big it doesn't there's not going to be any good way to do it the problem is that the government's footprint is too big and its foot is stomping on our face like 1984 that's the problem and so no matter what they do and how they restructure this is like rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic they've got to get government to be smaller but that's not going to happen and so they will play these games and if they play these games i think they have a chance of making things much worse very quickly. Let's go back to the Reagan administration. Late in his second term, they came to him and said, Mr. President, we're going to lose Harley-Davidson.

He said, well, we're going to lose Harley-Davidson. Yes, the Japanese, because we'd opened up our markets, we had free trade agreements. That was a way for us. It was kind of an addendum to the Marshall Plan. Let these nations that we have destroyed, let them have access to our markets and build back up their economies. And they came to President Reagan and said, we're going to lose Harley-Davidson. And he said, OK. So he slapped a 50% tariff on the larger import of larger bikes. And they saved Harley.

That act of economic nationalism saved Harley. But when you're talking about a 60 tariff across the board on on all incoming chinese across the board that is insane and you're talking i like economic nationalism i'm a fan of it yeah it's interesting that no one i ran on this when i was running for congress no one knew i was talking about they loved the fact that i was standing up for the worker but no one in politics usually talks about this kind of stuff. You know, and there's a model too for it that you can actually look at the model. If you had a 25% tariff across the board on all manufacturing goods, not just from China, but just 25% to get into our markets.

If you manufactured a vehicle or a machine, anything that's manufactured outside of the continental United States, 25% tariff, and then you eliminate the corporate income tax for internal corporations, what that would do to give an incentive for companies to move here, build here, employ Americans and avoid that 25%, but a 60% tariff. That's, that's, uh, but you notice that Trump is not talking about eliminating the internal taxes either, right? No, this would be an addition to what we've already got and so you know that that's always the problem and when you look at what is happening with the irs you know they're

going to give them another um um you know 60 billion dollars and then the uh mccarthy and johnson both want to cut it down to like 45 billion dollars they only get 13 billion right now so you're looking looking at the democrats want to make the IRS seven times bigger. The Republicans want to make it five times bigger. They're not talking about reducing that at all. They're talking about rapidly escalating this. And it just came out that these IRS agents that they're putting in there, the vast majority of them are going to be for face-to-face audits,

face-to-face audits. face-to-face audits. And they refuse to say that they're going to limit it to the wealthy, 400,000 or more. No, I'm not going to say that. It's going to be for everybody. And this is just the beginning. I mean, they've only spent a couple of billion of the massive amount of money that's been allocated to them.

And the Republicans aren't pulling that back. The IRSs instead of saying we're going to raise taxes at the border and then pull the other stuff back instead of doing that instead of you know reducing the income tax they're going to escalate this and i think that's a part of the great taking to have this army of irs agents that are there but um it's it's um this is all going to result in a great deal, I think, of chaos, and it's planned and designed to do that, is what I think. And the gold people that are looking at this are saying it's also going to be a huge kickoff to inflation if they do this, because it's going to raise

prices on everything so rapidly, it's really going to kick inflation through the roof if they were to do this. Well, the only thing that really holds up this country anymore is small business. It's entrepreneurs, people that are still trying to keep the lights on and build things. It's funny you mentioned the so-called conservatives, Republican Party. I think you could float passing the Communist Manifesto through the House of Representatives and they'd be against 50% of it. So they try to conserve as much of the change that goes on with what the left and the progressives and the Marxists do, and the

Republicans come along and conserve that a little bit. So we really don't have anybody fighting for the Bill of Rights. Jim Jordan would do a hearing about it. Right. Do an inquiry. He'd do an inquiry. It's so weak, and that's why we have to take care of ourselves in these parallel systems. I saw Catherine Austin Fitz has been talking about sovereign state banks a lot on interviews. That's in the Constitution. This is what we have to do.

This is decentralized, build parallel networks, because no one in Washington is coming to save you. You have ridiculous ideas flowing out of there. And this is all in theory, too. I've seen Trump run before in 2016. I don't know what policies were carried out other than making, you know, Fauci president. I had a question. You know, I thought this would be a great tweet for you. You should ask if Trump is reelected, does Fauci automatically become president again or do we have to wait for the next?

He can become president very easily he seems to be in better health than either uh trump or well maybe his trump isn't as good at health as fauci is but you know we got biden there he could easily uh have fauci become president but both of them made fauci president and you know that's the whole thing i said in the 2020 election why am i why would i even bother to vote for president because we're being ruled by Fauci, and we're being ruled at the state and local level by bureaucrats because you've got state and local governments, for the most part, would not stand up to them. Some cases, if you get somebody that's bad at the state level, they're going to make it even worse than these bureaucrats. So that's really where the key is, is at the state and local levels.

And, you know, when we talk about the state banks, Tony, that Catherine Austin Fitz is talking about, there's a real concern that a lot of states could go bankrupt. You look at Illinois, look at what is happening in California. California went from, you know, they were looking at a big deficit before all of this COVID bailout from Trump happened of tens of billions of dollars. And all of a sudden they wound up with $100 billion surplus. And it took them no time at all to blow through that. And now they're looking at a $38 billion deficit again. And so you've got a lot of these Democrat States that, that are looking at essentially insolvency and that that's a concern.

And if they don't, you know, if they're that's another layer of concern, if the States cannot administer things that are, there's going to be another level of concern if the states cannot administer things. There's going to be another level of concern for all of us, I think. Yes, well, that's a massive loss of sovereignty when you have to go to the federal government and get a bailout for your state. Where does that put you in the column of having any sort of powers anymore? Because you're going to be, I mean, they're already under the thumb. They take the federal money, but that's another level of subservience.

And, you know, that could create a system that could rapidly accelerate balkanization in the United States of America. You're going to have some states, especially the blue states, with people fleeing, not building businesses, no investment. And then you see these collapse

because they just continue to tax higher and regulate more. And they're going to have these collapses i think that's inevitable their state budgets completely inflated places like illinois places like california these are going to be the first to go and they're going to be i think further linked to the federal government which is going to be a massive loss for liberty because the only way that we have any sort of freedom is to be able to flee and just across state lines at this point. That's right. Yeah. It's, um, it's interesting. You know, we talked about the Potemkin economy of China and we just had Biden put out his, uh, uh, adjusted figures. They added a million jobs that didn't actually exist at the department of labor. And we always see that, you know,

they always go in and they'll talk about what the unemployment rate is this quarter and how it changed, you know, from the previous quarter. And they always will go back and adjust previous quarter so they can show a positive trend. That is a bipartisan trick that they always do. But, of course, with everything, as with everything else, Biden takes it to another extreme level. And he's done that with us now. When you look at all of this, it's just the magnitude of it. The magnitude of the malarkey just gets higher and higher with Biden every time they go through it. And it's not just that kind of stuff. But the other thing that nobody is really talking about, Tony, are things

like the record credit card interest rates. It's something like 27% now on average. That's just, to me, that's such an abomination. If I was to run for any office, I would start trying to stop that at the state or local level. It's just thievery to charge people 27%. That's like loan sharking. It's amazing. That's usury. Yeah, it is usury. It's criminal.

It is. And they're taking advantage of people. I read a study a couple of days ago, credit card defaults are up 50% in 2023, according to the New York Federal Reserve, 50%. So people are living paycheck to paycheck. They're going into debt. It's funny, Drudge had a headline. I read it on my show last week, David. And it was, people are seeing prices lower in some columns, but the prices of groceries are way off the charts. And I thought, well, because those items that you're seeing the price drop, and this is economics 101, you don't have to be a professor. They're not buying those things because they can't afford them, whether it's used cars,

televisions, a new phone, but they have to eat. So the prices of the things they need, they absolutely need are going up. And so you have this, this duality of a falling prices in other places and rising prices in places that you need. That's the definition of a failing economy and a failing currency. And you know, the mainstream is not going to get it all the way up to the end. We, we are watching the death of a currency and it's slow, but the rest of the world is catching on. They're dumping the dollar. They're buying gold.

They're joining other financial coalitions like the BRICS nations. The fact that Saudi Arabia, David, joined BRICS, now we have BRICS Plus. The fact that Saudi Arabia joined BRICS is not headline everywhere over all these financial networks. And not only that, not only did they, you know, you got now 10 BRICS nations and another 17 that have like a memory kind of a, not a full membership status, but are kind of involved in that. But also the other part of the petrodollar was the fact that they would buy military weapons from us. And now they're looking to source that from other places. I mean,

the petrodollar is just gone in terms of its construct that was put there. That's, that's going to have big implications for everybody that's why i like to to get out of the fiat currency try to get into gold and silver and of course you know the world economic forum is talking about the fact that we've got to have interoperability between these cbdc's that's what they mean is a global currency they'll have a veneer of nationalism on each of these CVDCs, but they'll be interoperable. It'll be one and the same thing. But before we run out of time, we've got another guest coming on. Tell us what's going on at Wise Wolf. Well, we're just continuing to keep the supply chain open for our customers. That's been my mission here since all of this has been

accelerated in 2020. I realized that supply is going to be the issue that first quarter of 2020 dave i remember people calling in to get orders when the prices fell after the stock market collapsed and i couldn't source it at the time and i thought well this in the future i got to make sure that we have more than two or three supply chains so i've set those up we've got another location here in denison texas that i'm working on wolfpack has a lot of great products. If you want to support David, go to davidknight.gold. Check out, join Wolfpack. It's a great way to stack gold and silver, especially if you're on a budget. We have gold backs going in every single order now. I'm putting gold backs in every order. That's great. From me, I'm making sure that we

don't run out of gold backs for those sovereign state notes that are 24 karat gold. So even if you're on the lowest budget, even the Wolf Cub, the $35 a month, get some gold backs. So go to go to David Knight dot gold. Check out Wolf Pack. We've got some great incentives right now. And it's just a good way for for you to stack, whether it's, you know, $50 or $5,000. It doesn't matter. We can just amplify that. The gold backs are actually have physical gold, but a small amount on it.

It's in the format of what you typically see as paper currency. Yes, it's 24 karat gold. Yeah, so that's a great thing. And that's the key. What are we going to have as a medium of exchange, as a currency, not just as holding wealth, but ability to have a currency in case we can't get this done at the state level because the state moves very slowly and this stuff is coming at us very fast.

So we need to have something like the goldbacks that are there. Well, thank you for coming on, Tony. Always great to talk to you. We really do appreciate your support. And again, folks can get to wisewolf.gold by going to davidknight.gold. And that'll take you to Tony. Let him know that you came from us. Thank you so much, davidknight.gold and that'll take you to Tony let him know that you came from us thank you so much Tony appreciate it thank you David

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