The Duran Podcast - BRICS rise and Europe's economic decline w/ Alex Krainer (Live)

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

BRICS rise and Europe's economic decline w/ Alex Krainer (Live)

Okay, we are live with Alexander Mercuris, and we have with us once again, Anvider, Alex Krenner. Alex, how are you doing today? I'm doing really well. Good to be with you, gentlemen again, and greetings to all the viewers and listeners. And where is the best place for people to follow your work, Alex? Probably on X. My handle is at Naked Hedgy, and I also have a substack, Alex Kraner's Trent Compass.

All right. I have those links in the description box down below, and I will add those links as a PID comment when the live stream is over. So Alex, Alex and Alex, or Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, and Alexander. Let's get talking about what is going on in the world, what is happening in Europe, the economic situation, in Europe, bricks, and other interesting topics that we can discuss. with Alex. Before we get started, let me just say a quick hello to everyone that's watching us on Rockfin, on Odyssey, on Rumble,

on YouTube, and on our locals channel, the duraiad.locals.com. And a big shout out to our moderators in the chat as well. We have Zarael in the house today, the great Zareel. And I also think I saw the great Peter as well. Peter the Great was also in the chat, helping to moderate.

So, Alexander, Alex, let's get going. Let's, indeed, because of course we're in a period of great change, tremendous change, change that is going to be epochal. And there's nobody better to discuss it with than Alex Kramer, who follows these events with incredible care. And I'm going to suggest that what we're going to be talking about today, when people go back and study these times, they're going to agree that these were the most important events of all. If you dialed back, went to the world of 1944, in the summer of 1944, all sorts of

battles were taking place in all kinds of places in France, in Poland and Russia, and all of these places. And of course, those battles were hugely important. But the creation of a world global and financial architecture at a small place called Bretton Woods that I think many people today understand was one of the most important things that took place at that time of all and I think we're in exactly that same situation

and it's interesting because whereas the Bretton Wood system was created consensually with all of the victorious powers including by the way the Russians agreeing to it this is not the same this time. This time the transition is contested. And there is that tiresome quote of Gramshies that everybody comes up with, but which I think is true, where he once said that the

crisis lies in the fact that the old world is dying, but the new cannot be born. And in fact, we are exactly that situation. We are seeing the dying of the old world, but the new world has not yet been born. So we're not yet in that situation where we can see how things will turn out. And that's creating instability and uncertainty and a certain amount of fear. And I saw in the media here in Britain last week a real good example of that fear. Because as everybody knows, who follows our programs, the presidents of Russia and Iran, had a meeting in Ashgabad in Turkmenistan, and they mentioned and they discussed the fact

that they were due to attend again a BRICS summit meeting in two weeks' time, and the media in Britain covered that meeting in Ashgabat, and then they mentioned the facts that these two presidents will meet again, and they didn't mention the fact that they were going to meet again in a BRICS, summit meeting. The word bricks was obviously not permissible by the editors. They were clearly told,

don't mention the format, the venue where these two presidents are going to meet again in two weeks time. So where are we? We are in a situation where Bloomberg is now talking about a deep crisis in Europe, where everybody can see the steepening economic crisis in Europe. We have article after article, appearing in Britain, talking about the difficulty of getting growth to come back to the British economy. Everybody can in fact see that there is economic stagnation and decay in Britain. But alongside that, we have this decisive change in the world that's coming, the new world this coming. So, Alex, tell us about that. Firstly, do you agree with me that this is an epochal time? An epoch? Yes, I absolutely do agree with you. I think that we're coming to a

turning point in history that's breaking with continuity, which depends on how you wish to cut it. We could call it of the last five centuries, or we could call it of the last five centuries, or we could colleagues of the last 25 centuries. And I think that for the, well, okay, let's look at the very obvious, but very important thing that we have today, which no generation before us had, is the internet. So the first time ever we have orders of magnitudes increased access to information and knowledge. And so this is a blessing of the whole humanity. It's practically accessible to everybody.

And you can see the effect. And you can see also the empire as equestrian class throwing tantrums more and more often about how difficult it is to govern, how difficult it is to control the narrative. We saw Alex Karp in May this year complain that if we lose the internet, intellectual battle, we will not be able to deploy any Western army anywhere in the world.

And, you know, they wouldn't be throwing these tantrums if it wasn't a problem for them. It clearly is a problem. And that means that they have difficulty maintaining their order. And, you know, I think that the best visual for this, you know, for people to try to envision what this looks like is simply to envision old structures of society falling to ruins and new things growing from the ground up like, you know, in an organic way. Isaac Newton said that if he could see farther

is because he was able to stand on the shoulders of giants. What we have today is not just that we have the ability to stand on the shoulders of giants, we are collectively all climbing on top of each other, using each other's research, insight, knowledge, experience, sharing it. And, you know, every so often you find, you come across something that you never knew anything about. And now suddenly it's there in front of you in its fullness because somebody has spent 20 or 30 years of their life looking deeply into something. And then they just

deliver it in, you know, in a podcast or in an article or in a documentary film. And, you know, it's clearly the internet and this dynamic of exchange of knowledge and information is clearly a variable in the equation that never existed before. So we are off the charts of everything we knew in history, all the history that's been taught to us as distorted as it was, the reality today is taking. taking new turns. We don't know what those turns are because we've never been here. But I would say that I'm very positive and very optimistic about it because I think that we're rather than deferring to authority, you know, and say like, oh, well, this is like this

because this great authority says it's it is so. We are becoming the judges of what's real and what's not real and what's true and what's not true ourselves individually. And, you know, as insofar as many people have a very dim view of individual human intelligence and awareness and level of education and so on, you know, you come across that every time people are frustrated. Oh, how can everybody see this? Is everybody so stupid? But I think that, you know, we all come to our in-lawful.

in our own time. It's slow. It's a process that takes time. Everybody has different interests, so they will focus their attention to different things at different times. And then I also believe that there's a lot of very compelling evidence that we are a species designed for collective wisdom, for collective intelligence. And in that respect, you know, I think we get to extremely fascinating things. And what we can observe already now is that in some, mysterious way we are we have steered away from certain very bad outcomes some very bad projects and agenda for example the you know the the the the health emergency that we had a few years ago which was supposed to usher us into a new normal we were supposed

to go around with with certain permits and certificates that would allow us to get on the train, to get on the plane, to get in a restaurant and so on. And we were promised that this is the new normal, that the old normal was never coming back. Well, we're in the old normal back again, somehow. And we saw these measures fall in one country after the next, you know, famously in French Parliament in July 2022 when the, you know, the bus sanitaire was supposed to be renewed. It wasn't. and the people in power are absolutely vexed about it, but we steered away from that dystopian future. It's a mystery to me, but it is why I am almost incurably optimistic

about what's going on in spite of all the ugly stuff that's going on. Let's start with the old world, which is I think a point I would make is that, of course, what we think of what we think of economically as the old, world, Europe, the United States. In economic terms, in terms of economics, when I was born in 1961, it was the world. I mean, when people talked about the world economy in the 60s, as I remember it, I was just on the cusp of my memory. Everybody thought of Europe and the United States. There was some things going on in Japan. The Soviet Union was up to its own things, which nobody quite

really understood what they were. But overall, in terms of world trade, in terms of economics, industry, technology, science, culture, everything was concentrated on Europe and on the United States. And nobody thought beyond that at all. Now, of course, suddenly we find that we're just a part of a much wider economic world and the most, the least dynamic part. What is wrong? what is going wrong in Europe at the moment? And because everybody acknowledges that the situation in Europe is not good. I'm going to say something. Obviously, the cut off from Russia, the energy blockade has played a role.

But the malaise was already there before. And we've all lived through the financial crisis. Alex and I know about the financial crisis as it affected Cyprus and Greece, but it affected everywhere right across Europe. Even the period before the financial crisis, when there seemed to be growth, we can now see that that was a very unstable and ephemeral growth. And already going way back into the 80s, late 70s, things were not really looking terribly good. So what is wrong? What has gone wrong in Europe? Well, if you peel the onion all the way to its core,

what's wrong is entirely in the monetary system that we have. It's a fraudulent monetary system. It's literally based on fraud. It's a Ponzi scheme. And it can remain stable only to the extent that it is growing. Now, how does it grow? All the money that we have in circulation today entered into circulation as debt. So somebody had to go to the bank, raise credit, and obtain money to do whatever they plan to do,

whether it's real estate developments or whatever, you know, refineries, ships, whatever it be, economic activity, the humans engaging. And so the trouble is that only the principle goes into circulation. It has to be repaid with interest. So let's say if you put a billion dollars into circulation, but you have to repay $2 billion over the next 10, 20, 30 years, the second billion simply doesn't exist. It never went into circulation.

So the debtor's ability to, to repay the debt depends on other people going into debt. And so then, you know, if I'm a debtor, I can earn the money with interest from them and repay my banker. So the whole system depends into drawing more and more participants into it. And the problem arises because at a certain point in time, you saturate the economy with debt. you know, I, nobody would lend me a hundred million dollars, even though, you know, a bank might like to, but they will see that I would not be able to service that debt.

And they would ask for collateral and I don't have it. So once all the money good collateral has been tapped and drawn into the system, there is no more and the system can no longer grow. And so if a Ponzi scheme can no longer grow, then it begins to implode immediately. And it implodes all the way into an economic depression, into complete collapse of the society. So that creates a very, very strong incentive to add other people's collateral into the mix. So you start going, you know, developing colonies around the world. And this is what the Western world has been doing for the last 500 years and longer. But, you know, by now it's been refined, not to perfection, but it's been advanced.

And it's been also masked up with wonderful narratives about freedom and democracy and all of this. But you will notice, if you look deep into it from, you know, from revelations like the Pentagon Papers onwards, that it's always about resources and resources are not something that you cannot obtain through trade. You know, I'm from Croatia. Croatia doesn't have many military bases around the world. Our multinational corporations are not in the Middle East, in the Caspian region or anywhere else. But I don't remember a day that we didn't have oil available at the gas pumps for us. We trade and we buy it.

Croatia has tourism. so we earn for an exchange and we buy oil and whatever we need to buy, right? You could say the same for Switzerland and all the other countries. Something is different for the Anglo-American world. They are the ones who have colonies around the world, and they are the ones who have military bases everywhere around the world. And they are the ones who, and this is an empirical fact, are behind starting 80%, more than 80% of all four,

foreign wars between 1946 and today, you know, the, you know, the peace, the, the wonderful piece that we've had in the after World War II that they're selling us. Western corporations could equally like Croatian and Swiss corporations engage in trade and obtain all the resources that they need through, you know, fair trade. But they don't. And why is that? Because there is one group in society which is keenly interested in controlling the resources as they're collateral, and that is our banking oligarchies. It's the families who control the global systemically important banks.

G-Syps, they're listed in Bank of International Settlements website. These are banks like HSBC, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, etc. And so they are the only participant in our economic system. systems that have a very clear incentive to control these resources by force, to have them as collateral, because then they can issue loans to their clients. The clients are the visible arm of Western imperialism like BP, Shell, Halliburton, corporations like this. but you know B.B. Shell and Halliburton could do business on other basis, or they could take loans from Chinese banks or from Russian banks or wherever. They, in terms of incentives, they would be indifferent where they take their financing. And they could also organize their business so that they don't need to conquer.

They could just trade. Okay. So in order for the Western fraudulent monetary system to continue, growing, they need to draw other people's resources, which is what creates the incentive to co-op the political system and the military structures and the diplomatic structures and the economic wealth of the nation to fomenting this empire of military bases. And this has been the case throughout the last past few centuries. And this is the story that comes to an end. You know, a few months ago, Vladimir Putin famously said this vampire ball is now coming to an end.

But what I wanted to stress is that all these wars don't happen because the Western world, the individual people in the Western world are particularly evil or warlike, that our corporations are particularly greedy more than the Russians or Chinese corporations. that's not the fact either, is that we have originated this monetary system that creates the incentives for everything else. It's the foundation that ultimately poisons all other relations in society that creates always, without fail, misery at home, mayhem abroad, and it's been perpetuating itself for a very long time. And now it comes to an end. if you live in London, if you live in Britain, you can see this. You can see this very vividly, the extent to which the British economic and social system

has been structured around empire. The fact that the British themselves never talk about this, the fact that empire is hardly taught in schools here. Just to say, it's a very strange fact that this huge event in British history is always downplayed in British history. social and educational discourse is remarkable. An outsider, which to some extent I am, I could see this all the time, and I can see the effect it's had on the British economy and British industry and British entrepreneurial activity and

all of that, and it has been debilitating. Oh, it has caused extraordinary atrophy at the centre in the Imperial Corps. Now, that's, that's for. Britain, that's France, to a great extent, very similar countries. They're both colonial empires. Other parts of Europe were not like this. I mean, Germany's who have dabbled with empire, they never quite got there and they had an industrial structure of a kind. They had a very successful industrial structure. Well, that's coming apart now. Why is that happening? Why have the Germans let themselves, why have other parts of Europe let themselves be drawn into this?

Is it because what you said, the vampire managed to attract them to its ball? It also wanted those resources. It wanted the resources specifically in Russia, for example. With which Germany was trading? Yes. Well, Russia is the biggest price because Russia has, Russian resources are estimated to be worth between 75 and 90 trillion. million US dollars. And so that would be a whole lot of collateral, which if the Western banking

system controlled, then all the development loans, all the trade, all the financing would turn into a massive conveyor belt, transferring wealth from everybody who develops those resources to the Western banking oligarchy. And so, you know, breaking up Russia, destroying it as a political entity and turning it into, you know, a collection of weak client states that could always be pitted one against the other is the Western financiers' wet dream. It's the biggest price. And it would also remove the largest and most powerful rival that they have in their quest to control the Eurasian landmass. and the quest to control the Eurasian landmass has been the obsession of the imperial class for centuries. And we had an explicit formulation of this imperative from Mckinder onwards,

but also reformulated and reaffirmed by people like Zbignevorszynski, who was advisor to five US president about foreign policy, and it's basically been embraced by the neocons in U.S. presidential administrations, and the neocons are the people who ultimately formulate the American foreign policy. Now, a big mystery about this that people should focus on is that this is a band of highly ideological individuals who are organized, who are few, relatively few, whose interest are not really intersecting with the interests of ordinary American individuals and businesses, who should be the sovereign, the bearers of sovereignty in the U.S. democracy,

but who somehow have this disproportional power to wield influence on U.S. foreign policy. that is and how that is needs to be explained. And I believe that it is because they have the support of the banking oligarchy who ultimately, you know, control the, not only the military industrial complex, but also the media. And just to quickly touch on this, one of the great mysteries for me is why the United States, which is very different from Britain in so many respects. It's a big continental country. It's got abundant resources of its own, has evolved into something that seems to follow very much

the course that Britain did. It's almost restructured its society, its economic system, its foreign policy, as a continuation of what Britain was doing. in the 19th and first half of the 20th century. And the British and American political and economic worlds have a very strange way, which I don't understand. I mean, they sort of merged. Would you agree about that just very quickly? Because it is, again, maybe it's connected once more to finance.

If anybody knows anything about American history, they would know the enormous role that British finance played in organizing the US, the role J.P. Morgan played, for example, in mediating all of that. But anyway, just quickly on that point before we move on to what's going on on the other side, what the Chinese, the Russians and all of them are doing. Yes, so just quickly, this is not an accident. When the British Empire, when the imperial cabal, depleted their British host.

They realized that they need a new host and a more powerful host. And so they made a deliberate decision. And this was decided really in a smoke-filled rooms when men discussed things together to co-op the United States to become the next, you know, musclemen and global cup for the British Empire. Now, you know, when we say British Empire, this is hardly anything to do with the British people.

This is simply Britain is simply the played the host nation to the empire. It still does, except that the economic, political and military muscle has been co-opted from the United States. And they formed these Pilgrims Club in the United States. They sprayed a lot of money among people like Carnegie, J.P. Morgan. and others and they simply co-opted the American legitimate political structures into becoming the water bearer for the empire. Absolutely. Can I say I've been in some of those smoke-filled rooms. I haven't been part of those conversations. But by the way, those discussions that you just mentioned, I mean, you actually confront

find quite open records about them in 19, yes. I mean, you know, in the 1890s and early 1900s, people were quite openly talking about this, you know, how do we keep this going, the United States to join us? It's all set out as actually public speeches by people like Joseph Chamberlain, for example, people surprisingly not well-known aspect of British and American history. Let's talk about the other side because you mentioned the Russians. The Russians are now hosting this meeting in Kazan,

the one that the British media doesn't want to talk about, which is too horrible to even face. They're going to face this meeting. They're going to host this meeting in Kazan. There is talk about setting up messaging, interbank messaging systems. And I want to stress messaging systems. It seems to be all about,

trade we go straight back to what you were saying at the beginning that you can obtain resources through trade rather than simple imperial appropriation that is absolutely the impression I'm getting from all of the discussions that I'm seeing that this is all about setting up a system an actual system of trade as opposed to the imperial system that is now starting to buckle again is that your impression and perhaps you can provide some more details. Yeah, it's definitely the intent and they are very, very serious about it. The Russians are, the Chinese are, and I think pretty much all of the BRICS countries,

even though many of the BRICS countries today are still in a relatively vulnerable position with relation to the empire. They still have extensive ties with the IMF, and they are for some reason they are very, very, nervous about rocking the boat with the IMF. But I think that the process is moving slowly as a tsunami. And I think that there's enough of political and economic power behind it, that it will be successful. So they are already conducting very substantial trade bypassing the US dollar.

So I think that it's something like 90% of trade. between China and Russia today is denominated in rubles or Rhinbiyan. Something like 50% of Russia-China, Russia-India trade is denominated in their individual local currencies. So this is gaining momentum. And now it seems to me that this unit that, you know, it was pepe escobar who first brought my attention to it it seems to be as a to be a very very serious attempt to completely change the uh the global uh trade payments architecture uh for the future and i initially thought you know when i when i first downloaded the white paper of the

unit that it was it was a gimmick that it was yet yet another you know crypto something or other but I read the paper eventually about two weeks ago and I realized this was very, very serious. This is a very sophisticated novelty and that I think that it will be given due attention and it might become the new trade settlement system, not just currency, but a system. And so rather than it being centralized in, you know, Bank of England or later Federal Reserve banks, where, you know, everybody who wanted to trade internationally had to have an account with the Federal Reserve, like every country. And there they had to have, you know, all their dollar, you know, revenues accrue.

And then, of course, that gave the Empire power over them because if you wanted to spend those dollars, they could say, like, well, no, no, no, you can't do this? Why don't you just invest in our treasuries? You know, they give you a nice little return. They're safe and everything. And so the whole world ended up financing the empire by being forced into the empire's trade settlement system and to use the empire's currency. So this is now what becomes undone. And rather than it being now moving to the next center, whether it be Beijing, or Shanghai or Moscow or wherever, it's meant to be multi-nodal. So every, it would, the unit envisions participants in the system,

which it's not explicitly stated, but I think that they mean central banks, even though it seems that it's open that other types of participants might be able to set up notes. And so rather than, rather than the trade settlement, settlement system architecture being centralized as a large hierarchy under some, potentially somebody's political control, it's going to be decentralized under many different nodes, which will have to, you know, which will have to work within the rules framework of this new architecture, but the framework. is, let's call it democratic in the sense that many different participating nations

will be able to give their input into how this should be organized. Let's say that the skeleton is now outlined, but maybe the details to the blueprint will need to be set out with time. And some people say like, oh, well, this is taking forever, this is such a slow motion development. People forget that the Bretton Wood system, even though it was you know the Bretton Woods conference you know was a was a short-term event the Bretton Woods system wasn't fully implemented until something like 1958 yeah so it was also a very long-grown process where you went from the let's call it the the basic outlines of the

architecture to a fully implemented system and then we also know that it lasted about 30 years 13 years from then because it essentially fell apart in 1971 So I think that the system that BRICS nations are pushing forward will be successful because it will be more equitable, it will be more fair, it will not incentivize conquest, it will not incentivize creation of military bases and a forceful grab for resources. it will incentivize fair trades. So, you know, many nations will be torn between the Western system and the new system, and I think that the incentives will slowly push them to the new system.

Because precisely because it is more democratic and more peaceful and less predatory. Yes, it's fairer, it's more equitable, and it is acceptable, and it is excessive. explicitly being designed to be that way. Whereas the Western system is explicitly designed to favor a very, very narrow set of vested interest around, you know, Western banks and the banking cartel. And to everybody else's detriment. And then this is one of those juggernauts, which the farther it goes, the more onerous it becomes, the more onerous it becomes. comes on people who participated in it and more beneficial to the ultimate vested interest. And this is why we see that after centuries of continuity, the countries that participate in

this are, they have not developed. The poverty and misery is still endemic. And so I think that many, many countries will be looking to the new system with with hope. And I think that it will take very little time to show the proof in the pudding that, you know, just as the Chinese managed to raise 800 plus million people out of poverty, we're going to see swathes of humanity begin to rise out of poverty. And then everybody else will start thinking like, hey, that all brick stuff seems to be working. Let's look into it. and the political pressures that will emanate from that will make it irresistible. Even to the political puppets in the Western nations.

Because when the groundswell of public opinion shifts in favor of something and against something else, then the puppets in charge can no longer resist it. Because this is intellectual and structural backing behind it. I'm going to give an example of how the old system worked, because I remember that there was a G7 summit that was held in Glen Eagles in Scotland in the 1990s. Tony Blair organized it. It was all going to be about lifting Africa out of poverty.

There was a huge amount of publicity around this. All kinds of declarations flowed from it, and nothing changed. Absolutely nothing. And nobody talks about it anymore. It's as if that incident. that summit never took place. And that I think has been the consistent pattern ever since I can remember

that every so often we suddenly get this call in the West that we must do something about Africa or we must do something about India but nothing ultimately ever changes because the underlying structure, the actual system, never changes. It continues to be predatory in the same way as it always was. And now potentially it could change.

And it's logical that it should be driven by these two, principally, these two very different countries. Because Russia, you'd mentioned its enormous resources. So it has an interest in actually trading its resources other than having them extracted from it in the way that people in the West have been saying. By the way, I ought to say a couple of years ago, in London, before Putin came, I remember people talking about Russia as Nigeria with snow.

You know, just this we would repeat in Russia. I remember those conversations doing Russia, the same thing that Shell is doing in southern Nigeria, Nigeria with snow. So, yes. The Russians want to trade. They don't want to have themselves, you know, exploited and extracted. And the Chinese is the great manufacturing power. They want to be able to trade too.

They don't want to be locked into a system, which is what one senses all of these sanctions and tariffs are all about in which they continue to produce cheap products for the West, to the West's advantage rather than see their own economy develop and develop further. And is that where the tensions are? Is that ultimately what the sanctions are all about? I mean, we have all of the politics

and all of the talk about conflicts and wars and things of this kind and Chinese overcapacity in all of these narratives. But is it also partly an attempt to try to prevent development, to prevent development happening in these other societies because doing so would ultimately unbalance the Western system.

Well, yes, preventing development is, well, it's not stated explicitly, but it's definitely a core goal of Western imperialism. And the reason is because the Western system, the banks and the corporations, they grow up around them, want to have monopoly on the resources they control. They don't want Nigeria or Congo or Angola to develop a vibrant economy because they would become competitors for the resources that they produce. They would absorb their oil, their cobalt, their aluminum iron, whatever you have. They would absorb them at home. And in competing with Western corporations for those resources, they would bid up the price.

So all of a sudden, all those resources would become much, much more expensive to those. likes of Halliburton and BP and Rio Tinto and so forth. So preventing the development of the economic development of these nations that are under under colonial control is absolutely part of the strategy. And this is where the new system completely diverges because, you know, the Chinese have positioned themselves as the global manufacturing hub and over time they go from from more basic goods to more sophisticated goods and in order for their system to be functional they want to have more affluent consumers everywhere around the world so

their strategy is exactly to help countries attain such economic development that a large part of their population are those affluent consumers that people have money to spend and then you will buy stuff made in China and that makes perfect sense to the Chinese but you might also buy things made in Russia and you know if the West gets their act together we could participate in that because I mean imagine if you're if you have even a little bit of an entrepreneurial spark in you and now you have maybe a population of a billion or two or three billion consumers around the world who have some money to spend. And even if you are able to reach a very small segment of them, if you make a dollar from a million people, well, you know, that could work very well for you.

So for anybody in the West, you know, the wine makers in France, watchmakers in Switzerland, apparel makers in Italy, you know, Britain has brilliant high-fi equipment that is, you know, it's an industry that is dying to my massive regret because that is something that improves quality of life and that I would like to be able to buy. But it is all being destroyed in favor of large corporate systems and concentration. And so, you know, we in the West have a choice to participate in this, you know, burgeoning new world that is going to bring a human prosperity. standards of livings to new levels that have never been attained yet in history, or maybe they have been, but only in a very small local environment. This time, this could go global. So, you know,

it will be detrimental to the banking oligarchies who wish to control all this to their exclusive benefit, but it would be very beneficial to everybody else, not only in the third world, in the global south, in China and India and Russia, but even in the populations of Western Europe and UK and the United States and everywhere else. Indeed, it would enable us to escape the post-imperial trap that we find ourselves in in places like Britain. Now, what do you say, though,

to people in the West, in Britain, in the United States, who in the meantime are very afraid of this, they say, well, you know, even if we understand what you say, say you're talking about the fact that we might eventually find ourselves in this extremely prosperous and affluent time. That's going to be 10, 20 years into the future. We're worried about tomorrow. If all of these systems develop, we could find ourselves in a deep crisis in the meantime. We could see an implosion of our economic systems. We'll have terrible poverty, maybe inflation. It's too long into the future for us.

So we've got to support our governments which try to hold it back because ultimately in the meantime tomorrow, today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, our interests of economic interests are still bound up with the existing system. What do you say to people like that? And you know, you will find people like that who talk in that way. Well, I would tell them that they have no choice about the economic crisis anyway. The economic crisis is coming anyhow. And I think it will be one for history books. This is not going to be, you know, 2000.com bubble or, you know, 1997 East Asian financial crisis or 1998 global financial crisis.

Oh, sorry, 2008 global financial crisis. This is going to be more on the scale of Weimar Republic or the collapse of the Soviet Union or the Great Depression in the United States. That type of crisis is coming to us. And it's coming to us inevitably. It's a mathematical certainty. It's only a matter of time. And so the question will be, do we want to dig ourselves out from under this rubble on our own through individual action, through entrepreneurship?

Or do we want to be shackled to the powers that be that have brought us into this crisis? Remember, the 2008 global financial crisis essentially never went away. We're still in the wake of that crisis, and we have allowed the people who created that crisis to also create the solution to the crisis, which they haven't done. They've only protected their own interests at everybody else's detriment. And the next eruption is going to be orders of magnitude worse than what we're. we just what we lived through 15 years ago. So the choice will eventually be ours,

and we will have to make the choice understanding that one path leads into the status quo. And the status quo with the current monetary system is periods of prosperity driven by credit expansion, and then crises. crisis are almost constant in the Western financial system. You know, we keep being promised this, you know, growth and it's going to be better with the next administration,

and we're going to come out of the crisis. But we're always in a crisis. It's almost non-stop. There's a period. There's one business cycle when the credit cycle is expanding, that everybody feels prosperity, everybody thinks that things are going in the right direction. But as soon as the system becomes saturated with debt and this debt has to be repaid,

then you have this crisis from which they only use one approach to managing it, and that is by printing funny money and plugging up the holes and backstopping all the losses. But it's really drawing the life's energy from the whole society. And we feel it as a crisis. walk around the cities of the UK or the United States, you see with your own eyes what this is amounting to. Absolutely. Alex Graham, I have one very last question.

It's about the topic we discussed just before the program started. And it's about the budgetary crisis that we see in Britain. There's been a lot of discussion about the causes of it. But you've made several comments about the British having been given loan guarantees to Ukraine, which are coming due, which I think plays well into the topic that we've been talking about. Can you just explain what you understand about this? Because it's not been talked about to here.

And then that would be where I finish, and then we can go over to Alex, and he'll put some questions to you. Yeah, so, you know, I've been, my day job is in financial, markets and has been for a little over 25 years now. And so I, you know, I spend every day reading through financial press and trying to understand the big picture. And one thing that I kind of realized only recently is that whereas you get a good deal of transparency around the world, you know, in terms of, you know, statistics and monetary aggregates and inflation and,

debt and GDP and employment and all these things. I realized that Britain on that map is almost like that pixelated area where you can't you can't really, you don't really understand it. Then I asked some other people, do they feel the same way? And then they realize, well, now that you mentioned it, yeah, actually, you know, Britain is almost like a blind spot in global financial markets. And I think it's by design. We're not being told.

And I try to look into the official, you know, Britain has the government of national statistics or something like this. I think it's called ONS or whatever. And if you look there, you see that, you know, the debt is growing. The deficits are growing. But I think in August we hit 100% debt to GDP ratio. And you look at all these statistics that are available and they're not good numbers, but they're hardly panic-inducing stuff. you know, it's almost normal, given the state of things in the rest of the world. But I then question why has the British government and the Bank of England reacted so with such,

I would say, panic, let's say, over the summer months in July and August of this year, you know, there's been a very hard clampdown on freedoms and protests, on freedom of speech in Britain under the pretext of, you know, these conflicts between the local communities and the immigrant communities between Christians and Muslims, whatever it be. It's all contrived and untrue, but it gave the government the pretext to clamp down hard and to make freedom of speech basically history. And then also there was a sudden, very strange introduction of repos in by the Bank of England as a as a mechanism to provide financial liquidity to British banks and other other financial institutions. Repos just for your for your viewers to understand are a type of secured

loan their repo is since stands for repurchase agreements where let's say if i if i wanted to if i needed money and i wanted to borrow it from let's say alexander i would let's say i have some some british guilt uh on my balance sheet i would sell them to alexander for a given price they would be the collateral against which alexander could provide me cash so i would have that cash And then I would agree to repurchase those guilds from Alexander at a slightly higher price, and that would be, that would reflect the interest rates for that long. So this is routine business in many Western nations. It's very useful to the financial industry.

But when the central bank steps in to be the provider of liquidity, That suggests that something in the system is broken and that private institutions no longer trust other private institutions to participate in these repo agreements. So the sudden opening of the repo facility by the Bank of England to me was a massive red flag. And then I looked into a little bit what is going on with the Ukraine, There was a whole series of meetings between Kier-Starmer and Zelensky. And Zelensky spent two days in London.

And he got to address the British cabinet, the first person to have done so since Bill Clinton in 1997. And so I realized something was not right. And so if you look at the figures, you would come up with about 13 billion pounds that Britain provided for Ukraine. But then there's also other damages from sanctions, which are hard to quantify, but we know that the farmers reported

that the artificial fertilizers, which used to cost 250 pounds per ton before sanctions now cost 1,000 pounds per ton, that the cost of energy has skyrocketed in Britain. That, you know, there are other secondary, you know, for example, British Airways had the, had this connection to direct flight to Beijing, which they lost because of Russia sanction. It was a very important part of BA's business. It was, I think, two or three times weekly connection. And they simply lost this because of the Russia sanctions, because they couldn't

overfly Russian territory. And so now they had to fly all the way around and the flight became uncompetitive, and now they had to cancel it all together, and they gifted this business to their Chinese competitors. And now, you know, obviously British manufacturers lost the Russian markets and so forth and so on. And so the damage from this is really difficult to quantify, but we have, in June, 2003, we had Joseph Borrell, who ran his mouth in a conference where he said that, Oh, yeah, you know, Europe provided 60 billion euros in military and financial aid to Ukraine. But the actual damage to European economy is on the order of 700 million. Sorry, billion euros.

So if we take that scale together and we say like, well, if the hit to, British economy was commensurate to the hit to the European economy. Then we're talking about not 13 billion, but we're talking about 150 billion pounds. That begins to explain the panicky reactions by the British government and the Bank of England. And then it's not only that. It's not only Ukraine. You know, the British are very, very involved in the Middle East. Then there's all these nonsensical net zero things where I think just in 2022 or 23, I forget, the British government spent something like £23 billion on climate mitigating measures.

You know, I don't know what that is exactly, but just in one year they spent $22 or $23 billion on that. It's unproductive. And so it seems to me that the British establishment has bet very, very heavily on a number of unproductive. agendas, which are now a failed investment. And so something is going to go off the rails. And I, you know, that's my impression. And to come to these conclusions, you're really obliged to read between the lines. But I will publish this because I literally just made this analysis in the last two days.

I also wanted to see, you know, there's this thing called the wisdom of, crowds, you know. And I wanted to see what are the markets saying. So I compared the performance since 2021 between the British Guild's US 10-year treasury notes and the German Buns. And sure enough, the British guilds have performed the worst. And so over the last four years, more or less, the British Guilt have lost about 29%. German Bund has lost between 24 and 25%. And American 10-year treasury note has lost only 18%. So we see that the markets are penalizing British sovereign debt

more than that of other nations, even though arguably, Europe is in just as much trouble over all these nonsensical agendas as Britain is. But I think that the British establishment, which is maybe most strongly oligarchic and least transparent of all, has bet more heavily into these failed investments and the price to pay will be for the history books. Alex Crona, thank you very much. It's an outstanding series of answers, if I can say, altogether.

Thank you. And I'm going to hand over to Alex because obviously, I've got my questions, but I'm sure people will want to do so as well. You have time for 15, 20 minutes of questions? Yes, yes, absolutely. Great, great. Let's begin with Alan.

Alan Shepard says, I hear rumors that the Vietnamese Dang is going to go very high in value. Is there true to that? Can you answer to that or do you know? Unfortunately, I don't know the answer to that question. I would have to guess, and my guess would be probably as good as yours. Yeah, best not to guess on that. Thank you, Alan, for that.

Ralph Steiner says, the British U.S. Empire dream of conquering the European heartland. through World War I and World War II was expensive, and Britain appears drained. Can Britain still rule the world? No. It's a pipe dream at this point. There's no realistic way that this could happen. Britain is depleted economically, but it's also depleted militarily. All they have at this point is their intelligence services,

and their diplomacy, which can still make this happen, but more in terms of sabotage and destruction than constructing any kind of a new world order. Ralph Steiner says, the British Empire was well known for moving populations around like economic resources. This trait survived decline and mass immigration. and population replacement continues. Does this have any negative effects?

In the short term, yes, in the long term, I can't say really. You know, British Empire is not the only one who has done this. I think all empires do that. They colonize and they encourage people to populate the colonies. And they, for some reason, that is really weird for me to understand is they also import populations from colonized, subjects. Roman Empire did this. Practically the whole of Italian peninsula has been depopulated almost completely over the centuries during the Roman Empire and repopulated by people from the Middle East and from Asia Minor and elsewhere. I think that this is a part of this system of governance. If we look at Italy today, you know, other than other than migrants, you'd come across a lot of Italians, right? And all these Italians look like they are from there and they belong there. But they're not the Etruscans. You know, they, you know, there's hardly any Etruscans

left on the Italians Peninsula and all of practically the Italians are all, consist of people who have migrated to Italy during the days of Roman Empire and afterwards. So in the long term, I don't know. I think that things tend to normalize, that people tend to either create new hybrid cultures or adapt to the existing cultures on the continent. The same is the case for, let's say, Croatia.

You know, in the Roman days, there used to be a tribe called the Illyrians who lived there. And then the Slavs came in between the 7th and 9th century. And so today the language that spoken in Croatia is a Slavic language, is similar to Czech and Polish and Russian and so on. But we weren't there before the 7th century. So I think that long-term things normalize and populations kind of converge on the way human populations tend to live. In the short term, obviously, it can create a lot of pain. Oscar N says the Norway Prime Minister was in China and signed some economic cooperation now.

I thought Norway is not in the EU, only followed U.S. EU interest. Norway for bricks, perhaps? We'll see. I think it's possible. Well, you know, the world is about to change really dramatically. I mean, the defeat of Ukraine will have tectonic effects. It'll be, you know, it'll be an earthquake and there will be a lot of aftershocks. The whole architecture of the European, you know, secure it. not only security architecture, but also economic integrations on the European continent will change.

I think that there will be a moment when Russia will take control of Odessa, not militarily, but in administrative sense, absolutely. They will make sure that Odessa has a political leadership that's friendly to Russia. They're going to clean out the neo-Nazi element from. from the structures of power. And then, you know, Russia will have full control of the whole northern coast of the Black Sea all the way to the to where the Danube flows into the Black Sea.

That will open the gates to landlocked nations of the EU, like Hungary, like Slovakia, like Austria. And they will, you know, they will be much, much less susceptible to blackmail from Brussels and from Washington. And so this will give choices to these nations. And to the east, there will be this prosperous world where economy is burgeoning and they could do business with. And on the other side in the West, there's going to be this dysfunctional bureaucratic morass and stagflation to no end.

You know, even if you force, even if you assassinate Robert Fizzo and even if you try to regime change Victor Orban, that will have only short-term effect. And, you know, we can see that even now, you know, the regime changed Pakistan. They got rid of Imran Khan. But even Pakistan now wants to join the Bricks. You know, the tides of history are turning. You know, Bricks is the idea whose time has come and they're not going to easily well, they're not going to be able to

at this point they're like the king canute clogging the waves to stem the tide and, you know, Norway is a symptom of this and I think that we're going to see a lot more of that. Jamila says the IMF is to destroy Nigeria and Kenya. Now they destroyed Ethiopia. What do you think?

Also, Tony Blair, he foresees digital IDs in Ethiopia. I appreciate if you know something. I know little about Tony Blair wanting to introduce digital ID in Ethiopia, but I know a little bit more about the IMF. And the IMF is global financial cartels tip of the spear. They are extraordinarily powerful. and they're extraordinarily dangerous. You probably haven't heard this on any other program.

You're hearing it here first, but the IMF is where the orders to launch the anti-terror operation in Ukraine in May of 2014 originated. So this came from around the time of the, of the, what's it called, the central bankers gathering, annual gathering in late August, early September. Jackson Hole? Yeah. So from Jackson Hole, Jack Liu spoke with Christine Lagarde, who was then the head of the IMF. And Christine Lagarde asked the orders to the Ukrainian junta then to take control of the

of the south and east of Ukraine by force or else the deal with the IMF. IMF would not be, you know, the IMF would not be able to support Ukrainian government. So this is when the junta in Kiev launched the anti-terror operations. And it was also preceded by a lot of these people going to Kiev and encouraging them to do so. So, you know, IMF is a very dangerous player and it's very clear from the, from the, from behavior of different governments around the world that they're very afraid of IMF. The war against Yemen in 2000 and when was it 15 for, well, I'm blank now, but it ensued when Yemen rejected IMF suffer and the same thing happened in Bolivia, the coup in Bolivia happened

in the aftermath of Bolivia rejecting the IMF for funding. So these are people to be taken seriously, and this is another important reason why a new monetary system and the new trade financing architecture in the world are urgently needed. Alexander, do you want to add anything to that? Maybe something on Ethiopia, do you know? I don't know very much about Ethiopia, about digital IDs

and Tony Blair's enthusiasm for them. And his attempt to introduce them here in the UK, that I remember extremely well. He encountered a huge amount of resistance when he was Prime Minister. But of course, he's never given up. And he's now plugging that idea all over again. And of course, the technology has moved on.

And he wants to adapt his idea to the evolving technologies. And the interesting thing is that whereas back when he was prime minister, much of the political, the people in politics opposed him. Today, that opposition seems to be melting away. So we could very, very easily and very quickly find ourselves. in that direction. The British, just on a brief question about Ethiopia, the British have an enormous interest in Ethiopia because after the Second World War, it was the British who basically drove the Italians out of Ethiopia. The Ethiopians, by the way, fought against the Italians

very, very courageously, but it was the British army that found itself there. The British then forged very close relations with the Ethiopian monarchy, the British monarchy, the members of the royal family were very, very friendly with highly salacity, and he's retting you. The university in Addis Ababa was basically very dominated by the British, from British academics and people sent then and was in direct competition, as I happen to know, with a Russian Soviet set up

polytechnic which provided engineering education. It's all very interesting. I mean, again, very different types of education. So the British have always been in conflict with, as they see it,

the Russians for influence in Ethiopia. And if you go back to the period before the First World War. During that time, Ethiopia, the ruler of Ethiopia of that time, Menelik, he actually wanted to keep Ethiopia independent, both of the Italians, and also of the British. And as a result, he positioned Ethiopia in the late 19th and early 20th century as the major ally in Africa of Russia. And there was this very close connection between the Russians and the Ethiopians at that time. So this is a long story and that the British are

interested in Ethiopia. Well, that indisputably is so. Rysse asks, Alex, why is the US so afraid of the non-Western countries being successful in development and tech. Well, you know, they don't like competition. They like to dominate markets. They like to be the sole provider. I think it's natural. You know, this is, you know, this is the logic of any businessmen.

You want to control the marketplace. You want to be the dominant player in the marketplace because that's a profitable place to be. but you know the ideal are you know like what they say our value should be a free market competition so always made the best man win unfortunately however you know deep in the battles of the system I think that the the ethos is more is closer to the Tonya Harding approach to competition and for for people who are not old enough I remember when I arrived to the United States in 1987 as a 17-year-old as a foreign exchange student, there was this big scandal between two skaters, Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan.

Nancy Kerrigan was the better one, more talented one and more beautiful one. And Tonya Harding was the runner-up, the rival. And so because Nancy Kerrigan was better, I think. it was about qualifying for Olympics or something like that. Tonya Harding had a brilliant idea of having her boyfriend, kneecap, Nancy Kerrigan. And so that's one way to prevailing competition. You realize you're not good enough,

so let's just make sure that the other person is worse than you. And if you break their knee, then you're the better one. And so I think that unfortunately, at some level, there's a lot of people who have no problem with this idea. And so, you know, they'll use sanctions, they will use sabotage, they will go as far as, you know, well, let's say that the more benevolent approach is to poach talent from other nations, which has been done for decades by the United States.

They would just simply cream the top talent from China, India, from Eastern Europe, from everywhere, and bring them to the United States to work for them. But failing that, then you block those companies, you sanctions them, you make it difficult for them to do business around the world. And I think that there are some people who have no problem even assassinating key people. Or as we saw with Huawei abducting their executives and imprisoning them. So, you know, that's the Tonya Harding approach to competition. Beverly Trout says, appreciate the guest's emphasis on wake up on the planet. Wake up planet.

Thank you. Thank you, Alex. On that note, Alex Craeter, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you very much. Thank you. Once again, Alex, where can people follow you? Substack, Alex Krenner, Strenck, and TwitterX. at Naked Hedgy.

I have those links in the description box and I will also add those links as a pin comment. The excellent Alex Crater. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you. Take care. Take care. All right, Alex Adder. Are you with me? Oh, absolutely. For a fascinating program

altogether, amazing program, actually. When I said, I've been to those smoke-filled rooms. Of course, they're not full of smoke anymore because it's... But I have, I mean, you go to St. James' It's and where we have all the discussions. still take place in London, and they certainly did take place there. And, you know, going back to what Alex was just saying now about, you know, knee-capping people, the great difference with 19th century Britain is that they were quite straightforward and open about it. If you read the newspapers of that

time, I mean, you know, the fact that they were sending the fleet somewhere to, you know, shell people or attack it. The British at that time were quite, you know, the British at that time were quite, you know, the fact that. straightforward about what they did and why they were doing it. And because they didn't wrap it all up in all of the sort of rhetoric that we have to endure nowadays, you know, about human rights, values, all of that, in some ways it was done more straightforwardly and more intelligently. Today, because it has to be done in this very complicated way and justified and rationalised and all of that. It's, it's, it's, in the, it's, in, it's, in, it's, in, it's, in, it's, it's, in, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, uh, in, it, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, uh, it, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it the end it's more chaotic and somehow it's somehow less convincing yeah it was it was done straightforward back then because not many people would know about it or learn about it absolutely and now because of because of media and now social media and the internet everyone can hear about what these people are planning so they have to you have to dress exactly but you know if you talk about your cypress for example you look at the discussions

that were taking place in London about control of Cyprus in the 1870s. It's absolutely, you know, there's no attempt to pretend that there's anything else other than a power of land grab and control of the Suez Canal and the eastern Mediterranean and all of that. It's all there. It's all there. It's straightforward. Yeah.

They said they weren't blinded by their own rhetoric in any way. their vision was much more clear. And the British equivalents of the neocons, who did exist, all these people of that kind, they could talk quite openly, they could plan quite openly, they could hold their discussions, they could think it through,

they could consult, because there wasn't the embarrassment about it that there is to some extent today. Yeah. All right, from Ralph Steiner, British U.S. tank expeditionary division busted is bogged down in the first muds of the Rasputitsa around Kursk. Can the Anglo-American still muster an invasion force for Iran, like the war film saving, shaving Ryan's private Ryan is actually, but I, okay. Alexander, have you heard about this?

Well, I haven't heard of it, I haven't heard anything about this specifically. but about the fact that Western tanks have proved completely unsuccessful in Ukrainian combat environment, in the landscape. I don't think there's anybody who disputes this anymore. There's a brilliant, not brilliant, but there's a fascinating discussion, which you can find on video, actually, between a reporter from the British travel, the son, and Jack Watley, who is an academic at Russey, the Royal United Services Institute. He says straightforwardly, our tanks are no good. They're too big, they're too heavy,

they can't operate in soft earth conditions. They break down all the time. Ultimately, Russian tanks are better. Straightforward is that? Studio Rayner says, I have a friend who lives in Israel right now. He explained his lifestyle, and it's like Soviet-level state run,

but he couldn't accept when I said, he should leave. It's subversion that requires military intervention to solve. Well, people have an incredible and very powerful attachment to their own countries. And that's a reality. It's a reality in every

place that you will find. Including in Israel, where of course people have gone to Israel to be part of that country. So the attachment is stronger still. Sanjava says, hello, Duran. Greetings again. Greetings, Sanjewa. Good

have you with us. Let's see. Sangeva says one of three. I don't think we say this enough. Thank you, Alex and Alexander. And contributors like Zareel, I can personally attest that Duran is unique that many of us found solace listening

and participating in the Duran and finding a community in good times and bad, especially in fraud political times. Early in 2022, at the darkest times, Duran was a refuge for many of us. us facing social resentment. My wife is Russian. And part three says, so thank you

that you do this every day in health and sickness. May you have good health. And not only got to sticis. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, such effort for that.

Studio Rainer says, has anyone noticed that we're in a time like the Napoleonic Wars, democracy and freedom was a military tactic? the U.S. is like if Napoleon won and forgot his strategy of attack was that ideology. I think there's a lot of truth of this. I mean, I haven't seen people make that parallel exactly, except to some extent in Russia, where, of course, the Russians like to say, look, we've absorbed attacks from the West.

The one we're going through now is not so different from the ones we had to parry in the 40s. And the one we had to parry when he had Napoleon came and battled all his way to Moscow, which is about as far, by the way, as any Western invasion force of Russia has ever reached. Just saying. One second, Alexander. And from Ralph Steiner, Anglo-Zionist Empire, U.S., U.K., USA, Israel is now primed to attack Iran. and delay now could prove fatal as armies are pried militarily and politically, your thoughts? Well, I think this is now the big thing.

I mean, I've been talking about this for months. We've been talking about this on the Iran for months. I am absolutely convinced that that attack is coming. And we've done a program in which we discussed how all the actions that Iran is taking now are consistent with Iran being aware that this attack was coming. preparing for it. My own view is that in the end, like every other military adventure, we have seen for the last 30 years, this one will end disastrously. I mean, it may be a protracted and horrible business as it continues over, you know, the months and eventually the years, but in the end,

it will backfire disastrously on its initiators. Mama Alaska says thank you gentlemen for your consistent reporting. Thank you for that. Alaska Studio Rainer says this is what the rebellion will look like. Russian troops walking into the EU and everyone watches from their windows without military intervention. Subversion cannot be undone. Well, I don't think the Russians want to go deep into Europe actually. Why would they, what would they gain by doing so? I mean, from their point of view, they want to. they want to keep as far away from us as they possibly can. They want to be left alone. They've got lots of things they want to sort out in their own country.

They want to set up all their global and financial systems and all of that. And they want us to leave them alone. And we won't do that. We constantly picking fights with them for the reasons I think ultimately that Alex Crane has said. We look at this huge country and it's enormous resources. and we want the resources and we don't want the huge country. So that's why we have this constant issue with the Russians. I don't think they want to come over to take us over

because we have nothing to give them that they need. They just want us to leave them alone. Nikos says there's a two part. Pascal from Neutrality Studies has said that Greece was once interested in joining bricks. Was it under Cyprus? I'd love for you to talk about Greece. I've never seen that. I have absolutely never seen that.

If it was ever floated at all, it was intended entirely deceitfully, because I can tell you for a fact, and I'm sure Alex will agree with me, that the political class in Greece, every single element and part of it, is absolutely bought and owned by the Euro-Atlantic community.

I mean, you'll find the old communist here and there might have different views. You'll find a few people on the right. What is always called the far right. There are people like that in Greece too. But ultimately, the political class have no interest in joining Bricks. They don't have any conception of it. Zero interest. Absolutely zero. Negative interest in joining Bricks. They're a thousand percent committed to the European Union and more importantly to the US. I'm going to just to disclose something, which I told Alex, a short time ago, which is I met a friend of mine who is close to a very senior diplomat in the Greek foreign ministry. This person, his job is to try and forge relations with countries

in Asia, and he is encountering the fact that the Greek government is completely not interested. They're not interested in India. They're not interested in China. They're not interested in any place at all, except the place they're mostly interested is the United States, Washington, and to a certain extent, brassels. But that is the world that they know. They're not interested in anything else. Nikos also says, part two, are you interested in how culture affects foreign policy? Do you want me to ask nerd-rotic or the drinker, the critical drinker in a super chat

if they want to talk to you? Real quick, Alexander, I would say, It would be great to do a show with Nerdrotic, who's awesome, and it would be great to do a show with the critical drinker, who is awesome. And I love film, and I know that you love film as well, Alex. Andrews, anyway, are you interested in how ultra-effects foreign policy? Absolutely. And I think that the importance of culture in foreign policy is underestimated.

If you want to understand Russian foreign policy, read Russian literature. Just to say, you won't understand Chinese foreign policy. Look at Chinese painting. You will learn an awful lot, an awful lot more from those than you will from any number of studies that the CIA publishes. Just saying, all the Rand Corporation. That's the second. True. Rafael says, thank you guys.

We are still on fire. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Thank you, Raphael for that. La Keva says, all men of the world need to refuse military service. contingent on three generations of bankers showing up on the front lines. True. True.

Speaking the truth, give peace a chance. Thank you for that. Super chat. Ralph Steiner says, Kierstammer has billions for Ukraine and yet cuts back on heating for pensioners as high streets closed down. Is the nation of shopkeepers in decline? Yes, it is very much.

So if you come here, even articles in British media, this. Go to the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Daily, Tell, and Rob, three completely different newspapers, supposedly, three completely different political lines, only that is overstated, but nonetheless, all admitting the same thing, the Britain is in the grip, of a profound economic malaise, and ultimately a decline. Eliya Kuryakin says When the crash comes, which currency will survive best? I'm not going to say, I don't know.

Gold. I presumably will all come back to that. But don't take any investment advice from me. I never give it and I'm not in a position to. Linda, thank you for that. Superchat. Bobby, thank you for that. Super chat.

Servo Greek says Gallimera LeVendez. Bradden, Brate Alex, Sfe, Napolche. Thank you for that. Sable Greek. Ralph Steiner says, Vem Miller,

apparently Iranian, nearly killed Trump. I've heard that whole story, that whole narrative is, imploding, yeah, I heard the guy's a super true. That's what I heard. I don't know.

Stana, thank you for that super sticker. Ralph Steiner says, Imagine you're assassinated on a Persian golf course. Thank you for that. Ralph. And Ralph says, at least you're not speaking German, right? Thank you for that, Ralph, as well.

Alfred, welcome to the Drank community. Beverly says, appreciate the guest's emphasis on woke, and wake up the planet. Yes, thank you, Beverly for that. Ralph says My name is Osimandius, king of kings Look on my works

Ye mighty and despair Nothing beside remains Round the decay of that colossal wreck Boundless and bare The lone and level sands Stretch far away I ask that's Shetty

He's one of the greatest poems That he wrote Maybe he's most famous Ozymandius by the way Ramis is the second Just to say And it's based on statue of Ramesses the second, which the British brought with them to the British Museum,

where you will find lots of things. It's full of all kinds of artworks, which the British, shall we say, they gained possession of all around the world. The most interesting thing about the British Museum is that you will find nothing British in it. Yes, sir. Keelho, good thoughts, good words, good deeds, says South Africa and the IMF, we are sitting, on both. Elza says IMF stands for the international mafia of finance then, and in case of Ukraine,

the IMF should participate in peace talks, shouldn't it? Oh, of course it should. Of course. You don't want the IMF participating in peace talks. If they do, then you will get war. That's a guarantee. I can't say the word peace anymore. I destroyed it for myself.

I did it to myself, Alexander. Every time I say peace, I say peace. I know. Like Zelenskyy. I should say that even the IMF has gone through a process of decay. The fact that for all that time, it was run by someone like Christine Lagarde tells you a great deal about the kind of organization it has decayed into. Yeah. Ralph Steiner says Ukrainians blew up the bloody Nord Stream.

Nord Stream Besters. Well, that's what the Wall Street Journal says. Absolutely. It must be true. Because the Wall Street Turtle says it must be true. That's what they reported. Studio Rainer says, the United Soviets of America, if Yuri Besmanov is right, the entire West needs foreign military intervention to exchange anything.

They cannot rebel or vote to fix it. Russia liberate the U.S. Well, it's also different from what we've just. heard from Alex Crane. I think that, let me repeat again, I don't think the Russians have any desire to come and liberate us. We will have to do it ourselves. If we don't do it politically, then the economic crisis that Alex Craneer is talking about will do it for us. Nick, thank you for that super sticker. Elsa says, Alexander, on the other hand, because the information is available today, the people in power have stopped the care and just dropped their masks.

I don't think they have dropped their masks. I think if you follow what they do, they are constantly trying to spin narratives and engage in that kind of information control. And of course, in order to make the narratives work, they have to suppress and close down and all alternative modes of discussion that they possibly can. So we have all of these studies going on in various universities and places like this, all over, proliferating all over the academic world now, about how to control information and assist governments in doing that.

And can I just say you have any contact with academia, you know how much money is now going into this. Bob says European economic decline is another word for European economic imprisonment by the West. It's true. Absolutely. It's a very good point, actually. Ruby Appel says, thanks as always. You guys made a brilliant live stream.

Thank you. Thank you. Commander Crossfire says, why anyone says Israel will lose, Israel's goal is to significantly reduce the iron population in Palestine. Successful, there won't be any backlash. Oh, there will be a backlash. I mean, the Israelis have been running this policy for,

well, they've been running all kinds of policies in the Middle East, wars and things, and ultimately look at where they are now. their economy is declining, the people are leaving, things are getting worse for them. And I think they're going to continue to. OG. Wall, welcome to the Drand community. Ralph Steiner says, could Ian Proud give us some British views? Absolutely. We'll get him back. No question.

Studio Reiner says, combine nukes and two oceans of isolation. Will the US simply be another project like you, Will cartels need to take military intervention to reverse subversion? That would be interesting. I'm going to say this. One of the great questions about 20th century history is why the United States let itself become anglicized. Because it doesn't need to. It's a profoundly different society from Britain.

People who, people underestimate how different. America and Britain actually are from each other. I speak for somebody who knows both. And I really do believe, and I still say, that there is an alternative course that the US could still follow. It's organized. Its scale is completely different from Britons. It could go back to be what it was and it would work out better for it than staying and being what it is. Britain has much less room for maneuver than the U.S. does. Bastien Pashik, thank you very much for that super sticker. Winston says, I wanted to ask Alexander about Stammer holding an investment conference

and attempt to make the UK relevant, the dog barks, but the caravan moves on. That's absolutely. I've answered your question. I mean, what more to say than that. I mean, he's, we've done many, many programs about Stama on the Duran by now. And I think that one of the things that is becoming increasingly clear about Stama, the more we see of him, is that this isn't someone who has the vision, the imagination, the charisma, the personality, to make things happen. So he calls an investment conference. He calls together all the investors,

the international investors. He tells them invest in Britain. And whatever he says, the very fact that it is he who is saying it, this lackluster, uncharismatic into figure, it's going to cause investors to say to each other, I don't want to invest in this person. He's not giving me any reason why I would invest in him.

Because ultimately, I cannot have confidence that he's going to manage my investment wisely. So I think this investment conference fell completely flat and failed almost before it started. Britain, by the way, Britain, by the way, because of the structure of its economy, needs inflows of money from outside. It's very dependent on them. So persuading people to invest into Britain is through Britain economically an existential issue. Just saying. And Starmer is failing it even bad.

Ralph Steiner says, is burning innocent hospital patients a Holocaust? It can be. I don't, by the way, like the word. It's associated with certain religious practices. of the ancient worlds and i don't think we should sacralize uh events of this kind so i avoid using it ell ell says russia has always had good relations with i l why would they risk take take to take sides with i r i believe is israel and irr is ir is ir

is that the question but but i mean i i think that's right but i that's i presume that is But if I may say, I think that the Russians are in effect making their choice now. They look at the situation in the Middle East. They say to themselves, where is the source of the instability? It is with the United States and its allies, which is of course one of which is Israel. They see what the Netanyahu government is doing. the Russians always want stability. They always want a situation where they don't have to worry about what is going on in an area not that far from their own borders.

I've always remembered this about the Middle East. And I think that that's a view that more and more countries in the region itself are coming to share, thus the shift in Saudi policy, for example. Yeah, and Studio Reiner says a global internet outage would be a gift from God. Things would normalize within a month. Well, I think there are all kinds of people who would probably agree with you. Some of them could be found within government. Don't be surprised at one day, you know, somebody does try to switch it all off. Not that I think is possible to do anymore.

Commander Crossfire says, Israel is rich despite its earlier campaigns. Those leaving are fewer than those going. How is this different? Palestine will be cleared. No, one will remember. No, no. Your last point is straightforwardly wrong.

More people are leaving than are coming. Many more people are leaving than are coming. And I think one of the things that has been established over the events of the last two years, last year is that the apparent success of the Israeli economy was built on very, very uncertain foundations. Israel? Go on, go on. No, I was just going to say, I could tell you, I mean, anecdotally, what I see in Cyprus is a lot of people from Israel, from Lebanon, from the region are coming to Cyprus. A lot.

I'm talking for a country the size of Cyprus. it's having a hard time dealing with all the people coming. I'm hearing the same about Greece, by the way. A lot of people from Israel are going to Greece. And not as asylum seekers or refugees or anything like that. They're coming. They're buying properties. They're placing roots here.

Yeah, exactly. But yeah, that's what I see here, at least on the ground. Studio Rainer says Iran is equal to U.S. Suez Crisis bet $500 on it. I wouldn't be surprised. It could turn out that way. I think the Suez Crisis, a closer analogy actually is Ukraine, just as so. Alexander, I think that's everything.

Let me do a final check and your final thoughts as I do. I think it's a tour de force, actually, what we have heard. And I think this is, I think Alex, Alex Crane has got this absolutely right. We're going from an imperial, or if you like, post-imperial system in the sense that the colonies were all dismantled. The colonial structures were dismantled. But the underlying economic structures and trade structures and extractive structures that he'd been created, continued. But the process of decolonization, which began in the 19th, is now ultimately reaching its logical point where the world is just breaking away and is reforming

and is reforming in a way that is completely different and which the Europeans and to some extent the Americans really haven't mentally adjusted to. So it's a huge shift in the economic and world balance of power. All right. On that note, we will end today's live stream. Thank you to everyone that watched us on Rockfin, on Odyssey, on Rumble, and of course, on YouTube, and leaduran.com. Thank you to our moderators, Zareel, Peter, Brett, and I think that's it for today, moderating for today. Thank you once again to Alex. I have his information where you can follow. him in the description box and I will add it as a pinned comment as well.

Alexander, let's get some videos uploaded. Indeed, absolutely. Take care. Goodbye everybody.