The Duran Podcast - Elections, wars and Globalist panic w/ Tom Luongo (Live)

Episode Date: October 29, 2024

Elections, wars and Globalist panic w/ Tom Luongo (Live)

All right, we are live with Alexander Mercudis. And today we have, once again, with us, the one and only the great Tom Luongo. Tom, how are you doing today? I am very well, Alex. I would say the one and only. A great, well, you know, that's, that's a matter of opinion. The one and only and great. The one and only and great.

I'm just happy to be here, guys. It's good to catch up with you because it's been a while since we've had a chance to do one of the, It's been a while. It's been a while. We got a lot to talk about. But before we get started, what is the best place for people to follow your work to find you? Really, I mean, it's sad to say,

but I've been doing so many of these that I don't get, I don't have as much time to write as much as I used to over my blog, but over at the blog at tom long ago. Atm.m.com. I have to write something this week. I really do. But my Twitter feed or my ex feed are for TFL 1728. And then, of course, Patreon,

of Patreon, slash gold goods and guns, which is where a lot of the content on, And the commentary happens on a regular basis to the subscribers and whatnot. But yeah, okay. Great. I have all those links in the description box down below. And I will add those links as a pinned comment when the live stream finishes. Before we get started, Alexander and Tom, let's just say a quick hello to everyone that is watching us on Rockfinn, on Odyssey.

Hello to everyone on Rumble. And how's everyone doing on YouTube to all our moderators on YouTube, Zanrie. Peter, Brett, who else is on YouTube moderating? I think that is everyone moderating. Thank you to our moderators. Hello to everyone that's watching us on YouTube and to our awesome, amazing, super cool community on locals, the duran.com.

That is where you can find all of our videos, all of our work, and also join a great community on locals. Alexander, Tom, we have a very big, big week of news ahead, probably a big couple of months of news ahead. So, Alexander, Tom, let's get started. Sure. Well, we have a, we have a titanic pinpound of news coming, if I can say so. We've got huge numbers of events taking place. We have an American election in just over a week's time. We have lots going on in the U.S. economy, which I would really value Tom's insights of because you hear many contradictory things about it.

We've also got a crisis situation in Europe. Now, Tom has been talking about the European Union and all its works for as long as I've known him. And I'm going to say, I'm going to anticipate by saying that everything that he's been talking about for years, long before this current crisis began, is coming about. It's things are moving in Europe, at galloping speed,

in exactly the direction that he said. There's now growing signs that the whole monetary Eurozone thing is coming apart at the seams. Mario Draghi is talking about giant reforms of Europe, which basically mean, you know, continuing the same course that we've always had, only doing even more and even further. And he, of course, is a central banker, somebody who's been in central banking,

at the European Central Bank for a while. So, you know, he's an interesting person to think about. We've also had changes in interest rate policy, both in Europe and in the United States, and we don't want to talk about that too. And we have the other big wider question of what's going on in the wider world. We've had the Brick Summit. We've had talk about the new financial and trade and global architecture that's being created there. But maybe, maybe, and, you know, the major focus,

Today, since you got Tom, and this is, I mean, we'll talk about Bricks, but I would like to talk mostly about the US and Europe. What is going on between those two? Because I've never known, speaking in London, I've never known a time when economically the situation here is as bleak as it is now. We're on the brink of a budget here in Britain, which everybody is furious about before it's even happened. and what's going on in London is very little different from what's going on in Europe. So, Tom, firstly, you were right. You were right about Europe. That's the first thing to say.

Tell us where things are going. What are they going to do? What is Ursula von der Leyen cooking up? What is Christy Lagarde up to? What is their next plan? Will we get Euro bonds that might slip them in in all kinds of ways? Tell us more. I wish I really did have a crystal ball, Alexander,

and I do appreciate being the compliment. I do. It's not about me. It's not about being right. It's about just figuring out what's actually going on in the world. It's all we're all trying to do on a regular basis, right? It's not about any of us. And I, you know, we said, before we started,

I said, we'll go about 45 minutes to an hour, and I'm like, you just laid out like four hours worth of conversation. So, you know, let's see, where we go next. So as I'm watching the situation, post the Fed's September meeting, right? The Fed cuts interest rates in September. And I think everybody's gotten this a little wrong, including myself, to be honest with you.

Because previous in the meeting, I said, well, let's cut 25 bases. Let's see Powell cut 25 basis points. Get the ball rolling under serve the market. The market wanted 50 or 75. He gave them exactly what they wanted and they still weren't very happy, which tells you that things are much worse than we expected. Because when getting 50 and we still,

still get the bare steepener trade. And I'll unpack that in just a second. In bond deals where we have a sell-off of the long end of the yield curve was what I was hoping we would get with 25. And we wanted to getting it with 50. So that means that the market really needed 75? Here's the thing. And I've been watching this for a while now.

And my patrons know these talking points really well because we talked about them all the time on our private podcast, which is that the European central banks across the board, France, Germany, the Bank of England, all of its subsidiaries in the Caymans and Euroclear in Brussels and Luxembourg and everywhere else have been buying the hell out of U.S. treasuries and putting them on their balance sheets. And that buying wave has helped to drive the long end of the yield curve down up until the moment when the Fed cut interest rates, right? And it was all summer long.

And Janie Ellen was out at the Treasury Department. and she was out doing her thing, doing yield curve control through the Treasury Department. And we have Christina LaGarde with her transmission protection instrument maintaining yield spreads and trying to maintain currency spreads as well, trying to maintain exchange rates. And so all of this is kind of when you look at it, these markets have been held a very tight range for about four years now. even though the the the the the fed has raised interest rates the dollars started to rise against everybody's will and everything else when you go back and you look at the euro versus the pound and i'm getting around to where i'm going to i'm doing a very trumping thing i'm going to like lay the bound background and then we're going to go back and we're going to dial into what's really important doing a weave you're doing a weave doing the weave folks i was what's what's said that i'm like oh should i do that um right so what we're what we're doing here is we're setting the back

to understand what's going on. Go back to when Brexit happened. In the year of 2016, if you look at the euro versus the pound, the pound fell versus the euro by about 25% in effect, punishing the Europeans for even contemplating Brexit, right? And then it was never allowed. And then Britain got none of the benefit from the fall in the euro of the pound versus the euro because then the Europeans, barred any investment into into into the UK. So you saw Britain's their main trade their main trade partner Europe cut the frigging value of the pound by 25% versus the euro killing your killing all of your purchasing power. And what did that do? Of course, it did exactly what everybody you would expect under that circumstance is everybody to blame Brexit. It wasn't Brexit. It was the fact that they pushed Trump out of power in 2020 when he was kept threatening on going to give Britain a good trade deal, ran out the Brexit negotiations until the end of 2019, like the entirety of Trump's first term.

Then they gave us COVID. Then they got rid of Boris Johnson. They did all of this. And so they've held the pound and the euro in a very tight range such that it was never allowed to drop below basically 83 cents or 0.83. And that's where we are right now. And that meant you got all of the terrible aspects of Brexit without any of the benefits that you would normally get from your currency dropping by 25% versus your trade partner. Because we didn't get any investment. They blocked investment during the Biden administration.

They blocked and they manipulated bond yields and bond prices and currencies in order to to strangle the UK for the purposes of eventual. calling for a snap election this summer, installing their man Kier-Starmer in charge, in the head of the parliament, setting up a complete betrayal of Brexit, which is where we are right now. And now we're going to get this terrible budget that nobody wants, which is completely predictable under that framework,

which is that city, in effect, the old, what I would call the old British remnant of British sovereignty, not a huge fan of, as you guys well know, and what I would call Davos, that they're not, they've always been at odds with each other. And as the British remnant was going to, you know, go in a lie and itself with Trump, they got rid of Trump. And now they're scared to death, that Trump's going to come back. And so this is the moment that we're, and in the interim, now things have shifted even far. So I just told you the whole, like, historical thing, right?

And I only had this insight about the euro and a pound about four or five months ago. I finally just put the chart up on my, oh, my God. I don't. How did I miss this? Right? So when you when you parse it all back, that's where we're that's where the situation lies for the UK. Now you've got Ukraine and the sit and the bank of England guaranteeing all this defaulted Ukraine debt.

Now you've got the guilt crisis of 22, which our friends Alex Greiner has came up did the forensic work on how much money the bank of England is. underwater on that from bailing out the pension funds back then, you've got these massive holes in the Bank of England's balance sheet. And it just looks to me like, you know, the whole of the existing British architecture is being ripped apart at the seams. And, you know, and Brexit, it was the proximate cause, but it was because of the response to it by their. as opposed to Brexit itself. And it was, you know, you can almost look at it as we had, they had to, you know, by by doing the courageous thing and voting for Brexit, that meant that the next move was, of course, that we were going to, that their, your enemies were going to try to destroy you, which is exactly what we've seen here in the United States. They did the same thing.

And they're, they're forking both of us at the same time by creating a, an untenable budget situation in the United States. forcing Powell to raise interest rates as quickly as he did. In the end of the day, I think I'm right about that as well, that that was always an attack on this offshore dollar system, which was being used to undermine a presidential and U.S. political and cultural stability. It's paying for the border invasion. It's paying for the Soros-funded flash mobs and rent-a-mobes and all the rest of it and the I-C facility.

So when you see it all from that, from the money flow perspective, I think it's pretty obvious where this generates from and how it propagates. And then at the end of the day, we just have to all have to stand up and go, you know what? We're not doing that. And then you always had to ask yourself, well, who had the power to say no to this? Well, clearly it was Wall Street and the Federal Reserve starts there. And then it's now kind of propagated out to the point where now we have the potential for Trump to return to the White House with an cadre of people, powerful people around him.

of powerful personalities, not power in terms of their political power, but power in terms of their personalities and what they can bring to the table, then their experience, that changes the game in a way that is going to then, well, guess what? We're going to have a replay at Brexit, but we just, why I just outlined to the UK and how they punish the UK for Brexit, well, guess what? They're going to try and punish the United States for daring to re-elect Donald Trump.

And that's why the next two months are going to be, regardless of what happens in a week, it's going to be, you know, a mess. And I'm trying to keep it clean, boys. So, out of respect. So we're doing our best here. So there you go. That's what I think is that in the broad strokes, the 40,000 foot level, that's what's going on. Punishing Britain for voting for Brexit is one thing. Punishing the United States for voting for the wrong man for the president. Now, that is, that is, that is wild, trying to do something like that. I mean, I know.

I mean, I can't even, I mean, the, the, the implications of trying to do this. I mean, surely, if that is what they're going to do, if they're going to destabilize the entire global economy. I mean, I'm just, just, just saying, I mean, I, I'm the, the, the thought of it just, just, just, yes. Well, tell us more. I mean, it does. It bottles the mind, right?

Yeah. So, but here's the thing. And this is, and Alex, that is exactly the way to look at this. The hubris of this is hilarious. And I think we can go back. Like, if you really go back to what I, what you and I, what we all used to talk about in like 2018, 2019, 2020. Right. And I said, guys, you know, when I finally understood the implications of SOFA and the end of LIBOR and all of that stuff.

And I started to do that analysis back in 2021, 2022. And, you know, I was shouting into the wind. And a lot of people didn't, weren't, you know, down with the thesis. And that's fine. This is what it is. I was presenting as maybe this is what's going on. Right. And so, but when you think about it and you think about Trump and Brexit in 2016,

it really did break their, their world, right? Sofer is the thing that's been on the book, has been in the, in the Fed, the Fed wrote white papers. about the Sofer back in 2007, right? And the lead up to Lehman Brothers, they were talking about how can they replace Libor. And it just sat there and did nothing during the entire Obama administration. When you're, when you think about the, what happened with the world and Brexit and Trump

in 2016, it's really obvious that the people who were, who had the opportunity to leverage those events took advantage of leveraging those events. and they were very smart. They moved Mnuchin into Treasury Department, and they got Trump to nominate Powell, the only real, honest-to-god hawk within the FOMC, right? And the first thing, when you go back over it, you know, like Powell takes office in early 2017,

immediately gets John Williams, the architect of Sofer, philosophically, right, and at the New York Fed, so they move him from the Atlanta Fed to the New York Fed. If you go back and you read the financial times and the Times of London and the Wall Street Journal, you go back and read articles back then. They were all screaming that John Williams did not have the resume to run the New York Fed. They were all scared to death of him going into the New York Fed.

Then we get Sofer. And they roll Sofer out over a five-year period because you have to change this system slowly. But you get it in motion and you can't stop it. And so at that moment, so during the time, during that little period, but they didn't have political control over the United States because of Trump, in gumming up the works in the White House behind the scenes, they were working to get monetary independence of the United States

through Powell. Then all they had to do was hold Powell in office throughout the Biden junta and have him undermine all of this. And now, and then we're, and this is where we, this is why we are where we are today. And when we, and so at this point, I've looked at this in terms of you can have monetary or political control or both over a particular country.

If you're an oligarch, if you're a transnational oligarch, if you're part of evil corp central, right, or Davos or whatever you want to call it. If your Gant chart says we have to do X, Y, and Z to take over the world, right? Then you have to have, well, we have to get political and monetary control over a country. Now, when they had political and monetary control over the country under Obama, everything advanced, right? under Trump, they kind of had neither. They could freeze the political apparatus in place and keep Trump and neuter Trump, right? But they didn't really, but at the end of the day, the president really does have a lot of power. And eventually Trump figured out that he had some power.

And then they got rid of him. And then under Biden, they had political control, but they didn't have monetary control. And so now we're back to that moment where they could lose the entire United States. and that could be very interesting. So what they've done under Brexit, what they've done into Starmers, they've gotten, you know, they got rid of the Tories.

They got rid of Boris Johnson, who, you know, I don't think Boris Johnson is, I think he's a, I think he's a, he's a, he's a Willow. He bends with the wind. He's a global son Tuesday, and then when the political winds shift the other way, he's a sovereignist, and he goes back and forth

because all, you know, he's, he's just weak. He's the weak person. But he's the closest thing they've had to a British sovereignist as prime minister going back to Margaret Thatcher and that's saying something. Whenever you think of Margaret Thatcher, right? So, but Thatcher understood that the EU was a bad and the Euro was a bad deal for the United Kingdom, period. And Bernard Connolly's book, The Rotten Heart of Europe that my friend Ira Harris put back into print ages ago and I think Iris still has copies that he'd be willing to sell anybody. Bernard Connolly goes over all the portrayal of,

of Thatcher by her own cabinet, which I'm sure you understand Alex where, but a lot of people have never heard that story, right? So when you put all that together, I think that's the moment we're at right now. And so the idea that they're going to be able to rest political control over the United States. So again, if they get, if somehow they get Kamala Harris over the line or they invalidate Trump or they, you know, issue it, you know, if Jamie Raskin and company, you know,

say Trump's invalid and we're not going to seat his electors and we're just going to put install Kamala Harris as president at the Electoral College in January, so they can rest political control over the country again. You know what they're going to do. They're going to then give the libertarians exactly what they want. They're going to end the Fed by bringing the Fed back under the auspice of the Treasury, which they can control and then try and do UBI, you know, MMT and the central bank digital currencies and all that nonsense. That's their plan. That ain't happening. Wall Street's absolutely not down with that, neither is the Pentagon. Because in order to get that done, they got to get us involved in three

frigging wars around the world, which the Pentagon has clearly suggests, at least my read of it, that the Pentagon saying, we can't do this. So I don't know what you guys have been seeing different from that, but that's what I've been seeing. It's very subtle, but it's there. Well, my understanding at the moment is that the Pentagon has already got far more on his hands that he wants to deal with. He doesn't want more wars, and it certainly doesn't want

a situation where it might have to find itself in an even bigger crisis in order to sort out some political problems inside the United States. An overcomplicated political game, I am sure, is what most of these military people would think it. Okay, that's the United States. What about Europe? Because Europe is, I mean, I was in Germany a few months ago. Right.

I spent quite a lot of time there. I was in Western Germany. I haven't been to Eastern Germany ever, by the way, apart from Berlin. and everybody I spoke to, and this was a heartland area of the old West Germany, was furious, everybody could see the things were going horribly, very, very badly wrong. First time I've ever heard it, criticism of the European Union, by the way. Not something you ever used to hear in Germany. No, no, absolutely.

I mean, you did. People were very critical of the European Union. the fact that the European Commission is headed by a German politician, Osser von der Leyen, who is very well known in Germany for all the wrong reasons. I am sure has partly explains that, by the way, but I mean, they don't like her. And now that they see her in charge of Europe, they've got more reason not to like Europe. So people are very concerned about that. People are very concerned about the atmosphere of war.

I spoke to young people there who were very worried about war. People were worried about the fact that factories are closing. I was reading reports yesterday. Some of my German friends were telling me that Volkswagen is now talking again about shutting down plants and laying off apparently 10. That's right. Tens of thousands of worth. I've heard it's full. Wow.

It's a major, it's a major cartback. And, of course, the chemical industry is in deep crisis as well. And mechanical engineering. The Meytlstein is in a mess. And that, of course, is the key motor of the European economy. So what happens to Europe? I mean, all right, these big events happen in the United States. Are the Europeans onlookers?

Are they participants? Are they going to be able to control this? If it all goes wrong, what are they going to do? And what are they going to do about Europe? Because as a Draghi comes up with his plan, but I don't know anybody, anybody who takes it seriously, should we take it seriously? Is there another plan behind the plan?

I mean, that's the other question. I don't, I don't, yeah. That's funny. I don't know. Like, you know, it's funny. I'm watching Europe at this point, and I just see a whole bunch of people whistling past their own graveyards, right? I think that's, you know, when you put managers in charge, these people are like Fonderland and Charles Michelle and Joseph Borrell and all these people, they're all just managers. They're all the equivalent of, you know, middle managers at a small company running, you know, running an IT department in a small company.

That's what they are. So I like, you know, as I've already invoked at once, I'll use it again because it's been a while since I've done this. But this is just a big Microsoft project file to these people. It's just a big Gant chart of events that have to occur at a certain point in a certain time. And we're supposed to do this now. And all they know how to do, because all they've been trained how to do, is to go out there and front like they have like they have inevitability, front like they have power, front like they're in charge, they're on top of everything. but inside they're all like screaming. And you go, I hear stories all the time of the amount of infighting that's actually going on behind the scenes, right?

I don't know about you, but I look at Bondurlain and she just looks like she's like hollowing herself out to a corpse the longer she stays in power. I mean, you know, I don't know about you guys, but I mean, everybody and like they say that every good. Absolutely. Right. Everybody turns it, eventually everybody turns into ember of Palpatine, right, from Star Wars. And like, you know, every day, George Lucas looks more and more and more like a visual artist, a visual graphic design genius, right? And same thing, I just saw Victoria Newland like smirking through an interview with Rachel Maddow.

I was on my Twitter feed this morning. I'm like, well, the queen of warmongers in Victoria Newland smirking their way past their own graveyards. Like, because, you know, it's insane. And you look at Newland and you're like, when did she become job of the hut? And you're like, okay. Um, so they're, they're screaming inside. They're dying inside. You can see it.

Um, and they know that they're in serious trouble because here's the game. The Fed is not going to be able to cut interest rates to the, to the level that the markets have been handicapping. And this is what I've been saying for a year and a half now, like even going back, oh, certainly going back to last December when the market was handicapping seven rate cuts in 20, 24. And I'm like, you might get three. You know, you might get 75 basis points, but you're not going to get 175 basis points. That's not happening because we're going to see a big move out of sovereign debt as people, like they lose faith in their governments.

We see it everywhere. We just had Austria, we have refused to see the winning government. France refuses to see the winning government or, you know, manipulates the electoral system to get, you know, to get Macron across. the finish line. Then we get Michelle, our old friend, Michelle Barnier, and his prime minister, which is unbelievable, right? I just, I took one, I'll get that. I hung my head in shame. I went, of course, like, what else would they do? Right. We have Donald Tusk in charge of Poland. Right. So, like, all these, all these, these terrible people, and the people are unhappy about it.

And that means that people are losing faith in their governments, you know, alternative for Germany very well in those elections in Saxony's Thuringian and Brandenburg not quite well enough to enforce their will on the market on the you know enforce the german people's will but well enough so so now the big question is the following when the only thing keeping these markets looking like people have any faith at all in their governmental systems is the bond markets It's the yields that people get on their sovereign debt. And what we're seeing in the United States is this is, it's like a Chinese finger trap. We want to, we want to prove, if you're thinking about it from the perspective of how can we manage people's perspective.

Let's just start there. Well, hey, how about the bond markets are selling off because Trump is going to be reelected and that's not good for America. So why don't we all sell our sovereign debt? Why don't we all put our thumb on the scale, lift our bids, allow the market to rise? Well, then what does that do? That puts upward pressure on German buns, which they can't afford, puts upward pressure on French bonds, UK Bonds, UK GILts and everything else. So, yeah, you want to say one thing, but then at the same time, so what you're seeing with

Lagarde is she's furiously in there buying German buns to keep, to widen the spread while she's cutting interest rates, which makes no sense whatsoever. it's all about perspective of where the capital is going to flow and how they can hold capital from leave the one they got to hold capital from leaving europe they've got to get it out of the united states but then as if comes to power everybody's going to be looking at a 10-year u.s treasury trading at four and a half or five percent and they're going to go i'm buying that i'm not buying a german tenure at 2.3 percent like why would i do that so there's no market left for the German Bund.

So that means eventually Lagarde will run out of other people's money. Again, because commodity inflation is going to come back. When the sovereign bond markets, when everybody loses faith in the sovereign bond markets, where is the money going to go? It's going to get the gold, stocks,

tangible assets of all forms. Well, therefore, then commodity inflation comes back. Because now oil prices are going to rise. Copper prices are going to rise. And, you know, and people are going to start bidding those things up and they're going to bid up those. And you can see it in the divergence between the stocks, the commodity stocks, like oil majors are trading near a oil. Oil is at $70 a barrel and oil prices and oil majors are trading at, you know, seven times earnings at all time highs.

It doesn't make any sense. Well, guess it does. The leading, that's your leading indicator that inflation is going to come back. And therefore, then the feds going to have to raise interest rates to, quote unquote, tame inflation. and it's only and it's like it's the Chinese finger trap that Christine Legarde is in. She's trying to hold

and I really believe she's got like all five fingers now trapped in five Chinese finger traps and I think she's run out of fingers to get trapped. And it's been one, over the last five years or seven years since you and I've been talking, you know, we've been talking to each other. I think that we've watched the guard by, by degrees, eventually catch her entire hand

in a series of these traps. She keeps trying to wriggle out of it and just catching yourself tighter. And what that means is that I can think we can see within the next five to seven years, the end of the European Union. That whole thing is going to break apart. Hungary is going to leave. Serbia is never going to join. We're going to start to see that process.

And then the big bellwether for the whole thing is Italy. We'll see what happens there as well. Well, tell us more about Italy. Can I just say something, by the way, before you continue? The first articles have started to appear in Britain talking about a potential guilt crisis. And that that is ultimately one of the reasons why we have this budget that's coming,

which everybody's so angry about, that in fact that we're now very close to the point where international investors and Britain depends on international investors are going to lose faith in the UK because the drift of things. But if you just want to comment about that, but also about Italy,

because Italy is very interesting and very important in this place which I think we both have feelings about. So tell me, tell us a bit about Italy too. Sure. I mean, because these things are actually inextricably, like through Ukraine. Yeah.

Okay. The reason why investors are now beginning to make the, to make the connection to the UK guilt market is because Ukraine was supposed to to be a big win. There's a lot of collateral that was supposed to come out of Ukraine's tens of trillions of dollars of future cash flow to collateralize all of this debt. Okay. And it's now and that's coming off the table.

And Putin's like, yeah, you're not getting it back. You're not getting it. And now they've issued all this debt. They've guaranteed all this debt to fund the war. They're stealing Russian assets to keep the war going. in the hope that they can pay off all of these contracts and all these contractors that they've sold, that they pre-sold a win in Ukraine on. I mean, like tens of, the oil exploration contract were tens of billions of dollars going back

eight, nine, seven, eight, nine years before the war even started. I mean, these things were cut back in 2014, 2016, 2017. Same thing with the coal in the Donbass, which used to flow to Germany, now flows to China, the all of the oil and gas under the sea of Azoff, all of the lithium, all of the, you know, blah, blah, blah, and then of course there's the, we need to destroy Russia. And they're thinking in terms of we can capture all that and then use that to collateralize whatever it is that we've, we've issued going forward. If they don't get any of that, this is all debt without collateral. And that's why we're beginning to talk about a UK guilt crisis. Now let's talk about Italy.

I think, you know, Georgia Maloney has been a very, very interesting. figure and I you know I I I hesitated to be overly critical of her because she's in a very difficult position meaning like she's in a she's in a position where France and Germany are literally been trying to destroy Italy we have the Treaty of Carinale where like France is now like in effectually annexing part of northern Italy you have a lot of things happening here but at the end of the day, the United States has over 100 military bases in Italy. The American's strongest position militarily in Europe is in Italy, not in Germany, not in Poland or anywhere else. It's in Italy. So one of the arguments that I've been making, I've been saying for taking a wait and see

approach about Maloney as to whether or not she's a wolf and sheep's clothing and is she really cause a globalist or or or I tend to viewers kind of a Trumpian figure where she got into power as a populist and then found out that she's in a more miserable shark tank than Trump walked into when he walked into the White House. I mean, is anybody going to argue that the Italian deep state is not the oldest and most powerful in the history of the world? It only goes back to 2000 plus 2,500 years. I mean, you know, I'm just saying it, right? You know, anybody, just to quickly say, anybody who's had any involvement at all with Italian politics and the Italian system knows how,

complicated and dense and difficult it is for outsiders and how deeply laid it is. You're absolutely right there. Completely right. So when you think about it in those terms, if Maloney just staying in power is in itself a kind of victory, just running out the clock on these people. If you just look at it, because they've been doing everything imaginable to bind her down and to and to undermine her. And she's got that within her own coalition. She's got that from the European Union. So it's all the soft power and then of course you put her in a position where she has to betray all of her electoral promises then she gets to blame everybody else does the damage does the and you kill her or the death of a thousand cuts and the people blame her because she's the one in power because

they mistakenly believe she's the one who actually has power no she's the person holding in the office while the people with power destroy her right so what i've been seeing is the following over the course of the last eight to nine months, which you've seen out of Maloney, and I kept saying to my, because my people were screaming behind the scenes, like Maloney is a sellout and she's this. I'm like, maybe, maybe not. Let's watch and see what plays out here. If the United States ultimately decides not to escalate in Ukraine beyond a certain point,

we're going to see from the Pentagon, and I had friends in Italy trying to explain this to me as well, that we had to watch like the Italian defense minister Cajetta and others who I got on good authority are good people trying to do trying to reform things that and she only has a couple of those people within our own cabinet that if you if you understand that then watch the U.S. and watch the Pentagon if the Pentagon doesn't take the bait and move into Ukraine right in a serious way not the State Department trying to, and the CIA trying to put, force them into a conflict they don't want to be in. But the Pentagon itself, then you're going to also see Maloney walk back any real support from Ukraine.

She'll say things like, yes, Ukraine has to win. And then she sends a whole bunch of unworking Italian tanks and howitzers to Ukraine. It says, well, you can have these, but good luck fixing them. But if you can use them, go ahead, right? Because that's what she did, by the way. I think she's already been doing this. I mean, she's made it very clear that, you know, European troops are not to go to Ukraine.

She's strongly opposed to missile strikes on Russia. She's already acting increasingly over the last six months or so. She's been putting there's more and more spokes in that particular will. But anyway, I interrupt. No, you're absolutely right. What I was describing was millennia a year ago, right? What I said was, if you see these things occur, then you know that she's actually working her she's working the edges that she has available to us and

playing the card she has available to her because she's got the Pentagon and the military on the ground in Italy backing her and in fact you have the reverse of what the U.S. usually does in the U.S. color. You have the military backing a sovereign government trying to retain regain its sovereignty as opposed to the state department and the CIA trying to overthrow the democratically elected. the government in order to advance the globalist agenda. So this is, I think, one of the ways to interpret what's been happening in Italy over the course of the last two years. And so in the last six to eight months, we're getting the payoff of that temperance in, you know, in, in, in vision about Maloney.

And I said, I ate a lot of shit. I had a lot of, I ate a lot of, of, of a program from my, from my more black pill members of my community. I lost subscribers over this and everything for a while. And I'm like, well, okay, if that's the way you feel, that's fine. It's your prerogative. It's your money. You do what you want. But I'm like, I have to, I have to run this this way, this analysis this way, because I know Italian politics are really, really murky. And anybody who thinks they understand them, you know, that's just a sign of hubris. And I, I, what I think I know about Italian politics is, you know, five to 10 percent of what is actually going on behind the scenes, right?

So we're just scratching the surface of the depth of that depravity. But I think the signs there are very good that in another election cycle, depending on how things play themselves out at the ECB level and at the, and I think on to be honest with you, the wait and see game is to see whether or not Germany is the one that finally says, you know what? This isn't working for us anymore. We're the ones who are going.

I think the, I think the, you could split apart because the Germans. This goes way back to Jim Rickard's arguments about this ages ago saying, look, if the European Union no longer works for the Germans, the Germans are going to leave. Now, Jim having ties to the American, you know, intelligence community and all of that, is that code for what, you know, our, what's the word I'm looking for? Our policy has actually been. is that you know

just him reading the tea leaves I leave that to you and the audiences you know I don't know I don't have a good answer for that I'm just throwing the question so so what

happens now let's let's just do a piece of theorizing and let's let's assume that in November we have a new president who's Donald Trump

elected. He becomes president in January. He wants to move forward to try and come to some kind of, I mean, this is, I mean, I'm guessing now, because we don't fully know what Trump is going to do, but I agree with what you said before. He's got a much stronger line up behind him this time, a much, much stronger line up behind him this time than he did in 2016. And there's some of them are very, very serious people. And he wants to, he wants to come to some kind of a stabilization of the international situation. And he moves towards winding down the war in Ukraine. He tries perhaps to ease some of the other tensions that we see elsewhere.

The British understand that they're not going to get their collateral because they're not. And they may even lose, and they may lose their permanent aircraft carrier in Israel. in the process, right? Well, exactly. So all of that starts to unwind. What happens? What happens at that point? I mean, you were talking earlier about, you know, what kinds of?

What's the punishment move for this? Well, the punishment move clearly is World War III, is to saddle him with wars that he can't extricate himself on, which is what is, I'm honest, Alex. This is why we're seeing the escalation in Ukraine, why we're seeing, I think, the escalation in between Israel and Iran. But it's again, we keep coming back to this over and over and over again. The Pentagon keeps saying no.

You know, I mean, so let's let's look at what happened last week or the last couple of weeks. The U.S. puts American troops on the ground in Israel. And the right and the knee-jerk reaction to that is, oh, look, the United States is dutifully doing the will of their, you know, Israeli owners, for lack of a better term. And there's certainly an aspect of that. But at the same time, aren't they also deterrent forces? Because if the Iranians attack Israel and they kill Americans, haven't helped the Iranians.

But by the same token, when that happens within a couple of days, the Russians announced that they're moving Russian troops in to man the air, the air, the air, air defense batteries in Iran and sign a strategic partnership agreement, at least over the last couple of defense agreement between them and the Russians, the Iran and the Russians have been assigned recently. They up their relationships very recently as well in anticipation of this. So now we have tripwire troops in both places, because if Israel kills Russians or Iran kills Americans, that's a no-go.

That's a, okay, that's it. It's on, we're done. Like, okay, you want, do you want stepwise escalation? We're going to have stepwise escalation. Of course, both military, this is, again, I was on this show with Alex Craneer last week, we were talking about this very thing. And Alex brought up how, and Alex and I both went through the thing and we go, think back to 2015, 2016, in Syria.

where the deconfliction hotline between the Russian military and the American military was, you know, used all day long to ensure that the American Air Force did its job and the Russian Air Force did its job. And they stayed out of each other's way because nobody over there at, you know, and nobody wanted a war between the Russians and the Americans over Syria. Same problem, same situation today. I'm feeling better about that analysis today than I was a month ago. Yeah. Well, Alex and I in our programs, I think we've come to the conclusion for some time. It's certainly with respect to Ukraine, the Pentagon is definitely saying no. We've had the victory plan.

We had the missile strikes on Russia. we've had, as it now turns out, Zelensky demanding Tomahawk cruise missiles. Apparently he did. And the Pentagon repeatedly says no. And putting together the political leads, there was clearly a row early in September between the State Department and the Pentagon,

and the Pentagon said absolutely not, we're not doing this thing. And if you remember Alex, just to remind everybody that on a two, like Zelensky meets with Austin and Ramstein and Austin says, no more missiles, you're not getting anything else. And then on Wednesday, Blinken and Lammy both go to Kiev to say to tell Zelensky, oh, no, attack Russia. Remember that? Those are like back, like within 40 and hours of each other, these two things happen. I'm like, Lincoln's no longer present. is what happened at that point. So, go ahead. I'm sorry. No, absolutely.

So, I mean, they've come up against the immovable obstacle, which is the Pentagon on the war in Ukraine. So the, but, I mean, it is a rather astonishing thing to find ourselves in a situation where the Pentagon is not only a force of peace, but perhaps even a force of stability in the financial system. I mean, it really, it really does. Exactly. Exactly.

You know, you're absolutely right. It's a great point. Because if World War III doesn't break out, now what are we going to do? Well, then it's actually a point of instability in that word. And now all of the best laid plans of all these terrible people can't come to fruition. And now they have to actually write the checks that their mouths have, you know, they have to cash the checks that their miles have made. And they don't have the money.

And then what? And so, you know, I'll be honest with you. watching the American capital markets. Now let's take it one step further. Let's say we have a guilt crisis in the UK. Let's say we have a German bun crisis at some point. Why would we have those? Well, it's because, as I've said for many, many, for a couple of years now.

In Europe, it's mostly, the companies hold mostly bank debt. When they want to expand their businesses, they go to the bank and they offer, they get a loan, they do the thing. In the United States, we have a much more sophisticated corporate paper market. Right. Hell, in some ways, the Federal Reserve was designed around helping keep the banking system liquid by helping the corporate paper market more than there's anything else. So if Apple wants to build a new plant, Apple can go to their investors directly and issue corporate bonds. They don't have to go to a bank to do that. They might get, you know, they have to go to a reinsurance company on the bonds or something on those lines.

That's a different issue. But Apple can just go out and issue bonds at one and a quarter percent. Like, and they do. they don't do that as much in in in in in Europe you know everybody every region of the world has different financing schemes schema you know regimes is a better word because I don't want to use the the I don't want to have the the bad connotation of the word scheme right no this is the way they operate Asian banks lend differently than European banks lend and the American banks like they all operate differently have a different culture and involved in how they operate and so for that reason, you know, rising interest rates really puts the commercial banking, the commercial

banks in Europe under, you know, under the eight ball, or behind the eight ball. They don't have any options. And that's why LaGuard has to hold rates down. Okay. So why she has to, she can't let them get out of control because it will, the cascade will take the commercial banks out and then it will take the central banks out and then it will. And now, is that part of their plan? Sure. But if they, they want to collapse the whole economy so that they can roll it all up into the rubric of the ECB, get rid of the member central banks, get rid of the commercial banks, issue their digital bureau, issue their CBDC, issue their, you know, and have, and that's what they want, but they can't win the big war for global capital.

They don't crush the United States and they don't crush the Chinese and they don't crush the Russians. And as you rightly pointed out earlier, that just seems incredibly stupid. like how are they going to do this? And how are they, of course, they thought they were going to do it was by getting our political leadership to do really, really, really dumb things manage and use the managerial states in all of these places and the regular and use the regulations

and then go for political control, deny democracy, deny sovereignty, and then just set the people themselves against each other, create all these false diads, and, you know, get Americans to hate Russians and Israelis hate Iranians and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And hopefully eventually, as Bob's your uncle, we get World War III and we can collapse and then we can move on. Like, that's what they were thinking. And, yeah, that's not happening. But they are going to do a lot of horrible things to train.

They're not going to stop until they're removed from the scene, right? They're going to keep trying because they've got a big project chart up at Evil Corp Central saying this is what we're going to do. And when you kind of see it from that perspective, like, and that's the way I, I strategically, this is the way I lay this out. You know, to me, it's like, it's just a big board game. And I'm like just watching people make moves and, yeah, well, you know, nice. That's nice, but I'm still going to win because I'm still going to win because I'm, because I'm the Fed.

And when I take my workers are worth more than your workers. I don't care, whatever metaphor you want. Like, you know, when I take that action, I get twice the number of resources you get. Tough. That's just because that's the rule, you know. and that's where it is. And it was always a, I think it was,

it was going to happen as long as their plan was always was could have happened had they been able to keep everybody on side. But the minute, a system, a cartel like that, in this case, the cartel of oligarch who make they run the world, once one of them decides to turn predatory against another member of the cartel, they have to be very careful about what that member ostracizing that one member

of the cartel does. The first one they ostracized were the Russians and then the Russians took themselves out of the game and started playing a bigger game. They allied with the Chinese and now the Americans were like, yeah, that sounds great. We can all go to a less globalized world

but we can all go back to our respective corners. We have the bricks representing Asia. We have the United States representing North America, for lack of a better term. And we can fight over Africa. We can fight over South America. But, you know, what do Europe and the Brits do? That's a good question.

Go broke. From there, from the players' perspectives, yeah, you lose. You lose or you get nothing in both Willy Wonka. You know what I mean? Yeah. What you've just described is a little bit like what a certain person in Berlin did at one time. He also tried to take on the Russians, the Chinese, and the Americans all at once.

It didn't end up very well for him. Didn't end up very well for him either. The person we're not allowed to invoke, even though our opposite, even though our cultural opposites, you know, invoke that every day. Like my entire rant just now would be considered not, would be considered tantamount the Nazism. Really? Okay.

Okay. And everybody to the left of Karl Marx is now. now a Nazi. Like that's the world we live on thing. All right. Anyway, well, there it is. So, very, very dynamic picture. I have to just finish by saying, I really do worry about Britain. It would be very difficult to convey how bad and dark the atmosphere here has become, actually, on the eve of this budget. And, you know, that people are now talking indeed

about guilt strikes, which I haven't really seen that. Even during the trust period, people thought that could be sort of controlled. I think people are much more worried about that now. So anyway, let's stop there, because we could talk for hours about these things. What I was to say on the way out the door, Alex, is to say that I see the same thing. I think the last blog that I wrote from my blog was about, you know, trying to understand all of this from the British is a victim of of European imperialism.

And I believe very strongly that, you know, the little Britain, for lack of a better term, just like, you know, Maga, America, just like the, you know, just like the German middle class, they're all under attack. And we have to remind ourselves that the enemy isn't individuals within, you know, the sides within those. It's, it's us against that.

It's always been there. It's the superstructure. The people who actually function outside, who don't consider themselves connected to any particular country or nation and who believes that they can control things. Tom Longo, thank you very much for answering my questions in such detail and such a thoughtful and clear way.

I'm going to go over to Alex, rather. I'm sure Alex are some questions for you. And then we'll have a couple questions. And then, well, Alex. Yeah. You have 10, 15 minutes, Tom, for some questions? If I have as much time as you guys need, I block out as much time as you guys need. Awesome.

From Raphael, Bricks was a flat out success period. What do you say, Tom? I agree. I agree. It would have been nicer to see the Saudi show up, but I understand why they didn't. Apparently, they sent, like, the foreign minister, like, behind the scenes, right? but NBS didn't show off, of course. So, but I think there, I think the Saudi is in a very difficult position,

but I think that, yes, you saw another, another brick being laid in the foundation of the bricks going forward to, to do that. So yes, I agree. Tropical Rocket asks, are governments going to force banks to buy more sovereign debt? They may. There may be a moment where you, they try, they're certainly going to try it in Europe, right? was it Frederick Merz was out there the other day saying well there's 2.8 trillion dollars or euros in savings that if we could just get our hands on that and mobilize it we could fix you know everything

well and you know I know that people are thinking in terms of the of David Webbs work the great taking I've I've talked to enough people within the American power circles this is you don't want Kamala Harris to win they will do the great taking do I think that that will happen here in the United States. I think that they're going to do everything imaginable to not do that because they know that if they do that, they will just break the country. Now, again, is that a goal of certain people? Yes. So it's a worry, but the way I'm reading the game board as of right now, I would tell you that would be like killing the golden goose and Wall Street does not want to go that gently into that good night either. So let's just leave it there. And all

that in pause. I'm not sure I understand this question or if it's for Tom. Leonard Vona tracked 30,000 fake with fraud, Algo in WI. Oh, that's going to be fake. That's going to be 30,000 fake votes with a fraud algorithm in Wisconsin. I think he's worried about them stealing Wisconsin. And if he is, because, again, does it come down to Wemipa, right,

Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania? I'll be honest with you, I think the internal polling is so bad. And that's why we're seeing a lot of, we're seeing a lot of defections within the American political establishment. We're seeing a lot of tea leaves here saying that they know how bad the internal polling is. And they're just expecting that this, that this Trump landslide could be too big to rig. And if it is, then they have to go to Plan B or to invoke Dr. Strangelove, Plan R. And I don't know what Plan R is going to look like. So we have a couple of ideas, but there we go.

So Zaryl says van der Leyer is the EU Hillary and Volkswagen is cutting three plants and 10% wages. The fourth plant is being discussed. Yes. That's what I heard earlier when I did this. I did it as a German. Thanks to inglorious bastards, right, the three thing. If you've not seen the movie, they figure out that he's a British spy because he uses this as opposed to this. right um and uh to say three more beers and they're like you're not german it was a great little moment

in that movie um yeah the the the the Volkswagen thing is should be very disturbing to everyone um because Volkswagen really is for all intents and purposes and all puns intended um the engine of the german economy um and the source of Germany's internal trade surplus with the rest of the European Union and in and without that like what purpose does the European Union serve the German economy in the German industrialists. Now, what's fascinating is how far the German industrialist class in centered in Bavaria have been, have allowed this to go. But how far they've allowed this to go?

And maybe the bombing of the North Stream pipeline was, that was it. You know, that was that moment where they all got together behind the scenes, just kind of like when I think Wall Street got together and said, we can implement SOFER and we can go after, you know, we can go after the BIS and the IMF and everybody else, right? Maybe that was the moment. And maybe, you know, it's good things come out of bad events because at some point, systems change only when they're put under existential threat.

So the German industrialist class had to be put under an existential threat by the Greens and what I like to call Davos before they would finally get, you know, get off their backsides and do it and do the thing. You know what I mean? and try and save not only their own skins, but they're the German middle class who effectively pays their salaries. Right.

Ilya Koryakhan asks, can you ask Tom about Saudi Arabia? Can they spend their $800 billion in U.S. bonds fast enough before the U.S. seizes it? That's a good question. I never really thought about the U.S. seizing the Saudi's sovereign debt. The Saudis have a very, as I said before, they're a very difficult position because they are so inextricably linked through the peg of the real. And Alex, you guys know that I've been calling for the Saudis to depeg the real forever.

And it's been a call that's been out there for a long time that eventually they would have to do so. They've made overtures towards this. I think that the Saudis aren't, you know, under Trump, this could be one of those things where the Saudis are put under pressure to not leave the system. Like Trump is going to work very hard to keep the Saudis in our orbit. It's going to be one of the things that we're all that this, from this side of the aisle, from this part of the of the alternative commentary space, we're not going to be happy with Trump about by the way.

But we'll see what happens. There can be a negotiated settlement on this. The Saudis, that amount of debt is a weapon. And, you know, canceling those Q-Sips, like they would cancel the Chinese QSips on those bonds, would then ensure that there's a complete and utter collapse of the U.S. bond market. The U.S. is not going to do that. The Fed is not going to demand this. The Fed is going to do everything imaginable to protect the U.S. bond market because that protects

the dollar and that protects their position. Okay? The Fed does not care about the stock market at all. Greenspan is no longer in charge and we no longer have the balance sheet room to lever up and goose the stock market through the wealth effect. That's over. We have to get that out of our heads. And we have to think in terms of only what the Fed will do. Now, do we have a bunch of vandals currently running the American government?

Yes. Will Trump do anything to damage the credit rating of the United States? No. If anything, he'll do it. Make every move imaginable. to strengthen it. So what I would suggest is everybody sit down and listen to the Palisades Gold Radio interview that Tom Bodrovics just did with Judy Shelton, where she goes over the means by which to start putting gold down on the yield curve, an idea that I talked about. I bet that, you know,

Judy's talked about this for 10, 15 years now, but she's now out there doing the podcast circuit. She just wrote a book about this, codifying all these ideas that she's been, that she's been playing with or talking about for about 10 to 12 years now. I think she's absolutely right. We can capitalize the United States. We can deal with this, but the key to it is utilizing our sovereign gold. That's what the BRICS threat of the unit,

backing it by 40% in gold is all about. And, you know, hey, like, they do that. We do that. And the Saudis will be happy to convert those older treasuries, roll them over into new stuff, into the new issuance. And, you know, they can, peg the real in a

in a gentle way. And we can move forward. So I, I, that's kind of the way I see a lot of this playing itself out. Again, subject to, you know, a discontinuous event or some kind of step function escalation. But, you know,

I don't know what, I don't know what percentage to put on those things. Right. A basil says the portrait of Dorian Gray was based on Ursula van der Leand. Oh, Oscar Wild. Yeah. You know, you know that?

Oscar Wild wins. Like, dude, that's the comment of the death. You know, that was the book, Doran Gray, where Oscar Wild says that a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Which you could also say, you're first to live out of that. Oscar Wilde was truly amazing. He and Mencken are just endless quote machines, right? Go ahead. Boy, John Roberts says,

D-dollarization may be happening, but recent swift data suggests de-euroization is happening since 2003. How low will the euro go? Will the euro survive? I don't think the euro does survive. And I think that that's the key. I think John's, he's picking up some,

I don't know if he's picking up something. they came up to this independently or not, but this is something I've been talking about for over a year. When you go into the Swift R&B tracker, which comes out every month, it'll give you a breakdown of the money that's the percentage of the money flowing through various currencies and how the trade is settled. And from the moment, the sanctions went on Russia and the, the euro was no longer allowed to be used to buy Russian oil. the euro share of non-Eurozone global trade as settled through Swift. Now, those are a variety of caveats because there's a lot of trade that's not now settled

through Swift like it used to be dropped from about, what, 36 or 37 percent rivaling the dollar to 13 percent in less than a year. And it hasn't recovered. It's not going to recover because the Russians aren't taking euros for their oil more and their gas. And that was, so it's clearly the Euro, what the European Union was doing with this was they were creating a petro Euro. When you look at it, when you look at that data point, that data point tells you that

the euro's entire, you know, validity on the global market had to do with the amount of oil and gas and energy that the European imported and from the rest of the world. and they were setting up a parallel. They were setting up a replacement for the dollar through the amount of energy that they were buying from the rest of the world. And they were settling in euros. Then they shot themselves in the foot.

And to this day, I cannot understand why they did what they did. Because the euro is now, you know, I think it's currency without a purpose for almost everybody who uses it. So, you know, I've been short the euro, you know, strategically for, I don't know, since 2016. And, you know, I did so when it was at $1.40.

So, you know, I'm kind of right. But, you know, it's also been, it's a trade that's very, very difficult to map. And you really do need to be in and out of it based on, based on, you know, what's happening policy-wise within the, you know, within the respective spheres. But it's kind of like my structural short against the euro. has been one of those things that has driven me to try and understand all of this better over time. So I guess it's both been a blessing on the curse. There you go. Rafael says one US dollars true value is 20 cents.

Well, compared to what? That's the gold? Maybe. I don't know what that number is at this point, but I can tell you that gold at $2,700 an ounce doesn't balance our, are, um, are,

doesn't balance the amount of faith that we've lost in the institutions that undergird the value of the dollar. Right. And one of the things that I've been talking about in other, in other venues and certainly since the last time we've all talked is this. We have gold on the US, US's balance sheet, right? The US's balance sheet,

the fed's balance sheet is somewhere north of seven trillion dollars. And I haven't looked at the eight point four one report in a couple of weeks. It's in the seven and a half trillion. Let's call it $7.5.20. We have $8,100, and so 8133.5 tons of gold on the Fed's balance sheet held at a at a price of what the Fed paid for it, which is $11.04 billion or 422 an ounce. Now, let's take that tonnage of gold and let's multiply it out to the current price at $2750 an ounce. That's a lot more than $11 billion. It's probably close to $700 billion. I think if we do the math. Somebody in the audience, if you want to do the math for me, I would appreciate it.

But it is to understand that now gold occupies somewhere between 8 and 10% of the Fed's balance sheet in terms of actual value. So you've got a 10 to 1 leverage ratio between impaired assets like U.S. Treasury's mortgage-backed securities and all the loans and currency swaps and everything else versus the Fed's gold reserve. At what point, at what percentage of gold as an asset of the Fed's balance sheet, percentage of the Fed's balance sheet, what leverage ratio will restore. global faith in the Fed and the dollar. That's the way I look at this. Once you make a once you rock it from that perspective, that'll tell you what your upside is on the goal, because it's going to be a number. And I don't know if that number is a two to one leverage ratio, five to one, one to one. Not going to go any lower than one to one. Once the Fed's balance sheet is exactly the same as the value of gold, like it's not going to go any higher than that. In today's market,

it may be so the, and so in that scenario, either the Fed's balance sheet has to shrink, to the value of the gold reserves, or the price of gold has to go up to meet the current size of the balance sheet. Now, I don't know that we're going to get to one to one. We, as the people who use the dollar and use the euro and everything else, we will determine what that leverage ratio is. That's where the free market analysis in this will come to pass. That's where it will make itself felt, despite all of the machinations and all of the proclamations and the rules and this and all these bloodless, feckless managerial nightmares that we call world leaders,

regardless of what they say, this is what we're going to do. And I don't know what that number is. I don't know what that leverage ratio is, but you have your framework. Let's watch it. Let's watch it play itself out. It could mean $10,000 gold and a $2 trillion balance sheet or $5 trillion balance sheet. It could be, I don't know, but that's where we're going to go. Okay.

And if we have a financial crisis that forces the Fed to lever up the balance sheet to $70 trillion, well, then you can tell yourself, do the same calculation and then ask yourself where gold is going to go. Then you have to start talking about the collateralization of Bitcoin as well as a potential reserve asset, which is also absolutely in process right now, that Bitcoin is being used to collateralize parts of the sofer market and parts of the repo market. okay um it it it's happening it's i don't know how big a part of it is but it's there you can see it in the correlation trades um so but but using that simple framework of looking at the feds balance sheet you'll get an idea of what you what the value of the value of the dollar is and again that then tells you where the bricks leverage really is it's in if they monetize gold the unit, then it's going to force us to monetize gold. Or as Judy Shelton puts it, why don't we go first? Which is exactly what she told Tom Brod-Drivix last week when I listened to the interview

last week. And so what she said last night, she said in that interview, she's like, why don't we go first? Why don't we lead the world as opposed to lagging? I don't know. So we'll see what happens. But these are the things I'm going to be watching. These are the big trends, the big things that I'm watching right now. Ribo says, Tom's take on the low is spot on. She fell victim to the system, as Trump said on Rogan. I don't think people understand the force of the system. The EU wants to cripple her and the nationalism in Italy. I agree. Thank you for the corroborative point. I mean, again, I think that's, I think that's the right read. And then we'll just continue to run the hypothesis and look for data points that

confirm that or deny it, one or the other. But she's been in power long enough now that I think which she's pretty much a known quantity. I'll be honest with you, like the pictures of her and Elon Musk, I think that's a sign. Basil says it's difficult to call Maloney a strong man. Elsa says, using the interest of Russian frozen assets to pay everything, is there any serious pushback on this narrative in the West?

In the United States, there's absolutely pushback on it. It's taken over a year. they've been floating this idea for a year, and they finally got it done only after it became acute that Ukraine was defaulting on the debt. Remember, as Alex Kiner pointed out, at the start of the war, Ukraine got a two-year moratorium on paying back its existing debt to the IMF, which the Bank of England guarantees about $40 billion with the debt, right? after Ukraine negotiated a haircut with the bondholders, then they defaulted anyway. Fitch downgrades Ukraine six months early because the Fed told them to because that's what the rating agencies work for the Wall Street folks.

Don't kid yourself. They don't work for City of London. Maybe the London rating agencies work for the City of London, but the American rating agencies, they work for Wall Street. So especially Fitch, I think Fitch has absolutely maps the Wall Street. So that was your tell. And so now at that point, once it became acute, that's one of those things that was causing them all, Adjeda, you know, and to like lose sleep and argue amongst themselves, how are we going to get this done? That, you know, caused Vondrell-Land's face to start, you know, morphing into emper of Palpatine.

That's what's eating them up inside. They don't know how to get out of that one. So they finally had to do it by doing. So they then, you know, they then invalidate the very concept of foreign exchange reserves, which under which is the thing that undergirds the entire global monetary system. And now we're into a new era. And so we're definitely in, we're in flux right now. Let's put it this way.

I'm a real quick historical digression. If you go, we had a monetary system called Bretton Woods after the Bretton Woods agreement in 1946. That lasted until the London Gold Pool ended in 1968. We then had two or three, depending on your read on it, Murray Rothbard did some work on this and what does government done to our money, where between 1968 and Nixon closing the gold window in August of 71, we had like two or three monetary systems were attempted, and they all failed. Eventually, we had to kill gold from the monetary system. And then we were into the, and then it took about eight or nine years, or actually about a decade,

to establish the dollar reserve system with Volker. right. The LIBOR, and that starts about in 1983 with the peak in interest rates and in the end of the recession. Then the LIBOR standard, which now is the dollar reserve standard, LIBOR comes into effect in 1984, and it's codified amongst all the G7, that that's what's going to be used as the dollar, the dollar debt index rate. That lasts until Lehman Brothers broke the world. Then we had coordinated central bank policy from 2008 or 2009, or 2011, really, at the end of the gold bull market. until 2021. Then Powell breaks the world by saying, nope, that's it, draining the world the euro dollars. And we're now into another system and we're into another one of those ugly interregnums like 68 to 71 that we were and or between Lehman brothers and 2011. We're in that period right now.

And that's why it looks really weird. That's why nobody can figure out what's going to happen next. I don't know what's going to happen next. I'm just telling you that's what I say. when I break it down that way. So everybody's negotiating their position in what's going to be the next monetary order. But there's going to be a negotiated settlement amongst the quote unquote powers that be. And there are still going to be central banks on the other side of this. Hate to break it to all the Austrians and the Bitcoin Maxis in the audience. But that is the next generation problem.

I'm not going to see it. I ain't going to live that long. I smoke too many of these. Go ahead. The alkali says, if money is truly backed by trust, then inflation will lead to erosion of trust and the system will die. Yeah, the system is dying. So we have to have a system that replaces it, that reestablishes trust. Davos's plan is to break the, is to purposely collapse the old system and let them build a new one that will, that's the thread.

That's the needle they're trying to thread. They're trying to collapse the old system and stay in power. And I think that the global monetary system, the global flow of capital is too democratized. China is too powerful. Russia's too powerful. The United States is too powerful. Like they were able to pull this off in World Wars 1 and World War II because Europe was the industrial center of the world. And they had the trade surplus with the rest of the world. And they had the advantage and everything else. And then coming out of World War II, they thought they could take, they could transfer that wealth and power to the United States,

keep oligarchic control over it, hollow the United States out in the process, and then transport it all back to Europe. And they also thought that they were going to be able to build up China and get oligarchic control over China. That's why George Soros goes out there and says, Xi is the devil, because Xi said no. If you think about what happened over the course of the buildout of the dollar reserve standard, the buildup of China, it was designed to put all the money in and then get political power the way they've correct. They've corrupted the United States and they've corrupted everybody else. And the Chinese refused to open their capital account. It's what happened.

And smartly, the Chinese said, no. They took down Russia with it. You know, the Russians didn't learn the lesson until 2015 when the sanctions on happened after Crimea. And then Putin had to really scramble. But he negotiated, he tried to negotiate with the West for, for 12 years. And that was his big mistake was waiting that long. But, you know, hey, nobody's perfect.

Putin's done an amazing job. But at the same time, maybe he wasn't even able to do so because the Russia wasn't strong enough to do so to stand up to the system until 2015. We can all make these arguments and have a nice, long conversation about that, certainly. But these are just, you know, all from one point of view, it looks like a mistake.

From another point of view, it looks like something else. But the key here is that China said no. Paul Walker says, who's purchasing all these failing companies and stocks? Countries with limited natural resources will need to consume humble pie by the truckload. I'm sorry, Paul. I don't know what you mean by what stocks. Are you talking about like the Magnificent Seven? You're talking about tech stocks.

You're talking about AI stocks. I'm not sure what you're talking about. I look at commodity stocks. And I can definitely see accumulation in the pattern, in the chart patterns, without a doubt. If I look at, you know, price and volume and time and everything else, these things just look like there are undergoing massive accumulation. And so if they are, they're just getting ready for the next bull wave and commodities. And that's what the money is actually flowing to. So if Paul has more clarity on that, just, you know, throw another addendum to the comment.

Yeah, just put in the comments. Yeah. Zareel says, Tom, no matter who is potis, we will have a war. he's my i'm not saying you're he's i my my um it's a coin flip in my head so how's that i i don't disagree with you but i don't fully but i still hold out hope that at the end of the day core as will prevail yeah life of brian says please elaborate a bit on the italian deep state compared to the u.s.a deep state a bit maybe alex should cover this you probably know what well try Try and read an Italian newspaper, even when they publish in English, and you'll get a sense of how impenetrable Italy is.

Now, the point of understanding about Italy is that you're not just talking about one deep state. You're talking about lots of different deep states of all the various different regions, which were previously independent countries, which have all interconnected and become entwined into each other, which adds a whole other layer of complexity. then you have a bureaucracy that was formally connected with the Vatican City State, which has also got entwined into that system as well. Then you have a whole sort of, and you know, one doesn't want to indulge too much in stereotypes, but there's always been, you know, sort of propensity in Italy, let's face it, for intrigue, that kind of thing.

So there's that stirred up into the mixture. And of course you've had the Cold War. You've had the period of before that, the era Mussolini, which also created further deep layers, the very complicated way in which the Republic was created after the Second World War. And of course, the fact that there was the Communist Party in Italy and the Vatican and the United States, and they were all playing things out against each other.

And there were the great, very, very, very, powerful industrial oligarchies in the north fiat and all of the others it is inevitably going to be a very very complicated structure and remember also long period in italian history dominated by one party the christian democratic party which was divided into multiple different factions all of them connected to a very complicated intelligence community within Italy, which had also very complicated connections with the United States. Well, you can see it all. I mean, it's not difficult to understand. And all of this happening in an extremely sophisticated society, which is Italy is, by the way, at every level, politics, culture, in every aspect of Italian society, is very, very, very sophisticated.

So it's a very, very complicated deep state. And exactly as Tom said, it has an extraordinarily long history. If you try and understand and follow Italian politics by going to the Italian media, you will get absolutely nowhere. Just to say, the Italian media is even amongst mainstream media in the world today, one of the most difficult to make much sense of. There are only very, very few people in Italy who have all of the various threads

and understand all that is going on. So Italy is an extraordinary place. I mean, it's a wonderful country. Amazing things happen. But most of what goes on in Italy, exactly as Tom said, happens under the surface, unless you are part of the inside,

world of Italy. And by the way, I've been started about his banking system, which is also an enormous, you know, history and legacies and all kinds of things. I mean, Italian banks going, some of them go back to the middle ages, just to say. So, I mean, you know, if very, very few people who are on the outside really understand everything that's going on. and many, many people on the inside or who think that they're on the inside have only understandings of part of what is going on. If you want me to give you a book, which is a good introduction to Italian politics,

go to a book called Who Defends Rome, written, I believe, in the late 60s, about 1970, which is about the plot that brought down Mussolini, the one. one that emerged in July 1940. And you will see how there are layers upon layers of people, the military, the intelligence agencies, the Vatican, the royal court, as it was then was, and it will give you a sense of what a complicated political society Italy is. And can I just say it also gives it a kind of stability as well.

I mean, that's the other thing to say about this system. I mean, it does, yeah, go on. I was going to say, all I'm going to say is that this, the underscored Alex's point, which is the Alexander's point, which is that we think of all of these modern European nations as, you know, ancient. They're not. Like, the current conception of Italy is only 175 years old or Germany. Same thing. Like, they only emerged in the middle of the 19th century. And, you know, they have histories that go back 2,000 years, right?

And so for that reason, you know, we have to, you know, each individual country, or in a sense, each individual region of Italy itself is itself a lifetime study for one historian or one commentator. So for any of us to understand, the only thing we can do for any of us to think we understand any of this is just to take a look for people to present one facet of it as it exists at the current version of the game now, but understand that that's a picture without any resolution whatsoever. And we do it best. Absolutely. Can I just quickly say, the two Italian cities that I know best, which happened to be Venice and Rome, one of the things people don't realize is that all of the players who existed in the papal states, when it was the, they were the papal states in Rome, the so-called black nobility. And the old families who ran the Venetian Republic, they are still there. They even occupy their own houses. the old palaces.

I mean, it's an extraordinary fact that, you know, in Rome, you still have, the old aristocracy still occupies its own residences and palaces. And they do the same in Venice. And they have their own specific dialects and things like that, and all their old connections. And, you know, they still function. And they still, you know, they still have all the connections.

And they're just there. below the surface of Italian life. And unless you know them, you just, unless you know some of them, which I once did, but no longer do, you won't,

you won't see it. Tom, you just wanted to go. Two, two small points, one, I have a friend of mine who's Italian, who says,

if you really want to understand regionalism and Italian deep state, watch Italian soccer. Because the Italian soccer clubs are a reflection of the Italian, um, uh, the current state of Italian politics and the various powers,

which is one. The second thing is just to bring up, this is something I meant, I meant to bring up earlier, which is, oh, by the way, one of the things that gives you hope that Italy is starting to extricate itself is Unicredits trying to buy commerce back. Yeah. Now, let's talk about that. It's a big story.

And it's a big story. And the big story, and the reason it's a big story is for the following. In order for Italy to leave the European Union, you've got to deal with this pesky target to imbalance, right? where Italy owes Germany, basically, a whole bunch of money. Because, you know, the Italians issued the debt to run their, their fund their budget deficit. And that debt was guaranteed by German banks and other banks and

ultimately the Bundesbank through this Target 2 program. Well, what if unicredit buying commerce bank is a way to wipe a lot of that off the books? And that's a me, that's the, that's an early indicator that Italy, is beginning to extricate itself. And this is the, this is the Italian deep state's way of saying, you know what? We're done. Yeah. That's enough.

This whole Brussels thing is enough. And they've gotten the talk from, and they've gotten enough of a, of a tap on the shoulder by the Americans to say, you can start pressing your sovereignty again. We're going to take care of the rest of this. Again, it's a tea leaf. Read it how you want. But it's a big story. because it's a $6.63 billion potential, it's a lot of money that would wipe out at least half, if not more, of Italy's target two imbalance.

It's a huge story in Germany, by the way, just to what to quickly say. And a lot of people in Germany are very, very upset about it. I'm sure they are. So that's a great question asking us to get more detail on the account in a deep state. Here we are another, you know, there's another. 10 minutes gone. We've got anything else, Fox? We got a couple more. You have time? Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Just a comment from Zareel. Two and first thumb and two fingers, Tom, you're not German. And first two fingers, Tom, you're not German. Oh, okay.

I'm not German. From Paul with the companies, Tom, VW market shares, Boeing and failing EU companies. Yeah. Boeing is. being, I think Boeing, like they're attacking transportation at every level. They want to move us all into 15-minute ecologies. They want us to eat bugs. They want us, they want to, you know, kill us off and pods and everything else. It's all just part of it. It's a cafe here in the United States trying to destroy the car industry through the corporate average fleet economy, standards and all of that stuff. The RINS look into RINS,

a renewable and identification number system for blending ethanol into our gasoline and blah, blah, blah, blah, making American, you know, they have to tune. And they have to, the companies have to make engines tuned for our market because we blend so much ethanol into our gasoline. That raises the price of gas. It destroys crack spreads for refiners, blah, blah. It's, it's all designed to politically destroy the transportation system. And guess what? America's big and America can't run on trains.

It needs to run on cars and trucks. And if you destroy the car and truck industry in the United States, then you destroy the United States economy, which is absolutely the plan. So then you go after our diamond industries like airlines, right? Because airlines, cars, these things, they are diamond industries in that because of the expertise needed to build the entire plane, you have to create 50 other industries that had to be,

brilliant as well. And you destroy Boeing, you destroy all the supply chains. Oh, by the way, if you want my honest opinion, I think that's all French plot, Airbus. So like, let's not, let's not even kid ourselves. So, you know, the Chinese and the Russians are making their own commercial mid, you know, mid-sized commercial airliners because they're trying to get away from this duopoly of Boeing and Airbus. And that's the right thing for them to do. I'm not surprised. And the same thing is going with Volkswagen. What's the diamond industry in so many ways for the German economy? It's the cars.

And Volkswagen is an immense part of drives so many downstream aspects of the German economy. And, I mean, it reaches the chemical industry and the refining industry and the materials industry and the engines and the electronics and everything. I mean, everything. And I can tell you that, you know, we no longer here in the United States look at German tools. and German cars the same way we used to. We don't because I got news for you. They're not as good. I mean, I love Volkswagen's, but God, God's forbid.

I actually have to like search out the electrical gremlins and the average of Volkswagen. Like the electrical systems are very terrible, right? And so the engine will run forever. The car will run forever. But, you know, every once in a while, it'll just like shut off because the only electrical system will shut out. We'll short out while I'm on I-75.

I had a beetle that did this. And this was 20 years ago. So there's so much going on here. And you know, you have to ask yourself the basic question I always have, which is, you know, the observation. It's not even a question. It's like personnel is policy. Personnel drives, you know, look at the people who run the country. Look at the people who run the industries and who run and who are put in power.

And that'll tell you what the policy is and is going to be. And until you get rid of the personnel, you can't change the policy. Let's do two more. For Tom, Elza asks, what do the Indians do with all the euros they get from the EU from all the oil from Russia? Do they build aerospace factories? What else? That's a good question. What do the Indians do with those euros?

They should recycle them into European sovereign debt. They could also just dump them back on the market and buy something else with them. This is part of the reason why you have to be careful what you wish for. When I've noted, have you, has anybody noticed the uptick in British activity in that area of the world? I have. I also noted on the eve of the BRIC summit that India and China finally ended their border dispute that's been going back to, you know, forever since Indian independence, right? What do they do with those? They should recycle them into European sovereign debt or they could as well, yeah, they could continue to build deeper,

factories. India is going to be the big winner here in complicating the oil, the global oil industry. Right. And I wouldn't, if I were Europe, I wouldn't trust India on this at all. They could take all the money, build over refineries, and then, and then, you know, go, thanks. Now what? I mean, does anybody, would anybody expect the Indians to not press their own advantage for their own purposes? Has anybody, you know, have you met your average Indian person? they're very good entrepreneurs. Like, you know, and they don't have a lot of, and they don't have necessarily any loyalty to anybody else other than themselves, right?

So I would be very careful culturally. That's a bad exchange. Russians are, Russians are, Russians are, Russians is like selling people stuff. Like they're not, they're not, they're not, Russians aren't particularly complicated people and they like to, I like to honor their agreements. So, you know, there you go. Final question from Tabernock. Thoughts on Trump tariffs effects on China and the USA and Europe?

The tariffs from Trump are one of his hard negotiating tactics. He's going to ask for the moon. He's going to settle for a lot lower. It's a typical Trumpian negotiation. He's also throwing out into the mix the idea of replacing the income tax with tariffs. that's not going to happen, folks. But it's a typical Trumpian thing to highlight what the situation, what the problem is, where the fulcrum of the problem is, and then let us start to chew over it.

But it's, and then he does that to scare people. I don't think Trump wants a trade war with China anymore than he wants a real war with China. But he's willing to put, you know, he's willing to make, to, he's willing to put, he's willing to put, things in place to realign and change the dynamics. And so what's he going to do? He's going to do more of what he did the first time. He's going to raise tariffs and he's going to cut taxes and cut him hard. Right. That's what he's going to do. And the original Trump tax cuts expire for the fiscal year 2025 or for tax year 2025. So this is going to have to be something he gets done in the first year of office. He's in office. So we're going to watch. So to give you

an idea of why I think he's going to win is there's many little bits and pieces is because the Democrats are now seating out into the end. I've seen it from the British media and I've seen it from European media and I've seen it from Washington is that Democrats are that Trump's going to come into power but they're going to but the Democrats are going to win the legislature. And I'm like, yeah, that ain't happening. If he comes in with a kind of landslide in the, especially in the in the battleground states that I think that's going to happen he's going to have down ballot success okay he lost in 2020 and still retained you know and still retained the congress like it was a so why would you you see the reverse of that this time no one likes the democrats in the united

states everybody's angry with them why would they vote for these guys so if they if you're if you're going to get that many people breaking that hard for trump this time that every we're starting to see Democrats trying to hold onto their seats by by by endorsing Trump. That's how bad it is. I just saw that hair I just saw something this morning that I literally while we were chatting I noted at one point that somebody noted in my in my community that Harris is apparently pulling ads from North Carolina moving to Virginia because now Virginia is in play and she can't win North Carolina.

So that's if she's doing that and she's campaigned. in Pennsylvania, she's in trouble. She shouldn't be campaigning in Pennsylvania. So Trump is going to do what he's done before. And he knows exactly what he wants to do and what he's going to do. And there's going to be a negotiated settlement between the United States and the Chinese. And we saw that from when Jamie Diamond went over there to China last year. Ignore Janet Yellen, ignore Blinken, ignore those people,

They're not going to matter. What they said in 2024 will not matter. Diamond going over there and having a big conference and bring all the, and all the, bringing all the business leaders together. That was the tell. Okay. Wall Street is like,

this is not, it's going to be, is it going to be hard on China? Yes. We'll be good for China. Yes. It will be good for the United States. Yes.

At the end of the day, the friction that we've, that has been, the sand that's been thrown into the gears of the global economy, especially since COVID, that's going to be, that's what all these questions are talking about, or that's kind of the theme, all of these questions about India and about China and whatnot. That's what has to be negotiated away. That has to be gotten rid of.

It's all policy. It can all be gotten rid of with, you know, with people sitting down and treating each other like humans, as opposed to slaves. And when you see Davos and their minions negotiating, they always dislike what they did to Sariza in 2015 over the Greek debt crisis. A subject I know you two know very well and have a lot of emotional investment in because I'm speaking to two exemplary Greek men. You know what the European Union did to you. You know what they did to Greece. And that negotiation, just like Brexit, is always the same.

saying you will get nothing from us we will demand everything and you will be destroyed well they can only do that if they have the united states backing them up they can't do that anymore and so that's what i think ultimately trump is is will be the the major theme of the trump administration it's going to look ugly at times he's going to be he's going to bluster and you know zopa his way to um uh to to to to drive people nuts but that's the way he operates And he's very good at it. So let's see what happens. All right.

Swarles says, just in time to donate. Great to see Tom on the Duran. Thank you, Swarles, for that. And thank you guys for the invite. I really appreciate it. It's great to have you on the Duran, Tom Lungo. Before you leave, Tom, where is the best place for people to find you once again? As always, the best thing, the best thing at the end of the day is Twitter.

I mean, I use Twitter as the primary marketing tool at this point. And I always post links to whatever content I'm putting up for the subscribers. So if you're intrigued by that stuff, or, of course, you can go to the Patreon. And I will commit from here forward to making sure that the blog is better water than it's been in the last few months. But it's been very, very busy. All those links are in the description box and they will be added as a pin comment. Thank you very much, Tom, for joining us. Thank you.

Thank you, guys. Thank you very much, Tom. Good to have you back. Best to you and the families and all that stuff, guys. guys, let's pray for a really a much better 2025, even though I'm not, I'm not saying what about that, about that at all. I'll see you guys soon.

Bye-bye. Take care of top. Thank you. Bye-bye. Alexander. Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic show, huh?

Absolutely. Very extraordinary coverage. I mean, the Italian deep state. That was fascinating. The guilt, oh, it is actually. I mean, Italy is an extraordinary country. I used to know it a lot better than I do, to be honest, and I haven't been to Rome for a long, long time. Would you say Greece is as complicated?

No, it is not as complicated. I mean, we're not that big, and we're not that old as a country. I mean, we got our independence back in 1821, and we haven't had the time to create those layers. I put it like that. Yeah, but we have our deep state in Greece, of course, as well. All right. Dennis, welcome to the Duran community. Great to have you with us. Tom says the UK government is worried about democracy in Ukraine. Meanwhile, at home, Labour MPs are beating up their constituents in the street.

That was absolutely awful. That was just horrible. I don't know whether people know about this, but a Labour MP was absolutely beat up one of his constituents. It was called on film. He's now been suspended and might no longer be in the Labour Party before long. But, I mean, it gives a very vivid idea of the kind of governing class. We haven't Britain at this time. I mean, it's absolutely awful. Well, Jamie Bretto, thank you for that super sticker. Eric says, thank you to the Duran for informing and educating us about geopolitical events

in this time of line. and deception. Thank you for that. Let's see here. Nico says, I agree with Levan about Georgia. Kabakizia must put Zudha Bichvili and Tida Bukotchava

in the in the same gulag as Sakasvili. Well, you might even get there. I hadn't realized. I'm not going to try and speaker name because, you know, I don't know her well enough. But the Georgian president, as I understand it, is actually a former French diplomat. She's actually French. I mean,

you work in the foreign ministry. Foreign ministry, exactly, that, you know, she was previously, obviously, she's obviously Georgian extraction. But it does seem incredible that you should have the diplomatic, you're a, a diplomat of another country as your president, tells you an awful lot about the state. of things in Georgia. I think the government will survive and I think we will come through. I think it was an even more convincing victory than many expected. And I think that the attacks on it will lead to a consolidation of Georgian society. And I should say that Ian Proud of the British diplomat, when we've had several times on our programmes, has written a good piece about Georgia. He knows

the country and he says much the same things that we've been saying, that this is a valid, election result and when you know that internal realities of Georgia, you can understand why the result was what it was. Yeah. Nikos says Dimitri Liatos would be a great Greek guest. He was the Greek correspondent for Et in Russia. He's based there and he has a channel called Yviochoros. Yeah. Interesting.

Okay, why not? Yeah. Thank you, Nikos, for that. Yeah. Basil says, Gonzalo Lira lives, truth, never die. Yeah, true. Nico says, Speaking of Greece, happy Ohi-day, my fellow Greeks.

Alexander, you have that accent, but to me you are Greek. Oh, absolutely. I would say this, actually. I mean, when I was a child in Greece and 60s, Oh, He-Day was a huge thing. This is the day that commemorates a moment in 1940 when Italy, which is, of course, allied with Germany at that time, presented Greece with an ultimatum.

And very, very courageously, Greece, though a divided country at that time, united and basically said, no, we were not accepting this ultimatum. And there was a war between Italy and Greece, and Italy didn't do at all well. And unfortunately, the Italians, Mussolini, turned to the Germans, and the Germans intervened, took over.

But it was still an extraordinary moment. My father, who obviously lived through it, never forgot it. the sense of euphoria in Greece, that Greece actually had the courage to say no. And it was a huge event in Greece in the 60s. I get the sense that perhaps, and I say this great sorrow, it's faded a little. It's not as important in Greece now as it once was. Ilya Kureakin says Salome is not a Georgian name. Interesting.

Law of attraction says whatever the U.S. election results will be, it will be, it will be said it was stolen or influenced by the Putin. Of course. You know, there's an article today in the New York Times, which floats all this hopelessness all over again, and talking about how it all happened before in 2016, and now it's happening all over again. Oh, you had the Mueller inquiry and the horror of its inquiry

and the other inquiry by the man who was the name. I've already forgotten, you know, the Durham inquiry. Despite all of that, we still. go on talking about the Putin's interference of the American elections. Yeah. Anime 19 says Alexander, global and domestic

decline of the U.S. of the dollar collapsing colonial project in the Middle East, failure in Eastern Europe. Perfect coincidence or just failing tentacles of the same beast? No, it's not a coincidence. It's the symptom

of enormous overreach but by a political class in Washington that has lost connection with reality. They're trying too much, too many places, and they're neglecting the United States, and they're doing a lot of harm to the rest of the world in the process, and they're dealing harm to the United States. I mean, it's not, it's not coincidence. If you want to see where all the, it all joins up, look at the political class in Washington

and the near-com, the, near concert, it's cool. Hedrim says, is the US balance sheet audited? I know lots of unaudited spending going on in the USA. No, no, no, it's not audited. And I think this is well understood. Even the Pentagon hasn't had a proper order in decades, as I understand. Ilya Kuryakin says, what is with the de-agriculturalization of the Netherlands?

It's such an insane policy on its face. Well, they're all insane. I mean, all of these policies, none of them make any sense if you take a step back and think about them. I mean, the Netherlands de-cragal, agriculturalizing, Germany, de-industrializing. I mean, all of this is so completely contrary to the tradition and culture and history of these places. And you would have thought that it would be impossible, but of course it happens. and it is inevitably going to happen. You put countries like the Netherlands and Germany within a union

where, as I said, the union wants, in order for itself to be strong for the member states to be weak. And it has one set policies that he imposes on all of the others and it cannot be held accountable for what it does. Raphael says Russia will invade Alaska and enter the USA by foot. Of course. That goes without saying. And, you know, that's just any part of their giant master plan. They've got much, many other things that they're preparing to do as well.

Basil says, don't put all your eggs in the same unipolar NATO basket. Obviously, yeah. Thank you, Basil for that. On fire today, Basil. Azareel says, stop voting ballots, vote in person. Oh, absolutely. I've never, I've always voted in person, by the way, and I never intend to change so long as I can. Bin Lind says, why is the English budget so unpopular? Cheers. Well, because it's going to, if all the things that we're hearing about, we're going to see a significant, a significant rise in taxes at a time when we've already been through a high period inflation.

and when people's living standards have been falling. So what we've been told is that we've all been through a long period of austerity, going all the way back to the 2008 crisis, and we're going to be given even more. So, of course, it's unpopular. And business leaders are unhappy because it's going to reduce demand, and it's going to add to business costs, and middle-class people are unhappy because they're,

worried about their living standards and they're struggling and people in, you know, lower demographics they're unhappy because they're being told that there's going to be cutbacks in spending or things that matter to them, like maybe the health service won't get as much spending as they feel it needs. So everybody is unhappy. No part of Britain is happy. And everybody is annoyed and angry and critical of the government, but it looks like what we're going to have. Raphael says, in Haiti, there is a saying, be careful with sleeping, be careful with a sleeping cat. Shoegu is traveling nonstop to many countries. NATO will not be the one declaring the war. Russia is on her way to declare the war soon. Oh, I don't know. I don't think the Russians are

looking for wars. I mean, they've got a big one that they've got to bring to an end, which they will, but I mean, I don't think they're looking for wars. But they are building up their links and their connections. And if you want me to say what I think, we've done a program about this, I think if you're talking specifically about the Middle East, the Russians are a force for stability there. They always have been. They don't want the situation to escalate. They don't want wars and to the extent that they can, they will apply whatever leverage they have to avoid war and to preserve peace. Summer of 1970 says thanks again, Duran.

Thank you for that. Jamila says Trump, he called us aliens. I don't understand. My family lives in the United States. They want to vote for Trump because when they voted for Obama and Joe Biden, they did nothing for them. I think the win this time, do you think the win this time will be good for Trump? Well, we'll see. Like Tom Longer, I am noting that there are all these defactions. I mean, you know, Bezos and the Washington Post story. It was an interesting story.

Lots of things like that going on. So that all points, that all appears to point in a particular the direction. But to be frank, I'm not going to hold my breath until the votes are all counted or not, as the case may be. We have a result. Raphael says, my predictions, when the war ends, the UN and Bricks will merge with the HQ in China, Russia, Turkey, and South Africa. the U.S. will have to close every base outside the U.S. All colonies will be made independent. Well, you may be right. I mean, that's, we'll just have to see.

I mean, we're still in a very dynamic and evolving situation. And I don't think we can give, I wouldn't want to give precise predictions like that. And I would have thought the Bricks would want to keep the UN as a separate entity because it's useful to them in that kind of way. my own view anyway. Zareel says, remember, black rock never fails. They are everywhere. Elsa says, does the godfather help to understand Italy?

In a kind of a way, but the godfather is, I think, isn't it mainly in the United States? And it's basically about the United States more. And of course, it's about one part of Italy, in the sense it's connected to Italy, which is Sicily, which is, you know, is definitely a part. of the entire Italian system. But there are other parts of Italy which are every bit as complicated as that. If you know it's central Italy, if you know, you know, the Renaissance cities, Bologna, Ravena, sorry, not not Ravanna, I was, anyway, the ones in the centre. You will understand how complicated Italy is. Florence, all of these places, they have their own very, very deep

cultures, Ferrara, all of these places are very complicated cultures, their own establishments, their own societies, their own banking systems, their own ways of doing things. And they all integrate together in a very complex way. Rob one, welcome to the Duran community. Midwest Boy asks, what does Sofer refer to Tom? I'm not sure. I was going to work. Well, it's the alternative to LIBOR, isn't it?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, this is my thinking on it. Yeah.

Signus 424, welcome to the grant community. Commander Crossfire says the only place democracy is acceptable is if America's candidate is electable. Well, this is if you're talking about the, um, um, um, outside the United States. It's true. I mean, not just America's candidate, but the Western political classes candidate. If that person wins, that's a democratic election.

If that person loses, then it is a disaster. I'm reading the articles and editorials today in the media in Britain about the election in Georgia, Georgia, make you feel ill, actually. Yeah. X-FX, thank you for that. Super chat. Sherry says, thank you, Alex and Alexander and everyone.

When you fall off the saddle, get back on it. Marcus Aurelius. That's true not. And Peter Bogdanov, thank you for that super sticker. Alexander. I think that is everything. Let me do a quick check and make sure we got all the questions. Your final thought.

As a... We covered a huge amount of grounds in this program. And I mean, it's interesting how everything does connect. It was Lenin who once said that everything is connected and it does. In war economics. I still can't get over the fractures. I said that the Pentagon appears to be a general force for peace and stability. that does seem to me

an astonishing thing given its history of the kind of things that you associate with it but anyway there it is whereas an extraordinary program full of insight about lots of different things

yeah Swarles Super Chat Zaryl I read it just in time to donate great to see Tom on the Duran that's how we that's how we ended the segment with Tom with that super chat

thank you Swarles for that amazing super chat that is everything Alexander Thank you to everyone that joined us on this show with Tom Longo. Tom's information will be in the description box down below where you can follow Tom, as well as a paint comment. Real quick, Alexander, that's from Samuel.

I am from Central Italy, and I can confirm. Thank you for that. Thank you for that. Thank you to our moderators, Zareel, Brett, Peter, T. Jordan and I think that's everyone. Sorry, oh, Peter, T. Jordan, Brett. That's everyone moderating, right?

I think so. I hope I didn't miss anybody. Thank you to all the questions, all the comments, everyone that watched us on Rockfinn, on Odyssey, and Rumble, and on YouTube, and a big thank you to everyone that joined us

on our locals community. The durand.com, Alexander, should we end the show? Absolutely. Well, I think we should. And get down to doing more videos and we've got some videos to publish. Yeah, absolutely. All right.

Take care, everybody.