The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin REFUSES To Crash - Even Peter Schiff Admits He’s Surprised

Episode Date: October 11, 2026

Peter Schiff joins the show to explain why he believes rising Treasury yields, soaring U.S. debt and persistent inflation are pushing the economy toward a major financial crisis. He questions whether AI can solve America's debt problem, debates Bitcoin versus gold as a hedge against currency debasement, and warns that changing political dynamics could create new risks for Bitcoin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGEMGEMP operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. What if America isn't HECONs? heading toward a debt crisis. What if we're already in one and most people just haven't realized it yet? Today, I'm talking with Peter Schiff about why he believes the bond market is already broken. Bonds sell off no matter what now. Good news, bonds go down. Bad news, bonds go down.

That's because bonds are in a bare market. We're six years into this bare market. The bull market lasted 40 years. So this one could last at least half that long. Interest rates can move dramatically higher. We have a 40 plus trillion dollar national debt. Right now, they're looking at 5% interest. rates, but in a couple of years, they can easily be 8% or higher.

And America may be approaching a debt spiral that even an AI-driven economic boom can't solve. We're already broke. We blew our money before anybody even knew about AI. We're coming to a situation where AI requires this massive capital investment, and we don't have the money. We also get into inflation, the Fed, gold, the dollar, housing, and of course, Bitcoin, which Peter admits has held up far better than he expected. So what breaks next and how should investors prepare? Let's go. Let's go.

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Products might not be available depending on where you are. Talk to a financial advisor. I don't generally pander in conspiracy theory, but I want to ask you a question about job numbers, inflation, and the Fed. Because it seems that the numbers they need conveniently appear anytime they need them. Last week, we had a soft inflation print right after the Fed hiked, putting less pressure on the Fed, arguably to hike again. but if you look under the hood, they actually recalculated how they do PCE, which is something they've done in the past.

And of course, we had soft job numbers come in way below expectations. And of course, those expectations are set by somebody. And they revised down the last three months as they tend to do when nobody's looking. So my first question is, how do we trust the data that the Fed is using? And is the Fed actually using that data? Well, first of all, you can't trust anything that you get from the government. I mean, that should be obvious. The government is not exactly a neutral party here.

You know, it would be like having our children grade our own report cards, their own report cards, and then trusting their grades. So you always got to take the numbers with a grain of salt, especially the jobs numbers, because whatever they are, they always revise them down. And that obviously isn't random. because if it was a random era, half the revisions would be up and half the revisions would be down. But I'd say at least 80% of the revisions, if not more, are down. So clearly there's some flaw in the way the numbers are calculated so that the initial number, which everybody pays attention to, is always higher than it ultimately ends up being. That's probably baked into whatever methodology they use.

And the same cooking of the books happens with inflation. The CPI has been changed so much over the years, over the decades, that it no longer has any relationship to the CPI of the past. And it probably has very little relationship to actual consumer prices. It's some sanitized version of consumer prices, where they rise a lot less than they actually are. Now, whether the Fed understands that these numbers are just publicity stunts and ignores them, I don't know. You know, because I don't trust the Fed either.

So I don't think anybody in government gives us the truth. I think we get propaganda from the government. And I would throw the Fed in there, even though technically they're outside the government, that they operate as if they, that they were a part of it. So I think that you have to try to look towards non-governmental measures to know what's really going on. The same thing happens with the unemployment. You know, they've so changed the way they calculated that people that would have been considered unemployed in prior decades are not counted anymore. So it's not even apples to apples when they say, oh, the unemployment rates, the lowest has been.

in 50 years, well, not if we measure it the way we did 50 years ago or 40 years ago or 30 years ago, because if we use the old measures, we're nowhere close to a low. So the numbers are very deceptive. And interestingly enough, Donald Trump himself recognized that. That was a big part of the 2016 campaign that the numbers were fake. But of course, now that he's part of the government, that he criticized, he's become the master of the swamp that he wanted to drain. Now all of a sudden, the numbers are real, right? And that conversion happened during his first term. His first year in office, he basically repudiated everything he said in the past

because he pointed to the same phony numbers as evidence of how great, you know, his policies were working. And when a reporter asked him, but you said the numbers were fake, he said, well, they were fake now. They were fake before. So because listen, so obviously that I asked this because the Fed hiked rates for the first time in years and obviously that spooks markets to some degree. Although to be honest, I don't think anybody cares what the Fed does anymore because markets seem to barely react. And the bond market certainly is not doing what the Fed or the Treasury wanted to do.

But either way, you would imagine that if the Fed was looking at these numbers, they wouldn't have hiked in the first place knowing that it was likely. the job numbers of PCE were likely to come in soft. Well, even though the PC numbers are soft, they're still well above the Fed's 2% target. So rates are still too low. The data, as bad as it is, still supports more rate hikes, not fewer rate hikes. And even the rate hikes that the market is assuming are not enough given how much inflation is actually out there. because again, the CPI is sugar-coding it.

It's a lot worse to the extent that the 2% target is what they really have as an objective. We're a lot further away from that than what they think. Now, maybe their objective is just to have a phony 2% inflation rate, even if it's really three or four, right, because the numbers are understating it. But I don't think the markets really were spooked at all. I mean, here we're talking, the S&P and the NASDAQ record highs. Now, beneath the surface, the average stock is going down. So stocks are being impacted by the rate hikes.

It's just that you can't see that impact if you just look at the indexes. Because the indexes are dominated by a handful of companies that are being powered by the AI scenario that's developing or all the buildout. So you really can't go by the stock market at this point. It kind of marches to a beat of its own drum. The bond market continues to sell off. And I think that is going to be the situation, regardless of whether the Fed hikes again or not. I think the bond market is in a bare market.

It's been in a bare market since 2020. That's when it started. That's also when a 40-year bull market in bonds ended. And this is a game changer for the U.S. economy because it means ever-increasing interest rates, which also means ever-increasing mortgage rates, which is going to destroy the housing market and the economy because a lot of the consumer spending

was a function of serial cash-out refinancings, where homeowners, every couple of years, if their credit card debts were too high, or they had an auto loan, or they ran into trouble, they can always tap the house as an ATM. They can do a refi. The house went up because of falling interest rates so they can pull out some equity and then refinance and still end up with a lower payment because the rate was lower.

And so that was really driving consumption. Well, that's gone. Nobody's going to be able to cash out any money from their home equity because nobody can refinance their mortgage without dramatically increasing the payments. So the refi option is gone to both extract cash to spend and to lower your monthly payments. And those monthly payments are going up now, even if you have a fixed rate mortgage, because your maintenance costs are going up, your insurance costs are going up, you know, everything associated with homeownership is getting more expensive,

even if you locked in a fixed rate mortgage. And of course, not everybody has a 30-year fixed-mate mortgage. There are people that had five-year adjustments that are about to reset. They're going to be, you know, much, much higher. There are still people that have shorter-term arms. They're there. So the U.S. economy and companies are in a lot of trouble because we're not riding the wave of falling interest rates anymore. We've got the headwind of rising interest rates. And this is also very problematic for the U.S. government because we have a 40-plus trillion-dollar national debt. And, you know, right now, they're looking at 5% interest rates, but in a couple of years, they can easily be 8% or higher. If you look at where the market went

during the bull market, the 10-year Treasury was 16% in 1981, and it bottomed out at 60 basis points in 2021. So, you know, a huge decline. And now we're back up to five, 0.3-ish, but we're still way below the 16% where we started. It's kind of ironic that, you know, historically, we're probably at an average. It's not really that historically, but the context and the situation is so much worse for the rates to be where they are. Well, the rates, the rates right now are lower than they were in the 70s, the 80s, or the 90s. on lower. They're higher than the average was for the 2000s and the 2010s. But those decades were more of an aberration than reality. And, you know, I look at it, we went through

three periods and now we're in the fourth period. And you can think about it as like a, you know, rectangle with four quadrants. And we started out in quadrant one, where we had low, debt and low interest rates. And that was great. We had a lot of savings. The government didn't borrow a lot of money. The budgets were in balance, you know, roughly. And so, and if you needed to borrow money, it wasn't expensive because we had a lot of savings. Then the debt really started to shoot up in the 60s and the 70s, really, and then the 80s. And then the 80s. And so, So debt went up, but we still didn't have that much. It was still manageable.

But what happened was the market started to worry about the increase in debt and the inflation that could ensue. And rates went way up. So then we went from low rates and low debt to low debt and high rates. And the high rates were affordable because we didn't have that much debt. So, yeah, we can afford to pay, you know, 16% on a 10-year treasury because we didn't have that many outstanding. And most of the debt was locked up. So, you know, it wasn't affecting the existing debt. And people could afford an 18% mortgage because mortgage rates got to 18% in 1981 because they didn't have to borrow as much money.

They put 10% down or 25% down. So they didn't borrow, you know, the whole purchase price like they do now. And the prices were a fraction of the current price. So it was okay. Then following the real 2008 financial crisis, when debt really exploded, interest rates collapsed. That was like Quadron 3. We went from even higher debt, but we got low interest rates. And it was the low interest rates that enabled the higher debt to be financeable.

But I was always warning in contrast to the government, the various Fed chairs and Secretary of the Treasury, I was always worried because I said, hey, the debt is permanent, the short-term rates are not. And so you can't say there's no problem here because we can afford to pay the interest, because the interest rates could go way up and then we can't afford it. But according to all the government officials, they said, yeah, As long as we can cover it now, it's no big deal. And so they would say that the debt is not unsustainable. It's just the path that's unsustainable.

And I would say, well, that's a distinction without a difference because if we're on an unsustainable path, eventually we're going to arrive at an unsustainable destination. The question is when? That's where we are now. Because now we're moving from high debt, low interest rates to high debt, high interest rates. and that is a quadrant that is impossible for the U.S. economy to exist. We're not going to be able to do it.

I mean, if you think about a couple years from now, when the national debt is $50 trillion, you know, what if the cost is 8% on $50 trillion? That's $4 trillion a year, just in interest on the national debt. Now, where to how are you going to get that money? obviously we're going to have to borrow it, which would add roughly another $3 trillion to the annual budget deficits. Right now, they're already close to $3 trillion. So we would be running $6 trillion a year budget deficits.

So we'd be going from $50 trillion to $60 trillion in under two years. And there's just no way that this can happen. Because then it's going to take more than 100% of $1,000. tax revenue just to pay the interest on the debt. That means the government would have no money for anything else. It would just be a transfer mechanism to take money from taxpayers and give it to bondholders. But there'd be no Social Security, no Medicare, you know, no national defense, no anything. So obviously, the rate at which this thing is spiraling out of control, we are headed for a massive crisis. I think the only hope appears to be.

an AI miracle. And that's what the president seems to be putting all of our chips on. We've got all in on it, that AI could be so powerful that a robot economy, you know, where machines and computers do everything for us more efficiently and cheaper than we do it ourselves. And the GDP just explodes that that's the only way that we can save ourselves. Yeah, but even if that happens, we still have 50 trillion or 60 trillion in debt. Yes, but the idea is that the economy will be so huge that it will be a tiny fraction. I mean, this may be just a fantasy. Obviously, it's a fantasy, and I find it so interesting because I would argue that people in power are not idiots, right?

I mean, Varsh is smart. Bessent is smart. And Besson's narrative changed seemingly almost over. Right. When he first came in, he had a comment last August, August 2025. This was in the Doge era when apparently we cared for about three months about the national debt. But he made a comment that, you know, they were laser focused on paying down the debt, that the debt was unsustainable. They said, he said this, you know.

And then a year later, almost to the day was the quote where he said, 40 trillion is not really a big deal. We're laser focused on growing our way out of them. Right. Yeah, they backtrack. They backtrack. They backtracked very quickly. You know, I don't think the talk about reducing to debt and Doge and, you know, was ever real in Trump's mind.

I think it was just campaign bullshit. It was just what he said to get the votes of the people who care about these things. And I think he had to at least, you know, carry out something in the early days to just make it appear as if he was fulfilling that campaign. promise. The problem is, I don't think Elon Musk got the memo that it was all just a joke. I think he actually believed that that Trump was serious. I think that was the source of the early tension and their relationship because he came to Washington with good intentions, actually wanting to cut government spending and he ran into a wall from Trump. It was like, come on, this was just a joke. This is all, you know, pomp and circumstance. There's no substance behind this. So that, that was a

And, you know, maybe initially Scott Bessett really thought, you know, yeah, we're going to do something about the debt. But the minute that Trump embraced the big, beautiful bill, you knew that they were never going to do anything about the debt. Because the big beautiful bill was just a bunch about more debt. It was about adding to the Biden deficits. It was about taking all the Biden spending that Trump and Republicans criticized during the entire 2024 campaign. and not only not cutting any of it, but adding to it, spending more than Biden was spending. And Biden did the inflation reduction act if you want the most gaslighting title in history of anything. Yeah, look, I'm not letting Biden off the hook.

Biden was bad, but so is Trump. And of course, I don't blame Biden for all the high inflation of 2021 and 2022. Trump, Trump did that. his policies and the Fed, they did that in 2020. The consequence showed up in 2021 and 2022. Inflation works with a lag. First, you create it by expanding the money supply with deficit spending and QE, whatever they want to call it.

And then later you get the increase in prices. So Trump was there when they created the problem. Biden was there when it became obvious because the consequence developed. But then Biden made it worse. And so Trump inherited that and now he's making it even worse for whoever succeeds him. It's probably going to be a Democratic socialist who's going to be the next president. But I agree that Scott Besson's, you know, a smart guy. You know, I mean, I'm sure he probably has a higher IQ than me.

I don't know what mine is. But I mean, maybe he's smarter than me, right? So I don't know that he believes anything he says. I think that all of these guys, I think, just kissed Trump's ass. And it really is a despicable sight to behold. Because it's not like Trump could have anybody killed. You know, the worst thing he can do is fire you. You know, he's not like this, you know, this king that you know, or, you know, like a communist dictator that, you know, you're afraid to criticize because you're going to be dead.

I mean, all that's going to happen is maybe you'll lose your job for telling the truth. but everybody's afraid to. Now, there are a lot of people in the cabinet that Trump is making rich. So maybe they don't want to criticize what he's doing because they're getting so rich off of all of, you know, the graft that's taken place in the Trump administration. But I know Trump himself, you know, Trump is either just a pathological liar who lies about everything. I mean, everything that comes out of his mouth is pretty much a lie. I mean, and I can tell the obvious lies.

But because there's so many lies that I know for a fact are lies, on stuff that I don't know, I just assume that that's a lie too. Because he has no credibility with me, given how grave the lies are and how many he's told. So I don't believe anything he says. but I still don't know whether or not Trump is actually lying or just completely delusional. But those are the only two possibilities. Even if AI, the future that you described with robots and computers doing everything for us, that's not a tomorrow solution.

That's a 5, 10, 15, 20 year down the road situation. and the well, I don't know. The people who are really in on this AI, you know, the narrative, the situational awareness, you know,

game changer kind of philosophy. This is all going to happen over the next couple of years. I mean, everything is going to be completely transformed. Now. So, but I just don't see. I just don't see how that's going to actually happen.

Yeah, but how much money are the hyperscalers and AI companies going to also have to raise and how much debt are they going to have to take on to reach that future, right? So you have the, oh, yeah, they're going to have to have a public debt, but you also are going to have unsustainable private debt in that world. Yeah, they're going to have to borrow tens of trillions. And that's why it's like, well, borrow from whom? Where is it going to come from? People, you know, they think that there's just an unlimited amount of credit available.

and what people don't understand is if we're going to spend tens of trillions of dollars on AI CAPEX, what are we going to give up in order to afford that? You know, what are we not going to do? What sacrifices are we all going to collectively make to allow this? And, you know, if it's going to drive interest rates up into the double digits, If we have to borrow so much money that rates are 30% or 40%, how can this be given how much debt we already have? It's just not. It's not. And I don't know, like the resources that would be required, the raw materials, the energy, the metals. you know, to do this.

Where's it all going to, you know, you just can't snap your fingers. And I don't know how quickly the robot miners could be out there or, you know, or out there, you know, drill it for energy or building nuclear power plants or, you know. But this, this AI future, I think can exist, but it's going to take a long time to do it. And even if you think, oh, this is the absolute best use of our investments. right now to just get this AI up and running to the point where, you know, we get their recursive self-improvement and we get the robots building robots so we can all sit, sit back and do nothing and just watch all this happen.

Really fat. It's going to take, it's going to take a long time. And it's not like we've got all this extra cash. Like, hey, we've, we've been saving our money over the decades. And now we have all this extra savings to finance the AI buildout. We're already broke. We blew our money before anybody even knew about AI. So we're coming to a situation where AI requires this massive capital investment,

and we don't have the money. And it's going to be funded at the higher interest rates that you described. Right? Yes. And I, you'd say, well, where is the government going to get the money? If interest rates go to 10, 20%, where's the government going to get the money? And they said, well, they're going to tax all the AI companies that are making so much money. They're not even making any money yet.

They're spending money. They're not paying taxes because they're writing everything off. So it all leads to massive money printing. Every single scenario, no matter what, leads to the same thing that they've always done, which is... Right, but if they print massive amounts of money, that doesn't solve the problem because then prices will go up. So if you print a lot of money, everything is going to cost more. So you can't pay for the AI buildout by printing money because then you have, you know, because you don't be able to afford to buy and think is the money will be worthless.

Yeah, so that's a classic debt spiral. But I mean, I guess that's the point. And to be honest, this is, you know, I haven't been around as long as you, but the bond market is calling that bluff, right? I mean, Bess Intert tried to talk it down. We all know that going from $3 billion to $6 billion in buybacks is a rounding error when you're talking about $40 trillion in debt. But they did try with the narrative, at least, to say, you know, we're going to basically

intervene in the bond market. They kind of indicated that there's a point of too much pain. I don't know if that's 5.2 or 5.3 or 5% or what it is. And the Fed, you know, is expected down the road to cut to help this problem, but none of it seems to help the problem. Well, the Fed caused the problem. And whatever they do at this point, it's just going to make the problem worse. Right. But ever since Besson came out and they announced their own operation twist, bond yields have risen by over 30 basis points. We were still below 5% on the 10 year. And yesterday we hit 5.35. The 30 year, this 30 year got to 5.7. So rates continue to rise. And then for a while, they said, well, if the Fed hikes rates, that'll help the bond market. That'll show everybody

they're serious about fighting inflation. Oh, they raise rates and bonds sold off anyway. And if you notice, bonds sell off no matter what now. That's what I'm saying. Good news. bonds go down. Bad news, bonds go down. That's because bonds are in a bare market. They're going way down. We're six years into this bear market, but the bull market lasts at 40 years. So this one could last at least half that long. Bare markets are usually quicker than bull markets because they move faster. But I would imagine that we would retrace the entire bull market. And again, as I said, you know, we started at 16 percent, um, treasurer. and 18% mortgage rates.

I mean, that's why look at the home builders. The home building stocks are getting killed. They're the lowest they've been, I think, in history in relation to the S&P, you know, where these home builders are. Because the whole home building industry, I think, is going to grind to a halt. I don't think that you could profitably build homes in America for the vast majority of Americans because the cost of construction with raw materials and labor and tariffs are now so high. And now you've almost got 8% mortgages, 7.5%.

We'll be 8 soon. I think we'll be 9, maybe by the end of the year. Nobody could afford to buy these homes. So you can't build them. Why build homes that nobody could buy? So the entire housing market's future rests on a crash in existing home prices. That's the only way anybody is going to be able to buy a house is if the current houses crash. But that sets up a whole new problem because when home prices crash, you know, we've already seen that movie.

What happens when home prices crash? People default on their mortgage. You know, you have a financial crisis. You got, you know, Trump was talking about privatizing Fannie and Freddie when they, you know, when they first got elected and we're going to take them out of conservatorship. they're likely to have to have another bailout before the end of his term the government, even though they're already under government control, the government is going to have to infuse massive amounts of capital into Fannie and Freddie to cover the losses on the mortgages

they've insured. Because a lot of these mortgages are going to go into default when real estate prices crash. That's why those stocks are down, you know, 75% plus from their peaks. after Trump ran them up, you know, doing a favor for his buddies who already own those stocks and we're probably smart enough to sell into the hype. Yeah. Scary. It's a scary world.

So what do you think in your estimation breaks first? You know, if you had the bond market, the dollar, the economy, all of them at the same time, because I've been imminently impressed with how many levers they can pull and buttons they can push to keep this thing going. Well, the bond market already broke. The precious metals market broke. Gold, you know, gold had the big rally from 2000 to 5,000. It's now back around 4,000.

But gold's clearly broke out. Silver broke out. It had the big run from 30 bucks up to 125. It pulled back, but now it's around 60. So it broke out from the $50 double top. So metals have broken out to the upside. Bonds have broken to the downside. The other two financial markets,

that haven't cracked yet are the U.S. dollar against other foreign currencies. So for the Forex markets and a stock market. The stock market may be the last one to break. I don't know. Although, again, beneath the surface, the stock market has already broken. 60% of the S&P 500 is in a bear market right now. That means down more than 20%. Even though the index itself is at a high, 60% are in bare market.

markets. And I think 86% are in corrections, meaning they're at least 10% below their high. So you've got a very small number of stocks that are making new highs and that are, you know, disproportionately represented in in the S&P 500 index. So I think this many stocks have already broken down. And I think they'll continue to break down and move lower. But when we, will, you know, the mag seven break? I don't know. But the dollar may crack first. I mean, that hasn't happened yet. I've been thinking that that would be a next shoot, a drop would be the dollar going down. And maybe that will happen as we get more weak economic data that kind of sidelines the Fed for many rate hikes. But the inflation data keeps getting worse.

Yeah, I mean, as bad as the dollar is, like where else would you rather be as far as current seats, right? I mean, the euros, China. I mean, everybody is in the same. Well, I'd rather be in gold, right? That's obvious, right? You don't have to, it's like you don't have to choose between those fiat currencies. You could take gold. That's the mistake that a lot of people made. See, my anti-fayat social club shirt right here. You know, we may be, well, I like gold as well. We maybe disagree on the end, the end asset, but we definitely agree on the problem that you need to get out of it. I just, you You know, like I said, I've been impressed with how many ways they have to keep kicking this can down the road.

But it's certainly, you know, and so it seems like a fool's errand to try to place a timeline on when it will all collapse because you look like a doomer. Right. Yeah, well, that look, I already look that way. I mean, that's how people dismiss me all the time. I'm a broken clock. I'm a chicken little, right? Just a gloom and doomer because I understand the problem. and I warn about the problem

and my warnings are meant to allow us to do something about the problem before it becomes a crisis. You know, I would contrast that with the warning that was issued, I forget, like six months ago exactly when it was by former Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson, who said that we need an emergency break the glass plan

to deal with the coming debt crisis when people don't want to buy our bonds anymore. I think he's specifically focused on foreigners no longer want to buy our bonds or start selling our bonds. He said, we need a plan to deal with that crisis. He did not say we need a plan now to prevent that crisis. Let's head it off. Let's act responsibly before it's too late. Let's cut government spending so that the markets will regain some confidence.

No, no. He basically just conceded that the crisis was inevitable, that we were going to do nothing to prevent it. And he said, we better at least have a contingency plan to deal with it because it is going to happen. As opposed to what we're doing now, where we've got no plan whatsoever, at least as far as I know, maybe they have a secret plan. But, you know, there's nothing that they've, you know, of course, if they had an emergency plan, they wouldn't let us know because they don't want us to know that they're even preparing for the emergency. because they don't want us to think that they're worried. Right. Because they would be afraid it would be a self-perpetuating prophecy.

Like if it got out that the government was preparing for a crisis in the bond market, that would create a crisis in the bond market. So we talked about when Besson made the announcement about the bond buybacks and intervening basically in the bond market. When that happened, gold had a big bounce, if I recall. 4,000 to 4,600 or so. Obviously, dare I say, Bitcoin had its 24% move at the time and all of a sudden people started lumping them together again as the hedges for the debasement trade. I mean, I know I have a feeling how you feel about the Bitcoin, half of that, but clearly parts of the market understood that narrative and reacted very quickly. Yeah, I mean, there was an initial reaction. People, I guess, bought the, you know, the inflation hedge of their choice.

So money came into gold, money came into Bitcoin. Interestingly enough, gold lost pretty much the entire rally. Yeah, sold it on all of the tough talk from the Fed about raising rates and fighting inflation. Bitcoin, on the other hand, held on to its gains. Now, prior to that, gold had, you know, was, you know, had a big move and then a big correction. Bitcoin never had the big move. Bitcoin, you know, had the big move a long time ago. And Bitcoin went way down.

So, you know, Bitcoin was down around 60,000-ish before that news. And now it's, you know, 85,000. So Bitcoin has held on, whereas gold, you know, had gone up to 5,500, then had fallen to about 4,000. The news did shoot it back up to like 46, 4,700. But now it's right back down to 4,000, whereas Bitcoin is not back down at 60,000. So Bitcoin hasn't given up those gains, which has surprised me a bit because I expected Bitcoin to go down.

So I don't really know what's holding it up. I do expect it to go down. I do expect it to make new lows. I just would have thought it would have happened already. Yeah, so I find it curious that it was clearly that narrative that sent them both up and that gold has retraced and that Bitcoin has not. I mean, you said you don't know why. Is it possible that Bitcoin is just doing the animal spirits thing again with the four

cycle and is ramping up for yet another self-fulfilling prophecy where, you know, it's the time of year and the time of the four years where Bitcoin just goes. Because listen, you don't know. I mean, look, maybe it was a technical thing. Maybe there were shorts that were covering. I mean, short squeeze, but that only got it to, you know, 72. Factually. You know, there was a lot of stuff going on with strategy. You know, it looked very vulnerable to a meltdown. Maybe there was more shorts there. And, you know, you know, strategy started, you know, buying back stretch and got the prices stretch back up near 100 again um back buying bitcoin again not a lot of bitcoin but it's you know it's just yeah it's just like they sold at the bottom so yeah

yeah i mean but it's it's kind of like it's all window dressing right it did it's buying it uh you know it's it's just to to show that they're buying it they're trying to you know get you know get the market up. So, but so it's more symbolic. Yeah. But that could have helped. You know, we had, but, but,

you know, I think that what's holding up Bitcoin is the same thing that's holding up, you know, the, the, the, the, mag seven.

And, you know, I think it's all part of the tech move. You know, I know that a lot of the Bitcoin proponents have somehow, you know, hitched Bitcoin to the AI wagon. They try to portray it as like, well, this is the, this is the money that the AI is going to use, you know, it's going to be a digital world. And so they're going to transact in digital money. And so they're going to use Bitcoin. And they're going to use stable coins. I agree with that narrative. I just think they're going to use

stable coins or, you know, say it for obviously, or they would use a tokenized gold. I mean, they don't have to use Bitcoin. But, but, but yeah, I mean, you know, there, there, there was, a rally. But the interesting thing is the rally stopped. So, I mean, Bitcoin went down and then went sideways for a while. And then instead of breaking, it rallied. But now it's going sideways again. So is it forming another top just the way it formed that bottom? And, you know, where is the real break out or breakdown going to be? I think that another factor that's going to hurt Bitcoin is going to be the midterm elections. Because I do believe that the Republican Congress being very pro-bitcoin and pro-crypto was a net positive for price. And I think the reverse will happen

when you have a hostile Congress because the Republicans have politicized Bitcoin in a way that it never was before. So Bitcoin is a Republican thing now. And so we both agree it shouldn't be, correct? Well, I mean, in theory, it should be in that in theory, No, if there's a fiscally responsible party, but there isn't. Right, but in theory, right, the Republicans are the more anti-government, free market. I want the government out of my business. And, you know, so the original spirit of the early bitcoins was that libertarian, free market, anti-government, let me get out of the system kind of mentality.

So they should have more in common in that respect with the Republicans. But obviously that's not really. The Republicans now don't stand for that. That's all BS. But the reason it became politicized was because Trump's campaign was financed in large part by the crypto industry. And Trump overwhelmingly won the crypto vote by promising to do things specifically to enrich people who own Bitcoin.

You know, I'm going to establish a Bitcoin. We're going to use taxpayer money to buy Bitcoin. We're going to make the United States the Bitcoin capital of the world. I'm a Bitcoin president. I have a Bitcoin cabinet. I have a crypto czar. All the Bitcoin people were enthusiastically supporting Trump because they thought that Trump would make them rich because Trump was going to drive up the value of Bitcoin. And then the Republicans now are antagonistic because now they see that Bitcoin is a source of funding for Republicans. a source of votes. So now the Democrats are anti-Bitcoin just for that reason alone. Forget about anything else. And so they're going to be very hostile. They're going to go after Trump's donors. They're going to go after the industries that support him. They're going to go after his voters, right? So they're going to do whatever they can to make things difficult for that industry. Now, Trump is still the president, but he won't be president for much longer. But a lot of this comes out of Congress. So I think that the tables are going to turn and Washington is going to be,

you know, more of an enemy than a friend when it comes to Bitcoin. I was having a conversation with Dennis Porter recently, but there's a world, a very likely world where Maxine Waters is the head of the House finance, you know, or whatever the name of the committee is, and Elizabeth Warren is the head of Senate banking in three months. Yes, and they are very, very anti-Bitcoin. Now, some of the reasons they're anti-Bitcoin or some of the reasons that I'm against Bitcoin, but that's irrelevant.

You know, because if they were getting the Bitcoin money, they would be for it. I mean, everybody sells their soul to whoever bids for their support. Yeah, let's not pretend that Elizabeth Warren is anti-Bitcoin for any other reason than the funding from the, you know, banking lobby or that she just doesn't believe anybody. Yeah, look, the question is, can the Bitcoin lobby quickly, you know, change, decide their backing and start funneling a bunch of money over to the Democrats,

you know, and say, oh, okay, now we're with you guys. I mean, I have a slightly less cynical view. I agree, actually, with almost all you said about the crypto lobby, but I do think that there was an element of survival there, too, and not just the idea that they would enrich themselves. I mean, the last administration was factually trying to kill the industry, right? So I think the crypto lobby was born out of a need to survive more than it was out of Let's say, look, I'm not saying that, look, you know, the, I'm against government regulation in general.

I think we want more free markets. But what I don't like about what the government is done with crypto is they endorse it and embrace it. I don't like that either. You know, I don't want the government. I don't want the president of the United States out there, you know, saying buy Bitcoin, never sell your Bitcoin. Bitcoin's going to, you know, a million. I don't want the government backing it. I don't want, I don't want a strategic Bitcoin reserves.

I want the government to stay neutral on these things. I don't want the person launching meme coins. And well, that was, well, yeah. And obviously that was one of the worst things that he did is he basically took advantage of the people that, you know, that had supported him in that, in the industry with the launch of those BS tokens. But, you know, people were dumb enough to buy him. I mean, what are you going to do?

You know, he took advantage of, of that. But, you know, and he made hundreds of millions of dollars or over a billion dollars. I mean, his family members made a ton of money on it. And then, of course, he pivoted Donald Trump media to a Bitcoin treasury company. So he backed it that way. His kids, you know, they started Liberty Financial. And they, you know, they basically became crypto people. And that's part of the reason that a lot of people wanted to invest in crypto because they

wanted to ride with the Trump's. They figured, hey, the Trumps are now in crypto. They run the government. They're clearly going to stack the deck in favor of their own crypto investment. So that's where we want to be. So the government is skewing the playing field. And I remember, and you're laughing, the early days after Trump won, all of the PR, all the pumping of Bitcoin that drove it up to $126,000. It was all based on the Trump camp, you know, the administration and the strategic reserve and a Bitcoin.

president and a Bitcoin-friendly Congress and all this stuff was going to happen. They were really selling this and they were selling Trump's involvement in the industry. I'm not laughing at what you're saying. I'm laughing with you in this case. No, I'm not laughing at you at all. Listen, I obviously I'm a bit coiner, but I think I was probably the most hypercritical person of the meme coin and then of their involvement throughout the time. I also, I hate it.

And what's funny that I was kind of giggling sadly about is that everybody thought, they would be enriched themselves by riding the Trump wave because Trump was going to pump the tokens. But in fact, what the family did was earn all the money on the fees, which was not directional. So the beam coin and World Liberty Financial and all these things going down, earned them more money. And they never had to actually see the assets go up or sell any of them. Well, they did. I'm sure they. That didn't matter. They were making all the money by going to zero and earning fees, sadly.

Yeah, I'm sure they dumped. enough of them early into the market that they made money that way too. But you're right. They make money all the way down. They didn't need it to go up as my point. They didn't need it to go up and people thought. Of course. Yeah. But what I also didn't like about it and I was critical was I thought it opened up a very easy way to bribe the president legally. You didn't have to give him money.

You have to buy his tokens. And you buy his meme coins and then just show him your wallet. And that was, you know, then you could, you know, you could get a favor from the president. And pretty much it's all pay or play in the Trump administration. Either you join one of their clubs, you join Mara Lago, you join his kids club, you know, the Capitol Club in Washington, D.C. You know, you subscribe, you know, to early access to his truth social posts. Or you just dump money in one of his kids' hedge funds.

I mean, countries all around the world are now investing money with the Trumps. They're all his clients, every one of them. All these foreign countries. are paying the Trumps. Now, are they doing that just because they think the Trumps are the, you know, are the greatest investors or are they buying something here? Are they, are they expecting something in return for, for patronizing all these Trump businesses? You know, this is on a higher level than, you know, the Clinton Foundation back in the day

what they were talking about that's charitable foundations that maybe were funneling money to the Clintons or, you know, Hunter Biden selling his art. you know, I mean, this is so much worse. And it's on such a bigger scale. You know, the Trump's, the Trumps are making so much money off of his presidency. And then all he says is, well, I'm not taking my $400,000 salary. So that proves I'm not in it for the money. Obviously.

When you're making billions of 400,000 around the year. Listen, I know we only got five minutes left. So I want to pivot off the Trump and Bitcoin and just ask you a question, which is assuming that's everything we've discussed. here is the path that will likely be taken. What do you think the average family should do to protect themselves if that's what's coming? Well, what I've been saying the average family should do for a long time is stock up on stuff. You know, everything you need is going to get more expensive. So you might as well buy it now as long as it's not going to perish. As long as it has a long

shelf for life and you got room in your house, buy the stuff you're going to need. Do your grocery shopping for next year now for, you know, those kinds of items, because if everything you want next year is 10% or 20% more expensive, that's a great return, tax-free on your investment. So, you know, take care of that. Then buy some gold and silver. I think that, you know, the breakout has been confirmed. I think 4,000 is about to support on gold. I think 60 bucks is about to support on silver. Not that you can't go below briefly, but I don't think there's a lot of downside in either metal. So people should go to shift gold. In fact, I got a new product there, T gold, which will ultimately, you know, be tied to a tokenized gold as well. That's part of what the

T stands for is tokenized gold. But for now, it allows you to buy gold and silver. We store it. The first thing we're going to do is give you debit and credit cards where you have the ability to immediately translate your gold or silver into purchasing power and buy things. But I'm going to to allow ultimately when I get the licensing and stuff so people can send and receive gold to and from each other so businesses can invoice in gold be paid in gold and people can have commerce in gold and eventually withdraw their gold in the form of a token if that's what they want whether my own token or whether one of the existing tokens like tether gold but but that will work and I think if you have bitcoin you know and you want to have some money

in Bitcoin. I mean, it's a gamble. It's not a gamble that I think is worth making. But if you're all in on Bitcoin, you know, you're too over-invested. You could go to take some of your Bitcoin and buy some gold and silver as a hedge in case you're wrong about what's going to happen with Bitcoin. And, you know, you could do that through shift gold. You know, we make it easy with BitPay to take your Bitcoin and buy some gold and silver. And for your people that have bigger portfolio, You need to diversify out of U.S. bonds for sure. They're going a lot lower. And you know, you can have some exposure to tech stocks.

I'm not saying you can't have any because it's possible that all this stuff is going to happen. But it's more likely that it ain't. And there's a lot of downside risk in these stocks and the overall U.S. stock market. So people need to diversify. They need to have more exposure to overseas markets, to value, to natural resources, to things that are going to do well if we have, you know, a stagflation. If we're going to be in the desert for a while before we get to the AI promise land, you know, you've got to have a portfolio that's going to survive. And we're doing that

at my asset management company, Europe Pacific asset management. So I would encourage people to check out the website at Europac.com, give us a call or fill out a form so you can have a consultation. And also, I have five mutual funds, which you could buy at any discount broker or directly on my website. But you can get the information about my funds. the symbols and then you can just buy them yourself at any discount broker you just got to make sure to buy the no load version each fund you know you have a load and a no load share class if you're not working with a broker you don't want to pay a load so just buy the advisor class which is no load love it peter thank you so much your time that went by really really fast it's always uh great to catch up

and this time uh we didn't even need to argue that much about bitcoin great thanks a lot scott i always tell people that you know even to the bitcoiners i know you love to trigger us it's great for But I always say if you just listen to 99.9% of it, we all agree. You know? And the true, well, the true believers, where I have the more in common or like, the more Bitcoin maxi you are, the more you have in common with me. Yeah, yeah. Check solid.

Thank you, Peter. All right. Take care.