The Wolf Of All Streets - Can America Go Bankrupt? | James Lavish

Episode Date: November 27, 2022

If you’ve never heard of a 'debt spiral', it’s time you did. America may already be in one, and there’s no turning back now. James Lavish is a hedge-fund manager and the author of The Informationist Newsletter. https://twitter.com/jameslavish #America #Crypto #Debt ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen  GET UP TO A $8,000 BONUS IN USDT AND TRADE ALL SPOT PAIRS ON BITGET FOR ZERO FEES! ►► https://thewolfofallstreets.info/bitget   Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wolfofallstreets   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io  Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe  Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c  The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

What is a debt spiral? Are we already in one? And more importantly, can America actually go bankrupt? I'm going to give you a spoiler right now and tell you, yes, America can go bankrupt. And James Lavish tells us how and what we need to do as individuals to avoid that fate. Well, welcome back. Extremely full room of thousands of screaming fans. See? See? The good news is we're capturing incredible content. And as you guys know, we're going to be releasing all of this slowly over the next few weeks on my channel. So we will be delivering this content to thousands of people one way or another, for sure. And with that in

mind, I know that we're at a Web3 conference, obviously, and there's a lot of justified optimism around the crypto space. But if you've been a Bitcoiner for a long time and have been passionate about it, then you're seeing a bit of the dystopian reality that a lot of Bitcoiners predicted coming to fruition, certainly with governments, the Fed, central banks, and monetary policy. And James has been sounding the alarm on this for quite a long time and has written and spoken, and made some very compelling arguments, comparing effectively governments to businesses. And when we look at business in context,

seeing what the governments are doing, realizing how dangerous it is. And so the topic, very lighthearted topic, can America go bankrupt? And I'm just going to go ahead and start the conversation and pose that you had a very compelling thread about debt spirals. Maybe we should start there. Yeah. The answer is yes, unfortunately. Well, you know, you talk about the governments and how they're the Fed is they're they're managing fiscal policy. But really what they're doing is they're manipulating. They're manipulating the money and that's the problem. And so what we see is these great booms and busts.

And the problem is though, just like you said, is the government's supposed to be run kind of like a company would be run, right? So you all know, we've seen it happen over the last few years. You've been hearing about it, you've been reading about it, but we operate in a deficit. The United States and most developed countries operate in a deficit. And what does that mean? It means we have to borrow money to pay for all the things that we have, right? So all of our entitlement programs, our defense spending, and then, of course, our interest payments on our debt.

So, Scott, first of all, great to be here. Thank you for having me. My pleasure. Thank you. So, the last two years, in the last two years, the government debt in the United States has gone up by $8 trillion. Just think about that for a second. $8 trillion, okay? And it is now standing, it just crossed, yay us, we just crossed the $31 trillion mark of debt in the United States. Absolutely mind-numbing that we have that much debt on our books, right? So the problem is, okay, let's put that in context for people. So at $31 trillion, that's about $100,000 of debt per person in the United States, per citizen. Now you add all the unfunded liabilities, your social security,

your Medicare, your Medicaid, that's another $170 trillion of debt of unfunded liabilities, your social security, your Medicare, your Medicaid, that's another $170 trillion of debt of unfunded liability. That equals about $500,000 of debt per person in the country. And just let that sink in for a second. How do we pay that back? Right? It sounds pretty problematic, doesn't it? So it does. So clearly we operate in a deficit, right? So just like a company, you're supposed to be looking at your, your revenues and your expenses. Right. And I see Mark Gasco over here is nodding his head. He knows he's like, he's been behind the whole way saying, Oh my God. Yeah. We're both saying the same thing a lot. So you look at your, you look at your revenues, right? Your GDP. And then you look at your profitability from that GDP and you take that

profitability and see if it covers your expenses, your, your, your interest expenses, right? Okay. So, um, if you're not operating properly and you're operating a deficit, what can you do? You can cut expenses, right? Right. That's political suicide. Governments are great at cutting expenses. They're really good at cutting expenses, right? You can stimulate your GDP, okay? So think war, right? But you start a war, it could come back home and then of course it can then destroy your profitability, right? And then the third thing you can do is you can raise taxes. Okay. So raising taxes also not very popular politically, and it, uh, it actually hurts profitability and your, your, your long-term

GDP because corporations, higher taxes, less profitability, they can invest less in their businesses. It hurts productivity. So your GDP over the longterm goes down if you raise taxes. So what do you do? Well, the easiest answer is you just issue more debt. Print more money. Print more money, issue debt, right? So you print more money to monetize it. And we'll talk about that in a second. But if we look at the United States, right? And we were talking about it before. And you just think about the components, the main components of our balance sheet and our revenues and our expenses, right? So you've got your revenues, your main revenues are your taxes. You've got capital

gains taxes. You've got corporate taxes. You've got personal taxes, right? So that's your main line item of revenue, okay? There's a little bit more beyond that, fees and penalties and estate taxes, but mainly like 95% of our revenue comes from those main categories, right? Okay. And then you've got your costs, which is your entitlements. That's your social security, your Medicare, your Medicaid, okay? Big number. And then you've got your defense spending, okay? So all of these, these are costs that are not negotiable. These are written in legislation, okay? Mandatory costs, okay? So if we look at right now, we look at where we are and you're looking at our balance sheet. What you're hoping is, and you're looking at our revenues expenses, you're hoping is

that after you take your taxes and you subtract those big line items, so that the entitlements and the defense spending, you're hoping that what's left over covers your debt expense, right? And if it does, then you're above a one times interest covered ratio, right? So you're just looking at your gross profitability as a corporation or country and hoping that you're above one, okay? So if we walk through our numbers in the United States, and these are from the Congressional Budget Office numbers, right? This is what they're projecting. And, you know, theirional Budget Office numbers, right? This is what they're projecting. And their baseline is pretty optimistic, okay? So right now they're expecting $4.8 trillion of revenue this year from taxes mainly, right? Of course, we know that's going

to go down. We'll talk about that in a minute. Then we've got $3.7 trillion of entitlement spending per year, and we've got about $800 billion of defense spending. So do the math on that. Okay. And that leaves you with $300 billion left over for your interest coverage, right? So you got $300 billion that you can spend on interest. Here's the problem. Our interest right now is at $400 billion a year. So our interest coverage ratio is three quarters. It's 0.75. And if we were a company, if the United States was a company, we'd be considered a zombie company because we're not covering our interest. And so what do we have to do? We have to issue more debt, right? And that's really the big,

major problem that we are finding ourselves in, right? So that's kind of where we stand, right? Now, the problem there is that we're in a rising interest rate environment, right? So the Fed is trying to fight inflation. And they're doing this by raising interest rates. So they want to crush demand. Raising interest rates, crush demand, okay? So what does that do? Well, it just makes our borrowing more expensive.

And the problem is we have about roughly a third of our debt comes due. It matures in the next 18 months. About half it matures in the next four or five years. Okay. So we have to replace that. Now, if you do the math on that $400 billion of interest expense over that $31 trillion of debt, that means our interest rate is about 1.3%-ish. Now, what's the 10-year today? It's just under 4%, right? So that's kind of your benchmark treasury that you're looking at where you have to refinance all your debt. Your 10-year's at 4%. So now take that $31 trillion and multiply it by 4%, right? That's a big number. Let's just say half it comes due and you have to pay $600 billion, okay, on your interest expense for half of it. That leaves

$200 billion. So it's $800 billion of interest expense right there. Okay. So let's put it this way. We'll compare it to like you're an individual and you've got credit cards, right? Okay. So you're a single parent and you're trying to make it and you've got your mandatory expenses. You've got your mortgage, you've got your car payment, you've got your food. And as you're paying for these, you're not meeting all of those obligations. And you need to borrow a little bit more. You've got two jobs, you know, inflation, everything's up. It's difficult, right?

So what do you do? You take out a credit card. Well, then you've got this credit card you're making payments on, on top of your mortgage, your car payment, your food, and any other expenses. Well, as that grows, eventually you're going to need to take out another credit card. And then that interest rate is going to be higher because your credit score is going to be lower. And you get into this situation where you have to take out yet another credit card. And eventually you just get into what

we call a debt spiral and there's no way out. You're trapped. And that's where we are in the United States. The Congressional Budget Office admits it. They have the numbers, they have the charts, and they show that they expect our debt to GDP to rise to over 200%. And they're delusional in their timeframe of it, but they think it's like 2050. It's more like 2030 something. Okay. So they show that that's going up. They show our interest coverage going way down. They know that we're trapped. There's no way out. So that's a pretty big monologue, but go ahead. Has a government historically ever been able to escape a debt spiral once it's begun? Okay, so here's the thing. No government that has had over 130% debt to GDP has ever survived.

No fiat, right? The difference is, okay, but we're in the United States. We have the luxury of issuing U.S. treasuries. The U.S. treasury is the reserve asset of the world. It's a global reserve asset. Everybody needs dollars. Everybody uses treasuries. you're in a developed nation and you issue debt in your own currency, you can print money endlessly to fund that debt, right? It's the countries that are emerging. It's the countries in Central America and South America that are not issuing debt in their own currency. They're issuing debt in the dollars. That's where they get in a lot of trouble. We're seeing it happen right now. And you're going to see countries fail. You're seeing hyperinflation in places like Lebanon, in Venezuela, in Argentina. You've seen these places just collapsing,

right? Well, the United States, we have the luxury of being able to print money, okay? So the answer is, I don't think that the United States is going to fail, at least not yet. It's going to take a while. We will be the last ones to go under. Now, that doesn't mean we won't go under because eventually our debt load is just going to be so gigantic and I mean, ridiculous that nobody's going to want to buy our debt. The state government's going to own all their debt. And I mean, we're seeing what happened in Japan right now, right? Okay. So let's talk about Japan really quickly. Japan has decided that they want, they want inflation to run a little bit hotter. So what are they doing? They're buying every, they've, they've stated, they're going to buy, the bank of Japan is going to buy every single 10 year treasury. That's that is sold on the market. They're

standing there buying every single one to keep the interest rate at 0.25%. Okay. So what does that mean? Now, as they hold an interest rate there, then you're seeing whoever sold that bond. Okay. Now has yen and they don't want to hold the yen so they're selling the yen and buying dollars okay so you're seeing the yen collapse the bank of japan now owns they have bought so much of their own debt they now own the bank of japan owns more than 50 of the issued debt think about that their jet debt to gdp is over it 250%. Is that right, Mark? I mean, that's about what it is. So they're in a spiral right now. And you're seeing the yen just escalate up, which is bad. That means more yen per dollar. It's up over 145. That's over 30%

in a year, right? And then their treasuries haven't traded in three days. It's been three days since the treasuries traded. What does that mean? That means nobody is willing to buy the treasuries or trade the treasuries at that 0.25%. The market has literally locked up. So can it happen? Yeah. Is Japan in trouble? I think they are. But they're also in a different situation because they're a net exporter. So they have the luxury of they can decay away their debt from the corporate level.

OK, so they just pay it down. So it's a little bit different. But the United States is, you know, it's kind of like the cleanest shirt in the pile of dirty laundry. Okay. And so we're going to be, this is going to go on for a long time. But the question is how, like if it just keeps escalating like this, how does it, how does it happen? Right? So right, the interest rate on the 10 years is 4%. Now, we hear a lot of people talking about the Fed and how they're going to, you know, Powell's going to have this Volcker moment. He's going to raise rates and just keep raising them. And, you know, because we have runaway inflation, we're trying to deal with runaway inflation. So, of course, they're trying to crush demand. The problem is supply side. They know that, but they're going to crush demand. They're going to put people out of jobs.

They're going to make it too expensive to buy things. And what's the best cure for inflation? Inflation. So, unfortunately, right? I mean, it's awful. But that's their plan. So,, right? I mean, it's awful, but that's their plan. So they're raising rates, but the question is how far can they raise them? Now, you know that we just talked about it. We have $31 trillion of debt. Half it's coming due in the next few years. Well, they can't raise rates to 10, 15, 20%. It would be ludicrous. We would be completely swallowed by

our debt load, by our interest payments. So what's the other choice? The other choice is to declare victory on declining inflation rate, even though it's not back down to 2%. Let it run hot. What does that do? Well, it allows the government to let GDP run higher on a nominal rate. That means that GDP is going to go up in dollar terms, even though the dollar's inflating, and then they're going to pay down that past debt with those inflated, cheaper dollars. They're worth less. And that's their plan. And so just get used to high inflation for a little while, because that's the only way they can do this. Now, the only problem is, as they're doing all this, they have to raise rates as quick as they can and then pause and

then come back down. So you're seeing the markets try to jump the gun on that. And every time a Fed speaker comes out, what did we have, 11 speakers last week? I mean, 11 speakers came out to try to manage the market because they don't want the market to get ahead of itself. So they want the market to decay a little bit. They want the market to come down a little bit in order to bring down inflation, but they know that they can't crush the economy into a depression because then the debt spiral is it we're trapped and we can't get out and then it all collapses. And so they're playing a game of chicken right now. And that's their, that's their, you know, that's what they're doing. If you've been following me for the last few months, then you definitely know that I've been

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So it's kind of a nonsensical comparison, right? Completely different environment. Yeah. I mean, he can't do it. And they know it. Now, the Fed and the Treasury, I mean, they're at arm's length. The Fed's not supposed to be a government entity, but it's politically driven. I mean, the governors and the chairman, they're appointed by the president, and they're nominated, and then they're approved by Congress. So of course they all have, you know, direct lines to political aspirations in DC. I loved your analogy of the prettiest, the cleanest shirt in the dirty shirt pile. I always taught, people always ask me, well, how's the dollar going up in this context? Right. Shouldn't the dollar be crashing? Shouldn't it be dying? Well, it's the same thing. It's, I always call it the prettiest pig in the context, right? Shouldn't the dollar be crashing? Shouldn't it be dying? Well, it's the same thing. I always call it the prettiest pig in the pen, right? Because it's just relative to

everything else. It's not actual dollar strength. It's dollar strength relative. But how does that end? What you described with the yen, we're seeing what's happening with the pound. We're seeing what's happening with the euro. How do they ever gain strength again against the dollar? Because obviously, the dollar has to go down for us to see any assets rise in value. They don't. Well, I mean, they will recover some. The developed countries will recover some unless they go under, unless Japan or the UK, Italy, the EU. I mean, I can see the EU breaking up in the next 10 years. I mean, I actually predict, I think Germany is going to walk away. Why? Because they're funding debt to the countries in the South, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece,

you know, and there you go. And that's a perfect example. Greece went through a debt spiral back in the Great Recession, right? So, and we saw it happen real time. They actually went into bank accounts and took people's money. They said, well, you know, we need to make the bank whole. So we're going to take your deposits. So it can happen in developed countries. Now, what they did is they wrote down their debt. They had austerity program. And now they emerge.

And Greece is actually in better position than Italy. Now the big worry out there is Italy. And Italy's on a wire right now. And I think that Germany is going to get tired of funding Italy endlessly. And that's all they're doing. They're just borrowing money. I wrote all about it in Target 2, and we won't get into it here. But the bottom line is, at some point, Germany is going to say, well, we know we're never going to be paid this money back. And so we're going to have to cut cord and go become an exporter again.

You talked about in Greece, how people effectively, not only were they unable to withdraw their own money, but the government basically came and took it. We've seen that clearly in Lebanon. Everybody's probably seen the videos at this point of people holding up banks literally with guns to get their own money out of the bank, not to rob the bank, to get their own money out of the bank. Right. And so that obviously tees up the next obvious question here, which is as an average person, as an average investor, if you assume that this is inevitable, how do you protect your own ass and your own assets? Right. Well, if you, you, you know, that the money printer go burr, right? I mean, it's just the money is going to be printed and that we know

it because they're going to keep issuing debt. The Fed's going to have to buy their own debt in more QE endless. It's just, we're going into the point of all of this. And this is what I want to get across. I don't think the United States is going to fail. If the United States fails, I mean, it is over. The whole financial system crumbles because everything is predicated on, everything is built on, everything is interacted with the US dollars. If you're not directly interacting with the dollar, you're one or two steps away. So we have the luxury here, again, in the United States to be able to deal with dollars.

But if you know that they're going to continue to inflate the money supply, they're going to continue printing money, you need to own assets, you need to own hard monies. And my favorite hard monies are gold, silver, and Bitcoin. coin is it's going to be adopted at some point. And there's going to be a switch in the investment world. And it's going to go from a risk on asset into a store of value. And when that happens, I mean, it's going to jump from a quarter of a million dollars per coin to millions of dollars per coin. And the point is, it's going to be a store of value and an asset that can be a reserve asset for some of these countries that their currencies are inflating away from them. So my hope is that the fiat world dies in a whimper, not in a crash. And that's, and I can see that happening because the U S dollar is so strong. It's got so much confidence in it. People don't ever expect if

you, if I walked out there on the strip today and said, you know, and told people about the debt spiral, they'd look at me like I'm crazy. Like it's not going to happen in their lifetime. Well, it might, you know, depending on how young they are. But that's the point is that you, I recommend people like own some, it doesn't have to be more than one or 2% of your money, but own something, get off zero. Because if it doesn't work, if somehow the, you know, CBDCs come to fruition, another terrible thing. I mean, we won't even get into that, but, and they somehow kill Bitcoin, which I don't think it's killable, but let's, I don't, I don't believe that anything is a hundred percent,

you know, coming from the risk management world. I just don't believe that anything's on a percent. Let's just pretend that it's, it's a non-zero. Okay. But if, if you just put one or 2% of, of your money into Bitcoin and say, it doesn't work fine, you still have 98% of your capital left. But if it does, that's going to be worth two, three, four, five times your whole portfolio in the future. It's just simple math. When you talk about Bitcoin reaching adoption in this scenario, are you talking about as a global reserve currency? Or are you talking about as just another store of value asset? I mean, you did sort of allude to central banks and countries theoretically taking it on as a reserve asset, much like they do gold. What's the end game?

Well, I think the end game is just that. It becomes a global reserve asset. And that's the idea. So you could have dollars and working on the rails and Bitcoin working as the global reserve asset. And that's the future. Is it in 20 years, 50 years? I don't know, but there there's just no way out of this debt spiral. We're in it. It's not going away. We're in it. It's not, I mean, this is where we are. So we have to have something that's hard money that people can trust, that they can store their hard work in. People are going to get tired in the next couple of decades. This does take a long time. Mark, again, nodding his head because we've been seeing this for decades on Wall Street. It takes

a long time, but people are going to get damn tired of working their asses off and having it stolen through inflation, all of their hard work and their money. If you can't, if you can't afford a house or, you know, you can't afford enough gold or whatever it is, you can't afford to buy physical gold or you don't know how to, it's going to be really easy just to buy it, get your money, buy a little Bitcoin and just put it away and store your value. And that's the future. For what you just described, I think this is the first time right now, probably since the COVID crash, that I would say there's a general awareness of this problem at all in my lifetime. Even the great recession, I don't think that your average person cared about inflation, really thought about

it. And I think this is the first time that you're seeing a widespread awareness that holy shit chicken's 25 dollars yeah because milk is 10 gas is six dollars not today but it was exactly and you know um i went to subway the other day on my way home from la i stopped at subway. And I had one sandwich and a bottle of water, $22. Are you fucking kidding me? I literally didn't know that it was that bad. I mean, so, but they've printed what? $6 trillion? $6 trillion. Where do you think it went? It went into people's pockets. It went to corporations. It went to loans. It went to houses. People's houses are up. So, they take out second mortgages and then they buy more things. So, yeah, it's not going away, Scott. It's here to stay. So, the topic was, can America go bankrupt? Obviously, we know that the answer is yes.

But before we go, what does that actually look like? Are we talking about Mad Max, dystopian future? You and I are hanging out at the back of a big rig going to Gastown? Or is it more like Greece and they restructure and we start the whole cycle again? All right. The answer is, I don't think the United States can go bankrupt without taking down the whole world. Okay. So we don't, that's not what we want.

Mad Max. Mad Max. So that's the answer. Can it happen? Yeah, of course it can. Of course it can. We can have an uprising and people just refuse to use the dollar ever again, you know, and then it's just hope you better, you better hope you own Bitcoin, better have some silver in your safe. obviously, Bitcoin review is a hedge against this nonsensical monetary policy. I guess, humor me for a moment. Is it possible that any central bank or the Fed could actually get control of the economy and fix the problems of their own making? Short answer, no. It's already gotten out of the control i mean you're seeing it it manifests all over the world now right we're seeing it manifest in japan you're seeing it

manifest in italy and now this the the the absolute lunacy that's going on in the uk now right so here's the problem you can't print energy okay we can't energy. So when you're in the UK and you're in Europe and you have these expenses that are going through the roof and it's making everything more expensive, everything is built on energy. Okay. You can't, you can't take the sun is only up half the day and the wind doesn't always blow. And so, you know, if you just decide that you're not going to use cheap energy and you're going to force difficult energy protocols on people, then you're going to suffer the consequences of that. We're seeing in Europe.

Okay. I digress. But the problem we have right now is that the UK is getting hit, okay, with high energy costs, super high inflation, rising interest rates. So what does that mean? You have pension funds that have a mandate to pay people a certain amount of money, but they can't meet that obligation because interest rates have been held artificially low for so long and they are mandated to own a certain amount of bonds. So what do they do? They leverage those bonds.

They use an instrument that leverages those bonds. And what you saw happen last week was when somebody comes out, when a chancellor comes out and says, oh, we're going to have this new budget and we're going to have these huge tax breaks. Right. What happens? People freak out. How are you possibly going to pay off these bonds? So they sell the bonds and they sold the bonds so rapidly.

It shocked the market and the chancellor had to come out and say, oh, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. Well, you know, on. Don't panic. And meanwhile, you've got the pension funds knocking his door. We have a margin call. And if we don't solve it today, we go bankrupt this afternoon. And so what do they do? Buy bonds. Money printer go burr, buy more bonds. At the same time, they're raising interest rates. It's absolute lunacy. They're QE and QT at the same time. Have we ever seen that before? I have not.

I've never seen that before. So, and that's where we stand. So we're already in it. We're in the debt spiral. And we're going to hear about more. We're actually going to see some, sadly, you're going to see some countries and currencies collapse in the next few years. It's reality. And the dollar is going to, it's just going to swallow them.

And that's going to get into a whole other conversation, the dollar milkshake. Brent Johnson from Santiago Capital, he has this theory that it's called the dollar milkshake theory. You haven't heard of it. It goes back to old, the drilling days where you've, you, an oil driller would drill down and drill a, a, a pipe long enough to go into his neighbor's. There will be property, right? We've all seen the movie at this point, right? Exactly. So he goes in and they, and he sips his neighbor's oil, right? That's where the idea comes from. But in this case, the pipe, the straw is the US dollar. So, right, the straw, you're sitting across the cafe and you've got your milkshake and I've got my straw and it's all the way across the room. It's so long they can dip into your milkshake and I can drink your milkshake. Well, that's the U.S. dollar. And the straw is all the U.S. dollar-based liabilities, Euro dollars, foreign payments in dollars, interest payments in dollars overseas.

And it will literally swallow every single currency into its own milkshake. And that's what we're going to see. And that that's, we're, we're starting to see the, the, uh, the beginning of that right now. Well, I guess the only thing this time that is different, although you're not allowed to say this time it's different, right? It's the foremost dangerous words in investing is that Bitcoin exists. Bitcoin exists. And it didn't in the past. So I guess to leave everybody with a thought is that you actually have an asset now where you can protect yourself and be your own sovereign investor and protect your wealth and not worry about any of this. That's right. And I'm not saying go 100% into Bitcoin. You know, usually keeping cash right now is probably smart, right? But get off zero. Yeah, we've even got Mark in the audience with hashtag get off zero. I've seen you tweet that at least a thousand times. So it comes full

circle. Well, listen, it's not the most optimistic of views, but I think it's reality and we have to be pragmatic. And it's important that people understand what's actually happening and don't bury their head in the sand. So thank you for presenting the facts and the case and everybody buy Bitcoin, obviously. Thank you.