TRIGGERnometry - Jim Rickards - “Trump Will Win Again”

Episode Date: October 28, 2020

Economist, lawyer and bestselling author Jim Rickards joins us for a 3rd time to give us his take on the US presidential election. Support TRIGGERnometry: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissin. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. And it does not get any more fascinating than the man we have back for you today. He was one of the people who predicted that Donald Trump would be elected in 2016 and he's got an interesting take on it today. Jim Rickards, welcome back to Trigonometry. Thank you, Constantine. Thank you, Francis. It's great to be with you again. It's great to have you back. Why don't we not beat around the book? Bush and get straight to it. Donald Trump, according to various polls, is down about 10 to 15 points

in the polls. There's obviously all sorts of things going on. A lot of people, even the people who were saying he would win four years ago are now backing away from that prediction. What do you make of that situation and who do you think is going to win as we sit here recording this mid-October? Yeah, I can't imagine there were very many people who said Trump would win four years ago back in way because there were only five of us. It was Pat Cadell. Steve Bannon, me, Michael Moore, believe it not as far left, but he was smart enough to see what was coming, and one or two others. Donald Trump didn't think he was going to win. Malani was very upset in an election.

She's like, what? I got to be first lady. By the way, she's been a fabulous first lady, so all credit to her, but she was as shocked as anyone. But basically nobody saw it coming. But in the meantime, Trump's had a lot of success, a lot of controversy, obviously always the center of attention. So there are far more people today who were willing to stand up and say, yeah, I'm with Trump, I'm voting for Trump, et cetera. And they, in this cycle, the 2020 cycle, you're actually the right, Constantine. They were saying that they thought Trump would win.

Now they're all running for cover. It's the typical Washington approach. You know, why provide leadership when you can run and crawl in the hole? And Republicans are worse than Democrats. At least Democrats, you would expect them to say Trump's going to lose, but the Republicans are turning to. I took some comfort from that because my forecast, and I want to be clear, it's model-based. Isn't everybody's forecast model-based? So the answer is yes, but they have pretty bad models.

My models have worked a lot better. So it's model-based. You know, you don't get very far in this business going with your gut instinct or your preference that has nothing to do with it. But says that Trump was going to win, but I was getting a little nervous because there were a lot of people who agreed with me. But just in the literally in the last five days, I'm isolated again, which is great. I feel more comfortable being out on a limb. That tells me I've got this right.

So we'll see what happened. It's going to be close. I would never dispute the fact that it's going to be close. And if you're an investor or someone who needs to prepare for all scenarios, and that's always a good idea, you can't rule out the fact that Biden would win. I could give you a whole playbook of what would happen if Biden wins. But you've got to call it like you said. Right now, I've got to try.

jump winning. I would like to say on election night, he'll certainly win on election night, but the problem is, this is a big deal, the election won't be over. I like the way they do it in the UK. They're well-round elections,

good exit polling, and they actually declare winners based on the exit polls, and then they count the votes, but it's quick and it's a very good track record. The United States is anything but, and this year it's going to be much,

much worse. I don't know how much you want get into it. I travel around the world a lot and I went into, you know, foreign, you know, media and analysts and just everyday people. And they always say, you know, Jim, we don't understand U.S. politics. I say, well, that's okay. Americans don't understand it either. But you can take people through it. So there's a lot behind the forecast. I don't, not sure which way you want to go or how deeply you want to go. Well, Jim, before we get into the integrity of it, which we do want to get into, because one of the

things I found fascinating you talking about four years ago was how the betting markets were and the forecasting was based on amounts of money as opposed to numbers of people. That was a fascinating thing. But before we go back to that, a lot of people will be watching this going, look, Jim Rickards, he's a conservative Republican. Of course he's going to say Donald Trump's going to win. This is just, you know, this is what he wants to happen. And that's why he's predicting it.

What do you say to those people? Well, I am in fact a conservative Republican. I think I'm more of a pragmatist than a, you know, by the book, conservative. But, you know, let's say I'm a right-leaning conservative. But I don't get paid and I don't have any success if I'm wrong. So from a, you know, serving the audience, providing a newsletter service, providing interviews like this, banging the drum for one side or the other just because I may have a preference. It doesn't get me anywhere.

It doesn't increase your, it doesn't improve your reputation, it doesn't enhance your standing, it doesn't serve the audience. So, and by the way, in 2012, I predicted Obama would win. I didn't vote for Obama, but I said it would win. And all of Wall Street was all in for Romney. You know, this guy, Paul Singer, Elliot investing, and many others, no reason to single out Paul Singer. They were certain Romney was going to win. And I actually put that into my model, because Wall Street,

Street has a really, really horrible forecasting record. I mean, ask yourself, do Wall Street see the 2008 financial crisis coming? Did they see the 2020 financial crisis coming? Did they see the pandemic coming? Do they ever get anything right? The answer is no. And by the way, if you go back to 2019, July 2019, my book, Aftermath at the end, between pages 288 and 293, it specifically mentions pandemic.

It says a pandemic, I had two other scenarios, three. I said each one has a certain probability. There's a hundred percent chance. One of them will happen in the next three years, turned out to be the pandemic. I spoke about armed, I spoke about social disorder, armed gangs in the streets, which is exactly what we have. So everything that's going on now was forecast in my book, my 2019 book, Aftermath. I have a new book coming out. Maybe we talk about that.

We'll tell you where we're going. But my point is, yeah, I have political preferences. I vote. But I don't always vote for the winner, but I don't have my own. success if I can't forecast the winner. Or just to be clear, before you jump in, Francis, whether you're right or wrong in your prediction, you're not getting paid by us either way.

Absolutely. This is a pleasure. I'm happy to do it. I'm just joking. I would say, yeah, we can go back and forth and all that, but I would say the audience wins. Jim, I've got a theory on what I actually think Trump's going to win. My theory on why is because here we talk about a shy Tory vote,

a shy conservative vote. People don't want to admit to voting conservative, having conservative values because of the backlash that they will face in their public life and so on and so forth. But you can almost times that by 10 as to being a Trump voter in that not only do you face ostracization by your peers, your family, you also risk losing your job. So why would anybody admit in a poll or otherwise that they're going to vote for Trump? Do you think that's part of the reason why we see these polls so skewed towards Biden? It's part of the reason that the polls are heavily skewed you right and that is part of the reason. I personally don't worry about it because I don't have a job. I mean, I'm just, I'm a writer. You can't fire me because I work independently,

so I guess I can say what I want. But you're absolutely right. It's gone beyond, oh, gee, maybe we'll have a heated water cooler discussion or a couple people at a cocktail party getting their tempers up. That's that's par for the course. But it's way beyond that. And you're absolutely right. People are being hauled before disciplinary committees at schools because they tweeted something innocuous. You know, pro-Trump, let's say, but not, you know, QAnon or Alex. I'm not talking about that stuff.

I'm just saying, you know, go Trump. You know, something very bland that being called before disciplinary committees because other students feel endangered. You know, it's a snowflake factor, as we call it. People are getting fired from jobs. They're being denied tenure. their publications are not being picked up by, you know, the right journals, which is critical for a career path in academia and the law for that matter. So the consequences are, the punishments, if you will, for a point of view, are more harsh than ever. And you're absolutely right. Why would

you speak up? Just go to the voting booth and do your thing. Now, I mean, said that, it's, you know, Francis, you said it's sort of a factor of 10. You're right about that. Let me give you new data that's just literally coming out, came up this morning and in recent days. In addition to the registered voter who is likely to vote, there's a distinction between registered and likely, let's take the likely voter who's likely to vote, voter for Trump, going to vote for Trump this time, but maybe doesn't talk to a pollster or doesn't voice that opinion. So in addition to that, the Republicans are crushing the Democrats in terms of new registrants, just going door to door.

We call it the ground game. You need tens of thousands of six to not more volunteers. It's the most thankless job in politics, but it's one of the most powerful. You go door to door, knock on doors, introduce yourself. And if the person's not registered and they lean Trump or you have a reason to believe that, you get them registered. You give them the forms or, hey, hop my car, I'll take it down to town, whatever you need. Or go to this website, et cetera.

But it shows up because certain states, including the key battleground states, actually allow you to register as a Republican or a Democrat or an independent. Now, some states don't do that. You're just registered, period. But some of the key states, including Pennsylvania and Arizona and Florida, you can actually indicate a preference on the Republican. So they get the data. This is hard data.

This is not speculation. And Republicans are beating Democrats two to one. in new registered voters, in particular, white non-college educated voters. That's the Trump base right there. You know, you can slice it and dice it any way you want, and I think it's too bad. We're so spun up about race, but there it is. But the white non-college, the high school graduate,

the high school dropout, the assembly line worker who never got any college, white and in particular men are, the margins are 100,000. Okay, so maybe one state was about 190,000 Republicans signed up and about 95,000 Democrats signed up. So the margin was 100,000. But these are states that Trump won by 10,000 votes. In case of Pennsylvania, 44,000 votes. So when you see 100,000 or higher margin in registrants for your party among a demographic that is just all in for Trump,

And that margin is bigger than Trump's margin of victory in 2016. That is a very good sign. The other thing is even more interesting, black women are registering Republican indicating that they want to vote for Trump. Now, is Trump going to get 50% of the black women? No. 40, no, 30, no. But he might get 10.

And in 2016, black women went for Hillary Clinton, 99 to 1. They got 99%. So the point is, if you even make it 9010, say you add 10 points. So what's that demographic? African-Americans are 12% of the population. Let's just say half-man, half-women. So you're talking about 6% of the population with a 10-percentage point increase. That's 0.6 percentage points in your column.

That's huge. I mean, when you're winning in these states by 2-10s or 3-10s, and here's a demographic that's coming 6-tenths your way, that by itself is used. So there are, without getting too geeky, maybe I already have, but the point is there are things like that. And just to add one more footnote, when you register a new voter, someone who's never voted before, but they're like, whatever, they're fired up, they're angry or they're motivated, whatever, they're going to vote and he registered them. They are not in the pollsters databases because they've never voted before. Now, I excoriate the pollsters for looking at, you know, all adults or register. those categories don't matter. You've got to look at likely voters.

So the first thing you've got to get right is let's confine to likely voters. You need a big enough sample, which means 13. I've done polling for presidential candidates where I've hired, you know, I'm not going to mention the name, but if I did it, you say, oh, yeah, that guy. Top, top posters. So I've worked behind the scenes, how you construct the questions, et cetera. And when you need about 1,300 respondents to have a good sign.

typically ballot poll. Well, some of these are coming out. You read the press releases. They had 800. 800 registered voters. I don't care about 800 registered voters. You know, half of them won't vote. And 800 is too small of a sample. So that doesn't tell me very much. The other thing here ad nauseum, and this goes back to where you started, you know, Biden's ahead 10 points or whatever. By the way, it sounds like, it sounds like six today on the same polls. Those are national polls. We don't have national elections in the United States. That comes as news to a lot of people, but we don't. We have 50 state elections and the District of Columbia, so just throw that in. So 51 separate state elections plus D.C. And when you vote, you're not even voted for president.

You're voting for electors who then go to Washington in December and pick the president. So that's how it works. I mean, it's fifth grade civics class. But the point being, national polls are meaningless. And let me give it, let me be specific about that. In 2000, In 2016, Hillary Clinton got 4 million more votes than Donald Trump just in the state of California, just California. Now, Hillary beat Trump by 3 million votes, which means Trump beat Hillary by a million votes in the rest of the country. You know, you got this big, big cluster of extra Democrats in California. Now, that will show up in a national poll. You should be, you know, they should be taking that into account.

But you can only win California once. In other words, just because you got four million more votes, you don't get to win it twice. You win it once. So the point being, those four million votes in the example I gave skew the national polls, but they don't get you any electoral votes. They're just wasted. You could win with 50% plus one. That's all you need.

So 50% plus 4 million is 4 million wasted votes. So forget the national. Look at the battleground states. Look at Michigan, big deal, Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio. Everyone knows what there. Look at those individual polls. And even there, there are a lot of flaws, but that'll give you a better guide. And Jim, I'm going to put the counterpoint to you that a lot of people are saying that Biden is going to romp to victory because people are sick and tired of Trump. They're sick and tired of his divisiveness. There's a rhetoric that he is racist. And, There isn't backlash against him happening in America. Handled the coronavirus very badly, many people would say. Is that all he got? Here's the thing. They've been saying that for six years on a daily basis.

So you're right that people say that. You're right that the media access and the amplifier and repeats it. And a lot of people have that view. You're absolutely right. The question is, isn't enough to win. I mean, leave aside whether it's true. I would dispute the substance of it. Donald Trump got the first Israeli Arab peace deals in 25 years.

Prior to COVID, COVID's a once in a hundred year, you know, the CepDAC, so you have to allow for that. But prior to that, he had higher growth in the Obama administration, lower unemployment. A lot of the job gains were two African Americans and Hispanics. But by the way, just to prove the point, a poll came out recently. And this goes back to, I believe 1984, Ronald Reagan was in it. It might have been 1980, Jimmy Carter, but it was Ronald Reagan early days, 80 or 84. And he was in a debate. And he said, my fellow Mergers, I want you to ask yourself a question, are you better off today than you were four years ago?

Now, he knew the answer was no. We had a bad recession, high interest rates, high inflation, high unemployment. meant so it was rhetorical question in the sense that the answer was no I'm not better off but he knew that but he asked the question there was like how am I better off no why would I vote for this guy so since then the pollster is a gallop in particular picked up on this every four years they poll are you better off than you were four years ago in a very recent poll meaning in the last couple of days 56% of the Americans said yes I'm better off than it was four years ago now and then they looked at other winners, not the losers, but the winners, Obama in 2012, George W. Bush in 2008,

et cetera. And their answer to the question was kind of 47, 48%, 46% in that range. They won with a below 50% yes answer to the question, and Trump's got 56% saying yes. That's a very good sign. And then when Biden was asked about it, I mean, it's a sad case. I mean, basically, You know, you might want to check the supplies in your bomb shelter because we're electing, well, we're voting on a dementia suffer. I mean, that's not a gratuitous claim. It's very clear, and a lot of physicians agree. Just to be clear, I'm not a doctor, and I haven't interviewed Joe Biden, but that's very

clear to anyone who's paying attention. So a reporter, you know, he doesn't answer many questions, but a reporter said, well, what do you think about this poll that says 56% of Americans say they're better off than they were four years ago? Biden said, well, they shouldn't vote for me. Now, I guess he couldn't do the math because if you tell 56% of the Americans not to vote for you, you lose. But Biden's reaction was, well, they shouldn't vote for me. By the way, that kind of angry response that response function, which is more anger than rationality is a symptom of Alzheimer's, early stage Alzheimer's. You know, he's picked fights all through the primary.

You call people, you know, you're a lion-dog-faced pony soldier. He calls some guy, he was a heavyweight. He said he called him fat. Probably meant to say fats, but he said fat. He's challenging people to push up contests. I mean, these are all, this is erratic behavior of someone who is suffering mental decline, and that's very apparent. So, but my point is, data points like that are very favorable to Trump.

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who runs a company called Pierham Logistics in the United States. And Colby's business, partner, Heinzzi, is Colombian. And that means that they can help in English and in Spanish. I don't know what that was, but I think it's the reason we need a big, beautiful wall. If you make products in one place and sell them at another, you need reliable transportation services at the right price. As a broker with hundreds of carrier options, Pairham Logistics offers you LTL, truckload and parcel services in the United States. The great thing about PIRHing logistics is that they're proactive and they will give you daily and sometimes even hourly updates on your transportation. What he's saying is they'll send you more emails than LinkedIn. And who wouldn't

want that? Payham Logistics are offering Trigonometry fans free supply chain analysis. All you've got to do is contact them and mention that you're coming from Trigonometry. Absolutely. The website is www.perham-lawistics.com. Are you going to spell it for them? Oh yeah, that's a good point. I should do. It's www. p-e-r-h-a-m-h-a-m-logistics.com. The question that I wanted to ask, Jim, is do you think that American democracy is in a state of crisis? Because there is a poll that is frequently that is used to demonstrate the fact that I think it's 30% of people on either side, red and blue, say that they wouldn't respect the result. of the election.

And do you think that we're going to see social unrest on the streets if either candidate has a very, very marginal victory? The answer is yes. I actually wrote an article. I have a newsletter or Strategic Intelligence.

It comes out monthly. It's a big list. It runs around 5,000 words. That's a decent-sized article. I wrote an article in February 2017, literally just a week or so after Trump was sworn him as president. And I said, I talked about the resistance.

And I said, they're coming at Trump. And I talked about what I call the five arrows. The first was, you know, scandal. Just get the guy so bogged down scandals that the White House becomes dysfunctional and you can't do his job. Two was the 25th Amendment, which allows for the cabinet and or a committee of Congress to remove the president from office, declare that he's mentally unfit, at which point the vice president. becomes acting president. By the way, that will be used if Biden wins. Kamala Harris will be acting president by the next summer. But by the anyway, they went after Trump on the 25th Amendment.

Third was impeachment. And fourth was just, you know, force him to resign, make it so miserable, so relentless, so one side is so unfair that the guy would just resign. The fifth one, and I say it delegately was assassination. But I've just written a book on the COVID pandemic. and I reached the conclusion based on a lot of evidence that's in the book, so I don't have to recite it now, that this virus did come out of a laboratory. It was a bioengineer and did come out of a laboratory.

I can't go so far as to say it was weaponized and released on purpose. It probably was an accident. But if a fatal virus came out of a Chinese lab and the president was struck with it and sideline for a few days, it's pretty close to assassination. So my point being, every one of the arrows that I predicted has, in fact, been thrown at Trump. And they have all failed. He's still, you know, he's still standing and here we are coming down the home stretch. But they're still trying everything they can think of.

Jim, let me try and use some of your past words on our show against you a little bit, because last time we had you on you talked, we asked you, this would have been probably April, May, something like that, in the middle of the pandemic. And we asked you whether Trump would be reelected based on what was happening at the time. And you said if the economy is good, there's a very strong chance. It's clear the economy is not going to be good, is it? Correct. Now, saying that he'll get reelected if the economy is good is not the same as saying he won't be reelected if it's bad.

True. So I'll leave it at that. The economy is not great. but a lot of the things, a lot of the decisive things happen at the margin. So is it getting better? Yes, it's not getting better. There's no V-shaped recovery.

You know, Larry Cutlow, nice guy, but he's the president head of the National Economic Council. I say they should give him some pom-poms because he's kind of a cheerleader for whatever. Very nice guy, really atrocious forecasting record. So the idea that we're having a V-shaped recovery, it's all good, is not true. And there's empirical data behind that.

In fact, everyone's worried about the second wave of the virus. Okay, that may happen. What we're seeing is a second wave of terminations and furloughs, a second wave of redundancies. The first wave was in March and April, obviously. Businesses shut down. They laid off employees. But some didn't.

Some got, the Congress enacted $3 trillion of support programs. One of them was the payroll protection plan. and basically said a small and medium-sized business could apply for a loan, get it, and the size of loan was based on your payroll, it was two and a half times your payroll. If you used it for the intended purpose, which was payroll and rent was allowed, but if you used it for the intended purpose, the loan would be forgiven. There'd be some paperwork at the end. You'd have to prove you paid it or whatever. Well, that worked. It worked fairly well for anyone who could qualify for it. You had to jump through some hoops. Okay, but the theory

was that when that came out in April and early May, it was a two and a half, two and a half month bridge loan to August. And the view was that by August, the pandemic would be over, the economy would be recovering, restaurants would reopen, they'd hire back to people, et cetera. None of that happened. Reopening did not happen. It happened in fits and starts, but then no sooner did they reopen, they shut it down again. When you go back, go, do you don't reopen? It's, you know, there was wishful thinking to think that I mean I live in a town I'm in New Hampshire we have it's it's kind of a restaurant magnum we have about a hundred really good restaurants in a small city but what we're seeing now is not that they shut down and the reopening without their seating and

you know 25% capacity we're seeing bankruptcies we're seeing closures now the entrepreneur may go somewhere else and someone else may step in and in the fullness of time maybe there'll be another restaurant but not now those jobs are not coming back and and because everyone's used up their working capital to get this far now they are broke and there is no new plan thank you nancy plosie and as a result we're getting a second wave of list we're seeing in airlines restaurants hotels casinos resorts um you know nail salons etc and people look down their nose at some those airlines is a big industry but uh people look down the nose at you know bars restaurants And the other salons are like, who cares?

You got 10 employees. In the aggregate, those types of businesses are 45% of GDP and 50% of total employment. So maybe individually, they're small, but in the aggregate, it's half the economy. If you whack half the economy, you're not going to get good results. Now, having said all that, the stock market is close to new all-time highs. That's a separate story. You'll go, how could the economy be so poor if the stock market's going up? And it's a very simple answer, which is the stock market has nothing to do with the economy.

It has to do with the market capitalization of like six names. They call it the S&P 500. I call it the S&P 6. If you take, well, it is. If you take Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, Apple, Google, so-called alphabet and Facebook, those six stocks are 40% of the market cap of the S&P. So if they're doing fine, the index is doing fine. The other 494 stocks, however, are nowhere near all-time highs, and some of them are barely off the lows of March 23rd.

So, and the ones I mentioned, by the way, are the least affected by the pandemic. You know, if you're digital, you're streaming, how is Netflix affected by a virus? Well, it isn't. How is Amazon affected by a virus? Well, business is booming because people are afraid to go out. So I understand why those names are doing well. But in a cap-weighted index, you get into a, recursive function where people bid up the stocks, and then the price goes up. And what happens next?

People buy them because the price went up. And then you bid them up some more. So you're in this feedback loop. They're going higher. The indices are going higher. The economy is not. But when you sit down at night and watch the nightly news or whatever, they say S&P, you know, near an all-time high. So it sounds all good. And Jim, isn't this virus and in particular the lockdown response to this, just going to exacerbate the gap between rich and poor, particularly in countries like America? Yes, it already has. And I think it's a very, very good point. The income inequality was pretty bad before this. It's worse now because the most vulnerable are the most affected. And I don't just mean in terms of getting the virus. Yeah, I mean, there are health care disparities in terms of how you get

treat it if you get it, but independent of people getting the disease, just the fact that you've been fired, or terminated, or laid off. And one of the things we're seeing, if you can, people are saving. Well, that makes sense. If you've just lost your job, and you've got to pay rent or pay the mortgage or a car loan or a student loan or whatever it may be, you're going to save more and spend less so you can meet those obligations. Even if you're better off and you've kept your job, you're doing what economists call precautionary savings, which is you don't, you're not stressed on a day-to-day basis, but you're like, well, maybe I'll be next. You know, maybe I'm getting fired. Maybe my business will go down. And so I will save more. Well, savings can be a good way to drive an economy, assuming you can find productive investments for it.

You can route it to investment and it's productive. That, you know, investment is part of GDP. but the problem is that has a five to 10 year payoff if you can find the projects, which is doubtful because there's no agreement between Democrats and Republicans on infrastructure spending. You know, where's the interstate highway system? Where's the moon landing? Where's the big ticket items that are going to absorb some of this investment? Well, they're not around right now other than the military to some extent.

But if you're saving and you don't have productive investment, that comes at the, expense of consumption. The U.S. economy is 70% driven by consumption. So what you have is a situation where maybe you have some investment, but maybe you just have savings in a liquidity trap, which best case has a 10-year payoff and worst-case, not much payoff at all, at the expense of consumption, which is getting crushed immediately here and now. That's the recipe. I actually expect, I distinguish, and we not have to believe this, but I distinguish between recessions and depressions. A recession is, you know, we all know what it is.

It's two consecutive quarters of declining GDP with a couple, you know, maybe rising unemployment, a couple bells and whistles. And we have the National Bureau of Economic Research, which is the official arbiter of when they start and stop. And they've already said it started in February, and I think that's right. A depression is different. Depression is a long-term period of below-trend growth. You can actually have growth in a depression.

The point is it's below potential. It's below trend. And your debt's going up. and your growth isn't going up enough. So we're probably out of the recession. The recession hit in the second quarter. So first, I was this big United States, but I think it's true generally of the world.

First quarter down 5%, because it really struck in March. It had a pretty good January and February, but March was bad enough to take it down 5%. Second quarter was down 31% approximately. So there's your recession right there are two back-to-back quarters of the decline. Third quarter, we won't have the numbers.

until I think October 28th. It looks like it's up 35%. So people go, wait a second, Jim. You know, down 31% up 35%, aren't you back where you started? And the answer is no. Go back to your fifth grade math book. If you start at 100, so 100% of GDP, that's your baseline. You go down 31%.

You're 69. So you've got to apply the 35 to the 69. That's about 20 or so. it gets you up to 89, you get round numbers, gets you up to 89, 89 is not 100. And then what about the fourth quarter? What if it's down there? What if it's 2%? You know, you're not getting out of this.

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is also trigger. I want to stay with Trump just for the moment. Jim, there are two other things that have happened since we last talk to you, which will undoubtedly have a huge impact on the election. The first one of them is the coronavirus. As we talked earlier in the interview, there is a perception among some people, I would argue many people, that Donald Trump has not handled it well. Over 200-something,000 Americans have died. A lot of people think his handling of it was involved in that figure, in that very high death toll.

And the other thing is we obviously had the protests in the wake of the George Floyd situation. we don't know exactly what happened there, but obviously, you know, visually it looked very bad. And there was protests and all over the world. There are riots continuing across America on the daily basis. And that is obviously something that may drive a lot of people into Trump's hands because they feel like they no longer have security and safety in their own lives. So how will those two crucial elements play in this election? Well, the first one about Trump's handling of this, first of all, the 200,000 dead. You know, this, you know, Kamala Harris, who's kind of a lightweight, is out there laying 200,000 dead at the feet of Donald Trump.

It was your, you know, Neil Ferguson, who said there were going to be 2 million dead, you know, in the Lancet. I think he's, I think he's with Oxford, but he's with one of your top universities of research labs and published in Lancet, which is the most procedures. He's, Jim, sorry to interrupt, he is at Imperial College London. But for American viewers who may not be familiar, it turns out he was very busy doing some extracurricular activities on the side instead of doing the work. Correct. So he's been largely discredited. But I think you have to compare it to 200,000 dead is 200,000 too many.

So we can stipulate that. But is it, oh, gee, good leadership would have been zero, but Trump was 200,000. So we will lay those fatalities at his feet. Or you were looking at maybe two minutes. million in some states of the world, 200,000 was a job well done. So that's the kind of balance you need to understand this. And I don't see that from anywhere politicians, but I lean a little bit to the category that this could have been a lot worse. Now, in case of Trump, I think he handled it horribly, but let me explain why, because there are two facets of this. One is, what policies

did you pursue? Were they effective? And could someone else have done a bad? better job. There's a legitimate policy dispute. The second part is what was your demeanor? What was your message? How did you act as a leader? We've never elected an immunologist as president. We've never had an epidemiologist in the White House. And no one should expect a president to be able to wave his hand and say, oh, the virus will go away. But Donald Trump is just the kind of guy who might say something like that. I mean, it's absurd. So if you look at actual policies, he banned travel from China in January, not March when the hockey stick, you know, hyperbolic growth started in January. Probably right there saved several hundred thousand lives because China was busy

exporting the virus. People were flying out of Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan on a daily basis going all over the world. This is why Italy got whacked because it was Fashion Week and the Chinese on the big chunk of the Italian fashion industry and then those people came to New York, etc. So So the point is China was busy exporting it and Trump cut it off. Then, in very short order, meaning in a matter of, well, probably four or five weeks in stages, ban travel from the UK, travel from the EU, travel from, close the Canadian border, the longest non-defended border in the world closed. It's still not reopened, by the way.

So he did a lot of those things right. Now, we have Mario, sorry, Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York. He's coming out doing daily press conferences, and he's screaming, it's hyperbeats, ventilators, ventilators, ventilators, get me the ventilators, get me the ventilators. Trump used what we call the Defense Production Act, which now allows the president, basically through executive power, to order U.S. industries to produce certain goods in a national emergency state of war, et cetera. A lot of these laws have been around since the 1950s because we were getting ready for nuclear. work. And he got the ventilators. Guess what? Those ventilators are unopened. They're stacked up in

warehouses. They don't work. It's a really bad treatment. And there's no better example of that than your prime minister, Boris Johnson, because he was near death. He'd say the same thing himself. And his doctors had a choice. You could intubate, which means you put the, that's the ventilator. You put the tube down your throat. That's called intubation. And it's like a lung machine that pumps your lungs. Or give him pure oxygen. The more the better. And, you know, intubation doesn't work because the problem is not your lungs. Your lungs work fine. The problem is the oxygen can't get to the blood cells in the lungs. Intubation is what you do when your lungs are not working. You have to pump this guy's lungs up. But oxygen is the answer because we get more

oxygen in the lungs. More of it will get to the blood and that will keep you life. They had a really close call. They said, we're not sure what we're going to do it. They went with oxygen and Boris Johnson survived. And that was the right decision. But he's a really close call. But he's He's like a one-man case study on the fact that ventilators don't work. And so Trump got the ventilators, and they're, like I said, they're still in boxes. So this warps speed, we don't have a vaccine yet, but even his worst critics are amazed. They're like, wow, the fact that you got, you know, billions of dollars, billions of dollars to 10 or more major drug companies all over the world and told them to work flat out and waived every impediment and waived every regulation.

Yeah, safety and effectiveness still counts, but we're going to get all the other red tape out of the way. We don't have a vaccine yet. We may not, by the way. I'm not saying that the vaccine is a foregone conclusion, although Wall Street seems to think so. I'm not so sure. But my point is, there's nothing more you could have done. He did everything possible. So if we're talking about the ventilators, even though they don't work, he got him, he surged two hospital ships to New York and Los Angeles.

He built a field hospital in the Javitt Center. It's just like, you know, it's a big convention center, et cetera. He, Warspeed, got stuff going on the vaccine, the travel ban, political. He did all those things exactly right, exactly right. Now, what did he do wrong? Trump was handed an opportunity to maybe break the ranks of the top 10 best presidents in American history. He had an FDR moment.

Remember, FDR was sworn in March 1933 at the depths of the Great Depression, the Great Depression, There was a bank run. And he closed the banks. Imagine today, President, just saying, all the banks are closed, I'll get back to it when they reopened. That's what FDR did. He did a lot of things. He did a lot of things. He did, above all, he inspired confidence.

He said, gave a very famous speech and the memorable line, of course, is we have nothing to fear but fear itself. It was a church-hilling moment. It was an FDR moment. Trump had that opportunity. What you should have done. Any business manager knows this, any overseas and politician knows it, you deliver the worst news first.

You say, you know what? This is bad. This is a pandemic. Haven't seen this in 100 years. Sad to say, we may have 100,000 or 200,000 fatalities, tragedy. We may get them. But we can beat this together, working together as Americans, mobilizing industry with your help, et cetera, we can beat this.

that speech would have guaranteed him victory and would have put him in the history books. He didn't give that speech. He got out there and this is in late March, early April, every day, did these tedious, tendentious, two-hour press conferences where, pardon my language, but he got in a pissing match with lightweights like John Carl and, you know, the Washington Press Corps. You know, that worked in 2016. and it worked in a non-crustic situation because everyone hates the press anyway. It wasn't at all the right thing. It wasn't, he didn't, he failed to rise to the occasion.

So substantively, he did almost everything right. A few mistakes, but they were inevitable. Nobody, nobody had this right. Nobody knew what we were dealing with. But given that uncertainty, he did a really good job substantively. Stylistically, and from a leadership point of view, he was horrible. And if he loses, again, I'm,

My forecast is that he'll win. But if he loses, I'll lay it at the feet of those press conferences. I'll go back to April and say that's where he lost because he failed to provide leadership. Okay. And then take me through BLM, which has obviously had a huge impact on society over there as well. Sure. I call it a Bolshevik Lives Matter. They are a neo-Marxist organization.

They have a platform. You can go to the website. This is not, you know, conspiracy theory. We're not going to Fortune or anything. Just go to their website and look at their platform. They endorse a policy that has killed more African-Americans than slavery and lynching combined. There were approximately 3.1 million American slaves from Africa and their descendants during the period of slavery up to 1865, going back 1619 to 1835, about 3.1 million, 3.1 million slaves. and they didn't all die because of slavery.

But if you said their lives were, you know, in effect, worse than impaired, degraded, et cetera. Call that 3.1 million victims and several hundred thousand from lynching. They have, but Black Lives Matter supports abortion, which has killed 20 million black children. So if Black Lives Matter, why are you supporting abortion? You say, well, abortion is black and white. It's not. African Americans are about 12% of the population, and they're about 40% of all the abortions. So abortion is disproportionately a kind of black genocide.

And if you think that's a stretch, I would say the biggest abortion provider in the United States is Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood was founded by Margaret Sanger. She was a public figure in the 1930s. Go read what Margaret Sanger said. She was a racist and anti-Semite. and said one of the reasons we need to have more abortions is so the black population doesn't get out of control. That's what you said. Again, you can look it up.

And so there's your founder of Planned Parenthood. Those are your statistics in terms of abortion. And Black Lives Matter supports a policy of black genocide. So they're frauds. They're frauds in terms of the public person. Where they're not frauds is they say they're neo-Marxist and they are. But what will be the impact of everything that's happened as a result of their protests on the election, do you think? It's going to help Trump.

I talked to a guy, I won't mention his name a couple days ago, well-known figure, you know, top, top investor, multi-billion dollar portfolio. And he called me, it calls me from time to time for, you know, just to talk about the economy and portfolio allocations to stuff to get well. And he's a smart guy. He's very plugged in. He calls me, he calls 50 other people. This guy is very plugged in. And he was anguished. He lives in Wisconsin.

And he was, I don't understand what's going on. He said, I went to a drug store. You know, we have CBS or right aid, you know, different chains of drug stores. And it was completely boarded up. But it was open for business. And I went inside, you know, to get some prescription. And he said there was an armed guard just in black. He wasn't a rioter.

He was an armed guard with like bandoliers, multiple weapons and extra ammunition, you know, standing guard. And he said, what is this? Is this America in 2020? My answer is yes, it is. Get used to it. And then he went to another place. And they were in the process of burning it down.

He said, I pulled up. And there was a guy, you know, throwing papers in a trash can lighting on fire and getting ready to, you know, break a window. And he said, he drove a wall. way. Well, okay, that's Kenosha. That's Milwaukee. But the same is two in Portland. Seattle. There's a cold-blooded point-blank shooting guy shot a bodyguard for NBC, shot a guy in the head in Denver. It's all one film. There's no dispute about what happened. I'll leave the judicial system to its devices. But this is going on all over. So, and then Black Lives Matter, I call it bullshit.

Lives Matter. They finally woke up and said, huh, why are we burning down around cities? We've got to take this to the suburbs. And that's where the white people live and not all of them, but, you know, that's where the white upper middle class, they moved out. They're out in the suburbs. So let's go out in the suburbs. And they are. So all of a sudden, if you're in a ring of suburbs around the city that's burning and you think you're safe, you're not. This is all sunken. People get it. Even when the networks don't cover it, I make the point that the local news does. and local news is local news. They have a lot less political bias.

I won't say none, but they have less than the networks, and their job is to bring people news from their communities. Well, you may not see it on the networks, but you'll see it in local news Kenosha in Portland and Denver and Atlanta and L.A. and a lot of other places. People get it. They know these are not protesters. There are some protesters out there,

and no one questions anybody's right to protest peacefully. but that's a small part of what's going on. This is violent. I would call it insurrection. I would call a revolution. And before we went on the air, I said, I feel a little bit like, you know, you're in England and I'm in France and it's 1789 and I'm reporting from the front lines of the revolution. We have something going on here that's not too distant from a revolution. And there's only one way to deal with it, which is you have to crush it.

Now, what, and people say to me, well, Jim, we had riots. in 1968 and I remember them. I remember the riots in 1968. I've had a whiff of tear gas, you know, just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And we had other riots along the way, Rodney King, I think, 1992. And he said, but these seem worse and what's different? I'll tell you what's different. The rioters are always there. The Marxists are always there. The people who want to burn things down are always there. That's not new. They're just, they usually keep their heads down, but now they're asserting themselves. What's different is that the government authorities are not trying to stop it.

Now, I remember in 1968, you had a, you know, if you had a Democratic mayor like Mayor Dale in Chicago and a Republican president like Richard Nixon, they work together. They might have hated each other's guts the rest of the time, and maybe they didn't agree on much else. But Democratic mayors, Democratic governors, Republican presidents agreed. that you cannot let riots get out of control, that you cannot let that grow and you have to do something about it. And they did with the National Guard or whatever it took. And they supported the police. That's not happening now, whether, you know, Teddy Boy, Wheeler in Mayor of Portland

or, you know, what's her name, Summer of Love, Jenny, Mayor of Seattle, you know, Laurie Lightfoot, a car Lori Lightweight in Chicago. These people are incompetent, not that bright. hate Trump. So to them, that affects their outlook more than the fact that their cities are burning. So the reason this is different. The reason it's spreading is that people on the ground are not stopping it. Well, there is a way to stop it, which is vote for Trump, and that's what's happening. And so you think that if people vote for Trump, that that would be a far more effective way of dealing with, as you called it, insurrection? Correct, because, you know, right now, one of the problems with Trump,

and Trump created this problem himself, as usual. I always say this election is not between Trump and Biden. Biden is an empty cornhusk. This election is between like the good Trump and the bad Trump. So that's how I think about it. But just, you know, taking the bad Trump for a minute because he is kind of his own, his own worst enemy. he is willing to do something about this,

but the mayors and the governors won't work with him. But if he is reelected, what's going to happen? Trump sets himself up as an excuse for not doing anything. Like, we have racism, blame Trump. We have riots, blame Trump. The economy is weak, blame Trump. Yeah, OK, presidents get some of the blame. I understand that.

But Trump has become an all-purpose excuse not to do your job. not to be an effective mayor, not to be an effective governor, not to suppress riots, not to arrest people, not to charge and et cetera, because we just hate Trump. So that's just blame Trump. Well, okay, that'll only get you so far. I'll get you a lot of burned out real estate. But what's going to happen when Trump wins? Are you going to let your city burn for the next four years and blame Trump?

Is that going to work? The voters going to support that? Or will you have, you know, maybe a moment of lucidity and say, you know what, we really got to put a lid on this? So now, having he said that, just to be clear, we haven't really talked about this. But, you know, my forecast is that Trump's going to win. He may not win on election day. He actually, when you, say, two in the morning, so the election is November 3rd.

Let's say it's November 4th. So two in the morning, three in the morning, we're all up late and watching the results come in. And Trump's going to have big leads in a lot of places. They're not going to declare him the winner. They're not going to say the election is over because we're going to get something like, no one knows the exact number, but perhaps as many as 40 million mail-in ballots. That has never happened before. We've always had, you know, absentee ballots.

I got one once. I knew I was going to be away. And I went to town hall. the ballot handed it back over the county. Yeah, that's, that's oldness. But this, these mail-in ballots, they're being mailed out, un-mossilicited. They're, you know, they'll put a mailbox with 100 ballots in the lobby of a apartment building until I wanted to pick one out and send it back. Right. You know, somebody's not going to pick up 50 and fill them out and send them back. So, they're going to have to count them. Now, some states have done this a lot. They're good at it.

I was in Oregon and Florida are two states that have had success with this. They kind of know what we're doing. Pennsylvania has never done this before, not to this extent. In Pennsylvania, the whole election may come down to Pennsylvania. Now, I would try opening five million envelopes and counting them. It takes a while. And how competent is government bureaucracy, not vary. And then state laws are, going back to what I said before about no national election,

we have state elections. The laws vary. Some states say, okay, you can count the ballots as soon as they come in, in which case they may have a pretty good count, not complete, but pretty good, on election night. Other states say you cannot open the first mail-in ballot until election day. So you're going to wake up on November 3rd with a pile of, you know, 10 million ballots, and maybe 5 million or whatever. But those are the order of magnitude we're talking about.

You're not going to count, pardon me, you're not going to count five million ballots in one day. You're lucky to count it in a week. So we're going to be sitting around a week after the election, waiting for the results in Pennsylvania, let's say, or Michigan. Meanwhile, if you look at the scoreboard, Trump's ahead. Because it's absolutely the case that the Democrats favor mail-on ballots and Republicans favor going out on election day and casting a vote at the polling place. I don't know why we can't agree on anything in this country, but that's just the case. So those votes are counted immediately. The voting machine votes.

So Trump's going to run up big margins in these places. And they're going to say, well, time out. We're not declaring him the winner because we got all these mail-in ballots. And though they're predominantly Democrats. So what's going to happen is the lead is going to erode. His leave is going to keep going down. It doesn't mean he loses, but it's going to keep going down, down, down. There are both campaigns, last time I checked, had approximately 600 lawyers.

lawyers each. I dare say they have more today. And these are the top election lawyers and litigators in the country in every state. It's not like they're all in New York that are fanned out across the country. They're going to march into court, federal district court. They're going to get injunctions. They're going to get orders to impound the ballots. They're going to get, they're going to try to extend state law. State law said, I mean, look, Americans can barely renew their driver's licenses without screwing it up, not including myself in that. How are you going to vote? I mean, you have to check the boxes, okay, you get that. But then some of them have signature requirements.

Some of them do not. Some of them need witnesses. Some of them do not. And then when you follow up your ballot, you're going to stick in the envelope and mail it back. Well, some of them have what's called a security envelope. So you put the ballot in the security envelope. And then you mail it back so that when it's open, the security envelope goes to like a poll watcher or somebody more official.

Did they remember the security envelope? Did they put the right postage on it? What does state law say about ballots that don't have security envelopes? Well, some of the law say you discard them. They didn't follow the rules. Well, that's a lot of discards in the heavily Democrat. Is some judge going to say, well, every vote counts. Sorry, forget the security envelope.

Well, I'll appeal that to the Court of Appeals. And it's going to make its way to the Supreme Court. And guess what? We have a vacancy on the Supreme Court. And we have hearings this week to fill the vacancy. So this is right. Well, by the time this goes out, Amy Coney Barrett may, well be sitting on the court. She's likely to be part of a six to three people would argue

conservative majority. And then, of course, I guess where you're taking this is people are going to say her being on the court is illegitimate because she was appointed, rush, quote, unquote, rushed through. And then the election gets decided by this court, the Supreme Court, with her on it. And people say the election result is illegitimate. Is that what you're saying? No. I think they're... It's interesting. That is what the Democrats are saying. To me, her nomination, the confirmation hearings, the final vote, et cetera, are totally legitimate.

She will take her seat legitimately and be one of the greatest appointments in American history. No, sure, sure. I'm saying the argument will be from Democrats. Correct. Is the decision made by the Supreme Court is not legitimate because she was appointed at the last moment. We should have waited, blah, blah, blah. And so I guess what I'm getting at, and this is something Francis and I have both talked about and have been very concerned about is if it's a close election, which no doubt it will be, there will be a tremendous amount of bickering about whether it's actually a legitimate outcome or not. Well, let's make, okay, let's take that scenario constantly and make it a little worse because that seems to be what I specialize in.

what you're saying, you know, as a foregone conclusion and perhaps by the time this interview's released, she'll be seated. Don't assume that. Remember, in Brett Kavanaugh, you remember all the controversy and the allegations of gang rape and, you know, Seder and Christine Blasey before. You remember all that. Well, that did not happen during the confirmation hearings. That, after the confirmation hearing was done, But before it went to the floor of the Senate, Diane Feinstein, you know, pulled a, pull a letter out of her, you know, desk drawer, which because we're sitting there the whole time. We have credible allegations that, you know, whatever.

And then they blew it up after the hearing. So if you're a Democrat and your goal is to push this past the election day because you think the Democrats will win the Senate, how do we know they don't have, you know, an ace up their sleeve? in terms of some, you know, doesn't have to be credible, just a foundatory or detrimental release that they're not using now. They're saving until the days before the election for the sole purpose of trying to delegitimize the process and keep her off the bench. Now, she'll probably be on the bench. You're probably right.

But I don't rule out that other scenario where you end up going to a court for, but even if it is a nine-person court, and you get a 6-3 decision, you're absolutely right. That will result in charges of the whole thing being illegitimate. Saturday, which they did with George Bush, they never accepted the fact that George W. Bush was a legitimate president because he prevailed with a 5-4 Supreme Court decision on counting, hanging Chas in Florida. This will be worse. Great stuff. Thank you, Jim.

We can always rely on you to chair us up. That's why we love to have your own show. People say, I'm Mr. Newman, Bloom. I'm actually an optimist. I'm a pretty happy person as I go through my day. But I don't, like I say, I don't get any points for wishful thinking. And what I really offer is not doom and boom, but hopefully good analysis. And above all, my concern is that I want people to see what's coming.

And Jim, just before we finish and we talk about what's coming, we have lockdowns happening all through Europe and the United States. And people seem to prioritize. lockdowns and everybody locking down and adhering to these rules over the economy. And the economy seems to be something that a lot of people don't seem to understand. They're like, oh, it's just the economy, it doesn't matter. But in very real terms and very clear terms, could you explain to laymen like me and Constantin?

Speak for yourself, man. What actually happens when there is an economic crash? And what are we likely to see, particularly with this type of economic crash, which is unprecedented? Well, that's right. It's unprecedented. You know, at the risk of seeming like a book salesman, but I always say books are hard to write and are harder to sell. But I would refer readers to my new book. It's called The New Great Depression, Winners and Losers in a Post-Pandemic World. It's available for pre-sell on Amazon coming out in January.

But I spend a lot of time in the book going exactly on the issue that you raise, Francis. And first of all, lockdowns don't work. the evidence is overwhelming. Lockdowns are the first resort of politicians. And I'm sure we have this guy, Anthony Fauci. I mean, he's 80-something. He's running a major government agency. I mean, I sort of sympathize with millennials.

Like, don't you baby borns ever retire? He's older than the baby boom. I mean, enjoy your retirement. Why are you still running this bureaucracy and doing it poorly? But there's an old saying, you hear it a lot here on Wall Street. you know, if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And if you're an immunologist, everything looks like a lockdown. In the absence of a vaccine, they go, well, all we can do is lock it down, so we can do.

That's not true. First, so lockdowns don't work. It's good evidence for that. Secondly, who put him in charge? And this, I would fall Trump for this. You know, is Trump in an emergency meeting or his coronavirus test force, do you want an immunologist, and epidemiologists and the biologists at the table, absolutely. The best ones you can find, not necessarily placeholders in the bureaucracy,

call Johns Hopkins or Harvard or MIT, get the best Stanford, get the best people you can find and give them a seat at the table. But do not put them in charge because they don't know anything about economics. This was exactly the point you were raising. And here's the telling piece of data. More people have died because of the lockdown, that have been saved due to the lockdown. Has lockdowns saved some lives?

Probably. I'm hard to quantify, but probably. But we know it has killed a lot of people. 50,000 excess suicide. I say excess. That means above the baseline. So there's a certain amount of suicides. Since the lockdowns began in March,

50,000 suicides, spikes in drug abuse, spikes in alcohol abuse, spikes in domestic violence, spikes in deaths from heart attacks, cancer because people didn't go in to be treated because they were worried about COVID. Anxiety, depression. By the way, I have a old chapter on the mental health aspects of this and how it sort of

played into the riots, meaning did COVID cause the death of George Floyd? Of course not. Not saying that. But the death of George Floyd was a catalyst for, yes, some peaceful protests and a lot of illegitimate violent protests, but not protests, but just violence. riots, how much of that was fed by the anxiety and depression of people being cooped up for months? And by the sudden, the political leaders said, well, yeah, we use social distancing, unless you're rioting, in which case, we don't care. Oh, okay, that's practically an invitation to go out and start rioting.

But so, yes, the scientists were okay at coming up with ways of figuring out the benefits of the lockdown. but they were abysmal at considering the opportunity costs. In other words, did you get some benefit? Yeah. But what are the costs? No one ever called a timeout said, okay, we hear you. But what are the costs in anxiety, depression, suicide, alcohol, drugs, loss of skills, loss of networks, loss of, I mean, social interaction. You know, this is a great format here, but I've been with you guys in London.

It's a lot more fun doing in person. We all know that. Well, the people who are dying. because of lockdown. Not to mention the 5,000 or more killed because of Governor Andrew Cuomo's orders to requiring nursing homes and adult care facilities to take COVID patients. He said you have to take these people. Okay, fine.

You killed over 5,000 innocent nursing home and adult care facility patients who didn't have COVID because you put the infected in the nursing home instead of finding an alternative. That's what's been going on. So do lockdowns work? No, by the way, one of my sources on that, Dr. D.A. Henderson, former dean of the Johns Hopkins at Bloomberg School of Public Health, the man credited, not a sole effort, but credited with leading the eradication of smallpox in the 1970s, and a winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is our highest civilian awards,

like the Congressional Medal of Honor, wrote a paper in 2006, pre-COVID and said lockdowns don't work. So this is not something, you know, I pull off the web. The medical evidence is very clear. But we have destroyed the economy. We were very successful with that. Well, fantastic. And on that note, that very happy note, Jim, as always, we should mention, of course, the new book, we've read all your previous books.

You're a very prolific writer. And they're always fascinating, very interesting, a lot of detail, a lot of data. We recommend people go and pre-order the book. remind everybody what is called and when is coming out, Jim. Yes, the New Great Depression, Winners and Losers in the post-pandemic world. Publication date January 12th, but available now for pre-order on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. And we'll make sure to stick the link in the description of this video and audio, so make sure you go and check that out.

And with that, Jim, as you know, we've got one more question for you. Which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be? Well, deflation. That's the greatest economic danger we face because deflation increases the real value of debt. We have enough debt. But the thing is, I'm a big, not just fan, but I always insist on converting data from nominal to real. This is where the bond bears have it all along. Nominal rates are low.

The lowest rates and 50 years or whatever. Lowest nominal rates, yes. not the lowest real rates. Real rates are still very high. And that's a product of deflation. And we have disemplation now. We're going to go into deflation. That increases the real value of debt.

It makes it impossible to get out. So the only way out, you can't grow your way out. It's too late for that. We're in the Depression. There's no reason for the U.S. to default on this debt because we can print the money. So, you know, no reason to default, actually. There's only one way out, which is. is inflation. I'm not saying inflation is a good thing. I am saying it's the only way out, just

mathematically. But the Fed's been trying to get inflation for 12 years and they've failed. And they're going to continue to fail because they forgot how to do it. But in chapter six and the conclusion of my book, I explain how you can get all the inflation you want in five minutes and I expect to see that in the future, basically by devaluing the dollar against gold. Not the euro. The dollar Eurocust rate. It goes up and down and, you know, maybe for an importer, exporter, it matters. But all the currencies, dollar, euro, yen, Swiss franc, pound sterling, they're all in the same boat. They're going to live a boat. Maybe some are taller, some are smarter, some are prettier, but they're all in the same boat. They're going to survive or die together. But where's the one

objective metric that's not in the boat against which you can all devalue at the same time? There is only one, which is gold. Two presidents did this, FDR and Richard Nixon. One did it on purpose and it worked. One did it by accident and it failed miserably. But it's like letting the genie out of the bottle, you know, good genie, bad genie. But the Fed doesn't know this. I'm explaining it to your audience, but the Fed doesn't know it. They're going to find out the hard way. But this implies a much higher price for gold than the years ahead. Jim, thank you so much for coming on the show. Fascinating as ever. And we are going to see what happens, whether Trump really will win the election or not. And thank you guys so much for watching the show.

As ever, our shows are on Wednesday and Sunday. Those are our interviews. They go out at 7pm UK time, always. We also have live streams, constantly. We do indeed. And they go out on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, 7pm, UK as well. And as we head off, thank you once again for watching. Make sure you go and follow Jim on Twitter as well.

We'll put his account in the bottom of the video. And we'll see you very soon. Take care, guys, and see you soon.