We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP183: The Dollar Decline, China, Gold & Crypto Currencies w/ Luke Gromen (Investing Podcast)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hey, so how's everyone doing out there? I am super pumped about today's episode because our guest, Luke Roman, really gave us a fantastic interview. When Stig and I were done recording this show, we both looked at each other and we're like, wow, that guy is really smart and I think you're going to see exactly what I'm talking about here in just a couple of minutes. During our discussion, we talked to Luke about the current situation with the U.S.

Starting point is 00:00:27 dollar and why it might be in a long-term down. trend that had just started this past summer. Additionally, Luke provides substantial thoughts on China its role in the global economy. He talks about gold, crypto, the U.S. equity market, and much, much more. So without further delay, we bring you Luke Groman from the macro-thematic research firm, Forrest for the Trees. You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected.

Starting point is 00:01:13 All right. So welcome to the show. We have a guest here. Luke, as you guys heard in the introduction, Luke, we are pumped to have you on the show. I can't wait to start diving into some of these questions in hearing your thoughts. So welcome to the Investors podcast.

Starting point is 00:01:27 Thank you guys very much for having me out. I'm excited to have a chance to be on the show. Yeah, we're pumped to have you. Okay, so Stig, you got the first question. Fire away. So look, the first question is something I'm really excited to hear your opinion about because intense efforts have been made by the Chinese to create oil and gold contracts denominated in the Chinese currency one.

Starting point is 00:01:49 I know you have a very interesting thesis of how the Chinese can print one for oil as a means to remove themselves from the dollar banking system. Could you elaborate on your thesis? Yeah, absolutely. I'd be happy to do so. You know, what I think they have been, what the goal is here, is ultimately the way we've looked at gold and what China has done with gold has been a means to an end, if you will. In other words, we don't think what they're doing with gold is about gold. We think it's about oil. And specifically, what we think they're doing is attempting to, as you said, gain the ability to print you on for oil.

Starting point is 00:02:27 And in so doing, they would become really only the second nation in the world able to do that. And what we think the goal is here is that if you're China, you can look and see in the past, being on the dollar-denominated system or the dollar-centric currency system leaves you with a big vulnerability, a vulnerability that you've seen firsthand with Southeast Asia crisis. In the late 90s, you saw it in South America. In the early 2000s, you saw it in South America in the 1980s. You saw it with the Soviet Union. And that is that historically, if you're an emerging market, the way this game sort of goes for you is that you borrow in dollars and then the dollar strengthens or the U.S. begins raising rates, dollar strengthens. You begin to get upside down in terms of the currency mismatch. you can, as an emerging market in a dollar-centric system, you really only have one lever to fight that, and that is your FX reserve pile, which is, you know, so you would, you know, as the dollar strengthens, you have to burn down your FX reserve pile to defend or support your currency. And then at some critical tipping point, you don't have enough FX reserves and you're forced to significantly devalue your currency. You have a financial crisis. And, you know, at that point, we sort of wash her in.

Starting point is 00:03:54 repeat and do the whole thing over again. And so what we think what China's really been trying to do is trying to do and appears to our eyes is very, very far along the way and successfully so doing is all of that emerging market FX reserve calculus, right? And there's a number of different China and Yuan bears out there talking about this. What this is really based on is IMF reserve adequacy math. In other words, you know, the IMF has a formula that says if you are an emerging market, then you need to have FX reserves equal to, you know, a certain percent of your import bill, you know, et cetera, your capital needs. And that's what sort of everybody that's really been bearished on the yuan or a lot of people have really been bearish on the yuan is

Starting point is 00:04:39 focused on this reserve adequacy number. And what China is doing is sort of changing the game a bit, which is to say if China can print yuan for, we think starting with oil, but ultimately, you know, If you look at their import bill, it is heavily driven by commodities. Then all of a sudden, you have a second lever to manage your import bill with. And that's where I think the oil and gold contract come in. In other words, if you're China, the worst case scenario for you is you're importing oil and commodities only in dollars, and you're importing more oil because you're growing, and the oil price is rising. And so you're going to start moving towards a current account deficit.

Starting point is 00:05:23 And if you go into a current account deficit as China with your banking system, et cetera, your debt position the way it is, that's going to be a problem. You're going to have to burn down FX reserves. Eventually, you'll have a currency crisis. You'll have to deval the yuan, and you'll set yourself back decades in terms of the development of the country over the last couple years. What the yuan oil and gold contracts, China is sort of circumventing that whole process by going direct to the key oil exporters and saying, we'll pay in yuan. we've effectively reopened a Bretton Woods gold window in Yuan at a floating gold price at Shanghai

Starting point is 00:05:55 at the SGEI, Shanghai Gold International Board, starting in 3Q14. They then link that to Hong Kong in 3Q15. They opened another yuan gold contract in Dubai in early 17. And so now China has a second level, rather than just burning down FX reserves as a means of defending their currency if they were to move towards or actually get into a currency. account deficit position. Now they can go to their exporters willing to sell oil and other commodities in yuan and adjust the gold oil ratio at which they are doing business. And in so doing, manage their oil and other commodity import bill, which given that the import bill is such a big

Starting point is 00:06:39 part of imports for them, allows them to them manage their current account in a way that they have control over their current account and not it's not purely based on what the dollar is doing. So, Luke, so I read somewhere, I can't remember which book this was in of Ben Graham's, but I read somewhere that Ben Graham suggested that the best way to peg a currency is to do a commodity like index, like peg it to oil, peg it to all these different commodities, not just gold like we had done in the past. I'm curious, is that kind of what you think you're seeing China do at this point? I know that you're really suggesting that it's mostly in gold and oil at this point, but do you see that maybe their end state is something that would be,

Starting point is 00:07:26 are they eventually going to move towards a peg or do they like still having the ability to just print like crazy? Or like, where do you see this going, I guess? I think most central bankers, centrally planned economies, et cetera, are going to be very reticent to peg anything, peg their currency. Let me rephrase. Pague their currency to anything, whether they that be gold, whether that be a commodity basket, et cetera. What I do think China is trying to do is effectively peg or manage the ratio of gold to oil. And when you say, when you hear gold, it can be, you know, gold in SDRs, it can be SDRs. But it's, it's, if you look at what happened, you know, prior to 1971, you have, you have.

Starting point is 00:08:16 a system where we were at a fixed-price gold standard for much of the prior 200 to 300 years. You know, it went away during wars, et cetera. Post-1971, you had a system where the U.S. closed the gold window and we effectively backed the dollar with oil. And the deal was, you know, if you look at the data itself, it was never explicitly said this way, but the U.S. made, you know, the U.S. kept. the dollar as good as gold for oil. In other words, if you look at how many barrels of oil, a treasury bond bought, it was pretty consistently between, I want to say off the top of my head,

Starting point is 00:09:02 15 or 20 to 30 barrels of oil per treasury bond for almost 30 years. And so to directly answer your question, what I think is happening is, again, China is looking, to increase their own domestic flexibility economically, which a peg of the yuan to a currency basket would reduce that flexibility. So having, setting up a system, a parallel system at the time being with key creditors like Russia, like Saudi, other OPEC nations, where there is a gold oil ratio where they manage the ratio of those two that can adjust over time. But my guess is you'll see that ratio, that that'll be the ratio they managed to. And that would affect effectively, you know, if you reset up a system where gold is made much bigger relative to oil

Starting point is 00:09:52 or SDR is made much bigger relative to oil, and you fix a lot of the imbalances in the system and you create a system that allows you to maintain your flexibility as China, while also circumventing the dollar system. But, Luke, you would need major all countries to be able to secure that physical supply, of all that oil. So, I mean, what do you think the outlook for that would be in the future? What do you mean in terms of storing the physical oil supply? Yeah, I mean, before, like, Chinese can go in and make these contract with these countries

Starting point is 00:10:36 and denominated in their own currency, basically move some of the oil supplies away from the all-based dollar standard. you need to support, I guess, from the Middle East and from other oil providers. So what do you think the outlook is there typically and historically, the U.S. have been extremely dominant in that region. Yeah, I got you. Yeah, and that's a great point. And I think what you would really need to get this system kick started is less full support

Starting point is 00:11:08 from the Middle East and more full support from one big critical oil system. supplier. And as such, I think that's where Russia comes in. Obviously, they're not OPEC, but our case has been, and if you look at the evidence, there's a lot to support this, is that once China was able to get Russia into the fold, and then Iran into the fold, and then Venezuela into the fold, you had a quorum of major oil suppliers willing to do this. And once they begin to be willing to do this, then all of a sudden, that starts to put a lot of pressure on any oil exporter. that doesn't want to do it. And so what you start to see is a market share move, right? So as you look at 2016, 2017, China is the world's biggest oil import market now. And China's, and Asia broadly, you know, the head of OPEC, I think last year, said that, you know, over the next 25 years, the only market that is going to grow for oil demand is Asia. And China, of course, features largely within that. So China's using that dominant position to move market share. And so Saudi, either two or three years ago was China's number one position. They fell to number two to

Starting point is 00:12:15 Russia. For a period of time last year, they fell to number three behind Russia and Angola, which is incredible when you think about, you know, sort of mighty Saudi falling to number three in the most important oil import market in the world to Angola. And the question is, why is that happening? And well, in 2015, Angola made the yuan their second reserve currency after the dollar. And so there's a lot to suggest they were selling oil and yuan. And so to me, China has been patient to gain. the cloud to make themselves a big physical market player went to Russia. Russia was more than happy to do it. And so now China's moving the market share to those willing to price in Yuan. And

Starting point is 00:12:53 that in turn is, you know, we've been hearing for a while. I was in London six months ago, was hearing from people in a position to know that the discussion was happening. Saudi, Saudi is probably going to be forced to go along with Yuan. They have to keep their biggest customer happy. And so I think China, Russia have the ability to do what they're doing. But it's ultimately China and Russia driving this process. You know, I think anybody who's here in this argument can say, yeah, I can see that trend playing out. But then the question really becomes, what's the speed at which that trend's going to play out?

Starting point is 00:13:23 So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on. Is this something that takes five years to really kind of reach maturity where you really start seeing a rivalry with the U.S. dollar? Or is this something that's a 20-year kind of thing? I'm curious to hear the timeline. There's a couple ways to look at it. The first is just strictly on the market share side. if you look at, okay, what percent of world oil flows could China quickly denominate you on?

Starting point is 00:13:47 And I think consensus in the West in particular is, you know, you're going to get three rogue states, you know, quote unquote rogue states, Russia, Iran, Venezuela to do it, and nobody else. The reality is not as clear to me. But a reason I say that is if you look at, the way we've looked at it is the world's top 15 oil net exporters. In other words, those nations, you know, you take. their production, you subtract their usage domestically, and what you have left is their net export number, you know, what they can supply to world markets. And if you look at that number, China has over the last five to six years signed either outright you want oil pricing deals,

Starting point is 00:14:29 you want swap deals, significant lending deals whereby, in a lot of cases, the loans are repaid in actual physical oil or infrastructure, big major infrastructure deals where China's either partnering with them in refineries or other domestic infrastructure these countries. At any rate, these deals that China has signed with oil net exporters are with oil exporters responsible for 96% of global oil net exports, which means, you know, in theory, the highway's already there, right? The fiber's already laid. The question is when's the fiber going to get lit, so to speak. And so, you know, given that consensus is that you only have three rogue states pricing oil on yuan, I would take the over on that, given China's market cloud. The other way to look at it

Starting point is 00:15:18 is sort of the physical oil market dynamics we just discussed is, it's sort of the reverberating impacts on the United States and the United States fiscal side, which is to say part of the reason everybody's had to stockpile dollars for as long as they had, you know, it started off as you had to have dollars to have oil. And that was the petrodolar deal. So that led to growth in, in dollar, heavily dollar denominated FX reserves. That's what the deal started as. And it sort of has developed, or, you know, you started, you started off needing dollars

Starting point is 00:15:49 because if you needed oil. And then it sort of developed into a network effect of, you know, you needed dollars because you needed dollars and everybody had dollars. But again, then once this system starts happening, if you're China, you know, China announced in late 2013, the PBOC said it's no longer in our interest to stockpile FX reserves. And China hasn't on net added a treasury bond. You know, there have been movements up and down in six or seven years. And so when I say there's this second angle of what it means for U.S. deficits, what China's doing,

Starting point is 00:16:24 the flip side of the coin of what China is doing for the U.S., it means over time the U.S. government gets permanently and structurally defunded at sort of a slow but steady pace. as the world just needs less treasury bonds. And the problem is that everyone doesn't have to show up and sell their treasuries. They just have to stop buying treasuries with the U.S. fiscal situation doing what it's doing. And it begins to put pressure on the U.S. fiscal side. And the reality is we're seeing that pressure. We saw that pressure beginning in 3Q14 when Global FX Reserve stopped rising and fell for the first time in 70 years.

Starting point is 00:16:58 The LIBOR just happened to bottom that same quarter. Live war has been rising ever since. and now you're seeing LIBOR, it's screaming higher like a scalded cat, which tells you there are two reeds, right? One, there's obviously a dollar shortage offshore. The question is, you know, everyone keeps saying, well, that's because there's all this supply of treasury bonds and it's soaking up the dollars. Exactly. That's because the U.S. has a funding problem or a fiscal problem that we ultimately think the Fed's going to have the funds. That's where I think you get into this two-pronged answer of, okay, there's the physical dynamics that we discussed first,

Starting point is 00:17:30 but then there's also this network effect or sort of slow working balance of payments machinery that is squeezing the U.S. as U.S. funding needs are rising meaningfully higher, given the twin deficit picture in the United States. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord. and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is.

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Starting point is 00:21:29 business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start hearing sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash WSB. Go to Shopify.com slash WSB. That's Shopify.com slash WSB. All right. Back to the show. You know, it's interesting that you bring up this network effect when you're talking about currency. And I don't think there's any way we can answer this, but I wonder if it's a winner take-all kind of scenario that would continue to play out as long as we have a global economy. So like if the yuan continues to build steam, is that something that's going to completely materialize into like this full-blown network effect where the dollar would diminish?

Starting point is 00:22:17 And we're obviously talking over a long extended period of time. But I don't know, could those currencies coexist together at a 50-50 split as far as like the demand? Or does the fiscal situation in the United States make the network effect of the Yuan just continue to explode? What do you think through that? I do think they can and I do think they will coexist regionally. I think the way this movie ends is you end up with regional reserves, where the dollar is the reserve in the, sort of the, you know, North America, South America. The euro is the reserve in, you know, Western Eurasia, if you will. And then the Yuan is the reserve in eastern Eurasia. And,

Starting point is 00:23:00 and, you know, of course, overlapping around the fringes, each of those currencies each. In terms of this network effect, ultimately, once you begin pricing oil, commodities, et cetera, in multiple currencies, you know, you begin driving a multi-polar, multi-currency world, which is something everybody's talking about. And, you know, it's not just me. It's the World Bank. It's the IMF. It's Russia.

Starting point is 00:23:28 Everybody's talking about this. But if you're going through this multipolar or multi-currency world, what starts to happen is that you start moving back towards a currency system that trades off of balance of payments fundamentals. If you look back for thousands of years, the way currency markets traded, in terms of fundamentals, was really twofold. It was based on your trade position and it was based on how big your reserve pile was. And it's interesting, Chairman Jeao, the PVOC, said exactly this in Shanghai in early 2016.

Starting point is 00:24:01 And that was the way the world worked for millennia, up until 1971, in which case the currents, the best currency had the lowest pile reserves and the worst trade balance. And so if we're moving back towards this multi-currency system, you have to start looking at the currencies, you know, basically evaluating their fundamentals based less on this dollar-centric system and more based on the traditional bounds of payments, FX reserve pile system.

Starting point is 00:24:28 Under that system, as we move towards that system, you should see the currency start to move in a manner consistent with that. And if you look at the big five, if I have to rank them, you know, yuan's number one, euros right up there, number two, running neck and neck. Then you've got the yen. then you've got the pound, and then you've got bringing up the rear by a, you know, way, way back is the dollar. And that's not to say, you know, the dollar is bad per se.

Starting point is 00:24:50 It's simply a function of the, you know, a hangover from the way the old system worked. We had to run those deficits to supply the currency for everybody else. And so in terms of how do I think it will play out, I think ultimately as we move towards a multipolar system, the dollar has to weaken dramatically. And so to answer your question of, will the yuan take over the world or whether the Euro take over the world is its network effect? My answer is no because it has a sell, as we move towards this balance of payments centric system, the dollar is going to have to weaken tremendously. But as it does, we compete really, really well when our currency is fairly valued relative to others. And the American Shale is a very good example of that. You take the dollar to 70, you take the dollar to 65 or 60 on the Dixie index.

Starting point is 00:25:37 We're going to be competing really, really well. And so to me, it's less a winner take all and more having this multi-polar currency system drive more appropriate relative currency valuations based on the fundamentals of trade and the fundamentals of FX reserve positions. And you'll get to that sort of regional reserve system, in my opinion. So are we there with the dollar? We've seen the dollar devalue in the last, when did it really start to devalue? probably six months ago really start to take off and we're seeing this trend and it's looking

Starting point is 00:26:11 like there's a lot of momentum getting behind us. Is this just an interim kind of thing? Or do you think that this is the start of something much bigger? I think it's a start of something bigger. I mean, it's not to say we couldn't get a sort of near-term counter move. In fact, I think some of the fed's increased hawkishness of late has been more about supporting the dollar and supporting the long end of the treasury curve than it is about the need to become more hawkish. But ultimately, you know, as long as China and Russia and OPE, as long as it's sort of this big trend of multi-currency settlement of oil and commodities more broadly, trade more broadly, keeps happening, it's going to keep forcing the world towards this this multipolar system.

Starting point is 00:26:57 And as it does that, boy, the dollar is still not trading in the right zip code yet. It's got to go way lower in order to kind of get that system to balance. You know, the governor on that ultimately, in my opinion, will be, you know, the U.S. deficits. If we just keep doing what, if this multipolar system just keeps developing, it means people just have, they don't have to sell treasuries. They just don't have to buy it or they don't have to buy as much as we're generating. And compounding math will do what compounding mass going to do and the dollar will weaken from there. Especially if our debt keeps going up and we just have to keep issuing more and more, right? It only compounds the issue.

Starting point is 00:27:33 That's exactly right. And when you look at, you know, the demographics and some of the strikes. Defectural Deficits, we're getting to a very dangerous place. I mean, you look at what the United States spends its money on, and it's, you know, boy, 90% of what we spend our tax receipts. If you look at tax receipts, 90% of tax receipts are spent on entitlements, defense, and interest expense. And politically impossible to cut any of those. So when a person would compare the U.S. to Japan and say, well, why isn't it happening over there? Would your response be because of the FX reserves or what's your response for that?

Starting point is 00:28:06 why hasn't this happened to Japan is really multi-pronged. Number one, Japan's a big surplus nation. Number two, Japan does not have the global reserve currency. Number three, the United States has effectively provided Japan's defense for the last 40 or 50 years. And so Japan has not had to spend their money on that like the United States, not only has to spend on our own defense, but de facto sort of defend global trade lanes. Japan's very different, demographically speaking.

Starting point is 00:28:38 Japan has largely funded its debt internally, which means, you know, when you have deflation, it's not a problem as opposed to the U.S. who is funded externally. So there's a lot of really big important reasons why Japan is different than the U.S. in terms of how this situation is likely to resolve, you know, given what would seem to be a similar problem, you know, given debt loads. on the surface. So, Luke, I would like to talk about the other element here in this equation, because we keep talking about oil primarily,

Starting point is 00:29:14 and then we also talk about gold from time to time, and sometimes that will also be denominated, and we just briefly touched upon it before. Now, I think one thing we need to outline for the audience here is also to talk about the dramatic changes we have seen in recent years in the gold market, especially from China and, Russia. So could you tell us about what has happened to the gold market and then talk about how does that in turn change perhaps the relationship and the dynamics between the U.S.,

Starting point is 00:29:47 Russia, and China? Absolutely. So gold market's a really interesting market. Most people want to look at it and think about it as a market and the price on the screen is a price they see. And the reality is it's a political medal. And, And it's a political medal, and it is a market where you have a very big cash-settled derivative market attached to it, which also complicates things. And so there's always been this discussion of, is it manipulated, is it not manipulated? And it's, you know, conspiracy theorists. No, just look at the fact. As I look at what's happening with gold with what China and Russia appear to be doing, the calculus seems very simple.

Starting point is 00:30:34 China, Russia seem to be saying, okay, you're right. It's not manipulated. Give us the physical. And the problem, of course, is, you know, regardless of whether it's manipulated or not, the physical oil market alone is, you know, on an annual production term basis, you know, 10 to 15 times the physical gold market. And so as soon as you see Russia do what they started doing in 2013, which was their pile of treasury stopped growing and actually fell a bit.

Starting point is 00:31:04 And it's, you know, it fell, you know, quite a bit at first. And since then, it's sort of just been marching time. And their pile of gold at the FX Reserve level rising steadily, that's effectively what you're seeing happen is them saying, okay, it's not manipulated. Great. Give us the physical. If you or I tried to do that, you know, that's, you know, it's what the, the, the, the, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the, the, uh, the, the, uh, the, the, uh, the Hunt brothers did to the silver market. They just changed the rules and they close you out. But when you're a nuclear armed power, you can't exactly, you know,

Starting point is 00:31:33 it puts you in a position that is difficult to, it turns into a geopolitical statement, a geopolitical issue. That's what I think what Russia and China are doing with this, which is if you look at how China has set up their system, you know, we said before, it looks like China has reopened a Brettonwood's gold window through Yuan at a floating gold price when you look at, what they've done at the SGEI in Shanghai and then Hong Kong and Dubai. However, to our eyes, it looks like China has learned the lessons from the mistakes the United States made in trying to have operate a gold window, which is to say, number one, they're not fixing the price because you can't maintain a peg.

Starting point is 00:32:11 Every peg in history has broken, a currency peg in history is broken. And then number two, and this is very elegant, in my opinion, any gold that is in mainland China is not allowed to leave mainland China. And so when you look at this system, China and Russia appear to be saying, okay, great, it's not manipulated. Give us the physical. And we're going to start trading in it and, you know, settling some imbalances in it on the margin. And this pile that sits in China is not allowed to leave, by the way. And we've been buying it and we keep buying it. We're just tightening global supplies. But once it's in mainland China, it's not a leave. This little pile over here in Shanghai can leave. And if you have some in Hong Kong or Dubai, it can move however you want. And when

Starting point is 00:32:53 you think about the implications of that, then you go, okay, well, where does the gold, any gold that gets any offshore you want that were to get settled in physical gold, if it can't come from mainland China, where does it come from? Well, there's really only two, maybe three places, right? It's U.S., U.S., or India. And the Indians aren't selling, they're buying. They're always buying. So, okay, it's really U.S. and U.K. And so now, you know, to anybody familiar with or having read the history of the London gold pool in the late 60s, this starts to look really familiar because now you can just see it's basically like a boa constrictor slowly tightening because it's what China and Russia is saying, hey, all right, gold's not manipulated,

Starting point is 00:33:38 give us a physical. You end up with a situation Shanghai, Hong Kong, Dubai, where they're saying, okay, we need physical. That's physical. It can only come from the U.S. or U.K. Now the U.S. or U.K. has to say one of three things. Yes, you can have your gold, and we're going to let the price rise, which will devalue the dollar as gold rises. Okay. Yes, you can have your gold, but we're not going to let the price of gold rise. We're going to allow the leverage in the gold system to rise as the physical leaves and moves east. And as a practical matter, I think that's what's been happening since 2013.

Starting point is 00:34:09 Or option number three is, no, you can't have the gold. And, you know, the day, were that to ever come that, you know, London or New York says, no Shanghai, Hong Kong, Dubai, you can't have the gold. That'll be a real interesting day, but I don't think the dollar's going to open up the day the CME says, sorry, Comax is going cash settled on everything. And so that's what I think China and Russia are doing, is effectively they're calling BS on, you know, is it manipulated? Is it not? We don't care. Give us the physical. You say it's not, you say that's the right price? Okay, give us the physical. The reality is if you look at gold relative to any number of monetary aggregates, U.S.

Starting point is 00:34:48 foreign debt outstanding, et cetera, gold trading at a fraction of where it should be relative to any number of those sort of gold PE ratios, if you will. And how much do you think that they will accumulate? I mean, if you look at how much gold that they have, you know, if you look at the U.S. call it, you know, 8,000 tons or whatnot, you know, if you look at that comparison to GDP, you know, it's we approximate the same rate with Russia, even though they're still accumulate. I don't think that anyone, except for the Chinese, knows how much gold that they have. It's a very difficult number to find.

Starting point is 00:35:22 And I think if you can find any number, it's probably not the right one. But it seems like they're buying up like everything, productions. So like in everything that's on and off the bargain. So how much do you think that will end up accumulating? Do you think they will find new thresholds compared to the GDP? Or do they just look at this and like a lot? longer time horizon. You know, I think they're looking at this in a lot longer time horizon.

Starting point is 00:35:52 I had a customer who said to me, Luke, have you ever heard what Mao said about when he was asked about the French Revolution? I said, no, he goes, someone asked him what he thought about the French Revolution. And his answer was, it's too soon to tell, you know, 170 years later. And, you know, whether that story's apocryphal or not, to me, I think that they're, you know, it speaks to the willingness, the cultural willingness and ability to be patient to achieve a longer-term outcome. If I'm them, I want to acquire as much as possible. I mean, I think what they're doing broadly, I mean, this relates to gold, this relates to oil, et cetera.

Starting point is 00:36:32 You know, remember, we talked about before, you know, the dollar system has been supported by the expansion of paper derivatives that promise gold, that promise oil, that promise. you know, real wealth, right, or assets that provide real wealth in this world. And as those derivatives have expanded, you end up with these highly levered paper derivative systems that require nobody to ever exchange the derivatives for the actual underlying. And I think that's what China sees is, and I've been told a number of stories suggesting that is exactly what China sees, which, and so then if you understand that, to the way we've looked at it is, you know, I don't know if you guys have seen the movie or read the book Moneyball, Michael Lewis's book. They're effectively playing a sort of monetary money ball,

Starting point is 00:37:24 which is to say, you know, in that book, you know, the gist of that book, of course, was that, you know, a walk and a single in baseball are functionally the same thing. But the guys who hit a lot of singles get paid and, you know, a big multiple, the guys who walk a lot. And so they could build a very competitive team on the cheap by, you know, hiring the guys or by signing the guys that that walked a lot, as opposed to the guys that hit a lot. At any rate, in much the same way, Westerners in particular, Western banks have been told by regulatory authorities, which are controlled by the American government, that, you know, a treasury bond is every bit as good as gold and treasury bond is worth this much oil, et cetera. And China's looking around and going,

Starting point is 00:38:05 well, gosh, there's all that debt out there, and there's not that much gold out there. There's not that much oil out there. The mismatch between American dollar derivatives and American dollar debt relative to the physical underlying has been allowed to get way out of whack over the last 25, 30 years. And so they're just walking around going, okay, you take the treasuries and the dollars, we will take the fill in the blank physical underlying. And that's really the game I think they're playing. So to directly answer your question, how much do they have, how much is enough? If I'm in China, I've been probably looking around going, I can't believe they just let me keep exchanging dollars for this. Like, what are they doing? I can't believe they're being this dogmatic

Starting point is 00:38:43 about the treasury system, the dollar system, but we have. Now, maybe that's changing on the margin. People are certainly squawking about it here in terms of some of the implications. But that's what I think the game is, is this, okay, you take the dollars, we'll take the stuff. You know, I'm curious, Luke. A lot of the ideas that you're talking about kind of resemble some of the stuff that Jim Rickards has been talking about for the last couple years. And one of the narratives that Jim usually brings up as this idea, the SDR is becoming a global currency and things like that. I'm kind of curious how you view the SDR. Do you see it in a similar light playing a similar role?

Starting point is 00:39:21 Yeah, I could see. I mean, he is, I would definitely defer to him on his understanding of that relative to mine, just given some of his relationships and how long he's been involved at those levels in that game. That said, in terms of my interpretation, yeah, I think, you know, look, you saw China come out in 2009 and explicitly say we want to move to some sort of neutral reserve asset. I think it gets into a political discussion between the varying parties of, you know, do we include some gold in it? How do we, how do we manage that? I mean, there was a white paper put out by the IMF in 2011 under Dominique Strauss-Con when he was the chair, which looked at pricing commodities, this is quote,

Starting point is 00:40:06 looked at pricing commodities such as oil and gold in SDRs. And that would kind of tie back to the point made earlier where if you reestablish a ratio, right? So if we come out and say, hey, gold is, you know, the IMF is going to bid for gold at 5,000 SDR. And the ratio, you know, and maintain a ratio of gold to oil at 400 to 1, right? So there's, you know, 400 barrels per ounce. So now you've got SDR 5,000 gold. You've got 120 SDR oil. And then you've got the five basket currencies underneath that that has different implications for.

Starting point is 00:40:49 Mechanically, there's no reason why something like that wouldn't work. It would work beautifully. The system would be balanced almost instantly. There would be certainly major vicious sector rotations, et cetera. but that would allow you to very quickly sort of move along that transition from this dollar-centric system to that balance of payments currency system that we were discussing earlier. And really, it would actually be a huge boon to global trade. It would be, you know, people a lot of times say, oh, if gold's at 5,000 or 5,000 SDR, even,

Starting point is 00:41:22 you know, the world will be ending. You're going to, you know, no, you're going to reset, you're going to basically have written down the real value of sovereign debt globally. you're going to rebalance trade, you're going to incendent trade. The global economy, growth, wealth, prosperity would explode higher with one caveat. If you have all your wealth in sovereign debt globally, you're not going to be happy on a real basis. You're going to get paid every dime nominally, but you're going to lose money on a real base. But I think that's to direct the answer to your question.

Starting point is 00:41:53 Does the SDR ever old quite possibly? Yes. It could be done. It's easy to do in the way. way I described. It's not simple. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up and customers now expect proof of security just to do business. That's why VANTA is a game changer. Vanta automates your compliance process and brings compliance, risk, and customer trust together on one AI-powered

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Starting point is 00:45:33 you're going to be the bill payer. Oh, you're, that's, to me, this is like the most crystal clear thing. As I, you know, I've been doing this for, you know, 23 or 24 years now. And it's interesting. You look at who of the biggest marginal buyers of U.S. Treasury bonds been over the last three, four, five years, been U.S. commercial banks, been U.S. public pension funds. It's been U.S. retail investors through investment funds, if you look at the Treasury data. And, you know, I don't want to come off as sounding flip or glib. But the reality is, as I look across my career, almost a quarter century now, the biggest bagholder in every, you know, macro blowup I've had in my career have been U.S. commercial

Starting point is 00:46:14 banks, U.S. public pensions, and U.S. retail. investors. And so, yeah. So why are they the patsy at the table? Are they the patsy at the table because they have a relationship with the Fed and they're forced into it? Yeah, regular. The banks certainly have been regulatory, like, regulatorily, regulatorly forced into it over the last four years in particular, right? You look at 3Q14. You had new HQLA or high quality liquid asset regulations that mandated that the banks up their capital levels and the capital they held was rated, you know, risk weighted. And oh, by the way, treasury bonds are zero risk weight. So, you know, go buy a bunch, and they did.

Starting point is 00:46:50 Money market funds, you know, we are going to, you know, reform the money market fund industry, but those reforms are much less draconian if you buy treasuries than if you buy private sector paper. And I think some of the, you know, the public pension stuff, I don't think there's anything necessarily regulatory driven there other than I think that, you know, low interest rate environment, they're just trying to liability match and they're just, you know, they're getting squeezed. sort of our natural buyer, U.S. investment funds, you know, some of that is demographic. And they can get away with it because of the governance and the way that it's been, you know, the ownership is so distributed. The underlying owner doesn't even understand what the heck's

Starting point is 00:47:31 happening. That's exactly right. And it's, and when you really look at it, look, I mean, remember by point before, what are the biggest, you know, the two biggest line items that we need to spend all this treasuries for our entitlements. And so, you know, to the extent that, you know, public pensions and individuals are responsible for this stuff and are the bagholders, unquote, look, they're really paying for their own care, you know, a novel concept, right? So if we now have established where the downside is and where we think in the coming 10 years where people are going to be the billpayers for the future growth, where is that growth going to happen moving forward? Where are you excited moving forward into the next 10 years?

Starting point is 00:48:09 You know, I'm really excited, you know, if you look at from the big context of what we're discussing, you know, if the dollar-centric system, if the beneficiaries of that in the United States were people in the dollar export business and the losers in that were people, you know, in the manufacturing or in the stuff export business, you know, I think that's going to reverse. I think you're, you know, via, you know, the balancing of the dollar through some of the methods potentially that we talked about, the dollar export business loses, relatively speaking, and the stuff export business wins, relatively speaking, in the United States. And so I think, you know, structurally, you know, infrastructure, commodities, industrials, tech.

Starting point is 00:48:55 So tangible and intangible products. Sorry to interrupt you. Tensical and intangible. Yeah, because IP is every bit as valuable or intellectual property. Everybody is valuable as, you know, a steel mill, maybe more so in today's economy. I actually probably definitely more so in today's economy. The flip side of that coin, of course, you look over to Asia. or these other export-driven economies, right?

Starting point is 00:49:15 It has been, the loser has been, you know, their game has been, we're going to defer consumption in order to build capital and export to the Americans. And I think you're going to see a reversal of that as well, away from sort of, you know, mercantile, I know that can be a loaded word, but sort of, you know, export-driven production growth and more, you know, producing more for our own consumption. And so I think former, in particular in Asia, former export-driven economies will see outperformance on a relative basis by consumption and services and vice versa in the U.S., the stuff that outperform before while relatively underperform. You'll be more sort of stuff, export-driven. So I know that this industry has just been bludgeoned over the last two or three months, and that's the crypto industry since December.

Starting point is 00:50:07 But as a guy who understands why a peg is so important and this whole movement of global currency and the mixing and the dollar kind of devaluing and this whole narrative we're talking about, I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on the idea of crypto becoming this global peg. Kind of your thoughts on what you think the likelihood of something like that is, kind of your just your general thoughts on it. Sure. Crypto to me, the thing that has gotten my attention most, two things, I guess. Number one, in the short term, it was interesting. I was looking at what Bitcoin was doing last year, and I was thinking to myself, gosh, that Bitcoin is doing what gold would be doing if it didn't have this gigantic paper derivative market attached to it. And I was introduced via mutual friend to one of the bigger physical gold traders in the world late last year. And unsolicited, this person says to me, boy, Bitcoin's doing what gold would be doing if it didn't have this gigantic derivative market attached to it. I just remember my jaw dropping. So watching what Bitcoin did was very interesting just in sort of a near-term perspective. From a broader structural perspective of crypto to me, the thing that gets me most interested, most excited ties back to the point I made earlier that I think it's underappreciated, particularly in the West. the degree to which the dollar-centric system has been supported by rapid growth of paper derivatives

Starting point is 00:51:40 and control that they control the pricing of underlying real wealth, whether you're talking about gold, silver, commodities, et cetera. And so when I start to look around and see a lot of different use of crypto in these systems, you know, crypto and putting gold on the blockchain, putting oil and copper and all these different real assets on the block. chain, you start thinking about, you know, if you think about those things in the context of understanding how big the dollar derivative markets were allowed to get relative to physical underlying of not just gold, but of lots of different real wealth assets, and start thinking about the implications of that. To me, crypto could be absolutely groundbreaking in terms of

Starting point is 00:52:29 its ability to relatively quickly, you know, sort of disintermediate or re-intermediate, I guess, you know, this paper derivative market. Now, I'll pick on gold specifically because it's easy to illuminate, right? But if you've got gold, which has, say, there's 100 paper ounces out for every real ounce, and you start putting gold on the blockchain where all of a sudden it's one-to-one, you're effectively creating a parallel market in gold in much the same way that China and Russia are trying to do. In other words, if I'm a gold miner and you get gold blockchain to take off in any real way, you know, say there does get to be a shortage.

Starting point is 00:53:14 Historically, when you've got a giant derivative market and there's a shortage in physical gold, the price of gold crashes, actually, because it's just a run on the bank. The liability collapses. But the premium should be rising. So all of a sudden, you would have a situation where gold miners could go start selling into this real physical bid in blockchain. same, suppliers could go to that market, and you'd be circumventing the gold derivative market. And that could take place in any market where a physical asset market where there is a paper market

Starting point is 00:53:43 attached that has historically set price. And so I look at crypto as potentially very revolutionary means of disintermediating sort of the dollar-based commodity derivative system, which has massive implications. and given the speed at which the guys in Silicon Valley and tech historically move, I don't know that we're talking about decades. Yeah. You know? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:54:10 We're with you. Yeah. You know, it's so interesting talking about currencies. We talked about the one and dollar. Now we're talking about cryptocurrencies, gold for that matter. I'm curious to hear your thought process of how to value the prospects for a currency. And it could basically be any currency. It's more like how you think of it.

Starting point is 00:54:33 Like, because it's, it might be easy to say, well, you know, it's demand and supply. And then, you know, one guy can come with like three arguments that you will appreciate and another guy can say, well, and then I have another three arguments. So, you know, it's a push. How do you consider, like, the magnitude and significance in different events and different demand supply factors? Can I piggyback on what Stig just said? If you were going to describe how currencies work or how they, how they're valued to like a high school students, how would you describe that? I think you have to start all the way back and understand that, you know, they're lent into existence, right?

Starting point is 00:55:15 The way our system works. Start there. You know, they're lent into existence. Okay. If they're lent into existence, you know, then you start getting into some of the different, you know, you kind of next branch down is, okay. historically the way this has worked is the guy with the best trade position, guy with the biggest pile of reserves, had the best currency, and vice versa the worst. And then we changed the system a bit from the last 40, 50 years, and now we're starting to move

Starting point is 00:55:43 back. Then I think you go down to another level where you have to understand that it's not purely based on supply demand of trade, but then there's also debt levels, right? certainly once, if you've had sort of this monoc currency driven system like we've had, which has been, you know, basically if everyone borrows in dollars, you know, there is this incipient dollar demand that is always there. And if you understand that, then you can understand what's happening offshore in terms of liquidity based on what the dollar is doing, based on what LIBOR is doing. You know, and then I think within all that, I think another overlay you have to look at are

Starting point is 00:56:27 you get into geopolitics, you get into creditor and debtor relationships. One of the big things I think the world is missing, and particularly Westerners are missing, is that the United States, especially post-08, you know, everyone says, well, we need to run the deficits. Everyone loans us the money. We're everybody's consumer. You know, what's going to happen if we're not here to consume everybody's production? And it's sort of always been the case, but particularly post-08 it's been the case. That's a little bit like being on the island, you know, being on a deserted island, right, with, you know, we'll say with, with Mr. Yuan and Mr. Yerow and Mr. Pound and Mr. Dollar, and we're all sitting

Starting point is 00:57:08 around a table and Mr. Yuan, you know, catches all the fish and Mr. Yuro cooks all the fish, and Mr. Yen, you know, sort of, you know, upkeeps the boats to, and makes the boat to go catch the fish, and Mr. Pound sort of, you know, you know, has nets to catch the fish. and Mr. Dollar sent the end of the table going, well, you know, you guys can't vote me off the island because if I'm not here to eat all your fish, like, you guys are screwed. Historically, that was sort of true, but we actually, once upon a time, kept again, we keeping the dollar as good as gold for oil. There was a responsibility that the U.S. had or, you know, managed, you could see in the way

Starting point is 00:57:48 we managed the dollar, you have two currencies, right? You have dollar external, dollar internal. And we, in particular in the early 80s, you know, Paul Volcker, late 70s, early 80s, you can read the Fed transcripts. They have a great archive called the reform of 1979. And, you know, the dollar was in a very bad place. Paul Volker went to Belgrade Yugoslavia and was effectively told by the chairman's like, listen, take care of the dollar. He spent 24 hours there, flew back to Washington. And basically, you put the United States.

Starting point is 00:58:23 into a very bad recession effectively to show the world that we would be willing to take the pain to manage the dollar for everybody else. And that bought us 30, 35 years. And, you know, today I find it's not, you know, particularly in the last 10, 15, 20 years, you can see how Washington has dealt with it. It's basically been this. It's our currency and it's your problem. And so there's sort of this, this mutual balance has been lost or was lost. It's being restored now. So I think, you know, there's, you know, when you think about what currencies, what currencies are, what they mean, when you think about credit or debtors, there's a responsibility of both. You can't just be the debtor. And because at some point, you know, post-08, you know, we got into a situation where,

Starting point is 00:59:09 yeah, hey, you still need us to consume. And if things change too rapidly, it creates a problem. And people understood that. You get five, eight, ten years on. Look, you know, America still needs the world to lend to us at negative real rates to be able to consume to basically keep the wheels on the car. Yeah. The problem with that is over time, if you lend to somebody at negative real rates, you're going to go broke yourself on a real basis. Like, I am happy to borrow all the money in the world at negative 2% real rates for 30 years.

Starting point is 00:59:38 I'll take it right now. Give me a call. You can take. But of course, anyone who lends that to me, I'm going to have all the wealth in 30 years. Yeah. And so the world's going, eh. And so there's, you know, it's a very complex topic with a number of different, But I think if you start understanding structure the system, if you understand motivations of

Starting point is 00:59:56 partners under that system, and how those motivations of those partners change over time. I mean, Charlie Munger says, you show me an incentive. I'll show you an outcome. You know, like the outcome we have right now is the most predictable thing in the world. You know, the only thing left to know is sort of what the day no one is. You know, I don't know what that is. But getting to where we are, you know, if you understand where we started from and how things developed since, you kind of go home, well, that makes sense.

Starting point is 01:00:25 I'll tell you what, Luke, just so impressed with your depth of knowledge. It is mind-blowing. If somebody's listening to this, I'm sure people out there listening to this saying, I would love to learn more about what Luke knows here. What book would you recommend for currency, understanding the depth of the stuff that we were talking about today? What are some books or a video or whatever? We can link to it in the show notes if you found something that was really influential that helped you understand the things that you know. Sure. You know, I think in terms of the current period of time in particular, the one I've been talking about, I've tweeted about it a number of times. I've written about it in our research a number of times has been

Starting point is 01:01:04 Lords of Finance by Liyahuat Ahmed. And it's a biopic of the big four central bankers right after World War I. And that was really the last time we had a global sovereign debt bubble like we have now. And it really, you know, I first read that book. I think it was published in 2010. I think I read it in 2011. And I just remember going, oh, my gosh. Like, this is, it's a veritable roadmap to what we're going through. And so I would highlight that.

Starting point is 01:01:31 You know, there's a book called A Century of War called William Engdahl. He can be a bit conspiratorial at times, in my opinion. There are certain things in the book that, you know, considered a bit conspiratorial. That said, it's also very, very well researched and very, It provides some really good narrative background of kind of understanding how some of the world's geopolitics, currency overlaps have developed over time. So, Luke, I know you're on Twitter, and we'll have a link to your Twitter feed in our show notes for anybody else that wants to follow you and talk with you on Twitter. But anything else that you want to tell our audience, a little bit about your company, your background, just tell everyone what you do. I am the founder and president of FFTT, which stands for Forest for the Trees.

Starting point is 01:02:19 And as I said before in the interview, spent nearly 25 years on Wall Street as an analyst and sales executive at a couple different regional investment research firms. And in early 2014, hung on my own shingle as FFTT. And what we've really, what we really try to do is aggregate a large amount of publicly available data in a unique manner and try to identify developing economic bottle. next in different sectors and, you know, macro themes for our customers, you know, our customers are institutions, family offices, sophisticated individual investors, and we publish an 8 to 10 page report every Thursday, and we do a brief pre-recorded webinar with a, you know, brief transcript every other Tuesday. And, you know, people looking for more information about that and some some samples of our work. It's available online at FFTT Frank-Frank TomTom dash LLC.com.

Starting point is 01:03:17 Awesome. We'll have a link in the show notes for people to check that out. Luke, thank you. Seriously, incredible discussion with you and we really appreciate your time. Absolutely. Thanks for having me on. It was thoroughly enjoyable. I really appreciate you guys. All right, guys. That was all the Preston and I had for this week's episode of The Investors podcast. We see each other again next week. Thanks for listening to TIP. To access the show notes, courses or forums, go to TheInvesterspodcast.com. To get your questions played on the show, go to Asktheinvestors.com and win a free subscription

Starting point is 01:03:52 to any of our courses on TIP Academy. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making investment decisions, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the TIP network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting. B.I.P.

We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP183: The Dollar Decline, China, Gold & Crypto Currencies w/ Luke Gromen (Investing Podcast)

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