Latest / Man in America Podcast / Martin Armstrong on Why the CBDC Will Fail and a Great Depression is About to Begin

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Martin Armstrong on Why the CBDC Will Fail and a Great Depression is About to Begin · Man in America Podcast

• 0:02
  Seth Holehouse: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Man in America. I'm your host, Seth Holehouse. So 2023 has been a wild ride so far, especially in the financial industry. If you look at what's happening with the banking collapse, you look at what's happening with the the BRICS nations, the dedollarization, it seems as if everything is speeding up. And on top of that, you've got the Ukraine war.
• 0:27
  You have the the neocons that seem to be constantly pushing us into war as if they need us to be in wars. And it's just it's just a wild year so far. I think it's only gonna get even more crazy. So joining us today, though, is a brilliant man to help us make sense of where things are at and where they could be going, and that is Martin Armstrong. So Martin Armstrong is a financials financial cycles expert.
• 0:56
  He's actually much more than a financial expert. He understands geopolitics, the cycles of war, the rise and fall of civilizations. And so he's a brilliant guy to tap into right now to understand just where things are at, where they could be going, etcetera. So I hope you really enjoyed this interview with Martin Armstrong. Before we jump in, though, make sure you're following me on social media platforms.
• 1:16
  It's at man in America. On Twitter, it's at man in America US. And every show is done as a podcast as well. So if you'd rather listen, just go to your favorite podcast app, search for man in America, and you'll find me there. You can also find me over on LFA TV on Rumble.
• 1:31
  It's a great channel. It's a bunch of really, really good, you know, strongly, you know, great valued hosts. That's against LFA TV over on Rumble. Alright, folks. Let's jump into this interview with Martin Armstrong.
• 1:43
  Martin, it is great to have you back on the show. Thank you so much for being here with us today.
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: Well, thank you for inviting me.
• 1:51
  Seth Holehouse: Absolutely. So last time you came on, it was actually before Christmas, and we talked about a lot about, I guess, lot of things, but looking towards the future and instability and looking at where we're at right now, you know, with the bank failures, the debt ceiling, the Ukraine war continuing, NATO, you know, just everything, the southern border, the Biden crime family, like, the whole thing. It just seems like it's getting crazier and crazier. So, I mean, there's a million things we could start with, but what do you wanna jump into to start the discussion?
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: Well, I think what people have to understand, you take this whole argument over the the debt ceiling. There is a really serious, you know, argument that people are making that Biden can invoke the fourteenth amendment to circumvent congress entirely. I mean, I've studied law, particularly constitutional law, and there's just no way. I mean, the fourteenth amendment was written after the civil war, and it simply says that, yes, the debt cannot be questioned but by the South and that The US would not honor the debts of the South. So it was saying that they could not question that they had to pay taxes to pay off the debt of the North.
• 3:25
  That's what it was about. I mean and to to claim that this somehow gives Biden the the power to overrule and ignore Congress is absurd. Because then you have Article one, section eight that says, clearly, the delegation of of paying bills and debt and credit belongs to congress, not to the president. So, you know, I don't know if we're just living in in wonderland or what's going on. The people even have the audacity to make this argument.
• 4:07
  I mean, you do that and you you are basically, you're just the the entire constitution. I mean, what's the separation now between congress and and the president? I mean, effectively, that becomes a dictatorship. So there is no pretend democracy or so, you know, what I would say that is really very concerning is that the Biden administration is really just occupied by a a combination of neocons and climate change zealots. And in both cases, they do not care about anything other than their goals.
• 4:59
  And to to say that, you know, Biden, you know, there shouldn't be a debt limit and and we can do whatever we want is really very, very serious because you're you're basically tearing up the constitution now to to say that you want your agenda and that's it. I mean, I have very good sources. Everybody pretty much knows. And I was actually surprised, but Henry Kissinger's just came out and said the same thing. And I know we have the same sources.
• 5:35
  And my sources have been basically saying that they are definitely scared to death of Trump, that the the polls show that Biden would maybe get 30%. I mean, that's, you know, unbelievable. But so Kissinger came out and said the same thing and I've been warning about, that that they think the neocons think if they start a war before the twenty twenty four election, that no president has ever lost an election during a war. And, I mean, it's getting pretty serious. I mean, you know, these drones that went after the Kremlin and stuff like that.
• 6:24
  And, you know, the, you know, the Russians that come out and said, look, you know, Ukrainians could have done this without the the aid of The United States to begin with. It's I mean, normally, I would have to say this, that Putin is not the evil emperor. You know? He is the most conservative of the group. If you look really at who is threatening, you know, nuclear weapons and stuff like this.
• 6:59
  Like, the head of Chetney came out and said, oh, you know, Kyiv should just be nuked. And it was Putin that comes out and says, no. No. No. We don't wanna go there.
• 7:09
  Xi is also getting involved trying to to reduce this this thing. So, honestly, for anybody to try and take out Putin, it's either complete stupidity, or it's a deliberate attempt knowing that the second tier are just as neocon radicals as as we have running around Washington. You do you do something like that, and they come into power. They would retaliate.
• 7:42
  Seth Holehouse: I see. So, basically, they're a big driver of this this push for war, which you can see it all over the place, is that they're concerned about Trump getting back in in 2024. And so, obviously, we see that the political persecution, the legal persecution of him. But then at the same time, if, you know, if they can get us into a war, it it kinda clears the slate and opens up all kinds of possibilities for them, including, like, what you mentioned about making sure that that's one extra thing they can do to ensure that Biden gets in again. Right?
• 8:14
  So they're so they're so if they're that scared of Trump, I mean, it must show that they're not as weak or said they're not as strong and powerful as one might think that they are.
• 8:27
  Speaker 2: No. They're look. I mean, I've worked with Washington for probably forty years. And you have to understand when Reagan was elected in Washington, they were actually beside themselves. And they were saying, oh, gee, we're gonna have to train him.
• 8:50
  They really don't like anybody who's not from Washington. And that doesn't matter if they're Republican or Democrat. It that's that's not the issue. It's like they don't want, you know, anybody, you know, from outside the neighborhood coming in and playing in their sandbox. You know?
• 9:10
  So over the years, I've watched this. And if you just go down the line and they're always some you know, Biden's from there. Camilla's from there. I mean, that's what they want. Trump was a wild card to them.
• 9:28
  And I can tell you the way it actually went is I used to be part of the vetting process. I would go around and meet with people who wanted to run for president, and they were said that I was there to to inform them about the world economy. But it was really like, well, do you think he can smart enough to handle it and stuff like that? So what happens is, actually, when Bush Junior was gonna go, they had asked me to go down and meet with him. I said, okay.
• 10:02
  Fine. Sure. And immediately they said, oh, but this one's different. I said, what's different? Oh, he's stupid.
• 10:09
  I said, he's stupid. And oh, yeah. Yeah. I said, why you know, all of a sudden we flipped from is he intelligent enough to he's stupid. And that was 1999.
• 10:22
  Alright. And they said, well, he's got the name, and so we can win. So then he goes in and they pick the cabinet. They're the ones who put in Cheney. And you look at the cabinets.
• 10:34
  They were all neocons, etcetera. They did the same thing basically with everybody, including right right down to Donald Trump. They pretty much said, oh, look, you don't have experience. We need to put good people in, you know, so that we can give confidence to to the world economy. And he bought that line.
• 10:56
  And then if you look at everybody who was there from John Bolton on, everyone starts stabbing him in the back. Alright? And then he starts firing people back back and forth. And, I mean, I will say this. I've I've met practically every head of state from over the years.
• 11:17
  I was good friends with Maggie Thatcher. And I did go to Mar A Largo to to dinner there at at Trump's place in March of twenty twenty. And he actually impressed me. And and that's not easy. Right?
• 11:37
  He that's when he said he wanted to pull the troops out of Afghanistan. And he said that he was sick and tired of writing letters to their families to say, oh, he died for a god and country. And he actually said, he says, what are we doing there? They've been fighting over borders for a thousand years. What difference are we going to make?
• 12:00
  So John Bolton came out and, oh, this is outrageous. He fires them, etcetera. They always want war. And he was actually the first head of state I ever heard that was concerned about people dying on the battlefield. And, you know, then, you know, a child grows up without a father because he was killed over there or whatever.
• 12:28
  I mean, I never even heard Maggie Thatcher ever talk about that with the Falklands War. It's always, well, we gotta get them this. It you know, it's they're doing it again. Oh, Putin is this. We have to go.
• 12:42
  How many people have to die to go get this one guy? I mean, it it just doesn't make sense. But it's so it's all really propaganda. And that's why they're afraid of Trump because we're actually if Trump got in, he'd fire all the neocons again. Yeah.
• 13:00
  So he is a a major threat to them. So I would not would have passed them to pull out the standard playbook and and create some sort of confrontation before the twenty twenty four election. And in all honesty, if they can't stop Trump one way or another, I think they would assassinate him. I mean, I believe, you know, that look. I mean, how many decades have to go by before we get information from the CIA on the Kennedy assassination?
• 13:35
  I mean, I mean, everybody pretty much knows they did it. And but what are you gonna do? I mean, he was against war there too. So it seems like anybody who's against war is conveniently removed one way or another.
• 13:50
  Seth Holehouse: And Kennedy was just one of many. You know, Gaddafi, I mean, the list just goes on and on and on of all the different world leaders that we've sent our own military or CIA assets in just to to take out because they don't agree with us. So, yeah, you know, why not why not a president like Trump then who's a a complete thorn in their side?
• 14:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, I mean, although, you know, like I said, the polls show that he would win overwhelmingly. I don't see how they could possibly allow him to get there. They'll do whatever they have to, I think, in in in all honesty. But because you're talking about they finally have their goal.
• 14:35
  And look. I I knew, you know, Bill Crystal, one of the neocons who wrote the book to go into Iraq. And this they really think that if you go into these countries, overthrow the roar, that the people will cheer and they'll get some sort of a, you know, ticker tape parade or something. And it's just not that way. You can Google Tony Blair's apology for Iraq, And he even admits that, yeah, well, we thought removing him would be okay, and then we subjected the people to sectarian violence.
• 15:18
  It's just I don't know. I think it goes back to to Khrushchev and his statement that we will bury you. And they end up with, okay. Fine. We'll we'll put democracy around the world.
• 15:34
  You know? But we don't have democracy. I mean, that's all a fallacy anyhow. I mean, it in Vietnam, I mean, you couldn't drink, you couldn't vote, but you were old enough at 18 to go, you know, kill people in war. So is that a democratic process when you have no right to vote on should we go to war or should we not?
• 16:02
  It's this is decided by these neocons. You can also Google and and find McNamara who was a neocon there. He did put out a book before he died. And on YouTube, he's there basically, I think, trying to clear his conscience before he died. And he said, we were wrong.
• 16:24
  We thought Russia was behind them. He says, we just you know, we're wrong. So 58 thousand guys and American soldiers die because they were wrong. But, I mean, this is unfortunately what we have to deal with. Why these people always want war, I don't know.
• 16:44
  I mean, Ron Paul even came out and said the same thing. I mean, all we've had is endless wars, and they never won a single one of them yet. So, you know, this is it. I mean, then you have the climate change people who want to move ahead at such a rapid pace that we don't have a power grid to to handle everybody's cars being electric. You know?
• 17:13
  And they, you know, it's when they were forming the euro, they they came to me and I met with them. And they were selling that as, oh, everybody will pay the same interest rate. And I said, this is not going to work this way. They were trying to to give the image of The United States. I said, yes.
• 17:37
  The dollar has a single interest rate for the federal government only. Every state has a different credit rating. And was like, you know, don't say that, please. You know? And I said, this is gonna fail.
• 17:52
  And they said, well, we just have to get the euro in, then we'll worry about the debt problem later. And, of course, they never did. But they always just rush into things. And so now in Europe, have, you know, people complaining, oh, well, this you know, Greece is paying more than than Italy, and Italy is paying more than Germany. You know?
• 18:14
  I told them, you're just gonna move the currency for, you know, volatility from the currency market to the bond market. You know, it's I think that's just common sense. And so You're gonna buy a debt based upon the credit rating of the of each state.
• 18:33
  Seth Holehouse: Alright, folks. I've got a quick message for you. I have one simple question. If today you could no longer go purchase more food for your family with the food stores that you have in your home, how long would you be able to feed your family? Would it be a week, three weeks, a month, two months, a year?
• 18:53
  This is a really important question folks that we have to be very realistic about because the elites are proactively trying to put us into a state of food crisis and a state of famine. I'm sure you've seen all of the different food processing plants and farms that are blowing up. You've got cattle dying by the tens of thousands. They're proactively trying to collapse our food system because they know if they can control our food, they can control us. And so one of the best ways to be outside of their control is to be able to have our own stores of food and to be able to produce our own food.
• 19:25
  So there's really two things I would recommend. One is having heirloom seeds that you can grow your own food with, making sure that they're non GMO heirloom seeds that that way you can harvest your seeds this year, use them next year. You can use these seeds for generations. Literally, it's how it will work. The other thing though is this high quality storable food.
• 19:45
  This is food that's sitting somewhere, it's hidden in your basement, buried in your backyard, whatever it ever it is. So that way if there is a crisis, if there is an emergency, you might have three months set aside to get through that time period. And so for this, I would highly recommend a company called Heaven's Harvest. This is an amazing Christian owned patriot company, and what they're doing is they're making high quality storable food. Again, lot of the food companies, they say these food buckets, they're all about maximizing calories per dollar.
• 20:15
  They're filling the buckets with a bunch of filler and junk like sweet beverages, etcetera. But Heaven's Harvest, they focus on very high quality food that will last up to twenty five years on the shelf. They also sell heirloom seeds. You can buy all of your seed, you can buy all of your restorable food. And look folks, personally, I would recommend having at least three months per person in your household, if not six months or even a year.
• 20:40
  Again, depends on your budget, but I'll definitely make sure you have some seeds because that seed, those seeds could be worth their weight in gold, if not more in the future. So to go ahead and do this right now, go up a new tab and go to heavensharvest.com. And if you use the promo code Seth, that's s e t h, promo code Seth, you'll save 15% off of your entire order. So again, folks, the time is running out and you'd rather be three months or one year early than one day late. Again, heavensharvest.com and use promo code Seth to save 15% today.
• 21:16
  With what's happening with the banking system. Right? We had SVB, then we had a signature and a handful of other banks, You know? And it seems like every you know, a bank fails. They come out and tell us everything's fine, whether it's Jamie Dimon or Jerome Powell or Yellen's.
• 21:31
  Oh, the banking system is so strong. It's it's perfect. And then our bank fails. They come out and say, oh, it's so strong and it's perfect. Yet it seems like it's really unraveling.
• 21:41
  So, I mean, looking at the big picture of the banking system and the loss of confidence in the banks, the fact that we're having more money that's exiting banks than ever before in history is because people are moving into other assets, they're losing trust. Where do you see this ending up? I mean, do you think that we're gonna continue to see this cascade and and kinda go out of control until it gets too big to control?
• 22:07
  Speaker 2: Well, that's part of the digital currency move that if you move it to digital, then, you know, you can't go up to the bank and say, you know, give me all my money and here's put it in this paper bag, you know. So that's part of it. But, you know, in all honesty, you know, the people who've been behind a lot of the decisions, even at central bank level, it's pathetic. I mean, you had Draghi in Europe take interest rates to negative in 2014. And I even warned them this.
• 22:56
  This is this is insane. You can't do this. Alright. So interest rates remain negative for for over eight years. So every bond that all the European governments have issued since 2014 are down anywhere between, you know, 30 to 40% if they had to sell them.
• 23:20
  And you take the in The United States, the problem, SVB and Republic Bank, etcetera. And most of these smaller banks are they really got wrapped up in this woke nonsense that, you look at SVB. They you know, the risk managers they put in, okay. Well, we need a woman. Not that she's qualified.
• 23:51
  You look at the board members, and the board members at SVP were basically just political donors to to the the Democrats. Not one had any banking experience. And this is a real problem because what happened is then you have the the fake news per se, Always saying, oh, well, you know, inflation is gonna be under control. It's gonna go down. And you have these people without experience in a lot of these small banks just believing whatever they read in the newspaper.
• 24:29
  So they didn't hedge. They had no understanding of even what hedging is. And, I mean, I'll give you an example. I mean, I was actually called in when they were creating the euro, and Britain was gonna stay out. Mercedes ended up shorting the British pound because all the newspapers said, oh, the pound is gonna fall.
• 24:55
  It's not part of the euro, etcetera. Right? Well, of course, the opposite happened. People didn't trust the euro, they moved to the pound, and the pound went up. So we got called into Mercedes.
• 25:07
  They had lost a billion dollars because they hedged thinking the pound would go down. And I asked them, I said, why did you get into this trade? And they actually said to me, well, that's what, you know, was on the headlines all the time. And then they asked me to go meet with the board of Daimler Benz. They said because they got the same same trade.
• 25:36
  So I went to go meet with them, and the board made its hedging decisions. They didn't even have a financial team at all. They made their hedging decisions based upon what they read in newspapers. And then because they had gotten it wrong so many times, they passed a rule that once they put a hedge on, they'll just let it expire. So at the last day of the fiscal year, Daimler Benz and Mercedes were suddenly merged, everybody was shocked.
• 26:08
  It's because we got Mercedes out of the their loss. Daimler had a billion dollar loss, which they wanna show. The two of them were merged together. It was very neatly hidden. And this is the way it is.
• 26:23
  I mean, no matter some of the biggest companies that I've gotten called into, they're unsophisticated. So here you have interest rates down artificially for so long. Alright? So then you have bonds. And the way a bank makes money, it it basically takes the a demand deposit and invests it long term.
• 26:54
  The spread. Very nice. Interest rates were virtually zero. So they were getting all this money for free, and then they were buying long term bonds. Well, what happens?
• 27:08
  Long term interest rates went up. All of a sudden, if they need to sell the bond, they have to take a huge loss. And the money that they used is from demand deposits. So you can walk in there and say, I want it now. That's the banking system.
• 27:25
  All right. When you artificially took rates so low, the banks got addicted to this like it was heroin or something. The money was free. So buying long term at one and a half, 2% max, that was a windfall for them. Now it's coming back to the opposite way.
• 27:48
  So the other thing I will say, which I don't really wanna scare people, but the two thousand eight to two thousand nine crisis was mortgage backed securities. So the banks that got in trouble were the ones that had those. This time, this is affecting all banks. Substantially different than 08/2009. Alright?
• 28:17
  Now that means it's largely the smaller banks that get, you know, the biggest risk because they didn't have any professional people, And that's the real crisis. And so
• 28:36
  Seth Holehouse: Do you think that we're on the edge of something that is far worse than what we what we experienced in 02/2009?
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: Well, yes. I mean, I don't wanna scare people. But I mean, the other problem is is that it sounds very nice. It's two fifty guarantee, blah blah blah. Okay.
• 28:59
  I mean, I was on the phone literally screaming at some of the people involved in decision making and saying, you have to cover all absolutely every deposit. Well, why? I said, because if you wipe out the small business that's gonna have more than two fifty there just for payroll. Alright? Now you're putting so many small business employees 70% of of the workforce.
• 29:31
  You take those out. So in other words, every small business that has more than 250,000 would lose it. I said, you're gonna be talking about a major banking crisis because I'd have to advise them, get your money the hell out of a bank. And then I don't know. I mean, you get these people in these positions and they have zero experience in the financial world.
• 30:00
  And, honestly, it was like their mouth just dropped. They're like, really? That would happen? Yes. It's it's just mind boggling.
• 30:13
  We don't have the expertise at government or or central banks. I mean, we need, you know, qualified people. You can't just, you know, be hiring somebody because of their race, creed. You know, I need three more women. You know?
• 30:35
  Do they can they do the job? Well, that's irrelevant. You know? Do you think say, oh.
• 30:41
  Seth Holehouse: You think that we would see bail ins? Because I know that there's been some discussion about that. Do you think that it could get to a point where either the banks are seizing assets from the customers to stay afloat or the government would seize anything from the the people to keep the banking industry alive?
• 30:59
  Speaker 2: Oh, there have been definitely discussions of doing that because it it and I I've been warning them. I said, you if you go down this road, you're wiping out small business. Unemployment's gonna shoot to probably 25%. And you talk about a great depression, that will look like your dress rehearsal. You know, the stupidity of people at this level, it's just mind boggling.
• 31:32
  And, you know, sometimes they just put out total BS. I mean, like, yelling, oh, well, we're we're only gonna, you know, go after the billionaires and and track $600 on on eBay. I don't think, you know, Elon Musk is selling some used bicycle for $600 on eBay. I mean, this is absurd. I mean, it it hiring 87,000 IRS agents for what?
• 32:01
  To go after the the rich? The rich are the ones that basically any business, you have to have law firms and and accountants in place just to deal with it. So the only people that they would possibly be able to target are the small business people and anybody who is making money on the side on eBay or whatever. I mean, this is you know, the the the lies that come from them are are really just too much.
• 32:35
  Seth Holehouse: Do you think that
• 32:35
  Speaker 2: they actually, you know Sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead.
• 32:38
  Seth Holehouse: I was gonna say, do you think that they want this system to collapse because it becomes the perfect opportunity to bring in their central bank digital currency, which gives them all the control they've always wanted?
• 32:52
  Speaker 2: There are definitely people that push for that. What what you have to understand is is they also are pushing for war. Why? Because they have actually had discussions that a war gives them the ability to default on all the debt, start all over, and create Brenton Woods too. The IMF has come out with its digital, you know, currency, and their objective is to replace the US dollar as a reserve currency.
• 33:31
  So, I mean, all these plans are there. It's not conspiracy theory. It's just that how do they implement it? That's that's the main question. And and that seems to come back to, you know, if we can just create some sort of a war, then that's the justification for because, you know, all Europe defaulted all is dead after World War one, World War two.
• 33:54
  I mean, this is what they do. You go to war. I mean, American Revolution, the constitution says that they would honor all the debts of the continental currency. They didn't. You can still buy continental currency, you know, on eBay if you want.
• 34:12
  They never honored that either. So, I mean, it's just the way, you know, things happen.
• 34:17
  Seth Holehouse: And where do you think the BRICS nations fit into this? Because they also seem to be aggressively advancing their, you know, plans and and their kind of push for a replacement to the US dollar as a reserve currency with their currency. And they also seem to be and, like, what we're witnessing right now is a massive dedollarization of the world. We have nations all over completely turned their back on The United States even though all the oil producing nations are. I mean, how does this fit in?
• 34:50
  And, I mean, what are what what's the how is that going to affect the dollar? Because as I understand, our dollar has had its strength and stability because of the agreements with the oil producing nations, because we're the world reserve currency, but that's all being undone rapidly.
• 35:09
  Speaker 2: Well, the to tell you the truth, the theory of the petrodollar, that was really all fake news. They did that in '73. After '71, Bretton Woods fails. So they were all saying, oh, the dollar is gonna completely collapse. That's it.
• 35:34
  It's not backed by gold. And dollar went up. So they had to come up with an excuse. Well, why is the dollar going up when it's no longer backed by gold? So then they came out, oh, it's it's because of the oil.
• 35:48
  All that is very nice. It's just propaganda. The real story here is that the wealth of a nation is not its gold, not oil, not commodities. It's its people. The United States has the largest consumer economy in the world.
• 36:10
  And so what's happened is that that's how Europe came back, China, Japan, from the ashes, basically, by making things to sell to Americans. So it's the American consumer. So all this brick talk is very nice, but it's, again, irrelevant. If they would say, oh, we're gonna reject the dollar, blah blah blah, all the rest of the stuff, then the problem becomes if they think that they can sell their product in their currency and not dollars to the American consumer, then it's gonna fluctuate. And honestly, I was involved in that as well.
• 37:03
  The Japanese, you know, I explained to them and they listened. Alright? How did they beat the German cars in the seventies? I said, look. The only way to do that is you price it in dollars.
• 37:19
  You take the risk of the currency back, and you manage it. And that's what they did. Then German cars went up in price dramatically in the seventies because they were pricing their cars in Deutsche Mark. And as the dollar would go down, people, you know, were looking at I mean, I had bought a Porsche in 1971 for, like, $20, and they were, like, $50 by the end of the decade. You know?
• 37:47
  It's not that the car appreciated. It was all currency moves. That's why I got called into the by the Germans. Okay. Fine.
• 37:55
  You did this for the Japanese. Now do this for us. Okay. So if you're taking the Brix and you're gonna take your product and you're not gonna sell it in dollars, you're gonna say, oh, you're gonna have to pay here in in whatever, in Indian rupees. Very nice.
• 38:14
  But you're now telling the American the foreign exchange risk is yours. That's not gonna fly. Alright. So I know a lot of people talk about this BRICS thing, and that's, you know, very nice and all its oil and this. They need to sell to the American consumer.
• 38:33
  Just look at the facts. Alright. What percentage of the world economy is energy? It's it's less than 10%. The bulk of it is consumer oriented.
• 38:46
  So you ought to take the take the look at Germany. Alright? And you can look at the stats. Germany's the strongest economy, very nice. But they used a mercantile theory.
• 39:01
  Get rich by selling things to everybody else. So they kept very high taxes. And if you look at the German citizen, they're worth less than an Italian. Alright? But they have the strongest economy because they also have the highest taxes.
• 39:20
  Alright? So whereas China will surpass The US economy. There's no question about that. But China has looked at this very carefully. China is attempting to create a their own consumer based economy.
• 39:41
  Alright. Whereas Europe is not. Alright. So they have looked at what made The United States successful. It was a consumer economy.
• 39:52
  Alright? So China will surpass The United States. And, ultimately, after 2032, fine. I think you'll be looking at the strongest economy will be the Chinese one. But it's not because of oil and things of this nature.
• 40:10
  They are strategically rebuilding this the Silk Road. They are strategically building their own domestic consumer economy. They are not stupid. They know what they're doing. Whereas Europe is more caught up in Marxism and socialism and all this.
• 40:32
  Know, it's quite it has really seriously suppressed their economic growth over the years. And it's it's just the way it is. I mean, you know, I love Europe. I've spent, you know, decades going you know, living there, going back and forth. But, you know, I would you know, one person, I was doing an interview with a in a press there, I think actually in Paris.
• 41:05
  And they said, you know, that your forecast that the EU would not be able to beat, you know, The United States. I said, correct. Why do you say that? I said, because you don't understand what made The United States. I said, it was actually discrimination.
• 41:25
  What do you mean discrimination? Whoever was the last off the boat was always discriminated against until they spoke English. Alright? So you ask an American, what are you? Oh, I'm half German, half Irish, whatever.
• 41:38
  Well, you don't see that in Europe. You know? I mean, sure, there are some exceptions. But, you know, I met people that are Scottish and and and mother's Italian, etcetera. You would never see that because they don't speak the same language.
• 41:54
  What made America great was the fact that everybody ended up having to speak the same language. So, I can't hire somebody to answer the phone in the office that only speaks Spanish. You know, you know, it's it's you gotta be able to to deal with the customer on the other side. So often it, you know, it is you know, the problem of we get together and as long as we consolidate everything, then the economy grows. Like like this wokeness stuff is very bad because it divides everybody.
• 42:35
  And so you start saying, oh, it's them. It's this. I mean, that's pretty much what Hitler did. Oh, the Jews. This.
• 42:46
  And and all of a sudden, goes from the, you know, the Jewish bankers. Then it goes to the Jewish store owners. Oh, the hell would they just get all the Jews. You know? You know, when you start, you know, taking groups and you you point the finger at them for one thing or another, then you separate them.
• 43:07
  And it's when the people are basically collective, then the government has trouble. You can also Google, because it came out in the lawsuit, I think it was in Alabama against Amazon. And the papers that got released was that they called it a diversity index, that they wanted to keep their workforce as diverse as possible so they don't combine together. So the blacks don't get together with the whites, the Spanish state. As long as everybody stays in their own little group, then they don't band together and create a union.
• 43:52
  This is what the paper and and that is actually how governments function. If you keep the people divided, then they will not join together, come up, and get you. As simple as that.
• 44:08
  Seth Holehouse: Which is why it just seems like we're constantly being hit with the divisive, you know, race wars, straight versus gay, you know, Christian versus atheist, and black versus white. I mean, it's they're constantly keeping us divided. So I wanna go back and take a step back and look at the the banking stuff because so I had Doctor. Charles Niner on the past couple of months. You know, what was something that his cycles were pointing out was he was saying that by fall, he expected the stock market will probably lose upwards of 40% by fall.
• 44:41
  Now, if you're, you know, talking and we're looking at like what you mentioned that you had 02/2008, '2 thousand '9, it was the banks that were heavily leveraged with, you know, mortgage backed securities. Right? And now it's something that is it's all the banks. So what do you see unfolding? And I think that in terms of not wanting to scare people, I think a lot of the audiences watching this show, I've probably scared them with much worse because I tend to be someone that's like, well, let's look at how bad it could be, and then we'll figure out how we can position ourselves.
• 45:14
  Right? So, you know, so where do you because if if this makes potentially the Great Depression look like a dress rehearsal, what what what could that look like? Right? What might people expect to happen?
• 45:29
  Speaker 2: Alright. Well, you're that forecast that the Dow would be down 40% or whatever. That you have to understand why something like that is less likely. Because when a stock market crashes, we call it a flight to quality. So where does the money go?
• 45:56
  It goes to government bonds, t bills, etcetera. Now in this situation, it's the government that's the problem. So are you gonna sell your IBM stock and run out and buy government bonds? I don't think that scenario works this time. So the people that are forecasting that by that very forecast means you sell the asset and you go to cash and you're going to bonds.
• 46:32
  Why would you do that if the problem is the cash and the bonds?
• 46:36
  Seth Holehouse: So where do you go? What what happens? Basically,
• 46:41
  Speaker 2: it it goes in the opposite direction. This is a time where private assets rise. Now that is real estate, it's stocks, precious metals, anything that is the movable things are probably the best. Even collectibles. I mean, some of the the ancient coins that I mean, I've been shocked.
• 47:14
  I mean, the last one, like, would sell for, you know, 3 or $400,000 bringing, you know, $3,000,000. It's like, what is going on? You know? You hear, I mean, you know, outrageous prices for the first comic book of, you know, of Superman, stuff like this. I mean, I'm in Florida, and I get, I would say, at least three phone calls a week.
• 47:39
  Gee. You wanna sell your house? No. I don't. Where am I supposed to go?
• 47:43
  You know? Chicago? No. Thank you. You know?
• 47:48
  Now you also have a problem of we have a migration issue as well, whereas people are fleeing the blue states, particularly California, Illinois, New York, and they're moving to Texas and Florida. I mean, I can tell you, I mean, this is it's crazy here. I mean, the the traffic has certainly doubled in six years. And, you know, and I talked to real estate friends of mine down here, and they're saying, you know, houses are, like, you know, one to three million. People are coming in paying cash.
• 48:29
  So it's clearly it's what we call people just trying to get money off the grid. What do you do with it? If you've got, you know, 3 or $4,000,000 sitting in a bank account, do you just leave it there? If the bank goes down, you're not gonna get more than $2.50. Do you wanna go out and buy thirty year bonds when the interest rates keep going up and maybe somebody doesn't want the bonds?
• 48:55
  You know? So basically, it's it's a very difficult situation, and it's mostly going into the private sector. And and that's why I seriously doubt that you would see the Dow down 50% because for that to happen, you would have to go someplace else. The other thing is that the amount of money in the debt market is generally 10 times that of the equity market. So it doesn't even take that much coming out of the bond market to say, well, gee, maybe I should get something a little bit, you know, different.
• 49:36
  You know? Then you have the war situation. And, you know, I've said, you know, when I created this model, it was just largely tracking capital flows. And back in the eighties, we had a client, it was Universal Bank of Lebanon, and they asked if we could you know, they found a ledger where somebody wrote the Lebanese pound down every day into the, you know, mid eighteen hundreds. And could we build a model?
• 50:09
  I said, sure. Okay. Fine. So we stuck it in and out came and said, your you know, I called him because I thought something was wrong. I said, it says your country is gonna fall apart in eight days.
• 50:20
  So I said something, you know, something's gotta be wrong with the data. And very commonly said, well, what currency would you recommend? And I thought that was a very strange way to respond to what what I thought was an outrageous forecast. And I said, well, it says to Swiss franc. 8 days later, the civil war began.
• 50:41
  We had another client who was a big shipper out of Saudi Arabia, and he called me and he says, Iran is gonna start attacking shipping in The Gulf tomorrow. What do you think gold's gonna do? I said, well, it says it's going up. So by the time we got to 1998, I began to understand, if you know you're going to do war, you start moving your money in advance. So we put out, you know, we ended up being on the front page of the London Financial Times in June of ninety eight, he said that Russia was gonna collapse in about thirty days.
• 51:19
  That was the long term capital management crisis, the whole thing. And so the point is I've warned that if we're gonna go into war with China and then they are going to start selling US debt. They've been doing that every month selling tens of billions of dollars. You don't own the the the debt and fund your opponent to wage war against you. So the bond market has this other albatross around its neck.
• 51:58
  And the more we move towards war, the more you will see China divest itself of US debt. So that also keeps pressure on interest rates to go higher as well. So it's we live in a very complex, dynamic global economy. And you can't reduce everything down to a single cause and effect. Like the climate change people, everything's CO2.
• 52:28
  I think there's something a little bit more involved here, you know. It's never just one thing. And the same thing on finance. I mean, we got to look at, okay, if we're going to keep jawboning China, then they are going to sell the debt. If they sell the debt, that's going to push the interest rates up higher on this side.
• 52:48
  If you're going to be looking at the government not paying small businesses, that that would then create a depression. But probably more so in the small companies rather than the big companies. I you know, because that's where the politicians have their money. You know? So we have to understand that we're everything is connected.
• 53:14
  Absolutely everything is connected. We can't say it's just one thing. So I don't see the stock market crashing 50%. It you know, to do that, you're gonna have to have basically a banking failure where they decide to allow all the small companies to go bust. I don't see that before 2024.
• 53:42
  I think Biden will cancel the currency after the election. I don't think they would do that beforehand. They're definitely going to push out the the central bank digital currency from July forward, and even that's connected to the five g. Why are we going to five g? Because they need faster speed so that you can instantaneously transfer money right then and there.
• 54:22
  You pay a store. Okay. Fine. Here. The store's gonna know that the money's good instantly.
• 54:29
  Alright? You're you don't you're not gonna have a $50 bill to give somebody. Alright? So ramifications of that are are very profound. They go further off.
• 54:43
  I mean, you see a guy, you know, with a sign, I'm homeless. How do you give them money? You know, do you have a digital card? You know? All that's out.
• 54:53
  I mean, how do you hire this 16 year old girl next door to to be the babysitter? You know? It's you know, they talk about, oh, and, you know, all crime and prostitution, etcetera. You know? The implications of eliminating cash are far greater than I think people really suspect.
• 55:19
  Seth Holehouse: And do you think that they'll be successful in doing that? Or do I mean, because it seems like whenever the government tries to do something, something big, especially look at Obamacare, look all the different things they've tried to do, it always fails. And I I can't think of a more complex operation than getting rid of the getting rid of cash as a as a currency and replacing it with the, you know, digital currency. So do you think that they will succeed? Or do I mean, I because I would imagine a lot of people will just say, I'm not gonna like, I'm just not gonna participate.
• 55:54
  Right? It's like when they they brought the euro in, and a lot of other countries still they, you have people that use their local currencies. So, I mean, how would they possibly do this? And, I mean, do you think they'll even succeed at it?
• 56:09
  Speaker 2: If you ever go into Europe and you understand, I mean, they cancel their currency routinely. So even in Britain, if you have a a £10 note from twenty years ago, it's not worth anything. You have to go to the central bank, and then they'll replace it with a new one. But you go to a store, sorry. We don't take that.
• 56:33
  And so Europeans are more in tune with this canceling the currency stuff. You had Trudeau in Canada cancel. He canceled all the high denomination notes as of, you know, January. And The United States, it presents a a bigger problem because 70% of the dollars are held outside The United States. And people use it as a hedge against their own governments.
• 57:08
  I remember when they were coming out with the new hundred dollar bill, They were running advertisements on the international flights. The old ones are still valid because everybody else cancels. Oh, you can still use them. You know, they're they're still valid. US had to go out and start a campaign internationally to say that they're still good because everybody else just cancels it.
• 57:33
  That's why the dollar is really the reserve currency, because the dollar has never been canceled. If you got a $10 bill from 1861, yes, it's still valid. But, I mean, it's worth a lot more to a collector. But so that's also part of the dollar reserve status, which people don't really appreciate unless you start moving around internationally. I mean, I got a few thousand dollars from the last time I was there in India, they canceled them all.
• 58:02
  So, you know, that's very nice. I gotta go back there again to cancel the the the you know, I suppose they would they would redeem them. But, I mean, this is the way, you know, it it functions. Outside The United States, they routinely cancel currency. I mean, like I said, even Trudeau just did it in Canada.
• 58:26
  So Americans, it's strange, but US wants to give it a shot. Will it succeed? I think it will cause more civil unrest and a lack of confidence in The United States domestically and internationally. Once they do that, then the dollar will not be the reserve currency. You can't hold it overseas as a as a check and balance against your government.
• 58:57
  So, you know, and and even then you have to, you know, when they do this digital currency, they will also wipe out all, you know, cryptocurrencies. You have to understand this is a you know, they're not gonna allow Bitcoin to survive. That's competition. You know, the object here is to get their after all cash transactions for taxes. Alright.
• 59:33
  So why would you then allow any cryptocurrency to exist, which would still be the same thing as cash? You're gonna eliminate the cash. They're eliminating the the digital, you know, cryptocurrency side as well. They don't want any competition. And their view, just like Yellen was saying, oh, we're going to have to audit $600.
• 59:57
  6 hundred dollars. How much are you, you know, you're going to really get? But if they sit there and think that we are all just scum, They really look down upon us as as some sort of an ant farm. And we you know, they wouldn't have a problem if we all obeyed everything and paid every tax that they ever dreamed of. This is really their their view.
• 1:00:28
  I mean, I've been in meetings and argued. And in Canada, I I was completely dumbfounded. Response was, well, what we earn is really theirs. They decide what we're allowed to keep. This is how far the left has gone, that we're just economic slaves to them.
• 1:00:55
  Human rights, all that's out the window. It's like I don't know. I mean, it's it's the most Marxism basically has been responsible for more deaths than anything, any theory ever devised by man. I mean, hundreds of millions of people died just simply within the communist revolutions. And they just never stop.
• 1:01:26
  I mean, just look at the eight points from the W. F. From Klaus Schwab. I mean, democracy is is they don't even want that. You can Google there was the Feet when Trump was elected.
• 1:01:40
  It was they were all upset. It was like, suddenly, democracy became populism. Populism was evil. Why is it evil? Oh, because it's against career politicians.
• 1:01:54
  You know? So it you know, it's yeah, I mean, you take Ukraine. Oh, we're fighting for democracy. Well, the Minsk agreement said that the dumbass was supposed to get elections and be allowed to vote. So where is this a battle for democracy?
• 1:02:12
  It's not. It's it's but, you know, they look. They they've been lying about things for a long time. And and just look at every war. It's the tapes are out now by, you know, from LBJ.
• 1:02:29
  We were never attacked by the Vietnamese. And and he says, for all he knew, they were shooting at whales that night. Fifty eight thousand people of our guys died for whales. Weapons of mass destruction never existed. I mean, just go on and on and on.
• 1:02:49
  I mean, it's they say whatever they need to say to achieve their immediate goal. That's it.
• 1:02:56
  Seth Holehouse: Yeah. You're you're absolutely right. I mean, the, you know, the Pearl Harbor, which they knew about ahead of time, I mean, all of these became justifications for their for their wars. Do you have time for one more question? Is that okay?
• 1:03:12
  Are you Sure. Oh, okay. Well, it's it's actually it's kinda two questions put together. One is the we're seeing, you know, central banks and a lot of the bigger governments, etcetera, that they are buying gold in record numbers. So I wanna see what your thoughts are as to why they're doing that.
• 1:03:30
  And then the other question, it kinda relates to it, is do you think that we could ever see an act of 1933 again where, say, when the government wants to transition to a central bank digital currency, that they would actually seize the precious metals from the hands of the people?
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 2: The reason you see China, Russia, etcetera, going for gold, it's not that you're returning to a gold standard. And it's not even that they think gold's gonna go up. It's what I'm talking about is you do not hold the the currency of your opponent. All right? Because basically, look, I mean, they just seized private assets if you were Russian.
• 1:04:22
  That's it. We just took yachts and everything. They can do whatever they want. There is no rule of law. So if China's sitting there with, you know, trillion dollars worth of stuff, we're not gonna honor that.
• 1:04:35
  You're gonna eat it. This is why they're going to gold. Okay? It's not that they think gold is gonna go up or down or whatever. And so it's not bullish from like a a standpoint of price.
• 1:04:48
  It's neutrality. Okay? That's what they're interested in. And you can't go with the euro. You can't go with the dollar.
• 1:05:01
  Canada is too small anyhow, and they're just as crazy as any so is Australia. Britain, same thing. So where do you go? So that's why you see some of these central banks buying gold. It's got nothing to do with being bullish or bearish or anything else.
• 1:05:21
  It's just being neutral and they get rid of everything else because the West is not trustworthy. Just look at the Minsk agreement. I I couldn't believe it that you can Google that. And somebody asked, well, why don't asked Merkel, why didn't they force Ukraine to to honor the Minsk agreement? And she actually responded, well, we never really intended that.
• 1:05:46
  We we just did that to do, you know, Russia to give, you know, Ukraine time to build an army. It's like, excuse me? Why would anybody then enter any treaty with you ever again if you're you don't honor what you say? I mean, I I couldn't believe that response. It was just mind boggling.
• 1:06:09
  Then how would you then say, okay, Russia, we're ready for a peace agreement. Should they trust it? I mean, it I mean, I couldn't believe that a head of state would have ever responded in such a reckless manner of that. So why should China or Russia or anybody else enter any agreement on anything if if we don't honor it? So I don't think you know, when in 1933, when they confiscated gold, what they did was they went after all the institutions.
• 1:06:50
  So if you have your gold in a storage facility, yes, they could take that. They know where it is. But they did not come knocking on everybody's doors and saying, give me every, you know, this 1 20 dollar gold piece you got in your sock drawer. That's why so many of them have survived. All right?
• 1:07:11
  But if you had there are a number of Supreme Court cases on this The people challenged that. And the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the government, know, the Gold Clause cases. You say, well, I, you know, deposited $20 in gold, and I should get $20 in gold back. And they said, no. A $20 bill is just as good.
• 1:07:38
  So I don't think that they would confiscate going down to as it was in '33, but any recorded storage facility might be a problem.
• 1:07:53
  Seth Holehouse: I see. Okay. Well, that's that's helpful. And do you think that if because there's a lot of people that do have precious metals sitting in storage facilities. And do you think that there'll be writing on the wall ahead of time where it'd be like, okay, things are getting kind of hairy now.
• 1:08:08
  Time to kind of pull that, you know, back home and and pay the fees to get it out of there.
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 2: It's hard to say. I mean, I think that when these people realize that it is the alternative to what they're doing, then they will start attacking it. This is a war between them and us, basically. And I do know guys that run smelting operations, and they have to report where every gram comes from and where it went. So as I said, it's the same thing with crypto.
• 1:08:55
  They're not they don't want competition. There's always a black market that emerges. So I would expect that to happen where maybe gold and silver basically are the underground currency of that. And what they'll do is they'll make it illegal for you to do a transaction in gold or something along those lines. They're never afraid about passing any, you know, any crazy laws.
• 1:09:33
  I mean, just look at what they're actually proposing that Biden should should pardon Hunter. I mean, you know, that's like, really okay. Fine. So the allegations go back to you yourself. So now you're you're giving yourself a pardon while you're addressing I mean, it it's just the conflicts of interest are like, don't you people care about even that anymore or what?
• 1:10:01
  So it just seems like everything's just beyond any rational contemplation anymore, and the the year is just starting.
• 1:10:12
  Seth Holehouse: That's that's certainly true. Well, I thank you for the time that you've given me today. Before we sign off, do wanna bring up your website, which is armstrongeconomics.com. So I really encourage folks to come on here. And I know that you offer a lot of services and guidance.
• 1:10:29
  Right? So what will people find on your website?
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 2: Well, the the website is completely free. You don't even have to register to get in, and we don't sell advertising. Socrates is a fully functioning artificial intelligence system. It's the only one in the world. And it writes over a thousand reports every day on everything that imaginable.
• 1:11:01
  Real estate, individual stocks, precious metals. And it's all the stock markets around the world. I mean, it's covering economic statistics. So this is all I gotta say, it's a fully functioning AI system that is confined to just the world financial economy. It's not gonna answer, you know, what's Lady Gaga's, you know, dog's name.
• 1:11:31
  But that's you know, it's unbiased that way. It's it's nobody else is in in there changing anything, you know, you know, whatever. So it it's it's very it's non biased, not prejudicial in any way. And that's what's making it so attractive around the world. It's covering markets that nobody else even covers.
• 1:12:02
  So gold, silver ratios are there. I mean, you know, even the Dow gold ratios are there. I mean, everything imaginable. You know, it's I mean, you can gain access to for I think even just $15 a month or something. We try to make it some things open for the average person.
• 1:12:26
  But this was all started just for institutions. So we've opened it up to try and help society as much as possible.
• 1:12:36
  Seth Holehouse: I see. Okay. And this website is ask-socrates.com. And then also Martin or sorry, Armstrong@economics.com. So, Martin, thanks again for having you for coming on the show.
• 1:12:51
  I think that in say three or four more months is gonna be a lot more to talk about. So maybe we'll do another one of these because I think it's going to be a pretty wild summer.
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 2: It's it's definitely 2023 was supposed to be a very critical turning point on according to our computer, and we just started. By the the time we get through the summer and and the fall, I mean, it's it's gonna be very interesting to say the least.
• 1:13:20
  Seth Holehouse: It is. Well, thanks again. Take care and have a wonderful rest of your day.
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 2: Thank you.
• 1:13:26
  Seth Holehouse: Alright, folks. I hope you enjoyed that interview with Martin Armstrong. He's one of the few people that really captivates me and he's he's also got all these really interesting stories about meeting world leaders and this crazy things that he's been involved with. But, you know, there's a lot of weight to what he says, and he talked about some very serious aspects of our economy. And the one thing there's a few things that stuck with me.
• 1:13:51
  One of the things was talking about the you know, this is a a basically, this will make the Great Depression look like a dress rehearsal, which is pretty significant. And so to follow-up this interview, I've actually got another interview with Doctor. Kirk Elliott to talk about a lot of the things that we covered in the Martin Armstrong interview, but also to show some articles and some recent information about what's really happening. So we're now going to jump into an economic update with Doctor. Kirk Elliott.
• 1:14:19
  Kirk, it's great to see you, man. How are you doing?
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 3: I'm doing well. It's great to see you.
• 1:14:25
  Seth Holehouse: Yeah. And it was it was good seeing you in Miami as well for the reawaken event. I mean, it was, you know, just obviously a a big event, lots of energy, a lot of people waking up, and you always leave those events feeling just inspired and, you know, having more hope for the nation.
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 3: Well, that's what it's all about. Right? I mean, Clay does such an amazing job on bringing everybody together, like, topic after topic, whether it's the economy or health or things or spiritual side, right, politics, bringing it all together. Because a lot of times it feels like we're alone in this battle. Right?
• 1:15:03
  But when you come away from that, it's like, oh my word, I'm not alone. There's thousands of people that just came to this event that think like me around the country. You know, it's got to be people are waking up everywhere. And that's I that's what I feel whenever I leave any one of those because I go to a lot of them is there is hope. There's people fighting.
• 1:15:24
  This is for our freedoms, right? Our personal freedoms, our economic freedoms, our health freedoms, our religious freedoms, all of them. Right? And it's just an amazing thing to go to. But, yeah, we we had a great time there.
• 1:15:36
  We loved seeing you. We loved being with the other show hosts that were on. Loved meeting all of our clients there because there's a lot of them. And it was just it was just really a good weekend.
• 1:15:47
  Seth Holehouse: Yeah, it really was. And it was interesting because you could see in talking to a lot of people there, you mentioned, you know, kind of the feeling of being alone. And that was something that gave me encouragement because a lot people they told me in the feedback and talking to the audience members, said, look, you know, it's shows like yours that make me feel less alone. Like, I can't have these conversations with my family. I can't talk about this with my spouse or my children.
• 1:16:13
  But having, you know, tune in and listen to a conversation between you and they mentioned your name a handful of times as well, people that just see things the same, really, it really helps them.
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:16:25
  Seth Holehouse: Yeah. But some some crazy things are certainly continuing to unravel though amidst all this. And and, you know, keep in mind that my perspective is that I have a lot of hope for the American people and for our future, especially for the good people. But I also want to be really just very sober about where things are at. And, you know, because, you know, you and I have really, you know, kind of honed in on the economic aspect of our world, and I've learned so much from you.
• 1:16:52
  I think that we should continue just really trying to wrap our heads around what's happening, especially as we're looking at the continuing bank runs. Because as much as they're telling us that everything is okay, all the indicators are showing the opposite. And there's actually a warning from a pretty big hedge fund manager that we're gonna get into that I think is like is shocking to say the least. But let's go ahead and start with this article that you sent me about Pac West. Right?
• 1:17:24
  This is another one of the big banks that we've been eyeing and how their shares continue to tumble. Actually, I've got a little chart down here where you can see that you do not want your stocks to look like that. Right? Like, that looks like it's the opposite of what happened to the votes for Joe Biden. Right?
• 1:17:43
  It's just like a vertical line down. But what they're saying though with this is that, you know, there's just this news from late last week that their shares dropped another 20% and they're already down 80%, but after bank deposits fell 9.5%. So almost 10% of all their bank deposits in the last week fled that banking system. So what can you what can you make of that?
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 3: Well, when you think about why banks fail, it's it's pretty easy. They have more withdrawals than they do deposits. I mean, it just boils down to that. And but this problem, like we've talked about before, goes back to March of twenty twenty when the Federal Reserve changed the reserve requirement to zero because banks don't have to have anything on hand. Well, Kirkland is stupid.
• 1:18:35
  Why would they do that when they have to write checks and, you know, people have checks and savings account withdrawals and everything that they do? Well, the lower the reserve requirement goes, the more a bank can lend out. So there's or more money that they can use to invest. Right? So it's in the bank's best interest and to try to stimulate the economy because if you lend out a ton of money, like all of it, you've got all that money kind of working for you.
• 1:19:02
  Well, where this becomes a real problem is when people's wages are declining, prices going up, people can't afford to live like we have right now, then a 0% reserve requirement, which they use to try to stimulate the economy and get more people to purchase, that doesn't even matter. I mean, you could probably put the the interest rates to negative. And if people don't have money, they simply don't have money. They're tapped out. Doesn't matter if interest rates were negative 15%.
• 1:19:31
  They're still not gonna spend because they don't have it. And the other part of that problem is banks have no liquidity. I mean, as we've seen over the last, since the beginning of this year, you know, over the last five months, the basically m two money supply is shrinking. It's not growing. It's shrinking, which means that not just our people pulling money out of the system, but because it's shrinking more than that.
• 1:19:57
  Right? We can tell. It's down by $500,000,000,000, half a trillion in the first four months of this year. That's basically the fed pulling money out of circulation. Not all of that is people getting out of dodge and going somewhere else.
• 1:20:12
  That's way too big of a number for that. So the Fed is simply pulling money out of circulation in exchange for a central bank digital currency, the FedNow app, right, that has complete transparency and control. So they've got to show momentum somehow, some way, and I believe that's what's happening. Because, Seth, if if you ask around, if I ask around, not many people have much money in the banks to withdraw. Right?
• 1:20:39
  They don't. So where's all this money being pulled out of the bank coming from? It's stuff that we haven't really have in our hands anyways. It's money that the fed has injected into the banking system over the years, and they're just pulling it out. The banks aren't lending it to people anyways.
• 1:20:53
  So, really, that that impact is not going to impact consumers all that much in my opinion. It's ultimately gonna really hurt the banks as they have no capital anymore to lend. And even if they wanted to, the Fed doesn't let them have it. Right? Because they're they're future casting, going down the road and saying, this this economy doesn't look good.
• 1:21:14
  Paper money is going away. But the more that these things decline, the quicker we can get our end game way, which is central bank digital currency because it's complete command and control. So I think all of this appears, and I hate to be mister conspiracy theory guy, but to me, it's not really conspiracy, not when the dots line up so well, is they're they're dramatically impacting the system in a negative way to pull paper money out because you can't tax paper money. You can't control people with paper money, but you can with digital. So in the finance world, for anything to be born, something else needs to die.
• 1:21:54
  And this is what's dying is paper based money creation via the central bank that we've been used to since the early nineteen hundreds that's dying in exchange to give birth to a central bank digital currency, which is all about command and control, knowing everything you spend on everything. That's the world that we're headed into.
• 1:22:15
  Seth Holehouse: And so you mentioned the m 2 money supply and that, you know, made me think of this article and I mentioned this kind of getting into this, but this is something that I'm just gonna read through some of this because my jaw hit the floor when I came across this. And this is okay. Let's go dive in. So US government may freeze American bank withdrawals as currency panic and capital flight mounts. This is from the macro guru Hugh Hendry.
• 1:22:43
  So I'm gonna read a little bit of this for the folks because this is this is so important. Like, this is so important. So hedge fund manager and macroeconomic expert Hugh Hendry just issued a major warning on The US banking system and the American economy as a whole. In a new interview on Bloomberg Markets, Henry says mass panic and capital flight away from The US banking sector is entirely justified. He says a further decline in the m two money supply, which in part tracks money in liquid checking accounts, could convince the US government to step in and prevent citizens from taking their capital out of the banking system.
• 1:23:24
  He says, quote, sometimes it's kind of relevant to panic. I would recommend you panic. You've seen the biggest waterfall decline in M2 right now. M2 is deposits, not loans. That's the deposits fleeing the system and going into money market funds.
• 1:23:40
  That could reach a crescendo where the Treasury and the Fed may have to come in and actually restrict your right as a US citizen to pull money out of The US banking sector. It continues, Henry Henry says capital flight from The US banks is not solely about fears on whether the FDIC will ensure deposits above $2.50 ks and a blanket guarantee on deposits would not solve the problem. He says, quote, There is capital flight deposit flight from the banking sector seeking yield. I fear that. I don't say this lightly, but in 1934, the Federal Reserve Act confiscated gold from US citizens.
• 1:24:19
  We're at the point where the Fed and Treasury officials I'm sure are having to consider a gate a gate lock on unite on US bank deposits. So, I mean, we've talked about balance, right? We've talked about the idea that, you know, in order to save this banking system that they might see some of your money and kind of put it towards the, you know, kind of bailing out the banks, right, as you saw happen in Cyprus. This is a whole different thing because this is something, like, if there's one trend I've seen the past couple of years, especially under Joe Biden, it's that the federal government and the federal agencies are really pushing the limit on the amount of control they're willing to exert on We the People and how much they're willing to shred the constitution. And so, I could see them, I look, we saw them saying, shut down your restaurants, you know, social distance, wear a mask, it's for your own safety, we're protecting you.
• 1:25:23
  I could see them saying, you know what, we're gonna temporarily, we're gonna restrict and limit your bank withdrawals because if you overdo it, it's going to collapse the banking system. So we're going to protect you. I mean, I mean, when I when I show this to you, what are your thoughts on this?
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 3: Well, so my thoughts are we don't have to look much farther back than even what happened in Zimbabwe. I'm sorry, not Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe was a hyperinflation, which they had to limit people's withdrawals. Right? But, again, people had nobody.
• 1:25:56
  It's like, good grief. When they have over a % inflation a year, this is terrible. But Nigeria, Three Weeks ago, they limited people's withdrawals out of the bank accounts to $40 a month instead of $40 a week, which is what Nigerians need to survive on. They limited the withdrawals to $40 a month, but they forced that issue on people. Why did they do that?
• 1:26:23
  Well, it wasn't because they really cared about people taking money out of the bank. It's because they wanted to control them, and only point 5% of that population actually wanted central bank digital currency. Well, by the time they were done forcing the issue, you had 60% adoption rate. Why did they do? They starved out their population.
• 1:26:43
  Said unless you agree to the central bank digital currency thing, we're just not gonna give you enough money to live on. Only give you $40 a month instead of $40 a week. Well, man, that's living on 25% of what you normally have. It's a loss of 75% when you can't get that out of the bank, And they're saying, gotta deal with what we tell you you're going to do and live on it and you're going to be happy about it. Right?
• 1:27:08
  Well, it's like, what if I'm not? What if I need more than $40 a week?
• 1:27:14
  Seth Holehouse: Well, what's crazy Kirk is is like ten years ago, I would have looked at that story and said, well, yeah, that's Africa. Like that would never happen here in America. It would have been so easy to write it off and say, well, yeah, that's Africa. Right? But now, you know, I would honestly like, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw our own government and our own Federal Reserve attempt to, you know, pull the same kinds of shenanigans here in The United States.
• 1:27:44
  It's sad to say that, but it's it's how I if that's how I truly feel.
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 3: Well, I agree. I mean, none of us want that. Americans, we want a strong dollar. We want this to be strong and so we can move forward with confidence and invest with confidence, but politicians don't even know what's going on. These these international nongovernmental organization agreements have nothing to do with congress.
• 1:28:08
  Right? They have nothing to do with anything except that they can get the bill passed by congress, and the bill might say, hey. We're just gonna use stimulus money. We're going to use money that's printed out of thin air maybe, which is which are just bank deposits issued by Chase. They they rubber stamp the back of the check, say, hey.
• 1:28:27
  Before we even deposit it, slip this money over into the Fed at at the Federal Reserve, you know, one of their big banks, because we don't want it. We don't want it in the system. Or, I mean, this is this is such a prevalent thing happening right now. I believe full on that there's another bank run coming because they simply don't have liquidity. And then to even give out a loan right now is insane.
• 1:28:54
  I was talking to a client this morning, and they were wondering what to do with their money. They said they're gonna they have to refinance their home somehow, as was their exact words were. And it's like, what do you mean somehow? Said, well, we can't get a loan because our FICO score isn't high enough. It's like FICO score is dumb, right?
• 1:29:13
  It's like never had a missed payment. You know, you're living within your means. Well, you might not get a very good FICO score there unless you're maxing out your credit cards pretty much. I mean, I don't know exactly what the metrics are and paying off, you know, your your monthly payment every single month without skipping a beat. I mean, this is where we're headed where even on a credit card, which we're used to them knowing everything that you buy and sell because you get the this, you know, information sheets, bunch of separation of of payments based on every payment that you make that's going into the S and P five hundred or the Dow, those days are numbered.
• 1:29:53
  Right? Those days are numbered, and ultimately, they're not gonna let you do that. They're just gonna say, alright. You've gotta bail out your own currency system. Right?
• 1:30:00
  Just just give money to the bank, and then we're gonna make sure that you get everything else that you need that you paid your whole life in to get. So this is where I see it coming is even on the federal side, you're gonna start to see draconian measures that really just want to destroy the faith and confidence that you have in The US stock market so they can usher in their own way of living. Because it's gonna be hard to defeat people now when it's actually bad, but it's not horribly bad. You can still have a good time at Disney. Right?
• 1:30:31
  But but it's really getting bad, and so we don't wanna we don't wanna participate in that. We don't wanna participate in anything that is going to show a huge massive negative profit. Give me a break. That's where we can thrive and keep people in the right place at the right time.
• 1:30:48
  Seth Holehouse: Exactly. Exactly. Well, and I think that's something that you know, look, I'm I'm obviously not a financial guy. I don't have a PhD in economics, but I'm trying, you know, I'm piecing it all together. I'm really stringing together the overall narrative.
• 1:31:03
  And I think that, you know, what I'm seeing with this is that, okay, what is the root cause? Well, I think in many ways, it's it's the the sovereign debt crisis, right? It's like going back and I just, you know, I just interviewed Martin Armstrong, right, we just had that interview and he talked about this and saying that basically, you know, like in 02/2008, it was the it was the mortgages, right. So the banks that were tied up in these mortgage backed securities, they're the ones that collapsed, but like right now, it's the treasury, right. It's the sovereign money.
• 1:31:37
  Right? It's the central banks. I mean, it's like at the very core of the system. It's almost like before, maybe you had skin cancer on your arm in 02/2008 and they could remove that skin cancer. Right?
• 1:31:49
  And the rest of your body is okay except for that that one area. Whereas now it's like the cancer is in the bones of the entire system and there's no way to remove it because it's at the very core of the system. And you know, when Martin Armstrong when I was asking about this and he said, he said that they've been describing this scenario that he you know, what he thinks is coming next will make the Great Depression look like a dress rehearsal. That was just mind blowing. But it's always crazy because I find that a lot of times when I'm speaking to a particular expert, that other people like independently will come to those exact same conclusions.
• 1:32:27
  And so we just had this was just today, this article came out. This is from Peter Schiff, an article that was, you know, talking about this. So here, this is on Zero Hedge. Peter Schiff, Great Depression two point o is incoming. So Peter was on Jesse Kelly's show recently.
• 1:32:44
  They're talking about inflation, what it means, and it's like, the CPI is only 4.9%. Right? It's not 5%. Like, we're concerned. It's just it's mind boggling.
• 1:32:55
  But there's something I want to get into in this because Peter said some really important things that I think highlight exactly where things are at. So he said that the crisis is going to come in the form of a sovereign debt and currency crisis. He said, quote, so much worse than just the garden variety financial crisis that we had in 02/2008 because this time, it's not just going to be subprime mortgages that are the problem, it's going to be the US Treasury debt that's a problem.
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:33:26
  Seth Holehouse: Nobody is going to want to own our sovereign debt because of how high inflation is. And that's also going to create a dollar crisis. There is where we're heading, and it's a big disaster. And he continues and says, in asking about whether, you know, Jesse asked him, is this gonna be like the Great Depression? He said, it's probably gonna be worse.
• 1:33:46
  It's a depression. But unlike the depression in the 1930s, where the people at least got the benefit of falling prices that provided some relief. During the depression, you lost your job, but at least the cost of living went down. If you didn't lose your job, you were actually better off because you had your paycheck and your paycheck went further because consumer prices fell during the thirties. But this time, even the people who don't lose their jobs are going to suffer because they're going to lose the value of their paychecks.
• 1:34:14
  They're going to lose the value of their savings because everything that you need to buy is going to be a lot more expensive. And that's going to compound the burden for the unemployed, because not only are they going to be without their jobs, but their savings are going to be destroyed. And even if they get checks from the government, it's not going to be enough to afford the basic necessities. So, I mean, like what Peter said in that just then, especially talking about the, you know, sovereign debt crisis, it's almost word for word almost exactly what Martin Armstrong said. And it's really it's what you've been saying as well.
• 1:34:51
  Speaker 3: Well, it's what both of us have been saying. I mean, this is the crazy thing about that. This isn't what Martin is saying and all these others that this is not rocket science. Right? We just have to connect the pieces.
• 1:35:02
  To me, it boils down to lowering wages, right, plus rising cost of borrowing, plus rising debt equals bad economy because people aren't going have as much money to spend. Right? So that's that's the issue that we're dealing with. So when I hear people like Martin Armstrong and others who are actually shouting it from the rooftops, and he's not as much of a of a big, huge silver fan as a lot of us are, but yet he's going in with full steam ahead. Right?
• 1:35:31
  Because he wants to see what his projections, I guess, will will come to in in light of the world that we're going to because he's an amazing trends forecaster. Amazing. And what he's seeing is this cycle of wars. Now the cycle of conflict. Right?
• 1:35:50
  And when you what causes that? It's it's a lot of times lack of food comes before that. Well, the with the inflationary pressures, we don't have a lot of food. Right? When you had the Arab Spring back in the day, what did Martin Armstrong say?
• 1:36:06
  Well, it's like, well, look what look what's happening. You've got you've got a food crisis in The Middle East and being angry, so to speak, is a real thing. Well, it is. When people can't afford to take care of their people in their own country, weird things start to happen. Right?
• 1:36:22
  And it's this cycle of war. It's this economic cycle. It's a food shortage cycle. It's all of these cycles culminating into something that's bigger than the Great Depression, something that's bigger than anything that we've ever seen because it's not just a subprime lending bubble like we had in o seven through o nine. It's not just a tech stock bubble like we saw in February.
• 1:36:48
  It's literally an everything bubble. Everything that's grown because of borrowing and debt, which would be the stock market, the bond market, real estate, they're all going to come crashing down as this debt market implodes. And this is where we start to look at things like in in a completely different light. Like, this isn't gonna be a correction. This is gonna be a collapse kind of a feeling because it's based on everything.
• 1:37:16
  Now you've got draconian measures that are being talked about ever since Janet Yellen, a couple weeks ago, said we're gonna run out of money at the June. Well, she's talking about the debt ceiling. Right? This happens every single year, so I don't want people to be alarmist about it. It's like, yeah, we we basically have this conversation every single year.
• 1:37:36
  The end of the fiscal year, we are going to run out of money, so they raise the debt ceiling. They can talk and politically maneuver around it all the time, blame somebody else. I don't care what side of the political aisle you're on, you always raise the debt ceiling. They always do. But that adds more to the end game, which is all of that money, very inflationary.
• 1:37:55
  It's gonna tear us apart because people don't have enough money to spend. So now what? When there's not enough money to spend and people aren't working and wages are coming down, they're not paying into social security, which is why Janet Yellen says, we're gonna run out of social security in ten years. Ten years, it's no longer going to be there. It goes insolvent.
• 1:38:16
  So what are they talking about now? Policymakers in America. The same exact thing that the policymakers in France did, raise the age of benefits to get it out of Social Security or reduce the amount of payments that you get or a combination of both. Raise the age, reduce the benefits. Now you kick the can down the road another five to ten years.
• 1:38:40
  Right? But but this is gonna be very devastating. They're not even gonna keep up with cost of living adjustments. They're not gonna keep up. And and so but they've hit this point of, well, we gotta try to save the system from implosion for everybody, so therefore we'll just put austerity measures in.
• 1:38:57
  You know, you you don't get to access the benefits for another few more years, or or when you do get your benefits, it's gonna be less, not just due to inflation because they're physically maybe cutting the benefits officially, not just due to inflation, right, but officially, those are what austerity measures are, and this is what policymakers in America are talking about. The same thing that's causing riots and looting in France right now, which is simply raising the age of retirement. They're talking about the same thing here.
• 1:39:28
  Seth Holehouse: Exactly. Or you could also just get rid of some of the population, which maybe that's also in their playbook. Perhaps.
• 1:39:36
  Speaker 3: That's in their playbook. We've seen it. We've read it. My commencement speech when I graduated with my master's degree from the University of Denver, senator Tim Worth was our commencement speaker, and he was one of the biggest proponents of global population reduction in the Senate at the time. It's like, wait a second.
• 1:39:58
  This is supposed to be a happy day. We're graduating. You're saying, yeah, we need to get the total growth population down to 500,000,000 people. It's like, what? The whole earth?
• 1:40:09
  I mean, that's just a couple hundred million more than America. What about China and India and everyone else? I mean, this is their thing. But, oh, you have to have that if you've now got computers that are replacing people's jobs because they don't want people to go to the government for unemployment benefits or handouts or welfare because their jobs are never coming back because the computer just took it. Yeah.
• 1:40:32
  All of this plays into that system, Seth, of population reduction. You don't have to pay for computers, so why not hire a computer? There's no benefits, and you're not gonna get sued by one. Right? They're gonna make this look amazing.
• 1:40:47
  But everything that we see in fact, when I I've already seen this with my with my own eyes. When when we were flying to Miami for the Clay Clark event, went into the United Club Room, and they usually have people that are picking up people's plates and everything. They now had computerized robots rolling around in the room with a trash receptacle on on top saying, you know, put your plates in here. They already got rid of the people. Right?
• 1:41:17
  And it's like, how sad. How sad that and I just saw it. Right? It's like, oh my word. This is what we've been talking about.
• 1:41:25
  People are already being replaced by robots and computers, and it's like, it's not gonna end, which means what is going to end is the monetary system as we know it. Right? Because you can't afford you can't afford what's coming with nobody making wages because you don't have to pay a computer to raise to get income tax revenue. There so everything they're talking about has this horrible flip side to it. Yeah.
• 1:41:53
  Everything we're gonna do is gonna cost a ton of money, but, oh, yeah, we're not gonna have as much coming in because we don't have people working because we replace them with computers, and there's no income tax revenue from those dumb dumb computers. This is the world that we're living in right now.
• 1:42:06
  Seth Holehouse: It really is. And so I have a few questions for you, you know, but I wanna bring up something that Martin Armstrong said where he kind of, like, as he saw this collapse unfolding, it was a collapse more of the government, you know, kind of tied central bank tied assets and that he saw people fleeing more into the private assets, Like pulling your money out of a bank and putting it into, you know, land or even the stock market. And so he saw that as the government assets collapsed, that the other items and a lot of the other commodities would be increasing. And so, you know, there's a lot of people that are watching this and they're they're looking at this thinking, okay, alright, well, we've got, you know, Peter Schiff as one person. You know, there's a lot of people saying that, okay, we're heading into something that could be and will most likely be worse than Great Depression.
• 1:42:57
  Okay, what do we do? We've got tech layoffs, right? We're already seeing massive tech layoffs, which is one of the early indicators of what's gonna be happening with the economy. As they say right here, according to data compiled, that the running total tech layoffs to date is a 90,000 for this year, surpassing last year's total of 164,000. So we're already way past last year's, I am halfway through the year.
• 1:43:22
  So people are seeing the indicators. Right? People are seeing this unfolding. And now I know that, you know, I I kind of talk about a lot of things. I talk about land.
• 1:43:32
  I talk about food, etc. You're in the precious metals industry. You're in gold and silver. And so why is it amidst all this turmoil? Why is it that you're saying, hey, this is the safe haven, you know, like taking that money out of the, you know, like Peter Schiff saying, like, you know, saying that you're gonna lose your savings.
• 1:43:52
  What's that mean? And what happens? Like, why are you saying, hey, put some of your savings into silver?
• 1:43:59
  Speaker 3: Well, because this isn't a normal recession slash depression like the Great Depression. Right? Which normally prices come down to stimulate people buying, right, to start the the economy headed up again. This one's different because they can do that. They're printing money like there's no tomorrow to try to stimulate the economy that causes inflation and prices to go up, not come down.
• 1:44:24
  But so that's the inflationary part. But what they're responding to, a recession is a business cycle thing. It's it's how many people are working, how many people are buying stuff. Right? That's what the recession talks about.
• 1:44:37
  And so you've got fewer people working, so fewer people can buy, but and everything that they are buying has higher prices. That's stagflation, and that's the the worst possible scenario for a policymaker. But that's the world that we're going into. We are not going into great depression style depression. We're going into more akin to Weimar Republic Germany Hyperinflationary Depression where nobody's working, but they're printing money to get out of it.
• 1:45:06
  And and see, the reason why we are going into recession pressure because nobody's working. That article that you just referenced, what else does it say in there? 20% of of Shopify is being laid off. Dropbox is cutting their employees by 16%. Three m, not even a tech company, is laying off 6,000 people.
• 1:45:27
  Right? So that's that's big. Lyft, you know, the the competitor to to Uber is laying off 26% of its workforce. IBM owned Red Hat, four percent of its workforce. Gap is laying off 1,800 employees.
• 1:45:45
  Bed Bath and Beyond filed for chapter 11. Facebook laid off about 10,000 while closing an additional 5,000 open job opportunities on on the job search boards. So and then Amazon is laying off a ton. Like, I don't even know
• 1:46:03
  Seth Holehouse: how many 19,000.
• 1:46:05
  Speaker 3: 19 thousand or 2.5% of its workforce. Right? SiriusXM, four hundred and seventy five people. Dell, six thousand six hundred and fifty positions. I mean, this is this is insane.
• 1:46:20
  This is when Biden tells us that the economy is growing, and they have this thing under control. Don't listen to a politician say that because in all of this in all of this, the unemployment rate went from 3.6% to 3.5%. How could the unemployment rate get better when all these jobs are being laid off? Something's not adding up. Right?
• 1:46:44
  Well, I'll tell you why it's not adding up because they fudge with the numbers. If you're so discouraged, Seth, that you stopped looking for work. Let's say you lost your job and you're you're hitting the sidewalks, sweating, knocking on every door saying, please hire me, please hire me, please hire me. And nobody does for months. And you get so discouraged that you stop looking for it and say, I'm giving up family.
• 1:47:05
  We're living in a tent. We're going out in the woods. We're going to live under a Right? Not you that doesn't mean that you're working. But the government says, no.
• 1:47:14
  You're no longer unemployed because you voluntarily stopped looking for work. It's like, I didn't voluntarily do anything. Nobody's hiring me. I just I can't do it anymore. But because you voluntarily did that, they take you out of the numbers, which would make unemployment look smaller, right, even though massive tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people are getting laid off.
• 1:47:37
  That's how they manipulate the numbers. And this is why it is a dangerous thing moving forward because we live in a world where you don't get truth from mainstream media. This is why Fox got rid of Tucker Carlson. Right? It's like they they want you to believe what they want you to believe, and they're gonna censor everything else.
• 1:47:57
  I'm telling you, the economy is not good right now. The CEOs will tell you the truth. We're laying off by the tens of thousands because we have to report to our shareholders, and we can't provide all these jobs and create expenses when we don't have offsetting revenue to come in. That's the true picture of the economy moving forward. Thank you, mister Biden.
• 1:48:21
  Seth Holehouse: Exactly. Exactly. And so where do precious metals fit into this?
• 1:48:26
  Speaker 3: Well, in an inflationary world like we have, they they soar. I mean, not only do they soar, they're the safest thing you could actually go into because things always go up with inflation. Right? And so so but, Kirk, real estate is a thing, and you're talking about real estate come collapsing down. Yes.
• 1:48:44
  Real estate, though, is a debt based thing. You have to qualify for a loan. The banks have to have money to give you to buy it. So anything that you have to finance does not qualify for that. Now on basically cash based purchases that are things like groceries, gold or silver, because people don't go into debt to buy gold or silver.
• 1:49:07
  It's a cash purchase, right? Either in an IRA or just out of your checking account. You're not financing it. You're not leveraging it. Those things go through the roof during times of inflation.
• 1:49:18
  Things that need to be financed, even though they're a thing and tangible asset come down during times like that because banks run out of money, and it makes it hard or difficult or impossible to even get a loan. So I to hedge, I would invest into silver right now. Absolutely, a %. It's the safest thing to go into. Even in a world where it's the slowest, most sluggish global economy we've seen in over forty years, silver is still skyrocketing.
• 1:49:47
  Imagine what it would be if we had a robust economy and if we were completely running out. That would be even something more spectacular. But I don't see it as being a bad option no matter if we speed up the economy or slow it down right now because where we are in that cycle.
• 1:50:06
  Seth Holehouse: That's a good point. That's a good point. Well, Kirk, it's always great having you on the show. For folks that are watching, if you want to contact Kirk or his company, you can either go to goldwithseth.com. So it's goldwithseth.com.
• 1:50:20
  You scroll down to the bottom, there's a little form there you fill out to set up an appointment with Kirk or one of his advisors, or you can just call (720) 605-3900. Again, it's (720) 605-3900 because Kirk's got a great team. And if that's something you've if you've been thinking about it and, you know, you're on the fence, you just take that that next step because even and this is what was telling someone lately, even if you have a few ounces of silver put aside, you're already way better off than probably 98% of the American population that doesn't hold any precious metals. So even just that little bit really could be significant. It's like, you know, some of the other countries, I think it was Argentina or because Argentina was talking to someone after their currency collapsed, or perhaps it was Venezuela was one of those big countries that, you know, at that point, a wheelbarrow of cash would be required to buy a chicken yet an ounce of silver could pay for a family of four or family of five.
• 1:51:22
  It could pay for their food, their needs for the entire month. Like, that's just what happens when that, you know, unfolds.
• 1:51:30
  Speaker 3: Amen. Couldn't have said it any better myself. But that's where you can have a smile on your face. Even though our freedoms and way of life are eroding because not everything will go away with your freedoms. Your finances can thrive.
• 1:51:46
  You just have to be in the right place at the right time.
• 1:51:48
  Seth Holehouse: Exactly. And so folks, those, the phone number and the links are also in the description. So, Kirk, again, it's always a pleasure having you on. It's like talking to an old friend. And, I appreciate what you're doing.
• 1:52:01
  That's one thing actually I can tell you that a lot of people that I met at this reawaken event and talking, a lot of them as I mentioned mentioned you, and they just like they thank me and said, look, I've learned so much about money and the economy. Like before I had no idea about these things. But you know, Kirk, you consistently coming on here has really helped educate a lot of people. Because I think that it's not by chance that a lot of us are very financially illiterate. Like they've designed it like that.
• 1:52:28
  They don't want us to know how these things work. They want us just to kind of follow what the the mainstream advisor tells us to do because then we're we're still always trapped within their debt trap. And I think this is one of the ways out of it they don't want us to do. Right?
• 1:52:44
  Speaker 3: It's exactly right. They don't want us to know the options, because the government wants us to be, if they're economic and indebted to them, slave. Right? So they're not going to tell us the truth. They're just going to tell us, come to us for help.
• 1:53:00
  Don't do it through the private sector. Don't go to your bank. And they're making it so we can't go to the bank so we can go directly to them. Right? So don't do that.
• 1:53:08
  Don't do that because there's options. Just give us a call, and we'll help you through it. And and set up a true strategy for success moving forward to keep you in the right place at the right time the majority of the time and take advantage of these trends. Right? Because they can there's a lot of advantage to be taken as some things go down in markets like this, some things go up.
• 1:53:29
  Gold and silver, that not only they go up, they're actually going through the roof. And that's what we wanna take advantage of.
• 1:53:36
  Seth Holehouse: Well, thank you so much, Kirk. Thanks again. Take have have a wonderful day.
• 1:53:39
  Speaker 3: My pleasure. We'll see you.