Latest / TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast / #663: The Canary in the Coal Mine for Credit Markets with Ed Dowd

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#663: The Canary in the Coal Mine for Credit Markets with Ed Dowd · TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast

0:00
Crazy times sitting down again with Ed Dowd.
0:04
And I think we're going to ease into it with somewhat benign information.
0:11
Maybe it's not benign, but I think the least controversial topic of the week, which is the Federal Reserve finally cutting rates 25 bps.
0:19
And you were telling me that you think this is a slap in the face to Trump.
0:24
Well, look, the prediction markets were expecting 25.
0:27
Our math was showing they should have done 50.
0:30
That was our call. I don't care that I'm wrong because I've said to people if they do 25, it's kind of a thumb in the eye of Trump.
0:40
They're probably going to be doing more cuts as we roll forward. Housing starts and permits came out today. They were a disaster.
0:48
We've been predicting a real estate housing crisis. We put out a report in January that talked about that, that people can buy.
0:56
And our conviction in that call is only just getting more convicted, I should say.
1:04
And today, the data is bad.
1:07
My partner, Carlos, called me this morning.
1:09
He said, I'm updating the dashboards, and this is pretty bad.
1:12
So the housing market's rolling over.
1:15
People can't afford to own homes.
1:17
The millennials can't buy from the boomers.
1:20
It's a disaster.
1:20
And the boomers are keeping their prices high.
1:23
I think anecdotally on Maui, I have a friend who's a real estate photographer.
1:28
His business is booming.
1:29
Why is it booming?
1:30
Nothing's selling, but people keep firing their real estate agent and relisting.
1:35
And he keeps getting to go reshoot and or relicense his photographs.
1:40
So he's having a great time while no one's selling any homes.
1:44
Yeah, I think you said you retweeted it, but I recorded a melody right yesterday, and it seems pretty clear.
1:51
I very much like people like her who actually get in their car and drive to go see these things.
1:59
And one of the cities that was a topic discussion is the city I just moved away from, which is Austin, Texas, moved back home to the Philadelphia area.
2:08
But it was very clear to me when I was down there for the last four years that they were overbuilding to a degree that was astonishing, both downtown and in the sprawl.
2:20
And so you couple like the housing data and just anecdotally to your point, I'm a millennial father with children with friends who are fathers and mothers with children in a similar situation.
2:30
And nobody's moving to buy these houses.
2:33
The prices are simply too high.
2:36
And then you factor in the jobs revision.
2:38
And it seems clear.
2:39
I guess that's my big question.
2:40
Like, have we been in a recession for the last two years?
2:45
You know, we think we have.
2:46
So we made a call that ended up technically being wrong.
2:50
We were looking for a recession at the end of 23, beginning of 24.
2:53
That's what all our early economic cycle indicators were telling us.
2:58
They had worked for the last 60 years, and then suddenly we were wrong.
3:03
So we asked ourselves, hey, have the laws of economic fundamentals changed, or is something else going on?
3:09
And we eventually figured out there was a new economic variable that really isn't talked about.
3:14
And it's the elephant in the room.
3:15
It was illegal immigration. When you drop 20 million people into a country over a four-year period and you fund it via deficit spending, because that's how they did it.
3:28
That's why we were running 8% debt-to-GDP deficits, which are crisis-level deficits.
3:36
Last time we ran those types of deficits was during the Great Financial Crisis.
3:39
We ran them for two years in 2023 and 2024.
3:44
And there were two things going on, unprecedented government job creation and importing illegal immigrants.
3:50
And that was all funded via direct payments from the U.S. government and Washington through the NGOs.
3:56
It created a false juiced economy.
3:59
A lot of signals were sent to decision makers that were wrong, some of which are multifamily housing developers.
4:06
That's going to be the crisis is not a single family home crisis that's coming.
4:11
It's going to be a multifamily home crisis, structures with five or more units.
4:15
We have not seen this type of overbuild since the 70s when the baby boomers were leaving colleges and going, you know, getting their first jobs before they bought homes.
4:25
So we have multifamily housing crisis, which is also going to drag down single family home prices.
4:32
So we've had a—you know, there's an overbuild right now and high inventory in single-family homes.
4:37
The home builders are struggling to sell their inventory.
4:40
And no one can afford these homes.
4:42
And with the cessation of the illegal immigration flow that started under Trump, so that's at zero now.
4:49
And the deportations are not that high yet, but self-deportations are quite high.
4:56
Lacey Hunt, an economist, thinks there's been about 1.2 million people that have self-deported.
5:03
I think there's only been a couple hundred thousand of actual deportations.
5:06
But the second derivative on that is chilling.
5:10
And a lot of the flow of funds to these illegals has been stopped or curtailed.
5:15
So a lot of these people are leaving.
5:17
So the juice that went into the economy in 23 and 24 that kept us afloat and kind of prevented a recession is all gone now.
5:26
and now we're left holding the bag.
5:28
And Trump is going to have a housing recession
5:30
coupled with a stock market bubble.
5:34
So we have a dot-com bust, like 2000 dot-com bust coming
5:38
and a housing crisis at the same time.
5:40
So it's going to be ugly.
5:42
It's not apparent yet to the average Joe
5:44
because the stock market is at new all-time highs
5:47
based on seven AI stocks, eight AI stocks.
5:51
And if you look at the Value Line Geometric Index,
5:54
which is 17,000 issues, it has not gone above the 2022 highs.
6:01
So the average stock is not done well in this market.
6:06
And it's an unprecedented bubble of epic proportions.
6:09
And it's not a question of if or when it blows.
6:12
And we think it's sooner rather than later.
6:14
Trying to call it top is a fool's errand.
6:17
Well, you won't know the top until it breaks.
6:21
We've never crashed from all-time highs.
6:23
So you'll get a high, you'll get a sell-off of 10% to 15%, then a counter-trend rally.
6:30
And then if the counter-trend rally doesn't go back into all-time highs, then the bear market has begun.
6:35
So we won't know we're in a bear market until we see some price action telling us that.
6:40
But we think it's coming soon.
6:42
Well, let's dig into these details, starting with the effects of the closing of the border and self-deportation.
6:49
you were tweeting about, you quote tweeted the tricolor story, which I wasn't aware of until
6:54
a couple of days ago when I recorded with Melody Wright. And she was under the impression that this
7:01
is a canary in the coal mine, potentially first domino to fall in credit markets in terms of
7:08
liquidity crunch. Yeah, it's one of many, but this tricolor auto was basically lending to a large
7:17
part of their book was lending, giving loans to illegal immigrants that didn't have, it's coming
7:22
out now, they didn't have like licenses and or documentation, and they just gave them money to
7:27
go buy cars. And that's all gone poof, because, you know, any kind of Ponzi like this needs constant
7:36
new illegal immigrants to keep it going. So the growth, it's called a growth Ponzi. And once the
7:42
stops, it's exposed, and they just went tits off, bankrupt. And there's a lot of banks that were
7:50
lending to Tri-Color Auto to finance these loans, and now they're holding the bag, and they're going
7:56
to have to write off these loans. And this starts to send a chilling effect throughout the credit
8:03
system. Credit's going to start to tighten. It already has. And additionally, Tri-Color Auto
8:10
probably sold a lot of these loans in the asset-backed market,
8:15
and a lot of these bonds are sold as AAA,
8:18
and I'm hearing that they're not trading like AAA bonds anymore, obviously.
8:21
Here's the tweet that you quote tweeted.
8:25
As you mentioned, the bondholders are scrabbling,
8:28
and I think the second paragraph is very telling.
8:30
In Dallas, the regional bank, Triumph Financial,
8:33
has dispatched teams of employees to use car lots
8:35
where they're identifying and whisking away to safe locations
8:38
the vehicles they believe are collateral in their loans in Midtown Manhattan, a boutique
8:42
investment firm that built a position in Tricolor's asset-backed bonds, Clearhaven Capital Management,
8:47
has been calling other bondholders, urging them to band together and fight to keep big banks away
8:52
from the assets that belong to them. Those banks include JP Morgan, Fifth Third, Bancorp.
8:57
They've begun to forensically examine their own collateral, who ascertain the magnitude of the
9:01
losses. And this is an area of the market. I mean, I think you've been on top of it, but not where I
9:07
would expect this to start subprime auto lending yeah so this is gun poof uh the real estate market
9:15
uh has been floated by illegal immigration not so much in home purchasing but uh you know putting
9:22
a floor on rents and when you have uh rent floors you know owners of of homes that rent to other
9:28
individuals or multi-family housing can kind of get by with uh with with their economics well
9:36
that's all going the wrong way. And new tenant rents started plump, which is a quarterly series
9:41
that's really not that well followed. We talk about it in one of our real estate reports.
9:47
It's been plummeting since the fourth quarter, and that started right around when Trump got
9:52
elected. So there were a lot of self-deportations when Trump got elected, and new tenant rents
9:55
started collapsing. New tenant rents are a canary in the coal mine for all tenant rents,
10:03
which then lead into shelter and prices of homes.
10:06
So it's beginning.
10:07
And you can see it's starting to show up in the housing starts numbers and the permit numbers.
10:12
Permits have been, permits peaked in 2022.
10:14
New permits for single-family homes peaked in 2022.
10:17
They've been rolling over.
10:18
We have an unprecedented gap between homes for sale and homes sold.
10:25
Normally, that time series closely follows each other.
10:30
And the gap is about 500,000 homes right now.
10:32
So how does that close? You know, that that closes with prices coming down. And, you know, I think, you know, you talked to Melanie. When did you talk to her yesterday before?
10:44
Two days ago. Yeah. Yeah. She was talking about and you were talking about the inability for people to make the math work.
10:52
And what's happened is home prices spiked after COVID.
10:56
And part of that was due to the Fed.
10:58
I don't know if people know this, but the Fed went in and bought an unprecedented amount of mortgage backs right after COVID.
11:06
And they took that supply out of the market.
11:09
That gave liquidity to other lenders to reloan and started a housing, mini housing boom when rates were low before they started their interest rates spike.
11:19
And that caused just – that's what we're seeing now is this overbuilding from that liquidity event.
11:30
And then interest rates have gone up.
11:32
That makes mortgages unaffordable for the average person.
11:35
Then you have the insurance costs, which have doubled since COVID.
11:40
You have property taxes, which are up a lot.
11:42
And then if it's condos, HOAs have doubled.
11:46
People can't make the math work to buy a new home.
11:50
And so the only way to readjust this and make the math work is price.
11:54
And people right now are slowly – it's dying on them that the prices that they're listing, they're not going to get because no one can afford it.
12:02
And I think there's a lot of people hoping that it solves on the rate side of things.
12:07
It's a two-part equation, price or rates.
12:09
And I think many are convinced and under a state of amnesia that the Fed beginning their rate cut regime will lead to a lower 30-year mortgage rate and lower 10-year bond, lower 10-year U.S. Treasury yield, 30-year U.S. Treasury yield.
12:27
But as we learned last year, that's not a foregone conclusion. And I think that brings up the sort of profundity of this particular Fed meeting, really the lead up to this meeting over the last year with Trump berating him before the election, continuously berating him after Lisa Cook getting kicked out, Stephen Mirren getting put in and the Fed signaling that they want to add something to their dual mandate, make it a tri-mandate, if you will.
12:57
with implicit yield curve control, yield curve control by any other name.
13:02
And so what effect do you think that has, if any, on the housing market particularly?
13:09
Well, this is something people don't understand about Fed monetary policy.
13:14
It takes 18 to 24 months for that to get into the system.
13:19
It doesn't happen immediately, and it doesn't benefit the economy.
13:23
There's a time lag.
13:24
And just like when they raise interest rates from 0% to 5.5%, it really doesn't start to hurt the economy and cool inflation until 18 months later.
13:36
And that started happening during the 2024 election.
13:40
May of 2024 was 18 months after the Fed rate hike cycle.
13:44
So these cuts, and people got to remember, they started cutting interest rates in 07.
13:50
And they cut all the way down to the bottom in 09, went to zero.
13:55
And home prices went straight down.
13:59
And, you know, there's an 18-year housing cycle.
14:04
And we're back, you know, since 2007, we're 18 years from there.
14:10
Here we are.
14:11
And it's not going to – and not only that, they're behind the eight ball
14:17
because the payroll numbers are fragile.
14:20
So they should have been cutting a lot last year.
14:24
And they didn't.
14:26
And so real yields are still around 1.5%.
14:28
And that's a problem in inflation.
14:32
We're predicting inflation will print a sub 2% number
14:35
before the end of the year CPI.
14:37
Now, everyone says, oh, CPI is fake.
14:39
Yeah, it is fake, but it's rate of change.
14:41
And that's what people in the bond markets care about.
14:44
And everybody's over-allocated stocks
14:47
and under allocated bonds because it been a massive unprecedented bond bear market for the last three years And one of our favorite asset classes is the 30 treasury And to your point
15:00
everyone said, oh, the 30-year, they're not going to be able to sell those. Well,
15:06
in a slowing recession deflationary scenario, which we see coming, the 30-year traditionally
15:13
And it goes up quite a bit in price down in yield.
15:16
And you just mentioned the third mandate, yield curve control, which we – you win both ways.
15:22
The economy slows.
15:24
You make a lot of money on the long bond.
15:25
And even if you're wrong there, the Fed's going to come in and do yield curve control and bail you out because this is a national security issue.
15:33
And this is – we have $37 trillion in debt that needs to be refinanced.
15:38
We have too much on the short end.
15:40
And the government is going to force the U.S. institutions and U.S. citizens to own these bonds.
15:49
And that's why there's this stablecoin push, as you know, to fund the deficits.
15:55
This is a national security issue.
15:57
And don't bet against the government to force you into treasury securities.
16:04
Well, it's funny because I've had a lot of discussions.
16:05
There's a lot of people who are riptard bullish out there.
16:10
They think that the economic policies put forth by Trump and Besant and crew are really reorienting the economy to springboard moving forward, whether it's tariffs, deregulation, what's happening at the Fed with the sort of explicit intent to merge the Treasury and the Fed to enact this yield curve control.
16:37
And then on top of that, really leaning into energy and AI, which is going to lead to a productivity boom that sort of helps us thread the needle to achieve escape velocity and make sure that the markets keep churning.
16:51
I'm guessing you'd not believe any of this.
16:56
Well, they're not necessarily wrong, but it takes time for these things to happen.
17:01
So let's talk about these trade deals.
17:04
We have a European trade deal announced.
17:06
We have a Japanese trade deal announced, right?
17:09
Well, those both have to be ratified by their respective parliament.
17:12
So there are agreements, number andums of understanding, and they're not ratified yet.
17:18
And oh, by the way, trade needs to be rebalanced, but there's going to be pain along the way
17:22
because tariffs are not inflationary.
17:24
They are in the short term, but in the long term, when you look at the whole economic,
17:30
the impact economically in the micro level, they're deflationary.
17:33
We wrote about this several months ago, and you're going to see a margin squeeze on America's corporations because they're not going to be able to pass the prices along.
17:42
And that's going to cause them to shed employees.
17:44
This is all coming.
17:46
So Trump has the right idea, but there's pain and a valley in between his policies taking effect.
17:53
And the AI boom is classic.
17:55
It's just like the dot-com, telco, dark fiber buildup boom.
18:01
It's a lot of speculation and hype.
18:03
There's no revenues there.
18:05
And the productivity isn't going to come for five, six years from now.
18:08
And oh, by the way, most of the AI giant companies that we're going to want to own don't even
18:13
exist yet.
18:14
Because if you think about what happened during the dot-com boom, the only one that came out
18:17
of that that went on to glory was Amazon.
18:20
Facebook, Google, Apple really didn't exist until after the cheap broadband was utilized.
18:26
And that's what's going to happen.
18:28
Pricing for AI is off the charts ridiculous.
18:30
and it's going to have to be recapitalized at much lower prices.
18:33
So all the people who made these investments initially are going to get wiped out,
18:36
as usual, in the bubble.
18:38
And that's not a bad thing.
18:39
That's the way capitalism works.
18:41
There was a railroad bubble where everybody invested in building out the railroads,
18:48
and the first investors, the speculative investors, all got wiped out.
18:52
And then we had the railroads built, and then everything was recapitalized
18:55
at much cheaper prices.
18:56
Then the productivity boom came later.
18:58
So people aren't wrong.
19:00
It's just that they're wrong in the next two years, and it's going to be a very painful problem.
19:09
So we've seen gold scream to all-time highs.
19:11
Bitcoin is, I believe, about 5% below its previous all-time high.
19:18
How do you think these hard assets, neutral reserve assets fare?
19:22
Well, it's tough because if you look at it, gold had a run-up into the great financial crisis and then corrected 50% once the margin call came.
19:36
I don't know if gold is going to go down 50%.
19:37
It'll have a pullback, but long-term, you want to own gold because they're making gold money again.
19:42
We all know that the dollar reserve system at some point is going to become renegotiated.
19:47
Again, the call on that is not imminent, but gold will have a pullback, I think.
19:54
I wouldn't worry about it.
19:56
I wouldn't panic.
19:57
I'd buy more.
19:58
Bitcoin, as you know, and we've talked about this, is unfortunately very highly correlated with risk assets.
20:07
And unless it decouples its time, which I don't know if it will, if we get the financial asset correction I'm predicting,
20:14
Bitcoin will participate in that.
20:17
Makes sense.
20:20
Which is, it's funny because I'm just using pattern recognition sentiment indicators.
20:25
Not everybody, obviously, yourself and others are ringing the alarm bell.
20:32
But there's many people who are convinced that we're going to $250, $300 in Bitcoin by the end of the year.
20:39
And who knows, maybe that's the blow off top and that's when.
20:42
It may be, and maybe Bitcoin decouples.
20:45
But if you want to go with historicals, it won't until proven otherwise.
20:50
And I'm sure you've heard the meme floating around like never doom.
20:54
And I'm a big just generally never doom.
20:56
But when it comes to financial analysts covering these subjects, there's a growing contingent of people who don't want to hear any of the negative analysis and would call somebody like you a doomer.
21:08
Well, I'm not a doomer.
21:10
And we were myself and other economists that have been doing this for a long time.
21:15
were wrong about the recession in 2023-24. But the problem is, when you avoid the pain that
21:24
should have come then, and you blow a bubble like they did with illegal immigration, you've
21:28
misallocated capital. The Fed made bad decisions. Corporations made bad decisions. And the capital
21:35
market made bad decisions. So when this all corrects and equilibrium is restored, because
21:40
that's what markets are, they eventually reach their equilibrium, there'll be a lot of pain.
21:45
Now, I'm not a doomer. This pain is good. Lower home prices are good for the millennials and Gen X that are younger. This is not necessarily a bad thing.
21:58
Now, obviously, I don't want people to lose their jobs, but that's just this reset, not great reset, but this financial reset is basically the passing of the baton of generational wealth from boomers back down to the generation below that's actually doing the work.
22:15
And, you know, look, my fear is we get more of the same.
22:23
If we have a, you know, correction, what do we expect?
22:29
The Fed will do what it does, do unprecedented monetary policy.
22:33
The Trump administration, you know, might do things that harm the younger generation long term by bailing out the boomers again.
22:40
So this is a generational kind of battle that's been going on.
22:45
And the boomers, you know, they've been bailed out since the great financial crisis.
22:51
Well, to that point, if this crisis does materialize, we have correction, housing market, stock market, and the government and the Fed are forced to react.
23:00
What, in your mind, would be the most advantageous way to react to this particular crisis compared to 2008?
23:10
Yeah, I don't know what they're going to do.
23:11
Yield curve control, I think, is on the table.
23:13
and they're talking about it.
23:16
And if you've been watching what they're doing at the banks,
23:20
Jamie Dimon has been saying, hey, you need to loosen up the capital ratios
23:26
on treasuries so that the banks can buy more treasuries.
23:30
And there's a reason that Jamie Dimon knows the game.
23:34
He knows that financial repression is coming.
23:37
And it's not pretty when it happens.
23:42
And the problem is the system.
23:45
The system relies on constant inflation.
23:50
Bankers' creed is inflate or die.
23:54
That's why we're at the point now where even a mild recession could take down the whole system because there's just so much leverage and financialization of the U.S. economy, which was hollowed out over the last 30, 40 years of these NAFTA trade deals and exporting all the jobs overseas.
24:10
So we have this kind of financialized economy where a lot of people's wealth is in their home, which, you know, home is a place where you live.
24:19
Your wealth should be other things like, you know, savings and productivity and jobs.
24:23
And it's been basically a Ponzi speculative financialization of our economy.
24:28
Yeah.
24:29
Yeah, it's funny observing the Silicon Valley types that are really bullish on AI and they're wholly convinced that it's going to lead to this productivity boom, which I think it will eventually, to your point, years down the line.
24:44
I used it certainly made us more productive, more efficient, able to do more with less here at the media company and at the fund that I work for.
24:52
But in terms of it being widely implemented within corporations across the country immediately to create that productivity boom, it doesn't seem like it's going to happen that quickly.
25:03
And then you just look at forward P ratios and they're above dot com levels right now, which is something that for some reason or another doesn't get brought up often enough.
25:14
I think like something to point out like this doesn't seem sustainable.
25:18
It's not sustainable. And if you do the math, historically, when we get to these types of dividend yields on the total stock market, the 10 year forward projected returns, which we wrote about in February are zero.
25:30
What that means is if you buy in your 401k a basket of the S&P right now, including dividends, 10 years from now, you're projected to get back to even.
25:41
That implies there's a big drawdown in between now and year 10.
25:47
And that's happened like clockwork.
25:50
And it's not a timing tool.
25:52
It can be like that for another year.
25:54
But when it happens, it's going to be pretty epic.
25:57
Yeah.
25:57
Yeah. No. And the other signal that I've been following, the indicator I've been following is the credit spreads between corporate debt and the Fed's fund rate, which have compressed to levels of complacency that are very worrying as well.
26:11
Yeah, no, we've done the math on that. It's in our report we put out in January on predictions of a deep world-wide recession. We looked at these credit spreads.
26:21
and when you look at them when they're super tight like this historically they go much wider
26:28
this is this i mean that's just the math they're adam they're they're they're they're like three
26:34
standard dv or two standard deviations below normal and we just know how this works they're
26:40
going to go the rubber band goes the other way and it's going to go quick and fast yeah
26:45
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see. And that's what I wonder. I mean, with midterms next year, too, just thinking of the chaos that could unleash. But I said this to somebody else, I think off air. No, I said it on air with Tom Luongo last week, who is very bullish on the economic policy.
27:09
But I think the Charlie Kirk assassination does sort of de-risk the sort of importance of midterms for the Republicans specifically.
27:24
Because I think they've been focused solely on the economy.
27:27
Make sure that it doesn't implode so that we can get to midterms and make sure that we hold the House or get the House and the Senate.
27:34
But now with this Charlie Kirk thing, I don't think the importance on the economy is as severe or as imperative as it was last week, early last week.
27:47
go? Well, apparently, again, we have to look at polling numbers, but anecdotally, people are
27:55
saying they're leaving the Democrats because they've lost a lot of normal Democrats who aren't
28:01
high media consumers who just are watching what's going on and hearing some of the people that they
28:08
thought were friends saying boring things are running center to right. So that needs to show
28:16
up in the poll numbers because right now it's anecdotal. The worry, of course, is this Charlie
28:24
Kirk assassination. And, you know, Charlie Kirk interviewed me three times. He's a wonderful human
28:29
being. Personally, I was, you know, I'm 58 and I marveled at his communication skills and his
28:37
ability to create what he did from such a very young age. I mean, he was a phenom in 18, 19,
28:44
and he just built something that, you know, quite frankly, I was in awe of.
28:50
He was quite an individual, and I'm sad that he's gone.
28:56
But when you step back and analyze this, my biggest fear is that this is the beginning of, you know, a divide-and-conquer strategy.
29:05
I've said forever that this is a class issue, not a left versus right, black versus white, Hispanic, Muslim.
29:16
This is a class issue, and we are at the end of a grand cycle, and you need to focus on who's really in charge.
29:25
And the divide and conquer strategy has been well used throughout the millennium.
29:29
This is nothing new.
29:31
No.
29:32
It's not what I was telling you before we hit record.
29:34
I think my strategy is to recognize we in the fog of war and to not make any knee reactions I did tweet some stuff the day of and the day after but I think over the weekend took some time to take a step back and recognize what you said Hey there probably some ulterior
29:53
in the aftermath,
29:54
there's going to be ulterior motives
29:55
to really divide and draw a wedge between people.
29:59
Yeah, there's going to be all sorts of narratives
30:01
that are spun out of this.
30:03
And the key to focus on is
30:05
whatever narrative is coming out,
30:07
if it's about dividing, ignore it.
30:10
And remember, this is a class issue.
30:12
And when I say class, I'm not talking about someone with $10 million.
30:16
I'm talking about the oligarchs, the super ultra wealthy, the, you know, the Uber 0.01% that control the lion's share of the wealth of the globe.
30:31
It's funny how easy people are riled up.
30:33
And we forget, I mean, especially not to, I mean, COVID.
30:37
I think the implications of the aftermath of COVID, reaction to COVID, I think ended probably, I would say, 2023, but 2023, really.
30:48
So we're not too far after that, and people are getting spun up into another mass psychosis right now.
30:56
Absolutely.
30:56
And here's the other thing, people.
30:57
I mean, look, we stopped doing a lot of new COVID research at the end of 24 because we did it for free and free doesn't work as a business model.
31:08
And, you know, the science is now coming out and proving definitively that these vaccines are a disaster.
31:16
The problem is it was a mass poisoning event and we're left with the bill.
31:22
The bill is continued disability increases.
31:25
We're running around 6 million above where we were pre-COVID.
31:29
When you and I were talking, we were at 3 million.
31:32
So the damage from the vaccine continues, and it's going to cost the country a lot of money.
31:38
And it's also, you know, I hate to say this.
31:42
I put out a tweet talking about a new concept called volatility of thought.
31:48
There's a lot of psychological and psychiatric issues that have been caused by the vaccine.
31:53
that was shown in our UK personal
31:56
independent payment system, where they get down into different claims.
32:01
Psychiatric claims went off the hook starting in 21, 22, and 23.
32:05
They're just exploding. So there's neurological issues.
32:09
So we have a population that's getting sicker that also
32:12
isn't thinking straight. Yeah, I discussed this with Jessica Rose when she was on
32:16
a couple of weeks ago, and again, haven't been able
32:20
to verify it. Yeah, but it would not shock me at all. I saw one study that was observing the brain
32:28
matter of people who had taken the vaccine, and it was essentially the effect that the study showed,
32:35
you're going to have to verify it, was that people were essentially being lobotomized. It was
32:39
graying out the frontal cortex of their brains, which wouldn't shock me at all.
32:44
uh you know look um the anecdote look there's there's the math which we've proven something's
32:53
going on in the population and then there's anecdotes and we all know people that uh not
32:58
everybody the good news it's not everybody but there's we all know people that have changed and
33:03
they're not thinking straight yeah well that gets another thing we discussed before we hit record
33:08
last week there was a lot of very positive momentum toward the direction of getting accountability and
33:14
letting the public know that these vaccines are, were not safe and effective, are not safe and
33:19
effective with the Maha hearings on the Hill last Monday. Um, and I was extremely optimistic,
33:26
um, Monday, Tuesday after those, those hearings, because it was quite obvious that, um,
33:34
anybody standing up for the vaccine that Jake, I forget his last name, the guy from Stanford got
33:38
But they mopped the floor with him.
33:41
And the data they brought, the arguments they brought were pretty clear cut and dry to me.
33:47
And I think many others who, even others who were skeptical of the narrative around the COVID vaccine not being safe and effective.
33:57
You know, before the Charlie Kirk assassination, let's go back a couple of weeks.
34:01
Trump put out that true social statement about Operation Warp Speed maybe not being as great as he thought.
34:08
That was a huge sea change in the Trump mindset that he was willing to.
34:13
And that gave me hope that Kennedy had his support.
34:18
And also the attacks on Kennedy proved to me that they're scared of what he's coming up with behind the scenes.
34:26
You know, it's hard for us to know what's really going on because, you know, when you're head of HHS, you're not communicating what's going on.
34:33
So we only had to like, you know, crumbs to go on, some of which were new mRNA vaccines being approved.
34:39
But when I saw Kennedy being attacked and the ferocious blitzkrieg against him, that's when I'm like, Bobby's doing the right thing.
34:48
And then Trump put out that tweet.
34:51
And then we had the hearings.
34:53
And I think that's Scott.
34:54
I think the last doctor that presented the other side, his name was Scott.
34:58
Last name is Scott.
34:59
Maybe Jake Scott was his name.
35:00
But he got, like you said, he got wiped out by everybody else.
35:07
I was super optimistic that, oh, the truth is finally going to start to come out, and then boom, it's gone.
35:12
No one's talking about it anymore.
35:14
Charlie Kirk, you know, on Wednesday, the hearings were Monday, Tuesday, Charlie Kirk, and now no one's talking about it.
35:22
Everyone is enraged about this assassination.
35:25
And, you know, I find the timing a little too convenient personally.
35:34
Do you think, I mean, obviously the momentum in terms of public attention on this topic has waned significantly, understandably so, in the wake of Charlie Kirk.
35:46
But do you think it's completely stomped out?
35:48
I mean, there was hearings this morning as well, I believe.
35:51
No, no, it's not because this has happened before.
35:53
People don't remember, but we were getting a lot of traction in COVID truth about the mRNA vaccines in 2022.
36:01
And then the Ukraine war started and wiped it off the map.
36:04
So the COVID story has been wiped off the map a couple of times.
36:09
But the bad news is the reason it's not going to get wiped off the map is the damage continues to grow.
36:14
And more and more people are realizing how bad this is.
36:18
And I think there was a Rasmussen poll that came out recently that 54% of Americans believe that they know somebody's either been injured or died from the COVID vaccine.
36:26
So we're over the tipping point now.
36:29
And that's the sad part of this is they're not going to be able to get away from the COVID story because the damage continues to steamroll and slowly gather moss.
36:38
And it's not only that Rasmussen poll.
36:43
It's like people who know people have been injured or died from the vaccine.
36:47
I think the other sort of negative externality of the vaccine is becoming blatantly obvious to people is the turbo cancer.
36:55
Maybe I don't know if that's considered an injury in these polls.
36:59
But I think if you look at the rates of colon cancer in men in their 30s, I know multiple people, some of which got cancer and died within a few months, some that got it and started at stage four.
37:13
And I think it's becoming so big that you can't ignore it.
37:18
And also the birth rate dip, that's a problem.
37:24
That's going to continue for a while.
37:27
Look, I said this years ago, and I still believe this.
37:33
You know, what happened during COVID with these vaccines is one of the greatest crimes against humanity.
37:38
you know and 70 60 70 percent of this country was poisoned to one degree or another
37:46
it's a mass poison not only this country but yeah the glow and i mean talk about
37:56
sort of black swan events for the financials could the if there is accountability and the
38:05
big pharma companies are held to account. Anthony Fauci's held to account. What effect does that have
38:11
on pharmaceuticals? Obviously, it will leak in the media too. Trump and RFK have,
38:18
then it goes far as to ban advertisements for pharmaceutical drugs on TVs, but they made it so
38:24
you have to verbally utter every potential side effect, which is going to make it very expensive
38:30
and unlikely that pharma ads actually get on air.
38:36
But there's got to be some financial consequences for these companies.
38:40
But then, as you mentioned, for the country overall,
38:43
is we have to take care of the people who have been negatively affected by these vaccines.
38:49
Yeah, so the budget of the Medicare expenses in the U.S. is going to continue to rise.
38:57
Social Security is saving money because of the death of the older people from COVID and the vaccines.
39:05
So they're saving money on Social Security, but the disabilities and the continued care of those who are injured is only rising.
39:17
The implications of a COVID reckoning, I think, are so scary.
39:23
And that's why it's kind of the elephant in the room, and they don't like to talk about it that much, is because corporate America would be liable.
39:30
Fortune 500 companies mandated this.
39:33
So it's not just pharmaceutical industry.
39:35
It's a lot of people.
39:37
So they're very hesitant to open up the floodgates of litigation because it would cripple the economy.
39:43
And I said that pre-Trump election 2024 that my biggest fear is that they try to memory all this because there's so many vested interests that don't want to talk about this because it's just a giant mess that has huge economic implications.
40:02
That's why I'm just thinking through that.
40:04
I don't want to laugh because it's not funny, but the only solution, like open the floodgates and say, hey.
40:13
we fucked up crime against humanity poisoned tens of millions of americans half the country
40:19
60 of the country um but you're not allowed to sue these companies because
40:26
it would triple the economy they could try that i don't think it'll work i think i think uh the
40:33
problem the problem is this this isn't going away and there's a reckoning coming and i i don't know
40:39
win. And, you know, I think you and I have been shocked that, you know, this vaccine should have
40:45
been pulled in February of 2021 on the VAERS data alone. I mean, we had a swine flu vaccine that
40:53
killed 25 people and they pulled the freaking thing. The VAERS has got, you know, 16,000 U.S.
40:59
deaths or even more now and globally, like 34,000. And, you know, that's an underreporting
41:06
factor of 40, anywhere from like 20 to 50, let's call it 40. So in the U.S. alone, it's probably
41:12
800,000 to 1.2 million people dead, we know. But the point is, and then of course, the disabilities
41:18
and the injuries, there should have been pulled in February of 21. The signal was there. And then
41:24
people like me should never exist. As the internet phenomenon, I should not have existed
41:31
if things were working properly.
41:34
And here we are.
41:35
It's 2025, and we're still not having a national conversation about this.
41:40
It's absurd.
41:41
It really is.
41:43
And I think it's necessary.
41:44
It just doesn't show how broken the institutions are across the board.
41:49
Yeah.
41:49
I think where it's COVID, Charlie Kirk, again, fog of war.
41:54
But I think one thing that's clear is that the institutions,
41:58
particularly the universities have indoctrinated a generation or part of a generation with overtly Marxist communist views,
42:09
and they've become completely detached from reality to a certain extent.
42:15
And I think that's exacerbated by the economic situation as well,
42:20
where people are more willing to get on the path of either radical right or radical left sort of political views,
42:27
because they're not getting any help from the moderates that exist in the system today.
42:33
And I think across the board, the institutions, pharma, financial, university, education,
42:39
it's become clear that it's completely bankrupt across the board.
42:43
And that's why when it comes to COVID, the vaccine specifically,
42:50
if we get accountability, we need the national conversation and a period of,
42:55
it's blatantly obvious that all these institutions are corrupt at their core.
42:59
We need to do something different.
43:01
Well, the other thing, the reason why we need a national conversation is because there's
43:05
still so many people who don't know why they're sick.
43:08
And if you don't know why you're sick, you can't treat it.
43:10
I mean, there are protocols to clean up the spike protein.
43:13
I don't know which ones are the best.
43:14
I'm not the doctor.
43:15
But if you don't know what's causing your ailment and you can't take proactive action,
43:20
you're going to go to the doctor and go, I got this, I got that.
43:22
they're going to give you more pharmaceutical drugs to hide the symptoms rather than gear.
43:28
And, you know, I'm a hopeful person.
43:30
I believe that the bodies of, you know, God gave us this body.
43:34
It's very resilient.
43:36
And I think if people were aware of what was going on, they could heal themselves.
43:41
Yeah, I completely agree.
43:44
How are you positioning yourself?
43:46
Obviously, you talked about 30-year treasuries, sort of the ugly duckling in the pond.
43:52
Well, 30 years are for people that would be like an institutional client that likes to speculate.
44:01
The average Joe should be in three-month T-bills just waiting to buy cash equivalents.
44:06
The average Joe should be just – I've been saying this the last two years.
44:10
Fortunately, I was early like Warren Buffett, but have some dry powder in your portfolio to take advantage of bargains when they come.
44:17
And don't be over levered.
44:19
I had a consultation.
44:22
I do some consulting on the phone, and somebody who was a real estate investor asked me what I thought.
44:30
And I said, well, what's your leverage profile look like?
44:33
You got a lot of rental property income He like I don have any leverage And I said that fabulous And you should probably think of re in the bottom of this market and expand your empire
44:46
He's like, that's a good idea.
44:47
So if you have leverage, reduce it.
44:51
If you have a portfolio, raise some cash.
44:54
I'm not going to tell you, you know,
44:56
I'm not going to tell you to get out of everything.
44:57
It's up to you.
44:58
And if you don't have gold, get some.
45:00
Yeah. And so with Tricolor going down, where should we be looking next to the knock-on effects from that?
45:12
Well, the banks have been extending and pretending. They've been hiding the commercial real estate losses.
45:18
The Fed put out a statement about that in November of 2024.
45:25
The New York Fed did a report saying the banks are extending and pretending.
45:29
So there's huge losses on the banks' books right now.
45:33
The Federal Reserve came in.
45:34
People forget this, but in 2023, we had a duration problem, meaning everybody's bank bond portfolio was underwater because they raised interest rates.
45:44
And there was a deposit of flight.
45:46
The Fed came in and lent money to the banks against their losses and shored up the system.
45:53
That was duration interest rate risk.
45:55
What they're not going to do is lend money to banks to bail them out of credit risk.
46:00
And the credit part of the cycle is coming.
46:02
This tricolor is probably going to set off a knock-on effect.
46:06
It'll start slowly.
46:08
It's already been going on behind the scenes, I think.
46:12
Japan has issues.
46:13
So that's a black swan event none of us can predict.
46:16
Japan goes tits up.
46:18
They're in trouble.
46:20
They have currency crisis brewing.
46:21
And I follow this guy on Twitter who said that the Bank of Japan has been doing interventions every night for the last 45 days.
46:29
So we've got issues.
46:31
And there's a lot of insolvent banks.
46:36
And the question is, when do the credit markets care?
46:40
And I think they're going to start caring soon.
46:42
Well, as it pertains to the real estate market, are the banks going to have the biggest problems this time around?
46:46
Or from what I understand, a lot of it is the private credit.
46:49
Well, I think banks hold mortgages on their balance sheet because they've got higher yields than Treasury.
46:56
So there might be some issues.
46:58
Definitely there will be some regional bank issues.
47:00
The big banks will gobble them up.
47:03
It's the shadow banking system.
47:05
It means private credit funds, private equity.
47:10
Like I think Melanie was saying that there's a lot of different lenders that stepped up.
47:15
Those are the ones that are going to go.
47:16
But the problem is the banks are exposed to them because they lend to them.
47:21
So let's say you're a private credit fund.
47:24
Where do you get your leverage?
47:26
You get it from a bank.
47:28
So the banks are on the hook.
47:29
They're just not as direct as they were last time.
47:33
So they'll just have to assume those assets, right?
47:38
Yeah.
47:39
I mean, so it's an indirect problem.
47:43
Yeah.
47:43
Yeah, it definitely feels like weird.
47:46
There's a lot going on.
47:47
You mentioned the numerology of the markets before we hit record.
47:53
A bit demonic, approaching 6666 on the S&P.
47:59
And just when you consider everything that's going on,
48:02
not only economically with the employment numbers,
48:06
inflation slowing down, the P.E. ratios that we're seeing,
48:10
but socially with Charlie Kirk, the COVID vaccines.
48:14
We've talked about this before,
48:16
and I feel very comfortable talking about it with you.
48:18
It feels very clear that we're in a spiritual battle right now.
48:21
I actually read a newsletter about it last night.
48:23
And I think while a lot of our discussions
48:27
and many other discussions I have in the show
48:29
focus on the data and policy decisions,
48:32
I think many people need to begin thinking more spiritually.
48:37
What are we actually doing here?
48:38
and what type of world do we want to live in?
48:41
I don't think you can solve the problems by manipulating policy
48:46
and trying to push the data one way or another.
48:49
I think we have to have a sort of societal confrontation
48:53
with what we're doing as a society.
48:56
Yeah, look, there's cycles.
48:59
You mentioned spiritual battle.
49:03
There is.
49:03
I mean, the secularism of this country, which started in the 60s and is with us now, people don't have an inner compass anymore.
49:17
And their idea of what's wrong and right has been distorted.
49:21
And let's be honest.
49:23
The intelligence agencies have been working this to the best of their ability.
49:29
We got rid of the Smith-Mundt Act under Obama.
49:32
us as a country, we've been propagandized. Media doesn't tell the truth and they're not on the hook
49:37
for it. We have literally—the media is an apparatus of the government. And we know about
49:45
Operation Mockingbird. And to think that went away, you've got to be naive. And if you believe
49:51
most of anything that comes out of the media, I don't know what to tell you. And also, we have to
49:55
be very leery of the quote-unquote alternative media, because you don't think the CIA has figured
50:01
out a way to infiltrate that and get control. And we, you know, and there's been scandals lately of
50:07
big influencers getting paid to promote stuff. So there's, you know, I'm currently not paid by
50:14
anyone to promote anything. I'm just, you know, trying to, you know, I get paid by selling my
50:19
economic research. I don't get paid by telling you how to vote or think about something. I'm
50:24
skimming my raw opinion, but there's a lot of influencers out there that are getting paid.
50:28
I'm getting paid
50:29
but by advertisers to push Bitcoin products
50:32
that's my propaganda
50:34
that's called sponsorship
50:35
you're not getting paid to push a tweet
50:38
on
50:39
India or Coke
50:42
no
50:42
and not disclose it
50:45
it's about disclosure
50:46
and that's the
50:47
I mean obviously Fog of War
50:51
this whole like Bill Ackman Hampton story
50:53
B.B. Netanyahu
50:56
trying to pay
50:56
media organizations and influencers to talk a certain way about Israel.
51:03
It's very clear.
51:04
That's definitely happening in alternative independent media.
51:07
I mean, if you're just,
51:09
if you have more than two brain cells and you're aware,
51:12
you just look at the road shows that some people go on and the shows that
51:17
they'll go on on that road show and they turn out to be the same.
51:25
Oh yeah.
51:25
No, this is – we're in the fog of war and just step – again, I, like yourself, was very emotional the first two days.
51:36
And I made a point of not saying what I actually – how I felt.
51:43
And so it's called about having some discernment and self-control.
51:46
But when you feel yourself enraged or emotional, step back, realize this is what they want.
51:52
They want you to think emotionally and just come back to the 30,000 foot view.
51:57
This is a class issue.
51:59
That's it.
52:00
And when you think that way and you say, what do I have in common with an oligarch worth $100 billion?
52:07
Absolutely nothing.
52:09
And that's, again, this is rhyming with the conversation I have with Jessica.
52:15
If and when the next economic crisis materialize.
52:19
I think that's going to be really – that's going to determine, obviously, where we go for decades.
52:27
But in 2008, it was bail out the boomers and screw the millennials and all that.
52:34
But I think this time around, it's going to be a decision.
52:37
Do we bail out the boomers yet again?
52:39
Or do we give the millennials and the Zoomers a chance to actually do something with their lives and build wealth?
52:45
The other thing is historically, there's precedence for this.
52:48
If you look, when wealth gaps like this get created and they take a long time to manifest, and we're at one now, they're settled one of two ways.
52:58
There's an existential threat to the owners of the wealth, like the French Revolution, or there is a reset, like the Great Depression and the big new deal, the New Deal economics.
53:13
They share again with the middle class.
53:16
those are the only two options you have.
53:20
So it's going to be interesting to see how they go.
53:23
I think it should be very interesting for people to understand why do they want to create
53:29
a digital control grid system?
53:31
Because they want to avoid the French Revolution, and they want to probably not give you a good
53:37
new deal.
53:38
So this whole digital currency thing, Palantir, this 24-7 surveillance, that
53:46
And the obsession with that, that is a real thing, and they probably don't want to give us a new deal, is my guess.
53:55
And they're racing to get that system in place.
54:00
And that's why you have to resist any kind of calls for, like we saw Pambon, you talk about hate speech, which is, you know, Charlie Kirk said that was nonsense.
54:10
Anything that curtails our speech, no.
54:12
Anything that gives us less choice and options like digital currencies, no.
54:18
I'm a freedom-loving individual, and I know what's coming, and they're going to try.
54:23
I mean, these people cannot admit that the system is – that they screwed it up.
54:29
And in the collapse, they're going to blame everybody but themselves and try to control and take everything.
54:33
But, Ed, Alex Karp stood up in L.A. last week at the All-In Summit and promised us that Palantir is not surveilling or spying on individual American citizens.
54:44
We'll never do that.
54:45
I don't believe that for a second.
54:47
We have him on record saying crazy things.
54:52
And these people – you've got to remember these people live in bubbles, and they all talk amongst each other, and they're super wealthy, and they think it's a chess game.
55:02
they really do yeah well and it's just like i was sitting there i was watching that i mean
55:09
for a second i was like oh wow maybe i misunderstood palantir and then it's like wait a second you
55:14
like literally use metadata to track and identify and then ultimately uh target people with attacks
55:21
like how there's how do you how can you do that without surveilling people and it's uh
55:27
it's like blatant in your face gaslighting if you will and i think palantir i mean this is i've
55:35
talked about this with whitney webb and she gets a lot of backlash for it but you have sex to the
55:40
right which i'm um i sort of sympathize with to a certain degree like in terms of you got to be
55:46
optimistic can't always be dooming but um if you look at the paypal palantir tesla mafia that is
55:54
now sort of in control in terms of the influential cognoscenti behind the Trump administration
56:01
from the tech sector.
56:03
They're not really working on things that give us more freedom at the end of the day.
56:10
No, they're not.
56:10
And look, I'm not in the black pill community.
56:14
I think there's always hope.
56:15
But there's also such grand systemic cycle things out of our control going on that, you
56:23
You do what you can, but also build – I was talking to Catherine Austin Fitz, veteran in Maui a couple weeks ago.
56:31
And I agree with her.
56:32
And I said this years ago, build new systems, build new communities like you're doing.
56:40
And just kind of don't get too freaked out by what's going on that you can't control.
56:46
Try to control what you can.
56:48
No, I really appreciate Catherine.
56:50
I've never had her on the show.
56:51
I know she's highly skeptical of Bitcoin and thinks it's a CIA project.
56:56
It's unfortunate to me that she does because I think I could sit down with her for an hour and sort of walk her through how it's pretty obvious that it's not.
57:05
She would be a Bitcoin advocate, but that's why I do what I do.
57:08
It's like we need to create these opt-out options for people to escape the system that they're trying to trap you in.
57:17
That's one of those.
57:18
and and i think a current she talked about a currency that i talked about a couple years ago
57:24
but the currency of personal relationships will become more important in trust and integrity
57:28
uh in a world where there's not that that seems to be lacking quite a bit
57:33
and surround yourself with people that you can trust and like uh that have the same values and
57:38
and and you know my friend group is pretty well vetted so no one would say anything stupid
57:45
about charlie kirk but if if i i said openly on twitter that and any acquaintance that says
57:50
anything stupid like that you know i'm not gonna i'm not gonna like scream at him just to say like
57:56
i can no longer associate with you just kind of quietly walk away you know you don't give it
58:00
energy you just you just don't give it zero energy like you're no longer worthy of my interactions
58:07
now that i said that an hour ago on rabbit hole recap the show i just did that like that's
58:13
I think to your point of recognize we're in the fog of war, recognize they're trying to divide to divide us because that you're not giving your energy to those people because that's what the evil side feeds off of.
58:27
Is that negative?
58:28
You don't want to hurt them, but you just you just you give them zero energy.
58:34
And that's that's how that's how you stop this.
58:36
They want they want energy.
58:38
The people that are angry want you to engage with them.
58:42
They want to argue.
58:43
They want to yell at you.
58:44
But nothing hurts these people more than being ignored.
58:51
Develop the courage to ignore.
58:53
Ed, thank you for coming back on the show.
58:56
I think a timely week for an update with Ed Dowd.
59:01
So I appreciate your time.
59:02
And yeah, stay frosty out there, everybody.
59:05
It seems like, I mean, it doesn't seem.
59:08
It's very obvious that things are foreshadowing to, I think, some singularity at some point in the future.
59:14
And it's going to involve many things, financial, social, liberty-oriented things.
59:22
So I think keep a clear mind.
59:27
Thank you for having me on, Marty. Great to be here.
59:29
All right. Peace and love, freaks.