Latest / Financial Survival Network / Capitalism's Bleak Future: Homelessness, Inflation, Cryptocurrency -- John Rubino #5949
Transcript
- 0:00Well, you know that since the last time you and I talked, the
- 0:03CPI and the PPI both came out, and the CPI was much lower than
- 0:08anybody expected. The PPI was actually negative. There was actually deflation in commodities,
- 0:14and so all of a sudden, it seems like inflation is and you
- 0:18know, you and I talked about this. There are so many recession indicators
- 0:22out there that we would expect lower inflation and maybe even deflation in the year
- 0:26ahead. You are listening to Carrie Leutz's Financial Survival Network, where you get
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- 0:50than ever. And welcome. You are listening to watching the Financial Survival Network.
- 0:58I'm their host, Carrie Lutz. John Rabino is with us. John,
- 1:02Hey, I just came back. I got to share with you.
- 1:03This just came back. I was in LA for conference in Woodland Hills,
- 1:08which was pretty Tony neighborhood, and I mean I could not believe, like,
- 1:15right in the center of town, there's a homeless encampment. They're supposedly
- 1:19building the La RAMS training center there, but they got ghost malls, they
- 1:23got ghost buildings that have been empty for ten years. Remember that electronics chain
- 1:29Fries, which was a marvelous chain, the best chain out there, way
- 1:34better than any of the big boxes. Now that's been empty for about ten
- 1:38years. I just could not believe. And then I go to the airport.
- 1:42All right, I know, like newcomer to the drug scene. But
- 1:46in front of the airport last night as I'm leaving the night before, there's
- 1:49like people all over the place smoking marijuana in front of the airport. John,
- 1:55what is the world coming to here? Well, you know what,
- 1:57maybe that's where they put all the sand for Cisco of homeless people when they
- 2:00cleared them out, just lay a good thing for presidents to come visit.
- 2:05So yeah, because they you know, they're somewhere, So maybe they just
- 2:07dumped them in some other homeless encampment. So you saw, you saw it
- 2:10double the normal number. But I can't go. California is a nightmare.
- 2:16Yeah, I haven't newsome. It is very likely going to be the Democrat
- 2:21nominee this time around, or possibly no not guaranteed, but I think,
- 2:24you know, possibly good pump, but he's so easy to run against.
- 2:30All you need to do is run video of California right now, almost random
- 2:35video. You don't even have to curate it or anything. Just drive down
- 2:38the street and post the video and then say do you want this guy running
- 2:42the country? You know? And that seems like that's all you would have
- 2:45to do. Man, I'm like, all for legalizing, liberalizing all these
- 2:49drug laws. It's a mental health issue. It's not a criminal issue.
- 2:53But because the cost gets so high, people have to steal to support their
- 2:57habit, it becomes a criminal justice issue. But in places like even New
- 3:00Jersey and numerous other states, the deal is you got to go for treatment
- 3:06if you get arrested for crime, and if you don't, then they'll send
- 3:10you to jail. This is what we need for the rest of the country.
- 3:15You know, you get arrested for drug crimes whatever, or you're a
- 3:19criminal because you're involved in drugs, you need mandatory treatment get off of it.
- 3:24And you know it's doable, but there's no will to do it.
- 3:29You know. Have you had Michael Schellenberger on your show because he wrote a
- 3:32book about this called San Francisco, Sico, San Francisco, San Francica.
- 3:38Yeah, and that's basically the conclusion that he comes to in that book is
- 3:44that most of the people in the streets are drug addicted or mentally ill,
- 3:49and therefore you can't fix their lives by giving him a little apartment or something
- 3:54like that. The rent's not too damn high. Is that that's not the
- 3:59call of it? No, no, he yeah, he actually said the
- 4:04idea of the normal middle class person who loses their job and ends up on
- 4:09the street is a myth. Yeah, it's not what's there? So,
- 4:13yeah, and so you basically have to have some kind of a some kind
- 4:17of what you know, a liberal person might call coercive. Yeah, there
- 4:21has to be some kind of coercion involved in here where they there's some behavior
- 4:26that's expected and if they don't behave in that way, then there's a consequence,
- 4:31you know. And so we'll see. I think it's a self correcting
- 4:34thing, luckily, because different states have different policies, so we know what
- 4:38works and what doesn't. And yeah, could not they got it more.
- 4:42Yeah, the guy the guys who implement what doesn't work just get kicked out
- 4:45of office. Hopefully, that's so easy to happen. One's upon a time
- 4:48that happened. But now they get they get kicked up for higher office,
- 4:53right, yeah, you just move them up to president or sent there's something
- 4:57like that. I mean, look at our president now. He was basically
- 5:00a failed politician, and he failed his way to success. You know,
- 5:04the way it's happening now is that people are voting with their feet in states.
- 5:11They're moving out of states that are badly run and into states that are
- 5:15perceived as being well run. And there's a nasty side effect to that,
- 5:19which it leaves all the people who like the way the badly run states are
- 5:24being run at home to vote and people don't like it leaves so you don't
- 5:29get any pressure on the mayors and the governors to do a better job because
- 5:33they get reelected no matter what. So anyhow, that's that's a long that's
- 5:38a sessions worth of yeahs So, but in the meantime, we got plenty
- 5:46of issues here. So what's with inflation that just disappeared? Happy days are
- 5:50here again. Rates are going lower and pretty soon before you know it,
- 5:56banks will start making loans again. Who could believe that could happened. Well,
- 6:00you know that since the last time you and I talked, the CPI
- 6:03and the PPI both came out and the CPI was was much lower than anybody
- 6:09expected. The PPI was actually negative. There was actually deflation in commodities,
- 6:15and so all of a sudden, it seems like inflation is and you know,
- 6:18you and I have talked about this. There are so many recession indicators
- 6:21out there that we would expect lower inflation and maybe even deflation in the year
- 6:27ahead, and that's starting to kind of play out. And so the question
- 6:31is is it good for the stock market? Because stocks rocketed on this,
- 6:33We had this big relief rally, Yeah, and huge ract you know.
- 6:39The implication, well, disinflation is good for stocks when when the inflation rate
- 6:44is positive, but declining stocks usually go up. But deflation is bad for
- 6:48stocks when when prices actually go down. And I kind of think that that's
- 6:53what we're going to see in the next year, just because there's so many
- 6:55really major signs of weakness out there and zero heads. Today they just said
- 7:00that the index of leading economic indicators went down for like the sixteenth month in
- 7:06a row. You know, those are things that point towards future economic activity,
- 7:12the things that make up that index, and you know, there's all
- 7:15kinds of other things that you and I have talked about that indicate recession is
- 7:20coming. So if we get if I'm not here already, yeah, yeah,
- 7:26if they don't go back and revise everything and say, oh, it's
- 7:28starting in October, which is usually the way it works and the way it
- 7:31could work this time, but that's not good for stocks because an actual recession,
- 7:38especially if there's deflation during the recession, really lowers corporate earnings and that's
- 7:44bad for stock prices, and yeah, yeah, it's bad for the banks,
- 7:47and it also blows up a lot of the leverage speculating community. There
- 7:53are huge sections of the financial world that can't function in deflation. They need
- 7:58inflation and interest rates to be doing what they're supposed to do and instead of
- 8:03just plunge it, so you know, you you end up with lower corporate
- 8:07earnings, falling stock prices, and then a bunch of crises that governments have
- 8:11to step in and bail out. And I kind of think that's Petsil's coming
- 8:15based on a lot of commous leaders. So this relief rally was probably kind
- 8:22of a delusional and it's probably going to be reversed out pretty soon. That
- 8:26that would be my prediction for the next few months. All right, Well,
- 8:28it'll be interesting to see, that's for sure. I mean, uh,
- 8:33it definitely, it's definitely we're at a real pivotal point here. We
- 8:37don't know what's going to happen, but if these banks don't turn around fast,
- 8:41I don't see how that's going to help. And kudos to you for
- 8:45that great article in zero Hedge today by you, and we'll put a link
- 8:50in the show notes to that about inflation just up and disappearing. Yeah,
- 8:54it's nice when zero hedge kicks up your stuff, you know. That's uh
- 8:58that that site is a giant compared to most of the regular sites up there,
- 9:03so very cool to see that happen once in a while. Hey,
- 9:07So, you know, going back to the recession, the phenomena, you
- 9:09know, the leading economic indicator is down for the nineteenth straight month. Do
- 9:15we not have a recession? Now? How is there not a recession?
- 9:18Well, there's been all kinds of indicators like that, Like remember how long
- 9:22the yield curve was inverted for and it didn't cause a crash or anything.
- 9:28So there's a lot of stuff out there that, you know, the indicator
- 9:31happens, but the economy doesn't follow along the way it has historically done.
- 9:35And there are reasons for that, and one of them is all those stimmy
- 9:39checks from Yeah Trillia. We basically said, Okay, you don't have to
- 9:43go into work, so you stay home and work from home. You don't
- 9:48have to pay rent, you don't have to your student loans, yeah,
- 9:52or your mortgage or your student loans, and then we're going to send you
- 9:54checks at least every two months. So people ended up accumulating what they call
- 10:00excess savings, and they've been spending those excess savings for the last couple of
- 10:05years, and that's kept the economy going when a lot of those indicators said
- 10:09that it shouldn't anymore. You know, the yield curve goes inverted. So
- 10:13you know, we've got plenty of money, and now people have used up
- 10:18their excess savings, but they're putting everything on plastic. So credit card debt
- 10:22is soaring, which is another negative indicator. You know, when you get
- 10:26a trillion dollars of credit card debt and rocketing delinquencies on credit cards, then
- 10:33you know, consumer spending has to decline because all those people who are now
- 10:37having to pay on their student loans but they're already maxed out on their credit
- 10:41cards. They're not going to go out to Costco and spend five hundred dollars
- 10:43this weekend. It's just not going to happen. So that's another recession indicator
- 10:48and possibly deflation indicator of many, Yeah, of many or sure, and
- 10:58you just, uh, it's this lead living in this world of illusion of
- 11:05delusion, because I think the argument is there quite persuasively that we were been
- 11:11having a recession for the past year. It's just that the some of the
- 11:15traditional indicators tend to lag anyway, and real estate's been good, the job
- 11:22numbers have been okay, so we hang our hat on that. But the
- 11:26reality is if you just printed money and nobody had to do anything, you
- 11:31know, it would look it would look even better. Yeah, oh,
- 11:33the modern monetary theory thing would look great for the first few years. If
- 11:39we just just printed money and gave it to everybody, cut everybody's taxes and
- 11:45stopped borrowing money, and just finance the government with newly printed currency. That
- 11:48would work until why yeah, until inflation spiking the dollar tanked, because that's
- 11:54that's the logical conclusion of a product, you knows, where you just finance
- 12:01yourself with newly created currency. So you know, we kind of did that,
- 12:05really and we got a pretty good economy out of it, at least
- 12:07in terms of headline numbers superficially. You know, you mentioned real estate and
- 12:13what was the other thing you mentioned something else that labor, the labor market,
- 12:16and both of them under the surface are horrendous, but the headline numbers
- 12:20are okay. But you know, in the labor market, you get you
- 12:22get these big jog job numbers now and then after the number comes out and
- 12:28everybody gets excited about it, people dig into it and say, oh,
- 12:31one hundred and seventy five percent of the new jobs were we're part times.
- 12:37That means we're losing full time jobs at the same time people are having to
- 12:41take on, you know, third jobs in order to make ends meet.
- 12:43That's not a good job's number after all. But by that time, everybody
- 12:48saw the headline number and came to their conclusion, you know, and same
- 12:52thing with real estate. Link criss are elevated still, but The reason they're
- 12:56elevated is because nobody's willing to sell because the mortgage rates you're so high now
- 13:01that if you sell a house with a three percent mortgage and you have to
- 13:05take on an eight percent mortgage to buy your next house, that doesn't work
- 13:07for you, you know, but exactly the case. Your mortgage, your
- 13:13low rate, cut rate mortgage has become a major asset. But it's also
- 13:18to become a millstone around your neck because if you need to finance your next
- 13:22home, it's going to cost you to double and you'll buy half the house
- 13:28that'll wind up costing you the same. Why bother moving? It's like a
- 13:31rent controlled apartment in New York City, isn't it. You get it?
- 13:35You never leave. You know, you're ninety six years old, you're still
- 13:39walking up those stairs to that rent control department. So I think that's true
- 13:43with a lot of houses now that are you know, McMansions. They're completely
- 13:46inappropriate for the sixty nine year old baby boomers living there because they've got three
- 13:52stories and the boomers have bad news, but they can't leave, you know.
- 13:58Yeah, So I think there are three big sources of homes for sale.
- 14:03Inventory come in pretty soon, and when they come, it's going to
- 14:05be a deluge. And that is the boomers who are going to finally have
- 14:07to sell they can they can't get upstairs anymore. And the Airbnb guys who
- 14:15are terrified that the other Airbnb guys are going to sell a bunch of their
- 14:20inventory and push prices down, so they're going to start selling. And then
- 14:22the Wall Street guys who bought up entire neighborhoods at bubble prices, and they're
- 14:28going to behave like Wall Street always behaves when they figure out they're in the
- 14:31wrong asset class. You know, they're going to just sell everything at whatever
- 14:37and just take the losses. So we'll see a lot of private equity companies
- 14:41go bankrupt and dump their inventory. And so those neighborhoods that got bought out
- 14:48for twenty percent over the market are now going to be sold at forty percent
- 14:52under the market. So you know howling is going to crash. There's just
- 14:58no way around it. All that is and we've already seen we've already seen
- 15:03commercial crash. That's a basket in case, no end in sight. Eight.
- 15:07So bitcoin is up over thirty seven thousand bucks, I got to admit,
- 15:11I've been buying it. I'd been making some money on it because I
- 15:15would just buy some every Monday, and then it would hit a price target,
- 15:18I'd sell it and then I'd begin the process over again, and once
- 15:22a week I would buy x amount of bitcoin. And yeah, it's been
- 15:28it's been a nice little run up there. Well, those ETFs are finally
- 15:31coming that people have been talking about for such a long time, you know.
- 15:33And when a physical ETF comes into a market, it's usually really beneficial
- 15:39for stock prices like or for the commodities price. Yeah, that happened.
- 15:43There was the GLD gold ETF came out back in the day when gold was
- 15:48much lower, but then it bought a bunch of inventory, got everybody excited
- 15:52and gold had a nice round, and same thing with uranium and so the
- 15:58as I understand that the new bitcoin and if they're in et aps are going
- 16:03to come in and they'll do the same thing. They will buy a bunch
- 16:07those coins and take them, yeah it spot and take them off the market.
- 16:11So people are excited about that prospect. Well, and the other thing
- 16:14that's nice about these ETPs is it lets enormies buy the thing like, I
- 16:18don't know how to buy the bitcoin myself. I wouldn't know what to do
- 16:23if you told me go out and buy some bitcoin right now. But when
- 16:26that Etsy hits the market, I'll know exactly what to do. I'll just
- 16:30go buy. I'll pull up that ticker and hits sen or he'll hit buy,
- 16:34and that'll be that, you know. So I think a lot more
- 16:37buying will come into the bitcoin market for sure, and it will probably pull
- 16:45up the other crypto currencies. So I think that this is you know,
- 16:48other things being equal good for cryptos. And there might it might not be
- 16:53equal, like there might be a you know, huge deflation herey crash right
- 16:57now that ups bitcoin and ethereum and gold and silver all down with it.
- 17:03But just other things being equal, that's probably why cryptos are going up right
- 17:10now. And I think he could be right hey, and miracle of the
- 17:12old miracles, Argentina just elected libertarian. I didn't know that you could spell
- 17:18libertarian in Espaniel, but evidently you can. Yeah, something was to do
- 17:22with libertad right, you know, you're just a little thing like freedom.
- 17:26I didn't think but he cared about that anymore. Well, you know,
- 17:30this guy sounds like a cross between Ron Paul and Darnald Trump because he's you
- 17:37know, he's really emphatic, and you know, he okay, being like
- 17:41Ron Paul, he wants to close down the Central Bank, but he also
- 17:45wants to make abortion illegal from the top down, you know, national law,
- 17:52and he wants to close down a long list of government bureaucracies, and
- 17:59he wants to cut wealth are spending. So you know, you toss all
- 18:02that together and that you know, some of those policies are conservative, some
- 18:07of them are populists, and some of them are libertarian. So you know
- 18:11it's gonna be fun to watch. But hey, he could always move to
- 18:17Chile after this fails, right, Well, you know, Chile was the
- 18:21closest thing to a libertarian country that we had out there for a really long
- 18:25time. And yeah, yeah, yeah, well yeah, in Hong Kong
- 18:30got taken over a China, so it's no longer that and forget that.
- 18:33You know, Chile had a very free market economy because of the legacy of
- 18:40Pinochet, right, and so you know, it wasn't all a good thing
- 18:45the way it happened, but Pinochet left Chile with a relatively constrained public sector,
- 18:52relatively loaded taxes, relatively clean regulations, and so Chile was a very
- 18:57successful country for a long time. Now they're kind of backsliding into socialism,
- 19:03but but who knows, we'll see. It's nice to see Latin America leading
- 19:07the way in that direction from once, you know, because usually that's they're
- 19:11they're pulling in the other directions a lot of the time. Maybe they swing
- 19:15between dictatorship and socialist dictatorship, you know, military and dictatorship and socialistic,
- 19:22and it's never they never find that happy medium, and Chile was kind of
- 19:26that for a while. So maybe Argentina will end up being that too.
- 19:30That would be nice, and I would any man, it's going to be
- 19:33down. It would be like a block of uh well maybe maybe you know,
- 19:41Argentina going back to libertarian things would be enough of a push to get
- 19:45Chile to go back as well. And then you would have the entire southern
- 19:51tip of South America. Plus you could kind of throw Uruguay in there to
- 19:56some extent, not truly libertarian, but not like the rest of the world
- 20:00either. So then you'd have three major South American countries and then if it
- 20:06worked, it could become the basis of a movement, right it could.
- 20:11I mean, that's hoping for a lot in this world because so much of
- 20:15the bad stuff that's happening out there is being blamed on capitalism, which means
- 20:19a lot of people vote socialists because they perceive their problems to be caused by
- 20:25capitalism. But I wouldn't call what's happening in the world today capitalism. It's
- 20:30capitalism. Yeah, yeah, you know, it's an oligarchy in the US,
- 20:37which is you know, it's as close to fascism as it is to
- 20:42pre American capitalism because it's basically a partnership now between big corporations and loaded governments
- 20:51and these guys. You know, that partnership is you know, censorious.
- 20:56They do not want free speech, they don't want petition, and they don't
- 21:03want clean elections. So you know, that's that's not our view of capitalism.
- 21:08And so you know, I think that the best thing we could do
- 21:12in the US right now would be aggressive anti trust, where we go in
- 21:18and saying, you know, okay, Golden miss acts from now on,
- 21:19your five smaller bags, Japie Morgan Chase twelve smaller bags, and you know,
- 21:26Pfizer, Yeah, you know, right down the line, you just
- 21:29go into these uh, these industries that are run by just a handful of
- 21:32the companies and break them up. That's normally perceived to be a left wing
- 21:37policy, but I think, you know, because it is. Well,
- 21:41see, you could get pop right wing, populists and socialists to agree on
- 21:48that policy and maybe you get fifty one percent of the vote out of that
- 21:52coalition. So it's conceivable that that that, you know, it's it's that
- 21:57the populists and socialists get to get for that one issue and then then anti
- 22:02war too. You know, once they're together, they can look at the
- 22:03other things they agree on and say, all right, men, and we're
- 22:07going to close down the military empire. So again, that's that's asking for
- 22:11a lot of today's world fantasy. It's a nice fantasy. It could happen,
- 22:15you know, that's like who's been changed? Man. I don't know
- 22:18that one, but yeah, or if we can, if they can pull
- 22:22it off, I support it wholeheartedly. Hey, so China and Saudi Arabia
- 22:29central banks sign a currency swap agreement. I'll give you my take on it.
- 22:33It doesn't mean anything because you got like China with a crashing currency.
- 22:38Everything's crashing in China. It's just a matter of time until three gorgeous damn
- 22:42takes everything out. Well, yeah, China is not the super powerful more
- 22:48to live that it seemed like it was for a long time, because they've
- 22:52got a major financial crisis going right now, and they've got a demographic collapse.
- 22:57It looks like they're on Their population is shrinking and aging at the same
- 23:03time. So they're not going to be a manufacturing powerhouse in the same sense
- 23:07that they were for the past twenty years, you know. So, yeah,
- 23:11you're right. Just because China makes a deal with somebody else, it
- 23:15doesn't mean what it might have meant at one time. But what a currency
- 23:19squad swap means between countries is that what's the Saudia currency? Is it real?
- 23:26No? No, yeah, I don't know what the sound enough currency
- 23:32is. Okay, But anyhow, you China and Saudi Arabia give each other
- 23:37or they buy each other's currencies, right, so then they've got some of
- 23:40the other countries' currency on hand and they can use that to buy stuff from
- 23:44that country without having to swap into dollars in order to do it. So
- 23:48it's a it's a form of dedollarization, and it's a real thing in the
- 23:53sense that henceforth Saudi Arabia will be selling oil to China for you want,
- 24:00and that will do with those you want, but they'll have them. Yeah,
- 24:06well, yeah, yeah, I see. That's the thing. You
- 24:07got to have something you can do with that currency once you get it.
- 24:10And that's that's the problem with for instance, Russia and India hutting these bilateral
- 24:15trade deals because Russia will sell oil or natural gas to India and go get
- 24:19rupees back, but they can't buy anything with the rupees that they want,
- 24:25you know, so that that deal is not working for them. And so
- 24:29that's part of the rationale for that gold backed bricks currency everybody was talking about
- 24:33for a little while. But yeah, we've talked about it for a week
- 24:37and now we're onto this. Yeah yeah, but you know, it's the
- 24:41same process that's being worked out. It's going to happen. I don't mean
- 24:45to say dollar, it's supreme supremacy forever. We pretty much abuse that position
- 24:51of trust. So the world will have to find an alternative. And we
- 24:55want the world to find an alternative because it's doing more harm than good to
- 24:59the United States in so many ways, the unlimited deficit spending, the unlimited
- 25:04military industrial expansion, complex expansion, all that as a result of the abuse
- 25:11of our trust of the world's reserve currency. But hey, you know,
- 25:15this is just another step along the along the path going to be interesting to
- 25:21see what happens in any event. That is it for today. Make sure
- 25:23you go over to John's substack. It's rabino dot substack dot com link in
- 25:30the show notes, along with a link to your superb article John about inflation
- 25:37disappearing that appeared on Zero Edge today that tens of thousands of you out there
- 25:41have been reading. Hey, you've got any questions or comments, email kl
- 25:45at Carrie LUTs dot com site Financial Survival Network dot com. Sign up for
- 25:51your free newsletter, John. We'll catch up to you in a couple of
- 25:52weeks. Thanks carry so Ya, thanks for listening to Carrie Letz's Financial Survival
- 25:59Network, your solution to today's trying times. For the latest, go to
- 26:03Financial Survivalnetwork dot com. Financial Survival Network now more than ever