Latest / What Bitcoin Did / Has the Debt Spiral Started? | Luke Gromen

Transcript

Has the Debt Spiral Started? | Luke Gromen · What Bitcoin Did

• 0:00
  The central bank and the government faces a choice, which is simply, do we stand aside and default on our applications, or do we print money to keep our debt nominally money good?
• 0:13
  We're in a spot where one false step and, you know, things can go pear-shaped pretty fast.
• 0:18
  When you do dumb stuff with borrowed money for 40 years and you follow an economic dogma, you eventually get to this point.
• 0:27
  They're financing deficits in your cash markets because they can't issue enough bonds at the long end at rates that don't blow up the debt.
• 0:37
  We've got exponential functions in two different directions happening.
• 0:40
  And that means it's going to happen like way, way faster than we think.
• 0:46
  I think over time, all else equal, Bitcoin probably wins.
• 0:54
  Mr. Luke Groman, good to see you, man.
• 0:56
  How are you doing?
• 0:56
  I'm doing great.
• 0:57
  Great to be back and great to catch up with you.
• 1:00
  Was that your first beefsteak last night?
• 1:02
  I think it was.
• 1:03
  What did you think?
• 1:04
  I like meat, so I like steak.
• 1:08
  And I certainly had a lot.
• 1:10
  And it was excellent.
• 1:11
  It was prepared exactly as I love it.
• 1:13
  medium rare, medium
• 1:17
  it was excellent, the company was great,
• 1:19
  the conversation was great, so I enjoyed it.
• 1:20
  He's like a real legit chef.
• 1:22
  I believe it based on how everything tasted.
• 1:24
  It was amazing, but yeah,
• 1:26
  I didn't eat much all day, so it hit the spot.
• 1:29
  That's just what you want.
• 1:30
  I got roped into playing beer pong and I was there quite late.
• 1:33
  I feel a little bit slow this morning,
• 1:35
  so if I'm slower than normal, that's why.
• 1:38
  Hardly.
• 1:40
  We've got a lot to talk about.
• 1:41
  I follow your work pretty closely.
• 1:43
  I read all the reports you put out and things are getting pretty crazy.
• 1:47
  Like I've, obviously you've been working this for 30 years or whatever it is.
• 1:50
  I've been paying a little bit of attention to macro stuff really only since after getting into Bitcoin.
• 1:55
  So like 2018, 2019 was probably when I really started like enjoying listening to people talking about the macro side of things.
• 2:01
  And it's not like it's ever seemed like it's in a really healthy spot.
• 2:05
  But right now it seems like it's in an absolute mess.
• 2:09
  Is this the worst environment you've ever seen?
• 2:13
  I wouldn't say worst. I would say most precarious. I think it's in sort of an okay spot at the moment. But in terms of worst, I would, you know, most precarious, where you're almost on the head of a pin.
• 2:31
  And any step you take in either way, there be dragons, whether it's geopolitical, whether it's debt, whether it's unemployment, whether it's demographics, whether it's – there's a whole list of things, resource constraints slash competition.
• 2:52
  There's just everywhere you go, it seems like, you know, if we don't know, we don't know if the next step that is going to be the step where you sort of, oops, you know, go over the edge.
• 3:05
  But, you know, we're in a spot where one false step and, you know, things can go pear-shaped pretty fast.
• 3:12
  So, like I say, there's a lot I want to go through.
• 3:14
  But can we start with the Fed?
• 3:16
  Because they've obviously started cutting rates.
• 3:19
  And I understand why from one perspective, like jobs aren't looking great at the moment.
• 3:24
  But at the same time, inflation is still above target.
• 3:27
  It looks like inflation is likely to come back in a more reasonable, like more sizable way over the next few years.
• 3:33
  Like what do you think they're doing the right thing by cutting rates and potentially continuing to cut rates throughout the rest of the year?
• 3:39
  It depends on which hat or which team you play for, right?
• 3:44
  If you play for the Fed independence, preserve the real value of the bond market no matter what, sort of the operating environment the last 40 years, then it's not the right thing to do.
• 3:58
  I think they probably shouldn't be.
• 4:02
  But if you play from the side of the much, I think the much bigger, and this is the side, this is the team I'm cheering for or playing for, if you will.
• 4:14
  If you go from the side of a broader strategic context where we are trying to extract ourselves from the errors of the past 30 to 40 years of economic policy, this neoliberal, globalist type of dynamic,
• 4:44
  And I don't know that there's anything wrong with those strategies, those theories in and of themselves.
• 4:54
  The issue is they've been taken far, way too far in one direction.
• 4:58
  And so now as a nation, the United States, we've offshored too much of our defense industrial base.
• 5:04
  We have hyper-financialized, and we find ourselves where it's essentially a national security threat.
• 5:15
  When you are reliant on China to make critical components for your military, you don't have a military.
• 5:22
  China backs your military.
• 5:23
  When you have offshored your labor and your economic system has changed or perverted the incentives of your economy such that it makes way more sense to go into finance than it does into engineering or skilled trades.
• 5:44
  And I say that as someone who made a conscious decision to go into finance for exactly the reason.
• 5:48
  The incentives were simply much more attractive for someone going into college in 1993.
• 5:56
  We have created these massive distortions.
• 6:01
  And if we look at what the Fed is doing from that side, continuing to manage the economy as they have over the last 40 years for the bond market, for the banks.
• 6:14
  for sort of neoliberal, globalist roadmap, if you will,
• 6:23
  that's only going to worsen the issues,
• 6:28
  the distortions in the economy it's created
• 6:30
  and worsen the national security issue.
• 6:32
  So I think from a broader construct of if we as a nation,
• 6:38
  and I've said this before,
• 6:40
  We need to decide where we want to be in five years and 10 years as a nation and even as the U.S., but also as the West.
• 6:47
  And we need to say, look, if we want to rebalance things, if we want to not be dependent on potential adversaries for our defense supply chain, if we want to have a skilled trade base in five or eight years, that it actually exists.
• 7:04
  Because a lot – the small amount that we have relative to what we need is going to age out over the next five to eight years.
• 7:11
  Then we need to make a decision today that looks like cut rates, run it hot, financially repress the bond market, financially repress the banks, put up some protectionist barriers so that we can bring some – we can bring some balance back to this very imbalanced economy.
• 7:32
  from a perspective of where we want to be in five years strategically,
• 7:36
  10 years strategically.
• 7:37
  And so I think it's the right thing to do,
• 7:41
  but the Fed has always been a political institution.
• 7:45
  It's always been a political question.
• 7:46
  Should we be raising rates?
• 7:47
  It is hyper-political now, and it feels like that's because
• 7:51
  we're at such a critical moment in time.
• 7:52
  If we don't make the right decision now,
• 7:56
  I think the next five years from now, 10 years from now,
• 8:01
  could be pretty tough, could be pretty bumpy.
• 8:05
  And is that right decision now basically paying in the short term
• 8:08
  to actually have real growth in the long term?
• 8:12
  Yeah, in essence.
• 8:13
  I think it's inflation in the short run for a rebalancing.
• 8:18
  Basically, there's a great quote by Lord Acton said,
• 8:21
  down through the centuries,
• 8:23
  the issue that has always swept down through the century
• 8:25
  and that will have to be fought once again
• 8:28
  is the people versus the banks.
• 8:29
  And I think it's a quote that defines the moment that we're in.
• 8:36
  Ultimately, the banks and the bond market have won for 40 years.
• 8:41
  Policy, economic policy in this country, be it what the Fed has done with rates, be it with the offshoring of the industrial base to lower deficits, or excuse me, to lower inflation, reduce costs, et cetera.
• 8:55
  It has all been done with one goal in mind, which is to subjugate the U.S. middling working class to support the real value of the bond market and by extension Wall Street.
• 9:08
  And that has now been taken too far.
• 9:11
  And so if we want to be where I think most Americans would agree we want to be, then yeah, pain is all in the eye of the beholder, right?
• 9:20
  It's something I say all the time is what's normal for the spider is chaos for the fly, right?
• 9:23
  If you own lots of long-term treasury bonds, yeah, what I'm advocating would be very painful.
• 9:31
  If you own Bitcoin.
• 9:32
  If you own Bitcoin, if you own gold, if you own productive businesses, if you're a working-class person whose wages are going to rise as fast or faster than inflation, maybe for the first time in 50 years, then that's not as painful.
• 9:48
  And I think as a country, we wake up and you have a more rebalanced economy, a more self-sufficient economy where you're not as reliant on potential adversaries for key things.
• 9:57
  It's tricky.
• 9:59
  It's bumpy.
• 10:00
  There's no guarantee it's going to work.
• 10:03
  We've let it go on so long.
• 10:05
  It's a little bit more market-driven paradoxically, right?
• 10:09
  Ultimately, if we do those things, there should be more inflation.
• 10:14
  But that inflation is a market signal telling us, hey, you've underinvested for 40 years in your industrial base, in your working class, in your skilled trades, in your young people.
• 10:26
  And now you need to catch up.
• 10:28
  And doing that is going to be inflationary.
• 10:30
  And that's that, you know, that is just the fallout of the decisions we've made over the last 30, 40 years.
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• 12:44
  And is it like Trump recently came out
• 12:45
  and said you can grow yourself out of debt,
• 12:48
  which I think you can also read
• 12:49
  as you can inflate your way out of debt.
• 12:51
  Is that what you think the administration
• 12:54
  are actually looking at as a real?
• 12:55
  Is that sort of their plan A right now?
• 12:57
  I think it's become plan A.
• 12:58
  I think plan A was Doge originally,
• 13:01
  which as you know, I was, yeah,
• 13:03
  I was looking at the math going,
• 13:04
  guys is, if you try to doge before you devalue the real value of the debt significantly,
• 13:11
  you're going to create a huge crisis. And they tried. They created a huge crisis aided by
• 13:17
  Liberation Day. And then they backed off. To their credit, I will say that, to my eyes,
• 13:25
  the senior members of this administration have been very open to course correcting relatively
• 13:31
  quickly, whether that be Besant, whether that be Vance, Trump, et cetera.
• 13:37
  Myron, they seem to take market feedback and adjust course.
• 13:43
  And so I do think plan A is now, we need to run this hot.
• 13:47
  We need to nominal growth, nominal GDP growth, and paired with Fed help, that is ultimately,
• 13:56
  I think, part of the rate cut dynamic.
• 13:58
  and get out of this the way we got out of it after World War II, right?
• 14:02
  We spent a bunch of money in World War II.
• 14:03
  Debt to GDP was 110%.
• 14:04
  It was 55%.
• 14:06
  Sorry, it was 110% in 1946.
• 14:08
  By 1951, it was 55%.
• 14:10
  How did they do that?
• 14:11
  Real rates in the United States were negative 13% at the lows, right?
• 14:14
  So bondholders got very, very repressed.
• 14:17
  We had capital controls, so it was a little different.
• 14:19
  But we also grew really rapidly, right?
• 14:21
  You had all these GIs coming back.
• 14:22
  You're building houses.
• 14:23
  You're rebuilding the world.
• 14:25
  So you can do it.
• 14:26
  And there are some things that are different this time, but all of those things point to we're going to need a lot hotter nominal GDP growth than the low double digits we ran at coming out of COVID.
• 14:40
  Where does that come from?
• 14:40
  How do they do that?
• 14:42
  Is it literally money printing, stimulate the economy in any way possible?
• 14:48
  That's a very good question.
• 14:51
  I think on the surface of it, if you're running big deficits, that's going to be stimulative.
• 14:55
  And that is depending on how you finance that, somewhere between stimulative and the close cousin of outright money printing.
• 15:05
  And it depends how you ultimately finance that.
• 15:11
  That's a big part of it.
• 15:13
  Then you get the private sector helping, in theory, with some of the things we're seeing.
• 15:19
  Right now, the big capital spending project du jour is AI and data centers, and that's certainly adding to GDP.
• 15:30
  The trick within that is that is a productivity driver, which ultimately then sort of under, you're investing faster in something that's going to remove jobs faster.
• 15:40
  Yeah.
• 15:41
  And that's a paradox that I haven't kind of solved for in my head, right?
• 15:47
  There's what you end up there.
• 15:49
  You end up with a situation where you have a moment in time where nominal GDP grows faster.
• 15:57
  I think stocks, as stocks grow or stock prices rise, I should say, you end up with a consumer spending binge.
• 16:07
  And this is kind of what we're seeing.
• 16:09
  This is how they're kind of trying to do it, right?
• 16:10
  We've got big deficits.
• 16:11
  So we're running still 6%, 7% of deficits at all-time high receipts.
• 16:14
  We're running AI and data center.
• 16:18
  Capital spending is really hot.
• 16:20
  Sort of traditional industrial spending still, like, you know, they're spending on the grid and stuff, but your ISM indices across the country are plus or minus 50.
• 16:27
  So they're not really humming.
• 16:30
  And then you've got consumer spending that is still strong, but very bifurcated amongst, you know, basically top 10%, top 20% of consumers and the boomers.
• 16:41
  And then sort of the bottom 50% are under pressure, I think, partly due to inflation, partly they are in the crosshairs of some of these productivity gains.
• 16:50
  So it is a very tricky blend to try to get there in real terms other than just straight, hey, we're going to grow 5% real and inflation is going to be 10 or 8.
• 17:03
  And I think when you talk through it and say it's real tricky to get there in real terms, the conclusion is ultimately, you know, CPI has probably got to go to 8 or 10 if they want to have a chance of growing out of this.
• 17:18
  And, you know, that sets off a whole other set of, you know, trade-offs, as the economists like to call them.
• 17:26
  When you were on the previous What Bitcoin Did, I would have guessed it had been a couple years ago.
• 17:30
  We were talking about inflation coming back.
• 17:33
  In fact, I think it was when inflation was still relatively high.
• 17:36
  But you said that it's not a 0% chance that we go to like 40%, 50% inflation.
• 17:41
  Do you still think that's on the cards?
• 17:45
  I think there's still a risk of it for some period of time
• 17:53
  simply because of the level of debt in the system.
• 17:57
  You know, all the great inflations that you see are not because, oops, the central bank was too loose and the economy ran too hot and inflation suddenly went to 40 or 50.
• 18:06
  That's not how it works.
• 18:07
  The great inflations are we have debt to GDP of 120%, and our foreign creditors are not buying our debt like they were either at all or certainly relative to the new deficits.
• 18:21
  And our deficits are 6% to 7% of GDP.
• 18:24
  And then we have some sort of crisis.
• 18:27
  And when we have the crisis, receipts fall, interest doesn't fall, foreigners sell bonds to get liquid, and the rates start going up in your crisis.
• 18:38
  And you go into a debt spiral because of the level of your debt, level of your secular deficits.
• 18:43
  And then the central bank and the government faces a choice, which is simply do we stand aside and default on our applications or do we print money to keep our debt nominally money good?
• 18:54
  And it's those times when governments are printing money to keep their debt nominally money good that we've seen the greatest inflations in history.
• 19:03
  And, of course, the numbers I just laid out were the numbers of the United States.
• 19:08
  And so is it possible?
• 19:11
  Sure.
• 19:11
  Is it my base case?
• 19:12
  No.
• 19:14
  But it would depend on events.
• 19:16
  It would, you know, if we get a crisis, we get a recession where receipts start to fall, GDP starts to fall.
• 19:26
  GDP falling with debt to GDP and deficits where they are, structural deficits, you don't, it's not a policy option.
• 19:37
  You have, yeah, you start to see.
• 19:40
  And, you know, importantly, we've seen hints of this.
• 19:43
  We even saw it earlier this year where, if you remember part of the plan, right, we're going to do austerity and we're going to doge and we're going to take some pain.
• 19:54
  And we going to Besson going to scare stocks into bonds and he going to get the tenure down Judge us by the tenure Judge by the 10 year i think this was february he said this and then we do we start moving toward we weren even in the liberation day yet we were just into
• 20:09
  uh march and stocks going down 10 year yields going down so far so good and like 10 days in
• 20:17
  all of a sudden stocks keep going down 10 year starts going up and keeps going up keeps going
• 20:22
  up. And then we do Liberation Day, and it comes down for a cup of coffee and then takes off like
• 20:27
  a scalded cat higher. This is emerging market with a fiscal crisis, having a recession, trading action.
• 20:38
  And had they stood aside, had Trump not tacoed, right? Trump always chickens out.
• 20:44
  They didn't have a choice. I think he said the bond market was getting a little queasy. Yeah,
• 20:48
  it was getting a little queasy. It was getting a lot more queasy. They were getting themselves
• 20:53
  into a position where, okay, your interest rates are going up, your receipts are going down.
• 20:57
  You've got a couple of weeks until you have a really bad or failed auction. And then it's only
• 21:03
  going to get worse and, and, and. And so their choice is sort of taco and get what we've in taco
• 21:12
  in April and get what we've had as we sit here, what today's October 8th, get what we've had in
• 21:17
  the ensuing six months, which is sort of bubble time and inflation has stopped going down and
• 21:22
  maybe it's ticking up a bit and gold's at almost 4,100 as we sit here and Bitcoin's 120,000,
• 21:29
  125,000 and stocks are at all-time highs. That's the choice. That's the trade-off to
• 21:36
  making the decision in April not to send the United States and by extension of us being the
• 21:44
  world's reserve currency and base reserve asset, incumbent base reserve asset, into a debt-death
• 21:50
  spiral, which would have been rates up, stocks down, bonds down, just wash rates repeat until
• 21:55
  you either default or you print it all. And so it is still a possibility.
• 22:03
  And it's one of these things where the margin of error keeps getting slimmer over time. As the debt
• 22:09
  goes up, in theory, there's this operating room where, okay, we're keeping inflation high enough
• 22:15
  that we're above stall speed where we go into a debt spiral, but we still are low enough where
• 22:23
  the bond market's not freaking out on the other side, right? But the rate that you need to stay
• 22:29
  above stall speed goes up with your debt. And the rate, whether it's a hard ceiling or it's a
• 22:37
  declining line of the rate where the bond market starts to go, we're done here.
• 22:45
  That space is narrowing. And once those lines cross, that's when you get brief moments of
• 22:52
  very high inflation. Now, that makes it sound like it's fait accompli versus a tail risk,
• 22:59
  which I realize I kind of just talked my way into. So there are externalities that could stop that,
• 23:07
  Right. If, you know, if China falls off the map first, right.
• 23:11
  Part, you know, if if if Russia falls off the map first, if we get some sort of productivity miracle, if something really happens, you know, either tech or health care, where there really is a productivity miracle that kind of restructures the economy, then there's ways out of that.
• 23:27
  But that's the path where that's the path we're on, where ultimately that type of decision will eventually lead to that.
• 23:33
  I just think there's probably a few more iterations of it between here and there.
• 23:36
  When I normally talk to people about inflation, one of the big concerns and one of the big impacts that it has on society is the sort of wealth inequality that that drives.
• 23:45
  But you're saying you think that wages will outpace inflation in this environment.
• 23:49
  Why would that happen when it's not happened in the past necessarily every time?
• 23:53
  I think wages for certain constituencies would outpace.
• 23:58
  I think basically you'd be taking money out of the pockets of rates traders and bankers and putting it into welders and skilled trades.
• 24:06
  which I think would serve to narrow some of the wealth inequality in theory.
• 24:12
  It is a blunt instrument, admittedly, and it's not guaranteed to work.
• 24:19
  But we can see the gap in wealth inequality that financialization is driven.
• 24:29
  It might not work.
• 24:32
  The thing we know is we know we're short.
• 24:34
  I don't know, I would have saw some congressional person say we're short 600,000 welders or something like that.
• 24:39
  You know, I saw the headline.
• 24:41
  I didn't dig into it, so it might be misquoting.
• 24:43
  But, you know, we're not short 600,000 mortgage bankers.
• 24:47
  You know, we're not short, you know, 600,000 rates traders.
• 24:53
  And so, you know, if we want to be able to build some of the things we want to build, you need to sort of restructure that.
• 25:01
  But, you know, being an old dog myself, it's hard to teach old dogs new tricks, right?
• 25:08
  So it's not like the rates trader is going to sort of have his salary go down because rates don't move around because the Fed's capping them.
• 25:14
  And he's going to go learn to be a welder.
• 25:16
  That's not how it's going to go.
• 25:18
  No, and you can't just click your fingers and do that overnight.
• 25:20
  No, you can't.
• 25:21
  And that is further tricky because the solutions to that are, well, you bring in more people to be the welders.
• 25:29
  But there, too, there's a delay. And sort of here, too, immigration policy of the U.S. is always framed in humanitarian concerns, understandably so.
• 25:43
  But I think the politicians and the economists do that from a very cynical standpoint, which is to say they don't care about humanitarian.
• 25:53
  What they care about is keeping inflation low. What they care about is keeping wages down.
• 25:57
  And that way, they can keep bond market rates low so they can borrow more money to spend on their pet projects.
• 26:03
  And if it requires them saying, oh, you are a cold, uncaring person because you want to restrict immigration, think about it in supply-demand terms.
• 26:15
  If the supply of labor shrinks, what's going to happen to wages?
• 26:20
  There's historically just countless – go back to extreme examples, the Black Plague.
• 26:27
  labor was able to dictate terms to sort of the lords and ladies for like
• 26:32
  decades if not centuries yeah um and again all with the greater i'm not trying to play hey you
• 26:41
  know blue collar versus white collar anything i'm looking at it from the united states of america
• 26:45
  this distortion that has been allowed to evolve in support of the bond market in support of
• 26:50
  washington in support of wall street has become so egregious that it's now creating these political
• 26:55
  problems and that you have to do something to fix it. But it's, to your point, there's no guarantee
• 27:02
  because the inflation market signal is a blunt instrument. But you need an inflationary market
• 27:13
  signal to fix what has been distorted. You have an inflation, we want to get wealth inequality
• 27:24
  down. How do we do that? Well, you have wages at the bottom go up and you have the real value of
• 27:29
  the bonds at the top come down. That can buy you time. But to your point, it's risky because
• 27:35
  inflation as a market signal tends to exacerbate some of those very pressures you're trying to fix.
• 27:42
  And yeah, I would fully concede that this is not, hey, it will absolutely work if we do this.
• 27:49
  It might not. We just have to try. We have to try. Well, the one thing I can tell you with
• 27:53
  absolute certainty is it's not gonna work we go the other way like we're already seeing that right
• 27:57
  we already you know uh whether it's the charlie kirk shooting whether it's the brian thompson
• 28:01
  shooting whether it's peter turchin had a uh who's written a great book end times uh and he tracks
• 28:08
  um he has a political violence uh index um as of a few weeks ago it's at the highest level uh
• 28:16
  since the 1860s in the united states as he tracks it right we've surpassed the 1960s
• 28:23
  So, like, I can tell you we're going to get a lot more of that if we don't, you know, it's like the old saying, right?
• 28:30
  If you don't get off the road that you're on, don't be surprised when you arrive at your destination.
• 28:35
  We know the road we're on, and we know we're running towards our destination faster.
• 28:41
  So I know a pretty high degree of certainty how this is going to go.
• 28:44
  So this, you know, the inflation to try to sort of rebalance things that have been imbalanced by, it's a Hail Mary.
• 28:54
  Maybe not quite a Hail Mary, but it's not a sure thing.
• 28:59
  The road run is a sure thing.
• 29:01
  Exactly.
• 29:03
  So when you talk about productivity miracles, there's a very obvious one in AI.
• 29:07
  I did a show a couple of days ago with an AI safety expert.
• 29:12
  he's actually the guy that came up with the term AI safety.
• 29:14
  So he's very concerned about AI,
• 29:18
  for one, taking basically every single job in the world.
• 29:21
  And then on a more extreme example,
• 29:24
  literally killing humanity.
• 29:25
  But if we just focus on the first part,
• 29:27
  which is like, let's say AI is as powerful
• 29:31
  and is as sort of disruptive in terms of taking jobs
• 29:36
  as we think it may be.
• 29:37
  Whether that's three years or 10 years or 20 years,
• 29:39
  it doesn't really matter.
• 29:40
  Like if you assume that all jobs in the world
• 29:41
  are going to be taken by AI.
• 29:44
  How do we even manage that?
• 29:47
  Because, again, I know the Fed is just one small part of this,
• 29:50
  but if they've got a dual mandate of jobs and inflation,
• 29:53
  they may as well just forget about one of them.
• 29:56
  How are we going to manage moving into this world?
• 29:59
  I don't know.
• 30:03
  I hadn't thought much about AI prior to two years ago,
• 30:09
  almost three years ago.
• 30:10
  So May of 2023, I was invited to speak at a conference out in Vancouver where I was on stage with an AI robotics expert and someone who has had a company and whose robots were already being, AI robots were already being tested by major American companies in their warehouses.
• 30:36
  and these robots are literally you know they would beat you know the best american chess player
• 30:41
  and they would you know they would literally pick up the strongest nfl linebacker with one hand and
• 30:46
  throw them across the room and they never need sick days and they never take time off and and
• 30:50
  and what this person said was that the um the pace that these robots aren't that different
• 31:02
  than electric cars in terms of the manufacturing process.
• 31:04
  They're not very manufacturing intensive,
• 31:06
  and they'll continue to get better at an exponential rate.
• 31:10
  And that in their view, you would see what they called autonomous labor.
• 31:15
  You know, you were already within a few years of it.
• 31:16
  There was some sort of labor test of like sort of just a basic functional
• 31:20
  of like your intelligence, your ability to pick up this box, put it over there.
• 31:23
  It was already approaching this sort of scoring as a human
• 31:27
  on a basic autonomous labor test.
• 31:30
  or a basic labor test.
• 31:33
  And that once that happened
• 31:34
  and you make some extrapolations
• 31:37
  about sort of how technology improves exponentially,
• 31:40
  you could see fully loaded,
• 31:44
  fully amortized autonomous AI labor
• 31:47
  at $5 an hour by like 2035 or 2032.
• 31:54
  And I remember sitting there going,
• 31:57
  oh my God.
• 31:57
  because I know so when I stepped onto the stage and and it was my turn to speak I came
• 32:03
  I was talking about just sort of the debt picture and the receipts etc
• 32:06
  and I said look what he just said is fundamentally incompatible with what we all know as our debt
• 32:15
  based system right so I was on x the other day and you know one of my one of my friends
• 32:21
  Tony Nash mentioned, look, you realize that if AI does what Wall Street thinks it's going to do, it's going to take all our jobs.
• 32:29
  I said, yes.
• 32:31
  And when it takes all our jobs, we're going to stop paying our mortgages.
• 32:37
  We're going to stop paying our car loans.
• 32:38
  When we stop paying our car loans and our mortgages, banks are going to start to run into trouble.
• 32:44
  What do the banks hold as their reserves?
• 32:47
  They hold treasury bonds.
• 32:49
  What are they going to sell?
• 32:51
  to offset credit losses due to people stopping paying on their
• 32:54
  and sell treasury bonds.
• 32:56
  So now you're going to have this unemployment rise,
• 33:00
  wage deflation, interest rates rising.
• 33:05
  Then what?
• 33:07
  Like, what do you do as a Fed?
• 33:09
  Like, that is an emerging market problem.
• 33:10
  So it's almost, I don't think,
• 33:16
  I think markets are actually starting to,
• 33:19
  like, based on conversations I've had,
• 33:21
  with investors, based on what I'm watching in the markets, I think markets are starting to go,
• 33:25
  oh, God. Oh, God. I think they're starting to see that second derivative problem. And as you know,
• 33:34
  we've been harping on this. I mean, I've been saying it over and over. AI is fundamentally
• 33:38
  incompatible with a debt-based monetary system. It cannot work. Either it's going to collapse
• 33:44
  or the Fed's going to have to come in and buy the entire bond market.
• 33:48
  Yeah, well, when you go through those scenarios,
• 33:50
  the only thing that it seems like they can do is UBI.
• 33:55
  There's already jobs that AI is replacing.
• 33:57
  If you're a computer programmer,
• 34:00
  there's a group of people that are using AI,
• 34:02
  making themselves way more productive,
• 34:03
  but then there's another group,
• 34:05
  probably the younger people coming through
• 34:06
  who are less experienced,
• 34:07
  that are just being replaced by seasoned developers
• 34:10
  using AI to develop.
• 34:12
  And if you're a long-distance truck driver,
• 34:14
  I can't imagine that job being around in 10 years' time.
• 34:17
  And they are one of the biggest unions in the country, I think, in America.
• 34:21
  So there's going to be a lot of political pressure to just give people money.
• 34:28
  You know, I had a conversation here last night with someone.
• 34:32
  And I said, listen, AI is already better than all but the top 10% of developers.
• 34:39
  I said, wait, wait, say that again?
• 34:40
  I want to make sure I heard it correctly.
• 34:42
  I was at a conference in Vail earlier this year.
• 34:46
  He said, you can take your phone already.
• 34:48
  Take a picture of a spot on your skin.
• 34:51
  It's better reading dermatologists.
• 34:53
  Do you have skin cancer or not?
• 34:55
  At that conference, they said, listen, within five to 10 years, top 20% of dermatologists are still going to have jobs.
• 35:01
  Bottom 80% are going to have to find something else to do.
• 35:04
  There's an article, or there's a hubbub this week about AI actresses.
• 35:09
  Some AI actresses like reading for scripts and sort of the real actresses are all losing their minds.
• 35:14
  And I'm not laughing at them. I empathize with it, but I recognize this because my mental model for all of this is what happened to the U.S. Rust Belt when China went into the WTO.
• 35:27
  China was the first AI. Everything I'm hearing from people on what AI is going to do to white collar is exactly what I heard from blue collar guys.
• 35:36
  I used to golf every Saturday. My late father-in-law was a Teamster union official in Cleveland, and his two colleagues that ran other unions that were Teamster unions around the city, they were like, look, what do we do about this?
• 35:54
  We know that they're going to be cheaper. We know how this is going to go. What are we supposed to do? And I know how that played out. And the way it played out was private UBI, effectively, as the working class got offshore to China from 2001 to 2005, is what I've called private UBI, which is, hey, we take credit standards down to nil and subprime, right?
• 36:22
  So you were making $30 an hour full benefits at Ford, and now you're a $12 an hour greeter at Walmart, no benefits.
• 36:31
  But Goldman Sachs will write you a subprime loan so you can still buy a car and a house and a bass boat.
• 36:36
  And your living standards, they don't change from 2003 to 2006 when home prices start to fall.
• 36:43
  And now you can't refinance it.
• 36:44
  And then Goldman Sachs gets out of that business.
• 36:46
  And what ends up happening is, of course, we have a deflationary whoosh, and then all of it ends up in sort of second derivative fashion on the Fed's balance sheet, which goes from $800 billion to $4.7 trillion.
• 36:57
  And so I look at this now and go, this is all so familiar.
• 37:03
  I've seen this before.
• 37:05
  And we've kind of already done some of the private UBI stuff, right?
• 37:09
  Credit standards haven't exactly been loose.
• 37:12
  But, yeah, you end up with what do you do?
• 37:14
  You're going to need some sort of public UBI.
• 37:16
  Well, what's the quid pro quo to that? Who finances that? Do you just straight money print it? I don't know the answer. And I would tell you, I've gotten indications that leaders have known about this problem for years, that AI, the AI sort of employment slash meaning mismatch is coming.
• 37:46
  And so, yeah, I don't know.
• 37:51
  This is part of one, you know, when we let off of like, hey, there's a no, things are kind of okay right now.
• 37:58
  We're on the edge.
• 37:59
  We're on the edge.
• 38:01
  And, you know, this is technology.
• 38:02
  So, like, we can stand here on the edge.
• 38:06
  And even if we don't take another step, the edge is going to come to us.
• 38:09
  so I don't have an answer but I could it is one of the things that makes me
• 38:15
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• 40:40
  AI isn't going away.
• 40:41
  Like it doesn't seem like it's going away.
• 40:43
  I was even when I was talking to this guy, I used the example of computer engineers.
• 40:50
  And he was like, they've gone from being computer engineers to being prompt engineers working with AI.
• 40:54
  but the next harsh realization is that AI is better at prompt engineering than them.
• 40:59
  It's almost like training.
• 41:00
  A lot of American engineers would complain about the times in major corporations
• 41:04
  where they are forced to train their replacement and then the job goes to India.
• 41:10
  We've seen this before.
• 41:12
  And you look at it and go, 1990, biggest employer in America was manufacturing.
• 41:20
  By far, across almost all 50 states.
• 41:22
  in 2024, in 38 of 50 U.S. states, the biggest employer is healthcare. Now, it's not docs,
• 41:31
  and it's not nurses. It's not practitioners where the growth in jobs has occurred. It's all
• 41:35
  in administration primarily. And to me, healthcare administration, you talk about a field that is
• 41:45
  uniquely suited to being disintermediated by AI.
• 41:50
  You know, do you think AI can do billing better than a human?
• 41:53
  Do you think AI can do, you know,
• 41:55
  reading records better than a human filing?
• 41:58
  Oh my gosh, it's not even close.
• 42:01
  And so you then you look at what's American GDP
• 42:04
  if the biggest employer in 38 of 50 states.
• 42:09
  And oh, by the way, these jobs tend to be decent jobs.
• 42:11
  They tend to have benefits.
• 42:12
  They tend to be the kind of jobs
• 42:14
  that you can use to buy a house with.
• 42:16
  This is almost like the failing of the,
• 42:21
  hey, we're going to get away from manufacturing.
• 42:23
  We're going to move into a service-based economy
• 42:25
  because it's higher, it's cleaner, it's less dirty,
• 42:28
  it's safer, and it's higher paying,
• 42:31
  and it's higher ROI, higher corporate margins.
• 42:37
  I don't have the answer for that,
• 42:39
  but I can tell you that 30 years of doing what I do
• 42:42
  and seeing bottlenecks earlier than most people,
• 42:45
  I'm seeing this and it puts a pit in my stomach.
• 42:50
  I haven't seen, I haven't felt that since probably,
• 42:54
  you know, 07, 06, when I look at this and go,
• 42:57
  oh God, like this, there's no way this works out
• 43:01
  without some sort of serious disruption.
• 43:05
  I don't know the answer to that.
• 43:07
  Like the things I do know is, you know,
• 43:11
  There's a great quote by the physicist Albert Bartlett.
• 43:13
  One of the biggest shortcomings of the human race is the inability to understand the exponential function.
• 43:21
  And so people are going to go, okay, well, this won't be a problem for three or four years.
• 43:26
  It's not going to be three or four years.
• 43:27
  It's going to be faster than that.
• 43:29
  And even still, that's right around the corner.
• 43:30
  And even that, exactly.
• 43:31
  It is so soon.
• 43:32
  And, you know, if it's 18 to 24 months, markets are going to start to care.
• 43:37
  your forward thinkers, your forward thinking capital with mandates that allow them to be early,
• 43:45
  they're going to start caring now, six months. And so then I look at it and go,
• 43:52
  gold doing what it's doing, where gold goes up every day ending in Y. Interesting, right?
• 43:57
  One of the things I would probably buy, go buy me some gold. And oh, by the way,
• 44:00
  Western investors are so woefully underweighted gold. It's like it's night and fun. They could buy
• 44:05
  gold every day for the next three years and probably finally get to a market waiting you
• 44:09
  know or waiting equal to the sort of people in in in the east um bitcoin because i don't see
• 44:21
  how you don't end up with some form of ubi like you're saying like it just is so and part of that's
• 44:27
  I'm so, I usually don't fumble for words per se, but sometimes there's nothing to say.
• 44:35
  Like, it's so obvious what's about to happen, while Wall Street has sort of right tail extrapolated,
• 44:41
  hey, look at all this productivity.
• 44:44
  Yeah, well, it's like, you're forgetting about like-
• 44:47
  Maximum productivity, but with no one with a job, I don't know what that means.
• 44:51
  And the unprecedented thing here is like, in those historic examples you've given,
• 44:55
  there's always something else to pivot into.
• 44:57
  But if AI is replacing things across the board, there is no pivot left.
• 45:01
  And I wonder if things like UBI have to come as almost like reparations from the AI companies.
• 45:08
  I don't know.
• 45:12
  You know, the optimistic view of it, you know, I've been accused of being a half-empty guy on this and other issues, certainly.
• 45:21
  But once you write tail extrapolate, once you get to that, then in theory, you're going to have the tools for a whole large number of humans to, I'm going to use sort of a, to self-actualize, to whatever that means.
• 45:45
  You want to educate yourself, create art, create beauty, to create architecture, whatever that might be.
• 45:54
  You are going to have the tools to do it.
• 45:57
  And the levels of disruption that that entails, most humans, that's what I can tell you from the Rust Belt experience.
• 46:11
  Most people don't want to self-actualize.
• 46:14
  They just, they want some meaning.
• 46:17
  They want a good job.
• 46:18
  They want, you know, a group of friends.
• 46:20
  They want social connection.
• 46:21
  They want sort of these fundamental human experiences that are all about to sort of just get tossed up in the air willy-nilly in the name of sort of productivity.
• 46:33
  You know, and the most productive thing in the world is if there's like one guy working, doing all the work, and the machines are doing it all.
• 46:38
  And that's, you know, that's, that's, yeah, I don't, you know, the other thing that, you know, and, and, and Jordy Visser has done a lot of work on this.
• 46:50
  I've seen a little bit of his work is a really good point.
• 46:53
  I hadn't thought of it until he brought it up was there's, there's a couple of eighth graders in a garage right now.
• 47:02
  and they're going to get these AI tools
• 47:04
  and they're going to disintermediate
• 47:07
  like,
• 47:08
  I don't know,
• 47:10
  some gigantic movie studio
• 47:12
  or like...
• 47:13
  That's 100% going to happen.
• 47:14
  And,
• 47:15
  you know,
• 47:18
  it almost does make you wonder,
• 47:20
  not necessarily reparations,
• 47:22
  but just talking through this,
• 47:23
  there was a period in time in the 80s
• 47:25
  where, you know,
• 47:26
  Michael Milken's like,
• 47:26
  hey, this revolution of junk debt,
• 47:29
  you know,
• 47:29
  and he did all the work
• 47:30
  and he said,
• 47:30
  look,
• 47:31
  If you look at junk debt, the premiums that they're paying, the spreads that they're paying relative to the actual default rates make no sense.
• 47:40
  So that was sort of the fundamental first principle of what he did was like, we can issue these junk bonds at lower rates because the default experience was lower than what.
• 47:53
  And then this will allow these companies to get capital, to grow, to drive jobs, et cetera.
• 47:58
  and early on everyone loved it and it all worked and then they started doing leverage buyouts of
• 48:08
  like you know the holy grail companies the crown jewels and like the elites are like whoa whoa whoa
• 48:15
  like you can't take you know this this little upstart firm Drexel letting these smaller
• 48:20
  raiders like borrow money to buy you know these gigantic crown jewel American corporations and I
• 48:26
  just wonder if, you know, we're starting to see symptoms of that type of blowback already, right?
• 48:33
  Like, you know, whether it's Hollywood, you know, already with the AI actresses, like, you know,
• 48:41
  oh, these working class people, you know, you know, South Park, you know, they took our jobs thing,
• 48:48
  right? Like, and South Park makes fun of everyone. So I don't want to make, you know, I'm not picking
• 48:51
  on them per se, but like, you know, when some kid comes up with an AI show that knocks South Park
• 48:59
  off the air, and I'm not saying that's what's going to happen, but just as an example, you know,
• 49:03
  like the Dirk or Dirk meme will have come full circle. And there's going to be a pushback from
• 49:09
  sort of the powers that be at some point, right? Of like, and I don't know, it's, what does that
• 49:17
  look like you know whether that you know look if these eighth graders in a garage start
• 49:21
  disintermediating fortune 100 companies and people's 401ks you know now in theory they'll
• 49:25
  switch but like there's a massive wealth transfer away from you look you a proxy of our you know
• 49:34
  example might be what we've seen with bitcoin right like you know it's like ha ha ha those
• 49:38
  bitcoiners are crazy and all of a sudden like four years later holy cow they're like a political
• 49:43
  force. Why? Because they have money. Why do they have money? Because they're holding a better
• 49:48
  money and they're a political force now. Literally, the government's talking about it.
• 49:54
  Not just talking about it. It is part of, at least tangentially, a design to try to help
• 50:02
  finance deficits, right? So the same kind of thing. I don't have an answer. I'm kind of talking
• 50:08
  through it. It's a fascinating question. It is. And I've got loads of other stuff I want to
• 50:13
  talk to you about. But just quickly, last thing on the AI thing, you brought up before in terms of
• 50:18
  like meaning. If everyone loses their jobs, what are they kind of here for? And Roman Jampolski,
• 50:23
  the AI guy who I spoke to, calls this like the icky guy risk. It's like, what do people do when
• 50:29
  they have lost their job? They've lost their meaning. They have to kind of start again and
• 50:32
  think about what they want to do. And the sort of doomer in me thinks people are just going to sit
• 50:37
  inside, drink at 10am and play video games. And I'm like, what does that do for society?
• 50:42
  It's really scary.
• 50:46
  I can tell you this is exactly what's going to happen because I've lived it.
• 50:49
  I've seen it.
• 50:51
  Look, in 1992, in my hometown, it's town square in my hometown, Strongsville, Ohio.
• 50:59
  We had late October, so right before the presidential election in 1992, we had President George Bush.
• 51:07
  Bruce Willis was there.
• 51:09
  everyone in the area was there to see it right that's how important that region was
• 51:16
  in terms of swing states how vibrant 2016
• 51:20
  i guess six presidential elections later right for 24 years on the same day that hillary clinton said
• 51:28
  you know i disagree with donald trump's dark version of america america is still great
• 51:34
  literally less than a mile from where President Bush had stood and given a speech,
• 51:40
  somebody walked in to an upscale brewery with an AK-47 and held it up at assault rifle point
• 51:49
  with his buddy with a pistol and locked the people into the freezer and made off with the money.
• 51:58
  And from drug overdoses being nothing in that region, and when I say that region,
• 52:04
  I mean, you know, from 1992, drug overdoses in the Midwest, Rust Belt, tail.
• 52:10
  From 2008 through 2022, nearly a million Americans died of drug overdoses.
• 52:20
  Insane.
• 52:21
  When you then factor in suicides and alcoholism-related deaths into a basket that Case and Deaton, in their study called Deaths of Economic Hopelessness in the Wall Street Journal, you were seeing death rates in those parts of the world that were rivaling the death rates seen in post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s.
• 52:45
  Which, another example, you lose meaning, what do you do?
• 52:49
  You drink yourself to death.
• 52:51
  You use drugs.
• 52:53
  You go back in time.
• 52:55
  I have a friend of mine who's a Native American, Plains Native American elder.
• 53:02
  When they lost their meaning, when they started being fenced in, so to speak, right?
• 53:07
  What did they do?
• 53:08
  They drank themselves to death.
• 53:10
  So the history is very clear.
• 53:13
  Like, there's no mystery, in my opinion, when you take the meaning of people away, what they're going to do.
• 53:20
  And yeah, to your point, it is very troubling.
• 53:26
  I don't, you know, it's one of these things where it's, I don't, I know how it's going to go.
• 53:36
  Yeah.
• 53:36
  And it makes me sad.
• 53:39
  And I think the thing that's sort of like some of the division in this country is New York City, some of the – there have been winners and losers, as there are in any period of time.
• 53:51
  But over the last 20 years of this globalization, there have been very clear winners and losers.
• 53:55
  And the winners have been very isolated by and large from exactly what I'm describing, certainly at the scale.
• 54:04
  They're not going to be isolated from this.
• 54:06
  They're going to witness it for the first time.
• 54:07
  And that kind of goes back to the point of like, you know, they have more political power than sort of, you know, the people in the Rust Belt.
• 54:15
  Nobody cares about the Rust Belt.
• 54:17
  They care about Manhattan when it comes to Manhattan.
• 54:20
  And oh, by the way, guess how they're going to react to it politically.
• 54:24
  They're going to elect, you know, Mondani's of the world.
• 54:27
  Yeah, 100%.
• 54:28
  And that's not going to make it better.
• 54:30
  It's going to make things trickier.
• 54:31
  So there are second derivative impacts of this AI thing that are simply not being thought through.
• 54:39
  And I don't know that it's been released, right?
• 54:42
  It's a virus.
• 54:44
  You can't stop it now.
• 54:47
  You've sowed the wind.
• 54:48
  Now you're going to reap the whirlwind.
• 54:52
  For good or for worse, it's out there now.
• 54:53
  It reminds me of the line in The Big Short.
• 54:56
  It's Brad Pitt's character.
• 54:57
  I don't actually know if this is factually true, but it's in the film.
• 54:59
  He says for every 1% unemployment goes up, 40,000 people die.
• 55:04
  And if unemployment goes up to 60%, 70%, 80%, then I don't know.
• 55:09
  It's scary.
• 55:10
  It is, right?
• 55:10
  It's just like, just stop fucking dancing, right?
• 55:14
  Yeah.
• 55:14
  Yeah.
• 55:15
  It's one of these things where you go, I don't know.
• 55:19
  I mean, to me, it's all about this.
• 55:22
  You've got to be what's coming, good or bad.
• 55:26
  If this all goes well, it's going to be disruptive.
• 55:28
  and everyone can be flexible, great.
• 55:31
  You got to be mentally tough.
• 55:33
  And if it goes how it's gone historically,
• 55:35
  you got to be really mentally tough
• 55:37
  because it's going to be,
• 55:39
  these effects are going to happen.
• 55:40
  When you take away the meaning of people and mass,
• 55:45
  we know how it goes.
• 55:48
  There is no mystery to this.
• 55:49
  And anyone that says otherwise is lying.
• 55:54
  Let's go from one slightly Duma topic to another.
• 55:57
  One of the most interesting things that I've read of your work recently, and I've not really seen anyone else talk about this, is what's happening in the Middle East.
• 56:06
  So you wrote about after Israel bombed Qatar, Qatar moving more towards China, and kind of the implications on the petrodollar system.
• 56:15
  Can you explain what's happening there?
• 56:17
  I can illuminate on what I'm hearing, which is that in the Middle East, that was seen as a bridge too far.
• 56:27
  that essentially it was almost like a red wedding kind of thing where they were invited under certain one auspice and then bombed in a city that is, you know, I've never been, but I'm told it is very much like a, you know, like a Geneva or, you know, it's sort of a beautiful city with kind of seen as like a neutral, you know, everyone, everyone leaves their swords at the door and comes in and, and
• 56:56
  negotiates in good faith and then leaves.
• 56:58
  And this was seen as a violation of good faith in certain circles is what I hear.
• 57:03
  And it was tricky as well for the United States because, you know, the first story was, well,
• 57:11
  we didn't know ahead of time.
• 57:13
  And then we, which is not a good look for us, by the way, right?
• 57:17
  Is we are, you know, we're the empire and we're being filled in on things after the fact.
• 57:21
  It's not a good look for the administration.
• 57:23
  Is this when Trump said they don't know what the fuck they're doing?
• 57:26
  Was that in response to this?
• 57:28
  I can't actually.
• 57:28
  It might have been.
• 57:29
  I don't know.
• 57:30
  I don't know.
• 57:33
  But I think it was not a coincidence that shortly thereafter, the Pakistanis and the
• 57:48
  The Pakistanis and the Qataris did, or no, excuse me, the Pakistanis and the Saudis did a mutual defense agreement.
• 58:02
  Well, Pakistan is a nuclear-powered country, a nuclear-armed country.
• 58:06
  They are a longtime close ally of China.
• 58:08
  And so to me, you can make the case that the Saudis just went under a nuclear umbrella of China of sorts, which I think is really interesting because people say, well, there'll never be any change in the petrodollar system, et cetera, because, well, Russia showed you can make change in the petrodollar system if you have nuclear weapons.
• 58:37
  That was the lesson of Saddam.
• 58:38
  That was the lesson of Gaddafi.
• 58:43
  And so viewed through this lens, I'm not saying it's the right lens, but I think it's a lens worth considering, is that, look, the Pakistanis have deals with the Chinese.
• 58:54
  Pakistanis now a mutual aid agreement with the Saudis.
• 58:58
  The Saudis don't have nuclear weapons, technically.
• 59:00
  Hey, we don't have nuclear weapons.
• 59:03
  We're abiding by everything.
• 59:04
  You describe this as nuclear umbrella as a service, though.
• 59:07
  It's a nuclear umbrella as a service. Exactly. You know, and if, hey, if the Chinese bleeds certain missile technology to the Pakistanis who then use it or transfer it over to the Saudis, you know, that's oops.
• 59:19
  So I just saw it as the whole daisy chain sequence, particularly in the context of what transpired in June when the Israelis attacked Iran while we were negotiating still in theory.
• 59:36
  and the you know it came out that the the israelis were running short of air defense
• 59:45
  missiles within like 10 days and the u.s had burned down 10 50 or 10 15 percent of its
• 59:50
  high-end air defense missiles uh helping defend israel within like 10 days of medium intensity
• 59:57
  combat not high intensity just medium intensity combat um to me my overall takeaway is that the unilateral advantage
• 1:00:11
  that we have enjoyed in that region, we, the United States, have enjoyed in that region,
• 1:00:15
  seems to be gone. And if it's gone, then you're moving towards a more multipolar balance. And in
• 1:00:26
  that case, to me, you're going to end up with changes to the system, multi-currency energy
• 1:00:33
  pricing, maybe even by parties that have historically only priced in dollars, more
• 1:00:40
  settlement in things like gold of energy surpluses at the central bank level, because
• 1:00:45
  it's just another example, right?
• 1:00:48
  You already, it was another violation of trust.
• 1:00:51
  When we grabbed Russia's FX reserves, I think Yanis Varoufakis, the former Green
• 1:00:56
  finance minister said, I'm not saying they should or they shouldn't have done it, but they did it.
• 1:01:00
  And when they did it, okay, then people say, fine, we're going to start buying a lot more gold
• 1:01:06
  rather than treasuries. And that's what's happened. And in the same way, I think this was seen in the
• 1:01:11
  Middle East as a violation of trust of sorts and a view of, well, okay, well, then we need to start
• 1:01:18
  making alternative arrangements or even just threatening alternative arrangements. And it's
• 1:01:25
  one of these things, I think once you see it, you can't unsee it. And so I think it's more of sort of
• 1:01:29
  a move towards multipolarity that this move by the Israelis bombing Doha seems to have engendered.
• 1:01:39
  And to put it into context, if this does kind of break down the trust in the Middle East,
• 1:01:45
  if the petrodollar system unwinds to a degree where not all oil is going to be priced in the
• 1:01:49
  US dollar, that's a potential future you see. What does that actually mean for the US bond market?
• 1:01:55
  Oh, that's a big question.
• 1:01:59
  I think there's only one currency
• 1:02:00
  that can replace a dollar on that
• 1:02:01
  as an oil currency, and it's gold.
• 1:02:03
  And so I think it's noteworthy
• 1:02:07
  that the gold to oil ratio
• 1:02:08
  has gone from like 55 to 65
• 1:02:10
  in like a month since the Israelis did that.
• 1:02:20
  What does it mean for the bond market?
• 1:02:22
  I mean, it ultimately, I think, just further accelerates a trend we've already seen, which is, as we have seen the marginal oil barrel priced outside the dollar over the last 10 years, you're going to see more of the marginal oil barrel priced outside the U.S. dollar.
• 1:02:43
  There was an article yesterday on Reuters that India is buying oil from Russia and Chinese yuan.
• 1:02:49
  like iran and india and and china are very big oil buyers they're 35 of the world's population
• 1:02:58
  right they're all both buying oil outside the dollar now like like the petrodollar has been
• 1:03:04
  like it's it's it's like you know it's like breaking it's putting a hole in an airframe at
• 1:03:07
  altitude right like it doesn't take a really big hole for you to lose pressure and start to have bad
• 1:03:12
  bad consequences. And I think that's, what does it mean? I think it ultimately means that the U.S.
• 1:03:20
  would have to either significantly shrink deficits, which it can't because the debt's too high and
• 1:03:25
  the government spending as a percent of GDP is too high. And so until you devalue the debt,
• 1:03:30
  you can't shrink your deficits without going into a debt spiral that we touched about earlier.
• 1:03:36
  or ultimately you have to run hotter.
• 1:03:41
  You're going to have to inflate away debt.
• 1:03:43
  You're going to have to nominally grow.
• 1:03:44
  You're going to have to invest.
• 1:03:46
  And so to me, I think ultimately, what does it mean?
• 1:03:48
  It just means the real value of treasury bonds.
• 1:03:53
  And I would, as a proxy for that, I'd look at GLD over TLT, right?
• 1:03:57
  The GLD ETF, the gold ETF over TLT, long bond ETF,
• 1:04:00
  which is going vertical now.
• 1:04:04
  the gold is crushing along the treasuries,
• 1:04:08
  I think it's going to accelerate.
• 1:04:10
  It doesn't necessarily mean that the price of treasuries
• 1:04:12
  in a vacuum has to crash
• 1:04:13
  because there's a number of different levers,
• 1:04:15
  but I just think the real value of the treasury market
• 1:04:19
  will deteriorate more and perhaps faster
• 1:04:24
  as a result of that.
• 1:04:25
  So one of the reasons I ask that is,
• 1:04:27
  obviously, this administration
• 1:04:29
  has been very open to stablecoins.
• 1:04:31
  And I wondered if they can try and plug some of the hole in the treasury, the demand side of the treasury issuance through stablecoins, through the proliferation of stablecoins and trying to spread those basically as far and wide as they possibly can.
• 1:04:45
  I think that's the plan.
• 1:04:46
  I think ultimately-
• 1:04:48
  Has that become the almost new petrodollar system?
• 1:04:51
  Yes, is the short version.
• 1:04:52
  I think that's the goal.
• 1:04:53
  I think that's what they would like to have happen.
• 1:04:58
  Can it work?
• 1:04:59
  I think, number one, let's call it what it really is.
• 1:05:05
  We can't issue long-term bonds anymore at rates that we can afford that don't blow up our existing debt and put us into a debt spiral.
• 1:05:14
  So we are going to let stablecoins, which are near-cash equivalents, proliferate.
• 1:05:21
  proliferate. Translation, we are going to finance our deficit in near cash markets.
• 1:05:30
  We're running a 7% deficit. We're going to finance it near cash markets.
• 1:05:37
  Now, stablecoins yield zero, short-term rates in the US still, whatever, four-ish.
• 1:05:46
  I wouldn't be surprised at all if the
• 1:05:51
  administration, if this is successful,
• 1:05:55
  if you don't get Besant to come out in some sort of
• 1:05:59
  non-transferable
• 1:06:04
  or non-redeemable T-bills
• 1:06:07
  into the stablecoin market, which is to say everything in a
• 1:06:10
  stablecoin is non-redeemable
• 1:06:14
  and they're not going to yield four,
• 1:06:17
  they're going to yield 30 basis points.
• 1:06:19
  And he will have reduced the deficit from seven to,
• 1:06:22
  once you have enough of the bonds in there,
• 1:06:25
  from seven to four, like that, right?
• 1:06:28
  Because so much, whatever,
• 1:06:29
  a trillion and a half of the deficit
• 1:06:31
  on a gross basis is interest.
• 1:06:33
  And if you finance enough of it,
• 1:06:35
  the math is oversimplified.
• 1:06:37
  But again, let's not lose sight of what we're doing here.
• 1:06:41
  And by the way, when you take rates from four
• 1:06:43
  to 30 basis points.
• 1:06:45
  Now it's really like,
• 1:06:46
  it is like that far
• 1:06:49
  from financing in cash markets.
• 1:06:52
  30 basis point,
• 1:06:53
  three month T-bill and cash.
• 1:06:55
  They're like kissing cousins.
• 1:06:56
  Basically the same thing.
• 1:06:57
  They're the same thing.
• 1:06:59
  And again,
• 1:07:00
  this is what has to happen.
• 1:07:02
  This is not,
• 1:07:03
  I'm not trying to reflect badly
• 1:07:04
  on the Trump administration,
• 1:07:05
  best in any.
• 1:07:06
  This was in the cake.
• 1:07:07
  When you do dumb stuff
• 1:07:09
  with borrowed money for 40 years
• 1:07:11
  and you follow an economic
• 1:07:12
  dogma of globalism and neoliberalism, the way we have done so for 40 years to such an extreme with
• 1:07:20
  no balance, you eventually get to this point. And you could take it even broader and say,
• 1:07:24
  this is what you do. Fiat currency systems end up financing in cash markets.
• 1:07:30
  And then the inflation inflates away the debt. This is what they're talking about doing.
• 1:07:36
  The stable coin aspect and the sort of new petrodollar side of it is essentially
• 1:07:41
  taking the Europeans' heads. We're barely keeping our heads above water and debt and basically taking
• 1:07:46
  the Europeans and so the rest of the world, shoving them underwater and standing on them and be like,
• 1:07:49
  okay, we're okay now. And we would be for a bit, but to me, I think it's super important for
• 1:07:57
  investors. It's a great, someone said it to me once, said wisdom is calling things what they are
• 1:08:04
  or seeing things for what they are, not for what they're called.
• 1:08:08
  And so stable coins, new petrodollar, dollar wrecking ball, all this stuff,
• 1:08:15
  they're financing deficits in near cash markets because they can't issue enough bonds at the long
• 1:08:22
  end at rates that don't blow up the debt. And as an investor, once you understand that, you're like,
• 1:08:27
  oh, you can get enraged about it or whatever. I know what to do with that. I absolutely know
• 1:08:32
  to do with that. There's a guy, a friend of mine called Mark Goodwin, who wrote a book called
• 1:08:37
  The Bitcoin Dollar in sort of 2021. And he called this back then. And it seems like that book is
• 1:08:43
  playing out exactly as he wrote it. But if for anyone listening who is like, holy shit, what do
• 1:08:49
  I do? I mean, we know Bitcoin's the answer. You talk about gold a lot. It's funny because the first
• 1:08:54
  time you were on the show, I was having a look, it was five years ago. And you were sort of
• 1:08:58
  interested in Bitcoin, but you were still a little bit hands off. And now when I read your pieces,
• 1:09:02
  every one of them finishes with, buy gold and Bitcoin. So is the answer literally as simple as
• 1:09:08
  that? The way things have evolved, the average person should probably have, in my opinion,
• 1:09:16
  20% of their liquid net worth in some combination of gold and Bitcoin, depending on their risk
• 1:09:24
  tolerance, age, proximity to retirement, et cetera, right? Because obviously, I think over time,
• 1:09:34
  all else equal, Bitcoin probably wins relative to gold.
• 1:09:41
  But there's ways maybe it wouldn't, but let's set those aside. But Bitcoin in the meantime has been
• 1:09:48
  proven to be far more volatile, and that matters for the average investor. But yeah, I mean, the
• 1:09:54
  way things have evolved and the way things are evolving with AI, especially, right? Because we
• 1:09:59
  can just talk about the debt side and you're like, okay, we can see what they're doing.
• 1:10:03
  But AI is accelerating this. That's the tricky part around, you can see interest never sleeps,
• 1:10:10
  right? It's a compounding interest. It's the eighth wonder of the world. It's just going up
• 1:10:12
  and up and up. And that's why they are having to issue more of the shift, more of the debt into,
• 1:10:18
  it's why Besson came in and he doubled the run rate of treasury buybacks that Yellen was doing.
• 1:10:24
  Like, and mostly shifting from long end to short end.
• 1:10:27
  Like, it is what it is.
• 1:10:28
  I would be doing the same thing.
• 1:10:30
  He's not a bad person for doing it.
• 1:10:31
  Math is a math.
• 1:10:32
  And it's the stuff he said he didn't want to do.
• 1:10:34
  It was the stuff he didn't want to do.
• 1:10:35
  Yeah.
• 1:10:35
  You know what?
• 1:10:35
  I want to go play in the NFL.
• 1:10:38
  I don't want to fly commercial.
• 1:10:40
  You know?
• 1:10:41
  Sorry.
• 1:10:42
  Yeah.
• 1:10:43
  The math is the math.
• 1:10:45
  And when you look at the math as a math, and then you overlay the stuff we're talking
• 1:10:51
  about with AI, that's the really tricky part where we've got exponential functions in two
• 1:10:57
  different directions happening. And that means it's going to happen like way, way faster than
• 1:11:04
  we think. Will the stablecoin thing work? Maybe. I don't know. I mean, he needs to get trillions
• 1:11:15
  into stablecoins. Where is he at today? 300 billion, 400 billion? It's not happening fast
• 1:11:21
  enough he needs to be at like two trillion by like mid next year um and that has implications
• 1:11:28
  right because that means he's got to issue the state the t-bills and the stable coins got to
• 1:11:32
  get issued and those are like you got to start you know and oh by the way you know the banks one of
• 1:11:39
  the one of the provisions of the genius act is that the banks can use reserves to back stable
• 1:11:44
  coins well the whole reason qe wasn't like wildly inflationary you know and and i and lots of other
• 1:11:50
  people, and this was pre-FFTT, I was just a sales guy on a desk. I thought it would be,
• 1:11:55
  but then as you read up and as time has gone on, it hasn't been as inflationary as feared,
• 1:12:00
  not by Whitechart, because essentially so much of it was sterilized in bank reserves. Banks were
• 1:12:06
  paid a bribe by the Fed to basically take the money they gave them in QE and just hold it.
• 1:12:11
  if stable coins start being used in day-to-day life as you know banks are issuing them back by
• 1:12:20
  reserves you're mobilizing trillions in reserves and now just ascribe a modest money multiplier to
• 1:12:27
  that all the qe inflation that that was you know the although there was feared and never arrived
• 1:12:33
  is come in like a freight train is as our friend lynn would say so like and again this was always
• 1:12:42
  in the cake there is no like the math is the math and that's why i say the events like you need to
• 1:12:51
  you need to protect yourself like this you know we all enjoyed the party you know whether we voted
• 1:12:57
  for it or not right you know your boomers and and silent generation are getting 70 percent of record
• 1:13:04
  tax receipts and entitlements and yes they did pay into that they didn't pay that much for it all
• 1:13:09
  you know there's been inflation of services etc they're they're taking out more than they put in
• 1:13:13
  that's why it doesn't are what they are and and oh by the way our politicians spent their money
• 1:13:19
  as as they put it in they're spending our money as a print so yeah i mean it's it's somewhat
• 1:13:25
  cliche like yeah you need to own gold bitcoin but like you need to own going to bitcoin we're in that
• 1:13:30
  part of the cycle it just is what it is and i hope you know after it's over then you know i can leave
• 1:13:34
  a note in my will for my grandkids or great grandkids and say listen there's going to come
• 1:13:39
  a time around you know 20 85 and you're gonna you know you're gonna want to start buying some
• 1:13:45
  some some gold again um and i'll be done with it for for the rest of my life and you know it's just
• 1:13:51
  it's the arc.
• 1:13:53
  That's all it is.
• 1:13:54
  Golden Bitcoin is just the arc
• 1:13:55
  to get you through this monetary storm,
• 1:13:57
  this monetary flood.
• 1:14:00
  And I write about it a lot more
• 1:14:03
  because that's what's happening.
• 1:14:08
  It's accelerating.
• 1:14:09
  Like, the water's up to my knees
• 1:14:11
  and I'm still coming in.
• 1:14:12
  It's like, well, okay,
• 1:14:14
  get busy building the arc faster.
• 1:14:16
  It's funny though.
• 1:14:17
  It seems like the world
• 1:14:18
  is now waking up to this.
• 1:14:19
  JP Morgan came out with their debasement trade.
• 1:14:22
  The only thing that I'm not sure about with that
• 1:14:23
  is if it's even a trade,
• 1:14:24
  because that assumes you get out of it at some point.
• 1:14:27
  Is there a world where you do see selling your gold?
• 1:14:30
  Sure.
• 1:14:31
  When does that time come?
• 1:14:33
  For me, gold specifically,
• 1:14:38
  I look at it as what's the price of the dollar, right?
• 1:14:41
  Ultimately.
• 1:14:42
  So one of the metrics, as you know,
• 1:14:44
  I've published a number of times,
• 1:14:45
  is the market value of US official gold
• 1:14:48
  relative to the foreign-held portion of U.S. Treasuries.
• 1:14:53
  And with this magnificent gold rally that we've had,
• 1:14:57
  that ratio is 11%.
• 1:15:00
  In other words, if at market price,
• 1:15:02
  all U.S. official gold, if we have it,
• 1:15:04
  I'm assuming we do,
• 1:15:05
  collateralizes our foreign debt at 11%.
• 1:15:07
  In 1989, that was 20% as the Berlin Wall came down.
• 1:15:13
  We went into our unipolar moment.
• 1:15:15
  It bottomed at like 6%.
• 1:15:17
  the long-term average is 40%. So gold would have to rise nearly 2x from here just to get to the
• 1:15:26
  1989 level. So it would need to rise nearly 4x to get to the long-term average. And if we had an
• 1:15:31
  honest-to-goodness dollar crisis, like we did in 79-80, that was a dollar crisis. And gold was at
• 1:15:37
  the market value of US official gold was 135% of our foreign-held debt. In other words,
• 1:15:44
  foreigners could have showed up with their treasuries and said, give us gold.
• 1:15:48
  And the U.S. still would have had a third of its gold left over after they had extinguished
• 1:15:52
  all foreign debt of the United States. That was a gold bubble. We had 135% backed foreign debt.
• 1:15:58
  Today, it's 11. And things are not getting better. They're getting worse. And oh, by the way,
• 1:16:03
  in 1980, 30% debt to GDP, 2% fiscal deficit. Entitlements were nil. We still had an industrial
• 1:16:11
  base. Things were great. And they had the ability to raise rates to 15% to defend the dollar.
• 1:16:16
  We can't raise rates. They tried to raise rates to four to defend the dollar,
• 1:16:21
  and everything went pear-shaped. All of a sudden, they're doing BTFP and this and that and what
• 1:16:25
  have you. So there's no ability to raise rates to defend the dollar. It's all going to have to.
• 1:16:31
  So the answer to the question is, it's 11% of foreign held debt today?
• 1:16:35
  I don't know. The very earliest I would think about selling any gold would be that 20% number,
• 1:16:42
  but it's dependent on events. If we're seeing things evolve such that there's actually a path
• 1:16:48
  forward to fiscal austerity versus just run it hot, okay, maybe 20% is a number. More likely,
• 1:16:54
  I probably wouldn't even consider until 40%. Now, 40%, that gets you, what is that,
• 1:16:59
  $16,000 gold, $15,000 gold? I would probably take some out there. Maybe I would lend some to
• 1:17:05
  the federal government at $15,000 gold.
• 1:17:09
  Or maybe I'd buy some farmland at that point or something, some other more productive asset.
• 1:17:15
  But it's about the price of the dollar in real money terms, in gold terms.
• 1:17:19
  Bitcoin, I think, is a newer asset.
• 1:17:23
  I think it's going to be more volatile.
• 1:17:28
  For me, it's all about what's the price of the dollar, what's happening.
• 1:17:35
  And with Bitcoin, there's also a geopolitical hedge, right?
• 1:17:40
  And I never thought, look, I'm not going anywhere.
• 1:17:43
  I'm staying here.
• 1:17:44
  Like, I love this country.
• 1:17:46
  I was born and raised here.
• 1:17:48
  I'm an Eagle Scout.
• 1:17:49
  Like, I'm not leaving, right, for the meme.
• 1:17:53
  I'm not leaving.
• 1:17:54
  I'm not fucking leaving.
• 1:17:57
  But it does give you some optionality for periods of time, right?
• 1:18:00
  like you know uh in a way that gold doesn't simply because you know it's hard to fly somewhere with
• 1:18:07
  any real amount of gold it's really easy to fly anywhere with enormous amounts of bitcoin or it's
• 1:18:13
  really easy to send you know bitcoin over a zoom call to friends family etc around the country in
• 1:18:19
  a way that is just impossible with gold so for me it's all about multi you know what's the valuation
• 1:18:28
  of the dollar sort of relative to these assets.
• 1:18:34
  And what am I watching?
• 1:18:36
  What am I seeing?
• 1:18:37
  Like, are things getting better?
• 1:18:38
  Are things getting worse?
• 1:18:39
  What's the political?
• 1:18:40
  And unfortunately, sort of across the board,
• 1:18:42
  a lot of the metrics, I think I wrote it a couple weeks ago,
• 1:18:47
  like two weeks ago.
• 1:18:48
  I'm still buying gold and Bitcoin every week
• 1:18:49
  because the other side of that is,
• 1:18:54
  when do I want to buy dollars relative to gold and Bitcoin?
• 1:18:57
  You know, hey, it's Friday.
• 1:18:59
  Do I want to buy gold?
• 1:19:00
  You know, I want to buy dollars and sell gold in Bitcoin.
• 1:19:02
  No, based on what I'm saying, no, not yet.
• 1:19:04
  So I'd have to start seeing that.
• 1:19:05
  And I think the prices are way higher
• 1:19:07
  before that balance is in my own mind.
• 1:19:10
  Yeah, I think that's probably the perfect place
• 1:19:12
  to close out, Luke.
• 1:19:13
  I've really enjoyed this.
• 1:19:14
  I think we should close the show,
• 1:19:15
  how you close every article, buy gold in Bitcoin.
• 1:19:18
  Buy Bitcoin first, though.
• 1:19:20
  Where do you want to send anyone
• 1:19:21
  who's want to hear more about you?
• 1:19:23
  Sure, thank you.
• 1:19:24
  If you're interested in hearing more about our different research products, fftt-llc.com for more information.
• 1:19:32
  And as you know, I'm on the – I almost called it the tweeter, which is – I'm on exit at Luke Groman, L-U-K-E-G-R-O-M-E-N.
• 1:19:41
  Love it.
• 1:19:42
  Thank you for this, Luke.
• 1:19:42
  This has been great.
• 1:19:43
  Thanks for having me on.
• 1:19:44
  We've got a fun few days ahead of us.
• 1:19:45
  Absolutely.
• 1:19:46
  Let's go.
• 1:19:46
  Absolutely.
• 1:19:47
  All right.
• 1:19:47
  Thanks, man.
• 1:19:54
  Thank you.