Monetary Literacy & Mastery Foundation

You own nothing. Those are all intangibles. They are all inside the system. If those overvalued intangible assets fall, you take the loss.

Because the real question isn't how many investments you own. It's how much of your wealth you actually control.

Take a look at this Bloomberg headline. High earners are actually choosing not to max out their 401(k)s because they want more control over their money.

Now look at the Schwab chart. Savings accounts, IRAs, brokerage accounts, health savings accounts. Look at all those choices.

But you want to know something that I really want you to recognize?

You own nothing. Those are all intangibles. They are all inside the system.

And this is what I really want you to recognize: Most of these are different forms of money or wealth. They're different ways of holding financial claims inside that same system.

And every one of those accounts comes with rules, restrictions, and somebody standing between you and your wealth—and taking lots of pieces of it, by the way.

So think about that. You worked for that fiat money. You gave up hours of your life that you can never get back. And now, to access the value of that labor, you have to go through somebody else's system, and they're also dictating the value.

Here's the reality: If you don't hold it, you don't own it, and you need permission to access it. Period.

And governments understand exactly how to encourage people to keep their wealth inside that system.

Look at what Ireland just announced: a brand-new savings scheme. Doesn't that sound wonderful?

Well, wait a minute. This isn't about putting fiat money aside and keeping it safe. Heck no. It's designed to encourage people to move their savings into stocks, bonds, and investment funds.

They call it democratization. Pay attention to that word. I hear it all the time.

I call it expanding the pool of people whose savings can be pulled into the system.

Because a debt-based financial system needs fresh capital to keep asset prices elevated, debts financed, and promises intact.

In other words, there always must be new money coming into every Ponzi scheme, and the public must have confidence in the system so they keep using it.

But listen to this scheme.

The first 50,000 euros gets favorable tax treatment. Above that, there's a proposed annual 1% tax on the excess account value.

And that tax isn't based on whether you made money or lost money. It's simply based on the excess account value.

Now, let's look at the full cycle. And I want you to expand your thought process on this.

The central bank expands the fiat currency and credit supply, pushing up the fiat-denominated prices of financial assets.

But at that same time, inflation is reducing the purchasing power of your labor and your savings.

And then you're encouraged to move those savings into financial assets whose prices have already been inflated by that same system.

Do you see what I'm saying here?

They encourage you to go into a system, reduce the value of your labor by inflicting inflation on you, and then, on top of that, tax the inflated value.

If those overvalued intangible assets fall, you take the loss. If their fiat value rises because the government did this, the government can tax that higher valuation.

And I know it's complicated. That's why I've tried to explain it a few different ways, so you can see what's happening.

I mean, it's evil genius. There's no doubt about it.

But through all of it, you still do not hold the real asset. You need permission from the bank, brokerage, custodian, or platform to access it.

Think about that.

Your labor is devalued. Your savings are pushed into potentially overvalued financial claims. The government taxes the inflated fiat value, and you still need permission to access what you supposedly own.

Well, I'm sorry. To me, that's not a savings incentive.

That's a wealth transfer mechanism disguised as an opportunity to save.

And who determines the rules? Who would that be? Oh, yeah. The government.

Who holds the assets? Financial intermediaries.

And whose markets benefit when more fiat money flows in? Not yours.

Now, let's go to Mexico, because this is where you can really see what's happening to retirement wealth.

Oh my goodness, look at this chart.

Mexican pension funds hold approximately 4.3 trillion pesos in government debt.

Where did all that fiat money come from?

The workers. People spending their lives working, putting fiat money aside, and believing they're building financial security for retirement.

Look what happens. The retirement funds become buyers of government IOUs.

And in case you think that doesn't happen everywhere, what do you think is in Social Security?

When there were excess funds, the U.S. government borrowed them. There are just IOUs in there now.

So here it's simple.

The government gets a market for its debt, and the workers get a promise that they'll be paid in the future with fiat money that has less and less purchasing power.

And down the road, what are they going to be paid in?

More fiat money. More fiat currency that governments and central banks can expand, reducing what each unit buys over time. And as we're seeing with sticky inflation, it doesn't take very long.

So the worker takes all the risk while the system benefits from access to that accumulated capital.

And here's the part that I really want you to think about.

Your retirement savings can be supporting government borrowing and corporate borrowing while you're counting on those same financial promises to support you.

And that brings us to the most important question of all.

Whose financial stability are you really working for?

Who decides what you can buy?

Who actually holds your assets?

Who benefits from your labor?

And what happens when you need access during a crisis?

Because here's the truth.

Having five different accounts inside the same financial system is not true diversification.

You're still dependent on financial institutions, government rules, and a currency that, by design, loses purchasing power.

And remember what purchasing power represents: the value of your labor, those hours of your life you've already spent.

That's why I'm such a strong advocate for physical gold and silver.

When you personally hold physical gold and silver, you're holding monetary assets that are not somebody else's promise to pay. You don't need anybody's permission to possess them.

And that's what true diversification is about.

Holding wealth outside the financial system and, if you're so inclined—or because you may not have any choice—inside the financial system as well, rather than depending entirely on financial claims.

Here at Zang International, we help you create and build protection before the system forces that decision on you.

Physical gold and physical silver that you own, control, and hold outside the financial system.

So give us a call today, because once urgency becomes an emergency, frankly, your choices get smaller, not bigger.

Because the real question isn't how many investments you own. It's how much of your wealth you actually control.

So thank you for being part of this extremely important conversation. And wherever you are in the world, please be safe out there.

And remember, sovereignty begins with what you choose to own.

If you own property in California, you're not safe. A new ballot measure will empower the state to confiscate a percentage of the assets of any resident, even though its initial provisions don't communicate that intent. California's "One-Time Wealth Tax for State-Funded Healthcare, Education, and Food Assistance Programs Initiative," which has already qualified for the November ballot, is even worse than it appears.

It's not as if appearances aren't bad enough. The explicit intent of the initiative already chased at least six billionaires out of the state in 2025. Moved to Florida are Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, along with PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. Nevada is now home to billionaire Don Hankey, and Texas has welcomed former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. Famed director Steven Spielberg has moved to New York, apparently concluding even that deep blue state is a safer bet than California. Just the departure of these six men has lowered the potential take from the wealth tax by an estimated $27 billion.

A Hoover Institution study claims that another 20 California billionaires have already made departure plans and will leave immediately if the initiative is approved by voters. One of the initiative's many diabolical provisions is that it will apply retroactively to anyone living in the state after January 1, 2026, but unlike the six who got out in 2025, this next tranche of would-be exiles have been advised by their attorneys that the initiative's retroactivity will not survive a constitutional challenge.

Other details of this initiative are likely to survive court challenges, and they reveal a stunning level of aggression toward wealth. If you live in California, and this bill is approved by voters, you will have to pay a "one-time" tax of 5 percent of your "covered assets" valued over $1 billion. "Covered assets" include unrealized gains in the value of stock owned by employees of private companies. It is unlikely the framers of this initiative didn't understand the implications of this provision. Valuations of private companies are subjective, volatile, and illiquid. An employee with stock options valued at a few billion in the last private equity round could be assessed tens of millions of dollars in wealth tax on money they don't actually have access to, based on a value that could plummet at any moment.

It gets worse. The language of the wealth act provides for what amounts to unrestricted escalation of its reach, something that will surely become necessary when high earners are driven away, taking their taxable assets with them. Built into the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act is the right of the state legislature to amend its provisions with a two-thirds vote. That would include lowering the $1 billion threshold, replacing "one-time" with an annual assessment, and eliminating the exemptions currently present for real estate and retirement accounts. The wording of this initiative is purposely designed to give the state legislature the authority to override the property tax protections afforded by Proposition 13, passed by voters in 1978 and one of the only obstacles left that prevents the state from stripping the state's middle class of assets they've earned and stewarded over generations.

It is ridiculous to think California's state legislature cannot muster a two-thirds vote, anytime they wish, in order to extend the reach of the "Billionaire Tax Act" down to "millionaires," which, in California, is almost anyone who has owned their own home for more than a decade. In both houses of California's state legislature, 75 percent of the seats are held by Democrats. The overwhelming percentage of Democrats in California, and, for that matter, a sizable portion of the state's dwindling contingent of Republicans, are controlled by the state's powerful public sector unions. And more than anything else, these unions have one guiding principle: grow government, because bigger government means more membership, and more membership means more dues revenue. That's the reason that the top 10, if not the top 50, largest contributors to winning campaigns for seats in the state legislature are all public sector unions.

To grow support for more government, you must grow dependency on government, and to that end, California's state legislature has engineered a perfect storm. Every decade, more regulations buried small emerging competitive businesses, allowing the biggest and most politically compliant businesses to gain captive markets. And in complying with the state's overregulation, lacking competition, these politically favored businesses passed the increased costs of regulatory compliance on to their customers. Voila, California's energy, water, transportation, higher education, housing, and all government services became increasingly unaffordable. And as households, by the millions, could no longer afford to survive economically, government aid stepped in to fill the gap.

The numbers support this assessment. Between 2010 and 2025, when the state's total population only increased incrementally by about 1.5 million people, the number of participants in California's taxpayer-funded food aid benefits soared from 3.7 million to 5.5 million, and the state's Medi-Cal enrollment exploded from 7 million to 15 million, over one-third of the population.

Everything California's state government has done over the past 15 years has exploded commensurately. The state General Fund in 2010 was $87 billion. In 2025 it was $228 billion. Even adjusting for inflation, spending more than doubled when the total population barely budged. And what of this population?

Over the period from 2010 to 2025, nearly 10 million people moved from California to other states. The people moving into California and the people choosing to remain in California are increasingly characterized as either high-income residents who can withstand the high cost of living or low-income residents who depend on government assistance. California's Gini Coefficient, at 0.49, puts it in a virtual tie with New York and Connecticut as the states with the worst income inequality in the nation. To claim this is the fault of billionaires is a convenient lie, promulgated by the very politicians whose own policies were the true cause.

It ought to be clear to anyone who has spent any time in sunny California, a place blessed with literally every scenic amenity imaginable from alpine peaks to sandy beaches, the best wine on earth and spectacular coastal cities, that the only thing that could possibly induce them to not want to live here permanently would be an overtly hostile government. And that's exactly what has happened. Every major challenge California faces is the product of a government that has decided to serve itself instead of the people.

The model of "democracy" that California has perfected can be summed up in one sentence: overregulate an economy to make life unaffordable without government handouts, then win elections by promising more government handouts to people who can't live without them. It is unsustainable, because as the old cliche goes, pretty soon you run out of other people's money. The exodus of California's wealthiest residents is the latest iteration of this doom loop.

Far removed from idealistic fantasies sold to voters, this is the reality of progressive politics in California. Given half a chance, it will be exported to the rest of the nation.

https://amgreatness.com/2026/06/03/californias-wealth-tax-is-coming-for-everyone/

Host:

Hi, welcome back to the Della Cambona show with a blockbuster interview. Today we have Mitch Vexler back on. He’s been exposing what he calls a clear pattern of fraud in property tax appraisals and the trillions in school district bonds built on top of them. Today we’re digging into his latest report, Who Watches The Watcher? — the illusion of oversight, the compromised review boards, and how political fixes keep changing the subject while the real allegations stay uninvestigated. This also connects to the bigger market risk. In my recent conversation with Michael Pento, he warned about his models and the U.S. dollar. Mitch is going to challenge those models head-on. What happens when you force in the fraud data? The school bonds lose all credibility and the panic hits Treasuries. He argues a controlled demolition of those bonds is better than a greater depression. We’re going to dig in right now. Mitch Vexler, welcome back. It’s a big one.

Mitch Vexler:

Yes, it’s been very busy. We’re about to get filed more than likely within the next 10 days. The Supreme Court of the United States claim is fairly simple: Does any state Supreme Court have the authority to deny, via deprivation of rights under color of law, any citizen’s access to both state constitutional law and federal constitutional law? The obvious answer is no.

What we’re asking the Supreme Court of the United States to do is reverse and remand. There’s also a follow-up petition going to the Sherman Federal Court under U.S. Code 42 sections 1983, 1985, and 1986. It’s a civil claim going after the chief appraiser and the entire bench of the Supreme Court of Texas individually for deprivation of rights under color of law. We’re doing that civilly, but deprivation of rights under color of law, sections 241 and 242, is also a federal crime.

Host:

A big part of the puzzle that happened since the last time we spoke is that President Trump is aware of this. Walk us through what he knows.

Mitch Vexler:

When I did the Fraud Fighters presentation, I had no idea what to expect. I was simply told there were people there who had access. It turns out they had more than access — they had President Trump on speed dial, including Peter Thiel himself. I spent several hours with Peter Thiel in the back room, off the floor where it was quieter, speaking with him every 20 minutes or so. It was a crazy event, but he understood what was happening.

At that same meeting with Peter Thiel was David Kenny, a bar-licensed Supreme Court of the United States appellate attorney. He has a sister case in California about the bond fraud. His dollar amounts are much smaller than what I’ve discovered, but the pattern and practice to defraud is identical.

When you mentioned Michael Pento and he used the word “model,” that was right up my alley. Around 2:00 in the morning I got an idea: “Okay, you want a model? I’ll give you a model across the United States.” This pattern and practice is occurring everywhere, and it’s not by accident — it’s by intent.

Over the last year to year and a half I’ve been collecting audits from attorneys general across the United States who are auditing school districts and/or central appraisal districts. We’ve quantified the problems. We haven’t quantified them for every jurisdiction, but the pattern of practice is excruciatingly real and identical. We proved it in Volume One and Volume Two of the Pattern in Practice. Danielle is the only one who has the copies right now, but within about four or five hours those two documents will be posted to my website. There’s no way out. I didn’t invent this.

Attorneys general for different states had their own audits. I simply mapped it out. It took a couple of days, then I used AI to identify the common thread. One document is about 35 pages, the other about 39 pages — down from over 3,000 pages of audits. I went after the common thread: the laws that were broken. Even the attorneys general themselves don’t have this compiled this way. This documentation is going to be used in court.

Host:

These are bombshell documents. Have you heard back from the president’s office? Has there been feedback?

Mitch Vexler:

Not directly. There are meetings happening today. There was a meeting yesterday with various people. The goal is simple: I need Solicitor General Sauer’s signature on one piece of paper I’ve already prepared — the Motion for Expedited Hearing. With that one piece of paper, this case should be heard within 60 to 90 days at the Supreme Court of the United States.

This is a national security risk. This is not a property tax case. Imagine if another state did what the Texas Supreme Court did: deny a citizen access to the courts — deprivation of rights — not just one citizen, but 32 million Texans. That is what the Supreme Court of Texas did. They violated their oath of office. They violated the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Texas. They prohibited adjudication of a known, proven, deemed-admitted fraud.

Host:

It is happening in other states.

Mitch Vexler:

Think of it this way. What happens if Oklahoma, or any state, does the same thing the Texas Supreme Court did? The Constitution of the United States vanishes. It’s deemed meaningless by rogue courts. Who would have thought the biggest rogue court at the moment is here in Texas?

Multiple people are now reaching out. I’ve reached out three times, left messages. They have the emails. I’m even sending it through their Supreme Court channel. They could look at it and say they’re busy. They’re not that busy. This may very well be the largest case Solicitor General Sauer has on his plate right now. It comes down to two paragraphs:

Does the Supreme Court of Texas have the right to deny any citizen or citizens their constitutional rights?

The answer is no. Reverse and remand. That’s what we need the Supreme Court of the United States to do. Very simple.

The balance of the case under 42 U.S.C. §§ 1983, 1985, and 1986 will be heard in the Sherman Federal Court. This isn’t going away. It’s getting bigger and compounding.

Back to Michael Pento’s point: Model this, everybody on Wall Street who thinks you’re so smart. How does your model look when you take into account $5.1 trillion? That number is light — admittedly extremely light — but it’s quantifiable. Take $5.1 trillion into your bond model numbers and figure out how it’s going to get paid for. It isn’t.

Models on bonds are based on credibility. Mathematically, the $5.1 trillion could in theory work at 13 cents on the dollar and be paid off over time if all expenses and interest were frozen today — which isn’t going to happen. But when this blows, what goes with it simultaneously within hours? U.S. government bonds — the 2s, 5s, 7s, 10s, 30s. They will drop in value within hours.

Markets are about price discovery. When an algorithm gets nervous and sees the words “credibility” and “bond” in the same sentence, you’re talking hours for virtual complete destruction. The algorithm builds speed based on volatility. Volatility will spike because the credibility is gone.

This problem could be resolved by repealing all property taxes in favor of a uniform state sales tax and immediately wiping out the bonds. You kill the $5.1 trillion. It’s like giving up the queen to save the king. The king is U.S. government bonds. You cannot let them get infected by the school district bonds.

Model that into everybody’s current bond portfolios and you start seeing the panic. When the algorithms pick up the panic, everything goes bad real fast and nobody can stop it.

Host:

That’s an excellent analogy. The obvious question is: of course they’d want to save the king, right? But do they see it as too much of a risk right now to sacrifice the queen?

Mitch Vexler:

At that presentation I knew there were federal officials in the room. I laid the case down simply and spent an hour in front of about 780 people. I said: if you can disprove anything I’ve said in this presentation or anything in the Second Amendment to the criminal complaint delivered to the FBI, DOJ, SEC, and IRS, I’m begging you — please. If anything is wrong, we’ll fix it. But I know you can’t. You also can’t disprove the 403 pages of the Second Amendment, the First Amendment, or the original criminal complaint. If you can’t disprove it, then it happened.

All of this is a matter of getting the case heard. Had the first court said, “Vexler, we’re going to hear this case,” we wouldn’t be having this discussion. What this case has done is lay bare the criminality of the courts themselves protecting known, proven, deemed-admitted fraud.

Hence the piece Who Watches the Watcher? Volume One covers how many audits occurred and the common thread. Volume Two maps the local level — not just state, but local taxation and local school district bond levels. No matter how you slice this, they knew these bonds were toxic. That word “toxic” appeared in the California Policy Center document in 2015. The State of Texas knew it was bad in 2015. They kicked the can down the road to the point where this is more than likely going to blow up in fairly short order.

Host:

If it does blow up, is that the “reset” so many other experts speak of?

Mitch Vexler:

When they say “reset,” let’s bifurcate it. On one hand you have currency — make no mistake, we are in a currency war. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t be doing these tariffs. That’s one column.

On the other column, the word “reset” pales in comparison to the reality. The reality is that $5.1 trillion is 80 times bigger than Enron. Enron shook the globe.

These school district bonds — or any bonds for that matter — are paid for within the Federal Reserve system itself. The Federal Reserve has a reverse repo that can take bonds at face value. I’ve already stated the school district bonds are worth in theory 13 cents on the dollar. In truth they’re a liability, because when this blows the lawsuits will run rampant. They are not an asset. Yet the Federal Reserve will accept them at face value. I believe the Federal Reserve is completely clueless about how the impact of these bonds will actually work.

Let’s use a simple school bus example. A bus bought 20 years ago had a five-year shelf life. They built bonds upon it. Over 20 years the debt load on that bus is up 4x the original cost. Every time they issued a new bond — say a seven-year bond — they never paid off the first one. They rolled it into a new bond, then another, then another. I don’t believe this can be undone. There’s no system that can go backwards because they don’t hold the CUSIPs that long.

The median household income doesn’t exist to pay this off under any circumstance. This is the abject definition of bankruptcy. When I say the bonds are worth somewhere between 13 and 30 cents on the dollar in theory, I’ll take the opposite side and tell you these things are a liability. There’s no asset here.

It’s worse because the Federal Reserve can use the reverse repo window to cover the banks at face value. Remember 2008 and the big to-do about rating agencies? These are the same rating agencies today claiming these bonds are worth AA or BB. These bonds are sub-junk. The simple reason: mom and pop don’t have the money to pay this off. This is compound cumulative interest on top of compound fraud. It’s a Ponzi scheme.

Host:

For the middle class, for the mom and pops — does everyone just go broke? What does life look like?

Mitch Vexler:

It’s not necessary. This can be fixed more than likely within 10 days. At the federal level, via executive order for example, repeal all property tax. Wipe it out. You have to replace it with something, so replace it with a uniform state sales tax. In Texas it might be 15% total; in Montana 9%. It’s only going up 3 or 4% from where you are today. But mom and pop get their properties back. Every institution gets their property back. When you pay that property off, it’s yours. You own it. That’s your retirement.

Right now what you have is equity stripping. The amortization that should go back into your pocket is being transferred into the pockets of the central appraisal districts and the school districts. They’re equity-stripping your mortgage. Not only do you not fully own the property because of the property taxes, but more money is coming out of your pocket.

We broke it down recently: if you had a $220,000 home five years ago, based on Federal Reserve rates it might reasonably be worth around $270,000. That isn’t what happened. Through the fraud they said your $220,000 home is now worth $440,000 — up 100% in five years. Property owners think they’re happy. Happy on what? They’re broke. The person who owned that $220,000 home just wrote a check over five years for the fraud component, not the real estate. The $400,000 or $600,000 number isn’t real. It’s a fraud. The rating agencies are dead wrong.

Host:

Speaking from a Canadian perspective — I know you’re Canadian and now live in Texas — if you take a city like Toronto, it’s amplified. You cannot buy a home today without $160,000 income and live comfortably. Canada has the same Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice. They just put a “C” in front of USPAP. Same document.

Mitch Vexler:

USPAP isn’t the problem. The problem is nobody ever read it. They’re not using it. They claim they do — go to any central appraisal district website and it says they adhere to USPAP. Mass appraisal standards require adherence to USPAP. It isn’t happening. This is fraud by intent. This is no accident. That’s what Volume One and Volume Two of the Pattern of Practice prove through the attorneys general audits themselves. I didn’t make this up.

Within 60 to 120 days there are going to be major political shifts. The Canadian people have had enough. The American citizens I’m speaking to — and I’m getting emails by the hour — have had enough. The money simply isn’t there.

If the Supreme Court of the United States allowed the Supreme Court of Texas to get away with deprivation of rights — and it’s not even up for debate that is what happened — what would be the net result if the American people no longer had the privileges under the Constitution? The answer is civil war. That was the founding of the United States. The War of Independence was fought over this exact issue: taxation without representation. Representation means the law.

Canada has the same problem. They don’t have the same constitutional structure, but they have an awful lot of very angry people and a lot of very poor politicians. Something bad is going to happen. The reason I’m doing this is because I saw it coming in 2016–2017. We started calculating the math in 2017. The goal then was to stop that something bad from happening.

You’re now seeing these problems play out live in London, Ireland, Germany. They have the exact same problem: the calculation of taxes stripping citizens’ money. It’s the property taxes that are the problem. And USPAP is global.

The truth is a very simple fix: get rid of the property tax in favor of a uniform state sales tax and wipe out the fraudsters. Look at what’s happening in Minnesota. The national press hasn’t figured out that the nexus of where that money comes from to create the fraud is mom and pop. Mom and pop are paying for the fraud to be committed against them. It’s the property taxes.

The only answer is repeal the property tax in favor of the uniform state sales tax. Get rid of the central appraisal districts. Get rid of the tax assessor-collectors. Get rid of all these boards that claim to know what they’re doing.

Host:

Those people want to hold on to their positions.

Mitch Vexler:

You can’t hold on to something that wasn’t yours to begin with. Or you end up in something 80 times worse than 2007 — or worse — because now it will infect U.S. government bonds due to one word: credibility.

If the U.S. government doesn’t stand up and say “enough — $5.1 trillion, bankrupt the school districts that participated in the fraud,” that is the credibility. Letting this fester and blow up means U.S. government bonds go with them. I don’t know what the trigger could be — it could be Japan; Japan is in a world of hurt on their bonds right now. No one knows the exact trigger or the exact damage. But what we do know is quantifiable: these school district bonds and the property taxes.

People sell these bonds under two words: “unlimited tax.” There’s no such thing. It’s a bald-faced lie. I defy anybody on this planet to show me an unlimited tax. The entire structure is 100% fraudulent.

At that presentation four weeks ago in Vegas I showed a chart called the Infection Rate Spreadsheet — the same infection-rate math used in COVID to determine how fast a disease rolls through a community. If you have three bad property comparisons, within 60 days you’re at about 12% corrupted data at the central appraisal district. On tape, Don Spencer, the chief appraiser of Denton Central Appraisal District, stated they took 60,000 properties outside of the database, manipulated them in Excel, and put them back. Take 60,000 plus the three and you’re at roughly 50% corrupt within 60 days. Take that out three years and you have a 100% corrupted database.

That one document proved there is not a single central appraisal district in the United States that can adhere to USPAP. It’s a mathematical impossibility. The fraud is up and down the chain, all the way into the Supreme Court of Texas itself.

The goal is to stop a disaster from happening. Recognize the disaster. This is fixable very quickly — probably within 10 days the switch can be flipped so the damage is minimized. Those who invested in these bonds are going to lose. Sue the people who sold you this garbage if you want. But even though it’s $5.1 trillion, we haven’t seen a portfolio that holds more than 2% of these school district bonds. The real mom-and-pop economic damage is minimal. But you cannot keep paying on something that’s bankrupt for the next 30 years while they keep ordering more bonds “for the children.” None of this money — the operations and maintenance or the interest and sinking fund — is going to any children. We’ve even found hidden investment pools. The teachers themselves are getting ripped off and have no clue those pools are there.

It’s up and down the chain. The two largest purveyors of fraud on the planet are the Federal Reserve and the school districts.

Host:

You started working on this in 2017. I’ve been with you on this journey for a little over a year now, and it’s pretty terrifying to see the trajectory. We have the bond risk and the fraud risk, but now you’re talking about the risk to the U.S. Constitution and the risk of civil war. This is a whole other ball game.

Mitch Vexler:

That’s why when Michael Pento mentioned the word “model,” I said fine — we’ll prove it, and we’ll prove that the people using these models don’t have access to this information. They don’t know I exist. They don’t know the website exists. Everybody should go look at the amount of evidence on the website.

You mentioned the word “reset.” Reset of what? The only thing that is truly secure is something in your hands. You’re right back to the metals. Even if the government said we’re going to back currency in motion (M1 and M2) at 40%, gold goes somewhere around $40,000 an ounce.

Could they do a basket — gold, silver, corn, oil? Absolutely. Would I like to see that? Sure, because it lends credibility. This whole thing really comes down to credibility. We have a U.S. Constitution that does not just guide the United States — we’re the backbone for the globe. If that Constitution is rendered meaningless, we have an extraordinarily serious problem.

This itty-bitty thing people perceived as a tax case has turned into something Solicitor General Sauer has nothing more important to do. This is the biggest case right here, right now. This is a national security risk.

We’re way past a tax case. They should have left this alone and said “we’ll let this go.” The first judge didn’t, and the other judges allowed it to happen all the way up the chain. There’s no defense because the law exists. Deprivation of rights under color of law is real — both civil and criminal. The math clearly exists. We’ve provided every stitch of it. The facts exist.

What we haven’t hit yet is a judge willing to take this on. We’re now at the point where we have to go to the Supreme Court of the United States to reverse and remand the Supreme Court of Texas before the bonds blow up and we end up in civil war.

Host:

Mitch Vexler — you can learn more at Mockingbird Properties. He’s fighting the good fight. God bless Mitch and all the work you’re doing.

To the people on Wall Street: you have power, you have reach. Study the website. Go look at Volume One and Volume Two of the Pattern in Practice. Tell me your models take this into account — I tell you they don’t. Reach the politicians you know, all the way to the top. Now is the time. This case needs to be heard at the Supreme Court of the United States.

Thank you, Mitch. We’ll bring you back soon and hopefully have some good news the next time we speak. Thank you all for watching.

Mitch mentioned metals, and of course we both believe you should be owning physical metals in times like this. Mitch, do you get bogged down by the price? Are you chasing the price of gold and silver every day?

Mitch Vexler:

No. There’s somebody you and I both know, and there’s a standing order a little bit below where we are now, but it’s big enough to fill a pickup.

Host:

That person is now heading the global division of ITM Trading. We’ve gone international, so we’re able to service Canadian clients, clients in Europe, wherever you are in the world. We’re trying to help people outside the U.S. take back some control by holding physical gold and silver. Reach out to my colleagues at ITM Trading. Mitch, we’ll see you soon.

Mitch Vexler:

Perfect. I appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Host:

Thank you all for watching. We’ll have more great content coming your way.

Wednesday, August 19th, 2026. Maneco64, home of alternative economics and contrarian views. We’re going to look at the bond market today. It’s the most important market for our current monetary system — the fiat debt-based system.

I worked in the bond market for over 20 years. That’s my specialty from my time in the financial sector in the City of London. I started out in Geneva, Switzerland. For the last few years I’ve been telling those of you who have been around that the bond bull market is over, and that is highly significant.

We had 40 years of plain sailing, downwind sailing, with bond yields and interest rates going ever lower. It was the cycle, and central banks took advantage of it with their money printing and artificially induced low interest rates. Now that’s over. The bond market is sailing windward, against the wind. I used to sail as a kid back in Brazil, and it’s a lot easier sailing downwind than windward. Unfortunately it’s going to be tough. All it means is that debt creation is going to be a lot harder. That’s a real problem, and we’re going to look at that.

Many people think this is going to be negative for gold, silver and commodities, but I think it’s going to be the other way around because they are going to implement financial repression. They will try to keep official interest rates always below the rate of inflation — and by inflation I mean the supply of money and credit. The inflation they tell us is 3% or 4% is not really inflation. That’s a highly doctored number called CPI, which is the consequence of the inflation. It’s going to be much worse than the 1970s because in the 1970s they didn’t really lie about what was going on in terms of inflation and prices. Now they do, and a lot of people are going to get fooled. If you’re stuck in the bond market you’re going to be losing out even though you think you’re not.

Before I start I want to give a shout-out to my precious metals dealer affiliates. In the US it’s Miles Franklin — they always have specials. You can look them up through my landing page; there’s a link below in the description. Here in the UK it’s Gold Investments. I’ve been dealing with them on a personal basis since the beginning of this century, around 2002, when I first started stacking. All the details are below in the description and they have promo codes you can use. With Gold Investments you can deal online or make an appointment and go up to their office in the City of London.

The bond market is really important, and I’m not saying this just because I worked in it. It’s important because of the system we’ve been under since President Nixon closed the gold window on August 15th, 1971. We’ve been under a debt-based fiat currency system. That means the currency that circulates is purely backed by debt. Therein lies the problem: debt cannot be extinguished with more debt. We can extinguish our personal debt with the debt-based currency, but for the system as a whole it is an impossibility. That’s why they have to keep the debt growing — they can’t pay it off.

We’re at almost $40 trillion in US national debt, and it’s really high here in the UK and everywhere else. I’m not just having a go at the US. That’s without adding all the unfunded liabilities, which run into hundreds of trillions. It’s an impossibility to pay off the debt.

From 1981 to 2021 we had the bond bull market. Cycles matter. From roughly 1942 to 1981 we were in a bond bear market. Interest rates bottomed during World War II under yield curve control — the 10-year was capped below 2%. Then especially in the early 1960s interest rates started rising, and we had a really bad bear market in bonds that culminated with the 10-year yield going up to about 15% in 1981. The Fed funds target or base rate went up to 20%. That helped save the dollar. The debt burden at the time wasn’t as bad as it is now. Federal public debt to GDP was around 33% because they had financial repression throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, combined with the baby boomers and population growth. The debt came down and inflation ate away at it.

Now we’re in a position where the debt is so huge it’s as big as if we were fighting a major world war. The cycles turned in 2021–2022. The rate we saw during the COVID crisis — 0.3% for the 10-year yield and about half a percent for the 30-year — that was the bottom. A lot of people, even so-called experts, bond fund managers, and Wall Street and City of London economists, thought we were going to keep having this bond bull market forever. On this channel I’ve been warning since 2020–2021 that the bond bull market was over. That’s a huge problem because it means it’s going to be really hard to finance everything.

The value of bonds is going to go down because instead of decreasing yields and interest rates like we had from 1981 to 2021, it’s going to go the other way. We were sailing downwind from 1981 to 2021. Now we’re sailing windward and the winds are going to be really tough.

Why do I say that? Globalization seems to be over. We’re not going to have the benefit of most foreign nations, including countries like China and others in the global south, being very willing to finance the deficits and the debt in the US and the West. They realize what’s going on. They realize that having too much of their monetary reserves in our government bond markets is dangerous because it can be frozen. That’s why they’re going into gold.

The other thing that 40 years of a bond bull market did is that it allowed the US economy and the UK economy (we’re like a mini-me here) and to a big extent Europe to become financialized. That means they became heavily dependent on debt and outsourced their industry to the rest of the world, especially China, starting with the WTO deal that let China in. We became heavily dependent on China and other countries for manufacturing, mining, extraction and processing of raw materials. This part of the economy in the West has been totally neglected. Now we have to get back to a real economy, but it’s going to take a while. It’s not something you can do in six months.

Coupled with that, we’re sailing windward against the wind with really tough storms ahead in the next few years. The debt is huge — not just public debt but corporate debt, personal debt, unfunded liabilities, and also the over-the-counter and exchange-traded derivatives. We’re talking trillions. With the cycles turned they can’t bring back a bond bull market. They’re going to have to try to keep interest rates and bond yields as low as possible. They’re going to do whatever they can. They’re going to lie about the CPI so that people think they’re getting a good deal in the bond market. But the smart money sees it, and that’s why people are turning to gold, silver and hard assets. I’ve been talking about this since the beginning of this decade because cycles turn.

What 40 years of easy credit has also done is lead to a massive growth in the welfare state, especially here in the UK and in Europe. Even in the US, which is supposedly more free-market oriented, you have loads of unfunded liabilities. That’s a huge problem now with interest rates going higher.

Since 2021–2022 bond yields in the US and the West have been going up relentlessly. We had a kind of respite from late 2023 until recently, but the other day the 30-year T-bond yield reached the highest level since 2004 — over 20 years. It’s going to keep going. This is not just something related to the US and the UK. Even German government bond yields — the 10-year is at the highest level since 2011. That’s very significant because prior to 2020 the Germans were very frugal. Their debt to GDP was under control and they were actually running budget surpluses. Now that’s all going out the window. This is not happening in isolation only in the US and the UK. It’s happening everywhere in the West.

What about China and other countries? China has a lot of debt, but I think they’ve been preparing for this because they’ve been accumulating gold — not just in the public sector (People’s Bank of China and state-owned enterprises) but among the general public. They’re pushing their people to have the safety of physical gold, not paper, because they know what’s coming. When you look at the reserve assets that foreign countries hold now, the amount of gold has gone above Treasuries, and I think that’s going to continue. Even allies like South Korea and Japan are going to wind down their Treasury holdings because the storm is coming. When the storm comes, everyone looks after themselves.

Unfortunately I think the UK is not well prepared for this because we have so little gold as a government — only about 310 tons. Gordon Brown sold half the gold back in the early part of the century, but even if he hadn’t sold that we’d still only have around 600 tons, which is not as much as other countries.

Most people don’t realize that the debt burdens are astronomical and the cost of financing this debt is going to increase. It’s not going to be an era of easy money and Goldilocks like from 1981 to 2021. A lot of people are going to be shortchanged because the people who work in the bond market, the pension funds, the fund managers, and the regulators are not going to give up on bonds. They’re going to keep the vast majority of the public investing in the old 60/40 portfolio. Yes, Morgan Stanley diluted that to 60/20/20 last year with 20% to gold and hard assets, but I think they’re just going to drag their feet.

One of the ways the state is going to wipe out the burden of the debt is through a soft default. Those people who depend on the state — here in the UK it’s about 30 million people, almost half the population — might still get the nominal amount they’re promised in pensions, benefits and public-sector salaries, but those amounts are going to become worth less and less. That’s how they get away with it. It’s going to happen across Western Europe, the US, Canada, Australia and the other Western countries.

Unfortunately it’s going to be really tough. Most people don’t know this is coming. Hopefully some of you will be prepared. I’ve been warning about this since I started the channel and even before that, when I used to warn colleagues at work, friends and family. A lot of people won’t listen, of course. I can’t do anything about that. I can only warn people.

So what do you do in this environment of ever-increasing rates, governments trying to keep interest rates as low as possible through financial repression, and diluting the value of the currency? You try to pay off as much debt as you can. You try to stay away from debt as much as you can. You try to create value for yourself and your family, and you try to put a little bit of sound money aside — physical gold and silver.

To conclude, the most important thing we have to realize is that we’re in an era where borrowing is going to be a lot tougher. People who have borrowed and need to roll over a mortgage or other debt are going to find it a lot harder. It’s going to be like prior to 1980, when it wasn’t easy getting credit. People are going to have to adjust to that, and governments are going to have to adjust to that. Our governments and central banks have a really tough few years ahead. Eventually things will turn and get better, but if you’ve been frugal and avoided having a lot of debt you can be fine. Some people will keep the debt and it will be debased, which in a way is good, but the problem with keeping debt is that you never know whether you can service it. I’d rather neither be a borrower nor a lender. That’s why I think hard assets are going to be the way forward, especially gold and silver.

With that, I’m going to wish you all a very good day. Take care. Bye.

Are we creating two different economies without realising it?

Central banks influence the economy through interest rates, liquidity and monetary policy. Yet there is a growing question worth debating: what happens when financial markets respond positively to monetary policy, but the benefits take much longer to reach households, workers and small businesses?

Imagine a situation where stock markets are rising, investors are becoming more confident and borrowing conditions are improving for major corporations. At the same time, a small business is struggling to obtain a loan, a first-time buyer cannot afford a mortgage and households are still paying high interest rates on existing debts.

Both realities can exist within the same economy.

This raises a fundamental question about the modern financial system: is the transmission of monetary policy becoming increasingly unequal, and what does that mean for long-term economic stability?

1. The hidden problem with interest rate changes

When a central bank changes interest rates, financial markets often react immediately. Bond yields move, currencies adjust and investors reconsider the value of shares and other assets.

However, the transmission of those changes into the wider economy can take considerably longer.

A household with a fixed-rate mortgage may not experience a change in its monthly payments until its existing deal expires. A business might face higher borrowing costs despite a reduction in the central bank's policy rate, particularly if lenders believe its industry has become riskier.

This creates an interesting situation in which monetary policy can be restrictive for some parts of the economy while financial conditions are improving for others.

The Bank for International Settlements has also highlighted how the growing importance of market-based finance makes financial conditions more sensitive to market prices and international shocks.

Bank for International Settlements

2. What the 2026 financial data tell us

The UK provides an interesting example of how different borrowers can experience the same financial environment.

In its July 2026 Financial Stability Report, the Bank of England projected that a little over five million UK households would face higher mortgage repayments by the end of 2028. This was a conditional projection based on the interest-rate expectations and mortgage data available at the time, not a guaranteed outcome.

the UK's central bank

Its second-quarter 2026 Credit Conditions Survey also reported that lenders had slightly reduced credit availability for small and medium-sized businesses, while availability for large businesses was unchanged.

the UK's central bank

These findings raise an important issue about how we measure economic recovery.

If financial markets recover before households and smaller businesses experience better borrowing conditions, does that necessarily mean the economic recovery is incomplete?

There is another side to this argument. The Bank of England's July report also found that UK households and businesses remained resilient in aggregate and that the banking system continued supporting the real economy. Financial stability and individual financial hardship are related, but they are not identical measures.

the UK's central bank

3. Could the changing financial system make this problem bigger?

Traditional banks are no longer the only major providers of finance. Investment funds, private credit providers and other non-bank financial institutions play an increasingly important role in global capital markets.

This can diversify funding sources, but it also creates different channels through which economic shocks can spread.

The IMF's April 2026 Global Financial Stability Report highlighted vulnerabilities associated with leveraged non-bank investors, sovereign debt markets and cross-border capital flows.

IMF

Consider what might happen during a sudden international financial shock. Investors may sell risky assets, lenders may reassess creditworthiness and businesses may delay investment.

Even if central banks provide additional liquidity to stabilise financial markets, that does not automatically mean every business will receive affordable credit.

It is therefore worth examining whether the increasing role of non-bank finance changes how effectively monetary policy supports the wider economy.

4. The wider consequences for the next generation

One of the most important aspects of this discussion is its potential long-term effect on younger people and future entrepreneurs.

A person who already owns financial assets may benefit from rising share prices or property values. Someone without substantial savings may instead face higher housing costs and greater difficulty building wealth.

Similarly, an established corporation may have access to bond markets and several financing options, whereas a new business may depend on a bank loan or its owner's personal savings.

These differences are not necessarily evidence that monetary policy itself is failing. They do, however, raise questions about whether the financial system transmits economic opportunities evenly.

An effective monetary policy framework must also consider inflation, employment and financial stability. Making credit cheaper for everyone without regard to risk could encourage excessive borrowing and create new vulnerabilities.

The challenge is understanding where legitimate risk management ends and structural barriers to productive investment begin.

Questions for the community

1. Are stock markets still reliable indicators of economic health? Should we give greater weight to household disposable income, business investment and access to credit when assessing the economy?

2. Should central banks pay closer attention to who receives affordable credit? Would this improve monetary policy, or would it risk drawing central banks into decisions better left to governments and commercial lenders?

3. Is the growth of private credit and non-bank finance making the financial system more resilient or introducing new vulnerabilities? Could it help businesses that traditional banks are unwilling to finance?

4. What happens if financial markets recover but the cost of living remains high? Could a prolonged difference between asset-market performance and household finances weaken consumer demand and future economic growth?

5. How should monetary policy respond to another major supply shock? If rising energy costs push up inflation while weakening household spending, what trade-offs should policymakers consider?

Final thought

Perhaps the most important question is not simply whether central banks should raise or lower interest rates. It is whether we properly understand how those decisions travel through an increasingly complex financial system.

A strong stock market, a resilient banking system and improving economic growth can coexist with significant financial pressure on particular households or industries. Understanding those differences is essential when analysing the financial news.

I'd be particularly interested in hearing whether members think the biggest obstacle to economic recovery is the price of credit, the availability of credit or something more fundamental, such as weak productivity and investment. Which do you believe matters most, and what evidence would change your view?

GFN – WASHINGTON: Judy Shelton has joined the Treasury Department as counselor to Secretary Scott Bessent, bringing an advocate of gold-convertible government bonds into his office as inflation and deficit concerns drive up U.S. borrowing costs.

Her 2024 book, Good as Gold: How to Unleash the Power of Sound Money, develops the case for using gold-convertible Treasury debt to protect long-term bondholders. She has advocated a 50-year bond backed by U.S. gold reserves, with conversion into metal available at maturity.

Shelton argues investors would accept lower yields in exchange for that protection, reducing federal borrowing costs.

In a move likely to send shockwaves through the corridors of the Federal Reserve, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has appointed renowned economist Judy Shelton as Counselor to the Treasury Secretary. This strategic hiring, finalized on September 30, 2026, positions Shelton, a long-time critic of fiat currency and proponent of sound money, inside the heart of America's financial decision-making apparatus.

Shelton is no stranger to controversy. During President Trump's first term, her nomination to the Federal Reserve Board was thwarted by Senate Republicans who viewed her advocacy for a return to the gold standard with skepticism. Now, with her new role in the Treasury, Shelton brings her anti-establishment monetary philosophy to the forefront at a time when inflation and federal debt have reached critical levels.

This appointment is not just a personnel change; it's a symbolic strike against decades of monetary policy that critics claim have hollowed out the U.S. economy. For years, Shelton has argued that tying the U.S. dollar to a tangible asset like gold could prevent unchecked fiscal expansion and restore stability to the nation's finances. Her arrival at the Treasury could signal the beginning of significant policy shifts aimed at challenging the status quo.

The timing could not be more significant. As Bessent and Shelton assume roles together, Shelton's prophetic words from 2024 ring loud: "But in 2026. Stay tuned." In recruiting Shelton, Bessent is sending an unambiguous message: the days of unchecked money printing overseen by the Federal Reserve are under scrutiny and potential restructuring.

Shelton's appointment deals a blow to the legacy of fiat currency that dawned when Richard Nixon removed the dollar from the gold standard in 1971. Opponents of fiat argue it has enabled fiscal irresponsibility and the concentration of economic power. With Shelton's advocacy for monetary reform now influencing U.S. policy directly, the debate over gold and sound economic practices is rekindled.

While the return of the gold standard is not imminent, Shelton's presence in Treasury underscores a pivotal challenge to the fiat currency order. Her perspective indicates a shift towards policies emphasizing fiscal discipline and currency stability, potentially altering the landscape of U.S. economic policy.

The ramifications of Shelton's policies on everyday Americans remain to be seen, but her track record suggests a focus on serving stable, practical economic interests over speculative financial engineering. As this story unfolds, it invites reflection: Is this the dawn of a new era defined by economic realism?

https://vblgoldfix.substack.com/p/gold-bond-advocate-judy-shelton-joins

[music] Hey everybody, this is your host of the Freedom Report, Robert Kint, and it is Wednesday, September 23rd, 2026. Welcome back to the program. Today I'm going to be going over which assets have returned the most since 1971 using two different measures or basis. We're going to do it on a log chart so that you can see scale. For example, a log is a base 10 chart. Meaning, if you're seeing something go up on the chart into the next scale, it's a 10x. And so what a log does is tells you, for example, if

you go from 2 to 20, that's a 10x. Well, from going to 20 to 40 is not a 10x. You have to go to 200. So, it's really going to tell us what have been the biggest booms in these various assets since 1971. And then we're going to get into why the winner is what it is. Is it gold and silver? Is it one of these other assets and what that could mean going forward? So, this is really was intended to be a gold and silver focused video, but as I was getting into asset valuations and returns since 1971,

I thought, "Oh, there's a different story being told here as well." So, this presentation is going to morph from just an economic presentation to also a socioeconomic or a uh cultural presentation as well. And I think you guys are going to be interested. So, without further ado, we're going to jump right into it. So here is the presentation called inflation adjusted values what has actually done better go and sorry for the transitions on this presentation that's the template

downloaded and I didn't have time to remove them all right gold since 1971 well first of all why am I using 1971 that was the date at which President Nixon was forced to remove the dollar from gold convertability meaning we were the world's reserve reserve currency and we're no longer on the gold standard. That allowed the US government to take on as much debt and print as much money as it wanted to without worrying about backing it up with gold reserves either bought, mined or whatever the case may

be. And we took gold out of that system. It allowed the market to go to different valuations and levels. So this is in other words which assets done better in the fiat currency era. And I want to use two discounters or I want to use two uh I want to discount it for inflation. In other words, I want to see what the returns are after we deal with dollar price inflation if that makes sense. So this is a chart of gold and you can see uh this is 2025 number. So it has 2820. Uh obviously gold went up to 5,500. So

that's just the graphing software I was using. But gold's now gone up to like it's 4,300 now was 5,500. But it just went 71 to 2025. You can see that nomally gold is much higher than in the gold uh line squiggly line than it was for the BLS real 1971. Meaning if you took CPI and baked it into that cake, what was your return? Well, it was a whole log scale less. In other words, it was at least 10 times less when you factor in inflation. That's why I used a log chart. It shows scale, not necessarily

just bulk prices. If you look at shadow stats, and I use shadow stats because John Williams uh is an economist. He's been an economist since the 80s. He's done he's classically trained economist. And he will graph out uh real inflation as measured in 1980. And people say, "Well, that has to be inferior. We're so much more advanced nowadays." But in reality, what the government has done is they've messed up the inflation number with uh geometric waiting, hydonic adjustments, uh taking out certain

measures of uh uh price inflation, taking things out of the core PCE and CPI and really just confuses things. Well, what I like about John Williams is like I'm just going to use the 1980s version and I'm going to stretch it out over time so you can see you can compare 2026 with 1980s, 1990s, 2000, 2010s and get an accurate representation of where prices actually are when adjusted for real inflation. What's really happened to prices, not with all the goofy government screwing up the numbers and playing around with

the numbers, just the raw numbers. And you can see that um gold started at 40 and $40.80 in 1971 and and if discounted for real inflation through shadow stats, it's only worth 56 bucks. So gold really hasn't risen all that much when discounted for inflation. Now this could be a very damning chart to people in the gold and silver industry. And I'll do silver here in a little bit in the precious metals industry cuz like see see I told you you should be in real estate and stocks and bonds and uh tech startups and investing

in companies you know and even buying a grocery store or convenience store. Why would you be in gold? Look at that return. Wouldn't that seem to make the argument the gold has done very poorly when accounting for real inflation? And no. What it means is gold's done its job. it has accounted for real inflation and taken that value in. And wait till we get to some other charts to see how other assets have done using the same inflation measures. both the official government CPI number uh that we get

through the BLS well that the BLS is reporting we get it through the BLS and then the shadow stats number done by economist John Williams who uses an unfettered unmanipulated measure of inflation that allows us to actually compare with the past without a bunch of fiddling around with the numbers. Moving on to golden real terms. I took out the gold in nominal terms and we drew a line on this chart for where it was in 1971 and you can see that gold if you look at it in CPI terms has gone up a lot. It's

gone a whole log scale up meaning it would have done very well. That's why a lot of people look at that red line and say gold's done very well even when discounted for inflation. So I think gold is overpriced. But when you count it for real inflation, not government fiddled numbers, but just straight data that Shadow Stats produces, gold really hasn't gone up that much. Now, it's done pretty well since the pandemic, but and it did pretty well 2008 through 2011, 2009 through 2011, but overall, it's not

up that much when compared to real inflation since 1971. In other words, gold's done its job. If you look at silver since 1971, you see a similar thing. Nominal dollars in silver is at the silver line. And then you have the CPI number uh discounted number in red. Meaning we take the gold price movements from year to year and we back out or we discount by the inflation rate to see what the real return is. Is the asset growing over inflation? Because if I have to pay 5% more this year for my groceries, well, I want an

asset that captures that 5% at least so I'm not losing my purchasing power and hopefully returns something over that. So silver, if you look at it with the BLS line, it looks like it's gone up a whole log scale or over 10 times what it was in 1971. That's how to read the charts. It's not a price chart. It's a log chart. So if you look at it, silver's gone up at over 10 times from 1971. But if you look at it from shadow stats, what I call real, unfettered, unfiddled with inflation, silver has not

gone up 10 times. Silver is actually under the $158 base that it was in 1971. Meaning silver has lost value even though it's a precious metal. Even though it's used in just about any technological, medical, military, and many other uses, EV, solar, you name it. Silver's used everywhere. We think we're in supply deficit, at least yearly mining deficit. How could silver in real terms when discounted for real inflation be worth less than it was in 1971? That doesn't make sense. This would seem to

indicate that silver is undervalued and it hasn't really been doing its job against inflation like gold is. And I would agree with that because since the '9s, silver's really been industrialized. It's treated as a base commodity. And a lot of people think those commodity supply and demand characteristics with the mining shortages is drawing down all this world silver inventory. And eventually we're going to get to the point where silver really pops for those reasons. But right

now silver is not priced as high as it was in 1971 when accounting for real unmanipulated unmolested uh inflation data that John Williams pro provides us at shadowstats.com. By the way, if this interests you, and I'm not affiliated with John directly. I don't have no, you know, he's not been on my show, I think once in the last seven years, like him. But if you like his data, go to shast.com. He has not only inflation data, has a lot of measures in data. Sum's free, and then he has a

subscription service which pays for all the work that he does. All right, silver in real terms. Again, we move out nominal prices and we just look at CPI numbers versus shadow stats inflation numbers. And you can see with the line drawn across since 1971, silver in real terms, unmanipulated data, just straight price terms, uh, straight inflation price terms is under its 1971 average. So when people say that $65 silver is overvalued, it's really not when compared over time. You can see that on the time series

chart and it's been that way. It's been cratering since 1980. And it went up in 7980 because the high oil inflation and came down and except for like 2010. It really wasn't it didn't peak above its 1971 value in real terms when accounting for real inflation. All right, moving on to the S&P 500. Now, this is interesting. The reason I'm bringing in the stock markets is because I was just on Danny's show at Capital Cosm this morning and we were talking about the effect of inflation on assets and I was

saying that I don't think the stock market's really returning what most people think it is when you account for inflation when you account for stuff you got to buy. So, if you're sitting out there and you're a baby boomer or Gen Xer and you're thinking about you're in retirement or you're thinking about getting to retirement and you have a million dollars in different assets, how long is that million dollars going to last if if the returns on the S&P 500 didn't really keep up with inflation or

barely kept up with inflation? So since 1971 when we got taken off the gold standard, the S&P 500 is barely over its inflation adjusted value, meaning it's basically been flatlined for 55 years. Despite the nominal returns you get in the index and what you think you're making off of that, when you take into account real inflation, you haven't made much. And this is one of the reasons the government uses the CPI numbers they do because it effectively covers up how badly those assets are performing when

you consider real inflation and it's kept people in the system. Monies are captured in the stock market and 401ks and pensions and IAS and various retirement plans. And these BLS numbers make it seem like people are getting real value. But when you take into account the cost of things, go look at my real estate presentation from two weeks ago and how expensive houses are and then look at what's happening to diesel and gas prices and the price of the grocery store. You're going to look

at this and say, "Well, the stock market's really not increasing my purchasing power." And it comes with a ton of risk. Now, this is the top 500 companies in America. Let's go on to look at the Dow. The Dow Jones Industrial is more of a manufacturing industrial index. really looks at manufacturing and physical uh activity uh productive activity in the u in the country and now we're we're less of a manufacturer than we used to be. We make less. We still make things. We just

don't make it as much. And the service economy and the tech economy is much bigger. And interesting to note that that if you look at gold at the Dow in in in real terms discounted for real inflation, shallow stats, it's even. So the Dow has gone exactly nowhere. That means that the productive capacity of our nation in 55 years has not gone up relative to what we're paying to get stuff. That's an astounding an astounding chart. And it means despite all the technological advancements,

despite all of the the wonderful things that we have, we actually can't afford to buy more of it. uh these manufactured things and these companies that manufacture things when discounted for real inflation. Our standard of living really hasn't gone up the way that we think it has. All right. Now, moving on to the NASDAQ, you see a little bit different story here, especially starting around 2009 2010. The NASDAQ when discounted by either CPI or shadow stats has done actually really well. And

you can see it's gone up by a factor of 10 on shadow stats and by a factor of nearly 100 when discounted for inflation. And again log log scale. So I'm going from 10 to 2 to 10 to 3 to 10 to 4 on the left hand side of this chart. If you see here uh it started right here the NAS uh the NASDAQ actually right here in 1980 then went to this 10x scale then went to this 10x scale when you're measuring in this red and this BLS inflation the CPI. So it looks like NASDAQ has actually kicked button taken names really especially

since uh about 1990 when discounted for either inflation because even in shadow stats the number it looks like a 10x there right since about 2008 2009 so since the last since the great recession technology is more than 10xed or at least the value of the NASDAQ has and wait till we get a little bit deeper in the NASDAQ to look and see that it's not the entire NASDAQ it's really a collection of firms at the All right, moving on. What is the winner? Well, if you graph all of these out on a log chart

and you use the CPI, this is the top chart, or the shadow stats, the bottom chart, on both charts, the winner is the NASDAQ in purple. The purple line, whether we discount for shadow stats, real inflation, or the goofy government CPI inflation, the NASDAQ wins. The interesting thing to see is that the NASDAQ really only started consistently winning in 2010. So for the last 16 years, not really since 1971. Since 1971, almost everything did better with the exception of the tech boom in 2000, but the tech boom in 2000 was a little

premature in predicting the tech technology economy, but it came back around the great recession. And uh the top firms and NASDAQ and the technology sector has really been where all the money's been or the capital's been flowing to. Gold has done well. Gold is in blue on this chart. Gold is second place. So gold just by holding value, if you remember the chart we had before, gold's just held value since 1971. And the fact that everything else is below gold, including S&P, Dow, and silver is below gold means

that all of those are basically flatline or less than uh the value or offsetting inflation or your per, you know, maintaining your purchasing power whereas NASDAQ and gold are clearly on top. So, the winner really is NASDAQ. And it's like, okay, Rob, well, if that's the case, why are you keep telling us to invest in gold and silver? Why are you a Gold and Silver channel? Why aren't you just constantly talking about Microsoft and Amazon? We're going to kind of get into that for the

remainder of the presentation. And there's going to be a little bit of a warning there at the end of this presentation about where we may be going. And it doesn't just have to do with economics, but I've got quotes from other people to paint that picture instead of me just doing it myself. And it's interesting to see how long these quotes have been about, but I'm giving it away. So, let's keep going. So, the winner is technology stock. So, I so I said, okay, what are the changes in

technology since 2010, which caused the NASDAQ to separate from everything and just all this money has been flowing into it for 16 years? Well, you had the mobile app store super cycle where we got into the mobile phones like this one and we got into the apps and really technology came home to sit in our laps every day. It's no longer we're lucky to have a computer at work. Even if you're, you know, a construction worker or a plumber or you work on cars or you you're traveling around salesman or

whatever and you don't really on the computer, you're not on the computer a long a lot of time. Everybody gets on a computer with one of these. It's your personal digital assistant. And actually started off as PDAs because I used to work at a technology store back in uh the mid9s and I sold some of the very first PDAs including an Apple PDA and then it eventually morphed into a phone and then they combined the phone and the technology of a digital assistant and made it into like a little uh little

complex supercomput there and Apple transformed consumer electronics into an ecosystem. Then from 2013 to 2018, you had the 10bagger factory of cloud development. Uh Netflix pioneered streaming from the cloud. The stock sword 27x in 10 years. And since 2021, Netflix has been killing it. They can spend a billion dollars on content and make three to four billion dollars in revenues because they have over 300 million subscribers. And not all of their content has to hit. They just have to keep the misses to a minimum. And

when I was studying Netflix over the weekend for a different project, uh the way Netflix did it is they figured out that the middle is where you win. So the mi the middle spend, you know, the the5 to $30 million productions, whether it be seasons of a show or whether it be a movie, are the ones that win the bread and butters. But you got to have the blockbusters to attract new people and to keep people in the game. And then you also have your cheaper content like a lot of children's productions and

simpler content which also keeps the family sticky. And so Netflix has figured out the mix that keeps keeps everybody uh basically attached to what's going on with uh the content with Netflix. And so they're just printing money. Their return on investment of their investors is ridiculous. And they're they're billions of dollars of profit. They have more profit and assets than they do debt. and it keeps growing. Uh the other type of suites, Microsoft Azure launched in 2008. It's up over 20x since the

entire Microsoft company. Adobe put creative suite in the cloud in 2013. Uh AWS, Amazon went from 3 billion to $25 billion revenue. So those five years were about building the cloud. That's about building infrastructure. First, you get the the device that's going to power the apps. Next, you have to build the infrastructure that the apps run on so that people can use this and use their laptops and use their smart TVs. Then from 2010 to 2021, you had the zero interest rate policy. So the funds Fed

funds rate 0% for seven years. And so what happened was at 0% rate, a dollar of 2030 earnings is worth a dollar today. Meaning there there is no discounted time value of money in terms of earnings. And so if at 5% rates that goes down to 61 cents. So the analysis is that 40% of the value of of NASDAQ in these companies increasing was just the fact that we had zero interest rate. They could borrow at zero and then that meant their cost of acquiring capital was near zero. So that allowed them to grow exponentially. You say well why

didn't all the companies do that? And that's has to do with the next few bullet points we're going to get into. This is why it didn't happen in staples and commodities and others. COVID forced digitization. Lockdowns forced daily life onto digital platforms. This and others. Homeschooling on the computer anyone that people didn't weren't allowed to go to school. Worship services online. People ordering more from Amazon and Walmart uh delivery which is now ubiquitous. You have

Walmart drones delivering goods to your driveway. We just all got used to that during 2020 2021 because we couldn't go anywhere. And that forced people to digitize. It forced people to get on the system. and NASDAQ jumped 44% in 2020. The annual returns 19 since 2020 has been 19% which has been higher than any of the other the indices because those lockdowns drove digitization. They drove the online uh technocratic sort of model. Then in 2022 2026 it's AI you have the second cloud now you've got AI

and it requires all these additional data centers so that the computers now can do the thinking. AI and cloud computing demand now uh demand now accounts for 40% of the S&P 500 market cap. That's how powerful it is. And video alone 168.9% market cap growth in 2024. Uh the Magnificent 7, the top seven technology stocks soared to 17.6 trillion in December and they're up more than that. And then it was network effects, buybacks and capex. So this is where the economies of scale of centralization of technology comes into

play. Okay, so the the IT sector increased 450% since 2010. And one key thing I noted through my research is once you win one of these areas, search like Google or Bing or whatever, uh, social media or the operating system, once you win one of these categories of technology, whether it's what helps us do technology or how we're searching technology or what we're consuming over technology, your marginal cost is 0%. And that raises your return on equity, ROE. In other words, when you get money into your stock, you're able

to multiply that because you don't have a marginal cost. You've won the game. Everybody's using you. So, it was a concentration of all the technological functions into these single companies, the top seven single companies, which great gave them market power and it gave them almost unlimited returns. They could borrow money and still make a ton more than what they borrowed. So they were able to almost infinitely scale. Why? Because we had the people addicted to this. We had the lockdowns.

We already had the first version of cloud. Then we added the AI cloud and now everything's automated. Now you have less people in jobs and you have less people in small to medium companies and you have the centralization of power to the big companies. And now they're getting rid of labor. They're cutting jobs and letting AI take over some of those functions. And so the cost of these technology companies to do business is really falling really low. And that's put every other industry at a

distinct disadvantage. And what we're what we're seeing happen since 2010. And the reason NASDAQ has done so well is a concentration of wealth that's being sucked into these top seven companies and it's creating a juggernaut that nobody can defeat because it's technologydriven. It's lower cost. uh they have almost zero cost of capital. It doesn't matter what interest rates get to, they're going to beat it. And let's go to another chart here, which I think you guys will be interesting to

see. I've got a couple of three companies here at the top. We got uh Apple, Microsoft, where which are a combination of hardware and software, mostly software, and then Nvidia, which is a chip manufacturer. And you can see that their return on equity is very high. The return on investment capital, which is ROIC, is high. And then you got the whack. That's the weighted average cost of capital. So, let's talk through this. The last column, the weighted average cost of capital is the cost to

acquire a stock or pay out a dividend or whatever the stock costs are plus the cost to borrow debt. So, it's debt and stock. You go back to the original balance sheet equation of liabilities u the cost to acquire uh or issue stock and the cost to acquire debt. In other words, the cost of money. The weighted average cost capital is a cost of money that businesses use to finance their functions. Well, if they're getting a return on the equity, uh, that is return on stock and a return on invested

capital, which is a return on debt or other investments is twice as much as their cost of capital, then there's no reason for them not to take on that debt or issue that stock or even buy back stocks, which has a cost of its own, because they're going to get more back. They're going to get a rate higher than whatever that is. So, they almost can't lose whichever one they choose. They can take debt or they can recycle stocks. Nvidia, the same thing. It's 60% return on equity as a chip company, 50% return

on capital, and only has a 10% cost of capital. So, it's making five to six times what it borrows or pays back in stocks. Now, the broad NASDAQ composite, including a thousand companies, is much less. Their return on equity and return on capital is less than their their average cost capital. So, it's not all technology companies. It's the Magnificent 7 and Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia are really leading here into which they can do no wrong. It's like their business can do no wrong. Why?

Because all that capital is already in. They've won their various fields. Apple's won the the mobile phone war. I don't care about Samsung and the others. Apple really dominates in a lot of technology fields. Uh Microsoft dominates a lot of software fields. Nvidia dominates in a lot of chip fields. And so those companies basically have so much concentration of power. It's like how do you stop them? They're a juggernaut. And the rest of the technology companies are trying to catch

up. And so what happens is you have the power of all technology, the internet, AI, and all that stuff in a a very small group of companies including these AI companies which are rising. AI companies rising is going to be the next guys to take over the crowns from the Apples and Microsoft's Nvidas here in a few years. What is the outlook? What is the effect of this? Well, I've already talked about job loss. We've already talked about um lack [clears throat] of growth in uh opportunities for small and medium

business which businesses which create most of the jobs. But here are some quotes from people that talked about the effect of centralization of power and technology in the past. We're going to start with Dwight Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address as president. We must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of the scientific technological elite. What he was saying is the companies are going to have more power than the government and they're

going to capture it. That's called regulatory capture and the government's not going to be able to stop them and neither would the people by extension of that because the government is the enforcement arm of the people. And Dwight was basically saying and you know we had the bomb and stuff like that had already gone off back then and he was looking at technology going uh this is the biggest existential threat. He also talked about other things. uh this isn't as quoted from his farewell address but

it's very important and relevant to the day and very preient for him to say that all the way back in 1961 you also have Aldis Huxley the famous author uh dystopian author who had a couple of dystopian books was very well connected and things that he wrote about seemed to in some to some extent be coming true in many areas of life and he said but the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power Okay, connecting technology growth

to power just like Eisenhower. George Packer, a famous journalist said, "Today we have our own concentrations of economic power." This is in 2025. Instead of Standard Oil, US Steel and Union Pacific Railroad and JP Morgan and Company, we have Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft. The technology companies can consolidate powers better than the other industries. Even the energy industry because the energy industry uses what? Technology. technology is the pillar beneath the entire economy. That's why they're doing

so well because everybody uses them. Uh Christian Lewis Lang, Nobel Peace Prize 1921. Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master. So what happens when AI basically is running everything in society? Is it a servant now or is it a master? And what does that mean for us? What does that mean for the economy? What does that mean for freedom? What does that mean for jobs? What does that mean for us as a society? That's one of the existential questions of our generation of our time. Uh technology uh oh going down to Marshall

McLuhan, philosopher, professor and intellectual. We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us. We create the technology and then the technology takes over and shapes the direction of our lives. And the last one by Jacques Ulu, the technological society, a book in 1954. Technique has become autonomous. It has become a reality in itself. It is the new sacred. And by technique, he means technology or how you do things. Technique and technology have the same base in in uh language. And he's basically saying technology.

There is the risk. look at the only thing that's outdone gold uh since 1971 and really since 2010 if we're really looking at the chart and that's NASDAQ and that's a concentration of power in technology and that is a real threat AI social credit scores uh things like that and it seems as though uh technology is is is on this this train that won't stop it's just going to keep going I would say that the only thing that's going to protect you from that is gold because gold at least

captures inflation and at least gold gives you an alternative way to to trade outside of technology like uh digital currencies or the digital dollar or the the online systems and I would advocate that gold is probably your safe haven if you're worried about those things you know so to answer one of the original questions that was po has been posed to me by my friends and has been posed lately to me is why would I invest in gold? Well, gold beats everything except for NASDAQ and technology, the top seven

firms. And so, everybody's piling money into there, but I would rather put my money in gold because I'm not so sure. I want those firms to have all this power and control because you see all the people that warned against it and what's going to happen over time and it seems like everything they're saying is coming true. So, I'd rather be in gold for those reasons. People that were in, you know, in NASDAQ since 2010, 2009 really when I started investing in gold had beaten me. But that's okay. I don't want

to put my money into that system. I love technology. I'm sitting here broadcasting to you over technology, using technology, but there's a limit to which I want that to affect my life. And I think having a real physical asset is something that is going to help uh me uh dealing not only with inflation, but dealing with whatever's coming down the pike with this new technological future. Uh and just to remind people, I spent 30 years in tech. I started off as administrator, then I did auditing and

consulting, then I did cyber security. My masters is in information assurance which is cyber security. Uh my bachelor's is a hybrid business technology degree called management of information systems. I have an associates in applied sciences which was basically Cisco networking and Unix system administration internet technologies that I got in 2002 when the internet was growing. I spent a lot of time in tech and I know tech very well and I think some of the advancements really caused me to have some concern.

So the presentation started off as what's done best. Well, it turns out only one of the stock market indices since 1971 has done best, but really since 2010, but gold's the runner up and I think gold probably is going to lead to more freedom than the other one. But if you want to simplify this this whole presentation down, why investing in the Dow, the S&P, bonds, and all those other things when gold is simply beating it? Because it maintains your purchasing power. If you're looking for the most

economically beneficial, lowest risk of these things to put your money into, it would be gold. Silver a little bit to a less extent because it's become industrialized. But if you consider the supply and demand characteristics and how we're likely eventually to get to real world shortages while all of our available stocks are being used up in all this technology by the way that uh and this this rampant increase in technology silver I think will explode past gold at some point but right now gold is the

stronger of the two. That's going to do it for today. This has been your host Rob Ke with the Freedom Report. >> [music]

Welcome back. Today I'm joined by Larry Leard, champion of sound money. Larry's the founder of Equity Management Associates and the author of the book Be Print. For years, he's been warning that America's mounting debt, chronic deficits are pushing us towards a point where the Fed's first job is not controlling inflation, is keeping the financial system afloat. Larry, it is great to have you.

Great to be back with you, Peter. I've always enjoyed our conversations.

So, let's begin with your book. What is the central argument of the big print?

So the thesis is that the way our financial system is constructed requires debt and monetary expansion to keep it going and grow. It's kind of like a shark. It has to go forward or else it's not going to it won't get oxygen going through its u its gills. And um as a result of that, you know, the the um and that's based on the way money is created, which is kind of a long story and the book lays it out, but basically banks lend money into existence. And by lending money into existence, that means you're creating additional debt whenever, you know, you're you're growing your economy. And that's you know, Reagan really kind of started this uh you know, with the notion that we could take on debt, use it to grow the economy. And in the certain measure, there's some sense to that, but when it gets too far down the road, it becomes problematic. And the problem occurs when the debt gets so large and the growth in the economy doesn't match the growth in the debt. There becomes a big gap which is to say that the you know and there's a chart I used to put up on Twitter and X all the time that showed kind of the growth of the debt burden and the growth of GDP and they were diverging. And so yeah

what when that divergence occurs what happens is that something will break on the debt side and um and then the government will have to step in and print money to create more money to service that excessive debt. And we've had a lot of these breaks throughout history. I mean, you know, and these are really kind of credit bubbles that burst. You know, debt debt fuels growth gets too far ahead of the economy, it bursts, and then the economy collapses unless enough money is printed. And the first example that was actually 1929 where there was a lot of leverage and that stock market crash. But we've had other examples since then. The two more recent ones are really um 2008 and then the COVID example. And uh so in 2008 we as we all know we had a housing bubble and the debt just got so large it couldn't be supported and we woke up one morning and the entire economy was going to collapse and secretary of the treasury was uh begging you know the speaker of the house to you know give him $700 billion or else the ATMs weren't going to work and so um that I call that the first big print uh and of course they went from you know 700 billion to multiple trillion over a series of years and and you know this in doing so what government is effectively doing is they're backstopping the banks. They're putting money into in bank reserves and increasing the monetary base. And that's that's good in so far as it does stop a collapse of an overlevered system, but it's bad because all that additional money eventually works its way through the system and creates inflation, right? And so, you know, the first one was was was uh 2008 and then in COVID we did the same thing, but we did it on steroids. I mean, it was even bigger and faster. And so what my book argues is that these are a feature of the system. This is not a bug, it's a feature. And we're going to have another one [laughter] because we're going to get all levered up again and then something's going to break and then the government's going to have to come in and print a ton of money. And so we now, you know, we've now got two examples of it. So we can see that it's a pattern and we we I believe it's going to happen again. And the implication is of course that then you have to you have to try and earn forms of money that the government can't print or or hold I should say save in forms of money the government can't print. Um the natural ones in my mind are silver, gold, and bitcoin. So that's the that's the overall thesis.

Yeah, I've argued um you know I've got a bunch of articles talking about you know whether we should replace the Fed and of course we should but with what?

And the question is always what does the Fed do? And in most people's minds, it fights inflation,

right?

Right. Like usually when you read about the Fed in the newspaper, it's talking about how, you know, inflation is getting, you know, whatever. It's it's too high. And so the Fed is going to do this and that to fight it. And so I think that most voters in their minds, uh, the Fed fights inflation. In fact, there was a study of that and they found twothirds of voters think that the main purpose of the Fed is fighting inflation which is hilarious because we didn't have a Fed for the first what 130 years

right

and we had zero aggregate inflation correct

until we had a Fed so if it doesn't fight inflation what does it do and I think the answer is the main purpose of the Fed is the bailouts I think people underestimate they see the bailouts right so it was you know whatever it was in 2008 2.3 three or 2.7 of which much was allegedly paid back. Of course, there's risk adjusted and, you know, it's a transfer at the end of the day, but that's not the real, you know, goal here for Wall Street, right? The real goal is the year-to-year money printing,

correct?

That, you know, people see 2% uh inflation, but once you include, you know, productivity growth, population growth, uh usage of dollars overseas, right? Once you include all that, you're probably talking closer to 5% money printing, which is what on the order of 1 and a.5 trillion. So, most of which is captured by Wall Street. So, it's not the 2.7 trillion bailouts every, you know, 20 years. It's the trillion and a half every single year. That's what the bailout mechanism is. And that's the function.

I mean, to your to your point, there's a very interesting statistic. since 71 the money supply M2 you know I I kind of measure I'm a monitorist in and Austrian and my economic views and that means that I kind of measure you know the um inflation in terms of how much the money supply grows the broadest measure today of money supply is M2 and if you look at it from 71 it's grown in the high seven seven digit 7 point something area like call it 7.6 six or 7.7. So, you know, the government I think over that same time frame has said we've had inflation of two or 3% on average and they're just they're cooking the numbers. And so, you know, and I I think the 7% is much more in line with what the average, you know, person has experienced. I mean, if for example, you look at housing prices or price of a lot of things that are kind of stable, you know, more stable, they've grown at some percent compounded for years and years. So,

yeah. Well, and you know the gap between those that people don't take account of is that essentially all of the productivity gains since call it 1971 you know so China uh crashing manufacturing costs the stupid software thing the impact of the internet of software of container shipping right there have been all of these advances in technology that should have lowered crisis.

Correct.

Right. If we look back to the late 1800s, which was a, you know, that was also a period of enormous technological gain. Uh, the so-called Great Depression in the 1870s, which was actually economically fantastic, but prices went down. That's what depression used to mean. That's

right.

And we didn't see any of that over these past 50 years. We didn't see anything from China. The average American does not appreciate. They think China just stole the jobs. They don't understand China also slashed the real cost of manufactured goods. And the reason people don't see that is because all of it was gobbled up in money printing

correct

yeartoear as you say I think if you take the aggregate number the change in M2 since Nixon killed off the gold standard in 71 I think you're looking at what I think it's around about a trillion or more than a trillion a year. Of course that's that's that's compounded. So at this point it's probably about a trillion and a half or north of that in money printing every year. People don't understand what a massive swindle this is, right? This is not learing centers 20 million at a time, right? This is this is enormous sums of money being siphoned out of the pocket of every, you know, dollar holder, every pensioner, uh, anybody on a fixed income, anybody with a contract that, you know, that has nominal prices, which is almost everybody. Well, and that's the thing, Peter, that I think most of the world doesn't understand. I tried to address this a little bit in my book, and Austrian economists do understand is that over time, the natural course of prices is they should fall as mankind becomes more efficient and smarter and we do things better, cheaper, faster. And I mean, you can actually see that very well in an area that we're all very familiar with, which is electronics and technology. I mean, remember what you paid for your first huge flat screen TV and remember the quality of it? you know, it was thousands of dollars and it was much lower quality than today. And you can buy the same TV today for, you know, a fraction of that and it's higher quality. So, [snorts] [laughter] excuse me. That's the kind of thing that could be and should be happening in all areas. Not not entirely because some things are it's hard to make certain processes more efficient. But, as you pointed out, I mean, there have been things like the China price or or even oil. Finding oil has gotten cheaper um as a result of fracking. Do you know what I mean? and the technology to to locate oil deposits has gotten better. So, so yes, we should be living much better lives than we're living. And everyone thinks, "Oh, isn't this great? We've got all this technology. We're living pretty well." But a lot of it has been stolen and rad by the people at the top who, you know, benefit from this system. I mean there's a whole there's a term we have for called canillionaires which are basically people who know how to borrow cheaply and invest in things that are going to work and grow and you know they they get ahead and so that's why we have such enormous wealth concentration at the top whereas the average citizen is they're only four s they have two sources of borrowing one is against their house and that's a good asset and they can generally borrow at 6 7 8% or you know lower at some points in time but their second source of borrowing is a credit card and that's basically usery, you know, the credit card companies are all between 18 and 30%. So, you can't borrow at 18 30% invested things and get ahead. That's pretty hard to do. So,

um yet if you're on Wall Street, you know, you can borrow at the Fed funds rate and of course they do. So, so yeah, it's a very unfair system. It's very broken. Now the so Kevin Walsh one of the things that he he's talked about uh even before becoming Fed chair was this idea that artificial intelligence is going to be massively deflationary

right

and so that's going to create the you know

the space to cut to cut rates

space to cut rates so I guess the first question is do you think that's going to happen uh you know given all of the equities that Kevin Walsh has to deal with at this point. Number two, if it does, are we going to see a giant everything bubble? Everything is going to go up again. It's going to be like CO squared.

Yeah. Well, there's a lot in there. Um, look, I I think AI is real and I think AI is going to increase overall general human productivity. There's no doubt about it. I've experienced it myself. We've all experienced I have people who are friends who are parallegals and and so forth. I mean you can just do you know it's a great a is a great tool and you can do more better cheaper faster just like the spreadsheet was a great tool and the internet was a great tool and email is a great tool these are all things that improve productivity and so that's that's a positive is it going to completely solve the problem the way that worst describes it happen instantly and we've got this enormous boost in productivity that therefore you know prevents inflation I I don't buy that I think that's all that's a dream that's like doge is going to cut a trillion dollars out of the budget which never happen. Um, you know, it's a nice it's a nice fairy tale to talk about, but it's not realistic if you actually examine the numbers. I mean, you know, we have to basically grow this economy very rapidly or else the debt is going to overwhelm us. And the only way historically to do that is to have a lot of inflation. I mean, they did it after World War II. You know, the the thing that's interesting now is that debt to GDP now is in the 124% range and after World War II is very similar. It's about 114% range. And basically the way we got out of that after World War II was we grew we grew the economy like crazy. I mean we went from producing a million cars a year to producing 5 million. We went from you know uh 200,000 housing starts to millions of housing starts. And so you know that that kind of and and that was all good and that it it allowed us to grow the economy and reduce the size of the debt relative to the economy. The other thing they did is they balanced the budget and so the debt didn't get any bigger. I mean that got very big when they were fighting World War II but then it didn't get any bigger. Here's the thing that's important to notice is that in that period where we were growing, inflation was really high throughout the 40s and 50s, there was one year in 1952, inflation was 18% a year.

So, you know, the whole I mean, but Santa has been out there saying we're we got to grow our way out of this debt burden. And he's right. I mean, in a sense, he's right, but guess what? You can't do that without having inflation. [laughter] You know, you just can't because because you can't get 18% productivity improvement. It's just not going to happen that quickly. You're going to get some but not that much. Right.

Right. Well, the Doge example is nice uh because in theory so you know Singapore for example kept growing at 6 7% even after it was a rich country. However, if you look at the, you know, package of taxes, regulation, uh, frankly, government involvement, you know, Singapore comes in and like proactively seeks out startups and say, "How can we help you?"

Right.

Um, like what we do with, you know, people on welfare, Singapore does with startups. Right.

Right.

So, like it it, you know, like with Doge, it's a great idea to slash a trillion dollars. Yes, we should absolutely do that. What are the odds? Similarly, it's a great idea to grow at 67% like Singapore. What would it take to get from here to there? We're sitting here right now. You know, Bernie Sanders wants to ban AI. Like,

the, you know, central debate points for us on economic policy are nowhere close to where they

Well, [laughter] that's, you know,

that's right. I mean, we don't have the kind of industrial policy necessary to to drive that growth. But but you know to be fair I mean I'm I'm very supportive of growing. I mean growth is a good thing. I just think it's going to be inflationary growth and it has to be inflationary growth and that that's probably the least painful way out of this thing. I mean the other the other way to solve it would be to just let it all collapse and you know that's a a 1929 kind of scenario and and that's very destructive and a lot of people suffer in that. There's no point in doing that. So, I I think that, you know, the and really the the correct solution, Peter, I mean, I talk about this in the book, is is a one-time monetary reset where we say, "Look, we've been living off our, you know, debt too long. We need to return to sound money, and here's how we're going to do it." Now, that would have a certain very, you know, it'd be like tearing off a band-aid. It would hurt. But if we then return to a sound money standard, um, things would rearrange themselves very quickly and we'd be off to, you know, very non-inflationary growth, which would be a great thing. Um but the you know the debt means that we've got to continue growing. And the other thing that's just really disappointing is the lack of will to address the deficits. I mean

just this weekend I read you know that um another party had come out and said that if we don't spend 1.5 trillion in defense you know we're going to lose the we're going to lose the Middle East. Well you know one I'm not even sure that's true. But two you know where are we going to get the 15 trillion? I mean we're already spending 800 billion. So that's add another 700 billion and we're running a deficit of north of two trillion a year, you know, and and theoretically in a full employment or relatively full employment economy where the record high stock prices. I mean, you know, imagine if one of those things changes. Imagine if the stock market turns down or we get a business downturn, the deficits are going to get even larger. So all of these things in a big picture sense are what I call the symptoms of a sovereign debt crisis. And the United States is behaving in a way that in histo in history was much more common among smaller and emerging countries which is they spend more than they have. They borrow to do it. Eventually they can't make the debt payments and the interest payments. They print the money to do it. People realize they're printing the money to do it. They abandon the currency and the currency has super high rates of inflation and or potentially even it fails. And all of those things are now kind of occurring. And and we saw that we've seen this in Venezuela, Ecuador, Wymer, Germany, you know, Zimbabwe. I mean, there hundreds hundred examples of it. I I lay them out in the book. And and as a result of that, that's I think we're doing the same things in the United States. Now, we happen to be the biggest country with, you know, the biggest military and we're kind of the reserve currency still, even though we've lost some of that. And uh so it's going to take a little bit longer and it's not like we're going to fail overnight, but if you do the same things, you're going to get somewhat like the same results. And I think at a minimum it means we're going to get very high inflation. And you're really seeing that now. I mean look at look at the diesel pricing. You know look at the I mean at you know I mean wars came in and he was talking about how he wanted to shrink the balance sheet and he thought we could cut interest rates because of this AI productivity miracle. And of course now all the numbers have gone against him. And so he's faced with a very difficult decision. I mean this week they have a Fed meeting.

And I think the market is saying it's like an 80 or 90% chance he's going to hike. And maybe he will. I don't know. I I I actually don't think he will. I think he'll try and find some excuse not to, but but maybe he will. Um, and uh, you know, it's it's a problem. I mean, this inflation, they're not going to slay this inflation beast easily. Once it gets started, this is like the 70s. Uh, it tends to each wave tends to get bigger. So, if you own gold, and many of you do, you already understand how it protects your wealth from the insanity coming out of Washington, the inflation, the recessions, the wars. But with monetary medals, there's a way to actually earn a yield of up to 4% on your gold, paid in more ounces of gold. You retain ownership of real allocated physical gold with no storage costs while your ounces grow every month outside the banking system. If you're serious about protecting your future and building your legacy, head to monetarymetals.com/per to get started. Now, back to the show. Yeah. Before Walsh came in, uh, he was t he'd actually been talking for years about this. He calls it Robin Hood monetary policy,

right,

where they can cut rates because they're going to sell down the Fed's balance sheet, which is the stash of money the Fed's accumulated by printing money in the past. And it's

right

something like six trillion or 7 trillion.

Yeah. Yeah. 6 and a half trillion I think the balance sheet is today roughly. Yeah.

Six six and a half trillion. And so if you do that then it cancels the dollars and then in theory you can let the real economy rip with low interest rates and that's going to be soaked up by the balance sheet roll off. And I think it was about 3 or 4 months ago where they started I can't remember the mechanism you probably know this better uh but they got kind of a scare out of financial markets sort of a a uh echo of the so-called taper tantrum where essentially you know markets were seemingly unable to digest the reduction of the Fed balance sheet and so they they pivoted back to so-called not QE in other words

they call They call it reserve management and it happened in December when Powell was still Fed chair

and they said it wasn't QE and it wasn't money printing both of which are technically lies but um and and and yes so they so they did start printing money and they are printing money now admittedly not at big print like rates I mean this is I I call this right now we're kind of in small print land and then they're doing some other things around the margin which I'm sure you and your listeners have been familiar with which is to say Treasury Secretary Bassant who used a lot of money to sold a lot of bills to build up the Treasury General account has been using that account to buy back um longer term bonds because you know the real so the trigger here just for everybody to understand this is we're in potentially we're in kind of a debt doom loop where um just describe that quickly. Government runs a deficit. They have to finance the deficit by selling debt. That's more debt into a fixed number of debt buyers, which means the interest rate goes up to get that debt sold, which then and by the way, the US government's one of the largest payers of interest in the world. We pay $1.3 trillion a year in interest on our 40 trillion of debt. And so that that then gets larger. You know, the the interest payments get larger if the rate goes up. So then the deficit gets bigger. So then we got to sell more debt. You see where I'm going with this? It's a we call it a doom loop. It's recursive. And you know, it just the more interest rates go up, the bigger the deficit gets. The bigger the deficit gets, the more debt you got to sell. So, so that's the risk that they're facing and they know it. And um historically, because they've acted aggressively several times to prevent it, the real trigger rate is to see the US 10-year bond yield go through 5%. And as I look at it right now, we're almost there. In fact, we might be there this morning. We're 4.98 this morning. So, we're right on the edge of that. and um you know and and so what Bent has been doing is he's been buying back bonds to try to keep that rate from going out of control but I I'm not sure he's going to be successful. Right?

So in the late 1990s uh the tenure was running about 7%

right

in the 1980s the early 80s was running 12 a.5. Now, that was the overhang coming off the 1970s. But just taking the late 90s, why could we digest 7% in the '9s because that was the miracle economy, right? Everybody was excited. That was the dot era. That was Bill Clinton, new Gingrich.

It's a great question, a great point. The biggest the biggest difference is that we weren't running the huge deficits, Peter, and we didn't have the debt to GDP that we have now.

Yeah.

I mean, when Paul Vulkar came in, so so we had an inflation. We went off the let's just to recoup the big picture. We went off the gold standard in 71 and people started losing confidence in the dollar and they were buying gold. So gold went from 22 to $800 in the course of the decade of the 70s. It was very inflationary. Debt to GDP at the time was in the mid30 range like I think it was like 38%. Paul Vulker said look I know how to solve this problem. We're going to jack interest rates up to 20%. and we're going to create an enormous positive, you know, interest rate on the bonds and people will buy these bonds. Um, and we will we will put we will stop inflation and moni, you know, the money supply growth debt in its tracks. And he did and they could do it because the numbers the balance sheet numbers allowed that. Okay. Um, the balance sheet then, you know, came down as a percentage for some time because we really didn't run that big of deficits, you know, post that time frame. Um, and then Reagan came along and he started running deficits, but they in today's terms they're quaint. They were like, you know, hundred billion or something. I mean, we're running$ two trillion dollar deficits. I remember when Reagan's deficits first were announced, I think his first one was like 180 trillion or some billion. And everyone was like up in arms. We can't run a deficit that big. It's enormous. And now, of course, it seems quaint. Um, but you know, and in the Clinton era actually, if you recall, and it was somewhat based on accounting ledger demand, if you recall, there was actually a year where we ran a surplus. So, um, part of the reason we could do it was the debt burden wasn't so large and the and the the fiscal dominance, which is, you know, a term we can define in a minute, wasn't as present. We weren't as as monetarily out of control. And and that's really the core of the problem. I mean, yes, having a lot of debt is a bad thing, but hey, Japan's had a lot of debt for 20 or 30 years, and people said, Japan's going to collapse, right? Well, yes, but they also had a ton of savers, and they weren't running huge deficits. So, you know, the difference here is that our deficit's what's really doing us in. And and that's why when I talk to people who are looking at investing my fund, I always say that, you know, they say, "Well, what could go wrong? How do we not make money in this investment, Larry?" And I'd say, "Well, we don't make money if the government gets responsible." Of course, they always laugh, right? Because we all know that the odds of that are pretty low. But, you know, look, I mean, my investment thesis would be severely tested if the government started to get serious about balancing the budget. I mean, the reason that the reason they have to keep printing the money is that they they keep spending more than they're bringing in and issuing debt to do it. And so that's that's the real core of the problem, right? All right. So, explain fiscal dominance. So, traditionally, the alleged purpose of the Fed was to manipulate interest rates in order to get the Goldilocks economy with just enough growth and just enough inflation. you've argued and I think it's a you make a great case that the Fed is no longer that's no longer the predominant uh goal, right? Uh you know they're not they're not trying to walk the line between growth headlines and inflation headlines rather at this point their main goal is fiscal dominance. So explain what that is and how the chang.

So the Fed has had a lot of mandates if you recall when it was set up in 1913. It was set up because of the panic in 1907 when JP Morgan bailed out the banking system. And what the bankers at the time realized is that if we could get the federal government to back our play um every time we got out over our skis, they would print the money to protect us and we wouldn't go bankrupt. And so so that was the initial reason behind the Fed. you know to have a we need a permanent backs stop to secure the financial system. So that was there for quite some time. In the 70s the Fed charter got amended to focus on um you know full employment and um you know low inflation or monetary stability. Um and that that third item wasn't really talked about very much but we know it's there and I call it the Fed put. um which is yeah we want to have as you say we want to have monetary um we want to have a balanced monetary system but but if something breaks they're there um and and so what happens is once you get into fiscal dominance the the Fed really what they do really can't control things that much and by fiscal dominance I mean the point where they are spending more money than they are bringing in and the market is starting to trade interest rates and stocks and bonds and gold and and Bitcoin and all more on is this government creditworthy rather than does this interest rate compensate me for my risk. Um and and the fact of the matter is that the government the market is coming to see that they're not getting compensated for the risk. The bond market is the sucker at the table. I mean it's amazing how how much bonds have gone down in gold terms since you know we started running these huge deficits. I mean they've just been getting killed. And that goes back to my point about we we're in a sovereign debt crisis. So the history of the Fed is that when a bubble burst, they reinflate it. You know, when the.com bubble burst, I remember very clearly Greenspan saying, you know, we need to get a housing bubble going. You know, and he even advised people, go out and take out a heliloc against your house, borrow against your house. And so they got the economy going after the collapse of the dotcom bubble. And then the.com bubble burst and they took interest rates down to zero again. And they were like, well, we, you know, we got to get the economy going again. And they held him there for a long time. I mean, 0% interest rates is just an outright crime. I mean, it's a crime against capitalism to have money have no value. It implies the money is worthless, which kind of is, but um and so basically what then happened is, you know, now we've blown a bubble at the next level up. So each level, you know, with with stocks burst, we we we printed a housing bubble. Housing bubble burst, we printed a a bubble in kind of everything. COVID came along and now we're you know and that at that point in time they really took the gloves off as you know they sent out checks they handed money to you know to companies um that they didn't have to pay back. I mean, they just really let the printing rest run wild and it was, you know, it was over $5 trillion worth of stimulus. And so, you know, now what they've done is they they've called into question, you know, is the currency itself worthless. I mean, they they've always said, don't worry, you know, we Bernaki said, we we have a technology of printing press. We are not going to let deflation happen here. Even though deflation is good and natural and we want deflation, they've said they've determined that it's not good because they're Keynesians. Fine. So, if they're not going to let deflation happen, we know that at the end of the day, if things start to go sour, they're going to print more money. And the math of the situation is such that they're going to have to print a ton of money, which is why I named my book The Big Print. It's not going to be a little one. Each one's gotten bigger. I mean, in the [laughter] in the '08 example, they printed, I don't know, $3 trillion over four or five years. I mean, that was QE1 and two and QE Infinity and Bernaki. And I I remember Bernaki telling Ron Paul, "Oh, yeah, you know, the balance sheet is 1 point some trillion. We'll bring it back down." Well, They went to three, you know, and then in the COVID one, they took it from three to nine at one point. They brought it back down to six something. But um and the point is with each one of these, it gets bigger. Has to get bigger because of the way the debts compounding. So, you know, another one of these events is coming. Uh we don't know when. Um but I've never been more certain of anything because of the math. So, that's why, you know, it's just it's absolutely essential. So, I think the average person um is aware of this issue and has a piece of their savings in money that can't be printed.

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So walk us through what you think is coming next here. One of the key questions I want you to kind of put in the sequence is

timing

the next recession. So since the Fed has been created, we have recessions almost like clockwork.

That's because of the Fed's monetary manipulation. It makes rates too low and then it hikes them too high.

We're at the potentially too high stage at this point. But walk through so what happens first?

Uh is a recession necessary for that sort of doom sequence to start? It's a great It's a great question. I I don't know because we're kind of in uncharted territory. I mean,

we could just go right into what Austrian economists call a crackup boom where they just everything keeps going up,

but the inflation gets worse and worse and worse and, you know, the um we don't head towards hyperinflation, but we head towards very high inflation. Um I think that, you know, my sense is that right now real interest rates are pretty negative. um you know, inflation by my calculations, even though they reported at three or four, I think it's running closer to seven or 8%. And so, you know, if that's the case in a 10-year time frame, why would you want to own a bond that's paying you four or 5%. You wouldn't. Um, and so I I think what's going to happen is the bond market's going to be the trigger for it. And it's actually happening right now. I just looked, the 10ear actually just went through 5%. And so, you know, that's in my view eventually what's going to happen is the government is going to be forced to step in and put in what we call yield curve control, which is they're going to say, "We stand ready to buy all these bonds at 5%." And by the way, they did this in World War II. This is not something new. I mean, when they were financing World War II, they knew they were going to have to sell a ton of bonds. And they knew that if interest rates went up, that was going to be a real problem because the cost of those servicing those bonds was going to make the problem bigger. So, what did they do? They said, "Okay, short-term rates are 38 of a percent and long-term rates are 2.5%." And we stand ready to buy everything at those prices. And my sense is that's probably what's going to happen here. And when they do that, you know, the bond market's going to look at the Fed and go, "Sold to you." And so the Fed balance sheet is going to go from 6 trillion to 20 trillion. And you know, you might ask, well, okay, the bond market comes to the Fed and says, "I want to sell my bond to you because I don't like this 5% anymore." Where's the Fed going to get the money to buy that bond? Easy. They're going to print it. They're going to issue a reserve to a bank and the bank's going to buy it. Um, and so that's going to grow M2 again and the money supply is going to explode upward. And so so they will keep the system running. Um, but it will be very very inflationary, Peter. And does does it mean, you know, do we have a recession? Does the stock market go down? I don't know. Stock market's pretty overvalued. Um, but that doesn't mean it has to go down. I mean, I I've said in my letters, and I believe truly that what they're going to try probably try and do is a run it hot strategy, which is to say, I mean, if you know, okay, inflation's eating you alive, but hey, you all have jobs and the economy is still running and the stock market's making record highs in nominal terms, not in gold terms, not in Bitcoin terms, but in nominal terms. And so, my suspicion is we kind of tend towards that side of things. But, you know, along the way here, if anything goes wrong and we do have, you know, an economic downturn or something breaks, I mean, candidates for that are commercial real estate and private credit and the insurance companies and there a lot of different areas where they're a

AI debt probably.

Yeah, AI debt. I didn't thought about that one, right? I mean, got all these companies taking on enormous AI debt and now we discover the Chinese are offering the same thing for a fraction of the cost, right? And of course, you're already seeing the AI guys starting to position for how the government's going to save them or bail them out, right? I mean, it's just

it's it's just it's horrible. And so, you know, look, it it we don't know exactly how it's going to pull. We don't know the time frame, but I will make two predictions. I've said many times other podcasts, I think we're coming to a head in the next 12 months. I mean, this kind of feels to me like 20 2007. You know, some of the things that have happened, you know, with the with the, you know, the private credit guys gating their investors, etc. These kind of remind me a little bit of summer of 2007 when the the Bear Stern CRS CRS funds failed or CDE funds failed and and so if you think about summer of 7 2007 we didn't actually get the crack up until September of '08. So, you know, I kind of feel like in the next year this going to become a real problem and they're going to have to do something like yield curve control or drop interest rates substantially. I mean one way by the way you know if you think about the US government deficit right we're running a $2 trillion deficit u but you know say a trillion of that round numbers is interest expense well how do you solve that you take interest rates down to zero and you're not paying anything on your bonds you know your your deficit gets reduced and so your interest expense is much lower now in turn you know the bond market then the bond market really revolts you know what are you kidding me you know you're you're printing money and you're you know you're doing something that's massively inflationary Because don't you know don't get me wrong reducing interest rates will create borrowing which will create M2 which will lead to inflation. So if we go down that direction fine um but it's going to be massively inflationary right and so so I think within the next year it's going to come to I think within you know longer term I think within you know call it six or seven years there's a good chance the whole monetary system fails or we have to have a reset which is to say you know inflation's incredibly high it's persistent um and maybe we elect some politicians you know um like you know Thomas Massie or Warren Davidson who say Hey, we got to return to sound money. Um, so I I kind of that's that's the longer term view, but but we're not there yet. Um, you know, we're not even close to being there yet. I think I think we're at the stage where most of the world knows that inflation's a problem. Um, and I think we're in the stage where maybe 10 or 20% of the world has a sense of how to address it, which is, you know, real estate, gold, silver, and Bitcoin. But I think we're, you know, we still got 80 or 90% of the country that really doesn't understand why we've got inflation. and they and they tend to believe the Fed narrative that oh well don't worry the Fed will hike rates and we'll get this all back under control again when mathematically that's just not possible. That's the whole thing is this isn't really this isn't a valuebased judgment. It's actually based on the math you know.

Yeah. I think uh definitely uh Wall Street people at large are sort of assuming maybe they don't realize it but they're assuming that the Vulkar solution you know jacking rates up that can fix it. Don't worry about it. there's a solution to it. And as you said earlier, you know, the debt as a percent of GDP is more than three times higher than it was when Vulkar worked his magic.

Uh you [laughter] there aren't enough dollars uh to hike it to 20%. Like if you did 20%, right? If you had 20% rates at this point on 40 trillion of government debt, the government debt alone would be 8 trillion in interest expense. Right.

I think they collect something like six trillion.

Yeah, that's right.

And and then you know there's a lot of things to buy like trillion and a half defense budget. So I mean that would be enormous.

So if you just take the gap on that you're talking 7 trillion let's say.

Yeah.

And the entire money supply is 20 trillion. So that would be just naive math. 35% inflation per year.

You're absolutely right. It it just but the bottom line Peters it just doesn't work. It just mathematically doesn't work. And it's it's kind of stunning to me how obtuse so many people are that they just don't see this because it's just sitting there in plain sight. It really I mean you just laid it out very very well. I mean it it's it's sitting there in plain sight. I mean if they actually hike interest rates that's going to make it worse. Now maybe tomorrow, you know, this week he's going to there's a Fed meeting at this week. I think it's on the 16th. Maybe he's going to hike rates 25%. Maybe he's going to hike them 50%. who the hell knows and trying to establish himself as a as a inflation fighter. If he goes down that road at some point something's going to break and you know and and it's possible that that's their strategy, you know, to to hike rates, have things break, have the market break, have everything break, and then come in as the firefighter and drop rates quickly. I mean, this is what they've done in the past and and try to save everything. But in my view, that's kind of a stupid strategy. um you know, they'd be much better off to cut rates now and say, you know, we're going to let inflation run hot. Um you know, nobody likes that, but everyone will at least keep their jobs. We'll keep the economy moving forward. I mean, obviously everything will get more expensive and those on fixed incomes are going to get crushed. But um I mean the re, you know, look, the real the real solution here is to do a one-time monetary reset, but [laughter] excuse me, there's no political will for that from what I can see. So

yeah, I mean generally historically it takes a crisis to get there and for better or worse we're not at a crisis and if we were at a crisis that's not necessarily a good thing for the accelerationists out there. If we look at every crisis in American history, uh you could argue Andrew Jackson was a crisis that made things better. He got rid of the Fed,

the precursor to the Fed. Every other crisis has made things substantially worse. Right? This is the crisis and leviathon ratchet book by Bob Higgs.

Y

you know every war, every 2008, every COVID, we don't come out the other end of it purified.

No,

leaner and meaner. Well, no, but but but having said that, there are cycles and you know, if you um you know, look, I mean, what Vulkar did was extremely painful, but then he did pave the way for a bunch of years of falling inflation and and generally um healthy economic growth. I mean, it would have been better if we'd been on sound money to begin with and, you know, a lot of that um, you know, the productivity increases that we enjoyed would have flown through to people, but but they kind of had it all in balance back then to some degree. Um, you know, and and that's why I mean, I think a lot of people out there are missing the fact that this is the kind of thing you got to look at in hundredyear cycles. I mean, the last we're in a sovereign debt crisis. The last sovereign debt crisis was World War I. you know, when basically the cost of the war forced all the European countries to go off the gold standard. Um, you know, and so, um, that's the model. Um, and nobody was around then is alive today. So, um, you know, everybody's using the old playbook, which is, yeah, the Fed will raise rates and we'll get inflation under control. We'll go back to it all being normal and the stock market will go on to make new highs because, hey, you know, buying the dip has worked since 1980. and it has, you know, generally uh but I I'm not so sure it's gonna continue to work. [laughter] I'll take the other side of that bet.

All right. So, speaking of which, last question here.

Yeah.

How should an ordinary American like what should they own? And a key point here, I think you're familiar with the book When Money Died. Yeah.

By uh

very good book. Yeah.

Yep. By Ferguson. and he talks about the VIAR uh episode of hyperinflation and one of the points that struck me in that book is that early on in VHimar stock markets reflect the future right and so when the hyperinflation started coming in stocks responded to it first

yeah so in terms of how people should position themselves I mean the point I make to most people I think is that um you know if you have savings um I mean and by the way if you know, if you're young and you don't have a lot of savings, I mean, it's u this is less relevant. And whatever the new money is going to be, you're going to you got your whole career in front of you to make money. But, um, the point is if you're older and you have savings, it's generally important to hold on to those savings because in your later years, you're not going to have as much earnings power and you want to have, you know, be able to live, okay? Um, and and I guess the point I try to make is that we clearly live in a period of monetary debasement and we clearly live in a period where inflation is going to be a problem. And the the best traditional protection against inflation are to own things the government can't print. So real estate qualifies, but the negative there is you've got t taxes and maintenance and a lot of issues and some areas are a bubble. So, you know, real estate's I think a poor substitute. I think probably the best pure play qualifier is gold. Um and then if you want something that's got more alpha to it and obviously has a lot more volatility, Bitcoin, uh in my opinion is great as well. My book talks about both of those. um silver works too. Um you know because these are these are forms of money that cannot be printed and I think they have you know although they've gone up a fair amount in the last year or two I think they have much much further to go as you know the governments continue to debase the currency. how you know what what you should be looking out for is if if that changes then you know maybe lighten up and and like all investments the way to deal with this I mean I happen to be about 100% in on both of these two assets but I'm a professional and I can do that um you know given my circumstance I think that most people um you know I think a lot of people just have their IRA or their 401ks in the stock market and I think the stock market is very pricey I'm not saying it's going down but I don't think it offers the riskreward benefits that gold than Bitcoin do. And I often say to people, if you don't have 20% or 30% of your savings in something that protects you from this inflation, I think in five or 10 years, you're going to have regret. Um, and and by the way, stocks kind of protect you from inflation because they, you know, they're they're productive enterprises that will go up in value over time. But traditionally, in highly inflationary periods, stocks have been kind of, you know, subpar. Like take the 70s as the last big inflationary period. stocks were kind of flat to slightly up over the whole 10-year period, whereas gold was up, you know, gold and oil, the two major commodities, were up 30% a year, compounded for 10 years. I mean, it was enormous. And I think that's the kind of environment we're going into, an inflationary environment. So, I think that people need to make a make a decision, you know, take a decision to have some of their assets in these assets that that will be protecting them from inflation. Yeah, that's a great point that you know stocks are kind of a halfway hedge. They are real things.

However, they get overvalued in the inflationary period and then uh you know that point about the 70s is great. They held value. Uh but I think housing went up quite a bit during the 70s although in 1980 it wasn't as high as you would think. I mean it did go up quite a bit but remember in 1980 interest rates were 20%. And housing was really driven by interest rates. And I remember

that's true.

You know, at the time frame and my I I saw my parents house a good example. So my parents um

bought a house in Ann Arbor in the 60s for I don't know 40,000 50,000. That's kind of what it was, right?

And uh so the 70s came along and there was enormous inflation. I think by the end of the 70s that house was worth I don't know maybe you know 150 you know so it gone up 3x which was nice

but interest rates were high and it was only 150. Well, as interest rates came down over the next, you know, from 80 to 90, that 150 became 800 or something. I mean, you know, because people can now afford, you know, the higher housing prices. So, uh, yeah, it's, um, housing is it's got a interest rate component to it.

Yeah.

All right, Larry, thank you for coming on.

Thank you. Um, if you don't mind, I want to show my book.

100% show your book. Yeah. I was going to ask, all right, how do people follow you? And please show your book.

Yeah. Okay. Well, you follow me. I'm on Twitter. It's just under my name, Lawrence Leard or X, I guess it's called now. I'll always call it Twitter. Um, the book is available on Amazon. It's the only place it's available. I didn't have a formal publisher. I self-published it. I sold about 60,000 copies of it. Um,

wow.

Yeah, it's in all Well, it's it's okay. It's in all formats. It's called the big print. It's in all formats. um you know, hard cover, soft cover, um uh Kindle and audio.

And then I I also um I run a fund and my partner and I, David Foley, we run this fund called EMA, Equity Management Associates. And so we have a website, EMA2, uh Edward Markalpha 2.com, where we publish our quarterly commentary. And that quarterly commentary is about a 15-page writeup of, you know, what happened this quarter in the monetary debasement world, more or less. and and it's free. You can sign up. There's a place if you go you scroll down on the page, there's a place you put in your email address and we won't ever spam you. And so you can read our quarterly commentary of, you know, how we see things going and and that's free. So So those are really the best ways. And um yeah, no, I I just also I'm on pods a lot so and I I'm kind of I kind of keep I'm a broken record. I keep saying the same thing over and over again, but it is coming, you know, and I think that you know I mean one one of the things we didn't cover, Peter, I think a lot of people ask me kind of where do I these prices are going? I mean, let me just give you a sense. You know, I I kind of feel like gold is going to, you know, between 6 and 10,000 in the next couple years. Um, I kind of feel like Bitcoin is going between 150 and 250,000 in the next couple years. So, and I have pretty high level of confidence in both of those. Um, but I could be wrong. I mean, I I thought Bitcoin would be higher by now than it is. So, um, I could be off, but I think they're both going higher.

Yeah. I didn't want to put you on the spot. I know that uh you know the trick as a financial uh analyst or commentator is always that if you make a concrete prediction

I'll say the time. Yeah.

Yeah. You're going to be wrong in some sense, right? Either it's going to go you know much higher than you said like like the likelihood that you know gold in 5 years is exactly what you said it is is nearly zero. It's going to be somewhere around there. And so you know there's a lot of people who uh who avoid making predictions. So yes, that is bold. You're actually putting a number on it.

Well, I'm just giving a time frame. Yeah, general rule of thumb. I mean, I I think they will both be significantly higher as this sovereign debt crisis unfolds. And it's just math. And you know, how and when it unfolds, we don't know. Um, you know, if there's some kind of big break, and I think there could be, you know, if something really breaks at some point, then, you know, the history of this, I mean, after 2008, gold, we keep in mind that in 2008, gold got hammered right in the beginning. um until they printed. And in 2020, it was the same story. And so, one of the things I would caution people who are thinking of buying these things is that you really have to be prepared for the possibility that in a in a in a something breaking scenario, you kind of get a liquidity squeeze and everybody sells everything and everything will go down.

Yes.

And so, you know, Bitcoin went down 50%, gold went down 25 and and that could happen again. Now, you know, it didn't last very long because in both instances, the Feds stepped in and printed a lot of money and 3 months, 6 months, a year later, they were both much higher than they were when the whole thing started. But, um, you know, it's a uh it is a volatile trade and I I caution people, you know, to be aware of that. I mean, you don't want to buy into these two things. See the see the market break, they go down and then you panic. you know, these are these are long-term holdings that I'm quite certain math will reward you. Um, but you've got to think in a couple of year time frame.

Yeah, really good advice. Um, specifically for anybody considering Bitcoin, it's a very common pattern that if somebody comes into Bitcoin and they don't really understand it, you know, they haven't gone through the [laughter] years of uh content to really become familiar with it, then they'll panic at the first drop. And the key on all these things is, you know, you decide what your thesis is ahead of time. And, you know, as you say, in in 2008, everything went down for a minute because the market, broadly speaking, considers dollars as out of the market. They shouldn't, but they do think of it that way. And so, you know, everybody dumped they dumped everything, right?

Correct.

Uh, but then, of course, the snap right back. And if your thesis is correct, then the snapback should be violent. Like it should be COVID level as in stuff dips for a minute. And it did dip right early in co like midFebruary there was a moment there where stocks went down that I want to say 10 or 12%.

That was more than it actually went down about 28%. And then and then POW panic and came in with just all those programs and all that money

and they just took off and you know Bitcoin as I recall was roughly eight or 9,000 and I co it dipped into the five maybe four five six area is just by memory

and then in October it went from 10 to 60

you know over the next over the next year. So I mean [laughter] um and that's that's the pattern you know they they they wait for something to break it breaks they print money and the money flows into the system and the hard the hard assets go up. So and and for the record the pattern that you're describing of you know gold and bitcoin going up. I mean in gold's case that's a 55 year trend without the system collapsing

right. So you know people you know they say ah yeah you know you've you've said the system's going to collapse for 55 years. Okay. But gold has been, you know, it was what, $23?

Oh, yeah. Or

Yeah. It was $35 in 1971. That was the last $35. So, it went from 35 to what is it today?

4,400.

Bingo. So, you you know, even even if the big print doesn't occur, if we just have another 55 years of little print, apparently that's stellar.

That's right. I mean, that's, you know, I can't say for certain that we're going to have runaway inflation. I, you know, or hyperinflation. the currency is going to collapse. Total sovereign debt crisis. But what I am extremely confident of is that given the fiscal situation, we live in an inflationary world and it will continue to be inflationary until something changes, you know, until they they cut back on spending or balance the budget.

And I don't see any evidence right now that that's going to happen.

Agreed. I think everybody listening was [laughter] that snowballs chance.

Yeah. I mean, actually, I forgot about the most recent one. I mean, how about those $5,000 checks Trump's going to send us, right? Oh lord.

Where's the money? That's $1.2 trillion. Where's the money for that coming from?

We're We're, you know, three weeks from Democrats doing 10 and why stop at 10?

Well, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Vote for us and we'll give you 10, right?

Yep. It's just nuts. So, anyway, I really enjoyed talking to you. Thank you very much for taking the time.

Yeah, it's always great. Thanks, Larry. And folks, thanks for tuning in. Until next week, we'll be watching. See you next time.

Paramount Skydance Chairman and CEO David Ellison is exploring a potential California exit as the studio battles a multistate challenge to its $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Politico reported late Wednesday that the studio is seeking roughly 400,000 square feet of office space in Nashville, signaling that its relocation is in the works. We have reported in the last few days and last month of Paramount's plan to exit the left-wing state (read here & here). 

The studio could move at least some operations to the Tennessee capital within two to three years, according to the report. No relocation has been announced, but the search raises the risk that California could lose a major Hollywood studio headquarters. Such a loss would deepen concerns about the state's ability to retain businesses as its entertainment industry struggles and the exodus of businesses and residents shows no signs of stopping.

Starting in October, Paramount will owe roughly $7 million for each day the transaction remains incomplete, according to the report. That amounts to approximately $210 million over 30 days.

The Paramount-Warner Bros. deal faces an antitrust lawsuit from 12 states, including California, despite approval from the US Justice Department in June and regulators in more than 60 countries and jurisdictions. The trial is scheduled for March, with settlement talks in San Francisco next month.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who is leading the lawsuit, has called Paramount's relocation threat nothing more than "blackmail."

For Hollywood, the potential studio loss extends beyond another corporate exit; the exodus includes Chevron, Tesla, SpaceX, Oracle, Charles Schwab, and many others.

Tennessee has actively courted the studio. Nashville also has an existing Ellison family connection: Oracle, co-founded by Larry Ellison, announced plans to move its headquarters there in 2024. Larry Ellison is also financially backing his son David's Warner Bros. deal.

"I tried to warn you. LA is getting absolutely decimated by the insane communist wackos running California. Bob Bonta's jihad against Paramount is a death blow. What a corrupt piece of shit," Spencer Pratt wrote on X.

They Will Turn Your Money Off! Incoming Stablecoins More Dangerous Than CBDCs - Fitts

Daniela Cambone: Hi everyone, welcome back to the Dingella Camboni Show. Well, look, most people who leave Wall Street and Washington either cash out or go out quietly, but Catherine Austin Fitz did neither. She's an investment banker and former US assistant secretary of housing and federal housing commissioner. She spent years in court with the Justice Department after she started asking where the money actually went. Guess what? She won. Then she started publishing what she found. She talks about missing trillions digital money that can just be switched off and facilities most of us have never seen on a map.

Today she's here and we're not going to treat her like a curiosity. We're going to treat her like someone who used to sit in the rooms where the numbers get written. Uh it's a tremendous honor to welcome to the show Katherine Austin Fitz. Katherine,

Catherine Austin Fitts: thank you.

Daniela Cambone: So good to to have you on.

Catherine Austin Fitts: It's great to be on.

Daniela Cambone: You're remind Did Did you ever see the Hamilton show when it was on Broadway?

Catherine Austin Fitts: Of course. Multiple times.

Daniela Cambone: You're reminding me of that song, I want to be in the room where it happens. The room you you Well, I like having people on the show that are in the room where it happens. And uh that's why I was dying to get you on because you've sat on both sides of the table as an investment banker and as a United States Assistant Secretary of Housing and Federal Housing Commissioner. I mean, hello. [laughter]

When did you I mean, you know, you have these incredibly highowered positions, but then you were looking, you know, through the numbers and you realized the official numbers at Real Flows no longer matched. I mean, uh, walk us through that moment. It's the first time you're on the show. I mean, when did that light bulb moment happen for you where you're like, "No, something's seriously wrong here."

Catherine Austin Fitts: So I saw tremendous corruption when I was in the administration and that's why I had to leave because I was being ordered to break the law and I wouldn't. So I had to I had to go.

But I discovered the internet and so I decided to start a company that could use the power of new technology to help democratize basically equity investment and and liquidity. So um you know we were making software tools. One was IPO in a box where small business could form a venture pool and literally with radio dots make their perspectives.

Anyway, so so we had this whole vision of democratizing sort of equity the equity markets and um and what happened was I ran right smack into the fact that the mortgage bubble was growing. We had a contract to be lead financial adviser to the Federal Housing Administration and um and what was happening was there were real shenanigans going on with mortgage fraud as you know and certainly which came out during the financial crisis and we tried to essentially wind it down and stop the corruption inside.

And so we were targeted by the Department of Justice basically to get us out to, you know, to fire us. But also we had done so much in terms of building databases and softwares to map out how the money worked that it was exposing the fraud. And so there was a great effort to steal all of our software and databases and basically keep it under court control for many years and to shut us up.

And you know, there's a great line. I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Gladiator. It's one of my favorite movies and there's a great line where they say to the gladiator before they can kill you they have to kill your name and I had a very good reputation before the litigation started and there was tremendous effort to destroy my name and I realized oh they just can't afford for me to have credibility when it comes to you know the talking about the mortgage fraud.

And it was funny because I tried to warn people about the mortgage bubble and what was happening long before the you know all the way into the financial crisis. And what was amazing was how many people wouldn't listen because I had been discredited and yet you know and when the of course when the bubble popped then it turned out I was right and and there you were.

But it was terrible because you're trying to warn everybody about something that could bankrupt them and and yet they can't hear you and it's it's a terrifying experience.

Daniela Cambone: We'll get right back to the interview, but this is an important moment to ask yourself [music] when the next crisis hits, will you be properly positioned or wish you prepared earlier?

I've spent over two decades reporting on global economic shifts and what's [music] happening now is unprecedented. In moments like this, timely decisions are critical. That's why we've put together [music] the private wealth playbook. It's a free guide showing you how to use Gold and Silver strategically for protection, [music] privacy, and long-term performance.

Click below or visit dannyreport.com to download it now so you can move forward with clarity and confidence. [music]

Now, back to the show. I mean, there's so many questions I have for you, but I find it so commendable the fact that, you know, here you are in this highpowered position, Catherine. I mean, few people would walk away from that, but you couldn't stand it.

Catherine Austin Fitts: So, I had a chance to go back in. You know, repeatedly I would get offers to go back in. But here's the thing. There is a line between civilization and the absence of civilization.

And the interesting thing about me is if you look at the training I had, I really had tremendous training both on Wall Street and in the financial world, you know that if a financial coup starts that they're going to destroy the country. And so you can't go along because you're talking about something that is going to destroy everything that gave you and I and our families the blessings that we enjoy. You you can't you can't destroy, you know, you can't be part of that.

And it was very interesting because when I left the Bush administration, I came out and I said to the people I started the company with, I said, "Look, these guys are going to use the technology to destroy us all. We need a plan B."

And so the the goal of Hamilton Securities was let's create something that can build so much bottomup wealth that these guys don't have to destroy everything. We can find a way, you know, to get the government and the country on a financially sound basis and move forward.

So my idea was not to fight with them. My idea was to provide a pathway that could work for them and everybody. So, you know, with globalization, a way that the middle class could succeed despite globalization.

And what I didn't understand was they were so dependent on criminal cash flows that they couldn't permit that to happen. And I just didn't understand it at that point.

And the litigation was the process by which I learned about the covert side of the house and understood what the issues were in terms of creating a new model because essentially we knew the existing model would have to change. we'd have to do a reset and we're in the middle of a reset.

And my vision was let's create lots of bottomup wealth with new technology. Their vision is let's use new technology to get complete top- down control. And because they're thinking conservatively and risk managers and I'm thinking who would want to live in that world? It's psychopathic.

So um you know so so there were two different visions and I have an online book after the litigation was over I wrote an online book to explain you know the difference between the two visions and what had happened and the sort of the dirty tricks and and the targeting and it was really funny.

I've tried to publish it in hard copy three times and the first two it was sabotaged badly and the third time they threatened if I did it to kill somebody in my family.

Daniela Cambone: So I said oh my lord were you getting an anonymous note? What what the how did the how did that director get

Catherine Austin Fitts: I got three phone calls each with a message but if you put them together that was the message so it's done very it's done very tactically so if I try and you know talk about it in a court of law I won't win

Daniela Cambone: but it is it a voice

Catherine Austin Fitts: no it's three people you know you have three different conversations but they each give you a piece it's like a code and when you put the three pieces together you get the message right so so um anyway so I didn't know if they were serious or not, but I didn't want to test it.

So, I've just left the book online. It's Dylan Reed andco uh.com and it's it's called Dylan Reed in the aristocracy of stock profits. And it's all there. It's all it's not it's not suppressed. They just want it in a hard copy.

Daniela Cambone: Not not to not to not to digress, but um when we talk about, you know, threats and people trying to stop this, you know, stop the exposure of the fraud. Um do you believe it's happening at the government level or is this, you know, talk of deep state stuff? like what what level are we talking about here that we're trying to listen?

Catherine Austin Fitts: You have sort of a permanent government of the intelligence agencies and the enforcement agencies um that's veryworked and and they have both private and public capacity and then you have the political representation which tends not to be the deepest part.

Um and and but you also have tremendous private interests and we've seen much more um privatization of the intelligence and enforcement capacity into you know in into literally corporations that have teams of intelligence agencies working for them.

Daniela Cambone: Okay. I'm I'm going to circle back on exposing the fraud, but let's get into the nitty-gritty here because you talk about $21 trillion that can't be accounted for, right? you know, walk us through that in in plain language of how something I mean, we're not talking about a couple of bucks here, right? How does something that large disappear without the public noticing, Catherine?

Catherine Austin Fitts: So the federal government has never obeyed the or or a new round of laws were passed in the Bush administration in 1991 and then 9293 to institute uh financial disclosure uh for the federal government and a process began in 1996 whereby the federal government announced it wasn't going to obey the law.

So the federal government since 1996 has never once obeyed the laws related to financial disclosure. They are required to have audited financial statements and to publish the audited financial statements and they have never done that. They have refused to do that.

Now you and I both know if a company refused to do that the stock exchange would shut them down. Their bankers wouldn't make their transactions. They wouldn't be able to raise capital in the markets. Right.

Daniela Cambone: Right. Of course.

Catherine Austin Fitts: Right. Okay. But the federal government can keep on borrowing and the federal government bank accounts which are run by the New York Fed and its members as agents for the New York Fed keep running its bank accounts and keep borrowing money in the Treasury market. Right?

So, so you've got a financial entity that doesn't have to obey the financial management laws or provide, you know, proper financial disclosure, which means anything's possible because if I can issue securities without putting it on my balance sheet and I can do, you know, sort of non-disclosed transactions and my banks will do it, of course, anything's possible.

Okay, so here's what happened. In 1995, there was an effort to get the financial uh system and the federal credit on a sound basis, particularly with respect to the baby boomer retirement obligations. The effort failed. It turned out to be a three-w weekek very bitter shutdown of the government.

And that period was later described to me by the president largest pension fund in the country saying, "You don't understand. They've given up on the country. They're moving all the money out starting in the fall."

And what happens the right after that the um the Fed and the New York Fed bought shares in the Bank of International Settlements and then proceeded um starting at the beginning of uh well it was October 1st 1997 large amounts of money started going missing from the federal government.

So it's called undocumentable adjustments and and the Fed the federal government had to publish supposedly financial statements. What they would do every year is publish, we're not going to produce audited financial statements and we have this much in undocumentable adjustments.

Now, what the coverup artists will tell you is, oh, well, those could just be accounting entries. But the reality is if if the department of the army has six times more undocumentable adjustments than they have budget, something is very wrong.

If your church had an annual budget of $500,000, but it was missing $6 million in a year and they said, "Don't worry, it's just accounting transactions," you would force them to produce audited financial statements. Right.

Daniela Cambone: Right. Of course.

Catherine Austin Fitts: Right. So, so what happened was from uh 1998 fiscal year to 2001, uh $4.4 trillion went missing from the federal government. And we all have heard about it because the the day before 911, Donald Rumsfeld got up and said, "There's 2.3 trillion missing from the Pentagon." Remember that? Okay, that was the missing money.

And in fact, on 911, many of the buildings that blew up had records on either the securities, the Treasury market, or the accounting. Um, you know, if you look at the office at the, uh, at the Pentagon was said to be the office where the O and I was doing an investigation on the missing money.

Anyway, so, so, um, after 9/11, people stopped worrying about the missing money. I kept talking about it, but it was not a hot topic coming into the financial crisis.

And then with the financial crisis, people started to realize the extent of the fraud. And um, and not only did you have money going missing from the federal government, but then you added 29 trillion of bailouts. And so people knew something was very wrong.

And and if you look at the size of the bailouts, it was more than three times all the single family mortgages in the country.

Daniela Cambone: So So wow.

Catherine Austin Fitts: So whatever was going on, it wasn't just mortgage fraud. Okay. So So money kept going missing.

And then finally in 2015, in the last year of Obama, um there was an announcement that there were 6.5 trillion missing from the Pentagon, which was the biggest annual number yet.

And I started, you know, I kept talking about it on the radio because at that point I had up to 12 trillion dollars of missing money. And a professor from MSU heard me and uh called me and he heard me on the radio and said, "She has to be wrong."

So he went to the Pentagon and looked at their financial statements and realized, "Oh, I was right." So the money was going missing from the Pentagon and HUD where I had used to work and I knew the financial operation at HUD, you know, inside and out.

Anyway, so so Skidmore called Dr. Skimmore called me and he said, "Can I help?" And I said, "Yeah, let's get your students and do a complete survey of all these years at at DoD and HUD."

We did and he got the number. I had it up to 12 trillion. He found another um he found another 9 trillion so we got it up to 21 trillion and that was at the end of 2015.

So there was tremendous pressure at that point with this kind of attention to get the Pentagon and HUD to produce audited financial statements.

Well, what happened next? You're going to love this, was a little known policy. Remember Kavanaaugh hearings, the Supreme Court hearings with all the sex?

Daniela Cambone: Oh, yeah.

Catherine Austin Fitts: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay. Very distracting, very attention getting.

While that was happening, and you will appreciate this, the Congress and the executive branch working together, Democrats and Republic, passed a little known policy called Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board Statement 56, which basically said, I have a big article up about it if you're interested, but it basically said that the federal government by a secret process and a secret group of people could take a secret amount of the financial statement out of the financial statements and keep it secret and not only do it for the 24 covered agencies but for 150 plus governmental entities.

And wait get this with the national security laws and the classification uh classified laws they can then add the big banks and contractors who do business with the federal government.

Now what you will understand because of your background and the show that you do that means the vast majority of the issuers in the US bond market and the large cap stock market

Daniela Cambone: have secret books

Catherine Austin Fitts: right secret books. So I used to plow through the financials of the US government and HUD and DoD and from that time on I stopped looking because who knows what it means? You don't know. It's like that it's make believe.

Daniela Cambone: Well, I I I Well, I'm wondering, well, who's who's lining their who lined their pockets the most?

Catherine Austin Fitts: So, uh, so, so there are a couple things going on. The first thing is you you've grown since the 47 and 49 act, you've grown something called the black budget, which is a secret or covert part of the economy. And it's grown and grown and grown. That's number one.

And it's, you know, it's there's so much that's secret and and as it's grown, it's benefited a huge number of people. Like a lot of the technology in Silicon Valley, I believe, based on understanding the black budget was transferred, you know, was financed by the ta taxpayers, but transferred to these corporations.

So, they're real issues as to, you know, who should really own what. But, um, so this part of the secret part of the economy has grown and grown and grown.

But then in 1995, I think what happened was they gave up on the current structure of the government and they literally decided to engineer a coup.

And the way you do that is you you keep the existing system going, but you transfer as many assets as possible into a new system and then you bring up the new system and then you slowly, you know, dissolve the existing system.

And and the way I would describe that is in the existing system the bankers run monetary policy and fiscal policy. In the new system the bankers want to run both monetary and fiscal policy. So they want control of the fiscal side of the house and they want to keep a lot of the economy secret.

Daniela Cambone: and and and and that's where we are today Katherine.

Right. And I don't I don't want to forget this question because um you spoke of these distractions and that's how they were able to do it like psychops if that's another word you want whenever they're selling like the Kavanaaugh hearings I'm like what are they really doing right what what's the what what do you think is the equivalent in today's environment okay of a news that we're being fed that's the Kavanaaugh moment

Catherine Austin Fitts: there there are two things that we need to know first of all the game with energy And if you go to Celier, we have something called the energy timeline and trade bottlenecks. You can look at it and it will describe everything.

The the energy gain going on in the planet is co 2.0. It's a way of dramatically shifting market share out of the little guys into the big guys and centralizing power. And it's part of the US moving from a an open trade model globally to a closed trade model. And it it revolves around controlling energy.

So, so you know, COVID 1.0 was health. Now we're doing energy. Yeah. Okay. And it it's all about, you know, who controls what and so, uh, take a look at that energy timeline. I think that's the important one important thing to understand.

The second important thing to understand is we are watching the organi the legal organization and preparation of the largest bubble-blowing machine we have ever seen in the financial markets with the implementation of programmable money and digital tokens.

And if you look at what they're planning to do, you know, people who say the bubble's about to collapse, the bubble's about to collapse. And the bubble right now is ridiculous.

But if you look at the bubble machinery they are building and they are planning on launching at the beginning of next year. I don't know if it'll work because this is the most outrageous bubble plan I have ever seen in my life.

And I have seen a lot of bubbles. I've seen a lot of bubbles. But and if this succeeds, if this succeeds, you are going to see a tsunami of you're going to see explosive bubbles all over the planet.

And and here's what I'm going to describe it. I'm going to give you a brief overview and then we can dive in. Okay?

Daniela Cambone: And that was nervous laughter, by the way, on my part. Okay?

Catherine Austin Fitts: So So retail is leaving the Treasury market, right? And and so we see Norway saying they're going to sell government sovereign bonds including treasuries blah blah blah. So so institution is selling.

If you look at what the Treasury plans to do with stable coins, they plan to market stable coins into retail all over the planet in a way that will bring in they think by the end of the decade three to four trillion dollars into the treasury market.

Now, that's not a lot of treasury market, but you're talking about drawing retail in in a way that you create crypto accounts. It's crypto rails and you can pump out enormous leverage to all four billion customers, right?

So, if you remember, you're probably too young to remember the way that the Germans unified Germany after the wall came down in '89. They just offered a sweet premium for the tender and for the for the East Germans and the East Germans overnight got like a stock tenders for another company.

The West Germany tendered for the Eastern Germans through the currency and boom, they unified overnight.

The US is planning on marketing dollars through crypto rails all over the planet to anybody they can reach on Google Pay, Apple Pay, mobile payment phones. And my suspicion is they're going to be exceptionally generous with leverage.

Think of this as the pallets of cash that went out to Iraq, except this time it's going out on the crypto rails.

Now, hold that thought for a second. They are working to build digital tokens for stocks and bonds. Coinbase has said, you know, and some of the other crypto firms, we're going to offer the big cap US stocks with 20 times margin on digital tokens.

So imagine four billion people and and Armstrong has said we can we can bring four billion new people into the US stock markets.

So imagine you're offering 20 time margin on the crypto rails. You bring in four billion people to the US stock and bond market.

Mark Andre about a month ago tweeted out, you know, uh our current stock market is 68% of the global stock market. Unless something goes horribly wrong, you know, within a reasonable period of time, we're going to be 90%.

That's what he means. He means we're going to go out and try and get people all over the world into our channel.

Daniela Cambone: Okay. So, two two points I find. Okay. Let's talk. A lot of your thesis is centered around digital central bank digital currencies. Um,

Catherine Austin Fitts: no stable coins through stable coins. stable coins and digital tokens.

Daniela Cambone: I feel uh and tell me if you agree with me or not. At one point, you know, and the ECB has spoken, you know, Christine Lagarde has spoken about uh moving to moving the euro to digital currency.

And in the US, we were speaking about it heavily at one point, I would say, under the Biden administration. And all of a sudden, it really uh kind of went away magically. people stop talking about it, right?

But you see it coming as soon as possibly next year, Katherine.

Catherine Austin Fitts: So, no, it's here. It's here. So, you know,

Daniela Cambone: but the use of it, the use of it.

Catherine Austin Fitts: Yeah. So, so let's talk about So, so programmable money that is used to control us is the problem. And it doesn't matter whether it comes in the form of a CBDC or it comes in the form of a stable coin or it comes in the form of a Visa credit card that can be used in the same way.

We don't really care. We just don't want to be controlled, right?

So, so there are a couple problems with the CBDC. One is a CBDC requires authorizing legislation for Congress and in this kind of environment, you're not going to get it. That's number one.

But number two, uh, if you can do programmable money through stable coins, which are privately issued, the problem with the CBDC is the Fed is a creature of Congress and if they do something that Congress doesn't like, Congress can pull the rug out from under them, shut them down, require disclosure, and under the law, they have public policy obligations.

If if instead rather than going through the central bank, I go through private stable coins.

Daniela Cambone: Yes.

Catherine Austin Fitts: where they are mandated to do whatever Treasury tells them to do in terms of applying the central controls and the rules. Then I have the same as Twitter censorship.

I have government control, but I have private issuers that can say, "Well, I'm not subject to p public policy obligations. I'm not subject to FOIA. I'm not subject to any of these rules."

And you've got something which is far more dangerous because then the people who control them can griff to their hearts content and skim and do a whole lot of stuff that would be much harder to do with central bank digital currency.

So the stable coin plan has turned out to be far more dangerous. I mean I hate CBDC but the stable coins are far more dangerous than CBDC.

Daniela Cambone: Um if I could put you in a room alone with Scott uh Bessant, right? No microphones, no cameras, nothing. What's the one thing you'd want to tell him?

Catherine Austin Fitts: Well, I'd want to ask him questions.

Daniela Cambone: Ask him. What would you want to ask him?

Catherine Austin Fitts: I would say, if you're planning on marketing$4 trillion dollars of stable coins to the world, why did you brag about being able to seize the wallets of a billion dollars, a billion dollars worth of wallets of Iranian wallets?

Why why would you market that way? What's what was that about? That's what I would ask him.

And then I'd ask him why he illegally gave Musk all the data from IRS and the payment systems.

Daniela Cambone: Interesting. Interesting.

Catherine Austin Fitts: I'm pretty sure I know why he did, but you know, I'd still ask him.

Daniela Cambone: I I want to I always want to give my audience tools, right? They walk away from this like let's say if we have a family of four watching, they have $8,000 in savings, let's say a mortgage.

What do you think? What would you tell them is the single most useful thing they could do this month?

Catherine Austin Fitts: Here's what they must do. They What's important is not what the price of your asset is. What's important is that it's your asset and it doesn't have a leash and somebody can take it away, right?

So when you think about portfolio strategy and managing your assets, you want to focus on what are the assets that are very hard. You you don't want to make it easy for people to take your stuff, right?

The first thing you need to do that the kind of auto I call it the automatic third lock which is what they're trying to put into place with respect to our currency or our digital assets what you want to do is you want to keep the system from going all digital.

Okay. So if there's one thing you want to do you want to preserve cash and you want to preserve analog systems. you know, whether you're trading, you know, gold coins or you're doing barter or you're using cash, right? Whatever your systems are, that's number one.

Number two, we have a book at Ceri called Coming Clean. It's free. You can come in and you can download it and it's full of uh it's like a buffet of all the things you can do to get the bad guys out of your head, out of your home, out of your heart, out of your wallet, out of your life.

And you want to build as much personal resiliency in terms of food, in terms of health, in terms of who you depend on, who you associate, where you bank, etc., etc. to give yourself as much personal resiliency as possible.

So, I'll get I'll tell you a funny story.

During the litigation before it started, I had gifted, you know, I was on Wall Street. I had a great career. I loved making money, made a ton of money. And whenever anybody in my family was in trouble or needed help, I would just help them. It's like that's what you have money for, to help your friends, right?

So, so when the litigation started, I they tried to cut off all my credit, all my, you know, completely control me and cut off my resources, cut off my income.

And my family got together and and I had an uncle who bought some of my farmland from me. He was wealthy. And so they targeted him and showed up at his door in the middle of the night with a subpoena and tried to scare him into not helping me.

And so the family had a a big pow-wow by phone. Yeah.

And everybody said, "Well, we're going to drop her because otherwise they're going to target us."

And Michael said, "I'm not going to drop her because she always helped us. If we were in trouble, she helped us. And now if she's in trouble, I'm going to help her."

Well, it turned out that I had I didn't even know how much I'd gifted her loan, but I had gifted her loan 250,000 to family and friends. And over the next 11 years, 200 they either paid back or gifted back exactly 250,000.

I didn't realize it until we won the litigation. I got the money in and I said, "Okay, I'm going to pay everybody back that helped."

And I did the numbers and I realized I had loaned or gifted 250,000 and then for 11 years that money had been repaid or gifted back and if it wasn't for that money I wouldn't have made it. I would have been dead. There was no way I would have made it without that money.

So when the money came in I had had a 401k that I'd had to bust and pay half the money in taxes and fees and it was 500,000. I had to pay 225,000 of taxes and fees to get it.

And um and my CPA said, "Let's fund up the 401k."

And I said, "No, I'm going to take that 500,000 and I'm going to bonus it out on the people bank because that is the only bank I trust. That is the only bank when the you know what hits the you know what that that they can't shut off."

And so one of the things I learned as an investment advisor, we're trained to put all of our money in the brokerage account and not help our kids or our grandkids or our family.

Wrong. You want to identify the people in your life that you can trust and you want to support and back them and that's what gives us resiliency.

So I just have to say this because I was telling you how much I love the Italian people. You can't do to the Italian people what you can do to the Americans because the Italians they support and and finance their families internally.

They have much more resilience because you can't bust those family ties. Right. And that's why Right. Right. They they know how to play the game. They've lived through up and down empires. They know.

Daniela Cambone: Oh, hell yes.

Catherine Austin Fitts: And that's what Americans have to learn. Americans have to learn, you know, we're in a war and we need to circle up with each other and and find the people we can trust and build resiliency together.

Daniela Cambone: And because so true, right? If you look at the things we need, food, health, you know, finance, all these things, what you need are people you can trust in the health area, people you can trust in the food area.

You're talking about building that community. And it's so true that the Italian people, you know, I I I witness it and I'll have a funny story I'll tell I'll tell you one day.

Um, but because we can't stop this programmable money train, Katherine. So, you talk about

Catherine Austin Fitts: I I'm an optimist. So I think we can for two reasons. One is it is possible to put up guard rails legislatively within states to do so.

It is also possible to keep the financial system from going all digital. If we can keep enough analog alive that they can't go all digital, we create options.

But the third reason, and this is a longer term reason, if you look at what they're trying to do in terms of central control, I absolutely believe it will fail because the notion that you can use digital technology to control the entire universe is absurd.

And and I just think their model is going to fail. So, but I don't

Daniela Cambone: I think that's the only thing we can bank on.

Catherine Austin Fitts: Right. Right.

Daniela Cambone: Because you're proof. You're proof. You're someone who went into government hoping to make a difference, you know, with with good intentions, and those people get cut out. The moment you start exposing fraud or, hey, something's fishy over here, you're out.

Catherine Austin Fitts: Well, but here's the thing.

Daniela Cambone: So, how am I supposed to have any faith in the system?

Catherine Austin Fitts: Well, I I don't have faith in in the existing institutions. With rare exception, I do have faith in people, and I do have faith in what people can do if they organize in effective ways.

So, so let me give you an example. If I was to go to a data center, our third quarter wrap-up's going to be on data centers.

If I was to go to a data center protest, I would see a thousand people and if I said to them, give me a copy of your IRA and 401k. What I could prove to them is they're financing the data centers, right?

But here's the thing. If they get smart, and this is going to be in our third quarter wrap-up, how to do it. If they got smart and said, you know something, I'm going to stop financing the data centers. I'm going to stop financing the companies that are poisoning my kids.

I'm going to stop and instead I'm going to start financing companies that are productive and are making money or good companies, right?

And I shifted my money. If we shifted our bank deposits away from the banks that did the financial crisis and did the 21 trillion missing money, if we fa we stopped financing the companies that are poisoning our kids or poisoning us.

If we stopped financing the bad guys and started financing, you know, things that would provide us with the food and health and other things we need are just good companies.

There's a there's a ton of good companies in the world. If we would finance the good guys and stop financing the bad guys, there would be a revolution. There would absolutely be a revolution.

We can't vote our way out of it, but we can shift our money and that could have a profound impact.

Daniela Cambone: Um, just one final point. I know we went over time with you today, Katherine. I know you have limited time. I would I'm going to have to bring you back, but um just your point about the bubbles of all bubbles.

You've seen many um is this just your thoughts on is that what leads to this financial reset that many experts feel is inevitable or do you feel we're already in?

Catherine Austin Fitts: So, we're in the in the res the reset started in August 2019 with the going direct reset. We have a big wrap-up and and a summary on Cileria on the going direct reset.

So the central bankers met in Jackson Hole in August of 2019, reviewed a plan prepared by a group of central bankers through the Black Rockck Investment Institute called the going direct reset and co one point you know co the pandemic was sort of a first big piece because they injected five to six trillion into the economy and then they shut down the small business and farms.

Yeah. to create the offsetting deflation and that meant you know Wall Street I'm grossly oversimplifying could take the six trillion and go buy all the assets the people had been shut down and were in a corner. So it was a way of consolidating control upstairs.

Right now we're in what I call CO 2.0 with the energy game, but it's it's a you know it's a it's a long-term fundamental re-engineering.

I have a wrap-up that I published in 2018 called um uh the state of our currencies and it's about the end of currencies and what they were going to do with the digital control grid and I described the resets historically so I knew a reset was coming and then when you know when it started in 2019 I was like okay here it is.

But this is an old game because every hundred every 80 to 120 years the central banks do a reset and every time they go into a reset they try you know um assert control of capital of labor and travel and then centralize uh you know capital and and and do a reset.

The thing about this reset though is this is the end of currencies if they get a complete digital control grid. And so we're talking about com, you know, the end of financial liquidity available to the majority of the population which I for one am going to do everything I can to prevent.

Daniela Cambone: Katherine Austin Fitz, you are a force. You are a dynamo. And uh thank you so much for your time today. Please come back.

Catherine Austin Fitts: I definitely will. This was a pleasure. It was a pleasure to finally get to meet you in person. Well, not really in person, but

Daniela Cambone: as good as it gets. Katherine Alston Fitz, thank you so much. And thank you all for watching. And of course, uh if you have any questions, reach out to my wonderful team at ITM Trading.

We spoke so much about the importance of owning uh physical gold through through everything that's coming our way. Uh we'll see you soon.

Here's the strange thing. You and I don't own our homes. But in Missouri, gold and silver enjoy a Lloydial title now because it cannot be confiscated. That was in our bill. And the federal government, if they decide to come into Missouri and confiscate gold and silver, the state absolutely cannot help them confiscate the gold and silver. We now have actually legal tender status for gold and silver in the state of Missouri. Basically, it comes down to actually setting up an alternative transactional system. Much like the federal government likes to toy with us to get us to a cashless society.

Now, we need to actually set up infrastructure in the state for use of gold and silver as money.

Welcome back to Liberty and Finance. I am delighted to have this returning guest whom we have not had on for far too long. Patrick Holland from the Missouri Freedom Initiative joins us. Today is Friday, September 4th, 2026. Patrick, thank you for coming back on Liberty and Finance.

Don, again, thank you so much for having me back. It's been a long time and we've had an update that's been available for a while, too, that we needed to share with your audience.

Would you please tell us about the breakthrough legislation that you got passed into law in Missouri, the Constitutional Money Act?

Yep. So, the last I think we visited might have been just shy of two years ago, and we were still trying to get that across the finish line. This is a very unique bill that has since become law that happened in July of 2025. But we'll start by saying that Missouri entered the fray. We now have actually legal tender status for gold and silver in the state of Missouri. Along with that, of course, was the elimination of capital gains taxes. So there's no more state taxes on investment or anything else having to do with gold and silver. It's simply gone.

But along with that, we got many other things, and we'll go through those as we talk and everything. But one of the really exciting things—and it's something that's esoteric if we talk about this too much—and people will say, "Gosh, I don't know that." A lodidial title. Very important.

Yeah, that's when do you or do you not own your home?

That's right. And here's the strange thing: you and I don't own our homes, but in Missouri, gold and silver enjoy a loial title now because it cannot be confiscated. That was in our bill. So basically, the state can't confiscate gold and silver unless it's through due process, which was standard with everything else. And the federal government, if they decide to come into Missouri and confiscate gold and silver—much, kind of like what Roosevelt did. So we all know this. And if they try to do it, the state absolutely cannot help them confiscate the gold and silver. They can't help them.

And of course, if they do, you can zue the state, and that's actually in the bill as well. So basically, we've eliminated the taxes on gold and silver. We've made it legal tender. It's always been money, so we won't go down that road. It's always been money, always. But now it's legal tender in the state of Missouri. And also, it can't be confiscated. So basically, a loyal title, which we can't seem to get on our homes and indeed in our lives. But gold and silver enjoy that status right now in the state of Missouri.

So that was something really exciting that we got through that—and I think, for lack of a better term, for—I'm a little nervous that someone in the legislature may be watching this video when it comes out, but I don't think they understood what they were doing because they just let it through. So I would like to see another state do what Missouri did to prove whether or not this is something that they were just on board with or if it was something they simply didn't understand.

Can you walk us through the major—why this is like a grand slam home run, this bill, as far as what the major accomplishments are? Because they are multiffold. I think you just hit several of them, but help us understand the highlights because every person in every state of our country should be weted. Their appetite should be wetted to have what—the rights that the Missouri—the people of the good state of Missouri just made sure that they have going forward for themselves, their children, their—and their children after them.

Okay. Gotcha. And I'll tell you what, let me share with you a little bit of candy that we got through on the bill. And it's something that may not seem important when you first hear it, but when you understand the implications of it, it really becomes quite profound. And that is the fact that employers can in fact pay their employees now in silver and gold in compensation. That's also law in the state of Missouri. The only thing is, is the employer has to agree to it, and the employee has to agree to it, and no one can be forced.

Is there any stipulation in there about the taxable quantity assigned to that compensation, whether it's face value or market value or whatever?

Actually it would be just plain market value. So that is—it's really that simple with that. But also the only other stipulation is that if it's physical gold and silver as opposed to a UPMA deposit or some kind of electronic transfer, the responsibility remains with the employer in order to ascertain the purity of the silver and gold before it's paid out to the employee. That would be the only other stipulation.

Okay, that's a big one. Being able to pay your employees in real money, hard money, gold and silver, that will hold its value because that's been one of the—

Just like they used to, man. You see the movies that were made back in the 50s and the 40s where you're lining up for your paycheck and they were giving you like four quarters for the week and that was silver.

And that's been one of the first victims to fall in rampant degradation of the currency is the value of the working person's wages and therefore their savings as well.

Yeah, savings. But really what it was was their purchasing power. It just—it disintegrated. And of course there's a lot of subsidy—subsidizing of this through anything from food stamps to any—there's all kinds of subsidies now for employers not to actually pay a living wage. The government is the safety net for employers to actually take more profits, pay less to their—and by the way, this isn't a rich versus poor thing. I'm just saying that this was part of the system and how it evolved when we started getting away from real money.

The government had to start subsidizing the businesses by literally offering free services to people, and before then, we didn't have to do that.

So in addition to paying your employees in gold and silver in Missouri, what else did this bill—to now law—achieve?

Well, first of all, it was—it's—I would say it's groundbreaking in the way that we got a Lloyd title for gold and silver. That was a big deal. And in fact, and it's not like I'm trying to belabor the point, but I would say this to anyone who's watching this. If you have a business that vaults gold or silver, Missouri is the only state that will protect you. That's it. There's no other state that's done what we've done. So, if you vault silver and gold for a business, you might want to consider having a vault in Missouri because they can't confiscate it here.

So it—others might say, well, if you have a vault, the government knows where it is, the federal government, so they'll just go right to it. Well, technically, the government of Missouri, it's their responsibility to protect your right to own gold and silver. So basically, then we have a clash, don't we? So the—and we don't talk about that aspect of things because people start thinking, well, this is a civil war. No, it's not. It's just lay down the law in your state. Silver and gold will not be confiscated in my state. Just lay it down.

Put it on paper, get it through your legislature, and we should talk a little bit more about all the challenges we had getting that done, how long it took to get done, all because of one speaker of the house, because this bill done was popular. Everyone knew about it. It was all over the place. I mean, it was popular not only in the capital building, it was popular across the state and thousands of people were calling and emailing. There was a lot of pressure. So what the speaker of the house did was go something like this: "Good. Now I've got leverage for the things that I want to get done. I won't let this bill through unless I can get my 11 corporatist bills through. And if those go through, then we'll let the silver and gold through." So this is what happens when your bill becomes super popular in a state house or a state legislative house.

It becomes leverage.

Unintended consequences of getting involved rather than just having a sleepy sheep population that doesn't do anything and the sausage gets made in the back room of politics the way it was unhindered by the public awareness other than what you're going to tell them on the official evening news. But in this case, when you get the public actually fired up about something and actually clamoring for something, be ready. Watch out.

And that's what you're telling us is for those who are actually getting involved and getting things moving and lobbying their lawmakers in their own state and in their own counties, be aware that this can be a unintended consequence of getting involved. And you want to underscore the importance of not being thrown off your track by that.

Absolutely. In fact, actually there's heroes. There's so many heroes to the story. A lot of people might think, well, this was Pat Holland who got this done. Pat Holland might have written this and Pat Holland may have organized a lot of this, but there were thousands of people involved in getting this done. That's how popular it was. And I got to tell you a quick story because it's going to put a smile on your face because it is ironic and we like irony sometimes in the gold and silver business.

Even though it's a completely different metal, the fact is Mike Moon, who was the sponsoring senator, actually snuck this onto a banker bill as an amendment. That's how it got through. It didn't have its own time on the floor, basically as its own bill, and we were very close to the end of session, and Mike Moon saw an opportunity along with Senator Rick Bratton. So, we have another hero to talk about. And they saw an opportunity. They stuck it on the bill because they saw a bunch of things on there that everyone was going to vote yes on.

And so they didn't think the speaker, the new speaker, Jonathan Patterson, would actually stop the bill because of it, because too many people wanted it. And it sailed through that way. And so on a banker bill, no less, is how silver and gold got passed in the state of Missouri. I wish we could have the beautiful fairy tale story like they have in Arkansas where there was absolutely no grassroots support for their silver and gold bill and it sailed right through with like one no vote and like hundreds of yes votes. But it wasn't to be that way in Missouri. It was a fight.

It was a knockdown, dragged down fight from the very beginning because of the popularity and then the leverage that it was used because of its popularity.

Help us understand if that's the only reason that there was any so-called opposition was just to try to get other things in on its coattails. Help us understand what the nature of the opposition was so that people can be prepared for that in their own state as well.

Okay. The opposition that we faced mainly—and this is really stupid—was a leftright thing. So the left didn't want it because it was sponsored by the right and so they were fighting it. Do you remember, Kaiser, when I came on to your show? I may have even provided you some video snippets of it when it was on the floor in the House in 201.

We're talking the Missouri House now—was on the floor, and Pete Meredith, who was a Democrat, a senior Democrat, basically started talking about he had concerns about this bill because if gold and silver became legal tender in Missouri, he had concerns that Nazi gold would make its way to the borders of Missouri. Confederate gold would become a problem. He spoke about mega gold, whatever that is. And then he also brought up a new concept and this one was zombie apocalypse silver. Yeah. He was worried about zombie apocalypse silver.

It literally—it was like a clown show right on our house floor with the Democrats throwing up the dumbest, stupidest arguments ever against gold and silver. Literally just to burn up time. And ultimately, of course, it wasn't to be put to a vote anyway because in the Senate side, they were waiting for the Senate to put two bills on the floor that the House Speaker wanted on the Senate floor, which didn't make it to the floor because the senators were like, "We're not doing corporate garbage here. We're just not going to do it." So they let silver and gold on the floor only for the Democrats to complain about Nazi gold and then it was taken right off the floor again and it wasn't voted on.

I would have anticipated there might be some substantive push back from either traditional banking or other quarters or governments who want to be able to take advantage of the inflationary—the degradation of money supply to make it easier to pay off their debts later or something like that.

Nope, not at all. In fact, I added the inside track on that because Dirk Deon was the sponsoring representative in 2023 and he has a very close relationship with bankers in Missouri just because of his position in the House. He does the budget. And so he was talking to the bankers. They—in fact, their exact words were they were neutral—and they certainly didn't come in and fight it in any way, shape or form. Not in any hearing. I was at all the hearings. Not a single hearing did they come by and say they didn't like it or have reasons against it.

And there was no push back in any back rooms either. So the bankers were fine with—even with a loyal title. They were fine with it. So, but any rate, I wish I could tell you that there was some grand conspiracy, but there really wasn't. There was just a house speaker that was dying to get a whole bunch of legalized gambling in the state of Missouri. And that's what he was trying to get through. And he wouldn't let silver and gold go through unless they heard that on the floor of the Senate.

The other push back that we've heard in a lot of quarters is that, oh, this will be used because it's anonymous, and there—there can be misused for criminal purposes, and that therefore we can't have it. We have to—we can track and control and keep tabs on people. Any push back that came from that regard?

We did it. It was from specifically from the Democrats in the House. That's it. And that was in a hearing. They—that's exactly what they were talking about. They were worried about criminal behavior and a non-trackable money being used for criminal activity.

And how was that objection overcome?

It wasn't taken seriously by the committee—by the committee chair. No one took those concerns seriously at all.

On the topic of a loyal title, which you brought up about the nonconfiscability of gold and silver currently in Missouri: Does that only protect citizens of Missouri? Or is—or has Missouri essentially become kind of like a real money banking haven for people all over the country who want to have a safe place to store their gold and silver and maintain individual property rights of it?

That's actually a very good question and there's several ways to answer it. First off, when it comes to people who are not Missouri citizens that are in the state of Missouri, when you're inside the borders of Missouri, you're represented by the politicians that actually represent that area wherever you're at. So, if you're traveling from state to state, that's kind of a neat thing. You're actually—you could be represented by basically someone from that district you're traveling through. But when it comes to vaulting services, anyone can vault here. They don't have to be a Missouri citizen.

The gold and silver itself is what enjoys loyal title, not the business that owns the gold and silver, just the gold and silver. So basically, anyone from anywhere in the world could store gold and silver here and enjoy our non-confiscation laws here?

You mentioned the word business in that previous sentence about the business that owns the gold and silver. Does this not cover individuals or are individuals kind of considered a type of corporation and themselves? How—why do you bring up the word business all the time?

No. I brought it up just as a juosition. So the elodial title doesn't attach to a person who owns gold and silver. It simply applies to the gold and silver itself.

It's not the legal person of the owner. It's the asset itself.

Correct. Yep.

Good clarification.

So for instance, basically if you had a loidal title on your land, that means the government can't come and confiscate the land, but it doesn't mean the government can't take you out of your house and put you in jail.

In addition to those aspects of the bill, the Constitutional Money Act that has been passed into law in Missouri, other aspect you mentioned—

One more thing I forgot to mention: you can't discriminate against gold and silver. So—and this is for the state. This is a law for the state, not the people. So in other words, if it becomes normal to use gold and silver for transactions, let's say, Kaiser, you're driving through here and you're getting gas and you're going to pay for it in gold and silver. So, basically they can't discriminate at the gas station and say, "Well, since you're using gold and silver, we're going to charge you a 10% search charge." They can't do that here. You cannot discriminate. You cannot put one form of legal tender over another.

And I'm sorry I got off track there. Let me tell you something else we did. The government of Missouri will accept electronic transfers of gold and silver for payment of taxes or services. That's something else no other state's ever done before. So, we did get that done here. They don't want physical. So they've been very bold about that. We've had meetings about that during the whole process, during 3 years to get this done. They didn't want physical gold and silver, but they didn't mind necessarily electronic transfers as long as they could be easily converted into cash. So, that is specifically in there as well.

What about certain forms? Some states such as Florida have passed electronic gold and silver transactional laws or gold transactional gold laws, but they've specified restrictions such as US mint or certain forms, which really is limiting to those who have already built up assets. How permissive is Missouri about the different forms of the species of gold or silver that you hold?

I'm glad you asked that because actually we define them in our bill. And so basically, any form of gold and silver that is really formed and in function, in weight and purity—basically, that's made to be used as money—is money in the state of Missouri now. So basically, that includes everything from gold and silver coins to gold backs and to even—and the language is very specific in the bill. I was very specific that electronic gold and silver is to be treated as legal tender. We did not make electronic gold and silver legal tender in the state, but we did say it must be treated as legal tender.

So that's a very specific wording choice that I used. And although some people were a little hesitant when I said—when I was talking to them at first, when I was explaining what I was doing, they got it eventually. And it is another first. There is nothing in the constitution that says that a representation of gold and silver can be gold and silver. That's why we called it the Constitutional Money Act. Everything in our bill jives 100% with the constitution. And if we made electronic gold and silver legal tender, we would be out of bounds as far as the constitution's concerned. And this is my interpretation.

So I may talk to another person says, "That's nonsense." Basically electronic representation is really kind of the same thing, and I get it to a certain extent, but we wanted to be able to maintain the Constitutional Money Act name with our bill, so we kept it that way.

Any additional gains for the common people's constitutional rights that you see coming from this new law in Missouri?

Yes, but in a different way. Basically, it comes down to actually setting up an alternative transactional system, much like the federal government likes to toy with us. And the latest one is, of course, the Fed now program. Those of you who know about Fed Now from the Federal Reserve know that it's basically—it's more or less an infrastructure to get us to a cashless society. That's what Fed Now was really designed to do. In the case of what we did in Missouri with the Constitutional Money Act, now we need to actually set up infrastructure in the state for use of gold and silver as money.

Now that we've taken away capital gains and we've made it legal tender and we've even allowed for businesses to actually pay their employees in gold and silver, we need to start setting up the transactional system, start getting people used to it, getting them a little bit more educated, getting businesses on board with accepting gold and silver, basically for products and services. So that's kind of the next stage of the process and that's a big one. That's a—that's a big one. But one of the things that makes it really easy, I mean, some people have issues with coins. I love gold and silver coins. I absolutely love them.

And I have one of those special—I can't remember what you call it—a meology detector, something like that, where it detects the purity of the silver and the gold. And that could easily be set up at a point of sale register where you can actually verify the purity. But there's also goldbacks which are really made for transactions. And so I'm sure you're familiar with goldbacks, Dunigan.

Mhm. Yep.

Yep. So, basically, Goldbacks are starting by literally—and we're talking about the, I believe they call it the guild, the goldback guild. Businesses all around the United States are starting to accept gold backs. This is the beginning of that infrastructure. Now, it may not be the end of it, but it is certainly the beginning, and it is a start, and it is powerful, and it is actually moving and in use. So anyone could sign up that has a business—that is, sign up for free with the goldback people. Go to the guild and sign up and register your business as accepting goldbacks, and they will actually advertise your business on their website.

Not only what you're doing and what services or products you provide, but also the fact that you're accepting gold backs at your business. So, you'll start attracting probably brand new customers you never had before just cuz you are within the Goldback network.

Patrick, in addition to this bill now law in Missouri, you've been working on getting grassroots activism fermented so that you can become the leaven in the bread and you can—this can spread across farther than Missouri to the people of all the great states of the United States. Any comments from you on how you're doing that and how people who live in those states can take advantage of the work that you're doing in Missouri?

Sure. Well, first off, I did write a lot of legislation, not just for Missouri, but for other states as well. So, I collaborated with a lot of representatives and senators in other states, Nebraska, Montana, Arkansas, Mississippi. I mean, the list goes on and on—even Arizona, Minnesota, even—to try and get legislation done. But what was really lacking was any type of grassroots support. Now, Arkansas was kind of a special deal. I mean, those silver and gold bills just sail right through. It's a hot knife through butter. In Arkansas to get sound, muddy legislation done. In many states, like Missouri, it is a knockdown, drag down fight. Florida is another example.

Florida is another one of those states where it's really difficult to get something like that done, probably because it's popular and they're using it as leverage. The same thing that was happening in Missouri. So my advice to people is first off—and in fact, Dunigan, if you're good enough, please put a link at the bottom of this, in the description section, to the Missouri law that I sent you earlier. And I'll resend it to you if I need to. And basically, just take—just print that Missouri law out, and basically, you don't even need an outline anymore.

Bring it to your legislator and say, "This is what I would like to do in our state." It's really simple. It's easy. It's very easy to understand. And, basically it covers pretty much every base. The only thing that we don't have in Missouri is a state depository. And I did write a bill for that as well. That was part of SB 100. And it came down to they didn't want the expense of it. That's what they were complaining about. And so the treasurer was dead set against it and said, "We'll fight you. We'll fight you on this." Basically if you keep pushing a bill where it says the treasury has to have a depository.

Well, that's because my vision of a depository is very different from other people's. The depository for the state would be for the state only, state reserves, not for the people, not as a bank, just for the state use. And we'll let the free market come into our states, like UPMA, like Glint, like Kinesis. Let those free market aspects come into our state and serve the people's needs for silver and gold and banking and let the state have their reserves in silver and gold, totally separate from the people's. And basically, if you do that, they're less likely to start—and that's another thing, too.

Oh, actually, another really interesting point about our bill. Those who read the bill will notice there's absolutely no regulation on silver and gold. And that is by design. We didn't want the state regulating silver and gold. And when we were pushing this bill, there were a lot of Democrats that said, "I am a no vote on this, Pat." And let me tell you why. Because I have absolutely no idea how this even works. And I would say to them, I said, "Well, that's because the free market's already got this. Everything that we need to transact in silver and gold, the free market already has. We don't need the state involved." So, I'm a free market guy.

I just—so that's the way I designed the bills. And in fact, I've noticed too where, in other states where I've helped construct their bills, I had to kind of pull away from it because they would add state regulations and I was like, "No, I don't want to be a part of that anymore. I don't want to say that I had anything to do with writing that." Because they wanted regulations, the state to regulate silver and gold. If the people's money and private money come together in the form of state bank that's controlled by the treasury that holds silver and gold, believe you me, they're going to start regulating it.

And you don't want that. You want the free market to come in. You want several factions of the free market to come in to serve the people's needs because then you have choice and competition.

There's one more thing that a lot of people have been asking about, is if you own gold and silver and if you've been prudent and gathered it up over time, how do you envision that it will be actually used by the people of Missouri in—now that they've been empowered to be able to do so? How do you foresee some of the most common use cases developing?

Actually, that's a very very good question in itself. But the co—most common use cases I would see are mom and pop small businesses, period. I don't see large corporations. I don't see Walmart jumping in saying, "Yeah, we want to transact in silver gold." They'll sell gold to you, but they don't want to transact in it. So basically, that is—that ties right back to what I was talking about with the goldback guild. There's a lot of guild members right here in the state of Missouri.

These are private businesses, small mom and pop businesses that are in fact in accepting gold backs and many of them accept coins as well, gold and silver coins. So, basically, like I said, this is the very beginning of the infrastructure. Something is happening and it's with the gold back guild. Like I said, it doesn't necessarily end there, but that is a really good starting place because it's organized and it's nationwide.

Any forms of things calling themselves gold or silver or companies organizing to provide services around gold and silver that you felt were like coming out of the woodworks and it gave you a feeling that people need to be cautious and wary cuz this could open up basically a whole new kind of a free field and there could be both reputable and non-reputable players on a new field? Any thoughts from you on that of people trying to be smart about taking steps forward in this and not just stumble into a pit?

Yeah, I do. I mentioned to you I have one of those detectors myself that can actually detect a purity. As gold and silver are going up in value, basically fraudulent versions of gold and silver will be coming out. It is guaranteed is going to happen. And so basically, this is the thing: if you're worried about fraud, basically there are things you can do to protect yourselves by simply checking the purity and the weight of the gold and silver. And yes, the equipment is expensive. It's $1,000 for one of those metal dete—or I call a metal detector. I'm not sure what it's called. Sigma. Made by Sigma. Yeah. Mhm.

Yeah. There you go. So, but the gold backs themselves, basically they have anti-counterfeit printed right into them. And I think a lot of it is actually on the back side, but any rate, so these are impossible to counterfeit. I do believe they've offered $20,000 to anyone who could counterfeit a gold back and no one even came close. So with the gold backs, there's features being built in. I would hate to think that we would have to put some kind of chip in our gold and silver coins, basically to verify them or anything else like that, because people have suggested that in the past.

But yes, I do think that there is a possibility of fraud coming out for fake silver and gold. People need to be careful, and there—just learn about what you do to verify the purity of the gold, and the weight too. Not just the purity, but the weight.

And I imagine not only fake silver and gold, but what about services that might end up—your long treasured gold and silver you put into whatever, and then you never see it again? As far as there's other ways of making fraud against people than fake metals.

Sure. If you don't hold it, you don't own it. Right. So, I would once again—I—transacting in silver and gold is just like transacting in cash. If you've got $400,000 worth of cash in your house, good for you, first of all, but, secondly, that's probably not the smartest way to hold on to cash. If you got that much silver and gold, you probably want to look into vaulting services. As opposed—if especially if that's your life savings and if that's your retirement. So, I would advocate for that. But, basically most people I don't think need to do that.

I mean, you can hide gold and silver in your house, or no one would ever find it. And so, it's relatively easy to do. But with a bill like Missouri's, basically with vaulting, I think, because of the anti-confiscation that we have here, I think vaulting is going to be a thing here in Missouri. I think companies are going to want to come here and start vaulting. And I don't think it's any more expensive to vault in Missouri than it is in any other state. So but you have those added safeguards and protection. Now—

Is there any protection of personal privacy or any aspects of that in the Missouri constitutional money amendment? Some people are concerned—well, there was a number of levels of concern. Some people are concerned that—that you mentioned that if you own gold and silver, you can keep it private. You don't have to tell anybody about it. And that's—some people are concerned that that right to privacy about what you already own may be going out the window if you're expected to start giving lists just like there have been lists where you have to tell the government you have this or that or the other.

Oh, no. There's no requirement in the state of Missouri to inform the government you have anything. In fact, I have a lot of silver to be honest with you. I've been a silver buff since I was 14 years old. And I've—that was one or two years ago. And so you—but I never participated in any IRA program that I could actually use it as a tax write off because I didn't want the government to know about my silver. So I forewent the tax write off in order to keep my right to privacy. So that's what I did. But to each their own.

But there is absolutely no reason you have to inform the government in our bill or in any law in Missouri that you have any silver and gold at all. And now that you know we got rid of capital gains, doubly so.

It's capital gains at the state level. Any other taxes you've—sales tax, any other types of taxes at the state level on gold and silver?

None. It's totally taxree. The only taxes on silver and gold now are literally on the federal level, as far as Missouri's concerned.

Do you want to have a free crack at the—what you think about the concept of capital gains tax on gold and silver at all, for even at the federal level, how you feel about that?

That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. It's stupid. It's dumb. In fact, I mean, I don't want to talk about this because it was a rumor I heard about 2 years ago, but I did hear that if 15—this is a rumor I heard from the federal government. Okay, so we have to consider the source here, right? But I did hear a rumor from someone high up, someone that may be one step away from the president, that if there were 15 states that made silver and gold legal tender in their states, that Trump would ask Congress to get rid of capital gains on silver and gold.

Now, that was—that's just a rumor. I can't confirm it with anyone else. I heard it from one person, but I did hear that. But—but I do think that getting rid of capital gains on silver and gold is highly, highly important right now. And just get it done in your state. We'll worry about the federal government later. Just get rid of it because it is—it's evil and it's wrong.

If people want to support the Missouri Freedom Initiative as well as direct their lawmakers to the resources available there, where should they start?

Well, first of all, we're a very very special type of organization there. The only organization that we have technically is an email list and that's by design. We do not take donations. We do not have a membership sign up. We have nothing like that whatsoever. It's an email list that's—it's over 4,000 people in the state of Missouri that are on that email list and all of like mind and work together. And so basically that's the way we've kept it. We don't take any type of money or donations of any kind. In fact, we have a saying in the group: "Your own time, your own dime."

Is that a silver dime?

Yeah, silver dime. Yep. There you go. So it's got to be a silver dime because really the other kind isn't worth it. But so it's been—they can't bring us down. They can't bring us down. I have seen other grassroots organizations start out with the same model, and then they go, "Well, I need to make money doing this." So they start taking money and then their support evaporates very quickly because they're making money but all the supporters for that organization don't. And so they're asking them all to go up to the capital and yeah, you're getting paid to go to the capital, but I have to pay for it myself.

It's that kind of—it's squirly and it's dumb and all that fun stuff, but this is just human nature. So basically, yes, there's absolutely no money in anything that we do and they know it up at the capital. They—in fact, they regularly investigate me personally to see if I'm taking money in any way, shape or form with the Missouri Freedom Initiative donations so they can actually register me as a lobbyist. And so because the rules change on what you can do up at the capital, if you're just a regular citizen up there and not a lobbyist, you have so much freedom in the capital.

You have so much—you could do just about anything you want. When you're a lobbyist, all the rules change. And I do not want the rules to change. I want the freedom.

It's interesting. G. Edward Griffin, whom you are no doubt familiar with, who founded the Red Pill Expo and wrote The Creature from Jackal Island, a—Another Look at the Federal Reserve, talked to us about his organization, which he said is—is not leaderless, it's leaderful, meaning it's any individual and many individuals within that organization could stand up as points of coordination if the need arose. Rather than being able to do a decapitation. So I can say, we—well, we took out the honcho, and so now that organization falls apart because it's a like-minded people collaborating together.

Yep. And it's virtually the same thing. I am not a leader by any stretch of the imagination. I consider myself more of an organizer of leaders. And like I said, I would love to at some point in time shout out a thousand names of people that work their butts off to make this a reality in Missouri. And there's a ton of them. Citizens for Sound Money was helpful. Let's shout out to Isaac Gaither and his wife and his sister. Just a bunch of people that folks probably wouldn't know, but these people worked their butts off.

They believed and they helped craft and actually execute the most permissive gold and silver laws that you will see in the entire world, which we enjoy right now in the state of Missouri. No one else is even coming close. So it is. So there's a lot of leaders in our organization, is what I'm saying, and thank God for them.

Well, we're certainly grateful for you rattling the cage and saying, "Hey, we've got something we need to talk about. Let's get on and talk about it." Very grateful for your presence here with us again on Liberty and Finance. We're going to put a link to the actual law, the Missouri Revisor of Statutes official law about the Constitutional Money Act number 40801, and it will be in the description of this video, folks, if you want to check it out, if you want to get your state legislators fired up about it. You can point them to that and also to the mofree.org, the Missouri Freedom Initiative.

Any other pointers, Patrick, on people who want to get access to you and your information?

Yeah, just go to mofree.org. You can reach us through there. This is actually during the dry period because right now our legislature is not in session. We do have a veto session coming up in just over a week. And so I may go up there and do something at that time with flock cameras at data centers or something. You know how crazy I can be.

We do need you to come back and talk to us about that because that's about to get times 10 or times 100 beyond flat cameras—is this new thing about on every light pole in the country, which could be over 50 million of them, coming to a city and neighborhood near you soon. So we want to talk to you more about that soon, and—but thank you for giving us this vital update on the Constitutional Money Act being passed into law in Missouri and the fruits that are going to come from that. Patrick Holland from the Missouri Freedom Initiative. Thank you for joining us again on Liberty and Finance.

And just to show you what that can do to politicians or central bankers, do you remember the Bill Holter piece?

He said, “Who is going to finance the central banks? If they’re going to rescue the system, who is going to finance the central banks?”

Well, let me tell you what the ECB and the European Commission think about who is going to finance them.

You.

People with money in the bank are going to finance the EC Commission and the European Central Bank.

Because I’ve got a piece here. I’m going to link it.

And I’m going to ask Craig now to lift 47 seconds to 1 minute 19.

Embedded clip:

“The two most powerful leaders in Europe both just confirmed that they are coming to seize the $10 trillion sat in bank accounts in the European Union.

“I know that sounds crazy, but this clip from Ursula von der Leyen just broke the internet yesterday.

“You can see the subtitles. She said, ‘Savings are unfortunately lazy, and there is 10 trillion dollars worth of euros sat in bank accounts.’

“This clip is so insane that before I play the Christine Lagarde video I’ve got for you, I’ve gone and translated this clip from French into English for you to prove that what Ursula von der Leyen just said is real.

“Listen into this.”

Translated clip:

“Unfortunately, this saving is quite lazy indeed. 10 trillion euros of household savings continue today still in bank deposits.

“And a significant portion of European savings is invested outside our continent.

“Europe must now put it to work for the benefit of its many and diverse businesses across the entire modern economy.

“That’s the aim, uniting savings and investments.

“We’ve tabled securitization, banks and insurance investments, and market integration and supervision. They could unlock up to 470 billion euros.”

So, what the ECB is saying is that there is 10 trillion sitting in bank accounts, and it’s not doing anything.

It’s lazy.

That’s their description of your savings.

It’s lazy.

So, what they think is this money should be invested in the EU, of course. They actually say that.

Okay?

So here Lagarde is saying it should be invested in Europe. And they actually say in European businesses.

So they’re actually putting a wall up around Europe in terms of your money in your bank, in your savings account. They’re going to use it to invest within Europe, which is collapsing.

Can you see it?

Now, I would have said, “Well, that’s a rather random conversation.”

Not that politicians or central bankers have random conversations. There’s usually a big plan already behind the conversation. This is just a way of filtering it out to the public.

And then I saw another piece.

And here’s Van der Leyen talking about the same thing from the Commission.

So it’s not only the central bank, it’s now the Commission. It’s not only the bankers, it’s now the politicians saying exactly the same thing.

Embedded clip:

“More than 800 billion euros per year.

“If we want to be realistic, and if we want to deliver on our commitment under the Paris Agreement, if we want to protect ourselves from a security point of view, and if we want to move to the digital age, 15.7% of household income is actually saved.

“But where is it saved?

“It’s saved in cash. It is saved in bank deposits.

“That’s probably not the most efficient way to put your money to work.

“So I would start with that. Start with an instrument in which Europeans are reasonably comfortable investing in. Take some risk.

“The second direction I would take is make sure that money can move around. Remove the barriers. We have so much of it.

“So, in order to expand geographically where this money can be invested, we have to look at those barriers and those hurdles that we have inflicted upon ourselves.

“And the third direction that I would take as well is make sure that that money that is invested in this European instrument that can move around is actually heading in the right direction.

“And in that respect, you know, I’m not enough of an expert in venture capital and the venture capitalist approach to risks, but that’s where the money has to flow, among other things.

“We don’t have the luxury of time.”

So, we are seeing a plan that is already in place being leaked gently to the system: that the European elite are going to take the money from the banks that people have in their savings accounts and invest it in European business, which is failing badly.

Where do you go with this story?

As Bill Holter said, where do the central banks get the money from?

Well, they’re telling you.

It’s coming from bank deposits.

Now, me as a banker, if I heard this story in Europe, with the chief politician of Europe and the chief central banker of Europe both saying, “We need to activate the 10 trillion of savings that are sitting in bank deposit accounts,” I’ll take my money out.

Scott Bessent warned of a “grand economic reordering” on the scale of a new Bretton Woods.

Now the pieces are snapping into place.

Bond yields are screaming: U.S. 10-years near 4.8%, Japan’s 10-year JGBs lunging toward 3%. Washington and Tokyo just ran a rare joint yen intervention after USD/JPY smashed a 40-year low near 164 and they’re still coordinating to keep FX “orderly.”

Gold has surpassed U.S. Treasuries as global reserve asset.

China is already building the alternative: 21 straight months of official gold buying, a Hong Kong vault-and-clearing network to make yuan convertible into metal, and BRICS payments rails backed by gol, designed to settle trade outside pure dollar clearing.

China also triggered the biggest gold-rush among the central banks.

In July 2026, the UK, China, Japan, South Korea and India all sold U.S. treasuries while increasing their gold holdings.

South Korea sold their Dollar Forex Reserves and started purchasing gold after 13 years.

This was exactly warned by the famous City of London banker

@LordBelgrave

at the start of year.

The City was well aware of the situation and a financial crisis will be engineered by the central banks, IMF, BIS and G-SIBs.

We’re now watching a global monetary reset happen in real time.

https://x.com/SternDrewCrypto/status/2095970159114747947/video/1

Since the Fed's counterfeit money funds the Empire, it's to be expected that both the monetary system and the Empire are declining together. The powers that shouldn't be will continue to fight reality, but sound money and putting America First will materialize at some point. For the benefit of the American people (and the rest of the world that is tired of being invaded and threatened) we say the sooner it materializes, the better. Texas is getting the ball rolling with sound money. Gold and silver are now legal tender in the state.

New ECB data show gold has surpassed U.S. Treasuries as the world's second-largest reserve asset, reaching 27% of global reserves. Central banks now hold over 36,000 tonnes of gold, near Bretton Woods-era levels, as countries increasingly favor bullion over sovereign debt amid rising geopolitical tensions and sanctions concerns.

Apple builds and sells iPhones. I happen to own one of the older models, for the same reason I own a last-legs older model car. What if Apple could skip the build part and sell only the phone? The money saved would be an enormous boost to its bottom line. And if Apple passed the savings onto customers I could conceivably afford to upgrade.

Where would the phones come from? From a bookkeeping entry, of course.

Unfortunately, Apple's customers are very demanding and want the real things, so the build operations will have to stay. Perhaps their executives looked upon another business and envied their ability to sell loans without drawing down their savings. Customer with good credit wants a loan? Create the amount with a few taps on a keyboard and send him on his way.

The customer will spend his newly-acquired money, thus keeping people employed. Since he has good credit, he will be able to make monthly payments, and the lender, the bank, will normally apply his payments to extinguish the loan, with the interest being the bank's profit. Everyone's happy and the economy keeps expanding until it busts.

Experts will diagnose the bust. The usual fiends will get blamed. Government will step in to cure the problem its monetary and banking interventions helped create. The economy will slowly recover and continue on the same path as before, meaning banks will continue extending credit from ether rather than savings.

How did this racket get started? It's complicated. That's one reason it works-the crime doesn't exist if enough people don't see it.

Gold and silver coins have long served as money, until more recent times. For government, gold became an economic culprit during the Great Depression, as explained by JM Bullion,

The Great Depression officially began on October 28, 1929, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 13% of its value in a single day. The following day, it dropped an additional 12%, and in a matter of weeks, it was worth half as much as before.

In response, consumer confidence plummeted, and people began withdrawing their money from banks as quickly as possible. Banks, which work with reserves and don't keep much of their deposits on hand, began closing their doors. (emphasis added)

Bank-created money was disappearing, and prices fell accordingly. Let's expand on this.

The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 required the Fed to hold gold equal to only 40 percent of the currency it issued. By adjusting interest rates, the Fed could increase or decrease its stock of gold. Higher interest rates shifted "gold from the pockets of the public (both here and abroad) to the vaults of Federal Reserve district and member banks." Conversely, lower rates drove gold from the Fed's "coffers into the hands of the public both at home and overseas."

During the panics of 1930-1931 people were losing their trust in banks. A depositor with $1,000 in a shaky local bank could protect himself from that bank's failure by withdrawing $1,000 in currency. The dollars-fully redeemable in gold coin-gave him needed purchasing power. But the bank now had $1,000 less on which to pyramid new loans.

After Britain abandoned the gold standard on September 21, 1931, foreign holders of dollar assets began converting them into gold. Americans rightly feared Roosevelt would do the same when he took office on March 4, 1933. An owner of a $1,000 note or checking account would risk losing his legal ability to convert it into gold at $20.67 per ounce.

People knew what was real and they lined up at banks demanding gold. But the dual legality of fractional reserves and the promise of 100 percent redemption of notes and deposits made banks vulnerable to a panicked crowd demanding redemption. Thirty-six hours after his inauguration, Roosevelt shut down the banks for a week (the Bank Holiday of 1933). A month later he ordered Americans to surrender their gold or face heavy fines and imprisonment.

The inflationary Fed system wasn't limited to Wall Street, though stock market margin credit played a significant role during the 1920s. Businesses, farmers, real-estate borrowers and ordinary bank customers were also drinking the elixir of Fed bank credit.

Gold had powered the growth of civilization. "According to Herodotus, King Croesus, who ruled Lydia from around 560 to 546 B.C., was the first person to issue pure gold and pure silver coins." It only took the government-Fed cartel twenty years to get rid of it, 1913-1933.

https://mises.org/mises-wire/central-banking-scourge-civilization

What if the safest place for your money isn't inside a bank at all?

In this episode, Daniel Diaz welcomes David Schlereth, the newest board member of Citizens 4 Sound Money!

David breaks down his journey into the liberty movement, why the Federal Reserve System is "the greatest scam in human history," and how everyday citizens can protect their hard-earned wealth by stepping outside the traditional banking system.

Economist Stephen Moore said Americans now pay more in taxes than they spend on food, clothing and housing combined, arguing the growing tax burden shows government has become “so big and bloated.”

In a post shared on X on Wednesday, Moore cited a chart from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity estimating Americans paid about $8.19 trillion in taxes in 2025, compared with roughly $7.39 trillion spent on food, clothing and housing combined. “Government has become so big and bloated that taxes cost more than life’s basic necessities,” Moore wrote. “Every American taxpayer should be outraged.”

Moore’s comments come as many Americans say they already feel overburdened by taxes. A Pew Research Center survey published in April found that 60% of U.S. adults believe they pay more in federal taxes than is fair, up from 56% in 2023.

Monday, August 3rd, 2026. Manco 64, home of alternative economics and contrarian views. Well, today we're going to look at statists. Yes, the people who run governments, and they can be on the left or right. They all resort to legal plunder, which is a concept that Frédéric Bastiat wrote about over 150 years ago. I'm going to recommend this book and I'm going to go through the foreword later on after I talk about the current fallacy that we're seeing here in the UK. And I have to say it doesn't just apply to the Labour Party, Labour government and socialists. It applies to the Conservatives as well. They were in power for 14 years and nothing was done about the size of the state or taxation. They're just statists as well, with a different uniform. It's like football teams or soccer teams using different uniforms. They're both at the same game.

Here in the UK we have a new Chancellor of the Exchequer, who's the equivalent of Scott Bessent, or Secretary of the Treasury. His name is John Healey. I'd never heard of the guy until they appointed him. Apparently he was in the Treasury during Gordon Brown's reign as Chancellor. So that ended up really well, didn't it? Gordon Brown, the man who thought he had conquered boom and bust. The man who sold half the country's gold. But if you look at his background, he doesn't even have an economics background, this John Healey character. And he basically now is blaming private businesses for inflation.

There's an article here and it's actually coming from the Guardian. There's some other ones in the Telegraph, but I'll pick the Guardian, which is a left-leaning newspaper. It says: “Healey's profiteering warning on food and fuel risks row with retailers. Chancellor says the government wants to prevent shoppers being taken for a ride at the pump or till.”

I mean this is so rich coming from a guy who's in charge of raking in all the tax from you. I've had a look here. The total tax take of the UK government is 40% of GDP. Yes, 1.2 trillion pounds. The thing about the UK government is it's a monopoly. It's enforced by force, right? You don't pay the tax, you go to jail. But private businesses, they compete with each other. This 40% includes taxes like income taxes, National Insurance, interest income, dividends and other government income.

I've looked here at total government spending. Yes, government spending. And how do they spend? Well, they have to tax. Total government spending is around 45% of GDP. They only tax 36.3% of GDP. Well, total government receipts is 40%. So their deficit is around four to five percent of GDP. That's why the currency is going down the toilet. That's why people are struggling to buy things cheaper. Well, everything's getting more expensive because the value of the currency is going down. It's a simple law of supply and demand.

And before we go over that article, just want to bring up something that Felix Somary, who was the Raven of Zurich, said. I recommend that biography, The Raven of Zurich, Felix Somary. There's a free PDF online. He said many years ago the following: “The state alone is responsible for inflation. Inflation without government, or indeed against government, is impossible.”

Let's quickly go through this article and then I'm going to go through some more numbers that show that this guy is just having it on. He's just trying to pass the blame to private business, to people who actually compete.

John Healey, the Chancellor, has said the government is standing by to prevent the public from being taken for a ride at the pump or the till as the Iran war continues to hit prices. Well, what's hitting prices is not the Iran war. Yes, temporarily it might, but it's that four to five percent deficit spending for like 10–15 years that they do. That's what hit prices. And who started the war? Was it the supermarkets? No, it was Israel and the government of the United States, and the UK government is helping, allowing the US government to use its bases to keep this war going. So again, government to blame.

While he said that there had been no significant evidence of so-called price gouging during the crisis, he used the weekend column to tell big retailers that ministers were watching closely for any signs of profiteering. Healey faces a difficult economic balancing act as the energy price shock caused by the month-long conflict in the Middle East reignites the cost of living. Last week the Bank of England kept UK interest rates on hold as it warned that a further escalation in the Iran war could drive inflation above 4% next year, adding to the financial pressures on households.

Well, here's another institution that is the major inflation machine: the Bank of England. They were given in 1694 the power to create currency and credit out of thin air, and the banks that work with the Bank of England do the same. Yet they're blaming the Iran war for inflation. No, we've had inflation for decades and they might tinker with the prices, which is really not inflation. It's the consequence of the prices through the statistics. But we all know that things compared to 20 years ago are a lot more expensive, and that's how they do it gradually, so that people only kind of notice things. Younger people, they're born and that's what the price is. But what they don't like is the acceleration.

And I mean this is not just socialist or left-leaning governments that try to blame businesses for inflation. Remember back in the 70s Nixon put price controls, rent controls. It doesn't work of course.

So just wanted to go through some numbers here. It's quite outrageous really because I had to look at how much of the cost of fuel is taxed in VAT here in the UK. And by fuel I mean gasoline and diesel at the petrol stations or gas stations as they call it in the UK. And guess what it is? 50% is tax and VAT. It says here fuel duty is 52.95 pence per litre. VAT 20% on the entire retail price including the fuel duty. So VAT is charged on top of another duty — or well they call it a duty. It's a tax really.

For example, if the petrol costs 160p per litre at the pump, fuel duty will be 52.95. Pre-VAT price including the duty will be 133.33. VAT will be 26.67. The total tax will be 79.62. So basically half of it is government taking it from you and they're blaming the retailers. It's just outrageous really.

And I had a look as well at supermarkets. What proportion of goods sold at supermarkets in the UK are charged VAT? It says there's no official government statistic for that, but a reasonable estimate is that around 65 to 75% of supermarket sales by value are zero-rated for VAT. Well that's good, but around 25 to 35% of supermarket sales by value are subject to the standard 20% VAT. So they come to the conclusion that for every £100 you spend a week in the supermarket, you're paying about £5 to £7. That's the government right there. And I'm not even talking about all the rules and regulations, all the employment rules, all the National Insurance that the supermarkets have to pay for their employees, and the employees as well. They pay National Insurance, income tax, corporation tax for the big supermarket chains and for the petrol stations. It's just outrageous really.

And I've noticed that the new prime minister Andy Burnham is talking about nationalisation. So he wants to decrease even more competition in business. You can bet things are going to get a lot worse if he gets his way. Nationalisation. I mean even President Trump is doing that in the US. The US government is buying companies like Intel and mining companies. I mean that's crazy. What we need is more competition, not more interference.

What else is going on in terms of the government that I wanted to tell you about. So, how much net profit per pound would UK gas stations make? And the number is tiny. They make about 1 to 2% for every pound of fuel sales. So it's almost nothing. It says here that is why most petrol stations or gas stations do not rely on fuel sales for most of their profits. Fuel is often used to attract customers, while the convenience store generates much higher margins. A coffee, sandwich, snacks, or groceries can produce several times the profit of selling an entire tank of petrol.

Well, the other thing I would say as well, we have very high energy prices, not just at the pump, but electricity and gas. And why is that? Is it because of the greedy corporations? No, it's because we have this UK policy which was unanimously passed by an Act of Parliament in 2008, the Climate Change Act of 2008, which basically stops big corporations from extracting natural resources that could power our economy really cheaply, because they tell us that there's an existential crisis called climate change and that we have to stop consuming fossil fuels or whatever. I mean this country has huge reserves of oil and gas in the North Sea. We have a huge amount of coal under the ground. While the Chinese use their coal for thermal energy, we don't. So again, blame the government.

But as I was saying as well, the public is to blame. And why is that? You might find this a bit harsh, but this is where we come to Frédéric Bastiat. And I highly recommend you get this book. You can get a free PDF on the mises.org website, or you can go to the Mises website and buy the book from their shop. It's not a big book. You can read this in a day or even less, a few hours.

It says here about Frédéric Bastiat. So let's go through it a little bit. “It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.” So that's all it is. All these politicians, all these governments in the West these days, all they are is an organised crime syndicate where they extract almost half of your wealth. And then when people realise that they're doing that through inflation and taxation, they blame the people who actually make life a lot easier for you — the private businesses that compete. They might be big corporations. They might be small businesses, but I promise you things would be a lot worse if the current lot in power in the UK get their wish of nationalising even more businesses.

France of 1850 was in political turmoil in the aftermath of the revolution of 1848. The tide of socialism was sweeping the nation. One man stood alone against the tide. The precocious son of a merchant, Frédéric Bastiat, devoured the writings of free trade economists such as Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Say, rejecting the popular notions of his day. Bastiat began to speak and write against ideas he believed were undermining the natural harmonies of interest among men. First as an orator and essayist, later as a member of the legislative assembly, he became known for withering logic and devastating wit. He also became isolated politically. The struggle between left and right was for power and plunder. So you see left and right doesn't matter. Yet Bastiat believed that the only purpose of government was to guarantee individual rights and freedom. I totally agree with that. It's not democracy. Democracy is actually this left and right rubbish. It's the tyranny of the 51%.

This is what I wanted to talk about here. It's one of his most memorable epigrams and it's the reason why I said unfortunately we've only got ourselves to blame, because the vast majority of people will accept something for nothing. Yeah, they will accept help from the government but they don't realise what that really means. So this epigram says: “The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” So there you go.

Make sure you share this far and wide, not just here if you're in the UK, but anywhere else in the world because this is something that's happening, not just here, it's happening everywhere, as I said.

So it's 6:40 a.m. London time. How are the markets doing? Well, I've checked the bond markets first. I think that's really important. The JGB market — the JGB yields are up today. Actually, the 10-year yield is up four basis points at 2.83. The 30-year is approaching 4%. So things are still not great for the Japanese bond market. But for the US Treasury market, the yields are coming off a little bit here, which is a good thing. But I think this is just a little correction in a much worse bear market where yields are going to go a lot higher. Yeah, it sounds confusing. Yields going higher is a bear market because it means that bond prices drop. Right now the 10-year yield is at 4.70. It's down about five basis points. You can probably bet there's a bit of intervention in this market by the powers that be. They use the big Wall Street banks to do that for them. The 30-year is down four at 5.23. I don't think they're going to be able to stop this because the states — and by the states I mean governments in the West — they've abused their power through spending, through inflation, through taxation, and they're going to try to keep these markets manipulated as long as possible, just like they try to keep the precious metals manipulated. And why is that? Well, because these are like barometers of monetary and fiscal corruption. And they're not going to succeed because I think people are waking up, especially the people with a lot of wealth. They're starting to realise this is not good — the smart money. Unfortunately, the public will only get involved when it's a little bit too late.

So this is what I try to do here on this channel, and I'm not trying to sell anything. I'm just trying to warn you and tell you what I've been doing over the years, i.e. making sure I have a little bit of gold and silver outside the system.

So what are gold and silver doing this morning? Well, gold is at 4,062. It's up about 20 bucks. High's been 4,088. The low is 4,040. Yes, we're a bit addicted kind of to looking at the fiat price of gold and silver. I mean, I do it. You probably do it. But I think the best thing is really to keep getting rid of the organised criminals’ currency, the fiat currency, as much as possible. Unfortunately, we need to keep some to pay their extortion fees, you know, the taxes. And if we don't, we go to jail. But at the same time, try to protect yourself. That's all gold and silver are. They're insurance with no small print. It will always pay off. Always pay off. And it never expires, right?

So, with that, I'm going to wish you all a very good rest of the day. Take care.

Very interesting. The reset(like what happened in Mexico) is designed to steal from people and keep inflation going. They cut off three zeros so 1,000 pesos went to 1.

This tricks people psychotically because if price of an item goes up 1000 to 2000, that's a lot, but if it only goes from 1 to 2 it makes it seem like prices are increasing slower. It also fools people due to the smaller number. People will think, "Oh it used to be 50 but now I'm only paying 2" even though it still rose the same.

Good morning, everyone, from Join the Dots. This should come to you Wednesday. Now, I say that because it's very important that you watch Monday and Tuesday's shows because there was an absolutely superb interview with Grant Williams. And it took two shows to dissect it and describe it. But they are vital for you to understand because everything that comes today, which is almost the whole world of finance, was covered in that Grant Williams interview. So, please make sure you watch Monday and Tuesday's shows.

Okay, so we're starting off today macro with London property market. And I've got a piece here I'm going to link and send to you from Savills talking about how the billionaire market is okay, but the millionaire market is really suffering. And it says that property prices in the millionaire range in Mayfair, St. James, Belgravia, Knightsbridge, Chelsea, Kensington, all the primaries of London, are down. Listen to this figure. More than 25% since Listen to this date. 2014. I kid you not.

Okay, so look at that look at that link to Savills report. Please, because tax changes, political uncertainty, higher rates, higher taxes, particularly, are leaving are lending themselves to make people leave the cities. And that leaves property crises developing. Not here yet, but developing. Okay, and again, the billionaires succeeding, K-shaped economy. The rich, the super rich, are getting super richer. And the normal middle class are being pushed down to the poor where they become dependent. Because that's the aim. That's the aim, at the end of the day, of this is to take away the middle class. Greg Mannarino's been talking about it for 3-4 years. Strip the middle class of their independence, right?

Now, we come on to Australian property because again, this was referred to me by Duncan Cook 3789. Thank you, Duncan. You're linking quite a few pieces. Quite interesting. Thank you. This is a guy we've featured two or three times before. He's an auctioneer in Australia and he describes the fact that he's been to six auctions and there's not one registration. Not one person has registered. I'm just going to get my phone to work here because I've got the Let's have a look at what he says. He says it is the worst auction time in his 30 years. His worst auction time in 30 years. There it is. Worst auction day in 30 years.

Okay, so that's link number two. Please watch it because again, join these dots. Please join these dots. Property prices falling in all capital cities across the Western world. That means Australia, Canada as well and Japan and other centers. They're falling. Actually, I won't say Japan because Japan, because of the weak yen, is actually attracting some buying.

Link number three, BTC liquidations, Bitcoin liquidations. Very briefly, there's a report out. It shows two companies selling their treasury assets. They aren't treasury assets, are they? They just bought some Bitcoin to try and make some money. All right? And now they're selling them because the price is going down. Of course, it starts to constrain their balance sheet, what they can do in their real business and they're selling off. So, to me, I see this as a fundamental risk to Bitcoin. All right? It's a fundamental risk that companies who bought Bitcoin and put it in their treasury and are oh, we're so clever, we're so clever, are suddenly finding that they're having to sell it to clean their balance sheet up. And as rates go up, as liquidity gets harder, they need more liquidity. They need to force their balance sheet to work more. And that's not sitting in Bitcoin. It's just a risk that I see a lot of people haven't talked about it. Maybe I'll be wrong. We don't know.

Okay, link of the day. And we're going back to our friend OG John AG and the source code. Now, he is getting a lot more limited on his presentations now, and I understand why because he was absolutely slammed by JP Morgan and Jane Street and anyone else in the manipulation game because he exposed them 100%. Do you remember? He exposed them 100%. And it was the day after he called out JP Morgan that his source code site went poof. Or OG John AG was just taken off the air. He's back as the source code. Watch it, please. Now, I'm going to take you through one episode, and I'm only going to take you through the first half in the rest of this link of the day presentation because there's so much in it. Because obviously doing less presentations means he can concentrate more on an awful lot of things. Or has to. So, first of all, take this insert. It's the first 2 minutes 28, and I want you to really understand what he's saying because it's your job to invest. It is not your job to listen to someone else and do what they said. It's your job to work hard to invest. You can make or lose more money in your investments than you can working for 5 years. So, you have to spend some time. You do not just listen to one person and do what they say. That's why I bring you join the dots. There are lots There are hundreds There are thousands of people out there all with different opinions, and we try and find those that are the very, very best opinions. So, please listen to the first 2 minutes 28.

OG John AG insert:

Someone dropped a comment under the last video. Should I hold my silver or should I sell it? That was the whole message. And before I go anywhere near a chart today, I have to stop on that question because the question is the problem. I do not like it. Not from you, not from anyone. Nobody on this earth should be able to walk up and talk you into or out of what you do with your own money. That part was never mine to carry for you. It is yours. It was always yours. Here's what I want to see in that comment box instead. OG, I pulled the data myself. I did the homework. Here is my plan. This is my time frame. My risk is defined to the dollar. And whether it is a 20-year hold or a 20-minute trade, it does not change a thing because the plan is mine and I can defend every line of it. That is the comment of a free person. The other one is the comment of a dependent one. Nobody talks me out of a position because I did the work to get into it, and I have been doing it for two decades. Most of you know me for the macro, the long game, the big picture, the metals. That is not the whole of it. I am also an active trader, and I trade markets that have nothing to do with metals down on the fast time frames. I have sat on the 1-minute chart. I have sat on the 15-second chart. To most people, that is gambling. To me, it is the furthest thing from gambling there is, because I know what I am doing before I do it. I know when. I know how. I know my exit before I am ever in the trade. I know my invalidation. I know my target. I know how long I expect to sit in that seat down to the detail. I have logged that data on myself for years, thousands of times over, until I built models for different market environments. So, by the time a setup is in front of me, it is almost mechanical. I do not get surprised inside a trade. And the metals are the opposite end of that same discipline. Those I hold for the long term, and nobody tells me when to buy them or when to sell them. Not the metal, not a single position I hold. I know exactly why I am in it and exactly how long I intend to stay. And I am telling you all of this today for one reason, and it is not to impress you. It is so you understand that none of it is a gift and none of it is luck. It is reps. It is years of logging my own decisions and being honest with myself about the bad ones over and over until the flinch was gone. Every piece of that is something you can build for yourself, and nobody, me included, can build it for you. So, when you send me that question, understand what it does. It does not help you. It exposes you. It says you do not have a plan of your own. It says you are leaning on mine. And leaning is exactly how you end up eaten. That is the line between prey and a predator. And I am not going to dress it up as anything gentler than that. I am not your financial advisor. I have never wanted to be, and I never will be.

And one piece you'll take out of that is metals are for the long term, the generational wealth. They're not trades. They're not trades. I had a look at the figures, and we started this service at the beginning of July 25, just over a year ago. Silver was then 35.50, so it's up 60%. Gold was 3312, so it's up 25%. I'm very happy with that. Extremely happy with those returns. As you know, I'm weighted towards silver, 70% silver, 30% gold, or 25% gold and 5% a bit of XRP as my HBAR and XLM as my crypto hedge. Not there to make money in per se, they're as a hedge in case we go into a crypto base world.

All right. So, let's turn on confidence. And he talks about this, and he talks about confidence is having experience, logic, a plan, a rationale, listening to the right voices who all have shown all those qualities, i.e. logic, a plan, experience, rationale, not just YouTube whizzes who pop up and tell you to do something and then disappear when it doesn't work. All right, all of these All of this experience is what I bring you in Join the Dots, and no more so Yes, I've done a lot of good in all linked a lot of good interviews, but that Grant Williams one was pretty special. All right. So, the last two episodes, Monday and Tuesday that you've seen, watch them again, watch them twice, maybe watch them three times, because they're worth listening to.

All right. So, what do we get to really in in what source code is telling us? We're at the end of financialization. How many times have I told you that in the last year? We're at the end of cheap debt. I've told you the same. We're at the end of no or low inflation. Commodities are all going to boom, aren't they? Doesn't matter which way the world turns. Either they're going to be secure assets, safe assets, or they're going to become necessary for the build-out of massive new infrastructure to cope with the world and the decoupling from China as it as the world's main source. The total dependence that China has created or the West has allowed to be created, it doesn't matter who's to blame, means they have to build out. The end of arrogant disregard, I call it. And that is obviously becoming dependent on someone that you can't rely on. The end of peace, again. The end of globalization, again. The end of the luxury of dependence. Yes, I like that one. The end of the luxury of dependence. We feasted on dependence, and now that dependence is turning against us. What are we going to do? So, I say that brings the end of freedom because all of those things are going to disappear. And that means to take you into the next world, they have to take your freedom away to be able to take you into that next world cuz you ain't going to want to go there on your own because it's going to be very very unsettling. And we've talked about that a lot in all the shows. We've talked about how the people now are being forced or will be forced into a new system. And you can't take them there. You can't say oh you can't explain it to them. No one wants to hear. No one's got the time. No one's got the patience. You can't sit down and say, "Oh, let's have a big discussion about how we're going to take you into No, it has to be forced. So, therefore, you need a crisis, and that's why you have the metals as your generational wealth. Gold is your safety. Silver, I think, is your investment.

So, Rick Rule sees it as well. So, insert 3 minutes to 4 minutes 15, an explanation of sentiment and the incorrect professional opinions through this period. Please listen.

OG John AG insert:

Purpose. Skip and you miss the point. I know this part is uncomfortable, but it is the part you actually need more than any level I am about to hand you. If a man is telling you to just follow him, walk away from him. If you are relying on anyone, me included, you will not make it, period. You will not survive this market. That is not me being harsh with you. That is the entire reason this channel exists, not to make you need me, to turn you into an apex predator who never does. And that, right there, is why a certain crowd cannot stand me. Not because I am loud, because they know I see more than they see. And worse than that, I can act on it. And I am handing it to you for nothing, the exact thing they could not deliver even when you paid them for it. One more thing before we touch a single chart, and it weighs as much as anything on the board today. Sentiment. Look around and half the room has quietly turned bearish on the metals. Gold is done, they tell you. Silver is finished. And why? Because of a retracement. That is the whole reason. Not the vaults, not the physical, not one number that actually matters. A pullback on a screen. These are the same people who would not touch gold or silver when it was cheap and hated, and who fall in love with it at the all-time high. They only want the asset when it is expensive and crowded. Sit with what that makes them the moment the move runs. It makes them the fuel. It makes them the exit liquidity for everybody who bought the discount they were too scared to touch. That is the entire role they play. That is all they

I think it's a brilliant description. Remember, no banks, no banks have been buying gold and silver since whenever. No banks have been buying gold and silver. They've got their 60/40 portfolio, haven't they? 60 equities, 40 40 bonds. And now the bonds have come to the end of that 40-year period of financialization, which has been created by low bond rates, low inflation, low inflation. No official inflation, anyway. Despite what we see in food prices.

So, the next clip I'm going to give you is 7 minutes 30 to 8 minutes 51. Please listen.

OG John AG insert:

Now, watch the part the president will not put on a poster. Diesel is still trading at levels you last saw when crude was above $100, and it ticked higher again today. Lower crude on the screen does not help you when the fuel the real economy actually runs on keeps getting more expensive. So, a man can stand up and say oil is only 85, victory. The truck that brings your food does not run on the screen price. It runs on diesel, and diesel is telling the truth. Here's the bigger read on energy, and it is the one the long-term holder needs. We have moved out of the old world where commodities moved mostly on demand. Growth slows, oil falls, growth picks up, oil rises. That was the whole game before this decade. That game is over. The danger now is not soft demand. It is supply stress in the things the system cannot run without. And the cleanest tell for supply stress is backwardation. When the barrel you can get today costs more than the barrel promised to you next year. When that happens, the market is screaming that people want it now, that inventory is thin, that the system is paying up for the present. That is why oil can do exactly what silver did. Silver is dangerous on the upside because you cannot conjure new mine supply overnight. It takes years. Oil is dangerous for the opposite reason, because you cannot kill demand overnight. The world still has to move and eat and ship, no matter the price. Same trap from two directions. Supply cannot answer fast enough. The physical gets tight, the shorts get caught, price starts to run, the shorts are forced to cover, and the covering pours fuel

This covers diesel and silver. Now, that was an excellent interview by uh Mario Manic 64 of Peter Carlin on the diesel issue a few days ago. Please go back and watch it. Please go back. Okay, diesel and silver. How do you link those? I do, and so does OC OG John AG in 7 minutes 30 to 8 minutes 51. So, there are supply stresses in these vital commodities. Diesel is vital, silver is vital. Diesel to move things, silver in the new electronics world, the missile world, the bomb world, the data world, every world, the TV world, the EV world, silver.

All right. Now, we come on to the next clip. And this is 10 minutes 01 through to 12 minutes 30. It's the last insert. Please listen. It covers so many things that Grant Williams covers and that I've covered before. The trust in relationships, the trust in the yen, the Japanese carry trade, the rate rises, the intervention all failing. Please listen.

OG John AG insert:

That is the setup. The scarce assets keep rising even while the average person is struggling. Look at Japan, the clearest picture of a system out of tools. The yen just hit its weakest against the dollar since 1986, 40 years. And look at what they threw at it. In June, the Bank of Japan hiked to 1%, the highest since 1995, and normally that lifts a currency. The yen barely moved. Before that, they spent better than $73 billion buying yen directly. It firmed, then reversed. Then a push to force their giant pension fund into domestic assets. A pop, then nothing. Three tools, three failures, and the yen sits right back where it started. Adam Ferguson saw this in When Money Dies, his account of the Weimar collapse. The lesson is not the wheelbarrows of cash. It is that once a currency loses the trust of the people holding it, the official machinery stops working. It was never about which lever they pulled. It was confidence. Japan is not Weimar, and I will not pretend it is, but the mechanism is the same. A rate hike, a record intervention, a pension push, all shrugged off. That is what it looks like when the tools stop biting. And a weak yen is not just Japan's problem. It raises the cost of every barrel and every bit of food that island imports, feeding inflation already over target and eating into the real wages of ordinary households. And here is why that lands on you in America, whether you own a single yen or not. Japan is the largest foreign holder of United States debt, carrying its own debt worth better than 230% of its economy. To defend a sinking yen, Japan has two moves: hike rates or sell foreign assets. Selling foreign assets means selling US Treasuries. So, at the exact moment America is financing a war and paying more than 1.2 trillion dollars a year just in interest, its biggest foreign lender is being forced to become a seller. That is why yields are ripping higher across the whole developed world at once. And that is the quiet reversal almost nobody is pricing. For decades, cheap Japanese money flowed out and funded everything, every carry trade, every leveraged bet around the planet. That tide is turning home. The world was built around Japanese money leaving. Now it has to adjust to Japanese money coming back, which brings us to

Okay, so tomorrow we'll come back and we'll finish that show from 12 minutes 30 onwards cuz it starts to talk about bond markets then, which are so so so vital to what's going to happen. So, I hope you enjoyed today's show. Please watch that a few times. Please watch those clips from Source Code times. They are crucial to understand. And thank you very much man, from Craig, from me, and Mr. Fugly happily sleeping here. Cheers.

Woo!

Most people never even noticed it happening. The label said gold standard, but the real question is what kind of gold standard were we on? The public was told nothing major had changed. But underneath the system was moving away from gold toward pure debt-based paper money.

So, Bill 457S9s asked a very important question and one that I've actually been wanting to answer for a really long time and have so told you I'm going to answer it. So, now I am. And here's Bill's question. But during the depression, we were on the gold standard. So, I believe what he's talking about is the big dip. and let's just take a look at what comes next because a lot of people say but during the Great Depression we were on the gold standard and that sounds really simple and and technically we were but the real question is what kind of gold standard were we on because just because something has the same name does not necessarily mean it is the same thing and we've talked about that regard art in confiscation quite a bit. All different names mean the same thing, but even the same names can mean completely different things. And that is why this story matters to you because the same thing has happened to our money over and over and over again. real money, sound money, was slowly replaced with paper promises, then debt, then digital debt, and most people never even noticed it happening. But frankly, you feel the result every day. You feel it when groceries cost more, when saving money feels harder, when your dollars buy less and less, and even though you've worked just as hard or even harder.

So today, I want to walk you through a simple fable, the ship of Thesus. This was a famous ship that was kept in harbor for many, many years. Over time, one old wooden board rots, so it was replaced with the new board. Later, another board is replaced, then another, and eventually every single part of the ship has been replaced. The bonds, the sails, the mast, everything.

And so the question is, if every part of a ship is replaced one piece at a time, is it still the same ship?

And if every part of money is replaced one piece at a time, is it still the same money?

And that is what we are going to answer. And I'm going to show you how they did it because they're doing it again. So having this recollection will help you understand what's really happening. So again, Bill asked, "But during the depression, we were on the gold standard." And I'm thinking it's because the US dollar lost purchasing power even while we're on the gold standard. That is the statement we're going to examine, not with options, not with politics, but by looking at what money actually was, how it changed, and what happened to its purchasing power. because the label said gold standard but the question again was it the same ship or had key parts already been replaced?

Now before we can answer that we need to know what real money is supposed to do. Sound money has four key jobs. First it is a unit of account and that means we can use it to price things and value things. Second, it is a medium of exchange, which means we use it to buy and sell or barter. Third, it is a standard of payment, which means it can settle debts fairly and you are fairly paid for your labor. And fourth, it is a store of value so that no matter when you use that money, you are always paid fairly for the labor that created it to begin with.

Now, gold and silver have served these roles for thousands and thousands of years. Proof of concept because they are not someone else's debt. They run no counterparty risk. They don't need a promise from a bank. They do not need a government guarantee. They are money in and of themselves because they have the broadest base of functionality and the broadest base of demand. It's why it overwhelms the systems ability to manipulate it. That, my friends, is the foundation of sound money. Now, let's look at what happened when that foundation began to change. So, look at this chart. In 1914, the consumer dollar had full purchasing power. So, $1 bought 100 cents worth of goods. But by 1933, that purchasing power had already fallen by over 50%.

So before gold was taken from the people in 1933, the dollar had already lost a large portion of its purchasing power. And I'm going to show you why in a moment because that is a very, very important clue. If we were truly on a strong, honest, sound gold standard, why was the dollar already losing so much purchasing power? Now, this is where this ship of Thesius story begins. Because the outside still looked familiar. People still they still used dollars, didn't they? People still talked about gold. It was part of our system. And people still thought the system was safe. But inside the system, parts were already being replaced. So now let's bring in the fable. The ship of Thesius asks a simple question. If you have a ship and you replace one wooden board, it still seems like the same ship. Then you replace another board, then another, then the sail, then the mass, then the steering wheel. At what point is it no longer the same ship?

That is what happened to money. Gold money was not replaced all at once. It was replaced one piece at a time. First, people used actual gold and silver coins. Then they used these paper certificates that that I mean these represented gold. You see this little gold image right there? Then they use Federal Reserve notes and those notes are debt instruments and the Federal Reserve is a private corporation. We'll come back to this. But in the end, the system was no longer sound money. And each step looked small, but it changed the money entirely. It was debt wearing the costume, the costume of money. Now, let's look at one of the first big pieces that were actually replaced because this slide shows a key phrase, elasticity in note issues. That's key because what that means at that the system wanted the ability to stretch and grow the money supply.

But sound money is not supposed to stretch just because banks or governments want more money. Gold and silver are disciplined. They cannot be created with the stroke of a pen or a push of a button. They cannot be printed or magically created into existence. But paper notes, I mean, that's easy. They can be expanded. So, when the system allowed more flexible note creation, it opened the door to inflation. This was one of those replaced boards in the ship. The name gold standard may still have been there, but the discipline of sound money was already being weakened. They destroyed the constitution at that moment in time.

Next, we see how people were made to think that nothing had changed. But I got news for you. This is one of the most important slides that I can show you because here, what do we see? We see a gold coin, a gold certificate, and a Federal Reserve note. To the average person, these may have felt the same because they were all used in circulation at the same time. They could all buy the same level of stated value. They were all $20. And they were all treated alike, like sound money. But they were not the same thing. A gold coin, this is money. A gold certificate is just a paper claim on real money. And a Federal Reserve note. Well, I got news for you. A Federal Reserve note is a debtbased instrument. That, my friends, is a huge difference. It's like replacing the solid wood boards of the ship with painted cardboard. From far away, it may look the same, but it is not the same.

And now we can see the whole transition a lot more clearly. And frankly this slide makes the point plainly because the note a note it's a debt instrument and that matters because gold is not debt silver is not debt but a note this thing it just represents a promise nothing more and promises can be broken promises can be changed and promises can be inflated away.

So here is another replaced piece of the ship. Money used to be an asset. Then it became a claim on an asset. Then it became a debt instrument. That is not a small change. That is the heart of the story. The system that we still call money. But it was no longer sound money in the same way. Now, let's see what happened when this new debt money system expanded because this is the piece that I have been dying to show you since Kelly created it. Now, I'm going to come back to that whole chart that you just saw, but this chart from the Federal Reserve shows the transition from a goldbased system into a paperbased system. And notice it did in the beginning happen in one dramatic moment, but then they backed off and it happened more gradually and that's why most people missed it. The ship still had the same name. The money still had familiar symbols. The public was told nothing major had changed, but underneath the system was moving away from gold toward pure debt-based paper money. And this is why saying we were on the gold standard during the depression is way too simple because we were transitioning off of it. The better question is, were we really on a true gold standard or were we on a weakened system where the gold had already been crowded out by paper claims on debt? And the answer becomes clearer when we look at what a Federal Reserve note really is. Like I showed you, the Federal Reserve is a private corporation and the note is a debt instrument. And I just want you to notice that little bit of gold on the bottom. Well, there's your 10 to one. That fractional reserve system because all that gray area did that's private corporate shortterm commercial debt. And that, my friends, was now turned into this Federal Reserve note. You and I and everybody everywhere in the world are working for debt, corporate debt. Why in the world is that okay with you? I'm coming back to the larger slide here in just a minute. But you can see that kickoff because this is where you saw that massive loss of purchasing power. This is the purchasing power and it shows the 1920s were not just a time of prosperity. They were also a time of credit expansion because once the government oops wish that happened to them but once the government prints all this money into existence. It's in the system. It goes someplace. And that's why the 1920s were so seemed so prosperous. And I also want to point out this 48% loss of purchasing power right out of the shoot when the Federal Reserve instead of 20th of an ounce supporting $1 in that note that I just showed you that 20th of an ounce now supported $2.40. This is not rocket science. They just printed almost two and a half times the amount of money into existence than they could before with the same amount of gold inside of the system. That's why we lost that 48% level of purchasing power. Can you see it? And you see that little blip up to 60 cents worth of purchasing power. We've talked about this before. When inflation heats up and pushes your price into the sky, if they pull back just a little bit, you go, "Oh, look it. Things are under control. Things are more normal." Even when that's just covering up the lie. So, it was all of that money creation that created the roaring 20s. And for the first time, the middle class could get credit. What an amazing thing. Yay. It could keep that whole game going because an inflated money supply means that things look in terms of of numbers that they're going up and up and up, but in reality, what they're doing is they're destroying your purchasing power. And when more debt money is created, it can push up those asset prices and create bubbles. And me, I mean, honestly, people feel richer. for a while. But there is a cost and that is the purchasing power falls. The dollar buys less. So the roaring 20s were not just built on real savings and sound money. They were built on pushed up credit. And credit can feel good on the way up. Look at this. I can buy so much more stuff. Happy days are here again. buddy, can you spare a dime?

But it can be painful when the bill comes due. And that brings us to the next image because people were being asked to trust those paper promises and that inflation was a good thing. This image of that period of time, Roosevelt reminds me and reminds all of us really that the public was being asked to trust the system and the system was based upon inflation. But trust is not the same as sound money. And a promise is not the same as payment. And a paper claim in your hand is not the same as gold in your hand.

This is another part of the fable because the ship may still be floating but if enough strong parts were replaced with weak parts eventually that ship cannot protect the passengers. And in a monetary system, we all of us, we're the passengers. Our savings are on that ship. Our retirement is on that ship. Our purchasing power is on that ship. Our future and our children's future is on that ship.

And this chart shows the growth of debt currency and checking accounts. compared to gold and silver. And you see that all the way on the bottom. The important point is this. The paper and debt claims grew much faster than the sound money foundation. And that means more and more claims were built on top of a smaller and smaller base.

So you can look at that and they withheld all of that debt that they created until they were ready to unleash it on the public. And when did that happen? Oh yeah, after they confiscated and took gold away from the public. That my friends is when they unleashed it. When you and I have no other options, we are fully tied to the system. Can you see why it is so critically important for you to have that shortity in food, water, energy, security, barter abability, wealth preservation, community, and shelter because this is what I think we're going to see with stable coins. And by the way, we saw it again after the 70s in the 1980s kickoff. This is always what happens. always and they really tell us that it's a all for our best interest but I don't know with this K-shaped recovery exactly whose best interest do you think this is really in because all of that is simply inflation and devaluation and the strong wood is replaced by weaker materials. The ship may still look fine for a while, but the strength is gone. That is what happens when a monetary system builds too many promises on too little real money. That's why you have to be your own central bank because eventually the promises become too large and the system needs inflation to keep it going. And that is why the debt money system creates a loop.

I'd like you to notice on the bottom the amount of gold that we held in deep storage storage for foreign governments. And in the 60s they were taking and pulling the gold out of our system. So by the time Nixon closed that gold window, which was really a confiscation from foreign governments of their gold, why they allowed it, I don't understand, but they did. That was the most current overt confiscation of gold and very significant. We had no choice. Had we not closed that gold window when we did, we would have less gold or who even knows how much gold we have in deep storage today. But that is something to really pay attention to. This is a very complicated slide. I'd like you to feel free to talk to your strategy specialists about it to make sure that you really understand it. And it's critical that you do because this is what we have going on right now as they transition us from this paper system into the next system which I hope we have a say in because there are six stages to the debt money doom loop and we're just going to do that simply put because the higher the debt the lower the interest rates need to be so that they could take on more debt and service it. This slide shows that debt money doom loop. Here's the simple version. When the system needs more money, it creates more debt. When more debt is created, interest rates often need to be pushed lower so that you could take on and service that debt. When rates are too low for too long, lots more borrowing happens. That creates more inflation pressure. Then confidence in the currency weakens. Then the same system needs even more debt to keep going. That is the loop. Debt money does not solve the problem. It feeds the problem and makes it bigger and bigger and bigger.

Sound money, physical gold, physical silver creates discipline in the system. Debt money demands expansion. And that is why your purchasing power keeps getting drained over time. They just want it to happen slowly enough that you don't make any changes. Now, let's move from history to where we are today because this chart shows federal debt rising from hundreds of billions to tens of trillions. This is not just a government problem. It affects every person who earns, save, invest or retires in do dollars or any other fiat money because debt at some point it has to be dealt with. It can be paid honestly. It can be defaulted on. It can be rolled over or it can be inflated away. And inflated away is what they've always depended on. Historically, governments often choose inflation because it is less obvious. It does not look like a tax bill, but it is. And it acts like one. Your dollars buy less and less. Your savings stretch less and less. Your labor has to work harder and harder just to stay in the same place, if you even can. And that brings us to the purchasing power of the modern dollar. Because this chart shows the long fall in the purchasing power of that dollar. This is the result of the replacement story. When money becomes debt and debt must keep growing, purchasing power is always sac it's always sacrificed. That's that K-shaped recovery. For most, it's sacrificed. For the few, it's better. That is why prices do not really go up in isolation. What is really happening is that the dollar is going down.

The measuring stick is shrinking. Imagine measuring your child's height with the ruler that gets shorter every year. It would look like your child is growing faster than they really are. That is what inflation does. It makes prices look like they're rising, but much of the time currency is just the currency losing value.

Now, let's compare that shrinking dollar to spot gold and spot silver. Because this slide brings the story home. Look at the difference between the cost of a basic food basket and spot silver and spot gold over time. I even happened to do it almost a year ago. So I thought I would leave that in there from last year because I thought it was really interesting in 613. So not quite but almost a year ago while the food basket had gone up a little bit more than 2300%. Spot silver had gone up over 3600% and spot gold glowing closer to 16.600,000 600,000%. But look what happened this year when I just ran those numbers the other day. Well, that basket had gone up a little bit to over 2400%. So, almost a full 100 percentage point. Spot silver basically more than doubled during that same period of time. And spot gold rather than the 16.6,000% 6,000% it went up almost 22,000%.

They are monetary assets that have always for thousands of years survived governments, currencies, wars, reset and debt cycles. They do not depend on someone else's promise to pay. This is why they matter. So the question is not whether or not gold and silver move up and down dayto day. Paper currencies come and they go. Debt systems expand and then they fall. But sound money sound money remains on task to protect your purchasing power over time. So now we come back to the fable and the final lesson.

Money was not replaced overnight. You'd notice it. It was replaced one piece at a time over time. First gold and silver coin were replaced by paper claims. There's that paper claim. Then that paper claim were replaced by these notes. And those notes then debt instruments. And then debt became the costume of money. And when debt wears the same costume of money, most people do not notice right away. They still see dollars. I mean, I can pull out a $20 today. They still see dollars. They still see bank balances. They still see numbers on a screen and the stock markets going up. But the substance has changed. The ship has changed. The money has changed. And the people who do not understand that are the ones most exposed and vulnerable when the system changes again.

That's why this story matters. It's not just history. It's a warning. And it is also an opportunity because sound money was never destroyed. Gold and silver. Look at they're still here from thousands and thousands of years. They are not promises, not debt, and not someone else's liability. They are the monetary foundation that outlasts every single paper system that has ever been in existence.

So, here's the question I want to leave you with today. If the monetary ship has been rebuilt with debt, paper, and promises, what part of your wealth is still anchored to sound money?

This is exactly why we do what we do here at Zang International. And it all has to start with your goals. We help people build a sound money strategy using physical gold and silver so that they are not depending only on a debt-based system that is designed to lose your purchasing power over time. If this story made any sense to you, don't wait until the next crisis to prepare. Call us and schedule a sound money strategy session because the best time to understand the ship is before it starts taking on water. And the best time to own sound money is before everyone else realizes why they need it. And it's too late to get it.

And without a doubt, while we need that local community, we need a global community to demand sound money, create that discipline in the next monetary system that we're transitioning into. And frankly, I know without a doubt that together we can do anything. Remember the dimes? If you're a client, you get the first one free and then the rest of them at our cost cuz you're the army. Let's get sound money back in the system again. Don't we have an obligation to do so? And until next we meet, please, wherever you are in the world, be safe out there. Bye-bye.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/07/gold-isn-t-returning-confidence-is-leaving/

Most people are framing the conversation regarding gold wrong.

They talk about gold making a comeback -- as though the metal changed. As though something happened to gold.

Nothing happened to gold. Gold is exactly what it has always been.

What's changed is the environment around it. And that distinction matters enormously, because it tells you where to look for better insights.

For decades, people treated fiat currency as the unquestioned foundation of global finance. Gold became an afterthought -- an inflation hedge, a crisis trade, insurance against events sophisticated investors assumed would never arrive. The system ran on confidence, and confidence was abundant. When confidence is abundant, nobody examines the collateral.

However: when confidence erodes, collateral suddenly matters again.

That is what is happening now. Not suddenly. Not dramatically. Systemically.

Central banks have been quietly adding gold reserves for years. Governments have grown uncomfortable with the political risk embedded in foreign currency holdings. Institutional investors are revisiting strategic allocations they long considered settled. Discussions have surfaced around gold-backed sovereign debt. Tokenization is making physical ownership practical inside a digital financial system.

Taken individually, none of this looks like a revolution. Taken together, it looks like a system beginning to search for a more trusted foundation.

The conventional gold debate obsesses over inflation forecasts, Federal Reserve policy, and price targets. That framing misses the structural issue entirely. Gold is not becoming more valuable because its characteristics changed. Its characteristics have been constant for centuries. What changed is how much those characteristics matter in the environment we now occupy.

Every period of monetary history forces the same question eventually: what asset sits outside the promises of everyone else? That question grows more urgent as sovereign debt expands, fiscal flexibility narrows, and geopolitical relationships become less predictable. In that environment, neutrality acquires real value. Gold carries no national allegiance, no corporate balance sheet, no counterparty obligation. Those qualities have always existed. Markets are simply beginning to price them again.

Although gold-backed money deserves serious consideration -- not as nostalgia, but as a return to the classical gold standard -- it remains highly improbable. Modern governments have little incentive to surrender the flexibility fiat systems afford them. The realistic scenario is quieter than that. Gold gradually resumes its role as a reference asset. Not circulating currency. Not legal tender. But foundational collateral, increasingly preferred when confidence elsewhere continues to weaken. This is what appears to be happening far away from all the sell-side headlines.

What makes this moment worth watching is the self-reinforcing nature of the process. Higher demand supports higher prices. Higher prices strengthen balance sheets. Stronger balance sheets make additional gold ownership easier to justify. Broader institutional acceptance encourages wider adoption. Wider adoption generates further demand. These are not isolated developments. They are feedback loops.

Today, whether this ever produces a formal gold-backed currency is secondary. The primary insight is: people and governments are actively adjusting the value of confidence. Quietly. Through behavior, not announcement. History repeatedly shows that monetary transitions rarely begin with a declaration. They begin when participants start acting differently -- and by the time the new consensus becomes obvious, most of the adjustment has already occurred.

So the right question is not whether gold deserves renewed attention. The right question is why increasingly sophisticated institutions believe it does -- and what that tells us about the system they are quietly hedging against.

That answer has nothing to do with nostalgia.

It has everything to do with architecture.

Financial systems are based on confidence.

When confidence begins to fragment, participants seek assets that require the fewest assumptions.

Gold has occupied that position before -- not because governments demanded it, but because markets eventually preferred it.

And while goldbugs wait, there is now an option to collect as much as 4% yield on physical, paid out as additional ounces of physical gold, something our friends at Monetary Metals have been perfecting for years.

Gold is not asking for a larger role in the current system.

The current system may be assigning it one.