Why America’s Debt Bubble is About to Pop with Peter Schiff | Align Podcast #519
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Welcome back to the Lime Podcast. Today's conversation is all around investing and the economy and what the heck is happening going forward with the future of politics and government and economics, and particularly how we can make safe, sound decisions today that will lead to a more fruitful life moving forward. This podcast is typically more geared towards health and wellness and things of the sort.

But a big part of health and wellness is also feeling financially safe. And so I wanted to have Peter Schiff. Peter Schiff is someone who I have been observing and listening to from afar for a long time. He is a financial commentator, radio personality, he's a stockbroker, he's accrued millions of followers and subscribers across various platforms. And he's someone that I really appreciate his lens on investing.

He is someone that has a very, very strong bias towards specific things that you'll find out more about during this conversation. And so I would take all of this with a grain of salt. I would also say this is definitely not financial advice. It is more of a exploration into the meaning of money, the way that we place value on certain things, the potential trajectories and directions.

of where things will be going in the future, where things may go in the future. And a big part is just how we place value on certain things and how that can fluctuate based off of the times and the psychology of the individuals living in those times. So I hope you guys enjoyed this conversation with Peter Schiff. I invite you to watch the YouTube version of the Align podcast. Subscribe over there for a chance to win sweet prizes at the end of each month. Thanks for reviews. Thanks for a new. Let's get to it with Peter Schiff. Peter Schiff.

Thank you for making time to do this. I've been following your stuff for a very long time. And I wanted to start with asking you about your thoughts on

the direction of the economy coming up with the presidential election and such. Something I've heard you suggest is we're on the precipice of a financial crisis greater than that of 2008. What are your thoughts on the direction of the economy coming up? You know, we've actually been on that precipice for a long time now. But obviously, we're a lot closer to falling now than we were in the past. But, you know, we'll see how much longer we can defy gravity here.

But the problems have been building and they've really exploded in a very noticeable way over the last several years where you've finally seen the consequences of years of inflation show up dramatically in consumer prices to the point that inflation is now the single biggest issue on the minds of voters, at least most of them.

And it's just getting started. As much as the Fed wants to pretend that they've solved the problem, it's just going to get worse. They never raised interest rates nearly enough to put the genie back in the bottle. And now they're cutting rates. And the national debt's about to hit through $36 trillion. Maybe it'll do it before we get the results from tomorrow's election. But we're at $35.97 trillion now in the national debt.

But we've been living in a bubble where we keep on taking on more debt. Donald Trump set the record for the most debt in any one term, and Biden's already beat it in one term. I mean, he's almost close to beating Obama, but Obama had eight years, and Biden's only been there for not even four.

But it's a giant debt bubble. You know, we have massive trade deficits as well as massive budget deficits. Our manufacturing sector has been in a persistent recession, depression for years. It got worse under Trump, too. I mean, it was you know, it wasn't just Biden, but it's continued to deteriorate under Biden.

And, you know, the voters feel it. That's why so many people want to change. It's because what they're experiencing now is no good, right? The media, Wall Street tries to say that we have this great economy. Well, then why would anybody want to screw with it? If the economy is so great, people would want more of the same. The reason they don't want more of the same is because they can't handle the same. They're drowning in debt. People are working two or three, four jobs just to put food on the table and pay the rent.

You know, the credit card debt is an all time record high. And so are the interest rates. You're at like 24 percent interest now on credit card debt. And people have never had so much credit card debt. Meanwhile, the cost of living is just absolutely exploded, which is where all the jobs come from. It's because people are forced to moonlight because they can't survive on one job where they used to be able to do that.

So it's really a horrible economy. It's masquerading as a stronger economy because you have all this inflation that is pushing up the GDP, creates an illusion that the economy is growing. But if you measure things in gold, the price of gold is $2,750. People want to celebrate the Dow. Oh, it said $40,000. But in terms of gold, it's about half what it was in 2001.

So the real value of U.S. stocks has been cut in half, even though the Dow keeps hitting new record highs. And that's because the dollar is collapsing in value. And so it's an illusion. People are fooled into thinking they're richer. Sure, you know, people earn more than they earned 20 years ago in dollars, but they can't buy anywhere near what they could buy.

Because the dollars that they earn have lost so much value, even though they earn more, they still could buy less. And in fact, most of the government numbers are influenced by the fact that inflation is so underreported. And so by pretending inflation is a lot lower than it is, they can also pretend that the economy is growing when in fact it's shrinking.

What would be, so I would love to get into the intrinsics of how all that works, like who's in charge of the economy, who is in charge of the economy? Well, nobody's supposed to be in charge of it, right? I mean, we're supposed to have a free market, right? It's not a centrally planned economy where we have a bureau of government officials that decide everything. But I think the numbers were designed

to under-report certain things and over-report others. So when it comes to inflation, the methodology for computing the price rises was deliberately designed in such a way to make the price increases a lot lower when they get reported. So when the CPI says 3%, it's probably 6%.

So what goes into the CPI is not necessarily what comes out because there's all kinds of mechanisms to reduce those numbers. But again, when you're looking at prices, you're not measuring inflation. You're looking at a result of inflation. The inflation is the expansion of the money supply and money supply has exploded. It started going up on a massive trajectory after the 2008 financial crisis and then

even increased the trajectory with COVID.

But we flooded the world with money. That's why prices are so much higher than they were before we did that. Yeah. How long can that be an effective strategy at kicking the can down the road of inflating the economy with quantitative easing and just printing more money? How long can that work before eventually the jig has to be up? Or can you just keep perpetuating that? Well, obviously, you can't do it indefinitely.

But yeah, the $64 trillion question is how long can it be done? Because we've already done it for a lot longer than I would have thought 10, 20 years ago, knowing what the problems were. But all those problems are now so much bigger. That's the problem with can kicking. When you do it, the problems actually get worse. And so when you eventually run out of road or the can is too big to kick, it's much worse. And where that tipping point is is

I don't know. I mean, do we have another three months, three years? You know, you know, there's no no way to know, you know, until you're looking back on it, you know, with the benefit of hindsight. I mean, it's going to happen. And the thing is, when it does happen,

The mainstream media is going to be, oh, my God, this is crazy. Nobody could have predicted this. This is a total black swan. This is a 100-year flood or whatever. No, this is completely out of left field, right? But no, I mean, it was obviously coming. The problem is it's been delayed for so long. And the people like me who've been warning about it, you know, people say, you know, make fun of us because we're warning about a crisis that, you know, apparently hasn't happened yet.

But a lot of the things that I have been warning about have happened, including the big outbreak of inflation as measured by consumer prices. But, you know, I don't know. I mean, I would imagine that, you know, it's going to blow up, you know, during, you know, the term of whoever wins tomorrow's election. You know, that, you know, that that's the bad part about Trump winning is he could end up being the bag holder on this.

Because he's made a lot of grandiose promises about how great everything is going to be as soon as we elect him. And that's not going to be the case. I mean, that doesn't mean we shouldn't vote for him. I mean, he's going to be better than Harris. But things are going to get worse no matter who we elect.

The problem is if we elect Harris, they may never get better. But I don't know what Trump's going to do. I mean, I know for sure Harris will do the wrong thing. Trump will probably do the wrong thing, but may eventually do the right thing. There's a chance. There's no chance with Harris. What does it look like for the average consumer when the proverbial can becomes too large to kick? What does that actually look like to a human being that's not an economist? Yeah. Well, you know,

The problem in the US economy is that we're all living in this bubble and Americans collectively don't produce anywhere near what they consume. And the difference is made up by imports. And so we are able to import more than a trillion dollars a year of merchandise that we don't have the capacity to produce. And we don't really pay for it. We just create money and use that.

But our trading partners, what are they going to do with the dollars? They really can't do anything. They can just buy treasuries or buy other dollar debt instruments. But they've been accumulating all these dollars, and we've gotten the benefit of all the stuff that they make.

Well, I think what's going to happen is that we get a crisis where the world realizes that we're broke and we can't pay our bills. I mean, sure, we can print money, but that doesn't count because that just destroys the value. And I think our trading partners are going to start getting rid of their dollars. I think that process has already started. I mean, that's one of the main reasons that gold is $2,750.

Central banks have been de-dollarizing quietly and slowly. I think the pace of that is going to pick up. But I think we're going to get a big drop in the dollar. That's going to also cause a big rise in long-term interest rates and consumer prices.

And so that's going to impact Americans profoundly because it's going to dramatically increase the cost of living in the United States. Basically, this huge foreign subsidy is going to be removed and Americans are going to have to get used to living within their means. And unfortunately, our means are

have been dramatically reduced over the decades where we've shut down our factories and replaced them with shopping centers or whatever we've got. And so things are going to get very expensive, which means people aren't going to buy many things. Most of what people earn is going to go to food. It's going to go to the utility bills.

healthcare, people aren't going to have money left over to buy discretionary items, bigger ticket items, travel, do other things. They're just going to be scraping by. It's just going to be pretty austere here as a result. And a lot of people who are retired

are going to find that their retirement has been cut short because they're not going to be able to pay the bills.

with their retirement income or savings because the bills are going to be too high in relation to what they've got. So a lot more people are going to be reentering the workforce. I'm not exactly sure what they're going to do, but they're going to have to do something. For a person, I'm curious categorically for a person who has, say, $10,000 saved in the bank compared to a person that has $100,000 compared to a person that has half a million dollars.

What would you recommend for those different categories of demographic of people to invest their money or their energy at this point in time to hedge their bets for the most brightest, most optimal and safest future? Well, one of the things I've been recommending for a long time for people that just don't have a lot of extra cash that are just barely making ends meet.

is to stock up on things because the stuff that you need is just going to get more and more expensive every time you go to buy it. And eventually there's going to be shortages because they're going to have price controls. So things that are non-perishable, things that you know you're going to need in a year or two or three that aren't going to go bad, that will keep, you should just stock up on them now, you know.

you know that could be you know deodorant toothpaste uh toilet paper you know all kinds of things medicines you know some of the medicines don't have an expiration date so you got to watch it you know you know because you don't want to have stuff past its its usefulness but there are things that can keep uh there are a lot of food products that that will keep that you can store

and that you'll have. You could also, if you have property, you could invest in seeds or you could plant stuff and grow things.

So try to be a little bit more self-sufficient if you can because prices are going to get a lot higher. So you think things are going to get so bad. Your bet is things are going to get so bad, it's wise to go into prepper territory. Yeah. I mean, the prepper territory, I'm not so much prepping for like a war, which although that could happen or where it's a big natural disaster.

It's just that if stuff's going to get more expensive, if I could buy something now that if I wait a year and buy it, it's 20% more expensive. Why not just buy it now? That's like a 20% return on my money. Just go and buy the things in advance. But the other reason to do that is I think eventually the stores are just going to run out of stuff.

Because more people are going to be hoarding stuff. Like I'm saying, when the prices really start to go up, people will be taking stuff off the shelves as soon as it's there. But also, if you look at how the government is vilifying business owners by accusing them of price gouging, it's very likely that price controls will be imposed by the government.

and when that happens a lot of goods and services that are subject to those controls just disappear they're no longer available to buy legally the only way you can buy them is on the black market which is why i also say you should have some silver coins go to ship gold and get some junk silver because most likely if you have to become a criminal to buy you know ordinary items

So the guy, the criminal who's selling them to you is not going to take American Express or Visa. You know, he's breaking the law and he might not even want U.S. currency the way at rate at which it's depreciate. So you got to give him real money, which would be, you know, silver coins or things like that. But if you got more money than that, you know, once you've taken care of, you know, having some emergency supplies or again, again, it's not emergency, just stuff that, you know, you're going to need anyway.

But you got to make investments. You got to figure out where you're going to invest. Inflation destroys savers and paper assets. So if you have a lot of money in cash, in bonds, whether they're treasuries, muni bonds, corporate bonds,

You've got a fixed annuity. You've got cash value and an insurance policy. All that stuff gets wiped out to inflation. You have to own real things, real assets, so real estate, stocks in companies that have real plant equipment, real natural resources that they own, whether it's agriculture,

minerals, oil and gas. I mean, things that the government's not printing, but that we have to buy and the prices will go up. So I invest in companies all around the world that I think will do well in an inflationary environment. The owners of those assets will do well, especially outside the United States, because if I'm right on the dollar collapse relative to other currencies,

Just because Americans are too broke to buy stuff doesn't mean the factories producing those stuff, that stuff, stop producing it. Everything keeps being produced. It's just that they don't ship all the stuff to America anymore, which will save them all the cost of bringing the stuff over here and then bringing the ships home empty, which is what happens now. You know, the ships come over from Asia and Europe full of stuff and they go back empty because we got nothing to put on there.

So they'll save all those shipping costs. This stuff will stay in Asia, stay in Europe. And, you know, people, I think, in the emerging markets will just start consuming what Americans can no longer afford. But the companies that are positioned to profit from the rise of the emerging markets are

That's where we're investing. I mean, Americans are done as far as their shopping days, right? We're gonna be hunkering down and living much more austere lives. Now, of course, I guess the wild card down the line is AI and how quickly this can be implemented and rolled out as far as efficiencies and productivity.

But a lot of money needs to be invested to build it out. And this is money we just don't have, right? I mean, we're drowning in debt. So in the short run, there's just a lot of problems. I want to take a moment and share some exciting news by optimizers Black Friday.

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something that is too much to hold? Because I feel like the concept of $36 trillion, I'm too simple to even have a conceptualization of what that means. What is the difference between $36 trillion and $50 trillion and $20 trillion? What does it even mean? Well, I guess there is no real difference in that we can't pay back $20 trillion or $36 trillion or $50 trillion. So

I guess it doesn't even matter because we're going to default on it either through inflation or, you know, honestly, one way or another. But if you look at how much, you know, the government right now collects about $5 trillion a year in taxes. You'd think that would be enough money. But they spend over $7 trillion a year. And so we have a deficit of $2, $3 trillion a year, you know, which is, you know, a good chunk of the government that we can't afford and we're not paying for it.

Now, we're paying for it with inflation. That's why prices are up, because we have to fund the deficits by creating inflation. So inflation is the tax. And that tax is going to get bigger and bigger and bigger as a result of these deficits, which are only going to get bigger because of the deficits themselves, because it's a self-perpetuating spiral, because the debt has to be financed and we have to borrow the money to do that.

So if we have a $2 trillion deficit, we have to borrow another $500 billion to pay the interest on that $2 trillion each year, assuming interest rates stay pretty low, on top of the fact that we got to pay interest on the $36 trillion that was already there. So the debt is spiraling out of control. And it has got to end in a crisis because we're borrowing the money.

In theory, people aren't giving it to us. So when somebody is loaning you money, they have an expectation of being paid back.

Well, people are going to start to realize that they're not going to get paid back. It is impossible. It's mathematically impossible for the U.S. government to pay back this amount of money. Now, yes, we have a printing press so we can print the money, but that is the problem. If we have to print the money to pay off the debt, the money doesn't have any value. So it doesn't matter that you got paid. You got paid in money that doesn't buy anything. So once our creditors

come to this conclusion, then they want out. And I think we're going to get to that point where U.S. treasuries are toxic. They're junk bonds. Nobody will touch them. They're not like the risk-free asset that everybody wants to own. They're toxic debt that nobody wants to touch. And so then you have the Federal Reserve that isn't just the buyer of last resort. It's the only buyer.

But the problem is it's not just treasuries, it's dollars. Because if we're going to print money to fund the debt, then the dollar crashes, which means you don't want any bonds. You don't want muni bonds. You don't want corporate bonds. So how do you borrow money if nobody will lend it to you? So the whole economy implodes, especially since our economy is built on debt.

We have a dysfunctional economy where we borrow a bunch of money that we can't pay back to buy a bunch of goods that we didn't make and we can't afford. And so, you know, this whole pyramid is going to collapse.

And who are who is the United States specifically borrowing money from? Like who are from everybody? Lenders every we owe that we we owe everybody. But we're borrowing a lot from the Fed. Right. Which is just printing it. But we're borrowing money from pretty much every country that we do business with because we've got a trade deficit with every country we do business with. So they lend us money to buy their stuff.

but we can never really pay it back. It's like Wimpy on a Popeye. I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. He never has any money, but he's getting free burgers. And is there strategy in that, presumably, from the United States? I don't know if it's strategy. I mean, it's just how we're surviving. We're just surviving. But we're exploiting the fact that the dollar is the reserve currency.

And we use that as a crutch. So we don't have to, you know, we don't have to have the factories. We don't have to produce. We could just have service sector jobs, which are a lot easier to create, you know, and a lot easier to perform. You know, the hard work, you know, is rolling up your sleeves and get your hands dirty and actually go into a factory and making stuff. You know, there's not that many Americans anymore that do that. I mean, there's a few, but it's a very small percentage and the percentage shrinks every day. And the risk would be

Worst case scenario for U.S. economy would be if the dollar does not become the reserve currency. Is that kind of our biggest leverage? We're the reserve currency now. The risk is that we lose that status, which I think is inevitable. We lose that. That's kind of our highest leverage point. Is that kind of? Well, that's what we're living off of. You know, that's the big subsidy that we get that makes this dysfunctional economy function.

Because we get all these imports that we don't have to pay for. Our interest rates are lower than they otherwise would be, considerably lower. And our consumer prices are much lower than they otherwise would be if the dollar wasn't the reserve currency. And so America, in a world where the dollar isn't the reserve currency, we're not going to be able to borrow all this money. And prices are going to be much higher. We're not going to be able to have a trillion dollar a year trade deficit.

So how is that trillion dollar a year trade deficit going to go away? It's mostly going to go away because we stop importing because the imports are going to be so expensive that we can't afford to import the stuff. And our exports are going to have to pick up, you know, that, you know, that's what's going to happen. So we're going to be living, I mean, you know, a more frugal life. It's not going to be like, you know,

People earning $70,000 a year and spending $100,000 and taking on $30,000 a year in debt via credit cards or home equity lines, it's going to be earning $70,000 a year and spending $50,000 and putting the other $20,000, saving it or something like that. But it's going to have to be very different.

And how will that affect real estate markets? Real estate's going to go down in real terms. So, you know, in terms of how much real estate you can buy with an ounce of gold, right, that's going to increase. Commercial real estate, you know, the real estate that'll do the worst in the commercial is going to be retail, you know, like strip malls, shopping centers, that stuff, office. I mean, industrial land, farmland will do well. You know, that'll probably do the best of the resources, you know.

So buying up farmland is probably not bad. But residential real estate, you know, depending on where you live in the country, you still may see real estate prices going up. But the price of everything else will go up more. Right. So the food in the refrigerator is going to be rising at a much faster price than the house that the refrigerator is in.

But what's also going to be rising probably more than the price of a home is going to be the cost of owning it. So your your your maintenance, your insurance, your utilities. Right. Maybe your house goes up by 10 percent, but all that stuff goes up by 30 percent. I mean, so it's going to become increasingly more expensive to own a home, you know.

So in addition to buying a home. So that's going to be the biggest problem for a lot of homeowners because, you know, a lot of people have locked in their mortgages and they have a 30 year mortgage at three, 4%. So paying the mortgage might not be the problem, right? It's paying all the other bills on top of the mortgage that are going to be going to be problematic. Yeah.

I would think that probably sage advice for a person would be to invest in themselves and like their capacity to provide value for others. Yeah. I mean, that's always good. I mean, to build up your own skills, although it's hard to tell exactly, you know, which skills will be in demand in the future with what's going on with AI and things. But I think right now,

We throw stuff out a lot, right? If something doesn't work, I mean, you know, try to find a TV repair. You can't, I mean, if something goes wrong with a TV, you got to throw it out and buy a new one. I mean, nobody takes any, you know, audio visual equipment to repair anymore.

So maybe learn how to do something like that, because I think a lot of this consumer electronics that we're used to getting cheaper every year is going to go way up in price because the dollar crash. And so, you know, if you know how to fix some of this stuff, you know, I mean, when you could buy a new television, you know, for six hundred dollars, it's better than the one that you spend a thousand. You're not going to spend two hundred dollars to fix it.

But if it costs you five grand to replace it, you know, maybe you'd spend the money to, you know, five hundred thousand dollars to repair it or something. So, yeah. So there'll be a lot of things, you know, that people could could try to do or businesses that will do well in a bad economy. You've got to try to figure out, you know, you know, what goods and services can I sell when people are poor? But, you know, it's hard to say how long this downturn is going to last. A lot of it depends on the policy response.

I mean, the government certainly has the ability to make things a whole lot worse. You know, they can't make it better. All they can do is get out of the way and allow the free market to make it better, which, you know, would happen. But it's very rare these days for the government to ever get out of the way because that's not what politicians want to tell the voters. Like, what's your solution to this problem? Well, I'm going to do nothing and I'm going to let the market solve the problem. That's not what the voters want to hear. They want to hear, what are you going to give me?

How are you going to what are you going to give me to make my life better? Right. And so the more the government tries to solve the problems we have, the worse the problems are going to get because the government is actually the source of problems. And the thing that they could do is get out of the way by cutting regulations and cutting government spending. So the government is a smaller burden on the economy.

But what generally happens during a problem is the government increases the weight of that burden. We've been able to bear that weight because of the dollar status. So we've been able to push off the cost on the rest of the world.

But when we can't do that anymore, we're going to have to bear the full brunt of that weight and we're going to see exactly how heavy it is. In simplistic terms, why does the government interfering with the economy in the form of probably subsidies and things like actually end up being deleterious for the future of the economy? Well, the way the free market works

is you have a profit motive and you have competition and supply and demand, then you have these market forces that work to allocate resources, capital, land, labor to their highest and best use to best satisfy the needs, the demands of the individuals that comprise the economy. So you always get an efficient allocation when market forces are guiding everything.

But whenever the government comes in and tries to micromanage, centrally plan a different outcome, then you have a less than optimal allocation of resources. The politicians don't know. And so money ends up going, capital ends up, labor goes to places that it shouldn't. But the other problem with government is it just layers all sorts of unnecessary costs

on top of an enterprise. If the government stays out of the way, you can be efficient. But when the government comes up with all kinds of rules and regulations, you got to spend time filling out forms, complying with stuff, hiring people in compliance, dealing with regulators and auditors and all this stuff just makes you a lot less productive.

And people would think, well, but aren't these regulations necessary? Doesn't it protect the consumers? Doesn't it protect the environment? And usually they don't. They're just justifying the jobs of the bureaucrats. So we have this whole bureaucratic class that's like a parasite on the economy.

that we have to support. But as they're sucking the life out of our businesses, not only do we have to pay all these bureaucrats, but the businesses that they've now attached themselves to are far less productive. So, I mean, there's so much that we lose by having all this government interference. But the problem is, you know, the voters don't get this. You know, they don't understand. They think they're getting something for free from the government.

They think, you know, that businesses are gouging them or exploiting them and they need the government to protect them. It's all a bunch of nonsense. But that's how they get elected. You know, that's the problem with democracy. That's why that's why we're not supposed to be a democracy. It's unfortunate that we've devolved over the decades into the democracy that we have today. You know, everybody says, oh, who's a threat to democracy? I wish we had a threat to democracy so we can go back to a republic.

because we need to protect ourselves from a democracy. It's an evil form of government. The founding fathers knew this, you know, because of the majority. I mean, look, this election may be determined by a joke that was told by a comedian. That's how ridiculous the electorate is, that they don't understand a joke from reality.

I mean, so many people vote that are clueless about how an economy works. They just vote for whoever they think is going to give them free stuff. And it's a disaster. Yeah. And what is the differentiation between a republic and a democracy? Democracy is, what does it mean to you? Well, I know there's a joke. A democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what they have for dinner.

And the republic is a well-armed lamb challenging the vote. But no, a republic, America, you know, when the framers established the United States, the popular form of government was a monarchy. And so we didn't want to have a monarchy, although we did offer to make George Washington king. He turned it down.

But we established a Republican form of government. I mean, if you read the Constitution, it says that the United States shall guarantee to every state of the union a Republican form of government.

You know, you recite the Pledge of Allegiance and to the republic for which it stands. You know, the word democracy does not appear in the Constitution, in the Bill of Rights, in the Declaration of Independence, in the Articles of Confederation. I mean, none of the founding documents of the United States mentioned democracy because we're not a democracy. I mean, there were some democratic aspects to democracy.

the federal government. The House of Representatives was the only really elected body by the people, and they were elected every two years. But the Senate was appointed to six-year terms by the state legislators. They were not elected. The president was not elected by the people. We actually had an electoral college that was supposed to, right,

elect the president, not just rubber stamp the popular vote, but actually decide who they wanted to vote for. It was supposed to be a separate group of people that decided who the president and who the vice president would be, not the public. But of course,

Early on too, even the votes, like let's say, okay, yes, we voted for the representatives, but you had to be 21 to vote in pretty much every state. By the time a man was 21, he'd probably been out of home for eight years. People went to work at 12, 13, 14. By the time you're 16, got married, right? Live on your own, you have a couple of kids. I mean, 21 is like 35 maybe today.

So people had a lot of experience. Women couldn't vote. It was just men because women didn't generally stayed at home. So they weren't involved in the economy as much. They weren't expected to know as much about the issues.

You had to pass a literacy test in most states. You had to pay a poll tax. You had to own property. There were all kinds of restrictions on who could vote. So it wasn't very democratic. Most people couldn't vote. In fact, voting is not considered a right. There's nothing in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, that says you have a right to vote. Voting was always considered a privilege.

And so not everybody got the privilege because they didn't want to elect a bunch of morons like Kamala Harris, right? They didn't want people voting Kamala Harris. But if you look at the way our government works, even if the House and the Senate pass something,

The majority want to do it. One man, the president just vetoes the whole thing and then that's it. Doesn't happen. That's not democratic. One guy could veto it. Now, in order to override a veto, you need two thirds majority. That's not majority. That's not democracy. You need a big, you know, big number. And then even if Congress passes it and the president signs it,

You know, the Supreme Court, you know, five justices on the Supreme Court out of nine could say it's unconstitutional and there goes your law. Right. So the whole idea, it wasn't like a democracy would be, hey, that sounds good. Let's vote on it. And whatever the majority wants to do, you do it. You just put it to a vote. But we have we're a constitutional republic. We have a constitution that severely limits what the government can do. Doesn't matter how many people want to do something. You can't do it.

Because the Constitution forbids it. So, you know, just because we have some aspects of a democratic process where the majority of the vote will determine the outcome of the House, we were not a democracy in that sense. We were a republic.

But over the years, you know, we become more and more democratic. And that's unfortunate because that, you know, now we have an enormous government that does all kinds of stuff that it's not supposed to do. I want to take a moment and share a way that I make sure I cover my bases for vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants each day. That is a scoop of a field of greens in a glass of water. I absolutely love this stuff. It is made with real fruits.

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time when the United States will go back to some form of gold standard or some form of standard at all? Yeah. I mean, I think that the experiment in fiat money that began a little over 50 years ago is going to come to an end and it's going to be a complete total failure. Could you explain in also like the most simplistic of terms what happened with that for a person that's not familiar with the transition away from the gold standard and how that affected

Yeah. Well, you know, when the country was established 1789, the first coinage act, the dollar was defined as a certain number of grams of gold and silver. So what a dollar really was, was a weight, was a weight of gold and silver. You had to have a certain amount of gold. And if you did, then that was a dollar, certain amount of silver equal to dollar. And that was our money. You know, gold and silver were money.

We didn't have any paper notes, currency, other than during the Civil War, they issued some paper currency that was backed by real money, gold and silver. That went away. And it came back in 1913 with the establishment of the Federal Reserve, but the Federal Reserve was a private bank. But it issued Federal Reserve notes that were redeemable in real money, which were dollars, which were gold and silver. Federal Reserve notes were backed by and redeemable in gold and silver.

Roosevelt changed that in 1933. He said that you could no longer get gold for your Federal Reserve notes. You could still get silver. You couldn't get gold. And then they, you know, in 1964, Johnson took the silver out of our coinage and replaced it with nickel and copper. But 1971 is when Nixon closed the gold window after Roosevelt said that Americans couldn't get dollars for their Federal Reserve notes, gold.

Foreigners were still able to do that. So if you're a French central bank and you had Federal Reserve notes, you could still come to the Fed and get your gold. But that stopped in 1971. And ever since then, we just have paper money that we can print. There's nothing backing it up. Nobody could ever take our notes and say, "Hey, I'd like real money for this." No, there's nothing behind it. It's just fiat. It's a piece of paper.

And that's been going on. But, you know, you can't have a monetary system without money and this piece of paper, not money. Money's got to be a commodity. It's got to be a good commodity.

uh that's where it comes from i mean gold is a precious metal gold is the most useful metal on the periodic table we do all sorts of things with gold and gold is very scarce and so it's useful and scarce that means it's very valuable but it has a lot of properties that make it work great as money right and other commodities have been money over the centuries but gold has just worked the best

But what we have now is a cheap substitute for actual money, and it doesn't work because it's not a store of value. And the government could just create it out of thin air and destroy its value. So all these fiat currencies end in hyperinflation. The world is littered with fiat currencies that no longer exist.

Right. I mean, there's a lot of currencies that had a lot of value at one point in time that are completely worthless. I mean, some of them have some value as a collector's item. Right. But not as not as real money. But yeah, I mean, so I think we're going to go back to real money. I think that this period of time is going to be an aberration, you know, you know, it

a thousand years from now you know when they look back you know and they study history and the period of fiat currency is going to be a small period you know it's not gonna you know we're gonna be back now people think oh it's just gonna be bitcoin that's the future you know those guys are dreaming uh they want to you know bitcoin will be an even smaller footnote than fiat currency how much steam do you think the concept of cryptocurrency and bitcoin has from your

which you're obviously very not a fan at all of crypto and a big fan of gold, among other things. Yeah, I just don't think I don't think crypto I don't think Bitcoin can deliver on its promise. I don't think it could ever be money.

And since it can't be money, I don't know what it can be. I mean, people are saying, well, it doesn't have to be money. It could just be digital gold. But what makes it digital gold? First of all, we don't need digital gold. We need real gold, right? Digital gold can't do anything. I can't conduct electricity with digital gold. I can't make jewelry with digital gold, right? It's like saying, well, digital food.

Well, I mean, what good is digital food? I can't eat it. There's no nourishment there. But is the value of gold based off of the story of gold or the actual inherent value that it has for being a conductive metal that doesn't oxidize and you can use it on spaceships and such? Or is it more based around the story, which ultimately is comparable to crypto in the sense that it's the reason it has a value is all based around the story. Also, fiat currency, the reason it has value is all based around the story. Like the actual inherent value of the precious metal gold

I don't know that that is consistent with the $2,700. Yes, that's all about a story. That's all about belief and faith. There's no actual value in faith.

paper money. I mean, there's some small value, but not much. I mean, I guess you can burn it, right? You know, if you're, you know, so, you know, it's not very good as toilet paper because it's not that soft. But I suppose you, you know, if that's all you had, you could use it, right? But Bitcoin doesn't even have that value, right? So, but gold, no, gold's value comes from its metallic,

properties, the things that you could do with gold that you can't do with other metals or you can't do nearly as well. And there's a lot more use cases for gold today than there was 100 years ago, 200 years ago. So gold is a lot more valuable because we found all sorts of ways to use gold. I mean, gold is in everybody's cell phone. There's a little bit of gold in there. But is that why it costs $2,700 or is it because of the story around it? First of all,

most companies just to mine the gold out of the ground, it costs like 12, 13, 14, $1,500. So, I mean, just if you figured out, well, what should gold be priced based on the cost, but not all mines there, there's a lot of gold deposits that it will cost more than 20, 2,700 to get that gold out of the ground. It's an expensive process just to mine it. Um,

But you could also do a lot with a little bit of gold, which is – and it's very divisible. And so people can buy just the quantity that they need. But gold really hasn't gone up in price. I mean if you talk about, oh, gold is $2,700. When I talked about the Coinage Act of 1789, gold was $20.

And gold stayed at $20 from 1789 to 1933. Gold was $20 for all that time. And then it stayed at $35 from 1933 to 1970. It's really just started going ballistic recently. And that's not an accident. That's because we started to print all this money. You could have still bought

an ounce of gold for under $300 in 2001. Gold is the same. The dollar is not. The paper money is worth a lot less because we've radically increased the supply. And so if you keep doing that, right, you're going to need more and more dollars to buy one ounce of gold. And so right now you need $22,750. Soon you'll need $10,000 to buy an ounce of gold. But again, it's the same ounce of gold.

It's just that the dollar is so much less value. But all the prices are going up. Again, just go to the supermarket. See what stuff costs. It's not just the price of gold. The price of everything is going up. And the price of stocks have gone up. The price of real estate has gone up. All these prices are going up because we're paying for everything with money that's losing value.

or not even money, just fiat paper. Would you be able to steel man the value of Bitcoin or crypto or just maybe just Bitcoin? Or if you had to steel man that, how would you steel man it? Steel man being like drawing out the point of like a Michael Saylor or someone that's pro-crypto. Yeah, well, Michael Saylor is pro-crypto.

because he owns a lot of crypto and he's borrowed a lot of money to buy a lot of crypto. So he's levered to the hilt and he's going to borrow billions more to buy more crypto. But like the technology of crypto, because I think that that's and also the scarcity of there's only a certain amount of Bitcoin that will be created. So it's kind of it's just a game. It's a made up game, but it's also a medium of trade that may or may not be more efficient than what we're presently utilizing. The problem is nobody actually needs Bitcoin. And there's there's

thousands of other crypto tokens that nobody needs either that you could buy. It doesn't matter that there's 21 million Bitcoin. There's so many other things that you could buy that are just like Bitcoin. I mean, it's just a brand. It's just a name. But

What people buy when they buy Bitcoin is the hope that it goes up and somebody else will pay more. I mean, it's not you don't buy Bitcoin because you want to use it as a medium of exchange. It's it's a very inefficient medium of exchange. It's very slow and expensive. Why do people buy gold if you're not if you don't work for NASA or you're not if you're not an electrician?

Okay, you buy gold because you need it. You're a jeweler right here. Here's a gold ring that I got that's made out of gold. There's gold in this watch, right? So that Rolex had to buy some of this gold. But the value of that's based on a story. If that story shifted, it wouldn't be valuable anymore. No, because, well, gold, I mean, gold, if you take a gold watch in the water, it's not going to tarnish. It's fine. I mean, it's like gold. It's pretty. It shines. It's nice.

Even if you have like a silver, it's tarnished. You got to polish up your silver. You don't have to polish gold.

But, you know, I mean, gold is real metal. It does all kinds of, you know, there was recently we sent a spaceship, not a spaceship, a big telescope into space. And it had these gigantic mirrors to work this telescope. And they had to coat them in gold because it was the only way, I guess, that they could get through the atmosphere or not. They needed to be coated in gold.

And so because gold could do things that you can't do with other metals. And even if somebody buys gold and has no intent of using it for anything, they're storing it for somebody who's going to use it in the future. That's why it's a store of value. If I have gold, I don't have to use it. I can store it so somebody else can use it. But nobody uses Bitcoin. You just hold it and then you try to give it, sell it to somebody else.

And they try to sell to somebody else at a higher price. It's just a greater fool. That's all it is. There's nothing special about it. - I don't have like a particular opinion on this either way. I'm really genuinely curious. And I'm only kind of playing devil's advocate because you're so pro-gold, so my mind's going in that direction. - Well, I've been pro-gold before Bitcoin existed. I mean, gold is real money. I mean, gold's in the Constitution, right? So gold's been around for a long time.

as money. It's the only legal tender constitutionally we're supposed to have. But things can change. Like if you go to Roman times or West African times at one point, like I already know, you know, the meaning of salary means to give salt. It's like salt something. So what happened to salt? Now you can buy it at a minute stop. Yeah, I can. Salt actually has real world value. I mean, it's not a great form of money. I mean, what happens if the wind blows and there goes your money? Yeah.

You know, it's a windy day and you've lost your savings. But but yeah, but I mean, at least I mean, salt's better than Bitcoin. I mean, I can put salt on my food, make it taste better. Right. But, you know, but, you know, big, big look, cigarettes are way better money than than Bitcoin. You know, even though I don't smoke. Right. I you know, somebody smokes or someone's going to want my cigarettes because there's an ultimate end user.

for cigarettes. - What about just the technology as a medium, a decentralized medium of exchange? Like you think of all of that, everything like removing the middleman, like every time you spend a credit card, it's going through all these different middlemen and all these people are taking a little bit off of that. Just people having something where they can exchange

currency, energy, whatever. But I already can do that without Bitcoin. There's all kinds of payment platforms that you have. Venmo, PayPal, Zelle. You got Alipay, all these other... Where you just can easily pay money quickly, cheaply. And then people can use Visa, MasterCard, American Express. All these things are more efficient than trying to pay for something with Bitcoin. And

And you can't really price things in Bitcoin because it's too volatile for you to fix a price in Satoshi's. But even to just use it to pay for something. And nobody does. I mean, it's just, you know, people just hold it. The country of El Salvador does. Not really. They're all using dollars. No, no, they do. I was just there like a month ago, and that was one of the things. I actually didn't have...

current i don't remember i didn't have all i have is a credit card and they're like oh we don't do credit cards we either do cash or uh crypto and they're like oh yeah everybody uses crypto you gotta you get download the there's a bunch of different types of apps so it actually is working very seamlessly in el salvador right now at least in the in the place that i was i don't know about like the entirety of all of el salvador i think most merchants you know are are not are not utilizing it it's a lot more hype than it is uh is reality uh but you know

El Salvador, I mean, that's one little teeny country. I mean, Bitcoin has been around for 15, 16 years, right? It's not like, you know, it's around a lot of countries where people, just small pockets where, you know, they're trying to hype it up. You know, they're trying to get the crypto industry to come down there. That's really what they're interested in, having money come in and rent office space and hire people and, you know, stuff like that. But I said, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter about the technology of blockchain.

But as with gold, and you don't even need a blockchain for gold, but I could tokenize my gold. And now we can, you know, I can use gold to pay for stuff a lot easier than I can use gold or Bitcoin. And you don't even need a token. The custodian could just create an app where ownership of gold is evidenced on the app. And, you know, I can instantly pay somebody by sending my gold anywhere in the world, you know, instantly, inexpensively.

So we have a lot of technology today that enables us to make gold a much better medium of exchange than it's ever been. Much faster, much easier. In fact, you don't even need... When we were on a gold standard, you couldn't use gold really for small transactions. So that's why we had silver. That's why we had copper, nickel. We used other metals and metals.

But now, you know, we wouldn't need that. I mean, you could buy, you know, penny candy. Not that you could buy candy for a penny anymore anyway, but at one point you could buy a lot of candy with a penny.

But you could buy it with a gold. I mean, you could spend a fraction of a gram of gold with the technology that we have now that didn't exist 100 years ago. So Paul Tudor Jones, I'm sure you're familiar with him. And he's one of the, like a quote that he said is all roads lead to inflation, which I agree with. And then he's long on gold and Bitcoin. What is he smoking that he is long on both gold and Bitcoin? Why is he confused?

Well, I don't know that he's confused or not. He may be just a trader. I didn't say that Bitcoin couldn't go up. And Paul Tudor Jones trades for a living. He places bets. I know he has more money in gold than Bitcoin. I think a lot more in gold.

than Bitcoin. So I think he views Bitcoin as a trade because he thinks that if inflation really picks up, that there could be a rush into Bitcoin and he'll be able to sell his Bitcoin and make a profit. I mean, that's my guess. I think he knows at the end of the day, it's going to crash, but he may be looking at it as a shorter term trade and not really concerned about where it eventually goes. But I think that he's probably

uh, sized his position such that if it, if it does go straight down, uh, he's still fine because he's got a diversified portfolio and he's got a lot of gold. He's got a lot of other things, uh, other than his Bitcoin bet, but I haven't had a private conversation with him. So it's, I can't really speak for him, but just trying to guess, I think he's a pretty smart guy. And so I would imagine that, that, that he would agree with me,

he just thinks that maybe there's a run to 100,000 coming or more. And so he just wants to make that bet. I would just prefer not to make that bet. I'd rather bet on something else that I think has more upside with less downside, because I think there are opportunities, especially in the gold and silver mining stocks. I think those, he talked about the fastest horse in the race. I think they're going to be the fastest horse when they finally get into the race. But yeah,

But yeah, I manage a gold fund, you know, so that's where my money is. And a lot of my money is in gold stock. But the Europe Pacific Gold Fund, you can buy that no load at any discount broker. People should look at that, look into it or they can go to my website and get information on all my funds. What is the name of the fund and the website? It's the Europe Pacific Gold Fund. Okay. And is there a most competitive place to buy gold for a person?

Like I know like there's like, I know Costco sells, sells coins on occasion. Apparently that's like, there's like a good deal there. Like where, where is it? Costco is not bad price, but I think they limit you to like a couple, maybe two ounces at a time. So you can't get a lot, but their prices are good. But shift gold, we've got great prices and you can buy as much as you want. Right. And we, we've got really good prices competitive. Uh,

in gold and silver people should go to shiftgold.com the symbol on my gold fund is epgix that's the no load so you might as well if you can go to discount broker you don't want to pay the load but it's epgix as a europe pacific gold fund but talk to the advisors europe pacific asset manager we have all sorts of separately managed gold accounts wrap accounts a lot of ways that we can help you protect your wealth from a dollar collapse uh you know stagflation hyperinflation you know

The problem is some of these roads don't just lead to inflation. They lead to hyperinflation. And so it's hard to know exactly which one we're going to take. But no matter what road we take, right, he's right about that. There is inflation. The question is how

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Yeah. Do you think Trump, what do you think a Trump presidency would look like for four years compared, like this four years compared to the previous four years? Do you think it could be comparable or do you think it would be quite different? I think things get worse no matter who wins.

The question is, will they eventually get better? And that depends on what Trump does or what Harris does. But I think the chickens have got to come home to roost. We're going to have to pay the piper for this. And we haven't done that yet. But right now, all the politicians are promising more free stuff, whether it's, you know, what is Harris promising? I'm going to give everybody twenty five thousand to buy a house, fifty thousand to start a business, seven thousand to have a kid, you know.

And Trump, I'm going to take no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security, tax cuts, corporate tax. Everybody's going to get tax cuts. OK, but we're broke. How are we going to cut everybody's taxes when we're already not taxing people enough? I mean, unless we're going to cut spending. Now, Donald Trump talks about putting Elon Musk in charge of the Efficiency Committee. But at the same time, he doesn't want to cut national defense. He wants to increase it.

He doesn't want to cut Social Security. In fact, he wants to increase Social Security because by exempting Social Security benefits from tax, that's the same thing as increasing the benefits. So he wants to increase Social Security more than it's already increasing. Medicare, Obamacare, they're off the table. He can't touch interest on the debt. That just keeps growing on autopilot. So, I mean, there's I mean, so the debts are going to explode. We can't have tax cuts.

unless we have massive spending cuts. But since Trump doesn't want to do that, we're just going to have inflation. But at the same time, he's promising to get rid of inflation. Well, he can't. He can't do all those things. But, you know, at this point, it doesn't matter because they're just trying to get votes, right? So you just say, you know,

It's like used car salesmen, right? They're just going to tell you whatever they have to tell you to get you to buy the clunker that they're trying to unload. I wonder on this day, November 4th, 2024, how long would you, if you were betting, how long would you bet before crypto, based on your bias, goes to zero or like the jig is up with crypto from your perspective? Zero could take a while.

You know, because even bankrupt companies, you know, they go to the pink sheets and people still trade them. I mean, they have no value. So, you know, I don't know when Bitcoin will go to zero. But I mean, even if it went to a thousand or a hundred for most people, that might as well be zero. Right. I mean, if you bought Bitcoin at sixty thousand and it loses ninety nine point nine percent of its value, I mean, that's as close to one hundred percent. It doesn't really matter. Right.

So, you know, I don't know when it's going to zero out for sure, because there'll always be people, you know, willing to trade it and willing to speculate. Ah, it's going to come back. It's coming back, you know. But I think it's going to have a huge crash. In fact, I said on my podcast recently, if I actually believed in Bitcoin and I wanted to buy it, my strategy would be to own no Bitcoin now. I want to get rid of it. And I want to wait for MicroStrategy to go bankrupt, which I believe they will. And they're going to have to sell all their Bitcoin.

And once they're bankrupt and they've dumped all their Bitcoin on the market, then you maybe you could buy yours if you're bullish on Bitcoin. Because I don't think we're going to the moon with Michael Saylor on board. He's going to have to get flushed out of this market. And everybody thinks, oh, he's the king of Bitcoin. He's going to be the richest man in the world. He's not because he's the most leveraged man in the world.

And it's a two-way street. It works great when the price of Bitcoin is going up, but the price of Bitcoin is going to be going way down and he's not going to be able to repay the money that he borrowed. And the creditors are going to take over the company and they're going to unload that Bitcoin.

And who knows where the price is going to be when that happens. But after that happens, if you want to take a position because you really believe in it, all right, then all the speculative dead wood has been sweeped out of the market. Do you foresee gold taking another dip as well? Or do you feel like

Not a significant dip. I mean, I don't think we're going to see gold below 2000 again. I think it's I think we've passed that, you know, for good. But could gold go back down to twenty five hundred, twenty four hundred? I suppose it could. You know, it's twenty seven fifty now. But I think it's more likely that the dips are going to be no more than one hundred, one hundred and fifty dollars. I think we're just going to keep making new highs.

in the price of gold because we're making new lows in the dollar. We're making new lows in the euro, making new lows in the pound. In the end, all these central banks are debasing their currencies. Or actually, they're just not really debasing because they've got no value to begin with, but they're just printing money. And so it's got to keep losing value. Gold is going to get more and more expensive, especially when people wake up to reality of how much more value these currencies are going to lose. And it's a race to get rid of them.

And when you're trying to get rid of your dollars or your euros, what do you buy? As I said earlier in the podcast, there's a limit to how much food you can stock up on. I mean, so what are you going to buy? You can buy gold because then you can figure out what you're going to buy later. If you have gold, you can buy anything you want in the future because you can trade your gold for food. You can trade your gold for whatever you need.

And so that's where people are going to go. And then the price is going to start spiraling even faster than it has been. Yeah. And you foresee probably the stock market taking a pretty large hit. That's kind of like Warren Buffett. In gold terms, yes. I mean, I think Warren Buffett is stockpiling cash and he should be stockpiling gold. You know, I think he's wrong. I mean, he's correct in that stocks are overpriced, but he should not be sitting on all those U.S. dollars. He should own real money.

Well, he's waiting for probably everything to fall apart and then to rebuy everything back on a discount, I'd imagine. Right. But he could rebuy it at a bigger discount if he had gold to pay for it. But the risk he has is that we have hyperinflation and he can't buy any of that stuff back because the

the currency is worthless. Well, I appreciate you, man. Thank you so much for getting it. Like I said, I've, I've followed your stuff for a long time and it's all right. Well, take care. If your listeners don't know, I got my own podcast and Peter Schiff show. I do one or two a week at shift radio.com and I, on my YouTube channel. So people should make a habit of, uh, listening also follow me on X. You know, I went over a million followers, uh, uh,

not too long ago. And so I post quite a bit on that platform. So you should follow me there. And then-

If people do want to get gold through your... Shift Gold. Just call it. Yeah, go to shiftgold.com. My last name, S-C-H-I-F-F gold.com. There's a toll free number right there. Or you could just fill up your shopping cart and check out. We've got all my recommended gold and silver products right there. Easy to see. You know, it's not complicated. You know, we don't try to sell you, you know, numismatics, semi-numismatics, you know, and rip you off with these fake collectibles. You just want to buy pure bullion as close as you can to the spot price.

Awesome. Amazing, man. Thank you so much. I appreciate you. Thank you all for tuning in. That's it. That's all. I'll see you next week. I hope you guys enjoyed that conversation. Once again, this is not financial advice at all. It's just an exploration into value. And I want to invite you guys over to the Align Podcast YouTube channel to subscribe over there for a chance to win some sweet prizes at the end of each month. Thank you for reviews. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for joining you. I will see you next week.