Jan. 9, 2024 - Bannon's War Room
48:53
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies. | ||
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Because we're going medieval on these people. | |
| You're not going to free shot all these networks lying about the people. | ||
| The people have had a belly full of it. | ||
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
| I know you've tried to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big lie? | ||
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unidentified
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MAGA Media. | |
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
|
unidentified
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Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | |
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
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War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | |
| It's Tuesday, 9 January, Year of Our Lord 2024. | ||
| We told you about the historic year. | ||
| Remember, tonight we're going to be from the Las Vegas CES, Consumer Electronics, talking about the advances in artificial intelligence, regenerative robotics, all of it, and going to Taiwan. | ||
| We're talking about really the kickoff To this year of elections, where 40% of the world's population are going to vote in just about every election, from Europe to India to Taiwan. | ||
| It's all nationalists versus these globalists. | ||
| And the Taiwanese kicking off about the CCP is probably the most important way we could kick off 2024. | ||
| Of course, 48 hours later, President Trump will be the Iowa caucus. | ||
| So we're going to get to all of that in detail. | ||
| A report from the field with Laura Loomer tonight also. | ||
| Really honored, particularly given a historic year, a guy that I have admired and has taught me so much over the last decade or so. | ||
| Jim Rickards joins us from Strategic Intelligence. | ||
| Jim, you know, I went to, as a naval officer in the Pentagon, I was able to get a graduate degree at Georgetown in the National Security Studies, which was kind of the elite program at the time, I think started by Jean Kirkpatrick. | ||
| Then I went to Harvard Business School and worked at Goldman Sachs, had my own firm, but I never really focused I always kind of miss this thing about currency and really understanding currency. | ||
| I think it was in 2008, I picked up a book, Currency Wars, and I think it was 2008, and it really changed my perspective on things. | ||
| In fact, that really got me engaged in making films, Generation Zero and others. | ||
| And that was your book, and it hit like a blocker. | ||
| One of the things I knew, because I still had a lot of relationships in the Pentagon, I did some checkings and you had been, people had reached out to you for war gaming exercises. | ||
| They said, hey, my theory in the Pentagon, I was there, why are we not focused more on economic warfare? | ||
| Why are we having these huge defense budgets? | ||
| The defense budgets at the time were nothing compared to today. | ||
| Why are we not focused on economic warfare? | ||
| And in the very opening of your book, You said, hey, by the way, I'm a lawyer, I went here, I did this, I'm a Wall Street guy, but I got wrapped up in doing these war games, and this is really what the book's about. | ||
| So tell me about that. | ||
| Tell us your background, because I don't think a lot of people know it. | ||
| Your background, your intellectual foundations, and how did that lead you to currency war, which has led to everything else? | ||
| Yeah, it's hard to say whether my background is eclectic, or I just couldn't decide what I wanted to be when I grew up. | ||
| I got a graduate degree from your rival, Georgetown's rival. | ||
| I went to the School of International Studies, Johns Hopkins in Washington, D.C. | ||
| I got a master's degree in international economics. | ||
| It's sort of a boot camp for the IMF, Tim Geithner, Madeleine Albright, Wolf Blitzer. | ||
| They all went to the same school along with quite a few others. | ||
| Then I went to law school. | ||
| I used to be proud of the fact that I went to Penn Law School. | ||
| There are eight Ivy League colleges, but only five Ivy League law schools because three of them don't have one. | ||
| But, uh, you know, Liz McGill's on the faculty. | ||
| She was, we know what happened to her. | ||
| She just got fired as president. | ||
| And so, uh, yeah, but, uh, but I stayed on the international side. | ||
| One law degree wasn't enough. | ||
| I got a second law degree, um, graduate law degree from NYU in taxation, and I went to work for Citibank. | ||
| So my first kind of, you know, real job, I was international tax counsel for Citibank, but you're really, you're in the belly of the beast, if you want to put it that way. | ||
| Did that for 10 years, loved doing it. | ||
| Uh, had some great dialogues with Walter Riss. | ||
| And I tell people, That was back when Citibank was a bank before they turned it into a hedge fund. | ||
| But it was also, I mean, candidly, we sort of thought Wall Street was like getting your hands dirty, but the wrist in round with Citibank is the finance arm of the State Department. | ||
| So it fit in perfectly with my background in international studies. | ||
| Then I went to the dark side. | ||
| I joined a Wall Street investment bank. | ||
| We were one of the largest dealers in U.S. | ||
| government securities, one of the so-called primary dealers. | ||
| And the thing about being a primary dealer, It's not a well-known category, but it means you get to talk to the Fed. | ||
| The Fed is your customer. | ||
| And there are only about 20 firms on the list. | ||
| They're all big banks, but mine was one of them. | ||
| That's when I really got immersed in federal finance and so forth. | ||
| Then I went to work for a hedge fund, after about 10 years there, a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management. | ||
| We did extremely well and then hit a hit. | ||
| Hit an air pocket and almost closed every security. | ||
| I think I've heard of it. | ||
| It almost took down the American total financial system, right? | ||
| Eventually. | ||
| Well, actually, you're right, Steve. | ||
| We were within hours of shutting down every market in the world. | ||
| Now, we did film the runways, bringing it for a soft landing. | ||
| If you think of it in deal terms, I know you're a dealmaker, but this was $4 billion, all cash, four days, no due diligence. | ||
| That was the deal that the 14 banks that go in the 14 families. | ||
| But we did it. | ||
| We got it done, but with hours to spare. | ||
| Hang on, hang on. | ||
| I got to talk about this. | ||
| They called the New York Fed, and that's where you're talking about the prime brokers, and this will get into, you know, Krugman's out over the weekend with an article. | ||
| Doesn't want Trump, doesn't want Rickards, doesn't want Warren. | ||
| You can't touch the Fed. | ||
| He said next thing they're going to do, they're going to start arguing about the Fed. | ||
| On long-term capital management, Didn't they call you guys down to the Federal Reserve in New York? | ||
| And that's the one that makes things roll. | ||
| That's where the trading desk is for these government securities. | ||
| And these prime brokers, I think, with Citicorp and others, we don't own the Fed. | ||
| The Federal Reserve's trading desk, the New York Fed, which is everything, is owned by private institutions or banks. | ||
| Didn't they call guys in there, say, got them around the table, say, guys, here's how it's going to be. | ||
| Pony, and this is back in the late 90s when $4 billion was a lot of money. | ||
| You're going to pony up $4 billion. | ||
| No due diligence. | ||
| Let's go around the table and see what you're going to kick in. | ||
| And we're not leaving here until we get $4 billion? | ||
| Yes and no. | ||
| But we actually called them. | ||
| See, remember, we're a hedge fund. | ||
| Who in the world? | ||
| We never thought we would be rescued or bailed out or anything of the kind. | ||
| We could see what was happening. | ||
| We had very good risk management, as it turns out, very good accounting. | ||
| We knew exactly what was happening. | ||
| By the way, one of our partners, David Mullins Jr. | ||
| was the former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, the Board of Governors, so he was a real Fed insider. | ||
| But we called the Fed and told them what was happening. | ||
| They didn't know. | ||
| And so they came up on a Sunday afternoon. | ||
| It was Peter Fisher, who ran the open market desk, which is what you were describing, Gary Gensler, believe it or not, who's now the head of the SEC, and another guy, Dean O'Kloff, John Merriweather, who is our chairman, and I. We sat in a room for five hours. | ||
| Of course, we had computers, but we had printouts. | ||
| Turn the pages and went position by position all around the world. | ||
| And when we were done, and Peter Fisher had turned white, he was a white guy, but he had turned whiter. | ||
| And he said, we knew you guys could destroy the bond market. | ||
| We didn't know you could destroy the stock markets. | ||
| We were actually the biggest risk arbitrage here. | ||
| We were in every deal. | ||
| MCI Worldcom, Citi Travelers, Lockheed Boeing. | ||
| Not that they all went through, but anyway. | ||
| Then Peter went back to New York and got together with the head of J.P. | ||
| Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and said, we've got to do something. | ||
| John Corzine was involved. | ||
| And then they had the meeting at the Fed, and it's exactly what you described, the 14 families sitting around the table getting pledges. | ||
| It was supposed to be $250 million each, and then it would add up to $4 billion, approximately, a little bit less. | ||
| But you had friends like Bear Stearns that said, no, we're not in, and you had a lot of drama behind the scenes. | ||
| But then they sent us a term sheet, and then just for four days, nobody slept from Wednesday night to Sunday night. | ||
| Nobody slept, worked around the clock, and we got it done. | ||
| But here's what's, so when you, and there are good books written about it, but people say, well, okay, what's the big deal? | ||
| What they don't understand is that if it hadn't got done, every market in the world would have closed sequentially, starting in Tokyo, London, ultimately New York, You know, they would have reopened at some point, but this was a major financial catastrophe that was this close to happening. | ||
| That was a good experience. | ||
| I always say in the United States, when you screw up badly enough, they hand it over to the lawyers. | ||
| So I happened to be the lawyer, so I ended up doing the deal. | ||
| How did that lead to you running Currency War around the time of the 2008 crash? | ||
| And why did the military start saying, hey, this could be a new way of warfare, actually put you into wargaming? | ||
| Well, I came out of that very dissatisfied with the financial outcome. | ||
| I personally lost money, but you know, billions were lost. | ||
| Most of our money, by the way, that's why we weren't lynched, because it was mostly our money. | ||
| But the point was, I was the lawyer. | ||
| And you know, compliance was good. | ||
| Legal was good. | ||
| We got the deal done, et cetera. | ||
| I wasn't the risk manager, but I wasn't intellectually satisfied. | ||
| I was like, wait a second. | ||
| These guys really were geniuses and good guys. | ||
| I mean, know them all. | ||
| They're all friends. | ||
| Myron Scholes and Bob Merton, two of our partners, won the Nobel prize in economics the year before. | ||
| They had 160 IQs and we had a bunch of them. | ||
| And so these guys really were the best and brightest. | ||
| They really were the smartest. | ||
| They really did win the Nobel prize. | ||
| And yet they screwed up badly, unimaginably. | ||
| So they must be missing something. | ||
| Of course, they didn't do it on purpose. | ||
| So I just became intellectually curious to make, okay, what is it about the models that Wall Street uses that could lead to a result like that? | ||
| And I just started plunging into physics, applied mathematics, complexity theory, a lot of branches of science, and I continued my career. | ||
| And I found the answer, which is that They assume, not to get too technical, but there's something called the bell curve, which is a normal distribution. | ||
| Most events are in the middle, kind of boring, and then there are these two tails, and these are the extreme events, but they're extremely rare. | ||
| You know, Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan, embarrassed himself a few years ago when they lost money in that big whale trade, and he said, this kind of thing only happens once every three billion years. | ||
| Well, if you do a normal distribution, it is once every three billion years. | ||
| Except it actually happens every seven or eight years. | ||
| So that's supposed to tell you, when the data doesn't line up with the theory, it's supposed to tell you the theory is wrong and it was wrong. | ||
| And then I started another quest, like, well, what's right? | ||
| What is the correct way to do it? | ||
| Turns out to be a power curve, which is a different distribution. | ||
| So anyway, with that as background, again, physics and math and a lot of else applied, I started lecturing and I was a regular guest lecturer at Northwestern University and so forth. | ||
| And then, separately, after 9-11, I was tapped by the CIA, because there was insider trading ahead of 9-11. | ||
| The 9-11 commission kind of covered it up, and I know why, and I know who did it, but it was crystal clear. | ||
| I talked to the New York Stock Exchange specialist in American Airlines and United Airlines, who were the two airlines that were hijacked, and he told me, John Mulhern, who passed away a few years ago, he said, I've never seen a more blatant case of insider trading in my life. | ||
| So the CIA, it was not a law enforcement agency. | ||
| That's the SEC and the FBI. | ||
| CIA is an intelligence agency. | ||
| So what they said was, okay, if there was insider trading ahead of 9-11, which there was, if there were another terrorist attack, would there be insider trading again? | ||
| Could you find it, get a FISA warrant, break down the door and stop the attack? | ||
| And we did a two-year... | ||
| Study on that and came to the conclusion, yes, you could do all of those things. | ||
| And then I actually worked with partners and we built, for the agency, we built a prototype of a system that would do exactly that. | ||
| So that was kind of my immersion in the national security world. | ||
| So when this war game idea came up, the Pentagon didn't need any help from me in terms of war games generally, but they needed help in terms of Wall Street because they had never done a financial war game before. | ||
| You know, the whole idea was there were no missiles or bombs or anything. | ||
| You're going to use financial weapons, currencies, stocks, bonds, commodity, foreign exchange, etc. | ||
| So I was asked to provide that expertise. | ||
| I was on the development team, but then I actually got to participate in the game. | ||
| And very late in the process, we were recruiting the participants on the team. | ||
| You have five teams, red team, blue team, all that, US, Russia, China, the teams you would expect. | ||
| But I looked at the list and it was CIA, FBI, Treasury Department, Fed. | ||
| Think tanks, universities, what I call the usual suspects. | ||
| And I said to the director, I said, you know, war involves, you know, lying, cheating, stealing, deception. | ||
| And so if you want to have that, you need somebody from Wall Street to join the group. | ||
| So I got permission to recruit a couple real Wall Streeters. | ||
| I got a senior guy from UBS, the big Swiss bank, and another guy who had run Citibank Moscow and got them on the team. | ||
| So we have some real world experience. | ||
| Um, and when I came home after two days, uh, I said to my wife, uh, I said, I have good news and bad news. | ||
| The good news is my team won. | ||
| Uh, the bad news is I play China. | ||
| And that was the, they have a scorekeeper, and that was the outcome. | ||
| So from that, that was in 2008. | ||
| We did it at the Top Secret Warfare Analysis Laboratory at the Applied Physics Lab in Washington. | ||
| Just hang on for one second. | ||
| We're taking a short commercial break. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| The legendary Jim Rickards joins us on the other side, the founder and the driver of strategic intelligence. | ||
| A newsletter that I strongly recommend if this is your line of country that you guys get involved with. | ||
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short commercial break we'll be back in a moment uh... we're so uh... | |
| honored to have jim on and uh... and to be talking about the strategic intelligence newsletter but the reason i want him on today paul krugman | ||
| uh... who won the nobel prize uh... and and and by the way his jim was not for myron shoals was the black shoals i think was the capital asset pricing model which really driven modern finance me that's one of the basic tools you're taught krugman i still don't even know what he won for but he's like a political commentator his piece ladies and gentlemen and are we doing our job or what krugman's piece is a is a cry for help | ||
| Because the headline is in the New York Times, Donald Trump is about to start attacking the Federal Reserve. | ||
| And that's what we want to have Jim on today, and we'll get to that in a minute. | ||
| So you go up in this war game. | ||
| You guys are up at Princeton at the Advanced Studies. | ||
| Isn't that the thing, Einstein, in the movie Oppenheimer? | ||
| Isn't that the big scene up there where Admiral Schwartz is trying to give Oppenheimer to be the head of it, and Albert Einstein is there? | ||
| Well, that's the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, and Einstein was there. | ||
| We were in a different location. | ||
| We were at the Applied Physics Laboratory. | ||
| Which is halfway between Baltimore and Washington. | ||
| Top secret. | ||
| They do a lot of weapons, space exploration, but other things, including they host, they have what they call the Warfare Analysis Laboratory, the WALRUS, and that's where we did the war game. | ||
| Yes, we had this crew and I got a couple of Wall Streeters in there. | ||
| So before I went down there, I had dinner in Darien, Connecticut, where I lived at the time, with one fellow who was the Russian expert. | ||
| I said, Steve, here's what we're going to do. | ||
| Steve Hallowell was his name. | ||
| I said, you're on the Russian team. | ||
| I'm on the China team. | ||
| When we take our first break and we go to our embassies and whatever to come up with our plans, we should both push our team members to go back, for those countries to go back to a gold standard. | ||
| The idea was Russia and China would jointly announce that from now on, if you wanted to buy Russian energy or Chinese manufactured goods, you can only pay for it in a new currency that they had created. | ||
| They're going to set up a bank in London issued a new currency, etc., but it was 100% backed by gold. | ||
| If you wanted this currency, you could either deposit gold in the bank, which is fine, which they did, or you could run a trade surplus and get some other currency or borrow it. | ||
| But the dollar was done. | ||
| They weren't going to take dollars anywhere. | ||
| Obviously, this is not the kind of thing that happens overnight. | ||
| It's forward leaning, but that's the whole idea of a war game is to lean five or ten years forward and tell people what's going to happen. | ||
| Uh, my Chinese partners, including one guy who went on the National Security Council for Obama, rejected the idea, but the Russian team went for it. | ||
| Uh, and then that was funny. | ||
| The, the, um, they have referees and when we first did it, uh, announced it, the referee said, you can't do that. | ||
| You're, you're, you're breaking the rules or whatever. | ||
| And I stood up and said, wait a second, it's a war. | ||
| You can do whatever you want. | ||
| And they finally agreed. | ||
| They said, well, it's a legal move, but it's a dumb move. | ||
| I said, well, we'll see how it plays out. | ||
| And after three days, Russia had gained points. | ||
| China had gained points. | ||
| Just a quick footnote, Steve. | ||
| When we did this, Russia and China each had about 600 metric tons of gold. | ||
| That was their reserve position. | ||
| Today, Russia has 3,000 metric tons. | ||
| China admits to 2,000 metric tons. | ||
| Actually, a little closer. | ||
| Closer to 3,000 metric tons. | ||
| Although there's good reason to believe that they have maybe 5,000 metric tons or more behind the curtain. | ||
| It's something called the State Administration of Foreign Exchange. | ||
| Either way, both countries have quadrupled or more five times, 500% increase in their gold reserves, which is exactly what we told the Pentagon was going to happen in 2008. | ||
| They hosted the war, and they got the results. | ||
| Secretary Gates said, hey, nice job, everybody. | ||
| They didn't do anything. | ||
| But hang on. | ||
| 16 years later, 15 years later, you just laid out, and correct me if I'm wrong, because this is your line of country. | ||
| I'm kind of a devotee, but not an expert. | ||
| Isn't this exactly what the BRICS nations, their central banks, led by the Chinese Communist Party, and the Russians are doing in this de-dollarization? | ||
| Isn't this exactly what you warn people about? | ||
| We warned them about it in 2008, but I've warned them many times since. | ||
| I've got to say, I do get the meetings, whether it's the Treasury or the White House or the Pentagon. | ||
| I get in the door. | ||
| I get to meet with the people I want to meet with. | ||
| They're very polite. | ||
| They listen to me. | ||
| It's all good, but they don't do anything. | ||
| I was in another war game. | ||
| They have what they call tabletop war games, which are 10 or 15 people sit around tables Less elaborate than what we did at the Applied Physics Laboratory. | ||
| But I was, you know, kind of basically saying what I'm saying now, that this is going to, that de-dollarization, and my particular point at that time, just a few years later, was that we were overusing the sanctions. | ||
| Economic sanctions are powerful. | ||
| They can work in certain cases, not all, but some cases. | ||
| But over time, you are going to force people to get away from the dollars. | ||
| Like, how many times can you hit a punching bag before the punching bag gets up and walks out of the room? | ||
| And that's what the BRICS are doing. | ||
| They're walking out of the room. | ||
| That has accelerated. | ||
| But anyway, I'm in this meeting. | ||
| I'm one space away, one seat away from this guy, David Dollar, who was a senior official at the U.S. | ||
| Treasury and partly in charge of foreign currency and relations with Asia. | ||
| And so I'm kind of talking along the lines I'm talking right now on dollars. | ||
| Interesting name. | ||
| His name is Dollar. | ||
| But David says, The U.S. | ||
| dollar is the global reserve currency. | ||
| It always has been the global reserve currency, and it always will be the global reserve currency. | ||
| And he slammed, you know, both hands, palm down on the table. | ||
| I said, David, I feel like I'm sitting in Whitehall in 1913, listening to John Bowl say, you know, sterling is the global reserve currency, and it always will be the global reserve currency. | ||
| Of course, that's not true. | ||
| Sterling was done by 1944 by Bretton Woods. | ||
| So again, these things don't happen overnight. | ||
| They happen slowly. | ||
| It's like a salami type of push, but it is happening. | ||
| And this is where the Ukraine war comes in. | ||
| But hang on one second. | ||
| Before we go to that, I want to go back to the Brits. | ||
| That was before the guns of August, before 30 years of catastrophic wars. | ||
| The Brits were at the top of the game. | ||
| The pound was the prime reserve currency. | ||
| They had the greatest navy in the world, the greatest trading. | ||
| I remember my dad saying, if you saw a map when he was a kid, I think the pink was Britain. | ||
| And it was this little island that controlled so much. | ||
| But 30 years of catastrophic wars and mismanagement of their economy and massive deficits led to, at the end of World War II, it went to the conquering power at that time, the United States. | ||
| So these things do happen. | ||
| It's not some immutable law of physics that you adjust the prime reserve currency. | ||
| Am I correct in that? | ||
| You're absolutely correct. | ||
| In fact, I can tell you the month that the decline of sterling began as a global reserve currency. | ||
| It was November 1914. | ||
| Guns of August, the war started at the end of July, beginning of August 1914. | ||
| Now initially what was happening was that the UK and other European powers were selling assets in the US. | ||
| They were selling stocks, selling whatever they could to get gold because they were on the gold standard at the time and they knew they would need the gold to fight the war. | ||
| Believe it or not, John Maynard Keynes, who has got this reputation as a gold basher, it's not true. | ||
| He was the guy, he was the one voice in the Exchequer in the UK at that time saying, you must remain on the gold standard. | ||
| And his insight was the following. | ||
| He said, you know, yeah, 20 million dead. | ||
| I mean, the human sacrifice is beyond imagination. | ||
| He said, we're not going to win the war with gold. | ||
| We're not going to win the money war with money. | ||
| We're going to win the war with credit. | ||
| Your ability to borrow. | ||
| It's going to determine your ability to win the war. | ||
| And by staying on the gold standard, they had the credit and Jack Morgan, because the US was neutral at the time. | ||
| We didn't get into 1917. | ||
| Jack Morgan raised hundreds of millions of dollars for France and the UK. | ||
| He did not raise one penny for Germany, not a penny. | ||
| And he could have, because again, we were neutral. | ||
| And of course the UK won the war. | ||
| But what happened in November was after getting all the gold in from selling assets, they needed stuff. | ||
| Agriculture, clothing, weapons, gunpowder, resources, metals. | ||
| They needed stuff and they had to buy it from the United States, so the gold started to go back to the United States to pay for all this stuff. | ||
| That flow reversed in November 1914, but it took 30 years. | ||
| It wasn't until July 1944 when they signed Bretton Woods that sterling was done and the U.S. | ||
| dollar and the gold standard were the global standard. | ||
| But that's how it happens. | ||
| It happens over time. | ||
| You're right, it was two wars, World War I, World War II, and a lot else besides, and massive debt, and over-relying on the commonwealth country. | ||
| Today, and I've said this frequently, the world cannot destroy the U.S. | ||
| dollar, but we can do it ourselves. | ||
| The United States can destroy the U.S. | ||
| dollar, and that's exactly what we're doing, and Ukraine is a big part of it because of all these sanctions. | ||
| Again, I teach financial warfare at the U.S. | ||
| Army War College down in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. | ||
| I taught the class in the spring of 2022, right after the war in Ukraine started, and I said, here's what's going to happen. | ||
| I had the top gun once, a pilot from the Navy in my class, small group, about 12 or so, some civilians, CIA, State Department, et cetera. | ||
| I taught the class in the spring of 2022, right after the war in Ukraine started. | ||
| I said, here's what's going to happen. | ||
| The US had thrown every sanction you could think of, freezing the assets of the Russian Central Bank, banning exports of oil, on and on and on. | ||
| And I said, the Russian economy is going to do just fine. | ||
| They're going to, any oil that Europe doesn't buy, they're going to sell to China and India. | ||
| They're going to ramp up, they're going to put their economy in a war footing, ramp up their, uh, industrial base, et cetera. | ||
| The sanctions will mean almost nothing to them. | ||
| Uh, and, and, and that's, and I get a lot of skepticism, a lot of pushback cause they were all gung-ho, you know, it was right, right after the war started. | ||
| I taught the class again in the spring of 2023. | ||
| I said, here's what I told the class last year, and every single thing I said was right. | ||
| It's exactly what's happened. | ||
| The Ruppelstrang, the Russian economy, they have labor shortages. | ||
| I mean, their economy is expanding faster than the U.S. | ||
| economy. | ||
| Their economic problems, they have labor shortages because they're growing so quickly. | ||
| They don't need to import all these weapons. | ||
| They're building themselves. | ||
| By the way, what this war has shown is that NATO, I mean, Poland, forget it. | ||
| They couldn't defend France at this point. | ||
| I mean, these Kinzhal missiles, these hypersonic missiles. | ||
| They're blowing up the Patriots. | ||
| They've blown up four Patriot missile batteries, a billion dollars each, and they've blown up four of them with these hypersonic missiles. | ||
| So Russia's doing just fine. | ||
| But meanwhile, they've expanded the bricks. | ||
| They're moving full speed ahead with the currency. | ||
| And by the way, China's a big part of it economically, but the big brains are in Russia. | ||
| You know, Sergei Lavrov, the finance minister, Elvira Nabulina, the head of the Central Bank, Putin himself. | ||
| Putin's two favorite sports are martial arts and chess, so it kind of tells you that he's a very skilled player. | ||
| Hey, Jim, can you hang on for a second? | ||
| I want to hold you for another segment because I've got more to get into. | ||
| I want to drill down on this that no outside power could destroy the dollar. | ||
| It could only be destroyed by the elites in this country. | ||
| Jim Rickards, Strategic Intelligence, a newsletter you've got to check out. | ||
| We're going to make sure you get full access to it. | ||
| Modern Day Holy War will take us out. | ||
| Brother Jim will be on the other side in a moment Here's your host Stephen K band Okay folks and I'm not I'm not begin this up we'll show you the we'll show you the tweet as | ||
| As Jim was talking, John Thune, this is Jake Sherman over at Punchbowl, who gets all the scoops, John Thune, the number two in back of McConnell, has just told him that Congress is going to need a CR until at least March to complete the appropriations process. | ||
| These are folks that just got back yesterday after three weeks off they spent all that time off in the fall all the time and you know six weeks in the summer they're sitting here now and hey uh johnson you with the glasses the glass logo which you got to change to the steel balls logo um you promised you promised no more crs that's why we did this bifurcated january 19th february 2nd now the bait and switch is happening | ||
| So, Jim, you said something, and by the way, we're going to have you back on, and this is why I've got to have people take a look at the strategic intelligence, because this is obviously fascinating. | ||
| It's the reason Krugman's worried. | ||
| He understands we're coming for it, the Fed. | ||
| The physical, we have a unique combination. | ||
| You said, hey, there's no power on Earth by itself that could destroy the dollar, that could take us off being the prime reserve currency. | ||
| Unless we did it to ourselves. | ||
| Now there may be a conversation the American people have over time. | ||
| Do we want the commitments to go with it given the benefits? | ||
| Although the benefits are quite enormous. | ||
| But this is not what's happened. | ||
| We've had a unique combination of fiscal mismanagement and irresponsibility as seen up here on Capitol Hill right now. | ||
| Coupled with monetary irresponsibility as seen by our central bank, the Fed, and of course the New York Fed also, the guys that run it. | ||
| What are your thoughts? | ||
| I mean, we have the elites in the country actually working against us, and they're crushing the working people in this country. | ||
| How can we get out of this? | ||
| I mean, the BRICS Nation are basically saying, hey, MAGA and the Deplorables and the Bernie Sanders guys, the Bernie Bros, all that, you may have to suck on this every day, but we don't. | ||
| We have a choice, and I keep telling them, I said, they've got plenty of kids that went to Harvard, plenty of kids that went to Sloan, plenty of kids that went to Chicago and went to Stanford, they got to HP 12C, they can do the math, because the math is not quantum mechanics. | ||
| And they're saying, hey, we're opting out. | ||
| It's not going to be easy for us, it's not going to be overnight, but we don't have to take it. | ||
| Maybe American citizens have to take it, but we don't have to take it. | ||
| Jim Rickards. | ||
| Yeah, the good news, Steve, is that it's not inevitable. | ||
| There are ways out. | ||
| The bad news is that the people in charge, and we know who they are. | ||
| It's not some deep, dark conspiracy. | ||
| It's the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chairman of the Fed, the head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, head of the European Central Bank, and others, Mark Carney, the super central banker. | ||
| We know who they are, but they either don't get it or they're in favor of it. | ||
| I can't come up with another explanation. | ||
| The biggest thing driving the decline of the dollar right now, I'm not talking about foreign exchange rates per se, I'm just talking about the move away from the dollar as a store of value, as a reserve asset, as a global reserve currency, are these economic sanctions. | ||
| And by the way, just as a quick aside, this may be on the brink of getting much, much worse, meaning destroying the attractiveness or value of the dollar almost overnight. | ||
| Because Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, and certainly the Senate, and all the people you mentioned, they're working on a plan, they're supposed to have answers by the end of February, to seize the Russian assets. | ||
| Now, the Russian assets, the round number is about $300 billion Russia had in the form of Treasury notes and Treasury securities in Western banks. | ||
| Most of it's in Europe, some of it's in the United States. | ||
| Most of it's in Europe, in custody. | ||
| In Belgium, actually. | ||
| Now, we froze it on day one. | ||
| So as soon as the war in Ukraine started, we froze it. | ||
| But when you freeze it, it still belongs to Russia. | ||
| We didn't steal it. | ||
| We just said, you can't get it. | ||
| You can't sell it. | ||
| You can't collect the interest. | ||
| You can't use it. | ||
| But it's still your money. | ||
| But we're just going to freeze it until further notice. | ||
| But what they're talking about now is seizing it, which is actually converting it to our use. | ||
| And this is, again, about $300 billion. | ||
| And using the money to pay for the war in Ukraine. | ||
| Because it looks like the Congress doesn't want to approve the $60 billion. | ||
| We'll see how that plays out. | ||
| Now, that is the reddest red line I can think of. | ||
| You're actually stealing the money. | ||
| By the way, it would break a bunch of laws, but maybe Congress can ignore it. | ||
| Hang on. | ||
| Trump, because we try to make NATO get up to the 2% there and be an ally, not a protectorate, just like in the Middle East, we don't want these people as protectorates. | ||
| We're looking for allies around the littoral nation of the South China Sea, but we want allies. | ||
| People step up, pay their fair share. | ||
| We're considered the specter of darkness over the post-war international rules-based order. | ||
| That's a combination of treaties and alliances and Bretton Woods and the financial system. | ||
| Why is it that Trump, we're the ones sitting there saying, hey, we can't have FISA because we don't want surveillance of American citizens, but the progressive Democrats and the uniparty Republicans want that. | ||
| Why are we the ones saying, hey, we want these nations that are allies to act like allies, pitch in, have joint operations, and help to pay for their own defense? | ||
| Why are we the ones saying, hey, it's bad enough you freeze the Russian assets like you didn't even do to the Nazis in Imperial Japan, but you can't, if you, Just actually take the treasuries, convert them to dollars, and give them to the Ukrainians and the Atlanticists, because the American people have said, we don't want any more money in Ukraine. | ||
| We've got a $2 trillion deficit now. | ||
| We can't take another $60 billion and give it to Ukraine of just this year, because it'll be another $50, and another $50, and another $50. | ||
| This time we got to $9 trillion in Iraq and Afghanistan. | ||
| Why are the purveyors of unity, just like this Austin situation, why is Trump the the bad guy for wanting stability, and they're the good guys when this thing with the Russians, and I'm not arguing the KGB's position, I'm saying if you wanna have an immediate breakdown of the international order, steal people's assets, convert it to dollars, and then give it to a country that is at war with them, how can this, how can they sit there, Krugman, and these guys on MSNBC, and Stavridis, and Morning Joe, | ||
| and sit there and say the Trump people are bringing chaos and anarchy when they're sitting there going to the heart of the financial system of stealing. | ||
| The Russians keep this money in international banks to facilitate trade, so when they blocked them off, they seized the asset, but just like the Persians, we didn't, and the Iranians, we didn't take it and steal the money, they kept it, and that's what they're kinda, you know, bleeding back to them over time. | ||
| If you take this, convert it, give it to their enemies that are at war with them and doing attacks in Crimea and in mainland Russia, this is a trigger. | ||
| First of all, a breakdown of the dollar. | ||
| People will run from the dollar. | ||
| We'll be like Argentina. | ||
| But also, I think you'll start an international global economic war, sir. | ||
| I think that's exactly right. | ||
| This goes back to what I said earlier. | ||
| Others can't destroy the dollar, but we can do it to ourselves. | ||
| We're the ones proposing this. | ||
| Now, a couple of things. | ||
| First of all, they're talking about late February because it's the second anniversary of the war being whatever. | ||
| But that is the timeline we're on right now. | ||
| So a couple things. | ||
| Name one country in the world that would want to invest in U.S. | ||
| Treasury securities if you witness the U.S. | ||
| stealing $300 billion of U.S. | ||
| Treasury securities from the Russians. | ||
| Saudi Arabia, China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, all these countries have sent cases of over a trillion dollars. | ||
| We have to feed those out over time, not buy more, etc. | ||
| has shown its willingness to just steal them. | ||
| So again, we do it to ourselves. | ||
| It's stupid. | ||
| But beyond that, OK, something about the White House, they can barely think one move ahead. | ||
| They definitely cannot think two, let alone three moves ahead, which a good chess player can do. | ||
| So what do you think Russia is going to do if they do this? | ||
| Well, Russia will immediately seize all the assets of Western companies in Russia. | ||
| Now, they have imposed some counter sanctions and said you can't sell them. | ||
| right away, etc. But they haven't stolen them. And most of those assets actually belong to the Germans and the French, a little bit of the UK, but mostly the Germans. | ||
| So Germany's like, wait, but a lot of these Russian treasury securities are in custody. | ||
| And as I said, Belgium is the main place, but some of them in Germany. But the point is, Germany's like, well, hold on a second. I steal the Russian treasury securities. You, the United States, use the money to pay for the war. And then Russia seizes industrial and commercial and energy assets from Moscow to Vladivostok. | ||
| And that hurts me. | ||
| So again, they haven't really thought through the ramifications, but the biggest ramifications is the one I mentioned, which is everybody else says, I have no interest in Treasury securities because one day you'll, you don't like what I do. | ||
| You don't like, you know, Saudi Arabia making up to Persia or to Iran or, you know, China threatening Taiwan. | ||
| So you seize my Treasury securities. | ||
| That's a red line they haven't crossed and they're getting ready to cross it and that'll be, that'll accelerate the decline of the dollar very rapidly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We will cover this and make sure that Johnson's guys don't get out of control in this thing because this will lead to a global economic war. | ||
| Jim, tell us about strategic intelligence. | ||
| I want to make sure the audience gets full access to your thinking, your writing, everything you've got at that in all your books. | ||
| Yeah, thank you. | ||
| Strategic intelligence is our flagship We have a couple other publications that are a little more specialized, but it comes out once a month. | ||
| A subscription for a year is 12 issues, very modestly priced. | ||
| We put more time and effort into that than anything else we do. | ||
| I write about 5,000 words, which is chapter length. | ||
| We have several other contributors, really good ones, Byron King and others, Dan Amos, who contribute to it as well. | ||
| We cover mostly economics and markets. | ||
| That's our job. | ||
| It used to be economics was one subject and politics was another. | ||
| That's not true anymore. | ||
| They're completely tied up. | ||
| And we've been talking about it today, how the politicians in Congress are destroying the economy and destroying the dollar. | ||
| So we turn to politics as well because we have to, because you can't understand the economic situation without the politics. | ||
| So I love writing it. | ||
| I put a lot of effort into it. | ||
| I get a lot of good feedback from subscribers. | ||
| I was in I was with my son-in-law the other day. | ||
| We were changing a tire in a workshop in a garage and some guy came up out of nowhere and shook my hand. | ||
| He said, I'm a subscriber. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| So we really, really enjoyed doing that. | ||
| Hang on, hang on. | ||
| I want to go to that. | ||
| I want to go to that point because one of the things we pride ourselves on in War Room is to tell people the way the system works, that you can't understand politics and you can't understand what's happened to this country until you understand capital markets and economics. | ||
| I've been giving a course on that for the last couple years. | ||
| For the audience, because a lot of audience members are saying, hey, this may be too above me. | ||
| Talk about the guy that came up and shook your hand. | ||
| Well, for the audience, I mean, do you need any prior education to actually begin to understand the strategic intelligence main newsletter? | ||
| Do I have to have a master's degree? | ||
| I mean, the target audience. | ||
| I understand a lot of guys on Wall Street follow you, a lot of investors follow you, but for a general audience here, a MAGA audience, who's, what's the wheelhouse? | ||
| Who's in the strike zone for you? | ||
| Yeah, Steve, I pride myself and it's my job on basically taking the most complicated concepts you can think of and putting them in plain English. | ||
| And I, just to be clear, I do not dumb it down. | ||
| I've never dumped anything down, but I do write in plain English. | ||
| And by the way, that's a skill in and of itself because economists love, you know, they love jargon and nominal, nominal wage rigidity. | ||
| Well, it just means people don't like to take a pay cut. | ||
| So why don't you just say people don't like to take a pay cut? | ||
| Why do you have to use a phrase like nominal wage rigidity? | ||
| And I don't. | ||
| So we write in plain English. | ||
| By the way, there are very few really advanced economic concepts that are actually that difficult to grasp. | ||
| It's like a priesthood. | ||
| They would like to pretend that it is, and they use the jargon to kind of put up a front, but the truth is it's not that complicated. | ||
| You start with supply and demand and get a few factors and go from there. | ||
| So the answer is no. | ||
| You don't need a college degree. | ||
| You don't need a graduate degree. | ||
| You don't need to understand all the jargon. | ||
| If I use it, I explain it. | ||
| I'll use a technical term and then I'll explain it in plain English. | ||
| It's very accessible. | ||
| You get airports, hotel lobbies, whatever. | ||
| People come up and shake your hand. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I always spend time with anyone who expresses an interest. | ||
| Yeah, the audience is diverse. | ||
| And it's, the thing that I really, you know, we sort of have a kind of 15-old demographic, but a lot of younger people, a lot of people in their 20s are subscribers, and you know, write to me and talk to me as well, because they've been, they're smart. | ||
| They're not uneducated, but they're miseducated. | ||
| They've been taught a lot of stuff that just basically isn't true. | ||
| We're now in the third generation of Americans who have no understanding of the gold standard. | ||
| I run into people, smart people, and they go, oh gee, I never knew we were on a gold standard. | ||
| It wasn't that long ago, 1971, early 70s. | ||
| Jim, hang on for one second. | ||
| We're going to take another break. | ||
| Jim Rickards is going to join us on the other side. | ||
|
unidentified
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We will fight till they're all gone! | |
| We rejoice when there's no more! | ||
| Let's take down the CCP! | ||
| War Room, here's your host Stephen K. Bamm. | ||
| Uh, Jim, I want to thank you for coming on today. | ||
| We look forward to having you back on a regular basis because these are the issues. | ||
| Look, we're fighting right now. | ||
| People are manning the ramparts on this obscenity that Speaker Johnson has put forward. | ||
| We're not going to let that happen. | ||
| This fiscal mismanagement and this fiscal irresponsibility stops with this audience. | ||
| We're going to be turfing people out of here because it's just outrageous what he's going along with. | ||
| But I want to make sure people get access to the newsletter. | ||
| So where do they go again? | ||
| Yeah, our publisher Paradigm Press, P-A-R-A-D-I-G-M, Paradigm Press Strategic Intelligence. | ||
| Put that in any search engine, Google, whatever, our landing page will come up and you'll see all the publications and check them out. | ||
| The one that works for you, we love new subscribers and we welcome those folks on board. | ||
| By the way, honored to have you on here. | ||
| Thanks for spending so much time. | ||
| Grace and Mo, let's get it out to all the chat rooms, how people get access to Jim. | ||
| Brother, thank you for writing Currency Wars. | ||
| It was a game changer for me, and thank you so much for coming on the show. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thanks. | |
| Krugman is a smart, savvy guy. | ||
| A very smart, savvy guy. | ||
| And he understands exactly where this is headed. | ||
| The Central Bank of this country, the Federal Reserve, is one of the biggest problems we have in this nation. | ||
| It's impoverishing you every day. | ||
| And we're going to get to the bottom of all of it, and yes, we're full on an outright assault on the Federal Reserve. | ||
| This is one of Andrew Jackson's central themes on his populist movement. | ||
| His populist movement, which was about the central banks, the Bank of the United States at the time. | ||
| And this populist movement, obviously, what, 150 years later, 175 years later, 180 years later, has many of the same elements to it. | ||
| We don't want central control of the banking system. | ||
| We don't want central control of our currency that's not controlled by the American people. | ||
| And we don't control it. | ||
| We don't control the Fed. | ||
| The prime brokers own the Federal Reserve, not the American people. | ||
| So anytime they give you the spin like that, it's just not the case. | ||
| And what they do is they work to enrich themselves. | ||
| This is why you've had the greatest concentration of wealth in the history of this nation from the 2008 The collapse brought on by those guys that they then bailed themselves out. | ||
| People looked the other way in Congress, bailed themselves out, or didn't understand it. | ||
| And remember, our task and purpose here is to make sure you understand it, because once working-class and middle-class people understand how the con works, how the scam works, that's the beginning and the end of the con. | ||
| This is why they never talk about it. | ||
| This is why all these other shows have so many shiny toys and more fun things to talk about. | ||
| I understand the war room is work. | ||
| I got that. | ||
| But it's work for a purpose, to empower you, to make sure that you can use your agency. | ||
| They've never had fights on Capitol Hill over these budgets like they have because of this audience, because you guys are up to it, and they can't spend any more talking points. | ||
| Johnson's talking points the other day were a disgrace. | ||
| He treats you like a bunch of simpletons. | ||
| And Johnson and the staff around him, you got a man up, bro. | ||
| I'm telling you, we will count your speakership in weeks, not in months. | ||
| In weeks, not in months. | ||
| Mike Lindell, you've seen, we're going to have a report from Loomer this afternoon on what's happening on the ground in Iowa. | ||
| You've seen it. | ||
| Of course, bitter weather is hitting there. | ||
| A lot of people now saying, oh, Nikki, and Nikki's got the biggest donors, all these globalist donors, Democrats, Reid Hoffman, all these evil guys. | ||
| She's going to make a run in New Hampshire. | ||
| It's all this. | ||
| That's why this audience has got to be prepared to show up. | ||
| You've got to vote. | ||
| You've got to have the president's back. | ||
| President Trump's doing everything he can. | ||
| He's in court today. | ||
| They're trying to destroy him. | ||
| Fannie Willis has got Well, would you rather have the donor money or would you rather have the people's votes? | ||
| It's lawfare on January 6th. | ||
| That's what they're running on. | ||
| We're gonna run on peace and prosperity that only Donald Trump delivered and only Donald Trump will deliver. | ||
| Give me your assessment of where we stand on all this, particularly the election being stolen, because that's what they're working on, how to steal it. | ||
| And then give me an update on the company. | ||
| Well, would you rather have the donor money or would you rather have the people's votes? | ||
| Our great real president has all the votes and people are, they're excited. | ||
| They're going to get out like they've never gotten out before. | ||
| And, and, uh, you know, I've been down there twice now and over the last week and, and it's, uh, everywhere you go, you don't even have a talk of anyone else other than, uh, our great real president, Donald Trump. | ||
| And, uh, you can see that all over social media too. | ||
| Um, it's, uh, I'm excited. | ||
| I think, you know, this is, I'm glad they're, you know, look at our real president putting in all the time down there knowing that it's, you know, you go through, you breeze through Iowa in a landslide and then it's just, that's going to set, just set a precedent and The rest of them should just drop out and let's save it for the big general election and get everybody united as a people. | ||
| Hold it right there. | ||
| But that's the whole thing that upsets me so much about the RNC, about these phony debates, about what Fox News is doing, because all day long it's somebody, it's either Glenn Youngkin or Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis. | ||
| They pick anybody but Trump. | ||
| We need to be focused on the general, and we need to be focused on winning the House, the Senate, the presidency, and the landslide, these governorships. | ||
| It is obscene. | ||
| They're going to spend up to a billion dollars on trying to take Trump out in these bogus primaries, brother. | ||
| It's a big distraction. | ||
| We had the great interview last night with Lou Dobbs and our real president. | ||
| We were attacked like you've never seen. | ||
| They just don't, they don't want anything. | ||
| Um, they're doing everything they can to stop our great president, Donald Trump. | ||
| And, and, uh, it's, uh, the resources spent, it is, it's a big distraction and just like these, uh, indictments and all this, uh, on all this, um, uh, court stuff and, But you know what, it's actually, you look back and what traditionally would have hurt, it actually helps. | ||
| Everything going on, it helps. | ||
| But it's just disgusting. | ||
| You got the RNC and like you say, Fox News and everybody. | ||
| When are they going to come on at the last minute? | ||
| Oh yeah, now we all support. | ||
| And you know, people are going to remember. | ||
| And they're going to remember that They're not going to forget, especially when you get your Fox News out there. | ||
| It's a shame, Steve. | ||
| They haven't shown up at rallies for him for years. | ||
| No, they don't want him. | ||
| The Murdoch's don't want him. | ||
| We've only got a minute, Mike. | ||
| Where do people go right now? | ||
| You've got to go to 800-873-1062 to talk to the operators, make sure they know they're going to have jobs. | ||
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| Let's hit it. | ||
| Mike's going to be back at 5 o'clock tonight. | ||
| The War Room Special is there. | ||
| Charlie Kirk is next, but so big after that. | ||
| We're back 5 to 7. | ||
| You do not want to miss it. | ||
| On fire in the War Room. |
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