Feb. 27, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
48:55
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Donald Trump is seeking nothing less than a total restructuring of a global trade environment which penalizes American companies, American workers, and American taxpayers through all manner of unfair trade, tariffs, non-tariff barriers, in this case taxation, as you mentioned, regulation. | ||
| And it worked back in the 50s when we were trying to help the global. | ||
| But we have this practice of just surrendering our treasure to the rest of the world for no good end anymore. | ||
| And ultimately, these are national security issues because if we don't have a manufacturing and a defense industrial base and... | ||
| Tech companies which have every dollar they need for cutting-edge AI and research and development, we're not going to be the country we need to be. | ||
|
unidentified
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I get it, Peter, but to what end? | |
| I mean, the manufacturing sector went into recession back in late 2018, 2019 because of the tariffs. | ||
| So, I mean, we're in a different world, a globally connected world, where some of these CEOs that we talk to are very concerned about tariffs. | ||
| They're worried about demand destruction. | ||
| They're worried about price shocks. | ||
| They're worried about trading relationships. | ||
| We heard the same concerns back during the first term when President Trump levied historic tariffs on China, levied historic tariffs on steel and aluminum, levied historic tariffs on things like solar and washing machines. | ||
| And what we got out of that was not the sky's fall and recession. | ||
| Or inflation. | ||
| What we got was price stability and prosperity. | ||
| I think the eighth wonder of the world is if you go to the Pride of Clyde in Ohio and you go to the Whirlpool factory, there's a washer machine that comes off every four seconds out of there. | ||
| I'll come back to it. | ||
| There's another four or five minutes. | ||
| I beg to differ with her right there. | ||
| She said it was a recession in 18 and 19. The fourth quarter of 19 was the world on fire in a good way. | ||
| Jim Rickards is going to join us here in a moment. | ||
| E.J., so President Trump on Tuesday, he just sent out a true social, 4% on Mexico, 25% on Canada, two of our largest trading partners, and I don't know if China's a partner or we're in complete submission to them since the trade deficit's so massive, but 10% on them. | ||
| Your thoughts? | ||
| Peter Navarro, right? | ||
| Is this a total geoeconomic reset for the United States and looking at this as a premium market? | ||
| Because he's not putting a 25% tariff on an avocado coming from Mexico. | ||
| He's not putting a 25% tariff on a component part under the hood that gets shipped down from Canada into Detroit to go into a car engine. | ||
| This is across the board. | ||
| So is this bigger and is this really national security? | ||
| Or are his critics right? | ||
| Is this going to trigger a massive recession? | ||
| Well, Steve, there's certainly no way it triggers a massive recession, although that is very much the fear in Canada and in Mexico. | ||
| We forget that the trade between our countries is not in any way equal. | ||
| What I mean is that if you look at all of America's exports, only a few percentage points go to a country like Canada or a country like Mexico, whereas almost all of Canada's exports, almost all of Mexico's exports come here to the United States. | ||
| And so if they really want to go toe to toe with Trump on this one, if the president of Mexico or the governor of Canada says, all right, let's do this trade war thing, then what will happen here in the United States will basically be like an economic speed bump. | ||
| But it will be a probably a full blown recession for a country, again, like Canada or like Mexico. | ||
| This is where Trump's approach to tariffs is so much more like McKinley's than than Hoover's. | ||
| McKinley had an almost scientific approach. | ||
| It was a very strategic approach to conducting tariff policy, whereas with Hoover, it was it was a shotgun style, almost random approach in the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that infamously made the Great Depression even worse than it already was at the start of the 1930s. | ||
| So what would the actual effect be? | ||
| Let's remember that there are a lot of elasticities to deal with. | ||
| There are fluctuations in the relative value of currencies. | ||
| In other words, exchange rates. | ||
| What I'm getting at here, Steve, is the fact that if you put a tariff on a certain item the actual cost of that tariff is never passed entirely on to the consumer. | ||
| The producer always ends up eating some of the cost of that tariff. | ||
| Famously saw this during the first Trump administration that Peter Navarro was just talking about, wherein about 80 percent of the cost of the tariffs we were imposing on the Chinese were simply eaten by the Chinese manufacturers. | ||
| They couldn't afford to pass the full freight on to the American consumer in the form of higher prices because the American consumer would choose alternatives. | ||
| We didn't have to buy steel from China, for example. | ||
| We could buy it from a domestic producer. | ||
| We could buy it from another foreign producer like the ones in Sweden. | ||
| In order to remain competitive, it forced these Chinese exporters, again, to eat most of the cost of that tariff, and we have every expectation that that would happen today. | ||
| And then one further thing, Steve, if I may, you know, things like a 25 percent tariff rate on Canada, that's perfectly reasonable when you think about reciprocity, because they the Canadians already impose about a 25 percent tariff or the equivalent thereof. | ||
| Once you consider not just tariffs, but also non-tariff barriers, think things like quotas that they have on American dairy, American automotive parts. | ||
| And so that is essentially an implicit penalty on Americans, whether it's an American farmer, dairy farmer or an American factory worker. | ||
| And so what the president is trying to do here is level the playing field for the American worker, for American exporters, so that we can actually compete on the world stage and make it a level playing field. | ||
|
unidentified
|
world. | |
| Jim Rickards, I want to bring you in. | ||
| Your thoughts on President Trump's – it's really a geoeconomic and geostrategic reset on this, and particularly when you look at tariffs. | ||
| He's got a different economic model. | ||
| He sees the United States as a premium market. | ||
| And if you don't, if you can get around terrorists by putting your manufacturing here and hiring American citizens at good wages, or you can pay a premium like you would buy a, you'd get a skybox for a sporting event or a front row seat for a concert, sir. | ||
| I agree with that, Steve. | ||
| And I disagree with E.J. a little bit on the difference between McKinley and Hoover. | ||
| Whether tariffs are a good idea or not depends on whether your economy is in surplus or deficit. | ||
| If you're running a trade surplus, don't put tariffs on. | ||
| But if you're running a trade deficit... | ||
| Absolutely do it and help create, you know, exactly as you described, high-paying jobs at home. | ||
| Say to the foreign trading partners, if you want to sell the United States, that's fine, but you got to build it here, put your investment here. | ||
| Right now, of course, the U.S. is running a huge trade deficit, so tariffs make a lot of sense. | ||
| And as far as the reset is concerned, yeah, it's a reset, but it's a reset to something that we had from 1790 to 1962, which was, you know, the American system. | ||
| Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, McKinley, Eisenhower, they were all on board. | ||
| So we're going back to really what we had to most of American history. | ||
| But the problem with Hoover is not that tariffs are automatically bad. | ||
| It's that the U.S. was a huge surplus country at the time. | ||
| So it depends on the initial conditions. | ||
| But the initial conditions right now are right for tariffs. | ||
| Describe, this is so important, the American system. | ||
| There's a document that is, I think, almost as important as a constitution in the Declaration of Independence by the Secretary of Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, who came out and put forward, our first Secretary of Treasury put forward a report on manufacturers, right, that has resonated down the ages to people like Henry Clay, people like Abraham Lincoln, the American system. | ||
| Can you just take a second to describe it? | ||
| Because that's essentially how the country... | ||
| Basically ran until globalization, until the high priest of globalization on Wall Street. | ||
| I went to the West Point of Capitalism, the West Point of Globalism, Harvard Business School, which all they preach was globalization. | ||
| Describe to people what the American system is. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Well, first of all, it did start with Alexander Hamilton. | ||
| Alexander Hamilton and George Washington took or called a field trip out to Passaic, New Jersey. | ||
| And they looked at all these waterfalls, which are there. | ||
| It's a natural resource. | ||
| And they said, perfect. | ||
| This is, you know, at the time you use water to run mills, to run water wheels and so forth. | ||
| That's how you powered industry. | ||
| And they said, this would be perfect for, you know, textiles and so forth. | ||
| But you had to put up tariffs to protect. | ||
| The US industry, we were kind of in our infancy at the time. | ||
| Now, there was an opposition party. | ||
| That was Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. | ||
| Jefferson and Monroe in particular, they were the agrarians. | ||
| They represented the southern interests, actually. | ||
| This is one of the, not the main one, but this is one of the things that led up to the Civil War, which was the South opposed tariffs. | ||
| They needed imports, and the North favored tariffs because they wanted to encourage industry, and they did. | ||
| But that system... | ||
| Basically, the early Republican Party, which was Thomas Jefferson, was pushed aside. | ||
| Henry Clay was the champion. | ||
| John Quincy Adams was another one. | ||
| This thread ran all the way through American history, with very few exceptions. | ||
| And the real turning point was 1962. That was the Trade Reform Act of 1962 when we lowered our tariffs unilaterally and then we went through multiple rounds of the Kennedy round, the Tokyo round and so forth. | ||
| But the U.S. today acts as the consumer of last resort. | ||
| We sit there to the world and say, hey, sell us all your stuff, cheap labor. | ||
| By the way, Ricardo himself admitted he was wrong about the theory of free trade comparative advantage. | ||
| Comparative advantage works in a classroom, but in the real world, the factors of production, the inputs, are portable. | ||
| So you may start out with some comparative advantage, but if capital can go where it wants, and it does, and if cheap labor is waiting for you overseas, and it is, then the comparative advantage comes out of thin air. | ||
| Look at Taiwan Semiconductor. | ||
| What was Taiwan's comparative advantage to semiconductors in 1978? | ||
| Zero. | ||
| They had comparative advantage in tuna fishing and a couple other things. | ||
| They created it out of whole cloth. | ||
| They basically got the capital, got the educational system. | ||
| If you wanted to leave Taiwan Semiconductor and go start your own company, they were like, that's fine. | ||
| Let's kind of create that ecosystem. | ||
| So the point being, comparative advantage, the theory of free trade falls down because the inputs are portable. | ||
| Once you realize that, you have to say, okay, what can we do? | ||
| To prevent having all of our industry, all of our intellectual property and jobs stripped away. | ||
| And the answer is tariffs. | ||
| And you mentioned, I think in the month of December, it was a record trade deficit with China. | ||
| Let me play the Caitlin Collins. | ||
| I'm going to get EJ in here before he has to bounce and come back to you, Jim. | ||
| Let's play the Caitlin Collins quickly and get EJ's response on this. | ||
| You just talked about how important the work that Elon Musk is doing is. | ||
| If you pass a continuing resolution, won't that just refund all the programs that he says he's cutting that are full of waste, fraud and abuse? | ||
| No, look, that's why I say you add anomalies to a CR. You can increase some spending. | ||
| You can decrease some spending. | ||
| You can add language that says, for example, the dramatic changes that have been made to USAID would be reflected in the ongoing spending. | ||
| It would be a clean CR, mostly, I think, but with some of those changes to adapt to the new realities here. | ||
| And the new reality is less government, more efficiency, better return for the taxpayers. | ||
| And I think that's something everybody should welcome. | ||
| What he said earlier also was about the Democrats trying to put restrictions on President Trump on all of this. | ||
| Maybe we can play the whole thing for Jim if we can put it together. | ||
| EJ, right there, clean CR but anomalies. | ||
| What do you anticipate? | ||
| What do you anticipate happening here? | ||
| Because, as you know, this audience doesn't like kind of omnibus CRs, but they're talking about anomalies where you're actually going to allow... | ||
| The doge cuts to go through, sir. | ||
| And Steve, I think that makes a lot of sense, right? | ||
| You should be counting all of these savings when you're trying to compute, okay, what is the actual cost of this legislation? | ||
| They should be counting things like future revenue from tariffs, for example. | ||
| And all of these things can be used as quote-unquote pay-fors to help cancel some of the supposed costs, according to the CBO, from extending the Trump-era tax cuts, the Trump tax reform. | ||
| So I think it's a very good thing that they're going to help incorporate some of these wins in terms in terms of cutting government, that they're going to incorporate some of that into the CR and say, OK, this is the new baseline. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We are cutting out all of these instances of abuse, of fraud, of waste, something which, by the way, both parties used to preach. | ||
| Let's not forget it was Bill Clinton, of all people, who got up to the microphone and said the era of big government is over and was constantly railing again against abuse, fraud and waste within the federal budget. | ||
| Now, whether or not he was true to that, that's a whole nother story. | ||
| I know, I know. | ||
| Bill Clinton lying. | ||
| It's a shocker. | ||
| But whatever the case, at least the Democrats used to pay lip service to this. | ||
| Today, it is shocking how many of the people in Congress get up to the microphone and rail against all of these cost savings, all of these ways in which we are clawing back Americans' tax dollars. | ||
| EJ, what's your social media? | ||
| You're coming a little hot on Twitter. | ||
| I think it's fantastic. | ||
| You've got great information, great charts, great analysis. | ||
| Where do they go? | ||
| Best place to find me is right there on Twitter or X, you know, whatever we call it these days. | ||
| The handle is at real EJ and Tony. | ||
| EJ, love you, brother. | ||
| I hope we got either EJ is going to go in and we'll lose him as an analyst and a contributor or... | ||
| He'll be the smartest guy out here talking about the details of the budget and inflation. | ||
| Jim Rickert's next. | ||
| Okay, with everything else out there, and I think we're getting some clarity now on the CR, which I'll be able to go into in a little while, and also the taxes part and other parts of this reconciliation bill. | ||
| This is quite important because this is going to lay the foundational element for the Trump presidency. | ||
| Remember, President Trump is always about energy and getting a foundation, a strong foundation for economic growth and opportunity. | ||
| Jim Rickards, one thing that stands in the way, and we've had the Birch Gold guys in here. | ||
| You know Philip Patrick very well. | ||
| He thinks the world of you. | ||
| Read your newsletter, Strategic Intelligence, which you can get by going to Rickards War Room. | ||
| You can get Strategic Intelligence, but you can also see all the specialty newsletters Jim puts out, and you get this amazing book about artificial intelligence and capital markets, which I will tell people will come as a shock to you, but it should be read. | ||
| Jim throws it in for free. | ||
| Jim, there's all this situation where the Bank of England is delaying delivery of physical gold for certain transactions. | ||
| There's also all this discussion, I think, of 20 metric tons or something that has been shipped from Bank of England and other money center banks in London to New York. | ||
| These guys are arbitraging, I guess, the difference in price in physical gold. | ||
| And then President Trump, and now he's been pretty adamant about it, that he wants to go to Fort Knox and actually wants to see and do a physical inspection. | ||
| And hear from auditors about gold. | ||
| And now he says he's going to take Elon Musk. | ||
| Now, Scott Besant, who the show knows very well, former major contributor, he says, hey, look, they do an audit every year. | ||
| President Trump, we want President Trump to go and they're arranging the visit. | ||
| How seriously should this audience take? | ||
| Because we know central banks are still buying at record rates. | ||
| What is up with, like, physical gold between the Bank of England, New York, Fort Knox, all of it, sir? | ||
| That's a great question, Steve. | ||
| But we've seen all of this before from the panic of Black Friday, 1869, and what they used to call gold points in the early 20th century. | ||
| But, yeah, first of all, I applaud the president and Elon Musk if they're going to Fort Knox. | ||
| I think that's great. | ||
| I think it'll be, I call it the mother of all photo ops. | ||
| By the way, if you've ever lifted a 400-ounce bar, they weigh 27 pounds. | ||
| I've done it. | ||
| I've been involved. | ||
| But it's like a free weight. | ||
| It's a lot heavier than you think. | ||
| But they'll go in. | ||
| They'll look around. | ||
| By the way, the gold is certainly there. | ||
| I've said that for... | ||
| Over 10 years, probably 20 years, but I said it in my book, The New Case for Gold. | ||
| The gold is there. | ||
| Just think about it. | ||
| Would the Treasury let the President go to Fort Knox if the gold wasn't there? | ||
| Of course they wouldn't. | ||
| So they're going to go there. | ||
| The gold is there. | ||
| I think it would be great for the American people. | ||
|
unidentified
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But hang on, hang on, hang on. | |
| I know when I was a small kid, my dad would tell me when he was a child back in the 20s and 30s that they would look at a map and the map would have pink or where the British Empire was. | ||
| He said that little country, that little island looked like you could control the world because it looked like half the map was pink. | ||
| He also said the standard back in those days was the Bank of England. | ||
| So I hear you that the gold is there. | ||
| But how do we have a situation where something is supposed to be so solid as the Bank of England? | ||
| You've now had, and it's been verified by the Bank of England, some problems with actually... | ||
| Completing trades, they need delay because they can't get the physical delivery of gold, sir. | ||
| Well, here's the thing. | ||
| Blythe Masters, who ran global commodities for J.P. Morgan for a very long period of time, she knows more about this than anyone. | ||
| She's left the bank and on to other things. | ||
| She had a quote, just a couple of words, and I found it on the Internet. | ||
| I verified it, but then it kind of disappeared. | ||
| It got scrubbed. | ||
| But she said, gold never settles. | ||
| And what that means is that the amount of paper gold transactions, gold futures, gold forwards, unallocated gold, leasing gold, etc., the amount of paper transactions is easily 100 times, probably more, no one knows the exact number, but easily 100 times the amount of physical gold. | ||
| Now, what she meant was... | ||
| As long as all the longs and the shorts and the lessees and the lessors and the paper gold holders and everything kind of roll over their contracts, some get in, some get out, it's all good. | ||
| But if you actually had a situation where the holders of those who are long, the paper gold, say, you know, I think I'll take physical delivery. | ||
| Call the CME or call the COMEX or call the Treasury for that matter. | ||
| Call anybody and say, deliver the gold, please. | ||
| You couldn't do it. | ||
| It would be physically impossible. | ||
| So what would happen then, you'd have the greatest short squeeze in history. | ||
| You'd have a mass scramble for physical gold. | ||
| The price would double probably overnight and then just kind of keep going from there. | ||
| You'd have bankruptcies as various dealers and counterparties failed. | ||
| Now, that hasn't happened yet on that scale. | ||
| And again, 1869 was the last time something like it happened. | ||
| But the market couldn't stand up to it. | ||
| Now, we're starting to see signs of that. | ||
| We're starting to see cracks in the structure. | ||
| And the question I have for the president, Elon Musk, go to Fort Knox. | ||
| Okay, the gold's there. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| Ask the Treasury, and they probably don't want to ask this, is that gold leased? | ||
| Is that gold leased to J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Citi, and others? | ||
| Hold it, hold it, hold it. | ||
| Full stop, full stop, full stop. | ||
| If it's in Fort Knox, it's supposed to be the gold of the United States of America and the United States Treasury. | ||
| That's why U.S. troops, it's in actually an army base, and of course the base is a little separate from the gold depository. | ||
| I would assume, and I think people watching this show would assume, that is the goal of the United States of America. | ||
| Is it not, sir? | ||
| What do you mean least? | ||
| Well, it is. | ||
| But if I lease my house to you, you can move in. | ||
| It's perfectly legal, but I still own the house. | ||
| Now, people don't understand gold leasing. | ||
| They hear the gold is leased. | ||
| They assume that, like, J.P. Morgan backs up a truck and takes the gold. | ||
| No, that's not what happened. | ||
| The gold is there. | ||
| The Treasury owns it. | ||
| I want to be clear about that. | ||
| The gold is there and the Treasury owns it. | ||
| But they can lease it out. | ||
| That's a paper transaction. | ||
| And here's the key. | ||
| When you're the lessee, you're, again, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, any of the big banks, you have a right of rehypothecation. | ||
| That means you can lease it to somebody else, or you can sell it to somebody else on what's called an unallocated basis, which is to say, yes, Steve, you own the gold, but not really. | ||
| There are no bars with serial numbers with your name on it, but it's a pay-per-goal transaction. | ||
| But that's my point. | ||
| It's a long chain of paper transactions. | ||
| Everybody thinks, every lessee, every buyer of unallocated gold thinks they own gold. | ||
| And they do have price exposure. | ||
| But they don't have the gold. | ||
| The gold's in the vault where it belongs. | ||
| But you can actually make money leasing. | ||
| How could you blame the Treasury for picking up a percentage point or two on the gold by leasing that? | ||
| But the bigger point, the one you refer to, is that the chain of paper gold is 100 times the physical gold. | ||
| You couldn't possibly settle all this. | ||
| Now, I don't, by the way, I understand gold leasing. | ||
| I just described it. | ||
| I don't know for a fact that the Treasury gold is leased. | ||
| I suspect it is. | ||
| I don't know that. | ||
| To me, it's a question. | ||
| But it's a question that the Treasury may not want to answer because the minute you realize it, that's how much that's supporting. | ||
| What you just described with hypothecation, where essentially you're breaking off from the physical reality of it and the ownership of it, ways to monetize. | ||
| Certain paper transactions, right? | ||
| You hypothecate it. | ||
| Isn't what you just described in that custody chain of events, everyone's leasing, all of that, much like fractional banking, which people say, how can this happen? | ||
| and it is wrought with potential risk that if the music ever stops, right, the people in the hypothecation chain, just like the fractional banking situation like at Silicon Valley Bank, that they end up holding just like the fractional banking situation like at Silicon Valley Bank, that they end up holding There's some person that gets stuck if the music stops, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| Silicon Valley Bank had about 3% of their deposits were FDIC insured. | ||
| The rest of them were completely uninsured. | ||
| So you're basically, as a depositor, you're an uninsured creditor of an insolvent institution. | ||
| So that's exactly right. | ||
| Up to 10% capital in different flavors and the rest is leverage. | ||
| We're talking about a market with maybe 1%, probably less. | ||
| In other words, leverage 99 to 1. And that is the issue. | ||
| Now, even in the, just take the futures exchanges, the COMEX gold futures contracts. | ||
| They have a vault and there's physical gold in it. | ||
| And if I'm long a futures contract, I'm allowed to put in notices. | ||
| I'd like to take physical delivery. | ||
| But I'm enough of a geek. | ||
| I've read the rule books of all these exchanges. | ||
| They all have a rule in the rule book that says we can change the rules. | ||
| And they tell you, we are not a source of supply. | ||
| So they just let you take physical delivery just a little bit to keep everything honest. | ||
| But if there were ever a massive wave of notices, hey, I'd like to take physical delivery, they would say trade for liquidation. | ||
| You're not getting that gold. | ||
| You're not getting that physical gold. | ||
| There is not enough. | ||
| That's just the futures market. | ||
| Then, again, there's unallocated gold, bank gold, gold leasing. | ||
| This is a huge market. | ||
| And this is what Life Masters meant when she said gold never settles. | ||
| We've got a couple of minutes left. | ||
| Why do we have a barbaric relic of our savage past in a day of artificial intelligence? | ||
| You just wrote a book about artificial intelligence in markets that everybody should read. | ||
| In fact, if you go to rickettswarroom.com, you get it. | ||
| He throws it in as a free item if you take strategic intelligence. | ||
| But you've got artificial intelligence that's changing. | ||
| Really, the nature of capital markets, because the efficiency and effectiveness of artificial intelligence, and you lay out a couple of scary scenarios. | ||
| But why is gold, this relic of 5,000 years, why is gold still important, still relevant? | ||
| Well, I think my experience as a kid may be similar to yours, because at the kitchen table, my father used to pull two $20 bills out of his wallet, and he slammed them on the table and said, look at this. | ||
| And one of them said, Federal Reserve note. | ||
| Which is liability. | ||
| That's what we call money is actually a liability of the Federal Reserve. | ||
| It's not an asset. | ||
| But the other one said silver certificate. | ||
| He used to carry it around. | ||
| And he would say, this isn't backed by anything. | ||
| My father was in the First Marines. | ||
| He was actually in the occupation of China. | ||
| He fought in World War II, but he was in the occupation of China. | ||
| And they had a hyperinflation there that was worse than Weimar. | ||
| Say, as marine buddies, they would take a wheelbarrow full of national Chinese money to get a case of beer. | ||
| So I had this from a very early age, the difference between solid money and paper money and leverage. | ||
| Again, the leverage system works as long as no one challenges it, as long as no one questions it. | ||
| But the minute you do, it collapses very quickly, and that's where gold stands up. | ||
| I mean, gold would skyrocket in these scenarios. | ||
| The problem, Stephen, and you referred to it with the Bank of England, and it used to be when they ran the gold corner, when they cornered the gold market, this is Jay Gould and Big Jim Fisk in 1869. When they cornered the gold market, it was gold. | ||
| Hang on. | ||
| I want you to tell that story. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| Jim Rickards. | ||
| President Trump and Elon are going to go up to Fort Knox and check things out. | ||
| Let's say that. | ||
| Check things out. | ||
| Make sure everything's on the up and up with our gold. | ||
| Short break. | ||
| Rickards on the other side. | ||
| You know, one of the powers of Rickards' book, it talks about artificial intelligence and capital markets. | ||
| I think it's David Swiker, Arizona, just put in a new bill talking about artificial intelligence and prescriptions. | ||
| I'm going to get into this. | ||
| AI, this is why we have Joe Allen. | ||
| Artificial intelligence, and with Elon, I mean, their theory of the case over Doge, I think, is to replace, part of it is to replace 50% of the federal workers with artificial intelligence, right? | ||
| This is going to cut through, but this is going to be every industry. | ||
| Particularly folks under 30 years old, those first jobs you get in your 20s. | ||
| A lot of those lower-level, entry-level jobs in management, administration, and technology. | ||
| I'm not talking about blue-collar jobs in factories or driving, you know, Teamsters jobs, driving trucks or driving Ubers or taxis or factories automation or the automation around our ports. | ||
| The first, the Sith through grass of artificial intelligence will initially come in its big, in the efficiency moves. | ||
| Through administrative, managerial, and STEM or technology jobs at entry levels and above, and then it'll start eating all the way up. | ||
| But Jim, people, the gold, one of the things about gold, people have tried to corner the gold market before, right? | ||
| I mean, the Hunt brothers tried to, and I think they did for a minute, control the silver market back in the 80s. | ||
| In fact, one of the Hunts is the... | ||
| He's the grandfather of the son that owns the Kansas City Chiefs who used to work for me at Goldman Sachs in L.A. for a while in his training. | ||
| He's like Boyle. | ||
| Boyle in journalism, hunt in finance. | ||
| But people have tried to corner the gold market. | ||
| How hard is that, sir? | ||
| And give me the best example you've got of somebody that tried to do it. | ||
| It's very hard, but the best example was September 1869. This is two of the so-called robber barons, Jay Gold and Big Jim Fisk. | ||
| And they decided to corner the market. | ||
| Now, there was a lot of gold. | ||
| They were in New York. | ||
| They did basically corner the physical gold supply in New York, but there were two sources of gold that they had to worry about. | ||
| One was London, but they weren't really worried about that because you had to physically ship it to the United States. | ||
| That would take weeks or longer, and they knew that that would not come in time to break the corner. | ||
| The other source of gold was the United States Treasury. | ||
| The U.S. Treasury had gold, and they had a station in New York. | ||
| So what they did, they had a middleman who was President Grant's son-in-law. | ||
| And he loves his daughter. | ||
| So they got an audience with President Grant. | ||
| They convinced the president that high commodity prices were good for farmers. | ||
| So Grant kind of naively said, yeah, you're right. | ||
| He ordered the Treasury to stop selling gold. | ||
| That was the green light, because once they knew the Treasury goal was... | ||
| The London Gold couldn't get here in time. | ||
| They had cornered the gold market in New York, so they launched the squeeze, which basically means you've sold gold on paper, you don't have it, so you're short. | ||
| You go to buy it, but there isn't any, because they've cornered the market. | ||
| So this went on for a couple days, and the price of gold skyrocketed. | ||
| Finally, Sam Brown... | ||
| Brown Brothers Harriman, the original Brown Brothers Harriman, called the treasurer and said, you've got to do something. | ||
| This is out of control. | ||
| People are going broken. | ||
| They called the president. | ||
| Then he said, told the treasurer's secretary, sell the gold. | ||
| That broke the corner. | ||
| But the point is, you really do have to control it all physically. | ||
| The problem with the Hunt brothers, they pretty much cornered the silver market, but they were relying on the futures exchange. | ||
| And the futures exchange at the time, as I said, changed the rules and said, no physical delivery in the market. | ||
| You can only trade for liquidation only. | ||
| So it's hard to do. | ||
| But here's the point. | ||
| You don't need a good old-fashioned corner. | ||
| You can just have a situation where who's buying gold? | ||
| Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, even our friends like Japan, Philippines, Mexico. | ||
| They're buying all the gold. | ||
| There's not that much around. | ||
| It wouldn't take much to cause a buying panic. | ||
| Well, this is one of the reasons, the converging factors, why gold is hitting all-time highs every five days. | ||
| I might want to also mention Jay Gould. | ||
| How did Jay Gould come up with the idea, he and Big Jim Fisk, to corner the gold market? | ||
| You know how it was? | ||
| His financing is actually working as a financier for the massive budget deficits that were run by President Lincoln and Salmon Chase and others, his Secretary of the Treasury. | ||
| To finance the Civil War. | ||
| That's where Gould got into the Senate. | ||
| A bunch of scandals with Jay Gould and others of these New York City financiers came down there and saw that we were thrown all in to win militarily, had a massive defense budget, which we had never had before, and the corruption that came in there, and particularly guys that he conceived of these ideas by seeing how rickety the system was down in Washington, D.C. as President Lincoln and Chase. | ||
| And others on that war cabinet ramped up to defeat the Confederacy in the epic Civil War. | ||
| There's an argument that one of the reasons the South lost is that they didn't finance it correctly. | ||
| They couldn't actually raise the money. | ||
| So Jay Gould, one of the worst characters, or best characters, depending on where you come down. | ||
| If you're a libertarian, you love him. | ||
| If you're a patriot. | ||
| He's a guy that's a little sketchy. | ||
| Rickards, how do people get to your newsletter, Strategic Intelligence? | ||
| You're brilliant. | ||
| You've got tons of experience. | ||
| Audience loves when you come on. | ||
| Where do people go to get the newsletter? | ||
| Thanks, Steve. | ||
| We have a landing page called RickardsWarRoom.com. | ||
| It's RickardsWarRoom.com. | ||
| You go there, you can subscribe to our newsletter, Strategic Intelligence. | ||
| But we have a free copy of my new book, MoneyGPT. | ||
| It basically looks at artificial intelligence, which is not intelligent at all. | ||
| It's all math. | ||
| It's just math and nodes. | ||
| But I explain all that in plain English. | ||
| But it's the interaction of... | ||
| Artificial intelligence, which is math, and human nature, which hasn't changed in 5,000 years. | ||
| That's extremely dangerous. | ||
| Now, I'm not bashing AI. It is powerful. | ||
| It is efficient. | ||
| But there are hidden dangers. | ||
| And I talk about those dangers as they relate to the stock market, banking, and actually nuclear warfighting. | ||
| Yeah, like I said, this was one, don't read before bedtime, because bedtime will be delayed. | ||
| It'll keep you up. | ||
| Rickards, we love you, brother. | ||
| Everybody go to RickardsWarRoom.com, the landing page. | ||
| You get the free book, plus you get access to Strategic Intelligence. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Okay, folks, we're not manning the ramparts today, but we're thinking through, we're going to think through together. | ||
| And with the President of the United States, what this is, I want to go back. | ||
| I want to play the Caitlin Collins in its entirety. | ||
| Because you're going to see what one of the hang-ups are. | ||
| The Democrats are their number one objective. | ||
| Which always before was to keep the government funded and keep the government going. | ||
| Because remember, they're the party of big government. | ||
| They've had kind of a shift. | ||
| Because there's a guy in the White House called Donald J. Trump. | ||
| And he's supported by a... | ||
| Folks in this country that wear the MAGA t-shirt. | ||
| So they're not so hot on this. | ||
| Let's play it. | ||
| We're going to set the strategic context of the firestorm that's going to be before us in the days and weeks ahead. | ||
| Let's go into it. | ||
| And we will. | ||
| None of that's guaranteed. | ||
| We'll see what those numbers look like. | ||
| Did Elon Musk approve of the blueprint that you passed last night? | ||
| Did he think there were enough spending cuts in there? | ||
| Well, we haven't gotten to that yet. | ||
| These are numbers, a floor, at least $1.5 trillion in savings that we're going to find, and trying to get higher, maybe $2 trillion or higher. | ||
| It's a start. | ||
| Look, you don't turn an aircraft carrier on a dime. | ||
| It takes miles of open ocean to turn an aircraft carrier. | ||
| That's what the U.S. economy is. | ||
| It took decades to get into this situation, but we are going to begin to bend that curve, and it's a great thing for the country. | ||
| I was just curious, since you met with him after this happened, speaking of deadlines that are a lot sooner than what you're saying, You're talking about there's a shutdown deadline that is looming on March 14th, which you well know. | ||
| Do you think Congress is going to end up passing another continuing resolution then? | ||
| Well, look, I wish we didn't have to, but it looks like the Democrats are trying to push us into that. | ||
| They've added these really crazy conditions onto the negotiation over the last week or so. | ||
| They've added a condition that says we have to tie the hands of President Trump, that the legislative branch, they want us to dictate to the executive branch, for example, a base number of employees for each agency in the executive branch. | ||
| I don't even think it's constitutional what they're requiring, but it's certainly an absurd notion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How long would that CR go, do you believe? | |
| Well, we haven't negotiated that yet. | ||
| But if it's a CR, it may be an entire year-long CR with some anomalies on it. | ||
| You know how all this works. | ||
| But it's not what we prefer. | ||
| We would like to do individual appropriations bills. | ||
| But it takes both parties to negotiate that. | ||
| And right now, the Democrats are trying to, it looks like, trying to set up a government shutdown. | ||
| We can't allow that to happen. | ||
| And we won't. | ||
| Well, you just talked about how important the work that Elon Musk is doing is. | ||
| If you pass a continuing resolution, won't that just refund all the programs that he says he's cutting that are full of waste, fraud, and abuse? | ||
| No, look, that's why I say you add anomalies to a CR. You can increase their spending. | ||
| You can decrease their spending. | ||
| You can add language that says, for example, the dramatic changes that have been made to USAID would be reflected in the ongoing spending. | ||
| It would be a clean CR, mostly, I think, but with some of those changes to adapt to the new realities here. | ||
| And the new reality is less government, more efficiency, better return for the taxpayers. | ||
| And I think that's something everybody should welcome. | ||
| Okay, let's interpret, because this is the first time it's been said, I think, publicly, and Caitlin Collins, I think, did a good job there in trying to draw it out of him only months after the war room, but that's fine. | ||
| The Democrats, we go back to the unitary executive theory, where the executive is chief executive, commander-in-chief, and chief magistrate has these powers enumerated by the Constitution. | ||
| Or laid out by the Constitution. | ||
| Right there, Johnson told you that in the negotiations on a CR, whether it's a 30-day CR or to the end of the year, or I would actually think in appropriations, if we did it with the single subject, which is what we want, which they haven't done, and Johnson can't put all of that on the Democrats. | ||
| He's only done seven of the twelve. | ||
| But we've kind of blown past that, folks. | ||
| What he's saying is the Democrats are going to sit there and say, no, we're not buying off on Trump having these powers. | ||
| We're not going to buy off on his new buddy Elon Musk having these powers. | ||
| We're not going to do it. | ||
| We're going to basically set a base case of employees, and I think programmatically. | ||
| Bottom line, there's not going to be a CR unless you get 100% of Republican votes. | ||
| And as we know, and this audience knows, There's at least 40 to 70 votes in the House on the Republican side are saying, we can't do this again. | ||
| This is a tantamount to another omnibus. | ||
| We're not going to do this. | ||
| What he's saying about anomalies is it won't be a clean CR. It won't be a one-liner. | ||
| The anomalies will be, because remember I said, hey, you're going to have to eat. | ||
| It's Biden's budget. | ||
| It's $2 trillion deficit and none of the doge cuts and what she just said. | ||
| Not that, not only the doge cuts not in there, you're financing. | ||
| The negative, you're financing USAID. So he says there's going to be anomalies. | ||
| That's going to be in the actual CRA itself. | ||
| In addition, and this is why we had Tietzel kind of last man standing. | ||
| There's only a couple of guys over CRA. They're staffing up again because so many of their people are in the administration. | ||
| Jeff Clark yesterday going to go in as the anti-regulation chief. | ||
| God bless that. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| Pay a letter over at OMB as the chief counsel. | ||
| Dan Bishop's about to get, I think, about to get confirmed, the great Dan Bishop, the congressman, and Russ Vogt with Scott Besson and Jason Treniter, Treasury, Alexander Preet. | ||
| You got Treasury, you got OMB. And what they have said is that, hey, war room posse, MAGA movement, even on the CR, the impoundments will start shortly thereafter. | ||
| The impoundments will start. | ||
| So we're heading, and this is why I had Josh Hammer kind of start the show, folks. | ||
| Get ready. | ||
| Not today, not tomorrow. | ||
| We got to get more details. | ||
| You need more information. | ||
| You need to be fully loaded on this one because this sets, as I said, this sets a series of events. | ||
| This critical path will set a series of events. | ||
| That will go all through the reconciliation, all through the taxes, all through everything President Trump's trying to do. | ||
| Remember that middle corridor, that middle vertical is the financial and economic crisis. | ||
| That's so important. | ||
| That's existential to the country and to his presidency, his second term. | ||
| You have the two things on the side. | ||
| Stopping the kinetic part of the Third World War. | ||
| Oh, did I mention that the British Prime Minister is about to show up about stopping the war in Ukraine? | ||
| And President Trump way down the road in stopping the war in the Middle East. | ||
| And in addition, the deportation securing the border. | ||
| The border has been kind of secured. | ||
| Deportations in the top couple of batters in the first inning. | ||
| But that middle vertical, game on in the nation's capital with President Trump and the MAGA team. | ||
| Short break. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here's your host, Stephen K. Van. | |
| Okay. | ||
| What I just laid out is kind of everything, and we're going to frame it more and make sure you're fully up to speed and fully understanding this, because this, between now and the 14th, is going to be big league. | ||
| And it's going to set the—it's going to lay the predicate. | ||
| And you just heard—and Grace, I'll get it cut. | ||
| Grace will get it cut. | ||
| I'm going to play it again on the 6 o'clock show. | ||
| What E.J. and Tony said at the end of the first hour. | ||
| That three or four minutes is reality. | ||
| I don't believe the White House is doing enough, and we'll do it, but to get out what the actual position of the American economy is. | ||
| You saw from these numbers today. | ||
| The inflation number for the fourth quarter was 4.2%, not 2.2%. | ||
| As the Biden regime said, the Biden regime, every number they gave you had to be reset, particularly in labor. | ||
| We've gone through that. | ||
| But this thing is not good right now. | ||
| And President Trump was handed a disaster. | ||
| And it's going to take some real leadership, some real discernment, and just flat old toughness. | ||
| This is going to be painful. | ||
| It just is. | ||
| It just is. | ||
| You don't spend this much money. | ||
| You don't get this messed up. | ||
| It's $175 billion they want for the deportation program. | ||
| Like, what happened to the infrastructure? | ||
| Where did it go? | ||
| $175 billion? | ||
| Do you understand the scale of that? | ||
| The breathtaking scale of that? | ||
| It's across the board. | ||
| It's everything. | ||
| This is also China. | ||
| On Tuesday, President Trump just said a China 10% tariff. | ||
| Hey, Jace Medical, this is the reason they're a sponsor of ours, because they know we understand this. | ||
| Rosemary Gibson and the whole thing about the supply chain. | ||
| You've been warned. | ||
| So go to the site and just check it out. | ||
| The Chinese Communist Party are just not going to sit there and take that. | ||
| It has to be done. | ||
| What President Trump's doing is smart. | ||
| It's timely. | ||
| We've got this trade deficit. | ||
| I think the trade deficit was $100 billion in December, and they're blaming it all for getting ahead of the tariffs. | ||
| That's not the case. | ||
| Totally different. | ||
| JaceMedical.com slash Bannon. | ||
| Go check it out today. | ||
| Go to the site and get Dr. Sean. | ||
| Those guys are all open to talk to you. | ||
| Also, MyPatriotSupply. | ||
| I think now's the time to think through, hey. | ||
| You know, it used to be the preppers were considered kind of kooky or wingnuts. | ||
| Not anymore. | ||
| You've got to get ahead of the game here. | ||
| MyPatriotSupply.com, the best company in the preparation business. | ||
| They've got consultants on the phone that walk you through all of it. | ||
| That's one of the reasons we love partnering with these companies that give you access to information. | ||
| We understand the Warren Posse wants to see the receipts, and your power comes from using your agency when you get those receipts. | ||
| That's what's going to have to happen over these next days and weeks ahead. | ||
| We're about to pivot into some tough stuff, folks. | ||
| It's going to get gnarly. | ||
| It just is. | ||
| They're not the votes there now. | ||
| I mean, as it sits today, just given where we are, you know, President Trump's government will basically shut down right after midnight on the 14th unless we get through a very tough political process in the CR. And President Trump, I think, is going to make the case. | ||
| I think you'll hear some of this today. | ||
| At the same time, he's trying to bring peace to the Eurasian landmass. | ||
| Charlie Kirk's going to follow us. | ||
| You're going to have Sir Keir Starmer show up, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. | ||
| He's a labor guy, leftist. | ||
| There'll be a lot of activity this afternoon. | ||
| There'll be the press conference. | ||
| Natalie will be here at 5. I may dip in and out of that, but I'll definitely be here at 6. To make sure we go through, you know, what is important from today. | ||
| And a couple of things I think have been missed in all this. | ||
| Number one, I'm getting Captain Fennell to join me from overseas to go through what's happening in these intelligence agencies, these people in these chat rooms. | ||
| And his point, because he's spent his career in naval intelligence. | ||
| It gets beyond just intelligence. | ||
| How legal is this? | ||
| Anyway, tons are going on. | ||
| Roger Kimball, one of the smartest guys, is going to also join me where I go through this day. | ||
| Another historic day. | ||
| Tamara Zielinski, President Trump, doing it all. | ||
| And I've got to tell you, I'm so impressed with E.J. and Tony. | ||
| He's one of the guys that are trying to get in, and I'm saying, hey, we've got to have some guys on the outside to help explain this stuff. | ||
| That four minutes, and I'll cut it and make Grace from Schwerber gets it, and I'm going to play it again on the sixth, was the single best summary in three or four minutes of exactly where the economy stands in the mess that President Trump was handed. | ||
| Mike Lindell, and folks, you should know something about Lindell. | ||
| I've gotten to be a personal friend and a colleague and a comrade over the last couple of years, but there's so much. | ||
| This guy gets attacked more than anybody but Trump. | ||
| And I say that as a guy that went to federal prison. | ||
| They're after Lindell much more, and they're after me nonstop. | ||
| They're after Lindell constantly, constantly, constantly. | ||
| They feel that his connection, he's kind of a Trump that can connect to a working-class audience, and particularly Mike then brings in, because he was saved late in his life, you know, he found God and he found Jesus Christ late in his life, because you read his book, he was a degenerate. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I mean, degenerate gambler, drugs, the whole thing. | ||
| But books, I mean, I meet this guy and I say, you're one of the nicest men I've ever met. | ||
| Man, I read that book. | ||
| You're a flat-out gangster. | ||
| But that's one of the reasons they're after you, Mike Lindell. | ||
| They understand your conversion story is powerful. | ||
| You understand how you live your faith is powerful. | ||
| They understand the message you are just being successful you are and having a happy, successful company is what they want to destroy. | ||
| And they're trying to destroy you, Sir Mike Lindell. | ||
| Yeah, it's horrible right now, everybody. | ||
| And I've decided this morning after talking to my lawyers and CPAs and the Treasury Department, by the way, the IRS has attacked my pillow. | ||
| And it's something that's gonna affect everyone, most people in this country. | ||
| And we're at the tip of the spear. | ||
| I'm going all at them. | ||
| I'm going after the IRS for what they're doing to us right now. | ||
| And I'll have full disclosure on that, maybe a full report on that for you all as soon as I'm gonna find out everything I can and can't say this afternoon. | ||
| But as far as I'm going, I'm telling it all. | ||
| I mean, what they're doing is horrific. | ||
| And this was when Biden left, he put this little thing in here. | ||
| Let's start with my pillow. | ||
| Keith Ellison in Minnesota to go after this has been going on all week. | ||
| Piling on, since the president did his great shout-out for myself and others that have helped us secure our elections and helped him out. | ||
| And then Keith Ellison, the day after he went in, all attacking my Lindell Recovery Network and also my Lindell Foundation, Lindell Outreach, all the stuff that I put all the funding in. | ||
| And it's like... | ||
| It is very intentional and they're going, why are they attacking you, Mike? | ||
| Donald Trump's already in and thinks, boy, you should get relief now. | ||
| No, it's even worse now because I think they realize I'm not going to stop until we get to secure elections. | ||
| And like Steve said, they don't like the fact that it's the American dream and be able to get to find Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior. | ||
| They're against everything that good stands for. | ||
| MyPillow.com. | ||
| Promo code WARROOM. Go check it out today. | ||
| Tons of specials. | ||
| 998 pillows, you guys. | ||
| We're doing it for the War Room Posse. | ||
| Promo code WARROOM. All of them that are left, the commemorative pillows. | ||
| Free shipping on your entire order. | ||
| Promo code WARROOM. Help us out. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Charlie Kirk is next. |
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