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May 6, 2025 - Bannon's War Room

46:51

WarRoom Battleground EP 761: A Special: Paper Soldier

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steve bannon

24:13

Appearances

scott bessent

03:08

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jake tapper

00:08

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Speaker	Time	Text
scott bessent ▲ ● ▼		When I entered public service, I spent more than 40 years in the asset management business.
		There, one mantra guides one of the world's most successful investors.
		Never bet against America.
		Warren Buffett coined the phrase, and it's been his lodestar as long as he's been in the game.
		Never bet against America captures a time-tested truth.
		The American economy is unstoppable.
		Throw whatever you will at our capital markets.
		The Great Depression, two world wars, 9 /11, a COVID recession of the last few years, or sky-high inflation.
		Each time the American economy gets knocked down, it gets back up again.
		And it gets back up even stronger than it was before.
		U.S. markets are anti-fragile.
		Indeed, the entire history Can be distilled into just five words, up and to the right.
		On a long-term horizon, it's never a bad time to invest in America, but especially now.
		The United States is entering a new golden age of economic prosperity for both Main Street and Wall Street, and we don't want anyone to get left behind.
		Come with us so we can build a more abundant America together.
		On President Trump's first day in office, he vowed to usher in a new golden age for our country.
		A golden age America deserves a golden age economy.
		So for the past hundred days, we've been preparing the soil.
		We have uprooted government waste and harmful regulations.
		We have planted the seeds of private investment.
		And we have fertilized the ground with fresh tax legislation.
		Next, we harvest.
		And we want you to harvest with us.
		America is the shelling point of global finance.
		We have the world's reserve currency and the deepest and most liquid capital markets and the strongest property rights.
		For these reasons, the United States is the premier destination for international capital, and the administration's goal is to make it even more appealing for investors like you.
		The President believes we can achieve more together.
		This is the abundant vision he has for the future.
		He wants everyone to be a part of it.
		Thousands of businesses are now catching the President's vision.
		Since he assumed office in January, Companies have pledged to invest trillions into the U.S. economy.
		President Trump has secured more investment for our country in 100 days than President Biden did during all four years.
		Entrepreneurs, too, are starting to understand what the president is trying to accomplish.
		March saw one of the highest levels ever recorded for new business applications.
		Many of these men and women, like many of you, are grasping that America First is a blueprint for a more abundant world.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		This is the primal scream of a dying regime.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Pray for our enemies.
unidentified		Because we're going medieval on these people.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		I got a free shot at 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're trying to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it.
		It's going to happen.
jake tapper ▲ ● ▼		And where do people like that go to share the big lie?
unidentified		Mega Media.
jake tapper ▲ ● ▼		I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.
unidentified		Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.
unidentified		Here's your host, Stephen K. Band.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Okay, welcome.
		Monday, 5 May in the year of our Lord, 2025.
		Thanks for sticking around for the second hour of our late afternoon, early evening edition of The War Room.
		You heard right there from our former contributor, the Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Besson.
		Scott doing a fantastic job.
		That was at the Milken Global Conference with Mike Milken.
		The guy's called the Davos of the West.
		Yesterday, they had competing receptions.
		Scott Besson, of course, Alexander Priate and Rebecca Karabas, all the team you know from the War Room, was out there.
		They had this Ken Griffin, who's been quite critical of the president, had his reception traditionally.
		And I think Ken has a reception every year to kind of kick things off.
		Scott Besson flew out because he was going to speak early this morning.
		He had a competing, kind of maybe a more MAGA reception.
		Of course, they spoke.
		We're going to try to pick that up live this morning, but with some issues with the Milken Conference.
unidentified		We've got it right there, and you've got a good summary.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Speaking of Scott Besant, joining me is Salia Motion, author of Paper Soldiers.
		And Scott, I notice, is in the acknowledgments of this.
		Talk to us first about your background.
		This book is absolutely amazing.
		We put this in the Pantheon.
		With Christopher Leonard's Lords of Easy Money, which the audience have just loved over the last couple of years.
		In fact, we had an entire hour with Christopher in Kansas City a week ago talking about his new research for his new book on the defense industry.
		But Christopher Leonard gives, I mean, for our audience, when a poll quote says about your book, a true feat of revelatory journalism.
		If you only read one book to understand American economic and political power in the world today.
		This should be the one.
		Why did you get interested in this topic, Scott Bessent, your understanding of this?
		Walk us through how you got here.
unidentified		I started covering Treasury in 2016 here in Washington.
		But before then, I'm from Ohio, from Cincinnati.
		And I grew up there, born and raised, pretty much the same zip code for most of my life.
		And at some point in my 20s, I went overseas, spent a decade in London and Oslo, Norway.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		And realized that we're not in Ohio anymore?
unidentified		Realized we're not in Ohio anymore.
		So I got back to the U.S. Hold on, as a business journalist.
		As a business journalist.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		How does a young woman from Cincinnati...
		And you go to the university.
		You're from there.
		You're born and raised there.
		You go to high school there.
		Your parents are there.
		You also go to university there.
unidentified		Yeah.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		So you're a local kid.
		How do you get into business?
		I mean, you're writing now at the highest levels of the most powerful economy of the world.
		And I know this just from my phone blowing up, having announced over the last couple of days you're going to be here, so many prominent people who follow your writing.
		How do you go from a kid in Ohio?
		To one of the most serious, not just business journalists, but about currency, capital markets, and finance.
unidentified		So I spent a couple of years in Columbus, Ohio, just covering regional businesses, and I really got to understand how a regional economy works and how it connects to the rest of the world.
		I went overseas, and I saw the U.S. from an outside perspective, and when I came back to Washington, I was able to kind of bring all that together and realize that the intersection where government...
		Policy, politics, and money is, there is a real misunderstanding there of how the so-called flyover states of America connect to what happens in Washington.
		So I kind of decided once Trump was elected in November, and everyone was quite surprised.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		November of 2016.
unidentified		November of 2016, that time he was elected.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		You could kind of see that coming.
unidentified		I'm not going to say I predicted it, but I was in Ohio and Hamilton County.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		I'm not saying you're MAGA, but I'm saying just as a kid from Ohio, when you go back and see what was happening.
unidentified		Absolutely.
		I mean, Ohio tends to predict the next president.
		A lot of that comes down to 120,000 votes in Hamilton County, which is where I'm from.
		I was there four or five weeks before Election Day, and I only saw Trump sign.
		So if that county was going to go for Trump, and then that meant the state was going to go for Trump, then the logical next conclusion is that the electoral votes would go to Trump.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		The people that you've known and work with in places like the city of London or in Wall Street.
		Were they even open to that concept that the working class in this country, many of whom had been Democrats or independents, that they felt something was so wrong in the direction of the country that they would bring in essentially a revolutionary figure, a guy that had no political experience whatsoever?
		Did anybody in your life at the time understand the profound nature of that vote for those people in Hamilton County?
unidentified		I don't think so.
		I truly didn't.
		All I could see was, oh, it looks like Ohio's going to go for Trump.
		I didn't know beyond that.
		You're still, you know, you're waiting for when the bellwether state no longer predicts the next president.
		I had no idea that there was this much angst and anger in the working class and the manufacturing sector and the blue collar segment of the American voting population.
		It was really hard to see that, but he saw it and he kind of showed the rest of the world.
		And it's interesting that after his four years, if you...
		If you listen to the first speech that President Joe Biden made to Congress, the joint session speech, the first couple of minutes, a lot of those words could have been said by Donald Trump in a different way, but by America and friend-shoring is very similar to America first.
		During the Democratic primaries that got us to Joe Biden in 2019 and 2020, you heard Elizabeth Warren talking about economic patriotism, which is also America first.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Ro Khanna's concept of really the economic nationalism we propose.
		Ro and the folks call it economic patriotism.
		And he has gone back to Ohio to do that tour a couple of times to pitch that.
		Let me go back.
		The thesis of your book.
		The subtitle is How the Weaponization of the Dollar Changed the World Order.
		Not simply the dollar, but the weaponization.
		So let's go back at first and talk about just the dollar, because our audience is a blue-collar, middle-class audience, but they're fascinated with capital markets, they're fascinated with international finance, because they realize, as you just said, that intersection of politics, economy, and finance is really where...
		Things happen, but it's totally misunderstood, including by, I think, 90% of the imperial capital here.
		What is it about us being the prime reserve currency that sets the world order?
		Before we talk about the weaponization changing it, what is just us being the prime reserve currency, the dollar being the dominant currency in the world today?
unidentified		It means that the world is pretty much beholden to the United States.
		Everyone is very, very exposed financially, economically, geopolitically to what the U.S. decides to do.
		It is the world's largest economy.
		So every multinational company...
		Every country that wants to drive their own growth needs the American consumer to help them because we have the largest consumer base.
		There's a lot of innovation in America, and that comes from all the R&D spending that's financed by our very big budget deficit.
		That innovation has also driven a lot of economic growth.
		The other thing is that we're able to outsource or sort of I think a lot of people forget that the very first act after 9-11 on September 24, 2001, was not a military tank rolling into a foreign country or U.S. troops.
		Hitting the ground, boots to the ground into another country.
		It was the U.S. Treasury Secretary, Paul O 'Neill at the time, being given specific powers from the executive branch, from George W. Bush, that you can now follow the money, find out how did the terrorists finance that attack, which was only a couple of hundred thousand dollars, all moved around.
		Plane in daylight for anyone to spot if they could find the trend and choke off any of that terrorist financing so that you can say you are not allowed to use the dollar to hurt America.
		That's where the weaponization begins.
		And since 9-11, we've seen more and more that America doesn't want to go to war.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Well, we call it, particularly if you look at the way the Chinese Communist Party and Sun Tzu look at it, kinetic war.
		When you get to the kinetic war, The theory of Sun Tzu is like you've lost just by having to go to that level of violence, that you should be able to win psychologically, with cyber, politically, but particularly economic warfare.
		So we say sanctions.
		That's war by another means.
		That's essentially using economic warfare.
		And of all the different weapons you have, trade barriers, all this, the biggest club that you have is taking the currency.
		And using the currency as essentially a weapon of war.
		Is that what you mean by weaponization?
unidentified		Yeah, it's right between diplomacy, which, okay, talking failed.
		We don't want to go to kinetic war, so we're going to use economic sanctions.
		And maybe not even use them.
		Maybe it's just talking about using them.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		I want to go back in time, how the world got in this situation, because, correct me if I'm wrong, I think as a teaser, you said this morning on the show, and it's in the book.
		Ninety-seven percent, I think, of all transactions of the world are converted into dollars.
		The vast bulk of all transactions into petrodollars.
		And I think your book says two-thirds or 75 percent of all government debt by foreign governments that are issued are dollar-dominated.
		So the world is captured by the dollar.
		They can't get away from it.
		You have a Damocles sword over your head at any time.
		If you cross the West, because everything you do in the way you interact with the world as an economy is done through a US dollar.
		Is that essentially it?
unidentified		Well, Steve, I'm going to put a little bit of a prettier face on this.
unidentified		It's actually that America has charmed the world into choosing the dollar as the world's reserve asset.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Charmed the world.
unidentified		Yeah, the U.S. so far has not had to use any bullying tactics.
unidentified		In 1944, when the second of the two world wars was coming to a close, the 44 countries, the economic officials from 44 countries gathered in the United States and New Hampshire and by design said the U.S. is now going to be the leader.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		This is the Bretton Woods conference.
unidentified		This is Bretton Woods.
		The IMF was created.
		The World Bank was created.
		The U.S. is the biggest shareholder because it's the biggest financier of both of those.
		The world realized that the U.S. has been the largest economy by then for almost six decades.
		It had been bigger than Great Britain.
		The sterling could no longer hold the reserve asset status.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		The destruction of the empire.
unidentified		Their physical destruction from World War I and II.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		This is the beginning of what we call the post-war international rules-based order.
		It was one of the central tenets of MAGA.
		That needs to be destroyed because it did not put America first.
		But wasn't this because you had the military alliances, you had NATO, everything that would undergird the security.
		You had trade deals and commercial relationships.
		But here in capital markets and currency, IMF and World Bank were set up and Bretton Woods was set up as the ultimate control mechanism would not be the United States Navy, would not be the United States Army.
		They would always be there to undergird it.
		But the central method of control.
		You say charm, would be the U.S. dollar.
unidentified		Yeah, and that's what I trace in the book.
unidentified		I trace the history of showing how the U.S.'s rise as a global superpower is intertwined with the dollar's rise as the world's reserve asset.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Who were the geniuses that had, whether we agree with them today or not, who were actually the architects?
		Because I would argue more than even the military part in the trade and GATT and everything like that, that this was the most brilliant because this actually gave you the ultimate control and had the greatest benefits to the country, at least in the first decades.
		Who were the leading architects of this?
unidentified		So there is Harry Dexter White, a senior treasury official at the time, Henry Morgenthau, top treasury official at the time.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Harry Dexter White's a quite controversial guy.
unidentified		Yeah, we're going to talk about the economics of it, though.
		So they sat down and realized that America has the best fiscal trajectory, but all the other countries...
		Looked at a couple of different options.
		They debated for a while.
		Should we have a shared currency?
		Is there any way around just one country having this?
		No, there really isn't because the U.S. has the biggest economy and the best fiscal trajectory.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		And traditionally had been whoever's the hegemon, whether it's the British with the pound since the Napoleonic Wars or before that, I don't know, the Spanish or the Dutch, the Dutch, who were a superpower even because of trade and the ability to navigate.
		So it was always traditionally by custom and tradition.
		That power, that control commerce, etc.
		We took over from essentially a 125-year run by the British under the pound.
unidentified		Yeah, and the U.S. dollar has been chosen over and over and over again.
		It's still being chosen many times a day, but sometimes big movements, right?
		In the 70s, Nixon abandoned the dollar gold peg, and that shook global finance.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, let's go to that, because we made a big deal about this on the show, that great book, Three Days in August, I think.
		So how do we – we're on a roll post-war in the 50s and even the 60s.
		We're on a complete roll.
		We're the hegemon.
		The world is essentially at peace, although we're kind of at a nuclear standoff.
		You then have Vietnam, the Great Society.
		Nixon, who is a Republican in August, I think, of 1971.
		What was it that triggered this crisis at the time that Nixon and Connolly, these guys – it seems like over a weekend up at Camp David.
		Their biggest thing, if you study it, was not that they were taking the dollar off the gold standard, but that they would have to cancel.
		They would want to give a speech to the nation that would preempt Bonanza on Sunday night, which was the number one show in the country.
		And they were actually saying, we're going to get blowback on this.
		What was it in the late 60s, early 70s that caused a Republican to go off the gold standard?
unidentified		There were a lot of factors at play, but one of the key ones was that inflation was starting to take a hold of the economy, and there just weren't enough dollars to back up the gold peg.
		It was no longer economically sustainable for the dollar to hold onto that peg, and that shook global finance and this new world order.
		Everyone said, oh, Bretton Woods is over.
		Maybe that specific...
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Or were people demanding, I think the rumor was the French, like, we're going to send some ships over and we want our gold?
unidentified		We want our gold, yeah.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Is that actually true?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		People said, hey, we want our gold.
unidentified		I don't know if that's true or not.
		Yeah, I'm going to have to look into that.
		But...
		People have chosen the dollar over and over again that time, right?
		Everyone's shaken up.
		It was a secret.
		All of a sudden, Nixon announces this.
		But a couple of years later, a couple of weeks and months later, people are still hanging on to the dollar.
		You zip forward into the 80s when there's a Plaza Accord and Louvre Accord to actively get countries together to weaken the currency.
		People are still holding on to the dollar after 9-11.
		And then the biggest sign was the global financial crisis.
		It was an American-made crisis that spilled over into the rest of the world.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		So you're saying in every different element, particularly like the Plaza Court, where people – and this gets to the road to Rio, which just kind of kicks off the BRICS nations.
		You're saying, hey, folks have tried this before.
		Folks have said – but have you ever had a decline in the purchasing power of the dollar today?
		I guess you're saying in the late 70s you had it with the monster inflation.
		But is it our charm or they can't come up with an alternative?
unidentified		It's both.
		There is definitely no alternative.
		Even now, even just two weeks ago, we have all these finance ministers and central bankers in Washington for the IMF spring meetings, the first ones under Trump's second presidency.
		And no one is saying, OK, we're going to grab a hold and we're going to be the world's reserve asset.
		No, the opposite is happening.
		You have the BOE governor, Andrew Bailey, saying, no, no, no, everyone, this is overdone.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Bank of England.
unidentified		Bank of England.
		all these calls that are, all this commentary that the dollar is power and those days are over, that commentary is overdone.
		The French and German finance minister and the German central banker all said that the dollar, We also haven't seen China say, OK, we're going to take on this role.
		We're going to start to increase transparency and get rid of capital controls.
		No one is stepping up to say we're going to do it.
		Even the BRICS, the BRICS have talked about since at least 2022, maybe earlier.
		We're going to find a way to circumvent the dollar and chip away at some of the dollar's power.
		Even now, they're saying, we're the ones who are going to defend multilateralism.
		The current status quo, we're going to defend it.
		That status quo is underpinned by the dollar.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		What is driving them?
		They just can't come up.
		They don't want to be this beholden because the weaponization, once again, goes back to economic warfare.
		At any time, we see right now with the Persians, right, with what's happening in Iran.
		People like myself are saying, we need to take the military option off the table.
		We can't be sucked into another war.
		And we can't do verification.
		We have to dismantle it.
		The way we do that is really go to economic war with the mullahs.
		That means cutting off the oil shipments coming out of the Straits of Hormuz.
		It means really going to sanctions and secondary sanctions.
		But that plays into the fact that...
		The world is going to be beholden to what the United States wants to do as long as they have this exposure to the dollar.
		Both the SWIFT system, which this international system, they can monitor every transaction that goes on in the world.
		And they can monitor it because eventually you've got to convert it into a dollar.
		Aren't they sitting there going, why do we give the Americans this much control?
unidentified		They are saying that.
		And some of this, Steve, has to do with the fact that there's nothing wrong with the dollar.
		Losing some of that.
		Because here's number two.
		The U.S. is way ahead of that.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Oh, there is no number two right now.
unidentified		There is no number two.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		That's why at workstations, they would talk about a basket of something new.
		There would be gold.
		I mean, it's very ephemeral of what they're trying to accomplish, right?
		Because there is no currency in the world today to even come close to this.
unidentified		No.
		And part of the reason is that investors are conditioned.
		To want a reserve asset to be backed by a government and a strong democracy.
		And you can't find that in this combination of largest economy and strongest democracy.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Because you're saying we took it up from the Brits at the end of World War II.
		They had had it since at least the early 19th century.
		So you're looking at 200 years plus of having a democracy.
		With a powerful military and business community, and at the time, the City of London, which was the Wall Street of the world, just that alone, that continuity alone.
		It makes it custom and tradition.
		People don't want to get off that.
		They're comfortable with that, right?
unidentified		Yeah, they're hooked.
		It's a dollar addiction out there.
		If you think about what happened in the aftermath of the 2022 Russia sanctions that the Biden administration led the world, right?
		Half of the world's GDP joined the U.S. in applying economic sanctions on Russia.
		And the European sanctions were maybe more important because the euro was much more intertwined with Russian activities.
		But the U.S. needed to lead that to get everyone along.
		What happened there?
		No one wanted a bunch of rubles, right?
		Putin starts trading more oil with India.
		India doesn't know what to do with all these rubles, and Putin doesn't know what to do with this pile of rupees because you can't exchange it the way you can exchange the dollar.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Would they rather take the currency?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Because weren't output deals from the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and of course this controversial one with the Persians and China, all done away from the dollar, is converted into dollars, weren't they all done as output deals that would be in the currency and they would take the currency risk and try to hedge it?
unidentified		Yeah, so we've seen that there have been a chunk of transactions and maybe an increasing or expanding chunk of transactions that are taking place outside of the dollar.
		There's nothing wrong with that.
		There's nothing wrong with diversification.
		If anything, it might benefit the U.S. a little bit to not have to sort of fund all of this.
		That's what Trump is out there talking about, right?
		He's saying that NATO members need to pony up a little bit.
		Our deficits are huge.
		We need to start to find ways to reduce that.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		I want to get into the history.
		Of how this started and how we got here.
		Plus, we talk about deficits, where this is going to go, particularly with this, it looks like, inability of our political class to cut spending.
		Birchgold.com, the end of the dollar empire.
		For the last four years, we've tried to teach you all this with free installments.
		The seventh free installment is The Road to the Rio Reset.
		Make sure you get that.
		The one before that, the sixth, was Modern Monetary Theory, the idea that broke the world.
		The outpouring of that, of you folks talking about this, has been quite amazing.
		That's where we get the seventh free installment done so quickly.
		So make sure you go to birchgold.com slash Bannon, the end of the dollar empire, and the Rio reset.
		Also, you get to talk to Philip Patrick and the team.
		Philip, we're sending an entire crew to Rio.
		Philip Patrick's going, guys from Birch Gold, and...
		Folks in the world, we're going to cover it wall-to-wall.
		Covering wall-to-wall, just like Jack Basovitz heading out to the Vatican.
		We've got a team going there to join Ben Harnwell, our international editor in Rome, who's stationed there.
		So we'll go Rome to Rio.
		How's that sound?
		Short commercial break.
		Back with Salia Motion in a moment.
unidentified		I think you've changed already.
		You went and lost your pride.
		But I'm American made.
		I got American power.
		I got American faith.
		America's heart.
		Go on, raise the flag.
		War Room.
		Here's your host, Stephen K. Vance.
		Welcome back.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Take your phone out.
		Text Bannon, B-A-N-N-O-N-9-8-9-8-9-8.
		You get the free ultimate guide for investing in gold and precious metals in the era of Trump from Birch Gold, Philip Patrick and the team.
		Check it out.
		Make contact with Philip and his team.
		Remember, it is not the price of gold.
		It is the process of how it got there.
		That's what you have to understand.
		Understand why gold's been a hedge for 5,000 times of turbulence for 5,000 years of mankind's history.
		Know that.
		And you'll start to understand how the world works.
		You start the book off with an amazing story about Steve Mnuchin and just the very mention in Davos, our favorite.
		We cover it every year.
		People go crazy.
		Just the very mention of not being a strong dollar, right?
		Sends the world's capital markets.
		Because in there's two different ways you do say how the dollar is strong.
		But why is it that everybody's associated, since they bought into the system, that they need to see a strong dollar, even if it has certain anti-competitive things for people in the United States?
unidentified		It has to do with the fact that investors, businesses, when they're planning out the next couple of quarters, they want stability and predictability.
		And they need that from the world's largest...
		The one that owns a reserve asset, the one that has the most influential and powerful central bank.
		They need to know that policymaking is going to be stable and predictable no matter what it is.
		That's why today, since April 2nd, 2025, it's been really hard for traders and investors and businesses and foreign central banks.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		What we refer to as Liberation Day.
unidentified		Liberation Day, sure, you can call it that.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Remember, you're in a populist national show here.
		Because they can't, although things have calmed down, the market, you know, the headlines in mid-April is the worst since the Great Depression.
		Things have calmed down since then.
unidentified		Why?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Because people have a better understanding of what's going on behind reciprocity, the non-tariff barriers.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Is that what you think it is?
unidentified		Well, there's also the 90-day pause came in.
		Showing that, okay, now there's going to be a little bit, a process.
		We want to see what is the roadmap ahead.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		We were big advocates.
unidentified		Yeah, and that's what a Treasury Secretary, a Treasury Department kind of, the goal is to instill some of that process, some of the predictability and stability that investors and financiers look for.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Hamilton County, that's where you're from?
unidentified		Ohio.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Hamilton County, Ohio, one of the most important, in one of the most important states, at least politically, one of the most important counties.
		It's ironic.
		That it goes back to Alexander Hamilton, and Alexander Hamilton is actually central to your book.
		Why is Hamilton such a towering giant in how he kind of thought this whole thing?
		Very different from Jefferson, from my home state of the Commonwealth of Virginia, had this kind of bucolic yeoman agricultural democracy of kind of little guys.
		You know, yeoman farmers in a perfect democracy, but Hamilton saw the possibilities of a continental superpower, but really when we were just starting, an economic superpower.
unidentified		Yeah, he was one of the founding fathers.
		He was the first Treasury Secretary the United States had, and he was there to issue the first ever bond sale.
		He financed, brokered the first loan that the United States ever had.
		It was $50,000 in the cash value of the 1780s.
		It came from the Bank of New York.
		It still exists.
		You can go to Bank of New York, Mellon, and have a look at some of those documents.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Which he was the founder, one of the founders of the Bank of New York.
unidentified		Yeah, and he signed some of that paperwork.
		I've seen it before, too.
		He issued that, and he said that credit is the price of our liberty.
		Because at the time...
		Think about it.
		The U.S. was very, very young.
		Everyone is expecting this experiment in democracy with all these ideals of low taxes and no monarchy.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		We fought against taxes.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Americans have always had a chip on the shoulder about taxes.
unidentified		Exactly.
		No monarchy.
		We don't need a king and a queen.
		Our electorate has the power.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		So we had no manufacturing.
		How did he envision that?
		Because credit would be tied to becoming a manufacturing power.
		The farmers, because Jefferson, they had that huge fight in one of the first cabinet meetings.
		When Jefferson gets back from revolutionary France, he tells Hamilton, he says, I don't really understand what a secretary of treasury does.
		Can you explain it to me?
		And he gives him the big rap on credit and manufacture.
		And Jefferson says, I hear you.
		I see what you're saying, but you're telling me that...
		Basically, a farmer here or even a small guy with a business will be in hock to a stock jobber in New York City who's in hock to a British merchant bank.
		He goes, what did we fight the revolution for?
		We're in hock to the same guys that we broke off from.
		What was Hamilton's response to that?
unidentified		I don't know.
		The point that Hamilton was trying to make when he said that credit is a national blessing, that our debt is a national blessing, is that you can take any dollar that the U.S. has and leverage it.
		You can show that this country is burgeoning.
		There's a lot of economic growth here.
		There's a lot of potential.
		So come invest in us so that we can use that debt to create more good.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		And if we have to do it with all cash we're generating, our equity capital will never expand.
unidentified		Exactly.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		You need debt just like leveraged by our guys today.
		Or buying a house, just like you mortgage your house.
		If you use leverage smartly, you can increase value and growth dramatically.
unidentified		And that's the thing.
		One thing we haven't talked about, Steve, yet is in the book, I explain that every American is touched by the benefit and the privileges of living in a country that is the owner of the world's reserve asset.
		because the world is always investing in the dollar, always wants, has an insatiable appetite, no matter how many trillions of dollars of treasuries and bonds we sell, federal government bonds are sold here.
		Everyone wants that.
		That means the interest rate cost, the insurance premium on that debt is lower than it could be with any other, Because people need to own.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		People need dollars.
unidentified		People need dollars.
unidentified		So the credit, the interest rate on our credit card bill, auto loans, student loans, home mortgages, that interest rate is very low because the U.S. dollar is a world reserve asset.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Uncharacteristically low, if you didn't have that, it would be higher.
		Now, in a situation where we seem like the political class cannot get control of spending, and here even President Trump's big, beautiful bill, because this show is the show that turfed out McCarthy for the deal he did with no debt ceiling limit and unlimited spending by Biden in those first two years.
		We're quite concerned that in the big, beautiful bill, there hasn't really been tremendous cuts.
		There's been $163 billion on the social side, but there's been not touching the Defense Department, over a trillion dollars.
		It looks like, and we're the first ones to call it on the CR.
		The CR this year, President Trump inheriting Biden's budget in the House and folks not doing anything about it, we're going to have a $2 trillion deficit for this fiscal year.
		It looks like...
		Particularly with the populist tax cuts we want to have of no tax on Social Security, no tax on overtime, no tax on tips.
		Right now, this number looks like $2, $2.5 trillion.
		So Scott Besant, as you're adding this to the debt, he's going to have to, on an annual basis, I don't know, sell $8, $9, $10 trillion of government securities, particularly yelling those guys did it short term.
		Is there the appetite?
		Are you concerned?
		That at some point, you start to reach some sort of where you're going to get pushback.
		Like, for instance, the Japanese, the Bank of Japan told the Financial Times, I think on Saturday, hey, look, we hear Trump with reciprocity and the non-terrorist barriers, and we're engaged with Besson.
		We think we're going to get a deal done, at least the architecture.
		But part of this discussion is going to be the trillion dollars of government securities we own, because we kind of see that you guys are going to come back for another bite.
		Is this going to get to be a problem?
		Is this debt?
		And particularly, people are taking this in dollar-denominated bonds.
unidentified		The trajectory of U.S. debt right now has made a lot of people nervous.
		You hear from Jamie Dimon and Mark Rowan and Ray Dalio and Ken Griffin and everyone below them.
		Everyone is wondering, at what point is there a debt issuance from a Treasury sale that goes a little bit wrong?
		Well, hang on.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Two weeks ago...
		On that, before they announced the process, it was a Tuesday.
		We had a little bit of disconnect in the 10-year, remember?
		And that's when the market imploded.
		And I think Scott had to oversee, put hands on.
		A normal 10-year and said everything was fine.
		It was oversubscribed.
		But this is what Ray Dalio, who's no MAGA guy and no friend of the show, and we play his clips all the time, he's saying, hey, we're one failed auction away from a crisis.
		This is my point.
		Aren't we hurtling towards this?
		And now we have smart guys warning about it.
		But once it happens, it's too late to kind of reverse this, is it not?
unidentified		I don't know.
		No one knows.
		We've never been in a situation where there's this much financial technology, this large of a country with this much of a hold over global finance, and then an auction goes awry and traders panic, right?
		Traders range from 22-year-old on up.
		They don't know necessarily.
		They're not thinking.
		They haven't read all the books.
		They're smart people.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		And they haven't gone through a cycle.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		They haven't gone through a tough cycle.
unidentified		Exactly.
		So this is why the conclusion of my book is that a lot of people say, oh, China and Russia.
		They could do something that shakes the US and makes the dollar not the reserve asset or makes the US not as powerful as it is.
		But I actually end the book saying that it's actually up to the US.
		It's up to the electorate to choose.
		Leaders that care about these issues and to try to call for a cut in deficits, but also understand what's going on in the economy.
		But it's up to the US to maintain its fiscal house in order so that no one else has this power.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		So that's it.
		We argue here all the time that the elites in this country have breached their fiduciary responsibility to the nation, to the country.
		Because in the bailouts of 2008, as Christopher Leonard showed so brilliantly in Lords of Easy Money, this is why you've had the greatest concentration of wealth.
		First, during that period for the bailouts, then later during the pandemic.
		So now we have the greatest concentration of wealth.
		I mean, we essentially have a capitalist system with almost no capitalists.
		It's 75% or 80% of the people in this country, the hardworking people in Hamilton County that have been there for generation to generation, own almost nothing.
		And this is the problem, is that you have a political class that refuses, I think, to address the central.
		This is why your book is so powerful.
		I'd like to give a copy to everybody up here.
		There's a handful of books if people read it and say, hey, not only do we have an emergency, but once you get into this crisis, all of your easy alternatives are gone and you're going to be down to, you know, like right now, $163 billion of non-discretionary cuts, which will never happen.
		They've already rejected them up on Capitol Hill.
		I mean, heck.
		The president's trying to get PBS and NPR.
		Leave the politics aside.
		It's a couple of billion dollars.
		It's nothing.
		And they can't even get their arms around that.
		It's the scale of this thing.
		Doesn't it worry you?
		You're one of the leaders in thinking through this currency and its geopolitical impact.
		Doesn't it concern you that it's the political class here that fails to take the leadership that the country?
		Because people in Hamilton County don't know.
		I mean, it's one of the reasons the show is so popular.
		We expose people to these powerful converging forces that drive global politics, which is really about money and the economy.
		And that's really the intersection of power.
		And people see their eyes open.
		They don't have time to do it.
		They're working two jobs right now.
		As you said, the biggest thing is how do you survive in an economy where the prices keep going up?
		Isn't it incumbent upon our leaders to kind of take that leadership?
unidentified		Look, I think the electorate is very powerful in the U.S. I think as long as the electorate can understand that there will be painful cuts in budget spending that will affect everyday Americans, meaning that they're Their lawmaker might have to lose an election because they voted in support of some budget cuts that maybe constituents weren't happy about.
		So it's this concept of short-term pain for long-term gain that right now, if we can accept some of the budget cuts, then it's better for future generations.
		But that starts with voters.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		I'm not asking you to make a political judgment because I realize you're apolitical in your job of what you do in your reporting and in your book.
		But when you think back to Hamilton County and those signs you saw in 15 and 16, which other people didn't pick up, in that mindset of those people, the same decent folks are now 10 years into this experiment, right?
		And now with essentially every day, we pick up the Financial Times to walk people through it.
		Now this huge thing on tariffs and the commerce part and the codification of commerce with trade deals, etc.
		In their perspective, Do you think they fully understand now how big a deal this is, that now you combine economics with finance and capital markets and we have a period in world history that's every bit as fraught with danger as around the Second World War and particularly the end of the Second World War?
unidentified		I do think that there is a lot more tolerance for pain.
		We learned that in February of 2022, when Biden imposed the economic sanctions on Russia.
		Gasoline prices across America went up, and polls showed that Americans were willing to pay a little bit more at the gasoline pump in the spirit of helping a democracy in Europe and trying to make sure Europe doesn't blow up into another big war.
		And now we're seeing that with Trump's tariffs, that there's also, again, a little bit more of a steeliness in the electorate that we can handle this.
		Maybe it's because the global financial crisis and 9-11 is a recent enough memory that people know that, okay, we're going to have to suffer through this, particularly after COVID.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		But the 2008, the financial collapse, the causes of it, the converging factors of it, and particularly...
		What was done as a result of the bailouts, right?
		And it's kind of bushing these guys, you know, with the political class, caused a problem.
		Obama, and he's kind of, we say all the time, he's kind of a tragic figure.
		He came in as an anti-war populist.
		He immediately had this financial implosion.
		And Geithner and Bernanke, all these guys are kind of neoliberal neocons.
		It's a classic neoliberal, save the system, will do anything to save...
		Christopher Lennon's book is shocking.
		And going back and reading actual the minutes of the governor's...
		I think Dick Fisher in Dallas was sitting there going, guys, if we take this to zero negative interest rates, it's the working class and middle class country are going to be decimated on capital formation.
		They're essentially going to finance a bailout of people who knew better.
		And people said, yeah, I got it, but we got to be unanimous for everybody to ask the vote.
		Do you think that the American people are also looking a little better at this with John Desai and saying, hey, every time something like this comes up, they're looking to me.
		of wealth.
unidentified		Yeah, that's an excellent point.
unidentified		There's a huge income inequality problem in the United States.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		And a bigger asset inequality.
		Yeah.
		The income inequality, I think, also misses the mark.
		I tell Bernie Sanders, he has a time.
		Income inequality, and you can solve that with tax structure, particularly our populist tax hit somewhat.
		The bigger gap is asset difference.
		You have a capitalist system with essentially very few capitalists.
unidentified		There's 75 But that's why I think future leaders need to actually go across the United States and understand the electorate, right?
		I kind of like to think about it as the empty glassers.
		We've always looked at the economy, especially in the decade after the financial crisis, during that recovery, as a glass half full.
		Look at all this recovery.
		So many people have recovered.
		But if you look at the breakdown of how Trump won the election, he won in...
		The states where those states stayed in a recession for much longer than the country as a whole did after the Great Recession ended for the country.
		It continued for a lot of people who went for Trump.
		So you have to think about there's a glass half full.
		Let's be positive.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		This is why every morning...
		After I took over the campaign, we redirected and spent more time piercing the blue shell.
		Morning Joe would sit there and mock us.
		These guys don't know what they're doing.
		And you could tell, particularly in Ohio, around Akron and Dayton, places like that, the demographic were like Western Pennsylvania, were like areas of Wisconsin, Michigan, and even Iowa.
		We could see that shifting.
		On Democrats and independents who were open to the fact of having a guy that had no traditional experience whatsoever because he was talking about economic nationalism or economic patriotism.
		I said, finally, this guy speaks for me.
unidentified		And this is the reason that I wanted to write this book, the reason I wrote it this way.
		I take readers into Weirton, West Virginia.
		I take you to Moren, Ohio, where I show readers how decisions made in the halls of power, at the Treasury Department, in Congress, at the White House, at the Federal Reserve.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Impacts your life.
unidentified		Impacts your life if you're from outside of Dayton, Ohio.
unidentified		This is how it affects you.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		We've got a couple of minutes.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		What did you learn about yourself in researching and writing this book?
unidentified		I realized, one, that you don't have to have an elite university background to write a smart book.
		I realize that diversity of thought is very important.
		I think diversity of all kinds is great, but I think it should be driven by diversity of thought.
		I grew up in Ohio and went overseas and somehow landed in Washington.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		You came from classic flyover country.
unidentified		Yeah.
		And then also that all social upheaval and this really fierce rhetoric that we hear from people that we should look...
		Pass the words and try to figure out what is the emotion and what is the economic pain that probably led to this.
		Because economic pain is usually the root of many social and political upheavals.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		When you're in places like the City of London and areas of Europe, in the Davos places you've had to go, and of course Washington, D.C., do they have any real understanding of...
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Flyer of a country of Hamilton, Ohio?
unidentified		No, they really don't.
		They think that America is basically L.A. and New York.
		And they say, oh, well, I don't know how you live in the U.S. New York is so unsafe.
		And I say, it is a huge, have you looked on the map, like how giant this country is?
		I'm from this part here in the center.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Where do people go to get this book?
		Where do people go to get your rights?
		What's your social media?
unidentified		I'm at Saleh Mohsen on Twitter.
unidentified		You can buy my book on Amazon.com, Paper Soldiers, or wherever you buy books.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Fantastic.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		It's been great to have you.
unidentified		Thank you so much.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		I think very enlightening.
		I tell the audience is very excited.
		This book, How the Weaponization of the Dollar Changed the World Order, is something we're going to refer to a lot.
		Christopher Leonard, the great Christopher Leonard, says, if you only read one book to understand American economic and political power in the world today, it should be this one.
		Thank you so much for joining us in the world.
		We're going to be back.
		We're going to leave you with the right stuff.
		We'll be back tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time.
		We'll see you then.

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