Episode 5197: Economy Shifts As Iran War Continues
Stephen K. Bannon and Dr. Bradley Thayer analyze Iran's "medieval" war strategy, fearing Trump's demand for unconditional surrender could escalate into a Third World War involving Russia and the CCP. They debate whether attacking Arab states might unite Persians against the regime, while Able Child and Sheila Matthews criticize a loophole in the Behavioral Health Information Technology Act that shields the pharmaceutical industry from psychiatric drug violence data. Finally, Philip Patrick warns that Bitcoin's volatility makes it unsuitable as digital gold compared to strengthening assets like gold amidst de-dollarization trends. Ultimately, these segments highlight how current conflicts and regulatory failures threaten global stability and financial security. [Automatically generated summary]
Pray for our enemies because we're going medieval on these people.
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War Room.
Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.
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Five-Front War Concern00:11:00
Dr. Thayer, I want to pull the camera back for a second of to ask you on this Saturday morning, given everything we got going on militarily, you've seen the methodical way that the CENTCOM is going down this target set to make sure what President Trump calls unconditional surrender.
He has now been a little more precise and says when they don't have the ability militarily to either project power on their own people or project power against their neighbors, that's what he thinks is unconditional surrender when they don't have the ability to do it anymore.
But the concern a lot of people have is with the Russians supposedly giving targeting information.
You got the CCP out there.
This is now going, you know, there have been certain missiles launched towards Turkey and Cyprus, Azerbaijan, I think, up in near the Caspian Sea.
Also, the Gulf is being hit.
You have people concerned.
Is this metastasizing into even forming up with Gaza and the Ukraine as a broader part of the kinetic part of the Third World War, sir?
Great to join you.
It might be.
My concern would be this, that when he talks about unconditional surrender, and Caroline Levitt yesterday on Friday said that when the president determines that Iran no longer poses that threat, that's when unconditional surrender will take place.
But my concern is this.
Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on right there.
Hang on right there.
Hang on right there.
I want to be very precise.
When Caroline came out and said that, poses that threat, define that threat, because the president said it and then Caroline said it.
I think we use that as a benchmark.
When he said, no longer, they no longer can have that threat.
What does she mean by that?
Well, there's an element of ambiguity there.
I think what she's saying is this.
My interpretation is this.
When they no longer have the military capabilities to harm their neighbors or to harm their people, that's when unconditional surrender will take place.
And she envisioned the campaign lasting four to six weeks in her statements on Friday.
So my concern is this, that you take a war against the theocracy, which is a limited war now, and we're turning it into a potentially into a total war against the Persian people, which is a different type of war.
So the war against the theocracy has great support in Iran among the Persian people and among the ethnic minorities that live in Iran, principally the Azeris, who are about 16% of the population, and the Kurds, which are about 10% of the population.
So you can see there that about one out of every four people living in Iran is either Azeri or Kurd.
If we say unconditional warfare against Iran so that they no longer have the ability to harm their neighbors or to harm the population, my fear is that this turns this into a national element begins to surface and the Persian people will begin to unite around the theocracy, which is what we don't want.
About six out of every 10 people living in Iran is Persian.
And so that's a concern.
The air campaign, the military campaign more broadly, does seem to be on track to a treating Iran's, of course.
Hang on, I want to go through.
You laid out five elements the other day, five elements of this campaign.
I want to do an update.
And I agree with you 100%.
If the Persian people, this turns into a nationalistic, that it's about the nation of Persia, these people will dig in.
Even some people are potentially allies of ours.
And that's why it's a very thin line, and especially on some of these bombing campaigns, that CENCOM as the execution department of policy is really under pressure here.
And that's why maybe not having all the munitions that we originally thought we were going to have, because we're giving them to Ukraine, they've been in Gaza, you know, some of these precision instruments.
When you're talking about, I'm going to have to use gravity bombs.
Well, even with some precision guidance on gravity bombs, they're still generally, it's generally gravity.
And that puts only more pressure on CENCOM.
And you're right.
You don't want to segue in to have a fight with the Persian people as a nationalist entity.
Then these folks could dig in.
I mean, it's 90 million people, 60, so what?
55 million Persians, some of whom hate the regime.
A lot of them that are underneath are Zoroastrians, right?
They hate it.
But if it has to be, you know, it's an ancient and proud people.
So if it doesn't, you know, if you turn it to that, you could have a long, tough fight in your hand.
Now, you laid out five elements the other day of how you grade the military campaign from CENCOM.
Let's go through that and see what your grade is today.
Certainly.
Well, the underlying point is that this is a traditional warfare, right?
This is like Muhammad Ali fighting Joe Frazier.
We're pounding on the Iranian.
And so, but we need to recognize Iran really in this campaign.
There's five, it's a five-front war.
The first front really is the missile front, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, the UAV drone campaign.
And here there does seem to be progress in a tritting that is grinding down due to their own launches, as well as what Israel and the United States have been able to destroy.
Second is the air war.
And the air war seems to be very successful from our perspective.
The corridors have been cut into Iran.
The shoulders have been widened.
And there's been successful destruction of enemy air defenses.
So, they do seem to be suppressed, although there's always the possibility, of course, that they're lying in wait and they ambush American bombers or American aircraft or allied aircraft.
The third front really is the naval war, straight of Hormuz, as well as more broadly.
And here we have some concern, of course, Steve, as you stressed in the last few days on War Room, that Iran is using a variety of measures to intimidate, which is to coerce through the threat of attacks, actual attacks, and the threat of more attacks to come, naval traffic, civilian traffic in the Gulf and in the Strait.
And then we have the ground front.
Fourthly, the ground front would be purportedly led by the Kurds, potentially with backing from the U.S. intelligence community, from Israel's intelligence community,
and potentially other actors as well, to serve as the boots on the ground, to serve as a ground force that would be able to seize and hold territory within Iran that might be used as bastions or that might be used to project additional attacks, ground attacks against Iran.
And then the fifth and final would be this, the front is also the fifth front is proxies.
The fact that the war is expanding, and this is shown most clearly in Lebanon, where you have a proxy war between Hezbollah and Israel.
Although with Iran's strong support for terrorism, we can see that proxy attacks occur.
For example, the attack in Austin, Texas, that we've had, that we might see other attacks and sustained attacks due to the fact that there are Iranian sleeper cells operating in the United States.
So when we think about the war, the kinetic aspect of the war, right, leaving aside the economic aspect of it, leaving aside the political aspect of it, we see those five fronts going on simultaneously today.
And there's variation in success.
The U.S. has been very successful in sinking Iran's Navy and keeping Hormuz open.
We can see that the Fifth Fleet, though, is going to be tasked with a very great responsibility to ensure that civilian traffic is able to transit the strait.
The missile campaign, again, as a result of Iranian launches and Israeli-U.S. strikes, has been successful at destroying any fixed launcher, but also finding what they call the TELS, the transporter erector launcher vehicles that would actually carry ballistic missiles.
But that's an ongoing campaign, and it's quite reasonable to suspect that Iran is husbanding some ballistic missiles.
They launched a lot at the outset of the war, and then you see a falloff because of the success of the air campaign, but also because of Iran's desire strategically to keep some of those ballistic missiles and their TELs in reserve so that they can be launched to lengthen the war, to draw out the war, and for Israel and the United States never to be sure that we've had, we've been able to destroy all of their ballistic missiles.
Likewise, the air war, their air defenses seem to be greatly weakened as a result of the cyber actions that we've likely taken in conjunction with Israel and the kinetic actions that we've taken with Israel and the U.S.
But we always worry about essentially a surface-to-air missile, an ambush of an aircraft.
The ground war, Steve, we worry about that a lot because of the possibility if you're using Kurds, that's going to cause a Persian nationalist reaction.
If you're using Kurds to break down the door on the ground and to seize a chunk of Iran, the Persians, the Persian people are going to react to that, I would suspect, vociferously.
Persian Versus Arab00:06:02
And that's going to feed support for the regime.
And that's not an outcome that we want.
And then, of course, the proxy front will be ongoing as long as this war is, right?
We will always be worried about a terrorist attack in the United States on American soil or against U.S. military targets abroad or against allies of torture.
Do you think as CENTCOM goes down what I refer to as the punch list or the target set, however you want to describe it, and you can answer this after the break.
I appreciate we're going to keep you for a short period of time in the next segment.
As CENCOM goes through systematically this punch list in those five categories or at least three of the categories of war to make sure that we've degraded and/or destroyed because President Trump is now saying there's no need for combat troops because we're going to so destroy what they've got.
As they do that, is one of the concerns how this is metastasizing on Persian versus Arab, Muslim versus Muslim, as this metastasizes into the Gulf.
The Financial Times of London, the Wall Street Journal, of course, obviously Bloomberg.
They're very focused on something they should be focused on, and that's oil assets being taken offline in the Gulf, whether that is the tanker fleet, whether it is refineries, desalination plants, all the gas fields, all of it.
We're going to take a short commercial break.
We'll return to Saturday morning in the warm in just a moment.
Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.
Dr. Bradley Thayer, thank you for giving us time on a Saturday morning.
Persian versus Arab, because to me, this is the most fascinating part of this so far: is that, and this is a big-time military campaign.
Folks ought to understand that.
And since, as you guys know, as a young naval officer over there in the North Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf, it amazes me, you know, 47 years later, the types of power, naval power we can project that we couldn't project back then.
So, as a former naval officer, it's awe-inspiring what's happening.
That being said, what really, and Dr. Thayer, you were just in Australia.
If we'd asked you at the time, I think all of us would have been stunned to see Persian versus Arab, Shia versus Sunni, this kind of outright attacks on the on the in the Gulf on oil assets, desalination plants.
And quite frankly, I think the Saudis and other people punching back.
Your thoughts about that?
Is that the new center of gravity in this war?
I think it's a key element of the war.
I think what Iran has done has escalated the war horizontally by attacking the Gulf sheikhdoms in Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan and many other states as well.
Their effort is to undermine support for the U.S. There's a logic for what they're doing, a military logic, strategic logic for what they're doing.
They want to inflict pain on the Arab states.
And then by so doing, of course, that also reveals the cleavages, the tensions that exist between Sunni and Shia Arabs, Iranians largely Shia, and between Persians and Arabs.
So Iran's efforts to hurt the U.S. to draw out the campaign and inflict pain on the Arabs is to a degree self-defeating because it's generating, at least at the elite level, support.
Another issue which needs to be addressed is that by attacking Azerbaijan, remember 16% of the population of Iran is Azeri.
So by attacking Azerbaijan, you're opening up a window for Azerbaijan to reach out to essentially their population, the diaspora population in Iran, likewise for the Kurds.
So by Iran escalating, and again, there's a logic to do that, they're also complicating their strategic situation.
They're adding to their enemies.
and they're adding to the might arranged against them.
Their calculus must be, at least with the Arabs, that there'll be a revolt, that at the mass level in the Gulf shakedoms, the people don't support the U.S. and they don't support this war and they don't support essentially their governments.
There's a logic there, but whether that's going to obtain they see this as the Israeli Anglo, the Israeli-American demons going after Muslims.
Go ahead.
Right.
Saddam Hussein attacked Israel, right, as a way to draw in the first in Desert Storm, Desert Shield in 91, Saddam Hussein attacked Israel as a way to essentially break up the coalition, as well as attacking Saudi, as well as attacking the Gulf Sheikhdoms, Bahrain very famously.
So again, there's that military logic there.
But whether that's going to be successful or not is certainly very difficult to.
You're following the war very closely.
Where do people go on your Twitter feed?
You've also been working on a huge book that we'll talk about that hopefully comes out this spring, if not early summer, that I think puts this all in perspective.
But where do people go to get your constant updates on this war and particularly your thoughts on are we segueing into the kinetic part of the Third World War and uniting all these fights in a massive kind of World War I type fiasco?
Right.
Brad Thayer at X and Bradley Theragetter and Truth.
Sheila's Consumer Loophole00:06:53
And so Steve, you know, the major caveat is let's not turn this into a national conflict.
Let's not turn it into a war against the Persians, which is going to greatly complicate the conflict.
Amen.
That's why CENCOM, the airmen, soldiers, naval officers, the crews of those ships, I mean, they're on the razor's edge right now.
Thank you, sir.
Appreciate you.
Thank you, Steve.
The CENTCOM, that's what we really try to do as many CENTCOM briefings as possible.
That's cutting edge.
Since they had this DHS, we didn't get a lot of time to get into it because so many other things are going on.
But the Senator, Mark Wayne Mullen, I want to get Sheila Matthews on here.
He has been, and obviously you're very supportive of the president, Sheila, and Able Child is.
I think Able Child, you're having your 25th anniversary, Gala, this week.
I want to make sure everybody knows about that.
You're very supportive, full MAGA.
But there's some issues.
You've been out constantly saying, Hey, we're missing the point on this mental illness thing.
We're not getting into the psychiatrist records.
This is a huge industry for big pharma.
We don't have our arms around it.
Senator Markway Mullins does have some legislation out there that you're saying, Hey, I think this thing needs a mid-course guidance.
Can you walk us through this legislation?
What's the fundamental problems with it?
And what do you think we need to do to kind of rectify it now that he's going over to DHS?
Well, Ablechild works with everybody, and we're looking at Senator Mullins, a co-sponsor of the BHIT Act, which is the Behavioral Health Information Technology Act.
What it is, is it's a big electronic network where they collect all our consumer mental health documents and they pass them around to behavioral health vendors and doctors.
And there's a flaw in this bill.
And what the flaw is, is it does not collect the data associated with the violence that the psychiatric drugs have.
So, what we're excited about is that he is the co-sponsor of this bill.
So, maybe he missed it.
Maybe he missed that loophole.
So, we need to put a patch on it.
So, we need to open that system up.
And he's the guy to do it now that he's got this big job and he doesn't need a bill to push through.
He can look at this flaw and say, you know what, we need to collect the data from the psychiatrists that are associated with these mass shooters.
So, it protects the consumer.
There's a consumer loophole here.
This bill is that he co-sponsored is more protective of the behavioral health and the drug companies.
So, Ablechild wants to be able to do that.
But it seems like this is the fight that you've had.
It seems like every, this one understand.
It seems like everything we have is to protect the psychiatry, the industry of the psychiatrist, because they're kind of the physician, the attending physician that prescribes this.
And this is how big pharma makes so much money.
I mean, is everything that we have here?
Is it just like you said, hey, May overlooked it?
It sounds like this is not a bug.
This is actually the way the system works.
Well, these bills are crafted by the behavioral health industry and they're pushed onto senators and congressmen.
And the voice of the consumer is often lost in there.
They go to the senators, we have a great idea.
We're going to do this whole new database.
And it was bipartisan.
So we're all often always cautious of that because we have to make sure that the consumer is protected.
It took us two years to get the Tennessee bill passed to test for the therapeutic levels for psychiatric drugs in mass shooters.
This bill that he sponsored has a loophole.
So Abel Child's been chasing this data.
So you're absolutely right.
This is a flaw in this bill, and he's going to be the Homeland Security head.
And we have mass shootings that become unsolved.
And, you know, as consumers, we need this protection.
We need this data.
It's a data vacuum for the consumer.
We need it patched up.
And, you know, we're willing to work with him.
We're aware of this flaw.
And we are going to stand on the mount and shout about this flaw because it protects, it protects the psychiatrist.
It protects these records.
And we're forever fighting to get these records released to the public.
And the consumers want to go to movie theaters and malls.
They don't want to be shot up by psychiatric patients that are on these dangerous black box suicide warning drugs.
We got to bounce.
But does it drive you crazy every time we have a mass shooting, they all come on TV for a couple of days and say, no, police are really looking for a motive when the first thing you hear is that they were under psychiatric care and taking these drugs, but they always, for three and four days until it fades from public view, say, we're really, the authorities are investigating for why they did this.
Yeah, I mean, Abel Child is frustrated, but you know what?
The consumer's frustrated and they know it.
And you look on the internet on X and they're all talking about it.
So it's out of the box.
We need the consumer's voice in there.
And I believe Abel Child provides that bipartisan.
We work with both Democrats and Republicans.
And I do favor working with the Trump administration.
You know, he's doing a lot of good things, you know.
Sheila, we got to bounce.
Where do people go to get all the information?
If they want to support you at the Gala, where do people go?
ablechild25.com.
We're going to be closing out tickets shortly.
We are overwhelmed with the response.
And please sign our petition on ablechild.org.
And so we get our voice in there with federal hearings on this issue and this flaw.
So I'll be tracking this flaw, Steve.
Yeah.
Great job in Tennessee.
We got to model everything after Tennessee.
Great job there.
Sheila, thank you so much for joining us.
Appreciate you.
Thank you.
Philip Patrick's going to join us next.
Of course, this, what is it, major military operation and or war, whatever you want to call it, this conflict in the Middle East is driving turbulence in capital markets all over the world.
So Philip Patrick's going to be here.
We're going to walk through about gold, also commodity markets, what it means for commodities, particularly oil, the hydrocarbons over there, and how that impacts the gold and bond market and equity market.
Central Banks and Precious Metals00:14:51
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Short commercial break.
Philip Patrick joins us in a moment.
Here's your host, Stephen K. Battle.
Welcome back.
We've got Philip Patrick joins us.
Philip, let's walk through why, just generally, because I want to get into the specifics of this war and what it's causing and the turbulence in capital markets and commodity markets.
But first off, why has gold been a because we're here for the discussion that we've kind of come full circle about?
Remember, one of the rushes to gold over the last couple of years is that Philip Patrick and we partnered with Birch Gold to talk about the end of the dollar empire.
Now, that was not about specifically about gold as a hedge, but gold as a financial asset, which became as the dollar was essentially the purchase power of the dollar was destroyed by the elites that run this country, right?
And particularly the massive overspending that when the purchasing power dropped, that the world would go to particularly central banks and others would go to buying gold and gold would have a floor and then it would become a financial asset as it has, right?
And in much like the 19th century.
But classically, gold has been a hedge against times of financial turbulence.
It's been a safe harbor.
And you definitely have financial turbulence now.
I use the term geopolitical risk.
And I tell people that's just a fancy schmancy term for war or the rumors of war when it gets down to it.
And now we're in it.
You know, we're in a conflict that is in the conflict, as our theory of the case is, the center of gravity of the conflict is not the military conflict.
Part of it is Tehran in Persia itself, which is being pounded to degradate their ability to have weapon systems that actually can attack their neighbors of the United States, also to have a command structure that's still run by radical Islam.
However, the other part is what's different than all these other wars.
It's Muslim versus Muslim that's metastasized, that's shifted over to the Persian Gulf.
And whether you like to admit it or not, until we are up to more full capacity, still much of the world, obviously Europe and Asia run on Persian Gulf oil and gas.
And so gold has been a traditional hedge.
What does that mean?
And what does it mean, particularly in a time like this?
Well, we're in a shooting war in a massive shooting war that is quite frankly, even now, forget Iraq and Afghanistan.
It's bigger than the Gulf War, sir.
Yeah, this is, I mean, there's a lot to unpack there.
Certainly, you know, even prior to this, as you mentioned, we had the perfect storm for gold.
We've printed the dollar into oblivion.
We've made it a much less attractive store of wealth.
We've talked about how we broke the trust, specifically Biden, through sanctions and weaponization of currency, which made the dollar far less attractive.
People have to understand gold has been the standard for international currency throughout all of human history, because ultimately, for most of human history, countries didn't trust each other.
And sort of post-World War II, this belief was born that the world had transitioned and we moved away from gold towards government debt and specifically U.S. government debt.
But I think clearly that illusion has been shattered.
First of all, the dollar as a store of wealth isn't what it was.
It's lost 28% of its buying power since the pandemic.
It is an unattractive, much less attractive store of wealth than it was.
Secondly, broadly, the trust has been broken.
So I think what we're seeing now is the world is reverting back to sound money, what has always been the standard.
Now, obviously, a war in Iran adds another dimension and more instability.
And you're correct in your assessment.
Look, the Iranians can't wage a military war or can't win a military war against the United States.
So the best way to do this is to morph this into an economic war.
I think it's why they're hitting the Gulf states currently to create uncertainty and chaos.
And I think it's going to be a very effective strategy.
Obviously, oil prices increasing on the back of it significantly.
If the war is long, drawn out and protracted, that's going to increase even more.
And that puts pressure on things domestically.
Ultimately, and we said this a lot under Biden: you know, oil is the most inflationary commodity.
Oil prices go up, put pressure on pricing across the board domestically at a time heading into the midterms when we really don't need it.
So the Iranians are smart, and I think they're going to continue to play a smart game.
So we'll have to see how this pans out.
But economically, this is problematic.
When you see, when you're on the, you know, we've had Eric Bowling on now.
He used to be a trader of oil and gas, futures, all of it in the pits for about a dozen years.
When you're talking to traders, we're talking particularly in people in the commodities market and people in the gold market.
What are you hearing today?
Listen, predictions, what I'm hearing is this is the perfect storm we're seeing now for precious metals, right?
The world is turning into chaos.
Sadly, the silver lining is it bodes well for investors in precious metals.
Predictions now are increasing dramatically.
UBS, JP Morgan, Bank of America have scrambled to up predictions now on precious metals.
They're projecting 6,300 now for gold by the end of the year.
We're trading in the 5,100 range.
So significant upside from where we sit.
This ultimately strengthens the long-term fundamentals.
And I think the longer the duration, the better it is for precious metals, the more strain it puts on the dollar and government debt.
When he's saying, there is, though, there is this flight to quality with the dollar.
The dollar has strengthened since this started.
So people are fleeing certain assets.
It's not the end of the bricks movement.
But clearly, some of the money market folks have said, hey, given I don't understand what's going on, maybe I get more into dollars, obviously gold too, but the strength of the dollar, you've seen that in the last week or so, because a lot of people said, hey, I think gold could be exploded.
It could get to the 6,000 or 6,500.
Remember, we don't forecast the price of gold here.
What we want to do is get you the information and get you into like end of the dollar empire.
And you take, you know, take your phone and text Bannon, B-A-N-N-O-N at 989898.
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All the information from Birch Gold in the war room on this topic are always free because we want a smart investor and a smart and a smart, you know, a smart consumer.
So, but what was this about the strength in the gold over the last couple of days?
Look, gold strengthened.
You make an interesting point, though.
Initially, you saw the dollar strengthen and it has done.
And it's good news.
People ultimately move to cash and it shows that for liquidity, people still want dollars.
What was interesting, though, is historically during times like this, investors run to government debt and yields decline, but the opposite happened.
Yields actually increased on the debt.
And what that suggests is people are less worried about collapse, more worried about inflation.
And I think particularly the impact of higher energy costs on top of today's already elevated price levels.
So as much as the dollar did strengthen, which was good news, yields on debt increased, which is bad news for the government.
So it's sort of a mixed bag there.
In terms of precious metals, though, like I said, I think demand will still increase broadly for metals.
It's still being driven by central banks.
De-dollarization is still happening very actively.
I think we're at 38-year lows now for central banks around the world holding dollars for reserves.
So that trend, I think, will continue long term.
Nothing is linear, right?
Nothing, the dollar is not going to go like that.
There'll be peaks and troughs.
But I think long term, the trend, at least at this point, is not changing.
You were the first to bring up, this is years ago.
In fact, this is the beginning of the year.
So I think after we were working with you guys, you had this blinding insight that really not just turbocharged gold at the time, but really had such a massive geopolitical impact.
When people in this, in the beginning of the Ukrainian war, I guess we might have been into it for the first year.
When the people that were so gung-ho, you know, that were driving the Ukrainians to put more people in and more of their resources in, really fight it, they came with this idea of first freezing the Russians' assets and then essentially stealing the Russian people's assets, dollar-denominated assets that were in essentially basically European banks.
And you came on and said, hey, this is a game changer.
It's one of the reasons people have had a problem with the SWIFT system.
They've had a problem with the because the Americans can actually weaponize the dollar, but we've never done this to the Nazis.
We didn't do this to Imperial Japan.
We didn't do this to the Bolsheviks.
This is a game changer.
And you saw the shift in the kind of sentiment to gold, particularly among central banks, because they realized, hey, maybe we can't be so dollar-denominated.
We just had in the last 24, 48 hours, the same situation in the UAE, where the UAE has warned the Persians, and 99.99% of people didn't understand this because they said, hey, I thought the Arabs and the Iranians and the Persians were kind of at a war with each other.
And the Iranians were always saying they were threatening them militarily and they had all these proxy groups in there.
And so this thing's not never really, it's been in the Abraham Accords showed that UAE and others were prepared to work with the Israelis.
The bigger problem was Tehran.
And then it comes up that Dubai is the, I call it Tortuga to the pirates in the Caribbean in the 18th sixth, 17th and 18th century.
Uh it's uh, Dubai is like the pirate's den.
And you had all the resources and all their cash wasn't in, wasn't in Switzerland, it was in Dubai.
And now Uae is threatening to say, hey look, not only might we freeze it, we might take it.
How is that?
Tell me, how?
That's a game changer in this war.
It reflects what happened in, uh in, with the Russians, but it's also going to be another indication of countries throughout the world and central banks that, hey, maybe I just can't be keeping my cash sitting around.
Maybe I have to go to gold, sir.
This was the point that I was making earlier, right?
For all of human history, gold was the standard because trust didn't exist broadly between nations.
And like I said, this sort of post-World War II U.S.-led order meant that the world broadly trusted each other.
And when the trust broke down, America was there to police it.
So we saw this transition, but that illusion has clearly been shattered.
The world now is sort of turning to blocks.
And I think asset seizures, things like that have ultimately escalated the inevitability.
I'd love to sort of take credit for some genius foresight when it came to the Russia thing, but ultimately it's common sense, right?
If you want to incentivize the world to hold your currency and trade in it, you know, you can't do things like seize people's assets and threaten to give them to a country that they're currently at war at to fight against them.
That's not only a message to the country you're sanctioning, but it's a message to every other country around the world that may want to do things that don't align with your moral compass.
It's that simple.
And the more it happens, the more the world will revert to gold.
Philip, can you just hang on?
I realize it's a Saturday, but just hang on through the commercial break because I want people to immerse them, avail themselves of the opportunity that you have to immerse themselves in information here and become wiser.
I think you'll become financially more and more stable if you do this, but if not, you'll still learn how the world works.
Birchgold.com, the end of the dollar empire.
If you go there today, all of the installments are free online.
But you also, if you want a hard copy, and the hard copy we did in conjunction with our partners over at Birch Gold is just nothing short of, I think, magnificent, the Patriots edition of the End of the Dollar Empire.
It's seven, all seven free installments and kind of reads right through like a book.
And remember, it's being taught now in graduate schools.
I thought it was undergraduate economics and finance classes, actually being taught now in graduate level.
Why?
Because we try to make this accessible.
Keep it sophisticated, but make sure that you didn't have to have a degree in economics to understand it.
Merchgold.com promo code bannon, the end of the Dollar Empire.
Philip Patrick, on the other side, war in the rumors, of War in the War Room this morning, here's your host, Stephen K, Battle.
Okay, I just want to make sure everybody to think about this.
Digital Gold's Liquidity Issue00:06:17
Um, Crypto was supposed to be digital gold, correct, Philip?
And it was going to have all these attributes of gold.
One of the things for the audience to understand that history has kind of proven the last couple of years is that particularly as the central banks stepped in from throughout the world, particularly the Chinese Communist Party, right?
But the central banks have stepped in and doubled and tripled on their gold reserves is that gold has been very liquid.
I think in the past there were some issues.
Well, if I got physical gold, you know, it's not like owning a stock on the New York Stock Exchange.
I can't call my broker and cross a trade.
But just the depth of purchasing in the gold market gave you liquidity.
If you wanted to offload your gold or sell it, you weren't looking at taking a 25% discount or something like this because of recent statistics.
And crypto was supposed to be the same way.
I think what we found, one, I want you to talk about it turned out it didn't move with gold.
It turned out to be instead of countercyclical with the cycle.
And I believe more importantly, and this is why you saw a lot of the tech boroughs very early on when President Trump won.
Remember, these guys all climbed on board and they want not just regulation.
They also wanted some the U.S. government to step in with these kind of these reserves to essentially add liquidity to the market.
And now we understand, particularly, specifically now that we're in the shooting war and crypto has been all over the place.
There's just not one, it's not countercyclical.
Number two, it is there's a liquidity issue.
And so it turns out it's actually not only not digital gold, it's kind of anti-digital gold.
Is it not, sir?
It's a good way to put it.
And I think not having the American taxpayer be the backstop for that is very, very important.
With the benefit of hindsight, it's clear to see what would have happened.
On top of that, the digital gold story just doesn't hold up anymore.
And honestly, it hasn't for quite a while.
Gold is a safe haven asset.
It performs incredibly well during times of stagflation, things like higher inflation, weaker growth, monetary instability, dollar decline.
They all drive gold up.
But what it is, is defensive, boring.
It's essentially insurance for a portfolio.
Bitcoin has not behaved that way at all, right?
When liquidity has been abundant, when rates are low, speculative appetite is high, Bitcoin absolutely soars and people can do incredibly well.
When liquidity tightens and when real rates rise, sentiment turns from risk on to risk off, the thing can absolutely plummet, right?
Drop 50, 60% as we've been seeing.
So, you know, gold is on the opposite end of the spectrum to that, right?
You're not going to buy gold and it's worth, you know, double, triple, quadruple two weeks from now.
But by that same token, it doesn't drop in half in a week.
So when it comes to sort of risk profile, I'd put it on the opposite end of the spectrum.
And as you rightly point out, you know, gold has thousands of years of history.
And what we've learned over those years is how it performs in relation to other assets.
So we understand very well it's defensive and it's countercyclical.
It does very well when things are struggling.
Bitcoin seems to be the reverse, right?
And in climates like this, when people are looking for safe havens, they're looking for wealth preservation, Bitcoin just doesn't achieve that.
So I've always viewed it as a speculative asset and I still do today.
So as some sort of support for the US dollar, definitely not.
I also want people to note that both Philip and myself came out of investment banking.
We are not gold bugs.
In fact, in the 80s and 90s, when I really left Harvard and went to work for Goldman Sachs, I had my own firm, it was really John Maynard Keynes, I think it was, that said it was a historic relic, a barbaric relic.
This has only been really this focus on the crushing of the U.S. dollar over the last couple of years because the U.S. dollar is still the backbone of the system, as you're seeing right now in this war.
The reason we partner with Birch Gold is that, you know, I never talk, it's not the price, it's the process and it's learning.
This was a great learning experience for you to understand how the world works.
Even if you never invested or you never did anything, it's just to have another arrow in the quiver that the reason you're the smartest, most powerful political audience in the world and have really bent the arc of history is that you use your agency and you're engaged.
And we've done this on geopolitics.
We've done it obviously on politics itself, on culture.
One of the most important things we do in the show is to talk to a blue collar and a middle class audience on things I think are more sophisticated than CNBC or forget Fox business.
That's just cheerleading.
Almost like Bloomberg TV, where we really try to get people in here and break down what's going on.
Because we say, if you don't understand that, you're not going to understand how the world works.
And that's why the partnership with Birch Gold and all the work we've put in together, the Birch Gold team and the Worm team to do it.
But Philip, I want people, if you go to birchgold.com, promo code Bannon, you get access to all the information.
But most importantly, you get access to Philip Patrick team.
And I've had so many people come to me and say, hey, in my relationship with Birch Gold, it's changed my life because I got it in gold at $1,500 and it's over $5,000 a day.
But it's really the learning experience.
I want, we got about a minute, Philip.
Where do people go?
How do they get access to you and your team?
It's really simple.
It's birchgold.com forward slash Bannon.
Again, birchgold.com forward slash Bannon.
Get the end of the dollar empire reports, access to guides on how and why to invest in precious metals in today's climate.
And as you rightly point out, you know, your viewers, your listeners, they have a real desire to learn.
So the feedback we've been getting from this has been fantastic.
And whether people ultimately buy or not, read the information.
That's going to be the most important part of this.
Tomorrow's Show At 10 AM Eastern00:01:28
So birchgold.com forward slash Bannon or text Bannon to 989898, ask for the information and do whatever they want from there.
No obligation, totally free.
Also, if you go, you can get access to the printed edition, the Patriots edition of the End of the Dollar Empire.
Also, we're coming out.
Philip and I have finally, Philip made some smart tweaks over the last 48 hours and we'll be out with the eighth free edition, the eighth installment as we rub this thing up again.
Philip Patrick, thank you.
Thank you for taking your time away on a Saturday.
Appreciate you, sir.
Thank you for having me, Steve.
Okay, I'm going to be up on social media with Grace and Mo, Elizabeth, everybody.
Plus, remember, tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, we're going to have our seven day a week.
We're going to do our Sunday show tomorrow to get you up the speed on everything you need to know.
Was this the beginning, the kinetic part of World War III?
Where did I hear that before?
Oh, that's right.
The guys in the war room.
Have a great Saturday.
We'll see you back here tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, and you will be back in the war room.