The Charlie Kirk Show - Another 2008... Or Worse?
Aired: 2023-05-02
Duration: 33:44


=== Banks Collapsing Worse Than 2008 (04:17) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey everybody, today the Charlie Kirk show.
[00:00:01]  Banks are collapsing.
[00:00:02]  In fact, what if I told you the numbers for bank collapses?
[00:00:06]  It's actually worse than 2008.
[00:00:08]  It's amazing.
[00:00:08]  You're going to want to listen to this entire episode.
[00:00:10]  It's very deep.
[00:00:11]  A lot of economic discussion here.
[00:00:13]  If that interests you, you should listen to it.
[00:00:15]  If it doesn't interest you, it should.
[00:00:16]  Honestly, it impacts every single one of you.
[00:00:18]  It impacts our entire civilization.
[00:00:21]  Email us your thoughts.
[00:00:21]  Always freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:00:23]  I want to thank those of you that support us.
[00:00:24]  Thank you, Steve from Maryland, James from Louisiana, Sarah from Minnesota, Michaela from Illinois, Christine from North Carolina, Laura from Colorado, Julio from California, Lori from Arizona, Tana from California, Rebecca from California, Angela from Alabama, Bethany from Tennessee.
[00:00:42]  I want to thank Sarah from North Carolina, charliekirk.com/slash support.
[00:00:47]  All of you support us and help us remain strong, growing, and flourishing.
[00:00:51]  That is charliekirk.com/slash support.
[00:00:54]  Get involved with turningpointusa at tpusa.com.
[00:00:58]  That is tpusa.com.
[00:01:00]  Get engaged and get involved.
[00:01:01]  Start a high school and college chapter at tpusa.com.
[00:01:05]  That is tpusa.com.
[00:01:08]  Buckle up, everybody.
[00:01:09]  Here we go.
[00:01:10]  Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
[00:01:12]  Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
[00:01:14]  I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
[00:01:17]  Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
[00:01:20]  I want to thank Charlie.
[00:01:21]  He's an incredible guy.
[00:01:22]  His spirit, his love of this country.
[00:01:24]  He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
[00:01:30]  Turning point USA.
[00:01:31]  We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
[00:01:40]  That's why we are here.
[00:01:42]  Brought to you by the Loan Experts I Trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at andrewandTodd.com.
[00:01:52]  The media is probably getting calls from the Treasury Department right now.
[00:01:56]  I guarantee you, the big uglies, CNN, even the people running the Apple News desk, NBC, I can almost guarantee you the Treasury Department's PR side, the communications director, they are working the phones saying, hey, can you just downplay the bank story?
[00:02:16]  It's okay if you cover it.
[00:02:17]  Just don't lead with it.
[00:02:19]  And apparently it's working.
[00:02:21]  I mean, they do mention it on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, but what catches your attention here?
[00:02:26]  The front page of the Wall Street Journal is some freak wearing a cat uniform at the Met Gala.
[00:02:35]  Jared Leto, Leto, next to Ann Hathaway, and Selma Hayek.
[00:02:43]  So it's working.
[00:02:44]  The lead should be not some doja cat thing.
[00:02:53]  Again, I've joked around for a while that we're living through the Hunger Games.
[00:02:56]  This is confirmation that the Hunger Games were awfully prophetic.
[00:03:00]  Again, they do cover it, but it's as if your eyes go away from it.
[00:03:06]  First Republic sees sold to JP Morgan on page of the New York Times, B1.
[00:03:12]  So it's buried because the front page of the New York Times, they're leading with Ukraine.
[00:03:17]  They do cover the bank issue, but you could tell it's not the emphasis.
[00:03:20]  Somebody is lobbying.
[00:03:21]  Somebody is working the ropes of these media companies.
[00:03:24]  And there's a reason for it.
[00:03:26]  We're on the precipice of a major bank run.
[00:03:28]  Institutional, an institutional bank run.
[00:03:31]  Now, you know this.
[00:03:33]  I hope you know this.
[00:03:34]  The money in your bank account is not actually there.
[00:03:37]  The money in your bank account is just a promise.
[00:03:40]  It's a promissory note.
[00:03:41]  It is a fractional reserve banking system.
[00:03:44]  It works as long as everybody doesn't go and withdraw their money all at once.
[00:03:49]  So the fall of First Republic Bank should be a lot bigger on the Wall Street Journal than the eye candy distraction smokescreen Doja cat person.
[00:03:59]  But somebody at the Treasury Department, and quite honestly, you can't blame them, is trying to just kind of tamper this down.
[00:04:06]  You can cover it here or there, but do not engage in panic.
[00:04:12]  So the New York Times has an incredibly important graphic right now.

=== Money Is Just A Promise (06:17) ===

[00:04:17]  Do you know that the three failed banks this year, Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and First Republic Bank, surpasses the amount of assets of busts in 2008?
[00:04:31]  So there were more banks that busted in 2008 than have busted so far, but these were so big that in 2008, there were 25 banks that busted for a total of $94 billion.
[00:04:47]  So far this year, three banks have busted for a total of $110 billion, $110 billion.
[00:04:57]  So currently, the banking collapse is already worse this year than it was in 2008.
[00:05:04]  What is driving this?
[00:05:04]  Well, a couple of things.
[00:05:06]  Number one, the $6 to $7 trillion of money that we created out of thin air, and we were against it from the beginning.
[00:05:13]  You can go back in the podcast archives.
[00:05:14]  We were one of the few people that thought that we should have zero stimulus.
[00:05:19]  Congress should not act.
[00:05:20]  And we were attacked.
[00:05:21]  People said, oh, Charlie, it's the worst thing ever.
[00:05:23]  During the lockdown, we said the number one way to stimulate the economy is to open the economy.
[00:05:29]  And Republicans and Democrats agreed to keep on spending money we do not have, creating money out of thin air, funneling fiat currency into the economy.
[00:05:40]  And basic economic truths, best articulated by Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell, when you create six, seven, eight, nine trillion dollars out of thin air, you're going to get a lot of bad behavior.
[00:05:53]  You're going to subsidize bad behavior.
[00:05:55]  You are going to get what in economics is called externalities.
[00:06:00]  You're going to get what's even more specifically called in economics, malinvestment.
[00:06:05]  Bad companies will be able to stay open.
[00:06:08]  Defunct nonprofits will be subsidized through ERCs or through this bailout money or through the stimulus money.
[00:06:16]  It was a completely unnecessary cash infusion that Republicans should have opposed.
[00:06:21]  And they did eventually.
[00:06:24]  It was a poor allocation of capital, especially since our dollar is just based on fiat, on the faith of the dollar.
[00:06:34]  Not to mention then the Biden regime comes in and wages a war on oil and natural gas and pushes for more regulation and destroys entrepreneurial confidence.
[00:06:46]  Poor allocation of capital always happens before bubble bursts.
[00:06:49]  Now, strict Austrian economists, of which I agree with some of what they have to say and disagree with other things, Ludwig von Mises, beautiful literature that they wrote.
[00:06:59]  And I read all this stuff like 10 or 12 years ago.
[00:07:02]  Murray Rothbard, but he's a little extreme.
[00:07:04]  They did have an interesting argument where they said the Austrian business cycle, as they argue, is that booms and busts are actually not normal.
[00:07:15]  Absent a massive central bank infusing the economy with artificial capital.
[00:07:22]  So basically they say this idea of recessions and growth and recession and depression, it's actually not the normal business cycle, that if you have a stable currency, you'll be able to get rich slowly.
[00:07:35]  You see, the promise of the people that want a metallic-based currency is you will get rich over a period of time and it's actually better that way.
[00:07:44]  Well, look at this graph here on the New York Times, that we already have more assets that have collapsed.
[00:07:50]  And again, the media, I don't want to say the media is doing a disservice.
[00:07:54]  The fact they're not playing into this is actually probably the right thing.
[00:07:59]  Why?
[00:08:00]  Why is it probably the right thing?
[00:08:02]  Because if the media led with bank run, bank collapses instead of Doja Cat, if the media led with this instead of Ukraine, you would have probably another 10 or 20 or 30 banks collapse, especially regional ones.
[00:08:17]  And this is not speculation.
[00:08:19]  Today, Pacific Western Bank is down 30%.
[00:08:24]  Regional banks are teetering on the brink right now as stocks slide to new lows.
[00:08:30]  In fact, I got a call from a very wealthy man yesterday, very, very wealthy.
[00:08:34]  And we were talking and he said, Charlie, just so you know, I have now reduced all of my accounts down to $249,999, $2,400.
[00:08:45]  Basically saying right below the FDIC limit.
[00:08:48]  Like, I am not going to keep a dollar of cash in any of my accounts that the FDIC does not 100% guarantee.
[00:08:55]  And that is a warning sign.
[00:08:58]  That goes to show that people's confidence in the system is deteriorating in real time.
[00:09:06]  The big, huge story happening in the country right now is not the Met Gala.
[00:09:11]  It's not Doja Cat.
[00:09:14]  It's not even the Ukraine war.
[00:09:16]  You are living through one of the worst bank collapses that is even worse than anything we have seen since the Great Depression.
[00:09:23]  Paying attention yet?
[00:09:24]  The Dow is down 500 points.
[00:09:27]  And this is how the CNBC covers it.
[00:09:28]  And again, the media has to be careful because the media does not want to be, they don't want to be chief sponsors of a mass bank run.
[00:09:38]  They say banking concerns linger.
[00:09:40]  Yeah, banking concerns is a mild way to put it.
[00:09:43]  This is already worse than 2008.
[00:09:45]  But let's make sure we understand why this has happened.
[00:09:48]  This did not happen because of Bitcoin or cryptocurrency.
[00:09:52]  This happened because of our flawed, unstable, fiat currency model that is finally coming home to roost.
[00:10:02]  30 or 40 years of cheap money, of neoliberal agendas.
[00:10:08]  Soon people are going to have a bigger indictment of the American dollar where they're saying, wait a second, there's nothing backing my currency.
[00:10:17]  There has not been anything backing your currency since Nixon, when he officially closed the door on the gold standard.
[00:10:23]  It's all hope, promise, and that hope and that full faith in credit of the United States is collapsing in real time.
[00:10:33]  It's smoke and mirrors.

=== Regional Banks Keep America Free (06:16) ===

[00:10:35]  Everybody, it is only May, and there have been $110 billion in bank collapses.
[00:10:41]  If this keeps up, we could see hundreds of billions of dollars more in bank collapses.
[00:10:46]  And I am not here as a fear monger.
[00:10:48]  It's the last thing that I want to do.
[00:10:51]  But we're seeing here, regional banks are falling sharply across the board.
[00:10:55]  If there is even a 5% to 10% bank run to some of these regional banks, it will put them under, after, under, after, under.
[00:11:03]  Hey, everybody, you're probably magnesium deficient.
[00:11:06]  That's right.
[00:11:07]  And people message me, Charlie, how do you get sleep?
[00:11:09]  I sleep great because I get the magnesium I get.
[00:11:12]  And look, unlike other magnesium supplements that might be giving you only one or two forms of magnesium, magnesium breakthrough contains all seven forms of magnesium designed to help calm your mind, help you fall asleep, stay asleep, and wake up refreshed.
[00:11:26]  Over 75% of the population is magnesium deficient.
[00:11:30]  And what most people don't know is that even if they're taking a magnesium supplement, they're deficient because they're not getting all seven forms.
[00:11:36]  Not only does magnesium breakthrough help you sleep better, it also calms your mind and allows you to feel grounded and relaxed during the day and especially before bed.
[00:11:43]  You also wake up easier.
[00:11:44]  It's pretty amazing.
[00:11:45]  Most magnesium supplements are proven to be ineffective because they only contain one or two forms of magnesium.
[00:11:52]  Magnesium Breakthrough contains all seven key forms of magnesium to help you have a relaxed response to stressful situations.
[00:11:59]  I take magnesium breakthrough, and you should as well.
[00:12:01]  Do not miss out on the most relaxing sleep ever with magnesium breakthrough.
[00:12:06]  Magnesium is essential to your brain health, your mental health, and your physical health.
[00:12:11]  For an exclusive offer, my listeners go to magbreakthrough.com/slash Kirk and use promo code Kirk10 during checkout to save 10%.
[00:12:18]  For an exclusive offer for my listeners, go to magbreakthrough.com/slash Kirk.
[00:12:22]  Do it now.
[00:12:23]  That is magbreakthrough.com/slash Kirk.
[00:12:26]  Use promo code Kirk10 during checkout to save 10%.
[00:12:31]  You're living through something that is historic and chaotic, and I'm afraid that there is an agenda behind it.
[00:12:36]  We're going to tell you what that is.
[00:12:37]  They're not shy.
[00:12:38]  The great reset crowd have talked about one world currency, centralized bank digital currency.
[00:12:44]  You see, the big banks are not upset about this at all.
[00:12:47]  JP Morgan is a beneficiary.
[00:12:48]  Their stock went up yesterday.
[00:12:50]  Bank of America, Wells Fargo, they're going to benefit from this.
[00:12:54]  Regional banks keep America free.
[00:12:58]  Regional banks are local.
[00:13:02]  They're accountable.
[00:13:03]  They usually have between $500 million and $2 billion in assets.
[00:13:07]  Regional banks are the state's rights equivalent of the American banking system.
[00:13:12]  They're ideologically diverse.
[00:13:14]  They underwrite loans that big banks won't always underwrite.
[00:13:18]  They donate to the local football team.
[00:13:20]  They'll open up an extra hour for you.
[00:13:22]  They'll take a bet on a local entrepreneur.
[00:13:24]  They stay in touch with local businesses.
[00:13:27]  And they're largely, this is the kicker.
[00:13:29]  They're mostly agrarian-based.
[00:13:34]  They underwrite farmers, heavy equipment loans.
[00:13:39]  If you look at the regional banks, yes, they'll do a restaurant, but it's a lot of local rural towns.
[00:13:45]  It's the food supply that is literally underwritten by a lot of these regional banks.
[00:13:51]  And we're seeing the amount of regional banks go down and down and down.
[00:13:54]  That's one of the, that's always been one of the prime directives of Dodd-Frank.
[00:13:58]  You see, Barney Frank, who was a slob, we don't talk about Barney Frank very often.
[00:14:02]  We should.
[00:14:03]  And I believe his name is Chris Dodd.
[00:14:05]  They came out with Dodd-Frank, not as a way to regulate banks, but they wanted to pseudo-nationalize them through shrinking the amount of banks.
[00:14:14]  This is a trend that we are seeing across the board.
[00:14:17]  They want a smaller and smaller selection of companies that you are able to choose from.
[00:14:22]  They want less banks.
[00:14:23]  They want less beverage companies.
[00:14:25]  They want less automobile companies.
[00:14:27]  We have three or four automobile manufacturers, if you count Tesla.
[00:14:31]  In Canada, there are basically five national banks.
[00:14:34]  Our huge array of local banks is not a law of the universe.
[00:14:38]  In fact, if they're able to chip away at the fact that we have a regional bank there and a regional bank there, and you got Wichita General there, and you got First Tampa there, and you got Des Moines regional there, and they could chip it away and chip it away.
[00:14:53]  And either they collapse, they go under, and they get eaten by JP Morgan or Bank of America.
[00:14:59]  That makes America less free.
[00:15:02]  They're local and decentralized, which we talk about repeatedly.
[00:15:05]  Local and decentralized power is a key to liberty.
[00:15:08]  This accumulation of power and money is smaller in a smaller number of banks threatens our very liberty.
[00:15:15]  So when they close these local banks, it's threatening our autonomy.
[00:15:19]  It's threatening your ability to be free of woke capital.
[00:15:24]  And these regional banks cannot always be controlled by DC bureaucrats.
[00:15:29]  This is a direct sabotage campaign to come for mom-and-pop banks to try to conform us into a national banking strategy controlled by a small, select few of banks headquartered out of New York.
[00:15:42]  Bank of America, Wells Fargo, J.P. Morgan.
[00:15:44]  Those are the big three.
[00:15:45]  And if you want to add the asset managers into it, it's BlackRock.
[00:15:48]  And then, of course, you have Goldman Sachs.
[00:15:51]  An underrated aspect of America's success.
[00:15:55]  This is more broadly applicable, which is something that we must just keep on repeating because it's a truth that we do not say often enough.
[00:16:03]  One of the reasons why America has been the most prosperous, generous, entrepreneurial country is decentralization of power.
[00:16:11]  The founding fathers' vision of this has proven to be one of the great liberators of humanity, one of the great guaranteers of flourishing.
[00:16:22]  Authoritarians always want centralized power.
[00:16:25]  Why do we have 50 states with a lot of autonomy?
[00:16:28]  We're very historically unusual.
[00:16:30]  Remember during the lockdowns, Florida was able to remain open.
[00:16:33]  South Dakota was allowed to remain open more than New York because the states created the federal government.
[00:16:39]  The federal government did not create the states.
[00:16:40]  But you see in the banking system right now a continuation, acceleration of the trend that we do not want decentralized.
[00:16:47]  We want uniform and monolithic.
[00:16:50]  They've done this to automobiles.

=== Beyond Bear Stearns And Lehman (04:25) ===

[00:16:51]  They've done this to food.
[00:16:53]  They've done this to pharmaceuticals.
[00:16:54]  One of the last institutions that has not been completely clobbered up by the centralized, by the Leviathan, is our banking system, but it's happening right now.
[00:17:07]  Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
[00:17:08]  Are you tired of feeling burnt out and struggling to stay productive throughout the day?
[00:17:12]  Does brain fog and short-term memory loss keep you from functioning at your best?
[00:17:16]  Well, I did too.
[00:17:16]  And then I was introduced to Strong Cell, more specifically, NADH.
[00:17:20]  If you don't believe me, check it out yourself.
[00:17:22]  What Strong Cell has done is they have a scientific breakthrough in cellular health.
[00:17:26]  They combine NADH, CoQ10, and marine collagen to boost your body's cellular function.
[00:17:31]  I personally take it every day.
[00:17:32]  I'm a big NAD believer.
[00:17:33]  People say, Charlie, how do you keep up the schedule?
[00:17:35]  How do you have mental clarity?
[00:17:37]  Go do some research on NAD.
[00:17:38]  It is a precursor to ATP, which is your body's life source.
[00:17:42]  StrongCell combines NADH with some of the best ingredients and vitamins available.
[00:17:46]  I get approached by many supplement brands, and I tell most of them no.
[00:17:49]  Do yourself a favor and give Strong Cell a try.
[00:17:51]  Visit strongcell.com forward slash Charlie today and use promo code Charlie.
[00:17:56]  That is strongcell.com forward slash Charlie.
[00:17:59]  And don't forget your 20% discount by using promo code Charlie at checkout.
[00:18:02]  Strongsell.com forward slash Charlie.
[00:18:04]  Check it out.
[00:18:05]  Strongcell.com forward slash Charlie.
[00:18:09]  Okay, we're getting hundreds of emails about the banking collapses, and we appreciate that.
[00:18:14]  Please keep them coming.
[00:18:16]  Let me read from the New York Times here.
[00:18:17]  Government regulators seized and sold off the First Republic Bank on Monday, making it the first, the third bank to fail this year after Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank collapsed in March.
[00:18:27]  These banks held a total of $532 billion in assets.
[00:18:31]  That's more than the $526 billion when adjusted for inflation held by the 25 banks that collapsed in the collapse in 2008 at the height of the global financial crisis.
[00:18:41]  So that really begs the question before any further, are we living through a financial crisis that the kind of the new strategies just kind of do ignore it?
[00:18:49]  Like, oh, yeah, we're not in a recession.
[00:18:50]  It's fine.
[00:18:52]  Look, the Treasury Department is very nervous right now, and they should be very nervous.
[00:18:55]  They're trying to downplay this.
[00:18:56]  The system is fully intact.
[00:18:58]  Everything is perfectly fine because they are just a couple percentage points of human behavior changing away from legitimate bank runs.
[00:19:07]  Even JP Morgan should be nervous at this point, but they're not.
[00:19:10]  Jamie Dimon is projecting strength.
[00:19:13]  They're like, oh, everything's fine.
[00:19:14]  It's a great opportunity.
[00:19:18]  The implosion in 2008 was of WAMU, as well as Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns.
[00:19:25]  This is more than Washington Mutual, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers.
[00:19:29]  I hope you guys understand that.
[00:19:32]  Just in the last couple months, we are experiencing a bigger bank collapse than WAMU, Lehman Brothers, and Bear Stearns.
[00:19:46]  You see, banks are failing, and we aren't having new banks grow.
[00:19:50]  The amount of regulation for a new bank to get started is nearly impossible.
[00:19:53]  The barrier to entry is so high that it's just basically pre-existing banks that are grandfathered in, and they want to destroy them all.
[00:20:01]  They want to pick off every regional bank.
[00:20:03]  Regional banks are a threat, and let's just reinforce this, re-emphasize this.
[00:20:08]  Why does America feel like it's in decline?
[00:20:12]  Because we're more centralized, more controlled, more stiff.
[00:20:17]  There's more power in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Washington, D.C., and New York.
[00:20:24]  Those are the three power centers in the country.
[00:20:26]  If you want to add a fourth, it's Los Angeles from cultural and you could say artistic, it's hard to call it art influence.
[00:20:35]  In recent years, fewer banks have gone under.
[00:20:37]  This is the New York Times editorializing this.
[00:20:39]  This is wrong.
[00:20:40]  Thanks in part to stricter regulations that were put in place in the wake of the financial crisis.
[00:20:45]  For Silicon Valley Bank, the last bank to fail was in late 2020.
[00:20:49]  So there hasn't been any bank failings for two years, and you have this massive spike.
[00:20:53]  And I'm afraid we are not done.
[00:20:57]  I'm afraid that we have not seen the end of it.
[00:20:59]  I'm afraid that we're just beginning to see the early stages of widespread bank collapses, potential bank runs, deterioration of our currency, entire portions of wealth being eradicated and destroyed.
[00:21:12]  Almost like a slow-motion demolition of the country.
[00:21:15]  Let's play Cut 39.

=== The Rise Of Delayed Gratification (12:27) ===

[00:21:17]  Great wisdom from the legendary Milton Friedman.
[00:21:20]  Play Cut 39.
[00:21:22]  Inflation is just like alcoholism.
[00:21:24]  In both cases, when you start drinking or when you start printing too much money, the good effects come first.
[00:21:31]  The bad effects only come later.
[00:21:34]  That's why, in both cases, there's a strong temptation to overdo it, to drink too much and to print too much money.
[00:21:41]  When it comes to the cure, it's the other way around.
[00:21:44]  When you stop drinking or when you stop printing money, the bad effects come first, and the good effects only come later.
[00:21:51]  That's why it's so hard to persist with the cure.
[00:21:55]  Why has the West been so great?
[00:21:58]  A lot of reasons.
[00:21:59]  One of them is delayed gratification.
[00:22:04]  We used to be a civilization and a country that believed in delayed gratification.
[00:22:09]  Delayed gratification from how we ate to our exercise to how we raised our children to how we invested to, yes, even how we appropriated money via public policy decisions.
[00:22:23]  Delayed gratification is all about leaving the next generation better off.
[00:22:29]  But the temptation to retire delayed gratification as a core value was irresistible.
[00:22:37]  The leaders in the early 1990s, primarily led by baby boomers, and I know I'm going to get a lot of emails about this.
[00:22:42]  I'm not blaming every baby boomer, but this is a generational fact, okay?
[00:22:47]  There was a decision made in the early 1990s to retire delayed gratification and prioritize instant gratification.
[00:22:56]  And it was hard to resist that temptation.
[00:23:00]  The guard was dropped after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
[00:23:03]  The 90s was the tech boom.
[00:23:05]  It was roaring.
[00:23:06]  It was the best time to be in America.
[00:23:09]  The stock market just kept on going up.
[00:23:11]  Wealth kept on getting created.
[00:23:16]  It seemed like boom times was going on forever.
[00:23:20]  Delayed gratification would have said, hold on a second.
[00:23:23]  We're not going to engage in malinvestment or relaxing monetary standards.
[00:23:27]  And everything changed after 9-11.
[00:23:29]  And again, I'm not blaming every member of the baby boomer generation.
[00:23:32]  Just so happens, every person who made these decisions were largely baby boomers in power.
[00:23:37]  And 2001, 9-11, 2001, and the Rubicon began to get crossed.
[00:23:44]  The Federal Reserve lowered rates after 9-11.
[00:23:47]  Looking back, that was completely unnecessary.
[00:23:51]  It was strictly a way to try to rebuild people's confidence in a system.
[00:23:56]  I believe this was done by Alan Greenspan called the Greenspan put.
[00:24:01]  I could be wrong, but Alan Greenspan, I believe, was chairman of the Federal Reserve in 2001 and lowered interest rates after 9-11.
[00:24:10]  Now, 9-11 was awful and it was horrible, and it did destroy actual infrastructure.
[00:24:15]  But was it really necessary to make money cheaper just because people's confidence was temporarily shaken after a terrorist attack?
[00:24:25]  No, what Greenspan started was a new philosophy of the Federal Reserve, which is that the Fed can lower rates if enough people get nervous.
[00:24:38]  After Alan Greenspan did that, we saw the low rates stay.
[00:24:43]  We also saw the proliferation of the Community Reinvestment Act, and eventually that all led to the 2008 financial crisis.
[00:24:52]  And then what did we do after?
[00:24:55]  What did Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner and Hank Paulson do post-2008 financial crisis?
[00:25:01]  We lowered rates.
[00:25:03]  Now, what does it mean to lower rates?
[00:25:05]  It means you make money cheaper.
[00:25:07]  Lower rates, as Milton Friedman just said, is alcoholism.
[00:25:11]  It gets you into a drunken stupor.
[00:25:14]  And we kept them low for ages.
[00:25:15]  And then what did we do again?
[00:25:18]  When the Chinese coronavirus happened, we further lowered rates where we were having 2.8 to 3.1% interest rates.
[00:25:27]  Why?
[00:25:28]  Because people got nervous.
[00:25:30]  So basically, Federal Reserve interest rates post-Greenspan in 2001 became Xanax for the financial markets.
[00:25:41]  You get a little nervous, your thoughts start getting a little out of control.
[00:25:46]  Interest rates became a way to kind of cool the jets a little bit.
[00:25:50]  Just take a little volume.
[00:25:51]  Just cool out.
[00:25:52]  We're just going to turn down the interest rates.
[00:25:54]  But anytime you manipulate interest rates, it comes with a serious, catastrophic, and to your society and economy, deathly cost.
[00:26:05]  And yeah, a lot of people got rich in 2020 and 2021.
[00:26:09]  For those of you that bought real estate and bought homes and actually leaned into low interest rates, your asset prices are up major, but things are not more valuable.
[00:26:18]  They are just priced higher because there's more dollar bills.
[00:26:22]  When you have more dollar bills, it's not necessarily more wealth is created.
[00:26:26]  It's just that asset prices go up.
[00:26:28]  And you know who's been crushed?
[00:26:29]  The muscular class and the middle class.
[00:26:32]  You see, Greenspan changed everything because the Federal Reserve could kind of just be almost used as a thermometer, not a thermometer, a thermostat.
[00:26:43]  Get a little bit hotter, a little bit colder, a little bit hotter, a little bit colder.
[00:26:48]  Milton Friedman continues explaining what our banking system actually is.
[00:26:55]  Play Cut 40.
[00:26:57]  You may think that when you take some cash to a bank and deposit it, the bank takes that money and sticks it in a vault somewhere to wait until you need it again to turn it back over to you.
[00:27:09]  The bank does no such thing.
[00:27:10]  It immediately takes a large part of what you put in and lends it out to somebody else.
[00:27:14]  The result is that if all depositors at all the banks tried all at once to convert their deposits into cash, there wouldn't be anything like enough cash in the banks of the country to meet their demands.
[00:27:27]  In order to prevent such an outcome, in order to cut shorter run, it's necessary to have some way either to stop people from asking for it or to have some additional source from which cash can be obtained.
[00:27:42]  That was intended to be the purpose of the Federal Reserve System.
[00:27:45]  It was to provide the additional cash.
[00:27:48]  It was to provide the additional cash in the need of a bank run.
[00:27:53]  The Greenspan put was in 1987.
[00:27:56]  He also lowered rates with the stock market decline after 2001, which was even more significant and completely and totally unnecessary.
[00:28:04]  And it set in motion, a cause set in motion, a cause and effect that we are now living through.
[00:28:12]  Multiple decades of economic malfeasance, multiple decades of financial incompetency, or was it incompetency?
[00:28:22]  That's the question.
[00:28:24]  Are we living through the culmination of error?
[00:28:29]  Or are we living through the culmination of design?
[00:28:37]  How often do you hear, I'll pay for it later?
[00:28:39]  I mean, you can finance a boat, you can finance your medical bills, which is understandable.
[00:28:45]  You can finance anything.
[00:28:47]  That's not delayed gratification.
[00:28:49]  That's instant gratification.
[00:28:51]  I want the dopamine rush.
[00:28:53]  I want the easier life, max out my credit cards, and we're all dead in the long run, as John Maynard Keynes would say.
[00:29:00]  Our whole society embraced a cultural rot.
[00:29:06]  The Federal Reserve did.
[00:29:08]  Our economists did.
[00:29:10]  And the cultural rot was no more short-term pain, no more short-term pain, period.
[00:29:17]  You see, raising interest rates, it's like taking your cough medicine.
[00:29:21]  It's kind of awful, but it's necessary at times.
[00:29:25]  Or restricting the money supply or cutting spending.
[00:29:28]  No, no, no.
[00:29:28]  You can't tell people that you very well might need to make adjustments to certain programs.
[00:29:34]  I mean, I'll give you an example.
[00:29:36]  If you even suggest that future retirees of Social Security have to have the age raised slightly, you have a revolt on your hands.
[00:29:46]  People do not want to hear that.
[00:29:48]  Look at what's happening in Paris, right?
[00:29:50]  I mean, revolt, literally, revolts on the streets because of an appropriate move by Macron to raise their retirement age.
[00:29:58]  It's just totally out of control.
[00:30:00]  Short-term pain is not just important.
[00:30:04]  It is necessary.
[00:30:07]  Delayed gratification built the West.
[00:30:09]  I am going to live not the ideal life for myself, but I love my kids so much.
[00:30:14]  I'm going to do what is necessary.
[00:30:16]  We don't balance our federal budgets.
[00:30:18]  We don't balance our home budgets.
[00:30:19]  It's all about.
[00:30:22]  It's about me.
[00:30:24]  I'm the most important.
[00:30:25]  It is the rise of the modern self.
[00:30:28]  I am the center of the universe, the galaxy.
[00:30:31]  I demand the stock market goes up.
[00:30:34]  I demand I have a second home.
[00:30:36]  I demand that I have a good golf game.
[00:30:38]  It is the economic catastrophe we are living through.
[00:30:42]  Yes, has globalist World Economic Forum implications that I'll talk about.
[00:30:45]  But I think most of this can be explained away by just widespread, unchecked narcissism.
[00:30:53]  That's too bad because a country rooted in duty, honor, and obligation would balance its budget and not lower interest rates and not just care about the instant sugar high.
[00:31:05]  What we have done over the last 30 or 40 years is we have had a diet of Twizzlers, Skittles, MMs, whiskey, and rum.
[00:31:14]  And we wonder why we're a little hungover.
[00:31:18]  Play cut 38.
[00:31:20]  Now, the first step toward understanding the cause of inflation is to recognize that it is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.
[00:31:33]  It's always and everywhere a result of too much money, of a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than an output.
[00:31:44]  Moreover, in the modern era, the important next step is to recognize that today governments control the quantity of money so that as a result, inflation in the United States is made in Washington and nowhere else.
[00:32:05]  It's made in Washington and nowhere else.
[00:32:07]  Our leaders, the people in charge in both political parties, they just increased the guzzle.
[00:32:13]  Ah, who cares?
[00:32:14]  We're all dead in the long run.
[00:32:16]  We'll figure it out.
[00:32:17]  Lower the rates, increase the money supply.
[00:32:19]  What's the worst that could happen?
[00:32:21]  Understand the whole neoliberal project of invading the world and supporting the war in Ukraine and importing products that we don't need.
[00:32:29]  It's all based in delayed gratification.
[00:32:31]  I mean, instant gratification, not delayed gratification.
[00:32:34]  America First, at its best, is a movement that we care what happens when we die.
[00:32:45]  We care what happens beyond my life.
[00:32:48]  America First is about the restoration, not just the restoration, but the preservation that my children and my grandchildren, in fact, that is in the preamble of the United States Constitution, posterity.
[00:33:03]  And both political parties just continue to want to get drunk at the guzzle of cheap money.
[00:33:09]  And yes, now you're seeing globalist forces and Jamie Dimon come and sweep in and buy up these regional banks.
[00:33:14]  The cheap money is not ending anytime soon, but we did this to ourselves.
[00:33:19]  And you're living through something dramatic.
[00:33:22]  And our leaders, more importantly, did it to us because many of you did delayed gratification over the last couple of decades, but your leader certainly didn't.
[00:33:31]  Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
[00:33:32]  Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:33:35]  Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.
[00:33:40]  For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.