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Oct. 13, 2022 - David Icke
23:09
Investor & Author of Planet Ponzi Mitch Feierstein joins Right Now
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This week on Right Now, investor, hedge fund manager and author of Planet Ponzi, Mitch
Feierstein joins us to break down the financial crisis and how it's just a Ponzi scheme that
was designed to fail.
We'll also be talking about Covid and Ukraine and what they've meant for people's wallets.
Watch the full episode on Friday at 7pm UK by starting a free 7 day trial at Iconic.com
Iconic.com.
Iconic.com.
so so
so Hello and welcome to right now home
Who had Sunderland on their social credit score bingo?
Not me.
Sunderland City Council says go smarter, go active to earn rewards.
Their website reads, the City Council has teamed up with Better Points, an app that tracks your travel movements via GPS using your smartphone and rewards you with points for using more sustainable modes of transport like walking, cycling, and using public transport.
Points can then be exchanged for rewards such as discounts in local shops, free coffee vouchers or charity donations.
Now some of you will think, well I don't see a problem with that.
But remember these things never start how they're designed to end.
Rewards for climate compliance will quickly become penalties for climate non-compliance.
The carrot of rewards is just there to get you to download the app.
Now, in a similar bait-and-switch, the sales pitch of equality is only ever a thin layer of paint.
The National Education Union proposes a change in the definition of transphobia to include the discussion of sex-based women's rights.
Now, I'm not happy with the deletion of women's rights, but soon you won't even be able to talk about them.
They'll become an extremist subject.
They're only ever discussed by the same dangerous subversives that are calling for de-escalation and peaceful solutions in Ukraine.
Talking of which, first the Nord Stream pipelines and now the Kursh Bridge that links Russia to Crimea has been destroyed.
The Grey Zone reports that they obtained an April 2022 British intelligence presentation hashing out an elaborate scheme to blow up Crimea's Kursh Bridge with the involvement of specially trained Ukrainian soldiers.
As expected, Zelensky's performed his usual duet with Shaggy on both occasions.
It wasn't me.
The guy calls for NATO to use pre-emptive strikes against Russia and crickets of condemnation from world leaders and media.
Now, any pre-emptive strike like this would lead to all-out nuclear war, the destruction of the planet, to the point where all that would survive would be McDonald's, Big Macs and 9-11 hijacker passports.
And yet, no one seems concerned about this.
Is that TV on standby?
You're not using a bag for life.
You don't care about the planet.
There's no rewards for him.
No, no, no.
Now go and tell the eco-fascists to throw some more milk on the floor.
That will help us all during a cost of not dying crisis.
When these trust fund babies walk into a food bank and then toss milk, eggs, and meat on the floor, rather than doing it in a middle-class postcode waitress with a camera crew in tow for a photo op, I'll believe they're genuine about their cause.
Our next guest this evening is the author of a book called Planet Ponzi, How Politicians and Bankers Stole Your Future, What Happens Next and How You Can Survive.
Mitch Feierstein is a highly successful hedge fund manager and CEO of the Glacier Environmental Fund Limited.
Prior to this, he was a senior portfolio manager of Chain Carbon Fund, part of one of the largest and best respected hedge fund groups operating in Europe.
It's a pleasure to welcome Mitch onto the show.
In Planet Ponzi, you say that the world is now approaching the final death rattle of the greatest Ponzi scheme in history.
Can you explain what you mean by that?
Well, what's been going on for the past decade has been the central banks have printed enormous amounts of money, you know, over probably a hundred trillion dollars in notional amount and guarantees for different credits.
So what we have is a massive amount of debt Credit is not necessarily a bad thing if it's used for productivity and to create products and create goods and services, but a lot of the debt has been used for financialization.
So people have been making money with financial instruments, which they were not intended to, and it's created massive amounts of leverage in the system.
Which now, we didn't learn anything from the credit crisis in 2000, the dot-com crash.
We didn't learn anything from the housing crisis.
And we certainly haven't learned anything from the credit crisis, except how to print more money.
And now COVID is the latest example of printing more money.
So the governments have We've created so much debt that it's almost impossible for a lot of the governments to pay it back.
So basically what we've had for the past decade, we've had central banks and governments printing inordinate amounts of money, over a hundred trillion dollars worth of debt and guarantees for different institutions So what's happened now is the Ponzi scheme is the amount of government debt and the total amount of debt in the system is overwhelming.
So as interest rates go up, we're going to have a big problem.
And the lenders, the corporate lenders in the triple B category and the subprime or actually junk markets will default because that's in the trillions of dollars and the central banks will have Problems servicing the debt as interest rates go higher.
So we've created a very bad negative feedback loop, which is now made the next crisis unavoidable because the bankers have taken this crazy idea and the central bankers that MMT, modern monetary theory, which is magic money tree, actually works and it doesn't.
So, you know, you can never taper a Ponzi scheme and this is the biggest Ponzi What does it mean for kind of regular people for want of a better phrase because when people hear kind of you know the banks or you know corporate this or financial that people kind of zone out and oh that's that's something that the billionaires deal with you know I just kind of just get on with my sort of three meals a day and get on with my life but but what does this collapse mean for regular people?
Well, it impacts everything.
I mean, it impacts the supply chains, it impacts supply and demand of goods and services, so it impacts jobs, it impacts interest rates, your mortgage, your food costs.
As you're seeing now, part of this debt tsunami that we're having is causing massive inflation.
The inflation rate, the real rate of inflation, is probably close to 20%.
But the government, of course, because they've got to make payments on universal credit or what have you, understates the actual inflation rate because it makes their payments lower.
And it also helps the pension, the underfunded pension liabilities that they have to cover that.
So it impacts the amount that you're going to make on your pensions, and it impacts The actual food that you put on your table at the end of the day, because as you've seen, the prices have gone up exponentially for people to feed their families and put clothes on their children, send their children to school, drive their cars, and it impacts every aspect of life because it filters down.
And it's the society's most vulnerable that get impacted the most by the excessive debt, credit, and leverage in the system.
So what the banks have been doing, and what governments have been doing, is it basically just kicking the can down the road, essentially?
Right, well it's been pray and delay, extend and pretend, and just let it collapse on somebody else's shift.
I mean, this has been going on for probably A good 15 years, and now we've hit pretty much the end of the road.
So I don't know.
Every time they have a crisis, the amount of these bailouts for billionaires or bailouts for bankers gets exponentially bigger, bigger and bigger.
And now we've reached a point where, you know, basically it's too big to fail is too big to jail and too big to bail.
And in my world, or what I've been arguing in the book is that's too big to exist.
Now we don't need to to have new regulations or implement or create new laws,
what we need is enforcement of existing regulations and laws that are applicable to everyone.
But unfortunately, there are certain countries in the world that have one rule for me and another for thee.
And we're seeing this and people are getting fed up and tired now with having to listen to politicians that speak out of one side of their mouth to get elected.
And then once they get in, they decide to do whatever they want.
Now this is a deterioration in society.
We've seen in the past three years, since that election or whatever that was in America with 81 million votes, we've seen a deterioration of society because people are
getting, people understand that there are systemic issues and problems that are not being
addressed in the economy and in the social aspect of life and it seems like the governments are all
trying to get people to be tribal and divided rather than to unify against this pure evil and the
amounts of lies that we have coming from the people who we elect to represent us and in fact
represent themselves in big pharmaceutical and other corporations for an extra pay to play as it were.
Oh absolutely, absolutely.
And it's the same the world over, it seems.
What's going on in America, there's nothing really different here.
I mean, here in the UK, we've got a prime minister that nobody elected, and people just seem absolutely fine with that.
What do you think will happen in the end?
If people get to a point of such desperation, I've always thought my attitude was the person I wouldn't want to mess with is the person that's got nothing left to lose and all of a sudden you're going to have massive swathes of the population with literally nothing left to lose.
Do you think that the kind of the powers that be will throw some low-level politicians under the bus or some bankers under the bus to kind of try and appease the masses?
Well, you know, I've been based in the UK for probably the last 22 years, so I'm here more than I'm in the U.S.
or the U.S.S.A., but I go back to the U.S.S.A.
fairly often.
Do I think people will get thrown under the bus?
I think they look to find some lower level people, but this isn't, this is, you know, just another diversion.
Like COVID was a diversion.
I don't know if you're allowed to say that word even.
Anybody who, Now disputes, the official narrative becomes smeared.
They become censored.
I mean, I had 50,000 followers on LinkedIn and I was taken off LinkedIn with no notice.
And I don't, I don't know why I was, I mean, some of my articles that I had written for a couple of publications, maybe people disagreed with them, but there were valid points that I made on the, you know, economic background or geopolitical situation that's going on in the world.
So when you have, A world where people aren't entitled to give educated or authoritative opinions and you have groupthink that's dictated by people masquerading as journalists who are in fact political operatives that just spew a narrative out.
Of course, you're going to have seeds of discord within society, but what's happened in America as an The Department of Justice, the FBI, the NSA, and the CIA, and they've actually deployed these government law enforcement agencies against political enemies.
I mean, this was the stuff that third world banana republics were made out of, you know, and we're not even getting into the conspiracy theories that turned out to be absolute truth.
So, I mean, when you have the government lying, People are poor.
People are cold.
People are hungry.
Of course, you're going to have a bad situation that will end badly.
Talking of conspiracy theories, I remember when the Great Reset was a conspiracy theory, even though you could buy it on Amazon at that point, but people didn't want to accept it because they didn't want to know the idea that actually this could be planned, like actually these things aren't happening naturally, these aren't mistakes and misjudgments, this is actually planned.
So how does this kind of the planet Ponzi and what's going on, how does that tie into the Great Reset in your view?
Well, if you look at what's going on for, take for example, what's happening with Sterling and this is everybody in the UK.
I mean, Sterling has dropped close to, you know, over 20% in the last year from the peak, right?
So if you look at Sterling from 2008, you used to have, it was 2.08.
So you'd get like over $2 for $1 of Sterling.
was 2.08, so you'd get like over $2 for $1 of sterling.
So now it's dropped to almost $1 for one pound.
So that's your purchasing power has diminished by.
Okay, along with inflation of all goods and services and prices have gone up.
But the real problem that we're looking at here is that people's real wages, their real wages, when you inflation adjust, have been stagnant since 1980.
So this is where you have the fundamental disconnect.
And this is where people need to stand up and figure out, well look, I've voted for these people and every time they deceive me.
So I think people are in the process of waking up and saying, look, we need some change.
We need real change.
We don't need three word soundbites like get Brexit done.
I mean, where is that oven ready Brexit deal that never happened?
I mean, that never got done.
And no matter what these guys say, they keep getting elected and reelected.
It's kind of like Stockholm syndrome.
I mean, and people will just vote for the red and the blue.
Labor.
Tories, Labour Tories, Labour Tories.
But you know, you're still getting the same result no matter who you vote for.
So it's like bait and switch Boris.
I mean, he came up and promised everything.
I mean, he said, look, I'm not going to extend Brexit.
I'd rather die in a ditch first.
Did he die in a ditch?
No.
He was drinking champagne during lockdowns and laughing at everybody.
That's exactly what happened.
So, you know, should we be outraged by that?
Probably not.
Not the drinking episode, but the dishonesty and inability to have moral authority to lead us, when you have one rule for thee and another for me, leads to societal unrest.
And if you can't trust the government or the people that you elect, you know, how can we move forward as a society?
I think that that's what we need.
We need leadership.
We've got a lack of leadership, we've got failure by the central banks, and we've got no way forward because we've got lunatics running the asylum.
Absolutely.
The question no one ever asked as well with Boris and his champagne drinking was why was it during this period of time where everyone was locked down and they had access to all the best scientists, apparently, and all the best data, they weren't worried about it.
That's the question I never saw asked by the mainstream media, which was the biggest question for me.
In terms of COVID, you know, Ukraine, climate change, You mentioned obviously COVID as being a distraction.
Do you feel as well that they're kind of, they can, yes, they're a distraction, absolutely, but they can also become an excuse in the sense of, I'll accept, you know, we've been asked to accept kind of being cold for Zelensky basically in a way, you know, we will just kind of go, well, I'd rather be a bit cold for a few months than die in a nuclear war.
So yeah, yeah, you just, you just take some, some more of my money.
Well, look, the problem with Ukraine is Ukraine is the most corrupt country in Europe, and we're not getting the true story.
I mean, Ukraine has absolutely zero path to victory in this conflict with Russia.
Zero.
And I don't say that lightly, but there is very few things that you can say there's zero probability of it happening.
Now, this in February and January and December, Russia had a red line.
They said, look, we don't want an expansion of NATO and we don't want missiles on our borders.
And if Ukraine puts missiles on our borders, that's a red line.
And if they join NATO, that's a red line.
So the West decided to ignore that.
I mean, if they had made a compromise and had a diplomatic solution, then we wouldn't be in this situation.
And I'm sure probably 80% of the people who are watching this and the people in the UK would have not voted to go to war and spend five billion pounds on this unnecessary conflict that we have now that could lead to a potential nuclear event.
Not only that, but I think that the probability now of Ratcheting down the rhetoric to the extent that we can get out of this very quickly, I think, has diminished greatly since we've had, you know, the United States jumping in, and then we've had a terrorist, two terrorist attacks on the civilization by blowing up a pipeline, and then we had the bridge that blew up on Saturday.
So, I mean, these are things that obviously people suspect who did it and who was behind it because of the motivations behind it, but nobody wants to say it
because everybody's afraid to get censored, to get shunned, to get smeared by the media, oh you're a
Putin sympathizer. Look, I don't agree with any type of war whatsoever, but
everybody should take a critical, be able to have a critical analysis of something based on reason and fact,
not on woke, not on identity politics, not on, you know, this is what I want to do and seek to
signal virtue.
But, you know, where is our money going?
How is it being spent?
And where's the audit trail?
And they can't provide any of that.
You know, they've got Azov Battalion, which is a good part of the Ukrainian troops, and there's been no real talk about that.
But if you look at why Israel hasn't really funded much of Ukraine, I mean, there are actual Nazis in the Ukrainian army.
So I mean, there's a lot of issues that nobody wants to deal with in the media.
The same is going with COVID.
But these are convenient.
Russia, blame Russia, blame COVID.
Blame Ukraine.
But don't look at the politicians taking pay-to-play, you know, making money for themselves and screwing the public.
Because they are, at the end of the day, they're responsible for what's going on right now.
And are they looking out for people or themselves?
That's the question that needs to be asked, really.
See, talking sense like that is what gets you kicked off LinkedIn, Mitch.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, you got kicked off a wrong thing, I think.
But thank you so much for talking to us, and talking sense, where actually there's not that much at the moment.
You know, it's very interesting you speak about Ukraine in that way, because particularly in the mainstream, no one's talking about de-escalation, no one's talking about peace.
It's all very much stoking the fire of war, and people seem to forget exactly what war means.
It doesn't mean Anything positive for anyone?
Yeah, there are no winners.
There are no winners, and especially with a nuclear war.
So, you know, what has happened here?
So now we have basically the energy supply in a tight market has cut out one of the major participants.
Now, this is only the beginning of this, because now if you think You know, whoever blew up that pipeline, it wasn't Russia.
I mean, I can say that with 95% certainty.
Because why would somebody blow up their own pipeline when they can just simply shut it off?
I mean, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
But then the narratives get out there, and if you contradict the narrative, You're a Russian spy, you know, you're this, you're that, you know, it's the whole thing with your, before it was you're racist, you're homophobic, you're transphobic, you're this, you're that, you're that, but this is the, you know, the left has become, unfortunately, the new fascist front, whereas, you know, you're not entitled to have an opinion unless it's groupthink, and, you know, this is so Orwellian right now, it's happening, and it all comes down to dollars and cents.
That's what you've got to think about.
Who has the motivation?
Who has the financial motivation?
And what are they trying to move forward?
I mean, it's the same thing with the Bank of England that's going on right now.
I mean, in saying that they're going to crash the bond market and the currency.
I mean, this is ridiculous.
I don't understand what Andrew Bailey's plan is or why he's doing this to the markets, but it's going to impact everyone.
And this is the important corollary that everybody needs to see that nobody's talking about on the main news channels.
You need to see how the economics behind everything are really driving the policies.
And it's insidious the way that things are happening.
But everything is related.
Everything is related.
Not a conspiracy theory, it's actual fact.
And so if you look at where the numbers are of all the money, you'll figure out what's going on or get a better picture as to what's going on.
Because, you know, if you listen to the President of the United States, he changes his mind every second.
I mean, I don't think we've ever had a president that has dementia that's obviously struggling to even put a sentence together.
I mean, and it's incredible that nobody in the media questions him.
We've got no critical thinking going on in the media.
All we have is groupthink and political advocates pushing a narrative on behalf of the Five Eyes intelligence programs.
Absolutely.
And that's why it's so important what you're doing, speaking out as someone with your background and credibility, and that's great.
We appreciate that, Mitch, and thank you so much for talking to us.
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