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Jan. 24, 2025 - The David Knight Show
53:41
Gold, Crypto, and Chaos: Trump's Impact on Economy, AI, and Global Conflicts
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All right, joining us now is Gerald Salenti of Trends Journal.
And, of course, if you go to Trends Journal and use the code NIGHT, you can save 10% off.
And I've really been anxious to talk to Gerald.
We weren't able to do it in our last scheduled one.
So this is the first time we've had Gerald on in 2025. And, of course, he's published his predictions for next year, but I wanted to talk to him about those and what he sees coming up in 2025. Last year he said gold is going to be the year of gold, and he was spot on with that.
Thank you for joining us, Gerald.
Well, thanks for having me on.
And, again, it's always great being on with you.
And there's a whole different time.
The Trump presidency, I wouldn't call him a president, I would call him King Trump.
Caesar, he's a Kaiser, yeah.
No, this guy's going to do everything he wants, any way he wants, any time he wants.
And that's the reality of it all.
That's what I was just saying.
I said, you know, I don't understand people cheering that.
I don't want to have a government that's run by executive order.
What happens when the next guy gets in?
I said, you know, we've crossed the Rubicon.
And the right is cheering this.
They love the fact that he's ordering everybody around.
He's going to bully other countries and all the rest of this stuff.
That's not a winning formula.
And we don't want to be governed that way.
It's no different with the other guy.
Yeah.
It's no different.
He's just doing it differently.
That's all.
The people that believe in one side believe in their side.
The other people that believe in the other side believe in their side.
That's right.
I'm telling you, the whole game's changed.
By the way, you were talking before about this transgender stuff and all of that.
We're changing the name of the Trans Journal to the Trans Journal.
I'm sure don't love that.
Well, that was last year.
That was 2024 to do the Trans Journal.
I mean, you were talking about it before I got on the air.
And then the other thing, too, you were talking about TikTok.
I am permanently banned from TikTok.
What'd you do?
We put up a clip where I said that...
Trump said he was going to end the Ukraine war in 24 hours.
And then he said, after he got elected, I'm going to end that war.
That war's going to end before I get into office.
Yeah, that's right.
The war's still going on.
That's right.
So we said, Ukraine's going to do something to escalate this.
Something like a false flag attack, like bombing a nuclear power plant, to get the people to support.
Ukraine.
That's it.
That's all we said.
We put the clip up of one of my podcasts, and boom, I'm blacklisted.
Wow, that's amazing.
So you think that's because they're trying to curry favor with Trump?
I don't know, but as you know, I used to be on Alex Jones every week for years.
I used to do a host an hour show.
They haven't had me on since October.
Really?
Wow.
Yep.
And I think it's because I won't suck up to Trump or bow down to Musk.
That's right.
And I only call it like it is.
There are positive things that I like that Trump is doing.
I happen to be, all my libertarian friends, and Judge Napolitano being one of them, they're all opposed to the tariffs.
I totally support them.
You do?
Okay.
Yeah.
That's one of the things I wanted to ask you about, because that's a key part of what he's doing.
I see it as just another tax that's being added without taking away the income tax.
But I agree that, you know, and I've talked about it many times, Thomas Jefferson said, That he had eliminated all these useful offices in his second inaugural address.
He said in the first term, we eliminated all these useless offices, and so we've now eliminated all internal taxes so that no one knows the taxman from the federal government, right?
No farmer, no laborer, no mechanic.
And so I think that that's a better system.
I think any tax is a better system than the income tax.
But what I'm concerned about is winding up with both of them, which is what my concern is with this.
Again, I'm just saying if he does what he says.
I agree with the tariffs because I'm up here in Kingston, and you've been here.
You used to have Gantt shirt factories up here.
All over, all over.
Factories everywhere.
Once upon a time, there was no such thing as rust belts.
It used to be made in America.
And again, I'm a trend forecaster.
I only look at facts.
When all things are connected, as we say in trend research, An opportunity misses those who view the world through the eyes of their profession.
So let's talk about tariffs and having it made in America.
Let's go to the Ukraine war.
Began on February 24th, 2022. What did that little stupid, out of his mind, slimeball Biden, we're going to put sanctions on Russia and Putin's going to pay the price.
Remember that?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
That's right.
And what happened?
All those companies from Europe and the United States pulled out of Russia.
We said, this isn't going to hurt Russia at all.
As a matter of fact, it's going to help them.
They're going to become a self-sufficient economy.
They have all the human and natural resources that they need.
And that's exactly what happened.
Yeah.
That's right.
So, going back to the United States, we have all the human and natural resources we need to be self-sufficient.
We don't need globalization.
Here, you and I, I mean, I'm older than you, I grew up during the Vietnam War.
Those dirty commies, we don't stop them, they're going to take over all of Asia, and those dominoes are going to keep falling, and before you know it, they'll hit the shores of California.
I'm not making that up.
Yeah, I know.
Right?
I remember that even though I was a little bit younger, I remember that.
We import other than from China, our second biggest importer of clothing and shoes and furniture comes from those dirty commies that's still there in Vietnam.
Yeah, that's right.
All these corporations are interested in making money.
That's all they want to do.
Hey, what does Trump have in there?
All the billionaires.
And everybody listening, get this in your head.
You have no right to talk.
You have no right to meet with the leaders unless you got a lot of money.
Kaboosh?
Yeah, that's right.
Yep.
You don't have a million dollars to donate to the inauguration?
Get the hell out of here!
That's the America today.
So going back to Trump, the tariffs, if they go into place and America becomes, again, I want it made in America.
I have plates over here for my ad Zidzi, may she rest in peace.
Made in Syracuse, right north of us.
Things used to be made all over.
All over.
Everywhere.
They were manufacturing.
Bring it back.
The jobs that we have stink.
And that's why they wanted all the cheap labor, because you go to Target, you go to Marshalls, you go to Coles, you go to Lowe's.
Help wanted, help wanted, help wanted, help wanted.
Full-time, part-time, because we're paying you nothing.
And we control everything.
We've done away with mom-and-pop businesses, or transgender businesses, too.
You've got to only be a chain.
So now, if he imposes these tariffs and brings back manufacturing, it could be a very positive element for America.
If he lives by his word, he wants to rename that mountain the McKinley Mountain in Alaska.
There were no income tax when McKinley was president.
The government got the money through tariffs.
The income tax is brought to us by a murderous bastard, may he rot in hell, who gave us World War I, federal income tax, the Federal Reserve, and the IRS, Woodrow Wilson.
That's right.
Yeah, I agree.
The income tax and the Federal Reserve and the open borders for trade and everything, that is all one package.
And that was a massive sea change from where we were.
And I agree with that vision, and I've talked about it even before, you know, Trump was talking about it, that, you know, that would be a much better way for us to operate, get rid of the IRS. My problem is, is that he's talking about how he's going to make the tax cuts permanent.
Well, that means he's going to make the income tax permanent.
And, you know, all the rest of the things, he's rearranging the deck chairs, he's playing a little bit of...
Of a demagoguery, I think, in terms of telling people, well, all the taxes will be paid by the other people.
All of the tariffs are going to be paid by us.
And so it's going to be a second form of taxation because you're going to see the price of goods go up.
And a lot of times, and I imagine how it's going to work, I was talking about with Canada, you know, the traffic going across the Ambassador Bridge.
When they're making auto parts, these things are going to be going back from Canada to the U.S., then back from the U.S. to Canada and so forth.
The same thing with Mexico.
Every time it passes, it's going to be like a VAT tax.
And I think the key thing that they're looking at it from is not even from a...
From an economic standpoint, I think Trump sees the tariffs as a weapon, as a stick, for his geopolitical purposes.
He's threatening sanctions and tariffs on Russia, just like Biden did.
And I've pointed out how that backfired, how he had a windfall.
Yeah, he had a windfall in the oil stuff.
They sanctioned his oil, and he had a windfall.
He said, hey, pay me in gold, and as the price of oil shoots up, pay me in gold, and I'll give you a big discount.
And he made way more.
Again, I'm just saying, if he does it, and it's done the proper way, no, you won't be importing him from Mexico.
And again, you can start with what really began under Nixon.
I think that was the worst of it.
And then Reagan, and then...
Clinton was the worst of the worst with NAFTA, bringing China into the World Trade Organization.
It's going to take time, but if he does it and the products are made in America, we could become a self-sufficient economy.
Again, bringing that prosciutto from Italy and that fine wine from France, I'm all in favor of that.
Oh, I agree.
We have the other products made in America.
Well, you know, the thing, though, is that he could go a long way towards helping America build up.
Just in family farms, like I was talking about yesterday.
Farms are going out of business by the hundreds.
Independent farms.
And what's driving them out of business...
It's not so much foreign competition as it is regulation.
And the fact that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is forcing them to use the meat processing plants, and two of them are gigantic American corporations, and the other two are foreign-owned corporations, JBS out of Brazil and others.
So, you know, it's that type of thing that's creating kind of a monopoly, an oligarchy, via regulation.
Now, if he does deregulation, that'd be far more effective than adding another layer of taxes, I think.
Hopefully somebody will recognize what is really happening with it, but even something as basic as making our own food can be strangled not by necessarily foreign competition, but by domestic...
And, you know, the way they rated this Amish farmer and that type of thing.
And so they've turned the ranchers into basically sharecroppers for these gigantic meat processing places.
That's a key part of this.
that is that's why i said i think that really his his tariffs are more of a geopolitical uh approach really than a you know let's make america first or uh let's let's do something that's going to help us economically uh it's going to require massive deregulation i hope he does that maybe he will because i think he's going to want to look good for the first couple of years at least i don't know that's he's against the regulation he says
And again, by the way, in my book, Trends 2000, which was an international bestseller, I wrote about how the farms were being taken over by the bigs.
Back then.
It was 1996 I wrote this book.
They started it in the 50s.
It really started, the bigs started taking over everything in the farming business.
And it just kept getting worse and worse.
But you're talking about the regulations.
Look what's going on.
Again, we look at the world.
Germany, the third largest economy in the world.
It's in recession.
The bureaucracy in Europe is at the worst.
I spent a lot of time in Italy.
I can't stand it anymore.
It's one of the most bureaucratic places on earth.
I'm telling you, I got friends that live there.
They can't do anything.
You can't cut down that tree.
You can't do this.
You can't do that.
You can't do that.
On and on and on and on and on.
The bureaucracy is terrible.
I believe, again, I am no...
As a trend forecaster, it's not what you like, what you want, what you wish for.
It's what is.
So only look at the facts.
We're talking about the positive things, I think, about Trump.
The negative things.
And how about what he's doing over there in Israel?
That's right.
Oh, the people that Biden put sanctions on, what they call settlers in the West Bank, Trump took them off.
And look what they're doing now in the West Bank.
Oh, they only killed about...
30 people in the last two days, robbing, stealing, and they're not settlers, they're land stealers.
And Trump, when he talked about what was going on in Gaza, he said, it's kind of like a demolition, you know, that place could be a real vacation resort or something, you know, essentially like that.
His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, we wrote about in the Trends Journal back in 2024, in March, when he spoke at Harvard University.
Saying that this is very valuable waterfront property and that the Palestinians should be moved out into the Negev Desert.
All right?
Yeah.
So what I'm saying is, again, just looking at what I said, what I think is a positive and a negative.
And they're not settlers.
They're in violation of the Geneva Convention and Article 242 of the United Nations.
They're stealing land.
Yeah.
I agree.
So anyway, so I'm just saying the things I agree.
And again, if I said to you, listen, I'm going to end that Ukraine war in 24 hours.
You vote for me.
And I didn't do it.
You'd say, Salenti, you promised to do this.
How come you didn't do it?
Yeah.
Where's the outrage?
That's right.
That's right.
Yeah, there's one side that doesn't want the war to end, and the side that said that they wanted the war to end isn't going to call him out on it.
He kind of walked that back a little bit before he became president.
He said, well, it might take a few months now, you know.
First it was going to be before I even become president.
I'm going to have that settled, and then it was going to be day one.
And now it's like, well, it might be a few months, and he stopped talking about it.
Yeah, I'm very concerned about the wars, yeah.
Now, another Trump thing.
You go back to our Trends Journal.
And you go back to a number of interviews I've done, and I do a lot of them.
We were saying back in October that if Trump gets elected, he will do everything he can to lower interest rates.
Wall Street, the bet was up until yesterday that The Federal Reserve will only lower interest rates twice in 2025, 25 basis points each time.
That was the bet on Wall Street.
Trump came out at Davos, said he's going to lower interest rates.
We have been writing about this in the Trends Journal since November, November 12th.
So when Trump gets in, he's going to do everything he can.
To boost the economy and the equity markets, because he's invested in both of them.
That's all he's interested in, and the billionaire gang, that's with him.
All they want is more money.
So, everybody says, no, no, no.
He can't force the Federal Reserve to do that.
Oh, no?
And then we said, let's go back to December 2018. The stock market in America in December 2018, The Dow had its worst December since the Great Depression, 1931. What did Trump do?
He forced Jerome Powell to lower interest rates, which Powell did in January 2019. So now, we have been saying, I just talked about Germany.
It's not only Germany, it's the UK. They're in dragflation.
Economy's going down, inflation's going up.
Germany's in a recession.
The Indian economy has its worst year in two years.
They have to lower interest rates.
Trump even mentioned this in Davos, that other countries have to lower interest rates to increase their economic growth.
They can't lower interest rates if the United States' interest rates are high.
Because their currency goes way down and inflation spikes.
Now he's going to lower interest rates.
Look at gold prices.
Just before I got on the air, $2,777 an ounce.
Went up $23 today, about $18 yesterday.
Because they're going to lower interest rates.
We've been saying this.
It's in your Trends Journal.
It's right there.
We said that when he says this, gold prices are going to escalate rapidly.
And that's exactly what's happening.
The lower the interest rates go, the deeper the dollar falls.
The deeper the dollar falls, the higher gold prices go up.
This isn't rocket science.
It's a fact.
I did a commercial for Tony Arterman.
Before Christmas, and it took Yukon Cornelius from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, right?
And he's prospecting.
And we changed the voice with AI. And he says, well, boys and girls, right now, Trump euphoria is driving the price of gold and driving up crypto.
So it's a perfect chance for you to jump in and buy some gold.
And that's exactly what it is.
Trump euphoria has gold on sale.
It was dropped down to what?
It would drop down to like 2,500, a high 25 or so.
It's now like up 200 bucks from the low that it had post-election, I think, isn't it?
Up in the high 2,700s.
I'm telling you.
I didn't think gold would boom as much as it is, and we said it, until Trump lowers interest rates.
Because again, you go back, gold went down because when Trump got in, he said he was going to impose these tariffs.
He said that he was going to impose those 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico the day he took office.
And now he lied about that.
At Davos, now he's saying, well, we're going to talk to China about the tariffs.
So what happened was gold prices went down because the dollar went way up.
Because of his imposition of tariffs.
Now he's not imposing, then the dollar went down.
And I think you had a lot of people who jumped into crypto as well, because they were going to do a whipsaw from Biden, who was doing everything he can to ban it or to regulate it out of existence, and now Trump is going to do everything he can to hype it.
What do you think about that Trump coin?
It went from $0 to $72 billion market cap in just 48 hours.
And they're going to do some more.
He did like a Melania meme coin, and then somebody did some fake Trump and Melania coins.
How do you tell a fake coin from a real coin if it's a meme coin?
Somebody did a Barron coin and made several million dollars.
And so a lot of people who are pro-Bitcoin are looking at this and saying, This is such rampant corruption.
It's going to be a real black eye to the crypto market.
What do you think about all that?
This is from...
I just printed this out before I got on the air.
Trump crypto plans have Wall Street CEOs ready to jump into digital assets.
CNBC. Just days into President Trump's second administration, Wall Street is singing a...
Different tune on crypto.
Oh, Wall Street's singing a different tune?
So is Trump.
When he was president, he was totally anti-Bitcoin.
It's all about money.
The biggest contributors were the crypto people.
One of the biggest groups of contributors to his campaign.
Goes on, quote, For us, the equation is really around whether we...
As a highly regulated financial institution can act as trans actors, Morgan Stanley CEO Ted Pick, might as well throw a PR in that, told CNBC on Thursday at the World Economic Forum.
The president on Thursday issued sweeping executive orders on crypto with an emphasis on, quote, protecting and promoting the use and development of digital assets.
So, here's the deal.
I believe, and I'm not saying this is going to happen immediately, but here's our trend forecast.
They're going to go to CBDC. Yep.
Central Bank Digital Currencies.
We're going to get away from that Dirty cash and they're going to go to digital trash.
We got a new coin.
We don't need those dollars anymore.
You go to China, you can put your hand out and they take your money.
Nobody's using money anymore.
That's right.
The whole world is digitized to the AI far out degree.
The whole world is going digital.
And we're already way down the road to CBDC, even though it's not necessarily a formal, official thing.
And you've got the five eyes of five English-speaking countries that their intelligence agencies are united together.
They said, we're not going to do CBDC. They're doing it already, and they're going to do it in a de facto way.
Now, Europe, because they love regulation and they love coming right at you in your face, they're talking about instituting a digital euro and a CBDC. They're still going down that road.
But the intelligence agencies have been looking at the way people have been reacting to this, and we've had a few states that have come back and banned CBDC and other things like that.
So they're going to call it something different, and they'll kind of do it in a public-private partnership.
Don't you agree?
It'll be kind of de facto.
I think, here's what I'm saying.
They're going to create, Trump will create a digital coin to replace the dollar.
And the reason being, there's no way in the world that America's going to be able to pay off its deficit.
It's not 36 trillion.
When you put in all the money owed, it's like 220 trillion.
And by the way, it went up over $9 trillion during Trump's administration.
The government debt.
They come out with a new coin and they'll value it way higher than the dollar to buy out their debt.
That's my belief.
Yeah, Mark Cuban, after Trump made all this money, Mark Cuban came out and some people said, well, he's joking.
I said, I'm not so sure he's joking.
He said, hey, we could pay off the national debt with a meme coin, you know, kind of trolling him.
But I think that's going to...
We've already had some people seriously suggest that the Treasury could print a $1 trillion coin, a physical coin, and then carry it over to the Federal Reserve and say, here, you're paid.
That's what I'm saying.
Yeah, yeah.
That's exactly what I'm saying.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's crazy.
It's definitely crazy.
And I'm going to tell you, Trump is...
Again, it's not President Trump.
It's King Trump.
Yeah, that's right.
It's King Trump.
This guy's...
You know, I had lunch with his brother.
I don't know if I told you that.
Yeah, yeah.
Back in 2017. Robert.
He had a restaurant over here in Wasaic, which is on the other side of the river from us.
And the brother told us that when the father died, I think it was like 2002. He left over half a billion dollars to the family in real estate.
So Trump is, you know, he's only interested in money.
That's right.
And look at, oh, this is the other thing.
Look at oil prices, how they've gone down.
Drill, baby, drill.
He's also telling Saudi Arabia to lower their oil prices.
Oh, what happened?
Oh, Saudi Arabia gave his son-in-law Two billion dollars to start up this firm?
Yeah.
Oh, now he's saying Saudi Arabia may invest a trillion dollars into the United States?
Mm-hmm.
And again, let's go back, make connections between different fields.
Where were the Arab nations to unite against Israel's genocide of Gaza?
Yeah.
They never united.
Yeah.
Because all they're interested in is money.
That's right.
Because back in 1973, they united against Israel, and they put the embargo on, and that forced Israel to stop.
They didn't unite this time.
The slaughter that's happened in Gaza breaks my heart.
And by the way, the media is now putting up the photos, like the toilet paper record, the New York Times.
They have a big photo of the destruction in Gaza.
How come you weren't putting this up every day?
How come you weren't putting this up?
Yeah, yeah.
So, going back, they're going to do, Trump is going to do everything he can to keep this economy up.
Because the bottom line is money.
And he's heavily invested, his family's very heavily invested, and the gangs that support him are heavily invested.
Oh, I absolutely agree.
Yeah, I think he's going to keep it going.
What do you think happens for crypto?
So you've got Larry Fink at Davos saying, I think we could see it going up within a year or two to 700,000 Bitcoin or something like that, because he's talking about not only just inflation, which is definitely going to be there in a big way, as you pointed out, but also the loss of confidence in the currencies and things like that with the massive deficits that we've got and that type of thing.
So what do you think is going to...
Happen with crypto?
What's going to happen with gold based on inflation, based on the deficit and the rest of the stuff?
Going up.
All of them, yeah.
Yep.
What about the stock market?
We've been bullish in the Trends Journal on Bitcoin since 2017. We call the tops the bottoms.
We said, wait, if it goes below this, it's going to go here.
If it goes above this, it goes there.
And then Trump again.
As I say, two of our top trends this year.
One is the Trump card.
And another's the wild card.
Those are different things?
Anything can happen.
Yeah, that's right.
Again, he does a 180. He said he was totally against the cryptocurrencies when he was president.
Yes.
The crypto club comes in.
They give him all this dough.
He's totally positive.
And they make up their own coin.
He makes himself a couple of billion bucks.
That's right.
Yeah, especially if you look at his treasury, his commerce secretary, right?
Howard Lucky Lutnik.
I call him Lucky because he didn't show up on 9-11 to his office.
Everybody else died.
But, you know, he's the crypto guy.
He's the stablecoin guy.
And I saw one person this week I talked about said, That, you know, stablecoin has been stabilized, you know, by the dollar, so-called, but they would anchor it to the dollar.
He said, it may go the other way around now.
You might have the dollar actually stabilized by the stablecoin, but either way, this guy with Tether and all the rest, he's been at the epicenter of the stablecoins as well as being at the epicenter of the memecoins.
I wouldn't be surprised if he had his fingerprints all over these Trump memecoins as well, Lutnik.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Again, it's the wild card.
And it's going to be, Trump is going to do everything he wants to do.
That's right.
That's right.
And there's no stopping him.
Yeah.
No stopping him.
Yeah, truly it's amazing, you know, the inauguration.
Seeing the billionaire club lined up there.
I mean, you know, you had everybody.
You have Bezos standing next to Elon Musk, standing next to Zuckerberg.
And then you've also got Sundar Pichai from Google.
They're all there, all together, all at once.
And they're all kissing the ring.
It's amazing to see how it's just been this monolithic thing.
Nobody's opposing him.
Jamie Demon is not opposing him to J.P. Morgan either.
He says, yeah, I like what he's doing.
I like these tariffs and all that kind of stuff.
Who cares if we have some inflation with it?
That it's going to be good for national security.
And of course, the other thing I wanted, what about the stock market?
What do you think is going to happen in the stock market?
Again, he's going to do everything possible, everything possible to keep the equity markets up.
The lower interest rates go, the more the equity markets go up.
This is from yesterday.
Donald Trump says, quote, he'll demand that interest rates drop immediately.
And this is from your Trends Journal, November 12th.
With Donald Trump being re-elected, now the question is, will he push the Federal Reserve to continue to lower interest rates, which will be positive for the U.S. equity markets, which have strongly spiked since he won the race to the White House?
And we go on.
Considering how Trump pressured Fed head Jerome Powell to lower interest rates when the U.S. equity market sank into correction territory in December 2018, the odds are high that interest rates will continue to decline during the Trump presidency.
That's in your trends journal.
No one anywhere, anyplace said this was going to happen.
And again, when you subscribe by putting, what is it, the night, it comes to, what, $2.50 a week?
Yes, yes.
And now when we made the forecast for a golden year for gold, gold was at $2,041 an ounce.
$2,041 an ounce.
Now it's $2,777 an ounce.
Wow, yeah, yeah.
Again, nobody, nobody, nobody said what I just read you.
No one.
Trump is only interested in himself and the bottom line.
That's right.
That's right.
And when you look at the stock market, the stock market has really been driven off of AI and off of NVIDIA and everything.
And his comments, bringing out Stargate and hyping that up, I think that's got a couple of purposes there.
He wants to hype up.
And keep that going, because that's driving the stock market as well.
And I think he also wants to, you know, kind of troll Elon Musk a little bit.
I remember the first time he got in, Steve Bannon was holding court and talking about philosophical things and all this other kind of stuff.
And everybody was saying, well, he's the real brains of the operation, and Trump is...
He got rid of Bannon, because people started trolling him.
They're trolling him on Elon Musk now, the fact that Musk has got a White House email, and he's got an office at the White House complex.
He's been hanging out at Mar-a-Lago and all the rest of the stuff.
And so I think a little bit of that was kind of to push him back a little bit.
But I think he's also trying to prop up AI. And that's the next thing I want to ask you about in terms of trends.
Artificial intelligence.
You know, we talked about manufacturing.
I had several comments here from Angry Tiger and a Syrian girl saying we'd love to see Americans become creative again.
We'd love to start building things here again.
But for us to be able to afford to do that, we've got to get rid of these regulations that are strangling us and benefiting the big corporations, and I agree with that.
But I think there's something else that's going on that he tipped his hand to yesterday at Davos when he started talking about...
It wasn't his idea, but he took credit for it.
Because AI is using so much power, we're going to have to have their own power plants, and they're going to be attached to them.
And I thought it was interesting what Trump said.
He said, yeah, the grid, it's old, it's unreliable, it's very vulnerable to attack and everything.
So these people need to have their own power plants.
And he even talked about it, not just from an AI standpoint, but he talked about As in manufacturing.
Because I think as we look at what has happened with taking the jobs away, China has exploited cheap labor, slave labor in their country, and of course...
Robot is the word for slave.
And check, you know, it came out of that play.
And I think that as they move into, when the manufacturing comes back, it's not going to come back so much with jobs as it'll come back with robotics.
And that's why these people need to have their own personal power supplies, because they're going to make it.
It's unreliable and extremely expensive for the average American.
So that's why the companies who are manufacturing things, they need to have their own power.
So what do you think about that?
What do you think is going to happen with robotics and with artificial intelligence and all the rest of this stuff from a standpoint, not just of an investment standpoint, but how it's going to be rolled out in society and how they're going to use that against us?
Let's go back to the power plants.
That's one of the things that he's saying that Saudi Arabia is going to invest like a trillion bucks into building these power plants.
And AI is the future.
There's no question about it.
Love it, hate it, it's going to be.
But is it going to do away with all the jobs?
To some extent it will.
I mean, we had an industrial revolution.
Look how that changed everything.
People used to make things on their own.
But life keeps going on.
I see the...
This is very important.
We could talk about everything that we're talking about, but there's other sides.
There are the cards that are being played that no one's talking about.
And that is what only the Trends Journal's talking about.
The office building bust.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
What's going to happen this year and next year?
There are over $2 trillion worth of commercial real estate loans coming due.
Remember, when they closed down the offices back in 2020, how many years ago was that?
It was 2025?
Yeah.
Now these leases are coming due.
They don't need all this space anymore.
You're going to start seeing defaults on office buildings.
That's going to bring down the banks.
Yeah.
There's no way they're going to be able to get out of this.
Yeah.
And that's coming around this year because you're talking about five years.
I imagine a lot of these things are like in a five-year cycle.
So that dam that you've been talking about for five years is going to burst this year.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And again, let's go back to 2023. Not ancient history.
Three banks failed.
Burst republic.
Signature and Silicon Con Man Valley Bank.
Yeah, yeah.
Silvergate or something like that.
Equity markets and gold prices spiked.
That was three banks.
Everybody Google up Castle Systems with a K and see what the office occupancy rate is.
It's under 50%.
I didn't look today, but as of...
Yesterday, it was 43%.
Wow.
Wow.
Now, let's look at the office.
Vacancy rate.
Ain't nobody there.
In the top 10 cities in America, 20% vacant.
Vacant!
We're going to convert them to hell.
No, you're not.
The buildings built in the last 50 years are non-convertible.
Again, the facts.
Let's go back to 2024. On 50th Street, New York City, midtown Manhattan.
A building that sold for $320 million in 2006, went up for auction, and it was sold for $8.5 million.
Sports Illustrated used to be there one after another.
They moved out.
The building is in the middle of the block.
No windows on one side, no windows on the other side, no windows in the back.
Only windows in the front.
Non-convertible to anything.
They've got to knock it down and build something else.
Look what they're doing now.
Trump is saying you've got to go back to work with all the people working for the federal government.
They know how bad it is.
That's not going to make any difference at all.
It may help Washington, D.C., but it ain't going to make any difference anyplace else.
So those are the wild cards that you have to look at.
That no one's talking about.
They're only looking at the positive elements.
And they don't want to look negative into this.
And by the way, the media's finished.
What is the Cartoon News Network, CNN, firing how many people?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
What, did Washington Post just fired another 4%?
That's right.
Journalism's gone.
Here, here.
You ready?
And then, of course, I just read something from Mediate saying they were laughing at Acosta because he was such a diehard supporter and apologist for the Democrats.
And they said, well, the same thing is going to happen to the conservatives.
They go out there and they become Trump cheerleaders.
And then when this stuff goes sideways and goes down, then the conservative media is going to be completely discredited because they kept telling you, hey, it's just 4D chess and everything is fine because Trump's in control, right?
Yep.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is $5 for the...
Sunday New York Times.
You ready?
This is the business section.
You see this picture?
Yeah, I see it.
That's the business section.
Look how much print they have here.
Yeah, wow.
Page after page.
Yeah, look.
They're kind of going USA Today.
Yeah, look.
Look at this.
Yeah, look.
This is the business section.
A woman on a porch standing and looking at her phone.
That's almost the entire page.
Yeah.
So what I'm saying is journalism's dead.
You're not getting anything anymore.
We're giving people what they're not getting anywhere else.
That's the key thing, because you're calling it as you see.
Like you said, I don't necessarily like what's happening, but this is what I see happening, right?
And you're not going to cheer for one side or the other.
I remember you always talk about how you were a political atheist.
You don't believe in either one of these sides, and you've kept it consistent with that.
So again, would I agree with you?
As I say, I agree with it.
You don't have to, but if this happens, then that'll happen.
Again, I'm totally, as a man who puts my money where my heart is and launched Occupy Peace, I am totally opposed to the genocide being committed, and now Israel ramping up the war, stealing more land in the West Bank, killing more people, breaking the ceasefire deal in Lebanon, stealing more land, killing more people, bombing it, and now going into Syria.
They control over 30% of the water in Syria now.
Wow.
And stealing more land.
Wow.
So you think that we'll get drawn in soon?
I think eventually we'll get drawn in with war with Iran on behalf of Israel.
Looks like Russia is, the Russia-Ukraine thing is going to be slow walked if it happens at all.
What's that?
Not going to happen.
Not going to happen.
Here's the deal.
There's no way, no way...
That Russia is going to give back the 20% of the land that they've conquered so far.
And again, they keep selling the lie that they took over Crimea.
They had a vote in Crimea.
That's right.
They voted.
That's right.
And the world organizations were there to monitor the voting.
Over 96%, about 96% or 97% of the people voted to reunite with Russia.
But we don't support a democracy like that, do we?
We did the coup to put that government in that said, and the rest of you, you can't leave us now, because that's the way the American government's been since Lincoln.
You don't have a right to self-governance, and you don't have a right to leave.
We don't care that you want to stay with Russia or whatever.
Yeah, this was the Trends Journal back in 2014. Mm-hmm.
You see how happy that guy is?
It's the United States overthrow of the democratically elected government to Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine.
Yeah.
People have no idea about it.
That's right.
And, you know, Washington is driving the world to the final war.
Article done by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts.
Yes.
Yes.
You know, so, I mean, the facts are here, but people don't care about the facts.
And about Lincoln had nothing to do with slavery.
It was all about unionization.
That's right.
Yeah.
It was pro-slavery.
Consolidation of power and all that kind of stuff.
And as I've talked about, too, you know, there was a Civil War in Italy.
1861, 1865. Didn't have anything to do with slavery.
It had to do with the Industrial Revolution and the consolidation of political power.
And it was happening all over the place.
They destroyed Italy.
Yeah, yeah.
Talk a little bit about, as a matter of fact, my aha moment.
with that came Karen's brother went to college in Italy and spoke Italian fluently and the relatives that were still there they gave him a diary of One of the people that had been in one of the armies there.
It was Garibaldi's army.
I don't even know what side he was on.
But they gave him the diary of Garibaldi's army.
And I was not aware that there had been an Italian civil war at that point in time.
It's like, wow.
As I looked into it, it was pretty amazing.
1861 to 1865, just like ours.
Same time frame.
Exactly.
Let's talk a little bit about, before we run out of time, Greenland and Panama and the Gulf of America.
What do you read, what is Trump angling for with all this stuff, and what's he likely to do with that?
Yeah, the guy's out of his mind.
He just says crap.
That's the wild card, right?
Yeah.
It's the wild card.
The Trump card and the wild card.
Yeah.
The Greenland, I mean, again, you know, I started, of course, after he said that, I started looking up all the data.
You can't, the mining companies that are up there.
They're having difficulty mining this stuff because there's hardly any infrastructure up there.
People don't want to invest.
Yeah, the minerals are there, but the place is 3,000 miles away from us.
What right do we have to be there?
And I keep hearing national security.
And we've got military bases up there.
Yeah.
We've got a military base there, and the military base after World War II, they had 10,000 people in the military base, and they've taken that down to 400. They know that it's not a strategic place to have a military base.
It's just that they won't ever close a military base.
But all this stuff about having to have Greenland because of national security is utter bunk.
So what do you think?
It's an ego trip with him?
What do you think he's really after?
Yeah, it's just talk.
It's not going to go anywhere.
I kind of look at it, and I kind of think, well, maybe what he's going to do is spend a lot of money to buy this because of an ego trip, and then he'll turn over all the exploitation of the minerals that are there to private companies.
But I know it's difficult for him to get it out.
I'm trying to say, it's not like they haven't been trying to get the minerals out from everything I've been reading.
That's some of the biggest companies there.
It's not working.
What about Panama?
What do you think he's after in Panama?
Nothing.
Panama's not going to...
Panama used to get the hell out of here.
It's the whole country.
I'm not going to give it back to you.
Yeah, we've invaded him once before.
I saw an article, I think it was Forbes magazine, sent to me by someone who knows Panama and spends about half the year there.
And he said, look at this.
The Panamanian government, their equivalent of the IRS, just audited this Hong Kong company.
It's not, you know, mainland China.
They've had it since the early 90s.
Just audited them.
So what is this about?
Are they trying to appease Trump?
You know, are they trying to, well, we're going to find them guilty of corruption so we can turn this over to something that pleases Trump?
I don't know what's going on with that.
I kind of think that it kind of falls into...
Kind of this, you know, trying to present himself as a strong man.
As part of America is expanding again and all the rest of this kind of stuff.
We've got a manifest destiny to go north and south.
You know, I think it's partly that.
Same thing, the reason that he's trying to rename the Gulf of Mexico.
I think it's kind of an ego trip and PR stunt.
Yeah, Gulf of America.
I mean, what, are you kidding me?
Who cares?
I mean, really, what the hell do I care with his name?
I wouldn't think that he would change it to the Gulf of Trump, you know?
He just spelt it, right?
You've got to get rid of that U and put an O in there.
That's right.
Let's see, what else do we have here?
What else is on your agenda coming up in the next year that you think is going to happen in terms of trends?
The biggest thing right now is we're in a situation, we've never had a president like this in our lifetime.
This is going to be a control of the government over the people like we've never seen before.
That's right.
And you look at all this immigration stuff.
I think that's going to be there to get everybody fired up and angry and fighting.
It's going to be a distraction they can throw out there.
Something else to try to make himself look strong.
But I think it's also going to be...
Another way for them to take us into this digital surveillance control grid, because, hey, we're going to have to have IDs already.
The Republicans are saying we're going to have to have mandatory e-verify.
You're going to have to get permission from the government in order to get a job.
It's just going to be another one of these paths to that type of thing.
What do you think?
Yeah.
Again, everything's going digitized.
It's the world of the future.
As I said, they say in the King James Bible, the meek...
Shall inherit the earth.
I said they misspelled it.
The geeks have inherited the earth.
That's right.
Yeah.
Look at, again, look at all the geeks that were at the inauguration.
That's right.
Look how Zuckerberg became Suckerberg.
Yeah.
Going to make America a geek again, right?
Yeah.
A little Suckerberg.
Look how he changed, right?
One after another.
Look how they all changed and suck up to Trump.
Yeah.
That's right.
No, they're in charge, man.
This whole thing is going to keep going on, but again, there's overinvestment right now in the AI, and there can be a bust from all this overinvestment.
That's a reality.
Yeah.
And if that busts, that's going to take down the stock market.
It's going to take down the stock markets, but again, Trump will do everything he can to keep the markets up.
Everything, everything, everything.
And I think there's a lot of what this hype about Stargate stuff is.
But I still see it.
You know, they look at AI. That is an issue of national security for them because that is their surveillance grid.
And Control Grid.
I mean, propaganda, lies, censorship, surveillance, Big Brother, it's all there in AI, so it's like everything for AI, and they want to keep that going.
They'll do everything they can to prop that up.
Well, it's always great talking to you, Gerald, and was very interested in seeing what you see coming up in the next year.
And, of course, you're going to be, as we see things developing, we'll be getting updates from you throughout the year.
Trends Journal, folks, you can get 10% Went off with the code KNIGHT. Very interesting read, and Gerald tells it like he sees it.
And that's a very rare thing anymore.
You hardly find anybody that isn't a partisan cheerleader, and Gerald has never been a partisan cheerleader at all.
So thank you for that.
And giving us your honest opinion, telling us what you see happening, even if it's looking bad.
You tell us what it's going to be.
So thank you so much for joining us, Gerald.
I appreciate it.
Thank you for all that you do.
Thank you.
Appreciate that.
And before we end, I want to just read a couple of comments here that we have from people.
And thank you for the tip.
SWB Jams, I guess.
I'm not sure what that is.
Thank you for the tip.
He says, Alex Jones showed his true colors when he sent David Knight to cover the Bundy Ranch standoff while he stayed at the luxurious studios to LARP as a warrior.
Well, yeah, that was an interesting back and forth.
And, you know, when people talk about a rigged...
Department of Justice, we can't forget what happened to, it's not just the J6ers, the pro-lifers of this group, or they're certainly not Trump, but this has been just an intrinsic politicized FBI and Department of Justice, and it continues, and nothing is changing.
A lot of people have said, oh, look at this, he's pulling back the security clearance of Mike Pompeo.
And you realize that Mike Pompeo wanted to kill Julian Assange, right?
Yep.
And again, you know, Gerald, we've talked about this before.
Trump had Gina Haspel, and I think she was the one who was really running the CIA while Pompeo was there.
She was number two, and then Pompeo moves to Secretary of State, and he put her in charge of it.
Trump had said, yeah, they lied us into the war in Iraq, and yet it was Gina Haspel who sold us those lies, wasn't it?
People will never look at what Trump actually did.
And really, I think, who is controlling him.
And I think it's those people in those intelligence agencies.
Well, that's the end of the show.
Thank you so much, everyone, for joining us.
And again, thank you, Gerald, for all of the insights that you have and for Trends Journal again.
TrendsJournal.com, you can see a sample of it there.
And you can save 10% with the code NIGHT. Thank you so much, Gerald.
Have a good day, everyone.
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