Gray Area - Rex Jones & Tim Tompkins - The Dollar's Collapse: What Really Happened...(Gray Area Ep3)

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Sept. 23, 2025 - Gray Area - Rex Jones & Tim Tompkins

01:08:58

The Dollar's Collapse: What Really Happened...(Gray Area Ep3)

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rex jones

28:13

tim tompkins

30:00

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neil barofsky

02:21

nicholas j freitas

02:36

richard nixon

01:16

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Speaker	Time	Text
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		The Jekyll Island Agreement was a covert 1910 meeting of financial elites on Jekyll Island, Georgia to develop a plan for new central banking systems to prevent future financial panics.
		Led by Senator Nelson Aldrich, these influential men, including bankers like Paul Wahlberg and Frank Vanderlip, drafted the Aldrich Plan, which formed the basis for the Federal Reserve System enacted into law in 1913.
		The meeting was conducted in strict secrecy to oppose public opposition to the creation of a central bank.
		So the stated purpose for this was that panic in 1907 that we talk about.
		They go, okay, so we can't rely on these private institutions to, you know, prop up the economy and to not ultimately loan out too much money and then end up bankrupt themselves.
		We have to take control.
		But it's kind of sick because you have just a transfer of kind of from small private interest to the huge private interest.
unidentified		The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 established 12 independent reserve banks in addition to a board of governors in Washington.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		They thought it would be a genius idea, specifically FDR, to create a declaration called the EO6102, which is an executive order to privatize gold, which meant no one can just keep gold in their household.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		You have to hand it over to the government and we will keep your money safe and we're in charge and we'll talk about our freedoms being taken away.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		I mean, that's like, that's a long time ago.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		That's pretty insane.
unidentified		The reason behind the order was to remove constraints on the Federal Reserve in order to print more money during the Depression.
		The order was issued within a month of FDR's inauguration and all Americans were required to forfeit their gold to the government.
		Wow.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		You kind of forget about history.
unidentified		Right.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		You forget how we get to this point, how we got to this point.
		And it's like kind of clear as day at this point how the train has been moving this entire time.
		And I don't know what happens from here, but it's not looking good.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Well, I mean, it's all the same, like geopolitical, economic, military, on all these levels, everything we've done, we've screwed everyone and ourselves the most in a very weird way by destroying all these relationships, right?
		Like we got 600 military bases across the world.
		We don't help anybody with those.
		Like we're not, oh, we're protecting, we're protecting Europe from Russia, from evil Russia.
unidentified		We're protecting Japan and over there from the evil China.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		We're protecting everyone.
		It's us.
		You must trade with our currency.
		You must do what we say.
		We can do whatever.
		We can bomb whatever.
		F you.
		That's the attitude.
		It's like having an abusive parent, you know, but an abusive parent that never even watches you, right?
		It just like shows up from like year to year to just like destroy your life and take everything you have and like disappears.
		Welcome to episode three of the gray area.
		I'm Rex Jones and this is Tim Tompkins.
		And you may have seen us before talk about economic news, cultural news, but everything we talk about on this show has geopolitical ramifications.
		And we've been talking a lot about war and crisis, both on our episodes and in our lives.
		And the thing is, when you think about the current situation, it doesn't make sense unless you examine the past century and what's truly gone on around the world and why it's happened and how America became this hegemon and how it's lost that power and ability purely by its own actions.
		So today we're going to do a more economic look at what brought us here, how and why over the past 100, 150 years.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		And for everybody who doesn't know, there's a lot of information in here.
		This was fun to kind of research in the background.
		It seems like we've got amnesia as a country and there's a lot of stuff that we did over the last 100, 120 years.
		And it's pretty clear how we got from here to here in a very short time period.
		So it didn't happen by accident.
		So we're going to kind of go through this like a kind of chronological order.
		So that way people are informed and they understand, okay, peak to trough.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		So, well, you know, Tim, I remember being a kid, and the thing you always hear about is: ah, the Federal Reserve, the evil Federal Reserve, and all our money is fake.
		It's monopoly money, it's not real.
		Like, this is the nomenclature that's always been used.
		This is kind of what woke me up as a kid to realize that, hey, the world isn't just this benevolent place, you know, where all the governments and the economies are all just trying to get along.
		It became very clear that it's a predatory thing.
		Once you go, hey, our money used to be worth gold.
		Now it's worth nothing.
		And they can just print infinite amounts of it.
		But that's a very, very basic perspective, right?
		And like, I remember like an old Liberty cartoon.
		It was huge on YouTube.
		I'll try to find it.
		I'll definitely repost it on X. I'll share it with you and you'll think it's really funny, but there's a little bit of truth to it.
		And that's the sort of thing that made me examine at the beginning of all of this.
		You know, we're kind of living in a fake system, or at least a system that's adversely designed for the rest of the world.
		And it's really designed to help us, but it stopped helping us a long time ago.
unidentified		Right.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		And the difficult part about this is the founding fathers, if you even look past the time period where we're going to start at, which is in the 1913, they had various views on having power centralized when it came to money and having a central bank.
		The power of the purse.
		Exactly.
		So, I mean, you had several presidents that at different points throughout the time period after we gained our independence that tried to start a centralized banking system.
		And then the next guy came over and said, nope, we're not doing this.
		This isn't going to help America in the long run.
		And you saw that play out until it became permanent in 1913.
		So the first one we're going to start with here is the Federal Reserve Act.
		For people who don't know what the Federal Reserve Act, we are just going to show a little clip to begin with.
		That way you guys have a little bit of understanding of what it is.
		And then we'll kind of break down a little bit of how it actually works.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		All right, let's go ahead and play the clip.
unidentified		But travel back in time to before 1913.
		No one was responsible for the health of our banking system.
		There was no lender of last resort.
		Why?
		Because from our country's earliest history, some people opposed a central bank.
		They feared it would put too much power in too few hands.
		But as the country grew, frequent banking panics kept the economy on a roller coaster ride, complete with ups and downs, chills and spills.
		The last straw came in 1907.
		One of Wall Street's largest financial institutions, the Knickerbocker Trust Company, went bankrupt.
		Panic was widespread.
		People raced to withdraw their savings, only to find that banks didn't have cash available.
		Financier J.P. Morgan and a group of investors rescued the economy with emergency loans to banks.
		But it was clear that relying on wealthy individuals wasn't the right long-term solution for the nation.
		It was time for a change.
		The United States needed a strong central bank that would keep money flowing during times of crisis and help prevent bank runs.
		To keep power from being concentrated in Washington or Wall Street, lawmakers spread control across the country.
		The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 established 12 independent reserve banks, in addition to a board of governors in Washington.
		The structure would insulate the Fed from partisan politics and powerful financial interests.
		Over time, the Fed learned how the supply of money and credit affects financial markets and the economy.
		By the 1950s, the Fed was working to counter the ups and downs of booms and busts and limit inflation.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		I was enjoying watching that.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		So let's break this down a little bit.
		So, on record, officially, this is the narrative that the government gave for why they needed to create this centralized system.
		Now, it makes sense on the surface, but if you really dive into the makings of how this was established, it's really sketchy.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Right.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		You know, have you heard of Jekyll Island?
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Yes, of course.
		And The Creature from Jekyll Island is an incredible book.
		It's a book that I advise everyone to read.
		Essentially, the most powerful financiers and political agents in the country all met in secret on an island off the coast of Georgia, and they decided what they were going to do.
		And if you look at what happened, I mean, I'll just go ahead and read a summary for the Jekyll Island Agreement was a covert 1910 meeting of financial elites on Jekyll Island, Georgia, to develop a plan for new central banking systems to prevent future financial panics.
		Led by Senator Nelson Aldrich, these influential men, including bankers like Paul Wahlberg and Frank Vanderlip, drafted the Aldrich Plan, which formed the basis for the Federal Reserve system enacted into law in 1913.
		The meeting was conducted in strict secrecy to oppose public opposition to the creation of a central bank.
		So the stated purpose for this was that panic in 1907 that we talk about.
		They go, okay, so we can't rely on these private institutions to prop up the economy and to not ultimately blown out too much money and then end up bankrupt themselves.
		We have to take control.
		But it's kind of sick because you have just a transfer of kind of from small private interest to the huge private interest.
		That's how I see it.
		This country used to be thousands of big banks or like bigger banks, you know, like medium-sized.
		That was all wiped out during this time period.
		And it was decided that the rich would rule via the power of issuing loans to people.
		So the government comes in and says, okay, we're going to take this responsibility, but then they just create a new private bank and they give that private bank with these people as shareholders responsibility.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Right.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		And it's very simple.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		So here, I actually did a deeper dive on this.
		So that was the official narrative.
		You had the 1907, but it didn't actually address what was causing all the bank runs.
unidentified		Okay.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		What caused all the bank runs?
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		It was the type of lending that they were doing to begin with.
		So what people don't realize is that back before the, in the before the 1900s, most of the lending that was being done was in the agriculture space.
		So farmers had to take loans in order to plant their crops and reap a harvest and then be able to pay the lenders back.
		But with something like agriculture being the majority of that lending, it's subject to weather changes.
		Anything that happened with drought, anything that happened just to destroy that happened to destroy the crop means that, okay, the thing that we invested didn't work out.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		No insurance, you're responsible.
		You have to pay us.
		We take your land.
		That's the only way you can pay us.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
		But then the banks lose all their money because they made all these loans for it's essentially risky lending.
		So if they had sat there and addressed the original root cause of, okay, we need to stop making so many of these agriculture loans and making this most of our portfolio, we could have probably fixed this a lot easier.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		So you see that as the cause of how we ended up with the Federal Reserve, right?
		Is we have this time period where people are defaulting on their loans, lands being seized, but money isn't being made, and then the banks themselves default.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		And it's, it's primarily the narrative of, okay, we need to create a centralized system as a catch-all for these banks instead of just cause addressing the root cause of why are they failing in the first place.
		You have to be critical.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		But there's no way for the Fed to fail because they print money.
		And that's the big secret there.
		And that's when the devaluation started because ultimately you have financial crises like we saw in the video.
		Like the economy goes up and down based on what's happening in the country.
		But that money is tied to the real economic engine of the country.
		It's tied purely to the resources, to the economy of people, the worker, people generating the cash and giving it value.
		Now we just have an infinite font, right?
		And even if the rate of inflation is 0.1% over and over and over the years, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
		And there's no taking any of that back.
		It just continues to grow and continues to go and go.
		So they saw this as like an innovative solution because like, okay, we can just wipe the slate clean and create this sort of new money that's different than the old money.
		And it's not going to be a problem.
		It'll never happen in our lifetime or our grandchildren's lifetime.
		You know, that's how long it's going.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		But it was also a power grab, too.
unidentified		Right.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		I mean, the fact that you have to have a meeting in secrecy, they basically told these guys, okay, hey, you need to dress in hunting gear and pretend like you're going on a hunting trip.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Nice.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		And when you're going on the train, don't allow any of the press to be able to follow you.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		If somebody didn't have anything to hide and you knew it was going to be controversial, that's the first thing you would do is make people hide their identity.
unidentified		Right.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Well, they're just deciding, you know, without a boat, without a vote, without a like constitutional referendum, they're deciding they're going to go ahead and go do this.
		And they already have enough backing in the government, like that leading senator who was involved in the process and whatnot.
		They just make the decision that they're going to do this.
		And then I believe it was Christmas in 1917, Woodrow Wilson signs this into law.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		So the funniest part about this whole thing is they rushed the bill and they purposely planned the vote two days before Christmas on the 20th.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		So no one's there.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		So no, half the people that would go to try to counter this wouldn't be there.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		And they knew that's the way it's always done.
		I mean, that's the way it's been done to this day.
		I mean, all the time they'll pass a massive package, you know, right around that time of year or, you know, during the summer or whatnot and people aren't there.
		And it's, it's very transparent and sick, you know.
		And if you're not hiding anything, if the thing is not bad, if the thing is good, why wouldn't you just bring it like normal?
		Simple answer is they feel entitled to bring it whenever they want to.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Right.
unidentified		Right.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		And when they do this, they change the world forever.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		So now, going through the rest of this history, this now brings us to 1933.
		1933, you had the Great Depression.
		You had a lot of uncertainty in the market.
		And Americans were hoarding the gold because what's a natural response to you don't know what's going to happen.
		You need to gather your resources, make sure that you're covered and your family is safe.
		Right.
		So during that time period, they thought it would be a genius idea, specifically FDR, to create a declaration called the EO6102, which is an executive order to privatize gold, which meant no one can just keep gold in their household.
		You have to hand it over to the government and we will keep your money safe and we're in charge and we let it change it for dollars.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Talk about our freedoms being taken away.
		I mean, that's like, that's a long time ago.
		That's pretty insane.
		Can you imagine?
		Can you imagine the seizing of all private resource?
		And I mean, people have tons of gold now.
		What if they did that to crypto?
		Think about that.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Oh, it wouldn't work now.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah, it wouldn't work, but still they might try, you know?
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		So let's watch this video because it kind of explains what happened during that time period.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		It's insane, the stuff that they got away with.
unidentified		Executive Order 6102 was a presidential executive order that required Americans to surrender much of their gold to the U.S. government.
		President Franklin D. Roosevelt passed the order in 1933 as a reaction to the crippling effect of the Great Depression on the U.S. economy.
		After years of economic turmoil, the American people desperately required relief from the financial disparity induced by the Depression.
		The reason behind the order was to remove constraints on the Federal Reserve in order to print more money during the Depression.
		The order was issued within a month of FDR's inauguration, and all Americans were required to forfeit their gold to the government.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
unidentified		However, each person in a household could retain up to five troy ounces of gold bullion coins.
		Those who surrendered their gold were compensated with $20.67 per troy ounce, the spot price of gold at the time.
		Many were upset by this, as gold's price increased to $35 per ounce with the passing of the Gold Reserve Act of 1934.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
		So they literally, that's the money being exchanged for monopoly money.
		That's what you're watching there.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		And they inflated the price of gold.
		Of course.
		Essentially, what this was, was a play in order to allow the government to create more money to try to stimulate the economy.
		And they knew they couldn't control the price of gold while it was in everybody else's hands.
		So they said, okay, well, let's get everybody to put our gold in our hands.
		And then we'll artificially control the price of gold.
		So we give you the $20 and say, oh, well, this is the amount of gold.
		And then they say, okay, let's bump the price up to $35 per ounce.
		And then all of a sudden, your $20 is worth less.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Right.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		That's insane.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Right.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		I mean, that's how they do it.
		It's classic.
		So moving on from here, do you want to talk about Bretton Woods and leading into that?
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Right.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		So just to premise this whole thing that we were talking about with this whole FDR, this didn't solve the Great Depression, by the way.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		No.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		World War II did.
unidentified		Correct.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		I mean, the unemployment rate from 1933 kept rising.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		It wasn't until World War II happened where the United States became a world economic power.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		The only one left.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		The only one left after everybody else was destroyed and used up all their resources.
		So that leads us to the end of World War II.
		All the countries, I think about 44 of them, come together.
		They go to a place in New Hampshire called Brentwood, and they all sit there and try to figure out what are we going to do now that all this needs to be repaired?
		How are we going to figure out the economic situations?
		Because we've got a lot of issues that are going on in the monetary system, and we need to create a new system in order to allow the world to continue to flourish.
		So in this case, what ended up happening was the U.S. dollar, like Rex said, the U.S. was the only country that was like, hey, we're still kicking.
		So essentially what they ended up doing was everybody agreed, well, you know, the United States is a stable system and nothing's going to happen to them.
		So Uncle Sam was like, hey, let us be the reserve currency of the world.
		And that is the initial point at which we now start having control over the rest of the world because everything is pinned to the dollar, essentially.
		So I want to go and let's watch this video that kind of explains what that Bretton Woods system was and kind of how it all tied together because essentially the dollar was still pinned to gold at that time period.
		But you'll see after some time, we eventually got away from the gold system.
		And so that's also what caused an entire mess.
		So let's go ahead and watch this clip.
nicholas j freitas ▲ ● ▼		Why did America really abandon the gold standard?
		Because most of us are simply taught that Richard Nixon dropped it in 1971 because the gold standard was failing.
		So he shut down the gold window and turned the dollar into a true fiat currency, meaning it's only backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.
		And by that, they mean the United States government.
		However, the real story is a lot darker.
		In fact, by 1971, the U.S. was actually bleeding gold.
		Was just a few months away from running out entirely.
		But to understand why the gold standard really came to an end, we have to go back to 1944.
		With the end of World War II just a matter of months away, representatives from the Allied powers gathered at Mount Washington Hotel in Brenton Woods, New Hampshire to work out what the post-war financial system would look like.
		What they came up with became known as the Brenton Woods Agreement.
		And under it, every major currency was pegged to the U.S. dollar, and the dollar was pegged to gold at $35 per ounce.
		The idea was that other countries would hold dollars and they could redeem them for gold whenever they wanted.
		And this was supposed to help facilitate international trade and create stability within those markets.
		But there was a fatal flaw in the system.
		And two economists spotted the crisis more than a decade in advance.
		In the 1950s, the Belgian economist Robert Triffin went before Congress with a warning.
		He said, if the dollar is the world's reserve currency, America has to run deficits in order to supply enough dollars to the rest of the world.
		But the more deficits America runs, the more people will lose faith that those dollars are actually backed by gold.
		And this is known as the Triffin dilemma.
		You can't force a centralized government-issued currency as a global reserve currency forever.
		The math simply doesn't work.
		Eventually, there will be more dollars than gold.
		And when countries realize that, they're going to rush to cash out before the vaults are empty.
		Unfortunately, Congress didn't listen to Triffin.
		But you know who did?
		The French.
		Jacques Ruff, the chief economic advisor of French President Charles de Gaulle, saw the entire Brenton Woods system as a scam.
		America got to buy anything it wanted with paper IOUs while the rest of the world could only get dollars by selling real goods that other people wanted.
		Calling this system an exorbitant privilege, Ruff warned the French president that the United States would inevitably default on the gold standard.
		De Gaulle responded by calling America's bluff.
		He held a press conference declaring that gold, not paper dollars, should be the only currency used for trade.
		But then he took it a step farther.
		He actually sent the French Navy to New York City to exchange all of their U.S. dollar reserves for gold.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		I bet that didn't go over well.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Nope.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		No, we didn't like giving up all that.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Our reserves, they actually went from 20,000 tons in 1950 to 8,000 tons by 1971.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		So that's a lot of gold.
		And once they realize that we're running out of gold, guys, we need to do something.
		That is when our beautiful president Nixon came in.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		I am not a crook.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Let's go ahead and watch him talk about it.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Essentially, what he did before we start this, he decided to get rid of the gold standard and unpin the dollar to gold and basically said, This is now a fiat currency, and you just have to trust us as the United States because we're the big brother of the world to basically bone.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		But a few years after that, we came up with an even better solution for what we were going to peg it to.
		Well, let's play next in talking about it.
		Let's go to that.
richard nixon ▲ ● ▼		The strength of a nation's currency is based on the strength of that nation's economy.
		And the American economy is by far the strongest in the world.
		Accordingly, I have directed the Secretary of the Treasury to take the action necessary to defend the dollar against the speculators.
		I have directed Secretary Connolly to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets, except in amounts and conditions determined to be in the interest of monetary stability and in the best interest of the United States.
		Now, what is this action, which is very technical, what does it mean for you?
		Let me lay to rest the bugaboo of what is called devaluation.
		If you want to buy a foreign car or take a trip abroad, market conditions may cause your dollar to buy slightly less.
		But if you are among the overwhelming majority of Americans who buy American-made products in America, your dollar will be worth just as much tomorrow as it is today.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Very haunting.
richard nixon ▲ ● ▼		The effect of this action, in other words, will be to stabilize the dollar.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		What does that remind you of?
		Because it reminds me of Trump and the tariffs right now.
		That's what that reminds me of a little bit.
		You know, except we don't make anything over here anymore.
		So everything we buy is more expensive.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Right.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		It's a whole system of like lies and corruption, essentially.
		Everyone kind of has these promises that they say, hey, we're going to do this and it's going to be better for you in the long run.
		Technically, him underpinning the dollar was supposed to be a temporary thing and it became permanent.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Nothing's ever temporary with us, which is insane to me.
		That's pretty wild.
		So getting into this and what we kind of hinted at before we played the clip or what I hinted at was we leave the gold standard.
		Nixon just creates this nebulous fiat thing where it's worth it because you have to trust us and we're this economic power and blah, blah, blah.
		That doesn't end up working out forever.
		So the powers that be after OPEC gets formed, they decide, all right, we got to build something called the petro dollar because we need a real asset, a real resource that our money is tied to.
		So we mandated as a country that all trade by those countries would be done in our money.
		And oil will be bought in dollars.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Well, and this is also being driven off of the fact OPEC, for people who don't understand that, is the organization of the petroleum exporting countries.
		So you've got countries like Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela who are massive oil producers.
		The thing prior to what Rex is going to get into with the petro dollar is prior to this, Israel had gone to war with Egypt, Jordan, and a couple of other Middle Eastern countries, and it created an entire spark.
		It's almost like the same thing that we're seeing today, you know, played back decades ago.
		But essentially what happened with that is OPEC saw the fact of all the things.
		It's called the Yom Kippur War, where Egypt tried to do a surprise attack after Israel had claimed all of this land when they had gone to war.
		And long story short, OPEC essentially said, okay, well, anyone who's supporting Israel gets an embargo, which caused the price of oil to go through the roof for other countries and sparked this panic and inflation went out of control.
		And so this is one of the reasons why the petro dollar, they somehow the United States convinces OPEC and Saudi Arabia to adopt the petrodollar.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Well, they saw the crisis as an opportunity.
		They saw where it was going and they're like, okay, we might as well just hop on this and control the whole thing and it'll work out for them.
		It'll work out for us and it'll work out for our allies as well.
		I mean, it was a pretty smart move.
		And when you peg something to oil, it's not like gold where, you know, it's extremely finite and a tiny amount of it is super valuable.
		You're talking about like billions of barrels ultimately.
		So you have something that you can now tie your hyperinflated already currency to that in itself is a hyperinflated resource when compared to gold.
		So it's kind of a beautiful system, right?
		What the problem with this is you do this.
		You have to be friendly with the places that have the oil because you're essentially giving them purchasing equality to the U.S. You're saying that's why Saudi Arabia is so rich.
		It's why they have all the money is they print money out of the ground.
		They take the money out of the ground, right?
		So we gave a lot of the leverage that we used to have as a nation, whereas before Bretton Woods, it's gold.
		We own all the gold.
		You must exchange for dollars and whatnot.
		Other countries have oil, right?
		Like we don't even have the most oil.
		Venezuela has the most oil.
		And then the Saudi countries and like not Saudi countries and the Middle Eastern countries like Saudi, Qatar, and all these other places, they have tons of natural resources.
		We ceded our dominance right there, you know, but it was a good thing for us to do in the moment in the decades, you know, around that time period.
		But now you look where we're at, China and Russia and BRICS have figured out a way to buy oil with their own currency from some of these countries, and it's only getting more and more extreme.
		And we kind of have to beg the Saudis like, hey, be friendly with us, be friendly with us.
		Please don't do this.
		Please don't do this.
		They're going to do it.
		So what do you think about the timeline on this?
		Because it seems like every 40, 50 years, we get some sort of major new event, right?
		And like where we're at now in the story, talking about OPEC and the petrodollar, we're leading into the 80s here.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, so before I touch on that, the problem with a lot of these policies, if you see up till now in this time period, and the same story plays out today, is everyone makes decisions based off of current situations, and they don't look at the timeframe of what this looks like 30, 40, 50 years from now.
		And half of those people realize, well, I'm going to be dead anyway.
		So I don't really care about this anyway.
		So let's just put this in place.
		Benefits me, benefits my buddies over here.
		And down the line, that is someone else's great-great-grandchildren have to worry about their problem.
		We are the great-great-grandchildren that had to worry about it.
		So it's kind of nuts, the fact of like, okay, we're doing the same thing today as we did back then, where now we are still making decisions where we're like, okay, well, let's just do in the best interest of the current generation.
		Well, forget about it.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		And it truly is.
		It's not a linear thing.
		It's an exponential thing, right?
		Because all this whole this whole time period, I'm sure people in the 70s and the 80s and in like the early 2000s are like, man, this money isn't worth anything compared to what it used to be.
		But where you're at on the slope, you're like here on the slope and you're like, this is insane.
		This is wild.
		We used to be down here.
		Now we're like up here.
		And then it's getting bigger and bigger and bigger because it's like the video said, we have to run deficits.
		We have to print more money.
		We have to be in debt, be in debt, be in debt to who?
		Ourselves and these other countries, right?
		And these other countries, as we talked about on live recently, they don't want to hold our bonds.
		They have no desire to hold our bonds anymore.
		They're trying to slowly sell them off because there's no way to do it all at once.
		But if you look at it on the time scale, I mean, we've talked about like 70 years here so far, right?
		We've talked about 70 years of a process.
		China over the last like five years has sold like a quarter of their debt.
		They've sold 250 billion and they're at 750 billion now.
		They used to hold a trillion worth of our, when I say our debt, I'm talking about our bonds, right?
		Money we have to pay back to them.
		And you look at an economy like Japan that's totally saddled with our debt, their debt to GDP ratio is over 200%.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's insane.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		So 200%.
		Ours is 125%.
		And we all know we're like, we're the worst people ever.
		Like this system's going to crash.
		You look at that society, they're totally cooked, right?
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Totally.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		And the other countries, they look at what we've done across the globe.
		They look at the reality of the situation and they go, okay, being pegged to another country's currency doesn't work for us.
		And being pegged to a resource that we have to use another country's currency to purchase doesn't work for us.
		We just want to trade in our own currency.
		And like getting a little ahead of ourselves here, we'll talk about this at the end of the episode.
		This is how we wound up with BRICS.
		This is exactly how it happened.
		And you're looking at it, right?
		Like the U.S., we come up with some like wily coyote scheme to catch the roadrunner.
		And like, we almost get the roadrunner, but we don't.
		And that's the gold standard being tied to gold and thus having all the gold.
		And they're like, okay, we found a new like giant thing, a TNT, the OPEC, the petro dollar.
		We're going to use this.
		We're going to blow it up.
		We're going to kill the roadrunner.
		Things are going to work forever.
		We blow it up and, you know, Promotion thing, but we do it to ourselves.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Do you know what happened with OPEC?
		So, all of these things that happen end up gearing up leading up to the 80s.
		Getting back to the timeline, this is what happened.
		Essentially, this isn't the first time we're complaining about interest rates and like housing being at like interest rates worth like six and seven percent.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		What did Reagan do?
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		What did he say?
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Well, okay, so during the Reagan time period, you've got time even before he got into office, you had the U.S. using a lot of using a lot of money and they were spending a lot of money.
		The moment that we took the dollar and said, okay, now it's a fiat currency and no longer tied to gold, it made our spending out of control.
		And it was you can do whatever you want.
		You can print as much as you want because there's no longer anything tying this to keep it at its baseline.
		So, now at that point, Gold Rock skyrockets from $35 to $850.
		And that's in a nine-year time period, which is absolutely insane.
		What that also causes inflation in the everyday consumer.
		And so, they got up to a point where inflation was at 18%.
unidentified		Wow.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		At that point in time, what they ended up having to do was they, of course, they had to raise the interest rates.
		So, you had the Fed chair, Paul Valker, who raised the interest rates up to 15 to 20%.
		And so, that meant mortgage rates were at 18%.
		That meant the average American just saw their money just disappear.
		And then you had the large stream of issues that came after that point.
		And so, going to the whole aspect of what Reagan tried to do, why don't you talk about this a little bit?
		Because I want people to understand during this time period, we're kind of reliving this, but it was worse back then.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		So, the government stopped spending money.
		The government massively cut taxes for people.
		And you got to keep in mind the post-World War II order, the taxes on Americans, I think it was like the highest tax rate was something like crazy, like 71 or 91%.
		Like if you made a certain amount of money, but that's how much money was worth, is that you could do that and somehow still make it work because the money itself was inherently valuable.
		We entered into kind of a new age where the money isn't worth anything.
		So, we're not going to take more of it from you.
		Right.
		So, that's how they sort of balanced that equation.
		It didn't totally work.
		Of course, like people were worse off then than before, but we have very short memories and we consider that a great period of economic revival and success just because we didn't enter into another Great Depression.
		Right.
		So, when you look at what happened by 1981, Reagan ended federal price controls on oil and natural gas.
		This encouraged production.
		And as global oil supplies normalized, it helped ease one of the main drivers of 1970s inflation, energy shocks.
		Okay, so you see how it all comes together, right?
		We have this new resource that's become super valuable, super important as more in the world becomes industrialized.
		We have a lot of it.
		We kind of control the countries that have a lot of it.
		We peg this resource to our currency, and then we have real money again.
		Kind of, kind of.
		But it's not just our real money.
		It's everyone's real money because they also have this resource.
		They're able to sell it.
		They're able to get our cash for it.
		So we have to make more cash.
		We have to make more cash.
unidentified		Right.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		And what people don't realize in the background, while everybody is using the dollar as the reserve currency, we kind of forget as the United States that every decision that we make now has implications across all the rest of the country.
		Their economies are directly tied proportionally to what we're doing.
		So you take this time period, you run it out towards the 90s, you run it out towards the 2000s, and the banking system just starts going nuts because they're like, we got all this money.
unidentified		Let's just start making risky bets and let's just start doing whatever we want.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		And Wall Street is starting to make all of these crazy bets on the market.
		And you've got people making loans that they shouldn't be making.
		You get to the early 2000s, around 2005, 2006.
		Everybody's thinking, oh, this gravy train is going to go on forever.
		And you had the stock market at all-time highs, but something was brewing under the surface.
		Everybody knows about the 2008 market crash.
		and everything that kind of happened with that.
		High-level overview for people who don't understand what happened in 2008 and what led to that.
		It was primarily fueled by risky lending practices from the mortgage companies and the banking system.
		Okay.
		So not to bore you guys, and I'm going to keep this like super high-level.
		Essentially, when you make a loan at a bank on a mortgage, it has a rating.
		Okay.
		The highest rating is in the A range, and then you have B, and then you've got C.
		And then below that is like, why are we even lending to you?
		Welcome to hell.
		And essentially what happens is these banks, when they give you a loan, you get a rating for how reliable that loan is, essentially.
		And so what they were doing was, what, well, let me backtrack.
		Essentially, what happens when you have these loans is you take a bundle of these loans, and let's say there's a bunch of A's and B's, and then they call that bundle.
		Like, this is an A bundle.
		You should definitely buy this.
		This has really good securities.
		This has really good mortgages in here.
		We'll sell this off to an investor who wants to buy this.
		And essentially, the investor is trusting that all the mortgages that are in there are high-level mortgages.
		What they ended up doing was they started taking these like C-level mortgages where people were getting like loans for like three or four different houses, 0% down, crazy.
		Essentially, we have a 30-year fixed mortgage now, but back then you could get variable rate loans where that number can change depending on how the market goes.
		And you could get all these variable rate loans because it was super cheap to get it at that time period.
		So what they do is they take these risky loans, they put them underneath all of these A-tier loans, B-tier loans, where it looks like it's good on the surface, but underneath it's a pile of caca underneath that they have essentially bought.
		So what ends up happening is after a certain time period when people can't pay back these loans, the whole thing falls apart, essentially.
		That's the high-level overview.
		Now going back to when the 2008 crisis happened, everybody is panicking, the market crashed.
		Everybody's like, how do we even get here?
		And then you've got what we call TARP.
		TARP is called the Trouble Asset Relief Program.
		That is something that Congress and the United States decided to do as a bailout program because they saw that the entire system was about to be destroyed.
		And so TARP, what they did was they spent $700 billion to bail out all of these banks that made really bad decisions.
		Now, up till date, I think the highest bailout at this point was probably like $150 billion.
		And we freaking tripled that overnight just from this lending, risking, risky lending practices.
		So now you've got a situation where we've bailed out all of these companies and all of these banks that made really bad decisions.
		And then we've created a new standard.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Right.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		And so I want to watch this video that's going to show you guys the person who was in charge of overseeing TARP.
		He was the, his name was Neil Barrisk.
		I'm going to butcher his name.
		I think it's Baroskinski, whatever.
		Eastern European one.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Let me see it.
		Let me see it.
		Let me see your notes.
		Let me see your notes.
		Borofsky.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Borofsky.
		Okay.
		Neil Barofsky.
		That does sound that sounds familiar.
		So, Neil was the inspector general of TARP, and this was the guy in charge of making sure that all of the money was going to the right places and that the system was going to work for the greater good of the United States and the people that lived in it.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Let's watch the clip.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		It messed it up.
neil barofsky ▲ ● ▼		I don't have anything against the people personally.
neil barofsky ▲ ● ▼		They're just part of a system that when I got down to Washington, I mean, I was really shocked to see how much the interests of Wall Street, how much power a handful of Wall Street banks have over our government and how much control they had over their banks.
unidentified		How much power do they have?
		Spill it out.
		How much they have?
neil barofsky ▲ ● ▼		They dictated the terms of their own bailout.
		And so there was some successes for TARP.
		I mean, in fact, TARP did help prevent, along with other programs, a complete collapse of our financial system.
		So that is a good thing.
		But it's all those other goals of TARP that Congress insisted upon when they gave this money and what Treasury promised that were unfulfilled.
		You know, it's not that extraordinary.
		You throw enough money at a couple institutions, they're not going to collapse.
		So that's why the program was supposed to help reinvigorate the economy.
		It was supposed to restore lending.
		When they got this money, they were actually supposed to put it back into the economy so we don't have the sluggish recovery we have today.
		And most importantly, it was supposed to help struggling homeowners.
		This was part and parcel of why the Democrats, particularly in the House, voted for TARP, was the promise to help foreclosure relief for so many struggling homes.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		There was some foreclosure relief for people.
unidentified		A million home, I think, is the number.
neil barofsky ▲ ● ▼		I think the current number now is around 800,000, which is one-fifth of what the goal was supposed to be.
		And the amount of money spent was supposed to be $50 billion.
		You know, it's around $3.5, $4 around what one of the credit card companies got.
		Neil, give us a specific.
unidentified		Tell us what Congress dictated through the TARP fund that banks ended up dictating the specifics.
neil barofsky ▲ ● ▼		Tell us the mechanics of how that happened.
unidentified		Sure.
neil barofsky ▲ ● ▼		I mean, just one example.
		Congress says you have to preserve homeownership.
		That's something the Treasury needed to do with the TARP funds.
		Because that was the original idea behind TARP.
		They were going to buy these mortgages.
		And it got written into the bill that Treasury would then modify those mortgages.
		Well, Treasury didn't do that.
		They just piled money into the banks.
		So that edict was out there.
		Then we had a program, a mortgage modification program, that Secretary Geithner himself told us back in 09 was more about, in his words, foaming the runway for the banks.
		In other words, helping to extend out the foreclosure crisis for the benefit of the banks that he feared could still go under, not about helping homeowners.
		And that's why, so the program is a series of choices that were very favorable for the banks, but bad for the homeowners.
		And when the banks started really abusing homeowners, violating the rules, really just hummeling the homeowners and squeezing the last few dollars out of struggling homeowners, rather than do something about it, you know, Treasury looked the other way.
		They complained to us that they were actually afraid that if they got tough with the banks, the banks might walk away from the program, which shows you the level of where the level of power lies between the banks and well, well, well.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Yep.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		What do you think about that?
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Well, I mean, it's just typical, right?
		They pass every one of these big bailout packages with the, you know, the stated goal of we're going to help the citizens, we're going to help the homeowners who are left out in the cold.
		And of course, it's never about that.
		You said 800,000.
		Was that the number that you had?
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it was one-fifth.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's one-fifth of the people you got to help, but you help five-fifths of the companies that you needed to help.
		You helped them 100%.
		You helped them get right back to normal.
		I mean, it's the same kind of consequence-free culture that we always talk about on the gray area, right?
		And like that's integral to our governmental and financial system.
		And that's what we've talked about here today: is no consequences for them, but consequences for you for trusting in them, right?
		And it's the same thing as the big banks back in the day, right?
		The people are left out in the cold.
		People don't get a bailout.
		People don't get paid.
		But the banks are able to, or at least the powerful backers behind the banks that build them out, they're able to meet with the government in secret and then create a new bank and then take everyone's gold and then use that gold to run the new bank.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Right.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		And if you think about it, not to get in the weeds, but these banks are able to make risky decisions and they know they're going to get bailed out.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Right.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		You can't even bankrupt, file bankruptcy on student loans as a citizen.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Right.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		So there's special issues.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		They have special rules that don't apply to the rest of the people.
		And that's the problem that I have with this whole system.
		So, you know, you were mentioning BRICS earlier.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		This is exactly where we see the origin of BRICS occur.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		This is the first moment of like true and the other countries are strong and capable at this time.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Well, I mean, you had the 08 crisis, like I said, because our economies are tied to the rest of the world.
		We created a world collapse that people don't even really realize.
		A lot of other companies, a lot of other banks internationally had assets and they had been making the same risky lending practices here in America.
		And when the whole system failed here, it fell all across the rest of the globe in different areas.
		So then that's when China in March of 2009, they call us out on our bullcrap.
		They're basically saying, hey, we need a new reserve currency.
		And they weren't sitting there initially saying it needs to be us.
		They said, well, the IMF should be that.
		And the IMF is the International Monetary Fund, which is kind of a global system which governs that marketplace, essentially.
		So then fast forward in 2009, now we have the official formation of BRICS, in which you've got Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa.
		They don't join until 2010.
		So it was just BRICK to begin with.
		But the whole purpose is they saw these people are out of control.
		They're spending all this money and they're causing all this collapse and the inflation is out of, is just destroying everybody.
		So we need an alternative.
		And they had good intention with that.
		And so now.
unidentified		Right.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		And that's the thing I want to touch on that a little bit.
		People always look at BRICS and they go, it's negative.
		It's negative.
		They're replacing America and America is the greatest.
		And we must fight to maintain our dominance over the world.
		And the dollar is so awesome.
		I mean, these other countries, they trusted us for a century almost.
		They were like, okay, America, you're going to handle it.
		We trust in you.
		Just please don't screw us too hard.
		We understand you have kind of a supreme dominant role having this currency, but just, you know, don't inflate the money to an insane extent.
		Don't screw over people.
		Don't screw over us and keep it consistent.
		But like, no, pull gold standard.
		No, now oil is all ours now.
		No, no, no.
		Now our economy is going to crash and your money's worth less, all the stuff that you're holding.
		No, no, no.
		And we end up at a point to where BRICS is just the natural conclusion of like where we're going already and where we've been going for the past hundred years.
		America has proven itself to be a bad creditor.
		Right.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		And you've got more people that are joining BRICS as we speak, especially during this time period, which we will get to.
		But let's fast forward from 2008.
		Everybody understands what happened after that.
		Everything kind of layered out just a little bit.
		I mean, you had bigger collapse during 2009, 2010.
		And then we had this period of like a little bit of normality where nothing crazy was happening.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		20 teens were pretty cool.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		We're pretty calm.
		Right.
		Now you've got 2020.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Right.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		COVID.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		COVID.
		Big pandemic.
		Big Papa comes in, messes everybody up.
		Okay.
		At that point, we kind of all are familiar with the story, but for people who need to be reminded, we spent $5 trillion in a one-year period.
		I think one to two-year period.
		Okay.
		And the Fed expanded their balance sheet by $3 trillion in 2020 just alone, which is absolutely nuts.
		And so this is like the fastest and largest printing of money that we have ever done in history.
		Like by a long shot.
		It's not even close how much money we printed.
		And so, of course, the impact is U.S. markets, they rebound fast.
		Everybody's like, oh, okay, we've got all this money now.
		We started doing PPP loans.
		We started having loans that we started having STEMI checks that started going to people in order to, you know, make sure that their households were covered.
unidentified		Yeah.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		And just a brief little factoid here.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		You know, there's a little bit of distinction, but 18, 20% increase to the total supply of money occurred in 2020.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		That's insane.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Of all money, of all money.
		And that's the factoid that always sticks out in my mind.
		They literally, they just turned the money machine on.
		And there's like, this is, okay, this is going to solve all our problems.
		And the interesting thing that happened because of that was you saw a bunch of big retail stores and really just retail and general places that hold inventory.
		They bought so much inventory during that time period that the reason why things in these big industries have been able to keep price down is they had so much, they were literally giving it away.
		You look at these big retailers, but now the prices at them are going up.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Well, that happened, but then prior to that, you had inflation spike to 9%, which everybody knows.
		That's absolutely nuts.
		But here's the thing, as a business owner, if you see a bunch of people who have all this money and expendable income to go and spend, they're going to raise prices because demand is going up.
		And also everybody was home.
		So they were bored.
		So they're like, I'm going to shop and everybody had way more money because I had people in my family and friends that I knew that were making more money from the stimulus checks than they were at their own jobs.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Right.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		And so they had no incentive to go back to work.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		But do you know how much fraud and abuse came from the COVID stimulus?
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Waste, fraud, and abuse.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		We often hear about that.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		So you had all of these programs together and we had about 300 and four between 300 to 400 billion dollars worth of fraud and waste, which is one out of 10, one out of every $10 in bailout money, okay?
		Which is absolutely nuts.
		And so the PPP loans, at least $100 billion worth of that was stolen via companies.
		You had identity theft.
		You had luxury purchases.
unidentified		Dude, people were just zooming out with Lambos and being like, hey, PPP loans, baby.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		You get to a point where like the money cannot be real because the amount of money is so huge, right?
		They're just, they just throw it away.
		Like it's like 300 plus billion has been spent on Ukraine.
		We spent 6 million in Iraq and 6 trillion in Iraq and then 3 trillion in Afghanistan.
		We spend 5 trillion during COVID.
		We spend, I'm not sure the amount, but a lot during the bailouts and during the financial crisis.
		It all just spirals and goes up and up and up.
		And then the defense budget is close to a trillion every year.
		And it's been like that for decades and it just goes up and up and up.
		And that's how we get to the debt clock.
		That's how we get to 37 trillion and like another half trillion, another half trillion in debt.
		That's how we arrive at the situation.
		And everyone's like, oh, I don't know.
		I don't know how we got here.
		I don't understand why things aren't worth anything anymore.
		Why a dollar can't buy anything.
		It's been like this forever.
		And it speaks to the strength of the system because it hasn't failed truly yet.
		And that is shocking, you know, but it truly was because the entire world has trusted us and trusted, like, you know, maybe they're self-interested, maybe they're even bad people, but they wouldn't screw themselves now, would they?
		They wouldn't screw themselves over.
		They have to remain in a position of strength for themselves.
		We're in a position of weakness and we control everything.
		It's freaky, right?
		Because in any sort of like normal like war game or situation, the weakest party wouldn't have all the cards.
		But when Trump says we have the cards, we do actually have the cards.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		We have all of them.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		We have all the cards and we're forcing them to play our game.
		And when you think about it like that, it truly is crazy.
		Your thoughts?
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		So the way I see this is the just the amount of fraud alone that all the money that they couldn't account for and the people were basically getting checks who were dead, people were putting in false social security and we were just paying that just kind of speaks to the brokenness of our systems in place.
		Right.
		And the issue is, is when you put your money in a bank, you expect them to have standard operating procedures and know where that money is being accounted for and how it's being treated.
		So people still have internationally have bonds here in the United States.
		They still have tons of investments here in the United States that they're trusting America to make the right decisions for them on their behalf, essentially, with the money supply.
		And so it's like, it's almost a no-brainer how we've gotten here because it's pretty clear.
		It's pretty clear as day at this point.
		And what this only did was just fuel the de-dollarization, essentially.
		Like he had mentioned, China has been dumping all of their, have been slowly dumping all of their bonds so that they can hedge their risk and not be so caught up and over-leveraged with what we're what we're doing over here.
		And so it really begs the question for a lot of these people is, can we really trust the systems that we have in place?
		And can we trust the United States?
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Well, and then it goes back to a thing where with BRICS, you have all these countries trading in their own currency and whatnot.
		It goes from being a point of, okay, it's not who holds the most U.S. crap.
		It's who has the most actual value on their natural resources and economy.
		So that can be a very scary thing for some countries, right?
		That could be a very scary thing for Japan, for example, which is probably why they hold so much of our stuff.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		They don't have anything.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, they don't have any resources.
		They have manufacturing base, but even that, you know, it's suffered a lot of decline.
		So you look at this and it's kind of, it's funny, like this is an old term used for COVID, but it kind of applies to everything.
		This is a great reset, right?
		We're returning back to a time of really, and people talk about globalism and BRICS being a globalist thing.
		We're actually returning, we're going away from a time of globalism where the U.S. is the hegemon and we're returning back to a system where it's about country per country.
		What do you have?
		What do you bring to the table?
		What resources can we trade with each other?
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Right.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		And, you know, that seems to me like it works out a whole lot better long term.
		And for America, you know, you look at us, like we have resources.
		We could do this, but, you know, we won't.
		We won't do it.
		We like it's, it's open offer for us to join bricks, to join all these organizations, right?
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Right.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		But we'll never, we'll never take that offer because we look at them as peons.
		Ultimately, we go, you know, y'all are so down low and we're so mighty and we control levers of power.
		Sure, but eventually everyone's going to leave the game when they see they can't win.
		Right.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Right.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		And like, that's where we're at.
		They're, they're already getting uneasy.
		They're kind of standing up around the table and they're kind of trying to decide, hey, is it worth it to go into the great unknown and try to make this new thing?
		Or is it worth it to try to think that this might straighten itself out?
		It's straightened itself out in the past before, right?
		No, it hasn't.
		It hasn't ever straightened itself.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		No, we've just swept it under the rudge.
unidentified		Right.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		We've just hidden it and they're finding our secret honeyhole of like garbage, you know?
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		Well, here's the thing.
		You can fool some of the people, but you can't fool the creditors and the people who give who look at the stats and who look at the numbers.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Like Moody.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Yes, exactly.
		All the analyzers across all of the major creditors that basically say, okay, what is your credit worthiness?
		They have a credit score.
		The United States has a credit score just like you have a credit score.
		And so with that being said, you had Moody, which he just mentioned, and you also had Fitch and S ⁇ P.
		And they all downgraded the United States from the top level, which is AAA.
		And then they went one level down to the next one underneath that for like Moody's.
		I think it's like double A1 and then for Fitch, it's like double A plus.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		And that doesn't sound like much, but that's everything.
unidentified		Right.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		That's everything.
		And you got to keep in mind, we talked about grand time scale today and exactly how we got here over the past century.
		That is such a huge seismic shift.
		You know, like we're already feeling that.
		We're going to feel that more and more in the future.
		But this is the type of thing that shifts the process from being decades away to being years away.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Right.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		And that's, that's the big deal.
		And that's why we talk about it a lot on the gray area.
		There are weeks when decades happen, you know, and there are decades when nothing happens.
		And that's essentially a Vladimir Lenin quote, but it's very true.
		And it's one of my favorites.
		That's how the world works.
		Right.
		And just because your grandparents and your parents didn't experience it doesn't mean that you or your children will not.
		In fact, it probably means more so, you know, in a time where you're able to kind of escape the evil, the evil will come down the road.
unidentified		Right.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		And I, and I think I was looking at, okay, what are our solutions for this?
		I think ultimately, and this is my opinion, but also I've, I've seen other people support this.
		I think the only thing that really saves us at the end of the day is you go through, there might be no saving, but ultimately what the decision would have to be is we'd have to go back to the gold standard across the world because that's the only thing that has real hard concrete assets that are tied to it.
		This whole idea of fiat, like I know what Bricks is trying to do at the same time, but I think ultimately you have to go back to that gold standard because there's unlimited supply.
		It's still rare.
		I can still say, hey, this is a big gold bar.
		Take this and this is of value.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think we would also have to, if there was any sort of restructuring that was done, we would have to acknowledge the other currencies and then relate the US dollar to them instead of to another asset like oil or gold, right?
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's hard.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's a real, it's a conundrum.
		I'm not an economist, so I can't really speak on it, but it seems to me on a baseline level that the BRICS solution makes the most sense to me from a logical perspective, right?
		Because you're just trading on what you have.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		But I think there's a level above that if like the United States can just let go of the wheel of power just for a little bit.
		There is a scenario where we do create a global currency that ties to multiple economies, just like Bricks is trying to do.
		It's a little tough because you've got economic situations that are different in each one of these countries.
		And, you know, but you do need a diversification.
		That's why like an S ⁇ P exists where you have the top 500 companies because you're diversifying.
		And if one falls, the other ones are still doing well.
		It doesn't mean everything drops at the same time.
		You don't just have one thing of Tesla that you're buying.
		And then whatever happens that goes up goes up and everybody's up.
		And then everything comes down and everybody is down.
		So overall, it's not this, this was fun for me because it's like you kind of forget about history.
		Right.
		You forget how we get to this point, how we got to this point.
		And it's like kind of clear as day at this point how the train has been moving this entire time.
		And I don't know what happens from here, but it's not looking good.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Well, I mean, it's all the same, like geopolitical, economic, military, on all these levels, everything we've done, we've screwed everyone and ourselves the most in a very weird way by destroying all these relationships, right?
		Like we got 600 military bases across the world.
		We don't help anybody with those.
		Like we're not, oh, we're protecting, we're protecting Europe from Russia, from evil Russia.
		We're protecting Japan and over there from the evil China.
		We're protecting everyone.
		It's us.
		You must trade with our currency.
		You must do what we say.
		We can do whatever.
		We can bomb whatever.
		F you.
		That's the attitude.
		And it's like having an abusive parent, you know, but an abusive parent that never even watches you, right?
		It just like shows up from like year to year to just like destroy your life and take everything you have and like disappears.
		And then like, this is the greatest person ever.
		And you're like, what?
		Like, what are you talking about?
		Come on.
		Like, this is a relationship that just on a baseline level, it doesn't work for either party.
		It doesn't work for the U.S. because the gravy train can't go on forever.
		The scam is indefinite.
		And it doesn't go well in the short term and the long term for these other countries because in the short term, they have to submit themselves to the U.S. and the woes of the U.S., like the 2008 financial crisis, that'll affect you.
		But also in the long term, you kind of lose the ability to have any real sovereignty or development for yourself because you're all tied to the West and what the West can bring you in that particular situation.
		I see it as a thing of just, it's not a perpetual emotion machine.
		It doesn't work.
		It's just slowing down.
		And when do we get to the point where it crashes?
		I don't know.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		I think it's going to happen though.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I think 2028, you know, like leading into the new decade and to the 30s, I think we're going to see a repeat.
		History likes to rhyme.
		You know, 1929, Great Depression, and all that.
		I see that as a real possibility.
		But again, I think it would happen much slower, much longer, much better in a more advantageous way for the West if the West right now would start cooperating on these new resources.
		Like Russia wants to do development with us in the Arctic and whatnot.
		I always talk about that.
		There are trillions of dollars that we could find and we could kind of smooth this out and make it so eventually it's kind of like bricks.
		You wake up one day and there's this new thing built and we just kind of don't use the old thing anymore.
		But do we have the ability to disconnect ourselves from our arrogance and believing that we will be able to find a way to fix it?
unidentified		Right.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		And cooperation.
unidentified		Right.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Everybody's kind of living in this delusion of how we were in the past and people can't separate the personality from all the things that we were doing right at that time period, which now that you look at the history, they seemed right on the surface, but they were actually just setting up for bad situation after bad situation.
		Right.
		And you're just trying to cover up and do it's a never-ending flywheel of catching up.
		Here's what I would say for the audience and people that are watching this till the end.
		There is an over-reliance on people thinking that the government is always going to have your back and that it's just going to make the right monetary decisions to be to better you and your family.
		And people don't like to inform themselves on how the systems actually work.
		There's a reason why Rex and I are business owners because the moment you become a business owner or the moment that you become an entrepreneur or you do something that gives you your own ability to hedge inflation where you're not waiting for the government to just drop interest rates, you take some of that power back.
		And the biggest thing for you going forward is going to be how do I protect myself in the future?
		Don't have to be one of those conspiracy theorist people that are building bombs underneath the shelter and making these giant fortresses.
		But you do need to start looking at: okay, how do I stack up enough money and not just stacking up, how do I invest in things that are not just here in the United States, but things that are international?
		You have to diversify your portfolio and find a way to climb out of this ditch that America has created for us at this point and hedge your own inflation by doing something else.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Why would you be loyal to your governmental system when it hasn't been loyal to you ultimately?
		A government by the people for the people that isn't what we've had for a very long time.
		And why would you trust the system to fix itself when we have this century-long track record of just the can being kicked down the road?
		And then for each successive generation, just makes an even worse choice.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Right.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		You know, for like the next generation or two removed, right?
		So we arrive at this point where I just see online, you know, when you talk about this sort of stuff, they call you a doomer.
		They say you're black pilled.
		They say all type of stuff, XYZ, you name it.
		They come at you and they go, look, like, we're the greatest country on earth.
		We have American exceptionalism.
		We're going to figure a way out of this.
		We always have.
		We never have.
		And what we're being real about on the gray area is presenting the whole timeline to you so that you have the very important context to understand that it's up to you and up to, you know, ultimately your senses and your instinct and your will and your drive to not be bound to the fate of the country where you just go, okay, we're going to figure things out.
		It's just going to get better one year.
		Ultimately, like we invest in gold, we invest in crypto, we invest in all these things, you start businesses.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Buy gold.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		You fight the slow rising wages by ultimately creating your own wage, right?
		Right.
		So like that's what we bring to you here on the gray area.
		It's honestly, it's an optimistic perspective, but to be optimistic about these things, you have to understand where the false optimism comes from.
		And a lot of the time that I see it, it's people that just, it's a too big to feel mentality.
		And that's what the banks thought too.
		And they, they were right.
		But you are not.
		You are not the bank.
		You are a citizen.
		You do not have special interest groups.
		You don't have lobbyists trying to get you paid back in Congress.
		Ultimately, we're all the little guy, right?
		And no one cares about us.
		So we got to care about ourselves.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		And the last thing I'll say is we're not here to sell you like Andrew Taney on the real world.
		Join us and you can go and figure out how to get your life together and find all these assets.
		I'm just trying to inform everybody as well as you have agency, right?
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		We're trying to inform people that they have agency.
		This isn't about a financial program or a protocol.
		This is about just realizing, hey, I'm a citizen.
		While I do still have this agency, while the sun is still shining, I'm going to make hay.
unidentified		Right.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		And this is the perfect opportunity to make money out of any other.
		You have more opportunity to make money now than any other generation.
		Just like the dot-com bubble happened and you had a lot of companies that were coming and there was just a new wave of things that you could do.
		AI is here, guys.
		Within the next five years, you can dramatically change your life because there is this machine that is essentially doing the work for you in certain aspects and is giving you the leverage.
		You can make pictures.
		You can create content.
		You can do a bunch of things that require you to have 10 different people in order to do that.
		So at the end of the day, there is no excuse for why you shouldn't be able to take these resources that America's still on top currently.
		And we're still having all these abilities that we can utilize to our, that we can use at the end of the day.
		And I just want to see people succeed at the end of this.
unidentified		Right.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Me too.
		It's all about common success.
		It's all about building, you know, a true spirit of freedom within the American people.
		And when we tire ourselves, you know, to kind of these like big interests, these big banks, the big government, we go, okay, you know, like, I just know one day it's going to get better because the people at the top are going to fix it because it's in their interest to fix it.
		They behave as if it's not in their interest.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		It's not because they're all going to die out and they realize it doesn't really matter.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		They don't care.
		The 80-year-old who owns everything doesn't care about you.
		You have to care about yourself.
		And that's the message of the show.
		I think this has been a phenomenal episode.
		I think we gave a lot of information here.
		I think there's a lot for people to just get as a starting point and then jump off and really realize, you know, like, hey, I want to learn about this sector of the economy.
		Hey, I want to learn about why this event happened.
		We give you that all here.
		There's a lot of points where you can go back and we'll time stamp it.
		I mean, the important thing that you have to realize is ultimately big power interests, they meet in secret and they decide how to run your life.
		Right.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		And you'll never hear about these conversations until decades later.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		So I suggest everyone read The Creature from Jekyll Island.
		I know I'll be rereading it.
		That's a phenomenal book.
		It goes over the events on Jekyll Island that transpired, that led to the creation of the modern financial system.
		I encourage everyone to go, you know, check out some of Richard Nixon's old speeches.
		There's a ton of content on him.
		I think there's even a YouTube channel archive of Nixon just purely talking, talking, talking.
		And if you look at him and you look at what he did on the corruption standpoint and you look at what like all the presidents have been doing.
		Like in recent memory, we have reached a point of accelerationism to where it's just totally out of control.
		I mean, Trump's got the Bitcoin statue right up by the Capitol.
		So, I mean, look, we're holding out the Bitcoin to you.
		We're holding out the gold to you.
		We're just saying, go find it for yourself.
		Go be an American.
		Go be successful.
		Go be free.
		Thank you for tuning into the Gray Area.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		Appreciate you guys.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Episode three.
		Please like and subscribe.
		If you made it this long, we really love you.
		We really appreciate you.
		Leave a comment.
		We're always trying to find out what y'all want us to talk about.
tim tompkins ▲ ● ▼		And follow us on X.
		We respond to the comments at Truism Tim.
		Rex Jones News with a Z.
		And then Gray Area Talks is the overall where you're going to find content on us as well.
		So we appreciate you guys.
		Love you.
		Thanks for tuning in this far in the episode.
		If you have, Roger out.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Phenomenal.
rex jones ▲ ● ▼		Thank you, Tim.
unidentified		Modern life has left us out of balance.
		Long ago, it was once said, certain remedies could grant a man the vitality of a horse.
		For over 6,000 years, these natural remedies have been harvested and tested by generations.
		Why create complex formulas when nature's roots are still in our hands?

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