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May 5, 2022 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
50:39
John Rubino of DollarCollapse.com reveals the signs pointing toward global currency WIPEOUT
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Welcome everyone to Brighton Conversations.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of brighteon.com.
And today, we've got the guest that, you know, I've been talking about his website, dollarcollapse.com.
We need to talk to this man today because the information he has is so vital For your financial survival, I believe, in what's coming.
And his name is John Rubino and he's a guest on many shows and he's a repeat guest with us.
He joins us today to talk about what's happening with massive currency printing or currency counterfeiting and what this means for the near-term future and maybe long-term future of the dollar and the U.S. economy.
John, it's a great honor to have you on today.
Thank you for joining me.
Hey Mike, good to talk to you again.
It has been an eventful few months since we talked last, huh?
Absolutely.
Yeah, so just starting right off here, some of the big things that are happening, the $1.9 trillion COVID stimulus bill, I believe, that Biden and the Democrats are pushing, Bitcoin crossing the $50,000 valuation, but then again, that's denominated in dollars that are losing value, so make of that what you will.
Massive, it seems, inflation or a bubble in so many things.
You've talked about this, you know, bond bubble, real estate bubble and so on.
What do you make of the picture that's shaping up right now?
Well, basically, the pandemic and the lockdown related to the pandemic accelerated a lot of trends that were already in place.
We were already running trillion-dollar deficits at the federal level, and basically every other sector of society was borrowing way too much money.
So we were headed for some kind of a reckoning with all that debt at some point.
It was...
But now it might have become imminent because we've had to spend so much money in the last couple of years just to keep ourselves from falling into a 1930s-style depression because of all the lockdowns.
You know, we've wiped out, what, one-third of the small businesses in the country?
Something like that, yeah.
Huge numbers of people can't pay their rent.
Huge landlords are going broke because their tenants aren't paying them.
It just goes on and on.
And all of these guys need to be bailed out.
So the federal government...
Is going to, one way or another, create another three to five trillion dollars this year after doing the same thing last year.
And so this debt burden that was already unsustainable and already, you know, about to blow up the economy is just that much worse now.
So whatever was going to happen is closer now than it was.
We still can't know anything about the timing, you know, whether it's this year or next year or five years from now.
But It's definitely closer than it was because we compressed a whole decade of unwise borrowing into just two years here.
And so there's got to be a consequence to that somehow.
And one of the things we learned, you know, I'm coming to you from Texas, and we had the Texas blackouts from the Arctic freeze or the...
Near total infrastructure failure.
Everything failed for a period of time, from cell towers, grocery stores, gas stations, emergency response services, transportation.
Everything failed.
Banks were closed.
We learned that these complex systems are far more fragile than we think.
And I believe that applies to the financial system as well.
And that's my question to you.
Do you believe that There's overconfidence, at least portrayed by Yellen and the CNBCs of the world and so on.
Overconfidence that everything's great, but in reality, things might be subject to a far more insidious systemic failure.
Oh, there's vast overconfidence or vast dishonesty, one or the other, you know, at the top level of the financial system right now.
Because, yeah, complex systems...
Once they reach a point where they require more new energy than they produce to keep them from spinning out of control, they're basically toast.
I mean, there's no way to salvage something like that.
And the financial system hit that point a while ago, and now it's only been able to keep going because we're pumping in so much new currency and creating so much new credit.
That it allows what is now kind of a zombie financial system to keep shuffling along on all this new credit.
But you can't do that forever because eventually you build up so much bad debt.
That it starts to blow up on you, and then the system spins out of control.
You know, Jim Rickards, who's one of the smartest guys in this space, in the gloom and doom financial space, has an analogy that I think is apt here.
He says the people in charge of the financial system think they're working with a thermostat, where they just turn the knob from 68 to 72 or whatever, and they get a nice smooth transition to a new equilibrium.
But what they're really working with is a nuclear reactor.
And once it crosses into the red zone, it goes critical.
And then it doesn't matter what you do with that knob.
You know, the thing is going to blow up.
Our financial system is that.
It's a nuclear reactor that is in the red zone, and now it's just a matter of time before the whole system just spins out of control.
Again, we don't know about the timing, but I think that it's going to spin out of control is kind of baked in the cake at this point.
Yeah, I completely agree with you.
And to continue that metaphor, so our financial system is Chernobyl in the 1980s, and I think that was 86, and they've already pulled all the bismuth buffers out, and the fuel rods are raw exposed to each other.
There are no controls on the system anymore, and they're just dumping more currency into the system to prevent an imminent collapse.
I mean, if they stopped pumping money, what would happen to the system right now?
Oh, it would totally melt down right now, because you've got so many people who are wildly over-indebted and can only get by by borrowing more money.
You know, at the consumer level, it's all these families that have student loans and car loans and a mortgage and credit cards and have to take out new credit cards in order to pay the bills.
And there are companies, there are these companies called zombie companies that have to borrow in order to pay just the interest cost on their debt.
You know, their operations don't even pay the interest on their debt, so they have to borrow more money.
They can only survive with new credit.
And then there are cities and states, like Illinois is the perfect example.
They're the poster child for this.
But they have to borrow more money.
Even though the state constitution requires a balanced budget, they still have to take on more and more debt every year by calling it other things, just in order to not default on their debt.
So take away easy credit from any of those groups, plus a lot of other groups, and they melt down.
And they become a domino that knocks down other dominoes, and the system just falls apart.
So you can't let anybody fail right now.
Okay, and that's why this is such an interesting year, because there was always going to be a crisis that was so big that it would force the government to bail out everybody in sight.
That was always coming.
But the pandemic and the lockdown brought that eventuality into the present.
This year, the federal government in the U.S., along with all the other major governments, are pretty much going to have to bail out everybody.
They've got to bail out states and localities for several trillion dollars, a huge number of over-indebted companies.
They've got to bail out renters.
They've got to bail out the renters' landlords.
They've got to bail out all the hospitality industries, plus most other small businesses.
And, you know, we're talking multiple trillions of dollars here, and they've got to do it all at once because they can't let everybody.
Any of these guys fail because their failure might pull down everybody that they owe money to and so on until the system breaks down.
So we have to do that this year.
And what happens after that is, you know, it's interesting in the Chinese curse sense.
You know, it's not going to be fun for most people, but it's going to be fascinating for finance geeks and, you know, economic obsessives, people like me who think this is a really interesting subject.
You know, we're going to find this next few years fascinating, but I don't think anybody else is.
Oh, yeah.
Well, they're going to be too busy suffering to feel fascination from it.
But I've got so many questions for you.
But yeah, I saw that they're even bailing out museums and the National Endowment for the Arts.
I guess the ballet troops need bailouts, too.
The bailouts are everywhere.
And $50 billion earmarked for FEMA. I know the dollar is going to collapse.
I get it.
I understand what's happening.
But I need to run my business.
And even I have this question too.
I need to run my business.
I need to meet payroll.
I need to be able to purchase supplies.
Whatever.
Whatever your costs are.
I know I'm going to lose some amount of cash that's in the bank when the day comes that the banks close, but what can I do that is semi-liquid to be somewhat risk-averse to the dollar?
Can I buy a foreign currency that might survive better, or is there some other vehicle that I could convert back into dollars as I need them and maybe avoid some of the dollar erosion that's taking place?
Do you have any advice for people on that?
Yeah, I mean, and that's something that you're right.
A lot of people are wrestling with because you need to hold dollars to make your payroll, right?
Right.
And to pay your suppliers and take care of your customers.
You know, it goes on and on, the reasons that you need to own dollars.
And so you don't have a choice but to have an account.
Right.
That includes a lot of dollars.
But of course, you know, you're paying people in dollars too.
So it kind of works both ways.
If the dollar gets less valuable, then the real cost of a lot of your bills goes down too.
So maybe that's a wash.
But a lot of the...
I mean, we're buying food and it's way more expensive now.
Or we're building a metal building.
The metal cost of the metal building is 250% of what it was 18 months ago.
So, yeah, here's where it gets tough.
If your costs start going up faster than your selling prices.
Right.
Then you're squeezed.
And that's what inflation does, because you're the one who gets hit with the costs first, right?
And then you have to raise your prices if you're selling something out there to cover your costs.
But that's not easy to do.
I mean, how do you tell your customers, oh, now this thing that you bought for 30 bucks...
Last month is now 50 bucks.
It's really hard to do without losing sales.
And a lot of businesses never figure out how to do it.
And they just go bust.
So, you know, running a business in inflationary times is tremendously difficult.
And I don't have that good of an answer for that.
You know, all you can do is try to get ahead of it by raising prices in anticipation of higher costs.
But of course, that's not easy and it might cost you more than it saves you because your customers will desert you.
So I don't know about that.
But let's say you've got...
Extra cash that you really don't need for day-to-day operations.
That's a question that's easier to answer, and that is that you move what would have been in just a big treasury account for your company.
You move some of that into real assets like gold and silver.
Sure.
Because those things, although they fluctuate, But over time, they tend to hold their value when a currency is falling in value.
In other words, they'll protect your purchasing power.
They'll be worth what you put into them.
Whereas the dollars in your bank account will not be worth what you put into them.
So you can do that with gold and silver because they're easy to buy and they're fairly easy to store.
And so that can just be another financial account, in effect, if you want to do it that way.
Pay somebody...
Trustworthy to store it for you.
And that's something that will preserve your purchasing power and will probably go up more than your selling costs will go up.
And more, you know, more than your supplies will go, you know, because that'll be the thing that does best, gold and silver.
Whereas a lot of other things will go up, but not that much.
So, and you just have to hope that that does it because, you know, if you're one of the unlucky companies that has to buy copper right now, or copper, Right.
You know, there's really no solution because they're going up faster than pretty much any financial inflation hedge you can think of.
So you kind of just have to pass that on to your customers or eat it in the form of lower margins.
And, you know, I wish there was a good simple answer for this, but what we're doing...
See, the financial system that we have designed works for the owners of financial assets because...
Their stocks, bonds, and real estate tend to go up, but it hurts savers who need fixed income.
In other words, if you need your bank account to support you in retirement, you're screwed.
And if you're a small business who has to buy raw materials and then turn those raw materials into something that you're going to sell, You've got a huge problem because the cost of what you're buying is going to go up possibly faster than you can raise your selling prices.
And that's not an accident.
That's kind of a feature rather than a bug in this system.
Because if you're a small business and you fail because of this, who wins?
Amazon.
Walmart, Google.
So the big guys who have a big say in designing financial policy are fine with the way this is going.
They're completely happy that one-third of the restaurants are going out of business because they probably have a restaurant arm that will pick up the slack.
And if a bunch of downtown stores go out of business, well, Walmart makes out and Amazon makes out.
So...
A lot of this is, well, we talked last time I was on about whether this is part of some big nefarious plan by a bunch of rich super geniuses or a bunch of morons stumbling across the gap between here and a cliff without realizing the damage they're causing.
And I still don't I don't really have a good answer for what that is, whether those people are stupid or evil geniuses.
But boy, the things that are happening right now sure do seem to be helping the 1% at the expense of everybody else consistently.
You know, it's not just two things here and one thing there.
It's everything that happens is better for them than for us.
Well, I think it's a combination of those two classes of people you mentioned.
I think it's the evil geniuses at the top using the useful idiots who are incompetent but still have control over the levers of the monetary system.
That's just my guess.
But about commodities, you're exactly right.
I just paid $99 for a set of copper jumper cables.
Because I wanted them to be actual copper.
I realized that almost all the jumper cables sold today are aluminum that are copper clad.
So they've gone to aluminum.
So when you're buying a one gauge, which is the thickness of it, a one gauge pair of jumper cables...
That's not copper unless you demand 100% copper.
Those are aluminum, and they don't carry the same current with the same efficiency as copper.
So, you know, there you go.
Inflation in jumper cables right there.
Yeah.
Well, that kind of takes us into an investment thesis then, because commodities are a really good thing to own right now.
You know, if you're...
If you've got your basic bills paid and everything and you've got your money left over and you're trying to decide how to invest it, I think we're at the beginning of a big commodity super cycle in which things like copper and iron ore and aluminum and zinc go up a lot.
On the one hand, it's because of all the money we're creating.
And on the other, it's because the governments of the world have decided that clean tech and alternative energy are what we're going to jump into over the next decade.
You know, we're going to shift, for instance, the entire auto fleet in the world, basically, over to electric cars.
And they use a ton of copper and a lot of other base metals.
Oh, yeah.
Electric motors.
So those things are going to get more valuable.
And solar panels, they use a lot of silver.
So silver kind of wins twice.
It's a monetary metal.
When we screw up the dollar, it goes up.
And it's an industrial metal that is used in things that governments are subsidizing really aggressively.
So you could buy silver very happily just on the industrial metal thesis without even looking at the monetary metal thing.
But you win twice with silver if you own it.
So I think those are things you can invest in.
Let's talk about silver and gold while you're on the subject.
Now, silver right now, unfortunately, the premiums are extremely high in the marketplace.
People are out there paying $40 plus for a single ounce of a U.S. Mint Silver Eagle, even with the spot price being $28, let's say, something like that.
But gold has not experienced that same kind of premium crunch.
And where silver contracts that are coming due in the commodities market are having trouble finding physical silver in a huge way.
I mean, there's a massive shortage of physical silver.
Seems like gold is readily available at the moment.
What's your take on that?
I mean, should people shift more to gold because there's less of a premium?
Or do you still think silver is the better bet?
Well, I mean, gold and silver are in a lot of ways the same thing.
You know, they move according to the same macroeconomic forces.
So they're both going to do great in the kind of world that looks like it's coming.
You know, where we're borrowing insane amounts of money and creating huge amounts of new currency and dumping it into the market and trying to devalue the big currencies of the world in order to get out in front of all our debt.
That's great for precious metals in general.
But in this kind of a cycle, this part of the cycle, where things really get going, silver tends to outperform gold.
Gold does great, and it's much safer.
At least it's much less volatile.
You know, it's not going to keep you up at night by dropping by 40% and then rising by 60% in the space of one year very often.
So gold is a good thing to have because it allows you to sleep at night.
Now, silver, because it tends to do better than gold in the really steeply upward sloping part of the market for gold and silver, will probably tend to do better over the next three to five years because it's a thinly traded market, it's pretty cheap relative to gold, and it has the industrial metal component to it.
So it's liable to go up about twice as fast as gold if history repeats.
And the way you measure that is the gold to silver ratio.
When the number of ounces of silver it takes to buy an ounce of gold is how you tell how these two things are valued relatively.
And right now I think it's like 70-something, which is fairly favorable to silver.
In other words, it takes maybe 70 ounces of silver to buy an ounce of gold.
Historically, if you bought at that level, Your silver would do better than your gold, but both would go up as a general rule.
And that's true today.
So I love gold.
I think it's the future of money.
We will probably have to do a monetary reset when this thing really blows up, and we'll have to go back to something like the gold standard.
So there's a good chance they just...
Rename or change the terms of the dollar to it being just a name for one ten-thousandth of an ounce of gold a few years from now.
And then gold is $10,000 an ounce, you know?
So that's a good thing to own between here and there.
Silver in that same time will probably go up quite a bit more, though.
So it just depends on your risk tolerance.
Why would any government, even after this debt collapse, let's say, or currency collapse, why would any government want to go back to having gold-backed currency?
Because that would force them into fiscal discipline that does not allow them to...
bribe their friends and pay off the corporations that are donating to their campaigns and all that.
You know, being able to print money and keep spending out of thin air sure does concentrate power in the hands of the corrupt at the top of the political system.
Why would they ever want to have a system that doesn't allow them to do that?
Oh, they will never want to do that.
As you said, it requires them to give up the best power in the world.
I mean, what's better than to be able to create money out of thin air, right?
If you could have any power, super strength, I would still take the money thing.
But...
At some point, it's going to be the least bad option on a list of terrifying options, because the other things will be a Weimar Germany-style hyperinflation, where, you know, Google that, and you'll see pictures of people taking suitcases full of cash to the grocery store, or throwing bales of cash in the furnace to heat their houses.
That's what happened to that currency then.
And that would be one of our options going forward if we don't get our act together very soon here.
The other might be, you know, stop printing all those dollars, but drop into a 1930s-style debt-driven deflationary depression, you know?
And nobody wants to be in charge when that happens because, you know, we still remember Herbert Hoover's name.
Because he was the president in 1930 when that happened.
So nobody wants to be that.
Nobody wants to be Herbert Hoover.
So they don't want that to happen either.
And the only other option is going to be some kind of a monetary reset.
So some people say we might, instead of keeping the dollar as the world's reserve currency, we might go to the International Monetary Fund's special drawing rights, SDRs.
As the new global currency, and that might buy us some time, but I don't know.
All SDRs are, it's just a name for a basket of currencies, including the dollar, the yen, and the euro, right?
So it's not clear how putting a bunch of failing currencies into a basket...
And then naming it something else gives you a better currency system.
So I think we'll have to go back to something that literally takes that power away from governments, which they never should have had in the first place, right?
You know, it's just a crazy idea to give governments the ability to create money out of thin air.
Well, and also after this pandemic year, people's faith in institutions and government promises has really been shattered across the board.
So if the dollar collapses and then the U.S. government, for example, says, oh, well, something went wrong with that.
It's probably Trump's fault, but you can trust us now because we have this new thing.
I think that's going to be a hard sell for a lot of people, especially if they just lost 95% of their purchasing power or more.
It's going to be a really tough sell.
But like you say, maybe then they'll say, well, this is backed by gold.
But even then, I don't know about you, John, but I wouldn't trust a Biden regime telling us, oh, trust us, there's gold in a vault somewhere.
I wouldn't even believe that.
Well, you know, that's what they do now.
They say, yeah, we've got all this gold, 8,000 tons of gold in Fort Knox, but you can't see it.
You can't visit and look at it or anything, and we don't audit it, but it's there.
Trust us.
So, yeah, they would try something like that.
For a gold standard to work, gold and dollars have to be exchangeable, which is what the classical gold standard was.
For 200 years, we had zero inflation and steady growth.
And if we went back to something like that, you would have to be able to go to the post office or some other government office and exchange your dollars for gold at a fixed price, the official price, anytime you wanted.
Right.
And that mechanism would limit the amount of dollars the government could create.
Because if it created too many dollars, people would figure that out and they would just go buy gold with it.
And the government would lose all its gold and the system would fail.
So it would have a limiting factor that maybe kept the government honest.
Even though governments don't want to be honest, there's no question that they would cheat if they could.
But you've got to have something that is transparently...
Yeah, and think about 1971, Richard Nixon, of course, decoupling gold from the currency.
But even at that time, he didn't blame the government.
He didn't say, oh, we plan to print money from here forward and loot the economy.
No, he blamed, I think...
Manipulators or something, right?
Didn't he?
Speculators.
Yeah, people were betting against the dollar.
And, you know, they're bad for doing that.
Even though, you know, we're financing the Vietnam War and the brand new Great Society entitlements and not raising enough taxes to cover the cost of those things.
But the people who bet against the dollar were the ones who were trying to hurt us.
And they're always going to say stuff like that.
So, you know, it's very hard to run an honest monetary system because it's not in the interest of the government in any given moment to be honest about money, because there's always a new election that you need to win or a war you have to fight, right?
So governments absolutely hate limits on their printing presses.
But, again, if the alternative is an epic generational crash that taints the political legacy of the guys in charge for the next hundred years, maybe that'll be the least obnoxious option to them, and we will go back to honest money.
But, you know, there's always the...
Global thermonuclear war option, too.
You know, if we have some kind of a big war, that'll distract people from the fact that the government is screwing up the domestic economy.
And that's the thing that scares me most, because I think a currency crisis is something you can get through.
A monetary reset happens.
Periodically in human history and everybody survives, basically.
But the kind of thing that would happen if we decided that it's better to distract the populace with a war than it is to deal with our domestic problems, that's an unpredictable thing that just could be terrifying, you know, because we have...
An astounding generation of new weapons that nobody can predict once they're out there in the field.
Well, many people believe that COVID itself was an engineered biological weapon.
I mean, I share that belief.
I don't know if you do.
I'm not even asking you if you do.
But many people do believe that.
And look at how disruptive that was in terms of the economy and debt spending.
I mean, what, 40% of all the dollars printed in the history of our country, I think, were printed last year?
I mean, truly, it's insane.
And that was from an engineered bioweapon, at least in some people's minds.
Yeah, I'm not a doctor, and I have absolutely no inside information about it, so I'm not qualified to have an opinion about whether this was purposeful or bioengineered or anything like that.
But I will say the timing is really convenient, and the way it worked out is really convenient for the guys in charge, because it allowed them to test out some of their tools for controlling civil unrest, and it allowed them to extinguish One third of the small businesses out there to enrich the guys who finance the campaigns of the people making these decisions.
So, very convenient.
If it was an accident, it was a really fortuitous accident for the guys in charge.
Absolutely.
Let me ask you this.
Do you think there's going to be a more linear, steady progression toward the dollar collapse, or is it going to happen in spurts or black swan type of events that we really can't anticipate?
Is it going to be a trigger event, a tipping point, or just a slow erosion?
Well, I mean, it could be either.
But first, I should probably define the term dollar collapse.
Sure.
Because it sounds like something that happens to the dollar, and we're all watching the dollar.
But what it is is an increasing rise in prices.
So we're not looking at the dollar.
We're looking at the price of everything going through the roof.
But what that really is is not those things becoming more valuable.
It's the dollar becoming less valuable relative to stuff that we're trying to buy.
Right.
So when the price of things starts to increase at an accelerating rate, that is a collapsing currency.
And we're already kind of seeing that.
You know, stocks have gone up farther than anybody had any right to expect.
Real estate is through the roof.
It's in bubble territory.
Bonds are in an absolute bubble, a historically amazing bubble.
Interest rates have never been as low as they are now.
In history, which is to say that bond prices have never been as high as they are now, because those two things are reciprocals of each other.
And, you know, cryptos, I wouldn't pretend to understand Bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies, but they're behaving like a bubble market or bubble sector.
So...
Against all of those things, the dollar is already collapsing.
And now we're seeing it start in industrial commodities and agricultural commodities.
You know, grain prices are way up, and lumber and iron ore and copper, those things are all way up lately, just in the last year.
So it's getting hard to find things against which the dollar isn't falling now.
And once people kind of, you know, clue into that, once you get the idea that, oh, it's not just stocks going up, but it's, you know, the cost of a new house and everything I'm trying to buy right now is way more expensive.
We're in inflation.
You know, people haven't come to that conclusion yet.
But when they do, it's hard to put that genie back into the bottle.
And that day is coming.
Well, I would say...
It's very seductive for people who are participating in stock trading, you know, the Robin Hood crowd and the FOMO panic mentality.
Oh, I don't want to miss out on this.
I need to jump into, you name it, Bitcoin, real estate, stocks, whatever.
Because in their minds, if they're not well-educated, if they don't read your website, dollarcollapse.com, for example, they think they're winning.
Because the dollar denomination of the things they own continues to climb, so they're looking through their computer screen and looking at digits on the screen, and those digits keep getting larger and larger and larger, and they're like, this is awesome, let's keep playing this game, we're winning, winning, winning.
But in reality, if they turn around from that computer, they've got no hard assets, no stacks of silver, no land, nothing that's real.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
When you're in a market that is going up, that doesn't feel like inflation.
That feels like you being a genius.
Yeah, exactly.
By just doing the right thing and making tons of money.
And, you know, you can't see that as a bad thing.
And, you know, I have experienced that a few times.
And what it leads to is a sense of omnipotence.
That, you know what, if you made 500% on your last investment, You quadruple the amount you put into the next one because you're going to make another 500% and then you'll be rich forever.
And so you end up with a sector that is way over leveraged because people are vastly overconfident.
And we're ending up with that everywhere now.
You know, you get people in the bond market, the stock market, the real estate market, the Bitcoin market, all thinking that they're super geniuses and rolling the dice on the next big thing.
Yes.
That fails at some point, catastrophically.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
This looks exactly or very similar to 1999 to me because I remember at that time, I remember cab drivers were offering tech stock financial advice to their passengers and saying to themselves, I'll never have to drive a cab again.
I'm going to be able to retire in one year just by buying low and selling high.
I remember people preaching to me When I was warning about the situation, they would preach to me and they would say, oh, you don't get it.
You're old school.
The rules have changed.
You don't need dividends or profits.
All you need is eyeballs and whatever website had eyeballs like drcoop.com or whatever.
Excite search engine.
They all crashed.
If you have eyeballs, then that's the value.
You don't need real value other than eyeballs.
I mean, this was the way they were talking then, and I'm hearing the same kind of irrational talk now.
Oh, yeah.
Well, now it's, well, tech stocks always go up.
How could you bet against Tesla or Apple?
And bonds are the place to be.
They're the safe haven asset of the world.
Everybody wants treasuries.
And houses always go up, you know, so you can just buy the biggest house possible.
That's everywhere now.
A little personal aside, back in the late 1990s, I was a tech stock columnist for a website called thestreet.com.
It was Jim Cramer's website.
You're kidding me.
Yeah.
And so I was smack dab in the middle of that whole thing.
And I was the resident bear towards the end there in 1999.
So I would write negative things about tech stocks and would just get deluged with emails.
From people saying exactly what you just said.
Oh, don't you understand that this is the future and optical networking this and cash on the sidelines that.
And they all had great reasons why tech stocks were going to go up forever.
And it lasted about, you know, one more year after I turned bearish.
And then by mid-2000, everything had collapsed.
And there was the 90% club of stocks that had gone down 90% in the last six months, you know.
Yes.
Well, you and I must have been two of a very small number of people who were bearish at the time.
And we were getting clobbered by everybody else.
We were like, oh, you're a fool.
You're going to miss the boat.
You know, I'll tell you what, I'll pity you when I retire like Bill Gates.
And people would think these things.
And those people ended up working as Walmart greeters because they destroyed their retirement.
they remember they would mortgage their homes and put it all in a tech stock or they would take their retirement funds and put it in a tech stock.
And I'm seeing again, similar things today.
Some people mortgaging their homes and putting it all in Bitcoin, even at $50,000 a coin, which, you know, gets me very concerned for those people because I always say own your home free and clear, own the roof over your head.
Number one, don't, don't put that in the casino.
You know what I mean?
Well, Elon Musk just took money that Tesla had raised by selling stock and bought a bunch of Bitcoin with it.
Wow.
In the $40,000 range, you know, so it's, it's upside for him, but still it was just, it was a move exactly like what you're talking about, but he did it with a billion and some dollars for a company, you know, and that's happening out there everywhere.
You know, you've got central banks buying tech stocks, basically with taxpayer money.
You've got corporations buying Bitcoin now and, um, and, and, And the Robinhood guys, of course.
You know, you've got regular millennials who we're sending COVID relief checks to, right?
We're financing their stock speculation.
That's true.
And they're rolling the dice.
You know, they're going long and strong.
GameStop, even after GameStop is up from $10 to $300.
And yeah, so we've got lots of bubble activity out there.
And it's a question of which sector blows up first and takes down the other ones.
So it's always impossible to predict the timing of this, and I'm not asking you to do so.
You know, I also watch your other interviews, and I notice you're very careful about that language, because we can't know the inner workings of the machine.
It's kind of a black box, too.
Even the experts don't know.
But how urgent should people be in thinking about protecting themselves from this?
I don't know if that's the right way to say this, but I want to help people understand that the sooner the better, but what's the right balance there?
A lot of people may have financial assets like CDs with a bank that aren't expiring for a year.
Should they wait that out?
What would you say to people like that?
I wish there was a single good answer, because you really can't know exactly when a bubble blows up.
I mean, all previous bubbles have popped.
By the way, I was a junk bond analyst in the 1980s during that bubble, too.
Oh, yeah, really?
I have been in bubbles my whole adult life.
But they pop kind of unexpectedly, usually after a lot of the critics have been so humiliated by being wrong that they shut up and go away.
And then you only have the fans left.
And then the bubble pops.
And you just can't know when that's going to be.
And...
So my normal advice to people is to dollar cost average.
You know, don't jump with both feet into gold or silver because what if they have one of their corrections right after you buy some and then you've lost a lot of money that if it had just been in a bank account would still be there.
So just buy the same amount each month.
Of physical gold and silver as the bedrock of your financial life.
And over time, you'll get a pretty good price because with the same amount of dollars going in each month, you'll buy fewer ounces when the price is high and more ounces when the price is low.
So your average price will be okay.
But you're right.
That's a timing thing because you may not have five years to To put that in position to get as much gold and silver as you think you want by dollar cost averaging.
So I would say that one way to approach this, you know, the fear that, you know, this is the year when it all blows up, is to increase the monthly amount of your dollar cost averaging.
So make it quicker.
Sort of like getting a 15-year mortgage instead of a 30-year mortgage, where you're paying more each month and you're getting more.
Therefore, for it.
Because I still don't think you should jump in with both feet right now in anticipation of a big financial crash because it's liable to take gold and silver down with it.
The stock market...
It kind of wants to correct dramatically.
But if it did that, it would probably pull precious metals down too.
Because if your Tesla stock and your Google stock are down by 50% and you need to raise cash, you're going to sell whatever you can that's not down yet.
And if gold and silver haven't gone down yet, you sell them and then they go down.
So you don't want to be caught in that.
So I don't think there's a perfect timing answer here, but I think you should be doing stuff to move yourself in the direction of real assets and away from financial assets.
Financial assets are bank stocks, bank accounts, government bonds, things like that.
Slowly, steadily be getting out of those things and into farmland, well-chosen rental properties, maybe some energy assets, definitely precious metals.
And then just hope, you know, that you have time to get all the way over there before everything hits the fan.
Okay, that's great advice.
We only have a couple of minutes left.
Another question for you on that front.
Well, I also want to ask you about your thoughts on platinum, but first mention, I started buying gold when it was in the $200 range, and I started buying silver when it was less than, I think, $6 an ounce, something like that.
The thing is, I've never sold any of that stuff.
And that's a question I get from people.
How would I theoretically sell it one day, say after a dollar collapse really hits home?
There's a question in people's minds.
How do you sell the gold and turn it into the currency of the day without risking the idea that now somebody knows you have gold?
So there's a fear of ever needing to use it.
Well, yeah, that's the thing.
If you have a lot of physical precious metals on hand, which you want to do, but it's a dangerous thing, too, because that makes you a target.
So you've got to be very careful about who you tell.
And then, you know, when the time comes, it's going to be extremely easy to convert gold and silver into cash or real stuff, because everybody's going to want it.
But, yeah, you've got to...
Not just flash it around.
Don't just show up at the grocery store with a giant bag of silver coins and pull two of them out to buy groceries.
But yeah, that's one of the intellectual challenges of this whole thing.
And again, there's no perfect answer to this.
Like where you hide your gold and silver and who you tell and what other kinds of paperwork attach to them so that if anything happens to you, somebody can find it.
All that stuff is something you have to think through and do what seems best for you.
But when the time comes, you'll be able to go to, for instance, a coin dealer and drop off a 100-ounce silver bar for serious money.
And then you'll have the cash.
And you won't necessarily be telling anybody you've got any more.
That could be all you had when you go to the coin dealer.
And then you go to another coin dealer with your other 100-ounce silver bar or whatever.
So that's one way.
And with gold coins, they're going to be very large denomination money when the time comes.
So you might take two Krugerrands to buy a used car off of somebody or something like that.
And again, they don't need to know what else you have.
So just be very judicious about who knows what you've got.
And when you need to spend this stuff, spend it in small increments, In different places, so nobody ties you back to the last thing you did.
Well, there are stories from right after the Great Depression, right around 1930, where people bought a hotel with a gold coin.
People bought luxury vehicles with one gold coin.
Because the paper money was so worthless at the time, but precious metals were so valuable, if you just held on to a coin for a few years, you could buy half the city.
Or, I'm exaggerating, but you get the idea.
See, basically, at that point, you're owning the bubble asset, which people are willing to pay any price to own.
So, it's both a good idea for you to get out of it at that point and really easy because there won't even be this spot price that everybody sees in the paper and says, okay, well, this gold coin is worth $12,000.
It's going to be, oh, you got gold?
All right, what do you want that I have?
You want my Mercedes?
Okay, because they won't really understand that.
Exchange rates between gold and silver and dollars at that point.
It'll just be, I need real money because the money I've got is toilet paper.
And so it's going to be very easy to turn your gold and silver.
The old, oh, you can't eat gold and silver, that doesn't really make sense because you will be able to buy any amount of groceries for gold and silver when the time comes.
Good point.
Okay, so it's not even about converting gold and silver into currency, but rather, you know, acquiring assets.
Like, here's a 100-acre farm.
How much is it?
Three gold coins, you know, or whatever.
Exactly.
I mean, it becomes money at that point.
Just like, you know, in prison, cigarettes are money.
Well, in a hyperinflation, gold and silver are money, no matter what the government says.
You know, you can still spend that stuff for real things.
And so that would be your plan at the top, you know, to convert your gold and silver money into things that can feed you and shelter you and protect you.
Exactly.
And be careful how you protect it.
And for you folks watching, as John said, don't tell everybody that you have gold and silver like I did, like I do.
I've been stacking silver since the late 80s or early 90s or whatever.
No, I guess it was the mid-90s.
But you're never going to find mine unless you can dig up my secret treasure maps with...
Crypto encrypted GPS coordinates or whatever.
No, I mean, but people do get creative.
You have to in hiding your stuff.
And that's kind of fun, really, because there's a lot of really creative ways to store gold and silver.
You know, some people say, put it in a frozen turkey in your freezer.
Because nobody's going to carry a frozen turkey away if they break into your house, right?
Good point, yeah.
They have fake rocks that you put in your garden, hollow rocks, and they have things that look like electrical outlets, but are really little tiny safes.
You unscrew them and there's storage space.
So, you know, there's lots of things you can do.
You can pour them into concrete blocks, like stepping stones in your backyard.
You can pour your coins, protected by a plastic holder, inside the concrete.
And, you know, if you need them, sledgehammer gets the job done.
But if you don't need them, nobody's going to notice.
Well, but at the same time, remember, somebody has to know about this because the last thing you want to do is, you know, keel over one day with a million dollars worth of gold that nobody else knows about.
Exactly.
You hear about somebody bought a used army tank.
They were a collector a while ago.
And there's like $35 million of gold bars in the tank.
What?
Crazy!
Yeah.
So don't be that person.
Don't be the guy who hid the gold in the tank and then died in World War I or whatever.
There's probably Nazi gold in there that he didn't want to tell anybody about, you know what I mean?
Yeah, but somebody needed to know.
All right.
Well, this has been fascinating, John.
I really want to encourage people to go to your website.
You also have, I think, an email newsletter and pretty frequent posts.
It's dollarcollapse.com.
Is there anything else people need to know about what they can find at your site?
Yeah.
If I could do a quick couple of plugs here, Mike.
There's a tab in the nav bar on the website for joining the email list.
You just click on it, put your email address in there, and I'll send you everything that I write for free.
And we don't share email addresses or any other information.
It just stays with us.
And also, you know, as I'm sure you agree, it's time to start getting away from corporate social media, right?
You've got to be on Facebook if you haven't already.
So we've moved over to MeWe, which is...
A Facebook alternative that doesn't censor too much and it has a nice, easy-to-understand interface.
And also Minds, which is a newer social media platform that I'm still learning how to use, but it seems interesting too.
So if anybody would like to come join us at either of those places, then we can kind of watch this whole thing unfold together.
What's your username on MeWe?
Dollar Collapse.
Dollar Collapse.
Okay, cool.
It's nothing personal of mine there.
It's Dollar Collapse on both websites.
Okay, easy enough.
That's great.
So check out John's website, folks, and also understand that I personally, John, I've found you to be really one of the most informative and humble analysts out there.
You don't claim to have all the answers.
You're erring on the side of caution and helping people be safe as they plan for their futures.
And I think that's the right attitude.
So I really thank you for what you're providing to us and the world.
Thanks, Mike, for I appreciate that.
Absolutely.
Well, until next time, John, it's been a pleasure talking with you.
And for those of you watching, feel free to repost this interview anywhere you'd like.
You have permission.
You'll also find it, of course, on brighteon.com, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Thank you for watching.
Check out dollarcollapse.com and get ready for a crazy, exciting, intriguing couple of years here.
It's going to be a wild ride, but with the right information, you can be safer.
Thanks for watching.
I'm Mike Adams.
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