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June 1, 2022 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
50:10
DollarCollapse.com founder John Rubino warns of the ECONOMIC CHAOS about to be unleashed globally
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Welcome to the Health Ranger Report on Brighton.TV.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighton Today, we welcome back someone who I'm going to kind of call the Nostradamus of finance.
I mean, his predictions have been so right on the money.
He's the founder of DollarCollapse.com.
John Rubino is one of our favorite guests here on this channel, and he's been right and right and right about where we're headed.
And today, I'm going to ask him about what's happening with the euro, what's happening with the yen, And what's happening, of course, with the dollar.
And then we're going to talk about gold and then also fiat currency valuations versus commodities.
Because it's one thing to see how currencies are doing against each other, but how are they doing against wheat or copper or gold for that matter?
What about the suppression of gold and silver?
So we're going to cover all that today.
You don't want to miss this interview.
If you have money at all or if you deal with money, you're going to want to hear this information.
We'll be right back after this break with John Rubino, From dollarcollapse.com.
Stay with us right here on brighteon.tv.
All right, welcome back, folks.
Mike Adams here on brighteon.tv.
And now we welcome John Rubino, the founder of dollarcollapse.com.
John, welcome to the show.
It's an honor to be able to speak with you again.
Hey, Mike.
It's good to be back.
A few things have happened since we talked last time.
When was it?
It was at least six months ago, I think, that we did an interview.
Maybe longer.
It's been a while.
Could be a year.
Wow, I can't believe that.
Well, I've been watching you and I've seen a lot of your other interviews.
You're, of course, right on the money.
But, you know, since we talked last, obviously we have the economic sanctions weapon of mass destruction deployed against Russia with them being cut off the SWIFT system.
And then that set into motion this chain reaction, this domino effect that is looking to be rather catastrophic.
So let's start there.
What's your take on kind of where we are right now?
This is early May 2022.
What's the world looking like to you?
The world is looking catastrophically crazy right now.
There's so much stuff going on almost everywhere you look, and all of it is really ominous.
You mentioned the The US using the dollar as a weapon against Russia.
And I think that's one of the big untold stories, or mostly untold stories, that you won't see on CNN or someplace like that.
But it could be the most important thing to come out of what's going on right now.
And the basic backdrop to that is that we have the world's reserve currency.
The dollar is something that everybody has to have in order to buy oil or in order to back their own currencies with central bank, foreign exchange reserves.
And so there's huge demand for dollars out there, which is great for us.
It gives us huge power here because we can just print.
As many dollars as we want and then buy real stuff with it.
So that's how we financed a global military empire that's bigger and spends more money than the next five militaries out there combined.
And it does lots of other things for us.
And it also upsets the countries who are disadvantaged by it.
And one of the ways a successful reserve currency operates is that it's neutral.
In other words, it's not a weapon.
If you use that currency, it doesn't disadvantage somebody else automatically.
You're not making a political statement by using that currency.
And we in the U.S. have totally screwed that up because we've decided to use the dollar as a weapon.
If somebody crosses us, we threaten to kick them out of the international banking system or we freeze their reserves somewhere.
We take their bank account.
And so basically, almost everybody in the world is sick of the U.S. dollar being used that way against them.
And they're terrified that they're going to be next.
So the most...
Oh, go ahead.
But also to that point, I want to mention Canada, because this was a big shocker for a lot of people when the government of Canada ordered the banks to freeze or seize the accounts of people who made even small donations to the Freedom Trucker convoy in Canada.
That was a big wake-up call to a lot of people to say, whoa, so this social contract between us and the banks, this doesn't mean anything?
And then when Russia's foreign currency reserves, to the tune of, I believe, 300 billion dollars, We're essentially seized, or you could say frozen.
That's essentially the theft of $300 billion from Russia, which is the same thing that Canada was doing on a smaller scale to its own people.
So these two signs together have been sending out major red flags to people who are paying attention, saying, wow, the banking system can't be trusted.
Yes.
So whether you're a Canadian saver or a Russian oligarch or the Central Bank of India, you're all worried that your bank accounts, to the extent that the U.S. has access to them, are no longer yours, or for the Canadian saver, to the extent that the Canadian government has access to them.
And, you know, what does that lead a logical person to do?
It leads them to look for ways around the existing banking system.
And, you know, what individuals are doing in a lot of cases is holding minimal amounts of cash in the bank and they keep their cash at home or they buy gold and silver or they immediately convert their money into things like real estate or energy assets that, you know, things the government can't just immediately steal from them because apparently that's a thing now.
You know, governments are just going to loot your bank account whenever they're mad at you.
As far as the global financial system goes, the impact of this is that a lot of these countries who have been victimized by the US's stupidity are looking for ways to trade and to back their currencies without using dollars.
So you got Russia and China trading in their own currencies.
For oil and other things.
And you've got Russia saying, okay, we'll sell natural gas to Europe.
You can have as much as you want, but you have to pay rubles now.
So all of a sudden, the Europeans are out there trying to figure out where to get rubles so they can buy their energy and not freeze when there's a cold night.
And this is a very big deal from the point of view of the current global financial system and the US dollar, because there's maybe 10 trillion too many dollars out there if the world doesn't need dollars.
And so people are going to start using their own currencies and dumping their dollars in order to get the other currencies they're using.
Those dollars are going to come back here and they're going to bid up U.S. asset prices, which means they'll push down the value of the dollar.
So that's very inflationary.
The dollar will lose value.
To the extent that this process is happening.
And we're making it happen.
You know, we're making the kinds of stupid mistakes that are going to lead to this tsunami of dollars coming back home and pushing up the price of everything here.
So the inflation that we've seen lately is just a foretaste of what would come if we don't get our act together and salvage the dollar's role as a global reserve currency and do it quickly.
It doesn't look like we're doing that.
So there's more to come.
As you're saying that, that's exactly what I'm thinking, is that there are no signs of sanity somehow being interjected into this.
There are no signs that the money printing will be held off.
There are no signs that the Federal Reserve will respond to this in a rational way to try to stabilize the dollar.
If anything, interest rates continue to be kept artificially low.
Money printing is, through the roof, insane.
Biden is requesting, I think, another $33 billion in, quote, aid to Ukraine.
I'm sure his family will get their 10% cut off of that.
That's a cool $3 billion right off the top right there.
But, you know, there's no sign that any of this is going to return to sanity.
And then when I saw that the UN's FAO was publishing month-over-month price increases for food of 12.6%, that's a month-over-month inflation in food.
That's when alarm bells started going off in my head because, as you know, if you have 12-plus percent per month, you double food prices in six months, and then you double it again in another six months.
That's the track that we're on.
People have no idea how catastrophic that's going to be for the world if food prices double in six months.
What are your thoughts?
Well, it's an extreme inconvenience for us if food prices go up, but it's an existential threat for people in a lot of other places because for most of the developing world, You know, Thailand, Brazil, Mexico, places like that.
The majority of the population is right on the edge.
In other words, they can kind of make rent, they can kind of put gas in the car, and they can kind of feed their kids today.
But you let the price of a couple of those things, and right now all of those things are going up dramatically, you let those things go up, and all of a sudden those people have to make a choice between being able to drive to work or feed their kids.
And traditionally, that's when you get riots in places like that.
You know, people just take to the streets because they don't have anything to lose.
They're starving or they're unable to work.
And you get regime change, riots and revolutions and that since a lot of these countries are Resource producers, in other words, they make and sell commodities in the global markets.
Revolution and civil unrest and general chaos there just makes the supply chains even more broken.
So this runs the risk of...
Kind of a doom loop where, you know, a feedback loop in which each thing that happens makes things worse, which in turn makes other things break, which makes things even worse and so on, you know.
And that's the kind of thing that we might be looking at in the year ahead because, you know, food price inflation is already kind of baked into the cake because what happens in the agriculture market this year is what determines Food prices next year.
So to the extent that plantings aren't happening and there's a big shortage of fertilizer because of Russia's sanctions and prices of fertilizer going up, so farmers are either planting less or just not planting anything at all or using less fertilizer and getting smaller crop yields.
You know, all of that stuff is going to affect food prices next year.
So the really big story isn't what's happening today with 15 or 20 percent food inflation.
It's what happens next year when you get another 15 or 20 or 30 percent on top of the debilitating increases this year.
So this thing has legs.
You know, this is a story that is not temporary.
It's not transitory like the Fed was saying early on.
At least that part of the inflation story has at least another year to run and possibly longer with a lot of unintended consequences along the way.
Well, let me ask you, in your assessment, I mean, you've been at this quite a while.
When did you first launch dollarcollapse.com, by the way?
2004.
It was originally a marketing page, a single page website for a book called The Coming Collapse of the Dollar and How to Profit from It that Gold Money's James Turrick and I co-wrote.
Okay.
And, you know, so since then, it's just been, it's been a site that's kind of evolved into a blog slash news aggregation site.
But throughout that whole time, it's been based on the same premise.
Okay.
We're making these catastrophic financial mistakes.
We're allowing way too much debt to be created and too much money creation to service that debt.
And it was going to destroy the fiat currencies of the world.
So, you know, at long last, it's starting to come true.
The basic predictions, rising inflation, spiking interest rates, extreme financial volatility, all of that stuff probably should have happened a lot sooner.
But the fact that everybody is armed with unlimited printing presses allowed them to keep fooling the markets for a much longer time than I expected.
But you can't fool people forever.
And now it seems like those chickens are coming home to roost.
Well, after 2008, I started to wonder how much longer the system has, but of course they bailed out the subprime mortgage collapse.
But my question to you right now is, how is it that the powers that be, you know, at the Fed, at the State Department, in the Biden White House, how could they have miscalculated so catastrophically about the results of disconnecting Russia from the SWIFT system?
Knowing that Russia has lived under sanctions for many decades or longer, if you go back to the Soviet Union, but they know how to survive.
They have domestic sources, domestic supply chains.
They're more resilient.
They can live with less, whereas the West...
is completely unable to live with less.
How could they have miscalculated the boomerang effect of how those sanctions are hurting seemingly Western nations and America far more than they're hurting Russia?
Well, that's a question you can ask about basically everything the U.S. has done for the last 30 or 40 years.
How could they not know that they were screwing things up on the scale that they are?
And, you know, the Russian thing in particular Is a fascinating mistake so far.
We don't know how this is going to play out.
And maybe these guys still have some hope that they're going to get something else.
I think the expansion of NATO is very important to them.
So they're willing to suffer economically.
In other words, they're willing to let us suffer economically because the guys making these policies, they're not going They're going to be hungry and they don't care if gas is six bucks a gallon.
It doesn't matter to them.
They're willing to let us suffer in order to, for instance, get Sweden and Finland to join NATO and possibly even Ukraine after all is said and done.
We don't know about that.
But right now it does seem to be backfiring on them because, for instance, the ruble tanked when those sanctions first kicked in.
And then Russia came out with its idea of backing the ruble with gold.
In other words, buying gold with rubles at a fixed price, which didn't last, but they're still buying gold with rubles.
Demanding rubles in return for energy sales, things like that.
Well, all of a sudden, the ruble went back up on foreign exchange markets.
So it's higher than it was when the whole war slash sanctions thing started, which means Russia is really not suffering all that much.
They're selling oil and gas on the global markets at extremely high prices.
So they're making massive free cash flow from their energy exports.
And at the end of the day, they're probably going to gain some of the energy assets of Ukraine.
So it's not clear that they lose in all of this.
The future is obviously unknowable, but right now it looks like there's a good chance that Russia comes out of this in pretty good financial shape and that the US, especially the dollar, Is irrevocably tarnished.
So it could be that we pay more of a price than we expected, which takes us back to your question of how could they not know this, you know?
And the general answer is that they're morons.
They're just Ivy League educated people who have never had to deal with anything in the real world in their lives.
They basically just got where they are by connections.
And they do not know how the world works.
In terms of monetary policy, they operate with these flawed Keynesian models that say, don't worry about debt.
All you need to do is print enough new currency to generate 3% growth a year and you'll be okay.
So what if it takes 8% more debt every year?
Don't worry about it.
Their models literally say that.
And so they're shocked when the economy doesn't work the way it's supposed to.
In foreign affairs, they seem to think That the U.S., with 5% of the world's population, is able to dominate the entire rest of the world and do anything we want to with impunity out there.
Because remember, we're talking about Russia right now, but China might even be a bigger issue for us geopolitically pretty soon, because let's say we actually get involved in a shooting war with Russia, which is apparently what a lot of people in the government right now want.
So we're going to be very distracted by that if it happens.
So what's China going to do?
They're going to take Taiwan because they know we're distracted.
And then we feel obligated to defend Taiwan.
So we're going to go over there and we're going to be in a two front war with nuclear powers while we are rapidly going broke.
Because of all the debt we've taken on during quote unquote peacetime.
So two years from now could be an extremely dark time for the U.S. when these mistakes actually bear the kind of fruit that they're liable to bear.
Well, and there's another factor.
I mean, what you just said is very much on track, but another factor that I've recently become aware of is the fact that the supply chain for the domestic military production of missile systems and anti-tank weapons, munitions and solid rocket motors and so on, that supply chain barely exists in the United States.
And a lot of the military production depends on supplies from China or Taiwan or other countries.
And we don't have the human labor infrastructure nor the military weapons design infrastructure.
We just don't have the designers focused on that anymore.
Where Raytheon Lockheed Martin recently announced that their next upgrade of the Javelin missile system and the next production batch will be 2027.
Like...
Is America even going to be here in 2027?
I mean, you guys are five years too late.
And we're shipping thousands of missiles over to Ukraine, depleting our own stockpile, to the point where, and the reason I mention this is because we could be in a situation with that conflict with China that you just alluded to, where we don't have anything left except nuclear weapons, you see.
And then that leads to acts of desperation and global annihilation.
You think that's a possibility?
It's a very real possibility, apparently, based on the behavior of the guys in charge right now.
They might force the issue.
This kind of takes us back to the supply chain thing you said, takes us back to another example of the stupidity of the people in charge, and that is globalization.
Over the past 30 or so years, the idea took hold that the way to run a global economy is to have everybody do the thing they're best at and then create these long supply chains that include steps in different places around the world.
You know, somebody mines something here and they ship it somewhere else for processing.
They ship the process or over to somebody else to make a component.
The component goes somewhere else for assembly.
And that's what you mentioned about weaponry right now.
We've got that kind of a supply chain out there, which does work when the world is peaceful.
Right.
Energy costs are stable and there's no civil unrest in any crucial place.
You can have a very efficient global economy with these kinds of long supply chains where everybody's doing the thing they're best at.
But while they were setting these things up, the globalists also developed this idea that it's fine to use the dollar as a weapon.
And if anybody steps out of line with the U.S. imperial project to kick them out of the global financial system, but some of those people are in these supply chains.
That are necessary.
So we're stomping around the world, breaking the supply chains that we created.
And that's kind of what we've got now.
We've got a world of broken supply chains because of our, you know, would-be dictatorship that we're trying to create around the world.
And so, yeah, it's hitting our military production at a time when you would think we would have a lot of extra weapons after spending a trillion dollars a year for at least a decade on the military.
But no, apparently we could easily run out of crucial components and literally crucial weapons if we try to use too many of them.
So yeah, we could be in a place where we need something from Taiwan, just as China is bombing Taiwan, and there's no chance of us getting that component.
And so a whole section of our military has to shut down because...
Historians are not going to be kind to the people who made these decisions.
No, and mentioning Taiwan, I mean, Taiwan's the world's largest manufacturer of semiconductors.
You know, you have the Taiwan Semiconductor Company, which China would love to own and dominate, and yet America's military depends on so many of the microchip components from Taiwan and other countries, including Japan and South Korea and so on.
So, you know, Trump was right about all of this.
Trump wanted to have a more nationalistic protectionism type of economy, especially when it came to military sourcing.
And under Trump's administration, in fact, the U.S., under his direction, began to source domestically more of the rare earth minerals that go into a lot of these components and systems.
And so we at least have that advantage right now.
But as far as these other components, we could be in very sad shape very quickly.
And let me lead into one more thing to ask you.
Seems like we're shifting from world currencies based on financialization, you know, abstracts, you know, just all these abstract concepts of what has value into a world of commodities backed currencies, which is what Russia has essentially declared.
And who's got the commodities now?
Or who's willing to mine them and export them?
And increasingly, it's not America or the UK, largely due to environmental concerns, nor Germany for that matter, but Russia and China are willing to dig into the ground and find metals and sell them or find energy and sell it to the rest of the world.
So doesn't the future belong to really commodities more than just abstract money?
Yeah, we're kind of heading in that direction.
And the Russia example is a very good one.
The Russian ruble now is strong relative to other currencies because of the commodities that everybody knows are there and that can generate cash, if necessary, to prop up the ruble.
So yeah.
It used to be that, oh, we've got all these dollars on our balance sheet, therefore our currency is strong.
The dollar is a financial asset that has counterparty risk.
In other words, somebody has to keep a promise for dollars or treasury bonds or bank stocks or most other kinds of stocks to be valuable.
Whereas an oil well, if you've got it, you've measured what's there, you've set the equipment up to pump it out, then nobody has to keep a promise then.
That's just there.
Or gold sitting in your vault at your central bank.
It doesn't matter what U.S. foreign policy is if you've got a bunch of gold because that gold is inert.
It's going to sit there.
It's going to have basically the same value 20 years from now that it has today and that it had 20 years ago.
And because of that, you're safe.
So yeah, we could be going back to some kind of a commodity-based financial system with gold probably at the center.
Oil and zinc and rare earths, they're very good things to have, but they're a little harder to measure and to keep track of, and their prices fluctuate with industrial demand and stuff like that.
So they're not quite as good as a backing for a currency as something like gold, which exists independently.
It's the ultimate neutral asset.
I'm sorry, John.
We're about to wrap up this segment.
Stay with us.
We'll continue in the next segment all about gold and precious metals.
So thank you for watching today on Brighteon.tv.
This continues on Brighteon.com.
Alright, welcome back to the extended interview with John Rubino, the founder of DollarCollapse.com.
And we just left off talking about gold.
Now, what's fascinating, as oil is going up and diesel prices have hit now an all-time record peak of, I think, $5.30-something cents a gallon, which is going to have a massive ripple effect on construction, transportation, farming, agriculture, outputs, everything.
Gold is very heavily suppressed right now.
I thought I saw it in the 1870s per ounce or something the other morning.
So talk to us about what's happening with gold and silver price manipulation.
And why are they so desperate to keep it low as everything else is going through the roof?
Well, first of all, I don't have any inside information on the manipulation that goes on on any given day.
But gold and silver are competing forms of money.
So when, for instance, gold goes up, that's the same thing as saying the dollar is going down.
And that's not in the interest of the people running the global monetary system to have their currencies plunging against some external form of money that they can't control.
So you see a lot of strange trading action in both gold and silver where it 4 o'clock in the morning, when most of the major markets are closed and there's just this transfer from Europe to Japan or whatever, you see a huge amount of futures contracts come online and just smack down the price of these things.
And so you wake up and the price is way lower.
And what happened?
Well, you know, a giant trade happened at 4 in the morning.
A lot of people in the precious metals markets see this as manipulation on the part of the governments of the world and the big banks that are partners with the governments of the world in manipulating the financial markets.
Now, they can do that in the short run, but they can't do that in the long run, because if they keep on doing it, and this is happening right this minute, people who want gold, silver, and other forms of zero counterparty risk assets will just buy up all the physical and other forms of zero counterparty risk assets will just buy We'll just buy up all the physical.
And that's what's happening now.
Russia, China, and India have been snarping up basically all the gold and silver that have been produced by the world's mines and not used industrially for the last decade or so.
So they have really big stockpiles of precious metals.
And individuals are getting in on this now, too.
You see the big mints that sell silver eagles or maple leaves or whatever are seeing record demand.
And in some cases, they're running out of supply and they're having to put everybody on waiting lists.
So you're seeing a lot of investment demand and a lot of demand from other central banks for the physical metals.
And record spreads between spot price and then the actual physical price.
I don't think the spreads have ever been this high.
Not that I can remember.
Well, what that means is the real price is what you pay to get something, right?
So the real price is exceeding the paper price where they play games with futures markets by quite a bit right now.
And so that means that physical is starting to set the real price.
And once that becomes obvious to people, Then there will be a scramble for physical because people will realize, well, I better get it now before this trend continues to the point where I can't get any, which is where we're headed.
There will come a time when you could wake up in the morning and think, okay, today I'm going to go all in on gold.
And you call around and people are like, well, you know, send us your money and we'll put you on a waiting list.
And maybe in the next six weeks, we will be able to get you half of your order or something like that.
So all of a sudden you can't get what you wanted.
And you wish you had done it earlier.
And so we're kind of in the late stage of the early part now where you can still get gold and silver.
You still have to pay up for it, but you can get it.
The next part of the process is where you can't get it.
You know, the prices, whatever it's quoted out there, but there's no physical available.
So that's coming.
Now, let's...
Let's talk about crypto for a second in the context of stores of value.
Now, just for the record, I was very skeptical of crypto until Canada started seizing people's bank accounts.
For me, that was a turning point.
Since then, I dove into crypto, and I've been advocating, not speculation, of course, I'm not into crypto speculation, but just the transactional use of privacy coins like Monero, for example, or just encouraging people to understand how to use crypto because of the mobility.
You know, you can put essentially money of something, well, crypto, on a thumb drive, right?
And if you have to flee a country like what happened in Ukraine, you could flee with assets in your pocket that don't have to be silver bars, which are pretty big and bulky and heavy, and then you could convert that crypto back into currency once you made it out, you know, to Poland or wherever.
So there is utility now that is suddenly more obvious than it was even just a year ago.
What are your thoughts on crypto and its role in all of this?
Thank you.
Well, I think cryptos are a fascinating concept.
You know, private sector money created technologically that exists independent of any kind of government banking system.
Fascinating idea.
Potentially really important for human freedom, as you said.
If we can bypass the regulators and the secret police with our wealth, that shifts power back to the individual and away from government.
So it's an awesome thing.
Now, the crypto market is very new.
However, and it's pretty chaotic right now.
You've got, what, several thousand different coins out there and all kinds of payment systems.
So for a newbie to the market, it's complicated.
And it's not clear how you go from understanding, you know, conceptually that this is a good idea to actually shifting your finances into cryptos in a meaningful way.
So a lot of people have a big learning curve in the next few years.
Yeah, that's true.
And you have to concern yourself with on-ramps and off-ramps because still most of the world is transacting in your local national currency, such as the dollar.
So until everybody, until all the merchants are accepting crypto...
You still have to go back into the dollar or the euro or whatever in order to purchase the things that you need to run a business or meet payroll or buy groceries, that kind of thing.
So I agree with you.
We're kind of partway there with crypto, but we don't have the full embrace as a transactional standard yet.
Maybe that's coming, but it might be never.
Who knows?
Yeah, and see, those on-ramps and off-ramps are the tricky part because that's where you become visible again.
You cross a border with your thumb drive.
Nobody knows you did that.
They don't know you took a million dollars worth of Bitcoin to Switzerland or whatever.
But when you convert that Bitcoin into something that you can use in a store, all of a sudden, all the alarms go off, right?
The NSA and everybody else that's looking for a transaction like that sees that.
And that puts you at risk.
So I love the concept, but I'm not sufficiently sophisticated when it comes to cryptos to be able to map out a strategy, even for myself, let alone for other people.
And the other thing is, I think governments see cryptos as a risk, and they're looking for ways to strike back.
So we have that process of kind of the Empire Strikes Back scenario playing out where there will be a stretch of years, maybe, or maybe just months.
We'll see how it goes.
where governments are actively trying to ban Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever, and actively trying to loot online wallets and actively trying to block other forms of payment via cryptos.
And it's not clear how that plays out or who wins in the end.
So that worries me a little bit about cryptos right now, just because you can't know what governments are going to do.
You know it's going to be extreme and authoritarian, but you can't specifically know how they're going to come after you.
So I would say that cryptos and gold and silver exist in the same universe, which is to say hard assets in their own way, things that don't have counterparty risk, things that bypass the legacy banking system, but they serve different purposes because cryptos are non-physical and in some ways that's their strength.
Gold and silver are physical and in some ways that's their strength.
So you need to understand what works when and which scenario you're protecting yourself from when you start moving into forms of sound money and otherwise hard assets.
Well, and how far you think the collapse is going to go, too.
Because if we get hit with a Russian EMP detonation, takes down the power grid, then your crypto is pointless in a power grid collapse, whereas physical gold and silver are impervious.
Even to fire.
I mean, they're elements.
They're on the table of elements.
They're created in the explosion of stars.
That's how impervious they are.
So gold and silver are going to be around no matter what.
But your points are well taken.
Mike, I get this question a lot.
People say, well, how are you going to spend gold and silver when the time comes?
You know, you can't eat it, so you have to spend it somehow to use it.
How are you going to do that?
And the answer is...
It will be very easy to spend gold and silver when the time comes.
Because, you know, go to the farmer's market and pull out some silver coins, you're at the front of the line.
You know, you're going to get all the fruits and veggies you want from these farmers who understand what's happening out there.
So that won't be hard.
You will be very, very, very able to spend your gold and silver when the time comes.
I completely agree with you, and I'm glad you pointed that out.
Now, getting back to the dollar collapse concept in the few minutes that we have remaining here, What about central bank digital currencies?
And do you believe that the collapse of the fiat, which again, you know, you've predicted that, although you haven't named a time, that's impossible, but you predicted that's coming.
When that happens, couldn't that be the perfect opportunity for the powers that be to drive people into digital wallets where they then are completely enslaved under a central bank digital currency system?
Well, yeah, central bank digital currencies, first of all, they're still fiat currency.
So digital dollar is still the dollar, and it's still subject to the supply and demand dynamic that is destroying the dollar either way.
But having it be digital, in other words, all of us having an account at the Federal Reserve that's our bank account, It takes away the last vestiges of our financial freedom because they see what we're doing and they can intervene if they want to.
In other words, if you're spending money on stuff they don't approve of, they can lock your account in a way that forbids you from buying certain things.
Or if you're not spending enough money and they need to juice the economy, they could put an expiration date on your Fed dollars so that you have to spend them or they will lose value.
Which are, you know, horrible things.
Again, neutrality.
The currency is no longer neutral when they start doing that.
Now it's a political tool or a military tool.
And that's destructive for the currency, but they're going to do it.
They're going to create digital currencies and use them to manipulate us.
So we should be taking steps right now to try to avoid that.
We've kind of talked about how you do that.
You get into hard assets that don't have vulnerabilities as far as the digital currencies go.
And you try to minimize the amount of government created and manipulated currency that you have to use day to day.
Well, one of the things that government is doing in response to inflation right now, we've seen this in places like California, Governor Newsom recommending sending out debit cards with credit for people to buy gas because gas prices are so high.
So the response to inflation, of course, is printing more money, which is going to drive inflation.
But then it seems to me that one of the clever manipulations that they could announce is when they're ready to shift over to central bank digital currencies, they could say, well, Guess what?
All your free money is in the digital wallet.
Come get it.
Come sign up.
Come use it.
If you don't use the digital wallet, you don't get the free money.
So it's universal basic income as a trap.
Kind of like a piece of cheese in a mouse trap.
You know what I mean?
Come on and eat it.
That's what they're going to do, I think.
That is absolutely what they'll do.
And it's pretty hard to say no to, right?
If there's a couple extra thousand dollars in a bank account there, all you have to do is sign up for it, give them all your information.
You will do that.
And so it's a very seductive thing.
They're...
They're going to be able to succeed with the initial rollout of central bank digital currencies because of that.
They can put free money in there, which they can create in infinite quantities with a mouse click.
It's not hard for them to do it, but that's just going to accelerate the The downward slide of the value of a lot of these currencies, because what are you going to do with that free money?
You're going to spend it, right?
So it's going to push prices up.
Otherwise, if you wouldn't have spent money on whatever you're buying, prices will go up more, which is to say the value of the dollar will go down even faster.
And so these currencies are headed for oblivion.
And the question becomes, how much control will we lose along the way?
How much freedom will they take from us with these digital currencies and with all the other things they're doing before we hit rock bottom and then have to rebuild some kind of a new system from the rubble?
Well, it seems like the regime has convinced itself through magical money theory, MMT, that they can print everything.
Like, that just more money will solve every supply chain problem.
Oh, groceries too expensive?
Print more money.
Groceries running out?
Do you have scarcity of bread?
Oh, print more money.
Or even fuel or used cars or homes?
Print more money.
And yet...
That's completely delusional.
You can't print food.
You can't print copper.
You can't print aluminum.
These are things that have to be mined or grown or created.
They're physical commodities.
So that is the commodities investment thesis right there.
If the government can't make more of it, it becomes more valuable when the currency that we're using to measure the price of those commodities goes down.
And that's what's happening right now.
Virtually everything that is in that category of government can't make more of it has gotten way more valuable in the last few decades.
It started with financial assets like stocks, bonds and real estate.
And then it went to collectibles like fine art and a bunch of other things, you know, name the category of collectible and the prices are insane there right now.
And now it's moving over to real stuff.
So we've got this commodity super cycle that people talk about, which will last 10 to 20 years, in which capital will flow out of all these things that governments can make more of, like treasury bonds and bank stocks.
And into this stuff that there is just a fixed amount of.
So that's the place to be.
That's where you want most of your investment capital to be.
And then you're in one of those boats that a rising tide just lifts up for years and years.
Timing is tricky to make these investment decisions because you never know whether there's going to be a crash in the next six months or whatever.
But longer term, you definitely want to be shifting from financial assets, stocks, bonds, bank stocks, things like that.
Sell your Goldman Sachs as soon as possible and then get into things like energy assets and gold and silver.
And you'll be one of the people who in the end are at least protected and maybe enriched by what happens.
And you can also create your own commodities in the sense of growing some food at home.
I mean, when grocery prices go high enough, growing a little bit of food becomes very financially rewarding.
It's no longer costly, like a costly hobby.
It's a money-saving endeavor.
You can grow corn.
You can grow red peppers.
You can grow vegetables.
You can save a fortune, depending on where food goes.
Yeah, yeah.
Food self-sufficiency, or even partial self-sufficiency, is something that everybody in the world is going to aspire to in the next decade, and a handful of people are going to achieve.
So if you can get partway there, and you know what?
You can.
No matter where you are, you can grow some food.
It's a good use of your time and your upfront capital.
And if you can make enough or grow enough food so that you can store some to get you through the winter, you've removed a huge source of anxiety right there.
You don't care.
You still care because it hurts other people, but you're not immediately affected by food shortages because you've got your pantry full of the stuff that you put away after your harvest in the fall.
That's a good way to be.
So if it's possible to be one of those people, That is definitely something you should try for.
Take some steps in that direction, even if you can't get all the way over there.
Just be moving in that direction, and you'll be better off.
No matter where you are on that spectrum, when it hits the fan, you'll be better off than you would have been if you hadn't begun that journey.
Okay, last question for you.
John Rubino of dollarcollapse.com and also thank you for taking the time today.
But last question is, what should people be looking out for?
Some signs of distress in the financial system or milestones being crossed or tipping points?
Like for the remainder of this year, 2022, what kinds of things should people be paying attention to?
Well, probably the single biggest one is interest rates.
I mean, leaving out geopolitics.
If we start lobbing missiles at each other, you know, Russia and the U.S., then all bets are off financially.
You can't predict anything about what's going to happen then.
But let's put that off to the side.
Let's say that doesn't happen.
Then interest rates are what you want to watch.
And specifically, the 10-year Treasury yield in the U.S., that's an interest rate that a lot of other things key off of.
For instance, that's where mortgage rates are derived.
So if 10-year Treasury, the yield on that bond starts to go up from here, and it's like 3% now, up from 0.7% a couple of years back.
If it goes up much from here, that means lots of loans are suddenly much more expensive, specifically mortgages.
And that'll crush the housing market, which will in turn crush the stock market.
So I don't know what the number is on the 10-year treasury, but I don't think it's much higher than it is now.
If it goes from 3% to 4%, absolute chaos in the financial markets will probably follow.
So pay attention to that.
Use that as your guide for where you are in your process of shifting into real assets.
Well, and according to the Fed's signals, the 10-year yield will almost certainly go up another percent this year, if not 2%.
I mean, just based on what they're signaling so far, I mean...
Well, see, they feel like they need to raise interest rates to rein in inflation.
Because higher interest rates slows down price increases.
But we're so indebted.
Everybody's borrowed so much money all around the world that higher interest rates raise their interest costs.
In other words, their debt service costs.
And it'll bankrupt so many people if interest rates go much higher that it'll...
Crush the global economy.
We'll go from being inflationary, in other words, prices rising fast, to the opposite, where everybody's going out of business, everybody's defaulting on their loans, prices are crashing because nobody can buy anything.
And that's why the Fed can't raise interest rates as far as it probably needs to.
Technically, to rein in inflation.
So there's a number that blows up the economy on, let's say, the 10-year Treasury.
And they need to get towards that number from here, but they don't want to get all the way to that number because that's Armageddon.
You know, that's the end of the financial world.
So they're stuck in this little box where they have to raise interest rates, but they know if they raise rates too far, it's over for everybody.
And they have left.
They have to raise rates, but they know they're going to blow up the system.
And I imagine it's hard for them to sleep at night knowing that.
Well, it's a trap that they created for themselves.
I mean, the box is only that small because of their previous decisions that are so catastrophic.
Let's just hope we don't get Jimmy Carter years of, you know, 18% or 20 plus percent.
Go ahead.
That's a really important point because we've had a situation like this in living memory in the 1970s.
Inflation started to pick up.
Energy prices went way up.
The dollar was crashing.
And we fixed it by raising interest rates to 16% to 20%, depending on which interest rate you're looking at, which we could never do now, because back then we were in pretty good shape financially.
That did not bankrupt everybody by doing that.
Well, today, if you raise interest rates just from 3% to 5%, boom, you know, the system is so indebted that it wouldn't survive it.
So we don't have that tool that we had before.
Back when, which means we cannot fix inflation if it gets a little higher from here.
It'll just run out of control.
And that's the risk.
And that's the dilemma for the Fed, because they know what will happen if inflation runs away.
They also know that if they do anything effective to fix it, then the system will collapse.
And you're right.
It's the box that they created.
These guys with their stupid models that really don't work in the real world and they're Educations that didn't prepare them for actual reality have just made mistake after mistake after mistake since the 1990s, or actually since the 1970s, if you want to go back to the final break between the dollar and gold under the Nixon administration.
So all of these mistakes year after year after year have built up more and more debt, more and more financial fragility.
And now we're at the point where we're unfixable.
There's no solution to this that doesn't involve incredible pain for millions and millions of people.
Yeah, it's crazy.
It's like what they've done to the economy.
They've created a cancer patient that goes to the doctor and the doctor says, okay, bad news is you've got stage 4 cancer.
Good news is we can cure it.
Bad news is, more bad news is, we can only cure it through euthanasia.
I mean, that's what this sounds like.
To solve the problem, you've got to kill the patient.
Well, yeah.
We've kind of reached that point where if you try to fix one side of the multi-pronged problem that we have, you blow up the other side.
So there is no fix.
All there is is this thing playing out until people realize there is no fix.
See, that's the phase change psychologically.
Right now, people still think we have adult supervision.
They still think the guys in charge can get us out of this.
But when they realize that nobody's in charge, nobody's getting us out of this, the guys in charge have no idea what they're doing, then everybody's going to basically panic financially and politically.
And if we thought the last couple of years were chaotic, wait till that happens.
That's going to be something that has not happened in our memory, in living memory.
You'd have to go back to...
Maybe the Great Depression, maybe World War II, some kind of crazy time like that, to equal the chaos that will ensue from us realizing that there is no fix for this.
Well, every day, John, I pray that you're wrong, but the evidence says that you're right.
And so where we are headed is going to be really something.
But I want to encourage people to visit the website that you founded, dollarcollapse.com, and I want to thank you for spending this time with us today to help educate people, get people prepared to save their assets against what's coming.
Thank you so much, John.
It's always a pleasure to speak with you.
Thanks, Mike.
Enjoyed it.
Absolutely.
Okay.
Take care.
And for those of you watching today, as always, you can repost this interview on other channels and other platforms.
You have my permission.
I don't think John will mind either.
Go ahead and get the word out.
Everybody deserves to have the knowledge to save yourself from the financial chaos that's coming.
Thank you for watching today.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.com.
God bless you all.
take care.
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