The Financial Big Bang Part 2: Revaluation, Inflation, and America’s Last Financial Trick
|
Time
Text
Welcome to chapter two of the financial big bang.
Remember that the subhead of this is how to position yourself for the greatest wealth creation and destruction event in history.
Now, this chapter focuses on the revaluation of gold.
This is an idea that at first, maybe a year ago or a couple of years ago, seemed radical, seemed fringe, seemed unlikely.
It has since transitioned into something that is not only likely but in my mind a near certainty and that happened on August 1st 2025 with a new discussion of this option posted at federalreserve.gov and we'll get to that but let me explain how this works first now it seems I don't know it seems impossible
But by forcing a new valuation onto gold, that is to bring up the per ounce price of gold from its current book value which was set in 1973 of $42.22 per ounce.
Okay, that's the book value of the gold that is held, well, by the U.S. Treasury.
Which means that right now the value of the gold on the books held by the Treasury, 262 million ounces nearly, is $11 billion.
Okay, $11 billion.
Now, that's crazy because, of course, it's only officially valued at $42.22 per ounce.
Now, if instead, if you were to simply declare that gold is now worth $12,000 per ounce, even though the market price of it right now is, what, $3,300 plus or $3,400 per ounce,
but if you declare it to be worth $12,000 and you multiply that by the $262 million ounces that the Treasury claims to have, then you get $3.14 trillion in valuation.
Now that should be an easy number to remember because that's an approximation of pi 3.14 right so just think of it as pi trillions or a trillion dollar pie so three 3.14 trillion dollars could be created essentially out of thin air now there's there's a paperwork shuffle that happens where the federal government announces the valuation of $12,000
per ounce then the federal reserve prints the money hands the money to the treasury then the treasury gives these special ious to the fed that grants the fed ownership of the value of the gold, but not the physical gold itself.
So it's a very odd distinction.
And I questioned Andy Sheckman about this.
He tried to explain it.
I still don't totally get it.
But let's just say there's some accounting voodoo that takes place, okay?
Which, hey, you know, it's the Treasury and the Federal Reserve.
If anybody can pull off accounting voodoo, it's them.
So the bottom line is, This creates $3 plus trillion in new dollars, you know, new currency that the Treasury can use to either service the existing debt, pay off the bondholders, or if it were enough money, you could eventually start to pay down the national debt.
Now, you may have noticed that $3.14 trillion is not, that doesn't make a huge dent in the current $37 trillion in the national debt, but it wouldn't even get there because it's only designed to pay off the current treasury holders as those debt bonds mature.
And since there's some huge number, huge amount of debt bonds maturing in the next year and a half let's say and again I've been told that number is something over $20 trillion I haven't been able to verify that but it's it's somewhere in that neighborhood you might say well 3 trillion doesn't really make a huge dent in that so how how does 3 trillion dollars help pay off $20 trillion plus in maturing debt?
And the answer is that they don't have to value gold at $12,000 an ounce.
They could use a much higher number.
So as it turns out, for roughly every $4,000 increase in the value of gold, you end up creating about another trillion dollars in currency liquidity for the treasury.
You got it?
So if you were to value gold at, let's say, $24,000, then you would have obviously over $6 trillion in new liquid dollars created.
And this could conceivably go even higher.
Maybe they'll take it to, I don't know, $24,000 or more or $50,000.
Who knows?
But this magical accounting voodoo will allow the U.S. government to kick the debt can down the road by simply revaluing gold at a much much higher price now here's the thing as I said earlier it is now clear to me that this is going to be done it's very clear this is going to be done and I'm about to show you some videos and some documents including documents from the Federal Reserve itself I've got two documents to show you there that talk about
this plan in great detail they talk about how it would even work so I'll show you that in a second Before I show you those things, ask yourself this question.
If gold suddenly overnight became, let's say, $24,000 an ounce.
And how much gold would you want to have on that day, right?
As much as you could carry, probably, correct?
So whatever gold you have now, and I remember buying gold at, was it, it was under $300 an ounce.
That was like $250 an ounce or something.
I remember buying gold then in the 1990s, and I've never sold any gold.
So I still have that gold, too.
It's not a lot, but it was something.
But whatever gold that you have, you paid...
Even if you bought gold recently, you may have paid maximum with the premium and everything.
You might have paid $3,500 an ounce, let's say.
So that $3,500 is about to go to, let's say, $24,000, although we don't know what number the Treasury is going to pick.
It seems like they would be silly to pick $12K as the new gold price because that would only generate $3 trillion.
If they pick $24K, it generates $6 trillion.
So if they pick $24Kk and you paid $3,500 or less per ounce, now you have a windfall of profit, of gain, let's say.
And at that point, you know, every ounce of gold that you have, you could trade it for $24,000.
And this is real.
If the government announced this level, then the entire gold market would settle around that level.
You would be able to sell your gold to any of the gold dealers, including our sponsor, Battalion Metals., they would buy the gold from you at, you know, something close to spot or whatever the supply and demand curve says at that moment.
But you would get something close to $24,000 an ounce from any reputable gold dealer, buyer, or seller.
Because gold would then be worth that much.
So at that point, for every ounce of gold that you had, you might be able to, you know, to cover a lot of living expenses for quite some time.
And, you know, $24,000, I don't know what kind of lifestyle you live, but I can live a long time on $24,000.
I don't have a bunch of overhead.
I don't have a very expensive lifestyle.
If it costs you more than $24,000 a month to live, then you probably can afford more gold is my guess but remember what I said earlier people were asking me well how much gold should I have and I said it's very simple I think you should have one ounce of gold for every month that you plan to live So, you know, if you plan to live 10 years, you should have 120 ounces of gold.
Because I argued that generally speaking, if you don't have too much of a luxury lifestyle, you can pretty much buy food and have a place to sleep and live a decent lifestyle on about an ounce of gold a month, per person.
If it's you and a spouse, let's say, then two ounces of gold per month.
But if the government revalues gold at $24,000 an ounce, my goodness, all of a sudden your gold stretches six times longer or more.
You see what I mean?
So in other words, when that day comes, if you hold gold, all of a sudden you're roughly six times richer.
Well, I guess it's closer than seven times.
more wealthy than you were before.
So obviously it's great to have gold before that day comes.
And that day will be a surprise.
Obviously there won't be a warning.
But there are early signs that that's happening.
And one of those signs is underway right now.
It's that really wealthy people who are close to the president's inner circle, they are buying gold like crazy.
And there's a massive effort to repatriate gold to New York.
out of London.
Because when the day comes that gold is revalued, of course, Trump wants to make sure that the Treasury has as much physical gold as possible, and that he and his friends have as much physical gold as possible.
So that's why there's been a mad rush for gold lately, because these people, they know what's about to happen, I believe.
Now, suppose you don't have any gold, and then that day comes, and suddenly gold is worth $24,000 an ounce.
Well, what does that mean about the value of your dollar?
It means that your dollar just dropped to almost one seventh of its previous value, at least in terms of pricing gold.
Now, it doesn't mean that groceries are going to be seven times higher the very next day.
No, it won't work that way.
But over time, there will be a number of people who start selling gold, either maybe to the government, to the Treasury, or other buyers, in order to take profits.
You know, if you see gold go to $24,000 and you need cash, you're going to start unloading gold.
And a lot of people will do that.
at that time.
And what that's going to cause is, you know, it'll create a lot of movement of this money, this $6 trillion, some portion of it will flow into the economy of people who are buying things with it.
Things like homes, land, groceries, whatever.
So you're going to have more dollars chasing the same limited supply of goods and services.
What happens in that scenario?
The answer, of course, is inflation.
So you're going to see inflation when that day comes.
Now, this inflation effect will be, I believe, quite dramatic.
That is, if gold is priced at something like 24K, it would be less dramatic if gold were priced at 12K or 15K.
And we don't know what number the government is going to choose, but the higher the number, the more dollars they get.
So it seems like there's every incentive to choose a higher number.
This is kind of what Andy Sheckman is talking about when he says that Trump will sacrifice the dollar to save the debt market.
In other words, by revaluing gold, Trump and his team will be devaluing the dollar because of all this new money flooding in the system.
But they will be able to refinance some of the money.
some portion of the treasury debt not enough to stop the final collapse but enough to delay it this is a delay game can they delay it another year?
I don't know.
Three years, five years, ten?
nobody knows, but they can delay it for some period of time, and that is their goal.
So the short version here, and then I'm going to get into the Fed documents to show you, the short version is that the more gold you have when this day comes, the more your wealth increases by almost seven times if they choose the 24k number.
The more dollars you hold on that day, the more your dollar value rapidly decreases because of all the new dollars that are effectively created because of this gold revaluation move.
In other words, this is a massive increase of the money supply, something kind of like what we witnessed during COVID, which set off much of the inflation that you're seeing right now, which is why a steak might cost you $50 at the grocery store these days, or at a restaurant it might be, you know, $100.
So that's because of massive money creation.
This is what is about to happen, and I think it's very clear that this is going to happen.
So the first video I want to play for you is from a man known as Clive Thompson and I spotted this video a few weeks ago now this man what he says just makes total sense and he's talking about gold being revalued at $15,000
now Clive Thompson he recorded and posted this video before August 1st which is the day on which the Federal Reserve posted a new document that further discusses the gold revaluation strategy and that seems to me to be the confirmation that they're going to do this.
So understand that this man you're about to hear from, Clive Thompson, he's on YouTube, and I don't know his website, but I'm sure you could probably find it pretty easily, Clive Thompson.
Let's listen to him for a few minutes so you can get a sense of what he's talking about here, which is completely aligned with what I just explained, but in more detail.
Here we go.
Hello, dear viewers.
My name is Clive Thompson.
What if I told you that the U.S. government has a secret plan to revalue gold at $15,000 an ounce and it will wipe out the current year's deficit and reduce the US government debt and it won't cost you a single penny.
Before I get on to that, I've been investing money for 50 odd years.
I've made a lot of mistakes.
I don't make so many mistakes these days.
And my mission is to help you manage your finances better, to learn how to invest in the stock markets, how to invest in gold or gold miners or Bitcoin or equities or property or any other type of investment.
I'm here to teach you about investing your money so that you can prepare your own financial future and your retirement but let's get back to the question of $15,000 gold it sounds impossible right but this plan is not only possible it's been done before and I think it's in the making as I as I make this video and the key to all this is gold we're talking
about a potential revaluation of the US government's gold holdings from the statutory price of $42.22 to $15,000 an ounce.
Today, I'm going to break down how this could happen, who gets rich, why the whispers about this plan are getting louder in the highest circles of power, and how you can know when it's about to happen and prepare yourself.
Let's start with a simple fact.
The United States government owns a lot of gold.
It's about 261.5 million ounces to be exact.
But here's the crazy part.
On the official books of the government, this gold is valued at just $42.22 an ounce.
That's the statutory price of gold set in 1972.
The gold thus has a book value of only US$11 billion.
But at today's market price of about $3,300, that same gold is actually worth over $862 billion.
And if gold would be worth over four or nearly four trillion dollars.
But let's go back in history a little bit.
Where did this gold come from in the first place?
Currently it's held by the U.S. Treasury, which is a branch of the U.S. government.
But it wasn't always theirs.
Back in 1934, in the middle of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Gold Reserve Act.
This law forced the Federal Reserve who held the gold to hand over all of its physical gold to the US Treasury.
And in return, the Federal Reserve got a piece of paper, an IOU called a gold certificate.
If you look at the Fed's balance sheet today, it's the very first asset listed on the balance sheet.
It's called Gold Certificate Account, and it's valued at that same $11 billion.
But it's just an accounting receipt.
It's not a claim to get their gold back, ever.
The Federal Reserve cannot and may not convert that certificate into gold, and it has no right to ask for redemption of the certificate.
So the only way it can be redeemed is if the...
the treasury so decides and if they redeem it they'll redeem it at the statutory price of gold i.e.
at 42.22 an ounce which is 11 billion dollars so that gold certificate is on the books as 11 billion dollars it's only worth 11 billion dollars and it never will be worth any more and it can't even be cashed in at least not at the holders behest so we go back to 1934 all that gold was transferred from the federal reserve to the treasury as a result of the gold reserve act but
Roosevelt wasn't done on that day the next day He devalued the US dollar by over 40%.
He did this by changing the official price of gold from $20.67 an ounce to $35 an ounce.
Or more precisely, as it was worded in his proclamation, he reduced the gold weight of the dollar from 25.8 grains of gold 9 tenths fine to 15.715.
grains of gold 9 tenths fine obviously we know it today as an increase in the price of gold from 20 to 35 Now this move, this genius move at the time, created a 2.8 billion paper profit out of thin air.
And Roosevelt made absolutely sure that that profit went straight to the Treasury, not to the Fed.
He said, and I quote, We believe that all profits should revert to the Treasury of the United States for the benefit of the country as a whole.
And with that, the Fed was left with a bit of paper and nothing more.
Obviously their real gold was now gone.
The move shocked bankers in London, Paris and Zurich.
The mighty US dollar that they held had suddenly lost 41% of its value overnight.
Foreign bankers saw it as an aggressive, unfair trade tactic.
It was a clear signal that the old rules of money no longer applied.
So why am I talking about something which happened 90 years ago.
Because today, the USA is facing a similar crisis.
The national debt is spiraling out of control.
The interest payments alone are becoming one of the biggest expenses of the entire federal budget.
And worse is to come.
The government has to refinance about 9 trillion of its debt.
over the next four years.
That's roughly one third of its debt.
This debt was issued when interest rates were low, about 1.5% to 2%.
Today, interest rates or yields on bonds are closer to 5%.
That refinancing cost, which is coming over the next few years, is going to cause the government's interest costs to explode.
Something has to be done.
And that's where the 1934 playbook comes into focus.
The idea, gaining traction, is to repeat Roosevelt's move but on a much grander scale.
A revaluation of gold to $15,000 would generate $3.9 trillion of windfall for the Treasury.
It would wipe out the entire budget deficit for 2025 or 2026 when they do it and it would allow the government to pay down a huge chunk of the national debt.
So how would this work technically?
Because it's a kind of monetary sleight of hand but it can be done in four simple steps which I'm going to outline and I'm not asking for any Nobel Prize for explaining this first the Treasury would buy back the gold certificates held by the Fed paying the value 11 billion dollars Secondly,
The President would issue an order raising the official statutory price of gold to $15,000 an ounce.
Thirdly, the Treasury now sell all of its gold to the Federal Reserve at the new price, the new statutory price, receiving in exchange $3.9 trillion of newly created digital cash.
And finally, the government would repeat the 1934 trick.
which is to pass a new law forcing the Federal Reserve to hand over that gold back certificate.
The end result.
The Treasury's got its gold back, plus it's got $3.9 trillion in cash created out of thin air.
$3.9 trillion in cash created out of thin air by the Fed.
And since the gold certificates aren't counted as government debt, the national debt could be drastically reduced.
And, of course, in the current year, there'd be a huge profit made by the Treasury, resulting in a badminton.
So who wins in this scenario and who loses?
Well, the biggest winner, by far, is the US government.
But the other beneficiaries would be anyone who owns gold or anything related to gold such as gold mining stocks.
Central banks in countries like Russia and China would see their assets soar.
Individuals who own gold coins or bars would see their wealth multiply.
And of course, gold mining companies would become incredibly profitable overnight.
All right.
Hope you enjoyed that video there from Clive Thompson.
There's more.
And I've got two Federal Reserve documents to show you here straight ahead.
I do want to mention that if you want to get physical gold and silver, do not take this recording as any kind of investment advice.
It is not that.
Do your own research and get your own experts.
But if you want a very fair, very competitive price on gold and silver, physical or vaulted, on your behalf, you can contact our gold and silver sponsor that we've worked with for many years.
They're called Battalion Medals.
That's actually their new website project and you can reach them at metalswithmike.com metalswithmike.com they've been our sponsor for i don't know seven or eight years something like that i've forgotten exactly how many years and highly trustworthy third generation family business they do a massive volume of gold and silver all over the country and around the world and they know their stuff and they don't do any bait and switch tactics and their premiums are very very low
especially compared to a lot of other sort of more popular retailers that are out there.
And there is a very dishonest practice in the gold retail industry right now where they talk you into these odd coins that are weird ounces, like, I don't know, one and a half ounces, and you're overpaying by far.
I've talked to Annie Sheckman about this.
some people have overpaid by two or even even three times the value of gold in order to get these weird coins, these collectors' coins that nobody recognizes and nobody wants to buy.
So don't get taken, don't get talked into something that sounds too good to be true.
You want real physical gold and silver, get it from a trusted source.
And you can't do any better than metalswithmike.com.
And yes, they are our sponsor.
And yes, so they do compensate us for plugging them, a very small compensation, actually.
So I just want to make sure that you get a good value and a high integrity provider if you decide that gold and silver are right for you.
Personally, I'm stacking gold and silver on a regular basis at whatever price it happens to be that month because I'm not speculating on it.
I don't consider it to be a speculative investment.
I consider it to be asset protection.
So I'm stacking gold and silver, and now in anticipation of where this is going, I'm stacking as much gold as I possibly can manage because, again, I believe it's going to be revalued.
And when it's revalued, it's only going to happen once in our life.
Once it's announced, you can't go back, right?
Instantly, everybody's gold will be worth much much more than what it's worth right now and probably silver will follow as well although we don't know to what extent.
I mean, the silver market is anyone's guess.
I do think it will rise, but I think there'll be a lag time on the silver.
So if gold goes to, I don't know, let's say gold goes to, let's just use a lower number here, $15,000 announced by the federal government.
And, you know, currently the gold to silver ratio.
is pretty crazy like 90 something but historically it's been much much lower it's even been like 15 or 20 but i'm just going to say it's 50 so So that would put silver at $300 an ounce if it follows gold and achieves that same ratio, you know, 50 to 1 ratio in terms of gold to silver price.
So silver at 300 is very conceivable, if you ask me, although obviously we can't guarantee it's going to happen.
And silver is not a monetary metal entirely like gold is.
Silver is an industrial metal.
So that has to be factored in as well.
But I do know silver is in short supply.
But in my mind, if gold is revalued, there's no way that silver stays at its current price, it begins to track towards gold over time.
But that's just my assessment.
You can determine your own assessment.
But wasn't that talk by Clive Thompson really amazing?
So I hope you picked up on a couple of important points that Clive Thompson shared with us.
One of those being the fact that the Treasuries, essentially the IOUs to the Fed, They don't count as debt.
They're not considered national debt.
So by using something like this, a massive gold revaluation of...
Again, because the IOUs to the Fed don't count.
They are not considered officially debt.
even though, you know, logically, you could say they are debt, but they don't count as debt.
So yeah, it's a financial voodoo game, but Trump could come out and publicly say, "Hey, I'm the first president We actually made money this year as the government and we were able to pay down some amount of debt.
Think about that.
Now even though it's financially not true, but politically it's very valuable to be able to say that because everybody's concerned about the debt.
So because most people are not very sophisticated in understanding what what all this is and it is it's complex right and there's a lot of financial sleight of hand taking place in this scenario most people would not track it and they would just believe whatever Fox News reports.
Oh, it's the first time we've had a government surplus since, well, I guess since Bill Clinton.
And his surplus was also a bunch of financial shenanigans as well.
So, you know, we've just gone deeper and deeper into debt every year, no matter what.
The other thing that Clive Thompson mentioned is that the U.S. government is going to have to pay back $9 trillion.
in maturing debt bonds over the next four years.
That number is low.
I mean, Clive's number is actually too low it's significantly higher than that in fact I mean there was something like nine or ten trillion that's due this year just in 2025 or something close to that and again 2026 might be another eight nine ten trillion something like that so over four years this is really significant it's probably over four years it's probably well over 30 trillion dollars I just don't have the final numbers
right now because they're shockingly difficult to nail down probably on purpose.
So this isn't a $9 trillion game.
This is a 20 plus trillion problem.
And that's why I think gold will be revalued much higher than $12,000 or even $15,000 an ounce.
I also want to mention that as Clive Thompson said, everything related to gold would also go up tremendously in value.
So if you've purchased things like gold backs, for example, which is sort of spendable gold, you know, gold backs, You can get gold backs in small denominations such as one half of one thousandth of an ounce of gold in the gold back.
But typically the smallest that people see is one 1,000th of an ounce of gold but I like to hand those out to people I give out a lot of gold backs all the time and gold backs they're beautiful it's very artful and there's real physical gold in the gold backs well those gold backs I mean I guess let me check the price right now and by the way my laboratory has confirmed the gold content of the gold backs And right now one gold back
is priced at $6.70.
So gold backs tend to be about double the spot price of gold.
But gold backs have their own supply demand curve and there are goldbacks that are available in different denominations such as 5 10 25 50 and 100 and I've got some of all of those and we are an affiliate for the goldback company too if you want to check them out yourself just go to verified goldbacks.com that's our website that shows you our lab testing results on the goldbacks again that's verified goldbacks.com
or you can find them at my affiliate site rangerdeals.com they're also listed there but goldbacks are designed to make gold spendable.
Whereas you can't easily chop a gold coin into a thousand pieces and say, here, you want a thousandth of a coin?
You know, that's not going to work.
But with a gold back, you can take out one, one thousandth of an ounce of gold in the form of a gold back.
And at many farmers' markets and an increasing number of local retailers, this is increasingly accepted as a form of payment.
at the current gold back price.
And when you have states like Texas that just recently signed into law the recognition of gold and silver as legal tender.
And of course that's true in many other states like Wyoming, etc.
Then you're seeing gold and silver be increasingly recognized as a spendable kind of cash because it holds intrinsic value.
And the thing about goldbacks is the gold is in the goldback.
It's not a receipt for gold.
It's not a claim on gold.
And it certainly isn't a dollar.
It's not a debt instrument, which is what the dollar is.
A goldback is an actual, very measured amount of gold in a speci wallet or a pocket or wherever and they're durable and beautiful so gold backs I mean right now okay if a gold back is $6.70 in value right now let me do the math on this if that goes up let's say let's say gold is revalued to $24,000
an ounce that's going to put gold backs at about $45 plus per gold back And I remember when I first started talking about these, they were $3 and something each.
And they could go to $45 per gold back.
And since you can have a 100 gold back that's got 100,000ths of an ounce of gold in it, guess what the price would be on that using the same numbers here?
Well, it would be about $4,500.
Can you imagine?
Just, you know, having a gold back is like, at that price, handing out gold backs would be like handing out, you know, $50 bills.
So all the gold backs that I've given to people, which has been just a massive amount, I mean, I don't even want to say how much, I like to give out gold backs because I'm a generous person and I like to share the message of gold.
And one time at my church, I just gave a gold back to every person that came in.
for attendance because I believe in reverse tithing and I've given stacks of gold backs to Michael Yan to hand out to people he knows in Japan and he's done that and he uses them as bookmarks too they're really great bookmarks but I've given away so many many gold backs to people because I like to share gold.
And think about it, each one of those gold backs could become worth $45 if the government makes this move.
So gold mining companies will absolutely explode in value.
Now, I'm not an expert in gold mining, and so I steer clear of that because most gold mining companies go belly up.
I mean, most silver mining also.
I mean, just precious metals mining is a very risky business.
But there are people like Peter Schiff who know exactly about which mining companies are better positioned.
I don't know, so I would defer to others like him.
But if you end up in the right gold mining company at the right time, your shares in that company could go up 100x.
That's no joke.
I just don't know who that might be.
And I don't like to, that's just not my thing to watch stock prices.
I just feel like it's out of my control So I don't invest in mining companies, but some of you probably do, and some of you are going to do extremely well in those mining companies, if you're in the right ones anyway, when this decision happens or if the Fed makes this move as I think they will.
So this is all really critical information to keep in mind.
Personally, I'm happy with just gold itself going up, you know, seven times.
I mean, that's, I'm thrilled.
I'm actually just thrilled with gold, how much it's gone up in the last three years.
You know, it's skyrocketed from under $2,000 an ounce to almost double that.
So I'm thrilled about that.
If it goes up another seven times, then, you know, I'm jumping up and down for joy.
But I'm also very concerned about what happens to the mass impoverishment of the people who don't own gold and the inflation that's going to kick in, etc.
And I'm going to talk about that more in an upcoming chapter.
But I just wanted to let you know that everything that is related to gold is going to go up if gold is revalued.
That includes goldbacks.
That includes gold mining companies.
It includes your gold ring, you know?
Like, you'll be able to take it to a pawn shop shop and get seven times more if you want your gold fillings and your mouth i have some gold fillings oh my god they're going to going to be worth a fortune.
If you go broke, you start pulling teeth.
How broke are you?
I'm so broke, I'm pulling teeth.
That's when you're desperate.
No, I'm kidding.
Never pull your own teeth for the gold value.
But think about whatever gold you have or whatever forms of gold you have and how much more valuable it can become.
It's extraordinary.
Now, I want to show you another video, or just part of it, actually.
It's a video by George Gammon.
George Gammon is known as the rebel capitalist, and he's a sharp guy I've always enjoyed his whiteboard presentations and they even animate the figures on the whiteboard which is really fun he's he's got a video they put out a few weeks ago that talks about this plan to revalue gold again George Gammon's video was put out before the August 1st publication by the Federal Reserve of a key document that
I'm going to show you coming up.
But George Gammon explains how this works, and he cites a different document on the Federal Reserve website that's part of the training manual that tells Federal Reserve employees how to do this.
It even mentions the current $11 billion of gold valuation on the balance sheets of the Treasury.
So I just want to play a little bit a little bit of this video for you so you can hear another person explain what this is and you know george gammon is not a he's not an intellectual lightweight he's a serious guy with a sharp mind, good financial grasp, and I think he nails this.
So check out this video.
Imagine waking up tomorrow morning and hearing this.
Breaking news.
This just in.
In an effort to solve the US debt crisis, the government has just revalued gold to twenty thousand dollars an ounce.
Now that may have been artificial intelligence, but there are some very high level macro thinkers like Luke Groman with real intelligence that have been talking about how the United States may try to solve their debt crisis by revaluing gold to twenty thousand dollars an ounce, if not higher.
And this is something they could be doing very, very soon.
I'm going to explain how they would do this and what I think the probabilities are of this.
actually happening?
And three, simple fast steps.
Step number one.
Let's go over the mechanics here.
It's actually pretty easy, believe it or not.
We'll start in this section of the whiteboard, and we've got everybody's favorite, your drunk, insolvent uncle Sam.
The federal government right here.
So he just is holding a sign that says, I will pay twenty thousand dollars for an ounce of gold.
So if you are a goldholder and you wanted to sell your shiny yellow metal, what did Kane say, the barbarous relic?
Why would you sell it at a lower price than twenty thousand dollars an ounce?
The answer is you wouldn't.
Okay, so Fort Knox, as we know, has a lot of the gold, but the total amount of gold the United States holds roughly 260 million ounces, which at today's price would be valued at approximately 858 billion.
Okay, well, let's think this through.
If your drunk, insolvent Uncle Sam revalued the price up to $20,000 by just putting in that bid, then the value of the gold the United States owns goes from, let's call it, 850 billion straight up to roughly five trillion dollars.
Now you may be saying to yourself, okay, George, I get that, but where on earth will they get the money?
Well, they just sell treasuries.
And you say, well, wouldn't that increase the debt?
Yes, it would increase the liability side of the balance sheet, but it would also increase the asset side of the balance sheet because they're buying that physical gold.
And I'd also like to remind everyone that back in 2020, the Federal Reserve came out and put in a bid for corporate debt because that market was completely blowing up.
There was no liquidity.
And they only had to buy about a billion dollars worth of corporate debt to kind of set a floor on the actual price.
So my point here is number one, they would increase the liabilities side, but they would also increase the asset side, basically a wash.
And also, in my opinion, they wouldn't have to buy that much to go ahead and reset that price from where it is today all the way up to twenty thousand dollars, if not higher.
Okay, great.
So very straightforward.
Now let's go over and look at the Treasury, Scott Bissent, and the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell.
We've got assets on the left, liabilities on the right.
Currently, 37 trillion in deb in debt, call it, for the federal government, but they have the gold that we were talking about earlier.
And the Federal Reserve, they have the TGA as a liability on their balance sheet.
That's basically the checking account for the Treasury.
Now, believe it or not, the Federal Reserve has this secret monetary manual.
At least no one that I know of has really ever heard of it other than Luke Groman.
He's the one that pointed it out to me on Twitter when we were going back and forth about this.
And this is actually a real thing.
We're going to go to it in just a moment.
So I guess they just give this to their employees when you get hired at the Federal Reserve.
this Fed monetary policy manual.
I guess that's how it works.
But in section two dash one zero, they talk about how the Treasury can issue these gold certificates.
Sounds very fancy, but it's just a financial gimmick.
And this is the key to this whole thing working out.
Okay, so the Treasury can issue these gold certificates.
We got it?
All right.
And these gold certificates have perceived value to an entity like the Federal Reserve.
Again, this is just accounting gimmicks back and forth here, but they are legal.
Okay, so those gold certificates.
issued by the Treasury go onto the Fed's balance sheet.
They buy all of them, which represents a claim on the gold they have as an asset.
So they buy five trillion dollars worth of these gold certificates.
So then they've got those gold certificates as an asset, and they have the five trillion dollars of liabilities that they just deposited into the TGA.
So now the Treasury's balance sheet changes in the sense they have five trillion dollars in cash.
But they also have the liabilities, those gold certificates they sold to the Federal Reserve.
And of course, they still have the $37 trillion in debt they started with.
But what they can do is effectively buy down the debt so they take it from 37 trillion to 32 trillion.
I know a lot of you right about now are kind of scratching your head and saying, okay, George, I thought this solves the debt problem or the debt crisis.
They still have 32 trillion, for heaven's sakes.
It's not like this takes it down to zero.
And you would be correct.
Right now, the debt to GDP for the United States is around 120%.
And this is what's got us in this crisis mode.
But a lot of these high-level thinkers, like Luke Groman and many others.
believe that if we could just get the debt down to about 60 to 70 percent of GDP, historically speaking, this would dodge the bullet.
And this would take us from a point of crisis back to a point where the debt of the United States is sustainable.
All right, I want to jump in here for just a moment because what George Gammon is referring to here.
I have a little bit different take on where this money goes.
He's talking about it paying down some of the debt.
I don't even think we're there.
Right now, I think that Trump is going to have gold revalued to raise money to simply service the current debt, right, to pay off the maturing bonds even as new treasuries are sold.
So I don't even think this is going to pay down the total debt burden, but it will simply avoid a total debt default.
In other words, this keeps the engine going a little bit longer, but I don't think it's going to reduce the national debt by trillions of dollars.
That's my guess.
The second thing that's worth mentioning here is that even though the Federal Reserve holds the gold certificates, according to Andy Schackman, who I spoke with, those certificates only give the Federal Reserve the right to the value of the gold, but not to the gold itself.
So this is why it's not a gold heist, because that was one of my first concerns.
This sounds like a gold heist, where the The Federal Reserve, which is a globalist bankster cabal, would be taking over ownership of all the gold of the United States of America, all 262 million ounces.
Apparently that's not the case, is what Andy is telling me.
But, you know, technically, who knows for sure.
So I want to wrap up this chapter, and I want to summarize for you here what we've learned from all of this.
Number one, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury, through this financial voodoo, they are able to create lots and lots lots of dollar liquidity or new dollars and to create those into existence by simply revaluing the assets that are already on the books.
And the only reason this exists is because gold is still statutorily priced at $42 and change.
And it's been that way, you know, for decades.
So even though many other countries have revalued gold to the current value, which has given them liquidity in order to cover debts, you know, to create revenue for the government, there's no reason There's no reason why the U.S. government has to limit the price to the current market price.
If instead the United States government went to something much higher than the market price, which is effectively setting the new market price of $12,000 or $15,000 or whatever, then that just creates so much more liquidity.
Again, every $4,000 that they increase the price would give them another trillion dollars in liquidity.
Now, I asked David Morgan, the Silver Guru, what he thought the effects of this would be.
I'm going to discuss his answer more in an upcoming chapter.
However, it's worth at least giving a summary.
He says that the revaluing of gold to, let's say, $15,000 an ounce would signal the collapse of confidence in the fiat currency system.
And this revaluation would, quote, ripple across the foreign exchange markets, and it would trigger a cascade of repricing in every major asset class.
And I asked David Morgan this privately, so he sent me this answer privately.
I'm sharing it with you.
He says, as far as silver, it would likely exp experience the most explosive repricing of all.
He said that in foreign exchange markets, the dollar would suffer a huge blow, and that holding treasuries or dollar-denominated assets would be seen as increasingly risky, and that central banks around the world would shift into much harder assets such as gold or commodities.
He said this would create global risk for every fiat currency system and it would cause a devastating ripple effect in the faith of fiat currencies.
And then he says that what would happen after the U.S. repricing would cause trade imbalances that would become unworkable.
Arbitrage across borders would, quote, wreak havoc, he said.
Currency pegs would break.
Bilateral trade agreements would have to emerge as new agreements.
And a multipolar monetary world would become official.
And then he says that silver would become the people's money.
So gold would be the central bank's money or the value backstopping their currency.
But silver would be used by the people.
And even though the gold to silver price ratio today is something over 80 to 1, he says the historical ratio is really closer to 16 to 1.
That's even lower than what I was using earlier in my example.
So if that were true, even if it went to 40 to 1, he said, then gold at $15,000 means silver is $375 an ounce.
And at a ratio of 20 to 1, then silver is $750 an ounce.
Right.
right wow um even a conservative reversion he says to the mean would bring us a silver price of 250 to 350 which would absolutely shatter the paper silver markets so the bottom line there wow um kind of makes you wonder i mean i'm asking myself the question Should I buy gold or should I buy silver?
I don't know.
Half-half?
I mean, by dollar amount?
I don't know.
You have to make your own decision, do your own research, et cetera.
Silver could also be revalued by the government itself because there's some amount of silver on the balance sheet, just like there's gold, except the silver amount is far, far less.
So it wouldn't be, you know, nearly, it wouldn't have the impact of gold being revalued.
So basically, I think the bottom line here is that In order to save the U.S. debt market, Trump and his team are willing to not only destroy the dollar, but to send ripples of a mega earthquake shockwaves across the entire world which would cause all kinds of financial upheavals and the bottom line is that
people who hold gold and silver are going to be the new wealthy people who hold dollars and other fiat currencies are going to be the new impoverished i mean that's the simple way to look at this so obviously You want to protect your assets, get them into metals before this happens, if it does happen.
Again, there's no guarantee that this is going to happen, and there's no guarantee at what level the government might set the price.
And this is clearly a very desperate move.
But it's increasingly clear to me that this is a move that Trump is going to make.
I mean, it's bold.
It's daring.
It takes, what do they say, chutzpa.
Or is that the right way to pronounce it?
Chutzpa.
Do you have to put a lot of throat into that word?
I'm not sure.
It takes some balls, is what I'm saying.
And it's going to...
And suddenly they find that they are not.
not so I'm going to wrap up this chapter if you want to get gold and silver again do your own research don't take this as investment advice but check out our sponsor battalion metals they are at metalswithmike.com and if you use discount code ranger by the way they will waive your shipping insurance fees so you'll save a little bit there and then they'll know that you heard about it through us which helps
with our sponsorship obviously so use discount code ranger if you do purchase something from them and you should know they're very trustworthy high integrity people.
Otherwise, I wouldn't even work with them, but I've been working with them for many, many years.
And my audience is thrilled with the professionalism and the level of service that they get from battalion medals.
All right, the next chapter coming up is all about stablecoins and the Genius Act and how Trump is working to use these stablecoins to find new suckers to buy more U.S. Treasury debt, but it won't matter.
That's my conclusion.
I'll tell you why in the next chapter.
Oh, and one more note.
If you want to follow my interviews and my podcasts my daily work just follow me at brightion.com my channel there is called hr report you'll see my thumbnails with either bbn which means brightion broadcast news or hrr which means health ranger report you can also of course find me on x at health ranger or brightion.social health ranger brightion.io I'm also a health ranger there Or even on Telegram,
I'm real Health Ranger and nothing else.
There are a lot of people impersonating me on Telegram, but go to real Health Ranger and you'll get the right version of me.
So it's going to be interesting.
All right, welcome to the documents addendum to chapter 2 of my audiobook, The Financial Big Bang.
Now here I'm going to be showing you the Federal Reserve documents.
You'll see them on your screen.
I'll show you exactly the titles.
You can look them up yourself in order to confirm that what I've reported so far here in chapter 2 is absolutely true.
So let's just jump right into it.
The first document I want to show you is from federalreserve.gov slash about the Fed slash financial slash accounting slash manual.htm and it's called Financial Accounting Manual for Federal Reserve Banks May of 2025 and it says that this manual known as the FAM contains the accounting standards that should be followed by Federal Reserve Banks now if you go down to chapter one
balance sheet you'll see a section called 2.10 gold certificate account And here it says the following.
The Secretary of the Treasury is authorized to issue gold certificates to the reserve banks.
to monetize gold held by the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
At any time, Treasury may reacquire the gold certificates by demonetizing the gold.
Isn't that interesting?
In other words, the Treasury can issue gold certificates and it can also take them back.
The Treasury is in charge of this, not the Fed.
Next paragraph.
Treasury maintains an account with the Board of Governors entitled Gold Certificate Fund, Board of Governors of the FR System.
When the Treasury monetizes gold, it credits this account in return for deposit credit at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
You got that?
There's the swap right there.
So the Fed is issuing a deposit credit to the Treasury, which could be $6 trillion, and the Treasury then issues the gold certificates to this account.
Okay?
And then the next sentence says the opposite can also occur when demonetizing gold.
The Treasury can do the opposite.
It says the offsetting entry in each case on the FRBNY's books is made to the gold certificate account and the U.S. Treasury General Account.
In other words, this is money that gets dumped right into the General Account of the Treasury, which means the Treasury can use it for anything that it wants to.
Got it?
Also, whenever the official price of gold is changed, I'm skipping ahead to the next sentence, Treasury adjusts the account and simultaneously the deposit account.
Right there, I mean, that's the gold nugget right there.
Whenever the official price of gold is changed, so it can be changed officially by a a Treasury official or perhaps the president, then Treasury adjust the account and adjust the deposit account accordingly.
Anyway, this section goes on.
You can read more.
Section 2.2 is a special drawing rights certificate account or an SDR account issued by the IMF.
Yeah, that's interesting as well because that's another backup global currency.
for the central banks to rely on if the local currencies collapse, SDRs.
But that's a whole different discussion.
So right there, what I just read you from the Federal Reserve, and it's on their website, federalreserve.gov, shows you exactly what we're talking about.
It spells it out in black and white.
And remember, this is a manual that's given to Federal Reserve employees and officials to make sure that they stay in compliance.
Now we're going to go to another page from the Federal Reserve.
This page was released on July 31st, 2025.
And this is called the Federal Reserve Balance Sheet.
And if you scroll down,
That's why the next two columns are zeroed out because it does not change because it has been set since what year was that?
Like 1971 or earlier?
No, it was way earlier than that.
But gold has been set at this price of basically $42 for generations.
So that's why it's $11 billion right there on the balance sheet.
Note that that can be changed at any time.
That could be changed to $6 trillion just by announcing it.
Just by the government saying, we're going to set the gold price at $15,000 or $24,000 or whatever.
And then there's one more document I want to show you.
This is Fed's Notes, published August 1st, 2025 by Colin Weiss and this was just published a few days ago.
So this page which I referred to before, it's authored by Colin Weiss and it shows that the statutory price of gold is currently $42.22 and that it could be changed to current market prices or higher.
It doesn't have to be limited to current market prices since the government itself can set the market price if it wants to set it higher.
You see?
So this paper looks at five countries that have revalued their gold holdings over the past 30 years.
That's Germany, Italy, Lebanon, Curaçao, St. Martin, and South Africa.
That sounds like six countries.
Oh, Curaçao and St. Martin, I guess, is counting as one country.
Okay.
So it's like five plus one countries.
And it says that once gold is revalued, that the proceeds have been either used by the central bank, which is what Italy did, or by the central government.
like South Africa, Lebanon, and Germany.
And this is in the last 30 years.
We're not talking about, you know, World War I, Weimar, Germany.
We're talking about recently, relatively recently, in the 1990s, I believe, in the case of Germany.
It says that central banks have used the revaluation proceeds to offset operating losses and maintain net profits or to minimize the reporting of net losses.
So in Italy, revaluation proceeds covered a one-off loss for the conversion of a specific bond.
with the Banca d'Italia owned.
Oh, that bank owned.
Okay.
So notably here, all this new money is counted as revenue.
for the year for the government so it can make it appear that the government is just rolling in all kinds of revenue in the current year and it can override you know deficits or losses if you scroll down another paragraph here says central governments have drawn on revaluation proceeds to retire existing debts often in exceptional fiscal circumstances So typically if a country is on the verge of failure,
financial failure, debt implosion like the U.S. right now, then it might renegotiate terms with some of its creditors, which would be treasury bond holders, and it might agree to pay them off at a reduced rate, and it could then revaluate gold in order to raise the funds to pay them off and thereby clear that debt at a discount.
But of course, when that happens, the whole world looks at the debt of your country and concludes that, you know, your debt's very risky.
And then for that point forward, obviously, you would have to pay much higher yields in order to sell treasuries.
And that's not what Trump wants to see happen.
Now, what's interesting.
about this is if you go down to figure two, taking a look at this chart shows you that Lebanon revaluated gold equivalent to, it looks like what, almost 11% of its GDP in 2002.
And that was a dire situation.
And that money went right to the central government, not the central bank.
And Lebanon has, of course, been...
But that shows that you can actually fund a big percentage.
of your government's revenue needs, even a big percentage of the GDP using gold revaluation.
Well, think about this.
If the U.S. were to revalue gold at like $24,000, let's say, that would generate about $6 trillion.
Well, $6 trillion for the United States is roughly about 20% of the GDP of the U.S. So that would dwarf every other country in this chart, especially Germany, which had a relatively small revaluation effort.
But that's because the U.S. is in a deeper financial quagmire than is Lebanon and the U.S. will have to resort to really desperate measures.
But as you can see here, this Federal Reserve paper is discussing how this works.
As this paper says, if you go to the Lebanon section, it says that the relatively large size of this operation, which was $1.8 billion in Lebanese Treasury bills.
The relatively large size reflected Lebanon's extremely difficult fiscal situation at the time.
Lebanon had incurred substantial debts to rebuild its physical infrastructure following the end of the Lebanese Civil War in 1990, and the interest costs of this debt consumed 91% of government revenues by 1997.
91% of government revenues.
Wow.
All right, so despite the international aid, the retirement of some government debt through funds transferred from gold revaluation accounts and a swing of the primary fiscal balance into surplus territory, Lebanon's debt to GDP ratio continued to increase after 2002 and further fiscal restructuring was agreed upon in 2007 so you know it goes on basically Lebanon is a financial nutcase even
to this day and you know currency is always in trouble it seems but the U.S. is a financial nutcase as well so let's see what have I shown you I've shown you the Federal Reserve the financial accounting manual.
I've shown you the Chapter 1 balance sheet that specifically cites the Treasury issuing the gold certificates.
I've shown you the Federal Reserve balance sheet that shows gold as a line item currently valued at $11 billion.
And I've shown you a Fed paper that was just published that discusses five other cases around the world where gold was revalued by governments or central banks in order to generate lots of revenue that could be used by those governments or by those central banks, typically to retire debt.
And that's also exactly, probably, that's the way that Trump intends to use this for the United States, except it would just happen at a much larger dollar amount.
Again, I'm guessing up to $6 trillion, but we won't know until it happens.
So these documents answer some critical questions.
One question, you know, from skeptics, they might say, well, there's no proof that this could even be done.
Yeah, there is.
It's actually written right into the Federal Reserve Manual that you can read on federalreserve.gov.
And I just read it for you and I gave you the title and the link.
So it's right there.
Well, somebody else might say, well, there's no proof that anybody else has ever done that actually yeah five countries have done it just in the last 30 years they've done it successfully and the federal reserve wrote up a paper about how they did it so there you go or another person might say oh well there's no proof that the fed actually has gold on its balance sheet actually there is it's right there on the federal reserve website it's a line item currently showing 11 billion dollars or
11.041 billion dollars and it's there every quarter you know every time they issue one of these reports the same value is right there you can go back for decades and you can see the same line item.
It's been there this entire time.
So not only can the Treasury and the Federal Reserve do this, it has been done before, it has been done successfully before in order to retire debt, and the Federal Reserve is so aware of this that they've published a paper talking about how to do it.
And they've even published in their employee manual how to do it and how to credit the accounts back at the Treasury with the new made up money.
So yes, this is not only possible, it seems to be inevitable.
Inevitable at this point.
And notably, This tactic was used whenever a country got into a lot of financial trouble and desperately needed to retire debt to achieve what?
To achieve a lowering of the debt-to-GDP ratio, which is exactly what the U.S. is now facing, and that's what I talked about throughout much of this chapter.
So there you go.
And I think the timing of this August 1st article by Colin Weiss is really important to note.
The timing of this shows that this is something that's on their radar right now.
They're looking at this right now.
They're preparing for it.
And I think they want to put out this information publicly so that they can come back and say, if anybody's surprised by this, they can come back and say, well, we put it on our website August 1st.
How did you not know, right?
Of course, very few people pay attention to the Fed notes on the Fed website.
I mean, I wouldn't have found it if I wasn't looking for it.
So almost nobody is reading this stuff except, you know.
Treasury people and Fed people, maybe a couple of reporters, but they're not really reporting on this.
So I think this is an issue of public disclosure before the event.
So that, again, so they can.
say, well, we told everybody that this is what we were going to do, basically.
I mean, gosh, we put gold on the balance sheet and we published the article about all these five other countries that did the same thing.
And then we wrote it into the employee manual, and that's been out there for years.
So how could anybody be surprised?
Because you see, there's going to be a tremendous amount of anger when this happens among people who don't have gold.
Obviously, people who don't own gold and silver are going to be financially wiped out and they're going to be extremely unhappy about it and they're going to start pointing the finger at probably the Fed.
Maybe the Treasury, maybe the administration, who knows.
I also think this would be an opportune time for JP Morgan to issue its Morgan coin stablecoin so that Trump could sort of appease the rioting peasants and give them a UBI expressed in stablecoins.
Because giving people stablecoin UBIs costs the government nothing.
Because they can just print the money.
They can use that printed money to back the treasuries that back the stablecoins.
And then they can tell everybody, we're giving you $1,000 a month in stablecoins as a UBI to cover your expenses.
Don't you love Trump?
Don't you love me?
Because we're going to give you beautiful money.
And it's going to be a CBDC, basically.
And everybody who signs up for that is going to have all that money tracked and surveilled and all that.
oh man It's not just know your customer, KYC.
It's a spy on your customer, SYC.
So.
So that's probably what's coming is my guess.
You're going to see the UBI rolled out at the same time.
And most Americans don't understand what causes inflation, which is, I mean, technically, it's always a monetary expansion.
But people don't know that.
They just think prices are going up because, you know, grocery stores are mean or whatever.
The insurance company is mean.
So they don't understand that this is all about money printing.
And so if Trump turns around, like steals all this value from them by creating trillions of dollars in new money, but then turns around and gives them back a pittance oh here's a thousand dollars a month shut the hell up stop writing most people are going to worship Trump for that they're going to worship him well Trump gave me money you know I don't see nobody else giving me no money Trump gave me money they're not going to do the math on this and figure out that the money Trump gave
them is a lot less than the money Trump stole from them by creating trillions of dollars in new money but again That's one of the quote advantages of the mass dumbing down of the public education system is that nobody can do math.
I mean, it's an advantage to the government to be able to pull the wool over the eyes of the American people.
Nobody can do math.
And they certainly can't do compounded interest or the rule of 72 or anything like that.
I'm like, what?
They don't even know what yields means.
Yield, that's a sign on the road.
Whatever, people can do the math.
So the bottom line here, as with everything else I've mentioned, is action item-wise, that is, it's own gold and silver.
Own gold and silver.
You want the life raft out of this quagmire?
You want to be able to get off the sinking Titanic, your lifeboat is made of inflatable gold and silver.
Well, maybe inflatable is the wrong word.
Buoyant gold and silver.
How about that?
Buoyant gold and silver.
You can ride gold and silver out of the sinking Titanic.
And if you don't have gold and silver or other similar commodities, you're pretty much screwed.
So it's cause and effect.
It is what it is.
Now in the next chapter coming up here, oh, I've got some good stuff for you.
The stablecoins, the 50-year treasury IOU plot the student loan debt federal lands scheme and the coming default it's going to get interesting if you want to acquire gold and silver talk to our sponsor you can reach them at metalswithmike.com metalswithmike.com that will take you to battalion metals and i've worked with them for years they've been our sponsor i they're
our first and only gold sponsor And they're honest.
They're trustworthy.
They don't run bait and switch tactics.
They represent all the top mints.
They are bonded, insured, guaranteed discrete delivery.
They've got vaulting services and much more.
They are one of the largest gold and silver operations at the retail and wholesale levels in the United States.
So reach out to them at metalswithmike.com and acquire whatever gold and silver that you think are appropriate for you.
I guess the question is, how much do you want to have remaining when it all hits the fan?
That's probably how much you should consider.
putting into metals because that in my mind that's what's going to be left the dollars toast and dollar denominated you know debt instruments like treasuries are also obviously toast eventually not not immediately but eventually nevertheless hire your own super duper financial advisor and do your own research and make your own decisions Don't take this as financial advice.
I'm just telling you sort of my analysis of where this is going.