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April 2, 2020 - American Countdown - Barnes
01:47:07
20200402_Thu_Barnes
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Welcome to another edition of American Countdown.
Tonight, resolved that the economy is heading to a depression unless the president reopens America soon.
The reality in tonight's opening statement is that the economy is being put into a position in a place it's never been.
We are talking about retraction rates that people are talking about 25%, 30%, 35%.
Some estimate as much as 50%.
We saw today the unemployment rate.
New unemployment claims of 6.6 million.
Ten times more than has ever happened in American history in a single week.
That follows upon 3.3 million just last week.
That's 10 million new unemployment claims in just two weeks.
And these unemployment claims are supposed to already be reduced.
They're already supposed to be reduced by the bailout of small businesses, by the family leave provisions passed in the fiscal bill last week, also by the various corporate bailouts and the various Wall Street bailouts.
So given that, we were supposed to see reduced unemployment claims.
The estimation was maybe 4 million, maybe 5 million, and instead it came in at over 6.6 million.
That was on top of reports from across the country by various individuals saying that, in fact, there had been a delay in the processing of unemployment claims, so it is likely much higher.
Additional claims today from the Congressional Budget Office and from various banks including Goldman Sachs and Bank of America and Fitch that talk about the degree of the economic harm to come is far worse than anyone imagined.
So we live in an environment where we are on the cusp, the precipice, the cliff is right before us.
It is literally tick-tock on the clock of the American experiment, from a constitutional liberties perspective, and the American economy on a go-forward basis.
And we are right at the end, right near the doomsday clock.
We're living through a Dr. Strangelove film, where what's being experimented with is the public economy and civil society.
And if we don't take, and if the president in particular does not take remedial action soon, doesn't reverse course quickly, then the entire economy sits at a fragile end.
We'll be talking later on tonight with one of the better economic analysts in the around the world.
Someone who's done excellent reviews and research about this and other topics has forecast and foreshadowed the problems that we now face.
And he'll be up at the bottom half of the hour.
And then in the next hour, we'll take your calls as members of the jury to decide what's going to happen and give your questions and try to respond to them the best we can and provide you the best and most accurate information in an era and time where we are facing unusual and exceptional risk.
We would like to thank our sponsor, InfoWarsStore.com, and encourage you, given recent news, that if there's something on that store that you like, anything you like, whether it's supplements, whether it's food supplies, whether it's coffee, whether it's anything for your health, for your well-being, now is the time to buy and now is the time to stock up.
Why do I say that?
Well, for example, in Vermont, a state that's traditionally been friendly and favorable to farmers and others, a person went to the store today and tried to buy seeds.
What did they find?
They couldn't buy seeds.
They're illegally prohibited from buying seeds.
Why is that?
Why can't they grow their own food?
Because it's now been determined that that's not essential.
Just as all of a sudden the First Amendment free speech is no longer essential, the right to petition your government no longer essential, the right to hold public rallies no longer essential, the right to go to church no longer essential, the right to own or purchase a gun no longer essential, the right of privacy no longer essential, the right of medical privacy no longer essential, The right to own a business, the right to operate a business, the right to have a business, the right to have that business or property or job not taken away without due process of law by the government or without just compensation.
All of that gone overnight because it's no longer essential.
We've sacrificed our constitutional liberties in a millisecond.
What else will be sacrificed in the interim?
While our economy sits at a precipice and an edge.
So if you really, if there's anything you value, if there's anything you want from TheInfoWarsStore.com, now is the time to buy.
Now is the time to stock up.
Why?
Because who knows whether a week from now, two weeks from now, two days from now, your local government will say you're not allowed to receive that package.
You're not allowed to order that item.
You're not allowed to get that because it's not essential anymore.
That's the world in which we reside.
A world that was made for films and apocalyptic stories and novels, not for everyday America.
But it is everyday America for more than 80% of Americans.
There's police guarding borders in various states, not allowing one party to travel from one state to the next.
My hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee today announced a shutdown order, where the same provisions that did not permit an exception for 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, or 6th Amendment activity was not in those either.
So we're even seeing in conservative states, even seeing in Republican governors and mayors falling in line, being unwilling to contest and challenge this institutional establishment narrative that puts our economy at risk and infects our constitutional republic.
It turns out the only thing that it was the only thing China sent over was not just the virus.
They sent over an infection that was Chinese totalitarianism to boot.
So let's get into some of the update tonight on what's happening with the virus and what's not happening with the virus.
So, for example, there's a chart that's out that they tried to convince the president of that said there was going to be this doom and gloom.
It was connected to a University of Washington and another public entity out there that, by the way, has tight ties to Bill Gates.
And if we look at the chart, this is what was supposed to be happening.
They said, look at all these people that are going to need emergency care.
Look at how this is going to be an ICU surge that's going to lead to massive deaths.
And instead, the actual curve is showing something completely different.
It's not going anywhere near this exponential growth rate that was predicted.
Instead, it even is flattening and going down.
Now, to give an example of where that comes from, it comes in part from the data out of New York, the epicenter of this virus in the United States.
And what does it show?
Well, amongst those, amongst total new hospitalizations, just from two days ago, all of a sudden the numbers started going down, not up.
In fact, more people were discharged, as we'll see in a minute.
Then we're newly hospitalized with the virus.
And it's important to note that New York is listing anybody who's sick that happens to have the virus as being sick because of the virus, even though there's serious doubt about whether the virus is what caused their illness when they often have one, two, or even three other severely deathly diseases.
When we look at the daily ICU units, the intensive care admissions that were supposed to be flooding the system, over thousands were supposed to already be in the system in just New York City, we see instead the number going down, not up.
When we go to the change in the people being discharged, we see the people being discharged is what's going up.
Not people going, the new admission rate is going down, the ICU admission rate is going down, while the number of people being released because they're better is going up.
We see it similarly in the daily intubation rate that's taking place.
Now let's contrast that.
So the models so far have been completely wrong.
So here you have the president has been misled by these various models, promoted by people like Bill Gates, promoted by people like those around him in the administration who were backed by Obama a long time ago.
I mean, Dr. Birx's case was an Obama appointee and is close to Bill Gates and was part of various groups that pushed various vaccines and other programs.
Over the past decade or so, her role within government, Bill Gates, was part of a group called Dreams that helped promote that throughout Africa, part of which became controversial.
The Gates Foundation pushed various forms of vaccines that later Catholic priests in Kenya said were laced with sterilization, that that controversy was never fully resolved or adjudicated.
So that's the process that that's that's who he has giving him advice right now.
People who do not have his motives or his incentives or the country's motives or the country's incentives at heart.
Now by contrast let's look at what happened in the economic system.
Initial jobless claims 6.6 million just today.
Now let's contrast what happened, for example, in the Dow cumulative absolute percentage change.
And this goes into what's happening in terms of the volatility in the Dow.
And what we see from this chart is it looks worse than October 1929.
If we go back, once the system collapses, it often never rebounds or doesn't rebound for a decade or more.
Just ask Japan, which, when it went through its collapse in 1991, still hasn't recovered from that level almost 30 years later.
If we look at the charts and see what happens, once the bottom starts to hit, it tends to just go there for years and takes almost more than a decade to get back to a level that isn't even as high as the original high.
That's the kind of problem that we could be facing.
That's our history.
And this is again all based on a pandemic that appears to be more panic than plague.
One of the big issues was whether or not the asymptomatic spread rate was unique amongst this virus.
Increasingly, there's less and less data and less and less reason to believe that's the case.
That was the key factual assumption behind this model, was that it would have a unique infection rate that, unlike the Spanish flu, which impacted about 10% of a population that it hit over a compressed time period of three months or so, ultimately having an infection rate of about 33% over three years, That this one was somehow going to have a 65% infection rate over three months.
Well, the key assumption to that, one was the original infection rate would be unusually high, but secondly, that the asymptomatic, people who never exhibit symptoms, would somehow spread it at almost an equivalent rate, at 50% of the rate, of people with symptoms.
Even though there's little evidence that that has traditionally occurred in influenza.
Well, that's a particularly useful survey and study that was done and published by the National Institutes for Health.
It's called, Does Influenza Transmission Occur from Asymptomatic Infection or Prior to Symptom Onset?
And its point was, while it can occur, that it's the probability that it occurs has been overstated historically by the numbers.
In fact, when they did their ultimate review, they concluded, and I quote, There is a scant, if any, evidence that asymptomatic individuals play an important role in influenza transmission.
Indeed, they go on to talk about the past problems with past studies that overestimate this and exaggerate this repeatedly.
They said we have found limited evidence to suggest the importance of asymptomatic transmission.
The role of asymptomatic influenza-infected individuals in disease transmission has been overestimated in recent articles dealing with pandemic planning.
So there's a history of making the precise error that these models are making right now.
And yet we are shutting down our economy and suspending civil liberties to achieve it.
Indeed, today a person who was paroled in exchange for the risk, to reduce his risk of getting the virus, went into somebody's home and tried to assault them.
There's going to be more crime stories like this coming up, because unlike what the mayor of Houston says, the idea that crime is just going to take a break when inmates are getting released, when people can't purchase guns, when people are stuck in their homes, is an improbable long-term outcome given what we know about human psychology and human history.
But tonight, we're focused on the economy and the consequences that may be coming.
There is an assumption out there that the economy can just bounce back.
That it's like an engine that you just turn off in the car and you can just go back out, put the key in, and boom, it'll be all the way back to normal.
But as we pointed out earlier, the history of the economy is that that's not what happens.
When in fact we have a major contraction or economic collapse of the kind and the calamity that people are talking about occurring if we don't change and reverse course quickly.
Those economies tend not to bounce back for a decade or more.
Let's just go through what some of those headlines are and have been.
Just today, Fitch, which just about two weeks ago, actually ten days ago, was predicting that, yeah, growth would still be here, it would slow down, but we wouldn't have a major recession.
Fitch sees, quote, deep global recession just ten days after predicting slow economic growth.
The credit rating agency said it now expects world economic activity to decline by as much as 2% this year.
All around the world, they expect one of the biggest retractions, contractions and recessions that we have seen in recent history.
Now what's significant about Fitch is Fitch is involved in looking at and evaluating bonds and evaluating the risk of bonds becoming junk bonds.
We'll get into a discussion later with our guest tonight on how there's been an explosion of the corporate debt obligations.
And how the control of the interest rates of those obligations is critical.
How many of those corporate debt bonds are tied to the salvaging the pension funds who are deeply underfunded.
How if in fact those corporate bonds suddenly get downgraded from triple B to anything less to basically junk level, they could collapse the pension funds, they could collapse the corporate debt market, they could collapse the economy very quickly.
So that's why what Fitch says is significant and consequential, because Fitch is going to be part of that process.
Here's another headline.
Most second quarter GDP forecasts, this is from Fortune, now range from horrible, minus 8%, to catastrophic, minus 15%.
Indeed, they note that the Google search trend data shows that more people are searching about recession and economic pain now than they ever have in the history of Google searches.
Worse than 2008.
Worse than 2009.
Already.
Here's Goldman Sachs.
Remember they talked about 15%?
Fortune was saying 15% would be catastrophic.
Well, Goldman Sachs just cut their quarter 2 GDP forecast to minus 34%.
They're talking about the economy collapsing.
That's what a 34% contraction is in a single quarter.
They see unemployment rising to 15% by mid-year.
And remember, that's just the unemployment stat that doesn't measure a lot of other economic aspects of people who are otherwise unemployed that would have been counted in the old stats from the 20s.
The general estimate is in the 30s.
So the general estimate is if we have 15% now, that's the equivalent of 23-24% back in the 1930s with the way they calculated it then.
In other words, they are projecting by mid-year we are going to have unemployment worse than the peak of the Great Depression.
And that's even with mandatory family leave laws being passed to keep people on payroll for businesses and corporations.
That's even with small business administration loans that are supposed to keep people on payroll for the next two months.
It's still not sufficient to withstand the bloodletting that is occurring in our economy thanks to the panic from this pandemic and the policy response to the pandemic.
Here's another headline.
Seven financial heavyweights have unveiled forecasts for a sudden U.S.
recession.
And they go to in great detail how there's huge declines in manufacturing and consumer spending in the near future.
Explosive exponential unemployment rises.
A decline of anywhere from 24 to 40 percent in the economy.
Things we have never seen in the history of the United States.
Or at least the modern history.
Here's another headline from Business Insider.
The deepest recession on record.
Bank of America slashes forecast.
Now sees at least 20 million jobs lost.
15% plus unemployment.
A shrinking economy for three straight quarters.
That's what's coming by almost everybody's estimations unless we reverse course and the president reopens America quickly and quits letting this tyranny of technocrats and people in the white lab coats run our country and our economy and our civil society.
Here's another headline.
Manufacturing downturn deepens outside of China, which we'll come back to.
Global manufacturing orders fell at the steepest rate in 11 years.
Only China reported any month-on-month growth.
So who's going to come out profiting from this economic collapse?
Who's going to be replacing the United States in the supply chain?
Might it be China?
China says manufacturing activity expanded in March, defying expectations of a contraction.
Eurozone manufacturing, by contrast, that activity collapsed last month due to the breaks in the supply chain.
Corona crisis versus the Great Depression.
As one just sort of basic analogy, if we look at it, they have a chart here of the 10 worst daily losses in the history of Wall Street, and already two of the top 10 are from the last two weeks.
That gives you an idea of the scale of what we're facing.
If you look at the average return and you look at the issues and the volatility taking place, it's in many cases off the charts, at a level that was almost exactly equal to 1929.
We see similar sort of sell-offs and drawdowns that we haven't seen in a long time.
Indeed, and then you look at the history of GDP in the modern era, we've never had a contraction like this one.
That's what they're talking about.
Data and stats like we've never seen.
If we go back to the Great Depression, we'll see that once the unemployment rate went up, It took all the way to World War II before it got back.
It started at 3-4%, then it went up to as high as 25%.
And remember back then, they included more people in this than we do today.
So if you see 15% or 16%, that's the same as 25-26% back then.
We were using the same methodological standards.
And it took, and look, year after year it stayed up in the double digits, not dropping until we got into World War II.
It took World War II for us to recover last time.
Why do people think we're just going to have a V-level bounce back when we're putting the economy into a starvation mode?
And then of course we have the other wonderful benefits of the suspension of civil liberties and the deprivation of real community values.
Just look at this headline.
Germans snitch on neighbors flouting virus rules in echo of the Stasi past.
They're reporting in Germany, they're reporting, as you'll see they're doing also in the United States and elsewhere in the West, reporting on strangers, reporting on neighbors, reporting on friends.
Are you having a household party you're not supposed to?
Are you doing a little get-together?
Are you going to a funeral?
Are you wanting to take a little walk in the park?
Well now all of a sudden you're a threat, you're a danger, and your own neighbors, your own family, your own friends, Are the ones who are eager to rat you out in a style we haven't seen outside of Soviet-style societies or Nazi-era Germany.
Indeed, that's what this article compares it to.
They see the denunciation that was commonplace under the Communists in East Germany and Hitler's Nazis is now occurring daily in Germany.
They're even calling on people in parks, people on restaurants, any gathering they simply don't like.
But that's not limited to Germany.
Here we have, all across America, residents snitch on businesses' neighbors amid shutdowns.
People are getting misdemeanor citations for merely getting together.
Their snitches are emerging as enthusiastic allies as cities, states, and counties issue these crazy orders and now are doing municipal hotlines so you can call in and rat out your friend, your family, your neighbor, or get back at whomever you wanted to by saying that they're doing something wrong.
The latest example of this from Philadelphia and New Jersey.
Officers break up a funeral and charged 15 people with crimes simply because they attended a funeral.
But that's not it.
Let's look what's happening around the world and the global scale of what's taking place.
Locked in cages.
Beaten and shamed.
Coronavirus laws lead to abuses.
This includes in India, they are beating people, forcing them to do squats, push-ups, crawl, or even roll around on the ground.
In South Africa, they force you to roll around on the ground and then kick you, use water cannons, firing rubber bullets, storming apartment buildings.
In the Philippines, they're placing young people in dog cages.
And throughout the entire world, they're taking extreme actions across the board by enforcing social distancing through totalitarian means and mechanisms in ways we haven't seen since Bull Connor and the 1960s South.
And it goes further.
We have the world risk sleepwalking into surveillance with the various coronavirus control systems.
Governments are using facial recognition, using phone tracking, and China has introduced a traffic light system.
So you get a light.
You either get a red light, a yellow light, or a green light, based on whether you're being a good boy or girl.
And if you're not being a good boy or girl, then you can't even move out of your own apartment or home if they don't want you to.
The whole sort of panopticon of ancient lures now becoming a daily reality under the guise of monitoring and protecting our public health.
But this toll, of course, ultimately has a deeper toll on the economy itself.
And that economic toll will be on our public health.
As even PBS was reporting, you can expect a spike in mental health issues, mental health depression, and a range of other health issues.
Indeed, during the depression, over half the people who became seriously ill never even received any medical care in the country.
Even a third of people who were debilitated in their illness did not even receive any medical care.
Because when you don't have money, then you don't have hospitals and doctors.
So this is why the economy is essential to the functioning of our public health.
And as we reported yesterday, there are hospitals all across the country that are furloughing employees, laying off employees, shutting down part of their operations due to lack of funding.
This is the unintended but clear consequence of our panic policy responses to the pandemic.
A pandemic that has not shown the endless exponential growth or plague-like risks that the various people in the lab coats predicted.
Then you have an article in Forbes talking about the revolution after the crisis.
You have people like Governor Newsom admitting, and we'll go to this clip right here, talking about how this is a great opportunity.
Let's use the virus crisis that they've helped create and manufacture in a Simpsons-like way, as forecast by the Simpsons decades ago, in order to seize political power in ways we could never do so before.
So let's go to a video of Governor Newsom saying that's exactly what he plans to do.
I'm wondering if you see the potential, as some others in the party do, for a new progressive era, if you want to call it that, in national politics and policy, and whether there's the opportunity for additionally progressive steps such as the ones that I listed on the national and state level going forward, you know, because of this crisis.
We've had some very deep policy conversations in this space now for weeks.
Let us remind, despite the fact that California was running historic economic output in terms of our GDP growth, in terms of our net wealth.
From job creation to low unemployment to record reserves, surpluses, the wealth distribution, the income inequality was not something that was substantially improving.
And that's the case across the rest of the world.
As IT and globalization detonate at the same time, you're seeing that concentration in fewer and fewer hands, the middle class feeling squeezed, increasingly the trend lines We're suggesting what is self-evident become a headline, and that is we were going from a three-class society to a two-class society.
So something was fundamentally flawed in that global context manifested quite acutely here in the state of California, the richest and the poorest state with a number of the most impoverished metros in the country.
We've long been struggling to address those issues.
So I see this quite substantively through that lens, that equity lens, looking at those folks that never fully recovered.
You look at medium wages for folks coming out of 08, 09 in the Great Recession that haven't fully recovered even today that are struggling.
And so what is going to happen to those folks in this current crisis?
And what's the opportunity, to your question, for reimagining a more progressive era as it relates to capitalism?
And I'm a capitalist.
I'm a small business owner.
I'm a job creator.
Well, my customers are the job creators.
I'm beneficiary of their support.
And that helps build that demand that allows me to hire more people.
And so as a former business owner, now governor, I have had that experience and I have that appreciation of the importance of consumer confidence, consumer spending in a vibrant middle class.
And And so, yes, forgive me for being long-winded, but absolutely we see this as an opportunity to reshape the way we do business and how we govern.
And that shouldn't put shivers up the spines of one party or the other.
I think it's an opportunity anew for both parties to come together and meet this moment and really start to think more systemically, not situationally.
Not just about getting out of this moment, but more sustainably and systemically to consider where we can go together, this historic moment, if we meet it at a national level and a state and sub-national level.
So, answer is yes.
Your spine, because what he is talking about is a seizure of power in an unprecedented and unparalleled manner, using this virus crisis as the guise, as the fig leaf to achieve it and attain it.
Look at this article talking about the revolution after the crisis from Forbes.
This isn't like it was Jacobin or someplace.
And it says a massive economic contraction provides an opportunity for a total reset of the global economy.
There's a liquidity crisis and a solvency crisis at a pace we have not seen before, which provides a great opportunity for what?
A new global system.
Universal basic income.
A highly automated production infrastructure.
Let's replace all these human beings with robots while we have the chance.
Maybe we'll see something like what we saw some years ago and a return to when the United Nations talked about proposing a new global currency.
Maybe that talk will be a year or so right around the corner.
Look at the additional headlines.
Unemployment could reach 30% within months and economic output could shrink by 50% according to leading economists.
Five economists who say this recession will be the next Great Depression.
That's again a major publication.
View, get ready!
A bigger disruption is coming about how this will be used as a means and a technique to have massive shifts of wealth all around the world under the fig leaf of trying to control a pandemic.
The second Great Depression is coming, and is likely within the next two years, according to a leading UK publication.
Analysts anticipate the worst financial crisis since 1929, according to a CNBC article, even.
We could be nearing the second Great Depression, according to Forbes.
The Trump advisor warns that another Great Depression is coming about due to the response to this pandemic, and the panic response to the pandemic.
New York's restaurant industry lost $2 billion and 250,000 jobs.
Another leading publication.
This looks like a depression, not a recession.
That's the world in which we reside.
And if we don't reverse course quickly, and the only man who can help us and salvage it and save it is President Trump.
When we come back after the break, we're going to talk with a leading economic analyst who has been forecasting and foreshadowing this for a while.
So come back, and we'll have further discussion.
And in the later next hour, we'll have your calls.
as the economy teeters on disaster.
Welcome back to American Countdown.
Tonight I'm privileged to have a great guest.
As a lawyer, I deal with people that deal with millions and billions of dollars of assets and transactions, and part of my obligation is to be able to try to forecast what's going to happen politically or economically in order to best protect them legally.
One of the people I've enjoyed the most on YouTube is George Gammon.
You can find him, his last name is spelled G-A-M-M-O-N, for those people listening by radio.
You can find him at Twitter, at George Gammon.
But I highly recommend the sort of master class presentations he puts on on a daily and weekly basis on YouTube.
What is really important is he makes things that are otherwise difficult to understand, that are not within the universal language of the ordinary and everyday person, accessible and gives information that in turn is actionable.
It's that combination that is a rare skill set in today's economic world, especially if you're watching places like CNBC and CNN and the rest.
So George, glad to have you on tonight.
Hey, thanks for having me.
It's a pleasure to be here.
So George, I think a lot of people don't fully appreciate, for a range of reasons, in part I think there's a degree of economic illiteracy within the country that the media has helped propagate and push to sort of protect the privileged classes and the central banks from meaningful scrutiny.
But also, I think there's people who, for their own motivation or incentive, either self-interest, they don't want to see something bad really about to happen, or people who are Trump supporters, for example, who want to believe that this will not actually crash down on his head.
Could you explain in sort of a summary fashion, before we go into further detail, why the probability of just a magical bounce back in the economy is not a likely short-term outcome?
Right.
I get that a lot on Twitter and social media and the comments of my YouTube videos.
And what I start off with is asking them, OK, if we're going to go back to normal, normal means an economy that can't handle interest rates over two percent.
Normal means an economy that needs the Fed's balance sheet at four point five trillion and growing.
So personally, I don't consider that normal and I don't consider it healthy.
So my point is, if we go back to something like that, it's going to be very difficult because of the asset bubbles that we've built and the addiction that our entire economy has on artificially low interest rates and money printing.
Exactly.
I think the analogy or the sort of comparison to drug addiction is a useful one.
So it's like people that have reached a certain tolerance level, that as their tolerance level gets higher and higher, the drug of just sort of pumping cash into the system becomes less and less and less effective.
And that we see something like what's happened in Japan, I mean, I think a lot like most ordinary Americans still have no idea that Japan experienced a smaller scale version of it and it didn't happen around the globe.
So it didn't have the catastrophe, the sort of collapse that could have happened otherwise.
But Japan is basically not recovered for really almost 30 years now.
And I think a lot of that context is a lack of understanding of what the Fed really does and is up to.
And people were distracted by the stimulus bill, or what was labeled the stimulus bill, if you're going to call it that, while in fact a lot more money is being committed to by the Fed in terms of what they're doing and what they are up to.
Could you explain some of what the debt explosion is and how unusual and unprecedented the degree of debt is across multiple levels within the economic structure today?
Oh, geez.
Well, before we had the coronavirus, the pin, and that's not our big problem here.
The big problem is the underlying fundamentals of the economy were very, very poor.
But as far as debt, we have sovereign debt all-time high, corporate debt all-time high, consumer debt all-time high, state debt all-time high.
So that goes back to what I was saying earlier on how the economy just cannot handle interest rates above, call it, 2%.
But I think if you look at Japan to your earlier point and a lot of people have seen that deflation the two or three decades of just stagnant growth.
And they've looked at their balance sheet and said, well, my goodness, they're 220% of GDP.
And we printed up $4.5 trillion, let's call it, in base money since 2008.
And it didn't create a lot of inflation here.
It wasn't hyperinflation like all you Austrian economists were so worried about.
But what they're really not understanding is how money is actually created.
So you have base money that the Fed controls, and that's when we say they're printing money, quote-unquote.
They're just creating bank reserves.
And then it's up to the primary dealer banks to create an additional deposit by buying a financial asset or lending that money into existence using those bank reserves as kind of a backup.
I won't go deep into the weeds.
So what happened is the primary dealers were able to lever up and buy financial assets, which took all the inflation that the Fed created, meaning the expansion of the money supply, and drive it into assets like stocks.
But this time, With the federal government now getting in the mix with this $2 trillion stimulus package, which I think is just the beginning.
I think this is the tip of the iceberg.
I think they're going to go to a $4 trillion, $6 trillion, who knows where it's going to end.
I'm calling it now Stimulus Infinity along with QE Infinity.
But my point is it's taking the new money supply that's being created and kind of taking it from the Fed's balance sheet and moving it into the real economy in the form of additional deposits.
So why is that a big deal?
Because now you have more money in the real economy chasing the goods and services that we all buy on a daily basis.
Whether it's groceries, whether it's car insurance, health insurance, your rent, where the way they did QE in Japan, A, was a lot different.
They didn't really get it into the private sector.
And we have to remember that the Japanese have almost a 30% savings rate.
So they're able to absorb all of those, not treasuries, but all the Japanese debt with the public themselves.
They've got the savings to buy that debt.
We as Americans don't have any of the savings.
So we rely on foreigners to buy a lot of our debt.
So we're much more interest rate sensitive.
But my point is that we're a lot different than Japan.
And I do think that we're going to have two or three lost decades like Japan had.
But it's not going to be a deflationary.
Type of stagnation.
I think it's going to be more of an inflationary stagflation where although nominal GDP growth is actually going up, call it at 3 or 4%.
We have inflation at six, seven or eight percent.
So when you look at real GDP growth, which is just nominal when you subtract out inflation, we're either flat or we're negative GDP growth.
So you've got that in combination with most likely higher unemployment.
And I see that as a more likely outcome than a Japan type of situation.
But on net balance, it's pretty much the same.
You have low to no or negative GDP growth.
I think one of the fascinating things that you've been getting into is how we may have different dollar markets, if you will.
We may have inflation for CPI, but we may have deflation for housing prices.
We may have a strong dollar internationally.
And even today there was movement that was taking place that appeared to reflect that kind of parallel trend.
Could you give some basic explanation to people of why there are different markets, why they may see things happening that don't seem, were not supposed to happen together or parallel?
Yeah, they see the dollar going up or down as kind of a binary type thing, right?
So if my groceries are getting more expensive than or if we see inflation in the United States and that means the dollars quote-unquote going down, but it You've got to look at it as two completely separate markets.
So you've got a market for dollars outside of the United States and you have a market for dollars inside of the United States.
And what's the transfer mechanism to get those dollars outside the U.S.?
Usually that's through our imports.
So we run a trade deficit.
So, all these countries are nice enough to send us stuff.
We import the stuff and we export green pieces of paper.
Those are dollars.
Well, outside the United States, there's a tremendous amount of dollar-denominated debt.
And I won't go into all the reasons why, but it goes back to the dollar being inexpensive 2011-2012.
So, they loaded up on this debt, not just countries, but also corporations.
So if they have to pay back this debt in dollars that now have appreciated if they don't have any oil coming into their country for dollar revenue.
Or a lot of tourism or exports, they've got to print their own currency in order to buy those dollars to repay those debts.
So that means more supply of their currency and less supply of dollars, more demand.
That makes the dollar go up on the international FX market.
So if you look at the DXY as an example, you can see that going to 100 to 110.
But that's really what the dollar is.
Compared to the euro because that's the most prevalent currency in that basket or what's the dollar compared to the yen or the Colombian peso?
It doesn't really have a lot to do with the value of the dollar compared to the apples.
That you buy at the grocery store, right?
Because that now is dealing with the amount of dollars that are inside the United States.
So if we have this situation where they're doing MMT as an example or helicopter money.
Where they start this universal basic income where it maybe starts off for a month or two, but then it becomes, you know, like every other government program that's temporary, it becomes extremely permanent over time, right?
So then you have a lot more dollars in the system that are chasing potentially fewer goods and services because now we have all the supply chain disruptions because of what's going on with the coronavirus.
And then you have the transfer mechanism for getting those dollars outside of the United States.
That's interrupted as well because, remember, our imports are reducing.
That keeps more dollars within the United States.
So then you have that local inflation that you'd see in the CPI, or they'll probably try to change the way that the numbers are generated, just like they did in the 1990s, just like they've recently done.
So if you, not to go off on a tangent, but if you measured inflation the same way that we did in the 1970s, the last 10 years, the inflation rate, the CPI, would have been a lot higher.
So I think they'll most likely do that.
But going back to your original point, that's how you could see local inflation in the prices of the goods and services that you buy, while at the same time you're turning on CNBC and hearing that the dollar is getting a lot stronger.
Exactly.
And the other thing that was fascinating to me was that you could have stagflation, which was supposed to not happen in the first place, but did in the 70s, but that could be compounded by people's main principal assets also going down in value, in the sense that their homes might be going down in value.
And for those that have pension funds, That those pension funds could be in serious, serious trouble.
I think most ordinary people, until there was some discussion about it related to the fiscal debate, did not realize the scale or scope to which much of the stock market had been boosted by corporate buybacks.
But also to the degree they didn't realize those corporate buybacks are tied in in part, and the corporate debt explosion, to making the pension funds look a lot purtier than they are.
Could you talk about that?
Well, you just hit the nail on the head.
I mean, there's all these, they're interconnected.
It's a daisy chain.
And it starts with the pensions having to go further out the risk curve than they normally would because the Fed has kept interest rates artificially low.
So they have to come up with a 7% return in order to meet their liabilities.
So the only way that they can even come close to that with interest rates being at zero for so long is to not only go into the corporate bond market, which is a lot more risk than they typically take, but also to do so with leverage.
Most people don't realize that.
The pension funds just don't go in there.
They're levering up to go into the corporate bond market.
And then the corporations take that money, that inflow of capital, and they just buy their own shares back.
And I've seen charts that would suggest since 2010 almost 90% of the...
value of the stock market or the increase in the stock market has come specifically from corporate buybacks.
So that's something that is completely unsustainable.
And you get this, I call it a doom vortex, which is just this loop that's just, it feeds on itself, where if you have stock prices go down, then that makes the corporate balance sheet look a lot worse.
It feeds on itself where if you have stock prices go down, then that makes the corporate balance sheet look a lot worse.
And then that downgrades them potentially into into junk debt.
And then that downgrades them potentially into junk debt.
And then the pension funds can no longer hold them because they're obligated to just keep investment grade.
And then the pension funds can no longer hold them because they're obligated to just keep investment grade.
And then the pension funds have to liquidate.
And then the pension funds have to liquidate.
So you've got this type of setup where you could have no buyers in the corporate bond market while at the same time you have no buyers in the stock market.
They're all going away.
And that takes us back to the Fed printing up all this money.
And in my opinion, the Fed is going to try to take as much of the private sector balance sheet and move it onto their balance sheet.
Because if you've got half the stock market, let's say, or 60% of the bond market on the Fed's balance sheet, if it takes a 50% haircut, the Fed's going to pay 100 cents on the dollar.
So it's in their minds, and I'm saying this is correct, but in their minds, that's a solution for the problem.
Because the economy is built on asset prices or asset bubbles, debt and confidence, if they can keep asset prices high by bringing everything onto their balance sheet.
So they're the only seller and they're not going to sell.
That means that the market kind of artificially stays high.
I think that's going to be their game plan.
But of course, that goes back to what we were saying, where long term, the release valve has to be the U.S. dollar.
And what's extraordinary to me about a lot of this is, for example, I mean, I had heard of MMT, but I thought MMT was sort of a marginal left-wing original theory and whatnot.
I did not realize the degree to which it had become mainstreamed within certain finance sectors and the economic advisor sectors until this happened, because I started reaching out to friends of mine.
Some are venture capitalists, but some are economic advisors with access to the president.
And I was like, aren't you worried that, you know, we're sort of we're removing the fig leaf from all the problems.
And once all the people see all those problems, it's going to come cascading down.
He was like, oh, no, no, we have plenty of tools for that.
I was like, well, what do you what do you mean you have plenty of tools for that?
I didn't really work for Zimbabwe or Hungary in 1946 or Weimar, Germany or a lot of other places or Argentina in the 1990s.
I know of no place where this strategy has actually worked to deal with this kind of problem.
Can you describe to people who, you know, 95 percent of people, I'm sure, have never even heard what this MMT is.
And aside from all the other alphabet like agencies, the Fed has been announcing over the last two weeks.
A lot of them are really predicated on the assumption that MMT can just solve our problems.
Could you address what MMT is and what some of the critics say are major deficiencies with it?
I'll tell you what I think is a deficiency with it right off the bat.
I think that we as a society and the politicians and the economists have suffered from recency bias.
And that just means that whatever's happened over the last 10 years is just going to continue to happen indefinitely into the future.
And that means if we can print up all this money again, take the Fed's balance sheet going for 4.5 trillion and doesn't create inflation, then no matter how much money we print on a moving forward basis, it will not create inflation.
So the problem with that, and I think what your friends are telling you, is that the Fed has a lot of quote unquote tools to solve that problem.
Well, Yeah, their tools are to raise interest rates like Paul Volcker did in the early 1980s.
The problem with that quote-unquote solution is the debt to GDP in the early 80s was only about 30%.
Well, now it's 110 percent and we've got trillion dollar deficits.
That's without the stimulus package.
So my point is that you've got so much more debt in the system and we've been we've the economy is now addicted to almost zero percent interest rates to take interest rates above on Fed funds.
Even two or three percent would completely crush the economy to the extent that if you normalized interest rates and you're going up to five or six percent, that would most likely have the exact same impact of the coronavirus.
It would be almost one in the same.
So those two, in fact, Volcker said that himself before he passed away.
He was asked if now we could do the same thing he did in the early 1980s.
And he said, no way.
Absolutely no chance.
You could not do it.
And so that's first and foremost.
Second, what is MMT?
That's really the belief system that the government or the Fed can print as much money as they want, and it just really won't matter.
And the only thing that we really need to be concerned with is the rate of inflation.
And I think initially you can tell why that's kind of a bad idea, because once the inflation genie gets out of the bottle, then it's almost impossible to get it back in.
And their solution for that, they see the Treasury as spending money into existence.
And it gets quite esoteric here, so I'll just try to give you the broad overview.
So the Treasury spends money into existence, and when they tax money, they destroy – the money supply.
So when they spend it, it's increasing the money supply.
When they tax it, it's destroying the money supply.
So according to them, their policy solution for inflation that was getting out of hand would be just to increase taxes.
Well, the problem with that is that if we go into a stagflationary environment where you've got this negative real GDP growth, the economy is really struggling and you've got high uninflation, the last thing that you want to do is jack taxes up to 60% the last thing that you want to do is jack And when I'm talking about increasing taxes, I want to be clear.
It's not just increasing taxes on the quote-unquote rich or the 1% or increasing capital gains tax.
It's because that wouldn't pull enough money out of the system.
So you would have to increase the taxes on the poor and middle class because they're the majority of the tax base.
Particularly because they have to get the money back out of the economy to solve their problem of inflation, and that means they need to get it from the consumers that are otherwise spending it, in order to be able to counteract the problem that MMT inherits.
And what's fascinating to me is, even MMT doesn't say, in the case of a supply shock, like we have currently, that somehow you're going to be able to manage this issue.
So I've been unsettled by the lack of public discussion and debate About what exactly the Fed is up to.
What exactly the economic solutions are.
And I get that Trump sort of thinks that mindset over matter.
And that he can just convince people to have confidence.
And magically we'll all back back.
And if he manages to pull that circus trick.
God bless him.
I hope he does it.
But realistically I think he's underestimating the economic pain.
That is coming down the pipeline.
In part because I think he didn't fully get why the stock market was going that way.
And then you have things like the Fed.
Maybe they're going to bail out.
They're already sort of bailing out foreign banks.
In terms of what they're doing over the last several days.
Now Trump may have some sympathy with Deutsche Bank.
Because they were a nice lender to him over the past decade or so.
And some other lenders walked away from the risk that was Trump in some context.
But you have those issues that are sort of pending.
and And so it seems like the scope and scale of it, you have a general populace that doesn't really fully get what's really happening, but they're the ones that are going to suffer the consequences of what our public policy decision makers are doing now.
Can you describe a little bit about, like, the Fed seems to think they can paper over a lot of problems, at least in the near short term.
How many, I think, is there now six or seven different little acronym agencies that they've announced over the past ten days?
Yeah, if not more.
It's just every single day there's another one.
The last one that I know of was the FEMA program.
You referenced that earlier where the Fed basically set up a repo market outside of the United States.
But if you think that one through, and I'm not sure if your viewers know how that one works, but basically They're all of these countries, not all of them, but a lot of the countries outside the United States and the corporations have a lot of treasuries on their balance sheet.
So we talked about the liability side of their balance sheet earlier holding dollar denominated debt.
But the good thing for them is a lot of them have a lot of dollar denominated assets in the form of these treasuries.
Well, the Fed Regardless of what they say, they set up this repo market.
So they go to XYZ country and they say, well, first of all, wait a minute.
You've got to sell your treasuries right now because you need the liquidity.
You need the dollars.
But we don't want you to do that because if you sell your treasuries onto the open market, that's going to create more supply.
So the interest rates on the treasuries are going to go up.
Well, the Fed knows that they can't have interest rates go up in the treasuries because that has a knock-on effect in interest rates in the United States, and that crushes the economy.
It brings down the house of cards, like we were saying earlier.
So the Fed sets up a repo market, which basically says, we'll take your treasuries, we'll put them onto our balance sheet, and then we'll just give you the dollars that you need to go ahead and pay off your debts.
Now, of course, the Fed is saying this is temporary.
It's only going to be up six months.
And these are just short-term loans or however they want to categorize repurchase agreements because they say that they're technically buying them, but that gets into some muddy water.
But my point is they're giving these entities outside the United States dollars at basically 0% interest.
The Fed's taking the treasuries.
So again, they don't have to be sold into the market and to keep interest rates artificially low.
But if you think that one through, they're pegging the yield curve just like they did back in World War II.
If they peg the yield curve by printing more money and expanding their balance sheet, that the market sees that as potential future inflation.
So no one in their right mind wants to hold a 10-year treasury or a 30-year treasury because you're holding dollars.
You don't want to hold on to that for 10 years if you're only getting 2% interest when inflation will most likely be 5% because the Fed's taking their balance sheet to $30 trillion.
So, you're going to try to sell that.
Well, you've got these cross-currents happening at the same time, where the Fed is trying to create more demand to soak up those Treasuries, but the market is trying to sell those Treasuries off because of the inflation expectations, which creates another doom vortex, where the more the market tries to sell off the Treasuries, the more money the Fed has to print, and it just goes in a circle.
Exactly.
We'll be right back after the break with George.
Welcome back to American Countdown.
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George, a couple of questions, additional questions I had before we let you go.
Thanks for sharing your time and i recommend everybody go to his youtube page it is literally a master class you want to learn about leverage you want to learn about shock if you want to learn about the fed you want to learn about the housing market if you want to learn about he'll have various guests on there they'll have great ideas i'll just throw one little clue out there you know oil tankers might be a good idea right now so there's all kinds of things that are useful and interesting and insightful on a daily
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One thing that fascinated me, George, was the speed with which the Fed committed to what you were calling Buzz Lightyear, infinity and beyond versions of quantitative easing, where they were basically saying, we'll just buy everything now.
We won't even do the fig leaf, but we'll do it.
And they're not taking it as collateral through their primary dealers.
None of that anymore.
It's just, we'll buy bonds, we'll buy stocks.
And ultimately, it was like the Fed could get into a position where they actually own most Americans' mortgages, if they want to.
They could get into a position where they own most of America's corporations.
And this could happen without a public discussion ever occurring in this country.
Can you explain how that could happen?
Sure.
It goes back to what we were saying on how I think the Fed is going to try to take the private sector balance sheet.
That's what I mean by that.
So let me unpack that a little bit so it's easier to understand.
So you've got equity and debt in the private sector.
Let's call it equity of the S&P 500, the companies that are there.
And then you have their bonds in the bond market.
Well, if the Fed buys the majority of the S&P, then they're going to own a big equity stake in a lot of our major, major corporations.
Also, if they own the debt, then they also have a big controlling stake.
And then when you combine that with them being able to buy a lot of the mortgages through mortgage-backed securities, They could.
I mean, they could have the title to or the claim to most houses in the United States, most companies and most of the debt, including the debt of the United States government.
Wow.
And what do you think could happen in terms of things like people are looking at gold, people looking at Bitcoin?
To what degree?
A lot of people that are sort of in this intellectual space have traditionally liked those as a sort of counter against these kind of central bank wayward activities.
But there's some doubt as to what's exactly going to happen, at least in the near short term.
What's your instinctual take on that?
Well, those are two completely separate questions because the asset classes themselves are so different.
When I look at my own portfolio, or what I suggest for people that watch my YouTube videos, is you've got to compartmentalize it.
So I like to allocate 10% to insurance.
For me, that's just physical gold.
Then I also like to allocate 10% to speculation.
I define that as just buying something because I think the value is going to go up in the future, hopefully some asymmetry.
And Bitcoin would definitely fall into that category.
As far as The government, I mean, you've got counterparty risk there in the sense that the government could confiscate your gold.
They've done it in the past.
And the government could definitely make Bitcoin or any cryptocurrency illegal to use.
And I think that one of the main factors or components that's going to come out of this downturn that we're going into, or this crisis, is the government is not going to let it go to waste.
And I think they're going to come up with what they've already come up with a digital U.S.
currency.
That's that seed has been planted.
But I think they're most likely going to use this crisis as an opportunity to implement a government backed digital currency and ban cash.
So a lot of people just think, well, it's not a big deal because most of the dollars that I have are electronic.
They're just in my bank account or on my debit card.
But what you don't understand is A digital U.S.
or government-backed currency would put, call it a serial number, on every single dollar in the system.
So they would know where you're spending every single dime and they could control it.
They could control the demand side.
And if you wanted to take that money outside of the United States, they could just simply put the kibosh on it very quickly.
But even for people inside the United States, let's say they wanted to promote some sort of business, call it green energy, and I'm not here to debate whether that's good or bad, but they could force you to use half your income on This this asset class, if the government's pushing it.
Another thing, if you want to talk about personal liberties and restrictions, let's say you're someone that goes out and you are an average person, but you make a mistake and get a DUI.
It's your first one.
You didn't hurt anybody.
You go and pay the fines, whatever.
Well, the government could come in and say, all right, well, from now on for the next five years, we're not allowing you to buy alcohol.
And if you think it through, they could control that because every single merchant would have to be set up under the same system.
It would have a serial number.
So the system that the merchant is set up with would be able to monitor that serial number and control what you buy and what you sell.
Think that one through.
If they wanted to keep interest rates low, they could just prevent you from selling your U.S.
Treasuries.
And then that has the same type of effect.
I mean, you could go down the rabbit hole for the next four hours on how that's a really, really bad idea if you're someone who values personal liberty.
But I think that's most likely coming down the pipeline.
And with whatever I'm saying, I want to be clear.
I just look at things as what's the most probable outcome.
There are no certainties at all.
We could see something where we go to a gold back dollar.
we go into gold standard again, or we go to a dollar, who knows, it could be backed by Bitcoin.
We could use Bitcoin as the world reserve currency.
From a philosophical standpoint, I would absolutely love that.
But I'm just saying that anything is possible It's just, what are the probabilities?
Oh, exactly.
I'm a big sports veteran.
As a lawyer, I like to give people advice.
Everything's probabilities.
They're not always thrilled with that.
They would love a certain outcome.
But that things are just weighing probabilities.
Great sports gamblers, it's the same thing.
You're just trying to beat the edge by a little bit.
Be 56% right rather than 52% right.
And that's what makes a great gambler in the modern world.
I think another thing about, I mean, I think especially when you combine politics and economics, something like a digital currency fits within what the state would want because it empowers them to an extraordinary degree.
And they could have every justification for it.
And in fact, our current currency problems that are about to be accelerated over the next year or two would particularly be the pretext.
for, hey, here's our solution.
This can help solve it.
I've even heard discussion that maybe there would be a global digital currency controlled by states in different ways.
What do you think about that idea?
Is there a possibility of that occurring and how much of that is a risk versus a national digital currency?
I definitely think it's a possibility because to your point, it gives governments so much control and not only from a taxation standpoint, but it also gives them control over interest rates or the central bank, let's call it.
Right now, it would be very difficult for the Fed to take interest rates to like a negative five.
Because people just withdraw their cash.
You might be able to go down 50 basis points like they have in some places in Europe.
But at a certain point, the general public draws the line and they take their money elsewhere.
But with a digital currency, you could not take your purchasing power out of the banking system.
Right.
So that would not be a constraint.
That's another reason why I think you'll most likely see this at some point in time, because the central banks are full of Keynesians.
And in their mind, the way their models work is the way you solve the problem of the business cycle.
It's just by lowering interest rates.
That's how you smooth out a recession.
You've got to create more demand.
Well, the way their models work, and I've never seen them, but I would assume based on their actions, that if you have interest rates at zero, well, if the solution for a recession is to take interest rates from four percent, let's say, down to zero, well, then the solution, if you're already at zero, has got to be to take them to negative four.
Problem solved.
Yeah, it's just like a calculator or board game to them.
They don't realize that human beings, it might not work in practice.
So since you've got a global consensus on how to handle a recession or a depression, I think that's going to really drive them to incorporate that even faster.
And I think it's always for your security.
That's how they always sell it to the general public.
So whether they're going to say, you've got to give us all your cash and we've got to ban it because the coronavirus is spreading so fast and you don't want to touch that dirty cash.
Or they're going to say, we need to do MMT.
And in order to get you your MMT payments or your universal basic income, it's very cumbersome to send it in the mail.
So why don't you just go ahead and download the United States government app and then we can just Electronically wire the money to you every single month just instantly.
And of course most people are going to go right along with that.
They're going to think that's the best thing since sliced bread.
But of course now they're tracking you.
Now they're not only controlling but monitoring what you're spending money on and then what you're not spending money on.
So to take that to the next level where you're talking about a global digital currency.
I think that you could have something like the SDR, which Jim Rickards has talked about quite a bit, and you could have local currencies, but they're all transferable into that global digital currency, and that just takes it to a whole new level of Big Brother.
Oh, exactly.
I mean, what's extraordinary is, to your point, just today they were saying that it's going to take so long to send those checks out that anybody that doesn't have a bank account they can transfer.
It may not even be until September that you get it.
You have people like Congresswoman Tlaib saying, you know, it'd be great if we had some sort of direct credit system instead.
And the initial one was talking about a credit card or debit card of some sort.
But you're right, what would make much more sense is just to add an app to your smartphone that's already tracking you to make sure you're not sharing the virus or violating social distancing rules as is currently being applied.
So it's a natural extension to that.
What would you say to people in terms of how they should prepare for what's coming?
In other words, what are some of the steps they can take, aside from self-education, to prepare for what's coming very soon and what's coming over time?
I think the easiest thing the average Joe can do is just make sure that if they do have a mortgage, it's a 30 year fixed rate mortgage.
If we do see inflation, stagflation, then you're going to You're going to be much better off if you've got a fixed rate mortgage.
So why is that?
Because let's say you can fix a rate right now at 4%, but inflation goes up to 6 or 7%.
Well, the delta between your interest rate and the rate of inflation is a transfer of wealth from the lender to the borrower.
Which would be you because you're paying back that mortgage in cheaper dollars, devalued dollars.
So that's I think the easiest thing people can do.
The next thing would be to make sure that you've got some physical precious metals.
And I'm not saying 100% of your portfolio, nothing like that.
For me personally, I like to have 10%.
And that's just a hedge against what's going on.
Maybe for you it's Bitcoin.
Something that's fixed.
It's in limited quantity.
I think real assets, hard assets, are going to be the only place to hide in the future.
And also the way I'm thinking through my personal investment strategy is to focus on the basics.
I think we've gone so long with having All these companies that don't make money, that just continually lose billions and billions of dollars.
I think of an Uber, that everyone loves Uber, but the fact of the matter is the only way they can provide that service is if they just literally just burn, incinerate money.
I remember a quarter last year where they literally lost $4.5 billion in one quarter.
Well, that really couldn't exist unless there was all this super cheap money.
So my point is what I'm focusing on is food, shelter, and energy.
That's really the three things, because I think if you just take it right back to basics, that regardless of how bad this recession is, or if we go into a depression, I think people are going to be less extravagant.
And as long as you're in those type of hard assets, you might not make money, but I think you'll lose a lot less than if you had your money in like a Shares of Tesla or something like that.
Right.
Exactly.
Well, thanks a lot, George.
Thanks for joining us.
Everybody can go and follow him on YouTube.
See his videos.
He has tons of videos up.
It's a great way to get self-educated quickly.
You can follow him on Twitter at George Gammon.
Thanks a lot for being with us, George, and appreciate this, especially on short notice.
Thank you for having me.
Absolutely.
So as we get back to the economy and what's happening in the economy today, and people can call in at 877-789-2539, or if you're going to call internationally, one, you can call from the country code 512-646-1776.
If you're going to call internationally, one, you can call from the country code 512-646-1776.
That's 512-646-1776.
That's 512-646-1776.
But let's talk about just some of the stuff that George was talking about.
Here's a report from Counterpunch that goes into the dark secrets and the Fed's last Wall Street bailout are getting a devious makeover in today's bailout.
What they discovered is that the Federal Reserve during the last bailout, secretly and without the full awareness of Congress and the public, funneled $19.6 trillion in cumulative loans to bail out the trading houses on Wall Street.
Why?
Because they were helping banks that were in fact insolvent at the time.
That banks that were in some of these loans were collateralized.
How?
With junk bonds and stocks at a time when the markets were in a free fall.
They helped global foreign banks with dollar swaps with a final tally of all of the final bill for the bailout of 29 trillion dollars.
The GAO audit exposed how they spent a lot of that money, and you saw a report yesterday where governments are trying to remove the ability of transparency to even occur, to try to suspend the freedom of information laws, suspend the sunshine laws, so they can do this in secret without anybody having cognizant notice of it.
In addition, the second dark secret is that the economy, as George was talking about, is that there's hundreds of trillions of dollars in derivatives that interconnected the global banks as counterparties, and that problem is still present.
That problem hasn't gone away at all.
Problems, and you can even look up a George Gammon YouTube article going into the video that describes the issues with Deutsche Bank as just one illustration of the problems they're facing as one of the major counterparties that may have actually triggered a repo market issue back in the fall.
And what's happening?
Well, the Fed is relaxing rules about leveraging these precise issues.
They're creating special purpose vehicles.
That's something that Enron did that got Enron into a lot of trouble.
They're creating things like the Commercial Paper Funding Facility, the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, the Term Asset Backed Securities Loan Facility.
These alphabet set kind of acronyms that are special purpose vehicles as well, couldn't leverage including purchase of toxic waste, confidentiality agreements that are going on with private parties that are the vendors to these deals, leverage up to four trillion dollars, doing emergency lending powers and buyers of last resort that can result to in what As you heard George talk about, the Fed owning effectively your home or most of corporate America.
Here's another article.
Big banks get Fed blessing to extend leverage.
That's from yesterday.
The Federal Reserve will let Wall Street banks take on more leverage.
The so-called leverage ratio.
And what's the leverage ratio?
From the article.
It's one of the most fundamental limits implemented in response to the last meltdown.
In other words, it's something that was supposed to prevent another meltdown from occurring.
And what are they doing?
They're actually stepping away from it.
And why?
Because of what George was talking about.
There's been a significant inflows of customer deposits at banks.
Why?
That's what the beginning sign of a potential either a crisis in confidence where people don't spend or if they do spend an inflationary effect on the ordinary everyday person's goods and services.
Here's some more articles on the same subject from the Wall Street Journal.
Fed eases capital requirements for big banks to boost the flow of credit and changing and allowing more leverage ratio than they were supposed to do that was supposed to stop after the last crisis.
And here's more from the Fed.
Fed's new repo measures followed a $100 billion Treasury exodus.
You heard George talking about how they set up one just to deal with the foreign banks and foreign issues.
The other central banks swapped treasuries for dollars, selling them to source dollars.
This was becoming such a problem that the Fed had to step in and help these foreign banks out.
Here's another article from Politico.
Banks warn of chaotic launch of small business lending program.
Some fear a disaster that could dwarf the failed kickoff of the Obamacare enrollment website.
This is the problem with trusting government as the means of economic restoration and activity rather than simply distributing money to the public.
They have this big agency that's going to have a bunch of bureaucrats involved that are going to delay the ability for those funds to get to whom they need to get to.
Here's another one.
Fed's liquidity programs leaves $9 trillion of orphan markets in the cold, mentioning, in fact, that parts of the credit of the economy are already seizing up, corporate bonds becoming junk debt.
And as George talked about, that's going to trigger a cascading set of events or can trigger such a cascading set of events.
Involved the pension funds, involving stock markets, involving the corporate buybacks, involving corporations' ability to function, involving the downgrading of their bonds and their debt by Fitch and other rating agencies that could cascade into the real economy.
Okay.
The Fed is also going to bail out local governments now.
The Fed is likely to support municipal debt, says former New York Fed president.
This is according to MarketWatch, owned by the same group of people that own Wall Street Journal.
The Fed said they're likely to move forward with a facility he anticipates they will to deal with the corporate investment grade debt and municipal bond market debt on the same terms so that local governments can also just borrow as much as needed to spend as much as they want the local politicians interest in favorite policies and get bailed out by the Fed even though no one else would actually buy that debt.
Here's another one.
The Fed is powerless to stop the market's riskiest debt from getting downgraded and defaulted.
This is according to Goldman.
This is the problem of corporate debt getting lowered, and when it gets downgraded and it becomes effectively what they call junk bonds, then that triggers problems with pension funds who can no longer have that debt, which in turn triggers problems for corporations to be able to buy back stock, which they're limited from doing out of the federal stimulus package that was recently passed in addition to that.
And it triggers a cascading set of events, where it leads to further debt going down, which leads to further inability to purchase stocks, which leads to pensions having more problems, because a lot of this was leveraged in the first place, and pensions that were already underfunded being underfunded by bigger and bigger and bigger amounts, such that the ordinary person, the retiree who depends on that pension, suddenly maybe has 20, 25 cents on the dollar to what he's supposed to have.
And as 401K and IRA are going down at the same time, and as Social Security is unreliable due to similar issues with the debt markets and the U.S.
government at the same time, see what kind of cascading problems and risks that are faced unless the President turns the economy back on right now to try to at least delay the onset of some of these issues.
That's what's going on in the country today.
As the headlines were today, no words for this.
10 million workers filed jobless claims in just two weeks.
Unemployment claims spiked to new record.
Job center closed until April 30th.
With much of the country ordered to stay at home, countless businesses have shut down and tens of millions are out of work.
And that doesn't even deal with all the people who are separately, effectively out of work, but that's simply been forestalled by the small business package or the mandatory medical leave package.
So that's what we face today.
Now there are ways you can take by being prepared.
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And the reason for that is because who knows what happens two weeks from now or even two days from now.
We're seeing things happen in this country we have never witnessed before.
Such as you go into Vermont, you want to buy some seeds to grow your own food to have a stable supply, and now the Vermont government has told the Vermont stores they cannot sell those seeds.
So you can't even buy seeds at your local food store.
What next?
How long before they start rationing food?
They start saying, you can have this and you can have that.
How long before they experiment with price controls, which can be a form of rationing, like Nixon did during the stagflation or the beginning stages of it in the 1970s, which, as George was just talking about, is a real risk to occur in the United States within the next year or two years.
Stagflation returning with a vengeance to a degree the virus never posed a risk directly to our economy like that could.
So go to theinfowarsstore.com, get what you want, buy what you want, stock up now, buy it now, so that you have it and aren't at risk if for some reason they decide in two days or two weeks your local government won't allow those things to be shipped to your home.
So the Hope folks have been calling in.
It looks like they have.
So now we're going to shift to the jury stage of the case, if you will.
And we'll want to hear from you.
If you can sort of ask your question within a minute, that would be great.
Let's go to, I think it's Austin in Kansas.
Can you hear me?
Yes, sir.
Go ahead.
All right.
So I'm probably like you are where, I mean, there's just so much going on in my head.
I could ask you a ton of questions.
But mainly interested in the fact that unemployment went up and the stock market also went up today.
So could you talk about that and how does the stock market represent the real economy and that nature?
So what you have is you're going to see some wild divergences, wild variances.
And that's what George was talking about.
You're going to see a scenario where you're going to have, you could have inflation within the, for the ordinary everyday American, they may see their dollar have less and less and less value when they go to the grocery store or when they go to the Walmart or when they go to buy basic supplies or when they try to access basic services, whether it's a haircut or anything else.
If the the dollar may actually have even greater value if you happen to be a foreign government or foreign debtor where the dollar is actually a burden or obstacle to you.
You also might have situations for example like with gold where if you're a hedge fund or mutual fund where you suddenly need liquidity because you have limited access to credit due to solvency crisis that are taking place in different places around the world.
You have to get that liquidity and the one thing you have that can get it is gold.
So you sell off your golden mass and you can see gold prices go down at a time where logically normally you would think they would be going up.
You may see Bitcoin go through wild stages where people think, hey, Bitcoin is actually a safer currency within its limit structures compared to national currencies.
But in the current political environment, the real risk, as George was talking about, is the governments may just ban you from being able to use it.
Same thing with gold.
People worry that as they see government seizing power at a record level, that maybe they'll simply ban gold or force everybody to turn in their gold, like Franklin Delano Roosevelt did during the Great Depression, where he forced everybody to bring in their gold under threat of criminal punishment and prosecution.
So you're seeing a disconnection from the real economy and stock market, and even seeing disconnection with the dollar in different markets, seeing disconnection with the gold in different markets, seeing disconnection with Bitcoin in different markets, than what you would expect and anticipate.
And you're going to see more of that.
Because the the Fed and the other various state banks, central banks across the globe, are trying to take every mechanism possible to either arbitrarily or artificially mask the underlying deep economic problems that are there and that are present.
And so you can expect that.
And so the thing to watch now, there is still cues and clues.
When you see the Fed add a trillion and a half to their balance sheet, which is effectively what they're on pace to do, just in a two to three week time period, that's a huge red flag.
During all of 2008 and 2009, it took them two years to put four trillion on the balance sheet.
And now they're putting about half that up in a couple of weeks.
They've committed to even more.
They've gone from saying, hey, we'll put $50 billion in the overnight repo market to $100 billion to $150 billion.
Well, heck, maybe we'll put a trillion a night into it, as they committed to at one point.
That's the kind of crazy cash they're talking about.
Nobody really knows what that's going to do.
So it could have a temporary effect on the psychology of the market.
And if you go back to some of those charts in the 1920s and 1930s, you'll see there were times where the stock market would bounce way back up while unemployment was also going up.
But what you ultimately saw was the stock market crashing as it caught up to the real economy.
So when we come back after the break, we'll take more of your calls.
Thank you for your call.
And talk about whether a global digital currency is coming.
Talk about whether the economic disaster can be avoided by President Trump and how he must act fast.
Welcome back to American Countdown.
As the clock goes tick tock on America's economic future and its freedoms. - Yeah.
If you don't recognize the scope and scale of what's happening, to give a sense of what they're doing to our civil society and our constitutional liberty and our economy, they have all the sense of the guy who decided to ride the bomb and Dr. Strangelove.
So let's go to that clip.
It's just a little reminder.
This is what is the mindset and mentality of what they're trying to do to our economy in these days with the people in the white lab coats.
Let's look at clip number four.
Target distance of seven miles.
Correct track indicator, minus 7.
Roger, 7 miles.
Check GPI, is it still in range?
Check.
GPI source, back to set.
Target distance, 6 miles.
Roger, 6 miles.
Pulse Ident Transponder, active.
All side down, that's Plunder Act.
Target distance, five miles.
5 miles.
Arming alignment factor, zero mode.
Arming alignment factor, zero mode.
Target distance, 4 miles.
Roger, 4 miles.
Auto CDC into manual teleplex link.
Auto CDC into manual telepex linked.
Target distance, three miles.
Roger, three miles.
Target in sight.
Where in hell is Major Kong?
Hey, what about Major what about Major Kong?
*Screaming* *Screaming* I think.
Welcome to the Fed's secret plan to save the economy.
That's basically it right there.
A nuclear bomb right to the core of the financial and economic system of America and the world.
But that's not all that we're facing and dealing with these days.
We deal with orders like the judge and chief judge in Florida issued an order saying that certain things were mission critical for the courts to do.
What was not included in that mission-critical list was anything about constitutional liberties, your right to religious expression, your right to political activity and circulation, your right to public rallies, your right to purchase or own or keep a gun, your rights to your privacy against that getting waived without your notice in the case of medical privacy.
As appears to be occurring with people who are diagnosed with the coronavirus, that being tracked and put on their phone for politicians to know all about them?
Imagine that.
Imagine if the government could know everything about your medical privacy overnight.
There was a reason why I brought a civil rights suit during the Obama administration to deal with precisely those issues when the IRS seized 60 million medical records of more than 10 million Americans.
What do people think is going to happen as there's increasing talk about digitizing medical records?
And what is this obsession, as is identified in the court's order, that what the court was concerned about was none of any of those constitutional liberties, but was making sure that there could be things like forced vaccinations and enforcement of any order of anybody who violated the social distancing standards.
But included in that was any mandatory forcible seizure of your bodily fluids.
We appear to live in a world that truly is a Dr. Strangelove world.
As this clip reminds us, clip number two, I'm sorry, clip number three of Dr. Strangelove and the importance of precious bodily fluids.
Mandrake, I suppose it never occurred to you that while we're chatting here so enjoyably, a decision is being made by the president And the Joint Chiefs in the war room with the Pentagon.
And when they realize there is no possibility of recalling the wing, there will be only one course of action open.
Total commitment.
Mandrake, do you recall what Clemenceau once said about war?
No, I don't think I do, sir.
I don't know.
He said war was too important to be left to the generals.
When he said that, 50 years ago, he might have been right.
But today, war is too important to be left to politicians.
They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought.
I can no longer sit back and allow communist infiltration, communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
It's incredibly obvious, isn't it?
It's here.
A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, certainly without any choice.
That's the way your hardcore Kami works.
Jack, Jack, listen, tell me, tell me, Jack, when did you first become, well, develop this theory?
Well, I, uh, I first became aware of it, Mandrake.
During the physical act of love.
Yes, a profound sense of fatigue.
Feeling of emptiness followed.
Luckily, I was able to interpret these feelings correctly.
Loss of essence.
I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake.
Women sense my power.
And they seek the life essence.
I do not avoid women, Andre.
Yeah.
But I... I do deny them my essence.
Yes, yes.
Yes, indeed.
Life essence.
But these days, that's what the politicians are obsessed with, checking bodily fluids while they bomb the economy back into the last century.
But to give an example of the state of affairs today, as we heard from a caller a couple of days ago, increasingly people are requiring papers, letters of transit to merely get around.
It reminds us of the irony of this, as you may recall from the film Hunt for Red October, where what they were so proud of, the Russians that were trying to flee to the United States to protect the United States and to come to the United States against what Russia was doing at risk of nuclear war, as portrayed in that film with Sean Connery and others, was how you wouldn't have to have papers when you traveled in the United States.
Well, increasingly that may not be the case.
You may need letters of transit simply to go from town to town, city to city, state to state.
But let's remember what it used to be that was celebrated as a characteristic trait of the United States and look at clip number two.
And I will live in Montana.
And I will marry a round American woman and raise rabbits.
And she will cook them for me.
And I will have a pickup truck.
Or a... possibly even a recreational vehicle.
And drive from state to state.
Do I let you do that?
Yes.
No papers?
No papers.
State to state.
All right.
All right, commence your turn.
Well then, in winter I will live in Arizona.
Actually, I think I will need two wives.
Oh, at least.
Imagine that was a time in which things like letters of transit were supposed to be left to 1940s films about Nazi era Germany and France.
Reminds us, in fact, they built a whole film around it called Casablanca.
Let's go to clip number seven.
Look, Rick.
You know what this is?
Something that even you have never seen.
Letters of transit signed by General Vigo.
Cannot be rescinded.
Not even questioned.
One moment.
Tonight I'll be selling those for more money than even I have ever dreamed of.
And then, adio, Casablanca.
You know, Rick, I have many a friend in Casablanca, but somehow, just because you despise me, you are the only one I trust.
Will you keep these for me, please?
Will you keep these for me, please?
What a civil society we are devolving into if we allow this panic over the pandemic to turn us into something like out of a 1940s Nazi-era culture celebrated in American film.
Let's go to some of your additional calls.
I think there's a tie from Tennessee.
Sir.
Yes, sir.
Go ahead.
Hello.
How are you?
Mr. Barnes, thank you very much.
I appreciate you taking my call.
Just want to talk about the cash into the digital currency.
I'm a bartender.
Raised a family bartending, making my money in tips because people value my service.
I don't depend on my employer to pay me.
I depend on the service I give my people.
But the whole idea of the digital currency is to track every dollar you make.
But what they're really truly missing is no currency has any value unless the people that are willing to exchange it put a value to it.
So I could take a saltine cracker box and cut it into pieces of paper and if the people believe in who I am, they will give me value to that.
And that's what he's saying with the papers in Casablanca, great movie.
They're talking about the papers, he wants them to hold papers.
Those papers are worth more than gold at that point because they allow that point of transit, whether they're real papers or not.
And that's where we're at in this point.
The digital currency It's about tracking every transaction we do so we can be taxed.
If they can't get carbon tax due to the fact that we're carbon-based life forms, they want to tax every transaction.
So I couldn't sell an old car.
I can't have a yard sale.
My daughter can't babysit the neighbor's kid for a cash transaction.
It would all have to be on a digitally tracked currency of debt.
Not of wealth, but of debt.
That's my statement.
That was all I wanted to say.
Respect out to you.
Absolutely.
Thanks for calling in.
No question.
The way in which the different politicians and would-be petty tyrants have used this as a pretext to seize powers, the way Governor Newsom admitted on film that he was anticipating using this crisis over a virus as a pretext for a power grab,
The way everybody from town managers to mayors to governors to people all across the country and the world are using this as an opportunity to act out their sociopathological powered dreams and ideals is a disturbing reflection on where we're at.
Gives us reason to second guess and question the so-called government experts on their purported policies as a response to this pandemic.
And a lot of it being more panic than plague in terms of what they're forecasting and predicting.
When it's being used to do things like contemplate the possibility of going to the kind of currency that is intended to do nothing more and nothing else beyond controlling you as an individual and surveilling you and invading your privacy and monopolizing power in a way that any paper currency could not even achieve, despite all the problems that already exist with fiat currencies in the world.
So thanks for your call.
Very informative, very helpful, and anybody calling from Tennessee is always welcome.
Let's go to Lynn in Chicago.
Hi, can you hear me?
Yes, ma'am.
How are you?
Okay, good.
I have two questions and one hypothetical.
One is the debt clock.
They show us this cartoonish debt clock.
I want to know where the books are.
So I want to know what the relationship is with this cartoonish clock they keep giving us.
Two is the Fed.
The Federal Reserve, we have to pay taxes on our stocks, bonds, investments, whatever we have.
How much money has the Fed actually made on interest, profit, off of all the interest that we've paid to them?
And are they paying taxes on that?
Hypothetical.
You have a country.
That country has three people in it.
It has $10 circulating between those three people.
It cannot print its own money.
Suddenly, two years later, the population booms to 1,000.
Okay, they can't print their own money, so they have to go to the bank to get more money to put it in circulation.
So then, two years later, that population booms to a million people.
Well, a million people can't share $10, and they need money for goods and services and to create businesses, so they have to go to the bank.
So isn't this kind of going against nature?
Isn't this Just falling in the lines of nature.
If the population keeps growing, growing, growing, you need more money for circulation.
So if you have to keep going to this bank to bring the money in to circulate into this population, and you have to pay interest on it, of course this is going to balloon into what it is today, and it's never going to stop.
So it's going against the laws of nature.
I mean, this is just a perpetual problem that's never going to end.
So that's what I have to say.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, as to some of your questions, for example, with the Fed, we mostly don't know what the Fed's books are.
So we know the Fed is putting all kinds of assets on its books.
But that's why people like Senator Paul have consistently called for auditing the Fed.
Audit the Fed to find out all of the intricate details.
We often only find out days, weeks, months, years, decades later, if at all, what the Fed even did just in the recent financial crisis in 2008 and 2009.
The scope and scale and severity of it has often led to films by people like Oliver Stone sort of guessing and speculating what really took place behind those closed doors in those cloistered halls on Wall Street.
So we simply do not know what has fully happened.
In terms of what the Fed has done, because it's a private entity, it has limited public responsibilities and accountabilities, most like other state central banks across the globe for the most part, and it creates a constant and continuous problem with knowing exactly what they're doing, why they're doing it, who they're benefiting, who's profiting, how the Fed profits itself, how the people connected to the Fed profit.
We're mostly left in the dark and in doubt.
In the same context as what you're talking about, is it going against nature?
There's no question.
There's no historical example of what they call MMT, modern monetary theory, working in this kind of environment, to the degree that people have tried to print their way out of problems historically.
You can go back much further, but in just recent examples, Weimar Germany, where people ended up carrying cash in wheelbarrows, ended up being so destructive of people's confidence in the civil society that it helped birth both communist and Nazi revolutions in Eastern and Central Europe.
That, in turn, brought us World War II, and fascism and communism, and fascism lasted for a decade or so, and communism lasted for seven or eight decades.
leading to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people.
So in the name of saving a very small group of people who may not have had much life expectancy anyway, such that we were basically just changing the cause of death on their death certificate that was going to be issued anyhow, in the name of saving that population, we are risking tens and hundreds of millions more because of what can happen we are risking tens and hundreds of millions more because of what can happen
Not only the decline of the health care system and the rise of suicides and mental health and other physical stress-related health ailments, but also the political and ideological diseases, not only of the sort of inflationary environment that the Fed's MMT and the other state banks, central banks MMT policies may unleash not only of the sort of inflationary environment that the Fed's MMT and the other state banks, central banks MMT policies may unleash upon us,
Because the last time this really happened, it gave us Nazism, it gave us Fascism, it gave us Communism, and it gave us deaths not in the five figures, the six figures, or the seven figures, but deaths in the nine figures over the better part of a century.
In that same context, we can see what could happen with these kind of inflationary effects.
You can study Weimar Germany, look up Hungary 1946, look up Argentina in the 1990s.
Look up just recently Zimbabwe in 2008 or just look where they're actually printing 1 trillion dollar bills.
That's how bad it got.
Or simply research and look at Venezuela today.
You're right.
It goes against nature and nature tends to respond accordingly.
And this kind of strategy that is mostly untested in the degree it is tested, has failed around the world, is what we face.
We face somebody jumping out of an airplane, riding a nuclear bomb, thinking they're solving the world's problems when they're actually causing them.
In that context, think about what is happening around the world now.
Let's look at clip number eight as what's happening in Ecuador.
What happens when people demand papers?
What happens when they demand seizure of bodily fluids and forced vaccinations and stay at home and deprivation of the economy and denial of civil liberties?
Let's just take a look at this clip.
Step number eight.
Step number eight.
Tulcán and Domingo Sabio.
They're burning a dead body in the corners of Tulcán and Cristóbal Colón.
I mean, they're burning it in the garbage like anything.
I mean, it's a tremendous mess.
like anything.
It's a tremendous calor.
Look at the blood.
Look at the blood.
Look at that.
Look at that.
What happened?
Look at that.
Look at that.
What happened in the Orient?
Things like this headline.
Perro Li released early due to COVID-19, the coronavirus.
And how does he do it?
How does he respond to his early release?
As civil society falls apart, all kinds of things happen, things like this headline.
Parolee released early due to COVID-19, the coronavirus.
And how does he do it?
How does he respond to his early release?
He breaks into a house and threatens women with a knife.
That's the kind of examples of stories we can look forward to in this kind of environment.
In an environment where they ask you to just obey, never trust your own eyes, just believe what you are told and act accordingly.
That's what we are basically being asked to do.
We live in an environment currently where despite all evidence and data showing us that this pandemic is far more panic than plague.
Despite that, our economies are being shut down around the world.
Despite that, our civil society is being shredded.
Despite that, the basic cores of our constitutional liberties and freedoms are being eviscerated in ways that have never occurred in our entire constitutional history as a constitutional republic.
I mean, think about it.
Our founding fathers were intimately familiar with viruses and plagues, yet they never included any exception to a single constitutional liberty for a public health crisis or a national emergency or anything else.
And yet, what are we being told?
Obey.
Never trust your own eyes, just believe what you are told by the establishment, by the political establishment.
By the military establishment.
By the economic establishment.
They are telling you they must impose this sort of nuclear bomb on our civil society and destruction of civil liberties.
They must drop this nuclear bomb on our economy.
They must let the Fed continue to operate in secret with the shadow banks and the shadow parts of our economy, where they print trillions and trillions of dollars to bail out their friends and connected allies, while unemployment surges and surges and surges.
While ordinary people are locked down and home arrest and home detention in their own homes.
Where prisoners and inmates are released but told that they can stay released as long as they don't go to church or go pray in public outside an abortion clinic.
That's the environment we currently reside in, an environment that was made from dystopic, from dystopian novels, not from the utopian ideals of our constitutional founding.
That is why we must take radical change and radical steps now, and that is why the president Must take radical steps and radical action now.
He must reverse course.
He must reopen America.
He must re-establish our constitutional liberties.
He must re-instigate our American economy.
Or if not, then we face three great collateral consequences, three great collapses.
The collapse of our constitutional republic, the collapse of our economy, and the collapse of any opportunity for President Trump's re-election.
It was likely no coincidence today that the double-digit and highest unemployment rates were reached in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, states that are the core foundation of President Trump's re-election opportunity.
While Democrats may see this as an opportunity to seize power because every economic collapse in the United States has been followed by Democrats seizing power, Same thing happened in 1945.
Winston in the United Kingdom.
Winston Churchill won the war.
And how did the public thank him?
Because of the economic problems?
They threw him and his party out in a landslide.
The president can make a difference.
He was elected to make a difference.
Act and operate on his instincts.
He can change the equation by himself.
He can reverse course and reopen America.
Do it, Mr. President.
Save the country.
Save our constitutional republic.
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