Whenever you put government in charge, you get a big mess. That's exactly what we have. President Trump campaigned against a "big, fat, ugly bubble," and then took ownership of it. Big mistake. The Fed has twisted the economy into a Gordian Knot, and has painted itself into a corner. There will be a lot blame coming from every direction. The answer, as always, is liberty.
Whenever you put government in charge, you get a big mess. That's exactly what we have. President Trump campaigned against a "big, fat, ugly bubble," and then took ownership of it. Big mistake. The Fed has twisted the economy into a Gordian Knot, and has painted itself into a corner. There will be a lot blame coming from every direction. The answer, as always, is liberty.
Whenever you put government in charge, you get a big mess. That's exactly what we have. President Trump campaigned against a "big, fat, ugly bubble," and then took ownership of it. Big mistake. The Fed has twisted the economy into a Gordian Knot, and has painted itself into a corner. There will be a lot blame coming from every direction. The answer, as always, is liberty.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Chris Rossini, co-host.
Chris, welcome to the program.
Great to be with you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
Chris, I would like to talk with you and visit with you on the subject of the collapse.
And when I use that word collapse, I'm talking about several things possibly.
Of course, it could be right now the collapse of the stock market may be the leading signal of what might be much bigger.
But, you know, the collapse of the stock market and the collapse of the credit market, as well as the collapse of the economy.
So there's a lot there, and they're all interconnected.
And one thing I want to talk about a little bit is a collapse is significant, but it's only worthwhile if we evaluate it correctly.
You know, not only for political reasons, but for economic reasons, so we don't make mistakes and that we can correct our errors.
And there's a lot of people can be blamed for this.
And I'm just looking around because there are so many.
And, you know, first off, I want to start with Trump because he's a contributor.
But I'd have to say that Trump's excitement of becoming president and his pushing for less regulations and less taxes has been beneficial.
And he sort of was a cheerleader for the stock market.
And I think his biggest mistake, though, not having the taxes lowered and less regulation, but taking credit and bragging about this is my stock market and claiming that the economy is booming and full employment and all that.
I'm afraid that's going to come back to haunt him because that's a lot more complicated than that.
And right now we're going to start seeing this because nobody's bragging right now about how great the stock market is going.
The stock market has been going down sharply.
And there's a lot of contributing factors on that.
And that's what I would like to talk with you today about.
Yes, while President Trump will not be fully to blame, obviously there are people well before him that have contributed to this.
He hasn't helped.
He's bringing it about even faster.
And I was going to mention the tariffs.
Tariffs are taxes on Americans.
You're not going to make America great again by taxing Americans.
I mean, if every American took out their pay stub and looked at it, who is taking from you the most?
It's your local, state, federal governments.
They all have their hands in your pockets.
It's not China.
It's not the EU and all the tens of thousands of regulations that make it very hard to get a job, to start a company.
This is our government.
This is not China.
So to think that the president is going to now add more taxes with tariffs on Americans, you know, that's a big mistake, and he's just hastening the decline.
Yes, and I'm sure the tariff situation and the tariff tax has canceled out the cut in taxes.
It has a way to iron itself out to make the calculation.
But tariffs are taxes, and a lot of people have a misconception of it because it looks like they're punishing the other people, not recognizing that the imbalances that we have in trade is a result of monetary policy and the management of reserve currency of the world, which we do poorly.
And you can't solve that by combining it with tariffs and regulations.
And then it invites things like putting on sanctions, which I think is such a terrible mistake in any pursuit for trying to reduce trade wars.
That just aggravates everything.
I was fascinated with a title the other day on Bloomberg.
And Chris, it said, the traders don't know why.
this sell-off is occurring.
Well, our problem is we have so many, and I believe we have the basic reason, but we have a lot of people and a lot of things and a lot of bad mistakes that contributes to the bubble.
That's what we should be talking about.
You have to know where the bubble comes from, and then you have to talk about how people have mismanaged it and think it could last forever.
You know, Trump says when the subject, at least he was quoted as saying this, others said, well, I don't know if he could possibly say something like this.
He said that when he talked about the debt bubble bursting, he says, well, I'm not likely to be here when that happens.
He says, I won't be here when it happened.
Well, of course, that's beside the point.
And the other thing is, is maybe he thinks the debt bubble won't come for 10 years from now or after he's out of his second term, or at least not now.
But the big thing is, though, a debt bubble and a crisis pending, the timing when the major event hits is unpredictable.
What we're witnessing now is the weakening of the system, the leakage of some of the inflated balloon of the economy and all that has happened.
And we're getting hints.
But no, Trump may not be in office by then, but he may well be in.
And like I said earlier, he's going to end up getting blamed because I don't think all of a sudden for, you know, everything is going to be rosy at the beginning of the election next year.
And that's what people will be in 2020.
That's what people are looking forward to.
And the economy then will be a big event.
Even though the so-called good economy recently didn't seem to help Republicans, a downturn in the economy, downturn in stock markets and unemployment rates going up will not be helpful to the Republicans in 2020.
And I want to urge our viewers to always look at who you're not allowed to criticize if you're thinking about who to blame.
The Federal Reserve's Influence00:10:36
And one big one is the Federal Reserve.
You're not even supposed to know who they are.
But even if you do, do not criticize them.
Even the president, when he was criticizing the Fed, the press got on, how dare you?
They're independent running the economy.
Don't try to criticize them.
And the other big one is the military empire.
There's tons of propaganda that goes into keeping that alive and going.
But you have to criticize the fact that we have a thousand bases all over the world trying to be the policemen of the world.
But these are supposed to be sacropsyct.
And ironically, this combination of the Fed and the military empire is exactly what is bankrupting America.
Yes.
And I've always referred to the Fed as a facilitator.
Yes, it's in charge of the money supply, prints money, messes around with its interest rates, and does all this manipulation.
But what it does, it facilitates and helps the people who want special favors to accomplish that.
And you've already mentioned the military people.
They can't do without the Federal Reserve because that's how you finance the deficits.
But it facilitates the event of government intervention.
So there's so many people involved in that.
What about the average person?
Because right now, it's, what, like 60% of American homes are receiving some check from the government.
Well, they don't collect enough to take it from one person and give it to the next.
And nobody saves enough in Social Security in these other places.
So they end up needing to print money and run up the deficit.
But the demands the people put on it, the demands of the business community, the demands of foreign governments that we have to take care of them and they're our allies and for us to maintain our empire, we don't get away with it for free.
We have to pay them off.
When we take over a country with a coup or militarily, we have to keep financing the government, no matter how bad it is.
And just look at the countries in the Middle East since 9-11.
We've taken over a lot of countries.
None of it is successful, but it costs a lot of money, and that's the price to pay.
And there's a lot of people involved.
But the economy in general becomes dependent on it.
It's like a drug.
And if you take the drug away, the people demand it.
So as bad as the Fed is, it is really the instrument of facilitating big government.
So you wouldn't have big government if you didn't have the central bank.
And if you just look at our history from 1913 on, it was a combination.
It was philosophic, foreign change in foreign policy, progressivism and welfareism came in and fighting all these wars and the Fed coming in and the income tax.
So it is an overall philosophy, but probably the most influential and the most significant and the one the deep state wants to have total control on will be the monetary system and the banking system.
So the deep state is very much responsible for the mess that we're in where they're always angling to get some benefits.
But Chris, I'm going to have to say, when this economy comes down, even though there's more talk of the deep state than there ever has been in the past, I don't think it's going to be sorted out enough that the average guy on the street will say, well, we've got to go after the deep state.
More people now than ever know about the Fed and they know about the benefits from it, but they don't quite understand that it's the deep state because we're getting too much attention for the radicalizing it, making it worse.
Just think of this last election, it becomes sort of acceptable to run as socialists.
And I think the other facilitator that facilitates this whole message is the media.
If we didn't have all this bad information pumped out and all the ideas behind this, and it's done probably maliciously, but probably because of total ignorance, because of our universities have taught that this stuff is okay.
There are some people I've met in Washington.
They haven't particularly benefited by the system, but they believe in it.
They studied good economic policies.
There aren't very many in Congress that even know the word Austrian economics.
And they go along with this.
And that's why the process continues.
But if you look at what happened after the Depression, they blamed the gold standard and free markets for it.
And that accelerated what was started in 1913.
We've been fighting it ever since.
But why we live in special times is what we're witnessing now.
We're really witnessing the beginning of this collapse, the unwinding of something being built for a long, long time.
You can't get away with QE 3 and 4 and expand the money supply and then not know what to do.
Well, how do we shriek the base and try to compensate?
And then, oh, yeah, we've messed things up in trade, so we'll put on sanctions and go around arresting people who they said, well, you violated the sanctions.
We put this, I'm referring to the case in China.
We put sanctions on you.
You're not supposed to deal with Iran.
Here you are buying oil and different things, and you didn't get a waiver for this.
So, therefore, we're going to punish you and we're going to arrest you if you do it.
And that's what we ended up doing the other day: arresting a Chinese official.
And that was the day that the market went down 900 points.
So, one problem leads to another and compounds it.
So far, that's what we're doing.
So, we better start getting some people prepared on how to rebuild the system.
Yes, I'll finish, Dr. Paul.
You made a great point.
Americans, unfortunately, are addicted to big government.
And that same big government, as you just mentioned, thinks that it's the king of the world.
So, when this comes down, there's going to be definitely cries for more government, government to do more, do something, help us.
But the more that it does, the more that it strangles.
It's almost like if you're in the grip of an anaconda and you're just begging it to keep squeezing you to help you, it's not going to work, it's going to kill you.
So, you know, the answer, and we that's that's our message: is liberty.
Don't be afraid of freedom, your freedom.
It's the greatest gift you have.
Americans have been brainwashed out of believing into their own freedom, but it can return.
Very good.
And I'd like to just close by expanding a little bit on how this Federal Reserve works and what their responsibilities are.
The Fed is the cause of the bubble.
The pressure put on by their special interest groups that we mentioned, they're part of the problem too.
But once the bubble is built and we see it coming along, and there's deficit spending, there's lower than market rates, and there's an increase in the money supply.
We know that the recession and the correction has to come.
So, it's not like we're just being clairvoyant.
Oh, yeah, I think we're having about time to have a recession because they come periodically.
No, the next recession is predictable, and usually the depth of it is usually related to the amount of inflation and interference they've had.
And this one has been big time.
But on the other side of it, there's a lot of events that go on.
If you look at the problems of the trade and people putting on sanctions and raising tariffs, that doesn't cause the collapse itself.
You have to have the bubble, but it contributes to it.
It's very, very important.
It's all part of it.
But I like to think sometimes for my own benefit: well, there's a cause and the cause of the Fed is that system.
But the other times, you know, like this morning, there was a report that the unemployment rate, the unemployment figures, weren't as good.
Oh, no, they were worse than they expected.
So the market jumps up.
Oh, the Fed's going to print more money.
And that sort of thing.
So there's anticipation and all these computer programs going on, military events around the world.
All these things are contributing factors.
But ultimately, the solution is for the American people to decide what kind of a government they want, if they want an interventionist government that's going to protect them from all ills and take care of them so they're never endangered and they aren't allowed to make any decisions for themselves.
That the economy is run by a different method of private property and volunteerism, and it's not run by economic planners in Washington.
It's not run by the special interest.
And the important factor is to protect personal liberty.
And lo and behold, if you follow those rules, you end up a free market economy, you end up with sound money, and you end up with an entirely different foreign policy, which plays an awful lot of mischief.
Yes, the foreign policy and the spending contributes a loss.
The militaryism contributes a lot.
But if you didn't have the Fed to monetize that debt, there would not be these excesses.
So we have to look at the main source, which is the Fed, because it accommodates and expands all these evil, monstrous things that we do to ourselves by pretending that we're going to take care of everybody.
We are the saviors of the world, not only of our people and take care of people forever.
Just look, look at what's happening here and look at what's happening around the world.
And it's not been because there was too much freedom.
It was always way too much interventionism.
And this whole idea that the mixed economy was the solution, oh, a little socialism here, a little bit of market economy here, inflation here, and we'll control it, doesn't work.
You have to be precise.
You have to know what we believe in.
In our early history, there was a much better definition of free market economies and sound money, and we did a lot better.
But right now, what we have to anticipate is the final collapsing of this economic system and the financial bubble.
And then we will have our opportunity, and we better work hard at it, is to present the case for liberty.