When Will The Dollar Be Dethroned? Whose Fault Is It?
Reserve currencies come and go. They usually go because the nation that issues the reserve currency abuses the situation. Delusions of world domination, endless wars and endless welfare are embraced. These terrible ideas are then financed by money that's created out-of-thin-air. This can go on for awhile, and it usually does, but only until the rest of the world refuses to go along anymore. The U.S. fell into the empire trap a century ago, and the world is starting to say: "That's enough."
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today is Chris Rossini, our co-host.
Chris, good to see you today.
Hello, great to be with you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
We're going to talk about those things we talk about on Friday.
Frequently, they have economic matters involved.
And, of course, some people might want us to talk about indictments.
You know, and we're not going to talk, we might mention that, but I think, you know, even the indictment has an economic effect, you know, and the first thing today is it didn't seem to hurt Trump, you know, in economic matters.
So anyway, but before I start, I want to do make an announcement.
Actually, it's an invitation.
I think most of our viewers know that we partner with Birch Gold, and we talk about gold quite frequently.
But today, the announcement is a little bit different.
Birch Gold and myself, I will be there.
We're going to have a webinar.
And the invitation is for people who would like to participate needs to call into that number, text Ron, 989898, and get the details of this.
It's a free seminar.
Nobody has to pay money on that.
We haven't done this.
If we did one, it's been a while ago.
So it's something a little bit different.
And there'll be some questions and I'll ask.
So this is an opportunity to get us to know a little more, but a little bit more about some people who may be sending in some questions to us.
So that would be happening on April 6th.
But if you need to, that's going to roll around here pretty fast.
So if you're interested, you have to call that number on the text Ron Paul.
Text Ron, 989899.
I think that's what the name is.
That's right.
Yeah, that number is hard to remember.
But anyway, today, though, we need to talk about some current events and one subject we want to talk about.
And we've talked about it before.
Federal Reserve's Role00:14:19
And there's a good reason why it has to come back.
And that is how long is the dollar going to last as a reserve currency?
And people have been talking about that for a long time.
And it's amazing.
It's always longer than some predictions.
Because, you know, somebody could have said in 1913, boy, the dollar's not, the gold standard's not going to last long with the Fed taking over.
And there was probably be pretty good reasons for that.
But it took the Fed all the way up till 1933 to say the Americans couldn't even own gold.
So there was an attack on it.
And then with the combination of what happened after World War II and the Bretton Woods, gold wasn't allowed to be owned by the people, the Americans, but foreigners could own gold, which was sort of a mixed bag.
So the dollar was convertible, but it was a pseudo-gold standard.
It was a gold reserve standard.
And even back then, when that was set up in 1944, we had most of the gold and most of the wealth, and it looked like we could fudge the figures and print money forever.
Henry Hazlitt, who was a great Austrian economist and journalist back then, as it was happening, at an IMF meeting, he said, he says it won't work.
He says it's going to be inflationary.
And he was obviously right.
But it took up until 1971 for all of us to throw, especially Nixon, throw in the towel.
It's not going to work.
So it took a while, even though a lot of people knew about it.
So even after 1971, people say, boy, this can't last very long.
But here it is 50 years later, and it's still rolling along, but with a great deal of difficulty.
And it was created mainly for those on our side and in our country to have the reserve currency of the world.
And we have had that.
It gave us tremendous benefits.
But Chris, you know, you and I and others have talked about, you know, the shortcomings of that.
We overstep our bounds.
It gives us license to inflate.
It gives us license to interfere in the market with sanctions, license to fight wars we shouldn't fight.
And again, for decades now, you can't do this.
I remember when I first started watching politics, it was Barry Goldwater that was talking about the deficit.
And here it is many years later.
So the people who disagree with it say, see, you don't know what you're talking about.
It doesn't end.
But if you understand Austrian economics, you don't get tied up with that because the one thing is you might understand prices and money and business cycles.
But one thing that they teach is don't pretend that you know what's going to happen exactly tomorrow or the next day because that involves decisions made by millions and millions of people, customers and consumers, business cycles, wars, and whatever.
So there's a lot of variation there.
On the long term, you can plan and say there are some economic laws that you can't define.
And one is that if you print a lot of money, it loses its value and it causes bubbles that have to be corrected.
And eventually, it destroys the reserve status of the currency.
Chris.
Right, Dr. Paul.
Yeah, and the dollar and the empire, the dollar reserve currency goes along with the empire and they're both going down together, it seems, because attempting to force our, in quotes, our values on the rest of the world has completely failed.
It should have never been done in the first place.
And our values are not even the original American values of individual liberty, limited government.
You know, that was thrown out.
Half the country, you know, despises these so-called new values.
You know, but empires have to buy their friends.
That's how they get away with lasting.
And nations, they go along in their own self-interest.
A, they like being bought off.
And B, they don't want America coming and giving them freedom and democracy real hard and good.
So they go along.
But once nations start to abandon this and they start to see it's no longer in their interest, you know, I think we're seeing that in a large scale.
You know, we see news of even France has done a yuan denominated transaction for liquid natural gas with China.
And China's doing this with Russia and all these big nations.
They're starting to get away with the dollar.
They've had enough of this.
And you can think of it kind of like what we went through with COVID.
You know, people were huddled and didn't say anything and they took their beatings until some people started to stand up and say, hey, that's enough.
And then others see that it's safe to go in the opposite direction and then it's like a windfall.
So that's what's going to happen with the dollar.
It may take a long time, may take a decade or more.
But once countries say, hey, we don't have to deal in dollars and we'll be safe, they're going to fly out the door and that'll be the end of all the fake friends that the empire had.
Very good.
You know, the first part of our question is when will the dollar be dethroned?
And that's what we've dealt with for quite a few months now and some quite a few years.
But the answer to that, I already gave it.
Nobody knows exactly when, but we can talk about what is approaching.
And right now, how does it maintain it?
We keep moving in that direction all the time.
And this week we had this story out about France buys 65,000 tons of liquid nitrogen gas from China in the first ever one-denominated trade.
But there's a lot of other trading going on now outside the dollar.
And the more of that you see, the closer we're getting to seeing the end of the dollar.
But I still don't say the dollar is going to end next week or next so the banks, the banks are failing again.
And we know all that stuff's going to happen.
But still, predicting the exact timing is very, very difficult.
And yet, if you're in the savings business and trying to take care of your family or in the business people trying to anticipate the future, it isn't easy.
It's so much different than when you have free markets and you have market forces.
And the people who are successful have to be pretty smart about how to anticipate markets and consumer demands and how to run a business.
But that's not where we are.
Most of this is how am I going to get a bailout from the government?
And one thing that happened since this recent boondoggle, especially with COVID and others, that some banks get treated, everybody's treated equally, because some banks are treated more equally than others.
So the ones that got treated more easily, like Silicon, they've been taken care of.
I don't think anybody's walking away.
Oh, I don't have any money left.
I don't have any money left.
I had so much money in there and it wasn't insured.
It really doesn't matter.
But I want to make one point because there is an article here.
It was on Zero Hedge.
And they show that during this time, the expansion of credit, going to the discount bank and borrowing money and doing these all these, all of a sudden they were able to inject $37 trillion in keeping things settled.
We're impressed that this whole system lasts longer than it should, but it takes a tremendous amount of faking and false reassurance.
But the people do it.
They want this to work.
And other countries who have an investment in dollars and they don't like it, they have to sort of think about that too.
But there it is, $37,000 million, a trillion dollars.
The point I want to make is this didn't go through the Congress.
This wasn't authorized by the Congress.
And so when you're looking at whose fault is it and how does it happen, you know, you can't say, well, it's the consumers, it's the bankers, it's the Federal Reserve and all of this, because it really started with the creation of the Federal Reserve.
We know that when they, especially when they have a fiat currency and they're a reserve currency, they inflate.
So we know that that is the basic problem that we have.
But the thing of it is, the Federal Reserve can do this and manipulate.
And they do this without direct congressional approval, just like they go to war without congressional approval and nobody seems to challenge this.
So this is something that we wouldn't have if you had a free market because you'd have insurance of our deposits, but they would be private insurance.
And people would have to pay more attention.
But now everything seems to be insured.
I haven't yet seen anybody walking out of the bank and the customer very upset because he says, I don't have anything.
I don't have anything.
And people say, well, there's a darn good thing that the Fed could bail them out, but it's not a darn good thing that the Fed created the monster.
And that's where the problem is, because on the short run, there seems to be benefits.
And even on the longer run, when the market demands a correction and a liquidation of debt, the Fed still can paper it over.
And people are so anxious to have some help, they do it.
But the point we're making here today is there's lots of signs that something big is happening, and it has to do with China and Brazil and Russia.
And they're ganging up on us.
But it just makes it easier for the people who like to bash China.
So when they do this and are more successful, it's all China's fault.
So they'll come up with the scapegoat, but it's not true.
And we have to look at monetary policy in a much more honest way, Chris.
Very good, Dr. Paul.
And Dr. Paul has long said that we've been living way beyond our means for a very long time with debts and whether it's government, federal, state, your local corporations, individuals.
I saw a headline today that Generation Z is racking up that faster than any other generation in history.
And this is part of the whole funny money thing.
It really has just seeped into all of our lives.
You know, my grandfather came from Italy, had a third-grade education, and that's it.
That's as far as he went.
And he on one income supported a family, lived a good life.
That's something that's unimaginable today.
And things are not made here.
I was before the show trying to think of someone that I know that they work somewhere where they make an actual thing.
And I could think of nobody.
Now, that's not to say that nothing is made here, but compared to like when my grandfather's generation and after him, virtually nothing is made here.
What is manufactured in America is debts, digits.
And stuff is made in other countries.
They do the work.
They make the stuff.
And then they ship them over here for digits.
You know, so they're getting the raw end of the deal.
We're getting all this stuff that we have all around us, and they're getting this depreciating digits.
So this is going to change.
You know, it's not going to take long for people to realize that they don't like this deal anymore.
So we are going to have to live within our means once again.
We're going to, you know, debt maybe will be a bad word once again.
So that's what's ahead.
How long and how you know how long this process takes, I can't possibly say.
But that is what's ahead for Americans, as long as the world, you know, keeps moving in the direction that it's going in now.
There's one problem with this, Chris, because there's going to be a little bit of an opposition to it.
It is going to be bipartisan.
You know, both of them will say, you guys like China too much.
Well, we don't like tyranny.
We don't like authoritarianism.
We don't like fiat money.
But the problem that we have is if we don't, if we see something happening in our own country, we want to suggest very politely change it.
It doesn't make any sense.
But then that takes away the individual we want to blame and the Republicans and Democrats.
How many of them there?
We have some good Republicans who are still coming more over.
What are we doing in Ukraine and all these other things?
And we have to look at some of these budgets.
But we got to direct our problems to China, China, China.
But you pointed out economic.
Actually, China is pretty successful, and I don't think they depend.
They take our money, but then they go and invest it overseas and they say, oh, they're all over Africa now, and they're getting hold of all the metals in control.
But they're doing that.
Like Chris, you pointed out, we buy their stuff.
It isn't like they send more dollars overseas.
I guess that's a circuitous way of us having foreign aid.
We put the money in China's hand and they go and they spend it and help out these countries.
But they don't have, yes, they have a military because we have a military all around them and we keep threatening and putting sanctions on them.
And why do we have to pester them over a boundary between Taiwan?
Yeah, that's important, but that is not important for the average American citizen trying to make a living and trying to deal with these deficits going on and the worry about the military obligations that we have.
So that, I think, is the big thing.
And that is one of the reasons that I was very much aware of this when I would talk about war and why we should bring the troops home.
Citizen Watchdog00:02:35
It wasn't China back then.
It was mainly the Middle East.
That's where we were doing the most mischief.
And we're just barely out of there, you know, 40 years later.
It just goes on, on and on.
So that is the problem.
It lasts for a long time.
It's very, very expensive.
It undermines our liberties.
And it violates the Constitution.
Oh, don't worry about that.
We don't have to worry about the Constitution because the Constitution says, if it's not prohibited, we can do anything we want, which is a lot of malarkey.
That's not the way it works.
Anyway, Chris, what else do you have here today?
Yeah, I have one more, Dr. Paul, to cover.
Yeah, it's really bizarre that, you know, our government is the U.S. government.
This is our country here.
We have to, as Americans, watch over our government.
Unfortunately, our government wants to point out everywhere else, you know, instead of on themselves.
But our eyes have to be on them.
Our eyes are, you know, who cares about China or Russia or any other country?
We live here, and we have to watch over our government.
They're the ones that tax us.
They're the ones that censor us, lock us down, try to force all these big pharma stuff into you.
They're right here.
We don't have to look outside of our borders.
But they're very good at deflecting and pointing outwards off of themselves.
But you can't do that.
As a responsible citizen, if you're going to be a patriot, you have to take care of your own country.
And our own country was set up on an incredible idea of individual liberty and so importantly, non-intervention in the affairs of other nations.
Our founders were so explicit about that.
And yes, they were imperfect.
There is no perfect.
They were hypocritical in many cases.
But there was a general trend of individual liberty and non-intervention overseas until 1898.
And that was when it was abandoned.
That's when it was outwards.
We're going to go and rule the world.
And not only has that failed, not only have they failed at bringing so-called freedom to the world, we lost our freedom here, which is also what James Madison warned about.
He said, if you go into this war business, you're going to lose your freedom here.
Your own government is going to take it from you.
They're not going to allow you to criticize what they're doing all over the world.
Currencies and Privacy Concerns00:05:06
So we have, but we have an opportunity to go in the right direction again as things change.
But there is a lot of work to do because many Americans have no idea what the founding principles were.
And as Dr. Paul pointed out, there's going to be tremendous resistance to keep the status quo in place.
You know, what happens happens, but we have an obligation to speak out for our government to do the right things.
That's what we try to do here, and hopefully, you know, you can try to do that as well.
Very good.
I'm going to talk about something very briefly where I took a position in the 1970s, and it was superficially correct, but it really wasn't very accurate in thinking when it might happen.
And that has to do with currency reform.
Because, you know, when the Bretton Woods ended, gold was $35 an ounce, and it quickly went up to $800, which is a tremendous percentage increase, I'll tell you.
And the markets were really reeling from all that.
And there were so many currencies in the past, and they still are there.
You know, if you look at Venezuela and other places, where they have to add zeros.
Well, we basically add zeros, but we're pretty tolerant of that.
You know, a dime used to buy a gallon of gas.
Now, I think, well, how much is it now?
A dollar?
Oh, no, it's more than a dollar.
It might be $10 in some places.
So we've added the zeros, but it's been done in a way that it wasn't like there was a recall.
And when it gets really bad and it's runaway, it's a recall, and they call in all the currency, and then they twist, and then they take it and give you currencies that have more zeros on it.
But I think that there's something else going on that this change that we have to be concerned about is still happening.
First thing is, the attack on cash is still going strong as ever.
There's a lot of rules and regulations.
And the banks and the government and everybody else wants everybody to quit using even checking accounts or cash, especially.
But I think that's very symbolic of privacy and what you do.
But they want to know what is going on.
So therefore, they're trying to get people to use some type of trail where they can follow it.
So now those central banks, and our bank spends a lot of time on this, and this is still up for grabs because it's non-modern technology.
And that's central bank digital currencies.
Because if that goes through, and to some degree it will, even though there's a significant percentage of people who still like the idea of writing a check and using cash, I have to confess, I'm one of those people that still sort of think that's a good way to keep good track of what you're doing.
And remember, but no, they want to do this.
And they want a lot of people working on this digital currency.
But it's sort of like in medicine when they said we have to protect the privacy of all our patients.
So it turned out that every single doctor in every single office, they have to make reports as they write a prescription.
It electronically gets into the hands of the government to make sure nobody's over-treating some patients and what are they doing with prescribing drugs, all these other kind of things.
And it also interferes with privacy of patient care and it also adds a lot of expense.
But this is, and that's been going on with medicine.
But on the other one, right now, they want to do this for everything.
And I think they're moving in that direction.
And I think it's some degree is going to happen.
But just my experience with people that I know, they don't like the idea.
And one thing is, is I've always been amazed that I'll talk to somebody and they say, oh, I have to go buy the courthouse.
I pay my water bill and I pay my rents and different things just in cash.
And I thought, well, that must be 10 people out of 50,000.
But it isn't.
There's more people that do that.
Some people, when they get their paycheck, they go and get cash and go out and buy the stuff they want.
But still, I think it's a threat.
So, the sort of predictions I had is about the money changing back in the 70s.
They would change the appearance, and we would have colored money, and it'd be a recall.
Well, they did change the appearance of the currency, there's no doubt about it.
It looks a lot different, it's all colored.
But now, there's a change, they still might do that.
Who knows?
They'll do whatever they think is necessary to maintain their power.
But right now, I think the greatest threat to our privacy will be when the central banks have digital currencies in one way or another, and everything will be digitalized and none of this other stuff.
So, I wanted to just once again emphasize how much we appreciate you coming to the Ron Paul Liberty Report.