'This Is Fine' - Banksters Reassure America After Nation's Second Largest Bank Collapse
JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon believes "the system is very, very sound" after his company takes over First Republic Bank in the second largest bank failure in US history. Should we believe him? And...how much is this "deal" going to cost US taxpayers? Also today: Ukraine Defense Contact Group is a scam. Finally - though the House voted down a bill to get out of Somalia, it's actually good news.
JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon believes "the system is very, very sound" after his company takes over First Republic Bank in the second largest bank failure in US history. Should we believe him? And...how much is this "deal" going to cost US taxpayers? Also today: Ukraine Defense Contact Group is a scam. Finally - though the House voted down a bill to get out of Somalia, it's actually good news.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you?
Did you get your bailout over the weekend?
I went and checked the mail two or three times, but one day was Sunday, and they don't deliver mail.
So it'll all come.
It'll all come Tuesday.
So anyway, the bailouts are always available to everybody.
I saw something today about France, you know, and they're leaders of Liberty.
But you know what?
The prime minister there is a little goofy, and I think he sort of leans left.
But he came out and he wanted to save their social security business.
So he wanted to have retirement age at 64 instead of 62.
And the people are totally hysterical.
I mean, economically speaking, you could make a case for it.
What else are you going to do?
You don't have the money.
You know, I think Reagan did that in the 80s.
They changed the dates a little bit.
But to me, it meant, how are we in this country going to react if you even made any attempt to cut anything that made a lot of sense?
They'd rather bet on the government printing out the money.
But, you know, there's a trouble with our banks.
I guess you know about that.
And we've been reassured, though.
FDIC said they could handle it.
No problem.
And then J.P. Morgan, Jamie Diamond, he said, and he's involved, of course, he bought out the leftovers for First Republic.
And he said the system is very, very sound.
Don't sweat it, you know.
He didn't say don't sweat it.
But so people are supposed to be reassured.
But this is a big deal, and it's a lot of money.
Wow.
And it's interesting.
It's so mixed up because they're going to get a lot of money from the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, and the loan is for $50 billion.
And it's fixed interest for five years.
They never have to worry about interest rates going up.
And I don't know what the final interest rate was, but it's better than what somebody would get for a housing loan.
And another thing I learned about looking at this, they also, you know, First Republic lost $100 billion over the Silicon Valley Bank.
You know, they had deposits in there.
And, you know, it's just massive.
And look how much they put into Silicon Valley.
But Jamie Diamond, he's a good money man.
I don't know about a businessman, but he's in the middle of that.
And it's just utterly amazing how much money is flowing around.
And then they wonder why people are starting to lose a little bit of confidence about the dollar.
And the gold prices keep wanting to go up.
And people are concerned.
But I think that this is a typical example of what happens.
Banks get into trouble.
The people know there's something wrong.
And everybody, not everybody, most people realize the big guys are going to get bailed out.
And this is their big effort.
That's why they exist.
And there will be some losses.
But even in the midst of all this shenanigans, the J.P. Morgan returned $10.6 billion in the midst of all this deficit.
But it's the money that they gave them to them one hand, and it makes the paperwork look good.
Oh, but we're clean now.
We don't owe the FDIC any money, but except we're going to borrow $50 billion to help pay the bills.
So this is, to me, astounding, but not a surprising.
That's the way the system was built.
And they bail out the big guys, which means a lot.
I mean, it's just not your little local banker that gets the bailout.
They usually don't.
But they bail out the big guys.
I got to thinking, they get the money, they get to bail us, eventually they'll get hit.
And some of them do.
But the people who pay for this are the people who will suffer the consequence of printing all this money up.
They don't have any money in that bank.
You know, there's no money there.
But, you know, with a printing press, this also gets to me a bit because they're balancing the budget and they're working hard to try to cut a little bit of spending and all.
But it doesn't mean a whole lot.
I mean, they do all this.
Are they getting daily authorization by the Congress to do this?
Oh, but the law says you can do this.
All of a sudden, the law says you can do anything you want and print money.
But who pays?
The little guy?
Because what they're doing here, it was caused by inflation and malinvestment and debt and manipulation of interest rates.
And they're just adding to the fuel.
And guess what?
The middle class and the poor are going to suffer the most.
I used to think that maybe the poor have it well off.
At least they don't have to pay income tax, but they pay the inflation tax percentage-wise.
They're the ones who really suffer.
So guess what?
If I were in Congress, and I am not thinking about going there again.
You better be careful about that.
I would vote against the bailouts and try once again and at least make the point the best we can even today.
Sound money would have solved this problem and prevented it, but we gave up on that a long time ago.
The big dissertion was in 1971 when we said we owe nothing, we're bankrupt, and yet the world still believes in it.
With all this mess, you'd think maybe the stock market would go down or something like that.
But people say, well, as long as I get my check and I'll complain to my congressman, just raise my payments.
If we have another COVID, we know how to pass out money real quick.
Well, you know, I don't follow this as closely as you do by a loan shop, Dr. Paul.
So when I look at it, it's from a very different perspective.
I don't have the experience, but when I'm looking at it, I see, now I remember Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, and I know that, you know, they took a big hit when this collapsed.
First Republic took a big hit, as you say, $100 billion.
That's not chump change.
But so now all of a sudden, over the weekend, I see the J.P. Morgan snaps up First Republic.
What happened?
I mean, how does that work?
It's mysterious.
And the details are meant not to be very clear.
It's sort of, we could work out the details on what they did hour to hour and what they did with maybe forcing some international banks to come to the rescue.
And that's why, guess what?
They're mostly opposed to my effort to audit the Fed.
Yeah, I wonder why.
And yet when you present the case for audit to the Fed to keep up with all this, the people have gone along with me.
I think on one of those votes we had for Audit and Fed.
Every Republican, a lot of Democrats voted to at least have transparency.
But I guess if push came to shove and you couldn't print money, then there'd be a little hollering and screaming about it.
So anyway, I think this is a big issue.
It's going to be more inflation.
The bank system, I don't want to argue with a guy that's as smart as Jamie Manner, Jamie, because he's smart and makes a lot of money, and he's an insider, and he's going to get by.
But he says everything is okay, very, very sound.
I would say, Jamie, I don't quite believe that.
I was going to ask you, because the other thing you said is this is nothing like 08 or 09.
Do you think he's right about that?
Well, not exactly, but 08 and 09 caused all this because 08 and 09 is when they said we got to do whatever is effort, and the interest rate took them way down and they had negative interest rates.
Well, at the same time, their position was our goal is to destroy the money at a 2% rate, measured by CPI.
So, no, it ushered in the age, and people wanted to clear it up.
Then they dug such a deep hole they couldn't get out of it.
So, 08 started this, caused all the male investment.
A lot of money was borrowed at 0%.
And these crises that are occurring right now are the fact that interest rates have gone up.
Even the establishment realized we can't keep having negative interest rates.
Most people, we were taught that was a little risky at school, but they still do it.
But we're still in part of, well, you could go back even before 08.
You can go back to 1971 or you can go back to 1913.
All this stuff is built into the system.
But these recent bankruptcies were very much related to 08, zero-rate interest, and then now with interest rates creeping up a little bit, the loans that they have made, you know, they're not viable.
And there was one comment, a person that seemed to be knowledgeable.
They said, all banks are insoluble.
You know, they're insolvent.
And they just go on and they do this.
And it's going to be the probably commercial property issue that's probably going to bring down a lot of people.
Interesting.
Well, I wanted to ask you about one thing in the Zero Hedge article about it and see what you think about how important this is.
They talk about, quote, a catastrophic supervision of Mary Daly-led SF Fed, which was more worried about rainbow flags and DEI than making sure banks were solvent.
Do you think some of this woke stuff is to blame?
Oh, absolutely.
How about all, you have the malinvestment from low interest rates and the printing of money and all the government spending and regulation.
But ESG was a disaster.
I had been talking to this for a few years and say that is in addition to all the mess going on.
And some of that ESG is coming home to roost.
Some of those companies aren't making the money, but they're going to have the side of the Fed.
The Fed will be on their side on this.
But no, I think absolutely all that cultural Marxism is part of it because it's, you know, everything has to be diverse.
Diversity is number one, not sound economic policy.
But guess what?
It's so secret, nobody hardly knows it except libertarians, that the greatest example of diversity is individualism.
ESG's Hidden Cost00:11:50
And that, of course, is a crime.
The people who run the show, they like individualism and they like low taxes.
But no, you have to belong to a group and you have to do as you're told.
And if not, you'll get punished.
And even the people who do well, just think of the scientists and the doctors and all that took an independent position on COVID.
That's why it's so bad.
And I think the money issue and going back to OA is very much related.
Well, there's not a lot of diversity in the fact that it's always the poor and middle class who are left holding the bag.
Yeah.
Well, let's move on to the second story that we want to talk about.
And we can go to the third clip.
I think we covered those first two pretty well.
This is something we noticed in Politico this morning.
The little-known group that's saving Ukraine.
And this article, and we can actually go to the next one.
This article is about the working group set up by the U.S. to coordinate.
It's a monthly meeting to coordinate sending weapons to Ukraine.
And here's how it opens.
It's held at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, still occupied by the U.S. a couple years after World War II.
So they say, when U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin brings together the defense chiefs of more than 40 nations here in southwest Germany each month, the hours-long gathering typically ends the same way.
Celeste Wollender, the Pentagon's head of international security affairs, calls on each participant to read out what weapons their nation is ready to donate to Ukraine.
So it's a big roundtable.
Wollander, who is another Obama neocon retread, she was in the Obama administration.
Now she's got a top job with Biden doing the same thing that she did under Obama.
She just calls on him and hey, what are you giving?
Hey, what are you giving?
Hey, what are you giving?
This seems to me like the craziest way to run a war in history.
That's for sure.
It is crazy.
You know, the crazy thing about this is it, to me, looks like we organize these meetings.
And it's our time to give the monthly directive.
And I think, well, where is the deep state in this?
Well, the deep state is just a little deeper than this.
These are the open, more open people in the deep state.
And we're delivering the message and probably the threats and innuendos.
But there are 40 countries that roll over for that.
And all I could think of was I had to be very careful on which speeches I wanted to go here on, even on the House floor and even the speeches that the committee hearings.
Sometimes it can be pretty bad.
And I got to thinking, what if I had had a job and I had to go to that every month?
I can't remember how many hours, but many hours because everybody had to give a report.
But I think it was just obedience training, you know, in the banking system.
And this is the crossover with the foreign policy system, because this is keep the money flowing.
We will have the weapons.
We'll never be short of cash.
The banks, if you have anything to do, you'll get bailed out.
And even if you don't directly have it, even if you're totally independent, you'll probably be canceled for broadcasting about free markets and sound money.
Well, I put together four clips to show you in a nutshell how this actually works.
Now, Politico makes it look like this is some great worldwide cooperation and coordination of the war.
Well, it's not that.
If we can go to the next one, this is, I put this little slideshow together to tell our viewers how it actually works.
Now, this is Reuters, I think a week or so ago.
Slovakia hands over all 13 promised MiG fighter jets to Ukraine.
I'm sure Slovakia's representative at this roundtable said, we're going to give 13 MiG fighter jets to Ukraine.
Sounds great.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Slovakia.
That's what Wollender says.
And then let's look at the next one.
This is from a pro-Ukraine Twitter account.
Slovakia announced it would send 13 MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine in the coming weeks, joining fellow NATO member Poland.
Now, here's the important part, Dr. Paul.
Slovakia's MiG-29s were retired last summer, and most are not operational.
So do the next one.
This is on the same line.
Poland and Slovakia donated broken fighter jets to Ukraine armed forces.
Poland and Slovakia handed over to Ukraine, used MiG-29 fighters, which are unable to take off.
That's called, you've just donated some targets, not some fighting jets.
So what is it all about?
Well, I would say, Dr. Paul, this is a huge money laundering operation and a massive grift on the part of these nations that are participating on the backs of Ukraine and with the blood of Ukrainian soldiers.
And why do I say that?
Let's go to the next one.
Michael Tracy, who we know well and who does great work, he makes a great point.
So why is Slovakia, what are they doing it for?
Slovakia will receive unspecified arms from the United States worth $745 million in exchange for giving its MiG-29 fleet to Ukraine.
Defense Minister Jaroslav Nod said.
Duda, he's the head of Poland, said Poland's Air Force would replace its planes it gives to Ukraine with American-made F-35s.
So I would say, Dr. Paul, in these four slides, I'm demonstrating this massive grift.
They send junkie planes that can't even take off, and the U.S. hands over half a billion dollars.
This is insane.
A couple things.
They may not be too smart, or they might have a strategy which they don't want, you know, a victory on either side.
This activity goes on and on.
But you could understand, let's just assume they're making an effort, but not too smart.
And then you wonder why NATO is not winning the war.
Somebody's winning some contracts and somebody's making some money.
But as far as conquering Ukraine and kicking Russia out of their old homeland.
Yeah.
Well, I see this as all about optics and politics rather than warfighting because I'm not a military expert, but I study this very closely.
And, you know, the way you win wars is you have coordination, you have a multifaceted approach.
You don't have a bunch of people sitting around an auction table.
Okay, I'll give a couple hand grenades.
Okay, I'll throw this bullet.
I mean, the whole idea of these things aren't interoperable.
This is not the way that you win wars.
And everyone who has any sense, even an amateur like me, knows this.
So what it seems like to me, Dr. Paul, is this is unbelievably cynical.
They're using Ukraine's blood to fight against Russia, and they just don't care if the last Ukrainian dies, because surely someone in the Pentagon realizes this is not how you fight a war.
It seems like there'd be more resistance by the people there.
And I don't know if there's any resistance building in Ukraine because they're the ones who are suffering and they keep calling up more troops.
And who knows how many people have been killed because you can't believe any of the reports.
But it is a disaster.
It's bad policy.
And the one thing you can't say, it's not polite if you want to study this and make it fair and balanced on who caused what.
But if you want the information about how all this started, especially aggravated and expanded since 2014.
And then we find that we, as an American people and American government, have a lot of responsibility.
And some of the sharpest, I made an attempt to not provoke individuals in Washington because I didn't figure I'd win very many elections.
But they really believe this stuff.
They're very sincere that the effort, even by some of the guys that have come our way, as far as China goes, there is nobody really is allowed to talk about China.
There's a lot of whisper about Russia, but on China, China, you cannot possibly say anything, or you're a heathen and you hate America, you're against the troops, and you're not for a deficit.
Oh, that's true.
Some are for the deficit.
But, you know, in all that budget talk, I didn't see too many very strict determination to cut back on some of that militarism.
Yeah, well, the one thing we learned from these Pentagon leaks, so-called Pentagon leaks, is that the U.S. Pentagon and State Department, despite what they say on TV, they believe they assessed that Ukraine would run out of its air defense by May.
This is May 1st today.
So the idea is they knew that they're running out of air defense.
I followed the war pretty closely, as closely as I can, and I know that Russia is increasingly using aircraft to strike at Ukrainian targets rather than simply artillery.
That means they feel confident that they have air superiority, which according to U.S. military doctrine, that's first.
You gain air superiority.
So it looks like they're feeling much closer to having the air superiority.
And in that circumstance, everyone is talking about the F-16s.
They're useless.
It takes a couple of years to train a pilot unless we're going to put Americans in those planes shooting at Russians.
And I think that's a pretty bad idea.
So the idea when Russians, when Russian has achieved its air superiority, the idea that you would inject F-16s or whatever, or broken MiGs into the equation is pure fantasy.
It's fantasyland.
So it doesn't look like there's a way out, at least that way.
The only bright light I would see is that the Chinese, they've already done a lot in the Middle East.
They've gotten Iran and Saudi Arabia together.
They have offered, they're sending a special envoy to Ukraine to try to talk to them.
So maybe there's some hope there.
There's no hope in Washington, I'm afraid.
But along with this, as you described, the military situation, the effort to undermine what America's doing is to make sure that we continue to lose ground on having control of the world reserve currency.
Every day you'll read a story about that.
Last year, the statistics were very bad for the dollar on how many people used something other than the dollar in transactions.
So that is a big deal because even with all the shenanigans going on and all the control and power, you know, the countries that have obeyed us, you know, will, if they think there's a chance that they need to and have to do it, I think they are moving that way.
And that's why every once in a while people will say, you know, we're here in dissent about how long is we going to be asked to send more stuff to Ukraine.
Except for, unfortunately, there's not enough American citizens.
Say, why are we there?
What are we doing?
What kind of a policy is this?
Where are we going to get the money?
And then you go and lecture somebody else for not spending more money.
They're no richer than we are.
The world is all, it's so dependent on the trust in the dollar so that they can keep monetizing everybody's debt in many ways.
If anybody gets into trouble, and certainly this weekend showed what do you do when our banks get into trouble because of this mess.
We find out that we have to really turn up the printing presses.
Why Trust Matters00:07:16
But yet the trust, what I see is that they're desperate.
They have to trust it.
Maybe we can get by on this.
But the thing is, if we get by as we are, I think it just means there's a greater distortion and a bigger bubble that is not sustainable.
And that they don't want to hear about it.
Oh, no.
That's why Jamie had to come out and say, very, very taking care of it.
Yeah, we'll take care of it.
It's funny you talk about lecturing because I did find a clip, and this is thanks to Alex Cristoforo, whose podcast I listened to.
He put it up.
And this is JD Vance.
This is an audio clip, Dr. Paul.
So you might want to find your earpiece.
I think this is a great, great little clip.
I think it's about 40 seconds.
We can listen to the whole thing.
This is JD Vance, Senator JD Vance on the House floor.
Talk about lecturing.
I think he's great here.
Listen to this.
We have built a foreign policy of hectoring and moralizing and lecturing countries that don't want anything to do with it.
The Chinese have a foreign policy of building roads and bridges and feeding poor people.
And I think that we should pursue a foreign policy, a diplomacy of respect and a foreign policy that is not rooted in moralizing.
It's rooted in the national interest of this country.
Because Ambassador Sullivan is at the lead of moralizing instead of pursuing America's national interest, I object.
I wonder if he's watching our program.
That is wonderful.
You know, it would be fascinating to have a conversation with a person like that that's actually thinking because I'm always curious, how did he get to this position?
Because it sounds like he believes what he just said.
And this is one thing that people tell me.
People know when they're hearing the truth versus a politician that's saying the same words, but they're not telling the truth.
But I'd be fascinated to know, you know, sometimes it's a grandfather.
Sometimes it's a teacher, sometimes a meta-politician.
Who knows what?
So it's always fascinating to me thinking that maybe if you can get a hint on how people get to this position, it should help us in trying to spread our message.
And I like what he said.
We should be overseas for our own national interest, not because we want to lecture everyone.
And it's just a great piece.
Well, I guess the last little thing we want to go to is a vote yesterday, I think it was yesterday, in the House, on a resolution to withdraw from Somalia.
Now, you sent it over to me, and my first thing was, oh, here we go again.
But you made a good point, which is that, you know, behind the fact that it failed and it failed badly, there is a silver lining in this cloud, and that's the vote.
Yeah.
Well, I was annoyed at first, but then I thought, I wonder how the votes was.
So Matt Gates is doing a good job.
And he's been hit with criticisms for various reasons, but he's been pretty darn good on this issue.
But the vote was 102 to 321, 102.
But then I go, well, that's not too bad.
I used to do it with Dennis Kassini.
We'd get a lot less, but we kept plodding along, plotting on.
But the neat part is, and this happened on another recent vote, we pointed out that the opposition to the spending and all was done by a coalition.
So this coalition, 52 Republicans, 50 Democrats, what a source of building optimism about that.
So these people, but how often, how often do you see anybody on mainstreet media putting to these person from how do you guys talk to each other?
You could actually make it interesting about why these individuals came around to this agreement.
But you know what?
It's The waking up of conservative and constitutionalists versus the failure of the progressives right now, and people are noticing this and they're frustrated.
So they're coming out.
And the Democratic Party's not progressive in a good sense.
And so they have been talking to each other.
So they should definitely be encouraged.
I wish I could do more for them.
Well, I think the message here, and it was, you know, very, very evident when you and Dennis Kucinich were doing this thing, is that sometimes you can win by losing in a way, you know.
And these hundred and some members pretty much evenly split.
That's good news.
Now, if I if they would listen to me, you know, I'm sure they won't.
But the best thing for this to move forward would be to don't be making these votes for partisan reasons.
Don't go down to the floor and be partisan.
Just talk about the issues so that you can grow.
So, you know, one of the reasons, one of the things that we did when you had your Thursday lunches is to make a comfortable setting where people could say what they felt and not worry about recriminations, you know.
So if they could do that with this group of 100 and some people and just build on it, build on it, and build on it, you might really have something there.
You know, the other thing I think that helped our luncheon was the fact that we didn't announce and didn't say it, but everybody knew how it was run.
There was nobody from the press there that they, oh, I heard him say that.
And now I'm going to destroy him because he said something that is just not politically correct.
And everybody, you know, gave their real opinions and they would ask honest questions with our special guests.
So, yes, it was a lot of fun.
Yeah, it was.
Well, I'm going to close out, Dr. Paul.
If you could put on my last clip by reminding it's May 1st, it's May Day.
That means we have just over a month before we're going to get together in Houston.
They lie.
Nihilism in the War on Truth is our Houston conference.
It is on June 3rd.
I will put a link when the show's over in the description to get your tickets and join us and a great group of people to discuss a lot of things you've been talking about for a while, Dr. Paul.
So it's going to be a lot of fun, and we hope to see you there.
Back to you.
Very good.
And I too want to extend the invitation to get as many people to come to our conference in June.
And I'm looking forward to it because I always find it worthwhile.
I always learn a lot from the other speakers.
And actually, I like to talk to the people.
And I'm always fascinated how do you arrive at these positions?
And a lot of times they'll ask me that question too.
And some of the stories are really pretty neat about how they do it.
But I'm really fascinated when somebody will be like, you know, a college student or something, or even a little older.
I can't believe I've been doing this for this long.
And they say, oh, I watched what you were doing in 2007 when he was 14 years old.
And he heard some stuff about the Federal Reserve.
So that always encouraged me to talk to young people and give them more credit than they get because it seems like their minds are more open and it has to be interesting and important.
Encouraging Young Minds00:00:39
And that should be our goal.
And we certainly want to appeal to those individuals.
And as many people know, we have a lot of young people coming to our seminars.
So that to me is very encouraging too.
And besides, ideas have consequences.
Just total numbers are important when you want a prevailing attitude for people to understand why sound money is good and the First Amendment is good.
But it's still good to have a few people there in leadership position and understand philosophically and morally why we should move in the direction of greater amount of liberty for all of us.