Does Yellen Make Any Sense On Trade Policy With China?
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned this week against "decoupling" U.S. trade with China. There's an old saying that if goods don't cross borders, armies will. It should be obvious to everyone that cutting trade with China would be disastrous, and war with nuclear China would be catastrophic. America can be economically competitive again, but it's going to take a drastic reduction in the size and scope of the federal government. That's where our energies should be focused.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today is Chris Rossini, our co-host.
Chris, welcome to the program.
Great to be with you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
Today, we're going to be talking about China and our relationship with China and trying to point out a few things that are instrumental and very important to deal with as trade policies.
And we're going to quote from Secretary of Treasury Yellen because we have to clarify something.
If you're not careful, you could read something she said this week and say, what?
Has she lost her mind?
Has she joined us and believe in free trade?
Well, we'll talk about that in a little bit.
But before we do this, we want to go into a subject we talk about usually on Friday mornings to emphasize the importance of gold in the economy and investments and history and whatever.
You know, gold to me is interesting because, you know, a long time before I was born, they were talking about like 6,000 years ago.
They knew about gold as being something very, very special.
And certainly since 1971, I paid a lot of attention to it because that was the last link of our dollar to gold.
And gold was at that time $35 an ounce.
And since then, it's been soaring, not straight lines.
Markets don't work in straight lines, but it's up and down.
But essentially, it hangs around $2,000 now, which I assume is still very much in the beginning of what can come to this country if we don't change our ways.
So gold will remain important.
And if you listen to the radio ads and what's going on in the world, gold is talked about more.
There are more financial articles on countries trying to get together and restore some type of an international currency, you know, a reserve currency, which the dollar has been serving, and thinking about trying to replace it because the dollar is showing signs of weakness.
And it's been a steady, that's almost a straight line when you look at the value of the dollar in terms of gold.
And since 1971, it's lost by 98% of its value.
But they told me anytime I expressed concern about all this, the Federal Reserve Board Chairman say, yes, yes, you're right about that.
But these changes that are made, these dramatic changes, as long as they're orderly, it's okay.
So if you can drain the wealth of the country, punish the people where they can't hardly recognize it, pass on the deficits through inflation, and it appears orderly in the banking system, then they say, don't worry about it.
But that's their goal is to keep the banking systems orderly.
But they can't even do that because the most important things to keep things orderly would be, you know, the definition of what money is and have a definition of the unit of account and also have market rates of interest.
And if you listen to any of that debate going on this past week about what should the interest rates be, oh yes, later on, we're going to pause now.
We've done enough.
We're going to pause, but in a couple of months, we're going to raise them again.
And the markets, believe me, were very, very confused.
And they're going to remain that way and get much worse because the federal is not on the right track.
That's why gold's going to be here for another thousand years or two.
It's been around.
They can't cancel gold, but they can control it.
They can manipulate and they can make it illegal and they can tax.
But ultimately, markets rule.
And that's exactly why the Bretton Woods Agreement broke down in 1971.
Markets were saying, the United States is fooling us.
They say they have the best currency, the reserve currency, but the United States wanted to print as much money as possible, spend it, and have that advantage of having a stimulus here at home, export the inflation, and the people around the world will take it because it's a reserve currency world.
And what we're seeing is the witnessing of this system breaking down.
So I think gold is going to be very much in the news as time goes on.
And people know that it's very significant.
Most countries that have suffered with runaway inflation over the centuries have resorted to gold to restore sanity.
And that's exactly what we did after the Civil War.
We were off the gold standard for 15 years.
Then we had to have a restoration of the transition back from the greenbacks back to gold.
So that's coming.
It's going to be chaotic.
And the Fed is not going to be our friend.
And the economists will be confusing.
That's one reason you should do your best to get as much information as you can about investment, historically speaking, as well as financially speaking, and how can gold can be helpful in protecting against what's coming.
That's why I work with the Birch Gold Group.
And we communicate together.
But through this program, we actually pass on a message to you about connecting with Gold Group, the Birch Gold Group.
And that is, if you text Ron 989898, that's Ron, 989898, and you will connect with the Birch Group.
And they will send you some material that should be very helpful to you in trying to understand the chaos that goes on and what we expect.
But they're not going to get rid of gold.
Gold is going to become even more significant as things are happening.
So if you're curious enough to get as much information as you can get, you can do it through text Ron Paul.
Nope, sorry.
Text Ron 989898.
And that will do it.
And they will send you material and it will be free.
And Chris, we're going to be talking now about a subject that you and I have visited with, and that has to do with the trading with China.
And we came across a very interesting article because I read it and I called Chris.
I said, Chris, look at this thing.
What has happened?
What's going on with Janet Yellen?
Has she been watching our program or something?
She all of a sudden said something that sounded halfway reasonable.
And that is she is trying to neutralize the overly vocal hawkishness toward China.
She didn't try to cancel all of that because she's part of it.
But one of the consequences of the movement here in our country is to hate China, break off relations with them, and keep the military industrial complex happy, prepare for war over Taiwan, that sort of thing.
But here, this was her statement.
This was reported in CNN.
But this is the lead which caught our attention.
While we surely have concerns that need to be addressed, decoupling, that's the word, would be a big mistake.
Yellen said in her testimony before the House Financial Service Committee on Tuesday, Americans benefit greatly.
This is Yellen.
Americans benefit greatly from buying goods that are cheaper to produce in China.
China equally benefits from U.S. exports that also bolster the U.S. economy.
And we happen to think that's a pretty true statement.
We advocate free trade as a method of having more peaceful relationships with China.
But that's not the case.
And as our discussion goes on, we're going to point out why Yellen doesn't get an excuse for the rest because she's still a globalist and an interventionist.
She's just yielding to the overwhelming evidence that trading with countries can be beneficial to both, and it could hurt the American consumer every bit as much as it would hurt the Chinese consumer.
Chris?
Right, Dr. Paul.
And, you know, we all know that individuals, it's much easier to point the finger outward than to work on yourself.
Well, the same applies to countries since they're made up of individuals.
It's much easier to go point fingers at other countries, call them bad guys when you really should be looking at yourself because that's what you control.
The solution to our economic maladies are very, very simple.
It's just putting them into practice is very, very hard.
You know, the solution is government needs to get out of our way to make doing business in America attractive again.
It's very simple, very simple to say, very simple to understand.
But we have so many people who like to dictate and they do not want to stop dictating.
We have so many bureaucrats.
There are millions of people that the government employs.
There are regulations on top of regulations, on top of regulations, in all levels of government, and they do not want to stop.
They just want to keep adding.
But when this happens, people take their money and they will invest it in places where they are treated best.
They will take their money across the world if they have to.
And it is very risky to do so.
If I was to, I can't imagine doing that, taking my money and trying to go start businesses and work in China.
That's a very big risk.
You're dealing with a foreign government with foreign laws, foreign cultures.
But people are willing to do that because it is so unattractive to try to do business here in America.
And it's getting even worse with the wokeness.
So people calculate, where can I profit?
And they don't want to profit here.
And we have the biggest government in the history of the world.
That is the opposite of the land of the free.
You cannot have both.
It's one or the other.
We have chosen the biggest government, and we are suffering the consequences.
And to go and point fingers at Russia, China, and everybody else is to really miss the point.
Very, very good.
You know, this subject has come up because there was legislation being discussed, and that's why Yellen was before the Financial Services Committee.
And the Republicans obviously wanted much, much tougher treatment of China and more sanctions.
And so the unique part was Yellen was called to testify, but she gave this discussion and sort of was trying to bring some common sense into it.
But I think the whole thing is that decoupling from China would be very bad.
First off, I've talked about protectionism, sanctions, and all the stuff that goes on in all the wars that we get into.
And the one thing is, if you try to separate it, which most of the time they do because people who want sanctions want to do it in this narrow sense of protective sanctions, protective terrorists to benefit some corporations or punish somebody that we don't like.
But who in this country suffers the most?
Well, it's the poor people because sanctions don't work, and prices generally go up when you have trade wars.
And who has to pay the penalty?
Mostly poor people.
Even what happens is if a country can produce something at a lower rate, and whether or not it's labor or what it is, or maybe their efficiency, you know, that helps the poor people.
You might be able to buy tennis shoes from China.
That might be 10% of what you'd have to pay if you bought them.
If they were insistent, they make them in the United States.
There's a big business in that.
See, so you take away, if you put on the sanctions and tariffs and all, you raise the prices.
So the poor people lose the advantage of the purchasing power if you have the chance to buy overseas as well.
I also see free trade and free purchasing power around the world as a civil liberties issue because I don't believe in the income tax.
I believe what people earn belongs to them.
And if you believe that is the case, people should have a right to spend the money the way they want and not make the assumption that the government owns everything that a person earns.
And the income tax assumes everything they earn belongs to the government.
And then they write a law that says you could keep such and such over, maybe you could keep 10%, 20%, or whatever.
So it's a civil liberties issue.
You ought to be able to earn and spend it as you see fit.
So if you want to buy something from China, if we're not in a declared war or something horrendous, which we are not, we're just stirring up problems when we say, oh, yeah, that's different.
But the Chinese don't protect the civil liberties of the Chinese people.
And one time I had this little debate in a financial service committee, and I said, yeah, but what about here at home?
And had some examples of what we do here at home.
Like right now, what about Assange?
What about the people who were captured at the capital when they were demonstrating against the policy?
They lost their civil liberties.
They were put in prison.
Why are we concerned about that?
Yelling and screaming.
And saying people who are saying, well, we can't do this with China until they have perfect protection of all their civil liberties.
And I think about the protection of civil liberties here is a big enough job for us.
We have jurisdiction there.
We should be dealing with that rather than nitpicking and trying to tell the Chinese exactly how to run their country.
Exactly, Dr. Paul.
And, you know, unfortunately, there's never a shortage of armchair warriors, especially in this country, whether it be against Russia on one side, and there's people that, oh, no, no, to stop the war with Russia, but they want war with China.
That's a good thing.
Wants No War00:04:24
We do not want war with Russia or with China.
They both have nuclear weapons.
We would be physically in danger in both cases.
And in China, especially, the disruption would be unbelievable because we are so dependent on them.
I mean, I went to a store once, me and my brother, and we were just, we were talking about it.
We're like, let's look at these, where this stuff comes from.
It's unbelievable how much came from China.
If they were to just cut that off, our lives would be disrupted to a degree that we can't even imagine.
But we're so used to in this country.
Yeah, you and him, you go fight.
I'm going to go to the beach.
You know, wars are out there somewhere.
And it's a shame because that's not how war is.
War is a serious thing, and we do not want to be involved in it.
And on top of it, our government would clobber us here.
Forget about fighting against Russia and China.
They would go after us like they did during COVID.
They would restrict and restrict and mandate and mandate, just like in COVID, you know, because we're at war.
You know, nothing is off limits.
And, you know, who knows?
Maybe half the country would call for their own persecution just like they did with COVID.
So we don't want to go through any of this if we want to live good lives.
Now, if we want to suffer, then this is the way to go.
But we should avoid war with Russia, China, and everybody else and really worry about making our country even resemble what it used to resemble in the past.
You know, since we really aren't competing well with China, and that's why the products are coming in and they're, you know, cheaper than what we make here.
But Yellen actually recognizes that competition is good.
She recognizes that we should at least work with them and try to maintain some form of trade.
But she also says that what we should do is assist Chinese competitors, third world nations, take more money from the American consumer that they've saved by buying cheap China products, take that money and invest it in the poorer countries, say in Africa, and make them more competitors.
So we want to subsidize them.
She wants more money for the IMF to make the IMF more in charge.
She's a globalist.
She's interventionist.
She has a few type of sentences that sounds reasonable because she recognizes that trade is good and it's beneficial to both sides.
And that also she's aware of the fact that there can be aggravation.
But Chris has mentioned it and we always mention it.
The odds of war are always so much greater with countries that we fight with economically.
And just look at all the provocation that we're involved in and sending our ships just to test the South Sea waters and go through the straits.
Yeah, yeah, technically it's legal.
But life and the existence of the United States doesn't depend on the fact that we get away with going up there and getting 10 feet away from their vessels.
Oh, well, we didn't have a crash.
So far, we didn't blow up anything.
I mean, it makes no sense to do that.
And in a way, Yellen understands some of this.
So she wants to maintain a few things that are beneficial, but she wants to do it by remaining a globalist.
And she has not been much help in balancing the budget and a few things like that.
But it's easier for us to argue these cases because we're non-interventionists in social, personal matters, religious matters, and we're non-interventionists, international matters, and we're non-intervention on all economic matters.
And that's a consistent policy.
And you will always find not only one or two little tidbits about why free trade, we should sort of watch that, but it should be done on principle.
And people should realize that they have a constitutional right to spend their money where they want and not have our government concocting these scenarios where we're on the verge of war and we have to do this.
Assets at Risk00:06:17
And look at that.
What's the biggest budget?
You know, this contest between our interest on our debt and subsidizing the military-industrial complex.
Not a healthy situation, and that's why some of this nonsense will come to an end.
Chris.
Very good, Dr. Paul.
I'll finish up.
Unfortunately, in our country, and the media plays a big part of it.
People are scared of China, communists, communists, communist.
And yes, communism is as bad as it gets.
But to think that China is going to take over the world with communism, I think is a huge mental mistake.
They have one military base in Africa, Djibouti.
We have a thousand all over, even encircling China, wouldn't you know?
You know, so to think that the Chinese are coming is ridiculous.
They are more capitalists than us in so many ways.
And unfortunately, on the other side of the coin, we are more woke than China in so many ways.
And they're like, you keep that stuff over there in America.
Don't try to bring that woke stuff here.
So in the end, both countries, ours, theirs, is a mixture of government and corporations.
That's what has swept the world.
Corporatism.
Dr. Paul talks about it all the time.
That has swept the world.
This fear of CCP, and yes, they are authoritarians.
They do not care about civil liberties, but they're not taking over the world.
You know, we have our own problems with civil liberties here than to be worrying about this country that's 6,000 miles away and not even close to our doorstep.
But they changed from communism.
Communism could have never produced the stunning prosperity in China.
These are capitalist principles that they adopted after Mao and they ran with.
Now it's corporatism, but corporatism obviously produces better results than communism, which is just pure starvation.
But that's what we're dealing with.
So this fear that the CCP is going to take over the world, it sells.
Lots of people are scared to death.
They're running away.
They're scared.
But I think it's a false fear.
And they should worry about getting rid of the corporatism here in America so maybe we could produce some prosperity again.
Very, very good, Chris.
You know, there's always consequences.
We talk about managed trade, sanctions, and those things leading to war.
But there's a lot of things that happen that leads the way there.
And they're going on already.
But I read one today that has to be one of the dumbest things that I've ever heard.
But it's the Republicans doing that in the Congress right now.
But by a matter of fact, it's bipartisan.
The headline on anti-war is: U.S. lawmakers introduced bill to give Russian central bank assets to Ukraine.
So where do these assets come from?
How did we get those?
All the way back, probably they're dealing, they didn't designate which one because we have so many.
We took assets from the Iranians in 1979.
And it was their money, but because we were in this fight, of course, we've been fighting with, we started a squabble with Ukraine all the way back to 1953 when we participated and managed a coup to throw out an elected leader in order to have access to their oil.
But the U.S. lawmakers now produce it now.
Now, what do you think Russia thinks about that?
Oh, that's not a bad idea because we're not using them.
Yeah, this one.
The Russian Central Bank would mark a significant escalation of Washington's economic war against Moscow.
Hundreds of billions of dollars in Russian central bank assets have been frozen by the United States and its allies.
Well, we shouldn't even be doing that.
I mean, as far as I'm concerned, it's theft.
We're getting involved in this.
We aggravate, and then there's a trade war goes on, and then the country oversteps its bound.
And because we own the IMF and the World Reserve Currency, we do have license to steal.
So what we do is we freeze their assets.
I mean, if they did it to us, we'd be dropping bombs on them.
But we drop bombs on them.
We don't even have to have that much aggravation.
It just makes no sense whatsoever.
But the real irony here is I think NATO has declared war against Russia.
And Russia is defending itself.
And so there's been, so we get more upset with Russia.
So we confiscate, we put on sanctions to confiscate money and freeze assets.
And now we're running short of money to keep sending to Ukraine.
And they're running out of weapons.
So here, oh, this is, here's a savings account over here.
We stole it from these countries.
We put it in a bank.
I just wonder who earns the interest on all that stuff that sits in these banks for all these years.
But that is what they want to do.
Republicans and conservatives are in favor of this.
And all it's going to do is aggravate it.
But you could see how things like this takes us one step closer to having an escalation of the militarism that's going on.
Because I don't think the United States is going to get away with being the leader in NATO promoting this war that is there, financing the whole war, but have no body bags coming back.
And I think eventually that and the bankruptcy, the American people are getting sick and tired of the border disputes in Ukraine and Russia and Poland while ignoring ours.
And, you know, and we have, as a result, all this inflation.
So the American people are getting sick and tired of this.
And it's not going to be easy sailing.
It's going to get rougher, but it need not be.
Reading the Constitution00:01:10
It's not difficult to figure out.
We could change policy with sensible people.
And it should be simply done and say, oh, that's overwhelming.
How could you possibly change all this?
We've been doing this for years.
Well, we've been doing it for too long.
It's coming to an end.
But we could start by having people who truly believe that all their votes should be involved by obeying the Constitution.
And people who wanted to learn and understand more about a guideline.
It's reading the Constitution.
But I was told, Ron, you're off base up there.
Committee chairman said, you know, that's anachronistic for us to think.
We don't look at that anymore.
They say that in public, and they don't.
That's probably one of the truest statements they ever made to me.
We don't follow that anymore, and they don't care.
And I think that goes along with my theory that there's a faction out there called the nihilists.
They don't believe there's a possibility of truth being known.
And certainly they're not interested in the truth of what the Constitution actually says.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.