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Feb. 24, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
40:04
1592 Greece, Gold and Financial Terrorism - Freedomain Radio Interviews Max Keiser

The economic war being waged against Greece, the EU - and North America!

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Hello, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I have the inestimable Max Keiser on the line, who is the inventor of media derivatives and who has been, I think, vociferous, insistent, and sadly, as is often the case with the truth teller, largely unlistened to.
And he has some fantastic, original, and somewhat mind-blowing thoughts about the causes and current situation within the Greek world.
Thanks so much for taking the time, Max.
Now, you've talked about the financial situation in Greece being very similar in the year 2000 as it is now, but with the help of investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, they were able to hide the financial problems that they were having which have unraveled since the credit crunch late last year.
I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how they managed to sneak all of this debt into the EU and what you think is going to happen from here.
Right. Well, we know that Greece has said that their debt-to-GDP ratio is in the 12% to 13% range, and the objective is to bring that down.
The Maastricht Treaty, when they created the euro, states that the country's debt-to-GDP can't be over 3%.
Now, for Greece to get into this euro, they needed to hide billions of dollars worth of debt.
The man from Goldman Sachs shows up and he creates some synthetic swaps using an accounting methodology that they used.
They make the reference to artificial exchange rates.
They simply created exchange rates that were based on nothing but just basically phantom numbers.
They created phantom accounts.
They hid billions of dollars worth of debt.
They made it appear as though the GDP ratio to...
The debt was acceptable.
They snuck Greece into the Euro.
And during this period of time, the past 10 years or so, you've had, you know, still the last 10 years of the 25-year bull market that started back in the early 1980s.
And starting, of course, in the year 2007, you had the collapse of the 25-year bull market and you had the collapse of the credit markets.
And now we've systematically seen A lot of countries and countries exposed for the fact that they are basically, you know, if you liken it to a chain letter, these are the people, or a Ponzi scheme, these are the people who came in late who are going to have to suffer the consequences, while the people who started the Ponzi scheme, like Goldman Sachs and these other banks, of course, make out very well because they were in early.
Right, right. Now, people seem to think that the decision point is whether in the future, I guess in the short-term future, the EU should pump up the Greek currency or give them money.
But to my understanding, that's already happening because the EU is buying up Greek debt, is monetizing the Greek debt.
I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that through the bond sales.
Well, I mean, the only way out of these problems is going to be through growth.
You can't have growth without jobs, and you can't have jobs without savings and capital.
And the only solutions, really, that the EU is putting forward to stimulate growth is to increase their debt burden.
You know, this worked for 25 years.
Anytime that there was a burst in the bubble, whether it was long-term capital management, which involved Russia and some other countries, or whether it was the savings and loan crisis going back Really all the way back to the beginning or whether it was a dot-com crisis or the subprime crisis.
Every single time you had a bubble burst, the net aggregate debt levels increased.
And Wall Street got very good at hiding the debts on special purpose entity accounts, off balance sheet accounting, using credit default swaps, synthetic credit default swaps, and they kept this Ponzi scheme going.
And so the question of whether or not Germany is going to bail out Greece or they're going to come to their rescue, the entire eurozone, like the entire globe, is suffering from multi-trillion dollars worth of debt that is crashing the entire global economy.
And there's really very little growth coming from anywhere except for maybe China, which is feeding into Australia.
But this China growth is highly illusory as well because they're just building all these phantom cities out there in the middle of China without any way to sustain that growth.
So at some point they're going to have to probably to avoid a huge economic dislocation in China.
They're going to have to abandon the support of the dollar, let their own currency rise, give their domestic population some purchasing power with their local currency, and try to make it on their own without having to rely entirely on that vendor financing scheme that they've been perpetrating with the U.S., basically lending Americans money vis-a-vis the bond market to buy cheap basically lending Americans money vis-a-vis the bond market to buy cheap goods at Walmart so that they can build up China's export
So there is no solution in terms of the Eurozone.
There is no bailout.
There's no money.
They're completely bankrupt.
The banks in Europe are sitting on many times their capitalization is in debt.
There's no money.
There's no money.
Now, I'm going to put myself in the German Chancellor's blouse for a moment.
Fortunately, there's no video for this for you.
But if I'm in Germany's shoes, I'm torn between two courses of action.
If I bail out the Greeks, then that helps me to continue to borrow because, of course, if Greece goes down, it will pull down the Euro.
On the other hand, Germany is a huge net exporter, so if the euro goes down, that's very beneficial to their exports.
Do you have any thoughts on which way do you think they might go?
Right. If, in fact, the euro is on the decline, Germany, as a huge exporter, reaps the benefits from a falling euro.
But, you know, to revisit the first half of your question, you talked about they're in a position to facilitate their borrowing.
The point is that we're heading toward what Hyman Minsky called the Minsky moment.
This is when the interest on the debt exceeds the GDP of a country, in this case, the globe.
And you go into a massive deflationary debt implosion.
So there's not going to be any borrowing because you're talking about financial Armageddon, basically, and there's no way around it.
But you have to accept it and start to look past This fact of economic life and decide how you want to come out through the other end.
It's impossible to avoid at this point because Look in the U.S. They have put in trillions of dollars, 13, 14, 15 trillion dollars of fresh credit into that economy, and money velocity is still close to zero.
You still have unemployment rising.
You still have GDP now rolling over and going negative.
House prices are back to going negative because all that 13 trillion just went off with a down payment against the 20 or 30 or 40 trillion in debts that are still In the system that haven't been figured out how to be paid for yet.
And the U.S., if you were to mark to market the entire indebtedness of the U.S., including the unfunded pension, the unfunded Medicare, Medicaid, you're talking about $100 trillion Right.
Right. It's completely...
I mean, the existing paradigm of how to run countries is, to my mind, is completely dead and gone.
And now we're just going to pick through the bodies and see what we can bring back to life.
Now, another thing that I would like you to talk about a little bit, if you could, is you've used the term financial terrorists.
And, of course, to people who get the 10-second snippets, that seems all kinds of extreme.
To those of us who've delved a little bit more into the details of the IMF and some of the confessions of an economic hitman approach, this stuff was used to work in the third world where you would lend money to the government and then end up gutting the government and privatizing a good deal of the public assets for the fund and profit of private interests.
This seems to be creeping northwards or creeping from the third world into Europe.
I was wondering if you think that's a viable way of looking at it and also if you could talk a little bit more about why you use the term economic terrorist to refer to the lending institutions that have facilitated or enabled this debt.
Sure. Well, the term terrorist is usually associated with fanatic, religious, extremists, violent, murdering individuals who are suicide bombers or kamikaze pilots.
Now, let's talk about Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Kenner Fitzgerald.
These are people that are...
They believe in adherence to scripture in a theocratic, fanatical way.
They don't observe the Koran.
They observe Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.
They take a very select reading of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.
They look only at the chapters that they think apply to them, and they ignore the rest, similar to what a fanatic and a religious fanatic would do.
A religious fanatic that has gotten the term terrorist believes that they're doing God's work.
Recently, Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, told the world he believes he's doing God's work because he's a religious fanatic.
He's a fanatic follower of a very select reading of the Tenants of Capitalism.
As a result of this fanaticism, he engages in what I call suicide banking, where he destroys himself and others.
The Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns were an example of suicide banking, where bankers are blowing themselves up to conform to this theocratic belief in their belief as they see it in God.
And the results are the deaths of innocent civilians, whether it's People who get blown up by bombs or planes.
Or in America, you've got 45,000 people dead last year because they don't have the health care needed for these people because that money was given to the religious fanatics on Wall Street who needed to pay themselves their Christmas bonus.
So you've got the deaths.
You've got suicide bankers.
You've got religious fanatics.
And you've got it's a direct parallelization.
That's why I call them financial terrorists, because that's what they are.
Right.
And you can say that's any more descriptive and accurate than that.
And of course, in Greece, the hospitals at the moment are running on what is called, of course, emergency only, which means that people aren't getting the healthcare, even those within the socialized medical system, which is inevitably going to result in deaths.
And why? Why?
Because Goldman Sachs, a religious fanatic, in 2000, and then in 2009, they tried to do the same thing.
They came in there with their holy book, The Wealth of Nations, And they proclaim that to either you're with us or against us, you comply with our corrupt accounting methodology, or you have all hell to pay.
And this is exactly the same thing.
I mean, the parallels are exact.
But what is the endgame?
This is something I can't really understand with these institutions that lend all of this money to governments.
And of course, what they're really buying is the enforced tax revenues of future citizens, but it's not like they're going to go in and replace the government with their own entities.
And clearly the governments can't sustain it.
The economy can't sustain it.
The current tax base, even if everybody magically complied, can't sustain it given the demographic boom that's about to hit the retirement and medical schemes.
But what is the end game of these banks?
Are they looking at just, I want to get as much money out of the treasure room before the door of reality slams shut?
Is there some other thing?
Are they looking to take over governments?
What is the end game to lend all of this money to governments when they clearly can't pay it back?
Well, you have to look at this really in the context of the whole history of neo-classical economics, the Enlightenment, and the transition really from medieval times to what we call Enlightened or the Age of Reason and the whole birth of Neoclassical economics and this whole idea that free market capitalism can be a mechanism for distributing wealth in ways that reward merit and hard work.
That is being destroyed and we're going back to basically a feudal system.
And you see this happening right now with the concentration of wealth, which is becoming, in America anyway, we've never in America ever had a concentration of wealth disparity ever in the history of the United States.
The 70% of the wealth now is controlled by something like one half of 1% of the country.
And this is just getting more pronounced every month going forward.
So eventually, what the end game is, you're talking about most Americans are going to be in prison, performing slave labor, prison labor.
Already it has the biggest prison population in the world.
And that's a huge manufacturing base in America is in the prison population, they get paid 50 cents a day.
Hmm. And basically everyone else is going to be living in Sherwood Forest.
They're going to be out there in no man's land without any support whatsoever.
And the smart money, like let's say John Paulson, who's a hedge fund manager, who made money on inside information trading subprime debt, betting against it, they've been aggressively buying gold bullion.
John Paulson now owns as much gold bullion as many countries own.
He owns... I forget how many tons exactly, but he is one of the biggest players.
Paul Tudor Jones, very famous hedge fund manager in Connecticut, is heavily buying gold as well.
China just announced they're doubling a huge more gold position.
India just bought a huge gold position.
So the smart money is basically taking all the derivatives and the phantom illusory paper and they're converting it into hard assets like gold.
And they're allowing this thing to collapse.
And coming out the other end, you're going to find that 99.9% of the wealth will be controlled by, you know, maybe 500 or 600 people around the world.
It's back to feudal times.
It's feudalism. The rich, the aristocracy, the monarchy, they never really liked the whole idea of a middle class to begin with.
It was very inconvenient for them.
They prefer to live in a world of lords, monarchs, and serfs.
So here's their chance, and they're taking it.
So if I understand you correctly, so then the people who are in control of the fiat currency are essentially shorting the fiat currency.
In other words, they're going to make money when inflation hits, and they're also transferring the fiat currency into gold, real estate, other hard assets, which aren't going to inflate in the same way.
And in fact, as the inflation hits, the value of gold, of course, should go up relative to a dollar, right?
Well, the value of gold is going to go up whether you're talking about deflation or inflation.
It's going up right now during a period of deflation because the purchasing power of all these fiat currencies is declining.
And that's why the price of gold is going higher.
Once you have this Minsky type moment and you've got this hyperbolic nosedive into a debt collapse, Then, okay, you're going to have, I suppose, hyperinflation.
And then you see gold, of course, performs well in that environment as well.
So nobody is stopping this from happening.
You know, obviously, if there was an attempt, for example, Barack Obama, when he came into office in 2008, if he wanted to Do something that would have been beneficial for the people who voted for him.
He had two options.
If he wanted to do something that was beneficial only for the bankers, he had one option.
Now, we know that the option that he took was he bailed out the creditors.
That is, he bailed out Wall Street and he perpetuated this nightmare.
The two other options he could have done Where A, he could have simply nationalized the banks, ring-fenced all the bad debt into like a resolution trust corporation like was done during the savings and loan corporation, fired all the crooks, the charlatans and the financial terrorists, and started the lending cycle again.
And this would have been something he could have done.
And the economy in America would have been stabilized and growing right now.
Or, the second thing he could have done was instead of bailing out the creditors, he could have bailed out the debtors.
So in other words, at that time when he took office, all the mortgage debt in America, all the credit card debt in America, when he added it all together, it worked out to approximately 11 or 12 trillion dollars.
He could have simply paid everyone's mortgage and credit card debt in one day and just said, everyone's house is fully paid for, everyone's credit card is fully paid for, start the ball rolling again, start their lending again, and the economy would be growing right now, and he could have done that as well.
So those are the two things he could have done.
Now, why didn't he do either one of those two things?
Because he's not working in the interest of the American people.
He's working in the interest of the bankers.
And he did the only thing that would totally screw the people and benefit the bankers.
And this is exactly what he did.
So there is no attempt by the government to do anything that would have done anything beneficial for the general population.
This is obvious. This is obvious.
It's irreputable. You can't argue these points.
This is what just happened.
Right, right. Well, I'm not sure I would agree with either of those two solutions.
I would prefer an abolishing of the Fed and return to the gold standard as a way of stabilizing the currency.
But again, we're sort of arguing details because I agree with you that he has completely bowed to the banking interests because, of course, the people who are in charge of the banks and the head politicians – We think that it's sort of about nationalism, you know, that the Greek politicians are there for the Greek people, but the Greek politicians are in bed with the bankers,
and it's a political and banking class that have much more in common with each other than they do have with their own citizens, and you can see that with the astounding statements of the Greek politicos, which is that they somehow are blaming their people for the debt that they hid from the people and from the EU and is now bringing down the country.
This is classic Stockholm syndrome where the people who are being held captive fall in love with their captor.
And this is a classic situation.
And you see this over and over again.
And the Greek people are now trying to appease the terrorists that are holding them hostage.
But getting back to the solutions that you're talking about, you know, going back to the gold standard and the two-part solution you just mentioned, you know, you're talking more philosophically.
What I'm saying is that when Hank Paulson goes down in front of Congress and he puts a gun to Congress's head, it says, give us $700 billion or we're going to crash this market.
Essentially, if Osama bin Laden, you know, there's no difference between Hank Paulson and Osama bin Laden, except, you know, the way that the color of their skin.
Osama bin Laden, if he went down in front of Congress and said, give me $700 billion or I'm going to blow up your economy, Would Congress just roll over and say, tickle my belly?
How do I help you?
How do I appease you? Can I make you a cup of tea, Osama?
When Hank Paulson goes to Congress and says, give me $700 billion, or we're going to blow your economy up.
Now, Barack Obama, who's the president, he should have said, you know...
You should have said, look, buddy, you can't threaten American people like that.
You can't say you can't threaten us like this.
You can't threaten the American people.
We're going to nationalize all your banks today, which I have the executive order to do right now, and we're going to throw all your bums out, and we're going to work this out in a way that doesn't hurt the American people.
That's the solution he had at his fingertips.
He could have done it right there.
As far as your solution in terms of going back to the gold standard, And these other options, okay, philosophically speaking, ideologically speaking, these are sound policies.
That's right. But we're not talking about adopting a sounder course of economic architecture.
We're talking about the fact that America was held at gunpoint by financial terrorists and Obama basically put on the knee pads and did not do a single thing for his constituency.
That's what we're talking about.
Right, right. Well, and I think that we can see, because as goes Greece, so will go North America sooner or later, and I would guess sooner rather than later, because what you can see happening in Greece, which is so typical of these kinds of catastrophes, is that it's not debt payments that are suspended, Because who really gives a rat's ass if the government defaults on a national debt?
As far as the general people go, it's not their debt.
It's all went to other people's pockets, to other people's profits.
What they always do, which I think is going to provoke significant periods of social unrest, they always cut the frontline services in order to provoke the citizens into a response and a riot, which I think is a very dangerous game.
Rather than cut the debt payments, rather than just default and sort of have a ground zero start over, they start cutting things like ambulances and they start closing schools and they start closing hospitals, which inflames the citizenry.
And it's the very worst thing that you could do as far as actually helping your people go is because there's millions of options you'd have on your list of what to cut before getting to frontline services.
but they always start with the frontline services, which is a very dangerous game to play, in my opinion.
Well, I don't think they're consciously cutting frontline services.
I think what they do is they simply don't When the payments come in to pay for these services, they just throw them in the garbage and they pretend like nothing is going on.
They just abandon their responsibilities.
Now, you know, Greece, why are we talking about Greece as being the inflection point for all this?
What about Iceland?
And before Iceland, what about Chile?
And before Chile, what about Argentina?
You know, this has been going on for 20 years.
Mexico. What about the Asian financial crisis?
This has been going on for 20, 25 years.
Now, suddenly, it's in Greece.
It's on Western Europe's doorstep.
And suddenly, this is new and exciting.
No, it just means that the crusaders, the financial terrorists, are getting closer to the Bundesbank, which is basically the mother load of 6,000 tons of gold.
They want Bundesbank's 6,000 tons of gold.
John Paulson wants the Bundesbank's gold.
Paul Tudor Jones wants the Bundesbank gold.
They want that 6,000 tons, and they're moving in on it.
They don't care who dies and who they kill.
They're terrorists! You know, terrorists kill people.
And what's the objective? Goal!
They're going for it. Right, and I think it's fairly easy to say that people viewed Argentina, Chile, and Mexico, and the Asian stuff, and even Iceland, it's like they're not us.
They're not like us, in a way.
They're foreigners. And of course, Iceland is just three people on an ice cube.
But now, of course, you're right.
It's moving into, in a sense, this Western conceptual homeland and coming to Europe.
Now, you've said that this latest bubble is going to play out for about two years.
I was wondering if you could give us the fast-forward or not-so-fast-forward version, if you have the time, of how you see this crisis playing out over the next two years or this domino series of crises.
Well, of course, there's always the hunt.
The search is always on for the next bubble because when you create a bubble, you know, it's a bait-and-switch.
You know, it covers a lot of sins.
And, you know, we've gone from bubble to bubble to bubble.
It's bubble economics. And the bubbles get bigger, the collapses get bigger, the bailouts get bigger, the debt loads get bigger.
But there's always been a way to invent a bubble that will cover over this problem.
And I think we may see yet one more huge bubble over the next 24 months.
And if you look at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the CFTC, the people who brought us the Commodity Modernization Act, Of 2000 that opened the way for all of the problems since 2000 and the collapse of 2008 and 2009.
They're in the process of approving a new financial product, box office futures contracts, which will allow individuals to speculate with futures contracts on future box office.
So Avatar is a movie coming out.
Avatar 2, which will come out in two or three years, people will be able to speculate, borrow money, and speculate on the success or failure of Avatar 2.
Now, Hollywood, the box office, is a $10 billion per year industry.
That's your cash flow. That $10 billion can be used to spend at least $500 billion to $750 billion worth of these derivative products.
And these derivative products are going to be distributed throughout the known universe.
Anybody who is interested in celebrity, Hollywood, tinsel, celebrity TV, reality TV, all the stuff that we hate about contemporary culture, this is all being now securitized.
So if you hate all these really bad TV shows and really bad movies, they're all being securitized into futures contracts available at the click of a mouse to speculate on the success and failure going forward.
And I believe if you combine this with social networking, Facebook now has 400 million users and there's 80 million of them On a thing called Farmville, which is growing virtual vegetables for virtual money, and that virtual money is going to be convertible into buying and selling virtual box office futures contracts.
You've got the whole makings of a huge bubble that will give the people the illusion of, well, until that bubble bursts.
And that'll probably be the end.
I think it's a fitting epitaph for America to have the last and final bubble burst in Los Angeles, in the center of Hollywood, because this is really the nexus of all that is rotten in the state of America.
And so this is really, for the next two years, It's not economics.
It's really more like anthropology.
You see the whole mix of Wall Street and Hollywood.
You see this coming together.
People completely have no resistance to this celebrity nonsense.
And they're going to be big borrowing and stealing to get their 20 bucks on a bet based on some future Tom Cruise movie.
And the Commodities Futures Trading Commission is really...
You know, they really should be shut down because for approving these products, and I know having invented the technology that runs this new platform, this new what's called the Cantor Exchange, I know that when I designed it, I designed two or three different ways to manage that exchange, one ranging from very what I call the weak to the strong.
This method in terms of the weak version of the technology is very loose between the conflict of interest of the broker and the dealer because most of the market making and price discovery of all these exchanges involves what's called a broker-dealer kernel, if you will, of that system where the people who are making markets and matching buys and sells are also buying and selling for their own account.
On the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, for example, it's very weak and the market makers are specialists, profit from inside information all day long.
And that model, if you look at Goldman Sachs' high frequency trading, for example, it's a way for them to co-opt what's going on in the New York Stock Exchange.
And to be the buyers and the sellers of high-frequency trading and take advantage of the fact that the market-making capacity is extraordinarily weak because there's no regulatory policing of the market-making mechanism on the floor of the exchange.
Now my technology, the virtual specialist technology, you can set that market-making mechanism to tight or very strong so that the broker-dealer conflict is eliminated.
But from what I've seen on this new exchange, the Cantor Exchange, and from the CFTC, they're not going to use the best version of this, the tight version, the iron version.
They're going to use just more of the same very weak market-making technology, which is easy to manipulate, easy to trade on inside information, and you're going to see a wholesale raping of the American public once again, and they're going to be like moths to the fire because they all are going to be sucked in by the magic of Tinseltown.
And it's kind of going to be fun to watch because, you know, I mean, it's like watching a whole generation getting wiped out in 18 months.
I mean, I just can't.
Throughout history, I don't think there's ever been an incident like this where a whole generation wipes themselves out based on their own venality.
So it'll be interesting, I think.
And I think that'll be the last bubble, though.
Now, if you could just tilt your camera forward a bit, I just want to make sure I get your chin as well.
And I'd like if you could close off, and I think I can still see your face through well-justified moral spittle, which is great.
And I really do appreciate this.
And you touched on something very interesting, which was the culture.
The culture of, I mean, of course, the ancient Roman technique of pacifying the serfs with bread and circuses is alive and well in some of the junky entertainment that is going on in the world.
And you had, I think, A very insightful comment, which I'd like you to expand on if you could, about the degree to which you see media culture driving this hysteria, where you will get, in a sense, a financial wipeout when fiat currency meets virtual currency, which is two abstractions fighting out over the corpse of the body politic.
To what degree do you see the media playing a role in distracting people and keeping them sort of satisfied with the sort of silly puzzles and humiliating entertainments of reality television and away from the real issues of the time?
Just to repeat what you just said, it's exactly right.
Fiat currency meets virtual currency.
It creates an amalgam that is going to destroy what's left of the economy.
The role of the media, of course, is instrumental.
When I started on Wall Street back in 1983, I remember that the prospectuses that were forwarded around to the brokers and the bankers There was rules, for example, you couldn't have color photos on the red herrings because they might be an inducement to purchase the security.
Now, flash forward to CNBC and James Kramer, who's on the idiot box turning home shopping network Meets New York Stock Exchange.
And think of all the money, think of all the people James Kramer has bankrupted over the past 10 to 15 years.
I mean, he has lost more money for more people over that period of time than probably Stalin.
You know, he has totally destroyed the net worth of millions of people.
I mean, he was basically giving them marching orders through this recent $5 to $7 trillion wipeout.
So now, imagine a thousand James Kramer bloom.
And every TV network has a James Kramer who's going to be peddling Hollywood box office futures contracts and mixing it with entertainment news and a social networking site.
I tell you, it's going to be something.
It's going to be something that's going to be fascinating to behold.
Now, what is your advice?
I mean, I know that this is a tough question to ask, but for people who have less than stellar incomes, what would your advice be for how they could best prepare for the financial dislocations, to put it mildly, that seem to be coming down the pipe over the next few years?
Well, you know, I don't really...
Offer advice, investment advice, really, because that's not what I do.
The variations out there are extreme.
Everyone's situation is so different.
You really can't give an answer that just makes sense.
Beyond the fact that, as I've been saying for the past eight years, all I've really mentioned at all has been gold bullion.
That's all I've talked about.
A 21% gain per year in dollar terms, which is, I believe, outperforming Warren Buffett.
So it's been the most successful, consistent investment of the past eight years.
And that's all I've talked about.
And once again, in 2010, I would say it again, gold bullion in a world of fiat currency meets virtual currencies.
And with an impending, you know, cyber-nuclear fusion of virtual fiat ersatz cream pie currency madness, Obviously, you want to have the thing that the monarchs are going to have at the other end of this.
Gold bullion, beyond that, people have to make their own choices.
It depends on what their value systems are.
Some people have different value systems and value different things.
It's impossible to say how that's going to play out culturally.
Back in the 1960s, You know, you had an interesting cultural shift in the United States where you had a generational break where the new generation coming up really became very anarchistic and they took drugs and they tried to redefine that culture.
And it was a complete split that you really couldn't have predicted five years before.
Remember, five years before that, it was still very Lawrence Welk, Ozzie and Harriet, leave it to Beaver.
Then within five years, you had 1969, you had an amazing cultural transformation in a very compressed amount of time.
And I think, ultimately, we're going to go through one of these again.
And what comes out of that is going to be very, very interesting.
So the whole values will change.
The cultural values will change.
The cultural artifacts will completely change.
People, you know, and the good news is that usually during these periods, the cultural artifacts are greatly improved.
So the music of the 60s is great.
The art of the 60s is great.
You know, we went from the art of the 60s, we went in then to the disco period of the 70s, which was a bit of a, like a dark ages.
And then we went into the complete slumber period of Reagan in the 80s, where things really went into like a dark ages.
But over the past five or six years now, there's a percolation.
There's a bubbling up in the cultural zeitgeist now.
And I think that you're going to start to see some people rise up who are going to redefine the values and culture.
And so in that regard, it's exciting.
And so for this reason, when we talk about the collapse of this bubble economy, the good news is it's going to bring in something very exciting, culturally speaking.
So if you value culture and art and humanity, this is a welcome end to a 25-year neo-feudal capitalist nightmare.
Well, I think that's admirably put.
And I just wanted to point out that I won't necessarily put these words into your mouth.
But when you talk about people who read Adam Smith, I mean, they may read selections of the wealth of nations, they don't read the theory of moral sentiments, which is a much more important work when it comes to personal integrity, which is really what's lacking, I think, in many cases in the world.
The other thing that I would mention too that banks, sort of semi-corporate mercantilist banks lending fiat money to other governments is the complete opposite of the free market as Adam Smith envisioned it.
In fact, he consistently warned against cartels and the collusions of big business and government as being the opposite of voluntary and free exchange of value.
It is not the free market and I believe that through this cultural shift, We're either going to rediscover what voluntary transactions really mean, which is not government coercion or subsidies or national debts or any of that sort of nonsense, which is straight out of, as you say, feudalism.
We're either going to rediscover voluntary exchange or we're going to lose it completely.
And I think that the work that you're doing, to some degree the work that I'm doing, is trying to help people remember.
That there is a real black and white line between voluntary trade and all of this theft through inflation, fiat currency, the selling off of future generations through national debts that has nothing to do with what the free market is really all about but it's really to do with an overtaking of a kind of imperial colonialism of the voter through very powerful statist and corporatist forces Which are not operating in the free market for a variety of reasons.
I'm not going to say you can agree with all of that, but I wanted to put that opinion out there so people could at least sort of get where I'm coming from if they watch only this video of my series.
Well, I will agree with what you just said.
And what's gone wrong is the system of incentives.
So what we've seen since Adam Smith's day is a bastardization of the incentives offered in the economy.
In Adam Smith's day, the incentives were that individuals would have the right to compete and compete in ways that rewarded hard work and merit.
In the year 2006 and 2007 and 2008, we've got a system that incentivizes larceny and incentivizes theft.
And the winners are those who are stealing the most.
So this has nothing to do with what the whole system was about to begin with.
Right. I mean, Ayn Rand, I think, identified it quite well when she talked about the difference between the aristocracy of merit and production versus the aristocracy of political pull, and we're really shifting towards the latter.
But I think that the game is relatively up now, and I think people have the chance to look at something new.
Now, I really do appreciate your time.
I'd really like to give you the opportunity to give your contact information, your website, and so on, so that people who are interested by your Rapid fire, very fascinating and occasionally tangential, not that I'm one to complain.
Thoughts can pursue your thinking further.
Yes, of course. Well, thanks for having me on the show.
And basically, MaxKeiser.com, that's K-E-I-S-E-R, is the hub around which there are a few different spokes, including our various TV shows on Russia Today, Press TV, and other outlets.
Well, thanks, Max, and I appreciate you holding the mainstream media's feet to the fire when it comes to describing what is happening in Greece and other places.
So thank you so much for going out there and speaking the truth, and I hope that you get more than 10 seconds at a time to explain your perspective, but thank you so much for doing what you're doing.
All right, thanks. All right, all the best.
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