Viva & Barnes - Viva & Barnes SIDEBAR! Crypto, Stablecoins and More! Live with Brent Johnson, CEO of Santiago Capital!

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Oct. 27, 2025 - Viva & Barnes

01:00:14

Viva & Barnes SIDEBAR! Crypto, Stablecoins and More! Live with Brent Johnson, CEO of Santiago Capital!

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	1907 panic nearly destroyed us.
	Banks failed.
	Fortunes vanished.
	We want to control America's money supply, create booms, trigger busts, and profit from both.
	And how will we do that?
	We'll create money from nothing, loan it to the government, and charge interest.
	Legal counterfeiting, my friends.
	But there's a cost.
	Every dollar we print steals value from existing dollars.
	It's a hidden tax that flows directly to us.
	And it gets worse.
	If we ever get off the gold standard, governments can print money for wars.
	Endless wars become possible and profitable.
	Since Americans hate central banks, we'll call it the Federal Reserve.
	Sounds governmental, doesn't it?
	It's not.
	The president will appoint board members, but we'll pick who he appoints.
	We'll have 12 retail banks.
	Looks decentralized, Democratic, even.
	But New York banks control them all.
	That's us.
	You're probably wondering how we're going to get this through Congress.
	December 23rd, 1913.
	Most of Congress home for Christmas.
	Perfect timing for passing unpopular legislation.
	I'll publicly oppose our own bill in Congress.
	They'll pass it thinking they beat Wall Street.
	We'll fund university chairs, write the textbooks.
	They'll teach our system as economic science.
	Beautiful.
	Every American born after this will inherit debt on money we created from nothing.
	Generational servitude.
	The Federal Reserve.
	Not federal, no reserves.
	But everyone will think it's their government protecting them.
	Good afternoon.
	That's fantastic.
	Now, we're just going to ask about the accuracy of this because I see things on the internet and I don't know exactly how accurate they are because I know the limitations of my own knowledge.
	Let me just make sure I'm on the good mic, which I'm.
	Now we're on the good mic, people.
	We're not wasting any more time.
	I wanted to play that as just a brief intro before I bring in our guest for the day, Brent Johnson.
	Have I screwed this up?
	Hold on a second.
	No, I'm good.
	Okay, bringing in Barnes first.
	Robert, how goes the battle, sir?
	Good, good.
	And now we're bringing in Brent.
	Now, I'm going to go like this because I think I should be on the bottom.
	It'll look a little bit more appropriate.
	Okay, sir.
	How goes the battle?
	Very good.
	Can't complain.
	Give us a 30,000-foot overview.
	I mean, I read your bio and I can read it from your website, but just so everybody knows your credentials and knows your history, before we get into the first question of the day, which is the historical accuracy of that intro video, who are you for those who are meeting you for the first time today?
	Yeah, well, thanks for having me.
	My name is Brent Johnson.
	I've got a wealth management firm called Santiago Capital.
	I started doing this in 1999, and so I've been lucky enough to see the dot-com boom, the real estate or the dot-com bust, the real estate boom, the bust, the Euro crisis, COVID, and everything in between.
	So it's been quite a ride.
	You're well known for the dollar milkshake, as it's colloquially described in the Finn Twit circles.
	But for those that are unfamiliar with it, could you give sort of a basic description of your thesis and how it's gone so far?
	Sure.
	Well, the thesis was, it's based on the fact that I think the world has borrowed an incredible amount of money.
	The debt has gotten to a level where I think we're going to start having the consequences of borrowing all that money.
	And I kind of explained that despite all the sins that the United States has created for a number of reasons, some deserved, some undeserved, I thought the capital of the world would flow into the United States and the United States would suck up all the money that gets printed as a result of responding to the crisis.
	Now, we never really had the crisis.
	We came close a couple of times.
	You know, COVID was close.
	2022 was close.
	We never really had the crisis, but the asset prices moved in the way that I thought they would if we had the crisis.
	So from that perspective, it's been a great framework for understanding what the hell is going on in the world.
	And some people have, you know, enjoyed the theory.
	Some people absolutely hate it.
	But it's certainly been an interesting time to be part of it.
	Brent, I started off with that video about the Federal Reserve and the meme on the internet.
	So it goes, the Federal Reserve is neither federal nor reserve.
	Nothing, no, say not no accountability, but it's not a government entity.
	I said I'm going to start with my stupid question of the day, which is what a debt, because in one of your podcasts, you referred to the Fed Reserve as a debt-based monetary system.
	And so, I mean, it's one big question.
	How accurate was that two-minute synopsis of the Federal Reserve?
	And what does it mean that the U.S. financial system is a debt-based model?
	So I think it's fairly accurate from a historical perspective.
	That is kind of what happened.
	You know, a bunch of bankers met in late December of 1913, and out of that came the plan that they had had for a while, which is a quote-unquote central bank of the United States.
	I think it does a good job of telling the story.
	I don't think it tells the whole story.
	And so I don't really have anything to say bad about it, but I think there's more to it than that.
	As far as a debt-based monetary system, what they're talking about is moving away from a gold standard and getting on a debt-based monetary system.
	What that means is money is basically created out of thin air.
	When you look at the monetary system today, we have a monetary base.
	The monetary base is made up of three different things: currency, physical currency, physical coins, and then reserves that are put at the Federal Reserve.
	So the banks place reserves at the Federal Reserve.
	Now, since QE started, the Fed actually increases those reserves that the banks once had to put there themselves, but that's the monetary base.
	And I think a lot of people think that when a bank lends you money, they are lending you somebody else's money that was deposited at the bank.
	But that's not the way it works.
	Money gets deposited at the bank.
	That stays at the bank, and they use that money as collateral to loan new money into existence.
	And so that loan creates more deposits.
	And so you end up getting a monetary base that gets levered several times.
	So right now, the monetary base is like six or seven trillion.
	I think M2, which is kind of a rough calculation for the overall money supply is around 22 or 23 trillion.
	So it's like 300% levered.
	So if everybody went to get their money on the same day, there's actually not enough money to pull out of the bank because there's not 23 billion of physical dollars and coins and stuff out there.
	So that's what I mean when I say money is loaned into existence.
	And speaking of which, I've been intrigued by Richard Werner's work, Princes of the Yen, that developed in other ways, in which he showed that contrary to what we're taught in our little economics classes at college and high school and elsewhere, that it's primarily the main issuer of currency really isn't the government anymore.
	It's private banks, globally.
	Absolutely correct.
	And then parallel to it, the intriguing work that we will bridge into the stablecoin discussion, Jeff Snyder is one of the more popular podcasters in this space.
	There's a wide range of intellectual and academic research on it, but it's mostly suppressed in that the way I explain it is the Euro dollar system, that a lot of money is issued, not even by U.S. banks, that is the U.S. dollar, that the digital world that really became a ledger world prior to that,
	that the digital world is codifying in literal code, that it created the opportunity for anybody that, to a degree, to choose their balance, to choose their medium of exchange in some other government's currency.
	The way I try to explain this to the normie is, you know, about 90% of all dollars, maybe more, that are on somebody's balance sheet somewhere in the world were never issued by the U.S. government or the Federal Reserve.
	Do I have that basically right?
	And can you give another basic explanation of what this Euro dollar credit creation system is?
	No, no, you have it exactly right.
	And this is where I say the video wasn't correct, but it didn't tell the whole story.
	The reality is, is that most of the quote-unquote money printing that everybody likes to say, money printer Gober, it's actually done by the commercial banks and the global commercial banks and even non-financial entities and non-bank identity or institutions.
	It's not so much the governments themselves, quote unquote, printing the money.
	It's kind of a partnership, I guess is the way to say it.
	And that is the nature.
	It's funny that it's funny that you bring that up because I, for a long time, didn't even know what the Euro dollar was.
	I'd heard the word.
	I didn't really know what it was.
	When I found out what it was, I didn't realize how big it was.
	When I finally figured it out, it was like the light bulb moment.
	I was like, holy cow, this changes everything.
	And it really does.
	And I think what you really have to take in order to understand the Euro dollar market and to understand the Federal Reserve and to understand the problem that we have, and then to take it one step further and understand why I think stable coins are a big deal, you kind of have to have a little bit of a fundamental understanding of what money is.
	Now, I know everybody will raise their hand and say, I know what money is, but you actually have to define it.
	You would be surprised at how big of a debate ensues when you're asked to actually define money.
	Some people believe money is a derivative of the free market that is used to satisfy the double coincidence of wants so you don't have to barter.
	Other people say money is what the government demands in tribute in the form of taxes.
	And sometimes it's the same thing, sometimes it's not.
	But the point is, is regardless of whichever one it is, money is used as a tool or as a means of control that governments use against its own citizens or to marshal its citizens in a certain way.
	Really powerful countries can use money to get other countries to do what they want to do.
	Not all countries can do it, but some countries can do it.
	And by the fact that the global reserve currency is the U.S. dollar, the U.S. has more control over the global monetary system than any other one government.
	Now, that doesn't mean the United States has full control.
	And in fact, this Euro dollar market sprung up from the fact that there was institutions outside the United States that wanted to transact in dollars, but did not want to be beholden to or controlled by the United States, most notably the Soviet Union after World War II.
	When they were doing operations and doing trade in Europe post-World War II, a lot of it was done in dollars because, again, the dollar was the global reserve currency.
	But they didn't want to hold those dollar balances in U.S. banks because the U.S. could confiscate them, just like they did two or three years ago, right?
	So they started holding these balances in European banks.
	And then the European banks said, well, we've got these dollar balances.
	We shouldn't just let them sit there.
	Let's put them to work.
	And so they started making dollar loans, but using those dollars as collateral.
	And then this grew and it got bigger and it got bigger.
	Then when the United States went off the gold standard, there was a lot of choice.
	You know, are we going to continue using the dollar as the global reserve currency?
	Are we going to switch to something else?
	But because this Euro dollar market had already started to grow and countries around the world were already using dollars, even without the gold being backing it, it was already kind of global money.
	And then when the United States agreed to the deal with Saudi Arabia, where all oil gets priced in dollars, that turbocharged the need for dollars.
	And that made this Euro dollar market grow even more.
	And so now the Euro dollar market is so big and it's so opaque.
	There's been several attempts to try to measure it and you can't even measure it.
	But suffice to say, it's at least $100 trillion and probably $700 trillion if you start adding up derivatives and off-balance sheet items and non-bank entities and non-bank financial institutions.
	It's just, it's like this monster out there that has grown on its own.
	And initially, the U.S. was kind of okay with it because it created demand for dollars.
	That's part of the reason the U.S. can print so much money and get away with it is because there's so much demand outside the United States for that currency.
	But it also created this monster that can boomerang back on the United States.
	The United States doesn't like not no country, there's not a country that does not want to fully control the money.
	Money is a means of control.
	And so the U.S. would very much like to get that Euro dollar market under its control, but it currently isn't.
	Again, they have more control than anybody else, but they don't control it.
	And so that's kind of where we're at today.
	You know, there's a lot of countries that would like to de-dollarize.
	There's many institutions or many regimes that would like to get out from underneath the influence of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency.
	It's very easy to say you're going to do it.
	It's very easy to hold a conference saying, you know, talking about the plans to do it.
	It's a whole other thing to actually do it.
	But that's where we're at today.
	And just to explain, because I was actually just going to ask the question of what it meant to come off the gold standard, it basically meant that the government no longer had to issue money in correlation to or backed by the amount of physical gold it had.
	It could just make money out of thin air.
	That's right.
	And again, it used to be that if you had dollars, you could turn them into the U.S. Treasury and the U.S. Treasury exchange them for gold.
	That is no longer the case.
	But it's important to remember that it wasn't just the United States that was quote unquote printing dollars.
	The whole world was printing dollars by loaning them into existence.
	And that's the pressure that put on the United States and why they eventually abandoned Bretton Woods and the gold standard.
	Right before we have, but you have it right.
	You have it right.
	Because we're going to draw an analogy to stable coins versus if you're stable coining your digital coins with currency that itself is untethered to any underlying value.
	I'll come back to that question in a bit actually.
	Sorry, Robert, what were you going to say?
	Oh, yeah.
	Well, right before we bridge into that, could you explain the desire for the dollar as a means of exchange around the world?
	In other words, that a lot of times I see people have this very almost like 1980s version of the global economics.
	Now, part of that's because of the miseducation and misinformation provided in the schools and the universities and even to a large extent the think tanks and the prop politicians.
	I doubt 95% of members of Congress could pass an economic literacy test on our monetary system, unfortunately.
	Heck, that even applies to a fair number of people in the White House.
	God bless them.
	Maybe not Scott Besson.
	He's good at making sure his pals got taken care of just like he did in Argentina recently.
	God bless them.
	The George Soros taught, oh, Scotty, well, the, but putting that aside for the moment, the like the way I was trying to explain to people is if you're, let's say, a farmer in Uganda and your food product maybe going to go over to the Argentina consumer markets and you're deciding how to denominate the transaction, how you will, you know, you, what medium of exchange you'll use for how you'll get paid and how you'll pay, that the US dollar is the safest, easiest, most stable one.
	It may be the ugly, it may be a real ugly partner at the end of the night at the bar, but prettier than all the other folks that are at the bar.
	Can you explain how that works functionally?
	Sure.
	So, I mean, global trade for the most part, and of course there are exceptions, but by and large, global trade takes place in dollars, especially commodity-based.
	They're invoiced in dollars.
	They're transacted in dollars.
	Now, there may be some currency conversions along the way, but they're priced in dollars.
	So if it ends up, if you end up paying for it in Argentinian pesos, you have to use the Argentinian peso equivalent of the dollar amount that it was invoiced in to settle the trade.
	And the reason, part of the reason that the dollar is the global reserve currency was initially because of the Bretton Woods and World War II, but then more so because that is what the world chose on the free market to use as money.
	This is the Euro dollar market.
	What I think a lot of people don't realize is that the Euro dollar market, this market for dollars outside of the United States, that was not the United States going around and telling a manufacturer in Turkey that they had to do business in dollars with a trade partner in India.
	Those two entities chose to do that because it was the most liquid and it was the safest and it was the most convenient out of all the fiat options.
	Now, in 1971, the world could have said, you know what, we don't want to use fiat anymore.
	We want to use gold.
	And they could have, you know, just stayed on a gold standard, but kicked the U.S. out of it.
	But they didn't do that.
	They chose to continue using fiat and they really chose to continue using the Euro dollar.
	And because there is so much demand for dollars all over the world, it makes it the most liquid fiat currency in the world.
	It makes the most likely to be accepted by a counterparty.
	And as a result, it becomes the biggest market.
	It's the most trusted and it's therefore the most liquid.
	And a lot of times, I think a lot of people, when they think about the dollar and how it's a bad currency, I think they're thinking about it in purchasing power terms.
	And that is true.
	But you must remember, fiat currency is designed to lose purchasing power.
	It's not supposed to retain its purchasing power.
	So it's functioning the way it's supposed to.
	Now, you might not like that.
	You may think that's a stupid design, but most of the world, that's what they use, right?
	And so if you're going to operate on the global stage, this is not a dollar versus Bitcoin or a dollar versus gold or dollar versus diamonds argument.
	This is a dollar versus other fiat currency argument.
	And when you measure it on that basis, which is what most global trade takes place in, the US dollar far and away beats the other currencies.
	Now, de-dollarization has been a very popular topic the last kind of 10, 15, 20 years.
	And it gets a lot of publicity because it sounds cool and it sounds interesting.
	And people like to think about the United States burning down into a pile of ashes.
	But the reality is, is that all of those, all the progress that has been made on that front, there is some progress at the margin.
	And there are some trade deals that take place in non-dollar.
	And there is a great desire to increase that.
	But again, it's very much at the margin.
	And it's not when you actually measure the volume that's done in dollars versus everything else, it's really not much of a competition.
	There is no other, there is no other country on earth that uses anything other than the same fiat currency model that itself is basically allows any government anywhere on earth to print endlessly.
	Yeah, that's the thing.
	I mean, the rest of, let's just use Europe as an example, right?
	Or let's use Japan.
	Brazil and Argentina could choose to trade with each other in yen if they decided to.
	They could develop a Euro yen market, you know, a market for yen outside of Japan if they wanted to, but they don't want to because it's not as exciting.
	And that's the second or third biggest currency on the planet.
	And it's, it's not, but you want the most demanded currency on the planet.
	You want the most liquid.
	You don't want to pay a big spread.
	You don't want to have to go when you go to the store, you don't want to have to go around, or when you go to the mall, you don't want to have to shop around at different stores to see which one will take your currency.
	You want to go, you want to have the currency that all stores will accept and all the stores accept US dollars.
	One more question before we bridge into stablecoins.
	I am curious about, you know, the Euro really was launched to compete with the US dollar on the global stage.
	And now those other objectives that people are now witnessing in the European in Europe as to what the European Union was about, a little more totalitarian, authoritarian, et cetera.
	Putting that aside for the moment, but the Euro, that effort has failed.
	And in fact, if anybody has suffered from the sanctions wars over the past five years, particularly against Russia, it's the Euro more than anybody.
	But why do you think, I remember when I was watching when they first did the Euro and then they announced like a 500 Euro and it was really thin.
	And I was like, man, that is great for drug dealers.
	They're designing money to be circulating in the black market.
	You know, 500 instead of 100, even the size and the scale of it was made so you could pack it in certain ways.
	But why did the Euro effort fail to displace and replace the dollar?
	Well, so it's not that I totally disagree with you, but I disagree with you a little bit on what its intention was.
	I think the primary goal of the Euro was to unite Europe into the United States of Europe.
	Now, I don't think that was ever going to happen, but that was the dream, right?
	And part of it was to more integrate the country or to integrate the continent.
	And eventually, I think the idea was to get into a common debt market.
	Now, they've never gotten there, but to have a common currency without a common debt market, that's kind of stupid on its, but stupidity has never stopped the government from doing anything in history.
	So, you know, we put that aside.
	But I think part of the reason that it didn't quote unquote replace the United States dollar was because the US dollar just had such a head start.
	Essentially, the dollar is a network.
	And it's like, it's kind of like Twitter.
	Everybody loves to hate Twitter.
	Everybody says they're going to leave.
	Everybody says they're going to go to use a different one.
	But everybody ends up coming back to Twitter because that's where everybody is.
	Even if they hate Elon, they end up back on Twitter because that's where the action is.
	Right.
	And it's not to say that these other platforms aren't good.
	It's not to say that these other platforms can't work, but that's just not where the volume is.
	And so the dollar is kind of the same way.
	And I think for a while, the Euro did take some, this is the other part I would say is I don't think that the Euro was launched to the great dismay of the United States.
	I think the United States blessed it.
	And I think to some extent, the U.S. wanted some pressure off of the dollar.
	Remember, most of the times throughout history that special operations have been done, either by the Treasury or the Fed, it's to weaken the dollar.
	It's not to strengthen the dollar.
	The Plaza Accord was to weaken the dollar.
	All of the QE that's done, that's to weaken the dollar.
	The problem is in this debt-based monetary system that we talked at the beginning, eventually that debt comes due.
	And when that debt comes due, that tends to make the underlying currency rise because you need that currency to pay off that debt.
	And so even though they do all these special operations, it's typically just a matter of time before the dollar strengthens again.
	And then they have to come in and do some new program to weaken it.
	And I think the Euro coming into existence, I think, was part of potentially taking some of that upward pressure off the dollar.
	This is going to be the jagged segue right into the stablecoin question.
	I mean, it's going to go back to the question that I asked earlier about when they took the U.S. off the gold standard.
	It basically meant they didn't have to match every dollar out there for a dollar of gold that they would keep in some reserve.
	We have this advent now of the stablecoin, which I think a lot of people are misunderstanding.
	And I'm always full disclosure.
	This is not an ad for Tether.
	We work with Rumble, who's trying to compete on dethroning the YouTube, which is sort of like another currency trying to dethrone the American dollar in the digital world.
	I didn't understand fully what a stablecoin was.
	And now that I understand it, I appreciate its international appeal and its potential for reestablishing or not reestablishing, strengthening the international core supremacy of the US dollar by digitizing it for markets that don't have access to physical US dollars.
	Explain what the digital, what the stable coin is.
	And then my question is going to be what the risk of stablecoin problems are barring absolute falsification of audits, which are intended to correlate a dollar for dollar digital versus real.
	Well, so I think using the gold standard is a good example and a good way to segue into this.
	The way that you used to have, there used to be faith in the dollar because it was convertible into a piece of gold.
	So you could say it was gold backed.
	Now, a US dollar stablecoin, the way it is going to maintain its value or the way it is intended to maintain its value is to buy US dollar assets and typically short-term US dollar assets, which kind of for the most part translates into either short-term or short-term bonds or T-bills of United States treasuries.
	And that is the way when somebody wants to get out of their stablecoin and get into actual dollars, they can exchange one for the other.
	Or that's how it's supposed to maintain its value.
	Now, theoretically, what could happen is a company could issue a US dollar stablecoin.
	Let's say they issue a billion dollars of this coin, but then they only have, they only turn around and buy $700 billion worth of T-bills.
	They take the other $300 billion and put it in their Swiss bank account or wherever it is.
	And then at some point, that value could break.
	If enough people tried to get out of that coin and go into something else, they would not be able to meet their obligation.
	And then therefore, that stable coin would no longer be stable and it would collapse.
	I think that has long been the fear for many stable coins because, as you said, the audits perhaps weren't as stringent as they should be.
	It was a very opaque market.
	Some would be issued in a country that wasn't as strict about transparency as the United States was.
	But that is essentially how it would work is it would allow an entity to issue a coin, back it with US dollar assets.
	And what that does, it does a couple of things.
	But I think it also, I think this is what most people have been focused on.
	But I think by focusing on this, they missed the big strategic picture.
	It has been focused on the United States is now on an official basis going to bless these stable coins, right?
	Whether the treasury just comes out and says, we like these, you can do them, or they come out and they say, you're going to have to apply for a license.
	The Genius Act has based it, which is a law that's been passed by the United States.
	It's put into doctrine or whatever the right legal term.
	It is now a law that says how these stable coins must operate.
	And so it legitimizes the structure to a certain extent.
	And as a result, there's a lot of people saying that the United States or these institutions are going to issue these stable coins.
	And when they issue these stable coins, they're going to have to buy the U.S. debt to back them.
	And so that's going to be a new source of demand for U.S. debt.
	And it's going to allow the U.S. to continue printing money or borrowing money longer than they otherwise could have.
	And it's not that that's necessarily wrong, but I think that misses the big strategic strategic advantage that these stable coins offer.
	Because what a stable coin will allow is it is kind of like the Euro dollar on steroids.
	And not only that, these this starts to get a little wonky, but some people are going to say this is really simple.
	Some people that are new to the thing, new to this topic, may get a little confused.
	But traditionally, U.S. dollars have traveled over these Euro dollar channels via the Swift network and some of these other legacy payment systems and messaging systems between banks.
	And that's the system I was talking about.
	The U.S. has some visibility, some control, but doesn't completely control.
	But these stable coins via code, these channels are not only visible, but they're programmable.
	And so it gives the U.S. complete visibility or potentially gives the U.S. complete visibility and control.
	They can shut it down.
	They can open it up.
	They can turn somebody's money off.
	They can turn it back on.
	So it's the control aspect that I think is a bigger advantage than the demand for the debt.
	But the other part is it also allows the U.S. to quote unquote dollarize the world if they wanted to.
	Or the world could get dollarized even if the U.S. didn't want them to, the same way the Euro dollar flourished outside the purview of the United States.
	Because in the traditional financial markets, if you live in, let's just say, I don't know, let's just say Turkey, right?
	And you want to hold a US dollar balance, you have to go open a bank account, and then it has to be with a bank that allows you to hold dollars.
	And then that bank may limit the amount of dollars you have.
	They may limit the dollar amount.
	Even if you have them, they may limit the amount you can take out.
	What the stable coin does is it allows somebody who doesn't even have a bank to all of a sudden hold a US dollar balance because they can hold it on their phone.
	And as long as there's an internet connection, they can connect to the internet, download a wallet, and they can transact or they can hold these US dollar stable coins.
	So it completely disintermediates or has the potential to completely disintermediate the traditional banking system.
	And you would think that that would not necessarily be a bad thing.
	And it wouldn't be a bad thing unless that country started to get into some kind of fiscal problem and the citizens wanted to exit the local currency.
	Traditionally, the way that Turkey, as an example, would fight against that is, again, they would limit the amount of US dollars you could hold in the first place.
	And then, if you wanted to take them out of your account, they would limit it even more.
	And so, if you wanted to get out of Turkish lira, you literally had to go find physical US dollars on the black market and hold those.
	You no longer have to do that.
	And so, the ability for, and in these other countries, again, as Americans, perhaps you think the US dollar is a horrible currency.
	But for the rest of the world, from a fiat perspective, the dollar is the hardest currency for the strongest currency.
	And if you don't believe me, just when next time you travel, talk to locals and ask them, you know, what currency do you prefer?
	Do you prefer to keep your savings in your local currency or do you prefer to hold it in something else?
	And will you take dollars or will you take yen?
	You know, it's fun to kind of have these conversations and see what they will take.
	But the point is, is on a fiat versus fiat basis, many, you know, entities, many people, many even small, medium institutions abroad would want to hold dollar balances as opposed to local currency balances.
	And the problem is, is that can exacerbate the weakness of the local currency versus the dollar.
	And one of the things that I said at the very beginning is money is a means of control.
	If the Turkish government loses control of the monetary system within Turkey and citizens now start to hold dollar balances rather than lira balances, the Turkish government starts to lose control.
	They don't like that, right?
	But these digital dollars on a phone makes it much easier for the Turkish citizens to circumvent whatever capital controls or laws or regulations that they have historically, that the Turkish government has historically been able to put into place.
	And just about, if you look back through history, any country that has had a currency crisis or whose currency has failed, the government typically fails shortly thereafter.
	And again, it goes back to control.
	It's because money is a means of control.
	And if you can't control the money, then you can't control the society.
	And it really gets into sovereignty as well.
	And we wrote about this in our paper.
	To be sovereign is to basically have absolute power.
	It means you're beholden to no one and you answer to nobody.
	It's the total opposite of being a slave.
	But if you are subservient to a form of money that you cannot control, you are no longer sovereign.
	And so this is a way that the U and the best weapons are the ones that people don't even know are being used, right?
	And so this, and by the way, I don't know if people realize this, like money as a weapon, this isn't some idea that I just came up with.
	This is military doctrine.
	The United States Army, Marines, they know how to use money as a weapon.
	It's taught at their colleges.
	It's implemented in their actions when they've been in foreign theaters.
	And so this is not some foreign concept that they're going to have to learn how to do.
	They already know how to do this.
	It's just a matter of whether they do it or not.
	But to me, I missed this initially.
	When stable coins kind of first came around, I was very skeptical.
	I didn't think too much about them.
	I thought many of the companies that were operating in them were probably a little bit shady, and they probably were.
	And perhaps they weren't fully backed the way they were supposed to.
	But I think with the United States coming in kind of on an official basis, turning this into law, and then if and when they give it kind of their official blessing, I think it makes these stable coins much more legitimate, if that's the right way to say it.
	And I think they will proliferate much more than they already have.
	And I think that has incredible consequences for global geopolitical relations, sovereignty, global sovereignty.
	And I think it's going to be a real, real challenge for the rest of the rest of the world should be very afraid of a US dollar stablecoin.
	I'll just put it that way.
	Yeah, I was, you know, as soon as I saw all the politicians for it, you know, the stable, this act, the Clarity Act, all the rest.
	Like, I know the Trump administration had sort of bought into it for both political reasons and personal monetary reasons.
	I mean, there's a Melania's meme coin that led to a lawsuit and all that kind of thing.
	But I was like, something else is clearly afoot here.
	And it reminded me like crypto was sort of pitched as the ultimate exit ramp from the control grid, you know, like the Tron, like the original Tron movie's not the most recent abomination.
	You know, throw that one out.
	And now this feels like a return entrance ramp to lock people back into the grid without even their full knowledge or notice.
	It's like people think they're being invited to the four seasons Bora Bora.
	And once they get inside, they're in a financial Alcatraz.
	I remember being Russia on this years ago.
	Go ahead.
	No, I was going to say the Ritz-Carlton in Saudi Arabia, I think, would be a good example, right?
	You're in a luxury hotel, but it's really because MBS has you there shaking you down, right?
	And the irony here is that this technology was developed as a private market attempt to subvert governmental control.
	Or at least that's the common belief.
	And so it's pretty interesting to see the state or the government, however you want to define the powers that be, kind of co-opt these private market innovations in a way that can ironically, you know, build the quote-unquote prison walls higher than they ever were before.
	And again, I don't think people realize how effective this can be.
	And we tried to lay it out as well as possible in our paper.
	So I'd encourage people to read it.
	But it's really fast.
	For me, I work in the markets.
	I love geopolitics.
	I love the madness of crowds.
	And this stablecoin thing sits right at the intersection of all of those things.
	It's fascinating.
	I was showing a link, and I think the link I shared had something behind a paywall.
	The paper that Barnes and I read, is that publicly available or do you need to be behind it?
	It is publicly available, but you do need to pay for it.
	So we have a research service.
	We have two different levels.
	I'm sorry if you don't mind me.
	I'll just if you're a short service.
	I'll give a short little plug here.
	But we have a research service.
	We have two levels of service.
	One is $400 a year and one is $2,400 a year.
	This is our higher level publication, but we've made it for the next 10 days.
	Anybody that signs up in the next 10 days for the $400 a year gets access to this pro-level report.
	And we're doing that because we think this is one of our more important reports and we want to give as many people access to it as possible.
	But we also have to keep, you know, for our long-term pro-tier subscribers, we can't just give it away for free either.
	Just so people understand why I'm, first of all, Barnes and I have no cut in this, but I think you might be saying, why are you sending us a behind a paywall link?
	I'm not ripping Brent's work and then giving it away to his detriment for free.
	Brent, okay, the digital prison and cryptocurrency, people are concerned that this is like the first step towards CBDC.
	You mentioned that it's easy and easier for the government to turn on and off the currency.
	Now, I don't know if you mean on like a global scale, on a global liquidity scale, or on an individual trapping people and making America into China.
	I'm not on the fence of this.
	I'm back and forth about this because we're already on something of a CBDC.
	It's called our credit card.
	They can already shut us out.
	They just have the banks say, all right, it's nice that crypto is available online, but we're not going to let you buy it.
	And we're going to freeze your credit card every time you try to.
	And so we're already, if not entirely, on some form of cashless digital currency society, I think we're already there.
	Where I'm back and forth is it looks like the CBDC is a way to actually circumvent government control over your finances and their ability to shut you off by shutting off your credit card or by freezing your bank account.
	And then you'd have access to these digital funds through other means that are more difficult for the government to physically shut on and off.
	And I don't know which way is right.
	I mean, if you can flesh that out for me.
	Well, so I don't think you're wrong, but this is where this is where I say I think the U.S. is co-opting the innovation that was designed to escape the prison.
	And so I think initially that is why these stable coins and digital assets and crypto, however you want to describe this whole ecosystem was developed.
	You know, there was a, I'm sure you guys have heard of the book, The Sovereign Individual.
	You know, it came out like 25 years ago.
	And, you know, having this electronic form of stateless money was a huge part of that.
	So it's, you know, this has been a big movement.
	But again, it gets back to the network of the U.S. dollar.
	And this is where I don't know exactly how this is going to play out, but right now, anybody who's wanted to issue a US dollar stablecoin has been able to.
	Perhaps the U.S. will come out and say anybody that continues to operate a stablecoin will have to get a license from U.S. Treasury or will have to meet certain standards that they haven't already had to.
	But they will want to get some visibility or control over this in some way or another.
	Regarding, you know, is it a way to control the rest of the world or is it a way to use it against its own citizens?
	So it's probably both, right?
	I mean, I think people are going to laugh at this and it's going to sound a little dark.
	But, you know, if you think of, if you think of a country like a farm or a ranch, it makes a lot more sense.
	You know, some ranches are free-range and they let you roam around and eat whatever you want.
	And, you know, but at the end of the day, you're still staying within those confines.
	Other ranchers, you know, they have you locked up in a really tight pen and you get outside for one hour a day and they give you not very good food to eat.
	But, you know, but at the end of the day, it's livestock.
	It's management of livestock.
	Right.
	And so, you know, the fact that the farmer may want to control the farms.
	that are his neighbors and in his whole country and da da da, but he also wants to control the individual livestock within his farm.
	And, you know, perhaps on certain days he does one and on other days he does another.
	But the point is, is that the current system, while it is somewhat influenced and controlled by the United States, they don't have full control.
	If they were able to get the traditional financial system to leave the traditional Euro dollar rails and migrate over to the new US dollar stablecoin plumbing or rails, however you want to describe that, which they would then have more control over than they currently do, I think they would love that.
	Again, you have to be, if you look at this very cynically, which I tend to, whenever I analyze something, I analyze it cynically, because if you analyze it with rose-colored glasses, you're going to come to rose-colored conclusions.
	But if you analyze something cynically, you're going to undercover all the bad parts of it.
	And so that way, if the bad parts don't come true, that's great, but at least you're ready for the bad parts if they do.
	And if you analyze this from a control perspective, it is kind of potentially the ultimate means of control, which gets back to what you were talking about, a central bank digital currency.
	You know, Trump said we're never going to have a central bank digital currency.
	And there was always pushback against that because the United States was founded on individual freedom and individual rights.
	And the government, the Constitution said what the government could do, not what the individuals could do.
	And so a central bank digital currency is many ways un-American.
	But the way they'll get around that is they'll just make it a treasury coin rather than a central bank coin.
	But at the end of the day, it is a CBDC.
	It's just called something differently.
	But I know, and I'm kind of jumping around here, but this splinters out into so many areas.
	I think this is also one of the ways in which Treasury gets control over the Fed.
	So, you know, you said at the very beginning, is this accurate?
	Is this group of bankers, this Federal Reserve that's not really federal, are they independent?
	They're sort of independent, but the U.S. granted them that license and the U.S. with a stroke of a pen can take that license away too.
	So I think the independent central bank is one of the biggest myths that they teach at the business school.
	It's true to an extent, but if you go too far, your charter will get revoked and the government will remain in control.
	But there's often been over the last, since the Fed was created, I think there's been four or five, maybe six, like public, like very public spats between the executive branch and the president and the Federal Reserve, when the president wanted them to do one thing and the Federal Reserve refused to do it.
	And interestingly, the Federal Reserve has a pretty good track record in this.
	I think they've won three out of five or four out of five.
	But anybody who's been paying attention to Trump and Powell over the last year knows that they're not really in agreement right now.
	And we've got another Fed meeting this week and he's going to cut rates, but he's probably not going to cut rates as much as Trump wants him to.
	And Trump is probably going to say something about what a horrible central banker he is.
	And in the next couple of days, you're probably going to see headlines about this very topic.
	But as regardless of how it exactly plays out, because I don't know, but I think the Treasury and the President are trying to get more control over the central bank.
	Now, whether these two ultimately get merged, whether they just work together on a closer basis, whether the Fed gets shut down, I don't know.
	But I think this, if the Treasury issues a stablecoin, it is a way to circumvent the banks because everybody could just open an account directly with the Treasury.
	Remember what I said at the beginning, the money that gets printed is primarily from the banks, right?
	And it's kind of a partnership between the government, the Fed, and the commercial banks to kind of run the system.
	This is a way to potentially get the banks out of there or get the Fed out of there and more so go directly to the people.
	It's almost like in 2008 or was it 2007, 2008, when Obama started tweeting, right?
	And he said, this is a way for me to interact directly with the people.
	He didn't have to go through the news agencies.
	He didn't have to go through the print media.
	It's not that they were talking bad about him anyway, but it was a way for him to avoid them, right?
	And this is kind of the same thing.
	It's a way for technology to allow the government to skip an intermediary and go directly to the people.
	And in some ways, that may be more efficient.
	In some ways, it may be less efficient, but it probably grants them more control.
	And, you know, I think, you know, BRICS might have some success if to the degree the focal point is having assets stored in such a way that they're not easily seizable by the West.
	But that is radically different than a replacement currency to dominate global trade.
	Can you explain why that, you know, I've been trying to explain for several years a lot of my friends on the sort of anti-empire, anti-establishment, anti-Fed think BRICS is coming and it's surging and it's growing and it's about to replace the U.S. dollar and the US dollars disappearing and the petrodollar is vanishing and so on and so forth.
	That there's really no evidence of that at all.
	And if anything, the stablecoin revolution further enhances the capacity of the dollar to dominate simply because not what governments demand or compel or coerce, but what people and businesses on an everyday basis around the world choose.
	That's right.
	The private market is going to do the government's work for them, is what I would say.
	In the same way that the Euro dollar market dollarized the world for the U.S., the stablecoin market can dollarize the world further for the U.S. But regarding the BRICS, the BRICS are never going to issue a common currency.
	And anybody who keeps saying this on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, they're just, it's all cope.
	These countries, listen, they are powerful countries.
	And I am not downplaying the power that they have, but they're not natural allies.
	They have enough internal problems of their own.
	The idea that they're going to launch a common currency that they're all equally on board with, and then the rest of the world is just going to automatically accept it.
	It's just, to me, it's fantasy.
	Or instead of issuing another currency or agreeing on one common currency among the already existing five currencies.
	Right.
	Both equally improbable.
	I think they're both equally improbable.
	Not impossible, but just very low probability.
	So when you see these headlines, it's okay to think about, and it's not something that you should just necessarily dismiss, but when people make a headline, when you see the BRICS meeting and they all get on stage and they say, we are planning to one day think about offering a potential, like it's always in the future.
	For 15 years, it's always in the future.
	And they've never actually done anything.
	And the reason they haven't done anything is because they can't agree on anything.
	And even if they did, the market is not there for it.
	Now, many people will say, okay, gold is their currency.
	And I say, fine, that works for me.
	I'm a huge proponent of gold.
	I think gold's probably going to go much higher in the years ahead.
	Part of the most controversial part of the milkshake theory was when I said the dollar and gold will go up together.
	And I clarified the dollar will rise versus all its fiat peers, but that doesn't mean it's going to hold its purchasing power and gold is going to rise as well.
	And so if the rest of the world stops buying U.S. treasuries to the same extent they were and they start buying gold instead, that's fine.
	But again, gold, and can you use gold as a currency?
	Yeah, sure, gold could be used as a currency, but you got to remember these other countries, they want to control their economies and their societies in the same way that the United States wants to control the U.S. that the whole role of a government is control, right?
	I mean, if that wasn't their role, they wouldn't be there to begin with.
	And so the idea that they want to have the golden handcuffs put on them when they're all running budget deficits as well.
	It's just, to me, it just, it's a bit silly.
	And even if gold does rise and become the new global reserve asset, which is fine.
	Again, I don't mind, I have no problem with gold becoming the global reserve asset.
	The United States has more gold than anybody.
	So how does that negatively hurt the United States?
	Or do I mean we haven't yet had the audit of Fort Knox?
	And then the question is whether or not that's true anymore.
	But operating.
	Well, it is true.
	But, you know, my typical comeback to that is I haven't seen the Chinese audit recently.
	I haven't seen the Russian audit.
	I haven't seen Brazil's audit or Italy's audit.
	The Steelman retort to that, you can see China, however, buying up gold currently.
	I mean, that's a verifiable.
	I don't know what the speaking.
	Well, sorry, go ahead, Vio.
	No, no, no.
	Oh, yeah.
	All right.
	So how much does the look, there's a lot of misapprehension that I see out there, not only about what BRICS can and can't do, but about China.
	Now, I have some doubts about whether we manage certain things that, you know, in terms of rare earths and other things, it appears we put ourselves in a bit of a pickle in terms of Trump's big hole.
	Yeah, exactly.
	In dealing with this, but you know, this week there's going to be an announcement on some sort of either a trade deal or a delay on a trade deal.
	We keep just kicking the can down the curb, kicking down the curve, kicking down the curve.
	What do you think is going to happen?
	But I notice it's so hard to figure out China to a degree because everybody's either pure propagandist, even the people that maybe not even don't intend to be, they just regurgitate the official narrative from China, which has incredible strict controls on it on what news and until information comes out.
	I mean, you even get people who some people think gee had a stroke, some people think that's insane.
	I mean, you get all kinds of wild speculations like the Soviet Union days, where nobody knew what the heck was happening there.
	Then you get the people who just hate China or real anti-China, who tell you about the fracture is about to fall apart, about to collapse, everything's going to, Trump is going to roll up.
	So you get these really extreme things.
	And I assume the truth is somewhere in between.
	But can you explain what are some of what are some of China's advantages, but what are some of China's real disadvantages in this economic competition with the United States?
	Well, so listen, first thing I'll say is China is in, you know, a very, very capable adversary, if that's how you want to classify them.
	You know, I don't think we can, by any means, clap call them an ally.
	And where we used to be able to call them a partner, I think that's, you know, a little bit disingenuous at this point.
	So, you know, adversary, I think, is probably the polite way to say it.
	And listen, they have done a good job of a couple of things.
	They've done a great job of convincing the rest of the world that they're invincible.
	And they've done a good job with the rare earths.
	I think that they very cleverly identified what their core strength was.
	And they worked tirelessly for a couple of decades to make that an even bigger advantage than it otherwise would be.
	So I give them credit for identifying and exploiting that.
	And that's the rare earth, the magnets, the high-end precision components.
	And that is their ace card.
	Now, for the U.S. to kind of come up with their own solution to that is on some estimates, it's 10 to 15 years to fix.
	Other people will say it's two to three.
	My sources tell me it's probably in the four to five range.
	And the reason I say four to five, and I actually have a little bit of insight on this, is that this is when people say that there is not a plan in Trump's White House, they're completely wrong.
	And to me, this is just TDS on steroids.
	There is a plan.
	You might not like the plan.
	You may not agree with the plan.
	You may think that he doesn't know how to follow a plan, but there is a plan.
	And they are treating this as the 21st Century Manhattan Project.
	And they are going to do everything in their, and when I say everything, they are going to do everything in their power to ameliorate this advantage that China has.
	Now, that doesn't mean that they will automatically win.
	It doesn't mean that the United States can't get hurt along the way.
	I've said many times, I expect the U.S. to get hurt in this competition, probably even bleed.
	But the U.S. has the ability to throw some knockout punches that the rest of the world does not have.
	But you asked, like, what's their, you know, their manufacturing is clearly their advantage.
	The domination of rare earths is clearly their advantage.
	Their ability to build ships and, you know, hardware and vehicle, I mean, that is one of their advantages.
	Their disadvantage, their biggest disadvantage is that they're not self-sufficient from an energy perspective.
	Now, people will say, well, they have Russia.
	That is true.
	They have Russia.
	People will, the other thing is that their biggest disadvantage, though, is demographics.
	They have a demographic nightmare on their hand.
	And as demographics start to break down, social problems are going to start to rise.
	They still import a lot of food from the rest of the world.
	They have to import fresh water.
	They have to import, you know, a much, they still have to do a import a bunch of stuff for basic living.
	Now, that doesn't mean that they don't have some of this stuff on their own.
	I'm just from broad strokes, that's their disadvantages and their advantages.
	The United States, they don't have these rare earths, or they do have some of them, but we don't have the laws that allow us to mine them.
	Some of our allies have them, and so we're working with them to get access to those.
	And listen, I'm going to, this may not go smoothly the whole time.
	It may not be friendly, but one way or the other, the United States will do what is necessary to get access to these things.
	And I would say those that automatically bet against the United States are doing themselves a disservice.
	The United States has never lost a war.
	It had to win.
	Now, listen to what I said again.
	It's never lost a war.
	It had to win.
	And I think people who think that the United States is automatically going to lose because we're a dying empire, I think that's the wrong way to look at it.
	I don't know what's going to happen.
	I don't know who's going to win and who's going to lose.
	But what I do know is the United States is not just going to roll over and give up and grant hegemony to China.
	That is not going to happen.
	And the biggest weapon that the United States has is the global monetary system.
	They still control the access to dollars and they can turn those off and they can turn them back on and they can use that as a weapon.
	And they know how to do it if they choose to.
	I want to say, if we can get the last five minutes to some questions over at locals, we'll do specifically here from Tequila Repostato says, please ask Mr. Johnson his take on China and its Belt and Roads project and their new debt as their new debt-based model.
	We touched on it, but if you had any more thoughts.
	No, I'd say, so, yeah, I think that's that's in many ways the Belt and Road is a copy of what the United States did over the last 60 or 70 years.
	It's debt diplomacy.
	You know, you go and you meet with people and you say, hey, let's do this deal together.
	And they say yes or no.
	And if they say no, then you come back with a bigger check and you give them all this money and they eventually do it.
	And then when they default on the debt, then you go in and you negotiate mineral rights or new terms.
	And eventually you get them under your thumb.
	And for a while, that was working.
	Recently, in the last couple of years, there's been several countries who have pushed back on this.
	And to a certain extent, the United States has helped them push back on this.
	And so I think China was trying to do it.
	I don't think they were as successful as they thought they were going to be.
	And now I don't think they will have much success with it going forward.
	Yeah, I would note that when China choose to do what currency they chose to denominate a lot of that debt, even China was choosing the U.S. dollar in major cases.
	Speaking of the one other side question I had before we wrap up, you pointed out in Argentina that the investments that, well, I guess we call it loans, bailouts, whatever it is, but really investments in Malay, which paid off yesterday.
	Some of us had some other political investments in it, so we're all glad to do it.
	Glad to see the outcome, whatever people think of the politics of Malay.
	But that given our problems with Colombia, problems with Brazil, problems with Venezuela, the other three big countries, given the geopolitical significance of Argentina resources in Argentina, can you explain why that's just a geopolitical realistic investment for the U.S. to make?
	This is not just, hey, yeah.
	Well, you know, when Besson gave the first 20 billion, and I think he's given another 20 billion since I first said it, I said, you know, this is almost as dumb as that time Seward bought Alaska, right?
	It sounds pretty stupid initially, but when you think about its strategic significance, it's not stupid at all.
	And you have to realize, I mean, this is the game we're in now.
	We are in a game of thrones.
	I mean, literally, like I say that jokingly, but I actually mean it.
	Like, this is China and the United States heading against each other on a global basis.
	And all pieces on the map are in play.
	And China was making great inroads into Argentina.
	And Trump has basically said, not in our backyard.
	And so, you know, Argentina has, for as long as I've been in business, it's been the country of the future, right?
	It's always had this great potential, incredible natural resources, and incredible geographic advantages.
	And, you know, by partnering, you can call it, I jokingly made a little video about it.
	I said, is this a bailout or a buyout?
	I mean, I can guarantee you, whatever the terms of the deal are, the U.S. has first right of refusal on these assets that are needed, whether it's the lithium, whether it's the copper, whether it's the natural gas.
	Like we don't just give $40 billion to another country because we're nice.
	That doesn't happen.
	It goes back to the Belt and Road Initiative, right?
	Debt diplomacy.
	This is the big game.
	And we're lining up partners.
	And in some cases, we will buy them.
	And in some cases, we will force them.
	But that's what's going on.
	And listen, China's doing the same thing.
	They're trying to get their ducks in an order too.
	And they're trying to line up their partners.
	And this is what's going on.
	But Argentina is a total geopolitical strategy at this point.
	Fantastic.
	Brett, I mean, the one more question.
	I don't know.
	I think we're not going to have time for it.
	How George Soros bankrupted, nearly bankrupted the Banks of England.
	Maybe Barnes will do a hush-hush on that.
	Brent, people can follow you on X. They can follow you on your website.
	What do you want to plug while we're here?
	And I'm going to put it in the pinned comment after the show.
	Sure.
	If you go to santiagocapital.com, you can go from there.
	You can find just about everything.
	I'm very active on Twitter.
	If you look up Santiago AU Fund or just search Santiago Capital, I'm the white seashell.
	If you're interested in some of the stuff we talked about on a research basis, if you go to research.santiagocapital.com, it gives you all the different options there.
	And I'd love to interact with all of you.
	And I appreciate you guys inviting me on.
	This was fun.
	That's amazing.
	I saw you actively interacting with people on Twitter about the stablecoin debate.
	So I can attest to the fact that you are active on Twitter.
	Robert, what were you going to say?
	Oh, yeah, no, absolutely.
	Brett, Brett's been a great, good follow for a long time.
	Great independent insights about what's going on in the world, particularly as to currency politics, which has geopolitical consequences, can have lead to all kinds of other conflicts.
	As Kissinger said, control food, you control the country.
	Control fuel.
	You control the continent.
	Control money.
	Control the world.
	And that's what all this is ultimately all about.
	So thanks, Brett.
	This was awesome.
	And thanks to everybody who came in.
	And Brett, ordinarily, I'd say we'll say our proper goodbyes, but we got now the next stream lined up.
	So I'm going to go jump over that.
	Thank you very much.
	I'll message you after this.
	This was great.
	Bye, guys.

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