Episode #244 - Caitlin Long and Watching the Old Order Hang On

[music] [music] [music] [music] Hello and welcome to the Gold Ghost and Guns podcast for January 14th, 2024. My name is Tom Langa. a lot to talk about and we will because Caitlyn Long is in the house. Um it is uh episode 244 as I said and uh let's get to it. Caitlyn, how have you been? How it's been uh just way too long since you and I have talked.

>> Yeah, I think our last our last episode was April, the financial crisis that wasn't when you you and I agreed, you know, all these naysayers who thought the sky was falling were wrong. And yeah,

>> and uh you had a you had a really profound line, which is that the Fed was stepping up to defend the dollar and not defend European interests anymore.

>> And I I think that's kind of where we are. Um and I mean, but I mean, and don't get me wrong, it's like, you know, and it's been a long time since you and I talked. And I know that what you want to do, of course, is like what you usually do when you come on the podcast is you get to interview me, which is always a little weird. Um but which I but which I also enjoy.

Um just to say that and I know that that has been a very controversial take of mine and >> um but at the same time I think that when you look at the way Trump has operated since then and the way things have moved since the tariff tantrum which is basically when you and I spoke last or right in the right around the aftermath of it um and we'll have a link to that podcast um in this one so you guys can review it all and we can do the thing and we can go you know and all that. So, but it's been a very interesting, you know, nine months and I mean, an incredibly fascinating nine months to say the least. So, why don't we start then with wherever you think we should uh we should

>> Well, let's start with the Fed. I I'm I I'm mostly going to stay quiet because I know some things, but um I'm really interested in your take because you and I have disagreed on this in the past. Uh you were a big fan of Jay Powell. So, let's start with the the video that has now had I just checked 87 million views. [laughter] The feds, you know, um um Jay Powell I'm the victim video.

>> Yeah. Jay Powell doing the struggle session.

>> Yeah. >> Right. I think that honestly this is struggle session video and and I don't think that I mean I'm not going to say that Powell was comfortable with it because it was clearly obvious he was not comfortable.

>> Some people said it looked like he was it was a hostage video.

>> Yeah, it really was. I mean, I really I that's what I mean by a struggle session. I mean, he really was in a very very difficult um [clears throat] position and but at the same time, I also noted that um I was talking to Dexter White about this this morning and he noted that somebody came back and said, "Hey, man, back off. Don't say anything further from here. Let Luna do her thing and this is just what this is the way this has to play out." Now, I I've been saying for a long long time that what's clearly on the table is that we have to in effect reverse the revolution of 1913 where the where city of London effectively took over the United States financial um system by getting us the Federal Reserve Act, the 16th Amendment, the income tax, and the direct election of senators, which, you know, depending on your point of view, is the second or third or even fourth American Revolution.

Um, and what are we in now? The fifth? I'm not really sure, but you know, depending on your Yeah. I mean, I don't think anybody's really sure. Yeah. Exactly. And then I've also said that, you know, when you really stop to think about what the Federal Reserve was originally set up to do, and you know, we've ar we can argue as to whether or not it was ever going to be able to hold together as the thing that it was originally designed to do because I think that's what you and I spoke about the last time um that we, you know, by the time we got to the banking act of 1935, the Fed had now become like the entire financial system. And now no longer was it just a backs stop organization or the commercial paper markets. It now became a backs stop for the US Treasury markets. And then you know and then everything that we all complain about in free markets and the you know Austral libertarian complex or even just the monitors complex we all look at it and go that's all wrong right and the Fed has now become this kind of central thing central clearing house for evil in the world.

Um, aside from the fact that we also have the Bank of England and we have, you know, the ECB and we have all these other terrible central banks >> and which came to Powell's rescue, right? I mean, the a bunch of central banks got together and

>> of course they did because they're they're defending the conception of central banking. I don't think they're really defending J. Powell because every time Jay Powell goes and you know sits down with Christine Lagard or you know when push comes to shove he always just mouths the the the sovereigntist effectively the the version of sovereigntist line which is my job is the dual mandate of full employment and um and stable prices. He did away with the 2% the 2% inflation target at Jackson Hole which was a big deal. finally he didn't have to like that was a huge deal that was very much anti-globalist

>> um in that respect because that's been you know the big >> um shibilith of the you know post greenspan era that we're all just going to have to accept the fact that the central banks are going to inflate 2% a year

>> yeah and vulkar by the way remember how he challenged that

>> oh vulkar was no fan of that

>> he was not and neither was Powell right Daniel D Martino Booth made that point in her book that Powell was one of the people along with Richard Fischer and a couple of others who were incredibly angry with Bernanki just unilaterally making that Fed policy back in I think 2007208. So this so Powell's, you know, kind of, you know, I I would say, you know, less globalist impulses um have are well documented within the Fed, right? So not to say that he's also not going to defend the Fed because he's been a Fed employee,

>> you know, for years. I mean,

>> it's what 12 13 years. Yeah.

>> I think he was a think >> Obama appointee to governor, right? Yeah.

>> Right. I think it was a junior member of the of the FOMC back in either 2008 or whenever it was. So there we are. So he's been

>> I don't think it was that early. I think it was under Obama. It was like 2012. Was that right?

>> We'll have to check that.

>> We'll have to check on that. Um, it's fair enough. I mean my I I I made the mistake of thinking the other day that La Brainer was still vice chair of the FOMC. So you know like

>> I don't know what she's doing now. She's she hasn't been heard from recently.

>> Gone. She's not at the Fed. Oh, well, she's definitely not at the Fed because she jumped shipped to go to the to the Biden White House.

>> Yeah.

>> And we see how that turned out.

>> So, so you know, Trump has been setting up this I think he's been setting up this attack on the Fed. He he knows he has to undermine the anybody's faith in the Fed as an institution, right? this is, you know, in the in, you know, outside of our little sector of the world, like where we all like care about monetary policy because it's, you know, we're weird and it's a hobby or in your case, it's your profession, right? Uh, and for me, it's basically a hobby or that's now part of my profession. But, you know, at the end of the day,

>> we're six sigas from the norm in terms of the way the world the way the world views all of this stuff. Trump has to popularize this argument. And it was so interesting, Tom, too, because when that New York Times story broke before the JPAL video came out,

>> I tweeted out at the time, "Something's up." Because it was clear to me that that had been leaked by the Fed

>> and then the video came out a few minutes later, which which confirmed it. And then that put the Trump administration on defense. And you had Jannine Piro come out and say, "Listen, he used the word indictment. We never indicted him, right? That's what I was getting. All we did was send a subpoena because the Fed ignored our information requests. And so the whole thing now was like, whoa, this is

>> when does the Fed actually act that way where they're acting defensive, right? And

>> well, no, but they ignore information requests all the time. And now Powell said he may not do his Humphrey Hawkins testimony. That's the one oversight that Congress has over the Fed. Sure. And now he's using that as an excuse apparently that was one of the headlines today not to do his Humphrey Hawkins testimony. That's that's interesting. But um but but where I was going was it was so interesting the waves of reaction. The first wave was the financial market people who came out to defend the Fed. And the second wave was that that you and I probably saw was a lot of the Bitcoiners who were like rah rah big prints coming by Bitcoin. Right.

>> Right. [laughter]

>> And then the third wave was the next morning is the is where I was really going. Um that that sort of the populists and the MAGA crowd then jumped on this and said, you know, look, it's the Democrats defending the banks. It's the Democrats defending, you know, the the big powerful establishment. And um but um then it started to kind of fracture too, right? because you had you had like Killis and Mowski come out and say we're not going to let Trump's nominee through until this is all calmed down. And so um it's just the the waves of reaction were so interesting because

>> the first wave was so it's the finance people who are all online all the time and you know some of us saw saw that New York Times story and you know immediately we're like uh oh something's up and

>> right no I it is it is fascinating right when you when you stop to think about all of that what I saw mostly was the the central banks you know rallying around you know let's you know they all hate Powell because he hasn't like given them anything that they want really. I mean, he's done nothing but he said, "Oh yeah, if you want swap lines, you got to pay full price for them." He's given them nothing that they've actually help actually wanted over the last four years. He raised interest rates and forced them all on the defensive and then held interest rates high even after the tariffs, which was even worse because it helped Trump cut trade deals all last summer.

>> It ex It very much did. Yes, I can see that. Yeah,

>> weak dollar plus high interest rates meant everybody had to capitulate, right? And there's Trump out there going he's got TDS and he hates me and everything else. [ __ ] off. Seriously, dude. I No, I mean I'm like I'm watching this going, I don't believe a word of this. How very calmly goes to Jackson Hall. He gets rid of it and then all out of nowhere. No one had this handicapped. It was a nobody's bingo card that Powell was going to come out and scrap the 2% inflation target. All I said going into it was he usually likes to use Jackson Hole as a way to change to announce new new big policies if he can. Right. I didn't know what it was going to be and then when he did that I'm like

>> Yeah. Well, there's something else about Jackson Hole. You know that I'm part I live in Wyoming, right? And I'm part of the the Jackson Hole conference at Anthony Scaramucci. We got together a few years ago to start that conference, right? And this year, vice chair for supervision Bowman came and Governor Waller came. Last year, they all got invited and the general counsel of the Fed apparently disinvited them, right? Tells you who's who was really in control, right? And so they did not come to the Scaramucci conference. And the funny thing is Anthony came three years ago and said, "Let's do an anti-fed kind of crypto conference right in Jackson Hole, right as they're all arriving for, you know, the Jackson Hole Symposium."

Um, and it's now it's kind of turned into just it's it's a nice little microcosm of originally it was sort of the the counterculture >> conference and then he invited the Fed and and you know the the establishment within the Fed, you know, blocked the the the cryptocurious ones from coming and then a year later they're there and they're not just there. They're there for the whole conference. I the magnitude of time that a lot of us got to spend with them was was was it would it would surprise a lot of a lot of people. But I think it's not a an accident that some of the pro- crypto policies have have come out since then, right? They have now I think when we last talked in April I pointed out that the big anti-crypto policy which had been voted on by the board seven to zero including by the way um Bowman and Waller voting for it in at the time because again and we'll get back to the way that Fed chairs work. Fed chairs kind of dominate, right? That the Fed culturally is an organization that tends to try to get unanimous votes. Very different than the other seven vote um organization in namely the Supreme Court, right? Where each one of the justices is very independent. Fed Fed governors have 14-year terms. Supreme Court justices are life terms, but you know, they're both very long, right? So in theory, Fed governors should be independent, but that's not how it's actually been. And so what's interesting is to see the the reversal of Waller and Bowman um from last year. Uh and and when we talked when you and I last talked in April and they had the uh the the anti-crypto guidance that was blocking banks from issuing stable coins, I know we're going to talk about stable coins in a moment.

Um um they finally reversed that in December. And I said, "Well, that's the thing we needed to wait for. that needed to happen and they got it they got it reversed and what's interesting is all it was six to one so it was voted on seven to zero during the Biden era and now during the Trump era it was reversed six to1

>> yeah and that and that makes sense because the Trump administration is pushing so hard for so you know in a sense you can almost argue that you know what you're what you're saying and or what you're implying and I think it's a very strong argument that you're making is that the Fed is is they're not independent in that respect. Like once like they had to be anti-crypto because the administration and the dominant and the the effect the government was anti-crypto like at every level

>> the whole government. Yeah.

>> The whole government was anti crypto. Now all of a sudden right now we bring in we can bring in Elizabeth Warren and then

>> and then you know that shifts with the new administration and all of a sudden they can actually you know go with the flow. So they're

>> they got room to move. Yeah.

>> Yeah. They have they have room to maneuver. that they can put their finger in the air just like anybody else and go oh the winds have shifted now we can actually do all these things and you know it's it's just that's so I so from that perspective it did not none of this has surprised me at all that Trump is making his his I mean when you say all that I didn't wasn't quite following any of that stuff because I got so many other things that I follow and so I get to talk to you to get like to fill the back of my head with the stuff that I haven't been able to to to keep up with. So to me this is this makes perfect sense that we would see this that the Fed it understands that it's one going to get reformed whether it likes it or not that some of its functions are going to be pulled back under Treasury which by the even the last by the last time we spoke back in April Besson had already made that abundantly clear that he didn't want he thought he thought that the the Fed should not be in bank regulation and this that and everything else and he also let everybody know that he and Powell have lunch every Monday or breakfast every Monday

>> every And so, yeah, you you can't you have to think it's not like they're talking about golf. It's not like they're talking about, you know, the the the the [ __ ] World Cup or anything. They're talking about this stuff, right? So, you know, so Jay, you go out there, you let Trump do his thing. And now to my point originally is that and I've been saying this all all year which is in order for Trump to take Fed reform which at best would be a five or 1090 you know 595 1090 issue in Trump's terminology meaning it's a it's important to 5 to 10% of the population the 90 to 95% of the population. He has to turn that into an 8020.

>> Yeah. He's now he's not going to get there in a year, but he can move the needle to 50/50 at this point, right? And by tying it directly to this Taj Mahal thing because that is

>> right

>> completely it's another symbol of everything that he's doing now pushing on Minnesota and the all the government corruption. So, and if you think about it from that perspective for strategically, I'm now thinking like Trump and thinking strategically, right? you know that Kosh Patel, you know, the minute that that that you know, Quality Larrying Center and all of that hit in uh in the Somali mafia hit the airways when Nick really did his thing, Kosh Patel two days later comes out and says, "Oh yeah, we've been in Minnesota since July investigating all this stuff." So of course, yeah, why do you think Nick Sterling shows up at Quality Learing Center? Why do you think he knows exactly where to go? He's and this was so this was agenda to so after the shutdown after the one big beautiful bill on after this this and this >> beginning of the year this is what we're hitting this is what we're hitting on now because we're moving into primary season now we got to deal with we got to deal with Congress we start shaming them we start putting out all the smurfing numbers and everything else and now right

>> of all of that where everybody is now completely outraged about how much of our tax money they're spending on this [ __ ] Oh, and by the way, we can resurrect the Fed and the and the Taj Mahal and the fact that Okay. Yeah. And the the Fed's been ignoring Congress and been ignoring the administration. Fine. We're going to bring everybody. Hey, has has anybody not noticed that Hillary Clinton didn't show up today, but she's getting she's getting the she's getting the the the uh referral.

>> Um

>> Right. Right. Right. Right.

>> The contempt referral. Like, it's finally happening. So, yeah. Slowly but surely, bit by bit, you you start re you you you change the the the public's perception of all of this and the Fed is part of it because it's an issue that to most people is just completely irrelevant and you've got to make that a thing. So this is what Trump is very good.

>> 87 people viewed the video. 87 million people viewed

>> and now all of a sudden it's a big deal. Now it's a big deal.

>> Well, we'll see. Right. Where does it where does it go from here? So, you pointed out correctly how Besson's been very consistent about his views of the whole thing. I I can't remember whether you and I talked in April. I think it would have been after afterwards, but we probably didn't. When I learned that Treasury was at least looking into the possibility of tokenizing treasuries and we did not talk, we did not talk. If you think about the impact of that,

>> what does what does the Fed do aside from monetary policy and bank regulation? It runs Fed wire,

>> right?

>> If Treasury issues tokenized treasuries,

>> know actually we need to talk about this, you know, now that I remember. Yeah, that was part of that was a major point in that podcast. Then what does the Fed have to actually do?

>> Well, I mean, basically, it's an upgrade to Fed Wire or a competitive to a competitor to Fed Wire, right? And one of the challenges that the Fed has had is is for for whatever reason, whether it's just inertia or uh the the phrase in technology is security by obscurity um or by obsolescence rather, right? You basically just, you know, you have cobalt on, you know, a lot of these big banks literally have cobalt still in their in their tech stacks, right? So I don't know if that's true of the Fed. I don't know.

>> Um, right. But but but that's kind of the point, right? That you know, if you if the if nobody's hacking cobalt is is the point because you know the 20somes don't know how to do it, right?

>> Are there any cobalt? I mean, are there any is there anybody left on the planet other than maybe an AI that can actually program in cobalt?

>> This is so interesting because before AI, a lot of the big banks were actually trying to go find retired cobalt programmers.

>> Right. Exactly. [laughter]

>> I know. I mean, I've had this conversation with people like so cobalt, forkr and machine language, those guys are all dead, you know.

>> Yeah.

>> Well, but it's still in these texts and the banks are too afraid, you know, not it's not just banks, but you know, obviously banks are are a big part of of of historical, you know, tech debt and um and and and part of the issue is that the payment systems and they're running on 1970s technology. Fed now of course is not 1970s technology but Fed wire and uh and and a definitely and they haven't really been upgraded right so um it's there's a clash coming in that regard as well

>> because as somebody who's dealt with this trying to build the middleware to to bridge that 1970s technology to modern API based cloud-based real-time gross settlement type payment rails

>> wow right and so and Treasury understands all that and so the the you know who's going to bridge that gap and is Treasury going to step in and that's kind of like a it hasn't happened yet. I'm not surprised that it hasn't happened yet, but it's the kind of thing that you can bet that those conversations are happening behind closed doors. And it's kind of a threat, right? It's a it's kind of a sort of damocles. If you don't get your act together and you don't stop being insular

>> and stop trying to kill the crypto industry, then, you know, there are it's a pretty easy way to take that part away from the Fed by just basically tokenizing treasuries. And one of the interesting things that has happened is the SEC in the last couple of weeks has come out and given the DTC, the depository trust company, the the ability to tokenize securities. Stop and think about that. If you're issuing, we we got to talk about the the root of this because tokenizing an analog when people register corporations, they're registering them in a PDF, it's a form fill, right? You can create a PDF from a form fill, but it's not natively digital. And unless you have an API call to the Secretary of State of Delaware or now Texas or Nevada or Wyoming, the big states where corporations register, if anybody has an API call directly to them, then it's n it can be you can natively digital digitally register a corporation. However, that doesn't exist because the states haven't upgraded yet. And so what you're really doing is creating a token against analog data. That's not really a token, right? It's it's basically a claim on the analog data is what it is.

>> Um, but if we can get natively digital securities, which means natively digital corporate registrations at the Secretary of State where there's an API call to verify that when you're buying the share of stock, that is a validly issued share of stock as opposed to one of these rehypothecated claims. All of a sudden, that's that changes the game and the SEC took a big step towards that. Now, what's the impact of that on US dollars? You can't realize the benefit of cleaning up the the stock system, which is very,

>> we've talked about this in the past. There's all kinds of fraud and um just inefficiency and inaccuracy in stock ledgers. Why? Because the the there's a settlement delay, right? We're still at T plus well, we're at T+1 now, but I mean, we have the technology to make it real-time gross settlement. and to have the dollar leg and the securities legs settle atomically. We have the technology to do it. We're just not doing it. Why? Because the balance sheets are too leveraged and everybody's really afraid to to actually move to that system and there are too many people who figured out how to arbitrage it and make too much money off it and so they don't they're fighting tooth and nail against the upgrades. I've talked about this before. Before I came back to my native Wyoming, I was working with a startup called Symbiot that worked with the state of Delaware on the Delaware blockchain initiative and we worked with the Delaware Secretary of State's office. I went with the Delaware deputy Delaware Secretary of State to the SEC and had an interesting conversation where Delaware was talking about how many times they have discovered that a publicly traded company listed more shares in its 10K as being issued and outstanding than were validly registered in Delaware. Okay. And it often comes out because the database is never connected, right? And it often came out that um that the those discrepancies arose during corporate proxy battles. And there's a famous speech by a Delaware um um Chancery Court judge Travis Ler that talked about how if a corporate proxy battle is within 10 percentage points that you don't really know who won because the stock ledger systems in the United States are so antiquated and and and they're just constantly trying to catch up.

>> and so if it's if it's outside of 10% you pretty much know who know who won. But if it's inside of 10%, you don't really know who won. Okay? And the Proctor Proctor and Gamble one is is a good example of no one really knows who won, right? We just they just agreed to sort of stop fighting a few years back. But the point is like, all right, so so the SEC is on to this. They're going to clean up this the the muck in the in the securities industry, which absolutely needs to be cleaned up. And yet now come back to the payment piece. If you have tokenized shares, which we're heading towards, how do you deal with the fact that the dollar leg isn't tokenized? The answer is you got to tokenize the dollar leg. And you've got to be able to do it in very, very, very large value. Not talking volume of payments, value. What is the high value payment system in the United States? Fed wire.

>> Okay. So, if you can start tokenizing treasuries, right? And we're seeing asset managers tokenizing treasuries already. What if the Treasury tokenized treasuries? That's effectively a tokenized US dollar payment system, isn't it?

>> Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

>> Yeah. Yeah. And we don't need the Fed.

>> Well, you know,

>> that's what But that's what you're that's what you're implying.

>> To be fair, this was not my idea. When I heard the idea, of course, all the puzzle pieces fell into place,

>> right? And I'm just I'm just trying to make sure that I'm just trying to make sure for the for the listener that they understand where you're going with this and where and I and I make sure that I understand where you're going with this because I remember

>> the last time you and I spoke and you were going through all of this this this stuff. And I remember flat out and you asked me, "What do you think about all that?" I said, "I don't write. I don't honestly know." And it was the first time I've ever actually sat in a podcast with someone where I could not keep up with the rate at which they were throwing information at me. Now, to be fair, and that's to your credit, by the way, and to be fair, I was like, "Okay, I don't know what she just said." But when I went back and listened to the podcast to edit it, to put it out, I'm like, "Oh my god, what she just said was the most [ __ ] brilliant thing." I literally said this in my office.

>> But it's Bess. It's not me. It's best.

>> Oh, no, no, no. I know that, but we went through the last time. I'm just giving you an an understanding of sometimes, you know, there's a lot of information coming out in a fire hose here. And I do it when I'm doing a podcast, you're doing it here to me, which is fine. I I I love it. I adore it. It's just sometimes, you know, you actually have to sit back and sometimes you do have to listen to this information two or three or four times to finally have it go, oh, oh, oh, oh, that's that's I like, oh, oh, that's

>> but it fits into the puzzle piece,

>> right? Coming back to what we were talking about before the tangent on securities and corporate registration the it fits into the puzzle piece of the clash between the Fed and Treasury because that is a sort of damocles that Bessant you know if let's put it this way if I heard it others heard it too right so the fact that that that technology exists that they don't need to go spend 10 years building an IT system and they could literally do it tomorrow what kind of pressure is that putting on the tradition system to get its act together and upgrade and get with the program. Yeah.

>> Well, again, this this gets down to that that that um again, think about what I've been saying about the need for Fed. We we clearly need reform of the Fed. We're now on the cusp of it actually happening. And then we have to ask ourselves, well, what is the role of the Fed going forward? And you know in conception I've always just been saying well it should they should be there to backs stop the domestic economy the domestic the liquidity of the domestic economy either in the form of you know backstopping the commercial paper market in its original form or whatever the the internal um value of the of the the liquidity of the system domestically the domestic dollar markets while at the same time putting up a firewall around the offshore $ markets and letting them fend for themselves. And if they do need to come to the Fed, they should pay a premium for that. Or as you know, Vince and I have have termed it, don't market an excess charge on it. It's an ATM fee. It's whatever you want to call it. But at the end of the day, you're paying 25 to 50 basis points over what Americans are paying for because you are not Americans and you want dollars. Piss off. And that's just the way it's going to be. And we have the uh and we have the ability and the Fed can serve that role at the very least as again this is all interim stuff as we move away from the old system that we or this existing system you can't remove it from the system because the Fed's still there in case there are attacks on our financial system from abroad because as we're doing this it's of course going to invite the Have we not noticed how much Europe has now turned around and said Russia's not their enemy. The United States is their enemy.

>> Well, but let's get back to we haven't talked about this yet. The thing that made that you that I learned from you from and you credited your hive mind is so for it's so amazing how you know you can work in the financial market for years and not really think through and a lot by the way that's not an indictment of people who worked in or do work in the financial markets. It's very narrow what most people's expertise is. And kind of zooming out and looking at the forest through the trees, stopping to think about how there was only one US bank that was in the Libore panel for so long, right? Why were London banks setting the critical US dollar interest rate? You helped me see that. And and the Fed itself by moving over from sofur and you and I gave credit to them to Don Williams, by the way, who's been incredibly quiet in all this.

>> Oh, yes, he [laughter] has. Right.

>> As as and and and as the Fed just to remind everybody as president of the New York Fed, he is the actual vice chair of the FOMC.

>> Correct. Correct.

>> Which is different than the Federal Reserve Board. Those are two different things. The Federal Open Markets Committee is one thing. It's very powerful. And then there's the Federal Reserve Board. Even I get confused on that stuff every once in a while. Just to remind everybody, let's get back to brass tax and proper definitions of everything. Go ahead.

>> Well, but sofur brought US control over US interest rates and enabled what you're talking about where they can say to the rest of the world piss off. You have to spend you have to pay more if you want dollars.

>> Um and and you know I think was it William Mcesses Martin who said the dollar is our currency but it's your problem.

>> Yes.

>> Yes. Right. Yeah. Right. I mean that's kind of and for a while Bernanki did and and crew the sort of the globalist crew didn't behave that way. Right. Because look at They the vast majority of dollars of the expansion of the Fed's balance sheet in 2008 went to non US borrowers. Yeah.

>> Absolutely. No, absolutely. The

>> and they were giving non US banks master accounts right and left. Like Aden, which is a competitor to Stripe has a master account, full-fledged master account, interest on reserves, all this. Stripe doesn't have one. How does that benefit the United States?

>> Clearly it doesn't. And clearly the I mean what we we the way we used to put it um internally in gold guns for years is that you know when the Fed's at the zero bound it's not it ceases to be a central bank. It's just another Euro dollar pumper. I mean it's no different than anything else. It's just the ultimate carry and then we become the ultimate carry currency. So interestingly enough the way I've been thinking about this stuff like conceptually now is what we're watching now is the process by which the United States gets control over its yield curve again. Because if you really stop to go through 2008

>> absolutely

>> 2008 and you think about what happened. I' I've done a complete 180 on what 2008 was all about. I don't know if you you and I haven't spoken about this but in the last three months it's finally it's finally kind of kind of gelled in my head as to what this is all about. So sofur was the first attempt for us to get control of the short end of the yield curve because that's what it does. Right.

>> Brilliant. Now on the other side, now the other angle on that is that the Japanese Bank of Japan, the Japanese yen carrier trade is another attempt to have foreign control over the short end of our yield curve because the Japanese yen is a source of cheap, you know, cheap borrowing dollars and do the thing, right? Okay. So now the Japanese are normalizing interest rates.

>> And by the way, that correlates very strongly to gold. But I digress. [laughter] Okay, we'll get there. and and I want to and I want to hear that. But now let's talk about what what did we actually lose in 2008?

>> Does why did we bail out why did we bail out AIG over and over and over again Londonbased AIG as opposed to letting go broken broken up into 17 different

>> where rehypocation was literally infinite. Right.

>> Right. So why was AIG bailed out and why was Lehman Brothers destroyed? If you go through the timeline and it's I know I don't rem I don't I had to go through this like literally chapter in verse and go back through the timeline and look up the day in which they not which you know which things started to go bad then they nationalized Fanny and Freddy then this happened then that happened and I went oh in this order on these dates the goal was Fanny and Freddy. Oh well 200 2008 was all about the nationalization of Fanny and Freddy in order to then create Obamacare later on because what they wanted was the control over the long end of the yield curve. They and that's what Fanny and Freddy traditionally did in the market. They bought and sold made a market and mortgage back securities control long end of the yield curve. So you get rid of the short end of the yield curve. You get they have control over that. Now they have control of the long end of the yield curve and they in this case is [ __ ] London.

>> Yeah, it's London, right? But remember, Operation Twist was later though and there's another

>> and then and then they gave it all and then they did all that to pay for Obamacare. But the point of Fanny and Freddy was to was to put them in conservatorship and take them out of that market.

>> So they couldn't make a market mortgage back securities. And then they gave us DoddFrank with all the bad with all the insane [ __ ] um um um uh um hoops that small business owners have to go through to get a [ __ ] mortgage and the mortgage terms and everything else. If you look at our mortgage mortgage terms today, they're no different than they are everywhere else. the 30-year fixed rate mortgage that was the in that was the engine of the growth of the middle class in the United States. Yeah, you made that point.

>> It was destroyed when Penny and Freddy were nationalized and basically turned over to the real Manurion candidate, but he wasn't a Manurion candidate.

>> He was London's candidate. He was Obama. Obama was the Manurion candidate, folks.

>> Yeah, he's a globalist. Right.

>> And so there it is. And I'm like I'm looking at it all now going, "Oh, so that's why they that's why they shut the government down back in November. They didn't because Trump was planning on

>> it was over Obamacare. Yeah.

>> Well, no, not just Obamacare. It was over Fanny and Freddy. They're still bombing Fanny and Freddy. They're still trying to fight this every every day. If you The most popular arguments on FIN Twit today are the are people arguing over the senior preferred shares and the junior preferred shares and how to deal with all that [ __ ] and Freddy when at the end of the day Trump can turn around and go, I'm cancelelling them all. Whatever's left and we're just going to pay the we're just going to pay the coupons on and we're not converting them to common because 95% of them aren't in convertibles to common anyway. Yeah. Okay. That's interesting. There's another angle though that I want to I want to throw out at you because it's not consistent with your view of 2008, which is and I I can't recall if you and I have talked about this before, but Hank Pollson's book was it included an incredible revelation that Bloomberg then interviewed him about after his book came out and he walked back, but it's in his book that um during the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and I I have very vivid memories of all that because remember that sort of China's coming out, right?

Um and and and the just the jingoism and the strength that China was portraying back then, it was, you know, we have arrived and we are a competitor to the United States and look at all this incredible technology that we're bringing and and all that, right? Okay. So Paulson, who was the Treasury Secretary under Bush, um went to he disclosed that he went to Bush, George W. Bush in Beijing that his counterpart had told him that Russia had visited China to propose an attack on Fanny and Freddy by Russia dumping all their mortgage back securities and that um because of all the bugging that they assumed was taking place while Bush was in China, Pollson did not feel comfortable even telling Bush about this until they got on the airplane to come back home from the Beijing Olympics because um he just assumed that it was all bug. Now, what was fascinating is when that book came out, I was still working at Morgan Stanley and there was a just a kind of like a lunch and learn group of women and I brought that I brought that story up and a mortgage back securities trader said you know that makes something make sense and I like tell me and she said all of a sudden in the dog days of summer in the first two weeks of like end of July the Olympics were at the end of July 20 or 2008

>> um and then in the the following following two weeks, Russia, the the Bank of Russia called up every desk on Wall Street and started dumping their mortgage back securities. Needed to sell that those mortgage back securities at any price. Just move them. I don't care how much the market moves. And people acknowledged at the time it didn't make sense because you'd never trade that way if you were trying to maximize financial returns. That was an attack on the United States. And what was fascinating was that China did not play ball with Russia and told the United States about it. So Bush and Pollson knew that it was coming. Now when Bloomberg interviewed Pollson about this after the fact, Pollson just like almost w kind of portrayed it as if he wished he hadn't told the story. I actually tried to foyer documents from from Pollson's treasury to try to figure out what actually happened there because obviously there was there was a lot of movement and that was a very material piece of 2008. But it's it's consistent with what you're saying that they were going after Fanny and Freddy. But what was interesting is that it was Russia that was doing it and and in those in those illquid markets they were able to basically cause spreads to gap out. Actually think I want you to think about this really carefully because what else happened in 2008? Now we have Georgia. Now we have South Asetia. Now we have the Russians moving in at the same time. So all of that was an attempt to call a revolution by the British andor the Americans to attack the underbelly of Russia. So of course the Russians are going to attack in the financial markets in a that actually makes perfect sense to me. And then you ask yourself the question why did we do that? Why? Why did we try? Why did all why why was why did Chatam House and GCHQ and and the special Why did all that happen when we knew that we were going to get a financial and then I mean you could set a series of you could set a series of dominoes in in motion here especially after the repo crisis of 2007, which turns into the vaporization of Bear Sterns in March knowing full well that something was coming down the pike after that. And then that summer, their goal was to put Obama in the White House. And they had to do so in such a way that they had [clears throat] we had to get to that state. How do you get to that state?

>> Well, they created a financial crisis. And what was interesting is Russia thought because back then China was a heavy investor in not just treasuries, but also mortgage back securities. Yes.

>> And if you

looked at who owned a lot of the Fanny and Freddy paper, it was the central banks of Russia and China and of course others as well. But they, Russia, didn't think they were big enough on their own apparently because they approached China, allegedly according to Hank Pollson, to to to create a coordinated attack. And and China actually, if you go back and look at the foreign exchange rate, China fixed the the the yuan dollar rate, um, in order to help the United States at that point. So clearly, they were not on board with what Russia was trying to do.

But what was interesting is that Russia just dumping into illiquid markets and causing spreads to gap out of not just Fanny and Freddy paper, but but, um, private mortgage-backed securities as well. They were really trying to, you know, to to foment a financial crisis, and it turned out Russia was big enough to do it on its own.

"Yeah. Well, because that that tells you how bad those, how how terrible those markets were."

"How unstable those markets were. Yeah."

"Absolutely. Which, you know, validates everything that Michael Burry was saying about, you know, all his CDS trades and all that stuff that's in The Big Short and all that stuff. But that's a really interesting part of that. And I think geopolitically, it makes sense because now 2008 and 2007 are really important years because remember, you got you have Putin goes to the Munich Security Conference in 2007 and lays down the freaking law that if you people continue this, continue the way you're going, there's going to be a problem. And then within a year, he then turns turns around and and and has the Bank of Russia, you know, pull the plug on our mortgage markets because they can see what's coming. That we're giving every, we're giving every freaking, every unemployed, you know, dude in America a freaking $500,000, $5,000, $500,000 jumbo loan."

"Right?"

"No docs, no ninjas, all these ninja loans. I'm like, if I'm Putin, I'm like,"

"Right."

"This seems obvious to me. Why don't we knock these people in the teeth?"

"You know what I mean?"

"That's so interesting."

"I would, if I were Putin, this is exactly the way I would do it. Like, I don't want to kill anybody, but we'll we'll attack them where they're weakest. They have run this system as hard as they can for as long as they can. And they've, and he's always said, and Putin, to to his credit, has always said the US, and he likes to use the US for this because obviously, but he knows it's as much London as it is anything else. They use the dollar as a weapon."

"Well, of course the US uses the dollar as a weapon, right?"

"So, I mean, he, I mean, just a fan of that, like, like, just lay, just lay all that stuff out. So, yeah. And I think that's, I'm not trying to defend Putin or anything, but if I were him, that's what I would have done."

"Yeah. Go read his book now because it'll be interesting for you to pick up based on what you're talking about, what you're learning and and how Fanny and Freddy were were a part of that."

"And then at the end of the day, what's the first thing they do? They nationalized Fanny and Freddy. Correct. There was literally no, I mean, I could see it as they nationalized Fanny and Freddy as a means by which to stop the attack on the external attack on the United States. But then you have to ask yourself, why did we engender that attack by doing the things that we were doing with Saakashvili in Georgia and South and all of these things? Because remember, 2008 was a big coming out party for the Russian military to finally stop the bleeding and say, China, that's right. Yes, right. But that was coinciding with China's entry to the world. For for for those who are, because you, you and I are of a certain age."

"They, the Chinese were probably very unhappy with Putin at that moment. I'm sure they were, right? But you and I remember just how"

"Jingoistic that was. I mean, it, that that Olympic opening ceremony in July 2008 just shocked the world. And"

"I, I had no idea we were going to we were going to cover this up today. This is really cool."

"Right. Right. Well, because, you know, it's so interesting because that's where I got really curious. I've people have asked me kind of the my Bitcoin origination story, and it goes back to 2008. I was working on the trading floor at Morgan Stanley, trying to put puzzle pieces together because things didn't make sense to me. It was it was it was Pollson giving an interview saying that, um, or no, it was Geithner at that time giving an interview saying that interest rates were too low. And then after the financial crisis, criticizing the Fed for holding interest rates too high. And it was, um, he, he contradicted himself within like a two-week period of time, right? And Geithner, for those who don't know, was was, um, Obama, he was, was he Clinton or Obama's Treasury Secretary?"

"He was he was Obama's secretary."

"He was Obama's. Okay."

"He was he was at the Fed at the time. He was, remember, he was he was at the Fed and then he was moved over to Treasury."

"Okay. I, I, yeah, I don't know all that."

"The guy was at the Fed and that's why that was his, he had the resume for it to be."

"He certainly had the resume for it, but it, but he contradicted himself. It was on a Charlie Rose show, and I remember at that time thinking, this makes no sense. I've got to really dig in. Um, and it's so interesting because, you know, working on Wall Street, everybody's in, you know, heads down, in their little zone, in their specialty, and a lot of people just don't pop their head up. And, and also, it's, you know, the Wall Street jobs are so lucrative that that people don't want to pop their head up and don't want to lose them. I had a very unusual Wall Street career. I did five different jobs."

"Right?"

"And started three new businesses in 22 years because I just kept getting bored, right? That meant I just was curious and just kept, you know, I, I, I was asking the deep questions, but I had access. That's what's so interesting. I had access and being able to have a mortgage-backed securities trader who was a junior person, so therefore working in the first two weeks of August and had to deal with the Bank of Russia like calling to dump their mortgage-backed securities at any at any price. And it made no sense to her. And then you realize like, this fits into a bigger puzzle piece, um, that it was it was, you know, designed to try to force the United States to nationalize Fanny and Freddy. And it, and that's exactly what happened. And here we are all these years later."

"And and we're still dealing with that pro, and we're still dealing with that problem. We're and what, and the net effect of it is between Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley and everything else that's happened since then, uh, we haven't really been in control of. We, you know, we had the middle class was the middle class's access to wealth was nationalized. Obama, Obamacare destroyed destroyed our ability to have healthcare and and predictability and raised costs on us unbelievably. Zero interest rates were a, uh, were a just nothing but a pump for, uh, unbelievable, uh, inflation and things like insurance costs."

"Oh, cost of college, all of this stuff, housing cost, everything else. And then of course, we don't even have access to the, um, the fixed rate 30-year mortgage, which literally created created the middle class and helped create the modern middle class."

"Yeah, your point is very well taken. And that's why Besson is so focused on mortgage rates. So focused on mortgage rates. And that's where that's a strategy for the midterm for him, right? Is get interest rates down. Period. Full stop."

"Well, so now let's now let's go back now. So now let's go back to what I I teased earlier about Japan because it is my prediction for this year that by the time we get we exit 2026, the United States and Japan will be within a quarter point of each other."

"Okay. Do tell because I have not paid that much attention to Japan. Although I noticed that Besson and and the and his counterpart in Japan are meeting an awful lot."

"Yeah. Well, Besson had, I'm sure that at the IMF conference back in October, that Besson told Ueda over at the BOJ, you will start raising interest rates again. And and that's just the way things are going to be. Um, don't worry about the the yen. We, we'll, you know, we'll take care of you. The the point being is, okay, so there's a couple things I want to I want to note about this. Um,"

"The reason is is that you have to do away with the yen carry trade. You have to force the carry trade onto some other currency, onto some other central bank. Because why did they build the bank? Why did we build Japan? Go back to Richard Warner's Princess again. Why was Japan rebuilt after World War II turned into this massive industrial entity? It was in order to be able to use the Bank of Japan as a, um, a, as a, a source of cheap Eurodollar leverage."

"And and and build upon."

"That's so interesting. Ponzi scheme. Now, and then we then we leave them there as the ultimate carry currency with a massive capacity."

"Of the Japanese economy as the third or fourth largest economy in the world to be able to fund this, that the size of the carry trade necessary to keep to basically keep the welfare queens in Europe afloat."

"Oh, wow. I've never thought of it that way. Right."

"Now Powell goes on his higher for longer. He has so he says I can, the United States economy can handle five and a half percent interest rates. Can you? No, you obviously can't. But the Bank of Japan is slowly having to unwind this. What was this is why when Kuroda walked away in December of 2022, I was confused. I was like, 'Okay, it's time. Kuroda's time. Okay, well, then we'll just get meet the new boss, same as the old boss.' But then his not his protégé declined to take the job."

"Right. Yes, I remember that. Okay. And I talk and I remember talking, I've talked about this. I was like, that's weird. This is Japan. Seniority is everything. You know, saving face and and and and it's all very important, right? Everybody has to has their place and everything happens in a certain order. And he said, 'Nope. I was an architect of the old system of low interest rate policies and QQE and everything else and for the good of the country, I'm going to step aside because I can't be impartial.' And then we get"

"that no one was expecting and doesn't immediately start raising interest rates. He just like widens the band that he allows the 10-year to start trading in and all that. And then in August of 2024, we get the big tantrum where he raises up to a quarter point. And then we get a massive equity unlocked. And then he lets it be for six months. And then he raises again when Trump is inaugurated in January. And nothing again. Um, the end carry trade unwinds a lot during the tariff tantrum."

"For sure. Right."

"Now, but that has nothing to do with the Bank of Japan. The Bank of Japan did nothing during all of that. But it was clear that someone, and I think it was, I think the Bank of England, the Bank of Canada were running an operation. And they were and so they were having to unwind yen positions in order to get all that done. And that's because you watched the, um, you watched the the yen, um, our, you watched our the long end of our yield curve move about 60 basis points to the upside. And the Japanese yield curve drop by 80 basis points to the to the downside. So we, we just watched, we just watched this game play. Um, and then he raises again and nothing happens this time. So he's at 75 basis points now. Clearly, the long end of the yield curve is rising in Japan because it needs to to cover, you know, to finally get to the point where it can cover inflation. And we're bringing interest rates down slowly. So, but what happened in 2025? In the first half of 2025, Besson, Trump, run a weak dollar, we're buying gold policy. We're breaking the LBMA."

"Yep. Oh, well, and [laughter] today I saw a wonderful Franklin meme today. Franklin goes to the LBMA and discovers the vaults are empty."

"Yeah, the vaults are empty. Right. So, [laughter] so for the first half of So, that goes on until literally the weakening of the dollar versus the euro. So the Euro dollar cross is strengthening, you know, versus the euro up until literally to the day to the day that Ursula Von der Leyen goes and and and supplicates herself at in front of Trump at his castle in Scotland on British soil."

"Yeah. Right."

"And says, 'I will cut the trade deal with you immediately.' The Euro dollar like trades on a very, very tight band for the next for the rest of the year. But the Euroyen cross keeps stra And the Euroyen keeps strengthening. So it's putting So we just shifted from the Euro dollar cross to the Euroyen cross. Okay, now I see where you're going. That's put that. So and then the and so they're keep they're keeping the pressure on the Europeans by squeezing them out of the carry trade slowly but surely. So over the course of this year, I expect Ueda to keep cut, keep raising rates. They'll probably start to accelerate. Maybe not every meeting, but every other meeting. I expect Japan to be close to 2% at the end of the year. And I expect us to be somewhere around 2% by the end of the year."

"The correlation that I alluded to earlier that you said you'd ask me about is about going"

"By the way, the Swiss National Bank is back. Oh, sorry. The one last thing. And the Swiss National Bank is already back at the zero bound. Who's going to become the carry trader of choice? Is it going to be the Bank of England? It's going to be the Bank of Canada. Who can handle this? Bank of England can't handle it if if silver's $150 an ounce and gold is $6,000. The Bank of Canada clearly can't handle it with market. Who's going to take that on? But yeah, but Switzerland is too small an economy to do that."

"Exactly. Right. So there's no there's no capacity. But my I'm getting at is that the the old carry trading system, like who's going to become that? Is it going to be the ECB? Are they going to have to go back to the zero bound?"

"What do you think?"

"I don't know."

"Or is that is that where Besson is forcing them?"

"Or is that where Besson is forcing them? Exactly."

"Yeah."

"And if that, if that's the case, um, it's going to be that like at that point then all that capital flees Europe. Well, just going back to the the very high correlation between the Japanese 30-year rate and gold."

"Just incredibly high correlation, right? And I think Besson made a very important"

"Um, he gave us a tell early on about gold. I mean, he's been consistent about gold for years, right? But unlike other US Treasury Secretaries that did not want gold and silver to rise in price because they viewed that as a scorecard on the dollar, Besson never said anything like that. He's happy to let it. I mean, and and I, I think you already know this, but because of the revaluation of gold that has taken place, that actually gold is the number one reserve currency in the world right now."

"It is. And what have I been saying for two, what have I been saying for a long time?"

"What's going to bake your noodle? What's going to bake your noodle is the day that the Fed, when the when the the the when the Fed allows and is welcomes a rising gold price. Why? To offset the leverage of its balance sheet of its real assets versus its fake assets, its overvalued assets. The So, it's got all these treasuries that are on the market that it bought at like 1%, right? All these mortgage-backed securities that are unmarketable. So like, so they got this massive notional value of the Fed's balance sheet. Well, right now at $4,500 an ounce."

"Our gold reserves, our official gold reserves are on."

"Right. If they're there, right?"

"Oh, they're. Yeah. Well, no. Official gold res No, they're there. They question whether they're bigger than that or not. Brent and Johnson and I are both convinced that the United States has more than 80, 133.5 tons of gold."

"Oh, interesting. I have not heard you say that. Okay. Oh, yeah. What makes you convinced?"

"I just think that's way we were buying gold left and right and we have unofficial reserves and they're in the and they're on the balance sheet of like GLD and other places where we're storing them."

"That's true. They're they're inside the United States even if they're not officially on the Fed's balance sheet. I got you."

"So that all that LBMA gold that we took in last year that was that's now on GLD's balance sheet, which is not going anywhere, right?"

"Because JP Morgan is the sole custodian. And JP Morgan has to call the Treasury Department up and go, 'India wants 300 tons of gold. Do we give it to them?' No. Sell them, make them liquidate their GLD shares for dollars. [ __ ] off. No, you can't have them. This is the way it's going to be. Same thing with, same thing with silver, by the way."

"Oh, silver. Isn't that crazy? It's what, 91 right now?"

"93 something like that. It's insane. But wow. Okay. So, so when you think of it that way, like I all I've ever been saying is that at some point the Fed's balance sheet led the leverage of the Fed's balance, and I wasn't when I originally put this model together, I never said I always thought, well, the Fed will still be there. But now we're talking about the the Treasury taking over control of a lot of the Fed's. And if we're talking about"

"That doesn't change. The Fed's still going to be there."

"Right. Right. Exactly. Yeah. So, at some point, the leverage ratio of the assets that the Fed actually has versus its total balance sheet, that's going to get that's where we're going to find out where the price of gold is going to go to at some point where we that's where the free market comes in and says, we will decide what that leverage ratio is. We'll be 1:1, 2:1, 3:1, 4:1. It was like 11 to 1 when I first started talking about this. Now it's like six to one. You know, it's like a trillion versus three trillion dollars or whatever it is. It's like five to one or whatever. I think we get that. We might get to a Jim, a very Jim Sinclair one to one."

"Well, what would the gold price be at that point?"

"$50,000."

"Well, well north of of Yeah. Well north of $40,000 an ounce. I think it's going to be somewhere around 20. That's what I think. I also think I also think a million dollar Bitcoin and $400 silver for those exact reasons."

"Right. Well, it's very clear. One thing that is absolutely true about 2025, aside from just the craziness of everything that's happened and sort of the, you know, a lot of people talking about the fourth turning."

"Real assets, gold, silver, non-oil commodities, and Bitcoin have rallied together, right? Different, not not on a every day, but directionally, right?"

"Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah."

"And Bitcoin's breakout this week has been"

"Massive. Hilarious because I've just been waiting for it. I'm like, 'Oh, this is good.' I don't know about anybody else, but I bought a little BITU a couple of weeks ago at $83,000. I'm like,"

"I like making 2x on my Bitcoin right now and then getting paid as a monthly dividend. Like, you know, this is my 401k. Oh."

"That's interesting. Yeah."

"Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm I'm I'm playing those bets. Let me put it to you this way. I check the options for the first time in 12 to 14 years. I checked an options chain and I'm like, ah, that's not liquid enough for me to for me to play in that space. Thought but I thought about it. I"

"I don't trade around my positions. So just literally just"

"No, I mean, I don't either, but but every once in a while I have to let people know what I actually own because, you know, hey, this is what I do for a living, right? And so, you know, part of one of the things that we do have to do, we do should talk about is, you know, okay, I, I make my my bones very clear. I, I, whatever I recommend is if I'm invested in anything, I'm invested in the things that I that I recommend to people. I don't, I don't, whatever I have, and I mostly just have physical gold, silver, and Bitcoin. That's most of my my my worth. That and the equity in my home. I mean, why, I mean, look, I, I live off my cash flow. I'm still, I'm still a middle-class dude who's who shops close, shops at Walmart. Like, let's not kid ourselves. So, um, I'm living in a freaking RV in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee."

"Are you really? I was gonna say this is not your normal background. Yeah, I mean, obviously you wouldn't have we haven't talked since April. We only we only put this together in the last few months."

"Well, and the funny thing is, we've never met each other. A lot of people talk about how they love listening to our conversations, but we've never actually met each other."

"One of these days we're going to do that. And and you know, one of these days I'm just going to like get on a plane and fly to Wyoming and we're just going to like have coffee."

"Well, come to come to Scaramucci's conference in August. It's going to be even more interesting, right? Because it's right before the Fed's the Kansas City Fed symposium."

"Wow. I might I might have to. I actually have a I actually have a travel schedule this year that actually isn't just like, you know, you know, going like back and forth to Florida. I actually have a couple of places I'm going to be. I'm going to be in a couple of different places. I'm going to be in Calgary in March. I'm going to be in Atlanta in May. I'm going to be in New Hampshire in June for a Bitcoin thing actually for Camp Nakamoto up in up in, um, yeah, that's going to be fun. Uh, they invited me to come up there. So, got a couple of things that I'm couple of places I'm going to be this year, but you know, and then I've got a I've got a couple of Rush concerts to go to as well on various places in the country. So, um, you know,"

"Very good. Yeah. One must genuflect at the at the altar of Alex and Getty. So, you know."

"Oh, wow. Okay. Right. I, I'm not doing as much travel. I've got I've got a family member, I think you know this, who's pretty ill, so I've cut way way back on travel. And we'll see about how that's gonna play out in in, uh, in 2026 though."

"Actually, actually, we're going to be just so you guys just so you know, I don't care. I was like, we're gonna go on vacation to the to the the Southwest in for two weeks. So, I may be in your I may I may actually"

"Make a Yeah, make a make a drive. The Utah National Parks are amazing. And you especially if you catch, catch Wyoming in the summertime, it's also spectacular."

"Absolutely spectacular. So because come across I-80."

"I have to say, I mean, we're doing this now. Been up here on the the Kootenai plateau where we are up here is is different and great and fascinating. And every time I drive, like I drive down the the main road that goes where we are, like, and I drive into the valley, I'm like, I'm just looking out like, I miss this. I haven't seen this in so long because I've been living in flat land, you know, flat."

"Right in Florida."

"Yeah."

"That's where you raised your raised your daughter and Yeah."

"Oh, yeah. Absolutely."

"That's it's a it's it's and it sounds like you haven't completely cut ties, but once you cut interest or cut cut income taxes, a lot of folks end up there."

"I, I love I love my Florida citizenship. And I will do I will fight like hell to keep it for as long as I can. So, yeah. And I will So, we'll spend time."

"They should step in and do and basically try to take over Delaware. F I'm fascinated that no state has stepped in to try to do the Delaware natively register corporate securities on a blockchain [clears throat] trade, which what the registered agents. When I was working on this in 2015, I mentioned earlier that I went to the SEC with the Delaware Deputy Secretary of State and learned how"

"How many mistakes there are. And you know, between the Delaware corporate registrations and SEC, you know, 10K, number of shares issued and outstanding. And what's fascinating is back then, the whole idea, and it's still true today, although the incumbents were able to delay, delay, delay, right? I was working on that in 2015. Here it is 11 years later, um, and and oh, by the way, there's another piece of this that when my company at the time got access because we were partnering with the Delaware with the, uh, Delaware blockchain initiative, we got access to the back end of the Delaware Secretary of State's website. There were multiple hackers sitting on the line."

"Okay."

"And when we when we disclosed this to the SEC, it was it was kind of a shoot the messenger kind of thing. Like the state of Delaware didn't want the world to figure out that, you know, it knew this, right? And how many people were getting advanced information about mergers, right? And nobody seemed to care. So that means you ask the question like, 'Oh dear, who's in on this?'"

"Right? How is it that all these Congress people get, you know, they walk in with no net worth, no net worth, you know, wealth and and you know, all of a sudden I'm worth $30 million, right? I mean, I'm not saying she did all that, but it's just that there are mechanisms like that in the system that the old system, you know, there were interests that didn't want it changed, right? And so if you just go around the old system, you can clean up so much of that corruption."

"Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And and that and and so we're I think the the big thing we should be thinking about in terms of theme for the podcast is that no matter what the old system wants to, um, uh, hold on to, they're not going to. And clearly"

"Oh, absolutely. The technology exists to fix it all. Yeah."

"Just in general. I mean, but I mean, the technology even comes in the form of of of of, uh, of people who refuse to accept the old system for what it was. And that gets back right to back to what said at the beginning of the podcast."

"It's clear what Trump is trying to do. And he's got a team in front of him that understands what's been done and what is now going to be undone. And you know, last summer I said he's going to meet the king of England and he's going to issue terms of surrender. And the king clearly said no, or did the clear king clearly said I can't say yes, which maybe which is not exactly the same thing depending on your point of view. He's going to Davos on like"

"I think this is going to be great. Grab the popcorn. And he's flipping off, you know, his, uh, [laughter]"

"My god, my poor liver if I have to take a drink every time he says something something inflammatory. But I, you know, when he went to the UN and brought both bags of poop and the shotguns was like, that's one. Now he's going to do Davos on Davos. Yeah."

"And you know, there's gonna be Steven Miller is gonna be walking in with a tray and just going, 'Cole, over and over again,' and all over the crowd. It's going to be hilarious. Set it all on fire."

"And I saw he called Elizabeth Warren. I thought that was hilarious. He picked up the phone and called her. And they apparently they're doing, you know, they're trying to because he's targeting the credit card interest rates. He wants credit card interest rates down. So, he's sort of jawboning them down, right? And he's like, 'All right, he'll partner with her on that.'"

"Right?"

"How funny is that, right? That was not on my bingo card."

"Trump is an old-school populist. And really, at the end of the day, he's more a Democrat than he is a traditional Republican. He's a Democrat in the in the more in the Kennedy sense than anything else. Yeah."

"And you know, that's fine. Like, I'm okay with that. So, um, at the end of the day, like, he's not perfect, but he's clearly got his head and, you know, in a in a particular mindset."

"And that mindset is, we're just, we're done taking, you know, you know, spending the blood and treasure of the American people for the rest of the world. And especially and especially to Europe. He has to play with the Chinese. Yeah, you know, he wants to make nice with the Russians because he knows that that they're the best antipode to the rise of China as that that they're"

"For sure."

"Without a doubt. And the and it would be the best for the Russians as well because they don't have to be China's [ __ ]."

"Well, look at the commodity other than oil, right? Which is very specific because of the the dynamic between Venezuela and Iran. Other than oil, commodities have just rallied. What country is that best for? Russia. Yes."

"Right. Because it's so natural resource-rich, kind of like the United States in that regard. Yeah."

"And and Canada. And that's why Canada is going to have to just, you know, bite the bullet and learn to, you know, stop putting, you know, um, vowels at the end of every sentence. You have to like start talking like Americans. Sorry. Just coming. Sorry."

"It was It was really funny. I saw I saw a meme that that's that circled a map of the world. It's like Trump's, Putin's, and Xi's, right? And it just like, you can kind of draw it that way."

"Yeah. Know, somebody did that and they actually and they actually found that map and then they attended it and they wrote a big article. What's Tom Lango's thesis? I've been like, and it's really funny. It's on my Twitter feed. I'm like, yeah, that's kind of it. And it's drawn in crayon, too. If you, it's that world. Draw a red crayon. Draw."

"That's probably where I saw it was on your Twitter feed because I always I when I'm trying to I can't keep up with with everything right now. And I just I wanted to just I'll just scan your Twitter feed."

"At least once a day just to see your take on the events of the world because it is hard to keep up with unless you're doing it full-time. And you do do it full-time and"

"I don't know how you keep up."

"I don't know how I keep up either. I do have a I do have a large group of people who feed me a lot of stuff every day. I can tell you that in the position that I'm in now, I, I have to remind myself I don't like, by the way, I don't like the new chat function in Twitter because it doesn't actually give me all of my, um, notifications, which is part of the reason why I haven't. So, I, I don't always see the notifications in Twitter because I mostly, um, um, interact my Twitter feed through my notifications and my chats, right? I finally just checked, I finally just checked for the first time since Christmas, the requests for DMs."

"And it was like 20 long. I'm like, 'Oh my god.' And having to go through all that. So."

"Um, so if I miss something, if I don't get back to you in a DM on Twitter, it's it's I simply because the thing is not giving me really good notification numbers. So, don't, don't feel slighted. I will always apologize for it. But, yeah, I have a just an insane number of people just throwing stuff at me all day long. I've now trained like a whole group of research. Yeah. And it's great. And then I, I don't have to go and see the world. that the world comes to me every day. And I go, noise, signal, signal, signal, signal. And the signal to noise ratio from that is actually improving every day."

"Well, I'm sure it's pretty high, right? And and you know that the crypto Twitter sphere is all upset at Elon for changing the algorithm and down, down regarding or downplaying the, um, you know, crypto. And there's all this conspiracy theory. I don't know if it's true that Elon is going to be introducing a payments platform. And that's why the conspiracy theory is that that's not a conspiracy theory. We've known for a while that he was going to use Twitter as a super app and introducing introducing payments. But what we haven't known is that the algorithm was going to be, you know, designed allegedly to down, down rank."

"Downrank."

"Prioritize. Downrank. Thank you. The, um, crypto people. He also said in that, you know, after the, um, the European Union demanded that he, they, you know, they demanded X, Y, and Z about what he's doing to to to, um, to downrank and down people, all the rest. He's like, 'Fine, I'll just make it, we're making the Twitter algorithm public knowledge.'"

"I love that."

"Yeah. No."

"Right. And I think that's partly because of the criticism of our crew. Yeah. Yeah. I think it, I think him putting, he's been saying it for a long time that he's going to make the algorithm open source so everybody can see it. I absolutely, you know, I've never doubted that he would eventually do it because Elon is just that kind of guy."

"Yeah, he is. It's not about money to him."

"But not anymore. It really is. I mean, he's got enough, right? Um, Elon, Elon Musk recently, I read now he lives in like a $50,000 trailer and left West Texas or something. He actually doesn't have it. He's like, I have I don't want no, um, the infrastructure is now it's it's too much reliability. It actually just weighs you down. Having and having he's become very Keanu Reeves about things, you know, how Keanu takes public transportation and feeds the pigeons every day and and all that stuff. He's just a normal dude that eventually goes out and makes makes another John Wick movie, right? Elon's like hitting that stride in his in his, uh, in his middle age, which is actually good because he's so"

"Because he's so in effect, you know, he's so volatile and unstable that he needs to do that and needs to simplify his life because then he makes better decisions."

"That's Yeah. Well, and I think that's that's obviously the case of that that he is such a good. I think who who was it that one of his big investors said he'd never seen he until Steve Jobs, you know, he'd never seen anyone who was that good at filtering out signal from noise until he met Elon."

"That he's just hyperfocused on spending his time as a CEO on the things that really matter. And as somebody who is running a company, I, I can sympathize that that's one of the biggest challenges is all the all the all the noise that comes at you all day long and how do you how do you prioritize the things that are going to work? It's a challenge for sure. It is it is a challenge. And and this is part of the reason why, um, when we, when we, uh, evaluate the, uh, the decision-making of public figures, you know, it doesn't matter whether the good, whether we like them or we hate them. At the end of the day, you know, a guy like Jerome Powell, do you really think he knew exactly what was going on with the stupid renovations or any of that stuff? Of course he didn't. He's the FOMC chair, but he has to be the guy who's supposed to be in charge of that. He's the figurehead for it. We, we, we have to remind ourselves in this in this social media landscape that, you know, yeah, you want to be the the guy with the big bucks with the CEO after your name or have or have the big job. You know, with it comes the responsibility. It's like Trump gets blamed for [ __ ] that he has no control over. Just like we all get blamed for stuff that we have no control over in our lives. And it's just something we have to remind ourselves here of here and there to take a step back, evaluate them as people, and go, 'Well, they're like us. They only have 24 hours in a day. They still put their pants on one leg at a time and they still can only get so [snorts] much information. And the way they get their information, I think, is as is as important as anything else. And what I've been impressed with so far in Trump 2.0 is that he's spending less time watching the television set and railing at Fox."

"That's clear. [laughter]"

"Right. And doing and and doing the real work. And so he's been"

"Very focused for this second second term. No clear, no question."

"He has a much different demeanor. And for that reason alone, I'm willing to give him a very wide berth on things that I he's that he does that I may or may not agree with in the moment because so far he has done he has every time he's done that and everybody's like lit their hair on fire. Israel, Iran, for example, right? Venezuela for another example. In the end of the day, what did he wind up doing? He wound up giving them the war they wanted in Israel and Iran. 12 days. They beat the crap out of each other."

"A tie in a lot of injuries. It looked like it, it looked like my my fantasy of a Dallas Cowboys, Philadelphia Eagles game. A tie and a lot of injuries. Um, and, um, because I'm a Giants. I was a Giants fan before my wife, right? And, um, and then Venezuela got rid of Maduro, took Maduro in, put him into protective custody. That was necessary, pressured everybody into and then then backed the existing regime in order to allow, you know, a real, to allow Venezuela to to come to the floor, right? And"

"At the end of the day, so far he's,"

"You might not agree with his method,"

"but can't really argue with the results. That's the way I look at it. So."

"So let's close with what's your prediction. Who does he pick as Fed chair and when?"

"Did he not, uh, already nominate Hassid? Or was that just fake news?"

"I don't think it unless"

"I thought I saw I thought I saw that the same. I thought I saw that the same day that the Powell thing came out, but you know, again, it might have been fake news. Lots, lots of dumb [ __ ] goes on Twitter on a daily basis."

"Yeah. Yeah. That's funny you didn't know that. No, it's still the race is still on."

"Yeah. Yeah. I, I, it could be Hassid. It could be the, I don't know. I don't even, to be honest with you, I don't even care. I just know that it's going to be somebody that's going to do whatever Trump wants at this point. And what Trump wants at this point is 2% interest rates. He says he wants one, he'll take two. One is his ZOPA, right? His that's that's his ZOPA offer, but he knows 2% is probably where it needs to be in the long run. And if he's got Fanny and Freddy back in the marketplace, he can control the long end of the yield curve and still keep the funds rate around 2% for and then everybody's happy. And then, you know, charge the offshore dollar markets, you know, 3%."

"Right. Yep."

"That's all that matters. And if you can get"

"And recapitalize the Fed that way. Yeah."

"And recapitalize it that way. Absolutely."

"Yeah."

"That's what I think."

"Well, let's see. So, this is You said this is going to be published on Sunday."

"Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll see. I mean, he said he's going to do it in the month of January. So, we're still in the month of January, but we're almost half. Well, by the time this comes out, we'll be halfway through. So."

"Oh, yeah. Uh, this probably this is the 14th. I'll probably come out in about three or four days. So, we'll see what happens, right? All right. Well, as always, we our meandering conversation went to places we didn't plan. And I, I love that we really didn't plan it. We talked before we started about just basic concepts. Yeah. And and the moment we dove in, we avoid, we the plan went out the window. So, [laughter]"

"Are you kidding? So, um, where can people find you on Twitter? Do your plug. Let's get out the door."

"Yeah. CaitlinLong_, um, I'm on LinkedIn. Those are the only two really the only two social medias. And Noster."

"Of course. And of course, Custodia Bank and"

"The CEO of Custodia Bank and all of that. And you know, and I'm as always, I'm TFL 27. Sorry, I will do this right this time. Let's try that again, shall we? Begin again. I am TfL 1728. Patreon, Goats and Guns. Tom, me. You guys know the drill. You know how this works. Caitlin, thank you so much. We will not wait eight more months to do this. [laughter] Y'all be well."

"Be good and keep your stick on the [music] [music] [music]"