"INVISIBLE HAND" MANIPULATING OIL PRICES - w/ Chris Martenson

What's going on? Tell me what, what, what happened. What did Trump say? What did Iran do?

All right, Chris, let me tell you what happened. We booked this interview. I was going to get your analysis on the economy, the price of gold, oil prices, why they dropped so quickly, why China's still not buying up the oil even though prices are so low. Did China use up strategic reserves? So that was the plan.

And then Iran had a bad day. They struck a ship. Trump posted about it. He seemed calm. The next day he bombs them. And funny enough, I was speaking with another economist yesterday about the topics I just told you about with, um, when Iran got bombed live. It was with, might know him, um, Christopher. I don't, I have a thing where I need to always find the name when I mention someone with, uh, I don't have it. So I was, I was in an interview having an economic discussion and that happened. Jeffrey Curry. And then during the interview, Iran decides to bomb, the US decides to bomb Iran.

Also on that day, just in case that's not enough, Chris, for a discussion, the Lebanese government decides to do a separate deal with the Israeli government that's separate to the deal between Iran and the US that includes Lebanon and Israel and Lebanon. So this is what's going on right now, like this. And, uh, and today, after the attacks yesterday, um, today Iran decides to strike another ship, which shows that they did respond to the US attack, but very small response. I think two or three drones against Bahrain. Um, and then today they attack another ship. And what seems to be happening is a power struggle between the US and Iran on who controls the Straits of Hormuz. Iran's trying to assert its control. US convinces Oman to open a corridor in the south. Oman does. Iran is pissed off, and that's what led to Iran striking the ship. Yes. Two days ago and again today. So, um, yeah, Chris, it's not looking good. But what, what, what do you make of this? Also that today, the Straits of Hormuz had a massive drop in the number of ships going through. So we'll see how that impacts the market.

Yeah. Well, I mean, as there should be, because I think the ship they struck today, uh, report I heard is it was a Supermax, and this is a, a really large VLCC crude carrier. Um, they struck a container ship yesterday, and it was probably a pretty light tap. They struck the bridge, something flying obviously, 'cause it's the bridge is in the air. Um, probably a drone, but I don't think that was that serious. But this apparently, this ship is on fire and burning. Um, so if you're the owner of one of these very explosive, slow-moving ships, you're, you're, yeah, you're not going anywhere near the straits right now. And this is an amazing sort of a disconnect, because we get to the, uh, and Iran clearly had in that, uh, we'll, we'll have it reasonably open for 60 days subject to certain terms and conditions, you know, and, and then after that they said, "Yeah, well, there'll be some tolls or fees or whatever you want to call them." Uh, so that was their position. The United States position was no. This all has to be completely open right now with no restrictions whatsoever. And, um, I don't, that's a really profound disconnect between those two positions.

Yeah. Who do you think will blink?

Well, I just did a, a pretty big analysis of the strategic petroleum reserve, the SPR. There are a lot of questions like, how far can you go in all this? And that, and I think it's got a little bit of room. You have to make a few assumptions, but there's a report that the Department of War has a minimum threshold. They want to see 243 million barrels left in there, and you have to make some assumptions about what that means. There's only 331 right now. So that only leaves 88 million barrels to go at current drawdowns. That's 10 weeks. But they always have to leave 10% in there. So when you subtract the 10%, which is of the total capacity, which is 713 million barrels, that's another 71 missing. That means there's only two weeks left, um, that they can draw down at current rates of about 9 million barrels per week. If the Department of War has a say and says, "No, we have to leave something in reserve just in case, right? For true emergencies, not gas approaching $4.50 a gallon, that's not an actual emergency. I mean, going to war with China, that would be an emergency, right?" So that, that's one level. Um, if the Department of War doesn't have a minimum floor and doesn't really care, and I can't imagine that they wouldn't, uh, then we'll, we probably go to about October 4th. So the actual number we can manage here in the United States is somewhere between those two numbers, two weeks, 14 weeks, you pick. Um, you know, what assumptions you want to make. Now, they could always draw that down more slowly or even more quickly. Its max drawdown rate is about 4 million barrels a day, and we're doing about 1.4ish right now. 1.3.

Still, are we still drawing it down now, or we've slowed, we've stopped, we still?

We'll see what the next report is. Last week was a pretty hefty drawdown. Um, so it looks like it's going to start slowing down because they've had fewer bids for the oil that they wanted to release from it. Um, so we'll see how that, how that plays out. But I think that's the ticking clock in this story. Iran can wait. They know they can wait. All they have to do is make sure that, you know, some X million barrels per day is missing coming out of that strait, and the pressure is now on the United States' side of the court.

Yeah. Well, a good time now is to talk about the massive drop in the price of oil. Um, it seems to have given Trump a bit of breathing room. Um, the ability to take more risks again. You know, when the, when the price evolves at $100, $110, you know, $105, $110 a barrel, Trump just wants to do anything he can to deescalate and would think twice and thrice before deciding to to escalate in any way. When oil goes below $70, you know, that leeway is there. So, a few questions. First, do you agree with this point? But more importantly, why do you think oil's at that level? And let's talk about the elephant in the room, China. The reason that oil dropped so quickly and the reason that oil didn't hit $150, $200 a barrel is because of the drop in Chinese demand. What did China do? Did they use their strategic reserves? Why did Trump convince them in the meeting they had, um, the, the Trump meeting in this China visit? What happened there? And what's happening right now? Why are they still not buying up a lot of that oil that is floating for such a cheap price?

All right, two issues here. So, let's talk about the Chinese situation first. So they didn't reduce their demand, they reduced their imports. So their domestic demand was probably unchanged, right? They continued to burn through stockpiles and, and it's, they don't really have a strategic stockpile. That's the government's, and then, you know, corporations or industries, commercial inventories, uh, on the other side. It's all one thing, right? So, uh, when we talk about their inventories, I've always assumed it's just all adding up all the stuff they've got there because it's all kind of belongs to the state, right? Um, so, but they did take their imports down 4.4 million barrels a day in the last month, and that's a huge amount. And we know that Trump went over there with a bunch of dignitaries from our corporate world, and, and so they must have been some quid pro quo. The quid will reduce our imports. They must have gotten something for that. We don't know what yet, but...

They have to have, right?

Taiwan, that wasn't free.

Something to do with Taiwan. Something to do with Taiwan.

Maybe. Yeah. Yep. Probably.

What else could it be? So we, well, we saw just a week after that trade delegation that the United States suspended arm sales to Taiwan.

Forever. That's worked.

Exactly.

Right.

Exactly.

So we'll see. So that's on one side. The other side is that, um, uh, right now when you look at the structure of the oil market, all of our markets here in the West, that would be London, New York, um, you know, what we're really looking at is they're paper markets, right? So, it's entirely possible for people who have deep pockets and who are willing to sell short paper barrels of oil to drive the price down. They do this with every single commodity out there. They've done it for years with gold, with silver, but I didn't think they could do it with oil, but the data is pretty clear right now. So, managed money is a group of participants, and they are now the most bearish on oil they've ever been. They hold about $19 billion of shorts on the Brent contract alone when the normal number would be bouncing between two and five, right? So, it's like this massive increase in that our prime ETF for oil, USO, has 93% of its total outstanding float, all the shares out are short right now. This isn't just like, kind of short. We're talking GameStop level short. Like this is like if it goes the other way, mad scramble. So, the question is, well, who's doing all this shorting? How do, how I missed it? What are they?

Sorry to interrupt you. What, what are they shorting? I didn't understand.

So, there's an ETF out there with a designation USO.

Okay.

And that tracks the price of oil. It doesn't physically hold oil, but it tracks the price of oil. Um...

And so there are people out there who, whoever, if we had access to the data, we'd know, but investors, speculators are now have shorted practically the entirety of that. All the shares outstanding. If there were a 100 shares outstanding, 93 of those are short right now.

That's wild.

Yeah, it's, it's massive, massive concentration of short. So the question arises, how do you get max bearish oil in this environment? You know, and as we've mentioned before, be incomplete if we didn't mention Russia under a lot of technical difficulties trying to keep its oil going with all these successful attacks by Ukraine on its oil infrastructure. And that, that alone, just those attacks alone in prior years would have shot the price of oil up. So there's something else going on. I'm in the camp that believes there's an invisible hand at play here. Um, that this is something that our government uses markets as signaling devices at this point in time, and that they do intervene. Uh, and it's a belief I hold, but been watching them for a long time. This is odd.

How would they intervene? So you're saying that's using what money? Maybe Elon's magic money machines that we talked about, right? So, you don't go ahead because there's something, something just doesn't make sense.

Well, no, it doesn't, because we, we know demand isn't down. Demand, the price of oil right now, or gasoline, petrol, you know, jet fuel at the pump is not high enough right now to drop demand. So, demand is staying very, very high as if there was no war going on. But supplies were missing, still 8, 9 million barrels a day. We have this little flush of oil that's going to come out of the, the Gulf. But that's like a one-time flush. And by the way, a lot of evidence suggests that the tankers that are leaving are heading for China right now. And it's mostly Iranian oil that they've allowed through. Um, so we got that going on, but that's it. So we're still short many millions of barrels of oil per day. The price should be skyrocketing. Inventories are declining. That should be sending price signals, and it hasn't so far. But if that goes on further, we just sail straight into a shortage, uh, at max speed at some point. What's that saying? It's like, it, it happens slowly, but then suddenly, or something along those lines, like we're, like it's like things are just unraveling. Something's just happening slowly, slowly. It's like '08 financial crisis. I remember things are looking bad, things are looking bad, it's going to happen, it's going to happen, it's going to happen. And boom, it implodes. I just feel like something similar is happening with with energy markets.

Because the Iranians will probably be looking at the price of oil saying, "What the hell went on? We just opened the Straits of Hormuz. We're still attacking ships every few days. The US is on the brink of collapse, yet oil prices collapsing. Did we do a shitty deal? There's breathing space for Trump. Something's happening." Or they might see it being also manipulated. Like, let's just hold off for a bit and let things unravel. They might even play a role in letting it unravel. You know what? Let's cause the Straits of Hormuz to close. Let's strike a few ships for whatever reason, because they're going through the Omani side, and let's see if the price of oil really is going to be below $70, because it doesn't add up, or strategic reserves are weeks away or from just going to zero.

Yeah. Look, what, one of the things we know for sure is that one of the things Trump cares about most and really focuses on is the stock market, and also the price of oil. I mean, he talks about them all the time. So, it will not have escaped Iranian attention. In fact, it hasn't. Galibbah has made direct statements about this that, "Oh, Trump seems to care about his precious market." So they know that's his his weak point. They know that's what he's focusing on. So if you're smart and strategic, like we know the Iranians are, I would just let us continue doing what we're doing, holding the price of oil down for political purposes, watching our inventories drain. You just let that clock run as long as possible, and then you pull the plug on the whole thing. And if you do that, the United States really doesn't have any reserves to rely on at that point in time. There's, there's nothing to fall back on. It would be silly for us to do that, to drain our reserves down without a clear plan for how we're going to exit. Um, but if we do that, if we drain our reserves down and then reescalate and the strait gets closed down, I, that's going to be very bad for US markets, for, um, price of oil, for all kinds of things.

Jeff Curry must have echoed this, right?

Yeah, Jeff is, Jeff obviously he's been very bullish on the price of oil. So, he's a bit stunned by how the price collapsed, but he also feels there's something sinister and he's, he's really looking at China. He doesn't know what the hell's going on in China. For him, it just doesn't make sense why China is not buying up, importing more oil, why there isn't a spike there with these current prices. He thinks they might have used some of their reserves, even though it doesn't show, show in the satellite images. They're very secretive about these things. Thinks they're secretive about most things. So, he thinks they use some reserves. I think underground reserves or hidden reserves, something along those lines. But more importantly, he said, "Look, that one concerns me less on how they were able to not why they didn't buy up the oil when the price was high, but now the price is low, why are we seeing a spike in imports?" So, that's for him, doesn't, if they did use their reserves, they should be restocking pretty quickly. They're very risk-averse. So, that's what really is bizarre for him. I have other guests that are just talking about the manipulating. They're not, they don't have your expertise or that of Curry, but they're talking just looking at the basics. Things are not making sense. They keep talking about the price being manipulated. I'm looking at it, I'm like, like, how sinister is the world? For is there any historical where we could compare it to this where the oil price or a commodity was being manipulated to such an extent without anyone knowing, without any government organization or body admitting to it? Has that happened before at that level?

Um, well, you know, they had the London gold pool of 1969 where, where they conspired, meaning they got together, uh, the various governments and said, "Look, we're all just going to sell out of our official reserves whenever gold pokes its head above a certain number and we're going to do everything we can to keep it down." And that's what they did. And they held it for a long time because they just didn't want gold telling the world, telegraphing any sort of, uh, loss of faith in the paper currencies. And, uh, so that's what they did. And but it was just holding the beach ball under the water. So when they finally fumbled that and lost it, you know, gold price of gold shot right up, um, afterwards. So manipulation can deny reality for a while, but it, it, in case of oil, this is particularly dangerous because with gold, gold is, we pretty much every ounce we've ever mined, we can account for in all of history, right? It's a very durable substance and just sits on shelves. So that's a really different case. Oil, as I mentioned before, is, you know, we take it out of the ground, store it, and then we burn it, you know? So it has, it's a very different substance and it's totally non-negotiable for our economic way of life. It's just all these people with, we've been marketed to for a long time with these green dreams, you know, we'll put up more windmills and solar panels. We don't use oil to make electrons. That's not its use. It's to set it on fire and move things, jets, trucks, ships, trains, things like that. Um, so it's not, it's not a, what you would say, a fungible commodity. You know, we'll use solar panels instead of oil. Doesn't work that way. So, we need oil, and there's no easy replacement for it. And by the way, if you start to run out of it in any meaningful way in your society, you run into such serious trouble. Like, you have to start triaging. What do we do? If we don't have enough, what do we do? Well, the military says, "Well, we'll take our cut." And then somebody has to make a decision. And I, I guess we'll get more to the long haul truckers. It's important for our trucks to keep moving. And then maybe farmers should have some. So they'll go down this triage list, but, you know, who falls off the bottom of that is is the customer. You know, retail. Um, if there are shortages, we'll, we'll be hitting, we'll be getting rationed first and, and hardest, probably.

It's just manipulating such a commodity just would be so expensive if the US is playing that game. Let's say they're doing it without China's help, because why would China help the US get the US out of a hole they created and help the US hurt one of China's most important allies and potentially control the world's most important energy choke point to get leverage over China? Just doesn't make sense. So if the US is doing this alone, maybe with some other countries allied to the US, they'll be very expensive. So that means the US is waste, throwing money away and using its whatever is left of its reserves to try to sustain this low, low oil price that if Iran knows this or has a sense that this is happening, they'll just keep dragging along, dragging along, just bleeding the bleeding the US dry, letting them run out of the reserves, letting them stop their artificial, their invisible hand from manipulating oil prices or suppressing oil prices, and then everything will just blow up. So that could be Iran's strategy right now. Just wait it out until Iran, until the US screws itself.

Well, we've, we've, I'm sure you've seen it too. There's been recent reports that China has been fing items into Iran, that they've been sort of like having, um, pretty open relationships with them, and, and there's an economic and probably political and probably military ties going on in there. At least from what I've been reading and seeing so far. Kind of makes sense, right? And so, uh, perhaps they're in it together. You know, what's the old Sun Tzu saying? Never interrupt your enemy while he's making a mistake. Yeah. So, if they look at all the same data we look at, maybe they're thinking to themselves, the Chinese and the Iranians, like, look, um, if we really want the United States to be, you know, diminished and, you know, less of a threat, uh, what would be really helpful is to allow the United States, encourage them even to just burn through all of their oil reserves and then pull the plug, right? China comes back, hits the markets hard, pays whatever, oil shoots up, uh, and then, you know, the West has a huge mess on its hands it has to figure out at that point in time. Europe's in trouble. United States is in trouble. Japan's in trouble. It would fit, you know. Jesus. So, Trump really needs to get the hell out of there. MOUs or not, deals or not. He just needs to get the hell out of there.

Yep. Yep. And listen, there, there's there's only, I think we talked about this last time. It's, it's what kind of a loss do you want to take at this point in time? There's no coming out of here with a W at this point. There just, just isn't. And that's just a matter of geography and, uh, the way in which the Iranians conducted the war and all of that. So, I, I don't see that there's much that can be done at this point. If they control the strait, that sure, that that bothers us. You know, it sets a bad precedent for other straits worldwide, this and that. But, you know, if that happens, uh, it would be far worse to reescalate, have Iran do what it's promised to do, which is dial in on the non-damaged infrastructure in the Gulf States and really knock out energy production from that region. I mean, seriously, materially disrupt it for a long time. That leads to just a global catastrophe. And then we have to have a conversation about how much debt the United States has and all the derivatives and just how, how overleveraged the whole system is and just what a, what an ugly mess it would be if we suddenly had to contend with a rapid, sudden downshifting in economic output that our economy is not built for. That our financial system isn't built for that. Our banking system does not work in reverse. It only works in forward. So that's the alternative. I really hope this doesn't go to reescalation at this point. I mean, it's tit for tat, it's been fairly measured, I guess, unless you're on the rece, >> but, um, it just has that sense it could really dial up at any time, particularly if Trump decides he's out of patience and goes for a knockout punch.

Yeah, you could even say the Iranians are tempting Trump. They could be tempting Trump to escalate, striking the ships, trying to enforce their control, >> which is a red. Trump said, "Hey, it's a red line. Iran cannot control the Straits of Hormuz." Iranians are like, "All right, try to stop us." And they keep enforcing their control, seeing how far the US would go. And if it escalates, yeah, I don't know what coordination there could be as well between Iran, China, Iran, Russia as well, especially Iran, China. Russia has its own problems right now with Ukraine striking their refineries non-stop. But Russia, China, sorry, Iran, China, it goes back to your Sun Tzu quote, "Don't interrupt an enemy if they're screwing themselves or whatever it is. If they're sabotaging themselves, uh, man, I hope they're not playing the US. The US economy falls. Jesus Christ, the West falls." Great, Chris. Well, it's a weekend. To want to have a nice weekend, calm weekend. Things are getting better.

Well, you know, here's what, Mario, my struggle is. I always try and make sense out of things, and I might be trying to make sense out of nonsense, right? I'm, I'm looking for a pattern that fits, you know, and maybe there isn't one, right? Humans are famous. We look up into the night sky and we don't see dots. We see whales and dragons and and things, you know?

So, that's a good example. I didn't think of that.

Yeah, it's kind of a human thing. But the way I see these dots right now, it, it, one rotation of this and looking through this lens a certain way, it looks like the West is under attack, sustained attack, right? You remember that WEF video came out in 2016. "You'll own nothing and be happy," right? You'll eat less meat. Surprise, there's this alpha-gal tick-borne disease running around which gives you a meat allergy. Surprise, you know, ground hamburger, $7 a pound here in the US now. First time ever nationally. But number eight on that little kitschy video is the one that caught me. The WEF told us that by 2030, Western values will have been tested to the breaking point. Why Western values? Why not African values? Why not Chinese values? Why Western values? Um, and then everything that's happened since then where you see all this mass immigration that, you know, you can get arrested for daring to point out you don't think that's the best thing for your country. Where you see we had no borders in the United States. We're mystified. How, you know, how could we possibly have a border? You see the thing where all the trans stuff has come along where suddenly it's confusing if you can even like have autonomy over what gender you are, if parents have any rights. Just look at all these things. Those are Western values, right? Private property, privacy, um, the ability to control what goes in my own body. So the vaccine mandates cut against that strong, etc.

Science, male is male, female female, >> biology. That's a basic assault on on what you call your ground reality, right? Just erase it. But that's how that's how you break a culture, right? Is you attack the pillars, the family, faith, trust, right? Those are all the things I see under assault right now. Um, and, and so this, what we're talking about is possibly a dot that fits into that pattern set. It's like, well, if I wanted to really wreck the United States and I was in charge, I would have us drain our SPR and then slam us into $250 a barrel oil as fast as possible. Right. That's what I would do. It would be exceedingly devastating.

Yeah. It's just such a stupid own goal. What, what do you make of, um, you, because you reminded me a conversation I had with someone from GB News. I'm really bad with names. Uh, Oliver something, Oliver. And, um, he was explaining to me, he did a really good job. I think he's Scottish. He did an incredible job. I've had him on the show twice explaining to me how he's making sense of what's happening in Europe and the immigration policy in Europe. You're based in the US. Do you go to Europe often? I haven't been in years, not since COVID. So, it's been...

Yeah, it's changed insanely. It's changed so much. And the, the, the sense he's making of it is that there's just a, a war on on Western culture. There's a war on, I, I don't know, just society in general, um, causing division, eroding the, you know, the structure, the peace, the systems that we have in place to allow society to function through various policies that just don't make sense. Reason you reminded me of it is like what's happening with the Iran war itself doesn't make sense. The way it's being dealt with doesn't make sense. If they are suppressing oil prices and still gambling right now, that would make it a lot more bizarre. And then kind of reminded me of the immigration policy in the UK and Europe. Just doesn't make sense. Everyone's voting against it. Politically, doesn't make sense for society's survival. Just doesn't make sense. Um, yeah, this kind of, that's what your example, the ad by WEF, who's WEF, the ad that you were referencing.

The World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab's.

Own World Economic Forum. Yeah. I heard WEF, my bad. Okay. I didn't know they put that. Um, [ __ ] now I'm a lot more worried. But this is the World Economic Forum. Now you're making a lot more sense. Um, but yeah, it's, 'cause the more, the more I have these conversations with, like the ones I have with you, I remember our conversation when you talked about that printing machine that still stuck in my mind, the weird print money printing machine that was mentioned, Elon mentioned in an interview randomly and never mentioned again. Um, but when you start mentioning those things and I start talking to people like yourself, just seeing how the world works and, you know, the private conversations that you have with decision-makers are a lot weirder than what they say publicly, you start to realize there is so much we don't know. There's so many discussions being had that dictate a lot of what happens that people really have no idea about. Like, we're struggling to understand it. Imagine the average, average voter in the US that barely knows where Iran is on the map. All they're going to think about is nuclear weapons. Everything's fine. Gas, everything's fine. Gas prices are down. We're good. Um, they barely see the threat that Israel poses with this influence of American politics. And you, we expect them to go as deep as we do and just try to to look at the strategic petroleum reserves. Look at the price of oil that doesn't make sense. How the US is gambling with everything. And then, you know, look at the bigger picture and other policies that are just sabotaging what we built yesterday. It's worrying.

Well, it is. And speaking of worrying, I was just talking with a good friend in in the Netherlands on Thursday, and there's a lot of things they could be concerned about, like nuclear war with Russia. But, you know, what their top concern was? Number one, two, yes, two young boys. Um, was that there's going to be a civil war in Europe, a race war. That's the number one concern out of all the things you could be concerned about right now.

Right?

That's exactly, that's exactly what this, the guy I mentioned to you. I need to find his name because I think, uh, you'd, uh, you'd like him. But that's exactly what he mentioned to me. He said, Mario, like, this is, and another guest said to me also from GBUs. He's, okay. So this is him, Neil Oliver. I knew it was Oliver there. Neil Oliver. I knew it was Oliver.

And they said,

He's incredible. Just he's so good and eloquent, just like yourself, just a Scottish version, like so good at explaining things. But he said that the worst thing we could do is get into civil war, go on the streets and protest or resort to violence, 'cause that kind of amplifies the division that would help, >> whoever's trying to cause that division. 'Cause causing division just allows policies to pass that gives them more control. When I say them, whoever's in control, and it's usually corporations, wealthy people that control these large companies, corporals, etc. Um, but yeah, that was a good point you made. And if you see, see a lot of the policies that come out that lead to more oppression and centralization of power, they always come out after violence and after fear is created. So get a lot of illegal immigrants, let people go on the streets, let them riot, let them burn a few buildings, then introduce policies that lead to more control and centralization. And did you see that pattern play out at the beginning? When someone first told me about this, I'm like, "Come on, no. I stop with this conspiracy." And I see it again. And I'm like, okay, you know, it makes sense, but I don't think it's happening. Then you see it again and again, and then you start trying to make sense of, okay, why are they still bringing immigrants when 60, 70% or 80%, whatever of of Brits just don't want illegal immigrants anymore? Why don't you just stop it? And every leader, conservative, liberal, doesn't matter who it is, the same policy. Um, says they're going to stop illegal immigration, come into office, continue the same policy as the previous, uh, prime minister. So, yeah. Yeah.

Um, you know, I'm, I'm this kind of a guy. If somebody says that something's going to happen and then it happens, I think maybe they did it, right? So, so all of these policies that the WEF has been talking about are basically unfolding at this point in time. And look, we're going to get a, a great reset whether we ask for it or not, right? Um, and, and I think their position is, and I could actually straw man it and steelman it and, and make a decent argument for it, which is like, there, look, our debt levels are at a level now that's basically unfundable. And we know that anybody who, who even studies it for five minutes figures it out, right? Oh, we'll never pay this back. Okay, if we're never going to pay our debts back, what are the options? Well, you either default on it. That's bad. The whole system kind of breaks. Or you inflate it away. But we're running out of room to really inflate it away without it just getting away from us. So if a great reset's going to happen, if it's going to burst, well, why not be on the controlling side of that story rather than just on the, you know, receiving side. And so I think that's the plan. They're like, look, we got ourselves into a bit of a, bit of a pickle here. There's no real way out of it. It's not a problem. Problems have solutions. It's a predicament. There's no way to satisfy all the demands that that we've put out there. Okay, we're going to have to recast those somehow. What do you do? Well, it must be super attractive to think that we're this close to creating sort of a, you know, God in a box, you know, super AI that could help us parse through all of this and really manage it well. But if you strip away, one of the subscribers at my site put it really well. He said, you know, AI is is just communism with the promise that this time we'll have better planning committees. You know, it's, it's the same idea. A very tiny elite controlling all the decisions for everybody else with the conceit that the elites are in, in possession of better information, better intelligence, better brains, better genetics, whatever they think they have compared to everybody else. So, that's where we're going. But maybe, maybe we're just at this point where, you know, we got, we just went too far. You know, we kicked the can down the road. It was always just, maybe we'll pay the debt back later. Everybody knows it's a lie, right? It's, you talk to any economist who, who knows anything. They, they'll admit it. They're like, "Yeah, there's no, the United States has no intention ever of paying the, its government debts back. It just doesn't. Never will. It's going to roll them over continuously and make them larger every year. Full stop." Okay, that's just a math problem at some point. That's all. It's just simply a thing where, um, you know, technically lights out on that story is when your interest payments consume 100% of your tax revenues, then, then you're out, right? Because now you're borrowing basically more than 100% of what you need to, to spend on a yearly basis. Um, and it just doesn't work. That goes away from you really quickly. So I just get the sense that there is something really big coming. I think a lot of people sort of share that, like this is an uncomfortable moment in time and, you know, yes, there's the AI thing, which is a hugely disruptive story all on its own. Then there's this energy thing, which just doesn't make sense. And then there's these mysterious policies that seem to be designed to really displace the entire cultures of the West. There really aren't any similar programs operating in Africa right now or or Asia. It's really in the West, meaning they want to replace the existing cultures and they want them homogenized, they want them borderless, they want them, you know, all this stuff. And these, these are all plans that people have talked about for a long time, but they're actually happening. So to me, that's how I have to fit this whole Iran war into that construct and say, okay, if these people are string-pullers, if they have been very carefully laying the groundwork to do this Western deconstruction project, how does, how does Iran fit into that? And there is nothing like an energy shock to really wobble a nation or a continent.

Yeah. Great. And I feel like it's, it's like we're too far down the path when you have 70, whatever, 70, 80% of Americans that think they won the war. Um, when you have, when you have a president that talks about ending wars, ending wars, gets elected, and within a year starts one of the most catastrophic wars in the country's history that still hasn't ended, by the way, still going on. Just such a wild war that no other president dared to do. Um, you just start to worry that, you know, it's, it's kind of gone too far where I, I don't want to be the pessimist, but, uh, whoever is pulling those strings, if it, if it is one or the system or whatever it is, it's kind of, it won. I don't think there's much people could do about it. I know there's people listening to this, there are people that see it, there are people that talk about it, but that's such a small, small minority. And then if you look at how, how, how centralized power has become, you know, a few social media platforms control speech. You know, people are, imagine someone removes your all your social media accounts. I spoke to a guest not long ago that had their, um, I think it was X account, YouTube account, which X was surprising to me when they said X, upscroll account, that new Palestinian pro-Palestinian social media platform. Um, and two more accounts just completely wiped out. So when you start seeing things like this, you start to worry that, um, the ship has sailed. I don't know. I don't know. I just. But everyone feels like they're on edge as well. Like they just don't trust the system. The trust in, in, in governments, the trust in corporations, the trust in media is at an all-time low. So the other way of looking at it is like the world, the Western world is at a breaking point as well. So fingers crossed it doesn't go down a sinister path. But, um, you're really good at explaining this. I really enjoyed the conversation and, uh, I appreciate you helping us make sense of it.

Well, I, I've been really, uh, you know, admiring and watching your progress. I, on this, I thought at the beginning of the war, you were very optimistic, you know, and then you talked to more and more experts and you got more the nuance on it. And, and I think I've watched, you know, this happened to a lot of us, including myself, over the past month. I'm, I have this gnawing sense that I, I don't, there's a, there's something happening here, >> that I can't explain. That's it's illogical, right? It, it just makes no sense for Trump to send the tweets out that he is while negotiators are trying to do some very delicate work. It makes no sense to have done the decapitation strike as we did in the beginning. It, it just, none of this makes any sense at this point. Um, the only way it makes sense if he just walks, if he walks away, I'd breathe a sigh of relief. If he manages to just pull the hell away, I'd be like, "Okay, there's still hope. Maybe that was just a big F up and he just walked away. Let's just, you know, let's just keep crossing our fingers."

The amount of times I've hoped for something like this and then the opposite happens has just been too many.

Yeah. And, and then there, there's a couple of, um, interesting sort of sour notes. And also, I like the negative space in the story is the positive space. The negative space in this story is where's China? Where, where are they? They're like so quiet on this. It doesn't make any sense. And they're obviously one of the more impacted players in this whole thing. And, and, and very few public statements.

Sun Tzu, the quote you mentioned.

They're watching.

They're watching. They're kind of keep going. The US, keep going.

Well done. Yep.

Yep. Oh, looks like oil could get a little frisky. We'll, we'll dial back our imports a little bit. Let's keep it down so that the United States just...

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Let's, let's keep the price of oil down. Let's use our reserves. Let them think everything's fine. Let them dive back into it. They're back into it. All right. Cool. Buy up the oil. Price spikes and the US Trump looks at everything. He's like, "What the hell did I just do? Was I just played?" If, if that happens, if that paradigm is correct, there'll be a s another note in that play, um, which will be Russia suddenly announcing that they're ceasing, uh, exporting to the Western world.

They've been hinting at that. They mentioned it a couple months ago. They might stop exports to Europe, which is the Western world. It's the Western world. They don't export to the US. The US doesn't need those imports. So yeah, if they stop exporting to Europe, man, that would have been the great, what a, what a great play would be by. I will learn Mandarin and I will move to China if they manage to do that to play that. I swear I can't see any other option. Um, yeah, it'll be interesting to watch that play out. I appreciate you explaining the bigger picture as well, Chris. That was really, really good conversation. Really astute observation as always.

I've been chewing. Did you, did you figure out what that money printing machine is yet or not yet?

No.

The one we mentioned?

No.

No. I keep asking.

Know what it is. We need to know what it is.

It's a mystery.

So clear. It's a magic money machine. It just emits credits. You know,

I'm so. Message him and ask him like, "Hey, Elon, like that you talked about this that day."

Can you just tell us more about it?

But I think he'll just block me. He's like,

"I cannot, I cannot tell anyone about this, but it's just such a bizarre statement." Well, it was interesting. This is a quick aside. You, you remember the Pandora Papers, the Panama Papers, the Paradise Papers, three big dumps from these, uh, White Shoe Law Firms down in Panama and elsewhere. And, and they basically exposed that there are 250,000-ish shell accounts just sprinkled around these tax havens, Cayman Islands, all over the world, right? And, and so I started talking with people who are in the biz and I said, "Hey, how much, just ballpark, how much money do you kind of have to have to make that worthwhile?" Right? You wouldn't do that if you had $100,000 to shield. And they said it's about 20 million is the, is the right number where that starts to become a thing. All right. So you're like, okay, 250,000 times 20 million. Well, that's $5 trillion is potentially stashed.

No, it's more. You're looking at the minimum is 20 million.

Yes.

I'm sure some of them would be in the billions.

Yes, it would be. But minimally, I mean, there's there. So where did that come from? So I was actually in a, in a, I'm not in a position to reveal who I was talking to, but I was talking to somebody who was in an actual position to know something about these things. And I asked the question. I said, I scoured the, when they did the dumps, I looked at the names. I didn't recognize any names. They're just people, right? Not, not big names, you know? You don't have Rockefellers on there and, you know, expected names, right? Very few recognizable names. So I just like, is there any possible connection between say, people inside the US government or other governments and these magic money machines and those accounts? And he said, I absolutely can't talk to you about that.

Full stop.

When was that?

That was just a couple weeks ago. But it's, um...

Wow.

Just, yeah. Sometimes it's, it's the answer you don't get that speaks, speaks loudly, right? So there's something to that story. Nobody picked it up. That one, one reporter got her car blown up in Albania somewhere, I think, if I remember the story right, that was it. So it was just like...

This huge story. But if there are magic money machines, to whom are they emitting credit? I think there's a connection there for someone to draw. But man, that's dangerous territory. Those are the people who are there's so much you. The question becomes, how big is the fraud? Right. So we just found out, like, Medicare fraud in the billions, if not trillions, at this point in time. And the Somali darecare fraud, I haven't seen anybody go in handcuffs yet. So that's sanctioned fraud. Act Blue has its huge fraud thing running, you know, where there were like elderly people making hundreds of thousands of donations, you know, to the big blue machine. Like, all it's crazy.

So the next question is, when we talk about Western values, I mean, it's been revealed that the whole system is shot through with fraud, right? Massive, huge types of fraud. And that there's no appetite or interest in prosecuting any of that behavior, really shutting it down. If you're a little stuff at the edge, but really not at the center. And that's what Elon is doing when he walked in with Doge. I think he found a massive fraud conduit in USA ID, and then they said, "That's enough, buddy. Um, stop right there."

Yes. Yeah. It reminds me as well when he went and became the voice fighting against free speech and started facing all these obstacles. All these companies, all these politicians, etc., started to do everything they can to try to sabotage his efforts to fight for free speech. He kept that fight. It cost him a lot. And I feel like Doge was the same thing. He came in, saw all that fraud, all that corruption, and then suddenly moved away. You know, he has companies to run as well. Doge is still running. I think there's a whole campaign now to try to discredit Doge. Um, I read some articles, etc., that he's criticizing. I haven't had time to do a deep dive into it, but there is it's like a big beast that runs everything. And it's um, it's so convoluted. Yeah.

I, I hope you keep doing this. I do more videos. You should cover those papers on your channel, on your website. I think you should do a deep dive into it because I think it's important. Yeah, it's certainly it's certainly a story there. Um, but I have covered it at Peak Prosperity once. Can't remember if that was for my subscribers or if it was public. But at any rate, I just I was asking a question like, what I'm concerned about is if there are 5 trillion plus dollars just parked in these accounts that represents money that's basically invisible to the system right now. And if it's invisible to the system and all that money gets, you know, cold feet, all of a sudden decides I don't want dollars, I want something else, that's when we go through that slowly then all at once phase, right?

So, you know, Scott Bennett has been out lately basically drumming up the dollar and saying, oh, you know, Venezuela has to use the dollar now and all of that stuff. Um, which is sort of the bully way. We, you know, I think we bullied Venezuela into using the dollar. And China is very, very rapidly picking up steam with the yuan as a cross-border payment settlement system. It's expanded by 4x over the past 3 years from about 2% of global trade to 8%, but climbing rapidly.

And so, um, that's that could be the big thing that's sort of circulating here is that they're working really hard to keep the dollar sort of glued together at this point in time. But there's a lot of reasons for other countries not to want to use the dollar at this point, particularly because we use the the club to enforce it. And China uses that win-win approach, um, which some people seem to favor. Like instead of bombing me, I get a port and a railroad station. Yeah, we'll do that.

Um, so that's I feel like there's a big there's kind of a battle for sort of the heart and soul of like who's going to be who's going to be the new mercantilist. Um, you know, who's really supplying the world with what in the future, and China is clearly the manufacturing center. There's no question about that.

Yeah, I had someone on my show tell me about how the US needs to bring manufacturing back to the country, but that cannot be done if the dollar stays strong. The only way to bring back manufacturing, which is important for national security, is to weaken the dollar. And he's in the belief that there is a coordinated effort to actually weaken the dollar. The US government is working on it behind the scenes, but that's a whole other beast.

Yeah. Well, it hasn't worked out over the last few months, but we'll see. Exactly. It's not working too well. It's not working too well.

Yeah. I'll send you that video. Maybe we should do it next time we talk about it. I'll send you the video. The gentleman I spoke with. Are you on your computer? Uh, yes. Yeah. Try search Mario Norall and then put the name after. You might know the person as well. I did him on the same day I did Jeffrey Curry, I think, or the day before. Hold on. He's the first time on the show. And Andy Sheckman. Have you heard of the gentleman? Oh, Andy Sheckman. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, there. Andy Shman. Yeah. He, um, he was on the show. He was a great speaker as well. And he was explaining. Yeah, that's him. He was explaining it to me. Um, I probably need to listen to that interview again to really understand what he was explaining, but it was, um, it was a good conversation. I'll send you the I'll send you the link now. I don't think I have you on WhatsApp. I'll just send it to you on X. Yeah, that's Sorry, you can search my name and his name on YouTube. I forgot. Yeah, I think I found it right here. Um, yeah, Andy, he's he's in the precious metal space, right? So, he he tracks all things gold and dollar related pretty carefully.

Yeah. And what's interesting, um, you could look this up, but it's raised more than a few eyebrows that there are somebody is making very, very large outsized bets that by the end of the year, gold will be somewhere between 15 and $20,000. Um, so they've bought gold futures out there in that band. I mean, in a lot of them, like 30,000 contracts. It's a large number. Betting that gold will be uh uh 20 grand an ounce.

Are you bullish on gold? Oh, yeah. Well, is that bullish? I'm not I'm not bullish on gold. I'm I'm bullish on the fact that the Fed's going to print. It's just who they are. That's what they do, right? It's really gold is gold, you know. It doesn't really change. It just it's a lump. It sits in the corner. Um, it's been one of my larger sort of wealth storage vehicles for quite a while. Um, and silver, too, but gold mainly. And all I know is the Fed's going to print. I mean, they already are printing, right? So the Fed has already printed about 201 billion since the low of its balance sheet in December of last year. So in the about 6 months now they've printed, but they're on track to print 400 billion this year, which is a pretty hefty year, right? And then the US government is going to deficit spend 2.3 trillionish this year, and maybe more if the war goes badly. And then, um, the Fed hasn't had to print as much because the US government is now at a has a run rate of interest payments of $1.3 trillion a year. That acts the same as if the Fed prints money or there's a little hocus pocus and the US government borrows the money and then pays it out as interest. It's the same mechanism. Um, so with with some extra steps. So that acts like QE. So, it's it's kind of like in my mind like we're getting about $2 trillion a year of stimulus right now that's just coming back in. And that explains a lot of the stock market behavior we've seen and a lot of other behaviors. But it doesn't explain oil being down. It doesn't explain. Well, let me go further. The entire commodities complex has come under assault, right? Copper down hard. Um, wheat is cheaper now than at the beginning of the war. Corn, same thing. So the whole thing, if you are in control of things and you want inflation to look smaller or lower, and you can dump paper contracts in to make these real commodities go down in apparent price, then that's what you do, right? Problem. Right now, we know that we're going to be short 461,000 tons of copper globally this year. And it just gets worse as we look forward. We're structurally short on copper. We haven't opened more than three mines in the last 10 years. We need to be opening six a year right now in order to keep up with the demand. And we're not opening them. Why not? Well, because the paper price of copper has been way below the replacement price at the mines, and nobody's opening mines. So, that's the consequence. When we finally discover we're short on copper and we go, "Oh, let's let the price rise to send the right signal." It's too late because it takes 10 years to find, open, permit, and operationalize a mine. Minimum takes a long time.

That's what market intervention is. One of the most dangerous things to do. Mess around with open markets, consequences later on.

Yep. Yeah. Particularly if if you're if you're hitting it on the on the supply side, you know, you really should think that through very carefully.

I've been surprised. Silver's like this irreplaceable industrial metal, right? The most conductive, the most reflective. It has uses that are not substitutable, right? Okay, fine. The world has been in a structural shortfall for silver. Out of the last seven years, we've been um underwater six of those years, right? Meaning we're eating into supply, above-ground supplies. Demand is higher than supply. And the problem is that silver is a little bit like oil in this story because it's too a consumable, right? If there's 30 milligrams in a phone, but you make a billion phones, you're using a lot. If there's, you know, 15, 20 milligrams, sorry, grams in a solar panel, we don't recycle those. You know, when they go to the landfill, that's it. So, we take the silver and we kind of lose it in the landfills. And so, there's not that there's actually more gold above ground today than silver. So, the idea is we're supposed to get more and more out, but it hasn't been high enough of a price to incentivize people opening silver mines to the degree we would need to close a shortfall. Almost all the silver we get, 70%, the majority of it, I should say, comes out of base metal mining. It's a byproduct of copper zinc mines typically. So you get copper and zinc, get a little bit of silver, you sell that, too. So we're looking at this. We're in structural shortfall for six out of seven years. The silver should have been sending a really clear price signal. And for most of those years, it was parked between 20 and $30 an ounce, right? Then it had a little spike recently, and now it's falling again. This just says that if we wanted to fix this, we would have regulators who would say, "Listen, we understand speculating is a lot of fun, and we understand a certain amount of speculation actually adds necessary liquidity into the marketplace, but if I'm going to make a number up, markets should exist between producers and consumers for for commodities." And then speculators give, put a 20% cap on that, but this is 80% of the activity, price setting. And then there's a little extra here. It's completely inverted. 99% of all oil trading is done with people who neither produce it nor intend to take delivery of it. Right. They just trade it.

Exactly. Instead of the buyers and sellers, the ones dictating the price, it's the speculators dictating the price for the buyers and sellers. It's the speculators that are sabotaging the free markets from allowing them to do what they should do best.

Yeah. And listen, listen, speculators are there to make money. I get it. But the regulators, if they weren't being idiots, would say, "Oh, we can't allow this after a certain point." because that becomes destructive to the purpose of the market and then ultimately to my country, right? We don't want to end up in shortages of anything. That would be terrible, right? Particularly shortages of things like copper and silver. These are like non-negotiable necessities of modern industrial life, which I'm a fan of, just to be clear. Chris, love the conversation. Always, always a lot. I learn a lot and you leave me with a lot to think about. So I appreciate it, and I'm sure the audience loved it as well. Thank you.

Thank you. My pleasure. Anytime. I'll speak to you soon. I need to digest all this. Chris, give me about six months to understand it all. Yeah. Get a couple of good nights' sleep and a Best Western, you'll be good to go. Thank you so much, Chris. I'll see you soon. All right. Bye-bye. Bye-bye, guys. Um, let me know. I'm really keen to get your thoughts on this conversation. And I know I always say this after interviews, and I go through a lot of the comments. The comments of this interview, I'll probably go through them more than any other interview today because I'm keen to get your thoughts on what we've discussed and your thoughts on these types of conversations. Things I find really interesting, things that are not easy to understand, but also consequential to a lot of the things that are happening around the world. And, you know, having guests like Chris try to make sense of it and explain it to us is something I enjoy, and I want to get your thoughts on it. So, let me know in the comments. I'll be going live again in a few hours, in about three and a half hours, with Larry Johnson. Um, I might go live earlier if there's breaking news. Otherwise, I'll see you in three and a half hours. Bye.