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Today I'm going to cover a subject which you see a lot on YouTube, which is the coming market crash, stock market crash, or something like that. Um, I've done some commentary on that and tried to put that in perspective. So, I've got another one and I'm going to put this in perspective and talk about it. I think it'll be helpful to you. I'm Ben Repund. Thank you for watching my YouTube video. Today is September 9th, 2025.
Going to begin with a video which is an interview between Henry Blahett and Jim Rogers. Uh, Jim Rogers is famous, infamous, I guess you'd say, and he had an illustrious career making billions of dollars, billions and billions of dollars for his investor clients back in the 70s. And then he made as much money as he wanted, I guess, and he retired and took his money, and he manages his own money now. So, it's all private, but he does a lot of videos and I always enjoy listening to him because he's colorful and he's accomplished.
He is interviewed by Henry Blahett. Not a big name, but if you're back in the 90s, Henry Blahett was the analyst that followed the technology companies for Merrill Lynch. And so, you know, pretty big title and a big company. As a result, what he was doing was making predictions and they were making Merrill Lynch, as a result of his advice and his research, were making recommendations to clients to buy into that technology. And it, I don't know what he said, if you know, the market's going to NASDAQ is going to 50,000 or what it was. It was just a ridiculous thing, but he was kind of hyping it actually. And then it turns out that he was privately writing that it was garbage. And so the SEC got did an investigation and ended up revoking his license and banning him from the securities industry for life. So he's now a reporter and he does interviews and so forth. But he's definitely got a lot of egg on his face from that experience back in the late 90s or early 2000s.
But so I find it kind of ironic because of him doing an interview with Jim Rogers, who is the opposite. I mean, Jim Rogers has, he predicted the and profited hugely from the collapses in '73, '74, '79 to '81. That's really where he made his money was shorting the market during that period. And I don't know all the everything was private because it was a hedge fund. But he was very successful at it. And then when his money was private, he did was public in the early 2000s predicting the collapse of the housing market. And so he shorted the housing sector and the banking sector before it began to decline. Kind of, you could say, somewhat similar maybe to the big short movie.
Um, but anyway, it's he's still colorful and he's kind to Henry Blahett. And the reason I'm doing this one because it was in my mind. I was thinking about this phrase. He's done many interviews where he makes this statement and it was resonating in my mind and he said, "The next one, the next crash will be the biggest of my lifetime." Jim Rogers is in his 80s. I believe he's coming up on 83 and he'd been around a long time. Goes back to the 60s. He graduated from Yale with honors, went to study over at Oxford, came back and got in the business and he saw Wall Street, the brokers where he was. This is 1966. The brokers were actually recommending people just buy the market, buy this, buy that, investing in the market. And Jim Rogers looked at it at that time and said, "This just looks crazy. Why would you do that? These are not good investments." And so he was already in his 20s, he's thinking completely different from the way traditional brokers or financial advisors think. They think just no matter what the environment is, just put your money in the market. When it crashes or starts to crash, leave your money in the market. It'll eventually correct. That's how they think.
And so he eventually co-founded a hedge fund and that's where he made his money. And I won't go through all of that, but my point is that he has a way of thinking that is counterintuitive, counter to traditional thinking. And so as a result, he's been correct. I'm not aware that he's been incorrect. Sometimes he's way, way in advance. So the video I'm going to play to you, it was recorded a number of years ago, but he has been saying the same thing ever since. He tries to avoid putting a timeframe on it, but he does say whenever the next crash comes, it will be the worst in my lifetime. Now, he was not alive during the Great Depression or the market collapse of 1929. So I guess we would have to exclude that one. But you would have to include the ones that were 50% or more declined beginning in 1973. And so I would say if he is correct, I think he is, it's his opinion. It's not fact, it's opinion. If he is correct, then this will be a very difficult period.
So, um, take a listen to this and, uh, just think of it as the wisdom that's coming from Jim Rogers in whatever he's saying and that he has been correct as all of the time that I'm aware of that where he has made predictions. So, take a listen to this.
Well, it's interesting because these things always start where we're not looking. Uh, in 2007, Iceland went broke and people said, "Iceland, is that a country?" They have a market and then Ireland went broke and then Bear Sterns went broke and then, you know, Lehman Brothers went broke. They said they spiral like that always happens where we're not looking. I don't know. It could be an American pension plan that goes broke and many of them are broke as you know. It could be some country we're not watching. It could be all sorts of things. Uh, it could be war, unlikely to be war, but it's going to be something when you're watching Business Insider and you see that's interesting. I didn't know that company could go broke. It goes broke. Send me an email. Okay. And then I'll start watching.
And how big a crash could we be looking at? It's going to be the worst in your lifetime. I've had some pretty big ones in my life. It's long. It's going to be the biggest in my lifetime. And I'm older than you. No, it's going to be serious stuff. It's going to be very. We've had financial problems in America. Let's use America every four to seven years since the beginning of the republic. Well, it's been over eight since the last one. This is the longest or the second longest in recorded history. So it's coming and the next time it comes, you know, in 2008 we had a problem because of debt. Henry, the debt now, that debt was nothing compared to what's happening now. In 2008, the Chinese had a lot of money saved for a rainy day. It started raining. They started spending the money. Now even the Chinese have debt and the debt is so much higher. The Federal Reserve, the central bank in America, the balance sheet is up over five times since 2008. It's going to be the worst in your, the worst in my lifetime, too. Be worried. I am worried. Good. Good.
Can the Fed rescue us? Can anybody rescue us? They will try. They will. They will. What's going to happen is they're going to raise interest rates some more. Then when things start going really bad, people are going to call and say, "You must save me. This western civilization is going to collapse." And the Fed, who's made up of bureaucrats and politicians, will say, "Well, we better do something." And so they will try, but it won't work. It'll cause some rallies, but it won't work this time. And we are in a situation where Western civilization already seems to be possibly collapsing. Even with the market going up all the time, often when you do have a financial calamity, you get huge turmoil in the political system.
What happens politically if that happens? Well, that's why I moved to Asia. My children speak Mandarin because of what's coming. Uh, you're going to see governments fail. You're going to see countries fail this time around. Iceland failed last time. Other countries fail. You're going to see more of that. You're going to see parties disappear. You're going to see institutions that have been around for a long time. Lehman Brothers has been around over 150 years, gone. Not even a memory for most people. Well, that's you're going to see a lot more of that next time around, whether it's museums or hospitals or universities or financial firms.
So when you think of the market collapsing, I'm thinking of, um, that the, um, what's going to cause it to crash its risk factors. Right now the market is extremely elevated. That doesn't mean it's going down or it's going down immediately, but it puts the market at risk whenever it does go down or when risk factors come into it. So, I thought of this. I just wrote this down. What will cause the market to go down? The, again, Jim Rogers talks about this a lot. Debt, government debt and personal debt. And you could even say business debt. Um, but I think what he's been talking about a lot has been personal debt, the indebtedness of individuals not being able to handle the level of debt that they have. And a lot of that ends up being credit card debt, which is over 20% interest rate. So, but whatever it is, it will cause shock waves in the financial sector, the stock market, and the economy.
So, debt, printed money. Now there are $22 trillion dollars of money in circulation. The, the, the, President Nixon, back in 1971, completed the removal of the US from the gold standard. So what was agreed upon in 1944 at the Bretton Woods Accord was all the nations got together and agreed, we, the US wanted to be the reserve currency of the world. They said, "Okay, that's okay, you can be the reserve currency, changing it from England to the US, if you agree that your dollars are exchangeable for gold." So if someone presents a dollar or $100 or whatever, they can get an equivalent amount in gold. And that was taken advantage of by the Europeans, but primarily Netherlands, Germany, and France. And they were sending ships over to the US full of dollars. Again, I don't know the denomination, but the ships were full of currency and saying to the US, "We'll take you up on that." And that was a legal agreement, the Bretton Woods Accord. And then they were loading the ships up with gold, sending them back to Europe. That happened over a pretty short period of time. So our gold is at Fort Knox, West Point, the Denver, and in New York, Federal Reserve Bank. So those four locations.
And so President Nixon, I think it was like the middle of the night, just said, "We're going to break the accord. We're not going to honor it and we will not give you gold for this." And signed an executive order and sent the ships back. From that point forward, our dollars have not been backed by gold. They're not, you can't relate to them with a gold equivalency. Now, I look this up. There were 58 billion dollars in circulation at that time in the US. Today there are $22 trillion in circulation. I'll put this in perspective. So what kind of increase is that? According to my math, it is about 440 times more paper than we had in 1971. How much more gold do we have backing that paper? Zero. As far as I know, I've researched it. I've looked as far as I can. I can't find any place where the US has bought gold. China buys a lot, Russia buys a lot, and India buys a lot. China being the largest. They buy all they can get their hands on, and they've been doing it for years and years. And there's, I don't know what other countries do, but we have 8,133 metric tons of gold in those four locations. We used to have, before we sent it to Europe, we used to have about 16,000 metric tons. So we lost about 8,000 metric tons. And thankfully, President Nixon stopped it. Our paper would have become at that point completely worthless. There would be nothing of intrinsic value behind it. So at least we have the 8,000 tons.
But so think of it this way. Of the $22 trillion in circulation, what percentage of that is backed by gold? According to my math, 0.2%. So 99.8% of our dollars that are in circulation have nothing behind them. Nothing. So when I say it's backed by nothing, I mean 99.8% is backed by nothing other than good faith and credit of the US. If you and I agree it's worth something, then it's worth something. But otherwise, it has no intrinsic value. So, and we just keep on adding more dollars and printing more and adding more in circulation. Um, that's why I buy silver. I one day I think the paper is going to be worthless because it's just paper. And I don't know how that's going to play into the hands of Russia and China and India, but I think it's right now this poses a big threat to investors today.
The investors today who have the most money in the market are primarily baby boomers. They have the most and we've been in an upward market for 18 years since the last crash. If you look at the five crashes, the '73, '74, '79, '81, 1987, 2000, 2008, those five, you look at those, what is the space between those? I think the longest period of time is 13 or 14 years. It has been 18 years since the last one. I'm not saying we're overdue for one. I'm just saying there is a cycle and we are on an extended period of time beyond the last point in the cycle, which in my opinion raises the risk. So if this happens, it will happen if you believe in cycles, and I do, at some point it will happen. I think the risk is within the next 10 years for sure it's going to happen. I didn't say it will happen, I said I believe it will happen. So that's an opinion. And in the next five years, there is a very good chance I believe that it will happen.
So, where are you in that cycle in your life? Now, if you're way, way out there and you don't have much time left, okay, maybe that doesn't matter to you. But most people are not at that point. And so, if you said, does it matter to you to protect your money? Does it matter to you to have some kind of a way that if the market does collapse that you're not going to lose a good portion? So if, just using math, Jim Rogers' comment, if it is the worst in his lifetime, that would take you from about a 50 to 60% on up. So let's say 50, 60 up to maybe 80% loss in the market. Can you stand that? Most people cannot. I certainly can't and certainly don't want to.
So that's why when I started in the investment industry, I sold my other companies and did my research for five years. And when I did that, my focus was protecting downside risk, very focused on it. And so our strategies have done that. So we went live with our, two of our current strategies, and our core strategy was originally our moderate momentum. And that strategy has gone through, we never had in that six and a half year period, haven't had a real crash. So it has not been tested that way, but what has happened is we've had corrections. So, for example, in 2020, the market went down 33% in a five-week period starting in late February and going until late March. And in that period of time, the market lost 33%. Our strategy gained 2.3%. I think I've got that correct. 2.3% gain. That was great protection. I wish it did that well all the time. It doesn't, but it did then. And then in, let's see, the next one was in 2022, the market went down about 24% from January to June, and we were down 6%. And then this year in 2025, that period in February, March, and the first week in April, the market declined about 19% and we declined about 2.5%.
So those aren't deep, deep losses, but they are significant. And so it shows what we are able to show now with our documented history that we actually have a way to protect against risk. When we get to a deep decline, a crash, if you will, a collapse, I believe that will be in place and we will be able to protect the vast majority of client money. And I have my own money right alongside it, so I'll be protecting my money as well. And but I think that's important. Most financial advisors, investment advisors do not believe in that. And I know that because I talked to people in 2022 and they were telling me what their advisors were saying before they fired them. And they were saying things like, "You can't sell now. You've got to invest for the long run," things like that. And people just were very frustrated. They said, "Excuse me, I had people say to me, they said, 'I don't care what they do, just do something.'" But they don't believe in that. That's not the traditional method.
And so, when we get to this final crash, that's going to be as devastating as Jim Rogers says it will be, that is where you want and I want protection against deep risk. Will it be triggered by consumer debt? I don't know. He doesn't know. It's just an opinion. Other kinds of risk would be geopolitical risk. We've got a lot of geopolitical risk going on right now. Tariffs and potential war or, you know, trade issues. Inflation, deflation, job market. We had a fairly negative job report that came out this last week. If people become unemployed, lots of people become unemployed, that could trigger it. Real estate and what goes with that is interest rates. Things could go sideways in any one of these areas or some combination.
I don't personally see right now, I'm speaking in September, I don't really see right now that we have risk that's imminent that's right in front of us. Um, I don't know how far down the road it is, but I just, you know, when I started after I sold my other companies, I started did my research and then started in 2014.
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12 years ago, that was my focus was just protect, protect, protect. And that's been my story is protect. And during that period of time, I've given you some examples where it was very helpful to have that protection, but we've never seen in that period of time a deep decline. So I did, as Jim Rogers talks about in his lifetime, so I'm thinking, okay, include those five periods. They're about every 10 years or so. But I did go back to the Great Depression. I don't think what we're facing will be like that for a lot of reasons. But I did go back and look at the numbers and it was devastating back then. Here's the numbers I found. 86,000 businesses failed. 6,000 banks failed, went out of business, and their customers' money with them. And the stock market lost 90% of its value from 1929 to 1932. What's interesting is it began a march up in the mid-30s up to in 1937, and then it declined again in 1938, and that decline was another 50%. And so people were not expecting that. Eventually, you probably know history and you know that World War II brought us out of all that. It was a very difficult time. I don't think we'll go through that like that again. I hope we don't.
Um, but what Jim Rogers is talking about is having some way to protect against that so that if you do, and we have our way of doing it, that's all I can speak to. So I want to preserve as much of that money as possible. As I was resonating on this comment from Jim Rogers about the market being the worst coming market in his lifetime, I thought, "Wow, that's going to be very difficult." What that does, it plays on the psychology of our mind, of our being. Up and down markets. Up markets tend to have a, eventually, like we've had 18 years of mostly generally an up market, not a, at least not a crash, and so that plays on our mind to relax us to think, "Oh, things are okay. I can, now's a good time to get in the market." It's probably the worst time to get in the market. Continue if you're in the market, yeah, that might make sense, but starting, I wouldn't do it. Okay. But it's counter to what we are, what we should do is counter to what we actually think about doing.
So in an up market like now, people are chasing rates of return. "I want to invest in this and this and this." People, not all, but many people are not thinking as much about risk and protecting their money as they should, and chasing returns. In a down market, they want protection. But when they want that protection, it's usually too late. The market is already down so far that they feel the pain, but that's not the time to think about protection. So that's what I want to cover today. So that is something to think about with risk, how you deal with it in your circumstances, what you do with precious metals, about, you know, the protecting against the dollar, the decline of the dollar, the risk that you would take in, you know, the market, and you want to get a return, and you want to get a decent rate of return to cover inflation, and inflation is not 3 or 4% as they want you to believe. So, a lot of things to think about.
So, thank you for watching. If you have questions or comments, leave them in the comment section below.