James Rickards - Countdown To Crisis: How To Prepare for the Upcoming Economic Collapse

Full transcript: James Rickards on London Real

2:56 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is James Rickards, the former lawyer and investment banker turned economist, thought leader and author. You have over 35 years of experience working in capital markets on Wall Street in senior positions at Citibank and the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, as well as being an advisor to the CIA and the Pentagon as a highly sought-after financial expert.

3:20 You’ve been a contributor to publications like the Financial Times, the Evening Standard, and the Washington Post. You have topped the New York Times bestseller list on multiple occasions, with titles including The Death of Money and Currency Wars, and your latest book, sold out, outlines your predictions for our post-pandemic future and how we can best prepare for the inevitable economic collapse. You believe that now we are facing unprecedented challenges that will ultimately lead to a great reset, a ryzen CBDCs and as a result a cashless society.

3:50 James, welcome back to London Real. Thank you, Brian. It’s great to be with you It’s great to have you here. I just want to say before we get started that you recorded a separate video for us called Countdown to Crisis that talks about how this crash will be, and I quote, fast, bloody, and unavoidable, and people can watch this video separately at londonreal.tv forward slash Jim. That’s Jim.

4:10 There’ll be a link below. You also talk about how to position yourself to profit from this crash in 2022, so thanks for doing that. And, uh, Jim, you know, where do we start? I think you were on the show here in London five, six years ago. I saw you over in Phoenix before that, but we’re really in an interesting situation right now in the world.

4:28 I don’t think we’ve had such a openly obvious crisis when you and I have been talking. What do you see when you look out? You read the news about inflation, the war in Russia, you know, everything going on with the dollar. What do you see, Jim? Well, that’s a great question, Brian.

4:44 And, uh, you know, I write books, and I also write several financial newsletters, so I’m thinking about topics all the time. And, uh, there’s always one, you know, usually you say, well, all right, the sport in Ukraine is a really big deal, got to cover that implosion, financial implosion in China, really big deal, I got to cover that, or, uh, what’s going on in the U.S. with Basically, mentally incapacitated president. That’s, I don’t know, unprecedented, but I guess since Woodrow Wilson, anyway um, and and other topics.

5:16 I could give you a long list. You know, we maybe, the end of the dollars role was a global reserve currency, etc. The difficulty now, or two things: number one, they’re all going on at once like, you know, any one of those topics would, you know, fill a newsletter or a prison, or, you know, interview like this, etc. It’ll be a big topic of heavy lift, but they’re all going on at once. Number two, they’re not unrelated they’re all kinds of correlations.

5:39 The, you know, the breakdown and collapse of the global supply chain, which preceded Covid. A lot of people say, well, yo Covid came along, of course it messed up the splashing, uh, in my new book, uh, sold out. I’ve got very, very good documentation. It shows no, the supply chain was breaking down before Covid. Now of course Covid made it worse.

5:57 Yes, uh, and the war in Ukraine made where she at, yes, but this really started with Trump’s trade war in 2018. So, that, like I said, there’s a thread that runs through all these things, so uh, not to throw out my hands. I’m not going to do that, but when you ask me now, I’m like I’m thinking, well, you want to talk about China, Ukraine, supply chain, Biden they’re, they’re all, they’re all a big deal, if, you know, in terms of tragedy probably, uh, the war in Ukraine is the most important, because it’s highly, highly significant economically and strategically, but of course, as a human tragedy going with it.

6:34 You know, if Chinese real estate implodes, okay, there’s some hardship here and there, but it’s not like, uh, people being killed in Maine. They’re forced into refugee status, and that is, uh, part of what’s going on in Ukraine. So that’s a, that’s probably the biggest single one, but I wouldn’t miss the fact that all these things are going on at once. What, what’s the one that people are asking you most about? I mean, is it Americans looking at inflation and looking at, you know, all of their savings kind of just going down to being worthless?

7:05 Is that the one that are on a lot of Americans mind right now? And yeah, Americans, yes. Uh, it’s interesting, because I do have you know, come to international following, but there are certain pockets I mean, there are certain countries where, you know, there’s interest in what I do, or my books are published that language, or so, so, I have a good German following, and of course the Germans want to know what’s going on with energy. Uh, Japanese following, and so forth.

7:28 But yeah, the United States, the number one question, uh, because everyone’s concerned about inflation, but uh, there’s a big backstory there, but I always say, when it comes to your own money, everybody has a PhD in economics. You don’t need Larry Summers to tell you what’s going on with your budget and your, you know, ability to feed your family or keep a roof over your head. So people get inflation. It’s one of the reasons so politically toxic is because it sounded, well, you can’t fudge it, you can’t spin it.

7:55 It’s like, hey, if I used to fill up my Ford F-150 truck for 50 bucks, and now it’s 125 bucks, a, you get it. It’s right in your face, and B, that’s 75 bucks that you don’t have to take your spouse out to dinner, you know, buy a new jacket, or whatever. So there’s kind of demand destruction at the same time. You’re spending more money on the one thing you can’t do without. So, so people get it, but then from there, the question I get the most is, hey, Jim, is this going to cause a recession?

8:24 Are we going to have a recession? And I used, as recently as a few months ago, I would say, yeah, I think so. You can see it coming late this year, early next year. Now I say we’re in a recession. I mean, it’s not coming, we’re in it, and there’s data.

8:39 I, you know, I never make statements like that, Brian, without supporting it. We know that. So, first quarter 2022 is done, has been for a while, and the U.S. economy declined 1.6. That number’s in the books. Where the second quarter is done, we don’t have the official number.

8:58 We won’t until about 10 more days. The US government will release that, but we have very, very good estimates, particularly from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. They have a kind of a real-time tracker, and as of today they’re saying second quarter down 1.6 percent. So the standard definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of declining GDP. There are a few more bells and whistles, having to do with unemployment and a few other things, but that’s the rule of thumb.

9:24 So based on that, and based on the best available estimate for a second quarter, likely to be accurate, we’re in a recession today. Now it’s not severe, but that’s actually, I’m in bed with, uh, you know, pneumonia, but I’m not dying. Well, okay, but, uh, we’re gonna, we’re in a recession right now. And there’s, there’s a lot of whistling past the graveyard. I mean, the stock market is still, you know, greatly overpriced.

9:51 There’s still, you know, the buy-the-dips mentality hasn’t gone away, is still there. You got people like Jim Cramer yelling, you know, buy Netflix or whatever And, uh, you know, there’s institutional support, uh, this momentum trading. Of course, 95% of the trading is by robots, so you gotta reverse engineer the 27-year-olds from Bangladesh who don’t get out much, because they’re the ones really writing these algorithms. I mean, brilliant engineers, but, you know, you’d have to show them around Wall Street But, so, so all that’s going on.

10:19 So we haven’t really seen the real, the market collapse stock market collapse that I would expect in association with a severe recession has not happened yet. This is just going to play out. It’ll get worse as the year goes on. All right, so you’re expecting a major correction in stock markets? I mean, that is my expectation.

10:39 I have my own models, and I look at it closely, but if you listen to Michael Burry, uh, Jeremy Grantham, uh, you know, Charlie Munger. These people have been around, and they run, uh you know, hundreds of billions, uh, and they’re saying the same thing. So I mean, Jeremy Grantham did a, yes. Every now and then someone will throw some statistic at me, and I go, how long is your time series? Oh, we took it back five years.

11:03 I was like, you know, talk to me if you’ve done it for 100 years because that’s a little more meaningful. But Jeremy Grantham actually did do a 100-year time series and looked at bubbles all over the world, you know, in 1929, US, 1989 Japan 2000, dot-com stocks, you know, and many others. And he said he’s never seen anything like it, you know. It’s a triple, the greatest bubble of all time, times three, in the sense that it’s real estate, stocks, and other asset classes.

11:35 So, uh, yeah, I do. That is my view, but it’s shared by a number of other analysts, and that would mean, like, S&P coming off another 20, 30 percent. Yes. Uh, and again, you remind, you have to remind people 1929, everyone’s like, yeah, October, uh, I think 18th or 19th. It was late October 1929.

11:56 The stock market fell 22% in two days. It wasn’t one day. It was, you know, it was like 12 one day, 11 the next day, so 23 over two days, but that wasn’t the crash. I mean, that was the beginning of the crash. The, this, this Dow Jones fell 82 percent from top to bottom.

12:14 Now it took three years. It bottomed in, uh, June 1932. uh, started in October 1929, so not quite three years, but, uh, that fell 82, and and that happened. So, uh, so yeah, we’re down, uh, you know, Nasdaq’s down. Uh, I’ll bounce back a little bit in recent days, down close to 30 percent, down the S&P, down over 20 percent.

12:37 We’re in bear market territory, but that that’s just the beginning. That’s not what a full bear market, full, you know, market adjustment looks like in the face of the kind of recession that I expect. Okay, and again, we had that special video, Countdown to Crisis. There’s a link below, londonreal.tv forward slash Jim, where you kind of go into, uh, what’s gonna happen with this crash, why it’s going to be fast, bloody, unavoidable, but also how you can position yourself to profit from that in 2022.

13:03 So thank you for that. Talk to me about inflation, because you know, I was looking at some of the inflation numbers, and you have to go back to the 80s to see anything that’s approaching double digit. You know, I remember being a just a kid hearing about double digit inflation. I could kind of remember the the, the gas pumps, you know, the lines at the gas. It’s like a distant memory of me in the 70s, and but, you know, how do you talk to, you know, younger people these days about what inflation is or it means, because I don’t think people really grasp what it actually means to your savings or to the economy, and even a medium term well, that’s exactly right, Brian.

13:41 And if you, uh, you know, you’re a little younger than I am, but I lived through it. I was, uh, I started my career, uh, in banking in 1976, and, uh, so the ice, I remember my, uh, my wife and I used to kidding each other. She was in advertising. I was in banking, and the inflation was so bad, you’d get a raise every, like four or five months, and you didn’t have to ask. They would just give it to you because they knew that you were going to quit if they didn’t keep up.

14:07 So she would get a raise, and she was making more than I was at the time. So we’d go out to dinner, and I would get a raise, and I was making more than she was. So we would just tease each other about them. That’s how it was. And the psychology was, you know, if you needed, uh, whatever, you know, TV set or refrigerator, new car, whatever, you say, I better buy it now because the price is going to be higher if I wait a month or two months.

14:28 The price is going to run away from me. So it had huge behavioral effects. Of course, gold was, you know, going to the Moon. There was a lot going on at the time, but, but Brian, you’re right when you say we’re putting up inflation numbers today that are the highest in 40 years. That is correct, a little 41.

14:45 Actually, it was 1981 before we saw these numbers, but I remind people the inflation in 1981 was the end of a 10-year period of inflation it wasn’t the beginning. It’s like, oh, that has some inflation, yeah, we did, but it had started. I mean, some ways it started in 1968, and it really took off in 1974-75. So 81, these numbers, that was when Volcker finally got it under control, but you go back to 80, 70. Well, between 77 and 81, said five-year period, the dollar lost 50 percent of its purchasing power, not 15.50.

15:26 Uh, in that fiber stress, so you were putting up numbers, you know, 10 11, 13, and higher year after year. Yeah, 1981. It was, you know, nine or ten, which is what they’re comparing it to today, but that was, that was on the down slip. It had been higher than that in 77 and 78 and, you know, and 79. So the question is is this the beginning of an inflationary search where it’s going to get even worse, and it is going to last five years, or is it, is it different than that?

15:58 But I, but keep that in mind, because the 40-year comparison it is correct, but that was the tail end of an even worse episode and I think, Jim, you’ve actually said that this inflation is going to turn to deflation faster than most people realize. Can you explain what that means, and then what that looks like, and then maybe the ramifications of that? Sure. That is, maybe, I’m happy to explain it. Uh, and it catches a lot of people by surprise They’re like, wait a second, Jim.

16:26 You know, it’s inflation. You just look at, uh, 2022, you know, starting in January it was kind of like seven percent, and it was like, oh, it’s 8.1, it’s 8.6, now it’s 9.1, which is true, that is this year. It is going up. So people extract like that. And again, there is this comparison to the 70s by the way.

16:41 I think the situation we’re in today is very different from the 1970s, and I’ll explain why, but Well, let’s explain why right now, because in the 70s it was triggered from the supply side, with first the Arab oil embargo in 1973, as a result of the, uh, the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. And then the price tripled, but it went from, like, you know, two dollars to to, uh, to six dollars. Okay, well, you know, percentage terms, that’s a huge jump, but it was still six dollars and then it got to 12, and then in 1979 you had a second, uh oil embargo because of Iran and the Iota and the revolution, the hostages, and all that, and then it went from kind of 12 to 20.

17:29 So, uh, oil went up by a factor of 10 in the course of the late 70s, for because there’s two different embargoes. So that’s coming from the supply side, but what happened was the other source of inflation is on the demand side. So you have what’s called cost-push inflation, that’s where, you know, supplies choked off if there’s an embargo, or there’s a shortage of natural disaster, a lot of things coming from the supply side, and demand is inelastic, so you just pay up or, you know, kind of do without.

17:57 But the demand side is much more psychological. That’s called, uh, demand-pull inflation. That’s when consumers behave the way I described it, as I say, I lived in the 70s, where, you know, hey, I better buy it today, I better buy now. You’re pulling all this demand forward and bidding up prices because you’re worried that’s going to get even worse. So as that applies to today, we are starting with the cost-push inflation, mainly the price of energy, but the price of food is a big factor, and of course they’re related.

18:26 You know, it’s like, I was like, here’s the energy, here’s the food. You know, where do you think the food comes from? To get the food, you got to Fig feed the pigs and cows. What do you feed them? You feed them corn.

18:35 How do you get corn? Well, you grow it on a farm. You need nitrogen fertilizer. You need diesel in your tractors. Uh, you get the food, you got to put it in a truck to get it from point A to point B.

18:46 That requires diesel. The higher the diesel price, the higher the cost of food, because you’re moving it by truck, etc. So these things, as I say, are linked. But food prices are going up substantially, and you can’t. The two things you can’t do without, a gas in the car, and food.

19:01 So, so you have that, that cost-push inflation We’re not quite at the stage where it’s demand-pull. We’re not quite at the stage where individual consumers are behaving the way I described in the 1970s. They had better, better spend the money fast, because it’s, it’s losing value, and that, and you see that in inflationary expectations and inverted yield curves. I’ll come back to that, because that’s a really big deal. If you thought inflation was going to run away, as it did in the 70s, uh, yield curve would be steeply sloping, uh, and people would be in a frenzy to buy stuff.

19:38 They’re not, and yield curves are not sloping, uh, upward sloping. They’re inverted. They’re going down. That tells you that, uh, and we also see this, inflationary expectations, inflation expectations don’t drive inflation here and now. But what does is, inflation here and inflation hearing now can feed on itself.

19:59 Placing your expectations don’t drive it, but they tell you a lot. Their information really, to tell you a lot about what people expect, what the yield curve is telling us, what inflationary expectations are telling us, and other factors are telling us is that, yeah, there’s inflation now, but the Fed’s going to kill it, and they’re going to kill it by destroying demand and throwing us into a recession. And here’s where it gets interesting, because you could flip from this kind of inflation to disinflation or even deflation very quickly, and then people are definitely not prepared for that.

20:27 Well, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t say that kind of everyday consumers are prepared for it. I’m not sure Wall Street and mainstream economists and policy makers are prepared for it. They’re just extrapolating the inflation, saying, well, the Fed’s going to kill it. Yeah, they might kill it, but at a price, at a very steep price, and consumers are really bracing for that. So you know, this, even Jay Powell has said the soft landing is a, is a myth.

20:51 It’s not, it’s not gonna it’s not gonna be a soft landing. It’s going to be a hard, hard landing, but that’s not priced into markets. The markets are kind of pricing in a squishy landing or soft landing, or from the runways, they’re not pricing any really hard landing, and that is what we’re going to get. Wow, it’s going to be interesting to watch, and, uh, yeah, no one’s talking about deflation, so that, that will be an interesting potential end to this.

21:13 You talked also about an emerging global liquidity crisis, and maybe you could explain what that is. Obviously, last time you were here in London, Jim, you and I spoke about, you know, the Long-Term Capital Management crisis of 98, where there was a real liquidity issue, and I think you guys have 1.7 trillion dollars of derivatives at the time, and then we saw that happen again in 08. Well, first of all, maybe tell people what is it like to go through a liquidity crisis.

21:38 People don’t realize how bad things were in 98, or even in 08, and then what would one look like now? Uh, they kind of all look the same. I mean, they pop up in different places, you know, in 1998, it was Long-Term Capital Management. We, you know, the sequence there was interesting, because that crisis actually started in June 1997 in Thailand, when there have been a huge capital inflows at a fixed exchange rate. Thailand said, sorry, we’re going to devalue the baht.

22:09 It was, oh gee, I borrowed dollars and invested in Thai assets. Now they’re worth half. Uh, get me out of here. They dumped everything, and, uh, then that spread to Malaysia, uh, that have to be pre-order acquainted with the uh, Dr. Mahathir, who was prime minister at the time. He has some interesting stories to talk about that.

22:28 Then Indonesia, then South Korea by the fall of 1997 and, you know, the old expression, you buy when there’s blood in the streets. Well, sadly, there was real blood in the streets in Korea. There were riots, and people were killed. And then it cooled off a little bit, and then up pops Russia, you know, by April, and then that came to a head in August of 1998, and the whole world was waiting for Brazil. Brazil was the next dominant, like I said.

22:56 Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea, Russia, here comes Brazil No. Here comes Long-Term Capital Management. We were in the, we were like a country, uh, in terms of size and leverage and all that, and that became the epicenter of the crisis, and of course I negotiated that bailout, so I had a pretty, pretty front-row seat. We, uh, my wife, uh, remembers. I was getting if I got any sleep.

23:19 A lot of people didn’t sleep for five days, but I said I gotta get at least two hours in here, because I gotta make decisions, and one night I went to bed at, one o’clock, and I was going to get up at five, but at three o’clock the phone rang. It was the Italian finance ministry. They were looking for some information on some unsecured loan agreement they happen to be, and we were the biggest older Italian government debt Uh, and, uh, so, uh, yeah, so I took the call, and then she said, well, when you were done, you went right back to sleep.

23:43 It took two seconds to fall asleep, so that’s how crazy it was. But, and you guys were the smartest guys in the room at Long-Term Capital Management. You had, well, I think it was, uh, Myron Scholes, one of the MIT professors that had done the two Nobel Prize winners, uh, the creators of the Black-Scholes formula were, uh, it was Myron Scholes, Fischer Black, and Robert C. Merton. and it’s called Black-Scholes, but everyone recognizes that Bob Merton made, you know, indispensable contributions mathematically, and, uh, and he was, he shared the Nobel Prize, to the credit, by the way, when they, when those guys won the Nobel Prize in ’97.

24:21 Uh, Fischer Black had passed away, but Bob and Myron took the money and split it three ways, and gave one-third to Fischer’s widow, which was a very, uh, classy thing to do. So that was, and well deserved, of course, but, uh, yeah, so we, we had two Nobelists, but, uh, you know, the average IQ around the place was like, you know, 165 or something. It was crazy. I was, and I, you know, she always inspired to be the dumbest guy in the room and I actually achieved that on a number of occasions.

24:48 But, uh, yeah, we had MIT professors, you know, with David Mullins was a former vice chairman of the Fed, the youngest full professor in the history of Harvard University. And I know lesser-known names, but well known in the industry you know, Greg Hawkins. We call him the hawk. So we had, there was no shortage of talent, but John, good friend from Salomon, was there as well. He was not, he was, John Goodfriend was the boss at Salomon when these guys coalesced as the in-house arbitrage team.

25:18 Okay. I just did not to digress too much, but that blew up, in, in a scandal where people went to jail in, uh, 1991 because Salomon, it was not our guys. It was Paul Mozer lied to the Treasury. He was trying to corner the market, interior nights. It was like right out of, like, 1869 the gold squeeze, but he’s trying to corner the market in, into your notes, and there was a ceiling on how much any dealer could own.

25:43 I think it was 25 or 30 of the issue, but he, he lied. He said, well, we’re bidding for customers, which was okay, and he bought like 70 of the issue, but he lied about the fact that it was for the house account. He was saying it was for customers, and uh, of course, this was, that he got, came close to corner, and the mark. We just found out he went to jail, uh, but that caused the board to fire everybody. Uh, Jay, I’m John Meriwether.

26:10 Was not fired, but he chose to resign in the face of, he was not implicated but it was kind of like he was vice chairman, so it’s hard for him not to be affected. But then they they left as a group and formed Long-Term Capital Management. So we were, we moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, so we were the northern version, reincarnation of the Salomon arbitrage group, of which good friend had been the boss Uh, I met good friend later. It’s been a long time with a interesting guy, uh, but, but how, so what foreign in a very well-dressed, you know, three thousand dollar suit and tie kind of way, he was very vulgar, uh, but it was like, it was like second nature to him.

26:54 It wasn’t like a guy gratuitously throwing around the upward, it was just the way he talked. And, uh, but, you know, he was a real Wall Street or very wealthy, and all that, but he’s, he was every bit as vulgar and speeches I had been led to believe. So I was like okay you’re the real deal. But, but, uh, so, so okay. So you got a whole bunch of 165 IQs and two Nobel Prize winners and all the modeling, technological capability you could possibly.

27:21 What did they get wrong? They had an a priori assumption that when spreads widened Well, when I say spreads, two instruments, you know, off-the-run Treasury versus on-the-run treasuries, or On the run Treasury versus Treasury futures, and you could apply this to anything, Japanese stocks, French stocks, and we did, if they were essentially the same and should be priced the same and would end up the same if held to maturity, that you want to own that spread and just wait patiently for the spread to converge, and then close it out and take the profits, and because the spreads tended to be razor thin, you could apply high leverage. Like, isn’t leverage dangerous?

28:01 Yes, it is but if you have a sure thing, if you know it’s going to converge, and in fact they were going to converge you could leverage it comfortably, and you were just going to make more money. So that’s the idea. So when the spreads widened, and you’ll lost a little money on the trade. They would kind of say, well, a good thing just got better, you know. A lot like the old school traders.

28:21 Yeah, it’s nature’s way of telling you you’re wrong. Get out of the trade. But Long-Term Capital is like, wait, good things just come back. Buy more wines. Hey, buy more.

28:28 This thing’s getting richer all the time, you know. And then, but what’s happening, of course, is that you’re walking into a trap, because at the end of the day, in a global liquidity crisis, the spreads go like this, and then the old, it’s not clear I mean, it’s not a cliche. It’s true. Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, and that was what they missed. We had four billion dollars in cash, and we, you know, leverage their futures and all that, and we had, we had a billion dollar line of credit.

28:57 We had repo facilities everywhere. Uh, we were tough negotiators when it came to margin calls, and all that stuff, and and, as I say, our accounting was so good, we knew, we knew how much we lost to the penny. Uh, there was a, this was not, it was never a case of mismarking or, gee, Mark is going to get, what’s going on. We knew exactly what was going on. That was kind of the scary part.

29:18 It was like we did know exactly what was going on, but, uh, but things like that have had two stages. Stage one, as the market’s moving against you, and instead of getting out early, these guys double down, double down, and what’s called a martingale strategy and the firm belief that it would converge, which it would, but too late for them. Uh, but then there comes at times when the word gets out that you’re the biggest victim, at which point you’re, you’re the marlin, the old man in the sea.

29:49 The sharks come at you. They, the street doesn’t care about the market anymore. They systematically trade against you, and they will not stop until there’s nothing left but the bill on the tail uh, and the skill that you’re picked clean. So August was, the world’s going against us. We’re losing a lot of money but September 1998 was, no, the world is now systematically trading against us.

30:15 There’s no hope. There’s no way out, and then when we called the Fed, because we know more about anyone, of course. We absolutely did not expect a bailout, and we were not asking for a bailout. We said there’s no way the Fed’s going to bail on a hedge fund. I mean, come on.

30:31 But, uh, we just, we’re just being good corporate citizens. We’re like, man, this is a problem. We ought to, we ought to let them know before it takes down the world, because that was in the process of happening. And I’ll never forget Peter Fisher, who was head of the open market desk at the time, and Dino Costa’s right-hand, Gary Gensler, who was assistant Secretary of the Treasury, now he’s the head of the SEC. These guys never go away.

30:54 Gary and Dino and Peter came up to Greenwich and sat with JM and me for six or seven hours, and, you know, we had computers, of course, but we had printouts of the positions. We just went page by page, and at the end of this, you know, hours-long presentation Peter Fisher, his face was white, and he said, I mean, blanched and he said, we knew you guys were going to take down the bond market. We didn’t know you were going to take down the stock market, because we had 15 billion dollars of stock positions.

31:29 We were the largest Rich garbage charger on the street. Nobody knew that. Like, hey, you guys are bond guys, what do you do in the stock market? We were in every deal. If you go back to look, you know, Lockheed Martin or, so, lucky Boeing, uh, Citibank, Travelers, uh, MCI WorldCom, uh, you go back and look at the deals of the time.

31:48 We were in everyone up to 4.9, because that’s, you don’t have to disclose until you hit five, so we would cap ourselves out of four points, and nobody knew this, and so you guys are going to take down every market in the world, and we would have. So that’s when they went back and had breakfast with, uh, John Corzine, who was out of Global Massage at the time, and Sandy Warner at, uh, JP Morgan, and, uh, David Komansky was head of Merrill Lynch, and they sat down and cooked up the bailout. Then we just, there was like no sleep for five days.

32:20 But my point is, the best description of a financial crisis I’ve ever heard is everybody wants her money back Like, that’s the easiest way to understand it. It’s not like, God, this asset’s better, I’m out of this, and going into that, or I’m rotating out of the sector, getting into that sector, or, uh, no, everybody wants his or her money back now, and so, it, so all asset classes behave the same way. They all go down, and all the spreads wide, and they keep widening until either there’s a sequential financial failure, which is, which was happening in 2008, by the way, just to jump ahead to that, or you shut every market in the world.

32:59 We came within hours of closing every market in the world in 1998. We got the 4 billion in, there’s a press release Things calm down, not right away, but we still lost more money after that. After Wall Street to Observer, we lost another half a billion, but Alan Greenspan cut rates twice in a matter of days, and then things calm down and kind of went back to normal. Actually, Wall Street made money on that deal. That wasn’t their intention.

33:25 They were trying to save their own skins, but a year later, was liquidated, and they took their money back with a small profit, but at the time, when you’re in it, there’s no rationality. There’s no, uh, rotation, there’s no Safe Harbor. It’s like everything’s going down. And we’re getting close to that today, and he’s saying the same thing happened in 08, when you saw Lehman go and bust, a few others almost going bust, and you’re like, okay, this is just happening again, except now it just happens bigger.

33:56 When I saw it in 1998, I’m sorry, when I saw in 2008, I wasn’t even, I wasn’t even sure, like I know this movie. I know how this sounds, and yeah, Lehman, sure, big deal, but go back again. This goes back to what I said about 98. It started 97. These things, these markets are so large, the scale of the system is so large that it can take a year to play out.

34:16 You have to understand the dynamics to understand that, and most people on Wall Street don’t, because they’re using badly flawed models and regressions, and, uh, you know, uh, you know, normal distributions, at risk. I said none of that. It’s all garbage, but that’s what people use, but if you understand complexity theory and complex system dynamics, you also understand that it takes a while to play out. You know, an avalanche starts with a snowflake and ends up burying a village.

34:45 You’re supposed to be looking for the snowflake, and In, in, in 1998, sorry, sorry, 2008, that started in 2007. August 2007, there were two Bear Stearns hedge funds that when, you know, illiquid, basically, uh, suspended redemptions and, uh, closed their doors, and a money market fund at one of the big trench Banks associated general, but they, and that was, that was not Bear Stearns itself. There were the Bear Stearns hedge funds. Bear Stearns didn’t bail them out.

35:16 Typical Bear Stearns, uh, believe me, after they, Bear Stearns refused to participate in the 1998 bailout of Long-Term Capital, so when they went down in 2008, I promise you, no tears were shed on Wall Street, because that was, like, you know, what goes around comes around. It was the attitude. But So that was the start. But remember, Bear Stearns itself failed in March 2008. Then by June, it was Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, uh, and then in August the Congress passed a bailout law for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac.

35:49 I was advising the John McCain campaign at the time, and I was on a call, and they were like, oh, high five. I’m like yeah, the crisis is over. Uh, Congress bailed out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. We can get back to talking about the war in Iraq, because that’s what we really want to talk about, and I, you know, skunk at the garden party. I said, I said, God, so she you’re not going to make it to election day without this getting much, much worse.

36:08 I didn’t say, you know, September 15th, Lehman Brothers, although everyone knew Lehman was the weak link. I mean, that was true in 98. That was always true on Wall Street. They were always the weak link, but I said, you are not going to make it to election day without an exponential increase in this crisis. Why don’t you get ready for that now?

36:26 Write your speech, have a four-point plan. It doesn’t matter what the points are. I just have them, uh, and put your guy on the steps to Treasury, and we assure the American people you win the election. I was laughed at, not invited back. I’m used to that.

36:41 And, uh, then when it came, what’s McCain runs around like a chicken with his head off, uh, sparging into the White House demanding an emergency meeting. Well, Bush, uh, says, well, I can’t invite McCain without inviting Obama, and which he had to do. He didn’t want to pick socks in the campaign, and there was a cabinet meeting, and Obama didn’t know anything either, but he was smart enough to keep his mouth shut, and the canes to run here. So American people looked at that, and they go, you’re nuts.

37:08 You kind of look calm, cool, and collect it. If you look at the polls, they reversed. Obama was behind until Lehman, and then after Lehman Then days later Obama went ahead in the polls. So that was a turning point in the election, but It’s, uh, you know, and then, so, so getting back to 2008. So when Lehman came up in September, it was September 15, 2008.

37:30 That was like the fourth domino, not the first show everyone remembers it. Oh, all what fell apart after Lehman. Well, it did, but you can see that coming a year away. Uh, and Morgan, Morgan Stanley was days away from collapsing. Goldman would have been right behind it, then probably Citi, you know, whether JP Morgan would have been the last guy standing, don’t know, but there were more, many more dominoes to fall, and that’s when Bernanke and, uh, Hank Paulson walked over the White House and said, we got to do something, and they did.

37:59 Uh, what they did is, they, like, overnight, they converted Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs into bank holding companies. Now, I’ve been a bank securities lawyer and bank lawyer for decades, and when you do applications to the Fed depending on the politics, it can take a couple years to get something like that approved. This was done, like, in the day, but the reason was, Don was said the Fed could bail them out once they were bank holding companies, have had the statutory authority to bail them out.

38:27 They did. Then things calmed down. We had a bad recession, and AIG was another wild card in the deck. But my point is, a couple points. Number one, you can see these things coming if you know where to look, but most people don’t.

38:39 Number two, they take a while to play out, so you get plenty of warning, but again, people ignore the warnings. And then finally And it’s important to understand there’s a difference between a financial crisis and a recession They’re both bad, but they’re two different things. You know, 1998 was a severe financial crisis, but there was no recession when the NASDAQ hit an all-time high on the January 1st, 2000. It went on for another year and a half, and there was no recession Uh, 1990, 91, uh, was an example of a recession, but no financial crisis.

39:16 They have some losses in commercial real estate but there was no financial panic. 2008 was both. 2020 was a severe economic contraction. It’s technically a recession, but it’s kind of hard to know what it was. It’s like, you know, Anthony Fauci shut down the US economy, so what is that?

39:35 Yeah, GDP, about 32 percent in one quarter, you know, technically, sorry, two course, technically, was two quarters, but it was really two months, March and April 2020. but March happened to be in the first quarter. April was in the second quarter, so it took both quarters down, but that was really concentrated in about two months, and then, you know, cat kind of came roaring back. Uh, but I called it called a severe recession contraction. But, uh, there was no financial panic in, in 2020.

40:01 The stock market went down 30 but it, and it, like, doubled from there. So, so these things can come together, and we’re interviewing, we’re almost certainly in a recession now. The recession will get worse, so that, that’s in the, that’s not priced into the markets, but that’s you don’t even have to guess. That’s, that’s here. It’s going to get worse.

40:21 The question is, are we in for a financial pattern that’s kind of what you’re referring to, Brian, and the evidence is yes. The evidence is right in front of your face if you know where to look, but most people don’t. It’s a little bit technical. I can explain it in plain English, but the signs are there. Okay.

40:41 And I guess you go a little bit deeper to this, and in your separate video, Countdown to Crisis, where you talk about how this crash is going to be fast, bloody, and unavoidable. Um, there’s a link below, londonreal.tv forward slash Jim. You also talk a lot about position yourself to profit for this crash in 2022. Uh, do you want to give us any hints about how that’s right in front of our face, or should they go watch the video for that well. I can give you more than a hand.

41:02 Like I said, these things, they, they, they’re often presented technically because some expert wants to seem smart or whatever, but you can do it in plain English. So basically, what we’re talking about the warning signal, and it’s a bright red flashing light, isn’t averted, Yoko. So what does a normal yield curve look like? So the, you know, the x-axis is a time, uh, and the y-axis is, uh, interest rate. So, and Treasury market’s a good example, but there are other markets.

41:30 I’ll get to one in a second. So what are the maturities of Treasury? Well, it’s 30-day bill, 60-day bill, 90-day bill, one-year bill, or 360 day bill, to your notified, you’re not a seven-year note, you know, tenure, now 30-year bond. So that’s your x-axis and interest rates go, they can be negative, but kind of zero to whatever A normal yield curve is upward sloping. You know, it’s the longer the maturity, the higher there, and that makes perfect sense.

41:57 If I’m going to lend you money overnight, I might want a certain interest rate, but if I’m going to lend you money for 10 years and I say, hey, Brian, you gotta pay me a little more because, you know, I’m taking more risk, etc., perfectly normal upward sloping your curve, and whether it’s steep or flatter. Okay, that’s important if you’re a trader, but upward sloping, but an inverted yield curve is downward sloping, and a vertigo curve says future interest rates are going to be lower than present interest rates. Well, why would that be?

42:24 If I’m lending you money for a longer period of time, and I want to risk premium and protect myself, why would I take a lower rate? The answer is because I think really bad things are going to happen that I don’t mean me personally. I mean, this is the institutional market, so, and we see this in the Treasury market. You know, it flips around day to day, but right now you have an inversion and kind of two years to five years. So five-year note is yield to maturity is lower than a two-year note, uh, and you see it in sevens to ten.

42:51 So the 10-year note has a lower yield to maturity than the seven-year note. Is that the whole sound? That the whole curve inverted but it’s in sections. It is. So in the short, the short end of the current, 30 to 69 today is one year.

43:04 Yeah, it goes up. Well, that’s because the Fed controls that part of the curve. They already told us what they’re doing. We know they’re going to raise 75 basis points in July, at least 50 in September. We’ll see what happens in November, they get, and then they have another meeting in December, but there’s no reason to think the Fed is not going to remain on this path of 50 to 75 basis point interest rate hikes for the remainder of the year, which is going to get interest rates of four percent.

43:31 Now, remember, when they did this, from 2015 to 2018, late December 2018, they went from zero to two and a half You know, two and a quarter, two and a half range. Now you’re talking about going from zero to almost four in nine months. That, that took four years, 2015 to 2018. So four years to get two and a half. Now you’re talking about eight months or nine months to go to zero to four.

44:00 That’s, that’s Volcker territory. So yeah, so the short end of the curve is upward sloping, as you would expect, but you get out around, not even that far. You still have to say three years, but now, like, two years It goes down again. Well, this is the biggest money in the world. Treasury market is the newest Treasury market.

44:18 It’s the largest securities market in the world. It’s a big money. The institution is sovereign they’re not a big factor, uh, and they’re telling you that things are going to get worse. Now, just to pile on, as we say in American football, there’s another market that’s even more powerful, more sophisticated, insiders only. The big money runs the world, and that’s the euro dollar futures market traded on the CME.

44:47 So, what’s a euro dollar? Well, it’s, these are dollar-denominated loans that banks make to each other, usually on an overnight basis, sometimes longer. This is, this is how the financial system is really funded. Forget the Fed. The Fed’s kind of a sideshow.

45:02 It’s good for headlines. The euro dollar market runs the world. Uh, So in Deutsche Bank needs a little money, and they borrow from JP Morgan, or Citi lends, to create a Swiss or however, UBS, UniCredit, however it plays out, that’s all in the euro dollar market, but the rates are very short term. You know, overnight, one week, etc., but that’s what banks use to leverage their balance sheet. That’s what banks use to support their derivatives positions.

45:30 That’s what banks use for collateral. And if I’m going to have a derivative position, I have to give you collateral. And this, symptom of a liquidity crisis is when you say, yeah, okay, Jim, I’ll take the collateral, but I only want Treasury bills. I don’t mind your junkie mortgages. I don’t want your corporates.

45:48 If you give me a 10-year note, I’m going to give you a one-point haircut, which is a lot. I want 30-day bill. I want your best, absolute best collateral, and even then there’s a little bit of a haircut, so if I have to get that collateral to pledge to you to leverage my balance sheet so I can make money, I need dollars. You know, if I’m Deutsche Bank, I need dollars to buy Treasury bills. Can’t buy them.

46:09 Euros and this is the secret of why the dollar is so strong. Everyone’s like, wait a second, you guys got, you know, multi-trillion dollar deficits. You got a hundred thirty percent of the GDP ratio, which is about as high. You know, I’m a size 11, and you, uh, you know, your budget’s out of control. Your inflation’s out of control.

46:27 Your politics are dysfunctional. Everything’s bad. Why on Earth would the dollar be so strong? The answer is, behind the curtain, people need dollars to buy dollar-denominated collateral to support their balance sheet. So that’s the secret driver there.

46:41 Now, what’s going on with the euro dollar futures curve? Now, you can trade your dollar futures on the CME, and they go out, uh, I think they might go out to, like, eight or nine years, or ten, but most of the liquidity obviously is in the early months, but the, the, the two and three-year, four-year futures trading is relatively liquid. Certainly two years is very liquid. And they settle monthly, and then as you get to long maturities, quarterly, etc. So there’s a euro dollar futures curve now.

47:13 How to think about this, and this is interesting. These are long-term bets on short-term rates, right? Because, if I, if I buy a euro dollar futures two years forward, I’m making a two-year forward bet on what it should, what overnight rates are going to be two years from now. So, easiest way to understand that: long-term bets on short-term rates. The euro dollar futures curve is inverted again normally sloping at the short end, and then it, it goes inverted, steeply inverted.

47:43 Uh, so that’s telling you that not only, do I think, not only does the Treasury market think 10-year note yield, the maturities are going to be lower two years from now than they are today but the euro dollar futures market is telling you overnight rates, the weight, the race, the Fed does control, are going to be lower two years from now than they are today. And just to make it worse, that kink, the inversion point, the inflection point, is moving in. Like, if I had we had this conversation six or eight months ago, I would have said, hey, Brian, you know, three years from now, the the curve isn’t very well.

48:21 It’s becoming, in two years now the inversion starts. The inflection point is kind of January 2023. Okay, so that’s telling you, so the largest, most sophisticated, uh, biggest player, real money market in the world is telling you that the Fed’s going to blink, that they’re going to raise rates, probably to the remainder this year, but then things are going to get so bad they’re going to have to cut rates, and that’s why we can see a liquidity crisis, uh and a very severe recession coming well in advance.

48:57 Wow. And this liquidity crisis will be worse than the mortgage crisis of 08, potentially? Yes, because, uh, we’re talking about markets. Well, for two reasons. One, we’re talking about markets with, uh, a lot more leverage mortgages were leveraged, and, uh, you know, that nobody, everyone said, oh, there’s only a trillion dollars of mortgages, you know, subprime mortgages.

49:19 Uh, if there’s a 20, uh, default rate, which is sky high. A high rate is five percent let’s just say a 20 default rate. So that’s 200 billion dollars of losses, which in real terms was less than the S&L crisis in the 1980s. So, like, yeah, 200 billion is a big number, but we can, we can bear it What people didn’t understand, when I say people, so I remember Nike Hank Paulson and others, what they didn’t understand was that yeah, there was a billion dollars of, uh, subprime mortgages, but it was leveraged six to one in the derivatives market so it was actually six.

49:57 I said if I said a billion, I misspoke. A trillion, but it was actually six trillion dollars, because it was leveraged six to one in derivatives, and now twenty percent of six trillion is, uh, 1.2 trillion now you’re talking real money. So, so now apply that to your adult futures, which is basically shorthand for the entire global banking system, uh, and that’s much, much more leverage than six to one. So, uh, it’s a bigger crisis, and it’s coming our way.

50:26 Wow. All right, uh, this is heavy stuff, and I know we’re also got a few more things to talk about. Again, there’s a separate video, Countdown to Crisis. There’s a link below that talks about how this crash is going to be fast, bloody, and unavoidable. It’s londonreal.tv forward slash Jim, but you also talk about how you can position yourself to profit from this.

50:44 I want to talk about the war in Ukraine, because you said that Russia’s winning in Ukraine, both on the ground and in the financial war, and maybe first we kind of zoom out, because, like you said, from a humanitarian level, no one likes to see what’s happening there, but also it’s important to diagnose what actually is happening there, so maybe you can speak on how you see that conflict. Well, all, sure. All wars are filled with, uh, lies and propaganda.

51:11 That’s just comes with a territory of Winston Churchill’s famous quote was, uh, in wartime, the truth is so important it must be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies, which is exactly right. So Ukraine lies, Russia lies. Got it. So the hard part for an analyst is, where can I get good information? Where can I get somebody who is actually trying to report?

51:33 Not easy to do, but there’s some good sources The Swiss, for example. The Swiss, uh, you know, like a nice, peaceful country. It’s a machine gun under every bed in Switzerland. Every, every parking lot is a bomb shelter, and this place is heavily armed. Every responsible adult has been in the military.

51:53 You don’t get anywhere if you haven’t But a lot of Swiss military, the kernel level, they’ll retire, and join, like, U.N. peacekeeping forces, and some of them are in eastern Ukraine. So they got some really good first-hand experience, and they, they care about getting it right. Aja’s, France actually is doing a very good job. You know, Macron is the best dialogue with Putin. I’m not saying he’s a fan, but those two guys talk And France perhaps is, uh, is a good sir.

52:20 There are other sources, but you got to dig But that said, the Ukrainian propaganda operation. When I see that, the particular kind of propaganda, I knew they were losing from the start, because they wouldn’t have been doing what they were doing. For example, remember, in the early days of the war, you’d see Instagram or Twitter or whatever. There would be a woman in camouflage with the automatic rifles, like everyone in Ukraine is picking up arms and standing up for the country, and uh, you know, the Ukrainians are very attractive people.

52:51 You know, they kind of descended from Vikings in a lot of cases, but I said, these women look like models. You know, like, all right, you’re volunteer, you care about your country, but they all look like Vogue models. Turns out, they were, they were models who were, like, dressing up in camo and holding guns and saying, uh, okay, you’re so, you’re, you know, you’re lying out of the gate. They show a film of a Russian tank being blown up, and then you see 20, and 20, it was the same tank.

53:15 You know, they kept showing it from different angles, etc. And the Russians are kind of keeping their mouth shut. You know, they, yeah, this is propaganda, of course, but they were just getting it done. This has been slow, brutal, bloody, but relentless, and uh, Russia, of course, they had Crimea since 2014. They built the land bridge from Russian territory to Crimea they took Mariupol, which was not only a critical port on the city of Azov, but it was the hotbed of the neo-Nazis, the Azov Brigade, and when I say neo-Nazis, I’m not throwing names around.

53:48 These guys are neo-Nazis. They trace the roots back to Stepan Bandera and what happened in World War II, uh, when they sided with the Nazis to fight the Russians. So, and the reason Putin went for it, and that was so bloody and protracted. Uh, well, there are three reasons. One, critical port.

54:05 Two, major major steel industry, but three, he wanted to eliminate the, the Azov Brigade, the Nazi element, and the Ukrainian armed forces, and he did, he accomplished all three things there. They got lujans, they got donuts, they, they’ve got uh, um, they’re just, they’re moving slowly. They’ve learned. They made some mistakes for sure, but they’ve learned from their mistakes. They’ve got their deaths in their sights.

54:33 Ukrainian casualties are high. Uh, is the US sending some weapons? Yeah. Uh, Germany, by the way, is not sending any more weapons because they’re not going to have any natural gas if they do. Uh, and so And, and the thing is, I’ve never seen a war that was easier to avoid all that had to happen before the war, as late as early February Biden picks up the phone, calls, Zelensky says we’re going to issue a joint statement saying Ukraine will not join NATO Ukraine will remain neutral, doesn’t have to be pro-Russian neutral.

55:08 We’ll give Donbas, you know, do a little husk, and don’t ask a high degree of autonomy, but they can kind of remain in the country, and on that basis, Putin will say, okay, that’s good enough for me, that’s what I want, and we’re done, no war. That’s where this is going to end up. With a big difference, you’ll still have that conversation to end the war, which never should have started. Um, but Russia’s not giving the land back. I mean, they fought and suffered to take it.

55:37 Of course, the Ukrainians suffered to defend it, but, uh, they’re not going to give it back. Why should they? I mean, and the, I saw stories, you know, the United Nations is warning African countries don’t take grain from Russia, because they stole it from Ukraine. I said, don’t you people understand anything about war? When you win and get territory, you get to keep the stuff you know?

55:57 It’s like, it’s like the Palestinians in Israel. Israel fought four wars, and they were four for four. They won all four wars. Uh, so they get to keep stuff, and that’s how wars worked. I don’t know what Fantasyland people are living in these days.

56:09 Uh, maybe they don’t study history, but Putin does, and, uh, so you’ll still have peace talks at some point, but Ukraine’s not getting that land back, and the longer they protract this, the less they’re going to have, because Putin’s got a site set on Odessa, and they’ll have the Black Sea, and the save as of And so, uh, so that’s kind of said. That we’re now, I said they’re winning on the ground, which I just described, and they’re winning the financial war. So Biden, who’s is saying he’s dumb and senile.

56:42 Doesn’t, uh, that’s not, it’s not enough. I mean, he’s worse than that, because when he when he is temporarily, uh, lucid, he’s a mean, you know, what. So uh, and he’s been pretty much wrong about everything, so he has a guy and the Treasury. By the way, Yellen’s clueless Sheldon, she’s a statistics geek from Berkeley who doesn’t understand anything we’re talking about. So she’s the Secretary of Treasury, but there’s a number two guy there named Wally Adeyemo.

57:14 Uh, Wally is the deputy secretary of the Treasury. He’s point on sanctions. He’s the sanctions guy, and by the way, not all, but a lot of my work for the intelligence community and the Pentagon was exactly on this topic. Financial warfare, economic science. They didn’t need me to jump out of the helicopter with a knife between my teeth.

57:32 I was the financial warfare guy. Uh, and I still, I still teach a course at the U.S. Army War College that I did this most recently in April. Uh, Wally, I’ll give my cue points, but he’s never had, like, a regular job in his life he, he gets out of, uh, Harvard, and, no, sorry, yeah, I think Evan’s Fortune are going to go He then goes into the Obama National Security Council as a junior he, they carried Larry Fink’s briefcase for about a year. You know, one of these executive assistants, but the problem with carrying Larry Fink’s briefcase is you’re stuck in the same bubbles.

58:09 Larry Fink, I mean, Larry Fink just talks to people who you know agree with him. It’s like the Aspen Institute, Davos crowd. so you’re not getting any real good information. And then he goes back, and his Treasury secretary. So the guy knows sanctions I’ll give him that.

58:25 He’s slapping them on left and right. I’ve never seen a more stringent lengthy array of sanctions in any matter, including Iran in 2012. but there’s no idea what he’s doing because he doesn’t understand the blowback. So let me just give you a couple examples so he said we’re going to seize the oligarchy. So those yachts, those bank accounts, those, uh, you know, homes in Belgravia were taking it all, and they have, and of course Johnson, like, took a lot of stuff, and some of the yachts have been towed into, uh, uh, custody, but what they don’t understand is that is Putin’s, we’ll send them a thank you now.

59:02 Putin hates the oligarchs. The idea that by hurting oligarchs you’re hurting Putin is nonsense. Putin’s base is the military, the intelligence, the Orthodox church, and everyday Russian people. That’s his base. He hates the oligarchs.

59:16 Now he’s never wanted to take them on. He told them, uh, when they put, uh, I forget, the Yuko Sky. I’m not sure of the name, but the head of vehicles put him in jail. That was a message. Like, you guys can keep your money, but keep out of politics.

59:31 If you do, you’ll end up in the next cell, or worse. Maybe you’ll have a poison lunch in, uh, in London. But but that was it. Uh, but now the US is destroying the oligarchs, actually, to the point where the oligarchs are starting to bring their capital back to Russia, because it’s the new safe haven. So this is a complete favorite of Putin.

59:50 It’s not punishment. Oh, you, uh, you double the price of a natural gas. Nice job. Putin’s getting paid for that. The natural gas flow has been, uh, diminished at Putin’s order, but he’s making up in price, but he’s losing in volume, and he’s still controlling the top.

1:00:06 He’s still got his hand on the valve. Uh, price of oil, we know what’s going on there. Putin’s making a 20, one billion dollars a month in oil, natural gas sales. They have not been curtailed. Everything else is grain things that people need, but not through all natural gas.

1:00:22 So Uh, and the ruble before the war was aided to one, shortly after it, when the sanctions were announced, it crashed at 140. It came back to 80, then 70, less. I looked, it was like 65 bid, you know, 66 offered. The ruble is too strong. A very nebulators, they had the central bank.

1:00:40 She may start to cut, actually. She already has. She’s starting to cut interest rates, because the ruble is too strong, so the ruble’s stronger. Putin’s richer. The oligarchs have had the Winx clip, which Putin always wanted.

1:00:53 And U.S., Germany’s going to start shutting down factories so people can heat their homes this winter. Uh, supply chain is worse than ever. Uh, Western industrial output is suffering because we can’t get platinum palladium, aluminum, uh, titanium, uh, etc., and more from Russia. And keep going. So, uh, Biden said no semiconductors going to Russia.

1:01:20 We’re going to Star them as semiconductors. Okay. How do you make a semiconductor? Well, it’s a way for you to get some silicon. You got some other, uh, mineral components, but you etch the circuits with a laser.

1:01:31 How do you power a laser? Neon gas. Where’s the Neon gas come from? Russia. Who processes it?

1:01:38 Is it plant in Odessa? So we say, hey, hey, put no semiconductors for you. Putin says, hey, know so many conductors for the world. down the global semiconductor industry by cardio company. Neon gas, you can replace it, but it takes years.

1:01:52 That’s the point. So Um, everything. So, stronger ruble, higher foreign exchange reserves, uh, no diminution and oil and gas revenues, uh, clip the oligarch swings How many more favors do you want to do for Putin? And that’s what Wally doesn’t understand. Yellen’s clueless.

1:02:10 Biden you know, he’d be asleep if he were in this conversation. It’s pretty pathetic performance by the U.S., and so we’re now seeing this post-Dollar World taking shape by some of these actions to basically say, oh, those dollars you always thought were going to be liquid, we’re taking them away from you. obviously, you saw a similar move with the Canadian government, where they actually suspended people’s accounts because of their civil actions with protests, etc., and, and we’re seeing, you know, G7 countries now making their own currencies less relevant in the future, something we never thought would happen to the dollar.

1:02:43 Is that a reality? Jim, are we going to see just a post-Dollar World going forward? We’re getting closer to that. It’ll come in stages. Yeah, in Canada, they’ve gone full fascist.

1:02:55 I mean, Trudeau is actually not smart enough to implement a fashion program, even though he wants it, but, uh, don’t underestimate Chrystia Freeland. She’s the Deputy Prime Minister and also the Minister of Finance. She is a real neo-fascist, and she’s the one who, uh, I think, like Canada, like in the US, I don’t know. We’ve got seven thousand banks or whatever, but in Canada you really only have five banks. There’s some smaller ones, basically five big banks.

1:03:22 And during the trucker protest, which was completely non-violent, yeah, it was, yeah, there were honking horns at three in the morning. They blocked traffic. They shut down Central Auto. All true, but it was non-violent, and they, and all Trudeau had to do was walk out, meet the leaders of that group, and there were leaders make a few concessions, say we’re listening to you, we’re gonna ease up on the Covid testing, crossing the border. If you’re alone in a truck, who are you going to give cover to?

1:03:48 I mean, that was that’s all he had to say, and they would have said thank you and gone home. Instead, they beat them in the streets. They trampled old women with horses. Um, they arrested the truckers. So Freeland calls up the banks, gets all the bank account information on a national security basis.

1:04:05 It freezes all their accounts. Calls up the crypto exchanges, don’t, sometime in crypto safe it’s not, you close up the crypto exchanges. It freezes their crypto wallets. puts them in jail. Pre-detention, uh, pre-hearing detention with no bail and confiscates their trucks.

1:04:25 These people can’t feed their families, and they’re still in jail. Uh, so that’s, that’s like her fastest route to really come to the fore And, and you know, it kind of, kind of gets worse, and I have a place in Canada. I spent a lot of time there, so I kind of said I know Freeland for better or worse, but I know her personally. So, uh, uh, so that’s, that’s pretty bad. But yeah, going around the world, the key distinction, Brian, this is important.

1:04:49 A lot of people mush them together. There’s a payment currency and a reserve currency, and they can be the same. The dollar is the leading payment currency and the leading reserve currency. Replacing reserve currency is tough. Placing it, replacing a payment currency is not so tough.

1:05:05 You need some agreement, but this is coming together in multiple fronts. So you got the BRICS, but the Brazil Russia India China and South Africa, but the BRICS are now sort of like BRICS plus, so because Argentina, Iran, Turkey, Kazakhstan, other, a lot of other countries have joined in these BRICS summits, so they’re working on a payment currency process Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Central Asia, led by China and Russia, that is working on the same thing. That group is working on the same thing.

1:05:38 They’re getting new members. There’s something called the, uh, try to get the name right, European, oh, Euro Asian free trade area, like UFTA or something. It was, it’s sort of Russia’s answer to the EU, but that’s getting new members. And you say, who cares about Belarus? Well, sorry, you know, it’s a lot of grain.

1:05:57 Yeah, a lot of energy. Uh, Kazakhstan, Russia, Serbia but again, you’re getting adhesion from places like Iran and Turkey that actually are important. Uh, so all of these organizations are working on new payment systems, and it’s not that difficult. Uh, for the exact reason you mentioned, say, okay, I don’t like the U.S. I’m an adversary.

1:06:20 I don’t like what they’re doing, but the dollar works as long as you leave the dollar alone. I’ll continue to use it even though I disagree with everything you stand for, but when you mess with the dollar, when you actually weaponize it, and it has been for a long time, but this is an extreme. You froze the reserves of the Central Bank of Russia uh, you froze their Treasury securities, which is 10 amount to default, you know, technically you kicked the 10 largest Russian banks out of SWIFT.

1:06:48 Uh, and Lavrov said three years ago, if you do SWIFT this, which we call it de-swifting, if you descript us, we consider an act of war. well, that, you know, what goes around comes around. So, so yes, I, I think, uh, and of course with electronic technology and digital currencies, not crypto as such, not necessarily blockchain, but central bank digital currencies, and you can create your own and you can create a new one without too much difficulty. Um, you know, there’s a story breaking the other day.

1:07:20 Russia’s asking India to pay for oil with, uh, UA dinar. So, not the dollar, but not the rupee. It’s the dinar, but why? Well, Dubai uh, is a financial center, a big one, a major transshipment center. They’re neutral in this thing.

1:07:41 They have not, uh, joined the U.S. sanctions, neither. What Christiana hasn’t, but neither have, you know, Brazil, uh, Iran, Turkey, I mentioned China, a lot of Southeast Asia a lot of the Middle East, Saudi Arabia. None of them have joined the sanctions. It’s, it’s, you know, U.S., Canada, EU, Australia, Japan. That’s about it.

1:08:02 Oh, yeah, big countries. It’s a big part of the global economy, but not, uh, all of it, by any means. It’s not even close, and So, uh, so they’re all working on this new currencies, new systems, and, you know, DNR could be, uh, you know, if, if all of a sudden China is willing to pay for UAE oil and dinar rather than Yuan not dollars, but dinar. You’ve created demand for dinar, and then India’s got to buy some to pay for the Russian oil, and you know, you’re halfway to a new payment currency.

1:08:35 Yeah, it’s a very, very good point. Very good point. Again, you’re going deeper into this in your Countdown to Crisis video. Link below, londonreal.tv forward slash Jim, where you talk about how the crash is going to be fast, bloody, unavoidable, but also how to position yourself to profit from this crisis going forward. Jim, you mentioned CBDCs, you mentioned blockchain, you mentioned crypto.

1:08:53 What is your view on all of these things? I, I think I read a quote with you somewhere saying that when you try to decentralize a financial system, you know, you are going to get a reaction, sometimes a violent reaction, from whoever you’re trying to take that control away from. What do you see in those things? I know crypto is different from a CBDC, but what do you see Um, the, yeah, I mean, I, uh, you know, I don’t own crypto. I don’t recommend it.

1:09:20 Everyone’s like, oh, Jim’s a technological Neanderthal. He doesn’t get us. Like, no, I was in, like, I was in a gold versus Bitcoin debate in 2010, Ellen, uh, and Devin, a little bit, uh, west of London, and, uh, when I’m in a debate, I’d like to know more about my opponent’s subject than he does, uh, because I don’t want to get picked off. I want to win the debate. Uh, so I’ve been immersed in this.

1:09:43 I’ve read all the technical papers and white papers, and, uh, you know, I, I, you know, I look at crypto exchanges. I look at, I understand what DeFi is. I get all of it. I don’t, um, think it’s going anywhere. That’s the view.

1:09:57 Could be right, could be wrong, but I do understand it. And the thing about central bank digital currencies is they’re not, they’re not cryptocurrencies. They’re not blockchain, they the ledger, because blockchain is just a ledger. It’s just a bookkeeping way. It’s digital, but the blockchain technology has been around since the ’80s.

1:10:16 There’s nothing new about it, but it’s your ledger, and it can be decentralized. Uh, Central Bank digital currency there’ll be a ledger, but it’ll be maintained by the central bank. Uh, and a CBDC dollar is still a dollar. A central bank digital euro is still a euro. Central bank digital yen is still yet, so it’s not a new currency.

1:10:38 It’s a new payment channel, a new settlement clearance channel, and it is better, faster, cheaper. I mean, if I buy something with a credit card, how does that work? Well, I’m at the point of purchase with it as a credit card. The merchant has a receivables. They sell it to somebody called a merchant acquirer, who, you know, scoops up a whole bunch of credit card receivables.

1:10:58 Then the merchant acquirer sells it to Mastercard or Visa, whoever the card sponsor was, and they get paid, and then Mastercard, Visa takes these small, over the world and then they send them to the banks that issue the credit cards, and then those credit card issuers send me a bill and I pay it. Well, you got five parties in that transaction. You got the customer, the merchant, the merchant acquirer, Mastercard, and the issuing bank, and, like, two and a half percent, three percent fees, and then that’s a really clunky, messy, expensive, slow system.

1:11:30 You can eliminate all that. You can just intermediate the banking system, and Mastercard, Visa, interesting stock implications there. With the CBDC, I can have an account at the Fed, and on my iPhone, and I can send you money. You can have an account at the Fed or Bank of England, whatever you like, and so it is better, faster, cheaper, but it’s also the ultimate surveillance tool. This will complete their surveillance state.

1:11:55 They already know enough about us with GPS tracking. You know, you got to turn your cell phone off and stick it in a Faraday sack. I have a few of those that carry with me if you want to, like, avoid being tracked in real time so they already know a lot about us, and digital facial recognition software etc., but this would be the ultimate. Because I go to a bookstore, I’m on Amazon, using essential bank digital currency, they know that I just bought a book called, you know, why I love Donald Trump, or whatever, you know, and if you’re the wrong political party, wrong political affiliation, give money to the wrong candidate, etc., oppose the regime in any way, they’re going to know it in real time through your payment history.

1:12:37 Uh, and they’ll be able to, you know, I mean, China, they’re already doing this. I say stuff like this, brand, people roll their eyes, like, oh, it’ll never happen. I was like, no, you don’t understand it. It’s already here. It’s not universal it’s getting there.

1:12:49 This is what they do in China. About the social credit score, it’s all about, you know, people can’t send their kids to colleges, can’t buy a plane ticket, can’t buy a train ticket etc., because they’ve, they have a low social credit score. It could be they were caught smoking. It could be they, they tweeted something that was like anti-g. But this will come to Europe, Japan, and the US, and don’t believe anyone who says, well, yeah, we, we could do that, but we don’t.

1:13:17 Worry, trust us, we won’t do that. Nonsense. The government never gives up power, never misses an opportunity to get more power. So that’s where central bank digital currencies are going, as far as cryptocurrencies are concerned. Uh, I studied it for, well, I’ve studied for kind of 12 years at this point, but I wrestled with.

1:13:38 I was like, okay, I read all the technical papers. I get it. I don’t get the charts I hear, but I can’t, I can’t really, really understand, like, what’s it all about, because what’s happened is that an ecosystem has been created around, I’ll say, Bitcoin, but could some other cryptocurrencies, and there are exchanges there are custodians, there are hedge funds that, you know, buy and sell these things. They’re analysts, they are charts, they’re technicians the entire ecosystem of Wall Street has been wrapped around Bitcoin, with one difference, which is there’s nothing there.

1:14:16 You know, at least if I’m analyzing Tesla, you know, maybe you like it. I hate it. Whatever, we can have a good debate about Tesla or Netflix or anybody. Well, at least there’s like a real company there doing something, that where we can argue, and then the ecosystem of custodian, settlement, clearance, brokers, all that stuff, technicians, charts, wraps around something that’s, uh, when I say real company, it doesn’t have to be tangible. Amazon’s not very tangible.

1:14:40 It’s a real company, but there’s like no there, that, where’s the kernel thing, uh, and it’s not there. So there’s no use case, uh, other than, you know, like tax evasion or money laundering or something. So how to understand it, and I didn’t really get a grasp of it until I did a really deep dive, and I’m talking years of studying, you know, like 20 books on communications theory, and in particular the digital environment, you know, Marshall McLuhan. So when they, when they put Sputnik up in I think 1958 or ’59, he said the entire planet became a human artifact, because we were, we were wrapping the planet in aluminum.

1:15:19 You know, that was it. It was right. And Uh, they say, you know, they’re saying we don’t know who discovered water, but we’re certain it was not a fish because a fish is in water. When you’re immersed in something, you don’t know it’s there. You got to take the fish out of the water, the fish goes, Hey, where’s the water?

1:15:37 But when you’re in it, you don’t know it. You’re immersing we’re immersed in an electronic environment, which is acoustic tactile, non-linear. We’ve been reading for 2,500 years since Plato, reading books, but now all of a sudden that doesn’t matter. You can’t go to a restaurant without hearing hip-hop on the speakers. We’re, we’re immersed in this digital electronic environment, and cryptocurrency is a part of this.

1:16:04 So they’re actually hallucinogenic Uh, everyone sees what they want to see. And then, when you think about it, let’s say you’re 25 years old. There’s, I’ve seen data on who, how many, what percentage of the age group, of the cohort, own Bitcoin or other cryptos, you know, by, by cohort, and the lowest over 60 is the lowest. It could be big account. This isn’t a dollar thing or a dollar-equivalent thing.

1:16:31 Uh, essentially you can’t talk about Bitcoin. I’ll talk about dollars. That tells you something, but It’s not the size that counts. The number of those in the cohort who owns anything, and the highest percentage, not surprisingly, are Generation X and millennials, but these are people who are playing video games from the age of four and going back to the ’90s, when they were growing up. Uh, video games had digital currencies that sell those game spots.

1:16:59 Just made money, like, your Army’s losing, but you, for, for you know, for 20 bucks, using your credit, using your parents’ credit card, you can buy more armies, you know. So of course when Bitcoin came along, they’re like, digital currencies seem like the most natural thing in the world, because they had been playing these video games for 10 years at that point, so they were adopters but it was no more real than the video game, but it was part of this electronic environment that I’m describing, so we’re in, we’re in this electronic environment It’s an acoustic, tactical world. So what are the characteristics of that that we should look out for?

1:17:34 One is tribalism and, and McLuhan and the brother, many other scholars are Cat Block, and, uh, and Walter Ong and others, uh, but uh, McLuhan is my favorite. Uh, great Canadian, by the way, but uh, he said tribal. He was the one who coined the phrase Global Village, and everyone said, ah, Billy, that sounds kind of cool, you know, we all sit around a campfire and share. No villagers kill each other. So, and when he said tribalism, he didn’t mean it.

1:18:03 He said, I didn’t say it was good I just said it’s coming, and so it helps to explain you know, the dysfunction of society and the political polarization. You, when you put that in a communications theory context you get tribalism, and that explains a lot of behavior, and so my take on Bitcoin: it won’t replace the dollar, but it may destroy the dollar by just, by destroying, by destroying the concept of money. We’re into money. This, we, we actually, we’ve lost the thread.

1:18:35 We don’t know what money is anymore. We have money in us, some characteristics, some not. That’s what Bitcoin’s really doing. It’s, it’s, uh, turning money into money-ness with different so-called forms of money having different characteristics, but we’ve lost the thread. We don’t know what money is.

1:18:53 Interesting that’s a fascinating read on that, and I know you’ve done a lot of research on it behind the scenes, Jim, so uh, that’s a fascinating take. Again, I’ve been going back to a lot of Marshall McLuhan, of the medium is the message and in a weird way, crypto is a new medium, somehow, and, and a lot of these things around it. Even an NFT is almost like a new medium, and so what is the message, and yeah, it gets very hallucinogenic. Is in the way, way it really breaks down our concept of what is money.

1:19:24 You would argue a lot of people don’t, don’t really have a great relationship with money to begin with, so maybe it can be morphed and changed quickly with these digital forms, and then you start looking at things in terms of inflation versus a Bitcoin world versus a non-Bitcoin world. Guy named Jeff Booth wrote a whole book about that. So yeah, it gets very interesting. So I’d be curious of how you see how this plays out in the next five, ten years as we go forward but, uh, yeah, this is great stuff, Jim.

1:19:49 Obviously, Countdown to Crisis, separate video you made, where you talk a little bit more about this crash, how people can position themselves. There’s a URL below, uh, londonreal.tv forward slash Jim. I think I asked you this last time you were in the studio here in London six years ago, and I’ll ask you again, you know, Jim, you talk about a lot of things in the world that look bad, and yet you always seem to be someone who’s quite optimistic, and so how do you position this, when you tell people this, that, guess what, this doesn’t mean you should go jump off a building?

1:20:17 There’s actually a lot of ways to solve this or position yourself. How do you stay optimistic? Well, I’m kind of naturally optimistic, so it’s a good place to start. Uh, and, uh, you know, you get people always put words in your mouth to get this, like, Doom and Gloom reputation. I’m not, I’m not a doom and gloomer but I am an analyst, and as an analyst, you’re not doing your job if you don’t uh, tell people what’s happening.

1:20:41 Like, what’s actually happening. Get the right data, get the right models, uh, which is as important and just be candid about what’s going on. So, uh, so I try to do that. If the news isn’t good, it’s not because I’m not an optimist. It’s just because I’m not gonna, you know, thank you out.

1:20:58 But, uh, to your point, Brian, uh, one of my favorite stories about how you can make money in any state of the world, certainly preserve, well, if you can do that. But how can you make money there? There was a guy, uh, I’ve written about this before, but his name was Hugo Stinnes. Who’s your ghost in this? Well, in, uh, he was an industrialist in the early 1920s in Weimar Germany, and he saw the hyperinflation coming long before it hit, so he went out and borrowed massive amounts of rice marks, which was the the currency of the time, and he bought industrial assets.

1:21:35 He bought shipping lines. He bought railroads. He bought a coal, uh, you know, mines, etc. So then the inflation comes along with hyperinflation. It wasn’t even like a trillion to one.

1:21:45 It was like they were sweeping it down the sewers at the end, and he paid the debts back. I would say pennies on a dollar, but it was, it wasn’t even that. It was like he paid on his desk back and kept the assets he was the richest man in Germany, because he borrowed money, and when, if you’re the debtor and your, the money becomes worthless. You don’t know any money. Here’s Penny, here, I’ll pay you back, but he kept the assets, which retained their value and can the richest man in Germany, and his nickname, I don’t speak German, but I’ll try this, inflation’s Clinic, which means the inflation came, so there’s a guy who, in the worst hyperinflation of any industrial economy in history, became the richest man in Germany by anticipating it, doing the right trade my other favorite story: Joseph P.

1:22:31 Kennedy, father of President John F. Kennedy saw the, uh, the crash coming in 1929, and he just shorted his way all the way through. He assured it made a fortune. He became one of the richest men in the United States in the early, you know, after the 1929 crash early 1930s, and that family fortune, Dynasty, are still going strong. So here you have, if you said, Gee, what are the two worst economic disasters of the 20th century?

1:22:58 Most people would say, well, the Weimar hyperinflation and the 1929 crash. Yeah, there’s two guys who became the richest guys in their countries because they saw coming into the right trade. So what I say to investors and savers is you got to see this stuff coming and do the right trade Lastly, just wanted to find and finish out on your new book, sold out. I know it’s coming out. I think a little bit later this year.

1:23:24 You know, you’re going deep into here. It’s a supply chain kind of 1.0, and what you call 2.0. Why do people need to understand what’s Happening here? Well, I make the point there’s the supply chain as we know it I call it supply chain 1.0. I date from 1989 follow the Berlin Wall, and, you know, the rise of globalization to 2019, just prior to the pandemic, so a 30-year period.

1:23:52 And I know the guy who built it, and, uh, he, he said to me, uh, he said, Jim, you gotta understand it took us 30 years to build this, and we blew it up in three years. It’s not coming back, not soon. It’ll take five or ten years to rebuild, but this is, this is not, this is not a flavor of the flavor of the month. This is not going away, so this problem is not going away soon. I also make the point in my book that there’s nothing to do about supply chains, and I use an example of the, uh, uh, the little Baron Rack in, in Turkey, which was a Bronze Age shipwreck, but it was discovered by diver by accident in the ’80s, and they excavate underwater archeology and excavation, and they discovered goods from, you know, amber from the Baltic Sea to gold from Sudan to swords and cedar from the Levant, Lebanon, and present-day Syria to other goods from Mycenae, and they were all on the vessel.

1:24:53 So obviously they were doing a counterclockwise trade route, and things were being consigned and dropped off and sold and picked up all along the way. So, but if you, if you do, if you do, balik C to Sudan, and then, uh, Iran to Spain, it’s like five million square miles. So, so you had a supply chain in the Bronze Age. You always have. What’s new was supply chain science.

1:25:16 It was the combination of computing power, which, you know, came along, and uh, better models and a quest for efficiency that gave rise to the modern supply chain that has now broken down. I explained why in depth. There will be a new supply chain, because, going back to the Bronze Age example, there’s always one but, but is it efficient? How does it work? What does it look like?

1:25:37 And there are what I call supply chain 2-0 will be, uh, it goes by different names, uh, you know, uh, Macron calls it, it’s not convergence, it’s, uh, Well, John Young was a friend-shoring on shoring uh, the collegium goes by different names, but the idea is we’ll build supply chains but only with our friends. There’s China will be out. Russia, I’d like to see included, but they’re going to be out, obviously. So this will be the Western democracies, you know, EU, Japan, in Australia, New Zealand, some others, and that other friends.

1:26:18 Maybe there’s some middle states who join in Brazil you know, India might want to put in that category, et cetera, and they’ll trade with each other, but they won’t rely on China. They won’t trade with China. We’re friends of China, or at least for the time being, with Russia. So, uh, so this patience is going to be rebuilt. It’ll take five years at least.

1:26:38 Uh, they’ll be around, but all of a sudden you’ll find semiconductors made in the United States, and the soybeans from Brazil are going to you know, India, and, uh, you know, mining output from Australia’s coming to Europe. China’s going to be out of the loop, and China and others, so But this is going to take years to build. It’s going to be a rough road between here and there. Wow. all right, looking forward to that book coming out.

1:27:05 And again, I highly recommend people watching the separate video, Countdown to Crisis. there’s a link below, but it goes deeper on everything you talked about now, and how people can position themselves to profit from this crash in 2022. Jim, uh, you seem like you’ve, uh, you’re in more demand than ever for your ideas, which is incredible. You seem like you’re in the best form of your life that I can see. Uh, what are the next five years like for you?

1:27:27 Is it more research? More of these interesting ideas? Are you going to be taking another time to do fun things as well with your life, or what does that look like? Well, I try to do fun things along the way. Uh, you know, sports are, uh, mountain climbing, skiing, uh, love sailing, having sales, much in recent years, but I have a lot over the years, so, uh, you know, I can’t I can’t tell my wife I got my eye on a new boat, but, you know, she’ll, if I make it a birthday present, maybe that works.

1:27:56 Uh, but, uh, uh, yes, and you know, I enjoy sports and family. Uh, you know, family comes first, so, uh, but in terms of what I’m doing, uh, uh you know, it’s funny, you think, uh, sold out, which is coming out in November or December in the UK, will be my seventh book. Like, hey, Jimmy wrote seven books, isn’t that enough? It’s like I keep getting new ideas, so I actually have a pipeline of maybe three more books. Gotta talk to my publisher and work that out, but I’ll probably keep writing.

1:28:25 I enjoy it. Uh, it’s hard work. I don’t, uh, people say, Jim, how do you write books? I said, just keep writing. Uh, but it is hard work, but But I like doing it, so probably do that.

1:28:35 My, my newsletters are, uh, growing. Strategic Intelligence is kind of the flagship. I got four or five there’s more specialized newsletters, the more expensive, but people like them because we have recommendations So kind of writing, traveling, public speaking, uh, uh, I love doing, uh, interviews like this, and opportunities like this, so I’ll probably keep going, but, uh, try, uh, do try to enjoy life along the way. I think the idea that, well, I’m gonna work really hard and then retire, and then I’ll start to enjoy life.

1:29:09 I don’t adopt that model. I don’t have a concept of retirement. I do work hard, but I don’t believe in deferring, uh, you know, every, everything you actually you need to do that to stay, to stay fresh and be good at your day job. Yeah, your books are excellent people have always enjoyed your conversations here on the show, uh, I mean, sometimes I check, and some of our old clips have, like, half a million views, and, you know, all the great conversations we have.

1:29:33 Your books, Death of Money, Currency War, soul, that is coming out soon, and then another few months it’s going to be excellent. Obviously, this video below, Countdown to Crisis, is excellent And yeah, just really appreciate you, Jim, because you’re not afraid to put it out on the line, to call a horse a horse, and to really kind of go for the throat, but to really call things the way they are and not be swayed by, you know, political correctness or what you should and should not say. I think that’s why people really value your opinions, that, and you’ve kind of been there, done that, uh, you know, not calling you the Forrest Gump of Finance, but you’ve really been there.

1:30:06 I’ve done that through a lot of these places, so that just brings a ton of credibility. Jim, what’s the best way for people to follow you and to know more about when the book comes out, etc.? Sure. I’m very active on Twitter, so my handle is at James G. Rickards, R-I-C-K-A-R-D-S, one, versus at James G Rickards.

1:30:24 Uh, my flagship newsletter, easy to find, strategic intelligence. Uh, my new book, sold out, it’s available for pre-sale right now on Amazon, uh, US and Amazon UK I love it. And again, the video below, Countdown to Crisis, thank you. To londonreal.tv forward slash Jim to watch it, it’s going to be more about this crash, how it’s going to be fast, bloody, and unavoidable, but also how you can profit and position yourself, uh, for that in 2022. Uh, Jim, be great to see you in person.

1:30:50 I know if you’re coming to UK later this year, but let’s definitely get together, and again, just really appreciate everything you do. I really enjoyed this. I love going deep, and, and really seeing the way that you look at these things. There’s many, many layers to your analysis. You’ve obviously spent decades doing this, and it really shows it’s super relevant, and I know my audience loves it, so thank you so much, Jim.

1:31:11 Really appreciate what you do. Thanks Brian. All right, appreciate. Thank you very much. Follow this man, check out all of his stuff, and we’ll see you next time on London Real.

1:31:19 Take care.