James Rickards - Global Recession Begins: The Great Reset & Rise Of A New World Order

Full transcript: James Rickards on London Real

2:37 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Jim Rickards, the American lawyer and investment banker turned economist, thought leader and author.

2:57 You have over 35 years of experience working in the capital markets on Wall Street, while also acting as an advisor to the CIA and the Pentagon. You’ve topped the New York Times bestseller list with titles including The Death of Money, Currency Wars, and your most recent book, Sold Out, which explained how the broken supply chain and surging inflation will have catastrophic consequences on the global economy. You are known as the man who predicted the biggest financial crisis in American history and right now you believe we are facing an economic collapse far worse than that of 2008, one that will lead to a major upheaval of the international monetary system and the dollar losing its status as the global reserve currency.

3:36 Jim, welcome back to London Real. Thank you, Brian. Great to be with you. Always great to have you back. Before we get started, I just want to alert everyone to an important video that you’ve just recorded that will not be available to the public.

3:49 Here you discuss the upcoming geopolitical shockwave of what you call the most significant development in international finance since 1971, but then you explain how anyone can position themselves to profit from this crisis. Our viewers can access that video at londonreal.tv/ gym, and I highly recommend that everyone go watch that immediately after our conversation. Jim, let’s get into it. I’m increasingly concerned about a recession in the U.S. and here in the UK, with our house prices falling for the first time in 11 years, and people are now predicting it to go down a shocking 10 percent in housing prices.

4:27 Jim, are we already in a global recession? That’s a great question, Brian. The answer is probably yes. We never know for sure until after the fact, because you’re in it. You’ve got to wait for the data.

4:39 Then, in the United States, I mean, they’re not the global arbiter, but in the United States we have something called the National Bureau of Economic Research. It’s based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It’s not a government agency. It’s a private group, but by 12 prominent economists, uh, you know, egghead types, and they’re the ones who declare when the recession began, when it ended, but they’re usually, it’s like a year after the fact. It’s like, you know, maybe in the middle of next year they’ll say, you know, recession started in the first quarter of 2023.

5:06 Like, thank you, we knew that, but it’s usually over before they declare it. So I’m not waiting for the official arbiter. I look at a lot of other indicators, and they’re almost uniformly bad, and they have very good track records of getting the predictions right, not unlike the Fed, which is always wrong, always late. So, whether that can be too technical, defense still getting unemployment. It’s based on the so-called Phillips curve.

5:31 It says, you know, unemployment is down, inflation’s up. Unemployment’s up, inflation’s down. That’s the Phillips curve. You know, you can draw it, and the Fed’s using that to guide policy. The Phillips curve is garbage, and it’s not a personal knock against, you know, Professor Phillips.

5:45 It’s the case that there’s no empirical support for it. I can give you examples going back to the 1930s of low unemployment, low inflation, which you had in the early ’60s. 1930s we had high unemployment, low inflation, even deflation. Late 1970s, whether we have high unemployment and high inflation, that was called stagflation. So I can give you examples.

6:08 If you think of it as a quad chart, you know, unemployment, inflation, you know, fill in the blanks. I could give you all four examples: low low, high high, low high, high high, which means there’s no correlation. You can have any. If you can have any one of them, there’s no correlation. so the Phillips curve has no predicted value on its face, because the data doesn’t back it up.

6:27 Last time I looked at Phillips curve was a flat line, at least where I went to school. Curves were not flat, but there it is. Now it’s worse than that, because unemployment, even if you thought it was a good indicator of something, particularly inflation, it’s a lagging indicator, or a lagging indicator, a recession, as the case may be. So let’s say you’re an employer, a business person. I mean, you’re an entrepreneur.

6:49 I start businesses, when you’re in a tough spot, when revenues are down and things are slowing down, margins are getting compressed, and all that, the last thing you want to do is fire people, because it took a while to find them, hire them, train them. You don’t want to let them go. You do everything else. So you turn down the lights, you call your landlord, negotiate a cheaper rent, slow pay your creditors, uh, you know, drive a hard bargain on somebody.

7:13 You do everything else to maintain your margins, and then only when all else fails do you start firing people. But so, first of all, it’s a lagging indicator. You’re already in the recession before you get around to firing people. Number one. Number two, because you held on so long, you tend to do it en masse.

7:29 It’s like, it’s not like I’m going to fire one person a month for the next year. It’s like I’m going to hang on to all of them, and then maybe sadly fire them all at once because I have no other choice. So, A, it’s a lagging indicator. B, it can turn on a dime from very low unemployment to very high unemployment within a matter of months. Uh, and if that’s what the Fed’s relying on, which they are, they say so.

7:50 It’s not a guess. They say that’s what we’re watching. Two things. Number one, you’re not going to see the recession coming. It’s a lagging indicator, and it can go from kind of good to bad almost overnight.

8:02 So the Fed, you know, is driving, you know, driving this way, looking out the back window, and they’re probably going to wreck the economy. But there are a lot of other signs to say, okay, okay, Jim, you know, unemployment’s not a good measure, and it isn’t. But how do you know, what are the good metrics? They tend to be a little technical. They tend to be things that very few people look at, but they’re there.

8:24 They’re not secret. Um, the big one, I think this gets more notice, is an inverted Treasury yield curve. Oh, well, what does that mean? So a normal yield curve, it’s like the longer the maturity, the higher the rate. That’s common sense.

8:39 So if I’m going to lend somebody money for a month, I might charge a certain interest rate, but if I’m going to lend you money for 10 years, I want a much higher interest rate, because there’s a lot more risk. You know, inflation to fall, credit risk, who knows what. So a normal yield curve is upward sloping. The longer the maturity, the higher the rate. Okay, right.

8:59 Now, yield curves are inverted, which means they’re downward sloping, which means the longer the maturity, the lower the rate. Why would you take the lower rate on a 10-year Treasury note than you would on an overnight loan? Which is, that’s where we are today. By the way, the overnight rate is over five, and the ten-year rates, you know, 3.6, give or take. Well, why would you take a lower rate for a longer term loan?

9:21 It makes no sense. Well, it makes no sense unless you think the bottom is falling out of the economy, because that, if I buy a 10-year note with a 3.7 yield of maturity, which I could do today, um, that, uh, that seems low compared to the 5% for the overnight, right? But that might, like, really good a year from now, if interest rates are one percent, if the ten-year has one percent, that 3.7 percent rate is going to look really sweet. It’s like, hey, I gotta, I gotta make it, get a very high return.

9:46 So in other words, this is the big money. This is the institutional money, this is people who know more than central bankers in many cases betting that interest rates are going to come down a lot, because if they weren’t, that inverted yield curve would make no sense. And so they’re betting that the economy is going into a severe recession, interest rates are going to drop, and 3.7 yields are going to look really good. Now, just to get a little more arcane, there’s something called the SOFR futures curve.

10:17 You know, SOFR is the new LIBOR. You know, the problems in the LIBOR, but these are long-term bets on overnight rates. With, you know, Treasury is a snapshot of what I think the 10-year rate is going to be, but SOFR is the opposite. They they’re trading strips, you know, quarterly settlements that go out three or four years, five years, but the longer ones aren’t that liquid. But basically I can make a bet as to what I think the overnight rate is going to be one year from today.

10:48 That yield curve is also steeply inverted. And again, this is the real, who trades so for futures? Well, the institutions and central banks and the big money, in other words. And it’s in the data. It’s not a guess.

11:01 You can look at it. It’s publicly available, and it says rates are going to drop, uh, steeply in the months and year ahead. So again, these are when you have an inverted SOFR futures curve, an inverted Treasury yield curve. Especially the big money betting the rates are going to drop like a stone. Well, why would that be?

11:20 Well, there are only two reasons: one, a severe recession, and a steep drop in inflation. And those two things do go together. One more example. Again, I don’t want to get two in the weeds, but there’s something. The Fed has an overnight reverse repo facility.

11:36 What does that mean? The Fed’s, that say, send me, uh, some, um, give me your cash and I’ll give you a treasury bill as collateral, and then we’ll unwind it at some point in the future. It’s called a reverse repo, so I can call it the Fed, uh, have them send me Treasury bills as collateral, give them cash, and they’ll pay me interest on that. It’s a phone call. I don’t have to do anything fancy.

11:57 Okay. But the Treasury also sells Treasury bills at auction, and I can bid on them, and people do, and the yield to maturity on those is lower than the Fed will give you for a phone call. So why would you bid an option, you know, take the market risk and get a yield that’s lower than the one you can get for a phone call? Well, the answer is that the Treasury bill that they sent me, when I do the, the Treasury facility, I cannot rehypothecate meaning I have to hold it, give it back to the Fed when they want it, but I can’t give it to you or anybody else.

12:32 Whereas if I bid at auction, I can take that bill, I can pledge it to UBS. UBS can pledge to Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Bank can pledge into Barclays and they do so. But the reason I’ve been more aggressively for that, uh, and take a lower yield, I’m fighting for a lower yield, so the higher yield I can get for free is because I need the collateral. That’s a sign that there’s a collateral shortage, that banks are reducing their balance sheets, their unwinding derivatives, etc.

13:00 So sorry to be a little technical, Brian, but the point is when you look at two inverted yield curves and a, uh, an auction rate that’s lower than what you can get for a phone call, they all say the same thing. Rates are going down, the economy is going to crash, and there’s a collateral scarcity, and banks are tightening uh, tightening up their balance sheets, so they’re all, they’re all bad signs. Yeah. When I got to Bankers Trust in 1993 I got thrown right on the swap book, and I soon learned about, you know, the Mercantile Exchange with the LIBOR futures, and we would trade them all the way out to what we call the reds and the blacks.

13:35 So that was nine years, ten years out of these forward three-month rates. So it’s actually right there to see. You don’t need to do bond math, you know, subtract the 10-year rate from the seven-year rate to see those forward yields. It’s actually right there in black and white, where you can see the forward three-month rates, and it kind of spells out what, what the market is telling you. Those forward rates are going to be, and it’s, it’s right there, and like you said, that’s the institutional money betting, and that money is usually righter than the Fed, right?

14:05 And the government, by the way, you mentioned, uh, swaps and derivatives. That reminds me of another indicator, just quickly. Uh, swap rates are um, we have negative swap rates. What does that mean? Well, what is the swap?

14:17 So I buy a 10-year Treasury note and I finance it in the overnight market. So what’s happening to me? I’m getting the yield on the 10-year Treasury note, and I’m paying an overnight rate, so receiving fixed, paying floating. Well, sometimes the 80s, you know, uh, but certainly, you know, in your experience in the 90s, in my experience, at some point somebody said, hey, why don’t we get rid of the bonds, like just pay fixed and receive floating? Who needs the bond?

14:42 The bond’s a piece of collateral, but we can have a contract. So that was, that’s a swap, a simple form of swap. So I do a swap with Deutsche Bank, and Deutsche Bank says, okay, Jim, I’ll pay you the 10-year rate, you pay me the overnight rate. It’s exactly the same as if you had the note and we’re financing it in the repo market. It’s just receive fixed, pay floating, and that’s the swap.

15:03 Pardon me, but if you think of the credit risk, oh, at least with the 10-year Treasury note, I got the United States government behind me. If I’m doing a swap with, you know, UBS, I got bank risk. I got some credit risk in the bank. You know, credit swaps failed, so it’s, it’s logical, it makes sense that the rate I get from UBS should be slightly higher than the Treasury rate. The swap rate from a bank should be slightly higher than the comparable maturity of a government security, because the government security is slightly safer than a big bank.

15:33 Well, right now that’s not true. UBS or, you know, I’m picking on UBS, Barclays, anybody else, in a swap, the rate I get is lower than I get from a 10-year Treasury note. So why, why would I do that? Why would I think the poor credit and take a lower rate instead of a higher rate? Well, the answer is the swap is off balance sheet, and the Treasury note, if I own it, I got to put it on my balance sheet.

15:57 So when you see negative swap rates, meaning the riskier credit is paying you less than the government credit, what it means is that the balance sheets are constrained. I got to, I got to do the off-balance-sheet trade because we can’t use up the balance sheets. That’s consistent with what we just talked about with the inverted yield curve, which is there’s some major credit contractions, collateral shortage, a dollar shortage and a credit contraction. That’s not a recipe for recession.

16:20 I don’t know what it is. Wow, this is powerful stuff, and what I love, Jim, is when you and I start talking like this, a lot of the audience, they understand more than I, than I always think they will. They kind of get it. So many people now are way up the curve on this stuff, and again, these things are right there if you know what to look for. You’ve also just recorded uh, this video that will not be available to the public.

16:43 You’re going to talk about this upcoming geopolitical shockwave of what you call the most significant development in international finance since 1971, but then you also explain how anyone can position themselves to profit on this crisis. People can access that at londonreal.tv/ gym. Again, highly recommend people check that out when we’re done. What’s next, Jim? You’ve pointed the finger, I think, at the Biden administration for a lot of this recession.

17:06 You have said that the president has dropped down our, uh, drain gained our oil reserves more than any president in history. Obviously, this is ongoing war in Ukraine. How much of this is the president’s fault? How much of it is, its supply chain, and where are we currently at now? What are we, about 17 months before an election?

17:26 But it’s a great list, Brian, because, because you can say, well, we could talk about the war in Ukraine. Yeah, we could talk about, uh, monetary policy. We just kind of did, you know, go through some of the recession indicators. Um, let me talk about the election, but they’re all connected. I mean, they, that’s really where the, the complexity theory and the density of the network comes in, because these things are all connected.

17:46 So just to spend a minute on Ukraine, by the way, I just, uh, last week, um, conducted my, I do this annually, assessment, eight years in a row, conducted a seminar on financial warfare at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and um, it is in the Army War College, but there are people there from all branches. Um, it’s, it’s a very elite group, hand-picked, about 12 students, uh, mid-career officers, so they’re kind of late 30s, early 40s, uh, lieutenant colonels, and from all branches, like Marines, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, uh, and a few civilians, State Department, and um, CIA, NSA, intelligence community, but as a fun group, 12, 13. I now look at the resumes, amazingly accomplished.

18:31 They all have multiple master’s degrees, the occasional PhD, speak four languages, been deployed from Iraq to, you know, uh, Colombia or wherever. And but they’ve been hand-picked as the future big brains. These are people five years from now, there’ll be three- star generals on the National Security Council, etc. So it’s a fun class, and my topic is financial warfare, which is kind of like finance and warfare, which is what we’re mashing up right now, but um, uh, and I, I spent a lot of time talking about this whole BRICS thing, and we can, we can talk about that, uh, if you like.

19:06 Yeah, but I tell you, interviews like this, Brian, I always explain. I said I didn’t say anything in the US Army War College that I’m not saying in this interview. It’s not like I have a secret package for them, and we do something else. So I just say the same thing. You can take it or leave it, you can agree or disagree.

19:20 Uh, but that’s a great group, very interactive. But I had, I was talking about the Ukraine war, and I said one of the most difficult things about this is getting reliable information, as in a war, everybody lies. You know, so the U.S. lies. If you ask me what has surprised me about the war, the conduct of the world, the development hasn’t really been a surprise. Russia was always going to win.

19:42 Just question how long, and, uh, you know, it’s tragic. But I’m surprised at how many war mongers there are in the UK. I’m not, yeah. Francis and the Machine, Germany’s between Iraq and hard plays, Hungary is actually against the war. Uh, Italy, um, you know, again, a little mushy, but, uh, and the UK, sorry, the U.S. has the war mongers.

20:07 I know that, but starting with Boris Johnson, going to Rishi Sunak, I mean, they’re more, uh, bloodthirsty than the Americans, and they’re the ones providing the Challenger tanks, etc. I don’t quite get it. I think all these, um, uh, Chamberlain, Churchill, Hitler metaphors fall down. I mean, I know history. I know what Chamberlain did, and I know, you know, Winston Churchill was one of the great heroes of the 20th century, but I don’t see that parallel.

20:33 I don’t see, um, are they doing it to try to get a better trade deal with the U.S.? Is it that simple, or no? Well, it it disappoints me to see the UK act as kind of lackeys of the US. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s sad to see. I mean, you know, it’s not the heyday of the British Empire, but it’s one of the largest economies in the world, major financial center, uh, nuclear power.

20:55 I mean, it’s not like it’s a, a tertiary power, but, uh, I don’t, I see what’s going on, but I have to say I don’t understand it. I don’t see why the UK can’t go their own way a little bit, but not to, but they are, but sure, they’re not. And, uh, so, but not to get, uh, too immersed in the positive, you can pretty much lay the entire Ukrainian tragedy at Biden’s feet, because Ukraine would not, um, Russia would not have invaded Ukraine in February of 2022 if they hadn’t been provoked for 14 years.

21:27 I mean, going back to 2008, so what happened in 2008? George W. Bush stands up at the NATO summit and says Georgia and Ukraine should join NATO. They just said that. Three, three months later, Putin invaded Georgia.

21:42 Yeah, during the Olympics, right? During the Olympics, I think. Right, yeah, that’s right, 2008 Olympics. So, so Bush says, uh, Georgia and Ukraine should join NATO. Putin almost immediately invades Georgia, takes the place over.

21:55 It’s like, were you not paying attention? Did you not get the message? And we had the global financial crisis and a lot else. So fast forward to, um, 2014. What happens?

22:05 They have an election in Ukraine, uh, a pro-Russia, pro-Putin president wins. You can debate, you know, election, uh, how high quality was the election? You say, I don’t like the guy, but, uh, but he won. There actually was an election, um, and within months, the MI6 and CIA, working with neo-Nazi elements in Ukraine, and they’ve been there since the Second World War, um, overthrow the guy. They basically, that, you know, they had the Maidan Square color revolution, so-called, which is all orchestrated by the intelligence agencies.

22:39 They got snipers. They’re killing people. The, the Ukrainian, uh, the anti-Russian Ukrainians were doing the killing, um, and then the guy flees for his life, goes to Russia, and we, the U.S., installs a puppet. It wasn’t, so was it Soros funding VICE to go there and cover it in the central square, and correct. Yeah, and Victoria Nuland’s behind the whole thing.

22:59 She’s, she’s like got blood, you know, coming out of her mouth. I don’t know. Um, but, um, so, so, so accordingly, what I said. We had an election, the pro-Russian guy wins, and you stage a de facto coup and kick him out and put in a puppet. So what does Putin do next?

23:16 If he invades Crimea, or Nexus, Crimea takes it over. So it’s like, okay, George, you should join NATO. He invades Georgia. Ukraine should join NATO. We just had a coup.

23:26 He takes over Ukraine. Are you not paying attention? Are you missing the West, U.S., UK? Am I saying, are you not paying attention to what’s going on here? Uh, and then, and then they sponsored, anyway, without getting the, the sponsored attacks on the Russian-speaking part of Ukraine, etc.

23:40 So by 2022, Putin’s at the end of his row, and now, yes, he did invade. Of course he did. And no, there’s no disputing that. But, um, but it was, fourth, oh no, the, um, the Minsk Accords, uh, which were balanced, I would say. They gave Donbas some autonomy in exchange for neutrality, and Ukraine would not join NATO, etc.

24:05 But Angela Merkel was later quoted as saying that was always a joke. We never intended to honor them. Um, and, and Putin’s feeling like a sucker at this point, which he kind of was. So in other words, how many times can you poke the tiger in the eye before the tiger strikes? And that’s the question.

24:21 So yeah, Russia invaded. I get it, but it was 14 years of provocation. Um, and now they’re playing for keeps, but the US wanted this war, because they were, and they are, delusional. They’re like, yeah, bring it on, because uh, you know, Russia will be depleted. They’ll get killed.

24:40 They’ll use up their armaments. They’ll deplete their arsenals, their inventories. They’ll spend a lot of money. We’ll throw sanctions on them like crazy. They’ll go broke, the Russians.

24:50 There’ll be unrest in Russia. We’ll get rid of Moscow, or sorry, we’ll get rid of Putin, and we’ll go all the way to Moscow and put Russia back where they were in the ’90s, with Boris Yeltsin, uh, and, you know, a bottle of vodka before breakfast. Um, none of that has played out. Everything I just said, that was the goal, and they say so. Again, I’m not breaking into secrets in Washington.

25:09 They say these things, but, uh, every one of them has turned out to be the opposite. Here’s what’s actually happening. Number one, uh, World Bank, not exactly, exactly a Russian puppet, is pretty much controlled by the US, projects Russian growth this year at 0.7 of one percent, but it’s been revised upward. Now go back to early 2022, what were they saying? Russian economy is going to collapse, you know, it’s the end of the world.

25:33 But we’re gonna, Biden is like, we’re going to bury the ruble. No, the ruble did that, from 70 to 140, for about a minute, and then it got back to 70, and then it got too strong. It was 50 to 1, whereas at the beginning of the war, 70 to 1. Elvira Nabiullina was the Central Bank of Russia, but my money, the only central banker who actually understands her job, um, actually had to, um, cut interest rates, not raise them, but cut them, because she was watching the ruble was getting too strong, and today it’s around 70, which is where the war began.

26:04 So the ruble is unchanged in a year and a half. Um, so the ruble is doing fine. The Russian economy is growing. They will probably outperform the US economy this year. We’ll see how it plays out, but I expect a recession in the US.

26:18 Now, recession in Russia? Um, their foreign exchange reserves are up because they’re selling more oil than ever at higher prices. Um, and inflation’s totally under control, so the Russian economy is, if not thriving, it’s doing pretty well, and it’s doing German as a recession. Japan’s in recession. The EU just went into a technical recession.

26:40 The U.S. is headed that way, may already be in it. The Russian economy is growing without inflation. So, so much for bearing Russia’s economy. But beyond that, Putin put the whole economy on a war footing. I mean, I studied, uh, World War II.

26:53 Victor Davis Hanson has a great book, The Second World Wars, plural, but, uh, he has like two pages on Stalingrad and a page and a half on D-Day. It’s the whole book. There were thousands of books written on all those subjects. His book is about industrial production behind the war effort and how Henry Ford turned assembly lines from Fords to, uh, to B-29s, uh, almost overnight, and how you know, the, the very mocked, um, they were the most, most lethal force in World War II.

27:24 They would kill two or three Russians to one German on the Eastern Front. Except Solomon, he killed three million, and Solomon was sent three million more, and five million more, and finally, at a certain point, the, John, the German general, said, wait a second, we were in over our heads here. We can’t, you know, that we can keep killing them, but they keep coming. Um, but between Lend-Lease and being on a war footing, they just out- produced Germany, uh, you know, 15,000 bombers a month versus three or four that our side could produce.

27:54 Well, the same thing’s going on today. Putin put his economy on a war footing. We did not, and so, uh, we’re the ones seeing the arsenals depleted. You know, the British are sending, um, of the show, The Shadow, I forget the exact name. Storm Shadow missile.

28:11 The U.S. sending Patriot missile batteries. Guess what? The Patriots don’t work against the Russian Kinzhal hypersonic missile. They can shoot down cruise missiles. That’s what they were designed for, but the Russians aren’t shooting cruise missiles, so shooting hypersonic missiles, and they’re blowing out the pages.

28:26 So the other day Lewinski said we need more Patriots. Yeah, that’s because we sent you three, you know, large batteries, a billion dollars a piece, and one of them’s destroyed, and the other two were on the way to being destroyed. Um, I saw a burning uh, Leopard tank the other day. Um, this is Germany’s, the Leopard 2, Germany’s state-of-the-art tank. The new, you know, Panzer division, whatever.

28:48 They’re getting blown up by the Russians. Uh, the um, oh, the British missile and the, um, and the U.S. drone, the HIMARS, the, uh, the mobile long-range artillery. It’s really more like a missile battery, but it looks like a big artillery gun. Um, the Russians have figured out how to disable the GPS. It’s sort of like, I think it was a cruise missile fired from a cannon, very potent, except if you disable the GPS, the GPS, the, the shell doesn’t know where it’s going, and this is the landing harmlessly.

29:19 They’re getting blown up. So, and the F-16 won’t be any different. War may be over before that. So the point is, so then, so then Zelensky’s begging for ammunition. The Ukrainian offensive just started about a week ago.

29:33 It’s failing badly. Casualties are high. Uh, this armor I talked about is being blown up. Uh, most of the Ukrainian armor are old Russian tanks. I think the T-62, they’re getting, they’re getting blown out.

29:46 They’re in open fields, and, you know, they don’t have any air cover, and the Russians are destroying them. Um, and so all these so-called miracle weapons. Don’t worry. So what does Zelensky, begging for now, ammunition aside? If Waco is a high-tech cannon, if you don’t have any shells, and the, the US has provided.

30:06 The US is begging South Korea, hey, could you send them some ammo? And South Korea’s like, well, we’ll ship it to Poland, and maybe they can do it. We want to keep our hands clean, but some of This is coming from South Korea. Uh, the polls are out. The Brits, the Brits are out.

30:19 The Birkins are out, saying, oh, wait a second, whose economy is suffering? Whose arsenals are being depleted? Who’s spending all the money? Who’s bankrupting their… It’s the United States and our allies, uh, not the Russians.

30:34 So everyone said, well, it’s called the factory, and order some more ammo. No, we shut down those assembly lines a long time ago, and we’re depleting our arsenals. You know how long it takes to retool a factory to start producing stuff once you’ve shut it down? Answer is about two years. So this war will be over, so sorry, to be kind of go on, but the point is every single goal or metric that the U.S. set has, um, not come true for the Russians and has come true for the U.S.

31:04 We, we’re the ones being depleted. We’re the ones spending the money. We’re the ones failing. Um, you know, the Ukrainians are, sadly, are suffering the casualties, like over 200, 000 at this point. Uh, Russia’s got a secure hold on the so-called land bridge from, you know, uh, Ross and Don to Crimea.

31:22 They’ve got their eye on Odessa. Um, they’ve had, you know, a year to build major fortifications. The Ukrainian advance, which they’re, they’re losing. I mean they’re basically attacking and getting beaten back by the Russians. Those are the outer perimeter.

31:38 That’s the Russian perimeter, that’s relatively likely, uh, stock compared to the much stronger fortifications the Ukrainians haven’t even gotten through. And this is like Pickett’s charge, you know, Gettysburg, where, you know, Lee had had a success at Chancellorsville, not too many months before Gettysburg. We just charged and broke through the Union lines and disrupted it and won the battle etc., and they were going to do a replay, we would, Pickett’s charge, except the Union line held.

32:10 Um, the Confederates were beaten back, and they retreated, and that was the beginning of the end of the Confederate war effort, uh, and then, you know, the rest is history, as they say. So that’s kind of what’s happening to Ukraine right now. Um, but the US won’t quit, uh, and so now they want the F-16s, which won’t be any different. They’ll just get shot down. Uh, and so then he said, where does it end?

32:34 And CC, uh, this guy, Chimarella, he’s the Eric Chimarella. He’s, uh, he showed an article. He was the rat in the Trump impeachment. Remember the phone call with Zelensky, as if, you know, how many times, you know, uh, Biden’s been to Kyiv talking to Zelensky? But Trump makes one phone call and he gets impeached.

32:51 But, um, but the guy who got the transcript of the call from Vindman and delivered it, Adam Schiff, and rounded out Trump, and started the whole impeachment thing. It was in the National Intelligence Council. I used to work there, um, and, uh, it’s like a big brain wing of the CIA. He was the rat. Well, he just wrote an article, as how, the Carnegie Endowment, where else, right?

33:16 Um, and they’re going to the Korean model. They’re saying, okay, we’re clearly losing, but let’s not lose. Let’s have like an armistice about the Korean War. It’s not over. What they did in 1953, they had an armistice.

33:29 They stopped shooting, and had a line of control, DMZ, but there’s never been a peace treaty, and technically North and South Korea are still at war. But what they want is an armistice in Ukraine. You know, stop the fighting, here’s the line, and we’ll figure it out, which would basically be an opportunity to rest and re-arm Ukraine before the war monger starts the war again. Why would Russia agree to that? I mean, Russia is winning.

33:55 Why would you agree to an armistice? I mean, that’s how World War I ended, before the Versailles treaty. So I just see people who are delusional who don’t understand the economic side of war, which is a big deal. I think you can push a button and get weapons, and you can’t, it takes years to retool those assembly lines. Um, I think money is unlimited, and it’s not, uh…

34:19 And have this, just do a rational. I’m talking about Fiona Hill, George Kent, Victoria Nuland, Tony Blinken, Jake Sullivan. These people are political hacks, or not that bright, and Biden’s, you know, feeble-minded, and that’s who’s running U.S. policy. Wow, I, I love how you break that down. I got a couple more questions about Ukraine.

34:40 You alluded to the fact, uh, that you’re going to talk a little bit about what you’re calling the most significant development in international finance since 1971. It’s an upcoming geopolitical shockwave. I do want to get to that, but also you have made a video about that that people can go watch right now, including how they can position themselves to profit. It’s at londonreal.tv/ gym. I highly recommend everyone watch this right when we’re finished.

35:02 Recently I’ve watched interviews with both RFK and Trump, who said they will end the war immediately, like one phone call, it’s over in a week, and fascinatingly, both saying kind of a similar thing, and quite frankly, Jim, I believe them both. I believe they could actually do it, and they will do it. You’ve watched both of those two men kind of campaigning. It’s a very, very fascinating race with both of them in there. I kind of, I’m kind of looking for a Trump-Kennedy ticket maybe at the end of it, but that’s another story.

35:33 Um, talk to me about what they’re saying. Could it be done, and what do you make of those candidates right now? Well, first of all, I find both of them intriguing. Trump’s, you know, better now, he was president, but, uh, RFK’s not exactly. The Kennedy name is not exactly unknown.

35:48 I’ll go back to, uh, the first election I could vote in was 1972. It was at the time, the voting age was 21 years old, but in 1968, as a high schooler, with no money, a friend of mine and I hitchhiked from Cape May, New Jersey, to Camden, New Jersey, a distance of about 80 miles to hear, um, his father, Robert F. Kennedy, speak, and so, like I said, I’m a, I’m a 16, 17-year-old hitchhiking. The hero, that’s how inspired I was. But why, but what he was doing at the time?

36:21 Wow. Um, how was, how was it? Yeah, sure. Sorry, how was the speech? Do you remember?

36:25 Oh, it was great. I mean, is it inspiring? And they kind of, you know, he, he came out of nowhere in the primary, because Lyndon Johnson was running for president, and Eugene McCarthy was holding his own in New Hampshire, and it was only at that point that RFK jumped in. But that’s okay, you know, you gotta pick your spots. Um, so, uh, yeah, I’ve been on that bandwagon for a long time, but, um, but RFK Jr. first, sorry, should answer your questions.

36:54 Yes, you could end it with a phone. This is a war that never should have started. Okay, you could have stopped it with a phone call. Say, hey, okay, put here’s the deal: Ukraine’s neutral, they’re not joining NATO, autonomy for the Donbas, stopped killing the Russian-speaking part of the population, and you know, maybe a few other bells and whistles, some security guarantees from uh, EU and NATO, and then that’s it. Sign that deal and just go forward, uh, and let the politics take its course.

37:21 So it should never have started. Okay, so then it starts. You could have ended it with a phone call, just by saying, okay, you’re serious, um, I should have known that from the start. We’ll do the same deal with one big difference, which is Russia will not give up the territory they’ve taken. They’ve spent too much money and blood to get there.

37:42 So you, okay, you want neutrality, you want no NATO membership? Yeah, but we’re keeping what we took, because I always explain, though, so many uh sort of anti-Semites or anti-Israeli people, you know, you find them in the United States, I’m sure elsewhere. These Palestinians, I keep explaining to them, I said, the Arabs invaded Israel four times, and Russia, sorry, Israel won all four wars. You know, when you win wars, you get to keep stuff. I mean, that’s what we’re about.

38:09 Okay, oh, get out of the West Bank. Well, no, they’ve won four wars. They won all, they’re 4-0. You know, the 2006 has a lot of things you can call that a tie if you want, but but you know, again, 1948, 1967, 1973, and um, the, the intifada, they won, and so they get to keep stuff. Well, Russia won, and they’re gonna keep stuff.

38:30 That’s the difference between pre-war and where we are now. Um, and yes, you could, you could do that deal with a phone call. It just, tell Zelensky, you know, you’re signing this deal, and we’ll, we’ll let you keep my slap, but that’s that’s it. If you don’t, you’re gone. Um, so, so they’re right about that.

38:47 Interesting, that, you know, Kennedy’s a liberal Democrat and Trump’s a mega Republican, and they think the same thing. That’s because they have a certain measure of common sense, but um, what, uh, you know, just, yeah, not to get two in the weeds, but I’m, I’m coming to you, uh, from New Hampshire, uh, in the United States. We have the first primary, and there’s a footnote there. So historically, New Hampshire is the first primary in the country. It’s a bellwether.

39:15 It’s where Gene McCarthy, by the way, in 1968, he did not win the New Hampshire primary, but he got way more votes than anyone thought, and that led immediately to Lyndon Johnson withdrawing from the race, and then RFK jumped in. But that was the secret. McCarthy didn’t win the New Hampshire primary, but it got like 38 to 40 percent of the vote against a sitting president, that was a shot. Who running for a second term? That was a shot.

39:40 So, um, uh, so that’s kind of the reputation of New Hampshire. Now, what happened in 2020? Biden finished fifth in the New Hampshire primary. Fifth. He slumped out of town.

39:55 He was written off by the media. Okay, he’s done. Let’s look at, uh, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar. They were the people who finished ahead of Biden in the New Hampshire primary. What happened next?

40:05 Well, the next primary was South Carolina, uh, which is about 50-50 Republican-Democrat, but if you take the 50% Democrat, that’s about 80% African American, and their boss, their leaders, James Clyburn, who was the number two, uh, number three ranking Democrat in the House, and in the Nancy Pelosi days, um, and he was going to steer that whole state to Biden, because the Democrats were scared to death that Bernie Sanders was going to be the nominee, and he was ahead at that point. So again, we got to flip this to Biden, and we don’t want to live with Lauren. She’s nuts.

40:39 So um, but they had to get everyone else out of the way. So the phone calls were made. What happened the day a day or two before the South Carolina primary? Pete would have just dropped out. Uh, I think Elizabeth Warren hung on for a few more days, but then she dropped out.

40:56 Clyburn delivers the South Carolina Democrats to Biden. Biden wins the South Carolina primary after finishing fifth in New Hampshire, uh, and the rest is history. He goes, and Sanders dropped out a few weeks later, and Biden becomes the nominee. So about six or seven months ago, the Democratic National Committee says, well, we’re going to change the primary calendar. We’re going to say South Carolina goes first.

41:20 Oh, oh, no kidding? Exactly. But that’s a slam dunk for Biden. They don’t want Biden to run in New Hampshire, because he’s like a sitting president running for reelection, and he might not win, or at least he might be Lyndon Johnson, win, but not by enough. What they didn’t seem to understand is that New Hampshire’s status as the first primary state is a state statute.

41:43 It has nothing to do with the Democratic National Committee or anything else. And again, here in New Hampshire, we have a Republican governor, and both houses of the state legislature are Republican-controlled. So they’re kind of looking at the DNC, like, we don’t care what you say. We’re going to have our primary first. We have it.

41:59 Out. If your guy doesn’t want to run, that’s up to him. But RFK Junior’s, I’m getting to the point here. RFK Jr. said, I’m definitely running in the New Hampshire primary. My path to the nomination starts in New Hampshire.

42:15 Um, so now you’ve got this awful conundrum for the Biden people. It’s like, oh, do we blow off New Hampshire? Well, how’s it play out in the general election? It comes down to a couple votes. New Hampshire’s got three electoral votes.

42:28 It’s not a lot, but if we’re the difference, you’ve alienated everyone in New Hampshire. uh, how does that look? If you’re running for president, you won’t run in a primary, so RFK Jr. could win the New Hampshire primary. He, and by the way, he’s polling about 35, like uh, the Gene McCarthy level in 1968. That’s not three percent, which all these other Republicans are.

42:52 It was Trump’s dominating, yeah. RFK’s polling around 35, and if Biden doesn’t run, the RFK Jr. New Hampshire primary, I defy the U.S. corrupt media to ignore that. I mean, they might, they might try, but then they’re just lackeys of the DNC. So it’s going to be a crazy year. Uh, and that’s, I would start there.

43:12 So yeah, on that note. So I had Robert Kennedy on my show in April of 2020, when we couldn’t talk about anything on YouTube. We had to run him on our Digital Freedom Platform, and I walked into that with my MIT education, thinking that every, anything science-based was the right thing to do, AKA vaccines. And Robert, I spent 90 minutes with Robert, and after he explained to me the lack of liability of these major pharmaceutical companies and walked me through the history, and he’s a, uh, extremely intelligent guy.

43:44 He understands history, political history. He’s got figures and facts, you know, that come right to the surface whenever he wants them. Um, and at the end of that, he had convinced me and changed my mind almost completely, and I had another interview with him later, but I was always deeply impressed with Robert. Unfortunately, the media completely, you know, called me anti-vaxxer and shut down any type of footprint, and so he really wasn’t even known in America, even though I think he had the best-selling book in America for like a year or so in ’21 or ’22.

44:16 Now he’s coming out. I’ve seen some of his speeches. I feel like him running for president is the best PR move ever done, because now people are forced to listen to him. He was on a two-hour Twitter space with Musk the other night, and, um, I, I could just feel the room just shutting up and listening to this guy, thinking, wow, this is something special. He doesn’t sound like any other politician I’ve ever heard, especially a Democrat, because he’s speaking the truth, and he understands what’s going on.

44:44 What a concept. Right, right. And you put your finger on, uh, you can go down the list of policy positions. Okay, you know, like, some don’t like some, or whatever. That’s politics, you know, that’s fine.

44:53 But he’s the appeal, and the reason for the success, support, is he’s speaking the truth. Yeah, the the, you know, that there’s politicians and media, they’re just full of lies. Um, spin. Spin would be putting it kindly. I would say lies.

45:09 So just the fact that someone’s actually, they, they know what you’re talking about, they’re speaking the truth. That is so refreshing that it draws people to him, even if they don’t agree with all his positions. By the way, the media is not going to have to do a hatchet job on him to keep the Biden, uh, you know, puppet show going. Um, and they’ll misrepresent everything he said. He did a big interview the other day, and it might have been the spaces thing with Elon Musk you were talking about, but I think it might have been some other, you know, high-profile publication, but he was asked about the Second Amendment, and he said, let’s say the Second One.

45:45 He goes, no, he says, I fully support the Second Amendment. It’s been in the Constitution since 1787. And he, and he made a person, he said, I’ve grown up in rural areas, you know, most of my life, you know, he lives up in Rhinebeck, on the upper Hudson. That’s a rural area. That’s not a big city, and they grew up in Virginia, um, people have guns.

46:03 He said it’s part of the culture. It had passed down through generations. I understand the meaning of it, etc. And I, as a lawyer and honest lawyer, he can read the Second Amendment. There are parts of the Constitution you could debate, but the Second Amendment isn’t one of them.

46:18 It’s like just plain English. Um, so then I said, what about early school students who said, yeah, that’s really bad, but why aren’t we asking the the tougher questions? These are pretty much all you know, uh, 17- to 19-year-old males, very few women, shoes, couple, but not many. um, uh, not people in their 30s and 40s. Again, exceptions, but it’s predominantly kind of 18- to 21-year-old males.

46:48 But he said, why are we looking at broken homes? Why are we looking at the drugs? Why is it that adolescents and teenagers in America are being swamped with pharmaceuticals, antidepressants, ADHD suppressors, um, Valium, uh, uh, you know, the various drugs, psychotropic drugs, that, uh, would not totally understood side effects. Um, we’ve taken two or more of them. Uh, what are the interactions that have been studied?

47:16 And he’s very practical. We should read the labels. They say may cause suicidal and violent behavior. says that on the label. So we’re feeding our kids, you know, these drugs by the billions.

47:30 They’re sitting there playing video games for 10 years, mostly violent video games, and they were surprised, and they pick up a gun to shoot people. They probably think they’re in a video game. So um, he said, that’s what we should be addressing. Why are we looking at the pharmaceutical companies? Why are we looking at the broken homes?

47:47 Why aren’t we looking at, um, video game manufacturers? So those are things not protected by the Second Amendment that are much more likely to be the cause, uh, or certainly the correlations are very high. It needs more research, but that is such a sober, smart, you know, I’ve asked myself the same question, but that’s such a smart approach to a serious problem. He doesn’t wave the problem away. He said, it’s not the guns.

48:10 It’s the drugs and the behavior and the video games and the broken homes. Yeah, and I think he’s right, but so that’s the only thing that appeals to people. Yeah, and I think then he links to that even back to the Department of Defense, and then goes after the military-industrial complex. I mean, again, he has seen into that dark, dark world of all those institutions. I mean, obviously, his uncle, you know, potentially was taken out by one of those institutions.

48:34 And so, and then he’s not afraid to call these companies out, whereas every other candidate, pretty much, which is, in some way, shape or form, um, it’s an interesting race. Um, do you think he could be bidened? Possibly. Yes, you know, it’s a long shot. I mean, just to be candid, and, uh, I, I do, uh, I do predictive analytics for a living, Brian, and I predict markets all the time, and that’s hard enough.

49:00 The one thing harder than predicting markets is predicting politics. Uh, we all know the cliché, you know, a week is a lifetime, and it’s true. That’s true when it comes to politics. So you’ve got to be careful about getting two program skis, but the short answer is yes, and I would put a lot of weight on this New Hampshire situation and Iowa that I just described, where the DNC is trying to rig the primary schedule to favor Biden, but New Hampshire is not having it, and RFK gets it.

49:27 Um, yeah, you say if you, you can’t win the New Hampshire primary and not be taken seriously in the next election, and uh, why was South Carolina so important to Biden in 2020, which it was? Uh, well, African Americans. There’s a lot of affection for the Kennedy family. I mean, you know, John Kennedy, before he died, was working on the Civil Rights Act. Okay, Johnson passed it, and credit to Johnson for that, but Kennedy was going down that road.

49:57 Kennedy was talking to Martin Luther King on a regular basis. RFK and Bobby, RFK Junior’s father, was, um, you know, taking the lead on civil rights. We weren’t where we needed to be. We hadn’t come far enough as a country, but Kennedy started moving in that direction. So uh, then of course, Teddy Kennedy, you know, was a senator, but had, you know, six terms as the U.S. senator.

50:21 Um, so there’s a lot of affection, but the Kennedy name in politics. So I wouldn’t underestimate how well RFK Jr. might do in South Carolina, even trying to rig it in favor. But yeah, it’s going to be very interesting to watch, and all the forces that are going to go against him, that are already out. You know, they’re already out there trying to battle them with their terms and everything, but it’s going to be fascinating to watch, and just, just quickly, there’s a, the probability of a spoiler now is that even the Democrats don’t like Biden.

50:53 I mean, it’s just in the polling. It’s not opinion, it’s like 70%. Not the voting public. The Democrats think he’s too old, don’t want him to settle, but boy, do they hate Trump. They just, I always, I would blame everything on white women, you know, married, and, uh, you know, the middle to upper-middle-class, college-educated white women of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, Montgomery County, Maryland, Loudoun County, Virginia.

51:16 They’re out there. They’re, they’re, they’re a key vote, and they just hate Trump, and that’s not going to change, but if you give them a third choice, say, oh, I don’t have to go for this. You know, enough people minded Biden, but I don’t have to vote for Trump either. There’s a bright, articulate Democrat out there. He’ll attract votes, and he is, uh, and that’s, uh, and then since we’re doing the wild card segment, uh, don’t go out of third party with, uh, Joe Manchin, um, because he, there is a, I was involved with the third-party presidential campaign.

51:48 I was back in 2012. I was a group that has spent a lot of big money behind, just spent years and millions of dollars getting on the ballot in all 50, which is hard to do, but there’s a new group that has done that. They’re on their way to being on the ballot in all 50 states, and um, they like Manchin, and so you may see Manchin as a third party. Now you’re back to, uh, um, well, in 1992, when I was going to say Teddy Roosevelt in 1912. But I was, um, just to be clear, I did not vote for Bill Clinton, but for business reasons I was in the government bond market, and I had a, I ran a Washington office, so you’ve got to play the game, and I was, I raised a lot of early money for Bill Clinton.

52:32 Again, it was business. But, um, so I got invited to all these meetings. You’d be there with Vernon Jordan, uh, Pamela Harriman, uh, you know, um, and uh, I remember one is early June 1992, so about five months before the election, and the polling was um, Ross Perot was ahead. He was at the time. George um, H.W.

52:56 Bush was second, and Bill Clinton was third. And James Carville stood in front of the room, for a fairly small group, and says, we got him right where we want him. And what he said is that Perot’s ahead. That’s good. He’s going to fade, because they always do.

53:12 Bush has had a ceiling, and we’re going to pick up enough of the Perot voters to win it. It was brilliant, and he got it exactly right. It wasn’t, it’s the economy, stupid. I mean, I know this, but he looked at that guy, that exactly, that’s exactly what happened. Bill Clinton never got a majority of the U.S.

53:28 He won the first time with like 39. It was kind of like round numbers, you know. Clinton 39, Bush like 38, and Perot 19, or you know, give or take. Uh, might have been in the low 40s, but the point being um, uh, Clinton didn’t have anywhere near a majority. He won a barely, we want a plurality, but in a three-party race that’s enough.

53:52 Yeah. And Manchin could do that again. I’m not saying Manchin is going to win, but man, if he peels away because, you know, the Trump haters are so entrenched, they’re just never going to vote for him. Forget it. If you give him another choice, they’ll go for it, and that could be RFK as a nominee or a third party.

54:08 Wow, that’s super exciting. I remember those times of Perot and Carville. What an astute guy. I’d love to get more stories about him in the future. We are going to get to this upcoming geopolitical shockwave.

54:19 You’re calling it the most significant development in international finance since 1971, when I was born, and then also explain how people can position themselves. You’ve recorded a private video. People can go watch that at londonreal.tv/gym. Before we go there, though, I’ve got to get your thoughts on Trump. I think today he was now federally indicted because of the secret documents in Mar-a-Lago.

54:40 What do you make of Trump right now? You mentioned the women. I’m not going to call them Karens, but, you know, a certain number of women that hate Trump. I’ve watched him recently. I really enjoy listening to him.

54:52 The last few months he seems calm. He seems relaxed. He’s not spiteful. He’s got great answers. He’s confident of the solutions.

54:59 I don’t know. I find him in a really interesting energy, uh, that I read him to where he seems like he’s in a really strong space. But like you said, you can’t discount the haters or the weaponization of the judicial system. Or is that what’s happening here? Jim, that’s exactly what’s happening.

55:16 And I have, you know, I’m fortunate. I have a huge, you know, global network of correspondence. They’re not, you know, commentators or TV anchors or whatever, but they’re just people I keep in touch with, and because I love that, I was talking about cognitive diversity. You know, not ethnic or racial diversity, but brainpower working on different wavelengths and different areas of expertise. And, you know, I correspond with engineers and a guy who runs the lumber yard and, you know, just everyday people, but all over.

55:45 So I put a high value on that, and one guy I’ve been corresponding with says, you know, I, I appear for the, the Republic, you know, the U.S. Republic, the United States of America, but I hear all these big-name, you know, Mark Levin and all these guys, Tom Fitton. They’re, they’re analysts. They’re always picked in the end of the Republican. It doesn’t seem to happen.

56:08 I guess, are they losing credibility? And I said, I said, the problem is, I think we might be seeing the decline of the Republic from the weaponization of the Department of Justice. I mean, when a Department of Justice controlled by one candidate indicts the other candidate, I’m like, are we in Brazil? I mean, where are we exactly? Is this Peru?

56:32 They’re nice countries. I’ve been to all of them, but, uh, it kind of looks like we’re Ukraine. For that matter, maybe we’re getting more Ukrainian instead of the other way around. But um, but it’s really sad, but what I said to this guy is, you have to remember these things take time. You can get the analysis just right.

56:49 It doesn’t happen overnight. If you look at the fall of the Roman Republic, not the Roman Empire, but the Roman Republic, it started in, uh, the, uh, late um, second century BC, and didn’t come about, round 133, uh, BC, with the death of Tiberius Gracchus, and came to a final end in 44 BC with the assassination of Julius Caesar. But that was from 133 to 44. You know, give it, that’s 90 years, 89 years, but basically 90 years. So so that decline occurred over a 90-year period.

57:24 He had Sulla and Pompey and Caesar. A lot of people came and got came and went. Uh, but it took nine years. I said, so if you asked me if we’re in decline, I would say yes, we’re in a decadent period, and the Republic is under threat, but if you said it’s going to happen tomorrow morning, not necessarily. I mean, it’s just a, it’s a long grind down.

57:44 And things that, by the way, Brian, the best prediction I’ve ever made in accounting is all the time. It was August 2021, and it was in the worst part of the Afghanistan debacle, that withdrawal, which Biden and the Pentagon grossly mismanaged, unnecessary deaths, etc., and somebody who was quite distressed by this turned to me and says, what happens next? I said, it’s going to get worse, and I’ve been right every day ever since. I mean, like, I just, I meant it.

58:15 I wasn’t being specific, obviously. I said it’s going to get worse, and it is getting worse. Uh, so yes, we’ve, you know, two law degrees. I mean, I can be a commentator, but I, I took constitutional law. Uh, what I see is a, um, a steep, uh, erosion of the rule of law.

58:35 The, the, the, the, the American Ireland is as much to blame as Biden. Merrick Garland turns out to be a bitter hack. You know, the backstory there was he was nominated for the Supreme Court by Obama, and the, but the Republicans controlled the Senate at the time, and we had a presidential election coming up, and Mitch McConnell said, basically, we’re not going to act on it. I don’t know if he said that in so many words basically, we’re not putting your guy in.

59:01 We’ll have an election. If you win, maybe. But Trump won that 2016 election, and then they got Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. So Merrick Garland was deeply embittered by that. He said, hey, you’re nominated for the Supreme Court.

59:18 I don’t get a hearing. I don’t get a vote. No, he didn’t. Um, but now he’s, he’s the, um, Attorney General, and he’s weaponized this, and he just doesn’t care about the rule of law. He’s just crushing Republicans, and you see it.

59:33 You see it over and over. So that has happened. Um, as far as the impact on Trump, I mean, what I ask myself is, you know, Trump is, you know, I always said that Elton John song, I’m Still Standing, and I like the song. He’s got a nice melody, but it’s like, no matter what you throw at me, I’m still standing. Well, that has so far that has been true of Trump.

59:52 Here’s Trump’s political problem, then I’ll flip to the legal problem. Um, he has, he has the most solid base I’ve ever seen. And, yeah, there’s a park down the street from where I live, there’s a guy sets up four or five, like, beach chairs in the park. You know, mine’s his own business, but he’s got these Trump flags, the American flag with Trump’s picture on it, Trump, and all this. And by the way, it’s a very liberal neighborhood, but he just sits there and enjoys the day and invites his friends.

1:00:18 He’s not a protester. He’s not burning anything down. He’s just got his Trump flags. So that base, you can’t touch it. You can’t budge it.

1:00:26 But the problem is it’s 40 percent. You can’t win on 40. Now you need, I mean, technically you can say you need 50 plus one, but it’s not even that. You need 50 percent plus one in a set of states that collectively have 250-270 electoral votes, which, that formula doesn’t mean more than 50% of the country. It could be 44% of the country, but if you get the right states, you win.

1:00:52 And, but Trump needs that extra five or seven or ten percent in a certain number of states, and he can’t get there. The 40 doesn’t go down, but he hasn’t shown the capacity to make it go up, because of the Trump haters basically, and the independents who don’t want to go this way, and the women. Um, but they’re half the electorate. So, uh, so that’s his problem, and he has not shown the capacity to um, kind of grow out of that and appeal to the middle. And I’m not saying he should change his positions.

1:01:26 He won in 2016, and partly because Hillary was like the worst candidate. Hillary Clinton was the worst candidate who was fortunate in his, uh, choice of opponents. Um, but now that, anyway. So, so they’re pretty interesting, but he could win. Trump could win against Biden, because Biden is so unpopular, but we’ve got these two wild cards, matched in RFK.

1:01:47 We talked about all that. Let’s turn to the legal side. Trump was indicted by a New York County prosecutor on state charges, not federal charges. Okay, so he’s awaiting criminal trial. You know, the process has started, but he was arrested and booked, you know, uh, and, uh, awaiting criminal trial on that.

1:02:06 He was indicted the other day on a host of federal charges, all felony charges. I don’t know the exact number. It’s like seven or eight, but they all carry like seven to ten year sentences. I mean, you know, in theory, could you get the Madoff treatment? You know, 100-year sentence.

1:02:20 I probably only lived 10, 20 years, but uh, 100 years not impossible. Um, there’s another state grand jury sitting in Georgia that by all reports, uh, may indict him, who are tampering with the Georgia state electoral process of calling the Secretary of State and saying, hey, can you find me some votes, whatever? Uh, not that that’s never happened before. And then, um, he’s also under criminal investigation on, um, the January 6th charges. Now, this indictment that was just handed up, uh, by the way, reporters always say handed down.

1:02:57 Indictments are handed up to the judge, so that’s a pro tip. If you hear a reporter say handed down, they don’t know what they’re talking about. The indictment was handed up. Um, that was, uh, on the mishandling, so-called, of the classified documents. Um, but there’s another grand jury, uh, sitting on, uh, his actions on January 6th, so you could be looking at two more sets of indictments on multiple charges.

1:03:24 So at what point is even the guy who you can’t take down, suddenly it’s like, you’re a defendant in three separate criminal cases, or maybe, uh, four separate criminal cases, two state, two federal, four grand juries, all tracking, all going on at the same time. Um, how do you even show up, you know, your testimony? Uh, I’m not making light of it. I’m actually quite the opposite. I’m saying there could come a time when that base arose, when people say, you know what, just, it’s just too much, just hurts my head.

1:03:58 Maybe there’s something to it. Of course, that’s exactly what the Democrats want. And by the way, the prosecutors in New York and Georgia are Democrats. Um, this is part of the weaponization thing we talked about. You know, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

1:04:13 You know, how many, you know, if it’s four cases, but there’s seven or eight counts each, like 30, 40 federal and state felony, these are felonies, uh, charges. Um, at what point does it possibly wear him down, despite his energy, where the electorate, down, um, and by the way, they don’t want any of these trials over quickly, because whatever they want to do, they want to drag them into 2024. So Trump’s going to be going around to New Hampshire, Iowa, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, running for president, but he’s going to be going around to Georgia, New York, and Washington, uh, and, and Miami, uh, defending himself against criminal charges.

1:04:53 And how does that work? And it is unprecedented, by the way. I’m not saying there’s a glib answer, because, uh, there’s never been anything like it in U.S. history, so that it would actually slow down his campaign, because he’ll have to show up in court. But is there anything else that stops him from getting to that November election date? And then if he becomes president, um, does that solve everything, or does that not involve him from these charges?

1:05:18 Great question. It could. Now, has a president ever pardoned himself? The answer is no, but constitutional scholars will debate whether it’s even possible. I you know, I’m a lawyer.

1:05:31 I think it is possible. I don’t see why, if the president can pardon everybody in the country of any crime whatsoever, why couldn’t he pardon himself? So he might do that. In fact, he, if he actually gets convicted of any of these things, by the way, there’s no there’s nothing about running for president. This is your, this is your camera for president.

1:05:53 If you’re a defendant, a criminal trial, that’s not a dis, it’s not a disqualifier. You just have to be 35 years old, U.S. citizen, um, or you’re born in the United States. Um, so there’s nothing about all these criminal charges put together, including convictions, that keeps them from becoming president. He might need a prison pass to get sworn in, but, you know, we’ll see. But then as soon as he puts his takes his hand off the Bible, he says, I hereby pardon myself.

1:06:19 He could do that, and I think that would stick. So that went to cycling, and, you know, Brian, we’ve been talking about, we’ve been talking about some stuff that sounds crazy, but it’s not. All these things are well within the realm of possibility. I get people say, oh, that’ll never happen, but time and time again, it does happen. You know, RFK, I think, will win New Hampshire.

1:06:42 Joe Manchin, I think, will run as a third party. Uh, will Trump be convicted? I would say on the merits he shouldn’t be, but now you’re into jury selection. That’s a whole other science. Um, but he might be, but that won’t stop him from running.

1:06:58 Would it even, far from deterring people, was it even generous of sympathy? Like, you know, I’m kind of lukewarm on Trump, but man, I’ve never seen a guy who’s more, uh, you know, not prosecuted but persecuted since Joseph Stalin. Uh, you know, we should take people down to the basement and shoot them. So, um, so maybe I’ll vote for the guy just because, you know, he deserves it. Something I don’t know.

1:07:21 It’s, it’s, I know all the factors. It’s hard to predict all the outcomes, but, um, but you can sort of set up a fan of probabilities, and they’re all, they all look implausible. But one or more of them will play out, and then the other one not. That you ever wish for this, but, um, Biden could just die. I mean, he’s an 80-year-old with the physique, uh, uh, condition of a 90-year-old.

1:07:44 I know 80-year-old guys who are like 60. They’re fit and sharp, and nothing, age is not a determinant. It’s a factor, but it’s not a determinant. So I know some pretty sharp radio rolls, but I also know some Barnes and 80-year-olds more like 90-year-olds had two aneurysms, and they did the surgery back in the time when you didn’t have the microsurgeries and the techniques we have today, uh, and a doctor 20 years ago would have said, this guy’s gonna not age well.

1:08:11 For that reason, so uh, we also, the stumble, and at the Air Force Academy, I’ve said to people for a long time, I say, because Biden doesn’t appear in public much, you can’t really, because you can’t talk, but, um, I said, if you see Biden on TV, hit the mute button. What, of course, MSNBC and Hollywood sound from the German directors, but, uh, watch it without sound. It’s scarier than actually listening to the words, because you see the reality. That’s what comes through.

1:08:42 Well, what struck me about the fall, that was said, he couldn’t get up. Yeah, everyone takes a fall every now and then, maybe, but, uh, he couldn’t get up, and they had to physically lift him up. Go back to Hillary Clinton doing the face plant at the 9/11 memorial. You know, they had to drag her into the SUV. Um, this stuff, you can slap it off or spin it, but um, people notice, and the impression they get from video is um, you know, television, etc., um, is much more powerful than all the words you wrap around it.

1:09:18 What happened at Biden dies? Like, what would happen? That’s almost the worst scenario I can think of, because Kamala Harris becomes president. I have a problem. She’s not feeble-minded or physically impaired, but she’s stupid.

1:09:33 I mean, she’s like a dumb person. Um, that’s okay. You know, I, I say I’m all for, uh, you don’t have to have a 140 IQ. You don’t have to have a 100 IQ. There are plenty of people with uh, 90 IQs who are like great Americans, hard-working, great family people.

1:09:51 You know, let’s, uh, let’s celebrate all of that. We’re all, and we all have different strengths and weaknesses. I’m not saying your character comes down to an IQ test. Quite the opposite. I mean, they’re, you know, some of the best people we ever meet are just, you know, good everyday Americans.

1:10:05 But she’s not that bright, and so, uh, um, and she’s, she’ll be the president. It’s hard to know which is worse, you know, people minded or not that bright, because they always come under the thumb of whoever’s around them. And that’s why you say, why are the Democrats, why are any Democrats supporting Biden? Well, the answer is he’s been surrounded by a progressive radical orb, and they get everything they want. There’s nothing Biden won’t sign.

1:10:33 So all they have to do is get it on his desk. He’ll sign it. Um, you know, Biden, I used to hang around the Center. It was close to some senators in the lunch, in this, the Capitol, the Senate document, which is in the Capitol, and, you know, probably interesting looking back. In those days, the only guy who would silence the Roman, turn heads, because yeah, I think there’s Kennedy, there’s Christina, there’s she, whatever, uh, was John Glenn.

1:10:58 John Glenn walked in the room, everyone just kind of, like, nodded, shut up, and not in his direction. He had genuine, he commanded genuine respect. Um, but those days are gone. But even in the days I’m talking about, um, Biden was always considered like the, the least, like the dumbest guy in the Center, like just not that bright, but now he’s not that bright and feeble-minded. Kamala, not this much.

1:11:24 She’s probably chosen for that reason, because she wouldn’t threaten Biden, because you know, there’s a, there’s not a good comparison there. But that’s a pretty scary prospect. And then the nominee for the party becomes what they’ll have to rally around her, because they have no other choice. It gets really messy, right? And then you throw RFK in there, and then what the hell is going to happen?

1:11:43 I mean, that’s quite a mix. You got it right. All right, I promised we were going to get to this upcoming geopolitical shockwave. Again, you’re calling it the most significant development in international finance since 1971. Uh, you have recorded a private video that we’re not going to post on social, but people can go watch it.

1:11:59 It also shows how anyone can position themselves to profit from this crisis. It’s londonreal.tv/gym. I mean, look, Jim, you’re known for one of your most famous books, which is Currency Wars, and I know you probably can’t tell us everything that’s going to come up, but maybe you can give us a few hints of what you see happening in the next couple of months, and I think it’s, uh, it surrounds what’s going on with some of these BRICS nations. But please tell us.

1:12:23 Yeah. Uh, first of all, the great thing about this one, Brian, is we don’t want to guess the date. We, I can tell you the date. August 22nd, 2023, about two months from where we are now. Um, it’s a BRICS summit.

1:12:37 It’s in Durban, South Africa, uh. The BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. So that’s what the BRICS are. Um, and they have a rotating presidency, so South Africa is the president. Yeah, Ramaphosa is the president of the BRICS this year, and he’s hosting this summit in Durban, South Africa.

1:12:55 BRICS have been around forever. They’ve been meeting. Yaki, whatever, who cares. Well, here’s what’s different. Number one, this is a leaders’ summit, meaning Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, uh, Lula da Silva, Prime Minister Modi, and President Ramaphosa are all going to be there in person.

1:13:09 A little twist on that, just so I can drop a quick footnote: the International Court of Justice has issued an arrest warrant, an international arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin. So, uh, and South Africa is a member of the International Court of Justice, so will Putin be arrested when he steps off the plane in Durban, South Africa? Uh, I doubt it. I’m sure they’re going to work that out in advance, but um, but the president of South Africa has granted diplomatic immunity to all attendees of all BRICS conferences during their presidency of BRICS.

1:13:43 Um, I would have thought, put in our diplomatic immunity anyway, but this is a little drama in there, but I’m sure if they, if they arrest people, they’ll be consequences. So, um, but that’s just this little side show going on, but an important one. But anyway, they’ll be there. So leaders’ summits are different. They have 190 bilateral meetings a year.

1:14:04 I mean, this is a very mature organization at this point. They’ll do, they have a sports committee, they have a women’s rights committee, they have a human rights committee, they have an immigration committee, they’re banking, finance, and many, many others. So this is very active. They’ve built, uh, see, I, I studied this closely and wrote an article about it, a long article. Uh, that’s what’s summarized in your, uh, in your video.

1:14:29 Um, but they’ve been working on this since 2006, and they created the New Development Bank, the NDB. Well, it’s an exact clone of the World Bank, except it’s controlled by the BRICS. Then they created something called the contingency reserve asset, which is an exact clone of the IMF. It’s a swing lender. So, you know, you’re in, uh, running a balance of payments deficit, you’ve got to run on the bank, your currency is under attack.

1:14:53 They can give you billions of dollars in loans until you can make some policy changes, and then kind of prop it up. But that’s what, that’s why the IMF was invented. That’s what this is. So they’ve cloned the World Bank. They’ve cloned the IMF.

1:15:05 They’ve got all these committees. They’ve been meeting for 17 years at this point, uh, and now they’re ready to unveil. Again, this will be the biggest shock in the international monetary system since 1971, when Richard Nixon suspended redemptions of dollars for gold among our trading partners. That was the shock, of course. Um, but that’s the kind of magnitude we’re looking at.

1:15:27 What the BRICS are going to do: they’re going to unveil a new currency. Now, I’ve always poured cold water on, again, the China, the Chinese yuan is going to be the reserve currency, and the Russian ruble is going to be, I’ve always poured cold water on that. I’m absolutely not. That’s not going to happen. But a new currency, you’re starting with a clean slate.

1:15:45 And there’s something else going on, which is, just at the beginning of June, June 2nd and 3rd, there was another BRICS meeting. This was in, uh, Cape Town, against, South Africa. They’re the host. These were the foreign ministers. Sergey Lavrov was there, and the, and the other, the other Prime Ministers, other BRICS, and what they were doing was looking at the wait list.

1:16:05 So, BRICS five countries, but they have a 17-country wait list, including six other countries that have applied for membership. They said, let us in. And, um, sorry, 23, until six have applied and 17 have expressed interest. Um, well, who’s in that group? Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Iran.

1:16:26 These are important countries. You know, like, I hate them, but they’re, they’re big economies. Collectively, we’re looking at, um, more than 50% of global GDP, about 40% of global population. Um, I think about 40% of the global landmass, because you’ve got Russia, China in there, two of the five biggest countries in the world, two of the three biggest nuclear powers, including the biggest nuclear power, which is Russia. Through Saudi Arabia in the mix, you’ve got two of the three biggest energy producers, Saudi Arabia and Russia, etc.

1:16:58 Um, and the Indian economy, the Indian population surpassing the Chinese population as we speak, 1.4 billion. So um, this is not some, you know, rinky-dink group of the third world countries or whatever. It’s like, you know, Colombia and Syria, whatever. This is half the world or more in terms of population, resources, military capacity, land mass, and wealth and output. So, but if you expand the list to all the other countries I described, so now they’re BRICS plus, but this could be by the end of August, they admit these other members.

1:17:36 It could be 11 countries, and, again, on its way to 20 or more. They’re going to unveil a new currency, and, nonetheless, I call it the brick. Bricks is a working title, but, you know, maybe they’ll take Bancor, which is what John Maynard Keynes did in 1944. Whatever they call it, it doesn’t matter. It’s a new currency, but, um, this will start to look like the European monetary zone.

1:17:55 This will start to look like the euro. So, you know, Germany and France and Italy, they’re all different countries, and they have different bond markets, but they have the same currency. So when you expand the group, the odds, they say that becomes a very successful, very liquid payment currency. Go way up, because no one’s depending on China or Russia, and you’re depending on this infrastructure, and it could be managed by this new development bank I talked about.

1:18:17 Um, and the other key thing, and this is the key to the whole thing, Brian, is it’s going to be linked to gold. Now, this is not a strict gold standard. I don’t want to overstate it. I want to say, if you had a BRICS currency, you can march into the People’s Bank of China and demand gold. I’m not saying that, but I’m saying the value linked to gold.

1:18:35 The whole idea is to get out from under the dollar. And I go back 10, 12 years. I used to warn, you know, I was being in skips, and, uh, in the Pentagon, and, uh, private means for the Treasury, and I warned them all. I said, sanctions work. The dollar is powerful.

1:18:50 I get it. You’re using it against Iran, but you’re overusing it. You’re over-applying it, and you are gonna, at some point, people are gonna get out of the dollar system. It’s like, how many times can you hit the punching bag before the punching bag walks away? Well, that’s what’s happening now.

1:19:05 We’ve gone too far with Russia with Ukraine, and I said, earlier, it’s all connected, and it is, and they’re walking away from the dollar now. It’s not that difficult to launch a payment currency, because, I just want you to accept this currency, and you think you can spend it somewhere else. But if you expand the group to 20 countries, see if China exports high-tech equipment to Russia and takes rubles in return. What are they going to do with the rubles?

1:19:31 They can only spend it in Russia, and that’s the same issue of any bilateral trading relationship. If it’s only two countries, you can’t do what’s right. You’re going to do with rupees for the oil they send to India? How much curry do you need? You know, that’s the problem.

1:19:44 It’s almost like barter. But if you expand the group, say, oh, I get BRICS currency from China for exporting energy, but I can spend my BRICS currency in Argentina after a week, and Argentina can spend their currency in Saudi Arabia for oil. That works. Now, here’s like, it’s like a loyalty program, isn’t it? Not a global, it’s just about, yeah, you’ve got to fly a certain airline to cash in your miles.

1:20:06 But, um, but this is, that’s why they, that’s why the airlines form these syndicates, like Oneworld. You got 15 airlines, not one. That’s a very good analogy. But here’s the key, here’s the missing link. Okay, you can make a payment currency.

1:20:19 Expand the BRICS backward, the goal, make a payment currency. Can it be a reserve currency? Because I’ve been the one saying that. Well, first of all, there is a difference, and you can’t have a reserve currency without a bond market, because no one holds the currency, in, you know, in paper notes in the basement of the central bank. You’ve got to put it into securities.

1:20:38 Do you have the securities market? None of the countries have a securities market of that size. But then I said, you know, I had one of these aha moments. I said, you could actually create it out of thin air by selling BRICS-denominated bonds to your own people. You don’t need Larry Fink and BlackRock and, uh, who’s got Mark Carney, all these people that buy your car.

1:20:59 So you buy your bonds, sell them to your own people. The United States did this in 1917 in World War I with the Liberty Bond drive. Uh, Woodrow Wilson invented it, but every city in America in 1917 had parades. You were not a patriot. You were not a patriot if you didn’t buy Liberty Bonds to support the war.

1:21:16 And by the way, look at the formation dates of E.F. Hutton, Dean Witter, Merrill Lynch. It was right around, the teens, right between 1910 and 1920. That was the beginning of retail investing in the United States, a good, prior that had been a pro-market um, so, and if you’re Brazilian and you’re an Argentinian, wouldn’t you rather have a BRICS-denominated bond instead of an Argentinian peso bond? I mean, you might want a U.S. bond.

1:21:41 You can’t always get them. Um, so this thing is coming faster than people, no one’s expecting this. I’ve written about it, by the way, the article I talked about, and thank you for preparing your video. And, uh, it was sort of published in the Bridge form. It was picked up the other day by uh, Russian state media.

1:22:01 I didn’t have nothing to do with it. They just thought it was interesting, but all of a sudden that’s reaching a billion people. So this is in the air. Who doesn’t know about it? The Fed, ECB, Bank of England, you know, the G7 finance ministers.

1:22:15 They don’t see this coming, and that’s going to be very detrimental to them. Correct, because um, if I’m Russia or China, and I have BRICS currency through the trade channels, and it’s linked to gold, do I want the price of gold to go up or down? I want it to go up, because that makes me richer. But but the price of gold, to the extent of denominated dollars, if they’re strengthening and raising the price of gold, what’s happening to the dollar? It’s going, it’s going down.

1:22:44 It was an increase in the dollar price of gold. It’s not really a change in the price of gold. It’s a devaluation of the dollar. It’s not about gold, it’s about the dollar. So that’s going to be extremely inflationary.

1:22:55 Wow. And this thing could feed on the cell very quickly and really push an already fragile situation. Correct. Wow. I warned the Treasury and the Pentagon about it 10 years ago, and they’re like, thank you, Jim, uh, and ignored it.

1:23:08 Yeah. Wow. Uh, well, I guess they probably won’t now. And it’s fascinating how, like you said, it just, you hit the bag too many times. And when you, I think when you saw the currency censorship going on with Russia after the Ukraine war, where basically anybody who owned dollars no longer did, I mean, was that the straw that broke the camel’s back, do you think, at the end of the day?

1:23:30 Yeah, I think, I think, I think that’s right. Um, and I love, we just got through this debt ceiling debate in the United States, you know, a couple weeks ago, and you were, you know, we referred to that briefly. Um, uh, but the argument, the political argument, the political part, we’ve got to raise the debt ceiling because the U.S. has never defaulted on its debt. We have to raise the debt ceiling. We can’t default.

1:23:50 I was just laughing. I said, we need to default on our debt all the time. What do you think happened in Russia? They had 150 billion dollars of U.S. Treasury securities, and, uh, digital book-entry.

1:24:01 They’re not paper. The Treasury froze those securities. Okay, if I buy a bond, and you don’t pay me principal and interest, that’s the default. You can call what you want, but we’re not paying the principal and interest to Russia, so we defaulted on this bond. It’s not, pure S&P or Moody’s, you can call it a selective default.

1:24:17 Okay. The US is saying, oh, pay no attention to those 150 billion. We’ll pay the rest of you people. Really? Why should you believe that when they just froze Russia?

1:24:25 So we defaulted on Treasury securities owned by the central bank of Russia. How else can you describe it? Wow. That’s a strong statement, especially coming from you, Jim, who’s been in the capital markets for a long time. I never thought how long I can go on.

1:24:40 The U.S. is actually the master of default. We do it all the time, inflation, you know, etc. We just have different ways of doing it. Wow.

1:24:47 All right, this is hot. This is really interesting, and again, like you said, you called on this 10 years ago. You’re world famous for your book, Currency Wars, and you, uh, have recorded a video people can go watch at londonreal.tv/gym. Will you talk about this in more detail? Again, there’s not much time left until this is happening, August 22nd, and you, of course, as usual, show how you can also position yourself to profit from this.

1:25:09 It’s a fragile worldwide situation. I highly recommend everyone check that out. We don’t have too much left, Jim, but, uh, time. But I wanted to ask you just a couple things. I mean, you know, we’ve seen the Twitter Files come out.

1:25:20 It seems like there’s all, constantly, more and more information about coordinated efforts by the government to restrict freedom of speech, to restrict commentary on Ukraine. Uh, you know, and again, for someone like me who has been a victim of all that in 2020 and 2021, it’s, and who at the time thought maybe I was going crazy when I saw eight different technology platforms shut me down in a 24-hour period. And I thought, I’m clearly losing my mind, because there’s no conspiracies out there.

1:25:48 And then I read something like the Twitter Files, and I saw that, oh, there actually was a coordinated effort going from the government that was supposed to protect my First Amendment rights to freedom of speech. But that’s another time, another documentary film. What do you see going on here, and has it been resolved at all? Has it even been addressed by the mainstream media or by Washington? Uh, the answer is no.

1:26:11 There’s, there’s progress. I mean, I do a lot of, uh, you know, I don’t consider myself a doom and gloomer. I consider myself an analyst, but I owe it to my audience, my readers, to give the best analysis I can. So if I have an adverse scenario, it’s like, I’m not trying to scare anybody. I’m just telling you what’s going to happen.

1:26:27 Uh, so there are some bright spots here and there, including Elon Musk taking over Twitter. I’ve been on Twitter. I joined Twitter in 2009, which is early days. Um, I have well over 300,000 followers. Uh, I’ve been attacked by ISIS.

1:26:43 I was using an ISIS recruiting film in 2015. That’s a long story. Uh, against my will, um, I’ve been attacked. I’ve been fighting the Ukrainian IT Army for a year and a half. Um, I’m pretty good at swatting flies, and, you know, is my Elton John quote, I’m still standing.

1:27:02 Um, so I actually know a lot about it, but as, as with you, Brian, I’ve lived through it and lived through the efforts and the shutdowns, and YouTube, and that. So as Google reformed, no, they’re probably worse. YouTube, uh, um, Facebook, uh, Instagram. No, they’re, they’re the same. Leadership is in place.

1:27:21 Uh, the mainstream media, uh, or the legacy media, whatever you want to call it, um, I’m confused. I can’t, I can’t tell if they’re not that bright or like willing cheerleaders of Biden, or just don’t get it. Probably all three. Um, you know, I tell people, do you want to know what’s going on in Ukraine? Do not read the New York Times.

1:27:42 Do not read The Washington Post. Do not read The Economist. Do not read the FT. They’re all lying. I’ll be blunt.

1:27:48 They’re lying. They’re propaganda. It’s hard to get good sourcing, but it’s out there. You just have to kind of work hard at that. Um, but what’s come out of the Twitter Files is that, okay, we learned, we sort of knew, because we lived through it, and you didn’t.

1:28:02 I didn’t, others did, but we sort of knew that the Biden administration, behind the scenes, and the CDC, without you, the fascist, uh, you know, and others, were pulling all these strings, suppressing all these other voices who turned out to be right. By the way, they weren’t just gradually, oh, they actually got it right. So we had to suppress them, etc. Um, we knew that. We kind of, but now we know.

1:28:25 Now we have the smoking guns. We have the memos, and we have the, the channels, and half the FBI retired and went to work for Twitter. Um, but it’s actually worse than that, because what we learned, literally in just recent days, I don’t know if this is a big news, uh, in the UK yet, but, uh, that the FBI was putting the word through to Twitter to suppress voices at the direction of Ukraine, because at the same time, you, you don’t have to be pro-Russian.

1:28:56 Maybe you’re pro-peace. People say, are you favoring Russia? I’m a favor of peace. Okay, and I, but I know what that means in the real world. Um, but Ukraine was calling the Department of Justice and the White House to suppress voices who might have expressed some doubt about the wisdom of what’s going on in Ukraine, or told people, you know, maybe we ought to keep out of NATO for Ukraine, etc.

1:29:20 And that, and using the FBI as a channel, they were then directing Twitter to suppress those voices. So it wasn’t just vaccines and mass, and all that other garbage from the CDC, who were completely corrupt. It was, it was Ukraine pulling the shots, but that’s consistent with the whole Biden crime family corruption scandal, which we didn’t even have time to talk about, but they were on the payroll of Ukraine, so they were willing accomplices of suppressing voices who had concerns about Ukraine.

1:29:48 So it was actually worse than just the White House. Yeah, wow. You briefly mentioned what’s come out with Biden. I think in the last couple days, about, now, I don’t know, was it fixed payments going directly to him, no longer just his son? Obviously, this is coming out, time, coincidentally, with Trump’s, you know, federal indictment.

1:30:07 What’s happening there? Just briefly, we have a few minutes. Well, the evidence that the Biden family operates as a crime family, so it’s not just Joe Biden. It’s his, uh, the brother, Big Jim Biden, um, Frankie Biden, uh, Hunter Biden, but Jill, uh, is, um, Biden’s sister. Is, you know, she looks like she’s the real, uh, she’s got some pretty sharp edges, um, and the, why is the ex-wife’s grandchildren?

1:30:39 I mean, it is a crime family, and what Hunter did, uh, for all his drug problems and gun problems and, you know, uh, worse. I don’t even want to mention it. Um, he’s, he seems to be pretty good at, like, organizing shell companies and getting the money where it needed to go, uh, and then layers and layers of shell companies. You don’t do that unless you’re hiding something. I mean, a lot of business people, business person, I’m a lawyer.

1:31:05 I set up companies in the Cayman Islands, but we were there. We told everyone what they were. You had the name. He could give you wire instructions. You don’t do that unless you’re hiding something, and they, of course, they were, um, tens of millions of dollars or more.

1:31:19 Um, but it kind of shows the stupidity of the Bidens, and here’s what I mean by that. So, Barack Obama and Michelle leave the White House. What does he do? He gets a 60-million-dollar book deal for four books. I’m an author, but my, my publisher, you know, I have great relations with them, but they were the ones who gave Obama 60 million and Michelle for four books.

1:31:40 And I know the economics of the book industry. That’s a, that’s a ton of money, and Netflix gives them, I believe, a hundred million dollars. I have to check the exact amount, but I believe 100 million dollars to produce series. So there’s 160 million right there. Legitimate.

1:31:54 It wasn’t a bribe. It’s just like, hey, be on your best behavior, get out and write, you a big check. Uh, Al Gore got brought into some TV network that no one ever heard of, and, but gutter, it was gutter buys it for 100 million. Here’s your payday out. So there are, it’s completely corrupt, but they’re totally legal ways to make 50 or 100 or 200 million dollars.

1:32:16 But here you got the Bidens, you know, grubbing behind the scenes for 10, 20 billion dollars. I mean, they’re, they’re just small-time crooks of Delaware. That’s the easiest way to describe it. It is a crime family, not too bright, because if they were, they were, why didn’t they get the book deal? You know, that’s actually legitimate.

1:32:29 Uh, so I don’t know what to say, except going back to Merrick Garland, a bitter, hyper- partisan, you know, whatever, um, is covering all this up. I mean, okay, so Trump said, you want to debate the Trump indictment for mishandling classified? I used to, I used to handle classified information. My, my hands would sweat. I mean, I’m a pretty calm guy, but if I was in Langley and I got some classified information off the printer, which I occasionally did, I’d be, before I put it in a burn bag, I’d be, I was like, afraid I would accidentally accidentally stick it into my briefcase and walk out.

1:33:07 And I never did, but that’s how careful I was with it. But you got, you know, Trump’s throwing around Mar-a-Lago. Biden’s throwing it around, this garage with this Corvette where Hunter Biden has access, and he’s working for foreign governments. So you can debate that all you want, but the lopsidedness of the Trump’s indicted, Biden doesn’t. Trump gets investigated, Biden doesn’t.

1:33:30 Um, the crime family information is out there, but the FBI is sitting on it. Uh, now, can the Republican House representatives break through? They’re trying. They’re trying, and we’ll see what happens in the 2024 election, but uh, if Biden lives that long. But, um, it’s, uh, it’s part of the bigger issue we were talking about.

1:33:51 Uh, Brian, about the decline of the rule of law and the decline of the Republic. I think it feeds into that. Yeah, that’s something I’m going to walk away with for sure today. Last thing, there’s a bunch of, uh, weird orange haze coming over New York City and all of Northern, East, Northeast, which is, uh, clearly, uh, because of climate change. I want to get your thoughts on that, and of all the ice that’s melting down in Antarctica, where you were recently, posting pictures on Twitter where all of the penguins seemed pretty happy.

1:34:20 What do you make of what you call the greens, the green scam, the green new scam? Uh, well, it is a scam. Uh, first of all, I’m hoping the smoke goes away before I’m going out to Montreal for the Formula One Grand Prix of Canada, so I’m hoping to, uh, smoke clears, the race is not affected. Um, it has nothing to do with climate change. It has a lot, well, everything to do with forest mismanagement.

1:34:41 So this goes back 50 years, but the Greens say, oh, we can’t cut down trees. You can’t, you can’t, they should burn. She can’t get out the underbrush. Well, fine, if you do that, you’re going to get unprecedentedly large forest fires. The Native Americans, a thousand years ago, knew how to manage, as far as better than the Canadians and the U.S., I should say, today.

1:35:01 So this is just gross mismanagement by the Greenies of the forest, and you should not be surprised that you get these kinds of fires with greater frequency, because um, nothing with climate change, by the way. The most recent data, this is a 10-year study, peer-reviewed, published in a highly reputable climatology journal, shows that the Antarctic ice sheets are expanding on net. Now, some of them are getting a little smaller, with LC, others, who I see, are getting much larger.

1:35:35 But yeah, summer, summer shrinking, summer expanded. That’s always true, but on net, there’s more ice in Antarctica. I just returned from an expedition there. The whales are fine, the penguins are fine, lots of ice, very cool glaciers calving off, all perfectly normal. Um, you know, Dr. We started on the UN models.

1:35:54 They’re, they’re, um, well, here’s, I could spend an hour, we don’t have an hour, but the simplest way is to assess the UN models. They don’t even back-test. I mean, how are they supposed to forecast anything? Take the model as it exists today, go back 10 years, where we have the data. We’re not guessing, we have the data from 10 years ago.

1:36:14 Plug it into the model, and it produces a different result from what actually happens. So these models can’t even back-test, which is supposed to be easy, because you know the answer, and how are they supposed to forecast? So, so, again, I could go on, but it’s all a joke. Uh, well, it’s not, it’s not a joke, unfortunately, because it’s, uh, there is no climate change. There is no, I’m sorry, we take that back.

1:36:36 There’s always climate change. You know, in the 10th century A.D., they were growing grapes in Greenland in areas that are covered by ice today, because of that, uh, Medieval Warming Period. In the early 17th century you didn’t need bridges in London. The Thames was frozen solid, and you could walk across the Thames, and they used to have what they call Frost Fairs, which were basically merchandise, you know, farmers’ market on the ice. Yeah, I’ve seen them.

1:37:04 So that was the Little Ice Age. So the point being, climate changes all the time, but it doesn’t change quickly. Uh, and what is it caused by? It’s caused by solar cycles, volcanoes, ocean currents, subduction of warmer, higher-salinity water under colder, uh, low-salinity water. Um, there are factors behind it, but they’re big factors.

1:37:25 You can’t control them. It’s not carbon dioxide, which is like a trace gas. Uh, I just put on some carbon dioxide, and I don’t feel poisoned, and um, by the way, carbon, say, for those who don’t know, is plant food. The plants absorb carbon dioxide. We, we might need a little more of it to keep all the crops in the world from failing.

1:37:44 So it’s a scam, but it’s about transferring wealth from north to south. It’s about the Trojan horse for global control, global money, global governance, and neo-fascism. Yeah, yeah, it all feeds in, and then it’s amplified by the media, just like so many things out there. Um, Jim, I could talk to you for another hour straight, but we’ll save it for another episode, for sure. Um, just want to say that I highly recommend everyone go to londonreal.tv forward slash Jim, where he’s just recorded a video that’s talking about this upcoming geopolitical shockwave, uh, that you’re calling the most significant development in international finance since 1971.

1:38:19 There’s limited time until that’s going to happen. There’s actually a fixed date, but also, as usual, Jim shows how anyone can position themselves to profit from this. This is very important. I highly recommend everybody go watch that. Uh, Jim, all I’ve got to say is, when I grow up I want to be you.

1:38:36 You, you live the coolest life. You’re hanging out with the coolest people doing the coolest things, from Grand Prix to Antarctica, and I saw you doing those treks in Antarctica. I mean, you know, that would make some, some 40-year-old men, uh, timid, and you’re out there skiing, and all this stuff. You’re at the Grand Prix, Memorial. Um, yeah, again, it’s just a huge honor to talk to you every single time, Jim.

1:38:57 You’re always on point. You, uh, you’ve got analysis on so many broad topics, and yet you bring it all together, and you know, you always seem to have this uncanny way of seeing what’s going to happen in the future, now calling the fall of the Republic, and I’m going to have to meditate on that. So, Jim, thank you so much. Let’s get you in studio whenever we can, but also let’s get you back soon, uh, probably around the time of what’s happening with the BRICS, and maybe you can give us an update.

1:39:23 Thanks, Brian. All right, there we go. Follow this man on Twitter, and we’ll see you next time on London Real. Take care.