LT w/ Dr. Elliott: Cardboard box indicates recession? Speaker significance SILVER Pray!
10.29.23: LT w/ Dr. Elliott: Cardboard box indicates recession? Speaker significance SILVER Pray!
Summary
➡ The United States faces unsustainable national debt, increased oil prices due to geopolitical conflict, and threat of losing its status as the world’s reserve currency. This is further complicated by a decrease in cardboard box sales indicating a possible decline in retail sales, and banks limiting available credit lines, indicating an economic downfall. This all amounts to a worrisome economic climate as we approach election year 2024.
➡ The text underscores the importance of turning to faith and wisdom, particularly in times of financial uncertainty. It highlights the importance of making sound financial decisions, investing wisely, for instance, in precious metals like gold or silver. The speaker encourages seeking guidance from professionals who share similar values for best financial outcomes. Lastly, the speaker asserts that trusting God and turning to prayer can bring peace in turbulent times.
Transcript
All right, well, it’s great to have Dr. Kirk Elliot back today with us. Amazing updates every single week. Every week. We have so much to share, you guys. We can’t cover it all in our 2030 minutes span. So if you’d like to reach out to them, please do go below this video. And we know gold. Gold at any time and reach out to them. They also have a phone number on that when you click on the link.
Absolutely amazing. So what do we have going on this week? It seems like you have a few things to share. Well, yeah, well, it’s great to be with you and everybody. You know, I read a couple of things earlier in the week that they all kind of go together, and this going together is actually functional to the war in Israel and Hamas, which we’re really heading towards a cliff.
It’s like politically, geopolitically, economically, politically, all of the above. Right. So as you look at what’s been happening with the GOP Speaker of the House thing, it’s like, okay, why can’t they pick a speaker of the House? I mean, how hard could it possibly be to get the GOBP together and actually pick a speaker, right? But here’s the reason why. When you start to look back, it’s like, I get it.
I get why this is a problem. Because you’ve got these factions forming. You’ve got more fiscally conservative GOP, which are saying, we are not ever going to give the government a blank check to do lot of those. For example, McCarthy was not that. McCarthy was more of the almost uniparty candidate. Without even batting an eye, they basically said, okay, let’s just extend the debt ceiling. It’s like, what, you’re going to give them a blank check because the reason that they just extended it rather than giving it a debt ceiling because he said, well, we don’t need a limit.
How about we give them a blank check until the election and then we’ll change things. That’s basically what they voted in. So it’s like, all right, he got ousted because of that, because that ticked off a lot of people in the party. So then they were without a speaker. So then they bring up Scalise, right. And Scalise would be a little more on the conservative fiscally side. Well, I think he saw the battle coming in 2024 and what was going to happen.
He’s like, I don’t want this. Don’t take me out of the loop. So then they went to Jim Jordan. Jim Jordan was actually Trump’s first pick, and he would have been very fiscally responsible. It would have been tough for the Democrats and the Rhinos to actually get any money for anything with him as speaker because he was a fiscally conservative politician. Right, well, so it’s like they kept battling and battling and battling, and he kept getting less votes after like the 6th time around where he said, I’m out.
Right. Kind of wanted back in, but didn’t really know. And so it’s like, let’s just go over somebody else. So then when you look at what we’ve got now, it’s actually a really good thing. So Mike Johnson, who was elected unanimously, I can’t figure out why, because he’s a very conservative Christian leader. I mean, he’s possibly one of the most doctrinally, solid people in Congress. It’s like, it’s like, why would they pick him unanimously? Because if he’s that solid on biblical principles, he’s going to be a borrower as a slave to the lender kind of guy, looking at proverbs, looking at don’t ever go into debt.
Right. All this stuff. But yet he was elected. And so I think he’s got a tough road. But I think this is very good for God fearing conservatives because I think he’s going to do good. He’s going to hold their feet to the table. Right. So this is really good now, but why were they having such problems actually picking somebody? Because November 17 lt is when the debt ceiling expires, the current one.
So now it’s going to have to come up for a vote. This is only a couple of weeks away, right? Two and a half weeks away. So what are they going to do? I think they’re going to extend it. But this is a problem this year. It truly is a problem because of everything that’s happening that I want to connect some dots here. So number one is something that we’ve already talked about, and that’s the BRICS meeting.
That meant the end of August, where Putin said they’re going to de dollarize the world. They added six of the nine largest oil producers on the planet into the BRICS nations, which is 70% of the world’s population, dismantling the petrodollar. So with no demand for our dollar, they’re going to be forced to print. Now, this is going to cause more inflation at a time when they need to pause.
They said they’re going to pause interest rates. Okay? Pausing interest rates is not a positive thing. Like they’re saying lowering interest rates would mean they’ve won the battle against inflation. Pausing them at a high level just means anybody that has any debt is going to suffer down the road because they’re locking in high payments. Right. But their messaging is, hey, we’re winning this war in inflation. We’re going to pause interest rates.
Isn’t that good, America? But it’s not. When you pause them at this high level, they know this. Right? They know this. So who else knows this? The mortgage banking world. Your Morgan’s. Your Citibanks. Your Wells Fargo’s, your us. Banks, all of the big banks that are issuing mortgages. So when the Fed paused rates, you would think, okay, mortgage rates are going to pause, too. No, mortgage rates continue to go up and up a lot right now.
And this is part of where we’re heading towards this cliff, because mortgage rates now on a 30 year mortgage are 8%, average eight. But they paused interest rates at about 5. 17. So since they paused rates in the last meeting, mortgage rates kept going up and up and up and up. Why does that happen? This is what the untold story that the Fed is so concerned about, is that the secondary market, the private market, that’s actually truly market driven, these banks are saying 30 years down the road, we don’t know what the markets are going to look like.
We don’t know what inflation is going to look like. We don’t know if this character lt that we’re given a loan for, for his house is actually going to have a job. We don’t know if his wages are going to go up or go down. We don’t know if the housing market is going to go up or go down, because 30 years is a really long time away.
But we don’t even know what’s going to happen tomorrow. So I would hate to have that job as the economist at a mortgage bank, right, that’s trying to figure this stuff out, right? So here’s where they’re saying JPMorgan Chase, bank of America, all these others, they’re saying, okay, we don’t really know. We don’t have a good feeling about the economy. How do we know that they don’t have a good feeling about the economy? Jamie Dimon from the CEO of Morgan Chase said earlier in the week that the central banks, including the Fed, have gotten everything 100% wrong.
You can’t be any more forceful than that comment. He actually said central banks around the world have been 100% wrong on forecasting what was going to happen to the economy. You think about it, and he’s right. I kind of hate to agree with Jamie Dimon, but he’s absolutely right because they said we’re going to keep raising interest rates and it’s going to slow down inflation. This is what we do.
And he said they were wrong because they’ve raised rates a lot, killing the economy. But it’s done nothing to impact inflation yet. Nothing. Because unofficially, inflation is actually in the 15% to 20% range. The only way that interest rates will slow down inflation is if the interest rate is higher than the inflation rate. Interest rates have to be higher than inflation rate for that to work, but they’re not.
I mean, interest rates are only like five point something percent. People think it’s the end of the world, but inflation is hovering north of 15. Interest rates have to get to about 20% for them to slow down inflation. They’re not there. This is why we’re heading towards a cliff right now. Another reason that we’re heading towards a cliff is the debt. So I’m glad you’ve got that on the screen because debt over the years we’ve been on this accelerated pace, and the national debt is now $34 trillion.
It’s been grown at about one point five to two trillion dollars a year. It’s quite a stinking bit, right? Which means on that pace, next year it’ll probably be 37 trillion. The year after that it’ll probably be 39 trillion. But no, this trend is accelerating. So just last month, last month, the debt, $600 billion was added to the debt in one month. So multiply that times twelve. What is that? Well, 600 times twelve is we’re pushing about 7.
2 trillion, right? 7. 2 trillion, not one and a half to 2 trillion. If we keep up on this pace, they’ll add the national debt won’t be 34 trillion, it’ll be like 41 trillion within the next twelve months at this rate. That is completely unsustainable. Right? Now, go back to the speaker of the House story, right? Who wants to be speaker of the House when they’re going to vote on the debt ceiling, when it’s an election year, when the BRICS nations have risen up and stealing our status as the petrodollar, taking away our built in demand for the US currency as the world’s reserve currency.
And we’ve got this exploding debt. Now we’ve got a war with Israel and Hamas that’s quickly, and I mean quickly turning in from two adjoining nations that can’t stand each mean, Israel and Palestine have been arch enemies since Isaac, and this, this goes way back. Ideological differences are the root cause of this conflict, right? And who owns the land? And so you look at these things, it’s like this conflict is now going to morph into a regional war which might morph into even something larger as countries and presidents around the world are now choosing sides, right? They’re choosing sides where Israel has a right to defend itself against a terrorist missiles flying in.
And then you’ve got, no, we have to support and honor Palestine and their right to land. And then the people who are innocently getting slaughtered, it’s like blame it on the terrorists, right? It’s like Israel has to but so you’ve got these ideological really, for the point of argument, it doesn’t matter who’s right or who’s wrong. What we have to look at is there is a conflict. And a conflict in that part of the world causes oil prices to go through the roof.
Last weekend, so probably six, seven days ago, alliance, the huge, massive insurance company from Europe, their basically investment arm, said, we think oil is going to hit $140 a barrel because of this conflict. The day after the conflict started, researchers come out that you and I talked about a couple of weeks ago that oil is going to hit $150 a barrel. So 100 and 4150, who cares? It’s right in that ballpark.
That’s up more than 50% of where it is right now. So that’s going to put a pinch on everybody. So again, we are heading towards this cliff. Higher prices, higher oil prices, political conflict, geopolitical conflict, massive amounts of debt explosion, right? I mean, the debt is just going through the roof like at a rate we’ve never seen. $600 billion in one month. Lt that’s a lot, right? That’s really a lot.
And so now that you’ve got the speaker of the House conflict because nobody wants to be in charge of the purse strings. That’s what the House is in charge of. They control the spending. And who wants that in a time when we run out of money, right? Because every one of those politicians wants to be reelected. And so now what are they going to do? They’re going to keep selling out future generations, destroying their futures by spending money now that we don’t have.
This is why I think articles like Jamie Dimon saying that the central banks are dead dog wrong. Why these articles about on CNBC? We’re heading towards a cliff. The US consumer is heading towards a cliff. Now, I want to connect another couple dots, and this is an interesting one that I think all of the viewers will understand this story. Okay? So there’s leading indicators that economists look at to see where the economy is headed moving forward, right? So, like gross domestic product, inflation numbers, unemployment, jobless rates, right? Consumer sentiment, those are all leading economic indicators that people look at.
Well, I want to give an unorthodox one that is actually possibly even better than any of those, and that’s cardboard box sales. Okay, so random thing to look at, but what are cardboard boxes used for? Shipping stuff. Right? So we’re heading into the busiest time of the year for retailers. From Black Friday until Christmas, retailers earn about 80%, 80% of their total annual revenue during that one month there’s, where it’s like, man, if I were a retailer, should I just shut down eleven months out of the year and just work for that one month? Right, but you wouldn’t be in business if you did that.
I mean, that’s a ludicrous thing to say, but it’s so big that that’s where they get 80% of their revenue on average for the whole year. Now, if that’s the case, then Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, all these retailers, they would need to be buying boxes like there’s no tomorrow to ramp up for the holiday season, where everyone’s going to want stuff shipped by Christmas. Right? But here’s the problem.
Box sales, if you look at it from September until now, like the last month and a half down, like 79%, 79, you look at it since the beginning of January. So the first ten and a half months of this year, it’s down roughly 83%. So no boxes aren’t being bought. So what does that mean? Means retailers and the CEOs who are looking at sales and looking at revenue and looking at everything that’s going out and coming in, they’re thinking, their actions tell us not their words, their actions tell us this isn’t good.
We’re not expecting to sell anything, therefore we’re not even going to order boxes to ship things out in. Right? Now, there’s yet another problem that I look out, and this is where mainstream media and politicians are bragging about this, but they should not be. There’s a couple of things that you should look at on credit cards. So credit card usage is up a lot over the last quarter, okay? Right.
People say, Well, I’m sorry, credit card usage is down over last quarter, but what’s up? The debt on credit cards. So debt on credit cards is up to a trillion dollars over the whole country, but usage is down. So when you add those two together, what this media is spinning that as is. Look, people are getting used to having a lot of debt. They don’t like it. They’re trying to get out of debt and they’re using cash to make their purchases.
It’s like, not really, or else retail numbers would still be sky high. They’re not. So credit card usage being down, but the actual amount on credit cards, like the balances is it a trillion dollars, as high as it’s ever been. What does that tell us? It tells us that banks are limiting people’s available credit, right? They’re taking away the excess on their credit cards, the excess unused portion of their home equity lines, and they’re taking it away so people can’t spend.
If people can’t spend anymore, this spells doom for the economy moving forward. The reason they can’t spend is because banks have to now have a 20% reserve requirement up from 0% during COVID They now have to have 20% of all deposits held back so you can avoid another banking cris. So when that happens, how do you maintain that you have 20% held back? You start limiting people’s credit lines so there’s no more debt can be added, right? So this is what’s happening.
People are tapped out, they’re maxed out. There’s nothing left under biden’s economy, where taxes are going up, wages are coming down, inflation is persisting, and cost of borrowing is going up. This is ugly. This is nasty. When you look at if the retailers who make 80% of their revenue for the year in the last month of the year, if they don’t do good, what’s going to happen in January? Layoffs.
They’re going to lay people off because they didn’t make money during the time when they should have been making hay, right? They didn’t make it. So I think come 2024 election year, people getting laid off, debt ceiling crisis, war in Israel, the consumer is heading towards a cliff and all of this happens lt during an election year when politicians are making promises, when people don’t have anything. They’re going to vote for the politician that gives them the biggest, best promises of we’re going to take care of you.
People aren’t going to ask how. They’re just going to say, all right, well, if you can do it, you can do it, because my income is bad, my family is starving. Right? We don’t have any money, please take care of us. And people will give away their freedoms, especially during an election year, because they’re suffering economically. That’s my concern for 2024. This is why I think that I agree with that article that we’re heading towards a cliff.
Even unorthodox ways to measure it. Like the number of box sales is pointing in that direction. Now, you add to that these unforeseen things that weren’t here a couple of weeks ago, war, oil prices going to start to shoot through the roof. Then come January, the BRICS Nations add the oil producers of the world into the mix. It’s shaping up to be kind of a knock down, drag out year.
But here’s where we get to be thankful that God speaks to us, that we have hearts and eyes and ears to hear his voice. Right. That we have biblical wisdom in the Scripture that tells us to get out of debt, to not listen to everybody that you hear. Right. Test the prophets that are speaking. Not everything you hear is true. Just because they’re on our side doesn’t mean that it’s true.
Right. So this is where people need to pray for wisdom. If you lack it in James, it says God will give it to you. Just ask him, right? And then apply the knowledge that the Holy Spirit gives you. And that is the beginning of wisdom. Right. So fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. So understand his ways, understand the love that he has for us, and he loves us so much that he’ll give us more than what we ask for.
In peace, in good relationships, in wisdom, in discernment, in courage, in boldness. This is where the life that he created for us, we need to start operating in that or else if we like I think about this often, Lt, and I know you do as well. It’s like, I don’t know how people survive in this world right now if they don’t know Jesus. I really don’t. But when you do know Jesus, it’s like you don’t have to fear any of this garbage.
You don’t. Because he is bigger than all of it. Right. We just have to tap into that wisdom that he has for us. Amen. Yeah. As we go through all of just I’m just reminded that we do have the opportunity to make good decisions also with our income and our future, nobody knows how long we’re going to be around, but it’s important for us to at least be involved in the right things.
And that’s where you come in. We just constantly reminded of how you helped my family in getting all of our IRAs moved to Silver, and we’ve seen a huge increase in that and it’s just been tremendous for us. What do you have for those that are looking into that? The precious metal world again, could you just let us know? Yeah. You mean as far as how can we help.
What are the different ways, different options? Correct. How do they work with you? And when they give you a call or they go to Amwinow. com Gold, what do you guys provide again? So go to that website or give us a call, 720605 3900, to say Lt sent you either way. Then when you call, it’s going to be a simple process. My amazing client concierge team will find out from you.
It’s like, what was it that Lt and Dr. Kirk were talking about that cost you to want to reach out because they want to address your concerns, your fears, and help your dreams come true, right? So then they’ll set you up on an appointment with one of my advisors where we’ll dig in a little bit deeper and map out a strategy moving forward that takes advantage of the times we’re living in rather than those trends taking advantage of us.
So we’ll help you. We’ll cross the T’s, we’ll dot the I’s, we’ll make the transition easy and the burden light to reallocate anything that you want to move out of other traditional asset classes, stocks, funds, mutual funds, paper assets, cash, whatever, into precious metals to protect and preserve and grow and thrive. Given the times you’re living in, our team does all of that. You just have to fill out a couple of quick forms that take, like, 15 or 20 minutes, and we’ll do the rest for you.
But here’s the cool thing. This is where our journey together begins, not ends. So most dealers out there are transactionally based. They make commission when you buy, a commission when you sell, and they forget about you in between. Right? Part of us is not different than that in the sense of transactions are kind of the necessary evil. You have to buy to get into a trend. You sell to get out of one.
But here’s where we differ. We don’t charge anything when you liquidate, which is key, because if you sell something that’s triple or quadruple or much higher price than what you bought it at, and you have a commission on the back end, it becomes really expensive. Zero is zero. We don’t charge anything for that. But in between the book ends of those transactions is life. This is where life is lived, and this is where we hold your hand through the economy.
We’ll always let you know when it’s time to buy, sell reallocate, get out of Dodge, do whatever needs to be done to make sure that you’re in the right place at the right time, the majority of the time. And that’s our goal is to bring peace in the midst of the storm, to start to melt away that financial anxiety. Because you realize then we have somebody that thinks like us.
We share the same faith, we share similar political views. We’re there, and we get to do life together. And this is where we operate. Almost partner with you on that. It’s not our money. It’s yours. It’s your decision always. Right. But we’ll help you and guide you to be on the right path the majority of the time. Amen. Amen. Hey, and before I forget, I just wanted to show you something that we didn’t talk about yet earlier.
Another one. This came up this week, and I thought you’d like this as we come to a close. Just what you’re talking about. They put this on there, the tin foil hat. We’re tinfoil hatters, right. You’ve got the Tin Man in silver with an axe and money creation is a scam only a wizard could love. He’s holding that sign, and it leads to guess what that is back there over his shoulder.
Do you know that’s the Fed? Yep. Federal Reserve. So we’ve always said gold destroys the Fed. And yeah, you’re only off to see a wizard, but we’ve got gold and silver with an axe taking them down, and I think that that’s really cool. Just thought I’d show you that before we close today. I thought you’d like that’s. That’s really quite good. Yeah, I have to send that one to you.
Pretty cool. Anyway, thank you so much, Dr. Kirk Elliott. Always enjoy these updates. It’s been tremendous. You’ve definitely helped us out quite a bit to get through this difficult time on the earth. And just like to lift you up in prayer real quick. Heavenly Father, thank you so much for Dr. Elliott and his team. Thank you for how you’re using them to help so many folks who are just confused about the economy and other things that are going around around them.
And thank you that they just take the time to work with so many. We ask that you continue to protect them, protect their company from the enemy who definitely doesn’t want them around to help people. As always, we thank you for your protection over them each day. We ask all this in the name of Jesus Christ, our Savior. Amen. Amen. Thank you, brother. Thank you so much again.
Talk to you again soon. .
