5.12.24: LT w/ Dr. Elliott: Bernstein economic idea disaster YEN craziness 250 over GDB in Japan worldwide pain Pray! | And We Know
Summary
➡ The article discusses the economic implications of Japan’s weak yen and high debt-to-GDP ratio. A weak yen benefits Japan as it makes their exports cheaper, boosting manufacturing and job creation. However, Japan’s debt is 250% of its GDP, a level from which no country has historically recovered, leading to significant changes in political structure or currency. The article suggests that Japan’s economic situation could cause global interest rates to rise and potentially lead to a worldwide economic slowdown.
➡ The text discusses the importance of investing in tangible assets like gold and silver, which have maintained their value over time, unlike fiat currency. It also touches on spiritual aspects, emphasizing the importance of giving out of love, not for personal gain. The text warns against the dangers of debt and the lack of privacy in the digital world, highlighting the privacy offered by gold and silver. Lastly, it criticizes the control and lack of privacy in cryptocurrency transactions, favoring the tangible and private nature of precious metals.
Transcript
Folks, it is an honor to have Doctor Kirk Elliott back with us again, giving these weekly updates. Now, it’s been almost more than a year and we continue to grow and learn. And this one today is going to be very interesting. Glad to have you back. We’re at nwknow.com gold, folks. It’s in the description box below this video. You can click on that, have the same conversation I’m having with Doctor Kirk Elliott or someone on his team and they will help you out. And it is absolutely amazing the changes that we’re seeing in people’s lives as they turn to you.
Thank you so much for coming aboard once again, it’s really great to be back. Lots to talk about this week, that’s for sure. Yeah, yeah. I wanted to show something right off the bat. This video has been going viral on social media. I’m glad that you brought it up today. It’s something that I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what’s going on, but this is Jared Bernstein. So who is this guy before he hit play? So he’s the chief of the council for economic advisors for Biden. So basically anything economic. He is like the main voice that’s whispering into Biden’s ear.
This is a good economic idea. This is a bad one. So every president has a council of economic advisors that speaks to interest rate policy. How much money should we print? What are we going to do with student debt and stuff like that? Right. So if it has to do with the economy, they’re the ones that are actually the loudest voices into the president’s ear. This guy happens to be the chief of that group. That’s, that really has a lot of economic pull with the president. Okay. For Biden. All right, so let me hit play on this.
All right? Yep. This government can’t go bankrupt because we can print our own money. It obviously begs the question, why exactly are we borrowing in a currency that we print ourselves? I’m waiting for someone to stand up and say, why do we borrow our own currency in the first place? Like you said, they print the dollar. So why does the government even borrow? Well, the. So the, I mean, again, some of this stuff gets some of the language that the. Mm. Some of the language and concepts are just confusing. I mean, the government definitely prints money and it definitely lends that money, which is why the government definitely prints money and then it lends that money by selling bonds.
Is that what they do? They sell bonds? Yeah, they sell bonds. Right. Because they sell bonds and people buy the bonds and lend them the money. Yeah. So a lot of times. A lot of times, at least to my year with MMT, the language and the concepts can be kind of unnecessarily confusing. But there is no question that the government prints money and then it uses that money to. So, yeah, I guess I’m just. I can’t really talk. I don’t get it. I don’t know what they’re talking about. Like, because it’s like the government clearly prints money.
It does it all the time and it clearly borrows, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this debt and deficit conversation. So I don’t think there’s anything confusing there. What is that so, I mean, nothing confusing except for him opening his mouth. I mean, that was the worst explanation. It was like two minutes that I actually feel dumber. I think I lost brain cells after listening to that. It was so bad. Oh, my goodness. So let’s start with his very first sentence. The government can’t go bankrupt because they print money. Okay, so Alan Greenspan, I remember Lt, a video from back in the eighties, like literally the 1980s, where Greenspan was talking about, well, the government can’t go bankrupt because they print money.
Same exact quote, however partially. That’s kind of true in a sense, in a short term thinking. Because when you’re the world’s reserve currency and you have built in demand for your currency, when you print money and you devalue it and you create inflation and basically treat it like monopoly money, there’s always built in demand for your currency. However, what they’re not looking at is throughout history, reserve currencies don’t last forever. None of them ever have in the history of the world. They never have. The average of a reserve currency is actually about 88 years. So we became the world’s reserve currency in 1944, the Bretton Woods act, which means all settlements between countries are traded in a particular currency to give stability to the global monetary system.
Now, that was put on steroids in the 1970s, in 1973, when we became the petrodollar, meaning all oil settlements were traded in the US dollar. So that just means they’re going to pick what they think the strongest currency in the world to actually be the settlement agent for all other countries and all these other purchases to actually give stability to the market. Right? So with that built in demand for our currency, sure, you can print a lot of money and you probably won’t go bankrupt. I wouldn’t say you can’t like they did, because you can. But they should know because they’re economists.
That reserve currencies don’t last forever. None of them ever have, ever. So what makes us think that we’re different? So that’s the first fallacy of what Bernstein said. Now the second part is I lt, I don’t believe that he’s as dumb as what he’s sounding because nobody can be that stupid. I mean that’s, I mean that’s my rash. Now when you’re the chief of the Council for economic advisors whispering policy into the president’s ear, you’ve got to know about everything. Economics, all of it. I mean you’re, you’re setting policy for a country. I don’t even know what he said.
He didn’t know what he said. He said, do we sell bonds? I think yeah, yeah, we sell bonds. It’s like what in the world? So here’s the problem. I think either he’s the one of the dumbest economists that’s ever lived or B, he’s hiding something, right? I think he’s hiding something and he doesn’t know how to tell the story of what he’s hiding. So here’s why I say that. So the government doesn’t print money in America. They absolutely do not print money. The Federal Reserve prints money. See, but the Federal Reserve is not the government. The Federal Reserve is actually a privately owned bank that’s owned by Rockefeller’s Rothschild, like seven uber wealthy international families that own the Federal Reserve.
So it’s not part of the government. Now people think that it is because it has the word federal in it. And people think that they have reserves because it has the word reserve in it. But it’s neither federal nor is it a reserve. So in 1913, Congress basically duped America into the Federal Reserve act and took money creation away from the people and put it into the hands of private bankers. Now what do they do? What Bernstein was trying to say is that the US government sells bonds. That’s how we make money. So the Treasury Department will issue 30 year treasury bonds and theyll sell them.
Well, in the past, like Japan, Russia, Brazil, United Kingdom, Germany, they would buy us treasuries and that would bring money into the US so we could spend it right. You could raise the debt ceiling, you could provide entitlements. But over the last few years thats gone like almost totally away. People, countries are not buying us treasuries anymore. They’re not sellers of it because we’re printing money like there’s no tomorrow. So who is the buyer of last resort for us treasuries? It’s the Fed. So this is where he doesn’t want the world, I don’t think, to know what’s actually happening.
That it’s the fed that goes to the printing press, presses the red button, creates money to buy our us treasury bonds from the government. See, he’s saying that the government prints money and the government borrows money. But that makes no sense, because if you printed money, you wouldn’t have to borrow anything. That’s right. And if you were a borrower and you just kept borrowing because you had income coming and you wouldn’t have to print money. So what he’s saying makes absolutely zero sense. You can’t, you, they’re not both, but because they’re not, the Fed is a different entity that prints money to buy the US treasuries.
And so their balance sheet. Lt is toxic. All they have is these garbage us treasury bonds. I mean, it’s bad. It’s really bad. So this is what he doesn’t want the world to know, is that the Fed, which is actually a private bank, where they’re, their books are unauditable. By decree. You can’t audit the Fed’s books. People going all the way back to Congressman Ron Paul and others have tried to audit them and they kept getting, no, you can’t. I mean, even just like three weeks ago, that was brought up again. And Jerome Powell said, nah, we’re not ever going to tell anybody who’s selling us treasury bonds what countries are wanting to repatriate their gold.
We’re simply not telling you. It’s like, it’s a congressional subpoena. You have to Freedom of Information act. It’s like, nope, sorry. I mean, what kind of power do you have where Congress actually requests that you, through subpoena, that you actually give something? All he says was, nope. Really? So this is why Bernstein can’t answer this question succinctly, because he’s lying about it. I would prefer to believe that he’s lying about it rather than he’s that incredibly stupid. Because if he’s that incredibly stupid and he’s the one whispering into our president’s ear about economic policy, we’re all doomed.
That’s right. Economically. That’s right. Speaking of doomed economically, we were talking about this before the show. Be careful what you wish for. Weaker Yen, a blessing and a curse for Japan. I lived there. I remember the first time I flew in 1990 as a United States Marine. And the yen rate was like 156 to the dollar. And I remember my dad telling me when he lived there, it was like 200, 300, you know, yen to the dollar, seventies and eighties and went back down. When I went back in government service about, I think twelve years ago, working in government service at the time, and it was like 98 or ¥100 to the dollar.
And it was really strange just to dip that low. Well, now folks living over there are now one like 150 to 153. Back in the like nineties, the eighties, again. What’s going on with that? What’s the big deal there? Man, that’s huge. So couple different things to look at. I mean, that is huge. Like, people in Japan love their weak yen. Why? Because when it’s a weak currency, like, it is basically all the other countries of the world that are buying Toyota and Sony and Honda’s and whatever else Japan manufactures, it’s technically less. When you have a strong currency buying something from a weak currency nation, it takes fewer of those strong currencies to actually buy something.
So for us, for example, in America, if I were to buy a toyota, it technically costs less than what it should because the dollar is stronger than the yen. It takes fewer of that strong currency to buy something that they create. In that sense, Japan loves it because people are buying their stuff and manufacturing. All of or jobs always follow manufacturing. So people are buying, and they’ve kept rates artificially low, even though they shouldn’t technically, with the currency that week, they should have raised rates. But there’s been intervention by the bank of Japan forever, keeping rates artificially low, like less than 1% for eons.
Right? So people that are doing business borrowing in Japan, they absolutely love it. But here’s the problem. Throughout history, when a country’s debt to GDP ratio surpasses 100, meaning they have more debt than they have gross domestic product, ultimately, that country ceases to exist economically. They change. Something happens. They change currency, they change political systems. Like, they could go from a republic to a dictatorship or democracy to communism, whatever. Something changes dramatically with the way that their political structure is done. Or they change currencies, right? And so at a hundred to one, there’s never been a country ever, like, literally, these aren’t good odds.
If you were to go to Vegas, LT, and I mean, this doesn’t describe you or me because we’re not gamblers. But, but let’s say you were, and you were to go there and somebody said, well, lT, you probably shouldn’t go because there’s a hundred percent chance you’re going to lose all your money. I was like, 100% chance. I mean, all right, so I wasn’t going to spend $500 in this entertainment, you know, I mean, whatever kind of excuse somebody would make. Right? Right. Well, 100% chance when countries go over 100% debt to GDP, they don’t recover from that.
Japan is at 250%. It’s like the worst in the world. Right. So now there’s intervention by the bank of Japan into the japanese economy. This is going to have a ripple effect throughout the global economy because Japan’s not small. Yeah, because I was going to ask how that affects the United States. Well, when there’s that much intervention and they’re just dumping trillions of yen into the market to keep this thing afloat, the rest of the world is going to look at it and say, what, we don’t want the yen anymore. Right. And so then Japan could go into an inflationary spiral, in which case they’re going to have to raise their interest rates to slow down that inflation.
Now, what’s that going to do to the rest of the world when there’s competition between currencies? If in America you invest in a treasury and you get like five and a half percent, and then the economy in Europe is really horrible and they’re inflating the living daylights out of the euro, and they have to raise rates to 6% to slow it down. Well, now the funds, international flow of money that was going into us treasuries paying five and a half percent, now they’re going to go into the euro, which is paying 6%. See, there’s been very little, like none capital inflow going in Japan.
So they start raising their rates to slow down inflation. They’re going to start to take capital inflow coming in, which will ultimately help their currency tame the inflationary spiral. But this is going to have, it’s called competitive devaluation. So when currencies start competing each other for capital inflows, throughout the last 50 years, Japan hasn’t been a part of that game because they’ve kept rates artificially low, but yet they still have so much manufacturing that it was considered safe, a safe haven because they had meat behind their words, so to speak. They had manufacturing might behind their currency.
And so people would still invest in it even though that Uber low interest rates. This is all about to change. And I think it will change the competitive landscape, because what Japan has that a lot of other countries don’t is a really sophisticated manufacturing base in that country. Right, right. I mean, you look at all the tech companies and everything that’s there. I mean, good grief, it’s, it’s big. So I think that’s going to have a problem. I think ultimately that’s going to cause interest rates around the globe to start going up even further and faster because of competitive devaluation.
So you mentioned the entire earth, this zero hedge article, the soft landing lie an earth. The entire earth economic slowdown is already underway. Yeah, so we’ve heard about a soft landing, and Biden’s talked about a soft landing quite a bit. And his economist. We’re not going to. I agree with this article. We’re not going to have a soft landing because there’s too much debt. There’s absolutely no way that you can have that much debt globally in the multiple quadrillions of dollars of derivatives debt exposure, and expect the plane to come landing down softly, because if that much debt, what do you have to do? Print money to pay it off? Well, what happens when you print money to pay something off? It devalues that currency.
You have to raise interest rates just like what we talked about. You raise interest rates when you’ve got that much debt. Anybody that carries debt is going to feel the pinch even more. See, this is the giant pickle that they’ve got themselves in way too much debt. They have to print money to pay off that debt with a cheapened currency. That cheapened currency causes interest rates to go up, which now you’ve got higher interest rates to pay off all that debt. And it’s this vicious cycle, and we’re at the point lt of no return. We’re beyond the point of point break at this point.
You raise interest rates anymore and you’re really going to kill the economy because we’re in so much debt. But if you don’t raise interest rates, well, then you’re going to have more inflation. So what’s the better or the lesser of two evils? I don’t know. I wouldn’t want to be in that position. My guess would be you do what Reagan did, which was decided higher interest payments on your debt is actually the lesser of two evils because that’s how they slowed it down. Countries that didn’t do that would be like Venezuela, Argentina, Zimbabwe. They just let inflation kind of run its course and they didn’t raise rates fast enough to slow it down.
And then they go into a hyperinflationary spiral where nobody can afford to eat. These aren’t either one of those outcomes I just described. Those are the two outcomes at this point. One is you put us into a big recession because interest rates are high and we have so much debt. The other one is you go into an inflationary spiral and people can’t afford anything. It’s because they let it go too far. It’s because they had government intervention trying to keep rates artificially low like they have in Japan, like what we just talked about. Ultimately, that comes to an end when the rest of the world says, no more.
We don’t want your currency anymore. Yep. Well, but that’s where we are in America. The rest of the world doesn’t want our currency. Japan’s not there yet, but we are in America. And that’s a sad thing. Yeah, real sad. And it ends up going into my mind, thinking through, again the constant reminder that we’re talking about currency, fiat currency, and your ability to come in at this point in time for years now and warning folks and letting them know the value of precious metals, gold and silver. And we were, you know, we have that reminder on the show overall that, you know, if you had the ounce of silver, ounce of gold 100 years ago, it’s going to have the same value to buy something that it has today.
And so that’s the reminder that you guys send us. Yeah, I mean, there’s some universal truths. You know, there’s only one way to happen. There’s, you know, a borrower is a slave to the lender. You know, first corinthians 13. You know, when you talk about these three foundational things remain faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love. Right. If you don’t love your neighbor, if you don’t love yourself, you’re going to have a world that’s full of hate. Right. So there are some universal truths in this world that are all biblically centered. The biggest one to me economically is you can’t sustain on debt.
It has to be paid back. And we can’t. I mean, literally, it’s mathematically impossible to pay back. And this is where I start to be real spiritual about it, because God’s economy is not man’s economy. God’s economy doesn’t make sense sometimes. Like, it’s like, how can you do more on 90%? You know, God can do more with you on 90% when you tithe your 10% than what you can do with 100. It’s like, what? God’s mouth doesn’t make sense. But there’s a blessing to giving so much so that God says, test me on this and watch how the floodgates of heaven open up so much that you won’t have room enough to contain it all.
It’s like, all right, let’s test it. But now here’s the problem that I see with a lot of people. They read that and it turns into a prosperity gospel where it’s like, I’m going to give so I can get. No, you give because you love to get. Now, you give because you love to give. And God’s a giver, too, and he’s going to give you more than what you can handle. Right. So you give because there’s a blessing to giving. If you give to get, you violate the heart issue of it. Right. And in America, we’ve, we’ve turned into greed monsters and we’ve turned into, it’s all about me, and everyone’s a victim.
And it’s like, I, I don’t know, there’s, there’s spiritual consequences to the economic and political and social reality that we’re living in. Right. Right. Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, we, as we get into, you know, that particular thing, even your heart on the giving side. We’ve talked about this before. It is so wonderful to watch when you do have the opportunity to give and watch the change that happens to that particular individual because that’s normally where it has, where it has its impact is on individuals. And normally when I hear you get something back from the Lord, I used to say that there was the intangibles, too.
The intangibles of the family is, is safe. Yeah. When I go to work, my boss is very happy with me, and it’s just a blessing because everything seems to be going right. Everything I touch and work is doing wonderful. And so I used to always say that’s not by giving so you can get something back monetarily. That’s where I believe there’s a lot of false teaching there. It’s watching the blessings overwhelm you to the point, well, look how much love is pouring out in everything that we’re doing with our family at work and those that we touch.
And so that, that’s a huge one. The other one is watching what you’re doing and giving your company. I mean, I know you’re not going to brag about as much, but I brag about you guys, is that you’re able to take those that are just nervous about what’s going on because there’s a lot of nerve, nerves going around with the economy, and folks are reaching out to you and they’re like, look, I don’t understand. Why do I have to, you know, why should, why is it important for me to get silver and gold because there’s still folks that just hold back.
They say, I just don’t, I’m never going to do that or I just don’t get it or someday I’m going to call. I just don’t feel like, I mean, what this impact that we have to have silver and gold with us right now? Could you explain that real quick before we go? Yeah. So God gives us ways to navigate through every storm in life. We just have to be open to receiving it and reading the word and finding it right. And so having something that’s real, having something that’s accountable, you know, we can say the same thing in currency as we can in relationships.
You know, as men, we want we should have accountability partners. As women, you should have accountability partners because we all go through junk in life and in finance, in economies. How do you have, how do you have accountability in a currency where you have tangible backing? Right. When, when government is left to its own devices and they can print money at will, it loses all credibility and accountability and transparency and everything else because they ultimately start lying about it. So here’s where we’re going to. What I believe is, is more biblically centered out of debt, transparent.
God’s money, which is allocated into gold, allocated into silver. It’s thriving right now because of the foundations around us are eroding. And first and foremost, gold and silver act as a, not just as an inflationary hedge and as a good investment during times of inflation, but it can help you save your financial freedom and your privacy in a world that’s now starting to go digital and everything that we do is tracked and monitored and it’s getting ugly. Just a real quick story here. There’s been so much about cryptocurrency and people think, oh, cryptocurrency, it’s amazing. It can shoot through the roof and blah, blah, blah.
To me, cryptocurrency and precious metals have the same fundamental forces driving them. Number one is privacy. Decentralized blockchain. Cryptocurrency is private and there’s a ton of growth that we’ve seen gold and silver, private and it has a ton of because it’s a non reportable transaction when you purchase it and it’s something you take delivery of and the growth is amazing. Fundamentally, there’s very similar, but logistically, no one’s digital. You can shut it off if they don’t like you. Right. So that eliminates that. When our goal is to have safety and growth in the same equation, there is only one choice, just one choice.
So I tried to open up because I wanted to see how easy it was. I’ve never done it before. Like I want to put, you know, $500 into, um, a cryptocurrency. You know, I tried to buy bitcoin. Well, $500. So it took me like forever to open up this, this Coinbase wallet. And then I was going to wire funds over to Coinbase from, from my bank account. Well, I get a call, it’s like, well, we can’t send the wire. We stopped. It has to go to a special investigatory unit. I said, what? It’s not fraud. It’s like $500.
You can tell, you know, it’s me. They said, no, Hester, go to our national fraud center hotline because we have to find out who you are. So you have to provide a driver’s license, a picture id, you have to send in a bank statement and some kind of a balance sheet to show that you are real and how much money you have. It’s like, what, for a dollar 500? It’s like, no. So here’s where they’re starting to demonize central cryptocurrency because they don’t want it, because it’s not what central bank digital currency is, which is all about control and power.
I went through that stupid little exercise so I could figure it out. It’s like, I’m not doing this dumb thing. I’m not giving up all that information for this. It was a test and they failed. It’s awful. But all it is is control. They want to know everything about you. And this is why I like the privacy of gold and silver. Amazing. Yeah, you guys been a big support for all of us, especially our family, when we brought our IRA over to silver. And it’s just been a tremendous blessing ever since. And so thank you for this update once again.
Man, we hit all fences. Bernstein was definitely a big one. And the weak currency of the yen has an effect on America. I just didn’t realize that to explain it. So we really appreciate that. Looking forward to next week’s update again, folks. And we know.com forward slash gold. Very simple. Click on that website in the description box below and you will be on a wonderful adventure for your life with Dr. Kirk Elliott and his team. Thanks again. We look forward to next week.
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