Summary
➡ During the 60s, Nixon aimed to reduce the size of government agencies, which wasn’t popular in Washington suburbs. Nixon’s knowledge about JFK’s assassination also made him enemies. After Nixon, Gerald Ford took over and pardoned Nixon and his associates. The Nixon era was followed by the petrodollar standard, which allowed the US to print money without a gold standard. This system is now being challenged by countries like Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, who are selling oil for their own currencies, causing inflation in the US. The price of oil is determined by supply and demand, and despite the push for green energy, oil and natural gas will continue to be used for decades. The offshore oil sector is currently undervalued, but has potential for growth despite the Biden administration’s opposition.
➡ Offshore windmills cause whales to beach themselves due to the infrasound waves they produce. The Biden administration prefers these to offshore drilling ships. Companies like Transocean, which own drill ships, could benefit if offshore drilling is expanded. The article also discusses the importance of rare earth elements, which are used in many modern technologies. China currently dominates the global supply, but efforts are being made to establish a rare earth industry in the West. The article also mentions the importance of gold, which was once illegal for Americans to own but is now considered a valuable asset.
➡ The US government doesn’t buy much gold, only enough for the West Point mint to produce coins. Unlike other countries, the US doesn’t stockpile gold in anticipation of potential currency issues. Meanwhile, the value of gold and silver has been increasing. The article also discusses the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, suggesting that it may end soon due to Ukraine’s dwindling resources. The war has allowed Russia to test its military capabilities and strengthen its wartime economy, while the US’s ability to produce ammunition and other military resources is lagging behind.
➡ The U.S. had a strong industrial base during World War II, producing vast amounts of military equipment and training millions of people. However, today, we lack the physical resources and skills to replicate this. Despite having smart people and powerful weapons, our industrial base is thin and relies heavily on foreign components. This situation puts us behind other countries, like Russia, and emphasizes the importance of investing in our military industrial complex.
Transcript
Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. We are at the Watergate Hotel of Watergate fame in Washington, DC. It’s 2024, which it just happens to be the 50th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation. And that culminated, you know, a year and a half or so, two years, actually, of, you know, investigations and what have you. And it started here at the Watergate, the darkroom national committee. Watergate’s not just a hotel. It is had office buildings and things like that. The darker national Committee had an office here. And apparently some, you know, some. Some bad people did some bad things. As some congressperson once said.
They broke into the DNC to try to, I don’t know, steal their secret documents and find out what’s their secret strategy to win the election. Well, you know, along the way, they got caught. And, you know, these guys were just, you know, they were the low level little flunkies. They were little, you know, they’re little screwdriver guys, you know, and the COVID up, it’s not the crime. It’s the COVID up. You know, trespassing. It could be some misdemeanor sort of a thing. But the COVID up is, you know, kind of where it all filtered up to the White House and Richard Nixon, you know, and so, you know, lots of investigations later, you know, it turned out that Nixon had been recording conversations in the Oval office, which had been happening since the days of at least Franklin Roosevelt.
I mean, it’s not that he was the first to do it. I mean, as soon as they had recording capability, people were recording conversations at the Oval Office. It was a standard thing to do. LBJ had them, JFK had them, Eisenhower, you know, so when they found out that Nixon had these tapes, they subpoenaed the tapes. He fought it in court. The court said, oh, no, they got to turn the tapes over. The tapes had all sorts of, you know, impertinent comments, you know, the things that people say when they don’t think anybody’s listening and, you know, kind of like you and me.
There you go. And anyhow, for the good of the nation, you know, the elders of the Republican Party made a big show walking into the White House and sitting down with Nixon and, you know, and then next, I hereby resigned the presidency. It was like a one and a half, one and a half line letter, you know, White House here by resign. Rich Stein. Richard Nixon. Yeah. And he got on the helicopter, he went, you know, and off into history he went. And Gerald Ford took over. Well, you know, why’d that happen? How’d that happen? I mean, a lot of people didn’t like Nixon, that’s for sure.
You know, they had not. I mean, he served in the Navy in world War two, served very honorably. He was an interesting character in terms of his youth growing up in southern California. You want to, you want somebody who is like, from dirt farmer to high office, that’s his story. I mean, if you’ve ever, if you ever get the chance to see the Nixon library in Los Angeles or, you know, down in that area, it’s definitely worth the tour. They have the house that he grew up in, things like that. It’s fascinating place. So his dirt poor beginnings, you know, let him to college into the.
Into the Navy. After the Navy, he went into politics, among other things that he. The first thing he did was he defeated a Democrat. Oh, you know, you become a mark man when you defeat a Democrat. And I said he was a senator from California. He staunch at a communist. He went after a guy named Al Jergiss who had worked in the Roosevelt administration. Al Jurgis was a soviet spy. Oh, no, he wasn’t. Oh, yes, he was. We know because in the 1990s, the National Security Agency declassified the tapes of Aldrich being handled by his handlers.
The Soviets, they hated him for that. They hated him because he was Eisenhower’s vice president. They never wanted him to be president in first place. In 1968, Humphrey was. Hubert Humphrey was supposed to be president. He won. They destroyed him. It was a three way election. George Wallace ran a one, a big whack of, you know, the old south, you might say. And, you know, and Nixon won. He won the election. So then he wound down the Vietnam War. He didn’t just sort of cut and run or walk away. He kept fighting, which cost a lot of lives and cost a lot of money.
But it was LBJ’s war. LBJ is the one who was, you know, he had fed, you know, three quarters of a million troops in there and, you know, billions and billions of dollars and, you know, the bombers and the bombings, I want to tell you, I seldom tell this story. I actually had dinner one time with Henry Kissinger. I was invited to a private affair dinner with. Yes, that Henry Kissinger. And I’m just going to say this because we can talk, we’re all friends and family here. And I asked Henry Kissinger, I said, mister Kissinger, what was it like becoming national security advisor to Richard Nixon? In January 1969, you come into the White House and, you know, here’s the Vietnam war going.
It’s one thing to be on the outside as a commentator, as a professor at Harvard, as you know. I mean, you’d been to Vietnam, but you come in and now it’s your baby, you’ve got to do it. And he looked at me and he said, lDJ, in Vietnam, he handed us a flaming bag of shit. At Vietnam War. We had to deal with it. And so the sense that, you know, when you’re an outside commentator just saying you should do this and you should do that in your Monday morning quarterback, that’s one thing. When you’re the guy who has to make the situations, we’ll put more troops in.
Do we bomb some war? Do we do this? Do we do that? Are we going to kill our guys? We’re going to kill their guys? What are we going to blow up? What’s going on? And it’s a proxy war because we’re fighting the Soviet Union. We’ve got ships going into Haiphong arbor unloading weapons and can’t bomb those ships and can’t mine the harbor. And all this sort of. I mean, it was really quite a delicate thing. Nixon dealt with all that. He dealt with as Henry Gissinger’s the flaming bag of shit that he had been handed by LBJ.
And so then he runs for reelection in 1972. This whole Watergate incident happens during the lead up into the campaign and such. It’s this nasty little nothing burger sort of in the back. During the campaign, Nixon won in a landslide. And so he beat George McGovern. And George McGovern was, you know, was a classic Democrat liberal. And he was a world war two hero. He was a bomber pilot in. Not in the air Corps, the US and the US air force, but the army air corps. Very heroic guy in many ways. You know, he just had a lot of kooky ideas about economics.
And he admitted that later on in his life much later, he admitted, yeah, boy, if I’d have known then what I’d known now wouldn’t have held some of those ideas. But Nixon crushed it. And so he goes into 1973, the inauguration. By 73, he had wound down the war in Vietnam. But the knives were out for Nixon. They had to get rid of him. One of the things Nixon wanted to do, and this will get us into an investment thesis, because we could talk about this all day, but Nixon had taken the US off the gold standard in 1971.
He, in the back of his mind, was planning to get us back on something like the gold standard during the second term. It was going, yeah, okay, we did it out of necessity. We had to get inflation under control. That inflation was a legacy of the Vietnam war, all that spending on bombs and bullets and troops overseas and everything else. So Nixon had it in the back of his mind to get back on the gold standard. Never served long enough to do that. Another thing he did, which completely outraged the bureaucracy of Washington, DC, was he said that he was going to de escalate the bureaucracy in Washington, DC.
We’ve had this. We built up this bureaucracy since the 1930s, certainly in the forties during World War two, in the fifties and sixties during the cold War and the LBJ build up and the war on poverty, all these offices and Alphabet soup agencies, he was going to scale them back. Well, that doesn’t, that doesn’t go well in these suburbs that we see out the windows here, you know, Rosslyn and over there in Georgetown and there in Bethesda, doesn’t play well in the. In the suburbs of Washington, DC when you do that. And then another thing that Nixon said, and this, who knows, this may have been Doug nailed in the coffin or, you know, the stake in the art.
He said that he actually knew what had happened with JFK. And when you talk too loud about that, you really make a lot of enemies. So Nixon left and Gerald Ford took over. Gerald Ford, who served on the Warren commission, which had investigated and whitewashed, you might say, the JFK assassination. He pardoned Nixon. A whole lot of other people in the Nixon entourage, I mean, dozens of people, the lawyers and assistants of councils and things like that, they got prosecuted for all sorts of things. It’s a big long list. And the prosecution machine that they had, the war machine that really was a Democrat war machine against Nixon and his sort of inner circle, they went after these people for years, many of them.
They spent lots of money. They spent their valet fortunes. Some of them went to jail. And so then people were writing books about it. The heroic. The heroic Watergate, the investigative reporters. And Woodward. Bernstein and all that. I mean, Bob Woodward, a junior officer in the Navy who gets out of the navy, goes to work for Washington Post, which has long been known as an outlet for the CIA. If the CIA wants you to know something, they’ll tell it to the Washington Post. And then Woodward is a 20 something year old guy, high twenties, 27, 28 years old.
All of a sudden he starts getting fed this inside dope on the Nixon matter from the number two guy at. At the FBI. Yeah, that’s right. How many 27 year olds do you know are on the phone or talking or getting packages from the number two guys, the FBI. Who are you? If that happens, you are not just Joe Blow, the 27 year old gumshoe newspaper reporter, some shoe leather reporter out there trying to make a name for yourself. So the long way of saying, describing a lot of history, that the whole Nixon thing was an opinion.
They got rid of Nixon. They put in Ford. The deep state rolled on, and now they rolled on without a gold standard. Now we had the petrodollar standard, which Henry Kissinger, my dinner companion, some years ago. So we came up with the petrodollars. And that was a way of somehow equilibrating the dollar as the world reserve, reserve currency, because everybody uses oil. Everybody buys barrels of oil. When the south, when the principal producers, Saudi and the rest of OPEC, all say, well, we’ll only price oil in dollars. Okay, great. They’ve just given the US basically blank checks to write.
We can print all the money we want down at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing or create all the money you want down at the Federal Reserve, which is right down there. You could almost see it from the other side of the building here. And that’s 50 years of history there for you. That’s amazing. I didn’t mean to take so much time. But you asked the question, why did you have to let you know? Yeah, I lived through it. You can. I can prove it with my driver’s license. Yes, I’m that old. I was there. I was not this young.
I was watching you from the outside in. But, you know, I saw it all then. Here we are. So, gold energy. What else do I want to talk about? Why don’t we riff off energy? Because we had the OPEC oil crisis pretty much immediately after we got off the gold standard. And how did that OPEC oil crisis happen? It happened when the arab countries, Egypt, Syria, invaded Israel. Oh, there was a war in the Middle east. Gee, that sounds familiar. Wait a minute, a war in the Middle east with Israel getting attacked? Okay. And so Henry Kissinger again, he went over there and he shuttled diplomacy to everything.
He got everything. The Nixon made a massive airlift to Israel. I mean, just c five s and c 141s, just full of stuff, you know, just that they needed to fight the war they were going to lose. Nixon gave them the ammo literally in a matter of days. I mean the jets were flying and they prevailed. They prevailed in the war, in the 73 war. But because the US leaned so hard in Israel’s favor, OPEC embargoed oil to the United States. Well, they didn’t stop producing oil and selling it. They just stopped selling it to the US.
Which means that the tankers that would have gone to the US went someplace else, but the tankers would have gone someplace else. They could go to the US. It was really just a question of two ships passing in the night. Well, I know along comes Kissinger. He works out the OPEC, the petrodollar situation which has prevailed for, let’s say 50 years. Okay, great, good for us. It’s breaking down now with the brics. I mean, who are BRICS? Which began as a marketing gimmick for Goldman Sachs, but Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, but now BRICs includes Saudi Arabia, it includes Iran, two big oil producers.
Iraq has an application, big oil producer, UAE big oil producer. So I call it Brics OpEC anymore. So the day that they really go off the dollar standard, they still sell oil for dollars. Of course they do. But now they’re selling oil for chinese yuan, they’re selling oil for certain local currencies. It’s a bilateral thing between different countries. It disfavors the dollar. And so in that sense, as people don’t need dollars overseas, the dollars tend to come back home and they are a source of inflation here at home. People say, what am I going to do with all these dollars? Oh, I know, ill buy some real estate, ill buy assets or ill buy stocks and bonds.
It helps to lift the asset bubble. Now you might think, well, gee, thats great. I like it when my house goes up in value. Yeah, you do. Except that when you sell your house, where are you going to go? Because the house down the way that you wanted to buy to move into that went up in value, too. So youre trading one expensive house to try to buy another expensive house. You’re going to sell your stocks, pay your capital gains. And when it comes with inflation and everything, how much did you really make like our 40,000 point Dow if you account for inflation of the last, say three years.
Three years with a certain group in office, three years of inflation. That 40,000 Dow is a 32,000 Dow in terms of what’s worth three years ago, 32,000. Anyhow, what’s going on with energy? The price of oil is supply demand. There is a global recession going on. Its a quiet recession. Its being masked by massive government spending all over the place, USA, China, Russia and its war spending. I mean theres an economic boom in Russia right now. They need young guys to work in their factories. You cannot be unemployed in Russia today. Why? Well, because their economy is booming.
Why is their economy booming? Well, because theyre fighting a war. Youve got guys at the front, youve got people working in the factories. Everybodys got a job. But same thing in the US. Oh, our GDP looks great. Well, yeah, it looks great when youre spending a trillion dollars every hundred days that you dont have. So what does this mean energy wise, long term energy? Go for it. The green new scam is a green new scam. Dont worry about it. I say dont worry about it. Profit from it. You, me, you out there. We’re going to be using oil, natural gas, for decades to come, centuries to come.
We won’t be there. Do it. Live long. We won’t live long enough to see when people don’t use oil and gas. Right. Natural gas, big companies, ExxonMobil, Chevron things. Yeah, sure. All those guys. One sector that’s really, really, really beaten down, although it’s had a stealth recovery, is the offshore oil sector. I’ve written about it, the in lifetime income report. You’ll probably see it in the root awakening. But it has to do with drilling offshore on the other continental shop. Now that’s a global thing. It’s not just the US Gulf of Mexico, it’s Europe and the North Sea.
It’s offshore Mexico, it’s offshore South America, Brazil, offshore Africa, the far east, it’s everywhere. Now the Biden administration is immensely anti offshore. I mean they have done everything they can not to lease, not to grant permits. The only things they want to build offshore are these big huge windmills which create this low frequency noise that kills the whales. Literally. Seriously, I mean it. The whomp wump bump of these windmill blades going around sends these what’s called infrasound waves through the water and it really messes up the whale’s navigation system and they wind up beaching themselves. So they go crazy with it.
It’s sort of a tinnitus for whales that’s caused by those offshore windmills. I mean, I’m not making this stuff up. The biologists tell me this. And so that’s, that’s what the, that’s what the Biden administration like, they don’t want, you know, offshore drilling ships out there, you know, poking bulls in, you know, a mile under the water and all that. Uh, I’ve been on offshore drill ships. I’ve got ten on the platforms. I write about it in this article that you either saw or you will see up there. And some of the offshore plays have had really nice recovery so far, but it’s the beginning of a recovery.
You know, you missed the first couple innings of the game, but there’s still more innings to come. There’s still. We’re not even at halftime of the football game to mix my baseball and football matches. I’ll just throw a few out there. Companies like transocean, rig rig. They own drill ships. Well, and in a world where a drill ship is a billion dollar capital investment, you don’t just go out and buy one at the used drill ship. Water something. No, they own drillship. They have them. And so when, when the offshore sector recovers, and its already started to recover overseas, call it a play on perhaps a Trump win.
Trump comes in and he opens up. Offshore drilling companies like Transocean are going to do really well just on the momentum of political win. Diamond Offshore, noble energy, drillers like that. Some of the offshore companies that work offshore oceaneering, international oceaneering, wonderful company. Just incredible company for services for the whales. Everything from prospecting the seabed to building the platforms or anchoring the platforms and inspecting them once they’re there. All the way, cradle to grave, all the way to decommissioning them 15, 2025 years from now when they have to take the steel and the pipe out. And FTI, I think great companies that work offshore.
So there’s just a couple of things. Energy is solid. Don’t worry about it. I mean, if there’s a recession, sure. Of oil goes down. Once the recession passes, the world is using oil, and it will only use more oil, and it’s going to get a lot of that oil from offshore. And I think offshore is an underappreciated play right now. So we like offshore stuff. If we can turn our attention to rare earths. You just wrote a great piece of the route for rare earths. For those who haven’t read it yet, why don’t you just explain all the great stuff.
Okay, rare earths. I mean, okay, guys, back to chemistry class in high school, and you looked at the periodic chart on the blackboard or on the hanging on the wall and all those, you know, period names of the elements and atomic numbers and all these little numbers and stuff. And, oh golly, what’s that stuff mean? Down at the bottom were these little things that didn’t seem to fit into the chart. Well, they do, but the charts, not big enough. So they put them on the bottom. But you have the lanthanides and the actinides. You know, the lanthanides are the rare earths, the actinides of the radioactive stuff.
But there’s always some smart kid in the class where this guy’s at the bottom. And the teacher would, don’t worry about it. They’re not on the test, okay? I’m just telling you right now, they’re on the test, okay? They are on the test. I mean, we are recording in front of a, you know, a camera. That camera wouldn’t work without reverse. Your cell phone wouldn’t work without reverse. The light bulbs above our heads are, you know, have rearers in them. Your car has rearers if it’s a gasoline car. I mean, you’ve got rearers in the magnets that control things like, you know, opening and closing the windows, you know, electric vehicle, hello.
Traction motors, batteries. Rarers. The airplanes that are flying out there up out of the Reagan national airport. Rarers. No, rare earths. Your life becomes primitive in a hurry. Who runs the rare earth supply of the world? Gee, that would be China, wouldnt it? 15 years ago, China ran about 95% of global rare earth supply. Today, after much, much effort and investment and billions of dollars of marketing, and from it, that’s down to around, oh, China runs, oh, maybe 84, 83%. It’s not that the rare earths aren’t out there. I mean, there are deposits in the US, Canada, South America, Africa.
There’s lots and lots of deposits. So the Chinese have really, they have really made a national effort, literally a national level effort controlled by their ministry of commerce, with handholding, with their Ministry of defense and Ministry of intelligence. They have made a full court press to lock up supplies around the world. Mineral sands, ore deposits, what have you, and then they’ve made the investment in processing materials. It’s not an easy chemical process, but it involves knowing what you’re doing. But it’s nothing that we can’t do in the United States either. But we just don’t do it because in some respects it’s easier to print dollars and buy them from China than it is to actually set up a plant and actually make them.
So part of the Infrastructure act and the Inflation Reduction act of the last couple of years has been that we want to get a rare earth industry in the west and certainly in the United States. Out in Utah, there’s company I mentioned energy fuels in blanding, Utah, like in Utah, it’s in sort of southeast part of the state. Landing. Tiny little town. Keep little town energy fuels. You, you, you, you. Now, as you might gather from the ticker, they were a uranium company. But when you have the same ore that you get uranium from, they get vanadium, which is another.
It’s an alloying agent for steel. And then many of the same minerals that have radioactive issues in them. You know, uranium, thorium, also carry rare earth. So they are just standing up and debugging out a rare earth circuit at the energy field. So great company. I visited the site where another play that I’ve always. I’ve liked for a long time, but they really are kicking into high gear now. It’s called ucor, u c o r e, but it’s u u r a f. I believe it’s the ticker. I visited. I have visited their pilot plant in Kingston, Ontario.
It’s north east of Toronto, about, I don’t know, about 130 miles or something, right on the lake. They’ve had immense cooperation from the government of Canada, the province of Ontario. That’s where they basically really pioneered the technology. But they’re building a plant right now in Alexandria, Louisiana. And Alex, and you say, well, why aren’t they building an Alexander? They’re building it on the site of the old England air force base, which has these big, long runways, so you can fly stuff in from around the world. It’s not too far from Mississippi, which means you can poly cargo right next to the railroads, and you can bring stuff in by rail right next to Interstate highway.
So, yeah, so it’s location, location, location, and they’re building a facility there to process rarer. So those are two sort of ideas that in the rare earth side of things. So no rare earths and your modern world goes back 150 years or something. So we absolutely need them. But we’ve also been talking about inflation. We’ve gone through energy and rare earths. We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention gold. What can you say? I mean, when Nixon took us off the gold standard in 1971 was $32 an ounce, and then not long after Nixon resigned. And it had nothing to do with the resignation.
It just had something to do with the politics of it. In late 1974, I believe, after Nixon Grossein Congress passed a bill that made it legal for americans to own gold. Now, it had been illegal for american stone gold since 1933, Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order that basically called in the gold. He did it under believer he did it. His legal authority for doing it was, I believe, the Espionage act of 1917. So hes using this sort of anti spy act to call in the gold. But all the people dutifully turned in their gold coins and what have you.
Some people did. They kept them in the basement or buried them in the backyard, whatever. Those coins all went to the US Treasury Department. They melted them down into these big 400 ounce bars. A very, very short amount of time. They built Fort Knox at Fort Knox, Kentucky, at the gold repository. They built the gold depository at Fort Knox, if we want to say, and allegedly that gold is still there, although there are very, very, very few photos of the inside. And no, Goldfinger was not filmed on scene, you know, wasn’t filmed inside the building. No.
Okay. Great movie. Yeah, great movie. You know, great. But it’s. It hasn’t been audited. We really don’t know what’s there. I’d like to believe the US treasury is not just lying through its teeth at us that, oh, yeah, we have this many ounces in Fort Knox. Okay. But the US has both. The US does not pay too much homage to gold. I mean, that’s right. We produce a lot of gold in the United States. Nevada has been a mecca for gold mining for decades. I mean, other places in Alaska, gold mining. But in terms of how much gold does the us government buy? Not that much.
The gold that it does buy, it buys to supply to the West Point mint. West Point, as in like Army West Point in New York, the Hudson Valley? There. There’s a mint there. If you think about West Point, that’s where the army football team is. Yeah, they’re there. But right down the road is the West Point mint. And it has big vaults full of gold, raw material. And then they produce gold coins that you can buy on eBay or with your coin shop or what have you, the US gold eagles and things like that. So that’s the only gold that the government buys.
The us government does not buy gold to put into Fort Knox, to restock Fort Knox or to stock it up even higher. Unlike Russia, China, numerous other countries. Yeah. Turkey, Egypt. I mean, lots of stans. I mean, India, south african countries, southern african countries. I mean, they are buying gold for their own national treasury, for their own national account, because they prudent central bankers anticipate that someday there will be a problem with using dollars and whatever comes out on the other side of it. We don’t know what we’re going to be using as currency to trade globally with.
We dont know what is going to happen if there is a dollar problem. But one thing that you can pretty much bet the ranch on, and they are, is that somewhere in the equation its going to be, how many ounces of gold do you have? How many pounds of gold? Probably eight months ago, gold was around $1,800 an ounce. Not too long ago, gold was around 2400. So its a big move in seven, eight months here. And is it going to go higher? Probably, yeah. Early this year, I think we were both talking that we’ll likely see $2,500 gold before the end of the year.
We might see it way before the end of the year, any day now, any day now. And then companion with gold is silver. Look at silver. Silver was 1819, $20 an ounce. It was in the low teens, mid teens, for years, in the last decade there. But now it’s being bid up in China, the physical side gets bit up every night, and then when the sun goes down in China and the sun rises in the west, the bankers, lammy, they knock that price down for paper gold. The Chinese, they’re buying paper, or they’re buying real gold, real silver at their exchanges, and they actually put it in their pocket and they take it home.
You know, that they buy a couple of grams or whatever, a few ounces silver coins, gold coin, whatever, they take it home, they put it in their little security box, and in the west, very, very few people own a physical gold. We at paradigm, a lot of us own some element of gold or silver, we talk about it all the time. And a lot of our readers, viewers out there in viewer land, maybe you own gold. So, okay, great. But if you go up and down your street, if you drive up and down your street for a thousand yards one way or the other, you know, you look at all those houses or all those apartments or all those with, how many of those people do you think own a, own it, own even one gold coin, own even, you know, I mean maybe they have a little silver dollar that their granddad gave them when they graduated from Boyce county or something, I don’t know.
Yeah, it’s not part of the culture in the US, but it was part of the economy for centuries. I mean, gold was the backbone of the american economy till 1933. Silver coinage was key to the us economy until the 1960s, when LBJ. Oh, yeah, him, a dumpster fire Johnson, when he pulled the silver out of circulation. Well, he did it because the inflation was such that the silver in a quarter was worth more than the $0.25 value of the quarter. We’ve covered Watergate, we covered Kissinger, Nixon. We covered rare earth energy, rare earth gold. Russia runs rain.
Last thing. Russia. Ukraine. Well, we’re over two years into the war. Russia was supposed to lose long ago, but they didn’t. Ukraine was supposed to lose long ago, but they didn’t. In a sense, you’ve got two russian armies fighting each other. You’ve got the real russian army, and you’ve got the ukrainian army, which was trained by the Russians. And in so many cultural ways, Ukraine is Russia. Call it Russia, light Russia, prime Russia, whatever, two slavic christian nations going at it head to head. And it has been a bloody, horrible war. I mean, I’m not telling anybody anything they don’t know, but the tragedy of the whole thing is that the war is going to come to an end.
No war goes on forever. It’s going to end, and then people are going to look back and they’re going to say, how’d that war start? Why did that war start? Could we have stopped it? It’s kind of like how we do with Vietnam. Why didn’t we go to Vietnam? Well, it was Eisenhower. Well, it was Kennedy. Well, yeah, but Johnson was the guy that loaded up the troops on the troop ships, and he’s the guy that authorized the bombings and the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and all that. But when you start to dissect what happened to that war, I think a lot of people in the us intelligence community, right up the river there.
Right up there. Yeah. Places like Georgetown, places like the state department right over there. A lot of those people. Defense Department right down there. A lot of those people going to have a lot of egg on their face. You know, that’s putting it really nice. I mean, another way of saying it is that we have some war criminals collecting government paychecks here in the. In the US, and look how the International Criminal Court just indicted Netanyahu and Galant over in Israel, and they indicted Hamas as well. Yeah, they’re nicely balanced. We’ll invite Hamas and we’ll indict Israel.
Okay. I mean, I don’t want to use them as the model of how to do it, but I think quite a few Americans who have their fingerprints on the Ukraine war from 2014 and before, all through the lead up the eight years from 2014 to 2020 when it started, a lot of american diplomatic and military and intelligence fingerprints on a lot of things that happened there, and it led to the war. The stories that you hear about how a month and a half into the war, there was a deal in Turkey to bring the war to a conclusion.
And we’ll make a new line on the map. We’ll pull our guys back and pull your guys back, and we’ll call it even. And somehow that got cut off by the powers that be that didn’t want it to happen. There’s a lot of people in Britain and the UK who they should not take any international airline flights because you might land somewhere and you’re getting up with a summons or a warrant. So how’s it going to happen? The war is going to end? I think the war is going to end fairly soon. The ukrainian side has basically run out of troops.
They’re drafting everybody they can draft. They’re drafting 65 year old guys and 17 year old kids. And they’re out of bullets, they’re out of artillery, ammunition. They pull all the m one tanks back. All, I mean, they had 31 of them. They’ve lost eight of them. The Russians have taken the destroyed m one tanks and they’ve got them on display in Moscow in Victory park, just all the destroyed capture equipment from the war. So Russia has tested all of its weapons, all of its electronic warfare, all its missiles, all its doctrine. They’ve cycled hundreds and hundreds of thousands of troops through combat.
They figured out who are the officers who know what they’re doing? They’re the ones that are dummies. Get rid of them. The generals have figured out who are the good generals, who are the dumb generals? Got rid of them. And the Ukraine war, the special military operation, whatever you want to call it, has created a very, very powerful Russia that has a full wartime economy going. They’re cranking out the ammunition, cranking out the vehicles, cranking out the jets, the cruise missiles that you name it. Here in the US, on our site, our ability to produce ammunition and such is not able to match that.
That’s for sure not good. Here’s a takeaway point on all this. That military power is the first derivative of energy and industrial power. If you have energy and if you have a vast industry, you can produce a military. That’s what the US had in world War two. We had energy. We had an unused industrial plant. We could produce all the steel we want. Produce thousands of tens of thousands of ships, hundreds of thousands of airplanes, millions of combat vehicles, billions and billions of rounds of ammunition. We had facilities to train 12 million people in uniform, you know, millions others in factory work and in other things to support the work.
You know, the US had all of that in the 1940s. We don’t have that today physically. We don’t have the, we don’t have the mines, the mills, the factories. We don’t have the skill sets, you know, the tool and die makers. We don’t have the designers. In another article that I wrote in for the rood, the other. A couple weeks ago when I visited the battleship Missouri. Yes. New Jersey. Oh, New Jersey. Oh, my God. I visited the battleship New Jersey in Philadelphia, at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in drydock. You know, it’s been on, it’s been, it’s a museum ship wore at Camden.
Yeah, it was a great piece, too. And it’s about two, three weeks ago. I don’t know, but if we can. It’ll put it in the, we’ll put it in the description. Delaware. Yeah. So it’s been moored at Camden, New Jersey, for 25 years or something like that. And, you know, the crud grows on the hull and things like that. You know, the ship has corrosion and ship, they towed it down to dry dock number three at the Philadelphia Nivier, which was the dry dock where the ship was actually built, you know, so it’s like, it’s truly homecoming.
They put the New Jersey in there. They drain all the water. They get under the ship. It’s sitting up on these big, huge concrete blocks. I’ve got photos in my, in the, in the article if you haven’t read it. And they power cleaned that baby. They took all the tread off. They took the paint off out of the steel. Then they surveyed the steel to make sure the corrosion wasn’t too bad. They’d have what was. And if there’s any problems, any potential leaks, new caulking, if this rivet rusted, they put a, welded it over all, and they’re repainting it in the litchboards.
That’s a story of american industrial power in that era. The keel. Well, the ship was authorized 1939, before the US came in the war. The keel was laid in 1940. And they constructed the shell of the ship and everything. And they launched it on, on December 7, 1942, one year after Pearl harbor. And this was the biggest, the biggest, most powerful battleship the US ever built. And when I say the biggest that is actually a true statement. I got to get this in because we built six of them of this class. Only four of them ever really cut water and sealed the seas.
The other two got sort of laid up because the war ended, but we built four of them. The New Jersey is four inches longer than its three sister ships. And so it is the longest battleship ever built. And so why is it four inches longer? Because at the Philadelphia Navy Yard where they were building it, a lot of the workers were from New Jersey, and they knew that they were building a ship that was the namesake of their state. So every time they could get away with it, they would cinch something a little bit, a quarter of an inch here, an 8th of an inch there, put a little more weld here.
Instead of butting the steel together, they’d put it a little further apart and weld the difference in. So at the end, when they launched the ship and the surveyors went out, they said, well, this ship’s four inches longer than it should be, and go, yeah, because that’s a new Jersey. That’s our ship. That’s a very New Jersey thing. The United States had that ability then in so many ways. We don’t have that capability now. Yeah, we produce great systems. We have really smart people. We have really powerful weapons. It’s a very thin industrial base that supports it all.
And much of that industrial base, a scary amount of that industrial base, relies on foreign components, down to the rare earths, down to the magnets that go into the drive motors and the magnets, the electronics, the rarest. And the electronics, things like that. Russia is right out there now at the cusp. We are way, way, way behind the USA. So something to take away, you know, from an investment angle. Yeah. You know, investing in, you know, the, investing in the military industrial complex. Those guys are in business forever. They’re going to be making money for a long time to come.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can’t get wrong with the american defense industry right now. Byron King, thank you so much for joining us once again and all your contributions. Everyone read Byron’s articles of lifetime income reports, strategic intelligence, and the route. And I’ll see you next time. Thanks for joining us.
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