Month: April 2022

April 29, 2022

High Oil and Gas Prices Are Here For A While – get used to it… 

Today we’re talking about oil. I know it’s not that exciting, but you know what, it affects everything else we need to talk about it. Because we heard a certain politician who happens to run the country, sort of make a comment about how there’s 9000 permits and the oil people should be drilling.  

We’re going to talk about why they’re not, why they may not and when they may or may not in the future. I can’t wait to get into this little subject. Because you know what, you can listen to the press, and you can listen to the politicians. But if you use your own common sense, you’ll get a complete understanding of what’s going on in the oil market. So, you know, oil is now topped $120 a barrel, if you use Brent North Sea crude as your gauge or its top $212 a barrel. If you use you know, the Texas Intermediate crude, West Texas, Texas crude, the stuff we make here in the United States, and the price is not letting up, right? And what everybody’s trying to do is get you distracted, and they’re telling you what it is. And what it is, I’m going to give you the facts here. So, you can make your own decision. And I don’t care what side of the political spectrum you’re on,  I let you make your decision. I’m not going to try to skew it. But I will, let’s say, use common sense.  

First of all, let’s start with an economics discussion. Right? When there’s a scarcity of something, the price of it will go up. If there’s demand for it. Well, we need oil, right? We drive every day, most of us don’t have that $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 up to 100,000 to buy a Tesla, or a Porsche for $200,000 electric car. Most of us have, you know, gas powered cars that’s been created over the last 100 plus years, right? It’s not like it’s a big surprise that we use oil here, right? But the politicians want you to think that it’s a bad thing. And all of a sudden, it’s killing the environment, which, in my opinion, not a lot of proof that it’s the oil that’s killing the environment. But you know, we can say that the Earth is getting warmer, and it’s because of co2 emissions, we can have that debate. And that debate happens to be winning in the political climate that we have today. But that’s not serving you. So, if you’re on that side of the debate, then you’re one of the people that’s like, “let’s get let’s get more electricity.” Well, when you get more electricity, going to electric cars, that money that’s got to be produced somewhere, right? So, without debating that, let’s talk about oil, right? Because we’re not all going to start driving electric cars tomorrow, you can’t just turn it around. Tesla doesn’t have enough of them. None of the other companies are making enough of them. And so, we’re faced with the reality that we are an oil-based world, not just country, it’s not the United States, that’s going to change the climate, it’s the whole world, right? And the whole world has to communicate and cooperate on this, and they’re not. And that’s okay. So, we have the reality we have to face. We can’t just wish and hope. I hope you don’t look out of your garden, go, I hope there’s no weeds, I hope there’s no weeds, I wish there weren’t any weeds, you have to acknowledge that there’s weeds in the garden, and then you got to pull them. So, let’s pull some of those weeds today.  

Let’s start with the fact that the world is industrializing, more and more. So, we don’t hear much about it in the West. But African nations are industrializing, like at exponential rates. All these little countries in Africa that we kind of left for dead. And, remember we saw commercials about people starving over there. These are economies that are now flourishing, right? So, let’s go with that one. Let’s go with some of these other economies in Asia that are now flourishing because China has gotten to be pretty expensive as a producer that’s going to Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos and other Asian nations that are now taking part in the industrialization of their own countries to supply the west with goods just like China did. So now there’s more competition. What that means is; anytime there’s productive productivity and production and an economy that advances the economy. I mean, if you think about an economy of 1000 years ago, it’s not like they were driving around in cars or anything like that. Only the rich people even had horses if there were horses, right? And it wasn’t like everybody was cruising around using energy. I mean, they had candles if you were rich. So now we’ve got all this abundance of energy. Why? Because of petroleum, right? And we have solar energy, and we have wind energy, and we have nuclear energy, and we have all these other energies, coal energy, and that’s supplied the industrialization of our country of Europe, of Asia and all these other big western and eastern countries that have gone so far.  

But now the other rest of the world is catching up. You think they’re going to all move over to electric cars and pay twice the price of an electric car when they can use a combustion engine? No. So, it’s the industrialization of the world that’s going to keep oil prices up. If you think oil prices are going back down in the next couple years, I’m pretty sure you got another thing coming. Right? Because they’re not, because that’s one factor. That’s let’s start with that.  

Number two, in this country, and in a lot of Western countries, there’s a lot of bad juju around oil, right? If your oil, you’re bad, and you’re killing the environment, and you’re creating global warming, and we’re going to regulate you, we’re going to pass this $97 billion, a trillion-dollar Green New Deal, and we’re going to, regulate you out of business. And when new regimes come in, they put in regulations to prevent you from drilling and doing all these other things. And then they come out and say, “Yeah, but we got 9000 permits that people are not using to drill. Why aren’t these little companies using the drill?” What would you do if you had regulations staring you in the face if you had the rest of the world, and Greta Thunberg, and you had climate deals being made around the world that some countries don’t have to abide by, but we have all of a sudden do? Like, would you go out and invest millions and billions of dollars in exploring and producing more oil in a country that doesn’t want you to? I don’t think I would. I wouldn’t want to do anything in a country that doesn’t want me to, right? If they’re going to vilify me and make me the bad guy, I’m not going to do any favors for them. And now the government is saying we need to produce more oil, I don’t understand why. Well, they’re not using the 9000 oil wells that they have? First of all, it takes a couple of years to even know if there’s oil there, and to even get the oil produced in those things. And so, oil has been depressed, and not depressed, while the price compared to these prices. But it’s been a lot cheaper over the last couple of years. So, there hasn’t been a lot of incentive. And then as the new regimes come in, they’re like, “well, we’re not going to go up, produce more oil now. Because now they don’t want us to, because they’re telling us they’re going to regulate us out of business, they’re going to make us make our cars be much more efficient, which means we’re going to sell oil.” Why would it want to produce and spend money, when we don’t even know how much longer we’re going to be able to produce? There’s too much uncertainty, you can’t have it both ways. Either you’re going to vilify them, and you’re going to be upset that your oil is going to be expensive, or you’re going to say, “You know what, we need oil, let’s encourage them to get oil and let’s mean time, you know, make it so that people buy electric cars or whatever”, right? And they they’ve been doing there’s a $7,500 tax incentive to buy make you buy an electric car. That’s what made Tesla what it is today, if you bought an electric car, you got $7500 bucks. Like right off the bat, that’s our money that we paid Tesla owners to buy those cars, Elon Musk is no dummy. He did that on purpose, right? That’s how the company became a trillion-dollar company. It’s not brain surgery. 

And then it takes, on top of it, a long time to get to get those things producing. And then after you produce them, they might say, “You know what, we don’t want your oil anymore anyway.” And let’s not forget this oil has gone from, let’s say, $46 a barrel a couple of years ago, to $112 a barrel, more than doubled. If you’re still producing the same amount of oil, you produced before you just doubled your money, you doubled your sales. Why would you go out there and incur all these costs, when you could just double your sales, then you know what we do? We let them buy their stock back. So that drives the stock up. All the people that work there are getting stock options. So, they’re all getting rich, right? Because they’re taking the money from the extra money they make from the oil, they’re driving their stocks up, which is completely legal. You may not like it, but it’s legal. And there’s really nothing wrong with it. But instead of investing back in the earth, I wouldn’t invest back there. I drive my stock up so that I get rich, right? They have shareholders; the shareholders aren’t all bad people. You might own some Exxon and some Valero and some BP. I mean, I don’t know what you own. But if you own some of those, you’re probably happy that they’re making more money, right? So, you can’t blame them for trying to make more money and using whatever system they’re going to use. Like you put all these pieces together. I don’t think you want to be in the oil business. And if you are, you’re fine making twice as much money as you were making last year before. And then they’re going to blame Ukraine.  

Let me just read you here how much we get Russian crude oil, and petroleum product exports to the United States represent 8% of all its imported oil, and less than 2% of the US supply. So, if you want to go over there go well, we have a Russian war with Ukraine. Yes, it does enter into it because the demand for oil goes up in the rest of the world. Europe really gets a ton of its oil from Russia. And so that conflict is creating an increase in price over there. I’m not doubting that. I’m just saying we can’t say that because there’s a Russian thing going on that’s why it’s gone up.  

Then we’ve got OPEC, like OPEC is the Saudi Arabia and Yemen and, and Kuwait and UAE and all these people that produce oil they get together, and they go, “why would we want to make more oil when the whole world needs us to produce oil”, and they’re willing to pay twice as much because they got to, they have to pay, right? They don’t want to produce it over in their country, they think, “Oh, the oil in their country only has a cloud above its country.” Like if you make oil in the United States, it only affects global warming over the United States, like people think about it, it’s a world, right?  

And then China doesn’t even show up to the last climate accord. And they’re the ones that are burning the most amount of coal. So, this is all a bunch of BS, guys. I don’t care what side of the aisle you lean on, or you land on. But you got to understand it’s not all you think it is. Some of it is common sense. I hope you’re picking up what I’m putting down here on common sense, but oil is a supply and demand thing.  

And then finally, I’m going to tell you, like I always do, all these things, it goes back to the Fed. And we’ve been printing and printing and printing in the last few years.  We’ve printed more money in the last 10 years, than 80% of the time we’ve been in existence in the United States. And if you look at the curve, it’s going parabolic on how much money we’ve printed, and that means that that money is sloshing around the economy. Okay, that’s demand. People are going to want to drive bigger cars or want to travel to places, buy airline tickets, you know, use oil.  Because I don’t know if you noticed, but pretty much everything around us is plastic, right? You get in your car, and the whole thing is plastic. You can look around your house, it’s plastic.  You look at your monitors, your laptops, they’re all plastic. What do you think that comes from the plastic fairy?  It comes from oil, petroleum, right? So, it’s all going to go up. And it’s all going to continue to go up. And you’re going to continue to pay more unless we drill. And we give incentives for these companies to drill and want to be here.  

But we’re driving the price of everything up, right with the Fed. And spending all this money as governments do all around the world. And we’re driving up the cost of things, this is not going away. And the last thing I’ll say is that this is a tax on poor people, right? Rich people can handle paying as they’re flying around in private jets, they can handle buying airplane tickets, they can handle driving big cars, and paying.  You know, I paid $82 to fill up my car today. And you know, two months ago, it was $52.  And it’s going up and it’s staying up. It’s a tax on the poor. Anybody that needs their car to go to work and come home is going to pay more for that. Right for that trip. Anybody that wants to go buy an egg? Well, that egg came because somebody drove it to that store where they used petroleum/fuel, diesel and gas in the truck to drive it to the store. But if that price goes up, then all of a sudden, you’re paying more for the eggs. Like it all works together. But it all starts with the Fed. It starts with the responsibility of the government. That’s why our debt is exploding. That’s why our dollar is debasing at a rapid rate. That’s why I think Bitcoin is going to be the future. Maybe what? Maybe, you know, other commodities like oil and gas and agriculture, and real estate and gold, silver and platinum will be as well. So, you’ve got to start thinking about your future because everything is changing. Everything is changing, and it’s changing because of oil. So don’t believe the BS politicians spew at you about why people aren’t drilling. Use your own common sense. And figure out your own wealth strategy when it comes to oil. And when it comes to putting other things together for your own wealth future.  

April 18, 2022

Tesla More Tesla and Twitter 

One of the big stories lately, and actually over the last couple of weeks has been Tesla. And there’s a couple of pieces of news about Tesla, I’m not going to get really into it, because, you know, I could open up a video podcast and go over the charts. And, that’d be fun, too, but not today. So, this week, we have Tesla reporting earnings. So, Tesla’s reporting earnings, Elon Musk, as we all know, is the richest man in the world. And he’s also the CEO of not only Tesla, but SpaceX, and now he wants to be the CEO, or at least he wants to own all of Twitter, or at least 51%. He wants to blow out this crazy board of directors that hasn’t been doing anything for shareholders over the last several years. The stock in the last I don’t know, maybe 10 years, is still around, where it IPOs where it came public, right? So, there’s, there’s no real value being created or created for the shareholders. And so, Elon Musk is like, “Wait, there’s a there’s a big censorship problem. And they got rid of the last president, they put lots of censorship messages on some of the people’s messages that they don’t agree with, other people get banned from Twitter or get put in Twitter jail.” And Elon Musk, who claims and I believe him is a free speech guy and he feels this is not right. He stated that he is going to buy Twitter because he can afford it right? For $43 million. At $54.20, is what he came out with last week. He says I’m gonna buy Twitter for $54.20. Well, the stock when he started to accumulate, now he owns 9.9% of it. But before he started to accumulate it, it was in the low 30s. It ran all the way up to 50, just underneath or a little bit higher, actually, where he was promising to buy the company. And the board said, “whoa, whoa, whoa, we don’t want this to happen. We don’t want Elon Musk to come in here and start snooping around all of our algorithms.” “And, we don’t want him to know why we were censoring and who’s paying us.” Maybe, even though you know, a couple of stories that I’ve read are the government is paying them to censor and that the government is in cahoots with their algorithm to make sure that some of the right leaning tweets don’t get out. I don’t know what’s true.  All I know is that Elon Musk claims that he’s a free speech guy. And so he doesn’t want the censorship.  

He’s like, “let it all go out there.” There’s going to be some bad stuff, there’s going to be good stuff. But it’s not fair to set for somebody’s opinion, to be censoring, something they don’t agree with. Especially if you look back a year ago, some of these sensors were censoring things that turned out to be true. Right? This Hunter Biden laptop thing, they were censored last year, they were kicked off of Twitter, and they turned out to be true. Some of the things with COVID, or whatever you want to call it. They turned out to be true. I don’t know what’s true and what isn’t. All I know is that Elon Musk is like, “hey, let’s have more free speech. “ 

This country was founded on free speech. It was founded on debate, and Elon Musk wants to put his money where their mouth was. People were like,” well, if you don’t like the censorship, why don’t you just start your own Twitter?” Okay, now he’s buying Twitter. He wants to buy Twitter and people are like, no, no, no, we can’t have him buy Twitter. So, I want to see if he could do it. I think it’s a really interesting game that he’s playing, right? He’s basically said to the board that he is not negotiating. He is giving them an offer to buy their stock way higher than it is in the marketplace. He also stated “Without me, I’ve accumulated a bunch of shares. So I’m a big shareholder. So you need to listen to me, I got the dough. And I’m gonna give you $43 million for your company, when you know, before I started buying it, it was only worth about 25 million.” 

He backed the board into a corner. So, the board is like, “oh, man, if we don’t accept this”, and by the way, the board doesn’t own very many shares. It’s really funny. They’re not that invested in the company. Then if the board rejects his offer, the shareholders sue them. Because the board says “well, we can grow we can grow users a lot faster than Elon Musk”. Well, they have proven to not be able to do that. Jack Dorsey left more than a year ago, and the company has done nothing but go down,if you look at the chart, and so there’s that question right? If you don’t accept his offer, then the stock if he sells it, stocks going to go right back down to where it was and all shareholders would have lost value, most probably right. And it might even go down even lower. because they’re like, “well, Elon Musk isn’t going to compete against this, or he’s not supporting this anymore, or whatever.” If they do accept his offer well, they’re all fired, right, or at least that’s what they think is going to happen. He, he’s already basically tweeted, look, “they’re incompetent, they don’t know what they’re doing. They need to shake things up, we need to, we need to have some shareholder value built back in this company, we need to have free speech.” And the people that are there, they’re starting to quit, they’re starting to freak out. There’s lots of stress. I’ve read all kinds of crazy articles about people are stressed out now, because you got most of my other company doesn’t agree with their political views. Well, too bad, right? You know, this is a free country. And if he wants to buy it, then he wants to buy it. And you know, you don’t want to work there, you don’t have to. But there needs to be some kinds of checks and balances with free speech in this country. And I think Elon Musk is making a shot that he can do that. Now whether he could do it or not. I don’t know. But the guys seems pretty capable of doing stuff, right? He like he puts up rockets that go up and they put all these satellites up, right? Cheaper than NASA ever did cheaper than any other country ever did. And then those rockets come back and they get reused. And they land just like they took off. Have you ever seen one of these rockets land because it lands on its own but right, it’s like ticks off and it comes back turns around lands, it looks like it’s taken off in reverse. It’s amazing. 

And he’s figured out a technology in rocketry to be able to reuse that rocket, NASA didn’t do that. The government didn’t figure out that method. They were the smartest scientists in the world, this guy figured it out. This guy figured out how to, “hey, Tesla, come here and pick me up from the valet spot”. And your car gets out of the parking spot without a driver and will come and pick you up and take you to your destination without you even having to touch the steering wheel. He’s figured that out. Nobody else has figured it out, Twitter hasn’t figured it out. The government hasn’t figured it out, critics haven’t figured it out.  

And this guy knows how to do stuff, right? So just no doubt that he’s going to be able to do what he says he’s going to do is pretty remarkable. He’s done a lot of things before. He bought, and started Tesla and now he is buying Twitter. And you know, he started and sold Pay Pal, he was one of the one of the partners in that.  

All right, now let’s get to the numbers this week for tests and I have a huge position in tests on my hedge funds. It’s something that I’ve owned for more than two years. It’s a fantastic company, it’s a well-run company. It’s growing at about I don’t know, 200-300% a year in earnings, it’s killing it in revenues. The revenues are going up, you know, 25%, 30% a year. Amazingly, everybody wants to, you know, electric car, I don’t know how practical they are? I tell you; I drive 600 miles to get to some places. And I don’t want to stop and have to stay overnight to be able to charge my car, I don’t want to wait in line for a two-and-a-half-hour charge to happen. So, for me, it’s not a really practical solution. The batteries are expensive and the batteries are tough to get out of the ground, plus it ruins the earth. There’s lots of arguments that you can make about all these, all the different sides. I don’t care about that, I care about Tesla as a company, and as a stock. For me. It’s an excellent company.  

So, they’re coming out with numbers on Wednesday. The stock today being Monday is kind of flat. And I suspect it’s going to be flat. But there’s a lot of volatility that usually comes into the stock during numbers. Now, the expected move, the implied move in Tesla is about 60 to $68 coming into numbers. So, this stock could go down $68 Is the street expects or could go up $68, the street expects. My suspicion is the world wants more electric vehicles. And they got the truck coming out. They got different models coming out of the Tesla. Yes, there’s some supply chain issues. But there is a lot of demand for Tesla. So, if you’re betting on Tesla, by the way, this isn’t financial advice, this is my opinion. I have my own funds, I don’t know your situation, go talk to your own financial adviser and have him or her talk to you in or out of Tesla. I’m just telling you; this stock has been fantastic for me over the last couple of years. But I don’t like playing stocks going into numbers, I’m really conservative. And when a stock moves $68 either way on the open, after it makes numbers, is too risky for me. So, I protect myself, and I protect my investors. And we you know, try to play offense and defense which is critical. When a company reports earnings, make sure you’re protected in these numbers. And let’s just see what happens with Elon Musk, and the Twitter saga. I suspect either they’re going to take the offer, that by the way, they pass a poison pill, which basically dilutes him and makes his shares worth less as other shareholders are more favored. Because he’s trying to buy the company. This is totally unfair stuff, adopting a poison pill, because the board doesn’t want to get fired like that is not in alignment with shareholders. But anyway, we’re going to see this play out over the next couple of weeks. Hope this was interesting for you. It’s a fun little piece of news to see what Elon Musk is tweeting what he’s doing, how he’s positioning, how he’s backing that board into a quarter. I think it’s a really fantastic story and We’ll see what happens.  

April 5, 2022

Russia is Stealing Assets and Businesses of Foreign Companies…

Today we’re going to talk about what Russia is doing to nationalize some of these companies that are doing business there that because of the crisis going on with Russia and Ukraine, they’ve decided to pull back and now Russia has an answer.

So, we know Russia has invaded Ukraine. Now. I don’t like that. And most people don’t like that. It’s like big, stupid, meanie head going into another country. But you know, we can get into political implications. And I’ll just say this, you know, the Zelenskyy and his country is not perfect. They’re not a perfect democracy. There’s, there’s some thuggery going on on that side. So you know, there’s a reason that why that Russia is going in there. And there’s a reason that we are also being told that Russia is the bad guys. But without having to pass judgment on that. I’m going to give you some evidence that Russian is the bad guy, right? That Putin is the bad dude in this good situation. But maybe you wouldn’t do anything different.

 So there’s all these companies that have been doing business in Russia, since you know, the wall came down in 91. And you know, McDonald’s has gone in there. Starbucks has gone in there, Burger King has gone in there. You got subway that’s gone in there, KFC, Marriott Hilton, you know, all these big companies gone in there, because of course, you know, they were they wanted to make money. That’s what their job is. But their job really is to protect shareholders. We’ll get to that in a second.

So let’s start with all the crazy stuff that Russia is starting to do. They’re starting to realize, hey, the world is cutting us off, because they don’t understand us. Right? They think we’re the bully. And maybe they are they probably are. But you know, we’re all you know, around the world. We’re saying, You know what, we’re not going to do business with Russia, that’ll show them, we’re going to put sanctions on them, we’re going to freeze their assets around the world, we’re not going to let them trade in dollars, we’re going to, you know, not let them use Swift, which is the transactional system for banking, that they need us to be able to close business. So what would you do if you’re Putin and the whole rest of the world is shutting you down, you’re going to figure out a different way. So he’s got work arounds the petro dollar, which is going to weaken our standing in the world as the world’s reserve currency. That’s bad for us, because it’s weakening the dollar. Now the dollar is being undermined because of this war, or because of our stance on the war, depending on how you look at it.

If we’re the ones that are freezing their assets, maybe we have a lot to do with us not be remaining the world’s reserve currency. Russia has got a bunch of assets from the West, they’ve got a bunch of assets from Europe and the US and all these other countries and companies that came in to do business. And now they’re all saying, Well, you know what, we don’t like what Russia is doing. So we’re not doing business there. Now we’re suspending our operations or closing them down.

Well, how do you think you would feel if you’re a shareholder of McDonald’s, and they decided to close the 200 McDonald’s or the 500? McDonald’s? They’re in Russia, like they spent a lot of money putting those franchises in those buildings in because McDonald’s is a real estate company, not a burger company, just so you know. And they put all that in, and now they’re saying, well, we don’t like Putin. So we’re just leaving.

Okay, interesting decision. But other companies are doing the same thing. So let’s start with the oil and gas business. So BP, and this is indicative of all the other companies BP put in $50 billion in investing in pulling oil out of the ground in Russia, you know, Russia is full of oil and natural gas. And so BP invested $50 billion, but now they’re like, we’re not gonna go over there because he’s immediate $50 billion, just gonna walk away from it. Okay, fine. That’s just one company.  Shell, Japanese companies, other companies, on and on these companies are all making a claim, which is their right. But if you’re a shareholder, I don’t know if you’re kind of in agreement with that, right?  You might have a little bit of an issue with it.

What the Russian government has done is they’ve passed these new laws that have basically said, Okay, guys, you don’t want to do business in here. Fine. You got five days to get your business to start back up. If you don’t start your business back up in five days. We’re taking them over we’re nationalizing that we’re making them Russian. We’re making them Russian assets, you will lose them forever.

Now you have 30 days to go in there and appeal or something like that. But after that, it basically goes to the Russian business community. So right now, Russia’s administrative arm is taking over these businesses, you got in five days, right? And nobody’s going to go back in five days and go you know what, let’s get our barista is going back up. And you know, they laid everybody off. Well, Russia doesn’t like that. So it’s just like, hey, there’s a Starbucks there. There’s a McDonald’s there. There’s a Burger King, whatever the whatever the store is, people need coffee, people need burgers, people need whatever, why do we need to wait for the Western companies to come back in and start doing business?  We got all the managers, we got all the baristas we got all the people behind the line workers will just tell them to go restart the thing that will make them go restart the thing, right, so that we get the economy going. And now Russia just takes that asset, which could, you know, this is going to add up to multi billions of dollars or maybe trillions. And now it’s become their assets. They’re keeping them in their economy, and now their people are going to be trading back and forth. And we’re not going to get anything out of it. Not that we’re going to do it, but the shareholders of these companies are not going to get anything out of it. They’ve made huge investments.

Now let’s talk about some of these pipelines. Russia has put pipelines all over Europe, right? They’ve invested billions and billions of dollars to put pipelines all over Europe. And that’s so they can sell gas, natural gas all over Europe, because Europe gets cold, and you’re upset. Well, you know, we don’t really like the fact that we have fossil fuels. And we don’t like nuclear, because it’s so dirty, they shut down their nuclear power plants, they shut down a lot of fossil fuel, and they put up solar and wind. And then when the sun doesn’t shine to the wind doesn’t blow, they have no energy. So, they need to buy energy from Russia, which is a cleaner fuel, that’s natural gas. But now in Russia, saying, you know, we’re not going to sell you any of this stuff. Because you guys are all boycotting us, and you’re putting sanctions on us. And Russia holds the cards. If you want some heat this winter, you’re going to have to play some ball.

But let’s go to the next one. Nordstrom Nord Stream two, which is their newest pipeline, they invested huge amounts of money to put this pipeline directly to Germany, Germany was like, cool, we need a pipeline, this is a great deal for us. Everything’s perfect. We got solar, we got wind, but you know, we got our own direct pipeline. And they invested five and a half billion dollars them in the rest of Europe, to get some of this gas in through Germany to the rest of Europe, gone $5.5 billion will be totally nationalized. This will be a Russian asset. And they can charge whatever they want for their gas. And you know what, there’s no alternative because everybody said, “Oh, well, well, let’s save some trees. And we don’t need fossil fuels in our backyard. So now their economies are going to be constricted and strangled because of stupid political decisions. Okay?

These are the people that we put in power, they put in power, and they make stupid political decisions. And now you’re seeing our companies make stupid political decisions. Fine, you have the right to make a decision based on your beliefs. But you’ve got shareholders that are not going to be disenfranchised because of your stupid political beliefs. You have to make the beliefs business first. Or you should at least state from the outset. This is the framework at which we’re going to do business. We don’t do business with thugs so that people that are investing don’t get caught up in your ideology.

So, we talked about oil and gas. The mineral sector is incredibly important. Russia produces fertilizer and wheat, and they produce bauxite for aluminum, they produce tons of stuff, okay. It’s a huge country. It’s like our country, United States, gigantic country, they we produce a lot of different things, right, because we have different climates. Anyway, without getting into details. Those are all getting nationalized. These people came in put in huge amounts of money to pull iron out of the ground, bauxite out of the ground, gold out of the ground, oil out of the ground and gas. And now Russia is just taking it over. They’re making part of their economy. I don’t know, that doesn’t sound like globalization is a good idea to me, guys. I don’t know, if you’re a globalist, you might want to rethink your position, or maybe you just dig in and you go, this is good. And screw everybody. We’re going to have to pay a bunch more money, but you’re going to be one of those people who pay more money for everything. And fuel is the first thing and fuel affects everything. All right? Manufacturing, Ford has three plants, three plants in Russia. Plants are not cheap, right? So, they invested a huge amount of money in all these plants. And these robots build these cars and these employees to come in and they lay everybody off. And Russia says, well, fine. Now it’s funny because when I was a kid, we went and bought a Lada. It was a car it was basically a Fiat and Russia bought all the old moldings and engines and everything all the parts for a lot of they bought from Thea because Viet said well, we’re going to go into something else. So, Russia bought them and they when they were in communist under communist control in the US Aren’t they basically all they did was produced a lot, they didn’t have any other cars, they produced these Ladas. And I think they had trucks. So, everybody had a Lada if you had any money to be able to drive, we ended up getting a Lada.  My family got it when I was about 16. And they cruised around Europe with it, and we used it in Greece for a little bit. And then we actually left it in Yugoslavia, because we didn’t want to pay the tax on it. So, we use this little car, cute little car, had very little power. But it was a nice little four door sedan, and it looked like every other four door sedan that came out of Russia, it’s just ours happened to be yellow, just like the color of this background. And so, we had a lot of, well guess what they’re going to have in Russia going forward, they’re going to have a lot of Ford’s, or they’re going to call them something else. I don’t know, some Russian name. And that’s going to be the car that primarily people are going to have, guess who built that technology, Ford did. And you know, I don’t know, I think there’s some US taxpayer money in that Ford deal, maybe as much as GM. But, you know, maybe we had a little part in building that. And they just left it behind. We leave a lot of assets behind countries these days for some reason. And it’s just helping out the rest of the world. I guess that’s what we want to do. We want to just print fake money, and drop it on the rest of the world and give them all kinds of stuff. And then they compete with us.  

By the way, if you like what I’m saying, please give me a like and subscribe. If you’re on YouTube. Please give me a follow and a rate and review. If you’re listening to this podcast. We’re just getting it rolling. I’m hoping it catches on. But I really you know, I like putting my messages out to the world. And you’re probably not hearing this stuff on mainstream media.  So, this is you know, this, this is interesting to you, then, you know, please help me out. It didn’t cost you anything, just a couple of seconds. Maybe do it right now. Pause it, go do it now. That’d be awesome. 

And then, you know, you got all these franchises, so Burger King, KFC and Marriott. And what they’re trying to do is, so these are franchises, right? So, you say, “Well, you know, their franchises, the people in Russia, or the franchisees bought the franchises from the franchisors and you know, the shareholders are going to get hurt”. But the franchisees, the people in Russia were like, “Hey, we don’t think we should shut this thing down. We want to keep our people employed.” They’re looking out for their own country, like we should be doing. They’re looking out for each other, we got to we don’t just stop because some, you know, Western company decides that they don’t want to open the McDonald’s. No. So, Russia under this new law that they’re passing, they say you got five days to reopen this thing in full at the capacity was at before, which clearly nobody’s going to do. And since they’re not going to do it, they’re going to take it over. Some oligarch is going to take over these businesses, right? And they’re going to buy another billion, you know, $50 million yacht, and we’re going to complain that somebody else did it when it’s kind of our fault, like, not our fault. Okay. You know, let’s not get into that. But it’s obvious like, wouldn’t you do that? If you were Putin, and you had maybe a beef legitimately or not. And people said, “Well screw it, we’re not going to go into your country, and do business anymore.” When you kind of say the same thing. When you go, “Hey, guys, anybody want to go run that McDonald’s?” Hey, manager, go back in there, bring back your people, go run, that thing will start paying you again, you start making some money, then you won’t have to starve Right? You would do that, like, I would totally do that. If I were the thug that ran Russia, totally, I’d be all about it. Because it’d be like free real estate, a free business. And even if they later on strike a deal to have them come back and get their asset back, you at least get to run the business for a while makes money, they’re going to try to avoid this by partially staying open under the guise of humanitarian aid. So, some of the pharmaceutical joint ventures are going to try to keep producing some pharmaceuticals, baby food, water, some big multinational corporations, they’re going to try to stay open.   
It’s probably not going to work. Because the law says you’ve got to go back open the way you were before you quit. So, you have to get back up to that level of business. And it’s going to be pretty hard to do. Nobody wants to go back there. Nobody wants to, you know, lose face. And especially in five days, you’re not going to be able to mobilize. And by the way, who’s flying in there, oh, I forgot to talk about the biggest dealio going on Russia has.   Okay, so you know how airplane flying has been increasing for the last, you know, 20 years. And they’ve been trading in all the old 737 and getting these new 737 and 737 maxes and, you know, oh, beefing up their capacity and energy efficiency and things like that. So, everybody upgraded their fleets. Well, that’s expensive. So, what happened is these companies little fleet leasing companies popped up. So, they would buy an aircraft for say, 100 million. I don’t know what oh, 737 goes for these dates a little outside of my budget, but you know, $100 million, but they need like 10 of them and United Airlines or Aeroflot in Russia. And so, they didn’t have the, you know, the billion dollars to buy the 10 aircrafts. So, a leasing company would come in and against the collateral, they’d be in the leasing business, right? So, now your airline company would be in the right business, they’d be flying airplanes around and doing customer service, what they’re good at. And the leasing company would be good at the capital, but you know, acquiring the jet by putting collateral against it and making some interest, so they’re fine. But now there’s $10 billion worth of aircraft floating around Russia. And they’re not doing a lot of flying these days. So, Russia basically said, you know, what, we got $10 billion worth of aircrafts, I think we’ll take them, grabbing them if you want them, but nobody’s going to go get try repossession of 737 airplanes. I like that show that’s on, you know, whatever that channel is that people go with repossess airplanes like this, it’s 737. Like you got to go into Russia, which they’re not letting people in. And then you got to go figure out where the plane is, like, those are gone. These leasing companies are going to start failing, right and left, because they’re not going to be making these payments, they’ve just given up $10 billion worth of assets. Now, I don’t know if they can withstand that, or not?  It is probably going to certainly hurt their earnings. But I don’t think it’s going to be good. But it’s going to be good for Russia. Russia’s got all these new businesses that they’re in charge of now, this happened in Venezuela, under Chavez, when he just started nationalizing Clorox and all these oil companies and all these big multinational companies that came in there, he said, “You know what?” I think we’ll take those. And we just left. And they’re still using them. 20 years later, it’s been happening, guys, now it’s happening in Russia. So why are we going out and building factories and building businesses all around the world. And then we just poof, let them go. It just to me the craziest thing. Bottom line here is, this is all going to be good for Russia, especially if things calm down, and they go back to normal, because things always come back, come down and go back to normal. And once they go back to normal, there isn’t going to be no normal for these people that that drop there 50 or 100, or 150, McDonald’s, or Burger King franchises or Marriott, hotels, these are going to be Russian assets. And they’re going to be run by the Russian government probably and going to be sold to a Russian oligarch, like all the stuff was done in 1991. When that walking, tumbling down, and they had all these assets that were state owned, and they didn’t sell, they went to their buddies, they said, “Hey, man, I got this big oil company, you want to deal?” And this Abramovich dude made these huge, incredible deals, he knew all the people that were the players, and bought these oil companies. And now he’s got a $450 million yacht that he cruises around the world. It’s because of corruption. And if you don’t think there’s corruption here, or wherever you are, you got another thing coming, guys, quit listening to the media. Listen to shows like mine, listen to shows like Rogan, listen to people where you’re getting information that is not just from one source, I get my information from researchers all over the world. And that’s why you’re hearing about this. And you may think that Russia doesn’t affect you. Or they’re making it affect you with the news or get you all riled up. Oh, those poor people in Ukraine. They’re just innocent. And they probably are, but their government isn’t so innocent. Let me tell you, my Intel says their government is pretty thuggish right there, they’re pretty oppressive. I’ll just tell you one more thing. My new sources say that Zelinsky, the President of Ukraine, who’s wearing all these, you know, cool little camouflage outfits and making himself look like the hero. He just shut down 10 opposition parties, he just shut down opposition media so that he’s controlling all the media. That doesn’t sound like a big democracy that we’re fighting for right. Now. I feel sorry for the Ukrainian people. The Ukrainian people are not the government. Right. But let’s not think that that’s some great democracy that we need to protect. And you know, they’re using our money. So, we have a right to kind of know what’s going on there. So, we should know what’s going on. That’s for a different podcast right now, just know that Russia is going to create this huge, huge windfall from the fact that they created a war across the border, which maybe or maybe they don’t have a reason to, to have that war, but they’re going to create a huge windfall, and it’s going to be great for the Russian economy, longer term.

April 4, 2022

Are there 2 ways to make money?

You know, there’s two ways to make money. There’s the fast way and the slow way. And the fast way is the slow way. Listen in to Mark’s recent Podcast with the very inspirational, Nick Spohn.  They cover many topics such as:

  • Asymmetrical risk – this is the idea that you can have a massive upside for a very little downside.
  • The stock market and cash flow
  • Pillar Strategy
  • Mark’s Cash Flow Machine System
  • Covered Calls
  • Mindset and Emotions
  • And so much more…

Podcast viewers and listeners can download a Free Report on how to create Passive Income from your investments by requesting the Report called the Regular Paycheck Strategy:

FREE REPORT

To hear the full podcast recording, click below.  Enjoy!

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