We are right in the middle of a war, well actually we’re not in the middle of it. It’s not our war, but we’re certainly interested in it because the press keeps throwing it in our face. And, there is some oppression going on, it’s been happening for thousands of years. And maybe we should feel like we’re somewhat responsible because we really are. But we’re good though, we’ve got a solution, we’re going to be sending in Kamala Harris or the vice president to solve the problem, just like she solved the border problem, they sent her over there. And they said, “Here, we’ve got a problem at the border, make sure you go check it out”. And that’s what she did. She went checked it out, and she’s solved the problem. And I guess they’re sending her over to Ukraine, and she’s going to solve the problem. She’s our vice president. So, you know, everybody’s going to listen to her, because she’s the second person in command underneath Joe Biden, everybody listens to him. So, I saw this clip, not sure if you saw it, but you should want to watch this clip. Now, Fox News, and I’m not trying to be political. This is actually a little bit tongue in cheek but I just think this is so funny. That, we’re trying to have with this really serious thing, with millions of people being displaced, with people’s bank accounts being frozen, with people being killed and bombs going off in a country, and a real calamity is starting to happen in another country. And we’re sending in probably our most unserious person to solve the problem. I don’t know how much gravitas she has around the world; I find it to be interesting that this is the choice rather than sending the President or sending somebody with some serious demeanor, they send this person take a look.  Here is an excerpt: “It is time for us to do what we have been doing and that time as every day. Every day, it is time for us to agree. This whole thing about the border, we’ve been to the border, we’ve been to the border, you haven’t been to the board. And I haven’t been to Europe. And my pronouns are she her and hers, she would look down at me and come on, what do you want? What do you want, and I look back up and I said, you’re going to literally see the craters on the moon with your own eyes, I’m telling you, we must together work together to see where we are, where we are headed, but also see it as a moment. Yes. Together, it is the perspective of a woman who grew up a black child in America, who was also a prosecutor who also has a mother who arrived here at the age of 19 from India, who also you know, likes hip hop. What do you want to know?” So, we think that this is our person, that is, I think she’s like a BS artist or whatever. Like, I don’t think even if you voted for her, whether you didn’t doesn’t really matter to me, you can’t look at this person and go, oh, this person is going to be able to interface with high level people around Europe and Putin, and be able to really solve this problem and figure out a way to credibly, you know, take care of the whole Ukraine Russia situation, like, I don’t think you’re thinking clearly and you can really think that. Maybe you can? Anyway, my opinion, I can’t. I can’t possibly look at this person. I just think it’s funny that this is what we do. We’re obviously not serious about being involved in solving this problem, right? If we were, we would say, “Okay, let’s turn on the pipeline. Let’s start to drill a little bit more, let’s figure out ways to get oil under control, we’ve got an inflation problem, that’s going to get 10 times worse”. Oil hit $115 A barrel today, never thought I’d be saying that this year. Right. There was a time a couple of years ago, where it was minus dollars, right? You they paid you to buy oil, right? But for a while, you know, a couple years ago was at $46 a barrel for a long time it was pretty stable. We’re paying $2.49 a gallon. Now it’s going to five and in six dollars, California, you’re going to see $10 gas, I think by the end of the year. Why? Well, you know, we’ve got some global warming and let’s shut off all the nuclear plants because they’re so bad for the environment. They’re not.  They’re actually one of the cleanest forms of energy that we have. But the Germans were like, “Hey, let’s shut them off. And we’ll turn on our windmills and our solar panels”. And now they’re really screwed because now they’ve got to rely on Russia to give them oil and gas. And since the United States decided to shut off their capacity, when we were the world’s producer of oil, now we’re the net importer of oil. We’ve got to import Russian oil. So, our costs are going to go up, that means we’re competing against the Europeans. And their costs are going to go up, like, nobody’s got a plan. Or if they do?  This is the plan. The plan is to make it so expensive to drive a car, that you’re just going to throw your car away, go buy an electric vehicle, by the way, you forgot that electricity is produced by a lot of other things other than the sun and the wind, which only work part of the time. Anyway, I’m getting off on this. But to me, this is a whole podcast about how serious are we as a nation? How serious are we as a world of creating stability. Now, we don’t have stability anymore, we have the potential for a madman that’s going to explode some nukes, because we wanted to get rid of our gas cars and go to electric cars, or because we wanted to put a few more solar panels in.  Nobody’s really thinking of the repercussions of being a weak power. And the United States, in my opinion, love this country, but we’re at the end of our strength. We’re at the end of being a superpower in the world.  The new superpowers in the world, are Russia and China. That’s the way it is.  Everybody that is in Europe, they’re weak. Germany is now you know, they are reliant on Russia, and China.  And, if you started to look at the world politics, you would see, this all makes total sense. This is all calculated, everybody makes fun that Trump gave a compliment to Putin. All he did was say, the guy’s a genius, right? Like, you don’t have to like him to know that he’s got a plan, right. And his plan seems to be working. He’s driving everybody else’s oil prices up higher. And we’re financing his war, because we’re paying more than a billion dollars a day to Russia, by just driving around in our cars, so that he can fund this war. Are we going to stop driving around in our cars? Oh, maybe we should have thought of that, before we empowered this plan. So, say what you want about him, or say what you don’t want about him. But the plan is, the point is, he’s got a plan in his mind. And his plan is probably way, way, way ahead of the people, like the person that I just showed you, who’s supposed to be the person that’s going to go to Europe and solve all of these problems. Because when she went there before, a couple of months ago, she said she had it under control. Don’t worry, it’s all good. We got out of control. I’m going to go ahead and rein everybody in. And now you see what is happening. So, we’re clearly not serious about it. And it’s affecting our wallets. This is the wealth architect podcast. And I want you to know, whatever you think about politics, at the end of the day, it comes down to money. And so, you’re going to be spending way more money on the things that you buy. One of the things you buy is oil, and everything else that you buy relies on oil, right? Everything gets trucked to your store. So, when the store is paying more for diesel and gas and truckers, you’re going to be paying more for your lettuce and your eggs and your meat and your dairy. Right? So don’t think this is Putin over there doing something. This is affecting your wallet. Right? Our foreign policy is affecting your wallet. And this is the way we’re handling the situation. 

So, the markets have been crashing for maybe three or four weeks, and at the beginning of January, the beginning of 2022. And the market had just gone down and down and down. In fact, the NASDAQ was down about 17% from the time around Thanksgiving, the end of November. And so, the market is crashing. Why? Well, because the Fed came out and said, “we got to get on top of this inflation situation and that inflation has gotten out of hand…”.  

What are they doing? They’re going to raise rates as if that’s going to solve the problem. Well, when you raise rates, you put brakes on the economy. Why is that? Well, first of all, you raise rates, and it makes it harder for people to borrow. It’s more expensive. People don’t want to spend more money on mortgages. And so, people quit spending money on mortgages. Well, when you quit spending money on mortgages, people quit selling houses, or building houses, or buying houses.  

And so, the housing market starts to slow down. When the housing market starts to slow down, what happens? People get laid off, when people get laid off.. What do they do? Well, they look to the government for money, or, you know, they take a wage cut. But that’s not good for the economy, you need velocity of money, you need money moving around a society to be able to sustain it. That’s the way we’ve set up our capitalism, right? We’ve gotten people addicted to consumption, instead of production. And so, now we consume things. But what happens when people don’t have jobs where they can’t buy the handbag? Or the Gucci shoes or the Nikes? Right? They quit spending money? Well, when you quit spending money, people quit paying taxes, or pay less. And it’s a downward spiral. So without getting into the debate of whether the Fed can really raise rates on a sustained basis, because they said they’re going to raise it four to six times this year.  

I don’t think they’re going to be able to even do one, they’re going to try it, and it will spook the markets like it already has. And they’re going to go, okay, okay, because their real mandate now is not inflation, their mandate is not let the market go down. Because, you know, politicians are the ones that appoint them.  

So, I think they’re painted into such a corner. And the question is this, is it going to kill the mortgage market? And therefore, is it going to kill the housing market? If the Fed raises rates, what people hope and what Jerome Powell, the Fed Chairman hopes, is that he’s going to raise rates a little.  

And they will say, well, it’s only a quarter of a point, it won’t kill the market. So, we will raise it another quarter point, the market gets used to it. But see, it won’t. You can’t, if you take a tissue, and you hold it up on top of your head, and you start to blow the tissue up, the tissue will rise.  

But eventually, the tissue will come back, because you’re going to have to take a breath. So, Jerome Powell is hoping that the market just takes a little breath, and then the tissue will continue to rise. But the problem is, he doesn’t have much breath anymore, right? They have no more tools in the toolbox. And so that’s what’s happening to the government, to the Fed, is that they’re screwed, he can’t really raise rates, because the markets will continue to crash.  

So, I think they’re going to cause a big housing bubble to burst, they’re going to cause a mortgage problem, they’re going to kill the housing market, it’s going to create a recession. I think it’s beyond a shadow of a doubt. Now, if it’s a depression that comes out of a recession, we’re in real trouble. Because we’ve weakened the dollar, we’re at a real risk of losing the US Dollar as the reserve currency.  

But we put sanctions on Iran over the last 10 years because Iran’s the bad guys right? We deem them bad guys. And so since Iran are bad guys, we tie up all their money.  

Whether you agree or not whether we should do that. That is what the US does. It is that “where’s the big bully in town”? We then say “don’t let anybody do any business with Iran”. So, Iran says, “well, we got all this oil, who wants some oil”?   

We don’t want to make America mad at us, right? America’s big and strong. We don’t want to make them mad. But after a while people are like, you know, “screw America”. They’re blowing everything up. They’re, bombing people that don’t need to be bombed, and they’re printing money that doesn’t need to be printed. And they’re, ruining the dollar. We’re using it and they’re debasing it.  

Hey, Iran, maybe we come up with a little something else to use to buy your oil. They’ve come up with a makeshift thing that they’ve cobbled together other than the dollar to buy their oil.  

And now they’re doing Bitcoin.  

So now that Iran, one of the biggest oil producers in the world, is telling people just pay us in Bitcoin, go around the dollar, we don’t need it anymore. You know, where else is this going to happen?  

It’s going to happen in Russia, where everybody’s trading oil and gas and everything else in Petrodollars. And Russia’s like, “I think we have a weakness here”. We’ve got a weak president over there in the United States, potentially. And if he’s weak, then maybe we’re strong, and we can weaken the dollar. We’ve wanted to get off this dollar reserve system for a long time. Why don’t we go ahead and weaken the dollar? Or forget about the dollar all together? Let’s look to use Bitcoin. They haven’t said they’re going to do it yet. But you know what they did recently, they came out and said:  

We think that Russia can be a big player in the mining business. Pretty good. That doesn’t sound like an outing of Bitcoin to me. And then one of their members of parliament, and their financial ministry came out and said, “we’re going to figure out a way to regulate Bitcoin, so that it’s fair to everybody”. They didn’t say anything about banning it, or getting rid of it like China says they’re going to try to do. Because China wants everybody to be on their central bank, digital currency. That”s their crypto.    

Russia is like, “hey, why don’t we get people trading Bitcoin over here”? And then we can trade oil with Bitcoin. And then other people, other countries will accept Bitcoin, and we can blow the US out of the water and the US is no longer the reserve currency. US is having supply chain problems anyway; people are going to move over to some new currency anyway. Russia doesn’t have to create it and have to compete against China. China doesn’t have to create it and, you know, blow everybody else out. It’s already there. Just use it.  

That’s a real potential.  

It’s really interesting to see what’s going on in the world when it comes to this. Hope that was helpful. I just wanted to shed some light on those subjects.  

We’re going to go through what I consider a fool’s errand, and that is to predict 2022. Now, I normally don’t like to make predictions, but you know what? A lot of people ask me for them. So, listen, I’m not a financial adviser, I don’t get financial advice. This is all just opinion, talk to your financial planner, get your attorney involved, whatever, but don’t come after me. Because this is not financial advice, it is just my opinion based on 40 something years of being in the markets. So, I want to start by telling you, look, I don’t want to make a prediction, but I’m going to make a prediction. If we go back and we see this age as well, great. If we go back, and we see that it doesn’t, great. But the bottom line is that it educates you, and starts to get you to think so. The first one right off the bat is very micro, and that is that Amazon will underperform. What I’m seeing in Amazon, I’ve ordered a couple things from them. They’re not showing up at my door, the orders are getting lost, they’re getting canceled. I’m hearing about it happening to a few other people. And there’s a little chink in the armor of Amazon and I think it’s the supply chain. Now everybody says, oh, no, no, they got their own ships, they got their own shipping. But, you know, if there’s a supply chain happening to Walmart, there’s probably happening to Amazon. I don’t think their growth is going to be as much as it was. And I think the pandemic is going to curtail, we’ll talk about that prediction in a minute. And as the present pandemic curtails fewer things will be ordered at home, not many fewer things, but fewer things enough to make you a little bit scared of the next quarterly report. So, I think Amazon this year, or at least part of this year will underperform the stock market. Number two, speaking of the market, I think we’re going to see a stock market crash of probably 20% or more, and that’s considered a crash or correction or whatever you want to look at it crash gets headlines, but bottom line is markets correct about every year, at least 10%, sometime during the year, on average, and every couple of years. Certainly, you know, every few years, you get a big correction. And I think we’re setting up for one of those corrections, I think we’re getting bubbles in a lot of different places. We’ve seen a bubble in cryptocurrency, we’ve seen a bubble in real estate in certain parts of the country, it’s an incredible level, we’re seeing bubbles in the stock market. The next one is two or more governments or currencies will collapse. Now at the beginning of 2022. And by the way, we’re recording this on the 13th of January 2022. We’re seeing that Turkey’s lira is collapsing, right? It’s collapsed by about 40%. This year against the dollar, huge inflation people are going into Bitcoin, right? That’s a foreshadowing, I think of something going on. But we’re going to see a couple of governments either fail or collapse. We’ve created a lot of fakeness in the last couple years of this pandemic. And we’ve flooded the markets with certain things, and Turkey has been no exception. They’ve put fake stuff into their market, now they’re paying the price. And I think President Erdogan of Turkey is not an economist, and he’s doing the exact wrong thing. And it’s debasing their currency even more, and now they’re going in and they’re stealing it from the companies, they’re taking their foreign reserves. It’s not good, but I think Turkey might be one of them. And there might be two or three other ones as well. And you’re going to see that there’s going to be some collapse collapses of government a little bit of disturbance this year, in the world markets. Bitcoin is going to be adopted as legal tender, and at least two countries, we already know that it’s adopted as legal tender alongside the dollar in El Salvador. And I think it’s going to happen in a couple other countries, Tonga being one of them, some other African countries being other ones, potentially Venezuela and Argentina, you might see them adopt some kind of a Bitcoin standard, because Bitcoin has a scarcity, right? They’re only going to make 21 million Bitcoin. It’s not like they’re just printing free money. And, you know, people are looking at that, like, why would we want to invest in the dollar and use that as our currency when we could just go to Bitcoin, and if they can, they will, or at least it’ll be alongside the dollar or alongside their own currency, it’d be interesting. The Fed is going to try to raise rates in 2022. They’ve signaled that they’re going to do that the signal that to curtail buying of assets, they’re called a taper. I think the pet for the Fed is in such a corner, I don’t think they’re going to be able to do it, they’re going to probably try to raise rates, the predictions from Goldman Sachs is it’s going to happen four times this year, the Fed says three, I think you’re looking at one, and I think soon as they try to raise the rates, and the market crashes or we get some kind of a pullback or a hiccup, the Feds going to go okay. Alright, let’s just print more money. I think the Feds are going to fail on that. And the government therefore will continue to debase the currency. We’re going to continue to have spending programs into an election year, and we’re going to continue to print more money, because we’re going to figure some crisis to say we need to give some free money to buy some boats. For this, this list of constituents, things like that a Bitcoin spot ETF is going to be approved. Okay, a Bitcoin spot ETF there’s a futures ETF on Bitcoin that’s been approved. And there’s been talk of a spot ETF being approved. But it’s been a lot of years coming and still hasn’t come. I think this is the year I think that’s this is the year for a lot of clarity to come in Bitcoin and in cryptocurrency, so that’s going to be interesting. Another 20 million people are going to adopt Bitcoin right now it’s at 130 million people around the world are using it, it’s just a drop in the bucket of what I think is going to happen. So, another 20 million people will probably adopt it this year. That’s a big number, right? And then gold is going to hit $2,000. In an ounce, we’re in an inflationary environment where the government says we’re have, we have 7% inflation, and you should watch my other podcast or see some of my videos about inflation. I think 7% is a lie, I think it’s more like 20%. And because that’s certainly the amount of money they’re printing. And so, I think gold is an inflationary hedge. And as an inflationary hedge, the dollar is going to continue to go down, and therefore gold will continue to go up against the dollar. And I think we’re going to see $2,000 An ounce this year. And my last prediction, we’re going to all be okay. Things happen in the world; they always have happened in the world. And when they’re right in front of us, they seem big. And when you look at them in the rearview mirror, they look smaller and smaller and smaller. So sometimes when you go back, you don’t even realize that they were big at one point, right? We’re already looking at 911, we’ve forgotten the pain of 911. If you look back to 1963, you forget the pain of JFK assassination. Right. Lincoln’s assassination is even similar. And what about Napoleon and things that happened? 500,000 years ago, you probably couldn’t even remember or very few.   Very few people’s lives you can you actually quote or remember. So those things get smaller and smaller, and they’re just little blips on the chart of life. I think we’re all going to be okay. What I would say guys is step away from the social media, step away from the TV, spend some time with the people that you love, laugh, live, enjoy life, don’t get caught up in the political stuff, and the strife that we have, it’s being created by the media. And I think your life is going to be way better. So those are my predictions for 2022. Don’t quote me on it, but you probably will. And, you know, anybody that makes predictions is setting themselves up for failure. And I know that but I’m doing it anyway because a lot of people were asking me about it.  

So, there was a big old trucker convoy going on in Canada.  I don’t know if you know, but a couple of weeks ago, Canada put out an edict that says, hey, if you’re coming to Canada and you’re a trucker, you need to be vaccinated. Well, about half the truckers estimated about half of them aren’t, but truckers are really in demand. Right now, we have a supply chain crisis. And truckers are ”you ain’t gonna tell me what to do?” Well, maybe a couple of them said, “you can tell me what to do.” Because otherwise they didn’t want to lose their trucking job, or they didn’t care about getting the you know, the shot. But now what’s happening is they started to talk on their little radios, and all of a sudden, it became a huge movement to say, “hey, look, government’s not going to tell us what to do.” The US government got involved and says you’re not coming over here, unless you’ve gotten the shot. So, the truckers like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on a second. And they started creating this convoy. And they were on a mission. Many had driven all across Canada. And I think there were about 50,000 trucks or something like that, like all kinds of trucks, dump trucks, garbage trucks, diesels, 18 wheelers, whatever kind of truck, and even pickup trucks. Then cars started joining. At the time it was 70 kilometers long, which is about 40-50 miles long. Imagine 40 to 50 miles of trucks that were headed to the capital of Canada in Ottawa. Right. So these trucks had made their way to Canada, and people were joining in, there were people on bridges, and they were waving their flags, and the press was not covering it because they didn’t want to show that people have power, even if they don’t have some weaponry. Their weaponry is their ability to join together. And Canadians were just tired of being pushed around like they had been pushed around for almost two years. They weren’t able to go out, they had curfews and one of the things I heard was that you could not go to Costco nor Walmart unless you were escorted in and you were only allowed to buy groceries. Unless you had the jab. And you can only go into buy groceries and food you can’t buy like other stuff that Costco or Walmart sells. And then you’re escorted out. Otherwise, you’re locked down in your home. Here we are two years later, everybody’s been the good little person in Canada, because that’s what Canadians do. They comply with stuff. They’re really nice people. So, they comply. They believe their government. They believe Trudeau is awesome or whatever. I don’t know what they believe about that guy. But like they’ve done everything they were supposed to do. If they were still getting sick, they were like, wait a minute, what are we doing? Especially the truckers were like, wait a second, you need us. And if you need somebody, you don’t piss them off. All that to say, they ended up pissing off the truckers and so the truckers got together and they all headed to Ottawa. At the time you could not get in or out of Ottawa, the capital of Canada. It’s a small town. A good leader would normally stand up and state, “I believe that this is the right thing to do.” But what did the Canadian leader do? He left, he took off in the middle of the night and went to some little secret hideout, because he was scared of the truckers. What were they going to do to him? They had been oppressed for a long time, and they were not taking anymore. I find it really funny that the press didn’t really cover it. They were more worried about Neil Young, this 107-year-old rock and roll guy that is a has been pulling his music off of Spotify, which is not even really a story. And some other guy named Nils Lofgren in Norway pulling his stuff off of Spotify and Joni Mitchell. All these really old artists are pulling their music off of Spotify. Nobody knows who they are anyway. So, it’s not like they were going to drop in sales. They’re just jerks, trying to force one of the only bastions of free speech, which is Spotify, to get rid of other people’s podcasts. Joe Rogan, for example, they did not want Joe Rogan’s podcasts on there, because he allows people say it how it is. He doesn’t censor people; he shuts up and lets people talk and they don’t like that. Because it’s not part of the narrative. It’s not part of the Trudeau narrative, either. They’re more concerned about that. And so, people were looking at that going, “Hey, wait a minute here.” Why do we care about this? But that’s who the press is and was covering, because they didn’t want you to know that there was a big movement that was very powerful, and might have a big voice. There are some really interesting things going on in the world today. It’s happening in Australia, where they’ve been the most oppressed country for the last two years. It’s going to happen and it’s starting to happen in the United States. It’s happening in Canada. It’s happening in France; it’s happening around the world. You’re not hearing about it, because the press has their own agenda. So very left-wing agenda. I know what they’re trying to do. But I have a feeling it’s not good. And a look if it’s good, let people talk. Right? Let people have a debate about it. Don’t censor them. This is what Russia did. Right? We had, Pravda was supposed to be the truth, right? That was the official paper of the USSR back in the 60-70s. Well, that was all government approved stuff that they propagandize that to you, right? That was what you read. You were like, “well, this is a truth.” But there wasn’t another side, there wasn’t a debate and you saw how oppressed those people were. And we’re going in that same direction, because we’re systemically trying to get rid of our institutions, and trying to create censorship so that people can talk. It’s a real shame. But those truckers in Canada, hats off to them. And I give them a lot of credit for doing what they did because they may make some changes in the world. Time will tell..