Blog

May 3, 2022

How A Deferred Sales Trust Can Help Lower Taxes

I HATE TAXES In fact, you’ll never pay more money to anyone in your life than you do to the tax man. In my interview with Brett Swarts, he shows us how we can use a cool strategy called the Deferred Sales Trust to reduce or even eliminate Capital Gains taxes. It’s a great interview. I hope you check it out. Here is Brett’s website:

https://capitalgainstaxsolutions.com/ @Capital Gains Tax Solutions

Here is the link for the Cash Flow Machine Mastermind: https://go.destinycreation.com/cfm-mastercourse-options

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!

March 25, 2022

Commodity Inflation Outta Control

Now this is a video and an audio podcast. And today, it’s just going to happen to be skewed a bit toward the video, because we’re going to do a little bit of charting now, I’ll try to walk you through the charts if you’re just listening to the audio podcast. But if you can get to YouTube or the video format of this, it’s going to be a little bit more helpful, but you won’t be lost. I’m going to be talking a bit about inflation and all the crazy stuff that’s going on around the world and how we’re about to hit almost hyperinflation or pre hyperinflation, as I call it. In the United States and in the Western world.

We’re going to be talking about this subject that I happen to be talking a lot about, I’ve been talking about it for a couple years, I’ve been warning people inflation’s coming, get ready get positioned, because things are going to be wonky, and they’re going to be strange. And now we’re seeing tons of wonkiness.

I want to show you some charts about, just to jump right in about what we’re experiencing in the inflationary world. So, let’s start with the chart of wheat. Look at this chart. If you look at the right side of it, we’re here we are in March of 2022. Wheat has absolutely spiked. Now there’s a huge war going on in Ukraine, and Russia. And those two places make a ton of wheat for Central Europe. So obviously, with that skirmish going on over there, there’s not going to be a lot of people thinking about plowing their fields. So those fields are going to go fallow, they’re going to go back to the way they were, they’re not going to be producing probably the kind of wheat that they were producing, which means there’s going to be scarcity and when there’s scarcity of anything, the price drives up as long as there’s demand and people need to eat. People need to eat bread, and anything else made with wheat. So you’re seeing that but it’s not just limited to wheat, it’s applying to all commodities. Take a look at oats, record high right oats go up, you need a lot of oats, there’s a lot of food that’s made with oats, there’s a lot of feed for livestock that’s made without same thing with wheat. Oats are at an all-time high. Take a look at copper all time high as well. Right? Looking at that now copper goes into construction. And I could show you charts and graphs on lumber, on concrete on all the other things, but this one pretty much embodies what’s going on in construction because you need it for wiring you need for plumbing, in some cases, you need it for a lot of different things. And if copper is expensive, everything else follows and it’s at record highs. So that’s what’s going on in copper.

Now the big one here for me is that crude oil is now back at a record high and you’re seeing it at the pumps. But the pumps are just a small place where you see it. You see it because that’s what you’re paying. But as you’re driving down the street, notice how much of your car is made out of plastic, right? Look at the door panels, look at the steering wheel, look at the dash, look at the panel, the radio, look in between the seats, the console, you open up the hood.. I had a BMW once and they made the water pump out of plastic. And it’s this is the thing that boils water, right, it’s 208 degrees. And its right around boiling water, they made it out of plastic and it blew up. And the impeller inside the pump was plastic. So much of your car is plastic. Where do you think they make plastic from.. the plastic tray? No, they may get from oil and petroleum.

And they also make fertilizer from oil and petroleum. And Russia is a big fertilizer producer and they decided the other day that they’re just hanging on to their own fertilizer just going to help their own people with their own fertilizer, which means they’re not going to be exporting a lot of fertilizer. What do you think’s going on with the price of fertilizer? It is going through the roof, and if it goes through the roof, so the cost of the products on these graphs that I’ve shown you. We are just the beginning of the kind of inflationary upward. But oil affects everything because the trucker needs oil and the trucker needs to get your cucumbers and tomatoes and goods to the store. If he has to pay too much for oil, it gets passed along to you, meaning higher prices again. Plus, now we have wage issues with those truckers because we have supply chain issues. More inflation has to pay them more the insurance is going to be more wrecks on the road, things are going to be going up in price. With all those things. I’m not saying every one of them is a major contributor. But you know, when you start to add a lot of weight, it starts to add up.

Now these are these to me are really interesting, not so much the numbers, but the trends. Everything was going along kind of hunky dory until about January of 2021. And that’s when people started to go back to work. They started to open up some of the economies. And over the last year you’ve seen that spike straight up when anything goes up at a 45-degree angle or higher. It’s very dangerous, and this one can continue to go higher. I think it’s just the beginning of the event; missionary spiral that we’re in. And I’ll just say this one thing, inflation is a tax on the poor. If you are of means and you can afford to go out and spend another $30 a week on your groceries, yeah, you don’t like it. Same thing with oil. If your gas is 60-70% higher than it was last year, yeah, you don’t like it, but it’s not going to force you to starve. But for somebody that’s a lower income, who has their last bit of money, and they are running out of money before they run out of month, they don’t have enough money to buy either that tank of gas or filling it only up halfway, or they’re buying worse food, which is going to create health problems down the road, you know, they can’t afford to buy the things they want. So that’s affected.

Now let me just go through this. This is the same kind of chart. But it basically ends at 2021 in November, and you can see this, the trends are spiking up, it’s not like they were all the way up from 19 to 20. It’s just spiking right and you’re seeing it. And once that spike starts to happen, if we don’t get it under control, and I don’t believe the Fed can get it under control, they’re going to try to raise rates at a quarter of a percent, half a percent. But inflation is running, they say at 8%. It’s running way more than 8%. Car prices, just used cars, are up 40%, gas is up 100%, our eggs have gone up, you go to the grocery store, those costs have gone up 30-40%, I don’t know where they’re getting the figure of 8%. But if you believe them, and you’re still only raising the rates by a quarter of a point, that’s not going to be able to be enough to bring down demand. And so, spiraling inflation is going to continue to happen. Plus, the Fed has painted another quarter. Now, I don’t know and I don’t want to get too wonky on the bond market and too wonky on how much money the Fed has borrowed or created, basically from you, this money out of thin air. And so, there’s $30 trillion floating around on thin air that that money, has to be paid with interest, they are borrowing it, right? Every time you borrow something, you have to pay interest on it. Well, the interest has been really low for a while, right, half a percent, 1%- 2%, depending on the length of it. And so, interest had been low, it hasn’t been very big bond payment. But all of a sudden, the Fed starts to raise rates, well, there’s going to be a huge sell off and bonds, have been up for 40 years in a row, they might go down now and pretty drastically. And that’s if they raise rates too fast, or they’re going to raise rates on themselves such that their interest payments have to go up. If interest payments have to go up where you think they’re going to get that money, they’re either going to come after you and get it in higher taxes, or they’re going to have to raise more money, print or create more money, right? What does that do? Well, the more money you put into this into something, the less scarce it is, right? So basically, it’s going to be, instead of spending $11, on a dozen roses, for example, you’re happy to spend $13, that’s going to cause more inflation, more money, which is where we’ve come from, is going to create more inflation. And so, that’s going to raise the debt even more. This is an upward spiral that the Fed and all the other central banks have gotten themselves into, in the last well, 100 years, but really specifically the last two or three years for sure. You know, I could just keep pulling up commodity after commodity after commodity. Everything is inflating.

So, what do you do about it? Well, it’s a tough one. Traditionally, you’ve been in a 60/40 portfolio of stocks and bonds. Now, it was a lot less when I was in Wall Street and growing my business, it was, you want to be more in bonds if you’re older and less bonds if you’re younger.

Now, why would you want to get 2% in a bond when inflation is running at stated rate is 8%. But realistically, it’s running to 20-25%. You wouldn’t want to do that, it’s a bad investment. But people are so conservative, and they’re so worried about getting their money back, that they’re not willing to take any risk. But the rates are so low that they’re forcing you to take risks, otherwise, you’re losing real purchasing power in your dollar. In other words, your dollar this year, if you had $1 last year, this year, it’s only worth 80 cents in purchasing power. Alright, so what do you do? Well, I don’t want to leave you hanging, right? I want to get just get you to understand what’s going on. But one thing I want to say is that an economy is measured on the productivity that it produces, right? So, if you produce a lot, your economy, your GDP, your society, your account, everything goes up. But over the last couple years, we’ve been incentivized to not produce, we were told to stay home, watch Netflix, you know, screw around at home and gain some weight, whatever. And that hasn’t been productive for our economy. But wait, we didn’t stop buying. We got free money from the government. And we kept buying and it created a supply chain problem. So, what can you do? Because that’s the question people always ask me now, I’m not you and this isn’t financial advice. But if I, were you, or if I were me, and I am me. So, I will tell you what I do. You have some money in real estate. Real estate will hedge you if the economy continues to heat up, because it’s an asset, especially if it’s a cash flowing asset, then you get some tax advantages. Depreciation up, depreciation potentially, and then phantom income and other things like that. So, you want cash flowing assets. Additionally, you want stock market assets, in my opinion, because stock markets are assets that go up during an inflationary time. But it’s timed, it’s tough to be in the markets. It is tough to time the market, buy and hold doesn’t work. We know that over time, you might have gotten lucky over the last 10 years, but really, the dollar is declining in value. It’s not that your buying power has gone up increasingly, incredibly strongly. But either way, I have a program called the cash flow machine, where we use our stock as the asset while we wait for it to appreciate. But we allow other people to give us income on the stock that we own, it’s not a dividend play, it’s more of an options play. So, I’m convinced that that’s a great place to put your money, if you’re good at business, then either invest or start or own a business. Because especially if it’s a cash flowing business, it’s going to produce cash flow for you to live on. So, and then finally, the last part is what I call tech assets, you want to have some bitcoin, maybe right? Because I think Bitcoin is a good store of value.

Now it fluctuates a lot, you’re going to have to wait for it. But it’s like putting your money in gold, like you’re going to have to wait for gold to go up to0. People have been waiting for gold to go back to where it is for 10-12 years. And here we are back to where it was 12 years ago, so hasn’t really done much in 12 years while you’ve waited, so you can’t complain. If Bitcoin goes up and down, it doesn’t do anything in the next couple of months, because it’s a longer-term store value play. And I’m a big believer in Bitcoin. But you should also have some gold and silver and other precious metals. Because those traditionally have been a great hedge for inflation, the old 60/40 bond, or stock to bond portfolio is dead, because what would happen is you would put 40% of your money in bonds. Now bonds are paying so little that there’s no real incentive to have bonds. So, they’re forcing you to take risks. And since they’re forcing you to take risks, those risk assets, as long as they keep money going into them probably will go up although right now, I think we’re having a little bit of a bear market. So, you got to be careful with the market, you have got to empower yourself. I would say “Never give up your power in your health, your wealth, or your time”. And I’m not being any different with that now. So, you need to diversify among assets, but concentrate within asset classes. And that way, you’ll be able to withstand the hyperinflation that I think is coming, we’re pre-hyperinflation at this time. Right now, it’s looking like, well, nominally 8%, up to what I think is 20- 25%, once we start going to a monthly rate where things are going up 10,12-15%, that spiral starts to increase out of control. And that creates huge problems for us, and the Fed and our economy. And it’s actually not just the US, it’s happening all over the world where they just printed money over the last couple years.

So, there’s worldwide inflation, it’s going to cause worldwide margin pressure, that margin pressure is going to lead to lower earnings, those lower earnings are going to lead to poor performance in the stock market. And we could potentially be looking at a recession here down the road fairly quickly, as we’re having this hyper-inflationary spiral go up. And that’s going to cause what’s called stagflation, a stagnant, stagnant economy, with inflation. Really bad combination. We haven’t had it since the 70s. And it was a really poor time in US history as far as economic or economic situation.

So, listen, my goal was just to empower you, and to help you make decisions going forward. Because this is now something you have to think about, it’s enough to think too much that the Fed printing money, and you just throw money in assets, but those days are over. And now you have to really be strategic about your investments. Before I go, if you could do me a huge favor? Like and Subscribe if you’re on YouTube, It helps a lot and helps me get this information to more people. Also, if you’re listening to this podcast, please take a moment like right now because if you don’t do it, now you’ll forget and go to my show and give me a rate and review please, hopefully as a five star but if you don’t like it, let me know. I’ll try to improve it. But give me a rating and review. I’d really appreciate it and we’ll get to get the word out to help more people take control of their money, help change the world just a little bit at a time. Because if we can take control of our power and our wealth, it’s going to help us a lot. Alright, thanks again.

March 25, 2022

Inflation Medium Dive

I unfortunately think this is a really cool topic. But I don’t enjoy talking about it that much. Because I think it’s an unfortunate topic, right, but it’s a topic that we need to learn about. And that is the topic of inflation. So, inflation is simply when things go up in price. Actually, if you really want to reframe it and do it the right way, you have to look at it as when the dollar loses value, right? When the medium of exchange, the denominator actually goes down in value, prices seemingly go up. And so right now, the federal government is printing money, right? Printing it is like they used to, just printing out dollars and $100 bills. What they’re doing is adding zeros to the Fed’s balance sheet and spreading money out to the economy. And so, it’s, it’s when you have too much of something, it’s worth less, right like one rose is nice, 12 roses are really nice. But 1000 Roses, like, it’s not as nice. So, the value of those 1000 roses goes down, right, you don’t need to buy extra roses, you’re not going to want to spend the same amount of money that you spent on the first rose. So that’s a value thing. And so therefore, inflation contrarily goes up, and things go up in value. So, it gives you an idea. Before I give you the idea, though, I will tell you, the Fed came out and said or the reports came out and the CPI was reported at 7%, the consumer price index. Now, I don’t believe that, but that’s a government figure that’s created and changed over time to suit the government and its political purposes.

But nonetheless, they’re supposed to take a basket of goods and compare it to a basket of goods from last year in the year before, they always changed what’s in the basket of goods. So, I don’t really see how it’s that relevant. So, I could just tell you that we all have our own basket of goods. When you start to analyze what’s in the basket of goods, the cost of living, right, what’s our real cost of living, you start to get a sense that what the government is telling us is the cost of living and what we’re really experiencing of the cost of living is not quite matching up. So, I’m just going to go over a few numbers. And if you’re watching this podcast on a video, I’ll have it on the screen. If not, I’m just going to tell you what the numbers are. And I’m going to let them sink in. So, I’m just going to go through year over year increases year over year inflation in certain categories. The first one is gasoline. Gasoline has gone up 49.6% Right. Gas was a couple bucks last year, it’s now more than $3.50 – $3.60. And if you’re in California with all the extra taxes they glob on, you know, you’re talking over four or five bucks. So, gasoline 49.6% beef, if you’re a meat eater, 89%. 18.6% Pork 15.1% Chicken 10.4% Fresh fish 10.2% Oranges, right, they grow out of the ground, how can they be more expensive, now 9.9%. Notice how not a single one is 7% so I don’t know how they’re getting an average. But furniture is 13.8% If you can get it a lot of furniture sitting on ships right now, dresses. 8% Now we’re getting kind of close to that seven jewelry 8.8% new cars up 12%. I just went and purchased a new car a couple of weeks ago with my girlfriend and I couldn’t believe how much a new car was, over $50,000 for a brand-new car?! Like I remember buying a brand new 1988 Honda Accord for $13,000 loaded and now new cars are $52,000. Just amazing. Used cars are up 37% When in our lifetimes have the value of used cars actually gone up. Usually, they say you drive it off the lot. It’s worth 30% less. Well, that isn’t happening right now. Used cars up 37% hotels, even though we have a pandemic, they’re charging an arm and a leg for hotels. So, you know it’s not a demand situation. You know it’s a value situation with the dollar car rentals as a result of prices of cars going up. And you can’t get cars because of a chip shortage or whatever they’re going to blame it on. You know let them blame it on anything they want, but car rentals are up 36% and they’re not going to blame it on is themselves.

The fact that we’re printing money, we’re creating these green new deals and these build back betters and all these crazy programs that are not productive, because anytime you give the government money, they can’t spend it as effectively as the price the private sector can spend it. They just can’t. It’s they’ve never been able to, they never proven to be efficient, and it won’t work. So that’s what’s going on. Year over year, not a single one of those prices that I just told you was 7%.

So, I don’t know what they’re putting in those stats..?

Imagine going out for a drink. What’s a drink costing out? A decent place, depends on where you live, of course, but I used to pay $8 and thought that was expensive for a martini. Now it’s $20 for a martini, and a lot of places, many places, sometimes it’s $24. That’s not 7%

Guys, like just five years ago, I was paying eight bucks for drink a couple years ago I was paying $2 for a gallon of gas a couple of years ago was paying, you know, $3.99 for a pound of chicken and now I’m paying a lot more. Everything has gone up. Okay, maybe it’s transitory as our fed, Chairman Jerome Powell says right? He says it’s transitory. And that one didn’t age well, because now he’s not saying transitory anyone anymore. And by the way, if you’re predicting your financial future, based on the predictions of the Fed, you’ve really sold a bill of goods, right? Because none of their predictions are right. And they’re the ones that are controlling the money. So why would we believe anything he says? Anything the Fed says, anything that politicians say, because what they’re telling you is that it’s transitory. It’s just going to be here for a little while. Well, we’re not going to say transitory anymore. Because, you know, we think it’s going to be here for a while, not a little while anymore. So, the Fed is looking pretty stupid. And the Fed is pretty stupid. And it has been ever since its inception, it served a purpose at the very beginning. But then they’ve gone astray. The Fed is trying to keep 2% inflation. Well, we’re way beyond 2% inflation, they think it’s seven, I’m telling you, it’s 20. And, you know, their purpose is to keep it at 2%. I mean, there’s no way, when real rates and real rates means that when you subtract what you’re actually getting from income, fixed income, and you subtract what the cost of living is, your real inflation rate is actually negative. So, if you get 2% on a bond, and that’s generous, but let’s say you get 2% on a bond, but your inflation rates 10%, you’re losing 8% a year in purchasing power, you keep your money in the bank, enough years, you’re going to lose all your purchasing power. Your $10,000 won’t be able to buy $10,000 worth of goods next year, it’ll buy much less. So in order to put this into perspective, and show you that it’s just not 7% It’s a little bit here a little bit there. It’s 32%. It’s 20. But I’ll tell you, let me go back to 1938. Tell you what things cost back then. And you can compare them what they cost around you and your area. A new house in 1938. You’re ready for it. $3,900 a new house. Okay. It didn’t have granite countertops, maybe back then. And it was a smaller footprint. It wasn’t a mansion. But $3,900 like double it to get a state-of-the-art home back then. You’re still talking about $7,800. How much was the average income back then? In 1938? If the average house was $3900. How much is the average income? $1,731 a year $1,731 A year if you’re making $1,731 a month now a lot of people consider you poor, right? A new car. I just told you how much a new car was, you know, a couple of weeks ago, it was $860 for a brand-new car in 1938. And they were pretty cool cars back then to write some cool 38 Mercury’s and Fords and really some really cool cars I’d love to have now. But $860 average rent. If you’re paying rent, I know you’re not paying $27 a month. And that’s what the average rent was back in 1938. About tuition to Harvard tuition to Harvard in 1938. You know what it is now, it’s like $40,000 a year or something like that. Tuition at Harvard $420 a year. A movie ticket 25 cents, gasoline 10 cents a gallon. You think that’s 7% increase and you know that many years. The US postage stamp back then was three cents. Today, you know what it is? It’s 55 cents or something like that. About Let’s talk about food, sugar, for 10 pounds of sugar. Now you go buy a pound or two. For 10 pounds of sugar, it was 59 cents. For vitamin D milk, a gallon of milk was 50 cents a gallon, ground coffee 39 cents per pound 1938. Bacon 32 cents per pound, it’s $10 a pound now guys, and eggs 18 cents a dozen. Now eggs, you’d be lucky to find them for under $2. They’re usually more like three or four. And so, you could see that there’s been an incredible devaluation, a debasement of our currency. And we’ve sat here and watched it happen, because it’s like the boiling frog analogy, right? If you put a frog in boiling water, he jumps right out. But if you put the frog in cool water, and then you put it on the stove, and you turn it up slowly, he’ll boil himself to death, because he doesn’t know when to jump out. We’re like the same way we let them do this, we let them print the money, debase the currency, give us freebies, we’re going to get some money for sitting at home during the pandemic, we’re going to get some special things for having kids, we’re going to get some special money for this for that. And while we look at our own interests, what’s happening around us is just crumbling.

Inflation is a tax on the poor. And they wonder why the rich and the poor have a bigger and bigger divide. It’s because of inflation. Because the poor don’t have money to put into assets to hedge inflation. The poor don’t buy stocks, the poor don’t buy homes, they rent them, right? So, they don’t have a hedge against this debasement of our currency. But rich people, or even people that are just slightly fluid, have enough extra money to say, “You know what I need to invest for my future”. If I put money in stocks, well stocks track the rate of inflation over time, roughly. So, if you’re in stocks, you’re keeping ahead of inflation, or you’re staying even with it, or you’re certainly doing better than the person who doesn’t have anything in there and just lives hand to mouth. And it’s the government who is creating all of these problems, this divide, it’s not the supply chain issues, it’s not that we don’t tax the rich enough, it’s we just print money, because we give people free stuff. Or we think we can do it better as a government than they can in the private sector. And that just kills our economy.

So, I have a chart up here, if you’re watching this podcast on a video, but bottom line, I’ll walk you through it, this is from 1800 until, 2020, roughly. Tt’s the buying power of $1 over time, and it starts out at $1. And it goes up a little bit and then it goes down to 60%. And then it goes back up to $1.60. The buying power of $1 over time from 1800 until now, to 2022, I guess, and then it’ll drop to 80 cents, and then it shoots back up. Now, during this period of time it was going up and down. The ups were because we were on the gold standard. We for every dollar that we had, you could go get some gold for that dollar when you went to the bank, or you could get some silver, when you went to the bank in 1971. That all changed and we no longer backed up our dollar with gold. We went off the gold standard in 1971. And since then, there’s nothing backing up our dollar. It’s just air right. So, people go oh, well, you know, Bitcoin is such a bad investment because nothing’s backing it up. There isn’t anything backing up the US dollar either. Except the back that there’s a big government with big bombs. Right, that, you know, we say that we stand behind the dollar and the whole world uses it right now. It’s changing. So, I’ll keep going. So in about 1900, the dollar was worth maybe $1.40. That’s your buying power of $1 went up? It’s pretty cool. That was the last time it really went up. It’s been going down since about the turn of 1900 century, what does that 20th century and it’s just been going down, it gone down in 1919 to 60 cents, up ticked a little bit back up near the dollar. And then after the depression, it’s got done nothing but go down. And if you look and tell how close it is to zero. But it’s worth about two cents. In other words, the dollar has lost, I don’t know depending on the study. But according to this thing, about 98% of its value. Since 1800, it’s lost 98% of its value. Crazy, right? So, the question is where does the inflation actually come from? If you look at it from that period of time, where’s our inflation coming from? You hear Jerome Powell? You hear the government figures tell you that it’s 7%. In food and beverages, the average inflation since 1800 has been 3.9% a year. Now that’s a year. Now think about that. That’s inflation that’s compounded on itself. So, the numbers when you really look at them are staggering. Now let’s see if you can get your brain around this food and beverages since the 1800s. The inflation rate has been 492,820% That’s How much food and beverages have gone up? Because there’s a compound effect of inflation, right? 3.9% of this year on top of 3.9% an extra and it starts to compound. So, it’s 492,000%. How about housing? Well, the average inflation rate for housing is 4% 4.18%, actually, but total inflation over that period of time 183,000% for a place to live, right. In other words, it was in when the dollar was worth $1, in 1800. Today, it’s worth 831 for every dollar to buy that same house. Apparel, about 2%. And the inflation rate on apparel is pretty modest. 7,307%, transportation 3% average, but 133,000% inflation in transportation. And that’s with all the technological advances, medical care, you’re going to freak out on this one, right? Medical care has averaged 4.69% inflation for more than 200 years. Okay. But when you accumulate it and compound it, it’s, uh, it’s 2,622,915% for medical care. Now, medical care has moved a long way. And we live a lot longer, but 2,600,000% It’s a little higher than the 7% that were supposedly being told that things are happening. Okay, education, about a 2% or 1.84%, average inflation rate, but 5,600% to be educated, and other goods and services, I don’t know what they put in other goods and services. But the average inflation rate on that is about 5%. But the total inflation percentage on other goods and services, get ready. It’s four and a half million percent, four and a half million percent. Now imagine if you’ve got that kind of a return for those many years, right? Well, you would first of all, you would hedge inflation, you wouldn’t get ahead of it. But you would have you know, if you invested $1, in 1800, you’d have, you know, $4,568,000 in today’s money, that’s what $1 would have bought you back then, is this starting to make sense? Are we starting to realize that what we’re being told is not, it’s not conducive to our well-being? And now the government is doing much, much more of this. And it’s accelerating the pace at which they’re debasing the currency. Why, why is that? Well, they’re using something called MMT, modern, modern monetary theory. And modern monetary theory just says, it doesn’t really matter what the dollar is worth, just keep, keep printing more of it, we need more dollars, we need to give people more dollars, we need to buy their boats and give them free stuff. If we give them free stuff, they vote for us. So, let’s keep ourselves in office and we’ll give them free money, keep them quiet, so they don’t have a revolution. And then they’ll vote for us. And we’ll just keep staying in power, and we’ll be able to be corrupt, because I think there’s a lot of corruption in government. People, you know, getting money under the table, that happens at the end of societies is the people at the top that are running things, all get richer, and then at the expense of the people that are at the bottom. And I think that’s happening. And I think we’ve got lots of reports that we see that it’s happening, but that’s beyond the scope of what we’re talking about.

The bottom line is the government is in the business of staying in the business of creating happiness among people, but people just think they’re happy. They’re just temporarily happy. But I can tell you, when your gas goes up, 50%, and you want to take a vacation with your family. And that last year was like the money you saved up and now you don’t have as much money to be able to spend on gasoline and hotels and food, you’re not going to be able to take that vacation with your family. It comes back to bite you another way. And that’s what’s happening to the government right now. And it’s going to get worse guys, you’re going to hear all kinds of reports in the next year, two years about how inflation is just a temporary thing. Once we raise rates, everything’s going to be fine. But when you raise rates, you raise the price of money. And when you raise the price of money, you slow down progress in the economy. When you slow down progress in the economy, people get fired. When people get fired. They’re upset, so you throw more money at them. What that means more people get fired. And the cycle continues until you have a recession and depression. That’s what we’re heading for right now. The government with this MMT theory is just like well, throw more and more and more money at it. But if you and I ran our households like the government runs its household, right? We would we would be in jail. They won’t let you just give people money that doesn’t exist, right. You have to pay your bills. And right now, we can barely pay our bills. The government interest on the debt that we’ve created is 30% of our GDP. It’s a crazy amount of money that we’re spending just to pay the interest off in our debt. Imagine if we raise the rates to try to quell inflation. Now we’ve got to pay more money on our debt. It’s a formula for disaster when you have to pay more money for your debt, you’re spending more and more of our taxpayer dollars. Now our taxpayer dollars are going to pay for some other country’s debt because they bought our debt 15 years ago, fine. But we don’t need to do that. You know, Ronald Reagan and several other presidents were out there saying we need a balanced budget to keep the government curtailed. I could tell you in the state of Florida, there’s a balanced budget amendment, and every year they come in with a balanced budget. Hmm. They don’t run deficits, right? They balance their budget every year, very responsible. As a result, the state runs well, there’s no personal income tax here, great place to live. And the economy is booming in the state of Florida. Contrast that with New York or New Jersey or Connecticut, high taxes, not a fun place to live right now. Right with all the lockdowns and craziness going on up there. Right, and mandates. And there’s no balanced budget So, they’re there, they’re going into debt there, things are going crazy in those states, and they have to borrow more and more money. And just like the federal government is borrowing all this money, it’s going to end in a disaster, right? So, I don’t know where it all ends. And when it all ends, I can just tell you that if you studied history and studied economics, and I have, and you start to look into what’s happened in other countries, when they’ve done the same exact thing at the end, those increases of free money increase at a much faster rate. And that’s what we have going on now. And it’s at the end of society where that’s happening. And I think because just looking at the graph, I don’t want to be doom and gloom because I love this country. But at the end of these things is where you’re going to get some major upheaval in the country, you’re going to have some major conflict, we’re already starting to see conflict in our country, just politically and socially. We’re starting to see some unrest. And if we don’t stop it, if we continue to be irresponsible, it’s not going to end well. And I think the way it doesn’t end well, and I don’t know how it manifests itself, right? Because it just doesn’t happen very often, probably happens every 100 years with a reserve currency. But when it doesn’t end well, you get a lot of changes. And so, I think that’s what’s going to happen, but you’re going to see potential defaults on the on the debt. Now I think we have a soft default going on by raising the rates, like we’re already defaulting on our rates, right? We’re devaluing the value of the bonds that people borrow. So that’s a soft default. Maybe eventually, it gets to the point where we undercut people, okay, we owe you $1,000 and will give you $500 for it, what do you say? And that’s the beginning of the end, when people don’t lend us money. They don’t buy our bonds, and the economy basically collapses. That could be with the way it goes. It could be that there’s alternatives. There’s always been the gold alternative. Now there’s digital gold, which is Bitcoin it could it be that it moves toward that alternative? Because nobody can affect the supply and demand of Bitcoin? Or certainly the supply? You know, I don’t know, I can just tell you that with everything that comes down the pike. There are things that are setting up that are unpredictable. So, we don’t know what the tipping point is. Is it a bond collapse? Is it a stock market collapse? Is it the Fed inching up rates too fast or too slow, is that the government just continues to print indiscriminately, we don’t know where it’s going to happen. I can just tell you based on studying history, it has happened. So that’s my take on inflation. comment if you want, let’s have a discussion about it. But I certainly think there’s a lot of history behind what we’re doing. And I tried to give you a little bit of history so you can see what’s happening to your money in your wallet. And I hope that helps.

March 21, 2022

My Bitcoin Trip to El Salvador

I actually feel like I’m in a time machine. It’s an amazing feeling. It’s really cool. I’ll tell you where I am and why I feel that way. Well, I am in a big, big corner, as you know. It took me a while to get there. But now that I’m there, I’ve gone down the rabbit hole. I’ve eliminated all my objections about Bitcoin. And I actually think that it’s probably the most perfect money that we’ve ever created, better than gold, because you can’t really take gold in your pocket, go across the border, or go to Europe with it, you know, $10,000 worth of gold. It’s just, it’s just too hard to do. But you can do it with Bitcoin. And you could do it in a matter of seconds, you could do it with a very little transaction fee. It’s really amazing, it’s an amazing thing. Anyway, I could talk for four hours about Bitcoin.

So, I am in El Salvador. Now. Salvador is this beautiful tropical country; you could see it behind me. And I would show you the beach but the waves are so loud, that you wouldn’t be able to hear the podcast. So, I’m going to show you a couple of pictures of the beach and where I am and what I’m doing. But El Salvador is actually ground zero for Bitcoin. What do I mean by that? Well, back in the middle of 2021, they passed the law that said, now they use the US dollar, right, but they passed a law that says bitcoin is now legal tender, in El Salvador, which means you can basically buy and sell things with Bitcoin. You couldn’t do that before. And you can’t do that in a lot of places. And they basically told every merchant they had to start accepting bitcoin. Now, this is a third world country.

Let’s start with the basics. 30% of the people here had some kind of banking relationship. 70% did not which is pretty typical of the world. So, the world is 70% unbanked. Think about the people and in those countries in Africa, think about the people in a lot of countries in Central America, there’s just no banking relationships. You and I take for granted that we’d go down to any bank within a couple of miles. And there’re probably 30 banks, right? We could open up an account. They can’t do that in El Salvador, they can’t do that in a lot of countries. And therefore, they have to exchange currencies, or barter or do something else. A lot of people for example, I know story of some people in, in some of the African countries, they’ve never seen a bank. In order to get to a bank, they have to go an hour, hour and a half to be able to open up a bank account. So, they don’t have a use for that. They have other ways of doing it. So, 70% of the world is unbanked.

In El Salvador, they have a country of about 6.8 million people. And what they did is they took 70% of their unbanked, and within three or four months they made them banked. So, this country has now gone from 30% banked to 70%, banked, which means now 30% are only unbanked, which now that it’s interesting, because banking just means that you have some way of controlling money, some way of giving money, or receiving money to somebody. You know where they do their banking, right here. And if you have a $50 phone, which almost everybody does, they use that as their bank. Now, I want to be part of this really cool culture. And so let me tell you why I’m here. So, I came here because I run a cryptocurrency hedge fund. And I thought, well, if I’m going to be running a crypto currency hedge fund, and I’m going to be responsible for all the people that are in my fund, and I feel extremely responsible to them. Because we’re in this in this new territory and we’re trying to figure out the best way to navigate the new territory, I figured I might as well get to Ground Zero. Where this is the first country in the world that is accepting bitcoin as their legal tender. So, I came here, kind of not knowing what to expect. And let me tell you, in a lot of ways, it’s still clunky, but in some ways, like if you think about these Third World people that are not used to transacting things in this way, and they’ve embraced it, imagine the rest of the world.? Imagine how silly we are for going oh,” Bitcoin will never work.” It works here. So let me give you an example. Last night, I went and had dinner and you know, food down here is incredibly inexpensive. And so I got a couple of pizzas and a beer. And I asked if they take Bitcoin and the woman said yes and I said, Okay, great. This is my first Bitcoin transaction. I heard it was pretty easy, but I was expecting it to be a little clunky because it was my first transaction as well. So, I had my wallet where I had my bitcoin, right, it was right here on my phone. And she opens up her app., she puts in, $3.75 for dinner and the beer. And she showed me a QR code. And I turned my wallet on, and I took a picture of the QR code, I put it up there. And the money is transferred immediately, as soon as the button that says send, that was actually quicker than a credit card transaction. Imagine, quicker than a credit card transaction. I looked down to make sure that all my bitcoin wasn’t missing, But I had verified it on the QR code that she was getting that it was $3.75 or whatever the Bitcoin was, and then it verified on my phone, and then boom, it just transferred took two seconds. It cost me very, very little, like two or three cents to do the transaction. And that was it.

If you see the video version, I’m going to show you some pictures up here on the video version of this podcast of how beautiful this place really is. It is one of the most beautiful places in the world that I’ve seen. And I’ve seen, I’ve seen 50-55 actually 56 countries. And where I am staying it’s what’s called Bitcoin Beach. It’s El Zonte, which has a beach here, but they kind of renamed it Bitcoin beach because everybody takes Bitcoin. And they’ve tried this, this experiment to see if it would take off. And it’s taken off for more than a year. And now you go down, you’re on the beach. And I’ll show you a picture here too. And there’s a woman that’s selling these little lemonades, or this little flavored ice, and she has a little umbrella and she’s on the beach and she sells these things. It’s just a sign it says Bitcoin accepted. Pretty cool, right? You don’t even have to be connected to a power station to be able to accept Bitcoin, you just have to have a phone. So pretty amazing to me that this is happening. So, this is a beautiful country. It’s progressing. And I went to a launch party of a company that is heavily involved in crypto space. Now I don’t really know much and talk much about NFT’s in a practical way. But I can tell you this company that I was that they had done a launch in conjunction with the country of El Salvador, it was a real estate play with crypto. It makes a lot of sense.

I go to Greece a lot, and Greece is similar, the property disputes are rampant because they don’t have a really centralized, good way to lock up property rights. They don’t have ways to say, well, this corner of the property is mine, or it’s not yours, and we can prove it. And this company is taking a cryptocurrency NFT. And using that, to delineate property rights, and El Salvador very progressively is embracing it.

More stories about El Salvador, they have something called the Bitcoin bond. So, El Salvador third world country, you might remember the drug stories of the gang stories, all the stuff they have here, I feel so safe here, unbelievably safe. And so that keeps a lot of people away. The press in a lot of countries I go to keeps a lot of people away. Even when I went to Greece a few years ago, I was they were having riots. And I told my buddy, I’m not going to come this year, because while they’re having riots, because they’re always having riots. And I go there and the riots, like 20 people or 30 people. It was really no big deal. But there’s nothing to be afraid of here. They want money from the world. They want to grow their country, they have a lot to offer, right, this place is just incredible. And the rest of the world is not giving them money, right, the International Monetary Fund, they don’t play by the IMF rules, because they’re a third world country. They don’t have you know, military operations, things like that. So, the IMF basically kind of gives them the cold shoulder. But they owe to the IMF. They borrowed some money some years ago. And they’re looking for some more. And the IMF said, “No, we’re not going to give any money.” So, what would you do if you run a country now, by the way, the guy that runs the country is this 29 year old guy named a Bukele and he is very loved by his people, because what he’s trying to do. He is trying to bring this country up, and I think this country is like where Costa Rica was 10 years ago. It’s that up and coming, that beautiful with that much potential? And he said, “You know what I’m going to do, I’m going to issue my own bonds,” he calls them Bitcoin bonds. He’s gonna issue those bonds to mine. Bitcoin was part of it, and to build infrastructure for the country, with the other part of it. Pretty smart, right?

But then you don’t owe any money to anybody else. You owe money to the bondholders who believe that you’re going to pay them back based on the promises that you have and based on what bitcoin does now, whether Bitcoin takes off or doesn’t, I think it’s going to be amazingly successful. You know, that’s a different story, but he’s raising that money. He’s raising a billion-dollar Bitcoin bond, right to help us infrastructures that that goes a long way in a small country like this. Think about a billion dollars in a small community that you live in? They have this beautiful series of volcanoes in the mountains here that create geothermal energy. And they’re going to be putting power stations next to these geothermal conductors, these volcanoes, and they’re going to make basically free power. Now, what do you need to mine? Bitcoin? Well, to mine Bitcoin you have to solve these complex mathematical equations and verify the transaction on the blockchain in order to make sure that the blockchain is solid. And it takes energy, right? So, it’s starting to take more and more energy, because the mathematical equations are getting more complex as Bitcoin grows into adaptation. And so, you need energy to be fairly cost effective. Because if it costs too much to mine, a Bitcoin, even by the time you get one, if you get one, you won’t be that much. So, imagine locating next is something that has free energy, like a volcano or a waterfall, right? Or, you know, some kind of solar park. Right? Those things are amazing. This one here happens to be next to a volcano. They’re doing some really cool things. And then finally, and I haven’t read all the rules yet, but President Bill Keller has actually pushed forward 52 new laws, they’re going to remove regulations and try to encourage people to bring their capital to this country. Now, what’s that going to do? Well, I’m telling you, right now, if you have this beautiful place which is right over here, 100 yards away, as beautiful as this beach, and you have technology that people are embracing. And you have a reason for people to be here with their money. Like there’s some future here. Contrast that with some of the other countries in the West, that you and I may live in that have, they don’t welcome your money, they tax the crap out of it. You know, they’re freezing bank accounts, if they don’t like what you’ve donated to. There, they’re not making things easy.

But here, you get somebody with a little vision to be able to go forward and you’re going to create this amazing paradise. I think that, you know, we’re in this we’re 10 years before Costa Rica was but we’re also 10 years before a country like Monaco or Monte Carlo or, places in Europe that have already figured out how to draw money in by lowering taxes by offering this beautiful lifestyle by being technologically advanced by giving people a reason to be here. I think we’re looking at a gem in Central America. And if you haven’t been to El Salvador, and it was never on my list, you really owe it to yourself to check it out. I’m checking it out on behalf of my investors. A little bit selfishly, I’m also enjoying myself, and I think you should too.

El Salvador put it on your list.

March 21, 2022

Bitcoin in El Salvador

Okay, so in the end of 2021, Bitcoin was adopted as legal tender standard in the country of El Salvador, South Central America. And El Salvador’s been using the dollar. They’re not getting rid of the dollar, but they just realized that the dollar is probably becoming worth less and less and they use the dollar as legal tender, but they thought, “You know what, maybe it’s time for us to adopt a new, more technologically savvy standard?”. And this President they have, he’s a young guy, his name is Bukele. He’s kind of a visionary and he’s getting a lot of flack for it, of course, because anything that’s going to be successful in the beginning, you’re going to get lots of flack for it. So, there’s people in the country that really don’t understand this technological move. But I think it’s brilliant, right? I think what happens is it first of all, it puts him on the map in the world as a country that’s forward thinking and technologically savvy. And then second of all, it allows money to be attracted to that country. So other countries that are doing the same kinds of things, tax incentives and things like that, attract a lot of money to the country. People will want to set up businesses there, they set up offices, and those are companies. Countries that are attracting money now that money gets to move around society and that helps us societies. That’s the idea anyway, and Bukele thought, well, you know, what if I if I adopt Bitcoin, and I give everybody some bitcoin, so what he did is he gave everybody $30 USD worth of bitcoin. And he basically put everybody on a, what’s called a Chivo Wallet. So, he had this wallet that was available from the government, it was free. And everybody downloaded this wallet. And when you downloaded it, as a citizen, you all of a sudden have $30 in there. Now, they also made all the merchants have to accept Bitcoin as legal tender. So, if you went into a merchant, you had your wallet, you held your phone up to the machine, it had to accept Bitcoin. And that was the way they got people to use it. Not everybody wanted to use it, they might have saved it, right? Because a lot of people think bitcoin is going from, you know, 40, 50 or $60,000 upwards to a million dollars. So, some people are just using it as a medium of storage storing value. Some people are using it as a currency, some people are spending it, some people are saving it. So, it all depends on what people want to do with it. But it’s their choice, they got it really from the government for free. Now that government went out and bought Bitcoin, it can’t just manufacture Bitcoin, like the US dollar or the euro, the yen, you can just create it out of nothing. So the government actually spent their money to do it. And they looked pretty good for a little while, then it went down. That’s what’s going to happen in a volatile asset. And anything that’s new and technologically advanced, and is cutting edge is going to be volatile, because there’s going to be all kinds of people that are going to be chopping it down, people going to be building it up, and it’s going to go back and forth. Think about the internet when it was first adopted. When the internet was first adopted, people were like, “what am I going to use this for? Like, I’m going to, I want to go to the store and buy things, or why do I need to do my banking online, I could just go into the bank, there are people that are going to help me.” And 20 years later, 30 years later, we realize how much the Internet has changed things. But in the beginning, people really didn’t see the utility. Same thing is happening in Bitcoin.

In this country, it’s attracting all kinds of things. So let me fast forward through this. You know, you’re going to hear a lot of negative things about Bitcoin and you’re going to hear that it’s for money laundering, but any currency can be used for money laundering, like cash is money laundering. It’s why they don’t make a $500 bill or $1,000 bill, right, they think it’s easier to launder money with it. But that argument doesn’t really sit right with me. The other one is that Bitcoin uses too much energy and it’s creating all this crazy energy. And it requires huge amounts of energy, and it’s so good that it pollutes the world. It’s a bunch of crap because it’s a very efficient use of energy to create value, that then becomes a permanent value in a society that you use to transact transactions and to store value and do all the other things that money and currencies do. So, I can get into all that but not on this podcast.

But it does create value and it’s a very efficient use of energy. Just to give you a quick thing, and I won’t go into too much, but imagine making a ship. Imagine making a cruise ship; huge plates of steel. How much energy is required to forge those plates of steel, how much heat? You don’t think that’s putting tons of heat energy and co2 and all the byproducts of energy into the into the world? Of course, it is and it’s not even efficient use on the other side of it. You get a ship sometimes, like right now, the ships are sitting outside of ports waiting to deliver their goods. They’re just sitting there. There’s no value. There’s no utility value other than holding things up that float and they’re floating. Or if it’s a cruise ship, they’re not doing too well. Right now, these days either with these lockdowns. So, you know it at the end of the day, what’s the utility after spending all that energy? Well, Bitcoin, its immediate utility, it’s a store of value, it’s a medium of exchange. Okay, so you’re going to hear a lot of FUD fear, uncertainty and doubt regarding Bitcoin. And regarding bitcoins adoption, you’re going to hear it all the way for the next 1015 years, until it’s widely adopted.

But I think it’s going to be widely adopted. Let me tell you a couple of reasons that I think it’s going to be widely adopted. First of all, it’s an immutable source of currency right now, I don’t look at it as a currency, I still look at it as a digital gold or a store of value. But it’s an immutable, in other words, it can’t be changed, it is an immutable store of value. And, you know, a few years ago, we put all these sanctions on Iran. And we told everybody, “Hey, listen, don’t be trading with Iran.” And we tried to shut them down and force their government and squeeze their government. So, they would have a revolution. Now, you know, maybe that’s worked in the past, it doesn’t seem to be working, at least right now. In Iran, they figured out ways to go around the US dollar being the medium of exchange. And the first way they did it was they went to all the other trading partners, that weren’t the US and they said, “Hey, you want to trade with us, we don’t need to use the dollar, let’s use something else.” And they figured out a different mechanism.

The other day they announced that they are going to be using Bitcoin. And so now you’ve got this big country that has a ton of value in its oil and other value, I’m sure as well. But really, we know of Iran is an oil producer. And now people are going to go right around the dollar. And they’re going to pay directly with Bitcoin. And everybody knows that if they accept Bitcoin, the US government can’t just print more of it and make it worse, make the value less and less. So, they went right around. If that happens, again, in a couple of other countries, if another El Salvador takes place, and there’s another one taking place right now called Tonga, and then you’re going to start to see Venezuela and maybe even Argentina accept Bitcoin. And you’re going to start to see some countries in Africa, except Bitcoin. Pretty soon, a lot of these countries are going to start trading together, right? And it’s not going to be stoppable. And the US government is not going to have the world’s reserve currency anymore. Now, right now, they have it, they trade oil and Petro dollars, that happens 99% of the time. But now that Iraq is saying, “You know what, we don’t need to accept Petro dollars, US base dollars, we’ll accept it in a different way. You can pay us in Bitcoin.” That’s threatening to the world’s place, the US is placed as the world’s reserve currency.

But back to El Salvador. Really cool things that they’re doing now is they want to create a Bitcoin city. Now, everybody’s poopooing the idea, they take this beautiful area of their country, and it’s near a volcano, and they take that Earth created energy, and they create a mining area, and they use that heat to create energy, the energy that creates Bitcoin. What happens? Well think about that, if you’re a Bitcoin mining company, and there’s a lot of them, you’re going to move your company down there, because they’re going to give you incentives and the energy is cheap. And if the energy is cheap, and you bring your company down there, you’re going to employ people. So, people are going to have a job. And then there’s going to be restaurants put around those places, and people are going to go and it will create other jobs. And there’s going to be a whole economy created around Bitcoin city. It’s actually brilliant, right? Think about if every country did that. Certainly, the first ones that did it would attract a lot of interest. And that’s what El Salvador is doing. They’re attracting a huge amount of interest in Bitcoin city. They’re attracting a huge amount of interest from capital where capital wants to go where capital is welcome. So, capital wants to go to a place where people are looking at Bitcoin as the new monetary standard. And if you think about Bitcoin, as a value, compared to gold, gold didn’t go up at all in 2021. In fact, it went down about 7%, but Bitcoin rose about 130%. So, and that’s been happening over the last 10 years, gold has really not gained the value that it should have in an inflationary environment, but Bitcoin has. So, is Bitcoin being used as a supplement to gold? I think so. I think it’s taking a lot of the money that would have gone into gold and it’s going into Bitcoin.

So, the lessons that we can learn from Bukele, the lessons that we can learn from El Salvador is that when you start to embrace an immutable, fungible, transferable electronic version of gold, and maybe you have had some cryptocurrency and currency characteristics, you start to accept that the US dollar isn’t the only game in town. And that there are other ways to do it. And maybe this guy is on to something, and maybe, and it’s going to be a test for the rest of the world and everybody’s watching. And maybe he’s a pioneer. And if he’s a pioneer, you can expect a lot more to come.

Now, the last thing I’ll say about it is the world is in a bit of turmoil. Over the last several years, what we’ve done is we’ve just debased all of our currency, certainly the US has debased its currency by 30%,40%, or 50%. In fact, they say that 80% Of all the money that’s been printed, since the US Dollar was created, you know, a couple 100 years ago, has been created in the last two or three years. And if that’s the case, then the dollar is losing value, it’s lost 99% of its value over time. Anyway, if you look at the chart of what it’s worth today, I mean, think about 50 years ago, what you could have bought with $10,000, it was a car right? Today, can you buy a brand-new car, the same level for $10,000? Now, you have to spend about 30K or 40K, and that’s just 50 years ago, 100 years ago is a lot different. So, the dollar has lost about 99.5% of its value. And it’s continuing to do that as we start to as we continue to spend, and the government continues to create programs that are not productive, and then we print money.

There are economies around the world that are failing, look at the Turkish Lira has gone up about 40% this year. The inflation rate is about 40%. It’s lost tons of value. So, the Turkish Lira, Venezuela, Argentina is ready to default on its debt. You’re going to start to see other countries around the world, probably accelerated because of the lock downs in this whole thing with the pandemic start to fail. When they failed in the past, what they would have done is gone to the dollar standard. And I think they’ll still do that. But I think now they’re going to start to embrace Bitcoin as another alternative, whether they go to the dollar coin, and the Bitcoin all together is something that I don’t know what will happen, but I’m sure curious about it. I really think that Bitcoin adoption is just starting to take place. We’re at the very beginning of this revolution.

March 15, 2022

Zandi Says Recession Coming; Fed Clueless

Today we’re going to talk about a common-sense approach that is about the Fed, you know, it’s one of my, one of my things that I like to talk about is the Fed. And I really wish I didn’t have to talk about it. But I think it’s so obvious that we’re screwed, right? And I want you to understand why we’re screwed, because so many people go through their life. And you know, believe me, that’s probably a better way to go through life and not worry about this stuff that I worry about with finances, and the Fed and the dollar and Bitcoin and all this stuff that keeps me up at night, you probably better you’re better off not worrying about but if you are listening and you want to learn about this stuff, I’ve got to take on it that’s a little bit different than some of the people that you see on the on the screens. And now there’s some smart people on the screens. But like I always say, you get an economist on the screen from Yale, and another one on the other side of the screen from Harvard. And they’re going to have two totally different opinions. So, the end of the day, nobody really knows. Right? So, I think I have just as good an opinion as they do. And, you probably do too. And some of it is like we don’t have we don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. We don’t have ulterior motives. And if the last couple years have proved anything to us, is that there may be some ulterior motives and the things that our elected officials or that are appointed officials have been feeding us. My goal here is to just educate you and get you to make your own decision. And that you form your own decision. What I care about is that you take information, and I’m not the only source, get other sources. And you start to use your brain to figure out what the information is for you. And how that can affect your finances. And that’s what I’m about, this is the wealth architect podcast. It’s not the wealth politics podcast, right?

So today, I’m going to be talking about a guy named Mark Zandi Mark Zandi with Moody’s Analytics. Moody’s is the company that right before the big crash of 2007/ 2008, which caused the Great Recession, is a company that came out and basically said, “Bear Stearns is fine, these companies are all fine and gave them all great credit rating”, so they get paid to get great credit rating. So of course, who do they get paid by? The company they are rating? Right? So, the problem there already. And so, you know, it’s not like these guys really know what they’re doing. My opinion, I got some smart people, but they’re guessing their economy. Economics is guessing. Right? It’s just who guesses best. And so, there’s so many pieces, there’s macro-economic issues, and savings issues and investment issues and debt issues, and the Fed and the spending, and wars and bombs, all that stuff goes in to these opinions. So, get a load of some of what this guy is saying. Now, let me start by telling you that I want you to look at this chart, if you’re on video, if you’re not, what I want you to do is just imagine that there’s a piece of paper in front of you. And there’s a hockey stick that goes from lower left to upper right. And that’s just a small, you know, increase in the debt. Okay, we’re talking about the national debt in the US. And then all of a sudden, it just takes off and it goes straight up like a hockey stick. Right? You got that in your mind. Those of you that are watching us on video, you can see that. So, you can see that’s the debt, the debt is gone parabolic. And we all knew it was going to go parabolic in 2008, when we printed our way out of the financial catastrophe, what we should have done, and we talked about it at the time, is we should have let all the weak companies fail. All the companies that have been taking all this extra risk, and you know, putting all of us at risk and making all of this stuff happen. where people lost their homes, where people, were bankrupted. It created a lot of opportunity, but it would have done it anyway. But it would have cleaned out the phlegm, right? There was a lot of phlegm back then everybody was getting alone, if you could fog a mirror, you could get a loan. And those companies that were, we’re putting the mirror in front of you were all the ones that being irresponsible, they were just making money, and they were greedy, not a single person went to jail, not a single person was fined. Everybody got bailed out. Some companies, they “token” let them go out of business. But at the end of the day, all the guys that were in the group, in the club, got bailed out. And it always happens in, in a society where you have corruption. And I think that’s what we have. Now we have it in spades. And there’s a lot of money sloshing around, there’s a lot of money sloshing around. My dad always used to say, “never let anybody sit next to a pile of money because they will want to spend it.” And that’s what we do here. We create infinite amounts of money. And we have been for 100 years, and we certainly have been accelerating, hence the hockey stick over the last couple of years. And there’s waste there that’s causing inflation, I know you’re feeling the inflation. So, I’m setting a stage here. And I’m going to try to make this quick. The government has come out and said, inflation is really high, it’s really bad. And by the way, it’s the worst in 40 years. And they say inflation is up seven and a half percent. Now, I say this all the time, but the last time you went put gas in your car, even before the Ukrainian crisis was your gas only up seven and a half percent. It went from $2 to 369, or $4, or $5 in California, and it’s going higher.

We have Russian oil, we have we have constraints in oil through straits and waterways, we have all kinds of problems. We have elimination of oil exploration in the United States, we have pipelines that are shut down, we have a lot of constriction that is creating to a lower supply. And if you know anything about supply and demand when there’s a lower supply, but the demand stays the same or goes higher. You get higher prices. And that’s what we’re getting right now. They can blame all the higher prices on Ukraine all they want. But higher prices have been happening since well, for a long time, right? Just go back to 10 years ago, and ask yourself how much you were paying for eggs? how much you were paying for a gallon of gas? how much you were paying for a cup of coffee? whatever it is for you, create your own basket of goods, I can tell you my basket of goods is running about 25 to 30%. Right? A Martini used to cost $9, a call brand Martini. Now Martini cost close to 20. That’s a 50% increase isn’t no seven and a half percent. I don’t care what they say, maybe you’ve got this basket of goods that you don’t need things that are expensive, or you’re not spending any money or whatever. But I don’t believe the official numbers is the point. So, create your own basket of goods. I think that you can use the seven and a half percent for the rest of this video. But the seven and a half percent is a bare minimum. And the Fed has a mandate to try to keep 2%. And last year in 2021. They were running around going well we don’t think inflation is a problem. Like you guys just printed trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars and you’re so stupid to say. “We don’t think inflation is a problem. We think it’s transitory”. Transitory, well, what is transitory for the next 100 years, it’s transitory. Then they came about few months later and went oops, it’s not so transitory. We’re going to quit using that word. We’re retiring that word they said. So, they realize they screwed up. If you can’t believe them, then why do you believe them now? Why do you ever believe them? Guys? I want you to think by yourself. I want you to think for yourself. So, I want you to go back and listen to this guy. I’m going to play a few excerpts from an interview that he had on CNBC. Some smart stuff that he puts out there, guys, you listen to him, you know how that makes a lot of sense. But I want you to remember, the Fed has their own “mandate to keep”, you know, unemployment, low and inflation at a 2% rate. Well, if inflation is at a seven and a half percent, if you believe that number, then what they’re supposed to do? According to the economic theories that Paul Volcker stated is, you’re supposed to make money more expensive, because if money’s cheap, right, if money’s cheap, everybody borrows it. And they go spend it. When people spend money. Prices go up, right? There’s a lot of money and lots of supply of money. Ooh, you know what, I don’t care if I pay another dollar for that cup of coffee, I got plenty of money, right? I got a raise. You know, I got free money from the government. So, when that money is sloshing around, prices go up. So, what the Fed is supposed to do is make money more expensive, so it’s not sloshing around anymore. The banks don’t loan as much and when they do, it’s costly, right. It basically says slows down the economy. When the economy slows down, there’s not as much money sloshing around it prices are supposed to come down. Paul Volcker, raised prices to like 20%, in the 80s, early 80s, late 70s, right back in that period of time, we had horrible inflation, right? I remember my dad getting a mortgage at like, 20% a year was crazy. But on the other side, you could get a 12% a year CD, you put a million dollars in, you get $120,000 a year out, those days are gone, unfortunately for the old people.

There’s a strong relationship between inflation expectations, certainly consumer inflation expectations, but also investor inflation expectations. I think you’re referring to the five year break even inflation expectations, they’re very highly correlated to oil prices. And if oil prices come back in the way which I would expect as the Russian Ukraine, event start to wind down. Going forward, hopefully that’ll happen. But what if it doesn’t happen, right? I mean, they didn’t predict oil going up. They weren’t out there talking about this, and inflation was transitory. But what makes us think that we should believe them that oil prices are going to go down, they’re going to get that exactly right. You know, the supply side disruptions related to the pandemic start to by a global supply chain. They start to perform a little bit better, inflation comes in, then then that’s a problem. And then I do think the Fed would step on the brakes harder, because at the end of the day, they work really hard to gain the credibility they have around that 2% inflation target, they’re not going to give that up easily. I love how he says supply chains are because of the pandemic, the supply chains are because of the pandemic, the supply chains are because the Fed printed all that money. And because they gave people money to sit at home. And because there were all these little restrictions and little rules about mandates and jabs and hiring and people aren’t happy. And in order to make them happy, you got to pay them more, it’s again goes back to the money inflation. Yeah, I think he’s sending a very clear, crystal clear, strong signal that,” hey, look, we have a 2% target. That’s where we’ve been, that’s where we are. That’s where we’re going to stay. And we’re going to do everything that’s necessary to get us there as fast as possible”. Now, clearly, you’ve got all these things going on with the pandemic and the supply side disruptions in Russia, Ukraine, and it’s going to take a bit of time to get things back down to target, but we are going back to target. Oh, yeah, sending a crystal-clear signal. Have you heard? Have you heard this guy talk? He doesn’t send a crystal-clear signal about anything. If you ask him, do you think inflation is going to stay? You know, at seven and a half percent? He goes, well, maybe we might want to think about joking about making a comment about it being down like he doesn’t answer any single question. And here’s Andy’s saying, Oh, he’s crystal clear. Come on, give me a break, and cement down those inflation expectations? Because then they will they make it a lot easier to actually get inflation down to the target? You know, some are asking Mark, what’s the big deal? If inflation is 3%? Or 3.1%, or 3.2%? Over the next five years? What would you tell them? Well, that presupposes that the Fed can calibrate things exactly. Right. Calibrate, right. They haven’t been able to calibrate anything, right? Certainly, they can’t calibrate anything. Exactly. Right? What makes us think they’re going to be able to calibrate anything exactly right, this guy’s given him a huge benefit of the doubt. And they’ve gotten everything wrong all the way up until now for the last 100 years, and certainly for the last five years easily. But if we’re headed towards three and inflation expectations are going to three, very unlikely that’s where it all stops, and we’re going to blow right past that. And then we’re going to be looking at four or 5 or 6 or 7 percent inflation. We get into that kind of dreaded wage price spiral that really infected the economy back in the 70s. and 80s. Paul Volcker had to ring out with very high interest rates, and obviously a very, very severe recession. So, you know, 3%, if you kind of land the plane right there, and it stays there. Okay, maybe that’s a reasonable debate. But that’s not what’s going to happen. We’re going to go right past that. And that’s what the Fed does not want to see happen. You know, I understand the concern about the wage price spiral, but you have to have the dry powder, so to speak, to support that, right. You know, if you don’t have an expanding monetary base or expanding, you can only grow wages so much before people have to say, “we’re laying off workers or we can’t hire or the or we reached this resistance point in the economy”. What is the dry powder that could allow this to just keep going and building on top of itself? Well, I mean, economy strong. I mean, we’re growing year over year. Real GDP growth is 4%, the economy’s creating a half a million jobs, you know, each and every month unemployment is at 4% and falling. And we’ve got a lot of savings out there, you know, the so-called excess savings, the savings that was done above, which would have typically happened, if not for the pandemic, by my calculation, it’s $2.6 trillion. Which well over 10% of GDP, that’s a lot of dry powder. So, this economy can grow along here pretty quickly, the economy, I don’t believe, is at full employment. We’ve got some latitude there, but we will blow past it. And if we do, then inflation will become, an endemic problem more of an issue as the Fed watch, press on the brakes even harder. Okay, so now I just want to put it in perspective, if the Fed is going to raise rates. Now they’re talking about raising a quarter of a percent, a quarter, right? So, in a year, that’s 1%, like that doesn’t even make a dent in the seven and a half percent. And we’ve got inflationary stuff going on, we got supply chain issues, we got more Russia issues. And there’s a lot of assumptions like, okay, Russia is going to end everything’s going to go back to normal. No, inflation is here to stay. And it’s going to hurt the poor, it doesn’t hurt the wealthy, the wealthy have enough money to buy gas, the wealthy have enough money to spend $1.89 on a dozen eggs, they can spend $2.69 an extra $1, you know, doesn’t matter. But the poor that 69cents, that 89 cents makes a difference, right? That’s the difference. It’s like it costs money. When your car goes $2.50 A gallon to fill up to $5 to fill up to what I think is going to go to 750 or maybe even $10 by the end of the year. You’re going to see major, major problems with people that can’t afford those kinds of those kinds of spending. So, it’s impossible, right? This is all a charade. Here’s what they’re going to do. They’re going to act like they’re going to raise rates, they’re going to raise it a quarter of a point, the markets going to freak out, like, it’s been freaking out for the last six to weeks, right? It’s gone down, then they’re going to go, “oh, man, maybe we can’t raise the rates, or we’re going to find another excuse”. You know what Ukraine’s going on? We need to print some more money, so we can buy some more F 16. And send to Ukraine. We’re going to need to print some more money. So, we can spend it on Raytheon, Raytheon can send some send some of our javelins over there. Who’s paying for that? We are, right. Ukraine doesn’t have industry right now. They’re not making anything. So, we’re paying for it, your taxes are paying it. But you know what? Easy money is easy. Easy come, easy go. Sit next to a pile of money. You want to spend it? Interesting, right? So, I want you to use your own common sense when it comes to what you hear on TV right? The inflation is seven and a half percent up to 25%. Right. Which means if you keep your money in the bank, you can buy 25% Less next year than you can this year. So, you can’t keep your money in the bank. You can’t keep your money in bonds, because bonds are crashing right now. And bond rates are going up a big deal. They’re going up they give you 2% To keep your money tied up. Right 2%. So, you got to put your money in stocks. You got to put your money in safe havens, because we don’t know what’s going to happen. There’s a lot of turmoil in the world right now with money. So, you got to put your money in gold and silver and Bitcoin, and whatever else will store that value. Real estate’s good too. So, all I’m trying to say here is you are in control of your financial decisions. And you should know what the people are telling you whether it’s true or not. You get to make your own decision. Don’t just listen to me. I’m just a bald guy on a podcast, right? Go listen to a couple other bald guys on podcasts and make your own decision.

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