Plundering the Crisis Economy with John Titus

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Unknown (00:00):
Music.

WW (00:19):
Welcome back to the Unlimited Hangout podcast, I'm
your host, Whitney Webb,contributing editor at
UnlimitedHangout.com and today Ihave a co host. Mark Goodwin,
author of the book The BitcoinDollar and Unlimited Hangout.
Contributor, Hi Mark.

MG (00:30):
Hello Whitney. Thanks so much for having me, of course.

WW (00:33):
So while most people have probably heard of Blackrock, the
world's largest asset manager,run by Larry Fink, it seems like
relatively few people are awarethat Blackrock has also played a
pivotal role in the largestinstitutional theft of American
wealth in the history of thecountry, and unfortunately for
us, it seems that the finalphase of this now decades long,
process of theft is quicklyapproaching, enabled in part, by

(00:54):
the media manufactured ignoranceof one of the greatest financial
crimes ever in this episode ofUnlimited Hangout we hope to
help dispel some of thatignorance with the 2008 economic
crisis. The unusual relationshipbetween the Federal Reserve and
BlackRock began with Blackrockbecoming a government contractor
and informal quote, unquoteadvisor to the Treasury
Department. At the time,concerns were raised at this new

(01:16):
role in the public sector forBlackrock would imperil
taxpayers. As the asset managerwas likely to place its main
driver, generating profit forits private sector shareholders
over positive outcomes for thepublic and the Treasury, even
when those concerns were provenright just a few years after the
crash. That didn't stop thegovernment from again turning to
Blackrock during the next majordownturn after 2008 that

(01:38):
downturn, while often framed asbeginning with the declaration
of covid 19, as a globalpandemic in March 2020. Had
really begun months earlier inSeptember of the previous year,
when the repo market wenthaywire, forcing the Federal
Reserve System to intervene. TheFed's intervention, little did
the public know had beenconveniently designed by
Blackrock not long before therepo market started to go crazy.

(02:01):
That Blackrock design policy,known as going direct, would
begin well before covid, butwould use the pandemic as cover
to execute the largest wealthtransfer in our nation's
history. Yet very few Americansare aware of the scale of this
more recent theft, particularlybecause the media, including
much of the independent mediathat railed against covid era,
policies, either declined tocover the story or remains

(02:21):
unaware it even happened withmajor politicians now claiming a
major US debt crisis is on thehorizon. Today, we turn to the
person who broke the goingdirect story, John Titus, to
explain what Blackrock has doneand what it will likely do
during this apparentlyanticipated next downturn. We
will also discuss themanufactured bank consolidation
wave that began with thecollapse of Silicon Valley Bank,

(02:43):
and how Blackrock covid eraantics have enabled that,
revealing how many of theeconomic calamities of the last
few years were intentionallycreated by those who
successfully sought toconsolidate control over both
the financial services industryand the public sector entities
that ostensibly regulate them.John Titus is the founder of the
best evidence video channelfound on YouTube and other

(03:03):
platforms. He is also a frequentcontributor to Catherine Austin
Fitts Solari report, where he cohosts the money and markets
podcast. Also, as I alluded to amoment ago, he is the original
author of the expose thatrevealed the Blackrock designed
going direct policy during thecovid 19 crisis. And has also
forensically exposed a varietyof financial crimes committed by
Wall Street and the Fed, oftenin tandem over the past several

(03:26):
years. Welcome back to unlimitedHangout, John. It's great to
have you today.

JT (03:30):
Great to be back. Whitney,

WW (03:32):
wonderful. So while Blackrock is a pretty well known
name these days, I feel thatmany still are unaware of what
they actually do and the powerthey actually wield,
particularly as it relates totheir relationship with and
their influence over thegovernment. So would you mind
giving a brief overview of whatBlackrock is, why it matters,
and its relationship with us,fiscal policy, before we drill

(03:52):
into the specifics?

JT (03:53):
Yeah, let me, let me say one thing, I didn't really break the
story. I think the person whoactually broke it was Pam
Martins ofWallStreetonparade.com, what I
did was was, was explain theconnection between Blackrock
paper dealing with the nextdownturn in 2019 and what

(04:16):
subsequently happened both onthe Fed's balance sheet and on
banks balance sheets, and that'ssomething that I was out there
alone doing, because so manyfinancial commentators and so
many monetary commentatorsinsist to this day that
quantitative easing is merely anasset swap, meaning it stays in

(04:38):
the banking system at thewholesale level when that fact
is incorrect and has beenrefuted by the Federal Reserve
itself, and it was refuted inthe wake of the pandemic.
Anyway, we can get into thatwhen the time comes. Let's talk
about BlackRock. ThoughBlackRock, like you say, is the
world's largest asset manager,to be clear, they are. A bank,

(05:01):
they're a financial institution.They're they're those two
entities are different. Banksare materially different than
non banks. Non banks are includeyou and me. When we lend $20 we
reach into our pocket, we pullthe $20 bill out, we are
dispossessed of that money whenwe lend it, we kind of kind of
lend on the piggy bank model.Banks don't do that. When a bank

(05:22):
lends $20 whether it's acommercial bank like Bank of
America, or a wholesale bank ora central bank like the Federal
Reserve, they don't they don'treach into their pocket to get
the money. They create thatmoney out of thin air and lend
it out against an asset, andthat is where Blackrock comes
in. So BlackRock, technically,yeah, they were involved with

(05:45):
the Treasury in 2008 but theirreal role in the pandemic, when,
when they when Blackrock wentbig time, was when the Fed
created out of thin air, andimmediately, as soon as the
pandemic began, the Fedbasically ginned up $5 trillion

(06:05):
of reserves out of thin air andbought assets. And when they did
this in early 2020, through thenext six or eight weeks, the Fed
bought assets from non banks,and that was new during the
global financial crisis. 20082009 the Fed, pretty much was
bailing out banks, and it wasbuying assets from banks, not

(06:28):
from non banks, but in 2020 itstarted buying all these assets
from from non banks, and thatwas Blackrock's plan. So So in
August of 2019 at the biggestFederal Reserve conference of
the year in Jackson HoleWyoming, which is hosted by the
Kansas City Fed. BlackRock has apaper called dealing with the

(06:52):
next downturn, and in thatpaper, Blackrock says, hey, you
know what? There's going to beanother downturn, and when there
is Federal Reserve, you're goingto need to buy assets from non
banks, which is a departure fromwhat the Fed did during the
global financial crisis of oh809, because you're going to
need to inject money, helicoptermoney, they called it into the

(07:15):
commercial banking system, andlo And behold, a month later,
the New York the overnight repomarket in New York begins to
melt down. The New York Fedintervenes. It begins buying
assets from non banks, and thatcontinues through January of
2020 up through March 2020 ofcourse, in March of 2020 around

(07:37):
March 10, the World HealthOrganization declares a
worldwide pandemic, and the Fedimmediately goes nuts and says,
You know what, we gotta, wegotta buy all these assets. Now,
what the Fed did not say whenthey made the announcement in
connection with the pandemicwas, we're gonna, we're buying
the asset from non banks. Butthat's what they did. And you
can see that very clearly. I'vemade video after video after

(07:58):
video of that showing that theFed was buying money, buying
assets from non banks, which hadthe effect of for every dollar
the Fed bought in assets, italso increased by $1 the amount
of money in the commercialbanking system going into the
pandemic. If you added up allthe checking and savings
accounts in the US, thecommercial deposits, there was

(08:21):
13 and a half trillion, when itwas all said and done, topped
out at $18 trillion that was theFed's asset purchase program,
and that was managed byBlackRock. BlackRock was brought
in by the Fed to manage thepurchase of assets. The Fed
signed a waiver saying, oh, youknow, it's no problem. You can
actually buy BlackRock. You can,you can order us to buy your own

(08:45):
assets. Isn't that great. Soyou, you're buying assets that
you own with, with, with moneythat we created. A thin air. You
buy your own assets. What asweet our deal. And no problem,
because we're signing a, youknow, a legal waiver to let you
do that. So it really wasn'tlike a theft in terms of, it was
a bank robbery with a gun topeople's heads. It was really

(09:06):
along the lines of Blackrock hadbig time insider knowledge and
leveraged the living be Jesusout

MG (09:13):
of it, and, and, you know, very conveniently, you know,
they crushed demand by basicallylocking everybody in their house
for, you know, a year and a halfor whatever, as they're, you
know, massively expanding themonetary supply and commercial
banks. I don't know if maybe howmuch econ 101, we want to do
here, but you've done somereally amazing work on, kind of
breaking down, you know, verysimply, the the two tiered

(09:37):
system of reserves and of money,of retail facing money. And I
think when you talk about therepo market, it might, it might
be helpful for listeners thatare maybe coming in from, you
know, knowing things are messedup, but don't exactly know the
mechanisms. Here, it might makesense to do a brief overview on,
you know, the creation ofreserves and how private

(09:58):
capital, you know, moneycreation is sort of. Innately,
this private, publicpartnership. And you know how
the Fed and Treasury makereserves, commercial banks make
money, and then what the repomarket actually is, and why the
repo market exploding inSeptember, you know, six months
before lockdowns. You know whythat's that's sort of important.
So is that? Is that too broad ofa question here? But did you

(10:19):
mind just kind of going over,yeah, take it away.

JT (10:21):
The repo market is is less the legal the repo market
triggered the crisis, for sure,but it's less important. The
amount of asset purchases donein that market was about $400
billion which, at the time,seemed like a big deal, but it
ultimately paled in comparison,right? So the repo market is
complicated because the Fed toto maintain a level of opacity

(10:44):
so that you can never know whothey're buying those assets
from. The Fed buys assets fromprimary dealers, and so you so
if you went to the Fed, even ifyou could go to the New York
Fed, say, who'd you buy theasset from? They're going to
give you a list of 24 primarydealers, and that's not really
who they bought the assets from.Um, anyway, let's talk about,

(11:06):
let's, let's talk about the twotier system, because that's the
more important component, andthat's what distinguishes
pandemic quantitative easing,what the Fed did during the
pandemic, from what it didduring the during the global
financial crisis. The globalfinancial crisis, banks were in
trouble. Okay, all the banks, Idon't care. I don't care what JP
Morgan says. JP Morgan was asdead broke as the rest of them.

(11:28):
That whole notion is just a lie.Jamie Dimon is actually the
first video I ever made wasOctober 5, 2013 called bankster
baseball, where I show that JPMorgan was just as broken. Jamie
Diamond's line of Congress, theywere all broke the banks. And so
what the Fed did then was theybought assets from banks. And

(11:50):
when do you do that? Banks don'tuse checking and savings account
like you do. They have specialtokens with the Fed. You and I,
bank at commercial banks. Banksdon't do that. Banks, Bank at
the Fed. The Fed is the bank'sbank, and the Fed to help people
do their banking with the Fed.They don't use like checking

(12:12):
savings accounts. They usereserves. They just consider
reserves like tokens. And sowhen the Fed was buying assets
from JP Morgan and Citigroup,what the Fed was do was create,
say, a billion dollars of thesetokens, these reserves out of
thin air, give them to thebanks. Give them to JP Morgan

(12:33):
Chase or Bank of America, and inexchange, the banks would hand
over an asset to and mostly itwas two thirds. Roughly it was
two thirds treasuries and 1/3mortgage backed securities. And
that made the banks liquid.Okay, because there wasn't a lot
of asset trading at that time.That was one of the problems was

(12:54):
that the markets had seized up.Everything was liquid. Well,
reserves are highly liquid, butthat swap there of reserves for
assets stays within the bankingwith within the banking system.
At the wholesale level, there'sno effect of that transaction at
the on the commercial depositlevel, your bank account doesn't

(13:15):
go up, my banking accountdoesn't go up. There's no the
money supply at that retaillevel is unaffected by the Fed's
purchase of an asset from abank, okay? But now you go to
the pandemic, and the Fed is nolonger it's not buying assets
from banks. Banks aren't theones in trouble, like you said,
Mark, it's really, in theory,it's businesses that are in

(13:39):
trouble because they're beingshut down in practice, not so
much. But the point either wayis in 2020, the Fed begins
buying assets, not fromCitigroup, but from non bank,
institutions like, say, Tesla,you know, big, big or or from

(14:00):
hedge funds, that would beanother non bank, financial
institution. And when you dothat, when the Fed does that,
because say, let's just calllet's just say, I use Tesla as
an example. Even though I don't,I have no way of knowing whether
they bought assets from Tesla.I'll use Tesla as an example.
Tesla does not have an accountat the Fed. Okay, so, so how

(14:25):
does the Fed go to Tesla and buyan asset? Tesla doesn't have an
account at the Fed. They can'taccept they can't the tokens
don't mean anything to theTesla. They're like, Chuck E
Cheese tokens. The Tesla's like,what? What is this? So the way
that transaction works is, no,seriously, that's, that's, they
don't have an account of theFed,

WW (14:45):
the rules. No, I know. I just think the analogy is funny.
Well, it's kind

JT (14:49):
of what went on. So the way the transaction work is, works
is the Fed goes to Tesla's bank,okay? And so, so. Say Tesla
banks at it's on the West Coast.It banks at Wells Fargo. So the
Fed to buy an asset from ElonMusk says, okay, the way this is

(15:10):
going to work is we're going to,we're going to deposit a billion
dollars of reserves at WellsFargo. Okay, that's an asset on
Wells Fargo balance sheet. NowWells Fargo needs a
corresponding liability on itsbalance sheet, because balance
sheets need to drum roll balanceout. And so when that liability

(15:32):
is created at Wells Fargo, ittakes the form of a $1 billion
credit to Elon Musk's bankaccount or his checking account
at Wells Fargo. And noweverything balances out. Elon
Musk got rid of his $1 billionasset in exchange, he now has a
billion new dollars in his WellsFargo account. So Elon's all

(15:53):
checked out. He's all squaredup. Wells Fargo is squared up
because it's got a billiondollars of new reserves on one
side of his balance sheet, theasset side, it has $1 billion of
liabilities in the form of a new$1 billion credit in Elon Musk
checking account. On theliability side, and the Fed's
balanced out because it's gotwhatever a billion dollar asset

(16:14):
it got from Elon Musk, which isin the custodian of which is
BlackRock, and it's got abillion dollars of liabilities,
called $1 billion of reserves.So every it's a three way
transaction, and that is theessence of pandemic. QE, I
wrote, I did video after videoof it. And finally, the Fed
wrote a paper saying, yeah,that's, that's, that's how

(16:35):
things work when we buy assetsfrom a non bank, and that's what
went on, and that's, that's whatdrove, as I say, the bank, the
money supply in the bankingsystem from 13 and a half
trillion to $18 trillion that'swhere your inflation came from.
All these other bogeymen theypoint to nonsense. It came from
buying assets from non banks.And Mervyn King, the former head

(16:56):
of the Bank of England, threwthe Fed under the bus and said,
Yep, that's the Fed's fault forbuying assets from non banks.
Wow, interesting. And thatthat's, that's what you need to
know. Because what it means is,if it's for, insofar as
Blackrock is concerned, itmeans, okay, well, they're
managing a ton of assets, and wedon't know how many, but
they're, you can rest assured,the world's largest asset

(17:20):
manager was brought in becausethey're going to be managing,
you know, pretty much theworld's largest QE program ever.
Number one, number two, as Isaid, they fed signed a waiver
allowing Blackrock to take bothsides of a trade. So what's to
prevent Blackrock from investingin Tesla? Right before they go
and plunk, you know, a billiondollars in the Tesla stock

(17:41):
answered nothing blocked them todo that. You know, there's the
conflicts of interest bound upin this are just amazing. But
yet it went forward with verylittle scrutiny or, and I must
say, very little understandingby people who write about
financial matters. That's what,that's what got me stop saying
this is just, they're stopsaying this an asset swap.

(18:03):
That's that's the answer thatyou would say every time, like,
well, there's not gonna beinflation. It's just an asset
swap at the wholesale level.It's like, No, it's not an asset
swap. It's a third, three waytransaction involving a non bank
entity that has the effect ofmirror, mirroring and
replicating the creation ofreserves. So if you create a new
a billion dollars of newreserves to do an asset purchase

(18:25):
from a non bank, you are, bydefinition and necessarily, also
creating, in parallel, $1billion of new bank money in the
banking system. So stop sayingit's merely an asset swap. And
yet to this day, I see renownedfinancial writers parroting that
very line, and it's completelyfalse, and the Fed says it's
false. It's unbelievable. Yeah,

MG (18:49):
there's also, I mean, I think you sort of exposed this
as well. Is that not only werethey, were they buying, you
know, assets from non bankentities, and there's this
obvious, you know, conflict ofinterest, but even managers like
Blackrock were buying their ownETFs within this program. And I
think that maybe would be a goodopportunity to kind of talk

(19:09):
about, maybe, like, what an ETFeven is, and why this is sort of
dominated, you know, since oheight, when Blackrock actually
bought the iShares brand fromBarclays after they denied a
government bailout, you know.Now, you know, the ETF is kind
of like the most popular vehiclefor investment, because it's
such a it's such a greatopportunity for these managers
to basically just index and justcreate a pricing mechanism and

(19:32):
then sell, you know, shares ofsomething that they don't
actually have to really do toomuch underlying work for. So,
yeah. So, so why has the ETFkind of exploded? We can get
into bitcoin stuff and whatever,but, but really, Blackrock went
from, you know, not, not messingwith ETFs at all, you know, and,
oh, wait, to now being thelargest ETF manager in the

(19:54):
world. And I think the ETFmechanism plays into some of
this stuff. So maybe just kindof overview it, yeah.

JT (20:00):
In my opinion, the ETFs have exploded. They're an easy it's
an easy way for Joe Schmo to getinto the stock market, because
he sold on a couple he's like,Well, it's secure, it's safe.
It's indexed. It's across abunch of it's a bunch of
different companies. You don'tto worry about a thing. And it's
managed by Larry Fink, and he'sa genius. So you just give us

(20:20):
your money and we'll spread itacross a bunch of markets, in a,
you know, in the electronic car,ETF, or whatever it is. And so
it really is expanded theparticipation of retail money in
the stock market. But noticethat it's, it's being managed by
professional money managers likeBlackRock. And so it has the
effect of it to me, it's, it'sreally a control mechanism more

(20:44):
than anything else, because ifyou look at, if you go to the
10k filings that every, or even10 Q filings, but certainly the
10k filings of companies thatare traded on the stock
exchange, you know, every, everyyear, they have To make file
annual report with theSecurities and Exchange
Commission, and one of the partsof the annual report is called

(21:08):
proxy statement, which includesa statement of beneficial
owners. And so you can gocompany by company, by company
by company, and see who wantsthis company and to what degree.
And when you do that, I don'tcare what the company is. If
it's a company of any size atall, you're going to see the
same names again and again andagain. The names are BlackRock,

(21:29):
fidelity, State Street. There'sall these big asset you know,
state Street's a bank, butthey're they're kind of weird,
but they're a bunch of differentcompanies, but they're asset
managers, and so if you thinkabout that, if you have and the
numbers that are typical, thenumbers you typically see, even
with huge companies, and so faras their ownership is concerned,

(21:53):
are 789, percent right aroundthere. And you you know, okay,
well, this company, that's a lotof leverage to have over a
publicly traded company. I mean,if you own 9% of the company,
and realistically, you gottapeel back another layer, like,
well, who owns BlackRock, whoowns the company? It's, you

(22:15):
know, you can only peel thatonion back so far. But even at
9% that's an enormous amount ofcontrol over a company, because
you can threaten, we'll dumpyour stock and tank your stock
price and destroy your bonus,you know, overnight, and it's
this. And when you talk about acabal of companies, just take,

(22:37):
you know BlackRock, you knowfidelity, and a couple others.
Those, those asset managers, owneasily, north of a third of the
company. So it's really, to me,it's a control mechanism that's
those companies need to get inline because a, a company like

(22:57):
Blackrock can dump the stock,and B because a company like
Blackrock is in bed with theFederal Reserve, which is
setting monetary policy. So itto me, the ETFs are part and
parcel of a larger controlsystem in the US financial
system.

WW (23:18):
Well, something else you've written about in relation to
the, I guess, downstream effectsof going direct is the creation
of these killer whale accountyou've called them. So can you
explain what those killer whaleaccounts are, how going direct
helped create them, and theirrole, as you investigated, in

(23:39):
the collapse of Silicon ValleyBank. And you know that the
regional banking crisis of thatof that time, the going

JT (23:46):
direct reset didn't contribute to the going direct
reset created those killer whaleaccounts. Okay, so let me talk
about what a killer whaleaccount is. To me, a killer
whale account is any it's a bankaccount that's so big that its
departure from the bankthreatens the bank, and they
were created during a goingdirect reset. So let me go back
to my Elon Musk's example. Letme, let me change the name of

(24:08):
Elon Musk, though, to a morerealistic name. And the name is
Peter Thiel. But Peter Thieldestroyed Silicon Valley Bank
period, full stop. That's Peterthiel's baby. He did that? Heath
moved all of his money and allof his company's money out of
Silicon Valley Bank, and itdestroyed that bank. The

(24:28):
testimony on the record is that$13 billion moved out of 10
accounts in Silicon Valley Bankin six hours. That's Peter
Thiel. He wrecked that bank. $42billion moved out of that bank
in a day, and that's what wipedthe bank out. Now, how is that
possible? How can that muchmoney that never happened during

(24:49):
the during the global financialcrisis? You know, it took two
weeks to move something like $16billion out of, you know, one of
those west coast. Banks. Andthat was, that was the worst
one, but two weeks versus sixhours. And the answer is, it was
enabled by the killer whaleaccounts. Because when the Fed
comes, like I said, back to thebillion dollar example, when the

(25:13):
Fed comes to Peter Thiel orPalantir and says, Hey, you know
what? We want to buy an assetfrom you. You've got a you've
got a billion dollar Treasurythere, we're going to buy that
from you. And Palantir is like,well, we can't accept reserves.
We don't take those stupidtokens. Well, you know, we back
with Wells Fargo, and the Fedgoes to Wells Fargo, and they
give them the money. Well, nowPalantir has a new billion

(25:35):
dollar account at Wells Fargo inthe commercial banking system.
That's a lot of money. Andnormally, in a normal situation,
people don't hold on to bankaccounts that big because
they're uninsured. Only $250,000of that is insured in the bank.
So what do you do? Well, thewhole, the whole thing you do is

(25:56):
you, you put it in the treasurymarket, because treasury, you
know, it's the government andit's not insured either, but if
the government goes belly up,you've got much bigger problems
than your assets. So that'sthat's people that people don't
keep that much money in the bankbecause it is uninsured and
because they're not getting aninterest rate on it. So what
happens is, all these people areout there with these billion

(26:20):
dollar accounts, and north of abillion dollars, it's like,
well, I don't why are theymaintaining these accounts? I
mean, I could see somebodykeeping a billion dollars in a
bank for, you know, a week or amonth or whatever, until they
get their ducks in a row. Butthat's not what happened these
companies like Palantir or PeterThiel, they left it in the bank
for a long time, and then theytransfer it out all of a sudden.

(26:44):
And when a bank, when youtransfer money out of a bank,
you know it's a liability to thebank. And so it would seem like
that's a good deal for the bank.The deposits leave liabilities
leaving but that's not the wayit works, because when they when
they send out of liability toanother bank, they need to send
a corresponding asset, and thecorresponding asset is reserves.

(27:06):
So deposits leaving is a bigproblem because, yeah, it's
gonna, it's gonna drain youryour your liability side by a
billion dollars, and somebodytransfers that much money, but
it's gonna drain your asset sidetoo. And that's the problem.
That's what. Why? Because peopledon't keep that money. They keep
they keep assets on hand, intheory, balancing out their
liabilities. But in practice, alot of those assets on the asset

(27:30):
side of a bank's balance sheetare illiquid. They don't move
that fast, and so the suddendeparture of a lot of money can
send a bank like Silicon Valleybelly up, and that's exactly
what happened. But Peter Thieldid that, and that entire thing
was enabled by pandemic QE, bythe New York Federal Reserve,
that that's exactly how thatcrisis happened. And no one

(27:52):
talked about that, despite thecrystal clarity of the
Congressional Record on thatpoint. I mean Mark Warner and of
Virginia, senator from Virginia,and he said, Yeah, the record
shows that $13 billion left thatbank from 10 bank accounts in
six hours. How does that happen?That happens because of QE,

(28:14):
because the Fed was buyingassets for non banks. That's how
that worked. Yeah. It's

WW (28:19):
interesting when you consider things too, like Peter
Thiel being CIA contractor, andsome of the other unusual kind
of intelligence links and someof these other financial crises.
So for example, you know, Markand I are hopefully working on
something that will encompasssome of the stuff that happened
in oh eight, and some of thethings that we found there I've

(28:40):
been kind of surprising. So, youknow, when I was doing a lot of
my work on Epstein a few yearsago, you know, I came across the
fact that he is essentially thepin that popped Bear Stearns. He
pulled a bunch of money out, insort of killer whale fashion,
out of one of Bear Stearns, likemost over leveraged funds,

(29:01):
knowing that it would go over ifhe under, if he did so. And of
course, he has intelligenceaffiliations. And then shortly
thereafter, I found out that thehead of sovereign risk at Lehman
Brothers at the time of the oheight crash, and when Lehman
went under, had been a topfigure at the CIA just like a
year or two prior. Her name wasJeannie misick, and I think now
she's like, one of the toppeople the Council on Foreign

(29:24):
Relations. So, you know, it kindof makes you wonder when, when
one considers, sort of like thewell documented overlap between
Wall Street and the intelligenceservices and things like that.
If you know, maybe there's otherforces sort of prompting, what
ultimately are these bankconsolidation waves and things

(29:46):
like that, which is, ultimately,you know, what the result of,
one of the main results of, oheight was, I think that's
exactly right, yeah. And then,of course, the regional banking
crisis. So yeah. Do you have anythoughts on that?

JT (29:57):
Well, first of all, that's a misnomer. The regional. Banking
crisis. Sure, the banks thatwent down. I mean, these, they
were all top 50 banks in the US.They were, they were massive
banks. They all had $200 billionin assets or more. They were all
in the top 50, if not the top30. They were huge banks. So
that was, that was that that'sa, that's a mainstream media

(30:19):
misnomer to get you off the centthose banks. That was a complete
takedown of those banks. Andthey were big time banks. So
regional bank is a bank like itonly operates in Mississippi.
Sure. You know, Silicon ValleyBank is all over. But as far as
the connections to intelligence,I look at it, those are

(30:39):
interesting connections, bothEpstein and Lehman Brothers.
Lehman Brothers story there, andthis is pretty much borne out by
the record too. The Fed, theycould have bailed out Lehman
Brothers, but chose not to thatwas that was a hit, that was a
grudge that Hank Paulson hadagainst Dick Fuld. It's pretty
well known that that was just agrudge match there. The Fed

(31:01):
could have bailed that out thatthat story that they didn't have
legal authority is absolutelyridiculous. Um, but the
significance of the intelligencein any kind of military is that
the banking, the central bank inthe US, to my way of thinking,
the central bank, modern centralbanks, really, since 1694 have

(31:21):
been top dog in every countrythey're in, and the reason for
that is that you know the moneyissuance, it's, it's, it's the
primal sovereign power, over andabove military power, because
you need the money to prosecutethe war, And it keeps everybody

(31:41):
happy, because a war is a bigproject, and it requires a lot
of money. It requires a lot moredebt in a debt based monetary
system. So the bankers are thelead guys. You know, if you
researched Epstein, I've lookedat hundreds of pictures of
Epstein, how many centralbankers do you find in the
photographs of people aroundJeffrey Epstein? Zero? Why?

(32:02):
Because Jeffrey Epstein's, he's,he's a control operation. He's a
blackmail operation. That's why,and the Fed knows better than to
get involved with that guy. Yousee treasury secretaries. You
see Larry Summers there. You seeBill Gates. Do you see any do
you see Tim Geithner there? Doyou see? Do you see? Do you see
Bill Dudley there, or BenBernanke or Donald Cohen? No,

(32:27):
you don't see those guys.They're smarter than that. They
know better. They've been wardedoff of that. To me, the central
banks are the dog and everythingelse is the tail. So when the
central banks need policyimplemented, they'll go through
the military, they'll go throughthe intelligence agencies, but
they're the ones calling theshots. Don't kid yourself about

(32:47):
that. I mean to me thesignificance of Epstein and all
this he might have been aroundduring the Bear Stearns thing.
Bear Stearns was, for sure a hitand for sure a takedown. But to
me, when I look at Epstein, i ilook back to one event that
happened, and we've alreadytalked about it, and that's the

(33:08):
passage of TARP. Because onSeptember 29 four days before
tarp passes, it fails, it getsvoted down in the house, and
then magically, 55 people changetheir vote. From No, we're not
going for tarp to yes, we're allin favor of TARP. How'd that
happen? Some people say,including Joseph Stiglitz, well,
there was an auction hell, andpeople were bribed. I call BS on

(33:31):
that. I think that the gun wasput to people's heads. Moreover,
if you watch capitalism, A LoveStory by Michael Moore, that
movie's not that good, but I'lltell you something, it's worth
its weight in gold because it'sgot two interviews in there, one
of Marcy Kaptur, who was thereat the time of TARP. She voted
no both times. And ElijahCummings, from Maryland, he
voted no once, and then he votedyes. Michael Moore interviews

(33:54):
him. He never. Michael Moorenever mentions the fact that
Elijah Cummings switches his novote to Yes, but he did. But
Cummings did that. And whenCummings is interviewed, he
said, you know, Michael Mooresays, Hey, what's up? You know?
Why did you know what's what'sgoing on in this country? And
Elijah Cummings just says,there's some dark, dark forces
in this country. These peopleare up to no good. And Marcy

(34:15):
Kaptur herself said that bailoutreversed from no to yes. That
was, that was run from thehighest levels, like an
intelligence operation, like themilitary operation. So if I'm
sniffing around Jeffrey Epstein,I'm sniffing around those 55 no
votes that got flipped, becauseI'm telling you, they weren't
just bought off. Some of themwere coerced off, no doubt about

(34:37):
that.

WW (34:38):
Well, as I recall, there's at least one former congressman
that said that Henry Paulsonthreatened martial law if the
bailout wasn't passed,

JT (34:45):
yeah, that was Brad Sherman. He was reciting,

WW (34:49):
I think Cynthia McKinney also corroborated that account.
Yeah, yeah, that's true,

JT (34:53):
yeah, you're right. He did that was, that was Hank Paulson.
There was a lot of lies going onin that time, but Marsh. Law
tanks in the street was one ofthem. There was a lot of,
there's a lot of the sky isfalling going on. I mean, I

MG (35:04):
think this, you know, that leads to a lot of questions of,
sort of, okay, well, that's sortof the who and the and the how.
But, you know, what's the why?You know, why would we do this?
You know, why would a top down,you know, Operation basically be
to, you know, to kill a bank oran investment firm, you know,

(35:25):
what? What sort of effects doesthat have on the monetary
supply, on the ability for thegovernment to finance its
budget, you know? And then, howdo interest rates play into all
this? Because that's aninteresting thing. I think about
the pandemic in 2020, is that alot of these killer whale
accounts are all being createdat zero interest rate. You know,

(35:46):
moment, a zerp environmentwhere, you know, maybe it would
make slightly more sense outsideof the obvious insurance issues
to keep, you know, billions ofdollars in a bank, because you
can't really earn this, thisrate anywhere else, but by the
time this, you know, regionalbank, you know, crisis sort of
happened. You know, the Fed israising rates faster than ever

(36:09):
in the history of the UnitedStates, even faster than
Volcker's. You know, doubledigit raise, right? You know,
after the severance of the, youknow, the Nixon shock,
basically, in the 80s. So, so,why? So, why would we do this,
you know, and I say we obviouslyvery liberally here. Why would
the United States as anintelligence military operation

(36:31):
want to create these huge debtbubbles and pop them and then
bail them out, basically, with,with with taxpayer money or the
creation of new reserves? Isthere some sort of economic
advantage to doing this? Is thisis just an inflation play where
we need to basically inflateaway our debts? Do you have any
any insight there as to why? Youknow we would, we would do this?

(36:54):
Why would we? I'll take

JT (36:55):
because there's a few questions in there. Let me start
with the one I can't answer. Idon't understand it this day.
Why do you take out SiliconValley Bank and first republic
and a couple others? I don'tknow. I mean a roll up as one
example is one answer. Youconsolidate the banks and make
them even bigger. Now that's oneof the that's one of the after
effects of the financial crisis,is those big banks which held

(37:17):
the gun to the government's headand said, Give us $700 billion
we'll blow your brains out.Those banks are now bigger. They
have even more leverage. Now letme explain something. The reason
those banks have that leverageis that the what I said, it's
the commercial banking supply,money supply that if you have a
bank, let's just take JP MorganChase. It's got now it's

(37:39):
ballpark $2 trillion in depositsthat that's $2 trillion of
money. If you erase that fromthe system, you can, you have a
problem on your hands. You Youhave a lot of people who aren't
going to have money. You're youcan. You can now measure in
hours, the amount of time it'sgoing to take for cities in your
country to start burning down.And that's the leverage those

(37:59):
banks had in 2008 you give us$700 million 100 million
dollars, would burn your citiesdown because you can't afford to
lose us. We have all that money,and people don't understand
that, and they've gotten evenbigger. And for sure, Silicon
Valley Bank and others goingdown could have been part of a
process of rolling, you know,big banks in the even bigger

(38:20):
banks and that that that is onepotential answer, but I don't
find that answer altogethersatisfying, and it may be the
jury is still out on that. Whydoes it make sense, though? To
what you the question is, havethe debt get bigger and bigger
and bigger like it is, and thenpop the bubble and all that
that's been done for hundreds ofyears. That's just what banks do

(38:43):
is because money in in theWesterns, really throughout the
world now, because money iscreated as dead in the form of
loans, the money supply is atinterest, and you don't have,
you never have enough money topay off the debt, and so you
leave the control over the moneysupply in the hands of private

(39:06):
banks. And private banks havedone this for years. I mean,
they create bubbles, and thenthey pop the bubble. The Great
Depression is probably theforemost example. They pop that
bubble, but they know whatthey're doing. They know in
advance this is going to happen.They short the companies that
are going to go down, and thenwhen the bubble pops, they buy
the assets for pennies in thedollar. That's an that's an old,

(39:29):
ancient formula. Okay, to me,though, the better question is,
why is what's going on now?Going on and what's going on now
is, you alluded to it earlier,is the interest payment on the
US debt is becoming massive.It's north of a trillion dollars
now the the interest payment onthe US debt is bigger than the

(39:49):
military expenditures in the USso what? So what is going on?
Because everybody knows thatonce, once your interest payment
exceeds your income, it'sbought. Game. I don't care if
you issue the money or not. Ifyour interest payment is bigger
than the amount of income youhave, you're done. You're
mathematically, you're gone. Sowhy is this going on? And I

(40:11):
think the answer to me is, andI'm working on a series now on,
this is the US is being forcedinto a crisis situation, whether
that crisis takes the form of afiscal slash, monetary crisis,
due to massive interest paymentsand due to the fact that we

(40:32):
create money out of we createmoney as debt, or due to, say, a
World War The US is being forcedinto a situation where radical
changes are going to be offeredas a solution. And I think one
of the things you're seeing nowis you're seeing attacks from
all quarters on the USConstitution, and that's of

(40:55):
grave concern to me, because Iknow what they're after. The
fact is that despite all the Fedsins, okay, it's one of the most
transparent central banks, andit's actually the most
transparent central bank in theworld, and the transparency is
due to the Constitution. It's abyproduct of the US

(41:17):
Constitution, because the Fed isa creature of Congress. How did
the Fed come into existence? Itcame into existence from the
majority of the House and themajority of the Senate voted it
in 2000 in 1913 and thesignature of Woodrow Wilson went
on the ACT. It was created by asimple majority in both houses.
The Fed can be dispensed anddispatched and eliminated just

(41:38):
as easily. Majority of thehouse, majority Senate,
Secretary, President, and it isgone. The Fed is a creature of
Congress. It's a creature ofelected representatives. And for
that reason, that constitutionalreason, there is transparency
into the Fed. I mean, nameanother central bank in the
world that's lost FOIA lawsuitsrepeatedly in the federal

(41:59):
courts, I can't think of any.And so we have a great degree of
transparency into the Fed. Now,don't, don't go, get me wrong,
it's not like, you know, thefact I would not call the Fed
Mr. Sunshine either. But there'smore transparency into the Fed
than there isn't, to say, theEC, the European Central Bank,
where the Jesus over there, it'sillegal for for legislatures and

(42:23):
for people Members of Parliamentto even offer input to the
central bank. I mean, it's anit's a fortress over there. They
have no transparency. They havewindow dressing transparency.
You know, the ECB issues thesereports and puts on these dogs
dogging pony shows. But theydon't have to do that. They just
do it because they don't want tolook bad compared to the Fed.
Okay, so the Fed is the mosttransparent bank in the world

(42:45):
due to the US Constitution, andthat, to my way of thinking, is
what the powers that be need outof their way. They need a new
regime where, you know, forcebranch or government to enable
the Fed to have trueindependence. They have the
Fed's independence now meansindependence of the executive
branch. That's what independenceof a federal agency means

(43:07):
legally in the US. That's notgood enough. They need
independence from thegovernment, independence from
nation, independence fromCongress. I think that's what
they're after. And I think thesecrises are all headed in the
same direction, in the directionof emergency, in the direction
of emergency powers to to bedeclared, to suspend the
Constitution for the veryreasons I just gave you. Yeah,

WW (43:31):
I mean, it's definitely clear there's a wide ranging
attack on on the Constitution,all of those things and and, you
know, the, you know, financialangle that I think is important.
And as it relates to what mayhave been the motive for Silicon
Valley Bank in particular, youknow, Mark and I have been
working a lot on aninvestigation that involves
Peter Thiel, prettysignificantly. And Peter Thiel

(43:53):
for a very long time, inaddition to being a long time
CIA contractor, his you know,mission, arguably, for much of
the past few decades has beenabout privately issued money and
changing how money is issued.And also he was involved back
when PayPal was first created,and sort of wanting PayPal to be

(44:17):
a broker of, like a new globalcurrency and all of that stuff.
So it may be related to sort ofsome of these discussions that
have come to the fore with thepush to digitalize money, and
the potential of how that wouldplay out if the two tier system
is maintained in that sort ofall digital future, and instead
of just of, you know, banksbeing able to create money out

(44:39):
of thin air, what about peoplethat are able to produce, for
example, a stable coin, orsomething like tether, for
example, the biggest dollarstable coin, as you know, able
to essentially create, you know,billions of tethers, you know,
with really little transparency.

JT (44:55):
Yeah, that's, um, that is really, that's that. That's
excellent and interestingspeculation. I had never thought
of that because, let me back upin the US, the issuance of money
at the highest level is done bythe 12 Regional Federal Reserve
Banks. So the Bank of New York,Bank of San Francisco, Federal

(45:16):
Reserve Bank of Richmond, and soon and so forth. They're, those
banks are private, okay? They'rethey're, well, that's well known
to be private, but they're partof the Federal Reserve System,
which is which is public. Sothere's some degree of
transparency into, say, the NewYork Fed. There's cases like
Bloomberg versus Pittman, andI'm sorry, uh, Pittman versus or

(45:41):
Bloomberg versus the FederalReserve, and Fox News versus
Federal Reserve, where there'ssome measure of transparency,
even into the private FederalReserve Banks. Now contrast that
with the transparency that'savailable into somebody like
Peter Thiel or Palantir, it'spretty much next to zero, and
that's what federal the centralbanks have a long history of

(46:03):
saying what we really want iswindowless walls into our
system. We don't want anysunshine in here at all. And I
think Whitney, when you'respeculating that the private
creation we already have, theprivate creation of money in
this country, big time. Go lookat the federal reserve balance
sheet. Last time I checked theirseven, seven and seven and a
half trillion dollars of itcreated by private entities. But

(46:23):
there's some measure oftransparency due to the US
Constitution. However you youget, you start getting involved
companies like Oracle andPalantir and, you know, Bezos,
all these guys, they all got CIAconnections, don't they?

WW (46:39):
Pretty much no, but Peter

MG (46:41):
thiel's a libertarian. John, I'm pretty sure you can be a CIA
and contractor an FBI informantand run your Roth the IRA to be
a billion dollars and be alibertarian. I'm pretty sure.

JT (46:53):
Yeah, you're right, you're right. I feel I'm totally
satisfied now. Yeah, that so,but you're right. I mean,
that's, that's speculation onWhitney spark, that the private
issuance of money that thatrings true to me, because
they're doing it with notransparency there. There is no

(47:14):
FOIA that applies to Amazon, orthat applies to balance here,
any of those others is there?They're private entities. You
can't get, you can get intotheir SEC filings, but they
don't, they don't really tellyou that much,

MG (47:29):
right? And maybe there's a little more transparency if
they're a publicly tradedcompany, as some of these are.
But a lot of this, right, youknow? And I think that this is
where I sort of, you know, thisis where I sort of start to call
CBDCs, at least when it comes tothe US dollar system as sort of
a red herring of census, where,where, I actually think, you
know, the US government reallydoesn't want to deal with the

(47:52):
hassle of having a retail facingdigital currency, and they want
to keep this private, publicrelationship with private
entities, as we've kind of seen,you know, Whitney, I think,
really broke the bubble for alot of people with, you know, a
lot of her reporting on on someof these, like, you know,
private companies that reallyaren't private companies, you
know, like a Facebook orsomething coming, kind of coming

(48:13):
out of, you know, these CIAprojects or DARPA projects. You
know, Oracle, as you mentionedbefore, is another great example
came out of the CIA as ProjectOracle. You know, that that's
really what, and now it'srunning the biggest database in
the world, you know, Fancy that.That's, you know, kind of makes
a lot of sense, but, but thisidea of, well, let's do it in
the private sector, because weactually, you know, we can hide

(48:33):
a lot more in the privatesector. We can restrict customer
access in the private sector,whereas what you just said, you
know, the Fed actually, youknow, can't do a lot of that
stuff as much as they've, youknow, really, you know, waged,
you know, financial terrorism,of course, across the world, in
a lot of ways, with theirinterest rate manipulation and
yada yada. You know, they'reactually decently decentralized.

(48:55):
You know, 12 nodes is actuallypretty good for, you know,
versus a Wells Fargo dollar orsomething like that. So I guess
I am curious, you know, in this,this sort of framework, you
know, how do you look at thecbdc play? Do you see it being,
you know, not to lead thewitness here, but do you see it
being more as like a reservetoken, sort of the

(49:17):
digitalization of the reservesmoving around? Is that sort of
what fed now is sort of thisinterbank settlement network,
not a retail facing thing. Doyou see it still staying in the
in the banks, private entitieshaving these available
programmable money? Or do youactually see sort of a retail
facing government issuedcurrency coming out anytime

(49:39):
soon?

JT (49:40):
The feds. Let me back up. The thing that makes me curious
about cbdc and makes me thinkyou are right, that's a red
herring. I don't think it's atotal red herring, but there's
problems with it. The thing thatkind of makes me scratch my head
is it was four years ago. Thismonth that August and Carson's

(50:02):
got up and follow the IMF theAugustins. Carsons is the
general manager of the Bank forInternational Settlements, which
is the Central bank of Centralbanks based in Basel,
Switzerland, that there thatthat truly is a fortress. You're
not getting anything, anyinformation out of that bank
that they don't want you tohave. But Carson's gets up in
October of 2020, and says, youknow, the great thing about $100

(50:25):
bill, the great thing about cbdcis, compared to $100 bill or
1000 peso note, is, you know,those, those cash, we don't know
what people are doing with thecash. You know, they could be
spending on whatever they want.But with cbdc, we have absolute
and total control to enforce therules and the technology to
enforce the rules, he loses hismind, but that was four years

(50:46):
ago where he's touting thecontrol mechanism that is cbdc.
Four years a long time. And arewe really any closer to getting
a cbdc? What people forget is inthat same conference from the
IMF in october 2020, JeromePowell was on that conference
call too, and he said, Well, youknow, sounds great Carsons, but

(51:06):
you know, we've, we got aconstitution in the US, and
we've got, we've got to takeinto account a lot of things.
And he said in anotherconference, we need enabling
legislation from Congress.Again, we get back to that
transparency, you know, monsterthat, from the Fed's point of
view, they don't want thattransparency, but they gotta
have it to get just to get thecaught between the rock and the

(51:27):
hard place. They want the cbdc,but to do it, they gotta lay a
congressional record thateverybody can look at in a
bright light a day. So they'restuck between a rock and a hard
place. In the meantime, you haveall these private forms of, kind
of pseudo money growing up fromthe very people who are now on
board with, you know, Bitcoinand digital money, right? And so

(51:54):
I wondered whether it's going tocome out. I think that you're,
they're going to definitelyintroduce it the way it'll come
out, is there? I you know, look,let's be let's be blunt.
Everybody knows there's a crisiscoming, and when it happens,
there could be a lot of peoplepushed to the edge. And I think
at that time, because thesesystems, like fed now have been

(52:15):
prototyped, you're going to seesome form of universal basic
income and digital money comingout from the wholesale level,
from the Fed, whether it'scalled cbdc or called something
else, I think you'll see itintroduced then as a way to dip
their toe into that water andget the project going and kind

(52:36):
of do what they've done with thefinancial crisis. You know, the
financial crisis kind of crushedits way upward. It started with
the bottom rungs of society interms of wealth and money, and
it's steadily turned its wayupward. And I think you'll see
the same thing with cbdc. It'llbe rolled out as a measure

(52:56):
that's sold. They're alreadydoing. It is sold as a means for
inclusion that we're helpingpeople who are, they're so poor
they don't even have a bankaccount. That's how they kind of
try to sell it. That same

WW (53:06):
selling point of like, banking the unbanked and all
that is actually prettyprominent for for dollar stable
coins, yeah. And what'sinteresting, too, in terms of of
getting around what you referredto with, you know, Carson's
fantasizing about total control,and Powell being like, well, we
have this problem in the UScalled the Constitution. I think
you know, the kind of approachthat they're planning to take is

(53:28):
very similar to how they gotaround the constitutional
protections that would haveprevented warrantless spying on
Americans after 911 where theypitched all of these public
sector spy programs and therewas outrage, and so they
basically privatize those like,that's where, you know, Facebook
came out of, and Palantir also.And essentially, you know, those

(53:48):
private entities areaccumulating the data and then,
and then selling it or sharingit, you know, with the
intelligence agencies and thegovernment. And so, you know,
let's take $1 stable coin liketether can collect, collect that
kind of data that would afford,you know, if it's a Carson's
hands, for example, totalcontrol, right? But it to the

(54:09):
public, it looks like it's ait's separated from that, you
know, public sector from thepublic sector. But in reality,
you know, tether has been veryopen that they have formally
onboarded the FBI and the SecretService to its platform are
willing to freeze anything thatthe Treasury wants them to. So
they'll seize and and freezepeople's assets and money and

(54:31):
wallets whenever the USgovernment comes calling. But it
enjoys this sort of reputationabroad, particularly in the
Global South, that it's not theUS government, and it's a way to
bank the unbanked, for peoplethat don't have access to
dollars in their home country,or they have rapidly inflating
local currencies, like inArgentina, and it's really
becoming a very covid, a rathercovert way to dollar raise the

(54:54):
world, dollarize the world. Andreally we have, you know, even
people that I know you'refamiliar with, like our. Our
good friend Larry Summers hasessentially been pretty overt
about that, I don't know. So itseems like they're kind of
repeating that same play thatwas very successful with the
with the whole US warrantlessspy apparatus, sort of becoming

(55:14):
a public private partnership. Itseems like a lot of these
digital dollars that alreadyexist are looking to do that as
well, and looking for this newwhat's likely to be some sort of
regulation and stable Coin Worldnext year, hoping to, you know,
sort of be the king of thecastle of these digital dollars
that seem like they're going tobe, sort of the retail facing

(55:35):
cbdc equivalent of the US. Andactually, Trump, when he spoke
earlier this year at the BitcoinConference was very much
embraced that, that vision, Iguess you could say that he was
going to bring in stable coins,and notably the co chair of his
transition team, Howard lutnicof Cantor, Fitzgerald. He's like
a major, I guess, Baron, youcould say, of US government in

(55:57):
the treasury market. He's alsoone of the main custodians of of
treasuries, because there's adirect relationship with tether
in the treasury market. So itseems like this is kind of where
it's it's shaping up. Well,

MG (56:10):
that's where they need to go, right? They need to sell
treasuries, right? I mean,that's sort of what you know all
this is about, is financing thatdebt you talked about, you know,
so eloquently earlier, about howyou know now that we've passed
that, that that fulcrum pointof, you know, our interest
payments are now worth more thanthe GDP, the growth of the
country. Our interest paymentsare now worth more than what we

(56:32):
pay to upkeep. You know, the theUS military, you know, we're a
zombie company you would neverinvest in the United States
right now. You take us out backand Old Yeller us, but they have
to make the Treasury market, youknow, sexy again. And I think,
you know, one of the fastestgrowing

JT (56:48):
No, they actually, they don't really, they've already,
they've already, yeah, they'vealready. Got a plan for that.
Don't worry about that. What youknow the plan is, and again, you
got to read fed papers. I mean,I pretty sure I've stumbled upon
the plan, which is the Fed isgoing to buy the treasuries

(57:09):
itself. Right now, under currentlaw, fed couldn't do that. They
changed the law, right? I mean,there's papers on that saying,
hey, wouldn't this be a greatidea. The Fed could buy the
treasuries in that way, allthose interest payments would
No, I'm not, I'm not kidding.Wow, wow, there will the federal
does buy the Treasury, the newlyissued treasuries, and because

(57:32):
the Fed, by law, has a turnover,its profit to the US government,
those interest payments just canbe recycled back to the
government. Because Because thelaw requires the Fed to turn
over 90% of its profit back tothe US government. All those
interest payments you got tomake on the debt, they're going
to go to the Fed and then passback through to the US

(57:53):
government. So didn't they readthat? Is that a great plan?
That's everything's hunky dory.Don't worry about that at all.

MG (57:59):
I trust the plan. John, I think that sounds great. Yeah,
that's very fascinating. I'mcurious. Then, you know, talking
about this, this idea of, youknow, maybe inflating away the
dead and the Treasury market.I'm curious. You know, recently
I've kind of gotten into someTwitter tips with some bitcoin
economists about, kind of, theidea of the petrodollar system,

(58:21):
the idea of, you know, creatingartificial demand for dollars,
maybe this concept of the Eurodollar market, creating more
liabilities for dollars. Thenwhen there's a crunch, you know,
that those liabilities increasedemand by flowing back into, you
know, legitimate dollar assets.Do you Do you think that any of
that is sort of economicallysound, this idea of, you know,

(58:45):
spurring artificial demand fordollars, you know, kind of
inflating through this de factomonopoly and on oil in a post
Bretton Woods scenario. Or is itjust purely, you know, the US
Treasury is the most liquidmarket in the world. The US
Dollar is just the best money.Do you see this sort of being a

(59:05):
political, military play or justsimply Gresham's Law, best money
winning? Well,

JT (59:11):
I don't they're not mutually exclusive. There's a bit of both
going on. I mean, right now, US,US dollar denominated debt in
the world, or US denominated USdollar denominated financial
assets account for somethinglike 60% of all financial assets
in the world, and a lot of thatis due to the Treasury. It's

(59:33):
considered the most it is themost liquid financial instrument
in the world, because a lot ofpeople overseas are like, I
don't want to keep it the moneyin my currency. I'll convert it
to treasuries and get aninterest rate. I mean, Alan
Greenspan testified in early2000s he says, You can't retire
the debt because so many peopleare holding debt overseas and

(59:55):
but they you can't pay themenough to part with their
precious treasuries. You. Hesaid that. So that's a big part
of it, but another part of it iswhat you said along the lines of
the petro dollar. I found outdoing money at markets with Kat
Austin, Austin Fitz this week,as we were getting ready for the
show that Iraqi oil has therevenue they get from that is

(01:00:17):
deposited directly in to the NewYork Federal Reserve account. I
like, well, I didn't know aboutthat. How did that happen? Well,
it happened as a result of thenext executive order. I think it
was an article in the cradle orthe intercept one of those.
There was an executive ordersigned by Bush in 2003 and

(01:00:38):
signed by every presidentialadministration every year since
that time that says, Yeah, wehave to take care of the Iraqi
country that we destroyed, andour way of taking care of them
is to take care of ourselves.And you're depositing that money
into the New York Fed. Yeah. Sothe New York Fed and the central
bankers will do everything intheir power, and then some to

(01:01:03):
extend their control over thesystem. And the petro dollar,
for sure, is a big part of that.Yeah,

MG (01:01:11):
interesting bringing up that. I mean, I what it was in
2000 they Iraq came out and saidthey were going to start selling
oil and euros and then money.

WW (01:01:22):
And was like, Look what you guys, other oil producing
nations, could

MG (01:01:25):
do. And then, and then what happened? I kind of forget what
happened. The next couple ofyears, someone knocked on the
door and enrolled in, yeah,yeah, that's the

JT (01:01:35):
central bank warfare model is, you know what? When you
ginning up a lot of debt is areally good thing, and war is a
really good thing, because notonly do you get to gin up a lot
of debt, you get to go overseasand take other people's assets
too. It's not wonderful. And atthe same time, because you got
to make that interesting, whydon't we introduce a whole bunch
of things called taxes? Yeah,this has been going on since

(01:01:58):
1694 when the Bank of England. Iwas started by a pirate named
William Paterson.

WW (01:02:05):
But it's just such a, I don't know, useful historical

JT (01:02:11):
changed, yeah. Patterson says, yeah. This is a great
system. This is Patterson thepirate says, in 1693, this is a
great system, because we could,we get to gin up IOUs out of
thin air and get interest on ourown, IOUs.

WW (01:02:27):
I mean, I hate laughing about it, because it's so
criminal and terrible, but it'sjust like the criminality is so
blatant, and now at this pointin time when, like, the
criminals are running all theregulatory agencies and like
everything in public sectorworld and private sector world.
I mean, it's just, you know,gotten to the point where it's
just so beyond brazen, I guess.But it's like, Pac Man, I guess

(01:02:48):
I'm kind of reassured to now italways started off with
criminals, and not just like,became that way, like, it's kind
of nice to know, in a weird way,that a pirate began it, you
know,

JT (01:03:00):
right? No, no. There was no accident about any of this. This
was baked into the cake hundredsof years ago.

MG (01:03:07):
It is really interesting too, especially looking at, you
know, the get again again.We've, I think we've established
pretty, pretty nicely here, thatmoney and capital creation is,
is kind of innately thisprivate, public partnership. But
then you look at like the Trumpadministration specifically
coming in. We know, we talkedabout teal earlier, you know,
he's kind of the, the mainadvisor of the transition team,

(01:03:29):
kind of the first go around. Andmaybe I'm, you know, it's that's
useful for my thesis, or ourthesis for saying that. But you
know, one of the critical youknow people that you know
really, really shaped the Trumpadministration. Mnuchin comes
in. He recommends Powell, youknow, they, they change all of
these things, you know, Mnuchinis a former one West guy,

WW (01:03:51):
also former Goldman Sachs, like Henry Paulson, who we
mentioned earlier, and

MG (01:03:55):
Bannon. Steve Bannon, under, Yep, yeah. Bobby Rubin, you
know, you start to see, youknow, you know, really, this,
this, you know, corruption,really just kind of brazenly of
the regulators, jumping back andforth, whether they're at, you
know, they're leading theTreasury one day, then the next
minute, they're, you know, thehead of Citigroup, you know, in

(01:04:17):
Rubens case, or whatever. So,so, you know, the, I think the
big thing that a lot of peopleyou know, kind of, you know, as
we're getting ready for electionseason, Insanity, and it's
really, you know, kind ofpopping off here, there's this,
there's this amnesia, forwhatever reason, of Trump's role
in the in the fiscal stimulus,in the lockdowns, in pandemic,

(01:04:40):
in The in the bringing in ofthese private sector goals to
basically rewrite, you know, theprivate, public relationship of
capital creation. Why do you whydo you think all of these crises
keep happening right overelection years? Why is it that,
oh, eight is during thistransfer of Bush Obama? You
know, why? Is, why is covidpandemic happening? You know, is

(01:05:03):
it sort of this obfuscation ofblame? Is it just a complete
coincidence? Obviously, that's abig question, but I

JT (01:05:12):
know it's not a coincidence. I had never thought about that,
but that's a great point. Is,why do these things top out and
get to a flash point, not notjust an election year, but in,
you know, presidential electionyears. And my best answer, based
on OA, because I know the OAcrisis pretty well, is that

(01:05:33):
that's when you can make deals.Obama himself, in my, from my
point of view, was a deal. He,you know, he's there, he was
there, and the people in hisadministration were there as
part of a deal. Well, what's

WW (01:05:48):
interesting about Obama is that he's very tied up with this
family from Chicago called thecrowns. And one of the top
people at JP, Morgan, yes, wasone of the crowns, like James
crown, I think in thatparticular family played a big
rise in Obama's time at Chicago.And then, of course, it turns
out, once Obama was like, Oh,I'm getting in, his entire

(01:06:09):
cabinet was pretty much chosenby by Citigroup, including the
treasury secretary. So it seemslike there was definitely some
sort of deal made. Well,

JT (01:06:21):
the Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, you know, just to
remind you, was, he'd been theNew York Fed President, and Tim
Geithner ran thatadministration. He was the top
dog in that administration.Obama, at best, was number two
and

MG (01:06:39):
and I believe summers, that was Geithner show, right? And
Summers was also an advisor toObama's group who was, you know,
critical, critical in thederegulation of the derivatives
market, which kind of, you know,arguably led to 2008 and and
extremely critical in the, youknow, repeal of Glass Steagall,

(01:07:00):
you know, we talked earlierabout the regional bank being
crisis, being this misnomer,because none of them are
regional banks anymore. Well,why are they not regional banks
anymore? Because they got rid ofthe laws that said banks had to
be within, you know, in otherstates, you know, they dissolve
Glass Steagall. So, you know, wesaw this, you know, again, I
think the deal making thing is,is really fascinating, that's a

(01:07:21):
great answer to a verycomplicated question. I would
say, so as we're, as we'regearing up here, Howie Latinx
chairing Trump's transitionteam, you know, as we're getting
ready for this, you know, again,arguably, you know, simulated
crisis, that that is controlleddemolition these have all been
controlled demolitions. Youcould argue, you know, What?

(01:07:43):
What? What should our listenershere be preparing themselves
for? You know, what's what? Whatdo you recommend folks to do as
we're kind of going into this,this deal making gestation
period, that is, you know, theevery four year cycle here, what
would you recommend people do? I

JT (01:08:02):
tell people to invest in themselves, invest in things
that can't be taken away fromyou, in your own knowledge,
because the rest of it could betaken away when there's no rule
of law. The bets all bets areoff. They can come and get it. I
mean, there's been no rule oflaw in this country for a long
time, since 2012 when theJustice Department comes out and

(01:08:23):
it's flat out, says some banksare above the law. Can't
prosecute them, too big to jail.So with no rule of law, that
means there's no rule of lawmeans there's laws preventing
theft of your assets, theconfiscation of your property,
that's all out the window. Sodivesting things that can't be
taken from you with yourknowledge. Number one, the other

(01:08:44):
thing is, at the same time, youshould leave partisan politics
at the door, because it's notgoing to do you any good. It's
not going to inform yourunderstanding of anything. The
more time you spend on partisanpolitics and using that to
inform your view of how themoney system work, that's time
wasted those partisan politicsare going to lead you into a
parking lot in Alaska when itcomes to trying to understand

(01:09:05):
how the system works, you needto let that go at the same time
you do that, though, you got tokeep the pressure on these
politicians, because they willrespond to public pressure. They
will respond the outrage. Therewas a point in the wake of the
global financial crisis, afterthe tarp passed, people were so
angry about tarpassing and soangry at the bailout that the

(01:09:27):
calls against it, the callsagainst the bailout and all that
ran over 100 to one. This isborn out in congressional
testimony. 101 is a massiveamount, and that is why the Fed
buckled again and again andagain to Congress, because
Congress had angry people behindthem, and it scared the Fed to

(01:09:49):
death. That's what they don'twant. So keep the pressure on.

MG (01:09:54):
Yeah, beautiful. It's interesting too. Also, you know,
specifically we talked aboutObama kind of being. A
reactionary or a deal. But, Imean, the, I think a lot of
that, that discord, you know,that was sort of my, you know, I
was 18 years old, you know, butthat was sort of my awakening.
Was kind of the beginning oflike Occupy Wall Street, and
seeing the way that that wascompletely co opted into being,

(01:10:18):
you know, now we go, oh, it'severything's great. Guys, hope
and change. Here comes Obama.He's going to drop more bombs
than Bush and print more money,but, and Citibank running his
thing, but, but hey, but he gota Nobel Peace Prize. Well, we
got it, but he got a Nobel PeacePrize. Henry Kissinger, though
it doesn't really mean anything,right? Yeah, yeah. I'd rather
not have a Nobel Peace Prize atthis point. But, like, there was

(01:10:42):
this unbelievable co option, youknow, through these, like, very,
very interesting, you know,media plate, you know, kind of
dialectics. And I think we'reseeing that again, you know,
there's this whole counternarrative of people coming up
that have now just, you know,they literally became famous
being, you know, coviddissonance. And rightfully so,

(01:11:03):
to many degrees. And now they'resaying the only solution we have
to Biden's inflation, and, youknow, the border crisis, or
whatever, is Trump. And sothey're presenting, again, this,
this false dichotomy, you know,immediately, yeah,

WW (01:11:20):
because, I mean, it's fair to say, right, as as you pointed
out, John with with goingdirect, you know, that was a
Blackrock brokered plan,essentially, about the next
downturn, and now we're facingthe next next downturn. And we
had the Trump administration,Mnuchin specifically, and
Powell, you know, implement aBlackrock plan, and then the
Biden administration's econ teamfor the past four years has been

(01:11:44):
run by Blackrock people. And Ibelieve Kamala is top advisor on
her campaign, is one of thosesame Blackrock guys from the
Biden administration and nowfacing the next, next downturn.
You know, it seems kind oflikely that you know either way,
Blackrock is going to get calledback into have some other sort
of scheme as it relates to howyou know, the US government

(01:12:08):
should respond. But there seemsto be either like intentional
amnesia or just like no interestin really covering that this is
like a bipartisan theft, and Ithink it's really interesting
when you look at, oh, wait, howangry people were using covid 19
as cover for what happened withgoing direct has, you know, been
really successful, becausepeople on the left can't call it

(01:12:30):
out, right? Because so many ofthem, you know, fell for a lot
of the major aspects of covidpolicy that were based on flimsy
or no evidence, right? And thenpeople on the right, you know,
can't really talk about thecomplicity of Trump without sort
of undermining a lot of thecampaign points that they like
to promote, like him being antiestablishment or or whatever.

(01:12:52):
So,

JT (01:12:54):
um, no, those, those are, those are great points. Those
are did. In other words, thecover of partisan politics is
not to be underestimated for theschemes that could be run under
them, right? So that's why Isay, the faster you ditch
partisan politics and try to getdown to the root of what's going
on, that's that's the that'swhere you want to spend your

(01:13:14):
time and effort, barking attelevision. And I know a lot of
people do that. It's like you'rejust going to get old, you're
going to die in front of your TVbarking. That's how you're gonna
die. Stop doing it.

MG (01:13:24):
Yeah, it's really interesting. I've been reading
this book that's The Best Way toRob a Bank Is to Own One that's
sort of talking about the SNL.It's incredible, talking about
the SNL crisis. And they talkabout how, you know, Reagan is
pushing this, you know, thiswhole concept of deregulation,
freeing the markets, and howthis is the you know, this is

(01:13:46):
the way. And at the same time,telling their regulators, do not
let this crisis be known, thiscrisis that doesn't exist, that
we're saying doesn't exist inthe savings and loan crisis.
Please don't, you know, say thatit was deregulation that led to
it, and please don't tell anyonethat it happened, because it
would be this big about face ofour partisan politics that we

(01:14:07):
ran on, you know, thisderegulation push, and now we're
here, and we have this huge, youknow, the basically, the the
insurance, you know, group thatyou know was responsible for
backing, you know, the savingsand loans are like $150 billion
you know, insolvent. But wecan't say that. I think that

(01:14:28):
there's a really interestingparallel to the Reagan
economics, this deregulation, tothe Trump era. And I think the
biggest sort of, you know,Trump, of course, is a master of
of misdirection and of rhetoric.And he comes out and he says,
you know, in in during hisadministration, you know that

(01:14:49):
Bitcoin is, is, you know, kindof, it's phooey, it's, it's BS,
the dollars, that is the king.That's what I care about. And,
you know, Bitcoin is a bunch ofhot. Air. Digital assets are a
bunch of hot air, but, but whatis he actually doing again? He's
having Mnuchin come in. Mnuchinbrings in the Brian Brooks, who

(01:15:09):
is a former VP and executive atCoinbase, the biggest Bitcoin
exchange in the United States.He brings them in as as the
acting, you know, the head ofthe OCC basically the biggest,
you know, I guess, kind of head,head litigator, basically, or
for, for the financial markets,and he sets policies. That's

JT (01:15:30):
the oldest banking regular in the US. I didn't know that,
yes, and

MG (01:15:34):
so, so he's a former one West he worked with Mnuchin, and
he comes in, and he basicallyputs out a bulletin that says
banks can hold crypto assets,and specifically stable coins.
So he comes in and does this allwhile Trump is, you know,
tweeting out, you know, thingsmisdirection, and then they're
bringing in and establishing,you know, direct bulletins that

(01:15:55):
allow banks to hold thesethings. Now we're seeing, you
know, Trump's former moneymanager, think putting out this
Blackrock ETF, which is thefastest growing ETF in history.

WW (01:16:06):
There's a Trump family now getting into dollar stable coins
with the Trump family. Yeah,again,

MG (01:16:10):
that's another interesting thing. You know Trump, you know,
two months away from theelection, he comes out and
announces, you could ignore thecryptocurrency aspect of it, but
he's issuing his own currency.You know. Back to this
conversation, this teal, thistealian conversation of private
capital creation. You know, Howinsane is that, that the leading
candidate, you know, two monthsbefore an election, is

(01:16:32):
announcing that he's issuing hisown private currency. So we're
in this, we're in this strange,you know, Twilight Zone, but
basically the Blackrock ETF isnow onshoring Bitcoin to an
extreme degree, a 22 billionworth while the leading
candidate who kind of set up allof this stuff in his previous
administration is coming outsaying they're going to pay for

(01:16:54):
the $35 trillion debt usingBitcoin, using crypto, And
they're going to dollarize theworld using stable coins, using
these private bank digital cars.He

JT (01:17:04):
doesn't understand debt. Anybody who says that doesn't
understand what he's thought. Hedoesn't know what he's talking
about. Well, don't understand

MG (01:17:10):
Ben, yeah. Well, he's also a huge misdirection guys. So
perhaps misdirection, butexplain. What do you mean by not
understanding debt? In thissense,

JT (01:17:18):
what do you use to pay off debt? The only thing that could
pay off debt unless the unlessthe creditor agrees otherwise,
is money. Right? You can't payoff debt with Bitcoin unless the
creditor agrees. Why would theyagree?

MG (01:17:31):
Right? Well, I guess perhaps the only other way that they
could do it is maybe sort oflike a new, basically petro
dollar system, where they theybasically create artificial
demand for treasuries and fordollars by doing some sort of in
and out monopoly on the on theon and off ramps for Bitcoin

(01:17:51):
using stable coins or somethinglike that. But you're right in
the sense of, you know, ofcourse, they could never you
can't pay dollar denominateddebt in something other than
dollars unless, yeah, you agreeto it, ridiculous,

JT (01:18:03):
yeah, without concern. I mean, but that, that gets back
to Whitney's point of theprivate capital creation.
Because if you look at it,there's really not that much
money in the system. The moneyin our system in terms of just
what, what legally, is money inthe US. It's, it's Federal
Reserve notes, and it's coins.That's it, right? Okay? Other
than that, when banks createmoney out of thin air, when they

(01:18:26):
credit your deposit account with$1,000 that $1,000 in your
Deposit Account, that's notreally money. Legally, that.
That's why you're an unsecuredcreditor of the bank, because
it's not money, right? Ifthere's money, you'd have it in
your hands. You'd own it, andyou know, there wouldn't be a
Counterparty, but you don't ownit, which is why you need
insurance on it in case the bankfails and the money goes Bye,

(01:18:48):
bye. Real Money doesn't do that.So the bank credit money isn't
isn't truly money. It's credit,and it created a thin air. And
so it's like, well, as long asyou're going down that road and
letting private parties createquote, unquote money out of thin
air, why not take it out a levelto non banks and let them do it

(01:19:08):
too? Right? So I think thatthere's a lot of merit to your
thinking along the lines of thiswhole system is tending toward
more and more privatization ofparties creating money and
unregulated parties creating,quote, unquote money. We've
gotten away from money, right?You know, that's why you need
the regulation to begin with, isthat they've given a sovereign

(01:19:30):
you know, the right to coinmoney is right in Article One of
the constitutions. Congress hasthe right to coin money and
regulate the value thereof. Um,but right there, it's a
sovereign privilege, andeverybody's known as the
sovereign privilege, back topredating Aristotle, right? But
as long as you let private banksdo that, well, then you got to
regulate them, because you'vehanded over a site, you've

(01:19:51):
delegated out, you farmed out asovereign right? And now you got
to keep your eye on them. But ifit gets more and more farmed out
and far. Of a way, you've got abigger and bigger problem,
because you have no moreopacity, less transparency built
into that system. That's athat's a real problem. I thought
about that too. You guys raisedit. Yeah,

MG (01:20:12):
it's interesting. You know, we're kind of finishing up this
investigative series, and one ofthe last things we're focusing
on is Facebook's Libra project,which is kind of this weird
Metaverse Plaza Accord where,you know, initially they wanted
to do this basket of currencythat had the dollar in it, which
obviously would have just sortof rapidly dollarized, you know.
And the interesting thing aboutit is, you know, Bitcoin had

(01:20:34):
been around for about a decade.You know, in 2018 2019 when, you
know, Facebook came up with thisidea, and the US government
didn't really care about Bitcointhat much, because it innately,
kind of can't be a paymentsystem that can be used by 3
billion people, 4 billionpeople, but Facebook has 2.2
billion active users in a month.And so three weeks after
Facebook announces they want todo, you know, hey, we want to

(01:20:56):
make private currency. You know,they're in front they have to
testify in front of Congress.Now, again, I think a lot of
this is, is the US intelligencestate sort of, you know,
pretending to feign, oh no, thisis hurting the dollar, when,
obviously, I think it reallyisn't. But this idea of
payments, and, you know, youknow, billion users versus, you

(01:21:16):
know, you know, what Bitcoinkind of can't do, is very
fascinating. But to your point,I think of the you know, people
are forgetting what money reallyis, you know that I think brings
into the cbdc play reallyinterestingly, because if a if a
government is creating adirectly issued cbdc in your
account, it relies on asettlement mechanism of another

(01:21:40):
party. It's basically a checkingaccount to be able to actually
settle, you know, a cbdc betweenparties. It's relying on, on a
trusted, a trusted settlementnetwork, which is not how m m
zero works. That's not how baselayer money works. A Treasury
note doesn't rely on that. Abank note, a coin, doesn't rely

(01:22:02):
on it's a liquid, exchangeable,you know, medium of exchange,
correct, but, but a checkingsaccount, you know, which is, you
go up the chain to m2 or, orhowever that there's, there's
innately trust in the system.So, do you think that that sort
of is, you know, can agovernment create m zero in a
digital form? Is that evenpossible?

JT (01:22:26):
I think so. But I wouldn't bet the farm on it, because you
could, in other words, thepurest form of money in the
system now is really silverdollar or a quarter, because
there's no counterparty at all.It's just it is what it is. It's
a quarter. It's worth 25 cents.You know, it's legal tender. $1
bill is a little bit different,because it's legal tender, yes,

(01:22:50):
however, when it's created,because it's issued by the Fed,
not by the Treasury, there's adebt associated with it. So,
yeah, it's money, but it's, it'ssomewhat impure, and that it
came money, a debt. Debt cameattached to it, okay, but in
either case you don't, there'sno settlement involved.
Settlement is only involved whenyou've got an IOU, like a like

(01:23:14):
bank credit. In other words,your bank account is technically
an IOU from the bank to you.What is it that the bank owes
you? Well, one of two things,either it owes you Federal
Reserve notes if you demandthem, or because that's why it's
called a demand deposit account.Or if you transfer, say, $1,000
to another bank, it owes theother bank $1,000 in reserves

(01:23:36):
for that transfer. But that thenthat's, that's what gets you
into the note. The issue ofsettlement is it's an IOU, it's
not really money. And thus,because it's an IOU, you
necessarily have two partiesinvolved. You necessarily have
somewhere in the chainsettlement involved. Can a bank?

(01:23:56):
Can it? Can have currents? Can agovernment issue directly,
digital money?

Unknown (01:24:03):
Um,

JT (01:24:05):
yeah, I think it could. But even if you don't need
settlement of that, you stillhave the issue of custodianship
and record keeping. So I'd haveto think that one through. I
don't know the answer to thatquestion off the top my head. I
don't think they will, though,because the debt based monetary
system is such an inherentadvantage to the people who get

(01:24:28):
to issue the quote, unquotemoney that gives them an
instantaneous advantage overeverybody else. I mean, because
if you can issue money, why workto buy somebody else's business?
Just gin the money up out ofthin air and buy the business
with your liabilities of yourIOU, and put the business on the
asset side of your balancesheet. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

(01:24:51):
We're done. That's why it's setto do the advantage of the
people who issue the debt, tohave the debt based monetary
system if you're just issuingmoney. Me, there's no
corresponding asset. You justsaid, it's just money that's put
out there. Historically, moneylike greenbacks under Lincoln
were put out there. They're, youknow, they're paid into
existence, and they're acceptedbecause they're accepted for the

(01:25:15):
payment of taxes and duties andfees. That's, that's just how
it's done. But when you issuethe money, you know, what are
you getting in return? You'renot getting an asset. You're
getting services of soldiers,for example, do you follow me?
Yeah. Whereas a debt basedmonetary system, the debt is
issued, you know, the money isissued against assets. Now, a

(01:25:36):
lot of times those assets aresimple, IOUs from customers, but
a lot of times there's othercommercial paper anyway, I
don't, I don't know. I have aproblem. I don't think the
people who run this system aregoing to be one of abandoned the
debt based monetary systemanytime soon and face in favor

(01:25:59):
of a pure money system, becausethe pure money system doesn't
offer them any inherentadvantages over everybody else.
You gotta remember the peoplerunning. You have to remember
that the people running themonetary system, they rely on
and need the advantage of anunfair of a tilted playing
field, and that tilt is providedby the interest that comes with

(01:26:23):
the issuance of debt basedmoney. That's their inherent
advantage, and I don't see themgiving it up anytime soon.

WW (01:26:30):
So I wanted to return to a moment for the possibility of
Trump or some other president,or someone attempting to use
Bitcoin to pay off the USgovernment debt. So you know,
Mark and I had sort ofspeculated that it would be
possible, since, you know, theUS government essentially
defines Bitcoin as a commodity,as opposed to other
cryptocurrencies that it definesas securities. And a lot of

(01:26:52):
these actors we've been talkingabout over the course of this
podcast have a very wellestablished track record of
manipulating the price ofcertain commodities. So what
would happen, for example, if atthe advent of whatever this
dollar debt crisis will be, andhow it will play out, what would
happen if they manipulated theprice of Bitcoin to high enough

(01:27:13):
levels that it would enable themto pay off 35 trillion or
whatever, dollars, since bitcoinis most often priced in dollars.

JT (01:27:23):
You've got to you know that $35 trillion is held by
counterparties. You know,there's people overseas, there's
people in the US who holdsavings bonds. The Fed holds
some of that money. Banks hold alot of the treasuries, all of
those counterparties. You know,if you want to pay down $35
trillion a day, you have to have$35 trillion worth dollars worth

(01:27:43):
of consent to agree to takeBitcoin, and you ain't getting
that anytime soon, and notMoreover, the amount of time
it's going to take to do that,right? Yeah, good luck. Yeah,

MG (01:27:55):
very interesting. I think the only way that I kind of see
them doing it, I agree. And Ithink that's a that's a
phenomenal point. I mean, youknow, we, you know, you look at
our biggest editors orcreditors, rather, we see
people, you know, sort of dedollarizing. I think de
dollarization in general is,again, sort of another
misdirectional red herring. Idon't in fact, I think we're

(01:28:15):
rapidly dollarizing. I think theinternet is, taking away power
from sovereign central banks andgiving people in these countries
in the Global South, if youwill, the ability to have access
to dollars. But I think the waythat maybe they could do it and

(01:28:35):
is through sort of capitalrequirements, and they can
basically manufacture consent bythe with these FinTech firms and
say, Hey, you want to hold, hey,Tesla, you want to hold 10,000
Bitcoin on your balance sheet?You know we're going to say that
it's a liability. You need tohave an equal amount or even
more dollar denominated assetson your balance sheet. You know,

(01:29:01):
through capital requirements,whether it's Basel three or or
just, you know, general, the theaccounting boards that they use
right now, you know, we canbasically force, you know, these
firms that want to hold massiveamounts of Bitcoin to also hold
in equal part dollars. And so Ithink there is a way to sort of

(01:29:21):
lever that consent and I agree,we're probably not going to get
Japan or China, you know, totake a trillion dollars worth of
bitcoin, but, but there's achance that we could get say,
you know, a Tesla Palantir, aPayPal, a Facebook, you know,
These groups that have workedwith Bitcoin in the past that

(01:29:43):
are very likely connected, orare connected to the
intelligence state, and most ofthe Bitcoin is held by people
right located in the US, or likea Blackrock ETF buying, you
know, $22 billion of Bitcoinsince January. You know, there
is sort of a setup here wherethey they could basically.
Manufacture that consent throughregulation. Yeah, kind of Yeah.

(01:30:06):
What do you think about that?Yeah,

JT (01:30:07):
they can. They can provide incentives to regulation. But to
be clear, regardless of whetherit's a bank or non bank, Bitcoin
would be held on the asset sideof the balance sheet, right? I
mean this, that's not whobitcoins on a liability to
anybody except the issuer? Butthere really is no issuer,
right? It's just out there.

MG (01:30:27):
Well, currently the the way that the bulletin works now,
there they they actually got itto Biden's desk very recently to
to change the denomination ofBitcoin from a liability to an
asset, but it actually istechnically a liability for US

(01:30:47):
companies that want to holdBitcoin. Howie, let Nick again,
tether guy, Chair of Trump'stransition team, Cantor
Fitzgerald, one of those 25 youknow, authorized, you know,
participants with the New YorkFed. So

JT (01:31:00):
let me ask you this, if it's liability, why would anybody
hold it? Why would anybody spendmoney to hold a

MG (01:31:06):
liability? Well, they have to hold the equal amount of
dollars, which is superannoying, yes, but I mean,
theoretically they could sell itbecause it increases in in
value. You know, someone likeHoward Howie lunick has said,

JT (01:31:18):
the fact that they could sell it, that would make it a
liability, don't it's kind ofhard to sell. You know, I tried
to sell my electric bill. Nobodywould buy it. Yeah,

MG (01:31:27):
great point. Well, I It's, it's, it's sort of an
antiquated, I mean, again,that's why they're sort of
pushing to change this. But itgot all the way to Biden's desk,
and Biden vetoed it. So there'sbipartisan support for changing
the accounting rules. But youknow, the US has a lot to lose
if they allow any sort ofprivate issued money, you know,

(01:31:51):
to to become money, right? So,so there they would want to keep
it as as a liability. Yeah, Iwas mentioning Howard just
because he had, you know,basically put out this video
where he was saying, hey, youknow, as as the custodian for
tethers treasuries, you know,and as Cantor Fitzgerald, which,
you know, I think at one point,was responsible for like, 70% of

(01:32:14):
all volume in the treasurymarket, you know, one of these
25 authorized participants inthe with The New York Fed
primary dealer, yeah, excuse me.He came out and said, you know,
hey, banks don't want to touchthis stuff because of this
antiquated accounting rules.There was bipartisan support. It
got to Biden's desk. He vetoedit. But for now, we have to

(01:32:34):
hold, you know, this ridiculousamount of dollars to be able to
hold Bitcoin. So no bank isgoing to want to touch it. We
need to fix it. So, you know,he's now the chair, you know, by
of Trump's transition team.Obviously, Blackrock is now
moving heavily into Bitcoin. TheKushner's themselves, who you
know, were a huge part of thefirst, you know, Trump

(01:32:55):
administration were part of theLibra Association through Thrive
capital. You know, they've,they've, you know, speculated on
creating sort of a US dollarstable coin. There's this kind
of infamous email from Jared toSteve Mnuchin about a Sam Altman
post, who's, you know, another Tacolyte, basically describing

(01:33:15):
the concept of a US dollarstable coin, and how that could
be helpful for for us hedgeman.So there is a lot of kind of
movement here, of, I would saybasically the founding of,
essentially a new, you know,Federal Reserve of sorts, being
going into this, the issuance oftokenized dollars. And, you

(01:33:37):
know, we're seeing PayPal moveinto the stablecoin game. You
know, we're seeing more and morecompanies like Blackrock that
are these huge infrastructurepieces of the US economy,
pivoting from going, you know,against Bitcoin, to now being
suddenly for it. Trump is nowsaying we're going to make
Bitcoin the crypto capital ofthe world and retain dominance,

(01:33:57):
which I think is an importantpiece there. So the retaining of
the dominance, not, let's go getdominance. It's we have, we do
dominate this, this systemalready. So as as you know,
we've, we've clearly talkedabout, you know, money is a
private, public thing. Money hasalso been digitalized for a long
time, but now we're moving innew world where there's private

(01:34:18):
issuers of crypto assets, oftokenized assets. So how do you
see, you know, basically this,you know, this push of everybody
online, through covid, throughpandemic, through shutdowns.
Now, now we're here. The PublicSquare is now becoming a
monetary network, essentially,

WW (01:34:38):
yeah, with wanting to make like x Twitter, half right?
Financial system, as Musk hassaid, and he's going to be on
some sort of commission underTrump allegedly determine
greater government efficientefficiency, or something, right?
Thanks,

MG (01:34:52):
yeah, so, I guess, yeah.

JT (01:34:54):
How many? How many can can banks right now hold crypto?
Crypto has assets on theirbalance sheet.

MG (01:35:03):
One Bank. There, there. One Bank got grandfather claused in
the day before Brian booksresigned from being the the
Acting Comptroller of theCurrency. He gave the the first
charter to a to a crypto Bank,which was anchorage digital,
which is now running the rewardsystem and doing the banking for

(01:35:25):
PayPal, stable coin. And thenalso, so that was in 2021, I
believe he left. And so theywere the only ones that got that
crypto native charter. And then,actually, literally, I think it
was last week. They they made anexception for the Accounting
Board. I think it's 121 thatthey allowed BNY Mellon to be

(01:35:50):
able to custody, which is, youknow, like the Bank of banks,
basically to to allow them tocustody crypto without having to
have the dollar

JT (01:36:01):
custody. Custody is a different question. Custody
means that they keep it in avault. That's not what I'm
after. What I'm after is, arethere's, there's, how many banks
in the US now, 4500

MG (01:36:13):
something like, roughly, yeah, okay.

JT (01:36:15):
How many of the 4500 banks in the US have crypto on their
balance sheets? Not in not incustody. That's not on the
balance sheet, that's incustody. It's different. How on
your balance sheet?

MG (01:36:26):
I think, literally, just Anchorage. And now I think BNY
Mellon is able to, but I don'tknow if they actually have yet.
So, so yeah, I think you'reright. It is this custody play,
not a direct whole Bank ofAmerica certainly isn't holding
Bitcoin on their balance sheetyet, because the regulatory

(01:36:47):
system is not really ready forthat yet. They don't want that
switch to happen. They're sortof slowly letting in, you know,
their sort of King madeinformation bank, you know,
Anchorage digital to be, youknow, that was sort of, you
know, it's advised by PayPalfounders, you know, it's really,
you know, kind of connected tothis intelligence state. Now

(01:37:08):
they're letting BNY Mellon kindof start to do it before they
sort of unleash this, this wave.So I do think they're kind of
doing it selectively. But itwill be very interesting to see
when a JP Morgan, which, again,is heavily involved BlackRock
and JP Morgan were doing this,this, this like tokenized
settlement network withprivatized versions of Ethereum.
They were playing with thesethings. So I think we will see

(01:37:31):
shortly. And I think, you know,I think the Trump administration
will be incredibly important forestablishing these rules. And
they kind of already did.

JT (01:37:42):
He says, who's the biggest issuer of crypto? Say, in the
US, the

MG (01:37:47):
biggest issuer? Well, Bitcoin is obviously the
largest, and it is, you know,quote, unquote, unknown. Let's,

JT (01:37:54):
let's, let's leave Bitcoin out, because they're a little
bit different.

MG (01:37:57):
So the second largest, you know, Blockchain would be
Ethereum. And the interestingthing about Ethereum is that
it's, it's sort of beenperverted by dollar token, and
now there's kind of more, youknow, economic weight in the
system of stable coins thanthere are of actually the the
underlying like ether token. Soit's been totally dollarized.

(01:38:20):
And that's a trend that we'reseeing with the majority of the
new private issued blockchains,that they're really just
dollarized, you know, methodsfor issuing dollars basically.
What does that mean? Dollarized?Dollarized in the sense that,
you know that their main, themain volume on, you know,
because these are justcommunication settlement
ledgers, right? They're really ablockchain. Is just a ledger.

(01:38:43):
It's basically just, you know,Microsoft Excel, but everyone
can log in and, you know, makechanges, but only, only once.
They can publish new states, butnot reverse old states. It's a
mutable ledger. So the ledger isnow being used predominantly to
dis volatility of dollardenominated assets between

(01:39:04):
parties. Does that make sense?

JT (01:39:07):
I don't track that. No, I don't understand that. Okay.
Well, what I'm after is who is,let's say that the system went
toward a system where you'retrying to you're trying to use
tokens as money because you wantto continue this trend toward
privatizing what is ultimately asovereign privilege. Would,

(01:39:28):
let's say this is done throughthe executive branch. Would the
executive branch have totaltransparency into whoever was
issuing the token?

MG (01:39:39):
Well, that's sort of where, you know, we're seeing the
tethers of the world, which, youknow, it's $120 billion more,
you know, dollar you know,they're, they're absolutely
having to work with lawenforcement, with the Secret
Service, with the FBI. They havehuge regular. Oversight, you

(01:40:02):
know, because they're, they'rebasically issuing dollars that
theoretically, you know, couldbe used to tower, you know,
finance terrorism,

JT (01:40:09):
yeah, but that's because they've, they've, they're
agreeing to that, right? Well,

MG (01:40:13):
because if they want to hold treasuries to tokenize,
innately, they have to have sortof permission from daddy, which
is the US regulatory regime tobe able to hold $120 billion

JT (01:40:24):
then the answer is, yes, there is transparency. Yes,
yeah, because they need it,right? Yep.

MG (01:40:30):
And that's where I think this is all going. It's very
funny. It's like, Oh, wow. Thekiller use case of blockchain is
is a re creation of the private,public capital creation model.
Great. So glad we did that. It'skind of interesting that that's
sort of where we're going. Well,one thing

WW (01:40:49):
I think that's going to be interesting to look out for too,
is a lot of what you and Markwere just discussing. A lot of
it hinges on, like what mighthappen with regulation going
forward. And I think it's goingto be really interesting to see
the timing of that regulation inrelation to this upcoming crisis
that's essentially beenacknowledged by, you know, major
politicians, like, for example,former Speaker of the House,

(01:41:10):
Paul Ryan, basically told TheWall Street Journal and I think,
some other prominent outlet,that basically it's assured
within the next, like, threethree years, or something like
that. And obviously they haveways of manipulating the time
frame to either make it longeror shorter, and they may do that
depending on what kind ofregulation they want to have. So
for example, if they think theycould get it passed or certain

(01:41:32):
regulate the regulation theywant passed in a time where
there isn't a crisis, they willdo that. But if the regulation
they want would not be passableat any other time during, except
during a major crisis, whererational thought goes out the
window and people are like, Whathave you done to my money? Or
something like that? I think wecould end up seeing a lot of
potential regulations comethrough that would seem kind of

(01:41:55):
maybe far out, you know, now, atthis point of time, that could
sort of further, you know, thetrends that we know this stuff
is going to, you know, go alongwith things like greater
centralized control for thesepeople, more financial
surveillance for the littlepeople, you know, various other
things that are sort of assured,no matter how they go. But I

(01:42:15):
think you know the timing of theregulation is going to be really
important, as you know, in termsof how you know crypto or
Bitcoin, and as you know, Trumphad theorized, or has claimed,
he might be able to pay off thedebt with that. I think you know
it might relate a lot to thesort of legislative measures
that either come before thatcrisis or like shortly after it

(01:42:38):
makes itself known. Because whenthere's, you know, a major
crisis in the guns to people'shead. Look, we talked about
earlier in Oh, wait, you can getthings passed that you normally
would not get passed in anothertype of situation that

JT (01:42:50):
that is very true. Keep in mind what, what the goal is for
people issuing credit or moneyis private issuers. What they
want is a system where twothings are true. One is they
have total control over theissuance Okay, and total control
over the system on the one hand,and two on the other hand,

(01:43:15):
there's no transparency and nocontrol of them by you or by
parties even external tothemselves. So they want to be
able to sit in a lockbox andwith with a remote control and
control everything outside, andhave outside not being able to
control anything inside. Thewhole reason you're talking

(01:43:38):
about regulation and stuff likethat is that the system I'm
describing does not exist nowdue to laws, due to democratic
principles, due to elections anddue to control of people along
those lines. Once they have thatlockbox control I'm talking
about, they don't need yourconsent. Well, what

WW (01:43:56):
about a scenario? And I actually got this from from
Catherine Austin Fitz, becauseof her reporting on the past of
the fastab 56 that accountingrule where basically,
essentially, the government canrelease like false accounting
statements publicly and keep thereal accounting secret. So what
if, for example, they come inand they promise greater

(01:44:17):
transparency in the nextadministration? You sort of had
this fielded by RFK JR and somepeople in the Trump circle, I
suppose, that have been, youknow, big supporters of, you
know, spoken at Bitcoin andother crypto conferences and
things like that. So what ifthey claim to be fully
transparent and are like, here'sour ledger of extreme accounting
transparency, but it's the fakepublic ledger enabled by fab 56

(01:44:39):
so I think that's anotherscenario that we could
potentially see the first,

JT (01:44:42):
the first question is, with their transparency is, what?
What Rule Do I have to enforcethe transparency if you change
your mind about beingtransparent? And the answer now
is, give the Constitution you.The Money creators are creature

(01:45:03):
of Congress, and Congress hastransparency into them when
Congress wants it or when theirconstituent wants it, with
somebody who's promisingtransparency in delivering,
like, what I call window displaytransparency. The question is,
yeah, but what if you changeyour mind? How do I how do I get
the information? Can I see youin court? What, you know, what
are we talking about here?That's, that's the question is,

(01:45:25):
when push comes to shove, how doI get the information out of
you? Answer that, you know,regardless of who the issuer is.
Well,

MG (01:45:33):
that's what's really interesting about the, you know,
you look at the the sort of thecreation of blockchain as being
a completely open, transparentledger where, you know, unlike
you know, a private bank dollar,you know, I don't know what
you're doing in your bankaccount. There's very little way
for me to be able to accessthat. The Bank sure does, and

(01:45:56):
maybe they sell that data tocertain people, but there's
probably a lot of rules thatallow them to restrict their
ability to sell that data.There's, there's sort of a great
perversion of the blockchain asbeing, you know, the Savior and
this altruistic thing of, youknow, the big bad central banks.
And, you know, here, here we go.We get to, you know, take, take

(01:46:16):
the, take the money back, quiteliterally, but it's an open
ledger, and so that transparencyis, well, the first,

JT (01:46:23):
the first question with people saying there's an open
ledger is all right? Well, tellme. Tell me who the top 10
holders of Bitcoin are, and inone amounts, right? And listen
to a pin drop, is, nobody cananswer the question, because
there's no transparency, right?

MG (01:46:37):
Well, actually, we've done some of that. There is actually
a quite a bit. And one of thelargest holders of known, known
holders of Bitcoin is the USgovernment, interestingly
enough. And now Blackrock is upthere. And these custodians that
you know, like Coinbase, that'sdoing all the custody for the
CTS

JT (01:46:55):
of the ones you just mentioned, who's the biggest
holder,

MG (01:47:00):
I think the biggest now, I think the biggest Bitcoin fund
in the world is the BlackrockETF, actually. And how much do
they hold? Like, 22 billion Allright? And what's the total
outstanding amount of bitcoin?21 million coins? It's like just
around a trillion dollar asset,I believe. Okay,

JT (01:47:19):
so Blackrock holds two tenths of 1%

MG (01:47:24):
well, they own, they own 500,000 Bitcoin, something like
that.

JT (01:47:29):
Okay, so it's tiny, so you don't know there could be a
whale out there. Who else 100times watches BlackRock, and you
wouldn't know

MG (01:47:37):
it totally, absolutely I, in fact, I pretty much guarantee
you that that's true. There'sthis big perversion in the space
where they where they talkabout, because it's pseudo
anonymous, right? Exactly. Sothey talk about how, well the
only people that knew aboutBitcoin in 2019 to 2012 when the
rate of inflation was, you know,50 Bitcoin a block. You know,
it's it has this disinflationarymonetary policy. Every four

(01:48:00):
years, it cuts in half. It'sissuance. And people always say,
Oh, well, in the first fouryears of Bitcoin, it was only
libertarians and cypherpunks,yeah, it's only the good guys.
And it's like, no, I guaranteeyou the second the shit went
live, but the US intelligencestate was looking at it. If they
didn't put it out themselves, Ithink it's actually, really not
that important, who actuallycame out with Bitcoin, but

(01:48:23):
rather where it's going. That'sthat's the more important thing.

JT (01:48:25):
Where is it held? Who holds it, right? I mean, look, the
more you guys talk about I mean,because I don't track this
stuff, right, crypto andBitcoin, I wouldn't touch it
with a 10 foot bowl. But themore you guys talk about it, the
more it sounds like a monsterversion of gold. Gold is a
financial asset that is used bythe powers that be, right? And
has been used by the powers thatbe for 1000s of years to do

(01:48:47):
exactly the kinds of thingsyou're saying, which is to
create crises. That's how theGreat Depression was created.
Gold gets shipped around all theworld. So the name of the game
there with gold and control isthe powers that be hold all the
gold, or they hold the vastmajority of it. And

MG (01:49:02):
God forbid, want to, you want to send a billion dollars
to gold, you need a, you need a,you know, a boat. You need a,
you need all it's, it's veryexpensive and obvious to trade
you can hold around, right?Yeah, sure. With,

JT (01:49:15):
with bit this the Bitcoin issue sounds like the gold
problem on steroids. Yeah. Whoholds that stuff? They could
collapse the market overnightwith Bitcoin and not have to
ship up the ounce, like you'resaying.

MG (01:49:29):
Well, now we're having the that's the thing that I think is
so funny about, you know, thecommunity, basically. And I've
kind of sort of retreated fromit. I used to be the editor in
chief of Bitcoin magazine. I'vekind of retreated from the
community as they're, you know,embracing Larry Finks and the
Trumps of the world. And I'mlike, Well, these guys are known
market manipulators. We JP,Morgan BlackRock, these guys
are, they're, they'remanipulating metal markets. You

(01:49:51):
know, they're paying, you know,you know, a little bit of money
to make a lot of money. Youknow, it's just an expense. You.
In their business. We tried

WW (01:50:01):
to tell people, embracing these people was a bad idea. Now
we call the Doomers. Yeah, blackpillars, yeah, bitcoins

MG (01:50:07):
The only thing that can save them, and we're dissuading them
from buying and it's funnybecause actually, I'm not. I'm
saying that I think the USgovernment is going to pump the
price of Bitcoin and manipulatethe price up. That's not really
dissuading you from buying it.I'm just saying this idea that
it fixes everything and it savesthe world is ridiculous. Money
is a tool innately anyway. Itcan be used to control people as

(01:50:28):
much as it can free people. Itdepends how you use it and where
you custody it and all thiscrap, right? But, but these are
known market manipulators,exactly

JT (01:50:36):
the guy, the guy wearing a hockey mask and a flannel shirt
and holding a chainsaw. He'sshowing up at the party. What
don't you understand about that?Yeah,

WW (01:50:44):
okay, but he's gonna pump our bags. Why don't we let him
in? But maybe there'll be someminor carnage. Yeah, we can,

MG (01:50:50):
but he's on CNBC saying, Bitcoin good, so I'm gonna let
him in. Yeah, it's, it's, it's,it's, it's pretty wild, the
perversion and the dialecticsand just, you know, honestly,
this, this really controlledmedia. And I think there's a lot
of good people, a lot of goodpeople in a lot of things. I
think there are good people thatprobably work for the Treasury

(01:51:11):
Department and the Fed and andat JPMorgan Chase and at
BlackRock, of course. But youknow, you look at the mechanisms
and what they actually do to

JT (01:51:19):
people, there's a lot of good people in all of those
organizations. I work in anorganization like that, yeah,
the top is the problem, right?Exactly. I mean, I've had
interactions with the Fed, andpeople the Fed have been very
accommodating, and they've goneout of their way to accommodate
me. They're good people thoseinstitutions, yeah, but the top

(01:51:39):
I would, yeah,

WW (01:51:40):
no, well, it's probably about time to wrap up here, but
one thing I wanted to bring uphere at the very end is related
to a lot of other things we'vebeen talking about. And I don't
want to pick on Trump, but Ithink it's pretty clear that
he's most likely going to win inNovember. So I wouldn't,

JT (01:51:57):
I wouldn't bet on that. Oh, really. But, well, yeah, I don't
know. Trying to predict thesecriminals is impossible, fair
enough,

WW (01:52:05):
but I think, I think there's a lot to be said about the play
that, like, if Trump, if he getsin, is going to basically, I
think everyone knows if Kamalagets in, like, what they're
going to do, which is the samething they've been doing over
the past four years, and thattheir economic team is BlackRock
and whatnot. But there's sort ofthis anti establishment sheen
that Trump has managed toreestablish over himself. Boy,

(01:52:26):
has he ever people that sawthrough that the first time seem
to have, you know, fallen for itthis time? Yeah, or develop some
sort of amnesia, you know. So asit relates, you know, to all of
this, I don't know if ifkamala's campaign has listed any
potential Treasury Secretarypicks. And I know that it was

(01:52:48):
reported that Trump had beenconsidering Jamie Dimon and
Larry Fink, and then walkedthose back and said he was not.
But the only person Trump isnamed as a likely candidate for
him, for for the Treasury is aguy named John Paulson who you
may know, yeah, because he madethe biggest windfall in the oh
eight crisis. But he did so byengaging in basically a criminal

(01:53:09):
conspiracy with Goldman Sachs,the Atticus thing. Well, do you
want to explain that and why?Maybe it's not a good idea to
have someone you know, the mostsuccessful criminal of oh eight,
be in charge of the TreasuryDepartment before another major
fiscal crisis, perhaps.

JT (01:53:25):
How do you make money? How do you make money on loans you
know are going to go bad? Youbuy answer is, you buy credit
default swaps and therein. So,in other words, you take out an
insurance policy on an assetthat you know is going to go bad
because the debt's not going tobe paid. Okay? That's what a
credit default swap is. It'scalled a credit default swap

(01:53:46):
because what it really is isthird party insurance, which is
a lot disallowed by the law. Sothey call it called a credit
default swaps. So what Paulson,John Paulson, did, is for
Goldman. He went out and pickedout assets. In other words,
debts, mortgages and whateverpackages, mortgage backed

(01:54:07):
securities that he knew weregoing to be bad, so that Goldman
could then turn around and takeout credit default swaps on that
debt, and he put together apackage. That's what he did. His
whole thing, was a, was a, wasa, was a massive crime, Abacus
and Timberwolf and they andGoldman knew that they were bad
assets. Again, that'scongressional tests, but they

WW (01:54:28):
didn't tell investors, as I understand it, and Goldman was
prosecuted, but nothing came ofit, except a civil trial. But
nothing happened to Paulson, andhe took all the money he made
billions. That's

JT (01:54:38):
why it's a crime. That's why it's a crime is they knew those
assets were going to fail, andthey held them out and sold new
investors and didn't tell themthese assets are shitty,
according to our own emails. Imean, that's the word they use.

MG (01:54:52):
Well, that's because the rating agencies and the auditors
are, you know, the good peoplethere. You know, they rated them
highly. So, you know, we. Trust.You know the well, it's
irrespective

JT (01:55:04):
of the rating. It's even without, even with, there's no
rating at all. That's still acrime, right? You can't, you
can't tell somebody, Hey, thisis a great investment, and
conceal material informationfrom the investor that you're
touting the investor to. That iscriminal fraud, and that is what
happened. And no one wasprosecuted. And Paulson was knee

(01:55:25):
deep in that he was an enablerof that. That's not who you want
in any you don't want him as hislocal dog catcher, much less
treasury secretary.

MG (01:55:35):
Yeah, it's very interesting looking at these huge scandals.
You know, I just read, you know,big book on Enron, I'm reading
about snls, and it's veryinteresting how the auditors and
the accounting firms are morethan complicit in these you
know, it's not just the CEOs,you know, giving themselves
kickbacks and all this stuff,but, you know, they basically

(01:55:55):
created a criminal enterprisewith regulators, with auditors,
maybe less so regulators, but Ithink so too. And, yeah, it's,
it's, it's very disturbing thata lot of these folks are, you
know, being floated after, youknow, you know, allowing
criminal activity to occur.It's, it's pretty wild, yeah,

(01:56:18):
but

JT (01:56:18):
if you prosecute one of the big guys, just prosecute a
handful of them. Yeah? Once youhave a hanging in the public
square, all that goes away,yeah? But it

WW (01:56:25):
seems like that's not going to happen. Because, I mean, I
think of regardless of who winsin the election, you're going to
have some insane financialcriminal in charge of Treasury,
because now the corruption isjust so I don't know brazen. I
don't even know if brazen evencovers it anymore. It feels like
a level beyond a brazen at thispoint. Well,

JT (01:56:44):
it's baked into the cake. Now the crime's baked into the
cake. And so the issue is, who,which candidate is going to make
a better deal for the criminalsrunning the show? Yeah, I'm

WW (01:56:53):
sure those are the negotiations going on right now.
Yeah. Are

JT (01:56:57):
there going? I mean, right now is the time of year, the
time of the election cycle wherethe presidential transition
teams on both sides are beingput into place, yeah? October
elections next month, thosetransition teams are being
formed today. Yeah,

MG (01:57:14):
yeah, it's wheeling and deal in time in

WW (01:57:20):
what a fun season we're in. Yeah. Well, anyway, John, it's
been a pleasure having you. Arethere any parting thoughts? Any
parting advice you'd like togive to people given a lot of
what we've discussed? Anythoughts about the amnesia and
lack of outrage despite theextreme amount of financial
criminality over the past fiveyears relative to the public
reaction in oh eight I mean, Iguess there's a lot of parting

(01:57:40):
thoughts, but I'll give thefloor to you before we formally
wrap up here.

JT (01:57:44):
Yeah, turn off your television. Get rid of it. And
never,

WW (01:57:49):
I like that

MG (01:57:52):
personally, unless you're using that television to watch
the wonderful John Titus bestevidence I

JT (01:58:02):
want, like a few computer, not the TV, yeah,

MG (01:58:05):
yes, yes. Well, hey, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank
you so much. You know, I really,really enjoy your work. I think
it's incredibly important. Thisis criminal activity. There's
not enough forensic, you know,sort of looking at this stuff.
We need more of it, and I thinkyou're best in class there. So I

(01:58:26):
really appreciated the time.Well, I'm

JT (01:58:28):
going to deliver soon, and Whitney's going to be part of
it, but that's a story foranother day.

WW (01:58:33):
Perfect. So with that being said, John and I want to second
what Mark said about your greatwork and a dearth of forensic
investigations, period. Andmedia today, independent or
otherwise, your voice is veryneeded. So where can people find
your work?

JT (01:58:49):
Best evidence is my YouTube. It's my Odyssey. It's my bit
shoot, and I have a sub stack.Best evidence also great, okay?
And then, of course, I do aweekly podcast with Katherine
Austin fitz@solare.com calledmoney and markets. It's airs
every Thursday night except thelast Thursday of the month.

(01:59:12):
However, that is a subscriptionservice.

WW (01:59:14):
It is a subscription service, but as someone who has
a Solari subscription, it is oneof the best financial podcasts
around, in my humble opinion. Sothank you. Definitely worth
considering the subscription,just for that, in my humble
opinion. Well, it's been apleasure, John. Thanks so much.
Thanks to you, Mark, and foreveryone that tuned in to

(01:59:35):
listen, hopefully you've learneda lot more about the brazen, you
know, criminals running ourfinancial system, and hopefully,
some of the things discussedhere can help arm the people who
have been listening with what toexpect over the next few years.
And perhaps, you know, help themprepare however they see fit.

(01:59:55):
And you know, just like Johnsaid earlier, about investing in
yourself, you know, that tendsto. The quote, unquote financial
advice that isn't reallyfinancial advice that I also
give physical things that willkeep you and your family afloat,
whatever that means for you. Ifthings get really crazy, you
know, we're not here to pump ourbags or chill anything in
particular to the audience,just, you know, try and take

(02:00:18):
care of yourselves, given a lotof what we've discussed here,
when things get hairy, it's bestto be, you know, prepared in
some capacity. And really one ofthe best ways to be prepared,
according to people, you know,I've talked that lived through
economic collapses in Argentina,for example, mental preparedness
is very important, so you don'tpanic when things get strange.
And I think that will hold truefor what we can expect over the

(02:00:40):
next few years as well. So withthat being said, thanks again to
everyone. If you listen to thispodcast and enjoyed it, please
share it widely. ConsiderSupporting if you feel so
inclined, we would appreciateit. And yeah, thanks very much,
and we'll catch you all on Ournext Episode.

Unknown (02:01:02):
You

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

24/7 News: The Latest

Crime Junkie

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Plundering the Crisis Economy with John Titus

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}On Purpose with Jay Shetty

24/7 News: The Latest

Crime Junkie

All Episodes

Plundering the Crisis Economy with John Titus

On Purpose with Jay Shetty