The $28 Billion Fund Manager on What’s Really Driving the Global Economy

This is the largest game. You guys like to play games. The largest game in the world is currency wars. And the US keeping the US figuring out over 80 years how to make the US dollar the most profitable, best product ever created by any human ever. They make a trillion and you guys will work 80 hours a week to get them.

Dad, let's— can you give us your thoughts on, if you can, the world right now? What's going on? Are you optimistic? Are you pessimistic? And then we'll kind of— we'll probably wrap up get on with your day. But give us your— everyone likes to hear John's economic update. Give us, give us your thoughts for a minute and then we'll kind of wrap up. All right.

When you're in a trade war with tariffs, okay, you need the dollar low. If the dollar is low like it was with Reagan, then people buy your stuff. When the dollar is high, you go buy other people's stuff. But in a tariff war, you want the dollar low. So when you're on watching NBC, all the talking heads, blah blah blah blah, The dollar's going low and Trump's not doing— Trump wants the dollar low. He's trying to emulate Reagan. Reagan kept the dollar low for a long, long, long, long time. That allowed me, my jeans company, to sell jeans overseas. When the dollar started going high in '97, you couldn't pass the price on to customers in Prague, right? They just couldn't take— and so it killed my company in 2008 that I ran for 9 years. So when you see this stuff, when you see this stuff on the news, you have to think in the big, in the big, big, big picture of what he's really trying to do. He might be, he might be always telling you, you want the strong dollar, strong dollar, but really he doesn't want the strong dollar. He's emulating Reagan. Reagan's his hero. And, and like I said, when you're throwing out tariffs all the time, the best thing is to weaken the dollar so that manufacturers here can sell their goods overseas. Number— that's number one. Number 2, people have been talking about— economics people, myself— talking about recession, recession, recession, recession, crash, crash, crash for years. Everything in the book just says we should crash, we should crash, we should crash. But all economic people for the last 100 years, they always say, well, it's different this time, right? This time's different. It's always different this time. But I do believe there are— I actually do believe that some things are different. Okay. One, We never had Bitcoin before. Okay, that's different. Okay. 2, our country spends— we're spending about $1 trillion every 100 days. You can't really have a recession when you spend $1 trillion every 100 days. There's just too much money out there. So everyone talks about Lehman Brothers in 2008 crash, and that's when all the crash happened. No, it didn't. That was fall of 2008. Summer of 2007, it was August. We were doing the lending. We had my lending fund. We saw every single bank freeze. No loans. August 2007. August to September, no loans. They would take your application. You'd come in and they'd give you an excuse why they couldn't give you a loan. So we saw the banks freeze. Now this is what— this is how I—

this is—

well, this is how I see it as big crashes. Big huge crashes. You're a loan officer at some bank and you're, you're on commission. You're doing loans, doing loans. You're making all this money 2007, 2007, and that comes August. Well, come September, October, November, you haven't done any loans. So you're living off savings for 4 months. And then the next 4 months you live off credit cards. And the next 4 months you call your Uncle Ricky or somebody, your aunt, your rich aunt, and you love them for 4 or 5 months. And then about the 13th or 14th month of not having a job, then you take your duplex that you— that's worth— that was worth a million bucks, and you lower the price to $900,000. No one buys. And you lower it to $800,000 because you have to have money. Okay, but in the 7 months, if you get your job back or you start— they start doing loans again, you start— you start paying off your credit cards, right? You need— I realize unemployment is a lagging indicator. I get it. But it's still a great indicator. Right? And if you have unemployment for a long, long, long time, then you start having crash because people sell. The difference between 2008 and 2020 was people in 2008, people who owned homes lost their jobs. In 2020, people who rented homes lost their jobs. People that work on cruise ships or waitresses or whatever, they lost their jobs. That was the big difference, right? And so, um, so you have to look at the long-term economics. Well, those things are— I believe those things are different. So therefore, you see the stock market All-time highs. But the crazy thing is, is Trump's crazy. You have gold hitting all-time high, you got real estate all-time high, you got stock market all-time high, and he wants a rate cut. Doesn't even make sense, right? In normal economics, doesn't make sense. Why do you need a rate cut? And part of my book that I wrote back in 2000, when they lowered the interest rates almost to zero, there's always a, there's always a reason to promote and protect the US dollar. And that's part of my thesis of my book. But that's that's in general. So everyone says, "Well, John, what about the BRICS countries?" Guys, you know, look, China is in right now a 1929 depression. Their unemployment is so high they stopped reporting it for some age groups. Their homeless is so high they just stopped reporting it. They they man they they are in and I feel sorry. I said I really feel sorry for the China. Look, we spend a lot of money. But they spend— they print more money than we print. And the US didn't cause it. They caused— China caused it on themselves. But the US kind of— the Federal Reserve poured gas on it and let the fire just run when they upped interest rates to 5%. Because China bought a bunch of Treasuries when it was like 1% or half percent, and now it goes 5%, they're getting killed. Every time they sell Treasuries, people say, well, John, John, the Chinese are going to sell all the Treasuries and kill the Russian— kill the US dollar. Really? That's what they're doing. They're selling treasuries for the purpose of killing the dollar. I don't think so. When you have a tariff over there, you have huge tariffs, and you have factories and factories and factories over in China with no orders. I'm watching this YouTube video. This lady, she's been in business, I don't know, 20 years. She had 150 employees. She goes, this is she's got she YouTube. She's YouTubing it, and she's talking in in Mandarin, but it's been translated. She goes, listen, I've been in business. I have called. 100% of every customer I've had in 20 years, I don't have one order. And so China is a net importer of oil, they're a net importer of food, and to do that you need US dollars. So if you're not selling all your products to the United States and US dollars aren't flowing in, you have to get US dollars. What do you do? You sell your treasuries to get US dollars so you can buy oil. And food. The U.S. is a net exporter of oil, and we're a net exporter of food. We have the Mississippi Valley; it takes in about a third. All those tributary rivers come Mississippi takes about two-thirds of the country. We have an advantage over most countries, almost every country. We can take a barge full of soybeans and just float it down to New Orleans. You can't do that in other countries. They have waterfalls and they have, you know, they just don't have that. We have an enormous advantage. And the fact that we have the world's reserve currency, we have the largest navy, most powerful navy in the world. And the fact that we can, we can do things with exporting of oil and exporting of food that other countries can't do is back to why China will not invade Taiwan anytime soon. They know they have to import oil, and they know we can cut their oil off if they if they take over Taiwan. Our Navy can cut off all of their oil, pretty much all of their sea-bound oil within weeks, and in six months they'd be out of oil. That's why they're building you know pipelines to Russia as fast as they possibly can, because until they solve the food problem and the oil problem, they can't take over Taiwan because we can choke them. And then they know this, right? Then they know this. And so it's all this time— back to China. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm rambling. I'm going further and further than you want me to go, Bridger. But okay, let me just go back. Okay, so back to my theory of the US dollar. Iran just got bombed. If Iran was selling their oil in US dollars, they never would've got bombed.

Yeah.

They'd have been slapped on the wrist. They'd have been talked to, blah, blah, blah. When a tanker gets taken over by— a Canadian tanker gets taken over by pirates, guess what? An aircraft carrier comes in and takes out all the pirates. When a Chinese ship gets taken over by pirates, the Navy, our Navy doesn't do anything. Why? Because Iran is selling that oil with non-US dollars and we don't care. Oh yeah, go ahead, pirates, go take that ship. Okay. This is the largest game. You guys like to play games. The largest game in the world is currency wars. The US keeping the US figuring out over 80 years how to make the US dollar the most profitable, best product ever created by any human ever. They make a trillion and you guys will work 80 hours a week to get them. And other people will cheat, lie, and steal to get them. And then guess what? The assembly line, Another trillion come off the assembly line, a trillion, and we just gobble them up. We want all work 80 hours, no, 90 hours, and other people lie, cheat, and steal to get them. That is the number one product. If you can produce that many all the time and people just want them, want them, want them, by definition you have the best product in the world, right? And so, wow, I'm gonna just close really quick. Bessette, you guys know Bessette, this, this guy, uh, what's his first name? Scott Bessette. Bessette, right. Um, he's a Treasury Secretary, uh, for, for Trump. Okay, let's go way back in, I think, the '60s, '70s. George Soros and Jim Rogers spoke at one of your events. They were partners and they had a fund. No one knew what a fund was back then. And they raised money, they raised money, they raised money, and they started shorting the British pound. And they shorted it and shorted it.

And Scott was on their team.

And Scott was like an intern or whatever on their team. And they shorted, shorted, shorted, and they crushed the British pound. Okay. Scott was there. Now Scott is with Trump, right? And he's like, you know what we're going to do? And this is when I wrote my book. It was under the Biden administration. They sued every— they sue, sue, sue, sue, sue everything crypto. And Trump has flipped that with Bissett because I believe Bissett is basically saying we're going to make stablecoins the world. You know, we're going to— a little kid in Africa, if he gets paid in Zimbabwe dollars for his labor that day on his little phone, he's going to change those Zimbabwe dollars into stablecoins. And if every stablecoin is US dollar-based, guess what that means? You just made the tent way bigger for the US dollar. And therefore, Bissett has kicked— by doing this, by making all the stablecoins US dollar and making it really easy for stablecoin companies to exist and have no taxes and all this good stuff, they have, uh, they have kicked that proverbial, uh, debt can way, way down the road. Okay, I'm sorry, I gotta keep going. I gotta go one more thing. So Utah, Utah We have 3 million people in Utah. We have so many banks in Utah. We have Discover Card. We have American Express. We have the Walmart Industrial Bank is in Utah.

Why?

Why is it here? Because years ago, the legislator said we want banks to come. They wrote the laws in Utah that slant toward the lender. When I was running my, my, my funds, my lending funds, we never did a loan in California ever because California writes their laws slanted toward the borrower. You can have squatters for 2 years. It's crazy. But in Utah and Colorado and Nevada and Arizona and Idaho, the laws are written toward the lender. Trump is doing the same thing for crypto. He is trying to make it so that, that, you know, you buy and sell crypto, you don't pay any tax on it. Right. You know, years, years, years, years ago, when this is right, right now, if you live in Australia, you live in Paris, and you— if you live in Paris and you buy Microsoft stock on New York Stock Exchange, and it goes up $100, you sell it, you pay zero tax. But I buy Microsoft, I pay tax on it. Why do they write the laws that way? They want all the money in New York. And so Trump is trying to, we're gonna get the business for the next 10 years or whatever on crypto, we're gonna scoop it in like Utah scoops in all the banks, and then we're gonna try to find a way to make money on it, right? So I don't know what you guys learned from all that, but.

Not bad.

But anyway, it sounded good, didn't it? Yeah, it sounded like I knew what I was talking about, right?

It did.

You guys think that guy knows what he's talking about, right?

Yeah.