1279: Warning Signs in the Economy & Banking on the People, Democratizing Money in the Digital Age by Ellen Brown, Web of Debt, The Public Bank Solution

Welcome to the Creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You're about to learn a new slant on investing, some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world's most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multimillionaire who's actually been there and done it. He's a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who's owned properties in 11 states, had hundreds of tenants, and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to your Financial Independence Day. You really can do it. And now, here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Welcome to episode 1279. 1279. And you know what that means. Tomorrow is a 10th episode show and a speaker announcement at the same time. Yes. Tomorrow our 10th episode guest will be a speaker at our upcoming Prophets in Paradise event in Orlando, Florida. We look forward to seeing you there. That should be exciting. Well, it will definitely be exciting. Okay, so we'll get to that tomorrow. But today we have a returning guest back on the show and she has some interesting insights into the world of banking and the economy in general. And that is Ellen Brown and she'll be with us in just a moment. I think it's maybe the fourth time she's been on the show over the years and it's good to have her back. So we'll have her here in just a moment. But you know, last week when, when I was dodging Hurricane Dorian, my first hurricane, I kind of had this morbid curiosity where I wanted to actually experience a hurricane because I heard that it was a pretty amazing natural phenomenon. But Florida lucked out, so we were spared, obviously, and not so much the case for our friends in the Bahamas. Terrible tragedy what's happened there, and I'm sure you all saw it by now. Please consider making a donation and helping out because that is just unbelievable what happened there. I mean, that, that hurricane just sat over that island and just devastated it. I don't know if you've seen the pictures from the air. I talked about it last week on the show, but really tragic. While I was dodging Hurricane Dorian, I was staying in a couple different hotels in Tampa, Florida and trying to decide what to do. And whenever I'm in a hotel, it seems like I pick up a good old fashioned and I must say, missed newspaper. Maybe a couple of them. They always have the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. USA Today, of course, is Like a newspaper for, well, not very literate people. But it's really easy to read and it has definitely got an agenda. Wall Street Journal, I think much more credible, but nonetheless, you know, interesting articles. So USA Today on the COVID of the Money section, article says workers sue over 401k plans. More lawsuits, focus on fees and investment options. And you know, there are so many benefits of getting out of the rat race. This is another one of so many. And that is that you don't have to be beholden to to your employer's graft and corruption in managing your 401k plan. And it may not be your employer's graft and corruption. It may be the investment company they chose to manage that 401k plan. But you open this up and it says excessive fees are a common complaint and subject of litigation. Index target date funds mitigate some of these concerns and investors interest must come first. Oh really, What a concept. It ain't never gonna happen with the Wall street crowd, folks. It's never going to happen. So don't count on it. Don't count on it. Wall street is the modern version of organized crime. Which, by the way, I want to make a point about that. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. You know how I always talk about you can't hear the dogs that don't bark, you can't hear the dogs that don't bark. And guess what? Dog isn't barking now. In fact, the silence is deafening. The silence is deafening. So Wall street has been going pretty well lately overall in the macro picture. Of course, it has its ups and downs and its scandals and the overall economy is going really well. So hey, Wall street follows along, right? But no one's asking this question except yours truly. And now all of you will ask this question too. I hope, I hope. How much better would it be if all of the insiders weren't skimming the cream off the top? If all of the insiders didn't have their hands in the investment returns of the public of Joe America Investor, if all of the insiders weren't skimming the profits off the top and doing what I talk about In Commandment Number 3, thou shalt maintain control. Of course thou shalt maintain control. Because number one, you leave yourself susceptible of the three problems. You might be investing with a crook, you might be investing with an idiot. That's number two. And number three, assuming you you're investing with someone who is honest and competent, they take a huge management fee off the top for managing the deal. And that could be the investment firm, the investment advisor. It could be the mutual fund manager. If it's not any type of fund, it's just the graft and corruption of the C suite and the board of directors, the CEOs, the COOs. And by the way, the Enron guy is back in the game. He's out of prison. Yeah, of prison. His sentence was shortened so now he's back in business and raising money again. Wow, how short our memories are. We got a show coming up where we're going to talk about that one. Got a lot to say on that. More to come. More to come. Not today. Not today. But they're skimming the profits off the top. I mean, look at the fiasco going on with WeWork. You following the potential IPO of WeWork, the co working office space company peloton I told you about recently. It's just amazing. And a lot of the graft and corruption is legalized graft and corruption. But you know, if we have any moral compass, we know what's fair and what's not for people to take. So imagine how much better it would be. How much better would the returns be of Johnny Public. You know, what do they say? John Q. Public. Right. How much better would their returns be? Even though they've been good? Right. They've been up. If you didn't have all these middlemen who. All these people skimming the profits off the top, how much better would they be? No one will ever know. No one will ever know because there will be no analysis done on that topic because who would be analyzing it? Moody's. Oh, remember Moody's and the subprime crisis and that scandal? It's just all over the place. But notwithstanding all of that, notwithstanding all of that, the United States has always been seen as the Brinks truck of the world. So on the front page of the Wall Street Journal business and finance section a few days ago, US assets see a rush of foreign investors. Overseas buyers piled nearly $64 billion into American stocks and bonds in just one month. So America, the safe place to invest. Now, it doesn't say what they piled into real estate because we know how much foreign investors love American real estate. That's not what they're discussing in the article. But the point being that the US very low political risk, very safe place to store one's money. And that's why it's so attractive to upper middle class and wealthy investors around the world. Workers under 35 say they're content with their pay. Wow, that's A surprise. The millennial workers are content with their pay. Now, I wonder if this has any relationship to the popular easing of marijuana laws. Yeah, that's been my theory for a while. If you want to make a population content and easy to manipulate, hey, if they're stoned, they're not going to bug you too much, right? So I guess they're content and happy with their pay. Not saying it's correlation or causation, but I think there is some linkage there. Especially the under 35 workers in Colorado and Washington state and now California, my former home state, and all the other states that have legalized or have very lax marijuana laws. Because hey, those stoners, you know, they're just kind of happy and content. Okay, Best Buy on page two, Best Buy warns of tariff impact. They say that there could be an 8% decline in retailers share price following a quarterly report on the trade war. But what they don't tell you because you can't hear the dogs that don't bark. No one talks about how what's happening for workers. Well, workers are getting paid a lot more money and they're content, clearly. And jobs are coming back to the good old US of A. But you hardly hear anything about this in the media. All you hear about is oh, the evils of the trade war. Trump is so evil, his policies are so stupid. I don't know. I think history is going to say something much different than the mainstream or lamestream media is telling us. But I'll tell you, there are definitely some bad news in the economy. This is going to be really harsh. When the self driving autonomous trucks come. You turn the page again and it says trucker shutdowns grow as shipping market cools. Now remember, the shipping market, whether it be container shipping at sea or trucking, is a good indicator of what's going on with the economy, at least in terms of the Adams economy. Remember, there are two economies, right? There's the Wall street economy and the Main street economy. But there's two other types of economies too. There's the Adams economy. Yes. Material that you can knock on, right? Goods. Goods, right. But then there's services. Now services don't need to be moved around by container ships and trucks and tankers. They are easily transportable through modern communication technologies. But the goods very serious and significant sign of the economy when you see trucking and shipping concerns. So this article says trucking companies failures are rising as faltering freight demand exposes operators unprepared for a downturn after last year's red Hot shipping market. Approximately 640 carriers went out of business in the first half of 2019, up from 175 for the same period last year, more than double the total of trucker failures in 2018, according to transportation industry data firm Broton Capital LLC. So the truckers are definitely having problems and that is going to be significantly worsened when the automation really hits that industry. Transportation, one of the biggest industries in the entire world, whether it be big major trucking, container shipping or ride sharing or taxis, you know, or UPS and FedEx deliveries, all sorts of things are in for a massive disruption with the autonomous vehicle that is coming our way quickly. Anyway, let's get to our guest, Ellen Brown and see what she has to say. It's my pleasure to welcome a returning guest back to the show, and that is Ellen Brown. Her most recent book out of the 13 that she's published is entitled Banking on the Democratizing Money in the Digital Age. Prior episodes we talked about the public bank solution with her and web of debt. Ellen, welcome back. How are you?

Thanks, I'm fine. How about you?

Good. Where are you located?

Los Angeles at the moment, my old hometown.

I always like to give our listeners a sense of geography. So Banking on the People, your most recent book, and then the Fed and Using QE Quantitative easing as a Policy tool. Let's kind of dive into those topics. Where would you like to start?

Well, that's an interesting subject at the moment because the central banks globally have been doing quantitative easing, which is like people think that means just printing money, but they're not really, that's not really what they're doing. What they're really doing is printing reserves, which they then buy assets off the books of banks with. So it's not money that gets into the real economy, but what I write about is that we need that money and we need it in the real economy. And that is a great policy tool, but it needs to be altered a bit so that it serves us and doesn't just serve the banks.

Now is quantitative easing, when people hear about QE in the news media, and there's sure been a lot of it in the last 10 years, when they hear that, they think usually if they kind of know the game, that it means creating money. Right? Increasing the money supply. And is that done, as you said before, just by creating electronic money or printing money, or is it also by lending money and easing reserve ratios and things like that? Just kind of define QE for the listeners, if you would.

Well, the way they have done quantitative easing, the Term was actually invented by Richard Werner in the late 1990s when he was advising the Japanese. And he said what they needed to do was quantitative easing, which would be to expand the money supply. But what he was recommending was to have banks have the government actually borrow directly from banks, and that this would expand the money supply because all of our money is actually created, or virtually most of our money today is created by banks when they make loans. But that's not what they did. That's not the quantitative easing that they did. And we've followed the Japanese lead. What they did instead was that the central bank created reserves. It all gets very complicated, but there are really two money systems. We've got two money systems going, and they don't flow into each other. So banks have their money system, which is they bank at the central bank, and when they deposit money, they get reserves. And when they borrow money, they are debited reserves. So reserves are the money created by the central bank, but they only go to banks, and they're only allowed to go to banks. In other words, the way our rules are written right now, the central bank can't just create money and hand it over to the government or do something useful like make loans to real people or small businesses or to state government, something like that. Things would be very useful. I mean, that's what I think they should do. But in order for them to be able to do that, Congress would have to change the rules a bit. But they could. I mean, they're always changing the Federal Reserve act. Like in 2010, the Dodd Frank act changed the Federal Reserve Act. I mean, they're always modifying it, so there's no reason they couldn't. But I think maybe they don't even understand that they need to. You know, there's a lot of talk about modern monetary theory lately.

We've done some shows on mmt and they've been somewhat controversial, but go ahead.

Yeah, well, so their argument is that whenever the government spends, it creates money because it borrows from the Fed. But it can't, not the way the rules are written. Right now, it's not allowed to sell bonds directly to the Fed and it's not allowed to write an overdraft on its account. It has to have the money before it can spend it. So right now, when the government spends, it goes into debt, it does not create new money. But it should. It could and it should. But Congress should change the rules to allow the government to be funded directly from the central bank. Other countries do that. Like in China, the central bank is part of the government and so it's there to serve the government. But 80% of the Chinese banks are also owned by the government. So they don't even really need their central bank to create money. They can use their government owned banks to create money in the form of loans. So like they make, might make a loan for say high speed rail and then the loan would be paid back with the profits from the railroad, that type of thing.

Let's just distill this down for a second though. We've talked many times over the years on the very esoteric concept. And I don't mean you and I, but we have to some extent too, but on the show about how money is lent into existence. It's a really weird concept. It's very hard to get your head around. But ultimately when you do, that's money creation. Right. By the way, when was that term QE or quantitative easing, when was it created? You talked about who, who created it and how it was originally used.

I think it was 1998 as Richard Werner.

Richard Werner, okay, so 19 up with a term.

It was actually a Japanese translation and that's why it's such a weird term, you know, it was a translation for something else.

Right, right. So 98. So about 21 years ago from now, you're saying what happens is that isn't really trickling down into the general economy. It's sort of up in the banker economy, but not in the main street economy, if you will.

Right. And so if you assume, as we now know as, I mean we used it when I wrote Web of debt in 2007, that's what I was basically writing about is banks create money. And that was a very controversial. But in 2014 the bank of England actually came out and said it. I mean before that the Federal Reserve had said it in an obscure publication, Modern Money Mechanics. But Anyway, so in 2014 the bank of England came out and said, contrary to popular belief, banks are not merely intermediaries that take in money and lend it out again. Banks actually create money when they make loans. They create deposits when they make loans. And of course deposits are counted in the money supply. So that's where our money comes from. So right now, quantitative easing involves the Federal Reserve creating reserves, buying up assets from the books of banks. So QE1 quantitative easing1, the first round involved buying up toxic mortgage backed securities off the books of banks. Toxic in the sense that there was no market for them. And because they were sitting there on the books of banks, they couldn't make more loans because they're ability was all used up with these loans. So the Fed bought those and gave the banks reserves. Well, this allowed them supposedly to make more loans, but they didn't actually make more loans or not substantially. It did clean up their books. So it helped the banks. But to the extent that they made more loans, it tended to be in real estate, which is an asset, an existing asset. So it's sort of a speculative investment into the stock market, another speculative investment. In other words, this was not money that went into the local economy. Meanwhile, you have local economies that get their money from local banks. And banks create the principal, but they don't create the interest when they make a loan. So debt always grows faster than the money supply. And that means you need some more money in the local economy regularly in order to fill that gap between debt and the money available to repay it. And the quantitative easing money does not go into the local economy, goes into the speculative economy the way it's set up right now.

Define, I mean you use those words maybe a little different than most people do. You call it the speculative economy and you say, well, real estate and the stock market are speculative. Now I would argue that real estate's pretty safe as long as it's not the high flying real estate. You know that in the super appreciation and, and depreciation, we call those the cyclical markets. But in the linear market seems pretty reasonable and not too speculative to me. But it's not too exciting either. We divide it up that way. But what do you mean? I think you mean it differently though, Ellen, than.

Yeah, I didn't mean that as a criticism.

No, it's okay.

The point of it is, if you buy existing real estate, well, I suppose you might buy it to live in, but typically you buy it in order to sell it to someone at a higher price. Or if you buy stock, typically it's not because you love this company and you want to help it grow and all that stuff. I mean, you're jumping in and out because you got some hot tip or whatever. I mean, you expect to make more money, you'll sell it for more later. But the point is that money is not going into the productive economy. Like even when you buy stocks, that money does not go to the company, it goes to the last holder of the stock. The only money that goes to the company is the original ipo, the original initial public offering of the company. So that's all right. I mean, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. It's just that that money is not going back to the debtors who are the consumer market. And if the consumers don't have money to spend because they're all borrowed up, you know, they, you need to keep borrowing going in order to have new money in the system that can fund new productivity, all the new money that you need for trade. But there's no money being created in the productive local consumer, you know, local small business type economy because everybody's all borrowed up. The businesses are in debt, the people are in debt. Right now debt levels everywhere are higher than they've ever been. So they're not inclined to take out more loans or they may be paying down old loans. So you've got every time they pay down an old loan.

And when you say they, when you say they, who you talking about? Are you talking about individuals, institutions or banks?

Yeah, like small business type companies, not your big international, because they're dirty. Fine. But small business loans are hard to come by these days. They tend to be doing like credit.

Card debt, which by the way is totally ridiculous and it shouldn't be that way. But it's all that stimulus is being captured by the bigwigs.

Exactly.

It's not trickling down the mainstream.

Basically two economies.

Yeah, I know.

You've got the big wig economy and then your local economy is starving for liquidity.

Yeah, right.

So QE is not going into the local economy, which is where it's needed in order to clean up individuals books so that they can pay off their debts and therefore go out and spend some more. But it could, we could change the model for QE now that we know that the Fed can do that. I mean, it was shocking when they did it. It was kind of like when Roosevelt took the dollar off the gold standard and everybody said that can't be done, but he did it and it actually worked. Or when Lincoln, you know, just printed the money to fund the North's participation in the Civil War and build the transcontinental railroad, et cetera. People said that couldn't be done, but it was done. And when, when The Fed did QE in 2008, people said, can they do that? But there was nobody to stop them. I know, it was actually the Fed was the only institution that could do anything then because they were declared themselves independent.

Right, okay, so Ellen, tie this in for investors a little bit and for just everybody in the broader economy. I mean, you know, the big question is always what's coming? Inflation, deflation, stagnation, what can we expect? What does this mean to all of us.

Okay, well, quantitative easing is definitely coming. I mean, the Fed tried to do quantitative tightening. The theory when they did quantitative easing was that this was an emergency measure and when the heat was off, that they could reverse it all. So Jerome Powell was attempting to. Well, it was before him that Ben Bernanke and then Jerome Powell, they were doing quantitative tightening. So they were selling bonds back into the market, and they were raising interest rates, supposedly to tighten the money supply. And that clearly didn't work. It did tighten the money supply, which meant that we, you know, the stock market collapsed last fall.

Right. You didn't mention Janet Yellen there. Interestingly, I don't know why you didn't mention Janet Yellen there. It wasn't.

Oh, sorry, sorry.

You skipped one. Right. You went from Bernanke to Powell. We skipped Janet Yellen, but that's okay.

Janet Yellen.

And then what's interesting about this, Ellen, is that it seems like that the economy is. It's tender in that every time the Fed. And everybody uses the gun metaphor, you know, like reloading the gun, right. You got to raise rates, you got to tighten so that you have ammunition for the next down cycle. And you can use it, and then you can loosen and. And bring things back a little bit, revive the economy. But it seems like they just can't really pull that off. They try it and then. And then we see signs of this tenderness to where you just can't tighten. Right. Is that. Is that an accurate. No, that's not an accurate perception in your eyes. What do you mean?

That's true.

Oh, yeah. Well, you're agreeing with me. Yeah.

As Max Kaiser says, you can't reverse a Ponzi scheme because you always need more money. Debt always grows faster than the money supply. Debt grows exponentially, and productivity grows linearly. So you need some extra money out there, and you're always going to need extra money out there, and it's not going to hurt to put extra money out there.

Why does debt grow exponentially? Just because governments spend too much or what? Because of the interest?

Yeah. So you've got debt plus interest. The debt creates like X amount of dollars, but you've got X plus interest owed back. So where is the extra going to come from? You've got to take out more debt. So that means you're going to have debt growing on debt, growing on debt. That's the only way to pay it back, because that's the only source of money in the system except the Federal Reserve, creating pennies and Even those are borrowed into existence.

A term that not many people use anymore. But it's kind of from the old days when we used to use paper checks. People would engage in this illegal activity called kiting, right? It's basically like kiting, right, where they. They go around and they. That's back. People used to do this when checks took so long to clear. Right? When it took a week or two for a check to clear, people would pay their debt with a bad check that they knew was bad, but then they would move the money around from account to account and eventually, like a Ponzi scheme, because that basically is a form of a Ponzi scheme. It catches up with you, right? And you can't. You can't pay it that way. And so that's what's happening. Right. If the productivity, if the GDP grew fast enough, you could pay the debt. But now we're at a point where that is almost impossible. Right? I mean, I don't want to say it's not possible because there could be some incredible technological breakthrough that could rescue us, but it had to be pretty well, exponential.

I think we could have a monetary breakthrough, which is recognize that we need more money in the system all the time. And you could do that. For example, I think the best idea is a national dividend. You pay it out every month. So people with debt you could make it required that they use that money to pay down their debt. In other words, it would just go automatically into their bank account. And if they had debts on their accounts, it would just go right to the debt. And 80% of the population is in debt, right. You know, is carrying debt right now. So most of that money would go to pay down debt, which means it would disappear. That money would disappear, but so would the debt. Because money is created as a debt, and it's extinguished when you pay debts off. And then the other 20% of people that didn't carry debt, they probably wouldn't put it into the consumer market either. They'd probably put it in the speculative market because, you know, what I'm calling the speculative money, but the other economy, because they don't need the money. They don't need it for consumer goods. They've already got their paycheck to pay for their daily needs. So if they got a little extra, they'd put it in the stock market or, you know, whatever they do, put it in bonds or something. Whatever they do with their savings, they'd save it. So it wouldn't go into the local economy either, but to the Extent that any of this new money did go into the local economy, it's needed in order to fill that gap between debt and the money available to repay it. And the money's not available because all money is created as a debt and the interest is not created in the original debt. That's one reason. And the other reason is that people don't spend all their money back into the economy, they save it. So all that money that was created as a debt and gets saved is not going back to pay into the local consumer economy. To pay down debt.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. So back to the question of what it means to us and what we should do, how we should think about our investment portfolios.

We've got the trade war going on, which is for that reason, it seems to me we're probably headed towards some really rocky, difficult times. But central banks are talking now. I saw that the head of the bank of England was saying that what we need globally, internationally, is a something on the nature of Libra, like a digital currency.

We don't need Facebook to run it. I trust them less than the Federal Reserve.

No, it would be a public Libra run by the central banks. Well, of course, nobody trusts the central banks, but we trust them more than we trust Libra.

I trust them a lot more than I trust Mark Zuckerberg, I'll tell you that.

Or Facebook. Yeah. So anyway, they're talking about all kinds of ways to fix the system. And it seems to me that the central bankers do need to get together and they could fix the system. And what they need to do is do some quantitative easing that actually gets into the real economy. That would fix the system. You can make the numbers work, but we're just short of money. That's the problem. Right now, there's more debt than there is money. So put some extra money out there. And people think that would be inflationary, but it wouldn't. Because if that money goes to pay down debt, it just extinguishes the debt. What we need is a debt jubilee. That's what they did 5,000 years ago in Samaria. And they kept that going for 2,000 years. And the reason they kept it going was they kept writing off debt. And that's what the Chinese do, they write off debt. And that's why their system works so well for them.

But how can. Right, how can having a jubilee be fair or beneficial? Who would write the debt off? Someone gets hurt if they don't get paid back.

Well, that's why the equivalent today in ancient Sumeria, it was the government that the debt was owed to. So they could easily write off debt. And in China it's the government the debt is owed to. Or China owns the banks. The government owns the banks. So they can write off debt on their own state owned banks. But today I would argue with that the alternative is to put more money out there. In other words, rather than hurting the creditors, you pay the creditors but you get the money to pay the creditors from the central bank.

Right, but that means inflation. So ultimately everybody. But it doesn't.

That's what I'm saying. It wouldn't because debt is. When you pay down debt, the money is extinguished, it goes to zero. So that's not going to add money to the money supply. All it's going to do is remove debt from the money supply.

It would be such an uneven system because you're rewarding the people who got in the most debt. Okay, so you give every. So you give everyone a mil. So you give everyone a million dollars.

So those people are having a thousand dollars a month.

That's the proposal. Okay, so $12,000 a year, you give everybody. It's like a living wage concept, a universal basic income. Okay, so you give everyone a thousand dollars a month. And I mean if their debts are higher than that, tough luck. Right? Okay, so fine, but the thousand a month. But that money has to be created and it trickles through the system. And it seems like that ultimately you can't get something for nothing. I don't know why. I mean you must be a fan of mmt I'm guessing, right?

Well, I would be if. Except that they say that all the government has to do is spend and money will be created. Which is not true. It won't be created.

I agree.

Should create new money, but that's not the way to do it. You're going to have to change some laws if you want to the government to create money. But I'm just saying that the thousand dollars a month, 80% of the population carries debt. So the thousands, let's assume that they all have $1,000 of debt a month. That's probably an exaggeration. But anyway, assume they did. Then that thousand dollars would go right into their bank account and it would pay off the debt. So it would go to zero. It would not add money to the money supply. The money supply would stay the same but. But the debt would go to zero. You see what I mean?

Yeah, it would be uneven and it wouldn't be fair. But it seems like that would trickle through the system and it would cause inflation. I mean, I don't know. If people pay their debts off, then they have more money to spend and there's more money chasing a limited supply of goods and services, and that's inflation.

Right.

So this is. Well, but that seems idealistic.

We need some more money out there. It's because people aren't spending that businesses aren't producing. They don't have customers, so why should they bother to take out loans and build bigger factories? But they would have customers if the customers weren't so heavily in debt. Particularly young people, you know, who are now heavily in debt with student loans. Therefore, they can't buy houses, they can't buy furniture, they don't buy new cars, et cetera. They're living at home with their parents. In the old days, in the 60s, when I grew up, people had money for, you know, it was easy to buy a house. You could just get right out of college and buy a house and get a job and decent wage and, you know, have all those things paid for.

I agree. It's a. It's a totally different world today. It really is. Give out your website and tell people where to find you and all of your books.

Ellenbrown.com is my blog. My books are available on Amazon, and my latest book is called Banking on the people.

Excellent. Ellen Brown, thanks for joining us again.

Okay, thank you. Great talking to you.

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