1723: RT News on Eviction, Priced In Gold, Is Real Estate Cheap or Expensive? Lynette Zang

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, 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 1723.

1723. And thank you for joining me. Today we are going to have an.

Interview with a guest who's been on the show before, but this time she's actually interviewing me and that is Lynette Zhang. She is in the precious metals business, mostly numismatic gold coins. In this talk, you're going to hear me talk about gold as a measuring stick. And that's really what we need to do. As I've said many times, we need to use a lot of measuring sticks to determine the value of anything, especially the value of real estate. Now why did I use gold? Well, because Lynette's audience is tuned into that topic. As you know, I'm not a super big gold bug. I think it's okay. It's insurance. It clearly has performed over a long period better than the dollar. So you have a choice, of course. How do you store your wealth? Do you store it in dollars? Do you store it in cryptocurrencies?

Do you store it in gold? Do you store it in oil?

You can store it in lots of ways. Do you store it in equity and real estate in the s and P500? And all of these different measuring sticks.

Of course are very dynamic.

They perform differently over time. However, one person brought up a good point on this interview in talking about the comp to 1970. And as you may recall from prior episodes when we've discussed this, when we talked about the Bretton woods monetary system that started right after World War II and lasted up until. And folks, this is the anniversary. Almost. Almost. I believe the anniversary is August 15th. So we're just about there for the 50 year anniversary of what our former president Richard M. Nixon said was the temporary suspension of convertibility of dollars into gold.

Just a 50 year temporary plan, right? Just 50 years as I've often repeated, Milton Friedman said, nothing is so permanent.

As a temporary government program.

You just gotta laugh at this stuff.

Because if you didn't find a way.

To laugh, it would be so sad.

You would just cry and it's so ridiculous. But look, we know better.

We know there is a massive game being played. We know the value of our currency.

Is being manipulated toward zero. And it is approaching zero rather quickly, unfortunately. But we know what to do about it. We know that we can use my trademark inflation Induced Debt Destruction technique, the iidd, Inflation Induced Debt Destruction. And we can use my Hartman Comparison Index, the hci, to understand what the real value is. And that is how we can understand.

What is going to happen in the.

Future versus where we are today.

And also looking back at history.

So the thought was that it really isn't a great idea to use 1970 as the first benchmark when you talk about gold. So I just want to, in this intro portion before we get into the.

Interview, and by the way, we got to talk about the eviction moratorium issue.

For a moment, but before we get into it, I want to just frame this a little bit. Or heck, you know what?

I'll frame it after we talk about the eviction moratorium.

So give me a couple minutes here.

And let's just talk about that for a moment. We're going to change subjects because I.

Want you to have this gold stuff in your head right before the interview so you'll be prepared to listen to it with new ears, with better ears. Okay? So, eviction moratorium. So as you know, the CDC eviction moratorium ended. And then I was on RT television being interviewed by Rick Sanchez, fantastic anchor person, and he was interviewing me about the moratorium ending. And no sooner, you can't make this stuff up, folks. No sooner than the next day did they reinstitute a new moratorium. Now, it's not quite the same. The Supreme Court has already said, hey, you can't do this, you know, so look, this stuff isn't going to last in any real way.

And the tenants really do have to.

Jump through some hoops to get it. There are about, I believe, 450 or so different tenant assistant programs around the country. So there's a lot to it. But largely and amazingly, really, because we thought this would be a giant problem for us. Last year when it was announced these moratoriums and they also announced forbearance, we.

Were kind of thinking we were going to say to our investors, look, if.

The tenants don't pay Just go into forbearance. Because if they don't pay, you can't pay, right?

Okay, so that was one plan. But guess what?

Our clients really didn't need to. On the whole, we hardly heard of any of you having any problems with tenants not paying rent. I mean, out of thousands and thousands of transactions that I've been involved in over the past 18 years of doing.

Investments only, and then long before that.

Doing traditional real estate, owning a company.

Having it sold to Coldwell Banker, working.

With a lot of investors in my traditional real estate career. I've got a lot of experience with this stuff for many decades, longer than I care to even say.

So we thought this would be a big problem, but it turned out to be a non issue, just a nothing issue. Now that's not true on the whole because many tenants did default. It's just that I guess we dodged the bullet. Our clients dodged the bullet because they weren't, on the whole, the type of tenants in our properties, the properties we've recommended. Now, a lot of them went into default and took advantage of the moratoriums and worked the system. If they were renting apartments from institutional landlords or they were renting really low end housing.

These people just kind of didn't have anything to lose. So yeah, keep in mind, you know, people could still get a money judgment against the tenants. They just couldn't kick them out. And the higher quality tenants in the properties you'll find on our website, go to jason hartman.com click on the properties page. Those are the higher quality properties. The higher quality tenants usually, almost always.

But there's an exception here or there.

Almost always come with the higher quality properties. You get higher quality tenants. And so we thought this would be a big concern, this moratorium, and it just wasn't. It turned out to be basically a non issue.

Thankfully, we didn't know that it would go that way in the beginning, but thankfully that's how it turned out.

So let's go to this interview that.

I did with Rick Sanchez and let's play you a clip from that.

Then we will circle back to the subject of gold and go to the interview with Lynette. So here we go on the interview on rt.

Welcome back, I'm Rick Sanchez. Tonight there does seem to be a fear among many that millions of Americans could be out on the street because while they used to be protected from eviction, that protection is not going to be there for them anymore. There are supposedly some 6 million families that have fallen behind on their rent due mostly to the global pandemic.

The numbers are staggering. Fifteen million people in the US owe their landlords as much as $20 billion in total. And while up to now they were protected by a federal eviction moratorium that prevents landlords from kicking them out if they didn't pay the rent, that is officially coming to an end. Who has decided to let the moratorium on evictions expire? Essentially, the President of the United States, Joe Biden. And while most agreed with him a few months ago that it should be lifted because, after all, Covid was on the wane, that is no longer the case. Because so many people have refused to vaccinate, because of the transmissibility of the Delta virus, and because many of the unvaccinated are ending up dead or practically dying in hospitals, the wane is no longer true. And that is why President Biden is getting serious heat, not from Republicans, but rather from Democrats who say the president is betraying them and helping, quote, the wrong side. Here are some numbers to consider. In 250 counties, at least one fifth of renters are behind on their payments, with the average renter owing at least $4,000. Nationwide, the bill for uncollected rent, $23 billion. But wait, wasn't the $50 billion in government rental assistance supposed to deal with that? Yes, it was, but the money has never been distributed. And what has been distributed has gone in a painfully slow fashion. In fact, only about 20% of the 50 billion actually has gone to tenants. Some of the worst case examples. Listen to this. California allocated 1.5 billion. They ended up with about 1 million being approved. Texas, it was allocated 1.3 billion, but has only paid out 22 million. So if the money never got to the renters but stayed in their homes anyway, then wasn't it really the landlords who paid the heaviest price? And oh yes, what did happen to the money? Makes you wonder, doesn't it? The host of Creating wealth podcast on itunes also has a YouTube channel where he breaks down the market. Jason Hartman, good enough to join us now to talk about this. You know, as I was preparing that report that I just shared with you and our viewers, I did have a lot of questions come to mind. Why didn't the people get all the money? If they didn't get all the money, what's the situation in the housing scenario for the United States right now? Jason, are you as perplexed as I am?

Yeah, Rick, you know, those are great questions. And I looked at your piece and I was just appalled at the amount of money that has gotten to where it should be, you know, California. I mean, a million dollars, that's it. Out of, you know, 1.5 billion. This is insanity. It's just another government program where they're on the take and it's getting lost in bureaucracy and who know, I'm sure it'll come out eventually, but it's just very discouraging, I imagine.

Then was I right to presuppose that if the folks aren't getting the money that they were supposed to use to pay down their rent, then the guy who's really getting hurt here, or the gal, is the landlord because they're not getting any money?

You know, you're right, it is the landlord. And that's definitely true. However, there's a whole, a whole other aspect to it, Rick, because as you look through that sort of supply chain of housing, if landlords are stuck with tenants that they can't force to uphold contracts and, and keep their agreements, right, Even though those tenants have been getting all sorts of government aid in terms of enhanced unemployment benefits and so forth, and, and for many, many months weren't spending any money. But you know, household savings rates have, have actually skyrocketed oddly. It's sort of the opposite of us thought might happen. And then there's a housing shortage. So, you know, these landlords can't recycle their houses into the rental market or into the for sale market. Some of them might want to sell their properties. And so what you're really seeing is first time buyers are also getting very hurt by these misguided government policies. And maybe now with the moratorium ending, we'll start to see some, what's known as price discovery in the market, where the market will start to adjust and things will start to happen. Yes, evictions will occur. That is sad. But some people will pay their rent. You know, a lot of people that have been not paying rent can pay rent. It hasn't really actually been a problem of what they can or can't pay. It's just been a choice that they've kind of wanted to work the system, frankly, and not pay because they're taking advantage of the policies that are there. So some of them will pay. They won't all be evicted, they'll just pay up and others will move and maybe they'll move to a less expensive place. Maybe they'll move to a more expensive place in some cases.

So I tend to understand and I think what you're saying is it's really. Yes, it could be A kind thing to do and it should come from the landlord. But the government should not be mandating people to not pay their rent because that could mess up the entire apple cart. That's what I hear you say.

You're absolutely right. Every time, Rick, when the government gets in the, in the middle of the marketplace, they distort the market, they distort prices and everybody suffers. Every time there's some sort of government program like this, you always see this type of thing, these distortions in the marketplace and a bunch of unintended consequences. That's what you have now. You know, look, I'm not completely against the idea of a moratorium and a forbearance when it happened for maybe two or three months during the darkest days of the pandemic. But to have it last this long is absolutely crazy. When we've seen savings rates skyrocket, when we've seen people not willing to come to work, and we've seen employers having to offer insane compensation packages to what otherwise would normally be minimum wage workers, dollar general offering basically dollar an hour and signing bonuses to work at McDonald's of $500, $1,000. I mean they've just totally distorted the market and the economy and they're going to create a massive amount of inflation in doing so, or already have.

Your point is a good one.

Already have.

I don't think that you lack compassion. I think you're just trying to make sure that the market plays by its own set of rules and not rules that are handed down to them. And I think that's a valid point. Jason Hartman, as usual, great guest, thanks for joining us, man. That's great.

Okay, so just a little info about that.

And then of course the next day.

They came up with a new moratorium.

So we'll see how that works. But look at, none of this stuff is likely to last and thankfully it.

Hasn'T really affected you folks who are following our plan.

So that's good news.

Okay, so now let's talk about gold. So of course in 1970 gold was $35 an ounce and that price was essentially fixed ever since the confiscation of Gold in 1933. Remember they did the confiscation. They said you weren't allowed to own gold bullion gold bars. Now some coins and jewelry was non confiscatable and that was good. Not everybody turned in every piece of.

Gold, but the bullion type of gold had to be turned in to the government in 1933. And I believe, if my memory serves.

Me correct, they purchased it for like $22 an ounce.

The government did.

That was the confiscation.

They did pay people for it.

But then right after they did that, they increased the price to I think it was $35 an ounce. And then it stayed fixed for years and years and years. So in 1970, a year before we went off the gold standard, it was 35 bucks. So let's just forget about that.

Forget about it? How do those New Yorkers say forget about it? I don't know. I'm not good at accents.

Let's just go to 1980. And in 1980, gold was $653 an ounce and the median price house was $66,400. So it would take you 102 ounces of gold to buy the median price house in 1980. By 1990 it took you double the amount of dollars. But gold had gotten down in price to 415 an ounce. So it took you a lot more gold, 293 ounces to buy the median price house 10 years later. So if you stored your money in gold for that 10 years, you lost. You would have actually been better. Even though there was a decent amount.

Of inflation, not as much as in.

The 70s, but through the 80s we had inflation there too. Of course you lost basically 50% of the purchasing power. But priced in gold, you lost about 66% of the purchasing power. So the dollar was the winner over gold. From 1980 to 1990, you would have.

Been better off in dollars. Now, of course, you would have been better off in a lot of other things besides dollars.

But just comparing only gold to dollars, that's the thing. But from 1970 to 1980, you would have been much better off in gold. So do you see? I call this the trade of the decade. The trade of the decade, Right. What is the trade of the decade? It could change every decade. So we've thought for the past couple of decades, the trade of the decade is income, property, and hey, that's almost always the best one because it has multi dimensional characteristics. And that's what makes it absolutely beautiful. Alright, so what about the next 10 years? 1990 to 2000, median house price was 122. I'm just rounding off 122 in 1990. In 2000 it was 173. Gold went down in price versus the dollar from 415 down to 283. So in 2000, if you wanted to buy the median price house with gold, it would cost you 610 ounces of gold. Whereas 10 years earlier it would have been 293 ounces of gold. So in that decade you were actually worse off in gold than you were in the dollar once again. But if you went from 1970 to 1980, you were much better off in gold. But again, for the first year of that decade, the gold price was controlled.

And then there was a ton of.

Gold speculation in the 70s because inflation, stagflation, Jimmy Carter.

Yeah, 70s was a mess, right? Price controls, etc, etc, people were very fearful then.

Okay, let's just take a 21 year.

Jump in the interest of time here.

And let's go from 2000 to June of 2021, median house price went from 173 to 348. So in dollars, your median house price.

Jumped basically by more than double.

Right. So gold went from 283 an ounce in 2000 to 1787 in June of 2021.

So in 2000 it would take 610 ounces of gold to buy the median price house. But 21 years later, basically a generation later, 194 ounces. So during that span you would have been better off in gold. During the prior 20 years you would have been better off in dollars. And this is what the Hartman Comparison Index helps you do because it compares not only to gold, but of course dozens and dozens of other items. So lots more to come on the Hartman Comparison index. We're going to go into this in a lot of depth at our live conference, Empowered Investor live in Orlando, Florida, September 10th, 11th and 12th. Be sure to join us. We are in the process of hiring some fantastic entertainment for the event. So it's going to be fun, it's going to be educational, it's going to be social, you're going to have fun, you're going to get to meet a lot of investors, a lot of our clients, hear how they're doing in these crazy times. And easy, inexpensive direct flights to Orlando airport. Beautiful resort hotel, absolutely gorgeous.

I recommend you bring the family, make.

A holiday out of it. Of course, Orlando is a famous place for theme parks and Disneyland, Epcot Center, I mean Disney World, Universal Studios and much more. So join us for that. Go to empoweredinvestor.com to get your tickets. Empoweredinvestor.com and if you join our Empowered Investor Inner circle, which is offered on.

That page@empoweredinvestor.com you get a free ticket.

If you're already a member, you get.

A discount on your ticket purchase.

So either way you can definitely win.

A lot of special stuff. For you.

All right, let's get to part one of my interview with Lynette. And we're going to talk about the HCI a little bit more in a different way than we've talked about it in the past.

It's always different.

There's so much to this index.

There's a lot of depth. I just can't wait for you to hear more.

So let's get to part one of that.

And we will also have more on Wednesday's episode.

Here we go with the first part.

I'm Lynette Zhang, chief market analyst here at ITM Trading, a full service physical gold and silver dealer specializing in custom strategies to help you not just survive, but thrive through the reset that's already begun. And I'm very excited today because here's somebody else that can help you do that. My friend Jason Hartman, a specialist in real estate, which is something that all of my viewers are interested in. But considering everything that's happening in the real estate market, from moratoriums to evictions to cancellations to sky high prices, we have a lot to talk about today. He's a very popular keynote speaker. So thank you so much for coming today, Jason.

Well, Lynette, the pleasure is all mine. It's great to be back on with you. And I always love our talks. Years ago, people would have considered some of this stuff out there, but I think the population is waking up and you just don't know who you can trust anymore. You know, there's an old saying that I'm sure you've heard, and I'm sure many of your viewers have heard, too. If you don't have your own plan, you will be part of somebody else's plan. You know, that's what's wonderful about the work you're doing, is you're trying to help people stay with their own plan for their life, which is a much better plan than somebody else's plan.

Oh, I guarantee you. I mean, you will own nothing and you will be happy.

Oh, scary.

That is the plan. It is actually really scary. And programmable money, too, meaning, you know, that they can dictate everything that we're doing in this lovely surveillance economy.

Yeah. We are nearing a point of what I'll call checkmate. You know, 20 years ago, I was studying how there was this movement to have a global fiat currency. They were talking about a North American currency, like via marrow. Right. And now that we have had the, you know, the advent of Bitcoin around 12, 13 years ago, and all the cryptocurrencies now they've gotten so much smarter. Right. Because they know that with a central bank, digital currency, they will exercise so much control over everybody's life, whether it be social scoring, whether it be lockdowns, whether it be what you can spend your money on, what you can't spend it on, how quickly that money in your phone, probably it'll be in your phone will expire. Will it go down in value? Can you spend it more than a mile from your home? What if they want you to stay in your own area? I mean, it is. It's getting pretty, pretty scary out there.

Yeah, you're right. And I, and I agree with that wholeheartedly. And it just points to the importance of really having physical gold and silver completely outside of the system, because that's the only way that you're going to be able to maintain your independence along with the food, water, energy, security, and then community and shelter.

Right.

So there's a lot. You know, I think the Shift started in 2008 to corporate America really owning and controlling the mom and pop. Can you talk really more about that and give us an overview of where you think we are right now?

Yeah. You know, in some ways, it's an amazing time to be alive. You know, we have all this great technology, and for a while we had a free Internet. Of course, that's changed, sadly, especially after January. Now the gloves are off. Everybody knows that they are censoring everything, that they're controlling the narrative, that we're just not going to get the truth anywhere except places like this while they last. Because they're censoring us too, and de. Platforming people and all kinds of things. You know, when you asked about corporate America, though, we're really in this environment, Lynette, where it's winner take all society. And instead of it being a more flattened environment where the power and the capital and the businesses are in the hands of small businesses of mom and pop entrepreneurs, which are really the backbone of America and the backbone of any great society.

It's all sort of coalesced into a.

Small number of corporate giants. And of course, we all know about the big tech companies and the other big companies, but even with something as simple as coffee, you know, try finding a coffee shop that's not. That doesn't start with an S, you know, and the poison that that company Starbucks is foisting onto society is just ridiculous. The stuff they sell causes diabetes. It's full of pesticides, it's full of sugar. It's awful. There's really no other practical, reasonable choice anymore because they've just, you know, the.

Way capital is formed in this country.

It lends itself to this winner take all type of situation. And that is very disconcerting.

Yeah, it sure is. That's the importance of being as self sufficient and independent as possible. You know, so I don't personally go to Starbucks myself, but yeah, I think we vote with our purse. I mean, that's how you vote. And if you support these guys that are taking over, and Amazon really did, that was the start of the death knell for the mom and pops because they didn't have to make money, they'd have to make profits.

And Lynette, there's the flip side of that equation. You're absolutely right because Amazon could do illogical things just like Uber and Lyft do they, they run businesses at a loss by raising money. I mean, look at. Raising money is not a business. Businesses actually sell products and services and mark them up. That's a business. That's a business.

Okay.

You know, yeah. Raising money is not a business, okay? That's a Ponzi scheme, essentially. You know, Amazon is not only putting the mom and pop businesses and retailers out of business, but they're also destroying the lives of workers. You know, we all have read about the abuses, the terrible abuses and absolute sort of iron thumb control that they exert in those warehouses on people. They have sensors that sense carbon dioxide, in other words, exhaling. Because when those sensors are triggered, they can tell people are talking too much amongst themselves. They promote a diversity agenda which, you know, on its face we think is good, but what really happens and the reason the corporatocracy is promoting this diversity agenda is because it splits people up into clans.

Okay?

You know, we all have seen that with BLM and the riots and all of this stuff, right? And every, you know, just, just look at social media. Everybody's arguing and fighting and it makes much less likely to unionize.

Right.

And gain some rights against the employer. You know, these are not capitalists, okay? These are the robber barons of our time. They are the new Carnegie's melons, Rockefellers and Vanderbilts. They're just totally abusive, okay? They're, they're abusing the workers.

They're usually not abusing the customers. They're usually kind of customer centric.

And since most of the audience is.

The customer, they please the customer.

Right, by offering cheap products, mostly imported from China. Yeah. And yeah. So, you know, I probably don't have to rant too much more about it.

Well, no, but, you know, we want to hear what the viewers want to hear as well, what we're having in this conversation. Because the only way to really protect ourselves is to come together as a community, because there are a lot more of us than there are of them. And a lot of what's happened over the last year and a half has consolidated that power.

Sure has. And they know that people will always default to convenience and price. And so that's how they woo us in. That's how the big companies are just. They've been just stealing all our data. You know, there's an old song, I think it's by Bob Seeger. You remember it? You know, I'm not just a number. Right, you're all just a number now. They have thousands of data points on each person. They have massively abused their privileges. They've invaded our privacy, they've sold our data. Remember, when the product is cheap or free, you are the product, so be really careful of that.

You know, back to your point though.

Earlier, Lynette, about being self sufficient. And you have done just a great job at that.

And I'm not sure I'd like it to be. I still have a ways to go, but I'm working. I've been working on it for a long time.

We all do. Because as humans, you know, that really is our strength, to be not independent, but interdependent. The problem is the version of interdependency.

We have now is giant corporations and government to individual people. Right, right. Who have been fragmented up into clans. What we've got to remember is that the government, in times of crisis, and we do have a desperate government, and most governments around the world are quite desperate, not just the United States. So this is not just a US thing.

Right.

For my podcast, I've got listeners in 189 countries. I'm sure you're about the same.

Yeah. All over the world.

And every government is basically over indebted. They're producing fiat currency. That's their main product, is the currency they produce. That's any government's and central bank's primary product. Their widget, if you will, is the dollar, the yen, the euro, the Brazilian real, the peso, whatever.

Right.

That's their product.

And they must get us to keep.

Consuming that product because with that product they control so much of our lives. And once that product becomes digital, they will control dramatically more with vaccine, passports, you know, the whole.

That's already started too.

I know, I know. Yeah. New York.

You know, the governments, though, always look.

For the low hanging fruit. And you mentioned gold and silver. Of course that's a good insurance policy. That's your business.

There are other pieces of low hanging fruit out there and one is real estate.

And that's my business. And I love income property. I think it's the, the most historically proven asset class in the world. It's more of an investment than an.

Insurance policy like gold and silver. But it's sort of hard to confiscate it. Yes, they are doing things around the.

Edges, there's no question. And we can talk about moratoriums as.

Well, but you know, it's really easy.

When the government is in dire straits.

To go take all of the retirement.

Plans, the 401ks and the IRAs and.

All that money in those plans is basically in brokerage account.

Right.

And they can just make an edict.

You know, even an executive order. Possibly they'll engineer a crisis or take advantage of a crisis that they might.

Be even be complicit in.

Or crisis will just happen and then.

For our own protection, the government will.

Have to step in.

And of course, who's going to administrate that?

A big tech company along with the government. They're of course in bed together.

And when they do that, they will retitle those accounts to the government and.

Then they will just inflate the value of them away so that you might get your government stipend, your stimulus in nominal dollars, but in real dollars it's almost meaningless.

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