Podcast appearances and mentions of Ben Bernanke

The Wealth Formula Podcast is one of the longest-running personal finance podcasts still standing. For more than a decade, I've shown up every single week to talk about investing, markets, and the forces shaping the economy. What's interesting is how much my own thinking has evolved over that time. Early on, I was more rigid. I was—and still am—a real estate guy. But back then, I didn't give much thought to ideas outside that lane. I was dogmatic, and I didn't always challenge my own beliefs. Time has a way of doing that for you. I've now lived through multiple market cycles. I've watched the stock market melt up to valuations that felt absurd—and then keep going. I've seen gold go from flat for a decade to parabolic over a year. I've seen interest rates sit near zero for a decade and then snap higher at the fastest pace in modern history. And I've learned, sometimes the hard way, that diversification is about survival and that every asset class has its day. One lesson I learned that I am thinking a lot about these days is: ignore major technological shifts at your own peril. Back in 2014, I first started hearing people talk seriously about Bitcoin. At the time, I dismissed it. I listened to the critics, was convinced it was a scam, and didn't take the time to truly understand it. That was a mistake—not because everyone should have bought Bitcoin, but because I ignored a structural change happening right in front of me. Bitcoin went from a cypherpunk expression of freedom to the largest ETF owned by BlackRock. Today, the dominant story is artificial intelligence. And whether you love stocks, hate stocks, prefer real estate, or focus exclusively on cash flow, you cannot afford to ignore AI. This isn't a fad. It's a general-purpose technology—on the scale of electricity, the internet, or the industrial revolution itself. That doesn't mean it's easy to invest in. It's hard to look at headline names trading at massive valuations and feel good about buying them today. But investing in AI isn't about chasing a single company. It's about understanding second- and third-order effects: energy demand, data centers, productivity gains, labor displacement, capital flows, and how blockchain and decentralized systems intersect with all of it. What experience has taught me is this: you don't need to be first to invest—but you do need to be early in understanding. If you wait until something feels obvious, most of the opportunity is already gone. This week's episode of the Wealth Formula Podcast is focused squarely on AI and blockchain—what's real, what's noise, and where the long-term implications may lie. Listen to this episode. You'll come away smarter. And years from now, you may look back and realize this was one of those moments where paying attention really mattered. Transcript Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by AI and may not be 100% accurate. If you notice any errors or corrections, please email us at phil@wealthformula.com.  Welcome everybody. This is Buck Joffrey with the Wealth Formula Podcast. Coming to you from Montecito, California. Today we wanna start with a reminder. We are in a new year and we are already doing deals, uh, through the Wealth Formula Accredit Investor Club. You can go and sign up for that for free. Uh, wealth formula.com just hit investor club and you just get on there and, and you’ll get onboarded. And from there, all you gotta do is wait for deal flow and webinars coming to your inbox. And, um, you know, if nothing else, you learn something. So go check it out. Uh, go to. Wealth formula.com and sign up for Investor Club now onto today’s show. Uh, the, it is interesting. I don’t know if you are aware it’s a listener, but we are, wealth Formula is, uh, probably I would say one of the, certainly in the one of the top longest running personal finance podcasts still. Standing. Uh, I’ve been around, well, I think the first episode was on like 2014, so it was a long time, but in earnest, you know, at least for over a decade. And, you know, during that time, I’ve shown up every week, every single week. Don’t Ms. Weeks, but none, none. Isn’t that incredible? I’ve shown up, uh, talked about investing and talked about very way markets are working, forces, shaping the economy, all that kind of stuff. But you know, as you can imagine, as a. As a younger individual versus, um, my crusty self. Now, you know, a lot of my own thinking has evolved over that time, you know, back then. And I, you know, I think this appealed to some people, but, um, you know, I was really dogmatic. I’m a real estate guy, right? And I still am a real estate guy, but back then I wouldn’t give anything else the time of day to even think about, you know, and, and, uh, I, I, you know. I was dogmatic and didn’t always challenge my own belief systems. Um, I’m different now, right? I’ve softened And time is a way of, of changing all of that dogmatic stuff for you. You know, I’ve lived through multiple market cycles. I’ve watched, well, I’ve watched the stock market, which I, which I always maligned, you know, melt up to valuations. Uh, that felt absurd. And then keep going higher. I’ve seen gold, which was kind of ridiculous for the longest time. I watched it for like a decade, just pretty much flat, and then it goes parabolic. Over the last year, I’ve seen interest rates sit near zero for a decade and then snap higher. Uh, not even as time, just launch higher at the fastest space in modern history. And I’ve learned sometimes I guess, the hard way that diversification is about survival and that every class, every asset class has its day. Just like every dog has its day. And um, you know, one other lesson that I learned that I’m thinking a lot about these days is ignore major technological shifts at your own peril. So what am I talking about? Well. It’s kind of a, it is a technological shift, whether you think it about not, but Bitcoin. Okay. Back in 2014, I first started hearing people talk seriously about Bitcoin, and at that time I dismissed it. I was, uh, I was listening to critics beater Schiff that constantly called it a scam, said it was going to zero and so on. I didn’t, I didn’t take the time to truly understand it, to try to understand it the way I understand it now, that makes me a believer in Bitcoin. That, of course was a big mistake, not because, you know, everyone should have bought Bitcoin and, uh, back then, well, they, you know, would’ve been nice if they did, but because fundamentally I ignored something that was a structural change happening right in front of me. And since then, Bitcoin went from a cipher punk expression of freedom to the large CTF owned by BlackRock today. The dominant story is actually artificial intelligence. Now, whether you love stocks, hate stocks, prefer real estate focused exclusively on cab, whatever, you cannot afford to ignore ai. It’s not a fad. It’s a general purpose technology and a technology shift, and the scale of electricity. The internet bigger than the internet, bigger than the industrial revolution. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s easy to invest in. I mean, I’m gonna go invest in AI and make a bunch of money because I mean, what does that even mean? It’s hard to look at headline names, trading at massive valuations like Nvidia and all that right now, and saying, oh, I’m gonna go buy that. Who knows? That’s gonna work out. When I talk about investing in AI isn’t really just investing in stocks or any individual company or data centers or whatever. It’s about understanding. The second and third order effects, energy demand. You know, as I mentioned, data centers, productivity gains, labor displacement, capital flows, and how blockchain and decentralized systems intersect with all of that. It is very, very complicated. Um, but it’s really important to start to try to understand, you know, an experience that stop me is this. You don’t need to be the first to invest, but you do need to be early in understanding. If you wait until something feels obvious, usually the opportunity’s gone by then. And you know, the thing about AI is even if you think it’s obvious now. The reality is that most people haven’t really caught on. Maybe they played with chat GPT, but I don’t think they’re understanding what this whole, you know, this thing is gonna do to our world. Um, anyway, so that is what this week’s episode of Wealth Formula Podcast, uh, is about. It’s about AI and also, um, a little bit about, you know, bitcoin and blockchain and that kind of thing. Um, we’re gonna talk about what’s noise, uh, you know, where the long, what the long-term, uh, implications are all of this stuff. This is a show that, uh, I really enjoy doing really, really good stuff. Um, so make sure you listen in. We’ll have that interview for you right after these messages. Wealth Formula banking is an ingenious concept powered by whole life insurance, but instead of acting just as a safety net. The strategy supercharges your investments. First, you create a personal financial reservoir that grows at a compounding interest rate much higher than any bank savings account. As your money accumulates, you borrow from your own bank to invest in other cash flowing investments. Here’s the key. Even though you borrowed money at a simple interest rate, your insurance company keeps paying you compound interest. On that money, even though you’ve borrowed it, that result, you make money in two places at the same time. That’s why your investments get supercharged. This isn’t a new technique. It’s a refined strategy used by some of the wealthiest families in history, and it uses century old rock solid insurance companies as its backbone. Turbocharge your investments. Visit Wealth formula banking.com. Again, that’s wealth formula banking.com. Welcome back to the show, everyone. Today. My guest on Wealth Formula podcast is Jim Thorne, chief Market strategist at Wellington. L is private wealth with more than 25 years of experience in capital markets. He’s previously served as chief capital market strategist, senior portfolio manager, chief economist, and CIO. Uh, equities at major investment firms and has also taught economics and finance at the university level. Uh, Jim is known for translating complex economic, political, and market dynamics into clear actionable insights to help investors and advisors navigate long-term capital decisions. Uh, Jim, welcome with the program. Thanks for having me Buck. Well, um, Tim, I, I, I, uh, had been following a little bit of, uh, what you discuss on, uh, on X and, um, one of the things that caught my eye is, you know, your, your narrative on, on ai, a lot of people are tend to be still sort of skeptical of AI and what’s going on, uh, with the markets. Um, uh, but at the same time, uh, there’s this. Sense. I think that ignoring AI altogether as an investor is, is, is downright potentially dangerous. So, uh, at the highest level, why is AI something people simply can’t dismiss? Well, we live in an, uh, uh, you know, many other people have coined this term, but we live, we’re living in an exponential age of, of technological innovation. And, you know, AI and I’ll just add into their, uh, blockchain is just the normal evolutionary process that, you know, for me started when I left graduate school and came into the business in the nineties where everybody had this high degree of skepticism of the computer and the, the, the phone, the, the. And the internet. And so, you know, what we do is we go through these cycles and there are periods of time where the stars align. And we have a period of time where we have what I would call an intense period of innovation where I would suggest to you that. People are skeptical. Skeptical, and yet at the same point in time, they very early on in the, in the, in the trade, call it a bubble when it’s not. And so I think it comes from the position of ignorance. One, I think two, fear, and then three. If you think about if you are an active manager, I in a 40 ACT fund, um, you know, and you’re sitting there with, uh, you know, mi. Uh, Nvidia at, you know, eight or 9% of your index. And that’s a big chunk that you’ve gotta put into your fund, uh, just to be market neutral. So there’s a lot of people that hate this rally. There’s a lot of people that are can, going to continue to hate this rally. But the thing I anchor my hat on are a couple of things. Look at if this is no different than the railroad. Canals, any major technological innovation, will it become a bubble? Yes. Just not now. So, so let’s follow up on that, because a lot of people think, or are talking about the, do you know the.com bubble, uh, comparisons, and you’ve argued that that sort of misses the real story. So, so where are we getting it wrong right now? Are those people getting it wrong? In the nineties buck, you’d walk into a bar and there wouldn’t be ESPN on there’d be CNBC on people were getting their jobs to become day traders. Folks didn’t go to the go to university because they were basically getting their white papers financed. You had companies that were trading off of clicks. So I lived that. Anybody who is of a younger generation has no idea what a bubble is, and it’s specious and pedantic for them to use that term when they have no clue about what they’re talking about. But you did mention that it could become a bubble. How do we know when it does become a bubble? Oh, it’ll become a bubble. Well, when, when, when you know, the, what, what I am looking for is, you know, when we, when the good investment opportunities start to dry up, when liquidity starts to dry up. So what I, it’s not about valuation, to me it’s about liquidity. So in 2000, what, and I’m roughly speaking, what went down was you had all these companies that were trading at Strat catastrophic valuation, this stupid valuations, and you walked in one day and they didn’t get financing. And if you read the prospectus or you followed the company, you knew that they were not going to be free cash flow positive for another two or three rounds of financing. All of a sudden you walked in and everybody goes, oh my God, this thing, you know, trading at 250 times sales. And everybody went, yeah, of course. And so what it was is, was when does liquidity dry up? So I’ll give you a date, um, you know, with Trump’s big beautiful bill act. 100% tax deductibility of CapEx and that goes until Jan 1, 20 31. So to me, that’s a very motivating factor for people to, um, invest. The last thing I would say to you in more of a game theoretic context book is, look, if you are a big tech company and you don’t invest in ai. You are ensuring your death. Yahoo, Hela Packard. I can go through the list of companies that cease to invest, so they’re looking. If it was you and I when we were running this company, I would say, dude, we gotta invest because if we don’t have a poll position in this next platform, whatever it is, we’re done. We’re toast. And I think that’s why you’re seeing all these hyperscalers spending as much money as they are. ’cause they get this, they saw it. So, you know, you framed ai not necessarily as a a tech trade, but as a capital expenditure cycle. Can you explain that to people? Well, what we need to do is we need to build out the infrastructure of ai. Then, and that’s the phase that we’re in right now. So it’s more like we’re building out all of the railroads, the railway tracks and the railway stations across the United States back in the 18 hundreds. And then we’re gonna go through that building phase. And then as that building phase goes, some companies, some towns, are going to basically realize and recognize what’s happening and start to basically take ai. Bring it into their business model, into enhanced margins. Right. So right now we’re building it out. I mean, you know, we all focus on the hyperscalers, but the majority of companies, pardon me, governments. Individuals, they haven’t used AI and, and what is interesting about this is back in the nineties, they were talking about how the internet had to evolve to be much more. You know, uh, have critical thinking in, in, in it. And it was more explained when you went to these conferences, as you know, you know, think about this. You’re hearing this in 99, okay? Not today. You go in and you ask Google or dog pile at the same time, or excite, okay? You would say, I wanna go to Florida in the third week of March and I wanna stay here and I wanna spend this amount of money and I wanna rent a car. Plan it for me. And they would come back and they would tell you that it would come back and it would, it would, everything would be there. And you would have your over here and all you would have to do is drop your money and you had your thing planned. So none of this is as, it’s aspirational, but we’ve heard it before. And in technology, what happens is it’s not like it’s new. We’ve been talking to, I did machine learning in in graduate school. Ai, you know, I did neural networks and I’m a terrible Ian. This isn’t, you know, Claude Shannon wrote about this in 1937, right? But it’s about when does it hit, and so it was chat GBT. Can we argue, was that right? As an investor, it’s stop arguing, start investing. Then what you’ve gotta figure out, which is the question you ask, is when does the music stop? I think it goes until the end of the decade. You know, one of the things that, uh, is interesting about this, uh, AI investment, uh, it’s, it’s unfolding in a higher interest rate environment. Why is that detail so important? Understanding its significance? Well, it’s the cost of capital, right? And so this phase that we have right now. It’s funny you say that, right? ’cause our reference point is zero interest rates, right? Yeah, yeah. Right. That’s right. So, you know, you know, so, so think about this, what it happens right now. Now we’re in the phase where you’ve got these hyperscalers that instead of taking all their free cash flow and buying bonds and buying back stock, are increasing CapEx because there’s a great tax deduction on it. So you get a lot of, so we’re in this phase where, for where, where a lot of the money is, you know, was. Was, let me, let me be clear, was a hundred free cashflow. Now we’re getting these guys, these companies like Oracle and what have you, you know, starting to issue debt and look at debt isn’t bad as long as the rate of return on debt is higher than the interest rates. And so, you know, you know, I, I would say historically speaking, for a lot of these high quality names, the interest rates are not, uh, at levels that will stop them from investing. Right. Right. You know, you’ve written that, um, productivity is ultimately the real story behind ai. So why does productivity matter more than the technology headlines themselves? Well, let me just put it this way, right? So we’ve grown, I grew up, I, I joined, I’m up here in Toronto, right? So I’m gonna give it to you in Canadian dollars, right? So I joined, I joined here. You know, I grew up here, went to the states, came back home. Growing this company I joined when we’re about three and a half billion. We’re getting close to 50 billion, and we’re the fastest growing independent platform in the country. I’m a one man band, right? I use three ai. In the old days, I’d have four research assistants. Where’s the margin in that? And so I, that’s how I see it. And let me be clear, it’s, you know, this isn’t we’re, it’s not perfect. But if I wanted to say, instead of you, but hey, write me a 2000 word essay on the counterfactual of what happened with railroads up until 1894 when the, when the bubble popped, give me a f, you know, a a thousand word essay and, and just a general overview. I can get that in less than five minutes. Michael Sailor is writing product on ai, which, which, which you would take, which you would take. He’s in his presentation, say it would take a hundred lawyers. So it’s gonna be more about those. And it’s, it’s no different than Internet of things or, you know, it was, uh, Kasparov that talked about this. Gary Kasparov talking about the melding of, of technology in humans. He would ran, run this chess tournament called freestyle. You could use a computer, you could use, you know, grand Masters. You could use whatever you wanted to compete. And who won? Well, who won it Was that those teams that were generalists that had a little bit of that, the knowledge of the computer and the knowledge of the test. Uh, o of chess, right? That’s what’s gonna happen. So this isn’t we’re, as far as I’m concerned, we’re not, yes, there’s going to be some d some jobs that are going to be replaced, but that is always the case in technology. I’m not a Luddite, okay? I am not Luddite. But the same point in time. I, I would suggest to you that it, it is just a really, for me, it’s a, helps me. Do research no different than when I was an undergrad and they went from cue cards in the, the library at the university to actually having a dummy terminal and I could ask questions in queue. You know, it stalked me from having to go to the basement of the library and going to microfiche. Right. Have helping that way. Now can it, can, will it do other things? I’m sure it is, and I’ll lead that to Elon Musk and the crew. You know, that’s above my pay grade. But for me, I see it as a very helpful way of, you know, allowing me to process and delineate. Much more information a a and not have me waste so much time trying to figure out what got went on in the past or, you know, QMF. Right. You know, summarize me the talk five, you know, academic papers in this area, what are they saying? And then they gimme the papers. Right. It just speeds the process up. Yeah. You know, um, one of the things that I’ve been sort of talking about and thinking about. Is that it’s hard to not see AI as a very, very strong deflationary force. Um, how do you think about that? Yeah. Technology is deflationary, right? Doubt about it. And so I look at it this way, Ray. Um, so I work at the financial services industry, okay. You know, Mr. Diamond of JP Morgan is talking about how they are starting to embrace blockchain and ai. They are going to cut out the back end of that in the, the margins in that, in that company by the end of the cycle are going to be fantastic. People just do not get in. You know, the financial services industry is built on a platform. Of the 1960s, dude. I mean, they’re still running Fortran, cobalt. So you know what I, how I look at this is much more as a margin type story, and there’s going to be a lot of displacement. But at the same point in time, I look at Tesla and automation and ai. And you know, people look at Tesla as a car company. I look at Tesla as an advanced manufacturing company. Elon Musk could basically go into any industry and disrupt it if it wanted to. Right. So that’s how I look at it. And so, you know, the hard part is going to be, you know. Nothing. If we get back to where we were, it’s not going to be perfect, right? Because here’s, here’s where the counter is, here’s where the counter is. Right? If you, if, if you think about, and we’re, I’m gonna take Trump outta the equation and ent outta the equation right now, but if we just went back to the way things were before COVID, we would have strong deflationary forces. Okay. Just with demographics, just with excessive levels of debt. Just with, you know, pushing on a string in terms of, in terms we couldn’t get the growth up, you know, and, you know, and the overregulation of financial institutions. Trump and descent are basically applying what’s called supply side economics, and they’re deregulating. It’s says law, which is John Batiste, that says basically supply creates his own demand and it’s non-inflationary. But really what they’re going to try to do is they’re going to try to run the economy hot and they’re gonna try to pull this way out of the debt. And if you do that and you deregulate the banks. And allow the banks to get back to where they were before the financial crisis. Okay. You know, and, and the Fed takes its interest rates down to neutral, expands the balance sheet. Then I don’t think we’re gonna go back to the zero bound in deflation. I think this thing’s gonna run hot for a long time. And I think it, the real question is, is, is is 2 75 in the United States the neutral rate? I think it is. Uh, but as, as, as Scott be says, and, and, and, and, and let’s be clear, buck, the guy’s a superstar. Okay. Guy is a legend. Just you sit there, just shut up and listen to him. Okay. They keep up, right? Well, so they’re gonna run it hot, but where we are is, in his words, mine, not mine. We’re still in this detox period, you know what I mean? We still got the Biden era. We still got, you know, a over a decade of excessive ca of Central Bank intermediation. That needs to get, you know, go away. So what I say, and what I’ve been writing about is 26 is going to be the year that the baton is passed back to the private sector. Let’s get rates down to 2 75. That’s, I mean, I’m going off the New York Fed model. That says real fed funds, the real, the real neutral rate is 75 to 78 basis points. I think inflation’s at two. That that gets you 2 75. Get the rates there and then get the balance sheet of the Fed to the level so that overnight lending isn’t loose or tight. It’s just normal. And then step back, go away and let Wall Street and the private sector create credit. Create economic growth and let’s get back to the business cycle. And if we do that, we’re gonna have non-inflationary growth. It’s gonna be strong, but we’re not going back to the zero bound and we’re gonna grow our way out of this. And so that’s where I get really excited about. This is a very unique time in history. A very, very, very unique time in history where, and I don’t know how long it’s going to last because of the compression that we have now because of the, you know, we live in such a digital world, but let’s say it’s five years demographic says it’s to 33, 32 to 33. That’s, you know, that’s how long this run is. And, and to me, uh, AI is a massive play. I, I, to me, blockchain is a massive play and to me it’s to those countries and companies that get it is, whereas investors, we wanna think, start thinking about investing. Yeah. You mentioned, um, non non-inflationary growth. Can you drill down on that a little bit just so people understand a little bit where. Usually you think of an economy running super hot, you, you think automatically there’s an, you know, an inflationary growth. So I want you to think in your mind into your list as think in your mind. Go back to economics 1 0 1 with the demand curve. In the supply curve, okay? And there are an equilibrium. And at that equilibrium we have a price at an equilibrium, and we have an output as an equilibrium. Okay? Now what I want you to do is I want you to keep the demand curves stagnant or, or, or anchored. Then I want you to shift the supply curve out. Prices go down, output goes out. We can talk all this esoteric stuff, you know, you know Ronald Reagan and, and Robert Mandel and supply side economics. But it’s really your shift in the supply curve out, and that’s what, and that’s what BeIN’s doing. I mean, this is a w would just sit down and be quiet. He’s talking about, you know, what is deregulation? He’s pushing the supply provider. Oh, hold on. My phone. My, my thing. And what did, since the two thousands, what did, what was the policy? It was kingian, it was all focused on the demand curve. Everything was focused on demand. And so all we’re doing is we’re, we’re getting the keynesians out. I use 2000 ’cause that’s when Ben Bernanke really came in and was very influential. Let me just say he’s a very smart, I learned so much from reading. Smart, smart, smart, smart guy. But his whole thing was Kasan. He came from MIT, his thesis supervisor was Stanley Fisher, right? We’re going back to, you know, Mario Dragons thesis supervisors, Stanley Fisher, all these guys came from MIT, Larry, M-I-T-M-I-T, Yale, and Princeton. Whereas previously it was the University of Chicago. It was Milton Friedman. It was, it was supply side economics. We’re going back, they’re going back to supply side economics and right now we need it. We need balance. But my god, what did we end off with? We ended off with four years of mono modern monetary theory. Deficits matter. That’s insanity. You had mentioned a little bit, uh, you, you’ve talked about blockchain a few times here. Talk about the significance. I mean, it’s sort of, you know, blockchain was a thing that everybody was, everybody was talking about it, you know, three, four years ago, but now it’s all about ai. But you know, now you’ve got, um, but in, but in the background, blockchain has grown, uh, adoption has grown. Uh, tell us what’s going on there, and if you could tie it into the significance of, of where we’re at today. Yeah. Um, uh, Jeff Bezos gave a wonderful speech, I think in two thou, early two thousands, where he basically talked about the fact that, you know, once this innovation is led out of the genie’s, led out of the bottle, whether or not, you know, buck and Jim, like it as an investment, the innovation continues. And so after the internet bubble pop, right? Really smart guys like Jeff Bezos, uh, Zuckerberg, you, you, the whole cast of characters, right? Basically built it out. Okay. And it wasn’t perfect and everybody knew it wasn’t perfect. I mean, that was the whole thing that was so bizarre. But they knew it wasn’t perfect and they knew that they needed to solve some problems. Right. And you know, it was a double spend problem. I mean, the internet that we were dealing with right now was developed in the 1950s and so on and so forth. And so, you know, that always stuck with me. Right. A couple of things stuck with me because I’ve lived through a couple of these cycles. The first one is Buck. When the, when Wall Street coalesces around something just shut up and buy it, right? I mean, I, I spent too much of my life arguing about whether dog pile and Ask Gees was better than Google. Wall Street said Google was the best. Shut up. Invest, right? And so, so look, blockchain solved the double spend problem. Blockchain solved all the problems that the original iteration of the internet could solve, and everybody knew it was coming along okay. So it’s a decentral, it’s decentralized, right? Uh, does, does not need to be reconciled. So no. Not only do you have another iteration of the internet. You have basically introduced into society the biggest innovation in accounting or recordkeeping since double entry. Bookkeeping accounting was introduced in Florence, Italy centuries ago by the Medicis and, and buck. All this is out there like, so this is a profound, right? So think about you’re in an accounting department and you don’t have to reconcile, right? So look. The first use cakes was Bitcoin. And what was the, what was the beautiful thing about it? Well, first off, it grew up by itself. And secondly, it’s got perfect scarcity, right? And so let’s just full stop. And I mean, yes, gold and silver had the run that they should have had decades. So I had been waiting and listening to people, gold bugs, talking about this type of run since the nineties. Okay. Um, but look, you know, and the problem with fi money, right? I mean, this is, this goes back decades. It’s an old argument. The way you solve it is, is Bitcoin. That’s the solution. I mean, forget about it. I mean, if they’re gonna whip it around and do all this stuff, fine. But the other thing that people miss and Sailor hasn’t, and Sailor is brilliant, is look. Bitcoin is pristine collateral in 2008, in September. What caused the, the system to stop was the counter. We could not identify counterparty risk for near cash. It was a settlement problem. Anybody you talk to Buck that says it was, you know, the subprime this and it, yeah, that was crap. I get that. But when the system shut down is you had a $750 million near cash instrument with X, Y, Z, wall Street firm, and you did this for three extra beeps and it was no longer cash. Guess. And guess what? Your institutional money market fund broke the buck. That’s when the system blew sky high. When the money market broke the buck and it was a settlement problem, blockchain and Bitcoin solved that. Sailor knows that, look where Wall Street’s gonna go. They understand now that. Bitcoin is pristine, collateral and capital that is 100% transparent. Let’s lend against it, and that’s what Sadler’s doing. That’s why Wall Street hates the guy so much, right? Think about that. Think of where is he going after he’s going after all the stranded capital on Wall Street. And, and the whole point is he’s sitting there going, I’m too busy for this. And you’ve got all these other people that are gonna live off of other people’s ignorance. Meanwhile, Jing Diamond knows exactly what he’s talking about. We can identify, if I hear one more person on me in, in the meeting say, I don’t know. You know, you know, uh, micro strategies balance sheet is so complicated. Really. Compared to JP Morgans, I mean, you know what his capital is. It says Bitcoin, like, what are you guys talking about? But hey, fucking in this business, people make generational wealth on ignorance of people who think they know what they don’t know. So, you know, just going back to Jamie Diamond, you know, he spent, I don’t know how long. Throwing every insult, uh, he could towards Bitcoin. And now they’ve really kind of, they haven’t backtracked. I think he’s, he’s, you know, his, his, um, I think the way he phrases is the blockchain’s a real thing. He never seems to really say the word Bitcoin, uh, in this regard. Um, banks in general, where do you think they’re headed with this stuff? I mean, I, you know, right now, again, you can kind of see even. Um, I think, you know, some of the big advisory firms suddenly recommending one to, you know, one to 4% of people’s portfolios in Bitcoin. I mean, this is all, I mean, gosh, I, I’ve, you know, been talking about Bitcoin since 2017. This is in unbelievable transformation in less than a decade. Where do you see this going in the next five to 10 years? It’s called the, it’s called, what is it? It’s called, I’m gonna call it the Evolution of Jim. Me, you know, in my business and, and, and, and you know, the thing I have book is I’ve survived and I’ve gone through a lot of cycles. I’ve done a lot, you know, and you ask yourself, you scratch your head a lot and you’re, and you, but you’re continually doing objective research and you’re this, if you, this is why I love this game so much. Right? So let’s just go stop for a second. Let’s get some context. Right. My first summer job, one of my first summer jobs, I worked in the basement of a bank in the in, in downtown Toronto, right up the street from the Toronto Stock Exchange. And my job was to let guys in with beak, briefcases into the cage, into the big vault, to basically bring in certificates. Okay. And, and what? Stock certificates. And so remember, you know, and I remember my grandfather when we, when he died, look at, we couldn’t sell the house because he didn’t believe in the banks. And we were finding certificates all over the house in the walls. Okay? Right. So in the 1960s it was bare based. The whole industry was bare based. And there was the volume in Wall Street started to pick up to the point where they couldn’t handle the volume. There was a paper crisis where almost a third of the companies went down bankrupt because of the cage. The cage. Okay. So basically what happened was, to make a long story short, they came out with, they came, Hey, why don’t we get two computers At one point in time, they said, okay, crisis. Let’s solve it. Well, why don’t we get these two computers and we can solve, or we can sell trades among, amongst each other. Okay. And then we don’t need to have guys riding around Wall Street with bicycles and big briefcases. Okay. And then what we did was, what we did was we sat there and said, well, why don’t we have a centralized clearing, and we’re gonna call it DTC or CDS, depending on what country you’re in. And what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna offer paper, we’re gonna, we’re gonna issue paper rights to the underlying stock that was developed in the early 1970s. That’s the system that we’re on right now. There are a lot of faults with that. Let me give you, when you’ve talked about the GameStop a MC situation, when you have a company that’s basically have more shares outstanding short, sorry, more shares short than outstanding, that shows you that the old system doesn’t work. It’s called ation. The paper writes to the underlying assets, it, it doesn’t match up. There have been guys that make a career outta this and write books about this, right? Dole Pineapple. They had a corporate, a corporate event, right? Hostile takeover. 64,000 for 64 million shares, voted, I think, and there was only 3,200 on. We all know this, so this has to be solved. The way you solve it is you tokenize assets, and this was talked about a decade ago, and they know about it and true tofor, they, and if you’re thinking about it, it’s totally logical, right? But if we allow this innovation to go full stream ahead, we’re wiped out, right? So what did they do? They delayed. They delayed. And as you know, you could talk about, it’s called Operation choke 0.2 0.0. Right. You know, the Fed overreached their bounds, they de banked people. I mean, this is why, why Best it’s going after them. They, yet they stepped over their constitutional mandate. Right. The federal, the Fed Act is not, uh, does not supersede the US Constitution. Elizabeth warned the whole thing. They did it. Okay, so let’s not complain about it. So now Atkins is gonna, we’re gonna have the Clarity Act come out and they’re gonna basically deregulate New York Stock Exchange already there. They’re gonna put everything on the blockchain and when you put everything on the blockchain, trade a settlement. There’s no hypo. Immediate settlement. Immediate, which is a benefit if you can get your act together because it, you know, for Wall Street firms you need less capital, right? So it’s a natural evolutionary process. And then you sit there and go back in history, if you and I were writing it, we’d sit there and go, well, should we be surprised that the incumbents right, the status quo pushed back on innovation? No, there was a guy, there was a prophet, um. At, at Harvard, his name was Clay Christensen, and he wrote this wonderful book called The Innovator’s Dilemma. You know, why does, why don’t companies evolve, or why do they go bankrupt? It’s because they cease to evolve and the status quo doesn’t allow the evolution of the companies to take place. Right? Well, that’s what happened in RA. We’re gonna complain about it. No, it, it is what it is. It’s water under the bridge. And so what I think is happening is, you know, Mr. Diamond is basically saying. He’s pragmatic, he’s a realist. And now he’s saying, we gotta evolve. And hey, by the way, now I’ve gotten to the point where I think I can make a tunnel. Think about that. Yeah. Think about his own stable coins, right? So his own stable coins. And, uh, well think about this. If you trade like internal meetings, right? And I’m hyped this hypothetical, right? I go, fuck, don’t screw this up this time. And you’re gonna go, Jim, what are you talking about? I go. We want a nice bread between bid and ask in these financial price. We don’t wanna go down to pennies. Okay? Can we go back to the old days when we were, you know, trading in quarters and sixteenths and so we can make some skin in the game? I think you’ve got the deregulation of the banking industry where the banks are gonna, they’re fit. It’s gonna be baby steps. But what’s gonna happen is they’re gonna basically say, stop taking all that capital that’s sitting at the Fed, making four or fed funds rate overnights wherever it’s four half, 3 75 right now. And you can now trade it. Go back to prop trading, which is what they did. And they’re gonna start off, they will start off with, its only treasuries. Eventually they’ll be able to expand throughout our lifetime. So the old way you gotta look at it is, you know. We’re bringing the ba, you know, we’re putting the band back together, man. Right. And the banks are gonna deregulate, they’re gonna deregulate the banks, they’re going to innovate, they’re gonna be able to use the capital, their earnings profile going out into the end of the decade. It’s, it’s gonna be monstrous, it’s gonna be, you know, it, it’s, it’s, and, and that’s how I get, you know, when people say, where do you think the s and p goes? You know, I say, you know, 14,000, you know, double from here by the end of the decade. And he goes, well, what about ai? I go, well, they’re gonna, that’s important, but it’s the banks. I think the banks are gonna have a renaissance. Yeah. Yeah. Um, one thing just to get your thoughts on, so when you look at the banks, you talked about sort of the inevitability of tokenization. Um, the stock exchange, uh, we talked about stable coins. I mean, another great way for banks to make money. Uh, essentially where does that, how, how does that help or hurt Bitcoin adoption? Because Bitcoin is a sort of a separate, separate, you’re not, you’re not building on Bitcoin as much as you are, say, Ethereum, Mar Solana or, you know, some of the, some of the blockchain things. So, so is it just that. Is it just a, an adoption issue? Because you live in a, in a different world. You live in a world of blockchain and Bitcoin is, its currency. It’s weird, right? Because I, I’m writing this feed like, so Buck, where are you right now? Where, where, where are you located? I’m in Santa Barbara. You’re in California. So, yeah, so I’m in Toronto, right? Uh, you know, I lived in, worked in the States for, you know, a decade, a couple of decades, and I’m back home and it’s like, man, they don’t get it. Right, and, and, and, and what am I talking about? Well, well, this, this is the, the thing that you’ve gotta understand is this, right. Ethereum was invented by Vladi Butrin in this town, Joe Alozo, who’s the head of one of the largest Ethereum groups. Father is a dentist at Bathurst and Spadina. We’re up here and people are saying, oh, you know, president Trump don’t talk about being a 51st state. We act like a colony, duke. We are a, you know, we forget about calling us one. We are. So, look, it, look, there is no doubt in my mind that Ethereum is going to have a place and, and we’re going to use it. Seems like we’re going to use Ethereum and that’s the smart contract, you know? Um. And that’s fine. Um, you know, but going back in time. But, but remember, there’s not per, there’s not perfect scarcity there. So I like Ethereum, don’t get me wrong, but I look at Bitcoin and I look at the, I look at the scarcity, and I also look at the fact of, you know, what sa, what Sailor, if you sailor did a presentation in the middle of next year and all hell broke loose. What he did, and it’s, you know, and of course I’m hypothesizing. He basically went to New York and said, I am going to create fixed income products and I am going to give yields. On those products, and I’m coming after the stranded capital that sits on Wall Street that you guys have been ripping on for years. In the middle of last year, staler went public and declared war. Okay. Are we surprised that Jim Shane Oaks came out and everybody came out basically guns a blazing. Are we surprised? But what he, what Sailor did and put and slammed on the table is it’s pristine capital, it’s transparent capital. And what are you willing to pay for that? And now you GARP banks trading at. We have no idea what their capital structure really is. Honestly, we have an idea, but it’s very opaque, right? You know, the high quality names are trading at two, two to, you know, two times tangible book. You’ve got fintech’s companies trading at four to five times, right book, and you know, what’s Sailor doing right now? Diluting his stock so he can buy as much Bitcoin as he wants because he sees the next game. He says the hell with what you guys think the next game is going to be. Wall Street’s going to realize that Bitcoin is pristine capital and there’s only 21 million of it. What do you and, and what just happened today? What did Morgan Stanley just file a treasury company. So everything you and I are talking about, they know they’re smart guys, right? They’re real, they’re not. That’s, this is the whole point. They’re really, really, really smart. Okay. They see they’ve gone through the history. They know. Okay, so you’re sitting there, you get around the room, you say, so wait a minute. Wait. Whoa, sailor’s over here. And he’s basically saying he’s gonna give you a a pref that’s basically backed by Bitcoin charging 10%. And he’s going after our corporate clients. I mean, and what’s the pitch Buck? You’ve got a hundred million dollars. Okay, you got a hundred million dollars in the kitty. Okay, buck. What happens is you need $10 million a year for working capital, which is in cash, which means you’ve got $90 million sitting there idle. Hey, buck, I can give you 10% on that. You go to Jamie, he’s giving you two. What are you gonna do? Yeah. I think one of the issues right now is I the, the perceived risk profile of that. Right. Uh, you know. I tend to agree with you about the, uh, pristine nature of Bitcoin s collateral, but just in general, the perception. I don’t know that, that that’s. That’s the case. Well, you gotta go back to the fact that, do you think Bitcoin’s going to zero or not? No, of course not. Yeah. ‘ cause the Bitcoin doesn’t go to zero. There’s no, then, then that are, there’s Bitcoin could go to zero. There’s no, I mean, I don’t think, I mean, non-zero probability, of course, right? I don’t think it is. And if that has been, if it has been selected and now you have Wall Street coalescing it, I haven’t even mentioned the president of the United States or his family. Right. Uh, or the Commerce Secretary and his family, right? Or if you go to New York, wall Street, right, they’re all talking about it, right? So, I, I, you know, to me, I, I, the question about micro strategy, to me it’s not. That it’s a treasury company and it’s got a pile of Bitcoin. What does he do with it? Does he become a bank? Like why does it, this is me. I’m pitching him. Right. Hey, Mike, why don’t you just become a FinTech, say you’re like a FinTech company and you’ll get, and you, you’re gonna instantaneously trade it five to six times book. Why don’t you, why are you, you’re talking like you’re attacking them, but you’re still, you’re still a software company with a, with a big whack of Bitcoin that you are writing pres. Right? So, and, and so that’s, that’s how I look at it. I think the wave is too big. We are going to digitize. And the other thing that we didn’t really touch on with respect to AI and blockchain, and I’m gonna paraphrase the president. Right. Um, Mr. Trump is, look, um, it’s a matter of national security, duke, and when I hear that, I go back to the nineties in the eighties when I was in late eighties when I was an undergrad. Right. And it wasn’t China, it was Japan. And, and you know, what happened was, you know, it, it’s funny, Al Gore did deregulate so that. The internet could become for-profit. We all stood around and said, you know what the hell could, how do we make money on this? That’s, you know, what do we do? And then what did we do? We, we, we threw a ton of money at it and the United States controlled it. And what did we get out of it? We got out, we got, you know, all those companies. Right. The last thing I would say to you, and this is much more of a personal story, is I, when I was younger, I was in New York and it was 2000 and I was at the Grand Hyatt, and it was a tech, it was a tech conference and, uh, Larry Ellison Oracle was there and he gave a, he gave a, he gave a a, a fireside chat. Then, um, we go to a breakout room and, you know, in a break, I don’t know about if you’ve been to one, but you go to a breakout room, it’s a smaller room at the hotel, and you know, sometimes you got 25 people, sometimes you got 50 people, right. And, you know, I went to the, I went to the breakout with Mr. Allison ’cause of Oracle and I went in there and it was absolutely jammed and I was sweating and he just looked at us and he just ripped us. He AP Soly, just, I still have the scars today. I’m talking to you about it. Okay. He called it a bubble. He called it a bubble. He, he was early in calling it a bubble. I never forgot that. And then you sit there and see what he’s doing right now. Where he’s levering up the balance sheet. Now, to me, having survived in this game for such a long period of time, and I call it a game, it’s a game of strategy, whatever, you know, how does that not, you know, I would say to you, we were, your office was next to mine. Fuck. I remember New York, he’s loading the goose loaded in. He go in, he’s borrowing money from his grandmother. He’s, you know, what is going on. And he’s really stinking smart. You know, he’s, he, Larry Allenson just doesn’t do, and people, oh, he’s in, you know, he’s, no, he’s not, he’s, he’s like the mentor of all of these guys. You know what I mean? So there’s a, to me, there’s a discontinuity that these need to believe that we’re still early on because you know, what, if Larry’s, what do we take when Larry or Mr. Ellison is leveraging up to me, it’s profound because I’m anchoring off of my bias to the New York, the New York high at, at the Tech Co. I think it was, I think it was at Bear Stearn. I couldn’t remember Bear Stearns or Lehman. But you know, one of those I carry that experience on with the rest of my life. I do. It’s like, what is Larry thinking? Right? So he’s leveraging up buck. That’s all I know. He’s a priest or guy. Well, that’s probably a good place for us to stop, Jim, uh, chief, uh, market strategist at Wellington Elta Private Wealth. Thank you so much for joining me. Thanks so much and be safe. You make a lot of money but are still worried about retirement. Maybe you didn’t start earning until your thirties. Now you’re trying to catch up. Meanwhile, you’ve got a mortgage, a private school to pay for, and you feel like you’re getting further and further behind. Now, good news, if you need to catch up on retirement, check out a program put out by some of the oldest and most prestigious life insurance companies in the world. It’s called Wealth Accelerator, and it can help you amplify your returns quickly, protect your money from creditors, and provide financial protection to your family if something happens. The concepts here are used by some of the wealthiest families in the world, and there’s no reason why they can’t be used by you. Check it out for yourself by going to wealth formula banking.com. Welcome back to the show everyone. Hope you enjoyed it. Uh, and, uh, as I said before, do not ignore ai. This is something that you need to start using. Have your kids start using it. Uh, make sure that they, you know. They use it every day because this whole world is turning AI and it’s gonna happen. You know, it’s gonna happen in, in a blink of an, uh, blink of an eye. And the world is gonna change and there are gonna be real winners out there. And the winners are gonna be people who knew where there was, was going and kind of used it in their mind’s eye as they looked on navigating how. You know how to allocate their money. Anyway, that is it for me. This week on Wealth Formula Podcast. This is Buck JJoffrey signing off. If you wanna learn more, you can now get free access to our in-depth personal finance course featuring industry leaders like Tom Wheel Wright and Ken McElroy. Visit wealth formula roadmap.com.

In Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization (Yale UP, 2023), distinguished economic historian Harold James offers a fresh perspective on the past two centuries of globalization and the pivotal moments that shaped it. James analyzes seven major economic crises that occurred over this period, including the late 1840s, the simultaneous stock market shocks of 1873, the First World War years, the Great Depression era, the 1970s, the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, and most recently the Covid-19 crisis. Through his insightful analysis, he illustrates how some of these crises contributed to increased cross-border integration of labor, goods, and capital markets, while others resulted in significant deglobalization. James classifies the crises into two categories: those caused by shortages and those driven by demand. He explains how shortages have led to greater globalization as markets expanded and producers innovated to increase supply, as evidenced by events such as the First World War and the oil shocks of the 1970s. In contrast, demand-driven crises, such as those that caused the Great Depression and the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, have typically led to international trade contraction and decreased globalization, often accompanied by widespread skepticism of governments. To support his findings, James examines the writings of key observers who shaped our understanding of each crisis, including Karl Marx in 1848, Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, and Carl Menger in the 1870s, German Treasury Secretary Karl Helfferich in the First World War, John Maynard Keynes in the Great Depression, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek in the 1970s, Ben Bernanke in 2008, and Larry Summers and Raj Chetty in 2020. Overall, James' work provides an insightful and thought-provoking analysis of the relationship between economic crises and globalization over the past two centuries, and sheds light on the potential trajectory of future economic developments. Javier Mejia is an economist at Stanford University who specializes in the intersection of social networks and economic history. His research interests also include entrepreneurship and political economy, with a particular focus on Latin America and the Middle East. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. Mejia has previously been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University-Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is also a frequent contributor to various news outlets, currently serving as an op-ed columnist for Forbes Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization (Yale UP, 2023), distinguished economic historian Harold James offers a fresh perspective on the past two centuries of globalization and the pivotal moments that shaped it. James analyzes seven major economic crises that occurred over this period, including the late 1840s, the simultaneous stock market shocks of 1873, the First World War years, the Great Depression era, the 1970s, the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, and most recently the Covid-19 crisis. Through his insightful analysis, he illustrates how some of these crises contributed to increased cross-border integration of labor, goods, and capital markets, while others resulted in significant deglobalization. James classifies the crises into two categories: those caused by shortages and those driven by demand. He explains how shortages have led to greater globalization as markets expanded and producers innovated to increase supply, as evidenced by events such as the First World War and the oil shocks of the 1970s. In contrast, demand-driven crises, such as those that caused the Great Depression and the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, have typically led to international trade contraction and decreased globalization, often accompanied by widespread skepticism of governments. To support his findings, James examines the writings of key observers who shaped our understanding of each crisis, including Karl Marx in 1848, Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, and Carl Menger in the 1870s, German Treasury Secretary Karl Helfferich in the First World War, John Maynard Keynes in the Great Depression, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek in the 1970s, Ben Bernanke in 2008, and Larry Summers and Raj Chetty in 2020. Overall, James' work provides an insightful and thought-provoking analysis of the relationship between economic crises and globalization over the past two centuries, and sheds light on the potential trajectory of future economic developments. Javier Mejia is an economist at Stanford University who specializes in the intersection of social networks and economic history. His research interests also include entrepreneurship and political economy, with a particular focus on Latin America and the Middle East. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. Mejia has previously been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University-Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is also a frequent contributor to various news outlets, currently serving as an op-ed columnist for Forbes Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In his timely, thought-provoking book Thinking Historically: A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy (Yale UP, 2025), Francis Gavin makes a powerful case for why a genuine historical sensibility, rooted in curiosity, humility, and discernment, is not just an academic virtue but a critical tool for decision-makers. Rather than mining the past for tidy analogies, he argues that history should be practiced as a way of thinking: it complicates our assumptions, reveals the unexpected, and helps us understand the world, ultimately making it easier to achieve a clarity of perspective. By weaving together lessons from statecraft and strategy, Gavin shows how thinking historically equips leaders to navigate complexity, confront uncertainty, and make wiser choices in a world that all too often misuses or neglects the wisdom of the past. The book is a major contribution to the ongoing conversation about the impact that history (and the humanities) can make outside of academia. Even more importantly, Thinking Historically also functions as a practical guide to historically-grounded decision-making. We've been waiting for this book for a long time. Check out the episode if you want to learn about the value of history in decision-making, reflect on how teaching history to policymakers is like teaching sex education to teenagers, hear about how Ben Bernanke used history to make impactful economic decisions in 2008-2010, and consider what historians can learn from nuclear physicists. Not to be missed! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In his timely, thought-provoking book Thinking Historically: A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy (Yale UP, 2025), Francis Gavin makes a powerful case for why a genuine historical sensibility, rooted in curiosity, humility, and discernment, is not just an academic virtue but a critical tool for decision-makers. Rather than mining the past for tidy analogies, he argues that history should be practiced as a way of thinking: it complicates our assumptions, reveals the unexpected, and helps us understand the world, ultimately making it easier to achieve a clarity of perspective. By weaving together lessons from statecraft and strategy, Gavin shows how thinking historically equips leaders to navigate complexity, confront uncertainty, and make wiser choices in a world that all too often misuses or neglects the wisdom of the past. The book is a major contribution to the ongoing conversation about the impact that history (and the humanities) can make outside of academia. Even more importantly, Thinking Historically also functions as a practical guide to historically-grounded decision-making. We've been waiting for this book for a long time. Check out the episode if you want to learn about the value of history in decision-making, reflect on how teaching history to policymakers is like teaching sex education to teenagers, hear about how Ben Bernanke used history to make impactful economic decisions in 2008-2010, and consider what historians can learn from nuclear physicists. Not to be missed! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The media obsesses over whether Powell should cut rates, but they're missing the bigger story entirely…Since 2022, the Federal Reserve has fundamentally lost its ability to control long-term interest rates - and that might be the best thing to happen to American monetary policy in decades.Joe Withrow from the Phoenician League returns to break down the most important financial shift you've never heard of: the transition from LIBOR to SOFR. While everyone argues about Fed policy, a quiet revolution has returned actual market forces to interest rate setting. The days of European banks manipulating global rates through sealed envelope submissions are over, replaced by real transactions from real institutions with real obligations.This episode examines the mechanics of interest rates, repo markets, and why Trump's demands for rate cuts might not matter as much as everyone thinks. From the $9 trillion debt rollover crisis to the geopolitical implications of monetary independence, Hans and Joe connect the dots between outdated financial instruments and your personal investment strategy.Chapters:00:00 - Intro04:05 - The five pillars and financial security foundation07:30 - Interest rates overview and Fed manipulation myths11:15 - LIBOR vs SOFR transition and why it matters14:45 - Setting aside preferences for objective analysis17:45 - Central bank money vs commercial bank money explained19:05 - LIBOR calculation method exposed22:25 - The shocking truth about rate manipulation25:45 - Ben Bernanke's "globally coordinated monetary policy"28:20 - COVID awakening and financial system skepticism29:20 - Fed funds rate mechanics and overnight lending31:10 - The $9 trillion debt rollover crisis32:20 - Powell vs Yellen: American vs globalist monetary policy35:10 - Balance sheet reduction and QE reversal36:30 - SOFR liberation from European bank control39:10 - World Economic Forum and "own nothing, be happy"40:25 - Immigration and cultural hierarchy discussion42:25 - SOFR based on actual market transactions44:30 - Repo market mechanics explained47:40 - Market forces vs manipulation in rate setting48:20 - Baseball card analogy for repo transactions52:00 - 10-year treasury as global risk-free rate53:30 - Market forces returning to long-term rates54:40 - Powell's rate cuts and opposite market reaction57:25 - Stephen Moran appointment and dollar devaluation strategy59:30 - Manufacturing reshoring and central planning concerns01:01:15 - Federal Reserve independence vs political control01:03:25 - Board of Governors structure and 14-year terms01:04:55 - Rate policy and asset price manipulation01:07:10 - Phoenician League membership and strategy sessions01:11:15 - Low stress trading strategy integration01:15:50 - Closing thoughts and next stepsKey Takeaways:- LIBOR was manipulated by 17 banks submitting sealed envelope "guesses" with no binding obligations- SOFR is based on actual overnight lending transactions between real institutions- This shift has fundamentally severed the Fed's control over long-term interest rates- Powell's 1% rate cut in 2024 caused long-term rates to go UP, proving the new dynamic- Fed only controls short-term rates (up to 2 years) through the Fed funds rate- Traditional "refinance when rates drop" assumptions no longer reliableGot Questions? Reach out to us at info@remnantfinance.com or book a call at https://remnantfinance.com/calendar!Visit https://remnantfinance.com for more informationLow Stress Trading: https://remnantfinance.com/optionsPhoenician League: membership.phoenicianleague.comFOLLOW REMNANT FINANCEYoutube: @RemnantFinance (https://www.youtube.com/@RemnantFinance)Facebook: @remnantfinance (https://www.facebook.com/profile?id=61560694316588)Twitter: @remnantfinance (https://x.com/remnantfinance)TikTok: @RemnantFinanceDon't forget to hit LIKE and SUBSCRIBE

BUY GOLD HERE: https://firstnationalbullion.com/schedule-consult/ Avoid CBDCs and work with Mark Gonzales! Get Your SUPER-SUPPLIMENTS HERE: https://vni.life/wam Use Code WAM15 & Save 15%! Life changing formulas you can't find anywhere else! HELP SUPPORT US AS WE DOCUMENT HISTORY HERE: https://gogetfunding.com/help-keep-wam-alive/# Josh Sigurdson talks with Mark Gonzales about the decisions being made to bring in a new chair at the Federal Reserve following the Jacksonhole conference in Wyoming. The Federal Reserve which has printed the United States into oblivion with inflation has been headed up by people like Paul Volker, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Janey Yellen and currently Jerome Powell. What's the difference among them? Absolutely nothing, except Paul Volker headed the central bank for a short period of deflation. Now, Powell is set to be replaced and there are 11 candidates for Fed Chair. 2 of them are the most likely candidates. The names are Kevin Hassett and Kevin Warsh. A small amount of research will tell you that both of these candidates are the typical establishment economists promoting the same old Keynesian Economics of the past with intention to expand into a global cashless currency system. Hassett worked on John McCain 2000 and 2008 campaigns as an economic adviser. He was also an economic adviser to George W Bush and Mitt Romney, or as some people call him "Obama 2.0." Hassett has also been an adviser to President Trump during both terms and was heavily involved in closing businesses in 2020 and pushing for the printing of 25% of currency ever printed in the United States including $3 trillion in 2020 that lead to the massive inflation we see today. Kevin Warsh worked as a fed governor as well as worked for the Group of 20 and the Group of 30, both of which heavily promote a global digital currency system. He has worked under Bush and Obama. He worked on the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group. Like we have said, in with the new boss, same as the old boss... Regardless of who is in power as a so-called "president," the economic policies remain technically speaking the same. The same old script will continue to play out as one side or the other sits on their hands for 4 to 8 years as people devolve further into poverty and through weakening of the spirit and demoralization, the people are more easy to control. The coming technocratic system is being put in place as we speak and people are still playing the game of politics, doing nothing to prepare. Perhaps it's time people take this more seriously, throw away the "hopium" and seek real world solutions for themselves. Stay tuned for more from WAM! GET NON-MRNA FREEZE DRIED MEAT HERE: https://wambeef.com/ Use code WAMBEEF to save 20%! GET HEIRLOOM SEEDS & NON GMO SURVIVAL FOOD HERE: https://heavensharvest.com/ USE Code WAM to save 5% plus free shipping! Get local, healthy, pasture raised meat delivered to your door here: https://wildpastures.com/promos/save-20-for-life/bonus15?oid=6&affid=321 USE THE LINK & get 20% off for life and $15 off your first box! DITCH YOUR DOCTOR! https://www.livelongerformula.com/wam Get a natural health practitioner and work with Christian Yordanov! Mention WAM and get a FREE masterclass! You will ALSO get a FREE metabolic function assessment! GET YOUR APRICOT SEEDS at the life-saving Richardson Nutritional Center HERE: https://rncstore.com/r?id=bg8qc1 Use code JOSH to save money! SIGN UP FOR HOMESTEADING COURSES NOW: https://freedomfarmers.com/link/17150/ Get Prepared & Start The Move Towards Real Independence With Curtis Stone's Courses! GET YOUR WAV WATCH HERE: https://buy.wavwatch.com/WAM Use Code WAM to save $100 and purchase amazing healing frequency technology! GET ORGANIC CHAGA MUSHROOMS HERE: https://alaskachaga.com/wam Use code WAM to save money! See shop for a wide range of products! GET AMAZING MEAT STICKS HERE: https://4db671-1e.myshopify.com/discount/WAM?rfsn=8425577.918561&utm_source=refersion&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_campaign=8425577.918561 USE CODE WAM TO SAVE MONEY! GET YOUR FREEDOM KELLY KETTLE KIT HERE: https://patriotprepared.com/shop/freedom-kettle/ Use Code WAM and enjoy many solutions for the outdoors in the face of the impending reset! PayPal: ancientwonderstelevision@gmail.com FIND OUR CoinTree page here: https://cointr.ee/joshsigurdson PURCHASE MERECHANDISE HERE: https://world-alternative-media.creator-spring.com/ JOIN US on SubscribeStar here: https://www.subscribestar.com/world-alternative-media For subscriber only content! Pledge here! Just a dollar a month can help us alive! https://www.patreon.com/user?u=2652072&ty=h&u=2652072 BITCOIN ADDRESS: 18d1WEnYYhBRgZVbeyLr6UfiJhrQygcgNU World Alternative Media 2025

Bottom Fishing for bargains. Consolidation, Digestion - awaiting the next catalyst. Saudi SWF takes a hit. The Jackson Hole confab is around the corner. PLUS we are now on Spotify and Amazon Music/Podcasts! Click HERE for Show Notes and Links DHUnplugged is now streaming live - with listener chat. Click on link on the right sidebar. Love the Show? Then how about a Donation? Follow John C. Dvorak on Twitter Follow Andrew Horowitz on Twitter Warm-Up - Labubus - Beanie Babies ? - US Debt - wretched - Good fishing this weekend - Chip Trackers Markets - Bottom Fishing - Consolidation, Digestion - waiting for the next catalyst -  Saudi SWF takes a hit - Validations - to the MOON - Casual Dining take a hit Weekend Fishing - Marlin, Roosterfish and Yellowfin Tuna - 2 bucket list items The CONFAB - August 21 to August 23 - Theme: Labor Markets in Transition: Demographics, Productivity, and Macroeconomic Policy - Powell to speak Friday at 10am - Historically: ---- 1989: Alan Greenspan became the first Fed Chair to formally participate in the program, establishing a tradition of Fed leadership using the event to signal policy direction (Volker stopped by in 1982) --- 2010: Ben Bernanke used the symposium to signal QE2 --- 2014: Mario Draghi, ECB President, hinted at aggressive stimulus to combat Europe's sluggish growth, influencing currency markets --- 2020: Jerome Powell announced the Fed's new “average inflation targeting” framework, allowing inflation to run above 2% temporarily to support employment growth More Jackson Hole - Many are saying this is the be the defining moment in Powell's Career - Certainly the last one attending that he will be chair - Odds are that he will look to continue the Fed independence and data dependency talk US Debt - The federal government's gross national debt topped $37 trillion for the first time in history last week, and the U.S. has room to add trillions of dollars more to the debt following the enactment of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). - OBBBA included a $5 trillion debt limit increase to avert a potential stand-off over the borrowing limit ($41 trillion limit) - US Debt to GDP = 100% - Every American owes $111,045 (Assuming spread evenly) - 25 years ago it was $19,000 er person LabooooBooo - Labubus, the quirky monster plush dolls made by Pop Mart, have exploded into a global phenomenon, doubling as collectibles and fashion accessories for adults. - In the first half of 2025, Labubu-related products generated a staggering $418 million in global sales for Pop Mart, with nearly 40% of revenue last year coming from outside mainland China. The company says sales in the first six months of this year are on track to more than triple, fueled by what's become a full-blown international craze. - The thrill of the hunt. Labubus are only available through online purchases and in-store pickups, if you can find one in stock. Adding to the scarcity factor is the blind-box packaging – you never know which character you'll get. - Some collectors chase elusive "secret" editions, with odds as low as 1 in 72. Investing - A better Way? - Powerball jackpot grows to estimated $643 million after no one won Monday night's drawing - Next drawing - Wednesday night - The jackpot is a new high for 2025 - he highest Powerball jackpot ever was $2.04 billion, won on November 7, 2022 by a single ticket sold in California. - The winner, Edwin Castro, opted for the lump sum payout of $997.6 million Energy Needed - Google and Kairos Power will deploy an advanced nuclear reactor to help power the tech company's data centers on the Tennessee Valley Authority grid. - The Hermes 2 reactor developed by Kairos will dispatch 50 megawatts of electricity, enough to power about 36,000 homes. - TVA will purchase the electricity from the reactor, making it the first utility in the U.S.

Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba is under increasing pressure after his coalition government lost its majority in the upper house of parliament. Mr. Ishiba says Japan needs political stability to address its mounting economic challenges.Also, Rahul Tandon examines global container shipping volumes to see how tariffs are redrawing trade routes. And two former U.S. Federal Reserve chairs, Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen, issue a rare warning that political interference could seriously damage America's economic credibility.

We look at global container shipping volumes to assess how tariffs are reshaping trade flows. Two former U.S. Fed chairs, Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen, issue a rare warning about political pressure on the central bank — could it damage America's economic credibility? In Japan, Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba faces fresh economic headwinds after losing control of both houses of parliament. And in the UK, we visit an Oxfam bookshop in Hove where a donation from Nick Cave is turning rare books into hot sellers.

We are joined in our latest edition of BM Talks by Alex Patelis, who served as Chief Economic Adviser to Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis between 2019-2024. Alex also worked in investment banks including as Managing Director of Global Research at Merrill Lynch and studied under Ben Bernanke for his PhD from Princeton. We asked:Ten years ago, Greece voted No in a referendum to a bailout, only for the new Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to perform the exact opposite three weeks later. What happened?Greece is now running a primary budget surplus with investment grade debt. How was this achieved? What lessons can the rest of the world take from this?What does the German "Zeitenwende" mean for the EU?Is this the end for the dominance of the US Dollar?What advice do you have for Scott Bessent, who also moved from the world of finance into politics?What do you think of populism? 

In this episode of Perspectives, Escala Chief Investment Officer, Tracey McNaughton, talks about the importance of trust – between governments, institutions, clients and their advisers and of course the rider and her bike.  (1:18) So, Tracey, how do you define trust?  (1:59) Can you think of a single system—financial, political, or social—that functions without trust?  (2:35) Let's go back to 2008. Where were you when Lehman collapsed? Did it hit you right away that this was a trust crisis?  (3:46) And the stats reflect that. Only 27% of Americans said at the time they trusted the financial system. Ben Bernanke was the Chair of the Federal Reserve. His first move wasn't to inject capital - it was to calm people down.  (4:22) That's the thing with trust - it's invisible when it works, but when it fails?  (5:07) Let's zoom out for a minute. We've talked about trust in institutions, but what about trust between countries? You saw that on display at the G7 recently in Canada. President Trump walked out mid-session. Again. Cameras rolled as he boarded Air Force One early, leaving key negotiations unfinished. The summit, momentarily, became the G6.  (6:00) What does that look like in practice?  (6:58) And trade?  (7:18) So is this a retreat from U.S. leadership?  (9:35) And while allies hedge, rivals act.  (10:25) And underneath all of that—is the erosion of trust.  (10:44) So Tracey, I'll put the big question to you: What if trust—not military power, not GDP—was the real engine of American leadership... and that engine's stalling?  (11:41) Let's come down from the G7 and walk into an adviser's office. We have spoken about trust between institutions and their clients, between the US and its allies. What about trust in our world – between the adviser and their client?  (12:38) It's not just about investments, it goes further than that, its nice to get to know clients on a personal level and vice versa.  (15:03) Let me shift gears—literally and talk about trust as it relates to something close to your heart. Like every other relationship we have talked about here, trust on two wheels isn't abstract. It's visceral. 

Tom Bodrovics introduces Chris Whalen, author of Inflated: Money, Debt, and the American Dream, which has been re-released in a second edition with significant updates. The conversation focuses on the current state of markets, the impact of President Trump's tariff policies, and the challenges posed by the federal debt and inflation. Chris explains that he removed 20,000 words from his original book to make space for a new chapter analyzing the Federal Reserve's management of the money supply under Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, and Jerome Powell. He highlights how the U.S. housing market has become heavily government-supported, leading to increased volatility and rising costs for consumers. Discussing inflation, Chris notes that it is driven by the inability of governments to generate sufficient income to meet their people's needs, as seen in countries like Argentina. He argues that borrowing from future income through debt creates distortions, particularly in housing markets, where prices have surged due to low interest rates and government intervention. He also critiques the dysfunctionality of Congress, which he believes is unable to pass budgets or manage spending effectively. Chris emphasizes the importance of gold as a hedge against inflation and expresses skepticism about stablecoins and cryptocurrencies, calling them speculative vehicles rather than reliable alternatives to fiat currency. He suggests that the U.S. dollar's dominance in global markets contributes to inflationary pressures, as other countries benefit from using dollars without bearing the associated costs. The discussion concludes with Chris offering an optimistic outlook, noting that while challenges remain, opportunities exist for investors to navigate inflation through real estate and gold. He encourages listeners to manage investments with a long-term perspective, considering the erosive effects of even low levels of inflation over time. Time Stamp References:0:00 - Introduction1:02 - His Revised Book3:08 - Tariffs & Debt Distortions7:12 - Reserve Currency & Inflation11:03 - Debt Markets & Fed/Banks17:32 - National Debt & Spending21:18 - DOGE Cuts & Old Systems30:17 - Trump's Strategy?34:04 - Gold During Nixon Era39:08 - Book & US Administrations44:13 - MMT Era & Cryptocurrency?50:21 - Silver Supply & 1800s52:06 - Stablecoin Backing55:02 - Concluding Thoughts56:33 - Wrap Up Guest Links:Website: https://www.rcwhalen.com/X: https://x.com/rcwhalenBooks (Amazon): https://tinyurl.com/mv3wctcrLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rcwhalen/ Richard Christopher Whalen is an investment banker and author based in New York. He serves as Chairman of Whalen Global Advisors LLC, focusing on banking, mortgage finance, and fintech sectors. Christopher is a contributing editor at National Mortgage News and a general securities principal and member of FINRA. From 2014 to 2017, he was the Senior Managing Director and Head of Research at Kroll Bond Rating Agency, leading the Financial Institutions and Corporate Ratings Groups. Previously, he was a principal at Institutional Risk Analytics from 2003 to 2013. Over three decades, Chris has worked as an author, financial professional, and journalist in Washington, New York, and London. After graduating, he served under Rep. Jack Kemp (R-NY) at the House Republican Conference Committee. In 1993, he was the first journalist to report on secret FOMC minutes concealed by Alan Greenspan. His career included roles at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Bear Stearns & Co., Prudential Securities, Tangent Capital, and Carrington Mortgage Holdings. Christopher holds a B.A. in History from Villanova University. He is the author of three books: "Ford Men: From Inspiration to Enterprise" (2017), published by Laissez Faire Books; "Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream" (2010) by John Wiley & Sons; and co-author of "Financial Stability: Fraud, Confidence & the Wealth of Nations,

More than any other single institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by a committee, for almost a century, the Fed's philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors. In the first series of The Chair, Tim Gwynn Jones talked to authors of books about the Fed's foundational Chairs – Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker. In this second series, he covers the people who chaired the Fed through the post-1990 period of financialisation, globalisation, and – perhaps today – deglobalisation. The third episode of the second series covers Janet Yellen – not only the first woman to become Fed Chair but the first person of either sex to lead the Fed, the Treasury, and the Council of Economic Advisors. To discuss Ben Bernanke's successor, Tim is joined by Jon Hilsenrath, author of Yellen: The Trailblazing Economist Who Navigated an Era of Upheaval (Harper Collins, 2022). “Bernanke was a consensus builder,” says Hilsenrath. “He wasn't the kind of guy who was going to push people on a personal level out of their comfort zones … Yellen was a bit of a bulldog there, but she was also a bulldog with the Fed staff. I mean, she had a view that the world was on fire and that they, you know, and that they had to be moving like people putting out a fire”. In 2023, Hilsenrath left the Wall Street Journal after a 26-year career during which he developed a market reputation as a pre-eminent Fed-watcher. He's still watching the Fed but now for his own advisory firm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

More than any other single institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by a committee, for almost a century, the Fed's philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors. In the first series of The Chair, Tim Gwynn Jones talked to authors of books about the Fed's foundational Chairs – Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker. In this second series, he covers the people who chaired the Fed through the post-1990 period of financialisation, globalisation, and – perhaps today – deglobalisation. The third episode of the second series covers Janet Yellen – not only the first woman to become Fed Chair but the first person of either sex to lead the Fed, the Treasury, and the Council of Economic Advisors. To discuss Ben Bernanke's successor, Tim is joined by Jon Hilsenrath, author of Yellen: The Trailblazing Economist Who Navigated an Era of Upheaval (Harper Collins, 2022). “Bernanke was a consensus builder,” says Hilsenrath. “He wasn't the kind of guy who was going to push people on a personal level out of their comfort zones … Yellen was a bit of a bulldog there, but she was also a bulldog with the Fed staff. I mean, she had a view that the world was on fire and that they, you know, and that they had to be moving like people putting out a fire”. In 2023, Hilsenrath left the Wall Street Journal after a 26-year career during which he developed a market reputation as a pre-eminent Fed-watcher. He's still watching the Fed but now for his own advisory firm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

More than any other single institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by a committee, for almost a century, the Fed's philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors. In the first series of The Chair, Tim Gwynn Jones talked to authors of books about the Fed's foundational Chairs – Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker. In this second series, he covers the people who chaired the Fed through the post-1990 period of financialisation, globalisation, and – perhaps today – deglobalisation. The third episode of the second series covers Janet Yellen – not only the first woman to become Fed Chair but the first person of either sex to lead the Fed, the Treasury, and the Council of Economic Advisors. To discuss Ben Bernanke's successor, Tim is joined by Jon Hilsenrath, author of Yellen: The Trailblazing Economist Who Navigated an Era of Upheaval (Harper Collins, 2022). “Bernanke was a consensus builder,” says Hilsenrath. “He wasn't the kind of guy who was going to push people on a personal level out of their comfort zones … Yellen was a bit of a bulldog there, but she was also a bulldog with the Fed staff. I mean, she had a view that the world was on fire and that they, you know, and that they had to be moving like people putting out a fire”. In 2023, Hilsenrath left the Wall Street Journal after a 26-year career during which he developed a market reputation as a pre-eminent Fed-watcher. He's still watching the Fed but now for his own advisory firm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

More than any other single institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by a committee, for almost a century, the Fed's philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors. In the first series of The Chair, Tim Gwynn Jones talked to authors of books about the Fed's foundational Chairs – Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker. In this second series, he covers the people who chaired the Fed through the post-1990 period of financialisation, globalisation, and – perhaps today – deglobalisation. The third episode of the second series covers Janet Yellen – not only the first woman to become Fed Chair but the first person of either sex to lead the Fed, the Treasury, and the Council of Economic Advisors. To discuss Ben Bernanke's successor, Tim is joined by Jon Hilsenrath, author of Yellen: The Trailblazing Economist Who Navigated an Era of Upheaval (Harper Collins, 2022). “Bernanke was a consensus builder,” says Hilsenrath. “He wasn't the kind of guy who was going to push people on a personal level out of their comfort zones … Yellen was a bit of a bulldog there, but she was also a bulldog with the Fed staff. I mean, she had a view that the world was on fire and that they, you know, and that they had to be moving like people putting out a fire”. In 2023, Hilsenrath left the Wall Street Journal after a 26-year career during which he developed a market reputation as a pre-eminent Fed-watcher. He's still watching the Fed but now for his own advisory firm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

More than any other single institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by a committee, for almost a century, the Fed's philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors. In the first series of The Chair, Tim Gwynn Jones talked to authors of books about the Fed's foundational Chairs – Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker. In this second series, he covers the people who chaired the Fed through the post-1990 period of financialisation, globalisation, and – perhaps today – deglobalisation. The third episode of the second series covers Janet Yellen – not only the first woman to become Fed Chair but the first person of either sex to lead the Fed, the Treasury, and the Council of Economic Advisors. To discuss Ben Bernanke's successor, Tim is joined by Jon Hilsenrath, author of Yellen: The Trailblazing Economist Who Navigated an Era of Upheaval (Harper Collins, 2022). “Bernanke was a consensus builder,” says Hilsenrath. “He wasn't the kind of guy who was going to push people on a personal level out of their comfort zones … Yellen was a bit of a bulldog there, but she was also a bulldog with the Fed staff. I mean, she had a view that the world was on fire and that they, you know, and that they had to be moving like people putting out a fire”. In 2023, Hilsenrath left the Wall Street Journal after a 26-year career during which he developed a market reputation as a pre-eminent Fed-watcher. He's still watching the Fed but now for his own advisory firm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

More than any other single institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by a committee, for almost a century, the Fed's philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors. In the first series of The Chair, Tim Gwynn Jones talked to authors of books about the Fed's foundational Chairs – Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker. In this second series, he covers the people who chaired the Fed through the post-1990 period of financialisation, globalisation, and – perhaps today – deglobalisation. The third episode of the second series covers Janet Yellen – not only the first woman to become Fed Chair but the first person of either sex to lead the Fed, the Treasury, and the Council of Economic Advisors. To discuss Ben Bernanke's successor, Tim is joined by Jon Hilsenrath, author of Yellen: The Trailblazing Economist Who Navigated an Era of Upheaval (Harper Collins, 2022). “Bernanke was a consensus builder,” says Hilsenrath. “He wasn't the kind of guy who was going to push people on a personal level out of their comfort zones … Yellen was a bit of a bulldog there, but she was also a bulldog with the Fed staff. I mean, she had a view that the world was on fire and that they, you know, and that they had to be moving like people putting out a fire”. In 2023, Hilsenrath left the Wall Street Journal after a 26-year career during which he developed a market reputation as a pre-eminent Fed-watcher. He's still watching the Fed but now for his own advisory firm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

More than any other single institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by a committee, for almost a century, the Fed's philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors. In the first series of The Chair, Tim Gwynn Jones talked to authors of books about the Fed's foundational Chairs – Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker. In this second series, he covers the people who chaired the Fed through the post-1990 period of financialisation, globalisation, and – perhaps today – deglobalisation. The third episode of the second series covers Janet Yellen – not only the first woman to become Fed Chair but the first person of either sex to lead the Fed, the Treasury, and the Council of Economic Advisors. To discuss Ben Bernanke's successor, Tim is joined by Jon Hilsenrath, author of Yellen: The Trailblazing Economist Who Navigated an Era of Upheaval (Harper Collins, 2022). “Bernanke was a consensus builder,” says Hilsenrath. “He wasn't the kind of guy who was going to push people on a personal level out of their comfort zones … Yellen was a bit of a bulldog there, but she was also a bulldog with the Fed staff. I mean, she had a view that the world was on fire and that they, you know, and that they had to be moving like people putting out a fire”. In 2023, Hilsenrath left the Wall Street Journal after a 26-year career during which he developed a market reputation as a pre-eminent Fed-watcher. He's still watching the Fed but now for his own advisory firm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

More than any other single institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by a committee, for almost a century, the Fed's philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors. In the first series of The Chair, Tim Gwynn Jones talked to authors of books about the Fed's foundational Chairs – Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker. In this second series, he covers the people who chaired the Fed through the post-1990 period of financialisation, globalisation, and – perhaps today – deglobalisation. Episode two of the second series covers the life and crisis-era times of Ben Bernanke, the man who filled Alan Greenspan's big shoes and ran the Fed from 2006 to 2014. A shy but world-renowned monetary economist and historian of the Great Depression, Bernanke was left holding the proverbial bomb when the financial system came close to collapse in 2008. To discuss Bernanke, Tim is joined by David Wessel, author of In FED We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic (Crown, 2010). “It wasn't obvious when he was appointed to the Fed in 2006 that having somebody who had spent their life studying the Great Depression would be well equipped to be Alan Greenspan's successor,” says Wessel. “I have sometimes said it was a like being a paleontologist. It's very nice that you know a lot about dinosaurs, but what use is that to us today until one day a Stegosaurus appears on the horizon. And it was remarkable good fortune for the country and the world that there was a guy who happened to have studied all the mistakes that the Fed made in the 1920s and the 1930s in a position to do something about it when a situation, not all that dissimilar, appears both to his surprise and to almost everybody else's”. Wessel is two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who now runs the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution. For 30 years, he worked at the Wall Street Journal - reporting mostly from Washington and covering economics and the Fed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

More than any other single institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by a committee, for almost a century, the Fed's philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors. In the first series of The Chair, Tim Gwynn Jones talked to authors of books about the Fed's foundational Chairs – Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker. In this second series, he covers the people who chaired the Fed through the post-1990 period of financialisation, globalisation, and – perhaps today – deglobalisation. Episode two of the second series covers the life and crisis-era times of Ben Bernanke, the man who filled Alan Greenspan's big shoes and ran the Fed from 2006 to 2014. A shy but world-renowned monetary economist and historian of the Great Depression, Bernanke was left holding the proverbial bomb when the financial system came close to collapse in 2008. To discuss Bernanke, Tim is joined by David Wessel, author of In FED We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic (Crown, 2010). “It wasn't obvious when he was appointed to the Fed in 2006 that having somebody who had spent their life studying the Great Depression would be well equipped to be Alan Greenspan's successor,” says Wessel. “I have sometimes said it was a like being a paleontologist. It's very nice that you know a lot about dinosaurs, but what use is that to us today until one day a Stegosaurus appears on the horizon. And it was remarkable good fortune for the country and the world that there was a guy who happened to have studied all the mistakes that the Fed made in the 1920s and the 1930s in a position to do something about it when a situation, not all that dissimilar, appears both to his surprise and to almost everybody else's”. Wessel is two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who now runs the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution. For 30 years, he worked at the Wall Street Journal - reporting mostly from Washington and covering economics and the Fed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

More than any other single institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by a committee, for almost a century, the Fed's philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors. In the first series of The Chair, Tim Gwynn Jones talked to authors of books about the Fed's foundational Chairs – Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker. In this second series, he covers the people who chaired the Fed through the post-1990 period of financialisation, globalisation, and – perhaps today – deglobalisation. Episode two of the second series covers the life and crisis-era times of Ben Bernanke, the man who filled Alan Greenspan's big shoes and ran the Fed from 2006 to 2014. A shy but world-renowned monetary economist and historian of the Great Depression, Bernanke was left holding the proverbial bomb when the financial system came close to collapse in 2008. To discuss Bernanke, Tim is joined by David Wessel, author of In FED We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic (Crown, 2010). “It wasn't obvious when he was appointed to the Fed in 2006 that having somebody who had spent their life studying the Great Depression would be well equipped to be Alan Greenspan's successor,” says Wessel. “I have sometimes said it was a like being a paleontologist. It's very nice that you know a lot about dinosaurs, but what use is that to us today until one day a Stegosaurus appears on the horizon. And it was remarkable good fortune for the country and the world that there was a guy who happened to have studied all the mistakes that the Fed made in the 1920s and the 1930s in a position to do something about it when a situation, not all that dissimilar, appears both to his surprise and to almost everybody else's”. Wessel is two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who now runs the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution. For 30 years, he worked at the Wall Street Journal - reporting mostly from Washington and covering economics and the Fed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

More than any other single institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by a committee, for almost a century, the Fed's philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors. In the first series of The Chair, Tim Gwynn Jones talked to authors of books about the Fed's foundational Chairs – Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker. In this second series, he covers the people who chaired the Fed through the post-1990 period of financialisation, globalisation, and – perhaps today – deglobalisation. Episode two of the second series covers the life and crisis-era times of Ben Bernanke, the man who filled Alan Greenspan's big shoes and ran the Fed from 2006 to 2014. A shy but world-renowned monetary economist and historian of the Great Depression, Bernanke was left holding the proverbial bomb when the financial system came close to collapse in 2008. To discuss Bernanke, Tim is joined by David Wessel, author of In FED We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic (Crown, 2010). “It wasn't obvious when he was appointed to the Fed in 2006 that having somebody who had spent their life studying the Great Depression would be well equipped to be Alan Greenspan's successor,” says Wessel. “I have sometimes said it was a like being a paleontologist. It's very nice that you know a lot about dinosaurs, but what use is that to us today until one day a Stegosaurus appears on the horizon. And it was remarkable good fortune for the country and the world that there was a guy who happened to have studied all the mistakes that the Fed made in the 1920s and the 1930s in a position to do something about it when a situation, not all that dissimilar, appears both to his surprise and to almost everybody else's”. Wessel is two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who now runs the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution. For 30 years, he worked at the Wall Street Journal - reporting mostly from Washington and covering economics and the Fed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

More than any other single institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by a committee, for almost a century, the Fed's philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors. In the first series of The Chair, Tim Gwynn Jones talked to authors of books about the Fed's foundational Chairs – Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker. In this second series, he covers the people who chaired the Fed through the post-1990 period of financialisation, globalisation, and – perhaps today – deglobalisation. Episode two of the second series covers the life and crisis-era times of Ben Bernanke, the man who filled Alan Greenspan's big shoes and ran the Fed from 2006 to 2014. A shy but world-renowned monetary economist and historian of the Great Depression, Bernanke was left holding the proverbial bomb when the financial system came close to collapse in 2008. To discuss Bernanke, Tim is joined by David Wessel, author of In FED We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic (Crown, 2010). “It wasn't obvious when he was appointed to the Fed in 2006 that having somebody who had spent their life studying the Great Depression would be well equipped to be Alan Greenspan's successor,” says Wessel. “I have sometimes said it was a like being a paleontologist. It's very nice that you know a lot about dinosaurs, but what use is that to us today until one day a Stegosaurus appears on the horizon. And it was remarkable good fortune for the country and the world that there was a guy who happened to have studied all the mistakes that the Fed made in the 1920s and the 1930s in a position to do something about it when a situation, not all that dissimilar, appears both to his surprise and to almost everybody else's”. Wessel is two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who now runs the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution. For 30 years, he worked at the Wall Street Journal - reporting mostly from Washington and covering economics and the Fed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

More than any other single institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by a committee, for almost a century, the Fed's philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors. In the first series of The Chair, Tim Gwynn Jones talked to authors of books about the Fed's foundational Chairs – Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker. In this second series, he covers the people who chaired the Fed through the post-1990 period of financialisation, globalisation, and – perhaps today – deglobalisation. Episode two of the second series covers the life and crisis-era times of Ben Bernanke, the man who filled Alan Greenspan's big shoes and ran the Fed from 2006 to 2014. A shy but world-renowned monetary economist and historian of the Great Depression, Bernanke was left holding the proverbial bomb when the financial system came close to collapse in 2008. To discuss Bernanke, Tim is joined by David Wessel, author of In FED We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic (Crown, 2010). “It wasn't obvious when he was appointed to the Fed in 2006 that having somebody who had spent their life studying the Great Depression would be well equipped to be Alan Greenspan's successor,” says Wessel. “I have sometimes said it was a like being a paleontologist. It's very nice that you know a lot about dinosaurs, but what use is that to us today until one day a Stegosaurus appears on the horizon. And it was remarkable good fortune for the country and the world that there was a guy who happened to have studied all the mistakes that the Fed made in the 1920s and the 1930s in a position to do something about it when a situation, not all that dissimilar, appears both to his surprise and to almost everybody else's”. Wessel is two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who now runs the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution. For 30 years, he worked at the Wall Street Journal - reporting mostly from Washington and covering economics and the Fed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

More than any other single institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by a committee, for almost a century, the Fed's philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors. In the first series of The Chair, Tim Gwynn Jones talked to authors of books about the Fed's foundational Chairs – Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker. In this second series, he covers the people who chaired the Fed through the post-1990 period of financialisation, globalisation, and – perhaps today – deglobalisation. Episode two of the second series covers the life and crisis-era times of Ben Bernanke, the man who filled Alan Greenspan's big shoes and ran the Fed from 2006 to 2014. A shy but world-renowned monetary economist and historian of the Great Depression, Bernanke was left holding the proverbial bomb when the financial system came close to collapse in 2008. To discuss Bernanke, Tim is joined by David Wessel, author of In FED We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic (Crown, 2010). “It wasn't obvious when he was appointed to the Fed in 2006 that having somebody who had spent their life studying the Great Depression would be well equipped to be Alan Greenspan's successor,” says Wessel. “I have sometimes said it was a like being a paleontologist. It's very nice that you know a lot about dinosaurs, but what use is that to us today until one day a Stegosaurus appears on the horizon. And it was remarkable good fortune for the country and the world that there was a guy who happened to have studied all the mistakes that the Fed made in the 1920s and the 1930s in a position to do something about it when a situation, not all that dissimilar, appears both to his surprise and to almost everybody else's”. Wessel is two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who now runs the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution. For 30 years, he worked at the Wall Street Journal - reporting mostly from Washington and covering economics and the Fed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Aimee Resnick, a senior at Northwestern University, interviews Steven Preston, CEO of Goodwill Industries International, on the “Weinberg in the World” podcast. Steven reflects on his time at Northwestern, highlighting his major in political science and his transformative junior year in Munich. He also shares how his unexpected passion for statistics influenced his career in investment banking and leadership roles.  Transcript: Aimee Resnick: Welcome to the Weinberg in the World podcast, where we bring stories of interdisciplinary thinking in today's complex world. My name is Aimee Resnick and I'm your student host of the special podcast episode. I am a senior studying social policy at Northwestern University who plans to pursue public administration in my home state of Colorado. Today, I'm excited to be speaking with Steven Preston, who is the CEO at Goodwill Industries International. Thank you, Steven, for taking the time to speak with me today. Steven Preston: Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to it. Aimee Resnick: Me too. To start us off today, I was wondering if you can tell us a little bit more about your time at Northwestern as an undergraduate in terms of what did you study and what were the most impactful experiences for you that led you to your current career path? Steven Preston: Yeah, so I was a political science major. And Northwestern, it was kind of a big thing for me. I kind of grown up in a medium-sized town up in Wisconsin and going to Northwestern kind of introduced me to a whole new world that I didn't even know existed of people from different places and that type of thing. I'd say there are two things, a couple of things that were really important. Number one is I was actually a poli-sci major with an international politics focus. So number one, it gave me a perspective on the world and how the world operates, which is something I didn't have as an 18-year-old coming to college. Number two, I took that further and I actually did a junior year in Munich program, and this was before the wall had come down, so east, west. International relations were what really defined kind of the global dynamic. So it was just a remarkable opportunity to study with different people in a different language right on the border of what was kind of definitional for international politics. And that year, I felt like I kind just burgeoned intellectually and academically and personally. The other thing I would say, that may not be what most people would expect, but I took a statistics class and I loved it. And I took more and I took more and I took graduate statistics classes and I became kind of like a quant poli-sci major. And that really was valuable for me because it was a way through which I could marry a topic that we think of as not being very quantitative and do a lot of research within political science using statistics, whether it was voter trends or national expenditures and how that relates to different government structures. And that became really important to me when I went into investment banking. I got an MBA in finance and [inaudible 00:02:38] Wall Street, and the ability to connect data with what felt like qualitative issues was really definitional to my path forward. Later, I became a CFO and a CEO and for the rest of my life, I really connected those two concepts in a way that was really powerful for what I was able to do professionally. Aimee Resnick: Absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing your response. And I think it's really fascinating how you were able to take a lot of the skills that you gained at Northwestern in your more non-traditional courses like statistics and apply them to a more impactful career pivot later in your life like we typically encourage at Weinberg. So thank you for sharing that experience. Steven Preston: Yeah. Well, I'll tell you, it's one of the requirements I have for my kids is they all have to have some proficiency in statistics now. So yeah, it's become multigenerational. Aimee Resnick: I'm sure they love that requirement. I say as someone who's not the biggest math person ever. But I'd love to hear a little bit more about your current career right now as well, as the CEO of Goodwill Industries. And I noted in your video introduction to the 2023 annual report for Goodwill, you mentioned that Goodwill is about possibilities of hope for the people who receive services. And in that same report, you described how over 140,000 people found new employment after receiving services through your organization in workforce development. So I was wondering if you could just tell us a little bit more about how Goodwill promotes economic opportunity across the United States and why that mission particularly resonates with you. Steven Preston: Yeah, so the people we serve are not the people that you're going to college with right now. 83% of the people we serve are people with a high school degree or less. In fact, about a third of the people never finished high school. And many of these people have other challenges in life. Some of them have gone down very difficult pathways, people coming out of incarceration, people who are experiencing poverty, even people who are experiencing homelessness. And what we often do in society is make assumptions about those people and make assumptions about what's possible. And we sort of relegate them, in many cases, into a category of, well, that's kind of who they are and that's what their life is going to be like. But the truth is that embedded in every one of those people is a massive amount of potential and talent. And in most cases, and I really say in most cases, those are people who, because of opportunities they've been given or not given, because of their circumstances in life, because of their pathways, have never been able to develop those capabilities. And in fact, have never really known how to, because they didn't have access to good education, they weren't surrounded by people who could give them advice. They didn't really know what the possibilities were. So what we do is we work with people to sit with them and say, "What are the possibilities for your life? And how do we help you get there?" So one of the most important things we do when somebody comes to us is really do an assessment of what their skills are, what their hopes are, but also what their challenges are. A lot of times, their challenges might be training or skills related, but they also may have challenges with behavioral issues. They may be, many of them don't have housing or have insecure housing. Many of them don't have core financial skills, so they know even how to get through life with a small amount of income. So if we can work with people to help them stabilize those sort of personal aspects of their life, at the same time that we can provide them with skills that are attractive to employers, we can help them move from a very difficult place to a place where they are flourishing and where they have a fundamentally different future, and a future that allows them to take care of themselves and grow and learn much more. What we often find is once we've supported somebody and they land that first job and they're successful and they see the people they work with and what the possibilities are, it's not just that their lives have changed to get to that job, it's that the trajectory of their life has changed because many of those people begin investing themselves, learning more, getting better jobs. And then the other great thing is it's often multi-generational because their kids benefit, or if they don't have kids and they had them later, they benefit. And it really breaks a cycle of poverty and brokenness that's very difficult to break. And that's why we talk about the possibilities and we talk about hope because that's really where we live. For me personally, I came from what I would call pretty humble background. So I think just in a couple of generations, I've seen what education and opportunity has done for me. But I think on a bigger scale, I've lived in a number of major cities early on, when I was in my 20s, I spent a lot of time in tough neighborhoods in New York working with kids in difficult situations and trying to help them move on. So I feel like I've seen it up front in what's possible. And then when I worked in the government, I was the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and that is really the federal agency that deals mostly with poverty issues. And seeing intergenerational poverty and seeing people unable to do something about it is a sort of a dispiriting situation, and I believe we can do something about it. And really, Goodwill I think is, well, I know Goodwill is the largest nonprofit that is trying to change the landscape for many of those people, and hundreds of thousands of people find a different opportunity because of us. Aimee Resnick: I think that's a really excellent transition because I actually do want to talk to you a little bit more about your experience with housing and urban development. So for context, in 2008, you were nominated by President George W. Bush to serve as the secretary of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. And I'd just like to hear a little bit more about how you started this large career in public service, and then a little bit potentially about how your public sector experiences under George W. Bush have shaped your approach to private sector leadership in your current career. Steven Preston: Yeah. So I think one of the important things was I spent almost 25 years in the private sector before I went into the government. So I had been an investment banker, I had been a CFO, I had been a corporate leader. And I say that because many times, young people coming out of college will say, "I want to go into nonprofit, what do I do?" And one of the first things I say to people when they come to me is, "Think about the early part of your career especially as a time where you are learning and growing and developing and getting the skills you need to be effective later in your career." And many kids, many people will go in a nonprofit and have a wonderful career. But I had 25 years in the private sector to prepare before going into the government and later into nonprofit. And those skills, both as somebody with an MBA and somebody who grew up through the corporate world, have been incredibly valuable for me in my career. So I want to mention that. So the first thing I did when I went into the government is I ran the Small Business Administration and the Small Business Administration makes loans to people who've lost their homes in a national disaster. And I came in after Katrina and most people hadn't gotten their loans yet. So I applied those skills from the private sector to figure out how to fix the operational and technology and financial issues to accelerate loans to people who needed to rebuild after the disaster. So toward the end of my tenure at the SBA, the housing and financial crisis was mushrooming. And because of the experiences I had as a banker and a CFO and the experiences I had in working in a federal disaster, the president asked me to go to Housing and Urban Development to work on the housing crisis. I give you the background because that's how I got there. I got there because my experience and my background were sort of uniquely prepared me to be able to do that. I would not be a typical HUD secretary because I didn't have a poverty housing background, but I understood financial markets. I understood operational fixes. I understood national crises and media by that point because you do a lot of... You're on television a lot, you're dealing with Congress. So I was uniquely qualified to do this for that time in history, which was the financial crisis. So one of the greatest things about serving in these situations was the, and I really do, I think it was incredible blessing to be able to serve in a crisis because when you're in the middle of a crisis, people need leadership, they need people who can pull them together to fix the problems. People want to be part of a team that's doing something great. And if you're successful, a ton of people have seen their lives improved, whether it's an ability to rebuild their home after Katrina, in the financial crisis, whether it's the ability to stay in your home if you're being foreclosed, or we were able to rebuild public housing in New Orleans, and sort of the two came together. The public housing had been destroyed in Katrina. And when I came to HUD, we worked on rebuilding it. So if you have that opportunity, even though it's extremely stressful to work in a crisis, you also have an opportunity to have a very big impact. And you have an opportunity to have sort of restorative or a kind of healing impact on an organization that's in stress. So it really hits on a number of different levels. It comes with stress, but it also comes with what I would say great blessing and great opportunity, both for the people you're serving with and the people who benefit from this service. So that was really what that felt like. And then the other part of that is it wasn't just about housing. Some people who know about that era of history will know what the acronym TARP stands for. TARP was a large allocation of capital that the federal government made to support housing and the financial system. That money ended up going into financial institutions to save them. And I was on the board of the TARP with Secretary Paulson and the head of the Fed, Ben Bernanke and two other people, which sort of put me right in the center of seeing what was happening across the financial sector around the world and how we were going to work to save it. And that was just, it was a remarkable time. I think it was terrifying for many people because we saw what could happen if the world financial system was going to break down. And thankfully, it was averted, although there was just a massive impact from the financial fallout, really from early to mid 2008 going into well into 2009 before things started to recover. Aimee Resnick: Absolutely. And that actually brings me to something I'm very curious about, bringing you back to your poli-sci roots. A lot of young people today kind of feel a large sense of distrust in the government, especially on campus at this time, which I've seen some people describe as a new type of political crisis, almost like that you experienced back in the Katrina era. And I'm curious, what steps did you concretely take to rebuild trust, and in particular with the Small Business Administration, because it was somewhat disoriented when you began? And how do you think that can be applied to the current context? Steven Preston: Well, so first of all, yeah, trust has been declining in federal government for a long time, and I think we're absolutely at a nadir right now. And for me, it's very distressing to see, because I think there are good reasons for people's concern. But it's also really important for people to believe that if they go into it, they can make a difference. What I did when I went to the SBA, I found... One of the biggest benefits I had is I'd never been in the government, I didn't really know how it worked. They brought me in because I knew finance and I knew operational change and they wanted things fixed. And I got brought in and sometimes I would say, "How do I do this?" Or, "We want to fix this and this is how we're going to do it." And people would say, "No, you can't because there's a regulation or a law and you got to do it this way." And I'd say, "That can't possibly be true." There's nothing logical about my having to do that to make this decision. But yeah, well, it's a law that's been on the books for a long time. So one of the benefits I had is I came in and I needed to know how it worked, but I didn't need to be overly shackled in how I did this. So when I first got nominated, so before I even got to Washington, I was in the George Bush administration and a lot of Republicans were kind of briefing me. And the Democrat head on my oversight committee was John Kerry at the time. He had just lost the election for president. And they were the committee that the Senate does the nomination, they were the ones who were going to approve my nomination. And I just said, "Well, nobody... I'm not talking to any Democrats. Why..." So I called up the people briefing me and I said, "I want to talk to John Kerry's chief of staff." And they're like, "Why?" I said, "Because I'm hearing what you guys are saying, but I don't..." I know I'm a Republican nominee, but I'm not like a super partisan guy and we're all trying to fix this problem. I want to hear what they're saying. And as a business person, the first thing I'm thinking is you hear from all your customers, you hear from all your stakeholders, you want to build the first... So I talked to her and she was really surprised, and she kind of gave me her thinking on it. Once I got to the administration, I said to my team, "We're all about transparency. I'm going to invite the Democrats to do briefings on how we're doing fixing this problem." And they said, "Well, no, you're going to give them fodder to come against you in the press," and blah, blah, blah. I'm like, "We all want to fix it, right?" So I started holding briefings at the SBA office on the measures we were taking to fix the problem, the data that we were seeing on how big the problem was, once we started fixing it, the improvements. And I actually became very friendly with the teams on both sides of the aisle. When I got nominated for the HUD job, I needed to get confirmed by the Senate. By that time, the Senate was Democrat and I was a Republican nominee. The two most important reasons I got through that nomination process quickly were John Kerry and Dick Durbin, who was the number two person in the Senate. He was head of my appropriations committee. And the reason was because we were completely transparent with their teams. We worked with them very closely. We had them over for briefings. And we developed those relationships because they trusted us. So what I would say is you can be somebody who works both sides of the aisle. And by the way, most of the time, as an agency head, most of the time, you're going to be working on issues that aren't necessarily big political issues. You're serving people, you're trying to improve something. You've got a program that you maybe want to tweak to make it better. And when we go into a situation assuming that people are going to attack us and be against us, sometimes there's a reason for that, right? It is pretty fiery. But I think we have to go into it saying, "Let's win them over." Let's help them understand that we're all trying to get to the same place. We might disagree on the best way to get there. And most of those people just want to do their jobs really well and be part of something good. So some of my fondest memories were working with people really on both sides of the aisle. And I'm very grateful I had the opportunity to do that. And we probably see less, it felt like it was really kind of fighting all the time back then, but oh my goodness, it's at a whole different level now. And I also think President Bush was very focused on bipartisanism. He did a lot of work with people on the other side of the aisle. The financial rescue package was very much negotiated with both sides. Believe it or not, back then, he had negotiated an immigration bill that was more heavily supported by Democrats and Republicans. But because of an impending election, a lot of people didn't feel comfortable supporting it because they were concerned about winning re-election. But many of those things were worked on with both sides of the aisle, even though there were plenty of partisan politics at the time as well. Aimee Resnick: Really, I like that idea of having optimistic view towards bipartisanship and hopefully seeing that expand into the future in the next decades as a way to build public trust. I absolutely agree, that's critical. And I think we'll move on to our last question because I recognize we're coming up on our time, but I want to ask you, what do you wish you could tell yourself when you were me, a senior who's interested in public service and policy, who's about to graduate? What do you wish you could say to that 22-year-old version of you? Steven Preston: So yeah, it's what I tell people. I've had a chance to talk to students at Northwestern a couple of times, not recently, but I've talked to a couple of classes with Diane Schanzenbach who's on the policy side there. And I've spoken at a couple of other schools. And I tell them, one of the pieces of advice I give is very consistent. You all are really smart. You are getting a great education. You are learning critical thinking skills. But our society is very much about groupthink. And when we see the political divide or the divide on policies, you don't hear a lot of talk about the deep research on one side of the policy or the other. And we see it actually in Congress. I think we've seen fewer deep policy thinkers than we did 10 years ago, or certainly 20 or 30 years ago. So my encouragement is, even if you have strong views on something, challenge them, look at the data. And in the area that we focus on is a perfect issue. Why do we have intergenerational poverty? What will change it? What really has to happen? And when you think about where that debate lies, it's pretty fiery, and you've got all sorts of people fighting about these issues. But we don't have nearly enough people saying, "Let's look at the data on what really helps somebody." You guys are in Chicago. What really helps somebody who's a little boy or girl who's born in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago or some other tough neighborhood? What are the factors that make it very difficult for them to have the kind of life that most of the people you go to college have? And what can we change in that person's life? Whether it's the kind of schooling they get, whether it is the kind of family support they have, whether it's the protections we give them. Whether it's when they come out of high school, if they do need a little bit of support to get on the right track, how do we do that? What kind of youth... What truly does it take to help a person flourish in society? Or in our world, somebody who's coming out of prison? We have all these big narratives. You guys are the ones, because you're super smart, you got a fantastic education, you're taking statistics, like I recommended, you can dig deep. And when you see something where you say, "I need to challenge my thinking. I know I've been telling myself this, but I actually don't see this. Or I think I need to understand it deeper." We need deep policy thinkers. And the other thing is, if you're going into business, everybody's going to say find the right solution and see the data. But in the policy world, a lot of times that stuff doesn't happen to the degree that it needs to. So use that great education and be rigorous, be tough thinkers, ask tough questions, even if it takes you to a place that maybe doesn't align with what you think is the case today, because that's what's going to help us have a better world. And you know what? Those are the conversations we need to be having across the table from each other. We can be having rigorous arguments about the right policy decision, but if we're going to do it, let's look at the facts and let's really pressure test those because that's what's going to help us all have a better world. Aimee Resnick: Thank you, I really appreciate that idea of having Northwestern graduates go out into the world and just make it a better place. That's very encouraging. Steven Preston: Well, I love Northwestern, and I don't live in Chicago anymore, so I'm sad that I can't go to those games and go to the concerts on campus and talk to students as easily as I used to. But I just think it's a terrific place, and thank you for giving me an opportunity to chat with students indirectly. Aimee Resnick: Oh, of course. I think with that, I will say thank you to our listeners for listening to this special episode of the Weinberg in the World podcast. We hope you have a good day. And as Steven just mentioned, go Cats. Steven Preston: Go Cats. Take care.  

This Flashback Friday is from episode 202 published last February 3, 2011. Jason interviews Robert H. Frank, author of "The Winner Take All Society," discussing economic inequality and market dynamics. Frank explains how technology enables top performers to scale their services, leading to disproportionate rewards. They explore examples in entertainment, law, and academia, highlighting the "positional arms race" in various industries. The conversation covers economic trends, inflation concerns, and policy suggestions. Frank advocates for a progressive consumption tax to fund public services. He discusses Ben Bernanke's approach to monetary policy and inflation control. The interview concludes with insights from Frank's new book, "The Economic Naturalist's Field Guide," which applies economic reasoning to everyday problems. Key topics: income inequality, market competition, economic policy, inflation, and financial planning.     Follow Jason on TWITTER, INSTAGRAM & LINKEDIN Twitter.com/JasonHartmanROI Instagram.com/jasonhartman1/ Linkedin.com/in/jasonhartmaninvestor/ Call our Investment Counselors at: 1-800-HARTMAN (US) or visit: https://www.jasonhartman.com/ Free Class:  Easily get up to $250,000 in funding for real estate, business or anything else: http://JasonHartman.com/Fund CYA Protect Your Assets, Save Taxes & Estate Planning: http://JasonHartman.com/Protect Get wholesale real estate deals for investment or build a great business – Free Course: https://www.jasonhartman.com/deals Special Offer from Ron LeGrand: https://JasonHartman.com/Ron Free Mini-Book on Pandemic Investing: https://www.PandemicInvesting.com    

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The Great Depression was the worst and deepest peacetime economic shock in the history of the industrialized world. It brought about profound social change and was a significant factor in the drift towards the Second World War. The depth of suffering during the Depression years is hard for many of us to imagine today. More than 1 in five children in the city were suffering from malnutrition by 1932, and the Great Depression was only getting going at that point, it lasted seven more years. So, why did events on Wall Street in 1929 reverberate around the world? Why did the depression last so long, and how did America and the rest of the world eventually dig themselves out of this financial hole? Patrick's Books: Statistics For The Trading Floor: https://amzn.to/3eerLA0 Derivatives For The Trading Floor: https://amzn.to/3cjsyPF Corporate Finance: https://amzn.to/3fn3rvC Ways To Support The Channel Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/PatrickBoyleOnFinance Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/patrickboyle Visit our website: https://www.onfinance.org Follow Patrick on Twitter Here: https://twitter.com/PatrickEBoyle Additional Reading: Milton Friedman on The Great Depression: https://amzn.to/4fvMYF6 The Great Depression by Robert S. McElvaine: https://amzn.to/40Szajt Essays on The Great Depression by Ben Bernanke: https://amzn.to/40Szajt Keynes letter: https://www.economicsnetwork.ac.uk/archive/keynes_persuasion/The_Economic_Consequences_of_Mr._Churchill.htm The U.S. Economy in the 1920s: https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-u-s-economy-in-the-1920s/ Britain In The Great Depression: https://moneyweek.com/economy/uk-economy/602525/britain-didnt-have-a-roaring-20s-it-had-a-roaring-30s-heres-why Michael Pettis in The FT: https://www.ft.com/content/ec1b730b-0fbf-3a8c-896a-557c06f730cf The photographers of the Great Depression - Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Arthur Rothstein Business Inquiries ➡️ sponsors@onfinance.org

Joseph Gagnon is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a former senior Fed staffer, and a returning guest to the podcast. Joe rejoins David on Macro Musings to talk about the unholy trinity behind the COVID inflation surge and what history can teach us about the unusual inflation experience of that period. David and Joe also discuss the inflationary lessons from the Korean War, the Fed's upcoming framework review, and much more.   Transcript for this week's episode.   Joseph's Twitter: @GagnonMacro Joseph's PIIE profile   David Beckworth's Twitter: @DavidBeckworth Follow us on Twitter: @Macro_Musings   Check out our new AI chatbot: the Macro Musebot! Join the new Macro Musings Discord server!   Join the Macro Musings mailing list! Check out our Macro Musings merch!   Related Links:   *What Caused the U.S. Pandemic-Era Inflation?* by Ben Bernanke and Olivier Blanchard   *Understanding U.S. Inflation During the COVID Era* by Laurence Ball, Daniel Leigh, and Prachi Mishra   Timestamps:   (00:00:00) – Intro   (00:02:46) – Predicting the Post-Pandemic Inflation Surge   (00:06:39) – Assessing the State of the Bond Market and Inflation Expectations After the Inflation Surge   (00:16:14) – What Caused the U.S. Pandemic-Era Inflation: Breaking Down the Literature   (00:23:45) – *The Trinity of COVID-Era Inflation in G7 Economies*   (00:32:55) – *Why Did Inflation Rise and Fall So Rapidly? Lessons from the Korean War*   (00:42:06) – Inflation, FAIT, and the Upcoming Fed Framework Review   (00:49:18) – Why Should the Fed Consider Nominal GDP Targeting?   (00:53:04) – Responding to the Measurement Issue Surrounding Nominal GDP   (00:57:40) – Outro

This week, Noah Smith and Erik Torenberg unpack China's economic strategies under Xi Jinping, from the controversial tech crackdown to the ambitious Belt and Road Initiative. They explore the intricacies of international currency dynamics, dissect Ben Bernanke's pivotal role in the 2008 financial crisis, and examine the complex effects of brain drain on developing nations. --

President of the Mises Institute and author of “How Capitalism Saved America”, Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo joins us to uncover the current state of capitalism and if it still exists in America. Earlier in the episode, Keith discusses the inaccuracy of economic predictions, citing examples like the 2023 recession that never happened, the negative impact of misinformed predictions on investment decisions and business growth.  Persistent housing price crash predictions have been consistently wrong despite global pandemics and higher mortgage rates. Dr. DiLorenzo advocates for #EndTheFed to reduce inflation and restore free market principles. Learn how voluntary exchange between buyer and seller through market prices communicates information and influences production. Resources: Learn more about Austrian economics and Ludwig von Mises through visiting mises.org  Show Notes: GetRichEducation.com/521 For access to properties or free help with a GRE Investment Coach, start here: GREmarketplace.com Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE  or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Invest with Freedom Family Investments.  You get paid first: Text FAMILY to 66866 For advertising inquiries, visit: GetRichEducation.com/ad Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search “how to leave an Apple Podcasts review”  GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREmarketplace.com/Coach Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— text ‘GRE' to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Complete episode transcript:   Automatically Transcribed With Otter.ai     Keith Weinhold  00:00 Keith, welcome to GRE. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, reviewing some terrible economic predictions and why it matters to you. Then the President of the Mises Institute joins us. Does capitalism still exist in the US and what would happen if we ended the Fed, today on get rich education.   00:24 Since 2014 the powerful get rich education podcast has created more passive income for people than nearly any other show in the world. This show teaches you how to earn strong returns from passive real estate investing in the best markets without losing your time being a flipper or landlord. Show Host Keith Weinhold writes for both Forbes and Rich Dad advisors, who delivers a new show every week since 2014 there's been millions of listener downloads of 188 world nations. He has a list show. Guess who? Top Selling personal finance author Robert Kiyosaki, get rich education can be heard on every podcast platform, plus it has its own dedicated Apple and Android listener phone apps build wealth on the go with the get rich education podcast. Sign up now for the get rich education podcast, or visit getricheducation.com   Corey Coates  01:09 You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is get rich education.   Keith Weinhold  01:25 welcome to GRE from Syracuse, Sicily to Syracuse, New York, and across 188 nations worldwide, you're listening to one of the longest running and most listened to shows on real estate investing. This is Get Rich Education. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold, now a lot of media companies and pundits and influencers like to make predictions. Listeners like learning about predictions and by engaging just a little of that each of the past few years on one of the last episodes of the year. Here, I forecast the national home price appreciation rate for the following year, many media outlets, pundits and influencers have made terrible, just absolutely terrible, predictions about interest rates and other financial forecasts. Last year, a majority of Pro prognosticators firmly forecast six or eight Fed rate cuts this year, for example, well, we're going to have far fewer, and that's because high inflation kept hanging around. Then there's the 2023 recession that never happened, yet both Bloomberg and the economist actually published some rather ignominious headlines, as it turned out, they published these in the fall of 2022 Bloomberg, big headline was forecast for us, recession within year hits 100% in blow to Biden, well, That was false. That didn't come true. I mean, 100% that doesn't leave you any room for an out. And then also published in the fall of 2022 The Economist ran this headline why a global recession is inevitable in 2023 All right, well, they both believed in a recession, and they believed in it so deeply that it got fossilized. Well, an economic archeologist like me dug it up.   Dr Thomas DiLorenzo  03:31 We are going to die   Keith Weinhold  03:35 well, but I didn't risk my life like Indiana Jones did there. This archeology, it only involves some Google searches. Well, here's the thing. What's remarkable about America staving off a mammoth recession and leaving all the other g7 nations in the economic dust is the fact that merely predicting a recession often makes it come true. Just predicting one often turns a recession into a self fulfilling prophecy. Yeah, recession forecast headlines alone, they can spook employers from making new hires and slow down manufacturing, and it can also disillusion real estate investors from expanding their portfolios. Well, the US economy grew anyway, besides the farcical prognostications about myriad interest rate cuts in a quote, unquote definite 2023 recession that never happened. You know, there's also a third forecast that so many got wrong. And you probably know what I'm gonna say. I've brought it up before, because this hits our world, those erstwhile and well still ever present housing price crash predictions. I mean this facet of the gloom boom really ramped up from 2020 One until today, even a global pandemic, new wars and a triplicate mortgage rates couldn't stop the housing price surge and the rent surge. A lot of doomsdayers just couldn't see, or they didn't even want to see that a housing shortage would keep prices afloat. They didn't want to see it because they get more clicks when they talk about the gloom government stimulus programs also buoyed prices, and deep homeowner equity cushions will still keep prices afloat. Ever since 2021 here on the show, I've used that rationale and more to explain that home prices would keep appreciating, but that the rate of appreciation would slow down, and it has slowed down since 2021 see YouTubers tick tockers. They notoriously use woe begone housing crash headlines, because that gets more clicks and then some of the rationale behind this. The reasoning is just dreadful, like, what goes up must come down, all right? Well, this is like, why does it matter? Who cares about wrong predictions anyway? What's the point? Well, people become misinformed. People waste their time on these things and see no one loses money on dismal economic predictions. But the damage is done, because when investors don't act well, then they didn't get the gain that they should have had. Businesses didn't get the gain that they should have had when they could have made new investment and hired new employees sooner. And of course, a recession is going to happen sometime. They occur, on average, every five to six years. It is just a normal part of the business cycle will collectively these three faulty economic predictions, rate cuts, a recession and a housing price crash. I think if you bundle them all up combined, it could be as bad as one doomsday prediction about worldwide starvation or the Mayan apocalypse. Remember that the wide to K bug, the acid rain, even that the internet is just a fad that ran a buck 30 years ago. World War Three is eminent, robots overtaking humans, or how about running out of crude oil. I mean, we're definitely all supposed to have jet packs in flying cars by now, right? But yet, did anyone have the clairvoyance to predict the stock market crash of 1929 or September 11 terrorist attacks, or Trump's surprise, 2016 presidency or Bitcoin hitting 70k A while back, or the coronavirus. So really, overall, the bottom line here with predictions is that no one knows the future. Control what you can maintain equanimity, add good properties, gradually raise rent, reduce expenses, create leverage and expect inflation truly the best way to predict the future is to create it in just that way. Well is the USA capitalistic nation today. That's what we'll discuss later with this week's guest. When Chuck Todd hosted the show Meet the Press, he interviewed AOC about this. Yes, I'm talking about us. House Rep from New York, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, what she say? You   08:34 have said you are democratic socialist. Can you be a Democratic socialist and a capitalist? Well, I think it depends on your interpretation. So there are some Democratic socialists that would say, Absolutely not. There are other people that are democratic socialists that would say, I think it's possible. What are you? I think it's possible. I think you say to yourself, I'm a capitalist, but I don't say that. You know, if anything, I would say, I'm I believe in a democratic economy, but.   Keith Weinhold  09:03 okay, well, I'm not sure if that clears it up at all. And I've listened to more of that clip, and it just makes things more confusing. But I think that most people have trouble drawing a line between capitalism and neighboring economic systems. Where exactly do you draw that line? I don't know exactly where to draw it. When I think of capitalism, I think of things though, like removal of interventionist central planning and allowing the free market to run with few guardrails. And then there's an issue like labor unionization. I don't really know about something like that. This is a real estate show. I'm still forming an opinion on a topic like that. In you know, some of this gets political, and that's beyond the scope of get rich education. The Fed was created in 1913 that central planning, its central banking from 1987 to. 2006 Alan Greenspan reigned as Fed chair. Those were his years, and he became even more interventionist. And then his successor, Ben Bernanke, maybe even more so with quantitative easing and such. Let's talk about, should they end the Fed and capitalism with this week's expert guest. You very well may have heard of the late, famed Austrian American economist Ludwig von Mises today, the Mises Institute carries on his legacy, and this week's guest is none other than the President of the Mises Institute. He's also the number one best selling author of how capitalism saved America and his newer book with a title that I love, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Economics. Hey, it's great to have you here. It is. Dr Thomas DiLorenzo.   Dr Thomas DiLorenzo  11:00 pleased to be with you. Thanks for having me.Th   Keith Weinhold  11:02 Well, Dr DiLorenzo, for those that don't know, just tell us a bit in an overview about Austrian economics and what Ludwig von Mises stood for.   Dr Thomas DiLorenzo  11:02 Well, Ludwig von Mises was the preeminent critic of socialism and fascism in Europe, and in his day, he fled the Nazis literally hours before the Gestapo broke into his apartment in Geneva, because he was the preeminent critic of fascism and socialism, and he was also Jewish, and so he had to get out of town. And he miraculously ended up after wandering through Europe with his wife in New York City, and he taught at New York University for many years, until he died in 1973 and but the Austrian School of Economics is a school of thought. It has nothing to do with, necessarily, with the Government of Austria, the country of Austria, just this the founder of a man named Carl Menger happened to be from Austria, but probably the most famous or well known among Americans would be Friedrich Hayek, who won the Nobel Prize in 1970s he was a student of Ludwig von Mises and critics of interventionism, critics of socialism. We teach about free markets, of how markets actually work and how governments don't work. And that's in a nutshell, that's what it's about. And you could check out our website, mises.org, M, I, S, E, S.org, you can get a great economic education. We have a lot of free books to download. Some of them are downloaded 30 or 40,000 times a month. Still, it's even Mises old books like human action, first published in the 1960s and so you can get a great education just by reading our website.   Keith Weinhold  12:42 Well, congratulations, that's proof that you're doing an excellent job of carrying on the Mises legacy into the present day, a lot of which is championing capitalism. Do we have capitalism in the United States today?   Dr Thomas DiLorenzo  12:59 I was an economics professor from 40 years before I got this job as President of the Mises Institute. And I used to say we had islands of socialism in a sea of capitalism at the beginning of my career. But now I'd say it's the opposite, that we have islands of capitalism in a sea of socialism. And socialism, this data is not defined anymore as government ownership. That was, you know, about 100 years ago, the socialism. It's basically government control of industry and in addition to government ownership. So the instruments of the welfare state, the income tax and the regulatory state, is our version of socialism, or central planning, if you will. And it's the Federal Reserve the Fed, which is a government agency that orchestrates the whole thing, really, it's a big, massive central planning industry that controls, regulates basically every aspect of any kind of financial transaction imaginable. They list in their publications over 100 different functions of the Federal Reserve. It's not just monetary policy. It's a big regulatory behemoth, and so that's that's what the Fed is. That's what I think we have today. A friend of mine, Robert Higgs, a well known economic historian, says our system is what he calls participatory fascism. And fascism was a system where private enterprise was permitted, but it was so heavily regulated and regimented by the government that industry had to do what government wanted to do, not what its customers wanted it to do, so much, and a large part of our economic system is just like that, and we get to vote still, so that's where the participatory and comes in, and the pin of Robert Hinz.   Keith Weinhold  14:41 yeah, maybe at best, I can think of today's system as capitalism with guardrails on but the guardrails keep getting taller. And I think of guardrails as being, for example, regulatory agencies like the Fed in FINRA. In the FDA.   Dr Thomas DiLorenzo  15:01 It is the beginning of my career. You know, I studied economics and a PhD in economics, and there was a big literature on what's called regulatory capture. And it was sort of a big secret among US economic academics. There was all this research going on and how the big regulatory agencies created by the federal government in the late 19th, early 20th centuries, were captured by the industries that they were supposed to be regulating. Right? The theory was they would regulate these industries in the public's best interests. But what has happened from the very beginning is they were captured by the industries, and they benefit the industry at the expense of the public. But today, that's caught on thanks to people like Robert Kennedy Jr, frankly, has been a very popular author. He sold a gazillion copies of his book on Anthony Fauci, and in it, he explains in tremendous detail how the Food and Drug Administration was long ago captured by the pharmaceutical companies. And he's not the only one. I think that that is being more and more recognized by people outside of academic economics, like me, and that's a good thing, and that's sort of the worst example of crony capitalism. It's not real capitalism, but crony capitalism making money through government connections, rather than producing better products, cheaper products and so forth.   Keith Weinhold  16:21 I watched RFK Jr speak in person recently, and I was actually disappointed when he effectively dropped out of the upcoming presidential race. And I do want to talk more with you about the Fed shortly, but with all these regulatory agencies and how I liken them to guard rails. You know, I sort of think of it as a watchdog system that's failing. You mentioned the FDA. I know RFK Jr brought them up an awful lot, the Food and Drug Administration that are supposed to help regulate what we put inside our own bodies in our diet. But these systems are failing. We have regulatory agencies in industry, industry in regulatory agencies. I mean, look at the obesity rate. Look at all the ultra processed food that's allowed. Look at all the seed oils that are allowed in food that people actually think are healthy for them. So this system of capitalism with guardrails is failing almost everywhere you look.   Dr Thomas DiLorenzo  16:22 I wouldn't call it capitalism. I wouldn't use the word capitalism at all, other than crony capitalism, people can relate to that. You know, a lot of these regulatory agencies were lobbied for in the first place by industry. That while the very first one was the Interstate Commerce Commission, it was in the 1880s it was meant to regulate the railroad companies. The first president was the president of a Railroad Corporation, the head of the Interstate Commerce Commission. So talk about the fox guarding the hen house. That was from the very beginning. And so in a sense, this word capture theory of regulation, which Kennedy has used, they weren't really captured. They always were created by the government. The same is true of all the so called Public Utilities. It was the corporations, the electric power companies, the water supply companies, that lobbied for governments to give them a monopoly, a legal monopoly, in electricity, water supply and all these things that were called natural monopolies, but there was nothing natural about them. There was vigorous competition in the early 20th century in telephone, electricity, water supply, and that was all set aside by government regulation, creating monopolies. For example, in electric power, there's an economist named Walter primo who wrote a book some years ago showing that always have been several dozen cities in America that never went this way, that always allowed direct competition between electric power companies. And what do you know, better service and lower prices. As a result, they did dozens of statistical studies to demonstrate this in his book.   Keith Weinhold  18:58 Okay, well, that's a great case study. Why don't we talk about what things would look like if we took down one of these agencies? We're a real estate investing in finance show. Sometimes it's a popular meme or hashtag to say, end the Fed. What would it look like if we ended the Fed?   Dr Thomas DiLorenzo  19:18 Well, the Fed was created in 1913 in the same era, with all these other regulatory captured agencies were created, right? And it was created basically to cartelize and create a cartel for the banking industry to make it almost impossible to go bankrupt. They've been bailing out foolish bankers for 111 years. And of course, the biggest example was that as the crash of 08 after they they handed Goldman Sachs and other big investment banks billions of dollars. That was a direct assault on capitalism itself, because capitalism, as you know, is a profit and loss system. It's not a I keep the profits. You pay for my losses system. You're the taxpayer. But that's what happened with that. So the Fed would. Fall into that the Fed is actually the fourth central bank in America. We had three other ones. First one was called Bank of North America. Its currency was so unreliable, nobody trusted it went out of business in a year and a half. And then we created something called the Bank of the United States in 1791 same thing. It created boom and bust cycles, high unemployment, price inflation, corrupted politics. It was defunded after 20 years, and then it was brought back to fund the debt from the war of 1812 and so we had a Second Bank of the United States. It did the same thing, boom and bust cycles, price inflation, corrupted politics. Benefited special interest, but not the general interest, and President Andrew Jackson defunded it, and so we went without a central bank from roughly 1840 until 1913 so we've had experience of that. And what we had been was competing currencies, and that would be sort of a stepping stone. If we got rid of the fed, we wouldn't have to abolish the Fed altogether. We could amend the charter to the Fed to say you're no longer permitted to buy bonds. Can't buy government bonds anymore. That's how they inflate the money supply, right? By buying bonds. That's totally unnecessary. And we could just just that would be a great step forward, and we would sort of whittle away our $80 trillion debt, if you count again upon count the unfunded liabilities of the federal government,   Keith Weinhold  21:26 if we did end the Fed, what would the price of money? Which are interest rates really look like? Would a new market rate be sent by individuals and companies on the free market like Bank of America, with a customer or borrower settling on an interest rate that they both agree to.   Dr Thomas DiLorenzo  21:44 You know, the Fed uses sort of Soviet style economics, price control. The economists and are all getting all over Kamala Harris for recommendations for price controls on rent and other things. Well, the Fed price control. They control the price of money. That's what they do. And so there's a big, kind of a comical thing that here you have all these economists, if they were to teach economics in the week one, they would teach about the bad effects of price controls, and then they get a job at the Fed, and they spend their whole career enforcing price controls on money, and the interest rate would be determined by supply and demand for credit and inflationary expectations. That's what the market does. And you wouldn't have these bureaucrats at the Fed tinkering around with interest rates, creating tremendous arbitrage opportunities for Wall Street investors. With all the movements and interest rates, you'd have much more stable interest rates, and and you wouldn't have this ridiculous system where the Fed says we need to always have forever at least 2% inflation. And of course, they never meet that, and they lie about it. I don't believe for one minute that the price inflation right now is 3% or under 3% that's ridiculous, right? And so things should be getting cheaper. Everything should be getting cheaper because of all the technology we have. My first PC I bought in the early 80s for $4,000 and it was a piece of prehistoric junk compared to my cell phone today, that almost for free. Almost everything should be like that agriculture, but the reason it isn't is the Fed keeps pumping so much money in circulation, that it pumps up the demand for goods and services, and that's what creates price inflation. And by its own admission, that's what it does, even though it's charter, it's original charter said they're supposed to fight inflation. All of a sudden, about 10 years ago or so, they announced, south of blue, we always have to have at least 2% inflation. Congress had nothing to do with that. President had nothing to do with that, and the people of America had nothing to do with that. It was dictators like Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke that just make these announcements. And where does that come from when we live under the dictatorship of the Fed? And of course, the people who are hurt the most by the Fed are elderly people are living on relatively fixed incomes and are forced to become Wall Street speculators they want to make any more money other than their fixed income, where, you know, during the days of Greenspan, when they're pursuing zero interest rates, maybe the mortgage industry like that, but the people on retirement income were starving as a result of that. So it's been sort of an economic war on the retired population.   Keith Weinhold  24:24 Things should get faster and cheaper to produce, like you said. However, there's definitely one thing that's not getting faster to produce, that's housing build times. Housing build times have actually gone up, which is sort of another discussion unto itself. But we talk about the Fed and then setting prices. People wouldn't stand for setting the price or having price controls on oil or lumber or bananas, but yet we set the price of money itself. People have just become accustomed to that. Yet it's that money itself that we use to buy oil and lumber and bananas the fed with that dual mandate of stable prices and maximum employment. If we did abolish the Fed, what would happen to the rate of inflation?   Dr Thomas DiLorenzo  25:12 Well, we would have less inflation. It's supposed to what we replace it with. There's some system would be a replacement, but we wouldn't have the boom and bust cycles that we have now. There's been research in the past 100 years or so of the Fed, and what the academic researchers have concluded is that the Fed has made the economy in general more unstable than it was before we had the Fed and price inflation. That's a joke. The dollar is worth maybe three cents of what it was in the year 1913 right when the Fed was created. So it has failed on all accounts. And so if we got rid of it, we would reverse that. The idea would be to start out with a competing money system. And I'll tell you a quick story is, you know the word Dixie from the south, you know land of Dixie that was named after a currency by a New Orleans bank called the Dix D, I x 10 in French, and it was 100% gold reserve. It was backed by something real and valuable, and it was so popular as even used in Minnesota. But that's why the whole south, the states in the South, were using this currency, because it was so reliable. But during the Civil War, the national currency acts imposed taxes on the competing currencies and taxed them out of business and established the greenback dollar, as it was called, as the Monopoly money of the country. We didn't get a central bank during the Civil War, but we got that. And so that's the kind of system that we would have. Friedrich Hayek wrote a whole book about this, about competing currencies, called the denationalization of money. He poses that as a good stepping stone to a freer market in money. And like you said, Money is the most important thing. Is most more important than bananas or shoes or any of these other things that we might have price controls on.   Keith Weinhold  27:01 All right, so we're talking about the case for ending the Fed. What is the counter argument? I mean, other than the government wanting control, is there a valid, or any academic counter argument for keeping the Fed in place?   Dr Thomas DiLorenzo  27:16 The Fed has an army. I call it the Fed's Praetorian Guard of academics. There was a research article published by an economist named Larry White at George Mason University several years ago, and he found that 75% of all the articles in the academic journals regarding money, monetary policy and so forth, are by people who are basically paid by the Fed, one way or the other. Either they're fed economists, or they've been invited to a conference by the Fed, or they're an intern some relationship with the Fed. The late Milton Friedman once said, If you want a career as a monetary economist, it's not a good idea to criticize the biggest employer in your field. So there's a lot of nonsense about that. And so yes, you'll have all sorts of rationales, but it basically comes down to this, that we think we can do central planning better than the Russians did under communism, because the Fed is basically an economic central planning agency, and there's no reason to believe Americans are better at it than the Russians or anybody else. And it basically comes down to that, you know, studying the past 111 years that's showing Well, yeah, they've been trying that for 111 years. They've made the economy more unstable, and they have failed miserably to control inflation. And why should we give them another chance? Why should we continue along this road? We shouldn't So, yeah, there'll be all kind of excuses the late Murray Rothbard, who was one of the founders of the Mises, who once answered this question by saying, It's as though people said, Well, say the government always made shoes. 100 years ago they took over the shoe industry. People would be saying, who will make shoes if the government doesn't make shoes? The government has always made shoes, right? But the government has not always monopolized the money supply. It's only like I said, we abolished three Feds in our history. In American history, they weren't called the Fed, but they were central banks. And the Fed is called a central bank, and we've done that three times. We've abolished more central banks than we have kept in American history.   Keith Weinhold  29:17  We're talking with Dr Thomas D Lorenzo. He is the president of the Mises Institute. About, is there really any capitalism left more when we come back, this is Get Rich Education. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold,  hey, you can get your mortgage loans at the same place where I get mine, at Ridge lending group and MLS 42056, they provided our listeners with more loans than any provider in the entire nation, because they specialize in income properties, they help you build a long term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage. You can start your pre qualification and chat with President Caeli Ridge personally. Start now while it's on your mind at RidgeLendingGroup.com, that's Ridgelendinggroup.com. Your bank is getting rich off of you. The national average bank account pays less than 1% on your savings. If your money isn't making 4% you're losing your hard earned cash to inflation. Let the liquidity fund help you put your money to work with minimum risk, your cash generates up to an 8% return with compound interest year in and year out. Instead of earning less than 1% sitting in your bank account, the minimum investment is just 25k you keep getting paid until you decide you want your money back. Their decade plus track record proves they've always paid their investors 100% in full and on time. And I would know, because I'm an investor too. Earn 8% hundreds of others are text family to 66866, learn more about freedom. Family investments, liquidity fund on your journey to financial freedom through passive income. Text, family to 66866.   Kristen Tate  31:11 This is author Kristen Tate. Listen to Get Rich Education with Keith Weinhold, and Don't quit Your Daydream.   Keith Weinhold  31:27 welcome back to get rich education. We're talking with Dr Thomas DiLorenzo. He is the president of the Mises Institute. You can learn more about them @mises.org and Dr DiLorenzo. Frederick Hayek, an economist that you mentioned very well known and a student of Ludwig von Mises, he believed that prices are a communication mechanism between a buyer and a seller. Say, for example, there's a new style of single family rental home that everyone wants to rent. So therefore the rent price goes up when other builders see that the rent price goes up, that brings in more builder competition, and with more competition, that brings rent prices down, and then the world is filled with abundant housing, rather than a scarcity of housing. So that's how I think of a free market system within capitalism as working, as defined through Hayek.   Dr Thomas DiLorenzo  32:22 You know, the consumer is king. Von Mises once wrote about the same point where he said that people mistakenly believe that it's the bankers and the CEOs and the businesses that control what gets produced and so forth, but it's really the consumer. You build a housing development then people don't want those houses. You'll find out real fast who's in charge. It's not the mortgage brokers. It's not the bankers. It's not you, it's the consumer. That's the free market system, and if you do without it, and not using the free market system, whether it's for money or anything else, is kind of like trying to find your way around a strange city with no street signs, and the prices are the street signs that tell us what to do, exactly like you said, if there's strong demand for a certain type of housing, that'll drive the price up, and that'll tell the home builders, we can make money building more of these. And they will do that. Nobody tells them. The Chairman of the Fed doesn't have to tell them that the President doesn't have to tell them that Congress doesn't have to issue a declaration telling them to do that. That was the Soviet Union where they tried that. And that's the great thing about the market, is that the consumer can tell the richest man in the world like Elon Musk, go play in the traffic. Elon Musk, if they don't like his cars or whatever he's producing, even though he's the richest man in the world. And he understands that he's a pretty successful businessman, I would say, and so so he understands that the consumer is his boss.   Keith Weinhold  33:53 Well, what else do we need to know? You have published a lot of celebrated books, from how capitalism saved America to the politically incorrect guide to economics. What else might a real estate investor or an economic enthusiast need to know today? Oh,   Dr Thomas DiLorenzo  34:10 well, I think everybody needs to be their own economist. You can listen to the talking heads on TV and on podcasts and all that, but educate yourself and become your own economist. Because a lot of the people on TV, as you might see on the news, they have an ax to grind, or they have a sort of a hidden financial interest beyond what they're saying, Be your own economist. And that's why I'm selling my website, which is everything on it, it's for free, mises.org, and there are quite a few others too. You don't have to go to school, you don't have to get a degree. You can get a good economic education, for example, on money. We're in the middle of giving away 100,000 copies of a book called What has government done to our money. I'm Murray rothbar. You go to our website, scroll down to the bottom, and you can fill out a form online, and we'll send you free books and. You can educate yourself that way. And so just in general, I think that's what people need to do. I taught MBA students for many years who are people in their 30s or maybe even early 40s, who didn't have economics degrees, but they were really into it, and for the first time in their careers, they decided maybe I should understand how the economic world that I live in and work in every day operates rather than going through your life and your career without you. Might know all about real estate sales, but it's also useful to know about the economy in general and how things work.   Keith Weinhold  35:35 And when one becomes their own economic student and they take that on, I think it's important for them, like you touched on to not just consume the economic news that's on CNBC or other major media, because that doesn't really tell you how to create wealth. It might inform you, but it doesn't necessarily tell you how to take action. For example, on this show an educational channel, you might learn about a story about rising inflation like we had starting three or four years ago. And here we talk about how, okay, if inflation is going to be a long term economic force, you may or may not like what the Fed is doing, but rather than save money, borrow money, outsource that debt service to the tenant on a cash flowing asset like a single family home or an apartment building. And that inflation that you're learning about on CNBC will actually benefit you and debase your debt with prudent leverage on a property, for example, so not just consuming the news, but learning and educating yourself and acting.   Dr Thomas DiLorenzo  36:34 Oh, sure, well It just so happens that last night, I was talking to a friend of mine who's a real estate professional. They're all talking about, Oh, are we going to have a slight drop in interest rates? And I reminded them that there will be a part of the market if they see it, if we do have a slight drop in interest rates, we'll look at that and say, well, maybe this is a new trend. And so I'll sit back and I'll wait. I'm not going to buy now, because I think the interest rates are going to go down even further in the next six months there were, there would be some segment of the market that thinks that way. And so that's just one little thing. Another thing I would mention is that one of the basic tenets of free market economics is that voluntary trade is mutually beneficial. People buy and sell from each other, because both sides benefit. And that's very important for any business person to keep in mind as you structure business deals, because you know about business deal that is successful is basically, I will give you what you want, and you give me what I want, and we're both happy. And that's that's one of the main tenets of how the market works. Voluntary exchange is mutually beneficial. So think about how to make it mutually beneficial, and you'll succeed in making a deal.   Keith Weinhold  37:45 Well, it's been an excellent discussion on Is there any capitalism left, and how would it look like if we turned the course and created more capitalism here in the United States? It's been great having you on the show.   Dr Thomas DiLorenzo  37:58 Thank you.   Keith Weinhold  38:05 Yeah , again, Learn more @mises.org or look up books by Dr Thomas DiLorenzo. His viewpoint is that there are now merely islands of capitalism in a sea of socialism where those conditions were inverted last century. We've got to end the complex between the government and corporations that these watchdogs are basically powerless when the fox is guarding the henhouse. Dr dilorezzo says we could change the Fed charter so that they couldn't buy bonds, which should reduce inflation. So he does offer a way forward there, a solution.  In capitalism, he consumer is king. This is a good thing. You yourself are empowered because you get to vote with your dollars. So therefore what you buy more of society will see and make more of but a prosperous, progressive economy that should be able to produce goods and services that are constantly cheaper because they get more and more efficient to make with innovation, but centrally planned inflation makes them more expensive, at least in dollar denominated terms. So progress should make things cheaper? Well, then everything should take fewer dollars to buy, homes, oil, bananas, grapes, but it doesn't, and it won't anytime soon, like I mentioned in the interview, there single family build times are taking even longer. That's not more efficient, and they're sure not getting cheaper. In fact, the National Association of Home Builders tells us that from permit to completion in 2015 it took 7.2 months to build a single family home. By 2019 it was up to 8.1 months and then. Last year, the time required to build a single family home from permit to completion was 10.1 months. That's not the side of an efficient economy. So basically, therefore, in the last eight, nine years, the time to build a home has gone from 7.2 months up to 10.1 months. That is a drastic increase in a short period of time. Just amazing. And we now have data after covid as well, broken down by region. The longest build time, by the way, is in New England, where it is 13.9 months to build a home from permit to completion. Gosh, such inefficiency. But despite all that stuff that you might find discouraging like that, I want to go out on a good news note here some encouraging sentiment for you, if you champion free markets, then invest in us rental property down the road, there is no centrally controlled ceiling on what you can sell your property for. Most places don't have rent control. In fact, there's been no federal rent control on private property since World War Two. And somewhat ironically, you benefit. You actually benefit from government backed loans at these low fixed rates, and now they're moderate fixed rates. You often get these through Fannie Freddie or the FHA. See you benefit from that particular government backing as a savvy borrower for rental property. And on top of this, you use the GRE inflation triple crown to flip over that not so capitalistic inflationary force. You flip it upside down and use it to your benefit, profiting fantastically from inflation. So you know how to take the situation you're given and use it to your advantage rather than your detriment. Big thanks to Dr Thomas DiLorenzo today, longtime econ professor and current Mises Institute president, more ways to build Real Estate Wealth coming up here for you on the show in future weeks, as always, with the dash of economics and wealth mindset. Until then, I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, Don't Quit Your Daydream.   42:28 Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of get rich Education LLC, exclusively,   Keith Weinhold  42:56 The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth, building, getricheducation.com.  

In this week's episode of Retire in Texas, Darryl Lyons, CEO and Co-Founder of PAX Financial Group, dives into the often misunderstood yet vital topic of the Federal Reserve and its profound influence on the economy and your investments. Darryl breaks down the complex functions of the Federal Reserve, from setting monetary policy to banking supervision, and explains how decisions made by the Fed impact everything from inflation to employment. Through personal anecdotes, historical examples, and even a few dad jokes, Darryl demystifies the Fed's role in the market and answers key questions such as whether the Fed is truly independent from the presidency, and how its decisions affect your investment journey. Whether you're a seasoned investor or someone just beginning to explore the financial world, this episode provides a clear and engaging roadmap to better understand the central bank's crucial influence. Key show highlights include: An introduction to the Federal Reserve and its key functions in the U.S. financial system. The Fed's dual mandate: controlling inflation and maximizing employment. How the Fed's interest rate decisions impact everyday investors and the broader economy. Historical moments in the Fed's history, from the Panic of 1907 to the 2008 financial crisis. Insights into past and present Fed Chairs, including Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, and Jerome Powell. Practical takeaways on how understanding the Fed can help you make smarter, long-term investment decisions. Tune in to learn how the Federal Reserve shapes your financial future and gain a better understanding of its influence on both the stock market and the economy. For more resources, visit www.paxfinancialgroup.com. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to share it with a friend! Disclaimer: Clicking the Like button does not constitute a testimonial for, recommendation or endorsement of our advisory firm, any associated person, or our services. Clicking the Like button is merely a mechanism to circulate our social media page. “Like” is not meant in the traditional sense. In addition, postings must refrain from recommending us or providing testimonials for our firm.

From stock price fluctuations to concerns about deflation, the reactions to the Fed rate cut have been varied. But we still need to keep an eye on labor data, says Mike Wilson, our CIO and Chief US Equity Strategist.----- Transcript -----Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Mike Wilson, Morgan Stanley's CIO and Chief US Equity Strategist. Along with my colleagues bringing you a variety of perspectives, today I'll be talking about the Fed's 50 basis point rate cut last week, and the impact on markets.It's Tuesday, Sept 24th at 11:30am in New York.So let's get after it. As discussed last week, I thought that the best short-term case for equities was that the Fed could deliver a 50 basis point cut without prompting growth concerns. Chair Powell was able to thread the needle in this respect, and equities ultimately responded favorably. However, I also believe the labor data will be the most important factor in terms of how equities trade over the next three to six months. On that score, the next round of data will be forthcoming at the end of next week. In my view, that data will need to surprise on the upside to keep equity valuations at their currently elevated level. More specifically, the unemployment rate will need to decline and the payrolls above 140,000 with no negative revisions to prior months. Meanwhile, I am also watching several other variables closely to determine the trajectory of growth. Earnings revision breadth, the best proxy for company guidance, continues to trend sideways for the overall S&P 500 and negatively for the Russell 2000 small cap index. Due to seasonal patterns, this variable is likely to face negative headwinds over the next month.Second, the ISM Purchasing Managers Index has yet to reaccelerate after almost two years of languishing. And finally, the Conference Board Leading Economic Indicator and Employment Trends remain in downward trends; this is typical of a later cycle environment.Bottom line, the Fed's larger than expected rate cut can buy more time for high quality stocks to remain expensive and even help lower quality cyclical stocks to find some support. The labor and other data now need to improve in order to justify these conditions though, through year end.It's also important to point out that the August budget deficit came in nearly $90 billion above forecasts, bringing the year-to-date deficit above $1.8 trillion. We think this fiscal policy has been positive for growth but has resulted in a crowding out within the private economy and financial markets. This is another reason why a recession is the worst-case scenario even though some argue a recession is better than high price levels or inflation for 80-90 per cent of Americans. A recession will undoubtedly bring debt deflation concerns to light, and once those begin, they are hard to reverse. The Fed understands this dynamic better than anyone as first illustrated in Ben Bernanke's famous speech in 2002 entitled “Deflation, Making Sure It Doesn't Happen Here.” In that speech, he highlighted the tools the Fed could use to avoid deflation including coordinated monetary and fiscal policy.We note that gold continues to outperform most stocks including the high-quality S&P 500. Specifically, gold has rallied from just $300 at the time of Bernanke's speech in 2002 to $2600 today. The purchasing power of US dollars has fallen much more than what conventional measures of inflation would suggest.As a result, gold, high-quality real estate, stocks and other inflation hedges have done very well. In fact, the newest fiat currency hedge, crypto, has done the best over the past decade. Meanwhile, lower quality cyclical assets like commodities, small cap stocks and commercial real estate have done poorly in both absolute and relative terms; and are losing serious value when adjusted for purchasing power.The bottom line, we expect this to continue in the short term until something happens to change investors' view about the sustainability of these policies. In order to reverse these trends, either organic growth in the private economy needs to reaccelerate and we'll see a rotation back to the lower quality cyclical assets; or recession arrives, and we finish the cycle and reset all asset prices to levels from which a true broadening out can occur.Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the podcast, leave us a review wherever you listen, and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague today.

Connie's motivational quote today is by – Ben Bernanke, "The ultimate purpose of economics, of course, is to understand and promote the enhancement of well-being." When I was in college many years ago, I double majored in Economics and Finance.  Yes, you can call me a dork!  Even though I was unsure of what I wanted to be when I grew up and I knew that finance and economics were two important topics that I needed to understand to support my future business career.  Fast forward 40 years and understanding these two huge topics has served me well.  I am excited about my conversation today, with my guest expert, Hunter Hastings.  We are not going to have a boring conversation about economics. We are going to dive in and discuss a business's brand, the secret of value creation, and economics in business.   YouTube: https://youtu.be/yKcFQ38qyWg   About Hunter Hastings:  Hunter has been a CEO, a CMO, and a partner in management consulting and venture capital. He's been a co-founder of three consulting startups and is currently an Ambassador for the Mises Institute. Born in the UK, educated at Cambridge University.   How to Get in Touch with Hunter Website:  econ4business.com Email:  hunterhastings@icloud.com   Stalk me online! LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/conniewhitman   Subscribe and listen to the Changing the Sales Game Podcast on your favorite podcast streaming service or on YouTube.  New episodes post every week on webtalkradio.net - listen to Connie dive into new sales and business topics or problems you may have in your business.

Olivier Blanchard is the former chief economist of the IMF and a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. He collaborated with former Fed chair Ben Bernanke to study the responses of 10 central banks to the recent bout of inflation, what we know about its causes, and whether finally getting it back to 2% will require a hard landing. In a wide-ranging chat with Soumaya, he also discusses areas where he has changed his mind, as well as the recent tilt towards the right in France.Soumaya Keynes writes a column each week for the Financial Times. You can find it here.Subscribe to Soumaya's show on Apple, Spotify, Pocket Casts or wherever you listen.Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In part one of this three part series, we consider why a country that issues debt in its own currency can't default unless it chooses to. We also explore how central banks can control interest rates on the national debt. We also consider whether it is possible for government borrowing to crowd out the private sector.SponsorsShopify NetSuiteInsiders Guide Email NewsletterGet our free Investors' Checklist when you sign up for the free Money for the Rest of Us email newsletterOur Premium ProductsAsset CampMoney for the Rest of Us PlusShow NotesMoney In The Modern Economy: An Introduction – Bank of England – Q1 2014Money Creation In The Modern Economy – Bank of England – Q1 2014Congressional Budget Office 2017 Long-term Budget OutlookGoing for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis – Michael D. TannerBernanke's Paradox: Can He Reconcile His Position on the Federal Budget with His Recent Charge to Prevent Deflation? – Pavlina R. Tcherneva – Levy Institute (includes quotes referenced in episode by Ben Bernanke and Michael WoodfordNew Framework for Strengthening Monetary Easing: “Quantitative and Qualitative Monetary Easing with Yield Curve Control” – Bank of JapanJapan's Debt Burden Is Quietly Falling the Most in the World – BloombergThe Bone Clocks – David MitchellVenezuela Is Starving – Juan Forero – Wall Street JournalCurse or Blessing? How Institutions Determine Success in Resource-Rich Economies – Cato InstituteForget Taxes, Warren Buffett Says. The Real Problem Is Health Care. – New York TimesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Chapter 1 What's The Federal Reserve And The Financial Crisis Book by Ben Bernanke"The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis" is a book written by Ben Bernanke, who served as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 2006 to 2014. In this book, Bernanke provides a comprehensive analysis of the 2008 financial crisis and the actions taken by the Federal Reserve to stabilize the economy and prevent further damage.Bernanke offers insights into the causes of the financial crisis, the challenges faced by policymakers in responding to the crisis, and the lessons learned from the experience. He explains how the Federal Reserve implemented unprecedented measures, such as lowering interest rates and implementing quantitative easing, to support the financial system and stimulate economic growth.Overall, "The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis" provides a detailed account of the Federal Reserve's role in managing the financial crisis and offers valuable insights into the workings of the central bank during a period of economic turmoil.Chapter 2 Is The Federal Reserve And The Financial Crisis Book A Good BookYes, "The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis" by Ben Bernanke is generally considered a good book. Bernanke, who served as chairman of the Federal Reserve during the financial crisis of 2008, provides valuable insights into the decisions and actions taken by the Fed during that time. The book offers a detailed analysis of the causes of the crisis and the Fed's response to it, making it a valuable resource for anyone interested in understanding the events of the financial crisis.Chapter 3 The Federal Reserve And The Financial Crisis Book by Ben Bernanke Summary"The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis" is a book authored by Ben Bernanke, who was the Chairman of the Federal Reserve during the 2008 financial crisis. In this book, Bernanke provides an insider's perspective on the actions taken by the Federal Reserve to address the crisis and prevent a complete economic collapse.Bernanke explains the factors that led to the crisis, including the housing market bubble, subprime mortgage lending, and the interconnected nature of the global financial system. He details the steps taken by the Federal Reserve to stabilize the financial system, including providing liquidity to struggling banks, lowering interest rates, and implementing unconventional monetary policies such as quantitative easing.Bernanke also discusses the challenges faced by the Federal Reserve during the crisis, including criticism from politicians and the public, as well as the difficult decisions that had to be made in order to prevent a full-blown depression. He reflects on the lessons learned from the crisis and provides insights into how the Federal Reserve can better prepare for future financial crises.Overall, "The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis" offers a comprehensive and insightful account of the actions taken by the Federal Reserve during one of the most challenging economic periods in recent history. Bernanke's firsthand account provides valuable insights for policymakers, economists, and anyone interested in understanding the role of the Federal Reserve in times of crisis. Chapter 4 The Federal Reserve And The Financial Crisis Book AuthorBen Bernanke is an American economist who served as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 2006 to 2014. He released the book "The Federal Reserve And The Financial Crisis" in 2013. In addition to this book, Bernanke has also written "Essays on the Great Depression" (2000) and...

The majority of my tribe, economists have been getting it wrong for decades, if you go back and look at economic research from the seventies, nobody is talking about coming inequality. Yet inequality afflicts the West, dominating politics. This week, in a not-so-groundbreaking revelation, Ben Bernanke's report on the Bank of England's failures shows us how out-of-touch economists really are. Economists need to get out more, mix a bit, walkabout more! A blind faith in mathematical precision has clouded our judgment. Humans are messy and economics is about humans, so let's be messy.Pre-order Money:A Story of Humanity here: https://linktr.ee/moneydavidmcwilliams Join the gang! https://plus.acast.com/s/the-david-mcwilliams-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In a recent interview with 60 Minutes, Fed chairman Jerome Powell gave assurances that the US banking system is sound. Ben Bernanke also claimed almost twenty years ago that real estate markets were not overextended. The hubris must be in the water at the Eccles Building.Original Article: Hubris Runs Rampant at the Fed

In a recent interview with 60 Minutes, Fed chairman Jerome Powell gave assurances that the US banking system is sound. Ben Bernanke also claimed almost twenty years ago that real estate markets were not overextended. The hubris must be in the water at the Eccles Building.Original Article: Hubris Runs Rampant at the Fed

In a recent interview with 60 Minutes, Fed chairman Jerome Powell gave assurances that the US banking system is sound. Ben Bernanke also claimed almost twenty years ago that real estate markets were not overextended. The hubris must be in the water at the Eccles Building. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.

Gauti Eggertsson is a professor of economics at Brown University and is the author of several recent papers on the causes of the 2021-22 inflation surge and the lessons to be drawn from it for monetary policy going forward. Gauti is also a returning guest to Macro Musings, and he rejoins the show to talk about these papers and their findings. Specifically, David and Gauti discuss the role of the Fed's FAIT framework in the post-pandemic inflation surge, the return of the non-linear Phillips curve, the merits of nominal GDP targeting and average nominal output targeting, Gauti's policy suggestions for the Fed, and a lot more.   Transcript for this week's episode.   Gauti's Twitter: @GautiEggertsson Gauti's website Gauti's Brown University profile   David Beckworth's Twitter: @DavidBeckworth Follow us on Twitter: @Macro_Musings   Join the Macro Musings mailing list! Check out our new Macro Musings merch!   Related Links:   *The Inflation Surge of the 2020s: The Role of Monetary Policy* by Gauti Eggertsson and Donald Kohn   *It's Baaack: The Surge in Inflation in the 2020s and the Return of the Non-Linear Phillips Curve* by Pierpaolo Benigno and Gauti Eggertsson   *The Slanted-L Phillips Curve* by Pierpaolo Benigno and Gauti Eggertsson   *A Toolkit for Solving Models with a Lower Bound on Interest Rates of Stochastic Duration* by Gauti Eggertsson, Sergey Egiev, Alessandro Lin, Josef Platzer, and Luca Riva   *The Fed's New Policy Framework: A Major Improvement but More Can Be Done* by Gauti Eggertsson, Sergey Egiev, Alessandro Lin, Josef Platzer, and Luca Riva   *The Princeton School and the Zero Lower Bound* by Scott Sumner   *Temporary Price-Level Targeting: An Alternative Framework for Monetary Policy* by Ben Bernanke

Become a Client: https://nomadcapitalist.com/apply/ Get our free Weekly Rundown newsletter and be the first to hear about breaking news and offers: https://nomadcapitalist.com/email Get on the waiting list and join us for the next Nomad Capitalist Live: https://nomadcapitalist.com/live/ Brace yourselves for an eye-opening journey into the economic foresight of Peter Schiff! This exclusive clip is extracted from our vault, featuring never-before-seen footage from our very first Passport to Freedom event, held in 2014. Peter Schiff takes the stage to dissect the economic landscape, sharing insights that remain as relevant as ever. From assessing the optimism at the World Economic Forum to dissecting the legacies of Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen, Schiff's perspectives provide a unique lens into the economic challenges faced by the US. Nomad Capitalist has served as the “architect” and “general contractor” for 1,500+ clients who wanted one company to manage their holistic plans. We help these clients keep more of their wealth, increase their personal freedom, and protect their families and wealth against current and future threats at home. Our in-house team of researchers, strategists, and executioners know more about these strategies than just about anyone. We've also spent more than a decade building a trusted network of attorneys, accountants, real estate agents, and others to assist our clients. As a result, our approach is not only holistic, but agnostic; we offer our clients advice on and options in 90+ countries, more than any other firm by far. If you're looking to diversify internationally, whether for lower taxes or as a “Plan B”, trust the industry pioneers at Nomad Capitalist and our experience serving the needs of globally-minded entrepreneurs and investors. Become Our Client: https://nomadcapitalist.com/apply/ Our Website: http://www.nomadcapitalist.com/ About Our Company: https://nomadcapitalist.com/about/ Buy Mr. Henderson's Book: https://nomadcapitalist.com/book/ DISCLAIMER: The information in this video should not be considered tax, financial, investment, or any kind of professional advice. Only a professional diagnosis of your specific situation can determine which strategies are appropriate for your needs. Nomad Capitalist can and does not provide advice unless/until engaged by you.

While the Fed fights generationally high inflation, the U.S. economy continues to grow, supported by high levels of spending. This has affected both the bond and equity markets.----- Transcript -----Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Mike Wilson, Chief Investment Officer and Chief U.S. Equity Strategist for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about the latest trends in the financial marketplace. It's Monday, August 14, at 11 a.m. in New York. So let's get after it. At the trough of the pandemic recession in April 2020, we first introduced our thesis that the health care emergency would usher in a new era of fiscal policy. The result would be higher inflation than monetary policy was able to attain on its own over the prior decade. In the first phase of this new policy regime, we referred to it as helicopter money, as described by Milton Friedman in the early 1970s and then highlighted by Ben Bernanke after the tech bubble as a policy that could always be employed to avoid a deflationary bust. Handing out checks to people is a fairly radical policy, however, the COVID pandemic was the perfect emergency to try it. The policy shift worked so well to keep the economy afloat during the lockdowns that the government decided to double down on the strategy by doing an additional $3 trillion of direct fiscal spending in the first quarter of 2021. This excessive fiscal policy is why money supply growth increased to a record level at 25% year-over-year in early 2021, and why we finally got the inflation central banks had been trying so hard to achieve post the great financial crisis. After the financial crisis, the velocity of money collapsed, while the Fed's balance sheet ballooned to levels never seen before. The reason we didn't get inflation in that initial episode of quantitative easing is because the money created remained trapped in bank reserves rather than in a real economy where it could drive excess demand in higher prices, a dynamic that's been obviously very different this time. Fortunately, the Fed is responding to this generationally high inflation with the most aggressive tightening of monetary policy in 40 years. But this is the definition of fiscal dominance, monetary policy is beholden to the whims of fiscal policy. First, it had to be overly supportive and fund the record deficits in 2020 and 21, and then it had to react with historically tighter policy once inflation got out of control. Back in 2020, we turned very bullish on equities on this shift of fiscal dominance and also subsequently indicated it would lead to a period of hotter but shorter economic earning cycles, mainly because the Fed would not have the same flexibility to proactively try to extend economic expansions. We also argued that catching these cycles on both the upside and downside would be critical for equity investors to outperform. From 2020 to 2022, we found ourselves on the right side of that dynamic both up and down, this year, not so much. Part of the reason we found ourselves offsides this year is due to the very large fiscal impulse restarting last year and remaining quite strong in 2023. In fact, we have rarely ever seen such large deficits when the unemployment rate is so low and inflation well above target. If fiscal policy is showing little constraint in good times, what happens to the deficit when the next recession arrives? The main takeaway for the equity market this year is that fiscal policy has allowed the economy to grow faster than forecasted and has given rise to the consensus view that the risk of recession has faded considerably. Furthermore, with the recent lifting of the debt ceiling until 2025, this aggressive fiscal spending could continue. However, the sustainability of such fiscal policy is the primary reason why Fitch recently downgraded the U.S. Treasury debt. Combined with the substantial increase in the supply of Treasury notes and bonds expected to fund these government expenditures, bond markets have sold off considerably this past month. This should start to call into question the valuations of equities, which were already high even before this recent rise in yields. Furthermore, if fiscal spending must be curtailed due to either higher political or funding costs, the unfinished earnings decline that began last year is more likely to resume as our forecast is still predicting. Equity markets seem to have noticed, with many of the best performing stocks correcting by 10% or more. Even if one is bullish on stocks, such a correction was necessary to reset investor exuberance. The challenge will come this fall if growth fails to materialize as now expected. In that case, a healthy 5 to 10% pullback may turn into the much more significant correction we were expecting to occur in the first half of this year. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please take a moment to rate and review us on the Apple Podcasts app. It helps more people to find the show.

PHOTO: NO KNOWN RESTRICTIONS ON PUBLICATION. @BATCHELORSHOW #MrMarket:Ben Bernanke writes of the Jerome Powell fail on rates. Liz Peek, Fox News, The Hill https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-inflation-erupted-two-top-economists-have-the-answer-6919042c?mod=hp_lead_pos10

Former Fed chair Ben Bernanke and two colleagues were awarded an economics Nobel for research on the role banks play in financial crises — research that's shaped the global financial system.

In 72 hours, Kanye West said enough stuff to get blocked by social media — but the Ye drama really reveals Elon's future for Twitter. Netflix just announced their biggest movie of the year will debut… in theaters? (*checks notes*) Physical movie theaters. And the award for Nobel Prize in Economics goes to: Ben Bernanke and his beard — For an essay in 1983 that saved us in 2008. $NFLX $AMC $META $TWTR $SPOT $AAPL Follow The Best One Yet on Instagram, Twitter, and Tiktok: @tboypod And now watch us on Youtube Want a Shoutout on the pod? Fill out this form Got the Best Fact Yet? We got a form for that too Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices