Podcasts about Bretton Woods

In Episode 14 of the Noss Gold Treasure, the investigation shifts to the early 1970s as President Richard Nixon positions himself to gain access to the vast fortune hidden inside Victorio Peak. The episode explores a pivotal July 6, 1970 meeting at Nixon's Western White House in San Clemente, California, where geologist Keith Alexander—representing a coalition of treasure hunters known as the "Filthy 50"—met with Nixon and Domestic Affairs Advisor John Ehrlichman. Alexander revealed secret knowledge of 742 gold bars weighing 40 to 50 pounds each (totaling over 3 million troy ounces) stockpiled at White Sands, seeking executive immunity and an official agreement to monetize the gold through the U.S. Mint.Three days after the San Clemente meeting, Ehrlichman dispatched a personal memorandum to Treasury Secretary David M. Kennedy inquiring how the group could legally recover and sell the treasure. On July 17, 1970, Secretary Kennedy responded with an accommodating roadmap, noting that no federal license was required to search for or possess buried treasure, while proposing a 50/50 split with the government based on the prior Fort Huachuca precedent. However, when Kennedy proved too rigid regarding strict regulatory compliance, Nixon replaced him on February 11, 1971, with former Texas Governor John Connally—a close associate of Lyndon B. Johnson and an alleged co-incorporator of the LaRue Corporation, an entity formed in 1967 to manage and launder Victorio Peak gold proceeds.The episode then unpacks one of the most consequential economic maneuvers in modern American history: Nixon's live televised address on Sunday, August 15, 1971, closing the gold window and ending the direct convertibility of U.S. dollars into gold. By dismantling the Bretton Woods monetary system, Nixon eliminated international audits and physical reserve accountability, effectively creating a systemic blind spot where missing national reserves or illicitly extracted military gold could no longer be tracked or audited.Connecting internal White House memorandums, Treasury Department correspondence, corporate records, and Watergate-era disclosures, Episode 14 details how Nixon installed key gatekeepers and altered global monetary policy to set the stage for the massive thefts that followed. From San Clemente to the Oval Office, this episode exposes how presidential authority and monetary policy intersected with the covert plundering of America's most controversial treasure. Join us for this latest episode as we tell the story so well documented by  author John Clarence.

¿Estamos asistiendo al nacimiento de un nuevo sistema monetario mundial? En esta conversación con César Meseguer, profesor universitario y defensor de la Escuela Austriaca, analizamos el origen secreto de la Reserva Federal, la reunión de Jekyll Island, el Bancor de Keynes, Bretton Woods, el privilegio del dólar, la compra masiva de oro por los bancos centrales, el avance de las stablecoins y la posibilidad de un nuevo patrón monetario digital respaldado por activos reales. Mientras gobiernos y bancos nos venden las bondades del dinero fiduciario y digital, ellos acumulan oro, deuda y poder: ¿están preparando una reforma para salvar el sistema o una nueva arquitectura de control? También explicamos quién podría ganar, qué países quedarían atrapados y cómo proteger el patrimonio mediante oro, inmuebles, empresas sólidas y conocimiento financiero.✅SIN CENSURA en SUBSTACK: https://substack.com/@magnatesladrillo✅¿Necesitas un PSI (Personal Shopper Inmobiliario) para acompañarte a invertir en bienes raíces en la Com.Madrid?: magnatesladrillo@gmail.com✅Si vas en serio «La Biblia del Magnate del Ladrillo» está AQUÍ✅

Denize kıyısı olmayan, doğal kaynakları kısıtlı ve etrafı dev imparatorluklarla çevrili dağlık bir ülke, nasıl oldu da dünyanın finans merkezine dönüştü? İsviçre mucizesinin arkasında sadece tarafsızlık mı var, yoksa çok daha karmaşık bir tarihsel ve finansal mühendislik mi? Bu videoda, İsviçre bankacılığının doğuşunu, yükselişini ve günümüzde yaşadığı kırılmaları tarihsel ve ekonomik bağlamıyla ele alıyoruz. Ömer Özgen bu videoda şunları anlatıyor:Neden İsviçre? Protestan göçü, paralı askerlik, düşük kamu harcamaları ve erken sermaye birikimi İsviçre'yi nasıl bir finans ülkesi yaptı?Gizliliğin İnşası: 1713 Cenevre servet gizliliği yasasından 1934 Bankacılık Gizlilik Yasası'na uzanan süreçte, gizlilik kavramı nasıl bankacılığın merkezine yerleşti?İki Dünya Savaşı Arasında İsviçre: Büyük Buhran, güçlü İsviçre Frangı ve tarafsızlık algısı bankacılığı nasıl bir güvenli limana dönüştürdü?Nazi Altınları: İsviçre'nin Nazi Almanyası ile altın ticareti, üçgen ticaret mekanizması ve İkinci Dünya Savaşı'nda RolüSavaş Sonrası Altın Çağ: Bretton Woods sistemi, Soğuk Savaş ve güçlü frank döneminde İsviçre bankacılığı neden zirveye çıktı?1990'lar ve Sonrası: Aşırı finansallaşma, gizliliğin aşınması, ABD baskısı, otomatik bilgi paylaşımı İsviçre modelini nasıl değiştirdi?Skandallar ve Çöküş: LIBOR skandalı, vergi kaçakçılığı davaları ve 167 yıllık Credit Suisse'in 72 saat içinde çöküşü bize ne anlatıyor?Bugün İsviçre Bankacılığı: Gizlilik sonrası dönemde İsviçre artık ne vadediyor? İsviçre modeli sürdürülebilir mi?Kaynakça: Switzerland and Its Banks: A Short History, Nils Herger, 2023Swiss Finance: Banking, Finance, and Digitalization, HB Meier et al., 2023 Switzerland, Gold and the Banks: Analysis of a Crisis, Jacques RossierCapitals of Capital A History of International Financial Centres, 1780–2005, Youssef Cassis, 2006The Swiss Banking Sector, Oliver Wyman, 2025 The Meltdown, Duncan Mavin, 2024Swiss Made, James Breiding, 2012Zurich and Geneva: The End of the Golden Age, Tobias Straumann ,2018Safety in Numbers: The Mysterious World of Swiss Banking, Nicholas Faith ,1982Swiss Banking: An Analytical History, Hans Bauer, 1998 00:00 Giriş1:39 Altın Çağ4:24 Bankacılığın Tarihi Kökleri14:21 Endüstriyel Bankacılığın Doğuşu20:00 Gizlilik Yasaları26:57 İkinci Dünya Savaşı ve Nazi Altınları34:40 Soğuk Savaş Sonrası Altın Çağ'ın Sonu38:36 Gizliliğin Bitişi41:39 Skandallar ve Credit Suisse'in Batışı46:05 Bankacılığın Güncel Risk ve Avantajları51:21 Kapanış

We welcome Michael Steger of Promethean Action to talk about the ongoing war with Iran and ask the question: Is this really different from the foreign interventions of the past? Then it's time for Weekend Peak Insanity: government-run grocery stores, Europe's latest political and cultural headlines, infuriating court decisions, and whatever else this completely unhinged weekend has thrown our way. As always, I'll try to get your calls and comments in there as well! I REFUSE to Live without Keto Brainz Nootropic Creamer 15% OFF w/ code JULY: https://tinyurl.com/2cess6y7 Every purchase enters you into the America 250 Product Raffle! E-Mail me @ Frank@QuiteFrankly.tv for FREE SAMPLES! JOIN The Culture Club!: https://www.quitefrankly.tv/sponsor Read Books, Watch Film, Keep Frank INDEPENDENT! One-Time Tip: http://www.paypal.me/QuiteFranklyLive Quite Frankly Amazon Storefront: https://amazon.com/shop/quitefranklyofficial Frank's Exquisite Light Roast Coffee: https://www.coffeerevolution.shop/category/quite-frankly Frank's Official MERCH: https://tinyurl.com/f3kbkr4s Gold & Silver: https://quitefrankly.gold Send Holiday cards, Letters, and other small gifts, to the Quite Frankly P.O. Box! Quite Frankly 222 Purchase Street, #105 Rye, NY, 10580 Tip in Crypto: BTC: bc1q97w5aazjf7pjjl50n42kdmj9pqyn5zndwh3lng XRP: rnES2vQV6d2jLpavzf7y97XD4AfK1MjePu Quite Frankly Socials: Twitter/X: @QuiteFranklyTV Instagram: @QuiteFranklyOfficial Discord Chat: https://discord.gg/xPu7YEXXRY Telegram: https://t.me/quitefranklytv Streaming Live On: QuiteFrankly.tv (Powered by Foxhole) Youtube: https://tinyurl.com/yc2cn395 Rumble: https://tinyurl.com/yeytwwyz Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/quitefranklylive Audio On Demand (Please Leave A Nice Rating!): Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/59vma35y iTunes: http://apple.co/2dMURMq Tonight, Promethean Action makes its Quite Frankly debut for a wide-ranging conversation on Iran, tariffs, trade, globalization, the future of the American economy, and why they believe the world is undergoing a historic geopolitical realignment. We'll examine their thesis that today's conflicts are part of a larger struggle over the post-1971 global economic order, and ask the questions many Americans are already asking: Is this really different from the foreign interventions of the past, and what evidence should we watch for in the months ahead? The interview draws directly from Promethean Action's recent presentations on tariffs, Bretton Woods, globalization, Canada, China, and the "American System." Then it's time for Weekend Peak Insanity: government-run grocery stores, Europe's latest political and cultural headlines, bizarre court decisions, and whatever else this completely unhinged weekend has thrown our way. As always, we'll finish the night with your calls, comments, and open lines.

ABD'de 2024 seçimleri yaklaştı. Harris'in mi yoksa Trump'ı mı kazanacağı önemli bir mesele ve tartışma konusuyken Mehmet Yaşar Altundağ Trump'ın hikayesini Reflect Studio'nun sponsorluğunda bizlere anlattı. Yaşar, bu videoda Trump gibi bir liderin neden seçildiğini anlamak ve anlatmak için Amerikan ekonomisinin ve siyasetinin dönüşümünden bahsediyor. II. Dünya Savaşı'nda sonra önce Bretton Woods ile Altın sistemini getiren, ardından küreselleşme ve neoliberalleşmenin öncüsü olan ABD Trump ile beraber eski üretim ve sanayi ekonomisine geri dönüyor. Öyle ki Biden da Trump'ın sanayi destekçisi ve Çin karşıtı politikalarını devam ettiriyor.Reflect Studio'nun sponsorluğunda ABD'nin Büyük Dönüşümü, Trump'ın Gerçek Hikayesi videosu yayında!

For nearly eighty years, the United States has occupied the center of the global financial system. The dollar became the world's reserve currency, Wall Street evolved into the deepest capital market on Earth, and American financial infrastructure quietly became the operating system for global commerce. But what if the rest of the world is no longer asking how to participate in that system? What if it's asking how to build an entirely new one?In this episode of On the Record, Christian Briggs examines one of the most overlooked geopolitical stories unfolding today: the quiet race to reduce dependence on America's financial infrastructure. It begins with an unexpected place—Brazil's Pix payment system—but quickly expands into a much larger investigation involving India's UPI network, Europe's Wero initiative, China's CIPS payment platform, and the growing movement toward payment sovereignty around the world.Rather than focusing on sensational predictions of a dollar collapse, Christian explores a more compelling question: why are countries that often disagree with one another politically arriving at the same strategic conclusion? The answer reveals a profound shift in how governments think about national resilience, financial independence, and the risks of relying too heavily on infrastructure they do not control.Along the way, the episode revisits Bretton Woods, the birth of America's financial supremacy after World War II, the rise of sanctions as a geopolitical tool, and the unintended consequences that may have encouraged nations to quietly develop alternatives. The discussion then turns toward the future, examining artificial intelligence, stablecoins, central bank digital currencies, tokenized assets, and the technological transformation that is rapidly redefining money itself.Most importantly, this is not a story about America's inevitable decline. It is a story about competition. The United States still possesses extraordinary strengths—world-leading capital markets, innovation, entrepreneurship, and technological leadership—but history demonstrates that financial leadership is never permanently guaranteed. It must be continually renewed.The episode concludes by asking a question that will shape the coming decades: Can America remain the world's financial leader while the rest of the world builds alternatives, or are we witnessing the early stages of a more decentralized global financial order?Whether you're interested in economics, geopolitics, investing, artificial intelligence, or simply understanding where the world is headed, this conversation reveals why one of the most important transformations of the twenty-first century may already be underway—quietly, steadily, and almost entirely out of public view.

Keith Weinhold explains why inflation has become a permanent part of the post–World War II economy and what that shift means for today's financial system.  He breaks down economist Dr. Mark Skousen's five structural reasons behind never-ending inflation and ties them to the hollowing out of the middle class and the "last generation to live normally" concept.  Keith then introduces opportunity cost as the biggest financial expense most people overlook and illustrates how leveraging low-cost, long-term debt to buy productive real assets can turn inflation into an advantage.  He closes by outlining a practical hierarchy for which debts to eliminate first and which to keep as tools for long-term wealth building. Episode Page: GetRichEducation.com/614 For access to properties or free help with a GRE Investment Coach, start here: GREmarketplace.com GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREinvestmentcoach.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.  For predictable 10-12% quarterly returns, visit FreedomFamilyInvestments.com/GRE or text  FAMILY to 66866  Unlock truly passive real estate income—visit flockhomes.com/GRE today to see if your properties qualify for a 721 exchange with Flock Homes. To get in the best physical, mental, and professional shape of your life, go to DanielThomasHind.com and apply for Daniel's intensive 1-on-1 coaching for burnt-out entrepreneurs and executives. Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search "how to leave an Apple Podcasts review"  For advertising inquiries, visit: GetRichEducation.com/ad Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— GREletter.com  Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Complete episode transcript:   Keith Weinhold  0:01   Welcome to GRE. I'm your host Keith Weinhold. In less than 40 years, America has gone from 75% gasoline to permanent inflation. Then learn about the biggest financial expense you will ever have in your life. It's not taxes, housing, interest charges, inflation, children, or healthcare. Most people have never heard of it today on Get Rich Education. You know, Mid South Homebuyers, that top Memphis turnkey provider. I learned that a secret weapon behind their explosive growth is more than just you buying their properties. It's an executive coach. For nine years now. Their CEO Terry Kerr and his COO Pat Nix have worked privately with a coach who I've now learned from too, and he doesn't market himself online anywhere. After 12 years behind the scenes, that coach is now making himself available exclusively for GRE listeners. His name is Daniel Thomas Hind. If you're a hard-charging business owner or investor who wants to get in the best shape of your life, physically, mentally, and professionally, you can fill out an application for a free consult. This is private one-on-one coaching for those willing to go to uncommon lengths to achieve uncommon results. Thanks to Daniel, we've all become better leaders, better operators, and better men. It started by showing up for ourselves. Now it's your turn. Go to DanielThomashHind.com. H-I-N-D. That's DanielThomashHind.com, and sign up before spots fill.   Keith Weinhold  1:41   What if you got your mortgage loans the same place I get mine? You sure can at Ridge Lending Group NMLS 42056 They provided GRE listeners with more loans than anyone because Ridge specializes in investment property. They'll help you build a long-term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage. Start your prequal and even chat directly with President Chaley Ridge. While it's on your mind, start at ridgelendinggroup.com. That's ridgelendinggroup.com.   Speaker 1  2:14   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  2:31   Welcome to GRE from Bavaria, Germany, to Batavia, New York, and across 188 world nations. I'm Keith Weinhold, and you're listening to Get Rich Education. In the 19 the 1988 movie Die Hard, there's a California gas station sign in the background that's visible. You can see it there. The gas price on this sign is a jaw dropper. Unleaded 77.9 cents per gallon, regular 70-4.9 cents per gallon. That now looks like it belongs in a museum next to rotary phones and blockbuster video cards. Yes, California gas for 75 cents, and the movie Die Hard. It had all these actors from yesteryear, like Bruce Willis and Reginald Vel Johnson. Yet you, depending on your age, you might remember 1988. It's not like ancient history. Now we all know that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, like Milton Friedman said, but is there more to this? Is there more than the Fed targeting 2% inflation, just like it says on their website? Oh, there sure is. And by the way, with a little research, it looks like California Gas averaged 95 cents in 1988, not 75 like it shows in Die Hard, but in any case, the point is still there. And today, inflation keeps running hot. Four years ago, the pandemic made CPI inflation peak at 9.1 percent. Today, the hangover effects of tariffs push it up, and the Iran war are turning up the heat even more, with the latest reading above 4% Inflation is running at more than double what the Fed wants. You can even make the case now that inflation is out of control. But here's the thing: inflation has exceeded that 2% target for 60-three consecutive months now. I mean, think about what that means. My gosh, just imagine having an important target that affects every American and missing it 60-three times in a row. That's kind of what's happening now, and they're. Going to keep missing it. So this streak of inflation above 2% started back in March of 2021 during the pandemic hangover, and it is still going strong after 63 months. Nobody knows where this is going to end. Most Americans get crushed by rising prices because their wages don't keep up, and you know collectively they sort of think we are concerned, but then they mostly keep doing the same thing while their lifestyle quietly shrinks. So consumers despise inflation. Everyday investors are lukewarm about inflation, and leverage real estate investors are smiling like they found a 20-dollar bill in last winter's coat. Leverage real estate investors are pretty ecstatic about inflation. Now the history gets super interesting.   Keith Weinhold  5:59   Okay, how did we get into this, where we just always seem to have inflation? So learn the history, and then I'll tie it back to how it affects you as an investor. Because before World War II, inflation behaved differently. The old pre-1945 pattern was that we had inflation during wars and booms. We had deflation after panics and depressions. So therefore, the result was that over long stretches, price levels often just moved sideways. We used to have recessions more often back 80 plus years ago than we do now. So therefore, you just had these price levels move sideways because a recession even prompted deflation, actually a strengthening of purchasing power. But then after World War II, inflation basically went permanently positive. I mean, yeah, permanently positive, where inflation is just always turned on with very few exceptions to that. In wartime, now we have inflation. In peacetime, now we have inflation. During the Super Bowl, now we have inflation. It is inflation, no matter what is going on. Right then, so what changed? Prominent economist and GRE podcast guest here, Dr. Mark Skousen. He has cited five major reasons that inflation became a permanent fixture from 1945 until today. And Mark Skousen was here on the show with us almost exactly two years ago because he's also the founder of a great event called Freedom Fest that Nareesh and I broadcast a show from, the five reasons that Scowson cites for never-ending inflation are first, never-ending wars. Now this doesn't only mean formally declared boots on the ground wars where tanks are rolling, never-ending wars. It means this permanent state of global military readiness that we have today, where we have overseas bases, defense contractors, right with the military-industrial complex. We have NATO commitments.   Keith Weinhold  8:17   We have anti-terror operations, naval patrols, intelligence agencies, and all this enormous machinery that's required to keep America as the world's security backstop. Well, all that costs an awful lot of money, and when government wants more money than it collects, it has a favorite trick: just create more dollars and create them out of nothing. I mean, it's like ordering another round of drinks for the table and then putting it on the unborn grandchildren's tab. The second reason for the never-ending inflation is the 1913 creation of the Federal Reserve and how that's changed over time because the Fed they were originally supposed to defend the dollar, defend the gold standard, and act as lender of last resort. Today it mostly just does the last one. It acts as the lender of last resort, and it's really not even last resort. I mean, she shit seems to patch any significant hole in the economy by creating more dollars and then pumping them into the system. When markets wobble, banks panic, or politicians overspend, or the economy catches any kind of cold, you know, the Fed often just shows up with this fire hose of liquidity. Now, sometimes that's necessary, but either way, it means more currency creation. So, the Fed it began as this sort of sober hallway monitor, but now they're often the responsible party that needs monitoring. But no. No one is going to stand up and do it because no one in power wants austerity under their watch because that is extremely unpopular. The third reason for permanent inflation is the Bretton Woods Agreement. You've probably heard of this, but let me summarize what it briefly means. Okay, Bretton Woods was the 1944 deal that basically created the post-World War II global monetary system? It made the U.S. dollar the world's reserve currency. If you remember anything from Bretton Woods, just remember that it did that. It made the U.S. dollar the world's reserve currency, and the dollar was pegged to gold at $35 per ounce.   Keith Weinhold  13:29   And finally, the fifth reason for never-ending inflation post World War II is Keynesian economics. I mean, you probably at least heard the term before. It's been thrown around here from time to time. Named after John Maynard Keynes, K E Y N E S. And before I go on, I invested in real estate for a long time before I learned all this stuff. Probably close to a decade of investing first. So I taught myself this material, Keynesian economics. That's the belief that demand is what drives economic output and employment. So, if you only remember one thing about Keynesian economics, it's that you need demand, and it stokes demand. It says demand drives everything, and what I mean by that is the spending, spending from households, corporations, and government. So, in plain English, when private demand weakens, the government should step in and spend. That's what Keynesian economics says. Well, that means deficits, borrowing, stimulus, support, programs, relief, rescue packages, emergency measures, and see what happens is that temporary measures somehow become permanent measures wearing a fake mustache. Remember, even Nixon said removal from the gold standard is temporary. Well, that was now 50. 55 years ago, in theory, the government runs deficits in bad times and then tightens up in good times. But that doesn't really happen because, in practice, government often runs deficits in bad times and good times, war times, peace times, election years, non-election years, leap years, all the time running deficits, spending more than we take in, and when deficits become normal, well, then currency creation has got to follow. That's the consequence. Well, these five forces that I told you about for never-ending inflation, the reasons that I just shared with you-they are now structurally embedded. They are not going away.   Keith Weinhold  19:03   I mean, there is even political resistance to deflation in this system. Investors benefit the most when they own one thing: real assets tied to long-term debt. You probably knew that I was going to say that because if the dollar is designed to slowly melt. You don't want to be the one holding the ice cube. You want to own the freezer. That's the control that you have. The first half of the year recently ended. It's time for our asset class rundown. From the midpoint of last year to the midpoint of this year, single-family home values are up only about one and a half percent. That's the average of Case-Shiller and FHFA. Apartment building values are down 1% in the past year. When it comes to rents per Zillow, single-family home rents are up 2.8% in the past year to an all-time record of almost 20-$300 Apartment rents are up just. 1.3% nationally. Sunbelt Apartments were the weak spot. Apartments.com said the South was down seven tenths of 1% year over year, and the mountain region down one and a half percent. With San Antonio, Denver, Austin, and Phoenix among the weaker markets, that's due to oversupply in those areas. 30-year mortgage rates down from 6.8 to 6.6% The S S&P 500 up 21 percent on AI optimism, despite a war in Iran. Though down in past months for the year, gold is still up 21 percent, silver soared 63 percent, Bitcoin down 45 percent. I mean, speculative digital assets have really gotten a cold shoulder. Oil up 4% although it went on a wild ride, and CPI inflation reheated to 4.2% That's our asset class rundown.   Speaker 2  22:59   This is our rich dad poor dad author Robert Kiyosaki. Listen to Get Rich Education with Keith Weinhold. Don't quit your daydream.   Keith Weinhold  23:17   Welcome back to Get Rich Education. I'm your host Keith Weinhold. I want you to listen to something along with me, and then I'll come back to comment. This is from the parallel truth. It's called the last generation to live normally, and it's less than two minutes in length.   Speaker 2  23:32   We have to talk about something that sounds dramatic, but it is becoming true. Your parents may have been the last generation to live a normal life-not an easy life, not a perfect life, but a life where the basic deal still made sense. You could get a stable job, you could buy a house, you could raise children, you could save some money, you could retire one day. And even if life was hard, most people still believed that if they worked honestly, their future would slowly get better. But look at what happened to your generation. You work more, but own less. You study more, but feel less secure. You have more technology than any generation in history, but less peace, less time, and less confidence about the future. Your parents were told, "Work hard, and you will build a life. But you are being told that, "Work hard, and maybe you can afford rent. And the most disturbing part is that this did not happen overnight. It happened slowly. First, housing became an investment instead of a basic need. Then, education became a debt trap. Then, healthcare became too expensive. Then, stable jobs disappeared. Then, everything became a subscription: your house, your car, your software, your entertainment, even your future. Everything slowly became something you rent but never truly own. And while ordinary people were falling behind, the economy kept looking strong on paper. The stock market went up, billionaires got richer, companies made record profits. Politicians kept saying that everything was fine, but if everything is fine, why does an entire generation feel like it is drowning? The truth is, your parents did not live through normal history. They lived through a rare window where ordinary people. People were allowed to share in the wealth of the system, but that window is now closing. The old promise was simple: work hard, buy a home, raise a family, retire with dignity. The new promise is different: work forever, rent everything, delay children, carry debt, and call it freedom. So maybe young people are not lazy. Maybe they are just the first generation honest enough to admit that the old deal is dead. Your parents were not lucky because life was easy. They were lucky because they were the last ones who got the deal before it was taken away.   Keith Weinhold  25:27   Yeah, there it is-the last generation to live normally. That's really a fresh slant on the hollowing out of the middle class. The rules have changed. Inflation is entrenched. Now you know why. Back in 2020, the pandemic accelerated that effect, and yet it's just unbelievable to me that people think working hard and saving money is enough to get you the lifestyle that you desire. Now I am not against hard work, it's the fact that people think that that's all that it takes. Before we hit the permanent inflation era, it might have made sense for you to say, save your money, pay all cash for a cheap fixer-upper property, and work hard for years to fix it up yourself. Oh, and then you could own a modest home debt-free. Today, even if you could do that, why would you? Instead, you can just prudently finance your way through life. You could have instead borrowed for two or three already renovated properties and let debt, inflation, and perhaps even tenants do the work for you. Above all, do the right thing before you do things right. That's what I like to say. Well, the way you get wealthy is by owning a lot of assets, not by grinding in the salt mines to pay off your debt. Those that are debt free are often asset poor. The biggest financial expense that you will ever have in your life. Do you know what it is? It is not taxes or interest charges. It's not even inflation or housing or healthcare or having children, most people have never heard of it. You probably have, but most people have never heard of this biggest financial expense you'll ever have, and they certainly don't know how to avoid it.   Keith Weinhold  27:34   Say that you're 35 years old and you put 100k under a mattress for 30 years until you're 60- years old. Instead, if that would have been invested at a 12% annual return, do you know how much that would have grown to? That would have grown to $2.996 million All right, basically 3 million bucks, a 30x increase. Therefore, it would be a 2.9 million dollar mistake to save money, and what this means is that the biggest expense you'll ever pay in your life is called opportunity cost. Yeah, opportunity cost is life's biggest expense. It's the return that was foregone when you chose one option over another. So opportunity cost is not what you spend; it's what your money could have become had you put it somewhere more productive. All right, now that was a pretty extreme example of 100k under a mattress. As a listener to this show, you are probably more savvy than a person that would save big lumps of money for close to zero return. Let me give you a better example of how when you pay all cash for something, you've usually just made your future self poorer. A friend of mine heard the episode last year where I talked about buying a new car for myself, a BMW X3 SUV. As it is, you probably remember that episode. Though I could have paid all cash for the car, I put the minimum down payment in there and then financed as much as I could because of a favorable 4% interest rate that I got on a car loan. Well, my friend Jesse heard that episode. This influenced him. So what he did is he bought a Subaru for his wife. Although he had planned to pay all cash and could have paid all cash for the car, Jesse got financing, and he did better than me. He got just a 1% interest rate somehow. Wow! It was actually nine tenths of 1% but let's just call it 1% What a deal! Instead of paying all cash for the car, he held on to that chunk of money. Instead of tying it up in a depreciating asset, he is financing it all. Now I don't. How much the Subaru costs, but let's just say it was 50k to keep the numbers simple. Well, look, if Jesse feels like he can get a 10% return over time by investing his money instead of sinking it into a car, how much does he profit by borrowing? Of course, he has the advantage of keeping his funds more liquid as well, but how much does he actually profit from this arrangement?   Keith Weinhold  30:24   Well, the math is so easy that you can even visualize it in an audio format here. Now it depends on the loan term, but the simple spread is a 10% investment return minus a 1% car loan cost. That is a 9% positive spread on 50k. That's roughly $4,500 per year in benefit. That's before any taxes, risk, or fees. $4,500 a year just for doing some loan paperwork. Like if you wonder whether the loan paperwork is worth it or not, that's what we're talking about here, and that's 375 bucks a month. So if you're wondering if it's even worth it taking the time to get a car loan when you could pay all cash, it probably is. All right, now that's the upside. What about the risk that's associated with taking a loan instead of paying all cash, well, the caveat here is that the 1% loan is guaranteed, but the 10% return is probably not, and that risk gap does matter. If you're financially fragile and you can't make the payment with another pot of money, well, then you risk default. That is over leverage risk. That's the worst case scenario. All right, what's the flip side? The flip side is that you could earn a return even better than 10% As we know, with real estate pays five ways on investment property. If you earn a 20% return, now you're making $9,500 a year on the spread, not $4,500, but a 10% return. That is the base case. So again, by paying all cash instead of getting the loan, your future self would be poorer by $4,500 a year. And now, my friend Jesse, that learned this from me, he's actually a CFA, a chartered financial analyst, a sophisticated money guy. But he had simply been overlooking this. And said another way, what you're doing here is that over time, your investment is paying you more than your interest is costing you, and in my life, I have been doing exactly this sort of thing all over the place for decades. An interesting thing that I hear about this, although it makes me scratch my head, I've heard a few people say this. It's just like, oh well, I don't want to have to deal with a car payment? I just rather be done with it and move on. What is there to deal with? Just set up auto pay with preserving funds for say a 10% return. You're then going to see more dollars flowing into your account than you will out of it. I mean that part can just be automated.   Keith Weinhold  33:19   My life and finances are set up this way. In fact, when I get a loan for a rental property, I have had mortgage loan officers that are looking at my finances. They tell me that I have more stuff flowing into and out of my checking account than they've ever seen anyone have. I'm I'm financing and arbitraging my way through life passively. This is thanks in part to inflation. I am not paying very much at all in that biggest financial expense that we all have in our lives-not taxes or children or housing, but opportunity cost. I am avoiding paying that. This is the world that we live in today, a lot of times debt reduction is horrible advice. Debt free that can keep people from falling over a cliff, but it stalls any wealth creation. Now the debts that usually make the most sense to pay down they're the ones with high interest, variable rates, no tax benefit, and no productive asset attached. And here is the priority order that I use for paying down debt or paying off debt. First, it is credit cards. Pay down these first almost every time. I mean, a 20% or even 30% credit card rate. This is like financial quicksand. You don't need a sophisticated investment thesis when you can get a guaranteed 20-4% quote-unquote return by eliminating this debt. The next place I would pay down are payday loans, personal. Loans and consumer finance debt. I mean, these are usually bad debts because they're at a high rate, have a short amortization, and they're usually tied to consumption instead of an income-producing asset. Pay these aggressively too, and then next in priority is paying variable rate debt that could reset higher. This isn't quite as important to address.   Keith Weinhold  35:24   We're talking about things like HELOCs, adjustable rate loans, margin debt, and some business lines of credit. Some of those can become dangerous when rates rise, even if the rate's tolerable today. The uncertainty can be a bit of a problem. Now, when it comes to should you pay down student loans, consider that. low fixed-rate student loans that might not be urgent. It sure wasn't for me. High-rate private student loans that could be different. That could get more of your attention. You also got to weigh things like tax benefits. Look out for forgiveness programs when it comes to student loans, those haven't been quite as available lately under this administration. Also, look at employer repayment benefits before you rush to pay down student loans, and then really the last one: low fixed-rate mortgage debt. Pay that last if you ever do. In fact, it is quite possible that I will always keep this debt type around that low fixed rate mortgage debt. So really, my rule of thumb here is to kill toxic debt. Be careful with unstable debt, and don't rush to pay off cheap fixed productive debt if you ever pay it off at all. You and I covered a lot of ground today, starting with 75 cent gasoline in California, all the way to the biggest expense you'll ever pay throughout your life, being something that most people have never heard of: opportunity cost. Coming up on the show here, a lot of good episodes, including a great guest and I are going to discuss a new way to invest in residential real estate that we haven't discussed before, and it will massively boost your cash flow. If you found today's show valuable, whether it was the history of why we have permanent inflation or the idea of passively financing your way to wealth, rather than only working harder. I would be grateful if you share this episode with a friend. Just tap the share button in Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and send it to someone who would benefit from hearing it. Or take a screenshot of this episode and post it on social media. It helps more people find the show, and it gives you and your friends something smart to talk about with each other. Until next week, I'm your host Keith Weinhold. Don't quit your daydream.   Speaker 1  37:53   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  38:21   The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth building at getricheducation.com.  

La pobreza extrema mundial pasó del 36% en 1990 al 10% en 2015, según el Banco Mundial. Ese dato se atribuye a la globalización. Pero cuando el FMI condiciona un rescate a recortar pensiones, o cuando la Unión Europea emite directivas que ningún parlamento nacional ratifica, eso ya no es globalización. Es otra cosa. Y esa otra cosa tiene nombre propio. Dos palabras que comparten raíz, que aparecen en los mismos titulares y que describen fenómenos radicalmente distintos. Una es un proceso histórico que arranca en las rutas comerciales medievales y que en 1913 ya había llevado el comercio internacional a niveles comparables a los de finales del siglo XX. La otra es un proyecto político: la construcción de estructuras de gobernanza supranacionales con autoridad real sobre los estados, que nadie ha votado y que no rinden cuentas a ningún electorado. En este episodio rastreamos el momento exacto en que ambos caminos se separaron: julio de 1944, Bretton Woods, 730 delegados de 44 países y un pulso entre Keynes y White cuyas consecuencias seguimos pagando. Analizamos el trilema de Dani Rodrik, según el cual no puedes tener a la vez hiperglobalización, soberanía nacional y democracia. Y desmontamos la mecánica por la que confundir ambos términos blinda de toda crítica a los organismos con más poder del planeta. El mundo está conectado y lo seguirá estando. La pregunta incómoda es otra: cuando una decisión tomada en Washington, Bruselas o Davos afecta a tu pensión, tu empleo o tus datos, ¿a quién puedes votar para cambiarla? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Key Topics How the American experiment of government based on consent and inalienable rights ignited global movements and reshaped societies, from Europe to Asia. The complex legacy of America's post-1945 institutional order, the Marshall Plan, NATO, United Nations, and whether this framework still works or if it's fundamentally broken. The rise of competing models like China's authoritarian capitalism and the implications for democracies worldwide. Why America's internal struggles, polarization, and quest for national self-redefinition threaten its ability to lead and inspire future generations. The risks and opportunities of a world where the U.S. steps back, and other nations forge a new, possibly more interdependent, global order. Links Zanny Minton Beddoes - https://mediadirectory.economist.com/people/zanny-minton-beddoes/ James Harding - https://observer.co.uk/contributor/james-harding Sylvie Kauffmann - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/signataires/sylvie-kauffmann/ Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs — belfercenter.org World Review with Ivo Daalder — belfercenter.org/world-review-ivo-daalder

Since stepping into the Papacy, Pope Leo XIV has been a forceful voice pushing back against the anti-human path we're on with AI. In May, he released “Magnifica Humanitas,” a sprawling encyclical warning of the dangers to human dignity and agency posed by runaway AI. Tristan had the incredible opportunity to meet with the Pope ahead of the encyclical's release.  In the modern world, you'd think we would have developed governance structures to deal with powerful new technologies like AI. It's worth asking why a 2,000-year-old religious institution is the only one standing up and loudly declaring that the default path is unacceptable.  In this episode, Tristan and Aza discuss what it was like for Tristan to be at the Vatican, why this is such a critical step toward a pro-human future, and how we can build on the momentum of the Pope's call to action. Your Undivided Attention is produced by Center for Humane Technology. You can find a transcript of this conversation on our Substack. RECOMMENDED MEDIA The Pope's encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas” RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES The Tech-God Complex: Why We Need to be Skeptics What Do We Mean by Humane Tech?Corrections: Tristan said that Pope John XXIII gave his radio address weeks after the Cuban Missile Crisis. It actually occured during the crisis. Tristan paraphrased the full quote from Pope Leo's encyclical on AI disarmament. Here is the full quote: "Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of “armed” competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance." Aza slightly misquoted Dr. King Jr. The full quote begins "The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live." The delegates for Bretton Woods came from just 44 countries, not "hundreds" as Tristan said.     Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On this episode, Sam sits down with Mel K to explore the hidden power structures that emerged after World War II. They examine the Bank for International Settlements, the Bretton Woods agreement, Operation Paperclip, the Dulles brothers, the creation of the CIA, and the declassified plans that reshaped global finance, intelligence, and political power. It's a deep dive into the institutions and events that many believe shaped the modern world behind the scenes. Please check out Mel K's book "Infiltration Instead of Invasion : America Betrayed (1944–1954)": https://bit.ly/4y1dUpG   Please subscribe to the new Tin Foil Hat youtube channel:  https://www.youtube.com/@TinFoilHatYoutube   Sam Tripoli's 5th Crowd Work Special "Hero Live From Batavia" Drops May 2nd On Youtube.com/SamTripoliComedy   Grab your copy of the 2nd issue of the Chaos Twins now and join the Army Of Chaos: https://bit.ly/415fDfY   Check out Sam "DoomScrollin with Sam Tripoli and Midnight Mike" Every Tuesday At 4pm pst on Youtube, X Twitter, Rumble and Rokfin! Join the WolfPack at Wise Wolf Gold and Silver and start hedging your financial position by investing in precious metals now! Go to https://www.samtripoli.gold/ and use the promo code "TinFoil" and we thank Tony for supporting our show.   Grab Tickets To Sam Tripoli's Live Shows At SamTripoli.com: Miami, Fl: 7/31-8/1 Lawerence, KS: 9/17-9/19 Tulsa, OK: 10/9-10/10 Dallsa, Tx: Nov 7th (TrutherCon) Austin, TX: Dec 11th-13th   Please check out Word War Debate and the WordWarDebate Contenders Series: https://wordwardebate.com   Please check out Sean Mel K's internet:  Please check out Mel K's internet: Website: https://themelkshow.com rumble: https://rumble.com/c/TheMelKShow twitter: https://twitter.com/MelKShow    Please check out Sam Tripoli's internet: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/samtripoli Sam Tripoli's Stand Up Youtube Page: https://www.youtube.com/@SamTripoliComedy Sam Tripoli's Comedy Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/samtripolicomedy/%20P Sam Tripoli's Podcast Clip Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/samtripolispodcastclips/   Please support our sponsors: Ethos: Ethos makes getting life insurance fast and easy, 100% online. You can get a quote in seconds, apply in minutes, and get same day coverage. There's no medical exam, you just answer a few simple health questions. You can get up to $3 million in coverage. Some policies are as low as $30 a month. Ethos has 4.8 out of 5 stars on TrustPilot with over 3,000 reviews. Help protect your family with life insurance through Ethos. Get your instant, free quote at ETHOS dot com slash tinfoil. That is E-T-H-O-S dot com slash tinfoil. Application times and rates may vary.   JackArcher: Finding pants that are comfortable, polished, and versatile doesn't have to be a guessing game. Jack Archer's Jetsetter Tech Pant is designed for work, travel, and everything in between with wrinkle-resistant, stain-repellent, machine-washable fabric that keeps its shape all day. Visit JackArcher.com and use promo code GETJACK to get 15% off your first order.  

In this episode of Beyond the Indus, Carlos Frederico Pereira da Silva Gama, founder of Brazil's BRICS Policy Center and an international relations scholar at the Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, joins host Tushar Shetty to examine the future of BRICS as the postwar order fractures in the wake of the Iran war. They discuss the priorities and divergences of India's BRICS presidency ahead of the September leaders' summit in Delhi, the expansion to BRICS Plus and its toll on the group's cohesion, why BRICS functions as one club in a wider Global South portfolio rather than a unified bloc, the New Development Bank and BRICS Pay as a challenge to the Bretton Woods system, the effect of Trump's tariffs and rhetoric on close US partners like Brazil and India, and the best- and worst-case scenarios for the group in a fracturing world order.

Today On The Eric Metaxas Show, Eric talks with Mel K about her book Infiltration Instead Of Invasion. Mel argues that America was not conquered by a traditional invasion, but infiltrated through finance, intelligence, international institutions, NGOs, academia, and the post World War II global architecture. They discuss JFK's warning, the Federal Reserve, the Dulles brothers, the CIA, the Bank of International Settlements, Bretton Woods, USAID, NATO, the UN, Trump, sovereignty, and the future of freedom.⭐ ORDER NOW:Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World

(This is a rebroadcast of episode 309)See our video at https://youtu.be/BwSR9LpqRm0In this episode of Libertarians Talk Psychology, we dive deep into one of the most defining economic turning points in modern U.S. history: 1971, the year President Nixon ended the Bretton Woods agreement and removed the dollar from the gold standard. This decision—often overlooked—set in motion decades of inflation, currency distortion, and financial instability that still affect every aspect of life today. Drawing on Dave Smith's compelling explanation, we explore how radically different the world could have been if the U.S. had maintained a stable, sound money supply. Imagine a world without runaway inflation, without the boom-bust cycles created by loose monetary policy, and without the government's ability to quietly tax citizens through currency debasement. Smith argues that abandoning gold didn't just change the economy—it changed society, culture, and global power dynamics. We break down:What exactly happened in 1971Why stable money is foundational to liberty and psychological well-beingHow inflation quietly alters behavior, incentives, and family lifeHow fiat money fuels political overreach, endless wars, and corporate distortionWhat individuals and communities can do now, in an unstable financial eraSound money solutions, from decentralization to Bitcoin to local alternativesIf you've ever wondered why everything feels more expensive, more chaotic, and more distorted than it used to, this episode connects the dots. Understanding 1971 is the first step—deciding what to do next is the challenge we tackle together.Clip from Dave Smith | PartOfTheProblemFollow Us:YouTubeXFacebookBlueskyAll audio & videos edited by: Jay Prescott Videography

Bob sits down with economists Alexander Salter and Joshua Hendrickson to discuss their new paper arguing that the standard Austrian critique of the Fed while correct, is fundamentally incomplete. They argue that the Fed's actual institutional role is to backstop U.S. dollar hegemony: the deliberately constructed post-Bretton Woods system in which the dollar serves as the world's reserve currency, U.S. Treasuries as the global safe asset, and the Fed as buyer of last resort for sovereign debt worldwide.Related:Hendrickson & Salter, "Should We End the Fed? Can We?": Mises.org/HAP553a

Bob sits down with economists Alexander Salter and Joshua Hendrickson to discuss their new paper arguing that the standard Austrian critique of the Fed while correct, is fundamentally incomplete. They argue that the Fed's actual institutional role is to backstop U.S. dollar hegemony: the deliberately constructed post-Bretton Woods system in which the dollar serves as the world's reserve currency, U.S. Treasuries as the global safe asset, and the Fed as buyer of last resort for sovereign debt worldwide.Related:Hendrickson & Salter, "Should We End the Fed? Can We?": Mises.org/HAP553a

The Last Trade: Matt Dines, CIO of Build Asset Management, joins to lay out the seismic monetary reshuffling underway in 2026, the unwind of the post-Bretton-Woods offshore-dollar system that ran the global economy from 1971 to 2022, why LIBOR's deprecation and the SOFR transition quietly moved the dollar's command center from London to New York, Scott Bessent's strategy to monetize the asset side of the Treasury balance sheet through the GENIUS Act stablecoin and a Bitcoin reserve targeting 1 million BTC, Tether's December 2023 alignment with the American Sovereignist movement, and the contrarian read on MicroStrategy as a "dollar strategy" rather than a Bitcoin strategy.---

This Day in Legal History: Congress Repeals the Gold ClauseOn this day in 1933, Congress passed the Joint Resolution that voided the gold clauses written into nearly every long-term contract and bond obligation in the United States, both public and private. The resolution declared that any provision purporting to require payment “in gold or a particular kind of coin or currency” was “against public policy,” and that obligations could be discharged dollar for dollar in whatever legal tender currency was in force at the time of payment. It was a remarkable act of legislative power: a one-paragraph statute that rewrote the payment terms of millions of existing contracts overnight, in the middle of the Great Depression, to make Franklin Roosevelt's recent abandonment of the gold standard actually stick. The Supreme Court took up the inevitable challenge two years later in the Gold Clause Cases — Norman v. Baltimore & Ohio, Nortz v. United States, and Perry v. United States — and in February 1935 it upheld the resolution as applied to private contracts by a 5-4 vote, while telling the United States, in Perry, that it had violated its own contractual word in repudiating gold-payment promises on government bonds, but that the bondholder had suffered no compensable injury. The doctrinal residue of that compromise is still with us: Congress can use its monetary powers to alter private contract terms retroactively when monetary policy requires it, the rule that has quietly underwritten every major monetary intervention since, from Bretton Woods to the post-2008 emergency lending programs. June 5 is not a day most lawyers mark on the calendar, but the resolution Congress passed on this date is one of the cleanest examples in American law of a legislature using its enumerated powers to dissolve a contract term that had been considered, until that moment, untouchable.The Supreme Court on Thursday handed Hikma Pharmaceuticals — and the entire generic drug industry — a 9-0 win in a case that had been hanging over the so-called “skinny label” pathway for years. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, writing for a unanimous Court in Hikma Pharmaceuticals USA Inc. v. Amarin Pharma, Inc., held that Amarin, the maker of the brand-name fish-oil drug Vascepa, had not plausibly alleged that Hikma actively induced infringement of Amarin's patents covering a still-patented cardiovascular use of the drug. The skinny label is a feature of Hatch-Waxman generic-drug law that lets a generic manufacturer copy only the unpatented uses of a brand drug by literally carving the patented uses out of its FDA-approved label, which is supposed to let cheaper generics reach the market for the unpatented indications even while patents on other indications are still in force. Brand companies have been trying for years to sue around that carve-out under the active inducement statute, 35 U.S.C. § 271(b), by pointing to generic press releases, marketing language, or website descriptions and arguing that doctors could read those statements as encouragement to prescribe the generic for the still-patented use. The Federal Circuit had bought a version of that argument and revived Amarin's case. The Supreme Court rejected that approach, and the test that Justice Jackson articulated is meaningful: the question is not how doctors might interpret what a generic manufacturer said, but whether the manufacturer itself actively encouraged the infringing use. Neutral statements that could be read as instructions to infringe do not count. The practical effect is to shore up the skinny label pathway and make it harder for brand companies to weaponize induced infringement against generic competition. The decision was originally framed as a pharmaceutical-industry case, but its inducement standard will reach across patent law generally and into every industry where § 271(b) gets litigated.It's unanimous: SCOTUS agrees with Hikma in ‘skinny label' case vs. Amarin | Fierce PharmaAlso unanimous on Thursday: the Supreme Court in Sripetch v. SEC held that the Securities and Exchange Commission can obtain disgorgement of a wrongdoer's ill-gotten gains without having to prove that any individual investor lost money. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the opinion for a 9-0 Court, which is itself a small surprise given the Court's recent pattern of skepticism toward broad SEC remedial powers. The case came out of a penny-stock pump-and-dump scheme that Ongkaruck Sripetch ran across some 20 small companies — buy shares quietly, promote them aggressively, sell into the bubble — and the SEC won an order requiring him to disgorge roughly $3 million. Sripetch's argument on appeal was that disgorgement is supposed to be tied to investor harm, that the SEC had not shown specific pecuniary losses traceable to him, and that the order was therefore not the kind of equitable relief the Court approved in its 2020 Liu v. SEC decision. The Court disagreed, on traditional equity principles: disgorgement, the Court explained, is measured by the defendant's unjust gain, not the plaintiff's quantified loss, and equity has always been willing to strip a wrongdoer of profit even when the victim cannot mathematically prove harm. The practical importance for the SEC is enormous — the agency reports collecting roughly $1.4 billion in disgorgement in fiscal 2025 alone, and a contrary ruling would have forced the SEC into an evidentiary burden that pump-and-dump and insider-trading cases are notoriously bad at supplying. The opinion is also a reminder that the Court's recent administrative-state skepticism is not all in one direction: when the question is grounded in old equity doctrine, the same justices who narrowed SEC adjudication in Jarkesy are willing to leave the agency's remedial toolkit intact.US Supreme Court Backs SEC in Fight Over ‘Disgorgement' Power | US NewsThe third and most constitutionally significant of Thursday's rulings was FCC v. AT&T, in which the Supreme Court upheld 8-1 the Federal Communications Commission's longstanding practice of imposing forfeiture penalties on regulated carriers through its own in-house process, without first giving the carrier a jury trial. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority, with Justice Clarence Thomas the lone dissenter. The case grew out of the FCC's headline-making fines against AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint for selling access to real-time customer location data to third parties without consent — fines that ran nearly $200 million across the four carriers, with AT&T's portion at $57 million and Verizon's at $46.9 million. The carriers challenged the fines on Seventh Amendment grounds, arguing that the Court's 2024 decision in SEC v. Jarkesy — which struck down the SEC's in-house adjudication of securities-fraud penalties as a violation of the jury-trial right — should reach FCC forfeitures too. The Court said no, on a structural distinction that matters: an FCC forfeiture order is not self-executing. The FCC cannot collect on its own. If a carrier refuses to pay, the matter is referred to the Justice Department, which then has to file a civil action in federal district court — a proceeding in which the carrier is entitled to a full jury trial and the government has to prove the violation de novo, with no deference to the FCC's findings. That collection-stage jury trial, Roberts wrote, is enough to satisfy the Seventh Amendment, even though the agency itself first issues the penalty. Justice Thomas's dissent argued the in-house process is no less coercive than the SEC adjudication the Court rejected in Jarkesy and would have extended Jarkesy here. The practical takeaway: agency in-house penalty proceedings survive after Jarkesy if there is a real, downstream jury-trial backstop. Expect every regulator with a similar two-step enforcement structure to point to this opinion the next time someone tries to push Jarkesy further.Court rules against cell service providers over right to jury trial in FCC proceedings | SCOTUSblog This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

A century ago, when depositors lost confidence in a bank, they'd rush to withdraw their cash. In 1971, US president Richard Milhous Nixon faced a similar dilemma. But his problem wasn't ordinary citizens fearing for their savings. Instead, it was America's closest allies who were nervously eyeing the dwindling supply of gold in Fort Knox at a time when the dollar's value was tied to gold and allies' currencies were in turn tied to the dollar. And just like a beleaguered bank manager of yore, Nixon chose to shut America's doors to further withdrawals. His decision threatened to pull the plug on the entire international monetary system established at Bretton Woods in 1944. It was so unexpected and outrageous, it became known as the “Nixon Shock”. In the first of two episodes on the topic, hosts Gillian Tett and Robin Wigglesworth get the story from economist and ex-financier Jeffrey Garten – a man with a CV so long that he once even worked for the Nixon administration himself.Further reading:Three Days at Camp David: How a Secret Meeting in 1971 Transformed the Global Economy, by Jeffrey E Garten (2021)Gold and the dollar crisis, by Robert Triffin (1960)Credits: Getty Images, the Richard Nixon Presidential LibraryTo enjoy future episodes, be sure to subscribe to The Story of Money wherever you get your podcasts, also on the show's dedicated YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@FTTheStoryOfMoneyHosts: Gillian Tett and Robin WigglesworthProducer: Laurence KnightExecutive Producer: Manuela SaragosaOriginal music: Breen TurnerBroadcast engineers: Bianca Wakeman and Petros GioumpasisPodcast Development: Laura ClarkeVideo editor: Kristen Kenyon and Josh Divney at Podcast DiscoveryLearn more at www.ft.com/tsom or get in touch at thestoryofmoney@ft.com.Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The economy was designed to serve life. At some point, it forgot. This article traces how that happened - through colonial extraction, currency manipulation, and centuries of treating the Earth as an inexhaustible resource - and more importantly, what is already being built in its place. It is also worth naming what is being built against it. Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC), digital identity systems, and the broader technocratic agenda advancing through institutions like the World Economic Forum represent a competing vision of the future - one where economic participation is surveilled, programmable, and ultimately controlled by the few. That is not a regenerative economy. It is the extractive economy in a new interface. The regenerative economy moves in the opposite direction: toward decentralization, sovereignty, reciprocity, and life. From Time Banks in New York to community currencies in Ecuador to worker cooperatives in Spain, it is not a future vision. It is a present reality, waiting to be joined. And while blockchain and regenerative finance are real and important parts of this picture, the regenerative economy is bigger than any single technology. It is a whole-systems redesign - cultural, spiritual, and practical - of how human beings relate to value, to each other, and to all living beings on Earth.A System Feature | Designed to ExtractA president steps up to the podium in Manila, praising the economic progress their country has fulfilled after, what many of us call “ the plandemic”. Outside the auditorium, a young mother carries her child on her hip, knocking on car windows at a red light, eyes down, asking for alms. The applause inside the hall doesn't reach her. It never does.The president says the currency has strengthened. That prices are coming down. Meanwhile, across the city, a farmer named Rodrigo is standing in the field he has worked for thirty years, calculating whether this harvest will cover the loan he took out before the last typhoon swept his crop away. It didn't. This is not an exception to the economic system. It is a feature of it. A reflection of a culture that does not care about those actually in need.Many nations measure their health through GDP - Gross Domestic Product - which essentially dictates whether or not an economy is “progressing.” It runs under one quiet assumption: that the Earth will keep giving. Indefinitely. Without asking anything in return. That before the calculations around supply, demand, and the balance of everything else, all the raw materials are already ideally supplied.The Earth is answering. Typhoons that once came once a generation now arrive like clockwork. Harvests that fed communities for centuries are failing across the Andes, the Sahel, the Mekong delta. The seasons that indigenous peoples read as living calendars have become erratic, unreliable, grieving. None of this is random. It is a response - accurate and proportional - to an economy built on the assumption that extraction has no cost.If we were truly “abundant” financially, we would not have billions of people at risk of starvation, homelessness, and other manifestations of neglect and poverty. The economy was supposed to serve all life. It has forgotten this. And in forgetting it, it has begun to abandon human life itself.The Story We InheritedMoney was supposed to be a promissory note for the gold reserves one actually held. The paper was a symbol - pointing at something real, something held in a vault somewhere, something that could be touched.Then the notes began circulating. And the longer they circulated, the more people forgot what they were pointing to. Eventually, the circulation gave rise to the idea of turning the notes into currency itself. The symbol became the standard. It became backed not by gold, but by story - a story so strong, so repeated, so programmed into every transaction of daily life, that we began to mistake it for the truth.We placed a middleman between ourselves and our needs. And somewhere along the way, we forgot we had done it. Perhaps, by design. Here is what the story never tells you: the gold itself did not arrive innocently.In 1302, Pope Boniface VIII issued Unam Sanctam, declaring papal authority supreme over all earthly power - making the Earth itself, philosophically, ownable. A century and a half later, that claim became economic policy. Dum Diversas (1452) authorized the enslavement of non-Christians across the globe. Romanus Pontifex (1455) granted Portugal the right to colonize and extract across Africa and the New World. Inter Caetera (1493) extended the same to Spain and the Americas.These were the founding economic legislation of the extractive world we live in - all cloaked in religious language.What followed was centuries of forced extraction. Economists Flynn and Giráldez have documented that colonial American silver - mined through indigenous forced labor in Potosí and across Peru and Mexico - became the standard monetary foundation of early global trade. The gold in the vault was never simply there. It was coercively taken.And then, on August 15, 1971, even that material trace was erased. President Nixon closed the gold window, ending the Bretton Woods system and severing the dollar's convertibility to gold. According to the Federal Reserve's own record, the international community was not consulted. From that moment, currency was backed by nothing but the authority of the government printing it.Knowing that we wrote ourselves into this story, we are now remembering that we can write ourselves out of it. Not only by writing new stories, but by reconnecting with stories that existed long before our current economic situation - stories that are still alive, still practiced, still remembered by the communities that never abandoned them.What Has Always WorkedBefore the conquest of certain nations to centralize power into their hands, other societies practiced more communal and regenerative ways of exchanging value. To them, considering other people and the Earth itself was not an ethical add-on. It was integral to the flourishing of their economies.Pre-colonial PhilippinesLong before the Spaniards arrived, the Philippine archipelago was a major hub in the maritime Silk Road - one of Asia's most active trade networks. Communities exchanged with Chinese, Japanese, Arab, and Indian traders at coastal ports and river settlements.The archipelagic geography made it impossible to consolidate wealth in any single place. Different tribes like the Maranao exchanged surplus agricultural produce, textiles, metalware, and forest products through robust barter systems built on kinship ties and alliances among polities. Value moved between two people who chose to relate. No middleman. Mutual trust was the economic infrastructure.Andean PeoplesThe Quechua people organized their economy around a relational foundation that lives in the language itself. Ayni - sacred reciprocity. Minka - collective community work. Randi-Randi - generalized reciprocity, the understanding that what circulates returns. All three connect to the broader principle of Sumak Kawsay: good living in right relationship with community, land, and the living world.Sumak Kawsay does not separate prosperity from the wellbeing of ecosystems. It understands them as one thing. This recognition runs so deep that Ecuador enshrined it as the central guiding principle for its national development in its 2008 constitution - the living legal inheritance of an ancient economy that knew how to stay.Haudenosaunee in North AmericaIn their 1981 formal statement to the United Nations, the Haudenosaunee Council of Chiefs articulated what their communities had practiced for centuries: that the earth was created for all to use, forever - not for the present generation to exhaust. Under their law, land is held by the women of each clan, who farm and care for it for the benefit of future generations.The Haudenosaunee saw land as a responsibility to be stewarded in trust. Anthropologist Kurt Jordan from Cornell University documented their economic practices and described them as “a reasonably sustainable, localized economy” even under intense external pressure. They had embodied communal stewardship long before theories about such things were written down.Southern Africa“I am because we are.”This is Ubuntu - the philosophy at the core of both social and economic life across Southern Africa. Communities in South Africa and Mozambique relied on mutual aid networks, intergenerational knowledge systems, and participatory rituals as practical economic infrastructure. These systems enhanced community cohesion and collective resilience precisely in the moments when extractive economies failed them. They understood, bone-deep, that no human being thrives in isolation.Diversity of Regen Economic SystemsMany communities across continents are actively rebuilding economic systems beyond the extractive model. The following are not theoretical. They are actively running. Hence, the more diversity of economic systems each person and community practices, the more abundant, unbreakable and independent we are from degenerative systems from governments and corporations that want to control it all. The Commons FoundationOne body of research forms the intellectual foundation for nearly all of them: the life's work of Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics. Ostrom spent decades documenting over 800 cases of communities successfully governing shared resources - in Switzerland, Kenya, Guatemala, Nepal, and beyond - without either privatization or state control.Her conclusion was simple and radical: communities do not inevitably destroy what they share. Given the right institutional design, they protect it and pass this duty to the next generation. And her eight design principles for successful commons governance - the framework that emerged from all that fieldwork - describe, as she herself acknowledged, the same governance systems that indigenous communities had been practicing for centuries.Her work is not a new idea. It is a confirmation of ancient ones.Regenerative Economics | Beyond ReFi - The Whole-Systems VisionWhen most people first encounter the term “regenerative economy,” they arrive through crypto. Through ReFi - regenerative finance - and the promise of blockchain as a tool for funding ecological restoration, decentralizing power, and making impact transparent. These are real contributions. They matter.But John Fullerton, founder of the Capital Institute and one of the most rigorous thinkers in this field, spent two decades on Wall Street before arriving at a different and more fundamental question: what if the entire framework of modern finance is running in conflict with how life actually works?Fullerton's work focuses on building an economic framework that supports the long-term health of people, communities, and the planet - not by tweaking the existing system, but by replacing its underlying logic. His core argument is that we are running our society in conflict with the patterns and principles that explain how life works.His answer is what he calls regenerative economics: eight principles drawn from living systems science that describe how healthy economies - like healthy ecosystems - actually function. Diversity. Balance. Circular flow. Robust circulation. Surplus financial capital, in his framework, needs to be recycled and regenerated into other forms of capital - natural, social, and cultural. Not hoarded nor extracted. Composted back into the living system that produced it.ReFi, in Fullerton's framing, is one tool within this larger architecture. Blockchain can decentralize power. Tokenized nature credits can make ecological value legible to markets. Community currencies can circulate value locally. But the technology is only as regenerative as the values underneath it. A crypto project built on extraction logic is still extraction, regardless of the chain it runs on.Regenerative economy is not a financial product. It is a civilizational shift - in how we measure wealth, in what we decide to protect, in whose voices count when decisions are made. ReFi is welcome in that shift. It is one current in a much larger river.Time BanksIn Jackson Heights, Queens, a retired nurse named Gloria hasn't touched the formal economy in months for the things that matter most to her. She spends three hours teaching English to a recent immigrant. Those hours become credits. She spends them on home repairs from a neighbor who knows carpentry. He spends his credits on childcare. The loop keeps moving.This is a Time Bank - a community exchange system built on one radical premise: everyone's time is worth the same. One hour of legal advice equals one hour of gardening equals one hour of emotional support. The hierarchy of market wages disappears. What remains is a web of people who need each other.Edgar Cahn, who developed Time Banking in the 1980s after surviving a near-fatal heart attack, called it “co-production” - the idea that the economy needs what the market can never price: care, community, civic participation, the work of raising children and holding elders. Time Banks make that invisible labor visible, and circulate it back into the community that produced it.Today there are over 500 Time Banks operating in more than 30 countries. Some have formalized into neighborhood institutions. Others run through apps. All of them rest on the same foundation the Quechua called Ayni - sacred reciprocity - translated into the language of modern urban life.Mondragon CorporationThe Mondragon Corporation in Spain's Basque region remains the most studied proof that democratic ownership functions at scale. Founded by six worker-owners in 1956, it now comprises 96 cooperatives employing over 70,000 people, with annual revenues exceeding €11 billion. Workers own the company collectively, vote on strategy at general assemblies, and operate under a constitutionally capped pay ratio of 6-to-1 between the highest and lowest earners.Traditional Dream FactoryIn a 25-hectare village in Alentejo, Portugal, Traditional Dream Factory is a living prototype of the self-sustaining regenerative community - blending collective ownership, ecological restoration, intentional community, and decentralized economy in one working place. They have raised over €1.25 million in total capital across 280+ token holders. Their 2026 build phase is completing co-living rooms, artist studios, a farm-to-table restaurant, a mushroom farm, and a biopool wellness space.AtreyuInvestment, as most of us have encountered it, prioritizes short-term financial returns above all else. Atreyu challenges this at the root by approaching investment through living systems principles and deep relational due diligence. They support their investees to ensure that both the enterprises and the ecosystems they steward realize their potential - together. They focus on early-stage businesses and actively encourage steward-ownership models that enshrine self-governance and purpose orientation.Muyu CoinOne of the first social coins in South America, Based in Ecuador - Muyu serves as an alternative exchange system rooted in community trust and an understanding of sacred economy. It protects the sovereignty of communities in their production, distribution, exchange, consumption, and post-consumption - keeping the loop of value inside the community rather than extracting it outward. It uses Cyclos, an enchrypted platform, a base.It first did an attempt to start in 2015, but not many people showed interest. It then came back very strong in 2020, due to the “plandemic”. People felt the need to have alternative ways to transact that was not controlled by limiting governments. Giving communities complete independence. Currently with over 150+ members who are exchanging goods and services in different nodes throughout the country. From food produce, clothing and art -to- car mechanic, dentists and school teachers serving to the community.Grassroots EconomicsFounded in Kenya, Grassroots Economics supports communities in building their own self-sustaining economies - even when national currency is scarce - through a model called Commitment Pooling.Consider Wanjiru, a vegetable seller in Mombasa's Bangla Pesa network. During a slow week when Kenyan shillings are tight, she issues a Community Asset Voucher - a commitment to provide vegetables - and deposits it into a communal pool. Her neighbor, a carpenter named Kamau, redeems it. He offers his own labor in return. The loop closes. Food reaches a family that needed it. A roof gets repaired. No national currency changes hands.This is not a workaround. It is a return to how value was always supposed to move.Since Grassroots Economics was established in 2010, they have supported 26,600 people across 290+ communities, issuing over 2,140 vouchers. Their protocol is inspired by indigenous Rotational Labor Associations similar to Kenya's mwethya and harambee traditions. It is open-source and blockchain-agnostic - meaning any community, anywhere, can deploy it.The Choice in Front of UsThese regenerative endeavors share one answer to the core assumption of the extractive economy: the economy does not need to extract in order to function. Value can circulate and regenerate rather than accumulate. Ecological health, community resilience, and the wellbeing of the next generations are not costs to minimize - they are the actual metrics that demonstrate economic success.The question is no longer whether it is possible. It is happening. The question is whether enough of us choose to participate in building it, and whether we remember our roles as stewards of the Earth that has always sustained us.We get to choose the future we want for ourselves, our children, and the seven generations that come after.Your Role in the Regenerative EconomyReading this is already a kind of remembering. The question that follows is simple: where do you begin?The regenerative economy is not waiting to be invented. It is waiting to be joined. Every one of the models described here started with a small group of people who decided to practice a different relationship with value - before it was proven, before it was popular, before it was funded.Here are real entry points, available now:Start with your immediate circle. Identify three skills or resources you have in excess - time, knowledge, food from a garden, tools sitting unused. Offer them. Ask for what you need in return. This is Ayni. It requires no platform, no signup, no permission.Relocalize your spending. Every dollar (fiat currency) that circulates inside a local economy multiplies its impact without leaving the community. Farmers markets, community-supported agriculture, local cooperatives, regenerative small businesses - these are not lifestyle choices. They are votes for a different system, cast weekly.Find or start a Time Bank in your area. hOurworld.org and TimeBanks.org maintain active directories. If nothing exists near you, starting one requires little more than a spreadsheet and a Telegram/Whatsapp group.Join a community working on this. It can be our Regenerative Leadership Community from www.regenerativeculture.life is one place. There are others - transition towns, ecovillages, commons networks - in most regions of the world. Find your people. The regenerative economy is, at its root, a relationship economy. It does not work alone.Learn the language. Permaculture design, commons governance, cooperative economics, sacred reciprocity - these are not abstract concepts. They are practical skills with deep traditions behind them. The more fluent you become, the more useful you are to the communities building this.The scale of what needs to change can feel paralyzing. It is not meant to. The models described in this article did not begin at scale. Mondragon began with six people. Grassroots Economics began in one neighborhood in Mombasa. The Quechua did not design Ayni for a movement - they designed it for a harvest.Start where you are. With what you have. With whoever is near you. That has always been enough to begin. It's not easy, but it is possible.Written by Gertie Farenas and Yoshi Pantera - 90% by us humans and 10% AI assisted.This Audio is recorded by a true voice - Yoshi PanteraThis article is part of the Regenerative Culture Chronicle - a publication exploring the ideas, practices, and communities building a world that benefits all life.Learn more at RegenerativeCulture.LifeThanks for reading Regenerative Culture Chronicle! This post is public so feel free to share it.Regenerative Culture Chronicle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you! Get full access to Regenerative Culture Chronicle at regenerativecultureworld.substack.com/subscribe

“The rules-based system just hasn't worked. China's system is so opaque that you can't see the subsidies. And when you've got China not interested in new rules and the US not interested in a referee, you've got two of the world's biggest actors who aren't on board.” — Soumaya Keynes It would have been nice to get John Maynard Keynes on the show to get his critique of Trump's trade war. But in the long run, we're all dead — even old Maynard. So instead, we found his great-great-niece, Soumaya Keynes — Financial Times columnist and co-author of How to Win a Trade War: An Optimistic Guide to an Anxious Global Economy. Having already appeared on Jon Stewart this week, Soumaya has a bit of Keynesian star quality about her. But she's also a first-rate economist. Her thesis is that the old rules-based trading system that her great-great-uncle helped design after World War II is gone. And it ain't coming back. China's subsidies are so opaque that rules can't be written to constrain them, let alone enforced. The US is no longer willing to submit to a referee. Without the two biggest players, no rules-based system is meaningful. So — now what? Keynes says we must think like a trade warrior. Donald Trump should leverage the tools available — but use them strategically. Trump's error in his second term was not being tough on China while being too tough on everyone else, especially allies like Canada and Mexico. Soumaya Keynes' most contemporary idea might be her most Keynesian one. John Maynard Keynes proposed penalties for countries running large trade surpluses as well as those running deficits — recognising that global imbalances are a two-sided problem. That idea didn't make it into the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement. Eighty years later, in equally anxious economic times, his optimistic great-great-niece is reviving it. Five Takeaways •       Can Trade Wars Be Won? Yes, Sometimes: The conventional wisdom: no one wins a trade war. Keynes and Bown agree — in theory. In practice, countries in a weaker position cave. History has examples: France in the late nineteenth century told its trading partners they were renegotiating treaties, and the smaller partners complied. Trump's tariffs in his first term produced concessions. The problem is not that trade wars can't be won. It's that the smaller power's only defence — coordinating with other smaller powers — is extremely hard to sustain. There's always an incentive to cut a deal first. •       China Is the Doper on the Sports Field: Keynes's sharpest analogy: the global trading system is like a sports game that needs rules to ensure a level playing field. China's subsidies — cheap credit, corporate handouts, opaque support for state-linked companies — are the equivalent of performance-enhancing drugs. The problem is that unlike doping in sport, China's subsidies are invisible. You can write a rule saying China won't give these handouts. But you can't verify compliance. And without enforcement, rules are meaningless. The WTO has not solved this. Nothing has solved this. •       Trump Was Right About China, Wrong About Everything Else: Keynes is careful here. She credits Robert Lighthizer in Trump's first term with identifying China as the real problem and building a focused strategy. In the second term, Trump put tariffs on everyone simultaneously — which dissipated leverage, alienated the coalition of allies needed to pressure Beijing, and mixed up the problem of China's subsidies with grievances against Canada, Mexico, and the EU. If you were genuinely tough on China, you wouldn't have put tariffs on everyone. You would have been more targeted. •       The Rules-Based System Is Gone and Isn't Coming Back: Why can't we return to the system Keynes's great-great-uncle helped build? Two reasons. China's subsidies are too opaque to write enforceable rules against. And the US has lost confidence in any international referee — a long and complex story, but the result is that America won't submit to neutral adjudication. Without the two biggest players, no rules-based system is meaningful. Yearning for the old approach is not an option. A new strategy is needed — and that's what the book is about. •       AI and the Next Trade War: Services: AI is central to the US-China conflict already — chip restrictions, military advantage, economic supremacy. But Keynes's less-noticed observation: AI could fundamentally reshape international services trade. The UK, for example, is a massive services exporter — finance, legal, consulting, accounting. If AI eliminates demand for those services, the UK faces a new current account crisis, new trade tensions, a new wave of economic conflict. Nobody knows how this plays out. Which is why, she suggests, the tools in the book will remain relevant for longer than the current tariff cycle. About the Guests Soumaya Keynes is an economics columnist at the Financial Times and host of The Economics Show with Soumaya Keynes. Before joining the FT she spent eight years at The Economist. She co-founded the Trade Talks podcast with Chad Bown during Trump's first term. Chad P. Bown is the Reginald Jones Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and former Chief Economist at the US State Department under President Biden. Together they are the authors of How to Win a Trade War: An Optimistic Guide to an Anxious Global Economy (Simon & Schuster, May 26, 2026). References: •       How to Win a Trade War: An Optimistic Guide to an Anxious Global Economy by Soumaya Keynes and Chad P. Bown (Simon & Schuster, May 26, 2026). •       Soumaya Keynes on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, May 19, 2026 — referenced in the interview. •       Episode 2892: Jason Pack on the Iran war — the companion episode on America's strategic distractions from the China problem. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouT...

Take 730 delegates from 44 countries, plus another 2,000 or so hangers-on. House them in a remote, dilapidated hotel with holes in the roof and broken furniture. Deliver a train wagon filled with alcohol. Throw in some Russian spies, German prisoners of war, a troupe of bombshell “secretaries” and a magician. And then have the lead protagonist, the world's most famous economist, almost die of a heart attack. What does that give you? Only the most successful international monetary negotiation in history. This is the story of the Bretton Woods conference of 1944, as relayed by journalist and author Ed Conway to hosts Gillian Tett and Robin Wigglesworth. The three weeks of chaotic talks would deliver three decades of postwar peace and prosperity, and enthrone the US dollar as the global reserve currency. The discussions also nearly killed Britain's lead negotiator, John Maynard Keynes, and would later disgrace his US counterpart, Harry Dexter White.Further reading:The Summit, by Ed Conway (2015)The Economic Consequences of the Peace, by John Maynard Keynes (1919)John Maynard Keynes, biography by Robert Skidelsky in three volumes (1983-2000)Treasonable Doubt: The Harry Dexter White Spy Case, by R Bruce Craig (2004)Credits: King's College Cambridge, the IMF, Dreamstime, Getty Images, the Hulton Archive, Ullstein Bild, Bettmann, Shutterstock, the LIFE Picture Collection, Thomas D McAvoy, Alfred Eisenstaedt, and the Darling Archive.To enjoy future episodes, be sure to subscribe to The Story of Money wherever you get your podcasts, also on the show's dedicated YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@FTTheStoryOfMoneyHosts: Gillian Tett and Robin WigglesworthProducer: Laurence KnightExecutive Producers: Flo Phillips and Manuela SaragosaOriginal music: Breen TurnerBroadcast engineers: Bianca Wakeman and Petros GiuompasisPodcast Development: Laura ClarkeVideo editor: Kristen Kenyon and Josh Divney at Podcast DiscoveryLearn more at ft.com/tsom or get in touch at thestoryofmoney@ft.com.Love listening to FT Podcasts? Join us live on Saturday June 20 at our inaugural NYC FT Weekend Festival at Spring Studios. Put your questions directly to our experts, experience your favourite podcast in person, and see the FT come to life. Register now and enjoy 10% off with code FTPodcast — this is one Saturday you won't want to miss. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Asked what secret he would use his resources to uncover, CZ says he would pick the private discussions around Richard Nixon's 1971 decision to close the gold window and end dollar convertibility, a move that destroyed Bretton Woods and launched the modern fiat currency system.

A pesar de la tregua comercial entre China y Estados Unidos de octubre pasado, persisten asuntos explosivos en las tensas relaciones entre los dos países, entre otros, las ventas de armas de Estados Unidos a Taiwán, el control de las exportaciones de tierras raras por parte de China o la política arancelaria. Laia Comerma, consultora de negocios, destaca un punto relevante: sentarse a discutir sobre Taiwán. Trump llega a China para su visita oficial acompañado de un puñado de dirigentes empresariales, entre otros, los de Tesla, Apple y Boeing, para pedirle a su homólogo chino que abra el país a empresas estadounidenses. Sin embargo, es sobre Taiwán que este encuentro ha tomado un rumbo inédito. "El hecho de que se discuta el tema de Taiwán ya es muy relevante en sí, porque desde  Reagan, la política de Estados Unidos es que sus ventas de armas a Taiwán no es algo que se discuta ni que deba discutirse con la China", explica la consultora Laia Comerma, presidenta de la Cámara para la Cooperación Hispano China. "En Estados Unidos se consideraba que ese no era un asunto de su incumbencia, según la Taiwan Relations Act de los Estados Unidos. El hecho de que Trump si esté dispuesto a discutir sobre eso ya de por sí es muy relevante y cambia la política de Estados Unidos hacia Taiwán. Esto puede tener un efecto muy significativo en un primer plano en la política doméstica de Taiwán. Y, por el otro lado, están las ‘garantías de seguridad', las cuales han posibilitado la autonomía y el statu quo en el estrecho de Taiwán. Ahora bien, si cambiase cualquier pieza de este rompecabezas gigante, complicado e inestable podría desencadenar un efecto domino". El encuentro entre los dos líderes se produce en un contexto interno difícil para Trump, con baja popularidad alimentada por la guerra de Irán y un repunte de la inflación, pero también lo es para Xi Jinping, pues China está atravesando un momento incierto para su economía marcado por el débil consumo interno y una persistente deuda del sector inmobiliario. Pero es en la imagen exterior, en la fiabilidad, donde China quiere ganar con sus cartas, dice Laia Comerma. "China desde el inicio del mandato del presidente Donald Trump se está presentando como una fuente de estabilidad, como el principal promotor del régimen multilateral. Aunque podamos preguntarnos qué representa ese régimen multilateral. Eso se puede discutir. Pero sí que es verdad que en un momento en el que Trump está atacando las instituciones que Estados Unidos había creado con el régimen de Bretton Woods, China se está presentando, mientras tanto, como una fuente de libre comercio, de literalidad y de globalización". Trump puede necesitar la ayuda de Xi para conseguir que Irán acceda a un acuerdo y para que Pekín consienta en reducir o eliminar sus compras de crudo procedente de la República Islámica.

Prof. Marcel Fratzscher, Präsident des Deutschen Instituts für Wirtschaftsforschung (DIW) Berlin, hat vorgeschlagen, die Bundesbank solle einen Teil ihrer Goldreserven verkaufen, um mit den Erlösen die dringend nötigen Investitionen in die Zukunft zu tätigen. Ein Vorschlag, der nicht nur einmal mehr verdeutlicht, wie sehr die staatlichen Finanzen aus dem Ruder laufen, sondern auch, wie gering die Neigung in Politik und der ihr zugeneigten Wissenschaft ist, die unumgängliche Priorisierung der Staatsausgaben endlich vorzunehmen. Wie schon die Milliarden-Schulden aus den sogenannten “Sondervermögen” dürften auch Milliarden aus Goldverkäufen letztlich nur dem Stopfen von Haushaltslöchern dienen. Viel schwerer wiegt, dass der Vorschlag von einem eklatanten Mangel an Verständnis für die geänderte geopolitische Lage zeugt. Während die Notenbanken der Welt massiv ihre Goldbestände aufstocken und jene, die in den letzten Jahren Gold verkauft haben, dies bitterlich bedauern, soll Deutschland den entgegengesetzten Weg einschlagen? Gold könnte bei einer Neuordnung des Weltwährungssystems eine entscheidende Rolle spielen und wäre auch für den Fall eines Zerfalls des Euro und einem Neustart der Mark ein wesentlicher Anker in der Bundesbankbilanz. So unwahrscheinlich so ein Szenario heute erscheint, so wichtig ist es, darauf vorbereitet zu sein. Denn nur das wäre die Krise, die den Einsatz von Gold rechtfertigt. Die Bedeutung der Bilanz der Bundesbank war Gegenstand eines Gesprächs in Folge 176 mit Dr. Ingo Sauer im Januar 2023. In Anbetracht der Fantasien, den deutschen Goldschatz zu schröpfen, ist es Zeit für ein bto REFRESH! Hinweis ABSTURZ – So retten wir Deutschland: das neue Buch von Daniel Stelter. Jetzt überall, wo es Bücher gibt. Auch bestellbar bei Thalia, Amazon, geniallokal.HörerserviceKolumne Deutschlands goldenes Sparschwein von Prof. Marcel Fratzscher (DIW) in DIE ZEIT (08.05.2026): https://is.gd/aOplWl Beitrag Marcel Fratzscher: Goldreserven als „riesiges Sparschwein für Krisen“ – wie diese? in Frankfurter Allgmeine Zeitung (26.04.2026): https://is.gd/ZhEgAF Beitrag Fratzscher fordert Teilverkauf von Reserven zur Krisenbewältigung im Handelsblatt (27.04.2026): https://is.gd/ERi5TW Interview Die Goldreserven sind sicher mit Burkhard Balz, Mitglied des Vorstands der Deutschen Bundesbank, in Welt am Sonntag (21.03.2026): https://is.gd/YHUtGm Leitartikel Die Bundesbank sollte ihr Gold weder verlagern noch verkaufen im Handelsblatt (26.01.2026): https://is.gd/mlaRvi Analyse des World Gold Council: Gold Demand Trends — Zentralbanken Jahr 2025 (863 t Nettokäufe): https://is.gd/3PCuWg Beitrag Bundesbank: Wert der deutschen Goldreserven steigt auf 395 Milliarden Euro auf FinanzNachrichten.de (Meldung dpa-AFX, 05.03.2026): https://is.gd/XxeQ8M Beitrag zur Entwicklung der Goldbestände seit Bretton Woods auf der Homepage der Deutschen Bundesbank: https://is.gd/NtRgwR GoldPrice.org Goldpreis am 01.05.2026 — 4.627 USD/Unze: https://is.gd/JSgC3E bto #176 Ernsthafte Bedrohung des Geldwerts (Januar 2023) mit Dr. Ingo Sauer: https://is.gd/leH9F7 beyond the obvious – Neue Analysen, Kommentare und Einschätzungen zur Wirtschafts- und Finanzlage finden Sie unter think-bto.com.Newsletter – Den monatlichen bto-Newsletter abonnieren Sie hier.Redaktionskontakt – Wir freuen uns über Ihre Meinungen, Anregungen und Kritik unter podcast@think-bto.com.Handelsblatt – Bis zum 13. Mai 2026: Unabhängiger Journalismus und Meinungsfreiheit sind keine Selbstverständlichkeiten. Zum Tag der Pressefreiheit gibt es deshalb beim Handelsblatt ein besonderes Angebot: 12 Monate Zugang mit 50 % Rabatt. Alle Infos unter handelsblatt.com/pressefreiheitWerbepartner – Informationen zu den Angeboten unserer aktuellen Werbepartner finden Sie hier. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The post-WWII global order is officially dead—and a new era is beginning. In the episode recorded live at the S&P Global Market Intelligence's Annual Community Bankers Conference on May 6, geopolitical strategist and author Dr. George Friedman discusses the conflict between the U.S. and Iran, Russia's failure in the Ukraine, how America reinvents itself through instability, and the pivotal U.S.-China summit on May 14. Dr. Friedman's core argument: The entire Bretton Woods system—NATO, multilateral trade, the U.S.-European alliance—was built to contain the Soviet Union. Russia's catastrophic failure in Ukraine proved that threat no longer exists, rendering the old framework obsolete. What's replacing it is a bilateral U.S.-China order that could reshape global economics for a generation.

The Clarity Act is being sold as stablecoin regulation, but the real story is much bigger. This breaks down how the US could use private stablecoins to extend dollar dominance, funnel global demand into Treasuries, and quietly roll out a CBDC-style system through the back door. Michael Saylor, Ray Dalio, Bretton Woods, fiat debasement, AI, and Bitcoin all collide in one massive macro shift.SPONSORS✅ Ledn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.nmj1gs2i.com/9W598/9B9DM/?source_id=podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Simply Bitcoin clients get 0.25% off their first loanNeed liquidity without selling your Bitcoin? Ledn has been the trusted Bitcoin-backed lending platform for 6+ years. Access your BTC's value while HODLing.

LISTEN and SUBSCRIBE on:Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/watchdog-on-wall-street-with-chris-markowski/id570687608 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2PtgPvJvqc2gkpGIkNMR5i WATCH and SUBSCRIBE on:https://www.youtube.com/@WatchdogOnWallstreet/featured  Another round of Trump tariffs just got blocked in court — exactly like we said would happen. The U.S. Court of International Trade ruled that Trump's new Section 122 tariffs were unlawful because the law was designed for balance-of-payments emergencies, not general trade deficits. The administration knew the legal ground was shaky from the start.In this episode, we break down:• Why the court ruled Trump's “Tariff 2.0” plan illegal• What Section 122 was actually created for after Bretton Woods collapsed• How the White House likely knew these tariffs wouldn't survive judicial review• Why this strategy mirrors Biden's legally questionable student-loan maneuvers• How Trump may now pivot toward “Tariff 3.0” targeting countries accused of “taking advantage” of the U.S.• Why markets and allies are increasingly nervous about unpredictable escalationAnd the uncomfortable reality: people may now fear Trump's reaction to losing more than the policy itself.

In this episode of Soar Financially, Clive Thompson, a retired Swiss wealth manager with 50 years of experience, reveals the real strategy behind a potential gold revaluation reset. Could the U.S. use a massive gold price reset to erase its debt?We explore the brewing battle between Trump and Powell, the Fed's next move, and why Jerome Powell's sudden exit could spark a gold and equity market boom. From Basel III and COMEX deliveries to Bretton Woods 3.0 and dollar devaluation, Clive connects the dots between central banks, debt relief, and gold manipulation.#Gold #Powell #debtcrisis

Welcome to Part 3 of our special four-part Deep Dive series into the international system! This week, we move from the historical and philosophical origins of the "Western Bubble" directly into the 20th century to examine the creation of the modern global order.Following the devastation of the Second World War, Western powers embarked on an unprecedented era of institution building. But were organizations like the UN and the Bretton Woods institutions created to save the world from hell, or to ensure Western dominance? The episode begins with an audio essay read by our producer, Stefani, exploring how the West attempted to project its own domestic success onto the rest of the globe.Following the essay, Dario and Balder unpack the immense arrogance of the 1940s geopolitical landscape. We discuss: The Illusion of Universality: How the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted by a small, Western-dominated vanguard that assumed its own history was the inevitable endpoint for all of humanity. The Danger of Vague Language: Why international law is intentionally written at a "middle school level," and how this ambiguity allows powerful nations to weaponise morality for their own strategic agendas. The "Sword of Damocles": How the West uses the guise of democracy and human rights to justify hypocritical military interventions—supporting dictators when convenient, and overthrowing them when they are not.Note to our listeners: This is Part 3 of a 4-part series on the international system. Next week, we will conclude the Deep Dive by exploring the spectacular collapse of this system in the 21st century and the ultimate decline of Western geopolitical legitimacy.This podcast is an individual project between Dario Hasenstab and Balder Hageraats. We are supported by our producer Stefani Obradovic from Western Bubble Insights & Strategy. If you would like to get in touch with us, write us an email at thewesternbubble@gmail.com.

They'll tell you Wall Street corrupted the system. That's the distraction. The real power wasn't in the bribes — it was in the blueprint.Before the Federal Reserve existed, a small network of bankers had already written the rules. The 1907 Panic wasn't a crisis they survived — it was the crisis they used. Jekyll Island wasn't a secret meeting. It was a founding session. And the system they designed wasn't built to serve the public. It was built to serve the architects.This episode investigates the hidden financial history of how America's central banking system was constructed — not by politicians, but by a private banking cartel that had already spent decades perfecting its methods. This isn't monetary theory. This is how power actually moves.What you'll discover:— Who was really in the room at Jekyll Island and what they decided— How the 1907 Panic was used to manufacture public consent for central banking— Why the Federal Reserve was designed to concentrate power, not distribute it— The blueprint that still runs the financial system todayCHAPTERS:00:00 Cold Open: The Lie They Taught You About Wall Street00:28 Lesson 1: The Blueprint Before the Federal Reserve01:24 Lesson 2: Jekyll Island — Who Really Designed the Fed03:50 Lesson 3: War, Debt, and How America Replaced London06:49 Lesson 4: Bretton Woods and the Architecture of Global Control09:50 Lesson 5: Deregulation, 2008, and Too Big to Fail12:18 The Ledger Today: What the System Was Actually Built For

Low Value Mail is a live call-in show discussing current events, politics, conspiracies and much more.Every Monday night at 7pm ETSupport The Show:

Vijay Boyapati is the author of The Bullish Case for Bitcoin, widely considered one of the most important foundational philosophical texts in the space.› https://x.com/real_vijay

Is the Iran War a pre-planned controlled demolition of the failing Petrodollar system — and the engineered launch of Phase 2 of the Great Reset? In this episode, Alex Sachon expands on his Substack article exploring the geopolitical, financial, and historical forces driving the current conflict. Drawing on the work of F. William Engdahl and others, Alex traces the arc from the Bretton Woods collapse and the 1973 oil shock to today's Iran War — arguing that the same imperial playbook is being run again, this time to transition the world out of the Petrodollar era and into a new technocratic global order.Topics covered include the role of Zionism as a US imperial asset, the engineered 1979 Iranian Revolution, the deep state's relationship with the Trump administration, and what the Great Reset really signifies for the future of Israel, the NeoCons, and the American Empire itself.

In Episode 468 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with renowned economic historian and author Barry Eichengreen about the history of international currencies and the prospects for the US dollar's continued preeminence, drawing on his new book Money Beyond Borders: Global Currencies from Croesus to Crypto. The first hour traces the long arc of international currency history, from the invention of coinage in ancient Lydia through the monetary innovations of Athens, Rome, and the Byzantine Empire, to Renaissance Florence, where a city-state with no navy and no silver mines managed to make its currency the dominant medium of exchange in Europe. The hour closes with a discussion about the Dutch Republic's revolutionary contributions to modern money and finance, and the Spanish silver dollar—the first truly global currency, which circulated from the New World to China and remained legal tender in the United States until the eve of the Civil War. The second hour examines Britain's emergence as the world's first modern financial superpower, whose decline opened the door to the internationalization of the US dollar, and the role that figures like Paul Warburg, the Federal Reserve, two World Wars, and the Bretton Woods Agreement each played in establishing dollar dominance—further cemented by the breakdown of Bretton Woods and the era of floating fiat currencies. They then turn to the present, examining what Eichengreen sees as the two most serious threats to the dollar's continued preeminence: the erosion of the rule of law and separation of powers inside the United States, and the fraying of the alliance relationships that underpin global confidence in dollar-denominated assets. They close with a discussion about whether stablecoins could extend the dollar's network effects, why the Euro and the Chinese renminbi fall short as credible alternatives, and what a world without a reliable global reserve currency could mean for international trade, finance, and geopolitical stability. Subscribe to our premium content—including our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports—by visiting HiddenForces.io/subscribe. If you'd like to join the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community—with benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by: Subscribing on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud, CastBox, or via our RSS Feed Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify Join our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and support the podcast at https://hiddenforces.io. Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas Episode Recorded on 03/09/2026

Want to reach out to us? Want to leave a comment or review? Want to give us a suggestion or berate Anthony? Send us a text by clicking this link!A strange AI intro sets the tone for a conversation about power, myth, and the cracks running through our civilization. We start with Tucker's claim that some believers try to force God's hand, and that secular boosters dream of a tech-ruled future. From there we pull the lens wider: the Bretton Woods order is threadbare, NATO expectations are stale, and a managerial class that once kept the peace now leans on slogans no one believes. Whether you see him as a disruptor or a danger, Trump becomes a prism for realism—treating Europe's security habits, Ukraine's symbolism, and great-power hedging as signs the old narrative no longer binds.Then we enter the thicket of AI. Not sci-fi hype, but concrete pressures: law firms cutting junior roles, back-office “email jobs” vanishing, and a narrow set of labs racing for an advantage that could snowball. We weigh the fear of a winner-take-all “singleton” against the possibility of AI fragility, closed-loop error, and a financial bubble built on scarce chips and shaky energy. Either way, the labor shock seems real, and the blow will land hardest on Gen Z and Gen Alpha. That lands us in the heart of the meaning crisis: social media frays trust, the dating market corrodes goodwill, and the institutions that once turned information into wisdom—churches, schools, civic bodies—feel absent when we need them most.We don't retreat into mysticism or denial. Instead, we argue for recovering thick stories and practices that hold under stress: moral limits, local bonds, real sacrifice, and the courage to say no when power dresses up as destiny. We also warn about importing religious wars we barely understand; others see sacred stakes even when we insist it's just policy. If this is the end of a world, not the world, then our task is to stand upright in truth, steward what's still good, and build the scaffolding for what comes next.If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review—your support helps more curious listeners find these conversations.Support the showNeed seafood for Lent? Check out https://shoplobster.com/ and use code AB10 to get 10% from Maine's ONLY Catholic lobster company.Check out our new sponsor, Nic Nac, at www.nicnac.com and use code "AB25%" for 25% off of your first order!********************************************************Please subscribe! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKsxnv80ByFV4OGvt_kImjQ?sub_confirmation=1https://www.avoidingbabylon.comMerchandise: https://avoiding-babylon-shop.fourthwall.comLocals Community: https://avoidingbabylon.locals.comFull Premium/Locals Shows on Audio Podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1987412/subscribeRSS Feed for Podcast Apps: https://feeds.buzzsprout.com/1987412.rss

O "Ulrich Responde" é uma série de vídeos onde respondo perguntas enviadas por membros do canal e seguidores, abordando temas de economia, finanças e investimentos. Oferecemos uma análise profunda, trazendo informações para quem quer entender melhor a economia e tomar decisões financeiras mais informadas.00:00 – Começando mais um Ulrich Responde00:31 – Cenário político brasileiro: escândalo surreal e indignante06:25 – Guerra Irã-Israel: Trump, a iniciativa Cinturão e Rota e o embate com a China07:53 – Por que as ações da BORR estão sendo prejudicadas pela guerra?08:58 – Possibilidade de invasão de Taiwan e Terceira Guerra Mundial11:46 – Células terroristas do Irã podem atacar a Europa antes dos EUA?13:29 – Como a China pode retaliar os EUA por invasões a parceiros de petróleo?15:13 – Macron e o investimento em armas nucleares: o início de uma nova corrida nuclear?17:32 – Existe correlação nas datas de início dos últimos conflitos?19:01 – Relação entre a quebra da correlação produtividade/salário e Bretton Woods (1971)20:37 – Crescimento do investimento passivo e a distorção na descoberta de preços21:42 – Bitcoin: motivo da alta recente e o papel de porto seguro em meio à guerra24:37 – O "Careca" será preso? Expectativas sobre o Senado e as últimas consequências25:04 – Geopolítica como o "novo normal": como empresários e investidores devem se prevenir29:15 – Por que não concordar cegamente com o ataque ao Irã: o conceito de Blowback35:34 – O que aconteceu com o Instagram da OranjeBTC?36:10 – O mercado está subestimando a guerra e seu impacto?37:13 – Qual o pior detalhe já revelado sobre o caso do Banco Master?37:41 – Impacto da queda do regime de Maduro e o futuro de Cuba38:33 – Conselho para quem tem 21 anos e quer viver de investimentos39:28 – Ações da OranjeBTC estão com mais desconto que o próprio Bitcoin?40:57 – Epstein agente do Mossad?42:25 – O caso do Sicário e a comparação com a queima de arquivo de Epstein43:59 – Por que os EUA ainda não dominaram e reabriram o Estreito de Hormuz?45:55 – Novidades sobre cursos da OranjeBTC46:05 – Stretch da Strategy e o "dinheiro infinito" de Michael Saylor47:07 – Como pode ser o final da guerra?49:19 – Como a guerra afeta o agronegócio (fertilizantes, frete e combustíveis)49:48 – Por onde começar a estudar economia?

In Episode 465 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Yale historian and Cold War scholar Odd Arne Westad, author of The Coming Storm, about why the pre-WWI era of multipolarity, imperial decline, and great power rivalry offers a far more instructive — and alarming — historical parallel to today's world than the Cold War, and what must be done to prevent the catastrophic descent into total war. The first hour explores what went wrong after the fall of the Soviet Union, how the end of the Bretton Woods system helped enable China's economic rise, and the striking structural parallels between the rise of Germany before 1914 and the rise of China today. Westad and Kofinas also examine the roles that Russia, India, and the United States play in this historical analogy, and how the failure to integrate rising powers into meaningful international frameworks — then and now — has set the stage for catastrophic conflict. The second hour takes a deeper look at the specific forces that could push the world from strategic rivalry to outright war, including the role of nuclear weapons in a multipolar order, the most dangerous flashpoints — from Taiwan to the Korean Peninsula to the South China Sea and China's border with India — and the underappreciated threat that terrorism could pose as a catalyst for great power conflict. They also examine the internal political dynamics that boxed leaders into impossible positions before 1914, how frighteningly familiar those constraints look today, and what Professor Westad believes must be done to stabilize the international system before the world faces consequences it is not remotely prepared to confront. Subscribe to our premium content—including our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports—by visiting HiddenForces.io/subscribe. If you'd like to join the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community—with benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by: Subscribing on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud, CastBox, or via our RSS Feed Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify Join our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and support the podcast at https://hiddenforces.io. Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas Episode Recorded on 02/23/2026

For years, we've talked about the world order 'shifting.' Changing. The end of the Bretton Woods agreement, But according to legendary investor Ray Dalio, the shift is over. The break is now here.In a massive new piece Dalio just released—following the 2026 Munich Security Conference—he made it official: **The post-1945 world order has broken down.** We have officially entered what he calls "Stage 6' of the Big Cycle."Historically, Stage 6 is the 'War Stage.' It's the period of 'Great Disorder' where rules are replaced by raw power, where debt cycles reach their breaking point, and where the global map is redrawn. We're seeing it in the 'Capital Wars,' the weaponization of the dollar, and the total breakdown of trust in traditional institutions.

REGISTER FOR THOUGHTFUL MONEY'S SPRING ONLINE CONFERENCE AT THE EARLY BIRD DISCOUNT PRICE at https://www.thoughtfulmoney.com/conferenceDollar Milkshake Theory developer Brent Johnson has released another report on stablecoins, emphasizing their tremendous potential to upend the global monetary system.He's shouting loudly about this because he sees most of Wall Street vastly unprepared for what's about to happen.It's largely treating stablecoins as a niche amusement, instead of the Omega-level disruptor Brent thinks it will prove to be.In fact, he thinks stablecoins will impact the global monetary order on the same level as the Bretton Woods accord, or when the dollar moved off the gold standard.To learn why, and what the implications will likely be, watch this video.#stablecoin #stablecoins #dollar _____________________________________________ Thoughtful Money LLC is a Registered Investment Advisor Promoter.We produce educational content geared for the individual investor. It's important to note that this content is NOT investment advice, individual or otherwise, nor should be construed as such.We recommend that most investors, especially if inexperienced, should consider benefiting from the direction and guidance of a qualified financial advisor registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or state securities regulators who can develop & implement a personalized financial plan based on a customer's unique goals, needs & risk tolerance.IMPORTANT NOTE: There are risks associated with investing in securities.Investing in stocks, bonds, exchange traded funds, mutual funds, money market funds, and other types of securities involve risk of loss. Loss of principal is possible. Some high risk investments may use leverage, which will accentuate gains & losses. Foreign investing involves special risks, including a greater volatility and political, economic and currency risks and differences in accounting methods.A security's or a firm's past investment performance is not a guarantee or predictor of future investment performance.Thoughtful Money and the Thoughtful Money logo are trademarks of Thoughtful Money LLC.Copyright © 2026 Thoughtful Money LLC. All rights reserved.

In this episode of Breaking History, Matt Ehret and Ghost examine a rapidly unfolding global financial reckoning centered on Credit Suisse and the broader international banking system. The discussion traces newly revealed Nazi-linked accounts, money laundering pipelines, and the role of major banks in facilitating corruption, cartel financing, and illicit capital flows over decades. The conversation moves through historical context including Bretton Woods, the petrodollar system, and the weaponization of finance, before turning to modern developments involving sanctions, currency manipulation, and intelligence-linked financial networks. Particular attention is given to investigations involving PDVSA, international drug trafficking finance, and the exposure of banking structures operating beyond national oversight. Throughout the episode, Matt and Ghost emphasize continuity between past and present financial power structures, highlighting how moral collapse in finance disconnects economies from real production and public accountability. The result is a wide-ranging, historically grounded analysis of how global banking functions as a tool of control, and why its unraveling appears to be accelerating.

China and the Global Economic Order (Cambridge University Press, 2026) examines China's evolving relations with the Bretton Woods institutions (BWIs), specifically the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group from the 1980s through 2025. Using a combination of new qualitative findings and quantitative datasets, the authors observe that China has taken an evolving approach to the BWIs in order to achieve its multiple agendas, acting largely as a 'rule-taker' during its first two decades as a member, but, over time, also becoming a 'rule-shaker' inside the BWIs, and ultimately a new 'rule-maker' outside of the BWIs. The analysis highlights China's exercise of 'two-way countervailing power' with one foot inside the BWIs, and another outside, and pushing for changes in both directions. China's interventions have resulted in BWs reforms and the gradual transformation of the global order, while also generating counter-reactions especially from the United States. Gregory Chin is an Associate Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Politics, and Faculty of Graduate Studies at York University (Canada), with a focus on the political economy of international money and development finance, China, Asia, the BRICS, and global governance. Nomeh Anthony Kanayo, Ph.D. Candidate in International Relations at Florida International University, with research interest in Africa's diaspora relations, African-China relations, great power rivalry and IR theories. Check out my new article https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sciaf.2025.e02699 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

China and the Global Economic Order (Cambridge University Press, 2026) examines China's evolving relations with the Bretton Woods institutions (BWIs), specifically the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group from the 1980s through 2025. Using a combination of new qualitative findings and quantitative datasets, the authors observe that China has taken an evolving approach to the BWIs in order to achieve its multiple agendas, acting largely as a 'rule-taker' during its first two decades as a member, but, over time, also becoming a 'rule-shaker' inside the BWIs, and ultimately a new 'rule-maker' outside of the BWIs. The analysis highlights China's exercise of 'two-way countervailing power' with one foot inside the BWIs, and another outside, and pushing for changes in both directions. China's interventions have resulted in BWs reforms and the gradual transformation of the global order, while also generating counter-reactions especially from the United States. Gregory Chin is an Associate Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Politics, and Faculty of Graduate Studies at York University (Canada), with a focus on the political economy of international money and development finance, China, Asia, the BRICS, and global governance. Nomeh Anthony Kanayo, Ph.D. Candidate in International Relations at Florida International University, with research interest in Africa's diaspora relations, African-China relations, great power rivalry and IR theories. Check out my new article https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sciaf.2025.e02699 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

China and the Global Economic Order (Cambridge University Press, 2026) examines China's evolving relations with the Bretton Woods institutions (BWIs), specifically the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group from the 1980s through 2025. Using a combination of new qualitative findings and quantitative datasets, the authors observe that China has taken an evolving approach to the BWIs in order to achieve its multiple agendas, acting largely as a 'rule-taker' during its first two decades as a member, but, over time, also becoming a 'rule-shaker' inside the BWIs, and ultimately a new 'rule-maker' outside of the BWIs. The analysis highlights China's exercise of 'two-way countervailing power' with one foot inside the BWIs, and another outside, and pushing for changes in both directions. China's interventions have resulted in BWs reforms and the gradual transformation of the global order, while also generating counter-reactions especially from the United States. Gregory Chin is an Associate Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Politics, and Faculty of Graduate Studies at York University (Canada), with a focus on the political economy of international money and development finance, China, Asia, the BRICS, and global governance. Nomeh Anthony Kanayo, Ph.D. Candidate in International Relations at Florida International University, with research interest in Africa's diaspora relations, African-China relations, great power rivalry and IR theories. Check out my new article https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sciaf.2025.e02699 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 this episode of Built to Divide, we pick up where the post-2008 housing machine left off—and show how the subscription economy (SaaS, streaming, “pay forever”) migrated into the built environment. Dimitrius Lynch traces the privatization movement from Milton Friedman's voucher logic and post–Brown v. Board backlash to modern power brokers like ALEC, corporate bill-writing, and the quiet reframing of citizens into customers.Then we explore build-to-rent communities engineered for “predictable cash flow,” housing-as-a-dashboard, and the rise of rentier capitalism—profits from controlling gates, not creating value. The episode connects BlackRock's infrastructure thesis and Aladdin risk platform, the 2008 recovery pipeline, and the long continuity from Bretton Woods → financialization → asset management dominance. Finally, we widen the lens to the next frontier: farmland financialization, where ownership detaches from stewardship and the right to live—and farm—becomes something you lease back.Episode Extras - Photos, videos, sources and links to additional content found during research.Episode Credits:Production in collaboration with Gābl MediaWritten & Executive Produced by Dimitrius LynchAudio Engineering and Sound Design by Jeff Alvarez

This episode of Excess Returns features a wide ranging conversation with Grant Williams on what he calls the hundred year pivot. Grant explains why today's environment feels fundamentally different from the last several decades, why long held investing assumptions may no longer apply, and how declining trust in institutions, money, and markets is reshaping the global financial system. Drawing on history, macroeconomics, and decades of market experience, the discussion explores what this transition means for investors trying to navigate a world defined by uncertainty, volatility, and structural change.Main topics covered• What the hundred year pivot means and why it represents a once in a generation shift• The Fourth Turning framework and how it connects financial crises, politics, and social change• Why buy the dip worked for decades and why it may fail in the years ahead• The erosion of trust in institutions and its impact on markets and money• The financial crisis, sanctions, and the freezing of sovereign assets as turning points• The role of the dollar, gold, and central banks in a changing monetary system• Lessons from history including Bretton Woods and the Suez crisis• Why commodities and real assets matter in a world of deglobalization and reshoring• How artificial intelligence fits into the current investment cycle and capital allocation boom• Portfolio construction and behavioral challenges in a higher volatility environmentTimestamps00:00 The hundred year pivot and why this cycle is different01:30 Defining the Fourth Turning and historical cycles07:40 The financial crisis as the start of institutional breakdown11:00 Sanctions, sovereign assets, and the end of unquestioned trust in the dollar18:20 Historical parallels from Bretton Woods and the Suez crisis24:50 What could trigger a broader monetary reset28:50 Energy, geopolitics, and shifting global alliances35:00 Commodities, real assets, and rebuilding supply chains42:40 Artificial intelligence, capital cycles, and uncertainty52:30 Portfolio construction, behavior, and risk tolerance59:50 Where to follow Grant Williams and his work

The Dominance of the US Dollar and Its Challenges. Alex Pollock (Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute) discusses Kenneth Rogoff's book, Our Currency, Your Problem, focusing on why the US dollar remains the dominant global currency. The dollar's strength is linked to US military power and superior legal and bankruptcy systems, which provide essential "social infrastructure." Pollock recalls the famous quip, "Our currency, your problem," made by Treasury Secretary John Connally in 1971 after the US defaulted on its gold obligations under the Bretton Woods system. Challenges from the Chinese renminbi and crypto are noted, but Rogoff finds serious institutional flaws in China's system. Critically, the growing US national debt is identified as the dollar's "Achilles heel," posing a major threat if global lenders stop lending. 1936

The Dominance of the US Dollar and Its Challenges. Alex Pollock (Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute) discusses Kenneth Rogoff's book, Our Currency, Your Problem, focusing on why the US dollar remains the dominant global currency. The dollar's strength is linked to US military power and superior legal and bankruptcy systems, which provide essential "social infrastructure." Pollock recalls the famous quip, "Our currency, your problem," made by Treasury Secretary John Connally in 1971 after the US defaulted on its gold obligations under the Bretton Woods system. Challenges from the Chinese renminbi and crypto are noted, but Rogoff finds serious institutional flaws in China's system. Critically, the growing US national debt is identified as the dollar's "Achilles heel," posing a major threat if global lenders stop lending. 1885 NYSE

SHOW 11-5-25 CBS EYE ON THE WORLD WITH JOHN BATCHELOR THE SHOW BEGINS IN THE DOUBTS ABOUT AI AND CHILDREN. FIRST HOUR 9-915 Canada's Troubled Relations with China and the US. Charles Burton (author of The Beaver and the Dragon) analyzes Canadian Prime Minister Carney's meeting with China's Xi Jinping following the APEC conference. Burton described Carney as a "supplicant" who echoed Chinese rhetoric of "constructive and pragmatic interactions," which means focusing on trade while avoiding criticism. Issues discussed included Chinese tariffs on Canadian canola and Canada's tariffs on subsidized Chinese EVs. Burton addresses the severely strained Ottawa-Washington relationship due to US tariffs and President Trump's stated unwillingness to talk, feeding "anti-American sentiment" in Canada. This trade uncertainty is a factor in Canada's massive budget deficit, which aims to fund government infrastructure to compensate for lacking investor interest. Furthermore, concerns persist in Canada regarding Chinese EVs potentially functioning as "listening posts" for state security. 915-930 Canada's Troubled Relations with China and the US. Charles Burton (author of The Beaver and the Dragon) analyzes Canadian Prime Minister Carney's meeting with China's Xi Jinping following the APEC conference. Burton described Carney as a "supplicant" who echoed Chinese rhetoric of "constructive and pragmatic interactions," which means focusing on trade while avoiding criticism. Issues discussed included Chinese tariffs on Canadian canola and Canada's tariffs on subsidized Chinese EVs. Burton addresses the severely strained Ottawa-Washington relationship due to US tariffs and President Trump's stated unwillingness to talk, feeding "anti-American sentiment" in Canada. This trade uncertainty is a factor in Canada's massive budget deficit, which aims to fund government infrastructure to compensate for lacking investor interest. Furthermore, concerns persist in Canada regarding Chinese EVs potentially functioning as "listening posts" for state security. 930-945 The Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. Peter Berkowitz (Hoover Institution Fellow and educator) discusses the Trump administration's "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education," which requires universities to meet ten priorities to qualify for federal benefits like student loans and research grants. While many goals are proper or already legally required (like protecting free speech and obeying civil rights laws), several are highly controversial. These controversial points include demanding that hiring decisions be made solely on individual "merit," which critics redefine to include group diversity, and requiring universities to maintain institutional neutrality on political issues. Most universities rejected the compact, asserting it would impair academic freedom. Berkowitz suggests the administration should use direct financial incentives to reward universities that actively teach free speech, rather than relying on mandates. 945-1000 The Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. Peter Berkowitz (Hoover Institution Fellow and educator) discusses the Trump administration's "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education," which requires universities to meet ten priorities to qualify for federal benefits like student loans and research grants. While many goals are proper or already legally required (like protecting free speech and obeying civil rights laws), several are highly controversial. These controversial points include demanding that hiring decisions be made solely on individual "merit," which critics redefine to include group diversity, and requiring universities to maintain institutional neutrality on political issues. Most universities rejected the compact, asserting it would impair academic freedom. Berkowitz suggests the administration should use direct financial incentives to reward universities that actively teach free speech, rather than relying on mandates. SECOND HOUR 10-1015 US-China Ceasefire and Competition in Technology and Space. Jack Burnham (Foundation for Defense of Democracies research analyst) characterizes the Trump-Xi meeting as a necessary "truce" that allows both nations to gain stability and strengthen their positions before the next escalation. Regarding rare earths, China is now employing the US "playbook," setting up a licensing structure rather than a full trade cessation. He emphasizes that building a complete rare earth supply chain outside of China, especially refining capacity, may realistically take seven to ten years. In technology, Beijing is pushing for domestic self-sufficiency in AI infrastructure, partly driven by paranoia that imported chips may contain backdoors or vulnerabilities. Burnham also details China's commitment to militarizing space, including copying US reconnaissance capabilities and practicing anti-satellite operations like "dogfighting." 1015-1030 US-China Ceasefire and Competition in Technology and Space. Jack Burnham (Foundation for Defense of Democracies research analyst) characterizes the Trump-Xi meeting as a necessary "truce" that allows both nations to gain stability and strengthen their positions before the next escalation. Regarding rare earths, China is now employing the US "playbook," setting up a licensing structure rather than a full trade cessation. He emphasizes that building a complete rare earth supply chain outside of China, especially refining capacity, may realistically take seven to ten years. In technology, Beijing is pushing for domestic self-sufficiency in AI infrastructure, partly driven by paranoia that imported chips may contain backdoors or vulnerabilities. Burnham also details China's commitment to militarizing space, including copying US reconnaissance capabilities and practicing anti-satellite operations like "dogfighting." 1030-1045 AI Philosophy and Jewish Wisdom. Spencer Klavan (Associate Editor of the Claremont Review of Books) reviews Michael M. Rosen's book, Like Silicon from Clay, which uses ancient Jewish wisdom, specifically the Golem legend, to analyze AI. Rosen categorizes AI believers into four camps: autonomists (who believe AI will achieve consciousness or sentience) and automationists (who view AI as a sophisticated, non-conscious tool). Both camps are divided into "positive" (optimistic) and "negative" (pessimistic) outlooks. Klavan identifies as a positive automationist, seeing AI as an "elaborate adding machine" or "better Google" that is helpful but requires human verification because it often "hallucinates" (makes up facts). He notes that chatbots conclude conversations with questions because they need human input to avoid becoming "deranged" and to improve their ability to predict human speech patterns. 1045-1100 AI Philosophy and Jewish Wisdom. Spencer Klavan (Associate Editor of the Claremont Review of Books) reviews Michael M. Rosen's book, Like Silicon from Clay, which uses ancient Jewish wisdom, specifically the Golem legend, to analyze AI. Rosen categorizes AI believers into four camps: autonomists (who believe AI will achieve consciousness or sentience) and automationists (who view AI as a sophisticated, non-conscious tool). Both camps are divided into "positive" (optimistic) and "negative" (pessimistic) outlooks. Klavan identifies as a positive automationist, seeing AI as an "elaborate adding machine" or "better Google" that is helpful but requires human verification because it often "hallucinates" (makes up facts). He notes that chatbots conclude conversations with questions because they need human input to avoid becoming "deranged" and to improve their ability to predict human speech patterns. THIRD HOUR 1100-1115 US Military Operations off Venezuela and the War in Ukraine. General Blaine Holt (United States Air Force retired) analyzes the significant US military buildup off Venezuela, headquartered at Roosevelt Roads, describing it as a "war-winning force" primarily targeting cartels and sending a global message of American might. He suggests that operations will likely use commando-style tactics rather than a full occupation, potentially leveraging historical events like the Bay of Pigs as cover for unconventional approaches. The conversation pivots to Ukraine, where Russia is effectively using new glide bombs and missiles, having shifted to a wartime mobilization economy. Holt notes the profound erosion of Ukraine's infrastructure and the demoralizing lack of manpower. He argues innovative, inexpensive defenses, such as Reaper drones with Sidewinders or lasers, are needed, as current air defense economics are unsustainable. 1115-1130 US Military Operations off Venezuela and the War in Ukraine. General Blaine Holt (United States Air Force retired) analyzes the significant US military buildup off Venezuela, headquartered at Roosevelt Roads, describing it as a "war-winning force" primarily targeting cartels and sending a global message of American might. He suggests that operations will likely use commando-style tactics rather than a full occupation, potentially leveraging historical events like the Bay of Pigs as cover for unconventional approaches. The conversation pivots to Ukraine, where Russia is effectively using new glide bombs and missiles, having shifted to a wartime mobilization economy. Holt notes the profound erosion of Ukraine's infrastructure and the demoralizing lack of manpower. He argues innovative, inexpensive defenses, such as Reaper drones with Sidewinders or lasers, are needed, as current air defense economics are unsustainable. 1130-1145 The Dominance of the US Dollar and Its Challenges. Alex Pollock (Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute) discusses Kenneth Rogoff's book, Our Currency, Your Problem, focusing on why the US dollar remains the dominant global currency. The dollar's strength is linked to US military power and superior legal and bankruptcy systems, which provide essential "social infrastructure." Pollock recalls the famous quip, "Our currency, your problem," made by Treasury Secretary John Connally in 1971 after the US defaulted on its gold obligations under the Bretton Woods system. Challenges from the Chinese renminbi and crypto are noted, but Rogoff finds serious institutional flaws in China's system. Critically, the growing US national debt is identified as the dollar's "Achilles heel," posing a major threat if global lenders stop lending. 1145-1200 The Dominance of the US Dollar and Its Challenges. Alex Pollock (Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute) discusses Kenneth Rogoff's book, Our Currency, Your Problem, focusing on why the US dollar remains the dominant global currency. The dollar's strength is linked to US military power and superior legal and bankruptcy systems, which provide essential "social infrastructure." Pollock recalls the famous quip, "Our currency, your problem," made by Treasury Secretary John Connally in 1971 after the US defaulted on its gold obligations under the Bretton Woods system. Challenges from the Chinese renminbi and crypto are noted, but Rogoff finds serious institutional flaws in China's system. Critically, the growing US national debt is identified as the dollar's "Achilles heel," posing a major threat if global lenders stop lending. FOURTH HOUR 12-1215 1215-1230 1230-1245 Private Space Enterprise, Artemis Debate, and the Human Body in Space. Bob Zimmerman (Behind the Black) reviews the private space sector, highlighting VAST, which is developing the small manned demo space station Haven One using its own investment capital, unlike other NASA-funded consortiums. VAST's larger planned station, Haven 2, is designed to rotate, creating artificial gravity. This capability is crucial for mitigating the damage extended weightlessness causes the human body, such as cardiovascular weakening, bone density loss, and vision problems (the eye flattens). Zimmerman notes the ongoing debate over NASA's Artemis program, where former administrators clash over SpaceX's ability to build the lunar lander on time, often driven by lobbying interests. He also reports that China recently set a new national record for successful launches in a single year (67 completed). 1245-100 AM Private Space Enterprise, Artemis Debate, and the Human Body in Space. Bob Zimmerman (Behind the Black) reviews the private space sector, highlighting VAST, which is developing the small manned demo space station Haven One using its own investment capital, unlike other NASA-funded consortiums. VAST's larger planned station, Haven 2, is designed to rotate, creating artificial gravity. This capability is crucial for mitigating the damage extended weightlessness causes the human body, such as cardiovascular weakening, bone density loss, and vision problems (the eye flattens). Zimmerman notes the ongoing debate over NASA's Artemis program, where former administrators clash over SpaceX's ability to build the lunar lander on time, often driven by lobbying interests. He also reports that China recently set a new national record for successful launches in a single year (67 completed).