You're listening to Carrie Let's Financial Survival Network, where you get valuable information you
just can't find anywhere else to thrive in today's trying times. You need the
Financial Survival Network now more than ever. Go to Financial Survival Network dot com
and get your free newsletter in gift Financial Survival Network now more than ever.
Welcome you are listening to watching the Financial Survival Network. I'm your host carry
Lust. Well, John Rabino is with us for our bi weekly chat.
And well, John, if this isn't a slowdown, I read today that
layoffs are quadruple what they wear last year. And of course nobody's talking about
it, but you got tech layoffs at every major tech company in the country
except maybe Tesla hasn't announced any layoffs yet. But how far can they be
off? Yeah, it does seem like everybody's laying people off. Um,
well, you know, Blos quarter GDP was up only one point one percent,
or at a rate of one point one percent, which means the economy
is almost at stalling speed already, so it's not a surprise they're layoffs.
But pretty much everywhere you look there are signs of the slowdown right now because
pending home sales just went down for the first time since November. Lumber lumber
prices are plunging because of pending home sales being down. You know, commercial
real estate. I think we talked about commercial real estate last time, right,
but it's um, it's in a crisis. You know, at least
certain sectors of commercial real estate are. Oil gave back its m post OPEC
surprise production cut jump. You know, it's almost back down to where it
was before that, and that's probably because of the slowing economy. And you
know, the big one is that the the M two money supply continue us
to go down. And I posted a thing called you can't you can't taper
a Ponzi scheme the other day, and the point is that, yeah,
we're we're we've cut off the money spicket. There isn't new money being created
in order to roll over debt and bailout people who need bailouts. And so
that means somebody, some sectors of the economy just won't get the money they
need to survive and they're going to start blowing out. The commercial real estate
is an obvious one, but a lot of lenders are either cutting off car
dealers completely from credit or are making it really hard for car buyers to get
the loans on, especially to use cars. So you've seen stuff like that
all through the economy. And what that means is lots of people are going
to be able to borrow or are not going to be able to roll over
debt, and a lot of them are going to go bankrupt. They're going
to stiff their creditors will then go bankruptcy, get one of these cascade failure
things going when you try to shrink the money supply and it's um it's not
clear that they're doing anything to reverse that. In fact, the FED and
the ECB are scheduled to raise rates on May fourth, so watch that day.
That's gonna be a big day if if inflation comes out I think on
May second, at least for the EU, and then the central banks raise
interest rates in the face of whatever the inflation number is. Then that's probably
going to scare the equity markets, or at least sober up the equity markets,
because you know, stocks have going back up. They're almost back up
to where they were before the last bear markets started, and that's not normally
how it should be heading into a recession. So I think very good chance
of some financial sectors blowing up on a level that's big enough to need a
government bailout and an equities bear market at the same time. So the second
half of this year it could be a lot scarier than the first half has
been so far. Yeah, and it's been pretty scary, that's for sure.
Well, we can pretty much anticipate that when this happens going to happen
in the first quarter. It's going to happen like September October. But one
thing I noticed with the Nick Santiago from In the Money Stocks is we started
a peculiar phenomena, and that is market crash is taking place during holidays.
We had a couple of them over the past six months. We never used
to get a crash during a holiday weekend, the three day weekend where the
A team basically goes off to their Hampton's jaunts and leaves it to the B
team and the C team to keep things going for a day. Now,
I don't think they're going off to the Hampton so quick when the holidays come
because something has happened to the market where these crashes have started to occur.
Uh. Yeah, And what's our next holiday to test that pieces is it
the fourth of July Memorial Day and that's also urban week in the Miami so
it's a great time to not come to Miami. O Week I could have
heard about. Is that is that sequel to Mayo or is that a hip
hop festival that it was? Okay, you just leave it at that,
Okay, yeah, alright, So layoffs are are just through the roof oil
price is getting and more importantly, money supply going down, deficit going up,
that sucks up all the available dollars. We get to have like a
dollar shortage year where we really do have deflation. John, Well, that's
um, that is kind of what we're saying. Because if if everybody needs
to roll over debt or to um to borrow to buy something, and they
only need dollars for that, right, and that if we're shrinking the supply
of dollars, then you know, logically you could say that, well,
interest rates have to go up, the dollar exchange rate will probably go up
relative to other currencies, and so you get a tightening of one share conditions
that way. So that might be how shrinking money supply manifests in the economy
via a tightening of monetary conditions in a lot of different places, in a
lot of different ways. And yeah, that wouldn't be a surprise. So
it could be that this, this coincides with a quote unquote strong dollar and
that you know, however you slice it from there, the effects are really
bad. Yeah. Yeah, and they're global in scope here. This isn't
just one country having an issue, John, this is the whole world.
Well, almost everybody is tightening. And you know, the ECB is the
shocking one. I wasn't really paying attention to found it, but they wrote
they could. They raised their version of the Fed funds rate from the negative
point five percent to three percent in less than a year, which is a
really fast increase in interest rates. And a lot of a periphery countries in
Europe, the pigs countries, which is what Portugal, Italy, Greece and
Spain. Yeah, and that anyhow, their interest rates, especially on their
ten year treasury bonds, have gone way up. Italy's is up in the
floors now. So this is a country that's so over over leveraged that it
had to have interest rates pushed by the ECB down to below what the US
Treasury pays to borrow for it to survive financially. All of the sudden,
it's paying four point three five percent or something like that on ten year money.
Who in the right mind would lend Italy money for ten years even at
four point three five percent, You know you're liable to see a negative fifty
percent return on those bonds. So it's possible that this is a bigger problem
for Europe, for the Eurozone in particular, than it is from the US,
because so many of the weak Eurozone countries just won't be able to survive
under these circumstances. And think about it. Would you loan money to Germany
at two point three percent and not get his high a return, or would
you learn it to Italy at four point three Well, see, that's that's
an interesting thing out because let's talk about Germany. They used to be the
country that got ever relied of everybody in the world. Germany was probably the
best managed country at one time. Yes, but since then they've been making
dumb mistake after dumb mistake. They basedly went to uh Well, when they
formed the Eurozone, they opened borders internally, so you had free movement from
one European country to another's the same way that Americans go from one state to
another. But apparently a German assistance, they opened their external borders too and
just let millions of North African refugees and other kinds of immigrants come in.
And then once hit in, you know, once they land on a beach
in Greece or Italy, they had unfettered internal momility within the Eurozone, so
they could all go to Paris in London. You know, that created a
lot of political turmoil where you've got these right wing parties that are anti immigration
gaining popularity all over Europe. And those guys are also euroskeptics, so they're
not really wetted to the idea of staying in the euro Zone at all.
And then while your while Germany was doing that, they decided to close down
all their nuclear plants and go to one M renewables and Russian natural gas.
Very clear that turned out that renewables like solar and wind don't work all that
well in a cloudy, not very windy country like Germany, so they didn't
get nearly what they thought they were going to get from from clean tech.
And then you know, with the German earther with the pipeline running natural gas
to Germany from Russia. Um, can I say the US blew up that
pipeline, because we we all know they did, But I don't think it's
really official yet, and I don't want to get you banned, so I'm
not going to say that. But yeah, yeah, but anyhow, Um,
that pipeline got blown up. So now Germany is not getting enough gas
from Russia to satisfy its needs, it's not getting enough electricity from solar and
wind to satisfy its needs, and it's it's in kind of an energy crisis
for having to close down big sections of its industrial economy. So where the
rest of the Eurozone could function because for instance, Italian and Greek bonds were
seen as German bonds. Yes, and with the German economy backing up the
ECB, that's no longer necessarily the case because Germany might not have the ability
to bail out a trillion dollar economy like Italy, and definitely not if you
you know, if you include all the pigs countries at once blowing up,
it's not clear that Germany via the ECB could bail out all of those guys
without crashing the Euro. So they might have a bigger problem from turning off
the money's pigot than the US does. And you know, we've got a
big problem. So that's saying something. But if Europe and the US both
have basically the same kind of Ponzi scheme death spiral that it looks like is
a complete possibility right now, Van who knows what happens in the global economy,
This is a big deal. You know, we have not seen anything
micos in our lifetimes. Between the US and EU, forty five percent of
global economic activity. All right, they're closing factories in China. There's a
couple of YouTube channels where they went around the ports to look at the empty
containers and literally it's empty containers as far as the eye can see. I
mean, it could be a good opportunity. You know, there were those
companies that were converting containers into houses, into small houses. You stack them
up, you put them next to each other. So it could be a
big opportunity in the reusable container housing market in China. But outside of that,
I don't see much much rights, you know. And then you've got
also the decoupling of the US and China which is also taking place, and
I would say the West is decoupling to some extent from and then you've got
the failure of the Chinese Belt and Road initiative. Basically, they invested all
this money, they loan people money. It's like it's like a chapter out
of the Confessions of an economic hit Man, the Belt and Road Initiative,
Yet everyone into hawk loan the money, wait for them to default and then
take over the Country's kind of like what the US used to do. When
you know Guatemala brought to seize the or Costa Rica try to seize the banana
plantations of US fruit, and you know that's when you get gunboat diplomacy.
I'm wondering if Beijing is going to relate going to resort to gunboat diplomacy to
collect all these loans. Another example, right here in the Bahamas, they
built this huge, huge casino which was totally unnecessary in NASA complex of hotels
for billions of dollars. China financed it it immediately. The Chinese ex import
or International bank financed it in immediately went bankrupt because Chinese aren't going to go
gambling in the Caribbean. That's just not their thing. And you know now
I guess China owns owns the island just about. Um. You know,
all these trends taken place here. It's you gotta wonder we're going to see
that the first quarter collapse or maybe even late summer collapse. You know,
what you're talking about with China is a variation of vendor financing. In other
words, if you're selling something, you can loan your customer the money to
buy it, and that works out great as long as they eventually can pay
you back. Germany did that in Europe. They ran trad serpluses with all
the picks countries and now a lot about depth is Germany is just going to
have to eat it. China did the same thing with the Belton Road initigive,
where you know, there are big sections of the developing world that it
will never be able to pay China back, and so China is going to
have to come in and take over these gigantic assets, which is going to
raise I mean, that's like back when the West owned all the energy assets
of the Middle East, for instance, and eventually those countries rose up and
nationalize those assets. So China might be looking at something like that if they
if they don't play nights. You know, they're going to have to extend
and pretend on a lot of this debt to avoid countries just electing nationalists who
nationalize the assets, and then China's out in the cold with the only option
to invade or something, and they didn't want to do that. That's a
US thing, you know, we had no problem invading other countries and murdering
bail leaders. Felt China doesn't seem to want to do that. I don't
pay. Yeah. Well, what's interesting also is that there's an additional motivation
behind the Belt and the Road initiative is that it's a way to get money
out of China. All right. You don't want to make money on these
projects because then you have to send money back to China. You want to
lose money. So then you get what authorized transfers out of China to these
countries, and when there's a loss, who knows how much they're really losing.
So it's a great opportunity to get flight capital out of China and invested
in the Western real estate, whatever you want to do. So the motivation
has always, in my opinion, this is a unique opinion to meet,
has always been in these projects the Belton Road to lose as much money as
possible. You know, it's like that to show the producers, remember so
Zero Mustell and Phil Silver. They figure out, you don't want to make
money in a Broadway play, you want to lose it. And then you
get all this investment in from all these rich widows and you lose the money.
You say sorry, honey, and that's what happened. But then the
thing turns into a success and they wind up having to pay all these investors,
and of course that's when they find out it was a big Ponzi scheme.
So the key here is the goal is all these projects outside of China
is to fail, but not fail so much that the government has to come
in. Fail enough so you can keep siphoning money out of China and into
the West. That's my theory. Okay, it sounds like an official version
of capital flight, right. They're just shipping as much capital outside the country
as they can in anticipation of bad things happening internally and stuff. You know,
in today's world. That isn't even the top five crazy ideas. Hey,
the top crazy idea is RFK Junior is going to challenge Biden now Look,
if it's an honest primary, I believe that RFK would probably win.
Well, we're not going to be any debates, and there probably won't be
any TV he'll be he'll be barred, they'll send him. The only interview
he'll be able to get is on Tucker Carlson's website. Well, you know
that that's true. Nobody will will talk to him in the mainstream media.
And but you know what, you go on Tucker Carlson's website and Joe Rogan
and you've been seen by ten times as many people as would see you if
you went on CNN or MSNBC. So I think, for the first time
ever, the alternative media is big enough to do an end run around the
mainstream media. So you know, it's completely possible that And another reason why
it's possible is that he appeals to both right and left because his the holy
anti vaccine thing he did plays very well with him Fox's current audience and with
libertarians. You know, there's an awful lot of people out there who believe
he's been he's been right and fout he's been wrong, which means he gets
a very broad based potential audience. And you're right, if he ever debated
Biden, he'd make forty points of you know, up that day, you
know, because Biden really shouldn't be doing debates right now against anybody and doing
them, you know, and Um Kennedy is articulate with a really good memory
for facts, figures and details, so he would he would be throwing real
um facts and figures at Biden, who will be coming back with stories about
corn pop and stuff like that, you know, from from when he was
seventeen years old. And I think it would be ugly. It'll be very
ugly at in the meantime, like all of these uh ev personalities are getting
fired. Don Laman on CNN the canned him because he misogynist. I don't
know, and I don't know exactly what that means in his case, but
evidently he didn't play well with his colleagues. Ucker Carlson has shown the door.
What do you think about Pucker Carlson? Tucker Carlson, I think I
think it was inevitable because he was so far off the reservation, because he
was anti war when the entire mainstream media is in favor of the Ukraine War.
He's anti immigration, m a in a way that makes sense when a
huge chunk of the mainstream is is pro immigration. What else? There were
three, three or four other things where the anti big Pharma. Oh,
that's right. Basically like the week before he got fired, he went on
a rant about Big Pharma owning the media seventy percent of their advert That could
have won right there. If somebody have him see event that, it would
have been over. That's it, I said, that is it. And
then he'd have these outside the mainstream guests on, like Jimmy Door and and
like RFK Junior, and yeah, that's that's right. He got fired right
after the RFK interview. Yeah, so I'm sure it was a confluence of
the events, but he never invited you or me on which was taking the
stake. Might have gotten him fired a couple of year earlier, John,
if he invited us, Yeah, yeah, well, well maybe his website
will be more around well or open to alternative voices. Even Jimmy the Jimmy
dor thing. Everybody who's listening to this who didn't hear the Jimmy dor thing,
go check that out. It was astounding to hear something like that on
in mainstream media. Yeah, and I don't know who's agree with Jimmy dor
I think he's a useful idiot sometimes, but he does because mind, he's
not holding to anyone, and he makes some really good points. I used
to watch him every day a few years back. But you know, I
believe what's going to happen now is there has been no heir to Rush Limbaugh.
Okay, now, rush Limba is more of a doctrinaire Republican Conservative,
but in his later years realized the futility of that party and the corruption of
it. But when he went basically the right completely lost its way. Typer
Carlson's more of a right slash libertarian rethinker. But I see this as his
opportunity, or perhaps at the natural transfer for the evolution of the party from
rush Limbaugh to Typer Carlson. Yeah, and Carrie, he'll be able to
do it with with multimedia, you know, he will have access to so
much more in terms of delivery than rush Lima ever did. So. Yeah,
I mean you saw his He did this little podcast thing the day afterally
got five million views. Yeah it's up to fifty seven million now. Oh
really, so he normally got three thousand views or three to sorry, three
million views, and so he got almost ten times as many viewers with a
podcast then his show on Fox Scott. So yeah, it's gonna be ganuiney
three. He has had liberated to actually really come his own platform or affiliate
with another platform, but basically running. I know you have to go in
any event, make sure you go to John's site Robino substack dot com,
subscribed to his material and send us emails k L at Kerryletz dot com,
leave comments on the YouTube below, and John, we'll talk to you in
a couple of weeks. Thanks, sure, talk to you. Thanks for
listening to Carry Lenz's Financial Survival Network, your solution to today's trying times.
For the latest, go to Financial Survival Network dot com. Financial Survival Network
now more than ever