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And welcome. You are listening to the Financial Survival Network. I'm your
host, Carrie Leutz. I am here at the ric Rual Symposium. We're
meeting with a lot of mining companies, metals dealers, and of course my
good friend here you know, and well Donegan Kaiser and done again. Hey,
we have a lot of history here, Yeah, it goes back quite
a way, as Carrie, because you're the one who actually got my son
Elijah to the big time in podcasting. Gosh, that was like thirteen years
ago, and then he got me into it. And here we are today
and I'm at the second time in a row we've met at the Rural Symposium.
Yeah. So things for the economy, the political system globally not looking
overwhelmingly positive, to put it charitably. What's your take on what's happening as
far as the economy goes, it seems like we're struggling to get off our
knees, as bank director Alistair McLoud, whom we interviewed recently and frequently on
our channel, would say, because there are so many areas of we've had
it. We've just come out of four years of broken supply chains from all
the lockdowns and all that crazy stuff. But it seems that during that time,
the era of unfettered access to liquidity and low artificially low interest rates and
everything that buoyed a lot of the expansion of the financial world over the past
four decades has made a title shift, and he's not expecting it to go
back. And people have been lulled into complacency, often by their mainstream analysts
and financial advisors and everyone saying that all they have to do is ride out
the dips and just stay invested in the market and that sort of thing.
But companies there's something like, as active money manager Michael Pento tells that like
forty percent of companies up to that are zombie companies. They can't even afford
enough. You don't have enough earnings to pay the interest on their obligations,
their business loans, and now they're facing having to refinance those business loans that
were at very low percentage too much higher interest rates, and that's going to
be an incredible stressor first in those companies. But if they can walk away
from some of that, like corporate real estate and non recourse loans and that
sort of thing, all of a sudden, that flows upstream to the banks
who issued that, who took on that, that the obligation, and that
means the banks that were already you know, last year in twenty twenty three,
we had three of the largest it was actually the second, third,
and fourth largest bank failures in the history of our country. And that was
just nothing compared to some analyses have come out with somewhere between six hundred and
one thousand additional banks that are in as bad or worse state than the three
that failed last year. And when these commercial loans start getting abdicated on by
the companies and the banks are holding the bag, it's going to be a
horrific site for people. You and I were just talking before we started this
recording session about people's reluctance to, for example, get into owning real assets
like physical precious metals, that sort of thing, because they're unfamiliar with or
uncomfortable with the idea of how am I going to protect my treasure. You
work hard, you save, you try to do all the responsible things for
a lifetime, and you amass this nest egg and you think, well,
it's safe because we live in the strongest financial country and the world has ever
seen. And I've got in all the diversified ETFs and everything like I'm supposed
to be, and somehow all my deposits in the banks, and my deposits
in the brokerage accounts, and my stock shares and the brokerage accounts are all
where my treasure is. And some people also think that their retirement pension plans
and retirement funds are going to protect them. But those folks are often invested
in the US Treasury bond that the rest of the world is turning their back
on now that we've seen them use as weapons in this sort of global financial
war. So it's going to be very different times we're heading into and a
lot of unknowns. But one thing that I think we can safely say is
the next forty years do not look like the last forty years. So if
you play the next financial war by the old rules, you're likely to end
up with. The best analogy I can think of is when Hitler's tanks were
rolling in across Poland in nineteen thirty eight nineteen thirty nine, and they came
out on horseback with their catboard, ready to fight World War One all over
at the best cavalry in the world, Poland. Yeah so, but I
guess at panz Er it doesn't stand up for a while, and it seems
that we're a lot of people just trying to survive financially, are using the
tools and the techniques that have proven themselves worthwhile over the last forty years.
But we're in a new regime here and things are likely to be extremely different
going forward. Yeah. So, the average person I've found living here in
Florida, maybe even more so so many retirees, really doesn't have a clue
about what potentially can happen here. That's a big problem I'm really concerned about
personally. I mean, that's when I founded my channel way back in twenty
thirteen, calling it Reluctant Preppers. The idea of preparedness is as simple as
the old boy Scout rule be prepared, which is, you know, if
life can bring unexpected and it does. And the old sayings like I'd rather
be seven years earlier than one day late, or having two is like having
none, and having one is like having zero. Because things break down,
you should have a spare if you think about it the most simplistic, and
Florida is a good time to think about that. And we're heading into the
summer hurricane season here, and it's absolutely prudent to prepare a head and think,
where's my water supply, my food supply, what am I going to
do for shelter? How well am I set up? How well do I
know my neighbors and my network and my community where we could help each other
in times of urgency. But that's just on a physical, natural disaster type
situation. But for this what you said about retirees, and Florida's got a
lot of those, I'm really concerned that the vast, vast majority of people
are woefully underprepared for the type of volatility that's likely to come, based on
all of the experts that we interview, because they think that their Social Security
payments and their pension and their certificates of deposit and their bonds and their bank
accounts and their stock accounts are going to carry them through, and there's real
reason to be very concerned about all of those. As many analysts who are
telling the truth have been saying, we're in the bubble of everything, and
this has never happened before in our country, where stocks and bonds and real
estate are simultaneously in a three way bubble, where we don't have any of
those asset classes functioning effectively as hedges against volatility in the others, and that
leaves precious metals as one of the rare remaining hedges. But most people have
no idea about that. It's been three generations since it was common understanding that
you put the fruits of your labor in your pocket as cold, hard cash,
and that's how you're going to protect your family's finances over the generations going
forward. But people who are learning the Lesson and Rick rule tells us it's
less than one half of one percent are going to be better prepared from a
preparedness standpoint for what's coming, no matter how unknown it is, are how
volatile it is. Then those who are trying to navigate the waters ahead based
on the old rules, Hey, it just reminds me that old saying better
to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not
have it. Right, It's exactly right. Yeah. So this this is
an example. Andy Sheckman just gifted me with this yesterday. This isn't eighteen
eighty four American silver dollar. It contains zero point seven one five ounces of
pure silver. And the thing about this is that this was worth one dollar
back in eighteen eighty four, and now it's probably worth forty dollars. And
so the question is what changed. This didn't change. This is still one
ounce of earth three quarters of an ounce of silver. But what changed was
the dollars going down the drain. And even when I was a kid,
the saying was a bucket worth what it used to be. But that rate
of change in the value of the degradation of value of a dollar is accelerating
a hockey sticket as the I won't call it the money supply. They have
every called the FRED calls it the money supply. If you go to the
Saint Louis feder Reserve, you can see charts on the hockey stimp of the
what they call the money supply, but it's the currency supply. And that
supply. And that's and that's how, that's how our lives became connected because
my homeschooled son, Elijah, came to me and asked me, as a
as a fifth grade homeschooler, dad, where does money come from? And
there down the rabbit hole we went and uh and what what he turns out
to what he was actually asking without knowing it was where does currency come from?
And why does it? Why do we act like it has value and
that sort of thing. How does it? How is it that people are
willing to exchange it for real things? And the times are coming, according
to many that we interview, when people will not be willing to exchange real
things for our current currency that really doesn't have any intrinsic value. So what's
you're feeling about crypto's? Crypto the solution for all that els Bitcoin ethereum and
name your others. I just got done reading the book by Michael Lewis about
Sam Bankman, Freed and FTX, and it was quite hysterical because, on
the one hand, it's kind of like he represents the dichotomy in society,
you know, having this knowledge, this extreme knowledge, the grasp of mathematics,
and yet not understanding the basics of economy and reality. It's a split.
You know. There's a saying like where a society where we keep learning
more and more about less and less specialization, right right? Yeah, Well,
it may be well true that cryptos may play a significant role in our
financial lives, whether we like it or not going forward. One thing that
many people will tout about bitcoin is that it's supposedly decentralized, rather than the
specter of central bank digital currencies such as might be issued by the Federal Reserve
or others, which would be basically controlling and tracking every single move of your
financial life. The concern about central bank digital currencies is that there's no way
to get out of the system. People say, well, I'll just go
take my money out of the bank. It's like, if it's a central
bank digital currency, it only exists in their system. There is no taking
it out of the bank. Is not like a dollar bill. No,
you can't. There's no physical manifestation of it that you can say, now
I'm off the grid, I'm out of the system, and I'll do it
as I please privately because it only exists inside the system. The promise of
bitcoin is that it that it would not be controlled in that manner by centralized
authorities, but it would be decentralized in their former democratic and that's certainly preferable.
There's the factory means that it's only usable for interchange and that sort of
thing when you have electricity and you have working computers and you can and you
can do those of transactions. So there's many kinds. I'll give you a
little little example where we walked into and some of our subscribers have heard this
one before, but my wife and I walked into our favorite locally owned breakfast
cafe where they always treat you like it's home and you feel very welcome and
that sort of thing. But we couldn't even get a seat at the time,
when in normally would have been a problem. And I said, ask
the person at the hostesstand, why can't we be seated? She said,
because no one can leave. I said, well, what do you mean
no one can leave because they can't pay. They can't pay the credit card
system is down. She said, Those two that had cash on them were
able to pay and leave, but everybody else is having to hang around because
they can't pay. And she said, we said, well, we have
cash, so anyway, But the point is that it's not just cash,
it's it's when you have precious metals, you have the real thing. So
it's that that cash has always been a icon of or a substitute for to
make it transactional. There's there are ways coming now to make to make things
transactional that may past that. The question is what's the underlying value. So
I think there's likely to be a role for cryptos going forward. It's certainly
showing a lot of resilience, volatility, but a lot of resilience over the
decades. When we met at the it was a second Liberty Mine Mastermind symposium
the co hosted in Las Vegas, Nevada, where there was quite a lively
discussion about cryptos versus solid assets like precious metal as a way of storing your
wealth. And there may be a role for both and I think time will
tell. But so it may be prudent to at least have your foot in
that in that door. Yeah, I buy a little bit every Sunday night,
just so I got some skin in the game, so I could talk
about it as like somebody who you know, actually you know, doesn't just
talk the talk, but walks the walk. And there's people in the gold
and silver space that own none. They just own some stocks and they hold
themselves out as experts. So when we have this conversation next year, God
willing, we're both here at the Rules symposium, what do you think we'll
be talking about. There's a lot that's going to go on. I'm afraid
between now and this time next year, the presidential election in the US is
likely to be contested and divisive, and that's a concern for the for the
civil functioning of our of our republic. We've got crisis points nearer than we've
ever seen them in terms of the banking system and corporate debt that both would
reflect. I mean, all it would take is for there to be an
unexpected bank closure where we get We got to notice back after the global financial
crisis from our brokerage firm saying until further notice, your access to the funds
in your money market account, which was called the reserve fund, are suspended
until further notice. And we called them up and said, hey, there
must be some because we're not in the stock market, we're not invested.
They said, well, you may not be. You thought you were in
this this money market fund, which you were, but it was invested in
Layman Brothers on the backside, so it's collaterally damaging them. Until further notice,
you don't have access to your fund. So when Mom and Pa Kettle
in Main Street, USA, get that Monday morning or Sunday night, notice
that until further notice your bank access to your bank accounts has been suspended.
I think a light bulb will go on for people that unless you hold it,
you really don't. You really don't have access to your assets. You
know. It's like having no debt and getting a margin call. But wait,
I'm totally solvent on liquid I don't owe anything and I just got this
margin call. What uh? And that's what we're up against? Hey,
done again? Where do we find you? How do we connect with you?
On the web? Look at look for Liberty and finance all spelled out
all one word liberty onfinance dot com. That's our web page. Also,
we're on YouTube, rumble right on SoundCloud, all of the place, gab
getter at Liberty and Finance. You'll find us there and we'd be glad to
have you as subscribers. Hey, and congrats on getting one hundred k subs
from our digital overlords over at the Alphabet Corporation there. We're always appreciated to
any breadcrumbs they're willing to throw us. One has to wonder how many subs
you would actually have had had they treated us like they treat cat videos.
You know, I'm just starting to learn a little bit more about these mysterious
algorithms that grant or deny impressions and click throughs and all that sort of thing.
And I had some very interesting conversations with two of those people who worked
in that company just this past week about that, and got an eye opening
conversation about the conversation. I'll just I'll just throw a breadcarmb out there,
just that it involved me the answer to my question of why did this happened
and why didn't that happen? How come this was ineligible? And they said,
actually, we don't know because it was our AIS. Blame it on
the AI. Yeah, it's the algorithm that decided and we don't even know.
We can't even tell you where you where you step the foul of the
line. I said, just tell us at what point in this discussion the
wrong thing was said so that we can be aware of that going forward,
and they said, actually, we think it might be this or it might
be that. So this is a it's a very chilling effect on many people,
some who got actually deep platform, some who just got shadow band that
sort of thing to think. Do you how do you have to self edit
so that you can escape that? And we have noticed that certain individuals whom
we interview where we'll get a very high click through percentage rate. Once somebody
does get an impression, but it's that they're not getting the impressions when that
name, when that name is in the is in the title of the interview.
We have our ways of bypassing the algorithm. However, sometimes they're expensive.
I mean just recently, I used to get hundreds of thousands of views.
Now if I get five hundred or one thousand now, granted there is
more competition and maybe I could be more current, but hey, discussion for
another day. Appreciate you coming on. Got a question for done Again myself?
Shoot me an email Klatcarrieluts dot com and you'll find a link to done
Again site on the on our site Financial Survival Network dot com in the show
notes. Just click through while you're there. Sign up for your free newsletter.
Done again, We'll talk to you again soon. Thanks Carrie, Thanks
for listening to Carrie Letz's Financial Survival Network, your solution to today's trying times.
For the latest, go to Financial Survivalnetwork dot com. Financial Survival Network
now more than ever,