Monetary RESET Is Inevitable (Uncut) 02-22-2025

Monetary RESET Is Inevitable | John Rubino

You know, we don’t survive as a society if we keep borrowing this much money. Assume the currency is the victim of the next crisis and invest in things that go up if the currency goes down in value. This is Kaiser Johnson with Liberty & Finance, and these are the Miles Franklin Weekly Specials for February 10th through February 17th, 2025, while supplies last.

Backdated silver Austrian philharmonics at just $2.85 over spot, and pre-65 junk silver dimes and quarters are at the lowest price in years at just $1.49 over spot. Pre-65 junk half dollars are just $1.69 over spot. To order our specials or any of the many other options we have available, call us at 1-888-81-LIBERTY.

That’s 1-888-815-4237. We’re available after hours and on weekends, and we look forward to speaking with you. Welcome back to Liberty & Finance.

We’re privileged to have this returning guest, John Rubino, the founder of DollarCollapse.com, whom we met in person for the first time at the first Liberty Mastermind Symposium in Dallas, Texas, joins us this Wednesday, January 19th, 2025. John, thanks for coming back on Liberty & Finance. Hey, Donagan, good to be back.

Quite a bit has happened in the last month since you and I talked. So it’s been a whirlwind. We’ve also interviewed our mutual acquaintance, who’s been with us from a long time back, TradersChoice.net founder, Gregor Manarino.

He talks about this snowstorm, this blizzard of executive orders and all kinds of things that have been happening to the pace that most people have a hard time even staying up with the flow, let alone having time to have fully formed thoughts and responses and find out the underlying facts of a matter before we’re onto the five more things hitting us at the same time. So it’s been a very eventful month and it looks like there may be more of the same of that ahead. I wanted to probe your thoughts that you no doubt have had, because you write about things like this a lot, is do you believe that the United States, as a people, as a culture, have the psychological and I guess the backbone and the fiber at this point to wean ourselves off of what you could be called addiction to big government at big debting? That would be number one.

And the number two would be, is it too little too late anyway? Because the mathematics are baked in the cake and we are headed down the road to dollar collapse as the name of your old website implies. So if we start, I guess with your, if you have any top of mind big takeaways about the recent month that we’ve all been through to start with, that would be fine. If you’d like to proceed right into talking about our readiness as a country to actually enact smaller government and smaller debts, we can go right to that.

Well, let’s talk about the last month because it’s been absolutely fascinating and completely unprecedented, at least in the US. I mean, some wild stuff like this has happened in places like El Salvador and Argentina where new leadership comes in and just, you know, tears up the playbook and does what seems right in the moment according to their ideology and just creates a new country. And, you know, nothing’s guaranteed down there.

We don’t know if their experiments are gonna work, but we’re trying something similar here in the US now. Trump came in and just hit the ground running. And, you know, his first time around, he didn’t know how to govern, didn’t know how the government worked or anything.

So his four years were relatively uneventful, you know? And that looked really good in retrospect after the four years that came after Trump. So that’s a big part of how he got elected again. But this time it’s completely different because he had all the think tanks behind him and all the executive orders all lined up and all the cabinet secretaries already chosen and everything.

And so they just, you know, threw it all out there and have gone for it. And the strategy now that they’re pursuing, everyone calls it flood the zone because they’re just throwing everything out there that they want immediately. And so it keeps opposition on the back foot.

You know, nobody’s able to really get in front of this stuff and stop it other than some judges out there. And that’s being adjudicated right now. But, you know, the Democrats in the legislature and in state houses and places like that are unable to stop what Trump is doing.

So he’s getting an awful lot of what he intended to get. Most of his cabinet secretaries are in place and Elon Musk running Doge, which, do you know the story behind Doge? That’s such a fascinating thing that I didn’t know at the beginning, was Barack Obama, when he set up Obamacare, the website had a lot of trouble. And so he created basically an IT company within the government and had it be funded by Congress and everything that was able to go into agencies and access their data and everything.

So when Trump came along, he just repurposed that existing government agency and called it the Doge Department of Government Efficiency, short for Doge. And that makes it in a lot of ways unstoppable because it’s already a funded by Congress part of the government with a mandate or a remit to be able to get into agencies databases and look at the data, you know? So that was really a stroke of genius instead of just creating the thing out of thin air, which I think a lot of people thought that’s what happened, but it wasn’t. It was an actual existing government entity that is just repurposed to do things Trump wants it to do.

Fascinating little side story there. But yeah, what they’re doing right now is taking kind of a sledgehammer to a lot of things. This is not precise what they’re doing right now.

They’re just laying off huge sections of different departments and zeroing out a lot of their activities and stuff. And from a libertarian standpoint, this is by and large really good, you know? Some useful things are being canceled and we’ll have to go back and start those back up. But generally speaking, when an empire has a central city that becomes too big and too powerful, you create this separate culture that is loyal to the empire and to the empire central city and not to the rest of the country.

And that’s what we basically created in Washington, DC. We had this huge constellation of NGOs and lobbying firms and law firms and think tanks where somebody can graduate from Georgetown University and then just hop from one of these entities to another, all of which are funded by taxpayers and spend a career doing stuff like that. And without really creating much of anything of value, but while making tons of money and impressing everybody with their important titles and along the way contributing some of that money that they get back to the politicians who financed that constellation of NGOs and consultancies, et cetera, et cetera in the first place.

And that’s what is now called the deep state or the swamp or the blob. And it’s an impediment to getting anything real done because it’s a bunch of people who are just out of trough making money from the taxpayers without really doing anything and certainly without wanting anything to change. So the idea that a lot of this stuff is being broken up is awesome.

After piggyback on that last revelation that you just made there about the central city zone that is somehow becomes very disconnected from the people. Now, when we were visiting Washington DC for the Ron Paul Institute’s Peace and Prosperity Conference a few years back, Elijah and myself, we did some filming there. We were informed that Arlington, Virginia and the county surrounding it was the only county in the entire country where property values did not decrease during the global financial crisis of 2008, 2009, 2010.

So it’s this exactly, it’s just like the central city in the Hunger Games. You could think of it as that in a fictional basis, but it’s in the real life is exactly what you described. People who’ve become so accustomed to an entire, you could call it an incestuous culture that has a basis assumption that there will be an infinite and unending gravy train of free money and that they’re somehow isolated, insulated and that their alliances and loyalties must be with that and rather than with the actual people of the country.

And Dunnigan here, the way you know that that’s what’s happening is the real estate. Like you said, when real estate booms in the capital city of an empire, that means the empire is sucking wealth from the rest of the empire and handing it to the people who are there in that constellation of things related to the government, but that don’t really produce anything, but they exist to maintain the power of the swamp. And you’re right.

Northern Virginia and parts of Maryland and in the general DC area have had a real estate boom that’s been epic in the last 20 or so years as the government has expanded like crazy. And so one of the ways that we know that it’s getting fixed is if house prices start to tank in the greater DC area. And right now there’s an awful lot of listings there, and it hasn’t really translated into plunging home prices yet, but that’s one of the indicators of success for Trump and his people is if people start moving out of DC and going back into flyover country where they came from and house prices start to fall in the greater DC area.

So I think there’s a decent chance that in the next recession, it’ll be different from the way it was when you were there. During the great recession, government spending just went through the roof. They hired lots of new people.

And like you said, real estate prices went up. Well, this time around, it’s completely possible that the opposite is true, that if Trump succeeds in what he’s doing and starts sending agencies out of DC and into California or Texas or Florida or wherever, and people move with the agencies, that that’s gonna take a lot of the pressure off the housing market and allow home prices to go back down to a reasonable level. That would be bad for the people who stick around and see their houses get cut in half, their home equity, but it’ll be great for the rest of the country because it will mean that influence and power is being dispersed instead of concentrated.

And that’s a much healthier way for a country to operate. One more stone in that bridge would be the number of people who have accepted government buyouts for their careers that are willing to, okay, I guess I see the writing on the wall. I’m no longer gonna be welcome, given my mindset of just wanting to keep the train going here in Washington, DC, and I guess I better pack my bags while the getting’s good and take this ticket and get out of here.

That’ll be part of that, if there’s just fewer people there to be that source of unrelenting demand on the real estate market. Another way you could look at it, if it weren’t so some, is it weren’t a signal, as you say it is, of the over-concentration of government power, would be like, okay, why do we care whether the real estate market in DC is all pumped up, but actually we all should really care about the ability or inability to cut back to something that even has some semblance of constitutional limitations on government that we’ve completely abandoned, as you said in this recent couple of decades at least, run up probably a lot longer than that. But you are on a train of thought.

I wanna let you continue it, but then I do want to circle back afterwards to do we have the fiber that it takes to even tolerate the hue and cry that’s coming up these actual actions are being taken of dismantling some of this egregiously overblown apparatus of bureaucracy that’s been sucking tax dollars out of all the American people, but go ahead, you were on a roll. Well, it depends on how far we can take it. For instance, some of these agencies like the education department, that’s low-hanging fruit.

They definitely have the political capital to zero that out, send the money back to the States and thereby shrink the federal government a bit. And the USAID is another place that it just has so many outrageous things that it spends money on, that makes it an easy target. So they can stop a lot of that spending.

It gets much tougher when you get into things like Social Security and Medicare. You can streamline that and they’re finding payments going out in Medicare and Social Security that should not be going out. So they can cut those payments out.

That’s not the majority of the payments that are being made, but it’s still a legit number, very big to normal people, even if not huge in the context of government. And they can make those cuts. So that’s possible.

But the thing that is the most pleasant surprise for me so far is that they’re actually talking about cutting defense. And Trump just floated with Russia and China, hey, why don’t we cut our defense budgets in half, all of us, you know? And then Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, just flat out said that there were big cuts coming in the Defense Department. So that’s one of the things that didn’t look possible for cuts.

The defense budget has been kind of sacrosanct for such a long time. But if you could take a third out of defense, then all of a sudden you’re talking real enough money that it will make a dent in the deficit. Now, having said all that, I think the damage is really done as far as avoiding a currency crisis.

We still have to go through the whole, oh, you know, the interest on our debts is bankrupting us, and we’re gonna have to do some kind of a currency reset. All of that has to happen still. But that’s survivable.

The stuff that we were looking at even six months ago was existential. We were blundering into World War III with a nuclear power, which makes all the finance stuff completely irrelevant. We start shooting at Russians, and somebody sets off an ICBM, and civilization as we know it is over.

But that’s not looking as likely now. It looks like we’re gonna be able to settle, even if it’s not on terms that makes the blob happy, we’re gonna be able to settle a lot of the geopolitical stuff out there. And so that’s a very big deal.

And because it dwarfs a financial crisis in terms of danger, that if we take that off the table, the coming currency reset seems like a totally survivable thing. You know, we’re back to our talks, Dan again, yours and mine, being about an investment thesis instead of about survival. And that’s a huge change from my point of view where it’s less and less likely that my kids are gonna be incinerated in a nuclear holocaust.

And the worst thing that we have to worry about is the value of the dollar falling off the table and a banking crisis or something like that, which we can make money from. If you play a currency crisis right, it’s actually a good thing for you as an individual investor. So we’re back to that intellectual challenge.

How exactly do we play the coming currency crisis? And, you know, I think that it’s possible that a well-run government handles this kind of thing in a way that maybe isn’t crazy painful for most people. You know, you’ve got kind of, you’ve got people talking about gold now in the Trump administration, which is very new. Oh, well, they’re also talking about auditing the Fed and Fort Knox and everything.

So these are the actions of people who understand money and who want their money to be sound. So they’re really reassuring. So it’s completely, oh, and they’re also talking about 50-year gold-backed bonds which I think are kind of a stupid idea from an investor standpoint because you’re still trusting the government for 50 years to give you the gold that is backing the bond.

But at least it shows that they understand that linking a currency to gold improves the quality of the currency. So this is all really reassuring stuff. You know, there’s no guarantee that we make any more progress beyond what we’ve made right now.

But, you know, between Kennedy at Health and Human Services and Doge with Elon Musk, you know, and the other people in the cabinet, I think there’s a chance of a lot of good things happening in the different cabinet departments too. So, you know, I worry about the deep state striking back. And I think that it’s highly likely that they strike back in very serious ways up to and including false flag attacks and assassination attempts and things like that.

So, you know, it’s possible that this is so much messier than it even seems like it is now. And it seems pretty messy right now. But, you know, survive the false flag attacks and the assassination attempts, and there’s a lot of good to be done out there.

And there are people in place who seem to understand what it is they’re trying to do, you know? So I’m pleasantly surprised and cautiously optimistic, but I’m still a gold bug, you know? We still got the crisis that makes gold go through the roof out there waiting to happen. Earlier, you were making analogies to other countries which have done radical excisions of parts of their government, such as Millet has done in Argentina. Millet, interestingly, is a big supporter of Elon Musk and Musk of Millet.

Also, Trump has said a lot of positive things about what Millet has accomplished. What are your views of watching what has happened over the past year or so in Venezuela versus, excuse me, in Argentina, versus what may be possible for us here in the United States going forward? Well, Millet is a stone-cold libertarian, and it’s been really fun to watch him just shut down big parts of the government. And, you know, Argentina now is running a surplus, I think.

And its currency is stable. You know, inflation is down. Government spending is down.

But, of course, a lot of people got laid off as part of the process of shutting down big chunks of the government. And so you kind of have to get through the resulting anger and maybe civil unrest. And there’s no guarantee that he makes it all the way through.

So we’ll see. But so far, I mean, it’s been a really interesting and promising experiment. And the fact that the United States is kind of emulating him on a vastly bigger scale is pretty damn cool.

And the world is going in the right direction, I think. And I think the people who are standing in the way of it are petrified. You know, the speech that J.D. Vance just made to the European Security Conference is astounding.

Not something that you ever imagined happening. You know, there’s so many things that are happening right now that are kind of, that before today were just libertarian virtue signaling, you know, and audit the Fed, close the Fed, pull out of NATO. Those are things that libertarians say to show how committed they are to the cause, but not that they ever expect anything like that to happen.

And here we are with a lot of this stuff actually happening, or at least being threatened out there. So, you know, very cool. And yeah, I could see a growing coalition of libertarian run governments out there, because we’ve got three now, more or less, and we’ve got a lot of political parties in other countries that would love to join that kind of a coalition.

And we’ve got the ability, because, you know, everybody’s watching Trump all around the world. So he gives legitimacy to that kind of point of view in other countries. So it’s possible that new political parties that are along the lines of Millet, or the guy in El Salvador, or even Trump, are gonna spring up and become, you know, legit parties with actual voters and a place in the parliament, et cetera, et cetera.

And maybe even, you know, prime ministers and stuff like that going forward. That would be a really nice trend globally. But I don’t wanna get ahead of ourselves there, because an awful lot has to happen before this becomes a global, sustainable trend.

Which is that the deep state is not just in the U.S. There are entrenched forces that have grand designs that have been gradually being, you know, put into place over the past century and decades that go just obviously in the opposite direction of this. When we attended that St. Ron Paul Peace and Prosperity Conference, they talked about the deep state and about neocons in Washington that were trying to get us into war constantly in order to bolster their view, their vision of an American empire. What about that? What about pushback that’s likely? I mean, let’s look at both sides of that.

First, you’ve got countries, perhaps Russia and China, who really can’t afford, none of us could have afforded. Alastair MacLeod even says England can’t afford the government that they’ve got. So the reality is most of the countries in the world probably that are in the Western sphere or even large government model can’t afford the governments that they’ve been persisting at in the militaries they’ve been persisting over the past decades.

So it may become as a great relief to many to say, can we just stop doing that? Because they could potentially have a more survivable financial future. But then that’s, at the same time, you’re talking about disempowering forces that have had sometimes even an unspoken or unacknowledged black book power, et cetera, in all these other countries around the world, especially in the US. What are your views of the counter forces that are at play in that attempt to try to downsize governments, given that there are those who would be benefiting from that, that’s the people probably, and those who would be fighting against it tooth and nail that are already entrenched power? Yeah, because there are two overlapping trains of thought out there.

And one is war is good because it’s profitable. There’s a lot of people who just make a fortune from the US military empire as we blunder around the world, invading everybody and then rearming the countries that we destroy and so on. A lot of people make incredible amounts of money from that process.

And then there’s another group of people who sincerely believe that the US, with 5% of the world’s population, should rule the world with the other 95% of humanity for the next 1,000 years. And they’re doing God’s work by destabilizing other countries and fighting proxy wars and et cetera, et cetera. And those two groups overlap.

There’s a lot of people who make money from it and sincerely believe in it, but together, they’re a very dangerous group of people. I mean, they kill for a living. They won’t hesitate to resort to violence to protect their gravy train or their ideological crusade.

And so, yeah, I think that they’re gonna strike back in big ways and hopefully Trump and his people are expecting it and are gonna do what they can to survive the empire strikes back scenario that is almost certainly coming. And beyond the military, there’s that whole constellation of people at NGOs and at think tanks who make a living from a massive government that is funded by taxpayer money and borrowed money, so the future taxpayers’ money. And they don’t wanna give this thing up.

They really love this gravy train that they’re on because it requires very little work of them or they don’t have to produce anything in the real world. They’re kind of like college professors in that sense. If you’re at a think tank or at a consultancy or someplace, your ideas don’t actually have to be tried out in the marketplace of ideas or industry or whatever.

So you can just write your white papers and teach your adjunct professor classes and lobby congressmen and stuff like that and make phenomenal money by regular people’s standards without actually having to produce anything that is tested in any kind of a market. And that’s cushy, that’s really nice. And if somebody tries to take that away from you, you’re gonna be enraged, right? And so we’re seeing that from the rest of the government here.

And you know, by the way, I don’t wanna lump all of the government in together. Like, you know, the parks department, the park service, they do real things that are very useful. And other people in other departments of the government actually do do useful stuff.

So one of the things that I hope doesn’t happen is that we just don’t take a meat cleaver to everybody and get rid of the good people in the federal government who are doing legitimate work and who are working hard and get rid of them along with all the people who are still working from home and putting in half days and stuff like that and think they can’t be fired because they’re civil servants or think they’re untouchable because if they lose this one job, they’ll just jump over to the congressional office where they’ve had an offer in the past or the law firm or whatever. You know, they think they can always bounce to some other part of the blob. So, you know, hopefully we keep the good government and get rid of the worst parts of the useless government.

And I know that’s asking a lot as fast as things are moving, but I hope that’s part of the plan to make sure they keep the best people and just lose the worst. So. Well, so that’s why I wanted to take it next is there’s quite a hue and cry, lots of protests going on.

I don’t know how many of them, I don’t know how we can know how many of them are grassroots and how many are AstroTurf, you know, funded by whoever that usually funds protests over the last four or five years, plus, plus, plus. Or will this be just a predictable expected, what you would expect it as you start tearing down a house of cards that was built on top of waste and corruption and so on, that there’s going to be a big cry out of, you know, reasons why that’s a terrible idea. Even a lot of excuses being given of, well, look at this example, these edge cases of people who are directly innocent people that are being, you could say they’re being hurt by these programs being taken away or these departments being taken away.

Do you believe that with the momentum that you’re seeing and the determination and the sense of team organization, et cetera, that you’re seeing coming out of the current administration, that that sort of predictable pushback and hue and cry will be a showstopper or able to just be overcome because there’s a greater good to be served and that’s of all the rest of the people who have been basically unrepresented for the past decades of taxpayers and et cetera, people who’ve been trying to just live as ordinary hardworking citizens of the country? Well, the New York Times just did a podcast where they interviewed actual government workers who were being laid off and heard their stories and it was heartbreaking. So, you know, it’s very effective. And, you know, what worries me is that those legitimate stories are gonna be used as ammunition in Congress where even most Republican congressmen don’t want actual cuts in the government because that’s how they make their money.

You know, they wanna be part of the blob. You know, you go to Congress for four years and then you jump over to a hedge fund or a lobbying firm and that’s where you make your real money. And they know that, you know, Congress is basically a job interview for their big money job later in life.

And, you know, you take that away, take away the big money jobs for congressmen to jump to and then suddenly their goal of being worth $50 million by the age of 60 doesn’t look so realistic anymore. So, you know, they might use that as an excuse to vote against cuts in government spending. And I think that’s completely possible.

And so, no, it won’t be an easy process. It can be stopped. But on the other side of that equation, Elon Musk and Donald Trump and RFK Jr. are, in terms of their personalities, bulletproof.

They’re immune to this kind of thing. Like, you’re not gonna make them feel bad about what they’re doing because what they’re doing is a crusade. And, you know, if they have to ruin the lives of a bunch of government workers, shit, that’s not even a question.

They won’t blink in order to get the things done that they wanna get done because the stuff they’re trying to accomplish is existential, you know? We don’t survive as a society if we keep borrowing this much money or if we keep blundering around, picking fights with everybody in the world. And if we don’t get radically healthier very quickly, you know, because there’s no way we pay for our healthcare 10 years from now if we stay this obese. And have this many chronic diseases, you know, we need to get healthy quickly.

So from RFK’s point of view, you know, sacrifice a bunch of government workers in order to save the, literally save our society, of course, you know? So I don’t think these guys are gonna flinch from what they’re trying to do. And that’s reassuring, you know? Because what they’re doing or what they’re trying to do, or if they do it right, is incredibly important and, you know, necessary. I mean, if we had four more years of open borders and soaring deficits and rising geopolitical tensions with other nuclear powers, you know, it’s not clear that there would be anything to fix after that, you know? We would be so broken that as a society, there would just be the major collapse and then rebuilding from, you know, something worse than the 1930s.

So we cut it really close. You know, we didn’t have another four years to get this thing together. And it’s not clear that there’s enough time to save the current civilization because it’s so far gone in so many ways.

But at least we’re doing generally the right stuff now. You know, it would have been better if we did it 20 years ago, but at least we’re doing it now instead of never, you know? So, you know, there’s that. All right, now I want to leverage your experience and your thought process over the past 20 years and your depth of understanding and knowledge about why you started dollarcollapse.com because you saw it coming.

You saw the freight train on the tracks heading towards us financially and monetarily. So you’ve just made the case fairly convincingly that the sweeping momentum has rapidly been built here in the last month was maybe more than most people saw coming. Many may be hoped for, but more than most saw coming.

And that is even perhaps surprising to you. Do you believe based on what you’re seeing so far that it’s realistic to think that this new direction that we’re currently charting can be enough mathematically to save us from this, what you’ve called the dollar collapse all along? Or is this just going to be, no, this is just an existential survival of our nation and the dollar collapse is going to happen too? Yeah, well, there’s no way to avoid a monetary reset of some sort just because the numbers don’t work anymore. I mean, we have an immense amount of debt.

And it’s not just federal government debt. It’s consumer debt, corporate debt, derivatives. Everywhere you look, we’re dangerously overleveraged and therefore incredibly financially fragile.

So there’s a crisis out there that breaks the system just because the numbers are so outrageous. I mean, debt or interest on the government’s debt is like $1.5 trillion a year. And that has to be borrowed, which makes the next year’s deficit even higher and raises interest costs even more.

And the only way to combat that in the short run is to cut interest rates dramatically. In other words, massively easy money to allow the government to borrow without having ruinous interest costs. But then that causes inflation.

We saw in 2022 what it’s like to increase the money supply by 30 or 40% and then see our grocery bills go up by the same amount. And if we did that again, people front run at this time because they know it’s possible. Back in 2022, it had been such a long time since there was legitimate inflation, painful inflation.

And then we had that happen. And now everybody remembers it or they’re still suffering from it actually because our living costs didn’t go down. They went up by a third or a half or whatever.

And then they just stayed up there. So a lot of people are having trouble getting by because of what happened in 2022. So if we try to deal with massively increasing government debt and spiking interest on that debt by cutting interest rates dramatically, which is what Trump wants to do, by the way.

As a real estate guy, he wants lower interest rates and he’s willing to publicly order the Fed to do that. If we do that, then you get a resurgence of inflation, which by the way, hasn’t gone away. The last inflation readings that we’ve had are like three and a half percent going on 4%, which is way above the Fed’s normal target range.

So if we spike inflation again, everybody’s gonna immediately start buying real stuff. So we’ll buy obviously gold and silver. I mean, gold and silver is the beneficiary of every big trend that’s out there right now.

So people will call you up and buy a bunch of gold and silver coins, probably mostly silver at today’s prices. And they’ll start looking for energy stocks like Exxon Mobil and Oxy Petroleum and Enbridge, the gas pipeline company. And then maybe they’ll buy uranium stocks or maybe they’ll buy really good quality real estate like rental houses and stuff like that.

They’ll just plunge into real stuff and away from financial stuff. And that brings about the currency crisis, because the ultimate financial thing is the dollar. If nobody wants to own government bonds, it’s because they think the dollar is losing value at an accelerating rate.

And there we are. And once that starts, I mean, where do you go? If you’ve cut interest rates and aggressively eased in order to stop government interest expense from going up and allow the government to borrow more, you can never raise interest rates again, because that immediately spikes government’s interest costs on the bigger amount of debt that they borrowed because you cut interest rates to allow them to borrow more. So we’re in that place now, which is kind of a death spiral.

And let’s say Trump and Kennedy and Elon Musk cut the deficit back to $1 trillion a year from $2 trillion a year. That would be phenomenal. That’s Winston Churchill level fiscal success.

But it still won’t save us because then we’re adding a trillion dollars a year to an already unmanageable amount of debt. So it still breaks. And so there’s our investment thesis.

Assume the currency is the victim of the next crisis and invest in things that go up if the currency goes down in value. And that’s a pretty straightforward investment thesis, but there’s an awful lot of moving parts to it too. Because do you want uranium stocks because we’re going back to nuclear power? Or do you want oil because we’re going to slow down the transition to electric cars, if not stop it altogether? You know, these are the things we have to think about to decide how to invest for what’s coming.

But it all starts with this primary thesis of currency crisis on the horizon. The big fiat currencies finally failing and having to be replaced with something else. So we just want to be on the right side of the currency reset when it comes and gold and silver are a big part of that thesis.

Well, now you’ve led us to the place where I was going to lead you into the revenge of the nerds. We were celebrating the efficiencies that are coming from this Doge reincarnation of this internally octopus connected IT department that knows everything about what’s going on in the books of all the departments of the government. But they also want to know everything that’s going on in all of our lives too.

And if the reset results in government controlled currencies that we’re all beholden to, et cetera, what that does to all of our freedoms and privacies. So that’ll be for next time. If people want to follow your writings, your prolific and deep writings on a weekly basis, where do they get connected to your Substack? I’m at rubino.substack.com. And it’s a newsletter that looks for actionable advice and actionable strategies for what’s coming and finds a lot of them.

And folks, if you don’t want to miss a single episode with John Rubino or any of our other guests, make sure you’re on our free mailing list. And we don’t share your email address with anyone. It’s completely private.

If you go to libertyandfinance.com, enter your email address, click submit, and then make sure you confirm on the confirming email. You’ll get one email in your inbox per day. We don’t spam you.

And it’ll be all of our interviews with John Rubino, the founder of dollarcollapse.com and now on Substack, and all of our other guests, as well as any weekly specials to help make gold and silver more affordable for you. And we look forward to you being one of our subscribers on our free mailing list. John Rubino, thank you for joining us here again on Liberty and Finance.

It’s Doug and talk to you soon. This is Kaiser Johnson with Liberty and Finance. And these are the Miles Franklin weekly specials for February 10th through February 17th, 2025, while supplies last.

Backdated silver Austrian Philharmonics at just $2.85 over spot. And pre-65 junk silver dimes and quarters are at the lowest price in years at just $1.49 over spot. Pre-65 junk half dollars are just $1.69 over spot.

To order our specials or any of the many other options we have available, call us at 1-888-81-LIBERTY. That’s 1-888-815-4237. We’re available after hours and on weekends, and we look forward to speaking with you.