BUCKLE UP For April 2 (Uncut) 03-29-2025

BUCKLE UP For April 2: Liberation Day to Spark a Market “DEMOLITION” – David Stockman

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Perfect if you’re serious about learning how gold and silver can protect your wealth. Get your free copy at dannyreport.com. Could this decision end up tanking the market instead? People are skeptical about the markets. They’re pretty rigged.

They’re pretty bubble ridden. The stock market will bear the brunt of the fallout. Yeah, buckle up, stay out of harm’s way.

Joining me today, David Stockman, who was the director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. I’m glad to be with you. There’s really some big issues percolating that we need to think about and discuss because people need to understand, I think.

April 2nd has been dubbed Liberation Day by President Trump, but you suggested in your commentaries it might be more like Demolition Derby Day. How so? Well, somehow, Donald Trump is right on a lot of issues. I think the attacks he made in his State of the Union address on the woke stuff and the DEI and this whole scam of the green energy and climate crisis going to boil the planet and all that.

He’s doing really well on those, and I think maybe there’s going to be a breakthrough on the Ukraine and we’ll start to wind down some of these forever wars. So I like a lot of what he’s doing. I’m not like a 180 degree critic of Trump, but on trade, he’s had in his mind, I think most of his adult life, a very primitive protectionist idea of trade, which is it’s zero-sum.

There are people over there and we’re over here, and those people over there are a bunch of cheats and thieves, and they’re constantly trying to screw us and take advantage of us. It’s sort of a transactional mentality that maybe comes from the real estate world in New York, which isn’t the most pleasant place. And anyway, so he has this idea that we can do wonders for our economy if we just throw our weight around in the international trade arena.

But in the process of, he did a lot of that last time, most of it didn’t work. The trade deficit with China is still 300 billion, despite all the Trump tariffs that are on China. But now he’s come up with the ultimate tool, I think, which is a utterly illusory idea that you can have a reciprocal tariff on the rest of the world based on a single number.

That’s what the Secretary of the Treasury said the other day, on April 2nd, we’re going to give them all a single number, which will be the sum of all economic sins, which is to say, we’ll look at all your tariffs, we’ll look at your non-tariff barriers, we’ll look at your tax policy, VAT, do you rebate your VATs, other aspects. We’ll look at your monetary policy, we’ll look at your health and regulations, we’ll look at subsidy, fiscal subsidies, and we’ll analyze it all, we’ll quantify it all, we’ll put it in a number and your number is going to be 10% on top of the regular tariff. And if you don’t come up with concessions that at least equal that or offset that, we’ll impose it and we’ll then somehow have fair trade and a prosperous economy.

Now, this all sounds maybe vaguely plausible if you just listen to it very quickly. But once you get into the detail, it’s absolute, complete nonsense, utterly unexecutable, it is going to create the biggest negotiating food fight that we’ve had in Western history for a long time. And we can go through some of the details, but I think it’s going to literally blow up or it’s going to be a fizzle.

By a fizzle, I mean they’re going to, you know, come up with some vague statements that we need to discuss with you at the EU or with Japan or with South Korea or India for the next six months to see what we can come up with. Well, if they do that, it’s a nothing burger and it’s way, you know, exaggerated and oversold. On the other hand, if they come up with a real number that becomes effective April 2nd, and they’re going to put another 10% on EU imports, for instance, to take one example, which are $450 billion a year, roughly, well, that’s a $45 billion tariff levy on top of whatever they might be paying already.

And that would really, that would disrupt everything. It wouldn’t necessarily be totally inflationary, it’d just be disruptive. It would cause all kinds of congestion and dislocation in the normal flow of trade, which is huge when you’re talking about $450 billion a year of imports just from the EU.

Let’s just, you know, think about that for a second. You know, that’s a billion and a half a day and all of this is going to be disrupted. So, I’m trying to give a bit of an overview that it all sounds plausible.

In other words, if your tariffs are high and ours are low, we’re going to equalize the gap, the difference, and won’t that be fair? But here’s the problem to make very clear to everyone listening. Our tariffs are actually higher right now than most of those of our trading partners. On a weighted average basis, our tariffs with the world last year were 3.3% of the imported value.

If you take something like the EU, it’s 2%. If you take something like Japan, it’s 1.7%. In other words, if you took the 26 leading trading partners in the United States, looked at just their tariffs and just our tariffs, computed the difference and applied the percentage, which is a couple percent, to total trade volume, which is about $2.2 trillion with the biggest trading partners, we would owe them $45 billion. In other words, Trump would owe them $45 billion versus what is implied by this whole thing.

So, last point. The point is they realize that it’s not just tariffs, the duty on imports, but it’s all this other stuff. Non-tariff barriers, health and safety regulations, monetary policy, are you a currency manipulator, and so forth.

But when it comes to quantifying all that, there’s no playbook written anywhere that anybody will agree to. Plus, a lot of it is just in the eye of the beholder. I mean, we can say South Korea’s exchange rate policy involves currency manipulation, so we should charge them with some kind of reciprocal tariff penalty.

They’ll say, we’re just doing monetary policy that we think is in the best interest of our country, given where we are in the world and the way our economy operates, and so forth. Now, what this will do is going to create such enormous arguments between the Washington trade authorities and every other country in the world that, as I said the other day, you would need something like a vast cavernous hall, the biggest ever built, full of negotiators and consultants and lawyers and government bureaucrats to try to work it out with just maybe the top 50 trade partners that we have, to say nothing of more than 200 overall. So this is going to be a disaster of epic proportions.

I can’t see how they’re going to work around it, but it’s only a few days away. The clock is ticking, so we’ll have to see exactly how this materializes. But I say to people, buckle up.

I don’t think, especially if you’re in the stock market or the bond market or other active securities markets, trading markets, there’s going to be an explosion on the days leading up to April 2nd. We won’t get to April 2nd. There’ll be so much leaking right in the hours and days before, but it’s going to be quite a shock to the system, I think.

So David, let’s dig a little bit deeper there because it’s so multi-layered, right? Yeah, absolutely. I also want to dive into some specifics, especially with what’s going on with Canada, which is a whole different challenge. But first, let’s unpack the repercussions a bit more.

Beyond the growing resentment, I was just in Toronto, and there’s a real wave of frustration towards the US with people even canceling their vacations. But you’ve pointed out that the stock market will bear the brunt of the fallout. Where else will we see the pain? What kind of backlash should we expect here? I think it’s going to go from Main Street to Wall Street.

In other words, it’s going to disrupt daily flow. We import, each year, $3.3 trillion worth of stuff, and there’s 365 days a year. So that’s a hell of a lot of stuff coming in every day.

And it’s not just final goods that may end up on a Walmart shelf or even Neiman Marcus or something, a higher price point retailer. Much of it goes into the intermediate production economy. In other words, we buy components, we buy parts, we buy raw material.

And all of that goes into the daily flow of production, distribution, trade, and sales of the United States. And all of it is going to be hit really hard in a way that I don’t think anybody’s ever tried since, in a different way, but since 1931, when we had something called smooth hauling. And that didn’t work out so well.

So now, I don’t want to be totally negative on tariffs. Although, basically, the problem, we do have a huge problem, okay? We’ve had current account and trade deficits of huge magnitude. Last year, it was almost a trillion dollars, year in, year out, for decades and decades.

This is not sustainable, and it is harming our economy. Trump is right on that. And we’ve got to be looking for solutions.

But you have to get to the cause. And the cause is not bad trade deals. He thinks everything’s a deal.

Everything’s a deal in the world. Everything’s a transaction. And in Trump’s mind, people that were in the Oval Office before him were kind of stupid.

And they had advisors who were either stupid or evil, or some combination of the both. They made bad deals. They gave away the store, so to speak.

And so the rest of the world’s living off from us. That’s just not true. It’s not closely true.

Because none of this is due, in my view, to bad trade deals or even the nefarious policies of foreign countries. You know, if you look at our policies on tariffs, our policies on industrial subsidies, what the Fed does to distort monetary reality, we’re just as bad as everybody else. So why do we have consistent, chronic, and large-scale deficits? The answer is we have bad monetary policy.

And the Federal Reserve is the leading central bank of the world. And they have flooded the world with excess dollars. They have caused our economy to inflate year after year after year, sometimes 2%, sometimes 9%, like it was a couple years ago.

But it accumulates. And over time, what it means is the price level in the United States, and by price level, I mean, you know, retail prices, but also labor rates, labor costs, and the cost of production for everything, occupancy, you know, and everything that goes into production. Now, the point of that is that unit labor costs in the United States have gone sky high.

It’s made us uncompetitive in a lot of markets for goods. And so all of this industrial economy core activity has been offshored because we priced ourselves out of the world market. And the driver of that outcome, that, you know, dire outcome was the Federal Reserve.

So the point is that Trump really understood monetary policy. And if he wasn’t such an easy money, low interest man, but, you know, he’s one of the worst that we’ve ever had in the Oval Office, he would be looking a few blocks away at the Eccles Building. That’s where the problem is.

That’s what’s, you know, they’ve been systematically inflating the U.S. economy since Greenspan took over, especially in 1987, after, you know, Volcker had solved the problem temporarily. And it is that consistent, persistent year after year inflation that has created this problem. So if you want to solve the trade deficit, which, you know, has to be solved one way or another, then you need to go back to sound money.

You need to stop pushing interest rates low. You need to shut down the printing press at the Federal Reserve for years and years and years and allow the economy to cleanse itself from all these bubbles, all this excess credit and debt that’s been created by bad monetary policy for several decades. So that’s the alternative.

But Trump, you know, doesn’t want to even think about that because that’s inconsistent. He’s got two big views of the world. The Fed is bad, and foreign, you know, trade partners are even worse.

And our trade bureaucrats are, you know, like unpatriotic, undermining of the American economy. All three of those propositions, unfortunately, have very little relationship to reality. But that gets us to April 2nd, and he calls it Liberation Day.

And, you know, as we started out, it’s Demolition Derby Day. It’s going to be a disaster of ethic proportions. But if there’s one thing we know, it’s that he wants the stock market to be soaring, David.

So President Trump must be aware of the potential repercussions, right? I mean, how does he reconcile that? Could this decision end up tanking the market instead? No, no, no. I think you got a great point. And in the first term, his North Star was not good policy, sound money, fiscal rectitude, free markets, any of the things that we would think of, you know, those were secondary if they ever even crossed his mind.

His North Star was the stock market. It was going up. It was proof that he was doing well.

And if it wasn’t, it was proof that somebody else was trying to get his way. Okay. But here’s the key thing people ought to understand.

He’s somehow convinced himself or has been convinced by some of his advisors, like Scott Besant, the Secretary of Treasury, that you may have to go through a little turmoil here. He keeps talking about it, you know, that we’re going to have some, you know, adjustment process. It’ll take a little while to work the cure, take a little while to work its way in.

So I think he’s prepared for some jolts in the stock market, which he will blame on all the bad policies he inherited. He will blame it on Biden. He will blame it on all the good stuff that Elon Musk and the Doge boys are fighting in terms of the corruption, the waste, the outrageous, you know, expenditures of money on the fiscal side.

So he’ll have plenty of things to blame. And frankly, if you look at history, and you remember, I was there with Reagan in 1981, and we inherited a pretty good mess, too, in the economy, you know, stagflation, bad stagflation, double-digit inflation, very little growth, job problem. And we blamed it all on Carter and bad inherited policy for years and years.

This is what administrations do. But, you know, there was at least a little bit of integrity about the way we formulated it, or, you know, the extent to which we did it. But Trump is, everybody knows, he’s unhinged.

He’ll go all the way. He will say just crazy-ass stuff, if it crosses his mind, if he needs to explain something and take the monkey off his own back. So I think people shouldn’t be, I guess I put it this way, people shouldn’t be complacent on the view, but that Donald is always watching the S&P 500 or the Nasdaq.

And when he sees a little bit of perturbation there, he’s going to back off. And so we should not sweat it too much. Now, I don’t think so.

And the other thing is Trump has never been through a huge drawdown in the stock market as an elected officeholder. I mean, he’s been around since the 70s and he undoubtedly saw the crash in 08 and 09 and earlier ones like the big meltdown in 1987. But it’s never happened on his watch.

And I think he doesn’t understand that once you trigger a liquidation in this stock market and bond market, which is vastly overvalued, as we all know, and has been, you know, it’s just been fueled by the Fed and other central banks and by all the borrowing and debt and artificial stimulation of the economy on the fiscal side for years and even decades, that if it ever starts unwinding, then the selling pressure is going to be epic in its depth and its impact. And I don’t think he’s fully grasped that once you start it and it really starts sliding, that you can bring it to a halt, even if you basically surrender, turntail and run and say, well, we’ve done all the tariff stuff, now we’re going to move along. I don’t think he realizes what he might be triggering here.

I don’t think he realizes the fragility of the financial markets. But, you know, if something, the stock market, the S&P 500 is trading at 25 times trailing earnings and trailing earnings can’t possibly be sustained. OK, it’s just way too high.

And I think, you know, it should be 15 times, let’s say. Well, that’s a 3500 stock market on the S&P, not a 5500. And, you know, there’s a hell of a lot of broken furniture between those two points.

And, you know, I think somewhere in that zone is where we’re likely to slide once we really trigger this demolition derby on April 2nd. One more point on trade before we move on, because I’m still trying to wrap my head around the endgame here. So take Canada, for example.

Why pick this fight? As long as I’ve been alive and as a Canadian living in the U.S., our two countries have always been close allies. So why create this tension now? I’m not entirely convinced by the fentanyl argument. What’s your take? Well, it’s a great question because the last country in the world that you would like to pick a fight with on trade is Canada.

Since we have what used to be NAFTA and now it’s called the U.S.-Mexico-Canadian Trade Agreement that he renegotiated last time in 2019 and said, shows you how good I am, what I can do. So he’s basically now repudiating his own handiwork because there are no tariffs coming in. And he went through this whole dairy thing and I’ve written about it.

Yes, they have crazy tariffs, but he negotiated his own deal, negotiated something called a tariff quota agreement, which said that for dairy products and cheese and butter and fluid milk and all the rest of it, up to a certain volumetric level, the tariff is zero. That’s the NAFTA tariff. And above that, it’s 180 percent.

So I went through the last five years and I found that they don’t even come close to their cheese tariff quota or their butter quota or fluid milk. And as a result of that, it’s totally an abstract, irrelevant number that he can wave around. Someone said it’s terrible.

It’s 146 percent or whatever it is, 150 percent tariff on the U.S., except it’s never applied because of the deal that he voted, the loophole that he negotiated through. And then when you consider how integrated the economy is, I say if you take 100 miles north of the U.S.-Canadian border, 100 miles south, and look at all the agricultural and industrial activity and the trade back and forth of parts, I used to be in the auto supply business and we had plants in Canada, we had plants in Detroit, we had plants in New York State, we had plants in Ohio, Wisconsin, etc. And the parts flew back and forth and back and forth as they went from one stage of processing to another.

And this is a pretty efficient system. It’s a good way to build up the part slate that goes into a final assembly of a car. And he’s going to disrupt the whole thing for reasons I can’t understand.

Now, so you say, why in the world would he do this? Well, he’s got a lot of bad information in his mind, that’s the first thing. But second, he had a personal animus peak about Trudeau, okay? That’s what it was. He was trying to say, you’re, you know, you’re a little twit, which he is, okay? And I don’t mind saying that.

But you don’t start a trade war with someone where we have hundreds of billions of turnover each year, both services and goods, because you don’t like, you know, the personality of whoever happens to be a government official or prime minister. But that’s the only reason that I can think of to explain why he went after them. And by the way, can I, I just want to throw one thing in here.

Because it’s kind of shows you how damn trivial this is. We have, if you take all goods and services, we have damn near $1 trillion a year of turnover with Canada. In other words, all the services that we import, export, all the goods we import, export, you add it together, it’s 100, it’s a trillion dollars worth of stuff coursing back and forth across the border, deep, deep integration of our economies.

And he’s now saying, well, but part of it is they haven’t cracked down enough on fentanyl imports. Okay, so you look this up, and you see that last year, there was 43 pounds of fentanyl seized at the border. The year before, it was 2,000 pounds.

And the year, the third year back, it was like 24 or something. It averaged 20 pounds a year. Now, this stuff may have a street value of $20,000.

It’s a terrible thing. But the total value on average, every year the fentanyl seized at the entire US Canadian border is about $400,000. Let me restate it, I’m not leaving zeros off, it’s $400,000.

And he’s jeopardizing a trillion dollars worth of trade. I mean, what kind of insanity, what kind of complete nonsense is this? And yet, when you see his spokesman on CNBC or elsewhere, they say, well, it’s not just a trade war, it’s a drug war, too. I think this is unhinged, over the top, complete nonsense.

And it’s kind of a warning if you’re in the economic business. Now, I’m not one of these guys that think Trump’s an incipient dictator, and he’s going to destroy the Constitution and all that. That’s Democratic BS, you know, Democrat Party BS.

That’s their hobby horse, because their policies are even worse than his. But if you’re in the economy, you’re in the markets, you’re in the to and fro of daily pulse of finance and economics, he’s the biggest disruptor of all time. And when you see things like, you know, we’re going to jeopardize a trillion dollars worth of trade with our nearest neighbor because of fentanyl, which frankly, if we had an enlightened drug policy, and we didn’t try to turn it, you know, into some kind of prohibition, they wouldn’t even be buying fentanyl.

But the fact is, fentanyl is 20,000 a pound, heroin is 80, 90,000 a pound on the street. So they laced the heroin with the fentanyl. That’s why you have a fentanyl problem.

But if you didn’t have this prohibition and this stupid view that you can defeat the use of drugs through a drug war, you know, we wouldn’t even be there. But that be that as it may, even now that you have it, you simply don’t disrupt a trillion dollars worth of people’s livelihoods. And I think this is important to understand, too.

There are jobs that are going to be, you know, people are going to be laid off as a result of this. There are people who’ve built up nice little businesses selling parts or doing value added processing to goods coming across the border on either side who are going to have, you know, their profits suddenly undermined and maybe even the viability of their business thrown into doubt. All of this is going to happen over a lot of stupidity, just unmitigated stupidity.

There is not a possible reason, drugs, trade, economics, you name it, for picking a fight with Canada on trade. And that’s where we are. So for all these people that think Trump is the be-all and the end-all and the salvation of the mess that we have both politically and economically here, well, I would say, wake up and smell the roses, you know? I mean, this guy is proving that he’s totally out to lunch on economics, which is the heart of what makes everything tick.

You know, we almost need a whole separate segment on this, and I don’t want to go too far down the rabbit hole. But I get that he disliked Trudeau. But what was even more puzzling, David, is that he recently said he’d rather see the liberals win and Mark Carney take over, because he thinks that would be better for the US than a conservative government.

That doesn’t really add up. It makes me think he actually may prefer having the liberals in power, because it keeps Canada as an easy target. Insiders I’ve spoken to in Canada suggest he sees the country as compromised, all signs pointing back to China, that Trump believes China’s controlling the drug trade, and that even the fentanyl seizures you mentioned are just a fraction of what’s really getting through.

And then, of course, there’s Venezuela, where the oil situation, once again, seems to be straight back to China, the tariffs he’s threatening for anyone that, you know, will buy oil from Venezuela. Your thoughts, David? Yeah, well, he’s got the China fixation, which is another whole segment, you know, that we would need to go through. But, you know, you have to start with this drug problem is due to bad policy in Washington.

And if you’re going to try to stop the drugs, suppress the drugs, make them illegal, you’re going to turn something… Let me give you a couple values that I use, okay? These are street values per pound to give you some idea of what prohibition does. And I think it’s important, because you’re putting your finger on it. That’s part of what’s behind all this.

Right now, the street value in the United States of heroin is about 90,000 a pound. If you take fentanyl, it’s about 20,000 a pound. If you take high-end caviar, it’s 2,000 a pound.

If you take, you know, a top cut of steak, it’s $16 a pound. If you take pasta, you can buy in the grocery shelf, it’s $3 a pound. If you get down to gasoline, it’s 50 cents a pound.

Okay, now how does something even like heroin get to be 90,000 when gasoline is 5,000? Gold actually is only 40,000 a pound today. So how the hell does fentanyl get to be twice as valuable as gold? Okay, think about that. The answer is because you got all these cops trying to, you know, suppress it.

And when you do that, you’re going to make a substitute attractive to the mafias and the criminal syndicates and everybody else who run the drug trade, okay? And that is so stupid. It’s just, you know, you have to speak up and say stupid is stupid. And this is like beyond stupid.

I want to shift gears now because it’s such a gift to have you on and I want to get this question in. You’re working with President Ronald Reagan at just 34 years old trying to do what Elon Musk is aiming for now with Doge. What would you say were the biggest roadblocks you faced back then? You know, the biggest roadblock is the Congress of the United States because when push comes to shove, the executive can do very little to permanently reduce spending.

And this is what I’ve been, you know, I’ve written now a whole book called How to Save 2 Trillion. And it was like a blueprint that I sent to Doge. I don’t know if they read it, but I made my best effort of how to cut the fat, the muscle and the bone to get 2 trillion of savings, which we definitely need or we’re going to go under just building this public debt, you know, to the sky year after year.

But, you know, what lies behind that is even if you find all of these wasteful contracts that he’s been exposing, and this is all great stuff because it’s alerting the public to how bad this is, how bad it smells, how much corruption and just stupidity and waste is everywhere. Yet, if you cancel all these contracts that he’s done, these stupid research contracts, these contracts from USAID to all kinds of people abroad for, you know, really dumb purposes, you don’t save a dime because under the 1974 anti-impoundment law, you have to recycle that money into another maybe slightly less stupid contract. And if you don’t, then the constituencies who live off this, especially the NGOs, and you can see all the middlemen who are in the middle, you know, right in the middle of this in Washington, living high on the hog and fat and happy, they’ll take you to a favorable Obama judge or Biden judge or even, you know, George Bush judge, and you’ll get an order under the Impoundment Act of 1974 to spend the money.

And if you’re not in contract A, it goes to contract B, and if not that, C, and so forth. And then, of course, that’s only 12% of the budget, all of these contracts and the so-called discretionary spending. The rest of it is entitlements, which have to spend by law, Social Security, all the way down to school lunches, subsidized school lunches for poor kids, and the interest on the public debt, which is now running a trillion and rising very rapidly.

So you can’t deal with debt service at all, because you got to pay it or the whole system will blow up. And you can’t deal with entitlements, which is 80% of, you know, the spending unless you change the law. And you’re not even going to save a lot by digging around in headcounts and overhead and stupid contracts, you know, in the discretionary part of the budget, because if you don’t rescind the authority, it’s going to be spent elsewhere.

So I think they’re just beginning to scratch the surface. And I saw in the last week or so that Elon Musk finally got briefed to the point where someone said, you know, if you don’t send a rescission package up to the Hill and force the House and Senate to vote on it, all this money you think you’re saving is just going to be recycled to something else. He’s finally awakened to that.

And he’s a pretty good promoter and, you know, marketer. And he’s making a big noise, which we haven’t had since 1981, I might actually say. So they could put, I wrote a piece a couple of weeks, a week or so ago, I said here, before you pass this latest continuing resolution that basically continues the Biden budget that they inherited, which is going to basically cancel everything that Doge is doing and Musk has done, before you pass that, why don’t you send up a $400 billion rescission package canceling all kinds of leftover stuff from COVID, all this green energy junk that was put into the Inflation Reduction Act that Biden passed and his infrastructure bill, at least show the world that you mean business, cancel the $400 billion before you, you know, put the government on another continuing resolution for the rest of the year.

Well, they didn’t do that either. They just passed the continuing resolution, because, you know, when push comes to shove, these Republicans on the Hill, you know, can’t get out of their own way. They’re so afraid of taking some political flack for allowing the government to shut down.

And as I say, the Washington Monument likes to go out that they, you know, they get they get beat every time they capitulate, and the system runs roughshod over them. And so here we are, you know, a couple months into the Trump administration, and we’re spending at the Biden uniparty level. Yeah, it’s so disappointing, because it’s so promising.

Yeah, yeah. But they’re starting at least, let me just say this, you have to be balanced about this. This is better than anything that’s happened since 1981, when we tried it the first time with the so-called Reagan revolution.

I look at it this way. If you have a dug-in enemy in a military battle, the first thing you do is you soften the targets with bat, you know, batter them with artillery and bombs, and try to loosen up the, you know, the defense before you send in the infantry to finish the job. Now, the doge is the artillery.

It’s not wiping out the other side, but it’s at least softening up the target, alerting the public. So there’s a huge problem here. There’s full justification for going in heavy duty to make the cuts.

But if they don’t send, as I say in the metaphor, the congressional infantry into battle and cut budget authority and change or amend entitlement laws, that’s the infantry, that’s the hard work, that’s the hand-to-hand combat with the embedded forces of the status quo in the swamp. If you don’t do that, the battle will be lost. So we’ve got stage one done here.

The artillery has been doing a pretty good job, but now they better get the infantry in there pretty soon. Just want to get your thoughts on gold now, since there’s been so much buzz about the yellow metal, especially with speculation on what this administration might do with it. Are they considering auditing the reserves or maybe selling some to buy Bitcoin? Can you share, you know, when you were with Reagan, were there any discussions around gold and what the U.S. might do with it? Yeah, there was a lot of conversations because, you know, in his heart of hearts, Ronald Reagan was a gold standard man.

And he really, truly believed that the biggest mistake in modern history was Nixon shutting the so-called gold window and shutting down Bretton Woods in 1971 at Camp David. But he constantly got talked out of his convictions by all the status quo politicians. And at the time, his treasury secretary was the worst, Donald Reagan.

Now, Reagan was a Wall Street man. He was the great CEO who built Merrill Lynch into a power house after he married the daughter of Merrill. OK, that’s how that happened.

But he was anti-gold standard. He was sort of, you know, he was a short term oriented trader from Wall Street who thought, well, if the Fed just performs a little better, there’s not any, you know, long term structural problem. So they put this gold commission up and, you know, a lot of good people on it like Ron Paul and some others.

But the thing got watered down because Don Reagan insisted that the idea of talking about gold shows that you’re old fashioned and you’re out of it and you’re kind of a kook. Only kooks believe in gold. Now, this was 1982 or 1983, only 11 years after we went off the gold standard.

So unfortunately, the real opportunity, you had someone in the Oval Office who actually understood money. He was educated, you know, in the 1920s. He went to college in the 20s, Ronald Reagan I’m talking about.

And he had a classic liberal view of sound money, a fiscal rectitude, a small government, free markets, etc. But that was the only chance we had to undo Nixon’s evil work. And today you got Donald Trump who’s like, you know, whatever he believes, it’s the last thought he heard yesterday.

And he has no convictions about anything when it comes to economic fundamentals. So I don’t think anything good is going to happen in terms of policy to get back towards a more sound monetary system and anything that looks like gold back money. But it might be good for the price of gold because there’s going to be so much chaos in the financial markets.

And I think bond prices are heading down and yields are heading up with all this borrowing that if you’re holding gold, I think you’ll be rewarded. And it’s a good place to hide. But I don’t think, you know, it’s going to lead to any resolution of the bad money problem that we have in the United States today.

And I think you’re right, David, it’s going to be tough to bounce back from that. One last point before we wrap up. What’s your stance on cutting USAID? Were you in favor of it? Or do you think it could come back to haunt the US? Yeah, we should cut every dime of it.

It’s a complete waste. Okay. Now, there’s two things.

There are people in the world that are hungry or people that need medical care. But that’s a job for philanthropy. I’m not going to propose to tax the bus driver in Milwaukee who can barely pay for the groceries and, you know, keeping the kids in school and all the other things you have to do, heat and light and shelter, in order to help people in Africa.

That’s a job for donors. That’s a job for philanthropists. And if you look at the net worth of the American public today, it’s $60 trillion.

If you look at the net worth of the top 1% or 5%, it’s about $50 trillion. So those are the people that ought to be doing the humanitarian aid, not the US government, because we’re broke, and we can’t afford it. That’s part of it.

The other part of it, it is used to carry out all kinds of foreign policy of the empire, as I call it, you know, regime change. It’s kind of just an adjunct of the CIA, and none of that ought to be going on. And all of this stuff that they were putting into so-called fighting disinformation and malinformation, that’s really like trashing the First Amendment.

You know, that’s a direct attack on free speech. How can you justify a government agency attacking the First Amendment? And that’s basically what, you know, tens of millions, if not a billion of this foreign aid money was going into. So I look at the $4 billion a year, up to $6 billion a year, cancel it all.

And I think the Doge has done really a good job on taking that one on. David Stockman, this has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much.

We’re looking forward to seeing you as the keynote at Rick Rule’s event. We’re also going to fire up the link for folks who want to catch you and myself at the show in Boca Raton. But one last thing, you mentioned buckle up.

Is that the key takeaway you’d like folks watching this to leave with? Yeah, buckle up. And I know people are skeptical about the markets. They realize that they’re pretty rigged.

They’re pretty bubble-ridden. And this has been going on year after year, which means it’s getting more and more iffy. And now is especially the case.

Just stay out of harm’s way is what I would say. All right, David, thank you so much. Like I said, people want to see you in person and hear from you, they can attend a Rick Rule symposium in Boca Raton this July.

We’ll be there as well. And you can sign up and register at rulesymposium.com forward slash 2025. Again, that’s rulesymposium.com forward slash 2025.

That’s it for me. Thank you so much for watching. As always, we ask you to subscribe to our YouTube channel.

It means the world to us. Thanks for watching.