The U.S. Is 80% Broke, And No One Realizes It (Uncut) 05-04-2025

The U.S. Is 80% Broke, And No One Realizes It, The Fed Caused This, and Can’t Fix It | Chris Whalen

The whole U.S. economy is based on the dollar, and the global economy is largely based on the dollar. So there aren’t many markets that can absorb even a tiny amount of exodus from dollars from U.S. assets. Let’s say we had a 10 percent sell-off in the S&P 500, right, tomorrow or maybe on Monday.

And then where are we going to go? We’re going to buy gold? There’s not enough gold above brown that’s deliverable to even absorb a tiny part of that. Hello and welcome to Soar Financially, a channel where we discuss the macro to understand the micro. My name is Kai Hoffman.

I’m the Ed.J.R. mining guy over on X and of course, you’re a host of this channel. And I’m looking forward to welcoming a first-time guest to the program. It’s Chris Whalen.

He’s the chairman over at Whalen Global Advisors, and I’m really looking forward to catching up with him. He’s one of the sharpest minds out on Wall Street in New York, and I’m glad he’s joining us on a Friday afternoon, just after jobs numbers came out as well. So we got lots to chew through here.

We got to discuss the economy, what is happening in the fintech space. He’s an expert there as well. So I have a couple of questions for him in that regard, because we got to talk about how the consumer is doing and how is that being reflected within that space.

So it’ll be an interesting discussion, a little different than normal. And you know, we’ve got to discuss what the Fed will do next week. I see there might even be a rate hike now in the cards.

Doesn’t mean it’s likely, but all of a sudden, it’s starting to show up in the polls. So lots to discuss, lots to get through. Really appreciate your support.

Just hit that like and subscribe button. It really helps us and it’s a free way to support us here. So thank you so much for doing that.

Chris, thank you so much for joining us. Good to see you. Thank you so much for coming on.

Yeah, Chris, we got lots to talk about as I laid out, but since it’s your first time on the program, I really need to figure out where your mind is right now in terms of the economy. What’s your assessment? What’s the state of the economy right now? How are we doing, A, globally and B, in the U.S. here? Global economy is kind of muddling along. Obviously, Asia has calmed down a bit, both due to the tariff discussion and for other reasons.

The U.S. is still doing quite well. We’ve been talking about a recession for, what, over a year? We were going to cut interest rates in the third quarter of last year, as you may recall. But the recession didn’t materialize, particularly a consumer recession.

Europe is having a hard time, mostly because of green policies and other things which have stunted growth. I’m going to speculate. I think you’re going to see a lot of these things undone.

Germany, in particular, seems to be having a very robust conversation about what they need to do and not do as far as the whole issue of global warming. And of course, the Ukraine war has affected Europe terribly. So I think, you know, overall, the economy is not horrible in a global sense, but it’s certainly not as robust as it was a couple of years ago when central banks were dumping money out of helicopters and into the street.

So we’re still getting over that. That 2020 through 2022 period is huge in terms of both the economy and the financial markets. But we’re kind of getting over it this year.

We may get back to normal sometime between now and the start of next year. Yeah, definitely a lot of uncertainty in the markets based, you know, caused by the tariffs here, Chris. But also IMF came out and revised its global growth forecast or what you’re hinting at just on a global basis.

But it really downgraded the U.S. in particular. And now we’ve got first quarter GDP numbers which are negative. So how close are we really to a recession here, Chris? Not close in the U.S. I discount anything that economists and related media have to say about the economy.

They tend to be mostly on a progressive side of things. There aren’t very many conservative economists in America. And, you know, for me, I think if you really studied what was going on in industry, you would see that housing is quite strong again because of the Fed home prices are at absurd levels in the U.S. And, you know, the rest of the economy actually had done OK.

It was not nearly the stereotypical 2008 kind of consumer led recession that we kept hearing about from the economists. I’m almost to the point, Kai, where I think we should start fining economists for publicly publishing commentaries that are totally wrong. You know, it’s not helpful and it confuses investors.

It confuses the public. On the other hand, Donald Trump has just put a budget out and he has no economic projections at all. So, you know, I am not a big fan of macroeconomics.

I think that I’m a micro economist. I tend to focus on the particular more than the generalizations, because when you generalize, you’re always wrong. That’s the unique thing about human action is you’re always wrong if you try and step back and generalize about something as large as the global economy, for example.

That’s to me absurd. I’d much rather look at what human beings are doing at the micro and local level. Absolutely.

It makes a lot of sense. But, Chris, I think we should also be finding then the federal agencies, they’re skewing things, meaning like the Fed or even the Treasury Department pumping, you know, cheap or free money into the market, because that way a lot of economists have gotten it wrong, right, because they just changed the rulebook. Well, it’s hubris.

You know, when you think you can conduct massive open market operations without having a substantial impact on the long term economy, on the references that we use to understand the economy, there are so many metrics that we use in finance today that have not made any sense in the past 15 years. Indeed, that’s one of the reasons I decided to republish my first book, which comes out next week, because, you know, in order to understand inflation, you have to know how we got here. But you also need to understand, particularly the last 15 years since 2008, because the Federal Reserve Board under Ben Bernanke, then Janet Yellen and finally Jerome Powell kind of loosed the bounds of earth and decided to do things that were completely absurd.

But there was nobody to question them. Members of Congress don’t even know what monetary policy is. So the Fed has kind of made it up as they go.

And their actions impact not just the U.S. economy, but the global economy. And, you know, nobody has any choice. They just have to accept whatever these people do.

So, for example, today, should they cut rates? Should they raise rates, as you said before? Who knows? I would tell you that on the commercial side in the U.S. economy, commercial real estate, private equity, corporations, there’s a lot of pain because many companies that were financed in 2020, 21, 22 cannot be refinanced today. You see fully lit buildings in New York City going into foreclosure. Why? Because they have too much debt.

So the Fed enabled a huge accumulation of debt. And now we’re getting rid of it. How is this going to end up? Hard to say, but I will make one prediction.

I think you’re going to have a macro housing price reset in the U.S. in three to four years. How what is that going to look like, Chris? Like since you’re since I think we’re going to go back down to 2020 level of home prices on average in the United States, a figure of 20 percent decline. 20 percent.

1. Not 2008, but 20 percent is still a lot. Yeah, absolutely.

Now, interesting. Like I know you’re a housing and mortgage specialist here, Chris. I’ll ask you like just the impact of the Fed funds rate that right now it’s four and a quarter roughly.

And the easing of QT, though, has there been a positive impact from that, from the easing? Like they didn’t go to zero on QT. But because the federal government is in deficit, when the Fed is buying securities for their portfolio, bank deposits grow. In other words, the Fed goes out, buys a security, they credit somebody’s account in the bank.

So all of a sudden, bank deposits are higher. All bank deposits are fungible, whether they’re held at the Fed or they’re inside a JP Morgan. Right.

On the other hand, when they shrink the balance sheet, all of a sudden, bank deposits start disappearing. Why? The Fed or the federal government’s in deficit when they redeem that bond that was purchased by the Fed previously. They got to go out and issue another bond.

Who buys it? A private investor because the Fed’s not buying. Right. So all of a sudden, the bank deposit disappears.

The investor now owns a Treasury bond. We haven’t seen any growth in bank deposits in two years in this country. And what that means is, is that banks are not buying mortgages.

They’re not buying mortgage-backed securities where we typically finance housing in the U.S. And what that’s meant is that the spreads between, say, the 10-year Treasury and 30-year mortgages have expanded. We’re writing 7 percent mortgages today in the United States. Now, 7 percent is extremely high, of course, and it’s relatively high.

It’s not Paul Volcker kind of high, but still the difference between where we were in 2020, March of 20, and today is considerable. Yeah, absolutely. Like 7 percent if your mortgage was, you know, what is it, three and a half percent before? I have a three.

I work in the industry, right? So we bought a house in 2021 and I told my lender, I said, don’t you dare price that mortgage until we close because I wanted to get it underneath three. But I was a little too late. That 3 percent mortgage subsidizes our living in New York state and the high taxes.

For how many years, if I may ask? We got it in 21. So, you know, we’re not going anywhere. No, I mean, so how long is the mortgage? I’m curious.

Oh, it’s 30 years. Yeah. Oh, 30 years, under three.

Wow. OK. Yeah.

Yeah. You shouldn’t go anywhere with that rate. Yeah.

No, well, you normally would have to get a floating rate loan to get anywhere near that kind of rate. But that’s how distorted things were. We have people out there who have 2 percent mortgages and the Fed owns mortgage backed securities that have a one coupon.

That’s bad. You know, a 1 percent Fannie Mae is trading at about 70 cents on the dollar today. That’s why the Fed is losing so much money, by the way.

Do you see the Fed stepping into the market at all in terms of liquidity, buying U.S. bonds or just buying mortgage backed securities again? No, no, I hope they will never buy mortgages again. They did not understand what they were doing. This is the same reason the Silicon Valley Bank failed.

It’s called duration. Mortgages have variable duration. So when rates are low, they pay off really fast.

Right. People move, they refinance. Today, payoff rates for mortgages, especially those low coupon securities, are measured in years.

They’re 15, 16, 17 years average life now. So what does that mean? The price goes down. And that’s why losses in the U.S. banking system are still huge, unrealized losses on securities.

And we hope rates don’t go any higher. The way you measure this, by the way, the pain measure is the 10 year treasury. That’s where you price this stuff.

Well, and it’s been going up four point three three. It has been going up. When it gets to five percent, you can hear screaming in the background.

I can imagine. Yeah. But also like saying on the Fed topic here, like what is the Fed supposed to do here? Like what can they do? What should they do, Chris? I think the Fed missed their opportunity last year to cut once or twice.

That would have been helpful, you know, to the commercial real estate market, also to lenders. You asked me before, you know, short term rates, five, a little below five percent. How does that impact lenders? Well, if I’m a mortgage lender, that’s how I finance my new pipeline.

I borrow short. I get money to close your mortgage and then I sell that loan into the market, get my money back and I go do it again. Right.

That doesn’t necessarily mean, though, that long term rates are going to follow. And I think one of the big changes we’re going to see that’s going to impact not only markets, but a lot of investors is that longer rates may stay elevated, even if the Fed were to cut short term Fed funds down to, say, four, three and three quarters, something like that. Right.

You might still see the 10 year treasury over 4 percent. That’s a big change. That’s kind of going back to where we were before 2008.

Yeah, absolutely. No, it’s a good question. It’s like, how long will it take for it to trickle down as well? And aren’t the mortgage going to go up again like we’ve seen with the last rate cut? Well, all of a sudden the mortgage rate jumps.

Yeah, we’re going to have a little boom, a couple of years, and then we have the maxi reset. And you know who told me that? I published a biography of a guy named Stan Middleman. He’s the founder of Freedom Mortgage, one of the smartest mortgage guys in the United States.

And he’s very good at predicting this stuff. He says misery on the eights. So about every 10 years or so, it’s human behavior.

Right. We need a little reset in housing, particularly now because affordability is non-existent. It’s so hard for people to buy homes.

I’m in New York, which is an awful market because of the progressive politics in the state. But homes are still getting bought because there’s no supply. We just saw a house across the street from me go in two weeks and it went for a hundred thousand dollars above the asking price.

Yeah, cars lined up outside. This is not a good market. It’s nothing like Florida, Texas.

But you’re starting to see softness all over the country. If you think about the average home in the U.S. average home mortgage, about four hundred thousand dollars today. The top half of that distribution is starting to weaken significantly, especially for spec homes that were built without a buyer lined up.

Now they’re flipping them into rentals. When you see a house for sale, it suddenly is for rent. That’s a bad sign.

Rent to own. I’ve seen that a few times as well. Does it work so well in housing? No, it’s a weird concept.

I still need to wrap my head around like, how do you rent to own? It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me personally. But also Airbnb. You’re giving the renter a free option, OK? And if they decide not to buy the house and you have the risk.

Yeah, no, exactly. I was joking. A friend of mine is selling a house in Utah and I was like, it’s a really nice house.

Like it’s way out of my price range. And I asked him, would you rent to own? You know, like, is there a way we can do that? He’s like, go away, please. You are seeing more people take back.

You’re seeing sellers take back mortgages more. And in particular, the FHA market, which tends to be the bottom third of the market, really, those mortgages are assumable. So if you find somebody that’s got a low coupon mortgage, you fill out a couple of forms and you can become the borrower and off they go.

I spoke with Melody Wright about that as well. And we talked about like how you can assume somebody else’s loan or mortgage without a lot of checking, which is troublesome, of course, because you never know how liquid, you know, your opposite partner, your partner is that you’re doing the deal with. Well, you have to qualify.

But what the investors like is that that loan stays in the pool. There’s no prepayment. So the Bank of Japan or the Bundesbank doesn’t get upset when they get a prepayment.

It’s going to say, but it often happens off market as well. It’s just between the two parties. Say I pay you, Chris, and then you pay your mortgage.

But I own your house. I live in your house pretty much or whatever. No, no.

The seller’s out. You actually have a financing. Then you pay off the seller and you assume their debt and you have to pay the fees, of course.

But it does work. Yeah, OK. Inflation expectations we need to talk about a little bit.

We we got to cover because Jerome Pyle put himself in the hot seat when he almost said the word stagflation. He got really close to it. I think it was the Economic Club of Chicago.

I might be wrong, but he was talking there. He was talking about higher inflation, slower growth. And we’ve seen both more or less.

What are your inflation expectations? How are you handling that? Well, inflation is the American pastime. It’s embedded in everything we do. We create layers of leverage when we don’t have enough income to do what we want to do today.

We go out and borrow money. So I don’t see stagnation here. I know that certain parts of the economy are not doing as well as others.

But the notion of stagflation like the 70s and the 80s. No, I think this time around, it’s different to borrow the old phrase. Right.

So what Powell’s doing is playing politics. He knows that the president wants him out. He doesn’t have to go.

His term goes through next year. And if Donald Trump doesn’t stop attacking Powell publicly, Powell can sit on the board until 2028. He doesn’t have to leave.

And that means Donald Trump’s not going to have a slot open to put a new Fed chairman in there. Kevin Walsh, for example, who’s a good friend. Great guy, by the way.

So if you go back and read the history books, there was a period right after World War Two when Harry Truman got into a pissing contest with a guy named Mariner Eccles. He’s got a building named after him in Washington. Mariner Eccles term expired.

Truman didn’t reappoint it. Truman reappointed a guy named Tom McCabe. And what happened was Eccles sat on the board and kept his seat.

And that stymied the president because he couldn’t appoint another governor. So there’s always subtle little things going on. The best thing for presidents is to ignore the Fed.

The Fed’s in charge of short term rates. The Treasury, Scott Besson has said this right, are really responsible for long term rates. If they get their act together on the fiscal side, long term rates will come down.

And interestingly, if you look at the numbers, the cash requirements for Treasury have fallen dramatically in the past month. Interesting. Can you elaborate on that real quick? Can you explain that? Well, they want to maintain a certain amount of cash in the account.

They have to pay interest on the debt and they have to make a lot of other payments that are coming in and going out constantly. That’s what the Treasury does. By reducing the scope of government, by reducing headcount, the federal government, some other things, they have reduced the amount of cash that the Treasury has to raise in the next refunding.

I think this is really the agenda of Trump. He wants to cut federal spending, reduce the size of government while giving individuals tax cuts. And he’s hoping that that will force down medium and long term interest rates.

Now, I appreciate you elaborating that, just clarifying a little bit. Much appreciated, Chris. Well, during COVID, we were raising six, seven hundred billion dollars at a shot.

The last refunding was less than two hundred. That was a couple of weeks ago. Is that what it was? Yes.

It went reasonably well. Everybody was predicting the wheels were going to come off the cart. No, it was taken up really nicely.

I only saw one auction that struggled a little bit, I think. Well, nobody likes 20 year bonds, but they did OK, you know, surprisingly. Interesting.

Interesting. Now, we got to talk economic indicators and we got one this morning is just the jobs number, which surprised to the upside a little bit. It surprised me as well.

And there was one interesting tidbit I’ll share with you, Chris, and then you can weigh in. But the job growth was primarily driven by health care, transportation, warehousing, some financial activities. But it wasn’t driven by government jobs like it was before.

Actually, government jobs or government employment experienced a decline of about nine thousand jobs last month. What do you make of the jobs report here, Chris? I think people don’t really appreciate how much dynamism there is in the private sector. Americans work and they tend to be keeping their jobs right now.

The volatility in terms of people voluntarily releasing a job or looking for a new job has been low. And Chairman Powell has talked about this in his past comments. So for me, when I look at all of this, I think the private sector is going to continue to outperform expectations.

And I think the government sector is going to shrink rather considerably because Donald Trump is only getting started. Doge, that’s sort of the topic. It’s a repudiation of the progressive model going back to the New Deal.

I spent a lot of time talking about this in my new book. But, you know, people don’t realize that there is an ideological as well as economic battle going on here. And Trump knows where he wants to go.

Republicans in Congress, not so much. They’re kind of caught in the middle. And then you have the Democrats who have traditionally seen themselves as the rulers of America.

They’ve written the history of this country going back a century. And they are stuck because they ran out of ideas. I mean, the biggest problem Kamala Harris had and Joe Biden, too, was all they could come up with was more government.

Americans don’t like that, even though we tend to be a fairly socialist country. In fact, right, we’d like to think of ourselves in better terms than that. We don’t like to think of ourselves as being financially dissolute, for example.

But you look at our fiscal policies and they’re not that impressive. Now, really, yeah, Kamala’s platform was like, oh, we’re not going to change anything. You know, I think that’s all she was going to give away money so that, you know, poor people could buy houses.

In the old days, in the 1950s, the government actually put out pamphlets helping people understand, can you afford a home? Can you take care of a home after you buy it? This is what maintenance costs. This is what this costs. Right.

There’s not even any discussion about this. American politicians are so busy finding new ways to borrow money to throw it, whatever it is, that it’s almost gotten to the point of being absurd. Somebody asked me today about community financial development corporations.

Right. Which was something we came up with during covid. They’re funded by the federal government.

It’s just more debt. And you know who the biggest ones are? Credit unions. You know where there’s the most of these things? Puerto Rico.

In a recession, this is not going to end well. That’s all I’m going to say about it. Yeah, no, absolutely.

Chris, I know you’re an expert in fintech as well. I got to ask you a little bit about that sector because credit card delinquencies are going up, for example, and the fintech space has seen a rise of buy now, pay later kind of companies. How do you factor that into these sort of economic developments? Is that a substitute for credit cards? And what’s your outlook there? It’s a disturbing trend in the sense that what it tells me is that lower income households don’t have enough income.

And so they are being forced to go back to the days of my parents in the 60s and the 70s. We used to collect stamps. And then when you had a book of stamps, you could go get something, a new toaster, whatever it was.

Right here, you have people who just literally can’t afford credit or buying things in small bites. And the industry is accommodating. So, for example, you had Klarna, which was the one of the leaders in buy now, pay later.

Scandinavian company was going to go public here in the US. There are other versions of this model. Another interesting one that I just wrote about was SoFi.

SoFi is now a bank. They were originally in student loans. They would refinance your student loans, lower the interest rate, help you get through that.

Right. But today, what’s their biggest area of growth? Credit cards and unsecured consumer loans, the default rates, you know, five percent net net loss rates, five percent. That’s that’s kind of dodgy.

And what’s happened is these newbies in fintech land and there are several of them out there. Jumpstart, there’s a whole bunch of them. They’ve all had to go above the banks in terms of credit risk to go after that new customer.

These are people that Jamie Dimon doesn’t want at JP Morgan. Even Citi, which is a big credit card issuer, would they want these sorts of customers? No. So they’re migrating to firms that are willing to take more risk.

And the question is, how will they do it? A recession? Because we don’t know. None of these business models have been through a real recession. Now, it’s like 60 percent of the tickets bought for Coachella were bought through pay now, buy now, pay later kind of programs.

I think that was actually the provider. I think they’re just a head scratcher to be to be honest. Look, to go to most sports events in the United States, you’ve got to do buy now, pay later.

I mean, good God, it’s expensive. Basketball. Imagine seats for the Knicks at Madison Square Garden.

I don’t even want to tell you what they cost. It’s a football game. I was at the Bills Broncos game.

The playoff game was 250 bucks for lower bowl. And I thought it was like, oh, it’s getting up there. German soccer tickets, 16 euros.

There you go. Inflation hasn’t hit there yet. So they keep it reasonable for the common man.

Right. I love that. We got to talk markets real quick, because we talked briefly about Klana and them pushing off their IPO was market related, valuation related, because people are starting to wake up that valuations might not grow into the sky here and that there is actually a ceiling at some point.

What do you make of the recent dip, but then recovery like you tweeted about today? We’re back to April 2nd levels in the S&P 500. Yeah, I predicted this with my flock. I told them that, you know, 2024 had been a little bit excessive.

Some of my banks were up 50, 60 percent in 12 months, which is not normal. But it was part of this workout from the period of Fed ease. The Fed threw so much money into the economy and Congress, too.

It was just silly. There was money everywhere. And so now markets are tightening up.

You’re starting to see things trade a little more on fundamentals. But the reality at the end of the day is that where are we going to hide if the Bank of China sold all its treasuries, went to cash? What are they going to do with the cash? They’re going to buy yen. They’re going to go buy rupees.

Who knows? The point is, is that the whole U.S. economy is based on the dollar and the global economy is largely based on the dollar. So there aren’t many markets that can absorb even a tiny amount of exodus from dollars, from U.S. assets. So, for example, gold.

Let’s say we had a 10 percent sell off in the S&P 500 tomorrow or maybe on Monday. And then where are we going to go? We’re going to buy gold. It’s not enough gold above ground that’s deliverable to even absorb a tiny part of that flow.

So my point is, is that, you know, the media, everybody else got kind of fixated by tariffs and oh, me, oh, my, because, you know, economics is easy. Anybody can talk about it. Right.

But when you have to make a decision about markets, my sense was there’s going to be some kerfuffle here. But ultimately, Trump is going to do a deal with all the countries that we don’t really have a problem with, like Europe, Japan, India. And then we’re going to be left with the Chinese, who are a modern predator, mercantilist state.

They’re kind of like Great Britain on steroids. You know, the British taught them how to do this, remember, when they were occupying China. So I think that ultimately this is going to be a U.S.-China conversation when it comes to trade and the rest of it’s going to be settled.

And so the question is, if you believe that, what should you do with stocks today? And the answer is you should be long. So I’m long gold, long S&Ps, the rest of my portfolio, I own a lot of financials, a lot of preferreds and financials. I love periods like this.

I love it when, you know, my friends on CNBC are pulling their hair out, going, oh, me, oh, my, because that means there’s stuff out there that’s cheaper than it was. And I told my subscribers, I said, go shopping, do your homework. Think about the things you couldn’t buy six months ago because they were overvalued.

So I went and bought some American Express when it got down to five times a buck. It had been over seven. And it’s one of the best performing banks in the country, by the way.

Absolutely. No, it really interests, like I actually enjoyed this week. It’s Friday.

What is it? May 2nd. So, of course, we had a holiday yesterday, but it felt like it’s a really relaxing week overall on the financial news. Would you agree? Oh, absolutely.

Well, they got tired. They couldn’t talk about trade anymore. Yeah.

But there’s earnings are not going to be great for my financials this year. They’re going to be OK. Interest rates have been falling, by the way, through the first quarter.

So that gave them a little bit of lift in terms of net interest margin. And the rest of the fintechs, you know, they don’t typically fund off deposits. They fund off the market.

But they again, the biggest problem they had is the lending slowed down. When you see rates go up, volumes go down. So that to me is an indication that at some point this year, the Fed’s going to cut short term rates.

Chris, last topic, really, really short or brief topic here, gold. You said you own it, you buy it. What’s your thesis? The gold trade is one of scarcity.

Central banks around the world are rediscovering gold 100 plus years after FDR tried to kill it during the Great Depression. And I think you’re going to hear more about gold. Gold is going to become a liquid asset for the purposes of Basel in the middle of the summer.

I think it’s July 1st. And I think you’re going to see more and more countries and central banks holding gold as part of their reserves. Over time, I think the dollar is going to decline as a reserve asset.

It won’t go away. But this means we’re headed into a different period in terms of trade, less monopoly on the part of the United States, more of a multilateral trade and also financial world. And I think a lot of countries are going to feel comfortable holding gold, holding the currencies of their trading partners and their neighbors.

It’s just a pattern I think is inevitable. Absolutely. No, it’s a, as you said, Basel III made gold another tier one asset next to cash and bonds, of course.

So banks will have to stock up, which will be. And you’ll see them buying silver, too. Silver is different because it has had such a mixed past.

But the thing about silver is that it’s consumed, it’s used in industry and then it’s gone. So there is a need for silver. And I think that trade is going to find some legs, too, although it’s difficult to predict when.

I talk about that a lot in my book because silver has had such a funny history. I compare the cryptocurrency guys to the silverites in the 1880s, 1890s. Well, the silver bugs are also an interesting group as well when it comes to that.

We should be trading way higher. I get the thesis, but I don’t see it happening just yet. Like it’s trading, as you said, like more like an industrial metal because it is being used.

Well, wouldn’t it be funny if countries start using it as a monetary metal again after more than 100 years? Because remember, by the time we had Bretton Woods after World War II, everybody was off the gold standard. They didn’t know what to do. And the mighty dollar was there.

So we we picked that. Absolutely. Well, I’m not sure if there’s even enough because we’re already running a 200 million ounce deficit in silver as we speak, Chris.

And that’s without the monetary component that’s being completely ignored. Absolutely. Chris, very last question.

Quick answer. If I were to come to you with a million dollars and ask you, Chris, help me invest this. It’s sort of a nice summary question of our conversation.

How would you allocate that money? No financial advice, big asterisks, you know, just to just sort of summarize what we’ve been talking about. I would probably do what I do with my own portfolio, which is about a third income, a third alpha, and then I would put the rest of it in gold and other tangible assets. So you notice I haven’t mentioned Bitcoin because I’m not a big fan of that.

But, you know, I think precious metals are going to have a resurgence. It’s really going to surprise people. Fantastic.

Chris, I know your book is coming out next week, May 16th, called Inflated. You want to give us the cliff notes real quick? Sure, I have reissued this book so that my fellow citizens have some idea. Of how we got to where we are.

How did this sleepy agrarian society from the 19th century end up as the monopoly provider of global money a hundred years later? And I try to especially talk about the last 15 years in the new book. We have, of course, Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell. And I try and give people a sense of where we’re headed.

The reality is inflation is the American pastime. We don’t like paying taxes. We never have, by the way.

This is not a modern problem. It goes back to the inception of our country. And I tell that story, I think, in a readable and enjoyable way.

Fantastic. Chris, last question. Where can we send our audience? Where can they follow more of your work? Well, I published the Institutional Risk Analyst, which is my newsletter.

I’m active on X and LinkedIn under R.C. Whalen. And I do publish a column for National Mortgage News. For those of you who like housing, I spend a lot of time with some of the biggest lenders in the country, and I love the housing industry as a people business.

And I really enjoy working with them. But let’s do it again, Kai. Absolutely.

Yeah, I really appreciate your time and the conversation. It was fun. We covered a lot of ground here.

So, Chris, we got to get you back on. Absolutely. So thank you so much for joining us, Chris.

Much appreciated. And everybody else, thank you so much for tuning in here to SOAR Financially. I hope you had a wonderful weekend or having a wonderful weekend as you’re listening to this.

In the meantime, if you haven’t done so, hit that like and subscribe button. How are you positioned? What do you think the housing market is going to do? What do you think about the fintechs? Have you used a buy now, pay later kind of scheme or not scheme, but business model or transaction before? I haven’t, but I’m curious what your thoughts are. Put them in the comments down below.

Thank you so much for tuning in. And we’ll be back with lots more. Take care.