Trump Didn’t Kill CBDCs (Uncut) 02-04-2025
Trump Didn’t Kill CBDCs – This “Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing” Will Track Your Every Move – Piepenburg
You will not want to miss this. We have just released the must-have report of the year, Outlook 2025, why the worst is yet to come and how to prepare. This took months in the making.
It’s compiled from exclusive interviews. This report isn’t speculation. It’s built from a series of in-depth conversations.
It’s unfiltered insights from the experts, everyone ranging from Dr. Ron Paul, Gerald Celente, Danielle DiMartino Booth, and so many more. You can get it at dannyoutlook2025.com. Again, that’s dannyoutlook2025.com. We are focusing on one of President Trump’s latest executive orders, the banning of a digital dollar. Why this 180? We’re going to find out why from Matthew Peipenberg.
He is my guest today. Matthew, always good to be with you. Welcome back to the show.
Thanks, Danielle. I’m really excited to swap thoughts with you again. Certainly, the CBDC new orders and all the Bitcoin noise and AI is a lot to talk about.
I was just speaking to our mutual friend, Frank Giustra, about this. We were texting back and forth on this. He’s like, you got to ask Matthew about this.
I’m like, I absolutely will. Obviously, talk a lot of other topics with you. But let’s start with this one of Trump’s digital dollar ban.
I’m pulling up a Reuters article here, which suggests it’s just going to give China and Europe future CBDCs free reign here. It basically leaves the field wide open. Why the backtrack? The US was doing all these pilot tests with CBDCs.
We all thought we were moving in this direction. Why the halt on this? It’s not to take any wind away from the new excitement and flavor of optimism coming out of the Trump White House. I’m not trying to be anti-Trump.
I’m cynical about politics in general. I have to caveat that left or right. I wrote an article exactly two years ago called the ABCs of CBDC.
I said, beware of technical innovations being the cure-all, just like human innovations. There’s not a cure-all in politics, tech, AI. They’re all kind of wolves in sheep’s clothing.
In terms of the specific question about having an executive order with a nice signature and a camera in front, we’re not going to go down the CBDC route of programmable, seizable, controllable digital money. We’re not going to do that. That’s optically fantastic.
Say that with the executive order in your left hand. But what’s happening with the right hand, whether Trump’s aware of it or not, with the right hand, we’re making a massive effort in the digitalization and tokenization of all things through the Ripple XRP railway of all things digital and tokenable and ISO compliance, ISO 222 blockchain compatibility, all this tech that’s going on. As you’re publicly decrying CBDC with your left hand, you’re rolling out a bigger play with Tether in your right hand and stable coins.
Stable coins to me, and Tether in particular, is just CBDC by another name. It’s not issued by a central bank or the two-tier banking system. It’s introduced by the libertarian liberals of Silicon Valley and the highly, highly integrated DC military industrial complex, DC political complex, which is so techie confusing intentionally that you can mock and get rid of the CBDC headlines by saying we’re never going down that route, while at the same time you’re rolling out the XRP highway, the digital highway, and in particular the Tether highway, which Tether is still just CBDC by another name.
It’s just as programmable. It’s just as seizable as a CBDC. It’s just not issued by a central bank.
And again, Tether is only just beginning and XRP and these other things are only just beginning. They’ve been in play long before Bitcoin came out. I think that’s creepy that the same NSA, Intel organizations that rolled out Ripple and the digital highway before Bitcoin was rolled out, have also rolled out stable coins.
And there is a direct connection between Bitcoin and Tether. There is a direct connection between the digitalization of all things and the centralization of all things. I think all of this is again a wolf in sheep’s clothing and we can get into the weeds on Bitcoin and XRP and Tether.
But again, Tether is a CBDC. Right now, it’s only 0.5% of publicly held debt in it. But the idea is to create a balloon in Bitcoin deliberately.
And also the idea is to attract attention and interest in stable coins in general and Tether in particular, because it’s just one more source. Tether is backed largely primarily by U.S. treasuries. It’s one more way to mop up otherwise unloved, weaponized, unwanted U.S. IOUs, U.S. treasuries.
And again, it’s only 5% of publicly held U.S. debt. But as Tether gets bigger, it takes the pressure off the Fed to have to print money to buy those treasuries. You can have the public do it for you by creating a balloon in digital memes, digital headlines, digitalization of all things, create a meme and a balloon and headlines in Bitcoin, which is also a complete contradiction to the White House three years ago or Trump three years ago.
But we can get into that. But the short answer on CBDC is, look, my opinion, very simple, is Tether is CBDC. It’s just not coming from a central bank.
It’s coming from another source. It’s coming into the open markets, but it is not from a central bank. So it’s officially not CBDC, but it is just another form of it.
And it’s very feasible, very programmable. And very trackable, traceable. They know Very trackable.
All the things that are scary about CBDC are just as scary in Tether. So it’s like you said, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. But I want to pick up on something you said.
You said you find it creepy. What did you mean by that? Well, again, desperate times require desperate measures. And it ties into the Bitcoin discussion.
I’m not trying to lead this away from Bitcoin, but it’s all part of the digitalization, the tokenization of all things. And when it comes to crypto, because it leads to this question, they’re all linked. And again, I’ve written a report on our Why Gold page about, is Bitcoin a better investment than gold? When you talk about gold and crypto, you think if you’re a gold executive that you have to just mock crypto in general and Bitcoin in particular.
I’m not one of those guys. You have to take Bitcoin very seriously, not just as a rising market cap and rising asset, but a politicized asset right now. We have to take that seriously.
And when I looked at Bitcoin versus gold, I was very generous with Bitcoin. It wasn’t a hit piece. And yet I still have some real concerns about it.
There’s something creepy about it. Like AI, I look at crypto as a potential wolf in sheep’s clothing. And I always start the conversation, and I have a lot of friends, Ronnie Sterfula, Larry Leopard, people that Ray Dalio, he’s not a friend, but Ray Dalio says, I’ll take gold, I’ll sprinkle some crypto or some Bitcoin on top.
There’s a reason that cryptos and Bitcoin in particular are making headlines. So you don’t have to be super critical of the asset class or certainly the people that are going long, Bitcoin or cryptos. You can’t mock that.
There’s power behind it and there’s politics behind it. But I always start the conversation with, and this sounds tinfoil-hatted, but who or what really created Bitcoin? And I know that sounds like a conspiracy theory. 70% of the Bitcoin market share is eerily static.
And we really don’t know who holds it and how they’ve held it and never sold it for so long. They seem to have tremendous confidence. I see it as Bitcoin like AI and like CBDC and Tether.
I see it as part of my many years syllogism that when countries are desperate and they’re broken, and their markets are at risk, and their currencies are at risk, and inflation is a headline, and social unrest comes from that, which is all around us, you get more and more centralization. That’s throughout history always the case from the extreme left or the extreme right. And to me, when you look at that, if you accept that premise that with debt comes centralization from social unrest and just absolutely destructive failed policies, you have to look at what I call the Voorhees or the Trump paradox.
Again, it’s all tied together. It comes to a point. But remember, Eric Voorhees, big pro Bitcoin.
I love the guy. He’s got a lot of intelligence. What does he see? Pounds his fist.
I chose Bitcoin because it’s decentralized. It’s apolitical. It’s out of the political swamp.
It’s out of the banking system. And yet you couldn’t be more centralized now with Bitcoin ETFs out of Larry Fink, who three years ago hated Bitcoin. Now he’s got a $50 billion Bitcoin ETF, and you couldn’t get more centralized.
And you have a White House talking about strategic Bitcoin reserve. This is from a president who three years ago said Bitcoin was a scam. Why the change? And why is Trump threatening 100% tariffs against the BRICS for going away from the mighty dollar when the entire central thesis of Bitcoin is to be away from the mighty dollar? It’s an anti-fiat, decentralized, apolitical narrative.
Now it couldn’t be more centralized, more political, and frankly, more centralized. And so these paradoxes, you know, Voorhees wanted something outside the system. Now it’s in the system.
Trump said it was a scam three years ago. Now it’s making the headlines as a Bitcoin strategic reserve. You’ve got to ask why this sudden change? And if Trump is so afraid of the BRICS going away from the dollar, why would he laud Bitcoin, which his entire narrative is to be anti-dollar? And the way I look at it is, you know, again, I think, and Luke Groman made a brilliant analogy of this in the 1970s.
This is not a conspiracy theory. OPEC got together with Kissinger and his crew and they said, look, and this came out 10 years ago. It’s not a theory.
It’s a reality. We’re going to inflate oil. We’re going to inflate it by hundreds of percentage points.
It’s dollar-backed with the petrodollar now. We’re going to inflate it. It’s going to draw attention into the oil trade.
It’s going to help us pay down some of our post-Vietnam debts. And to me, it’s very coincidental that we’re inflating Bitcoin now politically to draw attention to Bitcoin because Bitcoin and Ripple are a pair trade. You can trade between Bitcoin and Ripple.
The higher the Bitcoin price, the higher the interest in Ripple. You create a bubble in Bitcoin, very centralized, very pre-thought out years ago, in my opinion, long before Bitcoin was launched, you know, Ripple and XRP was launched. It makes perfect sense now.
You make a bubble in Bitcoin and then you use that to draw money into Tether, which is going to be supported by U.S. Treasuries. It takes the pressure off the Fed and off the headlines to buy unwanted bonds. It’s kind of complicated, but it makes sense.
By the way, that’s actually a tailwind for Bitcoin, the politicization, the centralization of Bitcoin. It’s actually good for Bitcoin investors. So I’m not saying Bitcoin’s stupid, Bitcoin’s going to die, Bitcoin’s going to zero.
I’m saying Bitcoin’s narrative of decentralized, anti-fiat, anti-government maverick, ironically, is the exact opposite of that. And that’s typically how PsyOps work or Intel programs work. You telegraph something as something blue when, in fact, it’s a red pill.
And that’s a very cynical view. Could be wrong, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you have former guys like Glenn Lilly, who was at the NSA, who created the Bitcoin deep hash programs in 2001. It’s not a coincidence that Ripple came out before Bitcoin.
To me, the dots are all connecting. In short, we’re creating a Bitcoin bubble to create a Tether interest, and Tether is CBDC. It’s just not issued by a central bank.
And looking at the executive order, I just want to take a step back here, Matthew. Because what they’re saying, if I’m understanding you correctly, is that the CBDCs are a lot more of a threat than Bitcoin would be to the dollar. And is the goal to prevent a global arms race for CBDCs, and in turn, securing the dollar as the reserve currency? Is that really the goal? What are they trying to do? Well, other than create interest in Tether and other stable coins that are backed by U.S. treasuries to absorb unloved treasuries, there is a genuine fear of the de-dollarization theme, the move away from the dollar that started when we weaponized it against Putin in 2022.
And there is a concern about the, quote unquote, arms race and CBDCs and who goes there first. When the IMF talked about CBDCs during the height of the COVID crisis, not a coincidence, by the way, every crisis is an opportunity to roll out something, again, sheep dipped in wolf’s clothing, but it’s really scarier than it looks. I mean, technically, CBDC is just an E-dollar, an E-euro, an E-yen.
It’s not necessarily a threat to your dollar. It’s just a digitalized version of it, you could argue. But that’s more transparent, more efficient, all the warm and fuzzy things that the IMF and even Powell talked about three or four years ago.
It wouldn’t replace cash, it won’t replace the privacy rights, et cetera, all those things. But what CBDC is, is something that is more transparent on both sides. They can see who’s got what, they can see how to program it, and they can also see how to seize it, like we saw in Canada in an indirect form, how you could seize assets of truckers who are unhappy.
So if you write the wrong article, say the wrong things, join the wrong group, CBDC technically could have the Fed or the U.S. government the power to take that away from you in a worst-case scenario. That’s the darker side of CBDC’s efficiency and transparency and modernization, digitalization and modernization of all things. There is a darker side of it.
It’s more centralized. To your question, is it part of an arms race, all the major central banks and all the major economies of the world are looking at some version of it. And for Trump to say, we’re not going there, he means it, we’re not going to go there, but we’re going to have a tether and we’re going to have other equivalents, just not in the centralized market of the central banks, but we’re still going to be highly centralized by technology and highly centralized by that quote-unquote free market.
We’re going there in disguise. Yeah, we are. It’s just, again, it’s a magic trick.
You keep him focused on the left hand while the right hand does something else. I don’t know if Trump’s doing that intentionally or knowingly. I think the people like Peter Thiel around him, I think guys like Glenn Lilly and Jeffrey Mann, who have been very open.
Jeffrey Mann is someone who was at the NSA. He saw Bitcoin as something that was created in Langley. I don’t know if that’s true or not.
Basically, he implied it’s an Intel organization. It’s an Intel created widget to surveil the enemy. My concern, and I’m not tech savvy enough, my concern is ultimately this digitalization and centralization in the private sector is just, again, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
It still has the power to track and watch and survey and control the users of that. That’s the bottom line. That’s why my argument I made exactly two years ago, be careful of CBDCs or anything like it, because despite all the efficiency, there is a darker narrative behind it.
It’s inherently complex. It’s intentionally complex. I mean, the entire ISO compliance operable distributive ledger is entirely complex.
Like derivatives, it’s meant to be complex so that you can’t see what it’s doing to you while it frog boils you into more centralization. That was something I warned about two years ago. I see it playing out in real time now.
Yes, I’m cynical. I start with the premise that I don’t trust the government. I don’t trust the official narrative.
If my premise is wrong, then I’m wrong. I’m not saying I have inside knowledge from somebody in Langley. This is just what I think, but it’s- I’m so grateful for interviews like this that you’re not going to see on legacy media that is not just running with a headline, but really looking at the truth behind it.
So I thank you for that explanation. Just one more point before we move on. Does it create a narrative, we’re already seeing it, of stablecoins versus Bitcoin? Why not use Bitcoin? I think Bitcoin and stablecoin, I’m using Bitcoin and Tether as a stablecoin example, are a pair trade.
And I mean that by a pair trade is that traders and buyers of both Bitcoin and Tether use the pair to move their funds between those two assets. And so if Bitcoin is getting popular and Bitcoin is getting political support, which again makes no sense if you think about it logically. If you’re the president of the United States, the dollar is your sacred mighty cow, why would you laud a narrative of Bitcoin, which is anti-dollar? But again, if you think about the pair trade with Tether, which is backed by US treasuries, it does make sense to take the bad guy name off of Bitcoin, make it more headline, make it more mainstream, make it more powerful.
Because as Bitcoin gets bigger, interest in Tether and the trades between Tether and Bitcoin get larger. And Tether becomes more mainstream. And so Tether becomes more acceptable, frog-boiled slowly.
You don’t even feel it happening until it’s too late. It’s frankly already happening. It’s already too big to stop.
I’m not going to stop it. That’s why I go to analog pet rocks like gold to be outside of the system. Egon von Greyer warned about this 25 years ago.
You want to truly be free of the banking risk, the counterparty risk, the geopolitical risk, the political risk. And to me, that boring old pet rock in a hole in the ground in Switzerland outside of the system is still freer than Bitcoin. And by the way, I wish I bought Bitcoin at a thousand dollars and had the guts to hold it to where it is today.
I’m not angry at Bitcoin investors, not angry at their good faith belief in it. And frankly, but I think the faces and the nameless faces behind Bitcoin raises a huge eyebrow for me in terms of its narrative of being a maverick altcoin. I want to get back to boring gold, as you call it.
But you made a point about the BRICS before. And, you know, we saw the headlines, Trump saying, you know, don’t even think about moving away from dollars. You’ll get 100 percent tariffs, you know, saying he’s not concerned about the BRICS, doesn’t see them as a threat, is the truth of the matter.
He really does see the BRICS as the major threat here. What’s your take? Well, I listened to your wonderful interview with Willem Milkoop, who’s great, you know, brilliant. And, you know, he said it best.
Trump wouldn’t be making this threat to the BRICS if he wasn’t concerned, highly concerned about the BRICS. I don’t want to say afraid, but I think he is afraid. Trump’s being advised you can’t deny what’s happening with the BRICS.
And again, it’s a longer discussion. And I don’t want to just be anti-Trump. But the tariffs warned or threatened against the BRICS are just confirmation that, A, the U.S. in general, not just Trump, is desperate and desperately concerned.
That’s the first thing. But I like to give two sides to every argument on the BRICS thing. I’ve been talking about the BRICS for years.
I’m obviously in the camp that de-dollarization and the threat of the BRICS is real, very real. It’s not overnight. It’s not going to replace the U.S. dollar as a world reserve currency.
It’s not going to destroy the dollar. It’s not going to end the hegemony of the dollar in a sense, but it’s certainly repricing and changing it. So it is a real force.
It’s almost half the population. It’s 35 percent of global GDP. They have a huge amount of natural resources among them.
There are many strengths in the BRICS that make them different than, say, Colombia, Mexico or Canada with tariff threats. But I also want to, I don’t want to just say that Trump is afraid and he’s stupid and these tariffs and these threats are useless. They’re not.
And there’s a reason for it. When I look at the BRICS and the U.S. and the tariffs and Trump, there is the argument that Trump, it’s like, who is the bigger sucker? Trump famously said, we’re not going to be the sucker to the BRICS. We’re not going to let them get away with de-dollarizing, moving away from the mighty dollar.
There’s great political optics in that and there’s strength in that. He’s like Teddy Roosevelt, but then some. Teddy Roosevelt said, speak softly and carry a big stick.
Trump speaks loudly and carries a big stick. He has legitimate reasons for being angry at de-dollarization or moving away from the dollar. I mean, and I think one of the main reasons is he’s seen a massive offshoring of jobs.
And this is the irony and the contradiction of Trump. But he does, first of all, see a major moving away of the dollar and offshoring and cheaper labor. And the irony is he’s got guys like the CEO of Apple at his inauguration or at Mar-a-Lago.
When you look at Apple as an example, those iPhones are all made in China, like every other American dream is made in China. The head of Nike, billionaire. Where does he make his shoes? Not in the U.S. John Deere, the great American tractor.
I’m from the Midwest. That’s Iowa. John Deere is Iowa.
Where do they make their tractors? Mexico. Trump is legitimately upset that the American dream has been offshored. And so part of the reason he’s making these tariff threats is to get CEOs that are in China or Mexico to get their butts back in the U.S. and make their tractors and iPhones in America.
Who couldn’t be for that? I’m for that. That’s expensive, the reshoring. It’s necessary.
It’s going to take more than two years. It’s probably going to be inflationary. But for the long-term direction of America, it makes sense.
So I get Trump’s idea. These threats against the BRICS are partly to try and convince U.S. CEOs to come back in the U.S. Trump also sees a $300 billion trade deficit with the BRICS. He’s legitimately upset about that.
And finally, he sees a national security threat in places like China making computer chips for weapons that we could possibly use in a cold or hot war against China. So we need to bring this back. He’s making Teddy Roosevelt big stick threats against the BRICS, and you can’t mock him for that.
He does feel like the U.S. has been a sucker. But then you have to look at it from the BRICS side, because they also feel like a huge sucker. They’ve had generations of importing U.S. inflation through Fed policy.
When the Fed makes a dollar weak or strong, rates up or down, the balance sheet fatter or smaller, that affects the local currencies and local policies of every other country in the world. They are, and the BRICS in particular, are the dog being wagged by the tail of the Fed. In addition, those BRICS countries have spent generations having the IMF and the World Bank give them loans with lots of strings attached that are very usurious.
And there’s a great book by John Perkins called Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Everyone should read that. They want to understand why the BRICS are sick of having the IMF or the World Bank give them generous loans.
They’re not generous. They’re usurious and they’re destructive. So they feel like the suckers from the IMF.
They feel like suckers from the World Bank. They feel like suckers from the Fed. And most importantly, since 2022, when we weaponize a neutral reserve world currency against a major nuclear power, the R in BRICS, that they’re going to react differently about the trustworthiness of this neutral reserve asset.
So from the BRICS perspective, they’re the suckers. From Trump’s perspective, we’re the suckers. And they’re both right.
And they both have to come up with a solution. And so it’s more complicated than just making fun of Trump for his big stick policies. He actually is trying to make America great again.
He means it. Whether that’s sublime or ridiculous is to be determined, but you have to put yourself in his perspective. It makes sense.
But he is a winner, not a leader. And as a winner, he sees everything as a zero sum game, winners and losers. He doesn’t have that John Nash, beautiful mind, let’s cooperate.
Because if he understood why the BRICS are moving away from the dollar, you can’t blame them. If I were one of the leaders of a BRICS nation, I would see that. And so it’s a lot more to it than just Trump is right or wrong or the BRICS are dangerous or not dangerous.
But clearly, from Trump’s perspective, we’re the suckers. But again, from the BRICS perspective, they’re the suckers. This power play will be interesting to see how it unfolds.
We saw how quickly Colombia cratered to the demands, to the tariffs, to the threats. Now, granted the BRICS, as an entity working together, will those threats work? Well, again, it’s like when we were weaponizing the dollar, even Obama said, don’t weaponize the dollar in 2015. But he didn’t mean that against countries like Iran or Venezuela.
You can play that game with Iran and Venezuela. And frankly, you can play that game with Colombia and you can play in terms of tariffs. And with all due respect, Canada is a major power.
But Trump can threaten Mexico. It can threaten Canada. And by the way, Mexico will retaliate.
Mexico will be creative. But the BRICS are different as a group than say Colombia or Mexico or even Canada individually. And that’s the thing I think we’re underestimating.
Again, I say the BRICS are 35 to 40 percent of global GDP and rising. And by the way, the BRICS have lots of weaknesses. I’m not saying they don’t have problems.
There’s a big difference between Russia and China and Brazil and India. They’re not fully coalesced. The percentage of GDP is almost all in China’s hands.
That’s the real power. So it’s not like the BRICS have this huge power and the U.S. is gone. But it’s easier to make those kind of headlines early on against countries like Mexico or Colombia.
It gets very different when you go against the BRICS. And the BRICS will do just like the world did when we did the first tariffs in 1930 under Smoot-Hawley. The BRICS will be forced to de-dollarize faster.
I mean, Russia said officially when they made that threat, you’re just digging a grave for the U.S. dollar. You’re going to accelerate de-dollarization. We’re going to get more creative.
We’re going to do more with our new development bank and our continued reserve arrangement. We’re going to do more to find trade settlements outside the dollar in gold-backed transactions, not gold-backed currencies, gold-backed transactions. We’re going to do more to come up with creative trade arrangements outside of the U.S. dollar.
So be careful who you throw that stick at when you’re talking to us as a group. And the question is, will they cooperate in a John Nash way or will they fight in a Trump winner-take-all way? And that’s the risk and that’s the danger. But don’t underestimate the BRICS, despite a lot of their weaknesses.
I’m not saying they’re monolithic. And if Trump is going to do something like this, this is the time, because America is still 50 dollars, still 58 percent of FX reserves. We’re still the strongest economy in the world.
We’re still the strongest military in the world. He’s got two years before the midterm elections. He’s got a house.
He’s got a White House. He’s got a Senate. He’s got a Supreme Court.
He’s got popularity. This is the last time to really carry that big stick, in my opinion. The problem is the BRICS are not going to bend.
They’re not even Trudeau. Trudeau bet he was really afraid. He went down to Mar-a-Lago.
He came back scared to death. Immediately. He was on that first plane.
He showed all his cards. Trudeau played it wrong. He added leverage.
That’s exactly what Trump wanted to see. Trudeau went down basically saying, if you do that, you’ll cripple Canada. Well, that’s exactly what he wanted.
One thing here. It is funny. And again, the BRICS aren’t all powerful.
But again, on the flip side, somebody in his administration should remind him that history rhymes. It doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. I’m not saying it’s exactly like 1930, but when Hoover tried the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, exports out of the US dropped by 30%.
Senators Smoot and Hawley lost their seats, and Hoover went down as one of the worst presidents in history. It backfired. And studies out of Switzerland have shown that this tariff will actually be more detrimental to the US than to the BRICS.
You can debate that all day long. We’re all going to have to wait and see. But I think it’s not as simple as just carrying that big stick and making threats when you’re talking about the BRICS.
One more point before we move on, because I could keep you here all day, Matthew. Abolishing income tax, replacing with tariffs. One more point on the tariffs.
Do you think we’ll see this really happen? Look, anyone would love to see the IRS replaced by the ERS, right? Again, that’s a whole other question, but that assumes that effectively the rest of the world complies with the US, because the US demand for products and the US export of products is so powerful that the rest of the world has no choice but to comply. My opinion is, from talking to people in Singapore, in Istanbul, in New York, in London, outside of the US, and my opinion is that we’re underestimating the resolve after many generations of being the plaything of the West in general, the IMF and the World Bank in particular, and the US specifically, that countries like the BRICS, and especially Russia and China, are looking for a non-dollar way to do business. And they’re not going to replace the dollar overnight.
Russia, as Kyle Bass said years ago, excuse me, China, as Kyle Bass said years ago, has been looking for the pretext to find a non-dollar energy source outside of, in other words, non-petrodollar, to buy oil outside of the dollar. There are all these forces in play by very powerful countries, not perfect countries, dysfunctional countries, but powerful, with large swaths of GDP and natural resources that are going to be harder to just assume compliance from the US than they could have 10, 15 years ago. And now the die is cast.
Since we weaponize the US dollar, these countries, in particular Russia and China, have a tremendous resolve to move away from the dollar. They don’t want to replace it. That’s mutually asserted destruction.
They don’t want a trade war because both China and the US need each other’s buyers and sellers. But Trump also has to recognize that a tariff is typically used to protect your industries. We don’t have industries to protect, as Andy Shekman has so brilliantly said, because we’ve offshored all those jobs to China.
That’s entirely the fault of the CEOs of places like Nike and Apple and John Deere. But I’m saying we’ve offshored the American dream to China and Mexico and Central America. And now we’re going to try and create a tariff to protect the industry that we don’t even really have.
So Trump’s real motive is to get these CEOs to bring those jobs back to America. That’s inflationary. It’s necessary.
I applaud it. But again, the BRICs are going to be as they were, as the countries were in 1930 when they’re hit with the tariff. They’re going to retaliate.
They’re going to get more creative. And it’s going to create more destability. And as Russia says, it’s going to increase the de-dollarization because all these tariffs are another form of weaponization, which didn’t go so well for us post-2022 and probably won’t go so well for us now.
But again, I applaud the reshoring thesis that is really lying behind tariffs from Trump. I applaud that. I want to get to a powerful quote I heard you once say.
You said, I saw the writing on the wall a long time ago. And that’s when you went from being a risk asset speculator to being a boring, physical gold wealth preservation stacker. It’s not gold buggism, you say.
It’s not hysteria. It’s not gold only goes in one direction and solves all problems. But it certainly solves the inflation problem, which you say is so obvious to yourself.
So I want to get back to that. It’s a loaded question, but how you saw the path to gold. And it’s still true today.
Because right now it’s hard being in gold, Matthew. I have people calling me, should I sell my gold? Because Bitcoin, just look at it. Bitcoin is the shiny object in the room.
And I’m like, no, you don’t want to be necessarily doing that. You don’t want to be doing that. So talk to me a little bit about your path to gold and why it’s still so relevant and important for you.
Well, again, I was a speculator. I was a hedge fund manager in a dot-com bubble. I make fun of Bitcoin as being a tulip.
It’s not. But it’s incredibly, there’s an opportunity because I understand the Bitcoin speculation. I don’t think it’s going to go to zero anytime soon.
I think it’s going to probably go higher. And I have nothing against speculation. I think of Bitcoin as a speculation asset, not a store of value.
That’s a whole other conversation. It’s a whole other debate. It’s not anti-Bitcoin.
But I was a speculator. And many in your audience are still speculators. And I respect that too.
So I’m a gold owner, not a renter. And I got to that point because I won the lottery ticket in the NASDAQ in 2000, just as if I were a Bitcoin buyer at a thousand that went to 50,000. I got into a pre-IPO in a tech stock when a monkey could throw a dart at the NASDAQ and make money.
And through a few contacts at Goldman Sachs, I got into three or four or five IPOs, pre-IPOs, which was the buzz. This was Robbie Stevens. Not genius.
Lottery ticket. Most of those struck out. One was a home run.
So I speculated and believed in risk assets, believed in the NASDAQ. And then I became a family office executive and I allocated to the best hedge funds in the world. And I studied stocks and bonds.
And I totally understand that in the sense that I understand why you want to be in risk assets. My particular case and the case of our clients from 90 countries, which isn’t for everyone, by the way. And I want to make that very clear.
I’m not against speculation. Like many, I’m in the position now where I’m thinking far more about unsexy things like staying wealthy as opposed to getting wealthy. And that sounds like a smug comment.
But this philosophy or ideology I have can apply if you’re a dentist, a plumber, a brain surgeon, a school teacher or a billionaire. You still need to preserve your wealth. And the secret I learned from talking to guys from Millennium to Peri Capital to Appaloosa to Paul Tudor Jones is the way to get rich is not to lose your money.
In other words, it’s like you see in third generation family offices. The big joke is, how do you have a small fortune? You inherit a large fortune. And I saw that with speculation.
There’s this constant need to make more, to optimize and to get a profit, get an annualized return. But that’s not sustainable. And when you have a certain amount of wealth, I started to think about, well, how do I measure my wealth? I’m measuring in my particular case at the time, it was in U.S. dollars, later became euros and Swiss francs.
But I’m still measuring my wealth in a beautiful Fiat ice cube. And it has a nice flag or a nice eagle or a nice image on it. But I realized it’s slowly melting through the compounding effect of inflation and currency debasement.
And again, I use the example of gold since we went off the gold standard. The U.S. dollar, like the Swiss franc or the other major G7 currencies, has lost greater than 98% of its inherent purchasing power when measured against a milligram of gold. And so I was thinking of my kids and grandkids.
And I was like, well, this is the wealth I have, whatever it is. It’s not more than others. It’s not less than others.
It’s different. It’s my wealth. I measure that in a Fiat currency.
I’m losing to it every day through the invisible tax of currency debasement because of Fed policy, which I got to understand better. It’s because of debt levels. Everything springs from debt and quantitative easing and currency debasement and inflation, the hidden tax.
I realized I’m measuring my wealth in something that’s melting. And you can argue that the S&P rising can outpace the debasement of the currency falling. But for me, gold just holds its value better.
And I trust gold in a way because I don’t trust Fiat money. And I use a lot of sports analogies or military analogies because of my background or my family. And it’s trite, but maybe it helps simplify things if you can disagree or not.
But I had a very good baseball team in high school, and I had dreams of going off and playing in the minors. I didn’t have the talent, but I had the dream. But we had a really good baseball team.
And I know this. I knew when I was 17 or 18 that if we had to play the Yankees, we were going to lose. We’d be lucky to get a bunt or a base hit.
But I knew we were going to lose. And it’s like Robert E. Lee after he was in Petersburg. He won so many battles.
His army was starving. He was surrounded. He was outnumbered four to one, and they kept fighting.
He should have known they were going to lose. And to me, the U.S. dollar is at Petersburg or the U.S. dollar or the Swiss franc or the euro or the yen or the yuan or the peso for different degrees. They have relative degrees.
I’d rather have a dollar than a peso or a lira. But I’m saying all fiat currencies are like my high school baseball team. They’re going to lose eventually.
I don’t need to time exactly. I don’t have to give all the right graphs. But I’m losing.
Gold doesn’t do much but hold its value. Fiat currencies do a lot of things. They’re swapped.
They’re traded. They’re arbitraged. But they are inherently losing their value.
They’re melting like Lee’s army. They’re melting like my baseball team against the Yankees. I have that kind of conviction.
It’s a strong conviction. It doesn’t mean gold goes in a straight line. It doesn’t mean measured against CPI inflation always outpaces, although I think inflation by the CPI is an open fiction.
It’s an absolute lie. But again, that’s the conviction I have. It’s the modesty I have, actually.
It doesn’t mean I’m against speculation or people who need to say, great, Matt, you’re preserving your wealth. I don’t have any. I’m worried about the rent.
I’m worried about tuition. I’m worried about mortgage. That’s huge pressure.
I’m not trying to be smug about that. But for many, even those, you still have to still measure your wealth in something. And I always believe that a percentage of that should be in something that holds its value.
And I’ll stop. But I’ll give a simple example. I’ve used it many times.
A shoe box with 250 gold coins, ounces each, in 1920, that was worth $5,000 US dollars because they were $20 an ounce for gold in 1920. And $5,000 in a shoe box in gold could buy you a house. That was the average house price in 1920 America.
If you buried that shoe box of gold in the ground and you left it there, you could say, great, I could also bury a shoe box with $5,000 of cash in the ground, too, to buy a house for my grandkids. Fast forward to 2024, I want to buy a house for my grandkids. Which shoe box do I want? The $5,000 I buried in 1920? Useless.
It’s not worth anything. It’s worth $5,000 inflated bucks. That same shoe box of 250 coins, which were once $20 an ounce, are now $26 or $27 an ounce.
In other words, that same shoe box that held its value since 1920 would buy me a house in 2024, just like it did in 1920. But that cash, that $5,000, can’t even buy the landscaping in that house. And that’s all I’m saying.
I’m measuring my long-term wealth in that shoe box of gold coins. Because I’m thinking, as Ronnie Sterfel has said of the Native Americans, generations ahead. Americans and our central bankers and our politicians think one election cycle ahead.
They want to debase the currency. They want to make promises that they can keep by debasing the currency at the expense of the people. And that’s what’s so grotesque about fiat money and politicians and central bankers.
Exactly. Beautifully said. Well said.
Thank you for that. It’s exactly that. If you want to create generational wealth, I say buy gold.
And I don’t lose sleep over it any night. Matthew, final point. I feel like we’re just scratching the surface here.
And I thank you so much for this great interview. I know there’s a lot of optimism. But from everything you’ve laid out and everything that I’m sensing and from past interviews I’ve watched, you’re still saying and seeing the threats that were there before are still very much present.
So if I had to ask you one main threat you’re focusing on for this year that you really have your eye on, what would it be? Well, again, I’m a broken record. I’m a cry, what is it, the boy who cried wolf. But I don’t think I’m crying wolf anymore.
I think the things that I’ve been warning about are not only going to happen, they’re happening right in front of our eyes. And that threat is very simple. It doesn’t matter whether it plays out in the S&P or the U.S. Treasury market, it’s happening in our society, it’s happening in our currency, it’s happening in our politics right now.
It’s going to only get worse. And that threat, I’ll beat it to death, I’ll say it a million times, that threat is debt, as David Hume said in the 1750s, as Thomas Jefferson said in the 1770s, as Reinhart and Rogoff will say today, and von Mises said in the 1950s. Debt destroys nations.
Debt ripple effects into desperate things from politics, Fed policy, currencies, bond markets, stock markets. We have a debt crisis, a debt collapse, driven by sovereign bonds and a sovereign debt crisis. Countries over their skis in debt, monetizing the delta between tax receipts and GDP, which is getting weaker, despite, well, with the rising S&P, yeah, it’s higher.
But I’m saying there’s a delta between our income and our debt. We monetize that delta by debasing the currency through inflationary policies, which crush the people in the middle class, in English. The middle class always gets crushed first.
They’re the first to get drafted. They’re the first to get hosed in a market collapse. They’re always suffering the invisible tax of misreported inflation.
So debt is creating the largest wealth transfer in our history. It’s creating the greatest amount of social unrest, which always follows a debt crisis, social unrest, which always comes to centralization, which we talked about at the beginning of this interview. All things ripple out of the debt problem.
And we could have talked about stocks and bonds. We could have talked about currencies. We could talk about Fed rates.
We could talk about social unrest, wealth inequality, tariffs. But it all comes from this desperate place we’re in because we are way over our skis in unsustainable, unimaginable debt, unlike we’ve ever seen. If debt is the cause of all destruction, this is the largest debt crisis, not only in the US history, but in global history.
So if you believe that debt is a cancer and that you can’t solve a debt crisis with more debt, monetized by mouse click money, by adding zeros at the Eccles building, if you can believe that simple common sense, then you know that the real source of all things political, financial, etc. come from debt. And debt comes from a destructive fantasy that you can solve a debt crisis with more debt, monetized with money out of nowhere.
And that’s modern monetary theory, neither modern nor monetary nor theory. It’s been tried over and over since ancient Rome to 1789 France to Weimar Germany to the Fed today. It never works.
And as it gets more and more desperate and more and more failed, you roll out the fantasies and the centralization, including tether Bitcoin et al. In my opinion, it’s just more centralized control. And my biggest fear is debt is destroying our civil liberties.
It’s destroying our ideals of the Constitution, which I did study in law school. And it’s slowly creating a massive have and have not culture. We live in a society that is purely feudalism with lords and serfs.
I’m ironically part of that upper 10 percent. I’m not proud of it. Don’t like it.
Don’t like where it’s going. Don’t like where it’s taking our country or our world. And gold can’t solve all those problems.
It just solves a currency problem for me. But the other things that I see playing out right before my eyes that I warned about for years, centralization, that’s everywhere. Matthew, thank you again for that.
And I appreciate you answering the question about threats, which makes me feel like I should share this with the audience. We’ve just compiled a new Outlook free report compiling threats you should be paying attention to and watching in 2025. Like I said, it’s a free report.
We’ll fire up the link here. Matthew Peipenberg, please come back fast, soon. Of course.
My pleasure, of course, anytime. Yeah, absolutely appreciated that. And like I said, you got to come back.
You got to come back and please stay tuned because we’ll have more great content for you. So stay tuned to the Daniela Combona show. Sign up DanielaCombona.com and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
That’s it for me. We’ll see you soon.