Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda.
Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, Ben, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Alright you guys, on the line I got Mike Swanson from WallStreetWindow.com and author of the great book, The War State.
You know, about the war state.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Oh, I'm doing great.
How are you doing?
I'm real good.
Listen, I'm very happy to have you on the show because I'm interested in what's going on in the markets, but I'm not interested enough that I pay close enough attention.
But I need to catch up sometimes.
And so, well, you know, there's the business community and there's the banks and the arms manufacturers and the federal government and the Federal Reserve and its monetary policy.
And especially boy in Trump years, we have the president and his trade policy and all of these things interacting and conflicting and complementing each other in various ways.
And so, you know, I'm just interested in where we're at and where we're headed.
So maybe start with the breaking news, if you want, about Trump laying 5% tariffs on Mexico until they abolish emigration to the United States.
Well, the market stuff, I'll get to the news and then the markets.
So the market stuff is actually easier to understand in a certain sense.
But the news items at this point, I believe that one in particular is confusing.
First of all, it's a declaration of an intention to lay a tariff.
So is it going to happen or not?
I don't know.
But I don't really understand the point of it.
It's just some of this stuff, it just gets to a point where it makes me wonder, is there a real strategy with these tariffs?
Because he's got a tariff war going on in China.
He's got one going on of Canada and Europe and all these, you know, all over the place.
And the China situation is interesting because reading the Wall Street Journal over the past year and other publications, it seemed clear to me that he is a firm believer in tariffs against China.
He's got advisors around him such as Peter Navarro and this Lighthizer character who's been in charge of the negotiations, who actually was the personal lawyer of Wilbur Ross.
And they're firm believers in permanent tariffs and using them as a tool to try to make, in their minds, America stronger in the world and try to push down China, so to speak, or at least thwart their growth.
And not really a negotiation tool to make them buy more stuff or whatever.
But that's what's in the newspaper publications.
But if you watch the financial media up until this month, the story was, well, they're going to make a deal and then the market's going to take off more and it's just a negotiating tactic and everything's going to be good.
And at this point, obviously, that doesn't seem to be the case at all.
And those negotiations are completely broken down.
And China's made two interesting statements this week in their media, or last week.
The premier made some statement to the Chinese people in a speech that they have to now prepare for a long march.
Now, you've got to go back to the Chinese revolution in Mao to know what that means.
And what that was was a year-long retreat in the Chinese Civil War.
So he's basically telling them, buckle your seats or buckle your belts and prepare to suffer for a year.
And then one of their state media publications had the quote, don't say we warn you.
And that's something these publications, the state media, said right before the Cuban Missile Crisis.
And what happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis is China invaded India and militarily defeated their armies, but just stopped, but scared the bejesus out of them, to say the least.
And they also use that statement when China, as Americans, we don't remember these events.
First one overshadowed by the Cuban Missile Crisis.
But China also invaded Vietnam in the late 1970s.
And they made that same statement then.
And now they lost, like, both sides lost about 30,000 people.
So when I see these statements, it makes me think that China has given up on negotiations and they're preparing to do something.
I don't know what.
Something dramatic in a year.
Maybe if Trump doesn't win, they won't do anything.
I don't know.
But it's just a sign of tension.
And then today, as you mentioned, this Mexican thing.
I don't know if that's real or if that's, I wonder if this, what it was is Trump said he's going to put terrorists in Mexico because they're exporting illegal immigrants to the United States.
And I don't, maybe that's a propaganda thing to try to tell his base of supporters that, look, tariffs are not just about China, but they're about stopping illegal immigrants.
So they're good.
It seems nonsensical to me that that's any sort of real tactic.
So I see what you're saying.
And then so to get back to China, though, for a minute there, that sort of like with Iran, there is no better deal.
You're not going to get a better deal or certainly not acting this way.
And you're saying that it's pretty clear that he doesn't want a better deal.
He wants essentially a complete regime change from America's post-Cold War free trade, freer trade policy toward, back toward real older protectionism.
And so in that sense, then the, the, the Mexico news from this morning is again, just another pretext.
And I guess kill two birds with one stone there.
If he wants to keep Mexican goods or American goods produced in Mexico, as well as Mexican nationals out of the country.
I think that's correct.
With China specifically, what has been in the journal and other publications is that they want China.
It's not so much about the trade deficit, but they want China to stop state subsidy of many of their companies, their industrial policy, which means basically changing their whole form of government, I would think.
And you see what they do with Iran, Venezuela, with Mexico.
I don't really know.
I mean, I, I, maybe we should just take it literally.
He wants them to do something about illegal immigration, but it's obviously, this has become a tool of foreign policy and not simply a trade is the way it appears to me.
And I'm not going to try to, it is what it is.
I'm not necessarily trying to pass judgment on it, but I don't, I don't, you know, is it effective?
I don't know.
And it does seem like it's going to push Iran and China and Russia in some closer together in the long run.
Now, politically, Trump needs a strong economy going into 2020.
And is this, you know, pretty much along the lines of the Smoot-Hawley tariff and this kind of thing that everybody says, boy, of all of the decisions that Hoover made in getting the new deal started before FDR even got there, that was the worst decision of all.
That in the middle of, well, anyway, obviously there's a lot of downsides to these tariffs and a reduction in international trade.
Trump's betting on some kind of long-term result.
And I guess he's betting on interest rates staying low and growth staying, you know, as they measure it at a reasonable clip in spite of these tariffs, or he's betting that in the long run, it'll be good for the economy anyway to have these tariffs to build up American industry again or something like that.
Well, I mean, on the face of it, you would assume that tariffs aren't going to be good for the economy and therefore not good for Trump because of that.
And a year ago or six months ago, I would easily think it'll hurt him politically.
However, it does appear, again, I'm just getting this from the Times or the Journal or somewhere, but he's made a decision over the past couple of weeks or have come to the conclusion that politically the tariff wars might actually help him, especially in regards to China, because there's hints that when 2020 comes around, he's going to run as a tough leader on U.S. foreign policy against our potential enemies, particularly China and Iran, and portray whoever the Democrats nominate as weak on both those issues, especially Joe Biden.
Biden's already said something about, you know, we don't need tariffs on China or something to that effect.
So Trump can position himself as the man who's tough against the Dems.
And I think on that sense, he thinks it's going to help him, especially, you know, Venezuela and Iran, the Republican Party or at least the conservative movement are on his side on both those issues.
And that assumes, though, that these policies don't tip us into recession, right?
Well, I think if it does, and I think we could be headed that way anyway.
And I'll explain why in a little bit.
But if it does, he can say, look, China is causing this.
You know, we're in a tariff war and you've got to be patriotic about it.
And then he's also already positioned himself to blame the Federal Reserve for raising rates too much.
He's done that over the past, really since the fall, multiple times.
And he's had his advisers do that, say the Fed shouldn't raise rates, they should lower rates.
They're the cause of it.
So he's already going to blame others no matter what.
And, you know, last year, one of the most amazing things I've ever seen on my television set was the stock market, the economy, and the currency of Turkey last August crashed.
I mean, there's a total, they're still in a crisis.
Unemployment there is almost 18%.
And the leader of Turkey gave a speech last August, early September, telling the people to sell any gold and silver they have to buy the Turkish lira to support it.
And whether they have it or not, the crowd was just cheering and clapping that.
So that tells me some of these world leaders, they can keep their core support, even if some of their actions are the cause for whatever calamity befalls people.
Yeah, we love sacrifice.
It makes us feel important.
So, I mean, I feel like we're in a moment, or in some ways, people may have been feeling this way in 2008 and since Trump won, but I heard someone make the statement that the Cold War era ended when the Berlin Wall fell, and now we're in the Trump era.
Well, I don't really think that's true, but we're obviously not in the Cold War era and the 9-11 terrorist stuff.
Maybe that era has, that chapter has turned, too.
And we are entering in some, something is happening or heading towards something.
And part of it, I believe, is the stock market and the economy, because what's happened there is, I think we last spoke in January and the market fell about 20% in the first quarter.
And it's gone, it went back up more than I thought it would, but now it appears to have peaked out again.
And I interpreted the drop in December as part of a cycle shift, much like the summer 2007 or 2000, which would lead to a bear market and lead to, ultimately, which is probably more important, a recession.
And the bond market is more important than the stock market in terms of forecasting that.
And it's giving the same warning signs that it did in 2000, 2007.
So if you look in the financial press, you'll see now all these stories that three-month Treasury bond interest rates are now yielding a higher rate than 10-year rates, and these are bought and sold by individuals everywhere.
And what this means is you get less interest if you lend money to the government for 10 years than you do for three months, which is abnormal.
It should be the opposite.
But it's doing this because this is happening, because people are assuming that in the long run now that interest rates are actually going to decline.
And they do that when they think the Fed's going to have to lower rates or there's going to be a recession.
And there's something called the Fed Fund Futures Market where people bet on this, and that market's pricing in about a 90% chance of a rate cut by January.
And as of yesterday, over a 55% chance when it's by September.
Now that's not going to happen unless the stock market declines first or there's signs of a real slowdown in the economy.
So I think that's where we're really headed for next year.
And I don't blame it on tariffs.
I mean, it's just these cycles play out over time, and recessions are just a natural part of the business cycle anyway.
So when I think of it that way, it's not that big of a deal, and bear markets happen too.
And I think of the stock market action last fall, and so far this year is just a very long, drawn-out topping process that will lead to a bear market by the end of this year, next year.
Yeah, Bear Stearns crashed in what, spring of 07?
It took another year and a half for the whole thing to completely fall apart.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And it's a yield curve inversion about the interest rates on the short-term and long-term of the bond occurring with a 3-month, 10-year.
That actually started in 2006 when the real estate prices peaked out.
And then, as you mentioned, Bear Stearns blew up a year later.
So these things take time to play out.
And the thing about these bear markets is the last two that we've experienced.
They're also big bubbles in the economy that blew up.
The first time was internet stuff.
The last one, much more serious with real estate and these mortgage-backed securities that took the banking, made the banks basically insolvent.
And this time, the last one was fascinating because it was actually fairly evident, I believe, that those problems were there and it took a year for it to matter in the stock market.
I saw the Bear Stearns story.
It was in June, July of 2007.
And in January 2008, I read an article that just laid it all out, that these banks' balance sheets are bankrupt.
And the facts are there.
There was an article in Barron's in the summer of 2008 that Freddie May and Fannie Mae were going to go bankrupt.
And it wasn't until over 90 days later that they crashed.
But this time, I've got to say these things because there's things I worry about that I think could be bubbles that could explode one day.
But I can't point to any signs to say that they've topped out or that, hey, this is really going to blow up.
So specifically, the thing that I see is the most, well, two things that are the most dangerous, potentially, is government debt itself.
And if you listen to Ron Paul and some experts in Austrian economics, a lot of them will say that, look, the 2008 crisis, they just took the problems on the bank balance sheets and put them on the Federal Reserve balance sheet and it's going to blow up one day.
And now the U.S. debt to GDP is over 100%, which historically ends up causing a problem with funding of this debt, which would mean a bond bear market.
Well, we're not in a bond bear market.
But the other aspect of that is corporate debt is also the highest level ever.
And that's thanks in part to the Federal Reserve doing what they did the last two times, lowering rates and keeping them too low for too long.
And we had the lowest interest rates for corporate bonds around 2016 ever in recorded history.
And so we now have this massive bond debt.
A lot of it's been used to buy back shares.
But frankly, there's companies I don't think would even exist without it, such as Tesla and even Netflix.
Netflix has like $8 billion in debt.
And even though I like it, I'm a customer of it, they don't make a profit.
So I don't know if these companies could exist without the low rates we have.
But the thing about the real estate bubble, it was kind of obvious that something was wrong there.
The real estate prices peaked in 2006 and were already declining before that Bear Stearns thing blew up.
But these corporate bonds, they're not going down in value, really.
So there's like an exchange rate of fund, the symbols LQD, and another one TLT, which is LQDs for the corporate bonds, TLTs for treasury bonds.
And I think if this is really going to be a problem, it would show up with the corporate bonds falling first.
If they fall like 20% off a high and TLT is still going up, that would be a warning sign, like Bear Stearns blowing up and something to that effect.
But that's not happening.
But if I see that happen next year, then I'll be getting scared.
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So speaking of all of that, let me go to Rothbard 101 here.
So this is just from the central banking chapter in For a New Liberty.
And he says the same thing in the case against the Fed and what has government done to our money and all that.
But the simplest kind of case of it, he says that, look, they always inflate and they inflate and they inflate until they get afraid.
And they get worried that they've distorted the market in this, that, or the other thing too much, usually the stock market, or as you know, we've seen dot coms or housing or whatever it is.
Uh, or, and, or they get worried about upward pressure on wages across the board, um, which they always want to oppose and they always will blame overall price inflation on wages going up instead of blaming wages going up on, uh, cost of living increases due to the price inflation.
But anyway, at some point they get worried that they've allowed too much bank credit expansion.
And so they start raising the interest rates and always just a little bit at a time because they want to cool the irrational exuberance, but without causing a crash, but they always cause a crash because as Rothbard says, you can't prick a small hole in the bubble and let the air come out.
The bubble pops and there's no way really, uh, to undo that.
So when you talk about, uh, you know, people are predicting that they're going to end up lowering interest rates.
Isn't it the case?
If they've already started raising them, that they're going to lease hold them or keep raising them because they don't want to lower them either for political reasons, just that they want to see the crash happen on Trump's watch in order to make sure that he's not reelected.
Um, or just because overall they're worried that they've Q one, two, three, four, and five the hell out of everything.
And they're afraid that essentially the Austrians are right about the distortions and about the inflation of a different prices in different sectors.
And that we better have a correction now before we have a correction later.
And it's that much worse.
Well, I would say that's true.
Uh, but they have another fear that seems to always displace the fear that they've gone too far in helping fuel these bubbles.
And that is, uh, one I don't really understand, but, uh, there's a book called, uh, Greenspan's bubbles and it's old.
It's written in 2008.
Um, but it's examines federal reserve transcripts of Alan Greenspan.
And, um, that's interesting.
In, in, in, um, uh, he displays a fear a couple of times.
Um, it's like you said, he was scared in 2000 that they're inflating things too much.
Uh, and, oh, we got to raise interest rates.
And he actually did a rate hike after the market broke in April that year.
It felt like 20%.
And he still raised them again, uh, really because of what you're talking about.
That, well, you know, this has gotten out of control.
And, and then, and they'll make the statement that, and they have done this, uh, Powell did it last year to raise rates, uh, even as much as we basically can.
So when the next downturn comes, we'll have ammunition to keep lowering them.
Yeah, exactly.
That's the best you're ever going to get out of these guys.
That's so funny.
So he said that, yeah, uh, uh, Powell said that last year.
Greenspan made this crazy statement that people are making too much money and we got to stop it.
He actually said that.
So, but, um, people are making too much money.
That is a problem.
Yeah, maybe it did.
Uh, but, um, what this, what this book has in it is a couple of times he expresses this fear.
And he did it first and during the 1987 stock market crash.
And then, uh, in the fall of 2000, uh, that somehow or another, if things fell too much, if the stock market fell too much, that the whole money system, uh, or money itself, the U.S. dollar would just stop flowing and people would stop trading stocks and everything would just freeze up somehow.
And I don't, I know that's actually happened, uh, in Russia in, in, uh, 1998, their stock market crashed so much that people stopped trading for a couple of weeks.
Um, but it's, it doesn't cause the end of the world.
And, you know, bottomed out was, you know, just bottomed out.
So I, for some reason, they seem to have this fear that things could just, you know, crash and just maybe, and I think that's what they're scared of in 2008 too.
Uh, but it's, the point is that when the market ends up falling, uh, they seem to overreact, uh, to by lowering rates, uh, or they're scared of this, scared of something happening, the whole system melting down.
And they, you know, their, their fear of, you know, the bubble has gotten too big becomes replaced with this, what seems to be a greater fear that the whole system could just pop basically.
Uh, although I don't really quite understand how that's really possible.
I don't, meaning, uh, I don't understand how you could just pop, uh, capitalism and, and just any kind, you know, the whole world economy, you know, I, I, but I don't think of stocks and bonds being the whole world, you know, being capitalism.
Yeah.
Well, so David Stockman, he, um, he talks about the great deformation really is since your world war two, right.
Where he says, and this is all just a construct.
I don't know, you know, um, but he's saying essentially you have this one big bubble since then.
And then you have all these other bubbles are sort of these smaller bubbles.
You can picture a soap bubble with smaller bubbles attached to it.
Right.
But the one kind of mothership bubble that they're all attached to.
And so you have, you know, the whole seventies stagflation era there.
Then you have the crash at the end of the Carter years and beginning of Reagan.
And then you have the buildup and then the Papa 87 and then on and on you 2000, uh, 1999, 2000, and then 2008.
And then here we are.
But that essentially that big bubble, that's the dollar bubble.
But it seems like that doesn't seem to be what you're referring to though, or what they're referring to, that they're afraid that they're going to, um, you know, pop the dollar bubble itself because that's really the risk they're running and trying to prop up all these smaller bubbles.
And they seem completely ignorant of the danger that they could end up costing faith in the US dollar overall, which is what you were saying is, hey, once your debt is this percentage GDP, this kind of thing, it doesn't usually work out too well.
Yeah.
And, and there's a couple of books that show that.
Uh, I'm looking at one.
It's free.
Anyone can download it or find it if they type in Big Debt Crisis.
And it came out last year and it just looks at all the case studies of all, every single time this has happened in the past 100 years, including in the United States in the 1930s.
But I think Stockman's basically correct.
And I mean, really, ultimately the biggest bubble, if it could burst, would be uh, this corporate bond bubble going down.
But then the treasury bond market unwinding and going into bear market at the same time as the stock market is.
And if that happened, the dollar would be going down too.
That's what happened in Turkey last year.
That's what Ron Paul is worried about too.
That's what he's always worrying about.
I'm not saying it's going to happen this year, but I am saying we can't go on like this.
You better listen now.
But I, I would think the order would be the stock market going down and bonds, corporate bonds and the treasury bonds.
And the dollar, I don't, it, but that's one thing I wonder about with, with this whole Trump tariff thing is it's not just the United States that has these big debts.
Most of Europe does.
Interestingly, Russia is in a, in a fairly good situation financially because they've ran through two of these crises lately.
One just a couple years ago and one in the late 90s.
But, so there's some countries that are financially sound, but many are in the same boat the United States is.
Japan, for example, and China maybe.
It's, their numbers are kind of mysterious, but, but many.
So, there is a line of thought that is it possible that it's not just the United States but most of the developed world and therefore a, a possible strategy that may make sense.
I'm not, and I don't know if it would even work, but could make sense of what Trump's doing with the tariffs is let's use these tariffs to push down the rest of the world so when this next crisis does actually come the U.S. can kind of still maintain a place to attract money because if Europe is crashing worse the, you know, the money's going to flow somewhere.
But, it's kind of a trying to make sense of it and I don't even know if it, if it's a, I guess I've tried to give them the benefit of the doubt, but I don't know if it would even work.
Yeah, I mean they do seem to be trying to, you know, come at China from every angle that they possibly can.
Crash coming or not, right?
They're trying to limit.
In fact, I read this article that talked about how essentially Trump, you know, implied a general order to his government that like do anti-China stuff and so there's no real central direction to it and some of the policies are contradictory but they all essentially have to do with you know, a panic about the loss of American hegemony and the rise of China in the world and you know, what can we do about it?
Yeah.
That was a thing I read in Chinese media too where they were saying, hey, you know, this event is designed to reduce us under absolute despotism.
What the hell?
I thought this was just a trade fight.
But, we're starting to see how you are here that this is part of a broader agenda against us which is sure to generate this severe reaction, as you talked about, pushing them toward Russia and toward China, I mean, toward the Europeans and the Europeans toward them and all that which I don't care about that but I can see why you know, the U.S. government has a lot of power to lose but they don't know what to do other than counterproductive things no matter what the question is as far as I can tell.
Well, one of the key concepts of the Austrian economics that I learned was that the Federal Reserve is trying to manipulate interest rates up or down but they no one knows the true exact level that those interest rates should be at so it's a futile exercise and when we look at state action when it comes to as you document in your show and your guests do you know, overseas in Iraq, Afghanistan then you go back to Vietnam and all the Syria Somalia Libya on and on and on you know, they try to they have a mission they think they're going to do something and it never goes out never works out the way they think turns into a disaster the planning doesn't work government state planning doesn't ever turn out the way people expect so with the David Stockman thing about the dollar bubble what's interesting about that and the Federal Reserve is from World War II or after World War II the U.S. created something called the Bretton Woods Agreement where the dollar U.S. dollar internationally was linked to the price of gold and we maintained that until 1972 and during that that made it though so the U.S. couldn't run limitless government deficits without having the gold leave the country and so it was sort of a buffer on what the government could do but one interesting thing is between World War II and the 70s there was no giant stock market bubble or massive recession really that came I don't think there's a bear market more than 25% during all that time but what happened was when LBJ was president he started he busted the deficit to fund the Vietnam War and his social programs so the gold started to leave the country inflation picked up the dollar actually did start to go down and it got the process continued every month and by the time 1972 came around Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard and what's interesting about one of the interesting things about that is I got a hold of the Federal Reserve minutes the first meeting they held after Nixon announced that decision and he didn't inform them and in the meeting they talked like oh this is just going to happen for a couple weeks and we'll be back on the gold standard well we're not back on it and really I think of all these big bubbles that we're talking about today the distortions in the financial markets and the government deficit government deficit they really accelerated since that moment and the government really documents that in his book but without all those deficits I don't know if we could have the wars we've had see left leaning people don't want to hear that what we need is sound money like Scrooge McDuck wants we want only the purest capitalism is what provides for the growth of wages along with the growth of productivity that's the gold standard he let the government create all of this money and run all of these giant deficits you get what everybody calls now the financialization of the economy which means it's all just bubble activity and a bunch of rich guys on Wall Street trading pieces of paper around as they get all their bonuses and their standard of living continues to increase at record paces while everybody else is treading water and so it's supposedly a left wing complaint it's the complaint of certainly the mass of people that you have this further and further disparity between the so called 1% and everybody else when it comes to income and yet it's all this government intervention all this paper money all the deficit spending and all the things that the right wing old gold standard curmudgeons have opposed that have led to this and it's only going back on the gold standard that's ever going to bring it to an end yeah and at this point in time I mean when it comes to the political arena in the United States the left wingers in the Democratic Party supporting that Green New Deal people around Bernie Sanders and so forth they've come up with this idea they call it modern monetary theory in which they claim that look we haven't had a crash a government funding problem so we can just do this forever and that's our theory basically that's what it comes down to but then with the conservative movement you know it's I don't hear people except Ron Paul and the Austrian economics people in the Libertarian movement who talk about the deficit anymore or the gold standard any of this kind of stuff so we're in a weird political time in which everyone is obsessed with Trump and not what's going on in the background right well of course big business benefits from all of this so the right broadly speaking and the Republican Party and business interests they're all for all of this stuff it takes a real ideological gold bug to be so right wing that he's left wing on pointing out the consequences of these policies yeah people complain about all this income inequality to the nth degree and essentially the entire consensus other than Ron Paul and you know people who follow the Austrian school is to continue along the same policies or make them even worse like you're saying where the socialists are saying hey guys it turns out that money is magic and you could just if only we'd known all along that the government could give each of us a couple of million dollars to live our dream why not what were we waiting for that's their lesson so there's really bad and then worse yeah and I don't know where like I said I'm pretty convinced the stock market's topping out and these bond you know the bond signals are suggesting the economy is going to at least slow down by the end of the year but where is this heading in a year or two is this going to start to blow up I really I don't know you know but that's one of the sayings about bear markets if I can get it right is something like if you're looking at the ocean when the tide goes out you see what's really there so that's that's what we're going to see in the next couple years but the notion that we had the Cold War era now we have the Trump era this sort of we've already seen politics change in the United States people getting you know all obsessed about who the president is to put it simply so where's this all taking us you know yeah exactly you look at the partisan divides going on right now and then compare that to after the current bubble pops I mean so much of this is because of the prior booms and busts oh yeah but yeah the next one is going to be a real SOB yeah so my recommendations you know to people buy a rifle yeah no just to buy gold and silver that's the simplest thing people can do and a rifle yeah or food cans of food and beans and stuff like that well you know you said something important there earlier too about how you can't just evaporate all the real wealth in this country right with all the trucks and all the highways and all the warehouses and all the machine tools and all of the everything I'm leaving out all of that property and all that productive capacity no crash can erase all of that it's just they can knock it all back on its ass for a few years and make everybody have to start over again essentially with what they have left which is what happens with this boom and bust but even then overall you can't stop the growth of the economy and the productivity of America it's always even with these horrible booms and busts it's still always a slow and steady upward trend yeah I mean during the great depression one of my grandfathers my dad's father he was a hobo on a train for a couple years but my mom's side of the family they had a farm a hundred acre farm out in Maryland and they didn't even know there was a depression so just growing their own food you know had cows and just operating their farm didn't feel it that's what they told me their markets were local enough in the county or whatever they just weren't affected by what was going on in the rest of it huh?yeah in fact they had a neighbor she had a farm this lady had a farm too across the street and when social security was created in the 1930's she refused to sign up for it so this lady never had a social security card her whole life and I met her but because of that she didn't pay taxes but she also didn't have a bank account and apparently she didn't sign up to become dependent on the state department to get her exports for her livelihood no I didn't do just wasn't in the system at all people probably the only person I ever met like that pretty crazy that's great to hear that in America you still have you know in a sense little plantations with their own self contained economies there assuming everyone is free to leave but yeah I guess those days are probably over now I don't think anybody can get away with that kind of thing now I guess there are some there are some little intentional communities around but not too many alright well listen I learned lots of things and I'm sorry that I don't know more so I could ask you smarter questions and stuff but oh no that's great it's good for the audience too you know yeah there you go I think so speaking on for them you know on their behalf they agree with that yeah alright thank you Mike thank you good talking to you alright guys that's the great Mike Swanson sponsors this show by the way there's your conflict of interest disclaimer designation and you can sign up for his newsletter at wallstreetwindow.com and get all the news and his video blogs that he does about what's going on in the markets and all his different advice and you got to read the war state it's a great history of the rise of the military industrial complex after world war two so Truman Ike and Kennedy years you'll want to check that out so you like supporting anti-war radio hosts that makes sense here's how you can do that go to scotthorton.org slash donate and there's all kinds of options to do so and all kinds of different kickbacks at different levels of course take paypal patreon and all different kinds of digital currencies and all of those sorts of things and anybody signs up by way of patreon or 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