For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And I'm happy to welcome back to the show my friend Charles Goyette.
He's the author of The Dollar Meltdown, Surviving the Impending Currency Crisis with Gold, Oil, and Other Unconventional Investments.
His website is charlesgoyette.com.
Welcome back to the show.
Charles, how's it going?
Scott, good to talk to you.
Thank you for having me back on your show.
Well, I appreciate you joining us here.
Hey, let me ask you something.
Yeah.
How much does war cost?
Which one?
The current war?
I don't know.
You define it however you like.
You know, the current war is open-ended.
I mean, it has no end, so the cost can...
You know what it's like?
It's like the guy that counted to infinity twice.
It's a little hard to believe that he did it.
Yeah.
But if there's no end to the war, then the cost is incalculable, isn't it?
Well, so, okay, say...
Remember that time that George Bush announced to our armed forces, get ready, we're going to go fight a war on terrorism.
Remember that?
I do remember.
It was a fake Texas accent.
We all know he's from Connecticut.
But anyway, it worked on everybody like a charm.
And then he started this giant war, supposedly in response to September 11th, although I'm not sure what any of it has had to do with that since then.
How much have we spent so far, you think?
Well, that's funny, because didn't they fire Lawrence Lindsay, who wasn't really that bad an economist, and had been with Bush all the way through his presidential race, didn't they fire him for saying it was going to be a $50 billion or $100 billion war?
So, anyway, but you know, I always...
I remember when they first did it, after they...
I guess Baghdad had fallen about a week before, and then they said, well, we want $87 billion.
And the entire nation went, $87 billion?
I thought you said it was going to be free!
Well, that's the thing.
I actually thought they should have fired Lawrence Lindsay for saying it would be a $50 to $100 billion war, because we had it on good authority from guys like Paul Wolfowitz that the war was going to pay for itself.
Which, I suppose, it's pretty embarrassing if you think that Americans are in the business of war, and then we go in and plunder the country, and the war pays for itself, but that's effectively what he told us.
So, anyway, who knows where we are now.
I think it's approaching $5 trillion, and I have that on the authority of a Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, who wrote a book called The $3 Trillion War, but admitted to me on the air that they thought it would work out to be substantially higher, and after all, that was 18 months ago that he came out with the $3 trillion war, and it just keeps on going, doesn't it?
Well, let's talk about opportunity cost here a little bit.
I went and saw Scott Ritter and a few others give a talk on Saturday about the post-traumatic stress disorder, and how one of the guys that was up there speaking was a veteran of Iraq, and he was saying as far as he's concerned, everyone who comes home from there, you know, never mind if they've done five tours or something, but everyone who comes home from there is injured, at least psychologically, if not physically, you know, missing arms and legs, or with brain damage like he himself had from concussions and that kind of thing, from roadside blasts and that kind of deal.
It makes me wonder, you know, if all this money hadn't been spent, or even borrowed or whatever on the warfare, and all these people had had jobs, you know, doing productive things in the private sector this whole time, rather than having a million-man army, if all that money had just been, you know, not even taxed in the first place, but just spent by the people on their own productive pursuits, it might not be that we've wasted $5 trillion, it might be that we've wasted, you know, I don't know, eight or whatever, I'm just making up a number, but there's all the wealth that they could have produced if they hadn't been pursuing all this destruction this whole time.
It's the human capital, the human time.
It's the transcendent capital.
If you think about all the, you know, the human intelligence, the intellectual efforts put onto planning the war, to propagandizing for the war, if all those people, all those bureaucrats, all those neocons had been, you know, actually producing something that had some real value, like refrigerators or beer coolers or something, you know, that would be a productive effort that is somehow lost.
So it's, yeah, it's the million-man army that would have been engaged in actually producing things that make life better for your fellow human beings and enrich us all.
So that'd be something else, the capital, of course.
And then there are tons of intangible costs.
The biggest one, in my view, is the fear premium on the price of oil, because this has decapitalized the American people.
I mean, it's got...
Now, what does that mean, the fear premium on the price of oil, Charles Goyette?
Well, think about it.
Think how long we've been saber-rattling now about Iran.
This has been going on for years.
Saber-rattling about Iraq before we ever went into Iraq.
I haven't...
Mr. President, Mr. President, are we going to war?
I haven't made up my mind.
In other words, people reasonably expected that a war would break out any minute, and the cost of oil was $10 higher, sometimes $20, sometimes $30.
I've figured that there were times the price of petroleum was actually $40 higher than it would otherwise be for fear of a war breaking out of the petroleum zones, for lack of workers going over there.
I watched the president of, I think it was Mobile on PBS once years ago.
He said, we wouldn't go over there.
We wouldn't go over there with your oil company.
So all of this has been a huge cost.
It's been a huge wealth transfer from the American people who saw oil go up to $147 a barrel.
It was only with the end of the Bush presidency that it came back down to, what, $34 a barrel, as Bush was in his waning days.
It looked as though the fear premium was starting to subside.
But, of course, it's back up now in the mid-'70s because you have one warmonger replacing another.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's funny.
Greg Palast, author of Our Madhouse, BBC reporter, he said that, from his view, at least, Houston's point of view on the Iraq war was quite opposite of the neocons, actually.
The neocons wanted to not only privatize it, but privatize it in the smallest parcels possible to anybody because they wanted to dump the price of oil through the floor and bankrupt the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
I guess they think, I don't know who they think would take power after the Saud family and how that would be an improvement for Israel, but that was what those kooks wanted, Elliot Cohen and all those guys.
But then James Baker and them said, no, no, no, we're going to do it like this.
It's going to be a national oil company run out of Baghdad, and they're going to go with the OPEC quotas, and that what they really wanted was to keep Iraqi oil off the market to dry that price up.
In fact, I think Palast even said, during all the worst of the saber-rattling about Iran in 2007, that, listen, man, this is a wink-nudge.
They're not going to bomb Iran.
This is Ahmadinejad and George Bush enjoying a joint chuckle as they drive the price of oil up through the roof.
Well, they do this all the time.
I mean, the first thing in the first Gulf War, the first thing they did was put an embargo on Iraqi oil.
I mean, when they get in there, they institute programs so that Iraq can't sell its oil.
I mean, the effect of everything they do is to run the price of petroleum up.
I understand that there would be some neocon fanatics that would want to use American petroleum prices and the U.S. national military to replace the Saudis.
We've seen this thing before.
I actually believe there's good evidence, though, that the first oil embargo was constituted, came off the drawing board of Henry Kissinger, and they tried to provide the armament-purchasing liquidity to the Shah of Iran.
So he sells, you know, the Iranians sell their oil production at a substantially higher price than would otherwise pertain so that they can play balance-of-power politics with the Soviets at Henry Kissinger's direction.
The American people are always victimized by this stuff.
Well, you know, there are people who kind of, I don't know if you would agree with the terminology here, but there are some who say that, in a sense, when they took us off the gold standard in 1971, that would be, again, the Nixon administration, that they sort of worked out this deal with the Saudis, and I guess with the Iranians, too, at the time, to basically put the American dollar on an oil standard where they agreed to denominate their oil sales in dollars and that then that creates an artificial demand for dollars so that everybody who's got to buy oil has to stockpile dollars in order to buy the oil with it, and that has helped prop up what otherwise is a ghost economy, basically.
And then, as, again, Greg Pallas notes, especially the Saudis take enough money for Coke and horse and their own internal security forces, and then they spend the rest back on American debt.
Well, it's a pretty plausible theory, I guess.
The dollar reserve standard was created in 1944, but there's no question about it.
The IOU-nothing dollar from 1971 on was clearly tied to the price of oil, and the Saudis knew it, and it became OPEC policy to price oil in terms of U.S. dollars, which had heretofore, everybody has a short memory about this, but heretofore had been priced largely in terms of the pound sterling, and the pound sterling was a waning currency from that time on.
I think into the 70s, a quarter of global petroleum trade was still in the pound sterling, but it was certainly on its way out.
Yeah, well, and that's because the pound sterling wasn't the pound sterling, it was the pound paper.
Exactly, and that should be a useful harbinger of things to come for the Americans that don't understand that the U.S. dollar is between a rock and a hard place.
You know, you mentioned beer there, and I've got to ask you something about that.
I'm not a drinker.
I've been trying to start drinking, but it just never really takes.
Well, I wouldn't go out of my way to try to start.
Well, you know, I don't know.
There are benefits.
But the question is to me, you know, people always say that, well, you know, it's good times as long as the beer's cold and the water's warm and the boobs are big and everybody's having a good time and music's playing.
Nobody wants to care about the war.
It's good times, man.
And then they say, well, you know, it's bad times.
You can't expect people to care about empire and stuff because, you know, they're worried about their job, they're worried about trying to pay down their debts, and it's to be expected.
It's okay.
I mean, it's bad times.
You can't expect people to care more about a bunch of posh tunes, which might as well be cartoon characters to these people.
They've got their own lives to worry about.
And I just wonder, you know, if beer in good times means that people don't care about it and, you know, I guess hard liquor in bad times means they don't care about it, when can you ever get the American people to pay attention to the killing of the people all the time?
Well, I mean, it's like the revolt of the masses.
You wonder how often the sheep will let themselves be shorn.
And it's one thing if they are shorn for their wool over and over and over again, but by the time that the shepherd starts wanting them for mutton stew, they should start to wake up.
But the American people have been fleeced over and over and over again, and you're right, there's always some reason that it's, I think, a childlike naivete that they trust their leaders, they believe in the goodness of their leadership classes, and so on.
But it's one thing, as I say, to have their pockets picked, but it's another thing when the sons and daughters of the people that created all this wealth in the first place are marched off to die on some phantasmagoric foreign scheme, as they have been now.
Yeah.
Hey, check this out, man.
So I'm watching some Sam Kinison the other night, and I think this is from about 1991, and this is Sam Kinison on the housing bubble.
Forgive the bad language, Charles, but you're a big boy.
About 36 channels, and I would say out of the 36 channels that a good 20 of them are shit that I never watched.
I'm not interested in a career in real estate.
That's about six channels now.
This guy's trying to talk you into, hey, give up your present job and learn how to fuck people over by buying poverty without money.
Yeah, yeah, that's worked out real well.
Fuck the SNL crisis.
Hey, you can be a land developer.
What, me?
I'm a fry cook.
It doesn't matter.
I work at the cafeteria at a hospital.
It doesn't matter.
You can be a millionaire in no time at all.
Isn't that funny?
You can't even really say it's history repeating.
It's in real time almost.
I mean, what, a couple decades removed?
Well, you know what surprised me is he's got 36 channels and nothing to watch.
I have 250 and nothing to watch.
Yeah, exactly.
Shows you how long ago that was.
Yeah, yeah.
And he's talking about the exact same scam, right?
Yeah, it's always, you know, and the American people are getting set up to be fleeced again in a major way.
I think about the 1930s when they got swindled on gold at $20 an ounce.
They had to turn it in or they would risk being felons.
But foreigners continued to hold gold, which now bought them 35 U.S. dollars.
So it improved the claim that they had on the productivity of the American people substantially from $20 to $35.
But it was a felony for Americans to own that gold.
And then up until 1971 on the Bretton Woods Agreement, Americans couldn't turn their paper, if they were suspicious of the quantity and the quality of paper dollars being issued, they couldn't march down to the Treasury or go off to the London Gold Pool and exchange it for gold.
But foreigners still could.
Now, how does that figure?
In other words, the American government decides that if anybody's going to get fleeced, we want to make sure that it's our own citizens first.
And they're setting us up for this again.
They appropriate.
Here at this time last year with all of the mortgage meltdown, no, I beg your pardon, there was no appropriation involved, was there?
They come up with $200 billion for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
It was not $200 billion to bail out people in Peoria.
It was $200 billion to provide liquidity to Freddie and Fannie so that the Chinese could roll their non-guaranteed investments in broken-down financial companies that, as Jim Rogers said, anybody could read the balance sheet knew they were broke to begin with, to roll them out of that, make them whole in Freddie and Fannie and roll them out of that so that they could roll over into guaranteed investments in U.S. Treasuries.
So wait a minute.
The American people got stuck again?
It just happens over and over and over.
And, of course, it's going on right now.
You've got the Federal Reserve.
You talk about deleveraging.
We're supposed to have had a year of deleveraging.
What's deleveraging?
What does deleveraging mean?
It means that all of these companies that had all of this leverage and when the market was going up, they did really, really well and they made a lot of money and all of these investment bankers.
But when the housing market started going down, they had all these leveraged investment instruments, default swaps and collateralized mortgage obligations and yada, yada, yada.
And when the market turned against them, they had all of this toxic paper, all of this trash paper that was worth zip.
And so what did they do with it?
Did they eat their losses?
Now let me think about this.
These are the people that dazzled us with their fancy financial footwork all of those years, took millions and, in fact, billions of dollars in fees for their financial prowess all of this time, and all of a sudden the market turns down, the market goes against them, and so they shuffle off their losses to the people.
So the Federal Reserve has come in and picked up all that trash paper.
You can't get an accounting of it, but they picked up all that trash paper.
It's on the balance sheet now of the Federal Reserve to the tune of, I guess, $800 billion or a trillion dollars of this trash paper, and that means effectively that the American people will eat those losses by the Federal Reserve's destruction of the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar.
So the politocrats are made whole, and the American people get left holding the bag again.
Well, now Charles, you make it sound like the people who are in charge are somehow just individual human beings who are operating in their own interests rather than in the interests of we the people, but these are people who work for the government, so how could that possibly be?
Scott, I'm not going to bite.
I'm not going to take the bait on that.
I mean, it's just, you know, if there's somebody listening to this program now that doesn't understand that your government will lie to you, in fact, that is what they do.
If there's somebody listening to this program right now that doesn't understand that, I think we've got to start back up at, gentlemen, this is a football.
Back to the beginning.
We might have to rewind too far.
All right, well, so here's the thing.
I'm getting lazier and lazier, and I still got to keep my eye on Iraq and Afghanistan and this kind of thing more, and I sort of have ceded in the division of labor and the keeping up with all this socialist health care and the bailouts and a lot of this domestic economic policy to my libertarian friends like you and let you figure out what the hell's going on and then explain it to me.
I can't keep up myself.
So, Charles, tell me.
It was September of 2008, a little more than a year ago.
The stock market crashed.
They said it's a terrible emergency.
You've got all these bad debts that you talked about and that kind of thing, and then other than putting, I guess, a trillion worth of bad debts on the Federal Reserve's books, what exactly else has gone on?
I mean, if you could sort of draw a picture of, in a way, it sort of seemed like a year ago they were talking about a real revolution in terms of the government and even especially the Federal Reserve's control over business in this country and that kind of thing.
Did that really stick?
Or, you know, draw a picture for me of what happened over the last year in terms of the expansion of government power or the misuse of it.
Well, first of all, the governing authorities, the monetary authorities, had no idea what they were doing.
This should be frightening to the American people.
They had no idea, but let's even back up before that.
I mean, you've got all of these financial institutions that had taken out expensive time on television and the golfing events in which the money classes are watching, in the expensive news magazines and so on, talking about their prowess in conducting the retirement affairs, the investment affairs of their money clientele.
You had AIG, the largest insurance company in the world.
You had Merrill Lynch.
Merrill Lynch, the biggest stock brokerage.
These are financial planners, financial counselors.
This was the largest retail brokerage house in the world.
And both of them were demonstrably incapable of managing their own affairs, knowing what they had in their own portfolio.
So that's bad enough that they collapsed, but when you step back and look at it, it's from the rank of these same investment companies that the intelligentsia that runs American monetary and fiscal policy are drawn, from the same guys that don't know how to manage their own affairs.
So you had a crisis in which haste was in order.
We must do something.
We must do something.
What must we do?
Well, they didn't really know.
And if you were to rewind that tape, you'd discover that Paulson, for example, the secretary of the treasury at the time, another Goldman Sachs guy, another in a continuing series of Goldman Sachs guys, had no idea what to do.
But he knew he had to do something.
I use in the dollar meltdown, Scott, I use an old Zen line that it's better to be doing nothing than to be busy doing nothing.
Because these people went into just a war of activity, and yet they didn't know what it was.
And one day Paulson would say, well, we're not going to become partners with the banks, we're not going to buy preferred shares, we're not going to drop money into the banks.
The Japanese experience proved that that didn't work, and indeed it did.
And two days later, they're buying preferred shares of America's largest banking companies.
I mean, nobody knew what they were doing.
Timothy Geithner was the head of the New York Federal Reserve, the most influential of the Federal Reserves, one of the guys in bed with Wall Street and New York investment bankers.
When Bear Stearns went down in the spring, the prior spring, he said, oh, okay, we've got to have this bailout of Bear Stearns, because if we don't have this bailout of Bear Stearns, then the mortgage market will crack, and the housing market will crack, and other companies will start to fall apart.
And so the governing classes said, oh, well, these are the wizards of Wall Street.
And he said, we've got to bail out Bear Stearns, because if we don't bail out Bear Stearns, I mean, they keep giving us, so we do, and the same things happen.
It reminded me of that old line that you will remember, where somebody said, you know, if you vote for Barry Goldwater for president, the war in Vietnam is going to get a lot bigger, a lot more Americans are going to die, and it's going to have serious economic repercussions on the country.
And the guy says, so I did vote for Barry Goldwater, and by God, they were right.
It's the same thing.
You've got to bail out Bear Stearns, or everything will fall apart.
Okay, I bailed out Bear Stearns, and everything did fall apart anyway.
That's so funny.
You know, I was talking about war last hour with Coburn, and he made the exact analogy the other direction.
Which was what?
The empire is like the banks, too big to fail.
We've got to keep killing them, because we can't get caught failing at anything.
Oh, my God.
You know, well, this is, I don't know, maybe it's a syndrome that's pervasive these days, that you can never recognize a real loss.
But if you can't recognize a real loss, if you can't find yourself in reality, nature has a really peculiar and a very hard-edged way of dealing with people that refuse to acknowledge the truth.
And this is, in my view, Scott, what's getting a little change in the direction of our conversation, but this is what's happening to America, and this is, you know, the childlike American persona that you described that, you know, times are really, really good, so we can't be bothered.
Times are really tough, we don't have time to be bothered.
But nature has a way of exacting a toll or a price from people who persist in believing these childlike myths that aren't true.
And so our governing classes, Republicans and Democrats alike, keep teaching us these things, like that America could spend its way to prosperity.
And you dig yourself into a hole of debt that is visibly $12 trillion, really much, much larger than that, and they advise that we keep on digging.
And, you know, everybody is beginning to understand that the U.S. dollar is in effective freefall, and yet they keep telling us that it's okay, we can print money, we can create money out of thin air.
They persist in believing, this is one of the most peculiar to me, is that we, the richest people in the world or among them, can continue to borrow to keep this government fed and its activities, warfare activities and others, we can continue to borrow from some of the poorest people in the world to keep this game going.
And so help me, this is, I mean, it's almost frightening the kind of blinders that the governing classes, and I mean specifically now the fiscal and the monetary authorities, must be wearing because they have no contingency to keep funding America's debt except for borrowing it overseas.
And, you know, if something can't go on forever, it won't.
If debt can't go on forever.
Well, see, I think this is the thing that people don't really understand.
Most people probably have some sort of expectation that the money system is basically all built on bookkeeping tricks and they know that there's a problem with having a $12 trillion national debt and all that kind of thing.
But I don't know if people really grasp the bottom line as you describe it, which is, you know, we're in a hot rod headed toward a brick wall here and the brick wall is going to win.
Ultimately the laws of economics are no different than the laws of physics and you can't just keep doing this without having some very real consequences for, especially as you say, the American people.
We're the last ones holding the back.
Yeah, and let me suggest maybe the American people ought to start watching people who really do know something about this stuff in the financial markets and those are people who have an enormous amount of money at risk.
If the American people need a bellwether or an early warning system, they should look at the visible panic that goes on in the global marketplace every time a new shoe drops.
Look, two weeks ago it was Dubai and it was Dubai World and it was the prospect that they would default on $59 billion in debt and it turned out to be maybe they'd default on $26 billion or they'd rearrange $26 billion.
Here's what happens.
This is a repeating cycle of bubbles and predictable crashes but you get this massive leverage in a place like Dubai, anywhere in the financial world.
It doesn't matter where it is and when it starts to teeter and every now and then some of it starts to teeter, then the whole world, you get massive movements in the stock market and the gold market and the currency markets and so on because the financial world, it's not the American people, it's not the average investor that hears there's something funny about Dubai and oh my gosh, I'm going to sell stocks X, Y, and Z.
Americans don't react like that.
Retail investors don't react that fast.
They watch the news unfold and they slowly make decisions but overnight in the global marketplaces, big things happen with the dollar and with debt and with interest rates.
Whenever one of these bloated bubbles begins to look like it's going to pop, the world holds its breath.
It's like Californians in an earthquake.
Everybody kind of holds their breath to see if this is going to be the big one and so it was the same thing with Dubai.
The markets moved sharply.
Every market in the world moved sharply one way or another.
Some currencies moved here, interest rates moved there, gold moved there, yada, yada, yada.
Everything moved sharply because nobody knows, is this going to be the one?
Is this the straw that's going to break it?
Is this the big one like the big earthquake?
But Dubai is chicken feed.
$59 billion is chicken feed.
Abu Dhabi could bail them out with reserves of 10 times that much sitting around.
It's chicken feed.
Yet the whole world is ready to crack on Dubai.
So what does that mean?
That means that everybody knows that the whole thing is a house of cards and they're just, like you said, the Californians in the earthquake.
Is this going to be the thing that makes the house of cards fall?
Is this the one?
In other words, nobody believes in it anymore.
They just are trying to do the best they can within the phony system, the way it's set up.
Everybody wants to ride it as long as they can.
History tells us that people get in too late or they get out too late.
But America is still the 800-pound gorilla and you look at $59 billion of Dubai.
We have, in this country, $3.4 trillion in commercial bank exposure to the commercial real estate market.
Well, I don't know where you are, but I'm here in Scottsdale, Arizona, a pretty prosperous part of the state and not that bad a part of the country.
But I drove up and down Hayden Road, one of the main thoroughfares through Scottsdale the other day, and I looked at these beautiful office buildings and it's just for lease, for lease, for lease, vacant, for lease, for lease, all miles down the road like this.
Here's trillions of dollars.
This stuff is already underwater, a good deal of it.
And, Scott, I had lunch with a banker the other day who was telling me about the books of some of these financial institutions.
Small Regional Bank, how about this one?
Small Regional Bank, I think he said had $800 million worth of real estate losses and they had set aside provisions for it of like $1.5 million.
I mean, he described to me one financial institution that was carrying a bankrupt company on its books as a performing asset.
The borrower, the company, the borrower.
Can I ask you, Rewind, just a second there?
You said $800 million worth of bad real estate loans with $1 million backing it up, is that what you said?
$1.5 million of reserves that they've set aside for it.
What it means is that they're not acknowledging reality on their books.
They're carrying things on the books that they shouldn't be carrying.
They're carrying things as assets on their books that shouldn't be carried.
But, I mean, this went on a year and a half ago as well.
It goes on all the time.
So you've got a system that's teetering, that's like inflated out of its mind in this cycle of bubbles and predictable crashes.
And the crashes are all about us.
This is Anti-War Radio.
This is my main man, Charles Goyette, here talking to you.
It's charlesgoyette.com.
The book is called The Dollar Meltdown, Surviving the Impending Currency Crisis.
And I guess the collapse of the commercial real estate market is just one more of the same kind of crash we've already had in terms of housing and that kind of thing.
But this impending currency crisis, I think what you mean by that is the crack-up boom, right?
It means the whole world giving up on the U.S. dollar being a worthwhile currency.
Are we really running that danger?
That's the big one.
It's the U.S. dollar.
And if you think about it, it's spread its tentacles everywhere because we've talked a time or two already about the post-World War monetary agreements.
The U.S. dollar is the reserve currency of the world.
Other central banks hold U.S. dollars just as they used to hold gold and issue their currencies against gold.
They hold U.S. dollars as a reserve.
And somebody asked me the other day, Charles, what about other currencies?
Why don't you recommend other currencies?
Because there is no such thing on the face of the globe now as one so-called hard currency.
Scott, we used to use the term hard currencies to refer to the redeemable currencies.
I think the Lebanese pound actually was a hard currency at one time.
It had a statutory backing of gold or 40% gold.
The Swiss franc was once a hard currency.
Yeah, until the late 90s, right?
The Swiss franc?
Yeah.
They were like the last ones to go.
They were the last ones to go.
And yet the financial press still talks about hard currencies and they talk about irredeemable paper currencies that are backed by nothing.
And they still, I guess through lethargy, continue to use the term hard currency.
But think about it.
If the United States dollar is in very serious trouble, and it is, there are other foreign banks, foreign governments, central banks that have issued their currencies against reserves of U.S. dollars.
So none of them, they're all squishy soft.
They're all squishy soft.
Does that help us then?
Does that mean that people who want to get rid of their dollars really have nowhere else to go?
We're having a global paper money crisis.
So you're saying that when the crack-up boom happens to the U.S. dollar, it may well happen to the euro and the yen and the won at the same time?
It can happen to all of them because none of them are redeemable.
It may happen that when one takes a dip, another one bobs up and vice versa.
You're talking about World War II level casualties or something here.
How crazy is this on your scale of likelihood?
How likely is this?
Well, let's put it this way.
No paper currency ever survives.
They always fall by the wayside, and this one will too.
There is no magic.
I don't know if this is supposed to be American exceptionalism, that Americans just think that they can have a paper currency that is irredeemable and continue to issue them at virtually no cost, at the cost of paper and ink or even less at the cost of electronic bookkeeping entry, that they continue to issue these things forever and the rest of the world will continue to accept them, that oil producers will continue to sell their depreciating or their depleting asset for paper dollars that we can produce at virtually no cost.
You know what it is?
It's like your little kids that they believe milk and eggs come from Safeway, and they don't know that there's a farm in the background and a lot of messy work about collecting the eggs and milking the cows and stuff.
You just go to the grocery store.
This is what Americans have come to believe over a couple of generations about money.
Well, money is whatever the government says it is, whatever this piece of paper.
Hey, we've always used these pieces of paper, but every brokerage house in the world, when they offer something for sale, they're forced to use that expression, past performance is no guarantee of future success, and it should apply to paper money.
It's very good when everybody's mesmerized and under the spell of the world's loan superpower and the richest country on the face of the earth, but the facade has begun to crumble on the dollar.
And I will tell you, in fact, Ron Paul this weekend said the same thing.
I've been going around speaking about an event that happened about a month ago, and as a real seminal event, this is a real benchmark in the currency crisis.
And this weekend at the Freedom Summit in Phoenix, Congressman Paul said, you know, I made a note of this date.
All of us that are worried about the shape of the U.S. dollar and the impact that it will have and know the history of the U.S. dollar remember the date, August 15, 1971, because that was the date that the last remaining link of the U.S. dollar to gold was severed by an act of President Nixon and all kinds of metals of trouble set in.
Well, he said, I just remember the date, I think it was the 5th of November, November 5th of this year could very well be the benchmark date that future discussions will be based around when the dollar standard ended, because it was on that date just a month ago now that the Central Bank of India looked at a pile of billions of dollars.
You've got $6 billion in reserves.
U.S. paper dollars, as we were saying, are produced at virtually no cost and without restraint by the Federal Reserve.
So you've got $6 billion here, billions of U.S. dollars, okay, over here a pile of gold from the International Monetary Fund.
Pile of gold?
Hmm.
Paper dollars?
Hmm.
Paper dollars?
Hmm.
Pile of gold?
And just like that, they took down 200 metric tons of gold for their central bank reserves to dump dollars to do so.
And Congressman Paul, I thought he was absolutely right, he was saying the same thing for the intervening month, that this may be the date that we will look back on later when the whole thing finally began to give up the ghost.
Yeah, well, it won't be too hard to remember the day, since that's how the slogan goes in everything, is remember it.
The gunpowder plot, only for real this time.
All right, well, hang on a second.
Let me talk about your book for a minute, and then I want to ask you a question.
Everybody, if you go to the bookstore, or you look at Amazon.com, or whatever you've got there, it's the bright yellow one with the melting Federal Reserve note $1 bill on the front there.
It's called The Dollar Meltdown by Charles Goyette, and it's really great.
And Charles is my friend, and I would be saying it's great anyway, and I would have thought it was great, even if it was, I don't know, what I could have done or something.
But instead, this is a really, really great book, and Lou Rockwell and Ron Paul and all of them seem to think so, too.
It's on the level of the best of the Misesian economists at the same time.
Of course, it's written in Charles' great prose, which is just like his quite professional radio manner, all the great metaphors and everything, Safeway eggs and all that, and piñata parties, and it's really great.
It'll take you two or three days to read or something, put aside a few hours to read it, and I couldn't recommend it higher.
And especially for those of you who have read Meltdown by Tom Woods, I would say it's twin.
This is the book that comes next on your list.
And I really mean that.
I obviously ain't making no money.
I'm just telling you that the book is awesome.
You will read it to the end.
I guarantee it.
Anybody you know is interested in what's going on with the economy and the dollar, especially Christmas is coming up and all that, and that's about the best shilling I can possibly do.
Now, let me bust your chops a little bit here, Charles.
I interviewed Bob Higgs the other day, the great Bob Higgs, author of, I don't know, 75 great books or something, and a brilliant guy.
And I said, well, you know, Charles says the damage is done, the dollar is ruined, things are going to fall apart.
And he said, well, you know, we're talking about the people who own the world here.
We're talking about the owners of the empire.
And it's possible that they could just be so, you know, out of touch with the reality of their situation that they do themselves in.
But ultimately, I think we should have a little, I'm terribly paraphrasing him here, by the way, but we should have a little bit of faith in the self-interested evil of the people who control our empire that they want to keep it.
And that, yeah, it's true, Bernanke has increased the money supply, but mostly he's just kept it on the books of the banks in their deposits at the Fed.
It hasn't completely depreciated the dollar.
Maybe, you know, maybe the crack-up boom is not in our future.
Maybe they can crank up interest rates before price inflation gets too bad.
Maybe they have found a way to soften the landing without driving us off the cliff.
Charles, what do you think?
Well, I have great respect for Higgs, and I think it's good that he raises that kind of caution.
I don't really know where to start.
We use the expression between a rock and a hard place.
I mean, if there was a possibility that they could raise interest rates to forestall currency destruction, they might be actually willing to do that.
But the commercial real estate market is hanging over their head.
That will only exacerbate that disaster, forestall a recovery in the housing market, kill automobile sales.
Interest rates on credit cards are already sky high for Americans that are trying to crawl out from under debt.
So, in other words, they have no room left to raise interest rates.
They virtually have no room.
But the larger issue that he has raised is about the empire.
The proprietors of the empire won't want to ruin their good thing.
The same thing, I guess, could have been said about the British empire, but they ruined their good thing anyway.
America is distinct, though, can be distinguished from the British empire, because the British pound sterling was not the reserve currency of the world.
Oh, it was the dominant currency of the world.
We talked about Middle Eastern oil priced in pounds sterling.
But you know, the most widely traded monetary unit in the world at the time was the British gold sovereign.
So the British empire was based on an actual honest, reliable, precious metal currency, the gold sovereign.
And you could find them on any corner, in any corner of the globe, and I suppose to this day you could still find British sovereigns just about anywhere in the world where gold is available.
It was the widest traded coin, reflecting the reach of the British empire.
This time it's a little bit different, because our reach is certainly greater than the British empire, but it is based not on a gold coin like the British sovereign, but on a paper currency that the rest of the world has been deluded into holding.
So if the proprietors of the empire want to keep the game going, they have an insurmountable problem.
They have to figure out how to keep the rest of the world, people around the world, other central bankers, other heads of nations, and other people that are aware, don't like to be fleeced.
I mean, it shouldn't be an astonishing economic discovery to point this out.
But you've got the whole world now holding these dollars, and they have a say-so, and there is no mechanism that the proprietors of the American empire can use to make those people keep desiring to hold U.S. dollars.
This is a distinction between empires of the past.
Well, we've got a lot of thermonuclear weapons.
Does that help?
Well, you know, I get in debates with these people who seem to think it does.
I'm trying to remember where it was.
I think it was on CNBC or something.
I was on with some guy who said, no, no, there can't be another strong currency because nobody else has the nuclear arsenal that we have.
Really?
Well, good.
See, more and more I really am thinking like an imperialist.
If you dump our dollars, we'll kill all of you.
I thought it was pretty funny, but I didn't get a chance to refute him.
Look, Mises says, the great economist Ludwig von Mises says, currencies aren't created.
They're not created from the top down and forced upon the population, but they evolve from the bottom up.
And I have run over and over again in the course of discussing this, that people say, well, there's not another currency suitable to replace the United States, not another currency that has the reach and not another currency that has the base that the U.S. dollar has, and so on and so forth.
But necessity is the mother of invention, and we've seen currencies develop on their own in sort of a spontaneous way in the marketplace as an alternative to bogus or fraudulent currencies.
And this will happen again.
Mises says that when you have the same conditions prevailing that led to the continental dollar collapsing or the French revolutionary currency collapsing or the Weimar Republic Deutschland collapsing, when the same conditions prevail, the same thing can happen anywhere.
There is no American exceptionalism if you think that the rest of the world cannot literally be forced to value our...
Look, if it's not so, it won't be so, and it's the same way George Soros made a billion dollars so-called breaking the Bank of England.
You know, they persisted in acting and behaving as though their currency was worth a lot more than it really was, and he said, well, let's find out.
And they went to the marketplace, and, you know, even the British government, nobody's bigger than the market, even the British government.
Wow, sounds like we're in trouble.
Well, okay, so worst-case scenario, dollars become worthless, crack-up boom.
Everybody goes out to spend any dollars that they have on anything of tangible value that they think they might be able to trade later on.
People begin starving, and people have to come up with temporary currencies.
I mean, it's not like, you know, again, we're talking worst-case scenario here, and basically the end of the paper dollar, it would take a while before the marketplace, I mean, even assuming, you know, Ron Paulian or somebody was the president and not a Democrat, and they would let this happen and let people develop new currencies, before the market can really decide on a new commodity-based currency for the whole country, people are going to immediately need ways to trade among each other, at least in their own neighborhoods.
What do they do, Charles?
Do you have recommendations maybe where people can look at examples of local currencies?
Of course, I guess if you've read Catch-22, you know everybody traded cigarettes in Europe, and basically tobacco became the de facto currency at least there for a while during the occupation there after the fall of the Third Reich.
But, I mean, if we're really looking at the worst-case scenario, then, you know, what ideas should people keep in mind for how to protect themselves?
I mean, I'm thinking of people with no savings to buy gold coins now with at all, you know, which is most people.
That's sort of the problem with this.
Even the people that understand what's coming and prepare themselves, you know, you can't really separate yourself entirely from the culture in which you live.
And if the culture goes down and if the people lose their freedom or the people lose their prosperity, then it impacts us and the opportunities that we're surrounded with and the social conditions and the safety of the civilization in which we live.
And the problem is that people will find other ways to trade, and they will find, you know, chocolate bars and nylon stockings as they did after World War II or the modern equivalent of that.
But all of those things retard trade and commerce and make us all poorer.
It's because they don't have the good qualities that a good money needs.
You know, not all nylons are the same.
They're not all the same size.
They're not all the same quality.
And so there's no fungibility.
A pair of nylons is not equal to a pair of nylons.
Like an ounce of silver is equal to an ounce of silver.
An ounce of gold is equal to an ounce of gold.
They're not divisible in the same way.
You take a half of nylon stockings, but you want to make a purchase that's half that much in value, so you cut it in half.
You can't do it.
It's not divisible like a good monetary unit should be.
It's not universally desirable.
You know, not everybody, people that are trying to keep food in their families aren't really interested in nylon stockings.
So it's like throwing sand in the gears of commerce.
If there's not a good viable currency or alternative currency to trade, somebody asked me the other day, then what do you suggest to ease our pain, to ease the transition?
I said, well, the first thing you could do is repeal the legal tender laws so that alternative currencies could begin to be developed now.
Because if there is an alternative or several alternatives that are being developed, you know, it will keep commerce from grinding to a halt or slowing down remarkably and making us all poorer.
So what do you need legal tender laws for?
If the currency is honest, you don't need it.
If the currency is reliable and of self-evident value, you don't need a legal tender law.
It's only if the people are going to be fleeced and need to be forced to hold a currency that you need legal tender laws.
So there are things that we can do that would allow people to start developing alternative currencies.
In the meantime, I guess the larger archetype for a currency crisis is to insulate yourself from things of declining value.
And things of declining value are paper money-denominated investments, savings accounts, passbook savings, cash, and so on and so forth, and to hold tangible assets.
And then you need to be aware of some of the other schemes that will come down the pike, and there are things like price controls and rationing and some of those other disasters, and insulate yourself from those systems if you can.
I guess that's the short answer.
Okay, now, so here's something I'm trying to get my head around.
I think Ron Paul talks about the evolution of the economy from 1971 as simply a series of bubbles, bubble upon bubble, and that basically our entire industrial capacity has been shipped overseas because we can export our dollars, we can print, as he said, dollars for no cost, and then buy cheap stuff from foreigners.
And so, in a sense, he's saying that ever since 1971, we've been having that kind of malinvestment that the Austrians talk about, that as long as the government is inflating the currency, they're giving misleading signals about where capital goods are supposed to go and these kinds of things.
So I guess my question is, you know, we have these recessions from time to time, and then they always try to reinflate the bubble, I guess with the exception of the early 80s when Volcker forced the recession in order to try to lick inflation.
But otherwise, they basically always reinflate and reinflate.
Does that mean that our economy is so skewed that we're actually at, you know, 40 years' worth of, quote-unquote, malinvestment and distortions of capital goods in our country?
Yeah, sure it does.
I mean, you've got a good enough handle on it, as evidenced by the lead-in that you gave me just now, that you and I will have to write my next book together.
We'll just collaborate on it.
Oh, great!
It does mean that.
Look, that doesn't mean that there hasn't been, you know, real economic progress on some fronts.
Somebody asked me as well the other day, he said, well, you know, what could happen that would help the economy, that would spur new growth and so on, besides in addition to a sound, dependable unit of exchange?
Well, one of the things, I mean, you know, I don't know if you're just daydreaming.
I mean, suppose they came out with, you know, some form of Nikola Tesla investment that completely revolutionized energy, and you were going to use the harmonic frequency of the Earth, right?
This would spur development and the dynamism of the economy in ways that we can't even begin to foresee.
Well, by the same token, this has happened in our past, you know, with the invention of the railroad, and the automobile, and the radio, and the Internet, and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
All of those things, you know, were things that gave us a real window of opportunity to have some real economic growth.
And so, despite the malinvestment and the rotten currency, and the termites eaten away at the foundation of America's prosperity, and the debt that they continued to build, and the debauchery of the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar, and the loss of enterprise to people overseas, despite all that, you know, there were real things that made our lives a lot better, and real developments, and real bursts of initiative, and so on.
And I can hardly believe that I could have lived without the Internet before.
So, all of these things, you know, they create real wealth, and real growth, and real innovation, and really improve human lives, as opposed to the things that government does with your money.
But at the same time, well, I guess Peter Schiff, probably, of all the Austrian-influenced people on TV saying things, he's the one who just, more than anyone else, over and over again, he says, that we don't make anything anymore.
And he talks as though, not just the way that the government manipulates the money, but that actually the country itself is bankrupt.
That we don't, you know, he talks almost as though there's no real wealth, that our infrastructure, that even, you know, our capacity for making wealth is basically gone.
Like, this is a shell of an America left, and everything's been transferred away.
Is that really right?
I mean, it seems like this is a pretty damn rich country.
Or is it all just a bookkeeping trick?
Well, it's a bookkeeping trick.
You've got $3.4 trillion in bank loans on commercial real estate that's only worth $1 trillion.
That's a trick.
That's an accounting trick.
If you have banks and investment banks carrying stuff on their books that's not really worth that, if they had to, you know, market to the market or liquidate it, that's an accounting trick.
I mean, all of these things are accounting tricks.
And I think he's right.
I mean, yeah, there's infrastructure here, and it has some value, but, you know, there's a tremendous amount of infrastructure around the rest of the world, too.
And as a matter of fact, if there's anything, there's a major amount of excess capacity to make stuff.
So, yeah, we still have the infrastructure.
I suppose we could still make some things here.
We've got, you know, Detroit that can still make cars, but there's no demand for it anymore.
There's no effective demand for the cars.
This is kind of what, you know, community college taught me was the deflationary spiral, right?
Where you have, you know, I understand, of course, the Fed is, you know, hitting the enter key and creating trillions of dollars and all that.
At the same time, you have the deflationary effect of all these bad loans basically being written off and recognized to be bad loans and all that.
And then what happens is, well, sort of like you just said, everybody's broke, so they stop buying cars, which means cars stop being made, which means more people go broke.
And then, you know, it's the deflationary spiral, they say, all the way down, down, down.
And where even good businesses end up going broke, things that even if we'd had sound money all along, these are the kind of businesses that would have existed in a real economy.
Even they get destroyed just because of the recessionary effect hitting everybody else.
Yeah.
Well, look, the point of a real deflation is to air out the excesses that existed in the prior inflation.
So if the value of things have been pumped up beyond sustainability, if there have been malinvestments and resources diverted to things for which there was no effective demand for projects and enterprises that were unsustainable, then you need to let those prices fall.
And some entrepreneur comes in and he looks at the plant and equipment and he says, well, I can use this to make widgets, and here's what I will pay you for it.
But the governing authorities don't want to relinquish the belief that they are still, you know, the automotive manufacturing hegemon of the world, which we are not.
So they try to prop up, you know, they end up buying General Motors and so on and so forth, when that plant and that equipment can still be used by somebody, but it's at a specific price.
And the federal government resists letting the price, all of this madness, in my view, Scott, is resistance to the reality of the market, resistance to the reality of the price, whether it's the price of the dollar or the price of General Motors or the price of real estate, it's all resistance to the reality of price.
But to get back to Peter Schiff, I mean, I agree with Peter Schiff about an awful lot, and most especially this, that the real answer to our problem, the real answer is savings.
We need just the exact opposite medicine of what the government recommends.
The government forces interest rates down to zero so that there is no reward for savings.
They make it counterproductive and they encourage people, go out and spend, spend, spend.
Here's cash for clunkers, cash for lobbyists, cash for Christmas, cash for this, cash for that, spend, spend, spend, which is the exact opposite of what the, look, we just had a debt bubble.
We had a crisis created by excess credit and excess leverage.
And the answer to that is to go out with more leverage and more spending.
These people are mad.
The answer, the solution is savings and capital formation.
That's exactly what the economy needs.
And that's exactly what the federal government tries to frustrate or thwart.
You know what's funny?
The National Review?
Yeah, they sure are.
Are you ready to hear the silliest thing they ever wrote?
Okay, now this couldn't possibly even be on the top ten, but still, this is pretty silly.
Are you ready?
Yep.
Apparently, even the libertarians in Congress, meaning Ron Paul, believe there is no corner in which the legislators' many hands and long noses should not reach.
Apparently, Ron Paul is a big government police state hypocrite because he thinks that Congress ought to have the power to audit the Federal Reserve System.
Oh my God, what are these people, what is wrong with these people?
Good Lord, are these mental midgets?
It makes you wonder if it's like, what do they call that?
It was some kind of like super-duper crystal meth that they had out for a while.
I really wonder what kind of drugs these people are abusing.
You've got to kind of half-believe what you're saying to write for National Review, right?
I mean, it can't be that cynical.
Well, God, that's just a level of stupidity that leaves one breathless.
Well, so tell me what you think is going to happen with this.
I think we should take a little bit of time to celebrate.
I think probably this is Ron Paul's greatest legislative achievement, is that he got his very real version, not the Mel Watt version, of the audit the Fed amendment attached to a terrible bill that he's already said he's going to vote against, but he's going to pass, empowering the Federal Reserve.
But it will require this GAO audit.
Wait a minute, Scott, wait a minute.
Has there ever been another guy like Ron Paul?
No, never.
There never has, has there?
No, and you know what?
There's a lesson here, too.
There's not ever going to be, either.
I agree.
This is something that's not passed on by chromosomes or genes.
It's a dedication to principle that you develop in the course of your lifetime.
There has never been another guy like him.
Think about this.
I mean, he's never taken his taxpayer-paid junket, returns a part of his congressional budget, he has not participated in the largest that goes with being in Congress, the retirement plans and stuff, he has never voted for an unconstitutional law, he has never voted for an unbalanced budget, and he will vote against the bill that has his special project attached to it because it's a bad bill.
Never been anybody like him.
God bless Ron Paul.
He is, man.
He's like the leader of the Rebel Alliance.
In fact, my only criticism of him is that he should explicitly warn people to do as he says and not as he does because he's convinced people, I think quite accidentally, that they ought to run as Republicans for Congress so they can try to be like him or something.
And they all fall short, and none of the good ones, if there are any, are going to win anyway.
And the House, you know, he's there to vote no and give speeches and teach liberty.
I mean, the House is not where it's at.
You know, the movement to abolish the House, that's where it's at, if you ask me.
Well, I think he recognizes much of what you said because at the Freedom Summit this weekend, he commented that he gets a lot of young, aspiring, would-be political junkies tugging on his coat sleeve and saying, Congressman Paul, Congressman Paul, I want to run for office.
How do I get elected to office?
How do I raise the money?
How do I do what you did?
I think effectively, to paraphrase him, and maybe a little bit inaccurately, but it was something to the effect of, find a principle, find principles that you stand for, and just advance the principles.
Don't worry about getting elected to Congress.
You know, find the principles that you hold dear and work for them.
Amen to that.
Well, you know, I actually witnessed Ron Paulian, a congressional candidate, talk about, I hope they don't ask me about foreign policy.
That way I won't have to answer, and then maybe I'll have a chance at getting elected.
Is that opposite?
That's how it begins.
Scott, that is exactly how it begins.
You know, you take a good guy from the neighborhood that you've known, and you know his judgment is sound and his principles are good, and you send him off to Washington, and he comes back in two years for re-election, and you hardly recognize him, and you wonder, how did this happen?
You know, how could he be one of us when we sent him?
And he comes back, and he holds no principle dear any longer.
He's sold a piece of himself off slice by slice by slice.
That's exactly how, oh, I hope they don't ask me something that is extremely important to the preservation of our liberty in this country and our prosperity as well.
I hope they don't ask me about that, because what will I do if I tell them the truth?
They won't like me.
Yeah, it's really too bad, especially when Ron Paul has proven that you can be a Republican from Texas and vote against the Iraq war, and in fact vote hell no on the Iraq war, and then get re-elected with a 70% margin two weeks later, if only you are a real man and stand by your principles.
Simple as that.
Yeah, the object left is there for everybody to see, but they're not all made of the same fiber that he is.
The more I think about him, the more I watch him, I just think he's been remarkable.
Yeah, you know, I hate politicians so much, and I really do try to second-guess whatever it is, I think, but especially my respect for Ron Paul.
He is, after all, a Republican member of the government, and I try to find things about him to not like, but man, he just doesn't disappoint me.
I'm with you.
He's my number one hero there, as far as...
Just look at, it's so unprecedented what he accomplished in the last couple of years, in terms of teaching people about liberty, his global speaking tour on behalf of individualism.
But what do you think is going to happen with this audit?
Do you think they're actually going to be able to get this thing passed?
I'm with the Fed.
I think that the governing authorities will move heaven and earth.
You know, it's key.
It's central to their game and to their largesse, to their control, to their power.
I think they will do everything they can possibly do to see that it doesn't pass or that it passes and goes unheeded in some way.
So, I mean, I don't think they'll go quietly into the night.
I certainly don't.
But what does it matter what the laws are, anyway?
If the laws mattered, we wouldn't be in this hell.
We wouldn't be in the Iraq war.
If the Constitution mattered, if the laws matter...
So, you know, the prospect always exists to pass a law like the audit of the Fed law, and then nothing ever really happens.
You know, there is an executive branch that has to execute the laws, right?
Right.
Execute people without trial, you mean.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I saw Ron being interviewed and he said, they asked him, well, this is just a Trojan horse.
You're trying to abolish the Fed.
And he laughed and said, look, Congress is not going to abolish the Fed because they listen to me.
The Fed is going to abolish itself because Charles Books is going to come true, you know?
Yeah, I think so.
And Jim Rogers said the same thing.
They will be so discredited by their malperformance that in 10 years they won't even exist.
I actually think that's true.
I mean, you know, they can't keep this bubble going.
There's a bubble out there that hasn't popped.
The dot-com bubble popped.
The real estate bubble popped.
Bubbles have popped all over the world.
The Dubai bubble popped.
But the one bubble that remains is the biggest bubble of them all.
It's the U.S. dollar.
And they cannot keep it inflated.
If it were a domestic currency and only a domestic currency, they might be able to fleece the people badly enough to destroy the purchasing power of the people badly enough that the people would grumble and still persist in using it.
But the rest of the world doesn't have to.
And so help me, it's the least kept secret in the world that all of the world, all of the world, plans are being made to distance themselves, to develop alternatives, to create new trading relationships, new settlement agreements, new currency opportunities, ways to insulate themselves from the problems of the U.S. dollar.
For crying out loud, Scott, there is a reason why the Chinese purchased the rights to publish the dollar meltdown.
The Chinese are more aware and more interested in the dollar predicament than Americans are.
It's a little bit mind-blowing to think that Americans, who will be the chief victims of this stuff, are less interested and know less about it than the Chinese.
But the Chinese, bam, right there, almost virtually upon publication, they bought the rights for China.
There is a reason.
There is a reason that Timothy Geithner goes to China and the students at Beijing University laugh at him.
Why isn't he laughed at on Meet the Press or on CNN or when speaking to a university in the United States?
Because the American people don't know as much about the shape and condition of the dollar as the Chinese do.
Well, you know, it's all because they got brainwashed with Mao's Little Red Book, and so they understand advanced free market capitalism so much...
Wait, I'm trying to figure out how that works.
How is that, that the Chinese understand free market economics so much better than Americans?
It's 30 years of 10% economic growth, and people that remember when they were children and they didn't have enough to eat, and they now see that the middle classes in Chinese are eating as well as Mao's ruling cadres used to eat.
So they know what's behind their growth, and what's behind their growth is taking the boot heel off the throat of the productive people.
They all know that, and then they watch what's going on over here.
Look, they know that it's a chance they can grab the golden ring now.
If only our Congress would emulate the Politburo over there, you know?
Yeah, it would be an improvement.
Wow, what a sorry state.
It's absolutely unthinkable that we would have reached this path yet.
Here we are.
Hey man, isn't it crazy if they're talking about maybe they should just quit their job and pack up their family and get the hell out of here and find a little island in the South Pacific somewhere and hide out, or what?
Well, you know, an increasing number of people do it.
I hear these conversations all the time.
I have them with friends, and I'm older than you are, but I can guarantee you that when I was a kid, nobody ever talked like that.
Nobody would ever have thought, and I say nobody, there were a couple of tax refugees and so on.
One of the years, I think, the Campbell Soup fortune bailed out, and that struck in my memory for some reason.
Those sorts of things happened occasionally, but now it's on everybody's lips.
It's everywhere you go.
Good people have some sense of fidelity and loyalty to their country are still looking at havens, places to get out, places to go, and it's because of economic necessity.
It's because you can get medical care, you can get dental care, you can get surgery in places that used to be considered third world, broken-down tin-pot dictatorships, and now they compete with the United States.
Well, you know your CAT scan's read in India anyway.
Why don't you go over there for radiology instead of here and paying a middleman in the meantime?
So opportunities are beginning to abound around the globe.
For me, I don't know where I'd want to go.
I have a lot of friends that have places they think are pretty attractive.
I don't know where else to go.
Yeah, well, me either.
I don't have any resources to go anywhere anyway.
I think I'm just going to sit here and watch the whole thing burn down, and I'll call the score all the way to hell.
Yeah, you might as well.
Oh, yeah.
That might be what I'm here for.
Yeah, do the play-by-play.
Hey, I've got to tell you, everybody at AntiWar.com misses you, and that's all of us that work there, and that's everybody in the audience as well.
I get emails all the time, Charles, we want you back bad.
That's really nice, Scott, but you do the work of two men.
You do the work of three men there, so everything's fine.
I really feel good about having been able to make a contribution to AntiWar.com.
I can't emphasize enough how important AntiWar is.
In fact, I even say in the dollar meltdown, I don't know how you can be informed about world affairs.
I don't know how you can be informed about economic affairs.
The global economic picture, if you don't read the material that is available to you through the hard work of the people at AntiWar.com, I mean, it is just a, I absolutely rely on it.
I think anybody that's well-informed, you can either go out and do all the work yourself to provide what's available to you right there on that webpage fresh every day, or you can just bookmark AntiWar.com, and you have it right there at your fingertips.
You guys do a great job.
All right.
Well, we can't wait until your lifelong radio career kicks back into gear, and we can get your interviews back on that page, too.
I think that might somehow probably help fool more people into listening to my show, too, as long as it's next to yours, trying to buy those Goyette coattails.
You're in a class by yourself.
I don't think there's a smarter broadcaster in America than you, Scott.
You are so extraordinarily well-informed.
Well, this is enough of this.
Never mind.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, your royalty is in the mail for that.
Thanks a lot.
Everybody, go buy The Dollar Meltdown, and hopefully I'll get my kick back there.
Yep.
All right.
Take care, Charles.
Thanks a lot, man.
Good to talk to you, bud.
Bye.
All right, everybody, that's Charles Goyette.
The book is The Dollar Meltdown, Surviving the Impending Currency Crisis with Gold, Oil, and Other Unconventional Investments.
It really is a great book.
I strongly urge you to go out and get it, and check out the website there, CharlesGoyette.com.
