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Guy's Take_107 - Free Rent for the Rich
00:41:08
"It's often discussed that arbitrarily lowering interest rates and the zero interest rate policy era leads to massive recklessness and unethical and irresponsible behavior. But there's something even more sinister that actually occurs. A lot of people notice how massive corporations are just buying up all of the hard assets and then renting it back to us. [...] Zero interest rate policy isn't merely something that leads to reckless investments. It essentially amounts to free rent for the rich for everything in the economy. If you can rent anything for free, what do you do? You lease everything and then rent it back to the public for a profit." ~ Guy Swann Why do massive corporations own everything, while the rest of us are stuck renting our lives back from them? Most people see the trend, but very few understand the actual mechanism driving it. In this episode, I break down how zero interest rate policy isn't just "reckless investment" – it's a fraud machine that hands the rich fre...
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- [00:01]
A
It's often discussed that arbitrarily lowering interest rates and the zero interest rate policy era leads to massive recklessness and unethical and irresponsible behavior. But there's something even more sinister that actually occurs. A lot of people notice how massive corporations are just buying up all of the hard assets and then renting it back to us. They notice how the older generations used to own their homes, own their cars, own their lives, and now we all rent either from the bank or from a massive corporation. Most people see this trend. Most people see that it used to be small and now it's a massive part of the economy. But too few see exactly why this has occurred. Zero interest rate policy isn't merely something that leads to reckless investments. It essentially amounts to free rent for the rich, for everything in the economy. If you can rent anything for free, what do you do? You lease everything and then rent it back to the public for a profit. It's time for a guys take episode. The best in Bitcoin made Audible. I am Guy Swan and this is Bitcoin Audible. This show is brought to you by bitbox, the hardware wallet with rounded corners and nice smooth edges. Get yours today at the link below, right down in the description of this show. And I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about bitcoin than anybody else you know. And this is Bitcoin Audible. Welcome back everybody.
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B
It's time for a guy's dick.
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A
So I we just read Wyatt's piece on the show or his article, excuse me, his chapter from his book the Bitcoinization of Finance. And there was something about his wording, the way he framed when he was talking about zero interest rate policy. And there was another section in the book a little bit later, but I thought that that one part of the book or that one chapter really hit home a little bit better or I guess more completely. And one of the ways that he framed it made me realize something about, at least in my mind, gave me painted a different picture in how I thought it made sense to explain this phenomenon because I think it's regularly known, at least in bitcoin circles and Austrian economic circles that zero interest rate policy, that the idea of arbitrarily lowering the interest rate is explicitly leads to reckless and low quality investments. Right. I've used the analogy before of a glass of water is in an economy where the money is a pristine, plain, purified glass of water, then only improvements to the water get invested in that. You have to put some flavoring into the water. You have to put ice into the water, you have to carbonate the water. You have to do something to the water to make it better than pure, pristine, purified water. The idea of lowering the interest rate, of modifying what the base case is of investment. Because if you hold money, then your money is actually going to appreciate in value based on the average appreciation of all of the resources and productivity in the economy. So if the economy is actually getting 5% more stuff every year and expanding capital goods by 5% every year, every year. Then your money that doesn't change in supply would get, would buy you 5% more at the end of every year. Which means that to borrow Something at 4% makes no sense. Nobody's ever going to lend their resources for 5, for 4% because you get 5% by lending nothing. You get 5% risk free because other people are making good, valuable use of the resources that we, the scarce resources that we have available to us. So this would be the pure, pristine, clean water that's our 5%. So if you print money, if you issue new money, new debt into existence so that you can push the price down to 3% or 2% for lending, for borrowing money. Well, you don't change the amount of resources that are available. You don't change what that, that you still have to make 6% or you're
- [05:07]
B
doing your net income negative, you're net
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A
lowering the amount of value and productivity that we get from our resources. Think about it. If there's 10 houses and 10 people have a way to invest in those houses to get a 7% return and then you loan money out at 2% and now a 3% return is something that's viable.
- [05:31]
B
Well, they're going to buy up those houses and then turn around and do
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A
them for a 3% value case, which
- [05:37]
B
means that we literally lose 4% of the economy.
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A
What I say 7, I think it
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B
was 7 and 3, I already forgot. But we lose 4% net growth that we would have otherwise had because all of the resources went to the crappier
- [05:52]
A
investment than to the actual good, the good choice, the good use of those resources. And specifically if you had a 5, 6% interest rate, nobody would ever use, use it for the 3% purpose.
- [06:08]
B
That would literally be uninvestable. Nobody would ever put scarce resources toward that because they'd be making a 3, 4% loss on what they actually get out of it.
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A
So going back to our water analogy,
- [06:22]
B
it's like putting poop. It's like putting a little bit of poop or a little bit of Dirt in the water or a little bit of bacteria in the water so that it makes it look like a good investment to just filter out the poop. And that's the low hanging fruit, right? It's harder to improve a thing than
- [06:38]
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it is to just get it back to like baseline.
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B
It's much harder to find a reason, a way to use a house that
- [06:44]
A
gets you a 7% return than it is to just to borrow it at 2% and then rent it out in a dumb, in a dumb way at 3% and make a 1% return. It doesn't merely degrade the quality of the investment.
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It makes dumb it. It makes it so that the people who would otherwise use it for good purposes use it for the hard things that actually improve the economy and actually benefit everyone. They get choked out. They get choked out in place of
- [07:16]
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the crappy, stupid, naive investment cases.
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B
So this is all a critical part
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A
of the conversation around how much damage is done when you manipulate the interest rate lower. But there's something way more sinister when you realize that money is just an accounting system. Money is just a way to allocate who gets the resources, and the resources themselves remain scarce. And this is where I say that what's actually happening is that you're letting the rich rent everything in the economy for free. And let me explain what I mean by that. You know, it's funny about scientific, like breaking things down, trying to do them scientifically and also trying to use like an analogy, because it's remarkable that Keynesians reject the idea of explaining macroeconomics in a microeconomic way or in an, in a microeconomic environment, because they literally treat them like they have completely different rules. But there is not a single thing in science that works that way. In fact, quite the contrary is the way we know how a hurricane works is because in a tub we can literally move our hand and spin it around in the water and we can test our hypothesis on the, on the physics of fluid dynamics and the pressure differences and all of these things. We explicitly can prove that the underlying laws in a tiny environment so that we can see and then interpret or intuit how these things will work on a massive scale. And we can measure to see what the other factors or the huge amount of complexity that we're missing in making sense of something at a scale that we can't possibly really see or measure directly, that we essentially have to intuit or infer. Like nobody's ever put a hurricane in a petri dish and then looked at it, right? We, we have to take a temperature here and a measurement here in, like, a hundred different places. And then we have to try to make a big picture out of this. And if we want to see every little thing that's going on, like you're talking about something that's so massive and so complex and has so many different factors, all we can do is infer. And that's why your weather report, even with all the technology we have, all the data we have, all the models we have, the weather report is still about 50% accurate. In fact, it was supposed to rain yesterday, and instead it was completely sunny. But all of the principles and relationships and laws we can determine at a very small level. We can see them when they're tiny. We can test them when they're tiny, and they don't apply perfectly when they're massive. But it's not because the laws aren't accurate. It's not because the physics or what we tested isn't true. It's because there are just simply so many factors that it's harder to see how they relate to each other. Economics is exactly the same way. You can make sense of every economic principle in an economy with two people
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B
or five people or even one person
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most of the time. And all that happens when you have billions or trillions of dollars in money and millions of people, hundreds of millions of people and different transactions that some occur instantly, some occur over months, some occur over years, and some are very difficult and slow to settle, and some are very fast to settle, and some are about capital goods and production goods, and some are about retail goods. All that actually happens when you introduce this infinite numerous layers of complexity and interaction and time zones is it simply obscures how those laws work, but it changes nothing about the nature of what is going on. And this is why I think it's very easy to dismiss when you have a little like, here's three people in an economy, and this is how it works. Be like, oh, well, one is the big economy. It doesn't really work that way. No, it works exactly that way. It's just harder to see who exactly who explicitly is benefiting and who explicitly is paying the cost. But if you can prove that something is inevitable in an economy with three people, and then you do it at the scale of 300 million people, the exact same thing happens. It just takes 50 or 100 years to play out exactly like it does at that tiny level, and of course, varies based on the degree to which you push or the frictions or the ability to communicate the information. And the number of transactions. All of those things affect how quickly it moves from the point of entry to the outer edges of every economic system. So with that in mind, let's look at what happens when you manipulate the interest rate by issuing more debt in an economy of three people. We have Alice, Bob and Tom. Alice has been making the food and she's earned herself $100,000. Bob and Tom have been eating the food. Tom hasn't been doing anything with it. He's just run out of money eating the food while Bob has been building a house. So Bob has a house and there's also a bank in our analogy. And the bank can only loan out what money actually exists. So Alice has $100,000 in the bank. She wants to buy the house from Bob because she wants a place to live conveniently for our little economy. The price is $100,000, but it makes sense as well because nobody else can afford it. So Alice is the only buyer. So this is the state of the economy. Alice has the savings, the bank is holding on to it. Tom is broke because he just spent all his money and has and has eaten up the food. Bob has eaten up the food, but then produced a house, and Alice is the only one that can afford the house. So Bob has a house, Alice has the money to buy a house, and the bank is supposedly, quote unquote, keeping it safe. Now what happens if the bank loans the money to Tom? Well, then Alice can't buy the house. Tom gets the house. So Alice isn't just going to give that up, right? Like if she owned the house, she
- [13:45]
B
would never rent it to Tom for free.
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A
Right? And this prevents her from being able to buy the house if her $100,000 is gone from the bank.
- [13:54]
B
And of course, only one person has built a house. Therefore only one person should be able to consume the house, the house's worth,
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because very obviously there's only one house to consume. So if the bank lends it to
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Tom, they have to offer Alice a
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fair price for that.
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B
They have to give her like let's say, let's say she bought the house
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and instead of living in it, she
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B
decides to live in a tent to
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make some income so she can pay Bob to build another house. Well, she's not going to just give Tom the house for free.
- [14:30]
B
She's going to charge Tom rent so that she can make the capital, the positive capital, to produce more stuff for the economy. For the same reason she wouldn't let somebody have her hundred thousand dollars for free. She's not going to let somebody live in her house free because she wants the house or she wants the value that the house is worth. She is the one owed in the economy because she's produced food for everyone. The bank owes her the hundred thousand dollars. If the bank lends it out, he owes the bank because the bank owes her the money. And if somebody has the house, they owe it to her because she's the only one that can afford to buy the house, because she's the only one that produced enough value for everybody to eat so that it can exist. The house only exists because Alice made everybody food. She and Bob are the only producers in this economy. The bank is the one keeping things
- [15:23]
A
safe, and Tom has done nothing but destroy resources. So let's say Alice buys the house for $100,000 and Tom offers her 7% a year, which is, you know, like $400 a month or so to rent the house. And she's like, no, that's not, that's not nearly enough. I can't both pay for myself to have food. I can't take the time to make my own food and then also pay Bob to build me a new shelter. With that amount of money, I will accept absolutely nothing less than, let's say, 12% that, you know, it's a thousand dollars a month. Well, Tom can't afford that because that's too much. He's. He's running out of all of his capital because he's not doing anything productive with it. And that means specifically that Alice will
- [16:13]
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not give up the money in her
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bank unless she gets 12% as well, because that's the only way to pay
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her to not have the house, because
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the house would give her 12% in rent.
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The weight of the money, the weight
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of giving up the money, the cost
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of losing and lending out the money to someone else is exactly the cost of what she could otherwise earn if she did something with it.
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So Tom, in this scenario gets nothing because he simply can't afford anything. And Alice refuses to offer something at a price that's not worth it to
- [16:47]
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her because she's the one. She and Bob are the ones that
- [16:51]
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everyone needs to adhere to because they are the only ones.
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They are the ones who should control the resources because they're the only ones
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who made the resources. Enter zero interest rate policy.
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B
Enter the ability for the bank to
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loan money out of thin air. Now, Tom doesn't have to ask for Alice's money. The bank can loan $120,000 into existence to Tom, and Tom can Outbid Alice for the house.
- [17:25]
B
She can only afford it if it's $100,000.
- [17:27]
A
She's the only one who has produced the value. She and Bob are the only two who have produced the equivalent have a house. Bob directly by building the house. Alice indirectly by producing enough food for everyone for the house to be built. Same thing, different path. Now the question is, can Tom pay the interest rate? Well, in the case of paying the interest rate for Alice's $100,000 in savings, he has to make sure he pays
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Alice the fair price because she's the one with the savings. But if the bank can lend it
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backed by nothing, he doesn't have to pay anybody's price. He simply has to pay the bank more than free.
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So the bank can issue it at
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0% interest for themselves and maybe they
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give it to Tom for 1%.
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Well now he can afford the house.
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B
And he can, he can afford the
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house very, very easily.
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B
Because you know what he does? He buys the house from Tom at 120.
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In fact, no, he does it at 105. Because all he has to do is outbid Alice. He doesn't have to do anything of any, of any real consequence. He just has to make sure that he has, he has cheaper money than everybody else.
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So he is now the price setter. So he buys it from Bob at just 105 and now he has $15,000
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to sit on to go ahead and keep buying food from Alice. But you know what? Now he's the one who owned the house and he rents it to Alice for 12% a year, $1,000 a month, and she can't buy the house. She just got outbid. So she has to rent the house
- [19:07]
B
to earn more money and make more food to purchase the house back from Tom at a higher price to afford the one thing that she has actually
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produced enough value for.
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B
And Tom is now has a permanent income at the price that Alice explicitly refused to give up her chance at a house for. She pays him. She now pays Tom for the right to be in a house that she had already explicitly refused to give to him at that price of her earnings. Bob and Alice just got scammed and they have no idea how neither one of them have a house. And Alice is paying rent to Tom. How the hell did that happen when only Bob and only Alice were the only ones that have actually produced the value to earn a house? And what is Tom doing to produce value in the economy? Nothing. He's just renting. He just took up the ownership and he's renting it back to Bob and Alice. He's turned rent seeking into a viable economic model because he gets to rent it for free, which is what issuing debt out of thin air does. Nobody would have ever let him have that house for 1% if they had legitimately owned it and had to have legitimately earned and risked the value of the house in order to give it to him. Neither Bob nor Alice would have ever, because it takes real resources and real work, would have ever owned the house and then said, sure, you can rent
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it for $100 a month.
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B
That's an absurd price. No one would ever give up any real resources at that price. There is nothing secure or durable enough to offer up to risk the entirety of that resource to someone else. For 1%, there's no time ever that 1% debt ever makes sense, because 1% debt is the cost to rent any resource that exists anywhere. At 1% that makes no sense. What resource do you know of that anyone would rent to you? For 1%, you buy a $3,000 mower, lawnmower. Would you ever rent it for $30 a year to someone? If you rented it to someone for an hour, it loses $100 in value instantly. But when a company can get debt, can get essentially free debt from a giant financial institutions that can, that can print it out of thin air, and they can get that debt at 0% or at 1% because there's just this flood of trillions of dollars of money. You know what they can do? They can literally just get a loan and buy up all of the lawnmowers in existence for $30 a year, and they just turn around and rent them for $300 a year instead. And it doesn't even matter if they become worthless at the end. They'll just make their money back to pay off the loan. The loan only costs 1%, and they'll just scrap it at the end and sell it for parts. And because everybody's doing this, they're constantly bidding up the price, which means if they get all the lawnmowers now, the metal itself will be worth fifteen hundred dollars at the end of seven years on a life cycle. And it's not because the metal is actually worth more. It's because the dollar, the actual debt that they took out has been devalued because now a new lawnmower costs $10,000. All the TOMs have been bidding up the prices on essentially free debt. The secret sauce of getting free rent for everything in the economy is to just go out and own everything to lease the entire economy, lease all the productive businesses, lease all of the homes, lease all of the real estate, rent with a loan. They own it and they only owe
- [23:08]
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it back to the bank at an
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interest rate that makes no sense. A rental fee that no one in the economy would ever pay. But they all give it up because they don't realize that that's what's happening. They think that they can take the $105,000 that they got for the house and go buy a better house.
- [23:26]
A
But then they realize there aren't any other houses.
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It's the only house. How the hell did Tom get to boot get to bid the price up another $5,000 that didn't exist? They committed fraud, that's how. And they stole the house from the productive people in the economy. And now the actual productive people have to re earn what they already earned just to get back to baseline, just to get back to the, the standard thing that they are owed for what they've done for the economy at large.
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And Tom owns everything.
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And Bob and Alice are forced to rent it from him for no reason while he sits in Bob's house and eats Alice's food.
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A
The act of creating debt out of thin air and lending it to a bunch of financial institutions and massive corporations for essentially pennies on the dollar doesn't merely create reckless investment. It doesn't merely lead to irresponsible behavior and low quality uses of resources. It explicitly defrauds the people who have produced the resources and it guts the ownership of the country out from under all of the people who build the country and into the, into the hands of everyone who defrauds the financing of it. If you ever wondered why it is that BlackRock owns all of the real estate in the United States, and yet they're literally just, they're number crunchers. They're.
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They're money pushers.
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That's why they're getting free rent. And so they're borrowing to rent everything
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in the country, everything that they can possibly get their hands on.
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They're running around buying up all the
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real estate just so they can rent it back.
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Because if you can rent a, an
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economy, in an economy that's on net,
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on average 5 or 6% productive every single year, and you can get it at a price that's 2, that costs you 2%, you will rent everything you can get your hands on simply soaking up the resources, soaking up the ownership
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of the country, of all of the
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productive resources, of all of the scarce
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commodities and homes and assets that people need to survive and have a prosperous life. Simply soaking them all up and then renting them back out. Being a pure rent seeker on free debt becomes an insanely viable and easy business plan. And under a sound money economy it would never work. It would never be sustainable. You would never be able to do that at scale. You would always owe it back to the person who produced the resources. And it would be the Alices and the Bobs of the world that explicitly determined how much they are willing to let it go for. They would know that the house was being taken from them or the ability to pay for the house was being taken for them from them because their savings are either no longer available or
- [26:36]
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their house is being rented out.
- [26:38]
B
It's a direct relationship because sound money restricts the fraudster. It restricts the corruption and the corporation and the bank from cheating. It means that the accounting for where the resources are and who they are owed to cannot be cheated. Issuing debt out of thin air to explicitly to control the interest rate beyond or below the rate at which the people who own the things would ever allow you to have those resources is just fraud. It's just cheating. There's no middle ground. There's no maybe do it a little bit. No, it just means that you sort of get away with fraud and the fraud only serves sort of costs a little bit instead of a lot. That's the difference. But fundamentally it is exactly the same thing. It is fraud, plain and simple. It is destroying the very job that money is trying to do to create a sustainable economy. There is no such thing as sustainability if you do not have sustainable money. If you do not have sound money, Any efforts at sustainability are hilariously inept. They are neutered out the gate. You cut their balls off and shoot them in the head from the outset. There's zero ever chance. The idea of liberals pontificating on a stage about sustainability when they support the printing of money out of thin air is the most hilariously backward, idiotic thing that they could even utter. It is so deeply and permanently fundamentally antithetic, hypothetical to anything sustainable that it's barely even a bad joke. Imagine lecturing Bob and Alice about how much stuff they use up while Tom gets the house and then rents it back to Alice for free and there's
- [28:26]
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nothing you can do about it.
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And specifically, Tom has all the resources that are needed for productive capacity. Maybe Bob wants to start a small
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business in this home that he just created. He just built.
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B
He wants to do something else. He's got another idea to be even more productive. Well, he doesn't get to do that anymore. And Tom is the only one that does it that actually has the resources to do anything. And he doesn't do anything because he doesn't know how to do shit. He's just the one buying stuff up and renting it back to everybody else so that he can have an income and be rich on the backs of all the people who actually build stuff. If you can't tell. I don't think there's a single benefit to any of this. It's just a big giant scam. There's no net anything but poison. It's just how much net cancer do you deal with? A lot of cancer.
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A little bit of cancer.
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B
And here's the really, really crazy thing. Here's the really, really crazy thing.
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A
The GDP is higher in the fraudulent economy. GDP's 105,000 plus Alice's rent. GDP in the other one would only be 100,000 if Alice bought the house from Bob. So Tom got all the stuff. Bob and Alice are serfs. Bob and Alice have to work harder just to get what they're owed. Tom is rich, probably forever. The bank is owed the house. Alice's savings can't afford a house they're both renting from Tom.
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B
And all the political economists and politicians
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get to point and say, see, the economy grew by 10%. It's all just a scam, creating money out of thin air in order to buy something with a more affordable loan at an interest rate that the market will not voluntarily offer them in any other context is simply a way for Tom to get Alice's house without asking Alice's permission. That is it. And this is the exact same conditions, the exact same principle, the exact same law that happens when you do it in an economy of 300 million people. And what happens is as soon as you get into the I'm the rich club, all the economics change. You don't have to be productive anymore. You can simply get loans at impossible interest rates, buy things that normal people can't get at those interest rates, and then rent them back out at the normal interest rates. And it's a forever feedback. As long as the interest rate is never allowed to correct and become real. And it continues in a downward spiral until the poor, middle class and upper class is simply just the ultra poor and the ultra rich. And you don't have to take my word for it. Just look at all of the charts about who owns what, how many people own their houses, what the Average age of a home buyer is the change in the median home price versus the change in the median income. Track the productivity of the middle class against the income of the middle class and how much wealthier the rich are than the poor and middle class over the last 50 years. Specifically, it's probably best to start it at 1971. And when you ever hear a politician say that houses aren't less affordable today because maybe they're more expensive but mortgage rates are lower, understand that is the scam.
- [32:08]
B
They've changed the nature of affordability.
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A
That used to mean how difficult is it to own a home and produce the value of a home into how expensive is it for you to rent it from the rich? That isn't affordability at all. In fact, that's proof that it isn't affordable because you don't have any control over it anymore. You've just turned ownership into a permissioned system. And they literally brag to our faces that they're making the economy better because the fraudulent numbers by which they use to soak up all of the ownership of all of the resources and assets and real estate and everything of genuine value in the economy and rent it back to us end up being bigger than the numbers that we would see if we actually got what we were owed. That's not a better economy. That's not growth. We're just getting to see how much was stolen from us by the percentage of counterfeit. If the GDP goes up by 10% because the supply of debt has increased arbitrarily by 10%, that's not 10% growth. That's 10% of the resources got shifted
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from the producers to the debtors. That's measuring how much we were stolen
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from within the system we use to allocate who is owed what. Now go back and look at what happened during 2020. Again, look at what happened when they shut down all of the businesses across the country, all of the small and medium sized businesses, and they left the corporations opened when 40% of small businesses across the entire entire continental United States
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permanently close their doors.
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A
And they said it was good for the economy because GDP went up that year. It should make a little bit more sense now as to what happened and why that insane outcome could possibly have taken place. It's not measuring growth, it's measuring theft. And if you want to stop being stolen from, I suggest you buy some bitcoin and put it on a Bitbox hardware wallet. The new Bitbox 02 Nova works on Android and iOS and desktop.
- [34:44]
B
Clean and sleek. Great Little device.
- [34:47]
A
I have always been a fan. I love it, I love the company, I love the guys, great crew. And I got a discount code for you and an affiliate link right down in the show notes. But seriously, buy Bitcoin, hold your keys, keep it safe, because that's the only way out of this mess. That's the only way to exit the scam. Most people are trying to be the scammer instead of the scammed inside the system, but you're not going to do a very good job in the middle class trying to do that because you're still going to pay. You're still going to pay the, the scammers up the scammer tree a higher interest rate. So yes, you can attempt to exit within the dollar system. You can attempt to be, be faster at the scam. You can attempt to try to move yourself up towards the renting something below the market price and selling it at the market price. If you want to be a rent seeker and if you want to be successful in the fiat economy, honestly, all of the incentives push us in that direction. It's a viable business model even though it should never be viable, even though it is contributing to the cancer. But I can't honestly berate someone for doing it because there's no way to fix cancer and you're going to be eaten by it if you don't anyway, you know, it's, it's literally either be a scammer or be scammed. And I can't say that for the sake of morality, you're supposed to just sit there and eat the cost of society all by yourself and be poor and die.
- [36:20]
B
You should try to get your own.
- [36:22]
A
But you should exit your value from the system. If you both want to be moral and you want the capacity for your
- [36:31]
B
behavior to reflect to the real world
- [36:34]
A
that you want to know, you produce something of genuine value that was worth it, measure it in bitcoin, save in sound money and keep it safe. Because everyone is going to try to counterfeit their way into fake prices and fake debt and play the fiat game. It's become the norm. We aren't just the fiat economy, we are the fiat culture. We are the fiat ethics. We've been lied to for generations that things that destroy resources are positive, healthy things to do and the only true way out is to simply stop doing the things that aren't worthwhile, that aren't actually valuable. And not just for profit, not just for, you know, making more money. If you wanted to make more money, you can, you can probably Make a lot more money in fiat land and probably far easier. Just like you can filter crap out of bad water easier than you can improve clean water. But for your own sanity and your own soul, I suggest you just try to make things better and get out of the spinning wheel, out of the culture of thinking that it's worthwhile to poison or dirty up someone's water in order to find a way to make money off cleaning it. A lot easier said than done. There's no black and white. There's no easy way in or out of this. It's not like I have all the answers. And I'm not. I'm not perfect. I would love to get a couple of pieces of real estate at 1% interest and then rent them out. You kidding me? That would be a gold mine. But I wouldn't delude myself as to the reality of the situation. And I hope that I would never get so tied to it or lost in that culture, in that economy, that I would forget the reality behind it all. Because it's very easy to be in the middle of a hurricane and excuse your tiny little behavior and think, well, you know, I'm not making a difference. But honestly, it's the only thing that can. It's the only thing that does actually fix it, is to go back to Alice and have Alice refuse to sell to Tom and to take her money out of the bank and refuse to loan it to Tom at anything less than a real interest rate. You know, there's a great quote that I love from Charles McKay from a book in the 1800s. Think like the 1850s or 40s or something. Extraordinary, extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. And it was quoted in the Madness, the more recent book, the Madness of Crowds. And the quote goes something like. Men, Men, it is said, think in herds, and they go insane in herds very quickly. And they only recover their insanity slowly and one at a time. Sound money will only be restored in exactly the same way. And all we can do is recover our sanity one at a time. And that will wrap us up on this guy's Take episode. Thank you for listening to Bitcoin Audible. Don't forget to share this out with everybody you know, who cares about being responsible and productive and not contributing to a cancerous lesion on our economy and would rather make the world a better place. And don't forget to subscribe. Check out Bitbox and our other affiliate links to great products and sponsors and partners and great stuff that I love to use and people I trust. It's a great way to help out the show. And I'll catch you on the next episode of Bitcoin. Audible and until then, everybody, I am Guy Swan and that is my two sats. Men, it has been well said, think in herds. It will be seen that they go mad in herds while they only recover their senses slowly and one by one. Charles Mackay. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1841.