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I'm Clayton ECKERD and in 2022 I was the lead of ABC's the Bachelor.

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Unfortunately, it didn't go according to plan. He became the first Bachelor to ever have his final rose rejected. The Internet turned on him.

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If I could press a button and rewind it all, I would.

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But what happened to Clayton? After the show made even bigger headlines. It began as a one night stand and ended in a courtroom with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal.

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The media is here. This case has gone viral. The Dating Contract Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you. Please. Search Warrant this is unlike anything I've ever seen before.

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I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. This season, an epic battle of he said, she said and the search for accountability in a sea of lies. I have done nothing except get pregnant by the Bachelor. Listen to Love trapped on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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So to explain what is going on here, we need to take a detour back in time to when this was written. This act was written in 1974, but we need to go back a little further to 1971. Now, in 1971, Richard Nixon makes probably the most consequential in a macro sense change to like how currency functions on a global scale in probably half a millennia when he pulled the US off the gold standard. So what does this mean? It means that Nixon ended what was called dollar convertibility, or the ability to go to the government and trade your dollar for a certain amount of gold. So this fixes the value of the dollar to the value of gold. So the value of your currency is sort of relatively constant in that, like it's this much gold, right? But it means that your macroeconomic policy is constrained by your gold supply. So why did Nixon take the US off the gold standard? And what does this have to do with balance of payments? Surprisingly everything. So, okay, what I've been describing about balance of payments, I've been describing modern balance of payments. If you go back and read stuff from the Fed from this era, when they talk about balance of payments, they're talking about flows of gold. In this period, every dollar that leaves the country represents an amount of gold. And the more of it that leaves the country, the more pressure that puts on the US gold reserves because, you know, there's less and less of it. This is what they're talking about when they talk about balance of payments right now. What's, what's interesting here, and this is something that's important for our modern purposes, is that the problem that the US was facing in the 50s and 60s that causes Nixon to do this when they're talking about having balance of payments deficits, which they are in this period, right? And this is why this law is written, is because this is a period where this stuff is talked about. The problem isn't a trade deficit, right? And this is very important. Trade deficits and balance of payments deficits, not the same thing at all. In fact, in this whole period, when the US is running these massive balance payments deficits to become a problem, they have a trade surplus, right? They have a trade surplus. So, like, okay, how are they, like losing gold then, right? Like, how are dollars flowing out of the country? Well, it turns out that what's actually making this a balance of account deficit, where, like, dollars are leaving the economy, which means Gold's leaving the US's vaults, is that the US is spending too much on its military. It's always military spending. It is always fucking military spending. Holy shit. It's the reason everything is broken. It's, it's, it's literally just always military spending. We're spending too much gold on the damn military, right? So the deficit, and we're talking about a balanced payments deficit. The actual deficit is that in order to pay for wars and to do military bases, they are spending money in other countries. And this is technically like part of the balance of payments, right? Because it's money leaving the country. And you know, like, technically speaking, the balance of payments as we've been talking about it, right? Like the account is balanced, but we keep spending dollars in order to obtain military bases, and then also in order to bomb Korea and then Vietnam. And the dollars have to come from somewhere. Now, again, the dollar at this point is gold. It represents a fixed amount of gold that the U.S. has. And those dollars are coming from the U.S. government. So that, that's what the actual, quote, unquote, deficit is in this case. Right? You will see this described as like, oh, my God, they're paying for stuff from the current account, from the capital account. No, no, no. Technically, yes, but like, like, what's, what's actually happening here is that the U.S. right, it's gold leaving the country because the U.S. is having to buy shit for military bases, right? And it's not getting enough gold back from trade to replenish the amount of gold that the US is spending on these military bases. Now, in theory, this is fine because it's technically speaking, you're spending dollars, and as long as no one tries to actually convert those dollars into gold, you'll be okay. Enter one Charles de Gaulle, President of France, who begins to, en masse, convert American dollars into gold in order to end the dollar's reign as the world reserve currency. Because he was pissed off at the US Running the world. This is not like Charles de Gaulle. Anti imperialist. De Gaulle does not want, like, the end of imperialism. De Gaulle wants there to be equal footing or more equal footing between the different imperialist powers. Right? He just wants France to be like a major world power, imperialist power as well. Right? The power the US Gets from being the world reserve currency is extremely important. So what is the reserve currency? The reserve currency is the currency that, like, all global trade is done in. And because it's the currency that all global trade is done in, all of the world's central banks have to hold like, a bunch of that currency. Right? And that's why it's called the reserve currency. But I say all of the world's central banks have to hold it, except for the United States, which does not have to hold dollars because it's our fucking currency. And if we want more, we can just hold print more, right? So this is technically called, like, seniorage privilege, but like, the power of this right is enormous. And the dollar status as the reserve currency is actually really important to us in terms of explaining these sort of balance of payments, deficits and crises. So, okay, here's the St. Louis Fed on why countries have to hold world reserve currencies. Quote, governments and or central banks keep, you know, like, reserve currency on hand for several reasons, including exchange management, insurance against sudden Loss of ability to pay for imports caused by a halt. Capital inflows such as foreign direct investment to the domestic market. Foreign purchases of domestic stocks or bonds or domestic borrowing from the rest of the world. Insurance for other economic contingencies such as wars or natural disasters. Now, the second one is what's of concern to us, right? It's insurance against sudden loss of ability to pay for imports. And that's what's commonly known as a balance of payments crisis in the current day, when you run out of dollars to pay for your imports or to pay for your foreign debt, which is a real issue too, right? Usually your money goes to the foreign debt and then you're out of currency and then you can't, you know, like, import more shit. This is a balance of payments crisis. And they're actually pretty common or decently common in a bunch of developing countries. And they are almost always completely catastrophic. It's one of the foremost causes of modern revolutions because when you have one of these balance of payments crises, you can't afford to fucking import things because you don't have enough dollars. You can't import oil or, you know, fertilizer or food because you don't have enough dollars to do it. And your government has gone through all of the dollar reserves, as I talked about in the ed. Sri Lanka is probably the most recent example. The country, you know, just ran out of dollars to purchase shit with. And the ensuing unbelievably hideous shit that everyone had to suffer through caused people to burn down the President's fucking mansion. You will know, and I've said this before, you will know if the US has a balance of payments crisis, because you will see the smoke and flames outside of your window. And it's not just like Sri Lanka, right? Like the revolution in Sudan. Like, the reason that there's a civil war in Sudan right now to some extent, is because of one of these crises that set off a revolution. Even though, you know what usually happens in these cases, right, is that a country has one of these crises and then someone, usually the International Monetary Fund, will give them a loan, and so they will give them dollars in exchange for, you know, like turning the entire economy of that country into a debt servicing machine, which means, you know, like, taking food out of the mouths of babies to pay that debt back. And this also often causes revolutions, right? Like, so like Sudan had a balance of payments crisis in, in like 2018, late 2018, 2019, and they eventually got an IMF bailout deal. But, like, the price of bread increased by 250%. And people drove Omar Al Bashir out of power. However, comma, you will note that I have been saying that these crises are caused because countries run out of dollars. But we can't run out of dollars because those are United States dollars. We can just fucking print them. We literally cannot have this kind of balance of payments crisis because it's all our own money and we can just print shit in our own money. Jesus Christ. This is so silly. Losing my mind. Like, it's not possible. You can't do it. Oh my God. Now, however, why is the law like this, right? Like, why is there a law written talking about the US as if it could have a balance of payments deficit Again, like, right up until 1971 when Nixon took the US off the gold standard, it actually was possible to, you know, make the US Run out of dollars, because you could run out of gold. And this is what like de Gaulle was trying to do, you know, by like making the US convert all of his dollars into gold. But Nixon just said, fuck it, the dollar is a floating currency now. And since its value isn't pegged to a certain amount of anything else, right? And that's the way it's been ever since. We can't have these crises. Now, the countries that have these crises in modern day are ones that peg their currency to like a specific amount of dollars, right? And they tend to run out of their reserves trying to like stabilize the value of their currency by offering conversions of their currency into the dollar at the official rate by like letting people go convert their currency into dollars. But again, we can't have that because it's dollars. We owe shit in dollars. And also in order to have like a full on balance payments crisis where you can't pay for things, right, it requires no one to be like, willing to lend you money. And it's like, okay, like, who is not going to lend the United States of America money? Like, are you kidding me? This is, this is the fakest crisis of all time. This bill, however, was passed again in like 1974, and it was only three years after the US was off the gold standard. And so people were like, okay, we're going to do this thing in case we ever go back to a situation where this stuff is possible. But right now, like, we literally structurally cannot have a balance of payments crisis. Like, we can't have one. You can't have a balance of payments deficits. This is not the same as a trade deficit. Trump is trying to argue that so we have a trade Deficit. Our Currents account, which is like the trade account, is like 4% below balance. But then if you look at the capital account and you put them together, it balances, because that's just how it works. Oh, that means we're in trouble and. Nonsense. Absolutely. Bullshit. He's also claiming that there's like, fundamental international payment problems, which, like. No, there aren't. Because fundamental international payment problems means you can't pay for your imports or like, your debt. And if we weren't able to do that, you would all know. So they're going to lose this lawsuit because this is the fakest crisis that has ever existed. And now you know how fake it is and also what balance of payments is. You know. Okay, I'm going to close on a story about this, which is that there is a scenario in which this knowledge has actually saved countries before. And specifically, like, the country that this saved was Cuba. There's like the Cuban revolution, right? And immediately after the Cuban revolution, the government, it's not, like, clear that they're communist yet. There's this very, very short window where it's like, not quite entirely clear what the fuck is going to be going on with this new, like, Cuban government. And the government sends Che Guevara to the US to negotiate with a bunch of American banks, right? And Che Guevara actually understands this stuff, right? He knows what balance of payments is. He knows. He's able to like, talk to all of the sort of Manhattan bankers who are talking about this stuff on their terms, right? And like, they literally, literally the line they say about him is like, yeah, he talks like a banker, right? He understands balance of payments. He understands all of this stuff. And what he's able to do, and this is critically, like, why the nation of Cuba, like, like why the Cuban revolution succeeded, was that he was able to get the US to give him all of his gold, like, because he was able to convince these bankers because he understood what they were talking about in their language, and he was able to convince the US government to get him all this fucking gold because he understood how this shit works. And that's why, like, Cuba was like, functional as a country after that, because they had managed to get all of their gold reserves which previously had been being held in the U.S. so, you know, you never know when you too might be at the head of a better revolution or you might be the one person in, in, in the new revolutionary coalition who understands what balance of payments is. And you too can get your gold out of the United States before the government realizes that you're communists and like, would have, like, locked it down and frozen it and taken the gold. So this is. But It Could Happen Here, the podcast that helps you take your country's gold reserves. Like Che Guevara. Oh, It Could Happen Here is a

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