#670: Why Central Banks Are Bringing Gold Home with Vince Lanci

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Why Central Banks Are Bringing Gold Home"

TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast (Episode #670 – Oct 13, 2025)
Host: Marty Bent
Guest: Vince Lanci (VBL), gold and macro specialist

Overview

In this engaging episode, Marty Bent sits down with Vince Lanci to dissect the sudden global trend of central banks repatriating (bringing home) their gold reserves. The conversation spans modern monetary policy, geopolitics (US, Europe, China, Russia), the gold and bitcoin markets, and the accelerating shift away from the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Vince provides deep insights on why gold’s global role is evolving, how China is weaponizing gold as collateral, the mechanics of market manipulation, and how bitcoin fits into this shifting monetary landscape.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Global Power Struggle: Currency Wars, Old Money & "Inter-Cabal" Fights

• Vince and Marty discuss how traditional power blocs (old European money, the US, China, BRICS) are scrambling for control in a rapidly changing world.
• European ideology vs. pragmatism: Vince notes that “European old money...they’re doubling down on ideology or wokeness...Germany's got no manufacturing anymore” ([02:00]).
• Squabbling elites: Marty frames the current environment as “an inter-cabal squabble...everyone jockeying for the new reference rate” ([06:15]).

Notable Quotes

• “Do you pick up what he's putting down in terms that England still controls the world?” — Marty Bent ([01:20])
• “He's become so patriotic that everything Trump does is viewed as good for us.” — Vince Lanci ([06:27])

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2. Gold’s New Role in the Global Financial System

a) China’s Gold Uptake and the HQLA Collateral Network

• China is not just buying gold for reserves, but turning it into a High Quality Liquid Asset (HQLA), so it can be used as loan collateral and project financing bypassing the US dollar.
• The Shanghai Gold Exchange (SGE) and its international division are building a network of vaults across BRICS countries. Gold used as collateral is increasingly visible, trusted, and can support cross-border lending.
• *“They're making sure people are trustworthy in gold...project financing...unlocking the buying potential of gold. Now you're competing—gold's going to compete with Treasuries.” — Vince Lanci ([19:00])

b) Central Banks Repatriating Gold

• The US and its allies are bringing home gold from London and other foreign vaults, to shore up sovereign collateral amid “collateral crises”.
• Gold is being reacquired and physically gathered, not necessarily for “gold bonds” or a return to the gold standard, but as a backstop in an uncertain world.

Notable Quotes

• “The US is now emptying London of its gold to get its collateral...a crisis of collateral.” — Vince Lanci ([28:30])

c) Global De-Dollarization and a New Paradigm

• The freezing of Russian reserves in 2022 was a turning point: it made the world realize US Treasuries aren’t the ultimate safe asset if political control can be exerted.
• Nations began buying more gold again (e.g., Brazil, Serbia) and repatriating it.
• Bank of America calculated the optimal central bank gold allocation is 30%, currently at 20% — implying potentially $2T of gold buying lies ahead, with price targets as high as $10,000/oz.

Notable Quotes

• “After [Russia’s assets] were frozen, that's no longer worth it [to hold Treasuries]...how can we work another type of collateral like Treasuries into our system to substitute for Treasuries?” — Vince Lanci ([39:00])

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3. Debunking the Gold Tariff Narrative

• Trump’s talk of gold tariffs isn’t economically serious — gold operates as an international loophole for barter and for trade accounting, and tariffs are used mainly for protecting local industries, not “critical” imports like gold, silver, or lithium.
• “They’re not going to tax or tariff gold. That’s complete horseshit...gold is money for them, anyway.” — Vince Lanci ([34:00])

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4. Inflation, Debt, and the Global Spending Race

a) Inflation Is Global, Not Just American

• Inflation drivers differ by region: US is reindustrializing, Japan & Europe ramp defense, China is building a social safety net.
• Every major power is “monetizing their debt”—printing money to finance what voters demand or what geopolitics necessitates.

Notable Quotes

• “Every country is spending for different reasons and every country is going to monetize their debt and it's a race to the bottom.” — Vince Lanci ([69:15])

b) US Political Response: Playing Catch-Up

• There is internally sophisticated analysis (e.g., Trump’s advisers know the terrain), but long-term US complacency as reserve currency means America is reactive more than proactive.
• Signs of catch-up: recent focus on critical minerals like copper, tariffs only on finished goods, and desperate moves to ensure control of supply chains.

Notable Quotes

• “We're always playing catch up because of our positioning.” — Vince Lanci ([50:00])

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5. Macro Market Warnings & the Path Forward

a) Are We Headed for an Asset Crash?

• Vince is “violently neutral” — he sees potential for an American revival, but fears the inertia of debt, bubbles, and insular bureaucracy.
• He mentions worrying patterns: “If I see a day where stocks are down and gold is up...that's when to be concerned.” ([72:50])
• References to the 1970s (asset and inflation cycles) as an analog for what’s possible now.

b) Fed Rate Cuts: No Good Exit

• Lowering rates now could hasten a crash; the market doesn’t buy that inflation is defeated.
• Bond vigilantes could punish premature easing, leading to outflows from treasuries and the dollar.

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6. Bitcoin vs. Gold: Collateral, Co-option, and the Real Threat

a) Market Manipulation and Futures Dominance

• The ETF and derivative markets allow large actors (banks, custodians) to suppress both gold and bitcoin prices through “rehypothecation” and paper trading.
• The US “co-opts” what it can’t kill — first by attempting propaganda, then by capturing liquidity via products like ETFs.
  • “If you can't kill it...you co-opt it. That's what they did with Bitcoin.” — Vince Lanci ([76:15])
• Historical parallel: US created futures markets for gold in the 1970s to shift demand away from physical, suppressing price for decades.

b) The Only Defense: Self-Custody and Real Use

• For bitcoin, self-custody and actual commercial/settlement usage are the path to independence.

• Dorsey’s Square efforts to integrate bitcoin for 4M merchants praised:

  • “It's not enough that it's a store of value, it has to be a currency.” — Vince Lanci ([87:00])

• The alternative is for bitcoin to become a “pet rock” asset, locked away in custodial “china closets.”

c) Bitcoin as Monetary Network

• Vince explores chartalist vs. Keynesian money theory, concluding bitcoin’s ledger quality makes it more “money” than gold, especially for cross-border use.
• “Bitcoin is a survivor. That's why it eventually wins.” — Vince Lanci ([98:48])

d) Memes, Alliances, and Generational Shifts

• Vince and Marty agree that gold bugs and bitcoiners are increasingly aligned against fiat debasement, despite some generational ribbing.
• “We're ideologically and philosophically aligned. We need to work together.” — Marty Bent ([100:27])

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On China’s Gold Strategy:
  "They're unlocking the buying potential of gold...now you're competing—gold's going to compete with Treasuries." — Vince Lanci ([19:00])

• On Financial Repression:
  "I've lived through the repression of [the] gold price...they're keeping the lid on it to accumulate it." — Vince Lanci ([10:29])

• On Bitcoin's Manipulation:
  “Every time someone buys a bitcoin at the BlackRock level, they're slamming a future...it's rehypothecation all over again...they've got bitcoin under control and it'll go up in price, but there's no one who's going to challenge the US on it right now.” ([79:00])

• On US Macro Cycles:
  "We're cutting in an economic borderline boom right now...last time we did that was 1973-74; gold was at the highs." — Vince Lanci ([53:40])

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• [11:45] - Shanghai Gold Warrants: Physical flows and China’s vault network
• [23:59] - Why BRICS countries are shifting away from US Treasuries; gold as new collateral
• [33:39] - Why gold tariffs are a myth; gold as a trade loophole
• [36:57] - Russian sanctions, reserve freezes & de-dollarization after Ukraine invasion
• [41:13] - Central banks rebalancing to gold; Bank of America study on gold allocation
• [46:43] - Did Trump’s team recognize the monetary shift or get caught flat-footed?
• [51:43] - Copper, energy grid expansion, and US industrial policy
• [60:24] - Are real recessions masked by CPI; analogies to Weimar Germany
• [66:20] - Inflation as a global, systemic issue; every region spending more
• [72:48] - Market crash signals; what would cause real panic
• [76:15] - Bitcoin ETFs, co-option, market structure, and futures manipulation explained
• [85:19] - Asian trading in Bitcoin disappearing as market moves US-centric
• [87:16] - Why Bitcoin must become an active currency, not just a “pet rock” asset
• [98:48] - Bitcoin’s survivability and inevitable niche in cross-border payments

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Conclusion & Final Thoughts

The episode masterfully connects the dots between geopolitical tension, monetary policy, the shifting role of gold, and the ongoing struggle for bitcoin’s independence. Vince Lanci’s expertise offers unique perspective on China’s strategy, gold market mechanics, and the future of sovereign assets.

Bottom line:

• Central banks are pulling physical gold home to regain control of collateral and hedge against a fracturing global monetary order.
• China is engineering a gold-backed, multi-vault network for BRICS, turning gold into an active financing tool—not just a static reserve.
• The US is belatedly responding by securing gold and key resources, but manipulation (in both gold and bitcoin) persists via derivatives and market structure.
• Bitcoin’s advantage is technical and network-based — but only if its users avoid being trapped inside centralized “china closets” or ETFs.

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Resources

• Victor Boylan (VBL) Substack: VBL Goldfix ([102:00])
• Follow on X/Twitter: @VBLGhost

Final Words:
"We're ideologically and philosophically aligned. We need to work together." — Marty Bent ([100:27])

Transcript

[Victor Boylan]

You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where.

[Marty Bent]

Central bankers are tripping over themselves to.

[Victor Boylan]

Devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitco. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Probably should be. Probably should be.

[Marty Bent]

I think this was the, the most enlightening pre record conversation I've had.

[Victor Boylan]

We should record that shit for your, for your premium people, right?

[Marty Bent]

We should have. We should have.

[Victor Boylan]

I, you know, I do that when I'm with Tom Luongo. We hit the tape before we hit the tape. I hit the tape on my phone, I go, let's go. We argue about something like music or some uber shit, you know.

[Marty Bent]

Tom is one of my favorite crazy uncles, recurring crazy uncles on this show.

[Victor Boylan]

He's totally, he's totally. Yeah, yeah. We definitely riff off of each other from different angles. I look at it from finances. I try and explain the world. He tries to explain the world from ideology. And together it's like we're both right or we're both just, you know, lying to each other. Who knows? All right, so I'm with you.

[Marty Bent]

Do you pick up what he's putting down in terms that England still controls the world? The crown of the world.

[Victor Boylan]

He needs a focal point. And that focal point. This is not going to be a negative statement. He seems to focus on a focal point and then he sees the tentacles coming out. I don't see the focal point. It may not be the king of England or the crown. You know, two years ago it was Davos and Wef and the Biden junta. That was his, that was his expression. And now he's gravitated towards the crown. I'm like, you know what I mean? When you look at things through the lens that I study and analyze things, which is like him, and that is all you do is you find out who benefits and who suffers. And you just keep eliminating people until you find out the one guy who's there. And I don't know that it's the crown per se, but there's definitely one thing that he said that's really true is that Europe in general is a plantation. Long time ago, he was talking about it this way. Europe's a plantation. They've feudalism and the people that are in power, want to stay in power. And the Europeans are still colonizing. They're still trying to protect their colonies. And I guess if you want to put a focal point on it, you can call it the crown. You can call it the people that operate the crown. I think I know from a friend of mine who's a banking executive here, that there's an ideological split and it's everywhere. And the ideological split is the. The European old money. I mean, they don't have anything there. I mean, I'm not. I'm not anti Europe like he is, but, you know, they're doubling down on ideology or wokeness. And Germany's got no manufacturing anymore. No, no, I agree with him. It's probably not that. In six months you and I will talk about this again. And he will say, well, I know who's pulling the strings of the crown now. He just keeps going up the line, right? It was like, I hate, but I hate Biden because of this. And I'm like, yeah, you're right. He goes. And then I will look at Europe and England in terms of trade. I'll say, well, this is what's going on here. That doesn't make sense. It always getting screwed, yada, yada, yada. And then I'll say, well, that's because the ideology is driving all the policy. Like I would say the ideology influences policy because I still believe that people can at least be semi rational. He's kind of dragging me that way, but he's like, no, no. Ideology determines everything with these people. And it's sad, pathetic, but it's like I'm looking at things differently now. For example, domestically, Kamala Harris, right. I don't care about the politics. I'm not a political person. Well, I identify her as what you would call a third generation feminist. So there's real feminists, then there's their children, and then there's the third generation. Why are you feminist? Because my mom was Kamala's third generation. I'm like, well, where did she get this training that I found out yesterday? Kamala Harris. I'm listening to the dead Kennedys, which is like, they have a song called. Are you familiar with the band?

[Marty Bent]

Yep.

[Victor Boylan]

So California uber owls, right? It's about Jerry Brown, you know, the hippie who wanted to run for president when Reagan won. And I'm reading the lyrics, I'm like, yes, it's pretty funny. It's really cool. And then, you know, where's Jerry Brown now? Boom. I did one of those things on chat GPT And Kamala Harris came up, and his name came up in his bio. She was Attorney General for California for seven years under him. And I'm like, oh, that's where you got it? And they just got off the deep end, those people. Anyway. All right, cool. So I agree with Tom on a lot of things, and when I disagree, I let him know. And it's usually minor stuff. Or when I don't agree or disagree, I just sit back and just watch him froth and we have fun. Brings on to kind of give him a sounding board to do his thing.

[Marty Bent]

It's great. Typically, for some reason, we always record on, like, late Friday afternoon. We do record. And that's like him after a week of screaming at people and dissecting things. And I don't know if I get him at his most tired point or when he's distilled his thoughts most clearly.

[Victor Boylan]

But they're always incredible conversations if they're not distilled clearly. I see the picture of the guy from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia with the map. Whoa. I'll say. Okay, timeout. Could you pause this? What the fuck are you talking about, Tom Pepper? I'm like, that sounds stupid, but it's not wrong. That sounds. It's not wrong. Oh, shit, he might be right. And I just walk away going, all right, I guess I have to look at it that way now.

[Marty Bent]

Yeah. I will say he definitely dragged me towards his viewpoint in terms of this, for lack of a better term, inter cabal squabble. Like changing the reference rate to intercobal.

[Victor Boylan]

Yeah, that's right. That's what it is. Inter cabal. That's a good phrase. You should get a dot com on that or something like IO Inter cabal squabble. The only thing that I've identified that I think that. That. And I'm saying it to you and I'll say it to him, but I haven't said it to him yet, but I'm saying it to you. He has become so patriotic. I'm very patriotic, but he has become so patriotic that everything Trump does is viewed as good for us. And I have said that as well. Meaning Trump's an accelerationist. Whether he's good or bad, I don't care. We're going to get to where we have to get faster because of him. But I don't think he's the 3D chess people. That's a person that people do.

[Marty Bent]

I think he's a people pleaser. He just wants to be liked, right?

[Victor Boylan]

Oh, yeah, He's A. Would you say people pleaser?

[Marty Bent]

Yeah, that's right.

[Victor Boylan]

He's got a personality disorder and I'm not saying that lightly. He's a narcissistic personality disorder. I studied him when I was in New York City for years as one of the things to look at. And yeah, and it becomes a people pleaser. He's constantly polling and thank God because he doesn't get married to an idea and he can change gears if he's wrong. On the other hand, it really kind of makes it look like he's out of his mind.

[Marty Bent]

Yeah, yeah. I was watching Scott Adams. He did his Daily show yesterday and he was highlighting like the Hamas is a real deal that was signed. Who knows if it'll stick, but nobody thought he could do that. And I think he's catering to like the people pleasing nature of like just, oh, you're right.

[Victor Boylan]

And that's something that Tom actually point out. He goes like, this is me and you versus Tom in his part conversation. Tom, do you know what Trump does on Thursday? He dumps some ideas to get them distracted. He does something else on Monday. It's brilliant. And I'll say, Tom, he tries stuff. If it doesn't work, he moves on to something else because he wants to keep the press on him in positive light. He's like, oh no, he's got a plan. I'm like, no, he doesn't. Tomorrow, you know, anyway, the point is the result is the same. But I agree with you. That's, that's, that's true. Right? People pleaser. Who, like right now he's, he's not like, you know, the economy he's talking about. The funny thing is, is because he's screwing up on, let's say he's being perceived as screwing up on terror. I mean, look, he's not making, he's not getting more popular. Right. He's losing popularity. So, so what's he doing? He goes, well, where can I pivot to next? Oh shit, let me work. He's working on things all the time and if Gaza works, his popularity goes up. I mean, look, after the midterms he's done in terms of influence and so he kind of recognizes that.

[Marty Bent]

I mean, last point on this. But like he did have msnbc, abc, CBS sort of giving him flowers. And Obama, while not explicitly mentioning him in the tweet, did say that was a good thing, that his peace deal is coming. So it seems like he is dragging people in his erection. But one thing that Trump is famous for is being a big Fan of gold. This is your expertise. And why I wanted to bring you on, obviously, is gold. I think it's still trading over $4,000 right now. Silver screaming I told you we've had.

[Victor Boylan]

Two people right now. Fucking idiot. Don't record that. Turn that mic off. Let me see what I see here. Yeah, Trump and gold, that's your Scott Bessant thing. And that's where bitcoin comes in. You don't announce you're going to create an SPR for Bitcoin. You just buy gold's 4019. Jesus Christ. Whenever I see gold up $40, I go, all right, what did Trump do today? The Gaza deal just blow up or something?

[Marty Bent]

He called out China. He said China's not.

[Victor Boylan]

Oh, tariffs are back on the table.

[Marty Bent]

China's not cooperating with the rare earth metals deal that they want to do.

[Victor Boylan]

Right, that's right. He said. Right. Stocks are down, gold is up. What's the dollar doing? And dollar's down. Yeah. The market's acting recessionary. I think I just saw something come across, a tape that he's. He's threatening to do more tariffs. Yeah. Trump threatens China tariffs. There you go. Doesn't take much to get gold going right now. And by the way, with the context of bitcoin, I do want to say something to your audience about that because having lived through the repression of gold price, all your people are smart enough, they know how it's happening. But I just want to confirm it and give them details of how it's being done, because they're keeping the lid on it to accumulate it. That's what they're doing. They're what. They're trying to wash people out. That's what they're doing. And I'm not even paranoid. Anyway. All right, I'm ready for you.

[Marty Bent]

All right, we'll get to that later. Let's focus on gold first. Like I was saying, I've had two people on the last three months caught my eye. Actually, probably last two months caught my eye two months ago. The chart of the Shanghai Warrens. Oh, yeah, going up. Cover that parabolically. What is happening there?

[Victor Boylan]

I'm sorry, what.

[Marty Bent]

What is happening there?

[Victor Boylan]

Are we starting now?

[Marty Bent]

Yeah.

[Victor Boylan]

Okay.

[Marty Bent]

We've been recording for 11 minutes.

[Victor Boylan]

Oh, nice. Cool. All right, so, okay. Shanghai warrants. All right, so the fact is, and I know you know this and your people know this as well, but the fact of the matter is, the Shanghai. Shanghai has been adding warrants, which are claims on gold in the exchange. Now, generally speaking, the Shanghai warrant Float is I'm going to make a number up, but it's going to be give you an idea of the scale. If you have the chart for your people, that'll help them as well. About 4. Like 4 on a scale of 1 to 104, you know, 4,000 warrants or 400 warrants. But it's a small number and it's very regular. And it goes like this. If you're looking at a chart, if you have chartists out there, it'll go sideways. And what that is is that those warrants in general are tied to people arbitraging the physical, to the futures of China. That's all it is. Right. There's not a lot going on there, but a couple of months ago, it starts to ramp. And there you go. That's it. Yeah, it starts to ramp. So it starts to ramp before 2025, it starts to ramp. Frankly, when Trump started doing the tariff thing and it's getting aggressive now. Now, I've been watching this for a couple of months with interest, but no conclusion. And just to stay with the facts of that for a second there, what they're doing is they're locking up gold. That gold is being locked up. And China has been importing gold hand over fist. And they advertise that now because they're broadcasting to their BRICS partners, their junior partners, that see, we've got the gold, we've got the gold, we're telling you, we've got the asset that allows us to get off of Treasuries, which allows us to get off of dollars. And they're doing that. But what are they using the gold for is really what I think. There's probably only three people have a clue, at least publicly, that are talking about it. One of them, I hope, is me. Another is Eric Young. He and I are friends. We've come to the same conclusion from different points of view. And there's someone else out there I'm not going to mention because I don't know. But here's the situation. And it has to do with gold and the yuan, the Chinese currency, and it has to do with trust. So in the west, we recently changed gold to a Tier one asset per Basel iii. And that means. Right, so everyone knows that terminology here. All right, good. So we changed it to Tier one Basel iii. And we did that because what it does is it allows the piggy bank of your gold to be recognized on your balance sheet. So my balance sheet now recognizes the asset threats at its full value. Used to be tier three. Tier three, only 50% of its value is recognized. So if I needed 100%, you sold it. It was. The structure was made for you to sell gold. They make it tier one, you don't have to liquidate it, so you hold it and you get the full benefit on your balance sheet. And when you do that, if you're, let's say you're a central bank, I don't know if it applies to central banks yet, but it, it offsets your losses. You have a bigger piggy bank, you have a bigger savings account, but you can't touch it, you can't monetize it, you can't loan it, you can't leverage it. It's just a pet rock, which is what they want, because if you let the pet rock out, it becomes a potential replacement for the dollar and for Treasuries. So that's Basel, that's Basel 3. And Tier 1, the next level above this is where China comes in. The next level above Basel III and tier one is what's called hqla. That's a high quality liquid asset. If they're not familiar with that, I'll explain it very quickly. HQLA means not only is it Tier one, but it's so liquid, it's so robust and so continuous that we trust it to be used as collateral in financing hqla. So essentially, what is hqla? Treasuries, the biggest bond market in the world. The argument was made in Europe that gold is not HQLA for various reasons. And, you know, depending on how you slice and dice the technicals of it, maybe it's not, but if you slice and dice the tentacles another way it is. The World Gold Council put out a report and I read that report and that report said, gold is not hqla. And I went, oh, shit. So it's just a pet rock still. It's just all pet rock. I moved on. And then I went back to this chart that you showed and I went, what the hell are they doing with that? And then I talked to a couple friends and I said, oh, shit. And then I did some. What I did then was I did deep dive research on the BRICS behavior at their summit this year in May. And that summit, which did not get a lot of press this year, there wasn't a lot of hype for various reasons, but I wrote five articles on it. And one of the articles was I identified from piecing together articles everywhere, from talking to two sources in mainland China, from talking to someone in Hong Kong, that China, to assuage fears of the other brics people had said, look, we want you to use the yuan for currency. And let's say you're a Saudi Arabian, you're like, okay, I'll use it, I'll use it. But you know what, I may not trust the US but the US dollar is better than the yuan. What are you backing it with? Well, we're backing with our economy. We're not going to back it with gold. But I'll tell you what we will do. We'll do something the US doesn't do. We'll let you convert it into gold freely, no problem. And Saudi Arabian said, everyone, I'm just. For instance, they said, that's great. Where will the gold stay? This is like five years ago. Where will the gold stay? Well, it'll stay in China. They're like, nuh, that's not going to work. We just ended this problem with the us. Everyone's pulling their gold back. And so China comes up with a plan. And the sge, which is a Shanghai Gold Exchange, that's their physical exchange, they create an international division, SGE International sgei. And the SGEI starts partnering with vaults in various BRICS countries and they create a network. So I'm Saudi Arabia, I give them my oil, they give me yuan, and I say, you know what, I want to convert this into gold. Will you make me a market? And they do china and then 1 yuan gets converted to gold. Where's the gold go? It goes into their vault. So in a sense, in a crypto way, they decentralized the or in non crypto you say they diversify the geographic risk of ownership of the physical metal. But they're still accounting for it. It's like old school blockchain. It's like Fred Flintstone chain. And so that made the Saudis and the other countries in the BRICS more comfortable holding yuan. I could convert it to gold. I could see the gold. I don't have to worry about it going anywhere. I don't have to worry about it. I don't have to worry about an accountant going in and auditing them to an extent. And they gradually got more comfortable with it. At the same time they got less comfortable with US Treasuries. And so at the BRICS summit, the Chinese had homework. And their homework was to internationalize the yuan and to internationalize gold ownership. And this is what they announced. Hong Kong, Singapore, the Golden Corridor. I'm not sure if I named that or they named that, but there's like a golden corridor, Singapore, Macau, all along this Area, the Shanghai Cooperative Organization. And they're saying all these vaults are now connected, which means you could arbitrage back and forth, which means every country can have their gold close enough to see, to visit. And I went, this is great. I see what they're doing. They're making sure people are trustworthy in gold. And I said, well, what are they doing about the volatility in gold? Well, because the US can spoof it lower. Anyone could spoof it lower. It's not that deep. Well, turns out they solved that too. Now, I don't know if it's going to work, but they solved that. Their solved was the gold will be carried on everyone's balance sheet according to a moving average, not according to the price at the end of the day. So 200 day moving average. And let's face it, over the long run, gold holds value because it's gold, right? I mean, there's no synthetic gold yet. At least not, not, not, not in large size yet. Okay, so, so they create the network of vaults. And I go, all right, this is for the brick summit. They address the concept of price volatility. I go, all right, that's good. And then I read something I wrote on it and I went, oh, shit. This is what they're going to do next, right? And this is what they're going to do. They announced that they're going to be partnered with vaults in countries that need to build infrastructure. So you're thinking about the African BRICS countries. Why? Well, I'm a country in Africa, Ghana, and I've got a shit ton of gold and it's just sitting there. And if I want to use it, I have to give it to the imf. And they give me treasuries and I borrow money and I build a road. But I want to do business with China. China is building roads and airports and cutting deals because they're just, they're colonizing economically. We know that China says you can use your gold. So I'm an African country that needs an airport built to simplify it. And I've got gold, I put it in the vault, which is in the system of the Shanghai exchange setup. And then China loans me the money on the gold directly. Not through Treasuries, not through some swap deal. The gold is there, trying to trust them. And then I take the yuan and I go back to China and I say, build me an airport. And so what they've done is they created project financing. Now I had gotten that far with this, I'm like, okay, this is really good. They're unlocking the buying potential of gold. You know, you own stocks, I own stocks. Can you borrow money against it and do stuff? Yeah. And if you use your leverage smartly, you're fine. I went, all right, so they're going to unlock gold and that makes it high quality collateral asset. I went, high quality collateral asset, hqca. And then I read this report, high quality liquid asset. Oh, shit. And then I went back to my bond days and I went, what is an HQLA used for now? I'll use a word that everyone knows, repo. If you want to get something done in the world, you pledge your Treasuries into repo, which is theoretically you're selling them and you buy them back as collateral and they give you money and that's what the repo market is. I have an asset that's high quality asset. It's a Treasury here. Loan me the money, I'm going to build the road and I'll pay you back on the back end. I mean that's what we do with Treasuries. And the HQLA pool is, I think it's more, but I'm going to throw you a lower number, $17 trillion, $20 trillion. And of that pool between, depending on how you measure, between 50 and 70% is US treasuries and none of it is gold. It's Treasuries or sovereign bonds that we deem are high quality enough. China's bonds aren't high quality enough. The BRICS won't even buy the Chinese bonds. But I'm going to pause for a second here because I'm talking a lot. Is there anything you wanted to, you know, I don't want to.

[Marty Bent]

Yeah, because this is, we've been covering this. Not this specifically, but this idea of this diversification away from the dollar treasury system and what are the mechanics? That's one thing I've been saying for years as a bitcoiner is like all these countries should just skip to Bitcoin instead of some bricks back currency because they're not going to be able to trust each other, which is like what you're getting into now. Who wants to buy Chinese bonds? Who wants to buy Russian bonds? Who wants to buy Saudi bonds?

[Victor Boylan]

That's exactly right.

[Marty Bent]

They're working around it.

[Victor Boylan]

Right. They're working around it. And I think China's endgame to that point is eventually they'll get everyone to buy Chinese bonds, whether it be stablecoin, Chinese bonds. But that's the point is they want everyone to Own Chinese bonds, but they're just replicating what the US did, probably a little bit better, using it at a more decentralized way. Yeah. But I agree, that's what they're doing. So here I am going, high quality collateral asset. I went, oh, yeah? And I went, oh, shit, now you're competing. Gold's going to compete with Treasuries. Then I went back to my European analysis and I went, wait a minute, but it's not hqla, so it can't be repo. Then I called a friend of mine on the mainland, I go, are you guys going to use this as a repo asset so you can unlock the financing of that poor country in Africa that wants to do this or wants to do that or so Saudi Arabians can load money to the country in Africa using gold as collateral because they have a ton of money? And he basically said, yeah. I said, well, how do you do that? This is where I was a little bit not wonkish enough. He goes, well, you get it. You turn it into a high quality liquid asset. We designate it for our half of the world as hqla, and then we put it into repo. And then I went, and I went back to the chart. And then I talked to a friend of mine, Eric, Eric Young, and he's popular on Twitter, King Kong. And I went, eric, HQLA you need to be to become repo. And I think they're doing that for all this mine stuff and this project stuff. I go, where's the gold? He went, that's what the warrants are for. They're locking the gold down. And at some point, again, this is theory. We're not sure yet, it's conjecture. At some point, we believe they're either, reasonably speaking, they're either testing the system out. They've tested things before and I've seen them test it. They're either testing the system out, stress testing it for warrants or whatever, or they're accumulating it to put it in the Hong Kong vault, which just opened. You put that in the Hong Kong vault and what do you have? Hong Kong is the buffer zone between China and the rest of the world. And you have your Switzerland for gold, and that's where your first repos will be. He and I concluded separately, coming from different points of view. So China is going to, I believe, has a very good chance or intensive. They have to. Otherwise the goal just to stow up that rock, they need to unlock its leverage and buying power. Now that everyone trusts it, now that everyone's in the process of trusting yuan, in the process over there, they want to say, okay, now you can borrow yuan against your gold and you can see the gold and you can build an airport. And it's like, great, let's do it. And they drop the neo Keynesian concepts and they do this, which is a hard money concept, and they're going to start doing it. That's what I think is going to happen. And I wrote a whole, I wrote like almost like a short academic style paper on it, St. Joe's Prep style paper. Right. And I had to drop that in since we figured that out, like it's the Jesuits. So I look at all that, I go, why the hell else would the warrants be going? A lot of people are saying, oh, they're doing this. They want to do the 3D chess thing. No, the warrants are rarely used because they're about arbitrage. They're just like shfe, which is the futures exchange. It's kind of like COMEX versus lbma. Comex London, Comex London. It's going back and forth, but then it just starts ballooning and it's not going anywhere. I mean, ultimately just makes the price go up. But I think they're getting ready to do that now. I want to add one anecdotal piece. It started happening before the end of the year, right on that chart you have. And it's since ramped up even more. What else happened at the end of the year? The US Started repatriating gold. US Started. Silver's on the count. Right? Okay. US stocks repatriated gold. Now, did we buy the gold or we're just bringing gold back that was ours? I don't know. I mean, I actually do know, but it's not important. What's important is that the US is now emptying London of its gold to get its collateral. But you have to, like Zoltan Pozar. It's a crisis of collateral. You need to have the collateral there. You need to say, this is my gold. If you're going to borrow it, it needs to be there. If you're going to borrow against, it needs to be there. So the US Starts calling the gold back. And I also noticed that when US Is calling the gold back, gold's not being bought by China. I have a chart. When the US Buys, China does it. When China buys, the US doesn't. So there's your. What's the word you use? Cabal inter. Cabal squabble into cabal squabble. That's exactly it. It's the War of the Roses, but it's a divorce. But again, I'll give you that chart. It's visually interesting, but I talked to someone in the political side and I think he's well connected. But what he said to me is that makes sense. I said, why do we start bringing gold back? And my theory was we started bringing gold back because we figured out we needed for something. I didn't know what for. If you talk to one person, it's we're going to have gold bonds. We're going to have a gold standard. Talk to all the bugs, right? No, we're not going to have gold bonds. That's my opinion. I'd like it to happen. Judy Shelton, I respect her and I think she's right and at one time I agree with her. But I think gold bonds would undermine the regular treasury market. Oh, gets the gold bond. Why would we sell people bonds with gold in it? We could just sell them paper. The second one is gold standard. No, we can't go back to gold standard. It's the end of the world if we do that. You can't do it, in my opinion. A use for gold? Well, yeah, the commercial banks can start throwing into blockchain and stablecoins and they create a new ETF type of product. The new product, like, all right, that's good. But there was more bought than should have been bought or more delivered. Some of it was going on the comex, some of it wasn't, you know, going to the treasury. And so I talked to my friend, I said, do you think that's related? He goes, oh yeah. He goes, I think the US finally paid attention to what they were doing and said, well, if they're getting theirs and there's a chance that gold becomes a competitor to the US If I want to finance a project in Africa, I may need gold too. So let's get our gold back. And so we ramped the gold back. You saw Trump flip flop. We're going to tariff gold and silver. We're not going to that. Those are just sorry, like them or don't. Those are idiotic things to do. But they work because when he does them, when he does them, the market tells him if he's right or wrong immediately, you know, he's instant feedback.

[Marty Bent]

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[Victor Boylan]

Yeah, excuse the. I mean I knew. Let's just start with the tariffs on gold silver story. But tariffs of Gold. You cannot tariff gold because gold is the intent. Bitcoin is going to be as well. But gold is the intentional, unintentional loophole to avoid sanctions. Everyone does it. So this is gold. Well, is it money? No, it's gold. It's a good. I'm buying a good from you, Right? It's a good. It's, it's, it's barter. You're giving me a jet and I'm giving you gold. It's barter. And so that avoids the monetary. That avoids the sanctions. But because gold is used for nothing and it's a brick, it's gold. So it's money. It may as well be money. It's not good for anything else. And so that's a loophole that exists in the world. Russia uses it, we use it. I'll give you an example as a Martin Armstrong example. When Japan looks at the US and says, this is not hypothetical. In the 90s, when Japan has. There's supposed to be a trade relationship. You have to buy this much from us, we have to buy that much from you. Well, what Japan does is. Japan used to go like this. All right, we're not buying enough stuff from the U.S. what are we going to buy? Cars? No, let's buy some gold. You buy American gold, it's a money laundering operation. You buy American gold, you take it, it counts as an import, it counts against your trade deficit. And then you take the gold and you put it back in London and you get out of it. It's a laundromat. So gold is used that way. Gold is used to satisfy the legal fine print on trade deficits, and that's where that went. So they're not going to tax or tariff gold. To put it simply, one of the words that I use a lot is mercantilist. But I don't want it to be like a catchphrase. But the bottom line is, if you look at the concept of mercantilism, you tax what you, you tax imports of what you make, and you don't tax imports of what you need. And we need gold, we need silver, we need lithium. You don't threaten the tariff. Lithium. And so gold is that loophole item that allows us to circumvent tariffs, and we don't close it because it's kind of like honor among thieves. We all do it. So the tariffs being a reason to bring gold to them, that's complete horseshit. It was complete horseshit then. I saw it then, and it's complete horseshit now. In fact, like a month or two ago. Didn't Trump do that? Didn't Trump say we might tax the gold? And gold went crazy. I mean, I know he did that, right? He said, we're going to tax bullion. And the bullion banks were like, whoa, you can't do that. Because all they do is take gold, put it in a safe, short it against it and take the money and then go out and buy Aussie bonds or something. Buy, you know, Nvidia. So he changed that right away. That was Rule 282. Changed that right away for gold. And there will be no tariffs on monetary bonds. Your gold chain, they might tariff that, but once it's melted down, they can't tariff it anymore, and that's it. So gold will not be tariffed. Gold's money for them anyway.

[Marty Bent]

Yeah. And tying this all together, too, I mean, before we hit record. So we got to touch on the Russian war because that really ties into this, too. Is that the catalyst for this big movement? And we've been prepping for this for over three years, but that was really. The treasury freezing in 22 was the last straw.

[Victor Boylan]

It was. And last straw is a good way to look at it. Because our biggest trade partner, China, raised concerns with us after the financial crisis. They're like, okay, we own a lot of treasuries and you're printing all this money. And they were convinced that everything will be all right. And during that time around 2014, with the whole Ukrainian thing, this is the geopolitics summit, right. Russia said, you know what? The US Is meddling. We don't want to deal with this anymore. We don't want our treasures. And they started de$izing. And they tried to bring. This is from someone who was involved in the conversations. Russia approached China and said. And said, we're de$izing. Are you going to de$ize? And China's like, no way. You out of your mind? We can't do that. We're not going to do that. We're still too tied closely together. China, little by little, is selling treasuries, but nothing crazy, but they're buying gold and it's not public. They're not really saying we're buying gold, they're just buying it. And then they get into the World Trade Organization. A little bit more time goes by in 2022, the US sanctions and Europe sanctions them for invading Ukraine. Now, for anyone who's not familiar, and I know that you are just briefly, Russia had most countries that use dollars, and every country does use dollars, has dollars in this global network called Swift. And Swift is essentially a big network of ATMs. And that money's in there, and your assets are in there. And it's basically all Treasuries. And you borrow against the Treasuries and you do what you have to do. Throughout most. I'm not a historian. Throughout most wars, nobody seizes anybody's money. They don't do that. So Russia invades Ukraine, and the US and Europe just decide to freeze all their assets, essentially confiscating their assets. Now, right or wrong, justified or not, every other country out there that has money in it says on the BRICS side, it's like, you know what? These guys have been keeping the price of gold down. They've been keeping the price of oil down. We can't make any money. We live off natural resources. We're poor. And they just took all the wealth from Russia on nuclear power. They could do that to us anytime they want. And they started knocking on China's door and saying, okay, we're ready, let's do it. And it started to accelerate, and China started buying gold very publicly to show them they meant business. And in 2022, the rest of the world outside the G7 said the only reason to own Treasuries was because of the guarantee that the US would never take it from them as a counterparty. And that made it more beneficial than gold with the interest rates. And after this, that's no longer worth it. How can we work another type of collateral like Treasuries into our system to substitute for Treasuries? And, you know, everyone's awareness had been raised up because of crypto and Bitcoin. And all of a sudden we also have the inflation in the us People become aware of it. And China starts selling bonds and buy gold, and they all start doing it, even just to bring in a present day. The last time Brazil bought gold was in 2021. And now Brazil just bought, I forget how much, 15 and a half tons this month. They haven't bought gold in five years, four years. And so now they're buying. So countries are de dollarizing even more. Even the countries that are our friends are repatriating their gold from us, Serbia. Whether they're friends or not, it's hard to say. But yeah, that's a great chart. That's a great chart.

[Marty Bent]

Yeah, I pulled this up because the inflection of 22, particularly on the gold part of the chart is pronounced.

[Victor Boylan]

So let's see, is that share of reserves. Yeah, that's actually an important point. So a lot of people will look at that. So that's. What's that showing? Gold is in the process of eclipsing US Treasuries as a share of the central bank reserves. Right. Okay. I have something to add to that. It's not me. Bank of America did a study about six months ago, and what they were trying to figure out, at least publicly, they probably already knew if central banks are buying gold. The word they use is diversify out of the dollar. How much gold should they buy to have an optimal diversification of their portfolio? Bank of America did the analysis and they said it's not efficient frontier, but it's similar to it. They said the optimal amount of their reserves in. In gold for all the central banks that report to the IMF is 30% and it's currently at 20%. So as a percentage, you should have 30% gold, maybe 50% dollars, and 20% other currencies. And so they optimize and they're basically doing a trade wave. How much trade do I do that I need gold for? That's going to go up. And I had that report and I broke it down. I've shared it with subscribers. Then you go into ChatGPT and you say, how much money is that? And it was like $1.9 trillion in gold. Now, are they going to buy it overnight? No, they're going to buy it over time. And it's probably. And then Goldman Sachs comes out with a report that says, we're not going to say what we think the optimal amount is, what we think they're going to be buying from three to five years. Okay, they want to buy $2 trillion worth of gold over three to five years. What does that do to the market? It drives the price to potentially $10,000. It just does. If they do it depending on how patient they are. And every time, to your point before we started, every time Trump says, I'm not putting up with China, what does gold do? It rallies because a central bank somewhere says, oh shit, let's buy a little bit more. So, yeah, I mean, that's it. The dollarization started with the Russian war and it accelerated something that was already on the table to happen. And it's not going to. It's not going to go away. We're talking about a decade of this probably.

[Marty Bent]

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[Victor Boylan]

To bitcoin gold Bitcoin?

[Marty Bent]

Oh yeah, anything part of this debasement trade?

[Victor Boylan]

Okay, so what was the first question again, because that was interesting. That was an interesting.

[Marty Bent]

On the geopolitical side where.

[Victor Boylan]

Right, right. We cut off flat footed.

[Marty Bent]

Yeah. Or the percent. Because obviously you had that famous Besant interview at the Manhattan Institute where he's talking about the global monetary reordering that he wants to be a part of. Like, in my mind, it's like, okay, he seems to know that something's going on, wants to be in that position. But you look at the, the volatility of Trump's positioning, throwing things out there, backing away, pivoting somewhere else. Like, do they actually know what's happening? Are they flat footed?

[Victor Boylan]

Yeah, I think we'd have to have like a, you know, sit down and have a beer or pizza or something and say, all right, what are they doing in the room together? And, you know, some people are like, you know, it's a master plan. And some people are like, he doesn't know what he's doing. And I personally think from the study that I've done of him over the years in the 90s and always when I was in New York, on Wall Street, I personally think that Trump will find someone that he likes to listen to, that he will, who knows how to not be alpha, but be like a consigliere. And this time it's Besant. And I think Besant said, this is where we're going, this is where they're going. We want to get there. Let's take care of this or that first. And so eventually, Trump's like, I want to make America great again. I understand we need to do manufacturing, but do that. Tell me the plumbing of this. And so Besset does that, and he basically says, eventually we're going to have to have more gold. We're going to have to have something. We're going to have to solidify the dollar. It's all about the debt that we have. We're going to have to monetize the debt. And this is where I think it's a combination of prepared and flat footed. This is like where I come down. It sounds like a compromise, but it's really not prepared in the sense that I think there are smart people like Scott Bessette who know what's going on and know the end game. Right. Flat footed in a sense, that because we are the global reserve currency and because we've been able to screw up for decades and get away with it, that incumbency, you're the champ. You always get the extra vote, I think that has made us complacent and so even someone as sharp as Scott Bessant, I think he's sharp, might say, yeah, this is going to be a problem, but we can come back to that. We can always buy time later on. And the reason I'm not just making that up is because I had a conversation with the CEO of Scottsdale Mint. And so he's very heavily involved in the industrial side of metals, copper and silver. And we were talking back and forth and, and we were talking like you and I are talking now, and it's like, you know what, why do we not care about copper? For example, China has been taking scrap copper out of the US for years. And we both concluded we don't care about it because we have copper or because we've just got bigger fish to fry right now, right? Same thing with silver. China has been going into Latin America and buying silver in raw form before it gets to the exchange. So the supply never hits. So it's like pre mining silver, you know. And I went, why? And he's like, yeah, they're doing that. I go, it's called silver concentrate. I go, why? Why do we not care really? Well, because silver really isn't that important. You know, it's important to us. We're in a little bit of a bubble. So Josh said, he goes, but copper is important. Everyone's talking about copper, even if the price isn't doing the crazy stuff. And sure enough, he comes back from an event, right, a month before they list silver as a critical mineral. And he says for some reason, the federal government has mobilized to protect our copper supply. Now is what he shared with me, what I can share that. He told me we have a big processing plant for scrap in Atlanta. I forget the name. He goes, they're locking it down. They're not letting any silver. He's talking about copper. They're letting copper leave anymore. They're making sure all the roads lead to this plant. They're centralizing. That's what the government's doing. They centralize. He goes, we're serious about copper now. And then the tariffs came out. I went, oh, so to my point, as half cocked as it is, I think we are smart enough to know what's going on. I think we do know what's going on and we think we have all the time in the world. And somebody sounds an alarm and they go, let's lock that plant down. So I think when that happened, you also saw us started repatriating gold and silver. And therefore I believe that we're playing catch. Up. But we always can play catch up because of our positioning. Does that make sense?

[Marty Bent]

Yeah. No. As it pertains to copper, it makes a ton of sense considering the sort of expansion of the energy grid that's necessary. Yeah, yeah, it has been deemed necessary. I think it's critically necessary, but.

[Victor Boylan]

Right.

[Marty Bent]

Mothers may have another opinion, but it seems abundantly clear that even without. Even before the AI boom, the data center boom, it was clear to me. I've been talking about it since 2018. I was very anti ESG energy is good. Cheap, abundant energy equates to human flourishing. Like, we should be expanding our grids. Our grids are unstable. And I think, luckily for us, this administration recognizes that now and has made it a point to really lean into the energy sector specifically. And copper is a huge part of that. You need copper throughout that whole supply chain.

[Victor Boylan]

That's right. The copper story is interesting because in there you could see how Trump screwed up, but reaffirmed it. He initially said about. Right when he remember how copper had that spike, he made an announcement that we're going to tariff all copper imports. And I immediately called Josh and I go, why the hell would we tariff copper imports? He goes, well, we don't really need to buy copper because we have our own raw copper. What we don't have is we don't have fabrication facilities, we don't have the manufacturing. I went, okay, fine. I go, but it still doesn't make sense. And sure enough, a couple days later, he said, now this is. This is. It's probably didn't hit the press this way, but this is the fact we tariffed finished goods in copper. So you and I, we go buy a copper weather vane over in Africa, we bring it back, it gets tariffs. Right. But then they made a carve out. And this is to your point about energy. The carve out was semi finished copper goods were not going to tariff. And so a semi finished copper good. Is an electric cathode because we don't make them and we need them. To your point about energy? So we were like, nope, you can't bring that weather vane in here. You can't bring in that copper kettle here. Cathodes. Oh, yeah, you could bring them all in. We want them all. And so copper is that important. And I think it's become obvious that we need it. So that's like the point of the spear. Whatever copper does, other things will do. And I agree with you.

[Marty Bent]

Yeah, it's very interesting times. Are you optimistic about our ability to navigate this reshuffling of the board. Politically, on the monetary side.

[Victor Boylan]

I'm violently neutral. Meaning I will wake up and say, yes, this can happen. And then I'll wake up and say, this doesn't make sense. And right now I'm wondering, this doesn't make sense side. So the yes, this can happen side goes like this. It's pretty simple. It goes, all right, we need time. We're going to have 5% inflation for the next five years, give or take. I'm just making a number up. And we're going to. That inflation is going to be used to retool the economy. We'll build manufacturing, and then we'll export our deficit by buying things because we can't get anyone to finance our deficit. We have to sell things. I'm with you. This is Bessett. We need cheap energy, we need a weak dollar, and we need to build stuff. I'm like, we can do that. That's me. Right? That's me. And I see the energy getting cheaper. I know Trump's cutting deals with Saudis. He's saying, look, keep pumping the oil at the right level. I'll keep the shale people out of your noses. I'll take care of Canada's sands oil. We'll keep that out of the market, and you can just get all the market share at the lower price, and you and Russia will be happy. All right, so, because we can do more. To your point, we can do more with cheap energy than most anyone else can. If you're a patriot and you believe in the American spirit. That's right. And then the data centers. And then I see the data centers, and I go, all right, we need to build data centers. We need to build data centers. And I go, well, why don't we just. Building data centers. Where's the demand coming from? And I'm not even getting into the fact that the energy grid's not going to be able to handle it. All the stuff that I think that you're focusing on, I'm not even getting into that. I go, well, wait a minute. Did we just alienate everyone in the world? They're not going to buy our treasuries. They all want to use gold. Every good that's made these days is a commodity. What are we going to sell them? Like Uber Eats? Our delivery system is the premium. And so I get depressed. And then, of course, it's zero hedge, right? Zero hedge. Post something and it shows, posting something like this every other day for about a month. But the thing they post when they talk about fundamentals they're right. And they say, okay, this ties in with Nvidia, ties in with. Everyone's talking about the circle jerk now that's been going around for years, but now they're talking about it. My concern is, based on my pessimistic side and based on the data that Zero Hedge is showing, is that companies are now extrapolating out, we're not going to do 2027 earnings, we're going to do 2035 earnings. And you're seeing these lines for data centers going out, projecting forever. And I go, and this is me positively going, that's crazy, but maybe it can happen. And then I read a line that makes me think it's not going to happen. And the line is. And the line is, this is why I'm worried about 10% inflation. And the line is, I'm not a doomer. The light is everything's coming along. We're creating an asset bubble by spending money to build data centers and our stocks are getting driven up because of the projected future potential earnings. And that's fine. And we can do that in a world where everyone's on our side, but they're not. So are you telling me this is like the Tyler thing, the zero, the line's going up like that. Are you telling me we're not going to have a recession for the next 15 years? Because that's what you're projecting. And I went, oh shit, we're going to have a recession. We have to have a recession because the rest of the world is gonna have a recession at some point and it's gonna affect us. And we can't raise rates, we're gonna lower rates. So my conclusion is we're not gonna, I mean, this is like today, call me tomorrow, maybe I'll be in a good mood, right? We're not gonna get there. Even if Trump executed everything perfectly, there's no successor to Trump who's gonna be like him. There's no maybe J.D. vance is, I don't know. But the bureaucratic deep state is still entrenched like a tick at a deer. They're not going to go anywhere. They're going to wait it out. And I think the first recession we get, because we're running a 1970s style bubble, first recession we get, we can't afford to cut, we're going to have to. We can't afford to raise, we're going to have to cut. We're cutting in a bubble right now, right? We're cutting in an economic borderline boom right now. Depending on how you look at it. And the last time we did that materially was in 1973. 1974. The US was on this mind. This is where we are now. 1973, 1974, the US was monetizing its debt. We're doing that again right now, by the way. We're not doing that the Fed, but we're monetizing our debt. It's really ugly what we're doing. Another conversation. But in the 70s, we were paying for all the Vietnam veterans coming home. We were trying to fend off communism, civil rights. A lot of social safety net and welfare money is being spent, spent, spent. We're financing Vietnam. We're still paying for Korea. And so we're cutting rates in the 70s. 72, 73, 74, and 73 and 74. The stock market does very poorly, but the gold market is at the highs. But then they cut rates in 75 and 76. The stock market explodes. Everything is great again. 76 is the bicentennial. I was 8 years old and everyone was so happy. The bicentennial. Everyone was like, and then 77 all goes in the shitter. They stopped lowering rates to paint the turd. As the expression goes, inflation came back. And between 77 and 79, 77 and 80, it was nothing but inflation. That's where we are now. Either we're in 1974 and we're cutting rates to get the economy going, or if Trump doesn't succeed, it's 1977 and we're going to have asset commodity prices high and data centers that no one's using. They'll become skateboard parks. So right now I'm pretty pessimistic, but thank you for letting me go off on that.

[Marty Bent]

It's important because one thing I'd bring up is, have we been in a recession in real terms for a while? Because if you look at inflation data using the cpi, it's not tracking real inflation. And then, like, how bad does it get? Like, I posted yesterday a passage from When Money Dies and the Corollaries to, like, why more Republic vibes are.

[Victor Boylan]

Yeah.

[Marty Bent]

Are very high right now. And it's. That's.

[Victor Boylan]

Behaviorally, they are very high. Behaviorally, sure.

[Marty Bent]

And like, everybody's on Robinhood. Every. Every Zoomer thinks they're the best stock, but not every Zoomer. But it's definitely a growing trend of zoomer stock traders giving advice. We saw that with Wall street bets, obviously.

[Victor Boylan]

But back then we tolerated. Because it was stimulus. There's no stimulus now. They're still doing it, no.

[Marty Bent]

And to your point about the debt and the rates, I worry lowering rates right now you just cut 25 bips, the 10 year is still above 4. And I think that one thing people had collective amnesia after the initial rate cuts from last year where they just assume like oh, the fed funds rate goes down and bond yields will follow. That doesn't seem to be really materializing at all.

[Victor Boylan]

That's right. I'd like to speak to that for a second if you don't mind. During the QE era we all got addicted to Fed lowers rates, bond yields drop and therefore we have to buy stocks because nothing gives us any interest anymore. Money market rates down, bond yields down, just help buy stocks. Right. But we're not in the QE era anymore, at least not from the Fed side. And so when you're not in the QE era, you're what I call the anti Goldilocks error. So the Goldilocks error was QE from the 90s. Well, QE started in the O's, but from the 90s through the mid 0s we had deflationary tailwinds, disinflationary tailwinds pushing us up. Goods were getting cheaper, technology was being implemented. Everything at Walmart was. The prices are dropping at Walmart every day, low prices every day. You don't hear that anymore because now we've gone from disinflationary tailwinds from technology, from developing supply chains to inflationary headwinds. And when you have inflationary headwinds, meaning other people are buying commodities that we need or restricting our access to them, like oil in the 70s, when you have that happen, you have inflationary headwinds hitting the economy. And with inflationary headwinds, you can't lower rates without causing a bubble. Actually I just lost my train of thought on that. The Fed can't. Oh, the deficit and the debt. Yeah. Oh, this is a bond market. Right. When you have an anti Goldilocks situation and you have the inflationary headwinds, when you lower the fed funds rate, the bond market vigilantes, and they're back, they say, wait a minute, you're not done fighting inflation. If you're lowering rates too soon, we're going to make the inflation come out the other end. And so that's really what's happening now. You're going about 4% when you lower. There's two ways. This again, another resultant pose our statement, there are two ways to fight inflation at the monetary level. One is by raising short term rates, which we've stopped Doing and two is by letting long term rates rise. So like you said, Powell cut September 17th last year, and the bond market dumped, yields climbed. The bond market did a. See, I call it a seesaw. The bond market like, did that. That's yields drop, raise. I was like, that's bad. That means that inflation is not out of the market yet. And sure enough, it cut again. And the bond market didn't do it as badly. But the bond market's not happy. And that's the rest of the world going, oh, look, another reason to not own American bonds. And they're selling them. And I think if he cuts again, we're going to have one of these. It's kind of like a mini version of what went on in the uk People start selling dollars, bonds and stocks and taking their money back. That's the real risk. If you want to watch anything as a reason to buy gold or as a reason to buy, you know, a crypto or bitcoin, if you want to. If you want to watch anything, you want to watch how the market reacts to when the Fed cuts. And it has not been approving of the Fed cuts. I don't think, like, I don't think he's going to. I think it'll be a mistake if he cuts again. I do.

[Marty Bent]

But does he have the political will to not cut? That's the question, right? That's where you have Trump coming in as well, being a bull in the China shop.

[Victor Boylan]

But he's a short timer too. Maybe he can hide and wait it out for six months.

[Marty Bent]

Yeah, right.

[Victor Boylan]

I mean, what is it? He cuts 25 basis points recently, right? He talks extremely dovish. And then like two weeks later, gold rallies $100. I'm like, oh, this is bad. He's going to cut again. And stocks are up and stocks start to tail off. Then he starts talking, oh, well, I was just readjusting the rates. He's doing that whole Fed speak thing. And I go, you're cutting into a boom. We're creating a boom. And related to what we're trying to do here is China every step of the way now saying things like, oh, you're spending $500 billion on Stargate. Oh, we did it for 5 billion. Now, whether they're lying or not is not the point. The point is they're putting propaganda out saying that we're paying too much. They're saying our assets are overvalued. And that's petrifying to me. They never did that before. I think the bond market is telling Us, we should not be lowering rates. I agree.

[Marty Bent]

Well, staying on this topic of government debt and inflation before we hit record, inflation's not geopolitical. There are these inflationary headwinds across the world for different purposes. You said here in the US Manufacturing, Japan, defense, Europe defense and social safety nets. China.

[Victor Boylan]

Right.

[Marty Bent]

Social safety nets. So the inflation trade is not isolated to the United States.

[Victor Boylan]

No, it's not. And it's actually like we're the last. We're probably going to be the last to really debase or cut. But, yeah, you're right, it's not licensed to the United States. And if you go around the world, Trump's policies, which would have happened anyway, right, under Biden, we pulled out of Afghanistan. If you look at Pax Americana of us being a cop on every corner of the world, we can't pay for that anymore, and some places don't even want us. So we're kind of like the tide of American military is receding. We're retrenching. Call it Monroe Doctrine, call it whatever you want to call it. Call it America first, whatever the reasons are. So we pull out of Afghanistan, butchered by Biden, and then war start. Gaza war starts. Ukraine war starts. And I see us not doing what we normally do, meaning in Gaza, we let the Israelis off the leash. And that's. I know it's another whole can of worms to talk about, but we really just said, you know what? We'll let them fight it out and make it a hockey fight. And then we go into. And then we say, what's Trump say? We're not going to spend money on NATO anymore. And the math is very simple. Speaking as a Tom Luongo person, but from my expertise, or lack of a better word, one of the things that Europe is very proud of is over the last 50 years, they're proud of their social safety net. They're proud of their welfare state, they're proud of free college, they're proud of no homelessness. And to Trump's point, that's because they have a defense budget of 0 or 1%, and we have a defense budget of 5%, probably more. And so we have been, since Communism, even, we have been the. It's like a few good men, like the you would need me on that wall type of thing. And we have been there saying, okay, we're subsidizing their welfare state. And so Trump says, we're gonna spend less. And now you do the math and they're like, everyone's gone from. Maybe it's 1 to 3% of GDP, now it's 5 to 6%. So call it 5, call it 2 to 5. That's a lot of money. And you're doing it right after you just let millions of people in your country to be attached to your social safety net where you think you're driving down labor, you're not driving down labor, you're driving down welfare. So Europe's got to spend more money. They can't even spend on their manufacturing. Germany's done. Italy's probably going to be the next leading country in Europe, if you can call it that. Then you go over to Japan and they're like, hey, listen, Taiwan, we don't have a good history with China. We don't want to have that blow up on our face and us say, well, we said we're pulling out. There's a pact like, a pact, like Asian. I forget what it's called, but Japan's ramping up their military spending. All the things that we didn't want Europe to do because we're worried about the Nazis coming back or about Imperial Japan coming back. Well, now we have to let them do it, right? So Japan spending on that, right? And everyone's got big debt from buying flat screen TVs with money they didn't have, right? So Japan spending on military, Europe spending on military and a safety net. In the US we're not spending. I mean, we are, but we're not spending on military. We're not spending on a safety net. Well, we are a little bit. We're spending to become a producer of good to get to compete with China. So we're spending, Europe's spending, everyone's spending. It's a race to the bottom, one way or another. And China, which has had to spend to begin with to get their economy out of their own, kind of like recession. And this isn't me talking, but I've read the work. I forget his name. Eric green, I think T.S. lombard, analyst. I had a conversation with him about a report that he put out. And I'm like, completely naive American, right? I'm like, they're communist. Even though they're not communists, they're communists. What do you mean they don't spend enough money helping people? He goes, oh no, oh no, no. When they went capitalist, they went full capitalist. They're like, you live in the country, we're not giving you a dime. You better move to the city and get a job. That was part of their urbanization plan, I guess. So what does that mean? He goes, well, it's not working anymore, people aren't moving anymore. And there's, there's a higher level of poverty, right? There's, there's also, they have like, like 50% college graduates or students or young men are unemployed. It's, it's, it's bigger than ours for sure. And I said, so what does that mean? He goes, well, he goes, they're actually working up the plans to add welfare for the rural areas because they're going to be spending a lot. They're creating a welfare program. They have no social safety net. And so I went, so China's going to spend on a social safety net? He goes, yeah. I go, so now every country's spending for different reasons and every country is going to monetize their debt and it's a race to the bottom. It's like Santa Claus. You got a 16 year old kid, he knows there's no Santa Claus. You know there's no Santa Claus. But as long as you don't acknowledge it, you keep giving him gifts. And that's where we are right now. I happen to know, now that I've studied it, that we're monetizing our debt already, which means we can't pay off our debt. So we're printing money, we're printing it not at the Fed level, at the treasury level. And in doing that we're weakening the dollar intentionally. So that's it. Yeah, everyone's spending, everyone's spending. No one can be austere yet. That comes after the crash. Possibly. That's it.

[Marty Bent]

And when do you think the crash will be? If there is one?

[Victor Boylan]

Yeah, I get that stuff like that. I, I don't, I don't know. I'm very, I'm very, I see that, I see the fork in the road and it's like, I don't know when it will be, but I'll know what will cause it. So it'll be, it'll be, you'll see information like let's look at the current events, right? You'll see information accumulating that oh, people are. Goldman Sachs, which has been AI stocks all the way, is now saying circle jerk, you know, client finance. And everyone say, oh, it's just like 2000. I said, well it's not yet because people still believe. I'll start to say crash. If I see a day where stocks are down and gold is up, not because gold's better, but because people are going to put their money into gold because stocks are down, they're not going to buy more stocks. So when I see things like that, I'll be concerned. I'll tell you what the warning shot across the bow was that I'm looking for to happen again to make me think there'll be a crash. The warning shot across the bow was. I think it was. I don't know, in April or May, when Europe, to defend itself, said, the US is no longer American exceptionalism, the US is weak and therefore, because of its debt, we're going to sell our stocks and instead of putting it in bonds, we're going to repatriate our currency. And that's where your crash comes from. So, for example, Japan is a huge investor overseas. Huge. And they've got problems now. They've always had problems, but the solution to their problems now is to repatriate currency. It's to sell your investments in Europe and bring your money back for yourself. That's what they need to do to shore up their currency. Imagine if they did that with U.S. treasury. I think they're the largest holder, maybe number two, but they finance the world. So as countries, I'm Europe, I need to rebuild my infrastructure. You can't use dollars to build a road. You need euros. And so it's sell my US stocks, don't put it in bonds this time, don't put it in dollars, put in euros, bring it home. And so when the dollar, gold. So when the dollar bonds and stocks drop at the same time, I get petrified. And we had, I think, a shot across the bow, and I think it was April or May. And when I see that happen, I pay attention. So when that happens, then I'll say, marty, we should get short. And of course we'll get our asses handed to us. But you get how it works. That's it.

[Marty Bent]

No, it is. In the last six months, I've described the period that we're living in as equally exhilarating and unnerving because it's just impossible to tell.

[Victor Boylan]

Yeah, yeah. The guy with one foot in a bucket of coals, the other foot in a bucket of ice, and you say, how you doing? He says, on average, I'm okay. That's where we are. That's where I feel like.

[Marty Bent]

Let's talk about Bitcoin. I mean, you talked about it earlier about a lot of the moves that have been made in the last couple of years with ETFs. I think the options on the ETFs, futures going 24, 7 soon, I believe, if not already. You think these markets, and particularly the derivatives are being used to hold the Price down so the government can accumulate.

[Victor Boylan]

Yeah, I do. And I'm not a paranoid tidfo hat wearer. I'm a person who never believed that. But I understand how it works now. There's only two things a nation does that it doesn't let its people do. One, kill you. You can't kill yourself, they can put you to death. And two, make money nations. And anyone who's a hardcore, I'm not a hardcore bitcoin person, but a nation needs to have sovereign money. That's sovereign wealth. And that's very like the charterless concept. You print the money, you give it to them, you take it back a tax, you create that circle, right? And then you skim off the top and you run it. Bitcoin was becoming a threat. Whether it's made by someone or not, I don't care. It has a life of its own now. It is a trojan horse in many ways. And what the US does, not all governments, what the US does is if it catches it early enough, it'll kill it. The threat to the dollar, if it doesn't catch it early enough, it'll just use rhetoric and propaganda and fund it. And if it survives that, then it will actively attack it. Maybe like a CIA go, CIA assassin goes out to kill bitcoin. I mean, you get my point. Like a regime change. And then if it can't do that, and this is where the US is really smart, it co ops it. So when you create the ETFs, I don't think, I think, I know that people do not value liquidity network that the US has big enough. And so I'm going to exaggerate, but I'll make a point. 70% of all the Bitcoin transactions were outside of the US the liquidity was not in the US you create finally the spot Bitcoin ETF. And without doing anything intentional, without funding it, without manipulating it, you make the liquidity pool the U.S. and so the U.S. may not own the Bitcoin, but the U.S. controls the Bitcoin. You raise margins, you change T2, all these things and you create, you control the liquidity pool. So if you can't kill it, you demonize it. If you can't demonize or vice versa, you can't, you co opt it. So what the US does is it takes everything it cannot control. Like you can, you can write a paper on this. Everything it cannot control, that's an outside force. And it co ops it. And that's what deal with bitcoin. Now I'm not even into the manipulation. Manipulation part. In 1974, there's a WikiLeaks email out there that essentially says what I'm about to say. In 1974, after the US went off the gold standard and the price of gold started to move higher, the US and the uk, London were trying to keep the price of gold down. Why? Because they were cheating. They were printing more dollars than they had of the gold. And they had this thing called the London Gold Pool scheme, et cetera, et cetera. But then they came up with an idea, simple idea, and it's in the email. We're going to create a futures exchange for gold. Why? Because if you get. It's in the email. If you can. If you can create a futures exchange, then you can reduce the demand for physical. Because over time, people will take convenience over authenticity. I'll take the knockoff. And when you get them with electronic bank accounts, it grows more and more. And a generation goes by and your grandparents are dead and they're like, I don't need the gold. It's the next best thing. That's gold. And you do that. And over time, you set up the market structure because you don't want gold to go up. You make it a tier three asset. You make the margins higher. And then you have these banks called bullion banks. Those are the custodians of Bitcoin. Now, the bullion banks say, all right, the government wants gold to go down. They're happy when it goes down. They're lending us money at zero. Will rehypothecate. And so rehypothecation, which was invented for gold bulls, not for bears, is used by bears to sell 5, 10 times as much gold as out there. And the reason it works, Marty, the reason it works is because the US liquidity pool is so big that the trading, you look at the US price, you trade on the US hours, you don't trade in the off hours. We become the market. And in becoming the market and the futures price becomes more important than the spot price, the derivative price becomes more important than spot price, then you can influence the market lower by just selling paper. You don't need the gold, you don't need the gold, just paper. And that goes on for years. And then they come up with other schemes. And I don't mean. These are just traders who want to make money, have done it. If I was in that seat, it's like, wait a minute, you want it to go down? Fine. I would approach the Fed in 1993 just like the Boeing banks that said, you guys have gold sitting in Fort Knox doing nothing, give it to us, we'll give you 50 basis points for it. We'll take the money, we'll take the gold, we'll short it, we'll take the money and we'll go buy something else. Greenspan was like great idea. It happened. Great idea. Clinton, who was the president at the time was like, great idea. It'll keep the bond players from freaking out because bond players would buy gold as a substance. And so they did it successfully for 30 years. And a generation goes by like an elephant tied to a stake with a thread. He doesn't know he can pull the stake out of the ground and it goes on and on. And that's why Bitcoin is Gold 2.0. They're doing the same thing. Are they doing it to buy it? Yeah, they're doing it to buy it. Are they doing it to make it the dollar? No, going to do that. Then you lose sovereign money and little by little there's no liquidity in the world anywhere for bitcoin except here now and other nations like China, although they should have it and they probably do have it. They've shied away from it because the US has a monopoly on it now. And so the rehypothecation has gone from bullion banks selling futures and taking the money and borrowing to custodian banks like JP Morgan or BlackRock or however they do it. Go like, I have your bitcoin, I'll give it to you in five. You basically take five orders from bitcoin and you set it's rehypothecation all over again. So every time someone buys a bitcoin at the blackrock level, they're slamming a future. And you know why that works? It works for the same reason J.P. morgan makes money when silver goes up. J.P. morgan has all the silver in the world, hypothetically in their vault they have the Hunt Brothers silver. It's been passed down to them, but they're not long silver. There's short futures against it and if the shit hits the fan, they just want under the contract. Isn't that what, what what bitcoin places are doing? That's what they did. We don't have the bitcoin so we're not going to honor the contract. So it's happening all over again and they've got bitcoin under control and it'll go up in price. But there's no one who's going to challenge the US on it right now. At least not yet. So I hope that makes sense.

[Marty Bent]

Yeah. I will say, anecdotal observation. I didn't really think about this until you started walking through that explanation is probably been a few years. But there was a point. I've been in Bitcoin for 12 years and it was a meme. And something that you came to expect is that when Asia woke up, the price would move.

[Victor Boylan]

I was like, oh, Asia's up and.

[Marty Bent]

That doesn't happen anymore.

[Victor Boylan]

Right.

[Marty Bent]

It's not as prominent as a meme as it was five, seven, ten years ago.

[Victor Boylan]

I used to trade the Japanese US hours for gold and I used to trade the arb. It was very, very low profit margin, high transaction thing. It did. Okay. But during that time frame when China was stimulating, when China was stimulating, all the base metals will go up. Iron, copper, aluminum, and then eventually silver and gold would go up and I would be able to kind of front run it. Right. So when China said, we're going to print money and then bitcoin comes on the scene, it's like iron, bitcoin, aluminum. Why is bitcoin going up? I called a buddy of mine, goes, well, that's because every time they print money, the banks want to make sure they don't have too many yuan in their pocket, so they buy something that can go up. So bitcoin was a, was. What do you call it, like a safety valve for these guys and they're not doing it anymore.

[Marty Bent]

Yeah, well, to your point, not even pushback, but just a different perspective in terms of the ability to combat this manipulation, which I think whether you call them, I think you can define anything as manipulation. Buyer sellers exist.

[Victor Boylan]

Right.

[Marty Bent]

It's just the market dynamics, the way they exist with the large custodians like BlackRock, which really they're custodying with Coinbase and you layer on futures and options on top of that and you can easily manipulate the price using those tools. But I think where bitcoin has the opportunity, and I think this week we have a great example of how to combat it, is it's so much easier to take delivery and actually use it and custody it. And I think if we see more things like Square announced this week, where they're enabling 4 million merchants to shuffle to immediately sweep a percentage of their cash flows in the bitcoin that they can then withdraw from their square terminals or business portals, that's what needs to happen if you want to combat this manipulation. So that's why here at this show, and I advise anybody getting into bitcoin, I think ETFs are good. If you want exposure, you don't have self custody and you don't need to use the Bitcoin. Right, but highly encourage people to take bitcoin in self custody, get it off the exchange to prevent this manipulation.

[Victor Boylan]

So you're talking about Jack when you say square, right?

[Marty Bent]

Yeah.

[Victor Boylan]

Okay, he has been on, not a rant, but he has been on a thread for about, I don't know, maybe three to six months. It's not enough that it's a store of value, it has to be a currency. Am I paraphrasing that right?

[Marty Bent]

Yes.

[Victor Boylan]

And he's so right, Marty. Meaning what I just said to you about how the US co ops something. What they do is they ring fence the liquidity so the liquidity is all there and they don't let it out. And so you take, I mean, look, Bitcoin's about network, right? You take the network and you make it a walled garden. And if it's not a currency, if it's not out there, it doesn't build its network. And if it doesn't build its network, it becomes an asset. It becomes the pet rock. That's what it does. I'm not saying gold was ever something. You couldn't do that. But you could do it with silver at one time. But you take this thing that is indestructible. Unless there's no energy for no power for 50 years, that's indestructible. That's as easy to use whether it's fast enough or not. I don't care. The point is, if it doesn't proliferate, it doesn't get used. It gets used as a store of value, but it doesn't get used. The analogy that I've used with my people is the Joe DiMaggio Baseball Card. Okay, so the Joe DiMaggio Baseball card. Let's say there's only 10 of them in the world and there's only 10 in the world and nobody cares about it. Well, it's a store of value, but you can't do anything with it because it's locked into the sec. They, they, they securitized money. They made money a piece of art. They made money an asset. They made it a humble. I don't know if anyone's old enough in your group. You know what a hubble is? You know those little stupid glass figurines that your grandparents have in a china cabinet? Well, they all have serial numbers on the bottom. They're all one of a kind. They're all Special and they're all worth money. And if you have to sell them, you'll get some decent money for them. But you can't go around with a Hubble. They stay in the china closet. The ETF is a china closet for bitcoin and it's going to go there and it's going to fall out of existence. It's like the landline, the first landline was built who needed it. But when the network gets built, the last person in the world who doesn't have access to a phone would pay a million dollars to use it because he wants to be connected. The first person wouldn't pay anything. And I think bitcoin, if you want to make the case that the government's involved and it's like, you know what, how about this? The government's involved in Ethereum because they want to make sure that bitcoin doesn't proliferate. I mean I'm just taking the side of a maxi in that point of view. Now the idea is to own it, lock it down. The idea is to. Instead of. And I know the maxis are like, oh, but it's a Trojan horse. You know what, maybe it's a trojan horse, but it's going to take 100 years for that Trojan. Worse. The state's not going to let it survive until the state itself is dead. The state does two things. It kills people and it prints money. And it will not give up either of those two things. And if it does give up either of those two things, that's because it's not a state anymore.

[Marty Bent]

That's interesting, focusing on Dorsey and you think of the prominent billionaire CEOs or executives rushing bitcoin. I think you have him. And then Sailor Juxtapose. Sailor. It's digital capital. Why would you ever sell? And the endorsee is like, no, this is cypherpunk digital cash that we need to be right in the economy. I respect the hell. I'm friends with both of them. And I agree more with Jack in the sense that like this is supposed to be used as money was in the white paper. I'm not getting full Roger Moore here but I think it is a better money at the end of the day. And this whole focus on treasury companies and using it as digital capital is catering to those who like to co opt it. And it's like, no, we should look stellar.

[Victor Boylan]

Who is, is, is brilliant in his own right. He knows what he's doing. He knows that the path is I want the price to go up and If I have to work with the government, I'll do that, provided I play well in the sandbox. Whereas Jack, in my opinion, that's probably pretty obvious. He's an idealist. And so he wants to. He's not an anarchist person. Maybe he is, I don't know. But he wants a more fair distribution based on merit and not based on incumbency. And so these are the. This is the bucket of coals and the ice. Right. It's true. I mean, that really is true. And I think at the end of the day. At the end of the day, I've seen what they did with gold for 30 years. Can they do that with bitcoin? I think they can. And I think they can, unfortunately, is because maybe you can't destroy it, but our liquidity pool is so big and so important, even if it is on the way down, that all you have to do is critically limit the on ramps and off ramps or structure them so that you're controlling them. And then half the world's going to be like, nah, I'm not going to use it. I mean, I'm an optimist, but I'm also a realist.

[Marty Bent]

Yeah, but would you agree with what I said earlier in terms that the ability to combat net suppression is much easier with bitcoin due to the fact that it's digital?

[Victor Boylan]

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think this is like a monetary philosophy point here. I think the main difference in terms of gold and bitcoin, I mean, there's many differences, but the main difference is that people look at gold as a store of value. That's money, because it's a thing. And if you really understand bitcoin. I'm not saying that I do, but I understand monetary theory. If you understand money from a chartless theory, then you understand that money should be nothing. It's basically just an accounting ledger. And gold is nothing. It's just that there is an obsession with it because I guess it's like a Marxist comment, like capitalism itself makes it that. But what's his name? Was it Richard Spencer? The guy who was on Tucker Carlson? Richard Warner. Right.

[Marty Bent]

He talks completely different.

[Victor Boylan]

He's probably like a rock and roll guy, right? Very. An old singer.

[Marty Bent]

He's like a white nationalist out of.

[Victor Boylan]

Oh, is he really?

[Marty Bent]

I think he was some deep state psyop. White nationalists here in the U.S. listen.

[Victor Boylan]

I'm not Elon Musk, all right? I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. Elon. Don't ban me. Yeah, so Richard Werner talks about Qe talks about all these other things and one of the things he said is that banks at the commercial level can create money. And I digged into some things after that. And what I digged into was there's a paper by the bank of England out there and the bank of England was written in 2014, I think maybe. And that paper at the bank of England said yes, because Warner was right. Yes, it was at Spencer. Again, yes. Money is created from nothing. And we don't want you to know that. It's not just created from nothing from central banks, it's created from nothing at the commercial bank level. And what they have is they have essentially what's called the chartless asset. The charter list is that there was a big fight between the Keynesians and these other guys, maybe German guys, I don't know. But the charitableist asset was like, no, no, money is just a ledger account of you owing me a favor. And so basically it's kind of like it dovetails into MMT as well. And then the other side, the Keynesian side, not neo Keynesian, was like, well, money needs to be tethered to something real so that we can make sure we don't overprint or debase. And so these, the Keynesian side one which became neo Keynesian, but the chartalist side is what Werner is talking about. And you know what, that's what bitcoin is. That's really what it is. It's like bitcoin is like, you know what, let's take the bitcoin ledger nano and let's put it in a gold casing like an iPhone and let's put it in an ETF and let's make everyone worship it. Let's make it shiny, like, oh no, no, it's a workhorse. Get it out there because that's what money is. Money is a workhorse. Now I'm not a proponent of mmt, but I am saying that there are aspects of Bitcoin that make it. I mean, I'm a gold bug, okay? There are aspects of Bitcoin that when the world is ready for it, will, whether it's bitcoin or a successor, when the world is ready for it, it'll be ready for it. You can't get away from the physicality of it all yet.

[Marty Bent]

Obviously I'm full on in it, been in it for 12 years, completely incorporated into my business. But we have, I think it's going to be ultimately successful just because, particularly for cross border payments. Like I have some contractors that work outside the United States and they demand to get paid in bitcoin. And like it was unprompted. I think obviously they know where a company focused on, on bitcoin specifically. But I was surprised. A couple of months ago this new contractor started and he, yeah, I was like, all right, send me the invoice. I was thinking it was going to be an international wire transfer and it was a bitcoin invoice. I was like, oh, sweet, I can pay you.

[Victor Boylan]

I think we were talking about this before as well. I think bitcoin's going to find a niche that can't be crushed cross border. Europe is scared to death of it, right? Black market, I'm not trying to demonize, but things that you got to get around stuff like you use with gold. And I think it's going to thrive in that niche. And then there'll be an opportunity like a calamitous event or a nation. And it'll become the surrogate currency and then it'll never go. There's your trojan horse. You can't assuming that you can't kill it. If you can't kill this, it will survive. And it will survive like a, in a good way, a virus. It won't go away. It'll be there. And then a good product that's indestructible. All it needs is time and an opportunity and something will happen. And they'll go from your contractors to a small country going, you know what? Oh Jesus. We trade with our partners across the border here all the time. And they're sanctioned and I'm sanctioned. Let's create a zone between my country and your country or the border and let's just use bitcoin. Just do that. And then after a while it organically spreads. That's the home run. The home run is time. And time usually means one or two generations. I have to be dead and you have to be old.

[Marty Bent]

I think many bitcoiners, myself included, recognize that as well. It's a multi generation thing. And that's a funny one. Hear people deride and besmirch bitcoin. It's like, oh, it's not used as day to day currency. Where can I spend it? What other monetary asset has launched and been completely ubiquitous within 17 years?

[Victor Boylan]

It's not survived. That's the whole point of a network. If you can create a network even if it's not being used, even if it's not being used, but it exists. All it needs is an opportunity. Look, using gold for an example. Shanghai has had gold for 15 years. And it survived. And then it saw an opportunity and boom, it took market share. This is what it's all about, surviving and taking market share. And bitcoin is a survivor. That's why it eventually wins.

[Marty Bent]

I think the other thing we have in the bitcoiner camp in our favor is we're very good at meming. We're very good at.

[Victor Boylan]

Would you admit.

[Marty Bent]

Would the gold bugs admit that we've helped the sound money cause materially in the last 15 years?

[Victor Boylan]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, look, I tried to reach out to you early on. Not you specifically, but, you know, your group. And I was like, listen, would you stop shitting on gold? It's the same thing. I mean, yours might be gold 2.0. I would like create memes of like old guy memes, right? Black and white cookie, you know, a Seinfeld joke look to the cookie type of shit. Shut up, you old man. And then. And this is where I started to hate sale because I knew that that fucker, excuse my French was just. Was just trying to say, hey, goal. Because he just wanted it to go up. And he was going after the demographic. It was a smart move, but he was like, people like, I'm Gen X, right? So Gen X up to boomers are like bitcoin. No way. I'm just lucky, you know? But yeah, it's like, it's like we're just. It's new tech. We're not familiar with it. Give us a break.

[Marty Bent]

You know, I've been very consistent throughout the years on this show. I love our gold bugs. We're ideologically and philosophically aligned. We need to work together.

[Victor Boylan]

Right? Well, I mean, that's it, you know, it's like the. Speaking of memes, it's like the. What is it? The Splinter and Ninja Turtles meme. You know, we raged you and now you're. And now you're going.

[Marty Bent]

It's used with Ron Paul a lot. It's like.

[Victor Boylan]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's a Ron Paul beat. That's exactly rubble. That's exactly it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Marty Bent]

Vince, this has been. It's been great. Thank you for doing this. I can't believe it's taking us this long.

[Victor Boylan]

I appreciate you having me. I appreciate you having me on. This is fun. I know you, my reputation and I know you from we're mutuals on X. But yeah, this was fun. Very pleasantly surprised. That wasn't negative, but I'm pleasantly surprised. I hope you are as well.

[Marty Bent]

And the fact that we went to the same High school. If you're ever back in Philly, let me know. We'll have to get a beer and a pizza somewhere.

[Victor Boylan]

Yeah, yeah. Have you. Have you. Have you. Have you been to the JJU in a while? Have you been to the prep in a while? Not.

[Marty Bent]

Not in a few years.

[Victor Boylan]

He looks fabulous. He looks fat. Unbelievable. But they've done. Unbelievable. Anyway, all right. Memories, you know.

[Marty Bent]

Well, hopefully this is the first of many. I'm sure there'll be plenty to talk about as things evolve moving forward.

[Victor Boylan]

Yeah. Actually, thank you for having me on, Marty. And. Oh, I just want to just drop. Is that okay?

[Marty Bent]

Yeah.

[Victor Boylan]

So I have a newsletter on substack, and it's VBL Goldfix. Victor boy, Larry goldfixubstack.com and it is, as you would guess, it's predominantly monetary and it's predominantly gold and silver because, well, that's what's been moving lately when those markets are not at the front of everyone's mind. I'll talk about geopolitics, which I do all the time. Look, if you understand gold, you understand geopolitics, you understand inflation, and you understand economies. And my background is in the bond market and fundamental analysis. And so, therefore, I will talk about bitcoin. I do get some good research on bitcoin as well, and I cover it as well, but that's not a sales pitch. I guess what I'm saying is I'm a gold guy who hedges his gold with bitcoins, not a bitcoin guy. So that's it. You can find me on Twitter as well. Just VBL Ghost.

[Marty Bent]

Like I said, we love our gold bugs here at tftc. So thank you for adding to the list of gold bugs that have come on the show. And we'll link to all that in the show notes. So you guys are interested, check out the show notes. Go check out substack. And great follow on X as well.

[Victor Boylan]

X money.

[Marty Bent]

Thank you. That's all we got today, Freaks. Peace and love. Okay, thank you for listening to this episode of tftc. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can, leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early, and ad free. Make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to Fountain FM to find that $5 a month get you every episode a day early. Ad free helps the show gives you incredible value, so please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time and until next time.

[Victor Boylan]

Okay.