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The Peter Ship Show. Okay, everybody, we got a lot to talk about on this evening's podcast, but I want to start off talking about the crypto pump that's been going on all day since early afternoon. And I think that's particularly important given my title for my last podcast, which was the Trump crypto bubble has finally popped. And I still believe that it's popped even though they're trying to blow some air back into it on a Sunday. But when I did the podcast on Tuesday, bitcoin had just slipped into a technical bear market. It was down 20% from its 109,000 post election peak, which happened, I think in November last year. We were trading around 87,000. We had been below 86 earlier. By Friday morning, Bitcoin almost broke below 78,000. So it was close to a 30% decline from top to bottom at that point. But, you know, other tokens, Ethereum almost got below 2000. It got below 2100. So it was down 50%. I mean, strategy was getting obliterated, you know, down over 50%. And that was after blowing another 2 billion. Buying more bitcoin just before the market tank. You know, I'm sure he bought more a sailor did during the week. We'll find out on Monday morning just how much more bitcoin, you know, he bought and how much he blew buying it. But all the altcoins, everything was getting smoked in in crypto. Now, we had a bounce on Friday and I believe we would have had another collapse Sunday night. And in fact, if you look at the chart of bitcoin and all the other altcoins, the market was getting ready to roll over early this afternoon. Bitcoin, to me, looked like it was getting ready to just go back down below 80,000. It was, I think, trading just under 85,000. It looked like it had peaked out and we were headed lower. And then out of the blue came a post on the social media account of the President on Truth Social that set the price of bitcoin rising $10,000 in maybe an hour or so. So we went from 85,000 to 95,000. We're still holding on to most of those gains. As I'm recording this podcast live. We're still above 93,000 on Bitcoin, but bitcoin wasn't the big mover and it wasn't even Ethereum, which was also up quite a bit. Maybe, you know, 12, 13. I think Bitcoin, you know, popped similar amount, but the big movers were Solano, Cadero, Ripple. Those things ripped 30% or more. Why? It was because of a post on Truth Social that was highly touted all over X and, you know, all over the crypto sphere and, you know, basically completely misconstrued and advertised as if Trump had just announced that a strategic reserve has been established, that it's a done deal, that it's going to happen, and, and it's going to include Ripple, Cardano and Solano. That's why those three tokens went up the most, because they were specifically mentioned in the post as being part of the reserve that was supposedly going to be established. Well, all this, first of all, is BS because no such announcement was actually made. So if you just read how the crypto crowd was communicating what was posted on Trump's account, you would think that, you know, it's a done deal. That was what the promoters, the pumpers, wanted everyone to believe. And of course, I don't think it's a coincidence that it came out early Sunday afternoon when none of the official stock markets are trading. So none of the ETFs anywhere in the world are. Are operating. They were still asleep in Asia. They waited for a time where the markets were as thin as possible so that the pump could create as big a rise as possible. So it was timed. And in fact, again, if you look at the chart intraday, they waited until bitcoin was at the low that it had been of the day and just ready to just roll over to put out the post. And I think that one of the reasons that we got a bounce in crypto on Friday is that people were buying because they knew that this Sunday morning post was coming. They had the insider information and they were able to load up specifically on these three tokens and, you know, because they knew which ones were going to be in the post. In fact, they may have already written it on Friday. Knowing that they were going to put it out there on Sunday. And so a lot of people got rich off of this, which really, you know, the hypocrisy really bothers me, you know, because I was watching and I'm going to talk about the Elon Musk interview on Joe Rogan. And, you know, I like the fact that they're talking about how these bureaucrats at the USAID are getting rich, basically getting kickbacks from these bogus nonprofits and how terrible it is that their families are getting rich because the government officials are taking advantage and exploiting their positions to enrich themselves. But that's exactly what Trump is doing with his family. They're getting rich off of this. If Trump was manipulating stocks, it'd be illegal. He could be impeached if he was, you know, giving his family members inside information. Hey, I'm going to put a post out about this particular stock. So you should buy it now or you should short it because it's going to be a negative post. And then they, you know, they, they position themselves to profit. He comes out and he posts something and the market tanks or goes up and his kids sell out. Right. It'd be totally illegal. But since he's doing it with crypto, I guess it's completely legal. There's. You can manipulate the crypto market. I guess it's not a crime. You know, you can pump and dump all you want, even if you're the President of the United States, because that's what's going on. But I think it really undercuts, you know, the message of the administration when we're trying to bust the people who did this at U.S. aid. And now, you know, the first family or whoever else or whatever friends of the president are involved in this. But I'm going to read the post. This is the actual post that was misrepresented all over X as being, okay, this is it. The, the, the, the, the strategic reserve is here. So here's what he posted. A US Crypto reserve will elevate this critical industry after years of corrupt attacks by the Biden administration, which is why my executive order on digital assets directed presidential working group to move forward on a crypto strategic reserve that includes xrp, Sol and ada. I will make sure the US Is the crypto capital of the world. We are making America great again. Expiration point right now. First of all, just on an off subject, even if, you know, Donald Trump really thought that crypto is a really important industry that America should dominate in, the government should stay out of it. The government is not there to pick winners and losers. If Donald Trump wanted to pick winners and losers, he should have stayed in the private sector and. And done it with his own money. The government is not there to do this. That's central government planning. That's what the communists do. If it's a free market, and if Trump wants to be a free market president, he stays neutral. He doesn't try to decide, hey, crypto is the industry, and so we're going to subsidize it. We're going to use taxpayer money to buy these tokens and not even the entire industry. Not only is he picking crypto as an industry, he's picking the individual tokens that he thinks are the ones that we need to have, which, you know, Trump should not be doing this. You know, in reality, the country that is the winner in crypto is the one that wastes the least amount of money on it, you know, which is probably going to be China. Right? Because this is a complete waste of time. This is a waste of resources. I'm going to get into our horrific trade deficit later, but our trade deficit is going to keep getting bigger if we waste our money on crypto. So the president is wrong. This is not an industry we want to dominate. It's a digital pyramid scheme. Why the hell would we want to dominate that? But, you know, in a free market, you make mistakes, but the government is not supposed to be making those mistakes. Let the market do it. But now let me get back to this particular post. So nowhere in this post does he say anything has been decided. He refers to his executive order on digital assets. Yes. What did that order do? It directed the working group to study the potential of a crypto stockpile. That's it. He is referring to that group that is still studying the potential. They haven't determined anything. And of course, even if this group, which hasn't even come out with a finding yet, even if this working group were to recommend to the President that we have a strategic reserve of crypto, they got to sell it to Congress. The president just can't establish it on his own. You know, it. They. They have to spend government money. They. They need a program. Congress has to enact it. Yes. We, you know, we authorize the spending of public money, you know, to buy these tokens. Right. So even if they had done that. But he didn't say that. This is all BS Now, I don't even think Trump wrote this. Do you think Trump knows that Cardano is ada? I mean, I was I didn't, I don't look it up. I didn't know that. I knew Solana would ripple. I forgot what ada, do you think Donald Trump knows ada? No, he did not compose this post. Somebody wrote it. Now, that other, the person who wrote it may have been the one that posted it. Now, maybe Trump, you know, copied it. Somebody said here, Mr. President, post this. But I doubt that even happened. I'm sure that there are some other people that Trump has given access to his account, and they made that post, but only after the. They had loaded up on those specific tokens. Now, the interesting thing about that post is that it didn't even mention bitcoin, right? So people are like, hey, this, we got a bitcoin strategic reserve. And the post didn't even mention bitcoin. So what happened was, I'm sure this went around like, oh, my God, wait is not even going to be any bitcoin in the reserve. And so later on, maybe like an hour, I forget, an hour went by at least, and then Donald Trump makes another post or whoever is posting on behalf of Donald Trump and posts this. And obviously BTC and ETH as other valuable cryptocurrencies will be at the heart of the reserve. I also love bitcoin and Ethereum. And again, I don't think Trump wrote this. I think, you know, it was written for him, but it was damage control because they left out BTC and ETH from the original post because that's not the one that everybody was going to dump because they loaded up on the other coins because they can make more money. Those things are up 30%, you know, more than twice the rally in bitcoin, but they had to go back and fix it. But also, I, I think the whole idea of having a reserve of all these currencies because he didn't just say bitcoin and ether, other valuable cryptocurrencies. What are those? Like, how many are going to be in there, right? It's going to be like a reserve of, of all sorts of tokens that they're just going to pick, right? And they're going to load up this reserve. Anyway, I got, I want to, I got another couple of thoughts on this topic, and then I'm going to move on. But we got a quick commercial break, so stick around. We'll be right back. I used to think a mattress was just furniture until I got my ghost bed. 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All right, so I'm talking about the pump and dump going on in crypto tonight. And you know, there is a area here where the bitcoin maxis and I have some common ground, although it's not quite as much common ground as, as they're claiming as a result of a post that I made earlier on X that is got like 2 million impressions now over 23, 000 likes. 5700 comments. Right? I'm getting a lot of bitcoin guys agreeing with me now. But this also shows you how ridiculous this whole, you know, reserve is stockpile that they're posting about. So when it comes to bitcoin, right? I get the rationale for a strategic reserve. I don't agree with it. Right? This is what a lot of the bitcoin guys are misrepresenting. Just because I understand the argument that somebody is making doesn't mean I agree with that argument. So the argument for a bitcoin strategic reserve is pretty simple. We have a gold reserve, right? Who knows how much gold is there? We're going to find out. We're going to Fort Knox. But we have a gold reserve. Other countries have gold reserves. Bitcoin is digital gold. Now, I don't think it's digital gold, but a lot of people do. That's the whole, you know, that's that, that, that's the, the marketing gimmick. It's digital gold, right? So bitcoin is digital gold, but it's actually better than gold because gold is analog, right? Bitcoin is a much better version of gold than, you know, old school analog gold. And we have a reserve of that analog gold. So why not have a reserve of digital gold too, right? Because it's better. So that's the argument, right? I don't buy the argument. It's BS but at least it makes sense, right? Because if Bitcoin is digital gold, then why not have a reserve of it, right? Okay, I get that. I disagree with it, but I get it. Okay, but what is the argument for a Ripple reserve or a Solano reserve or any of these other Cadero or any of these other cryptos that they want to put in there? And if you can say, well, we should have a reserve with Solana or Cadero, well, you know, why not Dogecoin? Why not throw it in on there? What about Fart Coin? Why isn't that going to be part of the reserve? Or Trump coin? It, it makes no sense. What is the argument? Now you can argue, well, Ripple is a really valuable token. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but so what? Why should the government stockpile it? Why do we need a reserve of Bitcoin of, of Ripple just because it's a valuable token? Now, I, I don't think it's valuable, right, but if, if it is, so what? I mean, think of all the valuable assets that are out there that we don't have a reserve of. I mean, all we have, we have a gold reserve and like an oil reserve. That's it. I mean, we don't have a wheat reserve or corn or soybeans. We don't have a copper reserve. You know, we don't have a reserve of stocks. I mean, everybody thinks that Nvidia is like, you know, you got to own Nvidia. Well, why don't we have a stockpile of Nvidia? Why doesn't the government buy stock in Nvidia? Why doesn't it buy Apple? Why doesn't it buy the entire Magnificent Seven, right? Aren't they valuable? Shouldn't we have a reserve of that? Right? You can't make an argument for a reserve of any of these other tokens. So the only rationale for saying or teasing that there's going to be a reserve of these currencies is to enrich the people who already own them. It's obvious this has got nothing to do with what's good for the country. This is all a money grab. This is Donald Trump or whoever is operating his social media account, basically spreading a lot of money around his donors and family members and helping them get rich, you know, off of these, off of these tokens. And, you know, yes, maybe it's not as bad as what the people did at usaid. Right. Because they, they just took the taxpayer's money and put it in and they lined their own pockets. And, and here the people who are getting fleeced are the people who are dumb enough to buy these tokens. Right. The money that Trump's friends and family are going to make off of these tokens is coming from the American public that is dumb enough and greedy enough to buy them. Now, you could say, well, you know, they deserve to lose their money because they were dumb. Right? People who gamble and lose, Right? Well, they deserve to lose. But the President is really, you know, taking advantage of his position to fleece the ignorant and the greedy. And I just think that's wrong. I mean, that is not. You don't want to exploit the office. We have so many important things that the President needs to do. There's so many important things that he could be doing. This is going to be a big distraction, and it is going to be used by his critics against him. He is basically handing them a great issue when he's got the high ground. Right now. He's got a very strong position, and this is weakening him by, by doing this. And he is opening himself up to a lot of criticism. Because if I'm going to criticize him, imagine what the left is going to do, right? Imagine how the field day the Democrats are going to have with this. There's no reason to give them this issue. Anyway, let me go on. I want to talk about some other stuff that's happening. First of all, the dollar. There was a big rally in the dollar on Thursday. You know, I talked on my last podcast, my Tuesday podcast, about how the dollar was rolling over. Well, it had a big rally on Thursday because that's when Trump came out with another post that the tariffs that we thought, you know, weren't happening, maybe we dodged a bullet. They're coming on Tuesday. On March 4, we're getting 25% tariffs, supposedly on the goods that we want to buy from Canada and Mexico and another 10% tariffs on top of the tariffs that we already have on the goods that we want to buy from China. And so when the news of these tariffs came out, there was an immediate rally in the dollar, because again, this is the algorithms pre programmed to buy dollars on tariff news. This is not bullish for the dollar. But if that's how they've been programmed, you know, garbage in, garbage out. So we got a dollar rally. I don't think it's going to last, especially when you look at the trade deficits. And I'm going to Go over a lot of the economic data that came out in the last couple days. But the, the worst piece of news that again gets very little coverage was the trade deficit, the merchandise trade deficit. They call it the goods deficit now. Back in the 80s 90s we called it the merchandise trade deaths. I don't know why they stopped calling it merchandise, but now they just call it goods. But anyway, so last month was the record, right? It was 122 billion. It was the worst trade deficit in goods in U.S. history. Well, it was the worst until we got January's number, which blew that number out of the water. So the consensus estimate was for a small reduction in the trade deficit in goods down to 116 billion. Instead it skyrocketed to 153.3 billion, just blowing away the worst trade deficit in one month that we've ever had. Now, maybe a chunk of this is due to the front running of the tariffs, but why didn't that get built into the estimates? I mean, we all know these tariffs are out there. Yet despite that, the estimate was 116 billion, even though everybody knew that importers may try to jump in front of these tariffs by bringing stuff in now. And of course, if Donald Trump was right, if our trading partners are going to eat the tariffs and not raise their, and cut their prices to make up for the tariffs, then why rush to bring them in now? Right? I mean, obviously importers don't buy what the President is selling. They know that tariffs mean higher prices and so they're trying to buy some goods before. But I don't think it's all that. I mean, I just think our position is rapidly deteriorating. The industrial base of the United States is disintegrating. We are wasting our resources on crypto and other things. And while we're doing that, we don't have the production, we can't produce the things that we need. And we are more and more dependent on the rest of the world, which means those tariffs are going to bite even harder because we have no choice. Most of these goods that the President wants to tariff, there are no domestic substitutes. So we can't buy us, we have to buy foreign and we have to pay those tariffs or we just don't buy at all. And in the occasion where there is an American substitute, the reason we're not buying those American goods now is because they're too expensive. Right? People are struggling, people are trying to get by. And so the fact that the imports are cheaper is helping Americans get by. But if they have to Buy these more expensive domestic goods instead because the imports are now 25% more expensive. That's just going to further weaken their, their position now. Yes, the, the, the, the big jump in the trade deficit was driven by imports. Imports did surge by 11.9%. Exports were up, but they were only up by 2%. So this, this is bad news. It doesn't really get reported. All of this comes out of our gdp. Right. Trade deficits are a net subtraction from the gdp. And that is why the Atlanta Fed on Friday Revised down their GDP estimates for Q1 to minus 1.5, I think. Let me try to read it here. Looks like minus one and a half. So that's half a recession. I mean, before that it was at 2 and change. It looked like, it looks like it was at two and a quarter before they revised it. Let me see. Here is. I can't, I can't say it if that's exactly it, because it looks like it's somewhere in the middle of, of 1 and 2. I'm just looking at the graph, but it just, just goes off the side, off the edge of a cliff. Yeah, here it is. Minus. Minus 1.5%. I was right. So nobody talked about that. Right. Everybody is distracted by a lot of other stuff. But we've now got a estimate for the GDP for the first quarter of this year. Right. Trump's first quarter as president. Right. Only half of July of January, but all of February, all of March. And we're going to print a negative GDP. Now, the media is going to have a field day with that, talking about how Trump wrecked the economy. And they're going to be able to use the GDP as proof. But we got more bad economic data that came out since my last podcast. New home sales for January were supposed to be 680,000, down to 657,000 bigger drop from an upwardly revised December number. So December, it was 734,000 new home sales, and it dropped all the way down to 657,000. That is a huge crash in new home sales in January. Right. That's going to be pinned on Trump. The durable goods numbers weren't bad. They were actually. The new orders were above estimates. But X Transportation, it ended up being below. But that one wasn't that bad. We got the final numbers for the Q4 GDP. They were unrevised at 2.3%, of course, driven by personal consumption, which was 4.2%. So our GDP was driven by consumer spending. And, you know, I noticed a good exchange on X by Elon Musk responding to somebody's post that was critical of GDP as a way to measure, you know, economic well being. And I agree. I mean, GDP is not, and I've talked about this on prior podcasts, it is not a good way to measure a standard of living. Because what's included in GDP are a lot of expenses that we'd rather not make. Medical expenses, legal expenses, insurance, cleaning up from a toxic spill or a national disaster. Right? A lot of expenses that we'd rather not incur end up increasing the gdp. Whereas stuff that we really enjoy, like leisure, you know, doesn't count at all. So if we have to give up our leisure and work harder, right, that means that we have a higher gdp, but we'd prefer to work less. So leisure is not in there. So I. There are better ways to measure economic growth. It's better to look at the increase in the productive capacity of a nation. The capital stock, the factories, the infrastructure, the housing, the roads, other things, stadiums, theaters, amusement parks. I mean, look at what we've actually created, right? How much more of that stuff do we have? Our capacity to provide our citizens with goods and services that make our lives better. Not just measuring what we spend and not counting anything. In fact, I thought it was the guy that put this up is the crypto czar, right? Yeah, a sax. And he used the analogy I've used a lot about digging holes and filling them. He said if we dig a bunch of holes, if we spend a lot of money digging holes and then we spend a lot of money filling them back up again, that's going to increase the gdp. But we've added no value, which is true. But I make the same argument for Bitcoin's proof of work, right? Just because we, we, we, we waste energy making Bitcoin doesn't mean we have anything of value. No more than digging holes and refilling them. Anyway, I got another commercial break, I got some more economic data to go over with and then a few more interesting topics to discuss. So don't go anywhere. Coming right back. 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Moving average also jumped up from 215 and a quarter. So 215.25 to 224. I do think that we're going to get a lot more unemployment going. Now. The good news is some of the unemployment will be government workers because that's where a lot of the jobs came from under Biden. And it looks like with Doge, we're going to get rid of a lot of these employees, at least at the federal level. Hopefully the same thing will happen state and local level. But you know, while that is good news because we don't have to pay their salaries and in most cases to the extent that they worked, they were, you know, undermining the productivity of everybody else, they're going to be unemployed. They're going to add to the statistics of the unemployed, which is going to be problematic for the Fed. And of course, I think a lot of these government workers, you know, who don't really work very hard and who are not very productive, fortunately, they may have a hard time finding gainful employment in the private sector, especially if they work for government for a long time and have a lousy work ethic, Right? I mean, because if you actually have to work for a private company that cares if you're productive and that's actually going to evaluate your performance, that's a whole new world for some of these career bureaucrats. So they may have a hard time getting a job and then a hard time keeping that job. But you know, this is going to complicate the situation for the Fed because unemployment is going to be rising and inflation is going to be rising at the same time. Stagflation pending home sales collapsed in January and in fact they also were down in December, although the December number was not as bad as they initially reported because they reported minus 5.5, they revised that to minus 4.1. But for January they were expecting minus 1.2 and we got minus 4.6. So back to back four handles on pending home sales and the index tanked from 74.2 down to 70.6. Look, we have a bear market in housing and that's because prices are too high and mortgage rates are too high and so people can't afford to buy. Kansas City Fed manufacturing, another negative number, although not much worse than, or not worse at all than the prior number we have back to back minus five for the Kansas City manufacturing. Again, we're not manufacturing as much. That's why our trade deficits are much bigger, because we have to import what other countries are manufacturing. We also got the Chicago PMI that was actually a beat. We got a number that was higher than expected, but still well south of 50. It came out at 45 and a half. Anything below 50 is a contraction. So that's recession territory. But it's not as bad as it was the prior month, which was 39 and a half. So it was an improvement, but it still indicates recession. But the other big number we got was the personal income and spending, because that's where, you know, the Fed gets its inflation numbers, the PCE. So their personal income actually spiked by 0.9 and the saving, the spending went down, down by 0.2. So the savings rate really spiked. I don't even believe these numbers. I, I think, I think there's something odd. I, I can't imagine that incomes went up this much and spending went down, especially with prices going up. So I don't buy these numbers, so I think they're going to get revised. But if you look at the inflation numbers, right, those are the ones the Fed looks at. The PCE month over month was up 0.3, which was the same as the prior month, they were looking for an increase to 0.4, but year over year, 2 1/2, which was a little better than the 2.6from the prior year. Oh, that's the headline. The core was up 0.3 and the year over year was up 2.6, which was exactly what they expected, although they did revise the prior month up to 2.9. But again, this is the number that the Fed claims is the most important. Right? The core pce, year over year. That's what they claim. They want to have a 2%. It's nowhere near 2%. It's closer to 3% to 2%. So we got inflation, but we also got a weak economy. We've got stagflation, which is the worst possible environment. The Fed's got no plan, they've got no contingencies for that. They got no stress tests for that. All they've got is hope and a prayer. But what they've been hoping for, what they've been praying for, isn't going to work. Anyway, a few more things I want to talk about. So there was a. A meeting this week. Zelensky came from Ukraine to meet with the President to supposedly sign this mineral deal in the Ukraine. But anyway, apparently he wanted a little bit more than Trump was willing to offer for this deal. And so we didn't get it. I think he, Zelensky is really looking for support to continue the war. And Trump, to his credit, wants to end the war. Right? The sooner the better. And. And so nothing happened. But the interesting thing is there was a live press conference, and of course, Zelensky is there in his T shirt, right? And everybody else is wearing suits. And there's a reporter that asks him a question, and he says, why aren't you wearing a suit? He says, you know, it's disrespectful. You're here in the, you know, White House, you're coming to ask for money, show a little respect. And don't you own a suit? Right? And now this guy's the hero, right? I think he. Maybe he's married to a congresswoman or something, because. But all of a sudden, this guy. Finally somebody has the courage to say this, right? To call out Zelensky for wearing a T shirt. Well, look how times have changed. I did that three years ago. I made the exact same comment. I said, you know, Zelensky was addressing a joint session of Congress. That had never happened before remotely. He was the first person to do it, right? And he shows up in his T shirt. And so I'm like, then he own a suit. I mean, you know, show a little respect. And I put in my post, you know, no one has less respect for Congress than me, but the two times that I testified in front of Congress, I put on a suit, right? Because I respect the institution of the Congress, even if I don't respect the congressmen and women who are currently there. I expect as much from Zelensky, especially when he's coming here asking for money, because that's exactly what he did three years ago. He was here asking for money, and he asked in a T shirt. But when I did it, nobody defended me. I got 47 million impressions on my. A Twitter post. It was still Twitter back then. I got, you know, what was 75,000 hateful comments. Only got like 7,000 likes. I got death threats. I, you know, the mainstream media, legacy media. There were dozens of articles written about me. How dare I say this? How dare I. You know, he's in a war. How could you expect him to put on a suit? You know, like he's in a foxhole, Like. Like he's actually under fire. And I put out. He was in a professionally lighted studio with makeup on. He had makeup. You know, he had his. His face groomed. Right. His hair, his beard. Right. You know, it's all staged so he could have put on a suit. Right. It wasn't like I was risking, you know, thinking that he needed to risk being shot to get a suit. Right. I mean, it was something that you could do. So I make this exact same observation, and I get taken to the woodshed. Now somebody is able to make the exact same point, and he's a hero. And I'm glad. I'm glad now that times have changed to that point where you can speak critically of Zelensky now, because, you know, he was like George Washington when I made that post, how he's like the founding father of this nation. He's fighting the revolution. I was pointing out that there's more corruption in the Ukraine than there was in. In Russia. Not that I was condoning the invasion. I was just putting everything in perspective that it wasn't good versus evil. You know, the. These are. These are both bad, right? These are thugs, you know, fighting over the turf. You know, it's not. It wasn't the American Revolution, but that's how the left was trying to build up Zelensky. And I made a very, you know. Right. Odd point. I. I still think he should have worn a suit three years ago, and he should have Worn a suit last week. But, you know, that just, it's a little bit of vindication for me. Even if nobody in the mainstream wants to vindicate me, no one wants to point this out. I mean, at least I know that, you know what, what I said was, was right. Anyway. Also, I, I saw an interview with Donald Trump. I forget which, maybe it was a Fox News reporter, but Trump said he wants a balanced budget, said, I want a balanced budget and I'd like to have it in two years, maybe one year, if not sooner, if not sooner. So he, he, he may want a balanced budget sooner than one year. Now, of course, the budget is so far out of balance, you know, we're $2 to $3 trillion in the hole. And he said he wants to balance it maybe sooner than a year. Well, if he actually meant that he could do it, I've said it on this podcast. Just tell Congress that you're going to veto that big, beautiful bill that pass the House because It includes a 4 trillion dollar increase in the national debt. Look, it may be a big bill, but it ain't beautiful, right? It increases the debt. It takes the debt, the deficits that were inherited from Biden and makes them bigger. You know, part of me thinks that one of the reasons for Doge is a distraction, right? It's like a magician, like if they want, if a magician wants to do a trick, right? And maybe he's manipulating something with his right hand. He doesn't want you to notice it, so he puts his left hand up in the air and he tries to distract your attention from where he's, you know, doing, doing something. Right? Well, the, what's going on in Doge and with all the attention focused on, oh, we're finding this fraud and abuse and we're making these cuts, they don't want you to see what the Republicans are actually doing in Congress. Increasing defense spending, Right? Increasing the deficits. It's a distraction from the real increases in government spending. Yes, there's some cuts, but they're offset by other increases. I'm sure the government is going to spend more money in 2025 than they spent in 2024, regardless of what's happening in Doge. So we got to put some pressure on what Congress is actually doing. Trump could do it if he said, I'm not going to increase the debt ceiling. And if he really wants to balance the budget within a year, which he said he does, that's the only way to do it. If you have to force Congress to stop spending and the Way to do that is you don't raise a debt ceiling. Although one of the ideas that he does have that I think will could be lucrative. We'll see how they market it are these golden visas. He talked again about his golden visas for $5 million a pop. What I did find out about those visas, that will make them valuable right now, if you are an American citizen or you're here on a normal visa, if you're living here, you got to pay taxes on your worldwide income. That is the curse that Americans have right now. We're unique among nations that we're taxed on our worldwide income. And I mentioned on this podcast the origin of that tax. The very first income tax that we had during the Civil War, which was, you know, went away after the Civil War and wasn't resurrected until 1913. But the Civil War temporary income tax taxed Americans, no matter where they lived, on their worldwide income. And that was to get the draft dodgers. People were dodging the draft and going up to Canada because in the north, that's where we had the first draft, because a lot of people didn't want to fight in the Civil War. In the south, you know, everybody volunteered because they were fighting for, you know, for a cause. But a lot of the people in the north didn't believe in it. They. They were fine, let the south go. They didn't care. And when, when the draft came in, people went up to Canada, right? That's where the tradition started. And so the idea was, okay, they may have dodged the draft, but we're not going to let them dodge the income tax. So we're going to tax them even if they're in Canada, right? So that's where it started, because when we brought back the income tax, we kept that tradition. But these golden visas, if you come in on a golden visa, you can live in America, but all of your global income is tax exempt. That is a big perk. So a lot of people might decide they want to live here because they can live in New York. They can live, you know, any big city they want and not have to pay taxes on their worldwide income. Now, if they really wanted to make those golden visas valuable, they would exempt us Taxes, too. If we did that, if Trump said, hey, pay $5 million and you can move here and live tax free. Now, it wouldn't be local, right? You'd still have to pay state and local taxes. But if Trump said, move here on a visa and live here on a visa and no income tax, no estate tax, no gift tax, he Might actually sell a lot of those. I can see a lot of people who would come here, and you might think, well, why should we do that? Because, you know, we're going to lose all this money. No, we're not. It's like Puerto Rico. We're talking about people coming here that never were going to live here. So that's tax revenue that we weren't going to get. Look, I moved to Puerto Rico along with, you know, four or five thousand other people because Puerto Rico exempted us from taxes. Now people say, oh, well, this costs Puerto Rico money. No, it doesn't. They were never going to get that tax revenue in the first place because none of us were going to move here. So if Trump just, you know, allows people to move here and not pay federal taxes, a lot of people are going to come, a lot of very wealthy people who are going to come, and they're going to bring businesses and they're going to hire people and pay salaries, and then they're going to pay local taxes. You know, they're going to pay state taxes, city taxes. So it would be huge. I don't think he's going to do that. But I think this idea of exempting them from the worldwide income is going to end up with some takers, but it's not going to be enough to get rid of a $35 trillion national debt. But I wanted to talk, finish up the podcast, talking about the Joe Rogan interview with Elon Musk, which I just watched today. And there were a couple of points that I wanted to make about it. One was, you know, Elon Musk was very critical of the legacy media and the way they misreport stuff, promote fake news to advance a political agenda. And that, you know, you got to get your news from Joe Rogan or from X. And I agree. And, you know, that's exactly what happened with me and, and, and my bank. It was the government using the legacy media. They used the New York Times, they used 60 Minutes to promote fake news, right? They, they investigate my bank for two years for criminal, for crimes, criminal investigation, tax evasion, money laundering. These are crimes. They find no evidence to charge anybody with anything. And so because it's embarrassing, because they wasted all these resources, they decide to use their buddies in the legacy media to promote a false story that my bank was actually guilty of. All the crimes, they found no evidence to charge it with. And to make their fake news story more credible, they get the Puerto Rican banking commissioner to shut down the bank under a pretense to make up some lies to shut it down. And then they use the shutdown as proof that the bank was committing the crimes that they found no evidence of. And that's why nobody was ever charged.