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You make no friends in the pits and you take no prisoners.

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One minute, you're up half a million

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in soybeans, and the next, boom. Your kids don't go to college and

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they've repossessed your Bentley.

Peter Schiff (0:09)

Are you with me? The revolution starts now. Starts now. We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it. Turn those machines back on. You are about to enter the Peter Schiff show. Peterbody, if we lose freedom here, there's no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth. The Peter Schiff show is on. I don't know when they decided that they wanted to make a virtue out of selfishness. Your money, your stories, your freedom. The Peter Schiff Show. Well, the big news story continues to be the war in Iran and the constant escalation. De. Escalation. Escalation of that war and all of the media spin and the administration spin that is dominating all the news headlines that I want to discuss at the top of this podcast. But I'm gonna get to some economic data which I think is also very important. And I'm gonna give you guys an update on some of my legal battles with the irs. Very important updates. So you want to make sure and stick around to the entire podcast. Don't tune out, because there's gonna be a lot of good stuff that I'm gonna be getting to along the way. And while I'm thinking about it, if you're not currently a subscriber to this YouTube channel, make sure and hit the subscribe button. Hit the like button. Leave me a comment. We gotta try to drive some engagement. And apparently that's the best way to do it. Now, first of all, I want to go over some of the events from the war. Well, before I do that, you know, I was watching the Sunday morning news shows, and the one that was the most interesting, I think it was Meet the Press. And Treasury Secretary Scott Besant was a guest on Meet the Press. Now, I had mentioned on a prior podcast, the administration had talked about asking Congress for a $50 billion down payment for the military for the war. But by Sunday, the price tag had already been up the ante to 200 billion. $200 billion extra appropriations. So that the Trump administration. He hasn't asked yet, but those were the rumors, that Trump was gonna ask Congress for 200 billion extra for the military, for the war. Right. He didn't ask Congress for permission to declare the war. He just did that on his own. But now that we're at war, he wants Congress to authorize, or he will ask Congress to authorize more funding. And so the woman, and I forget her name, who was interviewing Scott Bessen, asked a very good question, which Scott Bessant not only didn't want to answer, but in very Trumpian fashion, he really made fun of the reporter for asking the question. Now, the question was very simple. Are you going to consider raising taxes to pay for this war? I mean, that's an honest, straightforward question. You want an extra $200 billion, where are you going to get the money? And instead of answering it initially, he said, well, that's a ridiculous question. Well, what's ridiculous about it? What's ridiculous is that he doesn't want to answer it. He says, how ridiculous could you even ask me? Why would you even ask me how we're going to pay for this? It's like, yes, maybe it is ridiculous to ask the government how they're gonna pay for something when they don't pay for anything. They just borrow the money. The Fed just prints the money. So according to the Secretary of the treasury, this isn't just anybody. This is the Secretary of our Treasury. He's supposed to be protecting the Treasury. He gets asked, hey, how are you gonna pay for this war? Don't ask me such a ridiculous question. Who cares? So then he said, well, why would we need any money? Well, what do you mean why would you need any Money? The country's 39 trillion in debt. You're the Secretary of the Treasury. Did you not notice all that debt? We have a massive budget to have. So what do you mean you don't need the money? He said, we got plenty of money. That's what he said. We don't need any money. We got plenty of money. No, we don't. If we had plenty of money, we wouldn't have massive deficits, now would we? Because we don't have plenty of money. We have to borrow all that money. The reason we have these massive deficits is because we're out of money. We have to borrow the money. So we don't have plenty of money lying around to pay for this war. We don't have money lying around to pay for anything. So after first saying the question was ridiculous and then saying, well, we have plenty of money, they moved on. He never actually answered the question about how you're gonna pay for it. But he eventually did rule out tax hikes because she pressed him on the question and he eventually said, no, we're not even considering raising taxes to pay for this war. Well, then how Are you gonna pay for the war, Mr. Secretary of the treasury, you're not even considering tax increases. I mean, we had a major tax increase to pay for World War II. It was called the Victory Tax. We didn't just borrow money. I mean, we borrowed a lot of money. The US Government sold war bonds to raise money for the war, but there were massive tax increases. In fact, up until the Second World War, hardly any Americans even paid the income tax. The income tax started, as I mentioned, in 1913 as a soak the rich tax, but the middle class didn't really pay it until the victory tax of 1942. And in fact, that's what introduced withholding. Even if you paid income taxes before 1942, you didn't pay them until April 15th of the following year. When you sent your money in. There was no withholding of taxes out of anybody's pay. You just sent a check to the government. So nobody had to get a tax refund because nobody paid the taxes until after they filed their return and figured out how much they owed. So nobody got a tax refund. Now, when the withholding tax was introduced as part of the Victory Tax, it was to fund the war. So, yes, World War II was a much bigger war than the Iran war, but we paid for it. Yes, we borrowed some of the money, but we also raised a lot of taxes. And if Scott Besset was a responsible steward of our national treasury, he would be telling the President, okay, Mr. President, here's how much this war is gonna cost. Here are our options. Here's the type of taxes that we could levy on the American public to pay for the war. And of course, if the President was honest with the taxpayers and said, you gotta pay for the war, the war would be even less popular than it is. That's one of the reasons that, that Trump doesn't want higher taxes to pay for the war, because then the war will be far less popular. I'm not sure how popular it is now, but it would have even less support if people thought they had to cover the cost. So according to the Treasury Secretary, Ben Matter, we're just going to run up the debt because they didn't talk about cutting any government programs. I would have liked it if the journalist had asked Scott Bessant, okay, well, if tax cuts are off the table, I mean, if tax hikes are off the table, are you gonna cut anywhere else in the budget? Are you gonna cut back on some other programs to free up the money? Cause I'm sure he would have answered no to that question as well. So if you're not going to raise taxes and you're not going to cut spending, well, how are you going to finance the war? Obviously, just pile it on top of the debt. We're just gonna borrow more money. What the hell? We're already borrowing trillions a year. What's a few hundred billion more for the Iran war? You know, a few hundred billion here, a few hundred billion there, right? Pretty soon you're talking about real money, which, again, proves that the biggest threat to the United States is not coming from Iran. It's coming from Washington, D.C. is coming from the President of the United States. It's coming from the Congress of the United States that is spending all this money. The debt is the threat. Inflation is the threat. That's what the President should be concerned about. Instead of figuring out ways to spend even more money and go deeper into debt, why don't we try to figure out how to cut spending? The President and I mentioned this on a prior podcast that said that Americans need to be prepared to make sacrifices that we have to sacrifice for this greater good. We have to suck it up and pay higher gas prices because it's worth it in the long run, because we're gonna defeat Iran. Well, instead of focusing on defeating an enemy that really doesn't represent that much of a threat to us, why don't we focus on what does? The debt itself. And we're making the debt crisis worse by fighting a war that we didn't need to fight. And now we're borrowing even more money that we didn't need to borrow. So the sacrifice that he should be asking Americans to make is to accept less government, to accept reductions in government benefits. That's the sacrifice. That would be a sacrifice worth making, because that's a real payoff. We can have real prosperity if we can shrink the size of the government. Instead, we're making government bigger, we're making the military bigger, we're spending more money, we're making the deficits bigger to finance this war. So I thought that that comment was very striking. Nobody really talks about it the whole rest of the interview. I mean, I don't really believe a word that comes out of this guy's mouth. In fact, I don't believe anything that anybody in the Trump administration says, because I think either that they gotta know that Trump is lying. So if they repeat the lies, then they're lying, too. And, of course, Trump is talking about the war all the time, and I wish I could believe the things that he says and it's not that I just believe the stuff that the Iranians say. I mean, I don't trust them either. But I take everything that Trump says with a grain of salt, and so should everybody else, so should the media, so should the markets. Just because Trump says something does not mean it's true, because most of the stuff that he says I know is a lie. When Trump talks about the economy, I know he's lying. I mean, all this stuff that he says is happening, it's not happening. He's making stuff up, he's misrepresenting stuff. So if he does that, when he talks about the economy, tariffs, inflation, his accomplishments, all the other stuff that Donald Trump routinely lies about, and he lies about the same stuff over and over and over again, trying to convince himself that the lies are true. But because he has such a track record of lying, how the hell can I believe him? When he starts to talk about what's happening with Iran, when he talks about why we're having a war, when he talks about what's happening during the war, how the war is going, how can I believe him? I can't. I mean, I'd like to. I'd like to be able to believe the President, but how do you believe somebody that's told so many lies? You just get. You destroy your own credibility. So I don't know why anybody even pays attention. Why the media? Why the markets? Why. Why the markets pay attention to what the President says, but they do. And that may be one of the main reasons that the President says things is because he's intending to manipulate the markets. And I'm gonna talk a little bit more about that on the other side of this. Commercial break so stick around. We'll be coming right back. When I think about brain health, I'm not thinking about it in isolation. 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He said, if you don't open the Straits of Hormuz within 48 hours from this post, that's it, I am going to destroy your power plants. I'm going to knock out all your power plants. We're going to bomb them into oblivion, and you guys are gonna be in the dark. This is what we're gonna do. Thank you, Donald Trump. You got 48 hours or else. Right? Really, really tough. Of course, this is after he's already claimed we've already won the war. Right. And in fact, one of the things that Scott Bessant said on the interview I was discussing, he said sometimes you have to escalate to de escalate. So that's, I guess, part of their strategy here, escalating to de escalate. Like we gotta make the budget deficit bigger in order to make it smaller. Right. That's what they told us over and over again. A larger deficit today is a down payment on a smaller deficit tomorrow. I think the way to de escalate is not to escalate, just go straight to the de escalation and skip, you know, you don't have to go backwards to go forwards, just go forwards. But anyway, that's apparently they're negotiating style. We have to escalate so we can de escalate. Right. But anyway, so apparently that's what it looked like they were doing. Well, although on Saturday, you didn't know that it was like okay, this is it. The gloves are coming off now. We're getting serious. So the markets are reacting over the weekend. Of course it takes until Sunday before the markets are trading. Although bitcoin is already trading. So bitcoin already gets clobbered. I mean not dramatically. Down like 3 or 4%. I mean, you know, so bitcoins, I forget where it got down to 68,000, something like that, but it was like at 74,000. So maybe it fell 5%, I forget. But bitcoin went down on this tough talk. And then Sunday night and S and P futures are down several hundred points. Oil is way up. Oil's back over 100. Brent's back well over 110. Bonds are getting killed. U.S. treasuries. The yield on the 10 year treasury got up to 4.4%. The five year was almost 5. It was like 397, 398. Gold's down. In fact by Monday morning, early Monday morning, you know, like three, four in the morning, I forget, gold almost hit 4100. It got down to like 4120. I mean it was at 5500. It was when the war broke out, three, three weeks ago or four weeks ago, whenever it was, gold hit 5500. And then Monday of this week, two days ago, it almost hit 4100. Even on this news, on this, you know, escalation, dollar was up. So the markets are really moving on the escalation now. Of course this is ridiculous when it comes to gold. This shows you how liquidity driven everything happens to be right now in this massive bubble that the Fed has inflated. Gold goes down when the war gets escalated, but it goes up when it gets de escalated, which is the opposite of what you would think. You would think that when the war looks like it's gonna be bigger and last longer and be more disruptive, you should wanna buy gold. But if it looks like the war is over, you'd wanna sell it. But the opposite is happening. The longer it looks like the war is gonna continue, the more people are selling gold. I mean if they declared peace tomorrow, the whole war is over. Gold was sore. That doesn't even seem to make any sense. And you know, part of it too is linked to the idea that the longer the war continues, the longer we're gonna have to wait for the Fed to cut rates. And that elongated wait for the rate cut, that's what's weighing on gold. Which is irrelevant because the entire time the Fed is gonna be on hold, inflation is gonna be getting worse. And so real interest rates are gonna keep going down. And even if the Fed holds nominal interest rates the same and you know, if inflation goes from 3% to 6%, that's better for gold than inflation staying where it is and the Fed cutting. Because what's important for gold is real interest rates. The nominal interest rates at the end of the day don't matter. Even if the Fed raises interest rates to 10%. If inflation is 30%, do 10% inflation, interest rates matter? No, you're negative 20%. You would wanna buy gold even more aggressively if we had 10% interest rates and 30% inflation. So it's the real rate that is important. And the traders still don't get this. Now, eventually, if the war goes on long enough, this is going to stop at some point. The gold is going to start to go up when the escalation goes up. But we haven't reached that point yet. But I think the pullback, if you look at the pullback to 4,100, that's about 40% retracement of the entire rally. If you measure the rally from the breakout at 2000, that was really where we broke out. So it went from 2000, 5600. A 40% retracement is about 4100 now as we're talking now. And I'm gonna get to why this happened. But gold's back above 4,500. So it's already bounced more than 10% from Monday morning's low. But that 40% retracement is exactly the decline that we got the bull market in gold from 2001 to 2008, or that bull market where gold went from under 300 to 1000. The 40% retracement there was about what we did in between August of 08 and like November of 08. During those four months, gold pulled back about 35%, which was a little bit bigger than the pullback that we've had so far. Although this pullback was quicker gold's decline since we started the Iran war, it was a much faster decline than the one that was triggered by the 2008 financial crisis. That's how sharp the decline was. In fact, last week was the worst week gold's had since 1983. So way before the 08 financial crisis. But if you look at the magnitude of the decline relative to the entire bull market, what we've already had is in three weeks is about the same as what we had in four months of the financial crisis. But what's Significant is after gold bottomed in November of 2020 of November 2008. Now, the stock market didn't bottom until, like, February or January or February or March. I forget of 09. The stock market fell another 22, 23% after gold bottomed. But after gold bottomed, within three years, it tripled. Gold went to 1900. So if gold does the same thing again, has a 40% retracement and then triples, gold's over 11,000 now. I actually think gold is going to go a lot higher than that. I think the fundamentals are a lot better now than they were in 2011. So if gold could triple after a 40% retracement back then, it can certainly do at least that, if not more now, which is why everybody should take advantage of this decline and buy silver. In fact, silver went all the way down below 63. Remember, silver got to 121 or something like that. So almost about a 50% decline in silver from its peak. Not a retracement of the rally, but a complete, you know, 50% decline. Silver right now is about 71 and a half. So about eight bucks higher than it was Monday morning. So better than, again, 10% bounce off of those lows. But I think that it's nuts that we're at war. And the fundamentals for gold and silver are better than they've ever been. They were great before the war. They're even better now that we have a war. And I don't care if the war is over. The war is damaging the. The US Economy. Yes. The longer it goes on, the more the damage is gonna be. But there's gonna be damage even after the war ends. When the war is over, it's not gonna be a great thing that we're gonna have. I think that Trump is going to promote it as this massive victory, no matter how badly we lose. And not that we lose in a military sense, that Iran defeats us, that that's not gonna happen. But we can lose in an economic sense. We can lose in a sense that we don't really accomplish anything. In fact, I think Iran knows the Iranian leaders know that they win the war just by surviving. If the regime is intact at the end of this, then they've won because they've stood up to the big American Satan. If they're still in power, even if it's different people, if it's the same basic regime, just different players, and who knows what they're gonna demand. In fact, if you look, actually, I'm jumping ahead of myself. So I don't even wanna get to that. But I think they know and I think the Iranians know that at the end of the day the best weapon they have is the dollar, the stock market, the bond market, the oil price, the economy, the polls that's gonna determine when this war ends. I think that's what Trump is gonna ultimately base his decision on, not based on what's going on in Iran or any so called threat. It's gonna be the threat to him politically and the Republican Party that's gonna be guiding ultimately the outcome here. And I think the Iranians probably know that and they probably think that eventually. Look, how many bombs could we have, how many missiles? I mean we're gonna run out eventually, right? Cuz Trump's already admitted that we've run out of things to bomb. So how many more of these bombs are we gonna drop if everything is already destroyed? But in any event, and apparently obviously not everything is destroyed because they still have stuff and they can make more stuff, right? So they can make what we destroyed. But anyway, so let me get back to this whole scenario here. So Trump set off this big move in the markets based on this ultimatum. Then out of the blue, on Monday morning, before US stock markets open, he posts on Truth Social. Hey, great news. We're making a lot of progress in our talks. I think we're gonna have a five day pause on this bombing of the, of the power plants. We're having really productive negotiations. I think we got a deal here. This is great news. I forget exactly what it was, but it was, but it was the complete opposite of the tweet on Saturday morning. And of course it contradicted everything Trump had been saying in the prior week about we're not gonna negotiate, there's nobody to negotiate with. Iran wants to negotiate. Iran wants to make a deal. I don't want to make a deal. Screw them. Unconditional surrender. We're going to bomb you into oblivion. You just got to give up, right? No deal. That's what he was saying before. Now of course everybody says, well, you know, that's how he negotiates, right? He's got to say all this stuff. And you know, so again, if that's the case, you can't believe what he's saying. Maybe he has to lie in order to get what he wants. But why are we taking it seriously if we know that that's his style? So now this comes out and it's a huge reversal. Dow goes up like a thousand points, two thousand points. I mean it gave back some of the but it was a huge rally. Oil dropped like 10 bucks, right? Oil was way up. It went way down. Gold reversed, didn't really go positive, but gold was down like $250 before, before the post and it recovered those losses. Silver, which was down like $4, went positive a couple of bucks. So everything reversed. And I have a hard time believing that somebody didn't know that that post was coming and didn't make some bets either in the S&P 500 futures or oil futures or currency futures. And in fact, now I'm hearing all these reports about mysterious large trades that were placed in the S and P in oil five minutes before that post. Very, very large wagers of a size that nobody would make just on a random hunch. And why would you even have that random hunch? Who the hell would know? The only way somebody would come in with that size at that particular time is if they knew exactly what was gonna happen and they knew exactly the effect that it would have on the markets. Now, I don't know if the reason that post came out was so whoever had the inside information could make money. Or maybe Trump was just looking at at the bond market going yippee. The stock market tanking, oil surging, and he used truth social post knowing that that post would lift the markets, that that's the reason. Because so far the Iranians have denied that there's any talks or that they're making any progress. And again, I'm not gonna necessarily believe what they say either, but I can't believe what anybody says anyway. I got another commercial break. Stick around, we'll be right back. Work doesn't slow down between deadlines, emails, meetings and decision fatigue, it's easy to get buried and even easier to send something out that doesn't sound the way you meant it. In the AI age, speed matters, but so does sounding like you. That's why I've been using Grammarly. It gives me one place to start a draft, get feedback and finish the work without jumping between tools. 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Don't just sound like everyone else with Grammarly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free@Grammarly.com that's Grammarly.com a social post about this great deal, this truce, this pause, whatever. Remember that? That's what he did with tariffs, right? He would threaten these big tariffs, and then when the market started to react, he would pause whatever the tariffs were. He had a deadline and. And then he would put it on pause. And that's how he got the nickname Taco, Right? Trump always chickens out Taco because he would say something and then the markets would react in a bad way, and so he would do an about face. So the same thing is happening with the war. He lays down an ultimatum, the markets react badly, and then he withdraws it. Oh, well, there's a pause. Well, and he talks about how something great is happening. He's having these great negotiations. In fact, he said that the Iranians have offered him this great gift. Now, he didn't say what that gift is. You know, I thought a funny cartoon. Somebody sent me this cartoon. And it was Donald Trump was on a, you know, in a psychiatrist office, and he was, you know, lying on the couch, and he was talking to the doctor, and the doctor says, now tell me, these Iranians that you've been talking to, are they in the room with us now? You know, who the hell knows? Cuz remember Donald Trump was saying all these countries were begging to make a deal with him. Everybody was coming. Everybody wants to make a deal with me. They're lining up to make a deal. And remember back then, I said, I think this is bullshit. I said, I don't think anybody is lining up to make any deals. I think this is all in Trump's imagination, that everybody is lining up to make a deal. So now supposedly, all the Iranians want to make deals. They're all lining up to make deals. Are they? I mean, he wasn't being honest about the tariffs. Is he being honest about this? I don't know. Again, you know, when you've cried wolf so many times, you know, what are we supposed to do? Maybe There is a wolf, but how am I supposed to believe you, right? So anyway, now apparently, you know, we're supposed to be very optimistic and the Iranians are like, we deny all this. Now, apparently Trump has sent like a 16 point plan, like a truce to the Iranians, like, these are our terms, right? This is what we want for a ceasefire, for an end of the war. And from what I can tell, the Iranians have issued their own set of demands and the sides are as far apart as you could possibly be. Now, of course, you know, when you negotiate, right, you both start with extreme positions and you meet somewhere in the middle. But if they're still at the point where they're at the extreme positions, then it doesn't seem like they've negotiated at all. If both sides are at, you know, my way or the highway, I get everything. You get nothing. How do you claim you've even made any progress? Cuz what the Iranians basically want is the unconditional surrender of the United States. That's really what it amounts to. They want their own sovereignty recognized. They want to have complete sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. They want war reparations. They want the US Government to pay them for everything they destroyed. Now, Trump already talked about making Iran great again. He already kind of offered that, but that was supposedly part of a whole regime change where, you know, the Iranians were gonna get rid of the current regime and have this new independent, Western friendly democracy, and then we were gonna offer them aid. But basically what the Iranians are saying, no, no, we want you to write the check to this regime because we're not going anywhere, we're staying in power. And so I forget all the things that they want, but it seems like they would be non starters for Trump. But. So I don't think the war is any closer to being ended than it was before Trump issued his ultimatum, let alone when he said that we're very close to the war being over. And meanwhile, the strait is not open, the ships are not passing right, the damage to the oil market is ongoing. And not again, not just oil. More people now are starting to talk about fertilizer, which is going to be important. And in fact, one of the things that's probably going to happen, and very few people are even contemplating this. Let's assume the war is over. Let's assume, let's assume Trump finds a graceful exit to surrender, yet claim the greatest victory in the history of war. Because Trump has already decided that he's the world's greatest general. And any War that he starts is going to be the most glorious victory of any war, right? And so regardless of what happens, that's how it's going to be portrayed. But let's say that happens, we have this glorious spectacular victory and the strait opens back up and oil production can somehow get resumed. A to the extent that a lot of countries have already started selling out of their strategic reserves, they're gonna immediately wanna replenish those reserves, thinking, holy crap, there could be another shortage. I mean, what if the Gulf gets closed down again a month later? We better rebuild our stockpiles while we have a chance. And in fact, even more so, this war, kind of like a Covid, is a wake up call that you gotta stock up not just on oil, but fertilizer, oil, all kinds of strategic metals. Everybody needs to stock up because you never know when a global supply chain can be disrupted. So I think you're going to see elevated demand across the board for all sorts of commodities. So the prices are not going to go way down. Even if the war is over, they're still gonna go up. And of course you still have a bottleneck, a backlog of oil that wasn't produced because of the war, because if they can't ship it, you know, they can't refine it. A lot of stuff got slowed down, right? Just like with COVID 19 and all that stuff in the supply. So you're gonna have a problem with prices even if the war ends. But of course, the longer it takes, the bigger that problem's gonna be. And the other problem is all the extra deficit spending, all the money printing, all the inflation that is going to be necessary to fund the war. Which brings me to some economic data points that came out today that I want to discuss. One of them is on the weekly mortgages, the mortgage applications, because this just shows you what's going on and what is teetering right as a consequence here. So last week the index, the composite index for mortgage applications, dropped 10.9%. That is a huge decline. Purchases were still up 0.9, but refinances collapsed by 18.5%. But this week the index dropped 10.5%, almost as much, with a 5.4% decline in mortgage applications. This is people buying homes. And another 14.6% decline in refis below the 18.5% decline from the prior week. So they're plunging over the last two weeks. Why are refis collapsing? Because you can't refi anymore because mortgage rates are now moving higher. One of the consequences of the war and rising inflation is higher mortgage rates. And of course, everything associated with homeownership is going up. The utility bills are going up. Costs more for, you know, to heat your house in the winter. It's going to cost more to cool it. Your maintenance, your insurance, everything related to home ownership is getting more expensive, which means home prices have to come down, because that's the only way you can afford to buy a house, is if you get it cheaper, which is going to be the beginning of a financial crisis. Because if real estate prices drop 30% nationwide, what does that mean? Not only do you wipe out the home equity of, of millions of homeowners, but you raise the probability that those homeowners will default on their mortgage. And if they do, the lender is going to lose money because the collateral won't be there to repay the loans. And of course, the US Government, the taxpayer is on the hook for all this government insured debt. And of course, to the extent that the banks own it, right, they're in trouble and we're covering them. So this is another thing that's on the President's mind because he has talked publicly about his desire to maintain high home prices and to make sure that they get even higher, because he wants to protect the home equity of his voters. He does not want that home equity to vanish, which again is gonna be a more important factor, I think, in determining when the war comes to an end. But the more significant numbers were the import export prices. This is an early indication of what's going to happen to consumer prices, because this is exactly what happened. So if you go back and listen to my podcasts from 2001, this is before the big explosion in inflation when the Fed still had rates at zero and they were claiming there's no inflation. I was talking about import export prices. I said, these are the key prices. Look at what's happening to these prices because they're not manipulated, they're not hedonically adjusted. There's no substitution. It is what it is. And the tariffs are not in these prices. Right. These are just the raw prices. And so before you got that big spike in inflation that the Fed declared was transitory and only had to acknowledge, well after the fact that they missed the boat on this and they had to jack rates up. You saw it in the import export prices. That's where it showed up first. And look at what is happening to import export prices. It's already happening in producer prices too. They're moving again. That's a leading indicator of consumer prices. But import Export prices are a leading indicator of producer prices. Producer prices are already rising rapidly before March. In all the data that we have is from February and earlier. The war started March 1. Oil prices are up 50% since March 1 this month. None of that is in any of the February data or the January data. That is screaming inflation. So import prices in February shot up by 1.3%. That's just one month. 1.3%. Export prices, stuff that we produce and we sell abroad, those Prices jump by 1.5% in one month. I mean, we're almost at the Fed's 2% target in a single month, right? Because two months of that would be 3% for export prices and 2.6% for endpoint prices. Now, if you annualize these prices, right, because when the government gives us the GDP numbers, Q4, GDP was 0.7. That's annualized. The actual increase was one fourth of that. So whenever the government reports a number that's supposed to be high, like GDP growth, they annualize it. When they say GDP grew by 0.7% in Q4, they mean if you take the rate that the economy grew in Q4 and you multiply it by four to annualize it, then it was 0.7, because just in the quarter, it was not even 0.2. It was less than 0.2 for the quarter. But inflation, they don't. They never annualize it. Well, if you take these price increases and multiply them by 12 cuz, 1.3% increase in one month, you annualize it, you get 16.8%, 1.5%, which is the export number. Annualize that, you get 19.6%. Imagine if the government says export price is up 19.6%, import prices up 16.8%. These are huge numbers, right? They don't seem as huge when you only report the monthly increase and don't annualize it. But I'm annualizing it because that puts it in perspective. That shows you how big a jump there was in, in one single month. Now, you have to ask yourself, if import export prices rose that much in February, how much are they going to be up in March when oil prices jump 50%? The numbers could be much bigger in March. Now, what are the producers going to do? Because they're going to have to buy these imports and that's going to mean their prices, their costs, go way up. What are they going to do, eat it? No, they're going to pass it on to the consumer. So all this is going to trickle down to the consumer. It's all going to show up in consumer prices. The number is going to be huge. Consumer price increases in 20, 20, 26 will be the biggest jump since the one year. You know, I think it'll be bigger than every year of the Biden administration, maybe, except one. But even then it might be worse. 2026 could end up being a bigger increase in consumer prices than any individual calendar year under Biden. Right. And Trump likes to say we had the worst inflation ever under Biden. Well, it's going to be worse than under Trump. And I think one of the reasons we may be at war is because maybe Trump realized that this was going to be the case even without the war. Had Trump not started a war, the inflation already in the system baked in this cake and he helped bake it with the big beautiful bill. With a massive increase in government spending that accompany that and the rest of his economic policies, this is why inflation was going to go up. But by starting the war now, Trump has an excuse, something to blame the higher prices on. If the economy is in a recession, which it looked like it was going to be in one anyway. Cuz the economy was weakening long before the war started. Inflation was strengthening, the economy was weakening. Trump starts a war now, we get the news later, months, months later, probably before the midterm election. Inflation is high, the economy is weak, unemployment has spiked. Now Trump is like, well, this is all because of the war. And you can't blame me for this. I mean, I had no choice. We had to do this. We had to defeat the Iranians. They were about to nuke us or whatever. I had to do this. This is for freedom. And so this is just the sacrifice we all have to make. We all have to be willing to accept higher inflation because it's all transitory. It's all gonna go away as soon as we win this war. Of course everything is gonna be great. It's gonna be morning in America. It's gonna be, you know, the golden age. It's gonna be a huge boom. You know, it's just that we gotta just toughen up. This just happened like Covid, like something that just happened. We had no choice. We have to win this war at all costs. And so it's gonna be worth it, right? He's got a scapegoat now. He also has the Fed as a scapegoat. He's got the Supreme Court for knocking down his tariffs, but there's nothing like wagon the dog with this tail, right? And of course it makes sense that Trump would do something like that because this is what he accused Obama of doing, even though Obama never actually did it. Trump repeatedly said that Obama will start a war with Iran as a distraction from his own failures, from the weakness in the economy. So he already in his mind, thought that wars with Iran are good distractions for presidents that are dealing with weak economies. And so maybe he got the bad news from some of his people. Hey, you know, things are getting bad. You know, we got, we're in a lot of trouble here. Inflation is going to spike up, the economy is going to tank. You know, we got the midterms coming up. It's a good time to start a war. I don't know if this is what happened because I have no proof. I'm just saying that this is what's going to happen. I used to think a mattress was just furniture until I got my ghost bed. It's a whole different experience. I woke up and thought to myself, so this is what good sleep feels like. 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