← The Tucker Carlson Show
The Tucker Carlson Show
Gold, Crypto, the Debt Crisis, and How to Survive When the US Needs a Bailout
01:45:11
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- [00:05]
Tucker Carlson
So one of my midlife realizations is that people in my world, certainly me, ascribe too much to ideology and too little to money. The financial dynamics of the world drive a lot more than we acknowledge that they do. And we look at things, we're like, oh, these people believe this and these people believe that, and that's why they're fighting or that's why they're allies or whatever. But really, we should all remember that the love of money is the root of all evil. And money really has a huge effect on outcomes. But nobody says that, and I miss it so often. So you spent your life in the money business trading debt. Tell us just to start, but like you worked in Ukraine, you traded Ukrainian debt. What was that like?
- [00:55]
Coleman Church
I never worked in Ukraine. I've been to Ukraine on investor trip. I have traded Ukraine debt. I traded emerging markets debt my whole life until May of this year. Traded and sold it at a bunch of different banks, London and New York. Ukraine was certainly one of the instruments we traded, traded through the Russia crisis.
- [01:21]
Tucker Carlson
Can you explain, just for the truly ignorant, me among them, what is emerging markets debt?
- [01:27]
Coleman Church
So emerging markets debt, originally the asset class grew out of the debt crisis of the 1980s, when money center banks were hung with primarily Latin America debt. After the 80s crisis, Nicholas Brady, Treasury Secretary at the time, came up with a plan called the Brady Plan to restructure the debt, back it with collateral, US treasury strips that would make it more palatable to a broader base of investors to get it off the balance sheets of the money center banks and to create more of an institutional uptake of the debt and retail uptake of the debt.
- [02:07]
Tucker Carlson
So American debt, American banks are left with loans from other countries that those countries can't repay. Correct. I'm just trying to put it in terms like I can understand. And so then the Treasury Secretary basically says to those banks, we'll bail you out by guaranteeing these loans with American Treasuries.
- [02:28]
Coleman Church
It's one way to put it. It's a way to clean the balance sheet up and to create. I think there are two impacts. One, you clean up the bank's balance sheets, get it off their sheet, and create a marketplace and a dynamic that allows liquidity for this debt and then creates a whole new marketplace and to issue and clean up the country's balance. So you're doing good for the banks and you're doing good for the countries and theoretically doing good for a whole new investor base. And that started in the early 90s. And I kind of walked into Wall street in the early 90s out of college. And I just fell into this market that was starting and really boomed for a while.
- [03:12]
Tucker Carlson
And so what does that mean to attach a treasury to foreign debt? Can you tell us in layman's terms what that means to treasury strips? What is that?
- [03:22]
Coleman Church
Treasury strips zero coupon bonds effectively. So you have risk free collateral that's attached to the bonds. So that to get investors who would obviously wary of sub investment grade emerging market at that time was called less developed countries ldc. Then it was, then it evolved into emerging markets debt which actually is sort of a misnomer at this point because it characterizes almost everything outside of G7 from single A debt to defaulted debt. So it's grown over the last 30 years to incorporate sovereign debt debt of countries primarily issued in hard currency dollars and euros. Down to investment grade corporates government owned debt like oil companies, let's say nationalized oil companies that would be called quasi sovereigns. Down to corporate debt, all the way down to defaulted debt. So it's all of credit, all credit products. In a number of countries it's ballooned. But at the infancy it was really a, it was a evolving asset class to kind of clean up the balance sheets and open access back to lending to these countries. And instead of just being reliant on major money center banks for loans that really sat on their balance sheet and weren't that liquid, didn't trade much, let's open it up to a global investor base trade euro bonds, not necessarily put in your 401 but put in your pension funds and then hedge funds traded it. And from there it evolved from dollar debt into the local currency. Debt became much more fashionable. So investors can buy Turkish lira denominated debt or Kenya shilling denominated debt and then obviously derivatives.
- [05:16]
Tucker Carlson
Can you buy Kenyan debt in Kenyan currency?
- [05:18]
Coleman Church
You can. It's not that easy. But the harder it is to trade, the more the banks make money at trading it. So certain countries are harder to access than others.
- [05:31]
Tucker Carlson
So all of this debt originates from the desire of countries to raise money from the world. Correct. So if I'm Kenya and I want to fund the operations of my government, I issue bonds.
- [05:47]
Coleman Church
Yep. You issue locally issue local bills to local banks, primarily local bank treasuries. Foreign investors can access that through typically plain vanilla kind of derivatives. And they'll issue dollar denominated euro bonds that are open to the world to trade in dollars.
- [06:12]
Tucker Carlson
So if you're the treasury secretary, that's a huge power that you have. You can Bailing out other countries, certainly.
- [06:20]
Coleman Church
I mean, I saw it. My first job for about a year, I was an analyst on a trading desk. And like six months in, they gave me a trading book, the Mexico book. This is 1994, and they gave it to me because I was a kid and it was the safest book. You couldn't hurt yourself too much with it. About six months after that, the Mexican peso crisis hit. So yeah, that was Robert Rubin and friends. I lived through that whole experience of the book.
- [06:48]
Tucker Carlson
What did they do?
- [06:50]
Coleman Church
What did who do?
- [06:51]
Tucker Carlson
What did Rubin, then Treasury Secretary. What did. Under Clinton? What did he do with the Mexico crisis?
- [06:56]
Coleman Church
Well, what's interesting is you. I don't know if it's. It's a. It's a function of just how the human brain works. And you, you look back and you're like, oh, yeah, the. We basically bailed Mexico out and cleaned it up and everything went on as it was. But you forget as you're going through that these things all take a lot longer. Your memory shortens up, right? It took a lot longer and it took a few go rounds. And what I learned through that whole thing was because I went through a bunch of these crises. There was the 94 Mexican peso, 97, the Asia crisis, Thai baht, I don't know if you remember Thai baht crisis, and Korea chai balls and all that. And then 98 was Russia, 2000 was Argentina peso crisis, and then we had the GFC. So there was a series of rolling crises all in like the first 10 years of my career. So that definitely kind of wounds your ability to stay perma bullish when you're going through a bunch of rolling crises. But what I learned through these series of crises is that what you have to kind of start with is the bazooka to go with the moab of bailout that you have to go with way more than the market thinks you need. Because in the Mexican peso crisis, if my memory serves properly, they kept coming with not half measures, but just enough of what they thought would. Would bring back market stability or market confidence. And just enough creates a bit of spike in confidence and then start to start to panic again and then come back again until finally they come back with the. The mega bazooka, swap lines, bailouts, all that sort of stuff. So now that was also early in sort of the Washington consensus era of foreign policy.
- [08:48]
Tucker Carlson
And there was, I guess the macro point I would make or the conclusion I'm reaching is this is a huge feature of our foreign Policy.
- [08:58]
Coleman Church
It is. And the imf, it's funny you mentioned Ukraine. And the trip I went to Ukraine was an investor trip. And part of the purpose of an investor trip is to go and to meet with their finance ministry, their debt liability people, meet with banks, meet with locals, get an assessment and, you know, go to. You always, you always go to the imf, the IMF there and ask what the likelihood is of the next tranche being delivered. And, you know, perhaps it's a bit cynical, but 30 years of trade, emerging markets will make it pretty cynical. But I'd always go into those meetings and walk away from those meetings. Like, what are we talking about here? Of course they're going to, of course they're going to disperse the next tranche. That's what they're in the business of doing. They're in the business of lending money to these countries because that's what they do and that's where they make their money. So it's very rare that they won't or they don't, unless it's a real sort of turn your thumb up, turn your, turn your nose up, or thumb your nose at the imf. And, and is the purpose of the.
- [10:07]
Tucker Carlson
IMF to bail out mismanaged countries?
- [10:10]
Coleman Church
I think it's simple terms, yes. I don't think that's the, I don't think that's the most euphemistic way of putting it or how they describe it, but effectively, yes, I'd say backstop, or to keep them afloat and to offer them guidance as to how to run austerity programs and get themselves back on the rails so that they can move towards prosperity, democracy, all this sort of.
- [10:38]
Tucker Carlson
Does it work?
- [10:40]
Coleman Church
Typically, no.
- [10:41]
Tucker Carlson
Why?
- [10:43]
Coleman Church
Because one, it's very politically unpopular as a domestic politician to be taking orders from any foreign power, but certainly the west, and those orders come with strict austerity because how did they get themselves in those problems in the first place? Right. A certain distinct lack of austerity.
- [11:09]
Tucker Carlson
Living beyond their means.
- [11:10]
Coleman Church
Correct. So, you know, that's not, that's not, that's not particular to emerging markets countries. All sovereign, all sovereigns do that. Right. Everyone in the west is doing that as well now. Living beyond their means. But some of us, like the United States, are able to run what's called counter cyclical, cyclical monetary policy because we have a reserve currency. So we have a special privilege to be able to maybe be somewhat more profligate than others. But the money runs out a lot faster in emerging markets countries when you can't finance your debt and you have a dual crisis of both your currency and your interest rates running out of control. And at that point you've got nowhere to go other than to your friends in D.C. or Brussels and ask for the backstop. But in return for the backstop, you need to make some promises about how you're going to conduct your business going forward. And as you can imagine, cutting expenses, raising interest rates, slowing the economy doesn't generally get people reelected.
- [12:21]
Tucker Carlson
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- [14:08]
Coleman Church
That's probably a little more euphemistic than I would say. Yes, that's one factor. But there are other factors at play as well.
- [14:15]
Tucker Carlson
How many countries have been bailed out by the United States over the past 30 years that you're aware of?
- [14:20]
Coleman Church
Oh, I mean, there's hard bailouts and soft Bailouts, so I couldn't really put a number on it. Like, how many are running an IMF program right now? How would have to be in the dozens. How many, like strict bailouts? I really don't know off the top of my head. I mean, we can go through the, we can go through, obviously, Mexico, excuse me, Argentina. In the Asia crisis, there were a whole host of Asian countries that had to post up. So there's the hard bailouts and then there's like the softer bailouts are sort of coming back, staying on the, staying on the teat, so to speak.
- [15:03]
Tucker Carlson
Who makes money from this?
- [15:07]
Coleman Church
Who makes money from this? So the IMF theoretically makes money from the interest on the loans, but it's typically below market loans. So it's not a real profit motive. Banks make money from this, from facilitating the debt facility, the trading of it, the issuing of it, the fees issuing of it. Investors make money from higher interest rates, obviously. And then there's a subset of investors, like distressed debt investors that will buy a bunch of defaulted, defaulted paper, sit on it, and then do workouts. Like the most, the most probably stark examples recently would be Argentina, and right now Ukraine will be pretty significant one as well. See what the workout is with that.
- [16:09]
Tucker Carlson
What would you do with Ukraine as a banker at this point? What's likely to happen to Ukraine? Not on a military level, but Ukraine.
- [16:19]
Coleman Church
Is a different one than say in Argentina because it has at the moment more of a geopolitical put, so to speak, than pick a random country like Bolivia or Argentina. Although now under this administration, clearly there's more with sort of Monroe Doctrine Part 2, there's, there's more of a geopolitical put to Argentina. But, but Ukraine's a tricky one because there are you, obviously, up until recently, you had the entire west behind them, right? And there's this. This week alone, you've got, you got Larry Fink, Witkoff and Kushner over there working on stage two of what's going to happen, the peace process, but also the rebuild. So it's an odd one. I think that's going to be a combination of public and private because there'll be so much rebuild to do and there'll be a lot of money to be made in the rebuild.
- [17:16]
Tucker Carlson
What does a debt crisis look like? What is a debt crisis?
- [17:20]
Coleman Church
Well, a debt crisis typically is not a debt crisis alone. It's accompanied by a currency crisis, the debt crisis, the external debt, and then a local market interest rate crisis, which is also dead in itself. So the local T bills, local Interest rates will skyrocket at first to try to raise interest rates, to try to.
- [17:43]
Tucker Carlson
Attract.
- [17:46]
Coleman Church
Money to the currency, to stem the route on the currency. And that can work up until a point until you lose control of both. So what a debt crisis looks like is currency runaway currency devaluation, runaway higher interest rates which clamps down the interest rates, clamps down any lending locally, clamps down any local growth, creates defaults on domestic businesses. The currency running away depending on the country. But all countries it causes inflation. But countries that rely on imports certainly even more. Right. Everything you're bringing in is going to cost far more in your local currency. So it's really a spiral. And then current typically what happens is bonds will drop to a level that's called recovery value. And recovery value is effectively what is a term really more from say the corporate credit markets where if you were to strip everything down and sell it for parts, what could you get? What could you get for the cash value?
- [18:56]
Tucker Carlson
So interest rates spike, bond values drop.
- [19:00]
Coleman Church
Collapse. Yes.
- [19:01]
Tucker Carlson
What does this have to do with debt? Why is it described as a debt crisis?
- [19:06]
Coleman Church
Because no one can function without borrowing. No one can function without debt. So if you can't borrow, you can't exist.
- [19:18]
Tucker Carlson
And there's no country. That's not true of, I mean there.
- [19:22]
Coleman Church
Are countries that don't necessarily need to borrow as much as they do, but they still do.
- [19:27]
Tucker Carlson
Why?
- [19:29]
Coleman Church
Because one, because they can cheaply. I would argue the GCC countries don't necessarily need to borrow as much as.
- [19:40]
Tucker Carlson
They have the Gulf, Persian Gulf countries.
- [19:42]
Coleman Church
But they have recently, you know, Saudi for example, because they're going on a massive expansion to diversify themselves away from their core business, which is oil, which is actually, is actually a very wise thing to do. Because if you look at, if you look at countries historically, Venezuela is probably the most extreme example that had an opportunity was a single A rated country in the 80s. I went there in the 90s with gleaming infrastructure, like incredible highways, beautiful hotels, amazing, amazing place. And they never took the oil wealth and diversified away from it in a meaningful way. And then when you have an oil shock and you've taken out too much debt against the, let's make up a number. $100 oil price and oil drops to 30, you're all upside down. And so that's what, you know, that's what MBS is looking at for a multi decade plan to build these cities, technology innovation centers and so forth, which is clearly learning from the past.
- [20:57]
Tucker Carlson
But, but they're borrowing to do that.
- [20:59]
Coleman Church
They're borrowing to do that. Yeah, but they're borrowing at fairly cheap rates. There's also a concept that you want to borrow as a soft to sovereign level to set a benchmark against which your con, your companies can borrow. In international markets, this would be the broader the investor base, theoretically the cheaper the interest rate. So they'll set a, they'll set a benchmark level and then a corporation can borrow at that rate plus 20 basis points or 50 basis points.
- [21:28]
Tucker Carlson
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- [21:51]
Coleman Church
That's what we call from going from zero to hero.
- [21:53]
Tucker Carlson
And wander with me through the quiet woods of Maine. I have just three dog commands. And then as I direct the dogs, find the bird. Find the bird and then dead bird obviously, which I don't use as much as I'd like to. We cast for steelhead on the Deschutes river in Oregon.
- [22:11]
Coleman Church
That's the first one I've caught in a while.
- [22:12]
Tucker Carlson
Track mule deer in the Utah high country. Spearfish in the waters off Montauk, chasing striped bass and bluefin tuna.
- [22:19]
Coleman Church
See you on the other side.
- [22:19]
Tucker Carlson
It's called American Game Tales from the Wild Outdoor series. Watch it@tucker carlson.com. so if every country's indebted, I mean, debt decreases your sovereignty, your ability to make independent decisions.
- [22:38]
Coleman Church
That's correct.
- [22:39]
Tucker Carlson
Yeah. So if every country's in debt, then there are no fully sovereign countries then. Right. Can't just. It's not. No country is free to do exactly what it thinks it should do in its own interest. They're all connected.
- [22:53]
Coleman Church
No. And again, back to the US I mean, theoretically we are or were based on the fact that we have the global reserve currency. But there is a limit to everything at some point.
- [23:07]
Tucker Carlson
So what's the limit for the United States?
- [23:11]
Coleman Church
It's hard to say what the limit is. The limit is what loses the global reserve currency status. Right. And as I alluded to before, these things don't happen quickly. They happen over a much longer period of time than anyone would think. So how do you in simple terms for me? Well, let's look at some global current global reserve currencies historically. Dutch, Gilder, British pound, US Dollar, probably the most obvious Examples in relatively recent history. And what did they all have in common? They ruled the seas military dominance. And you'll see memes online where people say what pictures of fleets of aircraft carriers in the Gulf and displays of military power. That's what backs my currency. And you know that that is true. But you know, at some point you got to ask yourself a question like where. You know also what. How did empires from Rome to the Dutch to the Brits, like imperial overreach to an extent was what undid them. Right. And if we continue to, I mean what, what concerns me, what concerns me longer term of the potential to lose the reserve status is if we lose our military dominance. That's not happening obviously tomorrow or the next day. There's a few things that could obviously, I mean you're more versed than I am in this whole notion of modern day drone warfare. But that certainly levels the playing field very, very quickly. You see what the hooties were able to do with not so sophisticated and not very expensive drone technology. But that's, you know, that's purview for some military expert, not me. The other thing that concerns me, but.
- [25:11]
Tucker Carlson
The structure remains the same. So the United States can continue being indebted to the degree that it is because it has the world's reserve currency and it possesses that because of its military dominance.
- [25:24]
Coleman Church
It does.
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Tucker Carlson
But if.
- [25:26]
Coleman Church
Yes, I think what's a very important. Was a very important moment however was the seizing of the Russian reserves at the beginning of the Russia Ukraine conflict. I felt that and I think we'll look.
- [25:43]
Tucker Carlson
Can you tell us what happened just for people?
- [25:45]
Coleman Church
Yes. So quite simply, the Western power seized the Russian reserves that were sitting in, in the New York Fed, I believe it's 300 billion is the number that they seized and the Europeans still want to use that for rebuild and so forth. In Ukraine now, not to get into who's right and who's wrong in the Ukraine Russia conflict. That's not the point of this. The point is it sets a precedent. That's a scary precedent. That is your money that sits in US Treasuries or gold in our Federal Reserve is not safe if you run afoul of the powers that be. So there's a very obvious and natural reaction function to that which is powers like India, China and Russia stop buying treasuries and start buying gold. The gold call was certainly we have inflationary, you know, inflationary pressures we can talk about. But even more to the point, it seemed obvious at that point that that's the Trade? Yes. It's an inflationary.
- [26:59]
Tucker Carlson
I bought gold that month, remember? Yeah. And I've done better than the stock market's done.
- [27:05]
Coleman Church
Well, it's funny if the move in gold this year, I won't get it right off the top of my head, but it's over the last 20 years, I think now is if gold's now beat S and P. Now when you compare the two, it's really effectively just a debasement trade when you look at it.
- [27:21]
Tucker Carlson
What's a debasement trade?
- [27:22]
Coleman Church
Debasement trade is that the currency that we all use and think about every day has been debased against gold, the value of the dollar. I think oftentimes people look at the dollar as the dollar strong or the dollar weak. And what people are looking at is effectively the dxy, the dollar index, and that's a basket of major currencies or it's heavily weighted to the major currencies, Euro, yen, Canadian dollar, Aussie dollar. And it's really at this point, kind of a ridiculous comparison because all of those countries are sort of in a basket case with their debt issue and their growth. But if you look at the dollar versus bitcoin, or if you look at it versus gold over the last 10 years, it's pretty clear that the currency's been debased in those terms. So if you look at it in that terms, the stock market returns really actually look quite as great. It's wonderful if you're looking at what a dollar would, how many dollars it took to buy an ounce of gold 10 or 15 years ago versus today.
- [28:31]
Tucker Carlson
And all of that or some of it is downstream from the decision by the Biden administration to freeze Russian assets because that scared the crap out of the rest of the world.
- [28:41]
Coleman Church
I think the gold move is for sure, the dollar weakness against gold. Yes. But there's also, I mean, I think the big move in. I mean, if you look at what we did after the GFC in terms of interest rates and global financial crisis, where what we did, bailout, extraordinary measures, fiscal and monetary, keeping interest rates at 0, emergency measures, keeping rates at zero, that remained in place for a good 10 years, I don't know how you stayed. Emergency measures at zero, interest rates when the stock market quadruples over triples, quadruple over 10 years.
- [29:35]
Tucker Carlson
I think, why is that bad? All those investors got rich. Everyone's happy with their 401ks. Why is that bad?
- [29:43]
Coleman Church
Well, it's bad for a number of reasons. One is if you believe in a free market capitalist system, you believe in the pricing mechanism, the free market pricing is everything. The price of meat at the farmer's market is set by the free market, who it's willing buyers, willing sellers at a fair price. Once you start to put in price controls on the Soviet Union, it's definitionally we don't have free market capitalism at the core of free market capital, the price of money. So we artificially put price controls on the price of money. That's the way I look at it. We artificially kept interest rates way too low at zero when the market didn't necessarily demand the conditions. Maybe at the time, certainly five years hence, 2015. I don't really see why we needed to keep interest rates at zero for that long. So yes, I think the reason was, in my opinion the reason why the people at the Fed, the dozens and dozens of PhDs at the Fed making these decisions probably to a man, to a woman, wrote their PhD on the Great Depression and what the Fed did wrong and the horrors of deflation. So really the depression was really a result of deflation. So that's the greatest boogeyman of all. So anything you can do to fight deflation, deflation is the real killer, especially when you have in excessive debt load.
- [31:19]
Tucker Carlson
What I'm going to stick to the dumbest possible questions. I hope I don't offend you. What is deflation?
- [31:25]
Coleman Church
Deflation is prices going down. What you kind of want is a gentle inflation to help inflate away the debt to show gradual the benchmark, the target Fed target for a long, long time has been 2% inflation. They soft up that to 3 recently and as you know, just cut rates this week even with core PC at 2.8. So they've kind of abandoned that 2.2percent target. But what I think in that time.
- [31:57]
Tucker Carlson
Why wouldn't I want deflation? Because that makes the value of my paycheck higher.
- [32:02]
Coleman Church
It depends on who I is. Who's who the I asking that question is.
- [32:09]
Tucker Carlson
Right.
- [32:09]
Coleman Church
So if you're you and your wages are constant and you've paid off your house, certainly deflation would be great. Go to the store every day and things are cheaper. I mean there's deflation certain parts, certain sectors. Right. For years there's been deflation in all technological goods. Right. You get a flat screen TV for 400 bucks.
- [32:33]
Tucker Carlson
Yeah.
- [32:35]
Coleman Church
So for you Tucker Carlson, it would be wonderful for the economy as a whole that's really run on hyper financialization and debt. If you have a deflationary spiral, you are going to be left with a bunch of defaulted debt. So where we are right now to pivot, I guess, to where we are here with the US Is I think when this administration came in, they messaged pretty clearly that the move was going to be away from the Biden administration and more towards some austerity. There would be some tax cuts, but it would be offset with spending cuts, Doge Elon, et cetera. People got very excited about potential cuts. And then I don't know what happened shortly into the administration, but there was clearly a pivot that I didn't see coming. And it was around the time of the tariff tantrum and the big sell off in the stock market. But out of that seemed to come that there was a shift towards what people are now calling run it hot, which is forget about tamping down spending, little tax cut, maybe we'll take some slower growth, but we'll reduce the deficit for that'll be good for the long term. And instead let's just run it both ways, fiscal and monetary. So let's cut rates and let's cut taxes and let's spend more. And I don't know what happened or if that was always the plan or someone saw under the hood and said, look, the only way, typically there's two ways to get out of a debt problem. You grow your way out or you inflate your way out. And it seems to me we're going all gas, no brakes on both. Like, we'll just, we're going to, we're going to grow and we're going to, we're going to let some inflation go and that's the way we're going to get out of this debt issue. And I think Trump this week was saying, I could see 20, 25% GDP growth. I mean, that's, that's a nice number. But that would certainly help our, certainly help our deficit issues.
- [34:48]
Tucker Carlson
Well, it wasn't that long ago that many Americans thought they were inherently safe from the kinds of disasters you hear about all the time in third world countries. A total power loss, for example, or, or people freezing to death in their own homes. That could never happen here. Obviously, it's America. People are recalculating, unfortunately, because they have no choice. The last few years have taught us that. Remember when the power grid in Texas failed in the dead of winter? Yeah, it happened and it could happen again. So the government is not actually as reliable as you hope they would be. And the truth is the future is unforeseeable and things do seem to be getting a little squirrely. So if the grid does go down. You need power you can trust. Last Country Supply's newest product is designed for exactly that. The Grid Doctor is a 3300 watt battery backup system that will power full size appliances, medical devices and tools with clean, reliable power. It's even EMP protected. That means it's shielded from lightning, solar flares or an actual electromagnetic pulse. Eventually there's no gasoline, no noise, no emissions. You just plug it in, charge it from the wall, from your vehicle, or from the included 200 watt solar panel and keep going day after day. Taking care of yourself and the people you love is solely up to you. And the amazing thing is with these new batteries, we use one at home by the way, is they're super easy to use. There's no inverter you need to figure out on the front of it or anything like that. There's like three buttons. It's very easy and totally reliable. Highly recommended. We literally use one, as I said. Visit lastcountrysupply.com to shop the Grid Doctor for power you can trust this winter. Last Country Supply dot com. Have you ever seen any country try that?
- [36:36]
Coleman Church
No.
- [36:39]
Tucker Carlson
Really?
- [36:39]
Coleman Church
Well, in 35 years of watching 20, 25% GDP. No. No.
- [36:44]
Tucker Carlson
Have you ever seen any country approach a debt crisis?
- [36:48]
Coleman Church
Sure, sure. I mean, Erdogan's probably the most famous in Turkey.
- [36:54]
Tucker Carlson
Did it work? No. What happened?
- [36:58]
Coleman Church
He tried to keep cutting rates into an inflationary environment and put pressure on the central bank to cap rates. But the free market always, I think I always say you can suspend the laws of science, of physics, of gravity, of market economy for a time, but ultimately the gravity always, always works. So in the free market, always, always works. So no, it didn't work. They have runaway inflation and extraordinarily high interest rates. And he's under been under a lot of pressure domestically for re election, obviously.
- [37:37]
Tucker Carlson
So what's the right way to approach it?
- [37:42]
Coleman Church
Well, as I think was it Thomas Soul says there are no solutions, only trade offs. Yeah, there are no solutions. When you're in this situation, when you're in this situation of $37 trillion deficit.
- [37:59]
Tucker Carlson
Is that a lot?
- [38:01]
Coleman Church
Sounds like a big number to me. I'm not even sure how many commas are in there. It's a big number. It's really hard to grasp. But I think you go back, you started with ideology. The answer is always going to depend to an extent on what your ideology is and what you're willing to sustain in terms of pain, short term to long term. For me, I was more a proponent of what I thought the plan was going to be, which is some deficit cutting through spending cuts. And from what was coming out of Doge early, it seemed like there was plenty of fat to cut. That would have been politically rather popular, I think, especially with the right PR guys behind it. You know, guys were getting out there every week and on Twitter and going on podcasts and talking about sort of the absurdities they were finding. Now, maybe, maybe it's a drop in the bucket overall, but I think it was a. It was a worthwhile exercise to go with. I don't know. Again, I don't know. I'm not on the inside, so I.
- [39:13]
Tucker Carlson
Don'T see what could it be that there. I mean, so the idea always was that federal bureaucrats, public servants, as we call them, were serving and they were making less than their private sector counterparts. And there was suffering involved, but patriotism impelled them to do it, so they did. And now you look at the numbers and it's like, no, no, no, no, no. Your federal employee on average makes way more than your private sector employee. 2x2x. So they're the most privileged people in the middle class and by far that.
- [39:48]
Coleman Church
Doesn'T count their gilded pension plan.
- [39:50]
Tucker Carlson
Is it really 2x?
- [39:52]
Coleman Church
I think the number is. Average medium private sector family income is 70k. I think it's 110 or 115 for federal.
- [40:03]
Tucker Carlson
Not including the benefits, which are ridiculous. Work from home for five years. But then of course, the population of federal workers or federal contractors, which are. I mean, there are probably as many federal contractors. No one ever says that, but there are. Deloitte is a federal contractor. Right. So there's so many of them now that we maybe have reached that tipping point where no administration can pivot against its own employees because they're voters.
- [40:33]
Coleman Church
Maybe, maybe. But I'm sure you've alluded to many times, you can't have. What is it? Seven of the 10 top zip codes in the United States are all sort of in and around Washington D.C. i mean, I went to you. You grew up there. I went to school there in the early 90s and I hadn't been back for 15 years. I. It's night and day. It's gleaming, gleaming office towers, roads and rows. I remember having an internship two blocks from the White House and you were passing, you had to pass sort of bombed out derelict buildings.
- [41:07]
Tucker Carlson
And now it's just from the 1968 riots. They never were rebuilt.
- [41:11]
Coleman Church
1992, they were still there, like literally two or three blocks from the White House.
- [41:15]
Tucker Carlson
I remember.
- [41:16]
Coleman Church
And it's crazy. I mean it's. And flash is a Roman Empire, right? You go to, you go to Rome to collect your tribute. And so I don't know. I don't know. I'm not as privy to that world as you are. I don't know what people see when they get into office and realize that there's potentially no way, there's no way around it. All our intentions are we're great, but this is the way it's going to be. I don't know.
- [41:48]
Tucker Carlson
Okay, but you're also suggesting that this is not a solution, that you can't spend your way out of a debt crisis.
- [41:58]
Coleman Church
I haven't seen it done before.
- [42:00]
Tucker Carlson
Right. How much magic would that be?
- [42:02]
Coleman Church
The sense. A very talented individual, he's a lot of experience in markets, very successful.
- [42:12]
Tucker Carlson
The.
- [42:12]
Coleman Church
Right guy to have at the helm if he thinks this can be done. I guess we don't have any choice but to see how it plays out. But maybe that's the play. The play is this is our only way out. People on both sides, people I speak to, people I knew in the markets, friends of mine, people whose opinion I respect on both sides of the aisle, the one thing we all agree on is that this is not a tenable situation. It's not some mmt, Elizabeth Warren people we're talking to. This is like normal people that say like, okay, at this point we're kind of boxed at 37, 38 trillion. So maybe that's the issue. Maybe we're so boxed that we got to run this experiment because it's our only way out and hopefully growth kicks in. But it doesn't. The current growth scenario in the US is really hard to get your hands around. In one part because it's such a polarized economy, people are calling it a K shaped economy, which I think is a pretty accurate term. K shaped, meaning the lower end is hurting and continues to hurt more and the upper end gains and continues to gain more. And you know, we've seen through throughout history. That's not a tenable situation.
- [43:38]
Tucker Carlson
No, it's actually what happened in Venezuela. It's how they got Hugo Chavez.
- [43:41]
Coleman Church
Yeah, it's a powder keg ultimately so. And it's also extraordinarily difficult to get a real handle on where the numbers are because we're not releasing any numbers right now because the government shutdown. So, you know, the Fed's flying blind to an extent. You can rely on certain private sector indicators that are kind of shockingly bad, frankly, when you look at consumer loan defaults, credit card balances, credit card, the late credit card payments, auto loan defaults. I think October was 185,000 announced private sector layoffs. I think it worse since 08. So you have a situation where you've got to, you know, the U.S. cons, the U.S. economy is 70% 69, 70% consumer led. So if we're going to rely on the top 10% to continue to spend on Gucci bags and trips to Saint Barts, I, I just don't know how sustainable that is when the lower end is, you know, swapping out New York strip for, for pork loin. And Walmart numbers are great because middle and upper middle class is shifting from the Publix to Walmart shopping. Like everyone, everyone's getting squeezed. So I don't know, I don't know that the growth is there. The growth can come, maybe the growth can come with these tax cuts, with interest rate cuts, with certainly with deregulation will help and all this promised foreign investment. But there's a lack to all that. So we'll see.
- [45:25]
Tucker Carlson
It does seem from an ignorant outsider standpoint, which is mine, that there's an awful lot of emphasis on the public equities markets and the stock market's the measure of how we're doing. Whether or not that's a good measure, I don't know. Maybe not a perfect measure it feels like to me. But how safe is the stock market in the United States as a place to put your money? I can tell this is an uncomfortable question. Be as diplomatic as you can be.
- [46:00]
Coleman Church
Well, it is the largest, most liquid stock market in the world. It does attract not just domestic savings but huge foreign investment. For you know, there's expression that says money goes, capital goes where it's treated best. And we still do treat capital the best in this country. Extraordinarily dynamic markets from, you know, venture cap to private equity to public markets. And that's something we should all be very proud of. And it helps, you know, grease the skids of global commerce. And that's great. There are some concerns, clearly concerns about the current valuation of the equity market and the structure, the equinox structure of the flows. So one, there's massive concentration, risk. It was the fangs, now it's the Mag 7. I think the top 10 companies in S&P 500 I think have accounted for something like 42% of the gains year to date. The big get bigger. You had Nvidia at one point tipped over $5 trillion market cap, which is again A hard number to really get your head around at that point. I think it was larger in market cap than every market in the world except for US and Japan. Entire market cap of any other trade. Any, any index in the world.
- [47:37]
Tucker Carlson
So wait, bigger than the entire index of any country in the world?
- [47:40]
Coleman Church
Yes.
- [47:42]
Tucker Carlson
Bigger than the cumulative total the value of all the companies traded on those.
- [47:46]
Coleman Church
Indexes on a random exchange. Yeah except for I believe us for sure and I think Japan again I could be wrong but something in the, in. In that, in that you get the idea when I.
- [47:58]
Tucker Carlson
So just one company dwarfed all, all these economies.
- [48:02]
Coleman Church
That's right. And that you know we, we don't need to go into all sort of the price to book and price to sales and expectations of future revenue all that sort of thing. You get into a market psychology event where stocks that go up continue to go up because people chase momentum. I read something yesterday that the explosion in in options trading the volume option is now three and a half trillion a day which is larger than the entire market cap of the Russell 2000. So 2000 like the 2000 mid. Small mid sized companies 300 million to 2 billion market cap companies in the United States and that doubled I think from 2022 and then doubled again. So you've got an insane amount of leverage. You've got margin debt at all time high.
- [48:56]
Tucker Carlson
May I ask what. Why is it significant in the options market is huge.
- [49:00]
Coleman Church
Because it's not just the options market's huge it's also the structure. The options they've moved to zero day to expiry options used to be weekly or monthly options and now it's one like same day options. So the retail with the gamification sort of of.
- [49:16]
Tucker Carlson
Yeah of so an option my understanding of an option is an option is a bet on in what direction?
- [49:22]
Coleman Church
In the direction with and you get an immense amount of leverage. Immense amount of leverage.
- [49:28]
Tucker Carlson
So how does that work? How do I so let's say that.
- [49:31]
Coleman Church
You want to buy a call betting that Nvidia is going to go up between now and the close and at the money Nvidia call meaning let's say it's trading at 177 right now and you think it's going to go up and the price of the at the money the 177 call is till now to the end of the day is 75 cents let's just say so you're betting that it's going to go up more than 75 cents if it goes up a dollar fifty you've doubled your money. You're not just making 75 cents on 177 which would be whatever third of 1%. You're making 100% of your money. So you're getting. All you can lose is the premium, the 75 cents you pay for that option. But everything over 75 cents starts to run exponentially in terms of profitability. So people are making an insane amount of money on, in this run up on, on options, zero day options and they're doing it from their phone. It's pretty easy with a.
- [50:38]
Tucker Carlson
That's not really investing though, that's betting.
- [50:41]
Coleman Church
Yeah, that's gambling. But that's just one component of the structure of the.
- [50:46]
Tucker Carlson
But it sounds like it's now a huge component.
- [50:47]
Coleman Church
It is a huge component. But again with the gamification of you know, crypto trading and, and options trading and Robinhood and with gambling, you know, DraftKings and all that stuff, it's sort of part of the culture and it all started in Covid or people at home with extra stemmy money and not much to do. And the market was ripping and people got hooked on it and people keep doing it and generally people are doing quite well. I think, you know, retail has done better than institutional largely speaking this year. But the other part of the structure of the market that's somewhat concerning is just this passive flow. So then there's a guy named Mike Green who you should probably speak to has done the best work on this and passive flow basically 401k. If you put your money in every two weeks, your money's automatically going to your 401k and you click to that. It's auto invest. If you go and you look at most companies, 401k options, their options on what to invest and then you break down each one of them. Basically every single equity option fund you have has the same high concentration in the same five stocks. So Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia. So you don't know that necessarily. You don't really know what you're buying or what percentage of the fund is in those. It's very highly weighted because the higher the market cap go, the higher weighting, the higher the weighting goes and on and on and on. So it's an auto, it's just an automatic machine like underlying bid to the market that continues to the big. The big get bigger and bigger and bigger. And you could say okay, what's wrong with that? These are great companies, they're multinational, they have great business models that were low capital intensive and high margin and they're basically a lot of them are monopolies in their space. Okay, well, two things can happen. If unemployment rises, if you lose your job, you're not putting your money in 401k. If you lose your job and inflation keeps ripping, you might have to withdraw from your 401, which creates a vicious cycle.
- [53:01]
Tucker Carlson
The other way, it's too much concentration and too few.
- [53:05]
Coleman Church
Too much concentration and the structure of it perpetuates it. And then you add on the leverage of the option trading with the momentum that keeps this trade going and going and going to where you get to $5 trillion market caps. Now there'll be a whole coterie of Wall street analysts that'll justify why 5 trillion makes sense. Because of this, that and the other thing. But I'm not sure what if they're.
- [53:33]
Tucker Carlson
Of the 5, 8, 10 companies that have the bulk of the value, the plurality of the value of the entire S and P, if one or a couple of those companies dramatically reset in its value and its share price, what would happen?
- [53:49]
Coleman Church
Well, you're seeing it kind of right, right now as we speak, as the AI trade is starting to lose a little bit of favor. There's starting to be some questioning on the AI trade. And the market can't continue to trade up when it's trade up if one or two of the major components are falling out of bed. I mean, this week it's been Oracle and last night Broadcom took the market down. Nvidia is starting to weigh a little bit. So we're very tech sector heavy. And the other, the other thing that concerns me to an extent about not just for public markets, but for private credit markets is that with this AI build out and this data center build.
- [54:35]
Tucker Carlson
Out.
- [54:37]
Coleman Church
Obviously an extraordinarily capital intensive. And what I was speaking about before, about how a lot of these MAG7 countries had a great model of being capital light, they're now becoming quite capital intensive.
- [54:50]
Tucker Carlson
Right. It's not writing software, it's building physical things.
- [54:53]
Coleman Church
Exactly. You're building physical things and you're spending, you're borrowing a ton of money. This is what the problem with Oracle is right now is they borrow a lot of money and now they're borrowing a lot of money to build things and build things that depreciate in value over time. Right. Like a chip that you buy. A lot of this, A lot of the financing that's been going on too has been, people have been using collateral, these chips as collateral to borrow against. So there's borrowing and borrowing and borrowing but you're borrowing against a chip that naturally is going to be replaced by the next evolution, of course. So that's a bit of concern about the value of the collateral. And when that daisy chain unwinds, it could be ugly. The other thing is that there's so much borrowing in the private credit markets for these hyperscalers and these data centers that it crowds out. There's a finite amount of borrowing available. Right. So it's crowding out borrowing and investing in other areas of the economy. And that concentration risk concerns me to an extent as well. And the different. A lot of people have made the analogy to the 99, 2000 tech bubble. And the good news coming out of that down the line is that, okay, we all got hyped up on the Internet and we got carried away with pets.com, things like that.
- [56:19]
Tucker Carlson
Etoys.
- [56:22]
Coleman Church
But the truth was, in retrospect, we weren't hyped up enough about the Internet and what it would do and how it would change the world. But there's still a cycle that comes along where there's the euphoric cycle and then the crash cycle. And then on the back end of that, you have the winners that survive, like the Amazons. Right. That you could have bought for practically nothing in 2002. And then there were companies like, similar to me to the hyperscale data center were the fiber companies like Global Crossing, WorldCom. Right. And those were bubbles that crashed. But what were they doing? They were laying fiber, fiber cable for the Internet, which, okay, we had a mal investment boom. The companies crashed. But the cables still exist. And the cables are in use today. And the cables were very valuable. And the cables didn't depreciate because the cables have a useful purpose. So people are making the same argument now. It's like, okay, we may go through that cycle as well. It's maybe get a little euphoric. There'll be winners and losers out of this and it'll be fine down the road. And AI is not going away. I'm not here to disagree with that. But there's a slightly different component where you're building these things that aren't that could. You're buying all these chips that could depreciate download. It's not exactly the same trade.
- [57:54]
Tucker Carlson
No. And the nature of technology is hard to forecast. Very hard to forecast. I mean, so they were telling us six months ago that AGI was right around the corner. Nobody thinks that anymore, just for example. And so all of these infrastructure bets are predicated on predictions about what the technology will require in 10 years the.
- [58:17]
Coleman Church
Thing that we're really running up against. Do we know that we don't. You're exactly right. And I think there's. The worm's turning a little bit on the efficiency. A lot of these.
- [58:26]
Tucker Carlson
Yes.
- [58:27]
Coleman Church
And what they can and can't do. And people say I saved a half an hour or I saved an hour coding something, but then it took me three hours to check to debug the work that the, the actual, you know, clot or whatever did. But the real thing that we're going to run into is we don't have enough power. We don't have an electric and we don't have water to, to heat and cool all these things. That's just point blank. And even, you know, Jensen and Altman and those guys will tell you that. And that's why they're going hat in hand with DC and trying to make the case that this is a critically important industry that may need some government backing. But even if you get that, the fact of the matter is the only way you can really power these things without spiking electricity bills another 300% and then creating a whole. Another political problem domestically is you need nuclear power and we have plenty of natural gas that can work as a stopgap, but you need nuclear power and it's a 10 year build out minimum to get the nuclear power that you need. So when do we hit the. Somewhere between there here. In that 10 years we hit the wall in terms of our ability to get the electricity for these at this growth rate. Now is this growth rate accurate projection? Maybe it's not. And if it's not, then we need to see a lot of these companies come off in value.
- [60:01]
Tucker Carlson
So also there are a lot of concerns about climate change.
- [60:05]
Coleman Church
Yes.
- [60:05]
Tucker Carlson
Oh, just kidding. That kind of ended quickly, didn't it?
- [60:10]
Coleman Church
Yeah.
- [60:11]
Tucker Carlson
I haven't heard that phrase in months, have you?
- [60:14]
Coleman Church
Climate change? No, I did see. I saw something about, I saw something that Nature had. Nature magazine had to revoke a paper they did a few years ago that said that climate catastrophe was going to create a economic catastrophe. And that was all based on false premises. I think they really.
- [60:37]
Tucker Carlson
Yeah, I think the new idea is we're going to have an economic catastrophe if we think about the climate catastrophe in any way. I noticed Larry Fink's not lecturing as much about the climate anymore.
- [60:49]
Coleman Church
Climate and ESG is not as fashionable as it. As it was a couple years ago, that's for sure.
- [60:53]
Tucker Carlson
So how did that like as a guy who has dealt in markets like emerging debt is pretty pure. It's like a. Debt trading is like a pretty pure market, right? Well.
- [61:09]
Coleman Church
Pure is an interesting choice of words.
- [61:12]
Tucker Carlson
No, I'm not saying unsullied.
- [61:14]
Coleman Church
It's pretty plain vanilla. Is that what you mean?
- [61:17]
Tucker Carlson
I mean, like, there's a willing seller, willing buyer. But what I really mean is the price is an organic price. It's like what people will pay.
- [61:26]
Coleman Church
Correct.
- [61:27]
Tucker Carlson
So that is the definition of a market. Right. How do you get to the price?
- [61:30]
Coleman Church
Correct.
- [61:31]
Tucker Carlson
So as someone who's spent his life in that world and who clearly, you're clearly committed to the idea of markets, you believe people should be able to decide what they're going to pay for something and what they're going to sell something for. How do you explain esg?
- [61:50]
Coleman Church
I don't know that. Funnily enough, I don't know that even the experts can actually define it. And I'm. I'm not. I'm not joking when I say that when I. At my last job, we would do a conference every summer in Europe for investors, and we'd have a series of roundtable topics. And the one topic that was standing room only sold out every summer in Europe was the esg, without question. It seems the US has definitely faded quickly from that, but Europe still seems very, very hooked in. Very hooked in. It's not faded there at all. It's definitely a part of the investment process. But what's fascinating is if you go to 20 clients in London and you talk about ESG, you will get a different answer from each ESG specialist. As to, especially in emerging markets, it's a very difficult thing to.
- [62:56]
Tucker Carlson
Work your.
- [62:57]
Coleman Church
Way around the ESG constraints when most of what emerging markets are based on are hard commodities. And there's also obviously the governance component, the G component. It's not always maybe up to Western standards with the G. So they're.
- [63:16]
Tucker Carlson
With the G, they're a little light.
- [63:18]
Coleman Church
On the G. The G, the E's not great. The S, no one really knows what that means. And the G is highly questionable. So it's funny. It's just. It's there. It's still, I guess what I call a work in progress.
- [63:34]
Tucker Carlson
But just like conceptually, the idea that factors that are not really relevant to your fiduciary responsibility, which is to maximize returns for shareholders or something related to that, I don't know. It's just an interesting concept. How did that happen? It's that my personal guilt as, like an educated Westerner supersedes your right to have me handle your money responsibly.
- [64:08]
Coleman Church
Well, it's straight government intervention is what it is. It's government. It's government, it's ideology. If you are of that mindset where you believe in control economy, it is the dream of all dreams to incorporate your ideological bent into the last thing that should be left alone, which is the free market. You now inculcate all of this ideology into every decision making process all the way down to setting the price of money, which to me, I know I've run afoul of plenty of people on this, but to me that's a bridge too far. That's not the place for it. But it's once in, it's impossible to get out. Once you go into that's involved in all the investment processes, it's really hard to take it back out again.
- [65:15]
Tucker Carlson
So back to the AI infrastructure boom in the United States. If that slowed down or if people lost confidence in it, are you concerned about a cascade effect on public markets.
- [65:32]
Coleman Church
In the short term? Yes. The question is how quickly does the market rotate, do the rotation trade. So we're starting to see that actually the last week or two you're starting to see small caps really rally. Dow components really old economy stuff really rally as tech is being soft. So there's theoretically a way you can thread the needle there. But with the concentration risk and with the size of just actual size of these companies, it's going to, it's going to, it's going to be a drag on the overall market as a whole best case scenario.
- [66:12]
Tucker Carlson
One of the reasons the stock market is my theory is so big is because it's the easiest and as you said, most liquid way to park your money with some hope of return. And I don't really think Americans are encouraged to think of other ways. I just have always noticed that.
- [66:29]
Coleman Church
Absolutely. And as an emerging markets guy who's been able to look into other, other countries, frontier markets etc and how they look at it there, there's always from if you're an Argentine or a Brazilian or Turk, you're, you're always looking outside of your domestic economy, domestic market for opportunities and we really don't. Too much.
- [66:57]
Tucker Carlson
No. And it's so easy to participate in the public markets in the United States. As you said, you can do it on your phone. You can make bets on market movements from your phone, which is just like, seems like it might have unintended consequences maybe.
- [67:10]
Coleman Church
Yeah. Crosses the line from, as you said, from investing to straight gambling.
- [67:14]
Tucker Carlson
But okay, so it's ease of use is like the key to any scale, I think.
- [67:20]
Coleman Church
Sure.
- [67:21]
Tucker Carlson
That was Amazon.
- [67:23]
Coleman Church
That was. Yeah. There's a lot of applications to that.
- [67:27]
Tucker Carlson
Well, yes, yeah, yeah, that's true.
- [67:31]
Coleman Church
Yes.
- [67:32]
Tucker Carlson
Yeah. Well, that's by the way, why tobacco use went absolutely crazy. As soon as someone figured out an automatic rolling machine for cigarettes. People used to have to smoke pipes, cigars take snuff up their nose. The second you made it super easy to burn tobacco, the whole world became addicted to it.
- [67:47]
Coleman Church
Makes a lot of sense, right?
- [67:49]
Tucker Carlson
And that's what the stock market is in the United States from my perspective. But if you're trying to be a little more creative or hedge a little bit, your future, your family's security, where else do you put your money?
- [68:03]
Coleman Church
Again, it depends on, you know, who you are, net worth, et cetera.
- [68:07]
Tucker Carlson
Let's say you have an extra 100 grand. What would you, what would be a good call?
- [68:11]
Coleman Church
Well, the problem is the, the great obvious trades run a lot already, right? Gold and silver's already run a ton. So long term investing, let's try to look at stuff, the ideal cross of what sort of fairly valued or cheap or distressed or out of favor that people haven't really cottoned onto because you see a trend that's about to emerge. Right now we're in full throated recognition of the debasement trade and silver's breaking out. Not for that reason, but also there's a notion that there may not be as much physical silver out there as derivatives have been written against. So there's been a bit of a squeeze going on. Two weeks ago, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange shut down for a cooling issue overnight, just as silver was spiking, which was kind of convenient. So there's some technicals in that market.
- [69:15]
Tucker Carlson
Wait, so you think it's possible there's more paper against silver than there is silver?
- [69:21]
Coleman Church
Yes. So yes, they're definitely more derivatives written against all commodities than exist. But no one ever asked. Not no one. But typically, if you're an investor, you don't ask for physical delivery of the commodity.
- [69:35]
Tucker Carlson
I do.
- [69:36]
Coleman Church
I know you do. I do. You do. And I'm going to find out where that stuff's buried too. So you don't typically ask for the physical delivery of it when you're trading in, in tens and hundreds of millions dollars of derivatives against you, cash settle, your derivative against mine cash settle, the, the loser pays the winner and you move on. So where do you go at this point given where valuations are? I think, I think you go abroad, you look at multiples on US Stock market where we were trading historically, extremely high PE ratios for the index on historical basis and very high against foreign markets. I think what this administration's doing in Latin America, particularly as I mentioned earlier, sort of Monroe Doctrine 2, there's clearly a movement afoot to stabilize the region and to partner with those that are critical to us. I would imagine that'll open up a ton of investment in growth. There's. There are plenty of Latin American countries that offer pretty cheap historical PE ratios. So I think it's probably time to diversify a little bit out of the US and diversify out of tech. Heavy stuff. That's where I would go. Simply. I think you still have to own some gold and silver. Just have to own some, but just not as much as you wanted three years ago, given how far it's running, so.
- [71:03]
Tucker Carlson
But you're basically making a pitch for the Venezuelan stock market.
- [71:07]
Coleman Church
Not specifically, but there may be a catalyst coming there that could create a big move one way or the other, it seems, in the next couple weeks.
- [71:16]
Tucker Carlson
What about real estate? Land.
- [71:18]
Coleman Church
Real estate Land for sure. That's why I asked. It depends on who you are. I think productive agricultural real estate anywhere is always a good investment. Sort of a disaster hedge, but yes, land as a whole, yes. I don't think I'd want to be rushing into blue cities and paying high interest rates and taking out a bunch of debt on overpriced co ops in New York City necessarily.
- [71:48]
Tucker Carlson
What about buying a 70 Sarah office building on Sixth Avenue in Midtown New.
- [71:53]
Coleman Church
York if you can convert it to residential perhaps and get a lot of tax breaks. May want to see what our friend Mamdani says the first couple weeks.
- [72:07]
Tucker Carlson
So you made the point that for a bunch of different reasons, Ukraine war, but other structural reasons, we are on the path to losing our privilege as the holders of the global reserve currency at some point, right? Well, because all empires are. Yes, so we know that. The question is, when does that happen and what replaces it? And my read is as of now, there's no obvious national replacement. We're not going to adopt the British pound or the euro or the yen or the ruble, but instead gold is the stopgap, as it has so often been. But crypto seems like the next global reserve currency. Is that fair to say?
- [72:58]
Coleman Church
Yes, yes. I mean, I would say this. I think people bundle together the notion of blockchain and cryptocurrencies. And what I'd say, I can't necessarily make a pure prognostication on any one particular Crypto, I mean, it's been a phenomenal exercise and wonderful to see. It's sort of like adherent to Austrian economics to see the experiment work. I don't think we want to get into the dynamics of individual cryptos. I think at some point probably bitcoin as a crypto will be usurped just by sort of a better technology. But put that aside. What to me unequivocally and the next venture I'm going into is related to blockchain is blockchain is here and is not going away, going away whatsoever. And blockchain is going to transform the financial services industry pretty much every, everything we do financially transaction wise. And fortunately we have the wind at our backs with this administration and David Sachs and genius act, et cetera. And nobody who maybe was somewhat skeptical three, four years ago. Is it all, I mean, Larry Fink as an example, I think continues to say all assets are going to be tokenized. Just this week, DTCC said all assets are going to be tokenized and put on the chain. And that's going to remove a lot of little frictions in the system. Extra costs that don't need an extra time lags that don't need to exist. So the cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies exist with the layer of the blockchain. You can't have crypto without the blockchain. But the two are somewhat distinct.
- [75:10]
Tucker Carlson
So a couple of questions. One, is it safe? I mean, it's reliant on electricity.
- [75:20]
Coleman Church
Yes, but so is, so is every, I guess mentioned the CME went dark. Right. The other day, Chicago. So the NASDAQ shut down. Right. Everything we do is reliant on. Except for you coming over in your golf cart with a bag of gold coins for me. Is, is, is relying on energy that extent, is it safe? Is it hackable? The theory, you know, one of the theories being proposed, bitcoin. I'm not really sure if this is, you know, Bitcoin's had a pretty decent drop from high 120s to around 90. You know, part of, part of the thing being floated is that with quantum computing making the leaps that it's making that Bitcoin might be able to be hacked at some point perhaps. But again, I'll put that separate to the blockchain. The blockchain, deeply encrypted, safe. These are the rails on which everything's going to run.
- [76:33]
Tucker Carlson
Okay. Will it eliminate corruption. Or curtail it?
- [76:42]
Coleman Church
I think, I mean, because it's kind of, I think the question coming from you is a funny question because you know that nothing will ever eradicate corruption.
- [76:51]
Tucker Carlson
In the human unless it changes the human heart, Right?
- [76:53]
Coleman Church
No, of course, yes, it should eliminate corruption because what the blockchain is going to do, what it does is it creates a permanent, electronic, unhackable ledger. So think about something as basic as, like, title insurance. I don't know if you've ever had to deal with that, but first of all, why do we need to pay?
- [77:14]
Tucker Carlson
Have I ever deal with that? Yeah, I pay constantly for title insurance, so why.
- [77:19]
Coleman Church
It's an absurd notion, right? There's a title, you own the title, you put it on the blockchain, it's there forever. And when I buy my house from you, the title gets transferred to me. It's registered on the blockchain, the transaction's there. Now it's mine. It's there forever. We don't need to pay a couple grand or whatever. Sorry. One of my best friends runs a title company in Maryland. But, you know, he's my age, so he's probably almost done anyway. But that's just an example. Like, why do we need to pay five grand for title insurance? I just sold a house in Westchester and I found out that there was from two owners ago, there was, according to paperwork, there was a $650,000 mortgage still on the property and that never got expunged, but the brokers just kind of waved it back and forth and everyone just kind of stamped it. That's just an example, I think that everyone can kind of relate to. But also why we'll be able to send money immediately with. No, if I send money to you, you'll immediately get the money, get the care, get the interest on it. Why should I be paying $30 to send a wire from JP Morgan? Like that's pure $30 of margin, like all that kind of little stuff. And so the company that, that I'm start, is going to be starting with Jan one is called Liquidity I.O. and we, we have one of only six fully registered licensed alternative trading systems, which is a trading system that's going to be able to trade all these tokenized and financial assets. And what we want to do is help democratize the financial markets and tokenize all kinds of assets. But we're working with our backer, just made some acquisitions with a couple of consumer loan businesses, auto loans and manufactured homes, mobile homes, for example. There's a great story. These two young guys in Dallas, they were working at JP Morgan and with their fourth bonus, they said, we're not going to blow it this time. Let's buy some rental property. And they couldn't find any rental property. They were in Dallas. So they just cold called like 250 mobile home parks and they found one, put in 50 grand, turned around, it was a $6 million trade, they were going to do a bigger one. And what they realized they were better off doing was revolutionizing the lending business for mobile homes because guess who the biggest player in that is? Warren Buffett. So great business, obviously high margin business. But what I didn't learn until recently is that there is no refi on a mobile home and there is no lending available on a secondary purchase. So if I take out a loan for my mobile home and then want to sell it to you, you can't get a loan. You have to buy it for cash. And if rates go down from 8 to 4, I can't refinance it. So they're going to with their business and tokenization they're going to eradicate all kinds of costs which and create these two separate markets which is a solution to, is a partial solution to the home affordability crisis. Like that's something everyone can get behind.
- [80:39]
Tucker Carlson
How does this new technology figure into like monetary policy?
- [80:45]
Coleman Church
Like wow, that's a great question. So you familiar with the stable coins?
- [80:52]
Tucker Carlson
I am, but will you describe what they are?
- [80:54]
Coleman Church
Sure. So stablecoins think about it this way. In simple terms, say crypto like a bitcoin sort of a free floating currency. The market dictates a stablecoin is more like a pegged currency. So pegged to fiat in this case tether circle they're pegged to the US dollar and try to keep it stable at parity one to one. So what they are is a.
- [81:25]
Tucker Carlson
And there are national currencies like this, there are countries like Bahamas or whatever they just pegged one to one.
- [81:30]
Coleman Church
Exactly. Yeah. Panama's dollarized. Stephen Hanke was a big dollarization component. They tried to do it in Argentina, it didn't work. Hong Kong's got a dollar peg. So the stablecoins they try to keep parity with the dollar and they are theoretically backed by treasury bills. So money comes in, the money gets invested in treasury bills. One for one you're backed by AAA rated short dated, no risk. But these become a conduit for all these transactions on the chain automatic through these. So it could go through the stablecoin and into other things from there as a sort of a conduit. Now that's all good and well as long as we're sure. That those stable coins are taking dollar for dollar, investing in what they say they are without a lag or without moving too far away from that tether. At the moment, it seems to be diversifying away from strict T bills and they've been moving into gold, which is working for now, but yet to be determined how that works out.
- [82:49]
Tucker Carlson
So does that make, does all of this make the US Dollar stronger or weaker?
- [82:53]
Coleman Church
Oh, sorry. Yeah. So the good. That creates a natural bid for our treasury bills, which is a great thing for besant and friends, because that creates a whole new demand vehicle for our treasury debt on the stable coins. And what these stable coins do allow for, again a lot of emerging markets participants is allows them to quickly dollars and, and avoid depreciation risk in their own country. So you're getting a lot of foreign, foreign money into stable coins that will be bid for T bills, which should hopefully help with our, our funding.
- [83:37]
Tucker Carlson
H. Is there any way for the US Government to use stablecoins as a weapon in the way the Biden administration used Russian assets at the New York Fed as a weapon?
- [83:50]
Coleman Church
I don't know. I don't know. I imagine there is. I don't know what that mechanism would be and I don't think. I mean, in the Russia reserve instance, it was a bilateral seizure. This would be a seizure of untold amounts of investors season that I'm not sure what the, what the purpose would be other than just right. Stealing the money.
- [84:21]
Tucker Carlson
Well, we've seen that before.
- [84:22]
Coleman Church
True.
- [84:24]
Tucker Carlson
What do we know about global gold reserves since it's such a huge component now?
- [84:30]
Coleman Church
What we know, we don't know everything that we know because it's not fully transparent. But what we do know is the direction of travel, which is massive increases, particularly from India, China, Russia. That doesn't seem to be abating at any time.
- [84:49]
Tucker Carlson
That means they're importing gold.
- [84:51]
Coleman Church
That means they're buying gold. And there has been a lot of movement of physical gold, particularly over the summer. But the movement appeared to be more from the London vaults back to the United States rather than elsewhere. But we don't know. We don't have complete clarity on any of that stuff, how and why.
- [85:12]
Tucker Carlson
So if you're going to have an ancient commodity that's like a huge part of the global system, economic system, how can you not have transparency? Maybe I'm answering my own question.
- [85:26]
Coleman Church
You're looking at me like I'm an idiot. I saw you answer it before you finish the sentence.
- [85:31]
Tucker Carlson
In other words, if it's so important, why are people Being honest about it because it's so important, that's why.
- [85:37]
Coleman Church
Weird that the Chinese wouldn't tell us exactly how much glion they have in the vaults. Yeah, yeah. There's no reason they should or would or have to.
- [85:49]
Tucker Carlson
I guess. My question.
- [85:50]
Coleman Church
You don't actually show your hand on how much you're accumulating as you're trying to accumulate an asset.
- [85:54]
Tucker Carlson
Oh, is that true?
- [85:55]
Coleman Church
Well, yeah, typically I'm learning a lot.
- [85:59]
Tucker Carlson
About markets from you.
- [86:00]
Coleman Church
That's great.
- [86:04]
Tucker Carlson
So I told you I promised you stupid questions.
- [86:06]
Coleman Church
I know I said there are no stupid questions, but I was wrong. So.
- [86:12]
Tucker Carlson
Okay, then let me reframe the question. This way, if we got somehow full transparency on global gold reserves, where they are, who has gold, how much would we be shocked? Is there a big spread between.
- [86:29]
Coleman Church
I think so.
- [86:31]
Tucker Carlson
Reality. We.
- [86:33]
Coleman Church
We still don't have the audit of Fort Knox that we were supposed to get a few months ago, so.
- [86:39]
Tucker Carlson
Really?
- [86:39]
Coleman Church
Yeah. You might be shocked about that too. I don't know.
- [86:43]
Tucker Carlson
You think for Knox just has a lot more gold than they're telling us.
- [86:46]
Coleman Church
They may have 10 times more. I don't know. I really don't.
- [86:51]
Tucker Carlson
I don't. I don't want to speculate.
- [86:53]
Coleman Church
I mean, I like to speculate, but I don't want to speculate on that.
- [86:56]
Tucker Carlson
Huh. I'm guessing if there is a spread between perception and reality, it's. It's to the negative. But what do I know?
- [87:02]
Coleman Church
Not sure. There's talk about revaluing the gold as well.
- [87:06]
Tucker Carlson
What does that mean?
- [87:07]
Coleman Church
That means if you automatically reval. Revalue our gold reserves to market, we automatically have a higher effective capital base. That should make us more credit worthy for lack of a better term.
- [87:25]
Tucker Carlson
So gold, now US reserves are valued at like under 100 bucks an ounce. Something like that. Something crazy. Right?
- [87:32]
Coleman Church
I'm not sure exactly what, but.
- [87:34]
Tucker Carlson
But I mean that's like 1933 levels or something, right? And. And of course gold is over four grand an ounce. So like, why would we continue to value our own gold reserves thousands of dollars below what they're actually worth?
- [87:46]
Coleman Church
I have no idea.
- [87:48]
Tucker Carlson
That's weird though, right?
- [87:49]
Coleman Church
It is, yeah. Especially when every other metric in the county we have cost of living adjustments based on the CPI basket. I don't know.
- [88:00]
Tucker Carlson
So how much just to go back to your career trajectory in emerging markets. Debt.
- [88:06]
Coleman Church
Yes sir.
- [88:07]
Tucker Carlson
How much chicanery is there in that business? Like so if you're dealing with emerging markets. So some of those are like solid, transparent, well governed countries and some of them Are Nigeria. What's that like? Well.
- [88:27]
Coleman Church
I would say there's two components in the emerging markets trading business. There's the trading thereof in sort of the big money centers like Hong Kong, London and New York. And then there's the domestic stuff that happens. Now I could say in terms of chicanery, There's a clear 80 BC line at the global financial crisis on how we conducted business across the street in all products, pre gfc, post GFC and all. I could say it was a lot more fun pre gfc.
- [89:01]
Tucker Carlson
Was it fun?
- [89:02]
Coleman Church
It was a lot of fun. It was as fun as you could have having a job, really.
- [89:08]
Tucker Carlson
Job. What was so fun about it?
- [89:11]
Coleman Church
Every day was different. You're on a trading floor. Everyone every, every day is different. You had a front seat, you have a front seat and you're participating in global events every day. Mark's moving up, moving down. You're working with like a truly diverse bunch of people from all walks of life that are as close probably to merit meritocracy on trading floor as you could get. And it was very clear what the motivator was. It was making as much money as he could every single day. And there was nowhere to hide from that. So as a young person, it couldn't be a better learning experience because every day at the end of the day there's a number next to your name and whether it was through your good luck, bad luck, hard work, whatever, the number doesn't lie and that's the number. And it's just a great way to learn and to have to face yourself and improve upon yourself and you know, train forwards. Guys, you know, like PhDs from Princeton to guys that dropped out of college and we were all kind of in it as a team. It was really fun.
- [90:26]
Tucker Carlson
And what were the personality traits that allowed people to be successful? Like what's the perfect profile of a trader?
- [90:35]
Coleman Church
You know what's funny? I found that the best traders and there's, there's investors and there's traders, right? Different. It's a different mindset. The best traders I find were guys like to think with thought more in two dimensions. So if you thought in three dimensions you could out think your, you could outsmart yourself way too much. The what ifs and oh but and if you're in one dimension, you're just not at the IQ level to function. So the two dimension that kind of took the factors at play, saw what the trend was, took it at face value, didn't overthink it, went with it and wasn't Too much, had enough risk appetite, but wasn't too much of a cowboy, I guess would be the perfect trader. They saw the, the worst.
- [91:26]
Tucker Carlson
You're describing my dogs.
- [91:27]
Coleman Church
Yes. The worst traders I, I saw.
- [91:32]
Tucker Carlson
Were.
- [91:32]
Coleman Church
Oftentimes the smartest people. Really?
- [91:35]
Tucker Carlson
Yeah, because they just overthink it.
- [91:38]
Coleman Church
Just overthink your way. You over trade it. You overthink it. You're always looking at the, you're always looking but this and that. And I have all this information. You're the analysis paralysis and or talking yourself out of a good trade.
- [91:52]
Tucker Carlson
How did it change after the financial crisis?
- [91:58]
Coleman Church
We were egregiously over regulated from all sides.
- [92:07]
Tucker Carlson
Did that make markets safer for retail investors?
- [92:10]
Coleman Church
I don't think so.
- [92:13]
Tucker Carlson
Because the picture you painted over the last hour and a half is not one of impregnable safety. Just say that.
- [92:20]
Coleman Church
I mean there's obviously a lot of unintended consequences from the excess regulation, but it just, you know, it's funny, on Wall Street I think we were actually at the vanguard of hyper regul, hyper regulation, hyper monitoring. I mean they were monitoring every Bloomberg chat, every email, every phone call, everything was taped. Then they ran alos against it for keywords. You just like way more scrutiny and everything.
- [92:58]
Tucker Carlson
So you lived in the Panopticon before everyone else?
- [93:00]
Coleman Church
Yeah, I did and I, and I think there's also, you know, a lot of. Going back to the global financial crisis is such a seminal moment in this country in a lot of ways because it's actually. We made this deal with the devil and I'm a beneficiary of bailout. I worked at a big bank that got bailed out and I make no, I'll never deny that. But in doing so we let the Trojan horse in and we married the government effectively and they came in and they basically wrote our policies. They wrote our policies for us. And from HR policies to recruiting policies to you know, all the regulation and the stuff that I saw from a distance in terms of sort of arbitrary fining for violations was kind of gangster like. And I saw a lot of good people sort of thrown on the funeral pyre, sacrificed, just, just tossed out. Like, let's, you know, this guy, this guy was in violation, these guys weren't. But they were on the same Bloomberg chat. So let's, let's give like 10 bodies. Everyone's fired, everyone's career's over. It was, it was a, that was a bad, that was a bad time. It was a bad time. And so everyone started trading scared. People tried trading scared and it lost the the joy and it lost the.
- [94:34]
Tucker Carlson
But famously none of the, you know, the CEO, the executive level seem pretty insulated from punishment.
- [94:42]
Coleman Church
Yes. You know, if I were going to give, if I were going to give a more sort of generous take on it, you know, the CEOs really didn't have much of a choice in some regard. It was like, look, here's the deal. You could keep your job and keep making $25 million a year or if you agree to this fine for mortgage backed securities or whatever, Libor rigging or whatever it is, this, this arbitrary number, you could keep your job and you can keep your salary or you can get fired and the next guy will agree to it. So like, and they kept it afloat and they had to be, they had to be in good stead with the government or the fines and the regulation would just come and come and come, come. But once you get bailed out, once you ask for the bailout, they own you. And that's what happened.
- [95:44]
Tucker Carlson
It always is what happened. They made the deal.
- [95:46]
Coleman Church
Yeah. And it was like the tobacco companies, right. Like they kept the tobacco companies alive just long enough to keep bleeding them for fees. Like then they figured out there was just, there was money there too to take and they just kept coming back about.
- [96:01]
Tucker Carlson
Yeah. And the country did not get healthier. Life expectancy went down. And if I can just be honest, I don't think the quality of the cigarettes improved at all. No, I'm serious. If you smoke a sort of pre settlement Marlboro Red, not that they exist anymore or a current one, it's like it's not even the same product.
- [96:19]
Coleman Church
I was a pre settlement guy. I quit. Yeah.
- [96:21]
Tucker Carlson
Oh, me too. I'm just, I'm just saying. I've heard that. So no, I don't really think anyone won except for politicians. Right. I don't think there are a lot of lung cancer patients.
- [96:30]
Coleman Church
A lot of nice new regulatory buildings were built. And I think also one of the great stories that hasn't really been. Maybe this was for you. One of the great stories that should be investigated is where did the proceeds from all those post GFC fines go? Because I saw some stuff in around the time that was kind of staggering as to where it went. Now obviously it went back into building more of the regulatory bodies, like more sec, regular whatever. But I think some of the money flowed to some very specific political organizations.
- [97:15]
Tucker Carlson
There's no question about went to the swamp. Meanwhile, the whole pretext for this, the justification for doing this was I lived here then I just saw my house that year. So I was a victim of all this too, even though I never participated in it. But I lost my job along with a lot of other people. And just because the economy contracted so people lost their jobs, including those with four children. But the justification was, which I wasn't against, it was like, these people are totally reckless. Like they're completely reckless. Like what is a mortgage backed security? What's a derivative? And like no one outside your world had ever heard of any of that. It's like I thought when I signed up for a mortgage, like the bank I signed with held the mortgage, like we had no idea they sold the mortgage. Like most people didn't know. Again, there's a lot of ignorance, including in my house about this stuff. And so the idea was like, this is crazy and we need to rein it in. You've just described the quote, gamificate, gamification of markets. And it's like that doesn't seem like a decrease in recklessness.
- [98:19]
Coleman Church
Well, it actually reminds me something for the part of the previous conversation which is people say you never know when you're in a bubble until it's over. And that's entirely incorrect. I mean, I've been through a bunch and we all know, we also, oh yeah, we just didn't know when it was going to end. I mean, like, give me an example. People were talking about the bubble in 05. No, if you fought it in 05, you were out of a job pretty quickly. Like it went on for a long time. I could tell you the reason I want to bring it up is again the, the parallels to today is in, you know, so in 07 I had been on trade bonds for whatever 13, 14 years. So not the smartest guy, not the most quantitative guy, but been around enough to trade enough stuff to understand kind of how stuff works. And all this stuff they're coming through with like CDO squared, it's clo and like synthetic this and that. And like I didn't really understand it, I didn't have to trade it. But like I didn't really understand it. I didn't really want to get into it because I didn't need to. But it just is thinking if, if I'm already in the whatever percent of financial experts just by nature of where I sit every day and it doesn't smell right to me. Yeah, something's not right.
- [99:36]
Tucker Carlson
And you trade Nigerian death.
- [99:37]
Coleman Church
Right, right, right, right. So I mean I'm saying credit derivatives on Bulgaria and stuff. So like. Yeah, yes. But if you're yeah, you're taking derivatives.
- [99:49]
Tucker Carlson
Of Bulgaria, but you're like, this is too much for me.
- [99:52]
Coleman Church
It's just like, how many acronyms? Also, I'm just, just. I'm substantially averse to any acronym. And then when you, when you take the acronym and square it, you know, you're in trouble. But, but then this, this latest go round the last couple months with all this circular financing and hype with all the AI companies, and every day, you know, somebody's buying chips from somebody who's going to lend the money to buy the chips to invest in the scaler, who's going to do, do this? Like four. Every day, four companies are. You're like, dude, I suppose I could figure that out if I sat down and really tried to. But it gives me a headache just even thinking about it. And clearly it smacks with some kind of. It smacks of desperation or something. That's just my, my gut is just having, you know, the sniff. Haven't been around a long time. It's like, dude, if it doesn't smell right, it's just. It doesn't.
- [100:47]
Tucker Carlson
Don't put it in your mouth.
- [100:48]
Coleman Church
Right, right.
- [100:51]
Tucker Carlson
So you remember thinking, like, what about the tech bubble in 99, 2000?
- [100:56]
Coleman Church
Did you think, oh, I got blown out personal training, trying to short that in like the fall of 99. A lot of other people? Yeah, I mean, everybody. Yeah. Oh, I've. Hilarious. Hilarious. I was with my wife in March of 2000 at a dinner, at a lunch with a guy who was chairman of a major, major broker dealer. Famous famous broker dealer. And where she's 30 at the time, never invested in anything. And we're sitting next to him. He's like, so what do you. She's like, oh, I've been day trading stocks. He's like, explain that. What do you mean you've been day trading? She's like, oh, yeah, I just buy whatever IPOs. I just, if it comes out, I buy it. Do you remember that in 2000 on the IPO, friend, everything just went up. Like. She's like, yeah, I just buy it and then I sell it. It's awesome. And I saw his eyes just go like this. And that was like. That was like the Joe Kennedy shoeshine moment. I mean, it was literally like February or something. I think it was probably with. In probably two.
- [102:08]
Tucker Carlson
No, it's when your housekeeper is investing in condos in Clark County, Nevada, that you were like, I think maybe this is overheated just a little. For real.
- [102:18]
Coleman Church
Or you get your Uber. Uber divers. Like Trade crypto on Completely. Yeah.
- [102:24]
Tucker Carlson
Whenever people are going hard on like Cape Coral, Florida real estate who don't know anything about real. Not against Cape Coral, but you know what I mean.
- [102:31]
Coleman Church
Yes.
- [102:32]
Tucker Carlson
And those were the artists at zip codes. Yeah. So you think it's pretty obvious is what you're saying.
- [102:39]
Coleman Church
I just, it's. It feel there are sort of like the Russian. Just sort of like the letter that they wrote about the Hunter Biden laptop. It has all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation and it's all hallmarks of. Yeah. Late stage rally, let's say that.
- [103:05]
Tucker Carlson
Yeah. Well, you're very diplomatic. I have to say, though, just like with the baseline fact that you spent your life trading emerging markets debt, I think if you're uncomfortable with something, it's fair for the rest of us to be uncomfortable with it.
- [103:17]
Coleman Church
Appreciate that.
- [103:18]
Tucker Carlson
Yeah. Last question. You've been through all these bubbles and bursts and debt crises and bailouts, and at the, at the end of every story, is the United States or US aligned institutions like the IMF coming in and kind of saving the day. That's the thread that runs through all these.
- [103:39]
Coleman Church
Yeah. In simple terms. Sure.
- [103:42]
Tucker Carlson
I only deal in simple terms, Coleman. What happens if that happens to the Israelites?
- [103:48]
Coleman Church
Who bails out the bailer? Who bails the bailer? Nobody.
- [103:56]
Tucker Carlson
Okay, so then what happens?
- [103:59]
Coleman Church
I don't. I don't think. Hope you bought that. That agricultural land in Brazil at that point. So then what happens? I don't think we're. I don't think we get to that point anytime soon.
- [104:16]
Tucker Carlson
But just theoretically, as we've mentioned before.
- [104:19]
Coleman Church
You know, there is no. There's no alternative right now. Right, People still as bad as it could get in the States. Like, we're still the cleanest dirty shirt in the pile for the time being. Right. We still have this free and open markets where capital flows and gets treated. Well. There's time. There's still time to. Course. Correct. I'm not willing to go to who bails out. Who bails out the bailer. I just. I'm not willing to go there yet. I'm not willing to go there. We'll be all right. We're still the United States of America and we've got a lot. I mean, this administration's got a lot of mental firepower and a lot of experience. We still got time.
- [105:03]
Tucker Carlson
Coleman Church, ladies and gentlemen.
- [105:05]
Coleman Church
Thank you. Thank you so much.