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Although if the Blue Jays win again tonight, maybe Donald Trump is going to have to hit the Blue Jays with an emergency 100% reciprocal tariff because he's going to have to protect the American team from that foreign competition. You know, the Dodgers have three Japanese pitchers in their starting rotation. So, I don't know. I mean, how does Trump feel about that? Maybe have to have a tariff on baseball teams import foreign players. Uh I don't know. May I don't know how many maybe there's more Americans playing for the Blue Jays because they Japanese players as far as I can tell on their roster. It's just the Ders uh that have all the Japanese players. Anyway, I'm I'm just kidding. But we'll be watching that game uh myself uh after I finish this podcast. But anyway, so getting back to the news of the day. So the Federal Reserve as expected interest rates by another 25 basis points. So the Fed funds right now has a uh three and three quarters to four. Now the official inflation rate is about 3%. Which would leave real interest rates assuming that you believe the official inflation numbers which I don't. But it would leave real interest rates at about 1%. And for people who pay taxes on their interest, it's even less than that. Of course, I think the actual rate of inflation is far higher than what the government admits. And so, as far as I'm concerned, interest rates are negative. They were negative before the cut and they're even more negative after the cut. Now, also, as expected, the the Federal Reserve announced the official end to its quantitative tightening program, QT. That's going to end in December. And last I checked, the balance sheet is about 6.7 trillion right now. Now, if you remember before the 2008 financial crisis, it was below a trillion. I don't remember the exact number, but it was less than a trillion. And it blew up pretty big. So, by the end of QE3, before they started to shrink the balance sheet, it peaked out at about 4 trillion. But early on, I think it was in 2009 when Ben Bernaki first went to Congress to to testify about the QE program, and somebody asked him, and I can't recall the name and even whether it was a senator or a a representative, but somebody correctly pointed out to Ben Bernaggi that the Fed was monetizing government debt. like a banana republic and he was concerned and rightly so with the Fed, you know, monetizing government debt and and Ben Bernaki was very emphatic in his denial that the the Fed was monetizing debt and his explanation as to why the Federal Reserve buying government bonds was not monetization. was he said that in banana republics when the central banks buy government bonds they keep them. But in contrast he said that the Fed was just temporarily buying these bonds that it was just because there was an emergency of financial crisis. So the Fed was going to temporarily expand its balance sheet buy these bonds. But then when the emergency was over, it was going to sell the bonds back into the market. So in other words, there would not be a permanent expansion of the Fed's balance sheet. And for that reason, we were not monetizing the debt like Banana Republics. And so America was not a Banana Republic. Well, at the time I said BS. I said, "Yes, Ben Bernaki could claim that it's temporary, but I think it's permanent." Back then, I said, "There's no way that the Fed is going to reverse this, that this is a monetary roach motel. The Fed checked in and it ain't never checking out." Well, here we are now in 2025 and the balance sheet is 6.7 trillion and the Fed says, "We're not making it any smaller." which proves that Ben Bernaki lied or just was completely incompetent if he actually believed what he was saying. I at least was smart enough to know that what he was saying was impossible. But at least somebody should officially come out and say, "Okay, we are monetizing debt." That's what the Fed did. That's what it continues to do. And so we are no better than a banana republic. We are in fact a banana republic. The only difference between America and a banana republic is the bananas, right? We don't got them. And now, if we want to buy them, of course, we got to pay tariffs on them as we import them. But that's a significant uh development that there's an end to quantitative tightening. I'm surprised it took them so long. I actually thought they would have ended it a while ago. In fact, I thought they would have gone back to Q quantitative easing by now. Now, I believe that that's coming. We'll probably get that next year and I think stopping quantitative tightening is just the first step to initiating quantitative easing. Uh also what the Fed mentioned is that to the extent that bonds mature they will continue to roll over the principle but if it is a mortgage back security that matures uh the Fed won't roll that over into more mortgage back securities. it will roll it into treasuries. And so this instead of helping the housing market, a lot of people thought that, hey, if we stop quantitative um tightening, it's going to really help the mortgage market because the Fed won't be selling uh mortgage back securities. Well, they're not going to be buying them either. They're not going to be rolling over. So, the the uh mortgage back securities on the Fed's balance sheet is going to continue to contract. despite the fact that quantitative tightening is over. So, it's not really over for the mortgage market, only for the Treasury market. And so, I think you're going to start to see rising mortgage rates, not falling mortgage rates. And in fact, one of the things that happened today uh in the market as a reaction is bonds got clobbered and yields on the 10-year to the 30-year shot up as a result of the rate cut, which is again something that I had been forecasting. And I think that you're going to continue to get uh more increases between now and the December meeting. So, I think that rates will be higher when the Fed meets again in December than they were in November when they cut. And so, they're lowering short-term rates, but long-term rates are not cooperating. They are going up. But I think the most significant uh thing about today's announcement was uh Jerome Pal stating on multiple occasions and really going out of his way to state this. So, it wasn't just in the Q&A, although he repeated it in a Q&A, but it was in the prepared remarks and and Pal said that monetary policy is not on a preset path and that December is kind of up in the air, that it is not a foregone conclusion that there will be another rate cut. In fact, he went out of his way to say it is far from a foregone conclusion that we're going to cut rates again. Now, before today's announcement, a December cut was virtually a lock and so now the odds have gone down considerably, although it's still uh favored. Now, it's a bit surprising that the markets didn't react even more negatively to uh Pal basically rug pulling a uh December rate cut when the markets are pretty much banking on that. Uh so, I think maybe a lot of people believe that we're still going to get a cut in December. I would put myself in that camp. I think the Fed maybe just wants to pretend that there's going to be a lot more thought going into the next decision. Uh but that we're probably going to get the cut anyway. Uh because there is a lot of political pressure behind the scenes for the Fed to cut rates. And I think the Fed knows that the economy is a lot weaker than it lets on uh in in public. So, I think we're going to get a cut, but there is now some more uncertainty, which, you know, should be weighing on an overvalued market. You know, the stock market hit new highs again today. The NASDAQ, in fact, the NASDAQ was, I think, the only index that managed to close positive today, and so another record high. The other indexes were all down, but they they weren't down dramatically. Maybe the the uh Russell 2000 was probably the weakest of the bunch. Um, but it could have been a lot worse giving that this was a a hawkish cut, right? To the extent that you could cut rates and be a hawk, right? Although, you know, there's nothing hawkish really about anybody on the Fed anymore. Even the hawks are are doves. Uh, but there could have been a a a bigger sell-off than than there was. The other significant event of this uh announcement was there were two descents. Now you got one, right, who wanted 50 basis points, right? That's Stephen Moran. Uh that's Trump's uh guy at you know his yes man that he just slipped in to the Fed. And of course, you know, he's voting for 50 basis points, right? He he's just doing what Trump wants. But you know, Trump, you know, was in Japan and um you know, he was uh you know, bragging about how how great the economy was in Japan, right? Uh we got the hottest economy in the world. We've got the strongest economy in the world. We got the strongest economy in US history. And of course, he he credits all that strength with his own policies, right? So because of Donald Trump, we've got the hottest economy, the strongest economy. Yet at the same time, he claims we need these massive rate cuts, right? Obviously, those are inconsistent. If the economy is so great, why does the Fed need to slash interest rates, uh especially when inflation is as high as it is and and going up? So, I think, you know, the fact that Trump really believes that we need all this support shows you that he knows the economy is not strong, right? even he doesn't believe his own BS about the US economy, but his guy Steven Moran is in there and so he's voting for 50 basis points, but there was another guy, I think he was the head of the uh St. Louis Fed. I forget the guy's name, but he voted for no change, right? Not a hike, right? Which is, you know, I I think we should be hiking rates, but at least you had a guy that said don't cut him. So, you had most of the members that said, "Let's cut rates." You got one guy that says, "Don't cut them at all." And you got one guy that says, "Cut them more." But obviously a lot of divisiveness at the Fed, right? You've got, you know, different opinions, uh, which I think is rare. You know, normally everything is an is unanimous, right? And that's not the case, um, now. But in any event, I'm going to get over some of the more significant uh things that that um that that were said uh in the Q&A. You know, again, interestingly, Pal still puts a very positive spin on the situation. We're in a great place. The economy is doing great. You know, near 2% growth. We're at full employment, right? Of course, this is all BS because of the way we measure uh employment now, right? If we we measured unemployment the way we used to, we would be nowhere near full employment. So, we don't actually have full employment. We're just pretending that we have it. But the Fed uh is also pretending, right? The Fed should look beyond those numbers. But no, it it wants to uh perpetuate uh the government propaganda uh that we have low unemployment and that we have good economic growth, which again we don't have because the GDP numbers that purport to show that growth are also inaccurate because they dramatically understate inflation. And of course, the last thing that Pal wants to do is call into question uh the inflation numbers because he hides behind those numbers to try to claim that, you know, we're getting close to 2%. Even though he admitted, right, that inflation was 2.8, right? A and he admitted that even the core year-over-year if you take out uh food and energy, he admitted that was 2.8. Now, he also tried some more slight of hand later on when he talked about tariffs, and I'll get to that, but he said if you exclude the impact from tariffs, he said tariff inflation. And again, there's no such thing as tariff inflation. There are tariffs and there inflation. They're they're different things. But he said if you exclude the impact of tariffs, he said, "Hey, we're even closer to 2%. We're 2.4ish." All right. Well, even if that's the case, 2.4 4 ain't two, right? It's 40 basis points above two. What's that? 20% or something like that. That's a big number. What if inflation were 1.6 right now, right? Oh, they'd be they'd be slashing rates. They'd be doing QE. They'd be saying, "This is terrible. We're 40 basis points below target. You know, this is, you know, we can't have this. We need more inflation." Right? But when they're 40 basis points above it, but we're not even 40 basis points above it. there you have to not you know you have to strip out what you claim is the effect of tariffs because if you leave the tariffs in it's uh it's 2.8%. But again, one thing that Trump I mean that Pal said is that look, you know, once these tariffs work their way through the system, we don't have to worry about him anymore because it's just going to be a one-time increase in prices and it's not necessarily going to repeat and so we don't have to worry about it if it's only a one-off event. We're worried about a continuous increase in prices. But I'm going to get a little bit more into that because he he clarified uh and made some interesting comments in in the Q&A. But before I even get into that, and we're going to take a quick commercial break, but before I get into what was discussed, I want to talk about the one thing that wasn't discussed at all that never came up once and which should have come up, and that's the price of gold. $4,000 gold. The fact that gold had shot up so much between FOMC meetings should have been brought up but wasn't. And I'll discuss that right after this break. So stick around. 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Netswuite is the platform that I would choose and you should too. Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at netswuite.com/gold. The guide is free to you at netsweet.com/gold. All right. So, speaking about gold, right, gold was completely MIA at the Federal Open Market Committee meeting. Now, considering the fact that gold is the main monetary asset, you know, central banks now have more gold than US treasuries, foreign central banks. Uh, you would think that the rise in the price of gold would at least have deserved a question. you know, I think it should have been front and center. I mean, the Fed should have to address that elephant in the room. Um, but no, the topic uh was never even discussed. And I've mentioned on my podcast that Allan Greenspan, you know, who people call him the maestro and he's still held in in high regard uh including um uh by you know a lot of members of the Trump administration who speak about him. Um he specifically said that gold was his barometer of whether or not he got interest rates correct that even though we weren't on an official gold standard unofficially we were because Allen Greenspan still looked towards the price of gold as a market indicator of whether or not rates were too e high or or too low. And so what he told Congress was 4,000 $400 gold meant he was too loose and $300 gold meant he was too tight. And so he was kind of eyeing for around 350. And so if the price of gold stayed around 350, that would indicate to him that he had got interest rates about correct. Well, if $400 gold meant that Greenspan was too loose, what does $4,000 gold mean now? What is that saying about the PAL policy? Clearly, if 400 was represented too loose money back in the 80s, well then 4,000 certainly must represent the same thing now. And so that's why it should have been brought up. And by the way, my last podcast I titled it gold uh test $4,000 support. And some people might think, well, obviously it failed the test because now we're below 4,000, which is the case. We did end up falling below it. uh this week. And in fact, gold closed below 400 uh today, although it did trade above 4,030 this morning. Uh but it closed below it as I'm speaking. We're up about 20 bucks, but we're still just below 3950. But also on my last podcast when I talked about 4,000 support, I did say that it was very likely that gold would go below 4,000 and that 4,000 could be support even if uh the market was to go below because I think it's going to be similar to the way we handled the 30,000 support. It wasn't like 30,000 was some line that we couldn't cross. And the same thing with 4,000. We get below it, but whenever you get below it, you are in a support zone. And just like the market never fell too far below 3,000, I don't expect it to fall too far below 4,000, nor do I expect it to stay below 4,000 for any long period of time because that would give too many people the opportunity to buy it uh below 4,000. And I don't think that's going to be the case. So, I still think that we're at 4,000 support even if we're trading at 3,950. I mean, we're close enough uh to 4,000 to say this is where the support is. Obviously, the resistance now is closer to 4500 because we did get up to I think you know 40 40 No, no, 4,400 because we got up to like 4380. So, we didn't quite trade 4,400 and then and then we had had the pullback. But even with the pullback, where the price of gold is today is considerably higher than it was the last time the Fed cut rates. And the fact that the Fed is cutting rates and the gold price is going up is not a coincidence. Gold is reacting to a Fed that should not be cutting rates. Rates are too low and the Fed is making them lower. And so the rate cuts are a mistake and gold is clearly signaling that it's a mistake. Yet none of these journalists who are invited to ask, you know, pal questions understand enough about money or economics to ask the question or to point out that gold is flashing a warning or they don't understand the warnings themselves, right? because you know they have to flunk a test on economics before they could uh be a journalist and economics reporter at a lot of these uh newspapers or television networks and then you know then they get to ask these questions uh to uh to Jerome Pal. But before I get back uh to discussing uh what pal uh spoke about today and the market reaction, I want to mention one more thing about about gold. And that is a new product at Shiftold that has been up on the website for a little bit, but I haven't mentioned it because I wanted to make sure we got all the bugs out of it. Uh, and I'm going to talk a lot more about it on Friday when I do the Shift Gold market rap. Uh, but I want to mention it again today so people know about it. But if you go to the Shift Gold website and on the top bar, you'll see it has gold, silver, deals, and then it says trade. And if you click on trade, it'll take you to a page on the website uh that'll eventually be a direct link right now to my URL T-old. Uh but T-Gold will take you to this trade page and on trade um you can open up an account, you can click on it and you could buy gold and silver, not for delivery. So we're not going to ship you coins and bars. Not that I don't think you should still buy coins and bars and take custody. You should, but this is an alternative where you can buy in increments, you know, small increments and Shift Gold will store your metal for you in a third party vault, but you can buy as little as, you know, $100 worth of gold or silver. You can buy $50 worth, right? you can just buy little bits at a time and you're buying very close to spot because you're buying small pieces of a large bar. You're not buying individual small bars or or coins where you have to pay a higher premium uh to pay to fabricate uh those smaller uh denominations. So, it's a very cost effective way to buy gold and have it stored. But what I'm going to be doing here, and this is why I want to make sure that everybody, you know, who listens to this podcast, when you're done, go to Shift Gold and open up an account, open up a trade account. Now, eventually we're going to have an app where you could just download it in the app store and have it on your phone. Right now, you got to do it, you know, on a desktop computer, but eventually you'll be able to do it on your phone. But for now, you can go to your computer on the Shift Gold website and open an account. It'll only take you a few minutes to get this account opened up and then buy yourself some gold. Now, you can't use a credit card yet. That's coming, but you can pay for it, you know, direct deposit, AC, uh, you know, so it's it's it's simple to fund it. And what I'm ultimately going to be doing is building out a a a ecosystem where gold can serve as a medium of exchange. So what I'm going to be doing is introducing debit and credit cards that will be linked to these accounts. So, the debit card will allow you to spend gold if you want to in real time or you can go to any merchant and use the debit card or you can go to ATM machine and pull out cash and it will, you know, sell some of your gold automatically. Also, a credit card. If you don't want to sell your gold, but you want to borrow against it, you'll be able to use a secure credit card that will have a very low rate of interest because the loan is collateralized by your gold. Then you just have to pay off the loan, right? Like you're paying off your credit card. And now you won't pay interest anymore. But the interest will be a lot lower than it would be if you borrowed it on a normal credit card because I'm not taking much risk because I got your gold. I've got excellent collateral to loan off of. So you'll be able to borrow against your gold uh and you'll be able uh to spend it. But what I also want to do, and I'm going to be working on this, I'm building this up, is allow anybody who has an account at Shift Gold, who has gold, will be able to transfer, send or receive gold from any other account holder. So, if you've got some gold with shift gold and you're and a friend of yours has an account and you owe them money or they owe you money, you could pay each other directly in gold. Ultimately, I want to sign up merchants to have accounts with Shift Gold that advertise that they accept payments in gold because they want to be paid in gold. And so then instead of using your debit card, which will convert your gold to dollars, you could just pay directly in gold. So the merchant will receive gold from you. And of course, if you're a merchant yourself, right? If you're a Peter Schiff show listener and you've got a business and you want to be paid in gold, then you can establish an account with Shift Gold and allow your customers who also have accounts with Shift Gold to pay you in gold. Now, also, one of the things I'm going to be working on for all you crypto fans is I will be doing a token, whether it's my own token or whether I'll partner up. I have a lot of people that want to partner up with me, but I will be introducing a goldback token, which of course is the same concept as a stable coin, right? What is what is a stable coin? Well, you you have a third party that holds US dollars, and that third party that holds dollars, issues these stable coins like like Tether, right? And then you hold that. Well, if you can issue a token backed by dollars, why not issue a token backed by gold? And that way at least you have real stability because there's nothing stable about the dollar. So if you have a token that's tied to the dollar, it's just going to lose value over time. Whereas if you have a token that's tied to gold, it will preserve its value over time. That's real stability, not fake stability. So I think to the extent that you like stable coins, you should love uh a goldbacked stable coin, tokenized gold. And in fact, I mentioned this on a uh you know, you know, podcast I was on and uh you know, CZ from Binance heard that and he said, "Ah, that's you know, that's BS. That's trust me, bro. You know, nobody's going to want a gold back token because you have to trust somebody, which of course you have to trust people uh to hold your dollars, right? So, if you're going to trash gold back coins, you got to trash the entire stable coin industry. Uh but I am probably going to be doing a debate uh with CZ. Uh and I may even be going to his conference in Dubai. I got to iron out those details, but that would be in early uh December. Uh I probably won't have my token launched by then. I mean, it's, you know, it's on the list of things to do, but it's not the highest priority. The first thing was getting the infrastructure set up, which is here now. So the key today is to get as many people as possible to go to shift gold and buy some gold and to keep it on this platform. Now once it's there, you can trade it. You know, I don't I'm not encouraging people to buy and sell, but you can you could sell the gold and hold the cash in your in your account and then you can buy the gold back later or you can withdraw the cash. But the transaction costs are going to be low. But the idea is just to buy the gold and hold it and maybe or eventually to use it as a medium of exchange. So the physical gold and silver that we're selling at Shift Gold, you know, that's just that's for you to keep as a store of value. But the gold that I'm encouraging you to buy through this trade platform is the gold that I want you to be able to use as a medium of exchange, as an alternative to the dollar, right? to use gold the way it's meant to be used as money, but using modern technology to make it much easier to use gold as money than it's ever been in the past. And gold worked great as money in the past. It's going to work even better in the future. And by the way, you know, on Bitcoin, Bitcoin is back down to about 110,000, right? So, it's still about 12% below its US dollar high uh from was it August that it hit that high. Bitcoin didn't make a new high when gold made new highs. And when gold corrected, it didn't make a new high. In fact, it barely rallied. People were saying, "Oh, there's going to be a big rotation out of gold into Bitcoin." Yeah. The rotation lasted one day and then it ended and now Bitcoin lost whatever it gained. But Bitcoin also stopped making new highs with the NASDAQ. The NASDAQ has made a new high just about every day. Uh yet Bitcoin doesn't do that. So Bitcoin is not going up with risk assets. It's not going up with riskoff assets. It's, you know, it's it's just drifting down. But if we get a bigger correction in in the NASDAQ, which we obviously could have at any moment, or a big rise in gold, because Bitcoin is negatively correlated with gold and positively correlated with the NASDAQ, but I think we're setting ourselves up for a big drop in Bitcoin, you know. So, it' be a great time for you Bitcoiners to go cash out your Bitcoin and get some of the, you know, gold on my new platform. And then you'll be able to use your gold in ways that you could never use your Bitcoin. It'll actually work. It'll actually solve the problems that Bitcoiners pretend Bitcoin can solve, uh, but that it can't. And, you know, when it comes to Bitcoin, too, I've never seen a consensus trade where there was more um faith that you couldn't lose. There's so much conviction in Bitcoin. Not only do they think they can't lose, but they're guaranteed a huge gain. Bitcoin is not just going to go up, it's going to 10x. It's going to 100x for sure. You can't lose. And you know, you've got the president behind you. You got Wall Street behind you. I mean, you've got everything going right for Bitcoin. Nobody is negative. Uh when you get a market like that, it really can only go in one direction because everybody already owns it. Since it's so obvious Bitcoin can only go up, then why would anybody not own it? Why would the people be waiting to buy it? They just buy it now. So everybody is already in. And so the question is, who's left to get in? Nobody. Well, what happens when people want to get out and there's no new money coming in? The bottom drops out. That's where we're headed. you know, gold is nowhere near that. You know, I noticed I was watching uh CNBC, they had Jeff Gunlock uh interview and he's been bullish on gold and I'll give him credit for being bullish on gold and now he's not as bullish because he was 25% gold before. Now he's saying 10% because he thinks it's, you know, it's it's too high. Well, I think it's already pulled back. uh but 10% is fine allocation because he said another 5% in base metals and then he still recommends uh foreign stocks, emerging markets. So overall, you know, it's still a it's still a good idea, but he shouldn't be less bullish on gold just because more people have decided to to join in because it's still the tip of the iceberg. It's still very early and even though more people are bullish on gold, hardly anybody owns it now. Yeah, people own gold in their, you know, jewelry. People own gold in their cell phone or stuff like that, but they don't own it as an investment. I would say more Americans bought Bitcoin as an investment over the last year by far than who bought gold. So, Bitcoin is the crowded trade, not gold. If you own gold, you're still alone, right? It's it's pretty lonely out there. You know, there's a few more people who are who are uh you know, stepping up. Uh but the crowded trade and the consensus trade is in Bitcoin and and that's going to blow up. Anyway, let me just get back to uh the FOMC meeting because while there were no questions about gold, there was a lot of discussion about the stock market and AI and tech stocks. Um and you know some of the reporters were asking pal a are you concerned about the valuations in tech stocks? Um and do you think it's related to your monetary policy? Right. I mean you know and he basically said no. He said he doesn't think that interest rates are affecting AI stock prices which I think is ridiculous. I mean obviously cheap money is fueling uh the mania and without it you know you wouldn't have the fuel. I mean he said they don't really care about 25 basis points which may be true but in the scheme of things rates should be a lot higher and the fact that they're a lot lower than they should be is a big factor. In fact one of the reasons that you can afford to make all these capital investments is because the cost of capital is low. if the cost was much higher, uh, then they wouldn't be doing it. And ironically, a lot of these investments are being made, uh, to replace labor. So, the Fed is making it cheaper uh, to automate and to eliminate uh, workers in favor of of machines. maybe if interest rates reflected a true market level that we wouldn't be doing as much of this yet. You know, maybe we'd we' we we'd rely more on humans. In fact, two companies this week, uh UPS and Amazon announced major layoffs. I mean, tens of thousands of people being laid off. And I think it's mainly because they don't need them anymore, right? Because they are you using AI a lot more. But Powell didn't seem to care. He was asked if he thought that the stock market was too high or if he was worried about overvaluation. And he said, "Well, you know, we really don't really pay much attention or care about any individual price, which of course he wasn't asked about an individual stock price. He was asked about the entire market, right? the market, the stock market being overvalued is a big deal. It's not like one isolated price. It's this huge market, right, that has major implications for the economy. Uh if the market were to tank, right, but to say that, well, you know, it's just one price, so who cares? He goes, "We pay more attention to the totality of the market and the of the economy rather and the credit system without recognizing how intertwined uh the stock market is. Especially considering that today Nvidia not only hit a new all-time record high, Nvidia now has a market cap of over five trillion dollar." Five trillion. You know, to put that into perspective, there are only three countries in the world that have a total stock market capitalization. That means all the publicly traded stocks in the entire country. There's only three countries where the whole stock market is worth 5 trillion. The United States and China. And the third one is Japan. But Japan is only worth 5.4 trillion. Nvidia could be worth more than Japan by next week. Right? This is an amazing statistic, but it's also a very scary statistic. I mean, the whole US stock market capitalization. I think um Nvidia is about percent of the whole US stock market is one stock. And of course a lot of other stocks in the AI space right in the you in the MAG 7 right you have such a huge percent of the entire capitalization of the US stock market just in a handful of stocks. This should be very concerning for Pal. But he's dismissing it. He said, "Hey, it's not like the 1990.com bubble." Because he said, "At least today companies, they actually have a business plan." Yeah. I mean, they had business plans. They didn't have earning. But just having earnings doesn't mean that it's not a bubble. If you're trading at res ridiculous multiples to those earnings or if your earnings are being driven by vendor financing where the companies are loaning money to their customers so their customers can keep buying their products and they get rewarded with a rising stock price, right? There's so much stuff. You know, Pal has got his his head in the sand to deny that there's a stock market bubble. Yeah, AI is real. So is the internet, right? That doesn't mean you can't have a bubble, right? If it walks like a bubble, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck, right? Only the Federal Reserve could look at a duck and not think it's a duck, right? But that's what's going on. But they didn't want to discuss gold, but they at least discussed um uh the tech stocks. You know, by the way, you know, Donald Trump talks about how these tariffs are great for American workers, right? We need these tariffs to protect American workers, right? Well, all workers are also consumers, right? So, the workers that Trump wants to protect are also consumers. So, they are also harmed uh by rising prices. But if you just forget about that, if you assume that maybe they'll the tariffs will help them get a bigger raise, so that will more than offset higher costs. In America, we have about 12 million people that work in manufacturing. 12 million. That's out of a total population of workers of over 163 million. So about 7 and a half% of the US workforce is in manufacturing. So at most that's who's going to benefit from the protectionist tariffs in theory. Of course in reality they won't all benefit. A lot of them won't. A lot of them will lose their jobs because they're going to work at companies that will be less efficient as a result of these tariffs. But even if you assume that all 7.3 million got a raise because of tariffs, right? Because their employers were able to raise their prices because they had less foreign competition. And because they were able to raise their prices, they were able to pay their workers higher wages. Right? So you have a small number of workers who benefit but only because their employers could raise their prices on a huge number of workers, right? 92 and a half% of the workers who aren't getting a raise but are getting higher prices on all the stuff that they're going to buy. And in fact, you can see that if you look at the biggest employers because I was, you know, looking at, you know, uh, Amazon, uh, laying people off. They're the second biggest employer in the country. uh Amazon. Number one is Walmart. But if you look at the top 10 employers in America, eight out of 10 are retailers. They're stores. Eight out of 10. Those are our biggest employers, retailers. And the other two companies in the top 10 are FedEx and UPS, right? And UPS again laying off a bunch of workers. So, you've got retailers and then you've got the companies that deliver the stuff that the retailers sell. But the problem is where is all the stuff that the retailers sell? Where's it all made? That is the problem. It ain't made here. We are a gigantic distribution center for foreign produced goods. If you look at the top 10 employers in Japan where the president is, eight, eight out of 10 are manufacturers. That's where the stuff is being made. It's not just pictures that are coming out of Japan, right? They're manufacturing all sorts of stuff. Country like Germany, six of the top 10 employers in Germany are manufacturing companies. We don't have a single one in in the top 10. See, that's why the tariffs aren't going to work. We don't even have the industries to protect, right? They're just going to make what's left of our industries less less competitive. But this shows you, right? And the Fed pal is talking about how great everything is. We're in such a great place because the Fed has done such a great job of micromanaging the economy with interest rates and making sure that we have full employment and stable prices. This is all a bunch of BS on the Fed's watch. Our entire industrial economy has disintegrated and we've outsourced all of these manufacturing jobs and we've replaced them with these service sector jobs and we have this gigantic uh credit bubble and and and Pal is completely clueless about any of this, right? We're not even close to being in a in a good place. Now, let me look at a few other things that they spoke about. Oh. This I thought was really rich. So Pal admitted because he was asked, you know, why, you know, why are the people still upset about inflation? Because you claim inflation's come way down, but people are still upset. And and and Pal says, "Yeah, they they are upset and they have a right to be upset, right?" He said, "The reason they're upset is because even though inflation has come down, prices have not." and he admitted that prices today are a lot higher than they were a few years ago. And that is why people are so upset because the high prices haven't come down. In fact, they're still going up, right? So, if prices were too high and now they're going up, even if they're going up a little, you're still making a bad situation worse. Now, I agree with what Pal said. Yes. The problem is prices went way up and they never came down. But whose fault is that, right? Why doesn't Pal or why doesn't somebody ask Pal, okay, then why are you targeting 2% inflation? If you admit that prices came way up and they never came down, why don't you target falling prices, right? Why can't the Fed pursue policies to bring prices back down? Because that's what the public wants. Why can't they get it? Cuz remember, right, when inflation had been too low, according to the Fed, right? It was below 2% for a few years. The Fed said, "Oh no, we need to average this up." Right? Inflation's been too low. We've been below 2%. We need to average it up to 2%. So, we need to run monetary policy a little hot because we need to make up for all the years where inflation was lower than 2%. Well, if you admit that people are pissed because prices are so high and inflation was way above 2% for so long, why based on the same rationale, why is the Fed not targeting inflation way below 2%. to average all that high inflation back down and to deliver actual relief to the American consumer who he claims he cares so much about, right? Oh, we're here to help the consumer uh with price stability. Okay. Well, that means we need lower prices. We don't need prices to go up by 2% a year. We need prices to come down. And in fact, they need to come down by a lot more than 2% a year because they went up by a lot more than 2% a year. Right? If prices went up by six, seven, eight% in a few years, why can't they come down by the same amount? Right? I think people would be very happy, would be very relieved if they had that kind of price decline. But no, that's completely off the table because as far as the Fed is concerned, it doesn't matter how high prices go up in they always have to keep going up, right? So if we have one year where prices go up by 50% in one year, the Fed wants to make sure that next year they go up another 2%. So you're at 52%. And then 54%, right? We can't have prices go up 50% and then go down by 10%. Oh no, that that that'd be a disaster. We can't allow that. This is what Pal is saying. That's why it's it's not that you know the this 2 and 1/2 3% inflation. You have to look at it in the context of all the inflation that preceded it. We do need lower prices. We need much higher interest rates to bring the price level back down. Instead, what pal wants is he said it's going to take a while. We need wages to catch up to prices, right? And that way people can afford. So, in other words, he wants more inflation so that people can get higher wages to afford the higher prices that resulted from the inflation of the past. But of course, the policies that he is pursuing to increase wages will also increase prices. So, it's going to be like a dog trying to catch his own tail. It's never going to happen. In fact, pal said that the reason they want to cut rates, right? Because he said we're in, you know, we're in a good place, but we're in a challenging place. The good place is we got all this economic growth, we got full employment, but he said the risk is to the upside to inflation and to the downside to employment. And therefore, we're kind of, you know, in a difficult spot because, you know, if we want to fight inflation, we got to hike rates. If we want to uh fight unemployment, we got to cut rates. We obviously can't do both at the same time. We got to pick one. And so, this is a difficult position because we're not really sure, you know, which which road to go down, right? But when he was explaining it, he said that they the reason that they're able to stimulate employment by cutting rates is he said that rate cuts stimulate demand. And by stimulating demand, we create jobs. And that's not true. I mean, maybe that's what the Fed thinks, but you don't create jobs just by stimulating demand. You you actually create jobs by stimulating supply and and supply is actually curtailed by these rate cuts because rate cuts encourage more consumption but only to the extent that you borrow the money, right? Because lowering interest rates just makes it cheaper for you to go out and borrow money and buy stuff. But borrowing money and spending it doesn't grow the economy. It does push up prices, right? So you get higher prices when the Fed makes it easy for people to go out and borrow money and buy stuff. But what really grows the economy and creates real employment is the production of stuff. And by artificially lowering interest rates, the Fed actually discourages production. What we need is higher interest rates so that we have more savings to finance more capital investment to finance more production so we make more things. And it's the supply that ultimately creates real demand. And that's where we get good jobs. We don't get good jobs by expanding credit. Right? That's what the Fed wants to do is expand credit. Well, that's credit inflation. I've already described that inflation is not just an expansion of supply of money. It's an expansion of supply of credit. And Pal thinks you stimulate employment by expanding credit. You don't stimulate employment by creating inflation. You stifle it. I mean, the only way that you help create jobs by creating inflation is because you lower the minimum wage, right? Because the government sets an artificial minimum wage that makes a certain group of people illegal to employ. Well, as inflation erodess away the minimum wage, it's like reducing the minimum wage. And when you reduce the minimum wage, you do get an increase in demand for unskilled workers. So you do help people overcome the minimum wage by creating inflation. But nobody wants to fess up to that, right? They don't want to say, "Hey, we like inflation because it gets to reduce the minimum wage and now people can get jobs." They like to pretend, and the Fed likes to pretend that it can create jobs by creating inflation. It can't. and it doesn't want to label the credit expansion inflation, but that's exactly what it is. So anyway, this was more BS today uh from the Fed. Uh I expect gold to continue to rise uh based on the back of these continuous string of policy mistakes uh by the Fed that you know is now in a a trap of its own design and it can't escape. Uh and so the result is ultimately going to be a dollar crisis and a sovereign debt crisis. The people who think that you can ignore gold's rally because the bond market isn't collapsing. The dollar is not collapsing against other fiat currencies. That's all wishful thinking. All this stuff is going to happen. The fact of the matter is people are losing confidence in all fiat currencies, not just the dollar. But at some point soon, you're going to see the dollar uh losing a lot of ground relative to its fiat counterparts. But of course, if you wait for a dollar crisis, if you wait for a bond crisis to protect yourself, you've waited too long. By then, it's far too late to do anything. Right now, you still have the opportunity to protect yourself. You still can buy gold and silver. You can still move money out of US stocks into foreign stocks, into emerging markets. You know what had great day today is the base metals, right? The industrial metals hitting 52- week highs today. A lot of those stocks we own in our strategies. I own a lot of them personally. Uh but these stocks, copper and other metals, just on fire. Uh I'm still waiting for the energy. Energy stocks had a decent day today, but oil's still hanging out around $60 a barrel. There's a lot of people that are bearish on the price of oil. I am not one of them. I am expecting a big move up at some point in in oil. And so there's a lot of opportunity in in energy. So make sure and visit the Europeacific uh website europac.com. Uh talk to my advisors about getting an account set up a separately managed account or get into my mutual funds. You can learn about my mutual funds on the website. You can buy them no load at any discount broker. And don't forget to uh sign up for the newsletter at um at shiftsvereign.com. And again, don't forget to uh subscribe to the Shift Gold YouTube channel and look out for Friday's uh Shift Gold market rap that I will be recording on Friday after the close. For now, enjoy uh game five of the World Series. I'm going to go check it out myself right now. Bye for now.