Hello, Welcome to another episode of the Mark Mass Show, where we're always talking about the decentralized revolution, how the world is changing through the lens of politics, finance, and technology. And that technology that we're talking about is bitcoin, which is a decentralized technology. And there was a lot going on in the bitcoin world today and I have a lot to cover we're going to talk about in this segment.
We're going to talk about what happened in the bitcoin space, something crazy, weren't talk about the economy, what the Fed is doing, and even more news coming out of China. So lots to talk about in this segment. But jumping into bitcoin for a minute, the big news is that the price of bitcoin shot up, jumped up on fake news, on fake rumors. And what happened is we've been talking about on this show for a long time, is that there is an ETF coming out that would well hopefully
there's an ETF coming out for bitcoins. We have ETFs for all types of things, and we've been trying to get one through for bitcoin for a long time, and I believe there's eight ETF applications that are stuck at
the SEC trying to get through. Now one of the larger sort of cryptocurrency bitcoin related news sites, a site called coin Telegraph, put out a tweet on Twitter fake news, saying that breaking Sec approves a bitcoin spot etf And when that happened, within about thirty minutes, we saw the price of bitcoin shoot up before coin telegraph could come out and say reportedly, and then they went ahead and
they deleted that tweet altogether. Now, during that time, we saw the price job dump about seven to eight percent during that time before it was disproven. Now, what's in this? There's something in this. There's a couple of things. First of all, when that happened, we saw the price shoot up. Why did it shoot up so much? I think there's two reasons why. So, first of all, the frenzy triggered
a short squeeze. There were seventy eight million dollars in short positions and there was thirty four million in longs, and they got liquidated faster than.
You can say fake news.
They took off really really fast, and so there were so many shorts. As soon as it started moving, they started getting liquidated, which caused the price to move up faster, faster, faster, faster, faster.
Bester fa faster, all right.
The other thing that I think is interesting in the story is isn't just on the price action. It's really about what will happen. I guess if I think it's more when and the ETF actually does get approved. And so even though the news was fake, the reaction from the market wasn't. And so what we saw is that the market responded positively. We saw that the market moved up. We saw the price jump up almost ten percent in
just a thirty minute time frame. Now could it have jumped out more or less, I don't know, but I think what it means is that happened within thirty minutes. And so I guess the question that most of us want to understand is do we think this news is already priced in? Do we think that the bitcoin ETF getting approved is already priced in? I believe Bloomberg has it at like a ninety percent chance of it becoming approved. We've seen Gary Ginsler's language around this starting to change,
and so is it already priced in? And based off of this price action, it looks.
Like maybe it wasn't.
If this wasn't taken down within thirty minutes, if it was allowed to stay up for long or for hours, for days, for weeks. What could happen? How much could the price move up? Now? It's a little bit priced in in my opinion, because it didn't jump up that much. I mean, sure, seven, eight, nine, ten percent sounds like a lot.
It would be a lot for this.
S in P. Five hundred, it's not a lot for bitcoin. We've seen bitcoin move way more than that in a single day, in a single candle. And so while that certainly is positive price action, it's not as big as you might think it would be. And so to me, I think that most of it has been priced in, not one hundred percent of it, but most of it has been priced in. Of course, this doesn't account for the amount of funds that will flow into bitcoin at some point.
Now.
One of the biggest ETFs that's trying to get through right now is from the largest asset manager in the world, Blackrock. I'm no fan of Blackrock. I've been very vocal about that, but Blackrock is one of the I believe eight ETFs trying to get through. And if anybody's going to get an ETF through, it's probably going to be Blackrock. There's sort of like a quasi semi arm of the government. They work on the Fed's behalf, they work with the FDIC bank bailouts, all of those things. So if anybody
could get one through, it would be them. And it's pretty interesting this week to see the CEO of Blackrock, Larry Fink, come out and say that he's seeing client demand for bitcoin all around the world. He said that clients across the globe are talking about the need for crypto. He said that I think the rally today is about a flight to quality. With all the issues around the Israeli war now global terrorism, etc. People want to flight to quality, and he thinks that's why people are going
to bigcoin, which is very interesting. You have arguably the most powerful man in the financial world, which makes him arguably one of the most powerful men in the entire world, who you wouldn't think would want something like bitcoin to be approved, and also would always be trying to talk down fears of financial problems in the markets, financial markets, and here he is talking about bitcoin being used as a flight to safety.
So think about that for a minute.
Bitcoin went from being a scam to being a Ponzi scheme.
To being ridiculous.
Jamie Diamond of JP Morgan said that if anybody even used it, he would fire them, and if anybody at JP Morgan used it trade that he would fire them. To now we have arguably one of the most powerful men in the world think saying that they're using it as a flight to quality.
Boy, how far we've come.
It reminds me of the quote that I think it's first they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then they finally accept you. And so that's sort of where we're at now. I wouldn't say that it's a flight to quality necessarily. I think it's something a little bit different. So typically we have a flight to quality. And you think about treasury. The treasury market like the bond market, and bonds are what's considered a risk free asset. It's a risk free asset because the government's always going
to pay. Now, it's not totally risk free.
It's only risk.
Free if you hold it to maturation. However, even that's not risk free because they're going to pay you back, but they're going to pay you back.
With heavily devalued dollars.
So you may get one hundred dollars put one hundred dollars in you get a hundred dollars back, but the one hundred dollars may only buy you twenty or thirty dollars worth of stuff. So there is risk there, inflation risk. However, what I'm seeing isn't a flight to safety, because it's no one's flut rushing into the treasury or bond market. What they're doing is they're buying assets instead. So we're seeing gold at one of the largest deviations from the
treasury market that we've seen in recent history. Bitcoins holding up, even stocks are holding up, which is against everybody on Wall Street. They're telling you that no, once rates go up, the stocks have to come down because when the risk free rate moves up, stock the evaluations, the pe ratios have to come down. Really do they have to, because they haven't. Rates have been going up for a year.
How come the ratios haven't come down? And I think the reason why is the same reason why Larry thinks that people are rushing to safety. What they're rushing to safety in isn't the safety asset of the bond. What they're rushing to is anything other than fiat currency. But they're rushing to is anything other than government inside paper money bond market money. What they're rushing to is real assets.
That's why gold is going up, That's why real estate is holding up, that's why equities are holding up, and that's why bitcoin is holding up. Now do I think something could change? Of course, something can always change. There is so so much danger sitting out in this world right now that something could certainly change. But it's sort of like this crackup boom right level. Go On Misis, the godfather of the Austrian school of economics, called it
the crackup boom, he said. And then suddenly people realize that inflation is both intentional and ongoing, and they will no longer want to hold the currency and they'll quickly trade it for anything else that they can get their hands on. And so you see this happening in other countries all around the world, where Venezuela, Lebanon, Turkey, et cetera, where the currency is dropping so fast they'll literally take
anything other than hanging onto the currency. Now, we may not be at that point saying the United States is at the Lebanon, Turkey, Argentina, Venezuela level yet, but we're certainly on that path. And I think this is why people aren't rushing to the safety of the treasuries in the bonds, but rather holding onto assets such as equities which aren't super safe in my opinion, but gold, real estate and bitcoin.
But we'll see. If you're just tuning in listening.
To the markmas Show, we're talking through some of the latest breaking news headlines this week. We just went through what happened in the bitcoin crypto markets and with the largest asset manager in the world. But I have a whole lot more to cover when I come back after this very short break. Don't go away, I'll be here back all right, Welcome back. If you're just tune in your listening to the Mark Maas Show, we're talking through
some of the latest breaking news headlines this week. Of course, always looking through the lens of politics, finance and technologies, you can have a better understanding, better context to what's going on in the world now. Right before the break, I was talking about this Ludwig von Misus's theory called the crackup boom and how people don't want to hold
on to the money anymore, they'd rather buy assets. And so we've seen these assets going higher and higher and higher, partly because of this inflation where the currency's being destroyed and partly because of this rush to own those types of assets.
And I've been very vocal.
I've been on record many times on my main YouTube channel, Mark Moss, which, by the way, if you're not watching on YouTube, you should just search Mark Moss on YouTube and you can watch and listen to all these shows on the podcast just search the Mark Moss Show, or you can watch these episodes also on the Market Disruptors
YouTube channel. But I've been very vocal, even back when inflation was at seven eight nine percent, saying that this I think this would still even be some of the lowest inflation that we'll see for the rest of the decade. And so while a lot of people think that inflation is over the FED has won, I don't think they're even close. And what do I mean by that, I mean inflation has come down reportedly from this nine percent down to this three percent range, right, Mark, So they
did win. They got it down, right, well, not really. First of all, that number is so heavily.
Manipulated you can't believe that number.
Second of all, inflation comes in waves, all right, So yes, they got it down temporarily get ready for the next move up. Now, we can see this in any number of ways. For example, I saw this report come out this week that home buyers in the United States now home buyers must earn one hundred and fifteen thousand dollars to afford the typical US home. The median home price in the United States, you now have to earn one hundred and fifteen thousand dollars to afford that meeting home.
The problem is that's about forty thousand more than the median US income, So the median income can't afford the median house.
That's a problem.
The bigger problem is that this has gone up by more than fifty percent since the start of the pandemic. So now you need fifty percent more income today then you needed a few years ago to buy the median home price. The problem is your pay didn't go up by fifty percent, which is why we're continue to see it being harder and harder and harder and harder for people to live, which is why in the United States we continue to see strikes.
Right, we have strikes happening all over the place.
The auto workers in Hollywood, I saw the railways today, everywhere we're having strikes because people can't afford to live anymore. It's gotten way too expensive. Home prices went up fifty percent, but your pay didn't. And so while the FED wants to tell you they've got inflation under control, they haven't. Also, as I've mentioned many times, even if they did get inflation from their nine percent down to three percent, it
doesn't mean that prices came back down. What it means is that prices continue to go up, just at a little bit of a slower rate. But that's compounding because we're still adding on to the already high rate. And like I said, I've been very vocal saying that I think inflation is still going higher. And I think the market is actually telling us the same thing, not the FED. The Fed's patting themselves on the back saying they got a job well done, but the market is telling us
something different. Now, the market is us. The market is me and you. The market is the people, the businesses, it's Wall Street, it's the bankers, the people we make up the market. And the markets are what it's called discounting mechanisms. They're really the betting markets. Every day, if you put money into the market, whether into the economy, or more specifically, into the Wall Street kind of investment market.
You are betting.
You're placing your bet as to what you think that could happen. So if you go to Las Vegas, for example, you're gonna go into the sportsbook.
You're gonna bet on a football game.
So you're gonna say, I'm going to put down this hundred dollars that I think the Dallas Cowboys are going to win this game, and they either do or they don't, and I win money I don't. Now I'm sort of doing the same thing. If I'm buying Tesla or Apple or Facebook or or whatever stock i'm buying, I'm betting that the price of that stock will go up, or I'm short and I'm betting the price we will down.
So we're all betting at the same time. The market is is billions of pieces of data all aggregating together to tell us what people think is going to happen, what the future will hold. And so we can see this I've talked a lot about if you look at the treasury market, the bond market, we have the inversion
of the yield curve. You've heard about this extensively, so what this means the yield curve is supposed to go from lower rates in the short term, so three months, six months, et cetera should be very should be low rates, and the long term, the thirty year bond should be a higher rate because I want to get paid a higher amount to loan to you for a longer period of time. Makes sense, right, So we should have this yield curve where the long rates are higher than the
short term rates. The problem is it's been inverted, meaning that the short term rates are higher than long term rates. Whenever that happens, spens, it's guaranteed it. It's told us that there's a recession coming. I believe it's one hundred percent accurate, and it's told us that typically that recession comes in about twelve to eighteen months. And now we're starting to see that yield curve the inverted. Your career is starting to reinvert or what we call resteeping. But
what's happening is it's happening the wrong way. So typically, the way it's supposed to work is that the front end, which is higher than it should be, should come down. But what we're seeing is the back end that's higher I'm sorry, is lower is actually starting to go up. So what this means is that the market is actually calling the fed's bluff on maintaining a long term inflation target of two percent. The market doesn't believe that the
FED has control over inflation. The market believes. Millions of people, billions of people and data points believe that the FED has completely lost control of over inflation, just like I'm saying. And the reason we can see this in this yield curve. If the market believe the Fed's two percent target, then they would happily be buying notes on the on the back end at four point eight percent. Right, if I believe that we'd have two percent inflation, I'll gladly buy
a note at four point eight percent. That means that I'm guaranteed a almost three percent return over ten years. The markets, but the markets don't believe that. The markets don't believe the fed's narrative. The markets don't believe that they're going to continue to see this two percent target. They think inflation is going to be higher. That's what we're witnessing. We're witnessing the free market signal that it no longer believes the Fed's two percent target is realistic.
They don't believe it's attainable, and all the data supporting this is there. It includes the average inflation rate since nineteen seventy one being three point nine seven four percent. Since nineteen seventy one, the average inflation rate has been four percent, not two percent like the Fed wants to get to. And again, if the market did believe the Fed, then they would be buying the ten year note to lock in those real rates of return, not selling it.
But they're not. They're selling it.
The selling the rising rates signals the market fields it's not being properly compensated for the real inflation risk, which is greater than the previous consensus of two percent. So the yield curve resteepening, specifically at the long end, is telling us the Fed's lost control of the yield curve. It's a big deal, amah and the Fed. The Fed is trying to regain confidence in the market. They're trying
to tell us. We've seen several I think seven Fed boat board governors came out in the last week trying to what we call jab owe the market talk it back down, saying we think enough has been done. We think the market is taking care of itself. We think that we don't need to raise rates anymore. We think we've we've saw the inflation problem. Congratulations. Let me pat ourselves on the back here real quick. So this is what the Fed is trying to tell us, but the
markets don't believe it. If you're just tuning in, you're listening to the Mark mash Show breaking down some of the latest breaking news headlines this week so you can understand it. I have a lot more to cover when we come back. I'm gonna dig deeper into the bonds so you can understand exactly what's going on, what you need to do, and more.
Don't go away, I'll be here back all right, Welcome back.
If you're just tune in your listening to the Mark Maas Show, we're talking through some of the latest breaking news headlines this week so you can understand what the heck is going on out.
There in the world.
Of course, always looking at through the lens of politics, finance, and technology, you're really looking at the convergence of those three things to bring greater context into what's going on into the world. Now, we were talking about inflation, we were talking about the bonds, and specifically how the bonds are calling the Fed's bluff.
They don't believe.
The market doesn't believe, as evidence through the yield curve that inflation is coming back down to two percent, and we're seeing all types of problems.
In the bond market.
Nobody wants to buy it, wants to buy it, and the reason why is because they know the government is going to continue to print money. The amount of money printing is I don't even know the word. I'm speechless. I've never seen this before. No one's ever seen this before. As a matter of fact, there is so much debt. The government is spending so much money at an unprecedented level that it just boggles the mind. Let me let
me break it down for you. It took the US government just eighteen days to add more than five hundred billion dollars in debt after passing the thirty three trillion dollar debt run. Now, to put this into sort of some context, it took from the founding of the United States all the way until nineteen eighty one to get to one trillion.
Dollars of debt.
Okay, from beginning to nineteen eighty one, and now we hit that run rate in less than two months.
I don't even know what to say about that.
It took the US until March of nineteen seventy five do you get to its first five hundred billion, and now it did that in eighteen days.
It's insane.
And so now we're starting to witness that the market is starting to wake up to the fact that sure, sure it's risk free because sure the government's going to pay me back, but they're going to be paying me back with heavily devalue dollars. I don't want that. And not to mention, the demand is still mostly there. There's still people in the market other nations, governments, etc. Banks, pension funds that still want to buy the US debt. So there still is demand for the supply of the
US debt. The problem isn't the demand. The problem is the supply. The problem is they've pushed the supply up so much that the demand is just.
Not high enough.
That's where we're at, and we can see that really a lot of this has changed sort of in this in two thousand is really when we saw this massive change, when we really entered in this quantitative easy era, and really in twenty fourteen we saw it shift even more
in twenty fourteen. What shifted is we started to see that central banks around the world wanted to stop growing their holdings of US treasuries, and so that started to put a limit onto well, not so how much debt that could be issued, but really the function of the US treasury market overall. In order the US treasury market cannot have dysfunction, we need to have liquidity in the system.
If the dysfunction gets too high, if the financial system doesn't work properly, if the liquidity dries up, the whole thing can seize and freeze, and the whole system melts down.
Nobody wants that.
As much as I want to see the entire system rebuilt on a sound money system, a Bitcoin standard, if you will, I don't want that to happen tomorrow. We don't want a disorderly breakdown of the market. And so the FED certainly does not want this dysfunction to be high. But because of the fact that we don't have as many buyers in the market and because of the increased demand, something has to give. The FED has been holding this position of being hawkish. They want to continue to shrink
their bounds. They want to continue to tighten the market. But how can they shrink their bounds. How can they tighten the market when the government needs to continue to put more debt out and nobody else will buy it. They certainly can't. They're going to have to do something. They're going to have to Well, really, it's only one. I guess they have two options. Either one they have to inject more US dollar liquidity into the system, or
two they have to face the US recession. But a US recession isn't as in a policy choice they can make, because if they did, if they chose the recession, the resulting increase in unemployment would drive a complete blowout in deficits, which would likely drive a rise in US treasury yields in a recession, again, sending the US into a debt spiral that discredits the FED and the Treasury and ultimately forces a system systematic, systemic reset.
So what do I mean by that?
So, Yeah, the government is sort of like you and I, sort of like a business. They have income and they have expenses. The government has tax revenue that comes in and then they spend that tax revenue on lots of different things.
In pre pandemic times.
The US government was spending about four and a half trillion I think it was about four point eight trillion dollars per year. That was the annual budget after the pandemic. And now today they're spending about I think six point eight about a fifty percent increase in annual spending of the government. The problem is that they didn't have a fifty percent increase in income. As a matter of fact, the income went down. So the government is now living off of credit cards, if you will. Now, why did
the income go down? Well, because as we're moving more towards the recession, people are spending less money. A majority of that tax revenue comes from capital gains. So when your stocks are going up and your house is going up, and you're selling your stocks, you're selling your bitcoin, you're selling your real estate, you have capital gains tax you have to pay. But when asset prices aren't going up anymore, there's no capital gains, and so they lose a lot a lot.
Of their revenue any other number of things.
And so what happens is if this has already happened now, if the FED doesn't inject liquidity, and we go into a massive recession or any recession for that matter, then that's even less income for the government, which means their deficit goes from two trillion a year to three trillion or four trillion or whatever it is. Now, what do they do Well, they need more credit cards, so they need to issue more treasuries. But there's not enough buyers
for the tr treasuries. And what does that do. Well, If there's not enough buyers, then that pushes the price up. The price has to continue to go up to attract more buyers, and if that happens, the US goes into a debt spiral. Now, as I said, I think in the last segment, I said that the market is already telling us this yield curve resteepening uninverting, is already telling us that the market doesn't believe the Fed's narrative anymore.
They the market is saying, we don't believe the FED can get inflation back down, and so the FED is already discredited. If this continues to get worse, they're only going to be discredited even more. Now, this isn't the first time we've seen this, all right, So we've seen this many times since about twenty fourteen. Like I said, when things really changed.
So since since since.
This has happened, we've seen this cycle play out I think five times. In twenty fourteen, the US dollar was weakened at something called the Shanghai Accords, So the dollar had gotten too strong. It created all this treasury dysfunction, and so they had this meeting and they agreed that the doll or the usl would be weakened in order for this degree resolved, and they did. In twenty eighteen twenty eight nineteen, the FED was raising rates. Drone Palate
just come into office. He was full of fire and vinegar and he was going to fix things. He started raising rates and caused a lot of treasury market dysfunction. The FED had to pause rates, and then the FED was forced into quantitata easy and they didn't call it that to address the repol rate spike in September of twenty nineteen, A lot of people don't know this, but the market had actually the yield curve had actually inverted and the market actually locked up in September twenty nineteen.
So while most people think that the entire market was crashed because of the pandemic, it actually had started in September of twenty nineteen. Then we saw it again in March of twenty twenty, the Fed pause, they're not QE into the first quarter of twenty twenty and then they watched the market crash into the pandemic, and then they jumped in. Did anything that was net necessary, super quantity of easy and if you will. Then September twenty twenty two,
the Fed started to tighten. The Treasury started to run down its treasury this TGA account as we call it, the Treasury General Account, and this was in response to the UK guilt crisis. We covered that back then. So each time this market start starts to get dysfunctional, they have to move in. And we can see right now there's an index called the Move Index MOVE and it shows the volatility in the bond market, and we can see that this dysfunction is nearing another all time high.
We can see that this tells us that there's problems.
Coming around the horizon.
So hang on to your hats, be prepared to protect yourself and there's a lot more to come. If you're just tuning in you listening to the Mark Mass Show, I'm talking through some of the latest breaking news headlines of this week. Looking through the lens of politics, finance, and technology. I got a lot more to cover when I come back after this very short break.
Don't go away, I'll bear back, all.
Right, Welcome back. If you're just tune in, you're listening to the Mark Mass Show. We're running through some of the latest breaking news headlines, so you know what the heck is going on now. One of the big themes, unfortunately for this week and really for the last year, is war. Now, there's all types of wars, and I'm not talking about a physical, a hot war. What I'm talking about right now.
Is trade wars.
You know, I've been saying for a long time that I think the World War III is really a war of information and money. I'm still hoping that's true. Unfortunately, it's looking like it might be going more towards the hot war.
Let's certainly hope not.
But if I'm looking at the financial war, we can see things really seem to get kicked off into sort
of high gear. Maybe when Trump was in and we sort of had these tariffs started to happen with China, and that has just continued on a lot of it has been seemingly a shift towards trying to kind of keep China in their place, trying to keep them from rising up and challenging the United States, which is interesting because you might also argue there's people in the United States crime family, you know, like that, that want to
see China rise up. But that's because there's lots of warring factions in the United States and there's certainly some specifically the military, that sees China as a threat. Now I've covered this in the past. I made a whole YouTube video about it as well my main YouTube channel, just Mark on Mark Moss, talking about how basically the United States sent China back to the dark ages and what do I mean by that. Well, the Biden administration had continued to escalate things and had cut China off
from receiving microchips, specifically level two and level three. There's basically three levels of microchips. Level one being just like the supermost basic that go in like an old school alarm clock, and then level two level three being the very most advanced chips that you would need for AI
iPhones things like that. And so the Biden administration had decided to basically take those more advanced chips away from China and not just the chips, but everything that they need around manufacturing and servicing around those chips, and so there were sanctions placed on all the manufacturers, even other nations that supply those parts of machines to China. And so I kind of made the case that this literally sends them back to the dark ages because without advanced microchips,
you basically don't have technology. I mean again, you don't have iPhones, like, you don't have AI, you don't have any of these things. And so this was going to.
Be a very very big deal.
Now, of course, China's not happy about that. They've retaliated. I've covered this I think on my main YouTube channel as well, where they said, okay, aha, then we'll ban exports to you, and so the then China banned the United States from getting a couple key commodities that we
really need gallium and geranium. Those are commodities that are used for in the EV space, for renewable energy things like that, and so of course the United States has this policy to transition everything into renewables, unreliables, if you will,
and it can be very difficult without those exports. China said that why would we continue to export our finite materials to a nation that we're not friendly with, right, and so they're escalating this war, and it took another turn for the worst, well the worst if you're China, I suppose. And basically we saw this week the US Commerce Department set new rules on semiconductor exports, limiting the ability of American chip making companies like Nvidia and Intel
to sell AI chips to China. So basically what we're seeing as the Biden administration is continuing to tighten the restrictions on China's ability to buy these advanced semiconductors, and this of course fuels the friction with US businesses that sell to China, to the Chinese market. So if you're in Vidia and if you're in Intel, and now you can't sell your to China.
Anymore, that's a pretty big deal. That's a pretty big deal.
Now, the Commerce Department said Tuesday that it would significantly constrict exports of artificial intelligence chips, making it tougher for US companies to sell their chips or to introduce new chips to circumvent the rules.
And so that's part of this.
So capitalism for what it is, everyone's trying to figure out ways to get around this instead of trying to tighten that noose, circumvent the rules to do that. Now, the goal, according to Commerce Secretary Gina Ramando, is to limit China's access to advanced semiconductors that could fuel breakthroughs
in artificial intelligence and sophisticated computers. Of course they are they want to keep them in the dark ages now, these chips, the US doesn't want China to have them, and at the same time, they're critical for China for the Chinese, right obviously, that's why they're trying to cut them off. They're not just critical for the Chinese, they're critical for Chinese these military applications, she said, And this is a nod to the concerns that the US could
fall behind China in key defense technologies. Now, the updated rules significantly expand the US government's authority to determine what products US companies can and can't sell in the name of national security. Of course, everything's a matter of national security today everything and of course in times of war then we just continue to expand those rules of national security, and pretty much everything's a war today.
As a matter of fact, I was thinking about this the other day.
Pretty much everything the government declares as a war gets worse, not better. So I was just thinking that, like, since nineteen seventy one, I believe the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Agency, was formed, and since then the US has spent trillions of dollars fighting the war on drugs. But yet drugs are bigger, and they're a bigger problem today than they ever have been. So when they put the war on drugs, drugs weren't really a problem. And as a matter of fact, most drugs were just legal.
In the United States.
I think cocaine and ecstasy and things like that that were fine. There wasn't a big problem. Now, after making it a war and spending trillions of dollars, drugs are the biggest problem. As a matter of fact, it's the number one cause of death for eighteen to thirty five year olds. We've emboldened the drug cartels down in Mexico. Now they're a billion dollars potentially trillion dollar businesses because we fought.
A war on drugs, just making it worse.
We have a war on obesity, but yet obesity is worse than it's ever been. It's like the main cause of death in the United States. We have a war on poverty. Weet today we have more poor people than.
Any time in history. Well, I don't want to say any time in history. That's maybe a little bit of an exaggeration.
But there's a reason why we have people striking all throughout the United States. I reported earlier that home prices are up now fifty percent, not home prices, but the but the home payments are at fifty percent in last three years. But waits haven't kept up with it. So this war on poverty isn't really helping. And so we have a war on terrorism. Right, they've signaled this war on terrorism spent. I don't even know if we added
up probably twenty thirty trillion dollars on terrorism. And yet terrorism is a bigger, worse problem today than it was before. And so every war that the government declares just seems to get bigger, just seems to get worse. And now here we have a war with China, and if history is our guide, unfortunately it's probably only gonna get bigger and worse, which of course it does. Right, that's what happens with wars. That happened with the fights. You get escalation, right,
I call you a name. You threaten me, I push you, You punch me. I get a knife, you get a gun, and we just escalate from there until cooler heads prevail, until people are able to sit down think about this clearly and come up with some sort of residence. Now, in a situation like this where the US is afraid that China will overtake us, that's a legitimate concern, something they probably should have thought about twenty years ago before
they shipped all our manufacturing off to China. Today it's sort of like what we say, closing the barn door after the cows were already.
Gone, so to speak.
And so now it's a much bigger problem that I'm not really sure where this goes, but I can tell you it's going to be a rocky road, not just for the relationship between China, what potentially China may do with Taiwan, which I was looking today before the show to see if I could find like some sort of betting markets. So typically there's betting markets where you can like place wagers on who will be the next president things like that.
I wasn't able to.
Find one, but if I had to guess, I'm guessing there's at least a seventy five percent chance that China goes after Taiwan.
There's not a lot we can do with it.
So it certainly continues to add towards that. It continues to be a drag on US businesses like in video and Intel, and so we'll keep you up to date on what's going on with this. If you're just tuning in, you've been listening to The Mark Ma Show talking about the latest breaking news headlines this week as we chart the decentralized revolution. That's what I got.
Thanks so much for listening. Until next time,