Is it theatre? Is it all theatre? I I don't think it is. I mean, I think that it's, well, OK to start off with, it's extremely difficult to interpret Trump, what he's doing, what he's trying to achieve. I think that one of the really relevant questions that is not clear, even though people haste to make up their mind, it's not at all clear whether Trump and his team have a well thought out plan or whether they're they're just swinging left and right and
making it up as they go along. You know, and that's a very relevant question because, you know, if you, if they have a, a thought out plan, then you can try to guess what the plan is and, and, and how they might be achieving, how they might be moving ahead towards that plan, what the obstacles are and so forth. Then the analysis is maybe a bit easier if they're making things up as they go along, then it's,
it's impossible. It's just a, it's just a Blizzard of, of nonsense coming at us from all side, all, all sides all the time. Well, we also have to understand that Trump has very, very powerful enemies because he really is appending a system that's been, you know, it's been, it's been created and reinforced as a way of protecting the privileges of a certain privileged class in our
societies. And they are very upset with Trump. And they are the people who control the media, among other things. And So what comes through from the media is reinforcing the impression that this is just a circus and the Trump is making things up as he's going along. He's no plan is there's nothing other than chaos. And so we need to stop Trump and stop the chaos and get the world back into a a rules based order.
I'm not entirely sure, but here's over the past three months having spoken about this to a good many people, and some of them claim that they have first hand knowledge from people who are close to the Trump administration and who are sometimes sitting in cabinet meetings. The the feedback is that Trump is not a deep thinker, OK, which doesn't, you know, which doesn't exclude the possibility that he is, he has a certain intuitive acumen, which is which is
positive and accurate. You know that he knows what he wants to do and he understands how to do it in a certain street smart way. But I also have a pretty good feedback about, you know, from a, from a Bosnian politician who said that he went to a meeting at in Washington, not with not with the Trump and his people, but a level, level down in the hierarchy in the State Department. And he said, you know, I, I went there prepared to explain to them who we are and where Bosnia is on the map.
And he said, I was, I was shocked to find that they were very, very well informed, very knowledgeable that they understood the situation in detail and nuance. And So what that tells me is that the maybe the top level leadership they are as they are, you know, Cowboys may be shooting off the hip and they know what they want to do, but
maybe the plan is vague. But that the, the people in, in the deeper in the hierarchy of the, of the, of the command and control structure are actually learned, sophisticated thinkers who are doing their jobs properly. And you know, there's always a two way communication going on. So if, if the commander in chief says, hey, let's do this, people down in the hierarchy will say, Sir, this is not a good idea.
And you know, as, as we've learned from many of these military men, it's, it's in the end, it's the colonel's who, who decide what is done and what is not done. Because sometimes general who are, who are politically appointed people aren't as competent as they are. And they're all, you know, they're all ultimately afraid of blundering. So they they don't, you know, they won't, they, they might not insist if if a qualified person
tells them don't do this. OK, so having said all that, let's pretend for a minute that they are, that they have a plan and that they are trying to advance that plan. What might that be? I think that, you know, we can start with with the slogan Make America Great Again. How would you do that? It would appear from, you know,
what we see and hear. It would appear that that just going around shaking people down, telling them you do what we say or we're going to hurt you, you know, and everybody sees that. But I think that if we take a very high level view and we take it in the historical perspective, I I think that what Trump and his and this is where the tariffs work into the equation.
I think that what Trump and his team are trying to achieve is to return the United States from the British system of free trade to the American system of productive economy. OK, And So what is the difference? The difference is that the British system of free trade tends to create these boom bust cycles that the banking interests in the economy consistently and repeatedly inflate asset bubbles and then pull the rug from under them.
Because that's the, the, the process of creating private money in the form of credit and then forcing it into the economic system inflates asset bubbles, whether it's housing, equities, bonds, whatever. They, they play this game as an, as insiders. So they know what they're going to do, right? They know they're going to prime up the housing sector, for example. And then they know how to position themselves in advance.
And then, you know, the, the, the, the credit impulse goes and then people start buying houses, bidding up real estate prices. And they, that way they inflate a bubble as they've done in the early 2000s. And then at a certain moment, they yank the credit, the bubble implodes, but they, they bail
out before that. And you know, we've seen that so many times and it appears to be unrelated because, you know, there was a bubble in Japan in the 1980s, there was a housing bubble, there was a nasdaq.com bubble. Now we have an everything bubble. Well, OK, so bonds have started deflating properly, but until, you know, until 2-3 years ago, everything was at 200 year highs, right? And then in the process they, they plunder a great deal of wealth from from out of the
society. And then they even through their political influence, they get bailouts. So when the housing bubble imploded in 2008, the bankers got at least $16 trillion in bailouts. They're too big to fail banks and not just American ones. And that's official. That's according to the Government Accountability Office. Higher independent estimates go to as high as $29 trillion. And I, you know, as a, as a lifelong market professional, I think that whatever the government concedes, double it
at least. So I think that we're talking something in the neighbourhood of $29 trillion, and that is more than 85,000 U.S. dollars per man, woman and child living in the United States. That's an absolutely massive loot. And this same mechanism is being perpetuated everywhere all the time. You know, it, it's, it's, it's the, it's the system of colonial loot. And so it leaves a country crippled. It leaves a country impoverished and destroyed, as we can see in the United States today.
You know, a couple of these couple of these bubbles burst booms and busts and the United States is has been terribly weakened. You know, the the US cities are full of homeless people, drug addicts. It's it and the infrastructure's falling apart. It's been de industrialised largely. So I think that making America Great Again probably is a is an effort to reverse all this. And how do you reverse all this?
You have to allocate credit not to financial speculation, but to the production of physical goods. And so you have to repair, you have to repair the infrastructure, you have to repair the energy systems, ports, shipbuilding, communications, there's a lot of work. And you also have to, you have to disenfranchise the people who suck the wealth from out of the society through these financial manipulations and speculation. And, and these are very powerful and wealthy people.
So a Trump cannot come out in the open and say, hey, this is what we're going to do. Because even though, even though most people, you know, the ordinary people, entrepreneurs, the employee people, everybody in the economy would say that's great, at last there will be a lot of these very, very powerful
people who would want him dead. All eight US presidents who have either been assassinated while in office or died suddenly and mysteriously, all eight of them have been trying to promote the American system of political economy. What I'm talking about and this and this system goes back to the 1800s Abraham Lincoln's economic adviser, Henry Carey formulated this in his book called Harmony of Interests. And so the, you know, the, the powers that be don't want this.
They want pump and dump schemes forever because it's a, it's a big wealth extraction conveyor belt that they control. And if, if Trump is going to make America great again, then this would be a way to do it. But then you also have to avoid getting killed. And in Trump's case, you know, today, it's enough that he's constantly bearished in the media for this or that, that people lose confidence that people think like, well, you know, this is a circus.
This is, you know, we're being led by clowns. They have no idea what they're doing. And so the, the headwinds are going to be very strong and very powerful. And I think that this is what we're seeing now. And whether Trump is going to be successful or not, that's the thing that we can't know now. We, we will have to wait and see and see how it goes.
In the meantime, I would just for your viewers and listeners, I would suggest that we have to be a little bit circumspect about the way we judge Trump and his administration because we don't know exactly what they're doing and a lot of it.
Because if, what I'm saying, if there's some substance to what I'm saying, then 100% they have to do it either covertly, they have to hide their hand or they have to move in such an unpredictable fashion that they, you know, they disorient their opposition, that they, they, they, they confuse the opposition. And so we have to, we have to kind of accept that uncertainty is going to run high for a
while. But if you, if you blast them and criticise them for everything, then you're actually reducing the likelihood that they will be successful. So you're actually helping the other side, which has been, which has been ripping off and humiliating humanity collectively for I, I would say at least two centuries now.
But Alex, I saw a video I think from 2012 of Trump giving a talk and already there he was presenting a fairly anti China stance, which indicates to me that he has a personal gripe with China, unless I'm misinterpreting. And then what about in 2024? I think one of his key advisors wrote that document about how to readjust the global system, which seems to be playing out right now. Stephen Moran, I think his name is Stephen Moran. Is that right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, I read Steve Moran's paper. I, I can't say that I'm OK. I can say I'm impressed that he's a very thoughtful man. I'm not necessarily impressed with the, with the contents of the paper, but at the same time, you know, the paper that's available out there. I think I and my understanding is that it's not the finished version. So, you know, whatever, but you know, it's better than nothing. It means they think things through. They have a strategy.
If you have a strategy, you have something to work on. You know, strategies are never etched in stone documents. You, you, you always have to adjust it with time because things never play out the way you plan them to be.
OK, fair enough. The, the hostility towards China, I'm not sure about that either, because I know from Trump's mouth himself that he speaks to Xi Jinping on the regular, because he not only conceded that he spoke with Xi Jinping, but he also kind of in, in one of those press conferences, I don't know, like 5-6 weeks ago. He, he, he said under his breath.
I, I speak with him a lot. So there's a, there's a certain level of coordination between, between Trump and his people and Russians and the Russians and the Chinese. The, the rise of China has actually been achieved by applying this Hamiltonian American system of political economy, right? And the Russians are following the same model in, in, in their own way. And so it seems to me that there's a certain level of coordination which obviously again, cannot be fully
disclosed. And it seems to me that the this hostility stance is more for show. And I'll give you a concrete example. One of the big problems in, in the, in the United States is the, is the, the, the fentanyl crisis, the, the, the, the, the, the crisis of overdose deaths. And these, these drugs are flowing into the United States on an industrial scale. And if you read the media, it's all China, China, China. And Trump is not making much effort to distance himself from
this narrative. You know, it's China, China, China. And so it would seem, you know, like if you, if you, if you take your impressions from the from, from the, you know, general narrative, you would, you would get the impression that the Chinese are deliberately smuggling drugs into the United States to, you know, to get the Americans drugged up, I guess. But you know, Opium Wars have been a tool and a weapon of foreign policy used by the British Empire for over 200 years.
So that's, you know, that would be if I were investigating this problem, that would be top of my list of, of, of, of suspects. And then, B, the whole drug cartel network couldn't possibly exist without the support and the service of money laundering banks, because they generate something like $400 million of revenues per week in the United States, and it's virtually all cash. So Mexican drug cartels earn billions upon billions of dollars in cash.
They have these pallets of cash that they have to bring. Into Mexico, a large part of it goes back to Mexico. What do you do with that money? What do you do with that cash? You see, if you, if you take that money in cash, well, now you have to store it somewhere and you have to pay guards to guard it and you can't spend it on just anything. You know you can how, what could you buy?
If you only had cash at your disposal, you could buy, I don't know, some cars, some houses, some you could pay for some prostitutes, you could buy some champagne and caviar. But you know, after a while there's there's not much more you can do with that because cash, there are certain limitations to cash transactions. As we know from investigative reports by, you know, by the by the Pentagon, by by, by, by U.S. government. Mexican drug cartels have heavy weaponry.
They have whole militaries fielded. They have submarines, they have helicopters, they have anti tank weapons. They have all kinds of stuff that they could never buy with pallets of cash. Another problem is that if you have cash, you have to pay men to guard it. And what can happen is that these men could say to themselves, hey, why should we guard this money for El Chapo Guzman? We can, we have weapons here. We're we're armed, we're capable. Let's just take this money for
ourselves, start our own cartel. So, you know, you have, you have a certain weakness, you have a certain vulnerability because these piles of cash would be a magnet for alternative, you know, rival gangs, for police and law enforcement, you know, for all kinds of, you know, problems that would, that would
that this cash would attract. Whereas if you can deposit this money in a in a bank account, so you have, you have a clean bank account, well, then that bank account will have a signatory or a few signatories. So El Chapo Guzman will have exclusive right to use that money, or his or his accountant, whoever. And then he decides who gets the money, who doesn't get the money, what gets bought what what doesn't get bought. And the bank is guarding the money for him, no longer armed men.
Well, what that means is that the bank is actually, whether wittingly or not, enforcing the the cartel's hierarchy because he said, they say, we only recognise El Chapo Guzman as the rightful owner of this account and we only take orders from him. So if he orders a payment or a transfer, we do it. If some guy from the from the
cartel does it, we don't. And so they actually anoint the head of the cartel and by by virtue of giving him exclusive access to this money, which is now being cleaned up by the bank, they make that. This is a long explanation, but I'll get to the to, to to your question. So it's it's actually pretty much the bank that is the ultimate godfather of those banking of those of those drug
cartels. Otherwise, if the if the bank, if the if the cash was on a pile in a storage house, these cartels would splinter into a million rival groups almost instantly and largely eliminate themselves. And then they would be relatively easy target for law enforcement to mop up. As it is, that's nearly impossible. It's you know, you can get El Chapo Guzman, somebody will take his place. It doesn't matter. And that somebody will always have signature rights at the bank.
OK, so why am I saying all this? Because I've been trying to write about this. I've been trying to kind of alert people. Look, it's not China, it's not Mexico. It's, it's the banks. It's the banks always you, you cut the money laundering and you've splintered the cartels. That's, that's how you destroy it. So at the top of the heap in Washington, you hear China, China, China. That's the, that's the refrain that doesn't go away.
I mean, it goes away sometimes with Russia, Russia, Russia, but then Iran, Iran, Iran. But it's always like that. It's always some obvious target that people can all identify because if you say banks, banks, banks, people think like should I help? Should I hate my bank teller there? So it's like that. But then a few weeks ago, I watched an interview and unfortunately I forget the man's name.
I forget his his office and I forget what network it was on, but he was, yeah, sorry, but he was, he was one of the people I think in the DEA Drug Enforcement Agency or, or one of those tobacco firearms. One of those things in the, in the, in the, in the, in the administration. And he was investigating the fentanyl crisis. And this was people will be able to find this because there was a major bust of a very large fentanyl lab in in Canada.
And as it turns out, this is the biggest fentanyl lab they ever busted. They, they, they ever knew that they such a thing could exist. And then it turned out, we don't know, there may be more fentanyl labs because a lot of these drugs come from out of Canada. You know, the same place where the prime ministers swears an oath of allegiance to the king
in London, that place. And then as he was, as he was answering questions of the of the interviewer, and this is like I think it was on a, on a, on a mainstream media and network, he started getting into the role of the banks. And so it was clear to me that people in the guts of the administration get it. They understand what they up
against. Yeah. So again, you know, the, the whole big explanation was to, to maybe clarify the difference between the facade where you have somebody at the top going, China, China, China. Because that kind of gets media all excited and it gets everybody's hair on fire. Whereas people who are actually tasked with fixing problems have a much, much better understanding of what they're up against and are probably formulating ways to to deal with those problems.
So all wars are bankers wars? It turns out that that's that's pretty much the way it is. That's. Including tariff wars. Oh, well, you know, the tariff war is. No, it's not. No, that's not a bankers war that that war is. That war could be said to be the People's War, Maybe, you know, Do you mind? Expanding that a little bit because, OK, so hang on, just for just for clarity, because there's a lot of confusion around the pros and cons of tariffs. Would you mind just making that
simple? OK, so the the obvious part, which is, which is ostensibly the administration's intention is to penalise imports and to attract manufacturing back home to get the United States back on this American system of political economy. You know, we produce goods and services and we trade those goods and services, and that slowly raises our prosperity back and makes America great
again. But at the same time, you know, you're gonna, you're gonna trigger an inflation effect because as soon as you start imposing tariffs on foreign goods, the price of those goods is going to go up.
And not only that, but even domestic producers of those goods are going to raise their prices because, because now they can, you know, if you, if you make European cars 25% more expensive, the next day, the American car manufacturers are going to be raising their prices because there's now this gap. There's so much more competitive, but they also want to make money. So, and you get, you get inflation effect from that. That's unavoidable.
There's another very, very important inflation effect with tariffs is that, you know, the way the system has been set up is that you have this non stop. And this is part of the, you know, blowing of financialized bubble and creating this boom and bust sequence is that the, the, the monetary mass in the, in the United States has grown much faster than the GDP.
And, you know, Once Upon a time when people talked about inflation, when, when economists talked about inflation, they were not talking about the price rise. They were talking about the growth of the money, mass growth of the amount of money in circulation in an economy. And so we've had this monetary inflation for for decades and it's grown faster than the GDP, but it hasn't produced consumer
price inflation. And part of the reason there there are two major pressure release valves in the in the economic system that keep the monetary inflation into from creating consumer price inflation. One of them is the stock markets, the equity, let's call it asset markets. So the money that goes into stocks and bonds doesn't circulate in the bricks and mortar economy, so it doesn't exert pressure on consumer prices. That's one big pressure release
valve. The other one is foreign trade, because you're importing goods from abroad. These goods keep the price pressures at home down and the money that you spend on this good goes into the goes into the accounts of exporting nations with the Fed. So that money doesn't circulate in your domestic economy either and thereby it doesn't pressure the consumer prices.
So if you So what we've had in the United States since since the 1980s, you had the, the trade gap, the, the, the, the trade deficits going up and up and up and up. And I think that by, by by February, by the time Trump came to office, they reached $130 billion. It was just going bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and
bigger. And then I think that even last two months of, of last two months of, of Biden administration, the, the, the autopen administration, they went from about $78 billion in trade deficits in November of 24 to 130 billion in January, which is completely unprecedented. It's a, it's a massive spike. It almost, it almost feels like somebody did this on purpose to to rig the British economy, gosh, to rig the American economy for demolition so that it could blow up on Trump's watch.
But let's say that this trade deficit has reflects this draining of the of the money inflation from U.S. consumer markets so that you don't have consumer price inflation. Now, when you start to close that gap, when you start imposing tariffs and you start reducing this foreign trade in favour of domestic producers, well, that's another, another force that's going to exacerbate consumer price inflation. So you know that's they're, they're going to get that
effect. But again, to be fair, we have to, we have to recognise that Trump didn't create this. All these imbalances have been gathering for several decades, since the since the early 1980s. And this was patently unsustainable. So, you know, when something's unsustainable, it means it's going to blow up at some point. And so if Trump did nothing, this would all blow up anyway.
So it seems to me that what Trump is doing is maybe start to drain this, drain the water from behind the dam to reduce the impact from from it just bursting uncontrollably again. You know, it's, it's, it's risky and we don't know how it's going to turn out. But you know, he, he started the process, but he didn't create the imbalances that made the process necessary. And this is. Just part of the media narrative it it appears that Xi Jinping is
giving him the finger. It does appear so, but again, you know, the the tariffs are the Wrecking Ball Trump is using to raise this free trade system to the ground. And I think that the Chinese would prefer the United States to be on the American system because the Chinese strategy, you know, the Chinese have positioned themselves as the global manufacturing hub. They use the term mercantile. Well, yes, but you know, they they want affluent consumers
everywhere in the world. They can buy their stuff. So they don't want people everywhere to be poor with no purchasing power. So for China, let's say a prosperous United States would be preferable than a desperate United States. That's then a security, a
security concern. So I think that in with a longer view, the Chinese might prefer the United States to move away from free trade and or let's say some kind of a controlled free trade on a bilateral basis away from this globalist WTO open free trade where the United States has pretty much become a a buyer of last resort consuming crap from all over the place on credit. You know, so they consume, consume, consume and their debts are just exploding.
It's all on debt. You know, it's a system that's going to implode anyway at some point. You can't run credit card tab forever and keep buying junk from everywhere. And so this system has to be, you know, the, the, the change of course was, was was overdue and it was going to forced by the markets on the United States
in one way or another. And well, you know, Sergey Karaganov, several months ago, before Trump was inaugurated, he said that we see a role as helping the United States transition from being an empire to just being a major power in in the least disruptive way possible. And I think that the Chinese see it the same way. And so I think between Trump and Xi Jinping, there might be a disoriented war of words, but also a certain level of
coordination and cooperation. So, Alex, are you suggesting that Trump is in favour of multipolarity? Oh yes. Oh, that's 100% because that's go back to 15 January of this year when Marco Rubio was going through his confirmation hearing. He explicitly said we have to recognise the world is shifting to a multipolar architecture. And and he also said that we see the post World War 2 global order as more than obsolete. His words and it's actually being used as a weapon against
us, his words. And so Marco Rubio didn't come up with that himself. Marco Rubio was stating the policy position of this administration. And that was an extremely important revelation there. Obviously, you know, the media kind of glossed over it because they would prefer we don't think about it too much. But yes, I think that they are definitely shifting in favour of multipolarity. So if they're shifting in favour of multipolarity, what does that mean for the US dollar
internationally? I think that the US dollar is going to yield its, its role as a global reserve currency and global trade settlement currency to something else, which I think will partly you see the the architecture that it seems to me that the Chinese and the Russians are favouring is some kind of a future currency that's going to back by not only gold
but other commodities. And then it's going to be a, a basket in which many countries will participate in proportion of their contribution to that basket of commodities. So, you know, the United States is a, is a, is a great producer of, of commodities. It's a very resource rich nation. So it will have a major role in that system. This, this kind of thing has been formulated in, in a number of papers. I I read a few published by by Russian.
I don't know think tanks, academics, people who are people who are working on this, on this problem matter. And I think that this too is part of Trump's plan because one of the big vulnerabilities for the United States is that there's about an estimated 32 or 34I, I forget exactly trillion dollars worth of U.S. dollar denominated assets sitting owned
by foreign interests. And this is, this is a real source of vulnerability because at a given moment, if they all decide to dump their U.S. dollar assets, that could, that could, you know, that could be a tsunami that hits the US economy and their and their stock markets and the dollar. And so part of the game with the tariff force is also going to deflate that dam, you know, drain, drain some water from behind that dam to reduce that pressure.
And then I think, you know, there's been there's been talk about maybe setting up a dual currency system in the United States where you have a foreign dollar and a domestic dollar. So, you know, the domestic dollar is used by, you know, people to transact their business at home and the foreign dollars used for foreign trade. And this is this is the model that the Chinese have. And this model has insulated
China from external shocks. And you know, in the last 40 years, China hasn't really, you know, they had they had financial crisis in the sense that, you know, they have this real estate, they had this residential real estate bubble that burst. But if you remember in 1997 when there was a, a massive East Asian financial crisis that pretty much engulfed all the East Asian tiger economies,
China went unscathed. And this is exactly why, because they are, because they have this dual currency, their domestic economy was not impacted. And so I think that it makes sense that the United States should maybe follow the same model again, to insulate themselves from external shock to which they're very vulnerable. So that might be, you know, I don't know, maybe maybe I'm giving the administration too much credit.
Maybe I, I overestimate them. But knowing the nature of the game, I know that if they were thinking along these lines, they would not be able to say it out loud explicitly. They would have to work on this covertly. So we're, we're obliged to guess anyway. So you know, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll take the luxury of, I'll take the freedom of, of guessing wrong. But I, you know, if you guess otherwise, it's still a guess.
You don't know. And. OK, so, so, so ultimately a friendship between America and China is the best outcome. That's the win, win. There's no point in them competing. So what they have to do therefore is push ahead with the multipolarity. Is that correct? I I think that's absolutely clear. And you know, they, they need to, there's, there's going to be competition, obviously there's going to be some rivalry in some sectors, but there's also a great deal of complementarity.
Is that a word? It is now. Yeah, so I I officially inaugurate that their their their compliment. There's, I'm really confused there, you know, there are areas where the, where they, their economies could be complementary. Complementary. Complementary, yeah. I don't know if complementarity is quite it. That really like tilted my brain so. And so they can, you know, they can cultivate, that they can develop, that they can trade with one another.
There would be a lot of stuff that the that the Chinese would want to import from the United States. There's a lot of things that the Americans would like to import from China. There's a lot of things that they could develop together to trade with other parts of the
rest of the world. So, you know, there's no reason to always default to hostility And well, you know, if you are competing as we, we just have to take the Tonya Harding approach to competition and, and, and, and kneecap you and, and wage war. That's, you know, that's, that's the dumbest approach to, to, to things. And I hope that, that that cannot happen overnight. You know, there's certain modalities, modalities of
behaviour have become hardwired. There's people who have adopted a certain school of thought, certain approach to thinking and have been, you know, in the guts of the system for decades. They're not going to change overnight. But if you're talking to the people, and so if Trump and his people are talking to the Russians, they're talking to the Chinese, you know, little by little, they can cooperate. They can coordinate. They can define areas of
cooperation. They can forge bilateral agreements that are going to work for both sides and then gradually build on that. And then, you know, it obviously has to include cultural exchange so that you, you preempt the, the, you know, the xenophobia, the, the mutual fear of the two sides. And then, you know you can you can move the world towards peaceful cooperation and prosperity. It's not a fantasy. If you read Henry Carey's Harmony of Interest, that's practically exactly what he says.
The American system is moving the world towards permanent peace and prosperity, whereas the British system of free trade practically requires the estate of permanent warfare. That's so interesting because that goes against the the free market arguments from people like Rothbard and and Mises and and Hayek, etcetera. Yeah, it it, it certainly does.
And I know that there are many people there who are, who are very committed to the the, to the ideas of the Austrian School of Economics. I was one of them, but I've grown, I've grown convinced that actually Austrian School of Economics has controlled opposition because there are too many, there are too many very obvious flaws in their theory.
I'll give you an example. It's, it's practically taken as as as axiomatic that everything privately owned and privately managed is far superior to anything state owned as state, state, state managed. Well, if you look around, it's very obvious that this is simply not true. I'll give you, I'll give you a simple example, you know, because I, I grew up in former Yugoslavia and I grew up in Croatia, which was one of the six republics comprising former Yugoslavia. It was a socialist country.
So I, I saw, I saw the transition from the socialist economy to the capitalist economy. We went along with everything. We just basically took Western legal code and copy pasted it into our own legal code. Everything become privatised. And so one, many of these, many of these things like water utilities, trash, trash collection, it all went to private owners and it all did post Postal Service. It all deteriorated so radically that it's, it's glaringly obvious to everyone.
You know, our cities used to be very clean and the, the, the technology of taking people's trash and removing it was something that we took for granted. As far as I'm concerned, it was just magic. But you put your trash in the dumpster and it went away and that was it. And the city was clean. Well now it's privatised and trash is everywhere. The cities are no longer clean. It's it's. It stinks because you know in order to boost their profits they reduce the the number of runs they do.
So it went from trash being collected every day, which is what you want to do if you want to keep your cities clean. They do it once a week. Instead of picking it up in many spots. They've reduced the number of spots. So they, they actually kind of dumped the work of taking trash on people. So now instead of dumping your trash 10 metres from your house, you have to walk 200 metres with your trash so that they can collect it in, in just in fewer locations.
It makes sense from their point of view. They want to make profits, but it doesn't make sense for for from society. And then because they collect the trash only once a week, what happens is that this trash kind of rots there. And in the summer it's a serious problem because every 200 metres as as you walk around the city, and this includes tourist resorts, it smells that there's a rotting corpse somewhere. Well, this begins to become a problem because it attracts rats.
And so you, you, you know, you, you're creating the risk of very high external cost because at some point with all these rats and cats and stray dogs and fleas and, and other and, and maggots and flies, you're actually creating conditions for the outbreak of things that we thought we overcame like black
plague. Like, like, like, you know, you can create serious problems just so that the trash corporations could be profitable and and maximise their profit so that their share price could go up sky high versus when this was stayed owned and stayed managed. The cities were clean. None of these problems cause same thing with water. We took clean water out of the faucet for granted.
Well, now every so often they tell us, oh, you know, you have to boil water in many cities, the water looks like the water in the United States, You know, rather than being clean, it's kind of brownish, yellowish and, and and cloudy. And people are reporting health problems. This is all private enterprise that has degraded the system. Our post office under socialism used to be like Federal Express Express on its best day, only super cheap.
Now it's a disaster. Sometimes parcels come empty, somebody opens them, takes the stuff, a letter from major cities travel three weeks, whereas they used to travel less than a day under socialism. And on and on and on and on. What is the ultimate win win? No tariffs anywhere or tariffs in various guises. I would say probably tariffs in various guises because you do want international trade.
You don't want a patch word of autarkies around the world like North Korea that, you know, everybody has to be completely self sufficient in everything. You know, there's always going to be some things that the Americans are going to be making that's better than anywhere in the world. And there's always going to be things that the French are going to make that's going to be and we're going to want those
things. You know, I, one of the things on my Christmas list would be to own a Steinway piano, which are made in New York and they are, you know, they're, they're just like one of those things like the, the, the Rolls Royce of pianos offenders very. For for for guitars. Exactly, Britain makes the world's best hi fi systems, you know, amplifiers and and, and, and things like this.
And so you're, you're always want to, because it's not just the ability to put together big machines that that produce these things. There's a lot of knowledge, a lot of experience, a lot of like artisanal know how that goes into producing these top level things. And and that's true everywhere. You know, French wines, Italian garments, clothes and and, and and jewellery shoes, you know,
apparel. Every country has certain things that they're really good at because not only do they make them, they cultivate generational know how that you know, advances and refines itself and then, you know, it turns into something that you would prefer to have then over some kind of a forced domestic produced alternative to it. So I think that we're we're going to always have global trade, but you're going to also want to protect domestic
producers of other things. You don't want to just allow the place to be flooded every so often and and everything raised to the ground. But isn't let me use that free market argument. Isn't choice the ultimate freedom? Yes, I think that. Statement is true. Well sorry, let me rephrase that. You say the market gets flooded with let's pretend Chinese crap, but people are choosing to buy that. Yes and no. Because it would be, it would be like saying people are choosing
to buy cheap food. So everybody buys cheap food. It's it's they're choosing it because it's cheap and they're also choosing it because they can't afford more expensive stuff. You know, if people could buy expensive seafood, food and champagne every day and have it on their table, I think that they would choose that. And the fact that they buy, you know, large bottles of Coca Cola and, and, and, and cheap bread with white flour, it's because they can't, they can't do better.
And I think that it's, you know, as you, as you raise a community's prosperity and standards of living, they're going to make different choices. And I think that we all prefer quality products over cheap crap. And I think that if we could afford quality products, everybody would have a Steinway piano and A and A and a Fender Stratocaster instead of, you know, some cheap Chinese alternative to the. I just want to say that I have a Fender Stratocaster from the United States.
There you go. Yeah, yeah. Is the tariff war that we're currently seeing an attempt to bring sovereignty to America? Yeah, I I think so. I think so. But again, you know, we'll see where it goes. You see, I have a hard time with the idea that Trump and his cabinet are just clowns careening from one crisis to the next without a plan. Because if that were the case, they would never have even started the tariff war. You know, if they if they did this, they did it for some reason.
So you're forced to try to understand what could be the reason. What's worse, the the attacks and political pressures that they must have known this would this would draw on them. And I think that, you know, the the make American great again slogan is is probably more important than just a bumper sticker sticker slogan for election purposes. I think maybe that's as important to them as build back better.
What is to the Davos set? You know, there's a, there's like a, there's like a whole agenda, an intended agenda. You know, it's something that that that you intend to accomplish. So you're not just shooting off the hip randomly. You're actually trying to take
the system somewhere. And so even, you know, like, even if very serious mistakes are made, even if, even if the strategy ultimately fails because it could, it's very hard for me to to reconcile this with the idea that, oh, they're just a big bunch of clowns who have no idea what the hell they're doing. And by extension, is Is this a good thing for bricks? Oh yes, absolutely, absolutely.
Because you see, my conviction is that the the most important struggle in the world today is the struggle for the United States. Because if the United States aligns with the multipolar world and becomes a part of it, you know, a major part of it, but a part of it, you know, I think it was Larry Johnson in one of our conversations who said that the choice before the United States now is either to be the world's policeman or to be the polite guest at the, at the, at the
global banquet. And so that that is really the choice. Are you going to join the multipolar integrations and be part of it? Or are you going to force your order on everybody else at the, at the, you know, with a, with a, with a gun to everybody's
head? And so for the multipolar integrations, having the United States become part of them and become that polite guest at the table is a huge win because it also takes the United States away from the globalist forces that want the United States to be their enforcement arm with, you know, 1000 military bases everywhere around the world, telling everybody you do as we say or, or we're going to hurt you, sending these carriers, strike groups and bombing the
crap out of everybody. It will be a much, much better world. And we see how desperate the other side is to keep the United States on their side at the moment, concretely to be the guarantor of security for the Ukraine's government, which is, you know, the idea is that the United States does all the heavy lifting and all The Dirty work while the, you know, European banking families continue to
enjoy, enjoy their privileges. But then this also by extension, means that the US would become less favourable to NATO. Yes, absolutely. That's, that's a given. NATO is the creation of this, of this globalist set. It's, it's whole history is, is very, very suspect.
You know, we didn't know these things, but we know that NATO was created, I think in 1948 or 1949 right out of practically, you know, the, the, the smoke, the, the, the, the smoke from World War 2 was still smouldering when Winston Churchill declared the Soviet Union the enemy of the West.
That was in 1946. It was his Fulton speech in front of Harry Truman. And ever since the, the West has been moving pieces into place to create this Cold War between the West and, and the Soviet Union. And you know, the NATO has just kind of grown by accretion around that. And the United States has always been the main military, political, diplomatic and, and, and financial muscle behind that. So if the United States withdraws from Europe, that whole thing, you know, collapses
into nothing. Look, I I could turn out to be wrong, but you know, everybody who is opining on this is guessing. Yes. And we don't, we don't exactly know, you know, I, I, I heard the other day somebody whose opinion I really respect opine on this very negatively. And they were saying that, oh, you know, this is putting the independence of central bank in jeopardy. And and I'm thinking like, how
is that a bad thing? Excuse me, Why is why is the independence of central bank all of a sudden, this sacred cow that we shouldn't, we shouldn't question. You see, that's that's what I was referring to. There's been a certain school of thought has become entrenched in our society to the extent that many people now, almost by knee jerk reaction, default to the opinions they they they formed,
they formed a long time ago. And until they questioned them, they will, they will often default also to the wrong conclusion and and then invalid analysis. And I'm, you know, I grew up in communism, so I became very comfortable early on in my life with questioning absolutely everything because up until I was 1718 years of age, I was taught about communism, about Marxism, the greatest thing ever since sliced bread, right? And then it turns out the whole
thing was a lie. The whole thing was like kind of contrived in order to uphold the communist ideology, but every part of it was flawed or, or, or outright false. And so I take the same approach with, with Western ideology, with Austrian School of Economics, with Milton Friedman's economics, with Keynesian. I, I mean with the whole political everything, I, I, I don't take anything for granted. And so I try to avoid, to default to these opinions that stem from assumptions.
Then maybe themselves are not valid. But that doesn't mean that I'm right. I could turn out to be wrong as well. How can I follow your work? There are many ways, but three platforms where I'm the most actives, most active is on X. My handle is AT naked Hedgy. I have a personal publication on sub stack called Alex Craner's trend compass. No, sorry, Alex Craner's sub stack.
And then I have a a news, the daily newsletters for the daily newsletter for investors and traders called Isystem trend compass. So that's that's three places where I'm most active. Then then there's a company website and blah blah blah. But these three are the easiest places to find me. Well, on that note, let me try that again. On that note, Alex Craner, thank you for joining me in the trenches.
Jeremy, great pleasure. Thank you for having me and warm greetings to your viewers and listen.