Well, if you like, I can start in New Jersey in the ’90s. I can start in New Jersey in the 1950s, but I'll try to narrow it down a little bit. I could probably do it, take 100 hours, but we'll try to do it in 10 minutes. Yeah. Background, I graduated from Cape May High School. When I was there, it was still largely true, but certainly when I was growing up there, I went to high school there. It was mostly rural and fishing. Those were the two occupations; we had the run of things you could do, but most people either were farmers or fishermen. Those were the two main things. Now Cape May is a major tourist destination. So there's a summer Cape May and winter Cape May. The population actually increased by a factor of five.

It went from like 10,000 year-round population to 50,000 in the summer. There were a lot of wealthy families from Philadelphia and Baltimore. The rich New Yorkers tend to go to the Hamptons or to Newport, but for the wealthy families in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cape May was the destination. In the 1880s, it was known as the summer White House. A number of presidents stayed at Congress Hall, which was built in 1813. It's still there, by the way; I stayed there not too long ago. It's such an interesting place. So yeah, we never had any problem getting summer jobs because, like I said, there was always a call for help. But, the other nine months of the year it was rural, and fairly poor. We didn't feel poor. We were, if you did a demographic analysis, I guess we'd fit in that maybe lower-middle class societies, certainly not middle class or certainly not upper-middle class. But we didn't feel that way, we had a good time. We played sports. We worked on our studies and so forth.

But my high school class, for example, was 40% college bound, 60%, that was it. So for 60% of my class, my friends, I was class president. It was pretty good, pretty well acquainted with everybody. That was it, that was the only time they were ever going to wear a cap and gown. That was the only time they were ever going to be handed a diploma. It was a very big deal, our high school graduation. But I did pretty well academically, and went to Johns Hopkins University. So that was my introduction to Baltimore. Got a graduate degree there, so I ended up living in Baltimore for five years. Been back many times since, I still go back for a lot of reasons.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But I was banging out the degrees, I got four degrees. But it was the international tax counsel, Citibank and then that was a portal or gateway, whatever you want to call it to the world. Citibank, one of the reasons I joined them as opposed to a law firm, they were in business in 98 countries at the time. This was in 1976. So they had more overseas offices than the State Department had in embassies. So if you really wanted to see the world, you could join the foreign service or you could work for Citibank, and I did. And I just traveled many circuits around the world. Started out in Europe, I moved to Asia Pacific and Africa, and I was the number two guy coming up the ranks. So my boss would go to Tokyo, Sydney and Singapore. And I would get Zimbabwe, Kinshasa and Nairobi. Nairobi was fun, but yeah, they traveled quite a bit in Africa.

But that was an interesting time. It was a commodities boom. It was actually in the aftermath of a commodities boom. So you could see when cocoa and copper and oil prices had been soaring in the ’70s, which they were. All this money is coming in. And then it crashed in the ’80s, the early ’80s was the time I was there. So you could see the aftermath, how the money was wasted. There was corruption, they'd build a skyscraper and then they couldn't maintain it. So when I got there, the windows were falling out, everybody would say, look at this big skyscraper. So, it was a really good education in development economics, a subject people don't know all that much about. In the mid-’80s, I changed it up. I left after 10 years at the international tax counsel. I joined an investment bank that was one of the top dealers in US government securities. So we were what's called a primary dealer. People ask, what's a primary dealer?

Well that is a list maintained by the Fed. And it basically is your permission to trade directly with the Fed. So when, the Fed prints money, like how do you print money? Of course, it's all digital, but the way they do it, they buy bonds from banks and they pay for it with money that comes out of thin air. It's that simple. It's not more complicated than that. So the Fed builds up a balance sheet of bonds and the money comes out of thin air. Well, the Fed needs dealers, they need people they can call to do those trades. And they're very, very selective. And they're only today, it's about 20, the list varies. But my firm was one of the firms on that list. So we talked to the Fed. We were one of the few that could, so that was immersion in the Federal finance fiscal policy, US government securities market. But this is the mid-to-late ’80s, but that was the time when the derivative market was taking off. Of course, traditional futures contracts have been traded in Chicago since the 1850s, but these were swaps, options, swaptions, caps and floors, all over the counter, all off the balance sheet.

All, yes, we invented — this part of the team — we invented some of the contracts. I worked on the first credit default swap sovereign credit default swap ever. We didn't have any forms. There were no membership organizations. We had to sit there, and basically we were at the contract, which I did with some teammates who did the math. So it was a pretty exciting time. In the mid-’90s I changed it up again. You begin to get the idea that I either didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up. I preferred the word eclectic in terms of a career, but I changed it up again and joined a hedge fund. I was there for six years. We started to finish in the late ’90s and made a few headlines in 1998. This was Long-Term Capital Management. And prior to the financial crisis of 2008, the mortgage meltdown and Lehman brothers and all that, the LTCM fiasco was the greatest financial panic in the United States since the panic of 1907.

It's not that there hadn't been stock market crashes and the Great Depression was stressful. And Penn Square and Continental Illinois, a couple of big banks failures in the ’80s. We had the S&L crisis that just dragged onto the 1980s. So not that there was no financial distress, but in terms of the panics, that actually did come this close to taking down the entire global financial system. That was it. And I negotiated that rescue and lined up against, I call them the 14 families with the 14 banks. The original deal was 16 banks were going to put in $250 million each, and that was going to be $4 billion, and that was the rescue amount. But Bear Stearns dropped out and they got their payback in 2008. No one shed any tears when Bear Stearns failed in March 2008. But Wall Street has long memories and they remember Bear Stearns turning their back on the rest of the Street in ’98.

So Bear Stearns was in distress in 2008, again, no tears were shed. That was their sort of a payback from Wall Street. The other one was Lehman brothers, which just didn't have the money. So they scaled down to a hundred million. Goldman, JP Morgan, a couple others scaled up from $250 to $400 to make up the difference. And we cobbled together $4 billion, all cash, in five days. It was five days in September ’98, with no sleep. It was funny, the first day you were at the law firm, there were hundreds of lawyers running around in different rooms. There was a tax room, a bankruptcy room, a foreign syndicated unsecured credit room, due diligence room, etc. So on the first day everyone's got a suit and tie on. The next day the ties are down, the collars are open. The day after that the ties are going, the jackets are going, the shirts are half open. No one's sleeping. No one's bathing. We're just working around the clock, but we got it done. But we were hours away from shutting every market in the world. That's not an exaggeration. It would've started in Tokyo. And just going around the world, it would've reopened at some point, but we were looking at a global shutdown.

From there, I worked at a couple technology companies, ran a stock exchange and did a few other things. But after 2001, after 9/11, I got tapped by the CIA intelligence community to work on counter-terrorism finance, which I did for quite a long time. And that was, needless to say, interesting. Some things that I can say about that and some things I can't. But it was certainly taking a lot of practical experience along the way. They were actually interested in me because I had converted CitiBank Pakistan to Islamic banking in the early ’80s. So I was actually one of the leading Western experts on Islamic banking. And of course that was a big part of counter-terrorism finance. I did quite a few things there and then did a few other things. But by that point I was sort of regular on CNBC, doing it. Ultimately ended up doing Bloomberg, Fox News and a lot of other financial networks.

But I also started writing books. And my first book, Currency Wars, came out in 2011 and was a national best seller. Then followed up after that with The Death of Money, which was a New York Times bestseller, not easy to make that list. And I've been writing books ever since. And around that time, 2014 bumped into you and some of your colleagues and started working with Agora and different imprints and so forth. And had a long career at this point in international newsletters.

So like I said, a little bit of everything. But if you asked me to stitch it all together, I would say law, finance, intelligence, national security, economics, those are all areas where I feel pretty comfortable. But of course, you learn some lessons along the way. And I had gone, not me, but my family had gone through a bankruptcy situation in the early ’60s, this is 1962. And at that time the bankruptcy laws were a lot more stringent than they are today. Today, it's yeah, you file, you do some court filings, there's some procedure, but you kind of walk away without a scratch and start over. But then, in those days they took the house, they took the car, they put a lien on your salary. So even if you had a job and you were making money, a lot of it was taken right off the top to pay creditors. It was kind of, no easy way out. And so, I was a 12-year-old kid at the time, but 12-year-olds were going through their own changes. And so, all of a sudden you go from a brand new Chevrolet convertible to a 10-year-old Chrysler Imperial where you can see through the floor, to the road, that sort of thing. Not getting new clothes all the time, living in a bungalow, $35 a month.

I look back on it and I said this for a long time, but I'll say it again. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. Highly stressful for my family, not fun. I'm not making light of it, but it teaches you how to rebuild. It teaches you how to reinvent yourself. It was at that point that we moved. I didn't have any friends, because I lived in one community for, at that point, like I said, I was 10, 11 years old and had a whole network of friends. All of a sudden that's pulled away and you go into a new… I was in seventh grade, but we actually were so poor. The town was so poor, we had a six-year high school. So, we were on the bus with seniors as we were seventh graders. They were on the back of the bus. I don't know what was going on back there, but as a seventh grader, you sit in front of the bus. But, you learned a lot.

So, I became very focused on studies and got good grades. It's kind of how I got into college. My closet was a nail in the wall. You'd hammer a nail on the wall and you hung your hoodie and your jeans or whatever. And that was it. But, it gives you resilience. I mean, I've never worried about money ever since. I've made a lot of money, but I always say if you've ever lived through anything like that, you're like, "You know what? If it all went away, I could survive just fine." And that's a great source of strength. It gives you strength for all the other things you have to do and all the other challenges you face. Because if you've never had a bad day or you've never had the wheel of fortune, the reversal of fortune.

Actually, I know people who have been very successful, made a ton of money and had various accomplishments and it's all good, but they've literally never had a bad day. And a lot of them are very insecure, because they worry about that. They're like, "Oh, well, what would happen if this went away?" And having been through that, I know that you do just fine. You just have to kind of keep focused. Same thing happened in 1998 during the Long-Term Capital situation. I was their lawyer, I worked there. I was there from start to finish, but I also had quite a bit of money invested in the firm. I was the lawyer. I was like, "Wow, I'm working with all these geniuses." And they were, they did have genius IQs and there were two Nobel Prize winners.

I'm like, "Well, I'll just give them my money. They know more than I do and they'll do fine." And for four years we did, I mean, we kind of tripled our money and then it went down 92%. So, I wasn't bankrupt, wasn't kicked out of my house, but that was a real setback. And once again, you just pick yourself up and you go from there. So, I've had a couple of those reversals and they actually make you stronger. I was working with a hedge fund in the early 2000s, and with my partner, we went to a resort in Switzerland. We were meeting with one of the big hedge fund asset allocators further out on the lake, kind of like a suburb. But anyway, we ended up downtown, it was dinner, and we were having a couple glasses of wine and they agreed to give us $50 million, and had a $50 million allocation in his fund.

And the guy leaned over to me, the decision maker, and said, "I know what happened at Long-Term Capital." And he said, "I wouldn't give money to anyone who's never had a setback, because you know what it's like. You won't let it happen again. And I have more confidence in people like that than I do people who have never had a bad day, because that means that they can be a little arrogant or they can miss things." So, I mean, I agree with that, but of course that's just like agreeing with myself. But, he made a point of telling me that and I thought it was very interesting. But it certainly lined up with my experience. Once you've been through something like that, you don't let it happen again. So, yeah, a little bit of law, finance banking, hedge funds, intelligence, national security, economics, writer.

Yeah. Well, there's a Davos set, I call them the global elites. And I make the point that a lot of people who talk about them, write about them, the Great Reset, they're different names for it. I think the Great Reset is the one that's got the most currency at the moment. They're smart people, and they pay attention, and they can't come up with some good analysis, but they're several steps removed. They don't actually get invited to those things. They've never met the individuals involved. And to a great extent, I have. I've met with. Just one-on-one conversations, not like waving from the audience, but I've just had one-on-one conversations at length with Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, the former head of the IMF, John Lipsky.

And I once gave a private briefing behind closed doors in Rockefeller Center. Where else? To the head of Bilderberg. And if there's one group that's even more spooky and secretive than Davos, it's Bilderberg. Because Davos, you can kind of buy your way in, but Bilderberg is invitation only. It's a much smaller group. But I briefed the head of it and he was a very nice guy. And at the end, he came over and presented me a gift and I opened it. It was a vase with a kind of swirling glass, but beautiful. In fact, it's right over here, it's on the shelf near my desk.

But, you look into it and it's kind of a vortex. And I thought, "Well, that was appropriate." You don't want to get sucked into the vortex. So, I've met quite a few of these people. And the point I make is that they're real people, we know who they are. You don't have to cook up a conspiracy theory. There’s Mark Carney. Mark Carney's an interesting guy. He was the head of two central banks, actually three. He was the head of the Central Bank of Canada. He was the head of the Bank of England. And he was the chairman of the BIS. People are like, "What's BIS?" That's the Bank for International Settlements. That is the central banker's central bank. It's based in Basel, Switzerland. It's in a skyscraper on a river there. And central bankers from all over the world, but obviously the G7 are the main ones, they meet there once a month. And there are no records. There's no minutes. If there are, they're not released. There's no accountability. There's no press conference.

That really is secretive. I actually knew one of the guys, he's the vice chairman of the Fed, we were business partners in a couple different enterprises. And he was the attendee for the US to represent Alan Greenspan. Greenspan didn't like to travel that much, so he often skipped the monthly meetings. But my friend, David Mullens, went. He was the vice chairman of the Fed. He went as the US representative. So, he was inside the room, told me a lot about it. So yeah. But Carney was the chairman of that. A trifecta, heads of three different central banks, including the biggest and the most secretive. And Bob Rubin, everyone knows him from Goldman Sachs, the Secretary of the Treasury, but he's still around. He's the chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, which a lot of people think is as secretive as Davos.

So, I could go down the list, but we know who these people are. They're out there. They're giving speeches, you have to pay attention. But the Davos crowd, the Bilderberg crowd, the BIS crowd, they're known quantities. And I sort of steer away from conspiracy theories, because you don't need them. That's not because the conspiracy doesn't exist. They do. And you look for them. But I make the point that you don't need a conspiracy, if you have like-minded individuals. In other words, if enough people in powerful enough positions all have the same goals and they all agree on whatever it is they want to accomplish and how they want to do it, you don't need a conspiracy. They just wake up and do stuff and they're all in sync.

I always find it fascinating to look at where they went to school. What you discover is that they all went to one of 10 places. It's Harvard, Yale, University of Chicago, Stanford, maybe Columbia, maybe Wharton in the United States, or Oxford or Cambridge, the Sorbonne in France. There's a short list of schools. Berkeley, I would include. They all went to one of them. In many cases, they were each other's faculty advisors. When the younger one got their PhD, the thesis advisor was another one. And so, they end up both in the same position. Whether it's the board of governors or they're at Davos together or whatever it is, they all went to the same schools, same short list of schools. They taught each other. They all studied the same text. And they all think this same thing. So, if you can understand that, you can actually figure out what they're thinking, where they're coming from. And the agenda is not that difficult either because they tell you.

Now, here's where it gets a little tricky. And the IMF is a good example. The IMF is what I call transparently non-transparent. And what I mean by that is they can't say anything. They can't say, "We're the IMF and we're not telling you what we do." They have to tell you what they're doing. And they do. There are hundreds of publications, academic papers, speeches, spring meeting, fall meeting, annual meeting, etc., etc. But they have a certain jargon. They have a certain way of speaking. They have words and phrases that are not the least bit intuitive or plain English, shall we say. So a lot of times in the work I do, I feel like an anthropologist who goes into the jungle, studies the natives and comes back out and tells everybody else what's going on.

But I guess what's unusual about me is you have a lot of insiders and they're the people we're talking about. And you have a lot of outsiders who are throwing stones and criticizing, and, "It's a conspiracy," and all that. But they don't actually. And they're smart people, and I'm not disparaging anybody. But they don't actually have the technical training that you need to understand what the insiders are doing and how they're doing it. And I'm unusual in the sense that I have two law degrees and before I went to law school, I got a graduate degree in international economics but especially in development economics. Where I went to school, it's the number one school, School of International Studies in Washington. It's part of Johns Hopkins University, but it's their Washington, D.C., graduate school.

When you left there, it was like boot camp for one of three places. You either went to the IMF, or you went to the intelligence community or you went to Wall Street. I joined Citibank, which was the biggest bank in the world at the time. But, you learned the buzzwords. I was the last class to graduate before they completely abolished gold as a monetary asset. It was '71. Everyone says, "That's when Nixon went off the gold standard." It's not exactly what he did. He ended the convertibility of dollars for gold, but he intended it to be temporary. They were going to go back to it. They just never did. And it wasn't until about '74 that the IMF just said, "Okay, that's it. You can be a member and not put up any gold."

But that's when I was in graduate school. So, when we studied national accounts, you had to understand gold as a form of money. If you're younger than I am and you know anything about gold, you either went to mining college or you're self taught because they completely stopped teaching it in universities. But I caught the tail end of that. So, that's part of why I've always thought of gold as a monetary asset. But my point being, I speak their language so I can read their technical papers without a glossary and understand what they're doing. So, I think my insight into that whole crowd is probably — not probably, but definitely better than anyone who's not in the club.

Tim Geithner is in the club. By the way, he went to the same school I did. Tim Geithner went to the School of Advanced International Studies. So did Madeleine Albright, so did a lot of other people that are involved in what we're talking about. So, I'm a little bit the outlier in the sense that I have that kind of intellectual training, speak the language, understand it, but I'm not one of the elites trying to take over the world.

Well, that's my view, in terms of what's going to happen. But, just getting back to the Fed, a couple things you have to know about the Fed. Number one, they're always wrong. If you want a good forecasting tool, figure out what the Fed's going to do and assume the opposite. No, I'm serious. That's a very good forecasting tool. The other thing about the Fed, they're very, very transparent. They pride themselves on it. They want you to know what's going on, because they don't want any shocks. They never want to do anything where the market didn't see it coming, because that could sink the stock market, or cause an asset bubble. It could be in either direction, but the point is they don't. Just think of the Fed as an institution that never wants to surprise anybody. By the way, that's a change. I was around in the '70s and '80s when they never told you what they were doing.

And that was part of the big deal about being a primary dealer. You got to talk to the Fed, you knew before anybody else in the market, because they would drop hints, and then it would filter out from there. But, if you were in that inside group, that was extremely valuable. Today it's the opposite. They never want to surprise anybody. And they don't change quickly. I read all these things. Some index inflation ran a little bit hot or unemployment wasn't as good as they thought. Everyone, oh, the Fed's going to change course. No, they're not. They're not. They need to see three or four, even six months of bad data in a row before they say maybe we got it wrong. They don't do it for a month. They don't do it even for two months. Three at the minimum and more like six. So when they tell you they're going to do something, believe them. There's nothing that I do that's easier than forecasting the Fed.

Well, this gets back to what we were talking about earlier with the Davos crowd and Klaus Schwab and Mark Carney and now Janet Yellen, who's of course Secretary of Treasury, have signed up. There is a global climate change agenda. Now here's the thing on climate change. Is there climate change? Of course there is. There has been for four billion years. There's never been a time when the climate wasn't changing. I lived for 10 years on Long Island Sound. It's beautiful houses right on the water, a beautiful body of water. You can fish and water ski and wind sail and sail a boat and do all kinds of things. But it has a rocky coastline. And the reason it has a rocky coastline is that 10,000 or 12,000 years ago, it was a glacier, and glaciers move and they push the rocks out of the way. So when the glacier melts, it becomes a body of water. You get a rocky shore.

That's the difference between New Jersey and Long Island. The glaciers stopped at New York City, approximately. They never got to New Jersey. That's why I love Jersey beaches, but in New England we have rocky coastlines because we were covered in glaciers. It was a glacier. Now you can sail your boat. That's climate change, but it took 10,000 years and that's about the tempo. There can be ups and downs. Why did the Vikings get to Greenland in the 11th century? Well, the answer is, it was a lot warmer.

Correct. And there were farms in Greenland. Nowadays, it's a glacier, but in the 11th century there were farms. It's not that the Vikings were more hardy and could deal with and live on glaciers. It was that the weather was warmer. I'm not saying it wasn't tough to be a Viking. I'm just saying that there was this early Middle Age warming period. And then when I grew up, you had to read stories like Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates or whatever by Hans Christian Anderson. Well, I pictured everyone in Holland on ice skates, going up and down the canals. Well, that actually was true in the 17th century because they had what's called the little ice age in the 17th and early 18th century. And it could still freeze but in those days it was frozen solid every winter and the summers were not warm. Summers were not warm.

So, whether it's the 11th century warming period or the 17th century cooling period or the ice age, a lake or a sound or whatever, of course the climate changes. That's not the point. What we're looking at is not climate change, but climate alarmism, climate panic, climate fear. So then you always say why. These things, once you identify them, you don't go, ah, I got that figured out there. You're trying to pull something off here. Well, what is it? And why? The answer is global control. So they want global governance, global taxation and global regulation and world money. That's the agenda. So I just gave it to you. It's like, I didn't break into a safe, I didn't steal it. It's obvious in what they're doing. Global governance, world money and global regulation, global control. That's what they want. So how do you do that? Well, that's the solution. That's the end game. That's what they want. Well, if you want a solution, you need a problem, because you're going to go solve the problem.

Well, what you're describing, Addison, and you're right about 1789, but that's a very linear concept. And the world is not linear. And history is not linear. As Buckminster Fuller said, there are no straight lines in the universe and he's right. There are no straight lines in the universe, Euclid notwithstanding. So I think you have to go back to Aristotle who described politics as a cycle. It went from aristocracy to dictatorship, to democracy, back to aristocracy. And Athens had a very radical form of democracy. When they were in their democratic period in the mid to late fifth century BC, now they didn't have universal suffrage. It was for men only. And the slaves couldn't vote. Women couldn't vote and foreigners couldn't vote. And it was a little tighter than we have today, but among the male adults who could vote, they would all show up in the Agora and vote.

And I think it was about 8,000 or 9,000 of them. And they did some crazy stuff. The idea that if you lost a battle, you might want to punish the generals or in those days kill the generals. That's part of history, but they would have situations where they won the battle and they killed the generals because they didn't like the way they won. You won, but too many casualties, so we're going to kill you. And they did. And that was the problem with democracy. By the way, that is not a constitutional republic, which is what we have.

Yeah. That's a little simplistic. I think what they want, what progressives want in this country is a US version of what we just talked about in terms of the global agenda. And they said, "What do they want?" Well, we just named all the things from the first progressive revolution. So it was the income tax, central bank, direct election of senators, etc. So what do they want now? Get rid of the Electoral College, get rid of the filibuster, pack the Supreme Court, add two new states, four new senators, etc., which will make it easier to pass whatever else is in the progressive agenda. We know what that is, because they tell us. This is my point. You don't have to concoct a conspiracy. You don't have to be a mind reader. You just have to pay attention. They tell you what they want. And Modern Monetary Theory is a big part of it.

So it's unlimited spending. If you read Stephanie Kelton, who's the big guru on Modern Monetary Theory, she says you don't even need a government bond market. The idea there's too much debt, "We've got too many bonds. We're not going to be able to sell the bonds." She's like, "Why do you need a bond market? Just give our instructions to the Fed and tell them to send the money right to anybody you owe money to." I said, "Why do you have to sell bonds to get money, to deposit the Fed, for the Fed to buy the bonds, to give the money to the Treasury so you can pay your bills? Why do you need any of that? Just have the Fed wire the money directly to you or Raytheon or welfare checks or anything else."

Well, but Professor Kelton would say, "Who cares?" Remember Alexander Hamilton invented the government bond market and the debate at the time, this is now 1789, 1790 early in the Washington administration, the United States owed debts from the Revolutionary War. We had just written IOUs that issued Continentals. That was the form of money and they couldn't pay it back. And so the Congress said, "Well, that's easy. Just default, screw them, too bad." And Alexander Hamilton said no. He said, "Borrow more money and pay back that debt and you'll establish your credit. And then when the new bonds come due, borrow some more and pay those and just keep rolling it over." And all these people who say, "Well, you'll never pay off the national debt." It's nonsense.

You don't have to pay off the national debt. You do have to roll it over. And that's the distinction. That's where the train comes. You don't have to pay it off, but you do have to borrow more to pay off this fake Ponzi, in other words. And Alexander Hamilton invented it. That has been going strong for 230 years. Where does it run off the rails? Well again, paying back the national debt is not necessary, but rolling over the debt is necessary. And that has to do with confidence and trust. And if people lose trust in the value of a dollar or lose trust in the ability of the United States to be able to issue new bonds at rates lower than Zimbabwe, then it fails. That's when it fails. And that's the Argentina problem.

See problem with Argentina, and again, I've studied Monetary Theory because I always say, if you're going to debate somebody, you have to know more about it than they do. So I've done a deep dive on it. And they say, "Well, the problem with Argentina is they print pesos, but they borrow dollars." And whenever you have to pay back the debt in a currency that you don't print, you can go bankrupt. But if you're paying back the debt in money you do print, you can never go bankrupt because you just keep paying it back. You just print more money to pay it back. But there are a couple flaws in that. One is, and this is where Kelton really falls down, she doesn't understand international economics. She's just looking at a closed economy.

They were denominated Swiss Francs because nobody wanted dollars. And people go, "well, the dollar would never devalue 90%." Well actually it did in 1971, gold was $35 an ounce. In January 1980, gold was $800 an ounce. So if you value dollars by weight of gold, the dollar devalued 90%. That's a 90% devaluation because it took 10 times as much gold, or 20 times as many dollars to buy the same ounce of gold. So that means your dollar has gone down in that example about 95%. So those kinds of extreme evaluations have happened. People just don't know how to measure them. And there was a reputation for the dollar in 1977, because we issued bonds and Swiss Francs. And we pulled out of it.

But that's the point. If you know it can happen, if you know it's a risk, you don't want to push the envelope. Whereas the Modern Monetary Theorist and Stephanie Kelton in particular, Bernie Sanders, she's his main advisor. He's Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee among other things. They don't understand international economics. And so that's where the booby traps are in the exchange rate and devaluation.

Correct. Yeah, well the coins actually have some value by metallic weight. If you have a 1965 quarter, it was actually silver when I was a kid. A quarter was a quarter ounce of silver. And if you got one from the '60s, that's great, but they've been aluminum or zinc or something ever since. But that's a little different. So these central bank digital currencies are digital. The message traffic is encrypted. But they could disintermediate the entire banking system because one of the proposals is that you and I and everybody else in America, or the world for that matter, have an account with the Fed. It'd be an Addison Wiggin or Jim Rickards' account with the Fed. We'd have it on our iPhone. There'd be a little Fed coin app on the iPhone. And if I wanted to send you money, I could just do it, it'd be kind of like Venmo or PayPal, something like that.

But I wouldn't need a bank account, neither with you. No checks, no wire transfers, no fees, MasterCard, Visa, all that you know. And MasterCard and Visa charge a 2½% merchant acquirer fee. When a restaurant sells a lot of stocked food for credit cards, they don't take those to the bank. They sell them to what's called a merchant acquirer. The merchant acquirer bundles the bunch and delivers them to, say, MasterCard. MasterCard pays them, and then MasterCard goes to banks who issue MasterCards and collects all the money and then they put it on your bill and then you pay it. So that's like a five-step process with fees all along the way. Well, if you could have an account with the Fed, you could skip all of that. You could skip all of it, and it would just go from my account to your account with the Fed.

So interesting implications for the banking system, but that's a story for another day. So that's the world of central bank digital currencies. And the Chinese are furthest ahead. The US is working in the R&D stage at MIT, probably a year or two away. If it gets to it, then yeah, they'll have the kind of process we described earlier, but the US is still a couple years away. But the Chinese are furthest along. They're past the pilot program. The Chinese are actually going to use the Winter Olympics starting in about 10 days or so as a rollout of their central bank digital currency. If you go to the Olympics, nothing's going.

"You may have 50 stocks, but you have one asset class. It's called stocks and they go up together and they go down together." Yeah, there's idiosyncrasies and the thing is, the noncorrelation of stocks exists when you don't care. It's precisely when you care the most that they all go down together. Correlation gets close to one.

So what's real diversification? Well, okay. Have a slice of stocks. That's fine. I'm not anti stocks. Have a slice of cash, have a slice of real estate, have a slice of gold, have a slice of alternatives and that can be hedge funds, private equity, venture capital, fine art, whatever, land, farms, etc. That's real diversification because some of those things will be slightly... Oh, bonds, if we have to mention Treasury bonds. So, like, five-year Treasury bonds, 10-year Treasury bonds. Some of those things are correlated, but not that much. And some of them are inversely correlated, meaning when one goes up, the other one goes down. And the one that kind of reduces volatility of the portfolio is cash. Everyone hates cash, because it doesn't have a big yield, but they underestimate the fact that it does reduce volatility and it creates enormous optionality. If you're the one with cash and things really fall apart, you can go shopping. You're the one who can go out and pick up all the bargains and no one's better at thanWarren Buffett. So I would counsel diversification, but my caveat would be you need real diversification, not faux diversification. So telling me you have 50 stocks, I kind of shrug and go, "That's not diversified."