On today's show, Stephen K. Bodington and David Malpass discuss the massive cost overruns at the Federal Reserve's new headquarters in Washington, D.C., and why the Fed needs to do something about it.
00:00:00.000The headquarters is three buildings. The two that are still in progress are the Eccles and the one that's next door to it with the tunnel, right? That is a $3 billion and counting project that started at 1.8. It is massively overrun. It's massively overrun if you take just the two buildings, nearly a billion dollars of cost overrun.
00:00:28.460That information search is going to continue. We still want to get to the bottom of the plans that were submitted and how they have changed. Those never came back into the National Capital Planning Commission.
00:00:43.060I don't even think they know the costs. I don't even think they know the cost.
00:00:46.540The $3.1 billion is important. There's a cost overrun. You can look. These are the Fed's own internal documents that were FOIA'd and are published online.
00:00:53.580It went from 1.8, 1.9 to 2.5 and down to 3.1 for the capital expenditures within their own budget for the total renovation and build of the complex.
00:01:02.920So the chair is really splitting hairs there when he's saying, well, that's this building.
00:01:06.740OK, if you take that building out of it, it's still an inflation from 1.4 billion to 2.5 billion. There's no way around it. The cost overrun is massive.
00:01:15.840This is the primal scream of a dying regime.
00:01:23.640Pray for our enemies because we're going medieval on these people.
00:01:28.840Here's another time I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people. The people have had a belly full of it.
00:01:35.000I know you don't like hearing that. I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. It's going to happen.
00:01:40.180And where do people like that go to share the big line? MAGA Media.
00:01:45.140I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.
00:01:50.580Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?
00:01:54.340If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.
00:02:00.640War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Band.
00:02:03.860Okay, if we get any breaking news at all, and we hope to see some effort today on either the Epstein situation down in Tallahassee and or up in D.C. at Maine Justice,
00:02:14.960and if we get any, because I understand there are things happening with D&I on this exploding treasonous conspiracy,
00:02:28.440We've got some capital markets and economics to go through to understand what's really going on, the deep signal of the economy.
00:02:37.380And I also want to play the Donnie Deutsch and the Gregory Meeks,
00:02:40.800because guys are looking at the polling and thinking downrange.
00:02:44.620They understand that it's affordability and the cost of living and what's happening to the average American right now in the economy.
00:02:50.580David Malpass, former head of the World Bank, undersecretary of international finance, under President Trump at the Treasury Department in the first term.
00:03:00.200So, David, I wanted to play, and I don't want to go back to last night because you saw the laziness of the journalism,
00:03:05.180but I wanted to play really the meat and potatoes of what this mess is.
00:03:09.800And I think it's important on the Versailles on Constitution Avenue.
00:03:13.720So, folks, to make sure you've got the right numbers, and Russ's vote and Pulte gave them to you,
00:03:21.480it is $1.8 billion, which was approved, to now $3.1 billion.
00:03:26.960Now, if you take out the other building of which Trump and the Fed chair got involved in,
00:03:32.560you heard right there, it's $1.4 billion to $2.5 billion.
00:03:35.920Bottom line, it's a massive cost overrun, and also, I don't think they went back to the appropriate committees
00:03:44.340and to the architect of the Capitol and actually walked people through why there was overruns.
00:03:49.900Now, people say, well, Banner, why are you making a big deal about this?
00:10:01.300They have the Phillips curve model, which is the idea that if people are getting jobs, they're going to ask for wage increases, and that's somehow bad.
00:10:11.420Remember the whole goal of a good Trump policy that, you know, the forgotten man policy is that we want real wages to go up.
00:10:21.160We want wages to go up faster than inflation.
00:10:23.680Biden had the opposite going on, and people were getting poorer.
00:10:28.080And so Trump comes in and says, I want wage growth, and the Fed's going to step right in the way of it and squash it.
00:10:37.000Because real wage growth is one of the keys to – is one of the key, I say, on a dashboard to see if your policies are having an impact among the working and middle class.
00:10:46.660So how's the Fed going to step in the middle of that?
00:10:50.320They use an inflation model that's based on this wrong housing data.
00:10:54.640It's based on the inflation expectations.
00:10:57.940I'll give you – let me explain that.
00:11:00.740The Fed says to the public, we're really worried about inflation.
00:11:04.880Then they take a poll of the public and say, what are your inflation expectations?
00:11:09.860And the public says, I'm worried about inflation.
00:11:13.000And so then the Fed says, aha, we need higher interest rates.
00:11:16.300We need to keep our interest rates up to protect you.
00:11:19.220So it's a circular process that's been – that goes on worldwide.
00:11:24.620It keeps the rates high, and it keeps the elites employed.
00:11:28.380The Fed has this – I don't know, some people say it's 50,000 people working for them.
00:11:33.820I led a big organization, the World Bank.
00:11:36.560I tried to limit the amount of damage.
00:12:21.960That will bring down inflation, and it's a virtuous circle.
00:12:25.660And the Fed is right now just rejecting that.
00:12:28.560So President Trump reaffirmed yesterday that he's not going to remove Powell, although there's a lot of looking into this building and the overruns, and was it all straightforward?
00:12:42.200Since Powell's going to be there, there won't be these types of changes.
00:12:45.440Scott Besson's arguing for this fundamental strategic review, I guess as you are.
00:12:49.260I want to hold you through the break, but the two minutes we got, when you say upheaval and total restructuring, particularly how it interacts with the government, what do you mean?
00:13:00.000Downsizing the personnel, downsizing the balance sheet, lower interest rates that are paid to banks so you save some for the public, lower interest rates that they peg, that they target.
00:13:12.860And so – and you need models that are honest about inflation so that you can get there.
00:13:18.480I think also looking at the dollar and saying, well, we're going to have the reserve currency of the world, so that's going to invite money into the U.S., so we shouldn't have to pay so much for money.
00:13:30.060Trump was dead on on that yesterday, pointing out we shouldn't be paying more than weaker countries.
00:18:13.080From Epstein to North Carolina politics, to the education, to the really getting the minds right of the Ivy League schools starting at Columbia.
00:18:25.480And the Columbia president, there was an interview.
00:18:27.420She said, it's not about $200 million.
00:18:29.020She actually said to the choir party, it's billions and billions and billions of your tax dollars going to these universities for research, quote unquote.
00:18:49.220They've become centers for this neo-Marxism radical jihad that you're seeing the red-green alliance coming out of these Ivy League schools.
00:18:57.780Columbia, I thought the deal was great.
00:20:23.340You know, the dominance in cryptocurrency is going to be super valuable for the United States based on stable coins and stable dollar coins, U.S. dollar coins that protect us.
00:20:36.080And so he was square in the middle of that.
00:20:39.520And he's right that that will allow interest rates to fall.
00:20:43.800So the whole economic program is that you're going to allow people to produce in the United States and not subsidize the foreign production, which is what we've been doing with a broken trading system.
00:21:24.740But it's much bigger than people are letting on right now.
00:21:27.540It's not just the building and not just the governors.
00:21:30.380It's the whole way the Fed operates has to be changed.
00:21:33.920So are you are you calling for President Trump to, you know, you, Bess and some others?
00:21:39.000Do you think there needs to be a task force like now?
00:21:42.500Because, as you said, it's just not about naming some individual to be the head of the Federal Reserve.
00:21:47.940You're saying the institutional rot is much deeper than that, and particularly the interconnectivity of these other central banks.
00:21:55.040To do that, we don't need to wait to next.
00:21:58.060You know, they're going to name the new Fed chair in either December, January, February.
00:22:03.700They will take, you know, they'll go through confirmation and be confirmed and actually step in in June of next year, about a year from now, a little less than a year from now.
00:22:12.840So the you're saying we shouldn't wait for that.
00:23:10.920I'm skeptical the Fed will admit that.
00:23:14.400But I think Secretary Besson is exactly right to say to the Fed, you better get on with change because we're going to make it happen one way or the other.
00:23:25.820David Malpass, where do people go on social media and to get your writings and your thinking, sir?
00:27:14.780I'm going to go to I want your thoughts on this, because this is inextricably linked to President Trump's economic program.
00:27:22.480And there's more polling coming out today from Harry Enten that's saying President Trump is dropping the polls with independence.
00:27:28.920One of the reasons is maybe not enough focus on the economy.
00:27:31.660Now, he just passed the big, beautiful bill.
00:27:34.040But what I've argued is that, yo, the parts of that that people that are going to impact people's lives immediately, you've got to get out there and you have to message it.
00:27:43.320You've got to be hammering that every day.
00:28:38.600A former CIA, Pentagon and White House advisor with an unmatched grasp of geopolitics and capital markets.
00:28:44.720Jim predicted Trump's Electoral College victory exactly 312 to 226, down to the actual number itself.
00:28:54.600Now he's issuing a dire warning about April 11th, a moment that could define Trump's presidency in your financial future.
00:29:02.200His latest book, Money GPT, exposes how AI is setting the stage for financial chaos, bank runs at lightning speeds, algorithm-driven crashes, and even threats to national security.
00:29:13.700Right now, War Room members get a free copy of Money GPT when they sign up for Strategic Intelligence.
00:29:20.460This is Jim's flagship financial newsletter, Strategic Intelligence.
00:30:02.660I mean, Andrew Jackson, if you go back and read the Age of Jackson, I mean, his number one thing is, boom, hey, no Bank of the United States.
00:30:11.100It's just going to lead to corruption and greed and taking power away from his populist movement.
00:30:17.900I mean, it's one of the reasons they stole the first time he won, and they did steal it, that, you know, it was on this very issue.
00:31:22.560But isn't that the argument, isn't that the core argument in the central banks?
00:31:26.320I put this chart up the other day of the Chinese dumping U.S. bonds and buying gold.
00:31:31.860I mean, don't the central banks, the reason they've been buying gold at record rates,
00:31:36.940and you don't have to be, look, Philip Patrick and Steve Bannon did not start as gold bugs.
00:31:40.300We came out of investment banking where the gold bugs were kind of, you know, these odd ducks like Rand Paul and his dad, right?
00:31:50.720And nobody on Wall Street took them seriously until you hit the 21st century and it became obvious all these,
00:31:57.560there's been no controls in these legislatures by central governments anywhere, and the whole world's leveraged up.
00:32:03.080I mean, you're about to have the world's biggest margin call.
00:32:05.060Well, essentially, gold, the reason gold's been a hedge for 5,000 years is because of people's inability to control themselves anytime they get near a fiat currency.
00:32:15.120Is that basically the history, the economic and financial history of the world?
00:32:19.460And that's why gold's always been a hedge, sir?
00:33:41.180And this is the reason that, look, the purpose of the show is not to teach you.
00:33:44.960The purpose of the show is to give you access to geopolitics and politics and polling and analysis and capital markets and finance that you can teach yourself.
00:33:57.960Because only in learning yourself and going through that process to get your mental maps, like riding a bike, okay, it's so hard at first and you don't get it.
00:34:06.620And then all of a sudden, boom, I get it.
00:34:08.980You know this in things that you've studied before.
00:34:22.560This is why we've partnered with Birch Gold over the years, and this is why Philip and I and the team at Birch Gold four years ago said, hey, let's take the currency.
00:34:33.760Let's take the dollar as the prime reserve currency and let's walk through them over a number of years of what's happened here.
00:36:47.900Philip's going to join us back on Monday to break down everything Judy says.
00:36:51.480And so because this situation of money and currency and gold and geopolitics and capital markets is about to become even more important than it has been over the last couple of years.
00:37:02.320And we want to make sure the war in posse is at the cutting edge of that.
00:37:24.440Birchgold.com, promo code Bannon, end of the dollar empire.
00:37:28.420The first seven installments free, working on the eighth.
00:37:30.660And also a big announcement about that entire series when we get back from Labor Day.
00:37:36.240We've also had impact in Marjorie Taylor Greene.
00:37:39.100And so so Harnwell, these kinetic wars, particularly when the Middle East is is is heating back up the situation in Gaza.
00:37:49.600Also, there's there's renewed emphasis of regime change in Persia that we're going to be all over.
00:37:55.580Make sure we don't get sucked into that.
00:37:57.620But the Ukraine situation and you can tell President Trump increasingly frustrated about what's going on.
00:38:02.380But a quite interesting development over the last couple of days.
00:38:05.580And that is where the folks in Ukraine themselves, Zelensky, what they're trying to do is make sure that they're not accountable at all to the money that's been stolen.
00:38:15.860Right. And they want more money over there.
00:38:17.940And so what's happened in the streets of Kiev over the last couple of days, sir?
00:38:22.020This kind of changed at least the political direction a little bit.
00:38:27.180Well, if if Denver would be kind enough to pay some of the footage and I'll talk over the back of it.
00:38:31.400Really, since the 22nd of July, Ukraine has seen some of its worst protests against the government since Russia's invasion.
00:38:40.360And that's not unusual in and of itself, because under the martial law that Zelensky declared basic on the same day as the invasion protests,
00:38:50.260public displays of opposition to the government are prohibited.
00:38:54.420So it's not so much the numbers to concentrate on.
00:38:59.300And it was actually a growing protest over a couple of days.
00:39:03.760About two to three thousand people all told outside the presidential palace.
00:39:08.640It's the fact that these protests took place anyway.
00:39:12.600Steve, my look, I've got some headlines here.
00:39:15.480Denver would be kind enough to play those as I'll talk over the top of them.
00:39:20.240But what struck me about this, Steve, was that I had a sense of deja vu.
00:39:27.540And it reminded me of basically 18 months, 12 months ago, when every day I was coming on this show and I was saying,
00:39:34.320look, this is the mainstream media running one anti-Biden headline after another.
00:39:41.520They are getting ready to throw the person that they themselves created under the bus because he no longer is the instrument for their agenda.
00:39:51.560And it's exactly the same thing now that we see in Ukraine.
00:39:54.900There's just in the last 24 hours this string of headlines.
00:45:39.660We're officially rolling out a fresh new look on all of our products.
00:45:43.340So you'll notice an updated and improved design on all of our bottles and labels while still, of course, getting the same great benefits from all of our products.
00:45:51.180So this has definitely been a long time in the works.
00:45:53.840And in honor of the new rollout, we're doing a 20% sale on our grass-fed beef liver, which we just extended through the weekend.
00:46:01.280So just make sure to use code HUMAN, that's H-U-M-A-N, at checkout on any one-time order.
00:46:07.720So just wanted to quickly mention that.
00:46:09.780But also going off that, I know many people still aren't familiar with the benefits of beef liver.
00:46:14.340And we still get a ton of messages from people kind of asking, you know, what's in it and what would make it beneficial for someone.
00:46:21.640But in short, beef liver is arguably one of the best sources of highly bioavailable nutrients.
00:46:26.500So it'll include things like vitamins, minerals, coenzymes, amino acids, as well as peptides.
00:46:31.720And I've said it before, but I've always liked to just make the simple analogy that beef liver is essentially nature's multivitamin.
00:46:38.180So you'll get a wide array of vitamins and nutrients such as iron, zinc, vitamin A, B12, CoQ10, folate.
00:46:46.660But these will all compound to do things like help promote healthy skin, hair, heart, immune system, as well as brain function.
00:46:54.240And then on top of that, beef liver also contains many other critical vitamins and minerals that most people are deficient in.
00:47:00.080So things like selenium, K2, as well as copper and choline.
00:47:06.400And then, of course, you can sift through some of our reviews, but people always just rave about the natural energy boost that they get after taking the beef liver.
00:47:15.180And then I always like to mention, too, that on top of it, aside from it being 100% grass-fed and natural, is that the body can much better absorb these nutrients as opposed to taking like a man-made synthetic multivitamin, where oftentimes your body will just flush out those nutrients.
00:48:12.340There's a lot going on in this situation in Ukraine, but you've nailed it.
00:48:16.260But if you do the switch out, as much as we detest Zelensky, if you do the switch out now, you're talking about a longer war because the war hero and the general will come back, and he'll take over, and you're in for a long conflict.
00:48:29.780And what President Trump wants to do in the United States is have this conflict end as quickly as possible with no more American commitment.
00:48:36.840Harnwell, where do people go on your social media between now and your hosting tonight, the 6 o'clock hour, sir?
00:48:43.200On Getter, at Harnwell, which is my surname, Steve.
00:48:49.220Give me 20 seconds, right, because there are two things President Trump can do to leverage his influence over Zelensky at the moment.
00:48:56.320Let's get the facts out regarding the biolabs, and let's get the facts out regarding Joe Biden, Vice President Joe Biden's firing of Victor Shokin, who was the prosecutor, who was fired for investigating Burisma, the Burisma payments to Hunter Biden, right?
00:49:12.580President Trump has all the cards, Zelensky has none.
00:50:14.480And, of course, Todd Blanch, I'm sure we'll get some sort of readout of this really extraordinary second day with Maxwell down in Tallahassee.
00:50:24.360Mike Lindell, you've been let loose in the imperial capital.
00:50:38.040And you guys at the War Room Posse, you've made it possible that we're even around to be able to win this big appeal we just won two days ago.
00:50:45.720And the news went out to 56 countries.
00:50:48.240And everybody reported it except for Fox News.