Bannon's War Room - WarRoom Battleground EP 761： A Special： Paper Soldier

00:00:00.120 When I entered public service, I spent more than 40 years in the asset management business.

00:00:06.360 There, one mantra guides one of the world's most successful investors.

00:00:11.740 Never bet against America.

00:00:13.860 Warren Buffett coined the phrase, and it's been his lodestar as long as he's been in the game.

00:00:19.740 Never bet against America captures a time-tested truth.

00:00:24.700 The American economy is unstoppable.

00:00:27.460 Throw whatever you will at our capital markets, the Great Depression, two world wars, 9-11, a COVID recession of the last few years, or sky-high inflation.

00:00:40.540 Each time the American economy gets knocked down, it gets back up again.

00:00:45.500 And it gets back up even stronger than it was before.

00:00:49.760 U.S. markets are anti-fragile.

00:00:52.300 Indeed, the entire history can be distilled into just five words, up and to the right.

00:01:00.780 On a long-term horizon, it's never a bad time to invest in America, but especially now.

00:01:07.140 The United States is entering a new golden age of economic prosperity for both Main Street and Wall Street, and we don't want anyone to get left behind.

00:01:16.540 Come with us so we can build a more abundant America together.

00:01:20.980 On President Trump's first day in office, he vowed to usher in a new golden age for our country.

00:01:28.840 A golden age America deserves a golden age economy.

00:01:36.320 So for the past hundred days, we've been preparing the soil.

00:01:39.780 We have uprooted government waste and harmful regulations, we have planted the seeds of private investment, and we have fertilized the ground with fresh tax legislation.

00:01:51.480 Next, we harvest, and we want you to harvest with us.

00:01:56.760 America is the shelling point of global finance.

00:02:00.520 We have the world's reserve currency and the deepest and most liquid capital markets and the strongest property rights.

00:02:07.740 For these reasons, the United States is the premier destination for international capital, and the administration's goal is to make it even more appealing for investors like you.

00:02:20.300 The President believes we can achieve more together.

00:02:24.280 This is the abundant vision he has for the future.

00:02:27.780 He wants everyone to be a part of it.

00:02:30.640 Thousands of businesses are now catching the President's vision.

00:02:33.860 Since he assumed office in January, companies have pledged to invest trillions into the U.S. economy.

00:02:41.480 President Trump has secured more investment for our country in a hundred days than President Biden did during all four years.

00:02:50.420 Entrepreneurs, too, are starting to understand what the President is trying to accomplish.

00:02:56.140 March saw one of the highest levels ever recorded for new business applications.

00:03:00.900 Many of these men and women, like many of you, are grasping that America First is the blueprint for a more abundant world.

00:03:08.520 This is the primal scream of a dying regime.

00:03:16.780 Pray for our enemies, because we're going medieval on these people.

00:03:22.020 I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people.

00:03:26.280 The people have had a belly full of it.

00:03:28.260 I know you don't like hearing that.

00:03:29.680 I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it.

00:03:32.320 It's going to happen.

00:03:33.360 And where do people like that go to share the big line?

00:03:36.980 Mega Media.

00:03:38.320 I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.

00:03:43.760 Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?

00:03:47.520 If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.

00:03:53.860 War Room.

00:03:54.740 Here's your host, Stephen K. Band.

00:03:57.060 Okay, welcome.

00:03:59.760 Monday, 5 May in the year of our Lord, 2025.

00:04:02.700 Thanks for sticking around for the second hour of our late afternoon, early evening edition of the War Room.

00:04:09.100 You heard right there from our former contributor, the Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Besson.

00:04:14.140 Scott doing a fantastic job.

00:04:15.360 That was at the Milken Global Conference with Mike Milken.

00:04:19.460 The guy's called the Davos of the West.

00:04:22.040 Yesterday, they had competing receptions.

00:04:25.100 Scott Besson, of course, Alexander Priate and Rebecca Karabas, all the team you know from the War Room, was out there.

00:04:32.040 They had this Ken Griffin, who's been quite critical of the president, had his reception traditionally.

00:04:40.060 And I think Ken has a reception every year to kind of kick things off.

00:04:42.840 Scott Besson flew out because he was going to speak early this morning.

00:04:45.260 He had a competing, kind of maybe a more MAGA reception across the day spoke.

00:04:50.620 We were going to try to pick that up live this morning, but with some issues with the Milken Conference.

00:04:56.080 We've got it right there.

00:04:56.960 You've got a good summary.

00:04:57.760 Speaking of Scott Besson, joining me is Salia Motion, author of Paper Soldiers.

00:05:06.240 And Scott, I noticed, is in the acknowledgments of this.

00:05:10.240 Talk to us first about your background.

00:05:11.660 This book is absolutely amazing.

00:05:13.280 We put this in the pantheon with Christopher Leonard's Lords of Easy Money, which the audience have just loved over the last couple of years.

00:05:19.580 In fact, we had an entire hour with Christopher in Kansas City a week ago talking about his new research for his new book on the defense industry.

00:05:28.320 But Chris Leonard, Christopher Leonard gives, and I mean, for our audience, when a poll quote says about your book, a true feat of revelatory journalism.

00:05:37.380 If you only read one book to understand American economic and political power in the world today, this should be the one.

00:05:44.820 Talk to us, why did you get interested in this topic, Scott Besson, your understanding of this?

00:05:51.020 Walk us through how you got here.

00:05:52.680 I started covering Treasury in 2016 here in Washington.

00:05:56.980 But before then, I'm from Ohio, from Cincinnati.

00:06:00.680 And I grew up there, born and raised, pretty much the same zip code for most of my life.

00:06:05.840 And at some point in my 20s, I went overseas, spent a decade in London and Oslo, Norway.

00:06:11.040 And realized that we're not in Ohio anymore?

00:06:13.360 I realized we're not in Ohio anymore.

00:06:14.980 So I got back to the U.S.

00:06:16.160 Hold on, as a business journalist.

00:06:18.080 As a business journalist.

00:06:18.640 How does a young woman from Cincinnati, and you go to the university, you're from there, you're born and raised there, you go to high school there, your parents there, you also go to university there.

00:06:28.100 Yeah.

00:06:28.420 So you're a local kid.

00:06:30.760 How do you get into business journalism?

00:06:32.500 I mean, you're writing now at the highest levels of the most powerful economy of the world.

00:06:37.440 And I know this just from my phone blowing up, having announced over the last couple of days you're going to be here, so many prominent people who follow your writing.

00:06:46.280 How do you go from a kid in Ohio to one of the most serious, not just business journalists, but about currency, capital markets, and finance?

00:06:54.900 So I spent a couple of years in Columbus, Ohio, just covering regional businesses, and I really got to understand how a regional economy works and how it connects to the rest of the world.

00:07:05.900 I went overseas, and I saw the U.S. from an outside perspective, and when I came back to Washington, I was able to kind of bring all that together and realize that the intersection where government, policy, politics, and money is, there is a real misunderstanding there of how the so-called flyover states of America connect to what happens in Washington.

00:07:29.700 So I kind of decided once Trump was elected in November, and everyone was quite surprised.

00:07:34.180 November of 16.

00:07:34.940 November of 2016, that time he was elected.

00:07:37.680 You could kind of see that coming.

00:07:39.580 I'm not going to say I predicted it, but I was in Ohio and Hamilton County.

00:07:43.140 I'm not going to say you're MAGA, but I'm saying just as a kid from Ohio, when you go back and see what was happening.

00:07:48.480 Absolutely.

00:07:49.120 I mean, Ohio tends to predict the next president.

00:07:52.380 A lot of that comes down to 120,000 votes in Hamilton County, which is where I'm from.

00:07:57.160 I was there four or five weeks before Election Day, and I only saw Trump sign.

00:08:02.700 So if that county was going to go for Trump, and then that meant the state was going to go for Trump, then the logical next conclusion is that the electoral votes would go to Trump.

00:08:11.740 The people that you've known and work with in places like the city of London or in Wall Street, were they even open to that concept that the working class in this country, many of whom had been Democrats or independents, that something was – they felt something was so wrong in the direction of the country that they would bring in essentially a revolutionary figure, a guy that had no political experience whatsoever.

00:08:37.160 Did anybody in that – in your life at the time understand the profound nature of that vote for those people in Hamilton County?

00:08:45.260 I don't think so.

00:08:46.300 I truly didn't.

00:08:47.300 All I could see was, oh, it looks like Ohio is going to go for Trump.

00:08:50.240 I didn't know beyond that.

00:08:51.340 You're still – you know, you're waiting for when the bellwether state no longer predicts the next president.

00:08:55.900 I had no idea that there was this much angst and anger in the working class and the manufacturing sector and the blue-collar segment of the American voting population.

00:09:07.540 It was really hard to see that, but he saw it, and he kind of showed the rest of the world.

00:09:11.160 And it's interesting that after his four years, if you listen to the first speech that President Joe Biden made to Congress, the joint session speech, the first couple of minutes, a lot of those words could have been said by Donald Trump in a different way.

00:09:27.040 But Buy America and Friendshoring is very similar to America First.

00:09:31.920 Even during the Democratic primaries that got us to Joe Biden in 2019 and 2020, you heard Elizabeth Warren talking about economic patriotism, which is also America First.

00:09:43.640 Ro Khanna's concept of really the economic nationalism that we propose, Ro and the folks say call it economic patriotism.

00:09:50.980 And he has gone back to Ohio to do that tour a couple of times to pitch that.

00:09:56.440 Let me go back.

00:09:57.980 The thesis of your book is that you talk about the subtitle is how the weaponization of the dollar changed the world order, not simply the dollar, but the weaponization.

00:10:09.740 So let's go back at first and talk about just the dollar because our audience is a blue-collar, middle-class audience, but they're fascinated with capital markets.

00:10:17.960 They're fascinated with international finance because they realize, as you just said, that intersection of politics, economy, and finance is really where things happen, but it's totally misunderstood, including by, I think, 90 percent of the imperial capital here.

00:10:33.560 What is it about us being the prime reserve currency that sets the world order?

00:10:41.900 Before we talk about the weaponization changing it, what is just us being the prime reserve currency, the dollar being the dominant currency in the world today?

00:10:48.960 It means that the world is pretty much beholden to the United States.

00:10:54.300 Everyone is very, very exposed financially, economically, geopolitically to what the U.S. decides to do.

00:11:01.340 It is the world's largest economy.

00:11:02.760 So every multinational company, every country that wants to drive their own growth needs the American consumer to help them because we have the largest consumer base.

00:11:16.000 There's a lot of innovation in America, and that comes from all the R&D spending that's financed by our very big budget deficit.

00:11:22.880 That innovation has also driven a lot of economic growth.

00:11:26.580 The other thing is that we're able to outsource or sort of push out our foreign policy and geopolitical agenda.

00:11:34.720 Now, when we talk about weaponization of the dollar, that is specifically talking about economic sanctions.

00:11:40.260 U.S. economic sanctions were kind of barely used until 9-11 came.

00:11:44.840 I think a lot of people forget that the very first act after 9-11 on September 24th, 2001, was not a military tank rolling into a foreign country or U.S. troops hitting the ground, boots to the ground into another country.

00:11:59.260 It was the U.S. Treasury Secretary, Paul O'Neill at the time, being given specific powers from the executive branch, from George W. Bush, that you can now follow the money, find out how did the terrorists finance that attack, which was only a couple of hundred thousand dollars, all moved around in daylight for anyone to spot if they could find the trend.

00:12:22.400 And choke off any of that terrorist financing so that you can say you are not allowed to use the dollar to hurt America.

00:12:29.600 That's where the weaponization begins.

00:12:31.420 And since 9-11, we've seen more and more that America doesn't want to go to war.

00:12:37.260 Well, we call it, particularly if you look at the way the Chinese Communist Party and Sun Tzu look at it, kinetic war.

00:12:43.320 When you get to the kinetic war, the theory of Sun Tzu is like you've lost just by having to go to that level of violence, that you should be able to win psychologically, with cyber, politically, but particularly economic warfare.

00:12:59.520 So we say sanctions.

00:13:01.080 That's war by another means.

00:13:02.760 That's essentially using economic warfare and of all the different weapons you have, trade barriers, all this, the biggest club that you have is taking the currency and using the currency as essentially a weapon of war.

00:13:19.980 Is that weapon?

00:13:20.880 Is that what you mean by weaponization?

00:13:22.440 Yeah, it's right between diplomacy, which, OK, talking failed.

00:13:25.680 Yeah.

00:13:25.900 We don't want to go to kinetic war.

00:13:27.500 So we're going to use economic sanctions and maybe not even use them.

00:13:30.300 Maybe it's just talking about using that.

00:13:32.440 I want to go back in time, how the world got in this situation, because correct me if I'm wrong.

00:13:39.000 I think as a teaser you said this morning on the show, it's in the book, 97 percent, I think, of all transactions in the world are converted into dollars, the vast bulk of all transactions into petrodollars.

00:13:53.640 And I think your book says two-thirds or 75 percent of all government debt by foreign governments that are issued are dollar-dominated.

00:14:01.420 So the world is captured by the dollar.

00:14:06.280 They can't get away from it.

00:14:07.540 You have a Damocles sword over your head at any time if you cross the West because everything you do in the way you interact with the world as an economy is done through a U.S. dollar.

00:14:21.760 Is that essentially it?

00:14:22.780 Well, Steve, I'm going to put a little bit of a prettier face on this.

00:14:26.760 It's actually that America has charmed the world into choosing the dollar as the world's reserve asset.

00:14:33.660 Charmed the world.

00:14:34.500 Yeah, the U.S. so far has not had to use any bullying tactics.

00:14:38.100 In 1944, when the second of the two world wars was coming to a close, the 44 countries, the economic officials from 44 countries gathered in the United States and New Hampshire and by design said the U.S. is now going to be the leader.

00:14:53.820 This is the Bretton Woods conference.

00:14:54.520 This is Bretton Woods.

00:14:55.540 The IMF was created.

00:14:56.620 The World Bank was created.

00:14:58.180 The U.S. is the biggest shareholder because it's the biggest financier of both of those institutions.

00:15:03.420 The world realized that the U.S. is one has been the largest economy by then for almost six decades.

00:15:10.240 It had been bigger than the than Great Britain.

00:15:13.100 The sterling could no longer hold the reserve asset because reserve asset status because their destruction or empire, their physical destruction from World War Two, one and two.

00:15:23.760 Was this charm that this is the beginning of what we call the postwar international rules based order is one of the central tenets of MAGA that that needs to be.

00:15:33.420 Destroyed because it did not put America first.

00:15:35.400 But wasn't this because you had the you had the military alliances, you had NATO, everything that would undergird the security.

00:15:44.120 You had trade deals and commercial relationships.

00:15:46.180 But here in capital markets and currency, IMF and World Bank were set up and Bretton Woods was set up as the ultimate control mechanism would not be the United States Navy, would not be the United States Army.

00:15:57.080 They would always be there to undergird it.

00:15:59.020 But the central method of control, you say charm, would be the U.S. dollar.

00:16:05.400 Yeah.

00:16:05.720 And that's what I trace in the book.

00:16:07.240 I trace the history of showing how the U.S.'s rise as a global superpower is intertwined with the dollar's rise as the world's reserve asset.

00:16:16.720 Who were the geniuses that had, whether we agree with them today or not, who who were actually the architects of this part of it?

00:16:24.580 Because I would argue more than even the military part in the trade and GATT and everything like that, that this was the most brilliant because this actually gave you the ultimate control and had the greatest benefits to the country, at least in the in the first decades.

00:16:38.380 Who were the leading architects of this?

00:16:40.280 So there is Harry Dexter White, a senior treasury official at the time, Henry Morgenthau's top treasury official at the time.

00:16:48.080 They said Harry Dexter White's a quite, quite, quite controversial guy.

00:16:51.760 Yeah.

00:16:52.000 We're going to talk about the economics of it, though.

00:16:53.800 So they sat down and realized that America has the best fiscal trajectory.

00:16:57.700 But all the other countries looked at a couple of different options.

00:17:02.060 They debated for a while.

00:17:03.020 Should we have a shared currency?

00:17:04.220 Is there any way around just one country having this?

00:17:06.820 No, there really isn't because the U.S. has the biggest economy.

00:17:09.700 And the best fiscal trajectory.

00:17:11.880 And traditionally had been whoever's the hegemon, whether it's the British with the pound since the Napoleonic Wars or before that, I don't know, the Spanish or the Dutch, the Dutch, who are superpower even because of trade and the ability to navigate.

00:17:25.040 So it was always traditionally by custom and tradition, that power, that control commerce, et cetera.

00:17:31.220 We took over from essentially 125 year run by the British under the pound.

00:17:36.580 Yeah, and the U.S. dollar has been chosen over and over and over again.

00:17:40.040 It's still being chosen many times a day, but sometimes big movements, right?

00:17:44.320 In the 70s, Nixon abandoned the dollar gold peg, and that shook global finance.

00:17:51.360 Let's go to that because we made a big deal about this on the show, that great book, Three Days in August, I think about.

00:17:56.960 So how do we – we're on a roll post-war in the 50s and even the 60s.

00:18:03.480 We're on a complete roll.

00:18:05.200 We're the hegemon.

00:18:06.240 The world's essentially at peace, although we're kind of at a nuclear standoff.

00:18:09.760 You then have Vietnam, the Great Society. 0.97

00:18:11.780 Nixon, who is a Republican, in August, I think, of 1971, what was it that triggered this crisis at the time that Nixon and Connolly, these guys – it seems like over a weekend up at Camp David, their biggest thing, if you study it, was not that they were taking the dollar off the gold standard, but that they would have to cancel – they would want to give a speech to the nation that would preempt Bonanza on Sunday night, which was the number one show in the country.

00:18:39.360 And they were actually saying, we're going to get blowback on this.

00:18:42.400 What was it in the late 60s, early 70s that caused a Republican to go off the gold standard?

00:18:49.000 There were a lot of factors at play, but one of the key ones was that inflation was starting to take a hold of the economy, and there just weren't enough dollars to back up the gold peg.

00:18:59.980 It was no longer economically sustainable for the dollar to hold onto that peg, and that shook global finance and this new world order.

00:19:08.620 Everyone said, oh, Bretton Woods is over.

00:19:11.220 Maybe that specific –

00:19:12.460 Well, were people demanding – I think the rumor was the French – like, we're going to send some ships over, and we want our gold?

00:19:17.860 We want our gold, yeah.

00:19:19.180 Is that actually true?

00:19:20.220 People said, hey, we want our gold.

00:19:21.700 I don't know if that's true or not.

00:19:22.860 Yeah, I'm going to have to look into that.

00:19:24.480 But people have chosen the dollar over and over again that time, right?

00:19:27.960 Everyone's shaken up.

00:19:28.820 It was a secret.

00:19:29.620 All of a sudden, Nixon announces this.

00:19:31.100 But a couple of years later, a couple of weeks and months later, people are still hanging onto the dollar.

00:19:35.420 You zip forward into the 80s when there's a Plaza Accord and Louvre Accord to actively get countries together to weaken the currency.

00:19:43.380 People are still holding onto the dollar after 9-11.

00:19:46.120 And then the biggest sign was the global financial crisis.

00:19:48.580 It was an American-made crisis that spilled over into the rest of the world. 0.91

00:19:53.160 But still, people flocked to the U.S.

00:19:54.820 So you're saying in every different element, particularly like the Plaza Accord, where people – and this gets to the road to Rio, which just kind of kicks off the BRICS nations.

00:20:05.280 You're saying, hey, folks have tried this before.

00:20:07.560 Folks have said – but have you ever had a decline in the purchasing power of the dollar today?

00:20:13.520 I guess you're saying in the late 70s you had it with the monster inflation.

00:20:17.260 But is it our charm or they can't come up with an alternative?

00:20:22.700 It's both.

00:20:23.460 There is definitely no alternative.

00:20:24.940 Even now, even just two weeks ago, we have all these finance ministers and central bankers in Washington for the IMF spring meetings, the first ones under Trump's second presidency.

00:20:35.980 And no one is saying, OK, we're going to grab a hold and we're going to be the world's reserve asset.

00:20:39.440 No, the opposite is happening.

00:20:40.580 You have the BOE governor, Andrew Bailey, saying, no, no, no, everyone, this is overdone.

00:20:45.480 The Bank of England.

00:20:46.540 Bank of England.

00:20:48.020 All these calls that are – all this commentary that the dollar is power and those days are over, that commentary is overdone.

00:20:55.540 The French and German finance minister and the German central banker all said that the dollar – it is important.

00:21:03.080 The world see the dollar as the reserve asset.

00:21:05.780 We also haven't seen China say, OK, we're going to take on this role.

00:21:10.000 We're going to start to increase transparency and get rid of capital controls.

00:21:14.080 No one is stepping up to say we're going to do it.

00:21:16.020 Even the BRICS.

00:21:17.000 The BRICS have talked about since at least 2022, maybe earlier.

00:21:20.860 Let's get a shared common currency together.

00:21:23.160 We're going to find a way to circumvent the dollar and chip away at some of the dollar's power.

00:21:27.160 Even now, they're saying we're going to – we're the ones who are going to defend multilateralism, the current status quo.

00:21:33.700 We're going to defend it, which that same – that status quo is underpinned by the dollar.

00:21:39.160 What is driving them?

00:21:40.420 They just can't come up – because they all – they don't want to be this – beholden because the weaponization, once again, goes back to economic warfare.

00:21:48.920 At any time, we see right now with the Persians, right, with what's happening in Iran, the people like myself are saying we need to take the military option off the table. 0.98

00:21:58.620 We can't be sucked into another war, and we can't do verification.

00:22:01.800 We have to dismantle it.

00:22:03.760 The way we do that is really go to economic war with the mullahs. 0.98

00:22:07.160 That means cutting off the oil shipments coming out of the Straits of Hormuz.

00:22:12.120 It means really going to a sanctions and a secondary sanctions.

00:22:15.900 But that plays into the fact that the world is going to be beholden to what the United States wants to do as long as they have this exposure to the dollar.

00:22:24.520 Both the SWIFT system, which is internationalism, they can monitor every transaction that goes on in the world, and they can monitor it because eventually you've got to convert it into a dollar.

00:22:35.440 Aren't they sitting there going, why do we give the Americans this much control?

00:22:39.200 They are saying that.

00:22:40.200 And some of this, Steve, has to do with the fact that there's nothing wrong with the dollar losing some of that because here's number two.

00:22:52.100 The U.S. is way ahead of that.

00:22:54.100 There is no number two right now.

00:22:55.120 There is no number two.

00:22:55.560 That's why at workstations, they would talk about a basket of something new.

00:22:59.160 There would be gold.

00:23:00.020 I mean, it's very ephemeral of what they're trying to accomplish, right, because there is no currency in the world today to even come close to this.

00:23:07.040 No, and part of the reason is that investors are conditioned to want a reserve asset to be backed by a government and a strong democracy.

00:23:18.360 And you can't find that in this combination of the largest economy and strongest democracy.

00:23:24.580 Because you're saying we took it up from the Brits at the end of World War II.

00:23:28.000 They had had it since at least the early 19th century.

00:23:31.200 So you're looking at 200 years plus of having a democracy with a powerful military and business community.

00:23:39.500 And at the time, the city of London, which was the Wall Street of the world, just that alone, that continuity alone makes it makes its right custom and tradition.

00:23:49.540 People don't want to get off that.

00:23:50.760 They're comfortable with that.

00:23:51.940 Right.

00:23:52.140 Yeah, they're hooked.

00:23:53.100 It's a dollar addiction out there.

00:23:55.000 If you think about what happened in the aftermath of the 2022 Russia sanctions that the Biden administration led the world, right, half of the world's GDP joined the U.S. on in applying economic sanctions on Russia.

00:24:09.840 And the European sanctions were maybe more important because the euro was much more intertwined with Russian activities.

00:24:15.900 But the U.S. needed to lead that to get everyone along.

00:24:19.540 What happened there?

00:24:20.520 No one wanted a bunch of rubles, right?

00:24:25.100 Putin starts trading more oil with India, and India doesn't know what to do with all these rubles, and Putin doesn't know what to do with this pile of rupees because you can't exchange it the way you can exchange the dollar.

00:24:41.940 Would they rather take the currency because weren't output deals from the UAE and Saudi Arabia?

00:24:47.780 And, of course, this controversial one with the Persians and China all done away from the dollar is converted into dollars.

00:24:54.420 Weren't they all done as output deals that would be in the currency, and they would take the currency risk and try to hedge it?

00:24:59.880 Yeah.

00:25:00.040 So we've seen that there have been a chunk of transactions and maybe an increasing or expanding chunk of transactions that are taking place outside of the dollar.

00:25:08.400 There's nothing wrong with that.

00:25:09.600 There's nothing wrong with diversification.

00:25:11.620 If anything, it might benefit the U.S. a little bit to not have to sort of fund all of this.

00:25:17.580 That's what Trump is out there talking about, right?

00:25:19.620 He's saying that NATO members need to pony up a little bit.

00:25:23.300 Our deficits are huge.

00:25:24.780 We need to start to find ways to reduce that.

00:25:27.420 I'm going to get into the history of how this started and how we got here, plus we talk about deficits, where this is going to go, particularly with this.

00:25:34.340 It looks like inability of our political class to cut spending.

00:25:37.920 Birchgold.com, the end of the dollar empire.

00:25:40.720 For the last four years, we've tried to teach you all this with free installments.

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00:26:03.280 So make sure you go to Birchgold.com slash Bannon, the end of the dollar empire, and the Rio Reset.

00:26:10.940 Also, you get to talk to Philip Patrick and the team.

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00:26:30.060 How's that sound?

00:26:30.600 Short commercial break.

00:26:31.720 Back with Salia Motion in a moment.

00:26:34.200 I think you changed already.

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00:30:56.300 Welcome back.

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00:31:16.700 Remember, it is not the price of gold.

00:31:19.220 It is the process of how it got there.

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00:31:22.220 Understand why gold's been a hedge for 5,000 times of turbulence for 5,000 years of mankind's history.

00:31:28.420 Know that, and you'll start to understand how the world works.

00:31:33.200 You start the book off with an amazing story about Steve Mnuchin and just the very mention in Davos, our favorite.

00:31:41.980 We cover it every year.

00:31:43.020 People go crazy.

00:31:43.820 Just the very mention of not being a strong dollar, right, sends the world's capital markets because in there's two different ways you do say how the dollar is strong.

00:31:56.380 But why is it that everybody's associated since they bought into the system that they need to see a strong dollar, even if it has certain anti-competitive things for people in the United States?

00:32:06.780 It has to do with the fact that investors, businesses, when they're planning out the next couple of quarters, they want stability and predictability, and they need that from the world's largest economy, the one that owns a reserve asset, the one that has the most influential and powerful central bank.

00:32:24.180 They need to know that policymaking is going to be stable and predictable no matter what it is.

00:32:28.880 That's why today, since April 2nd, 2025, it's been really hard for traders and investors and businesses and foreign social banks.

00:32:36.820 For what we refer to as Liberation Day.

00:32:38.420 Liberation Day, sure.

00:32:39.360 You can call it that.

00:32:41.020 Remember, you're in a populist national show here.

00:32:45.020 Because they can't – although things have calmed down, the market – the headlines in mid-April is the worst since the Great Depression.

00:32:52.500 Things have calmed down since then.

00:32:54.420 Why? Because people have a better understanding of what's going on behind reciprocity, the non-tariff barriers.

00:33:00.920 Is that what you think it is?

00:33:01.880 Well, there's also that the 90-day pause came in showing that, okay, now there's going to be a little bit – a process.

00:33:08.500 We want to see what is the roadmap ahead.

00:33:10.060 We were big advocates of that.

00:33:11.300 Yeah.

00:33:11.540 And that's what a Treasury Secretary, a Treasury Department kind of – the goal is to instill some of that process, some of the predictability and stability that investors and financiers look for.

00:33:22.060 Hamilton County, that's where you're from?

00:33:24.420 Ohio.

00:33:24.920 Hamilton County, Ohio, one of the most important – in one of the most important states, at least politically, one of the most important counties.

00:33:32.720 It's ironic that it goes back to Alexander Hamilton, and Alexander Hamilton is actually central to your book.

00:33:39.060 Why is Hamilton such a towering giant in how he kind of thought this whole thing?

00:33:43.760 Very different from Jefferson, from my home state of the Commonwealth of Virginia, had this kind of bucolic yeoman agricultural democracy of kind of little guys, yeoman farmers in a perfect democracy.

00:33:59.240 But Hamilton saw the possibilities of a continental superpower, but really when we were just starting, an economic superpower.

00:34:06.360 Yeah, he was one of the founding fathers.

00:34:08.860 He was the first Treasury Secretary the United States had, and he was there to issue the first ever bond sale.

00:34:16.720 He financed, brokered the first loan that the United States ever had.

00:34:20.420 It was $50,000 in the cash value of the 1780s.

00:34:24.860 It came from the Bank of New York.

00:34:26.620 It still exists.

00:34:27.600 You can go to Bank of New York, Mellon, and have a look at some of those documents.

00:34:32.100 Which he was the founder, one of the founders of the Bank of New York.

00:34:34.020 Yeah, and he signed some of that paperwork.

00:34:36.140 You can go have a look at it.

00:34:37.220 I've seen it before, too.

00:34:38.780 He issued that, and he said that credit is the price of our liberty.

00:34:43.340 Because at the time, think about it.

00:34:45.220 The U.S. was very, very young.

00:34:47.160 Everyone is expecting this experiment in democracy with all these ideals of low taxes and no monarchy.

00:34:56.480 We fought against taxes.

00:34:58.860 Americans have always had a chip on the shoulder about taxes.

00:35:02.640 Exactly.

00:35:03.040 No monarchy.

00:35:04.100 We don't need a king and a queen.

00:35:05.420 Our electorate has the power.

00:35:07.100 So we had no manufacturing.

00:35:08.400 How did he envision that?

00:35:09.560 I mean, how did that?

00:35:10.300 Because credit would be tied to becoming a manufacturing power, right?

00:35:14.820 The farmers, because Jefferson, they had that huge fight in one of the first cabinet meetings.

00:35:19.540 When Jefferson gets back from revolutionary France, he tells Hamlin, he says,

00:35:23.320 I don't really understand what a secretary of treasury does.

00:35:27.220 Can you explain it to me?

00:35:28.160 And he gives him the big rap on credit and manufacture.

00:35:31.500 And Jefferson says, I hear you.

00:35:33.720 I see what you're saying.

00:35:34.580 But you're telling me that basically a farmer here or even a small guy with a business will be in hock to a stock jobber in New York City who's in hock to a British merchant bank.

00:35:44.840 He goes, what did we fight the revolution for?

00:35:47.260 We're in hock to the same guys that we broke off from.

00:35:50.280 What was Hamilton's response to that?

00:35:52.780 I don't know.

00:35:53.100 The point that Hamilton was trying to make when he said that credit is a national blessing, that our debt is a national blessing, is that you can take any dollar that the U.S. has and leverage it.

00:36:03.680 You can show that this country is burgeoning.

00:36:06.580 There's a lot of economic growth here.

00:36:07.900 There's a lot of potential.

00:36:08.980 So come invest in us so that we can use that debt to create more good.

00:36:12.880 And if we have to do it with all if we have to do it with all cash that we're generating or equity capital, we'll never expand.

00:36:18.120 Exactly.

00:36:18.620 You need debt just like he just like leverage by our guys today said or buying a house, just like you mortgage your house.

00:36:25.520 If you use leverage smartly, you can increase value and growth dramatically.

00:36:30.360 And that's the thing.

00:36:30.980 One thing we haven't talked about, Steve, yet is in the book.

00:36:32.840 I explain that every American is touched by the benefit and the privileges of living in a country that is the owner of the world's reserve asset.

00:36:41.840 Because the world is always investing in the dollar, always wants, has an insatiable appetite, no matter how many trillions of dollars of treasuries and bonds we sell, federal government bonds are sold here, everyone wants that.

00:36:55.500 That means the interest rate cost, the insurance premium on that debt is lower than it could be with any other fiscal profile of this country.

00:37:03.340 Because people need to own, people need dollars.

00:37:04.620 People need dollars.

00:37:05.100 And they buy those securities to get, yes.

00:37:07.600 So the credit, the interest rate on our credit card bill, auto loans, student loans, home mortgages, that interest rate is very low because the U.S. dollar is a world's reserve asset.

00:37:20.400 Uncharacteristically low.

00:37:21.360 If you didn't have that, it would be higher.

00:37:22.780 Now, in a situation where we seem like the political class cannot get control of spending, and here even President Trump's big, beautiful bill, because this show is the show that turfed out McCarthy for the deal he did with no debt ceiling limit and unlimited spending by Biden in those first two years.

00:37:42.020 We're quite concerned that in the big, beautiful bill, there hasn't really been tremendous cuts.

00:37:46.920 There's been $163 billion on the social side, but there's been not touching the Defense Department, over a trillion dollars.

00:37:54.280 It looks like, and we're the first ones to call it on the CR.

00:37:57.080 The CR this year, President Trump not inheriting Biden's budget in the House and folks not doing anything about it, we're going to have a $2 trillion deficit for this fiscal year.

00:38:06.360 It looks like, particularly with the populist tax cuts we want to have of no tax on Social Security and no tax on overtime, no tax on tips, right now this number looks like $2, $2.5 trillion.

00:38:18.180 So Scott Besant, as you're adding this to the debt, he's going to have to, on an annual basis, I don't know, sell $8, $9, $10 trillion of government securities, particularly yelling those guys did it short term.

00:38:30.840 We're going to do it, yeah. Is there the appetite, are you concerned that at some point you start to reach some sort of where you're going to get pushback?

00:38:39.140 Like, for instance, the Japanese, the Bank of Japan told the Financial Times, I think on Saturday, hey, look, we hear Trump with reciprocity and the non-terrorist barriers, and we're engaged with Besant.

00:38:50.020 We think we're going to get a deal done, at least the architecture.

00:38:52.200 But part of this discussion is going to be the trillion dollars of government securities we own, because we kind of see that you guys are going to come back for another bite.

00:39:01.060 Is this going to get to be a problem? Is this debt, and particularly people are taking this in dollar-denominated bonds?

00:39:08.020 The trajectory of U.S. debt right now has made a lot of people nervous.

00:39:13.340 You hear from Jamie Dimon and Mark Rowan and Ray Dalio and Ken Griffin and everyone below them.

00:39:20.480 Everyone is wondering, at what point is there a debt issuance from a Treasury sale that goes a little bit wrong?

00:39:27.100 Now, Congress is paying attention to this, too.

00:39:28.220 Well, hang on. Two weeks ago on that, before they announced the process, it was a Tuesday.

00:39:34.040 We had a little bit of disconnect in the 10-year – remember?

00:39:37.480 They had a – and that's where the market imploded, and I think Scott had to oversee – put hands on a normal 10-year and said everything was fine.

00:39:46.360 It was oversubscribed.

00:39:48.200 But this is what Ray Dalio, who's no MAGA guy and no friend of the show, and we play his clips all the time.

00:39:53.400 He's saying, hey, we're one failed auction away from a crisis.

00:39:57.760 This is my point.

00:39:58.760 Aren't we hurtling towards this, and now we have smart guys warning about it?

00:40:03.260 But once it happens, it's too late to kind of reverse this, is it not?

00:40:07.480 I don't know. No one knows.

00:40:09.280 We've never been in a situation where there's this much financial technology, this large of a country with this much of a hold over global finance, and then an auction goes awry and traders panic, right?

00:40:20.200 Traders range from 22-year-old on up.

00:40:23.000 They don't know necessarily – they're not thinking.

00:40:25.420 They haven't read all the books.

00:40:26.460 They're smart people.

00:40:27.260 And they haven't gone through a cycle.

00:40:28.400 They haven't gone through a tough cycle.

00:40:29.540 Exactly.

00:40:30.540 So this is why the conclusion of my book is that a lot of people say, oh, China and Russia, they could do something that shakes the U.S.

00:40:39.940 and makes the dollar not the reserve asset or makes the U.S. not as powerful as it is.

00:40:44.380 But I actually end the book saying that it's actually up to the U.S.

00:40:48.160 It's up to the electorate to choose leaders that care about these issues and to try to call for a cut in deficits but also understand what's going on in the economy.

00:41:01.300 But it's up to the U.S. to maintain its fiscal house in order so that no one else has this power.

00:41:09.540 So that's it.

00:41:10.560 We argue here all the time that the elites in this country have breached their fiduciary responsibility to the nation, to the country.

00:41:17.780 Because in the bailouts of 2008, as Christopher Leonard showed so brilliantly in Lords of Easy Money, this is why you've had the greatest concentration of wealth first during that period for the bailouts, then later during the pandemic.

00:41:29.120 So now we have the greatest concentration of wealth.

00:41:31.500 I mean, we essentially have a capitalist system with almost no capitalists.

00:41:34.900 It's 75% or 80% of the people in this country, the hardworking people in Hamilton County that have been there for generation and generation own almost nothing.

00:41:42.940 And this is the problem is that you have a political class that refuses, I think, to address the central – this is why your book is so powerful.

00:41:52.000 I'd like to give a copy to everybody up here.

00:41:54.100 There's a handful of books if people read it and say, hey, not only do we have an emergency, but once you get into this crisis, all of your easy alternatives are gone and you're going to be down to – like right now, $163 billion of nondiscretionary cuts, which will never happen.

00:42:13.200 They've already rejected them up on Capitol Hill.

00:42:15.120 I mean, heck, the president is trying to get PBS and NPR.

00:42:18.820 Leave the politics aside.

00:42:20.100 It's a couple of billion dollars.

00:42:21.360 It's nothing, and they can't even get their arms around that.

00:42:25.020 It's the scale of this thing.

00:42:27.300 Doesn't it worry you?

00:42:28.460 You're one of the leaders in thinking through this currency and its geopolitical impact.

00:42:33.020 Doesn't it concern you that it's the political class here that fails to take the leadership that the country – because people in Hamilton County don't know.

00:42:41.220 I mean it's one of the reasons the show is so popular.

00:42:42.820 We expose people to these powerful converging forces that drive global politics, which is really about money and the economy, and that's really the intersection of power.

00:42:53.400 And people see their eyes open, but they don't have time to do it.

00:42:57.040 They're working two jobs right now.

00:42:58.460 As you said, the biggest thing is how do you survive in an economy where the prices keep going up?

00:43:04.800 Isn't it incumbent upon our leaders to kind of take that leadership?

00:43:09.440 Look, I think the electorate is very powerful in the U.S.

00:43:12.560 I think as long as the electorate can understand that there will be painful cuts in budget spending that will affect everyday Americans, meaning that their lawmaker might have to lose an election because they voted in support of some budget cuts that maybe constituents weren't happy about.

00:43:31.840 So it's this concept of short-term pain for long-term gain that right now if we can accept some of the budget cuts, then it's better for future generations.

00:43:42.160 But that starts with voters.

00:43:44.000 I'm not asking you to make a political judgment because I realize you're apolitical in your job of what you do in your reporting and in your book.

00:43:50.360 But when you think back to Hamilton County and those signs you saw in 15 and 16, which other people didn't pick on, pick up, in that mindset of those people, the same decent folks are now 10 years into this experiment, right?

00:44:05.720 And now with essentially every day we pick up the financial times to walk people through it.

00:44:10.320 Now this huge thing on tariffs and the commerce part and the codification of commerce with trade deals, et cetera.

00:44:16.840 In their perspective, do you think they fully understand now how big a deal this is that now you combine economics with finance and capital markets and we have a period in world history that's every bit as fraught with danger as around the Second World War and particularly the end of the Second World War?

00:44:39.140 I do think that there is a lot more tolerance for pain across America.

00:44:43.720 We learned that in February of 2022 when Biden imposed the economic sanctions on Russia and gasoline prices across America went up and polls showed that Americans were willing to pay a little bit more at the gasoline pump for in the spirit of helping a democracy in Europe and trying to make sure Europe doesn't blow up into another world and into another big war.

00:45:10.680 And now we're seeing that with Trump's tariffs, that there's also, again, a little bit more of a steeliness in the electorate that we can handle this.

00:45:19.600 Maybe it's because the global financial crisis and 9-11 is a recent enough memory that people know that, OK, we're going to have to suffer through this, particularly after COVID.

00:45:27.580 But the 2008, the financial collapse, the causes of it, the converging factors of it, and particularly what was done as a result of the bailouts, right?

00:45:38.220 And it's kind of bushing these guys, you know, with the political class, cause a problem.

00:45:43.140 Obama, and he's kind of – we say all the time he's kind of a tragic figure.

00:45:46.060 He came in as an anti-war populist.

00:45:48.360 He immediately had this financial implosion.

00:45:50.720 And Geithner and Bernanke, all these guys are kind of neoliberal neocons.

00:45:55.080 It's a classic neoliberal save the system.

00:45:57.320 We'll do anything to save – Christopher Lennon's book is shocking.

00:45:59.680 And going back and reading actual – the minutes of the governors of the Federal Reserve to say – it was, I think, Dick Fisher in Dallas who was sitting there going, guys, if we take this to zero negative interest rates, it's the working class and middle class's country are going to be decimated on capital formation.

00:46:17.100 They're essentially going to finance a bailout of people who knew better.

00:46:20.400 And people said, yeah, I got it, but we got to be unanimous for everybody who has to vote.

00:46:25.340 Do you think that the American people are also looking a little bit at this with jaundice eye and saying, hey, every time something like this comes up, they're looking to me for sacrifice.

00:46:34.600 Why?

00:46:35.000 You just see continual greater concentration of wealth.

00:46:37.820 Yeah, that's an excellent point.

00:46:39.020 There's a huge income inequality problem in the United States.

00:46:42.760 And a bigger asset inequality.

00:46:44.680 Yeah.

00:46:45.040 The income inequality I think also misses the mark.

00:46:47.260 I tell Bernie Sanders, you guys, Tom, income inequality, and you can solve that with tax structure and particularly our populace tax hit somewhat.

00:46:55.280 The bigger gap is asset difference.

00:46:57.700 You have a capitalist system with essentially very few capitalists.

00:47:01.520 75 percent of the country doesn't own anything.

00:47:03.660 But that's why I think future leaders need to actually go across the United States and understand the electorate, right?

00:47:10.180 I kind of like to think about it as the empty glassers.

00:47:12.540 We've always looked at the economy, especially in the decade after the financial crisis, during that recovery, as a glass half full.

00:47:20.840 Look at all this recovery.

00:47:22.600 So many people have recovered.

00:47:23.760 But if you look at the breakdown of how Trump won the election, he won in the states where those states stayed in a recession for much longer than the country as a whole did after the Great Recession ended for the country.

00:47:39.460 It continued for a lot of people who went for Trump.

00:47:42.340 So you have to think about there's a glass half full.

00:47:44.460 Let's be positive.

00:47:45.360 This is why every morning after I took over the campaign, we redirected and spent more time piercing the blue shell.

00:47:51.800 Morning Joe would sit there and mock us.

00:47:53.500 These guys don't know what they're doing.

00:47:54.640 And you could tell demographic, particularly in Ohio, around Akron and Dayton, places like that, the demographic were like Western Pennsylvania, were like areas of Wisconsin, Michigan, and even Iowa.

00:48:05.360 We could see that shifting on Democrats and independents who were open to the fact of having a guy that had no traditional experience whatsoever because he was talking about economic nationalism or economic patriotism.

00:48:17.760 I said, finally, this guy speaks for me.

00:48:19.720 And this is the reason that I wanted to write this book, the reason I wrote it this way.

00:48:23.340 I take readers into Weirton, West Virginia.

00:48:27.880 I take you to Moraine, Ohio, where I show readers how decisions made in the halls of power, at the Treasury Department, in Congress, at the White House, at the Federal Reserve.

00:48:36.440 Impacts your life.

00:48:37.240 Impacts your life if you're from outside of Dayton, Ohio.

00:48:40.420 Yes.

00:48:40.560 This is how it affects you.

00:48:41.840 What did you, we've got a couple of minutes, what did you learn about yourself in researching and writing this book?

00:48:47.880 I realized, one, that you don't have to have an elite university background to write a smart book.

00:48:57.900 I realized that being, diversity of thought is very important.

00:49:02.280 I think diversity of all kinds is great, but I think it should be driven by diversity of thought.

00:49:07.620 I grew up in Ohio and went overseas and somehow landed in Washington.

00:49:13.560 You came from classic flyover country.

00:49:16.020 Yeah, and then also that all social upheaval and this really fierce rhetoric that we hear from people, that we should look past the words and try to figure out what is the emotion and what is the economic pain that probably led to this.

00:49:33.860 Because economic pain is usually the root of many social and political upheavals.

00:49:38.400 When you're in places like the city of London and areas of Europe and the Davos places you've had to go and, of course, Washington, D.C., do they have any real understanding of flyover country, of Hamilton, Ohio?

00:49:55.020 No, they really don't.

00:49:56.100 They think that America is basically L.A. and New York.

00:49:59.040 And they say, oh, well, I don't know how you live in the U.S.

00:50:00.960 New York is so unsafe.

00:50:01.840 And I say, it is a huge, have you looked on the map, like how giant this country is?

00:50:05.460 I'm from this part here in the center.

00:50:08.400 Where do people go to get this book?

00:50:10.620 Where do people go to get your writings?

00:50:11.920 What's your social media?

00:50:13.200 I'm at Saleh Mohsen on Twitter.

00:50:15.100 You can buy my book on Amazon.com, Paper Soldiers, or wherever you buy books.

00:50:19.160 Fantastic.

00:50:19.640 It's been great to have you.

00:50:20.580 Thank you so much.

00:50:20.800 I think very enlightening.

00:50:21.940 I tell the audience is very excited.

00:50:23.640 This book, How the Weaponization of the Dollar Changed the World Order, it's something we're

00:50:30.600 going to refer to a lot.

00:50:31.760 Christopher Leonard, the great Christopher Leonard, says, if you only read one book to

00:50:35.180 understand American economic and political power in the world today, it should be this 0.97

00:50:38.940 one.

00:50:39.440 Thank you so much for joining us in the War Room.

00:50:41.300 We're going to be back.

00:50:42.320 We're going to leave you with the right stuff.

00:50:44.140 We'll be back tomorrow morning at 10 a.m.

00:50:47.100 Eastern Daylight Time.

00:50:48.080 We'll see you then in the War Room.

00:50:49.340 Thank you.

00:50:53.640 We'll be right back.

00:51:23.640 We'll be right back.

00:51:53.640 What if he had the brightest mind in the War Room, delivering critical financial research

00:52:02.280 every month?

00:52:03.800 Steve Bannon here.

00:52:04.940 War Room listeners know Jim Rickards.

00:52:06.620 I love this guy.

00:52:08.080 He's our wise man.

00:52:09.060 A former CIA, Pentagon, and White House advisor with an unmatched grasp of geopolitics and capital

00:52:14.700 markets.

00:52:15.200 Jim predicted Trump's electoral college victory exactly 312 to 226, down to the actual number

00:52:23.900 itself.

00:52:24.460 Now he's issuing a dire warning about April 11th, a moment that could define Trump's presidency

00:52:30.500 in your financial future.

00:52:32.140 His latest book, Money GPT, exposes how AI is setting the stage for financial chaos, bank

00:52:39.060 runs at lightning speeds, algorithm-driven crashes, and even threats to national security.

00:52:44.320 Right now, War Room members get a free copy of Money GPT when they sign up for Strategic

00:52:49.880 Intelligence.

00:52:50.480 This is Jim's flagship financial newsletter, Strategic Intelligence.

00:52:55.820 I read it.

00:52:56.840 You should read it.

00:52:57.920 Time is running out.

00:52:58.760 Go to RickardsWarRoom.com.

00:53:00.600 That's all one word, Rickards War Room, Rickards with an S. Go now and claim your free book.

00:53:06.400 That's RickardsWarRoom.com.

00:53:08.860 Do it today.

00:53:09.520 Hey, War Room.

00:53:12.260 Hope you're all doing well.

00:53:13.380 My name is Trevor Comstock.

00:53:14.760 I'm one of the co-creators of Sacred Human, and I wanted to share just a little bit more

00:53:18.500 about our brand for those who may not know of us yet.

00:53:21.260 But about six months ago, we decided to launch Sacred Human with really the simple mission

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00:53:32.440 So unfortunately, as many of you know, a lot of these big corporate supplements will

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00:54:19.120 And cheers to your health.

Bannon's War Room - May 05, 2025

WarRoom Battleground EP 761： A Special： Paper Soldier

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