In this episode of The War Room, Stephen K. Besson joins me to talk about his recent trip to Davos and his thoughts on the Davos Global Conference with Mike Milken. We also discuss his new book, Paper Soldiers: How to Build a More Abundant America, which is out now.
00:00:27.460Throw 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.
00:00:40.540Each time the American economy gets knocked down, it gets back up again.
00:00:45.500And it gets back up even stronger than it was before.
00:00:52.300Indeed, the entire history can be distilled into just five words, up and to the right.
00:01:00.780On a long-term horizon, it's never a bad time to invest in America, but especially now.
00:01:07.140The 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.
00:01:16.540Come with us so we can build a more abundant America together.
00:01:20.980On President Trump's first day in office, he vowed to usher in a new golden age for our country.
00:01:28.840A golden age America deserves a golden age economy.
00:01:36.320So for the past hundred days, we've been preparing the soil.
00:01:39.780We 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.
00:01:51.480Next, we harvest, and we want you to harvest with us.
00:01:56.760America is the shelling point of global finance.
00:02:00.520We have the world's reserve currency and the deepest and most liquid capital markets and the strongest property rights.
00:02:07.740For 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.
00:02:20.300The President believes we can achieve more together.
00:02:24.280This is the abundant vision he has for the future.
00:05:13.280We 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.
00:05:19.580In 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.
00:05:28.320But 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.
00:05:37.380If you only read one book to understand American economic and political power in the world today, this should be the one.
00:05:44.820Talk to us, why did you get interested in this topic, Scott Besson, your understanding of this?
00:06:18.640How 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.
00:06:30.760How do you get into business journalism?
00:06:32.500I mean, you're writing now at the highest levels of the most powerful economy of the world.
00:06:37.440And 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.
00:06:46.280How 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?
00:06:54.900So 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.
00:07:05.900I 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.
00:07:29.700So I kind of decided once Trump was elected in November, and everyone was quite surprised.
00:07:49.120I mean, Ohio tends to predict the next president.
00:07:52.380A lot of that comes down to 120,000 votes in Hamilton County, which is where I'm from.
00:07:57.160I was there four or five weeks before Election Day, and I only saw Trump sign.
00:08:02.700So 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.
00:08:11.740The 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.
00:08:37.160Did anybody in that – in your life at the time understand the profound nature of that vote for those people in Hamilton County?
00:08:51.340You're still – you know, you're waiting for when the bellwether state no longer predicts the next president.
00:08:55.900I 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.
00:09:07.540It was really hard to see that, but he saw it, and he kind of showed the rest of the world.
00:09:11.160And 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.
00:09:27.040But Buy America and Friendshoring is very similar to America First.
00:09:31.920Even 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.
00:09:43.640Ro Khanna's concept of really the economic nationalism that we propose, Ro and the folks say call it economic patriotism.
00:09:50.980And he has gone back to Ohio to do that tour a couple of times to pitch that.
00:09:57.980The 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.
00:10:09.740So 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.
00:10:17.960They'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.
00:10:33.560What is it about us being the prime reserve currency that sets the world order?
00:10:41.900Before 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?
00:10:48.960It means that the world is pretty much beholden to the United States.
00:10:54.300Everyone is very, very exposed financially, economically, geopolitically to what the U.S. decides to do.
00:11:02.760So 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.
00:11:16.000There'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.
00:11:22.880That innovation has also driven a lot of economic growth.
00:11:26.580The other thing is that we're able to outsource or sort of push out our foreign policy and geopolitical agenda.
00:11:34.720Now, when we talk about weaponization of the dollar, that is specifically talking about economic sanctions.
00:11:40.260U.S. economic sanctions were kind of barely used until 9-11 came.
00:11:44.840I 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.
00:11:59.260It 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.
00:12:22.400And choke off any of that terrorist financing so that you can say you are not allowed to use the dollar to hurt America.
00:12:29.600That's where the weaponization begins.
00:12:31.420And since 9-11, we've seen more and more that America doesn't want to go to war.
00:12:37.260Well, we call it, particularly if you look at the way the Chinese Communist Party and Sun Tzu look at it, kinetic war.
00:12:43.320When 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.
00:13:02.760That'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.
00:13:27.500So we're going to use economic sanctions and maybe not even use them.
00:13:30.300Maybe it's just talking about using that.
00:13:32.440I want to go back in time, how the world got in this situation, because correct me if I'm wrong.
00:13:39.000I 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.
00:13:53.640And I think your book says two-thirds or 75 percent of all government debt by foreign governments that are issued are dollar-dominated.
00:14:01.420So the world is captured by the dollar.
00:14:07.540You 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.
00:14:34.500Yeah, the U.S. so far has not had to use any bullying tactics.
00:14:38.100In 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.
00:14:58.180The U.S. is the biggest shareholder because it's the biggest financier of both of those institutions.
00:15:03.420The world realized that the U.S. is one has been the largest economy by then for almost six decades.
00:15:10.240It had been bigger than the than Great Britain.
00:15:13.100The 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.
00:15:23.760Was 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.
00:15:33.420Destroyed because it did not put America first.
00:15:35.400But wasn't this because you had the you had the military alliances, you had NATO, everything that would undergird the security.
00:15:44.120You had trade deals and commercial relationships.
00:15:46.180But 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.
00:15:57.080They would always be there to undergird it.
00:15:59.020But the central method of control, you say charm, would be the U.S. dollar.
00:16:07.240I 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.
00:16:16.720Who were the geniuses that had, whether we agree with them today or not, who who were actually the architects of this part of it?
00:16:24.580Because 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.
00:16:38.380Who were the leading architects of this?
00:16:40.280So there is Harry Dexter White, a senior treasury official at the time, Henry Morgenthau's top treasury official at the time.
00:16:48.080They said Harry Dexter White's a quite, quite, quite controversial guy.
00:17:11.880And 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.
00:17:25.040So it was always traditionally by custom and tradition, that power, that control commerce, et cetera.
00:17:31.220We took over from essentially 125 year run by the British under the pound.
00:17:36.580Yeah, and the U.S. dollar has been chosen over and over and over again.
00:17:40.040It's still being chosen many times a day, but sometimes big movements, right?
00:17:44.320In the 70s, Nixon abandoned the dollar gold peg, and that shook global finance.
00:17:51.360Let'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.
00:17:56.960So how do we – we're on a roll post-war in the 50s and even the 60s.
00:18:06.240The world's essentially at peace, although we're kind of at a nuclear standoff.
00:18:09.760You then have Vietnam, the Great Society.
00:18:11.780Nixon, 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.
00:18:39.360And they were actually saying, we're going to get blowback on this.
00:18:42.400What was it in the late 60s, early 70s that caused a Republican to go off the gold standard?
00:18:49.000There 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.
00:18:59.980It was no longer economically sustainable for the dollar to hold onto that peg, and that shook global finance and this new world order.
00:19:08.620Everyone said, oh, Bretton Woods is over.
00:19:54.820So 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.
00:20:05.280You're saying, hey, folks have tried this before.
00:20:07.560Folks have said – but have you ever had a decline in the purchasing power of the dollar today?
00:20:13.520I guess you're saying in the late 70s you had it with the monster inflation.
00:20:17.260But is it our charm or they can't come up with an alternative?
00:20:24.940Even 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.
00:20:35.980And no one is saying, OK, we're going to grab a hold and we're going to be the world's reserve asset.
00:21:40.420They 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.
00:21:48.920At 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.
00:21:58.620We can't be sucked into another war, and we can't do verification.
00:22:03.760The way we do that is really go to economic war with the mullahs.
00:22:07.160That means cutting off the oil shipments coming out of the Straits of Hormuz.
00:22:12.120It means really going to a sanctions and a secondary sanctions.
00:22:15.900But 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.
00:22:24.520Both 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.
00:22:35.440Aren't they sitting there going, why do we give the Americans this much control?
00:23:00.020I 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.
00:23:07.040No, 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.
00:23:18.360And you can't find that in this combination of the largest economy and strongest democracy.
00:23:24.580Because you're saying we took it up from the Brits at the end of World War II.
00:23:28.000They had had it since at least the early 19th century.
00:23:31.200So you're looking at 200 years plus of having a democracy with a powerful military and business community.
00:23:39.500And 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.
00:23:55.000If 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.
00:24:09.840And the European sanctions were maybe more important because the euro was much more intertwined with Russian activities.
00:24:15.900But the U.S. needed to lead that to get everyone along.
00:24:20.520No one wanted a bunch of rubles, right?
00:24:25.100Putin 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.
00:24:41.940Would they rather take the currency because weren't output deals from the UAE and Saudi Arabia?
00:24:47.780And, of course, this controversial one with the Persians and China all done away from the dollar is converted into dollars.
00:24:54.420Weren'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?
00:25:00.040So 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.
00:25:24.780We need to start to find ways to reduce that.
00:25:27.420I'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.
00:25:34.340It looks like inability of our political class to cut spending.
00:25:37.920Birchgold.com, the end of the dollar empire.
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00:25:45.200The seventh free installment is The Road to the Rio Reset.
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00:31:43.820Just 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.
00:31:56.380But 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?
00:32:06.780It 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.
00:32:24.180They need to know that policymaking is going to be stable and predictable no matter what it is.
00:32:28.880That's why today, since April 2nd, 2025, it's been really hard for traders and investors and businesses and foreign social banks.
00:32:36.820For what we refer to as Liberation Day.
00:33:11.540And 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.
00:33:22.060Hamilton County, that's where you're from?
00:33:24.920Hamilton County, Ohio, one of the most important – in one of the most important states, at least politically, one of the most important counties.
00:33:32.720It's ironic that it goes back to Alexander Hamilton, and Alexander Hamilton is actually central to your book.
00:33:39.060Why is Hamilton such a towering giant in how he kind of thought this whole thing?
00:33:43.760Very 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.
00:33:59.240But Hamilton saw the possibilities of a continental superpower, but really when we were just starting, an economic superpower.
00:34:06.360Yeah, he was one of the founding fathers.
00:34:08.860He was the first Treasury Secretary the United States had, and he was there to issue the first ever bond sale.
00:34:16.720He financed, brokered the first loan that the United States ever had.
00:34:20.420It was $50,000 in the cash value of the 1780s.
00:35:34.580But 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.
00:35:44.840He goes, what did we fight the revolution for?
00:35:47.260We're in hock to the same guys that we broke off from.
00:35:53.100The 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.
00:36:03.680You can show that this country is burgeoning.
00:36:06.580There's a lot of economic growth here.
00:36:30.980One thing we haven't talked about, Steve, yet is in the book.
00:36:32.840I 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.
00:36:41.840Because 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.
00:36:55.500That 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.
00:37:03.340Because people need to own, people need dollars.
00:37:05.100And they buy those securities to get, yes.
00:37:07.600So 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.
00:37:21.360If you didn't have that, it would be higher.
00:37:22.780Now, 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.
00:37:42.020We're quite concerned that in the big, beautiful bill, there hasn't really been tremendous cuts.
00:37:46.920There's been $163 billion on the social side, but there's been not touching the Defense Department, over a trillion dollars.
00:37:54.280It looks like, and we're the first ones to call it on the CR.
00:37:57.080The 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.
00:38:06.360It 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.
00:38:18.180So 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.
00:38:30.840We'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?
00:38:39.140Like, 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.
00:38:50.020We think we're going to get a deal done, at least the architecture.
00:38:52.200But 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.
00:39:01.060Is this going to get to be a problem? Is this debt, and particularly people are taking this in dollar-denominated bonds?
00:39:08.020The trajectory of U.S. debt right now has made a lot of people nervous.
00:39:13.340You hear from Jamie Dimon and Mark Rowan and Ray Dalio and Ken Griffin and everyone below them.
00:39:20.480Everyone is wondering, at what point is there a debt issuance from a Treasury sale that goes a little bit wrong?
00:39:27.100Now, Congress is paying attention to this, too.
00:39:28.220Well, hang on. Two weeks ago on that, before they announced the process, it was a Tuesday.
00:39:34.040We had a little bit of disconnect in the 10-year – remember?
00:39:37.480They 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.
00:40:09.280We'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?
00:40:30.540So 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.
00:40:39.940and makes the dollar not the reserve asset or makes the U.S. not as powerful as it is.
00:40:44.380But I actually end the book saying that it's actually up to the U.S.
00:40:48.160It'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.
00:41:01.300But it's up to the U.S. to maintain its fiscal house in order so that no one else has this power.
00:41:10.560We argue here all the time that the elites in this country have breached their fiduciary responsibility to the nation, to the country.
00:41:17.780Because 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.
00:41:29.120So now we have the greatest concentration of wealth.
00:41:31.500I mean, we essentially have a capitalist system with almost no capitalists.
00:41:34.900It'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.
00:41:42.940And 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.
00:41:52.000I'd like to give a copy to everybody up here.
00:41:54.100There'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.
00:42:13.200They've already rejected them up on Capitol Hill.
00:42:15.120I mean, heck, the president is trying to get PBS and NPR.
00:42:28.460You're one of the leaders in thinking through this currency and its geopolitical impact.
00:42:33.020Doesn'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.
00:42:41.220I mean it's one of the reasons the show is so popular.
00:42:42.820We 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.
00:42:53.400And people see their eyes open, but they don't have time to do it.
00:42:58.460As you said, the biggest thing is how do you survive in an economy where the prices keep going up?
00:43:04.800Isn't it incumbent upon our leaders to kind of take that leadership?
00:43:09.440Look, I think the electorate is very powerful in the U.S.
00:43:12.560I 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.
00:43:31.840So 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.
00:43:44.000I'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.
00:43:50.360But 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?
00:44:05.720And now with essentially every day we pick up the financial times to walk people through it.
00:44:10.320Now this huge thing on tariffs and the commerce part and the codification of commerce with trade deals, et cetera.
00:44:16.840In 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?
00:44:39.140I do think that there is a lot more tolerance for pain across America.
00:44:43.720We 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.
00:45:10.680And 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.
00:45:19.600Maybe 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.
00:45:27.580But 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?
00:45:38.220And it's kind of bushing these guys, you know, with the political class, cause a problem.
00:45:43.140Obama, and he's kind of – we say all the time he's kind of a tragic figure.
00:45:48.360He immediately had this financial implosion.
00:45:50.720And Geithner and Bernanke, all these guys are kind of neoliberal neocons.
00:45:55.080It's a classic neoliberal save the system.
00:45:57.320We'll do anything to save – Christopher Lennon's book is shocking.
00:45:59.680And 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.
00:46:17.100They're essentially going to finance a bailout of people who knew better.
00:46:20.400And people said, yeah, I got it, but we got to be unanimous for everybody who has to vote.
00:46:25.340Do 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.
00:46:45.040The income inequality I think also misses the mark.
00:46:47.260I tell Bernie Sanders, you guys, Tom, income inequality, and you can solve that with tax structure and particularly our populace tax hit somewhat.
00:47:23.760But 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.
00:47:39.460It continued for a lot of people who went for Trump.
00:47:42.340So you have to think about there's a glass half full.
00:47:45.360This is why every morning after I took over the campaign, we redirected and spent more time piercing the blue shell.
00:47:51.800Morning Joe would sit there and mock us.
00:47:53.500These guys don't know what they're doing.
00:47:54.640And 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.
00:48:05.360We 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.
00:48:17.760I said, finally, this guy speaks for me.
00:48:19.720And this is the reason that I wanted to write this book, the reason I wrote it this way.
00:48:23.340I take readers into Weirton, West Virginia.
00:48:27.880I 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.
00:48:41.840What did you, we've got a couple of minutes, what did you learn about yourself in researching and writing this book?
00:48:47.880I realized, one, that you don't have to have an elite university background to write a smart book.
00:48:57.900I realized that being, diversity of thought is very important.
00:49:02.280I think diversity of all kinds is great, but I think it should be driven by diversity of thought.
00:49:07.620I grew up in Ohio and went overseas and somehow landed in Washington.
00:49:13.560You came from classic flyover country.
00:49:16.020Yeah, 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.
00:49:33.860Because economic pain is usually the root of many social and political upheavals.
00:49:38.400When 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?