The Federal Reserve announces three potential rate hikes next year, Joe Biden can t convince Joe Manchin to join his suicide squad, and Nancy Pelosi defends insider trading for Congress people. Today s show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Don t let Big Tech track what you do, anonymize your web browsing, and protect your data. Use the promo code: "ELISSA" to receive $5 and get an extra 3 months for free. You get 5% off your first month with discount code: CRIMINALS at checkout when you sign up for ExpressVPN and get 10% off for the rest of the year. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms. Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your fellow podcasting friends! Ben Shapiro is the host of The Ben Shapiro Show, a podcast that focuses on economics, politics, and pop culture. His latest novel Other Words For Smoke is out now and is available for pre-order on Amazon Prime and Vimeo worldwide. Click here to get a free copy of the book, "The Mythology: The Economics of Mythology and the Economics of Trump" wherever you get your copy of The Mythology of Trump's New York Times bestseller, The Five Most Powerful Man in paperback or Kindle Fire HDX. It's also available on Kindle, iBook, Paperback, and Audible, and also on Audible. The Economist, The Economist and The Financial Times, wherever else you get a good deal, and you can get a copy of His newest book, The Audible paperback edition, $99.99, and The Economist will be listening to the podcast. . It will be out in paperback, and all other good books, too all over the internet. and will be shipping direct to you on 27 other places if you do not have a good copy of this podcasting service including The Economist s paperback edition or your local address is available on the internet , and the paperback edition will be available in paperback The New York City, the Audible service, and or any other good deal will be in the next two weeks at your local airport will have it on your local Best Fiends shipping address
00:01:32.000Well, it looks as though the reality of the financial situation is beginning to sink in.
00:01:39.000According to the Washington Post, the Federal Reserve made its strongest move yet toward tackling inflation on Wednesday, moving up the timeline for what could be as many as three interest rate hikes next year.
00:01:50.000Okay, so if you're president of the United States, generally speaking, the last thing you want is the Federal Reserve hiking interest rates right before a midterm election.
00:01:58.000That's pretty much the worst thing that could happen, except for it happening in your re-elect year yourself.
00:02:03.000But when the Federal Reserve hikes interest rates, this makes it more expensive for banks to take on debt.
00:02:08.000When banks can't take on debt, they can't lend to you at lower rates.
00:02:10.000Your mortgage rates go up, your loan rates go up.
00:02:12.000It means less velocity in terms of the money flow in the economy.
00:02:16.000Well, when you've got inflation, the Federal Reserve, of course, has to raise those interest rates because You have price inflation and wage inflation and it's spiraling out of control.
00:02:26.000It's harder for people to actually get commodities.
00:02:28.000Production is not keeping up with demand and all the rest of this.
00:02:31.000And so the Federal Reserve has to cut back on some of that to prevent these giant bubbles from happening.
00:02:35.000Well, the problem is that the statistical ramifications of that for the administration in power are usually quite dire because whenever you ramp up the interest rates, They generally work in inverse proportion to the unemployment rates.
00:02:47.000So usually when you ramp up the interest rates, that means that if you're a small business and you've been taking out loans, you're getting an easy credit, well now you have to consider the fact that those loans are more expensive.
00:02:57.000That might mean you need to cut back a little bit.
00:02:58.000You might need to lay some people off.
00:03:00.000So typically speaking, you get a jump in unemployment when you have a spike in interest rates.
00:03:03.000This is what happened in the early 1980s.
00:03:05.000If you look at the 1982 elections, for example, the Reagan administration In 1982, there were a bunch of interest rate hikes, and the interest rate hikes at the very beginning from Paul Volcker were intended to create pain.
00:03:21.000The goal was to drive the interest rates down because we had stagflation.
00:03:27.000Democrats picked up a seat in the midterm elections in 1982.
00:03:32.000They picked up one seat in the Senate, and they picked up 26 seats in the House.
00:03:37.000And that was largely a result of the interest rate hikes that had happened before.
00:03:40.000Now, by 1983, the economy was booming again.
00:03:44.000And the reason that it was starting to boom again is because those interest rate hikes had brought back into some sort of stasis the actual economic growth rates, right?
00:03:54.000Basically, the real economic growth was allowed to boom because Ronald Reagan cut regulation and he cut taxes and he lowered the interest rates.
00:04:00.000And now the money had a solid basis, a solid footing.
00:04:03.000But Joe Biden isn't doing any of those things.
00:04:04.000So the likely outcome of this is that you're going to see the interest rates spike.
00:04:08.000And when the interest rates spike, you're likely to see an increase in the unemployment You're likely to see a slowing economy.
00:04:13.000And unlike the Reagan administration, which was focused in on making it easier to do business while solidifying the dollar, now you're solidifying the dollar, which means that credit is less cheap.
00:04:22.000But at the same time, you are also increasing regulation and increasing taxes.
00:04:31.000Joe Biden, by the way, understands that this is a recipe for stagnation.
00:04:33.000This is the part that boggles the mind.
00:04:35.000When he put out, at the beginning of his administration, his forecast for the next 10 years of economic growth in the United States, he said, we're going to get heavy economic growth in the next two years.
00:04:43.000We've gotten some, not nearly as heavy as it should be.
00:04:45.000And then he said that we were going to be growing at like 1.6, 1.7 percent a year.
00:05:46.000He said there's a real risk that inflation may be more persistent.
00:05:49.000The risk of higher inflation becoming entrenched has certainly increased.
00:05:52.000I don't think it's high at this moment, but I think it's increased.
00:05:56.000So according to the Washington Post, the Fed has been holding off on cooling down the economy in the hopes that the vast economic supports would continue to help the labor market grow.
00:06:03.000The Fed this week reiterated that for now it will keep rates near zero until the labor market hits policymakers' threshold of maximum employment.
00:06:09.000Well, I mean, I think we're pretty much at maximum employment considering that we have some 10 million open jobs and only 7 million people who are willing to fill them.
00:06:16.000When you have more people who are When you have more jobs available than people who are looking for the work, that's kind of definitionally maximum employment at this point.
00:06:25.000One of the problems, of course, for the Biden administration, again, is that the likely outcome of ramping up the interest rates is going to be a slowing economy.
00:06:34.000The Fed has two mandates, according to the Washington Post, keeping prices stable and getting the economy to full employment, but combating inflation by raising interest rates can slow job market growth.
00:06:42.000Powell defended the Fed, saying it was not behind the curve in addressing the inflation, but recent data convinced him and others it was time for a shift in policy.
00:06:49.000I mean, you guys had forecasted there was going to be, like, 4, 5, 6 percent inflation this year.
00:06:54.000Instead, it's showing, like, 9 percent to 10 percent price inflation this year.
00:06:58.000There's been notable progress in the job market, but again, some 4 million jobs are missing from the labor market compared to the pre-COVID days.
00:07:07.000Powell is still trying to blame the pandemic for this, but again, it's not about the pandemic as we will discuss in short order.
00:07:11.000It really is about the insane reaction to the pandemic that we have seen from our garbage policymakers.
00:07:17.000Fed watchers are waiting to see how the Fed will decide if the full employment threshold has been met before addressing high inflation.
00:07:22.000For example, Powell points its labor force participation, which has been slow to recover.
00:07:26.000Well, maybe the reason it's been slow to recover is because the government paid people to stay home and then basically trained people to stay home.
00:07:33.000Powell says we don't have a strong labor force participation recovery yet.
00:07:41.000This is something we need to take into account.
00:07:44.000Also, the Fed revealed new details on speeding up the full winding down of its vast asset purchase program to March, as opposed to its initial goal of mid-2022.
00:07:53.000Feds want the taper of supports for the financial system to end sooner so they can better be prepared to raise interest rates.
00:07:58.000So they've been buying up all of these assets, and there's no reason for them to be buying up all of these assets at this point.
00:08:06.000So all of this is bad news for the Biden administration.
00:08:09.000They're going to try and spin it as good news, but it is a realization and an understanding that the economy is inflated beyond all recognition.
00:08:17.000The Federal Reserve has to step in and do something.
00:08:21.000But that's not stopping Joe Biden from continuing to push really, really bad fiscal policy.
00:08:25.000We'll get to more of this in just one moment.
00:08:26.000First, let's talk about your sleep quality.
00:08:28.000So last night I went to bed at a good hour and then my wife had to wake us up very, very early for a doctor's appointment for one of the kids.
00:08:35.000Well, you know, that means that I really value the hours that I've got on my mattress, and that is why we need a mattress made just for us.
00:08:41.000We took a two-minute sleep quiz from Helix Sleep, and they shipped us a mattress made just for us.
00:08:47.000They have several different mattress models to choose from.
00:08:49.000They have soft, medium, and firm mattresses.
00:08:50.000Mattress is great for cooling you down if you sleep hot.
00:08:52.000Mattress is great for spinal alignment to prevent morning aches and pains.
00:08:55.000Even a Helix Plus mattress for plus-size sleepers.
00:08:58.000Helix even has mattresses with specialized cooling technology.
00:09:00.000If you and your family can never agree on the temperature of the thermostat, So, if you're looking for a mattress, you take the quiz, you order the mattress you're matched to, the mattress comes directly to your door, shipped for free.
00:09:09.000You don't need to go to a mattress store.
00:09:10.000Again, they've got a 10-year warranty.
00:09:11.000You can try it out for 100 nights risk-free.
00:09:13.000Really, there is nothing to lose here and everything to gain.
00:09:15.000You're spending eight hours of your life every night, if you're smart, on a mattress, and that mattress better be good.
00:09:36.000Okay, meanwhile, You would think that the Biden administration, if they were pursuing something that remotely approached sort of the Reagan policies of the early 80s, where Paul Volcker was ramping up the interest rates to cut down on inflation, you'd imagine that they would be seeking to incentivize business to keep investing.
00:09:51.000That basically their goal would be to say to the business community, listen, the reason we're ramping up the interest rates at this point is in order to curb a runaway inflationary spiral.
00:10:01.000This is going to provide you a more solid basis to Tell what demand actually looks like as opposed to too many dollars chasing after too few resources.
00:10:09.000Instead, it'll be the right number of dollars chasing after resources.
00:10:12.000And you should continue to invest because we're going to loosen the regulation.
00:10:16.000So if we are going to create more risk on this end for businesses in the form of less demand in terms of dollars flowing through the economy, we are going to lower risk on this end.
00:10:25.000By taking away some of your tax burden and taking away a regulatory burden, right?
00:10:36.000Instead, he is insisting that we regulate all of these companies up the wazoo.
00:10:40.000He has all of his financial bureaucrats honed in on how do we regulate big businesses, how do we regulate the stock market, how do we regulate people.
00:10:50.000And at the same time, he's saying we should raise taxes and he's saying that we should spend more and more and more money on various social services, which creates an inflation Inflation can be created in a couple of ways, and one of them is the federal government essentially borrowing money and then just spending enormous sums of money.
00:11:11.000It's not the Federal Reserve doing direct quantitative easing.
00:11:13.000It is instead the federal government borrowing lots of money via the Federal Reserve and then blowing it out that way to the citizenry.
00:11:19.000Okay, so Joe Biden is not stopping on all of this.
00:11:24.000Joe Biden yesterday said that he is still hoping to pass Build Back Better.
00:12:20.000Build Back Better helps to inflate the cost of virtually everything, including childcare.
00:12:25.000And when she talks about childcare, she's saying we're going to subsidize a particular type of childcare.
00:12:29.000But we're not going to subsidize another type of childcare, and we're going to regulate it pretty heavily.
00:12:32.000So the cost of childcare for a lot of families who don't feel like sending their kids to a government daycare center, that cost is actually going to rise pretty precipitously.
00:12:40.000Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi continues to praise Biden and pretend that he's doing an amazing job.
00:12:45.000We cannot have geriatric delusional morons running the country.
00:12:49.000It's just it is not a good solution to our problem.
00:12:57.000If the levels of incompetence, the staggering levels of incompetence you saw in government, you saw in any other area of life, you would never delegate power to the people in the other areas of your life.
00:13:08.000If you went to the doctor and every time you went to the doctor, the doctor misdiagnosed you and or provided for a surgery that made you worse than you were before, you would stop going to that doctor.
00:13:19.000If you went to a lawyer and every time you went to that lawyer, you ended up in jail, you would not use that lawyer anymore.
00:13:24.000And yet you go to these politicians Average IQ 37, basically vegetables, who spend all day figuring out solutions to problems that don't exist or solutions that make the problem significantly worse.
00:13:40.000Your solution is to give Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden more power.
00:13:42.000By the way, I feel like this across the board, it's not just a Republican Democrat thing.
00:13:46.000Why do you want these people to have power over your life?
00:13:48.000The only person who you should give power to is somebody who doesn't want to use it.
00:13:52.000The first rule for a politician should be somebody who doesn't want to be in politics.
00:13:56.000Because if you want to be in politics, this means you want power over other people's lives.
00:13:59.000People should be reluctant about how they gain power.
00:14:02.000People should be reluctant about how they use power.
00:14:04.000The only politician you can trust is one who promises not to do anything or to give power back to you.
00:14:09.000But anybody who claims they can solve your problems the way Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden do, and by the way, how many Republican politicians, they're lying to you.
00:14:18.000A little bit of epistemic humility would be a nice thing around here.
00:14:21.000Frederick Hayek famously wrote, when it came to economics, that when you centralize all power in certain pairs of hands, what you are doing is you are actually ending up with people with a fraction of the knowledge of the generalized market running the entire thing.
00:14:35.000If you were to use the sort of centralized economic system of the Soviet Union, you basically have seven people in a room, you have the commissars who are sitting together, At the top of the economy and they're making the rules for everybody.
00:14:48.000Why doesn't that work even if they're really high IQ?
00:14:50.000Because their level of knowledge is not as great as the aggregate knowledge of the entire society.
00:14:56.000Why in the world you would have a group of people who could not run a popsicle stand figuring out for everyone else how the economy is going to run, how your life is going to run, how you're going to take care of your family.
00:15:09.000How about a little bit of humility about the fact that there is a system that you do not run and that no one runs and has been running for hundreds of years in terms of how people actually run their individual lives and interact with one another.
00:15:21.000You don't control it and attempting to rationalize that into a set of rules whereby a group of elites is going to run everything using the set of rules.
00:15:33.000The famous philosopher Michael Oakeshott suggested that to try and pretend that a group of rational rules made up by a group of people sitting in a room and sort of boiling it all down to paper That those people are not capable of grasping the complexities of the universe.
00:15:49.000You're not capable of... No one is capable of complexing, of grasping the complexities of the economy, of human interactions, and yet you want to centralize all of that in the pea brains of people like Nancy Pelosi?
00:16:00.000Or the misfiring neuronal connections of Joe Biden?
00:16:50.000Husband and wife team Scott and Missy Tannen founded Bull and Branch to create a new standard in bedding by doing things the right way, not the easy way.
00:16:56.000Bullenbranch holds themselves to high standards across the board, and you can feel it.
00:17:35.000All righty, so Joe Biden is trying to convince Joe Manchin to go along with Build Back Better, and it is going extremely poorly, as it should, because Joe Manchin made this very clear.
00:17:44.000He kept saying it, Joe Manchin, throughout this entire process, he's felt like an American tourist in China, right?
00:17:50.000Like the root American tourist in China, where nobody speaks his language, and so he just says it louder, and still nobody speaks his language, so he just says it louder.
00:18:26.000And Nancy was like, maybe if we appeal to him this way, he'll do it.
00:18:29.000And the media is like, maybe, you know, Joe Manchin, maybe he'll break the filibuster.
00:18:33.000And then Joe Biden's like, I'm sorry, I'm track my corn pop is Joe Manchin.
00:18:39.000And surprisingly, Joe Manchin does nothing.
00:18:43.000Joe Manchin is like, nah, I got to get back on my houseboat after this and go back down to West Virginia, where Joe Biden lost by one million points and where he's currently underwater by like 40 points.
00:18:55.000And I've got to explain to those people why I felt it was vital to vote for a $2 trillion bill minimum in a time of massive inflation, where my people don't want this bill.
00:19:08.000Joe Manchin's only hope of staying in the Senate is being the Democrat who stopped Build Back Better.
00:19:12.000If he's the Democrat who voted for Build Back Better, then he's just Chuck Schumer in West Virginia, which means he's out of a job.
00:19:18.000According to Politico, tensions are boiling over as discussions about finishing Democrats $1.7 trillion domestic spending bill drag on between Joe Biden and Joe Manchin.
00:19:26.000The legislation looks increasingly likely to stall over the impending holiday break, prompting Biden himself to bemoan the slow pace.
00:19:33.000Well, the good news is that you can always just tell Joe Biden that it's the middle of May 2021.
00:19:37.000Manchin grew frustrated on Wednesday when questioned about whether he opposes a provision of the bill to extend the expanded child tax credit, deeming those queries bullshit.
00:19:46.000In denying that he wants to end the $300 monthly check many families receive for children.
00:20:12.000Though Manchin and Biden developed a warm rapport this year and collaborated on several prominent pieces of legislation.
00:20:17.000The plodding pace of the talks between the two Joes is straining their friendly relationship.
00:20:21.000Frustration among the White House aides with Manchin is high and growing.
00:20:24.000And while Biden likes Manchin personally, he too has grown tired of the elongated talks and will soon push him to make a decision and support the legislation according to two White House sources.
00:21:07.000Neither Biden nor Manchin view the likelihood this bill won't pass until 2022 is damaging to their relationship or fatal to the legislation itself.
00:21:13.000Manchin's friends in the Senate say he's not looking to tank Biden's agenda.
00:21:16.000They may have different views about timing.
00:21:18.000It's less about weather than about when and how much, said Senator Tim Kaine.
00:21:21.000Well, those would be rather large questions, right?
00:21:55.000What Chuck Schumer really could do is he could go back to Joe Biden and he could say, why don't we shift our specs a little bit?
00:22:00.000Why don't we actually break this bill down into a series of smaller bills that would make it difficult for Republicans to vote against?
00:22:06.000They keep saying, each constituent part of this bill has 65% approval.
00:22:09.000Okay, so why don't you break it down into 65% approval bills?
00:22:12.000And the answer is because they can't get those passed.
00:22:15.000They have to wrap it up this way, because if they don't wrap it up this way, they will not be able to cobble together the progressives and the radicals and the moderates.
00:22:23.000So they have to wrap it up into a giant omnibus package, and they can't pass that giant omnibus package.
00:22:27.000So the only good news here is that reality is starting to hit the Biden administration, and they're having a real problem coming up with answers on all of this.
00:22:38.000But the answer the Democrats will eventually come up with when it comes to all of this, is they're just going to get angry at the institutions.
00:22:45.000Because when they don't get what they want, they just start attacking everything else.
00:22:49.000So they've already created a massive inflationary bubble.
00:22:53.000Now the Federal Reserve is going to crack down on the inflation, which is going to ramp up the unemployment.
00:22:57.000When it ramps up the unemployment, Joe Biden is going to push harder on the institution.
00:23:05.000When they don't get what they want, the answer is to break the system.
00:23:08.000And not just to break the system, to break private competitors.
00:23:11.000In one second, we'll get to the apparently New passion among Democrats for cracking down on cryptocurrency because what they're afraid of is that the alternative to the dollar being manipulated by the central government will be a non-manipulable form of currency.
00:23:34.000But in the future, what you're going to be seeing as the Fed tapers is you're going to be seeing rising interest rates on the mortgages, right?
00:23:40.000Mortgage rates are going to go up when they go up.
00:23:43.000You're going to lose your chance to refinance your mortgage.
00:23:45.000That'd be a great way of saving money right now.
00:23:47.000Inflation's going up, so you need to save money, and the mortgage rates remain low.
00:23:50.000So now's an excellent time to refinance.
00:23:52.000You need to check out my friends over at American Financing.
00:23:54.000You'll get a free, no-pressure mortgage review.
00:23:56.000You can learn about custom loans that fit your life better.
00:23:58.000From lower rates to shorter terms, even high-interest debt consolidation, they can do all of it.
00:24:02.000They're currently saving customers up to $1,000 a month.
00:24:04.000They're helping many people skip two mortgage payments.
00:24:15.000Now is an excellent time to refinance, and you're going to lose your opportunity if you don't do it now.
00:24:19.000NMLSconsumeraccess.org. Again, go check them out. 866-721-3300.
00:24:24.000Now is an excellent time to refinance, and you're going to lose your opportunity if you don't do it now. Head on over to AmericanFinancing.net to get started. Okay, so when you are in trouble, you need to find somebody else to attack.
00:24:37.000And it seems that the Democrats have found a couple of things to attack.
00:24:40.000Thing number one is they're going to attack private industry.
00:24:44.000You saw this yesterday when Chen Psaki was claiming that inflationary spirals in meat and oil were created by greed in private industry, not by bad government policy.
00:24:51.000Well, now It seems that many of our nation's foremost financial innovators on the Democratic side of the aisle, or at the Federal Reserve, they're very upset at the possibility that you might take your money out of the system and put it into something like Bitcoin.
00:25:04.000Now, full disclosure, I own Bitcoin, I own Ethereum.
00:25:09.000I think that the possibility of a currency that is not under the centralized control of a government with its own political priorities, I think putting some of your money there is a good idea, which is why I own Bitcoin.
00:25:19.000I think Ethereum, which is attempting to cut down On the banking system's transaction costs by creating all sorts of innovative new ways to create a trustless financial system, that is a good thing.
00:25:32.000Understand that the innovation that Bitcoin represents and that a lot of decentralized finance represents is a way to cut out the middleman.
00:25:39.000The reason that you go to a bank is because banks verify your transactions, right?
00:25:43.000You know that when you put your money in a bank, the bank is going to be held accountable if the money is gone.
00:25:48.000So you trust the bank, which is why you put your money in the bank.
00:25:50.000But that also means massive transaction costs, because every time you run a credit card, the credit card company has to get in touch with a middleman, the middleman then has to get in touch with the bank.
00:25:57.000There are like seven or eight companies involved in every credit card transaction, which is why it takes two or three days for a credit card transaction to actually clear.
00:26:05.000That just because someone swiped the credit card doesn't mean the money is now in your account.
00:26:08.000Now the money has to go all the way through the system of verification in order for the money to reach your account.
00:26:13.000When it comes to international transactions, it can take like a week for an international transaction to clear.
00:26:18.000When it comes to decentralized finance, these transactions can clear like that very, very quickly.
00:26:22.000And in areas of the world, particularly impoverished areas of the world, where you don't have a good banking system, if you're in Afghanistan, you can't deposit your money in a bank account because there are no banks.
00:26:31.000What Bitcoin does, what decentralized finance allows, is for you to have that money digitally and transfer it digitally instantaneously.
00:26:37.000That's a very good thing for the world.
00:26:39.000And it cuts out a lot of the transaction costs in the middle.
00:26:42.000The way that it does this is through the blockchain.
00:26:44.000The blockchain is a way of verifying transactions because it basically has a history of every transaction that has happened With blockchain, that verifies that these are real transactions because everything is encoded.
00:26:57.000And what blockchain does, it's a way, the way that you earn Bitcoin, for example, is by verifying transactions.
00:27:02.000When people talk about mining Bitcoin, it's not somebody on a computer with a pickaxe, right?
00:27:07.000What mining Bitcoin means is that you have an entire computer system that is essentially decrypting all sorts of transactions and verifying the transactions actually occur.
00:27:16.000This is how you provide some sort of stability in the transactional system.
00:27:20.000Now, the drawback for Bitcoin or Ethereum or any of these other cryptocurrencies is that if somebody were to get your password, they can take all of your money, right?
00:27:57.000The other attraction of it is that you don't have a centralized government that is going to inflate the currency, where you put your money in a bank and then you just wait for the government to inflate it out of existence, right?
00:28:06.000If you took $100 and you put it in the bank at a 0% interest rate, just to make the math easy, back in like...
00:28:12.000And then you took that $100 out of the bank today, it'll be worth like, I don't know, 50 bucks, 60 bucks, maybe.
00:28:19.000Okay, so like the inflation rates eat away at savings.
00:28:24.000And when you buy Bitcoin, or any other form of crypto that is worth its salt, then what you are actually doing is you are buying a value that is not dependent on infusions of money into the system.
00:28:36.000Right, so that is the attraction of Bitcoin.
00:28:39.000And then there are things called stablecoins, which are pegged to, for example, the value of the United States dollar.
00:28:43.000Right, so you can buy a digital form of currency that cuts out the transaction cost and is pegged to the price of the dollar.
00:28:49.000Right, so you would think this is a good thing, right?
00:28:51.000This is a good alternative, and it takes enormous amounts of power away from the government.
00:28:54.000This is why the government is so scared crapless of cryptocurrency.
00:28:57.000They are scared so crapless of it that you are going to stop, like, if cryptocurrency ever became a denomination in use, Not denominated in dollars, but things started to be denominated in Bitcoin or you started trading in Bitcoin.
00:29:08.000It's not stable enough right now for people to really trade in Bitcoin.
00:29:11.000This is one of the problems with Bitcoin is that it used to be that there was this concept that Bitcoin would be used in transactions, right?
00:29:17.000Instead of paying for a car in dollars, you pay for it in Bitcoin.
00:29:19.000The problem is because Bitcoin is still volatile because not enough people buy it and use it.
00:29:24.000Because of that, the price of a Bitcoin could go up or down.
00:29:26.000So if you sell a car for A Bitcoin, and Bitcoin is worth $30,000 today, so you're selling a car for 30 grand.
00:29:34.000Tomorrow, that Bitcoin could be worth $20,000, and so you just lost $10,000, right?
00:29:37.000So this is the problem with Bitcoin, but it's going to get more stable over time as there is more and more buy-in.
00:29:41.000The government is so scared of this stuff.
00:30:00.000It is not as though they are hiding the ball.
00:30:02.000They actively acknowledge that what they do every day is manipulate how much your savings are worth.
00:30:07.000And yet we're supposed to trust them, but not trust a trustless system verified by blockchain.
00:30:12.000Here's Jerome Powell ribbing on Bitcoin.
00:30:15.000In terms of the cryptocurrencies that are really speculative assets, I don't see them as a financial stability concern at the moment.
00:30:28.000I do think they are risky, they're not backed by anything, and I think they're big consumer issues for consumers who may or may not understand what they're getting, and they're certainly They're not backed by anything, really.
00:30:58.000So what is the United States dollar backed by?
00:31:00.000It used to be backed by gold, not backed by gold anymore.
00:31:04.000It's backed by the full faith and credit of the United States, which is solid as long as you trust the United States.
00:31:08.000It's solid as long as you trust the United States government.
00:31:11.000Well, you know what's one thing that undermines trust in the full faith and credit of the United States?
00:31:15.000One of those things would be a massive national debt that is eventually going to come to eat up a huge percentage of our GDP every year and make it nearly impossible for us to continue to operate as a free economy without massive rates of taxation or massive cuts to social services.
00:31:31.000The question is, which do you trust more?
00:31:34.000A decentralized system where no one controls it, or a centralized system where Jerome Powell controls it?
00:31:40.000And the full faith and credit of the United States, which is being blown out on a daily basis?
00:31:44.000At a certain point, there will be another country that gets wise, lowers its corporate tax rate to 10%, and just eats everybody's lunch.
00:31:51.000Truly, I mean, that will be like the notion that the United States has to lead the world in terms of in terms of sort of the economy.
00:31:58.000It doesn't have to, but we are a massive country that gives us certain advantages.
00:32:05.000We have this huge territorial grasp, but That doesn't mean that if we spend ourselves into oblivion, there won't be somebody else who comes and eats our lunch.
00:32:13.000We are benefiting from the fact that the Chinese government, for example, has embraced the stupidest form of economics in terms of communism.
00:32:19.000Then they moved into a sort of mercantilism.
00:32:21.000That's also a dumb form of economics, which is why their outsized growth statistics are rooted in the fact that they started from a really, really low baseline.
00:32:28.000Basically, everyone in China had zero dollars, and now everybody in China has five dollars, and so they've had a massive growth rate.
00:32:32.000That does not mean that China's per capita GDP is anywhere near on par with Western Europe or with the United States.
00:32:38.000The per capita GDP in China right now is still really pretty low.
00:32:44.000The per capita GDP in China right now is about $10,500 per year.
00:32:48.000So all of the talk about how the Chinese communist regime has created massive prosperity in China is not true.
00:32:55.000They just have a billion and a half people.
00:32:57.000However, that does not mean that there could not be a country that comes up and realizes that all of the regulatory structures the United States has set up are garbage, that our tax structures are garbage.
00:33:06.000Joe Biden has pushed a global 15% corporate tax rate.
00:33:09.000If there were a country that went to 10% corporate tax rate, it would just suck in investors from everywhere.
00:33:15.000The amount of money that would flow in, if you could guarantee property rights and a predictable legal regime in a state with 10% corporate tax rates, that place would eat our lunch within a decade.
00:33:28.000Okay, but unfortunately, at the same time, these people are saying you should trust the full faith and credit of the United States and you should crack down on Bitcoin.
00:33:36.000Elizabeth Warren is doing the same thing, right?
00:33:38.000She's saying decentralized finance is really bad because it allows for illegal transactions.
00:34:09.000Here's Elizabeth Warren ripping on crypto, however.
00:34:12.000DeFi is the most dangerous part of the crypto world.
00:34:16.000This is where the regulation is effectively absent, and no surprise, it's where the scammers and the cheats and the swindlers mix among part-time investors and first-time crypto traders.
00:34:28.000Shoot, in DeFi, someone can't even tell if they're dealing with a terrorist.
00:34:33.000Stablecoins provide the lifeblood of the DeFi ecosystem.
00:34:37.000In DeFi, people need stablecoins to trade between different coins, to trade derivatives, to lend and borrow money, all outside the regulated banking system.
00:34:47.000Without stablecoins, DeFi comes to a halt.
00:34:53.000Okay, so without Elizabeth Warren overlooking a financial system, you should be scared?
00:34:57.000No, with Elizabeth Warren overlooking the financial system, you should be scared.
00:35:00.000Again, why would you give these people power?
00:35:03.000And the answer is they want the power, of course.
00:35:05.000They desperately want the power, which is why they're now pushing against that.
00:35:08.000They're also pushing against the institutions.
00:35:10.000It is not a coincidence that the same day that Elizabeth Warren is calling for a crackdown on decentralized finance, she's also calling for court packing in the pages of the Boston Globe.
00:35:19.000These people don't care about institutions, they care about power.
00:35:22.000And mainly they care about their own power.
00:35:23.000We'll get to Nancy Pelosi and an amazing statement that she made yesterday with regard to members of Congress and insider trading.
00:35:38.000First, there are right now over 10 million job openings in the United States, but only 7.6 million unemployed job seekers.
00:35:44.000That issue is being worsened due to a mismatch of employers and qualified talent.
00:35:47.000Employers are having to go above and beyond to entice people to want to work for them.
00:35:52.000They're offering, like, legal services, or ID theft protection, or pet insurance.
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00:36:39.000ZipRecruiter is indeed the smartest way to hire.
00:36:42.000Now, before we go any further, here's a reminder, this company, The Daily Wire, We were ready day one to challenge the Biden administration on the constitutional vaccine mandate.
00:36:51.000And we are getting very close to a million signatures on our do not comply petition.
00:36:56.000And we're getting very, very close because people are recognizing that they need to sound off.
00:37:00.000And we're going to get to all the COVID craziness right now.
00:37:02.000Democrats are considering new shutdowns and all this.
00:37:06.000This is what we are doing right now with our petition.
00:37:08.000We have a goal of reaching a million signatures.
00:37:10.000As I've said, we have over 875,000 signatures.
00:37:13.000We want to finish this before the end of the year.
00:37:14.000Get to a million signatures before the end of the year.
00:37:16.000Please, if you haven't already, sign the petition at dailywire.com slash do not comply and then share our petition with everybody, like far and wide.
00:37:24.000Let's send a message so loud the Biden administration can't ignore us.
00:37:28.000Hey, also, I am truly pumped about this.
00:37:30.000We have a brand new series available exclusively at Daily Wire.
00:37:34.000If you've ever wanted to be a fly on the wall for my conversations with my closest and most influential friends, you're gonna love this.
00:37:39.000Like, seriously, this is what this is.
00:37:41.000I get to hang out with all my friends, and you're gonna see what our conversations are like, usually when the cameras are off.
00:37:46.000In the premiere episode, Jordan Peterson joined me for coffee while he was visiting Nashville, and we have, I would say, a unique and pretty awesome conversation.
00:37:56.000All righty, so I'm here in Nashville with Jordan Peterson.
00:37:59.000Jordan's spending a lot of time in Nashville.
00:38:00.000In fact, I think Jordan may know Nashville better than I do.
00:38:02.000Last night, you dragged me to Robert's Western World, and you were like the guy of the house.
00:38:44.000I mean, I'm coming in with questions, and it's much less of kind of a discussion between the two of us, and it's much more of kind of just me probing in Jordan's ideas.
00:38:53.000But this is much more like how we talk normally.
00:38:55.000I mean, Jordan, you called me, we talked on the phone like a month ago, and this was basically the same conversation, right?
00:39:00.000This is how we talk when... Different topics, but... Yeah, different topics, but I mean, like, this is how we talk when the cameras aren't on us.
00:39:05.000People really love being in on those conversations.
00:39:08.000Yeah, no, I think that the fact that people are going to kind of get the fly-on-the-wall view of these kind of conversations is pretty awesome.
00:39:17.000So you'll be able to see clips of my conversation with Jordan here at the coffee shop on YouTube.
00:39:21.000But if you want to see the whole conversation, which really is the way you should see it, you need to head on over to dailywire.com or check us out on the Daily Wire app.
00:39:28.000You'll be able to see the whole thing there, and it's pretty fantastic.
00:39:59.000One of the great aspects of my life is that I get to talk to the most interesting high IQ people on the planet, like off camera, in private.
00:40:06.000But now we wanted to put that on camera so you can enjoy those conversations too, because honestly, some of the best conversations you have are the casual conversations over coffee.
00:40:12.000Head on over to dailyware.com slash subscribe.
00:40:47.000I mean, if you are, they just have to take a taste.
00:40:50.000Okay, so Nancy Pelosi yesterday, she was asked about members of Congress trading individual stocks.
00:40:54.000Now, I'm of the belief that once you're in Congress, you should not be able to trade on the information that you receive in Congress.
00:41:00.000Because if we are going to bar insider trading for private entities, we should bar insider trading for members of Congress.
00:41:07.000Because they can, in fact, even if you were to allow insider trading for people in the private sector, which again, I think there's a kind of libertarian case for that.
00:41:14.000actually allows for free flow of information, more free flow of information for market response than there otherwise would be.
00:41:24.000If you're a member of Congress and you can actually control policy, knowing that you can get a majority to do a thing that is going to impact business in a particular way, so you short sell the business, or you know that a business is about to get a subsidy because you know it's been formulating behind closed doors and you control the system.
00:41:41.000And so you're using the power of a democracy to make yourself more rich?
00:41:47.000Nancy Pelosi was asked about this yesterday.
00:41:49.000She, of course, has a long history of questionable insider trading issues.
00:41:53.000And she was like, well, we are a free market system.
00:41:56.000Hearing Marxist-leaning Nancy Pelosi talk about what a wonderful free market system we are by utilizing government power to make herself richer is pretty vomit-inducing.
00:42:41.000The question is whether you are participating in a free market economy or whether you are using your regulatory power to get rich.
00:42:47.000If you're a Soviet Commissar and you can dictate the price of shoes until you go abroad and you buy a bunch of shoes and you sell them in the Soviet economy while dictating the price, that is not a free market.
00:42:56.000And if you're a member of Congress and you're using your regulatory power to subsidize or crack down on a particular business, and then you are trading in that business at the same time, that is unbelievably corrupt.
00:43:18.000While examining trades made around the time of the 2003 Medicare overhaul, Peter Schweitzer experienced what he called his holy crap moment, according to Newsweek.
00:43:25.000The legislation, which created a new prescription drug entitlement, promised to be a huge boon to the pharmaceutical industry and savvy investors in the capital.
00:43:32.000Among those with special insight on the issue is Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, chairman of the health subcommittee of the Finance Committee.
00:43:38.000Kerry is one of the wealthiest members of the Senate, heavily invested in the stock market.
00:43:41.000As the final version of the drug program neared approval, one that did not include limits on the price of drugs, brokers for Kerry and his wife were busy trading in Big Pharma.
00:43:49.000Schweitzer found they completed 111 stock transactions of pharmaceutical companies in 2003, 103 of which were buys.
00:43:56.000They were all great picks, Schweitzer notes.
00:43:57.000Kerry's capital gains on the transactions were at least half a million dollars and as high as two million dollars.
00:44:02.000It was instructive to Schweitzer that Kerry didn't try to shape legislation to benefit his portfolio.
00:44:06.000The key was that he knew exactly what the government was about to do, and then he... and then he spent money in order to make money from it.
00:44:14.000Kerry's spokesperson said, Senator Kerry does not buy, sell, or trade stocks.
00:44:17.000She noted that Kerry's holdings were in family trusts managed by independent trustees.
00:44:21.000Further, Kerry was not a beneficiary of Theresa Hines Kerry's Trust, which were established before they were married.
00:44:26.000Also, Kerry was running for president.
00:44:29.000But Schweitzer says, it's not that I think John Kerry is calling up his broker on health care and saying, buy the company, sell the company.
00:44:33.000The issue is one of a double standard.
00:44:35.000He notes that if the executive of a health care company were in discussions with the White House over pending legislation that would affect his industry, And then, made a bunch of unusual stock transactions related to the industry, the SEC would probably open an insider trading investigation.
00:44:47.000This is the only group in America we exempt as politicians, who are probably the last people about whom we should be saying, oh, we'll take their word for it.
00:45:35.000Because I feel like you do, or you're completely addled and the moths have made their home directly in the center of your medulla oblongata.
00:45:59.000Greenlighting rioting all of last year.
00:46:02.000You and your wildly liberal George Soros best prosecutorial friends who have decided they are going to undermine law enforcement throughout the United States.
00:46:54.000It's time that the reign of criminals who are destroying our city, it is time for it to come to an end.
00:47:04.000And it comes to an end when we take the steps to be more aggressive with law enforcement, more aggressive with the changes in our policies, and less tolerant I mean, she is one of the chief manufacturers of the bullet.
00:48:23.000Although Eric Adams swore in the new NYPD commissioner in front of a mural that included actual cop killers, which is a strange move by Eric Adams yesterday in New York.
00:48:34.000Still, it seems like in some of the major cities, the chickens are coming home to roost a little bit for Democrats.
00:48:40.000Nationally, however, I think they're going to have to get walloped first.
00:48:43.000Honestly, I think the Democrats are going to have to lose an election.
00:48:44.000They're going to have to lose it in massive fashion.
00:48:47.000What's so ironic about all of this is that Joe Biden was supposed to be the guy who was still steeped in reality.
00:48:53.000He was supposed to be the guy when he was elected, who's going to be moderate, who's going to have both feet on the ground, who is not going to run after the radical proposals of his base.
00:49:01.000And instead, he decided to go as radical as humanly possible.
00:49:30.000Okay, so first of all, what he's saying right there, what he's saying right there is inaccurate.
00:49:33.000If you're vaccinated, you can in fact spread the disease to other people according to his own CDC.
00:49:37.000So he's contradicting his own CDC. But the more important statement he makes there is, what about freedom? I hear all these people talking about freedom. What about, what about patriotism? What about patriotism a little bit? It's like, well, Joe, your definition of patriotism, so far as I'm aware, consists in giving up Afghanistan to the Taliban, paying higher taxes, destroying businesses, allowing crime to run rampant in your cities, and taking shots.
00:50:04.000This is the definition of patriotism, according to Joe Biden.