00:00:41.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:48.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:30.000And by the way, so I titled this The Syllabus of Economic Errors because I'm playing off of the syllabus of errors, which folks out there might know, especially if they're Catholic, was a papal encyclical that was issued by Pius IX back in 1864, where he sort of rails against modernity and all of the heresies and mistakes of the modern age.
00:01:50.000He really saw the future and saw a lot of the failures that were unfortunately enduring even to this day.
00:01:56.000So unfortunately, in the economic realm, when I was thinking about the risks that are intensifying in the economy right now, I really believe that it is due to a comedy of errors, a circus of errors, or, you know, if you will, a syllabus of errors, policy mistakes, policy failures in the last several years that have led us to a place right now where we are in a terrible economic predicament, where I think the risks are rising dramatically.
00:02:22.000And by the way, when I say I think, it's not just that I think so, Charlie, it's that the American people think so.
00:02:26.000There was a really pessimistic, terrible survey that just came out, a survey that goes back 30 years asking, are your children going to live better?
00:02:33.000Are they going to be better off than you?
00:02:35.000Are they going to live a better economic life than you have lived?
00:02:37.000And for decades and decades, Americans always had a very optimistic view on that very basic fundamental question.
00:02:43.000Well, unfortunately, it has flipped to a totally negative view.
00:02:46.00078% of Americans do not believe that their children are going to live a better life than they are now living.
00:02:52.000Only 21% believe in the affirmative, and that is by far the worst ratio in all of American history.
00:02:57.000So the reason I wrote this article is to lay out how did we get here?
00:03:01.000Because unless we understand the mistakes and the failures that led to this point, we're not going to be able to change the forward trajectory and to make the kinds of reforms and revisions economically that are necessary for us to get back to a place where we can restore prosperity to American families.
00:03:17.000So walk us through some of these charts here and kind of give us the narrative as they all connect.
00:03:26.000So, you know, first, in terms of the syllabus of errors, you know, looking back at the errors, the first error and the biggest one by far was the lockdowns in 2020, the lockdowns, which were unscientific, illogical, harsh, and in many cases, illegal, where we effectively made people like Fauci and Gavin Newsome and Lori Lightfoot, we turned them into effectively dictators and monarchs over our lives.
00:03:46.000Now, there was a lot of damage done in many different spheres of life, right?
00:03:50.000Social, mental, physical, all of the damage done to our lives, but also economic damage.
00:03:55.000And part of this unintended consequence of the lockdowns is that people learned to work remotely.
00:04:00.000They simply learned how to work well from home, employers and employees, both out of necessity, had to figure that out.
00:04:08.000Well, when you convince people that they can do that, they no longer believe necessarily that they have to go to an office.
00:04:14.000In addition to that, and I detailed this in the article, you also had the violence of that summer of 2020, the BLM riots, which produced carnage all over America and turned so many city centers into places of incredible danger.
00:04:28.000And many of them remain so to this day.
00:04:30.000I was just back in Chicago, Charlie, our former hometown, and the loop, the downtown neighborhood on a workday is a ghost town.
00:04:37.000And the only people you do see around are pretty sketchy characters who seem like they're up to no good.
00:04:42.000Same kind of situation in downtown San Francisco.
00:04:44.000So you combine this remote work because of lockdowns, very dangerous city centers.
00:04:48.000And what you then get, if we can please pull up chart number two, what you get is office vacancy rates, which are absolutely soaring.
00:04:58.000That's office vacancy rates going all the way back to 2006.
00:05:02.000What you can see right now is that this current spike in downtown office vacancies is even worse than the 0809 recession.
00:05:10.000So as bad as the real estate situation was in 08 and 09, it is now worse.
00:05:15.000And what this means, Charlie, is that commercial real estate back in 0809, the risks were mainly embedded in the residential real estate market.
00:05:24.000Regular homeowners who were over their skis, over leveraged on home loans.
00:05:29.000As a matter of fact, home loans are pretty difficult to get.
00:05:31.000Anyone who's gotten a mortgage knows that.
00:05:33.000The bank practically wants to do a full physical exam of you in addition to the financial exam before they're willing to give you a loan.
00:05:40.000But on the commercial side, that's where the risks lie.
00:05:42.000And some folks in the audience might say, well, Cortez, I'm not involved in commercial real estate.
00:05:47.000And I would stipulate, well, you are, even if you don't know it, because the banks and particularly regional banks, which have been, of course, in tons of trouble lately, are incredibly exposed to commercial real estate.
00:05:58.000And as Biden's inflation makes commercial real estate more and more vulnerable because of rising interest rates, this becomes an issue for everybody in our society.
00:06:08.000And if we can pull up chart number three to prove my point, bank credit, the availability of bank loans has crashed.
00:06:15.000This is an article from over the weekend in Bloomberg.
00:06:18.000Bank lending slumps by the most on record in the final weeks of March.
00:06:22.000So the last two weeks of March, bank lending, Charlie, dropped $105 billion, billion with a B dollar the last two weeks of March.
00:06:33.000And we have data on bank lending that goes back 50 years.
00:06:36.000So think of all the economic calamities America's been through in 50 years, the oil embargoes of the 70s, the 1987 crash, 9-11, dot-com bubble, the 0809 housing recession.
00:06:48.000Nothing has compared to what we are seeing right now in terms of the pullback in bank lending.
00:06:53.000There is a credit crunch right now that is accelerating in our country.
00:06:57.000And that means for Main Street, for regular people, particularly for small business, access to capital, access to bank loans.
00:07:03.000It is drying up and it's drying up fast.
00:07:06.000So this has really significant real world consequences, sadly, for all Americans.
00:07:12.000And also, sadly, I believe it's going to get worse before it gets better.
00:08:24.000These places are going to turn into ghost towns.
00:08:26.000Yeah, and I think in some places they already have.
00:08:30.000By the way, that vacancy rate that I showed, that's nationwide.
00:08:32.000It's much worse than that in some of the worst affected cities that I mentioned, places like Chicago and San Francisco.
00:08:38.000But I mean, even San Francisco alone, Charlie, is such a risk, not just to that area, but to the entire country, because you may not be aware of this, but your 401k, in all likelihood, is investing in these office towers in places like San Francisco.
00:08:53.000So people don't believe that they need to go to the office.
00:08:56.000Center cities have become increasingly dangerous and effectively no-go zones for regular law-abiding citizens.
00:09:03.000On top of that, now we throw Biden's inflation.
00:09:13.000Along with collaborationist Republicans, especially in the U.S. Senate, he engaged in an absolute orgy of borrowing and spending that caused inflation to be unleashed intensely upon the American economy, driving interest rates higher.
00:09:27.000In my article, I also give a chart of what 10-year yield, which is the benchmark interest rate for the entire world, really, but certainly for our country, what it has done since he took office.
00:09:35.000It has more than tripled since he took office.
00:09:38.000That kind of spike in interest rates was not planned upon, was not foreseen, even by sophisticated institutional investors.
00:09:46.000So to your point, they're incredibly levered right now on the commercial side.
00:10:13.000And because of the capital that is necessary to build, for example, a new Trans-America building or at least recapitalize it, you get the big funds that come in, right?
00:10:24.000These are not, it's not mom and pop retail.
00:10:26.000Well, they are via the funds, but we're talking about five, six, seven, $800 million buildings, right?
00:10:33.000What happens when all of a sudden your occupancy rate is 11%?
00:12:03.000I'm not saying there's going to be a bank collapse, but there will definitely be fissures in not just in the economy, but the health of kind of lending as we know it.
00:12:15.000And it could be an unintended consequence of remote work.
00:12:22.000So listen, I think the combination of remote work plus cities becoming increasingly dangerous and inhospitable to citizens, to commuters, that combination led to unforeseen consequences for the commercial real estate market, made the commercial real estate market challenged already.
00:12:41.000Biden then comes in and throws inflation on top of this already challenging environment, making interest rates spike.
00:12:49.000And remember to the point you made previously, these office towers largely are incredibly leveraged plays.
00:12:55.000They are leveraged plays by institutional investors.
00:12:58.000So there's not a lot of leverage, unlike 0809, there's not a lot of leverage in the residential, regular U.S. housing market.
00:13:05.000As a matter of fact, the leverage situation there is very tame by historical comparison, meaning people have high credit quality.
00:13:12.000But on the institutional side, there's tremendous leverage.
00:13:16.000You now have inflation rocketing higher, sending interest rates higher with a work from home phenomenon.
00:13:23.000And so these office towers are in incredibly dangerous and unprecedented territory.
00:13:29.000And it has very dire effects for the entire economy, even if you don't think you're involved in commercial real estate.
00:13:35.000The reality is banks may not collapse, Charlie, but what we already have.
00:13:42.000And what we already have happening, it's not a matter of, we don't have to guess about it, is happening right now is an absolute credit crunch, meaning banks are simply not loaning money.
00:13:52.000They are pulling back massively because they are intensely aware of the rising risks because they see what happened to Silicon Valley Bank, a signature bank.
00:14:01.000They realize, particularly the regional banks, which are incredibly exposed to real estate, more so than the giant banks.
00:14:06.000The regional banks realize we're in a tough situation right now.
00:14:17.000The last two weeks of March, which is the most recent data we have, total bank lending fell by $105 billion in two weeks.
00:14:25.000That is the worst decline in the history of the United States.
00:14:29.000And we have data on that that goes back 50 years.
00:14:33.000So worse than the 2020 lockdowns, worse than 0809, the dot-com bubble, 9-11.
00:14:38.000None of those events compared in terms of bank lending to what is happening right now.
00:14:42.000And even if it doesn't get worse, I fear it's going to get worse, but even if it doesn't get worse, just what has already happened, Charlie, is going to have such terrible effects for the country because that credit, particularly from smaller and regional banks, that credit is the lifeblood.
00:14:56.000That is really the juice, the lubricant for the economy, particularly when it comes to small business, right?
00:15:01.000The kinds of small firms who can't go to JP Morgan and get a loan, but previously could go to their local banks.
00:15:29.000I mean, insurance company, whatever insurance companies put money into, it's boring and it's an annuity.
00:15:36.000So it's like self-storage and office buildings.
00:15:39.000In fact, residential was considered to be too risky for years.
00:15:44.000They might bundle AAA loans and that's about it and buy and purchase those.
00:15:49.000But this is big because what you're talking about is an inversion where so many people once considered commercial real estate to be just completely bulletproof.
00:15:59.00010 years ago, be like, what do you mean?
00:16:01.000People are going to stop going to work.
00:16:17.000And by the way, to bring this to capital markets, away from real estate for a moment, we saw this same phenomenon last year in 2022.
00:16:24.000Not only did stocks get killed, but bonds got killed.
00:16:27.000Bonds are supposed to be your insurance.
00:16:28.000They're supposed to be the safe part of your portfolio, kind of like you're talking about commercial real estate.
00:16:32.000So when the insurance side, when the supposedly boring side gets crushed right alongside the volatile, you know, sexier side, then you know you're in a terrible new environment.
00:16:41.000This is what Biden's inflation has done.
00:16:43.000It has made things that were considered to be safe, you know, and by the way, for valid reasons historically, suddenly unsafe.
00:16:50.000That's the new reality of this economy as the risks explode with Joe Biden.
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00:18:38.000I wanted to make a gold comment too, but I'll get to that second.
00:18:42.000Yeah, so Matt Drudge, as addicts of the Drudge Report will know, if you scroll all the way down on the Drudge Report below the three columns on the far right, he updates every single morning his actual server traffic, right?
00:18:56.000Not an estimate from similar web, not, you know, it's his actual traffic.
00:19:24.000I mean, a website, you know, as I've said jokingly, and here's a shameless plug: have your readers go right now if you've never been and go to citizenfreepress.com.
00:22:42.000Alan Dershowitz says that the federal government document case is the strongest, which is a joke because, of course, George W. Bush and Obama broke the same one.
00:22:52.000Jimmy Carter probably broke it as well, but it's not, you can't, it's politically unviable because Biden has the same issue.
00:23:02.000But Kane, I have a, I've heard this from multiple people.
00:23:32.000But a lot of those, a lot of those lefty polls were showing, I'm talking about a month ago, two months ago, they were showing Biden leading or at least Biden tight.
00:23:42.000There were some mainstream polls that were showing Trump leading.
00:23:44.000So I think at that point, yeah, they wanted him.
00:23:48.000They wanted Trump as the nominee, as the nominee in a way.
00:23:54.000Now, the last one we just put up, Rasmussen's numbers, they flipped big.
00:23:58.000They had Trump up six, 47-41 over Biden.
00:24:06.000The way you, because the point of your question is, you know, despite these indictments, do they secretly want him?
00:24:14.000Because they believe that young people, especially because of the abortion issue and what happened last fall and how young people turned out, they believe that young people and Trump derangement among independents will give them enough votes in those five or six swing states.
00:24:32.000I'm sure a lot of them believe that, right?
00:24:35.000And so, yeah, there's probably a large cohort, a large segment of Democratic strategists who probably want him over Trump.
00:25:26.000Yes, if there were, look, if there were an overriding controlling force that was somehow in charge of what Jack Smith and Fannie Willis and Alvin Bragg were doing, then you could say, yeah, but there isn't, right?
00:25:37.000We both know that these are, all of them are ego-driven.
00:25:41.000Alvin Bragg, this was a pure ego indictment for him to become famous.
00:25:45.000He now becomes an incredibly well-known person.
00:26:40.000And it's something special about Trump, but we've never, in my lifetime, there's never been a candidate that sort of drove that.
00:26:45.000Actually, Reagan de Libbett, one of my grandmothers, only voted Democrat her entire life, and she voted for Reagan.
00:26:50.000So Reagan was able to sort of flip the Democrats and flip independents in the same way Trump has.
00:26:55.000But let's get back quickly to why do Democrats want DeSantis?
00:26:58.000Well, they're worried about that age disparity, right?
00:27:00.000Beautiful young DeSantis family, gorgeous wife who beat cancer, beautiful young children versus the doddering old Biden who takes 12-inch steps, right?
00:27:09.000So that's why I think Democrats deep down probably are more afraid of DeSantis.
00:27:14.000They think he would get more independent votes, but they're discounting what you just mentioned, which is this unique Trump factor, his ability to drive people to the polls that we've never seen before.
00:27:46.000Do you think the Democrats want Trump to be the nominee?
00:27:49.000Is there some sort of three-dimensional chess that is going on where they say if we indict him, he gets more popular in the Republican primary, therefore he becomes the nominee and we think we can beat him easier?
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00:29:22.000I think that they're willing to run Joe Biden, not because of his appeal, his charisma, or his ability to speak, of which he has none of those things, but because they're so confident.
00:29:31.000In fact, newly discovered documents by our team, they're all public, but we decided to dig.
00:29:35.000There's an organization called America's Votes.
00:29:40.000Kane, did you know that they raised $245 million for the midterms to go get low-propensity progressive Democrat voters out to the polls in battleground states in the midterms just to go get people to ballot chase a $245 million operation?
00:30:00.000I think that they're willing to go spend a billion dollars to ballot chase, do early voting, play games of signature verifications, you know, tap dance around the law.
00:30:08.000I think it's more about the plumbing and the infrastructure and the machinery than the actual candidate that we're choosing.
00:30:33.000Next day, Trump, first interview on Fox News in six months with Hannity, goes right into ballot harvesting and saying in all the states where it's legal, we've got to do it.
00:30:42.000We've got to dominate because Democrats have sort of what you described in that 245 million.
00:31:27.000But I mean, they're paying, you know, one of them, and I don't know if this is America's votes, but they're paying, they're exploiting a loophole to pay people, not for their votes, but to go and get other people registered on an app.
00:31:40.000You know, it's and look, they're doing that much, much better than we are.
00:31:54.000I mean, what we're what we are going to attempt to do at turning point is try to build a ballot chasing operation in the states that matter, legal ballot chasing.
00:32:03.000I think we have to embrace early voting.
00:32:04.000I think the world of Mike Lundell, I think of this completely, I look at this completely differently.
00:32:09.000Getting everyone to vote on election day is unsustainable.
00:32:12.000And I'll tell you, I had a change in philosophy on this, Kane.