On today's show, Glenn Beck is joined by Stu and Pat to discuss the latest poll numbers in the Trump vs. Biden race, the latest in Big Mike's case, and much, much more. Glenn also discusses a new gadget that can incapacitate an attacker in case of a tear gas attack.
00:04:30.760And I think a lot of that goes back to the positive outcomes that have come or positive perceptions of how this case has gone in New York for Alvin Bragg,
00:04:39.800where it seems like kind of a catastrophe in the making.
00:04:42.880So we have that looking good for Donald Trump.
00:04:47.380Do you want, while we're here, the Republican vice presidential odds?
00:05:22.740It's interesting, too, that, you know, while you're right, of course, it is just mainly degenerate gamblers that would do things like this.
00:05:30.460You know, these people tend to care about the outcome of events.
00:05:34.580And, you know, pundits on TV don't necessarily have that same motivation.
00:05:39.760Many of them are playing to their base.
00:05:41.660Many of them are just saying the things they think they need to say to impress whoever they're going to be at a cocktail party next week.
00:06:44.140And it does tell you something interesting.
00:06:45.460I should point out, as you're accusing other people of being degenerate gamblers, I should point out that you have a $3,000 bet with me that Michelle Obama is going to be on the top of the ticket.
00:07:12.320Now, Glenn, I want to just give you this opportunity as I give you this additional knowledge that on the prediction markets, Michelle Obama is in third place.
00:12:42.280Let me just explain what's happened under Jerome Powell.
00:12:45.720And I hate to pick on him, but he's the Fed chairman right now.
00:12:49.760And under him, we've seen 25% of the value of the dollar disappear.
00:12:55.160Meanwhile, during COVID, the investment bankers and the Wall Street bankers had their best year ever in 2020, and we had 7% inflation during COVID, thanks to the Fed.
00:13:09.360They are – and then let me just tell you about Jerome Powell's background because it's indicative of the kind of people that work there.
00:13:17.180He started out as an attorney, and he got into investment banking, and then he went to Treasury, and then he left Treasury and went back into banking, and then investment banking, and then it was Barack Obama who put him on the federal board of governors, and then it was Trump who elevated him to chairman, and then it was Biden who re-nominated him.
00:13:40.320This guy is the uniparty person who makes the investment bankers rich and everybody else poor in this country.
00:13:48.640But it's also – people need to understand, the president can't just nominate anybody or appoint anybody.
00:13:56.540The Federal Reserve – so all of the – what is it, seven or eight banks, the biggest banks, we are not even allowed to know who they are, which is incredibly un-American and leads to all kinds of corruption.
00:14:10.320They get together, and they say to the president, here are a few names that we'll accept.
00:14:19.660Right, and then when – right, and then when that guy takes the job, who do you think he goes out to have dinner with every night?
00:14:26.160I mean, there's this argument that we want our monetary policy to be independent of Congress or the executive branch, but it's a falsehood that it's independent right now.
00:14:38.140I mean, Jerome Powell lobbies Congress and the White House to engage in more fiscal stimulus.
00:14:45.360So – and then they're working – I mean, when the Treasury gets their debt monetized by the Fed, do you think that's an independent thing?
00:14:52.900No, that's the carefully orchestrated dance, and that's what they've done here recently.
00:14:56.760There's three ways you can get money for the government to spend.
00:15:00.260You can either tax the people and take the money back, or you can borrow the money, or you can just create it out of thin air.
00:15:07.400And what they did during COVID is they created trillions of dollars out of thin air.
00:15:12.680And this is – now, Congress is to blame as well.
00:15:15.300Congress spent those trillions of dollars.
00:15:17.180But it's the Fed that enables it, and it's the Fed that pulls it off.
00:15:22.660And it's also the Fed – this is what kills me.
00:15:26.960You know, they said that, you know, in 2008, these banks were too big to fail, and we have to stop that.
00:15:32.920And everything Congress did made these banks stronger and bigger and hurt the small banks that are not part of the Federal Reserve system, so to speak.
00:15:44.760They're not on – you know, they're not one of the owners of the Fed.
00:15:48.120And it seems to me, Thomas, that every time something is done, the American people are the ones that lose, and the banks get the money, they get richer, and in the end, it's going to be those – however, what is it, five or six or eight banks that make up the Fed.
00:17:26.240They came in and they – well, they failed because the Fed then came in with whiplash and raised rates quicker than they've ever raised them before.
00:17:34.300And then the banks were kind of in this one model.
00:17:37.460So then the Fed comes and does triage on them.
00:17:40.220So the Fed starts out as the arsonist.
00:17:43.520Then they come in and they do the firefighting by raising interest rates.
00:17:47.720And then they go in and bail out the couple of banks last year.
00:17:51.840So they're causing the problems that they come in and allegedly solve.
00:17:58.440But I think we're almost to a point now where they're running out of levers or the rubber bands that attach their levers to our macro economy are stretched as far as they'll stretch.
00:18:09.200Because right now they're not really in control of interest rates.
00:18:13.740They might like to think they can lower the interest rate to stimulate the economy again.
00:18:19.640But the problem is when they – recently, when they put treasuries out for auction, the sovereign funds, the other countries that oftentimes buy our debt, said, you know what?
00:18:30.960At 4.5%, I don't think that's a good bargain.
00:18:36.540Would you – honestly, if you had – you were in charge of a bank or you were making loans as a private individual and you had somebody who came in and ran their life the way our Congress runs our country,
00:18:53.620what kind of interest rate would you demand from them that you would think it's worth taking the risk for that?
00:19:01.220Yeah, I mean, it would be easy, easy in the double digits and most likely in the mid-double digits for me.
00:19:12.080Yeah, and the other thing is then we try to inflate our debt down.
00:19:16.480In other words, we devalue our currency so it changes the impact of, let's say, the nominal price of our debt in gold if you could find some outside reference.
00:19:26.340So the Fed kind of – and the Treasury kind of likes inflation.
00:19:32.160The big guys don't care because, like we saw during COVID, they just reprice everything on Wall Street, and then the other assets, the Fed will prop up by buying them.
00:19:41.040So they make sure that the rich people can survive through inflation, the poor people can't, or even the middle class can't because you don't have these sort of financial instruments that everybody else has that the Fed takes care of.
00:19:53.560And so it's – and then the Fed is, when they cause inflation, they solve a little bit of the debt problem.
00:20:02.000But the problem is we're getting to a point where it's not going to work anymore.
00:20:06.800For a while, we had inflation that was greater than the interest rate we were paying on the debt.
00:20:11.900So you can see, actually, if people will take your debt at those low interest rates and inflation is that high, you should probably take on more debt.
00:20:21.860I mean, I hate to say it, but they're wising up in the rest of the world.
00:20:25.840Now, here's something else that happens.
00:20:27.860The U.S. dollar is the reserve currency.
00:20:30.860I mean, we've mucked with it, but not so much that people don't want it yet.
00:20:57.160We're kind of like the credit card gets 3% of all the transaction at the gas station.
00:21:01.900We get that 3% if we create 3% more money every year, which we typically do.
00:21:07.580But the rest of the world is getting tired of being used that way.
00:21:11.940They're tired of our transaction fees, i.e., our inflation.
00:21:15.220And when they start using alternate forms of money to do their transactions or holding different assets in their own sovereign wealth funds, then we're not going to be able to do that trick on anybody except for U.S. citizens.
00:21:32.820And again, this is all coming to a head.
00:21:35.140Thomas, I said this a while back, probably 15 years ago.
00:21:41.480When this actually happens, we are going to be labeled – because no politician in any other country is going to take responsibility for their own fiscal madness.
00:21:52.680Everybody's going to blame it on the United States because we were greedy, grotesque, and took on so much debt that we devalued the dollar, and it's going to affect the entire world.
00:22:05.980And, you know, I relate it, and I know it's for different reasons in some way, but I look at the way Germany looked at France at the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II is, I think, the way the rest of the world is going to look at us.
00:22:24.080We forced – we didn't – France forced Germany into just devastation where they had to inflate their dollar.