On today's show, Glenn Beck is joined by the Von Mises Institute's Alex Blumberg and Andrew Heaton to discuss the economy, the border crisis, and the need for a border wall. Glenn also gives his thoughts on the Arab Spring and the problems it caused in the Middle East.
00:02:34.480Well, and then, you know, most importantly, they steal the equity behind it.
00:02:39.080You know, you're talking about, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars.
00:02:42.260You have an equity potentially in a home, especially if you're if you have an elderly relative or or you just happen to have your house paid off.
00:04:27.980In this year of shows, we're going to be concentrating on eight categories, and I want to spend some time today working on these eight categories and explaining them to you.
00:04:37.960And then we're going to take phone calls for the TV show today.
00:04:40.980So if you have any questions or ideas or thoughts, please share them at 888-727-BECK for TV at 5 o'clock.
00:10:10.800The ones who are leading it are more like Antifa, more like Occupy Wall Street.
00:10:17.020What's happened is, after he blinked, the left and the right got together.
00:10:25.240Again, not coordinated, they're not on each other's side, but they both want to tear the system down.
00:10:31.680I mean, because you say the leadership's like Occupy Wall Street, but one of the big things they thought about initially was repealing the horrible gas tax that was bankrupting a bunch of French citizens.
00:10:43.760Because they were paying triple, basically, the old gas prices.
00:11:10.460This is a national movement in France that now has 70% approval rating.
00:11:18.280Well, yesterday, they announced that they want to collapse the bank and they want to collapse the euro.
00:11:25.320And so they are asking this weekend to go in, have French citizens go in and take at least 20% of their cash out of their bank.
00:11:37.940If there was a movement here in America that had a 70% approval rating and they could convince 70% of 50% of this population to take 20% of their money out of banks, that would be a real, real problem for America.
00:12:02.460This could be one of the things that collapses the euro, that collapses the economy over in Europe.
00:12:12.100I don't know if it will be, but this one story has everything in it that I'm looking for and is a good explainer on how these things can happen.
00:12:25.620Political polarization, the distance between the media and the government, that friction between them has caused polarization.
00:12:39.760They don't trust their government anymore.
00:12:42.580They don't trust the banking system anymore.
00:12:45.180They don't trust any politician anymore.
00:12:48.640So it has bubbled over and it went into street riots.
00:12:51.940Then they're using this power to buckle the economy.
00:12:56.640This could bring the entire system down.
00:13:04.960Let me focus on that and the eight categories that you need to be aware of.
00:13:10.040We're talking about what is coming in, how we want to focus this show.
00:13:15.760And I want to bring you in quickly on what we're looking for, because I look at you as a partner on being able to chart a course for either the greatest freedom, health, and wealth the world has ever seen in this next page and chapter of human history.
00:13:35.620That I think we are now on the bridge.
00:13:59.800So I want to give you eight categories that we are going to really focus on and try to put the world into context and show you what leads to a collapse and totalitarianism and what leads to freedom.
00:14:12.900So the first category we talked about was civility and chaos.
00:14:16.700It's important to look for, you know, the goodness index and charity and faith and religion where it's working.
00:14:24.500But it's also really important to look at civil unrest and war and instability and those who are preaching chaos.
00:14:33.180For instance, Iran and Russia, now Cuba and Venezuela, politics of meaning, things that really, truly matter.
00:14:47.960But what the president is doing with the trade war in China matters, but not for reasons that most people even understand.
00:14:55.740That arrest in Canada of the Chinese CEO, that was the thing that opened it up for me and I went, oh, my gosh, this is what's really going on.
00:15:12.600Also, money and how money is going to change, how jobs and employment is going to change.
00:15:19.200Our debt, our personal debt, our credit card debt, European debt, banking, banking scandals, the way governments are going to start trapping people's money.
00:15:31.780I bet you don't even know that your money has really been trapped.
00:15:34.940If the bank collapses here in America, you're not getting your money out.
00:20:48.560Can you explain what the theory is first?
00:20:53.380Well, the basic theory is that when a record-setting skyscraper is built anywhere in the world, by the time it's completed and ready to open, the world is going to be experiencing an economic crisis.
00:21:09.780And so the curse is the economic crisis that is associated with the building of a record-setting skyscraper.
00:21:16.940Now, if I'm not mistaken, it was the Woolworth building around 19, what was it, 14, 15, something like that, that did not, does not fall into that category.
00:21:30.680And that was the world's first real kind of skyscraper.
00:21:33.420Well, you know, we've been building taller and taller for about 150 years, and the skyscraper curse occurred earlier during the panic of 1907.
00:21:45.000But as the Woolworth building was being built, and it was being redesigned to go even higher to set the record, and then when it set the record in 1913, there was no economic crisis that followed.
00:22:00.200And so the original architect of the skyscraper curse, a real estate analyst named Andrew Lawrence, he called the Woolworth building a mistake of the skyscraper curse.
00:22:12.320But when I went in and looked at the detailed statistics, what I found is that the U.S. economy was going into a severe recession just as the Woolworth building was being prepared to be opened in early 1914.
00:22:28.180But what Andrew Lawrence forgot or just neglected was the fact that World War I was starting in Europe, and all of the major powers of the world were getting ready for a war, and they were buying steel, they were buying grain, they were buying weapons, they were buying materials.
00:22:48.420And so that reactivated the U.S. economy and brought us out of what was one of the worst downturns in U.S. economic history.
00:22:56.100Okay, so give me something, because I think it's fascinating, the Chrysler building is completed.
00:23:03.600There's actually two skyscrapers, Donald Trump owns one of them now by Wall Street, and the Chrysler building completed.
00:23:10.600We have the crash of 29, the Empire State Building's completed a year later in 1930, and we go into the Depression.
00:23:18.300You mentioned in, what was it, 1970, the World Trade Center?
00:23:25.600We were on a tremendous, record-breaking business cycle boom during the 1960s.
00:23:32.840Economists from the Keynesian school thought that they had been able to do away with the business cycle, and business cycle courses were being taken out of the curriculum going into 1970 as the World Trade Tower 1 and 2 were being built and rising in New York City, soon to be followed by the Sears Tower in Chicago.
00:23:56.340And what happened was, just as all this grandeur and glory for the Keynesians was reaching the pinnacle, the U.S. went into an economic crisis.
00:24:08.700We had the stagflation of 1970 through 1982.
00:24:14.460We had the U.S. going off the gold standard, things were so bad.
00:24:19.260We had wage and price controls being imposed by Richard Nixon in 1971, just as the trade towers were coming to a new record height.
00:24:29.360And so that was a spectacular, menacing sort of example of why we shouldn't trust Keynesian economics.
00:24:39.920So before we get into what you see on the horizon, what I really appreciated was the theory on why this is happening.
00:24:50.380Now, there's another theory out there that, like, for instance, the Sears Tower, whenever you build a tower, and I think, again, Woolworth was the exception to this, whenever they build a record tower, that company is at its peak.
00:25:07.640And you kind of can understand that because you're thinking, okay, well, they're arrogant now.
00:25:12.220But the way you look at the skyscraper and the things that you say, why this happens, makes total sense.
00:25:22.360So can you explain your theory on why this is true, why it happens?
00:25:28.940Well, you know, the people who build these buildings, they may be arrogant, and their arrogance may have risen as a result of the position that they've risen to.
00:25:38.160But basically, the underlying cause of all this is cheap credit, low interest rates, artificially low interest rates from the central bank or our Federal Reserve.
00:25:48.780And those low interest rates, in the short run, cause people to, you know, invest more, invest in long-term projects, invest in big, spectacular projects, because, you know, the credit is cheap.
00:26:08.820And so the Fed can create a rosy economic scenario in the short run.
00:26:14.920But what it's really doing is causing people to make the wrong investments in the economy, to go beyond what would otherwise be economically rational.
00:26:25.760And so the number one signal, the number one price in any economy is the interest rate.
00:26:31.800And when the Fed cooks the books and reduces that interest rate for economic, political, or whatever reason they do it for, if they do it too long and too far, ultimately they're going to create male investments or bad investments like record-setting skyscrapers, which otherwise would never have been built.
00:27:12.680So the author of The Skyscraper Curse, Dr. Mark Thornton, is on with us on the Glenn Beck program.
00:27:20.840And you say that the skyscraper curse is real because of low interest rates that the Fed has kind of cooked the books on.
00:27:31.220We are now coming out of a place with the lowest interest rates for the longest period of time in the history of our country and maybe the history of the world.
00:28:03.700Well, that's the background for all corporations who, you know, what their financial structure is, is dependent upon an environment of low interest rates.
00:28:13.560And so as we leave this environment of ultra low interest rates, you can expect a lot of those bad investments, which we can't necessarily pinpoint right now.
00:28:25.960But as we go forward, a lot of those investments that people have been making in real estate, in technology, in social media, a lot of that is going to be revealed.
00:28:39.580And I think we're starting to see this in the business news where profit expectations haven't been met, revenue expectations haven't been met, cost of production have risen unexpectedly for a lot of firms.
00:28:54.320And so when your revenues are coming down, your accounts receivable are backing up, and your costs of production are rising, the profits disappear and the losses start to reveal themselves.
00:29:07.840And then, of course, you have companies that are going to have to react to that with restructuring, with bankruptcy, with foreclosures.
00:29:17.700And I think this is a worldwide phenomenon.
00:29:33.260And central banks around the world have had to match those policies to protect their currencies, or at least to balance their currencies.
00:29:41.340And so this is not just a U.S. phenomenon.
00:29:43.180It's a U.S.-led phenomenon, but it's going to impact the entire world.
00:29:48.240The people in the know realize that there's corporations all around the globe, particularly in the U.S., in Europe, in Japan, in China, which are very, very vulnerable.
00:30:01.140And we can expect, over the next two years, for this crisis really to take hold.
00:30:07.700I think we're just seeing the leading edges of it right now.
00:30:11.240If this is a storm that's headed our way, put it in a category, one through five.
00:30:24.100You know, the silver lining here is that this is going to be a very bad economic crisis, in my opinion.
00:30:32.700I think the empirical information is following that opinion.
00:30:38.860And the silver lining is that we may have an opportunity to get the world back on a gold standard or some other more sound monetary system.
00:30:48.940They will tell you, Mark, I have talked to people in banking and very high up in economics.
00:30:57.540And they all, I mean, they're all, in my opinion, they all believe the same crap that they all learned in the same schools.
00:31:05.120But they'll tell you that there's no way the world can afford the lifestyle that we have with the gold standard.
00:32:00.160We can get back on a monetary system that's sound and stable.
00:32:06.560And I think we have a great opportunity here in this economic crisis that's coming forth to return the world to more human-directed purpose rather than political purpose.
00:32:22.200When you say Category 6, what category would you put the Great Depression in?
00:32:54.180They wanted to, you know, create all sorts of government jobs, which is the wrong thing to do.
00:32:59.900If you allow the free market to resolve an economic crisis, you can make it much shorter and much safer for people.
00:33:09.340And I think that we can reduce that Category 6 rating on this coming storm greatly if we were to be able to pursue a more traditional policy.
00:33:20.540I mean, when you had—we had Wilson that scared the hell out of people, followed by Harding and Coolidge, and their recession, which was far steeper than 1929, and the Great—what led to the Great Depression.
00:33:43.240You're not—you're in a situation now where the world thinks that socialism is the great answer.
00:33:50.860I mean, you're not really looking at a country that will say, you know what, we should all tighten our belts, and we're in this together, and let's all suffer together.
00:33:59.540We're going to do the opposite, don't you think?
00:34:02.700I'm afraid we might, but I think that there is a way out.
00:37:39.360And Glenn, I tell you, if the American people are listening, I mean, what you said in your opening is your introduction, which I appreciated is exactly why I have broke my silence after all this time.
00:37:51.000As time went by, at first I wanted to give people deference that, hey, they were just misinformed or because they were viewing facts through their own individual political ideological lens that they were unintentionally misinforming people.
00:38:06.240But as time went by, I don't say this with happiness, but I feel that there's actually some intent behind the distortion of the facts and what's out there.
00:38:21.840If anyone says that the wall is ineffective, that they're simply misleading the American people.
00:38:31.700There are facts, historical data that shows that the wall, as part of a multilayered approach of infrastructure, technology, and personnel, when those things coalesce together and they're provided effectively along the southwest border, Glenn, it works.
00:38:51.800And go to the fact, you know, there was an article that was just published by the Yuma County Sheriff's in Arizona that said when the wall, when the wall, along with technology and personnel, came to his territory, he saw over a 90% reduction in immigration.
00:39:07.620And he saw overall crime in his territory reduced drastically.
00:39:15.920In the United States Border Patrol, when I go there, again, I was there.
00:39:19.360I don't understand why pundits are not listening to the experts.
00:39:26.060Look, you know, so, you know, the president of the Border Patrol Council, Brandon Judd, and the current White House, you know, they didn't want me there and they removed me.
00:39:36.560And I'm here today, as you said, to say that they're right.
00:39:39.800And the reason why they're right is because they've got decades and decades, and they've dedicated their entire life along the southwest border protecting our country.
00:39:48.680And they're out there saying that the wall works.
00:39:51.100He talked about in the Gallus, San Diego.
00:39:53.480We could go on and on forever where it is fact, Glenn.
00:40:43.240That is a small problem of the overall problem.
00:40:47.740And I can tell you that the Customs and Border Protection, specifically CBP, they're working every day to improve their ground sensor technology and tunnel technology, working with the Israel, et cetera, to improve that technology.
00:41:03.120So because the bad guys changed their tactics, techniques, and procedures, therefore, we should do away with other infrastructure that helps reduce the other techniques they use?
00:41:15.800I mean, you see, it doesn't make any sense.
00:41:17.580Can you help me with, because I think this is a humanitarian crisis, because we are so, we are sending mixed signals all the time.
00:41:27.920People are sending their children over.
00:41:34.680The rape on women, you have a 30% chance, if you're a woman, you're going with a mule, 30% chance of being raped.
00:41:42.260Can you describe how a wall is actually the humanitarian thing to do?
00:41:48.700Do you have any facts to – go ahead.
00:41:50.760Yes, and again, Glenn, you're 100% right.
00:41:54.440Everything that you just said, you're 100% right, and that's based on my experience, in fact, and the experience of a whole heck of a lot of other people who have been doing this a lot longer than I have.
00:42:04.240Because remember, as the FBI, I was in charge of the El Paso division.
00:42:10.540So I lived it for two years and worked it for two years there right on the border.
00:42:14.400And I'm telling you, when I became chief of the Border Patrol, almost immediately, and this is back in 2016, almost immediately, you know what word I was using?
00:42:46.440So, look, again, it's – and no one is – and this is where it's disingenuous, too, when people want to try it as a soundbite, say, well, the wall won't solve everything.
00:42:54.960That's absolutely correct, but guess what?
00:42:58.560There's not a single Border Patrol agent in the history of the Border Patrol or any leader within that agency that has ever said the wall works.
00:43:05.500But it is a significant part of the multilayered approach.
00:43:08.400And here's where it will help everything that you just talked about.
00:43:11.880By building that wall, the infrastructure, technology, and personnel, what it's going to do is take away the avenue from the cartels and from the coyotes.
00:43:21.660They will no longer have the avenues to what I really think is a systematic abuse and torture of the people that they're bringing through this perilous crash.
00:43:44.800These are young girls that are being smuggled as part of the human smuggling effort, and they're being forced into sex trade and et cetera.
00:43:58.780And to think that we would not support everything that the expert says we need to mitigate that and have a positive impact on that, I don't understand.
00:44:09.420You build that wall, you have the technology, you have the personnel, it takes away that avenue from the cartels and the coyotes.
00:44:16.480And now the only way that somebody can get in is through the points of entry.
00:44:21.840And that gives us a heck of a lot better shot.
00:44:25.060I'm talking to Mark Morgan, a former Border Patrol chief who was with the FBI for a long time, U.S. Marine Corps.
00:44:29.160So, with the wall, this is something that a lot of people will bring up, Mark, is, you know, as you pointed out, tunnels could theoretically go under it.
00:44:43.320But the theory is, number one, you're going to get rid of the low-hanging fruit, right, people who don't want to do that.
00:44:49.060Two, you're going to delay anyone who's trying to attempt that so that Border Patrol can get there.
00:44:54.900And isn't it as well a sign, like, when you're in a country and you see pictures of the wall on television, there's a lot of people that will be dissuaded just from knowing that the wall exists.
00:46:26.840How was the change from like Oklahoma to New York?
00:46:30.240You know, okay, so I lived in New York for six years, and I think it's kind of like if you've been stuck in a car with someone for like three or four weeks, you have no patience whatsoever.
00:46:39.260That's how I was when I left New York.
00:46:40.620Coming back, though, I had rebuilt all of that deep breathing, and I was able to handle it.
00:46:50.840I think you can live there if you are very young or very hot or very rich, and I am smoking hot, but I don't have enough money to make it work long term.