Glenn and Stu discuss the close race between Ron Johnson and Mandela Barnes for the U.S. Senate seat in Wisconsin. They also have a special guest, economist Carol Roth, join them to talk about the economy and the gig economy.
00:02:17.580You're listening to The Best of the Glenn Beck Program.
00:02:21.520So yesterday, if you remember, my head was going to explode because why are we allowing California to dictate everything to the rest of the nation?
00:02:56.100Here's Janet Yellen from yesterday on our economy.
00:03:01.300We still see the impact of COVID in China and the slowdown in Chinese growth and with high inflation and tightening monetary policy in many advanced countries.
00:05:07.920But just because this, according to Department of Homeland Security, just because of what we've done on the border, there has only been a 500% increase in human smuggling.
00:05:24.580Now, I want to talk about those other countries that are having some problems, you know, with loans becoming more expensive, threatening jobs, trouble with their oil and gas prices, high interest rates and high inflation.
00:06:13.040And, you know, now they're going to have to completely reimagine, completely reimagine how Europe is put together because it's broken and they're not going to be able to do anything about it.
00:06:25.940They just have to reimagine how everything works.
00:06:32.080And they're looking now at an era of volatility, which is great.
00:06:36.240But, you know, the thing I really liked is he said, you know, United States and Europe had a fantastic relationship and we were cooperating a lot.
00:06:51.700But I urge you to think what would have happened if instead of Joe Biden sort of happened with Donald Trump or someone like him in the White House.
00:06:59.960It wouldn't happen with him in the White House.
00:07:06.220He was warning you of these things and you laughed at him.
00:07:11.580But don't worry about it, because we are fine, according to Janet.
00:07:52.100But then our our president, he got a little spicy with the with the sultan or the prince over there and and said, you know, this guy's a thug and a criminal and he has no place at the table and I'm going to take care of him when I get in.
00:08:09.940So now the the president went over and he said, hey, can you guys maybe up the you know, and they agreed as he left, they agreed to 200,000 barrels, which is nothing.
00:08:39.380And that kind of pissed the prince off.
00:08:41.980And so he's like, yeah, you know what?
00:08:44.660I'm going to reduce it even more than that.
00:08:46.560OK, so they went the people who were there at the meeting said that he was asking for oil and he was asking, you know, just can you just boost it up a bit?
00:08:57.760What's better is he was saying, and if you have to cut it, can you wait until after the election?
00:09:03.480That way he could, you know, convince everybody that we're on the move, everything's good and your gas prices are down and then OPEC could lower the production of oil.
00:09:15.700And then after you've made a decision on which side you trust to tell you the truth and to help you along, then after the election, then he could say, oh, my gosh, look at what these evil, evil Saudis are doing.
00:09:28.340OK, now, the president has come out and said we never even talked about oil.
00:10:28.380Oh, by the way, the other reason Saudi Arabia is so pissed at us because of Joe Biden is because he's making a deal with their mortal enemy, Iran.
00:10:58.320So the U.S. Department of Commerce introduced sweeping rules aimed at cutting China off from obtaining or manufacturing key chips and components for supercomputers.
00:11:09.700This is quoting is seen as a huge escalation, huge escalation in the tensions between Beijing and Washington.
00:11:18.560America argues that such advanced semiconductors can be used by China for advanced military capabilities.
00:12:25.460Oh, by the way, last night also, Biden doubled down on the warning of nuclear Armageddon.
00:12:31.800Yesterday, he said it again, you know, I don't think Putin will use a nuclear weapon, but I mean, it could be nuclear Armageddon if he does.
00:12:48.820Oh, OK, that that makes that makes it that makes it much more acceptable and and and soothing really to hear that news.
00:12:58.100Oh, and they also announced yesterday that NATO is going to hold a nuclear deterrence exercise.
00:13:23.020It was a NATO nuclear deterrence test.
00:13:28.020And I'm going to take you way, way back to 1983, because what we did, we held this annual every year.
00:13:38.200We did it annual exercise and we had 100,000 personnel over there, 16,000 of which were flown in from the United States.
00:13:49.160And the X or the exercise was to simulate what are you going to do if somebody launches a nuke?
00:13:55.400Now, the Soviet Union knew this was just an exercise that we did every year.
00:14:01.700But Reagan had been a little spicy, calling them a terrorist organization, saying that they were an evil empire.
00:14:11.860And so they no longer trusted the United States at all because they knew Ronald Reagan wanted them to collapse.
00:14:21.100So what they did is they they had these new things called computers and these computer programs who started to track, you know, they were there in Russia and they were very sophisticated.
00:14:39.040Russia had only the best computers and the best software programmers.
00:14:42.780And and so as they were doing this, what happened was it looked like we had launched a bunch of missiles on their computers and they were convinced we launched a bunch of missiles.
00:15:03.440And they had during the whole operation, they had all of their planes out with 10 minute warnings and they had loaded all of their missiles.
00:15:13.980They had also taken all of their missiles out of the protected shelters, opened up the blast doors.
00:15:23.280If it wasn't for the little red phone, hey, call me.
00:15:29.440We probably all would have been vaporized.
00:15:33.440But that has that maneuver, you know, the where they're where they're just trying to just have a military X, you know, exercise, you know, that that is just to see what we would do if the Soviet Union would launch a nuclear deterrent.
00:15:52.120You know, what would our deterrent be?
00:19:04.820And, you know, I don't know how much of this is COVID related because I've got members on the other side of the aisle who have not been there since COVID started.
00:19:53.020I mean, that's been my job is to go out and find out what people here want me to be saying in D.C., how they want to be represented, what their priorities concerns and their issues and what scares them.
00:20:25.680What I'm hearing is, you know, economy, number one, people are really upset that their paychecks are so much smaller now.
00:20:33.580They might be getting more per hour more.
00:20:36.820But when we look at and take into account inflation, you know, if you do the math, 8.3 percent, which let's face it, it's higher than that.
00:21:02.280When you start looking at gas prices, which or let's face it, I know that the Biden administration keeps wanting to blame, you know, the Russian war in Ukraine.
00:21:22.620He's spending, like crazy people, trillions and trillions of dollars more than any other administration has ever spent in the first 20 months.
00:21:29.980More debt than we've ever accumulated in our country's history.
00:22:34.160Do they really think, the Democrats, that they've got a winning message, or do they know they're in trouble?
00:22:45.240So when you talk to folks one-on-one when the cameras aren't on, Democrats will admit that they're in trouble.
00:22:51.760That they will admit that fiscally, that Biden has not been exactly what you'd consider responsible, and that people in their district are talking about it.
00:23:15.080But then they say that, and then you look at the board at the end of a vote, and you're like, every Democrat voted yes to spending more money, to being more fiscally irresponsible, to sending billions of dollars outside of our country, to hiring, you know, 87,000 IRS agents, but ignoring that we even have a border problem.
00:23:36.380So there's one thing that they'll say, but there's something else that they vote.
00:23:42.260Because you know, some of these folks, I'm going to give them credit, some of these folks really are smart when you talk to them, and you just shake your head at their votes.
00:23:49.860Because it doesn't reflect in their votes that they've got, you know, a brain cell.
00:23:52.800What do people in the district, when you're talking to the average person, what do they think about war and Putin and all of that?
00:24:04.680You know, this is something that Republicans had been warning for over a year, ever since our botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, right?
00:24:14.880When we started talking about the lack of leadership there, how when you're allowing terrorists to basically control your foreign policy, what message that was sending out.
00:24:26.480We said exactly what was going to happen.
00:25:47.800You know, and I would argue that what's happening at the border, they're turning a blind eye because they don't want to actually have to face that exactly what they wanted to happen is happening.
00:25:56.100They don't want to have to admit that if they go down there and they talk to people who work there.
00:25:59.300But we have had millions of people enter this country illegally.
00:26:01.740We have had, you know, a Democrat party who's wanting to have their own rule for votes on opening that voting rules up for the entire country with H.R.1, where they wanted to have people who entered our country illegally be able to vote.
00:26:18.760They wanted to be able to have people who are 16 vote.
00:26:23.400So you think about that plan and you can start easily thinking, well, maybe their goal is to have millions of people come into this country illegally because they're hoping that they're going to vote for them and change the way that our country looks.
00:27:02.200And where there's a void of leadership, China is more than happy to be filling that void.
00:27:06.500And they are doing that every single day.
00:27:10.300When you think about the rare earth minerals that they have rights to around the world, 75 percent of our earth's rare minerals and our policies.
00:27:19.300I believe we have a lot of them up in Alaska, but you'll never get anybody to open those up.
00:37:04.560The length of how deep and how long this goes.
00:37:07.900But there's another factor in here, which is because we are the world reserve currency, it's something called the Triffin dilemma.
00:37:16.120So not only domestically are we at odds, inflation versus recession, but from a global standpoint, you're at odds.
00:37:25.200Do you make decisions for the benefit of the U.S., which I'm not sure that we can, but let's just pretend that maybe we can.
00:37:33.160Or for the world, because the world is on the precipice of a massive global recession that could cause all kinds of reverberations here.
00:37:42.700So this is the massive puzzle that these central planners, again, have created because they thought like, oh, we can figure this out.
00:37:51.480But they don't realize they aren't smart enough to figure out all these moving parts.
00:37:55.520So as Fed chair, I need to slow the Titanic down so that we can get people, as we talked about offline, into the light boats versus not crashing into the iceberg because that's just not possible at this point in time.
00:38:09.620It's not possible to save the Titanic.
00:38:11.240Yeah, I personally don't think that it's possible.
00:38:13.880Everyone's just like, oh, there's a very narrow path.
00:38:16.560OK, well, the path is like, you know, as narrow as like one of my hairs.
00:38:22.640The time to do something really was before 2008.
00:38:26.920Once we went down the path of bailing everybody out, this is the inevitable outcome.
00:38:33.520And everybody, you know, at the Fed and all the experts and all the banking people, they all said, no, no, no, no, you don't understand.
00:38:40.180And I kept saying to them, I do understand.
00:38:43.180I don't think you're either telling the truth to yourself or you're you're you're you're just a crazy man because you can't do this at the numbers that we're doing it.
00:38:56.520Yeah. And the thing is that not only should they have not done what they did, then they shouldn't have kept in place for as long as they have and they shouldn't have doubled down.
00:39:05.300And that's the problem is that we keep having these opportunities to go.
00:39:08.700So, yes, we've made mistakes and we're going to change course, but instead everyone goes, no, I think this is fine.
00:39:16.060We're going to continue marching down or I'm not seeing the problem in the way that other people are anticipating seeing the problem.
00:39:22.220So since they're not recognizing it, we have some more room to just continue to continue on until they wake up and realize that it's a problem.
00:39:31.240Once you wake up and realize that the problem is there, then it becomes too late and we're in the situation that we're in today.
00:39:37.960So Monday, I did a monologue on Credit Suisse and I said, you're going to see in two years because the Fed doesn't have to tell you anything for two years.
00:39:48.100But I guarantee you, we are sending our money over to Credit Suisse right now to do basically what we did in 2008.
00:41:42.800It means they either continue to devalue their currency.
00:41:45.600They're going to have to spend more and more of their currency to buy dollars or they sell dollar denominated assets like treasuries in order to get the dollars to pay.
00:42:05.780The Fed's decision isn't just inflation versus, you know, a deeper recession here in the U.S.
00:42:12.520It's literally potentially creating a global currency crisis.
00:42:16.260It's potentially creating illiquidity in the treasury market in a crisis there.
00:42:21.360It's potentially, you know, all risk assets could end up just, you know, being sold in a massive fire sale.
00:42:28.120I mean, they have to think through all of those implications.
00:42:31.560And that's why if I were Fed chair right now where we started this, I would have to pause because I don't think that the Fed has the tools to combat inflation since their supply generated anyway.
00:43:10.880There's no investors in exploring for oil, et cetera, et cetera, and the fact that we are headed towards price destruction, meaning nobody can afford to do anything.
00:43:23.660So nobody's going to be using gas and you're going to be staying at home.
00:43:28.780So the price of gas will fall through the floor.
00:43:32.320They think then the banks will have or any investors will have a call on their investment and they won't have the money to be able to do it.
00:43:44.360So they're stuck in the same kind of trap where it's this vicious circle.
00:43:50.220So there is a case to be made that, you know, as we kind of go into a global recession, like a very deep global recession, that there will be demand destruction.
00:44:02.960But you have to remember that we just had OPEC plus decide to cut production 2 million barrels per day.
00:44:11.420So and, you know, China is still kind of getting back and running, you know, in terms of capacity.
00:44:16.980So I don't think that oil and gas are going to go back up to the levels that, you know, perhaps we saw earlier this year.
00:44:25.820But the idea that it's all going to come crashing down.
00:44:28.820I mean, yes, Europe's stockpiled on gas, but it's like a three month stockpile.
00:45:26.400It sounds like in 2020 when a bunch of people said, wait, you can't just turn off a third of the economy and then turn it back on whenever you want.
00:45:35.060And there's going to be absolutely no dislocation.
00:45:40.940You're losing the parts manufacturers.
00:45:44.060You're losing, in the case of nuclear, a knowledge base, specialized expertise.
00:45:50.920You cannot just flip the switch back on.
00:45:53.520And there's no meaningful sort of rush towards investment because all of these companies believe that, you know, whoever the next regime is, even if there's a friendly one in between, that they're just going to double down on these bad policies.
00:46:08.040So why would they make a 10-year or a 15-year, multi-billion dollar investment when people are coming out saying, we're coming after you?
00:46:24.860And in terms of energy, this is not just the next few months.
00:46:28.760This is a multi, multi-year disaster with massive human suffering.
00:46:33.860I mean, we're talking about already in Europe, just the implications, not just on heating your homes, but on the food sector, bakeries, dairy, companies that massively use energy, they're not able to produce at the levels that they could because the energy is too much.
00:47:20.480But to stay singly focused on this and continue while people are going to face starvation and freezing to death, it's, there's something deeply, deeply wrong with you.