The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1139
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 48 minutes
Words per Minute
180.39833
Hate Speech Sentences
107
Summary
In this episode of The Lotus Eaters, the lads talk about how millennials are giving Asians cancer, and why it gives them cancer. They also discuss the latest in the Brokernomics debate, and discuss the current state of the Trump administration.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
How do you do, fellow Lotus Eaters? This is the podcast of The Lotus Eaters, episode 1139.
00:00:07.080
I'm your host, Harry, joined today by Josh, who's threatening to get his willy out.
00:00:14.580
Who has got his willy out. And Dan, who's always standing full mast.
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All right, so this first section of the podcast will be testing out intros to the podcast.
00:00:40.200
Yeah, yeah. No, it won't, actually, because we're going to be talking about...
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I'm going to be talking about millennial writing and why it gave me cancer.
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Josh is going to be talking about streamers giving Asians cancer.
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I know you like an Asian, so I've done a whole second about it.
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Anyway, I think there's nothing else to say, so Dan, get on with it.
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I'm just doing the bloody hell screen zooming bit so I can actually read it.
00:01:18.400
I think I'm going to have to talk about tariffs again.
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I've been talking about tariffs quite a lot, but there doesn't seem to actually be anything
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I did this video on tariffs last week where I kind of, you know, gave it a bit of an intro
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and, you know, my perspective on the sort of general direction of things.
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Then I did a Brokernomics on that where I went into a bit more detail, the sort of, you
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know, basic tier of how these tariffs work and the mechanisms behind it and all that kind
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Then yesterday, I did a three-hour live stream with Academic Agent on a tariff debate.
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The shame was that it was two separate discussions going on parallel with one another.
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AA was looking at this from a potential short-term consequences angle where he was looking at
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if there are price increases of products due to the tariffs, how is this going to affect
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He was very concerned about Jamal, wasn't he, and his trainers?
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They're very important to Jamal, and Jamal does get as much of a vote as everybody else.
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So it was something important to think about in the short term.
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You were looking at it from a broader, long-term geopolitical strategy.
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So, I mean, AA is very good, you know, world-class thinker on elite theory and all that stuff.
00:03:01.600
He does have a slight hint of the Peter Hitchens about him.
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I mean, I'm maybe not less the contrarian, more the just unending misery.
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Yeah, so he was coming in from the perspective of, you know, the short-term power plays and
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So if you want to see two people of the right, even if one of them likes to be a bit contrarian
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to the right, then that would be an interesting discussion about, you know, the current stage
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And what I thought I'd do in this segment is because Travis are dominating everything
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again, I will go through a little bit deeper into my thinking of it, some of the stuff
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that I mentioned in that live stream, although without the back and forwards quite so much.
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Also, if you've got a question, Josh has very kindly said that I can run into his segment
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So if you have a question, put it in a rumble rant, and I'll try and answer it in the segment.
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And if you're a subscriber, put your question in the comments, and I'll get you another bloody
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full Brokernomics, and I'll go much deeper into your comments.
00:04:09.480
So that also means that you're not reading the comments at the end today, right?
00:04:14.940
Well, I'll do the rumble rants today, but the subscriber comments I'll save for the Brokernomics
00:04:21.100
so that I can go into them properly and with full detail.
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But, you know, any comments on yours, I'm sure we can do as before.
00:04:27.880
So let's start off with the setup behind this, because one of the things that's become apparent
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to me as I've been talking about this over the course of the last week is a lot of people
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are working on the assumption that everything was hunky-dory up until Trump put the tariffs
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This is a map showing who your largest trading partner is, given the binary choice between
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So, for example, Turkey's largest trading partner is actually Germany.
00:05:04.520
That aside, right, between the split between the US and China, you can just see that China
00:05:11.480
is dominating, apart from basically the collective West.
00:05:18.180
Apart from a little bit of Central America, Canada, and Europe.
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And even then, Eastern Europe's on China, Spain's with China.
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Australia and New Zealand, members of Five Eyes, they've gone over.
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So, I mean, this is not the sort of thing you can ignore for military reasons, which I
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The other thing that you want to bear in mind is, I think a lot of people were under
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the assumption that the COVID-era debt, and more broadly, the last 30 years of rampant
00:05:54.760
deficit spending, huge government expenditure, and debt accumulation, I think they thought
00:06:03.320
Well, it sort of is, in that when they held the default world reserve currency, a lot of
00:06:10.480
their debts were basically inconsequential to them, because they could just print more
00:06:17.140
Well, it lets you accumulate the debt for free, but the servicing cost of the debt isn't
00:06:22.480
So, I think a trillion dollars a year now is going just to servicing the debt.
00:06:28.340
So, yes, it's pretty much free at the point of creation.
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They can push it out there during the mechanisms that you described, but you still need to pay
00:06:37.020
Well, it's because the world has moved away from the dollar as a reserve currency to a
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And also, the debt has gone up, and so those interest payments are now extortionate, really.
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I mean, they're not bigger than Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid at the moment, but they've
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already exceeded the size of the military, for example, just paying the debt.
00:07:00.800
And if you look at this, I mean, you know, Americans have allowed themselves to cover
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up all sorts of sins in inefficient government, in bloated government, you know, jobs.
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A lot of the people enthusiastic about it, the leftists and the boomers, for example, just
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And, you know, if you could do that, why wouldn't you just always have a situation where people
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stayed home and didn't go to work and got handouts?
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Well, I didn't, because I wasn't here at the time.
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Being stared at by the neighbours every time I had a group of rules.
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I was working from home, so I was still working.
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Not if you worked in the government, you wouldn't have been.
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You would have been sat at home watching Netflix.
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But basically, the bill for COVID is, and you can see the huge jump in the debt, the bill
00:08:01.000
for that is coming due now because most of that debt was done on a five-year rollover
00:08:07.080
So the bill is coming due and basically the US has 10 trillion in debt to rollover over
00:08:15.400
So, and the other thing that's changed, of course, is that interest rates at the time
00:08:20.020
when it was done was about 1% and now they're about 5%.
00:08:23.500
So that's an extra 400 billion that they're going to have to pay.
00:08:30.340
Now, if you think about what Elon Musk is doing with Doge, a really good outcome for
00:08:37.460
So all of Doge's efforts could be wiped out if these debt costs don't come down fast.
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Please don't assume that if everything was going to be hunky-dory, if Trump did nothing,
00:08:53.880
I'll give you another bit of broader perspective.
00:09:01.360
All of us to step back and ask us, ask ourselves, what has the globalist economy gotten the United
00:09:10.240
And the answer is fundamentally, it's based on two principles, incurring a huge amount
00:09:15.400
of debt to buy things that other countries make for us.
00:09:18.700
And to make it a little bit more crystal clear, we borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy
00:09:28.560
It's not a recipe for low prices, and it's not a recipe for good jobs in the United States
00:09:39.520
We've seen the cost of housing so high that most Americans can't afford to buy a home right
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President Trump is taking this economy in a different direction.
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We cannot keep going down the Joe Biden globalist pathway where we have $2 trillion of peacetime
00:10:07.360
We've got to take this country in a different direction.
00:10:12.640
Wasn't it fun two weeks ago when we were just making memes of Vance?
00:10:27.400
So a quick recap from my very long debate yesterday.
00:10:31.520
I'll try and sum it up a little bit sharper today.
00:10:35.520
Here's my sort of broad macro arguments for what's going on here.
00:10:40.160
So first thing you've got to bear in mind is the dollar's exorbitant privilege,
00:10:44.440
so that basically its ability to run huge deficits supported by debt indefinitely,
00:10:53.400
And actually, the dollar is at greater risk of dying from its strength than its weakness.
00:10:57.440
The reason being is that if the dollar is too strong, 50% of world's debt are denominated
00:11:07.840
As I mentioned, the US has 10 trillion in COVID-era debt to roll over in the next year.
00:11:13.660
And you've got to get rates lower than nominal growth, right?
00:11:18.880
Basically, my thinking there is the economy is about the same size as the debt.
00:11:25.520
So if given that they're the same size, if one grows faster than if the debt grows faster
00:11:31.640
than the economy, then it's going to swallow everything.
00:11:34.280
And then you're in a debt spiral, which is bad.
00:11:36.680
So you've got to get those rates below the growth rate.
00:11:53.160
We're going to have to come back to them because they're part of the big meltdown that
00:11:58.940
China also has a vast amount of debt that it needs to roll over this year.
00:12:07.660
So it's a bit odd, some of the things that are happening at the moment.
00:12:10.780
It is also worth adding on to that, that the Chinese still need to restructure their
00:12:15.920
entire way in which they distribute money to their local governments.
00:12:20.640
Because at the minute, people are sort of surprised by this.
00:12:22.880
But the local districts or regional governments have a certain degree of autonomy.
00:12:28.340
It's why the social credit score thing is very different depending on where you are in China
00:12:34.880
because it's all done by these regional governments.
00:12:37.280
And they've been using their assets as collateral for loans.
00:12:40.660
And then eventually, the loans have got so large that they don't have enough assets to
00:12:47.560
So they've got to more or less restructure that system.
00:12:50.460
And this is all coming at the same time that the US is whacking large tariffs on them.
00:12:55.580
I mean, they're in a right pickle for a number of reasons.
00:12:58.460
And yet there is this brinkmanship going on with the US at the moment, which I will come
00:13:07.260
As well as the debt refi cycle, which is really important, you've also got to be thinking
00:13:10.880
about the manufacturing and strategic supply lines, including military.
00:13:15.920
Well, one, a recent Pentagon study found that the US military fails at hundreds of separate
00:13:23.400
points because it is reliant on Chinese supply chains in order to function.
00:13:29.380
Now, I would suggest that if you are a superpower and you're worried about an up and coming superpower,
00:13:34.900
you don't make your military fail if the other superpower that you're a rival with doesn't
00:13:43.220
And presumably the Trump admin has come to the same conclusion, even though obviously Biden
00:13:48.300
and Obama were not particularly concerned about that.
00:13:51.280
The US share of global manufacturing has declined 11 points over the last decade from 28.4%.
00:13:58.440
So the US used to have 28.4% of global manufacturing, and that's down to 17.4% related to that map
00:14:07.940
So that's going to be both the fact that the US has de-industrialized as well as a lot of
00:14:19.020
But that is a trend that is accelerating, so you would expect the next 10 points to come
00:14:26.160
And we are literally in the process right now of watching the US lose a war against Russia
00:14:31.200
because Russia can outproduce munitions, which is important.
00:14:41.100
It is effectively a US proxy war against Russia, and they're losing it because they can't produce.
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I remind us that the US is not a superpower because of the dollar.
00:14:55.380
It's really a superpower because of its military, which allows it then to enforce its dollar
00:15:03.360
And I won't go into now exactly how that came about.
00:15:06.580
But the strength of your military is also determined by the strength of your economy.
00:15:10.320
And the best measure of that in terms of sort of martial economy is industry, right?
00:15:17.060
Part of the reason that the US was so important in World War II is that they had the best industrial
00:15:25.740
I mean, that was really when they emerged as the superpower.
00:15:30.180
So to go with this, I have put together this handy chart.
00:15:42.720
So I put together this handy chart with emojis explaining the whole situation.
00:15:46.680
Because one of the pushbacks that I've had on this whole tariff thing is people looking
00:15:52.000
to identify different messages and say, well, look, if people can't agree what the tariffs
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are for, well, that must invalidate the whole argument then.
00:16:01.240
Because if there's any confusion over, you know, give me one reason why these tariffs,
00:16:05.560
there is not one reason why these tariffs are for.
00:16:07.560
So there's three broad buckets as to why the tariffs are going in.
00:16:12.720
So there's the trade issue, which is the US manufacturing, the big deficits, the lack
00:16:25.100
And I think that if Trump had come in and he was still the only person in the admin who
00:16:31.100
was enthusiastic for this, it would have been like last time where he did a little bit of
00:16:35.820
tariffs and, you know, he did something, but it wasn't earth shattering like this.
00:16:39.920
The whole reason why this tariff thing is as big as it is, is because he's got the second
00:16:46.360
So what are the, what are those second two camps?
00:16:48.520
Well, the money camp, which is the huge US debt, US debt, it's global debt, you know,
00:16:59.840
They can't release global liquidity, all of that stuff.
00:17:05.120
This is the, I mean, as you can imagine being a money guy and do brokonomics, this is,
00:17:08.560
this is probably the one that I focus on the most.
00:17:10.880
But, but what I'm saying is, is along with Trump's reasons for doing this, you then get
00:17:17.480
the money guys wanting to do this as well for their own reasons, but the policy achieves
00:17:23.920
Then you've got the military guys, which is, you know, the problem is as simple as this.
00:17:27.840
The US military relies on China, which is obviously bonkers.
00:17:34.780
I mean, actually, he's not being incredibly vocal on this, but there was a broad,
00:17:40.880
three military guys who understand that you just, you just can't have a situation where
00:17:44.660
China is, you know, able to turn off your military, obviously bonkers.
00:17:50.740
So then I've got, right, what does winning like for each of these camps?
00:17:54.740
Well, for the, for the trade guys, it's all about getting jobs back and getting the deficit
00:18:01.600
So when you hear Peter Navarro going out, he's being very bellicose on this.
00:18:05.540
He focuses purely on those two things, which is why you're getting different messages
00:18:09.780
from different people because he, he is only focused on those things.
00:18:14.920
For the trade guys, losing would look like backing down.
00:18:19.000
And, and there's, that, that is the whole effort at the moment is to put so much, to
00:18:23.200
do so much reeing and so much screaming that Trump feels the need to back off and just give
00:18:30.940
Um, I don't think Trump is a sort of chap who, who backs down because people are reeing.
00:18:37.440
I saw an old tweet from 2014 where he's saying some people are artists, you know, they, I'm
00:18:43.800
paraphrasing a little bit here, you know, they might work in marble or on a canvas, but my,
00:18:48.760
my art form is in deal making and making the best deals is, um, how I basically get my
00:18:58.120
And if you've got that sort of mindset, you're probably not going to just say, you know what,
00:19:04.780
I suspect he's going to hold the line on this, but we will see.
00:19:07.140
That's where all the effort is going, trying to make him back down.
00:19:11.360
Well, they get the dollar down, they get their, they get their 10 trillion of debt rolled
00:19:15.700
over at manageable levels and, uh, they probably get a Mar-a-Lago record.
00:19:19.680
Now, what do I mean by that is that, um, so with each of these, I mean, people, people are
00:19:23.700
saying, people have said in the debate yesterday, some of the comments were saying,
00:19:29.100
No, these guys have been very clear on what they want.
00:19:33.580
Scott Besson has been writing articles and doing interviews for, for years, making all
00:19:38.700
Um, and the military guys are making all of these points.
00:19:41.000
So all of the, there is, there is no guessing as to what people want, uh, and what winning
00:19:52.620
That is something that Scott Besson brings up every time he does an interview on this
00:19:56.340
is that there is going to need to be a new trade order in the world.
00:20:02.060
Now, these new trade orders, they come around every sort of 80 to a hundred years.
00:20:07.280
Um, you know, the, the, the last time would have been after the second world war.
00:20:10.760
Um, but you, you, you can keep going back and, and there will be a new trade order that's
00:20:19.160
Um, so either a new trade order, a viable trade order gets set up now when the US is
00:20:26.360
still hegemon or you wait until China are a co-equal partner or even ahead.
00:20:34.140
So they obviously want to do the trade and renegotiate now.
00:20:36.420
And that's getting, and that's getting the, um, the acronym there.
00:20:39.460
Well, the, uh, uh, the name Mar-a-Lago Accords, uh, which I will come back to in a future
00:20:44.900
Uh, and what does, what does losing look like to them when it's going to be, if, if the debt
00:20:48.680
cost goes up, you know, that'd be very bad for them.
00:20:51.340
Uh, as I mentioned, they, they want to roll over this debt close as possible to what it
00:20:55.480
was last time, not some, you know, great multiple of that.
00:21:00.400
The military guys, uh, what does winning look like for them?
00:21:02.740
It's going to be, um, self-reliance or at least allies.
00:21:06.920
I think the US military might be able to live with it if their supply chain, um, had some
00:21:13.420
Indian input, for example, or, you know, some other place, maybe they could be a bit more
00:21:21.280
I mean, preferably they want to bring it all back in house.
00:21:24.000
That would be the best win, but you most certainly don't want it to be in China.
00:21:30.480
Also, India is still relatively close to China and very evadeable.
00:21:34.860
So I, I, I wouldn't say that, you know, moving it from out, out from China to India is a win.
00:21:40.940
I just say it's, it's not as bad as China, but ultimately you do want to bring it all
00:21:46.680
Well, it's, it's, if China, um, can outproduce them.
00:21:51.760
There is a single Chinese shipyard that has outputted more commercial ships in a year
00:21:58.280
than the US has in its entire period since World War II.
00:22:02.140
Now those are commercial ships, but obviously that could be retooled for military ships pretty
00:22:08.980
If anyone who's ever played a, you know, a, uh, a 4X strategy game knows that basically
00:22:14.980
whoever's got the biggest econ just wins because your, your military is, is, is downstream
00:22:20.200
Um, also losing would look like the, uh, China having the ability to, to turn off the US
00:22:28.340
So, um, the, on, on, basically everybody is going to want to like the money stuff.
00:22:34.360
Um, longer term, China won't be so in love with it if they get the Mar-a-Lago records,
00:22:41.820
But, but China very, very much needs to get the dollar lower because it's got a lot of
00:22:46.620
debt to all of them and things that Josh was talking about as well.
00:22:48.840
So, so everybody is in favor of the money angle of this.
00:22:52.500
When it comes to the military angle, um, EU would probably, I mean, EU knows where it
00:23:00.920
So they're broadly happy with, you know, the Chinese, um, being cut out of it.
00:23:05.900
Um, the rest of the world, I mean, it depends on which country really, but, you know, they're
00:23:10.820
Obviously China is very, is not happy, um, with the US military being independent of itself.
00:23:21.240
I'm not in a WhatsApp chat with Z, but I'm, I'm, I'm going out there.
00:23:27.000
Maybe they'll be thrilled that it could be more of a fair fight.
00:23:33.000
Maybe, maybe they're, they're, they're looking for a good old scrap.
00:23:41.460
Let's just do it until we see who gets their military objectives and then peace, right?
00:23:46.960
But for the people who say I'm speculating, I am speculating that, that, that, that China,
00:23:53.820
Um, and then over on the trade side, um, EU, uh, are, um, they started off being very belligerent,
00:24:00.480
um, but they've, they're now making noises about, okay, we want a zero rate deal with the US.
00:24:05.800
Um, the concern for the EU is that if they get into a zero rate trade arrangement with
00:24:11.080
the US, um, they are vastly, vastly over-regulated.
00:24:15.680
So they might be able to compete with California, but they're going to get their, you know, they're
00:24:19.620
going to get their trousers taken down by the, by the rest of the US.
00:24:22.060
So, so they will then end up getting into a race to the bottom on regulation, which is
00:24:32.600
I think, I think the UK is going to be fine with this because we, you know, well, we don't
00:24:36.280
produce anything anyway, so, so it doesn't matter.
00:24:38.800
But we've got, we've got an aerospace industry, lots of aviation stuff.
00:24:42.400
Yes, we, we have got a little bit of manufacturing.
00:24:48.500
Okay, so we, we produce a little bit, so, so we're fine, but I didn't bother putting
00:24:58.340
I will say just the, the one thing regarding the deficits that's annoyed me a little bit
00:25:02.300
is regarding the EU has been the American whining that apparently the EU has been screwing
00:25:07.940
them over with this trade deficit for untold decades when really it's like, well, well,
00:25:14.460
Trump in particular has been saying, oh, they barely buy any of our cars.
00:25:21.220
Yeah, steering wheels on the wrong side as well.
00:25:34.260
Yeah, that's, that's been the one thing that's annoyed me about that.
00:25:38.500
We are never going to buy a Cadillac over here.
00:25:42.240
I would like one, but it wouldn't necessarily be a go-to.
00:25:50.520
I mean, I did buy an American, I bought a Tesla.
00:25:52.540
So that sort of counts, but I'm not buying one of those.
00:25:55.940
Teslas are a bit more adaptable and basically like little toy Hot Wheels blown up anyway.
00:26:02.640
So then I thought, let's have a look at the generations as well.
00:26:06.400
So we've got Boomers, Gen X, Millennials and Zoomers.
00:26:08.580
Right, Boomers are losing their shit right now because they've basically got all the stocks
00:26:17.760
I will come back to that, but Boomers are very unhappy at the moment.
00:26:21.820
Gen Xers, Gen Xers do actually have a modest stock portfolio, nothing like the Boomers.
00:26:26.740
So they are also down, but Gen Xers, we're a different breed.
00:26:33.120
We're used to being kicked in the teeth so often that we kind of like it at this point.
00:26:39.080
And actually, we're thinking longer term about all this stuff anyway, so it doesn't particularly
00:26:44.480
Whereas the Millennials and Zoomers, and I will come back to this, they are absolutely loving
00:26:48.940
this because they haven't got anything to lose.
00:27:02.260
I might skip over this Mar-a-Lago record, but it's just somebody's theory on how that
00:27:10.260
bar skip over that because it is taking a bit long.
00:27:17.000
So it's basically the US dollar against a whole bunch of other currencies.
00:27:22.460
Remember the win criteria is this would come down, but it's choppy over the past five days.
00:27:29.200
But, you know, it is lower on a month timescale.
00:27:53.560
So it initially came down more sharply and now it's up again.
00:27:55.960
And what you're getting at the moment is an awful lot of people on financial Twitter
00:28:02.200
What they probably do is they're, you know, they're just, they're just clip that bit there
00:28:21.060
So, you know, that is broadly moving in the right direction.
00:28:25.240
Yes, it has spiked between the absolute low after it was announced and up to there.
00:28:29.380
But it's still, it's still moving in the right direction as a broad trend.
00:28:34.540
Why was it going in a negative trend in the first place, even before this, if you don't mind?
00:28:40.360
Well, because people didn't see any point in owning anything else other than US assets.
00:28:50.820
This is, this is kind of the global risk-free rate.
00:28:53.560
And then they kind of needed to get bond prices to move so they could get this, this rate
00:28:59.280
down to a serviceable level, because this is what they're going to be rolling over that
00:29:03.800
So if they, if they can get this down, that is a win and it's not come down as much as
00:29:10.160
But, you know, again, you know, all the people on Twitter telling you that this is blowing
00:29:14.000
up and the CNBCs, you know, again, it's, it's, it's, it's just not actually that bad.
00:29:22.320
So this is, this is returning to the, uh, China thing because what has been happening
00:29:26.160
is, okay, rates were coming down, but in recent, the trend has shifted.
00:29:32.320
Now they're going up again, not back to the level they were there, which is why I showed
00:29:37.920
And the reninbi, um, the, um, uh, the Chinese currency is also going up.
00:29:42.860
So we've got a couple of competing theories as to what's going on here.
00:29:46.440
Um, this guy is, is sort of suggesting one side of this is that, um, China, so there's
00:29:54.460
There's people that think that China is, is selling off, um, U S treasuries, um, despite
00:30:00.420
them, um, which is, which is bold because it will hurt the U S, but it
00:30:07.900
will also hurt China a lot as well because they need their, their reninbi lower.
00:30:11.900
So, um, we are in the process of finding out as to whether that is the thing or not.
00:30:17.300
Um, also on China, uh, minutes before we came on air, I, I quickly checked the news feed
00:30:23.100
only to find that they are retaliating to the U S's retaliation to the retaliation of
00:30:31.480
So they've added, so, so basically, um, U S put on tariffs or whatever it was, 34%.
00:30:36.560
So, um, China put on 30%, 34% onto the U S and then, um, the U S put extra tariffs on
00:30:45.120
and now China have put another 50% on, like a few minutes before we came on air.
00:30:50.540
How many retaliatory tariffs do they have to put on one another before it's declared a
00:30:59.840
I don't know if there was a formal definition of trade war.
00:31:02.600
I think it's safe to say we're in it and just a quick note, tariffs don't go up to
00:31:09.240
So, uh, whatever, let's have a quick look into, uh, this article that only, it's only
00:31:15.000
So yeah, the, um, U S rate on China is now 104%.
00:31:19.000
Um, and, and China is at 84%, although the U S would say that currency manipulations count
00:31:25.280
So 104% would pretty much be double and a little bit more.
00:31:30.480
So when you buy your next piece of Chinese tat at the point where it comes into the country
00:31:35.000
to the importer, whatever they paid for it, they then need to pay 104% of that as a tax,
00:31:40.740
as a tariff, um, and then add their markup and then it goes on Amazon.
00:31:44.320
So it's still going to cost like six pounds for, you know, a toaster or something, but it's
00:31:51.120
Um, because it's fine because it's rubbish anyway.
00:31:55.700
I mean, none of this Chinese stuff lasts more than a year or two.
00:31:58.920
So, I mean, a lot of people are upset about it, but do you really need it?
00:32:13.060
Um, Vietnam got hit with, uh, with a whole bunch of tariffs.
00:32:18.280
So whatever price Nike pays when they import them from the factory in Vietnam is going
00:32:25.740
And is Jeff's chai latte from Starbucks going up as well?
00:32:32.200
You're going to have to bear, you're going to have, yeah, you're going to have to bear
00:32:34.440
in mind that the input price that the importer pays is a fairly small percentage because
00:32:39.500
the biggest markup is actually when it goes into the shop or what the importer gets.
00:32:43.920
So as I understand it then, if, uh, exporting in a US direction, as in if the US is buying
00:32:51.620
less stuff from abroad, does that mean that the global price of a lot of goods is going
00:32:55.040
to go down as the demand has gone down and therefore prices in Europe would actually be
00:33:03.400
Um, so a lot of this Chinese stuff is flowing into America and it looks like a lot less of
00:33:17.680
One way they might deal with that is by lowering the prices into everywhere else.
00:33:22.440
And the other people with a consumerist debt-driven mindset would be UK and Europe.
00:33:29.660
So yeah, maybe we have more, so maybe we can get extra Chinese tap that we don't need because
00:33:35.260
Americans are being edged out of it price-wise.
00:33:37.340
We can sort of drop ship it to the Americans with our lower tariff, be like a middleman.
00:33:44.720
If we had no shame whatsoever, we could pivot to being drop shippers.
00:33:57.100
Yes, Lotus Eaters branded toasters or something.
00:34:00.300
We spend one penny on the logo that we stick on the Chinese toaster and then we mark it
00:34:08.020
Although we will then have a 10% tariff going into America, but I think we can deal with
00:34:13.060
Um, one of the things I've noticed, um, uh, some of the...
00:34:15.600
A lot of people on, again, on social media have been saying that, that China can make
00:34:20.140
its population suffer because China has the bigger trade deficit with the US, so it does
00:34:25.820
hurt them more, plus they've got their own problems to deal with, which I haven't really
00:34:29.900
got time to get into now, but maybe I'll do that in the Brokonomics.
00:34:32.840
Um, but a lot of people have been saying, well, because China is a dictatorship, it can
00:34:38.120
just do that indefinitely because it doesn't have to worry about its people.
00:34:44.480
Yeah, well, the Chinese people have seen a very accelerated standard of living and the
00:34:51.360
whole reason that the CCP has sort of a hegemonic power over the Chinese people is that their
00:34:57.400
standard of living has got markedly better and the entire reason that their governance
00:35:04.040
exists unquestioningly, or at least appears to exist unquestioningly, is because people
00:35:10.100
broadly agree that their life is getting better in the future.
00:35:13.320
And if that stops, that is a big problem for everyone in China.
00:35:17.880
If, if the Chinese leadership has to deal with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of
00:35:24.080
unemployed men with nothing to lose pouring out of those southern factories back into the
00:35:35.040
I, maybe I'm going to have to follow up with another segment next week.
00:35:38.400
Um, when the, when the actual shooting war between China and the U S begins, or maybe
00:35:43.480
the Chinese civil war begins or somebody backs down.
00:35:45.640
If China ends up murdering an incredible portion of its own population, that would just be another
00:36:00.280
Um, other people are less concerned about the China situation.
00:36:05.460
Zero hedge is going, um, absolutely nuclear about, um, the basis trade blowing up, uh,
00:36:12.560
which is basically where hedge funds take, um, U S treasuries and then they turn them,
00:36:19.120
And basically they leveraged into it to such an extent, um, that they're, they are in trouble.
00:36:24.040
So, um, everybody who is, um, sympathetic to hedge funds who are over leveraged, um, this
00:36:31.940
Uh, the reason I, I stick it up on screen is because it creates a problem for Jerome Powell
00:36:37.480
and the fed, because Jerome Powell and the fed do not like Trump.
00:36:42.680
They don't want to help out, um, by, um, anything that they can do by, you know, um, as this
00:36:48.660
sort of image shows bailing out Trump's trade war.
00:36:50.840
Uh, but they don't want to let their friends blow up either because they probably go, well,
00:36:56.420
they go, they go to dinner parties, dinner parties of these people and they want to get
00:37:00.740
Um, so, so the fed is in a, is in a particular pickle at the moment.
00:37:04.540
Um, then I thought, um, oh, oh, let's talk about the boomers as well.
00:37:11.600
Can I, can I have a bit more time or should I skip the boom a bit?
00:37:21.400
So, so this is the S and P 500 boomers are absolutely freaking out because look, um,
00:37:32.720
So, so the S and P 500 used to be up here at, um, you know, what, what, what is that?
00:37:38.500
I assume this is one of those, cause I'm not an economist.
00:37:41.160
So I assume that this is one of those graphs where the idea was line, go up infinity.
00:37:45.480
Well, the whole point of the S and P 500 is that it's what the top 500 companies.
00:37:50.560
And because it's a diversified portfolio, the line forever goes up.
00:37:54.960
And in fact, it's, yes, it's quite rare for it to go down.
00:37:59.620
A few, a few weeks back, that was at sort of 5,700.
00:38:02.440
And here we are, we've lost 700 points on, on the, uh, the, the S and P.
00:38:06.880
So you might think, oh my God, that's catastrophic.
00:38:08.840
And, and the boomers are going absolutely mental about this.
00:38:14.060
Um, you know, we're back to levels not seen since mid last year, mid last year.
00:38:23.200
Most people investing in the S and P 500 are doing it more on the longterm, aren't they?
00:38:27.800
To try and beat inflation rather than in a safe investment.
00:38:32.680
So not necessarily going in there for a short trade.
00:38:36.040
So finally, let, let, let's get into this absolute, um, uh, massive boomer, uh, schism.
00:38:46.500
Um, and you, you, you guys, cause I'm, I've, I've rambled over a bit.
00:38:50.780
So you guys stopped me when you've had enough of this.
00:38:54.760
For all you mega cultists who keep saying the market slump doesn't matter because 20 and 30 year olds have had plenty of time to make up losses.
00:39:01.920
Uh, seriously, what's your answer for people retiring now who thought they were good until you guys effed it up?
00:39:10.060
Uh, funnily enough, uh, the, the zoomers and the millennials in the comments are not massively.
00:39:23.000
Um, didn't, didn't most of these people that he's castigating now have to shut their entire lives down a few years ago?
00:39:30.320
Uh, at the expense of all of this debt that needs to be repaid now.
00:39:34.300
Well, purely for the sake of Tim Wise feeling a bit more, um, secure in itself.
00:39:39.240
Some people are recycling some of his own comments back to him.
00:39:44.140
when you millennials and Gen Z arseholes stop congregating in large numbers because you're
00:39:48.640
young and you can handle COVID-19, perhaps we respect you.
00:39:52.220
Until then, we don't care about your college debt and no precious.
00:40:00.160
So, so people have been giving Tim advice, uh, stop buying, um, avocado toast.
00:40:05.880
Maybe he's going to have to cancel that fifth cruise of the year.
00:40:09.600
Some people are saying, look, go into plumbing, learn to code.
00:40:20.160
Um, you know, this guy is saying, look, you can pull yourself by your, by your bootstraps.
00:40:25.380
Uh, stop buying so much avocado toast and fancy letters and get an entry level job to
00:40:31.520
What if he goes in and gives the manager a firm handshake?
00:40:47.940
Have you tried a side hustle, pick up some extra shifts and over time?
00:40:50.940
Um, so, so, so the reason I threw this in there is because, um, there was a bit of a
00:40:56.280
generational divide over this one and, and zoomers and millennials, they just really don't
00:41:00.680
care because they are, they're not invested in the system.
00:41:03.380
People of Harry and I's age have nothing invested in the system.
00:41:11.060
Generally about a quarter of my wages every single month go to taxes and all sorts of things.
00:41:19.040
And that's even before council tax and value added tax on every purchase I make as well.
00:41:26.080
We're paying money to a system that screws us over actively.
00:41:33.880
They can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, take the Panda Express assistant manager job
00:41:46.380
Oh, that was a famous Tim Wise comment about how white people are going to go extinct
00:41:53.300
and he's not going to be sad about it because it's a good thing, actually.
00:42:04.620
Remarkable lack of sympathy from him on many fronts there.
00:42:11.920
Haven't had a chance to do anything more than a bit of reaction on this one and what's going on.
00:42:15.340
I'll do a Brokernomics when I get into it more.
00:42:17.500
And let's just see if anyone has left a rumble rant from me to answer straight away.
00:42:27.300
China has always been threatening to attack the independent nation of Taiwan.
00:42:31.540
If it were to economically collapse, this might push it to actually do so.
00:42:36.320
I think in reading out independent nation of Taiwan, your social credit score just got shifted down a little bit there.
00:42:47.240
I mean, this situation is so unpredictable at the moment that I'm going to I'm going to end up having to come back to it.
00:42:57.680
I only just caught that just before we came on.
00:43:02.040
Yes. Well, I suppose you could go to infinity percent tariffs or you could just embargo them or whatever.
00:43:07.100
And Bald Eagle 1787 says China can turn off the U.S. military because a vast majority of things the U.S. uses in their arsenal are made in China.
00:43:16.900
China just cuts off the exports and the U.S. military has zero munitions.
00:43:22.800
I mean, it's not just it's not just military as well.
00:43:24.900
China dominates on heart medication, diabetes medication as well.
00:43:30.740
The U.S. should never have got into this situation.
00:43:35.940
Oh, the last the last 30 years of globalist leaders.
00:43:41.120
OK, on to something a little bit less complicated, a little bit less serious.
00:43:45.980
And if we're entirely honest with ourselves, not particularly important.
00:43:51.460
And that is the scourge of millennial writing, which sadly has given me terminal cancer.
00:43:58.100
And if you still got all your hair, that's a miracle.
00:44:01.120
Well, I've chosen to go the Walter White route of, ah, screw it.
00:44:14.980
Anyway, so you may have experienced this before.
00:44:18.000
You may have encountered it, which is the millennial writing.
00:44:20.800
I first came across the term through this man's account, Shredded Nerd.
00:44:24.940
He's got a couple of videos on these sorts of things.
00:44:26.880
A recent video came out of called Millennial Critics, I think it was,
00:44:31.300
where he was insulting, like, Zero Punctuation and Yahtzee and people like that.
00:44:35.860
And he also did this one, a follow-up called Millennial Characters.
00:44:39.280
And I think you can identify Millennial writing through a few of the things that he identifies in these videos.
00:44:45.540
To sum a little bit of them up, I would recommend you watch them, though.
00:44:48.560
So, it doesn't necessarily mean that you are a Millennial who writes things.
00:44:54.060
Millennial writing is just the name that has been given to this colloquially.
00:44:58.760
So, you can be a Millennial who's a good writer.
00:45:06.460
And you can identify it through a few things, which is a reliance on irony and insincerity.
00:45:15.180
You can see this through, ironically enough, Boomer, Joss Whedon-style writing,
00:45:18.880
where things can be serious for a few minutes at a time,
00:45:23.040
but every serious scene has to end with a quip.
00:45:25.800
This is a product of emotional insecurity and a fear of rejection.
00:45:31.980
I just thought it's because of the fact that he's a hack.
00:45:46.040
Yeah, well, the thing is, Joss Whedon, he kind of started the trend,
00:45:50.380
while at the same time kind of having some good shows behind him at the same time.
00:45:54.900
So you could forgive it with him, because with him, it was new.
00:45:58.780
It was a new style of writing that was interesting and funny.
00:46:04.660
Well, it was more that he then did the first Avengers film,
00:46:08.460
and then the rest of Marvel decided to do it as well,
00:46:11.400
and then because Marvel was the big popular franchise,
00:46:17.160
but without even a fraction of the talent that Joss Whedon originally displayed
00:46:22.380
when he was writing this stuff back in the early 2000s.
00:46:26.360
But it does serve to undercut the kind of emotional stakes of any story
00:46:32.540
It's also got the constant pop cultural references
00:46:35.120
that you as the audience are just expected to get.
00:46:39.960
which a lot of people of millennials and my generation
00:46:47.320
They just think it makes them sound cool and mature.
00:46:53.840
but throw in lots of swearing in their baby talk,
00:46:59.440
that's probably going to get some people upset at me,
00:47:01.660
but I really didn't like the film Step Brothers,
00:47:06.160
It was two reasonably good comic actors playing man children.
00:47:13.640
But Will Ferrell has a bad tendency to go for characters
00:47:24.960
It's also very flippant in its depictions of violence,
00:47:27.720
where the writers clearly have never experienced real-life violence,
00:47:32.220
so they kind of tend to glorify it and revel in it.
00:47:46.260
these writers have never been punched in the face
00:48:10.940
and the world that they establish for these stories
00:48:13.560
tend to only reflect the cosmopolitan city environments
00:48:18.860
who have no attempt to think outside of themselves,
00:48:39.760
That's something that has popped up quite often.
00:48:41.920
Philipsistic is the word I think you wanted there.
00:49:07.020
while she was watching it at full blast volume.
00:49:09.560
And so I had the misfortune of hearing the dialogue.
00:49:12.700
And the thing that frustrated me more than anything
00:49:14.740
was I could tell every single one of these characters