Charlie Robinson (00:02.166)
Welcome to Macroaggressions, I'm your host Charlie Robinson. If you are watching us on rumbleband.video, Vigilante TV, now YouTube, holy moly, or you're listening, wherever podcasts are served. Thanks a million, we appreciate your support. If you wanna connect with me, macroaggressions.io is the best place to do that. I hope you've bookmarked activist posts for your daily news. How about Natural Blaze for some alternative health? It's all there, it's free. Go get whatever you want over there.

And if you want to follow me on social media, I'm on Twitter or X at macroaggressions and over on Instagram at macroaggression underscore podcast. Thank you so much to the sponsors who helped to make this show happen. Tell you what, if you aren't thinking about legal shield, you probably should. They have been in business for over 50 years in the United States and in Canada, and they'll get you access to an attorney in your area for a very reasonable price.

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Charlie Robinson (02:15.726)
All a cart add-on features that you can add to your membership if you're interested if you need it So best thing to do read about it go over to don't get pushed around calm and just check it out for yourself And since we're gonna be talking about I don't know economic collapses and things like that boy. I really hope you have storable food I mean look you can get it from my sponsor Augustin farms and go over there and use the promo code macro I hope you do but get it somewhere

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as we're gonna need it. Hopefully not, hopefully not. I'm not trying to speak this into existence, but I don't know if you saw, it's been a bloodbath in the crypto world, and that happens periodically from time to time, but it's not limited to crypto. This is happening all over the place. This is the beginning of the end of the economic system. And what I wanna do in this episode is I wanna talk a little bit about the financial house of cards that we see, and we...

have been talking about it for a while. It's not that we're wrong about it. We're frankly a bit surprised that it's still standing after everything. But it won't be last. It won't be up forever. And it'll seem like a massive shock to everybody when it happens. Of course, it won't really be a shock, but it will feel like one. So let's talk about that in advance so that we don't get shocked when it happens and that maybe we're prepared. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about the crypto meltdown, which was

Charlie Robinson (04:40.066)
catastrophic for a lot of people. We'll talk about the international component of this because it's not limited to the United States, of course. This is happening everywhere. When you export dollars to every corner of the world and then you start having problems with the dollar, then that's going to be everywhere that the dollar is. So it's international in scope. then we'll wrap up with, well, you know, it's Trump's economy now. And the way I feel about that stuff, you break it.

you buy it, right? And that's where Trump is right now. So we'll get to that. We'll get to that in a little bit, but it feels like this house of cards is just waiting for kind of a stiff breeze to blow it over, you know? You know, like those.

like those dust storms that you see that form off the Western coast of Africa every now and then on the satellite images and they watch them and then they turn into a hurricane, they hit the Caribbean and the US, we can see a massive storm on the horizon just like they can with the satellites. So the question is, how long do we have? And are the storm trackers of this financial, the financial storm trackers,

Are they gonna be out there in their Suburbans trying to get close to it and reporting back, know, hey, it's coming over the horizon, we see it now? Or are they gonna use their models to forecast the direction that this economic hurricane is gonna go and be wrong about it like they are with most of the hurricanes? Or are they just gonna pretend like they don't know what's going on and allow everybody to get walloped by this thing in the middle of the night, like what happened in Acapulco?

when a hurricane turned from a tropical storm into a category five storm in just a matter of hours. And then the media failed to report on it, even though, you know, they like to report on disasters and impending disasters, but they're strangely silent on that. imagine, envision, can see a world in which the corporate horror media in general, but the financial segment of that, pretends like they don't know what's going on.

Charlie Robinson (06:49.888)
You know, I mean, again, if you're waiting for Jim Cramer to tell you it's time to be in or out of a marketplace, like you've, you've, you've waited too long. If you're waiting for the, weather guy to tell you that, know, I mean, if you're waiting for the people at CNN to tell you it's time to get worried, it's past the time to get worried. The time to get worried was before they were telling you to get worried. Actually, because you prepare in

in advance of this. When the time comes to actually be worried, the irony is that you're not. You worried about it earlier when it was a smaller deal. And because of that, and because you could, you have a functioning brain and you can say, well, I can see where this is headed, even if I'm fuck, even if I'm 30 % off, it's still going to be bad. Well, if it's bad, then what if I can envision myself two years into the future and it's bad.

What would I wish I could get in my DeLorean and go back in time two years and get? Would it be storable food? Would it be get my money out of the banks? Would it be not be in US dollars? I mean, what would you do retroactively if you could? If you knew that there was a collapse, well, here's the good news. There's a collapse coming. I mean, that's awful, but we see it in advance.

So this isn't a category five hurricane that's gonna hit you in the middle of the night that you didn't know was coming. You can't stop that. You can't stop a hurricane any more than you can stop an economic collapse. You cannot stop it. You and I cannot stop it. We can, in the same way that you cannot stop a tsunami wave that's coming in. You can only get yourself to higher ground. That's it. The system is broken.

The fiat system is a house of cards. is, you know. But here's, guess, we're about solutions here, right? So let's find some solutions. Let's talk about how we get ourselves out of this because, I don't know, if you see it coming and you don't do anything about it, that's even worse than never knowing that it was coming in the first place. I mean, it's one thing if you're just a normie out there and you've got your head in the sand and you're,

Charlie Robinson (09:15.18)
and you're not paying attention and you're going to work, you're doing all the things you have to do. You get up and go to take care of your kids and go to work and go to get them to school and all that. And you don't have time to worry about this stuff or think about it. Your day is full. The day to day issues in your life are enough of a stress that some fictional economic collapse that may or may not come two years from now is not high on your list of priorities. You have day to day business to take care of. I get that. I got it too. But you're gonna regret it.

if you haven't planned accordingly for this stuff. And it's not gonna be on a calendar, of course. You're just gonna have to use deductive reasoning and logic and math and pattern recognition and logic and wherever this takes you. You're just gonna have to see things before everybody else is. So let's talk a little bit about gold and silver because this is a lifeboat. There are lifeboats for sale. You are on the Titanic right now.

This, I heard this described by Larry Lepard. was, he's a, he's a sound money guy initially who's pivoted into Bitcoin pretty hard and wrote a pretty good book about it recently. should have him on, but he was talking about this. He's like, you're on the Titanic. There are lifeboats for sale. The lifeboats that you can buy right now are more expensive than the lifeboats that Larry bought earlier, or I bought earlier, or some other people in the gold, silver.

Bitcoin space bot earlier, but they're still for sale. So if you're on the Titanic, are you gonna nickel and dime about how much the lifeboat costs or are you just gonna buy one and get in it? Because you know how the story ends, okay? You're just gonna be grateful that you have a lifeboat. Nobody's gonna ask you how much it costs later. They're just gonna be glad that you've got one. Your family will be glad. So when you take a look at stuff, you know,

When was the last time gold and silver were both at all time highs? Well, I didn't know the answer to this. So I messaged somebody who does know the answer to that. Tony Ardeburn, the owner of Wise Wolf Bitcoin and Wolfpack Gold. Sponsor of my show here, sponsor of the homepage of Activist Post. This is your lifeboat. Tony's selling lifeboats. A lot of people are, of course. He's not the only one. But if you're interested in getting one, talk to him.

Charlie Robinson (11:37.805)
He can help you and you may be saying, well, yeah, I mean, fuck, it's all fun and gaming. Silver's $50 an ounce. Gold's $4,000 an ounce. Yeah. Me- measured in fiat. Currently today, you know, do you wish you were buying silver? You know, when I was, yeah. I mean, I just, my only regret is I wish I had more money. I knew that when silver was $13 an ounce, it wasn't going to stay there forever. About as much as I could get my hands on.

Is that because I'm some silver investor? No, I don't know anything about silver. I like it. I don't know the ins and outs of it. I don't know the silver mining details. If I need questions answered about that, I'll ask Doug Casey. He knows that. I only know that it is a bet against fiat currency as gold is. It's a tangible physical asset that does not have counterparty risk. It means that for my

asset for my gold coin in my hand to do well, it doesn't require somebody else to do poorly. It's the best thing ever. I can do well and you can do well. can all, it's not, know, one guy wins, one guy loses. That's what I like about this. And Bitcoin is there too. There was a moment before the crypto crash that we're gonna get into. There was a moment where gold, silver, and Bitcoin were all at all time highs.

I mean, that's flashing red lights to me. When gold is in the tank, that means that people are making a calculation that there's more value to them in holding fiat dollars. mean, not to me, it's crazy to me, but to traders or people who've made this calculation. When gold is priced lower, they're saying,

We value the dollars and the things that we can do with the dollars way more than we value gold. When gold is increasing in price, what that is saying to the market is, we're a little scared of these dollars. I'd rather have something that I know isn't gonna go to zero or isn't gonna drop 30 % or isn't gonna do this or that. So people will go to safe harbors. Now, in 1980, gold was $800 an ounce and silver was right around

Charlie Robinson (14:03.118)
$50 an ounce, I think it got as high as 52 an ounce. 16 to one ratio, right? That's 1980. That was when the Hunt Brothers cornered the silver market. That's when we had come off the gold standard. Gold was $35 an ounce just what, eight years earlier and now it's $800 an ounce, hell of a trade. It's less a, it's actually less of a sort of a.

bet on gold and more of an indictment against the dollar. But either way, it doesn't matter. So flash forward now, 45 years later, and what do we have? We have gold at all times highs, 4,000. We have silver at 50, back up to 50. So crazy, 45 years. And you know what the value of the dollar has done and then, back in 1980, silver was $52 an ounce in 1980 dollars. And now it's 50 an ounce in 2025 dollars, which means it's probably more like, it's like a

quarter of its value or whatever. But now it's a, the ratio between gold and silver, 16 to one gold, 16, it takes 16 ounces of silver to make one ounce of gold. That's sort of the calculation, right? Back in 1980, it's 100 to one, all of 2025. With the spike in gold and the spike in silver, it kind of...

through the ratios off. So now it's down to 80 to one, but that's still like, you know, almost like four times, four and a half times more than the ratio back in the eighties. So there's still some, I think there's still some price discovery for silver. Part of the reason why silver is as low as it is, as it is, and why it never really broke out was because it's being suppressed. It's not my opinion that it's being suppressed. It's being suppressed and they got busted suppressing it and they had got dragged into all the banks.

You know, and they were found guilty, of course, because they're all running criminal enterprises here, and this is a criminal cartel, banking cartel. So they were busted for suppressing the paper market of silver, because they were. And what does that do? It's like every Friday, they sell a bunch of paper shorts in the market and bring the price of silver down. Why did they do that? A variety of reasons.

Charlie Robinson (16:20.514)
they still use industrial silver for metals and bombs and things like that. So it behooves the military information terror complex to keep that price as low as they can because they're gonna be buying a lot of silver because they're gonna be building a lot of Tomahawk missiles and silver is needed for that. So you wanna keep the price as low as you can. So there's that. Also, whenever the precious metals markets are rising, then that is just an indicator that there's a problem with the dollar and bankers, fiat central bankers and...

they're all criminal, they're running a criminal Ponzi scheme trying to prop up this dollar and keep it going. So anything that makes the dollar look bad, gold, silver, Bitcoin, they want to do away with it. They want to suppress it. They don't want you to recognize that as an option. you know, in just to put this in perspective to where gold was just to cut, you might be thinking, well, I don't really follow gold that closely. Well, just three years ago in October of 2022,

Gold was $1,640 an ounce, okay? So in the past three years, it has a compounded annual growth rate of 35%. That means it's going up 35 % this year. And then the next year, it's gonna go 35%. And then the next year, it's gonna go 35 % on top of that, which was on top of the, this is compounded annual growth. So it's not just 35%, it's 35 %...

on top of what you had the year before and then on top of the year before that, you so it really starts to take off. listen, it frankly made 10X over the next five years. I'm not licensed to give financial advice. So don't take my financial advice on this, okay? So maybe, maybe not. I don't have a crystal ball, but I don't think that you need a crystal ball on this one. You see what's happening to soon to be worthless federal reserve notes. They're printing them like crazy. They have to.

They're the world's reserve currency. But the world is asking questions about the strength and the backing of this world's reserve currency. And they're starting to make some calculations, especially after the US empire steals Russia's $300 billion of liquidity, that that sent a message to the entire world. You get on the wrong side of the American empire and they're

Charlie Robinson (18:37.848)
dollar scam that they're running and they will steal all of your money if they can't, if not just outright invade you and blow you up and murder your family. people, the people are starting to wake up to this. Governments have already started to wake up to this. was listening to Doug Casey and Matt Smith on one of their Crisis Investing podcasts earlier this year and they were talking about how every single airplane

that's coming from London to New York is loaded with gold. That all of them are. That there is a shift. That New York is asking for their gold or London is sending it there for some reason, but it's going there. There may be a bigger play here with gold. Again, I'm not sure. But 40,000 tons of gold is held by central banks.

and they're buying it worldwide. Russia buys a lot. Nobody knows how much China has, because China, anything that is mined in China, any gold that is mined in China is first and foremost has to stay in China, is bought up by the government or it's kept internally. So there's no exporting of gold from China to the rest of the world. And because of that, it's hard to get accurate reading on

Chinese goldmine, how much they're producing, how much they're keeping, how much they've had before. I mean, this is the Chinese empire of 4,000 years. mean, who knows how much gold they have squirreled away somewhere. that, I don't think we'll ever really know, but you know, there is a gold-backed bricks currency that is very real and it requires substantial reserves. And of course it's not a

retail-based BRICS gold-backed currency. It's a inter-country trade settlement function. So it's not that the people are going to necessarily, the people of the BRICS countries are gonna have BRICS currency notes in their pocket that are backed by gold. Not yet, maybe, maybe at some point that's the plan, but that isn't what it is now. When they talk about gold-backed BRICS currencies,

Charlie Robinson (21:00.31)
It's just interstate trading settlements and things like that. But again, they see the need for it. They understand we gotta have it back by something. mean, it used to be that you could have it back by a promise, by the government. And then you go, all right, well, who's making the promise? I well, it's the American empire. And you go, well, that's not gonna work. I don't trust them. So we need more than that. You guys are pathological liars who have shown your ability to...

bomb the shit out of anybody that gets on the wrong side of you or steal Russia's liquidity pool. So like, no, we're not gonna take your word for it. So the world is pivoting and they're pivoting, they're going back to what they know best. They're going back to gold. Okay, and so could we be gearing up for a move back to the gold standard? I don't know. I mean, it would destroy the Fiat Ponzi game that America has been running.

But there may be an economic collapse that kind of, know, seven out, line away, you know, clears the craps table and allows a re-imagining of currency. Silver appears to be trying to find its real price. You know, we don't, I say silver's $50 an ounce, right? It's $50 an ounce as of the recording of this. But once you stop the paper shorting of that market,

and people start buying silver and they buy more. and next thing you know, we're in the price discovery phase. I don't know what the price of silver is. I know what it has been, but it's been suppressed the whole time. Once you take that suppression off, where does it float to? Where's the natural level? You are holding a balloon or a beach ball underwater in a pool. When you let go of it, it's going up. The question is how high?

because you've been suppressing it for so long. It's got this internal force in it. As soon as you remove the paper shorts from the market, we're gonna find out what it is. So, that's what you get for decades of artificial manipulation. You get a wonky silver market that may or may not be reflecting accurate prices. So let's talk a little bit about this. 31 % of adults over 65 own gold.

Charlie Robinson (23:23.886)
All right, so your Boomer parents out there have some gold stashed away, least three out of 10 of them do somewhere. They probably bought it for $300 an ounce back in the eighties, sat on it, did nothing with it. So it's a thing in the Boomer community. It's been a thing. I'm Gen X. I like it, but it's not a thing in my community. I cannot tell you that I've ever had a conversation with my

friends about gold and silver. They don't have any energy one way or the other. I don't think they've ever considered it. My college friends and things like that. 18 % of 18 year olds, 18 to 29 year olds, I don't know what generation that is. 18 % own gold, a grand total of 11 % of the American general public owns gold. All right, so one out of nine people

own gold. That's a problem. 11.6 % of the American public own silver. That's a problem. Silver is affordable. I get it if you're like, I can't buy gold. Gold's $4,000 an ounce now. I got to buy. You can buy these little one gram bar. I get these little one gram. They look like, you know, like a tab of acid, you know, like a little rectangular gram. That's part of my Wolfpack gold. You know, I've been a member that by the way, if you guys aren't a member of Wolfpack, Wolf, macroaggressions.gold.

just go there and you can find out all the information about Tony's program. But it's just an auto-buy program. It's so great. Part of what you get, know, it depends on how much you set it up for your amount, but it used to be that I got, I would message Tony, I'm like, man, these boxes are a whole lot lighter than they used to be. You know? And that's the truth. And they're going to get lighter. They're going to get a lot lighter. You probably should get in there and get it while you can. At least start stacking it. And, and so,

You can, I get it if you're like, well, I can't really own too much gold because it's so expensive. You can own silver though, and you should own silver. And there's a bunch of different ways to own silver. You can get those, you know, the night, the early pre 65 coins and that are, that have silver in them. It's called junk silver. You can get a bag of them. It's like silver dimes and things like that. So you can get the, the very beautiful silver coins. There's the, there's a

Charlie Robinson (25:46.874)
There's a bunch of different types of them and numismatic stuff. And I think a lot of that stuff is garbage. But if you have questions about this, if you're like me and you're like, I like it. I know enough about it to be dangerous. I like to stack silver as much as I can. But, you know, do I know the ins and outs of it? No, I don't know. I don't even need to. But if you're interested and you have questions, Tony can help you. But I really just, strongly advise people to get, you know,

get your eyes on this. think $4,000 gold and $50 silver is going to be cheap at some point. Let's talk a little bit about the crypto meltdown. I'm sorry for anybody that got whacked in this, but this was the worst liquidation event in the history of cryptocurrencies. This is not, for those of you who are sort of on the outside of crypto, there's a bunch of ways in which you can get very reckless with this. Okay, you can make a lot of money and you can lose it just as fast.

You can just own this. So for those that don't really know, you think, oh, what happened? Did Bitcoin get wiped out? Did it go to zero? No, none of that happened actually. Bitcoin dropped from about 125,000 down to about 102,000 real fast. And then what do you know? The plunge protection team known as Larry Fink and BlackRock was there to buy up 45,000 Bitcoins at $105,000 per coin, which was $5 billion that they spent.

So market manipulation? I mean, maybe, I mean, probably. So I get a bad feeling when Larry Fink is backstopping things. But the point is that if you owned Bitcoin and you had it not on an exchange, but you had it in a wallet that you control, your own personal wallet, then this was a nothing event.

your Bitcoin went down, it went back up. It goes down and goes back up every day. It drops massively some days or some weeks and then it comes back up and goes up massively. So, to ride this thing out, if you just had coins and you were sitting on them and you're not doing anything with it, you would have been fine. If you're in the crypto casino and you're making bets with your coins and you're leveraging them up and you're taking...

Charlie Robinson (28:05.165)
you know, 20 times leverage. You have nobody to blame but yourself. And I get it that this was a manipulated event and it's there's a lot of fuckery around it. And I bet you some people who are very nefarious were behind this. And I'm not and I'm not going to let them off the hook. Of course, I think that that's awful and wrong. But if you're levered up like that, man, you you've you've got to be more careful.

$19 billion in levered positions were wiped out. 1.6 million traders were liquidated. That's what the numbers say. No, I don't know. Bitcoin dropped 8.5%, wiping out $278 billion in value in 45 minutes. Okay, it was nine times worse than anything that had ever been experienced before in terms of dollar volume.

That's what you're going to see when you move up into these big, when you're now a $2 trillion asset like crypto is, you're going to have big wipeouts, massive gains and then alarming wipeouts. And this is like, I I lived in Vegas for a decade, but had been in Vegas for a decade before that, know, plenty of times. And anybody who's been in a craps table, you know the feeling.

You get that tables full and the waitress is bringing drinks and one dude's throwing and it's going boom, winner, winner. Everyone at the table is cheering. People from other tables start to come over. The energy starts to get picked up. Now there's three deep at the craps table. This guy's on a heater. He's rolling like a motherfucker. I've never made so much money in my life. Seven, line away, boom, boom, boom. And the fucking air goes out of the room.

That's what it's like on a much bigger scale with this. That's just the thing that kept going through my mind was when that dealer real selling out, lying away, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and they start, and they grab, and they start stacking, start stacking all those steps, reaches over, starts stacking, and people start disappearing from the table slowly. God damn it, I'm out. You know, they grab their drink and walk away. That's where we are.

Charlie Robinson (30:27.267)
But imagine that instead of that craps table when you've got $175 down there and you're hoping that you don't get wiped out, try $19 billion. Okay, so that's what happened. Crypto market was down. The market as a whole was down 12.75%. That doesn't happen. If you woke up in the NASDAQ was down 12.75%,

There would be a line of stockbrokers jumping off of their high rise building. There'd be so many people jumping off that they'd have to take reservation. It'd have to give you a number and you'd have to come back later in the day to jump off the building. If the NASDAQ was down 12 and a half percent, but that's crypto. The top 100 blue chips were down 80 % in a matter of minutes. Ethereum was down 7%. XRP, ripple.

was down 43%. Doge, you know the Dogecoin, the Dogecoin, down 50 % from 22 cents to 11 cents.

Charlie Robinson (31:33.038)
I remember this during the dot com boom. I remember I bought stock in a company called Commerce One and this must have been 2,000 and I loaded up on Commerce One. I woke up in the morning, it had three for one split and was up $70 each share. I was like, holy shit. So to put that in perspective, this is like if you go to bed and you want to stock, let's say you want, I don't know.

pick a stock, you go to bed and your stock goes up $210 the next day, right? I looked at that, I saw that Commerce won three for one split, went up $70 per share after the split. I looked at it, I went to the gym, I came back, by the time I came back, was no longer, not only was it not up 70, it was down 10.

So that was like, it's up 210, I come back, it's down, it has lost 240. It's lost all of the 210 plus another 30. And I was like, what the fuck? That was my crypto wipeout. And I wasn't levered or anything like that. It was just one of those things where it's like, have to have a conversation with yourself and you go, man, what are you waiting for? When you wake up in the morning and your stock has three for one split.

and gone up 70 and you're not selling, you're too greedy. This can't go on forever. You have to look at yourself in the mirror and say, you actually had this coming to you. And so for the crypto guys out there, man, I hope you guys rebuild. I hope you rebuild without all this leverage. You are playing a very dangerous game and the force deleveraging across corporate desks was, I mean, that's what did it. It's not so much that it goes up and goes down.

It's that when you have so much leverage and it goes down, you are forced to sell it. You have to cover your bet. And so once it drops down, you have to sell in order to pay, you know, to cover your loss. But by selling it, you're selling it at a price that you didn't want to sell it. You're selling it at a loss and everybody's selling it at a loss. So that becomes a cascading effect, like a feedback loop. And it pushes it down lower and lower and lower and lower.

Charlie Robinson (33:51.632)
because I have to sell and you have to sell and now it drops down lower. And now a whole new batch of people have to sell because it hit their threshold because we pushed it down another 10%. And then those guys have to sell and then because they sold another batch and it just goes on and on and on until everybody gets wiped out. So the leverage players just got totally shook out of the system. And I think, know, mean, Bitcoin for all it's...

you know, for all the issues that it has, I guess, if people want to pick holes in it, it remains pretty much unshakable. Come through all that. I mean, we'll see. It's an ongoing thing. Again, part of the reason why crypto got walloped like it did was that this happened on a Friday. And you know, when you run financial markets that are open from nine to five, Monday through Friday,

Friday and then you get an incident like Trump saying we're gonna put 100 % tariffs on China and that spooks the market and everyone goes, holy shit, we have to sell. Well, the market for stocks is closed. But you know what market is open? Crypto. It's always open. So when there's a blowout on a Friday that should be felt by Wall Street, it instead gets felt by crypto Friday night, Saturday, Sunday, and it

It works as like a relief valve. then Monday, then the stock market gets to feel what it should have felt Friday evening, but didn't because it was closed. And it may or may not be a thing by then. It may have allowed some of the momentum to escape during the weekend when crypto was getting pummeled. When you're forced to sell your portfolio, you sell whatever you can sell.

as fast as you can sell it and crypto you can always sell. It's hard to get your broker on the phone. So I need you to dump all this gold I got. I need you to dump all these stocks out of these mutual funds that I've got. All right. Well, I'll get you sorted out on Monday morning then I guess, man, but it's Saturday evening and I can't do anything for you. So this is, you know, this is going to be a welcome to crypto moment for a lot of people. Tether was unaffected, also profitable. Stablecoins are

Charlie Robinson (36:12.463)
creeping into the public lexicon. People are starting to talk about this. UBI is on the way. It's here nationally, at least. It seems like it's coming. And for those who think...

Charlie Robinson (36:34.275)
You know, for those who think that crypto is just kind of here today, gone tomorrow, it's really not. The Bank of International Settlements has a universal rail system that they're building out for their CBDCs. And that is the end of humanity. mean, you may or may not be affected by a war. You will be affected if your money is controlled by the Bank for International Settlements.

I assure you, and if they have their crypto rail system becomes the de facto currency project for central banks, we're gonna have problems with them. So again, part of like get gold, get silver, it's also a bet against the system. I mean, I like Bitcoin too, and I realized that Bitcoin has its flaws because it's digital, but it is...

But part of the reason why I like it is because it's that it is a little different than gold. It is a little different than silver. Nobody says you have to pick one and only love one. This is not a monogamous relationship. You're allowed to cheat on gold and silver with Bitcoin if you want. It's fine. Nobody's gonna, nobody's gonna come for you. But I'll tell you what, is something like, again, just to reiterate, it's not, this isn't a fad. It's not going away when,

the tokenization of natural assets happens through the World Economic Forum, what they're talking about, natural assets corporations, these companies that they're talking about, to buy up natural assets and tokenize them on the blockchain. Crypto's not going away. You need to understand it as much as you can. My advice, again, and I'm not a crypto expert, but my advice, stay away from these shitcoins. You know what I mean? Because you're just asking for trouble.

You know, and some coins do things that some coins have a function. We, I'm involved in a project in independent media token, which runs on the Solana blockchain. The reason why I'm involved in this is because this token actually does something through the transaction process. It kicks off a 1 % revenue and then that revenue is pooled and that will be used to finance projects inside the independent media. So I'm on board with that a hundred percent. I'm even

Charlie Robinson (39:00.335)
I'm literally on the board of that. I'm not just on board, I'm on the board. So for the, and we'll talk about that more. It's getting, it's up and running now. So if you're interested in independent media token, that's the reason why I'm involved is because in this case, there's a function to it. It throws off, generates revenue and throws it off that we can use to build our projects, to get our movies done and our documentary series or our live events or the things that we wanna do.

we have plans for it. I think just looking at the crypto market, or looking at the economy in general, it feels like it should have collapsed already. When Berwick and I wrote, Controlled Demolition of the American Empire in 2020, when it came time to talk about what the trigger events could be,

you're automatically in speculation, Bill, because you're trying to talk about something that hasn't happened yet in the future. But it's not a big leap. And what we said was that we would expect contagion in the banking industry to occur because all it takes is one bank to go down. And so we were speculating.

that if it only takes one bank to go down, let's find the bank that is the weak link. And we'll talk about that. know, if I could, talk about it now because...

You know, we, we had, we had real problems with Deutsche Bank and we were looking at their balance sheet going, this thing feels like it's, it's ready to go. Right. And so I guess, and that's 2020. So I, I guess the question is how soon is now, you know, it's, it's all coming down as Berwick said to me, the conversation that started the book.

Charlie Robinson (41:11.503)
It's all coming down. That's a conversation we had in 2018. Was he wrong? No, he's not wrong. But when you start trying to time it, that's when you start, you get in the trouble. Not because you're inaccurate in your assessment, but because when you pick, when you say, it should probably happen at this point here because of X, Y, and Z. The thing that catches you off guard is that X, and Z change.

They go in there and they add new elements to it that weren't there before. Well, of course this bank should have gone down, but they changed the requirements on how they disclose their liquidity issues. And you go, well, fuck that, that'll kick the can down a couple of years, right? So when you're trying to time something like this, it's always difficult. I mean, but if you're waiting to hear it from your nightly news,

then it's going to be too late. Johnny Maher and Morrissey asked the question in 1984, how soon is now?

that muddy, awesome guitar track. If you're from Los Angeles and you listen to K-Rock or you're familiar with K-Rock radio, K-Rock listed How Soon Is Now by the Smiths as the number one song of the 80s, I'll have you know. But it got me thinking about this. I heard the song and I thought, well, how soon is now for us, for the economic collapse? Let's talk about this because the international situation is way worse.

Trump's crazy tariffs are not helping. He talked about putting a hundred percent tariffs on China and that didn't go well. It's all Bullshit. It's all talk. You know this these are Negotiating tactics that he's using but there are pending currency collapses in Argentina in Turkey in Japan in Britain in the EU in America and elsewhere currently right now, okay the

Charlie Robinson (43:18.32)
Argentina has done such a shit job with Malay. He's got a chainsaw. He's gotta be a libertarian. He's got a chainsaw. He's no libertarian. Libertarians don't put their hands on the wall and cry and pledge their allegiance to Israel. He's a fucking joke. He's a fake libertarian. He can take his chainsaw and get on stage and do all that stuff. But he just sold $20 billion worth of Argentine pesos to the United States.

Hey, remember that strategic Argentinian peso reserve that Trump was talking about in the lead up to the election? Remember everyone was really pumped on that. Everybody got, mean, holy moly, not a Bitcoin strategic reserve. You literally went out and bought the shittiest currency in the world. Congratulations, that's Donald Trump for you. my God.

these countries, Turkey's got problems. I was in Japan a couple, two years ago or a year and a half ago. We got there when the yen was 155 to the dollar, is absurd. It was like getting in a time machine, going back 30 years and being able to do whatever you wanted when you went out and buy. That was a great feeling. It's not great if you live in Japan though, because...

you unfortunately are on the receiving end of this currency devaluation and Turkey's has it coming. Obviously we see what's going on in Britain. The EU is a, it's just a, it's a dumpster fire. And the people who are running the EU, I see Christine Lagarde out there talking about how Bitcoin is a big problem. And it's like, my God, like.

I get it. Like you can have your opinions on Bitcoin or whatever, but when you're the head of the EU and you're like Bitcoin is a scam, it's just you're the wrong person to have that conversation. It's just, it's tough. It's tough to listen to that. know, fuck the Germans too, by the way, they don't have an economic, like they don't have a currency issue yet, but they will. mean, Nord Stream, the Nord Stream pipeline didn't kill itself.

Charlie Robinson (45:35.939)
So you can enjoy that expensive energy. There is an industrial collapse that's happening in Germany, right? 200,000 jobs have been lost in the last two years. That's a catastrophe. They're having problems in their automotive industries, the chemicals, they're big in manufacturing, mechanical engineering, construction, chemical, automotive, they're all cooked. And you know why they're cooked? Because the money is leaving Germany. Why the fuck would you stay?

The money is leaving any place where the financial restrictions are coming down, like in London. How many billionaires have left London? I don't know, almost all of them. They're leaving, they're on their way out. If they haven't gotten out of there yet and relocated to Abu Dhabi or Dubai or fucking Switzerland or you name it.

They're not sticking around to hang out in London anymore. then sort of a subset of that is, as I mentioned, the euro. The euro is cooked. They're all in denial about it. Prop it up all you want, but the euro is a catastrophe. They're gonna be the last to figure it out, of course, which is fine. And then...

Also internationally, China. China's got a massive property bubble and shadow banking issues and a closed capital system that prevents outward flow and really controls capital in a sense that it's tough to get your money out of China. they're forced to buy, wealthy Chinese who would love to take their money out of China and put it into anything else.

If they can't get their money out, and they usually can't, their investment options are surprisingly limited. And so the best thing that they can buy is property. And so they buy a house for themselves, of course. And then they have more money, because they're wealthy Chinese. And so then they don't know what else to do with it. So they buy another property. And then they buy another one, and another one, and another one. And then you get ghost cities. And then you start, you you have...

Charlie Robinson (47:57.135)
developers in China that are trying to, they've got all this demand for real estate, it's artificial demand, it's not like people actually wanna buy it, it's that they don't have a variety of options out there, so they're being forced to buy it. So they build and build and build and these Chinese property development companies get themselves eventually in trouble, which is what they've done, and now the government has to step in. And that's one thing.

You know, it's one thing if you're like, well, the crypto market went bust and some people lost their money. But if you're China and everybody in your country is all invested in the housing market and then the housing market goes bust, that's a catastrophe. So they're trying to make sure that that doesn't happen. But I mentioned Deutsche Bank and let's talk a little bit about this because this is the zombie canary in the coal mine as far as I'm concerned. And they have been installed. They have literally been insolvent since 1998. That is not an exaggeration. I'm not. So when when Burwick and I say

You know, we think Deutsche Bank is gonna go bust. People go, oh, get out of here with that crazy shit. Dude, they have been insolvent for almost 30 years. How they are still a bank is beyond me. Well, I shouldn't say that, it's not beyond me. They have taken $354 billion in government support. So that kind of helps when you're an awful bank. And by the way, the money, the 354 billion that

in government that support the Deutsche Bank got didn't come from the German government. It came from the Federal Reserve of New York. from 2007 to 2010. The Fed, the American Central Bank, propped up Deutsche Bank with $354 billion. That is a third of a trillion dollars. So when we say that we have questions about this bank,

That's what we're talking about, okay? We didn't pull a name out of our hat and say, let's just pick on this bank.

Charlie Robinson (50:05.892)
They were fined.

They were fined $7.2 billion for misleading investors in the 2008 crisis. They should have gone bankrupt.

You know how I mentioned that gold and silver are all being manipulated and suppressed with paper shorts and everything, and that I told you that they actually caught the banks that were doing that and they find them? Of course, nobody went to prison because nobody ever does. Deutsche Bank find $125 million for bribery and manipulating metals markets. So when I say $50 silver, they're just trying to, in price discovery, this is what I'm talking about.

Deutsche Bank and all the other criminal enterprises that call themselves banks have been suppressing silver price for the last 40 years. It may be $100 an ounce. It may be more than that. Nobody knows. That's what's going on. Again, Deutsche Bank also fined as if $7.2 billion in fines and then $125 million for bribery wasn't enough.

Don't worry, they were also fined $186 million for anti-money laundering control deficiencies. And the reason why they had their money laundering control system was deficient is because their entire purpose for existing is to launder money. So the reason why they're deficient in their controls of it is because they're not trying to control it. If they were trying to be an actual bank,

Charlie Robinson (51:48.784)
they would have gone out of business years ago. This is a money laundering operation. Deutsche Bank has 55 trillion euros of derivative exposure.

Okay.

So let me explain how the banking collapse will happen because it's going to happen. And we'll use Deutsche Bank as an example. Let's pretend you bet your buddy, let's just say you had good information and you bet your buddy a thousand bucks on last night's game and you won. Good for you. You want a thousand bucks against your buddy. Go over your buddy's house next day.

Where's that thousand bucks? Cause I'm the winner. I won the bet. And he goes, man, I don't have a thousand bucks. You go, hang on a second. If I'd lost the bet, I would have had to give you a thousand bucks.

That's just the arrangement we make. You can't bet money you don't have because I don't have it. Now what do you do? That's Deutsche Bank. Deutsche Bank has 55 trillion dollars of derivative exposures on its book. 55 trillion euros, I should say.

Charlie Robinson (53:09.665)
If you are Bank of America and you have derivative bets with all these other banks and you win a derivative bet against Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Bank is my friend that doesn't have the thousand dollars to pay you, okay? You're a winner on the bet, but you can't collect on it. So are you really a winner? And so if that guy has been placing bets all around town and losing, cause he's a degenerate gambler who's bad at picking bets and

also has the audacity to not have any money, then if you won the bet against him, you didn't actually win anything.

And when they go to collect on all of this, Deutsche Bank isn't gonna have any money, but it gets worse than that because Credit Suisse is a co-conspirator in all of this and they have even more of a derivatives book that's at risk. And they're completely insolvent as well. Well, I shouldn't say they're, I shouldn't say any, nobody's as insolvent as Deutsche Bank.

but Credit Suisse is teetering on the brink. So now, think of the, now you're at the Super Bowl party and you've placed massive bets with a bunch of people at the party and you're gonna win, but you have unfortunately placed bets with the poorest people at your party and they're not gonna give you anything. So this is the problem that we have, is that all it takes is one of these banks to not pay up on a derivatives bet

and it pulls the entire marketplace down. Let's wrap up with this because I don't wanna forget to mention this, but it's Trump's economy now. When you're a presidential candidate and you run on this, I'm gonna come in and I'm gonna fix this. I'm gonna do this other guy fucked it all up and I'm gonna come in here and fix it. And then you become the president and the economy sucks when you take over because the other guy was maybe brain dead or wasn't even there.

Charlie Robinson (55:16.801)
And then you go, you get about six months in, everyone goes, boy, this economy sure does still suck. And you go, well, listen, I mean, I inherited it from the other guy and there's, know, it takes a long time to turn around an aircraft carrier. So we're doing the best that we can do. You know, wait, you know, let's have this conversation later. When I, after, after my ideas have had time to take hold and after.

the decision-making that I put forth is incorporated into this and we start to have a new vision for where this economy is gonna go. You wait, well, it's Trump's economy now. This is walking into a store, holding up some expensive vase and going, how much is this? Well, you break it, you buy it, man. And that's what it is right now. He's trying to get 10-year rates, interest rates down as low as possible. And the reason why he's trying, he's,

not having much success with this, the Fed dropped a little bit, but not enough. And the reason why he's doing this is because the United States has $7 trillion of existing debt that is coming due next year, and then they have $7 trillion of existing debt that's coming due the year after that, and then they have another $7 trillion of existing debt that is coming due the year after that.

So if you're going to pay that debt, if you're gonna retire that debt with new debt, because you're never getting off the debt cycle, you're just, know, replacing one bag of debt with a different bag of debt at different interest rates, right? The key is, gotta get these rates down lower, you know? If I'm gonna refinance this stuff,

I need the rates as low as possible because if it all comes due and I've got to refinance it at seven and I thought I was going to refinance it at three, the difference in there makes every, you know, makes the country insolvent essentially. So when you've got almost $30 trillion of debt coming due in the next three years, it is extremely important that those interest rates are as low as possible. This would be the time.

Charlie Robinson (57:42.725)
you would want those interest rates at almost zero. He's not gonna get it. In fact, if the Fed really wanted to start a catastrophe, they just bump up rates, bump them up a point. And again, they did that over the last couple of years. We never had interest rates go up as fast as they did. Bad idea, not something that you want to make a habit of doing unless you're trying to destroy.

the economy, which they may be doing, but it's extremely important for the interest rate to be as low as possible so that Trump can refinance this debt. And if he doesn't get the opportunity to do that, then they're gonna start World War III. Okay. They're just going to as a way to paper over the catastrophe of the debt. Corporate buybacks will exceed one.

trillion dollars this year. know, it's when corporations are doing well and they have excess profits and they don't want to take that money and just put it in the bank because it's devaluing. So, and they maybe want to make it look like their stock is more popular or valuable than it currently is. So they take those profits and they buy their own stock back. So it's a stock buyback. They buy it back.

And in doing so, they become a buyer, not a seller. never, you know, they're not going to want to sell that. So they're going to, there's going to be less selling pressure that'll move their stock price up. The reason why CEOs do this is because their compensation packages are tied to stock performance. And so if you have a stock that just trades at $9 forever for 10 years, and your compensation package is tied to that stock going from nine to 13, and if it doesn't ever get to 13, you don't ever get the big payout. You're never going to make any money.

So you'll do things like, we do some stock buyback there. I got a billion dollars to buy all this stock of ourselves and that'll make the price go from nine to 13. Then I'll get my pay package. Will that be good for the company? No, it'd be a fucking catastrophe for the company, but I don't care. I'll get my money and then they can deal with it. That's what's been going on. So there's a lot of short-term decision-making happening. so corporations are buying back their stock. They should be buying Bitcoin with it.

Charlie Robinson (01:00:06.0)
and just putting that on their balance sheets. Some companies are figuring that out and some of them are doing it, but you're gonna, if you do what everybody's always done, you're gonna get what everybody's always got. And unfortunately, if you follow the herd on this one, you're gonna go right off the cliff. So I personally, if I were running a major publicly traded corporation, I would not be doing stock buybacks. would get my, my stock would be, I'd be trying to get out of my stock as much as possible.

And I'd be trying to get into Bitcoin. I just hold that on my balance sheet and say, this is what we're stacking instead. A representation, a pure representation of energy instead of some stock price that is measured in federal reserve notes, which may or may not be around a couple of years from now. I think everything's changing. And of course, here's the big monkey wrench that is getting thrown in currently.

that nobody really knows how to price into stocks or really the economy in general, and that's artificial intelligence, right? And there's something that people need to remember, and it's a little backwards than what you think, but technology like artificial intelligence is actually deflationary. What I mean by that is that things get cheaper

because you use that technology, more productive, lowers prices, you're able to do the graphic design work as an example. What would have cost me $1,000 on a graphic design project might only cost me, hell, I've got my AI, I can just have it do it for me. It cost me almost nothing, right? So you're gonna see prices deflationary in that respect. So that's something that it's tough. You've got an inflationary market of the dollar, dollar printing.

dollar value, everything is inflating. And then you've got AI coming in and throwing this very unusual tech monkey wrench into the mix because on the one hand, there's this new technology and there's all these businesses that are growing from it. But as that technology gets more impactful and more embedded in our daily lives, actually lowers, it's actually deflationary. In fact, it brings prices down because it's cheaper to do things.

Charlie Robinson (01:02:34.094)
So this is something that's gonna need to get sorted out as we move forward. You know, more productive, lower prices, things like that. That's a good thing. What's it going to do to the job market? Well, the guy though, who was the graphic designer that you would normally spend $1,000 on, you're not using him anymore. So he's got to either get on board with AI and use that tool for his own benefit and learn how to do it that way, or you get replaced and you're just selling buggy whips.

You know, so this is where it is. Let's talk a little bit about debt here. Personal debt in America is 18.39 trillion. That means that of all the Americans out there, we've got a lot of money that we've borrowed, okay? And when you're borrowing money, you're paying it back at interest. That is the problem. This is an 18.39 trillion of personal debt.

that's just waiting for maybe someday for you to pay it off. This is attached with a time bomb and it's called interest. And this is the problem. Personal debt, 18.39 trillion. Mortgage debt in the US, a little under 13 trillion. Okay, just to put this in perspective, auto debt, 1.66 trillion. Student loan debt, 1.64 trillion. Okay.

Student loan debt in the United States, you cannot discharge it with bankruptcy. For those who know, that's a George Bush thing. You can hang him an effigy for everything else along with that. Student loan debt does not get discharged. credit card debt, a little bit less in terms of, I mean, this is sort of interesting to put in perspective because everybody knows how much credit card debt Americans have. I mean, they have a lot. They don't maybe know the number.

I'll give you the number, it's 1.21 trillion. But just so you know, it's about, if you take all the credit card debt that Americans have, which is massive, student loan debt is about 30 % more than that, okay? Just to put that in perspective, it's quite a bit. HELOC debt, home equity, line of credit, that's $411 billion. That's the money you borrow.

Charlie Robinson (01:04:52.803)
you yourself will borrow against the equity in your house, if you own a house and if you have equity in it. Corporate debt, 11.4 trillion. Okay, so there's a lot of money out there sloshing around and it's a Ponzi scheme. Okay. My fear with all of this, my fear for the actual trigger that starts this contagion is commercial real estate.

And the connection to commercial real estate is medium sized banks. Medium sized banks tend to be the banks that loan on commercial projects such as office buildings, industrial parks, things like that. So when office buildings go bust and they will, it's not even necessarily gonna be geographic specific though, San Francisco and the like will go first. The medium sized banks are going to be the ones that fill the brunt of this.

when the first medium-sized bank goes under and it makes the news and the FDIC isn't there to backstop any of this, then you're going to see some real fireworks at that point. Because I think a couple of things will happen. First of all, if you have your money in a medium-sized bank and you just watched a couple of other medium-sized banks go under, you're going to be thinking, where do I go with my money? You're gonna have two choices, small banks,

Banks that are smaller than your medium-sized bank or banks that are larger than your medium-sized bank. This is the problem with that calculation is that the correct answer monetarily is you go to the big banks. And the reason is because you know, they probably won't get liquidated. And if they do, they're going to have government backing. They're going to have a backstop somehow, right? Unfortunately, that is the correct calculation to make.

Morally, the right calculation to make is fuck the big banks, I'll go with a credit union, a small one that won't get wiped out.

Charlie Robinson (01:06:59.759)
And that's what I've done, but it might be the wrong move from a financial standpoint. I can live with that because I think it's the right thing to do because I don't want my money with big banks for a variety of reasons. But that's something that this is just the psychology of collapse. If it happens in the medium sized banking industry and it will, you're gonna see people...

starting to make calculations. Because if you go into a small bank, the thought is, well, this bank may go under too, right? I might have to take my money to the Bank of America at some point. That's where we are. It's a problem.

I would also keep my eyes on something that is becoming an alarming trend here in the United States, though I'm certain that it is not limited to the US, though it is a problem here. And that is private equity in general and private equity vultures in particular, and they will be circling. We're starting to see this right now. Anything that generates revenue, you're starting to see assets like, like,

veterinary clinics getting bought up by private equity. Taking your animal, taking your sweet cat or dog to the vet is going to get more expensive as the nice family-owned veterinary clinic down the street from you got sold last month. Private equity came in, made them an offer they couldn't refuse. Guess what's going to happen? All the prices are going to go up. Guess what else is going to happen? That's not the only veterinary clinic that's going to get bought by that private equity firm. They're going to buy them all.

And that's what they're doing. Auto body shops, plumbing companies, you name it. If it generates revenue and it's gonna be around for a while, they're looking to buy that. They've got all the money in the world. They're just looking for assets that make sense now. And that's what they're coming for. But don't worry, don't worry everybody. The big beautiful bill is here to save us. course, Donald Trump has passed the

Charlie Robinson (01:09:11.909)
The big beautiful bill, big beautiful bill, build back better? wait, I don't know. I'm sure that's just a coincidence, right? But it's gonna add $3 trillion to the debt each year. Not just next year, but then the year after that and then the year after that. Because who cares? Because money is fake, it doesn't even matter, it's not real. Three trillion here, know, trillion here.

trillion there pretty soon you're talking about real money you know I think it's

Charlie Robinson (01:09:50.64)
Just, you know, this is all going to contribute to the debt over time, which is 50 % higher than it was under Biden already. So it's just the end. The American empire is circling the drain. The US dollar is a shit coin. Get yourself some tangible assets without counterparty risk. Make yourself some gold, some silver, some Bitcoin, some storable food, some bullets, some whatever. mean, get your money out of the bank.

silver coins, whatever you can do, you still have time to unfuck yourself. Please take advantage of it. If you liked this episode, you can take the additional step right now of sharing it with your friends and family. Connect with me, macroaggressions.io. Thanks everybody. Talk to you again soon.