Shownotes
The world seems like it is going crazy. We might have got into crypto for fun, the tech or maybe even to create wealth. Can it be a way to help protect our savings and wealth from the current economic environment? I believe it can be. Understanding some basic economic reasons for why countries are having difficulties with inflation will help you in preparing for the future.
Let's dive right in!!
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex/040915/countries-use-us-dollar.asp
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hyperinflation.asp
https://cryptoslate.com/tech-giant-stripe-takes-the-plunge-into-crypto/
https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/the-most-important-money-statistic-ever-21acb12c27d1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_energy_independence
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I can be reached by email at mcintosh@genwealthcrypto.com and on twitter at @McIntoshFinTech. My mastodon handle is @mcintosh@podcastindex.social. Looking forward to hearing from you!
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Music Credits
Protofunk by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4247-protofunk
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
The following music was used for this media project:
Music: Ethernight Club by Kevin MacLeod
Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/7612-ethernight-club
License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Artist website: https://incompetech.com
Transcripts
Hey everyone, Noah on this podcast is a financial advisor, and all information presented on
Speaker:this podcast is for informational purposes only. Now that we have the legal stuff out of the way,
Speaker:let's jump on in. Welcome to the generational wealth cryptocurrency podcast. I'm your host
Speaker:McIntosh. Today we're going to be talking about where do we go from here? Now, what I don't mean
Speaker:by where do we go from here is where's the price of Bitcoin going? We'll discuss that in other weeks.
Speaker:Today I want to talk about the overall world economy, and that actually does relate to Bitcoin.
Speaker:We'll get to that in a bit, but I do want to lay some groundwork. I want to put out what I think
Speaker:is going to be happening over the next year or two. This is not something that's necessarily
Speaker:going to happen this week. I do feel like we are moving towards what will amount to a new recession
Speaker:globally, not just here in the United States. And I will explain all that as we go along.
Speaker:All right. So one thing I do want to explain before we start into all this, of course,
Speaker:if you've listened to a few episodes of the podcast, you've probably picked up,
Speaker:I live in the United States. Because of that, I'm going to be discussing this from a US basis.
Speaker:Any bias that I might have would probably come from being here in the United States.
Speaker:However, and we're going to be discussing specifics of this as it relates to the United States.
Speaker:However, that being said, because the US dollar is the world's reserve currency,
Speaker:what goes on in the United States tends to at least influence other countries around the world
Speaker:quite a bit. I don't know, you probably don't know this, but there are a large number of countries
Speaker:that either use the US dollar as their official currency, or their currency is actually pegged
Speaker:to the dollar, meaning it changes as the dollar changes. I will have this in the show notes,
Speaker:a link to an article about this, a table with all this data. But there's actually more than 65
Speaker:countries that peg their currencies to the US dollar. There's also five US territories and 11
Speaker:foreign nations, including El Salvador as an example, that use it as their official currency.
Speaker:What that means is that when the United States experience issues, all of those places will
Speaker:experience issues basically directly. If inflation goes up in the United States,
Speaker:that will affect El Salvador simply because until very recently, the US dollar was their
Speaker:only legal currency. Of course, now they've made Bitcoin legal, and they're making moves
Speaker:in that direction to strengthen their holdings in Bitcoin and that kind of thing. I do believe
Speaker:that's actually in large part because of exactly what we're talking about, how these things are
Speaker:correlated, they're directly related. All of these other countries are affected by what happens here
Speaker:in the United States. What is happening in the United States? Well, unless you've been living
Speaker:under a log for the last six months or so, you know that inflation rates are rising in the United
Speaker:States. Last week, I reported last week that the CPI data was going to be released on the 10th,
Speaker:and that was done. It was given a value of 7.9% year over year, meaning a year ago things were
Speaker:on average 7.9% cheaper than they are right now, denominated in US dollars. What that means is
Speaker:things are more expensive now. Your dollar's worth less. You can look at it a number of ways.
Speaker:Your spending power is less. That was in line essentially with what they expected. I think
Speaker:people were looking around 7.8%, so we got 7.9%, which is right in line with what we were expecting.
Speaker:The stock markets, they've been going down lately. It didn't really affect the stock markets. It
Speaker:certainly didn't cause a big drop. That kind of thing did not really affect Bitcoin, crypto in
Speaker:general, but it's out there. We are experiencing what the government says is the worst inflation
Speaker:since the very early 80s. I think it's 1982. I don't want to go off on this, but the reality is
Speaker:they figure inflation differently now than they did back in the 80s and even into the 90s.
Speaker:If you figured it using the methodology that they did in the 80s, our inflation rate would
Speaker:be about 15%, which I believe is probably far closer to the truth. What that means is that we
Speaker:are already having extensive inflation. I think most people realize that. You drive by the gas
Speaker:station and look at the price of gas, and you tell me what it was a year ago, and it wasn't the same.
Speaker:It's far more expensive now. Housing is up. Food is up. All of these basic things that we need
Speaker:to have the life that we've got, they're going up. In countries outside of the United States that
Speaker:peg their currency to our dollar or the dollar is the legal tender of the country,
Speaker:the dollar is the legal tender of the country. That's going on for them. Now, we do get a benefit.
Speaker:All of that is fairly well known at this point. One thing to point out, why do we have that
Speaker:inflation? Now, the reality is right now, the president is actually blaming Russia.
Speaker:I'm not even going to go there. A lot of people believe that our inflation is caused by what
Speaker:I would call money printing. We could take an entire episode to talk about this one little bit,
Speaker:but essentially, we're creating money that's backed by nothing, and it's just being injected
Speaker:into the economy. To give you a very simple example, in a closed system, let's say you had
Speaker:$1,000, and it was distributed around, and that was your currency. You worked out all your prices
Speaker:based on that $1,000. Maybe a loaf of bread was a quarter of a cent. Maybe a car was a dollar. I
Speaker:don't know. Whatever. Then I injected another $1,000, or well, let's not even be that crazy.
Speaker:I injected another $200 into that system. What is it going to do? It's going to inflate the value
Speaker:of all of those items, because there's more money in the system. That's, in my opinion, what causes
Speaker:a lot of the inflation that we see, including... It's indisputable how much money we've been printing
Speaker:over the last few years. Since COVID came along, around that timeframe, it was going on before that,
Speaker:but not as crazy as it has been since then. We've been injecting massive amounts of money into the
Speaker:economy, and there was bound to be side effects of that. Well, we are seeing that. All that,
Speaker:we've got inflation. Where do we go from here? All right. In my opinion,
Speaker:there's three scenarios for where we can go from here.
Speaker:Understand, despite what the US government says, I can't speak for governments outside
Speaker:of the United States, but we've had people like the president and the treasury secretary saying,
Speaker:this is transitory inflation. It's not. This is not going to go away quickly.
Speaker:Our interest rates, which are in effect used to balance that inflation, are basically at zero.
Speaker:The rate that the banks are borrowing money from the federal government is very, very low.
Speaker:The way that you would combat this inflation is you would raise interest rates.
Speaker:People don't want to do that because it hinders people from borrowing money, from creating debt.
Speaker:So, it's this big tug of war. Next week, we've got what they call the FOMC meeting. I don't
Speaker:know the rest of it actually. Sorry. Something or another committee. It is a meeting basically
Speaker:of the Federal Reserve of all the principal people at the central banks in the United States. They
Speaker:meet and they say, Jerome Powell heads all this up and they figure out what they're going to do
Speaker:with interest rates. Now, the expectation that was set at the last round of meetings is that
Speaker:this year, 2022, they would start raising interest rates. I believe, well, several times.
Speaker:The debate at this point is next week when they meet and they provide their report is
Speaker:how, what is that actually going to be? The expectation until recently was either,
Speaker:it was either going to be 0.25 or a quarter of a percent or half a percent.
Speaker:Most people leaning towards a quarter of a percent, I believe.
Speaker:There are some people at this point who I could, well, I would include myself in this, who
Speaker:actually believe that they could actually come back and say, no, we're going to keep it,
Speaker:we're not going to increase rates this time around because they're so scared about people
Speaker:pulling back when they do this and you've got the war in Ukraine and Russia and oil
Speaker:shooting through the atmosphere with oil prices where $125 a barrel or very close to it
Speaker:and so on and so forth. And they might not raise the rates at all. I could see that,
Speaker:to be honest. Now, the stock market would view that as an awesome move and you would see stock
Speaker:prices go up. It's not good for the long-term economy, but in the short term, you would see
Speaker:a spike in the stock market, in my opinion. The medium road, 0.25, so a quarter of a percent
Speaker:raise, which is probably what we will see, will probably not really affect the stock market that
Speaker:much. It'll kind of be middle of the road. And then if they do raise it by half a percent,
Speaker:I think you would crater the stock market at least temporarily. Now, in my opinion,
Speaker:and I'm not on the FOMC board, we should raise it half a percent this time and then go from there.
Speaker:We're so far behind the eight ball on this. We have to get going. We have wasted so much time.
Speaker:It's hurting people. All right. So if we do see that half a percent, the stock market would
Speaker:probably get extremely spooked, but it would start to move things back in line where they need to be.
Speaker:Now, all right. All of that being said, regardless of that, we're still heading.
Speaker:Interest rates are not going to go down. They will probably continue to go up for a while.
Speaker:Well, this is not just going to magically go away. Russia could pull out of Ukraine.
Speaker:We could have unicorns and rainbows, and we're still going to have inflation because we continue
Speaker:to print money. Oh, and by the way, I would just throw this out because this irritates me to know
Speaker:and whatever I hear this. As of 2020, we exported more oil than we imported. So in other words,
Speaker:we were a net exporter, meaning we've got plenty of oil right here in the United States.
Speaker:As bad as it would be for Russia to shut down all their oil, which is basically what they're
Speaker:in the process of doing, it's not really going to hurt us. But we see oil at $125 a barrel,
Speaker:and you go to the gas station and it's now well over $4 and probably most of the United States.
Speaker:It's worse out west. So I don't even understand that. But then you also see politicians up there
Speaker:saying, well, it's because of what's going on in Russia. And I'm like, that's just a bunch of baloney.
Speaker:So anyways, moving on. Like I said, we've got three different scenarios for where we go from here.
Speaker:I'm going to give them kind of from best to worst case. I hope, frankly, I have very little
Speaker:hope at this point for the best case scenario. I will throw it out there, but I hope we just
Speaker:end up in the middle scenario. I'm afraid we may end up with the worst case scenario.
Speaker:Best case scenario is a recession that basically kind of mirrors 2008-2009,
Speaker:which was our housing crisis here in the United States. We were basically giving loans to people
Speaker:who couldn't afford it and they were defaulting in massive quantities. Banks were over leveraged and
Speaker:the government ended up coming in and bailing them out, which really means they printed more money.
Speaker:So in my opinion, what they did is they kicked the can down the road.
Speaker:Now, this will not unfold that way because the housing loans aren't being made to people who
Speaker:can't repay them at current levels. That's not what's going on, but I'm just saying it's similar
Speaker:in scope. It would affect a broad number of people. It would affect a large number of people.
Speaker:Similar in scope, it would affect a broad number of people, but most people wouldn't get liquidated,
Speaker:so to speak, by that. They're not going to lose everything. That's our best case scenario. It
Speaker:would take a few years to recover. Unfortunately, with that scenario, I'm afraid that really it
Speaker:would just be kicking the can down the road again. We're going to continue to prep money.
Speaker:We're going to continue to make crazy economic decisions, and it's just going to get worse down
Speaker:the road. But maybe that's what happens. The second scenario, it started in the 1920s,
Speaker:if I recall correctly. In the 1920s, early 1930s, really up until World War II,
Speaker:we had what was called the Great Depression. You had a lot of reasons for it, but
Speaker:we had a massive number of people in the United States who were unemployed. A lot of people lost
Speaker:everything, their life savings, and a lot of turmoil. The stock market was in the bucket,
Speaker:the toilet, for a good period of time. You can look it up, and despite popular opinion,
Speaker:no, I was not around then, but certainly in US memory, it's the worst depression that we've had.
Speaker:It's commonly referred to as the Great Depression. Some of us, well, the people who lived through
Speaker:that period of time, by and large are now passed, are gone. There's not a whole lot of direct memory
Speaker:at this point of that time period, but it was a terrible time. There's certainly no doubt about
Speaker:that. I could see that happening. I could see interest rates really going down. I could see
Speaker:interest rates, real interest rates, and I don't even care what the government says that they are,
Speaker:but hitting 20% year over year or more. I could see maybe even their official rates are well above
Speaker:10%, maybe they're 12% or something. Again, understand the numbers, these CPI numbers,
Speaker:these official numbers. They're heavily manipulated. You can look at the data they
Speaker:provided. It's all out there in the open how they do it, and it's just ridiculous.
Speaker:You look at how they calculate it, and then it's like they're cherry picking things to keep it down.
Speaker:That could take a decade to recover from. Now, that might provide a real reset for our economy
Speaker:and for the world's economy, and maybe subsense into some countries. I will tell you that the
Speaker:root cause of all of this, it goes back to this printing of money. We went off the gold standard
Speaker:officially in 1971. It actually, in reality, happened a long time before that, but the United
Speaker:States officially went off of it in 1971. Ever since then, we went from a very, very small amount
Speaker:of inflation to real inflation year over year that's just everything's not keeping up.
Speaker:If you're old enough, or if you have parents or grandparents around from that time period,
Speaker:back in the 70s, you had households where people, one person could go out and earn a living and
Speaker:support a family. That is almost not even realistic at this point in America. Now,
Speaker:maybe it is elsewhere. I think there are a lot of countries where that's true as well.
Speaker:The traditional family, and I'm not getting into all of that. I'm just saying, now it's not even
Speaker:possible. If you have a family, both parents work, they bring home their money, the government takes
Speaker:a significant chunk of that out in taxes, and then it's bled off to inflation, and so on and so forth.
Speaker:And you barely get by. So, the reality is that certainly in my lifetime, things have changed.
Speaker:And I'm not that old, but you can go back far further than that. The changes have not been
Speaker:for the better. And I do believe that a lot of it, and that's my opinion, you can maybe
Speaker:not believe it. Maybe there's two kind of basic schools of thought. One is a Keynesian school
Speaker:of thought, which a lot of modern people, so to speak, use. And this is where the money printing
Speaker:comes. It doesn't matter. Well, whatever, which I've never understood. And the other school of
Speaker:thought would be like an Austrian school of thought, and you can look that up. But it's
Speaker:far more like a government should have backing for their money. It's a basic function of the
Speaker:government, right? So anyways, I certainly see that that level of recession is possible. I also
Speaker:believe, and I strongly hope that this doesn't happen, but I do believe it's certainly possible
Speaker:within the next few years, say within the next five years, that we would have a level of inflation
Speaker:and recession that would be what they would consider hyperinflation. So what's hyperinflation?
Speaker:If you've never heard of that, kind of the textbook definition, it's when you get inflation,
Speaker:that's 50% or more per month, which is an insane, crazy amount. That means that you're going to be
Speaker:an insane, crazy amount. That means $100 this month has the same, you would have to have $150
Speaker:the next month to buy the same thing with it. I mean, think about that. And that's month after
Speaker:month after month after month. We see this in places recently. I believe Zimbabwe has had this
Speaker:officially. I believe Venezuela has had this recently. I'm not sure they're very open about
Speaker:that, but from what I've read, that's what's happened. We saw the classic example, if you
Speaker:want to call it that, was after World War I, the Weimar Republic in Germany had hyperinflation.
Speaker:This is where you see the pictures of people with literally with wheelbarrows of money going to buy
Speaker:bread. It's a terrible, terrible situation, but it's a resetting of that economy is really what it is.
Speaker:And governments do things to get out of that, but it's a long process. Now, in the United States,
Speaker:I actually did not realize this, but as I was doing my research for this, we actually officially
Speaker:had a period of hyperinflation after the Civil War, so in the late 1800s. And so, the United
Speaker:States has actually already gone through this, but I could see because of the money printing,
Speaker:because of our mismanagement, because of our inability to rein in governmental spending,
Speaker:which a lot of this goes back to as well, I could see us entering this kind of spiral where it's
Speaker:not 7% year over year, it's not 10%, it's not 20%, it's then 20% per month and 40% and then
Speaker:more than 50%, and that's where we're at. And everybody's just kind of scraping by.
Speaker:This is a doom and gloom talk. I do think that it's a possibility. I hope that our governmental
Speaker:officials are smart enough and care enough, which is frankly about the country and not themselves,
Speaker:to keep that from happening. I don't know if that's true.
Speaker:So, what's an answer? Because this is a lot of talk. Well, I don't know if you realize this or
Speaker:not, Bitcoin was actually created as a direct response to 2008-2009 housing crisis. We've gone
Speaker:over this before, of course, a number of times, but what are one of the main tenants of this?
Speaker:Tenants of Bitcoin? 21 million. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin issued. You will never
Speaker:have money printing with Bitcoin. When they're mined, which is going to be a long time from now
Speaker:for the last 2 million, we're almost at 19 million now, but it takes I think like 100 more years
Speaker:to mine the last 2 million, and that's because it gets harder and harder as it goes along.
Speaker:But that will be it. So, Bitcoin was created as a response to that and we see, you could say Bitcoin
Speaker:is kind of in price discovery mode at this point, but once Bitcoin establishes its true value,
Speaker:you won't see Bitcoin inflating versus U.S. dollar. Well, losing value versus U.S. dollar,
Speaker:I should say. So, if the U.S. dollar hyperinflates 50%, just like I described,
Speaker:and that $100 you have to have $150, you would see Bitcoin go up in terms of U.S. dollars 50%.
Speaker:So, it's an asset that should appreciate with the value
Speaker:of the U.S. dollar, so to speak. See, this I think is in large part why El Salvador,
Speaker:see El Salvador saw this riding on the wall, so to speak, and they said, well, what can we do about
Speaker:it? Well, we'll keep the U.S. dollar because it's so embedded into our economy, but we will give
Speaker:people that alternative and we will encourage them to use that, and that is exactly what they're
Speaker:doing. And that alternative Bitcoin doesn't have the monetary issues that the U.S. dollar does.
Speaker:Now, can the United States do the same thing? Yes. If they wanted to, within a week,
Speaker:the United States could pass the bill, move it through Congress, have it signed by both
Speaker:the House of Representatives and the Senate, and put it in front of the president.
Speaker:We could do that. I don't think we will. I think it might be a decade or two, and it might take
Speaker:that hyperinflation to do that, because I think our politicians, by and large, they either don't
Speaker:understand what's going on or they're in it for their own personal gain or both. And I'm just
Speaker:going to make a blanket statement. Yes, there are politicians who do get it, but they're not very
Speaker:many. By the way, I'm not a Republican. I'm not a Democrat. I'm actually registered independent,
Speaker:so I can just make both sides mad at the same time. It's OK. You don't have to be of the same
Speaker:political persuasion as I do to understand basic monetary theory. I mean, we are literally watching
Speaker:this play out in front of our eyes. And please understand what's going on. And that's why I do
Speaker:this podcast, why I'm doing this particular podcast, to hopefully open people's eyes
Speaker:a little bit more. So Bitcoin can become part of the answer. I actually Googled,
Speaker:right, because I don't know everything, best assets during hyperinflation. There's been a
Speaker:number of places that have seen hyperinflation. It's not a staggering amount. Less than 100
Speaker:countries have ever had hyperinflation. I don't have the number right here on my fingertips, but
Speaker:we have seen this. How does somebody in the United States, let's say you just have a middle-class
Speaker:level. Maybe you make $100,000 household income. Maybe it's $150,000, a couple of hundred thousand.
Speaker:Middle-class household. You got the house, you got the two kids, and the cars, and the driveway.
Speaker:The cars and the driveway. Kind of quote typical. How do you protect yourself?
Speaker:Well, I read some interesting things. First of all, and look, this isn't financial advice.
Speaker:I'm sorry. I said that at the top. I'm going to say it again. You need to do more research
Speaker:on your own. Don't just depend on me. But keep in mind, inflation. If you own stocks, if you own a
Speaker:401k especially, you might have what are called bonds in there. Bonds, as we move into these
Speaker:higher inflation levels, as we approach hyperinflation, they are not going to keep up.
Speaker:Some people say that stocks will manage fairly well. Stocks, you've got to understand. Why has
Speaker:the stock market gone up so much over the last 20 years? It's because of all this money flooding
Speaker:the market, this cheap money. They will go up. Maybe they won't keep up. I would argue if we
Speaker:have real hyperinflation, they probably won't keep up, but they would at least attempt to.
Speaker:Assets, real, what they call hard assets, like a house. House prices are going to go up.
Speaker:You're not going to lose value in your house price. In fact, if you have a fixed rate mortgage,
Speaker:and if you don't, you need to think about that very carefully and probably evaluate
Speaker:refinancing that. Again, not financial advice, but if your interest rates rack up 10% in the next
Speaker:year and you don't have a fixed rate mortgage, you're going to see your mortgage go up until
Speaker:you can't afford it and then you default and you're homeless or moved into an apartment
Speaker:that's gone up 25% in the last year in cost. So be very careful about that. Gold, silver,
Speaker:and I would argue crypto, certain crypto, and I don't mean every crypto and we've discussed this
Speaker:at length on this podcast. If you go back, basically Bitcoin is kind of the king. You've
Speaker:got Ethereum. You've got a few others like ADA. It's been around a while. I wouldn't just park
Speaker:my money in every little coin that pops up because if we hit a real bad scenario stretch,
Speaker:if we hit a real bad stretch, I think you're going to see a lot of things fold up. Bitcoin's
Speaker:not going away. Ethereum's not going away. ADA's not going away. There's a few that aren't going
Speaker:to go away. I would not. I would tend to concentrate my value, my portfolio, in these top coins.
Speaker:And with Bitcoin in particular, the Lightning Network growth over the last few years has been
Speaker:spectacular. Lightning's been around for a while, but it's really taking off and we've seen apps
Speaker:like Strike, which I've talked about a number of times. They are making the use of Bitcoin where
Speaker:you could pull money out of your bank, convert it to Bitcoin, send it to somebody like super quick
Speaker:and easy. And in case of Strike, no cost. I think you're going to see if things get... If we get a
Speaker:2008-2009 recession level, this may not take off, but once we start approaching these Great
Speaker:Depression levels and beyond, you're going to start seeing people move away from the US dollar
Speaker:because of the inflation and use Bitcoin, whether the government says it's legal tender or not.
Speaker:Oh, I want to sell you my truck. Well, its value is about 5,000 US dollars and maybe that's what
Speaker:goes on the bill of sale, but I'm getting my money in Bitcoin. I don't want your fiat,
Speaker:what we would call fiat, your US dollars, because I don't want to have to worry about next month
Speaker:that $5,000 being only worth 20% less. So I think that a hyperinflation level in the United States
Speaker:would drive us to what they call hyper Bitcoinization. You'll see that term knocked
Speaker:around on the Twitters and whatever, where people are... Kind of like what's going on in El Salvador,
Speaker:people everywhere are using Bitcoin, whether the government approves of it or not. Now,
Speaker:the government is moving towards, we're going to establish these regulatory frameworks.
Speaker:Things are kind of moving into place to at least acknowledge we've got all this going on out here.
Speaker:Maybe we're not going to make it legal tender, but we're going to acknowledge it's here.
Speaker:And maybe that's all that we get for the time being, but it would be a start.
Speaker:So I hope those last few minutes, especially, would help your thinking as we move through this,
Speaker:because none of us really know what's going to happen. And if people do, then if they say
Speaker:they know, then either they're super smart or they're lying or they're delusional. And I think a lot
Speaker:of people are just delusional. I can't tell you what's going to happen exactly, but I don't like
Speaker:what I'm seeing and I'm doing my preparations. I mean, the title of this podcast is Generational
Speaker:Wealth with Cryptocurrency. I want to be able to pass things on to my children and their children
Speaker:and so on and so forth. I don't want to pass them worthless money. When all this goes down,
Speaker:I want to do the best I can to, and I'm not going to take advantage of people, but you can position
Speaker:yourself to benefit from it rather than being hurt by it. And the people that I will hurt for the most
Speaker:is the people out there who will be hurt the most. The average Joe out there who, they're working
Speaker:hard, maybe they're working in a mechanic shop and they're making $30 an hour right now.
Speaker:Those are the people that even $5 a gallon gas is going to be a struggle for them. But when your
Speaker:food costs double in the year, which is probably what's, I would say in a two year time span,
Speaker:if you go back a year to a year from now, we're going to see that. That really starts to take a
Speaker:bite into people's budget. I can't drive down the road. It's hard to go to the grocery store.
Speaker:There's stuff not on the shelf and we haven't even talked about all that. We've got all these
Speaker:supply chain issues going on. And my job's not giving me a raise because they just can't afford
Speaker:to or whatever and so on and so forth. Those are the people that are going to get hurt the most.
Speaker:But at whatever level you're at, I would encourage you to consider what I've laid out.
Speaker:I don't know why you're in crypto, but this should be in part of your plans and at least
Speaker:in the back of your head. And I'm not your financial advisor and I'm not going to tell you
Speaker:what percentage of whatever, but at some point in all of this, if anybody is reasonably smart,
Speaker:they will say, I'm going to keep as little money as possible in US dollars and I'm going to put
Speaker:as much of it as possible in assets. And one of those assets, I would include Bitcoin, Ethereum,
Speaker:these blue chip crypto, if we want to call it that. Wow, that was depressing. Sorry,
Speaker:but that's kind of the state of the world. And we didn't even really even talk about Russia and the
Speaker:Ukraine, which certainly hasn't ended. It doesn't look like it's going to end anytime soon.
Speaker:We have seen a lot of crypto activity in the Ukraine and people, that whole situation,
Speaker:which has been interesting to say the least. I want to jump into the news real quick.
Speaker:I've already talked about the FOMC meeting. I'll go ahead and skip that, but that will be on
Speaker:Tuesday and Wednesday. They'll have an announcement Wednesday afternoon. And the CPI data came out as
Speaker:well. I saw a couple of interesting things. There was something that came out on Twitter.
Speaker:I think it was Friday night, some news source in Mexico, claiming that Mexico was making
Speaker:Bitcoin legal, legal tender, I should say. And I looked into that quite a bit. As far as I can
Speaker:tell, that's actually not true. I can't find any verified source at all of that. There is a story
Speaker:from a few days ago about a senator, I think, in Mexico who is pushing a bill to make Bitcoin
Speaker:legal tender. And I think that's what it's about. But I would point out, that story goes back a bit
Speaker:actually. And in October, the president of Mexico explicitly came out and said, we're not making
Speaker:Bitcoin legal. We're not making crypto legal tender, that kind of thing. That's not what this
Speaker:government is looking at. We're going to have to do something about it. We're going to have to do
Speaker:that. That's not what this government is looking at. We're going to raise our revenues through
Speaker:working on getting tax evaders, which is basically what he said in a nutshell.
Speaker:This senator is a member of one of the opposition parties. They're not in the main party. I don't
Speaker:think this really has a chance, but maybe it does. We could hope so. They're right down there by El
Speaker:Salvador. They're certainly, I'm sure, watching what's going on with El Salvador. And I think in
Speaker:some ways, they could see the same kind of benefits that El Salvador does. People sending
Speaker:remittances back and this kind of thing. I think it would actually be very wise of them to do that.
Speaker:And I do believe that whether it's a country, I think one of the countries in Central or South
Speaker:America will probably be the next country to approve Bitcoin's legal tender. We'll see. Tonga.
Speaker:I don't think they've done it yet. They've announced they're going to, so they may beat them to that.
Speaker:So Tonga is an island nation out in the Pacific. You may have heard of them recently. There was a
Speaker:volcano that exploded out there a few months ago, maybe. So maybe it's only been a month or so ago.
Speaker:It's been a few weeks at least, certainly. But anyways, unfortunately, I've not heard of a major
Speaker:like a major number of deaths or whatever. But people hurt. But they did have a volcano blow
Speaker:up on a large island country, which is rather disconcerting. I would certainly think so.
Speaker:So anyways, the other thing, and I will include an article about Bitcoin in Mexico. The Senator's
Speaker:name was Indira Kempis. And there's two other items. First of all, there's a Swiss city in,
Speaker:it's called Lugana. They are making Bitcoin and Tether both. Not legal tender, but they're very
Speaker:much encouraging their use. They're actually creating their own stable coin for that country,
Speaker:apparently. And they're very much promoting cryptocurrency. They're trying to kind of become
Speaker:the cryptocurrency center of Europe. And the article that I read, which I will include
Speaker:in the show notes, talks about how they're spending like $100 million to build this crypto center.
Speaker:So that was very interesting. And then finally, if you've been involved in retail online,
Speaker:you've heard of Stripe. They do payment processing. A few years ago, they started with crypto and then
Speaker:backed out of it after a few months. I'm not really sure why. Maybe they didn't have adoption
Speaker:or whatever, but they are actually coming back and doing it again. And I think this time they'll be
Speaker:far more successful. So that for people like who have WordPress sites and business sites online,
Speaker:all this kind of stuff, that can be very important as a way to integrate. Oh, not only can I take
Speaker:your credit card, I can take your Bitcoin. So that was announced this week as well.
Speaker:So something to look for. As normal, we've got article after article, news item after news item,
Speaker:all of this stuff. Adoption is being driven. Yes, I know the price. What's the price? 39,000.
Speaker:It's been 39,000, it seems like for days. For Bitcoin, right at 2,600 for Ethereum.
Speaker:At some point, we will see that it has to go up. And if again, as I always say, zoom out,
Speaker:if you back up, look at five years ago, it will happen. And we can view these times as good times
Speaker:to accumulate with our DCA strategy. If it goes down, buy what you can. Don't be scared,
Speaker:buy what you can. If we ever saw Bitcoin go down to $10,000 again, and there's people,
Speaker:bears, whatever, people who are out there going, yeah, Bitcoin's gone. I'd be like,
Speaker:I would be on my knees saying, thank you Lord, and buying as much as I could. I mean, really,
Speaker:because it's not going to stay there. Literally, countries are adopting Bitcoin.
Speaker:Do you really think Bitcoin's going to zero? I don't think so. I just don't think so. I don't
Speaker:think it's possible at this point. So, all right, that's it. It's been a long episode,
Speaker:and I know that this wasn't some rah rah episode. I'm not an economist. I don't play one on TV,
Speaker:but I do read a fair amount about this stuff, and I think about it a lot.
Speaker:My bias is I do come from a background of basically an Austrian economics background. I believe
Speaker:a lot of what we see can be traced to governments coming off of a gold standard for their currency.
Speaker:You see this all around the world, and you see the consequences of this all around the world,
Speaker:in my opinion, and it does not end well. We have propped up the United States economy for
Speaker:a long time because we are the de facto world reserve currency, and that gives us a lot of
Speaker:benefits, but that is running out. Major trading partners are switching off the USD,
Speaker:and they're using their own setup or whatever. We're losing that advantage as the United States,
Speaker:and we are seeing the inflation that is occurring because of this excessive printing of money.
Speaker:I'll try and put out some charts or whatever about the money printing. It's staggering.
Speaker:We have more debt right now in the United States than our GDP. Our GDP is in the mid-20s,
Speaker:maybe, of trillion, and we're at $30 trillion in debt and just going up month after month
Speaker:after month after month. It doesn't make sense to my mind. Maybe my mind is incorrect.
Speaker:Maybe I'm off. Wow, it'd be nice. I don't think so. Again, not investment advice. Do your own
Speaker:research. Make your own choices, but at least keep in mind what I said. I hope this was helpful.
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Speaker:I'm on Twitter at McIntosh Fintech, and you can reach me by email at mcintosh at genwealthcrypto.com.
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Speaker:Now go out and make it a great week. Talk to you soon.
Speaker:Bye-bye.