Best of the Program | Guest: Steve Forbes | 4/20/22

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Hey, welcome.

We're talking a little bit about inflation today with Steve Forbes.

He's fascinating and very, very clear on what inflation is and the warnings to our country.

Also, we get ready for our big special tonight.

I share some of the pieces that actually were on the cutting room floor.

Some of the things that are now being taught in your kids' classroom.

This is funded in part by the federal government.

It is everywhere across the nation.

If you thought CRT was bad, wait until you see tonight's episode at 9 o'clock.

And that's right after a brand new Studes America.

Normally I don't watch that show, but you have a good guest on tonight, don't you?

Yeah, yeah.

You know, we booked somebody.

Oh, Glenn Beck.

So, yeah, because I want to, because we're doing a little bit on

this as well, kind of focusing on a little bit of a different part of it with, you know, the lives of TikTok thing that's going on with Taylor Lorenz, and we're gonna get into that as well with you, hopefully, on the program if you decide to show up.

Yeah, it's Blaze TV.

We'll see.

You never know, you never know.

You never know.

Blazetv.com/slash Glenn is the place to go.

You can get your subscription for 10 bucks off if you use the promo code GLEN.

You're listening to

the best of the Glen Back program.

So I was reading an article and I'm having a hard time editing it because I think it's so important.

It comes from Alex Savetsky.

He is the author of the Uncommunist Manifesto.

And he says, modern society must make a decision.

We as individuals in a modern society are becoming more technocratically dystopian by the day.

Inevitably, we will inevitably be faced with a choice.

Succumb to centralized digital money or rally around the freedom and sovereignty of Bitcoin.

Now he points out in this a big difference between cryptocurrency and Bitcoin.

Hang on.

He says, the West is no longer the West.

I don't even know if it deserves to be capitalized.

What made it great and successful, the Enlightenment values and the sovereignty of the individual, are all but dissolved in the morass of

modernity's mindlessness.

Gone are the days of excellence, greatness, and standing out.

In are the days of conformity, compliance, acceptance, participation awards, and just fitting in.

The values and virtues that made the West great have been replaced with the incessant cry for comfort and convenience in return for obedience.

The crescendo of this horrific orchestra is nigh.

Gaslighting is the norm.

Like Orwell predicted, war is now peace, freedom is now slavery, ignorance is now strength.

The West was not defeated by a single blow.

It has been death by a thousand minute and meaningless cuts, from pronouns to equity, scientism, welfare, climate alarmism, political correctness, this incessant need to deconstruct objective reality into completely arbitrary subjective falsehoods that has transformed the once great West into a cesspool of moral relativism.

When everything matters, nothing matters.

We are truly living in a clown world.

We used to aspire to greatness and excellence.

We were interested in the idea of quality, of worth, of value.

But there is no more value.

Like the money we conjure out of thin air and use to measure human action and all resources, everything has been supposedly made abundant because we have no anchor to real cost.

And as a result, we're drowning in excess quantities of fake wealth, of junk that doesn't matter, whether this be NFTs, NFTs, moronic media, reality TV, fake celebrities, brainwashing at school, nursing home-level politicians, or scammed

scandemics.

And because we spend all of our time lying to ourselves and burning through real resources, We are simultaneously suffering from shortages in areas that do matter: energy, food, responsibility, intelligence and courage

we used to be pioneers we used to envision our place in the stars now we bicker and worry about our place in the dirt it's a sad time for humanity and dare i say only god knows

when we come out on the other side if we do it all

The empire of lies cannot last, and it will collapse either on top of all of us or atop only some.

I sincerely hope the latter, for the only meaningful and realistic goal we have left as sovereign intelligent individuals, is to limit the collateral damage.

As we embark on this pursuit, and as the collapse of these false orders inevitably occur, It's my belief that Homo sapiens will bifurcate into two primary camps and perhaps two different species.

One,

Homo

Lemmingus,

and two,

Homo Bitcoinius.

The first one is a classic mid-wit NPC status persona.

Those who lack personal control and restraint, and as such, project that lack onto the the rest of the world.

The key characteristic of the yearning to reduce the diverse constituents of a complex organism into simple numbers and transform these systems into mere spreadsheets.

They are the doctors who believe health is the absence of disease, that disease is the absence of modern medicine, and that depression is the absence of Prozac.

They lack the capacity to think holistically, and they view all fractal, complex systems as linear and isolated from the whole.

They have major control issues because they lack self-control and therefore compensate by attempting to control others.

They're willing to trade the diversity and complexity of life for sterility

and linear control.

On the other hand, Homo Bitcoinius will be the kind of individual who continues to become more robust, sovereign, and self-reliant.

They will be too busy practicing self-mastery and building something of value to bother with meddling in other people's lives.

They will be more local.

They will own the product of their labor.

They will trade freely and they will have no master.

They will own stuff and be happy.

Of course, there will be diverse classes of people arranged into hierarchies of competence.

They'll not be built on some arbitrary authority by decree, but the emergence of natural leaders and masters of their craft.

This is what nobility means in the classical sense.

To be noble is something to aspire toward, not something to sneer at.

To be noble is the pursuit of excellence and greatness.

It is my hope that the new West will both be built and populated by these kinds of people.

We're going to have a high price to pay.

He goes into the

difference between crypto and Bitcoin.

Have you ever thought of this, Stu?

That those are very, very different?

Sure.

Yeah.

I mean,

every project is different in scope.

And I was reading some of this earlier today, seems like one of the big criticisms he has is the centralization aspect of many of the other coins,

which is a problem.

You know, I don't think that they're all worthless, but that is one of the strengths of Bitcoin.

It was why it was the first one.

It

figures those fundamentals much better than

any of the others.

So So he talks about Bitcoin.

He says, here are the reasons Bitcoin came up in the first place.

It was the removal of rulers and issuers of money, the removal of monetary inflation, the

demonopolization of money forever, the placement of money into the realm of physical and natural laws.

and the fusion of energy, universal physical currency, to money in the metaphysical sense.

The magnitude of this achievement is staggering

and the inability for people to comprehend it is both mind-numbingly frustrating but also expected considering the nihilistic pets humans have become perhaps the words on this page jolt you or perhaps I'm just yelling at the clouds I don't know but I'll try my best to remind you that fiat is the enemy in every sense of the word and in every incarnation

Any kind of coin other than Bitcoin is just replicating the fiat we already have, but on a more digital standard.

You don't want to give these people, no different than Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, ultimate power over you, do you?

And he talks about how crypto

has just become outright Ponzi schemes or machines used by the financial tech world and by governments.

And he specifically goes into Ethereum.

And I didn't know this about Ethereum.

Ethereum apparently is, let me see if I can find it.

Ethereum is the

Ethereum foundation.

Did you know that?

Yeah.

He writes, it's infused with World Economic Forum participants, but Ethereum, co-founder,

owns Infura,

which practically the entire Ethereum network runs on.

He's part of the old guard, worked at Goldman Sachs, I believe,

in bed with agencies attempting to reduce the world into a spreadsheet and humans into numbers to populate it.

WEF, BlackRock, etc.

Look, Ethereum's a totally different project, right?

And it's a totally different aim.

But still, you know, look, the point I think is

most pure here in the difference between Bitcoin and these centralized Fed coins, where, you know, this is where you're taking the positives of Bitcoin and implementing it into a system where the central government can monitor every one of your activities.

And that is, I think, the biggest danger here.

You know, you can obviously be involved in these other crypto projects or not, but it's really more

about

not just

which cryptocurrency you're talking about, right?

It's, it's, it's a bigger issue than this.

Well, he's fighting off that centralization.

Yeah, he's talking about like Cardano is

using

we're super deep here, I think.

No, I know, I don't know that.

But they're saying that it's blockchain for social good, because that explains what happened at the World Economic Forum.

They were talking about blockchain.

And a lot of these things have their founders and,

you know, the people on their board who are WEF members, and they're talking about this is going to be

socially good for everybody.

That is leftist code language.

Socially good,

how are you going to make sure that things are balanced?

That's the one thing that Bitcoin does not do.

It doesn't balance and

promise you equity.

It promises that you can take your labor, turn it into money, put it in Bitcoin, and it remains

safe for you.

Yeah.

Relatively.

There's no overseer, right?

That's the promise of it.

And, you know, I will say there's a really good argument that a lot of the cryptocurrency stuff has gone away from that.

You know, they've tried to solve some of the

perceived problems

with

no centralization by putting a few people who aren't the government in a position of centralization, which is not

any good.

That's what we did with the Fed.

It's not great.

Right.

You are setting up a new Federal Reserve.

But like you, as you see, you know, we've been talking about this type of stuff for a while when you talk about content being removed from the internet and social media accounts going down, you know, banned and speech being not only banned, but banned in advance, you know, people censoring their speech before they even say these things.

That's the promise of this type of technology where it's so far outside.

You know, we keep talking about, you know, how are we going to change the law so that YouTube is nicer to us.

Like, I mean, I'm not saying there's nothing to do down those roads, but like,

those are not solutions to these problems.

Like, YouTube is never going to do what you want it to do.

Twitter is never, even with Elon Musk in there, you're just going to start disliking Elon Musk more more if he takes this thing over because they're never going to do, they're never going to do this right.

That is the reason why Bitcoin is so good is it sets the rules up and the rules can't be changed.

The rules are the rules.

They just exist.

Yeah.

Nobody can change those rules.

I would have no problem.

That's what the internet used to be.

I'd have no problem if you had YouTube, Facebook, whatever, and the rules were the rules.

And you don't change them along the way for your own board members or whoever.

You just, that's it.

And everything was fair.

You don't like that one?

Good.

Go create another one.

And they didn't have the ability to stop you from creating another one.

That's the world that America always was.

America was based on that idea.

The streets were lined with gold.

Not literally.

They were lined with gold because if you want to build something this was the place where you could build it and remember Disneyland was built in under a year about seven months you wouldn't be able to get an environmental study for Disneyland today

that's who we used that's who we were in 1955

So are we going to be free or are we going to be under somebody's thumb?

That is the main choice that we all have to make.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

And don't forget, rate us on iTunes.

If you don't

use TikTok,

good for you.

I mean that sincerely.

All hail you.

TikTok is a...

is a

Chinese tool, I think, just to just dumb us down.

But I digress.

There's not the censorship on TikTok that there is elsewhere.

And somebody

has really done a great job at exposing the craziness that is the fringe of the Liberal Party.

I can't say that.

You know, what was fringe, we're now living.

So I don't know what fringe is in the, in the, on the left anymore.

I have no idea what fringe is.

But

the creator has now come under attack.

And I want to play just a little bit of something she said yesterday as she is being doxxed and exposed and her address is given out online.

Here's what she said.

How has this affected your life, this Jeff Bezos piece?

Well,

the past two days have been very chaotic and overwhelming.

I had to make some travel plans, you know, really fast, but I was not planning on earlier.

So there was a little bit of coordination that had to happen.

And I'm now in a location where I don't think anyone would find me.

Not in any of the locations that Taylor Marin's leaked or that anyone can find.

But

it's been a little bit tough, but I'm not going to let this get me down.

So

her friends and people who know her say, she's not going to stop.

This is not going to...

It will frighten her.

It will scare her

because they're coming after her.

And these people will be violent.

You know, they always say, the right is so violent.

Show it to us.

Show it to us.

The left, I could show you.

boatloads of evidence that you're violent.

So all she's doing on this TikTok, it's the libs of TikTok.

All she does is take things that are on TikTok.

She doesn't edit them out of context or anything else.

She just takes the post

and she reposts it in one place.

And now conservatives go to libs of TikTok and they see what they're saying.

Let me give you two of the videos she posted.

Here's video number one.

This is a tool I use to teach students about gender and sexuality.

First up, we have sex assigned at birth.

This is what the doctor says you are when you come out of the womb.

It should be based on chromosomes, hormones, and genitals, but most time doctors just look at genitals.

Next up, we have gender identity, which is totally different from sex assigned at birth.

This is what you feel you are inside, and no one can see this from the outside.

There are three different sliders that you can move up and down to describe your gender identity.

Then we have gender expression, which is how you show your gender to the world.

It's usually based in a sort of binary system, which isn't perfect.

Again, you can slide these up and down to show the different gendered ways you express yourself.

Then we jump down to attraction.

We have physical attraction and emotional attraction.

These are different.

Instead of...

Again, there are sliders that a person can use to best describe their sexuality.

All right.

So this is done with a big cartoon unicorn.

This is for our kids.

That's a teacher explaining, showing the curriculum what's happening.

Instead of teaching addition,

we are teaching,

you know, attraction.

Bet the Chinese aren't doing that.

Now, this is a first grade

classroom.

This is a

from a teacher in a charter school in Boston.

Again, from the libs of TikTok.

Listen to this.

And something, something cool about me, Miss Hammond?

All right.

All right.

So something that's really cool and unique about who I am is that I am transgender.

So we touched a little bit about that at the beginning of this week in the book that Ms.

Hammond read, but I'm going to give you my explanation about what it means to be transgender as well.

So when babies are born, the doctor looks at them and they make a guess about whether the baby is a boy or a girl based on what they look like.

And most of the time that guess is 100% correct.

There are no issues whatsoever.

But sometimes the doctor is wrong.

The doctor makes an incorrect guess.

When the doctor makes a correct guess, that's when a person is is called cisgender.

When a doctor's guess is wrong, that's when they are transgender.

So I'm a man, but when I was a baby, the doctors told my parents I was a girl.

And so my parents gave me a name that girls typically have and bought me clothes that girls typically wear.

And until I was 18 years old, everyone thought I was a girl.

And this was super, super uncomfortable for me because I knew that wasn't right.

Hmm.

I didn't know the doctor's guess.

Did you know that?

No, I kind of thought they had some information based on science that

they were recording.

But no, I guess it's just a spin of a wheel.

I guess we don't follow the science.

No, no, it's just a guess.

So the reason why we're bringing this up is this is all this woman does.

She's not taking people out of context.

She's just playing that on one channel of, you know, her channel, Libs of TikTok.

And many of them are, those are two of the more serious examples.

A lot of them are are funny.

I mean, it's just, you know,

laughing at the oddities in our world.

We all have them.

Some people have more than others.

But nobody's on candid camera.

They posted these to TikTok.

That's really important.

As far as I know, and correct me if I'm wrong on this, Glenn, but she's not going into someone who has their account set as private and lifting their

account.

She's just going through

and being a human algorithm.

Yeah.

These are the things I find interesting.

Look at what liberals are really saying to each other

in this world.

And they admit quite a bit when they're bragging to their friends about how much typically they are owning conservatives.

They're doing this to brag.

So here's the thing.

Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post.

The Washington Post, through Taylor Lorenz, has doxed the woman that

has the libs of

TikTok.

Doxed her.

She's a regular person.

She's only, all she's doing is being a human aggregator.

That's it.

But apparently, Taylor Lorenz, who I think is psychotic, she has had a psychotic break.

Because she has been crying on NBC, complaining about threats and online bullying that she claims has targeted her.

And she said, it is so destructive and has destroyed my life and made me feel unsafe if there's just one piece of information that comes out about me.

Well,

she then goes to the Washington Post and exposes the woman behind libs of TikTok.

address and everything.

Now they're saying they didn't do that, but yes, they did.

They posted a real estate license with the woman's address on it.

Oh, I didn't see the address.

Bull crap, you didn't see the address.

And the only reason why this is happening

is because libs of TikTok is successful.

People actually watch it and laugh.

And that cannot be tolerated in an authoritarian state.

You do not make fun of the authoritarians.

You don't.

That's the only reason why this is happening.

This is intimidation, period.

They wanted us to extract consequence.

They wanted pain.

They wanted a price.

If you're going to make our movement look bad, then you're going to pay personally

in fear,

in harm to your career, in intimidation, in whatever form it is, you will have to pay a price for being successful against liberals, against progressives, against the far left, against the great reset.

They have to extract a price for it.

There's no other reason to do this.

BS, they didn't know the address was there.

In fact,

they're not even saying that.

They're not saying we missed the address.

They're saying they didn't do it at all.

They're just memory-holing the entire experience when everyone saw the link to the real estate license with the address on the page.

They're just acting as if it didn't occur.

That's their plan right now, The Washington Post.

And it's completely, it's embarrassing.

This is not 1997 where Taylor Lorenz was crying about a piece of information out about her, who is a public figure, a reporter, and everyone knows her name.

Now she's actually trying to justify outing someone who isn't a public figure, who doesn't have their name public.

What does that do to her life?

She knows exactly what it does.

She was just crying and sobbing about it on MSNBC a couple of weeks ago.

And to have this disconnect shows real struggles dealing with reality.

Oh, a psychotic break.

A true psychotic break.

I don't know.

She is a danger possibly to her own self.

She is to others.

She's now demonstrated that she is not living in reality and she is a danger to others.

That's a reason that, you know, they keep you at the hospital.

She said she was dealing with massive PTSD.

She said she was

mentally just exhausted.

This is two weeks ago.

And she understands the consequences of all this.

Then she goes to work with Jeff Bezos and she does exactly what she said caused her breakdown.

That's somebody who needs help.

I mean, that I don't want to get into the world of diagnosing people and committing people to insane asylums, but she is a danger to others, and she is not making any sense.

She is doing what she just said should never be done.

And it's a much worse version than what happened to her.

I mean, the fact that she's taking someone whose identity is not known and making it known is a really big line.

And taking someone who is not a public figure and making them into a public figure is a big difference.

Taylor Lorenz, look,

of course she's dealt with criticism online.

She's an online reporter for all of the major papers in our country, basically.

She was at the New York, the top two, New York Times and Washington Post, right?

She's been in the center of this debate for a while.

And of course, yes, she has received criticism, much of it fair, some of it unfair.

I'm sure some of it was terrible.

I know that we receive terrible, abusive things said to us all the time.

It's part of being a public figure in the United States.

It's not a good thing.

No one should do that to her.

However, what she's talking about here is now she's trying to say, well, this is just what reporters do.

So of of course, people who are antagonistic towards her and who are a little more aggressive are going to go to all of her friends and all of her family and do these things, show up at their door.

And we've seen some of it already.

She's already complaining about some of it happening already.

Well, you're the one normalizing this behavior.

This is insanity.

It should not happen.

And

she tweeted yesterday, she said, rather than debate doxing, I hope people can read the story and see the striking escalation of attacks against gay and trans people and the crucial role this account has played in the right-wing media ecosystem.

Well, look, I read the story.

That would have been the debate if you didn't name the person and give out their address, right?

That would have been the debate.

People would have been saying, Well, is this account highlighting people who are going through difficult times and maybe

shouldn't be highlighted?

I don't know.

You can have that conversation.

And you know what's so crazy is I'm not debating that that guy felt,

you know, he was a girl and felt like he's now a he or whatever.

whatever.

I wasn't even debating that.

What I'm debating on that TikTok video, the last one we played, is you're saying that doctors

are guessing.

That's the thing.

And you're saying that to first graders.

That's the controversial part for me.

I'm so past the, oh,

he's a dude.

He was a girl.

Huh.

I mean, I don't really care.

When I'm on TikTok, I don't really care what you say you are.

And it's such a strange thing where they separate this when it comes to gender and sex.

You know,

this has been their defense, right?

When you say, wait a minute, we know what sex is.

Everyone knows.

They're like, well, this is a different thing.

It's the feeling you have inside.

Look, maybe it is the feeling you have inside, but your feelings about what you have inside are completely unimportant to me.

I don't care what your feelings are.

Your feelings make no difference to society.

You have all the feelings.

You can be, you can cry at Hallmark movies or not.

I don't care what your feelings are.

Your feelings might be important to you.

They might be important to your family.

They might even be important to the first graders' families who you are teaching, but they are unimportant to society in general.

You can feel like a boy or a girl however you want, whenever you want, but what you are is important to society.

What you feel like you are isn't.

That's important to you and your personal life.

You deal with that all you want.

But what is actually important to society and to doctors who need to know whether you might be pregnant or not is what you are.

That's the important thing.

The best of the Glen Bank program.

Welcome, Steve Forbes.

How are you, sir?

Good to be with you.

Thank you.

So I'm really interested in

hearing your take on what we are headed for with inflation.

So

let's start here.

Explain what inflation is because some people, you know, you're so used to hearing we're going to have 2% inflation.

Oh, that's good.

No, it's not.

Is it, Steve?

No.

Just as you don't say we're going to reduce the size of a gallon of gasoline 2%, and that's good for you.

No, it isn't.

Keep it the same.

So inflation,

this is why we did this reader-friendly book, No Jargon, Straightforward.

There are really two kinds of inflation.

One, the non-money kind, non-monetary kind, is when, say, you have bad weather.

commodity prices go up, wheat prices go up, or you get the kind of shutdowns we had with the pandemic, which disrupts supply chains all over the world.

We're still suffering from that.

That sends prices up.

And then you have the money kind, where the government reduces the value, in this case, of the dollar, by creating too many of them.

And we know the government has been spending on a spree.

How has that been financed?

A large part of it is the Federal Reserve buys those bonds.

How does it get the money to buy those bonds?

It creates that of thin air, the ultimate ATM.

Now unfortunately, Glenn, on the nonmonetary inflation, normally if you just leave the economy alone, those things will heal themselves.

We did it after World War II, and we converted from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy.

Disruptions, but we did it.

But unfortunately, the Biden administration is putting obstacles in the way, starting with the war on fossil fuels and a lot of other the crazy things they've done.

77 executive orders, $200 billion of new regulations.

So they're making the problem worse instead of letting the economy heal.

And the Federal Reserve, they've been printing a lot of money.

They've been using gimmicks to try to keep that money from flooding the economy, but that's going to run out.

So if they don't get their act together, we're in for a rough time.

And let me just conclude on this.

Unfortunately, and this is where we have a real danger now, the Fed believes the way you cure inflation is not by stopping the printing press and making the dollar whole again, making it stable again.

They believe you do it by slowing the economy down, throwing people out of work.

And that's what they're up to now.

So, Steve, first of all,

the idea of inflation, where you say it's now at 8.5, that's just because we measure it differently.

If you look at shadow stats that measure it the way we did under Reagan, it's at 17.1.

Is that fair to do or not?

Well, this gets to the whole thing of how do you measure prices?

The whole labor department has a whole bureau devoted to it.

What do you put in the index?

And one of the crazy things is when people's buying patterns change, let's say meat prices go up, which they have.

So instead of having steak, you might go for some cheap hamburger.

Well,

they don't count that as inflation.

They just say the patterns have changed.

So yes, you can manipulate these things six ways to Sunday, but the bottom line is prices are going up.

The cost of living is going up.

Part of it is the pandemic and the Biden administration making things worse.

We can cure that, hopefully with a new Congress.

But the Federal Reserve, they got to get over this notion that when we do work, when we are trying to be prosperous, they've got to slow us down.

It's really bad stuff.

I don't know that anybody really understands the Fed balance sheet and what they've done and the money that they have loaned out, trillions of dollars that they have bailed banks out all around the world.

If you can't,

you know, they're trying to sell off the stuff they have on their balance sheet, but every time they try that and raise interest rates, the economy stops.

And so not sure they're going to be able to do either of those.

How do you pull this money back in to be destroyed?

Well,

what you do, first of all, which they won't do this part, is is you leave interest rates alone.

Let the market set interest rates.

Controlling interest rates is like rent control, which, as we know, hurts new construction.

This is trying to control the price of money.

It would affect the price you pay for renting the money, so to speak.

So they should just leave that alone and let the market do it.

Market can sort it out very quickly.

On your point about

the balance sheet, when you say balance sheet, people's eyes start to glaze.

This thing of it, Fed is sitting on a pile of bonds and too many of them.

And so what they should be doing is letting those bonds mature, not buying new bonds, let the money supply go down.

And if they do that in a responsible way, we'll avoid a huge slowdown.

But let me give you something.

This,

a gimmick that they've been employing in the past year, when they were creating $120 billion a month,

pulling money out of thin air.

Let me just,

let's walk your listeners through on this.

The Federal Reserve creates money.

They call up a dealer, a bond dealer like Goldman Sachs and say, we want to buy a billion dollars of bonds.

So Goldman says, fine.

They give the Fed the bonds.

And how does the Fed pay for those bonds?

They credit Goldman's bank account.

Where does that money come from?

No place.

The Fed just says, voila, you have it.

And that's how they create the money out of thin air.

So they're doing that last year at a rate of $120 billion a month to help finance the government's debt.

And so what they did to try to keep from an even worse inflation than we've been experiencing is they then create the money and then borrow it back from the banks and money market funds overnight.

If you want to get technical, if people want to look at this stuff,

they go to the Fed balance sheet, they'll find a thing called reverse repurchase agreements.

In effect, the Fed is pouring money, pouring a bucket of water in one end of a pool and then taking it out at the other end of the pool.

Now, that gimmick can't go on forever.

And you know, a year ago, a little over a year ago, they had zero of these reverse repos.

Now they have $1.7 trillion.

That's the game they've been playing.

Huge dam of money ready to flood the economy.

So we are now also

by turning the

taking the money and saying, oh, no, you're central bank, your dollars are no good to Russia.

A lot of countries around the world are going, geez, if I get on the wrong side of America, all of a sudden what I have as gold is no good, that's not safe for me.

We are destroying the dollar at the same time we're inflating the dollar.

How's this going to end, Steve?

Well, ultimately, and this will sound very strange and you shouldn't say it in polite company, ultimately in a few years, we're going to do again what we did for the first 180 years of this country's existence, and that is tie the dollar to gold.

What it means is, is gold for a variety of reasons keeps its intrinsic value.

And all it means, it's like a measuring rod.

Not perfect, but it keeps the dollar stable in value.

If we had maintained the growth rates we did for that 180 years, which was the greatest in human history, and then we went off the gold standard in the early 70s, and since then, the average growth rate of the United States economy has gone down by at least one third from about four point quarter percent to two point three per quarter.

That doesn't sound like much, but you do that over fifty years.

Let me just give you a number.

The average the median household income today is about sixty eight thousand dollars.

If we'd maintained our historic rates of growth, which we did for one hundred eighty years through depressions, wars, civil war, you name it, if we'd maintained that average average rate of growth, you know what the average health, what the median income would be?

$110,000.

That's what we've lost for a half century of funny money.

It's bad stuff.

Can you explain?

You just said that the Fed is going to destroy jobs or their, you know,

how are they doing?

Dude, they have this thing.

They have this theory called the Phillips curve.

It's not a baseball pitch.

It's named after an economist who said that if you want low unemployment, you have to have high inflation, higher inflation.

If you want lower inflation, you have to have higher unemployment.

They believe prosperity causes inflation.

They don't realize devaluing the dollar causes inflation, but they can't grasp that.

So as a result, when you hear this talk about soft landing, what they mean is, can we slow the economy down enough without going into a full-fledged recession?

Usually their attempts at soft landings is a crash landing.

They are trying to slow the economy down, create unemployment, because they think the economy is too prosperous.

That's why they think we have this inflation.

So they won't say that explicitly, but you press them on it.

Yes,

they want a slowdown.

and they just hope they can avoid a recession.

It's bogus thinking.

Experience disproves it, but at the Fed, the Phillips curve is wholly writ.

Steve, when you look at, by the way, we're talking to Steve Forbes.

He's got a new book out called Inflation, What It Is, Why It's Bad, and How to Fix It.

Steve, when you look at the money printing that we have done,

You immediately think of Weimar Republic.

I mean,

idiots know that, hey, you can't keep doing this for very long and at huge sums of money.

Okay.

Everybody learned that.

Weimar Republic, Zimbabwe, et cetera, et cetera.

Venezuela,

Venezuela.

So

do we know or have a guess

on how close we are to that?

I mean, is there a possibility we go into hyperinflation?

You can't rule anything out with these people, but I think the answer is no.

I think even some people at the Fed are realizing

they're in the danger zone.

And so they're trying to figure out, they got themselves into this mess.

And they were doing this, by the way, undermining the value of the dollar before the COVID crisis.

This was starting in 2018.

So they can't say, oh, we did it because of COVID.

No, they're doing it before COVID.

So I think they're trying to figure out now,

how do we get ourselves out of this without getting a disaster?

So I think they're going to slow down the money creation, but what they should be doing now is instead of trying to manipulate interest rates, just

let the bonds mature and their size that they hold of those bonds go down.

Nature will take care of it.

Keep the dollar stable and then let the bonds mature, run off,

and

we'll get through this.

But the other side of the coin is even if the Fed starts to behave itself, then you have a government that is doing everything it can to slow the productive part of the economy.

You know, the genius of Ronald Reagan was when he cured the inflation.

At the same time, he had cut taxes, deregulation, and that's why we roared in the 80s

after those tax cuts went into effect.

We're doing that.

So we're going to wait until 2024.

to get that done.

But in 2022, hopefully with the November elections, at least we we can put barriers in the way of the Biden administration from putting new burdens on the economy.

And also start questioning the Fed.

What in the world are you guys doing?

Why do you think prosperity is bad for us?

Steve, I know this is off the inflation path a bit.

We're talking to Steve Forbes, the book, Inflation, What It Is, Why It's Bad, and How to Fix It.

But I'm really concerned about these ESG programs

going and switching our economy to a stakeholder capitalism, which is just bullcrap, in my opinion.

And

the way we are

letting BlackRock and others come in and just buy us all up.

They're buying one in every seven homes for sale, going to BlackRock.

Well, this

and the nice, the good thing about a free economy, free country, and free speech, is when these things start to happen, you can arouse the public.

They won't say it publicly, but Coca-Cola and Delta really reversed course after they did what they did last year when they booted the all-star game out of Atlanta because they didn't understand what Georgia did with the voting laws, which are more liberal than they were in New York City.

Hello.

And they got burned on that.

They got real pushback on that.

Disney's getting getting pushed back on it.

So the way you answer this stuff is you push back.

And one of the things I think you're going to see happen after the November elections is looking at ideas on how, if you're a shareholder in a fund or a group, an ETF or something, how can you have a voice on how your share of the shares, so to speak, are voted at these annual meetings.

It's complicated, but I think you're going to see

real thinking on that.

So it's not just a group of people.

You know, decades ago, there was a great business guru called Peter Drucker.

And

some schools still read his books, business schools, but he warned of what he called pension fund socialism.

He noted the rise.

of pension funds owned by the state and by endowment funds.

And he said they could end up buying the economy.

Government doesn't have to do it.

They're doing it for them.

So I think you're seeing real pushback on that.

But this gets to what you might call modern socialism.

The modern socialists recognized you don't have to take over a company or an industry.

You just have to regulate it so its survival depends on your whims.

And that's what the Biden administration is doing, practicing modern socialism.

And pressuring BlackRock and others, or having BlackRock and others go along with pushing that kind of agenda, that has to be resisted.

But modern socialism, different from what Marx had in mind, you get the regulators to do it.

You don't have to take them over.

Would you say that we are now doing modern monetary theory in Washington?

We have one.

They're doing a form of it.

Modern monetary theory is simply modern garb on the old idea of devaluing money by creating too much of it.

You know, in Roman times,

they did it by reducing the precious metals in a coin and putting tin and junk in it.

Modern times, we do it by printing up a lot of paper money, or now ellipses on your handhelds.

And it's the same thing.

And what you see unfolding now, and we discussed this in the book, Inflation, is the old response of government, they scapegoat.

You know, in Roman times, they blamed Christians.

In evil times, witches.

Now today, we blame company executives.

With the same old movie.

Steve Forbes, his new book is out today.

You want to pick it up, Inflation, What It Why It's Bad, and How to Fix It.