The Todd Herman Show
Pelosi, VISA and Even More Mass Fraud- Zach Abraham Joins Ep-1859
Do you remember the famous video Steve Croft asking Nancy Pelosi about this weird IPO with this little company called VISA? So why now is the DOJ going after VISA We'll talk about this and much more with Zach Abraham, Chief Investment Officer, Bulwark Capital Management.
What does God’s Word say?
Psalm 37:13-15 13 But the Lord laughs at those who do evil. He knows the day is coming when he will judge them.
14 Sinners pull out their swords. They bend their bows.They want to kill poor and needy people. They plan to murder those who lead honest lives.15 But they will be killed by their own swords. Their own bows will be broken.
Mark 8:36-38
36 What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? 37 Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? 38 If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.”
Episode Links:
- The video that started it all. Pelosi being asked about buying pre-IPO Visa $V shares while serving as Speaker of the House
- Justice Department accuses Visa of debit network monopoly that affects price of ‘nearly everything’
- FTX fraudster Caroline Ellison sentenced to 2 years in prison, ordered to forfeit $11 billion
- So The Economy Now Depends On Stocks Which Depend On Front-Running The Fed... And This Is Fine?
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- Broadcast on:
- 27 Sep 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
- Liberty Nation with Mark Angelides. - Communications on the Presidential Campaign Trail and explosive communications for Hezbollah in Lebanon. There's a new hybrid warfare at home and out of town. And we're going to explain exactly how that works. (upbeat music) - Author, columnist, managing editor of LibertyNation.com. Podcast host, a conservative policy advocate. - Dismiss history at our peril. - Liberty Nation with Mark Angelides. (upbeat music) - Owning a rental property sounds like a dream until you realize how much work goes into getting it ready. Determine a competitive rent price, market the property, schedule the showing screen. Tenants draft a lease at a rent collection, handle maintenance request, maintain communication. - Whew, sound complicated? Renner's warehouse is here to take the hard work off your rental to-do list. Qualify tenants, check, rent collection, check. Maintenance coordination, you got it. Go to Rennerswearhouse.com for a free rental analysis to find out how much your home can rent for. Or call 303-974-9444. Because from now on, the only thing you need on your to-do list is to call Rennerswearhouse. - Do you remember this famous video, Steve Croft asking Nancy Pelosi about this weird IPO with this little company called Visa? - I wanted to ask you why you and your husband back in March of 2008, accepted and participated in a very large IPO deal from Visa. At the time there was major legislation affecting their credit card companies, making its way through the house. And did you consider that to be a conflict of interest? - I don't know what your point is of your question. Is there some point that you want to make with that? - Well, I guess what I'm asking is, do you think it's all right for a speaker to accept a very preferential and favorable stock deal? - Well, we did. - And if you participate in the IPO and at the time you were speaker of the house, you don't think it was a conflict of interest or have the appearance of a conflict of interest? - No, it was not because I was saying, when he has his appearance, if you decide that you're going to have a elaborate on a false premise. - Does it create a bad premise? For the speaker of the house to get to participate in Visa's IPO, why you are running the legislation? Is there some point to what you're saying? - Yeah, there's a point. You're a liar and a thief. We'll talk about this and much more with Zack Abraham, Chief Investment Officer Boer, Capital Management. Do this with the help of God Almighty. - Todd Herman's show is 100% disapproved by big pharma technocrats and tyrants everywhere. Now, from the high mountains of free America, here's the Emerald City Exile. Todd Herman. (upbeat music) - Today is a day the Lord has made and these are the times in which God has decided we should live in fresh office. Very, very good. Freelive webinar yesterday on Thursday, Zack Abraham joins us here Friday. Zack, welcome back to the Todd Herman show. Good times, it's Nancy Pelosi. I don't get your points. Is there some point you're making Steve Croft? Isn't that one of the best of all time? - Yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah. There's nothing, there's no comment had, right? Like, if you don't see what's happening to ya, I don't know what to tell ya, right? I mean, it's just right there in the open, right? If I did that, I'd go to jail. - Right. - Purinson. - Well, if you, for instance, said that the, if you said, I think you should invest in the Visa IPO. You might make a return of 100%. You might go to jail. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, I go to jail for a lot of, a lot of things that would pale in comparison to what you just heard on that video. It's just amazing to me. - I was at an event with Microsoft when I was doing a lot of public speaking around the video platform and the growth video. And I was on this plan. I don't know how it happened that there was a, oh, I remember, it was IP Ventures because I'd been working with them. They're a group at Microsoft that rolls technologies out of Microsoft into startups. And it was an IP Ventures event and I'm up there with an IP Ventures lawyer. And we were talking about video platform stuff and some things that we were rolling into the marketplace. And one of the, a guy stood up asking me a question, 'cause he had taught a question for you, you know, with the video platforms and investment you're making, what do you think this is gonna do to Microsoft stock? And I feel his hand on my wrist. I go, I think it says a lawyer sitting next to me. Anything I would say would be speculative. I couldn't make any guarantees since it forms a performance. This would be completely my opinion. And he just pulls my I'm not gonna guess. We're not gonna answer. - Yeah. - All right. - We'll leave that to you. And Steve Croft, when he's saying this, I'm watching Nancy Pelosi's face. And what I'm seeing her say is, you know exactly what's going on. You get the game. You're gonna do this to yourself? - Right. - Yeah, I, yeah, I doing what I do for a living and dealing with regulators and knowing what hoops we have to jump through with existing clients. So I'm not even talking about getting new ones. When you see things like this, it's very hard for me not to get bitter and angry. And when I say angry, I mean like flip the table upside down angry. - Yeah. - Because they'll turn my whole life upside down over something that worst case scenario is 1% of that. And oh, by the way, we didn't actually do that thing. They think we may have, right? So like meaning something much smaller, and I'm not addressing anything specific, just try to put it into things that-- - Right, it's all hypothetical, I get it. - Yeah, yeah, so something much smaller that they think we may have done, they'll flip my entire life upside down, cost me tens of thousands of dollars, right? And then to look at me and go, okay, well, you didn't do that, so go on your way. And then to sit there and look at that, just get ignored. And it's, we're at a place in this country, man, where, and I know I'm not telling you anything you don't know, but if you're voting for these people and you expect anything less than just total larceny and thievery, you're an idiot and you're not paying attention. Like they are raiding the coffers right in front of you, and they're not even apologetic about it. - And there's a reason I bring this up, 'cause I think a lot of people will be going, wait a minute, why are you reaching way back into history on this thing? There's a reason I'll explain this. I gotta get Zach, and we gotta discuss something that came out of the DOJ, 'cause anytime the DOJ does something that might make sense, you have to look at this and go, wait a minute, why did they start doing things that make sense? And we'll talk about this with Zach in a second. Let me ask you the sense right now in your life, as you're heading into, well, not Thanksgiving and Halloween, but let me just ask you this thing. You tonight or tomorrow are going to take a shower or wash your hands unless you intend to be a stinky, hippie freak. Or you're trying to run an experiment on how long you can last in society with BO. So you're going to do this, you're going to use a soap from a big company that doesn't care about you or you can use Alan Soaps, okay? Here's the difference, Alan Soaps made in America, big company made wherever, maybe by slave labor. Alan Soaps, 100% natural, big company stuff, what does natural mean? I mean, what, you don't like arsenic? And then number three, the mission. Alan Soaps exists to employ people like Alan, who's 13, he's really challenged by autism, he's effectively non-verbal. His brother, Ian, works there now, it is Ian's blend that's the liquid soap great for your business, like people not going to use bar soap there, but use liquid soap. And then lastly, is this, all this stuff is made in America, okay? By a family with three generations of soap making expertise. So we now employ three people at Alan's no longer one, the same sort of people that the party would have you believe should have been aborted, and right now should be stored in boxes. So make your decision. Big company soap doesn't care about your Alan Soaps that cares about all lives. Go to alansoaps.com/todd, get 10% off all the products there, there's subscription soaps, there's some of the just absolutely best washcloths you'll ever get there, softest things I've ever had on my face, alansoaps.com/todd. So Zach, I bring this up, because the Justice Department has decided to, has accusing Visa and their debit network of a monopoly that affects the prices of nearly everything. The story here is CNBC. US Justice Department on Tuesday sued Visa, the world's biggest payments network, saying it propped up an illegal monopoly over debit payments by imposing exclusionary agreements on partners and smothering upstart firms. Visa's moves over the years have resulted in American consumers and merchants paying billions of dollars in additional fees, according to the DOJ, which filed a civil antitrust suit in New York from monopolization and other unlawful content. We allege that Visa's unlawfully amassed the power to extract fees that far exceed what it could charge in a competitive market, so-called Attorney General Merrick Garland said. Visa and its small arrival master card have surged over the past two decades, reaching a combined market cap of roughly $1 trillion. And since consumers tapped credit and debit cards, if or store purchases in e-commerce instead of paper money, they're essentially toll collectors, shuffling payments between banks, operating for the merchants and card holders. Visa called the DOJ suit Meritless. So let's start with this. Your thoughts about the suit, Visa, the network, its effect on American finance. Then I want to get into the speculation. Why this lawsuit now? And I think there's a simple reason for now, then I think there's a long game. So what do you think about the whole Visa network and the charge of monopolies and them being just this money shuffling thing? - You know, truthfully to give a really comprehensive thing, I'd have to dig deeper into because on the face of it, I mean, look, you've looked at Visa and master card and the way, and I don't know those businesses inside now, but I think alleging that their monopolies is, I think it's totally within the scope of reason. I think that it's sort of like saying that, you know, the sky is blue. And not even alleging that they did anything intentionally, but when you look at the percentage, this goes into, I think you and I have had this conversation before, where I think one of the biggest things that we need to do is we need to revamp and modernize our antitrust laws because we have monopolies and we have monopolies creating pernicious feedback loops in society, much like we had at the turn of the last century with the robber barons. It's just done in a very different way, right? So people like, we don't have monopolies now, there's antitrust law, you know, like, no, no, no, the monopolies aren't stupid and they've structured themselves as a way to sort of dance around the antitrust laws. But if I look at one or two corporations that have very similar business structures and control 90 to 96% of an entire industry, I don't care how they got there, that is by definition of a monopoly, right? It's like, you know, Google, it's a stock that we own, but you know, I think one of the biggest problems Google's gonna have is that they control 95 to 96% of searches, right, on the internet. Meaning, does that make them an illegal monopoly? No, but when you look at what a, you know, avenue of commerce, the internet has become and if one corporation controls 95 to 96% of those searches, it becomes a very, it becomes a very hard argument to make that they don't control too much. And we have to go back to kind of what the purpose of antitrust legislation was. It's not about punishing successful businesses, it's about ensuring that there's competition, right? And that's the part of free markets that people forget. And that's unfortunately for a lot of people that are hardcore free market capitalists, right? It's what I think that they miss, which is regulation should be primarily reserved to ensure competition. That should be the first aim of regulation, right? Because where there is competition, there will be price discovery, there will be increased efficiencies and those benefits will pass down to consumers and capitalism works. Capitalism without competition though, just turns into aristocracy, right? Effectively, a corporate aristocracy that lives outside the rules. For a lot of reasons that you and I discussed. So generally speaking, I'm in favor of the lawsuit, even if the lawsuit doesn't come to fruition or even if it doesn't incriminate them because these questions need to start, they need to be asked. And you don't even really need to go that far, you can just go look at different individual sectors and business or in the economy writ large where the sector, for the last 100 years, had anywhere from 11 to 15 players and it now it has two. - Right, right. And this is what got my attention is, okay, there's the election, your thing. Because one of the big pitches for the figurehead was, "This concert prices are too high. People pay to surcharge to go see the Beatles. My son bows in the Beatles." And he hates that, you know, ticket chargers and Jimmy Hendrix was here at the White House last week. They were making this big, big pitch, right? And this, Merrick Garland, in his statement goes on to say things like concert tickets and groceries. So this is one part campaigning. Oh, they're gonna do away with the convenience fees and they're gonna make it cheaper to go see Dave Matthews on tour, whatever. - Fantastic, that's a relief to American family. - Right, that's not a top 10% or thing to go to the concerts at 500 bucks a hit. But there's something else. If you're gonna shoot at the king, don't miss and Visa has a lot of power, right? So this got my attention and I wanna present this thing to you here in a second. I was just chatting when I was down in Temecula at the SealFit event. Afterwards, I had the just most incredible time. Because there was this shift in tone. Obviously, I'm out of concern for Rabdo. I mean, I effectively pulled myself. I mean, Curtis said, hey, it's up to you, but you might end up on kidney dialysis. So I made the decision to pull medically. And me and a former teammate were sitting there were standing there. And we were never supposed to approach the Navy Seal area where they had their trailer set up that side of the street and one of our brothers got yelled at for standing on their dirt. But now that we're not in the event anymore, they were so polite, hey, please come and have food with us. Please come and have a meal with us. That felt really cool to talk with them personally, to hear from one of the coaches, hey, none of the yelling at you was personal. I'm like, no, I get it, I'm so thankful. But I got to talk to a guy, and I'm regretful. I didn't get his name, but he's 60 years old and he still beats up the young guys in swimming. He's a swim instructor at Buds and been a seal and professional long distance athlete. We talked about surgeries and then I talked about shoulder surgeries and then we started to talk about renew healthcare in Mexico. And the guy stops me and goes, yeah, but they do stem cells here. I go, yeah, not really. Because the stem cell stuff they do here, it is from your own body. It's as old as you are. It already had a line assigned to it. It comes out of your bone marrow. It makes bone marrow. Mexico's completely different at renew.healthcare. These are ethically found stem cells from placentas and umbilical cords. Only no abortion and I use a strain that's never seen the mRNA injections because it didn't exist when they started the strain of stem cells. And as I explained to the seal, this stuff gets into the joint. It will rebuild cartilage, muscle. It will rebuild tendons. And it does all this because of the supercharge power down there because they actually culture these stem cells that they can put 40 or 50 million in your body. Not the 60,000 stuff they put up here. If you're facing surgery and constant pain, you have neuropathy, even neurological issues. Please, please see if they can help you. They'll tell you honestly, yes or no, go to renew.healthcare, that's r-e-n-u-e.healthcare and elevate your quality of life by elevating your healthcare, renew.healthcare. So Zach, you're gonna shoot at the king, don't miss. I'll explain that in a second, but let me give you this follow-up on the Pelosi family. This is from-- - The Pelosi crime syndicate. - Right, yes. - We get this. - Yeah. - Nancy Pelosi's husband sold more than $500,000 in Visa stock just months before the DOJ announced the antitrust lawsuit into the payment merchant. Paul Pelosi sold 2,000 shares of Visa worth between $500,001 million within the last three months. On Tuesday, the DOJ announced the antitrust lawsuit against Visa. So they got into the IPO and they got out ahead of the lawsuit, certainly happened, Standchel, don't you think? (laughing) - Yeah, totally happens. And I'm sure she didn't get a tip off from the DOJ or anybody else, right? - That'd be violation of balance of power. - All above board. Here's the one thing that I do think that we need to go back and revisit though, is that the most perverse part of this whole thing is what they're doing is illegal. - Yeah. - Right? That's the most perverse part of the whole thing. And what it does though, is it makes you look at them and go, there is no intellectually honest person that could possibly cast a vote for her real. Because you try to push back against the deep state and all this other kind of stuff and politicians only in it for money. Look how long she's been around. Look at their net worth. If they really cared at all about equality, of outcome, all this stuff she talks about, why in the world would she not be on the floor of the Congress trying to repeal the very same laws that have enriched her and her husband? They know what they're doing. Steve Croft knows what they're doing. The media knows what they're doing and they don't care. And the reason they don't care is 'cause they're all eaten from the same trough, right? At the end of the day, it's scratch my back, all scratch yours and it's just the whole thing, it's just disgusting, it's just disgusting. - Right and this guy gets money in, he gets money out, he moves that around early and you're right, it's not illegal, they made it illegal. They made it against congressional rules for a while and then no longer. So here's my question. Why are they shooting at the king now? Because they could just have done this rhetorically. They could rhetorically attack Visa and they could get with a Visa jacket and say, hey, look, this is a tough election cycle. We're gonna say some things about you, we're gonna criticize you, we're gonna kind of go hard in public on this, but understand, it's just us winning election. This will calm down afterwards, nothing. But they filed suit. Merkarland doesn't care about America. - Right. - Merkarland doesn't care about the costs to Americans of goods or he wouldn't be driving, he wouldn't be destroying the labor market with the mass illegal immigration. He doesn't care about that. - Yeah. - Do they care about Americans and their financial health or they wouldn't be rating the coffers? So why? 'Cause I think it is a set put for something very big. - I think it certainly could be that. The other thing too is I think we all need to wake up to the reality of what it is that we're dealing with and just may not directly answer your question, but there's two comments that have stood out to me that I've heard some comments on recently. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a famous line that she likes to use, which is we're gonna win the world. - Okay, the world. - It's an odd statement. Where does that come from? She says it repeatedly. It's like one of her, like a closing tagline. Well, interestingly enough, that phrase is pulled directly from the pages of the Communist Manifesto, okay? And it's one of those phrases where you're like, okay, you can call me conspiratorial, but what an odd piece of phrasing, and then to find it directly from the, right out of the pages of Marx, right? I'm in a Spanish Manifesto. You're like, okay, Kamala Harris has another saying that she says something like we have to unburden the past with the, what is that phrase that she used, that turn of phrase? - We have to be unburdened by the things of the past and going to the future unburdened by the things of the past. - Right, once again, another quote loosely translated is pulled directly from the pages of Marx, okay? - Right. - I don't know that I would call these people full tilt Communist, but they're unquestionably Marxists, right? - Right, they're right about all that. - And I think that this does a couple of things. First of all, so it is for the election, right? To sit there and say, hey, we're cracking down on these different things. Look, we're a party for the fight and for the comic. But I also think it shoots a shell across the bow of capitalism in general. - Okay. - Right, now the funny things about them is that these are all targets of opportunity for them, right, meaning if at any point VISA could feather their nest or could help their campaign, you'd watch the animus or the attacks just come right out of us, you know what I mean? - Yeah. - They'd hern coat and they'd run the other direction. So, but I think that what you're looking at is, and this is sort of my fear of this entire election is that it's some point along the path. And look, I hope this isn't the case, but it may be. At some point along the path, the path forward quits mattering so much. And what begins to matter more is what's already been set up. The trajectory we're already on, right? We're just sitting there going, hey, we got to win this election or this will happen and you're sitting there going, that may have already happened. Right? And I think that's where we're at. And I'm not saying this election doesn't matter by any stretch of the imagination. What I'm saying is that if these people's lips are moving their line, and what the greater part of it may be, I don't know, I would love to hear your story because-- - My theory? - Yeah, I would love to hear your theory on it because I think it could mean any number of things, but I think that it's not going to fall too far outside of Marxist ideology and Marxist doctrine. - I don't think it does. I think that's part and parcel of this, but something occurred to me. You remember Karl Marx hated God. He actually said, I mean, he was a Satanist. He hated God. He wrote poetry about hating God about how he would rise above God. And hey, we're going to win the world. Mark chapter eight versus 36 through 38. What good is it for someone to gain the world yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone exchange, give an exchange for their soul? - They, you know, Congress, they refer to that as their optimal retirement. (both laughing) Got that. - Well, hold on, hold on, hold on. How much will you pay me for it? - Right, right, wait, wait. That's the question, what's the offer, right? - Right, yeah, yeah. - But then you think again of Satan tempting the Lord Jesus on the top, look, I'll give this all to you. A, you know, Jesus knew, well, it's actually mine, so you can't give it to me, but B, you're a liar. So we're going to win the world, but then this occurred to me as well. God's laughing at these people, he's laughing at the schemers, he laughs at the wicked, and they think they're laughing at him. I'll tell you my theory here in a second, Zach, 'cause I want to get into that, I want to get into FTX and the lady connected to that Carolyn Ellison, she's getting a huge prison sentence of two years, two years, we need to talk about that. Then I need you to explain to me front running the Fed and what that means, and explain this to other people. That's an interesting thing, front running the Fed. So I'll give you my theory here in just a second. I load up every about, probably, I guess, I do this three times a day, I'm guessing probably every two and a half hours or so. I take a product called Mass Zimes, and it comes from my friends at Baptimizers, here's why, is I want to maintain muscle, I want to maintain metabolism, and I want to have digestive comfort, and I eat so much protein, 360 grams of protein every day, which is a ton, by the way, it means 55% of my calories are coming from protein. I want to get every drop of benefit I can from the protein I eat. Mass Zimes took 243 experiments. Before Matt Wade would release it as a product, and prior to releasing it, they went and paid for a study at Birch International University in Bosnia. Side-by-side comparison, people who had the enzymes, mass Zimes, people who didn't, people who had mass Zimes produced 1,200% more amino acids in their bodies. That supports muscle growth, it can sustain muscle, it is the building block of muscle, so all this is combined into a bottle of this stuff for you, particularly if you've been through any restrictive weight loss through which can really, really, really hurt muscle growth, or if you're aging, okay, and we're all aging. Go to Baptimizers.com/tod, you get 10% off mass Zimes and all their products there. That's Baptimizers.com/tod, stop allowing poor digestion to limit you and your potential for power. It's Baptimizers.com/tod. So, Zach, here's my theory, is Visa set up a monopoly? All right, fair enough, it's a fair charge. Well, what replaces a monopoly better than another monopoly? See, 'cause here's the play. Visa had this terrible monopoly. They're taking advantage of the American people. All there are is a pass-through entity. That's all they do, they just shuffle money. You're paying 8% to have them shuffle money so that you can send your grandma. Your grandma needs 500 bucks to buy dog food or groceries. You wanna go to a concert with your friends. You need to pay the rent. You need to have Amazon delivered at your house. You need a ride to work with an Uber. We can't have this. So, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna create an alternative to Visa and they're gonna help us fund it in this settlement than this lawsuit. And it's called central bank digital currency. So, we, the government, will step in. We're not gonna have any predatory fees 'cause we are the government, right? We are the people, we are the central bank. That's the long-term play. Does that sound reasonable to you? That this is a set up for, we gotta not let the monopolists have this sort of stuff. Yeah, it would be, but remember, like, and that would not surprise me at all. Like, I wouldn't expend any energy arguing that against you. Okay, good. Because that wouldn't surprise me at all. At the same time, also remember, these are people that have the ability to create money out of thin air. So, I don't think that they are, what it tells me, I would be more, I would be more swayed by an argument that said, somebody at Visa or MasterCard stepped out of line. It wasn't following the right thing. Because there's so many of these companies right now, I mean, look, I truly believe that we are living in the new age of the robber barons. And I think there's so many companies that you could throw monopolistic charges at right and left, right? So, I almost feel like this whole monopoly threat, and you've gotta have an example, right? You gotta have a whipping boy. You gotta have somebody to show. So, I almost feel like this selective, or I wouldn't say it's there yet, but I'm saying that I would not at all be surprised that this was selective prosecution based on the companies that weren't playing ball the right way, or that just weren't needed, right? Like, that weren't funding, weren't putting enough into election campaigns, weren't coming along and doing their fair share, right? Because I think this would be, if you are looking, if you are opining after and aiming at authoritarian control, which I think it's really hard to make an argument that that's not what's happening. - Yep. - You need to have a sort of damocles hanging over the head of every free market institution, to get them to come along, to shut up and come along, or you're gonna let the sword drop, right? And antitrust legislation, especially in this environment that we're currently living in, it seems to be the perfect cudgel, right? To get them to do, you know, to carry it in the stick, right? It seems like it's the perfect stick to keep them in line and keep them playing, you know, keep them parroting the party line, you know, keep them contributing to places you want them to contribute to. So, I would look at this as sort of them sharpening their swords to use as a threat to coerce these corporations and doing what they want to do. - Okay, so it might be as easy as the DOJ going, so wait, are you sure you're gonna continue to process payments to gun manufacturers? - Right. - Right, so you're sure, right? Because we just want to check, but maybe you want to rethink that. And this could be them coming behind closed doors, you go, okay, look, we're not gonna process this, we're gonna put, because they've been labeling these charges, they've been labeling them as dangerous as suspect. So, it could be them saying, hey, we're gonna need you to move a little bit more quickly on helping us stop people being able to buy guns. Okay, that makes sense. And I would stand by my statement that I think that they're going to begin to vilify entities like this, 'cause it looks like Obamacare to me, 'cause Obama came out in the White House and said, "You know, doctors are taking out people's kidneys "for money." Now, learning what I have about the American, like medical system, maybe. Maybe, right? But I don't think-- - You are a liar. (laughing) - But yeah, those are just, those are just, that's over on China, right? So, you concerned yourself about that. All right, that's a great point of view. I want to talk about Carolyn Ellison, and then gotta help me understand front running the Fed. There's a lot of people who watch us and listen to us on Friday, because they're looking for an investment advice for you. Maybe you can teach them how to front run the Fed, since this is apparently what is driving the American economy. We do that with Zach Abraham, a reminder, Zach is a fan of this too, bone frog coffee. Tim has been with us for, well, since the show began, really. And I'd never met him. Did you know that, that prior to the show, I'd never met Tim. In fact, I didn't meet him personally for the first year, spoke to him on the phone a bunch. And the way this happened was so bizarre. This is a God thing. My friend Cyrus was in a coffee store in Redmond, Washington, signing his book. And Tim came in, and he read the book, or didn't read the book, but he bought it up and said, "Oh, you wrote this." And then they realized they knew each other through some separate contacts. And Cyrus said, "You got to meet my friend Todd." And Cruickshink says, "Tod Herman?" He goes, "Yeah, 'cause everybody tells me that. Why don't I need to meet Todd?" So we had the meeting, and I loved Tim from the moment I talked to him. He's a new retired Navy SEAL. So of course, I love that. He did three deployments. So of course, I'm thankful for that. He was a buds instructor. So obviously, great respect. The bag say, "God country team." And when the coffee came, I was praying to the Lord that it didn't suck. It didn't wanna call the guy and go, "Hey, I love the branding, but the coffee sucks." And that's what a lot of these private label companies do. They sell garbage coffee. It doesn't because Tim doesn't cut corners. He hooked up with Dave Stewart, who's a coffee legend. He started Saddles Best Coffee. That coffee company was so good that when Howard Schultz took Starbucks private, he was pretty much forced to buy it. So he's behind so many of the coffees and mentors Tim and the team. And Tim hires veterans whenever he can, works with veteran owned companies. It's sample pack time. You got a bunch of new viewers and listeners who've never tried bonefrogs, so try the sample pack. Go to bonefrogcoffee.com/todd. It's eight six out samples of bonefrog, or six eight sample, I can't remember. But try the sample pack. If you've already been buying bonefrog all this time, what has stopped you from saving 15%? Why do you wanna pay more for your bonefrog? You get 15% off subscription coffee at bonefrogcoffee.com/todd. FTX, this was the lady, Carolyn Ellison, who apparently liked to take the illegal psychotropics apparently and apparently have sex parties with Sam Bankman Freed. She's been sentenced to two years in order to forfeit $11 billion. She ran the Alameda Research Hedge Fund associated with FTX and agreed to this plea deal. Judge Lewis Kaplan, that name sounds familiar and it should, said, "A literal get out of jail free card I can't agree to." As he sentenced to Ellison while praising her extensive co-operation, $11 billion she has to forfeit. Zach, she's been able to hold onto this $11 billion. Does she have to forfeit the float? I mean-- - Yeah, that's, I saw that headline. I don't believe that there is still anywhere close to that amount of money. I think that's one of those legal things where that's like, they're charging that basically. My suspicion is, is that they're saying that that's the amount of funds that they wanna recover as opposed to what she has. 'Cause my understanding is a lot of that just evaporated, right? - Right. - So I'm not really sure. The one thing I will say though, reading that report, is I just, I'm hoping against all hope-todd that there is no photograph or video evidence of those orgies. (laughing) That's my biggest concern. - Okay, right. But that's you concerned for the people, right? - 100%, there's things you can't unsee and that would be, I would put that immediately in that category. - Okay, that's a fair assessment. I'll take that as a fair assessment. - But as far as the crackdown on them, this is a weird compliment. This is a weird complicated case, but it's complicated in the fact that it was allowed to be perpetrated in the first place. Meaning the amount of people that were duped into it, but I can't express, like people have asked me before, if you guys got caught up in any of that, no. And the reason we didn't get caught up in any of it is because it had fraud written all over it. Meaning, it reminded me so much of the go-go days of the Vancouver Stock Exchange and the penny stock natural resource companies that there were some legitimate big companies that came out of that, but the vast majority of it was just nonsense, right? It was straight up thoughts, right? - I seem to remember that FTX had this thing where they'd set up some weird corporate structure, part not for profit or nonprofit, part profits, and then they had the Alameda thing, which was investing money that they weren't supposed to invest because it was client money where they were buying their digital coins. And they had this massive market cap, but then they did some very interesting, lawyerly thing around their corporate structure where they didn't have to show their financial results. - Yeah, well, part of it was just the fact that they were Bahamian based. Meaning they didn't have to adhere to, so that's the first thing you sit there and go, why would you allow a financial institution to work or advertise inside the United States that isn't based in the United States as a subject to United States financial rules? - Oh. - Well, the reason they did is 'cause they had a lot of DC insiders in on the take, in on the deal, right? It was a celebrities who, it was, you know, everybody, you know, all the right people were at that party and so the reason she got let, or the reason she got the big piece of that taken off is she wasn't the brainchild behind it. She certainly helped perpetrate it. I don't think it's, again, due to the age of these people and where they came from, it's really hard to know what the motivation was. I think it's mixed. I think that there is a, there's part of them that didn't realize what they were doing, that they were just reckless kids. And then there's another part of it that I do think was purposeful, that they did have an understanding of what they were doing. But what my first takeaway was, actually a bit of surprise, if she's getting 10 years, SPF's gonna get hit a lot harder. - Right, because she was turning on someone. - Yeah, she was turning on him. - Yeah, I mean, she's saying like a canary. - Yeah. - Right? So, and that's not totally uncommon in a lot of these financial deals, right? If you'll turncoat and be a part of state evidence, they'll cut you down a lot. A lot of the folks involved, including the people that advise on the prosecutorial side, we're advocating for out to have two years of probation, not even in jail. - Wow. - Yeah, no jail time. So I actually, from the looks of it, it looks like the judge kind of hit her harder than anybody was expecting based on her level of participation in this. But I mean, you know, this was one of those that was, it was really weird to watch that whole thing, it was to develop because it, if you got caught, and a lot of people did, and it's amazing how they've already whitewashed off that evidence off their social media pages, all that kind of stuff. Because if you bought into that fraud, I, you know, I think you should automatically be exed out as a financial professional, because the smell around it was so bad. You know, we were sitting there in real time telling our clients, no, do not touch this stuff. They're Bahamian based for a reason. They're operating outside the finance. No, just don't, it reeks. And I can't tell you which ones are frauds, or which ones are legit. What I will tell you is the vast majority of these frauds. - Yeah. - Right, and it just, I mean, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it's not a zebra. - So this is zero hedge, my favorite site. You know, they're always right. 'Cause Tyler Durden was there. This is offered by Charles Huesmith via of two minds blog. So the entire economy depends on the stock market going up as punters front run the Fed. And this is not only fine, it's optimal, the best arrangement the world has ever seen. On which ethereal plane is this considered sane, much less optimal? The real-world economy and neofutal confection featuring a parasitic predatory nobility vacuum virtually all of the gains of the everything bubble while the bottom 80% stumble along in debt surfdom resigned to serving the top 10% who own 90% of the assets bubbling higher is cheetering on the precipice, clinging to the wealth effect of soaring assets, courtesy of the Federal Reserve for its lifeline is well insane. Speaking of gaslighting, how many people do you know who call this arrangement by its real name, neofutalism? No one? How many people are trending with excitement because every time the Fed cuts rates, at or near the all-time highs in the stock market, stocks were higher the next year, 20 times out of 20, hundreds, thousands, a great multitude to be sure. So we'll explain this front running the Fred strategy and why don't we just all give into this and just this is our plan. We do the one pony game. I know it's risk management, we can't do that, but what is front running the Fed? Well, front running the Fed is something we do here and you have to, which is, and this is something that I've been trying to tell people lately, and look, guys, this does not mean to go out and take a bunch of risk because we all know the underpinnings of this are extraordinarily fragile. We know that this country is not in a good place. We know that we're not doing good things. Campbell Harris is a plan. Yeah, oh, of course, Mamala is like, yeah, it's like a new age twist on Dear Leader, right? Like it's just, and I'm pretty sure it's gonna be illegal within two years to not have a picture of her hanging in your house, right? Great. So they have patrons saying, if you will. Yeah. Look it out for folks. Right. But the, the... So the front running the Fed is something you guys do. It's not, but don't go take a bunch of risks, but here's what it is. The underlying fundamentals of this economy don't look good. Okay, but that's not what's driving it and it hasn't been for some time. Okay, right now you have something going on that is historic, all right? That is, we've got a US stock market at record highs. We've got US housing prices at record highs. You have record household wealth, okay? Now we all know about the debt and deficits and all that kind of stuff, but never in the history of this country, have you seen governments, only one other time in history, have we seen governments run deficits? By the way, the deficits cranked up again. You're back up to 7% of GDP. You're not running at six and a half like we were. So now you're back up to 7%. Only other time that happened in World War II and it's not even comparable because we had a fraction of the debt we have now. We were on the gold standard. So don't take any solace in the fact that we've been here before because this backdrop is completely different. Much more dangerous. But you've got all of those factors, not just the market at a record highs, but on 95, you're looking at a market that the valuation is in the 95th, 96th percentile. So on a lot of records, we've never been more overvalued than we are now. Virtually every other record, we're like top two or three. So I mean, you can make a very, very logical argument and it's very easy to do. I could do it in about 90 seconds. This is the most expensive stock market of all time, okay? - Okay. - So in that environment, running 7% deficits, now you're starting a rate cutting cycle. Okay, what we call front running the Fed or what he's referring to is that we're buying up assets basically due to government and monetary policy as opposed to the efficacy or the bona fides, if you will, of the underlying investment itself. And the reason we're doing that is because it makes sense. And the reason it makes sense is we literally have to start thinking as deficits and the Federal Reserve pouring money into the system is the active degradation of the US dollar, meaning that any prices denominated in US dollars will go up by default, right? And so this is what we've been telling people. Now again, I'm talking about all the other dangerous things underlying the economy. The problem is, is they're playing a shell game. And the problem with shell games is they always end and they always end the same way, right? So it's sort of like a shell game meets musical chairs, meaning. (laughs) - That's a fun love that. - You have to front run the Fed to keep up with the rate of inflation to a certain degree because they're gonna push up asset prices. But you also have to, and I'm not saying this talking my book, but it's just a way that we've internalized it. You also have to have a constant risk management strategy because you know that what you're doing is you're playing a game that isn't based on reality, right? Which means that at any moment for reasons that we may not even be able to foresee at this point, the bottom can fall out, right? Because the underpinnings of it are not legitimate, right? They're not, they're not fundamentally based. And so that reality can evaporate in an extraordinarily short period of time. But one of the reasons that we've been very aggressive and are enjoying some really good runs on performance recently is from front running the Fed, meaning you're looking at deficit spending. And look, there is no guarantee in this game, but I will tell you this right now. If the stock market is not substantially higher at some point over the next 12 months, I will be shocked. And the reason I will be shocked is not because of the health of the economy, not because of new thing, but just 7% deficits in a rate cutting cycle, man. I mean, that flow of money is just so, and it's the equivalent, and I've tried to use this analogy, right? Yes, you've got holes in a bathtub, but they just keep installing a bigger flow faucet on there, right? And as long as the faucet is flowing harder than the money's leaking out the holes, the level of that bathtub is gonna continue to rise. - And this is what so many people at high incomes are betting their financial, not futures, but good portion to the portfolio because you have to, because when government's the big player, you gotta run in the wake. I would look at it this way. When you race stock cars, and when I started to race actual real race cars, and someone explained to me why you draft, you do that because if you don't get outside the draft, this actually happens to you. If you're racing at 200 miles an hour, and I wasn't, but I was racing at 140 miles an hour, depending upon the shape of the car, if you've pulled outside that draft, you'll drop from 200 miles an hour to 190 immediately because the lead cars are cutting the wind in front of you. They are just moving the wind out of the way. That lead car is the one that is spending the most energy, and then you get back third or fourth car in a tight draft, right? You aren't expending a lot of energy because the wind resistance is above you and around you, and you have this pocket. It actually sucks you, it pulls you. - Yeah, it is pulling you along except for the lead car. Lead cars making the bet that they can stay there and not run out of fuel. Everyone else is making a different bet. Then you can actually slingshot. You pull out of the draft a little bit and get a slingshot as you pass, and it can actually help propel you past a car to make a draft pass. But if you fall outside the draft, say you get a love, you know, a love tap, and someone love taps you enough, and you pull outside the draft, you don't lose one position. You're lucky to not lose five or six. And if you ever doubt this, try getting behind the semi. I mean, be safe about this. But if you're ever in a windy thing and the wind's coming at you, get behind the semi and find out how much easier it is to steer. So you have to do that when you're racing. And apparently, we have to do this with our economy because the Fed is the major market maker, right? Otherwise you drop out slots. And let's talk more about this theory of what the things we have to do. I thought it'd be a really interesting conversation for us next time, things we have to do given what the government's done to the economy that we may not like, but we have to do. So we'll make the conversation last time. Always good to have wise counsel, Zach Cabraham, knowyourestgrader.com. 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