Coming to us from London, Max Keiser joins Jason Hartman for a fast-paced interview about what is going on in our world with GDP, the debt ceiling and debt loads, gold and silver markets, and currency collapse.
Max is the host of “The Oracle with Max Keiser” for BBC World News and the author of the Keiser Report. Jason and Max discuss how long the world governments can put off the inevitable collapse of the fiat money produced by the central banks. Max talks about the various currencies around the world and which countries are set to implode.
Other topics that Max covers are countries that are losing their sovereignty, basically being held hostage and managed by entities outside of their own country, such as the IMF and Central Banks, how bonds play a role in this issue, and the edging toward a global tax. Max talks about the many ways that the world is being led into a globalized currency, which is not a theory, but happening in real time.
In addition to hosting the show and authoring the Kesier Report, Max is a blogger for the Huffington Post, and he has also presented features for the “People and Power” new magazine series on Aljazeera English. Max Keiser is the creator, co-founder and former CEO of HSX Holdings/Hollywood Stock Exchange, later sold to Cantor Fitzgerald. He is also the co-founder of HSX films that went on to make almost a dozen films, including “Mixed Signals,” “Six-String Samurai,” “Dancer, Texas Pop. 81,” and “girl.” The company was then sold to Ignite Entertainment/Lionsgate. Max designed, scoped, and built the Hollywood Stock Exchange with Michael Burns. Max was awarded a US patent (number 5950176) for the ‘Virtual Specialist Technology” on which the Hollywood Stock Exchange operates. He created virtual securities; MovieStocks, and StarBonds and created the first fully convertible virtual currency, the Hollywood Dollar. The Hollywood Stock Exchange remains the highest volume stock exchange in the world.
Max presented “Rumble at the Box Office” for NBC’s Access Hollywood. He also produced and hosted the weekly talk show, “Buy, Sell, Hold” for CBS radio’s KLSX in Los Angeles. In his role as technology entrepreneur, Max recently created Kinooga, a Web 3.0 social finance site for indie films. As a presenter, Max co-hosts “The Truth About Markets” on ResonanceFM 104.4 in London; produces documentary films covering markets and finance for Al Jazeera’s “People & Power” series and written a column in the Ecologist magazine covering markets and the ecology. Max Keiser has been involved with markets and finance for 25 years. He started his career as a stock broker on Wall Street after graduating from NYU.
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ANNOUNCER: Welcome to Creating Wealth with Jason Hartman! During this program Jason is going to tell you some really exciting things that you probably haven’t thought of before, and a new slant on investing: fresh new approaches to America’s best investment that will enable you to create more wealth and happiness than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self-made multi-millionaire who not only talks the talk, but walks the walk. He’s been a successful investor for 20 years and currently owns properties in 11 states and 17 cities. This program will help you follow in Jason’s footsteps on the road to financial freedom. You really can do it! And now, here’s your host, Jason Hartman, with the complete solution for real estate investors.
JASON HARTMAN: Welcome to the Creating Wealth Show! This is your host, Jason Hartman, and this is episode number two hundred and eighty-nine, and you know what that means: 290 is next, and that will be a 10th show, and on 10th shows we go off topic and talk about something of general life interet. And for show #290, we will have Sonia Arrison, who is the author of 100 Plus; we’re going to talk about the search for the fountain of youth. And longevity, and how we’re all living longer and longer. And you know, I think that has huge impacts on our investment choices. Very positive ones, actually. And I think that’s another thing that bodes well for owning income property. But, the down side of living so long is that we will outlive our money, and so we had better be planning for ourselves, and be doing all great things to make sure that we can stay solvent through a nice, long, happy, successful and prosperous life.
So that’ll be show #290, but today, on #289, we have Max Keiser, and Max was actually recommended as a guest by one of the couples on our Atlanta Property Tour a couple of months ago, so again, thank you for that recommendation! And we will be here with Max Keiser as our guest today in just a few moments. And then on #291, we have the ever so interesting G. Edward Griffin back on the show. This is his second appearance on the Creating Wealth Show, and of course you all know him; he is the author of the seminal work on the Federal Reserve and monetary policy, entitled The Creature From Jekyll Island.
So, that will be show #291. And we’ve got a whole bunch of great guests coming up after that. And you’ll just have to stay tuned to hear about the rest of them. But we’re going to talk about the Landlord Chronicles on future shows, we’re going to talk about economics with Logan, who is a very interesting economics buff, and mortgage representative, and just wow. A whole bunch of great shows in the can, already recorded. Lot of great callers we have to get to as well. So we’ll be back with those on future episodes, and for those of you who are attending Meet the Masters event, our Meet the Masters totally sold out. I would highly recommend that you book your hotel if you haven’t done it yet; I think the vast majority of you have, but again, we’ve got over 100 people attending, and we don’t have 100 rooms booked in our room block, and I know some of you are coming as couples, and of course doubling up, and you don’t need two rooms.
But I just want to make that one reminder to you that if you don’t have your hotel room booked at the Hyatt Regency Irvine, be sure to do that. And be sure to get in on our room block. Just mention Jason Hartman, and the Meet the Masters event, and you should be good to go for our discounted prices on the room block. And as I recall, that price is $119 per night, at the Hyatt Regency Irvine. So we’ll look forward to seeing you there. And if you cannot attend, be sure to get a copy of our Meet the Masters Home Study Course, at www.jasonhartman.com, in the products section. And that, again, is a sort of best of Meet the Masters, where we’ve got 22 different speakers—more than we have for any live Masters event. And I think you’ll really, really like that. It’s a great course; 500 pages of PDF download, which is all the slides from all the presenters.
And by the way, this is stuff you don’t actually get when you attend the live event. So, be sure to check that out at www.jasonhartman.com under the products section, and take advantage of that. So, we will be back with Max Keiser here in just a moment.
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JASON HARTMAN: It’s my pleasure to welcome Max Keiser to the show! He’s coming to us today from London, England, and he is a very astute commentator on the various situations going on in the global economy nowadays, and was actually recommended by a client of ours! So it’s a pleasure to have him on. Max, welcome! How are you?
MAX KEISER: Hey, Jason! Great to be on.
JASON HARTMAN: Well, likewise, it’s good to have you. So, what is going on in the world nowadays? Maybe I’ll just start with a very broad, general question. And then I want to talk to you more specifically about on your last episode, how you talk about how the bankers go around pillaging country to country, I thought that was very interesting, and I hadn’t heard it expressed that way before. But what’s your take on things nowadays? It’s a crazy world.
MAX KEISER: Well, it’s a continuation now of what we’ve been seeing for the last 10 years. And you gotta look at it really in the context of post-World War II, and post-going off the gold standard in 1971. Governments have been increasing debt, central banks have been printing lots of money, and the return of all this has been a case of diminishing returns. So, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, for every dollar of debt or stimulus you created, you might get a dollar or two dollars of GDP growth. Now, it’s—2007 and 2008, when this peaked, it would require 7, 8, $9 to be created to get the same dollar of GDP growth.
So, the situation became saturated with debt, and now it’s collapsing. It’s been collapsing for five years. And you can see there’s a great chart that was posted on the web by a couple of different sites that tracks the price of gold versus the expansion of the debt ceiling. And over the past 10 years, the debt ceiling has gone up over $16 trillion now. The price of gold is tracking that quite nicely, heading back up to $1800. And of course, the debt ceiling and the debt loads are gonna continue to go up sharply, and so too the price of gold. So for 10 years we’ve been saying, really, gold and silver are the only shelter in the storm, and that’s worked out pretty well.
JASON HARTMAN: Right, and you know what’s interesting, it’s like a drug addict. I mean, in the beginning, it doesn’t take much for the drug addict to get their fix. But after a while, they become so tolerant to it, maybe that’s really the same thing that’s happened to these economies around the world, with more fiat money creation. It just takes more and more and more to get the same pie, or the same result of stimulus, doesn’t it?
MAX KEISER: Yep. But sure, that’s a perfect analogy. And it’s diminishing returns, and now we have nations that are facing outright currency collapse. So…in Iran, you have a currency collapse, hyperinflation. You have gold making all time new highs against the Euro, the Swiss Franc. Other currencies—the Indian Rupee, soon it’ll be making new all-time highs against the dollar and the pound. So, currency, the paper currencies are now in serious trouble. They’re all in retreat, and the response is to either expand both the Keynesian, artificial demand programs and the money printing. So they’re trying to do both, at record amounts. And either one is working. There’s still—the GDP is still contracting, so none of those are working. None of those tools are working. And currency collapse, hyperinflation is now baked into the cake.
JASON HARTMAN: And I agree with you. The only real question though, Max, is when it comes to the United States, it really seems like it is different. Because for the time being, we’ve got the reserve currency, we’ve got the big military to bully the rest of the world around to play our game, to make China and Japan and other countries buy our debt, and force countries to trade in the dollar, and keep it as the reserve currency. There’s a lot of mutiny against this, for sure. But the question really becomes, for how long can they just keep putting off the inevitable? Maybe they can put off the inevitable for 5 years, 10 years, 50 years? I don’t know! Who knows? This has never really happened before!
MAX KEISER: Yeah, I agree with you that the US and the UK are probably gonna be the last two to collapse. The US has the world reserve currency status; the UK is the global epicenter for global bank fraud. AIG went to London, Lehman Brothers, the London Whale from JP Morgan, Bernie Madoff—all these things go through London. So, they have a tremendous franchise in global bank fraud, and that’s gonna insulate them to some degree. I think, as now Spain is going under and losing its sovereignty, and Italy is now on the radar as being a country that’s set to collapse, and it will lose its sovereignty as well. We know it’s happening in the Eurozone.
But really, the big wild card in the next 12-24 months is probably gonna be Japan. Japan, world’s number two biggest economy, set to go through a currency collapse and implode like Greece. They’ve got absolutely horrible economic conditions there, and I think that will really set the stage for this global currency collapse. Then, yeah, it’s true, you might have dollars, and you might have British Pounds, but the turbulence and the volatility is gonna be so outrageous at that point that people are not gonna be making that relative judgment anymore with any degree of assurity. You’re gonna see some very powerful social unrest, I believe.
JASON HARTMAN: And where do you think that social unrest will be? Will it just be widespread, will it be everywhere?
MAX KEISER: Well, I call this the global insurrection against banker occupation. And as a matter of fact, I minted up some one-ounce silver rounds that have that printed on it—it says global insurrection against banker occupation on one side, and then this is a new silver round that’s 100% made from recycled silver, so, it’s trying to mop up the recycled silver that’s out there—
JASON HARTMAN: What’s interesting about that, Max, by the way, I love the sort of dark humor in that, by the way. But what’s interesting about it is, it reminds me of—I think it was post-Civil War in the US, they had these coins, and God forgive me I just don’t remember the name, but where people were just so angry that they minted their own coins, and they were these complaint or protest coins. Maybe you know what that was.
MAX KEISER: If you’re a reader of Friedrich Hayek, of course you know, he called for people to create their own currencies, and the currencies should compete. And what’s happening now? You’ve got in the UK, several towns are creating their own currency, most principally in Bristol—has its own currency, the Bristol Pound, which you can pay your taxes in it, they print it in Bristol, it’s good in Bristol, it’s becoming a major currency. People are—of course they’ve got the silver Kaiser, which is recycle the silver round, you’ve also got BitCoin, which is a coin that’s on the web, backed by cryptology. It’s a cryptocurrency, which is competing with all these other currencies.
So, this is really the response people have to the collapse in the fiat money that’s put forward by these various central banks. And the central banks simply can’t control the system anymore. They just have no control. So, the people are taking matters into their own hands. Now, in terms of Europe, well, you spoke at the top of the show. The collapse of these various European countries—if you look at it, you’ll notice that it happened in the order of their vulnerability in size. So, first you had—putting Iceland aside for a second, because that’s kind of a special case. But on the continent of Europe, Ireland, which has GDP of $400 billion, it’s almost not even roughly the size of Exxon Corporation at that time. That was a country, and Greece, also, with $350-$400 billion market cap, you could call it, or GDP, these countries effectively have been exposed to a leveraged buyout. So you have all these hedge funds. John Paulson was in Athens with Lloyd Blankfein from Goldman Sachs, with Papandreou, the head of Greece, and they were talking about the collapse of Greece. They made billions on the collapse of Greece.
They used the profits from the collapse of Greece to then go after these other countries, like Portugal, now Spain. They’re building this war chest to go after these huge countries. They collapse the countries, the countries lose their sovereignty, they give it away, their sovereignty, to the IMF, and the Troika, what’s called the Troika IMF EU, ECB, the European Central Bank, and they’re making out like bandits! Germany’s quite happy, they’re running everything out of Frankfurt, so they’re getting a play out of all this, and they’re managing the federalization of Europe, they’re quite happy with what’s happening, and everyone else is losing their sovereignty.
France is now really starting to get nervous; they’re under attack. But I think Spain is definitely gonna lose its sovereignty, and then Italy. And of course, Italy has 2400 tons of gold. It’s got one of the top five biggest gold positions in the world, and just like Greece had to give away their 111 ounces away to the IMF, they’ve lost it now.
JASON HARTMAN: Tons, I believe you meant to say.
MAX KEISER: Yeah, tons, I’m sorry. 111 tons. They’ve had to give that away now as part of the deal that they signed with the IMF, EU, and ECB.
JASON HARTMAN: So sure, yeah, it’s really scary to see that these countries are basically being held hostage by the banksters. But when you say lose their sovereignty, be more specific about what you mean. To whom are they losing their sovereignty? Or just, being in debt? When you say that?
MAX KEISER: In other words, in Greece, the Troika—they came in, they signed off what’s called the memorandum, the Troika being IMF, ECB, and EU, and Papandreou, the former leader of the country, went to the public and said, we’re gonna have a referendum on whether or not we agree to the latest terms from the Troika. The Troika said, cancel the referendum, and said sorry, you’re the leader of the country, we don’t allow you to have that referendum. So, that’s a country that’s lost its sovereignty! It is being managed from outside of the country! That’s what I mean when you lost your sovereignty.
In Ireland, the Anglo-Irish Bank ran up GDP to debt of 10 times the country’s GDP. They went bust. The country took that trillion in Euro debt, and they gave it to the citizens to have, and when it came time to pay the Anglo-Irish debt of a billion Euros, it’s just unsecured debt! But the government which is in place now working with Anglo-Irish creditors, have forced the public to pay this unsecured debt. No referendum, no vote, no talk about it at all. It’s not even a secure debt! It’s a completely unsecure debt! That’s—they say themselves, they know, of anyone in Ireland, they say, we no longer have economic sovereignty. Which to me is the same thing as not having sovereignty at all.
So, those two have lost their sovereignty. Spain will soon lose its sovereignty. They’ll parachute in a technocrat, they’ll get rid of the current administration, current leadership, they’ll answer to Brussels, ECB, these other institutions from a centralized, federalized Europe. So, they no longer have their self-determination. They no longer run their country. It’s run from outside. That’s what it means. That’s what’s happening.
JASON HARTMAN: Yeah, unbelievable, it really is unbelievable. Max, it sort of begs the question as to, is this a conspiratorial thing? I mean, is this just some private companies—well, they’re not private, they’re public, many times. But, are they just bankers, in other words, and businesspeople, who are just looking to exploit situations, or is there some sort of a concerted effort here? I mean, it almost seems methodical and systematic, the way they’re going about this.
MAX KEISER: Well, I worked on Wall Street for many years, and I can tell you exactly what’s going on. The bondholders of these banks, these sovereign bondholders—they’re not getting paid. So what they’re doing is they’re rolling up their bonds into new uses. They’re resecuritizing. And they’re using new lending facilities that are European-wide to roll up the bad debt, to resecuritize, to expand, to extend the maturity, and to put a new coupon rate on these new bonds. So, it’s just a roll up. The fact that the people are losing their sovereignty, is never a consideration. None of that—the bankers who are managing this paper, these offerings, would ever take that on board as a consideration. They don’t factor in those types of things in their calculations. But there’s no growth to support paying off the coupons on these bonds, so, in response, there’s these—it’s just basically roll up. Now, when Europe as a whole—when they are incapable of paying the debt on the new [unintelligible] of debt that’s being issued to replace the current [unintelligible], then we’re going to see something very interesting. We’re going to start to see some talk with UK Central Bank, European Central Bank, American Central Bank, about creating a new global central bank, and they already talked about that at Davos a couple years ago. They said we needed lending facility of $100 trillion to create a new global central bank to roll up all this bad debt again.
JASON HARTMAN: Unbelievable. That is so scary to me. Let me take a brief pause; we’ll be back in just a minute.
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ANNOUNCER: Have you listened to the Creating Wealth series? I mean from the beginning. If not, you can go ahead and get book one—that’s shows 1-20—in digital download. These are advanced strategies for wealth creation. For more information, go to www.jasonhartman.com.
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JASON HARTMAN: I mean, Max, are we looking at a future of a global fiat currency? If you ask me, that’s checkmate. If you institute—if they institute, I should say—a global central bank, a global fiat currency, and legal tender laws that apply everywhere on the planet to where someone can be arrested for trading in another currency, even if it’s gold! Or silver, for example. That’s just an inflationary checkmate, isn’t it? They can debase and rob the population of the planet any time they want by just debasing the currency.
MAX KEISER: Well, don’t forget that in 1913, when the Federal Reserve Bank came around in the US, it was also the beginning of income tax in America!
JASON HARTMAN: Sure, yeah.
MAX KEISER: So, to pay for this global reserve bank, we’re gonna have a new global tax! So you’re gonna pay in America, state, local, federal, and global tax! And we already saw something last week that heralds this globalization. We say this suggestion by World Health Organization for a global tax on cigarettes, administered by a global organization, the World Health Organization. So now, this is the first time that we’re seeing a global institution that answers only to itself, not to any of the countries around the world, instituted a tax on everyone around the world! Okay, they’ll say oho, it’s for cigarettes, and cigarettes are bad, and this is, you know, we have to take care of your health. But this sets a dangerous precedent, because after that it’ll become the global carbon tax, and then after that it’ll become the global income tax to pay for the global central bank which is created to absorb all the bad debt from Europe, which just went bankrupt again, for the 20th time in the last two years, and by the way, the US is also bankrupt, we need to roll up all that debt in this new debt, same thing for Japan, same thing for Britain, so, you know. But all these things are happening in real time! It’s not a theory. It’s not a theory oh this might happen. This is happening! What am I missing here? Gold and silver are hitting new all-time highs. They’re telling us, staring us in the face, the truth. What are we—I don’t see any disconnect here. This is what’s going on right now, right?
JASON HARTMAN: Right, and you’re absolutely right. This is not some far off crazy theory—it is really happening, in real time. And then it also begs the question, Max, would there be a global confiscation of metals? Of gold and silver? I mean, FDR did it. Would it be a, turn in your gold, you can’t own it? You can have some jewelry, maybe, but you can’t have bullion. I mean, is that in the wings? Because gold and silver are the competition for the banksters. They’re the competition for the central banks. They don’t want people to collect it. They don’t want people to use it in trade. It is their nemesis!
MAX KEISER: Well, I think you’re right. Now we’re talking! Now let’s have a serious conversation. Gold is their nemesis. We’re gonna go back to some kind of gold standard at some point. It’ll have to be valued upwards. North of $10,000 an ounce if it’s gonna try to make a dent into this global $1 quadrillion derivatives mess. So, they’re gonna want it. Everyone wants it. They’re gonna want our gold, they’re gonna want to confiscate our gold; the US has already done it. So, a strategy—you have to think strategically. Number one, you would want gold held in more than one territory. More than one country. You would want to hold your gold—and also, gold and silver are not the same, really, at all. Silver is an industrial metal; it’s used also, not only as a monetary metal, but it’s also used in solar applications, industrial applications, there’s 700 million ounces of silver mined a year, and more than half of that goes into industrial use. The other half goes into people buying it for monetary reasons. So, to confiscate silver, that means you’d have to shut down the electronics industry, you’d have to shut down Apple, you’d have to shut down Google, you’d have to shut down Facebook, you’d have to shut down the Internet, you’d have to shut down television. In other words, you can’t really confiscate silver.
JASON HARTMAN: Yeah, right. I agree. But they could say from private citizens who don’t have an industrial use for it. They passed a law in the US in a couple of different states, I believe now, because people were stealing air conditioners so often, for the commodity value of the copper. And they’re also stealing catalytic converters from cars. So, they could say—look, governments can do anything they want, that’s the scary part, right? They can do whatever they want, ultimately. And now, they’ve made this law against trading. You have to have like an industrial license if you want to sell copper, you can’t walk into a place and sell copper, you know? It’s crazy!
MAX KEISER: Jason, you’re in the United States, right? You’re in the US? So, if the government is confiscating silver, would that qualify as tyranny?
JASON HARTMAN: Yes, absolutely.
MAX KEISER: Okay, so if that qualifies as tyranny, then I would point your direction to the Second Amendment.
JASON HARTMAN: Yes.
MAX KEISER: Which was created solely for the purpose of defending oneself against tyranny.
JASON HARTMAN: Couldn’t agree more.
MAX KEISER: That’s what it’s there for! It’s not there to have a hide concealing carry to go to your local Wendy’s to terrorize some hamburger flipper! It’s there for a very specific reason! And if you’ve got tyrants running the show, then you—you have a constitutional obligation to do something about it, okay? That’s the answer! I mean, it’s right there in black and white. Again, what am I missing? It’s right there! You can’t miss it! Unless you can’t even read English!
JASON HARTMAN: Max, you’re not telling me anything I disagree with. I couldn’t agree more; I just hope it never comes to that.
MAX KEISER: Of course it’s gonna come to that! Thomas Jefferson said, the water of liberty—I’m gonna paraphrase here. But he said he thought that liberty needed to be reinvented every 50 years. It’s been 200 years. We’re overdue!
JASON HARTMAN: Well, yeah, we are overdue. We’re living on borrowed time, aren’t we? Well, very interesting stuff, Max. Give you your website, if you would. Tell people where they can listen to your show, and learn more.
MAX KEISER: Just follow me on Twitter. Everything goes through Twitter now.
JASON HARTMAN: Okay.
MAX KEISER: It’s just Twitter! Twitter/MaxKeiser. Follow me on Twitter! And you will be set free from the drudgery of your existence!
JASON HARTMAN: Awesome. And closing thoughts, Max? I know you don’t have much time, but I appreciate the time you’ve spent with us. Any final thoughts?
MAX KEISER: No.
JASON HARTMAN: Okay [LAUGHTER].
MAX KEISER: No, I have no final thoughts, Jason. Your show must be a good show, so that’s all I can say. Your audience are gonna be very happy. They’re gonna be like Oh, Jason! Jason! Jason Hartman’s a smart man! He’s a wise man! He has Max Keiser on his show!
JASON HARTMAN: And Max Keiser is, too. Yeah, we’ve got several of our clients following you. So, hey Max, thanks for joining us, and keep getting the word out like you are, you’re doing a great thing for people. So, appreciate it.
MAX KEISER: Thanks, bye.
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ANNOUNCER: Jason provides an extremely unique service: deal evaluator. Are you interested in a property outside of our network? Need a second opinion? No problem! Let our experts evaluate the deal. Find out more about it at www.jasonhartman.com! The price is only $50!
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ANNOUNCER: This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company. All rights reserved. For distribution or publication rights and media interviews, please visit www.HartmanMedia.com, or email [email protected]. Nothing on this show should be considered specific personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, or business professional for any individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own, and the host is acting on behalf of Empowered Investor, LLC. exclusively.
Transcribed by David
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