China and the BRICS they're going to do a direct CBDC, so the government will actually control it directly. The US government cannot do that. The FED can't do it. It would be an unconstitutional 4th Amendment, illegal search and seizure stuff like that. The Constitution is negative, it's not positive. So that's a restraint upon government. So if you look at the 1st Amendment, it says "the government shall not pass any law," so what did they do? They turned it to Big Tech. You can do whatever you want. Facebook can censor you. YouTube can. You have no constitutional right to free speech. That's a misnomer. The government cannot take it away from you, but everybody else can. --Martin Armstrong
20:48. Same thing happened in Tokyo in '89. The yen was going up and all the capital was concentrating there, so then you get these sort of bubbles at that point. And if you look at the three stock market indexes, the NASDAQ, the S&P 500, and the Dow, the NASDAQ is more retail; the S&P tends to be more domestic institutional type stuff, and the Dow is more of the showcase for the international. Like we said before, when the Japanese came what did they buy? They bought Rockefeller Center. They don't go down and buy Mom and Pop houses for $200,000. They buy the trophies. When the Dow is leading that's showing you the big foreign money is still coming in. And we've got these neocons parading war on every front possible from Asia to the Middle East to Europe. I've had clients in Tokyo who have woken up and when you've got Korea shooting missiles off over testing they've come to the conclusion that they better have some money in the United States. So you're seeing some real estate still rising in selected areas. The stock market making new highs I think you're going to see a high here in January and then back off for at least a couple months. But this is basically just showing what we're dealing with. As things get chaotic around the world the capital runs over here. It's hard to invade the United States. You need a flotilla to get here,
or an illegal immigrant Invasion, right?
There's just a lot going on that way. Honestly, our computer keeps projecting war but as I have said on your show before . . . long-term trends and things of this nature we published . . . back in 1987 that the 2016 election would be the first time a 3rd party could possibly win. Well, that ended up being Trump who's neither a Republican nor a Democrat.
23:35. And then for 2024, it said that that could be the last election for the United States; nobody's going to accept it from either side. 2028 might not even take place. Now these are forecasts that the computer put out back in 1985, so having to live through this and see how it actually unfolds is like, you know, wow. It's not my personal opinion it's not being pro-Trump or against Trump, or anything else. Just the way it is. Even Nigel Farage came to speak at our 2019 convention in Rome. He said, "Of course I'm here. You're the only one who forecast that Brexit would win." All the polls said Brexit was going to lose, and they did the same thing with Hillary. I mean these things are driven mostly by the combination of what's happening in the world economy, and the real issue here is they know they're going to default. I've been warning and meeting honestly for 50 years that this is not going to work out and end well and they've always argued, "Well, we're the government, we're different." Yeah, how governments collapse and this has been the standard model throughout centuries, and you can see it unfolding now. You have the Neocons running off blasting China all the time. You got generals coming out and saying we're going to be at war with China within 2 to 3 to 5 years or whatever. Why would China then buy our debt? They are the largest holder of US debt now; if they stopped buying right, how governments collapse is that you issue new debt and nobody buys it, so you can't pay off the old debt. That's when it all comes crashing down, and we are coming to that area (meaning we're getting close to that time).
How close? How close are we to that?
I would say that we are honestly it could be less than 2 years. So what they're really looking at here . . . that's what the CBDC stuff is about. And people have to understand, all right, China and the BRICS they're going to do a direct CBDC, so the government will actually control it directly. The US government cannot do that. The FED can't do it. It would be an unconstitutional 4th Amendment, illegal search and seizure stuff like that. So what they're doing is they're using the test model that they ran on COVID and people don't understand. I mean if you look at a case it's Harris versus McRae, 1980, the Supreme Court case. I suggest reading it. A woman said "I have a right to an abortion, so the government should pay for it," and the Supreme Court said no. The Constitution is negative, it's not positive. So that's a restraint upon government; it's not a right that you actually have. So if you look at the 1st Amendment, it says "the government shall not pass any law," so what did they do? They turned it to Big Tech. You can do whatever you want. Facebook can censor you. YouTube can. You have no constitutional right to free speech. That's a misnomer. The government cannot take it away from you, but everybody else can. So that's what they're doing with the CBDCs. The top banks are already queuing up to create these digital dollars. They will be the ones that actually issue the coins. The FED will then cancel the currency, and they will be the monitors, all right, because the FED can't do it legally. So if they see something in your account, "Oh, this looks strange," they are already required to file a "suspicious activity report." So then they'll go to them and say, "Oh, hey, Kery Lutz just did this, and then that's the fine. And then the government can go in. It's a tip, but the government would have to do is issue a search warrant to go after the same thing. That's the difference. So the banks are doing the same thing as like Facebook, and everything else when they did with their first amendment issues. Now the banks are going to do it with the CBDCs. So the Fed will not be issuing a CBDC, and you have to understand this: it will be indirect, not direct. Now once they do that like I said I've been in meetings for years and heard nothing but the same nonsense all the time and they never assume that the government is ever the problem it's always us they think that eliminating paper money and then we go to these digital dollars and whatever what happens is that will eliminate the underground economy they really think they're going to get 35% more in taxes this is the number I've been told. There are no mirrors in Washington and Brussels; they never look at themselves, and this is what is really behind this. I see these people out. No, the great taking, I mean it's complete nonsense. Really, if they took everybody's assets, okay, then you're talking about the military. Why would the military then defend the government?
You can't do that, and it would be unconstitutional anyhow. When they confiscated gold, it went up to the Supreme Court. You can read those cases. You still have the same number of dollars. You didn't lose anything, right? That was their interpretation. It could have been clam shells, or gold, or whatever, but you still got the same amount of dollars in your account. So you didn't lose anything. So what they're going to do, in my opinion, is that they're going to be selectively defaulting. So by starting these wars, they will just default on China. They're not going to pay that debt, and anybody that opposes us they'll just default on it, and that's part of what they will do
31:31. China has their debt that they defaulted on that England settled it when [1997] they negotiated the Handover of Hong Kong but we never settled it with the US. We'll just tender our debt to we'll just cancel it out right?
31:46. Yeah this is just nonsense; you know they're not going to pay it. I mean that's as simple as that. China is a fool for even buying anything at this point. Like I said, it would be like me pointing an empty gun at you and demanding you to lend me $100 so I can buy bullets to shoot you.
So then the dollar loses its Reserve currency status. Is that what's going to happen?
32:17. The reason I'm going to the dollar as the reserve is because of nothing that the government does; it has to do really with the economy. The US economy is a consumer-based economy, and China is trying to copy the United States. The other type of economy is like what Germany did, it's the old Mercantile model from like the 18th century: we build stuff and sell it to everybody else that uses. But if you look at the stats, the average German has less net worth than net worth than Italian: they keep their taxes high, etc., you know, they're more interested in building BMWs, Mercedes, and selling them to the whole world. You know that's it. So the US is what has made the US the major economy it's that everybody needs to sell something here. If the Japanese need to sell the Toyotas , etc. So what you're looking at here, once they put in the sanctions against Russia that undermined the world economy, that was the first blow because you start dividing [the world]. So China starts setting up its chip system, and then it started getting more countries to go in that lines so the dollar will not be the exclusive settling currency. But from an economic standpoint, China really had nothing after communism finally fell. Japan was wiped out after World War II, so was Germany. It's the people that make an economy, all right? So Japan and Germany rose to the top. Why? Because the people were very hard producing. Now you know you get these people that just talk about our precious metals, that's it. Now I'm sorry. You look at Russia, they're the richest nation in the world from a natural resources perspective. In 1917, they had the largest gold reserves of any country on the face of the Earth, but if they don't have an economic system that allows people freely to develop things, it doesn't matter. That's the real thing about the United States. Listen to the speech by the head of Argentina, Javier Milei, at Davos. He was absolutely correct and he was trying to warn, you know, the West, "You're following the path that brought us down." Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world at the time and they fell from the top 10 to number 140. His speech is very, very good, and a lot of people at Davos didn't like it.
36:00.
