1:09:00 Biden, or whoever represents Biden--it's Obama, Susan Rice, and the rest of them--they are in charge of policy, and the Federal Reserve is on the outside looking in being forced into a subordinate role, and while all of my Austrian brethren would think that that's a very good thing, that is exactly what you don't want. And right, and I've been literally saying this for 8 months, and I never thought that these words would come out of my mouth, but as far as I am concerned if I'm right with my read, Jerome Powell is the best ally we have right now. Jerome Powell on the one side, Putin's army on the other, you can wipe out Davos; you can wipe out the European Union. And you could force a restructuring of Europe that would be good for Europe in the long run and would be good for humanity overall. And I'm dead serious when I say that, and unfortunately, it's going to take a war to do it but hopefully, it will be as little war as possible, and as few people will be killed as possible. I hope that the people who are in the State Department telling President Zelensky of Ukraine, "Don't surrender. Don't surrender. Don't surrender," meaning Anthony Blinken, they need to stop. And they need to realize that they're going to hang from lampposts when this is all over. Because that's what's going to happen. Because they're going to be tried, they're going to be convicted because the political backlash is coming in a way that it's going to be ugly, and I don't want it to be ugly. the righteous amount of anger that we're just starting to see from the Russians, and the way that they're telling us that they're going to scratch, is here. They have plenty of tools, plenty of weapons at their disposal which has nothing to do with them launching nukes at anybody, or invading Poland or Romania, and anything like that. The bigger question has to do with the people who are losing decide to take that choice away from them. It'll cost people some time. It'll costs people a couple of years of privation and hardship. And what I see in the future is bad. It's all bad. It's going to be bad or it'll be worse; I'd rather have it be bad than worse. And bad is food shortages, basic breakdown of spare parts, all of this stuff. We all worry about what the world looks like at $200 a barrel of oil. But no one's really contemplated what the world looks like at $500/pound aluminum. And that's what we have . . . when aluminum is supposed to be trading at $.85. And it's trading at $5, guys. Nickel is trading at like whatever . . . yes.
1:12:00 I was doing an interview this morning. Nickel is up 33%.
Right, and we're going to take Norilsk Nickel off the market, one of the biggest nickel producers in the world. How are we going to produce stainless steel or for anything else that we use stainless steel for, which is pretty much the entire world? You realize that, right, I mean I did 5 years in the palladium industry . . . in metallurgy. I know my steel compounds. We need chromium. We need nickel. We need Molly [short for Molybdenum] We need Vanadium. We need Yttrium. We need all these metals. Where are you going to get them? And you're going to take the Russians out of the market, what are you nuts!
1:12:40 It's not just that. How are you going to refine oil when you can't get the flange to replace the one that broke on the distillation column? This is basic stuff here or the rubber gaskets that used to cost a penny that we can't even get now because Thailand and Malaysia's rubber industry has collapsed because of capital flight. And everybody is starving because the rice patties are empty. This is what they're doing to the world. And Putin is the enemy?
1:13:20 Economics is not dry stuff like we discuss numbers on a page. Economics is blood. Every day all I see are dead people. All I see are children going without because some stupid government bureaucrat doesn't know the basics of the laws of diminishing marginal utility. Like it's not even hard. Can I teach it to these people? It's 5 minutes, now shut up and think about it for a minute. Blood and trade-offs.
