Thank you to Tom Woods @ the Tom Woods Show. In Episode 2552, "The Bankers Are Divided, and What That Means for You," on October 3, 2024, Tom interviews the incomparable, Tom Luongo.
2:25. In This Moment In Time there's a very interesting moment in time where we may even as austrians it may not behoove us to look at the FED as only the villain and to look at them in a storytelling sense in a different role if we do that I think we have a very unique opportunity to level up as markets commentators and all that I think it's very interesting Moment In Time.
4:11. The best thing to remember is that when everybody's winning when everybody is on the same page and they are Marching towards their perfect technocratic union everybody's winning hey we are all on board right it's kind of like the hockey metaphor there's no complaints in the room when everybody's winning the minute you start losing then everybody starts pointing fingers and you find out who slept with whose wife and you know all that and eventually you have to fire the coach that's the hockey joke. Because I can't fire the players in the central Bank world or in the globalist world you have to think of it in terms of when they're interests diverge or when one group turns predatory this is a classic cartel analysis. The cartel analysis is probably the best way to frame it. There's always going to be an incentive at some point for one member of the cartel to break with whatever it is the cartel thinks they're going to do next. In the case of central banks, and the commercial banks that they represent, or at least in the United States, what the World Economic Forum, WEF, the European Union, the IMF, and the UN, what they're proposing doesn't jive with what Wall Street wants. Because what they want, simply put, is the end of Commercial Banking. They want the end of private formation of capital in every fundamental way all the things that the Austrians argue for and cherish. But in our current environment, we have a two-tiered monetary system, two channels two cycle monetary systems: the Central Bank prints the money, and lends it to the commercial Banks. The commercial Banks then turn around and lend it to you, and those are two circles, two chains, and they intersect at the commercial Banks.
6:13. Central Bank digital currencies programmable Central Bank digital currencies where everybody has some digital dollars on their phone or digital euros or Pounds have no need for commercial Banks because you just get your money directly from the central bank. So if the central bank doesn't want to lend you money then you don't get the money this is what the big worry about Central Bank and Central currencies cbdc's is all about its programmable money where they can automatically de-platform you through an AI script. Where does JP Morgan fit into that? Where does Goldman Sachs fit into that? Where does Nomura fit into that? They don't. That's the joke, and that's why I'm saying to myself that Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve, especially Jerome Powell, who came out of the private sector as opposed to Bernanke and Yellen, and all the rest of them were all academics. Powell's friends were all on Wall Street. They call him "Private Equity Powell," so the Federal Reserve ultimately works for Wall Street, and if Wall Street is going to get cut out of the future, then what incentive is it for them to stay in the central bank cartel? That's the question I've been asking for 3 years.
7:50. Unless they abolish the dollar and we have no choice what happens if people just don't adopt the Central Bank digital currency.
8:00. Well they tried that in Nigeria, and it didn't work. They tried force-feeding it into Nigeria, and it didn't work. The Chinese have been trying to enforce the digital yuan on their people, and it isn't working. And so what are they going to do here in the United States? I don't know. I don't think they're going to ever get it. Like I've talked to Daniel de Martino Booth. I've talked to a bunch of people about this, and they're like "CBDCs over Powell's dead body." Why do you think they're trying to get rid of him? Or why do you think they blocked his second term so hard. How do we see it in the real world? We see it simply by the fact that Powell raised interest rates to 5 1/2% over the screams, howls, and squeals of the European Central Bank, everyone. Everybody. The classic vulture capitalist coming out of the private equity world, . . . I mean, Powell torched relationships and friendships with his private Equity friends for 2 years now. But Wall Street, and I'll specifically say, I think, Jamie Dimon over at JP Morgan has said, "No, no, no. We have to do this." From our perspective, these people look like vultures and vandals and evil rent-seeking. . . Evil rent Seekers. From their perspective, the way they see themselves they never see themselves as a villain. I think Jamie Dimon sees himself as a patriot. If you listen to him talk and you think about things from Jamie Dimon's perspective, when I listen to Jamie Dimon talk I see a guy who sees himself as a patriot. So I don't ever see him really selling out fundamentally U.S. interests. Whereas and it's very clear, he said he was talking about this literally last week, saying, "All of my very liberal friends don't understand what's about to happen. They're all finally starting to get it in New York that Kamala Harris can't be president." This is Jamie Dimon coming out and literally telling everybody you need to vote for Donald Trump. And during the primary when he came out for Nikki Haley, I had a bunch of people say, well, look, he came out for Nikki Haley, the neocon. I'm like, yeah, I know. What he really did was legitimize Republican voting in the Republican primaries to his liberal Wall Street friends. And it's like a baby step. Let's move toward Nikki Haley, and then when Haley falls out of the race and then Dimon is clearly backing Trump he's not just like angling to be Treasury Secretary or anything, you know, it's nothing like that. To look for the stuff, you have to see what policy happened. Faster than anybody in history coming out of COVID-19 and you could argue that he did so for Keynesian reasons. Let's bring, you know, let's bring down aggregate demand. The economy wasn't, I mean, it wasn't stunning or anything. It was just, you know, year-over-year baseline numbers looked great because they were so terrible during COVID-19. So Powell understood that they printed trillions of dollars, and he needed to get rid of it all. And even when he was a junior member of the Fed, Powell was always the hawk at the doves' table. So while Bernanke and Yellen were destroying, literally destroying the country with zero bound interest rates in QE, Powell was sitting there going, "What are we doing?" the entire time. But he was, of course, in the minority at the Fed
