Title: Kevin Warsh is not the new Paul Volcker. AIA Weekly Report 8.29.26
Show: AIA Weekly Market Update (Actionable Intelligence Alert — YouTube)
Guest: John Polomny (solo host)
Date: 2026-08-29 ("Today is Saturday, August 29th")
URL: https://youtu.be/8hydVuUX7DE
Length: ~60:00
Note: Verbal fillers (um/uh/you know/I mean/tic "like") removed and stutters/false starts collapsed; wording otherwise verbatim and every (mm:ss) cue kept in place. Auto-transcript garbles corrected to the intended entity: "John Pauly"=John Polomny; "Worsh"=Warsh; "Scotty Bessett"/"Besson"=Scott Bessent; "Nuke Gingrich"=Newt Gingrich; "Duck and Miller"/"Ducken Miller"=Druckenmiller; "Peter Malik"=Peter Mallouk (probable — left flagged in the text); "Ursula Vanderling"=Ursula von der Leyen; "off day"=AfD; "Muldova"=Moldova; "Olaf Schultz"=Olaf Scholz; "pilot bureau"=politburo; "Donets"=Donetsk; "satre"/"satropy"=satrapy; "Rick Ru"=Rick Rule; "spat trust sput"=Sprott Physical Uranium Trust (SPUT); "nextgen"=NexGen; "Adamrom"=Kazatomprom; "Senovas"=Cenovus; "Meg Energy"=MEG Energy; "Schlumbumber and Hallebert"=Schlumberger and Halliburton; "Arco Belt"=Orinoco Belt; "Lake Meaka Kaobo"=Lake Maracaibo; "Bowmont"=Beaumont; "screworm"=screwworm; "heers"=heifers; "El Nino"=El Niño; "Peter Teal"=Peter Thiel; "Hoy Peloy"=hoi polloi; "WF"=WEF; "anthemma"=anathema; "the interest on the Dell"=the interest on the debt; "Nordstream"=Nord Stream. Left as spoken because the intended form is uncertain: "Razer Oil" (a FinTwit handle), "Donroe doctrine" (his own coinage for the Monroe doctrine applied to Venezuela), "funing games", "crap goes", "gold cracks the global money supply", "Ukrainian PE guys". "DBA" is the correct ticker for the Invesco DB Agriculture ETF. Slide/chart references are to the deck he shares on screen.
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(00:02) It's John Polomny here, Actionable Intelligence. Today is Saturday, August 29th, and this is the weekly market update. The disclaimer, anything that you hear or see on this podcast or video is not to be taken as investment advice. I am not a registered financial advisor and I cannot give you individual financial advice.
(00:28) Please do your own due diligence. It's your money. It's your responsibility. Okay, let's get started. So, we had the Jackson Hole, Confab, whatever. Warsh's first time there. I don't put a lot of stock into what these people say. Of course, they're going to try to manage expectations. This guy is coming in trying to be this inflation hawk.
(00:55) And I thought, some people thought that some of the comments were positive. My view is that you have a schism here starting to form between the Treasury and the Fed because of some of the comments that he said. So, here's a summary of the comments and implications of those comments and I'll give a short commentary.
(01:18) I don't want to put too much time into this because I look at things at long term. The die is cast and yes, as I've said before, these people will in the end go to money printing. All roads lead to money printing. I've said that many times. It won't be linear. It won't be a straight line.
(01:41) We're going to have these little funing games until we get there. And that's what's going to cause volatility. You saw how gold sold off, for example, on these comments. And so I'll just put a disclaimer in there. Do you think that if long rates get to five and a half or 6% that he's not going to use QE? He's not going to have a choice.
(02:07) Okay? So, he's trying to project this. This is all gaslighting and gamesmanship. Okay? And we have to go through this. We'll see how it shakes out but he's at odds with the administration and the Treasury Department and reality. But what do you expect him to say? He has to. They say these things.
(02:26) It's all nonsense. So let's get into it. Basically it looks like a September 25 basis point rate hike is now the narrow base case but not a certainty. Rate cuts are unlikely without either convincing disinflation or meaningful labor market deterioration. This is part of the tough guy act that he's playing.
(02:50) Front-end yields should remain high, making treasury bills and short duration instruments attractive up to, out to two-year notes. If they raise rates or at least just hold them where they're at, that would be fairly good for short-term Treasury bills. But this is going to be at odds with a little bit of what the Treasury Secretary is doing because he's trying to sell, he's selling short-term bills and buying back some of these orphaned longer-term Treasury bonds.
(03:30) So, here's an important blurb here. Investors should not assume the Fed will use QE or aggressive guidance to suppress long-term yields. Yes, we should not assume that. That's a statement. That's an assertion made. Again, the deficits, the fiscal reality of the United States is not going to allow this statement to stay in effect.
(03:56) So, the Fed's just going to sit there. If rates, let's say rates go to 5 and a half, 6%. That could destroy the US economy. That's how leveraged the US economy is. You think housing's bad now? Just wait. And the problem is, as it's always been, is the upward pressure on rates being caused by the undisciplined nature of our federal government that continues to spend money that it doesn't have.
(04:29) Notwithstanding the fact that you have debts that are coming due that need to be refinanced and they're having to be refinanced at higher rates. Remember, we had a decade of basically zero interest rates in this country and a lot of debt was issued and the deficit didn't really move that much because interest payments were virtually nothing.
(04:52) It's like if you get one of those zero interest rate for 18-month credit cards, so that's over now and rates are readjusting. So you're having to roll debt into higher interest rates. Okay? And you keep expanding the debt. You keep piling on the debt. People are saying this is an out-of-control government as far as spending goes.
(05:19) Notwithstanding the fact the geopolitical situation and the fact that the United States is just running rogue. At least in my view this is turning people off. We've talked about this before. This is why gold is continuing to be remonetized. People are not buying the same amounts of Treasury securities because who wants to be a creditor to the United States when there's out of control spending? So, we can say now when everything's calm and there's no storm, we can say in calm weather that everything's fine and
(05:56) we won't do this, we won't do that. But we'll see when the next crisis comes and inevitably a crisis will come because there's nobody talking about cutting spending. The Fed put has moved further out of the money. Ordinary equity market weakness is unlikely to change policy while inflation remains near 3.5 to 4%.
(06:20) A large part of this inflation was caused by an unnecessary war in Iran that forced energy prices up. Fertilizer prices, food prices, sulfur prices, aluminum prices. I can go down. We have the whole litany that we can go through. Unnecessary war of choice is the main culprit for this high inflation.
(06:42) Could be easily ended tomorrow. I would suggest to you, you're going to see things calm down as we coast into the midterm elections. Then when the political pressure is off, reignite the war with Iran. It's not going to end until there's a final victor, either Israel and the United States or Iran. Someone will be the hegemon in the Middle East.
(07:05) So he's saying the right things. The market's reacting to that. That's what the market does. I don't short-term trade, so I'm just reporting what's happening, but I stay the course. Nothing has swayed me from the course that I think is set in stone for the medium and long term, that being years out.
(07:30) You have to own hard assets. These people are not — the bottom line, the root cause, dig the dandelion out analogy again, literally and figuratively, you have to get to the root problem. And the root problem is the United States of America and most of the western democracies spend more money than they take in.
(07:52) They have made promises that they cannot pay for. Hence, all roads lead to inflation. Notwithstanding the fact of what Kevin Warsh says at a meeting. What do you expect him to say? Okay, let's move on. So, I wanted to talk about this. This is what I'm talking about long term. This is what I'm talking about when I'm talking about planning and a permanent portfolio and things of this nature.
(08:19) What I'm talking about when I say currency debasement, how these establishment people, bankers and the central bank and your government steals your life force from you, steals the sweat of your brow from you via money printing and inflation and debasement of the currency that you're using to save in.
(08:42) And they are debasing. Now, this is average household net worth. I got this from someone else. Probably median net worth is probably better, but you're going to get the point. Okay, point is still made. So, in 2000, the average net worth, US household net worth was $400,000. In 2026, it was 1.35 million. That's 3.4 times in dollars.
(09:09) However, in gold terms, in 2000, your net worth was 1,430 ounces of gold. Okay? In gold terms. Remember, gold is money. At least I consider it money. Many people don't. However, and that would equate to the $400,000. Okay? In 2026, yes, you have 1.35 million dollars, but you only have 295 ounces of gold.
(09:40) Why is that? You're 80% poorer in real terms because of the expansion of the currency, the debasement of the dollar. Do you understand this now? Do you see how this works? It's the boiling frog. You don't see it week to week in your check. You don't see it month to month, you see it — it's insidious quarter after quarter year after year.
(10:07) The general public does not understand the word inflation and what printing money has done directly to how much a dollar bill is worth. And of course I add my comment at the end. You don't hate the political class enough. And just so you understand, both sides of the aisle — that's going to come at me in the comments — that means all of them, Republicans, Democrats, progressives, right-wing, what have you.
(10:34) The whole thing is corrupt and set up to cream money off you. So, here's our buddy Scott Bessent lying again. I remember when we had the last time there was a so-called balanced budget during the Clinton administration when Newt Gingrich was the speaker of the house. And one of the things that's occasionally proffered as an excuse or a goal or something that's put out that sounds good but will never happen is the fact that we don't have to be concerned about the deficits.
(11:15) We don't have to be concerned about the debt because we can grow our way out of it. This is not the first time that we've heard this even though Mr. Bessent is now saying this. We've heard this before. Newt Gingrich used to say this back when he was speaker of the house and they were arguing with Clinton when they did have a slight surplus I think for a year or two.
(11:38) And that's what he said. We can grow our way out of this. We need to cut taxes and get the economy moving. As long as the economy is expanding faster than the debt that's fine. Which is true. That actually is true. However, that's not what happens. Let's look at this in the top.
(11:57) You have real GDP growth for 23 through 26 at least the second quarter of 26 annualized. And you see 2023 it was 2.9%. 24 2.8, 25 2.1%. That's not bad for a developed economy like the US. That's fine. No arguments. Okay. The annualized rate, the economy is slowing down of course now. The annualized rate in 2026 is 1.5%. Well, here's the rub.
(12:27) US debt growth for those same time periods in 2023 was 7.2%. The debt grew 7.2% in 2023 and the economy grew 2.9%. That's not how you grow your way out of debt. 2024. Remember we said there was 2.8% economic growth. In 2024, the debt grew 6.9%. 2025 the economy grew 2.1%. The debt grew 6.1%. When are we going to achieve this GDP growth growing faster than debt? And right now in the last 12 months, as I said, 2026, taking into account the second quarter of 2026, the annualized GDP growth is running at about 1.
(13:23) 5% and the debt over the last 12 months has grown 7.5%. Debt is growing two to three times faster than the economy. So, the man is lying again. He's counting on the fact that you're so busy struggling to survive, taking your kids to baseball practice, going to the grocery store, paying your bills, just living your life that you don't understand this.
(13:47) You're not going to check into it. It's why I'm here. He's a liar. They all lie. The goal is to keep the game going, keep the plates in the air. Do you see it now? It's not a one-year one-off. This is how it is every year. And so they're lying. They lie and they will continue to lie. What else do you expect them to do? Tell you the truth.
(14:14) Most people in this country don't want the truth. Don't want to hear it. Because once you acknowledge the truth, like an alcoholic that goes to AA, then you have to actually do something about it. And that's what we're not going to do. We're not mature enough as a society to face up to the responsibilities of what we need to do to be prudent people.
(14:35) We want something for nothing. That's what we've degenerated into. As Bastiat said, trying to live off our neighbor via the ballot box. So, what do you expect the politicians to do? That's what they react to. So, this was an interesting chart that somebody sent me or I saw on Twitter. I can't remember. I want to preface this by saying just because something's certain like the collapse of a currency does not mean it's imminent.
(15:07) Adam Smith said, and I pointed this out in the weekly free email on Substack, that there's a lot of ruin in a country. He said that in his book, Wealth of Nations. So what he was talking about was whether it's Rome, whether it's the United States, the Soviet Union, whatever, there's a lot of built-up inertia, there's a lot of wealth, there's a lot of things that these big empires, these big countries can withstand before they finally give up the ghost and collapse, whether it's economic, political, what have you, financial.
(15:46) So because something is certain which it is in my view doesn't mean it's imminent. So you have to keep that in mind. So this is basically showing you seven indicators preceded every major currency collapse in modern history. The United States currently meets all seven. And so they show Turkey in 2018, Venezuela in 2017, Argentina in 2001, Sri Lanka in 2022, and the United States in 2026.
(16:16) And so what are these criteria or indicators that precede every major currency crisis, okay, or collapse? So I'll go through them real quick. Number one, government buying its own bonds. We have been doing that. It's kind of let up a little bit, but we'll be back to that. Debt to GDP over 100%. Check that for the United States.
(16:39) Interest over 15% of revenue. Yep, we're on that. Foreign holders reducing their holdings of our debt. Yeah, that's happening. Reserve share declining. Yep, that's happening. Financial oversight gutted. Yep, that's happening. And political interference. Yes, that's happening. The advantage that the United States has over all of these other countries of course and why just because I believe this is certain it isn't imminent is the United States dollar is the reserve currency of the world. However, that is slowly
(17:15) diminishing over time. These things take time. It's not — so you have people on the internet, you know who they are, the various personalities talking about a dollar collapse. It's big clickbait. But is it investable, actionable? When's it going to happen? No one can know. No one can know if it's going to or if it does, when.
(17:43) And so we can look at it like I look at it — we're on a trajectory that takes us to a big problem. Okay. However, that is adopted into our long-term financial planning. It doesn't mean it's a tradable situation on Monday morning. Now, that sounds maybe to you listening, well, that doesn't really help me, John. Well, it should because if you look back what we just talked about about how between the year 2000 and 2026, how you've lost a tremendous amount of purchasing power.
(18:24) That is your north star you should be looking at. We can invest, we can speculate around that, but when I'm talking about creating this permanent portfolio or this idea of how to navigate the final stages of this empire, which may take a generation to play out, this is what I'm talking about. The problem here with this comparison is the fact that yes, the United States meets all these criteria, but it's a reserve currency still.
(18:52) I think 70 or 80% of the world's commerce is still done in dollars and will continue to be for a long time. However, it's getting chipped away at and we're doing everything we can to undermine it. Okay, as we've talked about many times on this podcast. So, when I'm talking about the debt being insidious and never ending, it's like this never-ending cancer that's growing.
(19:20) It's like you've got this diagnosis. You have this cancer growing in you and there's nothing we can do about it, sir. It's going to kill you. This is what I'm talking about. This is a tweet, Peter Mallouk (probable) on Twitter. Quote, "It's only been a week since I posted on this last and the US has added over a hundred billion in debt.
(19:50) " Truly incomprehensible. So, in a week, this guy has been lamenting about the debt and talking about it. And in one week, we added a hundred billion dollars to the debt pile. Do you see what the problem is? And then you have Warsh talking about, "No, we don't have any intent to use QE or any of these things." Well, yeah, until you do.
(20:12) Nothing's going to happen till it happens. We're going to have a crisis. Something's going to happen. And then they'll just do like they've always done. Flood the place with liquidity. The US has added 650 billion to the national debt since July 1st. That's not even 60 days ago, folks. In 59 days, you've added $650 billion to the debt.
(20:39) That's 12 billion a day. And then he puts a quote from John Adams here. Quote, "There are two ways to enslave a country. One is by the sword. The other is by debt." That's John Adams. And that's true. This is what I'm talking about. Okay? It's insidious. It's never ending. It won't stop. It's an unstoppable force. Go to that US debt counter website.
(21:01) It's kind of cool little app. And things just spinning like out of control. It shows you the debt. It shows you cool facts about the interest on the debt. These things, it's just running crazy like a cartoon you would see, some cartoon where the meter is just spinning crazily. Okay, this is the problem.
(21:20) This is the cancer that's growing. It's eating away — the micro fractures that are eating away at the ice as you venture further out onto the lake until you eventually fall through. Nothing's a disaster until it happens. Then it's a disaster. You should be able to see the things leading up to the disaster. So, here's Druckenmiller.
(21:44) I've talked a lot about entitlements. There's a lot of varying opinion on this, but my view is that when you have a hundred trillion dollars in off-balance liabilities, you can't show me how you're going to pay that out of revenue that can be generated. Notwithstanding the fact that you just keep spending money in other things besides — you can have a $ 1.
(22:10) 5 billion dollar or trillion dollar a year defense budget, which is what the president is pushing for, or you can have a solvent entitlement system. You can't have both. You're going to have to rationalize things or you're just going to slam into a wall or you're going to be like a big fat bug hovering in the middle of the freeway until a windshield strikes you and then splat.
(22:35) So, what does Druckenmiller say? He had a Wall Street Journal opinion piece this week. Here's what he said. Here's a snippet. At prevailing rates, interest expense reaches 4.5% of GDP by 2033 and 144% of all discretionary spending by 2043. We are tracking those markers early. Anyone who tells you entitlements won't be cut is lying.
(23:03) Not about the outcome, but about who decides it. Either we restructure the promises deliberately on our terms, protecting those who most need them, or the bond market restructures them for us all at once, and it's on its terms. Yes, I agree. Again, it won't be a problem until the day it's a problem, and then you'll have a crisis.
(23:33) So right now I'm showing you a gold is real money chart. This is from Tavi Costa. You see the global money supply in blue just keeps climbing. Now over like $122 trillion. That's up from a hundred trillion approximately 3 years ago. Up 22 trillion basically in three years.
(24:04) We're not even fully through the year. Two years, nine months. And it shows you gold. You see how gold cracks the global money supply. So either money supply is going to contract — this is what I infer from this — and go down or the gold price is going to reattach itself and track it more closely. I would suggest to you that gold is probably going to move back higher and start tracking again with the global money supply growth which will continue at infinitum.
(24:45) Gold is real money. Gold can't be created by central bankers. That's why it protects your purchasing power. Somebody asked me in an interview. I give interviews with various channels. I usually put links to them in the weekly AIA free newsletter that goes out. And somebody asked me, "What do I think of Bitcoin?" I think Bitcoin, I'm not partial to a lot of other of the cryptocurrencies but I think Bitcoin has established itself as an asset class that can be probably
(25:22) used to protect purchasing power. I'm more partial to gold just because it has a 5,000-year history of doing exactly what it's doing now. However, I'm not going to sit here and be antagonistic towards Bitcoin. The view that I have is that going forward, especially now as we accelerate this final debt spiral, which is going to lead to eventually a currency crisis and a reordering of the monetary system of the world, hopefully towards gold.
(25:56) You want scarce assets. You want to own scarcity. You want to own things that are scarce and can't be reproduced by governments by fiat. That can be anything from land to income producing businesses that are involved in royalties, things of this nature. There's different things that you can do. You want to own the scarcity.
(26:28) You want to own things. To be glib I guess, things that if you drop them on your foot they'll make you go owie. So that's kind of what I'm looking at. And I think that we're in one of those periods now. And we're in a fourth turning. And so, as I've said before, I expect a tremendous amount of political, social, economic, and financial volatility.
(26:52) And I've not been disappointed so far. And I suggest to you that this is going to continue. That doesn't mean I'm a hermit that's buying a bunch of canned soup and olives and retreating to my cabin in the woods, isolated from society. I don't suggest that that's the right course either. I think it's being prudent and understanding the times that you live in and adapting yourself to them.
(27:22) So again, here's China, one of the most astute gold buyers that I think. They continue to just keep buying gold. And you can notice that as the gold price, which is indicated here, at least going back to 2024, if you look at the gold price represented by the gold line, you see that as the gold price goes up, they cut back their purchases.
(27:47) And when the gold price contracts, they ramp up their purchases. So, they're continuing to remonetize gold. We've shown the chart many times. Tavi Costa has produced it, of how central banks continue to increase their reserve of gold as a reserve asset. We had financialization of the world's economies at least in the developed world and central banks divested themselves of gold.
(28:18) I remember all of these central banks when they were poo-pooing gold, selling their gold at the lows. Gordon Brown was famous for that. Selling the Bank of England's gold I think at 275. It's a rock. It's a doorstop. It doesn't produce income. Blah blah blah blah blah. We're going to hold all these various government securities.
(28:39) They produce income, whatever. This total financialization. And so that's been totally reversed. Now as a percentage of reserve assets, gold continues to climb as these financial assets continue to decline. If you look at the various central banks around the world in totality. So I suggest that that will continue and China's one of the main instigators of that.
(29:08) They're going to continue to do that. I wanted to point this out. Europeans now pay eight times more for natural gas than Americans. And what I wanted to remind everyone of is a couple things. Number one, this is not a geological problem. This is a political choice. Again, let me say that your leadership in the EU has chosen higher energy prices for various reasons that I'm not going to pontificate on.
(29:45) These are political choices being made. As President Putin said the other day, one of the pipelines of the Nord Stream pipeline is still intact and can be turned on. It can be turned on in a couple months. They would probably have to do some refurbishment, run some pigs through it, whatever. But it can be brought back online.
(30:07) Is anybody trying to do that? No. Because Russia is our enemy and they're going to invade Western Europe. I want to ask somebody something just on a tangent. And somebody in the comments can explain to me why Russia would want to invade Western Europe. You have nothing that they need. They have over a hundred trillion dollars worth of natural resources.
(30:28) Why would they need to invade Western Europe? This is like this fantasy, this masochistic fantasy that these women in the EU have that they're going to be invaded by the Russians like this is April 1945. There's no — and what I don't understand is in a previous comment that most of these stooges make or even people in my comment section will tell me how the Russians are losing in Ukraine and are stuck and it's a stalemate but yet somehow they're going to invade Western Europe.
(30:59) So this is just an excuse. This is an excuse to have the EU which shouldn't exist and won't exist in my view in a generation. It's going to fall apart. Okay, because it's just all these nations. People are going to start realizing — you're starting to see a political uprising. Le Pen in France, AfD in Germany.
(31:22) They're going to have state elections here coming up. The AfD's polling 43% in the eastern part of Germany. And so the union's going to fly apart. So this is what they use, this boogeyman in the woods. The Russians are coming. The Russians are coming. To keep the project together because for these bureaucrats, for these technocrats, this is their job.
(31:45) This is how they get wealth. This is the incentive for them. What is Ursula von der Leyen going to do? Is she going to get a job as a receptionist at some company if she's not doing what she's doing now? What skill set does she have? She was a failure as the German defense minister. So she's a failure as whatever she is, politburo leader.
(32:09) Now what is this person going to do? So the project must continue no matter what. That's the goal. As I've said before in another interview I did, all organisms, whether an amoeba, a squirrel, you or these organizations have as their primary directive survival. Okay? Not to benefit you, not to make the European people's lives better, to continue the project, the amoeba.
(32:41) It must — the life force must continue. That's the primary objective of all of these things. Okay? Most people don't either understand that or don't accept that. They're not there to help you or make things better. They're there to continue the project. And so this is convenient so they can get everyone to coalesce around something.
(33:02) Otherwise, people start focusing on, hey, wait a minute, you're screwing us on these fishing rights or why are you regulating cheese prices in Montenegro and so that we have to import stuff from France and Switzerland. This deal really isn't working out for us. So this is what this is used for.
(33:24) The boogeyman in the woods. We always have to have a boogeyman. This is another way that they can spend 500 billion or a trillion dollars because we must build up our defense for what? Who's going to invade you? You just told me the other day in previous speech that it's a stalemate and Russia's going to collapse.
(33:46) So why do we need to spend? Because they need to do something to try to get some economic growth going. Not cut regulations, not cut spending, not stimulate the economy, okay, and put yourself in a situation where you get lower energy prices via nuclear power buildouts or opening the pipeline gas back from Russia and get those prices.
(34:08) Plus the fact that there's a lot of hydrocarbons in Europe. You're just not allowed to access them, not because they're geologically inaccessible, but because it's a political choice. Because climate change, right? Climate change. Don't you get it, John? Climate change. Okay, this is all made up to keep project moving forward, keep it intact.
(34:33) If a government exists and it makes choices and does things that make the citizens that it's governing, their lives worse, should it exist? I mean, seriously. And so it won't at some point. It's just that simple because you need the consent of the governed even in a dictatorship or these other things.
(34:59) Eventually the wheels fall off. That's it. And people say that's enough. And unfortunately for the people running the EU, they're trying to do everything they can to stymie this and they've already done it in several countries, Romania for example, Moldova, where they put their finger on the scales to get the outcome.
(35:18) That will only work for so long. Plus the fact that they have this foreign population among them that is not going to play nice as we go on as it continues to grow and asserts itself and wants more political power and wants to put its political system in place which is totally anathema to the values of European civilization.
(35:49) And so that'll be fun to watch, too. So why would Vladimir Putin and the Russians want to invade and have to deal with all that so they can deal with a bunch of French grandmothers protesting in August about the pensions aren't high enough? They already have that problem in Crimea and Donetsk. They don't need any more pensioners wanting more money or all this other stuff.
(36:11) Okay? Again, this is a political choice, not a geological certainty. And it's funny because the United States acts as a — this is what Europe is, a satrapy of the United States. Oh, you don't have to take the cheap pipeline gas from Russia. As a matter of fact, we'll blow up the pipeline so you can't take it and you'll just sit there like a cuck.
(36:38) Germany, Olaf Scholz. I bet you Olaf Scholz, I've said this before, didn't even know the US was going to blow that pipeline up, which they did. MI6, I'm sure the British and the United States blew up that pipeline. We're led to believe there was a bunch of Ukrainian PE guys diving down off a sailboat.
(36:55) Okay. And so this is what you have. And so the United States benefits because there's an arbitrage between the price of gas here in the US. This is why they're building all these LNG facilities along the coast. Everyone that you check on, Corpus Christi, the one down here in Brownsville, the ones up in Sabine Pass, they're all trying to put more export trains online because why not? We can get gas here in the US for cheap, three bucks a MCF and sell it in Europe for 20 or 30 or whatever they're selling it for. That works for
(37:30) the US. And you just bend over and take it Europe. You're a satrapy. You're irrelevant. You're just there. So, spot uranium just made a seven-month high. Bullish on uranium. Continue to be bullish. Again, as I've said many times on this channel and in various interviews, how you express a position to take advantage is the challenging part.
(38:03) I think as Rick Rule said, the easy money has been made, but the certain money is now to be made. I think you have to be very selective and understand what you're buying. You can't just go out and buy the recycled brownfield projects from previous uranium cycles. That doesn't work. Okay. As I've suggested and what I do is I just track the net asset value of these, well in my case the Sprott trust, SPUT if you will, and when it gets down to -10%, -13, -15% I buy some. Okay.
(38:38) Because I'm able to buy something that's probably going to go up over time at a discount. That's how real wealth is created. Now, the problem is that's not sexy. Well, that's not going to go up 300% a year, John. So, what's the junior I can buy? I'm sorry. I don't — I don't think I'm past that point where I need to have, mess around with junior stocks and you can create.
(39:00) What I would suggest if you're in that role and that's what you want to do and you want to try to make a tenbagger in this, you have to approach it as a private equity investor, okay? Like a venture capital firm would. And you need to put a portfolio together of 8 to 10 names with the understanding that 80% of them are going to fail.
(39:22) And maybe one out of the 10 does okay and one out of the 10 goes nuts and gives you a market beating return. But you have to do your research, okay? And you have to invest time and you have to understand what's going on. And this is difficult. And so what happens as I've said before and I've seen before, people get wedded to one story and they go all in.
(39:48) And if that's not the 10% success rate, that isn't the one company that actually makes it, then they get turned off. So unless — that's my advice, approach it as a private equity venture capital type situation where you have a basket of these things that are researched and have some kind of — I'm not talking about crap goes.
(40:10) I'm talking about legit companies and then approach it that way or just buy the metal on discount and sit back and make, you'll make money. Okay, this is a chart from NexGen, a widening uranium supply gap. This is the upper scenario that says by 2040 primary uranium deficit is projected to reach 335 million pounds per year.
(40:43) That's crazy. Says meeting forecasted 2040 demand of 530 million pounds will require mine supply to more than triple from today's levels. Now consider this again is looking at the market as it currently exists and the projects that are in development or have been announced. They are not sufficient in that time frame to meet that goal yet demand continues to increase.
(41:18) This is the problem. This is why it's so lucrative. This is why the potential is there. And 2040. People say, "Well, that's 2040, man. That's 14 years from now." Yeah. What's the average time frame to find and develop and bring online a uranium project? About 15 years. You're already in the window.
(41:41) Where are all these projects? Where are all these hundred million and billion pound projects? This is why the price will just continue to creep up until it gets to a sufficient level that people say, "Okay, I'm willing to invest $5 billion or $3 billion or two billion, whatever it's going to take to bring a project that's sitting out there.
(42:04) " Because there's plenty of uranium out there, folks. As I've said many times, it's not that there's not enough uranium in the Earth's crust. There's plenty. Okay? The price is still not high enough to bring capital in, take that risk. Would you want to, if you had 5 billion would you want to go partner with NexGen on a project that's uncertain as far as — you don't know with certainty.
(42:32) Yes, we're making a projection here and this is what it looks like on August 29th, 2026, but what's the reality in 15 years? What's the risk over the next 15 years as you bring the project online or even if it's 10 years? What's your permitting risk? What's the First Nations risk? What's financing? What's the operational risk? Where do you get the people? Where do you get the machinery? All of these things go into it.
(42:59) How much over budget? How much of a contingency will you need? Things can change over 10 or 15 years drastically. What will be the political situation in the world or in the jurisdiction that you're operating in in 15 years? Will it be the same? Will it be better? Will it be worse? These are all unknowns. And so, you need an extraordinary potential for a payoff to incentivize you to take that risk.
(43:29) We're still not there. It's substantially higher. This is why I've said you're going to see $200, $250 a pound at some point. Again, I don't know when, but you're going to have to see this really crazy number to incentivize people to really step on the gas and take the risk. So, on the demand side, it's relentless.
(43:54) Here's Sweden announcing applications for 8 gigawatts, that's 8,000 megawatts of new nuclear, applications for up to 8 gigawatts of new nuclear energy in Sweden. So it gives the different projects here. And so here we go. That's another, if you want to look at a thousand megawatts actually equaling about 500,000 pounds.
(44:17) That's about 4 million pounds of annual demand right there if those projects come online. Notwithstanding the fact that when you do the initial loading, you need about a million and a half, okay, pounds, okay, to get the reactor up and running. And then every year you're figuring on about a half million pounds per thousand megawatts in general. Okay, just depends.
(44:40) So where is this coming from? Who are they going to get it from? And this isn't just like a one-off. We were sitting here for two or three years and no other projects were being developed. There's projects all over the world being built as we speak, being planned. Okay. And where's the fuel going to come from? You saw the problems that cause Kazatomprom allegedly has run into.
(45:05) I suggest that a lot of this is managed to have the price go higher. Why should we produce cheap uranium for the world when we're in a situation, they can look at the numbers too? We have this uranium so we can make excuses about sulfuric acid and dinosaur bones that are holding up the earth moving and all this other stuff.
(45:24) Okay? Because the price just keeps going up. Old contracts roll off, new contracts come online, okay, at higher prices. I don't know. That's my view. So, of course, we know that farmers and ranchers are struggling here in the United States for many reasons. I can't go into them all. We have this El Niño, which is kind of a super El Niño, which is going to be causing some issues in my view.
(45:55) Haven't really talked a lot about that. One of the problems with agricultural investments, it's hard to, again, another sector that's easy to see that you're going to have an upward bias in prices, but hard to establish a position unless you're going to be in futures or options on futures.
(46:13) So what's happening? Well, farmers in America's corn belt say they are facing their worst crisis in 40 years as an explosion in diesel and fertilizer costs triggered by Donald Trump's Iran war pushes grain producers to the brink. I talked about this when the war first broke out. I think I was driving down the freeway the other day.
(46:40) I live in South Texas. We have very low gas taxes. We have a huge refining complex from Corpus Christi all the way up through Beaumont and into Louisiana Gulf Coast refineries. And so we do have relatively lower gasoline and diesel prices. Diesel was still 570 a gallon. Okay, here. So this is a problem.
(47:07) And I've talked about this before, why the diesel prices are higher because of the refining mess that we're in. It's not necessarily the oil price. Crude oil itself has to be refined into products. And if you're blowing up refineries in the Middle East, if you're curtailing refineries in the US because of government fiat and regulation, if you're going to support your ally in Ukraine to blow up all the Russian refineries because there's not enough diesel now in Russia. So, they've suspended diesel
(47:41) exports. Again, diesel's fungible. Diesel runs commerce. Diesel runs agriculture. Diesel runs your Amazon packages to your house. As the price of diesel goes up, your costs go up. Farmers costs go up. When fertilizer prices went up, whether it was from the nitrogen fertilizer being made in the 30% that the world uses in the Middle East, which have been suspended, that forced nitrogen fertilizers up.
(48:14) The sulfuric acid problem has not been alleviated. That's how you create phosphate fertilizers. You use the sulfuric acid in the process of creating phosphate fertilizers. So all of these costs continue to go up. Now we're finally starting to see grain prices go up. I think if you looked at the DBA ETF, which is an agricultural ETF, it's been up at least like the last 11 trading days, I think, straight.
(48:46) It's been moving higher because I think people are starting to price in that we're going to have some issues here. And so, again, how do you establish a position? That's the trick, right? So, I don't necessarily have an answer for that. I think as we come out of this thing people will be wanting to add more fertilizers.
(49:06) But if you take more farmers out of the equation, if you take more ranchers out of the equation, this is going to affect, less producers probably leads to higher prices or more cartelization like we have in the meat processing industry. This idea, because all of these governments now in the west are populist type governments and so because of the screwworm and some other things that went on with the cattle herd in the United States, cattle herd is at generational lows and so meat prices are up and so Trump being a populist like all these
(49:47) presidents usually are, let me bring in 300,000 tons of beef from wherever, Argentina or Brazil, whatever it's being brought in. Well, that's not going to incentivize, if you push the price back. Now, you need those higher prices to incentivize those cattle ranchers to not send those heifers to slaughter, to keep them because they're taking a risk also, right? Because how long to breed a heifer, get the calf, the gestation period, and then raise the calf up to slaughter weight, you're talking about a couple years.
(50:18) And so if you're going to have these high prices and then undermine these ranchers, for example, with your populist ideas because you have a stupid election coming up that you're going to lose, then they're going to send these heifers to slaughter and take advantage of the high prices now, exacerbating the situation.
(50:39) But this is how it is, right? So I want to talk about this Venezuela oil news that came out yesterday. Just as a side note, I've been ahead of this a little bit. I'm tracking this. I have a bot set up that's sending me news feeds on this. So I've been on this for a while. As a matter of fact, I added a speculative, highly speculative, let me add, okay, junior oil and gas name that had deals in Venezuela in the past and is now trying to resurrect those deals, not for exploration, but for production of
(51:23) already existing fields. Okay. And so they're in the midst of renegotiating agreements that they had already had prior to the sanctions that went on not only in Venezuela but also in Colombia which we've had a change in government in Colombia now that's more conducive to hydrocarbon exploitation. And so here's the situation which we saw yesterday with Venezuela that my bot delivered to me.
(51:53) President Trump said the United States had reached an agreement, given it majority control over more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuela's proven oil reserves. The plan is intended to channel roughly 100 billion of private investment into Venezuelan oil development primarily in the Orinoco Belt and Lake Maracaibo while directing resulting production toward US energy needs.
(52:20) This is a material step beyond the earlier 17 field discussions. If implemented as described, the US would no longer simply be easing sanctions or encouraging American companies to reenter Venezuela. It would be attempting to establish a structural long-duration position in the country's oil resource base.
(52:41) So this is the Donroe doctrine. This is the control of the Western Hemisphere in effect. Do I agree with it? No. I don't think we should be sticking our nose and doing this, but this is what's happening. Okay. The thing I would say is that I wouldn't get too crazy right now thinking that oil prices are going to massively drop.
(53:00) Billions of investment need to take place. I reported even in the weekly email that the export capacity in Venezuela is deteriorated to the point where you have ships lined up hanging out on demurrage for 30 days waiting to be loaded because the ability of the country to load tankers is deteriorated because of the lack of investment and the falling apart of the industry.
(53:28) So again, this is happening. This is going to continue to happen. I think longer term, resources and reserves don't equal production. A very astute observer on FinTwit, Razer Oil made the point in a former AIA portfolio holding, MEG Energy, which had heavy oil assets, has heavy oil assets, was acquired by Cenovus, at Christina Lake, which was this major project, which was 100,000 barrels a day, that they finally got the production up to after many years of investment and tweaking the project, but they have 4 billion
(54:13) barrels in reserves, but that doesn't mean anything because they're only producing a 100,000 barrels a day. Okay? And so production doesn't equal reserves. This is what the market sometimes confuses unfortunately. So I think this is good news for the US longer term. I think it's going to open up opportunity.
(54:32) I mean, Schlumberger and Halliburton and these guys are already moving back in there. They're bringing rigs back in. This is going to happen. People can, I've already commented, well, the terms aren't fair. They're being ripped, Venezuelans are being ripped off. It's still going to happen. Okay. And so, is there a way to play it? I think I found a way.
(54:53) Again, in last month's newsletter, I identified that. It's highly speculative. There's no guarantees. They're a smaller company. They may get pushed to the side. I don't know. We'll just have to wait and see. But it is a publicly traded vehicle that is focused on getting back into Venezuela. So, I wanted to point this out last part of the commentary.
(55:18) I guess Mark Carney, it's interesting. This Trump derangement syndrome and the hate for Trump and Trump instigating these trade wars with Canada has done a lot for his popularity. I think he's got an approval rate of 55 to 60% among Canadian voters, which is good for him. But I never read this book. I would never read this book.
(55:40) I guess he wrote this book back in 2020 or 2021. Mark Carney, Values, Building a Better World for All. So these are Carney's own words from his book Values. And remember, he postponed his next book until after the election. I wonder why is what the commentator says. So, apparently there's some page numbers here.
(56:02) I don't know if these are paraphrased. It would be interesting. I put this headline up here for our Canadian listeners to comment on. Did he really say these things in this book? I don't know. I'm not going to go buy it and look it up, but it's interesting nonetheless. I do know that he's a globalist. I do know he's a WEF stooge.
(56:19) I do know that he's a climate change aficionado. I don't think he believes that the world's going to end. I think he used that, and the pandemic, were tools for him and his crowd of goons to implement their technocratic ruling over society which they so thirst over. He quotes Marcus Aurelius. That's what these people are.
(56:45) They think that they're actually somebody, okay, they crave power for power's sake. They're little weak little bed bugs that would never come to you directly and try to push you around. They want to get other sociopaths that they can enable with their fake made-up laws and court orders to come and use guns against you.
(57:06) This person would never do it himself. Of course, that makes him even more dangerous. But anyways, this is what he said. A social credit system is already being imagined. Goes on to say, "Freedoms will be redefined by bureaucrats." Oh, that's awesome. The government will control every part of your life. You will own nothing, and that's the point.
(57:29) Business will serve politics, not Canadians. Your money will be tracked, rated, and controlled. Markets must be morally correct. I guess the question is by whose standard? Experts will replace democracy. See, this is the crux of it. The technocratic control. Let's do the same thing with Peter Thiel and Musk and all these bozos we've got in the US.
(57:51) Let's get rid of, the hoi polloi doesn't know anything. Let's push them to the side. That's what the EU's become. Rule by technocrat. Okay, it worked out so well in the Soviet Union, by the way. They were actually smart people, though. These dopes don't know anything. They just want power for the sake of power.
(58:09) They're dangerous sociopathic personalities. All institutions must serve WEF World Economic Forum ideals. Every financial decision will be judged by climate politics. Awesome. So again, he's very popular. I think a lot of it has to do with the trade spat with the United States and Trump.
(58:32) Nobody likes being pushed around. Nobody likes being threatened. He's standing up to Trump. So I think this is his popularity. But how insidious. Did he say these things? I don't know. I'm not going to read this book, but it's interesting. People can let me know in the comments if this is actually accurate.
(58:51) I'd be interested to hear. Okay, guys, that's it for this week. Appreciate you. Again, we have the Actionable Intelligence Alert newsletter. The weekly free email that I put out where I curate videos, articles, memes, anything that I find interesting in the week around the subjects that we talk about on this video.
(59:14) And I also have the paid Substack subscription which many people find valuable where I'm talking about the things that I'm investing in. I have the AIA portfolio which is skewed towards capital appreciation. I have the dividend portfolio, AIA dividend portfolio that has a unique spin on dividend income where we look for not only situation where we get good dividends but also potential for capital gains and I'm also introducing now a more permanent portfolio and I'll be talking about that more in upcoming issues as this world
(59:49) continues to get more volatile. How can we create a situation where we can create and maintain wealth and navigate through this ice field? Okay guys, that's what I have for you this week. We'll talk to you next week. Take it easy.