Hyperinflation Concerns: Mark Thornton discusses the on-ramp to hyperinflation, emphasizing the risks posed by massive government debt and unchecked money printing, which could lead to a loss of trust in fiat currencies.
Stages of Hyperinflation: Thornton outlines three stages of hyperinflation, where initially people accept more money, then spend more as they lose trust, and finally, reduce their cash holdings, leading to rapid price increases.
Investment Shifts: As inflation concerns grow, investors are moving from fiat currencies to real assets like real estate, gold, silver, and cryptocurrencies, with younger generations favoring crypto as a modern alternative.
Gold and Silver Dynamics: The discussion highlights the rising importance of gold and silver as central banks and investors shift away from the US dollar, with the gold-silver ratio indicating potential opportunities for silver.
Geopolitical Factors: Thornton notes that geopolitical tensions, tariffs, and sanctions contribute to monetary chaos, further eroding trust in the US dollar and prompting central banks to increase gold reserves.
Market Indicators: The podcast mentions that significant insider selling among major corporations and a declining US dollar index signal potential market instability and a shift towards hard assets.
Black Swan Events: Thornton warns of potential black swan events, such as geopolitical upheavals or economic bubbles, that could disrupt markets and accelerate the move away from fiat currencies.
Actionable Advice: Investors are encouraged to diversify into gold and silver to protect against currency devaluation and potential hyperinflation, as traditional assets like bonds and real estate may be overvalued.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to another episode of the minor issues podcast. I'm Mark Thornton at the Misesus Institute. We have a very special episode this week for you. Be but before I get to that, I want to tell you that the institute is starting its fall campaign. And there's a link in the description for you to donate to the institute's campaign. And I wanted to tell you about a a secret offer that I'm making. If you use the link to the Minor Issues podcast, I'm going to send you a free copy of a relatively new book called Free Trade in the 21st Century. And it's a collection of of essays by scholars from all over the world and even some politicians involved in the uh international trade issue. But this is the signature issue of this time and I'm going to send you a copy of this book. It contains not just my essay but several essays by scholars affiliated with the Misus Institute uh several of our friends and fellow travelers um to Austrian economics. So, it's it's really an exciting book about the signature issue of this time, and I'm going to sign it. And who knows, maybe you'll be able to find other people to uh other contributors to sign it and make it a collectible item at some point in time. So, in any case, uh I hope you can support the uh Misesus Institute and its work going forward. Um it's absolutely vital. It makes this podcast possible. So in this week's episode, uh it's really going to be based on last week's episode of the Minor Issues podcast. Um and it's my appearance and interview on the Liberty and Finance show. um where they had an opportunity to ask me follow-up questions uh related to last week's episode uh allowed me to elaborate on a lot of my answers and uh to ask follow-up questions and I know a lot of you uh would like to have an opportunity to do that. You write me questions and you put comment questions in all the time. So, this is a chance to see um and um it's actually uh for the Liberty and Finance Show, they actually kept me on for twice the length of one of their normal shows. So, it's quite lengthy and indepth. Um and on the YouTube version of it, um the comments were um I was very grateful. The comments were extremely complimentary to the host and to me and they were very pro- Misesus Institute uh people and commenters on there. So I would encourage you to watch this episode whenever you have time because this is not an 8 to 10 minute episode. This is nearly an hour long. And of course, share it with your friends who might be interested and share it with social media. Um, so without further ado, uh, here is this week's episode. Welcome back to Liberty and Finance. I am privileged to welcome a returning guest who hasn't been on our channel for far too long. Mark Thornton is from the Misesus Institute. He joins us today is Friday, September 12th, 2025. Mark, thank you for coming back on Liberty and Finance. Uh, Donigan, it's a pleasure to be with you. >> You have been interviewed in the past by my son, Elijah. It's all his fault that I got into the podcasting business in the first place back in 2013 because as a homeschooler, he had the audacity to ask such questions as not just where why is the sky blue, but where does money come from and where does it get its value and who gets the right to create it and then who do they give it to and how is this all fair? And I said, as most homeschool fathers might do, that's a great question. Why don't you do a research report on it and we'll we'll talk about it by reviewing your work. And he came back to me deeply troubled about a week later said, "Dad, I'm I'm stopping halfway through because if what I am learning is true, something is very wrong and I've got to start a podcast to let people know about this because people don't know this and they've got to know." So that's how he got into it and that's how I got into it. So, thank you as being uh the Misesus Institute as part of that whole story because they've been a wealth of information for people on the truth about reality of money and uh things that call themselves money but are not and what people do when they're confronted with the reality when they finally wake up and what they should do sooner if they want to protect themselves from the hard knocks they're going to experience if they don't. So, this is all uh greatly appreciated by our audience and thank you for being here. You recently published a a video uh presentation where you talked about how we are on the on-ramp to hyperinflation and you explained very concrete steps that hap have happened throughout history when when nations have gone down the road to hyperinflation and the the three main steps that occur and what the signs and signals are that people need to watch out for because we get a lot of people calling us or writing us and saying, "Well, how long till the monetary reset? How long till the collapse?" You guys have been talking about this forever. You've got a way of putting very uh pragmatic, reasonable, structured thinking to that. Very helpful, eye opening. Would love to talk about that. Also, your recently written about the gold silver ratio. That's been a fascinating interest to our audience as well. And finally, your most recent article just about to come out about black swans. Would love to hear more about that. So could you start us off with the on-ramp to hyperinflation and the the steps that happen typically when that is occurring and where we are at currently in that process? >> Yes, Dunigan. Um the two main ingredients to hyperinflation is a massive government debt uh which is symbolized by the color red and of course the ability to just print up money uh without any cost of production which of course that's paper money and in the United States we have green paper money and I I noted on the on my talk that if you add the color red to the color green you get the color brown. And I think that's very descriptive of the general direction of where we're going here. We have a massive debt. Uh we have a massive uh interest payments on the government debt that has exploded in recent years. Uh we're borrowing trillions of dollars of additional money. We're spending beyond our means in terms of the federal government in the trillions of dollars and you know that that has to be reversed or we continue on this road to hyperinflation and the namesake of the Mises Institute Ludwig van Mises on observing the German hyperinflation he said there's three stages and in the first stage age where the government is creating more money, but the people are used to the money being of a real tangible value, gold and silver. And so they'll accept the additional money that's being put into the economy. And when they increase their demand for money, it means that there's almost no effect on price inflation and the money doesn't depreciate. But and and just so we can clarify when people when you say people increase their demand for money for example wanting to put it into a savings account or that sort of thing and and take it on and absorb it absorb that uh that inflation of the monetary supply. >> Yes. in your in your wallet, in your purse, in your checking account, in your savings account, >> or perhaps foreign foreign holders of of the US debt as well or the other the country's debt as well. >> Yeah. But it's basically just the money itself and then eventually if the government thinks it can get away with this, they will continue to increase the supply of money. But then people will start reacting in stage two. They'll they'll no longer increase their demand to hold money. They won't add to their checking accounts. They won't add to their savings accounts. They'll spend more. And so they speed up the money in the economy and prices start to rise. And as this process goes on into stage three where the government is increasing continuing to increase the supply of money and but then in stage three people decrease their demand for money. So in they're not they're no longer adding to their accounts. They're actually reducing their checking and savings accounts. They're actually reducing their cash balances. They're spending more. And as a result, price inflation actually picks up. So the rate of higher prices increases. And this is when you enter stage three. This is the very early stage of the road to hyperinflation. And it's the of course the massive amount of debt that accumulates in stage one and in stage two. This could take just a couple of years as in the case of Germany or it may take place over a large a long period of time. But the common the commonality is the inability of the government to finance itself with taxes. And so as a result they're borrowing more and then as a result they're printing more. and you get into a position where they they are forced essentially to continue to print up more money, but people don't want to hold the money because they realize now they have new expectations with respect to the money. They're no longer willing to hold it. They want to spend it. And in doing so, they increase the prices of whatever they're spending it on. And of course um this this process as you know uh most people have very little understanding of what causes inflation or how much inflation they're actually experiencing, how um how bad they're actually being made worse off. And in the in the whole overall process, some people are first movers. They realize it early on and they try to protect themselves. They try to protect themselves knowing that the government's going to continue to print and so they want to get out of dollar bills in anything that's denominated in dollar bills and they want to move into real assets. uh and the some of the things I mentioned that we actually see today is people moving into more real estate. Uh the price of real estate is very high now. The price of land is very high right now because people have been parking a lot of their money in extra housing, extra real estate and extra land. And so that's one category. Another category of course you know all too well and that is people deciding to exchange their fiat paper dollars for gold and silver uh gold and silver coins, gold and silver bars uh things of that nature. So, and then of course as that continues on the price of gold and the price of silver starts rising and as people lose trust in their government and then they lose trust in their currency uh they want to exchange more of that currency for gold and silver coins. Uh and so younger people in this whole process, they've been sort of um uh for forced out of the real estate market because of the high prices. Uh they see gold and silver is sort of an antique phenomenon. And what they see is cryptocurrency and bitcoin is something that's modern. It's cool. It's based on the gold standard. I mean you have to expend resources to create cryptocurrency. It gets more and more difficult to create cryptocurrency. So in some sense it's mocking uh the gold mining industry. In fact they call it mining for for Bitcoin or mining for crypto. And so they see that as the modern, cool, hip way to get out of uh US paper money and into something that can go up in value over time. And of course, it has gone up in value over time. I remember when bit Bitcoin first came out, a single Bitcoin only cost $10 and it's been uh there's more and more Bitcoin out there. uh but the price has risen to over $100,000. So that's the general phenomenon and we are certainly uh you know and and I I think if you take the real estate, you take the gold uh silver stackers, gold stackers, and you take the people interested in crypto and accumulating crypto, that's still a minority of the overall population. There's most people have no idea of what's happening to them. They have no idea what's going on right now uh in the world the of monetary affairs and we are in a period of monetary chaos right now uh where there's no uh legitimate standard of monetary economics in the world and uh the reserve currency of the world has now begun to uh be in doubt and uh and and so not surprisingly gold and silver prices have moved very very high and uh gold is at an all-time you know record and uh and as I said before real estate housing land prices they're all up bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are all up uh stocks are even uh at all-time record highs too so uh people are learning uh day by day more and more People are coming to realize that they're being taken advantage of by their own government and the Federal Reserve, debasing the money, uh resulting in higher prices, resulting in impoverishment, resulting in a distribution of income away from the working class towards the wealthy Wall Street class, uh who's in control of the stock market. and uh you know and then eventually of course we're going to see the boom bus cycle emerge where everybody's hurt as a result. There's several things this description you make uh sounds very realistic. It sounds very descriptive of what we're in the middle of right now. Uh several things jumped out to me as you went through that. One was that in addition to the psychological awakening, the psychological awareness on ordinary people's part that they're uh un unjustified or undeserved uh trust in the stability of the value of the value uh preservation capacity of what's called money in the culture. But once it changes into being unbacked, currency uh is is eroded. Their their trust in current in that they start to awaken to this idea that wait a minute unlike everything that I thought was instinctively and naturally and and common sense fairness about that once you earn and you save that it stays there and it's stable. No, this is being stolen from through the corrosive effect of inflation that that then they they run out of uh enchantment with that and they want to they want to you know divest themselves of this of this devaluing thing and get into something that holds its value. But the part that a little light bulb went on for me just now when you were describing that and that is that with the acceleration of money velocity in your second stage there and acceleration of prices hard times come to people. People are really getting pinched. Retirees like in the 55 plus community where we live who thought they were soundly in retirement are now being told by their personal financial advisors, "Yeah, you better cut expenses or go back to work cuz your plan isn't working out quite right anymore." And or young people you mentioned can't afford a house. So you have all these uh subgroups of our culture that are all finding that hard times are upon them. This impoverishment that you described. So, even their ability to be able to stockpile more cash, if they wanted to, they can't. They're having to to dip into their cash uh savings or checking accounts or whatever to pay the bills just to carry on their life. Uh so why we're seeing that even in the bullion broker business is that we get more and more calls for people selling uh than we used to and fewer calls for people buying and they say they they wish they could afford it but they just can't right now because there's times are so tough. They have to liquidate to pay their taxes. They have to liquidate because of medical expenses. They have to liquidate because uh they they're going to have to move or various various needs. it's uh it or they trying to help younger generation to afford to buy their starter home that kind of thing. Uh any any uh further thoughts from you on this combination of confluence of factors uh that it's beyond just the psychological awareness and the awakening that that's a depleting resource but rather also at the same time just being impoverished to the point where they're they're no longer able to save. they're actually having to spend out their savings just as the debing country has been racking up trillion dollar deficits as you as you described. >> Yes. If if you haven't been stacking gold and silver, uh you might have a very large stock portfolio and stock prices have so far continued to rise and so you can feel good about that aspect of your life. And uh I think that a lot of people realize when they go to the grocery store especially and when they see their auto insurance, their homeowners insurance, they can tell that the bills have gone up. In the past with, you know, inflation in the United States, uh your auto insurance and your house insurance and your property tax were always going up, but by a very small percentage. and you'd have to actually go back and look at your checkbook or your account to tell how much it had gone up. Uh but now you know uh that those bills are going up significantly and those people are not making it up. I mean that your auto insurance bill is going up because it costs more uh if your car is in a collision or something. It's going to cost a lot more money to get the new parts and to pay the labor and everything else associated with that. if your house burns down, uh you know, the the uh raw materials and the labor to make it good, all of that's gone up significantly. So, these companies are not just making these bills up. The electric company is not making the fact that electricity is going up in price rapidly. Um, in many cases, they're not even producing it. They're buying it from somebody else. So, you know, all of these things are very, very real. And when I look at all the government statistics and all the private statistics and I look at the distribution of wealth and income in the United States, I see probably more than one half, maybe as high as 23 of the pop population who has uh experienced significant impoverishment um since the COVID affair and the massive increase in the money supply that the Federal Reserve unleashed on the American population um that was associated with that breakout of the COVID flu and uh you know trillions and trillions of dollars that greatly expanded the federal budget and you know the our our politicians our so-called representatives have never done anything to cut back the budgets after COVID so they just continue on ex uh spending everything that they spent during the emergency and then of course their regular 5 to 10 to 15% increase on everything. And so you know that that's just what they do. And normally you know if it if it's um if it's just on trend we have a hard time judging it. And this is the same thing that Misesus was saying about the stages one and stages two. If the inflation is low and the the inflation is steady, we don't really pay much attention to it. We don't react to it. We just do the same thing over and over again, which is perfectly reasonable and rational. I mean, that's the way humans are. Um, and it takes a while for us to catch on to what the government is up to and what these those people at the Federal Reserve, what they're actually up to. Uh, they don't seem to care at all about uh the American middle class, the working class. You know, they'll talk about their double their dual mandate about labor and inflation, but that's not it at all. They're they're two mandates. the true mandates are to uh finance the government debt. Okay, that's the big thing that they're into is to uh finance the government debt. That's what they do. They buy government bonds. That's what their job is. So that's one of their mandates is to help manage the government debt. And the other is to bail out Wall Street, to bail out the stock market, to uh you know to keep interest rates low so stocks uh go up in value. And then when the stock market crashes or the banks get in trouble, the Fed comes in and bails out the banks, the big banks who work for the Fed and the stock market, which is where they get their people from. You know, Jay Powell was from, you know, Wall Street. So that's how it works. So when they talk about, well, the dual mandate is making sure inflation is under control and making sure everybody gets a job, that is a total BS story. Oh gosh, there's so much everything you're saying. It just triggers uh reality with with interviews we've had. We talked with Dr. Judy Shelton, who was part of the Trump first administration. She talked about uh Bernanki and others behind uh doors with Greenspan and talking about this admission that the stable maintaining of stable prices. They said why don't we look at that as uh actually maintaining a stable rate of inflation because that's what people and I think it was Yellen who said that that that makes people actually feel better uh to to know that their the numbers on their check checking uh paycheck are going up or that sort of thing or their statements. So that idea that people actually appreciate it when you see they see the numbers get bigger. So we should keep uh debasing the currency uh out of our out of our you know consideration for the common man rather than holding to the value of the currency steady. Um there's there's so many aspects of that. Uh in your article recently, you also talked about geopolitical chaos, tariffs and sanctions and other reasons besides simply this drunken sailor debting and debasement of the currency why there's a mass pivot away from trust and faith in the dollar or the US Treasury. Can you underscore that so people understand there's more going on here than just impoverishment through debasement? >> Yes. You know, this is all tied together really. It's it's monetary chaos, but this is also a very militant aggressive world that we live in right now. And things like tariffs and sanctions, uh, these are aggressive moves on the part of one government against another government. And we're, of course, uh, big players in this. We're the number one country in terms of sanctions. And now we've dropped our free trade, our relatively free trade heritage in favor of just uh personal vendetta type tariffs. Um and of course also one of the things that kicked off this period of monetary chaos and the subsequent big increase in gold and silver prices was when uh we sanctioned the Russians and we in in essence took their um their USO holdings of treasuries their reserves of their central bank. we just took them um as part of our sanctions of of Russia and it it you know whatever um we can't really get into what happens before that um but this is just an ongoing uh escalation that's uh very much of military uh in its nature and tariffs and sanctions are really just the first steps and this is very unfortunate. This is very concerning. And of course, you know, this is why other central banks have lost faith in the US dollar. They've lost faith in US government bonds. So certainly we should not have any faith in the US dollar and US government bonds. if even if other central banks now have lost faith in it and of course just recently as you know uh gold has become the number one reserve asset on the balance sheets of central banks so the central banks around the world are dropping US treasuries long-term medium-term uh government bonds and debt in favor of holding gold and uh you know I can't blame Um it makes perfect sense. I mean gold was always um you know the number one uh asset international reserve asset for both the private sector and the public sector. And uh you know central banks realize that the the the trusting system of Brett and Woods and the subsequent dollar denomination where we more or less played fair with other countries is over. And so they've they've taken to replacing uh the dollar assets on their balance sheets with gold. And uh that's a big reason why gold has uh gone up in value because central banks have been big purchasers. But certainly I think that if central banks don't trust the US dollar and they're getting out of the US dollar, I think that's really good evidence that everybody should be wake up and uh and do the same thing. It's often ill illuminating for the little guy to see what the big money are doing and not listen to what they say, not listen to all the spin that goes on, all of the misdirection that says, you know, we're doing this for the good of the people. Janet Yellen saying, "Yeah, people would prefer this or whatever." Just look what they're doing. Another thing that they're doing, if you say they, uh, those are the highest parts of the food chain as insiders, the CEOs of even the magnificent seven corporations that have been the high-f flyers, the darlings of Wall Street for the past couple of years are selling at a ratio of 7 to1 uh, over buying in the market as we see it today. Any comments on that before we turn our attention to the gold silver ratio? >> Oh yeah. I mean, the Magnificent 7 is toast. Uh I think that uh you know that it's very soon that that whole thing is going to roll over. Uh the seven magnificent stocks are no longer all that magnificent. And they you know they talk about record setting days on the stock market, but it's they're really only marginal uh increases. And I think you're right. We need to focus in on the fact that the the wealthy and the big players uh are not only turning to gold, but now they're turning to silver. With gold prices up so high, the Russians and the Saudis uh the big players um big investors are getting out of the stock market and moving into things like physical silver. And uh and so I I you know, I really regret it. the fact that so many of the little guys are being forced into selling their silver stacks at this time. Uh, you know, they see it as, well, they've made a lot of money and they've got to pay their taxes or they got to pay the insurance bill or they've got a medical bill. You know, that's very, very regrettable. They're getting squeezed. But you know these big players they are definitely uh you know if we can follow their actions I think that what they're telling us is that they're getting out of the stock market. They're getting into um hard assets particularly gold and silver just like foreign central banks and they're getting out of the US dollar. The dollar is falling precipitously this year. Um, and you know, investors in Europe and Asia are getting very worried about their investments in the United States because even though they're nominally going up in value, the value of the US dollar is down, I think, 10%. So that when they translate those gains uh back into Europe and stuff, uh they realize that they haven't gained anything in terms of their um in terms of their local currency and it the other currencies are not in much better shape. I mean the Japanese are in chaos. The British are are teetering on disaster. The French are all locked up. Um, you know, so we're not the only basket case in town. This is something that's going on around the world and many of the major countries in the world uh especially the allies of the United States are are in serious trouble. Germany is trying to print its way out uh of a deep dark recessionary period. So um you know things are uh the the real economy uh is showing the adverse effects of this constant inflation and debt. And when the real economy contracts and it that you know when you see stagflation or we see a recession or a stock market crash and the economy is not able to produce as much. it can't employ as much labor because there's not enough savings left in the economy, then there's not enough money for payroll. There's not enough money for investment. And the economy produces fewer fewer goods and it doesn't matter what the government does to hand out stuff to people, we're just not going to be producing uh very much and everybody's going to feel that pain. One of the things you mentioned there was uh the the awakening that happens when your uh activities or assets look uh valuable when priced in US dollars, these declining US dollars. But then when you convert back into real things, you realize how impoverished you are. Uh that that awakening has not been missed on the part of international holders of of either US treasuries or US dollars and they're divesting. As you have said in your talk recently, the the two curves of uh how many what percent of international holdings are in US treasuries has been declining. The amount of foreign holding of central banks in gold has been increasing and we just hit a uh a crossover point. Do you want to touch on that before we move on? Yeah. I mean, the fact that central banks don't trust other central banks and they're they want to be more independent and less dependent on each other, I think is very very significant. Um, it's probably, you know, a a smart move. It's probably a good move that individual central banks are are are actually have more gold on their balance sheet. Um, but it's a very bad sign. And it's a sign that the the existing system is breaking down. It's all based on trust and confidence. It's all based on that trust and confidence. Trust in the dollar, confidence in the dollar. And the dollar has fallen significantly. And everybody the big investors who you know that their wealth is dependent upon that they see the big fall we've seen in the uh dollar index this year. Uh and the dollar index is just a relative measure versus the other currencies and the other currencies are falling in terms of their purchasing power. So there's a mad scramble and chaos has not you know broken out. It's not at a riotous stage at this point because not a lot of people have caught on to the problem and most people have not caught on to the real solution. We've been uh interested in talking with you briefly. I know we're running long on time, but about your observations about the gold silver ratio. You talked about that when you appeared in our channel long time ago with my son Elijah. Can you update us on your latest observations about the gold silver ratio and why people should pay attention? Yeah, I did an experiment back in May, I think it was. Uh the gold silver ratio was really in very high level territories. It was a more than a 100 ounces of silver to equal 1 ounce of gold. And so I went through the the motions of making that exchange where I took 1 ounce of gold, I traded it in, and then purchased a 100 ounces of silver. And you think, well, what's the difference? you know, why bother with that? Well, um I felt that we were in a very much in a stage where the metal prices were both going up and that because the gold silver ratio was at historic high levels that that that um that that ratio was going to fall and it has fallen. I think I started it it was like 104 to1 and it's now somewhere like 86 uh to one over a 3month period. Now of course both of the metals have increased but it means that silver has increased relative to the increase in um in the price of gold. So, uh, if you do the accounting on it, it would be like I, you know, I took 1 ounce of gold, I got 100 ounces of silver, and my 100 ounces of silver cover the increase in the price of gold, plus I had the equivalent of 14 extra ounces of silver. So, it was a good move. And, you know, some of that's based on luck or interpretation of the market. Uh but we were at extremely high levels. It's anything over a hundred is historically high and it's fallen down into the mid to upper 80s at this point. And uh I expect it to continue to fall. Um, you know, if if this policy agenda by the Fed and other central banks continues, uh, I expect that ratio to fall for both metals to continue to rise unevenly over time and for the silver uh, to increase in relative value uh, over time. And of course, um, you know, I don't know how far that's going to go. I mean, Washington could fix this situation. They could cut spending dramatically. They could stop the printing presses. They could stop paying public employees and cut back on their payments to social security benefits and so forth. Cut the military. Uh I don't think they're going to do that. But eventually this is going to get very very serious. And if we do get into hyperinflation, I mean you could see the gold silver ratio falling down to like 20. Um, I'm not I'm not I don't think that's going to happen. I hope that's not going to happen. Uh, but there's a long ways to go from where we are right now to plausibly pause plausibly what probably is going to happen. >> Help us connect the dots there in your thought process. Why would hyperinflation tend to correlate with a falling gold silver ratio? >> Well, because silver is going to rise in relative importance. the uh that the central banks would uh probably become less of accumulators and uh maybe even have to disperse uh their gold to somehow soften this the brunt of inflation whereas silver is a monetary metal that's actually used in commerce. So I would anticipate that when we get into a hyperinflation that people actually start using uh silver to make certain types of purchases. Now, you won't be able to pay your electric bill with silver, but there are probably a lot of things um that you will be able to uh pay uh with the use of silver. If you're active actively trying to pay uh with silver, you're starting to find people who are interested in receiving silver rather than dollars because they don't have any access. They don't really know. They don't they don't watch the show, man. Um, so we need to get more people aware of all this uh so that they can help themselves. But I've noticed that, you know, people are very appreciative to get silver tips and uh other people are appreciative of being uh paid in silver. So, you know, and that's with a 3% supposed rate of inflation. Um you know you can imagine if the if the government's measure was 10 or 15% uh hyperinflation is actually uh technically known as you know anywhere from 20 to 50% price inflation per month as measured by uh the government's statistics. So, we have a long ways to go till we get to an official hyperinflation. And that's why I say that we're only on the on-ramp to the road for hyperinflation. And there's every good indication that, you know, rationally we could stop the printing presses. Rationally, we could slash the budget and stop this problem in its tracks. I just don't think that's going to happen. And I think the political class is super super arrogant. I I don't think that they show any appreciation for the people they're supposedly representing. I don't think they really care about the rank and file citizenry of this country or any country. Uh I think they're in it for themselves. The people at the Fed, the people in Congress, I think I I don't think we can depend on them whatsoever. I think we have to depend. This is too serious. It has something that's that's potentially so dangerous to our standard of living that we have to step forward. We can't wait uh for these bozos uh to uh to come to the rescue because there's no indication whatsoever that they're going to do anything to help us. We have to help ourselves. >> Uh you mentioned there along the way that uh people will rise to using silver for ordinary transactions because it's an honest money. It's honest currency. Um, we are seeing a movement among the states, not at the federal level so much, but at the movement among the states bringing out legal tender laws for gold and silver. Uh, it was 14 states, then it was 17, 19. It's getting to be like 22 states that are that are seriously looking at this. And if you people go to soundmoneydefense.org or perhaps at the Mises Institute. There may be uh current information about that as well as far as this movement among the states within the US to establish for the good of their people the freedom and the right to choose to use uh sound, true, honest money such as gold or silver. And if people want to do it right now today, uh there's a link in the description of this video for Glint Pay, which is a it looks like a Mastercard debit card, but when you use it, nobody knows at the checkout that you're actually uh using grams of gold that are in your account uh to uh to pay for your purchases. So that your your instead of having your dollars sitting in your checking account being stolen for the inflation, you've got grams of gold sitting in your glint play account in a in a in a vault in Zurich, Switzerland, and you're maybe holding their value or even increasing in value in between the times that you're spending a little bit of it along the way. Um, yeah, the uh one of our students at the institute uh actually started that sound money defense league. I'm very proud of what his work. He's been incredibly productive with almost no resources available to him. Uh and he's hit um you know a live vein in the American public and he's done some great work. Uh JP Cortez and uh you know and I think this is what really I haven't written about this yet. Um but uh I'll give you the punchline which is I think what's going to force uh the politicians hands is when the states that have already woken up to the problem uh you know states like Utah and Idaho and Florida uh Texas and so forth um once those states start threatening to secede from the Union of the United States that's when they're going to wake up and start doing something about it um either as a result of outright secession or just the threat of secession. But I think instead of uh getting to utter destruction of our society through hyperinflation that the states are going to come to the rescue by threatening secession from the United States. >> That's major uh talk about a major event. Uh you've written recently or is about to get published an article about black swans which uh you can explain to us why these sort of seinal or page turning or tectonic plate shifting events can come uh apparently out of nowhere and what even might have been completely unexpected or unpredicted uh can suddenly be the thing that the straw that breaks the camel's back and all of a sudden you're going off in a new direction. What do you see about that? And what do you think people should be perhaps prepared for? >> Well, you know, I um before the black swan, it was Keynesian uh animal spirits that supposedly swayed the economy into booms and busts. Uh black swans gave us a different level of explanation that something real happened that kicked things into a boom or kicked things into a bust. Uh but what I tried to show in that article that that talk was that it really just represents what's going on fundamentally in the economy and and then once I described that I started talking about some of the things that are potentially black swans that are existing right now. Uh certainly the artificial intelligence situation where they're spending money hand overfist not really knowing where they're going and that without any completed plans uh for the electricity and the data centers and the investment and and all the rest without any real ma roadmap for customers and revenues and so forth. But there's a lot of other things. I mean, we're living in an everything bubble where the trillions of dollars that the Fed has created has really set off um bubbles uh in in most areas of the economy. You know, traditionally, real estate is a big one. We've been concerned about commercial real estate markets. Uh so, that's certainly a possibility. cryptocurrency has been, you know, has gone from 10,000 to 110,000. Uh, we don't really understand that all that well. I mean, the American public, the people who have been purchasing cryptocurrency, they don't even really understand it. I've talked to many people who have invested in cryptocurrency and they have no idea of what it is or why it's valuable. They just own it. So, you know, that's a classic type of area where black swans develop, black swans emerge, and you know, it's a great news story and it kicks off uh you know, a crisis of some sto some sort, but ultimately it's it's still the Fed behind the curtain that's been increasing the money supply and lowering interest rates and, you know, and creating the fundamental reasons uh for these booms and busts. So, you know that there's a lot of potential uh black swans out there and I go through a lot of them uh in the podcast tomorrow. We'll put a link to that podcast uh in the description of this video for those who want to follow up on that and for people who want to find out more about what they can learn at the Mises Institute and how should they get connected with that and your work? >> Well, we have the one of the largest economic web pages in the world. That's m i ses.org. We have tons of articles. We have like five podcasts. Uh we publish books and newsletters. Uh we have tons of video and audio lectures and uh information sources. Uh we as I said we publish books. We sell books that are discounted uh price on everything that's important in the economy. So, you really uh like with your program uh your your viewers need to go to misuses.org uh and get informed, stay informed. Uh you can subscribe for free. There's no, you know, we don't charge for uh any of our services other than the books and other than our conferences. And we have conferences dedicated to students and professors and the general public. So, please come and check us out. Uh I'm sure you'll be glad you did. Ludwig van Misesus was the major champion uh over the last 200 years for the gold standard. Um and he knew all the reasons why the gold standard was so important for peace and prosperity and increases in the standard of living and uh you know and that's what we're dedicated to here. about three times or so during our whole talk today, you mentioned unless people take this action, unless they like early movers move out of harm's way. Give everyone a a clear idea of what you're thinking that is available for people who want to take action. I mean, it's never too late to do what you can do now. We don't have the past we have today. What is it that people in your view can and should do to take care and protect their famil family's futures? you know, when you look at the um the alternatives, you know, government bonds are not going to be a very good alternative. I think real estate is overblown at this point and artificially inflated and I don't trust cryptocurrency at these levels. So the only real tangible reliable um asset I think is gold and silver um hard assets in general. But I think the easiest and and thing that anybody can independently do without, you know, relying on anybody else except yourself is to get on the phone, uh get in contact with a reputable dealer, uh get some input from uh other people who know what they're doing in this market. uh get some recommendations from other people and you know start uh getting on the go on your own personal gold standard, gold or silver standard and start diversifying away from anything that's dollar denominated. Well, we've been so grateful Mark Thornton from the Mises Institute. Thank you for coming back on Liberty and Finance and reminding us of all the the uh resources that are available there. We're grateful for your presence here and we'll make sure that it's not as long as it has been until the next time we have you back on. >> My pleasure. Done again.
On the Hyperinflation On-Ramp | Mark Thornton
Summary
Transcript
Hello and welcome to another episode of the minor issues podcast. I'm Mark Thornton at the Misesus Institute. We have a very special episode this week for you. Be but before I get to that, I want to tell you that the institute is starting its fall campaign. And there's a link in the description for you to donate to the institute's campaign. And I wanted to tell you about a a secret offer that I'm making. If you use the link to the Minor Issues podcast, I'm going to send you a free copy of a relatively new book called Free Trade in the 21st Century. And it's a collection of of essays by scholars from all over the world and even some politicians involved in the uh international trade issue. But this is the signature issue of this time and I'm going to send you a copy of this book. It contains not just my essay but several essays by scholars affiliated with the Misus Institute uh several of our friends and fellow travelers um to Austrian economics. So, it's it's really an exciting book about the signature issue of this time, and I'm going to sign it. And who knows, maybe you'll be able to find other people to uh other contributors to sign it and make it a collectible item at some point in time. So, in any case, uh I hope you can support the uh Misesus Institute and its work going forward. Um it's absolutely vital. It makes this podcast possible. So in this week's episode, uh it's really going to be based on last week's episode of the Minor Issues podcast. Um and it's my appearance and interview on the Liberty and Finance show. um where they had an opportunity to ask me follow-up questions uh related to last week's episode uh allowed me to elaborate on a lot of my answers and uh to ask follow-up questions and I know a lot of you uh would like to have an opportunity to do that. You write me questions and you put comment questions in all the time. So, this is a chance to see um and um it's actually uh for the Liberty and Finance Show, they actually kept me on for twice the length of one of their normal shows. So, it's quite lengthy and indepth. Um and on the YouTube version of it, um the comments were um I was very grateful. The comments were extremely complimentary to the host and to me and they were very pro- Misesus Institute uh people and commenters on there. So I would encourage you to watch this episode whenever you have time because this is not an 8 to 10 minute episode. This is nearly an hour long. And of course, share it with your friends who might be interested and share it with social media. Um, so without further ado, uh, here is this week's episode. Welcome back to Liberty and Finance. I am privileged to welcome a returning guest who hasn't been on our channel for far too long. Mark Thornton is from the Misesus Institute. He joins us today is Friday, September 12th, 2025. Mark, thank you for coming back on Liberty and Finance. Uh, Donigan, it's a pleasure to be with you. >> You have been interviewed in the past by my son, Elijah. It's all his fault that I got into the podcasting business in the first place back in 2013 because as a homeschooler, he had the audacity to ask such questions as not just where why is the sky blue, but where does money come from and where does it get its value and who gets the right to create it and then who do they give it to and how is this all fair? And I said, as most homeschool fathers might do, that's a great question. Why don't you do a research report on it and we'll we'll talk about it by reviewing your work. And he came back to me deeply troubled about a week later said, "Dad, I'm I'm stopping halfway through because if what I am learning is true, something is very wrong and I've got to start a podcast to let people know about this because people don't know this and they've got to know." So that's how he got into it and that's how I got into it. So, thank you as being uh the Misesus Institute as part of that whole story because they've been a wealth of information for people on the truth about reality of money and uh things that call themselves money but are not and what people do when they're confronted with the reality when they finally wake up and what they should do sooner if they want to protect themselves from the hard knocks they're going to experience if they don't. So, this is all uh greatly appreciated by our audience and thank you for being here. You recently published a a video uh presentation where you talked about how we are on the on-ramp to hyperinflation and you explained very concrete steps that hap have happened throughout history when when nations have gone down the road to hyperinflation and the the three main steps that occur and what the signs and signals are that people need to watch out for because we get a lot of people calling us or writing us and saying, "Well, how long till the monetary reset? How long till the collapse?" You guys have been talking about this forever. You've got a way of putting very uh pragmatic, reasonable, structured thinking to that. Very helpful, eye opening. Would love to talk about that. Also, your recently written about the gold silver ratio. That's been a fascinating interest to our audience as well. And finally, your most recent article just about to come out about black swans. Would love to hear more about that. So could you start us off with the on-ramp to hyperinflation and the the steps that happen typically when that is occurring and where we are at currently in that process? >> Yes, Dunigan. Um the two main ingredients to hyperinflation is a massive government debt uh which is symbolized by the color red and of course the ability to just print up money uh without any cost of production which of course that's paper money and in the United States we have green paper money and I I noted on the on my talk that if you add the color red to the color green you get the color brown. And I think that's very descriptive of the general direction of where we're going here. We have a massive debt. Uh we have a massive uh interest payments on the government debt that has exploded in recent years. Uh we're borrowing trillions of dollars of additional money. We're spending beyond our means in terms of the federal government in the trillions of dollars and you know that that has to be reversed or we continue on this road to hyperinflation and the namesake of the Mises Institute Ludwig van Mises on observing the German hyperinflation he said there's three stages and in the first stage age where the government is creating more money, but the people are used to the money being of a real tangible value, gold and silver. And so they'll accept the additional money that's being put into the economy. And when they increase their demand for money, it means that there's almost no effect on price inflation and the money doesn't depreciate. But and and just so we can clarify when people when you say people increase their demand for money for example wanting to put it into a savings account or that sort of thing and and take it on and absorb it absorb that uh that inflation of the monetary supply. >> Yes. in your in your wallet, in your purse, in your checking account, in your savings account, >> or perhaps foreign foreign holders of of the US debt as well or the other the country's debt as well. >> Yeah. But it's basically just the money itself and then eventually if the government thinks it can get away with this, they will continue to increase the supply of money. But then people will start reacting in stage two. They'll they'll no longer increase their demand to hold money. They won't add to their checking accounts. They won't add to their savings accounts. They'll spend more. And so they speed up the money in the economy and prices start to rise. And as this process goes on into stage three where the government is increasing continuing to increase the supply of money and but then in stage three people decrease their demand for money. So in they're not they're no longer adding to their accounts. They're actually reducing their checking and savings accounts. They're actually reducing their cash balances. They're spending more. And as a result, price inflation actually picks up. So the rate of higher prices increases. And this is when you enter stage three. This is the very early stage of the road to hyperinflation. And it's the of course the massive amount of debt that accumulates in stage one and in stage two. This could take just a couple of years as in the case of Germany or it may take place over a large a long period of time. But the common the commonality is the inability of the government to finance itself with taxes. And so as a result they're borrowing more and then as a result they're printing more. and you get into a position where they they are forced essentially to continue to print up more money, but people don't want to hold the money because they realize now they have new expectations with respect to the money. They're no longer willing to hold it. They want to spend it. And in doing so, they increase the prices of whatever they're spending it on. And of course um this this process as you know uh most people have very little understanding of what causes inflation or how much inflation they're actually experiencing, how um how bad they're actually being made worse off. And in the in the whole overall process, some people are first movers. They realize it early on and they try to protect themselves. They try to protect themselves knowing that the government's going to continue to print and so they want to get out of dollar bills in anything that's denominated in dollar bills and they want to move into real assets. uh and the some of the things I mentioned that we actually see today is people moving into more real estate. Uh the price of real estate is very high now. The price of land is very high right now because people have been parking a lot of their money in extra housing, extra real estate and extra land. And so that's one category. Another category of course you know all too well and that is people deciding to exchange their fiat paper dollars for gold and silver uh gold and silver coins, gold and silver bars uh things of that nature. So, and then of course as that continues on the price of gold and the price of silver starts rising and as people lose trust in their government and then they lose trust in their currency uh they want to exchange more of that currency for gold and silver coins. Uh and so younger people in this whole process, they've been sort of um uh for forced out of the real estate market because of the high prices. Uh they see gold and silver is sort of an antique phenomenon. And what they see is cryptocurrency and bitcoin is something that's modern. It's cool. It's based on the gold standard. I mean you have to expend resources to create cryptocurrency. It gets more and more difficult to create cryptocurrency. So in some sense it's mocking uh the gold mining industry. In fact they call it mining for for Bitcoin or mining for crypto. And so they see that as the modern, cool, hip way to get out of uh US paper money and into something that can go up in value over time. And of course, it has gone up in value over time. I remember when bit Bitcoin first came out, a single Bitcoin only cost $10 and it's been uh there's more and more Bitcoin out there. uh but the price has risen to over $100,000. So that's the general phenomenon and we are certainly uh you know and and I I think if you take the real estate, you take the gold uh silver stackers, gold stackers, and you take the people interested in crypto and accumulating crypto, that's still a minority of the overall population. There's most people have no idea of what's happening to them. They have no idea what's going on right now uh in the world the of monetary affairs and we are in a period of monetary chaos right now uh where there's no uh legitimate standard of monetary economics in the world and uh the reserve currency of the world has now begun to uh be in doubt and uh and and so not surprisingly gold and silver prices have moved very very high and uh gold is at an all-time you know record and uh and as I said before real estate housing land prices they're all up bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are all up uh stocks are even uh at all-time record highs too so uh people are learning uh day by day more and more People are coming to realize that they're being taken advantage of by their own government and the Federal Reserve, debasing the money, uh resulting in higher prices, resulting in impoverishment, resulting in a distribution of income away from the working class towards the wealthy Wall Street class, uh who's in control of the stock market. and uh you know and then eventually of course we're going to see the boom bus cycle emerge where everybody's hurt as a result. There's several things this description you make uh sounds very realistic. It sounds very descriptive of what we're in the middle of right now. Uh several things jumped out to me as you went through that. One was that in addition to the psychological awakening, the psychological awareness on ordinary people's part that they're uh un unjustified or undeserved uh trust in the stability of the value of the value uh preservation capacity of what's called money in the culture. But once it changes into being unbacked, currency uh is is eroded. Their their trust in current in that they start to awaken to this idea that wait a minute unlike everything that I thought was instinctively and naturally and and common sense fairness about that once you earn and you save that it stays there and it's stable. No, this is being stolen from through the corrosive effect of inflation that that then they they run out of uh enchantment with that and they want to they want to you know divest themselves of this of this devaluing thing and get into something that holds its value. But the part that a little light bulb went on for me just now when you were describing that and that is that with the acceleration of money velocity in your second stage there and acceleration of prices hard times come to people. People are really getting pinched. Retirees like in the 55 plus community where we live who thought they were soundly in retirement are now being told by their personal financial advisors, "Yeah, you better cut expenses or go back to work cuz your plan isn't working out quite right anymore." And or young people you mentioned can't afford a house. So you have all these uh subgroups of our culture that are all finding that hard times are upon them. This impoverishment that you described. So, even their ability to be able to stockpile more cash, if they wanted to, they can't. They're having to to dip into their cash uh savings or checking accounts or whatever to pay the bills just to carry on their life. Uh so why we're seeing that even in the bullion broker business is that we get more and more calls for people selling uh than we used to and fewer calls for people buying and they say they they wish they could afford it but they just can't right now because there's times are so tough. They have to liquidate to pay their taxes. They have to liquidate because of medical expenses. They have to liquidate because uh they they're going to have to move or various various needs. it's uh it or they trying to help younger generation to afford to buy their starter home that kind of thing. Uh any any uh further thoughts from you on this combination of confluence of factors uh that it's beyond just the psychological awareness and the awakening that that's a depleting resource but rather also at the same time just being impoverished to the point where they're they're no longer able to save. they're actually having to spend out their savings just as the debing country has been racking up trillion dollar deficits as you as you described. >> Yes. If if you haven't been stacking gold and silver, uh you might have a very large stock portfolio and stock prices have so far continued to rise and so you can feel good about that aspect of your life. And uh I think that a lot of people realize when they go to the grocery store especially and when they see their auto insurance, their homeowners insurance, they can tell that the bills have gone up. In the past with, you know, inflation in the United States, uh your auto insurance and your house insurance and your property tax were always going up, but by a very small percentage. and you'd have to actually go back and look at your checkbook or your account to tell how much it had gone up. Uh but now you know uh that those bills are going up significantly and those people are not making it up. I mean that your auto insurance bill is going up because it costs more uh if your car is in a collision or something. It's going to cost a lot more money to get the new parts and to pay the labor and everything else associated with that. if your house burns down, uh you know, the the uh raw materials and the labor to make it good, all of that's gone up significantly. So, these companies are not just making these bills up. The electric company is not making the fact that electricity is going up in price rapidly. Um, in many cases, they're not even producing it. They're buying it from somebody else. So, you know, all of these things are very, very real. And when I look at all the government statistics and all the private statistics and I look at the distribution of wealth and income in the United States, I see probably more than one half, maybe as high as 23 of the pop population who has uh experienced significant impoverishment um since the COVID affair and the massive increase in the money supply that the Federal Reserve unleashed on the American population um that was associated with that breakout of the COVID flu and uh you know trillions and trillions of dollars that greatly expanded the federal budget and you know the our our politicians our so-called representatives have never done anything to cut back the budgets after COVID so they just continue on ex uh spending everything that they spent during the emergency and then of course their regular 5 to 10 to 15% increase on everything. And so you know that that's just what they do. And normally you know if it if it's um if it's just on trend we have a hard time judging it. And this is the same thing that Misesus was saying about the stages one and stages two. If the inflation is low and the the inflation is steady, we don't really pay much attention to it. We don't react to it. We just do the same thing over and over again, which is perfectly reasonable and rational. I mean, that's the way humans are. Um, and it takes a while for us to catch on to what the government is up to and what these those people at the Federal Reserve, what they're actually up to. Uh, they don't seem to care at all about uh the American middle class, the working class. You know, they'll talk about their double their dual mandate about labor and inflation, but that's not it at all. They're they're two mandates. the true mandates are to uh finance the government debt. Okay, that's the big thing that they're into is to uh finance the government debt. That's what they do. They buy government bonds. That's what their job is. So that's one of their mandates is to help manage the government debt. And the other is to bail out Wall Street, to bail out the stock market, to uh you know to keep interest rates low so stocks uh go up in value. And then when the stock market crashes or the banks get in trouble, the Fed comes in and bails out the banks, the big banks who work for the Fed and the stock market, which is where they get their people from. You know, Jay Powell was from, you know, Wall Street. So that's how it works. So when they talk about, well, the dual mandate is making sure inflation is under control and making sure everybody gets a job, that is a total BS story. Oh gosh, there's so much everything you're saying. It just triggers uh reality with with interviews we've had. We talked with Dr. Judy Shelton, who was part of the Trump first administration. She talked about uh Bernanki and others behind uh doors with Greenspan and talking about this admission that the stable maintaining of stable prices. They said why don't we look at that as uh actually maintaining a stable rate of inflation because that's what people and I think it was Yellen who said that that that makes people actually feel better uh to to know that their the numbers on their check checking uh paycheck are going up or that sort of thing or their statements. So that idea that people actually appreciate it when you see they see the numbers get bigger. So we should keep uh debasing the currency uh out of our out of our you know consideration for the common man rather than holding to the value of the currency steady. Um there's there's so many aspects of that. Uh in your article recently, you also talked about geopolitical chaos, tariffs and sanctions and other reasons besides simply this drunken sailor debting and debasement of the currency why there's a mass pivot away from trust and faith in the dollar or the US Treasury. Can you underscore that so people understand there's more going on here than just impoverishment through debasement? >> Yes. You know, this is all tied together really. It's it's monetary chaos, but this is also a very militant aggressive world that we live in right now. And things like tariffs and sanctions, uh, these are aggressive moves on the part of one government against another government. And we're, of course, uh, big players in this. We're the number one country in terms of sanctions. And now we've dropped our free trade, our relatively free trade heritage in favor of just uh personal vendetta type tariffs. Um and of course also one of the things that kicked off this period of monetary chaos and the subsequent big increase in gold and silver prices was when uh we sanctioned the Russians and we in in essence took their um their USO holdings of treasuries their reserves of their central bank. we just took them um as part of our sanctions of of Russia and it it you know whatever um we can't really get into what happens before that um but this is just an ongoing uh escalation that's uh very much of military uh in its nature and tariffs and sanctions are really just the first steps and this is very unfortunate. This is very concerning. And of course, you know, this is why other central banks have lost faith in the US dollar. They've lost faith in US government bonds. So certainly we should not have any faith in the US dollar and US government bonds. if even if other central banks now have lost faith in it and of course just recently as you know uh gold has become the number one reserve asset on the balance sheets of central banks so the central banks around the world are dropping US treasuries long-term medium-term uh government bonds and debt in favor of holding gold and uh you know I can't blame Um it makes perfect sense. I mean gold was always um you know the number one uh asset international reserve asset for both the private sector and the public sector. And uh you know central banks realize that the the the trusting system of Brett and Woods and the subsequent dollar denomination where we more or less played fair with other countries is over. And so they've they've taken to replacing uh the dollar assets on their balance sheets with gold. And uh that's a big reason why gold has uh gone up in value because central banks have been big purchasers. But certainly I think that if central banks don't trust the US dollar and they're getting out of the US dollar, I think that's really good evidence that everybody should be wake up and uh and do the same thing. It's often ill illuminating for the little guy to see what the big money are doing and not listen to what they say, not listen to all the spin that goes on, all of the misdirection that says, you know, we're doing this for the good of the people. Janet Yellen saying, "Yeah, people would prefer this or whatever." Just look what they're doing. Another thing that they're doing, if you say they, uh, those are the highest parts of the food chain as insiders, the CEOs of even the magnificent seven corporations that have been the high-f flyers, the darlings of Wall Street for the past couple of years are selling at a ratio of 7 to1 uh, over buying in the market as we see it today. Any comments on that before we turn our attention to the gold silver ratio? >> Oh yeah. I mean, the Magnificent 7 is toast. Uh I think that uh you know that it's very soon that that whole thing is going to roll over. Uh the seven magnificent stocks are no longer all that magnificent. And they you know they talk about record setting days on the stock market, but it's they're really only marginal uh increases. And I think you're right. We need to focus in on the fact that the the wealthy and the big players uh are not only turning to gold, but now they're turning to silver. With gold prices up so high, the Russians and the Saudis uh the big players um big investors are getting out of the stock market and moving into things like physical silver. And uh and so I I you know, I really regret it. the fact that so many of the little guys are being forced into selling their silver stacks at this time. Uh, you know, they see it as, well, they've made a lot of money and they've got to pay their taxes or they got to pay the insurance bill or they've got a medical bill. You know, that's very, very regrettable. They're getting squeezed. But you know these big players they are definitely uh you know if we can follow their actions I think that what they're telling us is that they're getting out of the stock market. They're getting into um hard assets particularly gold and silver just like foreign central banks and they're getting out of the US dollar. The dollar is falling precipitously this year. Um, and you know, investors in Europe and Asia are getting very worried about their investments in the United States because even though they're nominally going up in value, the value of the US dollar is down, I think, 10%. So that when they translate those gains uh back into Europe and stuff, uh they realize that they haven't gained anything in terms of their um in terms of their local currency and it the other currencies are not in much better shape. I mean the Japanese are in chaos. The British are are teetering on disaster. The French are all locked up. Um, you know, so we're not the only basket case in town. This is something that's going on around the world and many of the major countries in the world uh especially the allies of the United States are are in serious trouble. Germany is trying to print its way out uh of a deep dark recessionary period. So um you know things are uh the the real economy uh is showing the adverse effects of this constant inflation and debt. And when the real economy contracts and it that you know when you see stagflation or we see a recession or a stock market crash and the economy is not able to produce as much. it can't employ as much labor because there's not enough savings left in the economy, then there's not enough money for payroll. There's not enough money for investment. And the economy produces fewer fewer goods and it doesn't matter what the government does to hand out stuff to people, we're just not going to be producing uh very much and everybody's going to feel that pain. One of the things you mentioned there was uh the the awakening that happens when your uh activities or assets look uh valuable when priced in US dollars, these declining US dollars. But then when you convert back into real things, you realize how impoverished you are. Uh that that awakening has not been missed on the part of international holders of of either US treasuries or US dollars and they're divesting. As you have said in your talk recently, the the two curves of uh how many what percent of international holdings are in US treasuries has been declining. The amount of foreign holding of central banks in gold has been increasing and we just hit a uh a crossover point. Do you want to touch on that before we move on? Yeah. I mean, the fact that central banks don't trust other central banks and they're they want to be more independent and less dependent on each other, I think is very very significant. Um, it's probably, you know, a a smart move. It's probably a good move that individual central banks are are are actually have more gold on their balance sheet. Um, but it's a very bad sign. And it's a sign that the the existing system is breaking down. It's all based on trust and confidence. It's all based on that trust and confidence. Trust in the dollar, confidence in the dollar. And the dollar has fallen significantly. And everybody the big investors who you know that their wealth is dependent upon that they see the big fall we've seen in the uh dollar index this year. Uh and the dollar index is just a relative measure versus the other currencies and the other currencies are falling in terms of their purchasing power. So there's a mad scramble and chaos has not you know broken out. It's not at a riotous stage at this point because not a lot of people have caught on to the problem and most people have not caught on to the real solution. We've been uh interested in talking with you briefly. I know we're running long on time, but about your observations about the gold silver ratio. You talked about that when you appeared in our channel long time ago with my son Elijah. Can you update us on your latest observations about the gold silver ratio and why people should pay attention? Yeah, I did an experiment back in May, I think it was. Uh the gold silver ratio was really in very high level territories. It was a more than a 100 ounces of silver to equal 1 ounce of gold. And so I went through the the motions of making that exchange where I took 1 ounce of gold, I traded it in, and then purchased a 100 ounces of silver. And you think, well, what's the difference? you know, why bother with that? Well, um I felt that we were in a very much in a stage where the metal prices were both going up and that because the gold silver ratio was at historic high levels that that that um that that ratio was going to fall and it has fallen. I think I started it it was like 104 to1 and it's now somewhere like 86 uh to one over a 3month period. Now of course both of the metals have increased but it means that silver has increased relative to the increase in um in the price of gold. So, uh, if you do the accounting on it, it would be like I, you know, I took 1 ounce of gold, I got 100 ounces of silver, and my 100 ounces of silver cover the increase in the price of gold, plus I had the equivalent of 14 extra ounces of silver. So, it was a good move. And, you know, some of that's based on luck or interpretation of the market. Uh but we were at extremely high levels. It's anything over a hundred is historically high and it's fallen down into the mid to upper 80s at this point. And uh I expect it to continue to fall. Um, you know, if if this policy agenda by the Fed and other central banks continues, uh, I expect that ratio to fall for both metals to continue to rise unevenly over time and for the silver uh, to increase in relative value uh, over time. And of course, um, you know, I don't know how far that's going to go. I mean, Washington could fix this situation. They could cut spending dramatically. They could stop the printing presses. They could stop paying public employees and cut back on their payments to social security benefits and so forth. Cut the military. Uh I don't think they're going to do that. But eventually this is going to get very very serious. And if we do get into hyperinflation, I mean you could see the gold silver ratio falling down to like 20. Um, I'm not I'm not I don't think that's going to happen. I hope that's not going to happen. Uh, but there's a long ways to go from where we are right now to plausibly pause plausibly what probably is going to happen. >> Help us connect the dots there in your thought process. Why would hyperinflation tend to correlate with a falling gold silver ratio? >> Well, because silver is going to rise in relative importance. the uh that the central banks would uh probably become less of accumulators and uh maybe even have to disperse uh their gold to somehow soften this the brunt of inflation whereas silver is a monetary metal that's actually used in commerce. So I would anticipate that when we get into a hyperinflation that people actually start using uh silver to make certain types of purchases. Now, you won't be able to pay your electric bill with silver, but there are probably a lot of things um that you will be able to uh pay uh with the use of silver. If you're active actively trying to pay uh with silver, you're starting to find people who are interested in receiving silver rather than dollars because they don't have any access. They don't really know. They don't they don't watch the show, man. Um, so we need to get more people aware of all this uh so that they can help themselves. But I've noticed that, you know, people are very appreciative to get silver tips and uh other people are appreciative of being uh paid in silver. So, you know, and that's with a 3% supposed rate of inflation. Um you know you can imagine if the if the government's measure was 10 or 15% uh hyperinflation is actually uh technically known as you know anywhere from 20 to 50% price inflation per month as measured by uh the government's statistics. So, we have a long ways to go till we get to an official hyperinflation. And that's why I say that we're only on the on-ramp to the road for hyperinflation. And there's every good indication that, you know, rationally we could stop the printing presses. Rationally, we could slash the budget and stop this problem in its tracks. I just don't think that's going to happen. And I think the political class is super super arrogant. I I don't think that they show any appreciation for the people they're supposedly representing. I don't think they really care about the rank and file citizenry of this country or any country. Uh I think they're in it for themselves. The people at the Fed, the people in Congress, I think I I don't think we can depend on them whatsoever. I think we have to depend. This is too serious. It has something that's that's potentially so dangerous to our standard of living that we have to step forward. We can't wait uh for these bozos uh to uh to come to the rescue because there's no indication whatsoever that they're going to do anything to help us. We have to help ourselves. >> Uh you mentioned there along the way that uh people will rise to using silver for ordinary transactions because it's an honest money. It's honest currency. Um, we are seeing a movement among the states, not at the federal level so much, but at the movement among the states bringing out legal tender laws for gold and silver. Uh, it was 14 states, then it was 17, 19. It's getting to be like 22 states that are that are seriously looking at this. And if you people go to soundmoneydefense.org or perhaps at the Mises Institute. There may be uh current information about that as well as far as this movement among the states within the US to establish for the good of their people the freedom and the right to choose to use uh sound, true, honest money such as gold or silver. And if people want to do it right now today, uh there's a link in the description of this video for Glint Pay, which is a it looks like a Mastercard debit card, but when you use it, nobody knows at the checkout that you're actually uh using grams of gold that are in your account uh to uh to pay for your purchases. So that your your instead of having your dollars sitting in your checking account being stolen for the inflation, you've got grams of gold sitting in your glint play account in a in a in a vault in Zurich, Switzerland, and you're maybe holding their value or even increasing in value in between the times that you're spending a little bit of it along the way. Um, yeah, the uh one of our students at the institute uh actually started that sound money defense league. I'm very proud of what his work. He's been incredibly productive with almost no resources available to him. Uh and he's hit um you know a live vein in the American public and he's done some great work. Uh JP Cortez and uh you know and I think this is what really I haven't written about this yet. Um but uh I'll give you the punchline which is I think what's going to force uh the politicians hands is when the states that have already woken up to the problem uh you know states like Utah and Idaho and Florida uh Texas and so forth um once those states start threatening to secede from the Union of the United States that's when they're going to wake up and start doing something about it um either as a result of outright secession or just the threat of secession. But I think instead of uh getting to utter destruction of our society through hyperinflation that the states are going to come to the rescue by threatening secession from the United States. >> That's major uh talk about a major event. Uh you've written recently or is about to get published an article about black swans which uh you can explain to us why these sort of seinal or page turning or tectonic plate shifting events can come uh apparently out of nowhere and what even might have been completely unexpected or unpredicted uh can suddenly be the thing that the straw that breaks the camel's back and all of a sudden you're going off in a new direction. What do you see about that? And what do you think people should be perhaps prepared for? >> Well, you know, I um before the black swan, it was Keynesian uh animal spirits that supposedly swayed the economy into booms and busts. Uh black swans gave us a different level of explanation that something real happened that kicked things into a boom or kicked things into a bust. Uh but what I tried to show in that article that that talk was that it really just represents what's going on fundamentally in the economy and and then once I described that I started talking about some of the things that are potentially black swans that are existing right now. Uh certainly the artificial intelligence situation where they're spending money hand overfist not really knowing where they're going and that without any completed plans uh for the electricity and the data centers and the investment and and all the rest without any real ma roadmap for customers and revenues and so forth. But there's a lot of other things. I mean, we're living in an everything bubble where the trillions of dollars that the Fed has created has really set off um bubbles uh in in most areas of the economy. You know, traditionally, real estate is a big one. We've been concerned about commercial real estate markets. Uh so, that's certainly a possibility. cryptocurrency has been, you know, has gone from 10,000 to 110,000. Uh, we don't really understand that all that well. I mean, the American public, the people who have been purchasing cryptocurrency, they don't even really understand it. I've talked to many people who have invested in cryptocurrency and they have no idea of what it is or why it's valuable. They just own it. So, you know, that's a classic type of area where black swans develop, black swans emerge, and you know, it's a great news story and it kicks off uh you know, a crisis of some sto some sort, but ultimately it's it's still the Fed behind the curtain that's been increasing the money supply and lowering interest rates and, you know, and creating the fundamental reasons uh for these booms and busts. So, you know that there's a lot of potential uh black swans out there and I go through a lot of them uh in the podcast tomorrow. We'll put a link to that podcast uh in the description of this video for those who want to follow up on that and for people who want to find out more about what they can learn at the Mises Institute and how should they get connected with that and your work? >> Well, we have the one of the largest economic web pages in the world. That's m i ses.org. We have tons of articles. We have like five podcasts. Uh we publish books and newsletters. Uh we have tons of video and audio lectures and uh information sources. Uh we as I said we publish books. We sell books that are discounted uh price on everything that's important in the economy. So, you really uh like with your program uh your your viewers need to go to misuses.org uh and get informed, stay informed. Uh you can subscribe for free. There's no, you know, we don't charge for uh any of our services other than the books and other than our conferences. And we have conferences dedicated to students and professors and the general public. So, please come and check us out. Uh I'm sure you'll be glad you did. Ludwig van Misesus was the major champion uh over the last 200 years for the gold standard. Um and he knew all the reasons why the gold standard was so important for peace and prosperity and increases in the standard of living and uh you know and that's what we're dedicated to here. about three times or so during our whole talk today, you mentioned unless people take this action, unless they like early movers move out of harm's way. Give everyone a a clear idea of what you're thinking that is available for people who want to take action. I mean, it's never too late to do what you can do now. We don't have the past we have today. What is it that people in your view can and should do to take care and protect their famil family's futures? you know, when you look at the um the alternatives, you know, government bonds are not going to be a very good alternative. I think real estate is overblown at this point and artificially inflated and I don't trust cryptocurrency at these levels. So the only real tangible reliable um asset I think is gold and silver um hard assets in general. But I think the easiest and and thing that anybody can independently do without, you know, relying on anybody else except yourself is to get on the phone, uh get in contact with a reputable dealer, uh get some input from uh other people who know what they're doing in this market. uh get some recommendations from other people and you know start uh getting on the go on your own personal gold standard, gold or silver standard and start diversifying away from anything that's dollar denominated. Well, we've been so grateful Mark Thornton from the Mises Institute. Thank you for coming back on Liberty and Finance and reminding us of all the the uh resources that are available there. We're grateful for your presence here and we'll make sure that it's not as long as it has been until the next time we have you back on. >> My pleasure. Done again.