S4 E1: Tipping Point Extravaganza

The premiere episode for season FOUR of "Money, Markets & New Age Investing” is a MUST LISTEN!

Greg notes FIVE KEY "tipping points" that have ALL pushed past their "stabilization angle". The tipping points are now TIPPED!

The Age of Polarization is continuing to intensify, and 2025 is just a PREVIEW of what's to come in 2026. Today, Greg shares his insights and vision as to what the future holds, as he has personally experienced this macro-market-monetary evolution for the last four decades! 

And remember to follow the Podcast on Instagram, NOT Instacart, as Greg mistakenly calls it in a funny mis-speak, type in the title of the podcast to find it or simply use the link below, also on X @money_podcast, and follow Greg personally @WeldonLIVE. All of our updated links are available below.

And to get Greg's just published 145 page Special Report, full of easy to read (and really "cool") charts that offer details on US Debt-Deficits, the US Consumer, the Housing market, Employment, Inflation, Stagflation, Fed Policy, the USD...and the Metals-Mining markets, with their superior performance this year, as was presciently "called" by Greg, email him directly at gregweldon@weldononline.com 

Transcript

Season Four Kickoff And Big Themes

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, Greg Weldon here with another episode of Money, Markets, and New Age Investing. Today we start kickoff premiere, the first episode of season four. And what's interesting about this now, having done over, I think this is my 42nd episode, something like that, been in going into my 42nd year in the business, literally this week. So it's kind of interesting to look at some of the things that you know I said in the 80s, some of the things certainly I said in my book in 2006, some of the things I said in 2025, some of what we see coming. And really to hone it into why I originally started this podcast dating back to my 2020 Age of Aquarius speech at the Vancouver uh World Outlook Conference is 1800 people and talking about polarization and how the astrophysics, the science, the orbit of the solar system where we are, uh in the Orion spur, Perseus arm, Sagittarius arm, Milky Way, 230 million year orbit, 25,800 year orbit, a lot going on. I've talked about it, I'm not gonna uh bring all that into play today. But what makes it interesting is to kind of see the polarization. And when you're talking about polarization, you talk about, you know, everything stretched, each end of the spectrum uh uh vibrating, resonating at a higher frequency, uh, with a little bit more volatility, uh, of ultimately to get more violent, in fact. But also in the context of the bigger picture trends that have been in place since I started in the business, primarily, really, the polarization of wealth and income in this country. I said this, and maybe I've even said this on this podcast once before. Remember very well going to a hockey game at Madison Square Garden, come from downtown, World Trade Center, was working in the Silver Pit and Commodities Exchange, the ColeMex. I was with a couple of my buddies. And we're on the subway going e-train, taking the e-train to the garden. And, you know, just remember having a conversation around, you know, the problem. This is just like when communism fell, and saying that, you know, ultimately capitalism fell. Every system has failed. Socialism, communism, dictatorship, democracy, republic, whatever, kingdom, whatever it might be. I mean, kingdoms are the one that doesn't fail, but let's not go there. Um but talking about how already from 1971, we went off the gold standard, how the polarization of wealth was a problem, and how this would ultimately destroy us. I'm talking about like talking about this in like 1984, 1985, that ultimately this is going to bring capitalism down. And then democracy, well, the problem with democracy is we've come become it used to be multiple parties, and you know, you had barely get a plurality, let alone a majority, sometimes at conventions because there are so many subparties of parties, and it was you know very much broader, more broad than it is now, where it's a two-party system, which serves to what polarize us, divide us, and don't you see it now everywhere? But what's interesting about it is the tipping points. We have so many tipping points converging right here, right now, kind of this time and space, all of it fits my 42 years, the 50-year cycle. I've seen this movie, I've seen every bit of this cycle, and to where we get back to my book in 2006 where I called the change in the cycle, which ended up being QE, which I said it would be. But not here to pat myself on the back. It's what are we gonna do next? And to understand what we have to do next is to understand the tipping points. And now I've been saying this for a while. I've certainly been saying this, you know, on and off since 2008, but really since 2020. And now it's that that phrase is catching catching on. It's pretty interesting to see it. Smart people are starting to kind of see what I've been seeing, all right. And it goes back to a piece I did called Grains of Sand, all right. And you know, it's kind of sand's in the hourglass, all right. When are you gonna flip the hourglass? That could be a good analogy, too. But I go back to Pete Seeger, and we're talking back in the 60s and 70s, kind of an anti-war movement was what this was all about at the time, but it fits now, perfectly applies. And Pete Pete Seeger, and I'm happy to send you this piece. I have all kinds of pictures and science around what defines a tipping point. There is actually such a thing in physics as a tipping point, all right? And Pete Seeger knew this. And what here's his comment. I'm gonna quote him directly. One side is a bunch of us with teaspoons, adding a little bit of sand at a time. One day, all those teaspoons will add up and the whole thing will flip, and people will say, How did it happen so fast? Why? Because when you reach that tipping point, as you know, the seesaw is now in motion, and gravity is in play in the whole nine yards, and it's going to flip quickly. All right. But how long does it take to add weight to one side of the seesaw to get the seesaw to flip? Well, this is something that is known uh uh in physics, the rotational dynamics and the stabilization angles. All right, so I could bore you with all the details there, but it really doesn't matter. Okay. Bottom line is it's a change in the equilibrium point, and that is bottom line. All right. So the you know, you say, how did it happen so fast? Well, we could say the whole debt thing, my black hole analogy, works perfectly with the uh seesaw and the sand analogy. And this is the point of this piece was to add kind of another analogy to the black hole. When you look at it this way, it's very interesting too. All right. So when you talk about the spoonfuls of sand, that's the debt. All right, and the other side of the seesaw is GDP, and when the debt gets really heavy, it lifts GDP. The problem is this is an inverse seesaw, okay? So when you are basically saying the debt gets so heavy, you know, you have to keep pouring more debt. And to the degree that the GDP is now falling, you're you're upside down. So you know, you have to get you you can't you can't reverse this because you need to get GDP to be heavier than debt, but you can't get more GDP without more debt because we're overindebted and we're at$1.86 of new debt that needs to be created to create one dollar of new GDP growth. According to the academic theories that we would apply to that. All right. That's the black hole. We've already crossed the event horizon, we've already reached the tipping point that Seesaw has flipped. The debt is in control now, okay, and we have lived off debt off credit. All right, going all the way back, and the times where you see credit kind of get whacked or you see the economy gets whacked, you know, final demand. Final demand's key. And consumer and services related to consumer, still 71% of the GDP. So we're not export you know denominated. We are consumer consumption denominated. And we have lived off credit all this time since 71. The rights of senior rich for the dollar, which are now fading too. And that's a big part of what we're going to talk about today. All right. We're talking about 74, 75, then 79, 81, 1987, 1990, 91. Okay, 1997, global debt crisis and FX crisis, Brazil, Thailand, Malaysia, Russia, 1998, long-term capital management, 2000, tech bubble, 2008. We know what happened in 2020. But that gets back to my book, because everything I said in my book would happen has happened. And it's the same now, only way more intense. Way more. Because this is the road we're on. We can't turn around now. The last time we could have organically fixed this issue and had the seesaw in balance to not be in the throes of a debt black hole would have been really 1990, 91, 92. And then you had Clinton with some budget surpluses. It would have fed off well. That was the last time we had an organic uh recession, if you will. I define that by a recession where you're paying down debt and getting healthier. That didn't happen. And when 2000, when the tech bubble crashed, yeah, I mean, that was a big deal. All right, the Fed was very aggressive, and they weren't yet, you know, monetizing public debt, but they were as aggressive as you could without monetizing public debt. And that's kind of what started the ball rolling. And then, of course, you see 2008, QE changed everything. But now you see it everywhere as I predicted you would in 2020. And this goes far back ahead of 2020. So something I've been studying since I was in college and studied some of this astrophysics under one of the greats, uh Anthony Avini, at Colgate University. All right. So what we see it now is in the relationship between politics and money. You've hit the tipping point. I mean, I think this whole doge slash Minnesota Medicaid nightmare, all right, what's going on in California using taxpayer money to house, feed, clothe, and you know, basically allow uh illegal people in this country to live, a lot of them, certainly criminals, not all of them, of course. I mean, I think that's overplayed a little bit, maybe, uh, on the on the on the right, but to whatever extent, I mean, the left's kind of lost their mind. When you talk about you're using taxpayer money to do all these things. Now you have Somalians, you know, fleecing the fleecing the taxpayers in Minnesota for hundreds of millions, if not over a billion dollars. And some people are saying it's as high as 8 billion. I mean, what that doesn't stand, okay? They've been exposed. This is being called out, all right? Tax dollars are being stolen, they're being spent recklessly and irresponsibly, as Doge proved. It's being, you know, subject to fraud. It's under the influence of people that are lying to us all the time, becoming more and more of a welfare state. We could talk about the number of people on food stamps and how it's increased over the last 15 years, and all these stats are kind of mind-bending. All right, let alone the biggest beneficiaries of all this reckless spending are employees of the public. All right. And it's the biggest nut that the government has is paying their own employees, which is part of the doge thing, which was right on. Uh, this is even worse in Canada. And I give a heads up to my buddy Grant Longhurst, uh, who works with uh Michael Campbell, and they do a it used to be CKW, now it's uh Money Talks in that podcast. Mike pointed out some of the, excuse me, Grant pointed out some of the stats in Canada, which maybe look at the stats in the US around how much of this spending actually goes to public employees' salaries, and how much do they actually make? The percentage of them that make over$100,000 is mind-blowing. So all of this is kind of being exposed for being so polarized where you now are upside down and you have this representation with no taxation. So an illegal citizen is just as represented. They can vote, they get health care, they get free everything without taxation. So we're completely upside down, and that's the best way to look at it. We we abdicated from England, okay, we seceded and created the United States because we're being taxed with no representation. In this case, now it's upside down, it's completely flipped because now it's no representation. I mean, representation with no taxation. Now, why is it working? Why is this working? Why are so many people voting for Mandami, for AOC, for Newsom, for Waltz? I mean, who the heck would vote for that guy? I mean, that's mind-blowing to me, but that's just my personal, you know, view of it. But, you know, what's what is you kind of say, what why isn't it working? And to me, it's like a question that a lot of me and people that I know kind of ask ourselves what is wrong with these people that go out and deface a Charlie Kirk memorial? Why do you feel the need to do that, acting out like that? Number one, it's being dissociated from the planet electronically. We've talked about that, you know, 7.83 hertz, the vibration of the human body versus what used to be the vibration of the crust of the planet was always the same. Now it's 8.29 hertz, and you know, it spikes higher, and of course you're out of touch. But the other part of this gets back to the bigger picture polarization of wealth and income. At some point, when you have what a phrase, the one percenters, okay, I mean, there you go. That means the 99% are hurting. So, of course, they're gonna rise up and vote in someone that's gonna tell them what they want to hear, whether it's true or not. All right. So there's a really interesting uh book that was uh published recently. I'm not sure when it was written because it was published post you know, post-death by an author that didn't want to publish it because it's so controversial. But it's really interesting because one of the questions is like, what's wrong with these people? And it's like, well, frankly, there's nothing wrong with these people. Right? There's absolutely nothing wrong with these people. They're pissed off, and it's like they've been kind of, you know, they they feel like they don't have an upward ladder, that there's not a glass ceiling, that there's a cement ceiling that's no at a level that's below their head, so they have to duck constantly just to survive. All right. I like that. That's pretty good. Just coming up with that. That's a good one. So the bottom line here though is this this thought process that was posted in Leviathan and its enemies by Samuel Francis. I'm gonna read part of this, uh, talk about this book, okay? All right. This describes the political condition which is known now as anarcho-tyranny, which is kind of anarchy but under tyranny. All right, anarchy, anarcho tyranny describes a political condition. I'm gonna read a lot, so I'll try to read slow, but I don't want this podcast to be too long. All right, political condition which the state abandons its duty to restrain real threats to public order while smothering the daily lives of law-abiding citizens under layers of surveillance, regulation, and punishment. Remember, this is written a while ago, okay? You could you could see someone writing this today, and that's how appropriate it is today. So that's what makes it really interesting. All right, now continue. What results is a strange inversion. Violent criminals and rioters walk free while ordinary citizens are fined, censored, or even arrested for words they type into their phone. Why what should the bedrock of justice, the equal application of law, become a weapon of selective enforcement used to intimidate the compliant while ignoring the truly dangerous? That's right on. Continuing, old forms of authority such as family, church, local enterprise, give way to sprawling bureaucracies and corporate behemoths, organizations devoted less to the common good than to efficiency, control, and the management of populations. These entities are largely insulated from accountability, and they exist first and foremost to perpetuate themselves. Boom! Bam! Mic drop, holy mackerel. But there's more. I continue by allowing chaos to simmer, in quote, in uh parentheses, unpunished crime, lawless streets, constant insecurity. Tell me that's not everywhere now. The regime manufactures this pretext to gain further control. Bam. Further. Meanwhile, the full weight of state authority falls on those who obey the rules precisely because they are easiest to police. It is safer for the state to punish an office worker for an ill-judged social media post than to confront gangs who rule neighborhoods with impunity. It's easier to squeeze citizens who file their taxes than to discipline the oligarch who launders billions of dollars. Disorder deter distracts, tyranny pacifies. Boom. I mean, that is right on. It really is. And then it goes even further. And I just have to read this. I'm just a lot of reading a lot of words, but it's just really so appropriate. Tell me it's not spot on. All right. Now, this is talking about the someone that wrote about that, knew the author, knew he had written this book, and when he died, this is the person that published it. Now he's talking about the book. I believe this manuscript grew out of the desire to correct an intellectual deficiency on the right, meaning the right side of the political spectrum. All right, conservatives. I remember discussing with Sam so many times the American right's apparent lack of curiosity about the socio-historical nature of its political circumstances. No one ever seems to explore why the left is ascendant culturally and politically while the right is consigned to a powerless fringe. All right, now that's not necessarily true right now with Trump in power, but it certainly has been, all right, to whatever degree. Um, even really kind of you know dating back to uh to Obama. All right. But this is interesting because I agree with this and I would put myself on the right. The right lacks the pathology to explain the power of its opponents and shows no interest in finding one. In other words, they're all nuts. All right. They have, you know, we can't we don't understand like what's wrong with these people. That's exactly right. I continue. Thanks partly to Marxism, whose ideological permutations are legion, the left has assembled a vast array of social and economic critiques that are the foundation for its political strategies. That line is exactly spot on true now. Further, continue. Organizations on the left typically focus with missions whose operating strategies are based on critiques of the socioeconomic power relationships and the perceived weaknesses or injustices in society. Boom. And they continue. One more. Although it was wildly wrong to think it could fashion a coalition of students and workers, and this goes back to the 60s again with the anti-war movement, uh, and talk about the SDS, which was the Students for a Democratic Society, which was in the 1960s. This guy was a member, so these guys are old, and this guy, you know, died, and then they published a book that he had written a long time ago, not even determining when he wrote that. But I continue. Um, the SDS determined that the university is a potential base and agency and movement of social change, and it has launched campaigns that did, in fact, help turn the American universities into an extremely effective apparatus working for the left's agenda. Bam, mic drop. Wow, that's good stuff. But it gets back to the polarization of wealth. That's why this is happening. That's why this is happening, and this is why I said it would happen in the 1980s. Because you can't have 1% with everything and expect that the 99% are gonna sit there and take it forever, especially when the uh situation gets worse and worse and worse for the lower. And that's what's happened over the last five years. Since the pandemic, because of inflation, it has put pressure on the lower half of the income scale to a degree that's about to explode into outright rebellion. Seriously. I mean, we have multiple tipping points that we're gonna talk about today, and then we have a huge one right at the end. Debt to GDP. We kind of you know just talked about that. All right, that's the black hole. But also, wealth and income is a tipping point. All right, we're gonna actually talk, we just talked about that, but also consumer is the tipping point, debt versus savings, all this, that's the next topic. Then it's the labor market, which is key. It's key because the consumer's dying because of inflation and high high delinquency rates and too much credit card debt, and they don't have enough savings, and their uh real income is actually now negative in some cases for small businesses. What's the what's the consumer supposed to do? All right, you throw a dagger into the back of the consumer if all of a sudden the labor market falls apart because of AI. And that's what's coming. And the Feds telling us this, they know this, and then that's the Fed's conundrum. Are they why are they waiting for that to happen before kind of addressing it ahead of time? Well, maybe they feel they can't do anything about it. We're gonna talk about all of this, but at the end of the day, when When the Fed is looking at this, they're gonna understand they need the growth to service the debt, otherwise, you have a depression. They're not gonna choose depression over reflation. They're not, not ever. And if they do, then Powell goes down in history as the worst central banker in history. Let's look at the tipping point of the consumer. All right. First of all, PCE spending on a monthly basis is now greater than disposable income. I mean, that's the problem. That's been going on since really kind of 2022 when inflation kicked in. All right. That's the debt black hole. Consumer's in his own debt black hole. Savings for the consumer right now is around 1.2 trillion. It's actually risen. It was 800 billion not too long ago. But that's good because you know they're gonna need it. But it's still not enough. It's not even close to enough. It's pitiful relative to the debt. All right. Credit card debt is 1.4. We're calling it 1.4, 1.36, but it's one point, it's called 1.4. Credit card debt savings 1.2. So credit card debt alone takes away savings. All right. Retail sales,$770 billion a month. Savings only covers$1.6 months of spend of retail sales. Okay. Uh the debt only covers$1.8 months, and that would be if you doubled credit card debt, it would only get you$1.8 months of retail sales. See where I'm going with this? I mean, there's no cushion, there's no margin for error. All right. Disposable um income, all right, uh, is 1.93 billion. Check that. Uh yeah, 1.93 um billion, 1.93 trillion a month on average, taking the annualized number, which is what the Commerce Department or the Bureau of Labor Statistics give us. Um excuse me, that's the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Then we talk about 1.93, all right. You cover only 18.8 days of savings. You cover only 32 days of credit card debt. I mean, you don't have enough income or savings to support anything beyond two months of consumption in any way that you look at the statistics and the numbers. All right. And let's look at it this way. The growth in credit card debt is 3.0%. It's one of the lowest ever. All right. We've had lower, we've had negative, but very rarely, and we're gonna talk more about that. But 3.0 on total consumer credit, not credit card debt. Total no, I'm sorry, on credit card debt. 3% year over year. All right, year over year growth. Um, consumer credit. I'm sorry. All right, yeah, I want to make sure I get this right because we're gonna talk about credit card debt too more. This consumer credit, only 3% a year-over-year increase. That's inflation rate. I mean, it's never been upside down like that. It's its own tipping point in terms of inflation versus consumer credit. Revolving credit of$1.3 trillion is down$33 billion over the last 12 months, and it's been down year over year for 11 months in a row. That's virtually unprecedented. Unprecedented. And the number just published at minus 33.5 billion is the deepest of that entire period. The only other two times in U.S. history where revolving credit has declined for even one month was in January of 2009, April of 2020. The the global financial crisis, the pandemic, and now that's the only three times in U.S. history revolving credit has declined. I've warned you about a credit crunch. One of my first podcasts, we talked about Volker, Paul Volker, talking in '78 to feed high inflation versus what Powell said. And Volker said we can't have a credit crunch. Powell said we wouldn't mind seeing a little credit decline. It's Pandora's box. You can't open it just a little. One of my 2025 themes going into the year ahead outlook in last January was consumer cocoon. We have it. And unemployment rising is a dagger in a consumer. Well, guess what? Unemployment's rising. All right. Delinquencies are rising. All right. ADP shows us 2.5 income for small businesses percent year over year gain. All right. Small businesses, those with less than 20 employees, employ 18% of the population. So 20% of the workers out there, okay, are earning the same as inflation, which means their real earnings, their purchasing power, not changing at all. It's zero. Wargreens just cut hourly wages. I mean, we haven't heard that in years. All right. And this is all happening while delinquencies are on the rise. Subprime auto loan delinquencies hit a record high last month at six almost 6.7%. That's up 150 basis points. It's 150 basis points higher than the 2008 high. That's how much of a record high this number is. All right. Not only that, but in the in the most recent quarter from the Feds uh quarterly, New York Feds quarterly uh household debt survey, delinquency rates rose in the third quarter for every category. Auto loans, credit card loans, mortgages, and even HELOC's home equity loans, which is the only source of any real money for the consumers. But again, you're talking about the lower half of the income scale. They're not homeowners, they're not holding stocks, they don't have any of this benefit. So why do we think that people are pissed off in the streets and acting out in any way they can to show their distress? Foreclosures rose 55,000 and bankruptcies rose 141,000 in the third quarter. Student loan rates, now that they're back on the books, the delinquency rate skyrocketed to 9.4 from 7.8 just six months ago. It's a dagger when you have a now a rise in the unemployment rate to 4.4, the highest in almost three years, all right, and up from 3.2 just two years ago. The 12-month change in the total employed is less than 1%. Year over year, less than 1% employment growth. Two is considered kind of normal. You're at 0.78. You've been below 1% for five months in a row, and below 1.5% growth in total employment for the last 15 months. The only other times we've seen this 2007, 2008, and 2020. Are we seeing the connections? The number of people receiving unemployment benefits skyrocketed again here, too. 1.97 million. It's up 46% since the June 2022 low. Almost a 50% increase in people, number of people receiving unemployment benefits. How about layoffs? Layoffs posted 153,000 in October, and just yes, literally the end of last week, 71,000 for November. That's up 24% year over year, number one. But go back to October. October's layoffs of 153,000. First of all, fourth quarter, lowest layoffs of any quarter. It's seasonal. No one wants to lay off people right before Christmas. Plus, you got most people getting hired for seasonal jobs, right? So fourth quarter layoffs are like unheard of. 153,000 in October was the largest month for month of October increase in layoffs since 2003. 22 years ago. And when you're talking about the year-to-date number is 1.17 million have been laid off this year in the first 11 months of the year. Even in October, without the November increase, that was already more than last year's full year. You are a 54% on the year-to-date through November number versus last year's same period. Come on. Are we hearing these numbers? 54% more layoffs than last year. And hiring is at the lowest level in 15 years down 35% year over year. The labor market is deflating. It's virtually collapsing from the Fed's page book. Here's the words. Weaker labor demand, limiting headcounts, hiring freezes, attrition, rising health insurance uh prices are continue to put upward pressure on labor costs. This is margin compression. So what are businesses doing? All right, well, we already see that wages are not growing anymore. The real average hourly earnings has been zero for the last two months, down or zero three out of four months, and six out of the last nine months. Weekly earnings, the real weekly earnings at 1.8, this means above inflation, in April is now 0.7. This is the mission impossible. It's a consumer clinging to us by a single finger now to you know a technical precipice like Tom Cruise in the Mission Impossible movie. So all of this is really interesting because this pushes us back to AI and the other tipping point. The tipping point is the labor market and AI. This is a whole other tipping point. Why? Because here's the words from Challenger Gray with the layoffs. AI adoption was the main reason for the both for the increase in layoffs. Softening consumer spending, softening corporate spending, inflation-driven belt tightening, and hiring freezes, also noted. The Philly Fed, the Atlanta slash Richmond co-joint uh uh chief financial officer survey, and the ISM data have all used the same exact words on AI. The main purpose of all this capital spending that these companies are doing, not on you know the AI part, but all these other companies that are doing capital spending on AI, not on doing AI, but using AI, is to reduce reliance on human labor, quote unquote. I mean, hello. This is a problem. And who else is at a tipping point? The Federal Reserve. Because what are they gonna do? They're facing what I call the ultimate monetary conundrum. Okay? Rising prices and lower uh final demand. And the Fed itself is polarized. I mean, you got Mirian, Mirin and Waller want rate cuts. You got Schmidt, Hammock, and Logan have come out against rate cuts from Schmidt. Here's Schmidt's comments. With inflation too high, monetary policy should lean against demand growth. He wants to weigh on demand growth when we have 36 trillion in debt and another 18 trillion in household debt. Okay? And then he says, in the end, inflation is the Fed's responsibility and within our control. That's about as arrogant as it gets. And here's Powell's words. We have a strongly we have strongly differing views on the on the board. We have very disparate views. And then he says, people on the committee uh have higher estimates of the neutral rate than he does. The Fed's polarized, the situation's polarized, the choice is polarized, and it goes back to my book. All the way back to my book. And Collins on the Fed from the Dow said is the only one that gets it. You know, basically saying the upside risk to inflation can't be discounted after more than four years of above target prices. However, a softer labor market and generally stable inflation expectations reduce the risks. Therefore, she's voting for a cut. But she also says, and this is where it's great, I do not rule out alternative scenarios featuring higher and more persistent inflation with adverse labor market developments, both. In other words, stagflation. The first Fed member to come out, Powell kind of hinted around it, but she is staring straight up. I see an alternative scenario where we have stagflation. What do they do? They do what they always do. All right. Now, right now, the expectation is they're not going to cut. I don't care what they say on TV. I mean, you know, well, the open the overnight interest rate swap does actually suggest they're going to cut. The few the Fed funds futures market doesn't. So there's a dichotomy in the futures market pricing. I can tell you this the amount of rate cuts priced for next year have fallen. So they were looking for four to five. Now it's three with a very small chance of four. So you've scaled back some of this, which is really interesting. But we're still behind the curve. So playing catch up is really interesting because what it does, it comp it compresses the U.S. yield premium. In other words, our bond yields coming down relative to other countries. Why does that matter? Because the dollar very closely follows this. The dollar is already down 7% year over year. All right. 9621 on the U.S. dollar index is a key technical level. If it takes that level out, it violates the entire uptrend line from 2008. And that's part of the secular bear market in the dollar that started with the plaza accord in 1985. You had a 2008-2011 double bottom. You had a rally into the 2022 high, and now you're breaking down. And we talk about the purchasing power of the dollar, pretty simple. Measure it against one ounce of gold. The dollar is down 41% in the last 12 months in purchasing power terms. Okay. It is right now at 2.3 cents on the 1975 US dollar. The movement in the gold price adjusted dollar index implies the dollar going to 65 versus 97, where it is now. That seems outrageous. 65 from 97? That's huge, right? But the secular target based on all these wave patterns from 1985 to 2008 to 2011 to 2022 to now projects a 70, or it's going to take out the lows from 70 that we set in 2008. It'll be new lows. This all fits for a huge dollar decline. Not only that, but when I look at it, you know, we talked about this. Uh, that that this whole thing ties into gold. All right. And what's great, what's amazing about gold is, and we call it gold in 2006, I call it gold in 23, I call it gold even 2000, but 2025, 2015, all right? But you still haven't had the dollar depreciation driven up moving gold. It hasn't happened yet. The fiscal market's tight because it's a squeeze and it's legitimate. All right. But open interest and speculative participation is not that high. All right. But now with evidence that the dollar is cracking, because we see it, the CEW, the emerging market uh currency uh ETFs getting wasted. All right. I mean, mean dollars getting wasted against emerging market currencies. All right. I love the currencies of commodity exporting resource exporting nations. All right. The African RAND is breaking out. Platinum has already broken out and applies a much higher RAND, very highly correlated. Same with the Aussie dollar and gold. Aussie dollar breaking out 0.66 to the US. Gold projects an Aussie dollar of 90. And then you have the Chilean peso, all right, just took out its two-year moving average for the first time in a couple of years. All right, the dollar's down 6% against the Chilean peso this year in the in the last 12 months. And when you apply copper to the Chilean peso, the correlation is very tight. It applies a much higher Chilean peso, much lower dollar. Then I like to look at what I call the secondary currencies in Asia and in Europe. In Asia, the number one currency is sing dollar. In Europe, of course, it's the euro. In Asia, the secondary currency that you know has ties is the Thai bot. It's at a three-year high. In Europe, it's the Swedish crone. Swedish crone is violated a 13-year downtrend line. And the dollar is down 12.5% against Sweden this year. That's huge. And the old ERM exchange rate mechanism thing where they're trying to conjoin all the European currencies. If your currency was out of whack by 12.5%, the central bank was mandated to intervene to support its currency. So under some circumstances, you might say the U.S. should be intervening in the currency. But that's only against the Swedish cron. All right. There's still a lot of currencies against which the dollar is strong, which makes it kind of only polarized more in trying to trade it. But these currencies to me are just breaking out in the ways that the metals, mining shares, and mining ETFs were earlier this year. That's what these currencies are now doing. So you want to get ahead of this. All right. Although a dollar decline would be bullish for stocks. The problem is you have an AI spending bubble and all this other stuff and an economic reality check that puts the stock market at risk. All right. I much more prefer to play a short dollar and continue with the bullish metal scene. All right. We called it. I mean, you go back to my Valentine's Day special on the metals specifically. I call it for a silver squeeze. It took months to develop, but it happened. All right. I said the GDX and the SIL gold and silver mining share ETFs would outperform the SP. And they have in a huge way almost triple digits. Certainly, uh, some of the individual shares that we recommended have triple digit gains against the stock market, which is up in 2025. Think about that. But we look ahead, what's next? Well, I tell you what, I'm looking at some of these other mining shares too, and some of these other metals. I mean, right now, you're talking about platinum and palladium look pretty good. You're talking about lithium and steel look pretty good. And lithium might not be a bad choice either. When you talk about lithium, let me just really quickly look. I think it's the I want to get to the lithium. LTIP is the sprout lithium miners. We recommend that August 11th. It was at$7. It's now at 12 and a quarter. It's up 70%. SLX is the steel. In the base metals love aluminum, tin, and zinc. So you have the DBB is the base metal ETF. The C O P X is the copper mining ETF taking off. Copper is going to six bucks. Easy. All right. But well, you know, what about 2026? Well, I urge you to stay tuned. January, I'll be coming with my 2026 year head outlook. And if you listen to my 2025, you know we nailed it on almost every position. Thought the stock market may show some more weakness in the fourth quarter and thought it was happening, but that one was wrong. All right. Everything else we said pretty much has happened. All right. In addition to that, I'm going to be posting my quantitative work on the SP 500 as a bonus for our uh podcast listeners. You can find that it's going to be daily, updated daily, where I'm going to show you what the strongest sectors in terms of bull trends versus bearish trends versus no trend at all in the SP 500 stocks individually and then in the underlying indexes related to the sector, the industry sectors. It's going to be worth taking a look at. All right. Check us out on X uh and Instagram to see that every day starting probably within the next week. All right. You can check us out at money underscore podcast. On Instacart, just type in money, comma, markets, and new age investing, and uh that'll take you to a bunch of choices that were at the top. Uh also follow me individually at Weldon Live, at Weldon Live on Twitter, uh, X, and YouTube, Gregory underscore Weldon. It is the 20th anniversary of me having done the hardest thing I've done in in my life outside of raising two kids on my own, which was write a book. And 2006 published Gold Trading Boot Camp. And uh, I'll tell you what, I was gonna read some excerpts from it to be just too long-winded, but uh you know, some of the things I said were things I'm saying today, only much more emphatically, with much more sense of urgency, with much more alarm, because it's time to take action, and I will guide you through this. Stick with me, follow me, check it out. Thanks for listening. Episode one of season four in the books. Thank you so much for joining me.