FRA: Hi – Welcome to FRA’s Roundtable Insight. Today we have Nick Giambruno. Nick is Doug Casey’s globetrotting companion and is the Senior Editor of Casey Research’s International Man. He writes about economics, offshore banking, second passports, surviving a financial collapse, foreign trusts and companies, geopolitics, and value investing in crisis markets, among other topics. He is also the Senior Analyst of the Crisis Investing publication. He’s lived in Europe and worked in the Middle East, including Beirut and Dubai, where he covered regional banks and other companies for an investment house. Nick is a CFA charterholder and holds a bachelor’s degree in finance, summa cum laude. Nick is a frequent speaker at investment conferences around the world. Welcome, Nick!

NICK GIAMBRUNO: Great to be back with you Richard.

FRA: I thought today we would focus on a number of interesting topics that are in the news and public highlight including what’s happening with the pension crisis in the U.S. and the war on cash with the overall theme of central banks intervening in the economy and in the financial markets. Maybe we could begin with your thoughts on the war on cash. Where do you see that trending? Do you see governments getting involved with cryptocurrencies to move away from cash?

NICK GIAMBRUNO: Well, let’s start by looking at the war on cash. And not to mince words, the war on cash is evil – It’s all about restricting peoples’ choices and forcing them into digital systems that can track, monitor and control every penny you earn, save, borrow and spend. It’s really a totalitarian-type control system and there really is no redeeming values of it whatsoever in terms of benefits that are worth the trade-off of basically looking your absolute financial privacy. So first thing is first – It’s just an awful thing, but nonetheless it is a growing trend. It’s not naturally popular in academia and with governments because it’s all about transferring governments more power and control over people. That is uniformly a bad thing, but nonetheless, it is a growing trend not just in the United States, but around the world. Your listeners might remember back decades ago in the United States there used to be $500 bills, $1,000 bills, and even a $10,000 bill. Those have all been gotten rid of, I think, in the 1960’s and 1970’s with the usual excuse of, it’s only being used by drug dealers, terrorists, money launderers and that sort of thing. So, the largest bill we have since then is the $100 bill and the purchasing power of the $100 bill has gone down drastically since the 1960’s and 1970’s. Inflation is an important component on the war on cash because if the governments don’t issue larger denominations of bills to keep up with inflation, it has the de facto effect of forcing more people to use cards and digital payments than they otherwise would because it’s just not convenient to use cash since the largest valued bill has been inflated away. And I see the same sort of demonization that the governments, the media, and their academic cohorts have used in other areas such as the very large denominations of U.S. dollar bills back in the 1960’s and 1970’s. I see the same language used by the same type of people towards private cryptocurrencies and that is a scary thing because it shows that they are gunning for this. It is important to distinguish between a private cryptocurrency and a cryptocurrency which is controlled by the government. In my opinion, I think it’s a wonderful thing to have these private currencies because the ultimate power and control these systems is not with the state or any government – It is distributed and decentralized. That’s why we see governments talking about how it is only used by terrorists, drug dealers, and money launderers. That why we see people who are intimately involved in the current system, banking and central banking system, which is as you are fully aware a fraudulent system, like Jamie Diamond coming out and saying Bitcoin is a fraud, these are signs that they are gearing up towards an assault on this. And we can go into the reasons why, but I think it’s going to be extremely difficult for them to crackdown on these private blockchain and cryptocurrencies, I think the cat’s out of the bag on this. But nonetheless, all of these issues are intertwined.

FRA: Do you think that governments will allow the private-based cryptocurrencies to coexist? I know you said the cat’s out of the bag and they are uncontrolled, but maybe in the future if governments try to control or regulate then do you see the possibly or allowance by the governments for private-based cryptocurrencies?

NICK GIAMBRUNO: Honestly, I don’t think that they have a choice. They can try to control it and regulate it, but I don’t think that they are going to have much more success than say Venezuela does in trying to control currencies that they don’t like which would be the U.S. dollar and other currencies. So, I think the U.S. government is not going to have a whole heck of a lot more success than say Venezuela does or any government does in regulating currencies that they don’t like their people to use, which in itself is a terrible thing. Why should some bureaucrat tell you what kind of currency you would want to use voluntarily? It’s really a terrible thing. Also another thing to point to, a similar technology, is BitTorrent. Now BitTorrent is a decentralized file-sharing technology that allows people to share any kind of file they want whether it’s a Hollywood movie that just came out in theatres, an E-book or anything, you can share anything. Anyways, this technology has been around for over 15 years and despite the U.S. government’s best efforts to shut down BitTorrent, it’s’ still decentralized. It’s like a game of Whack-A-Mole and despite their best efforts it is still easily accessible to anybody on the internet. Bitcoin is similarly decentralized and maybe even more decentralized. So sure, they can say that Bitcoin is illegal and you cannot convert your dollars into Bitcoin. It will just shut down these exchanges, but it’s not like Bitcoin is going to die or that it’s going to be impossible for you to get Bitcoin – It might be a little harder. I think it’s basically impossible for the U.S. government, Chinese government or any government to totally eliminate these private cryptocurrencies other than shutting off the internet and keeping it shutoff, quite frankly.

FRA: Great points. On central banks – Do you see central banks as being favourable to a war on cash to make it easier for bank bail-ins for central banks to implement their policy, for example, negative interest rate policies and those types of things?

NICK GIAMBRUNO: Certainly – The central banks are all on board and on the same wavelength of the folks who are advocating for the abolition of cash. So, the central banks are fully on board for this and I think one of the main reasons for the war on cash is because central banks want to use negative interest rates, which is a bizarre thing in the first place when you actually think about it, it’s like getting paid to borrow money – It makes absolutely no sense. And it wouldn’t happen in a free market. Negative interest rates basically couldn’t exist in a free market. They only can exist in a manipulated and controlled market such as the system that we have with central banks and fiat money. But the thing is, they want to implement negative interest rates because of their wrongheaded belief that instead of losing money from the sting of negative interest rates, people will think: We better go out and spend it quickly before we lose money from it. And that it will somehow stimulate the economy. It is completely wrongheaded in the sense that it will encourage people to save more money because it will be harder for people to save money to spend on their basic necessities. That’s not going to spur people to spend more, it’s going to spur people to save more because they are going to have less money available to spend on rent, food and so forth. It’s not going to make them go out and buy the iPhone 8 or the next ridiculous fad as they would like them to. Anyways, the whole point of the war on cash is to force people into the banking system because cash represents an escape hatch for people who want to avoid negative interest rates. It’s no coincidence that in countries that have the worst cases of negative interest rates, you see people saving more in cash. Look at Japan. Japan has had record sales of safes that people would install in their house to store cash because Japan has negative interest rates and people don’t want to lose money from negative interest rates. So, it’s a completely wrongheaded and destructive policy, again, that has no redeeming values whatsoever that could not exist in a free market where there are voluntary interactions between buyers and sellers – It can only happen via coercion in a government controlled financial system.

FRA: Do you consider cryptocurrencies to be a store of value or investments? Will Bitcoin, for example, retain its current valuation or will it come down a little bit towards what the cost to produce a Bitcoin in terms of electricity and computers, I think it’s around $1,000 now. What are your thoughts on that?

NICK GIAMBRUNO: Yes – I think the real value of cryptocurrencies, in my opinion, have yet to be established that these are reliable stores of value for anything other than the very, very short term. Nonetheless, they are extremely valuable as transfer mechanisms to move a value from point A to point B instantly. You don’t have to keep it in the cryptocurrency, you can convert it into other things such as goods, services, fiat money, gold or whatever you want. In terms of moving it from point A to point B, I think they have a tremendous amount of value, but as a store of value I think it’s going to take some time to establish that. Personally I favour gold and silver as long-term stores of value. But with the cryptocurrencies which is really, really interesting is that you don’t need anybody’s permission to send money to anybody anywhere in the world and it doesn’t need to be backlogged by the bank and have the compliance department check it out to make sure it’s fine, it doesn’t need the approval of SWIFT, it doesn’t need the approval of the U.S. government. You can simply send cryptocurrencies to anyone in the world and there’s pretty much nothing anyone can do about it and that’s a really wonderful thing.

FRA: Great points. Going on that theme of movement internationally of capital – What are your thoughts on globalism? You’ve written a lot about that and the end of globalism on the economy. Will that lead to protectionism or more local freebased markets?

NICK GIAMBRUNO: Well, I think the jury is still out on that, but I think it’s important to also define our terms because these terms are thrown around a lot and I think it’s important that we have a common definition of these terms so we know what we’re talking about. Globalism, in my view, is simply the centralization of power on a global basis, that’s it. That’s all it means. You look at the people who advocate for these things in centralized global power structures, that is globalism. Now whether globalism has reached it’s venus and is now declining – I think there’s a good chance it is. The European Union is a perfect example of globalism because it’s centralization of power of all these nation states into one global, one giant, super-national institution. So, we are talking all about the centralization of power. And it’s interesting because cryptocurrencies tend to go in the opposite direction – They tend to be centralized power and I am 100% for decentralization. Decentralization is always a good thing and centralization is, generally, always a bad thing. What we’re looking at here is what is going to happen if and when globalism and the ideology behind globalism, which is universally ascribed to by the elites in the academic, the political, the financial, the media elites in the U.S. and the greater Western world. In my view, it is a bankrupt philosophy and I think it’s sort of akin to Communism in terms of, this is a bankrupt ideology that is going to be relegated to the dustbin of history sooner or later. So, what is going to replace that? I think that is an open question. Are we going to move towards a more decentralized, voluntary society? I would like that to happen. Or are we going to move towards nationalism and protectionism which is just replacing centralization of power on a global basis for more of this tribalism and nationalistic feeling which isn’t necessarily a good thing either. So, I think the jury is still out on that whether we are going to move towards a more nationalistic, protectionist type of a world or we’re going to move towards a more voluntary decentralized type of world – I think the jury is still out on that.

FRA: You’ve written a lot recently on the U.S. pension crisis. John Mauldin has pointed out that he thinks the bubble in government promises is arguably the biggest bubble in human history. He gives an estimate of 2 trillion, but says that that’s based on an average 7% compound return, of 2 trillion of unfunded liabilities for state and local governments on the pension crisis. But, assuming the market could go down 40%, then you have unfunded liability in the range of 7-8 trillion so it’s enormous. What are your thoughts on the U.S. pension crisis?

NICK GIAMBRUNO: This is a perfect example of the extreme corruption in the U.S. and the extreme corruption in government and financial markets. It’s a total mess and quite frankly the pension crisis is an unsolvable problem. There’s nothing that can be done to solve this problem – It’s simply too big. The issue at hand here is that the government, these local governments: municipalities and state governments, all over the place, they are making extravagant promises on retirement benefits that they simply can’t deliver on that gets them the support of their government employees, unions, police officer unions, teachers unions and these kinds of things. But they’re really promising these people, their own employees, benefits that they can’t deliver on. What’s interesting is that pensions are pretty nice benefits. I mean think about, you basically get or pretty close to get your last year’s salary adjusted for inflation until you die and that’s a pretty nice benefit. Pensions don’t really exist in the private market anymore. About only 4% of private U.S. companies offer pensions anymore just because it’s not possible for them to do, but for a government they can promise these extravagant things. Another thing is is the accounting method of pensions. Governments get to use different accounting standards than private pensions do. And the single most important number in the whole pension crisis is the assumed rate of return on the assets of the pension because that assumed rate of return is used to discount the future liabilities of the pension. If they use an artificially high assumed rate of return, their liabilities are magically shrunk. These pensions are assuming that they’re going to earn a better return in the stock market than Warren Buffet into perpetuity which is ridiculous. They’re not using anything towards realistic assumptions in their accounting – They are using Bernie Madoff accounting; it’s a fraud. If they were in the private sector they would be going to jail for fraud, but nonetheless they are in the government sector and, magically, what is fraud in the private sector becomes acceptable in the public sector, which is totally unreasonable. Be that as it may, what they’ve done is they’ve promised these extravagant retirement benefits to their employees and now we’re really close to the tipping point because these pensions plans are basically bankrupt and that’s at a time of a stock market bubble and a bond market bubble of historic proportions. That should pump up the value of these and it has pumped up the value of these pension plans, but nonetheless they are still paying out all this money in benefits that even with an enormous stock and bond market bubble these things are still insolvent. And even with using unrealistic return to discount the future liability – They’re still insolvent. So, the next time the market has any sort of minor recession or downtown a lot of these pension plans are going to go bust. What does that mean? That means the taxpayers and the states are going to be on the hook to pay for these extravagant benefits. People in the private sector don’t get to use benefits, so they are extravagant benefits. How are they going to pay for them when the whole thing has gone bust? Well, they’re going to increase taxes and what taxes are they going to increase first? – Property taxes. We’ve seen this in Illinois. Recently property taxes are going through the roof in Illinois. Illinois is hardly the only place that has a pension problem, many many jurisdictions do. If your town or your state or your municipality or your city has a pension problem, the likelihood of your property taxes doubling, tripling or even going higher is very likely. It’s not just in the U.S., any jurisdiction that gets into financial problems always turns to higher taxes and property taxes. Greece is a perfect example. I think Greece’s property taxes have gone up 4 or 5-fold in recent years as they’ve looked to squeeze people for any penny they can get out of it. So, really to me this is an illustrative example of just how rotten the political system is, how rotten the financial system is and it’s all wrapped up into one nice crisis. This thing is going to come to a head sooner than later, certainly within the next cyclical recession which we are way overdue for in the U.S.

FRA: And the same thing here in Ontario, up in Canada. The debt per capita is multiple times worse than in Greece so it’s only a matter of time. We already see the property taxes going up and use fees, for example, licenses across the board going up here and there.

NICK GIAMBRUNO: Yeah – It’s frustrating. And really I think we should take a step back to think about property taxes and property rights because how can you say that you own something and that you are the owner of a piece of property and that you have to pay a never-ending and ever-increasing annual fee on? – It’s ridiculous. Think if you had to pay property taxes on your sofa or your T.V. Could you really say you owned your sofa or your T.V. or are you merely renting it from whoever was charging you that fee? I think it’s the same thing and I think property taxes are a terrible thing and hopefully, I’m not holding my breath, but hopefully they’re done away with at some point in the future, but unlikely, they are probably going up.

FRA: And also, you’ve written on the pension crisis where you’ve suggested two asset classes that investors could consider: gold related and cannabis related investments. Can you elaborate on that rationale?

NICK GIAMBRUNO: Sure, okay. Let’s start with gold. I think the pension crisis is going to be terrific for gold because as I mentioned, this is an unsolvable problem in the traditional sense. These state and local government could double, triple, even quadruple taxes and it’s not even going to make a dent in this problem and that’s assuming that the tax revenue they receive after increasing taxes, the collection rate, would stay the same – It wouldn’t though because higher taxes are going to drive people away from these states. We’ve seen this already in Illinois and Chicago in particular. I think 3,000 millionaires have left Chicago because of higher taxes in recent months and there was a study done that this was like one of the single-most outflows of wealthy people in the entire world, not just in the U.S., not just in North America, in the entire world. So, I think you have to take a step back when you see all of these productive people, these wealthy people fleeing the city that there is an issue here. Certainly there is a point of diminishing return that comes with raising taxes that has already been reached in a lot of these places so they can’t raise taxes and they can’t cut benefits either because a lot of these benefits are enshrined in the state constitutions that they can’t cut these pension benefits. Isn’t that a nice thing? You’ve got the government who says they basically guarantee these benefits and it’s against the state constitution to renegotiate or lower these benefits so it’s already bankrupting these places causing local debt crisis. They are going to default on these obligations one way or another. But ultimately, what’s going to happen is that the federal government is not going to just sit back and let all of these states and cities not make good on their promises to their own employees. It’s just politically going to be impossible for the U.S. federal government to step back and do nothing. That’s the whole point of having the central bank. They are the “lender of last resort”, which really sanitizing what they really do. They print money and give it to people so they basically socialize the cost of these things through money printing and higher prices and inflation. So, that’s what is going to ultimately happen, is that the federal government and the federal reserve is going to step in and paper over this pension crisis by printing money. That’s the bottom line of what is going to happen eventually with this pension crisis and that’s going to be good for gold. So that’s the rationale behind gold because simply, there is no other way to solve the pension crisis besides the printing press. That’s what ultimately is going to happen. Number two, the states are so desperate for any penny they can get. They are going to start to look for alternative means of revenue and I think they are going to look at the states who have recently legalized cannabis and they’re going to find the opportunity too good to pass up. There’s 100’s of millions of dollars being flowed in with new tax revenue from the legalization of cannabis in various states such as Colorado. I think it’s estimated that next year when California goes live with legal recreational cannabis, that they could bring in about a billion dollars in cannabis-related tax revenues. Nonetheless, this is not going to solve the pension crisis. A couple billion here, a couple billion there – It’s not going to solve a multi-trillion dollar issue. And I know that you cited earlier that it was a 2 trillion dollar problem, but that’s using the unrealistically rosy rate of return assumption of a 7% which is what most public pensions use. If you use a realistic discount rate, we’re looking at 5 trillion plus problem. So, a couple of billion here, a couple of billion there from legalizing cannabis is not going to solve this problem, but nonetheless because these states are so desperate it’s not going to hurt. They are going to look to get every penny they can get and cannabis is going to be a beneficiary of their desperation. That’s the rationale for the second investment.

FRA: Very interesting. In addition to cannabis, what controls: monetary policies, fiscal policies, government regulations do you see coming in the near future that governments and central banks will employ to deal with the increasing burden of government debt and unsustainable spending and deficits?

NICK GIAMBRUNO: Well, I think we talked about those a little bit earlier. I think we’re definitely going to be seeing negative interest rates spread because negative interest rates, of course, benefits the borrower and who are the biggest borrowers in the world? – Our governments and they’re the largest borrowers, the U.S. government in particular. I think we already have negative interest rates in the United States, not negative nominal interest rates, but certainly negative real interest rates when you consider the nominal interest rate and the rate of inflation. Sure, they give you this phony CPI number of like 1-point-something percent, – It’s much larger than that. Everybody knows that. Just go to a grocery store and look at how much groceries cost, your medical insurance, your tuition, anything, the prices are going up more than 2%. It’s an insult to peoples’ intelligence that that’s the number that they use. Anyway, I think there already are negative real interest rates in the United States. The little measly couple of basis points you get for putting your money in a bank – that doesn’t keep up with inflation. So there already are negative real interest rates in the United States. I think they’re going to get more negative either with higher inflation or lower nominal rates. I think that’s baked into the cake because that’s going to support the U.S.’s ability to manage that debt. Lower interest rates makes it easier to manage that debt and that debt is going nowhere. I mean there is nowhere but north for where the U.S. debt is going. It’s politically impossible. I think it’s a pretty safe assumption is that we’re going to continue to see that. If we’re going to see more and more negative interest rates that means they’re going to need to ramp up the war on cash because negative interest rates really aren’t effective unless you trap peoples’ money in the banking system. Well you can’t really trap peoples’ money in the banking system if you give them the option of having a bunch of cash stashed under their mattress. So, I think we’re going to see negative interest rates ramped up and that necessarily means we’re going to see the war on cash ramped up. And we already are seeing this. I think the head of the Harvard business school or Economics department, Kenneth Rogoff, he’s a huge advocate for the war on cash. And he’s a trendsetter, obviously being a top academic at a top institution, he kind of sets the trends on this stuff and I wonder what motivates this guy because I don’t think he’s stupid, I think he knows what he is doing. He is like the kind of person who wakes up in the morning and looks for ways to try and restrict peoples’ abilities to use cash and I think he’s clearly a sociopath. Unfortunately, this kind of wrongheaded thinking is gaining current so I think we’ll see more of that.

FRA: As the last question here, do you see any political movements within the U.S. to extreme socialism as a backlash, perhaps led by the millennial generation, that could severely affect the economy or the financial markets?

NICK GIAMBRUNO: I think that’s very likely. For better or for worse, probably for worse, these people are the future generation in the U.S. and who is one of the people that they idolize? – Bernie Sanders. And there is a really interesting article that Bernie Sanders wrote about how Venezuela is the success story of socialism. Obviously this was written a few years ago before their hyperinflation and major problems they have right now, so I encourage your listeners to check that out. Bernie Sanders basically wrote a glowing review of Venezuela and said, “Hey, we gotta bring this to the U.S.”. Well, Bernie Sanders represents the economic views of these people so, yes, I think we are going to see a lot more of socialism, collectivism and all the stuff that entails in the future, unfortunately.

FRA: Great. How can our listeners learn more about your work, Nick?

NICK GIAMBRUNO: The easiest place to do that is on the International Man website. That is: InternationalMan.com. We talk about all of these issues and more importantly how you can protect yourself and your family from these terrible things that we’ve been talking about today. The situation is not hopeless. There are things you can do to not only protect yourself, but profit from the distortions that will inevitably be caused by all of these wrongheaded policies.

FRA: Great. Thank you very much for all the great points and insight, Nick – Thank you.

NICK GIAMBRUNO: Thank you Richard – Great to be with you.

Transcript by: Daniel Valentin <daniel.valentin@ryerson.ca>

LINK HERE to get the MP3 File

Disclaimer: The views or opinions expressed in this blog post may or may not be representative of the views or opinions of the Financial Repression Authority.