March 21, 2025 – Are you ready for the next big expansion of the US money supply? Jim Puplava interviews Larry Lepard about his fantastic new book, The Big Print, discussing America's financial system amid a "fourth turning" crisis that began in 2008. Lepard argues that excessive money printing, a ballooning federal debt (now $37 trillion), and zero interest rate policies have fueled inflation and wealth inequality. He critiques the Federal Reserve's actions, predicts further quantitative easing, and warns of an impending monetary reset. Lepard advocates for sound money—gold and Bitcoin—as protection against inflation. They explore historical parallels, economic distortions, and the urgent need for awareness as debt and inflation spiral, driven by undeniable math, all of which requires another "big money print," possibly sooner than people realize.
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Discussed in today's show:
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Fourth Turning Crisis: Lepard ties current financial issues to a historical "fourth turning" starting with the 2008 crisis.
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Money Supply Growth: Discusses the Fed’s balance sheet expansion and its role in increasing the money supply.
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Federal Debt: Highlights the U.S. debt at $37 trillion, with $1 trillion in annual interest costs.
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Inflation Causes: Links inflation to money printing, citing Milton Friedman, and critiques underreported rates.
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Wealth Inequality: Examines how zero interest rates (ZIRP) favor the wealthy, exacerbating disparities.
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Sound Money Solutions: Advocates gold and Bitcoin as hedges against inflation, rejecting other cryptos.
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Monetary Reset: Predicts a necessary reset due to unsustainable debt, possibly via QE or yield curve control.
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Historical Context: References 1971 gold standard exit and past crises like the Depression and Civil War.
Transcript
Jim Puplava:
Over the last decade or so, we've seen tremendous changes in the financial system. Chief among them has been an increase in the money supply, an increase in the Fed's balance sheet, and a massive accumulation of debt by the federal government. What does all this mean? Well, that's a topic today we are going to be discussing with Larry Lepard. He's written a new book called "The Big Print: What Happened to America and How Sound Money Will Fix It." Larry, I want to begin with your book. You start off believing we're in the fourth turning, which began in 2008 with the financial crisis. Let's begin with that and move forward.
Larry Lepard:
Yeah. First of all, thank you, Jim, for having me on your show. I've known you for years, and I love the stuff you guys do. It's an honor to be here. So let's just go back to basics because some people may not have heard of that phrase. A lot of people have, but the "Fourth Turning" is a book that was written by Howe and Strauss, and it was written quite some time ago, but it was prophetic in that they've kind of predicted what's going to happen here. What they've done is they studied the cycles of history. What they've kind of found is that every society tends to go through seasons of, you know, growth, maturity, late maturity, and then ultimately kind of a crisis period where the rules kind of change, and then a new set of rules emerge, and you get another growth period or season. And these tend to last about 80 years, these cycles. And, you know, the last one—so I think we're in a fourth turning. Let's go back and look at the prior ones. There was one around the Depression and World War II; that was a fourth turning. And of course, it was a very troublesome time in the world. A lot of people died, and a lot of things had to get resolved. But of course, coming out of that, you know, we had a new spring, and, you know, the hero generation reaped the benefits of everything they'd done, fought to win the war. The fourth turning before that was the Civil War, same kind of thing. The country was torn apart by the issue of slavery and states' rights. And of course, that was a briefer one, but that got resolved, and the rules before and after the fourth turning changed. And the one before that was the American Revolution, where we were part of Britain, British colonies. Britain could tell us what to do; they could tax us. They had governors or people in the states representing the country. And eventually, of course, people here decided they didn't want to put up with that anymore. So, you know, 1776, 1865, and 1945 are the prior fourth turnings. And I think we're in one now. And I think the issue that's being addressed in this fourth turning is the issue of what is money. Because what happened is, after the last fourth turning, we started drifting down the road—and it actually happened during the fourth turning; it's gotten progressively worse—of Keynesianism, which is to say, believing that the government could solve problems through government spending and debt. And, guess what? You know, it kind of worked for a while. You know, Reagan ran some deficits. I remember everyone screaming about them. Of course, they're quaint in terms of size compared to what we have today. But, you know, Reagan actually did grow the economy, and that growth allowed us to beat the Soviet Union and caused them to, you know, fold their whole Cold War mentality. And in the early days, when your debt-to-GDP is low, you can do that. But eventually, if you keep growing the debt faster than you grow the underlying GDP, something happens that becomes a problem. And that is to say, because GDP is what generates the income necessary to pay the interest on the debt and to repay the principal on the debt. And so, as I show in the book, you know, in cases where we get to where we are now, which is debt-to-GDP of roughly 130%, you know, problems start to emerge that can't be solved without either significant inflation or a big depression or a monetary reset of some type. And of course, in the last one of these, the last fourth turning, we had a big depression. You know, it was the same kind of situation: a very leveraged economy. You know, debt-to-GDP was very high. So, you know, in my opinion, the reason to write the book was to try and wake people up to the fact that this is happening now, and they should protect themselves financially. They should protect themselves because there's going to be a lot of change in the next five or 10 years, in my opinion.
Jim Puplava:
You know, one of the issues that has come to the forefront is the distribution of wealth, which is almost, as you point out in your book, up tenfold for the top 1%, whereas everybody else—with technology, we offshored, moved our industrial base offshore, and productivity has helped to suppress wages. But as you point out in the book, when they went to a ZIRP policy, which was zero interest rates, if you were a hedge fund manager or a big institution, you could borrow money for next to nothing. I mean, heck, you could just put it in a dividend stock, and you probably made four or five times your money. That worked. And that created a lot of this disparity because if you had access to this capital, you could do very well and leverage yourself at next to nothing.
Larry Lepard:
That's exactly right, Jim. And that's what I tried to point out: that, you know, America, I think, was founded and built on the premise of fairness. You know, "all men are created equal," we're a nation of laws, etc. And when you take the financial system and you allow one category of people to borrow from the Federal Reserve at 0% interest, and you and I can't do that—you know, if we want to borrow money from a credit card company, they're going to charge us 25% a year—it's just a very big distortion. And it allows the moneyed players, you know, the Wall Streeters, the private equity people, the leveraged buyout artists, to just get silly rich. And that's exactly what's happened. And it allows some middle-class families too. I mean, I was reviewing some charts this morning of the growth in housing prices in Austin, Texas, from, you know, the beginning of ZIRP in 2008 to the present. And it's just stunning. I mean, low interest rates cause people to borrow and push up asset prices, which, for those people who bought those houses in '08, you know, they're happy they paid a hundred thousand; it's now worth five or six hundred thousand. But really, that's not, you know, true growth. That's inflationary growth. And, you know, they were advantaged against the wage earner we were talking about pre-show who maybe didn't have the capital to buy the house, and they're a renter, and all they know is they pay higher prices—or they're like my kids who are in their 20s and doing fine but have the issue of, "Well, how can I afford a house in this market, Dad? They're so expensive." So it, you know, distorting the interest rate—and this is a big theme throughout the book—distorting the interest rates the way the Federal Reserve has done has been just really grossly unfair. And, you know, I mean, I try to walk very much down the center of the political line and not take a side on it because I think the fundamental—but I understand anger on both sides—and the fundamental issue is that the money is broken, and it's just not fair, you know? And so, while I don't think a Bernie Sanders or an AOC have the right solution to the problem, what they're complaining about, they're correct about. I mean, it is an unfair system.
Jim Puplava:
Well, let's talk about the inflation that we're seeing. Because if you take a look at it, inflation is a money problem. As you talk about, you quote Milton Friedman: "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon." And let's talk about the growth you measure. Inflation is the true growth rate of M2, which has been about 6.8% a year, which is higher than what's reported. And then also, I wonder if we might talk about how inflation is underreported with hedonic substitution, all the various tricks that they play to manipulate the real inflation rate.
Larry Lepard:
Great, great. Thanks for bringing that up. You're serving me up softballs here. I mean, the book—and this is again where I just don't think—I don't think the average American—because, you know, the average American is just out there trying to take care of their family, go to work, do their job. You know, they're good people, right? But they don't—this monetary stuff, it seems, you know, the people who are in positions of power make it all seem very complicated and obscure. And, you know, they tend to gaslight you, right? They say, "Oh, no, inflation's not that bad." But, you know, then we go to the supermarket and we realize that stuff costs a lot more. And, yes, I mean, the Boskin Commission started it back in the '80s. You know, the financial people have figured out a way that if they can report inflation as being lower than it really is, that keeps the system going. And they know how to play it. They know how to buy—there are, you know, with inflation, there are assets that benefit. And going into debt is a smart thing to do with inflation because you're paying back with money that's not worth as much in the future. So if you can borrow money—I said somewhere in the book, I think—look, if you and I could borrow money at 0% for a large amount of money and then put it into something that's growing at a nice inflation rate, you know, use leverage—I mean, you know, you and I could be billionaires too. The problem is that that doesn't exist for the common man or the average person. So, you know, the person who's just working for a wage, all they know is that, you know, their wage isn't going up as fast as the cost of the things they buy. And that's just—that's why this wealth inequality and why the enormous unfairness—and the book has some very good charts and some very good examples. I borrowed one from Bill Fleckenstein; I borrowed the charts from John Williams, whose Shadow Government Stats everyone knows. And it does show—what we can see is that, you know, the money supply growth, as you point out, has been between 6.5, 6.8 to 7.8 percent a year over a long period, depending on what time frame you look at. And yet reported inflation has been much closer to 3 or 4%. So somebody's not telling the truth. And I'm pretty sure that the people not telling the truth are the government, and the reason is that they obviously have an incentive to lie about it, you know, to try and make people feel better. But, you know, whether—the truth is the truth. I mean, if things are going up, you know, at those kinds of prices—I mean, we all see it, you see it, I see it. You know, it's—we know inflation is there. I mean, there's a measure out these days—some people are saying, "Well, this Truflation measure is saying it's lower." I just kind of shake my head and say, "That's nonsense." I mean, you know, I've had insurance bills that have gone up 100% in the last year—auto insurance, 30%. I mean, everything is going up a lot more than the 2% target that they say they have.
Jim Puplava:
So I want to talk about where we seem to go astray. And a key point in your book was 1971. We severed the link with gold. And from 1971 forward, we began to experience inflation. We began to experience increasingly government deficits. I mean, I can remember—I don't know if you remember, Larry—in 1991 when President Bush broke his pledge on no new taxes because the deficits were like 400 billion at the time, which is nothing compared to today where they are a few trillion.
Larry Lepard:
Yeah, "read my lips." Remember that? Oh, yeah, yeah, you're right. I mean, this has been a slow and persistent problem. And it's not like it's all just come upon us at once. But the way I like to kind of describe it is, you know, we've been kicking a can. The can just keeps getting heavier and heavier, and we're getting weaker and weaker. Yeah, but '71 was a seminal moment. I mean, there've been a lot of them before that. The formation of the Fed was as well, you know, grabbing all the gold in the '30s and going off the hard gold standard. I mean, the '71 gold standard was really just a gold exchange standard. But yeah, and then, you know, then the Boskin Commission, then, you know, Reagan, then Bush, then Clinton suppressing the gold price, and then Greenspan really kind of coming out and saying, "Hey, you know, the stock market is an important part of the economy, and I'm going to use it as a metric." And so, you know, he fundamentally—as we all know, you were around, you saw it—he kind of established the Greenspan put, you know, which is whenever the stock market would get a little bit wobbly, he'd come out and say some nice things about how rates would probably come down. And, of course, they never went up, you know, commensurately on the other side of that. And that's really the problem with the whole Keynesian model. I mean, even Keynes himself—to give him, to be fair—he said, you know, "Look, the government should spend when times are, you know, and there's not enough demand. And then they should cut back on their spending and accumulate surpluses when there is enough demand." And of course, you know, the government's really good at spending no matter what because they like to do that to get reelected. But the other part they kind of forget about, conveniently. And so, yeah, I mean, and here we are, right? We've got—last year's deficit was 1.8 trillion. We're running at a higher rate than that today. And, you know, in spite of what I see as a positive in general—the notion of government efficiency and DOGE and finding some things that are wasteful—I applaud all of that, but sadly, it's, in my view, a little bit too little, too late. I mean, you know, 80% of the budget is pretty well dialed in with Social Security, Medicare, Defense, and interest. And so, you know, no matter how aggressive they are at DOGE, they're not going to solve this deficit problem. So, which is why, in my view, we're heading to a world that's going to be more inflationary, because the math of the situation suggests that you have to keep printing money to keep the system alive, unless you want to have a Great Depression, which is kind of how I came to the name of the book, "The Big Print." I mean, we've had two big prints. We had a big one in '08, and then we had a bigger one in 2020. And I think somewhere in the future there's going to be an even bigger one still, but it's not here yet. You know, things are kind of holding together, but—and you know, they're trying. I mean, like I said, DOGE is an effort in the right direction. I just don't think—I think we're too far gone for that to solve the problem.
Jim Puplava:
Yeah. At this point, it's math. I'm looking at the national debt clock. We're at about 36.6 trillion. Interest on the debt is 1 trillion, 12 billion. And at this point, Larry, don't you—it really gets down to math. I mean—
Larry Lepard:
Yeah, that's right. And I've said that a lot of times in my podcast. I mean, this isn't some crazy wild guy's conspiracy theory or anything else. It's just mathematics. I mean, how do you solve this? I mean, you know, anyone who plays around with a compound function on a calculator can kind of see it. One of my favorite charts—I think it's in the book—is interest expense and just how rapidly that U.S. government interest expense has gone up. And that's what's—I mean, you know, at a bigger picture, what I describe this as is kind of a sovereign debt crisis. And the reason for that is that, you know, there's a circular event that occurs. We run a deficit. The government needs to sell bonds to cover the deficit. The bonds go into a fixed amount of demand for those bonds. If that fixed amount doesn't grow, then they require a higher interest rate, you know, to get people to accept those bonds. That higher interest rate gets paid by the government on the 36 trillion as it gets rolled over, and the interest expense goes higher. I mean, it's now running closer to, I think, 1.3 trillion, which is larger than defense and approaching the size of Medicare. And so the deficit gets bigger, and of course, then you have to sell more bonds; you sell more bonds, and then interest rates go higher still. And so where I think we're heading—and I've talked about it a bit in the book—is to a world of yield curve control where the government's actually forced to buy its own bonds with printed paper, which it's done in the past, and it'll do in the future. And that really is just pure monetization of the debt and pure inflation. Of course, they could not do that and let interest rates go much, much higher. Some people say, "Well, Volcker solved this problem by taking interest rates up to 20%." And he did, but he did it in a context of a situation where the world had—the U.S. had 30% debt-to-GDP, and now we're at 125% debt-to-GDP. So, you know, if we take interest rates up to 10 or 20%, the whole world goes bankrupt. So that really can't happen. So they've got to kind of do what I call financial repression, which is to say, buy the bonds themselves, print the money to do it, and that's going to be inflationary. So we're headed, in my view, to some kind of a real problem. And I think the right way to get out of it with the least pain and the most fair solution for everybody is to do a monetary reset. And hopefully, that's where we'll go. But, you know, politics is pretty difficult to predict. I will say that, you know, he's not perfect, but I've been pleased with Scott Bessent because I do think he understands this issue. He's doing his best to address it.
Jim Puplava:
Yeah, I've heard some talk that they may talk to some of our debtors and get them to accept century bond coupon bonds for the defense that we've given them. But, you know, it was interesting. There's a committee that takes a look at—it's made up of the Treasury and various agencies—and they came out with a report, Larry, last October, and they basically said by the time we get to the fall of this year, the Fed will have no choice but to institute QE. In other words, the interest on the debt—the debt, I think, is like 10 trillion of debt that's rolling over this year—it'll be so large and massive, they'll have no choice.
Larry Lepard:
Yeah, I didn't see that report specifically. You might be referring to the TBAC report, the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee report. I'm not sure. I mean—
Jim Puplava:
Yeah, that's it.
Larry Lepard:
I think a lot of people—I mean, you've been—look, I'm not the only one saying this. There are some very, very smart people that I respect who are saying the same thing. I mean, you know, Ray Dalio, for example, has been all over this; so is Jeff Gundlach. You know, I mean, look, even Jay Powell himself—I mean, the man sitting at the control wheel on this whole thing has said our fiscal trajectory is not sustainable. And to that, I kind of respond like, "Okay, man, all right, I get it. But so what are we going to do about it, and why are you enabling it?" Do you know what I mean? It's like because the Fed—I mean, look, the government, you know, politicians in general, they're like addicts, and they want, you know, money is a drug, and they want money so they can buy votes and, you know, keep people happy and keep the economy going in the right direction. And the problem is that the Fed is the drug dealer, and they're willing to give them the low-price money that allows it to happen. So, yes, I mean, if we go back to QE, we're going to get another round of inflation. I mean, the book makes this argument and point that, you know, we had a deflationary period of time from Volcker's, you know, raising of rates to the present, really until March of 2020 when the 10-year traded at 60 basis points. But I think since that point in time, we've entered an inflationary age, and inflation will be the problem and the focus for the next 10 years. And I think people who aren't thinking about that in their investment strategy will suffer on a relative basis compared to those who are. I mean, I think bonds are a very, very bad place to be right now because I think that, you know, they will be paid back, but they'll be paid back with money that is diluted because, you know, they have to print more money. I mean, Jim, just for an example—I mean, you know, I'm sure you had the same reaction I had—you know, when COVID came around, they grew the money supply by 40% in two years. I mean, 40%. So if you were a wage earner and, say, you were in your 40s or 50s and you'd managed to save a little bit every year, and you had a nest egg built up of $100,000—or maybe as much as even a million if you've done well and you're a little later on—and suddenly they came in and printed 40% of the money, which more or less is what it's done, it pushed the price level up 40%. They just took away 40% of the value of your savings, you know, just—boom—right? I mean, and that's just—it's just wrong. It's just unfair. It's uneven. You know, the people who know how to protect themselves against that, they can actually make money off of that, but the average person can't. And that was really, you know, the reason I wrote the book more than anything else. I just kind of wanted to leave a legacy of trying to explain to the—I mean, I'm hoping I get a lot of Americans to read this because, you know, you'll read it and you appreciate it, and I appreciate your praise and so forth. And I read it—all of us in the sound money camp or in the investment camp, we get it—but that's really not who I aimed it for. I tried to write it in a way that somebody who doesn't know anything about this stuff can read it and go, "Oh, I see. This is how they're taking advantage of me." And then come to a conclusion about how they can protect themselves, you know, get things that protect you from inflation.
Jim Puplava:
So if we take a look at—I guess the thing that really surprised me more than anything else is the way they handled COVID. In essence, Larry, they shut down the economy. They put 300,000 businesses out of business. They paid people to keep people on the payroll. They sent out checks. And we went from 19 trillion in debt to where we are today at 37. I don't think people really grasp how big and massive this was. You're talking about adding almost $18 trillion of debt and what they had to do to bring interest rates down to zero, as they did for almost a couple of years, and then they're surprised that inflation wasn't transitory.
Larry Lepard:
Yeah, well, that part is just amazing to me. I mean, I almost think they had to be lying about it when they were saying it was transitory. And then for Powell to make the joke at Jackson Hole, you know, "The good ship Transitory has sailed"—I mean, I just wanted to puke. You know, here he is joking about, you know, the inflation that the rest of the country suffers from, and he doesn't suffer from because he's a multimillionaire. Yeah, no, it was an amazing episode. I mean, they say that was about $19,000 per family that was spent, you know, and I know people who got those PPP loans, and they didn't need them, and they were forgiven. And, you know, the average family got a few stimmy checks for sure—I mean, between 1 and $3,000. And some of the unemployed got some additional unemployment benefits, but it wasn't very well thought out. I mean, in my mind, in that situation, what they should have done is they should have targeted businesses that were very, very clearly being affected by COVID. So I get it—you know, the airlines, the hotels, the trains, you know, businesses, restaurants—businesses that had a direct hit from COVID restrictions. I get it—help those businesses. But everybody else, I don't see it. You know, I just—I mean, like I say, I know a lot of businesses that got big, big checks, and they didn't need them. So, yeah, and you know, I mean, I think the direct spending on COVID was around 5 trillion, but there was a lot of other stuff around that. I mean, there have been so many wasteful things. If you study it—and I mentioned this in the book too—we spent $8 trillion pursuing wars post-9/11. We spent $8 trillion pursuing wars in the Middle East only to capture Afghanistan and give it back again, to capture Iraq and give that back again. Now Iraqi oil all goes to China. I mean, it's—you know, it's just—I mean, imagine if that $8 trillion had been spent on, I don’t know, nuclear power or high-speed transit or just helping our people in general. I mean, because we also created, you know, a 300-billion-dollar-a-year veterans' liability for all those people who served and had a limb blown off or, you know, got disabled in some manner because they were in a bad spot. You know, so—and also that, you know, Dick Cheney and Halliburton could make billions and billions of dollars. I mean, it just—you know, on what we now know was pretty much a pretext, was a lie, you know—so a lot of bad stuff that's been done. And this is the danger—the book talks about this too—this is the danger of large centralized systems when the people that control them get control of them. They can bend them to their own purposes where, "Hey, guess what?" You know, I mean, the Iraq War made Dick Cheney rich—I mean, filthy rich, you know—and that's, you know, that's again a distortion of our public policy, you know, in order to benefit the defense industry, right? And that kind of stuff happens. And it's just not right. Now, the good news is—I mean, this is all quite depressing—the good news is that the internet and, you know, decentralization, which the microprocessor has brought about—these things are all driving us toward, you know, correcting these ills so that, you know, we won't have big centralized systems, or they won't be nearly as powerful in the future. At least that's the hope. Because I don’t think the average citizen of the world wants to go out and kill other people—unless you're a psychopath and you're a murderer, you know—and these wars are just stupid. And, you know, fiat currency enables these wars. I mean, you know that; I know that.
Jim Puplava:
So how do you think, Larry, this plays out? Because as the Treasury Committee talked about, they feel that QE begins by the time we get to the third or fourth quarter. And we've seen some disruptions in the Treasury market. I follow something called the MOVE Index. Whenever it gets up to 140, you've got problems in the bond market. We had the repo crisis of 2019. So you're seeing more and more dislocations in the Treasury market. And that's alarming.
Larry Lepard:
No kidding. You also had Silicon Valley Bank—they were on the wrong side of everything—even as recently as the fall of 2020. Well, you had the UK gilt crisis, fall of 2022. And then in 2023, you had the U.S. 10-year go over 5%, and within two weeks, 12 Fed governors said, "Oh, we're done raising rates," so the world can't handle higher rates. I mean, how it plays out, Jim, is so hard to know with certainty because there's just so many moving factors. But as a broad sweep, I would say you're right. And by the end of this year, they'll stop QT. They'll have to probably start to drop rates, even though inflation hasn't really come back to the 2% trend line. They'll lie and say it's close enough for government work, and then eventually they'll resume with QE. And my view is that that will fuel another round of inflation, which will then lead to, you know, hopefully political noise. I mean, I think if—right now there are some people who think, "Well, the inflation was all related to COVID, and it's gone away; we're going back to how things worked before COVID." And I disagree with that point of view. I think something—a switch really got flipped in COVID. And so my view is that as that inflation gets higher and higher, then there'll be more cries for sound money and somebody to actually address it. And that was somewhat of my hope for the book too, right? If we can get more Americans educated about what the problem is, then we've got a higher probability that those Americans would vote for somebody who says, "Hey, we've got an inflation problem based on printing all this money. We've got to stop that. You know, we've got to have a system that stops that." And so my hope and belief is that, you know, some politicians will emerge who have more of that view as that problem becomes more intense. And, you know, I think these fourth turnings tend to last about 20, 25 years. And so ours started in '08, you know, with the GFC. So 20 years would suggest that we get it resolved by 2028. I don’t know if it’ll get fixed that quickly. But I think by the early 2030s or so, there's a very high probability that some kind of a monetary event has occurred—there's a monetary reset, and maybe even we're going back to sound money and that sound money standard. And that's what the book was aimed at trying to promote. Because I believe strongly that sound money is a better way and better for nations, a better way to live. And I've seen countries that have been wracked by inflation suffer from it. When they return to sound money, things get better. I mean, it's a very optimistic view here. I mean, this is not—you know, I'm not all gloom and doom. I mean, things are kind of broken, and it's not great right now—let's, we can all admit that. But that doesn't mean it always has to be this way. You know, if we can move towards a much more positive system—if we go back to a sound money system. So again, you know, that’s kind of part of my reasoning in writing the book.
Jim Puplava:
Now, in your book, you talk about one of the solutions. Let's get into Bitcoin. Explain Bitcoin that the average person can understand—the implication of what—
Larry Lepard:
Yeah.
Jim Puplava:
—for the financial system.
Larry Lepard:
Yeah. And this is really, really important because I think there is a lot of misunderstanding about Bitcoin. I think there's a lot of hype, and there's a lot of crypto. A lot of people make the mistake of confusing crypto and Bitcoin. And let me just separate out the two very clearly. Crypto is fraudulent. In general, crypto is Sam Bankman-Fried. Crypto is somebody creating a coin, keeping most of it for themselves, saying it's going to be worth a lot of money, pumping it up, and then selling into it. It’s what, you know, sadly, President Trump did with Trump Coin or Melania Coin—they're both down 90% from their high. That's that kind of stuff—that's fraud, in my view. Bitcoin is actually—it's a technological innovation. They solved a problem that existed for 20 years in computer science, which is called the Byzantine Generals' Problem—how do you trust a bunch of people that they’re being honest? And so what they created was a system of digital scarcity based on computers and algorithms that mean that there are only going to be 21 million Bitcoin ever. And, you know, don’t get me wrong—initially, I was very skeptical that they could do this. I mean, I didn’t believe it, and a lot of people still are skeptical, but it’s been working for 16 years without a problem. So, you know, I’m beginning to think, "Well, okay, this is"—my skepticism—and I’ve learned more about how it works—so my initial skepticism has faded away. But you’ve got what really is an immutable digital record of units called Bitcoins, and there will only ever be 21 million of them. And so if you own one Bitcoin, you own one twenty-one-millionth of all of those in the world. And in effect, what it’s kind of becoming is a form of, quote-unquote, digital gold. I mean, gold has its value because it’s geologically limited—there’s only so much of it in the Earth’s crust; there’s only so much that’s been mined, and we only add to the supply by about 1.7% a year. So Bitcoin—we’re adding to the supply by about eight-tenths of a percent per year, and that decreases every four years. And by 2140, there’ll be no more Bitcoin ever issued, and it’ll run—the system will run off of the transaction fees. So what Bitcoin is—it’s true digital scarcity. And that is kind of an invention in the sense that, you know, life was—there was life before it, and there’s life after it. And I mean, think of something digital like, you know, a computer file or a music file or a video file—I mean, you can make millions of copies. Anything that’s digital, by definition, it’s not scarce—you can copy it a million times. But if you have a ledger that’s got a proof-of-work—you know, electricity behind it—you can create a form of digital scarcity. And that’s what the Bitcoin network has done. And what we’re seeing is that people are adopting it as a form of digital gold. And gold is great—gold is analog sound money. I own a lot of it; I love it; it’ll continue to go up in value; it’s protection from fiat debasement. But we do live in a digital world, and gold is heavy and hard to verify—and the tungsten bars—and it has some shortcomings. Whereas this is extremely easy to verify—everyone can see the blockchain, and it can be transferred in 10 minutes. You can send a billion dollars in 10 minutes. And so that’s kind of revolutionary. And what we’re seeing is we’re seeing both Bitcoin and gold go up in value because the money is being debased—you know, the federal government can’t stop printing dollars—but Bitcoin’s going up more quickly in value because there’s an adoption curve taking place as well. And whereas guys my age—I’m 67—would buy gold for sound money, a lot of them only do and still hate Bitcoin, you know, younger people, they get it, and they’re like, "No, this is digital gold, and it’s much better than real gold." And, "Yeah, I’m totally comfortable owning these digits and having, you know, a passkey to allow me to access my money." So, you know, it’s, in my view, it’s the future. And it’s been working, it’s continuing to work, it’s continuing to grow, and I think it’ll be a much higher valuation in the future. I’m very comfortable even buying at these levels—and, you know, I started buying a long time ago. So that’s—I hope that’s a description. But what I caution people to do is a couple of things you’ve got to understand about it. One, it’s not crypto—all other forms of crypto, I’m not a supporter of, even Ethereum. I just—I don’t buy any of these other use cases for these other cryptos because they can change their monetary policy; they’re not scarce. So I’m anti-crypto in general. And the other thing with Bitcoin that one needs to understand—I always caution people on this—is it’s very volatile, and as you would expect for a new idea that’s being adopted, you know, sometimes it’s going to the moon, and sometimes it’s dead. And so it goes to 80,000, it goes to 20—it goes up and down a lot. So whenever I tell somebody to think about getting into Bitcoin, I often caution them. I say, "Look, you need to understand that under a four- to five-year time frame, everyone who’s ever bought it is ahead. But in that four years, you could have a 50% drawdown easily." And the way you get hurt on Bitcoin is if you buy it—let’s say you bought it today at 83,000, and it went to 40, and you thought you’d made a mistake and you sold it—then you’d get hurt. But my view is if it goes to 40, I’m going to be buying a lot more. And I’m quite confident in a few years it’s going to be at 150. So what you’re seeing is higher highs and higher lows, but with a lot of volatility in between. So—and people need to understand that as they look to get into it. There’s a lot in the book—I mean, I’m, you know, obviously I’m selling books here, but surprisingly, you don’t make much money on books. I’m trying—I’m really trying to sell knowledge. There’s a lot in the book on Bitcoin explaining this and showing the relative performance, and I think making a decent case. I mean, I’ve had a lot of gold friends who’ve been very skeptical—I’ve been able to convert some of them; I haven’t been able to convert others. You know, I have no ill will towards gold—like I say, I still manage a fund that does a lot of gold stuff—but I also think Bitcoin is more asymmetric than gold. So—and I think that everybody owes it to themselves to learn a little bit about it. Because, you know, if I’m right—I mean, I think this will go up 10x, and then I think it’ll go up 10x again—we’re talking about over, you know, another 10 or 15 years. But, you know, a lot of people now say, "Well, you bought it at 80,000," you know, or "I have to pay 80,000—you got it cheaper." And that’s true. But, you know, in five or seven years, if it’s at 800,000, somebody’s going to say, "You bought it at 80—oh my God, you did really well." So it’s kind of one of those things that’s going to go up for quite some time because of its limited supply. So that’s kind of a long-winded answer, but I hope I touched on the key points.
Jim Puplava:
Yeah, well, you have people like Cathie Wood who think it’s going to a million dollars over a period of time. I want to talk about how this plays out because it seems like this debt loop that we’re in right now has two outcomes: either the system collapses under its own weight, or the Fed prints money to keep it afloat. So if you were to see this scenario play out this decade and unfold, what does it look like to you?
Larry Lepard:
Yeah, like I said, predicting the future is so damn hard. I think if you look backwards and you ask yourself about the people in charge and what they are likely to do—I mean, I think the collapse scenario, you know, which would arguably lead to, you know, the ATMs not working and Mad Max—I mean, this is kind of how they justified TARP, you know, and all the things they did in 2008—I just don’t think that’s a likely scenario. I think at the end of the day, politicians and the policymakers in power are going to say, "Well, we’ve got two choices. We can either let it all collapse because, you know, it’s all crumbling down, there’s not enough money in the system, and confidence is being lost—and, you know, knowing that what they’re headed towards is kind of a 1930s, you know, Depression-like scenario—or we can say, ‘Well, we can print the money to prop things up,’" you know, like pretty much the way they did with Silicon Valley Bank—we’ll talk about that in a second—but, you know, and the risk is inflation. But I think they view the inflation risk—they say, "Well, that’s a risk we’ve got to take because it sure is better than the Depression scenario." I mean, you know, it’s interesting—Silicon Valley Bank failed. So after 2008, they passed a law, Dodd-Frank, and the law said, you know—and everyone was mad about the bailouts in 2008, including me; I’m sure you were too—and it was unfair, and most of the country thought it was unfair. They bailed out the banks; the bankers paid themselves $20 billion; other people are losing their houses, right? And so Dodd-Frank was a law which said, "Thou shalt not bail out banks anymore," you know—it said it in black letters. But Silicon Valley Bank comes along and it fails, and guess what? They ignored the law. You know, they rewrote the rules and said, "Well, you know, this is systemic, and it would bring the whole banking system—we’re going to create this new thing called the BTFP and blah, blah, blah." And they bailed it out. And so I think, you know, we’ve seen—I’ve seen this movie enough; we’ve seen this pattern enough, Jim, that I think we kind of know how it’s going to end now. You know, could they hold off on printing the money for a while, and we have a big downturn, a swoon, first? Yeah, sure. And in that case, would, you know, gold go down to 2,000? Because, you know, in a liquidity crunch, everything gets sold—you sell whatever you can, right? So—and if we had that first, you know, gold could go to 2,000, and Bitcoin could go to 20,000. And the people holding that—it wouldn’t be any fun holding that. I mean, I remember in March of 2020, they both got hammered when the COVID outbreak came, before Powell came in with his bazooka on that Monday morning later in the month. But when he came in with that bazooka, they both came out of the hole like a rocket ship because everybody knew that that meant money printing. And I think at the end of the day, they have to print—and hence the name of the book, right? "The Big Print"—it’s coming. So—
Jim Puplava:
And the other thing that we’ve seen is the amount of printing keeps getting bigger with each crisis. So as we—
Larry Lepard:
Exactly. Isn’t that fascinating? Right? So, yeah, yeah. So Bernanke printed, you know, 2, 3 trillion over the course of three years. You know, Powell printed, you know—well, actually arguably five over the course of 18 months—you know what I mean? And so, yeah, and that’s another argument I make. I mean, the analogy is, you know, it’s kind of like giving birth—I mean, the contractions are getting closer together, and they’re getting stronger. You know, the system is, in my view, getting close to the endgame on this, you know, printing and spending money to keep it going. I mean, Keynesianism is fundamentally flawed. I mean, we went down the wrong road when we got off the gold standard; we started, you know, living like Keynesians. And, you know, we masked it for a good long time—everything seemed okay. And the technology stuff has masked it too. I mean, look, you know, I want to see the world return to the way it was when I was a kid because I felt like it was more of a middle-class—it was fair, and it was just a kinder place. And I feel like now it’s a little bit more of a money grab, and there’s no middle class, or the middle class is getting beaten up. But in turn, you know, I will concede that technologically, boy, being alive today is a whole lot better than being alive in the '70s. I mean, I went to college—I got to call my parents once a week for five minutes or 10 minutes because the long-distance charges were too high, right? Now I can call anyone anywhere in the world, an unlimited amount, and it’s, you know, a $30 cell phone bill—I mean, it’s crazy. So, you know, we’ve had a lot of technological improvement over that period of time, but sadly, you know, the system has set itself up to put a lot of that gain in the pockets of the people at the top. I mean, it’s just stunning to me that 1% of the country controls 92% of the wealth—I mean, no wonder why people are angry and not happy. I mean, you know, they have a right to be—it’s not a fair system. You know, that’s the problem.
Jim Puplava:
So when we’re talking about every single crisis, they’re getting more frequent—
Larry Lepard:
Yeah.
Jim Puplava:
—and the money printing and bailouts are getting larger and larger and larger. So let’s talk about how does one protect oneself? You have a chapter in there—you talk about gold, you talk about Bitcoin, but you’re not favorable on real estate. Explain why.
Larry Lepard:
Yeah, I mean, I’m not unfavorable on real estate. I mean, the first thing I say to people who are my fund investors, who are friends—you want to own things the government can’t print, okay? Because we know the government’s going to print a lot. And you know what they can’t print? Real estate—waterfront real estate, any real estate—there’s only so much of it; it’s real; it’s a real asset, and it will go up in value over time. The reason I dump on it a little bit in the book is that it’s not an asset owned free and clear. I mean, if you own gold and you hide it somewhere, they can’t tax it; they don’t know you have it—it’s free and clear; it goes up in value, etc. Real estate’s got taxes associated with it. And sadly, as most of us who live in America know—you live in California; I’m sure you’ve experienced this—you know, my parents had a nice house in the Midwest, and the taxes were quite low, and it went up a lot in value, and they did very well when they sold it. The state and local governments—just like our federal government—have gotten fat and bloated, and taxes have gone up quite a bit. And you own that real estate, but if you don’t pay your property taxes, they can come take it away from you. And so you kind of have this boat anchor you’re dragging around, which is you’ve got to pay taxes on that real estate that you own. And sadly, in a world where taxes are going up—that’s not fun. So, you know, I consider it a better investment than bonds, and—I don’t know—it’s probably on par with stocks, depending upon the stock valuations. Right now, the U.S. stock market is still, in my view, very overvalued. But it’s—to me—and obviously it provides you shelter, so, you know, you can live in it, and that’s—that’s got value too. So I’m not totally down on real estate. I just think that, you know, the pure-play protection against inflation is what it’s always traditionally been, which is gold and then silver, and then now this new emerging, you know, form of sound money, which is Bitcoin—which, by the way, you don’t have to get comfortable with. I mean, I think if people just invest in gold and silver and we have the kind of monetary crisis I’m talking about, they’re going to do just fine—they’re going to do very well. But, you know, if you want some—if you want some added alpha, you know, and you’re willing to take risk—and that’s, by the way, that’s the way you deal with risk in Bitcoin, right? You’ve got all this volatility—well, nobody would ever suggest you take all your money and put it in Bitcoin; that’d be crazy—I mean, it’s just too volatile. But, you know, most people can afford to, you know, invest, say, 5% of their net worth in Bitcoin. And if it goes up and down a lot—I mean, because if I’m right and that 5% goes up a great amount, you’re going to be glad you did it, you know, versus not having done it, so—
Jim Puplava:
That’s one of the ways we’re hedging our clients—we own precious metals, and we own Bitcoin. Because as I look at—once again, in your book—it’s all math at this point because you’re looking at a deficit where the interest—I’m looking at the U.S. debt clock, and the interest on the debt is 1 trillion, 12 billion. And I look at where the government’s spending money, where we are, and how fast this debt is growing. And I can’t help but think, you know, Larry, we’re growing debt at an astronomical rate, and we’re in a growing economy with low unemployment. What happens if we have a recession?
Larry Lepard:
That’s the other thing. I mean, you know—not to—I mean, I get accused of being, you know, too doom-and-gloomy, and I don’t—I don’t want to be because I think there’s a really bright future for all of us on the other side of some of this transition. But you’re right—I mean, isn’t it interesting? You know, so—one of these—a couple—one thing that’s interesting here that I found—I observed this in the book too—I mean, okay, so the GFC happens, and you’ve got to do QE and take rates to zero—fine, okay—but after a couple of years, the banks were technically stable, right? Why didn’t you start to push interest rates up again? Do you know what I mean? I mean, it’s like—you just gave everybody free—I mean, we had ZIRP—zero interest rate policy—from '08 to 2015—I mean, that was seven years of free money, which just distorted everything. The same thing is true with COVID—okay, COVID, I get it—it’s a very big crisis; you’ve got to deal with it; you’ve got to spend a lot of money; you’ve got to help people—okay, I can accept all of that. But post-COVID, why don’t expenses go back down the other way? It’s kind of like a ratchet, you know what I mean? As you allude to with the debt and the interest cost—it’s only going one way, and that therein lies the fundamental problem, you know, that it’s just—but there’s a—there’s a limit. I mean, there’s another chart in the book—one of my favorites—by Hirschman Capital—Brian Hirschman did it—and it shows examples of countries that have been in situations like the one we’re in over the last hundred years. And in almost every case, you know—well, in every case, it results in a crisis—generally speaking, it’s an inflationary crisis; occasionally, it was a deep deflationary depression. But, you know, inflation is going to become a real issue of our time. And I don’t think enough people are aware of that, Jim. And again, that’s why I wrote the book—I just want to try and help people prepare themselves for what I see as—it’s just the math, you know—it’s sad that we’ve gotten to this position, but it’s because no politician ever really wanted to face the serious issues. I mean, there were calls 10 or 15 years ago that said Social Security expenses were going to become a problem, Medicare was going to become a problem, but they never dealt with it, you know, and here we are, right?
Jim Puplava:
So I know that when you take a look at these outcomes for fourth turnings, it would argue that this fourth turning comes to completion somewhere around 2033, 2035. You don’t think it goes that long? Why is that?
Larry Lepard:
I don’t because I think we’re kind of in the steep part of the curve—I really do. I think it’s—you know, I think they’re going to be forced into this QE in the next wave. I mean, so currencies kind of fail—and in hyperinflations, or not even hyperinflation, but just high rates of inflation kind of manifest themselves when a large quorum of the people all come to the same conclusion, which is they can never stop printing money. And I talk about this in the book—and as you know, this is called Gresham’s Law. And what it means is that people—you know, I mean, I think right now there’s still some people who think, "Oh, it’ll be okay; inflation will go back down; DOGE will solve the problem; the government will get back into balance, etc., etc." I don’t believe those things—I think that—I’ll take the other side of that bet. And I think the next crisis will demonstrate that, you know, they’ll have to do QE; they’ll have to print; they’ll have to grow the balance sheet more. And with every one of these events—I mean, after 2008, some of us saw it, and then a lot of people went back to sleep, and then 2020—more of us saw it, and then Silicon Valley Bank—more of us saw it still. And I would say that the ranks of the people who see this now—or, you know, it might even be 5 or 10% of the country now that sees it and understands it—you know, I mean, you see all the gold bars selling out at Costco, for example, which I think is hilarious. And, you know, what will happen, in my view, Jim, is that, you know, eventually the next one will happen, and just more people will see it, and they’ll just start to kind of abandon the money. And so the things I’m watching are, you know, the interest rates on the 10-year bond—which used to be the base layer of the financial system—and then the price of gold and the price of Bitcoin. And so, you know, if gold starts squirting through 4,000, 5,000, $6,000 an ounce—I mean, that kind of is indicating, you know, currency failure. And so what you’ll see is the bond market then saying, "Well, gosh, we don’t want to hold this—it’s depreciating rapidly; I don’t want to hold this." They’re going to go to the Fed and say—the Fed will be doing yield curve control because they’ll say, "Fed, sell it to you." Well, the bond market is $36 trillion; the Fed balance sheet right now is 7 trillion. If you add those two—I mean, if suddenly the Fed had to print money to buy $36 trillion worth of bonds, that would be massively inflationary—massively. You see where I’m going? And so I kind of feel like that’s—you know, I don’t know if we’re going to make it to 2030 before that happens—it feels to me like it’s before that. But I don’t know—I mean, look, to be totally fair and completely honest, you know, I thought it was all over in 2008, and then they kicked the can for another, you know, 15 years. So, you know, they’re good can-kickers, and they may succeed in kicking it another 10 or 15 years. However, even with that—back to your point about the math—I don’t see how, even if they successfully kick the can, I think there will be inflation. I don’t think they can’t—they can’t get the inflation genie back in the bottle, in my opinion. Good example of that—you know, so the longshoremen went out on strike last fall, and these are guys who unload the ships and the ports and stuff. And they got a six-year deal for a 60% increase in their wages—10% a year for six years. And I can see how they got it—one, they kind of have a monopoly on those ports; two, you know, they just lost 40% of their purchasing power as a result of COVID, and they said, "Hey, this isn’t right; we want it back." And so—well, that 10% a year in higher labor costs is going to affect every single good that comes through those ports. And basically, you know, 10% a year is a real long way away from the 2% that the government is trying to get to. So, you know, the inflation—it’ll come from labor demanding their fair share. And, you know, history shows these things are really hard to stop—I mean, Volcker did it, but that was a different set of conditions. So I think we live in an inflationary world—I think the unknown is how quick, you know—when, where, why, you know—does it blow up? Do we kick the can for another 20 years? It’s possible—I have to accept that it’s possible. I think a much more likely event is within the next five or six years, it becomes acute.
Jim Puplava:
So if you take a look at—I think we had the Fed’s balance sheet at about four and a half trillion prior to COVID, got up to over 9 trillion; it’s back down to 7. You think with the amount of money that they’re going to be forced to monetize, we could see the Fed’s balance sheet go to 20 trillion and, in extreme, even 40 trillion? I mean, I can’t imagine what that would do to prices and inflation.
Larry Lepard:
Right. No, it’d be—it’d be an outright catastrophe—it’d be terrible—it’d be absolutely terrible. And yeah, like I say, I don’t even like talking about it because it’s kind of depressing to think that things could be that broken. But, you know, hopefully before we get there, you know, there’s a solution—I talk about this in the book—I mean, I’m sure you read the chapter called "Policy Response." I mean, there is a solution to this—if we reset to a sound money standard, we can stop all this chaos now. It’ll be a one-time painful event—let’s not kid ourselves about that—but the argument I make is I’d much rather take one big hit of pain knowing that going forward it’ll be correct and right and fair versus dragging this thing out for the next 15 years of just inflation just wiping people out—know what I mean?
Jim Puplava:
Well, it’s interesting because even with DOGE, you’ve got, like, Democrats that are extremely upset about cutting back on spending and fraud—so you still have political resistance to putting the nation on a sound basis.
Larry Lepard:
Oh yeah, yeah. Well, look, politicians like to spend money—it’s their business—and they think—I mean, it truly—some of these people, like these MMT people—I mean, they kind of think like money just falls from the sky, and there’s no inflation risk. And, you know, anybody who’s got half a brain as an economist understands that there’s no free lunch. And so, yeah—I mean, you can print money and give it to people, and they feel richer, but then the price level goes up because you didn’t really print the goods and services that they’re using it to buy. And without—I mean, the way—and this I talk about a lot in the book—I mean, the way we—you know, capitalism is a system that will really, really increase people’s welfare if left alone and fair over a period of time—I mean, you know, human beings are smart; they work hard; we’ve got more—you know, every year we get more efficient at doing stuff. And so, you know, left to our own devices in a fair system, the world will be a much better place, you know, going forward—and I believe that to be true no matter what. But, you know, you can really muck it up by, you know, printing money and having these perverse incentives. And of course, that’s what they’ve done, so—
Jim Puplava:
Well, it’s an excellent book—you kind of lay out possible scenarios. And like you say in the book, nobody can predict with any precision, you know, when this is going to occur—next year, 2028, or 2033—all we do know is it’s coming. And once again, this gets back to math—we’re almost at 37—yeah, we’re at 37, almost 37 trillion; we’re spending over 1 trillion in just interest alone, more than we do on defense. And so you lay out the groundwork here. And what I like that you did—you explain how the economy works, you explain the economic side of it, and then you also explain the money side of it—because, you know, the media does a poor job of explaining inflation. I can remember when we had the inflation in the '70s, and Jimmy Carter came out and said inflation is this kind of mysterious thing that goes on—no, it isn’t; it’s simply printing money.
Larry Lepard:
Yeah, no, it’s—that’s right. And what I hope—I mean, I hope the book—it’s a tough thing to write about because it’s not, you know, it’s kind of a sophisticated topic, and it’s not straightforward and simple—most people don’t understand it. But I hope the book was written in a way that the average person can get what’s going on, you know—and that was what I really—I mean, that was what I think I brought to the party—I mean, you know, I didn’t say anything that was particularly original, and I took from a lot of other great works, you know, that I’ve cited heavily. But what I tried to do was I tried to write it in a way so that you could give it to anybody, you know, with no monetary background, no business background, and they might read it and go, "Oh, gee, you know, this is a different way of looking at it—I think I understand the problem a little bit better now"—because, to me, you know, that’s what—that’s what actually triggered my writing the book. I was watching some political program in the early part of last year—I started writing the book in May of last year; it took me about six or seven months—and the program had, you know, blue team arguing with red team, and they were arguing about all this stupid stuff which, you know, in my view, wasn’t very important relative to the underlying problem, which is the monetary problem—it was like the analogy I use is the house is on fire, and they’re arguing over the color of the drapes, you know—and it’s just like, you know, "Come on, guys." I mean, and as you say, this isn’t terribly—it’s math—I mean, it’s not—this is not open for debate; it’s just kind of math. And so once you kind of see that and understand that, you can’t unsee it. And I think what it leads you to conclude is that if you want to protect yourself, you need to own things the government can’t print, you know—if you want to make the political system and the world fairer and better and solve this wealth inequality problem, you know, we’ve got to advocate for politicians who believe in returning to some form of sound money—I mean, there are degrees of that—I mean, it doesn’t mean we have to go back to a full gold standard or full Bitcoin standard—we could just rein the Fed in, for example, and say they’re going to set interest rates at X percent and not let the money—not let the balance sheet grow—I mean, that would be a start, right? But we need to do these things, or else we’re going to continue to lurch from crisis to crisis and inflation to deflation and money printing—I mean, it’s just—it’s going to be—it’s going to be more of the same, which, to be frank, hasn’t been that much fun, right? I mean, I don’t think there’s anybody—I mean, look at a lot of people—my cohorts, you know, in their 60s—I mean, they, you know, one, they lost a lot of money when the GFC—or I mean in the dot-com bubble bursting—if they were in tech stocks, okay, they recovered a bit of it, but then in 2008 they lost more money when the GFC burst, right? I mean, it’s just—it’s been—it’s been feast and famine—it’s been hard.
Jim Puplava:
I have one final question before we end here. What do you think caused Bernanke to initiate ZIRP? I mean, we had a lot of money printing with the Great Financial Crisis; we had a stimulus bill that came in with Obama his first couple months in office, and then the economy began to pick up and recover. And I know that Hoenig really objected to what Bernanke was doing—
Larry Lepard:
Yeah, he was really brave—
Jim Puplava:
Yeah, yeah—and he scolded Bernanke. What do you think was in his head when the economy was recovering, growing, to initiate zero interest rates and think that this wasn’t going to have an implication for the economy and inflation?
Larry Lepard:
You know, I don’t really know, honestly—I just think—I think he’s a super Keynesian; I think he was very arrogant; I think he believed in his head that what happened in the Great Depression was they made a mistake of not printing enough money—and they, by the way, they did print money, and they took rates down to zero—but I think he—you know, because remember there was that anecdote where he said to Milton Friedman, you know—because Friedman wrote the great book on the history of the financial system and said, you know, "We did it, and we realized what we did in 1929—we realized the mistake we made, and we won’t make that mistake again." So he was—he was not going to err on the side of having money be, quote-unquote, too sound. And my view is he just misdiagnosed what actually happened in the Depression—I mean, you know, look—if you don’t want to have big downturns, you don’t let bubbles form—and, you know, making money cheap is the easiest way to form a bubble—and so, you know, sure enough, he did, right? And, you know, it’s—it’s the everything bubble that we now live in. And so, yeah—it’s—I don’t know—he’s an arrogant man, from what I can see, and he’s—he interpreted history in a way that, you know, benefited him and gave him a lot of power—and then he used it, you know—he wrote the book about, you know, "The Courage to Act" and kind of trying to sell his whole, you know, behavior as being so—so incredibly brave—I mean, I thought it was incredibly irresponsible—but I guess it just depends on which side of the seat—which side of the ledger you’re looking at. But I think in the end—I think when the history is written, you know, 50 years from now—this whole period will be viewed as a monetary experiment that went terribly wrong, you know—and because—I mean, think about it—you know, we’ve had—we’ve had a lot of financial turmoil, you know, in the last 20 years, and I think—I think the Fed is really at the heart of all of it. So—
Jim Puplava:
Well, it’s—you know, I think we could sum up and say inflation is coming, and you would be best to prepare for it—and there are certain investments that are not going to do well—fixed-income investments when you have inflation is a sure way to poverty. Well, listen, Larry, I want to congratulate you on your book—the name of the book is called "The Big Print: What Happened to America and How Sound Money Will Fix It"—it’s written by Lawrence Lepard, who we’ve been speaking with. Larry, all the best to you with this book.
Larry Lepard:
Thank you, Jim—thanks for having me on your excellent program, and I look forward to catching up with you in the future.
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