🚨 Global Collapse? Trump’s Tariff War Explained - Robert Kiyosaki, Richard Duncan

Trump wants to put a global tariff wall around China so that China can't sell any of its goods anywhere in the world. So that China's economy will crash and China will no longer be a national security threat to the US. So China must view this as an act of war, as an existential threat to the survival of the Chinese Communist Party and they are going to retaliate very hard in ways that will be very painful for the average American.

Hello, hello, hello. Robert Kyosaki, Rich Dad Radio Show, broadcasting from Arizona. And today we have a very special, one of my original guests 25 years ago, I believe, now.

And uh Richard Duncan and we're so old. I found his book in Borders bookstore, which is now gone. Out of business by Amazon.

I mean, so much has transpired because things are moving so quickly. But the reason I'm very excited to call Richard, my friend, is I was in Border's bookstore and his book went picked me up and it was a book called The Dollar Crisis. And I went, "Holy moly.

" And it was the perfect book for me to read because what Rich did, he verified what my rich dad and what Bucky Fuller were saying about our currency, our money, the dollar crisis. And Richard's credibility is impeccable. He's an economist from Babson, but also with the IMF and also the World Bank.

So, uh, he knows what he's talking about. He comes from experience, which is crucial today. And Richard is also sitting on the border of China in Thailand, which I of wondered why, but it's a beautiful Thailand's a beautiful country.

But I remember Richard, you know, when the uh the Thai bot collapsed, that was an interesting time to be in Thailand also. So anyway, Richard, as an old friend and, you know, trusted advisor, welcome to the Rich Dad Show. Thank you, Robert.

It's it's really great to be back. Thank you for having me back. It's great to see you.

And the crisis is getting worse, isn't it? Oh, we've I mean, so much worse so quickly. It's It's hard to describe.

I'm really extremely concerned that that the global economy could could collapse into a new great depression and that the dollar standard could completely blow apart. Yeah. So, let's go a couple of definitions.

You know, like I was listening to this one guy speaking about the US dollar is the reserve currency of the world. So as a classically trained account um economist, what does that mean to a lay person that is to reserve currency? What what status is that?

Why is that so good or bad? What's the thing about it? It's very important that the US has the reserve currency.

It means it's the main currency in the world that other countries trade in. They India uses dollars to buy things from Brazil and Brazil uses dollars to buy things from Saudi Arabia. And uh the reason that the dollar is the reserve currency, first of all, we won World War II and all the other countries in the world were broke and didn't have any gold.

And so we pegged the dollar to gold and everybody else pegged their currency to the dollar. And so initially that was the establishment of the dollar as the reserve currency. But the reason it's remained the reserve currency is because over the last since 1980 the United States has had extremely large trade deficits with the rest of the world.

In fact 16 trillion dollars of trade deficits with the rest of the world. And that that has thrown out $16 trillion dollars into the global economy, making the trade surplus countries $16 trillion richer. And they have literally they have $16 trillion.

And with these trillion6 trillion, they must invest them in US dollar assets like Treasury bonds or stocks or Fanny May and Freddy Mack bonds or corporate bonds. So this money boomerangs back into the United States and helps finance our very large government budget deficit. So this has been very advantageous to the entire world because it's allowed the rest of the world to grow much more rapidly than they otherwise could have by selling $16 trillion worth of goods to the United States that they couldn't have otherwise done.

And it's been very beneficial to the United States because that $16 trillion has come back and been invested in US dollar assets, pushing up the stock market, pushing up bond prices and holding down bond deals and making it very easy for the government to finance its extremely large government budget deficits. Yes. So the point here is this.

back in was the Breton Woods in 1940 was it 1944 the agreement the US dollar became the reserve currency but it promised we would back our dollars with gold and that's when Tricky Dick Nixon in 71 took us off the gold standard which made the dollar US dollar 100% credit debt and now we print and print and print and print and print and we're Now I think the US national debts like 36 trillion offbalance sheet offbalance sheet liabilities including social security Medicare they estimate is around 250 trillion and then they will say well Japan's in deep trouble also so is Japan but their financed internally I mean their debt is financed by the Japanese people the world finances America and when they start dumping our bonds which you're doing right now. That's what I want to find out from you as again a classically trained economist work you worked with the IMF and the World Bank and you're sitting in Thailand out there next to our buddies in China. I'm going Kipasa what is going to happen Richard?

How how serious? Because you wrote the book the dollar crisis. Can it get be a much bigger crisis than this?

Right. So I wrote the dollar crisis in in 2002 and that's the one that you saw and that's how we got to know each other. And in the dollar crisis I was very worried about these very large US trade deficits that were destabilizing the global economy.

They were blowing the trade surplus countries into bubbles like Japan and later on China. And the money was boomeranging back in the United States and blowing the US into a bubble. And I said, 'Th this bubble in the US is going to pop and it's going to lead to a financial sector crisis and a severe recession and probably a collapse of the of the dollar standard in the global and the and the dollar reserve currency status.

Well, so that collapse actually did happen in 2008 and uh and the financial sector almost did collapse. There was a very severe recession, but the government managed to reflate the bubble with trillions of dollars of paper money creation and trillions of dollars of budget deficits. So the Great Depression that I foresaw at that time didn't happen.

I I just jotted down some how things had changed since then, 22 years ago. At that time the trade deficit was $450 billion in 2002. Last year it was more than twice that much, $1.

1 trillion. And the cumulative deficit, if you add them up over the years, in 2002 the cumulative deficit was $3 trillion. Now it's $16 trillion.

In 2022, the US government, the total debt in the US was $33 trillion. Now it's at $100 trillion. So three times larger.

The government's debt in 20 in 2002 was 6 trillion. Now it's 36 trillion. Six times larger.

The the total assets of the Fed, how much money they created back then, that was 700 billion. It peaked a couple of years ago at 9 trillion. Wealth in the United States in 2002 was 46 trillion.

Now it's 169 trillion. And China's economy in 2002 it was $1. 5 trillion.

Now it's $18 trillion. Gold was $300. Now it's $3,500.

So my point is is that by keeping this bubble inflated in 2008 and again in 2020, it's made this global bubble so much larger than than it was when I first wrote the dollar crisis in 2002. Now I think we're so we're so much more vulnerable than we were then and it's so much going to be so much more difficult to keep this bubble inflated. And so I think we're now moving into a I've just published a new macroatch video today called the dollar crisis 2025.

I think we're moving into this new period where the dollar is going to plunge like it did after 2002. Between 2002 and 2008, the dollar fell 41%. And that had seriously destabilizing consequences for our trading partners, for the global economy, for for the US financial markets.

And ultimately the global the global financial crisis blew up entirely in 2008. So now we're in this situation where we're much have a much bigger bubble and much more much less firepower to try to combat it if the bubble pops. So now we're turning to your question about what's going to happen if other countries start dumping our treasury bonds.

This is a real concern. And uh so President Trump, as you know, has put up very high tariffs on all the countries in the world, but especially on China, 145% tariffs on China. And he has a plan.

There is a a strategy. The strategy was laid out in a paper by a person called Steven Moran, who is the chairman of the Council of the President's Economic Adviserss. And here's Moran's three-step plan.

Step one is to put very high tariffs on all the countries of the world. Step two is then to threaten all of the other countries in the world to remove the United States security umbrella from them if they dare to retaliate against the high US tariffs. And step three is then to force all of these countries in to devalue the dollar into a agreement to devalue the dollar like a new Plaza Accord.

This would be called the Mara Lago accord. Now everyone has read this paper by now in terms of the policy makers, central bankers, the hedge funds, all the big banks. So they know that President Trump wants to devalue the dollar.

This is the main part of the strategy. So the only sensible thing for anyone to do who understands that President Trump wants to devalue the dollar is to sell US dollar assets as quickly as they can before the dollar gets devalued. Because if the dollar gets devalued, it's already dropped 10% from January.

It could drop another 30% or 40%. They would be all of their they would all of these people especially the foreigners holding dollar assets like treasury bonds would suffer enormously from a huge devaluation. So they want to sell their treasury bonds and their other dollar assets like stocks and this is what they've been doing.

So in the recent turmoil in the stock market we've seen a very unusual thing happen. Normally when betard betard This is going too far. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay.

We can only take so much at a time that my brain can't handle much more. Okay. So, okay.

So, so gold keeps going up because they're dumping treasuries and buying gold. That's what this that's what the central banks reportedly saying. Plus silver.

Right. And where we America got in tr wants to devalue the dollar that means make it weaker so that they'll buy more American products. Is that what you're saying?

So then the rest of the world goes he's threatening us and what you're saying is that he says if you don't play ball we'll stop protecting you. Is that basically right? That's what he's saying.

That's what he has said. Yeah. So, as a American sitting on the border of China on Thailand, what do you think the Chinese are thinking right now?

And then we'll go to a break for this, but make it make it quick. What do you think the Chinese want to do now? So, Trump wants to put a global tariff wall around China so that China can't sell any of its goods anywhere in the world.

so that China's economy will crash and China will no longer be a national security threat to the US. So, China must view this as an act of war, as an existential threat to the survival of the Chinese Communist Party and they are going to retaliate very hard in ways that will be very painful for the average American. Okay.

So that with that I'll give you a um everybody I love this guy Richard Duncan. He explains things so I can understand it on a macro macro level and he has a product called macroatch which you can subscribe to. And the thing I like about it is Richard uses pictures, graphs and charts so you can understand this.

So I think what Richard is saying here been friends for 25 years now is the most important time we need to pay attention because this is no longer just about money. It's about war and we're entering into a war right now. So we come back in a few minutes we have more of Richard Duncan and talk about why Trump and tariffs and China and weakening the dollar and gold and all this.

why you need to pay attention to it. We'll be right [Music] back. Rich Dad likes gold.

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Welcome back. Uh today our guest is a longtime friend, Richard Duncan. And when I was first starting with Rich Dad Poor Dad, I saw his book in Borders bookstore before Amazon wiped him out.

But uh and his book was the dollar crisis and we're kindered souls after that because my I was a tune with Dr Ruck Mr Fuller. He wrote a book called the grunch of giants gru n gross universal cash ice is how our wealth is stolen via our money via inflation and taxes. So anyway, that's why rich dad always said you don't work for money, you work for assets and I save gold and silver and today bitcoin.

So Richard Duncan is saying something that's very important to you me is this. If you look at history where now we starts off as a currency war. So that's the devaling of the dollar moving it up and down.

Then we go into a trade war or tariff war which Trump is pulling right now. And then from the trade war we go to a kinetic war. And I was just in the South Pacific touring the battle sites like Euima and Okanow and Guadal Canal and Pelu.

And I was out there this time and the Japanese aren't there anymore, but the Chinese are there. And the Chinese have become our adversarial person. So Richard sits on the border of China and Thailand or China with and Thailand.

But every time we've had a currency war, a trade war, it goes to a shooting war was a thing called the Boston Tea Party. 1773, it was a battle against the tariffs, the te taxes on tea, which led to 1776, the American Revolution. My concern is, and what Richard's concern is, we're on the verge of going to a shooting war.

Like I said, I was just out in the Pacific. Japanese aren't there anymore, but the Chinese are. And we're building huge runways and over the over the earth, over the curvature uh radar, and we're getting prepared for war.

And this next war, and the same as in Gaza and the Ukraine, this next war will not be pretty. So, Richard, with that, uh again, I want he has a program called Macroatch. Please, please, please subscribe to it because what Richard is covering now is so much.

He's got more and more in his in his repertoire and I strongly suggest subscribing to Macroatch and there's a discount for it that Richard offers. But this is not a time to be stupid or ignorant. This is a time to be paying attention to macro as well as what's happening on micro, what's happening in your pocket.

So Richard, take it away. So thanks Robert for mentioning macroatch. If your listeners would like to subscribe, they can subscribe at a 50% discount if they use the coupon code crash.

That's crash. And now going back to China, before the guns really begin firing, there are so many ways that China can retaliate against the United States for imposing these very high tariffs on Chinese goods and trying to force all of the United States trading partners to also put very high tariffs on Chinese goods. China can retaliate economically and they can retaliate militarily.

Here are just a few examples. China has a trillion dollars of treasury bonds. They could dump those and that would cause US interest rates to spike.

Another thing they could do economically is they could actually ban all Chinese exports to the US. Say we're just not sending you any more exports. And immediately there would be shortages in the United States of practically everything.

There would be consumer shortages. The consumers would freak out. There'd be very high rates of inflation.

The economy would global the supply chains would come to a standstill and that would crash the economy. Another thing they could do economically is they could close all of the American businesses in China. things like Tesla, all of the American banks, all of the American retailers like Walmart, Starbucks, McDonald's, all of them shut them all down overnight.

Computers, Apple, and that would and that would be a very serious blow to US corporate profits. And then they could retaliate militarily. Beginning with Taiwan, they could tack Taiwan or or something slightly less.

They could put a uh enclose Taiwan with an with their navy so that nothing could come in and out of Taiwan. And that would challenge the United States to see if the the US actually has the nerve to try to end this blockade. Or another military response, they could get their North Korean friends to start lobbing rockets into South Korea or even into Japan and that would force a US military response as well.

Or another example, China could send tens of thousands of Chinese troops into Ukraine to fight alongside the North Koreans and the Russians to send Europe a message of how rough things could get if Europe actually goes along with the United States plans to put up very high tariffs on Chinese goods. So all of these things would just cause havoc throughout the global economy, crush the US stock market, send it into a very severe recession. And even if Let me back up one one more second.

Okay, you said something earlier. When they they they hold our treasuries, which is our debt. If they dump that interest rates go up, that'll destroy us also because we owe what?

$36 trillion. And the interest payment on that would be greater than uh we we we go broke. We couldn't make that.

That would be like you having a million dollars in debt and your credit card guy says pay it or go you're dead. We're dead. Oh, you're right.

So you're you're of on all levels right now militarily, financially and tariffs and you know that all this stuff. So if they did start dumping their Treasury bonds, the Fed that would cause the bond prices to drop and cause the bond yield, the interest rates to spike up. The Fed would have to respond by printing trillions of dollars and buying up every Treasury bond that China sold, flooding the creating a new surge of the US money supply, which would lead to very high rates of inflation, especially at a time when when we're not getting any imports from China.

The trade tariffs are already going to be extremely inflationary. And then if the Fed starts creating another crisis round of quantitative easing of one or two trillion dollars, that's going to lead to inflation at least as high as we had a few years ago and perhaps higher. So the um let's get into what can a person do.

I mean I really want everybody to subscribe to Micro Watch, put the word crash in there, get a discount on it. But what Richard is saying, this is the macro. If you play the casual board game, it's the micro is what are you going to do about it?

So there's macro and then there's micro. So what I've been doing about as Richard knows is I own gold mines and silver and I own Bitcoin. I don't save the dollar.

You know, I'm converting as fast as I can to things the US government cannot mess with. So what else can a person do, Richard? I mean to protect themselves in this most critical time.

And I'm afraid most Americans don't know how critical it is. That's the scary part. This the thing about these crises is they don't just occur at one moment in time.

They they play out over time and over time what investors need to do changes as the environment changes. So, how this is likely to play out, I believe, is in the in the near term, over the next few months, 6 months at the latest, we're going to have much higher levels of inflation in the United States because of the trade tariffs. And at the same time, because of the other th those policies and the other Trump policies like Doge firing a lot of government workers and cutting spending, there's going to be a recession.

So, we're going to have inflation and a recession at the same time. That's stagnation. And it's going to also cause a severe fall in asset prices as US corporate profits get hit.

And as the stock market falls considerably further over the next six to nine months, we're going to start seeing some financial institutions begin to get into trouble like we did last time with Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns. Then eventually the entire financial system collapsed in the US in 2008 and they had to be bailed out. So, we're going to get to that point and right up until that point, everyone's going to be selling US stocks and US assets.

But when the crisis really hits and the banks start to fail, as they did in 2008, then the situation is going to change because the Fed is going to jump in and start creating trillions of dollars to bail out all these banks again. And the government's going to have trillions of dollars of budget deficits to pump up the economy. So the Fed and the government working together will keep this economy from completely collapsing again the way that they prevented the economy from collapsing in 2008 and again in 2020.

But this time it's going to be different because this time is going to be more like the COVID period but perhaps worse. COVID had global supply chain bottlenecks and so when the Fed printed a lot of money with the supply chain bottlenecks there was a lot of inflation. The situation is going to be the same this time.

The Fed's going to be printing a lot of money to prevent a depression but we're going to have global supply chain bottlenecks because we have this trade war with with China and we can't buy any products from China. So we've got a tariff supply ch shock that's inflationary and we have a demand supply shock a demand shock that's also inflationary from the Fed creating a lot of money. So these two things together are going to create very high rates of inflation.

Now Richard Richard so what can a person do? I mean besides ordering macro wants to understand the big picture micro see the board game behind me is about the micro what can I do what do I do so like I say you know I own gold mines and silver mines I own lots of Bitcoin I'm getting away from the dollar I'm only I'm I own cattle because people have to eat. So in inflation, I'm counting on the price of cattle to go with it.

So we've got to get down to the get out of the macro right now, Richard. But what is in the micro for these people? What do you see?

Because what I see in China, right? I isn't China and Syria, they're having unemployment problems and all that because it is backing up on them. Right.

So China that China has a totalitarian system that they can keep everybody in check. But what Americans can do is in the near term they can expect stock prices to fall and the dollar to fall. So if they're brave they can short stock prices and they can short the dollar now and and also they can buy gold because gold will will keep appreciating as the dollar falls.

Now, when the crisis really explodes, the 2008 like global financial crisis, when it hits, when the banks start failing and the Fed jumps in and starts printing a lot of money again, then stocks will go up. They will rebound and the economy will stop collapsing. But because there will be very high rates of inflation, then this will also make gold keep moving further higher and it will also cause people's mortgages to vaporize.

When there's high rates of inflation, it it evaporates people's debt because prices go up and wages tend to go up, but the debt is fixed at fixed interest rates. So if you have a a house and you have a 50% mortgage on it and we have high rates of inflation, that wipes away your debt. It wipes away your mortgage.

So you can view mortgage debt, for instance, as a as an investment strategy when there's high rates of inflation. It's going to make your mortgage debt disappear. So those are things that Americans could, normal Americans could could do as this as this crisis, this dollar crisis 2025 unfolds.

Good, good, good, good, good. Anyway, have you I I only know what's going on with YouTube, but they have pictures from China about unemployment. That also means this unemployment in the US coming because what Trump wants to do is make you know MAGA make America great again.

He wants our jobs. He wants our factories to come back. But as you've said to me many times it's not going to come back to the US.

The factories will go on to lower wage countries like Vietnam and Pakistan and all that. So the person who's hope holding for a job or un my concern is unemployment you know I mean when so let's say macro 2025 hits what's going to happen to unemployment in both east and west and Europe well unemployment is going to go up in China and it's going to go up in the United States unemployment rate now is still very low. But that's I think that's all about to change because the policies President Trump has announced are have been so chaotic that it's really crushed consumer sentiment and business sentiment.

So the consumer confidence is record low levels nearly and their consumers are going to spend less and businesses don't know what to do. They don't know if the tariffs are going to be 10% or a,000% or how long they're going to last. So, they don't know whether they should bring their factories back to the US or not.

They're all just frozen. They're not doing anything. They're not investing.

They just want to cut cost now before their their revenues collapse so that their profits won't entirely disappear. So as they as consumers spend less and businesses invest less, they're going to businesses are going to fire people and the unemployment rates going to move significantly higher. Yeah.

So at that point the Fed will begin cutting interest rates and perhaps quite quickly and they'll print more money and inflation keeps going and the the rich get richer because what inflation affects things like gold and silver to go up but also chicken and eggs to go up. You know chicken eggs and milk will go up. So that's why the average person s right now is going I don't know what's going on.

You but you've got to do something. And so give us a little bit more on what you cover in macro watch because what you have is the macro. My cash flow board game is the micro.

What can the individual do? So give us one more pitch on macroatch. I some macroatch.

I've now been making macroatch videos since October 2013. I make a couple of videos every month discussing something important happening in the global economy, focusing primarily on the US economy and what the government is doing, what the Fed is doing, what's happening with credit growth and what's happening with quantitative easing for instance. and then translating these developments into how the asset prices are likely to be affected.

So over the last couple of months in in December, I published a video called is the everything bubble about to pop? And now of course we can see it is. Today's video is called the dollar crisis 2025 explaining why the dollar is likely to lose another 30% of its value over the next couple of years and the implications of that.

And so I track the most important developments happening in the global economy and explain using charts in very simple language what this means. Richard, Richard, Richard, you just hit it. You just hit it.

What you what Richard does at macro watch, we should change it to suicide watch. Really? But it's not that bad.

Sometimes I'm bullish. Sometimes it's going up. I when people read your your thing, you have charts, but I mean pictures and then you explain it simply so the lay person like me can understand it.

And then the next question is what are you going to do about it? So that's why Richard, what you do is priceless. And uh again, what's the there's a discount if they put the you word crash in there, right?

If they they can find macroatch on my website, which the if they type in richardduncaneconomics. com, richardduncaneconomics. com, they'll be taken to my to my homepage and there they can hit the subscribe button and they'll be prompted to put in a coupon code and if they type in crash, they can subscribe at a 50% discount.

I mean this we're not talking thousands and thousands of dollars. This is really very affordable and uh they will immediately have access to 100 hours of Macroatch videos in the archives and and Macroatch really tries to explain to people how the economy really works today in this modern world where money is no longer backed by gold. It's back it's backed by nothing.

This completely changes the way the economy works and the way that the government manages the economy. So the goal of Macroatch is to teach people how the economy really works in the 21st century and all about the forces driving the financial markets driving up the stock market and the property market or driving them down so that they can make better investment decisions for themselves. So I I upload a new video every couple of weeks.

They're normally 15 or 20 minutes long. We have 30 or 40 charts and I hope your listeners will check it out and subscribe to Macroatch. Richard, it's priceless.

Priceless because from macro you go micro, you know, kipasa. What are you going to do about it? That's the question.

And that's why, you know, I appreciate our friendship for all these years. And thank you for being one of the great educators of our times, Richard. So, thank you very much.

Thank you, Robert. and thank you for being my mentor and for your friendship over the years. That's mutual here.

So, we help each other. So, when we come back, uh, we have a final word and again, thank you, Richard, for all you do for us. Thank you.

Thanks for We'll be right back. [Music] Welcome back and thank you for thank you to Richard Duncan and uh please remember his his his product is called Macroatch. You go go to his website Richard Duncan Economics and put crash and you get a 50% discount for it.

It's more than the price it's priceless because today I've never seen it so bad. you know, for the last 25 years, we knew this was coming. Uh, I hate to say this was he kept warning all of us, but a lot of people have not listened.

And now he's more terrified. I'm more terrified than ever before what's going to happen next. So, this is not a time to be stupid or ignorant.

This is a time to pay attention. And I appreciate all of you paying paying attention to the Rich Dad Radio Show because I'll do my best to make sure that we all get through this together, but we're going to some very very turbulent times, possibly a global depression and on and worse than that would be a war. So, so please take care and we'll see you next Rich Dad Radio Show.

Thank you for being a viewer. Thank you. This podcast is a presentation of Rich Dad Media Network.