"It Could Collapse The US Dollar" - Navigating America's Horrific Financial Crisis | Whitney Webb

do you think the debt is a real problem uh and is it something that people should really stop and address yeah I think debt is a very real and and serious issue and the amount of debt the US government has AC Creed I think as a testament to the poor fiscal management um of the US government um and not just the executive branch but Congress as well um and it's been going on for a very very um you know very long time and not a lot has been done about it and really you know in

the post 911 era the amount of debt that um you know the US government has taken on has just absolutely ballooned when you compare it to previous decades and I think a lot of that has to do with the Foreign Wars that the US government has engaged in including ones that aren't formally declared um in in this sort of effort to expand uh you know the the military Empire abroad and sort of maintain that hegemony and dominance and historically a lot of that uh was also into uh directly related to dollar hemony the Petro dollar

system which now we know uh has essentially been on the way out um but a colleague of mine Mark Goodwin uh put out a book a few years ago about this idea of the Bitcoin dollar system and this idea that the US government would sort of use Bitcoin uh and create the system that's like an analog to the Petro dollar system uh where because most people um you know uh when Bitcoin is purchased usually it's done with you know by buying dollars first um in order to purchase Bitcoin for example um and um in in

that type of um situation you'd be just like in the case of you know the Petra dollar where uh you know the price of oil is in it's priced in dollars you're generating artificial demand for dollars to buy some sort of energy commodity or energy asset and Bitcoin sort of is an energy asset at the end of the day uh it's moving uh essentially attempting to create the same system but instead of with oil uh with Bitcoin and most of the Bitcoin Holdings uh the world are concentrated in the United States and the US government

itself is one of the biggest holders um of Bitcoin in the world uh so I think uh there's sort of this effort there to do that and this was actually implicit in uh Trump's uh speech that he gave um at the Bitcoin conference a few months ago sort of saying uh that's what uh he sort of Saw utility in Bitcoin for um in a sense and uh but I think also that has a lot of uh causes a lot of complications when it relates to the ethos of Bitcoin which was originally about uh stopping irresponsible

Central Bank policy and fiscal policy uh the idea that you would um yoke Bitcoin to the US dollar instead of using it to challenge the US dollar or challenge Fiat or challenge debt-based currency or a debt-based monetary system obviously if you uh join you know the US uh dollar um to bitcoin having Bitcoin be a challenge to those things essentially kind of has to stop and and really in that situation you could have Bitcoin enable that type of irresponsible fiscal policy um because you could I mean uh you would essentially be using it as a

sync for hyperinflation um at the end of the day it is a really interesting frame to think of Bitcoin as a sync for hyperinflation of the US dollar but I don't know that a lot of people are going to understand what that means so if you had to say that same thing but from a different angle how would you explain to somebody how uh one why is the hyperinflation going to come about and two how is it Bitcoin that becomes the sync for that to stop that from becoming a runaway problem um so essentially if

you were to like hyperinflate the dollar in this type of system obviously the price of Bitcoin would appreciate as price in US dollars but it's not uh but Bitcoin itself isn't subject to inflation so the people that hold Bitcoin in that case would really benefit in that type of scenario but people that hold you know dollars uh for example um would not necessarily but there's also this effort to sort of resolve this uh that aspect of it by bringing stable coins into the equation which are um you know digital dollars but they're kind of gobbling

up us treasuries um and uh you know are buying sort of like nation state level amount of US Government debt and servicing the debt at the same time so sort of this the Bitcoin dollar system as I understand and again this is Mark Goodwin's work so again he can probably explain it a lot better than me and the the detailed mechanisms and all of that um but as I understand it you would have to have sort of these dollar stable coins uh in in the mix as well um as a way to sort of absorb

uh government debt and even you know these things may not be enough to absorb all of the debt that we have and so there's these uh efforts uh right now this idea of real world asset tokenization there's this push into uh Tok organizing what is referred to as natural capital or aspects uh I guess major uh like even entire ecosystems essentially and tokenizing them and using that as sort of like uh you know a store of wealth of finite Supply um so there's this one uh effort for example that's seeking to tokenize each hectare of

the Amazon rainforest and there's 750 million hectares so there's a finite supply of this digital asset security that's tied to each he te of the rainforest so then you have something else that you know uh can could in theory be used as a as a sync for this stuff too because when it's of a finite Supply it's in you know it's not subject to inflation and so you can sort of mitigate the in the impacts of inflation uh by having this anti-inflationary thing because of its finite Supply as a sync um you know for the

thing that you're creating more of in the case of in in the case of dollars um okay okay that that is really really interesting I want to walk people through that and my words let me know if I go astray um in fact one thing I'm going to lay out how I think the dollar hyper inflates but if you think I get that wrong please definitely challenge uh my thinking so here's what I'm taking away from this you right now because of the debt going up like crazy we are already in a position where the

US government is going to spend more just on the interest in the debt than they spend on military spending uh next year it's projected to be more than Medicare Medicaid all of our social programs uh and so what's going to end up happening is they will inevitably find themselves in a position where they're going to have to lower rates in order to be able to make good on that debt or default defaulting I think would be way worse and so what they'll end up doing is printing money now the problem is printing money in my

words in my words printing money is straight theft they are making more of the money so that they can so socialize effectively the losses the loses yeah exactly so everybody has to deal with the losses but then they can funnel that money into making good on the debt that they've accured okay so to do that then you're going to get into this um just death spiral of hyper inflating the dollar because you have to keep printing more of it in order to service the debt and deal with all your obligations so that you don't default

so that will effectively Drive the um the worth of the dollar closer and closer to zero uh every um Global Reserve currency has had this problem even if you look at the um British pound it's lost something like 98% of its value over the last 150 years or something is absolutely insane uh so this is the nature of currencies and what you need in order to avoid getting clobbered by that if you're paying attention is you need an asset that you can go into that you can store uh the value of your money that's why

they call it a store value uh that cannot be inflated and the one that has a lot of cultural attention and energy right now is Bitcoin that's certainly why I have invested in Bitcoin I do not trust the government not to just keep Printing and printing and printing but what you're saying is hey there's this process called tokenization that we can use to assign ownership to every physical thing of value such as the Amazon rainforest and if you own a given hect takre of uh the Amazon rainforest you know that they aren't going to be

making any more of it so you have something that is a finite Supply you're able to put your value into that and as long as people value that uh part of the rainforest you are good you have a a companion uh store of wealth to bitcoin or whatever but the side part of this is that in order to ensure the Integrity of the hex a on which this each unit of token is based you must surveil the forest and so there's this whole idea of now creating the internet of forest putting sensors on every tree

and every hectare of the Amazon in order to ensure that uh you know no one's messing with it and this may also at some point include you know the indigenous people that live there because you know if one hectare has an indigenous tribe and less trees right as compared to another hectare that isn't inhabited which one is more valuable in the eyes of inv s particularly if there's this um effort to impose like a carbon Market a global carbon Market which some people like Mark Carney and other prominent you know Central bankers and other Bankers

have discussed at length as a alleged solution um you know to environmental issues in the world um you know I think that is something that should be talked about um as well and also um the idea is to also use satellite surveillance and so this particular effort to tokenize the Amazon specifically is teamed up with a satellite company um called satal logic and satal Logic the chair of the board is Steve minuchin the former treasury secretary and also on the board is a man named Howard lutnick who was recently named to be co-chair of Trump's

transition team and he's the longtime head of canor Fitzgerald uh which is one of the main uh dealers of us treasuries and also uh very intimately connected to the staple coin tether uh which is also invested in SATA logic um so it would it'll be interesting to see exactly uh what what goes on there as it relates to the satellite firm which is also you know in previous reporting I did with uh Mark Goodwin who I mentioned earlier for Bitcoin magazine you know they've been involved in sort of this effort to create a carbon Market

in Latin America that was built on the Bitcoin blockchain specifically which is something that I think a lot of you know at least older School bitcoiners uh who were not really into the idea of carbon markets or any of these things uh would be you know quite against um but uh I I think it's um something that should definitely be talked about the idea of um you know sat using satellite surveillance to back all of the stuff up especially with a company like satell logic that has you know the people I mentioned on the board

uh but also are you know vying for us intelligence and Military contracts and the people that created that company are longtime contractors for DARPA and the NSA and US intelligence so you're going to have this satellite firm you know surveilling large SAS of Latin America um you know if these uh efforts one of which is called Green Plus and the other one called one Amazon uh go through you'll essentially have a a company that's tied to you know uh for important people that are uh as it relates to the US government you know former officials

um and um you know also people that have historically been US government and intelligence contractors uh you know surveilling uh your environment from the sky without a national government really having any say in the matter I think that's quite um quite problematic um and also tether uh is behaving rather you know uh making some interesting choices for a stable coin issue where I think as well uh they've started Investing For example in brain machine interfaces uh you know brain chips and that sort of thing um and um have also you know onboarded the FBI and

Secret Service onto their platform uh and have been you know shutting down people's wallets uh on behalf of you know the treasures ofac um and entities like that um so you know I think you know some of these stable coin issuers The prominent ones anyway are sort of anticipating uh this kind of system uh that that I discussed earlier and are sort of uh embedding the embedding themselves with powerful actors uh that I think ultimately uh mitigate their ability to be what some people have argued are human rights tools you know some people have said

that about stable coins in the past uh but if you're on boarding you know one particular government which very much has a political agenda as it relates to Latin America and other parts of the world uh onto your stable coin and are freezing uh you know and taking people's money essentially at the behest of that government and also getting you know invested with people that are uh at least in the case of a future Trump Administration are likely to have some political connections there as well um you know I think that's pretty significant yeah I

think that's very fair to say um let me ask do you think that the tokenization of the natural world um helps or hinders with this what you called the Neo feudal or where I've heard you refer to it as like a a new form of slavery where we have these two very Divergent classes because when you first started describing it uh it sounded kind of awesome and then by the end I thought uh oh like maybe this actually creates something really terrible well okay let let's take the case of you know um the the green

plus program which claims to sort of tokenize and and turn into carbon credits protected areas uh throughout Latin America so in those cases the carbon credits aren't given to the locals or the local governments to trade and make money off of and put back into their communities it's going through third parties that are not based in those countries and the money for the people there go into a particular fund that isn't managed by any people that live there it's managed by um well they haven't really been open about it but a guy from one of

the biggest insurance companies in the world locked in is ostensibly the head of it and they would decide when there would be certain allotments of that money and that money has can only be spent on projects that this particular group running green plus that again isn't based in Latin America approves of so in that case you're sort of choosing how the money can be spent you're framing it publicly as for the benefit of the environment and for the benefit of these local people but in reality you're deciding what they can and can't fund uh and

you know some of the the stuff that you know they their partners and whatever are tied to a lot of the same uh you know foreign oligarchs uh like the Rockefeller Foundation or the Gates Foundation or entities you know like that that go back to some of these you know very um you know wealthy families ultimately it's initiatives run by NOS that those organizations fund which ultimately doesn't necessarily work in the best interest of these local people who are you know poised to surrender these protected areas supposedly to protect them by generating carbon credits but

the carbon credits are going to be traded by people abroad and the decisions about how that money is spent is being made by people who are abroad not about the locals so it's it sort of seems to me like a way to you know frame a project that's going to make certain people a lot of money uh under very different terms than what is actually going to happen it seems more likely to disenfranchise rather than Empower locals uh but is Being Framed sort of as a planetary necessity uh because of the whole uh you know

climate change thing right so um we have to act now to do this stuff and so there's you know this pressure being plac through that rhetoric on people to comply with these types of things uh particularly in Latin America is a big focus of that now um but I think uh you know as as it's been you know played out in practice that really isn't the case and the particular group uh that I mentioned earlier that's doing this in the Amazon which is called one Amazon entered in into contractual agreements uh with this indigenous community

Community called the shiar I believe that live in the Amazon and it was framed to them as being great and then they actually went and like read the contract after they signed it and realized that it dramatically favored one Amazon over their interest and then voted to cancel the agreement right so these guys kind of have a history at least these actors that I've mentioned of sort of going in and framing their stuff making a sales pitch to locals that it's going to be great for them and then when it's not in practice the locals

are trying to get out of it so that should really tell you a lot about what's going on here I think okay um do you by any chance know the uh Ken theorem no it's very interesting I'm just beginning to explore it but one of what I'm trying to figure out is the thing you're talking about is it um the necessary outcome so when I think about the um take Africa and the natural resources that they have and does that have to be a point of exploitation or or could that be a point where they're

able to grow their industries from the ground up so for instance if you're just selling off uh your Cobalt or whatever yeah you're going to be in a really bad position because you're going to get effectively taken advantage of the real money is in building the products the batteries whatever that are Downstream of mining that element uh if however you build the industry in your own country and you say that we're a tremendous source of cobalt or in the example of what we're talking about you have this Amazon rainfor Forest um is it necessary just

just a fact of the way the economic system is set up that you will end up getting exploited if you do this or if they were smart could they put in legislation that says okay we're actually going to assign a value to all of these different items the rainforest the whatever whatever and now according to the uh Coen if I'm saying that correctly theorem it says basically the reason that we end up with these um imbalances where like people pollute into a river and now you have a company that's able to make a ton of

money because they can force us all to pay a cost for the pollution um but they get to reap all the benefits if instead you assign an owner to the river now all of a sudden the owner of that River knows exactly how much damage is being done and they can go to the company and say you owe me this much money because you are injuring this asset that I own that has a cost so it becomes this it's basically a statement of without clear um property rights then people get away with things like the

tragedy of the commons where they're able to uh push their pollution Downstream and reap econ economic benefits from it so as I was hearing you say the story that was what came to mind was like well hold on a second if you actually assign a value to this stuff uh to the rainforest just to stick with one example now suddenly the rainforest has clear property rights and if the property rights are clear as long as those people have not signed a stupid deal as long as the property rights are clear and I'm use a terrible

word right now just I don't have a better word in this moment uh but if they are clear and just now all of a sudden it's like we should be able to get into a position where um the local people or wh whomever uh are able to capture an accurate amount of value to know who is uh Deeter ly impacting their um their ownership uh and so if the Coen theory is correct that that may actually have a positive benefit now I'm I am barely beginning to understand uh this theorem So for anybody that knows

it better by all means drop something in the comments about what I'm not understanding uh very early in the Journey of uh getting knowledgeable about that but anyway do to really be succinct with the question do you think it is a fundamental nature of our economic system that that will become a point of exploitation or could that if structured correctly be a boon for any uh local region that has a natural asset yeah so I think um a lot of the powers that are affecting sort of this natural Capital agenda right now are inherently predatory

institutions um and so I think their interest is in exploiting which has been historically what has happened to Latin America in the colonial and postcolonial era um and I think this perhaps may be a more creative way of um sort of uh dressing up uh the same game to make it look different what is the game well I think what the goal here is is to sort of financialized and monetize what previously have been the Global Commons um so for example there was this effort that was headed uh by a Rockefeller Foundation connected group called

the uh intrinsic exchange group uh they partnered with the New York Stock Exchange to create this new asset class and asset vehicle called the natural asset Corporation and basically how these nac's um are are said to work at least as as far as the you know architects of it have said is that you know this group goes and identifies a natural asset that nobody owns and then they sort of have an Ico and sell sh shares in that and then work on generating profit uh you know for their shareholders and then allegedly will use that

money to uh towards conserving the asset and all of that but conserving the asset for example could mean not letting anyone or any locals go near it and these natural asset corporations could go and uh I don't know uh claim on a lake in Chile for example and say no one can use it but what if a bunch of local people uh fish in it and aren't necessarily damaging the lake uh but you you know at least in Chile and Argentina and maybe other Latin American countries uh water even if it's uh you know a

lake or a river that touches a privately owned property that's you know part of the commons so um the int intrinsic exchange group uh frames this natural um asset Corporation as creating a whole new asset class that dwarfs the existing asset classes we use today and they referred to that as Nature's economy and as the opportunity in unlocking Nature's economy so really it's a way to create this huge um in my opinion massive asset class that will allow them to continue really what is the Wall Street Casino allow it to continue uh allow them to

continue their bad behavior into the new era uh but are just going to be sort of taking uh ownership of natural features um and you know making these corporations around them um and then using them really essentially however they like um because in theory you know you could have a natural asset Corporation and through these carbon markets and all these other uh mechanisms that are being created you can buy offsets or or other things to sort of justify whatever you want to do to any sort of land you take ownership of um ownership of and

sort of frame you know this whole system as benefiting the environment but really I don't really think it is that because a lot of these uh natural Capital things um have been developed by um you know JP Morgan or uh you know people like Mark Carney who is you know a former Banker of the head of the bank of England head of the Bank of Canada um and also helped cover up the HSBC uh drug cartel moneya laundering Scandal among other things and uh these are the kind of people that are sort of Designing um

these supposedly sustainable development um systems but a lot of it involves uh debt politics um as it relates to uh you know Global South economies this idea and the sustainable development goals of having sustainable debt lels and all of this stuff um and how debt is an important part of financing the sustainable development goals and how a lot of these ideas of financializing nature they say it'll give nature monetary value but it also allows nature to be turned into financial instruments um that you know in the hands of these you know um predatory financial institutions

uh could just essentially become fod for their for their casino at the end of the day and I think that's um not really a good thing so I think we should look at the history of these institutions and not necessarily you know believe at face value what they say of you know this is good for the environment and whatever I don't really uh think that's necessarily uh the case if you look at you know groups like uh The Nature Conservancy for example that are sort of a Pioneer in this field uh they've been intimately connected

with Wall Street for a very very long time Henry Paulson who I mentioned earlier the former Goldman Sachs guy uh that was head of the Treasury Department when the' 08 0708 crashed started uh was chairman of the nature conservancy for a long time and uh they're very uh they have a lot of involvement with JP Morgan people they're pionering this whole idea of the debt for nature swap on that if countries um Implement plans the nature current Conservancy design uh designs for Land Management for example they'll be able to restructure part of their debt and

all of this it's sort of I would argue a way to use uh the huge debt load that Latin America has been saddled with uh through their relationships with entities like the IMF and the World Bank a way to sort of offer them an Out quote unquote uh but it's not necessarily an out it's sort of a way into this this new game I guess you could say and so I'm sort of um uh concerned about it in that sense and I'm also concerned that um you know his a lot of these same entities too

you know if you're going to turn like the natural world into into a commodity you know a lot of these banks that are involved like JP Morgan for example um have a track record of manipulating Commodities and engaging in a lot of uh you know Financial criminality that they've never really been held accountable for aside from you know maybe some multi-million dollar fines but when you look at you know how much money these banks have I mean it really those fines are nothing to them especially when you know the financial criminality being prosecuted uh creates

a you know profits 10 times the amount of the fine I mean it it was worth it for them at the end of the day they have no incentive to change their behavior so I think for us to believe that they're all of a sudden altruistically concerned about uh people in the global South and and the planet and the environment I think is honestly kind of naive of us and I think we should uh consider that perhaps this is a um there's different motives at work here if you like that clip check out the full

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