 Hello, I'm Jess Corvair with your latest news break in Iceland, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russia's Foreign Minister politely argued during an Arctic Council meeting over their differences. In Iran, families of American Iranians being held as prisoners and those under house arrest await news of the fate of their loved ones, which they consider hostages, being held by the Iranian government. And in Israel, a family is mourning the loss of their 56-year-old husband, father and brother, who was murdered by an Arab mob. The man was reportedly stoned and beaten by the mob for being a Jew. The man's family has decided to donate his organs to help both Jewish and Arab people. And that's your latest news break. Now back to American's Voice Live. Thank you for that report, Jessica. And for all of you, we're so glad you've joined us here on this Thursday. We certainly are. But you may have seen this in the headlines lately. Car thefts are up all across the country. According to a study by the National Insurance Crime Bureau, auto thefts up more than 9 percent from 2019 to 2020. Thieves are targeting catalytic converters. You say, now why is that? They saw them right out of the undercarriages. And experts say there's a good reason for it. This is it. The price of precious metals has skyrocketed during the pandemic, mainly platinum, palladium and rhodium, which can be found in those catalytic converters on these fancy cars. Well, Steve, while car thefts are up, jobless claims are down. Last week, jobless claims added up to 444,444,000, a new pandemic low that's slightly better than the 452,000 that they were expecting. Most of the decline came from a decrease in getting benefits through the pandemic-related emergency programs. The largest declines came from Georgia, Kentucky and Texas, all red states. The biggest gain in jobless claims, New Jersey, with 4,384. How about some virtual heartburn for you today? Bitcoin, way down this week, falling below $40,000 Wednesday, all the way down to $30,001 per and dragging down the entire cryptocurrency space with it. And this comes after the People's Bank of China apparently sent out a warning against using the digital coins as payment. Joining me now to discuss this a bit further, the founder of Sauchuck Wealth, Terry Sauchuck and the CEO and founder of Stock Swish, Melissa Armo. And guys, you look at this, if I'm not mistaken, Bitcoin was north of 63,000 earlier this year, it dropped to 30,000, which means it was off by 50% or more. Terry, I'll start with you. What's really going on here? Because it's not just Bitcoin. It's Doe's coin, Bitcoin, a whole host of them. What's the problem? Well, I don't think there really is a problem. If you look at crypto, this has happened in 2017 during the bull run. Bitcoin dropped by 35%, six or seven times and it dropped by over 40% twice. Anytime you get an emerging technology and you've got what is a pretty volatile asset, you're going to put up with these kind of swings. But the flip side, you're trading a 50% downside for a 10x upside and investment terms, that's about as good as it gets. Melissa, what do you make of this? I'm one of those guys that's been on the sidelines. I'm not going to kid you. I've never gotten into cryptocurrency. I'm just a little chicken up and I'm not going to kid you. I'm a little afraid of getting involved for this very reason and I'm probably not the only one, but others seem quite bold and they go after it. What is your take on these markets? This is what I consider a speculative investment. Why do I say that? Because it's very volatile. It can go up and down a lot and people still are not accepting it worldwide for payments for everything. In other words, you can't go into a grocery store and buy food with Bitcoin. One of the problems with using Bitcoin as a currency is because the price fluctuates so much. For example, you always have fluctuations from say the Canadian dollar to the US dollar, but it's not so crazy. It's a problematic for this ever to become mainstream as an actual form of payment because what if you pay for something? Like you said, one day it's worth 40,000 and the next day it's worth 20,000. So that's the problem with this. I think if people want to invest in it long term, if they really want to buy it, considering the fact that it could go back up to the highs, then they got to be in it for the long term. Terry, let me give you a way in on that. Melissa just said that you can't go buy a gallon of milk or a gallon of gas with Bitcoin, at least not yet. Some places taking it for payment in some fashion sometimes, but it's not consistent. It's not consistent across the board. Whereas if I walk in with greenbacks, I can buy whatever I want with cash or credit card generally speaking. Is that the drawback for people on this? I don't think so. I don't think Bitcoin long term is necessarily going to be a currency. I'm not saying that there aren't some people that would like that to be the case. I think there'll be other cryptocurrencies that might be actual currencies. I think Bitcoin has probably viewed more as a store of value in the long run. And so I think when you look at the different use cases, if you will, Bitcoin I think is probably more like because it's limited, because it's secure, I think it's going to be a store of value. There's things like Ethereum that have more use case scenario. And actually long term, Ethereum is probably a better and I think potentially a better investment because the entire financial system is essentially going to move to the blockchain at some point. The commercial banks are going to get disintermediated. And so I think like any newer investment, you just have to put up with some volatility. But the reality is, if you're not trading on leverage or on margin, it doesn't matter. You'll put up with the up and downs, but in the long run, if you look at three to five years out, the entire crypto market could go in the next five to 10 years, the entire crypto market could go from $2 trillion to $100 trillion. When you think about it in that terms, those terms, there's never been an investment vehicle or investment opportunity that offers that kind of upside. There's just nothing that even compares. So you're a believer in it, but let me ask you this. Let me follow up on that, Terry. And that is comments and conversations recently that the United States government wants more access to your bank accounts and mine. They want all the information they can get. And I think that part of it is because of this cryptocurrency, because the cryptocurrency is going on over here where they can't see everything that's happening. I don't think they like that. They want to be able to put a tax on that. They want to be able to make sure they're watching what you're investing in, what your payments are, what your return on investment is. And therefore they want their piece of the action. At least that's my take. What's yours? Well, I think they do want to be able to tax it. And so the domestic exchanges like Crackin, Coinbase, and others, they'll eventually collect more data and they'll make that data available. And for anyone that thinks that their transactions are not able to be seen on the blockchain just doesn't understand how the blockchain works. They're anonymous, but the wallets are not. So the IRS will easily be able to track wallets at some point and then follow the transactions on the blockchain that are associated with those wallets. So it's already been debunked to some degree. There's not nearly as much as money laundering and nefarious activities that are going on. This is just, in my opinion, more FUD, fear, uncertainty, and doubt around crypto from people that just really don't understand how it works. All right, so let's talk about some things that people do understand. Shifting gears is a little bit here. They understand the gallon of gas is now over $3 a gallon. They understand the oil is going up. If you go out to buy a piece of plywood or OSB, they'll say, my gosh, OSB, $100 a sheet. It's a sticker shock to say the least. Food, use cars, houses, gas, oil, lumber, all of it going to the roof. Inflation, a real problem all of a sudden that we haven't talked about in this fashion since the late 70s, early 80s. How concerned are you about this? I think we're going to see continued inflation. One of the reasons is because you don't have everybody back to work. So prices are going to continue to rise because there's a labor shortage. And you say, well, how can that be when there's people that need jobs clearly? We got the unemployment acclaims again today. There's people that still need work, but they're not going to work because they're getting the government stimulus. So normally, sometimes people say inflation is good temporarily because it will stimulate the economy to force people to go back to work and increase production and then prices go down. I think in this case, it's different because people are choosing not to go back to work because the government is paying people to, in fact, not work in some of these industries that people really need to go back to work. And one of the reasons why housing, for example, of the cost of to build a home would all these things are talking about is increases because the housing market has had a massive, massive burst ever since everybody got out of their homes with COVID last year in 2020. And people are moving out of cities like New York and going to the suburbs. We could see a big bubble with that. And that could affect bank stocks and that could affect the housing markets where people have paid too much money for these houses. And then you see all of a sudden it goes like that and people are upside down in some of the mortgages that they took out to buy some of these properties. And then you'll see costs go down. Sure, Terry, I want to ask you about something. You're right there in Detroit. You see the big three up close and personal on a fairly regular basis. You have a pretty good idea what goes on there. Ford unveiling its new lightning pickup truck yesterday with President Biden there. But I'm also seeing the highest used car prices according to the United States government since 1953. Since 1953, you try to buy a used car today. It's going through the roof. The new cars, they can't get chips for them. They'll take one chip from a Ford truck. They'll drive it out the lot. They take it back inside. Same thing at GM. Same thing with FCA. Is this going to be a problem? Major manufacturers unable to get their products to market even though there is great demand. Now, on the other side of that, I know the people that are selling boats and ATVs and side by sides and quads, they're getting manufacturer suggested retail on those. They're making a fortune, but they don't have much stock to sell. I mean, so there's mixed, I mean, people are making a fortune. People are going broke all at the same time, aren't they? Yeah, this is, I mean, what did you think was going to happen when we shut the entire economy down for nine months and we didn't let people go to work and build things? I mean, if you work on an assembly line, you can't really work from home. So it's created all these short-term price dislocations. I was talking to a friend of mine that owns, he runs an auto dealership, doesn't own it. And he's telling me that used car prices for a car that's a year or two old, in some cases they're paying more than what the original sticker price was because there's a massive shortage. And this is going to go on probably for 18 months, I would imagine before they finally get the stock rebuilt and Melissa's absolutely right. This is the greatest migration of people throughout the country in probably 50 years since the Baby Boomers came back or the Baby Boomer's parents came back. Hey guys, I appreciate it, Terry. I got to jump in on you here a little bit. I don't mean to do that, but the president is speaking right now so we're going to take it. I appreciate you guys being here today. We'll be back very soon, but we're going to go join Jill Biden in progress live right now. Here he is.