 Okay, now it's my pleasure to introduce the Marian Rothboard Memorial Lecture, sponsored by Stephen and Cassandra Torello. Michael Oliver entered the financial services industry in 1975. In the 1980s, Mike began to develop his own momentum-based method of technical analysis, momentum structural analysis, or MSA. Has received glory reviews, including ones from Bill Fleckenstein, a well-known market analyst, financial author, and hedge fund manager, and Dr. Gary Schlarbaum, longtime supporter of the Mises Institute. In December 2015, the Wall Street Journal wrote, MSA looks at the market from a somewhat different point of view. Rather than focusing on price, something that virtually everybody does, MSA tracks momentum, revealing trends that have been building for a long time, and have much more depth to them and staying power." Mr. Oliver is the author of The New Libertarianism, Anarcho-Capitalism, A Marriage of Concepts of Ayn Rand and Murray Rothboard, written in 1972 and published in 2013. I also want to add that Mike Oliver was the editor of the most radical, or probably the most radical, Libertarian newsletter in 1972 called The New Banner. There's only six issues, but they were wonderful, and they include a wonderful interview with Murray Rothboard, a very revealing and passionate interview. Dr. Mr. Oliver will address us on two topics, we get two for one. Knowing Murray in the early years and why Rothboard and Rand would relish 2024, beginning collapse of statism and its realities. Thank you. Nobody covered it in the intro. I had to cut some stuff out of what I was going to talk about. Anyway, thanks to Joe Salerno and the Mises Institute for inviting me to speak. Before I begin, I want you to know that I've not given a talk about libertarianism on that subject to an audience since 1971. And the audience size was about six, okay? And because it's so unusual for me to do this on this subject matter, my family came with me from Colorado, my wife, Janet, my son, Lauren, a filmmaker, my son, Brett, who's the other half of momentum structural analysis. Anyway, they wanted to see what I did. Anyway, relax today, put your pens away. There's no academics in my discussion. It's going to be, first part will be simply personal recollections. Therefore, it'll be from my eyes, so it seems very egoistic. But that's the way I saw it. I saw Murray Rothbard in the very early years of what then wasn't even the libertarian movement. It was hardly a thing you could call the movement. In the second half, I'll be talking about what's coming in the next year. I think that's a well-timed statement. I think it's going to be a crescendo year, not just in terms of the markets, which is what I analyze. But in a lot of institutions that don't belong here, that are based on illegitimate and concepts that ultimately had the decay. I'm not a sports fan, but I think what you're about to see over the next 12 months and maybe even sooner is going to be the best football game you've ever seen. Cheer, okay? That is if you're intellectually and personally prepared for that emergent reality. Now for a look back through my own experiences at the early days of the infant libertarian movement. Consider this like looking over my shoulder into a scrapbook. In fact, we'll see some points up here on the screen later. My intellectual context personally is similar to some others here. I know because I've read their bios. But in 1965, 66, I was in high school in Cincinnati. And I was a member of a popular conservative group then called YAAF, Young Americans for Freedom. I'm sure you're all familiar with it. Libertarianism to some extent among youth anyway emerged from that conservative movement at points in time. I was the youngest YAAFer in Cincinnati. And one of the older adult members, I think he was a lawyer at the time, said, have you ever read Ein Rand? And I had not. And he recommended it. I do so. I began the very lazy way of doing it. I read Anthem, the smallest, you know, thinnest novel. OK. And then I worked my way up through We The Living, Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged. And later her philosophical works. It was also interesting to me at that time, because my first knowledge at all of Von Mises of the Austrian school came through Ein Rand. This is in a copy of The Objectivist. This is dated 1970. You could have gone back earlier years. But you'll notice there's a review of the omnipotent government there. And believe me, it was highly favorable. And you go to the last page of The Objectivist and at her bookstore, there she is selling that particular book. Most of Mises' work were available through the Ein Rand bookstore, which was a mail order bookstore. But she definitely promoted him. And you've got to realize, I think this is a correct observation, that given the enormous size of Rand's audience, I mean, because of her novels and the movie, Fountainhead and so forth, which is huge, no doubt she very likely advanced the Austrian school of economics in terms of its public awareness of it, more than probably anybody else out there. So she had, to some extent, probably an impact on the Mises Institute even being here today. In 1970, I finished a bachelor's degree at Furman University in South Carolina and I moved to Columbia, South Carolina, the capital. And I began a master's thesis of political philosophy at the University of South Carolina. Again, I'm not talking about me, I'm just talking about how things, I saw things at that point in time. In Columbia, I bumped into a couple other Objectivists. And it was a fairly sizable city in South Carolina. And I bumped into two. And believe me, that's about all there were. There were also emergent libertarians. And we started a newspaper then called The New Banner. We'll see it in a second here. Which was the nation's first anarcho-capitalist slash Objectivist newspaper. We published it in 1972. It began in 71, but published in 72. And at its peak, it had 200 subscribers nationwide. Now, don't laugh. That was a huge number given the size of what was the libertarian movement in 1972. It was also in late 71, I began working on my master's thesis on anarcho-capitalism. So naturally, I communicated with Murray Rothbard. In July 1971, I'm going to tell you the date for a reason. July 30, 1971, I wrote a letter to Rothbard, which I explained I was writing a thesis entitled Anarcho-Capitalism. And I wanted his permission to quote from his works in that writing. And I said that one of the reasons was that I would later publish it. And therefore, I needed his permission to quote him. He responded. Now, look at the date on the letter. Three days after I wrote and mailed the letter, he responded. Again, it's a postal service, OK? Got to New York City from Columbia, South Carolina. Now, this is not my ego trip for me. This is a statement about the obvious. If Sherlock Holmes were here, he would look at that and say, there's no doubt that he deduces that Murray Rothbard was very, very eager to encourage and to help emergent libertarian academicians. So eager that he stopped everything he was doing to reply three days later. I'll quote from the letter. It's hard to see it, but parts of it. It says, it's always a pleasure to find anarcho-capitalists who are scholars. And this is far rarer and more important than people who are merely anarchists. You have my permission to quote from any and all my stuff. There have been a couple of projected graduate theses on libertarianism, but they've either dropped out or hopeless. So yours is the first projected thesis on the subject. If you have any questions on the subject or on my views, please feel free to write or to ask me in person. Well, I was flattered. With New Banner, a friend of mine with New Banner, Don Stone, we drove to New York City in January. Rothbard was willing to be interviewed by New Banner, interviewed him in mid-January. And it was a very delightful four hours that we spent in his residence. Now, if you're familiar with New York, I'll tell you where it was. It was West 88th, one block from the intersection of Broadway. So if you live there, go visit that street and you'll see West 88th Street. Anyway, we also met Joey, his wife, at that time. We were in his home, his residence. And she was as cheery as Murray. Anyway, let's go to the New Banner interview here. And here's some pictures of him during the interview. You'll notice he has a recording. We recorded the interview. And Clay upstairs there has been good to try to resurrect the entire interview in audio form. And I think it'll be available to the Mises Institute once he does. But again, this is 72. Anyway, go. David Nolan is forming a libertarian political party. Its membership has indicated an interest in nominating you for its presidential candidate in 1972. What is your response to this, Overture? Thank you. We're back. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, well, I've checked this through below that. Hey. Yeah. Tell me that. That's my favorite bird's eye. Right. I, I told them when they asked, they found me armor. grieved in the presence of the White House, Ava, Patrick, for the movie. I guess the humor is in. I really don't think so. I mean, the loveable third parties are a little bit... you have a little bit of a part of this, which sounds great, but I really don't think that at this stage of our development of setting anything but foolhardy to have a libertarian party to just have that many libertarians. I mean, there's no finances, there's no people, there's no weapons, so I really don't... maybe eventually you'll be able to have a libertarian party. What would be the purpose of a libertarian party? What would be the purpose of a libertarian party? Well, I think if there were a libertarian party, I mean, I find that I said I'm difficult to talk about this. I don't want to make it seem as if I think it's a realist. But if there ever weren't some libertarian party, there could be several things. Practically, we could have a balance of power. You know, we could have, say, the electoral college, or something like that. Even better, I mean, is an educational weapon to be very good, I think, because, you know, if you had 10 guys in Congress, let's say, each of whom were constantly agitating libertarian purposes, loading against the budget, let's say, I think it would be very useful. And also, see, we have a long-range problem, which is really a problem which, strategically, none of us have really ever tackled grapple with any extent. Now, that is, how do we finally establish the libertarians that are an echo capitalist? Now, obviously, ideas are the key thing. First, you have to start off with the sway to a lot of people of the anarchists or the anarcho-capitalist. But then, what? Now, what's the next step? We certainly don't have to convince the majority of the public, perhaps, because most of the public will sort of paddle on each thing and go, what happened? We have to, obviously, have a large minority. But then, in other words, how do we then implement this? And I think this is sort of the power problem, because as I've expressed in other places, the government's not going to resign. In other words, they're not going to have a situation where Dick Nixon reads human action or a drug, where many times he says, my god, they're right, I'm sorry. It's not going to have to be great. I'm not saying another denial of full of applicable possibilities might have, but a lot of these, strategically, will have a possibility to scale. Because the Marxist put in no ruling class that will voluntarily surrender its power. So, in other words, it has to be, we have to deal with the problem, and get these guys all far back. And I think a party, it seems to me, one of the few ways of doing it in the long run, in a sense, is if you really have a dedicated group in Congress or the Senate or whatever, you can start voting measures down or whatever. But I don't think this is the only way, I think, or maybe eventually there'll be civil disobedience where the public will start not paying taxes, things like that. In other words, if you look at it, dismantling the state, there's several possible alternatives. There's violent revolution, there's non-violent civil disobedience, and there's the political action method. Political party. I don't know which of these will be successful. It's really a tactical question. You can't really predict an advance, but it seems to me it's foolhardy to give up any particular warmth of this. In other words, we'll ban on political action, political parties, because you're saying, well, if you get into political arena, you're always compromising. It's very true, but on the other hand, what else are you going to do? I think this is a real problem. In other words, I think it's incumbent on people to come up with some kind of strategic perspective to dismantle the state. See, for example, a battle of faith somehow works it out. It's almost impossible to get rid of the state from his own point of view. In other words, he's against violent revolution. Okay, that's a very respectable position. He's also against voting. He's also against political party. And it becomes very difficult to really see what, you know, how possibly you can get out of the state at all from this kind of speech. You'll have to deteriorate. Yeah, I'll have to wither away in some way, because it's inefficient. A lot of people with that perspective think, well, it's going to be inefficient to sort of die out. I don't think that's going to happen that way. I don't see why we should give up something like political party. In other words, it might be a root eventually to dismantle this state or helping to dismantle a combination of one two parts. If you have civil disobedience in one hand and a party in government blocking measures with suppressable disobedience, something like that, you see what I mean? And obviously it's very hazy as in the future, if ever, but I don't see why we should, in other words, a priori give up a political party a political act. If you want his interview, you can go to the Mises site, type in my name and you can click on the in-print version of that. It's also a it's on Wikipedia. There's a big biography of Rothbard on Wikipedia. I know if you've seen it, but it's quite lengthy. More so than most people on Wikipedia. And if you go to footnote 126 on this, you'll find my name and there's a link. You can see the interview in print. It's actually on lourockwell.com that's where you're clicking. Anyway, now when we ran New Banner, again, it only lasted like six issues. They were like 10 pages each. We had a few interesting outside submissions. This one is from a guy named R. Cobb who was a fairly famous cartoonist then. But if you look at the picture, I hope you can read all the details there, but this is again 1972. This guy had a foresight. He knew what the state was all about. Now, he didn't know about the internet. Now, they do it different ways. They surveil you different ways. But look at the citizens B, citizens A, citizens C, places to sit. Anyway, we don't have anarchy. That's good. He later on became a conceptual and production designer for some major movies such as, let's see what we've got here. Conan the Barbarian, last starfighter, alien, close encounters of third kind and back to the future. And then it was an article that we ran that later helped change my life. The National Committed Legalized Gold, I just want to reminisce about this because a single libertarian James Blanchard III in New Orleans at that time, and this is 1972, basically ran into his own campaign to legalize gold. He funded it and he was pretty much it, but it got legalized. He lobbied it enough. He got enough votes and Gerald Ford signed it in late December 74. But the fact that he legalized gold got legalized it later changed my life and my career direction instead of academia. And then in the same issue, the summer issue I think it was a guy submitted an article on the Pledge of Allegiance analyzing it. A guy named Walter Block. I didn't know him, but we published a good article. Walter was 31 at the time. It was four years before he wrote his first book Defending the Undefendable. Anyway, my only regret is that when he submitted it and signed the letter associated with it, I didn't keep it. So I don't have it archived, which I would love. But anyway, so much about New Banner. My last communication with Murray was several years later in 1977. I was not an academia at that point. I had already shifted careers. But I submitted an article to him for the Libertarian Forum at that time. And his letter response to me was very lengthy. In fact, it's two pages. Can we have them both here or not? No. Can we just have one? Very lengthy letter. I'll read a few parts from it because it imparts some changes that had occurred in the Libertarian Movement between 1972 when we interviewed him in the time of this letter five years later. Great hearing from you after all this time and also to get your excellent article, which will be run in the Libertarian Forum. It was a very good contribution to the whole defense issue as well as the important issue on how to destatize another party. As you know, I'm more sanguine about the Libertarian. This gets interesting here. I'm more sanguine about the Libertarian Party than you are, though I must admit the Florida Party is one of the most right-wing of all LPs. The Florida, Colorado, and most of the California LPs tried to change the platform in a pro-war direction last week to call for military alliances with legitimate governments against private terrorism. But we managed to, he was active at that time in the LP, we managed to beat them back with what I thought was surprising ease. Radicalizing the platform still further by defending the right of private groups to defend themselves against tyranny by calling for negotiations aimed at a general and complete disarmament down to police levels. By making individual cops rather than taxpayers liable for restitution for aggressing against private citizens. That was also part of my thesis in earlier years, the issue of dealing with government violence against individuals and also how would a free market have a defense system, internal defense, security, and so forth. Anyway, he continues, our objective is anarchists were more in control of the platform committee, and it turns out of the convention. Our objective is not to turn the LP into an outright anarchist party, but rather to make it into a genuine radical libertarian party. So far again, to my surprise, the platform has gotten more radical and more anarchistic at each successive LP convention. He finished with a personal notice, as you can see by the letterhead, we're out here in California for a year, as I have gotten off teaching for the next academic year, always a pleasure. Anyway, that was my last communication. He did, in fact, run the article, and I love, this isn't the article itself, this is the cover of the issue, and I couldn't imagine a better title for the issue mine was in. Do you hate the state? I love it. God. Anyway, my article appeared in it, and I was, I'm very proud that it did. Anyway, the anarcho-capitalism is now also in Wikipedia. It's cited, and there's a fairly lengthy article on it, and of course, Rothbard is the founder, and I lucked up in the philosophy to know that anarcho-capitalism is now a street-wise term, and there's a guy in Argentina who's named his dog after him, you know. Anyway, now for the second part of my talk, totally off the archival look back at the early libertarian movement. Personally, in 1974, I was working on a Ph.D. at University of Hawaii. I finished all my coursework and I decided I was going to write a dissertation on Lysander Spooner. I was getting flack from above, naturally. That was a nuisance, but it was to be expected in academia. But what really concerned me at that time was the global economy was entering stagflation. I knew it, and I also knew that new academicians were not being hired very readily. There was a tight budget in universities. And I also knew that if somebody had a sign on them and said, libertarian, your chances of being hired were even less. So I knew it was not a career, at least at that point in time. It later wasn't the case, but that's five or so years later if you were libertarian, you could get hired. But back then, no. So one of my friends back in the States was hired by Meryl Lynch to be a trainee futures broker. And he said, come on in, the water's fine. So having a pro-gold bias and intellectual bias for gold based on political philosophy. We went back, Jen and I went back to the States and I was hired in early 1975 by E.F. Hutton's commodity headquarters in New York where I apprenticed under the head of the department who was also at the time the chairman of the Comex. Comex is the commodity exchange of New York where gold was first traded in the first day of January 1975. Again, thanks to Mr. Blanchard. I stayed a futures broker up through 1992, but in the mid-1980s, as Joe mentioned, I began developing my own technical methodology, but it was a methodology with what we called what was then called or today is called technical analysis. So it doesn't, it's not price chart, look at it price charts and draw in lines. It's a different methodology and in its primitive forms in 1987 I caught the crash. I was a futures broker at the time, made money in my own account and my customers did as well. And at that point of course I slapped myself in the face realizing I need to work on this. So I spent the next couple of years developing the methodology more thoroughly. In 1992, a major bank had learned about my research. I'd met with them and they were interested in buying my research. So I ceased being a broker and went into research and I sold my research to financial firms, mutual funds, hedge funds, financial planners, and later in 2015 we opened up to retail subscribers. A final comment on our work, I'm not going to get into the methodology. MSA's work has been highly accurate. We've called every single major stock market top and bottom since our inception. Some of them we called within the week. More generally we called them within 5 to 7% of the actual high or low. So our accuracy is very good and so I say that for a reason is not to solicit subscribers please. It's to give you a sense of the reason that I am methodologically convinced that the coming year is going to look and probably be cataclysmic to most people and therefore provide you with a sense of why I feel why you should give some credibility to my comments. This is also a time that I'm forecasting that if Murray were here and I and Rand were here they would both smile over the events that are coming year or two. We're entering part three of Atlas Shrugged in terms of real world. What I'm going to say now, what we're going to look at now are some fragmented ideas and I'm not just going to focus on markets the stock market but we don't use these kind of metrics some market analysts and so forth like to look at Fed metrics like what's the rate of interest what's them to look like and all that stuff what's unemployment all these data points one metric that is kind of interesting and it makes a statement these are Fed funds rates the rates that are controlled by the Federal Reserve you go back to 1960 and as you can see point number one is when I found that MSA that's the early 90s and rates have been collapsing and they stayed there for about three years from years 1992 to 1994 rates were at 3% the lowest they'd been in 25 years what followed was the dot-com bubble not that it wasn't justified on its own merits but money flowed they filled up the tank then the Fed filled up your tank and the market took off in subsequent years through 95 through 2000 and produced what we now call in hindsight the dot-com bubble the second point there is period number two 2000 through 2000 2002 to 2005 actually they began cutting rates the market topped in 2000 in price stock market they started cutting rates in January 2001 aggressively right just off the market top they cut rates to the bone by 2002 and kept them low through about early 2005 those were the lowest rates price of money was lowest it ever been what followed was a major stock market boom S&P NASDAQ 100 but also the real estate bubble followed that no chart of that here and obviously when that broke that was personal painful to many people now the final one it's almost unbelievable during 2008 they started cutting rates during the bear market they kept rates theoretical zero from 2008 to 2022 now there was one blip up there in the late 2018-19 I think it was they took it up to about 2.4 and it quickly yanked it back down again so they not only filled the gas tank for years in the first phase at zero rates they came back and filled it again to keep it going and sure enough stock market took off again that's the COVID period and the Fed was even the F's themselves they didn't just liquefy the situation they were in their buyers just like the bank of Japan did now let's look at the markets at that time after each of these periods of tank filling top chart is a period from 1994 to 2000 that was a triple and a half for the S&P in terms of price gain over the span of those five or six years and again this is the movement and largely led by dot-com stocks laden in the movement internet and of course as we if you recall because many of you don't but in the year 2000 the argument was it's going to change your life the internet is going to change your life and you know what they were dead right they were more right than they could even imagine and yet the dot-com bubble burst and dropped 82% the Nasdaq 100 went down it was primarily filled with those type of stocks S&P only went down 50% the chart below is from 2002 again this is after the bear market that came from the 2000 top to the 2002 low they cut rates all the way down and they kept rates low between 2002 and 2003 and finally they filled the tank enough and there it went again this was the bubble that was not shown here but is the real estate bubble that was associated with this I think Alan Green's plan can take some good credit but Bernanke came in later this is the Bernanke event there's an arrow in both of those charts the top chart you'll see there's an arrow a couple months after the price high that arrow notes the point where the Federal Reserve began cutting interest rates they cut rates by half percent then so now if you're in the stock market back then we called the top in January of 2000 and it labored for the next year up there, floundered around felt good in fact it was a Wall Street Journal article published in 2000 that coined the phrase soft landing which is commonly used today meaning no worries mate the Fed cut rates at that dark arrow up there first day of January 2001 they cut rates all the way down did the market benefit from that? no, the bubble was simply too big at that point the Fed could not stop the breakage of their own bubble they created it they couldn't stop it once it broke same thing happened in 2007 second month before the high, September of 2007 where the arrow is mid month that month despite Bernanke saying there's no real estate crisis he cut rates by half a point the S&P rallied for the next month into October so another four weeks of joy over the Fed cut rates did that work? no, no, okay so when the Fed cut rates don't be happy, it's not good news they cut rates all the way down market collapse anyway once they create the monster when the monster comes undone reality takes over there's a reality out there the Fed is not reality current situation for multiple years first time and then in 2018 they raised rates briefly when the COVID event came they filled the tank again so now we have a bull market that is 15 years old triple the age of any prior bull market in U.S. history and it's an 18 fold gain whereas most of the prior bull markets were doubles to triples the one in 2000 was like that fold I think but nothing compared in dimensionality of the advance nor in the duration of the advance that followed their monetary creation and their free money so we have the biggest bubble in the stock market history far bigger than even the 29 bubble which was also monetarily stimulated Reed Rothbard's Great Depression book he discusses the increase in the M2 back then when this beast breaks and we think it's already essentially top by the way we think this residue new high that the Nasdaq 100 has made that you see the last price action these are monthly bars it's taken out the old high of 2022 by a handful of percentage points most stock market metrics have not taken out the 22 and 2 high the reason the Nasdaq has and the S&P has is there's about 5 symbols in the front end of the indexes that have enormous weighting in the indexes the S&P 490 and they don't look like the S&P 5 front end 5 stocks so to some extent this is distorted price reality the chart below and I'm not going to get into it this is our method of looking at things is a momentum chart where we measure the price action in its oscillator relationship to the 3 year moving average of the index and to some extent therefore we back out the distortions that are caused by the money unit because when you look at price of anything low for bread or anything it's you know how many money units to buy it well low for bread when I was a kid was 20 cents you know now we must have a wheat shortage right okay no it's the monetary degradation so over the last since 1960 the M2 for example basically doubled every decade almost it doesn't matter which decade you pick so if you bought a stock in 1960 and 1970 it's twice its price are you making money no not really you break even so anyway a lot of this is price action that we look at is distorted by the money unit you use whether it's the yen or the euro in our case it's the dollar and given its distortion over time prices distorted over time you can't totally separate market analysis from the price but if you put it in a momentum scale it factors in more the movement of the underlying asset category it's dynamics whether it's lazy or strong and to some extent it backs out the distortions caused by the money unit not totally well if you look at the bottom chart and if that were a price chart would you want to buy that thing no it broke the integrity of 15-year uptrend channel perfectly parallel it broke it in early 2022 is when it came down through the lower red line and broke the structure and for the last two years of rebound that's what the momentum action looks like so don't be so happy and cheery about the stock market one we know the Fed when they do finally change policy and they've already said they're going to cut three times this year even before they get to their inflation number that they're hoping to get to they're still going to cut so they've comforted the market so you're getting a little party right now in the market but you're already broken don't trust me so when momentum does this and price doesn't believe momentum it's the one that will win out off the markets now another thing people are looking at today in terms of you know what's reality out there are data points you know we everybody watches them CMDC or whatever you know the employment numbers and so forth how good is the economy because it affects your life whether you're in the stock market or not like the recent unemployment reports have all been you know touted by the administration about how oh boy unemployment is just great the best in decades etc etc when you look inside the report which most people don't you find that the new job gains aside from being mostly part time as opposed to full time are in areas like retail restaurants home health care workers and especially government hiring not in the main things of the reality even that they put out isn't quite what it really is the notion of a soft landing I think is therefore when these markets break we know what happened in 2008 and 2009 it didn't just affect stock people it affected everybody in the street unemployment went crazy big firms went under and so forth so there's a real reality out there above and beyond the stock market so even though we look at the stock market when you create a bubble like 2009 look like nothing why because over the period of that time when an M2 went up and when rates were free people make decisions you make a decision small businesses big businesses state governments municipal and of the factors that you use in making a decision or a commitment to some project it's the cost of money and if you're given an injection that tells you the cost of money is free and you believe it you're delusional but a lot of people got delusional because it lasted for so long and therefore the number of errors committed over a three to five year bubble where the market only doubled or tripled is one thing but when you have a bubble this size and this old the amount of delusional errors that have been made on a micro level and a macro level must be enormous now we'll start to see them start to trigger the data points they don't lead the market down the market leads the data points down and at that point we'll start to hear stories not just about regional banks or something that are supposedly under control but other problems so that's a reality that we're going to face and the status are going to face there'll be consequences to this that are unusual this time we've had this last hundred years politics has been contested back and forth but it's always a couple terms of republicans control a couple of terms of democrats control and yet everything's copacetic there are no fistfights on the floor or anything like that this time it's going to be different because one when that pain hits it'll hit and it'll probably hit quickly because this market's ready to go and when it goes you'll feel the pain and it's not going to end copacetically we've been arguing for well over a year this 2024 election is not going to be copacetic no matter who wins and I don't want to say it's going to be violent but I wouldn't be shocked there was a poll taken by the University of Virginia Department of Politics that was released in October last year and they surveyed both Biden likely Biden and likely Trump voters these are some of their conclusions a staggering majority of both Biden 40% of his voters and Trump likely voters 68% believed that selecting electing officials from the opposite party would result in lasting harm to the United States other observation roughly half 52% of Biden voters 47% of Trump voters viewed those who supported the other party as threats to the American way of life next question about 40% of both groups of the Biden voters 38% of the Trump voters at least somewhat believed that the other side had become so extreme that it's acceptable to use violence to prevent them from achieving their goals final observation again quoting them a significant share of respondents also expressed doubts about both the future of democracy and even the United States as it is currently composed it's an issue that Mises institutes have been talking about for many months succession roughly 2 in 5 41% of respondents that lean toward Trump in 2024 at least somewhat agreed with the idea of red states seceding from the union to form their own separate country while 30% of Biden voters expressed a similar sentiment but for blue states these are incredible numbers not 5% but nearly one third 31% of Trump voters and about one quarter of Biden voters at least somewhat agree that democracy is no longer a viable system and that the country should explore alternative forms of government to ensure stability and progress it's going to be a very interesting year because all these pieces are going to fit together domino into one domino into another domino and I don't think it's going to be incrementalism we normally have incremental trends in the economy and in stock markets we don't have an incremental trend now I think we're about to enter what the chaos theorist would love you suddenly go from arm wrestling to sudden drama and things suddenly break and you wonder why again we're in part 3 of Atlas Shrug remember when everything came undone if you have any questions be happy to entertain Dr. Oliver thank you so much for your lecture I have a question on what to do do you think right now we should have a like a barber strategy store of value what is your take on gold and bitcoin to protect us from this bubble gold is a smart metal everybody looks at markets S&P's been around since the 1950s T-bomb's been around for 100 years the reds only been around a century so these aren't like some historic institutions gold's been around 3000 years and people have survived holding gold through all kinds of hell collapses of governments wars and everything if you came from another planet landed somewhere in Africa in one of the exchange with gold there'd be people who accept it land in Europe gold is money and it's also going to expand its quantity so ultimately yes that's why there's demand for gold and gold's been behaving quite well it's been doubled from 2015 to 2020 then it went into a three-year range effectively they only had a 20% drop during that range actually now it's making new highs and yet there's no headline to explain why the reason is it knows what's coming and it knows what the central banks are going to do when that stuff happens they have to go nuts that's their job they'll have to buy assets they'll have to liquefy the system no matter what they claim academically now but if that stuff starts to come apart they're going to unite and have a unified policy across Japan Europe and here to again liquefy the system whatever means they have and therefore your money and it's going to decay hours and there's people talk about the dollar is such you know we think the dollar is going to get weak as well during this period technical analysis suggests a major downturn another downturn in the dollar is about to happen but that's really not the factor it's all the currencies they're decaying in real value we've analyzed bitcoin since its inception and been quoted in the Wall Street Journal by it as well all our calls have been good and we got bullish in the high 20s 20,000s 2022 we got bearish at 55,000 when it was coming off its top and right now we're still bullish but in terms of its sustainability it doesn't have certain virtues that gold has aside from heritage it's on computers the government can access it and I think once people become more distrustful of the state because of events that happen in their lives that hurt them that's going to be a negative for bitcoin because it is accessible and the government already has tried to come down on it in various ways you know it's used to launder money you know all these excuses they had recently they did a study on whether it's too much energy consumption you know so if they have to let's say bitcoin it's a very useful currency about 10% of the population use it at everyday purchases in fact if you go on google you can find many major name stores that will accept bitcoin but if it ever became 10% of the day to day transactions central bank that's a threat that undermines the potency of their control of the money in it they take martial law steps that's a negative I think down the road for bitcoin the Fed takes somebody mentioned in the lecture the Fed is entrepreneurial when these crashes come when reality hits in the face they take unprecedented measures like paying interest on commercial deposits that was one example brought up now when this crash happens because it'll probably happen do you think do you have any prognosis for what these measures will be and additionally normally when you see these tough times hit people flock to more they consider to be more secure assets they even flock to real dollars they flock to USD or gold etc and so say the measure they take is by buying more carbon bonds buying ETFs directly do you think that if they do that and they probably value these assets and simultaneously people are flocking to more secure assets and this situation would look like if that happens well in terms of asset categories that we favor now we call it a commodity bottom in October 2020 commodities have gone down while gold doubled in price from 2015 to 2020 commodities continued to erode Bloomberg commodity index for example got down under 60 in price and then doubled to 140 by the time the war began in Ukraine and Russia it didn't go up because the war it had doubled but even now it's back around the 100 level we're talking index of commodity prices you compare the current Bloomberg commodity price at 100 to its peak in 2008 which was 235 and then there was a peak in 2011 it was 170 something so people who claim there's a commodity inflation it's off the page commodities are still vastly undervalued we have technical reason to argue we think Bloomberg commodity index is about now in sync with gold this time and so we're facing a situation that technically looks and fundamentally looks very much like the late 70's when the stock market became a wasteland after having crashed in 74 from 1982 the stock market was total wasteland you couldn't make any money unless you were lucky commodities boomed and gold boomed by the way that was despite fed raising rates during that time which is interesting so I think that's the I'm going to go into real assets things like farmland grains particularly grains this time we think energy was a leader in that first move up I think grains alike which hurts food that's just what government wants to hear that food prices you know wheat's going up that creates personal pain again you know helps add to the chaos but gold will lead it we also think silver and the gold miners are a better place to be than gold at this point because they're vastly undervalued so I'm curious based on that wonderful interview with Rothbard he didn't seem super confident in the libertarian party at the beginning and from that letter it seemed to indicate you may have not have been so confident in it what are your thoughts on third parties and independent candidates going into like 2024 with the growing political tensions the ultimate outcome may not be a political party but yeah he did change because the movement changed Murray would be so delighted to be here to look to see the size of the audience that have been in all these rooms he'd be giggling okay he created the movement and back then there were none when I first met him and he later did the Rothbard summer seminars I think the Mises Institute in February 15th report had a short video on the history of the Rothbard summer seminars and I think some well known names were there like Walter Block and Joe Salerno went to those and so Rothbard did generate the movement so this is important Mises Institute is important because you need an intellectual core you don't just need mass movement you need an intellectual core so when people say these ideas suck what works what's good what makes sense and that's when they turned to the Mises Institute in Spades and he'd be delighted but as far as political I have no opinion on viability the LP did a service and that it did in my early days if you use the word libertarian it meant you were a voluntary socialist Bakunin was a libertarian in academia back then he was an interesting man but he wasn't an eric capitalist but it was only when Murray Rothbard came around that libertarianism and the LP came around shifted to free market totally opposite to what libertarianism meant back in the 60s now if you use the word libertarian they don't think socialist thank you Sam so you mentioned that there's likely to be a large drop in the stock market and the economy as a whole what is that going to do to student loans and universities by view of student loans is once they were taken over by the government I totally disagree with the Republicans who want you to pay the loans back it's stolen money my article in defense of piratering was on that issue once it's unowned money and the government rips it off from everybody you can't trace it back to its owner and the government's not a legitimate owner of money so if you've got government money and don't pay it back fine I'll probably get arrested for that it's not stolen money it's not like taking a loan out in private I suspect strongly that in this economic crisis which will be associated with the stock market downturn there may even be a crash event in the stock market but I'm not betting on that they don't always occur you can major bear the 2000-2002 no crash none so it doesn't always happen but the pain that will be associated with that in terms of personal lives will one the student loans they simply can't pay it and in fact there's already talk of a tax rebellion a student loan rebellion if if Trump doesn't get elected there'll be a tax rebellion I almost guarantee it there'll also be serious talk among certain states of secession where it's already being talked about but it's a minority sort of issue it'll become a more popular issue if he doesn't win but as far as the tax issue paying taxes with student loan if you can't afford to pay it you can delay and we already know that in the COVID event they delay tax payments for three months one of those years because people just couldn't pay if people go into hardship there'll be more and more delays in terms of requests for delays loans and so forth to the point where the IRS will be ineffective in raising the money they're supposed to raise in which case they'll revert to a national sales tax I suspect the IRS will be abolished whether it's under when or Trump when that ultimately there won't be an IRS they'll revert to a sales tax and even there was a Trump advisor in his administration who recommended national sales tax at that time alright let's give a hand for Mr. Oliver thank you