Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 01:26 Japan's Alarming Debt-to-GDP Ratio 02:16 How Japan Accumulated Massive Debt: The Lost Decades 03:04 The Bank of Japan's Role in Financing Debt 04:13 The Magic Trick Stops Working: Japan's Interest Rates Spike 05:34 Japan's Spending on Interest Payments 06:32 Wall Street Protocol Program and Black Friday Offer 08:39 Japan as the Largest Foreign Holder of US Debt 09:36 The Broken Carry Trade: Borrowing in Japan, Investing in US 11:11 Predicted Wave of Money Leaving US Markets 11:39 Impact of Japan Selling US Debt on US Interest Rates 12:47 Consequences for US Economy: Spending Cuts, Inflation, Higher Loan Rates 13:38 Historical Precedent: August 2024 Market Drop 14:12 The Permanent Breakdown of the Japan Carry Trade 15:17 The Carry Trade: Leverage and Margin Calls 15:46 Your Exposure to the Carry Trade 16:23 How to Be a Winner During Financial Instability 16:59 Winning Sectors: Energy, Materials, and Tech with Pricing Power 18:34 Sectors to Avoid: Companies with Debt, Banks, Discretionary Consumer Stocks 19:20 Immediate Actions to Protect Your Portfolio 20:31 The Importance of a Market Crash Plan 21:20 Outro
Your 401k, your stock portfolio, they just got a lot riskier
and you probably don't even know it yet.
Right now, as I'm speaking to you, Japan,
the country that owns more of America's debt
than any other nation on earth,
is facing a financial crisis
that could send its tsunami waves
all the way into your retirement account,
your mortgage account,
and the US stock market overall.
We're literally talking about $1.2 trillion
in US treasury bonds potentially flooding the market.
We're talking about a 20 trillion carry trade
on the verge of collapse
and a debt bomb that makes 2008 look like a warm-up act.
I promise to you that by the end of this video,
you'll understand exactly what's happening,
why Wall Street isn't telling you anything about it,
and most importantly, what you can do to protect yourself,
maybe even benefit before this thing blows up.
My name is Felix Prehn.
I'm an ex-investment banker.
I've seen how the financial shenanigans,
sorry, the financial industry works from the inside.
I'm also the founder of the Goat Academy
where we've taught over 20,000 students so far
how to become better and safer investors and traders.
I'm also the co-founder of Trade Vision
where we give you access to the real-life news and data
that Wall Street has access to.
This back there is Winston.
He's our chief research hound.
He has a very large nose
and he's very good at sniffing out
and explaining Japanese markets.
Let me just walk you through a couple of data points here.
Japan's debt-to-GDP ratio is 234%.
234%.
Think of it this way.
Imagine you make 50,000 a year,
but you own 117,000 in debt.
It's pretty bad, right?
On a credit card.
Now, for context, the US is about halfway there
at about 120,000%,
which is already like banana republic level,
but Japan is literally double the US level.
They're the most indebted economy on the planet that matters.
No major economy has survived this level of debt
without defaulting, basically saying,
sorry, I can't pay you back, or hyperinflation,
where they print so much money
that their currency becomes worthless.
Zimbabwe being an example.
Now, you might be wondering, how did Japan get into this?
Well, it goes back decades.
In 1991, Japan had a massive stock market
and a real estate bubble, and that popped.
At one point, central Tokyo was worth
more than all of California, right?
Just picture that.
Essentially, it was like the 2008 housing crisis in America,
but much, much worse.
The economy basically stopped growing for 30 years.
It's called the lost decades.
30 years of stagnation.
Now, they did try to fix it.
The Japanese government just kept spending
more and more money that they didn't have,
trying to stimulate the economy.
They kept borrowing and borrowing
and issuing more debt to fund all the spending.
And the crazy part,
they also kept interest rates at basically zero,
sometimes even negative.
So think about that.
In Japan, you could borrow money for free
because interest rates were zero or negative.
Actually, if they're negative,
they pay you to borrow their money.
It's like a credit card with a negative interest rate.
The more you spend, the more you'll make, right?
Now, it's a magic trick, isn't it?
How did nobody call them out on this?
Well, the answer is the Bank of Japan.
It's their version of the Fed.
It became the biggest buyer of their own government debt.
They literally just printed money,
and then they used it to buy government bonds with us.
So they financed their own debt.
It's basically like you having a massive credit card bill,
but you can print your own money,
and then you use your own money
to pay off your credit card bill.
Now, in the real world, that doesn't really work.
But when you're a central bank,
you can actually get away with it for quite a while,
30 years, apparently.
And this kept Japan going.
Interest rates at zero, and the debt is irrelevant
because there is no interest, right?
It's just like, it's debt.
We don't care.
We don't have to pay it.
But the magic trick has just stopped working.
In November 2025, something unprecedented happened.
Japan's new prime minister
announced a massive stimulus package,
talking about 130 billion in new spending.
Fairly normal in economics.
You know, government announces stimulus.
What should happen?
Well, interest rates should actually drop.
Why?
Because stimulus means economic growth,
which means the government will have more tax revenue
to pay back its debt.
That's kind of the weird theory.
Investors usually like it when governments spend money,
but Japan's bond market did exactly the opposite
of what we'd expect.
When they announced the stimulus,
their interest rates spiked massively
to a record we haven't seen in almost 20 years.
Now, what does it mean when your interest rate goes up
and you've got debt up to your eyeballs,
up to your hairline even?
Well, it's an earthquake.
The market is saying we have lost confidence
in Japan's ability to pay back its debt.
And if you're still with me,
you might be thinking,
why the heck do I care?
I don't live in Japan.
I get you, okay?
Stick with me for a minute
because you will understand how this is a huge
ticking time bomb under the US stock market
and your portfolio and your retirement.
Now, here is my...
This is such a disaster.
Japan spends 23% of all its tax revenue on interest,
not paying down debt, just interest.
But when the interest rates go up
like they just have a few days ago,
so much of the tax revenue would go on interest,
not 23%, but way more,
that they would not be able to pay
for basic government services, right?
So you get into basically like the shutdown
the US just had, but permanent, right?
No government services that can work anymore
because there isn't any money.
So Japan now has two options.
One, they can print more money,
will crash the yen even further.
It could cause massive inflation.
Option two, do nothing.
And well, they'd go bankrupt.
So there is kind of no good option here, right?
They're damned if you do, damned if you don't kind of thing.
Now, before I show you
how this directly threatens your money,
I wanna make sure you're getting the full picture
of how Wall Street really works.
And in our academy,
we have more than a dozen of my mentors
who are all ex-Wall Street goats.
Think Goldman Sachs, think Bear Stearns, think Merrill Lynch,
or the Deutsche Bank and so on,
the big banks, the big hedge funds.
And they've worked for these companies
for 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years.
And now you have access to those same mentors
if you decide to go down that path.
But the reason I'm mentioning it
is because we coach one-on-one
and there is always gonna be a limit
to how many people we could teach one-on-one.
It's never really been a problem.
It isn't a problem right now,
but we are going to have to stop taking on new students
in our flagship program,
which is called the Wall Street Protocol.
Why?
Because we're going to get very shortly, within days,
to a point where we'll say,
hey, before, we wanna deliver for our existing students.
And until that batch graduates,
we will not take on more students
in the Wall Street Protocol.
So there's a little bit of urgency here.
If you ever thought about learning from my mentors
and myself, which it would be, take some action now,
which also happens to coincide with our Black Friday offer,
which is perhaps what caused this whole wonder upon this.
It makes me very happy
because it just means a lot of people wanna learn
and we're helping a lot of people,
but we wanna make sure we are able to deliver you guys
tremendous value and access and innovatability.
So do you wanna be part of this final batch here
on the Wall Street Protocol?
You can book yourself a free call with my team.
It's a free strategy call.
We walk you through what it looks like
to work with my team and my mentors.
You can do that at phoenixfriends.org freedom.
There's a link down below.
It doesn't cost you a thing.
It's completely risk-free.
We won't push you.
We won't try to hard sell you or anything like that
because we actually have the opposite problem
and we don't do that anyway.
We just believe people need to have a proper conversation
to be able to make a good decision
because we want people who actually are in the right place
and succeed.
So go to phoenixfriends.org freedom.
My hope is that it'll put you on your path to freedom.
So there's a link down below in the description.
Now, here is where this stops being a Japan problem
and it becomes your problem.
Japan is the single largest foreign holder of US debt.
They own about 1.2 trillion, 1.189.
How pedantic are we?
How 1.2 trillion in US debt?
That's more than the GDP of say Mexico
or Netherlands, depending on where you hail from.
It's more than the market cap of Apple.
It's big.
And over the past nine months,
while other countries like China
have been selling US debt,
Japan has actually been increasing their holdings.
Why?
Because Japanese bonds pay basically nothing.
So say you imagine this,
you're a Japanese pension fund
or insurance company or something.
At home, you get zero returns.
Well, you can go to the US and you get four or 5%.
So what are you gonna do?
You're gonna buy American debt, right?
It's just like purely logic.
But here's the problem.
The math just broke.
When Japanese bond yields were at zero
and the US, this is what it's been like for years.
Japan, free money, right?
So you can borrow in Japan
and you can send the money to the US
and you get 4.75%, free money.
So if you're a financial institution,
you're gonna borrow as much as you possibly can
and you're gonna send all that money
and buy US government debt with it
because US government debt is zero risk, right?
So what could possibly go wrong?
You're just gonna make 4.75% on money that wasn't yours.
It isn't costing you anything.
This is like the greatest getting rich scheme ever, right?
This new Ponzi is turning in his grave
thinking I should have thought of that, right?
But now, well, Japanese is already giving you 1.8%, right?
1.8%.
Now, US interest rates have come down.
You get about 4.2%.
So the difference is shrinking.
You might be thinking it's still a good business.
It's still free money.
Well, they hedged their currency
and that costs some money and it's gotten more expensive.
So this is no longer like the obvious 100%
money-making guarantee Ponzi scheme
that it's been for decades.
So suddenly, keeping your money at home in Japan
makes some sense.
And that's why a lot of people, a lot of analysts
are predicting a massive wave of money leaving the US
so it goes back home.
Japanese insurance companies, pension companies and banks
have trillions of dollars invested in US assets.
As Japanese interest rates rise,
the maths on that stops making sense.
So they're gonna start selling US government debt.
They're gonna bring the money back home.
We're not talking about a little bit of selling.
We're talking about hundreds of billions,
maybe even that full 1.2 trillion over time
leaving the US markets.
Now, why does it matter to you?
Because the US government is addicted to borrowing
just like the Japanese.
The US pays a trillion in debt interest, just interest.
It's more than national defense.
It's more than Medicaid.
It's more than veterans benefits.
Interest on debt is now the third largest item
in the government budget, right?
Only social security and Medicare is a little bigger.
Now, imagine what happens when Japan,
the US's biggest lender,
starts selling billions of US debt.
When there are more sellers than buyers, what happens?
Prices go down.
Now, what happens when bond prices go down?
And this is not obvious.
It always bends my head too.
When the price of a bond goes down,
the interest rate on that bond goes up
and that makes debt more expensive.
US is already paying a trillion in debt.
If it goes up just 1%,
so when rate goes up 1%, just 1%,
you have about an extra 200 to 300 billion dollars
in interest just for the US.
So where does the money come from?
Well, what are your choices?
Well, you cut spending.
Like that's never gonna happen, right?
Politicians, it's a popularity contest.
They're gonna do the popular thing,
not the responsible thing.
You could print more money.
What does printing more money do?
Causes inflation.
It devalues every dollar you own.
But it also affects you more directly
because the interest rate of the government
is the basis for everything else.
So your mortgage rates will go up.
Your car loans will go up.
Your credit rates will go up.
Business loans will go up,
which is how you strangle the economy.
And that's how Japan affects you
no matter where you are in the US
or actually anywhere in the world
because you all have exposure to American stock markets.
Now, we've seen this before.
August 2024.
Go back on my channel, August 2024.
I'll walk you through back then too.
Japan raised interest rates for the first time in 10 years.
Within one week, Bitcoin went from 65 to 50,000,
minus 23%.
The NASDAQ dropped 10%.
The S&P fell 8%.
We called it Black Monday.
Panic.
Now, it was temporary because the Bank of Japan backed off
and markets stabilized.
But right now, the market is forcing Japan's hand.
And they're basically saying,
this trade, this Japan trade,
this borrow free money and invest it in the US trade
is broken.
It is gone.
It is permanent.
And maybe this Japan trade is still a bit like fuzzy to you,
which I would get because it's a strange concept.
Let me walk you through an example.
Here is what you do in the past, right?
The financial institutions have been doing this for decades.
You borrow $100,000 from Japan
and it costs you basically nothing,
maybe $500 a year, maybe nothing at all.
You then invest that money and buy US bonds with it,
US government bonds with it,
and you make $4,250 profit on it.
What do you do with the profit?
Well, you put the profit into stocks,
into bonds, into real estate in the US.
And imagine you don't do this with $100,000,
but with $100 million or a billion dollars
or a hundred billion dollars, right?
And you start to see it's just free money.
Why would you not do this?
And in fact, the whole trade is worth about $20 trillion.
So one or two people have heard of this, right?
That's larger than the US economy, by the way.
And they've just been getting free money
by borrowing for nothing
and basically lending it to the US.
Now, this actually gets worse.
I'm not gonna walk you through the numbers
because it's a bit tedious,
but take a screenshot of this if you're interested.
Basically, these hedge funds are doing these trades,
they borrow.
They borrow heavily.
They leverage heavily.
This isn't their money,
which means a small loss becomes a catastrophic huge loss
and they have to sell everything to survive another day.
It's basically like a margin call.
That's essentially what it is.
They have to sell.
Now, you probably didn't know
what the carry trade rules are right now
and you still don't really know how it affects you.
Well, if you own an S&P index fund,
if you have a tech-heavy portfolio,
if you have any cryptocurrency,
you own a REIT or any kind of bonds,
then you are exposed to this carry trade and its risk.
You didn't make the carry trade yourself,
but the institutions that own these assets alongside you,
they did.
And when they're forced to sell,
well, your assets go down with it.
So, Wall Street doesn't really like talking about it,
but they've built this massive interconnected web
of borrowing.
And when one of those threads in that network breaks,
a whole thing can actually unravel.
But there's good news.
We've seen this play out before,
not quite as big as this,
but we know what the concept is here.
And the concept is that if you are selective
with your stocks,
you can actually come out a winner out of these things.
First of all, you have to understand the concept.
So, well done for watching this far.
And the winners are typically these companies
in these sectors.
Again, it's not financial advice.
It's my humble opinion based on my research.
And of course, Winston's research back there
is snoozing under the Christmas tree.
It's very cute, isn't it?
Winston, what's your favorite sector for hyperinflation?
Yeah, we're not gonna get much out of him.
Thankfully, we got a presentation out of him first.
So, what have we got?
Energy companies.
Oil and gas typically does quite well,
unless the economy completely tanks.
Different story.
Unlikely to with the kind of government spending we have,
in my opinion.
Materials and mining.
And we've been liking a lot of gold miners, silver miners.
This year made us a lot of money.
Gold and silver miners.
There we go.
But also other rare earth plays and so on.
And then you don't have to sell every tech stock out there,
but you wanna focus on your stocks with real pricing power.
Who has real pricing power?
If the brand raised prices by a dollar,
would you still buy it
or would there be an alternative you could possibly buy?
These we're gonna ask ourselves.
So, say I've got some of Winston's Tubalts on here.
If these became significantly more expensive,
I would probably buy a different brand, right?
Because Amazon will suggest it to me.
These are great, actually.
Chuck It is the brand.
Love these.
They're bouncy and they glow in the dark.
So, that's not product placement.
We don't do that around here.
It's just genuine Winston experience.
He loves these.
They're really bouncy and you can find them
when you throw them in the dark,
which is what we do every night.
Now, so it's companies with a big tech mode, right?
Can't replace it.
It's Microsoft.
It's Facebook, because it's hard to get
whatever many users they have,
three trillion or something, right?
Apple, pretty hard to get a billion people even to,
it's a bit of a Biden moment there, isn't it?
Hard to get a billion people to buy your phone, right?
Coca-Cola, it creates an addictive taste.
And there are loads of these companies out there,
but you just don't wanna be in the one
that's selling something that's pretty generic.
Think about that, right?
That's a living one.
Companies with lots of debt are a problem.
And so I'm a little bit concerned
about all this AI spending,
because that's all debt fields are starting to be.
Banks could get hit pretty hard
because they will have exposure to this trade.
They will own all these assets, right?
And the consumer is gonna get scared.
So discretionary consumer stocks, what is that?
Well, you know, Macy's, Nike, that sort of thing,
stuff you wanna buy, but you don't have to buy.
Flip side to that, your box stores,
you know, your discount stores,
they typically do quite well
because they're still gonna buy groceries
and stuff you need, so you're gonna go to the cheaper.
So you wanna really own businesses
that produce real things with real value
that their customers need.
They can't replace them easily.
So what can you do right now?
Assess your exposure.
How much of your money is in dollar assets?
It might be 100%.
For me, that's nearly 100%.
I actually don't mind that, but you wanna diversify.
You can put some percent of money into gold and silver.
I'm not saying a percentage here.
That's just a random sort of number.
It could be 5%, 10%, whatever you feel comfortable with.
Pay down debt that has a variable rate.
If you have a loan that has an interest rate
that can change, do something about that.
Companies, we wanna focus on strong balance sheets.
It's a workbook that comes with this thing,
this video that you can download
that'll give you a lot more insight
on the whole shebang together.
We also have something called Better Stocks GPT,
which is a tool I built,
but you can see how strong every single stock is.
You just type it in.
And that's part of our free community,
which is down below, Felix Rensselaer's resource,
which is also where you get the workbook.
And then you wanna stay informed.
I do that by using our AppTrade vision.
We get the news like that, just alerts.
But really, you wanna have a plan.
What will you actually do if the market crashes?
And I give you quite a lot of information around that
on this channel here.
Check out our educational playlist,
because you need to have the awareness and the knowledge.
We have some of that now.
But you also need to know how you take action.
For me, my experience with thousands and thousands
of students is that really the only way
you build up that confidence is by having the ability
to get some feedback live when the market moves.
And as I say, book a free call with us,
FelixRensselaer.com slash freedom,
before we close the Wall Street Critical this week
for new enrollments.
So early warning system, take a screenshot of that.
I'm not gonna run you through every single number here.
It would get tedious, but take a screenshot of that
so you know what to watch out for.
Here's some more indicators, super, super useful.
And yeah, you got that out?
You got a screenshot?
Yeah, brilliant, okay.
So bottom line, something big's breaking.
And we tried it last year and they backtracked,
but this time it's a lot more serious.
So you now know more than 99% of people, seriously.
Bit of a long concept, bit of a complicated concept,
but you now understand it on a high level.
So therefore you are not helpless.
You're gonna just figure out
what do you do with this information?
I've given you some options.
Hop into the free community or simply book a call with us,
free strategy call, see if mentoring
from some Wall Street goats is what would take you
to your goals and your targets and your freedom.
And if you got some value out of this video,
share it with somebody
who might also get some value out of it.
Winston and I say, thanks for watching
and we wish you great success.
If you have a 401k or you own the SMP or the NASDAQ
or straight out Nvidia stock,
then what I'm about to show you could save you
or cost you thousands, if not hundreds of thousands.