The Fed Can't Save You This Time — Here's Why

Our economy is changing and it's changing fast. Oil prices are high, gold prices are booming, and the stock market is falling. Now, everybody says this is happening because of Iran, but that's not true. Iran is the trigger, but the cracks in the economy have been brewing for years. So, if you're an investor, you want to pay attention to this because these shifts are going to create new investment opportunities for the people that understand them while everybody else just watches. Now, we've seen this story play out in history, and I want to talk about history because while history doesn't exactly repeat itself, it does rhyme. In the early 1970s, we were facing an inflation problem because the United States government took the dollar off of the gold standard, which allowed the United States government to spend a lot of money that it didn't have, which meant a lot of money was printed. That created an inflation problem. Then, in 1973, 1974, the United States got involved in a Middle Eastern conflict called the Yom Kippur War, which then caused oil prices to skyrocket. Then, we saw the United States economy get hit because of changes in the economy, changes in Federal Reserve Bank policy, which caused unemployment to go down. This created something called stagflation, slowing economy, slowing job market, higher prices. The concern is that we could see something happen again today because we've already been seeing an inflation problem after the pandemic. It hadn't gone away. Inflation was actually ramping back up in the early part of 2026. Now, we have higher oil prices, and we're seeing a slowing job market because of AI and other shifts in the economy. Let me break down now what this means and how this can impact the economy in multiple ways because the Federal Reserve Bank is stuck, but we need to start by understanding what's going on in the treasury market. By the way, if you're an investor and you've been concerned about your investment portfolio or retirement portfolio because of all the craziness happening, this is why. Right around the corner on March 18th, I'm hosting a live, free, and virtual investor workshop where I'm going to be showing you the research that my firm has been doing about how the economy is changing and how it's going to create new and unique investment opportunities, not just for the long-term investor. It's a free workshop. It's live. If you want to join, I'm doing it twice on March 18th, once in the morning at 1030 a.m. Eastern Time, again in the evening at 8 p.m. Eastern Time. Now, you do have to register, and we have a limited number of people that can actually join me live. So, if you're interested, I have the link for you down in the description below. And as an added bonus, when you do show up live, my team is going to send you a free digital copy of our new book, How Money Changed Forever, but you have to actually show up live on March 18th to get a digital copy of this book. So, let me start by talking about treasury bonds, because this is really something new that we haven't seen happen in recent history. When there are concerns about the economy, or really anything, people go to safe investments. And in the United States, what has been known as the safest investment is treasuries. A treasury is a loan to the United States government, and if you read any economics textbook, it will tell you that lending money to the government, these treasuries, are called a risk-free investment. Why? Because number one, the United States always pays their bills, because number two, they can raise your taxes, and number three, they can work with our central bank to print money, even if they don't have enough taxes. So, the government has always paid back these treasuries, so it's considered a risk-free investment. And generally, when there's concerns about geopolitics, like a war, there's concerns about a recession, what do people do? They buy treasuries. We saw this happen in 2020 when the pandemic hit. We saw this happen during the 2008 crash. We saw this happen, recession after recession after recession. Now, because of this war, people are actually doing the opposite. They didn't flock to treasuries the way that they normally would. How do we know that? Because when people are buying treasuries, the interest rate that the government pays generally goes down, because the government doesn't have to incentivize you with higher interest rates, because everybody's already buying these treasuries. But if people are not buying treasuries, the government has to incentivize you with higher interest rates. That way, you want to lend them money. Well, after the war started, we didn't see treasury yields go down. We saw treasury yields go up, because people stopped buying treasuries. They were buying less. Now, why would they do that? What that tells us is people are more worried about a dollar problem. People are more worried about an inflation problem than they are about a recession, which is new. Because generally, when you have geopolitical conflicts, you have concerns about the economy. People are worried about the economy going down. Now, we've seen recessions happen. We've seen 16 recessions in the last 100 years. They're a part of our economy. But this time, it's a little bit different, because people aren't just concerned about a recession. They're also concerned about a dollar problem. They're concerned about inflation. That's something you want to pay attention to. Even BlackRock recently just put out a note. Now, again, BlackRock is the world's largest asset manager. And what they said is that long-term treasury yields are rising, even though they're supposed to be a safe haven, telling us that something structural is happening. What does that mean? People are getting concerned about the dollar. This brings me to number two, the Federal Reserve Bank being trapped. Because generally, when you go through any sort of economic change, the Federal Reserve Bank steps in. Now, why? The Federal Reserve Bank is the central bank here in the United States. And their job is to monitor our money. And what they normally do is when there is a concern about a recession, the Federal Reserve Bank will try to stimulate the economy by putting more money into the economy or cutting interest rates. Because when you cut interest rates, buying a car is cheaper, buying a house is more affordable. That encourages spending. When the economy is getting too hot, and they're concerned about inflation, they will raise interest rates to make borrowing more expensive, to slow down spending, to cool down the economy. Well, we're facing a two-pronged problem right now. On one hand, we have concerns about inflation. Even if we go before the war started, inflation started to tick back up. Then the war started. Oil prices shot up. Oil prices impact the prices of everything, not just gas prices, but your grocery prices, your flight prices. I mean, oil prices impact every part of the economy because many industries use oil in some part of their supply chain. So when oil prices go up, the price of everything goes up, and oil prices can make inflation a lot worse. So now we have a situation where inflation is a problem. And to fight inflation, what does the Federal Reserve Bank traditionally do? They raise interest rates. That's why between 2022 and 2025, the Federal Reserve Bank was raising interest rates to fight inflation. Then on the other hand, we have an economy problem. In February, we got the report that we saw the worst job market since the pandemic, February 2026. Worst job market since the pandemic. Part of that is because of AI. Part of that is because of tariffs. Part of that is because of a whole lot of other economic factors. Now we got a new report saying So we have a job market and economic problem. Now when you have a slowing economy, what does the Federal Reserve Bank typically do? Well, they generally cut interest rates to stimulate spending. That's what they did in 2020, 2021. They cut interest rates to make it cheaper to buy a house, to make it cheaper to buy a car. That way when we were in this economic slowdown, people would continue spending to stimulate the economy. But now here we have a situation where we have inflation on one hand, a slowing economy on the other hand. What does the Federal Reserve Bank do? Are they going to stimulate and make inflation worse? Or are they going to try to cool down inflation, save the dollar, but then make a bigger recession? That is the dilemma that the Federal Reserve Bank is facing. And we're going to see, which brings us to point number three, a change at the Federal Reserve Bank. And this is a huge, huge change that we don't know what the impacts are going to be just yet. The Federal Reserve Bank is called the Federal Reserve Bank, but they're not a bank because you and I cannot go there to deposit money. They're not a reserve because they're not sitting on any cash and they're actually not federal. It says so on their website. Why does that matter? Because the president, Donald Trump, cannot fire the chairman at the Federal Reserve Bank because it's not federal. Now, for the last year and some change, President Trump has been very vocal about calling the current chairman at the Fed, his name is Jerome Powell, stupid and slow because Jerome Powell did not want to cut interest rates, at least not very aggressively, because he was concerned about making inflation worse. Well, in May 2026, Jerome Powell, again, he is the current chairman at the Federal Reserve Bank. His term is expiring. And because his term is expiring, the president, who right now is Donald Trump, gets to appoint a new chairman at the Federal Reserve Bank. Well, President Trump has been saying he wants the lowest interest rates in the United States of any developed nation in the world. Jerome Powell had been saying no. Now, President Trump is appointing somebody else who he says will listen to what President Trump wants. He is appointing somebody by the name of Kevin Walsh. Now, this is where things get a little bit tricky because Kevin Walsh used to be a member of the Fed back during the 2008 crash. And during that time, Kevin Walsh was against lower interest rates. He was against the money printing. He said that if we do too much stimulus, we're going to have hyperinflation, we're going to destroy the dollar. And so he was against what the Federal Reserve Bank was doing in 2008. Now, Kevin Walsh, prior to the conflict in the Middle East, he said we can lower interest rates and not make inflation worse if we remove money from the economy, if we take some of the dollars out. It's called tightening the balance sheet, which in plain English means removing some money from our economy. Well, the whole idea before the conflict in the Middle East was Kevin Walsh is going to come in and try to push the Fed to cut interest rates. Well, now here we have a very interesting dilemma. Inflation is going to get worse if this conflict in the Middle East continues and oil prices stay high. The economy looks like it's slowing down. High inflation generally means the Fed would raise interest rates. Slowing economy generally means the Fed would cut interest rates. What is the Federal Reserve Bank going to do with a new chairman at the Federal Reserve Bank? And that's the question every investor is going to be keeping an eye on, not just in the United States, but around the world, because it is going to have a big impact on the United States economy and the global economy. Now, the last thing that I want to say about this point before we move forward, which is the Federal Reserve Bank has to make a decision with a majority vote. There are 12 members, voting members at the Federal Reserve Bank. So even though one more person comes in that may want a different opinion, that doesn't mean that the entire Fed has to change everything that they do. You still need a majority vote to change their direction. But as the chairman of the Fed, you can help sway and influence the rest of the decision. So something you want to pay attention to, obviously we'll be keeping you posted here on my YouTube channel, but that is going to change our economy in many ways come May, because we don't know what is going to happen and our economy is in a very delicate position right now. This brings me to what's going on with gold. Gold is not just an Iran story with gold prices rising, because gold prices have been rising since the pandemic. And the thing you want to understand about gold is that it is not a traditional investment in that it is working to produce value. If you go and buy the McDonald's stock, you're buying a company that's working to sell hamburgers, buy more real estate, create more franchises, and sell more stuff. When you buy gold, you're buying something that just sits there and looks back at you. It doesn't really have real economic value. Yeah, you can use it in jewelry and a couple other things, but it's really not used in the economy. And so when you buy gold, you buy gold because you're worried. You buy gold as insurance, you buy gold as a hedge. And the interesting thing about gold is the gold prices have been growing faster than the stock market. And that's not normal. We've only seen gold prices grow faster than the stock market for five periods in history. One was around the Great Depression time. One was in the early 1970s, which I talked about, that stagflation era. One was the 2000 dotcom bubble bursting. One was the 2008 crash, and now post-pandemic time. So when gold prices are rising quickly, that is generally a concern, especially if it's rising faster than stocks, because stocks are working to produce actual value. Gold goes up when people are concerned about the dollar. So something you want to pay attention to. And then one of the most recent news, I just want to mention this, that we got is that consumer confidence is falling, which really is not a surprise. But what consumer confidence means is people's confidence in where the economy is moving. Why does that matter? Because people spend money not based off of how much money they have, but based off of how they feel the economy is going to be. And so when people's confidence falls in the economy, what do they do? They buy less cars, they buy less houses, they spend less money, and that can slow down the economy. So there's a lot of changes ahead. What does this mean for you? Again, if you are an investor, I invite you to join me on March 18th on my Live Investor Workshop. That link is for you down in the description. But you have to know your investing strategy. A lot of people are going to try to scare you or make you feel some emotion. What I want you to do is understand that things happen. Crap happens. You can substitute crap for whatever word that you want. And the stock market is very emotional. It moves up and down. As an investor, your goal is the long term, not what's going to happen over the next six months or the next two years, but over the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years. And now when you think about it like that, these movements day to day, month to month, even year to year are not that big of a deal. In fact, when markets go down, they create big investment opportunities because they allow savvy investors to come in and buy good investments at a discounted price. And every time you see markets go down, and I'm telling you this because I started creating content on the internet about a decade ago. So I have some experience here seeing people's reactions to this. Every time markets go down, whether it's 2025 with tariffs, whether it's 2022 during the market sell-off and the 20% stock market crash, whether it's 2020 and the pandemic and the stock market falling 35%, in each one of these instances, plus history, every single time people say, this time is different. The markets are collapsing. Do not buy. While the savvy come in and buy even more. And that's where if your goal is to be a long-term investor, understand poop. Panic leads to overselling, leads to opportunity, leads to profit. It has happened time and time again, and poop makes some people incredibly rich, but you have to understand the way the system works. And that's where you have to understand your strategy as well. If you're just investing into the broad markets, then you follow a strategy called ABB, always be buying. When markets go down, you keep buying. Now, if you want to improve your returns, then you can be a little bit more of an active investor. And now you can research where the money is moving, which industries are going to benefit. Now you can see better opportunities, more risk or more potential return. And this is where your research as an investor can become incredibly valuable because there's a lot of news out there. News can be very scary. And the reason why it has to be scary is because that's what gets you to click. And if you don't click, they don't make any money. The stock market now becomes a reflection of people's emotions. When people are scared, they sell. People are excited to buy. And that market going up gets more people greedy and excited and they buy more. When markets go down, people panic and they freak out and they sell more. And your job as a financially savvy investor has to be to cut through the noise. That way you can find real opportunity. So we're going to continue to see a lot of craziness. We're going to continue to see chaos. I'll be doing my best to keep you updated here on my channel. But if you want to understand how all these changes create opportunity, again, I invite you to join me on my workshop. The link is free down in the description. And if you got value out of this video, the best thank you is a referral. So if you could, please share this video with a friend, family member, colleague or fellow investor. That way we can continue to spread this type of financial education. Thank you. President Trump just confirmed that he wants to get rid of your income tax. Take a listen. I believe the tariffs paid for by foreign countries will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern day system of income tax, taking a great financial burden off the people that I love.