Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 00:32 Federal Reserve Raises Rates Directly Into Escalating Energy Shock 00:43 Agricultural Input Costs Explode As Combine Fuel Hits Thousand Dollars 01:01 Replaying 1970s Stagflation Policies Drives Massive Historic Bullion Rally 02:03 Global Central Banks Accelerate Physical Gold Purchases To Record Highs 03:13 Why Raising Interest Rates Fails To Tame Supply-Side Commodity Shocks 04:43 Real World Farm Diesel Squeezes Cascading Through Global Food Prices 06:01 Defining Stagflation: Stagnant Economic Activity Collides With Persistent Inflation 07:08 Supply Chain Interruption Mechanics Drive Cumulative Consumer Goods Inflation 09:32 Multi-Decade Asset Performance Comparison: Fiat Purchasing Power Vs Hard Assets 10:39 Transitioning From Vague Economic Anxiety To A Structured Written Strategy 11:48 Registration Opens For Live Inflation Trap Interactive Training Workshop 13:26 Eight Trillion Dollar US Treasury Refinancing Cliff Escalates Interest Expenses 14:34 Comparing Volcker 1980s Rate Hikes To Current High Debt Ratios 15:38 Intentional Currency Debasement Engine Used To Reduce Sovereign Debt Burdens 17:18 Utilizing The Winston App Daily Feed To Filter Market Noise 18:10 Treasury Refunding Debt Issuance Demands Massive Capital Absorption 19:47 Central Bank Reserve Managers Shift Capital Away From Paper Fiat 20:58 Unmasking The Cash Trap: Historical Dollar Devaluation Since 1971 22:13 Auditing S&P 500 Index Concentration Risks Inside Passive Portfolios 24:33 Outro
AI Generated·May contain errors
The Fed just did the one thing it hadn't done since 2023, it raised interest rates.
And I know interest rates sounds like, you know, dry central bank nonsense, and you can safely
scroll past this, but don't. Because this one decision is going to reach into your bank account,
your portfolio, and it's quietly going to take a slice of everything you have saved in your life.
And what makes me mad is this. They're raising interest rates into an oil shock. Oil is above
$100. Diesel, fertilizer, all the stuff that grows your food is up between like 40 and 140% this year
and it's climbing. There's a farmer doing the rounds right now saying it costs him a thousand
dollars to fill up his combine. And that kind of cost squeezes the life out of an economy just by
itself. And the Fed's answer to that is, well, let's make money more expensive on top of it.
What? So we've tried this before, right? We had high oil, we had a weak economy, we had a central
bank that was tightening the screws right into the middle of it, and that was the 1970s. And it
didn't end very well, did it? Back then, rates and inflation went upwards together. If you're not that
old, ask somebody who was. I wasn't. Winston, do you remember it? I don't think so. He's a puppy.
But what happened is, well, gold went from $100 to $850. The oil shock of Iran lit the final fuse.
Now, my name is Felix Breen. That's Winston here. He's our researcher and gold hoarder.
And I used to be a banker. Winston is just someone who choose things. And over the last seven years,
my mentors and I have taught about 25,000 people. We don't take any sponsorship here. We never
affiliated anything. There's no link to get a brokerage account or anything down below.
And it's because that way we can say whatever the heck we like, and I like it that way.
So while the news is arguing about oil and the Fed, guess what the skilled money on the planet's
doing? The central banks, where they've quietly gone and bought what? Yeah, gold, right? The
golden retriever says, yes. And it's the most, it's literally the most that they have bought
this century. You're wondering why the heck they're doing that? Well, stick around. By the
end of this video, you'll understand exactly why. But before we dive in deep to this,
there is quite a lot of stuff that I want to get through here. So I've written out the whole thing
for you in plain English, like what just happened, why it matters, how it affects your money,
what the big players are actually doing. A jargon-free, completely free, no-catch research
report. You can download it at phoenixfunds.org.dollar is the link. It's in the description
down below. So grab it, read it alongside it, read it afterwards, whatever, but make sure you
grab that. And look, the very fact that you're actually here and you're still listening to this
instead of watching kitten videos, which is very tempting, I know, most people are going to find
out about this in a year or two when it's too late. You're finding out about this early and
that makes you special and that puts you in a better position. So congratulations, my friend.
So let's get straight into it. Act one. Let me show you why raising rates into an oil shock
is a dangerous move. And you might be thinking, hang on, Felix, aren't you being a bit pretentious?
Don't these people know more than you? Well, these are the same people who printed four
trillion dollars of new money after COVID and said it won't cause any inflation. Official
government inflation peaked at 11 percent. I say official government inflation as in
they massaged that number down pretty hard. It was way, way more. So these are the same people
who are doing it again. Now, there was one time when raising interest rates makes a lot of sense.
Prices start creeping up because there is too much demand chasing not enough stuff. In that world,
raising interest rates makes sense. You just cool down the demand a little bit. Prices settle.
Everyone calms down. Everything is hunky dory. An oil shock is a very, very different animal.
The prices aren't going up because everyone's rich and spending like mad. They're going up because
the stuff itself, the energy, the food got more expensive to produce and energy sits underneath
everything. When oil goes up, it's not just your petrol, it's the diesel in the tractor,
it's the fertilizer in the field because, yes, it's all made from oil, which is kind of shocking.
I was walking Winston this morning, talking to someone who works in garments fashion,
and she was saying, you know, all the polyester is getting more expensive, which
isn't really such a bad thing, but, yeah, a lot of clothes are made out of that junk, right?
So, the food you shop, everything is getting more expensive, and there is this American farmer on
the news right now called John Boyds Jr., and he deserves his recognition, and he's been doing,
you know, farming for decades, and he's saying he's paying $7 a gallon for diesel. A combine
harvester holds 140 gallons. That's $1,000 to fill it up once. Now, his fertilizers, his chemicals,
his equipment, all those costs are going through the roof, and he says it's one of the worst
economic times in history for America's farms, and that man didn't overspend on anything, right?
He's been crushed by input costs he can't do anything about, and whatever it costs him to
grow the food, well, you're going to get the bill when the food finally makes it to you.
So, now put yourself into the position of the Fed chair. Prices are rising,
but the economy is actually getting weaker because everyone's spending more just to stand still.
Higher oil is basically a tax on the country, and into that they raise interest rates, which
means the tractor loan gets more expensive, the mortgage gets more expensive, the business that
was about to, you know, hold on now can't afford to borrow. So, you take an economy that's already
being choked by energy costs, and you're choking it just a little bit more. So, you then kill the
inflation. Well, maybe you kill the inflation, but you killed the patient first, right? Which
isn't really great success, and that's exactly what's happening right now, and it's exactly what
happened when? In the 1970s. We got an oil shock. Prices went through the roof, and the Fed was
like, let's put up interest rates so we weaken the economy. They invented a word for it. They
called it stagflation. Stagflation. A stagnant economy and inflation at the same time, which
economists have told you at the time couldn't happen. Yeah, economists, I'm one of those.
We're not, you know, the most open-minded, smartest bunch as a whole, and through the
whole thing, you know what went up a lot? Look at this chart on the screen here.
Gold went from about $100 to, you know, well, I haven't got the 70s on here, but in the 70s,
it went to $850, and people still think that Fed hikes kill gold. Well, in the 1970s,
rates and inflation ripped. It was an Iran-driven oil shock. It's funny how these things rhyme,
and what you need to understand is why this is what economists call supply-side
inflation. It comes from the input cost of the oil. It's really stubborn because
people don't explain it on TV or news properly, so let's do that. When the price of everything
is being dragged up by energy, higher rates do not affect the cause of the inflation.
The oil is still expensive because, you know, the Houthis are blowing up stuff in the Middle East,
and well, and the Americans and everybody else. Fertilizer is still expensive because half the
world's fertilizer comes out of Iraq. Yes, you didn't realize that, but it is true. Sulfur
comes there. The Russians and the Chinese have the biggest chunk of the other bits,
and I know the US makes some sulfur, but it's a world market. The prices are still going to go up.
So all the rate rise does is it punishes the borrower on the other side, punishes the family
with a mortgage, the small business with a loan, the farmer who needs to finance next season's
seeds or tractor or whatever. So you've made their money more expensive at the exact moment
their costs already went through the roof. So what do they do? They cut back, they spend less,
they might give up, and the economy slows. But the prices stay high because the prices were never
about them spending too much. And that's the trap in one sentence. The medicine doesn't treat the
disease, it just kills the patient. And then you could say, well, the disease was beaten, but you
know, not such a happy outcome. And it feeds on itself in a really nasty way. The farmer paying
$1,000 to fill his combine has to charge more for his grain. Or you guys don't know. The lorry firm
hauling that grain pays more for diesel, so it charges more for the transport. The shop pays
more for the delivery, so the loaf on the shelf costs more. Everything passes through and it adds
higher costs on top of higher costs on top of higher costs. So by the time it reaches you, that original
oil spike has been multiplied three or four times over. That's why an energy shock does not stay in
the energy commodity crisis aisle, right? It ends up in every aisle. So when someone tells you rates
are going up, gold's gonna fall, ask them which kind of rate rise they mean. Because it's important
to understand the difference. Because hiking into a boom is one thing. Hiking into an oil shock,
into a weakening economy, is the thing that sent gold up eight times last time. I'm not telling
it's going to happen in the future. I haven't got a crystal ball. Winston keeps eating them.
But that's the setup we're staring into right now. And I want to show you something that's on
the screen here, because this is the bit that made me go, really? Is this really? I started to stare
at it for a while. It's three simple pictures stacked on top of each other, all going back to
the year 2000. The top one here is the US dollar. And it's drawn as $100 note. And it's crumbling
away over time in terms of the value of what it can buy. The middle one is the home price,
the sort of average home price in the US. And it went from $160,000 to about $450,000
in the last 25 years. And then there is the bottom one, which is gold, which went from $200
to $5,000, wasn't it? A little bit less than that right now. So the dollar melts,
and the things you actually need, the roof, the hard assets, they get further and further out of
the reach. And this has already happened. This is the last 25 years of holding your wealth and
that they told you was risky, mad for tinfoil hat people. And what I really want to say to you,
with the greatest kindness, knowing this is one thing, but having an actual plan for it is another.
And most people don't have a plan. They haven't got anything written out. They don't know what
they're going to do next week. They're going to try and figure it out. So they've got this vague
feeling that something is off. And let me know if you've got that vague feeling. Just write
vague feeling in the comments down below, and we'll see it. Or just VF, if you wish. And they
have a hope that it's going to sort itself out, but it doesn't sort itself out. It shows up in
your life quietly as your money buying less than it did last year. And then a little bit less the
year after, and a little bit less the year after, and so on. Now, I've got a written plan. I know
what I'm doing with my money through the rest of this year, through the rest of next year, quite
frankly. And I could give you that plan. I've tried that before. People didn't read it. Well,
they saved it, and they said they read it, but this went about 30 seconds reading it. They skimmed
through it. So what we're going to do instead with you is this. We're going to sit down properly,
you and me, live for about two hours. And we're going to walk you through the whole thing,
what the institutions are doing, what I'm doing, and mostly how to build your own plan around your
situation. Not copying mine, because our lives are different. And it's completely free. So all
you've got to do is you go to inflationtrap.com, because this is what this is. This is Inflation
Trap. You grab yourself a free seat. You show up. And if you're going to come, put the word
prepare in the comments, because this is what this is about. This is for preparing to thrive in this
environment rather than to, oh, let's see and hope if some politician figures it out for me.
Because in 12 months, 24 months, and 36 months, a lot of people will be really pissed off about this
because they missed the opportunity. And they got punished pretty hard,
like people did in the 70s. And some people will be there, and they'll be like, this was
freaking brilliant. I swore that I did well, didn't I? So grab yourself a seat. There's a
link down below, inflationtrap.com. Let us know in the comments that you're coming.
But I want to dive a little deeper with you. Because if raising interest rates into an oil
shock is such a bad idea, why are they doing it? I mean, they are baffling people, the people at
the Fed, but they're not like outright stupid, are they? No, they're very smart people. It's just
how they got there. And in my humble opinion, it gets a little dark here, because they're trapped.
And your money is trapped too. Because to see the trap, you have to understand how the government
borrows. They basically sell IOUs. They call them treasuries because it sounds fancier,
but it's literally just an IOU. The government takes your money, and they pay you back later
with interest. But the problem is the sheer size of what has to be paid back and refinanced. Let
me give you the numbers. This is from the Financial Times. In the next 12 months,
$8 trillion of these government IOUs have to be repaid. Now, how do they repay them? Well,
they haven't got any money, so they have to borrow again. And the average interest rate
on the old debt — let me get a pen — the average interest rate on the old debt was 3.3%.
Can't really see that color very well, can you? Let's try a different one.
The rate right now is more like 5%. So you are taking $8 trillion, finance a 3%,
and you have to refinance it at 5%. You add about $130 billion a year in interest,
on top of what the government's already spending. So every notch higher on rates makes the
government's own debt more expensive. They're raising the price of their own mortgage, which
is just baffling and which is why Trump's so pissed off about it. Now, compare that to the
last time someone genuinely crushed inflation. The last inflation crusher the US has had was a chap
called Paul Volcker in the early 80s, and he did it with brutal double-digit interest rates — more
than 10%. But the bit nobody mentions is he could do that because the country's debt had already
come down. So it started at about 120% of the economy, and it went down to about 30%. So the
government could survive punishing interest rates because it barely owed anything relative to the
country. Where are we right now? Guess what? We're back to 120%. Grimes, doesn't it? It's where we
were in the 40s after World War II, after we beat the Germans. I'm one of those. I'm happy you did.
So Volcker's tool — big rates for long enough to cut inflation — today it would bankrupt the
government. They can't actually do it. So they can raise a quarter point and look tough, which is what
they just did. But they cannot hold rates high enough, long enough, to actually kill inflation
because it would blow up in their own budget. So what do you do when you owe too much and inflation
is running? It's a playbook for that. And again, it is an old one. It is not a new one. These guys are
not creative. They're just competing. Exactly what they did last time around. They are going to let
inflation run hot, intentionally. But they're going to lie to you about it.
And that's the thing that's going to make the debt go away. Because if you think about it that way,
if this is the economy and right now this is debt, you can do two things. You could reduce the debt
or you can make the economy bigger. If you make the economy much, much, much, much bigger,
the debt in relation becomes smaller. The easiest way to make the economy bigger is inflation. It's
sort of like a fake growing, but it makes the debt worth less because it makes money worth less,
right? Your dollar loses value. You can buy less groceries with it. Well, the same happens to debt.
It also becomes worthless. So it's rewarding the people who are really, really irresponsible and
up to their eyeballs in debt. And that's exactly where we are right now. We're in the inflated away
part. And the person who's going to pay for that is anybody who's holding dollars, which is you,
right? And in my opinion, this is why this quarter point interest rate hike is a piece of theater.
It lets them look like they're fighting inflation, you know, tough guys and so on.
But the actual inflation is running way hotter than they'd admit. And it means they can deal
with the debt and nobody will notice it because the Fed's being tough on inflation. So don't get
fooled by the headlines that says the Fed gets tough on inflation because it doesn't.
And if you want a genuine news source for that, I built an app called Winston Daily for that. Well,
Winston built it. And it gives you the news on the stocks you own, just an example portfolio.
And it also tells you what actually moved the market in about 30 seconds. And then, yes,
it will explain to you what the Fed just did or what Wall Street did or what diesel is doing and
so on. But that's it. It'll take you like a minute or two to get all your news in the world. There's
no politics in there. There's no noise in there. There's nothing to scare you. No scary pictures
of anything. Just what affects your money, your stocks and your retirement. Very, very simple.
If you want to play with that down below, there is a link down below. And it'll when you go into
it, it'll ask you to insert your portfolio and then it'll be 100 percent custom personalized
for you. A lot of the cool stuff in there, too. But check out that link. It's down below in the
description. Right now, there is one more crack in this plan, and it's literally happening this
week. In the next four days, from the point of me recording this, and every week thereafter is
pretty much as bad, 457 billion dollars of debt has to find a buyer. Government debt. It's an
enormous amount of new IOUs you're pushing into a market in a very short period of time.
And if there aren't enough buyers to buy all that debt, the government has to offer higher interest
rates to tempt them to buy it. Higher rates to sell debt means more expensive borrowing for
everybody else. More money getting sucked out of things like the stock market to sit in bonds
instead. So either the debt doesn't sell well and rates get pushed up, which hurts the economy,
or a friendly buyer has to step in and hoover it all up. Let's see who that buyer will be,
because it could be the Fed. It could print money to buy the government's debt, which is what they're
doing. And that is once again the 1940s move in its inflationary. By design, more dollars soak up
the debt, but every one of those new dollars waters down the ones already in your pocket.
So it puts a squeeze on your investments, and the government's paying juicy interest to shift all
that debt. The money has to come from somewhere, right? Often it comes out of the stock market,
because why take the risk of shares when the government, risk-free, gives you a big fat
interest rate, right? And then this question I always come back to, well, what's the money doing,
the big money, the skilled money, the trained money? So forget my opinion. What are the people
who do this for a living actually doing with their money? Because if the biggest money on the planet
is making the same bet, it's an interesting conversation, right, to some ex-banker in his
golden retriever with a hunch. And they're not being subtle about it. The central banks, the
actual institutions that print the money, are buying what? They're buying gold, yes.
Are you still allowed to stutter? Probably not, right? That's probably
offensive to somebody. So I'm sorry if I've offended you. So the people who print the
dollars are buying gold, which kind of makes you think, doesn't it? And again, something we track
inside the Winston app, there's a metal section for all your gold and silver banks,
and you can see what institutional money is doing. You can see what the big banks are doing.
You can see how much gold is left in the vaults and in everything else. And then, of course,
what's happening day to day here as well. Again, check out the link down below. It's a free,
completely free trial. But this is the chart I'd look at. This is how much central bank gold
holdings are rising. So the speed at which it's increasing is the fastest since about
1997 or something, which was Bill Clinton years, right, when politics was still entertaining.
I repeat, I did not. I did not have, you know. You know what I'm talking about. Anyway, Act 5
is the cash trap. Because some of you are thinking, I'm scared. I'm going to wait this out.
Okay. Feels like the wrong thing, right? The safe thing. Well, I totally get that.
Well, go back to 1971. It's the year the US cut the last link between the dollar and gold.
And after that, the government could print as much gold, sorry, money as it wanted. Hopefully,
we won't figure that out. And a 1971 dollar, according to government statistics, it's now
worth about seven cents. And I think that's a highly inflated number. It's worth a lot less
than that, a fraction of a cent. And that is just sitting in cash, right? So your safe asset
is guaranteed over time to lose. So what isn't going to lose? Again, another financial advisor
comes to your conclusion. You have gold, you have silver. It's the wilder cousin of gold.
But you also want to make sure that you're not super concentrated. I believe good companies
will weather this storm like they've weathered many storms before. Good companies. Most companies,
not so good. So don't panic sell your shares. Just know what you actually own. Because again,
a lot of people who think they're diversified are really sitting on a pile of the same handful of
expensive tech names, right? Again, if I just show you, the average portfolio I see looks a bit
like this. It's basically NASDAQ, S&P, and a couple of tech stocks and a touch of gold. And
that gives you a 70% exposure to AI. Bonkers, right? And it's just because the index funds are
all AI, by the way. So again, understanding that means you can make better decisions,
which means you can protect yourself better. Again, Winston App will tell you that if you
So what have we got? We've got rates going up into an oil shock, which is the same mistake
we saw in the 70s. Gold went up eight times in the 70s. They're not going to hold rates high
for very long because they can't. The debt's too expensive. They have to cause massive inflation
first that they won't tell you about, and then they're going to raise rates. And they're going
to print lots of money. It's the only way they can refinance, you know, $450 billion in four days
coming up next week. And just look at what the smart money is doing. Look what the central banks
are doing. Protect yourself from this inflation trap because it's going to kill people, like
literally kill their retirement and kill their enjoyment, which really, really, really, really
sucks. So my advice to you is don't just be a survivor of this decade that is going to finish
off with some serious inflation. The Fed is raising rates into an oil shock. We know how
that ends out. And the people who got hurt the worst in these cycles, they're not the ones who
saw it coming. They're not the ones who studied the pattern from the last few times this has
happened. They're the careful ones. It's the savers. It's the people who did everything right and kept
their money in something safe like cash or government paper, and then their watch would
melt away while, you know, no one's telling them anything about it. And my hope is that it isn't
going to be you because you were here early. So take the next step. Come and sit down with me
live. Two hours. It's coming week. And we'll actually build out your plan for what's coming,
how to survive this inflation trap. Give you the tools so you can do yours, not just copy mine
because that wouldn't be that useful. So go to inflationtrap.com, grab yourself a seat. And if
you're coming, let me know in the comments down below. Right. Coming. And I look forward to seeing
you there. And I wish you a safe 2027. Right now, I think we're going through some sort of weird
phase transition. And normally when you get bad economic news or you get bad jobs data,
that people are going to fly to safety into the bond market.