Luongo: Vivek, Money Wars, Cities, End Game

I spent much of the afternoon transcribing a video of Tom Luongo at RogueNews. That means I condensed at some points, weeded out repetitions, edited out things I didn’t understand. Follow the link for the original. Just a few comments before we get to the transcript.

Regarding Election 2024, TL focuses on Vivek Ramaswamy as running for the VP position, with Trump. I find TL’s remarks to be rather shrewd. As we learn more about Ramaswamy, TL’s misgivings appear to be borne out.

On the other hand, I believe TL is presenting too simple a view of how the Ruling Class hopes to finesse the Trump challenge. I see the GOP primaries as serving two potential purposes for the Deep State and Ruling Class. The first—which looks like a complete failure—would have been to find someone who could defeat Trump for the nomination. The second purpose would be to position someone as a strong VP candidate, which could only happen if that person gained a significant following. That hasn’t happened, so I don’t see how Trump could be cornered in that way. The benefit for the Ruling Class in the second scenario would be that if a Trump ticket should win in 2024—in spite of lawfare—Trump could be immediately impeached and replaced by a pliable tool of the Ruling Class.

Jumping all the way to the end, Luongo sounds a cautiously optimistic note. He maintains that the Ruling Class really doesn’t have a handle on the enormity of what they’re attempting to shove down the throats of the American people. Luongo thinks the American people won’t stand for it. I wish I could be that confident. See what you think.

In between, there’s plenty more of interest.

Chaos in August. Where We Go From Here.

[43:00]

VG: 2024—how's it looking?

TL: If it looks like Trump's gonna win they'll just put him in jail. What I think they're doing right now is they're trying to sell us on dark skin Ron Paul [Vivek]. He's the low rent Ron Paul. He's Rishi Sunak 2.0.

VG: There's an old saying, Be careful of men who appear out of nowhere saying things that you like. Let me let me pull the screen up real quick--this is a this is a interesting breakdown:

Vivek: So first let me just address a question that is on everybody's mind at home tonight. Who the heck is this skinny guy with a funny last name and what the heck is he doing in the middle of this debate stage. I'll tell you I'm not a politician ...

Obama: A mill worker's son who dares to defy the odds, the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too.

VG: There you go.

TL: It's hope and change 2.0. Who is this guy? He comes out of nowhere, he's made all his money in a SPAC [Special Purpose Acquisition Company].

A special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) is a company without commercial operations and is formed strictly to raise capital through an initial public offering (IPO) for the purpose of acquiring or merging with an existing company. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/spac.asp

It doesn't add up. He's running for VP, the Libertarians are gonna fall for it like they always do, because they have not a politically savvy bone in their body collectively. When you're talking about "Big L" Libertarians they just don't get it. Just because he comes out and says the things you want him to say, well they've got 15 years worth of data now on y'all after Ron Paul. They know exactly how to push all your buttons. I'm happy to be proven otherwise, that he's the real deal. Explain to me why I'm wrong but--I don't think I am.

He's clearly angling for the VP slot so that he can be acceptable to the majority of the people that when they take out Trump he can come in and go, 'I love Donald.' He's already presenting himself: 'I like Trump, y'all are up here making making fun of Trump, I think Trump's great.' Yeah, like, pull the other leg--it plays Jingle Bells. And his foreign policy is garden variety neocon. 'At this point Russia's not the real enemy, China is.'

VG: That's the entire thing. It's preposterous, it's infantile.

TL: He represents the Steve Bannon wing of the Republican donor wing. And again, we haven't seen this act before? How many times do we have to watch the sequel? We know the sequels are never as good as the original.

Vivek Ramaswamy’s Voting Record Shows He is Not a Registered Republican, and Donated to Anti-Trump Democrat Candidate in 2016

Okay so Davos' goal is to destroy cities, and that's San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore, all the way down the line. Look at what they're doing. Normalize crime, destroy the economics--and Chicago is a very important lynchpin in all of this. Chicago is still really important to the American economy. You're still talking about the Great Lakes trade and all the railroads run through it.

Comment: So TL is suggesting that the destruction of our major cities is part of an well thought out agenda. By making these cities unliveable through the Soros DAs, etc., the middle class will be forced out and the Ruling Class can have total, unfettered control. I would add to ‘normalizing crime’ the open border, as well. It’s breaking the major cities.

VG: LA, New York, Chicago, these are the vital three cities, these are the three legs of the stool that holds the country's financial markets-- but also logistical and supply markets. So if you are the Davos crowd these are the three legs you want to break. Geographically speaking and infrastructure speaking there are no other cities that you can replace them with. You can't build Miami into New York. They don't have the infrastructure. New York's built on near 200 year old infrastructure--you can't replace that. Same thing with Chicago. Same thing with LA. That's why it's so vital, and this is why they want our crowd to recede from these places. Now, perhaps at some point we have to go back in at the collapse of this or the reset--our reset of this whole entire thing--and then re-energize, reindustrialize these areas as best as we can. And we're going to need help to do that and that means at one point we're gonna have to be good friends and partners at a working level with both the Russians and the Chinese.

TL: And the only way you you start that process is by starting the process of bringing the offshore dollars home.

VG: Bingo!

TL: You have to bring the trillions of dollars that are sitting offshore, you have to give it an incentive to come here. I was talking with one of my patrons who's in Regional banking the other day. With the implosion of Europe there's going to be a massive move similar to what we saw in 2006, 2007--pre-Lehman Bros. into American real estate. The Florida housing boom of 2005 to 2007 was mostly driven by European money. The race right now is between, What's going to break first? The European Union or the United States? And the reason [Christine] Lagarde is playing bond spread games is to run the clock out, because if these markets don't get out of their current trading ranges, then the guys who don't understand what you and I are talking about, who are in there trading and investing and whatnot, if they never get that signal that they're looking for, then the money's not going to move.

So this is why it's so very important to break her [Lagarde] down. That's why I think October is going to be a very interesting month. That first week in October as always becomes very interesting because it's after the end of the quarter when everybody says, okay, how am I doing to deploy my capital for Q4, and then how to deal with tax loss selling? All that, and then we get into Q1 and that's going to be the mindset. And I'm sure there's a lot of guys looking at what's going on with Powell and everything else and they're looking at German bond spreads versus US debt and they're going, 'This doesn't make any sense.' At some point someone is going to show up with a whole lot of money and push this thing in the wrong direction, and when that happens ...

I think of it like a battlefield. At some point defensive lines break down. The Ukrainians are trying desperately to break down some of the Russian defensive lines. I don't think they're going to be successful,l mind you, but they're trying. Whereas the Russians are just sitting there absorbing it, but then the Russians are going to counterattack. And when the Russians counterattack there's not going to be any Ukrainian troops left. The same thing's gonna happen in the financial markets when this thing blows. It's gonna blow quick, and when the yield curve control blows it's gonna blow quick and I think the real tell here is that Janet Yellen needs somebody to buy all these treasuries that she needs to fund this year's budget with. No one's buying. The FED refuses to buy it. The Europeans have been buying it.

Comment: Keep this last part about the Fed clearly in mind as we proceed. In Powell’s Senate testimony he clearly stated that he does not feel obliged to monetize debt for Yellen at Treasury.

Oh, by the way, I broke the TIC report--the Treasury International Capital report--down, of foreign Central Bank holdings of US treasuries, and I went back to September of 2021, so, a couple of months after Powell started the stealth tightening. I broke it down by region: the Euro Zone and all of their attendant places like Bermuda and the Caymans--that's all Euro trash--and then the rest of the world: Asia Pacific. The Chinese and the Japanese and most of the Asian-Pacific region has been selling treasuries and the Europeans have been the ones supporting the US Treasury Market. Why? Because they cannot afford to have US bond yields push too much higher while Powell is raising rates, because if that happens then European yields have to go along with them in order to maintain spreads. So Lagarde has two problems in widening Bond spreads. A lot of these carry trades are predicated on ranges, and if you break outside the range in either direction the whole trade collapses and then it's got to be reversed.

This is why the Bank of Japan's tweaking yield curve control is very important. I would watch the Japanese Yen very carefully because the bank of Japan is going to intervene ... and that's gonna blow up a lot of carry trades. These finely tuned yield curve edifices that the ECB and Yellen have created and then again with Yellen flooding the market with treasuries. Yellen doesn't want higher treasury yields. She's a vandal and she's trying to destroy the United States and hand it to the Europeans, so raising the long end of the yield curve does not serve that purpose. What serves that purpose is selling all this debt and destroying the dollar and destroying our fiscal position and putting us in a trap while bond yields remain within the ranges that the ECB can tolerate. That's the game, and at some point someone is going to do something they're not supposed to do.

That's what I think is gonna happen at some point. The BoJ has already told everybody that they're ready to do this, and I think everybody who decides that they're going to short the Japanese yen, Good Luck. I would not screw with Ueda [head of BoJ] right here—at all. He has all the cards. He still has a very loyal investor class in Japan. Mrs. Watanabe, if you give her three and a half percent she'll she'll keep her money in Japan, because they're still a monoculture, they still care about Japan. They're not a bunch of deracinated yield seeking jackasses like we are, looking for an excuse to go expat.

I was saying this the other day. I said, three-month treasuries are paying five and a half percent. My local credit union is still only paying me 15 basis points on my passbook savings account because clearly their balance sheet is impaired. If it wasn't they would be offering the same rates everybody else is. Wells Fargo and most banks are only offering 0.15 % on passbook savings, but they're offering CD rates that are competitive or slightly competitive with treasury yields. So you can almost infer the bank's balance sheet from the number of points under the commensurate treasury that they're offering at CD rates. If they're only offering like 40 basis points lower than treasury yields then that's probably a bank in pretty good shape, but if they're offering 60 or 70 basis points or 80 basis points lower they're probably in rougher shape. So, for example, my local credit union is offering 4.9% on a seven month CD, so that's pretty good. I say to myself, well, I could buy the treasury directly and I could bail out Janet Yellen, or I could forego 60 basis points for seven months in order to help recapitalize my local credit union. I think that 60 basis points is worth giving to my local credit union to ensure that I have access to capital and cash in the local economy. I'm gonna keep my money local.

VG: So, Tom, I think the theme for a lot of people has been: local, local, local. Local banking, local politics, local business. Do you see that being the strategy going forward as the Davos machine finally dies?

TL: I think that has to be, and I know they're going to do everything imaginable to break the local infrastructure and local society down. But at some point they are not going to escape this. If they break it down as far as they have to in order to get us to comply, they're going to have to break the society down and atomize it. I don't think they realize that yet. I think they think if they ratchet up the pain another 25% or so from where it is and they offer us a carrot like debt jubilee for student loans and all that stuff, they'll offer us that cookie and we'll all go 'Yes, thank you.' 'No, how about I not pay you back?'

We just need to stop being being gaslit by morons. We'll get through this. It's gonna be hard and we'll probably all have to move our parents into our houses. We're all gonna have to up our humanity and our empathy, even for people who are currently maybe on the wrong side of some of these issues, ...