I’ve been following Judy Shelton online for years. I’m also reading her new book “Good as Gold: How to Unleash the Power of Sound Money.” For decades she’s been articulating a perfectly reasonable monetary policy that works for everyone who works. Here’s her latest interview in Gold Telegraph: The Authentic Judy Shelton: A Maverick Economist Takes on Washington. It’s one of the better interviews recently so I figured I’d do a quick writeup. The content below is drawn from the interview itself, and I also weave in my own comments as well.
Judy Shelton is a serious economic thinker. She’s been arguing forever that money should actually mean something and that it should hold its value over time. In that sense, the average American on the street would surely agree. And she thinks that governments should not be free to just print money at will, which only destroys the property of anyone who must work for a living. It’s utterly immoral what’s been done to us in the name of colonialist policies implemented intentionally like free trade, deindustrialization, outsourcing, endless rehypothecation, constant price inflation, and much more. For the last few decades, official Washington thought Shelton was eccentric at best, but it’s also clear that she’s been a threat to them all long. So, what do we have now? Economic confidence has collapsed throughout the Western world while stable monetary collateral assets like gold, silver, and Bitcoin have hit record highs denominated in every major currency globally. More and more people are finally starting to realize Shelton has been right from the beginning.
How It Started: The Soviet Union
Although she talks about gold constantly, Shelton’s path to sound monetary policy didn’t began with gold but instead started with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Back then she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Hoover Institution studying the internal monetary and financial condition of the USSR. She noticed something that others had missed. The Soviet Communists were running a massive internal budget deficit, financing losing enterprises, and printing money to cover the gap. But because prices were fixed, the inflation didn’t show up as rising costs. The problem, however, was visible as empty shelves, lack of growth and prosperity, and long lines to purchase necessary daily goods.
“I ended up thinking with like a green eyeshade accountant,” she said, “that the country was going bankrupt.” Some of her colleagues at Hoover, disagreed, such as Condoleezza Rice, who was focused on Soviet military capabilities and felt that it would be militarization that would take down the government. Shelton and Rice used to argue about the issue. Shelton stuck to her view that economics would destroy the Soviet Union. She was right. Over time her book at the time, The Coming Soviet Crash, caught the attention of former President Richard Nixon, who reportedly kept rereading it after 1991. He even began sending her handwritten letters, which she displays in her home and showed the audience during the interview with Gold Telegraph. In one letter, Nixon described her as “a star being blessed with both beauty and brain.” Sounds like Nixon.
But what mattered more than Nixon’s flattery was his candor about the monetary system itself. When Shelton told him her next book would be about Bretton Woods, the economic agreement that tied the dollar to gold after World War II until Nixon ended the policy in 1971, he wrote back: “I know very little about monetary policy.” She found that extraordinary because he was the man who ended the system and said so himself. Although a well known expert in foreign policy and geopolitics, Nixon was never skilled in financial matters. What’s interesting is that he felt confident enough to state that directly.
What Was Lost in 1971
Nixon’s August 1971 speech in which he directed the Treasury to “suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold” was supposed to be a short-term fix. Others outside the power elite at the time knew differently. However, years later Shelton met former Fed Chair Paul Volcker in 1994 at a conference marking the 50th anniversary of the Bretton Woods agreements, and he largely supported Nixon’s policy. Volcker said he thought they might need to reprice gold from $35 to perhaps $38 or $40 an ounce, and then reinstate the old system. That’s obviously not what happened.
“Did we essentially trade discipline for flexibility when we ended the gold standard?” Shelton was asked. Her answer was careful and pointed. “Flexibility is kind of a weasel word that can sound good,” she said. “What it really means is the flexibility to not be disciplined, and then that translates into the flexibility to reduce purchasing power, to incur inflation, to debase the currency.” In other words, it was intentional. She invoked James Madison, who argued in the early years of the country’s founding that depreciating the currency is the same as stealing property and that’s unconstitutional. The founders, she said, would be appalled. “Madison was so clear on that. He said a depreciating currency is just like stealing property.” She didn’t mention Hamilton, but you have to think that he would have been equally outraged about how the system he largely created eroded over the generations.
The early republic, she pointed out, treated the mint as the first priority. Jefferson saw a common currency as something that would bind the new country together, strengthen its commerce, and honor the work of its people. When citizens earn money, she argued, that money is property. Inflation expropriates it without due process. It’s theft, basically. They’ve stolen our money. They’ve destroyed our future.
The Nomination Fight: Pundits and the Washington Machine
In 2020, Shelton was nominated by President Trump to the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. The confirmation hearing in the Senate that followed was unlike anything she had expected, she said. I remember watching the hearings myself. It was clear that it was a hit job from both Democrats and Republicans to make sure that Shelton didn’t end up on the Federal Reserve. Given the politics in 2020, that result was expected. But I was struck by the obvious ignorance being articulated by the Senators. They just don’t know very much at all and certainly don’t deserve to be seen as leaders of anything.
Things weren’t much better in the financial or general media, though. “I was amazed at the power of pundits who I knew didn’t know as much as I knew about monetary systems and history,” she said. The attacks were personal and ideological. She was called a “gold bug” among other things. Her advocacy for sound money was described as a “dog whistle” to right-wing extremists, a common attack that represents nothing more than idiocy. Senator John Kennedy called her ideas “nutty,” which for him only serves as self reflection. Several other Republicans announced they were concerned. The nomination failed in November 2020 and the broken system continued.
“I had a hard time understanding that the Washington machine, built explicitly to protect politicians’ ever-growing spending demands, quickly closed ranks,” she said. Her family was in the chamber for the hearings. Her mother came from Los Angeles in her nineties. Her husband was quiet and supportive. Everyone knew what was going on.
But she draws a direct line between the failure of her nomination and what followed. The Federal Reserve then unleashed a level of money printing that contributed to the worst inflation in a generation. She didn’t mention COVID during the interview, but that was “scary virus” time as you may recall. Seems shutting down the world and gutting millions of jobs may have had some consequences, eh? By the summer of 2022, inflation was running at 9.3 percent. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell called it transitory. It wasn’t. And nobody was fired. Nobody resigned. That’s the way it always works for people who hold power.
“Not only did Powell not apologize,” she said, “but he refuses to resign. I think that’s outrageous, and it’s cheap grace to say you take responsibility when nobody gets fired.” Price stability, she noted, is the stated mandate of the Federal Reserve. “We didn’t get price stability. We still don’t have it.”
The Fed’s Footprint and the Case for Reform
Calls for Federal Reserve reform are now coming from the highest levels of the Trump administration, including from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Shelton understands why, although she would go further than most reformers.
“Inflation continues to be a lead issue for people,” she said. But her objection runs deeper than the inflation numbers. She’s troubled by the sheer size of the Fed’s presence in economic life and the way every financial decision is now made in reference to what the Fed might do next with respect to interest rate manipulation.
“We’d have a healthier economic system if people could just take for granted that the money is not going to depreciate, that a unit of account can figure into your planning for your whole future, and that you’re not just trying to keep up constantly with inflation and forced to put your money at risk.” She paused. “I think that would be a much better world.” Of course, she’s right. Her position is supported by people who need to make ends meet on a weekly basis, but certainly not the oligarchs hell bent on using the masses as their own little wage slaves.
As for who owns the Federal Reserve, she was way too careful. The legal structure is genuinely hybrid. There are twelve district reserve banks that are close to the private institutions in their regions. There are seven members of the Board of Governors, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Together they make up the 19-member Federal Open Market Committee. “It’s a quasi-public, quasi-private institution,” she said. “And that’s the arrangement that’s being tested now” under this second Trump Administration. It’s clear she knows more. It would have been nice to see her cut loose on the ownership issues like others regularly do.
Fort Knox, Treasury Trust Bonds, and a Live Video
One proposal that has attracted growing attention involves the gold held at Fort Knox. The last full audit was conducted in 1953. Shelton thinks an audit is long overdue, and not merely for symbolic reasons.
“There are a lot of Americans who don’t even trust the government to accept that the gold is there,” she said. “I think it’s needed.” But the audit would need to go beyond confirming the physical presence of the gold. It would also need to address whether any of it is encumbered, an issue no one ever talks about.
When asked whether she would support Elon Musk’s idea of a live video tour of Fort Knox, she didn’t hesitate. “I would love it!” she said. Can you imagine such a real time demonstration of reality? What if the vaults are empty? But what if they are overflowing with more gold than previously expected? Either way, it could be shocking to markets around the world and especially to Americans who have watched their life savings evaporate over the last few decades. We’ll never know, though.
But Shelton’s larger goal is to establish that whatever gold is actually in Fort Knox be held as official collateral for what she calls Treasury Trust Bonds, which she describes as long-term government obligations with a gold convertibility feature. The bonds would give holders the option at maturity to redeem the asset either at the nominal dollar value or in a pre-established amount of gold. She believes this kind of financial instrument would be massively popular. She also wants to prevent any future administration from simply selling the gold to capture a temporary windfall profit. Locking the gold reserves in as long term collateral, she argues, prevents exactly that.
The bonds, she believes, could inspire other sovereign nations to act accordingly as well. And the bonds could also become a condition of trade arrangements and a way to address currency manipulation without relying exclusively on tariffs. Shelton, says: “What does your currency do relative to gold, and what does our currency do relative to gold?” If one country depreciates more, that gap should be quantifiable. That, she argues, helps level the global playing field.
The Battle Never Ends
Toward the end of the interview, Shelton was asked about the risks of ongoing poor monetary policy. “I think what’s at risk is this sense of people increasingly [feeling] that they are victims of monetary favoritism, that the Fed maintains policies that increase the inequality of wealth and income, that they reward people who are already wealthy enough to have financial assets.” The people who cannot protect themselves are the people who work for wages, who save in dollars, whose property is quietly depreciated every year through pervasive inflation.
“I think we need a revolution of valuing honest work, honest government, and honest money,” she said. “And by that I mean celebrate people who actually make goods, who produce goods and services, not just people who arbitrage the anomalies of financial markets.” That’s an interesting comment. It clearly reflects the intention of the current Trump government as they implement policies to re-industrialize the United States after so many decades of willful decline.
She was then asked whether she would potentially join Trump’s new Board of Peace, which is focused on economic development as a tool of diplomacy to build global stability. She said she would join if she were invited. And that’s possible under the current administration given their similar positions.
And then, as the interview ended, she offered one last thought. It wasn’t a summary. It was a reminder of what we’re really facing. “The battle itself,” she said, “it never ends.” That’s sobering. It’s a battle. It’s a war. Instead of being passive, we have to actually get active and fight our own leaders to save our lives and build a future for our children. Just saying that feels reprehensible on every level. But that’s reality.
Imagine a world where Shelton’s simple, practical, sound monetary policies had been fully implemented? We’d all be thriving now. Perhaps that’s the problem. We’re not supposed to.
First, some context. Johnson’s Dollar Milkshake Theory says that despite the concerns about US deficits and debt, capital will flow into the United States during times of financial crisis. The world has borrowed enormous amounts of dollars through what’s called the Eurodollar system. When serious geopolitical or monetary conflicts emerge globally, everyone needs dollars to service their debts, which creates a massive sucking sound as liquidity flows to America. “The United States would suck up all the money that gets printed as a result of responding to the crisis,” Johnson says.
The “milkshake” metaphor is interesting. Think of global dollar liquidity as a milkshake sitting in a glass. The world is full of dollars created through lending, which represents all that debt denominated in US dollars sitting outside America. The United States has the straw. So, when a crisis strikes and everyone desperately needs dollars to settle their debts, the US essentially sucks up all that liquidity, like drinking a milkshake through a straw. Thus, capital flows into the United States, which makes the dollar stronger while other currencies weaken.
Johnson traces how he arrived at this theory: “The thesis was based on the fact that I think the world has borrowed an incredible amount of money. The debt has gotten to a level where I think we’re going to start having the consequences of borrowing all that money.” Despite believing the US has created many problems through its monetary policies, Johnson concluded that “the capital of the world would flow into the United States and the United States would suck up all the money that gets printed as a result of responding to the crisis.”
A Transformative Event in Monetary History
In his report “Empire by Code: The Rise of USD Stablecoins,” Johnson frames the emergence of USD stablecoins as potentially “a transformative event in monetary history, one as consequential as the day the United States severed its link to gold and as powerful in shaping the world’s financial order as the moment it abandoned Bretton Woods.” These are serious moves taking place.
The report opens with a warning from Carl von Clausewitz’s “On War”: “I shall proceed from the simple to the complex. But in war more than in any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole; for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together.”
Johnson applies this principle to money. As he writes in the executive summary: “Money, like strategy, is an ecosystem of power. Every instrument, market, and institution serves a purpose within a larger design, and none can be truly understood in isolation. This is why money and power are inseparable. Each reinforces the other, and together they shape the hierarchy of nations.”
The report examines several interconnected components: the Eurodollar market, SWIFT, the GENIUS Act (recent US legislation governing stablecoins), and the rise of stablecoins. But Johnson emphasizes they must be understood as “expressions of a single whole” through which the United States projects, maintains, or adapts its influence.
His conclusion is stark: “What is emerging is not just a new currency system, but a new form of control.”
The Eurodollar System: Dollars Outside America
To understand why stablecoins matter, we need to understand the Eurodollar market first, which very few people know even exists. This is not about euros or Europe specifically. Instead, it’s the market for US dollars that exist outside the United States. And it’s massive!
Johnson traces its origins: “Post World War II we had the Bretton Woods agreement where the dollar was the global reserve currency.” The Soviet Union was receiving dollars from trade but “didn’t want to put them in a US bank because they could be confiscated.” So they placed these dollars in European banks, which then used them as collateral to make new US dollar loans. That process enabled the creation of new US dollars — but outside the American regulatory authorities.
This created what Johnson calls a critical dynamic: “Most of the money printing that everybody likes to say ‘money printer go burr,’ it’s actually done by the commercial banks and the global commercial banks and even non-financial entities and non-bank institutions. It’s not so much the governments themselves printing the money.”
The system exploded after Nixon ended the gold standard and the United States convinced Saudi Arabia to price oil in dollars. “That turbocharged the need for dollars and that made this Eurodollar market grow even more,” Johnson says. Today, “the size of the Eurodollar market, which is the market for dollars outside the domestic United States, is orders of magnitude larger than the market for dollars inside the United States.”
Johnson emphasizes a truly unimaginable scale: “It’s at least a hundred trillion and probably 700 trillion if you started adding up derivatives and off-balance sheet items and non-bank entities and non-bank financial institutions. It’s just this monster out there that has grown on its own.”
Stop. Go back and read the last paragraph again. Unreal.
The catch? The US doesn’t fully control this system. Transactions run through SWIFT, essentially “the central nervous system for the global financial system,” but it’s a European system. “The US has more control than any other country. But they don’t have full control. They don’t have full visibility,” Johnson says.
What Are Stablecoins?
Johnson defines a stablecoin as a digital token issued by either a financial firm or a company that remains stable against a certain asset. Unlike Bitcoin, which has been highly volatile, stablecoins maintain price stability by being backed with US Treasuries.
The key feature is that stablecoins represent “a way to have a digital dollar that you can send, spend, and transact with that settles instantly anywhere in the world.” And crucially, “you don’t even need a bank to do it.”
Johnson admits he initially missed the significance: “Stablecoins have been around for six or seven years, right? And I was very skeptical of them initially.” Part of his skepticism came from questionable practices by early issuers like Tether, which “didn’t want to be audited” and had “some very shady practices to say the least.”
But as the system developed, Johnson came to realize “not only did I miss it, but everybody else who I think is continuing to miss it. And even those who are big advocates for them, I think are missing the real play.”
Beyond Treasury Demand
The narrative around stablecoins focuses on a straightforward benefit, which is that they create new demand for US Treasury debt. Here’s how it works. To maintain their dollar peg, stablecoin issuers must hold US Treasury bills as backing. As stablecoin adoption grows, so does the need to purchase Treasuries. With the US facing high debt service costs and massive refinancing needs, this new marginal buyer seems like a convenient solution.
While the Trump administration has promoted stablecoins primarily for this Treasury demand feature, Johnson says that this misses a bigger picture. “I think that’s really a secondary benefit,” he says. “I actually am of the belief that the US would not have that much trouble selling Treasury bills if stablecoins didn’t exist.”
Johnson says that the real strategic advantage is control and redollarization. The Treasury demand story, while true, is almost a distraction from what stablecoins actually enable. They don’t just help finance US debt. They fundamentally restructure how dollars flow around the world and who controls those flows, especially in geographies where hundreds of millions of people aren’t even banked. Again, the scale of those potentially new markets for the US dollar is unimaginable.
Even geopolitical rivals recognize this threat. Johnson says that “you’ve seen Putin make comments about the US dollar stablecoin” and other countries making comments “in some kind of a negative sense because they’re scared of it and they should be.”
But the real story could be much bigger. It’s about actually replacing the Eurodollar system with something the US can fully control, and dollarizing populations that were previously out of reach. If the US is successful implementing this strategy, it will represent a remarkable achievement and a reassertion of American monetary policy globally, which in recent decades has been eroded by the massive growth of the Eurodollar post World War II.
Money as a Tool of Control
To understand the strategic implications, Johnson emphasizes a fundamental truth about money: “Money is used as a tool or as a means of control that governments use against its own citizens or to marshal its citizens in a certain way. Really powerful countries can use money to get other countries to do what they want to do.”
This isn’t theoretical. As Johnson says, “Money as a weapon, this isn’t some idea that I just came up with. This is military doctrine. The United States Army, Marines, they know how to use money as a weapon. It’s taught at their colleges. It’s implemented in their actions when they’ve been in foreign theaters.”
The power of the dollar stems from its role as global reserve currency. “By the fact that the global reserve currency is the US dollar, the US has more control over the global monetary system than any other one government.” But that control has been incomplete because of the Eurodollar system’s opacity outside the United States.
The Empire Strikes Back
Johnson uses a Star Wars analogy to explain the coming financial war. “At the end of the first movie they blow up the Death Star, right? That’s a huge victory and we created Bitcoin and it’s achieved escape velocity or whatever. But the next eight movies aren’t about peace and love in the galaxy. The battle continues.”
Johnson says the idea that the US would simply accept displacement is naive. “A lot of people tell me the US is the great evil in the world or it’s the global bully or it’s designed the system that enslaves the world through taxation and theft via inflation. And then they also tell me that [the US] can’t possibly win the next round. I’m like, they just enslaved the whole world by your own admission, but they’re just going to roll over and the next round’s going to go to the next guy?”
Cryptocurrency was designed to escape government control. Now that same technology is being co-opted to extend control. “The dollar is already the ring of power, in my opinion, and this is a way to just entrench it even more,” Johnson says. “And the craziest thing, in the same way that the Eurodollar market built the Eurodollar prison that the world is now in, stablecoins is a way to turbocharge that and not only turbocharge it but give the US more control over it.”
Johnson is not clear who does actually control the Eurodollar system. But some analysts have speculated that it’s primarily European banks, which may help explain the current stress between Trump and Europe as the US make clear moves to reassert control over its own monetary policy — see LIBOR vs SOFR here and here.
In “Empire by Code,” Johnson describes how “quiet code and public ledgers are no longer just symbols of rebellion against the state. They are becoming extensions of it.” The tools once imagined to escape central authority are being absorbed by what he calls “the most powerful monetary authority the world has ever known.”
Johnson sees this as the US co-opting private market innovation: “The US is co-opting the innovation that was designed to escape the prison. And so I think initially that is why these stablecoins and digital assets and crypto, however you want to describe this whole ecosystem was developed.”
Unlocking Global Dollar Demand
The scale of opportunity is staggering. Johnson estimates that “easily 50 and probably 70” percent of people globally would prefer to earn and transact in dollars over their local currencies if given the choice. Currently, international capital controls and banking restrictions create enormous friction to transfer money. Stablecoins remove those barriers entirely.
“If you live in, let’s just say Turkey, and you want to hold a US dollar balance, you have to open a bank account and then it has to be with a bank that allows you to hold dollars,” Johnson says. The Turkish government can then limit how much you can hold and restrict when you can withdraw it, especially during a currency crisis.
With stablecoins, “anybody who doesn’t even have a bank” can hold dollar balances on their phone. “As long as there’s an internet connection they can connect to the internet, open, download a wallet and they can transact or they can hold these US dollar stablecoins.”
This creates an existential threat to national sovereignty for some countries. “The ability for citizens to exit the local currency” becomes dramatically easier. “If the Turkish government loses control of the monetary system within Turkey and citizens now start to hold dollar balances rather than lira balances, the Turkish government starts to lose control. They don’t like that.”
Johnson emphasizes the pattern: “If you look back through history, any country that has had a currency crisis or whose currency has failed, the government typically fails shortly thereafter. And again, it goes back to control. It’s because money is a means of control. And if you can’t control the money, then you can’t control the society.”
Why People Choose Dollars
Johnson pushes back against the idea that dollar demand is artificial or coerced. On a fiat versus fiat basis, the choice is clear. “Most global trade for the most part takes place in dollars, especially commodity based. They’re invoiced in dollars. They’re transacted in dollars.” As an aside, it seems ironic that this is what happened in recent decades with the Eurodollar surpassing the value and control of the domestic American dollar. Could that be why the US is making these moves under Trump now?
Importantly, “that was not the United States going around and telling a manufacturer in Turkey that they had to do business in dollars with a trade partner in India. Those two entities chose to do that because it was the most liquid and it was the safest and it was the most convenient out of all the fiat options.”
Even when Bitcoin advocates argue that unbanked populations could use Bitcoin, Johnson notes that “if given the choice to do it in dollars, a huge chunk of them, maybe the vast majority, would pick dollars for the reasons we mentioned.” This is the network effect on display. The dollar has the network. Bitcoin doesn’t.
“The dollar is kind of like Twitter. Everybody loves to hate Twitter. Everybody says they’re going to leave. Everybody says they’re going to go use a different one, but everybody ends up coming back to Twitter because that’s where everybody is. And the dollar is kind of the same way.”
A CBDC By Another Name?
This raises some uncomfortable questions. Are stablecoins just Central Bank Digital Currencies in disguise? The EU has been openly developing a digital euro, which Christine Lagarde continues to promote as Europe tries to maintain monetary control over disparate EU nations and perhaps even assert more control globally.
Johnson acknowledges the concern directly. When asked if all the fears people had about CBDCs are now back on the table, he responds: “I think they’re back on the table.” The government would know exactly what citizens are spending money on, there would be no cash for anonymous transactions, and authorities could shut down accounts at will.
The political workaround is elegant. “Trump said we’re never going to have a central bank digital currency. And there was always push back against that because the United States was founded on individual freedom and individual rights. A central bank digital currency is in many ways un-American.”
But Johnson sees through the semantics. “The way they’ll get around that is they’ll just make it a treasury coin rather than a central bank coin. But at the end of the day, it is a digital, it is a CBDC. It’s just called something differently.”
The distinction matters politically but perhaps not practically for regular Americans. Whether issued by the Treasury or the Federal Reserve, the result is the same. Stablecoins are programmable money that can be monitored and controlled.
Johnson even suggests this could reshape the relationship between Treasury and the Fed. “I think this is also one of the ways in which Treasury gets control over the Fed.” The ability to issue digital currency directly could circumvent the traditional banking system entirely. “If the treasury issues a stablecoin, it is a way to circumvent the banks because everybody could just open an account directly with the treasury.”
Domestic Implications: Do We Still Need Banks?
The implications extend far beyond international markets. “If you have a US dollar stablecoin that’s issued by the Treasury, you don’t really need the banks, right?”
The current banking system exists partly because of infrastructure requirements. But stablecoins change that calculus. “You certainly don’t need 14,000 banks. Maybe you need 10 or 20.”
Johnson admits uncertainty about the exact implementation: “I don’t know if they’re going to issue an official US dollar stablecoin, if they’re going to grant licenses to 20 different entities and then they create their own stablecoins, or maybe they’ll just let anybody issue their own stablecoin so long as they follow the rules that are outlined in the GENIUS Act.”
Regardless of the specific path, “new battle lines are drawn and people are going to compete for that territory.”
A New Form of Control
This creates what Johnson calls “financial battlefields” everywhere. Money is fundamentally about control, and when governments lose control of their currency, they lose sovereignty itself. “If you are subservient to a form of money that you cannot control, you are no longer sovereign,” he says.
The programmable nature of stablecoins gives the US unprecedented visibility and control compared to the opaque Eurodollar system. Unlike SWIFT, the stablecoin rail infrastructure is “very elegant and very controllable and highly transparent for whoever is programming.”
Johnson elaborates on the difference: “These stablecoins via code, these channels are not only visible, but they’re programmable. And so it gives the US complete visibility or potentially gives the US complete visibility and control. They can shut it down. They can open it up. They can turn somebody’s money off. They can turn it back on.”
As Johnson writes in his report: “What happens when the private innovation that once sought to liberate markets instead becomes the instrument through which a superpower consolidates them? What if the next great disruption does not weaken the empire, but strengthens it?”
Johnson’s conclusion is sobering: “This is about as an elegant way to invade another country without even people realizing it that I’ve ever seen.”
Can Countries Resist?
Johnson expects resistance but doubts its effectiveness. “Without question, there’s going to be a battle. And I don’t know exactly how this is going to play out. And the other countries will without question fight back because they have to. If they don’t fight back, they will cease to exist.”
The challenge is that resistance requires heavy-handed tactics: “The reason governments exist is because they have a monopoly on violence. And I hate to bring that up, but that’s the truth. And so if they throw people in prison or if they take their businesses or confiscate their assets, that will deter people from breaking the law, quote unquote, in that country, but it won’t stop everybody.”
Stronger countries like China have better defenses. China can “probably introduce their own CBDC or whatever it is. And internally that probably is better at defending against the dollar stablecoin than perhaps Turkey or Egypt or Afghanistan or Venezuela would be.” But even there, “I don’t think it will be perfect and I think it will still seep in, right? It’s like water. It just seeps in. It’s hard to keep it completely out.”
Europe faces particular challenges. “Europe is just in so much trouble. I just don’t know how else to say it.” Christine Lagarde talking about the digital euro shows “they’re trying as hard as they can to maintain control,” but their position is weak and growing more so over time.
A broader question looms. “What does this do over time to everybody who chose team America?” in the recent reshuffling of global trade. Johnson’s answer? “I think they’re going to get dollarized.”
Understanding Reality, Not Celebrating It
It’s important to note that Johnson takes a deliberately analytical stance on stablecoins rather than advocating for a specific outcome. When Taggart points this out in the interview, saying “You’re not a dollar lover,” Johnson responds, “This scares me to be honest.”
Taggart clarifies: “You are just trying to help people understand the world as it is and as it is likely to be.” Johnson isn’t cheerleading for dollar dominance through stablecoins. He’s describing what he sees as inevitable given the incentive structures of nation-states and the dynamics of power.
Throughout both interviews, Johnson emphasizes uncertainty. “I don’t have this completely figured out,” he says. “I don’t know exactly how this is going to play out. Again, I’m sure there will be some unintended consequences.”
He wrestles with the implications openly. “I think of a country like a farm or a ranch, it makes a lot more sense. Some ranches are free range and they let you roam around and eat whatever you want, but at the end of the day, you’re still staying within those confines. Other ranchers have you locked up in a really tight pin and you get outside for one hour a day and they give you not very good food to eat. But at the end of the day, it’s livestock. It’s management of livestock.”
Despite predicting that stablecoins will strengthen dollar dominance, Johnson’s investment advice reflects genuine concern about the outcome. He recommends owning gold and hard assets as “a put on the whole system” because “I don’t know that this is going to go well. I don’t know that it’s going to go perfectly. It may very well cause chaos. And gold probably does well in a world where there is chaos.”
His reasoning is that “there’s nothing more bullish for gold than a strong dollar because a strong dollar kind of wrecks the system and causes chaos. And gold does pretty well in chaos.”
For people who say the US cannot possibly win the next round of global monetary competition, Johnson offers a realistically stark reminder: “If that is your belief, you are betting against immeasurable power.” He’s not celebrating that power, though. He’s warning people to understand it so they can attempt to position themselves accordingly.
As he writes in “Empire by Code”: “This paper does not offer reassurance of the status quo. It confronts a reality that few seem to have yet recognized and even fewer truly understand.”
In two wide-ranging podcast conversations, financial analyst Tom Luongo and precious metals trader Vince Lanci map out a massive shift in how global markets work. Their discussions move way beyond the trivialities of daily price action. Instead, they’re looking at structural changes that upend everything we’ve assumed about money, power, and trade. Just listening to a few minutes of these guys going at it and you realize that we’ve already moved into a different world. Nothing they talk about ends up on the news. That’s how you know.
The picture Luongo and Lanci paint can be unsettling for those who just follow surface level headlines from talking heads in the media and independent analysts who know nothing. The comfortable postwar financial order in the West that governed the world for decades is breaking down. In its place, a murkier and more fractionalized system is emerging. For example, gold and silver matter more than most people realize, as this podcast reviews. And the battle lines have already been drawn, even if most observers haven’t noticed yet because they are stuck arguing old narratives.
One wonders what it’ll take for people to wake up.
Lanci gets straight to the point when discussing what’s happening in commodity markets. “The right price is the exchange that has the most volume,” he explains. For decades, that’s been the COMEX in New York and, for gold specifically, the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA). But something has now fundamental shifted.
China opened the Shanghai Futures Exchange with physical settlement only. The gold that arrives there stays there. And increasingly, that’s where the real action is. Over the past several years, the pricing arbitrage between Shanghai and the COMEX has grown wider and more persistent—something that rarely happened before.
“Over the last say six months or eight months with Trump,” Lanci notes, “with the tariff thing, the vaults are being built, the network vaults are being built, the internationalization of the yuan.” What he’s describing is a wholesale repositioning of where gold actually sits and where trading happens. This isn’t accidental. China and Russia have been quietly executing a de-dollarization strategies for years—moving away from dependency on Western financial systems and building parallel structures.
Luongo connects this to a larger geopolitical shift. He suggests the Trump administration finally woke up to what’s been happening. For years, China and India quietly bought precious metals while the West wasn’t paying attention. But now the strategy has become explicit. “The US finally woke up and started paying attention to these facts,” Luongo says. “China has been taking our copper and silver scrap out of the US for the last ten years under the radar.”
But Trump’s election changed the calculus. Between his victory and his January inauguration, Luongo believes China and India accelerated their positioning. They knew tariffs were coming. They knew the geopolitical relationship with America was about to shift dramatically. So they moved faster. “Trump’s going to be in office. He did tariffs last time, he might do it this time. Let’s start to dedollarize a little faster,” Luongo suggests was China’s calculation.
What’s notable is that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appears to understand this game. Bessent has a front-row seat to how financial systems actually work. He traded with George Soros. He knows how currencies get manipulated, how gold markets work, where the bodies are buried in the global financial system. “Bessent understands these things because he’s had a front row seat to how to manipulate currency, bond, gold and silver markets,” Luongo explains. When Trump brought Bessent in over other candidates, it signaled that serious financial restructuring was planned.
The response has been calculated and multifaceted. The U.S. is finally protecting its metals the way other countries protect theirs. It’s just doing it quietly. JP Morgan, for instance, recently became the sole custodian for the GLD and SLV ETFs—the largest gold and silver funds in the world. “We’re doing the same thing they’re doing,” Lanci explains. “We’re just wrapping it in different paper.”
But here’s what makes this significant: GLD and SLV operate fundamentally differently than the Shanghai Exchange. You can trade these funds all day long and get settled in dollars. But you cannot take physical delivery. The only people who can access the underlying metal are authorized bullion banks and government primary dealers. It’s the inverse of Shanghai’s model—a trading vehicle for price discovery with no physical exit for retail investors.
“This is the money shot,” Lanci says. “Folks understand that the end of globalization is happening. And it’s far more than just chips, solar panels, oil. This is the fundamentals of the global monetary system are changing.”
Understanding Backwardation and Market Structure
To understand what’s truly happening, you need to grasp a concept that confuses some investors: backwardation. Lanci is careful to define it precisely because “people are throwing it around like it’s something that you can just use like a term of art.”
Here’s the basic idea: In a normal commodity market, a futures contract that expires thirty days from now costs more than the spot price (the price to buy it right now). This is called contango. The price difference reflects carrying costs—storage, insurance, the interest you pay to finance holding the commodity.
Backwardation is the opposite. The spot price trades higher than the futures price. You’re paying a premium to get the commodity now rather than waiting for delivery later. This signals scarcity or urgent demand. Someone needs it right now, not in the future. They’re willing to pay extra for immediate access.
In normal markets, futures contracts trade at a premium to spot prices. This premium reflects the cost of carrying the commodity forward—essentially the interest you pay to hold it. Gold should trade this way because gold doesn’t decay or get consumed. “The difference between the price of gold now and the price of gold a year from now is interest rates only,” Lanci explains.
This is exactly what’s happening in silver. “Silver is trading forty cents over spot,” he says. And more strikingly, this isn’t just a near-term phenomenon. The entire silver curve is backwardated out months. December futures, which should be cheaper than front-month contracts, are actually more expensive when you account for the full term structure.
“So silver’s trading $48 in spot. It should be roughly, let’s call it every month should add $0.20 to it. Okay, so $48 in spot means $48.20, $48.60, $48.80 for the December futures. That’s a $0.60 spread,” Lanci explains. “Not only is silver backwardated from spot to futures, it’s backward dating from spot to 90-day futures.”
This matters enormously because it exposes a structural shortage. The difference between gold and silver is that gold isn’t consumed. All the gold ever mined still exists somewhere. Silver, by contrast, is industrially critical. It’s used in solar panels, electronics, batteries. When you use it in a phone and that phone ends up in a landfill, retrieving that silver is expensive and complicated.
“Silver production has been in deficit for the last x amount of years and that deficit is still there,” Lanci notes. The supply isn’t coming from new mining—it’s coming from above-ground stocks and, increasingly, scrap. But here’s the problem: there’s a shortage of accessible scrap at current prices.
How China Is Reshaping the Silver Market
China isn’t waiting around hoping prices will rise to encourage recycling or new production. Instead, they’re going directly to the source. Lanci has been tracking this closely, and what he’s found is interesting.
“China is importing silver before it’s refined. They’re going down the supply chain,” he explains. “They’re importing raw silver ore, and they’re doing the refining now.” This is a major shift. Historically, mining companies handled refining themselves. But China is bypassing that entirely, importing ore directly from producers in Latin America—particularly Mexico—and handling the processing in-house.
The evidence of this appears in Mexican lease rates. When lease rates go negative, it signals that silver is scarce enough that people are literally paying to lend it out. This happened in Mexico recently. “The lease rates in Mexican silver go negative when there’s less silver available,” Lanci says. Mexican producers would normally lease out their silver for a fee and get paid to lend their metal. But when China shows up ready to buy the metal directly at current spot prices, producers sell rather than lease.
This creates a particular problem for base metal producers and refiners. Because silver isn’t a primary product for most mining operations—it’s a byproduct of copper, zinc, and nickel mining—the availability of silver is tied to the production of these other metals. When base metal miners need to finance operations or hedge future production, they typically sell silver futures to raise capital or lock in prices.
“If you pull up certain bank reports, they will throw the silver in with the base metals. They won’t even put it in the precious metal side,” Lanci notes. This classification matters because it means the banks managing silver positions think about it in commodity terms, not monetary terms. They’re focused on near-term supply and demand rather than long-term value storage.
The COMEX will likely continue functioning, but its role will shift. Gold can move off futures markets because it doesn’t get industrially consumed—you don’t need price discovery mechanisms for something that just sits in vaults. But silver is different. “You cannot run a modern supply chain for base commodities that matter in second, third, fourth, and fifth order goods if you don’t have a working future,” Lanci insists. The COMEX will survive as a price discovery mechanism for industrial metals, even if the physical silver passing through its vaults decreases. The metal flows through but doesn’t accumulate.
The Dollar Splits in Two: Recapitalizing America
One of the most provocative ideas to emerge from the these conversations between Luongo and Lanci is the notion of a bifurcated dollar. The offshore dollar and the onshore dollar are becoming separate currencies with different values and different rules. And the ultimate goal, Luongo argues, for the Trump Administration is to recapitalize the American middle class. And that scares the globalists to death because they’ve been draining it for decades.
As usual, Luongo is especially blunt about what needs to change: “We want the FED to stop being the fucking Bank of England! We need to get back to something closer to the original conception of the FED.” For decades, the Federal Reserve has operated as an offshore financial tool, managing the global dollar system and supporting Wall Street rather than Main Street. That era is ending.
The strategy is deceptively simple. Make capital cheap onshore and expensive offshore. “The United States seeks to keep liquidity deep in the US, which will mean a weaker dollar,” Luongo explains. “That’s all very inflationary, I know that, but that’s what we’re talking about here.” A weaker dollar at home means cheaper borrowing costs for American businesses and consumers. It means small companies can borrow to expand. It means families can buy homes. It means capital stays in America rather than fleeing to offshore havens.
Meanwhile, an expensive offshore dollar restricts capital flight and forces foreign actors to either invest in American assets or pay premium rates. This two-tier system rewards those who play ball with America and punishes those who don’t.
Luongo lays out the mechanics clearly. “We want a dollar to be strong for trade purposes, not for parking lot purposes,” he says. The problem has been that anyone could park money in dollars cheaply, making the currency artificially strong for decades. This hurts American manufacturing and competitiveness. It’s why so much manufacturing left the United States—you couldn’t compete when the dollar was overvalued due to it being the world’s parking lot.
The solution he believes being implemented is a market access charge. Think of it like ATM fees. If you want access to American markets and the dollar, there’s a price. “So you say you can no longer convert your euros into dollars free of charge,” Luongo describes. “There’s a contract with us if you want free access to our nightclub beyond the velvet ropes, you have to be a member. And to be a member you have to cut a trade deal and you have to invest money in foreign direct investment, and we’re going to give you carte blanche dollars in dollars out.”
The effect of this strategy could be substantial. “By draining the world of the silver and gold and then collateralizing it some way for domestic purposes,” Luongo suggests, “that’s your path to a lower cost of capital dollars for US domestics and US corporates versus anybody who needs to borrow dollars who still short them and they’re going to borrow them at higher rates.”
The mechanics work through what Luongo calls a “market access charge,” similar to how the federal government might charge differently for domestic versus foreign access to resources. Countries that cut deals with the United States—like Saudi Arabia’s recent $600 billion investment—get favorable dollar access. Others don’t.
Tariffs serve a similar function. “The tariffs are the lever by which to turn that crank,” Luongo explains, “to keep that arbitrage, that wall up.” The goal is to make importing into the U.S. expensive enough that companies either accept higher prices or set up production domestically. Either way, dollars stay domestic rather than flowing out to pay for imports.
But there’s another piece: the shift away from the euro-dollar system toward SOFR (Secured Overnight Financing Rate). Both Luongo and Lanci view this as foundational. The euro-dollar market—offshore dollar lending outside Fed control—has been a mechanism for financial manipulation for decades. It allowed London and EU branches of one New York bank to create essentially unlimited dollar credit without direct Fed oversight via LIBOR (London Inter-bank Offered Rate).
“The two most evil markets in the world in 2022 where the euro dollar futures market and the gold futures market,” Lanci says bluntly. But the euro-dollar futures market is dying. “The volume on the euro dollars contract dropped off like a rock as SOFR became the law of the land,” he notes. The Fed has essentially killed it by making SOFR the official reference rate. SOFR is transparent, secured, Fed-controlled, and domestic.
This isn’t just about interest rates or financial mechanics. It’s about who controls the flow of money around the world and who sets the rules. These questions haven’t been seriously contested since the postwar order took shape. Now they are.
The Buffett Precedent: Why Silver Futures Matter
To understand why a functioning silver futures market is critical, Lanci takes us back to 1997. Warren Buffett bought a massive position in silver and demanded physical delivery. This caused a crisis.
Silver producers had been selling futures contracts they didn’t yet have physical metal to deliver. When Buffett took delivery, the market faced a genuine shortage. Producers would have been wiped out. But because there was a functioning futures market with proper hedging mechanics, the problem could be solved.
Here’s the key thing that happened: the front-month contract (for immediate delivery) spiked from $4.50 to $7.47. But the back contracts—silver for delivery months later—barely moved. “The backs didn’t move,” Lanci recalls. This pattern reveals something crucial about how markets work.
In a normal market like gold, where the metal isn’t consumed and just sits in vaults, the entire futures curve moves together. If spot gold is $4,500, then next month’s gold might be $4,510, and the month after that $4,520. A steady upward slope across all delivery months.
But silver is different. When Buffett suddenly demanded immediate delivery, only the front month exploded in price. The market was screaming: “We need silver right now and we don’t have it.” But the back months stayed calm because that silver wasn’t needed for months. Producers could eventually mine it. So those later contracts had no urgency.
Here’s what happened next: the exchange reported to Buffett that producers would go bankrupt if he took delivery. So Buffett made them an offer. He took delivery of the entire position but then loaned it back to the producers for one year. The interest rate for this loan was determined by market prices—about forty percent per annum. Buffett got forty percent returns in cash, plus he got the silver delivered to him one year later.
“Had there not been a functioning silver market, we would not have been able to satisfy Warren Buffett,” Lanci emphasizes. “The spot market would have gone to infinity. There would have been no way to measure what it’s worth a year from now. There would have been no functioning free market.”
This is why both guys insist the COMEX must survive as a price discovery mechanism, even if most physical silver never sits in vaults there. You cannot manage future production and supply without futures contracts. You cannot secure resources for the future. You cannot guarantee that next year’s phones will have silver in them.
“If you don’t have a way to price future production, and this is key in a capitalist society, then you have no way to secure future resources,” Lanci states flatly.
The Goldman Sachs Hedging Game
Goldman Sachs provides a practical example of how banks use precious metals strategically. Lanci has been watching their behavior closely for years, and he’s noticed something important.
When Goldman gets bullish on gold, they buy gold but simultaneously short silver—an equal dollar amount of each. “You buy a million dollars in gold, you sell a million dollars in silver, and so how much money you tying up? Nothing. You’re doing a metals cash trade. You’re doing a carry trade,” he explains.
The reasoning is that gold is a precious metal—a pure monetary play. Silver is a hybrid. It has monetary value but also industrial uses. If Goldman wants pure exposure to precious metals strength, they use gold. If they want to hedge that exposure, they use silver shorts.
This pattern worked for twenty years. Every time Goldman recommended gold, silver lagged in the resulting rally. Every time they recommended copper, silver lagged again. “They recommend copper, watch silver lag. They recommend gold, watch silver lag,” Lanci says. “For the last twenty years, I have known that, and I’ve watched it, and I’ve said, okay, they recommend copper, watch silver lag in the rally, and it lacks.”
But about a year ago, something shifted. Goldman stopped the hedging game. They started getting bullish on copper without shorting silver to finance the position. Banks more broadly stopped claiming that silver tarnishes and shouldn’t be bought by central banks. The tone changed completely.
“Now, about a year and a half ago, silver started to percolate, and there was a report that came out from a bank,” Lanci recalls. The bank claimed silver should never catch up to gold because “silver’s not being bought by central banks” and “silver tarnishes.” Then, remarkably, they never said anything negative about silver again.
Why? Because the dynamics shifted. When macro-discretionary funds realized all metals were entering a new bull market, they adjusted their positions. Funds that had been long gold and short silver—a common positioning—covered their silver shorts and sold half their gold. Now they’re betting on silver outperforming in the next leg higher.
Central Banks Know Something We Don’t
Both Luongo and Lanci believe central banks (particularly the Federal Reserve) understand what’s coming. They’re quietly accumulating physical gold while also appearing to run their regular operations. Luongo is blunt about it: “If you open the Fort Knox vaults you’ll find moths and IOUs,” he jokes, but then adds seriously, “I think we probably have as much, if not more gold” than official records claim.
The key insight is that gold is being quietly repatriated. When JP Morgan was called on old loans of gold tied to derivative positions, the bank bought more than it was obligated to return. Then it used those profits to buy even more. This created a cascading effect where more gold was accumulated than was ever lent out.
“If I’m JP Morgan and my note’s getting called and I have to buy, let’s say, ten tons of gold, I’m gonna buy twenty because I’m JP Morgan,” Lanci explains. “And then when you use that other ten to buy, I’m gonna use that as the ten and then hedge it and use the profits off the heads to buy another five.”
The Basel III regulatory framework seems to have triggered this process. When Basel III requirements for gold holdings increased, JP Morgan announced it was moving its gold derivatives from the FX books to the gold books—essentially exposing previously hidden positions. Then convictions were handed down for traders involved in gold price manipulation. Then JP Morgan became the custodian for GLD.
“This is all that’s happened from here,” Lanci observes. “The US is supporting GLD. They’re not going to let it go under. GLD will become the sole way that you can invest in gold.”
Mercantilism Returns
Luongo uses a term that echoes centuries of economic history: mercantilism. This is the system of national economies protecting their resources, running trade surpluses, and accumulating precious metals as financial backing.
“Tariffs are the lever,” he explains. “Ring fencing our own natural resources, find self finished products. That’s the essence of the mercantile model.” It sounds archaic—and in many ways it is. But it also makes intuitive sense. If you control your own resources and you don’t rely on global supply chains that can be disrupted or weaponized, you have power.
Countries around the world are already doing this. Ghana requires payment for gold in gold. South American nations are demanding higher payments for silver. The BRICS nations are rejecting requests for lithium without technology transfer for battery production. The U.S. is just being quieter about it.
You cannot run a modern supply chain for base commodities that if you don’t have a working future, Lanci says. This is why the COMEX survives even if it empties. Industrial metals—copper, aluminum, nickel, lead—require futures markets to function. Supply chains depend on the ability to lock in prices months or years into the future.
China and Russia understand this perfectly. They’ve been accumulating gold for years and positioning themselves for a fragmented global economy. The U.S. is waking up to the same strategy.
The Payment Chain Is the Real Story
Here’s an insight from the conversations that ties everything together: supply chains run forward from production to consumption. Payment chains run backward. When you sell something, money flows back from the buyer to the supplier to the refiners to the miners.
“As the BRICS were protecting their physical commodities, and our supply chains were broken, and we have to repeat, we have to start digging here, we have to start getting oil domestically, silver from Latin America,” Luongo explains, “the FED was smartly repatriating our payment chains, because if the supply chain is broken, then the payment chain is vulnerable to other countries.”
This is why gold repatriation matters so much. If your supply chains are broken, you need to control the payment systems. You need to know where the money is. You need to be able to block foreign access if necessary.
“That’s why I keep watching credit spreads between” currencies, Luongo says, and that’s why SOFR replacing the euro-dollar LIBORsystem matters. The Fed regains control over dollar pricing. The U.S. regains control over its payment system. This sets the stage for an onshore dollar that’s cheaper (weaker) for domestic capital and an offshore dollar that’s more expensive (stronger) for international transactions.
London’s Shadow Still Looms
Perhaps the most controversial argument in their discussions concerns London and British influence over the American financial system. Luongo is unsparing in his critique and has come to his opinions over many years of analysis. He argues that Britain, having lost its empire, found a way to preserve its power through financial manipulation. The LBMA, the euro-dollar system, the Bank for International Settlements—all of these are tools used by what Luongo calls the “high table” to maintain dominance.
“The Crown technically owns all of these assets. The Crown Corporation, your British East India company morphed into and became the IMF (International Monetary Fund), the Bank of International Settlements, all of this stuff, it’s all the same company,” Luongo claims. It’s a bold theory, and one that requires understanding how historical institutions transformed after WWII. Britain couldn’t maintain a traditional empire, so it evolved into something more subtle—financial control through banking systems and currency manipulation.
His theory is that American neoconservatives are often proxies for British interests, pushing the U.S. into wars that benefit London’s geopolitical position. “We fought Britain’s war in World War One, we fought it in World War Two, and now they’re trying to get us to fight the same war in World War Three,” he says passionately. From his perspective, the pressure to support Ukraine, the rhetoric about “democracy” vs. authoritarian regimes, the constant focus on confronting Russia—all of it traces back to London’s centuries-old strategy of preventing any single continental power from challenging British naval and financial dominance.
George Soros, in this framework, isn’t acting independently but as an agent of London. “George Soros has been working for MI6 since the day he was recruited seventy years ago,” Luongo claims. This is where Luongo’s analysis gets into murky territory. The 1992 pound crisis that made Soros famous? According to this theory, it was designed to destabilize Britain’s currency specifically to force the country into the European Union’s orbit—and therefore under tighter control from European financial elites aligned with British interests.
What’s relevant about this framework, whether you accept it or not, is that it helps explain why Trump’s approach feels so threatening to the established order. Trump is disrupting the postwar consensus that kept America committed to supporting Britain’s financial hegemony. He’s questioning NATO, demanding European allies pay more, questioning endless military commitments abroad, and most importantly, he’s reorienting American policy toward American interests rather than maintaining the global system that benefits London and factions of Wall Street in equal measure.
Luongo sees Trump not as implementing some grand strategy but as breaking the rules of a game he finally understood was rigged against him. “Trump is an asshole, but he’s our asshole, and he knows how those assholes think,” Luongo says bluntly. Whether Trump is motivated by ego, by a genuine desire to rebuild America, or by some combination, his willingness to disrupt the system and reject the advice of the foreign policy establishment is what matters. He’s willing to do things previous presidents wouldn’t do because they were too embedded in the old system.
Lanci approaches this more cautiously. He applies his own analytical framework: “Who benefits and who suffers?” When he runs this analysis on major geopolitical events, the arrows often point toward the same conclusion—the existing financial establishment wants to maintain control. But he’s less committed to the specific historical narrative about British influence. What he cares about is whether the math checks out. And on the question of whether the West is losing financial dominance over commodities and precious metals? The math is clear.
A System Breaking Apart
What makes these conversations compelling is that both men see the same underlying process happening across multiple domains simultaneously. Financial markets are fragmenting. Supply chains are reshoring. Central banks are accumulating precious metals. The dollar is bifurcating. Mercantilism is returning. And most importantly, the postwar consensus that kept America tied to defending Western European and British interests is breaking down.
“This war is multimodal,” Luongo says. “You’ve got financial war, you’ve got cultural war, you’ve got political war, you’ve got economic war. You’ve got literal military boots on the ground.” He’s not speaking metaphorically. From his perspective, the conflicts in Venezuela, Ukraine, the Middle East, the trade war with China—these are all fronts in a larger struggle over whether the old order survives or gets replaced.
He sees this as a conflict between the old guard trying to maintain their power and a new faction—potentially including Trump, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—trying to reshape the system in America’s favor. The Trump administration’s approach has been to treat geopolitics as transactional rather than ideological.
Luongo describes Trump’s strategy as explicitly breaking with the postwar consensus. “Trump went to London and offered terms of surrendered to the king, and the king told him politely to go fuck himself. Well, okay, now it’s on, like Donkey Kong.” From Luongo’s perspective, Trump attempted to negotiate with the British financial establishment, to work within their system. When they rejected him, he decided to dismantle it instead. There is obviously no direct evidence for this, so we’ll just have to see how the trends emerge over time.
But this explains the aggressive posture toward Europe. It explains the focus on tariffs and trade deals. It explains why the Trump administration is willing to let traditional American allies struggle while negotiating separately with countries like Saudi Arabia. Trump is treating international relations as bilateral deals between sovereign nations rather than as commitments to maintain a global order that benefits the collective West.
Luongo himself is explicit about where he stands on this divide. He’s reached a breaking point with what he sees as European parasitism. “I’m going on the warpath with these people because everybody needs to get it,” he says. He’s done with European commentators who criticize America while benefiting from American military protection and the postwar order that America built and sustained. “You speak with a European accent, and you do nothing but shit in the United States. Fucking you’re dead to me because you don’t understand the real access to the real problem here,” he states flatly. This is typical Tom. However, his outbursts are generally based on years of deep analysis. Again, we’ll just have to see.
This isn’t academic disagreement. Luongo sees European elites as having deliberately drained American wealth through the postwar financial system while simultaneously criticizing American foreign policy and American culture. They got rich off American sacrifice and American capital flows, then turned around and blamed America for the problems their own system created.
By draining the world of the silver and gold and then collateralizing it for domestic purposes, Luongo says, this administration is literally restructuring the financial foundations of American power. They’re not trying to maintain the dollar as the global reserve currency through British-style financial dominance. They’re trying to back it with physical assets in the United States and make America actually wealthy and productive again.
In Luongo’s hypothesis, the Federal Reserve is playing a role and collaborating with Trump. “Whether he’s doing that because he’s been told, I doubt it,” Luongo says of Powell. “But what he is doing is he’s saying, I want to protect our payment chains. I want to protect the dollar, and I want to protect the economy.” Powell, despite being a traditional conservative, appears to understand that protecting the American economy means sometimes breaking with what the financial establishment prefers.
Lanci reaches similar conclusions through different means. He watches the markets and asks what incentives different players have. When China and India start accumulating gold at a pace that wasn’t visible before, that signals something. When the Fed starts moving gold around and JP Morgan gets made custodian of the nation’s largest gold ETF, that signals something. When lease rates go negative on Mexican silver and it all flows to Chinese refineries, that’s not random—it’s a coordinated strategy. The math pointstoward the same place: fragmentation is coming, and those who own physical assets rather than paper claims will fare better.
Both men believe the next few years will determine whether America successfully transitions to a new model or whether it tries to cling to the old one and fails. The geopolitical stakes are high.
What This Means for Regular People
If even half of what Luongo and Lanci describe is accurate, the implications are profound. The familiar financial architecture that has defined the postwar era is being dismantled. The pricing power for commodities is moving from West to East. Central banks are hedging against currency collapse by accumulating precious metals.
Neither man claims to have perfect foresight. Lanci notes that the changes he’s observing could take decades to fully play out. But the direction is clear: toward fragmentation, protectionism, and a precious-metals-backed foundation for new regional monetary systems.
“We have to look at it from this perspective,” Luongo concludes. “All of this stuff that we’ve grown up with, these market structures, we’ve been imprinted with, based on the fact that the FED was a captured pawn. But now the global model doesn’t work, we better pull the reins in.”
For investors and ordinary people trying to preserve wealth, understanding these shifts isn’t just an academic exercise. The prices you see today for gold and silver might look prescient when viewed from the perspective of the system being built tomorrow. Both men have spent careers studying how markets work and how power flows through financial systems. Their conclusion is that we’re living through a genuine inflection point—the kind that happens once or twice per generation.
That’s the story Tom Luongo and Vince Lanci are following. Whether you believe their geopolitical analysis or not, the market structures they describe are real and measurable. And those structures are changing in ways most people haven’t noticed yet. Are you getting it yet?
