Rick Mills, Editor/ Publisher, Ahead of the Herd:

Self-enrichment is what the Founding Fathers feared most in a leader, that’s why they put two separate prohibitions on self-benefit into the Constitution.

In July 2019 Trump posted that “unregulated crypto assets can facilitate unlawful behavior including the drug trade” noting their value was highly volatile and based on nothing but thin air. When he was on Fox News in ’21 he said that bitcoin seemed like a scam.

Trump’s current pursuit of crypto riches, exploiting the power and allure of his office to enrich himself and his family, is a big shift from all of that.

The watchdog group, State Democracy Defenders Fund, estimates that as of mid-March Trump’s crypto foray has amounted to roughly $3 billion. Reuters revealed that another Trump enterprise, World Liberty Financial, made more than $500 million in recent months, and that the Trump family received 75% of crypto token sales.

There’s no other word to describe this except wrong, Bob.

Bob Moriarty, Founder, 321gold:

Well yeah, but you haven’t mentioned the worst.

RM: Go ahead please.

BM: He’s selling telephones.

RM: Yes, and mobile services.

BM: Here’s what’s funny. Everyone has different things that are important to them, and I believe you should at least pretend you’re not corrupt. Less than 24 hours before becoming president for the second time, he comes out with this meme coin that cost investors 86% of their money and I thought he was pimping the presidency.

Now you can argue whether it was legal if it’s done before he became president, but after he became president, it becomes pure corruption.

But when I opened the web this week and saw this $499 gold telephone from Trump I thought, “My God the guy has pimped out the White House.”

RM: Well, you made a good point when you say that he’s just so blatant with it. There is no doubt in anybody’s mind I think that the Biden presidency and the Trump presidency and Obama and Bush and on and on, I don’t think you could argue they weren’t crooked, but they did try and hide it.

As for that phone that he’s selling, I can guarantee you that a lot of it was made in China.

BM: It’s probably a $49 phone.

RM: Blatant is described in the dictionary as a free plane from Qatar.

BM: The entire trip to the Middle East, the media showed it as being a sales pitch for American technology and weapons. But in fact, it was a real estate pitch to all the big money in the Middle East, and it’s just made it crystal clear it’s a bribe.

For the president of the United States to fund a genocide and then go in and say we’re going to remake Gaza once we’ve ethnically cleared it, we’re going to turn it into a Trump resort I’m thinking this is amazing.

Now we had four years of a presidency where everything that happened legally was done with the Autopen. We don’t even know who was operating Autopen, that’s how bad the Biden administration was, and to the extent that I’ve never been a big Trump fan, but he was a so much better choice than Kamala Harris.

Some of his appointments are good, I like Kennedy, I like Tulsi Gabbard, I like the head of border security, these are all things that needed to be done, but Donald Trump has pimped out the presidency.

RM: Someone has to tell us who was running the US.

Trump has totally blurred the lines between pretty much everything. He’s even got a partnership with a company owned by a foreign government.

He’s not going to stay in power forever, and I can’t imagine when the Democrats do eventually get back in, all we’re ever going to be reading about is them going after Trump again.

BM: Do you remember anything of the Carter presidency?

RM: Yeah, ‘Billy beer’ Carter.

BM: The funny thing is that Billy Carter was trying to ride the coattails of Jimmy Carter, and there was an absolute uproar about it because it wasn’t a question of being illegal, it just was unseemly and totally inappropriate.

And Donald Trump has made Joe Biden and Obama, and the Clintons look like Kennedy. I’ve maintained for years that at the end of empire you get the idiots and the fools and frankly I think he’s showing this is it. Now let me raise an important issue. There were three empires that collapsed because of World War I. Do you happen to remember what they were?

RM: The Austro-Hungarian Empire was one, I’m blanked on the other two.

BM: Yes, and the Ottoman Empire and the Romanoff/ Russian Empire. Wars destroy empires. Now in writing I said a week ago this war is going to destroy Israel and the United States. It is a totally voluntary war, it is a war they cannot possibly win, and it is going to destroy both of those empires.

RM: Let’s talk about Golden Cross Resources (TSX.V:AUX).

BM: What I try to do when somebody advertises, I sit down, take a look at what they’ve got, and see is there anything here so compelling that investors will want to put money into it.

So, I talked to Matthew Roma who’s the CEO of the company and I said, “Send me bullet points and things that aren’t obvious.” He was one of the early partners in Snowline Gold, okay, and Snowline absolutely was a giant success in the last three years. I think it went from 18 cents to almost $9.

Well, another giant success was Southern Cross, so Golden Cross happens to be in exactly the same structure, but the numbers are actually stronger for Golden Cross than they were for Southern Cross. Now Southern Cross has done a ton of drilling, they have 20 drills operating on the property right now and Golden Cross just got started. Do you understand what a sheeted vein system is?

RM: Explain it please.

BM: Okay what you have is a series of veins, and the way Southern Cross defined it was that these veins were like a ladder and what you do is you drill down the rungs and you have one high-grade intercept after another. Well Southern Cross had extraordinary management, and they said, “Gee I wonder if there’s any gold in the rock in between the veins?” And that’s something that prior operators who had been operating at Reedy Creek owned by Golden Cross had never tested the material in between the veins.

RM: You’re saying the veins are the steps on the ladder and nobody tested between the steps?

BM: Yes.

RM: Okay, interesting.

BM: It turns out that it’s 0.3 to 0.5 grams, and a gram of gold right now is worth about $110 so 0.3 is something in excess of $30 a tonne; that is absolutely economic.

And because you’ve got to move the material anyway, it takes what was considered waste rock and it turns it into ore. So Golden Cross ticked so many boxes that I was compelled, even though I own shares to the placement, I was compelled to go buy some shares in the open market.

Let me think of a good way of putting this: If you measure Golden Cross against Southern Cross, Southern Cross is 33 times higher market value. If you measure Golden Cross against Snowline, it has 36X higher market valuation, so it’s one of those stocks that has giant potential, they’re drilling now, they’re going to have assays from what was considered waste rock coming out shortly, and they just did a placement for $3,000,000 so they’ve got money in the bank.

RM: That’s a great story.

BM: Well, here’s what I like, and I’ve been out of the Canadian junior that owned Southern Cross for years, so I don’t have any dog in the fight. And I don’t own Snowline anymore, but the management of Snowline and the management of Southern Cross has been absolutely brilliant, they’ve been really phenomenal stories for the last three years, and Matthew Roma literally was part of both of them.

RM: We buy stocks because they’re cheap, a lot of the times we buy them just because they’re cheap, if they’ve got a great story obviously that’s a bonus and if they come up with great results that’s great but the bottom line that we’ve been talking about a lot is buying them when the market cap is ridiculously cheap. Golden Cross when I looked at it has a market cap just shy of $33 million, do you still consider that cheap?

BM: Golden Cross has a market cap of $33 million, but you made a really good point, now most of the time in the past when you’re talking tactically, I come in and say, “Who cares? You’ve got a stock at 2.5 cents with a $3 million market cap. Where do you expect it to go in a bull market?” And some stocks like Harvest Gold went from 2.5 cents to 9.5 cents.

You make your money on the percentage increase, you don’t make your money on going from $0.50 to a dollar, you make your money going 2.5 cents to 9.5 cents. In the case of Golden Cross, even at a $33 million market cap that seems absurdly cheap to me because they’ve ticked all the boxes technically.

RM: I’ve been asked several times, “How do you value a company with a resource?” Well, when a company has a resource, the question becomes what is that metal in the ground worth? I can remember 25 years ago, I used to go down to my favorite magazine store and and it was just a little hole in the wall and they had all kinds of different magazines on so many different places and I used to get ‘Miner’s Digest” and ‘Northern Miner’ and I got reading one called ‘Investor’s Digest.’

It was full of good information, and I collected some of the stories and there were two that I liked. The first one was by David Stone, and he wasn’t shy about telling you about junior resource stocks, you know that they’re risky and the potential payback from investing in them has to be in line with the risk you’re taking on.

And he was always advocating, “Look you’ve got to see a potential for at least five times return on your investment.” He had his own way of calculating things out and how he did it.

There was another author I followed by the name of Julian Baring, he was a famous institutional investor from the UK, and he came up with an in-situ valuation and he said what he needed to do was figure out if the stock is worth putting his fund’s money into.

I use both men’s thinking in looking at some of these more advanced companies with a bit of a resource.

What I do is figure out the in-situ value of the metal. When we look at PTX Metals (TSX-V:PTX) we can see there’s a potential +$8 billion worth of metal in the ground, 135m/t @0.8%Cu Eq, and so you start thinking how much is it worth per share in a buy-out?

Well Julian’s method was to take 10% of the in-situ value and divide it by the outstanding shares fully diluted. Now I know the exchange doesn’t like this kind of math, but this is my personal way of doing things.

So, you’ve got $8 billion, take 10% of that and then divide it by the number of shares outstanding fully diluted, in PTX’s case 142m osfd.

But you’ve got to remember there’s metallurgy losses so I knock 20% off, you might not be in that bull market where you go 10%, you might only want to go 5%, or if the market is really rough 2.5%.

Next what you do is you take what the stock is trading at today and divide it into your number from above. Is the result more than 5 times the stock price today?

If it’s more than five times what the stock is trading then David Stone would have been happy to buy it, and Julian Baring would have been happy to put it into his fund.

I think it’s important that investors understand this kind of thing.

BM: Well, those are all really good points but let me point out my personal experience. I’ve been to somewhere between 400 and 500 different projects and when you go see a new project, somebody starts to advertise and they’re pumping up the stock, you get inside, you put money into it, I ended up owning a lot of different stocks and some of the stocks had done so well that I wanted to share them with the family so I took the very top two stocks that I owned and I gave my shares away to my immediate family.

Well one of them was White Rock Minerals, and we know White Rock Minerals because Silver47 now owns that important project in Alaska. White Rock ended up going bankrupt and the value of the shares literally went to zero.

I won’t identify the other company because I like the people, but a company that put $38 million into a project in drilling over an existing mine and couldn’t discover anything, and the stock went down 90%, so even though I have spent more time visiting projects than probably any other newsletter writer out there, I make mistakes too.

You are buying lottery tickets and the idea of making money on every lottery ticket is simply absurd. You’re going to make all your money on the one or two stocks out of 10 that actually succeed but two or three of those stocks are going to go out of business. Even White Rock was holding a $5 billion resource in Alaska and still went bankrupt.

RM: I understand that story 100%, I’ve been there, nobody’s right 100% of the time and the only way you can protect yourself is to buy a bag of popcorn kernels.

We’ve talked about this before, some of them will pop big time, some of them are duds, you’ve got to buy that bag of popcorn kernels and throw them on the fire and see what pops.

You can help yourself by de-risking even slightly.

BM: Well, the biggest mistake that investors make, and they do it consistently, is believing you’re married to these stocks. If you buy these stocks to make a profit, the only way you can do that is to sell them at a profit and I’ve seen stocks go from $0.05 to $0.77 and the person didn’t sell.

And called me up and asked me, “What do you think I should do with this stock?” And I asked them, “Why did you buy this stock in the first place?” “Well, I want to make money.” I said damn, if you went from five cents to 77 cents why didn’t you sell half or all of it? Then you’re guaranteed to make money.

He didn’t and he called me back a couple years later and sold the shares at a loss. You’re not marrying these stocks, these stocks are lottery tickets, they’re bubble-gum chewing cards, and the only way you make money is by trading.

RM: I agree, with the caveat that it might be a two-week trade, it might be a three-month trade, it might be a six-month trade, you’ve got to have a little bit of patience to let the guys go to work.

Investors also chase momo, they churn their account so much after a while all their seed capital is burned through.

There’s also the old saying, “You make your money on the promo” — and I absolutely agree with that. Do you?

BM: Yeah of course, I can tell how good the market is by the number of advertisers I’ve got, because when you’ve got a booming market, I’ve got 60 advertisers. When you’ve got something like 2008, 2009 I got down to like three or four advertisers. Nobody wanted to spend money on marketing, but when people stop spending money on marketing it means they don’t see a future and there’s a lot of that quite bluntly.

You know I measure sentiment, and I consider it very important and people spending money on marketing is a measure of sentiment. If they believe the market’s going higher, they’re going spend money on marketing.

RM: When times are good there is money spent, when times are not so good the wallet closes a little bit, the treasury is shrinking, things tighten up and they’re like everybody else, they turtle up and they want to survive and make their payments to the exchange and try and keep people employed.

But the last couple years these juniors have been in a terrible rut, it’s been a nightmare for a lot of them, and they’ve come out leaner and stronger and hopefully with a much better appreciation of the cash they are able to raise.

And things are starting to pick up, juniors are raising money and starting to spend on advertising.

BM: Well strangely enough I talked about this with someone else who asked me where we were in the gold bull market. He said, “In terms of innings what inning are we in?” And I said, “They just finished playing the national anthem.”

RM: That’s funny I was asked the same thing; I said the pitcher’s doing his 5-ball warm up.

BM: Here’s what’s crazy: Investors tend to look at the state of their account and when the account is down, they’re down. And I am exactly the opposite, when I see that stocks are crashing, when I see things down day after day, I think it’s wonderful because I know it’s going to turn.

One of the things that I learned literally 50 years ago was all things change and the fact that you’re a bear market today who cares? Because if you’re in a bear market today you’re going to be in a bull market tomorrow. We both have been in roaring bull markets, a couple of stocks like Harvest Gold, 2.5 cents to 9.5 cents that’s an extraordinary gain.

RM: Where else can you get that kind of a gain?

I want to jump over to something that people were talking about recently. We spent an extraordinary amount of time researching and putting together an article about the rare earths deal that President Trump just signed with China.

A lot of people think that the rare earths problem is solved now, and that it’s a great win for the US.

I’m saying whoever made this deal does not know rare earths, they do not know the sector at all, and they couldn’t tell one kind of magnet from another.

This is a horrible deal that does nothing, I’ll repeat, it does nothing to relieve the supply of rare earths the US military needs, nor does it give them any of the magnets it needs.

The F-35 uses 22.75 kg (50Lb) of magnets that the US cannot get. They couldn’t get them before; they can’t get them now.

There are 4 things to be aware of, the deal between the US and China is only good for six months, the US military needs specialized samarian-cobalt magnets, they’re not available anywhere outside of China, and they are not getting them in this deal.

Now here’s the salt on the wound: The US Defence Department or anybody connected with the US Defence Department need not apply for a license; you’re not going to get it. Chinas already stated it.

The US military, we talked about this before, in a conventional war the US military would be out of supplies in three weeks. Well, I’m going to say that it’s probably two weeks now because they’ve given so much stuff over the past little while to Israel. And the problem becomes you’ve got no more stockpiles of any of these REEs, let alone the magnets, and the only place you’re ever going to get them from, for years into the future, is from China.

So, the rare earth problem for the United States and the shortage of military magnets is far from solved, and yet we keep hearing that it is. One of the things that I’m worried about is that Trump has a brain fart and actually goes to war on Iran.

If the United States is supplying Israel with these necessary rare earths and the magnets out of their stockpile there’s big trouble looming, you were in a war, if you run out of missiles and bullets what happens?

BM: Israel has run out of anti-aircraft missiles and there is less than a 10-day supply. Once they have no anti-aircraft missiles it’s over. Now there’s a lot of things I understand that other people don’t understand.

The Iranians have actually shot down five of the F-35s, it supposedly was stealthy, but it wasn’t stealthy and in fact for five of them to get shot down was catastrophic. I was a fighter pilot, I flew the hottest fighter in the world 60 years ago and I’ll tell you the F-35’s a total piece of shit, I mean the idea that we’re spending so much money it’s a $3-trillion-dollar program and is simply absurd. But Israel is effectively out of missiles but it’s even worse than that. How much do you suppose Iran is spending on those drones?

RM: Drones aren’t expensive.

BM: They’ve got drones that are as cheap as $5,000 apiece. Now when you start firing the Iron Dome or the Patriot missile systems, those missiles cost $2-4 million apiece and you fire a barrage of four or eight missiles, so Iran throws a $5,000 drone at Israel, and Israel throws eight $4 million missiles, and they all miss.

At the end of the day wars are economic in nature and the funny thing is Trump’s sitting here talking about a two-week delay before he decides whether he’s going to attack Iran, and one it’s bullshit because the United States is already knee deep in that war; and two at the end of two weeks if the war is still going on Iran will have totally destroyed Israel.

RM: Here’s something totally unexpected, I guarantee that nobody knew this: Iran has a brand-new hypersonic missile they call a Fattah, and it’s breeching their air defences, and it’s really got Israel worried. The missile itself is hypersonic, it’s capable of Mach 15 and in-flight maneuvers. Now this is a huge potential shift in regional power, I don’t care what Israel says, I don’t care what the US says, that frigging missile’s a game changer.

BM: What is it that makes it effective?

RM: Speed.

BM: Right, speed. The kinetic energy of a hypersonic missile means you don’t even really need explosives. Now if you remember the videos going back to when Russia used the first hypersonic missile and you’re seeing “zing zing” you’re going “Holy shit, there was no explosives,” but those warheads hit the target going Mach 9 or Mach 10 and there’s so much kinetic energy that it’s more effective than explosives.

So strangely enough Israel has made the most significant mistake I think in current military history. They’ve taken on somebody where they didn’t know their capabilities and they’re getting their asses kicked and there is no defence.

Now I know that there are some people who are actually telling Trump, “Do not get actively involved in this war, do not do it because if you do, we’re going to lose.” Well, they are already actively involved, but it’s absolutely correct, the United States and Israel are going to lose this war that they started for no reason whatsoever, and they’ve shown how ineffective the Patriot is, they’ve shown how ineffective Iron Dome is, they’ve shown how effective cheap drones are, they’ve shown how effective hypersonic missiles are.

We’re the king with no clothes, everybody looked and said, “Hey the king’s got no clothes,” it’s now obvious. Why anyone in the world would buy an F-35 after today is totally beyond me. You would be far more effective getting stacks of $100 bills, put them out in the courtyard, pour some diesel over and light it because the F-35 is not an effective weapon. So, it is the end of the empire and when empires collapse, they go out in a smoking heap.

RM: You mentioned that Israel really didn’t know what the hell they were taking on, well Iran fired another kind of missile at them, they say the warhead on this missile kind of split wide open at an altitude of about 7 kilometers, that’s 23,000 feet, and it released an estimated 20 sub-munitions, okay, so what they fired is a ballistic missile with a cluster warhead containing 20 sub-munitions.

Now each of these sub-munitions carries 6 pounds, 2.5 kilograms of explosives and this stuff was scattered over an area of about 16 kilometers or 10 miles wide.

So, now they’re shooting steerable hypersonic missiles, they’re shooting ballistic missiles with cluster warheads — Israel and the United States had no idea that Iran had this technology. Period. And it’s come as a hell of a surprise.

BM: Well, here’s the problem and it’s so simple everybody misses it. What is it that has totally blinded the so-called leaders of Israel? There is one factor that is causing their stupidity.

RM: Well, when you think we are the chosen people, we can’t do anything wrong, nothing can hurt us, you might tend to get overconfident in your approach.

And there’s something else that’s going on too and that’s the Armageddon cheerleaders. A lot of the religious leaders in the United States and of course Israel wants the rapture, they want this to happen and they’re trying to drive events towards it. Now that’s a bit of a far-out conspiracy theory but there’s no doubt that some of these people have talked about it.

BM: Yeah, but unfortunately Israel is the one country that can cause Armageddon.

RM: Do you as President work with Israel and take out the site and any other nuclear site so Israel’s happy, or do you say no we’re not going to get involved in another Middle East war, Israel you’re on your own, knowing full well that they’re going to pound a nuclear bomb down that place’s chimney.

BM: Okay speaking as a guy who easily controlled 1,000 airstrikes with everything from 2.75-inch rockets to 2,000-pound bombs, I can assure you the bunker busters are 100% useless, they cannot work, they will not work, and it doesn’t make any difference if he uses them or not. Period.

The key there is if he does use them, he’s made a terrible mistake because he just demonstrated we have no weapons that actually work. Now should Trump wise up and say, “Hey wait a minute this is a stupid game, we lost the last 256 wars we fought, we don’t need to fight another one.” Israel is dying to use a nuclear weapon, but they won’t use it against the nuclear facility, they’ll use it against Tehran.

RM: The US just got out of Afghanistan, and I know the retreat was whatever and people can say whatever they want about it, but the fact is that Biden did something positive and he actually got the US out of a war that was killing several thousand Americans every year.

And nobody says that; nobody asks how many lives he saved by getting them out of there, it’s all about, “Oh the retreat was screwed up we lost 19 marines.” The fact is that by getting out of Afghanistan they saved the lives of many thousands.

Now here we’ve got Trump, who is not supposed to be fighting wars, he hates wars, he’s going to get out of all the wars, and he’s looking at actively, and I know the US is already involved in it really heavily, but he’s actively looking at coming out on the side of Israel in all this and getting the US involved in a war that is going to be 10 times worse than anything in Afghanistan. Is his MAGA base going to support this, Bob?

BM: Well strangely enough and the one thing I’ll say I’m really proud of, right from the beginning we said this is wrong, it’s going to happen, we’re going to lose, it’s a giant mistake. The MAGA base and the Democrats across the board, Americans are against this war, but do you understand the importance of uniforms in a war?

RM: No.

BM: What was the uniform of the Taliban?

RM: Robes and turbans.

BM: And what did they have on their feet?

RM: If they wore anything it was just a pair of sandals, likely made from an old rubber tire.

BM: What was the uniform of the Houthis?

RM: Pretty much the same thing.

BM: Okay, so pretty much a bunch of guys wearing sandals or with bare feet keep kicking your ass and cost you $2.3 trillion and a bunch of turban-wearing, sandal-wearing Houthis fight you to a standstill against Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UK and the United States, why would you get involved in another war because everybody in the neighborhood is kicking your ass?

The idea that the United States and Israel and Saudi Arabia, Germany and France and the UK and Israel can take on Iran is simply absurd. The Iranians are incredibly hardworking, intelligent good people. You don’t know this, but I took the last civilian airplane into Iran in December of 1978 just before the Shah was overthrown.

I’ve been there, they’re brilliant people and with nothing and no support and starving because of US sanctions they still have outfought the United States and Israel. And the idea that you’re going to defeat them, you’re not going to defeat them, this is an existential war for them, but what Israel is doing is saying it’s an existential war for them.

RM: I remember working for a company running natural gas lines into houses from the main line, and we went through this area of bush, and I was up at the house preparing the meter for hook-up. The crew were using a Ditch Witch, which buried plastic pipes about two feet below the surface, and they started yelling and they came running out and what they had done was they had pulled the Ditch Witch right through a massive, buried hornet’s nest, thousands of hornets poured out of that nest.

We couldn’t work in the area for three days; we just had to skip that area and go. There was swarms and swarms, I’ve seen some pretty big nests, but I’ve never seen anything like what happened when they ripped up that hornet’s nest. There must have been thousands of hornets and that is not an exaggeration, there were clouds of them and I just kind of imagine going in — anybody willingly, deliberately going into the Middle East and kicking that hornet’s nest, you just can’t fathom the reaction that’s going to happen.

BM: Benjamin Netanyahu wants to stay out of prison, the whole thing in Gaza, the West Bank, in Syria, in Lebanon had nothing to do with Hamas, it had nothing to do Hezbollah, it had nothing to do with October 7^th, it had everything to do with Benjamin Netanyahu staying out of prison.

RM: Isn’t Donald Trump facing the same thing in 3.5 years?

BM: Well, I’ll go you one better. Did it occur to you that the timing of the attack on Iran it seemed forced to me, it seemed like why did they do this right now? Did you sense that?

RM: I was thinking about the fact that there was no possible way that Israel was going to let the deal that the US and Iran was working on succeed.

BM: I think it’s worse than that. Something happened internally in Israel that made Netanyahu push the red button and I am told by a couple of different sources that Iran hacked the Mossad headquarters, and they got the whole Epstein file.

RM: You think maybe Elon Musk wasn’t too far off when he said Trump is highlighted in the Epstein files?

BM: Yeah of course, we’ve known that for years but so is Bill Gates, so is Dershowitz, there are so many so-called leaders, John Roberts is in the Epstein file, the woman who supposedly committed suicide here recently had a dead-man switch video, and she came out and she said, “Look, those people are far more evil than you ever imagined, Bill Gates is absolutely dirty.”

Believe me, the most powerful people in the world are in the Epstein files and Israel’s going to do everything in their power to prevent those files from being released. You’re going to see them released about a soon as you see the real story about JFK released.

RM: Something we’ve talked about, that we’ve brought up several times, is the agricultural situation in the US just keeps going from bad to worse. Last week or the week before I read a piece about migrant workers not wanting to come across the border because of ICE hanging around where they pick up their paychecks or where they get their job for the day, they get picked up by the farmers coming in or even going out to the bunkhouses.

Here’s the headline from yesterday: “Employees terrified of ICE raids are failing to show up at work’. High-profile immigration raids are scaring off workers and leaving employers unsure of how they’ll manage without them.

The Los Angeles garment district is empty, Texas dairy farmers say workers aren’t showing up to milk cows and Idaho onion growers are already struggling to find enough crop hands and says his labour supply is only getting worse.”

The article finishes off with, “If we deported everyone here that’s undocumented and working on farms and fields we would starve to death.”

BM: We’re going to, there’s something called unintended consequences and left unsaid in that piece that you were just talking about was the legal people who worked in the field are afraid to come into the United States because they get picked up by ICE. So, it’s not just the illegal people it’s the legal people as well.

The United States economy frankly is based on migrant, legal or otherwise, labor. The guy I flew the F-4 in Vietnam with raised Christmas trees in North Carolina, and I’ll tell you 100% of the Christmas trees in the United States are tended to by migrant labor, and if you have no migrant labor you have no Christmas trees.

Donald Trump has done things because he doesn’t understand economics, and he doesn’t understand unintended consequences, that he’s done things that that are catastrophic.

RM: Yeah, it’s all coming home to roost, isn’t it?

BM: Yep.

RM: One more thing, the Big Beautiful Bill is going through the Senate, there was a lot of senators talking about how bad it was, and they’ve got to do this, they’ve got to do that. Now they seem to be falling in line, this thing could be passed I think before the end of the month and people are already worried about the US debt.

Say we brought in $50,000 a year, we wouldn’t year after year spend $60,000, and I doubt if we’d be allowed, your debt would be going up like crazy and the banks would put a stop to it.

But apparently when you have the world’s reserve currency, the fact that you routinely overspend your revenue by several trillion dollars, actually the interest payments on the debt total 25% of your revenue now, so are we going over an edge or are we already over the edge here? It’s not so much the debt I’m worried about, but this deficit is blowing up, it’s out of hand.

BM: Well, there’s two different factors: There’s the funded debt, which is $37 trillion, the unfunded debt, which is well in excess of $200 trillion, the United States is functionally bankrupt, and nobody wants to discuss that, and nobody wants to hear that, but they’re bankrupt I mean we’re not going bankrupt we are bankrupt.

Is there any recovery from here? Hell no. The funny thing to me is they bring Elon Musk in under the theory that he’s going to reduce spending by $2 trillion, and it ends up being chump change. The Biden administration gave away more in tips than Elon Musk was able to save. We’re bankrupt, we’re going to pay a price for that, Donald Trump is going to destroy the dollar and probably destroy his administration.

RM: You’ve got an unmanageable deficit and debt, the Russian-Ukraine war’s not on the back burner it’s not even on the stove anymore, it’s been overtaken by events, and it seems like Russia’s pretty much got a free hand and we’re going to leave Ukraine to their mercy. The situation in the Middle East is well, I think the US is going to kick over a frigging hornet’s nest and that’s going to be the result of that.

Did you know that they can repair the human liver using your own lab-grown cells?

BM: I didn’t know that but I’m not particularly surprised because there have been some remarkable advances in medicine, and positive advances not the vaccine nonsense.

RM: It’s so ironic I guess is the word, that on the one hand we’ve got this amazing ability to create, and we have an equally amazing ability to destroy. Somewhere in between there’s got to be maybe a center, we could get back to creating instead of the destruction.

BM: Well, we’ve got to hit bottom first.

RM: Let’s hope this is a bottom because I’d sure like to start climbing that ladder, Bob.

BM: We’re in the most dangerous period in history and anybody who doesn’t understand that has not been listening to anything we say.

RM: People need to start not asking their leaders, but demanding their leaders start to act with a little bit of common sense and decency.

Next week we have a special guest. He’s going to come on the podcast and talk about stocks with us.

BM: Super deal. Have a good weekend.

Rick Mills
Aheadoftheherd.com

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Richard does owns shares of Harvest Gold (TSX.V:HVG). HVG andPTX are paid advertisers on his site aheadoftheherd.com

Bob owns Golden Cross and Harvest Gold