1/27/26: US Dollar Crash, Zionist TikTok Censorship, Bibi Blocks Gaza Reconstruction

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0:38Turning now to the dollar, there's some major movement in the US economy with major geopolitical implications. Go ahead and put this up here on the screen from the Financial Times. I'm going to read a little bit about this. The dollar sinks to a four-month low as gold soars past$5 ,000 and the yen leaps. So there's a lot of stuff kind of going on behind the scenes. The simultaneous spike in the price of gold to$5 ,000 an ounce and the dollar sinking to a low combined with some of the things that are happening in the Japanese markets. Nobody is fully understanding exactly, but I'll just read from what the general consensus on Wall Street.

1:14They say the dollar, analysts said, is suffering from the concerns over a potential government shutdown, down 0.6 % on Monday against a broader group of major currencies, extending losses sparked by the Greenland crisis of last week. U.S. risks pushed investors out of the dollar and they sought safety and precious metals, sending gold to an all time high. And the surge in yen has come as traders speculate that the U.S. and Japan could be lining up their first coordinated intervention in currency since the G7 acted to weaken it after the 2011 earthquake. So that's kind of explains the broader picture for all of those things.

1:48However, if you put D1B, guys, the next one up there on the screen for some of the implications, gold and silver also showed you some interesting, you know, reversals that happened at the end of the day. So it's all just very strange. And I think the volatility is broadly just part of the instability right now in the global system. So if you put the next one up there on the screen just to look at the several currencies all rising against the U.S. dollar, what you see is all of these different currencies that have been rising against the dollar at various different percentages. And I think that this is a direct consequence really of several factors.

2:30So instability in our current fiscal system, right? So we have a partial government shutdown, which is now looming. Greenland, which had tariff risk. You know, we didn't even get this in the show. I don't know if you saw this. Trump actually raised the tariffs from 15 to 25 percent on South Korea just yesterday. Again, huge euro bias in our press. Everyone seems to forget South Korea, massively important trading partner to the United States. I don't even think it got a single major headline in any of the newspapers. We're talking about a huge economy with huge levels of bilateral trade between the United States.

3:07Take a look at the cars that are out there on the road, not to mention Samsung and all of these other companies with huge footprints here in the U.S. That is, in my opinion, like way more of an earthquake than Greenland or any of these. Again, never deserves the attention that it gets. But you put that all together. You've got the shutdown. You've got Greenland. General instability here for the U.S. It's trading related questions about the U.S. and its word for trading relationships. That's what's going to swing your currency. And remember, currency linking with the bond markets, those couple of things all together have the potential always to just slip you in not a full blown crisis, but it can just always lead to problems for debt, for our own fiscal picture.

3:50And we're seeing all of that in the context also of a slowing U.S. economy in terms of what we have at home. Yeah. No, I mean, I think these are all signs of a reordering of not only the global financial system, but the global system overall. I mean, it's always been the U.S. dollar, treasury bonds. This was like the flight to safety when things were precarious. This is where investors and central banks, where they would where they would go. And now instead of that, you see hard metals, you see gold and silver, which are increasingly becoming the flight to safety instead of the U.S. dollar and treasury bonds.

4:26I saw a chart that said that, you know, central banks around the world are holding lower and lower amounts of U.S. dollars as, you know, reserves, which, again, is this sort of like slow but steady shift away from the U.S. as the central bulwark of the global economy and global financial system. Now, none of this happens overnight. I'm not saying that like de-dollarization is happening tomorrow or that this is going to be a quicker, instantaneous thing. But these countries, aided by the brazenness and, you know, wild maneuvering of Trump, have realized that the writing is on the wall and the old system is no more and that they need to plan and protect themselves for the future.

5:06So I think that's, you know, as you look at these movements in the market, which are sort of slow and steady over time and do have some reversals like we saw gold and silver reverse again. But the overall trend in the Trump administration has been for those precious metals to continue to spike and hit new and new and new record highs. Yeah, I mean, it's just gold is one of those where generally you can always say when it's high, things are usually not good, like it's flight from something. Let's go to the next one, please, Mac. This is D3. This is something I always keep my eye on. And this was always a big sign of economic problems under the Obama administration.

5:43The U.S. long term unemployment rate has hit a four year high. So one of the big arguments for the nerds out there who are watching the 2012 Mitt Romney debate, there was this moment where Romney and Obama were arguing about the unemployment rate. And this is something that Romney very clumsily was not able to hit home, but I have always thought was a real precursor to some of the economic dissatisfaction from 2012 to 2016. It's this long term unemployment rate where what it means is that people who are unemployed are taking longer to find new jobs than at any point in the last four years and that they're staying unemployed longer and longer.

6:23So it says it now takes an average of more than 11 weeks for an unemployed person in the U.S. to find a new job. That is the longest since 2021 during the entire covid insanity when a bunch of people were let go from their jobs as a result of the lockdowns. Some 26 % of 7.5 million unemployed actively searching for work have been looking for more than six months. So this is a huge problem because you've got unemployment insurance that doesn't last nearly as long. They say that it sees households under significant stress. People have emergency savings, can stretch them a little bit. But the longer you do, the more likely it is that you don't have the savings to cover very basic bills.

6:59Bad for households, bad for the economy, pushes people into debt. outside of the pandemic, we are now at the highest rate that we have seen in a decade, and it is heading in the wrong direction. And these, by the way, are from the official BLS statistics. So you can see a significant, actually, increase. One thing I also underestimated was that the government shutdown actually appears to have ticked things up, same thing as it started to tick up after the government shutdown. Can't pinpoint exactly why, But, you know, I mean, a lot, 40, what, several million people went 41 days without a paycheck.

7:37If some contractors, I think I forget exactly what the rules are, but I know some contractors in some cases are not entitled to back pay. That could have been it could have caused like some immediate retrench, but combined with the tariff policy shut, you know, people again, there's multifactorial reasons why all of these things happen. But in general, it's just not a number that you want to see. And this is where the dollar and the Federal Reserve also comes into play and interest rates because that's what matters, you know, for in terms of juicing the economy if you do want to try and do so.

8:07The longer that a person is unemployed, the more difficult it is for them to get back in the job market. You know, their skills atrophy, employers who are evaluating resumes think that there's something wrong with you and decide to go with someone who, you know, is just switching jobs or who is new out of college. I mean, that's the other thing we've been tracking, though, is college grads really particularly struggling, new college grads particularly struggling. I think the introduction of AI is part of that, even though it doesn't seem like, you know, the AI promise hasn't really fully come to fruition.

8:36But I think companies are kind of putting things on hold to see if they can get away with fewer workers and substituting in AI and shifting more work burden onto the workforce that they already have. They're sort of testing the waters for what they can get away with. And we've also seen an economy, which this has been, you know, the trend over decades. There's numbers coming out this morning where the earnings of this company and that company look, you know, pretty strong. But those top line numbers for the companies and the titans of industry and the oligarch class or the Epstein class, as Ro Khanna calls them, none of that is trickling down to benefit your average American.

9:14It is largely disconnected from the experience of the average person. And so, you know, it used to be that there was more of a connection between, OK, there's a productivity increase. The corporate giants are doing well. That means the workers are going to do better. That relationship has totally severed so that, you know, if you have the company overall doing well, it by and large doesn't really matter for the, you know, your average worker out there. So that's one of the disconnects that's going on in the economy right now and why you have such a tale of two realities, the asset owning class versus the rest of everybody else.

9:49Yeah, it's just so obvious. And, you know, the fact that the the political class just never wakes up, it's like, how could you have an economic backlash election to Joe Biden when the S &P was up by 80 percent or whatever over the course of his presidency? because it's the point is, is that those gains do not largely go to the average income and or household. So, for example, let's put this this health care one up there. This is a very important story. They say health insurance is now more expensive than the mortgage for these Americans. Monthly health insurance bills are rocketing higher for middle income earners who rely on Obamacare.

10:25So they say millions of Americans are going to see their monthly health insurance bills rise. Expanded subsidies have now gone. They point to, for example, a 47-year-old couple who paid$255 a month last year for a low-end ACA plan. Late last year, they learned their bill would be going up to$2 ,155, a sum nearly triple their monthly mortgage payment of$760. First of all, I need to meet these people and find out how they got a$760 mortgage. But second, you could say a$2 ,000 bill when you previously paid$255 is extraordinary. It's crazy, right? And so the general principle is regardless of whether it's more than your mortgage or not,$2 ,000 a month, no matter what income level you are at, is insane for health care, specifically for two 47-year-olds.

11:12You know, you guys know I don't have a ton of sympathy for boomers who are like early retirees and rich, but that's not really the case whenever we look at two probably self-employed people, probably people like you and I, you know, maybe small business, something like that, which have to rely on the open exchanges. Yeah. And, you know, that's right around what we pay for our family. Yeah. So there you go. Right. And you have multiple you have multiple children. And I think for me, I've been discovered. I know I've read the stories, but to experience it yourself, this is currently. So I talked about, you know, my daughter had to brief stare, stay in the NICU immediately after birth.

11:47I did not receive a bill this entire time. And my insurance company gave me an explanation of benefits saying, you know, you owe zero for because I hit my deductible, my very high fourteen thousand five hundred deductible. And then this, you know, eight, nine months later, I just got a bill from them for twenty five thousand dollars. And I was like, what? I was like, I don't you know. And so now this is the hidden productivity cost. I know the bill is wrong. The insurance company is not going to dispute it on my behalf. I have to call and to be like, oh, you're wrong and you need to read. And they're like, well, you're going to have to do a three way call.

12:24I mean, you know, just the the loss. I'm pretty confident I'm not going to have to pay anything. I really am. But this is opportunity cost of time, mental energy, you know, like hostile insurance agents and hospital people who do not care about you at all and who are like, well, you know, that's what the bill says. And I'm like, well, that's not what the insurance company says. Right. And then anyway, I'm just pointing out, though, that this is for this is just on a micro level, like in terms of how insane this type of system is. And yes, I know it's just it's just my first foray. I've never had to deal with something like this before.

13:01But I've read about many of these types of stories. And yeah, it can take it can literally suck hours of your life dealing with this type of nonsense. The whole purpose of I know yours is a little bit different because the bill is coming from the hospital. Right. And so the problem is actually with them. But I mean, the whole purpose of health insurance companies is to deny as much as much payment as they can and make you on the hook for as much as they possibly can. Like that's how they turn a profit. And it genuinely having never lived in any country other than the U.S., it genuinely seems miraculous to me that there are so many other countries around the world where you don't have this absolute nightmare, where you literally walk in and get care and walk out.

13:44There's no where's your health insurance card. Let me call. You're not covered. Let me send them the bill. No, you get the bill. No, you didn't meet your deductible. Like none of that. You just get care and then you leave. That is totally incomprehensible to me. It seems so miraculous that that is the case. And yet that is the case in every other developed country in the entire world. And think of all the distortions. I mean, obviously, the cost burden on people is unbelievable, but then it creates all sorts of weird distortions where maybe someone who would otherwise start a company and be an entrepreneur and be able to, you know, add something additional to the economy, they can't leave their job because they need that health care.

14:26Let's put this last one up on the screen because this is a mystery to me and one that we have to continue to track in terms of the economy. You had a record number of home purchase cancellations in December. So people who, you know, they thought they had a deal, they signed a contract, and then they end up backing out of it reached a record high. And I genuinely don't know what that's all about. My best guess is that just people get kind of spooked, like they're just not feeling super secure about their financial situation. They're not, you know, there was a whole tariff conversation going on.

15:03I don't know what led to this, but it doesn't seem like a good sign, Sagar, of how people are feeling about the economy. Yeah, I tried to figure it out, too. I couldn't find a single article that actually broke any of it down. So total mystery, probably, like you said, uncertainty and just general feeling of like, hey, now's not a good time. Maybe, you know, maybe interest rate changed, something like that. I really have no idea. But yeah, it is. I looked at the mortgage rates and there was not an obvious. It was like six, you know, for 30 year mortgage. It was like in the sixes and there was no obvious like, oh, they're really going up fast or they're really going down fast.

15:44And maybe we wait a little bit and secure a better rate. It was just kind of like, you know, up and down somewhere in the sixes the whole time. So there's not an obvious story to be told from the interest rates. But, you know, something is clearly going on there. It hasn't changed much. I mean, it's just dipping up and down. Yeah, I'm looking at the general trend. There's been some shift, but nothing world-changing in the last two months. Yeah, nothing particularly noteworthy, so I don't know. Well, if you're a housing specialist, let us know. Leave a comment and tell us what happened. Okay, well, let's go to the next one.

16:16So, guys, as of last week, the TikTok USA takeover is official, and many people are saying they long for the freedom of expression that we received under the Chinese Communist Party running of TikTok. There have been a lot of problems. Now, I'll just say up front, TikTok is saying that this all, Sagar, has to do with some sort of power outage at a data center, which I think when we give you the details here of the type of content that people are struggling to get circulating, you're going to be understandably skeptical about their explanations here. So this is one of the wildest ones. Let's put this up on the screen.

16:53And I tested this personally. I had some friends and family who tested this as well. If you try to send a direct message that has the word Epstein in it, they will not let you send the word Epstein or any other content that includes Epstein. And so you can see that up on the screen. This is what you get. This is the exact same thing that happened when I tried it as well. You get this little exclamation point, And then it tells you that this is like a potential violation of community standards and that they're worried about the safety of their community. So that one is for sure. There have also been on Mac, if you go ahead and jump forward to the E4, some of the reporting that we're getting from different users about the way that their anti-ice posts in particular are being completely suppressed.

17:47So you have the Democrats here. Dropsite has seen their reporting on various topics be suppressed. Jessica Burbank is another one who has seen her TikTok views just absolutely fall off a cliff. I know they I've had it. Ladies have experienced this as well. And it seems if we put E5 up on the screen, it seems specifically to be tied to any sort of post about the shooting of Alex Preddy in Minneapolis. Any criticism of ICE, sort of broader Trump criticism as well, seems to be not getting pushed into the algorithm whatsoever. So that that type of content from creators with large followings is getting next to no views when they post it.

18:32So as I said before, I can put E3 up on the screen. TikTok is claiming this has to do with a power outage. You know, I'm not, Sagar, a technical wizard here. So perhaps there is some way in which a power outage magically creates, you know, algorithmic suppression of content that just happens to be unfavorable in the eyes of the new, you know, Ellison-backed ownership. Perhaps there is some technical explanation for this, but this seems pretty hard to believe given these specific things that are being blocked, suppressed and censored. Yeah, I just don't get it. So here's the statement. They say a suffered a cascading systems failure that caused multiple bugs, such as creators having difficult posting new video, seeing content showing zero views, marked a rocket.

19:21But how would that explain the DM's issue? I did see the Epstein thing is right. I mean, that's the craziest one. I'm glad we started with that. But I mean, I did see some NFL creators who were telling me that they had the same problem with zero view. So it is possible, you know, the zero view thing. If I had to guess what has happened is that they've had a rollout of their so-called like political community guidelines and that it's just clunky in terms of the way that they're rolling out their code under new in under like the new guidelines or under the new ownership. And they're still trying to figure out like de-ranking and all of that or and or how to rank, you know, such content under the new regime.

20:02That seems to me because notice they're saying the zero views thing was a data center. That's believable. Like I said, with the NFL stuff, what's not believable to me is the DMS and the searchability. Some of the stuff that we've seen previously, especially when we know that the you know, the you have very like a lot in Zionist, like literally who is in charge now of the platform. We've had multiple people who have come out and have talked about it. Can we play that thought actually here? This is E2 about the criticism of Zionism. Let's go ahead and cue this up just to show you what some of the new standards on the platform are going to look like.

20:44Yeah. And so this is from TikTok CEO. This is an older clip, but just to give you a sense of some of the codification of their new hate speech rules and the way they're thinking about these things. We made a change to designate the use of the term Zionist as a proxy for a protected attribute as hate speech. So if somebody were to use Zionist, of course, you can you can use it in the sense of you're a proud Zionist. But if you're using it in the context of degrading somebody, calling somebody a Zionist as a dirty name, then that gets designated as hate speech to be moderated against. Over the course of 2024, we tripled the amount of accounts that we were banning for hateful activity.

21:29We also have, I think, over two dozen Jewish organizations that are constantly feeding us intelligence and information when they spot violative trends. There is no finish line. There's no finish line to moderating hate speech, identifying hateful trends, trying to keep the platform safe. There's no such thing as an endgame. No such thing as an end game. Well, keep in mind, this kind of fits with the ADL comments, remember, about the AI lawyers and how they have an army of AI warriors who are auto sending stuff to law. I mean, this is this is very, very scary stuff. I mean, look, yes, the war, you know, is winding down and some of the content.

22:09But like the point is, is that this machine being put into place can just be deployed for basically anything. And they're going to use, you know, their private guidelines. I really think this is the time. I think I've seen some Democrats talk about this. Didn't Gavin Newsom say that he was going to announce investigation? Everyone's concerned. You know, like you're talking about the Dem creators and all that. The thing is, is that this is now been going on for 10 years, you know, ever since 2016 and Facebook. And it's just we have to, like, put this to bed, especially tech tech stock is now under U.S.

22:41ownership. We need transparent guidelines that talk specifically about moderation, published standards, and then the public has to be able to weigh in. I've talked previously. I'm curious for your view. I think we should just pass it, take it off their plate and just be like, look, from now on, if it's consistent with the First Amendment, it's up there. And then in terms of de-ranking and all that for advertising purposes, you may have the ability, you know, to have some sort of tweak. But even then it gets sketchy because, as you and I have seen on YouTube, like if you get a video that's demonetized for ad purposes, it may still have tremendous news value, doesn't get a lot of views or something just doesn't appear to pop off.

23:24But I think at this point we need national legislation, just period, end of story that sets standards. Otherwise, this is what we're going to get. You have Elon on the one hand, Grok putting girls in bikinis, and then you've got this nonsense. And like the point is it cannot like, you know, literal girls, like actual children. Right. We didn't spend enough time on that. I just got lost in the sauce. But yeah, like literal girls, like we need serious federal guidelines and legislation from AI and to social media. Like my new cause to lab for AI is I think that anything AI picture generation should be banned for for people like for anyone who's alive.

24:02I just think there's nothing good that can come of it. All of these image renderers. Look, it's sometimes fun for thumbnails and all that. But like, no, the societal cost and the destruction and the ability to trust like any video that you see, it's too much. Same here with TikTok. We need published benefits like, oh, sorry, publish. We need published rules. This is what we do. This is how we de-rank. This is exactly how much it's going to go down. That's the very least. And in a macro level, we should just pass like anything consistent with the First Amendment. It's good to go. Period. End of story.

24:31The government's taking it off your plate. This is how it has to be. Because we can't have this. We're living under literal oligarchical fighting control, depending on who is in power and who depends and tends to have like the ear of the ear of the White House. Like the Biden administration, which is too much. Yeah. And I mean, there's that definitely needs to happen. You got to break up. I mean, it's just you can't the Ellison family, how many media properties they control at this point. And when you have billionaires for whom, like, you know, there are a lot of people who are leaving TikTok right now.