What Is the Future of the US Dollar and the Global Economy?

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1:52In the United States, just since the crisis of 2008, the amount of total wealth in the U.S. has tripled in 17 years. Total wealth in the U.S., in other words, household net worth, is now$184 trillion. This is up$123 trillion in just 17 years. It's risen by$40 trillion just in the last three years alone.

2:25Hello, Robert Kiyosaki. I'm broadcasting from Phoenix, Arizona. It's March 2026, I believe. And the reason the date's important is because things are changing so fast. But also in Phoenix, Arizona, March is heaven. In a month, it'll be hell. Don't come here. But right now, it's heaven. I have a very dear longtime friend, Richard Duncan, as our guest today. and the reason I invited Richard on is because years and years and years and years ago I was in a store called Borders Bookstore. They're out of business now. They're gone. Amazon took care of them. But I was going across this, I was looking at the book counter and there was this book called The Dollar Crisis and my whole thing is macro.

3:12You know, what is a dollar? Because I don't trust the dollar because a little thing is that the dollar was backed by gold up until 1971. And after 1971, President Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard, and the dollar became technically debt. And they started printing dollars. But when they print dollars, debt has to go up. So America today is the biggest debtor nation in world history. And how much longer can we print? Who knows? Only God knows on that one. So Richard is a classically trained economist, but he lives in Thailand now, so he sees the world from an American perspective from Thailand.

4:05And we've been friends for all these years. So his first book was The Dollar Crisis. This other book was The Corruption of Capitalism. That's because how we mess with the economy via the money we work for. And today, the U.S. dollar, I mean, I'm really, I'm kind of really, this is 2026 again. My concern is the whole world economy is based upon a dollar that's fake, the U.S. dollar. And what's going to happen from here is the reason I want Richard, who wisely sits in Thailand, best food in the world, and talk about what's going on. By the way, Richard, one of my first ports of call in the world, I sailed a ship carrying bombs to a place called Sathaheep, Thailand, and a trip to Vietnam.

4:58Anyway, so Richard, welcome to the Rich Dad Show and how are things in Thailand? Robert, it's great to see you. Thank you for having me back. and things are sunny and wonderful in Thailand as always. Let's get back to your first book I came across was The Dollar Crisis. What year did you write that book and why did you write that book? What was The Dollar Crisis? That book was finished in September 2002. And at that time, the price of gold was about$300 an ounce. Yeah, I remember that. So since that time, the dollar has lost roughly 93 % of its value against gold. The gold price this morning was$4 ,200.

5:47So the theme of the dollar crisis was that once dollars stopped being backed by gold, that allowed the United States to start buying things from other countries and paying with credit. and the United States developed a very, very large trade deficit with the rest of the world, which has turned us, as you said, into the world's largest debtor nation in history. And that money that we send abroad as a result of our trade surplus, this accumulated by the trade surplus countries, like China, they get the dollars, and then they have to invest the dollars back into U.S. assets. So I saw that blowing the U.S.

6:30economy up into a bubble as well. And I thought the bubble was going to pop. And it did, in fact, pop in 2008. Yeah, what America did was it printed fake money to buy whatever China produces. But now they were stuck with this fake money, the fake dollar. So they had to come back to the States and they had to buy our bonds. And the reason this, again, is 2026, and right now those Asian countries are dumping our bonds. So that's the real danger we sit on today and that's why I wanted Rich on this program. I encourage you to read The Dollar Crisis, subscribe to Macro Watch, but also you have another book called The Corruption of Capitalism or something like that.

7:18That's right. Why did you write that book? What was your viewpoint on that? so then i wrote that when the bubble of 2008 when that bubble popped in the financial crisis of 2008 i then followed up with the second book the corruption of capitalism explaining the the history of exactly how this bubble had formed once we stopped backing dollars with gold and all of the history of how capitalism became corrupted. Because capitalism was an economic system where dollars were backed by gold and the government had very little involvement in the economy. It worked by market forces. The heyday of capitalism was back in the 19th century before World War I.

8:09But after World War I, Europe went off the gold standard temporarily. That created a global credit bubble that blew up in 1930. The Great Depression then led to World War II. World War II, 60 million people died. But at the end of World War II, we ended up with the Bretton Woods system, with the dollar as a global reserve currency. And the dollar was pegged to gold. And that lasted from 1945 up until 1971. And then at that time, Nixon broke the link between dollars and gold. And we started evolving into a different kind of economic system. Capitalism became corrupted. And rather than the economic system, capitalism, which was driven by saving and investment, our system, our economic system evolved into something entirely different.

9:00I call it creditism, because creditism is driven not by saving and investment, but by credit creation and consumption. more credit creation and more consumption. It requires more and more credit to be created year after year to keep this U.S. and global bubble growing. And any time the bubble starts to contract even a little, the policymakers do everything in their power to reflate it. You're creating even more money and taking on even more government debt. So just since 2008, the government's debt has increased from$9 trillion to$38 trillion,$39 trillion just in 17 years. And that's been driving the economy ever since then.

9:45So capitalism became corrupted and turned into a different kind of economic system that's entirely dependent on ever greater amounts of credit being created. So again, as a classically trained economist, and you're sitting in Thailand, and you sit out there and you look at this world, and Iran just fired a rocket over the whole place to hit an island called Diego Garcia just to prove to the world it had rockets that could hit anywhere in the world. And this world economy is in this bubble. And what do you see is happening? Well, that's why you have MacroWatch because you can pay attention to it.

10:27Again, please subscribe to MacroWatch, everybody. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant analysis. But what do you see coming next then? I mean, we have this war in Iran, supposedly. Trump is having a field day out there. We don't know what the truth is. And we're talking just a little bit on the program. Iran just said, you have to pay for oil in yuan now, Chinese money. You know, I mean, those are big, big macro changes, huge changes. So what do you see, Richard? even before the war began, the central banks around the world were becoming increasingly desperate to move out of dollars and into gold. And that was one of the main reasons that gold appreciated so rapidly over the last couple of years.

11:23Had always seen the United States as more or less a reliable trading partner. They certainly want to sell their goods in the United States. But when they do, they get paid in dollars. So they've accumulated trillions of dollars. But now, with President Trump wants to reverse globalization, he wants to put up trade, he has put up trade tariffs, and he's started invading countries around the world. This is causing all the other countries of the world who own very large amounts of dollars to be extremely uncomfortable with their dollar holdings. So they're attempting as quickly as they possibly can to move from their dollar holdings into gold holdings.

12:05And this is very likely to continue. We've seen a big correction in gold prices over the last two or three weeks. But I would imagine over the long run, as I said at the beginning, the dollar has lost 93 % of its value since the dollar crisis was published in 2003. I suppose it'll lose another 93 % of its value over the next 25 years as well, if not sooner.

12:35So what do you forecast as the future? I was just in Malaysia two weeks ago and Vietnam two weeks ago. Again, this was in February of 2020, 2026. and I was saying to the crowd there, America just prints these fake money and it sends fake money over to, let's say, Malaysia to buy their resources and what they do with this fake money. And if confidence goes out of the dollar in Asia, what do you see is going to happen? I mean, they're going to start dumping the dollar. If they dump the dollar, what I've heard, I'm not an economist like you, If they start saying, we don't want your dollar anymore, doesn't that cause inflation back in America?

13:30If they were to stop taking dollars, that would mean that they would have to stop selling things to the United States. Because when they sell things to the United States, they get paid in dollars. So they still want to sell things to the United States because their economies still depend on export-led growth. So they have to keep selling things to the United States. And therefore, they will continue to keep receiving dollars. But once they get the dollars, they're going to try to sell them and get some other hard asset, like gold or really any other hard asset. But the thing is, just because the people's Bank of China, if they sell their dollars, the dollars don't just disappear.

14:16Someone else owns the dollars. So once these dollars have gone out into the global economy, they're there. But the more dollars that the Fed creates and the less confidence other countries have in the U.S., more likely the dollar is to lose value against gold in particular and silver and other assets. And oil. And oil, no. So that means inflation, right? That means inflation. That's right. So from, again, a classically trained economist, I went to dinner then by myself. It was$50. And then I go to the supermarket, and I say, how do people afford to live? And I look at the price of oil goes up, and I was sitting next to this soccer mom, big SUV, pumping gas in her car with kids.

15:12I'm going, what's happening to the middle class of America? I mean, they can't afford to live. I mean, that's how I see it. So that's why I wanted to talk to you because you live in Thailand. What do you see happening in the rest of the world? Because everybody's on oil. Everybody uses oil. What do you see happening? It's not just a soccer mom in the U.S. who's going to have to pay more for oil, but it's everyone in the world. Now in Thailand, there are long lines at the gas stations, just like there were in the U.S. in the 1970s. people are lining up for oil because there's just not enough oil here.

15:50And as the price of oil goes higher, that means everyone will have less money to buy other things. So there'll be less consumption of all other things. And this is going to put a lot of downward pressure on the economy, most likely lead to a global recession. If this war carries on very much longer, and perhaps already. So we come back, be more with Richard Duncan, and come back with Rich Dad.

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19:28So we come back, again, as my good friend Richard Duncan was talking about his brilliant, brilliant newsletter called MacroWatch. I encourage people to subscribe to MacroWatch simply because we're in for information and education so that you can make better, more sound decisions with your money for your future. So Richard, tell us about MacroWatch, what they get with it, discounts and things like that. Great. Thanks, Robert. So I started MacroWatch in October 2013. So it's been going on now for more than 12 years. And every couple of weeks, I upload a new video. It's me making, effectively making a PowerPoint presentation, discussing something important happening in the global economy and how that's likely to impact stocks and bonds and currencies and commodities.

20:19And so I hope your listeners will visit my website and check that out. They can find my website at richardduncaneconomics.com. It's richardduncaneconomics.com. And if they would like to subscribe to MacroWatch, just click on the subscribe button. And I'd like to offer everyone a 50 % discount. If they type in the discount coupon code CRASH, they can subscribe to MacroWatch for one year at a 50 % discount. They'll get a new video from me every couple of weeks, and they'll have immediate access to more than 100 hours of videos in the Mac4Watch archives going back to 2013. I hope everyone will check that out.

21:04So thank you. That's very generous of you a couple of weeks ago. I was surprised I was in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. That has gone from a little country, little town to a major, major city. and I was in Hanoi and then Ho Chi Minh City or Saigon and you know Saigon has 16 million people on mopeds and in one field swoop this is what I like about this is what amazed me about Asia there's 16 million mopeds all driving around the place you got buses and trucks going by it's packed you can't even move but they move and guess what they don't beep their horn they sit quietly. You know what I mean? America would be flipping birds and yelling and screaming.

21:51But there's 16 million little mopeds driving around Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City. And they do it peacefully. They cooperate. I was going, wow, this is not America. You know, just in how polite people are in traffic. And I'm in these big tour bus, and there's little mopeds that are going by going, how do they do this? And then of the bus traverses, and guess what? I said, what? This summer, all those mopeds will be electric. They're going to require them to change. I go to Vietnam pretty often, too. It's super dynamic now. Their economy grew by more than 8 % last year. It's the real hot spot in Asia because they export so much to the United States.

22:38They've become the major exporter. Their trade surplus with the United States is far larger than any of the other Asian countries except China. Their trade surplus with the U.S. is even larger than Japan's is, a lot larger. So they're selling all of these goods, Vietnamese goods, into the U.S., getting paid more than$100 billion a year and bringing it back to Vietnam and investing that money into building more factories, more hotels, more resorts, and into education, and as well as into building high-rise buildings and condominiums. It's a complete boom. That's what Thailand was like when I first moved here in 1990.

23:23But now Thailand is just barely growing. In fact, the United States is growing faster than Thailand is now. So it just shows you that the economy is boom and bust. What you're saying, Richard, from my understanding, Vietnam is more capitalist than America because they get their money, their capital, and then they reinvest it. And they build more factories and houses. America buys more social programs, like Social Security and pensions and all this stuff. And so I was looking at this. I said, there's no such thing as a communist out here. They're all capitalists. And so their economies are booming.

24:10And I look at America right now, we have homelessness increasing. Our factories are gone. Inflation is going through the roof. There's not enough affordable housing. You know, talking about America, there's an idea that countries that have a lot of oil is a curse. I'm not talking about America. America does have a lot of oil. But because countries that have so much oil, then they get this money so easily that people don't work and the economy becomes just dependent on only oil and lazy. The people have become lazy and things don't work. In America, somewhat similar because we've moved to this dollar standard where the United States is free to create as many paper dollars as it wants.

24:59It sort of created a kind of a similar oil type curse on the United States where the life has become so wealthy. There's so much money available around coming from paper money creation that it has led to people not having to work as hard as they once had to work. They can rely on Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and other government support programs. So it's kind of an oil-like curse of having the dollar standard and being the world's global reserve currency. What you're saying is America is going more socialist, whereas in Asia, they're going more capitalist. Like when I was in Hanoi, I found this most beautiful jacket.

25:56It was 19 bucks. I mean, in the States, it'd be like 200 bucks, you know. But they're producing. And they produce beautiful products. You talked about it in the other books. A lot of times I've interviewed you. Is that factories always go to the low-cost producer. So if Vietnam raises their prices, they move on to another country. But right now... That's right. Right? So Vietnam is kicking ass. That's right. And Thailand's problem is that its wages have now become too high. People here earn as much as$10 a day, and they can't compete with Vietnam, where they earn considerably less than that. So capitalism thrives when people make less than$10 a day.

26:47and when there are no safety nets of any kind. That's hardcore capitalism, blood and tooth and nail. I don't know the direct price, but they raised the price of a McDonald's worker. I don't know the direct price. They now get paid$25 an hour or something like that in California. And McDonald's broke because they can't afford the labor. And so it's not capitalism anymore. Do you know what I mean? A famous Austrian economist, Joseph Schumpeter, wrote a book. What was it called? It may come to me. But the idea behind the book was that capitalism and democracy were incompatible because once people have a right to vote, they're going to vote for politicians who will give them more socialism and higher wages.

27:45Amen. So, I mean, I'm not advocating, not suggesting that I'm opposed to democracy or capitalism, but it does seem that there's a lot of truth in Schumpeter's conclusion that to quite a considerable extent, capitalism and democracy are not really compatible. Right. So again, you know, I said, because I just got back, and like I said, one of my first parts of call, 1966, was Satahip, Thailand. There was nothing there in Pattaya. And now they're booming, booming megacities. I was in Hanoi. Hanoi was more beautiful. What happened? Hanoi's beaches are more beautiful than Waikiki. And I just couldn't believe it.

28:41So I recommend people do what Richard Duncan does, is go to Asia and see where capitalism is alive and well and stay out of communist states like Hawaii, California, and New York City. And because of this situation where the United States came from being a capitalistic economy, but it does have democracy, the U.S. has had to find a way to keep the economy growing despite the difficulties it faces in a democratic society. And they have done that by having more and more government debt every year. And when necessary, having the Fed creating more and more paper money to finance the government debt.

29:26And by pushing up asset prices, home prices and stock prices and creating wealth. It's just extraordinary how much wealth has been created in the United States. just since the crisis of 2008, the amount of total wealth in the U.S. has tripled in 17 years. Total wealth in the U.S., in other words, household net worth, is now$184 trillion. This is up$123 trillion in just 17 years. It's risen by$40 trillion just in the last three years alone. So now the policy of the government is just to keep the asset prices moving higher and higher as long as they can. And that requires taking out more and more government debt.

30:15The budget deficits for the last two years have been$2 trillion a year. And when necessary, having more quantitative easing. They restarted quantitative easing in December. The Fed has created$120 billion since new money just since December. And they've told us they intend to create$40 billion a month, essentially forever. Doesn't it create more homelessness and wealth disparity between rich and poor? Because what happens is when you print money, asset prices go up, but so do chicken and eggs go up, and housing. And so we have the massive crisis between rich and poor in America. That's dangerous to me, you know.