Carol Roth

And when you create money out of nowhere, it's a problem because you have to remember that money, in addition to being a store of value and a unit of account and a medium of exchange, that it's a proxy for productivity, right?

That it's something that they give you as a certificate, an IOU, a claim, when you earn money.

When you go out and you do work and you earn something and you're like, OK, well, instead of me trading with you and then you trading with the next person to help facilitate that exchange, they're giving you this IOU.

But it represents a claim on the work that I've done or the investment that I've made.

When you just start adding dollars that nobody earned, that didn't add anything to the system, that didn't create an investment, then all it does is just create more dollars that are chasing the same amount of goods and services and makes the fruits of your labor, so to speak, worth less.

And so that's really what happened, starting with the Great Recession financial crisis and then expanding thereafter.

It went nuts again during COVID and thereafter.

And they've just now added so much money to the system that they have, A, not only let the government get away with having huge deficits and not spending within their means, but they've also created non-merit based inequality.

I have no problem with capitalistic inequality, right?

That if you have Michael Jordan or Beyonce or the people who are at the top of their crafts making millions and billions of dollars versus somebody who's not quite as good, I do not care about that inequality.

But when it's being driven because the Federal Reserve is printing money that pushes up the value of assets,

at the expense of the cost of living of everyday Americans, I do have a problem with that.

And that really has been the driver of this K-shaped economy, what it is that we've talked about in all of this divergence.

It's part of the reason, a large part of the reason we saw the massive inflation during the Biden administration, in addition to his stimulus checks, but them being on standby and allowing this to happen

is sort of the enabling factor.

So it's government policy and Fed policy hand in hand.

Now, we are at a point fast forward to today where our fiscal foundation is a absolute disaster.

We have debt that exceeds the GDP of our country.

So our debt to GDP is north of 120%.

That's something that like you might see in an emerging market in crisis.