David Friedberg

Everyone's cheering, clapping, bouncing up and down.

Stock markets are up, stock markets are up.

And I'm gonna tell you why this is important in a minute.

And everyone's jumping up and down saying, great, the stock market's up.

The stock market's up in dollar denominated terms.

But if you look at the stock market relative to gold, it's actually down.

And the sell-off is not just in the stock market relative to gold, but you can actually look importantly at the metric that we all should care the most about, which is US treasury yield.

So this is the third year.

So the 30-year yield is now at 4.9%.

The average US government's cost to borrow today is 3.3%.

So if we end up needing to roll all of the US government debt, assuming we take on no new debt, which we know is not the case,

$39 trillion of debt outstanding, the federal government level today, and it had to get refinanced at this rate, we would have an incremental annual cost to service the debt, just the interest on the existing debt of roughly $700 billion a year.

Incremental cost to service existing debt as interest rates climb from 3.3 to 5%.

And so fundamentally, this is about 70% of the current defense budget.

It's about 10% of the overall federal budget.

It's a significant percentage of US GDP, about 3% of US GDP.

It's a substantial number, and it creates the spiraling problem that we're in.

Now, I just want to make one final point.

So there's this de-dollarization moment.

It's always worth having a reflection on it, but I just want to tie it back to Minnesota, Donald Trump, and socialism.