Peter Zeihan

So here we are.

Two things on that.

Number one, from an economic point of view, the only real weakness the United States has is in manufacturing, whether it's the primary processing of raw commodities like, say, cobalt or lithium or whatever else or cars or jets and everything in between.

We're a services economy.

We design the systems that everybody else uses, but we have not built out the industrial plant that is necessary for us to fly solo in the world.

We started working on some of that under Biden.

It collapsed under Trump too because of the tariff policy, because no one knows what the rules are.

We've literally had 6,000 tariff changes in the last year.

And so businesses basically stopped building things.

They'd finished what they'd started, but no one is starting anything new.

And so we're really going to get sucker punched in this specific scenario, which I think is a realistic conversation to have, because we will now have to do all of that while we have a shortage of everything that would have allowed us to build it faster before.

As for the dollar, long-term, two oceans, globally dominant military, strong population, young population, consumer-based population, the need to double the size of the industrial plant, all of those argue for a strong dollar going forward.

But until 11 days ago, we had an erratic policy on regulation, on tax.

Rule of law was being broken down.

We were deliberately breaking our trade relations with countries that are integrated into our manufacturing system.

All of the short-term issues argued for a weaker dollar.

You throw a war and all those minor details really don't matter anymore because we're really looking at the bedrock of what allows the rest of the world to function being broken actively here.

And so, yeah, there's only one place to put your money and it's here.

We'll be right back.

I'm not worried about a debt drop.