Show notes
Founder of the Raising Capitalists Foundation and previous co-host of The Real Estate Guys Radio show, Russell Gray, joins Keith to discuss the historical and current devaluation of the U.S. dollar, its impact on investors, and the broader economic implications. Gray highlights how the significant increase in interest rates has trapped equity in properties and affected development. He explains the shift from gold-backed currency to paper money, the role of the Federal Reserve, and the impact of the Bretton Woods Agreement. Gray emphasizes the importance of understanding macroeconomic trends and advocates for Main Street capitalism to decentralize power and promote productivity. He also criticizes the idea of housing as a human right, arguing it leads to inflation and shortages. Resources: Connect with Russell Gray to learn more about his "Raising Capitalists" project and his plans for a new show. Follow up with Russell Gray to get a copy of the Beardsley Rummel speech transcript from 1946. follow@russellgray.com Show Notes: GetRichEducation.com/558 For access to properties or free help with a GRE Investment Coach, start here: GREmarketplace.com GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREinvestmentcoach.com Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Invest with Freedom Family Investments. You get paid first: Text FAMILY to 66866 Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search "how to leave an Apple Podcasts review". For advertising inquiries, visit: GetRichEducation.com/ad Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— text 'GRE' to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Complete episode transcript: Automatically Transcribed With Otter.ai Keith Weinhold 0:01 Welcome to GRE. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, what's the real backstory on why we have this thing called the dollar? Why it keeps getting debased? What you can do about it and when the dollar will die? It's a lesson in monetary history. And our distinguished guest is a familiar voice that you haven't heard in a while. Today on get rich education. Mid south home buyers, I mean, they're total pros, with over two decades as the nation's highest rated turnkey provider, their empathetic property managers use your ROI as their North Star. So it's no wonder that smart investors just keep lining up to get their completely renovated income properties like it's the newest iPhone. They're headquartered in Memphis and have globally attractive cash flows and A plus rating with a better business bureau and now over 5000 houses renovated. There's zero markup on maintenance. Let that sink in, and they average a 98.9% occupancy rate, while their average renter stays more than three and a half years. Every home they offer has brand new components, a bumper to bumper, one year warranty, new 30 year roofs. And wait for it, a high quality renter. Remember that part and in an astounding price range, 100 to 180k I've personally toured their office and their properties in person in Memphis, get to know Mid South. Enjoy cash flow from day one. Start yourself right now at mid southhomebuyers.com that's mid south homebuyers.com Russell Gray 1:54 You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is get rich education. Keith Weinhold 2:10 Welcome to GRE from St John's Newfoundland to St Augustine, Florida and across 188 nations worldwide. I'm Keith weinholden. You are inside get rich education. It's 2025. The real estate market is changing. We'll get into that in future. Weeks today. Over the past 100 years plus, we've gone from sound money to Monopoly money, and we're talking about America's currency collapse. What comes next and how it affects you as both an investor and a citizen. I'd like to welcome in longtime friend of the show and someone that I've personally learned from over the years, because he's a brilliant teacher, real estate investors probably haven't heard his voice as much lately, because until last year, he had been the co host of the terrific real estate guys radio show for nearly 20 years. Before we're done today, you'll learn more about what he's doing now, as he runs the Main Street capitalist platform and is also founder of the raising capitalists foundation. Hey, it's been a few years. Welcome back to GRE Russell Gray. Russell Gray 3:19 yeah, it's fun. I actually think it's been maybe 10 years when I think about it, I remember I was at a little resort in Mexico recording with you, I think in the gym. It was just audio back then, no video. Keith Weinhold 3:24 Yeah, I remember we're trying to get the audio right. Then I think you've been here more recently than 10 years ago. But yeah, now there's this video component. I actually have to sit up straight and comb my hair. It's ridiculous. Well, Russ, you're also a buff of monetary history. And before we discuss that, talk about the state of the real estate market today, just briefly, from your vantage point. Russell Gray 1 3:55 I think the big story, and I'm probably not telling anybody anything they don't know, but the interest rate hike cycle that we went through this last round was quite a bit more substantial, I think, than a lot of people really appreciated, you know. And I started talking about that many years ago, because when you hit the zero bound and you have 6,7,8, years of interest rates below half a point, the change when they started that interest rate cycle from point two, 525 basis points all the way up to five and a quarter? That's a 20x move. And people might say, well, oh, you know, I go back to what Paul Volcker did way back in the day, when he took interest rates from eight or nine to 18. That was only a little bit more than double. Double is a far cry from 20x so we've never seen anything like that. Part of the fallout of that, as you know, is a lot of people wisely, and I was on the front end of cheerleading This is go get those loans refinanced and lock in that cheap money for as long as possible, because a loan will actually become an asset. The problem is, when you do that, you're kind of married to that property. Now it's not quite as bad. As being upside down in a property and you can't get out of it, but it's really hard to walk away from a two or 3% loan in a Six 7% market, because you really can't take your same payment and end up getting more house. And so that equity is kind of a little bit trapped, and that creates some opportunities, but I think that's been the big story, and then kind of the byproduct of the story. Second tier of the story was the impact it had on development, because it made it a lot harder for developers to develop, because their cost of funds and everything in that supply chain, food chain, you marry that to the 2020, COVID Supply Chain lockdown and that disruption, which, you know, you don't shut an economy down and just flick a switch and have it come back on. And so there's all of that. And then the third thing is just this tremendous uncertainty everybody has, because we just went from one extreme to another. And I think people, you know, they don't want to, like, rock the boat, they're going to kind of stay status quo for a little bit, whether they're businesses, whether they're homeowners, whether they're anybody out there that's thinking about moving them, unless life forces you to do it, you're going to try to stay status quo until things calm down. And I don't know how close we are to things calming down. Keith Weinhold 6:13 One word I use is normalized. Both the 30 year fixed rate mortgage and the Fed funds rate are pretty close to their long term historic average. It just doesn't feel that way, because it was that rate of increase in 2022 that caught a lot of people off guard, like you touched on Well, Russ, now that we've talked about the present day, let's go back in time, and then we'll slowly bring things up to the present day. The dollar is troubled. It's worth perhaps 3% of what it was 100 years ago, but it's still around since it was established in the Coinage Act of 1792 and it's still the world reserve currency. In fact, only three currencies have survived longer than the dollar, the British pound, the Japanese yen and the Swiss franc. So talk to us about this really relentless debasement of the dollar over time, including the creation of the Fed and the Bretton Woods Agreement and all that. Russell Gray 7:09 That's a big story, as you know, and I always like to try to break it down a little bit. One of my specialties I'd like to believe, is I speak macro and I speak Main Street. And so when I try to break macroeconomics down, I start out with, why do I even care? I mean, if I'm a main street investor, why do I even care? In 2008 as you know, is a wipeout for me. Why? Because I didn't think anything had happened in the macro I didn't think Wall Street bond market. I didn't think that affected me. One thing I really cared about was interest rates. And I had a cursory interest in the bond market. We just try to figure out where interest rates were going. But for the most part, I thought, as a main street real estate investor, I was 100% insulated. I couldn't have been more wrong, because it really does matter, because the value of the dollar, in other words, the purchasing power of the dollar, and usually you refer to that as inflation, right? If inflation is there, the dollar is losing its purchasing power, and so the higher the inflation rate, the faster you're losing that purchasing power. And you might say, well, maybe that matters to me. Maybe it does. But the people who make the money available to the mortgage community, right to the real estate community to borrow that comes out of the bond market. And so when people go to buy a bond, which is an IOU, they're going to get paid back in the currency that they lent in, in this case, dollars. And if they know, if they're making a long term investment in a long term bond, and they're going to get paid back in dollars, they're going to be worth a whole lot less when they get them back. One of the things they're going to want is compensation for that time risk, and that's called higher interest rates. Okay, so now, if you're a main street investor, and higher interest rates impact you, now you understand why you want to pay attention. Okay, so let's just start with that. And so once you understand that the currency is a derivative of money, and money used to be you mentioned the Coinage Act Keith money, which is gold, used to be synonymous with the dollar. The dollar was only a unit of measure of gold, 1/20 of an ounce. It was a unit of measure. So it's like, the way I teach people is, like, if you had a gallon of milk and you traded, I'm a farmer, and I had a lot of milk, and so everybody decided they were going to use gallons of milk as their currency. Hey, where there's a lot of gallons of milk. He's got a big refrigerator. We'll just trade gallons of milk. Hey, Keith, I really like your beef. I you know, will you sell me some, a side of beef, and I'll give you, you know, 100 gallons of milk, you know, like, Oh, that's great. Well, I can't drink all this milk, so I'm going to leave the milk on deposit at the dairy, and then later on, when I decide I want a suit of clothes, I'll say, well, that's 10 gallons of milk. So I'll give the guy 10 gallons of milk. So I just give him a coupon, a claim, a piece of paper for that gallon of milk, or 20 gallons of milk, and he can go to the dairy and pick it up, right? And so that's kind of the way the monetary system evolved, except it wasn't milk, it was gold. So now you got the dollar. Well, after a while, nobody's going to get the milk. They don't care about the milk. And so now. Now, instead of just saying, I'll give you a gallon of milk, you just say, well, I'll give you a gallon. And somebody says, Okay, that's great. I'll take a gallon. They never opened the jug up. They never realized the jug is empty. They're just trading these empty jugs that used to have milk in them. Well, that's what the paper dollar is today. It went from being a gold certificate payable to bearer on demand, a certain amount of gold, a $20 gold certificate, what looks exactly like a $20 FEDERAL RESERVE NOTE. Today they look exactly the same, except one says FEDERAL RESERVE NOTE, which is an IOU backed by nothing, and the other one said gold certificate, which was payable to bearer on demand, real money. So my point is, is he got money which is a derivative of the productivity, the beef, the soot, the milk, whatever, right? That's the real capital. The real capital is the goods and services we all want. Money is where we store the value of whatever it is we created until we want to trade it for something somebody else created later. And it used to be money and currency were one in the same, but now we've separated that. So now all we do is trade empty gallons, which are empty pieces of paper, and that's currency. So those are derivatives, and the last derivative of that chain is credit. And you had Richard Duncan on your show more than once, and he is famous for kind of having this term. We don't normally have capitalism. We have creditism, right? Everything is credit. Everything is claims on wealth, but it's not real wealth, and it's just when we look at what's going on with our current administration and the drive to become a productive rather than a financialized society, again, as part of this uncertainty that everybody has. Because this is not just a subtle little adjustment on the same course. This is like, No, we're we're going down a completely different path. But fundamentally, your system operates on this currency that is flowing through it, like the blood flowing through your body. And if the blood is bad, your body's sick. And right now, our currency is bad, and so it creates problems, not just for us, but all around the world. And now we're exacerbating that. And I'm not saying it's bad. In fact, I think it's actually it's actually good, but change is what it is, right? I mean, it can be really good to go to the gym and work out before we started recording, you talked about your commitment to fitness, and that if you stop working out, you get unfit, and it's hard to start up again. Well, we've allowed our economy to get very unfit. Now we're trying to get fit again, and it's going to be painful. We're going to be sore, but if we stick with it, I think we can actually kind of save this thing. So I don't know what that's going to mean for the dollar ultimately, or if we end up going to something else, but right now, to your point, the dollar is definitely the big dog still, but I think it's probably even more under attack today than it's ever been, and so it's just something I think every Main Street investor needs to pay attention to. Keith Weinhold 12:46 And it was really that 1913 creation of the Fed, where the Fed's mandates really didn't begin to take effect until 1914 that accelerated this slide in the dollar. Prior to that, it was really just periods of war, like, for example, the Civil War, where we had inflation rise, but th…
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