State of the 2024 U.S. Economy

What is the state of the economy? In this episode, Christian discusses how the dollar has seen at 17% decline in buying power so far this year. Gold has reflected that with a 25% increase this year. In 2001, the US dollar represented 73% of global dollar reserves. In 2021, it decreased to 55%. In 2023, 47%.  When the Silicon Valley bank was bailed out last year, there were an additional 1,619 banks that were in risk for failure. That represented 1/3 of all banks in the United States. Since that bailout until today, nothing structurally has changed other than stemming the tide of people pulling their assets out, bailing the bank out, and then creating the illusion of stability. Now, in late April 2024, Republic First became the first FDIC-insured bank failure of 2024. Simultanuosly, seven additional banks closed in that same week. The way to protect against the wave of upcoming banking failures is to invest in hard assets. The reason to invest in hard assets is threefold. 1) It gives you long-term investment appeal. 2) It hedges against inflation. 3) Hard assets have an inverse reaction whenever the economy is in a downturn.