Let me start by asking you about a topic that we turn to with you most weeks, I think it’s fair to say now, and that’s what’s going on in communist China, on the economic side in particular, Bill. It seems as though there’s increasing evidence that it’s really bad business doing business with the Chinese Communist Party at the moment. Your thoughts?

Thank you. So Bill, the last time these guys got together in one of their capitals, Vladimir Putin visited Beijing and on the eve of the genocide games, secured, I think, the green light from Xi to invade Ukraine as long as he did it after the Olympics were over. Might we expect this new chapter to open up a new front, do you think? Maybe in Taiwan, maybe elsewhere, including against us?

And we’re anxious to get his thoughts on what on earth is going on at the moment with respect to prominent banks in our country, notably Silicon Valley Bank, and Signature on the East Coast. And as we are speaking to him, the President has been making some remarks about what the federal government is up to, and we hope to be able to parse all of this with, well, a former insider, but a man who certainly knows his way around this beat.

Bill Walton is in the house virtually, I’m very pleased to say. And he is explaining to us what is going on with both Silicon Valley Bank and two cryptocurrency financing banks, all of which are in trouble. And President Biden and his team have professed that actual creditors at places like Silicon Valley Bank are going to be able to get their money. And it’s said, but it’s not a bailout. So Bill, what do you make of all that? Is it a bailout?

Well, our panel was on banking. And we had three small businessmen on talking about their troubles getting banked because they were in unfavored industries like guns or like fossil fuels, which have been shut out of the market, shut out of the banking business by the likes of JP Morgan and Bank of America. And that’s a big issue for us. But our conversation quickly turned to something that we all agreed was a much bigger threat, which is the looming implementation of central bank digital currencies. Now, that’s a mouthful, but what it means in essence boiling it down, is instead of your checking account with the bank you have now, which is problematic in some cases, you are instead banking with the Federal Reserve or an agency that we set up to manage this currency system.

So much to talk about. Bill, I just wanted to pick up where we left off a moment ago with Trevor Loudon who was warning us of this phenomenon of elite capture. And it has been particularly evident and I would argue devastatingly effective in your old stomping grounds, Wall Street. Your thoughts on the importance as this new select committee in the House of Representatives gets underway with hearing tomorrow that it be fully able to focus on the problem of people who have well, been working for and arguably betraying our country too, the Chinese Communist Party, whether it’s among the masters of the universe class or elsewhere in the financial sector.

I want to start by talking to you a little bit about a phenomenon that has taken your old universe, Wall Street, by storm. Thanks in no small measure to the industrious efforts of a fellow by the name of Larry Fink, the Street CEO I believe of BlackRock. It’s called ESG for short, Environment, Social, and Governance. And it is having, it seems, profound effects on the financial sector of our economy, the businesses that it obviously owns and influences. As well as diverting our attention, it seems, to the so-called, well, I think of it as at least climate change cult, instead of much more serious and imminent threat that Larry Fink actually is contributing to. Can you walk us through this?

So let’s talk first of all about the balloon, Bill. We’re taking stock with all of our regulars about what you make of what went down last week, besides of course the balloon itself at long last.

Well, again, to come back to the Apple situation, to talk about how… To give you an illustration of how deep these ties go, Apple had every single day, 50 business class seats booked from, I think it was San Francisco to Shanghai every single day. And they had their engineers over there for months and months working with the Chinese engineers and developing all their products.

Bill, we were talking about the hijacking, the capturing, the manipulation, the exploitation of climate change. One of the sort of entities that has benefited massively from this kind of practice has been the whole green energy agenda.