Is the Federal Reserve a godlike Zeus able to control our money and the economy, preserve financial stability and keep a lid on inflation? 

Or is it like the Wizard of Oz? A little man behind the curtain pulling levers to create smoke and noise to terrify and control people, but in the end only one market participant among many worldwide. 

If you’re a bond trader in New York, trying to predict minute day to day changes in interest rates, it’s more like Zeus. For the rest of us, I believe, it’s like Oz. 

Joining me to talk all this through are Alex Pollock and Steve Dewey. Both are grizzled veterans of the banking and regulatory world, which, as Alex points out, has been hit by a major crisis every decade since the 1970s. Together we have many decades of experience in financial markets. Alex and I have been conversing with each other, and interrupting each other, for almost fifty years.

This week, Americans for Limited Government published a provocative and insightful piece about the banking system asking, “Has the United States banking system become too big to save?”

In the past three years, to finance massive federal spending, the Treasury has issued almost $8 trillion new treasury bonds with almost $4 trillion bought by US banks during the tail-end of the Fed’s era of zero interest rates. 

Under President Joe Biden and his Administration the whole of government has been weaponized to promote a so-called Diversity Equity and Inclusion agenda that, in fact, will bring about just the opposite of what these words mean. 

Case in point is an assertive, left-wing, anti-family Department of Labor with its power to regulate and attempt to social engineer virtually every aspect of the American workplace. 

Congress has granted it a stunning amount of power to administer more than 180 federal laws and thousands of regulations affecting more than 10 million employers and 150 million workers.

And almost no knows what it does.

The censorship regime has been widespread and relentless. Our argument here is that the companies, as private actors, have a right to do that, but that the government does not have a right to coerce private actors to do what the government wants them to do.

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine grinds on, it’s nearly impossible for the ordinary observer to figure out what’s really happening.

One of the problems is that war news is generated primarily by Ukrainian propaganda, which is endlessly parroted in the Western media. Anytime there is contradictory information – for example, mention of Ukraine’s high casualties – Kiev pushes back so hard that Western leaders go silent.

But what is clear is that looming on the horizon is the very real possibility of a nuclear war, as more and more European countries are drawn in to the conflict.

“This whole climate hysteria seems to focus on a molecule – carbon dioxide (CO2) – which we humans exhale and which we release into the atmosphere by burning so-called fossil fuels,” explains my guest on this episode Jerome Corsi, PhD.

But what are realities of CO2, who is behind the agenda to demonize it and – most importantly – who benefits?

If someone wanted to weaken, then destroy a sovereign and free United States, what would they do? Well they might start with surrendering its energy independence. Make war on reliable fossil fuels oil and gas, coal and nuclear power.  Induce it to rely on wind and solar energy sources that are certain to lead to rolling blackouts and the ultimate failure of America’s electrical grid.

In 2020, over 30 years later, futurist and management guru Peter Drucker’s prediction came true with a bang. With the mandated COVID lockdowns, suddenly everybody had to learn to work from home. Office occupancy plummeted from 90% to 10% and we all learned about how to Zoom. Since then people are going back to the office, but occupancy still averages only 40 to 50% depending on the market, and in New York lower. So what’s going to happen next?

In 1974, with annual inflation raging over 12%, President Gerald Ford introduced WIN (“whip inflation now”) buttons telling Americans:

“To help increase food and lower prices, grow more and waste less. To help save scarce fuel in the energy crisis, drive less, heat less.”

In other words, the responsibility to fix inflation fell to ordinary Americans. It didn’t work – because they didn’t cause it in the first place – and it would be another eight years before Fed Chairman Paul Volcker tamed the inflation beast.

In this episode I’m talking again with Myron Ebell, Director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment, one of our most effective advocates for Free Market Environmentalism. Myron led the successful decade-long fight to defeat cap-and-trade legislation and led the effort to convince President Trump to withdraw from the Paris climate treaty. The list of those in the “climate industry” who fear Myron’s effectiveness is long. The radical head of the Sierra Club has said he is “one of the biggest threats our planet has ever faced.”

The Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board is once again planning to allow federal employees’ to invest their retirement savings into companies controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.

The FRTIB has decided to ignore directives by both President Trump – and President Biden – as well as strong opposition on Capitol Hill, to open a ‘Mutual Fund Window’ in June which would make available to Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) participants the opportunity to invest up to 25% of their savings in some 5,000 mutual funds.

Is this right and lawful? Well, we now have a test case to find out.

In a first-of-its-kind First Amendment lawsuit against the federal government, attorneys Jenin Younes and John Vecchione of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, argue that the government acted wrongfully when it “directed social media platforms, including Twitter, to censor alleged “misinformation” about COVID-19.”

Author John Tamny joins me on this episode for a freewheeling back and forth about some of today’s big concerns. John, a free market fundamentalist and original thinker, almost always has a contrarian take on things. John’s books include Who Needs the Fed, When Politicians Panicked, Popular Economics and The End of Work.

Listen in to a behind the scenes story meeting as the Bill Walton Show team speculates on what’s going on in the world. Starlink satellites and all the junk flying around in space, Elon Musk vs Jeff Bezos, Ukraine, the domino theory, Biden’s open borders, Alyona’s Kazakhstan take on Russia, media’s monolithic coverage of Ukraine, inflation, cooking oil and fertilizer prices, the insane (perhaps) Shanghai covid lockdown, the fragmenting world order and the dollar’s reserve currency status, what’s going on with China and Russia, corporate profits at all time highs … and more. Send us your thoughts about what we should cover.

We’re more than two years into the Covid-19 pandemic.

So by now, we should know enough to assess what we’ve learned about the measures our governments took to mitigate the virus? 

What worked?

What didn’t?

Fortunately, we now have a comprehensive comparative study, published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, authored by University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan – and Steve Moore and Phil Kerpen of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. 

In this episode I’m talking again with Dr. J. Michael Waller, Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Policy.

Mike’s Secret Empire: The KGB in Russia Today predicted the rise of the KGB, and inevitably, a Vladimir Putin. He was also Annenberg Professor of International Communication at the Institute of World Politics, and instructor in SYOPS operation at the Kennedy Special Warfare Center School at Fort Bragg.

This episode is a follow-up to my conversation a few weeks ago with Dr. Peter Vincent Pry about our concerns that our Administration’s responses to the Russian invasion of Ukraine could lead to nuclear war.

Today, we consider also an alternate possibility that Vladimir Putin is playing a much deeper game than most in the West have imagined.

Since the COVID-19 virus was loosed upon the world, either intentionally or accidentally, from Wuhan, China, the world has been fundamentally changed. The globalist economic and geopolitical fabric has been torn. There is no one single dominant power anymore and the post Cold War, unipolar world system is gone and is not coming back.

“No borders. No walls. No USA at all.”     
Chant by Antifa rioters marching in the streets of Denver.

With Ukraine and Russia dominating the headlines, America seems to have lost focus on the border – and the war – that really counts.

It’s not Ukraine, it’s America’s southern border with Mexico. The Biden Administration seems simply to have “opened it up.”

Thirty years ago, the United States, Europe, and Japan manufactured 90 percent of the global supply of the key ingredients for the world’s medicines and vitamins. No more. China is now the largest global supplier.

Millions of Americans are taking prescription and over-the-counter drugs made in, or with critical ingredients from China and they don’t know it and neither do many of their doctors.