John Sneisen grew up in Norway and says he had been brainwashed by the collectivist agenda until he was awakened by a book called Rich Dad, Poor Dad, by Robert Kiyosaki (a member of the Freedom Force Hall of Honor). John now is a passionate adevocate of individualism. He is the founder of a non-profit organization called The Economic Truth, which has over 10,000 followers in more than thirty countries. His organization analyzes economic events and hosts workshops on world monetary history. John is a two times Amazon Bestselling Auther of The End of Freedom: How Our Monetary System Enslaves Us and Canada, The Greatest Economy In The World? The Facts You Are Not Being Told About Your Money. And How To Protect Yourself From The Coming Crisis. He is also the Economic Analyst and contributor to World Alternative Media who reaches millions of people on a monthly basis talking about Economics, Investing and Geopolitics.
Stefan Aarnio: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the show Respect The Grind with Stefan Aarnio. This is the show where we interview people who have achieved mastery and freedom through discipline. We interview entrepreneurs, athletes, authors, artists, real estate investors, anyone who’s achieved mastery and examine what it took to get there. Today on the show, I have a good friend of mine, John Sneisen. Now he is originally from Scandinavia but he lives in Winnipeg, my city now. He’s the author of two books, he’s an economist. Love listening to John and reading his posts online. He’s an economist, he’s someone who’s part of the red pill movement. The blue pill is keeping you awake, the red pill’s waking you up. John, welcome to the show Respect The Grind. How are you doing today?
John Sneisen: Thank you sir. I’m doing good, it’s a beautiful day outside here so I can’t complain about that at all. I really got to say I also like the work that you’ve done as well Stefan. I been following you for probably about six, seven years ago when I first bumped into your name. Yeah, you’ve really achieved a lot greatness in your life. It’s really exciting to see that, because that’s the people that attracts me, that I want to be around and learn from.
Stefan Aarnio: Thank you. Thank you, it’s great. John, your story, you came over to Canada. Where did you originally come from? Which Scandinavian country was it?
John Sneisen: No, I came originally from Norway, and I lived there for 25 years. My last year I ended up in the military of all places. Before that I had a telecommunications degree, so I used to do everything with telecom, anything from pulling data wires to climbing in cell phone towers. Then I was like, “This is boring.” With me, I can’t sit still for too long and sit on something for very long. I need to move forward and learn more stuff in my life, so just getting really bored. And then I ended up in the military one year in 2007, where I went up North, all the way to the Russian Norwegian border. Up there I did some intelligence reconnaissance for NATO and stuff. So it’s interesting. And at that time too, I was looking for somebody to get together with. A girl, and I found my wife on something called Friend-a-Rama, which is like way pre-Facebook. And yeah, sure enough I came over for a three week date, and I suddenly ended up in Canada.
Stefan Aarnio: Wow. So are you the mail order bride or she’s the mail order bride?
John Sneisen: I don’t know which one, you’ll have to ask because I think both of us are.
Stefan Aarnio: That’s good man, wow. So it’s interesting, my Dad’s from Sweden originally. He was born in Helsinki, Finland, grew up in Stockholm and fell in love with a girl from Winnipeg. So that’s what brought him from land of the free Scandinavia over here to Winnipeg. It’s like the women man, they just, they trap you in.
John Sneisen: Yeah, I tell you.
Stefan Aarnio: That’s great. So John, how did you get into … You got two books now, Canada, the Greatest Economy on Earth. That’s something that a lot of banks, especially American banks are looking to the Canadian banks and saying, “How can we emulate them?” You got that book out that just came out recently, number one on Amazon for a long time. And then you’ve got the other one, End of Freedom. What got you into writing these kind of books? Because that’s not just something any old Norwegian wakes up in the morning, starts writing about this stuff. What got you into that?
John Sneisen: 100%, no. When I was in Norway, I also got involved in network marketing. Through my network marketing I’ve traveled all over Europe. And then I went to a conference, two different conferences, one in New Jersey where a guy called Robert Kiyosaki was the keynote speaker. So he got me to pick up the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Of course, you know everybody in real estate must have known and got to understand Robert. Just reading his book I was like, “Holy Smokes, I’ve been tricked my whole life.” I lived in Norway and I thought that being in ENS was really good. I didn’t see how badly I got stolen from, I call it taxation theft. but at that time I slowly started, it was a huge paradigm shift in my brain. It was really hard to deal with, but I wanted to find out more. So I went out to more of these.
John Sneisen: Another one I went down to New Jersey was actually Donald Trump, of all people, was the keynote speaker. So I read a couple of his books, and books that he did with Robert as well. So those brought me over to the side of understanding that there’s something wrong in our system today. Of course Robert had, one of his advisors was Mike Maloney, and that’s who I really connected with. He is, of course, like a monetary historian he calls himself, I’m monetary historian myself because I’m a historical geek. I like to understand cycles and how people behave throughout times, because look far enough into the past, you’ll see into the future.
John Sneisen: So that’s how I, it was just a snowball rolling on me just gathering more and more information. Of course with Mike Maloney, now I read the hundreds upon hundreds of different economics books, historical books and so on from there. So yeah, that’s how I got into all this crazy stuff.
Stefan Aarnio: Wow, that’s interesting. I have a similar path, I went and read Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I started studying Mike Maloney in Gold and Silver. It’s interesting because you start going down the rabbit hole and you see exactly how deep it goes. I just wrote a book, John, called Hard Times Create Strong Men. It’s interesting because I’m writing why aren’t the men, men these days. Men are turning into these girly pussy boys snowflake guys. I’m writing the book and by the end of the book, I’m referencing Yurk Bezmenov and G. Edward Griffin’s interview on three generations of socialism and communism.
Stefan Aarnio: It’s crazy because when you start looking into the monetary system, you start looking into history, you see these deeper patterns. Some people think you’re a conspiracy theorist, or they think that you’re crazy. What do you have to say to people who would say, “Oh that money stuff sounds like conspiracy theory.” Or you talked about cultural subversion or anything like that, what do you have to say to the conspiracy theory naysayers?
John Sneisen: Well I got to say to them that definitely, it’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s actually conspiracy fact. Because if you go back and look at all these different stories from history, I could pull up the first creation of fiat currency for example, like paper money was in China by the Sung Dynasty, and they created it in 1024. And they started issuing this, and then they started to create credit off of this. They actually borrowed money out to people and then suddenly, they had a massive economic boom in China at that point, and they became a massive empire.
John Sneisen: Then suddenly what happened over time is that when you have credit and create more of it, but then the problem is when they have this system that we have today, where you actually borrow money out of thin air from the bank and then they charge you interest. Well that interest doesn’t really system system yet. So over time, the more and more people that get indebted, the more and more people need to feed the payment build that interest on the debt that has been created in the monetary system.
John Sneisen: Of course in China as well, at that time it was around the 1120 something, it just started to go really bad because people couldn’t make their payments anymore. They felt that the currency had lost a lot of purchasing power that it had before. If you take a look at just today and look at the same, what are we saying today? Look at how most of the houses today hasn’t really risen so much in value, it’s the actual currency that have lost value. So we’re seeing that there’s so many different other examples, you got of course like four more empires throughout China that tried paper money, but then they actually reverted back using gold and silver after the Ming Dynasty which was in the 1600’s.
John Sneisen: Then of course, there was Jewish merchants that took these ideas of paper money and they got them over to Europe. So now Europe’s and I think it was Marco Polo, he was talking about how the great Khan and his Yuan currency back in the day was, like he just couldn’t fathom how people could take paper as a medium of exchange. Like “What about gold and silver” he was saying. He was just baffled by this. There was a couple of merchants and they called them the wanderers that over time brought these ideas over to Europe.
John Sneisen: And of course, the first ever example of this in Europe was actually from your dad’s home country, Sweden. It was a guy called Pomstruck. He created a private bank where he started to issue paper. Of course at the start he backed it by something, this is I forgot to tell, but that’s what happened in China too. They had coinage which was a certain percentage of the backing of the physical currency but over time, they just printed more and more of it. So that percentage ratio got lower, and lower, and lower.
John Sneisen: But same concept happened in Sweden as well where Pomstruck created a private bank and started issuing paper money, as well. But this one didn’t last very long, it lasted about 20 years, and then it was game over. He just issued credit everywhere, and issued more and more notes. And then of course, the backing disappeared. And that’s when there’s nothing really backing the currency anymore, it’s called a fiat currency, it’s backed by nothing other than the forcible guns of the government extorting the populous from taxes, and then paying back the money to the government.
John Sneisen: So over time it just repeats itself so many times, and it’s about 600-700 that it’s repeated just throughout history, this hold cycle with the creation of any type of currency or money. And then they just either do ways where paper currency could just make more of it, or with, for example, like the Roman empire and the Greek empires. They put lesser and lesser metals in their currency. Same as actually Canada, Canada’s done the same, and I talk about that in one of my books where Canada has actually just put lesser and lesser metals into their currency. So they could actually have the same face value, but are actually way less worth than they originally were with the silver and gold content that were in them.
Stefan Aarnio: Right, right. Well Canadian maple leaf gold and silver is some of the best in the world. And then we got our pennies, we took the pennies away because it cost what, five cents to make a penny?
John Sneisen: Yeah, exactly. The content in the coin’s actually worth more than the face value that the government is selling you. I actually got a little bit of a problem. I went to the mint and I started asking too many questions. I asked them, “How much does it cost to actually make a toonie or a loonie?” It took a little bit of while, but they actually told me it’s 15 cents. The labor, and cost of the metals and everything to actually get a finished product and then sell it off to the government. Now that price in-between the cost and the face value, that price is actually called [inaudible 00:12:15]. And [inaudible 00:12:17] is actually government’s take that as a part of [inaudible 00:12:20], and it’s a certain amount of GDP. In Russia, I think it’s as much as 5% that they make on actually printing the paper notes, and the coinage itself.
Stefan Aarnio: Wow.
John Sneisen: Yeah, so you can see how they actually make money on making more money.
Stefan Aarnio: The government lives on inflation, that’s why they’re always inflating the money. Because they get to use the money first, it’s the most powerful money. They get to live on that spread, and then by the time me and you are using the money, we’re getting screwed because our purchasing power’s gone, right?
John Sneisen: Yeah, yeah. And the easier access you have to debt or to money, you can buy great assets. Buy things that when you’re first to buy them, you’re going to get the benefit of their raise or their lowering in value of the currency. You’re going to have an asset that’s more worth than what you actually bought it for. So that’s what you can do when you’re a bank, you can create money out of thin air and then just buy real things. Where people just have [inaudible 00:13:19], so they don’t even have a title to their home when they take a mortgage. It’s pretty crazy. And then of course, the bank owns that house until you’ve paid the last cent back on that mortgage.
Stefan Aarnio: Right, right. Well it’s crazy John, I’ve looked in the money myself. And I would sit down at the Thanksgiving dinner table with my family, my cousins, my aunts, uncles, and I would tell them about the money system. It takes 30 minutes to explain this money system to everybody. Everybody gets up and leaves, they don’t want to hear about it, they don’t want to hear how they’re getting screwed. But Henry Ford used to say that, “If the average man understood the monetary system, there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
John Sneisen: Oh, exactly.
Stefan Aarnio: Because people are exchanging real value, real labor, real work, real effort, real goods, real services, for fake money. Can you speak about that a little bit? How the government, any government, fiat currency or the banks, they’re kind of in bed with each other. They’re issuing fake money, and we have to give real goods in return, and real labor.
John Sneisen: Yeah. The thing is like when you think about it, like for example let’s take Venezuela right now where they have a hyper inflation. Well it was interesting, some people said, “Oh this is how much it takes to buy something over.” And they had a massive stack, a huge pyramid of Bolivar Squerta, which is the local currency. Well then they put like one dollar bill beside it. And like, “Listen guys, don’t you see what’s wrong here? This one dollar bill has the same exact value in paper as one of those bills in that massive pyramid.”
John Sneisen: So you’re talking about fake money, well it’s all a conception of we believe that it actually has value. And of course, the government uses law, which is a legal tender law, to then force upon you this fake currency that doesn’t really have too much value at all. And you are taking that, you’re using it, you’re getting it from all of your hard labor, all of your investments and everything. And you give a value, because when you start to actually use it, well you are kind of giving more power to the government instead of you actually trying to avoid using it, and using other mediums of exchange.
John Sneisen: It could be, like today, it could be Cryptocurrencies, it could be gold and silver, it could be even bartering with each other. Because at that time, you’re actually given some real value back. For example, if you did a bartering exchange. Or let’s say that you used it for some work, well if you gave something for [inaudible 00:16:06] to another person and he accepts that, well that’s a real value. But the problem is with paper currency, you accept that let’s say $100 bill for that work that you did. But over time, that actually loses value. Real work doesn’t lose value whatsoever, it actually retains its value.
John Sneisen: All the commodities, all the real things around us in this world, actually they’re the ones that have value, not the paper money. Because if you live long enough, you see that it takes more and more of this paper money, or electronic money that we have today, to actually buy these assets, commodities, or … especially like [inaudible 00:16:45], people have had stagnant [inaudible 00:16:49], most of them that last 20 years. Well they’ve been screwed over big time because that currency that they’re taking and haven’t gotten a raise, well now they’re sitting there barely able to afford anything because they were promised that this currency would have some sort of value at one point.
John Sneisen: Well, now it doesn’t anymore. And I’m just going to tell one more story from a friend of mine who lives in Winnipeg, he ran away from Argentina. And in the 80’s his dad, they had a massive what’s called a devaluation of a currency. So his dad had his life savings, I don’t remember how much it was, but let’s say 100,000 Peso’s in the bank. It was probably way more, but if you took that 100,000 and then suddenly over night the government told him that it would be only worth $25,000 of purchasing power. Suddenly what had 100,000 purchasing power, so it lost 75% of its value, his life savings and investments over time.
John Sneisen: And think about that for a second. Just over night, like all your life savings, all the energy that you put into … You wanted to have some easy years at the end of your life to actually take it a little bit easy, and relax, and spend that money. Well that money is suddenly just lost 75% of its value. And there was nothing left for you to actually spend, and you’re suddenly poor. You might have been rich. And this happened just recently in Venezuela as well. You could have had a million Bolivars, but now a million Bolivars is like nothing at all, you need 30 million or 40 million.
John Sneisen: So it’s just this fake paper system, or electronic system that they have where they are able to just continuously print more and more units into circulation that depreciates the value of that currency. And that is the power that the government has over you. Meanwhile, if you had something like gold, or silver, or any other commodity that you could use as medium or exchange. Most of that doesn’t lose its value, and usually are more of a set or an average of that unit in circulation around the globe.
Stefan Aarnio: Mm-hmm (affirmative). So John, I mean we’re talking about fiat currency here, and this is fake money versus gold versus silver. In my book Hard Times Creates Strong Men, I talk about the economic devaluation of the middle class. The middle class has been wiped out, literally destroyed with the currency changes. And what I do is I took a gold coin, piece of gold from Rome, one ounce. And in Ancient Rome you could buy a toga, a haircut, and a pair of sandals for one gold coin. Today in the modern world, one gold coin gets you a finely tailored suit at a store like Harry Rosen, a nice suit, a pair of shoes, and a haircut. So gold’s been the same throughout history.
Stefan Aarnio: And I take the minimum wage in 1968, I think it’s like $1.35 an hour or something. And index that to today’s purchasing power, that’s $103,000 per year of annual purchasing power that a guy had in 1968 working at McDonald’s. Can you speak to that? Where a guy flipping burgers in make America great again 1968 is making 100 grand in today’s dollars. Can you talk about that? Today it’s like 13,000 the guy’s making in the $7.25 in modern dollars. So these people have lost 90% of their purchasing power between 1968 and today. There should be a revolution 30 years ago man, this is crazy, evil stuff.
John Sneisen: Oh, it definitely is. Like what has happened in, for example with the United States dollar. Ever since 1913 when they created the Federal Reserve, which is issuing the money, it has failed several times. It failed in the 30’s, it failed in the 70’s, and now it’s about to fail again. It’s just that they used to be backed by gold, and then they took away little by little the amount of gold that actually backed the currency. And so you can see how fast it’s just started to lose value. And there was certain points where over just a couple of days that they had these devaluations, especially in the 70’s, where you lost almost 50% of your purchasing power over night.
John Sneisen: Because they suddenly just took away all the power that it had when it was backed by gold and said, “Oh no, it’s not backed by gold anymore. It’s worth nothing now.” And like over time when people actually had a more sounder system, where there was less units in circulation. Well they actually got paid way more, and they had way more purchasing power. People could buy houses for very cheap. They didn’t have to get into a whole bunch of debt in order to buy a house. They just saved up for maybe five, ten, 15 years, and then they had a house. Well today, there’s no way most people can ever be able to afford a house by saving. You’d be ending up being 50 or 60 years from now in the same kind of timeframe. So-
Stefan Aarnio: Well your currency would devalue. Your currency would devalue, you’d never make it. Because as you’re saving, the currency loses valuation. You’d never make it. Like it Toronto right now, a million bucks for a house in Toronto. If you’re trying to save up, by the time you get there, it’s going to be two million for that house, or three million.
John Sneisen: Oh for sure, yeah. Yeah, no, yeah.
Stefan Aarnio: So it’s almost impossible. So John, would you say that between the debt, taxes, and devaluation of currency, is this the new slavery?
John Sneisen: Oh, it’s 100% like massive slavery on a global scale. I believe it’s the biggest scam of human kind that we’re getting perpetrated on. And of course, it was because as you say again, men got weak and they lost control over their own lives. They gave it to the politicians, everybody else. They gave little by little of their power away of rights, or whatever they had. And then suddenly they’re sitting there with almost zero rights, and currency and money that they are forced upon that have zero value.
John Sneisen: So you see over time that because nobody dared to stand up and say, well there’s been people that have tried, but they didn’t get enough people. It was good times, especially for the baby boomers, like our parents generation. Nobody thought of ever thinking about that, because those times everybody’s getting massive amounts of debt they just racked up. And everybody felt really rich, because it was just an uphill where there was more and more people getting born all the time, so you could just issue more and more debt.
John Sneisen: So everybody just kind of felt that there was no reason to ever think about that, that there would be any problems with that. But problem is that that’s of course what happens every single time. Because I was saying, it has 90 to 110 years timeframe, this currency cycle. Because people forget, and there’s a time span of maybe like 30-40 years where there’s no talk about it at all because it feels so good, because the creation is just continuing. But then suddenly at one point, everybody’s just looking around, and it’s like everybody’s feeling super rich.
John Sneisen: I got to tell a quick story from the French revolution and the Mississippi bubble, the first stock bubble. They at that time, people they started to invest, and then suddenly the share price started to go a little bit more, and more. And then more and more people comes in, so the market cap goes higher, the share price goes higher. And then of course John Law, which was the backer behind the Mississippi company told everybody in Louisiana, “There’s minerals just laying in open surface on the ground. We’re going to be so rich.” And of course, he was a big fraud perpetrating this, but more and more people got in.
John Sneisen: And then suddenly at one point, the people of course bought first, like similar to kind of what happened with Bitcoin and cryptocurrency just recently. They were all driving, not Lambo’s that the cryptocurrency guys were driving, but they had horse, and buggies, and [inaudible 00:25:01], and they had private servants, and everything. And then suddenly, it reached a saturation point where there’s nobody else to invest in this. And people are like, “Well I need my money now, I need to get out of the market. I’m going to secure my winnings.”
John Sneisen: Well as soon as the first guys start, usually today it’s Wall Street that used to tell, “Oh now’s the time to get into the market.” Because they’re [inaudible 00:25:27] into buy at the top and then they could sell off more at the top. So that’s what happened. And then suddenly you just get a cascading massive crash from that. So that’s always the mentality, and psychological behind any bubble.
Stefan Aarnio: So it’s kind of like tulip mania. What was that in the-
John Sneisen: Dutch, yeah.
Stefan Aarnio: Yeah, they had tulip mania where the tulips were the most prized thing in society, and people are trading their entire house for a tulip bulb, a little flower. And then one day you wake up, and tulips are worth nothing, right?
John Sneisen: Exactly.
Stefan Aarnio: So where’s all this going, John? I mean does it end in Civil War, does it end in Revolution, does it end in blood and violence? What happens at the end of the currency? Like I’ve heard people say the US currency is going to be done soon. If the US currency is done, the Canadian currency is done too. I mean those two currencies are like in bed with each other. What happens at the end of a currency in history?
John Sneisen: Well, during the end of currencies usually the weak country, which has the weak currency, gets either taken over. Well actually, not taken over, I was going to say in the sense that they just got taken over. But they actually are getting taken over by another country usually. So there’s the war that perpetrates at the end of a currency, and then of course you’ll just start to fuel it more. Because if another country tries to come and take over that country, well they’re going to build up their military power as much as they can before the currency is worth nothing. So they usually just buy everything that they can, the government creates a whole bunch of machinery.
John Sneisen: And look at Yugoslavia for example, at the end of it. The end of the hyper inflation, it completely ended up in a massive civil war. And people aren’t aware what’s going on. You look at the French Revolution was perpetrated by the loss of the [inaudible 00:27:55] at the time. And then you had, of course throughout earlier history, the Sun Dynasty’s currency ended up in a takeover by the Mongols that came in and took over. The Chin Empire took over their empire as well, because they had a weak currency, their economy were weak at the end.
John Sneisen: And it can’t get any economic power or purchasing power anymore. So nobody wants to be with the nation anymore. And then the nation gets desperate, and then it starts to retaliate around everybody else. And of course if you’re an empire, like the United States, you’d be ending up with massive bases, like the Roman Empire all across the world. And then you have a devalued currency, that nobody’s not willing to take anymore. So a desperate emperor would say, “Screw you guys, I’m going to make sure that I still have the power that I had 30, 40 years ago.”
John Sneisen: So an empire that had built themselves up, or a big nation that have a loss in value currency. Like look at Venezuela for example currently, in Venezuela there’s in desperate times, Maduro’s killed off a whole bunch of his opposition. So it’s a really civil war down there, but nobody’s talking about it because nobody’s willing to say that socialism would ever fail. But that’s what you see. There’s mass unrest, people get really angered because they were never educated about how they didn’t have what Rob Kiyosaki calls a high financial IQ. So they weren’t aware of all this stuff, and now suddenly they are getting taught economics 101 really fast.
John Sneisen: Where yeah, and you end up with people that loses 70 to 100% almost of all of the things that they thought they had in values. Well it’s pretty obvious where that’s going to take. And if you look at history, usually it starts like with currency wars in the modern times where you have different countries devaluing their currency will try to get more people to buy from them. Because they believe that in today’s changing economics, if you have cheap currency, you get more trade into your country because people are more willing to buy from you because they want cheaper goods into their economy.
John Sneisen: Well, the problem perpetuates pretty fast because that cheaper currency also tells you that the prices in your countries going to go up, and the people are losing their local purchasing power. And if you don’t raise their income that they had, well now they’re going to lose a lot of the purchasing power. So over time different countries moving forth and back, today I call it a raise to zero between different countries just devaluing their currency against each other.
John Sneisen: And over time, you get to a point where nations are saying, “Well I’m going to put a tariff on you, or I’m going to put barriers in my economy to protect my economy.” Well look at where we are today with all these trade talks, NAFTA, Europe, and Germany and all China versus the US, forth and back with tariffs and taxes on everything. Like the only people that they’re hurting is their own economy, and their own people. Because they’re the ones that have to pay more for the goods and services coming in through the country.
John Sneisen: So that is the second step towards the next step, which could be throughout history it’s shown that it could be a hot war. So somebody is so hurt, their economy is so hurt because they devalued the currency, they tried to protect their economy. But their economy isn’t better because their currency is garbage. And then what happens is that they just retaliate out of innate human despair, because it comes back to every human being if their pushed to the limits, well they could get violent. And they could retaliate against anybody when they’re really, really desperate, and they don’t have no way out to where they are right now.
Stefan Aarnio: Wow, so John that’s some dark and scary stuff that we’ve seen in history over and over again. And when you were talking about that, it reminded me of Germany where they devalued their currency, and they had to go for a blitz creek across Europe to do something. And it’s really interesting because World War II is about 80 years ago, which is a cycle of history, it’s what 80 to 100 years is a cycle.
Stefan Aarnio: And I see a lot of parallels in Germany with America today. In Germany they couldn’t pay the war reparations, they were too poor. They couldn’t pay, they were desperate. They got very strong leader, Adolf Hitler, that they all go behind because they thought this guy could save us. And the United States is the same thing. They’re poor, they can’t really pay their debts, they don’t really have a way of getting out. They have a strong leader, Donald Trump. Do you think history is going to repeat itself 80 years later?
John Sneisen: Well, I’m not sure if it will repeat itself right now, but it sure is moving faster towards repeating itself. There’s more and more people exiting doing cross currency swaps with each other outside of the US dollar. Most commodities used to be paid by US dollars, and it was of course with Henrick Kissinger going to Saudi Arabia in the early 80’s making the petro dollars, everybody’s creating the oil dollars. But now everybody was mostly trading different commodities in dollars, on a global scale.
John Sneisen: Well now more and more countries are doing what’s called cross swaps with each other, where they’re going around the dollar going from Euro to Yen, from Turkish Lira to Yuan for example. So just moving away slowly from using the dollar, and that’s going to push the United States to a point where of course, they are not … If you look today they’re running about a trillion dollar deficit, and there’s like who’s going to buy all this debt that they’re issuing? China has about two trillion, Japan had about two trillion.
John Sneisen: But now countries are actually starting to sell and get rid of the United States bonds, the debt that they’ve invested because they did trade with the United States. And that’s what made the United States a massive empire is because they were able to ship all this currency all around the world instead of keeping it inside within their borders. Because if they kept all those US dollars within their borders, the US dollar would have been done for a very long time ago.
Stefan Aarnio: Right, right.
John Sneisen: Yeah.
Stefan Aarnio: So what happens, I guess this is a high level question, but what happens when the Russia’s, and the China’s, and African countries, and European countries say, “We don’t want US dollars anymore.” What happens then?
John Sneisen: Well the empire strikes back.
Stefan Aarnio: Oh, the empire, you mean like Iraq? Like when Saddam tried to trade his oil in Euro’s, and they came and slapped him down pretty hard?
John Sneisen: Yeah, or Gadhafi tried to create an African gold currency. It’s kind of the same thing.
Stefan Aarnio: They went and shot him too.
John Sneisen: Yeah, you never dare to exit out of the US dollar world reserve currency system, and that’s where they have their empire. And their military might is literally like the gun pointing at everybody. “We’ll come, do you want to be like Gadhafi, or do you want to be like Saddam Hussein?” Well nobody wants that. But now, of course, guys like even Trump has mentioned maybe we should attack Venezuela because of their problems there. We need to get Madura out of power, he’s destroying the country. Which he is, but he problem of course the United States is not very well known for coming to poor countries. They’re looking for countries that actually have their main commodity, which is oil, to invade.
John Sneisen: So I think both Iran and Venezuela is on the verge of, like especially with the military industrial complex that they created. You have an industry that is caused by the monetary system, the need to, especially for corporation to pay out dividends in a losing system that loses monetary value. Like their currency is losing value all the time, so they need more and more income in order to give a better dividend to account for the loss in value of the currency that their investors are getting. So they need to find some more, well where does [inaudible 00:36:36] or Boeing, or all these guys, where are they going to get their revenue?
John Sneisen: They’re not going to build a whole bunch of airplanes for commercial travel, that’s done for. They’re going to have to find ways to attack someone. Because if you attack someone, you’re making trillions upon trillions of dollars in revenue, and then you can pay your investor a better dividend. But they’re kind of locked in it because of the losing value, the constant losing value of the US dollar. So they have to pay that higher dividend all the time in order to save their investors. Over time, that’s what I see as, I see these corporations are probably going to push the US military industrial complex over the edge, and they want to invade somebody else. Because now they’re not making money anymore, they’re losing money. And they need some kind of revenue source. So for his companies, unfortunately that is war.
Stefan Aarnio: Right. War is a good business. John, Trump when he was running, I was following Trump watching his speeches and things. He was talking about going back on the gold standard. Do you think that’s even possible these days to go back onto the gold standard, what would happen?
John Sneisen: Well you can definitely go back to gold standard. And gold standard doesn’t really take much, because it’s simple math when you look at a gold standard. A gold standard is basically currency in circulation divided by the supply that you have of gold. So you just take the US store gold-
Stefan Aarnio: If you have no gold, you can divide it by zero so it’s infinity now.
John Sneisen: Yeah, exactly. There’s a lot of, excuse me, there’s a lot of talk about of course does the United States even have gold anymore? Have they leased it out to all these other countries, and what’s going on with gold reserves? We know Canada, where we’re from, we’ve sold every single ounce of gold that we have left in our vault. So we don’t have anything, so we’re definitely screwed if somebody like China or anybody else moves to a gold standard. But let’s say that the United States had their 8,000 tons of gold, and they went on a gold standard, that’s totally possible. You can go on a gold standard and get five ounces of gold if you wanted to.
John Sneisen: You just take the coins, like the old either the M1, the M2, the M3, like if you’re going to count all the debts, or just the deposits, or all the cash and coins in circulation. And then you just abide that by the physical supply of gold. And you can do it on a 10% backing basis, 100%, and you would get suddenly a physical value of gold again that would jump through the skies. But yeah, it’s 100% possible. And of course with Trump and now he’s basically, most of the people are out of the fed. So he can appoint a whole bunch of people that want the gold standard.
John Sneisen: So I can see that as a possibility from a desperate nation, because what else are you going to do? You’re basically bankrupt, so like what other ways are out of it by … I think the best way would actually just be to create a new currency pretty much. But I’m not a big fan of any nation states per say. I’m what you call, I don’t know if you heard the term anarchical capitalist. So I would like no government at all to bug me, and no real central bank. I just want a free market in currency, a free market in business capital, and just thrown freely around the world. Instead of having all these barriers on each other, and all these people pointing guns at you if you don’t pay taxes to the government.
John Sneisen: But yeah, you could totally have a gold standard suddenly happen. And if you don’t have all your, I call it your wealth insurance, which gold and silver has been throughout thousands of years when any currency fails. You know, you’re going to be eviscerated. Because if you only hold paper assets, or just dollars or Yen, or whatever it is that fails, well you have nothing left of what you thought you had.
Stefan Aarnio: So John, tell me about the books. You’ve got two books written. Tell me about the books, I want the people at home to hear about these books, pick them up. Because obviously you’ve done a ton of study here, you’ve got a real deep wealth of knowledge, real understanding of history. Tell me about the books, and what they’re about.
John Sneisen: Yeah. The first book that I wrote was back in 2014 I started writing it, and it was called The End of Freedom: How Our Monetary System Enslaves Us. And what that book kind of goes into, it’s just a brief like run through the monetary history all the way back from the Roman Empire, and kind of forward. Just seeing what happened through the different monetary systems that we had. I talk about how they used the basement instead of printing a whole bunch of paper money, they took away, as I was talking about earlier, they took away different metals into the currencies. And then the currency lost value over time by doing that. So I talk about that kind of monetary history.
John Sneisen: And then I go into examples of things that happened with different hyper inflation’s. I talk about Zimbabwe in there, what happened in 2008 there. I talk where suddenly people were buying, like at the time in the hundred trillion dollar Zimbabwean dollar came out, you could buy two beers with that 100 trillion dollar bill, which is like nothing. But at the time when you had the, I think it was a week later on, that 100 trillion dollar bill didn’t even buy you a glass of milk anymore. So just talk about [inaudible 00:42:29] and what happens through these currency failures, and these different cycles throughout history.
John Sneisen: I talk about, of course, China and all the things that happened there. Just giving people a perspective of how a monetary system, get their birth and how it lives and how it dies throughout history. So that’s mostly what I go through that book. And then I was talking about in that book also about some real life examples. I talk about the mass misuse of currency with the Argentinian Peso, who it’s been misused all over time. And then I talk about Ukraine, I talk about Greece, and the bills there. I talked a little bit about Cyprus, I talk about … what else did I talk about there?
John Sneisen: I mention of course Venezuela and how I actually wrote in the book, “As you read this book, there’s either of these five things that’ll happen in Venezuela. I’m sure three of them has happened already, so their currency is dead.” What is saw is that the government was dependent on 90% of their income came from oil royalties. And when your oil income goes from 200 a barrel down to almost $30 a barrel, well it’s pretty apparent that the government needs to print mass amounts of money. So that’s kind of how I predicted the Venezuelan hyper inflation, and now devaluation. And now just a couple, a week ago they devalued the currency 96%.
John Sneisen: So I talk about that, and then I go a little bit into what I call the interest rate [inaudible 00:44:05] today. Where you have these money lenders, like cash lenders and so on, versus the Buffet’s that are sitting there getting the zero percent basically on their loans. So just talking a little bit about that. And then I talk about bail ins there, and how if you have money in the bank it’s not yours. And how suddenly what happened in Cyprus, where people thought that they even had insured money and the process in the bank, how they lost that money. So just talk about that in the book. And just give people kind of an overview of the past, the present, and I’m talking a little bit about the future in that book as well.
John Sneisen: Now I didn’t talk very much about cryptocurrencies or anything because it didn’t really like come to my mind. I just actually in 2014 I found out about that. But yeah, that’s what I talk about in that book. So basically giving people a brief overview over how money works, and getting to understand it. Because when you understand how money works, you’ll invest differently, you’ll think differently, you prepare differently what you would have done if you had no clue what’s happening in the world. So that’s the essence of my book, The End of Freedom. How Our Monetary System Enslaves us.
Stefan Aarnio: Okay, awesome. And then the new one you have right now about Canada, the Greatest Economy in the World? That’s doing really well on Amazon, I’ve seen it on the top of the charts. What’s that about in a nutshell?
John Sneisen: In a nutshell, it’s basically taking the concept of there was a couple articles that came out, I think it was in 2014-15, that said that Canada’s banking system and economy is one of the strongest in the world. And I had from me starting to do YouTube videos at the time in 2015 and 16, I started to have a lot of people asking me, “What’s going on in Canada? Can you tell us a little bit about what’s actually happening in Canada, and how can we protect ourselves? Do we have similar things happening to the economy? Because if I look at the news and BNN, they’re telling me everything is great and we’re in for decades of great growth and no problems on the horizon over here because our banks are solid, our businesses are some of the greatest in the world, and our currency is strong.”
John Sneisen: So yeah, so I kind of just started to debunk that statement. And I just go into everything from how actually the banks in 2008 here in Canada, they claim that they weren’t bailed out, but they actually were bailed out. They got a fund, they took money from a TARP fund, troubled asset relief program, that the Federal Reserve created in 2008 to bail out mass amounts of banks all over the world. And they would only talk about the American banks that they bailed out. But if you look at when they were questioned in congress, they actually said that they couldn’t tell people where that money went. But I’ve had people approaching me and giving me actually PDF documents that shows all the numbers from the funds. So I have some of that stuff in the book, I talk about that.
John Sneisen: And then of course, I attack the talk that Canada’s bank, or some of the banks are some of the strongest in the world. I talk about especially how we, Canada was the first country after Cypress to implement what’s called bailing regimes, which is basically if a bank fails, you thought your under $100,000 deposit is insured. Well I found out through my research that the CDIC only holds 0.39% of the deposits under 100,000 in a fund. So there’s not-
Stefan Aarnio: Wow.
John Sneisen: Yeah, so there’s not very much that actually is insured. And this is like with a lot of insurance companies that are the bigger ones have not that much actual physical capital and collateral behind themselves to … Like in a crisis if something happens, look at for example in 2008 with AIG toppling because of all the insurance claims through what’s called credit default swaps. They went bankrupt and they had to be bailed out, and that was one of the biggest insurers in the world. So I just attack the banks, and their proposed CDIC, how their deposits are all safe. I kind of crush that in my book, and I talk about the bail in regimes, how that is proposed.
John Sneisen: And I talk about the mass amounts of debts that are mounting in Canada. And this was, like when I started writing it was 2015, and I was seeing the warning signals that our private debt to GDP in Canada was two-hundred-and-twenty-something well now it’s two-hundred-and-almost-seventy percent. So you see the rise and just accumulation. I call it like debt saturation that happens. Because when you push x amount of debt into it could be a business sector, it could be real estate, it could be credit cards, it could be auto loans.
John Sneisen: There’s suddenly not going to be enough people to take on more houses, or more cars because you saturated the market with everybody’s now owning a house, everybody’s now owning a car. So there’s no more people to actually get to, and that’s where you get the problem where suddenly you have mass defaults. Because there’s not enough people to pay, not enough money created to actually pay the interest. And then suddenly the mortgages, the car loans start to fail. And that’s what you see is happening, especially in Toronto with the mortgages there. Like you’re seeing them just continuing going up.
John Sneisen: And as you said, we might as well like see $3 million homes there. And it could be very soon, you never know. But I talk about the massive debt problem that we have. And of course, I talk about … I actually wrote the book before Trudeau got in. So I didn’t even mention how terrible they’re running stuff. But I just talk about how terrible it is with the government, and what they’re doing, how much taxes we have in Canada. I talk about the corruption in the CRA, how they basically are a privately run organization that are hired for profit to actually take in as much taxes from the Canadian populous as possible.
John Sneisen: And then I talk about the mutual fund industry. I used to in 2009 or 10, I used to sell [inaudible 00:50:38] market products. So I used to sell syndicated mortgages [inaudible 00:50:42] that term to most of your viewers. And at that time I started to really dig deep into understanding the RSP system, and how you have the mutual funds, retirement, different retirement vehicles that people had. And I kind of debunk it. And I actually had a guy that doesn’t want to come out with his name, a financial advisor that advises me on a lot of stuff. He wrote a piece in my book about the corruption between, the collusion between the government and the banks. I talk about how the banks, they are in bed with the government.
John Sneisen: Because what they did with the RSP’s and so on, well they give you a little bit of money upfront as a rebate for you contributing into your fund. But then the banks get the benefit of getting all this money out of your account through the management expense ratios, and all these fees. And they make a whole bunch of money on that. Meanwhile the government can collect 30, 40, 50% in income tax at the end. And my investment advisor, a good friend of mine, he was telling how now people in their 50’s, 60’s, 70’s are surprised that they had to pay taxes on all this stuff. So they literally hadn’t saved up enough money. They didn’t know that they were going to pay 30, 40% in income tax [inaudible 00:52:01].
John Sneisen: That’s another thing that I break down, I’m trying to remember if there was a couple more things, but that’s mostly what I’m talking about in my book. And then I talk about the future, what we can see with a cashless society. Where you remove any cash physical coinage, or notes from the system. So I talk about that in the book, and how there’s actually a policy that was created by a guy called Kenneth Rogoff he wrote a book on it called The Curse of Cash, where he actually talks about how to implement a cashless system in any country around the world. And when you go and look at India and all these people that [inaudible 00:52:37], well they followed his book to the nine’s with exactly how to do it. So I talk about that in the book.
John Sneisen: And kind of the future of how they want to merge us into this massive government, and massive one world organization with the United Nations being at the helm. Where you have the international monetary fund being in control. And issuing what’s called a special drawing right, which is their global currency that they’ve been sitting on for 60 years, and they’re ready to roll that out. And actually just recently, I think I did a video on it for I think it was 2017, early 2017 when I bumped into there was a talk about a global tax corporation system. Well sure enough I found out about it later on that a guy called James Rickars, which a lot of people should read, he has a book called Currency Wars, the Death of the Dollar, the Death of Money and so on. Really insightful, he’s an economist.
John Sneisen: But in his book, I actually read about what I started talking about. That they actually created this thing for, especially this is for people that invest around the world, and have different corporations, it’s called base erosion and profit shifting. And it’s basically 100 signatories right now where they share tax data between each other, between nations. So now they’re coming after those pesky big corporations they talk about. But I think the people that they really want to target is the smaller investors, the smaller fish in the sea that doesn’t have millions upon millions to spend on tax lawyers. But yeah, so that’s kind of the concept.
John Sneisen: I kind of debunk that Canada is a really strong economy, and just help people understand where the strong points of Canada is as well. Like if we have a crisis, I talk about we have so much commodities and food in our country, that really we would be quite fine during a crisis. But not Toronto or Vancouver, because there in the stores you only have food for three days at a time. So if you get a crisis and like the world monetary trade and everything locks up, well people are going to run out of food quite quickly. And if you haven’t prepared for something like that, that usually comes throughout history. With hyper inflation and with all this failure of the currency, you’re going to get really hurt, even if you thought you had millions upon millions of dollars.
Stefan Aarnio: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Wow, that’s some heavy stuff there John.
Stefan Aarnio: Now the people at home, top three books you recommend people could read more about this stuff. What’s the top three books you recommend?
John Sneisen: You know one of my favorite books is what is it again, it’s called the History of Fiat Paper Money, and it’s buy a guy called Ralph T. Foster. If you have a little bit of, you have a want to understand this kind of stuff, it’s actually I met with Robert [inaudible 00:56:24] just recently and he actually is buying that book as well, because he hadn’t read that book. Because it just gives you like a historical run through history of every single currency that have failed. And you kind of, it’s a storybook, so you read all these stories of people. How and what happened throughout these calamities, and it’s like a repeating book. You just read through what happened in China, what happened in Europe, what happened in current in Zimbabwe. It’s all the same stories all over again, but it’s just from a concept of early 1000’s when they used to live at that time to the late 2000’s now. It’s kind of the same repeating story. So that’s a very powerful book, I call it the bible on paper money. If you want to read anything and learn anything, that’s the number one book that I really tell people to get.
John Sneisen: And then I actually have another book here, one of my newest favorite books that I started reading, it’s called Dark Pools by Scott Patterson. And it’s a book that tells you about the rise of electronic and algorithmic trading, and artificial intelligence. It talks about heir early story when it started in 1995, and all of that. So that’s another amazing history of how we got to the point where we’re at today. And it really gives you an insight of how risky it is today compared to what it was before when everybody was slowly trading. Well I recently actually one of the … like a quant is a trader that uses only computer trading, he doesn’t trade himself, he uses algorithms.
John Sneisen: The top quanta JP Morgan said that we might be set for some of the biggest drops in 50, 60 years that we’ve ever seen. But it’s going to be flash crashes in seconds because of these electronic trading machines are just trading up on each other. And really just it could collapse quite quickly. And then of course, he also said that it might be riots and chaos that you never have seen throughout history. So yeah, that is another fantastic book. And then I’m trying to find another really good book that people would read.
John Sneisen: It would be the Devil’s Derivatives by Nicholas Dunbar. And he talks about the history of how derivatives got created by the banks all across the world. Really insightful book, it talks about how [inaudible 00:58:58] masters from JP Morgan created what’s called the credit default swap. They didn’t want the regulators to get involved with them, so they called it a credit default swap instead of credit default insurance. So they just renamed it in order to get away from the regulation. And the credit default swaps was what blew up AIG in 2008. So that’s three of my favorite books to really give you a deep insight of how the markets and everything works.
Stefan Aarnio: It’s heavy, it’s heavy, John. What’s the one thing young people need to succeed these days? Last question before we go, what’s the one thing young people need to succeed?
John Sneisen: Well you need to, I would say two things. You need financial IQ, and you need personal IQ, where you need to get into personal development, you need to understand yourself. And really delve deep down into how you work as a human being. Because if you can control yourself, and you can control your money, that is the most two powerful things that any human being on this planet Earth can do today. Most of the people that we are talking about that are hugely successful, they understand those two principles.
Stefan Aarnio: Fantastic. Thanks so much for being on the show, John, Respect The Grind. This is a real heavy one, I think some people are going to have to listen to this twice. You’ve got some real intellectual stuff. Thank you so much for being here. We’ll see you see on.
John Sneisen: Thank you.
Stefan Aarnio: Hey, it’s Stefan Aarnio here. Thank you for listening to another episode of my podcast, Respect The Grind. Now if you liked the content on his podcast today, you are going to love my new book, Hard Times Creates Strong Men. Now we live in an age right now where the men have become weak, society has become weak, the mindset has become weak. What does it mean to be a man? Whether you’re a man, or a woman, you’re going to find value in this book, Hard Times Creates Strong Men, which reveal the philosophy and the power of what it takes to be strong in today’s market economy. Go ahead and get a copy of Hard Times Creates Strong Men at hardtimesstrongmen.com/podcast. That’s going to be a special offer just for podcast listeners. That’s hardtimesstrongmen.com/podcast. Get the book, you’re going to love it. It’s going to change the way you think. I’m Stefan Aarnio, respect the grind, we’ll see you on the next episode.
