#754: 15% Inflation Is Coming Back with Chris Martenson

**SPEAKER_1** (0:07)
You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free.
When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:18)
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:29)
I mean, that's part of the bold case for Bitcoin.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:31)
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

**Marty Bent** (0:36)
Chris Martenson, welcome to the show, sir. Very excited for this conversation. I've been a fan for years.

**Chris Martenson** (0:42)
Well, thank you. And thank you for developing the show and inviting me on. I'm thrilled to be here.

**Marty Bent** (0:47)
Like I was saying, my audience and myself, we have to give you a massive thank you for hosting our crazy Uncle Dave's Year in Review for many years now. And it's one of my favorite times of the year is when Dave finally gets around to publishing his year in review and then having a conversation with him.

**Chris Martenson** (1:08)
Yeah, it's always a little bit of a mad... Can you hear that, unfortunately?

**Marty Bent** (1:13)
It's a dog. OK.

**Chris Martenson** (1:15)
Yeah. And every year, it's such a fun thing with Dave because somewhere around November, he says, I'm not doing it. And then somewhere around mid early December, he's like, OK, I'm doing it. And then the stuff flies in like last minute, hundreds of pages. And he's very, very meticulous. Like everything has to be referenced, footnoted, you know, everything. And it's always a mad scramble. But what a what a joy to host that thing. It's one of my favorite.
I just love reading it every year.

**Marty Bent** (1:40)
I do as well. It's take a day or two over Christmas break if he gets it out by then and dive in. But yeah, we're we're here to speak with you, Chris. And I think it's a good time to speak with you considering everything that's going on in the straight ahead of her moves. I guess flip flopping, tacoing, cease fire on, cease fire off. What is going on? You wrote a piece, I believe, almost a month ago in May, calling for oil above $200, possibly much higher.
Are we on trajectory to hit that still? Do you think? How are you viewing everything that's going on in the Middle East right now?

**Chris Martenson** (2:22)
Well, you have to take one of two positions here, right? One is this is just rank and competence, right? And you get these terrible outcomes. And the other is that this is part of a suite of things that are being done to intentionally damage the United States.
And I'm leaning kind of 80% towards this is intentional because if you flip a coin 50 times, it comes up heads every time. You got to start thinking maybe it's not a fair coin, you know?
So what's been happening is, you know, what we saw early on, like the Strait of Hormuz gets closed, within two or three days, oil spikes to 120 a barrel, and then all of a sudden, all these traders out at Trefegura and all these other big houses, like somebody has stepped in in size and has started to sell these things, right? And so my architecture for understanding the markets, I was a day trader for a while. I was really successful 2005, 6, 7, and then my whole system fell apart in 2008 And I think that was kind of the rise of the machines at that point, right? Where there were really elegant algorithms with obviously faster fingers than I had, you know? And I remember the moment. So I was trading gold futures at that point in time, almost exclusively, and I was sitting on 10 contracts, and they had a really nice gain on them, but I had this really distant trailing stop, and I woke up the next morning and all 10 were gone. And somebody had come in and the price had gone just down. I personally got pickpocketed, right? My 10 contracts was the total volume in that tick, and it just, just somebody reached in and took it, and I said, okay, this isn't a fair game anymore. It's just, it's, you know, tuition's expensive in trading, but when I figured out just how fraudulent it was at that moment, right? Because that's not price discovery, that's clearly leaving and price setting. I started understanding that that's what the futures markets are really used for.
And that started obviously in the precious metals, but then I started to see these same patterns. And it was about two years ago, that same pattern started to show up in oil, right? Where in a single one minute candle, it would be three, four, five, six million barrels of oil sold all at once, just crushes the bid stack. Every bid under that normal bid stack that, an ass stack that's sitting there just gets crushed, right? And it had the same flavor as like watching a 2 a.m. silver slam where the bid stack would get crushed, but then that's the new price. It's not like all this activity reassembled and brought it back up again. And so I observed, okay, price setting is a thing. And obviously, there's no regulatory oversight that's interested at the CFTC, SEC, and curbing that behavior. And I think the explanation for that's easy because when that behavior is reinforcing the official narrative, it's okay, you know, that's just part of the game.