Iran, Oil and the Next Financial Crisis | Luke Gromen

**Luke Gromen** (0:02)
Everyone's like a lined up for the comfortable lie. No one wants to get in the line of the inconvenient truth. Would he start launching nukes? What happens next? People were paying 350,000 bucks for a jet ride out of the Middle East. You're in the UAE and you need to get your money out of UAE as fast as you can.
I buy some Bitcoin. Bitcoin was going up as things were getting worse in the Middle East. Normally, Bitcoin is fully risk-on. And in this case, it was actually acting as risk-off. This is going to go really fast. You know, it moves. Connect up a couple of computers, boom, gone. GTFO, like game over, see you later. People aren't going to pay their mortgages and their car loans and credit card bills. And then those things are going to blow up something in private credit. Private credit is going to have an issue. And then the banks are going to pull back on lending. And any kind of recession will force us into default on the treasuries or entitlements or print the money. And they'll print the money. I don't know how they're going to get there. To me, the only debate is how fast.

**Danny Knowles** (1:06)
Luke Gromen, great to see you, mate. How are you?

**Luke Gromen** (1:09)
Well, Danny, how are you?

**Danny Knowles** (1:11)
I am really good. Thank you. I was just talking to you before we started recording. It's 6 AM here in Australia and I was like, what did I miss, Luke? And you said, well, the war is over. So fill us in. What's happened while I've been asleep?

**Luke Gromen** (1:28)
Um, well, you were going to bed. You probably saw oil at 119 It finished. It is now at 84 again. It basically went straight downhill after they came in this morning. There was a rumor of a G, well, not a rumor, a report that G7 was going to get together and sell their oil out of their SPR. Uh, to get oil down, then they said, well, we're not actually doing that. Um, we've seen more news of refineries shutting down. I think I saw the Saudis. There was news last night of the US evacuating its embassy in Saudi Arabia. Um, there was news earlier today, potential. I am not sure if this was confirmed. US consulate was evacuated in Adana, Turkey. Um, this afternoon, Israel came out and said, um, there were, there was a report in Washington Post, essentially, that Israeli officials were beginning to, quote unquote, get concerned. Um, uh, understandably so, uh, with Tel Aviv getting hit last night and the lights getting apparently turned off. Uh, as, as the reports that I saw, um, we had, um, what was the next thing? Wait, oh, we had, um, Senator, uh, um, Senator Warmonger from South Carolina. What's his name? Um, I can't think of it. Um, at any rate, this guy has, like, literally been dreaming about bombing Iran since he was in the crib. And at any rate, um, he came out today and said, uh-oh, the Saudis are not supporting us. Maybe we should, like, slow this down a little bit. What's going on here? Um, and, uh, Senator Graham, Lindsey Graham, that's his name, not Senator War Monger. Uh, translates, actually, in South Carolinian, Senator Lindsey Graham translates to War Monger.
Anyway, I'm being more overtly political than I usually am. I should stop it. Um, it's only because I think it strategically was a very big mistake. At any rate, uh, shortly thereafter, the Iranians came out and said, every missile we fire from now on is going to be more than one ton warhead, uh, which, you know, I tweeted at the time, it's a big geopolitical poker call, right? Calling race, which is, we've been saying, we have plenty of air defense missiles left. The Israelis have been saying same, uh, and have been, we've both been saying the Iranians are going to run out soon. And the Iranians are like, we can keep doing this for a while and we're fine. And we are about to find out and literally probably about 20 minutes after that headline hit and about an hour or so after the Israeli Washington Post headlines hit, we have a CBS report citing Trump that he's saying basically the war is over. That, you know, we've destroyed their Navy and we've done, we've largely disrupted their, we've largely, or no, we've destroyed their ability to shoot missiles. Now, literally 20 minutes after he said that, Iran began getting hit or began, Israel began reporting getting hit by more missiles overnight. Yeah, it's getting to be nighttime there now. So it is nighttime there now.