What Does The Post-War Future Of The US Dollar Look Like? | Brent Johnson

**Adam Taggart** (0:02)
All right, and we should be live here. Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money Founder and your host, Adam Taggart. Welcoming you here for a special discussion, the special live stream discussion with the godfather of the Dollar Milkshake Theory himself, Mr. Brent Johnson. Brent, how are you doing?

**Brent Johnson** (0:18)
I'm good, thanks. How are you?

**Adam Taggart** (0:20)
Well, thanks Brent. Look, thanks so much for doing this. I know you've been traveling. Appreciate you on your first day back being willing to do this. But Brent, I've had a lot of folks asking for your presence on the channel recently, and I think a really big debate that's going on right now, that you're the perfect guy to tap on it, is, all right, so America has gone to war with Iran. There is certainly a large group that says, this is an unnecessary war. America is being a bully and at the same time injuring the rest of the world by sending oil prices skyrocketing and limiting lots of other key resources that come through the Gulf, you know, helium, which is important for semiconductors, fertilizers, et cetera. And so there's this sense of America creating a lot of unnecessary issues, and they're saying, look, this is going to come back and really bite America big time.
You know, trust in America is down.
Folks are going to start trying to find other partners to trade with, and in particular, that comes down to the dollar. Man, if you were thinking about de-dollarizing or were de-dollarizing before, this is just going to add fuel to that fire. Now there's another school of thought that says, look, America is doing what no other country in the world had the courage to do, but it needs to be done, making the world a safer place, preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons. America is fighting the most one-sided war in modern history and demonstrating the prowess of its military might. And not only is America being a force for good here, but it's showing itself the strong single superpower, and man, I want to be on that guy's team. And there's a lot of things going on, which we'll get into, but new swap lines and things like that. Things that people like yourself, I believe, are saying, hey, if the world needed dollars before this conflict, it's going to need to be even more. So these are two very conflicting points of view, Brent. Love to get your thought on where you think the truth lies. Is it more to one side than the other, or is it somewhere in the middle?
And right as I asked that question, Brent, you froze. Folks, Brent warned me that he might be having some connectivity issues here. So I will tap dance for a minute or two. Hopefully, that's all it takes for Brent to get back connected here.
Real quick, for those that are following the latest news in the war, at least as I found out this morning, it is that the regime is remaining super defiant. Not a huge surprise. President Trump, on the other hand, seems to be willing to ratchet things up here. He has basically said, look, blockade is going to continue until we get the concessions we need. In fact, we're probably going to add some military, some resumption of military actions on top of that.
I think the U.S.'s standpoint is maybe that combination of both keeping an economic stranglehold on the economy by keeping the Gulf closed, and continuing to take out whatever key assets remain of the Iranian infrastructure will be enough to get the Iranians to come and make the concessions that America wants. Is that going to happen? Folks, who knows? We're following all this in real time. Obviously, the oil market has not been too thrilled about this. Price of oil has continued to go up here, but we will see what comes from here. As Brent will hopefully explain in greater detail than myself here, one of the newer developments around this has been the number of countries that have come to the US to request these swap lines, which it's been funny because I've heard some people say, hey, these swap lines are agents of de-dollarization, which to be honest, folks, I'm not entirely sure how that argument goes. Now, what Brent, I think, will say is, hey, these things aren't gifts, they're loans, and when they need to be repaid, that creates additional demand for dollars in the market, so this latest development of countries requesting swap lines certainly seems to be a near-term validation that the world indeed is still just as dependent on the dollar as it was before, and maybe even more so going forward. All right, folks, so we're dealing with Murphy's Law in real time, Brent is just telling me that his whole Internet has locked up. So I'm just going to ask him if he can join via his phone, and if that doesn't work, folks, we might have to reschedule this, but in the interim here, this is a live stream. So if you are watching, you are more than welcome to ask me some questions here, and I will do my best to answer them in real time. I will tap dance for a few more minutes, and if Brent tells me he just can't get back in, then we will have to reschedule this, and my apologies for that. Let's see here. Very quickly, in case you didn't watch it, some other germane news to this discussion that I'll ask Brent about is Federal Reserve. Obviously, he's going through a big changing of the guard right now. Yesterday, we had Jerome Powell's last conference at the Federal Reserve, and Brent is going to try to get in by his phone, by the way, folks.