Forty trillion, from Malibu

What this hour covers

• The $40 trillion number: where it came from, how fast, and which part should worry you
• The budget line nobody wants to name, now bigger than national defense
• What gold did, what silver did, and why silver moved harder
• The textbook rule the market broke this week
• What to listen for when the world's central bankers meet in Wyoming

Full transcript

Welcome, welcome, welcome in everyone to the Gold Hour. I'm Alan Johnson Today's a little different, I'm actually out in Malibu I decided to get away from all of the hula blue going on in Los Angeles so I decided to take it off weekend off and come out here into Malibu so I had to kind of get away from the ocean so I could actually do this show because I had literally no service down there Well, if you're new to the show, I want to welcome you in and I'm really glad that you found me and if you've been with me for a while, you know how this works I read the same headlines you do I just read the fine print underneath it and I report it and let me tell you, this past week, two things happened thing number one, on Wednesday, the Treasury Department reported that the national debt of the United States crossed $40 trillion $40 trillion with a big fat tea and then number two, on Friday, gold closed out its best week since the spring, the highest price in three months and silver crossed $70 an ounce for the first time since June same week, coincidence?

Well, I'll let you decide by the end of the hour Now, let's get right into it because here's what I've got for you today First, we're going to sit down with that $40 trillion number and I'm going to just rip it apart, I'm going to take it apart and by the way, this is not to scare you, it's to show you what's actually inside that number and where it came from and how fast it actually got here and which part of it should worry you and which part shouldn't then I'm going to explain the one line item in the federal budget that nobody wants to talk about at all and that is now bigger than the national defense and I'll walk you through it the way a banker would walk you through your own bank statement because that's really all this is, it's a statement and after that, we're going to talk about the metals and what gold actually did this week and why and what silver did and why silver moved harder than gold which it usually does and I'll explain why that is and then I want to do something a little different I want to show you a thing that happened this week that literally broke the textbook there's a rule in finance that everybody accepts, everybody and this week the market threw it out the window and most people didn't even notice, you will after today and then we're going to take a look ahead because of this next Friday this next Friday all the central bankers in the world, I'm talking about all of them they go to a resort in Wyoming and they talk about our money, your money and I'll tell you what to actually be listening for because this is a big week and then we'll do the silver lining one word we'll talk word number seven and I'll tell you what I'm doing about all of this personally with my own clients, that's the hour so pour the coffee, get your drink and let's get right into it and I just want to give a shout out to one of my clients out there Carol, I know she's listening, I just want to say hello alright, so let's talk about the $40 trillion this happened, listen to this on Wednesday morning the treasury department literally put out a report and they put that report out every single day it's called the daily treasury statement and you know what, nobody reads it and it's about as exciting as a phone book but on Wednesday the number in it actually made the news and as of Monday August the 18th the gross national debt of the United States was at $40 trillion $47 billion $425 billion and some change and I'm going to say that again but slower $40 trillion now I know what happens when I say a number like that here on the radio your brain does not you know your brain does what your brain does and it goes okay that's a big number and then of course it just kind of moves on because you can't picture it, nobody can picture it so let's not try to picture it, let's do something better let's look at how fast it actually got here follow me in October of last year the debt crossed $38 trillion October now in March of this year it crossed $39 trillion and then on Monday it crossed $40 October to March, listen to this, five months look at the pattern here October to March, five months March to August, five months so I'm talking about $1 trillion every five months and that's the number that really matters it's not the $40, it's the $5 so let me put that five months up against some history it took this country nearly 200 years to borrow its first $1 trillion its first trillion dollars 200 years we're talking about revolutionary wars civil wars, World War I, the Great Depression World War II, Korea, Vietnam, all of it everything this country ever did the first $1 trillion showed up in 1981 now we add that same trillion in 150 days and the head of the committee for a responsible federal budget said something this week that I thought was worth repeating and here's what she said she said the gross debt has doubled in the last 10 years and it has quadrupled in less than 20 well that word quadrupled times four inside of 20 years and she added a line that stuck with me she said it is staggering how predictable the decline of a great power can be I don't think she meant that as a prophecy I think she meant it as a complaint because everybody saw this coming and I'm talking about everybody this wasn't a surprise attack this was a slow leak and a tire that everybody just kept driving on now here's the part that surprised the professionals and it came early the Congressional Budget Office by the way that's the official scorekeeper in Washington they're the ones that keep up with all the numbers they had us hitting 40 trillion in 2027 but it's already here now months ahead of its schedule so what moved it up?

well let me tell you there's a couple of things and one of them you probably didn't even hear about so the Supreme Court struck down a big chunk of the tariffs which means the money that was collected under those tariffs wasn't legally collected which means it had to go back had to go back over a hundred billion dollars was refunded this was money that was already counted in as income and it was already spent that money was already gone now I'm telling you a hundred billion dollars of expected revenue turned into a hundred billion dollars of outgoing checks and the debt clock actually felt it that's how thin the margin is right now and one court ruling moved the national debt milestone up by months now let me give you the plain shape of the federal budget because once you see it you won't be able to unsee it the government is collecting about five trillion dollars a year which is a record revenue when you look at it which most money which is the most money that it's ever even taken in and it's spending about seven trillion that's five and seven out that's a two trillion dollar whole bill every year it's just getting bigger and bigger that whole isn't getting filled it's getting deeper and deeper so next year you've got the same two trillion dollar whole plus the interest on the two trillion you borrowed last year and the year before and the year before that story that's it that's the entire forty trillion dollar story in four sentences it isn't complicated it's just relentless you know I mentioned 1981 I want to go back to that year for a second 1981 because I'll tell you I was working a lot working on a lot and a lot of you were working on as well and in 1981 is the year the debt hit its first trillion dollars remember we mentioned that and now here's what I want you to notice in 1981 gold was around four hundred dollars an ounce 1981 today gold is around forty six hundred so when ounce of gold buys about eleven times as many dollars as it did back then are you following me on this?

now here's a question did gold get eleven times better? is it more shinier? is it heavier? did they invent a new way to use it? no that's not it gold's still the same gold it always will be it's been the same gold since it came out of the ground what people need to understand is what changed is the dollar it takes eleven times as many of them now and that's not gold going up that's the yard stick shrinking and we all agreed you know to keep this calling it a yard the dollar just keeps getting smaller and smaller and think about what else you remember from 1981 do you remember a house? a car? a week of groceries? a year of college?

do you remember those numbers? you know exactly what they were and when you say them out loud to a young person today they probably wouldn't even believe you they think you're exaggerating they think we're crazy well we're not we're not exaggerating and we're not crazy you me we just lived through the shrinkage and they didn't and let me tell you gold hasn't gone up eleven times since 1981 the dollar has gone down and that's the whole argument for owning some it's right there it doesn't need any more than that and it isn't about I tell people it's not a get rich quick scheme it's not about getting rich nobody ever got rich on gold it's about not about you getting quietly poor while your statement says you're fine now whenever I talk to you about the debt on this show I get the same question sent to me by email all the time and it's a good question and it's the right question and the question is Alan who do we actually owe this to because there's a let me tell you there's a picture in people's head and even I've heard it so many times that we owe forty trillion dollars to China and that picture is mostly wrong and let me clean it up the forty trillion splits into two piles pile one is about thirty two trillion and that's called debt held by the public you can imagine that's the real stuff that's bonds that gets that got sold to somebody and who's the somebody and mostly us American banks, American insurance companies American pension funds mutual funds that your own for one K owns a piece of state governments, city governments and the Federal Reserve itself owns a big stack and then foreign countries do own a chunk.

Japan, China the United Kingdom and others but it's a minority of the pile not the whole thing now pile two is about seven or eight trillion and this one's really strange that's the government owing money to itself mostly it's the Social Security trust fund and for decades Social Security took in more than it actually paid out and the surplus didn't go in evolved it got lent to the rest of the government and then the government just simply wrote an IOU so a chunk of the national debt is Washington owing Washington which sounds like it doesn't count but it counts because when Social Security needs that money back and it needs it now the government has to actually come up with that money and it comes up with it by guess what borrowing from pile one so here's the honest version of who we owe it to we owe most of it to ourselves and I know some people here that and just relax oh we owe it to ourselves that's fine well it's not fine and here's why if your family owes money to your family then you can work it out maybe it ain't skivin' maybe but that's not what this is this is one group of Americans owning another group of Americans which one owes each one and the retiree holding the treasury bond is not the same person as the young worker whose taxes pay the interest on it those are different people with different interest and when the bill gets big enough well someone has to decide which of those two gets shorted and this is not a accounting question that's a political question and political questions get answered by whoever has the most votes at the time so we owe it to ourselves it isn't comfort at all it's just means that the fight will be an American fight and a couple more numbers and then I'm going to move on one group that tracks this put the debt at about $116,000 per American some of you know I mean it's crazy per American not per taxpayer per person meaning your new born grandbaby if you have one first day home from the hospital carries $116,000 and the folks at the Peterson Foundation which is a nonpartisan outfit they've been at this for a long time and they figure at this pace we will hit $50 trillion in about six years six years I'm talking about another $10 trillion their chief executive said something plain that I liked he said we've been running deficits for 26 years and we've ignored the structural problems the whole time and he said like any debt problem the longer you ignore it the worse it gets and that's not a Republican thing to say or a Democrat thing to say that's what any loan officer in America would tell you about your own balance sheet all right listen I want to spend some time some real time here because this is the part that actually is going to that touches you it touches your life and I want to explain it the way I'd explain it in my own kitchen table so let's just talk about a credit card everybody's had one everybody has one everybody understands one you get the statement in the mail or on your phone now even and there are two numbers on it there's the balance you know the big scary one at the top and then there's the minimum payment the little one at the bottom and here's the thing every one of us has figured out some point in our lives the minimum payment doesn't buy you anything it doesn't pay for your refrigerator you charge it doesn't pay for the tires on the car it just pays the bank for the privilege of still owing them you write the check you mail it in and then the balance is exactly where it was you bought nothing you just rented the debt for another month all right hold on to that thought for a minute the reason I'm telling you that is because the head of the house budget committee put out a statement this week with a number in it and he said that the federal government is now borrowing about six billion dollars a day six billion every day weekends included and then he said the part that I want you to hear more than half of that six billion is interest on the debt that we already have more than half so of the six billion dollars this government borrows today before you even finish your coffee over three billion of it buys nothing not a road not a soldier not a social security check not a hospital bed three billion dollars a day is the minimum payment it's rent on money that was spent years ago by people who are almost you know mostly retired now on things most of us can't even remember over half of what this country borrows every single day goes to renting the debt it already has and I want to give you one more number so you can feel the size of it the United States is now paying somewhere around 1.1 trillion dollars a year in interest just interest 1.1 trillion that is more than this country and I've said this over and over before spends on our national events now let that sit for a second we spend more renting our old debt and we spend on the entire United States military Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard and Space Force every base every ship every plane every paycheck interest is bigger and in the first 10 months of this budget year interest passed health insurance spending as well it is now the second largest thing this government does with our money only retirement benefits like social security is bigger number two on the list of what America spends money on is being in debt now here's why I made you think about the credit card because when a family gets in this spot there are only four ways out only four and there have only ever been four and number one you earn more fantastic I was talking to some people this past week about this and I'm like you get a raise, you get a second job, you bring in more money and for a country that's pretty good growth that's pretty good economic growth real growth and it's the good answer it's the only painless answer number two you spend less you decide to cut the cable skip that vacation you want to tighten up for a country that means cutting programs people depend on which is why it basically never happens and number three you just don't pay, you default you don't pay your bills, you just default well for a country that's the end of the world as we know it and nobody's doing that and number four four is the one you really need to listen and understand four is you make the dollars themselves become worth less you don't tell anybody what you're doing you don't tell anybody you're doing it there's no vote there's no announcement you just make more of them and what happens?

the debt gets easier to carry because it's carried in dollars and the dollars just got lighter now does the debt go away? no, does the number on the statements go down? no, but the numbers stop mattering as much because everything else went up and guess who gets to pay for that? the person holding dollars that's who pays every time it's always been who pays us, the savers, the pensioner the pension pays, the bond pays the CD pays and the guy who owed the money he pays it back in money that's worth less than what he borrowed it and there's four ways out of a debt the size and three of them require Congress to do something and do something hard and the fourth one doesn't require Congress to do anything at all so which one do you think they would bet on?

I'm not going to answer that for you but I'm just going to leave the question sitting right there one more thing on this and then I'm going to move on to my favorite and that's precious metals there are serious people smart people not fools who look at the same 40 trillion and say just relax and their argument goes like this the debt is big but the economy is big too and what matters is the ratio not the raw number well the United States borrows in its own currency which means it can never be forced into default the way Argentina can and people have been predicting a debt crisis for 40 years and it hasn't come yet and every year the doom crowd is wrong and every year they say next year and you know what?

they're not wrong about that last part people have been screaming about the debt since I was a young man and here we are our lights are still on so don't let me talk you into certainty in the other direction either nobody rings a bell what I'd say is this the argument used to be the debt is large but manageable and the thing that made it manageable was cheap money when you can borrow money at 1% you can carry almost anything well that number is gone zip it's just gone the interest bill is now the second largest line in the budget and the borrowing rate is the highest it's been in years so that manageable part of the sentence is doing a lot more work than it actually used to that's not doom that's just where the numbers actually are right now alright let's talk about my favorite subject which is gold silver because while all of this is going on in Washington right now something was going on in the market and those of you that got gold I want you to listen really closely about this gold had its best week and months by Friday spot gold was trading around $4,600 an ounce the futures contract that some of this got up over $4,650 at one point during the day $4,000 $4,450 well that's the highest gold it's been since the middle of May three months we're talking about and for the week gold was up five percent five days a percent a day third weekly gain in a row and for the month of August so far gold is up better than 11 percent compare this time to last year up about a third now I want to be careful here you know I always am because there's a version of this show where I just tell you gold went up and you should feel good well I'm not going to do that that's not this show never has been I won't let it be let me give you the whole picture including the ugly part because you need to know the ugly part as well because those sales guys won't tell you it this spring was really rough for gold in the second quarter April May June gold lost about 16 percent of its value worst quarter for gold in more than a decade and then it came after gold hit a record high early this year that came right after that near fifty six hundred dollars in January and then it just fell hard so if you bought at the very top in January some of you are you're still under water today and I'm not going to pretend otherwise you know if I did what this week is listen to me is a recovery it's a recovery and it's a good one but it's not a new record gold at forty six hundred is a three month high it's not an all-time high and anybody who tells you different they're going to try to sell you something so why did it move this week well there's three reasons and I'll go through them reason one we all know the dollar got softer weaker and here's what that actually means in plain terms gold is priced in dollars all over the world so if the dollar loses its value it gets weaker it takes more of them to buy the same ounce the gold didn't change the dollar did the ruler changed the yardstick we talk about it's like measuring a board with the yardstick that shrank and the boards the same board the number just went up and a lot of you are a lot of what you see should I say on the gold chart is just that it's the yardstick moving, moving up reason two the bond market got very jumpy and earlier this week the interest rate on the thirty year treasury bond hit its highest level since 2007 that was right before we had our big financial crisis that's the government's long-term borrowing cost and it went to a 19 year high and when the government's own borrowing cost is spiking people start asking uncomfortable questions and reason three and this is the one that's really interesting the treasury department stepped in and they announced they're going to buy or they're going to more than double their buybacks of a long-term government debt so the 10 year and the 20 year and the 30 year now became what they call a buyback sounds technical but it isn't it just means that the government going into the market they go into their own mark and they purchase back its own bonds almost to me it sounds like a positive scheme I don't know about y'all but they buy their own bonds back and why did they do that they do it so that they can push those interest rates down so they can take some of that pressure off and guess what it worked fantastic rates came down the dollar came down and they announced after that first jump the bond rates turned right back around and went right back up so that relief only lasted about a session a day and gold though interesting gold kept its gains anyway think about that the fix stopped working and gold held the treasury secretary has said more buybacks could be coming and that's the part the gold market heard not the problem is solved but they are going to have to keep doing this think about that now let's talk about silver silver had a bigger week than gold I'm talking about percentage wise on Friday silver got up to around $70 an ounce right now I think it's at $68 and ended up going right back over $70 this week and some quotes had it just over $70 some just under it depends on which screen you were actually looking at but $70 is the line and silver hasn't touched it since the middle of June up 3% on Friday alone up about 5% for the week and I want to explain something about silver that a lot of people never get told silver almost always moves harder than gold in both directions up harder and down harder up and down and there's a reason for that and there's no magic it isn't any kind of magic the silver market is smaller it's very smaller so the same amount of money coming in pushes the price further it's the difference between throwing a lock I'm sorry a rock in a lake and throwing a rock in a bathtub same rock just very different kind of splash and silver has a second job that gold doesn't have gold is money that's basically it gold is money and jewelry silver is money and it's a working metal it goes into solar plant panels it goes into electronics you know what it goes it goes into equipment running the computers that everybody's excited about these days silver has to show up to work in the morning so what silver does is it responds to two different worlds the money world and the factory world which is why it swings so if you own silver expect the ride to be rougher than gold now that's not a defect that's just the nature of the metal now the part of the silver story that doesn't ever make headlines the silver institute puts out a big survey every year it's the industry's own way of accounting and their number for this year says the world will use more silver than it produces well that'll be the six year in a row this has been going on six straight years of the world consuming more silver than it digs out of the actual ground and their estimate for this year is a shortfall of about 46 million ounces and here's the number that actually matters to me and it should matter to you as well since 2021 they figure the world has pulled out about 760 million ounces out of storage to cover those shortfalls notice what I said out of storage 760 million ounces pulled off the shelf now I want to be straight with you about what that does and doesn't mean it does not mean silver is going to go to the moon on monday this year silver went to $121 in January and then it fell all the way back into the 60s so those that bought high they got a way for it to go back up and the shortfall didn't stop that not for a minute because the price on the screen is set by traders and money flows and the shortfall is a physical thing happening actually in the warehouses so those two can go opposite directions for a long time and this year it really proved it so what the shortfall does mean is just simpler there's less metal sitting around and there used to be and every year we do this there's a little less and that's not a prediction that's just inventory now I want to zoom out from this week for just a moment because there's a slow story running underneath all the fast ones and it's the one that I care about most that I want to share with you central banks are buying gold not a little not for a year steadily now for years and at a pace that this world needs to think about who these buyers are these are not gold bugs these are not people on the radio these are these are the central banks of the country the institutions that print money for a living and they are taking the money they print and swapping it in for metal now why would they do that ask yourself why would a central bank actually hold the bank actually holds its reserves it holds other people's currencies mostly dollars and it holds government bonds and they're mainly American government bonds mostly which means the average central bank on this earth is holding a big pile of promises from our people in Washington and a few years ago they watched something happen they watched one country's reserves over political dispute and hundreds of billions of dollars held in the west switched off and every finance minister on the planet had the same thought at the same moment could that be me?

now whether you think that freeze was right or wrong it's a separate conversation and there's good arguments on it but the effect was the same regardless everybody who holds dollars learned that dollars sit on somebody else's ledger and gold in your own vault doesn't it can't be frozen it can't be canceled and nobody has to approve it it's the only reserve asset in the world that isn't somebody else's promise a dollar is somebody's promise a bond is somebody's promise gold is the only one that that actually isn't and I want to point out the thing that always gets me about all of this if a fellow on the radio listen to me tells you to buy gold or even calls you or whatever people say he's selling something and it's fair enough sometimes he is but when the bank of Poland does it when China does it when Turkey and India and half of Asia are doing it nobody calls out a sales pitch that's just called reserve management just a different name depending on who's doing it I just say watch what the people who print the money do with the money not what they say but what they do and there's one more thing pushing on all of this and it's the one you feel first and it's called oil oil prices have been climbing again and there's a standoff going on over the straight of our moves and the United States is preparing more for my here economic pressure on Iran now I'm not going to give you the geopolitical lecture or geopolitics should I say lecture because that's not my laying but I'll tell you what it means for your money because that is my laying oil is in everything it's not just your gas pump although you see it there first oil is in the shipping oil is in the fertilizer oil is even in the plastic oil is in the packaging it's in the truck that brings the groceries and the tractor that grew them so when oil goes up it doesn't hit your budget in one place it seeps into everything over about six months and one day you'll notice the same cart that costs eleven dollars more and here's why that matters for the interest rate conversation that we've been having if prices are climbing because of oil the Fed can't cut rates they just can't cutting into rising prices is the one thing that they promised never to do again and that's the box price is going up says don't cut a government paying a trillion a year and interest says please cut and they can't do both so the Fed is caught between prices that won't come down and a government that can't afford the rates so watch how that gets resolved because that's the whole story of the next few years alright so I promise you something that broke the textbook and we're getting close to time here but so I'm going to get this off if you got nothing from this hour anything else from this hour you're going to get this there's a rule in finance that everybody agrees on and beginners agree with it professionals agree with it it's in every book and the rule is when interest rates go up gold goes down gold doesn't pay you anything it just sits there it's no dividend no interest no coupon it just sits so when the bank starts paying you 5% to leave your money in a CD why would you hold a medal that pays you nothing?

you wouldn't so people say sell gold and buy the CD rates go up gold goes down every book, every class, every talking head on the television now here's what I want you to hear here's what happened this week the minutes came out from the federal reserves July meeting and those minutes mean it's those minutes showed that some of the people in that room argued for raising the interest rates, raising them not cutting and out in the betting market where traders put real money on what the Fed will do the odds of a rate increase at the December meeting are now sitting at around 70% so that's 7 and 10 so now the market is looking at a probable rate hike before Christmas and by the textbook gold should have gotten hammered instead gold had its best week since the spring best week in three months straight into rising odds of a rate hike so what happened?

because the textbook says rate hikes are bad for gold and that's worth understanding here's my read here's a read for you and it's a read by the way it's not a fact so take it as that the rate rule works when people are asking a small question and the small question is this where and I get this all the time where do I park my money for the next 12 months and for that question a 5% CD beats a metal that pays nothing every time no argument even started but this week people weren't asking the small question this week the debt crossed 40 trillion the government's long-term borrowing cost hit a 19-year high and the treasury had to step into the bond market to hold the rates down and people stop asking the small question they start asking the big one and the big question is what is a dollar going to be worth?

and gold doesn't answer the small questions gold has never answered the small questions it's always always answered the big one so when the small question is on people's minds gold gets sold for CDs and gold does nothing for years and when the big question shows up then the rate on the CD that stops being the point and that's what I think this week was not a bet on interest rates it was a bet on the ruler and I'll give you the honest caveat here because I always do one week is one week and I've watched a lot of weeks that look like a turning point and turn out to be a Tuesday if the dollar strengthens back up this month gold will give some of it back that's just how it works and if the Fed does raise in December there's a real chance gold takes a hit on the news regardless of everything I just said so don't take a good week as a promise just take it as me giving you some information let me point to winding down, let me point to you next week because, or should I say this week on Friday because there's something on the calendar and it's going to be this coming Friday the 28th yeah to make much of my days the right and it's in Jackson Hall, Wyoming and if you never heard of it here's what it is every August the Federal Reserve holds a conference in Jackson Hall, Wyoming and central bankers and they fly into the mountains over there and it's beautiful over there Jackson Hall it's now become the place where the Fed tells the world what it's thinking without technically announcing anything it's not a policy meeting and nothing gets voted on nothing gets decided but you know what's funny?

markets move on it anyway and they move on it sometimes hard because of what's gotten said out loud everybody's going to be listening to them including me so what should you listen for? well it's not the forecast forget the forecast they're wrong about the forecast as often as anybody here's what I want you to listen for one, do they talk about the government's borrowing cost at all historically the Fed pretends the federal budget is somebody else's department not their problem they've got their own job and if that changes if they start talking about the debt as a thing that affects what they can do well that's a big deal huge and two, which way is the worry pointed are they more afraid of prices of gas going up or just prices in general going up or the job market going soft that tells you which direction they'll lean when they have to pick and three, watch what happens right after not during the speech but right after the first hour of the speech is just noise, traders react into headlines the next day is the real read Jackson Hole is next Friday and nothing gets decided but everything gets hinted at and I'll cover it on this coming Wednesday's show alright so there are by the way there's more on the calendar than just Wyoming so let me give you the week Tuesday you get consumer confidence for August that's a survey and that's like how do people actually feel and I'll be honest with you I don't put much weight on those people's feelings and people's spending don't always match Wednesday is the one that matters Wednesday you actually get a population number the Fed actually watches and it's called the PCE and you get the first look at how much the economy grew last quarter two big ones same morning and if that inflation number comes in hot the rate height talk gets louder and gold is likely to have a rough day if it comes in soft the opposite Thursday is unemployment claims and that's the weekly one that's going to be a little noisy and then Friday of course is Jackson Hall so it's a loaded week this week Wednesday and Friday are the two that you really want to watch and I'd say this to anybody who gets nervous watching the price move day-to-day turn it off if you're one of them just get turned it off because it'll just make you nervous alright let's talk about the silver lining that's it one work a week one word a week and so far we've done work, grit, thrift, honesty, family, and promise and number seven or almost there is duty d-u-t-y let me tell you why I chose that particular word we spent most of this hour talking about $40 trillion and I want to say something about that number isn't about money at all the number is not an accident it's a natural it's not a natural disaster the number is a stack of decisions every trillion of it was somebody choosing the easier thing over the harder thing and here's the part that really gets me almost every one of those decisions was made by people who knew better they knew they said so out loud and speeches and then they voted the other way that's not a math problem that's a duty problem so duty is the thing you do when nobody's making you do it it's the thing you do when the reward for doing it goes to somebody who won't know your name and there were men who built the roads you drove on today who never even actually has driven on them there were people who put money aside so that their grandchildren could go to school and then they never even met those grandchildren that's duty doing the hard thing on behalf of somebody who isn't even in the room yet and then I don't say that to make anybody feel bad I say it because I think that's exactly what a lot of you are already doing if you're around 70 years old and you're still being careful with your money you get easily you could easily you could easily spend it on yourself if you're protecting something so it's still there for the kids that's duty that's quiet duty nobody claps for it Washington couldn't manage it with 40 trillion dollars and 100 committees you're managing it at your kitchen table with just a calculator and a coffee cup so this week's word is duty and I think a lot of you have been living it a long time without calling it anything all right so you're going to send that by the way just you can send that to hello or I'm sorry contest at heritagepartners.gold that's contest .gold you can also write into me any time you want to at hello at heritage goldpartners.gold you can call the toll-free number it's super easy 833-5774653 that's 833-5774653 anything you have on your mind just tell me well that's about the hour I know I'm closing off here early 40 trillion dollars on Wednesday gold's best week since the spring on Friday and a rule that everybody believes in that didn't hold you keep watching the big question and I'll keep watching it with you I want you all to take care of yourselves take care of your family God bless you God bless your family and of course God bless America I'm Alan Johnson and I'll see you next week All over his home maybe just serious about his oral health