Dollar devaluation and gold: what the debt spiral means

0:00Your 401k just lost 28% of its value. Your portfolio probably did too. Not because the stock market crashed. It didn't. The S&P was actually up 18% last year. But when you measure it against what money actually is, gold, you were down 28%.

0:19That's not a typo. That is the real cost of what Ray Dalio calls the debt death spiral we're already in. And here's what's changing. The US dollar has lost 39% of its value versus gold in 2025. Just in one year, central banks around the world are dumping US debt and they're buying gold at record levels. And the guy who predicted the 2008 financial crisis says we're entering what he calls capital wars where money itself becomes a weapon.

0:56What's at risk? Well, everything denominated in dollars. Your retirement account, your savings, your purchasing power, your salary. And by the end of this video, you won't be fear-mongered and doomed and gloomed. You'll understand exactly what's happening and why the people running the system can't stop it and what you can do to protect yourself and your family before this gets worse.

1:16My name is Felix P. I'm an ex-investment banker. That's Winston back there, he is the brains behind the operation, and we've seen how banks really work from the inside. We've also founded the GOAT Academy where we've taught well over 20,000 students and I'm also the co-founder of Trade Mission where we spread the real data, the real news and the insider flows of money. So our mission is simple, give you the same information the institutions have but without the BS they used to keep you confused and compliant.

1:51So why should you listen? Because I'm not selling you gold coins or fear-mongering for clicks. I'm showing you the actual data, the stuff Ray Dalio is talking about. And when he says the US is in a debt death spiral, I listen. And unlike the talking heads on CNBC who have to pretend everything's just fine, I can tell you the truth. The system is breaking and it's breaking faster than most people realise.

2:14So let's jump straight into it. The dollar is losing value fast. It is down a tiny bit against the Japanese yen. It's down 4% against the Chinese renminbi. It is down 12% against the euro. Down 13% against the Swiss franc. And down 39% against gold. The last one is really the only number that matters because gold doesn't lie. You can't print it. It doesn't have a central bank that can make it up. It doesn't have a government that can manage its value. Gold is what Dalio calls the most fundamental money. And it's screaming that the dollar is dying indeed.

3:02Now, Dalio says we're in the late stages of a major debt cycle. So let me translate from billionaire wishy-washy speak into English. We're at the part of the Ponzi scheme where the guy running it starts sweating. And here's how it works. The US government has $38 trillion and counting in debt. That number grows by $6 billion per day. Not per year, but per day. The US added a trillion dollars in debt in just 71 days last year. New record.

3:35But here is the thing. In the last year, the US paid $1.2 trillion in interest on that debt. That is more than the US spends on defence, which is why the US is going to increase its defence spending. It just makes sense, right? So it does, doesn't it? 17% of all government spending is debt, and it's going to hit $1.8 trillion somewhere down the road.

4:00Now, so why don't they just fix it? Well, how are you going to fix it? Think about it. You could raise taxes. You'd be out of office faster than I can say, I can't think of anything nice to say about politicians. You could cut spending. Again, political suicide. They're like, no no no, but you got to fund the fluffy mouse that crosses the road at particular times of the night and they need their money too. Look at the bill, I just went through it, it's all large, the whole thing. What else could you do? Well, you can print money.

4:31So this is what Dalio calls the structural trap and it's very beautiful in its simplicity. Because if you raise taxes, okay, look at the United Kingdom, right? Great Britain. I think they've retired the great. It's just Britain now. But they basically raised taxes because it was the fair thing to do. Tax the rich, tax the rich, that kind of thing. What happened? The wealthy all left. They just left. They just left overnight and they collected less tax. Companies move. All the Brits are in Dubai. Just go there. You can't shake a stick without hitting one of them. And it's a terrible idea.

5:06Then you could cut spending. Well, how are you going to sell cutting Social Security or Medicare or defence, right? Which voting block and which special interest group do you want to piss off, right? It's not going to work, is it? You're going to miraculously fall out of a window somewhere voluntarily, right? And leave a little note saying that you wanted to.

5:27So what's option 3? You print money. You make the debt worth less. And that's the path of least resistance. And that is exactly what they're doing. This is official government policy. Ray Dalio's quote from just is, if you devalue money, you devalue debt. Translation, you're going to inflate away the debt by making your dollars worth less, much less. Your savings, your salary, your retirement, all of it gets quietly confiscated to pay for the debt.

5:58Right? But you didn't notice it. Therefore you're not pointing your finger. You're not saying, "Oh, evil politician, I'm not going to vote for you." You're saying, "Oh, we're spending money, isn't it brilliant?"

6:09Now the official inflation rate is a cute little thing really. If you want to know the real inflation rate, well, look at what happened to the S&P 500 last year. It went up 18% in dollar terms. Compared to gold, it went down 28%. That 46 percentage point gap, that is the real cost of printing money. That's what they're not telling you. And when you celebrate record stock market highs, well, your stocks went up because the measuring stick, the value of the dollar, went down.

6:42So Dalio predicts that currency value, purchasing power, will become the top political topic in 2026. Maybe because so many people are watching this video because you're sharing with everybody, right? Because you're getting them informed too. And he's probably right. If we get to spread this message. If we don't, people will just be sheep ripe for the slaughter. So please share this video. That's all I'd ask. Don't do anything else. Just share the video.

7:05Because if people are starting to notice that their paychecks buy less, their savings grow slower, and the experts keep telling them the economy is great, well, what does it mean? The Federal Reserve is committed to price stability and maximum employment. And people keep saying right at every opportunity. He's saying, "How are you, sir? The Fed is..." What is he actually saying? He's saying we're going to print enough money to keep the government solvent and if that destroys the value of your dollars, well, it's the price of stability. That's essentially what they're saying.

7:37Now if you want to understand how we can actually still make money out of this, because we can still make money out of this, we just got to be a little bit more smart about it. We got to be more selective in my humble opinion. And if you want to use the strategies that I learned from my Wall Street mentors, there's also a free little master class that I recorded for you. I think it's 17 minutes long. It's intended for the TikTok brain damaged. It was originally 45 minutes, actually originally it was 2 hours and then it was 40 minutes and then I managed to squeeze it into 17.

8:03So if you want to learn how those guys buy and what their rules are and you want to learn those too, go to felixprehn.com/getfree, the link down below. Apparently I'm not allowed to say that it's actually going to get you free. That will be an FTC violation. So I'm saying to you, you can get it for free. See, that's permitted, right? See what I did there. So felixprehn.com/getfree and check it out down below.

8:27Now this should make you sit up pretty straight. Gold is now the 2nd largest reserve currency in the world. It is not the yen. It is not the euro. It is good old-fashioned gold. Central banks hold gold as approximately 9% of their foreign reserves. That is doubled. It was 4%. And it's accelerating. Central banks bought an absurd amount of gold in 2025 and they're going to buy even more gold in 2026. Central banks are basically buying half of all the gold in the world being mined in 2026.

9:08Crazy, eh? So what is that going to do to gold? Let's think about that. Gold did 65% in 2025. We started talking about gold miners around about May last year. Go back and watch my old videos or ask any of my students and a lot of those returned pretty nicely, right? The S&P did 18%. But it's a big biggly gap, right? It's a bigly ugly gap. It's a 47% gap between gold's returns and S&P returns. So what happened? The gold bugs are the smuggest people in the world. And everyone else got poorer.

9:44So let's look at the biggest buyers. Poland, China, Brazil. Those guys own a lot of gold. Now Poland has 28% of their reserves in gold. The Poles are pretty smart people. China has been buying for the last 13 months every

9:58Single month. Probably buying more than officially putting out there, but they're buying a lot. And think about it. Poland is a border country with Russia. China is in a cold war with the US essentially. Brazil is leading the BRICS nations away from the dollar dependence. So they're not just buying gold because they think it's a good investment. They're buying gold because they don't trust the US anymore.

10:19The real advantage of gold is that there is no counterparty risk. It's different from every other asset class. When you own US debt, a treasury bond, you're trusting the US government to pay you back in dollars. When you own a corporate bond, you're trusting that company. When you own a stock, you're trusting management, earnings reports, the whole system. When you own gold, you're trusting gold, right?

10:41Gold doesn't have a CEO. It can't commit fraud. It doesn't have a government that can print more of it. It doesn't have a counterparty risk, the risk that the other guy won't hold up to his end of the deal. It's just there. It's shiny. It's very shiny. Just look at it.

10:55So Dalio called gold the safest money for exactly this reason. And this is a guy who made all of his money in stocks, right? And investments, things that they can just make up. So in a world where even allies don't trust each other anymore, and Poland's an ally of the US, right, gold's the only thing everybody agrees on to have some value.

11:18So when central banks, the ones who are printing all the money, they're going to print a lot of money in 2026, it'll be one of the good years for money printers. If they don't want to hold money, it tells you quite a lot, doesn't it really? And you've heard of the trade wars, the tariffs, the quotas, all that stuff. Capital wars are very different. Capital wars are when money becomes the weapon.

11:41So here's what Dalio is warning about. He says trade wars are evolving into capital wars. Countries aren't just fighting over goods anymore. They are fighting over the flow of money that finances trade. That includes freezing or seizing assets, blocking access to capital markets, so access to the stock exchange, dumping US dollar debt and dollar denominated securities, weaponising payment systems like SWIFT.

12:07So the real turning point here came, and this is not a popular thing to say because everyone likes to hate the Russians. I know some lovely Russian people. But anyway, what happened in 2022 is that the moment everything changed is when the US and allies froze Russian reserves after the Ukraine invasion, invasion number 2. They seized hundreds of billions of dollars in Russian assets. They got kicked out of SWIFT, which is the international payment system if you want to transfer money. And they made it impossible for them to access the global financial system.

12:40And every other country on earth was like, "You can do that." Hey, what if you did that to us? What if you thought we were the bad guy for the moment, right? I'm not saying the Russians are not the bad guys. This is not about bad. This is about how you protect yourself and your family. This is what this is about.

12:56Because these countries all realised if you hold your reserves in dollars, if you keep your money in the western financial system, it can be taken away instantly. You piss off Washington, right? Talk to any deposed dictator in the world. Where do they keep their money? With the lovely Swissies, right? I had some great fondue the other day. What do they do each time? They freeze the assets and they just keep it. They just keep it. There's apparently a Swiss banking system structure.

13:25So countries think we're next. The Saudis watch. They think maybe we shouldn't be so dependent on these people. The Indians, the Brazilians, the South Africans. Everyone's thinking what will be the alternative here? So countries are building new financial infrastructure to bypass the dollar.

13:40Russia now has a SPFS system that is an alternative to the SWIFT system. China has the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System. Handles hundreds of billions of dollars by the way. And there's BRICS Pay under development. So these guys are reducing their US dollar usage and the dollar isn't going to go away. It's just going to be worth a lot less.

13:58And the BRICS currency project called the Unit. They're building a partially gold-backed currency. Maybe you think partially backed sounds nonsense. Well, that's how the US got off the gold standard, right? Initially was partially backed by it and then it was not backed by anything other than great, and you are great. You're very great.

14:19That's been launched and it's meant to be used as the trading currency between those nations. So this is no longer some fringe conspiracy, right? This is official policies from the countries that represent almost half the world's population, more than a third of the world's GDP.

14:39Now Winston here will tell you that there is a problem that most people don't know about. There is $9.2 trillion in existing government debt that matured last year. So the US government had to refinance $9 trillion in debt. Issue new bonds, pay off old bonds. Why does that matter? Because interest rates are higher now than when the debt was originally issued. So the US is refinancing cheap debt with expensive debt.

15:05So every time one of these bonds matures, which is how they work, they have an expiration date, the US interest payment goes up and there's a huge amount, the largest amount of debt ever, has to be refinanced in the next 2 years. So the US government has to get interest rates down come what may. So they're going to appoint a BlackRock chap to run the Fed who will make sure interest rates will be low.

15:33What's that going to do to your money? Well, it's going to cause more and more inflation. It's the only way they can keep this debt ratio down because they are at a really, really dangerous place already. But within that, you got to factor in that foreign buyers are disappearing. They're not buying the debt anymore.

15:51Interest rates are higher. So even if you lower interest rates, this is the thing that is hard to explain. You can lower interest rates as a government, but interest rates in the real world can still go up. Why? Because the market sees more risk. The market is saying, "We think you guys are crazy. We think you are fiscally irresponsible." Right? I prefer crazy.

16:13And therefore, we're going to demand higher interest anyway, otherwise we won't buy your debt. And that matters to you because it trickles down to your mortgage, your car payments, your credit card payments, all that stuff, right?

16:26So the government is trying to control some of those things. A 10% cap on credit cards, which sounds like a sweet idea, doesn't it? But the problem is that it means that those on lower incomes will find it impossible to gain any credit. Maybe that's the plan. Who knows? That'll be the side effect of it.

16:44So it just doesn't work, right? There's a reason credit card companies charge high interest. They could lower it by a bit, undoubtedly. They could particularly lower it for those with higher incomes. But those people tend to pay off their credit card every month anyway. So it's not really an issue for them. It's the lower guys are going to be cut off from credit. But that's not really what this is about. It's not a political statement. It's just an economic fact.

17:05But really, the only path is inflation. And as Ray Dalio says, our grandchildren will be paying in devalued dollars. So you got to think about how much of your money is in dollar assets and how you could potentially protect yourself from it. What's Ray Dalio's recommendation? He says 5 to 15% in gold. And I don't think he's wrong on that. It's not financial advice. I'm not a registered financial adviser in any way, shape, or form. Winston might be, golden retriever registered or something.

17:36But yeah, I think it's a reasonable thing to think about. Now there's a risk with that as in where do you store the stuff. And I would put it in some private storage. Banks I don't trust. Private storage companies I trust slightly more. Having it at home, for most people it's a daft idea. Now if you live on some sort of ranch and you're heavily armed in the middle of nowhere, then that's probably fine. I have a friend who said that to me, who said I have a shotgun and I have 12 large dogs. I'm like okay, you're probably okay. But if you live in a condo in a city somewhere or something, it's probably a pretty poor idea to keep your gold at home.

18:09So why gold? It's no counterparty risk. It's a hedge against debasement. No government involved. It's literally been the money for 5,000 years, probably longer, but the Egyptians don't need to know about that one. That's a whole other story we could open up, but we shan't. What's under the Sphinx? I want to know.

18:29What about Bitcoin? Look, Bitcoin is 15 years old. It's volatile. It could be banned. It could be regulated. At the moment, we're getting some pretty friendly crypto regulation. I am suspicious of Bitcoin. I think there are 3 letters that might have something to do with it. And you can draw your own conclusions from that. But I don't really trust it personally and you might disagree with that. That's all good and I hope you make a ton of money with it.

18:54But gold, it's physical. There is a physical problem of getting it out of the ground. It's a pain in the neck. To open a gold mine takes 16 years on average. So you're not going to get massive supply come on stream all that quickly. So you got to ask yourself who do you trust in a real crisis. I think the whole crypto thing is just, it's one of those things. They spun it as decentralisation is glorious. It's the most centralised

19:18Thing in the world. You can track every transaction forever. It's like you become transparent as someone who pays with it. What about gold? Beyond gold. Look, you could buy some international stocks, but the problem is the Europeans have the same problem. They're going to do the same thing. The Japanese have had the same problem for 30 years.

19:36Where else do you buy stocks? So I don't think that really fixes the problem. You could have cash, that's definitely going to get burned. Some people say that doesn't really work very well either. So there aren't really that many choices here.

19:49So how do you buy gold? Look, you can find online some reputable, ask AI, there's a reputable gold dealer in my country or area and it'll find you some. You can buy coins, you can buy bars. Storing is something you want to think about. There's some storage cost associated to that, which is obviously insurance and so on.

20:10There are ETFs, there's GLD, IAU, PHYS, and those are physically backed in my understanding. Now I haven't audited those. I don't know what they've got in their cellars, but apparently if you buy GLD, those guys will go out and they'll buy physical gold. That's the story at least.

20:30Mining stocks. We put out something on that earlier this week, so check that out. Higher risk, potentially higher reward, but you need to understand risk management and how to position that and all that kind of stuff. So again, check out the free master class down below. My mission is to get you educated, but I would say position yourself before everyone's figured it out.

20:51I feel that the mainstream isn't really talking about it yet. So we're still relatively early despite the massive rally we've seen in gold last year. But once gold hits $10,000 an ounce, people are going to panic. And you will have missed it. And again, I'm not saying it's going to happen, I don't have a crystal ball. Winston keeps eating them.

21:12But Ray Dalio is a smart guy and I'm sure he's got some business interest in what he's talking about. But he did warn us about 2008. And at the moment, and I think this is the key story here that I think we can probably all agree on, fiat currencies, the stuff you can print, are losing trust in value. Gold is the second reserve currency in the world after the dollar. And it's going to be interesting, it's going to be exciting.

21:36So your dollars are being devalued. Your stocks go down in real terms unless you really pick very, very good ones. You got to pick very, very good ones. I'm not saying that isn't possible, but you got to pick very, very good ones.

21:47And what do you do? Educate yourself. Don't listen to the mainstream media noise. Diversify. Maybe buy some gold. And that's not an instruction, I'm not a financial adviser. I'm just saying think about it because stuff's creaking, stuff's breaking. Not sometime in 2098. No, it's now.

22:05So the people running the system, they know it's breaking and that's why they're buying gold. So I always say follow the money. Don't worry about the whys. Don't worry about the politics, whether you like a politician or not. None of that matters. They're not really there to look after you.

22:21No, they have an agenda. They have people who put them there. They're people who are paid for the election, all that stuff. And you know that happens with all parties and all presidents and every country in the world. And that's just the system we live in. It's a pretty decent system compared to the alternative, right? Just look at a map of South and North Korea and you get the idea.

22:42So I hope this is helpful to you. If it is, share it with more people, please. That will be my only ask. And I wish you great success. All the best.

22:52Something absolutely wild just happened in the mining sector and I need to tell you about it right now. The US government just wrote a $1.6 billion check to one mining