Japan debt crisis: what US portfolios face next

0:00Wall Street's panicking and most Americans have no idea why. Japan's debt just collapsed and it's about to hit your portfolio harder than you think. Right as I'm recording this, Japan made an emergency move to hide $1 trillion in losses. But this isn't just Japan's problems. It's the playbook for how the US will handle our own debt crisis.

0:27Well, I'm not actually obviously American, but I invest most of my money in the US, so I sympathise. Your cash, your savings, your 401ks, your stocks, your ETFs, it's all in the crosshairs because what Japan just did proves that governments will do anything to avoid admitting that their debts are unpayable. By the end of this video, you'll understand exactly why US investors should be very worried right now and how this inflation playbook will destroy your wealth and the specific assets you need to own before it's too late.

1:05It's not a doom and gloom video. This is a video to give you informed and to give you actionable insight that you can actually use to implement and potentially even benefit from this. I'm also going to give you an indicator that allows you to track day by day on your own just how serious this is or if it goes away so you can make the right moves.

1:29If you're wondering who the heck I am, I'm the guy who's the same colour as the plane. My name is Felix Prehn. I'm an economist and ex-investment banker and I'm also the founder of the GOAT Academy where my mentors, my retired Wall Street mentors have been teaching regular investors institutional strategies for the past 6 years. We've taught well over 20,000 people and I'm also the co-founder of Trade Vision where we make insane level of data available to you where I got some of this news from.

1:59And I'm going to show you why Japan's collapse is a preview of what might be coming to the US and exactly how to protect and benefit from this before inflation really eats us all up and swallows us whole. Now, I know you're thinking, Felix, this Japan carry trade stuff sounds complicated. How am I supposed to track this? How do I know when it's unwinding and threatening my portfolio?

2:23And look, for most of us, it is hard to understand and track the Japan carry trade, whatever that might be. The data is scattered. The indicators are complex, and you need to be watching Japanese bond yields, currency movements, US market correlations. It's kind of a full-time job, right? So, here's what we've done. We've built a simple indicator in our stock intelligence community that does all the heavy lifting for you. It tracks the carry trade in real time and it alerts you when there is actual real danger.

2:56And it's available to anybody. It's like $6.23 a week, which is less than a cup of coffee per day. You can cancel anytime. There's no commitment, no hassle. And I think you're going to get a tremendous amount of value out of it because you can also scan for stocks. You can track your metals, precious metals holdings, see what the market makers of COMEX do, and much, much more. So, if you want to check that out, go to betterstocks.goatacademy.org. There's a full link down below. You can click in the description so you don't need to write it out.

3:30And let me show you exactly why this matters and what's really happening with Japan's collapse. Actually, let's pull up the indicator for you. And you can see it spiked up very significantly last August when the market crashed temporarily, and that was because of the Japan thing. And we're heading towards that same direction as you could see on the right hand side of that buried chart.

3:53So let me show you what just happened in Japan and why it's sending these waves through US markets even if you're not fully seeing it yet. Japan's banks and insurers are sitting on about $1 trillion in losses. How does that work? Well, they bought government debt and the government debt is no longer worth what it was once worth.

4:15Let me give you a specific example. There is a Japanese government bond that was issued at 99.8 yen, so basically 100, right? And I know we're being a bit nerdy here. And it's now trading at just 38 yen. So it's lost 62% of its value. Why? Because it pays almost no interest. And people don't really want to own Japanese debt because it pays basically no interest.

4:44And this is exactly what happened to Silicon Valley Bank, but about 10 times bigger. When SVB's debt, their bonds lost value, they had to recognise those losses and the bank collapsed in just 48 hours. It triggered a massive banking crisis if you still remember that.

5:05So this is also why US investors are worried about it, at least institutional guys. Mainstream, we don't really hear about it because they think we're simple-minded. Because the Japan crisis is connected to a $20 trillion carry trade that props up the US market. And with Japan's system cracking, guess what? They take their money out because they're getting margin calls. Basically, margin call, we'd like our money back. So they have to sell US assets.

5:34So Japan was literally facing a complete financial system collapse about 24 hours ago. Their insurers would have gone bankrupt. Their banks would have collapsed. A crisis that would make 2008 look like a warm-up act. And they did the one desperate move that they could still make.

5:55They made an emergency decision. The Japanese Institute of Certified Public Accountants, so the bean counters, announced they're changing the accounting rules so banks and insurers don't have to report losses anymore. They call this technically a policy reserve matching, whatever, and that those will be treated as held to maturity and not subject to impairment accounting.

6:24Which basically means even if your bonds are only worth 38 cents on the dollar, you can just keep them on your books at a dollar value and pretend everything is fine. We won't tell anybody about it. So it's a bit like if your house lost 60% of its value and your bank called up and said, you know what, we're just going to assume it's worth what you paid for. Problem solved, right?

6:50Except this isn't one house. This is the entire Japanese financial system. And it matters to you because it proves that when the debt crisis hits, governments won't let the system collapse. They'll just change the rules and they'll keep printing more money. Which means what? It means massive inflation is coming for you.

7:09And Japan's problems don't stay in Japan. We got a preview of that in August. Japan raised their interest rates just slightly, just a teeny tiny move and the markets crashed. Bitcoin went down 23%. The NASDAQ went down 10%, the S&P 8% just in a couple of days. Why? Because that $20 trillion of Japanese money started leaving the US.

7:34Where's this money coming from? Well, it's money that they borrow in Japan at very low interest rates. They then invested in the US. And when Japan raises their rates, well, that trade no longer makes sense. You might as well keep it at home and collect higher interest rates at home.

7:54So the current situation is a warning shot, which is what the indicator shows right now. We're at a warning stage, not at a cataclysm stage, but this is much, much bigger than what we saw in August. So track that indicator that we built specifically for you, so you know what the heck is going on. Go to that Better Stocks link down below. Get yourself that access.

8:18But what I'm really telling you is that Japan isn't actually unique. The US has the same problem. They just haven't admitted it yet. The US's debt is 120% of its economy. It's growing fast. The US is running a $1 trillion deficit every single year. It adds more debt every year than most countries' entire economies. So the US is on the same path as Japan.

8:44So what happens when you have debt you can't possibly repay whether you are Japan or the US? Well, you have 3 options. Option 1, you default. Let's forget about that one. No one's going to do that. Well, because you can paper over it, right? Option 2 would be cut spending and raise taxes, which is suicidal if you're a politician. So no one's going to do that either, which leaves only option 3, which means you pay for it. How? They print money. They inflate the debt away. It's just not that noticeable. And they change accounting rules to look like Enron.

9:15But it's what they've always done. It's the only politically viable path. And Japan just proved once again you can do it. No matter how dire the situation is, just change the rules. Just say you got losses, we're going to pretend there aren't any. Which is just insanity. But it is the reality we live in.

9:33So let me give you the steps the US government's going to follow. The government borrows more money, so they have to sell more bonds. The central bank will print more money to buy the government bonds. So the Fed in the US and the Bank of Japan in Japan will own pretty much all government debt. In Japan, that's already the case. And the government then spends money on deficit spending, of course, social security, military, whatever.

9:59And then step 4, prices go up because there's more and more and more money chasing the same goods. And that's inflation. Step 5, the debt becomes easier to pay back because the currency is worth less. So you borrow dollars worth 100 cents and you pay it back with dollars that are only worth 50 cents, right? And then there is the wishy-washy cover up, which is step 6. You use accounting tricks to hide what you're doing. You change the rules. You manipulate the inflation statistics and you keep the public in the dark, which is exactly what's going on in Japan right now. Because you see, once you start printing money, you can't really stop.

10:34Now before we go deeper, and I want to go deeper about actionables here. If you want to learn the strategies, not just a tidbit of news, how

10:42To actually protect your life and how to pick better stocks, be they gold or stocks or whatever, I put together a training for you. It's just a 17-minute video. It's very quick. It's condensed of about 4 hours worth of information into as little time as possible. And you can do that at felixfriends.org/getfree. There's a link down below in the description as well. You can check that out after this video. And it shows you which assets you might want to own, which to avoid, and how to follow the big money to know that you're roughly in the right place.

11:15And those are the strategies I learned from my Wall Street mentors who used to manage billions of dollars of institutional wealth at Goldman and Salomon and Bear Stearns and all the big banks, Merrill Lynch and so on. Right, said go bust. Yes, it was one of our coaches who did it.

11:35So we now know the scary scenario, the brutal truth. What is going to happen to you? Well, you're going to get poorer, not because you did anything wrong, but because your salary is worth less, your savings is worth less. So what do we do about it? Well, first of all, people always say, "Oh, put 20% of your money into cash. It's safe." No, it's the worst thing in the world. Yes, it is FDIC insured, but it's guaranteed to lose money every single year. It's the worst place to be when there's a lot of inflation.

12:04And if you're in stocks or index funds or 401ks or whatever, you're exposed to this. You're exposed to the carry trade if it does unwind. If you own bonds, well, you're probably getting destroyed because inflation is going to run high. Bond prices therefore go down, like those Japanese bonds that went from 100 to 38, which isn't exactly pretty. So you're kind of trapped, right?

12:27But there is actually a solution to benefit from this. There's always a winner, and I think you want to be on the winning side of this deal. So this is what I learned from my Wall Street mentors, guys who worked in those big banks. Yes, your salary isn't going to cut it because it's going to be worth less and less and less. So keep asking for big pay rises, please, because that's going to be important.

12:49But the real crux of this is that the middle class gets destroyed because they don't understand it, because they live salary to salary and they don't have enough invested. While people who are asset rich actually do very, very well. All of this, which is another reason, is perhaps happening. Your dividend investors, well, they get destroyed because bringing home a 4% dividend yield isn't very good if the asset inflation is 10% or 20% a year.

13:16So who wins? It's the people who own real assets, the people who own things that go up with inflation, not down, right? It's the biggest wealth transfer in history. It's faster than anything we saw in the 70s. But if you understand this, you can protect yourself. So if cash, savings, bonds, dividend stocks are all traps, what do you actually want to own?

13:37Well, in my humble opinion, and I'm not a financial adviser, I'm not a registered investment adviser or registered for anything really, it's just my humble opinion. So obviously do your own research. But for me, the answer is very simple. You need to own the assets that go up with inflation. Assets that have pricing power, assets that are real, not paper. And there are just two categories. There are quality stocks with pricing power. And there are hard assets like gold and possibly silver.

14:07And the good news is that US investors have access to the best quality stocks in the world. They're pretty much all American companies. You just need to know which ones because you don't want to just buy any stock, right? That's also why in Better Stocks we got a screener so you can find the quality stocks. Companies that have a high pricing power can raise their prices. You'll still buy their stuff. Think Apple, right? Will you still buy the iPhone if it's $100 more? Yes, people will still buy it. People sleep in the street to get their hands on it.

14:38They need to have a strong balance sheet. Strong balance sheet means relatively low debt, lots of cash flow, and essentially a brand that is so powerful or a technology that is so irreplaceable that people will just keep buying it. Now, the simplest metric to find those companies is gross margin. Generally, we aim for a gross margin of more than 60%. Again, if you go to Better Stocks, there's a preset filter for that. You'll see them. It'll take you about 15 seconds. You have a whole long list of them.

15:09And people will say, "Oh, buy energy, buy oil, buy gas, whatever." I wouldn't buy the entire index. I wouldn't buy an entire industry. I would find the individual stock. So again, watch the free masterclass attached and make use of a bunch of the tools that I'm giving you.

15:24Now, what about commodities? What about copper and all that stuff? Yes, could benefit, but it's also very, very volatile. You might not understand it fully. So why don't we just go for the best of the best which are the companies with those high margins that are therefore going to benefit tremendously from this? I mean Apple, Microsoft, Google to me would be some that would stand out for example, but there are many, many, many more and you don't want to be just in big tech either.

15:50So what other thing can we buy? What has 5,000 years of track record? Well, how about gold and yes silver? They have survived every currency collapse and they're going to survive this one too. And here is why it works. When people lose faith in paper money, they run to gold. Look at what the gold price did the last year, right? It's simple. You can't print it.

16:11Look back at the 1970s. The US had too much debt. It had high inflation. What happened to gold? It went from $35 to $850. 24x return. I'm not promising you returns, but it crushed inflation, and the people who owned that were happy and swinging from the fences. Silver is gold's more volatile brother. It tends to move with gold but with much, much bigger swings, much more risk, potentially more reward.

16:38So I'm not against saying put everything in gold, but a percentage, 10, 20%, whatever. You better come to your own conclusion on that and obviously talk to your adviser on that. But it's insurance against money printing and you have easy access to gold in the US, right? You can buy it physically, you can buy gold ETFs and hold physical gold, you can buy gold mining stocks. There really is very little excuse to have no exposure if you feel that is right for you. And that's always a big if because everybody's situation is different, right? Mine and yours are a different age, different whatever.

17:16But let me tell you also what to avoid. And these are the stocks that get crushed. Cash and cash equivalents, we've covered those, right? Long-term bonds, especially government bonds. They are terrible in these scenarios. Why? Well, if a government bond pays 4%, but inflation goes up to 7 or to 10, who the heck wants to own your 4% bond? Nobody. So it loses a lot of value.

17:42Dividend stocks, utilities, REITs, all these safe plays. They get hammered when rates rise, which they eventually do when inflation picks up. Not immediately, but they will a little bit later. And then number 5, this is speculative growth stocks with no earnings. And I know a lot of you degenerates are in some of those. I mean, I am too. I own biotech stocks and all sorts of things.

18:03But you see, I don't marry them. I buy them as the institutional money flows in and I sell them in an automated risk management fashion when the money starts to leave, because I know they can go to zero and they need cheap money to survive. I don't want to rely on that. So yes, we can trade it. I think we're going to have a tremendous year in terms of growth stocks and tech stocks probably, but there will come a point when the you know what hits the fan.

18:33And most of you are heavily exposed to these things. You have cash, you have bonds, your 401ks, you have dividend stocks or retirement income, and you hold growth stocks because you want a quick win. And those are all potentially very, very affected by this.

18:50So what do you do? Audit your portfolio, everything you're in. Look at all of it. Put all of it into the Better Stocks tracker so you know what the heck you've got there, whether it's quality or not. Think about gold allocation. This is long-term stuff. This isn't making money by Friday. This is protection, not sexy, but it could really help you in those moments.

19:09And don't let this stop you from investing. More money has been lost waiting for a crash than any crash. That's a Peter Lynch quote. Great guy. So keep dollar cost averaging in your positions. If you don't want to learn how the market really works, keep buying the index. Do it every month. It'll in the long run pay off.

19:30But if you want to get a bit smarter about it, your individual stocks or sector ETFs or something, you have to level up your skills. Investing is a skill. Money investing is a skill. So take advantage of all the free stuff we put out there for you. Check the links I'm giving you down below. We give out so much insane level of information that I wish I would have had 20 or 30 years ago. And if you're more serious and you actually want to learn from real Wall Street mentors, again, watch the masterclass. It gives you an opportunity to potentially do that down there. And to me, in my humble opinion, and let me show you the beautiful sunset here that we've got because it's tremendous. Can you see that? There it is.

20:11In my humble opinion, the US is about 10 to 15 years behind Japan and it's moving much, much faster. The debt is growing faster. The deficits are growing faster. They're going to keep spending the money on defence and everything else. Politicians are going to want to keep popular.

20:30So there is a path here and the path is very clear. Either we suffer or we benefit. Let's benefit together. Share this video if you got some value out of this and I wish you all the best.

20:40The Supreme Court just undid the Trump tariffs and it's handed Wall Street a $175 billion surprise. And look, if you don't get what this means for your money, means you