Your 401k just got hit with a retirement signal that most investors are completely missing right now. While you've been watching your retirement account, something extraordinary is happening in the financial markets that could change everything. Gold just hit$4,000 per ounce, up 44% up this year alone. That's the strongest performance on record. And that's good news for, you know, golden kittens, because they make money out of gold. This is Hugh, who did all the research for this video here. But more seriously, the national debt just exceeded$38 trillion. In just two months, we added a trillion dollars. And the International Monetary Fund just labeled US debt as a systematic global risk, the strongest language ever used. Every 1% increase in interest rates now adds$380 billion to what the government has to pay annually. And this isn't about government finances. This directly impacts your retirement savings, your purchasing power, and your financial future. By the end of this video, you understand exactly what's driving gold to record highs, why the AMF is sounding the alarm bell, and most importantly, what this means for your portfolio and how to position yourself for what's coming next. I'm Felix Breen. That was Hugh here, who's now expertly chewing the cables, this one. And I used to be an investment banker, this one not so much. And I've seen trading flows. I've seen the mechanisms that move the market, and I have a fairly good understanding of how institutional money thinks. I'm also the founder of the GOAT Academy, where we've taught over 20,000 students already how to navigate these markets. And I'm also the co-founder of Trademission.io, where we help retail investors understand what's really happening with up to the minute news. And my mission here is simple use my early retirement to teach regular investors like you how to read the signals that Wall Street is already acting on because the big institutions are repositioning right now. And I believe you deserve to understand why. If you agree with me or not, put agree in the comments down below. So I'm going to expose today the connection between record gold prices, the debt crisis, and the government policy change that just opened the doors for millions of Americans to move retime and money into alternative assets, including gold. This won't be fearmongering. This is about understanding the facts so you can make informed decisions about your financial future. Gold is currently trading over$4,000. It moves so quickly that by the time I made the research, um and by the time I'm recording this, it's already up some more. That is a 44% gain, 45% gain so far. And it means that, oh, if you'd invested$100,000 into it, you'd now have$145,000, which is not bad. That's just this year, by the way. Now, stocks have been solid this year. Don't get me wrong, we're up something like 17%, but nowhere near the gold performance. And here's what makes this significant gold outperforms stock to this degree very, very rarely. In the last hundred years, it's happened only five times. During five major periods: the Great Depression, the Nixon Gold Standard disaster, the dot-com bubble, the 2008 great financial crisis, nothing great about that, it was just big. And where we are right now. So where is the crisis? Where's the crisis? Shouldn't there be a crisis? Well, there is a crisis, it's just most people don't talk about it. But what you have to understand about gold is that gold is something that doesn't produce anything. It doesn't generate profits, it doesn't pay dividends, it just sits there. It actually costs you money because you have to usually pay for it to sit there because you're going to put it as a storage and you've got to insure it. So when investors pile into gold, they're not looking for growth necessarily. They're looking for protection. They're saying, I am more concerned about preserving what I have than growing it. It's a defensive posture. And when you see this at scale, it's a warning sign. So the current drivers are threefold. Central banks around the world, including emerging markets especially, are buying gold. So basically, governments are essentially buying gold. The US dollar has lost 5% of its value so far this year. And it means gold becomes more attractive because people are concerned about the loss of the dollar value. Now, before we dive deeper into this, with what's happening with US debt and where the opportunities are, if you want to just learn how Wall Street finds winning stocks and positions itself for opportunities like this, then I've got something better for you than this video. Actually, yes, there is a research report that comes with this video, and you can download for free that for free in our free community at feedixfriends.org slash resource. But there's something even better, and that is if you go to FelixFriends.org slash get free, you will learn Wall Street's three rules of how they actually spot where the money is flowing earlier than you probably are right now. That's a free video, it's only 15 minutes long, so it's definitely shorter than this one, and it'll just arm you with skills. If you go off and watch that, and I'd be very happy if I saw on the YouTube statistics that everybody left at this point and went off and got themselves skills rather than the news and the noise of today. But understanding this debt crisis, and yes, it sounds alarming, right?$38 trillion. It also sounds a bit absurd because such a large amount of money that seems to be kind of irrelevant. But you see, they're adding a trillion dollars in debt every 60 days. Interest costs about$380 billion for every percentage point of interest rate. And the debt to GDP ratio, well, it's at a fairly ludicrous level. Do you remember Greece? Remember when Greece defaulted on its debt? That's where Italy uh sorry, I I sorry I mentioned Italians there as well. The Italians are usually also in up bracket crazy levels. The United States, for the first time in over a century, will have worse debt than Greece. Greece, the country that nearly collapsed the European financial system in 2011. So how did we get there? Well, every year the government spends more than it takes in through taxes. Currently, they collect about 5 trillion in taxes, they spend about 7 trillion. That's a 2 trillion deficit, and I think we can all figure out that that is not really a great path to be on. And the trend is alarming. It's going to get way, way, way, way, way worse. So the forecast is that by 2030, the US will have 140% debt, whereas Italy and Greece will have a more modest 130% debt. So literally you're taking out two countries that are incredibly poorly run and have been for many, many decades. Lovely people, though. Nothing against the Greeks or the Italians, lovely people. But your government has always been an absolute fucking shambles. Sorry, did I say that out loud? But yeah, I did, didn't I? Um the US is running a deficit that's double what it was before COVID. There's no emergency, but it's still running out. And what that means is you can't really have high interest rates anymore. Because every 1% of interest rate costs you$180 billion. So even if you have a high inflation, you basically still need to have low interest rates, which means you're going to have more high inflation. It's a catch-22. It's an impossible situation. There is really no way out of this, other than have more inflation. And that brings us back to gold. But first, let's understand what the nitwits at the IMF say. Sorry, the incredibly smart people who run this very, very uh uh important and astute organization with no corruption and envelopes and backhanders at all. Uh but yeah, they do have some economists lying around there, and they're saying that the US public finances are a systematic global risk. So the international financial community is basically saying, we're actually really worried about this. So that's the potential, that's what they're saying, to trigger a cascade of problems across the entire global financial system, a bit like 2008, right? Remember when the uh US housing market collapsed because a few people were a little greedy, took down almost the entire world economy. The IMF is saying US debt has the same potential for contagion. And it can contaminate us in various ways if US interest rates go much higher. Not the government interest rates, the market interest rates, as in how much interest do I need to get paid to buy your debt, right? Very different to what the government said. So it's the market saying, how much risk is there? How much do we want to get paid in order to earn your debt? Now the debt's gonna spiral because borrowing will, well, they're borrowing to pay the interest, which is when you know you're at it off-kelter, right? Imagine you have a credit card, you maxed it out, and you can't pay it off. And to be able to pay the interest on that credit card, you get another credit card. And then you max that one out, and then to get the payable interest on both of those credit cards, you get another credit card. That's what the US government's done, right? Now, the problem is when US interest rates go up because we distrust the government and their debt, what happens to emerging markets? Well, their money, their let's call them dollars, but there won't be dollars. There'll be, you know, ringgit and yen and all sorts. They that money will flow into the US because you can now get 5, 6, 7, 8, 9% interest for relatively little risk. So it drains money from the rest of the world. But it also means the dollar loses value, which means nobody wants to hold it as a reserve, and nobody really wants to transact in it. So that's where we are. On top of that, as I'm recording this, there is a government shutdown. I actually don't think it's that big a deal, to be honest with you. Yeah, a lot of people not getting paid. If that happens for a long time, that's an impact on the economy. We don't get any economic data. I think most of that is cooked anyway. So I think that's really a big thing. I think less government is actually a good thing. So people always say this is disaster and all of that. I actually think this is quite a positive. It makes us realize we need a lot less government, not a lot more government. There is a little bit of my political opinion thrown in there, right? Now, some people will be affected followed by this, and obviously that needs to be addressed. Like you can't have people, you know, not getting treatment and that kind of thing. But it isn't really a huge problem because the economic loss is just like debt you're not creating. So I don't have a big problem with this part. But I have a problem with this part. The Fed is making interest rate decisions without data because the people who compile that data are furloughed or whatever the word is, and it creates uncertainty. Now, markets do not like uncertainty. The Fed chair just came out and said something un unpleasant. He said, further cuts are not a foregone conclusion. Like, uh, I think that's where you're wrong, because yes, December we might be wrong on that. But come early 2026, he's going to get replaced. You've been booted out as too late, Powell. Um, and you'll probably remember most importantly for printing the most money anybody's ever printed, and then for saying it won't cause inflation. When it caused massive inflation, he said the conflation would be transitory. It's a bit like our life. It is also transitory. At some point there is death. But but while lower interest rates, which undoubtedly will happen, what are they good for? Well, they're good for jobs, they're good for debt, right? It's cheaper to finance things. We have a problem, and that is that we still have inflation. And inflation is a tax on you. It is a hidden tax on you and your income, and it's a tax on anybody who holds cash or earns or salary. So as they're cutting rates and as they're starting the money printer again slowly but steadily, what does it mean? Well, there are more dollars around, they're worthless, right? They're less rare. There's less value to them, there's more inflation, there are lower interest rates, and therefore the dollar continues to decline. We've literally already seen this year a pretty much a 5% decline in the value of the dollar. Your foreign trips just got a little bit more expensive, but that's not really all of it. It means you get higher import costs in inflation, you get lower returns of foreign investors, and it erodes confidence and US economy and assets and increases the appeal of gold. There are countries like Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa who want to remove the dollar from their systems because they want to have their own control. And if you see the story around Russia, and I always say this, and people always say, oh, the Russians are evil, whatever. Well, if you're any other country in the world and you see that Russians' foreign reserves got confiscated, as in stolen, and are then handed over to their enemy, right? Doesn't make you sleep very well at night if you're Brazil, India, China, or South Africa. So do you want to own or have your foreign reserves in the United States or in the US dollar or in US government debt? No, you don't. So what do you want to do? You want to own no US government debt. Well, that removes one of the biggest buyers that's financing the government extravaganza in the US. You remove these buyers, what happens? Well, the government has less buyers. Therefore, it needs to incentivize less buyers to buy more. How do you incentivize them? You need to offer them higher interest rates. You see the conundrum trying to cut interest rates to stimulate the economy and to make the debt affordable, but in order to sell more debt to pay for the debt, we need higher interest rates. Man, this is why gold's becoming more attractive. Central banks are buying gold instead of a dollar. So, how does that affect you, my friends? Well, there is a 401k policy change. I made a video on that a little while back, but I think it's worth revisiting because a lot of people missed that. You can now put things into your 401k, or you're about to rather, it's still in consultation phase, I believe, into things like private equity. I think that's a terrible idea because that's incredibly illiquid and not really something I'd recommend. Real estate investments could be good or bad. Look at the fine print. Digital assets, cryptocurrencies, could be good or bad depending on which stage you're in in your life, but you can also put it into commodities. So it was previously very, very difficult to get gold into 401k. Now new markets, new products are being created for this. Now you have to watch out for the higher fees, the reduced liquidity, the increased volatility, and complexity. And bear in mind gold's at record highs. If you're buying this and you're retiring next year, you're taking some risks here, right? But there are opportunities here. In every crisis, there are opportunities. I'm a big believer of that. So you want to position yourself to benefit from these challenging times. The first thing is understand how to do it. The second is acquire the skills so you can manage your money better. And how do you do that? Well, when central bank gold purchases are at the highest levels in a day, decade, there is some thought about having some gold exposure. You can do it with ETFs, you can do with mining stocks, you can do with physical gold. I think there is pros and cons for all of that. There are also tips out there, which are inflation-protected securities. I'm sort of neutral on those, but you know, they're there. Real estate commodities, infrastructure, they hold some intrinsic value. They will probably outperform inflation. You can go international if you must. You need to understand those markets, though. But understanding gold is really this. It's not a growth asset. It is protection against the erosion of feared money in inflation. It is a hedge. So it is part of a portfolio that's diversified. It is not the entire portfolio. And I do believe you need a longer horizon there. Now, what do you want to avoid? This is the most important thing. Don't make emotional decisions. If you get that right, everything changes. And that's one of the core things that we teach. Watch the Felix Fensorg slash get free video and you'll get a great start there. Don't go all in on gold. That would be the worst thing to do. Going all in on anything is really bad. Chasing performance, if you don't understand money flows, is a bad idea. And don't quit stocks. I think stocks have a huge part to play in this. Really, really watch out for fees and aim for a more balanced approach. So you want to be in several asset classes. You want to consider your personal situation, your time horizons, and you want to revisit that at least once a quarter, maybe once a month, maybe every Sunday, right? Because this is your future. Not a financial advisor. You might want to get yourself some professional advice on your situation, look into the tax implications and everything as well. But above all, the one thing you can do is improve what's up in here, not smartness. You actually don't need to be smart and a good money manager, but you do need to have some rules. So if you look at the takeaways, gold's at about$4,000. It's a warning sign. It's not a coincidence. And yes, we've been making some nice money out of that this year, but it is a warning sign. The IMF is warning of a systematic global risk. US debt is at crazy levels, and the Fed is caught between a rock and a rock and needs to basically lower rates because Trump demands it to keep the debt sustainable, but then you need to pay more interest to sell more debt. It's an interesting place to be. So you want to learn more about how we benefit from this? Go to phoenixfence.org slash get free. I could spell get free. And watch that free 15-minute video, which I think will give you a lot more value than this because it's timeless, it's skills, and you'll have it forever. And then on top of that, get yourself the research report that I put together for this exact topic, which goes a lot more into depth. And I know we cover that a lot of stuff there. So sometimes it can be a bit like um I try to make these videos simpler, but sometimes there's just so much going on. And we really just do have to cover the economics of it and the opportunities. So check that out. That's at physicsfrance.org slash resources. There's a link down below as well. Both the links are down below in the description. You can just click on those. And if you got some value out of this, then share it with some. That would be the only thing I'd ask. That would be the greatest gift you give somebody else. It helps spread knowledge and information rather than fear and FOMO. And I wish you great success. All the best.