Hook Bonds Pull The Strings

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Ask a hundred people what really moves the stock market, and you'll hear the same handful of answers. The Fed, Earnings, Elon, Trump, the Jobs Report, Winston, and almost nobody will name the one thing that actually pulls the strings behind all of it. Bonds. I know, bonds. Probably the most boring word in the entire English language. It sounds like homework. It sounds like something your grandad did. But stay with me for the next few minutes. Because here is what almost nobody tells you. The bond market is bigger than the entire global stock market. It's the master switch sitting underneath your mortgage, your savings, your pension, and every share you've ever owned. And right now, that switch is being flipped in a way we have not seen in our lifetimes. My name is Felix Breen. I used to be an investment banker. That down there is Winston, my adopted little research hound. And before I got out and started teaching regular people the stuff that Wall Street likes to keep for itself, well, I did a little stint in banking and I was an economist. And we've taught over 25,000 people so far over the last seven years. And my goal is that you will understand why the US government has cost 40 trillion in debt and how it added the last trillion in just a couple of months. It now spends more just paying the interest on that debt than it spends on the entire military. And over on the other side of the world, Japan gave us a live preview of how this movie ends. The central bank had to step in and buy up half the country's debt just to keep the whole thing standing. So here's the question I want you to hold on to. If bonds are the master switch and the switch is being pushed this hard, what happens to the money in your pocket? And by the end of this video, you'll understand it better than most people on Wall Street. So let's get into it. Here's what we're covering: three things. And they build on top of each other. What a bond actually is, in just plain English, and why it quietly runs everything. Number two, why the biggest borrower on earth, the US government, is now trapped. And why Japan is the canary in the coal mine. And number three, what the smart money is quietly doing about it. I don't really like the word smart money. I prefer to call it skilled money. So I'm going to show you that and what that means for your portfolio. Now that sounds good, let's start with the basics because once all of this clicks, you will never look at the news or the stock market the same way again. But I appreciate before we go deeper, there's a lot of information to cover here, and bonds is not the topic that you know we sort of grew up with. So I'm going to put all the numbers, all the charts, all the history, all the plain English stuff about how bonds really control your money and your retirement into a free research report. You can just download it. It's completely free at felixfriends.org slash bonds, imaginatively titled. So it's in the description down below. Grab it and you can read it while you watch the video, or you can read it afterwards and then try to explain to somebody else, and that's going to then really, really sink in.

Bonds And The Price Yield Seesaw

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Okay, let's start right at the very beginning. Because if you get this part, everything else will fall into place. A bond is just a loan. That's it. That's the whole thing. Instead of you going to a bank to borrow money, a government or a company comes to you and to big investors and to other countries and asks to borrow yours. So imagine the US government needs money. It sells you a piece of paper, literally a piece of paper, it's a bond. And you hand over, say, $1,000. The government promises to pay you a little bit of interest every year and then give you your $1,000 back on some date in the future. That's a bond. You are the lender, they are the borrower. The bond is just the IOU. Now, here's the first thing that trips people up, and I need you to really, really get this, because the entire financial world hinges on this one thing. The price of a bond and the interest it pays move in opposite directions. Opposite. It's like a like a Cecil. Let me make it simple. Say you bought that bond when it paid 2% interest, but then interest rates in the economy go up, and there is a brand new bond that's being sold, and that bond sells a 5% interest. Well, guess what? Nobody wants your dusty 2% interest bond anymore, right? Because you can get 5% now. So if you want to sell your 2% interest bond, you have to lower the price to make it attractive. The price of your bond goes down. So it's priced down, what the market calls yields up. It's a fancy word for interest rate, essentially. It works the other way too. When everybody's scared and is rushing to buy safe bonds, typically what happens when war breaks out and that sort of thing, the prices get pushed up. And because the price goes up, the interest rate, the yield goes down. So that one little seesaw, price up, yield down, price down, yield up, is the heartbeat of the entire global economy. So you sort of get that now. I know it makes you makes our head hurt a little bit. I feel exactly the same way. I used to sit next as a bond trader, two, two desks down from me, and he took us into a little room once and did unspeakable things to us. He explained how the bond market really works. And I was like, this is really, really painful, but very useful. So yes, the bond market is boring. It is a sleepy corner of the finance that nobody talks about at parties because nobody would invite a bond trader, because you know, but it is bigger than the global stock market. So the global bond market is worth about $160 trillion. The global stock market is just a little bit smaller. Okay. So the thing that nobody talks about is bigger than the thing everybody talks about. So why does that matter in itself? Because bonds are where the serious money lives. When a pension fund or an insurance company or a foreign government has hundreds of billions of dollars to park, they don't put it in your latest meme stock and hope it's going to go up. No, they put it in bonds. And that means the bond market is where the truth gets told. Stocks are like the mood, the fun guy at the party with the good mood, but bonds are the actual money paying for it. So how does that make bonds the master switch?

Risk-Free Rate Sets Asset Prices

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The thing that actually controls everything else, including the value of every share you earn. It comes down to one idea, and it has a fancy name, but the idea is actually very simple. It's called the risk-free rate. And here's what that means: US government bonds are treated as the safest place on earth to put your money because everyone assumes the US government will always pay you back. So the interest those bonds pay becomes the baseline for the entire planet. It's the floor, it's the number every other investment on Earth has to beat. Think about it from your point of view. If a totally safe government bond pays you, say, 5% for doing absolutely nil nada zilch, nothing, why on earth would you take a risk on a wobbly company's shares unless they can pay you a lot more than 5%? Well, you wouldn't, right? Which is why the stock market has historically returned about 10%. Not a promise, obviously, of the future, but that's the statistics, right? So in that risk-free rate, say this 5% number goes up, then suddenly every other investment has to work harder to justify its existence. Money drains out of the whiskey things, the shares, the property, the crypto, the gold, and flows towards safe bonds, paying a nice guaranteed 5%. And this is the answer to a question that drives regular investors crazy. Have you ever seen your portfolio drop like a stone on a day when there was literally no bad news about the company's yearn? There wasn't the bad earnings, no scandal, you know, Elon didn't tweet anything, yet everything was red. Well, that's bonds. That's the master switch being flipped. Somewhere, bond yields, you know, the interest rates on bonds, that risk-free rate, it went up. And the price of every risky asset on earth got a little bit repriced downwards. So you didn't hear about it because it happened in the boring market, nobody wants to talk about, but it hit your account anyway, it hit your pension anyway. But there was one more piece, and it's the early warning system. And it's

Spreads Signal Trouble Early

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called a dreaded word called the spread. It's like, Felix, stop it! Stop torturing us. But in plain English, the spread is the extra interest that shaky borrowers, so riskier companies, have to pay on top of what the safe US government pays. And when times are good, everyone's kind of chilled and relaxed and you know, high on something in California, and therefore the gap is small. I just came from California, never smelled so much weed in my life. Uh, investors are happy to lend to everybody, but when the fear creeps back in, you know, recession fears or something, the gap suddenly widens because lenders start demanding a lot more to take a risk. And the bond market smells trouble long before the stock market does. This guy says it's really boring, but just bigger noses, you know, like Winston. So when we get a widening spread, that calls pretty much every crisis in modern history. Very quietly, weeks or months before the stock market panics. The bond market is the adult in the room of a bunch of people high on something. When it gets nervous, you should get nervous too. So just make sure we get this. Bonds set the risk-free rate. The risk-free rate prices everything else. And then there is something on top of that, which is called the spread, which tells you when fear is coming. That's the master switch. And the spread gets bigger, and to make sure that really lands for you, you've got the risk-free rate, which is the US government's 5%, say. And then on top of that, so you've got your 5% for safe bonds, government bonds. And then if the riskier stuff, say demands 7%, be not too worried. But if it moves to say 8% or 9% or something, the market is saying, this stuff is risky as hell. We think something bad's gonna happen, and that's what you should pay attention to. That's why I said at the beginning, if you don't understand bonds, you literally don't understand money. Now let me show you what happens when the biggest borrower in the history of the world starts pulling on that switch a little bit. But before I do, the thing that keeps me up at night is this. Everything

AI Bubble And Retirement Risk

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I'm about to show you, a government drowning in debt, interest costs exploding, it's all landing at the exact same moment as the biggest speculative bubble since the year 2000, the AI bubble. And I want to be careful here because I'm not an AI hater. AI is real, it's gonna change the world, but so did the internet. You're watching this through the internet, right? And that's exactly the point. Let me read you something. One of Warren Buffett's directors, the guy who you know runs Berkshire Hotherweb, he said recently, and I kind of haven't been able to stop thinking about this. He said, if we want to spend time trying to identify the emerging AI winners, which is what you're all doing, right? Or the lunatics picking picking stocks. Me too, by the way. At this stage of the cycle, we have to look back with caution at the internet. Who were the three horsemen of the internet? It was Cisco, it was Yahoo, and it was AOL. If you just wanted to own the obvious winners, they were the kings of the internet. Now, and two of them basically were vaporized. And the third is still quite a shadow of what it was. This is Berkshire Hutherway saying this. The guy with the biggest cash pile in the history of the world. So read that again, it's on the screen here. The obvious winners, the kings, Cisco, Yahoo, AOL. If you bought the most obvious, can't lose, everyone agrees on these winners of the internet. Two of them got wiped out, and the third never recovered. And the technology was real the whole time. The internet was arguably the greatest invention of our lifetime, and it still destroyed the people who piled into the obvious winners at the top. So let me make this a bit more personal for you. Imagine you are, imagine you're 55. Actually, put whatever age you guys in are in the chat and we'll run through through it together. And say you're planning to retire at 65. You got about $100,000 in your retirement account, which is actually the US average. Maybe you have a lot more. It doesn't really matter. But now imagine the AI names everybody owns get cut the way those internet darlings did. It's not this not to scare you. It's just history and valuations are much worse today than they were in 2000. So, what do you actually do about this? How do you actually protect your retirement from a crash that history keeps telling us is coming? Well, that's what I'm going to teach you. And I literally ran a session on this a week ago. More than 7,000 of you showed up live, which is incredible. But I've also got messages from literally thousands of you who couldn't make it and were like, can we do this again? So we're going to do this one more time. And we're going to do it live because it's going to take me an hour and a half, maybe two hours to walk you through this properly. And I want you to be able to ask me questions. So we're going to do it real time live. And I'm going to do this for you on what I think will be either your Friday morning or your Thursday evening. Depends on where you are in the world. It's completely free. You just go to survive the bubble.com, you grab yourself a free seat and you show up. There will not be a replay because people don't watch the replays. It doesn't land for you because they're not in the room. You need to be in the room to actually be there and to actually make this land for you. So if you are going to show up for yourself, write show up in the comments down below. And I know that you win. Now, let me show you, links down below in the description, right?

The US Debt Spiral Trap

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Let me show you why the biggest borrower on earth is actually trapped right now where the whole debt thing matters so much. So the United States government, literally this month, the US government debt crossed $40 trillion, right? And I want to give you a sense of how fast that's moving because the number is so big, it's just meaningless, right? In March of this year, the debt was $39 trillion. It crossed $40 just. Another trillion in just five months. That works out at about $117,000 of debt for every single person in America, every man, every woman and child, and probably every golden retriever. But the total number isn't even the scary part. The scary part is just the interest. Remember, all that debt is made up of bonds, and every bond pays interest, right? We learned that today. And for years, interest rates were basically a big fat zero. So the debt was cheap. And then rates went up. Well, because a certain lunatic started printing all the money, which is what they're doing again. So the government has to roll all that debt it took on at like zero cost over and has to refinance it at much higher rates. So the interest bill is exploding. So the US spends more on interest on its debt than it spends on its military. Crazy, right? Most powerful military on the planet. Every aircraft carrier, every base, every soldier, every jet costs less than the interest payments on the debt. Only Social Security is bigger, and the debt's going to eclipse that too. And here's the trap. The reason I call it a debt spiral is that to pay the interest, the government borrows. They're borrowing more, which means more debt. More debt means more interest, which means it has to borrow even more. And it around and round and around she goes. And a lot of that debt is very short-term, which means it comes to you very, very quickly. It has to be financed again and again and again, no matter what the interest rate is. So if rates stay high, the cost is just going to keep climbing. So the government is literally like someone paying off one credit card with another credit card, except the numbers have, you know, 12 zeros. Maybe you're thinking, so what? It's the government's problem, it's not my problem. Well, there are really only three ways out of a hole like this. One, you could grow the economy fast enough to outrun it, which have the size, it's basically impossible. Like I guess nobody who thinks it's possible except for Trump. And again, it's not an anti-Trump thing, it's just it's it's it's a nice idea, but run the numbers, it's very hard to do. Um, idea number two is just stop paying it back, which is unthinkable because it would literally blow up the global financial system, right? It's just never gonna happen because all the bankers would lose their jobs and uh, you know, I mean, we couldn't deal with that, could we? I mean, all the nurses would be out collecting money for the for the bankers because we know we know how important they are. Um, and then there is number three, which is the quiet one. And that's basically the one they always choose. They inflate it away, they print more money, they let the value of your dollar slowly fall and pay back the debt in dollars that are worth less than the ones that they borrowed. And this third option, this third door is the one that reaches into your bank account. It reaches into your salary check. Because paying off the debt by shrinking the value of the dollar means shrinking the value of your dollars too. Your savings are part of the bill. Your salary is part of the bill.

Japan Shows The Endgame

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Now, if you think 40 trillion sounds impossible to escape, I want to show you the country that's about a decade ahead of the US on this exact rate, glorious Japan. Japan is the glimpse into the future and ob which nobody in the West is paying any attention. And here's the situation: Japan's debt compared to the size of the economy is about 200%. It's the highest in the entire developed world. There are just a few sort of tin pot hot, you know, banana growing countries, but from the real economies, the worst debt in the world. Far worse than the US, which sits at 120%. About twice of the entire economy that it produces every year is debt. So, how has Japan not collapsed? Well, this is the fascinating part. And it's the preview of where everyone else is heading, so pay attention. For years, investors looked at Japan's insane debt and said, surely their bonds are about to blow up. Surely their interest rates have to go up. So they bet against Japanese bonds over and over and over, and they just kept losing money. So reliably that the trade got a nickname on Wall Street. They called it the widow maker because it destroyed everyone who tried it. And uh it was probably more like the divorced man maker, because, you know. Uh yeah, anyway. Uh so why did it keep falling? Because Japan did the thing I told you about, the quiet door. The central bank of Japan stepped in and became the buyer. When nobody else wanted to hold all of these bonds at these low interest rates, the central bank just created money and it bought them itself. At the peak, the Bank of Japan earned more than half of all Japanese government debt. More than half. It's still sitting on about approximately half. So the country's central bank bought half of the national debt to keep the Ponzi scheme, um, sorry, the wonderfully run economy from falling over. That's the end game of a debt sparrow. In the world when lent to you at a price you can afford, your own central bank prints the money and becomes the lender. It works right up until it doesn't. Because the price you pay is your currency. The Japanese yen has been getting weaker and weaker and weaker. And ordinary Japanese people have watched their savings and their spending power bleed away. Japan is literally the canary in the coal mine that we're all in. It's showing every other heavily indebted country, including the US, how this plays out. First the debt piles up, then the interest becomes unpayable, then the central bank steps in and buys the debt with printed money. And then the currency pays the price. So keep your eye on Japan because whatever happens there is coming to a Western economy near ye. So let's

Inflation And The Weakening Dollar

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connect all of this to your actual money, because this is the part that actually matters to you, right? When a government solve its when a government solves its debt problem by printing money and letting the currency lose value, it is not a painless fix. Somebody's gotta pay, and the person who pays is whoever is holding that currency in cash, in a savings account, in a pension, or receives a paycheck. And that's you. That's everyone who plays by the rules and saves. Economists have a very polite, boring name for it. They call it inflation. But that word is very gentle. But what it really is, is a transfer of wealth out of the pockets of the people who hold cash and earn cash towards whoever issued the debt. It is a tax, but you don't notice it because it doesn't show up on your tax bill. It shows up as your money simply buying less than it used to. And here's the proof on the screen. Since 1971, that's the year the US dollar cut is linked to gold, the US dollar has lost 87% of its purchasing power. So in real terms, that means a dollar from 1971 today buys you about 12 cents worth of stuff. Think about that. If your grandparents had put $100 in a shoebox in 1971 and you opened it up today, you would find essentially $12. So the money didn't get stolen, it just got diluted slowly, quietly, year after year. By the exact process I've just walked you through.

What Skilled Money Does Now

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Now, the part that should make you sit up with good posture is always a good thing. What are the people who understand this actually doing about it? Not the guys on TV or YouTube, the central banks themselves, or the very institutions doing the money printing, they're buying gold. Enormous amounts of it, massive amounts of it, right? Thousand tons plus a year in 2024 and 2025 and again 2026. So the people printing the paper money are swapping some of it for the kind of money that can't be printed. Why gold? It's the one asset on earth governments can't create out of thin air. So there's no button you can press to have more gold. It can't be defaulted on, it can't be inflated away, and it can't be stolen by another country unless they actually physically invade. So what do you actually do with all this? Well, let me be practical because I don't want to just scare you here. I want you to be able to act on this better. First, understand what cash really is right now. Cash is not safe. It feels safe because the number in your account doesn't move, but that's the illusion. Well, the number stays the same. What you can buy with it is declining pretty rapidly. And it's a guaranteed decline. So holding all your wealth in cash because you're scared about the market is like a it's like a slow, quiet bleed, and you'll be dead by the end or just poor. And then, second, gold, yes, is an insurance. And I think it's important to hear that. And it's a lot of the gold bugs really like push you hard on gold. I'm not telling you to gamble on gold to get rich. Gold is not a lottery ticket. Gold is insurance. It's the thing that holds value when paper money does not. It is the escape hatch. Every civilization has used for the last 5,000 years. No currency has survived, right? Or that long. So you buy it not to get rich, you buy it as fire insurance. And then third, now that you understand the master switch, watch it. Watch bond yields. When this risk-free rate is climbing, that's the pressure building on every risky thing you earn. Watch the spreads. You know, when the gap that the shakier borrowers have to pay starts widening, the bond market is telling you fear is coming. Usually before the stock market has a clue because our stock investors are not as smart, but we have friends. So you now have access to the same early warning system that the professionals use. Most people watching the news have no idea it even exists. And this is exactly the kind of thing we track inside. There's a tool that I built called the Winston app, named after this guy, and it watches the master switch for you, the yields, the spreads, the health of all these markets and all of that. And you can check that out if you wish. There is a and put a link down below with a free trial for you guys if you want to see what I'm doing there. It's where I get all my news from. So

Watch Yields To Protect Portfolios

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remember this the bond market is bigger than the stock market. It's the master switch. It sets the risk-free rate that prices every asset you own and it whispers when fear has come. The biggest borrower on earth now has 40 trillion in debt. It's adding a trillion every few months, pays more in interest than on the military. Japan has shown us how the story ends. And it ends with printed money. It ends with the dollar losing a lot of its power. And the skilled money, well, they know what the escape hatch looks like. And in a few years from now, when the history of this decade gets written, it won't lead with the stock market. It'll lead with the bond market the moment the master switch got pushed too far. And most people won't understand what they're reading because nobody ever explained it to them. But not you, because you made it till near the end of a bond video. Just don't tell anybody because you will lose all your friends. But you now get it. The next time somebody tells you the Fed or earnings or the job report is what moves your money, you'll know better. You need to look at the boring market. And it's the one that's bigger than all others, the one that pulls the strings. Because if you don't understand bonds, you don't understand money, and now you do. And now that you understand the master switch, here's the most important thing you can do with it. Everything I've shown you, the debt spiral, the printing, the quiet bleed on your savings, it's all landing at the same time as this AI bub. That is everybody piling into the exact same handful of obvious winners. And you just said what happened to the obvious winners of the internet, right? So the question isn't whether you understand the danger you do now. The question is what are you going to do to protect your retirement before it arrives? And that's what I'm teaching you live this week. I'll spend about an hour, maybe two hours with you, take a lot of your questions and walk you through how to protect yourself from this kind of a crash that history keeps warning us about. And all you've got to do is go to survivethebubble.com, grab your free ticket, show up, because there'll be no replay. And if you showed up, if you're one of the 7,000 people who showed up for the last one of this, we're going to cover some extra stuff for you as well, because I'm getting all the questions from you guys, and I can see where we've got some holes to fill. Click on the link down below. Let me know you're going to show up, right? Show up in the comments down below. And if you found this valuable, share it with somebody. Share it with somebody else who needs this information and it needs to be protected. And I wish you all the best.