Felix Nikolas Prehn's Podcast
Felix Nikolas Prehn is an economist and former investment banker. Felix — alongside his golden retriever Winston — interprets the economy and markets.
Felix Nikolas Prehn's Podcast
Felix Nikolas Prehn: When The Money Gets Rewritten
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A currency reset can quietly rewrite the value of your savings while you are still playing by the old rules. We lay out a calm plan built around what holds value outside fragile promises, plus the simple tests we use to spot businesses that can survive inflation and tightening money.
• Defining a currency reset in plain terms and why it can feel quieter than a crash
• Explaining how savings and pensions become claims inside the system that can be written down
• Showing why the careful saver can be more exposed than the gambler
• Breaking down three asset classes that tend to hold value when old money gets devalued
• Physical gold as hard money plus the key risk of paper gold claims
• Property as shelter and utility plus the downside of being easy to tax and impossible to move
• Why productive and self-sufficient property is more resilient than fragile “address value”
• The mortgage twist where fixed debt can shrink in real terms if payments stay affordable
• Why stocks are not one single thing and how pricing power can preserve real value
• Three stock filters we use: pricing power, something hard to copy, and manageable debt
• Why diversification matters and why going all-in on one hedge can backfire
👉 Claim 99% Off the Financial Freedom Program. Use coupon 99PC at checkout https://felixfriends.org/stocks
The Question Everyone Keeps Asking
SPEAKER_00A currency reset is the kind of event that happens maybe once in your lifetime. And when it comes, it does not treat everybody the same. Some families walk out of it a lot poorer than they thought possible. And a small number walk out richer than they went in. And Hugh here, of course, is our in-house currency expert. But in all seriousness, the difference is not luck. And it is not how much they started with. It is what they were holding when the music stopped. And I keep getting asked the same question. When this happens, what assets actually hold value? And there are three, and I'm going to show you why. So today I'm going to answer exactly this properly. It's not about buried gold bars, not some doomsday prepping here, just a real plan for real money. And the part that catches people out is this. One of these three assets is the one almost everyone assumes gets wiped out first. And we'll get to it. And once you see why it holds, you will never quite look at your money in the same way again, which is really the goal here. And by the end of this video, we're not going to panic. We're going to have a plan. So stay with me. If you're wondering who I am, my name is Felix Nicholas Preen. I'm an economist. I'm a former investment banker. I'm also the founder of the Preen Institute, where we publish economic research and research on financial markets and also provide instructions on how they actually work. I take zero sponsorship, zero endorsements ever. So me and Hugh here, we can say whatever we like. Now, there's quite a lot to cover here in terms of ground. So I've put the whole thing into a short free report that you can download and read in your own time at feedixfriends.org slash holds. There's a link down below in the description as well. So grab it, it'll make the whole thing stick with you a little bit more deeply. And one more thing before we start. If you're watching this, you're actually already ahead of most people. Why? Because most people will hear about this from a headline in 18 months or something like that. So you are early. And that is a wonderful thing to be. It's a wonderful thing to be early if you are in this situation.
What A Currency Reset Really Means
SPEAKER_00So let's be clear about what a reset even is in just plain terms, because the word gets thrown around and nobody really defines it, right? But a currency reset is that once-in-a-lifetime moment where the system rewrites the value of everything priced in the old money. It's not necessarily a crash. A crash is loud and you can see it. A reset is a little quieter than that. And in some ways it is much, much worse because it changes the rules underneath while you're still playing by the old rules. So here's the mechanism people don't really talk about. Most people keep their life's work as a claim inside the system. Cash in the bank, ordinary savings. The balance you were told to keep for safety, you know, pension you can't touch for years, all of that is a promise written in the old money, and it only exists as a record on somebody else's computer. And a record can be, well, altered. It can be tapered. It can be quietly written down. And the bigger the balance, the less it tends to be honored, because the bigger balances are where the money is. And this has happened before, over and over throughout history. Every few generations, the debts grow too large to ever be repaid in honest money, and the system finds a way to rewrite them. And sometimes it's very sudden and sometimes it's very violent, but most of the time it's slow, and you barely notice it until it's all over. But the pattern is always the same. The people who held claims inside the system paid for it. And the people who held real things outside the system did not. So this is not a conspiracy theory, it's just arithmetic. And when the debts cannot be paid, somebody's savings become the payment. So think about who that hits hardest. It's not the reckless gambler, it's the sensible saver. It's the person who did everything they were told to do. They worked, they were careful, they kept their money in the safest form they could find. And that safe form is the exact form a reset can reach. So the careful ones are actually the most exposed because they followed the rules too closely. Now the gambler already spent it or moved it or whatever, the saver left it sitting exactly where the reset can find it in one place that felt safest of all. So this is not losing money in a market you can watch and react to. This is agency being removed. It arrives sort of wrapped in soft language, fairness, sustainability, stability, that sort of gibber. And you'd be told it's for the common good, and you'll be told it's for your own good. And while you're being told all of that, the one form of money you trusted the most is being changed. So the question stops being, will this happen? And it becomes much more, it becomes a much more useful one. What do you move your money into so that when the rules get rewritten that's already started, your share
Why Bank Savings Become A Target
SPEAKER_00is in a form the new rules cannot quietly take. And that's the point of this entire video. Before I show you the three answers here, I just want to be clear. Reading what is about to happen to your own money before it shows up in the headlines is a skill. It's a real one. It's not luck, it's not a gift you were born with. It's a thing you learn and nobody ever taught it to you. Think about that. You were taught plenty of things at school you've never used since. And this they never covered. Never how money actually moves, never how to tell what holds its value from what gets taken, never how to read the early signals before the news catches up. And again, it isn't your fault. You cannot be blamed for a lesson you were never given. But here is the the tough part. And if I'm honest with you, and I can be honest with you because I'm not accountable to anybody, which is a wonderful thing. If you want to keep what you have spent a lifetime building, learning this is now your responsibility. No one's coming to do it for you. No politician's going to bail you out. But the good news is you can learn it. You already learned to walk, you already learned to swim, you learn to ride a bike, and those are actually fairly hard things to do. And you weren't born knowing how to do that. So I'm going to teach you this live and for free for about two hours. How a reset actually moves your savings and pension step by step in your portfolio, and how to tell the assets that hold from the ones that get taken and the early signals that I watch for, the ones that move long before any of it reaches the news. And you can ask me questions directly. I'm going to show you exactly what I'm watching or what I'm looking to buy and everything else while this guy here still sniffs around. And he might be there too. This is little Hugh. Well, he was little. Now he's getting rather large. But seriously, most people will act after the reset, once the prices have moved, once their portfolio is in the, you know, where. And by then the lesson is very expensive. Right now it's free. So here's what you do: you go to survive the bubble.com. The link is in the description down below. It's pinned in the comment. And you grab yourself a free seat. And then you're going to write the word act in the comments, A C T. And that way I know that you've done it, you know that you've done it, and everybody else knows that you've done it. And then you come straight back here because I'm going to give you the three asset classes that actually survive this. So asset number one, it's it's gold. So why does gold survive a reset when the cash doesn't? Well, the reason is simpler than people really make it. Gold does
Learning To Spot Early Signals
SPEAKER_00not sit on anyone's balance sheet. It isn't a promise, it is not a record. It needs no conversion because it's not a claim on anything else. It's just itself. And money is a promise of some value by the government. A share is a promise that you own a piece of something, right? But it's all just a piece of paper. So gold can't be printed. And when money is printed, which is what they're doing, every slice of the pie gets smaller and smaller because there is more money chasing the same amount of real stuff. And that's actually inflation. More claims, same pie, smaller slices. Gold has no pie to dilute. Nobody can wake up tomorrow and create a hundred years' worth of new gold to pay a bill. It's going to be dug out of the ground at great cost. It's slow, it's painful, it's, you know, there's a real genuine scarcity. There's not some sort of marketing trick. It's actually a feature of the product. And that's why you see central banks, the very people who print the money, and you can see it here who's buying the gold. Well, you know, how much of the central banks are buying here in the last um actually this year so far. And we've got the data through to July, waiting for the August and September data to come out. Um, and they're buying record amounts. And these are the guys who are printing the money, which is kind of an interesting uh take on it, right? So they're hedging against their own money printer. But there's a trap here, and it catches a lot of careful people. So please write it down. There is real gold and there's paper gold. Real gold is the actual metal, you hold it and you can put it in the storage unit, which is what I would recommend. Paper gold is a promise written on gold. It's a record that says you are owed some, and a promise can be inflated like anything else. If there are more paper claims and there is metal in the vault, then the paper gold is not really outside the system. It is just another piece of the very system. And if you look out here, how much gold is left on the vaults? Well, you can see it's declining, right? So all those paper promises are now backed by less and less and less. But the hard gold, it holds. So this is the warm-up, right? That's not the promise of the whole video. Let's look at what else there is, and then we get to the one that I is actually my favorite. Um, so the second one is property. Now, property is on the one side, it has a real value, intrinsic value. It's shelter. People always need somewhere to live and somewhere to work in any system under any currency. That demand doesn't completely vanish, right? So property is not a claim the way cash is, it's a real thing, bricks and mortar or whatever, and it does a job. But on the other side, property has two weaknesses, but gold does not. And the third one also doesn't. It cannot be moved, and it's very easy to tax. You cannot carry a house out of the country in your pocket, and the government always knows exactly where it is and exactly who owns it. So the property stays very reachable by the system in a way that metal in your hand does not. It holds its usefulness, but it stays with an arm's length of whoever is rewriting the rules. Now there's a nuance that actually matters here, and it's, again, one people miss. The more productive and self-sufficient the property, the more resilient it is. So there is a world of difference between, you know, a glass box and a city that only works when everything around it works, you know, the power, the water, the supply chains, and so on. And then there is one that, you know, land that can grow something, a place with its own water, its own power, its own ability to keep functioning with a wider system is under strain. So a home that feeds and runs itself is worth far more through a crisis than one that is just an expensive address that needs air conditioning to be able to be livable. And there's a second layer to this too, because property is rarely just property. Most people buy it with a large loan. So when you own a house with a mortgage, you actually hold two things a real asset, the building, the land, and then a debt written in the old money. And here's a strange twist. In a reset where the money is being devalued, a fixed debt in that old money, it also becomes worth less and less and less. Because you're going to repay it in money that is worth less and less and less when you borrow it. So the real thing, the property holds its value while the debt against it actually declines in value. So it's one of the few places in the whole system where being a borrower can really, really work in your favor as long as the loan is fixed and you can always make the payments. So property holds with a condition. The more it can look after the selves, the more it protects you, the more it depends on everything else. Well, if it doesn't, then it depends on everything else being fine, which is really not what you want. So maybe think about if you live in a property you own, you know, how how dependent is that property on everything around it function? And here's the third asset. And it's the one people assume gets wiped out in a reset. People look at the market in the last weeks and go, oh my
Gold And The Paper Gold Trap
SPEAKER_00God, everything is going down and all that stuff. And the lazy view goes like this shares are priced in the old money. They need exchanges and brokers to trade. So they sit fully inside the system, and the system will reshape them however it likes, and therefore shares are doomed, right? And you've probably heard some version of that. Now, it sounds sort of clever, but it's also mostly wrong. And understanding why is the most valuable thing in this entire video, because the mistake is treating shares as one single thing. They are not. A share is not a lottery ticket. A share is a part ownership of a real business with real buildings, real brand, real customers, and real cash coming in the door every day. And when the money loses value, those businesses do not at all behave the same way. Some get crushed, and some do something that feels almost impossible until you see it. They hold their real value, and a few of them actually grow during it. So what separates those two? Well, one thing above all, pricing power. Let me explain pricing power simply, because this is the heart of everything. Inflation is the force destroying your cash. It's ultimately money printing, but because inflation. So prices go up, your money buys less, your savings shrink in real terms. Now imagine a business that can raise its own prices just as fast or faster than the money is using value. What happens to that business? Its costs go up, yes, but its takings go up at least as much because it can just charge more and its customers keep paying. The very same force that is gutting your savings, inflation flows straight through that business and comes out the other side as higher revenue. Its real value is preserved, it can even grow. So the thing that destroys legacy money becomes the thing that lifts the right company's income up. And that's the whole secret. The right businesses do not fight inflation, they actually love inflation. So how do you find that business? And you can ask them about any company you already know. Question one, can it raise prices without losing its customers? This is about whether people have to have it or simply want it. Or there's no real alternative for it. A strong brand people trust, a habit people will not break. And by habit, I sort of mean, you know, an addiction to smoking or something. And a product that is close to a necessity is also very good. Something with no real substitutes. When a company puts its price up and people grumble and pay anyway, that's pricing power. You can see with your own eyes. And you've probably paid a higher price for something this month without even switching. That company has it. So think about the things in your own life you kept paying for, even as everything got more expensive since COVID. Maybe it's the brand of coffee you won't swap, the software your whole working life runs on, the everyday products you've bought for years without once checking whether there is a cheaper version, the medicine you simply have to have. Each of those is a company proving it has cut pricing
Property That Survives The Rewrite
SPEAKER_00power. And your wallet is quite frankly the evidence here. So you don't need a spreadsheet to spot them. You already know who they are, actually, because you are the customer who keeps paying. And then the second question is: does it own something that is genuinely hard to copy? A brand built over decades, a network that gets more useful the more people use it, a license or a pattern nobody can get, know-how that took a lifetime to build. And if a competitor with a pile of cash could copy the whole business in a year, well then the pricing power is not there. And then the third question, and that's kind of the killer here, really, is does it owe a mountain of money? A reset and the tighter money around it make old debt brutal, unless it's at a fixed rate, in which case could actually be a good thing. So a business that borrowed heavily at low rates and now has to refinance that debt at a much, much higher cost can be destroyed even if the product's good. So the third question is quite simple. When the money gets hard, can this company stand on its own cash or does it collapse the moments the lenders get nervous? And you're seeing a lot of the AI companies borrowed very, very heavily. And I'm talking about these sort of neo-cloud companies. Well, that business would not function if they have to pay a lot more interest. Now you might be thinking, okay, how do I find this? Well, again, in the in the Winston app, we actually have that data. You can play around with it completely for free for a month. You just click on stocks here on the left. Generally speaking, I click on highest rated. That's kind of what I'm looking at. And then in the filters, you can select, you can select an industry if you wanted, but maybe just in the United States, or maybe you're in Europe or the UK or Germany or wherever you might be living, and then where you want to invest. And they'll then give you those stocks with our score. The score does like what we call a moat. Now, what's a moat? A moat's exactly what we're talking about. It's basically pricing power. So you generally want to be looking at companies with a very high moat score. And you'll see some companies on here at the top of the list that you probably are not super familiar with, right? I mean, who invests in CESL or cargo's or DHT holdings? Well, very few people, but if you actually look at the moat, it's pretty impressive. So you can go through that. And in fact, what you could also do is you could click on, you could click on a couple of these and say, hey, I don't really know what these people do. Let me let me let me um let me find out, right? Uh you select a bunch of these, maybe add palette to the mix, and you hit the compare button. Actually, let's make it easier. You just click compare top 10, okay? Uh that's a little easier. And it will compare those top 10 for you, and you will see, okay, how the stock prices perform, but that's not really what this is about. This is about the actual business, the quality, the cash flow, the you know, all that stuff. Um, and it gives you all that information. You can go even deeper if you wish, but it's a really good place to start. Um, and that's essentially what I what I do when I look at a business. I look at, well, you know, do these guys have cash? Are they stable? Are they gonna survive what I think is coming? Okay, there's a link down below. Click on that, play around with it for a month. If you've got some value out of it, stick around. If not, just cancel it. And if you forget to cancel it, just send us a message in the in the in the support chat. There's live support chat,
Stocks That Pass Inflation Through
SPEAKER_00and say, hey, forgot to cancel this. Can you guys refund me? And of course, we'll do that for you. So let me let me show you one more thing. So for the companies that I follow, I get alerts and you can set that up as well. And one of the alerts you get is, for example, insider selled. So the big story of last week was Core Weave, uh, where the stocks down 25%, and insiders have sold $3.3 billion since this IPO'd. Well, would you have known that? Yeah, you would have known that because you would have gotten these little alerts here of all the selling. And it would have told you, well, it's a bit dubious, isn't it, when insiders are dumping this much off their own holdings. And maybe therefore it's something we should look at. And it would have probably also warned you that, well, these guys are running out of cash in three months. Right. And it's important information to have. So just go through it, at least for your own holdings, take you five minutes, and then you'll be in a much, much better place. And at the top, you can also see, you know, Winston's worried about it. Uh so that's kind of our our sort of headline ranking there. So, where does this Olivos? Well, the asset everyone assumes gets wiped out, shares is actually one of the very best things you can hold throughout the reset on one condition. You hold the right kind. Not shares in general, businesses with real pricing power, something hard to copy, and no mountain of debt waiting to get refinanced. And that company isn't just going to be a survivor in this situation, it's actually gonna come out the other side brilliant. And part of that is because the weaker rivals didn't make it. So actually, it's easier for them to compete. And that's how, and that's how the skilled people, not the smart people, not the rich people, no, the skilled people walk out of this wealthier because they own the businesses that pass the inflation on, instead of drowning in it. So if we pull the three together into one simple way of thinking, because that's really what I want you to do, what you want you to walk away from. You look at the stuff that needs no conversion, the hard money, right? Real gold. It doesn't just sit in your on someone's balance sheet. It's it's it's a real thing. And it's stays, and then there is what stays useful, whatever happens, the productive property, you know, shelter that does a real job. Residential as a higher real need than, say, an office, because we all did without offices, right? I sold my office just because COVID started, never been back since. And it's been a beautiful thing. And then there is what actually compounds throughout the storm, and those are the businesses with a genuine pricing power, the moat, the ones that take the force destroying your cash and turn it into higher income, higher profits. And then we've got to just be honest about the losers plainly because cash in ordinary savings will definitely lose money, in my humble opinion. It's like historic pattern. The heavily indebted business with no pricing power who have to refinance, and that's true for quite a lot of the AI space and tech space right now. The story is exciting, but it's only exciting when money is
Moats Debt And Insider Selling Clues
SPEAKER_00cheap and hey, money is no longer cheap. But very importantly, don't walk away and put all your money in one of these. Don't become a gold buck. It's it's it's a it's a bad idea because gold will move quite violently up and down depending on what people are doing in the short term. It's the traders who determine it. In the longer term, um, countries have quite a lot to do with it. And you know, the Middle East is probably selling quite a lot of gold right now, so the gold price isn't looking so good. So you never want to be dependent on one thing, because one thing can always turn against you. So the goal is to move your money out of the thing that's definitely going to lose into several forms that cannot reach so easy. That's the whole move. And honestly, actually, again, shares, the easiest thing to diversify, and I mean generally you need to diversify, you need companies in different industries that are not related. Again, something you can look up in the in the Winston app, just put your portfolio in and it'll show you exactly how you're correlated and how you're impacted by inflation here. So if we look at the inflation shield, so to speak, it'll just show you like what company stocks you own and are they in the same, are they inflation affected and are they in the same industries? Very, very useful thing to do. Again, just play around with it for free. And honestly, uh this is the this is the biggest thing that's gonna happen to us in our lifetimes here. The stakes are enormous and they're human, they're not just money financial. This is gonna feel like a gift to the people who understand this, because they're gonna get a lot wealthier. And the people who don't understand this, well, they're going to see their life's work halved or worse. It's got nothing to do with whether you're lucky or whether you are in the world, or how much money you've got, or how clever you are. It's just about understanding this system that we've seen again and again and again in history, fairly recent history even, and knowing what to do about it. Because right now you still have to have choice. Because we're still relatively early. But that will not be the case in some months down the road. So if you want
Diversify Now And Do Not Panic
SPEAKER_00me to actually show you how to read this properly before it reaches mainstream media headlines, that's exactly what the pre-life training is for. That's exactly what the point is of this community here. I'll walk you through how this affects specifically your stocks, your pension, your setup, and what gets taken, the early signals and everything else. So just join us on Saturday at survivethebubble.com. And this isn't about panic, right? This is about having a plan. So I hope to see you in the training on Saturday. If you think someone else might get some value out of this, share this video with them, share them the link to the training. And I wish you.