Is the Dollar Doomed? Rob Kientz Breaks Down the Collapse

Craig Hemke (00:01)
Hello again from Sprott Money and SprottMoney.com. We are now well into the month of April 2025. It is time for your Ask the Expert video. I'm your host Craig Hempke and our expert this month is Rob Keats. Rob from the Freedom Report and he's a great follow on Twitter. Someone I'm really excited to have you get to know. Rob, thank you so much for taking some time to join me.

Robert Kientz (00:42)
Thanks for having me back on, Craig. I appreciate it.

Craig Hemke (00:45)
It's always fun to visit my friend and it's always fun to visit Sprott Money. How's that? See, that's a professional segue right there. Hey, look, there is, I write about this a lot in my columns for Sprott Money. Don't be scared off by price. know, dollar cost averaging is always a good technique. You know, buy someone as high, you buy someone as low, but the most important thing is you're accumulating sound money that can't just be printed to oblivion. Sprott Money will help you with that. Go there right now. They've got great supply of gold eagles silver eagles silver maples. You name it Sprout money.com or of course is column at eight eight eight eight six one zero Seven seven five. So Rob here we are in the month of April. What a crazy month It's been I mean price just got smoked earlier than it came roaring back now. We've got all these hundred dollar updates We get to that in a minute. I want to start out though by having you describe some of the really important work that you've been doing trying to spread the news about sound money, legal tender bills in states across the U.S. I live in a state where we don't have that yet, but this is something we want to get nationwide. Tell me about how you got involved in that and where you think it's all headed.

Robert Kientz (02:03)
So a years ago I met the founders of C4SM, mostly Jim who founded it, and Forsyth, and some other people, and just kind of got involved with them at a volunteer level, and eventually after Jim stepped they asked me to participate on the board. So I've been on the board for about a year, just about a year now, and got really involved in both the educational and political side. And we're doing stuff like trying to pass legal tender bills and...been working in the state of Florida quite a bit and we're also trying to work in Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, South Carolina. And basically why do we need to do this? mean, gold and silver are money per the constitution. However, the federal government's ignoring that. But there's something called Amendment 10, which says anything not explicit, the power not explicitly given to the federal government belongs to the states and the people. what we're trying to do is get the states to say gold's money again and that's all you got to do and then it is money and then you have gold in your economy and it's that simple or you think it's that simple but when you go down the state level they most of the legislators don't understand money they've never lived in an honest money standard time they understand currency and fiat but they all know that something's very bad and they know that everybody's suffering all their constituents are suffering their budgets are suffering because they can't build the roads the bridges and the schools because of inflation so we're receiving a lot of interest in this but the way that the at the federal level they put some some booby traps into the system to try to catch people that would ever want to use gold as money again. So we're you know it's it's going to become a states rights versus federal battle at some point and I think the states are starting to figure that out.

Craig Hemke (03:44)
Many states currently here in the US have legal tender bills like that? Or laws?

Robert Kientz (03:49)
Eight. There are eight. I forget the latest one. Louisiana wasn't the latest one and I forget who it was, but there's eight now and we almost had a ninth in Utah. Got vetoed by the governor, but we think that's going to be put back through again. And that one's been in process for like 10 years. It was the original one. Everybody tried to pass it and it got through both houses of Congress this time. The governor vetoed it. The Florida one, we got through all the houses of Congress, thought we had a bill.

We still think we have a chance at it, some of the Senate staff that were helping write the bill got frustrated with it because it is a nuanced bill. Because of all the landmines I talked about at the federal level, you have to write it in a certain way, and it's proved to be fairly complex. So we've got a lot of support, but we're struggling to get it kind of across the finish line. All the people are supporting it. The committees are supporting it.

But just writing it in a way in which the state doesn't want to put themselves in the crosshairs with the federal government, you know, is the tricky part. And unfortunately, that's what's got people at the state level. I think all 50 states would have adopted by now, it's just that threat of the Fed. you know, I get it at the state level, you're weighing passing something positive for your constituents versus going to a legal battle.

And really what it's going to take is just going to take some of these state AGs that have the balls or willing to stand up to it and say, this is important enough that we need to do it. And the governors too, the governors need to speak up. So we are getting a lot of traction more and more states. think two more states have passed it this year. We're almost there with the, with the big one. So we'll get there eventually, but it is a slog. It's a fight. It's a battle. And there's a lot of money that comes in on the other side, because if you think about it, everybody that benefits from the FIAT system and the banking system doesn't necessarily want this to pass because it's competition.

Craig Hemke (05:38)
Right.

Robert Kientz (05:39)
and they've got a monopoly on the money. So we're making tons of good progress and a couple of weeks we'll know for sure where Florida stands this year. Even if for some reason, we got sales tax done in Florida, sales tax removed off a bullion, that's gonna be part of the budget bill that we'll go through in terms of the legal tender. We're not sure if this year or next year, but we've made so much progress. I think we're really close in Florida. And I think when Florida breaks, the rest of the states will as well.

Craig Hemke (06:04)
We're all grateful for these efforts, Rob. I mean, I've been doing this for 15 years and I go back all the way to the beginning. People ask me, okay, this is great. We're gonna hold all this gold and silver, but then what? When do we sell it, right? So does this provide kind of an avenue that you can convert your gold and silver into real estate or something else if it's legal tender in your state?

Robert Kientz (06:16)
Right, exactly. It essentially allows gold to function the economy as money so you can use gold to get into anything you want literally and Essentially what it does is removes capital gains sales tax all those types of things which removes all of the The reasons why people hold the gold silver forever the traditional models to hold your gold silver forever put it in the mattress And then it never does anything. It's just a rock essentially I mean it does if you never sell it you never get the benefit you never have an economy around it You never get rid of inflation

So we're just trying to get gold to actually circulate as money. If you can do that, then the game has changed. Then all of a sudden, you're not a victim of all the stuff that goes on at the federal level where they spend a bunch of money. Because people will battle at the federal level to say, we want this president or this bill, and they spend all this time and money. If you just put gold as money again, you don't have to care what the federal government does, essentially, because they can go spend a bunch of money, and you're like, well, that's OK. I've got gold over here. I'm fine.

Y'all go bankrupt yourselves. I'm good.

Craig Hemke (07:24)
You're right though, there are a lot of powers aligned against having that happen. So anyway, God bless you for trying and doing all the heavy lifting from which we'll all benefit. I've always found interesting too, Rob, your background as an auditor, financial auditor, and understanding the gummy works of the system sometimes. There's been a lot of talk about a certain audit lately that I've died to get your thoughts on.

This all kind of started back in early February when the secretary of the treasury in the US talked about monetizing the asset side of the balance sheet. And you know how balance sheets work. There's not a lot of assets there. Some guns, some ammo, some office buildings and a pile of gold. That then morphed into this, hey, if we're gonna do something with this, maybe we ought to find out. You know, if there actually is some gold and everybody was talking about auditing Fort Knox, and the Secretary of the Treasury was like, sure. Come on. We'll have it. And then poof. Um, let's say, I want to get your opinion on those two things. This monetizing the asset side of the balance sheet. And then two, why, why does this always just slip through the cracks? This is an investigation of Fort Knox.

Robert Kientz (08:40)
Yeah, it, you know, it goes under presidential candidates will promise anything. And then then we get in the office, they realize the consequences of their actions. And all of a sudden they, so where are the Epstein files? Where's the audit of Fort Knox? Where's all this stuff that were promised to the American people because there's so much damaging consequences of doing any of these things that they're all backing off of it, you know, and, and, and it's double speak. And as far as the audit of Fort Knox, it'll never happen because the gold's not there. if it, we know that because

Craig Hemke (08:46)
Right.

Robert Kientz (09:09)
There have been reports of people saying it's not the same bars, the serial numbers don't match, and it could be re-hypothecated. And there are stories from people who were in government saying they double stamped the bars with two serial numbers because there were more than one claim on it. So I don't think anybody believes those 8,000 tons are free and clear that the US owns them and that they're actually there. And you've had Germany saying, want to repatriate our gold again.

And how long is it going to take him this time? was it? Eight months the first time or a year and how long, you know, I don't believe it's there. that's, when Trump was saying we're going to do the audit, we're going to do the audit. think Besant at that point was like, no, it's there. Trump stopped talking. Like you could see Besant and Trump were not agreeing on whether to the audit because Besant went there in September and said, it's all good. But when Trump was saying, let's do the audit, Besant was like, I think we're good. Let's do something else. Let's monetize that on the balance sheet.

Craig Hemke (09:35)
Right. Yeah, longer. That's it.

Robert Kientz (10:04)
And let's use that money to support treasuries in the dollar through the sovereign wealth fund or something like that. And Judy Shelton was talking about gold backed bonds and to which I replied to her on Twitter, no, thank you. Because if you actually have the gold and you actually did backing, people would just trade the bonds for the gold. That's the biggest note. The US treasury, which is on its way out, going to be the biggest bond collapse in the history of mankind or gold, which would you rather have? Yeah, I don't know. That's a tough choice there.

Craig Hemke (10:09)
Yeah.

Robert Kientz (10:31)
None of these ideas really floated and that's why you don't hear about it anymore. So what they're going to do is some sort of paper revaluation where gold's going to be revaluated for 42 bucks an ounce to 35, six, whatever, whenever they do it. they're going to print that money. They're going to take the fiat and they're going to print that money and they're not going to pay down debt. They're going to go spend it on something stupid. They're going to go start a war or do something stupid that the American people don't want. And that will effectively remove any, any thought that the U.S. could rely on gold or its value. And I think that despite maybe good intentions of this administration, once they realize the truth, I mean, their hands are tied. The truth is U.S. doesn't have the gold, or at least not all of it.

Craig Hemke (11:15)
Yeah, there are guys that seem trustworthy to me, like Rand Paul, a Senator from Kentucky, or Mike Lee, a Senator from Utah. You know, they were talking about it. know, hey, Rand Paul wrote a whole letter. If you don't respond to me by what, like March 19th or whatever the date was. And it was March the 19th, just comes and goes. I mean, it all just, somebody come up and tap them on the shoulder and say, yeah, you don't want to be talking about this, pal.

Robert Kientz (11:33)
Yeah. I think people are tapping people on the shoulder, saying you'll crash a dollar. So just kind of let it go. Yeah.

Craig Hemke (11:46)
Shut the heck up. Goodness gracious. All right. Let's, like I said at the beginning of this, talk a little bit about this crazy month that we've had. There are so many things going on from day to day. It looked like the treasury market almost melted down a couple of weeks ago, yield spiked, and then the dollar absolutely plunged.

Robert Kientz (12:11)
Mm-mm.

Craig Hemke (12:12)
Stock market sold off and came back and sold off again. Of course, now we've had four $100 up days in gold in the last two weeks. Rob, make sense of it for me, would you? What do you think? How do all these dots connect?

Robert Kientz (12:27)
Well, I think the world is starting to figure out that the US is in trouble. mean, the DXY, the dollar index, has fallen from 110 to 98 from January to now. And that's a pretty big fall in that period of time. But just since the middle of April, it's plummeted. And what you're seeing is people don't believe in the dollar anymore. We've talked about de-dollarization. We've talked about alternative currencies. We talked about Belt and Road. We talked about the BRICS. We talked about the BIS, we've talked about Basel III, we've talked about the CBDCs, and all of that is in reaction to what's happening with the dollar. All of the advancements or changes in potential currencies worldwide have to do with the dollar. Dollar's failing. And you have all of the Middle Eastern countries now not doing dollar for oil contracts. it's just the end of this era, and that's what we're seeing. And the US, with the tariffs and everything, they're trying to balance.

the current account balance, what we spend on a monthly basis for our goods versus what other people spend for us. And to some extent in the short term that can work. We've got some wins with some of these countries, but it's also doing a bunch of stuff. I just read an article on Zero Hedge today, how the Chinese economy is collapsing and China may go into a deflationary depression very soon. There are American companies that are canceling wholesale levels of orders.

Craig Hemke (13:43)
Mm-hmm.

Robert Kientz (13:53)
For the rest of the year from China and its cratering Chinese economy. Now China's gone out and they've threatened all these other countries that have been acquiescing to the US because the US has the leverage in those relationships because it's affecting China. So what the US tried to do is run an end around China, take the rest of the world and isolate China, get them on the US system. And now China's threatening the rest of the world saying, uh-uh, if you want to be involved with us in the future in all of our trade contracts, you better not do it. Like they were warning Taiwan, don't send rare earths. I mean, that was in the news today. So China's fighting back. now you see what I think is going to end up being a cold war, maybe a hot war between the US and China. think the US and China, it's gone so far down that road that the US and China are not going to be friendly towards each other, perhaps for a decade or two.

And this is not good because short term you could see some wins, but long term these tariffs never work out. Having tariffs is good because it generates tax income, but it has to be within a framework that the world understands. And when you do a blanket, I'm going to tariff you 50 or a hundred percent and you just bully the world. That tends to just piss people off. And it also tends to screw up economies. And I'll tell you right now, if China does go and go into a deflationary depression, they're going to dump US Treasuries, it's going to crash a dollar, you're going to see wars kick off, you're going to see mass, and you know, even if, okay, with all of the cross investment across the world in the banking system, if China goes down, the US is in trouble. If Australia goes down, China's, I mean, they're all related, you can't, it's not where we're all sitting on opposite sides, and we all have our own economies, our own debt and everything. It's all mishmashed together.

And all that you're doing is essentially what Trump's trying to do is save the dollar at the expense of the dollar. He's saving it short term at the expense long term. Everything that's done, the executive orders, the tariffs is short term. It's not solving the issue long term. The issue long term is to go to austerity. The issue long term is to promote gold and other safe assets, stop spending, get rid of all the waste, deal with all the cutbacks. Tell people difficult things on their social security and on their benefits. That's the only way the US has to survive. And even if they do, it's going to be a much lower standard of living. And you still may have the dollar bust and you still may have to redo your currency. But the way they're going instead is to maximize long-term pain for short-term gain, thinking that some magically is going to happen to save the system. Because it's the way it's always been. Trump grew up in his real estate dealings with the dollar being so powerful.

That it allowed people in the US to do just about anything to make money. And we had so much power. And Trump does not understand, he does not understand when the dollar crashes that that's over and he keeps trying to extend it. You need to take the pain now, but nobody wants to do it. No one wants to do it. No one wants to deal with the pain now. And what we're setting up is a big time deflationary collapse of the world economy, which a lot of has been talking about for a long time.

Craig Hemke (16:53)
Right.

Robert Kientz (17:04)
And that's why gold's going up because gold knows it. Gold knows it. Gold knows we passed the Rubicon. We can never go back with the dollar. Gold knows it. And that's why it's doubled in what, like a year and four or five months? That's it. Game over. Gold's telling the story of what's going on. And I don't care how many tariffs they do. I don't care what they do. I don't care what trade agreements they come up with. The dollar's dead. The system's going down. There's going to be deflationary collapses in a lot of countries around the world that are dependent upon the dollar.

Craig Hemke (17:14)
Yeah.

Robert Kientz (17:31)
you know, the Middle East I'm worried about because even though that they're restructuring Alva dollar, they're not there yet. All of the Western Europe is in a mass panic. They're trying to start war with Russia. Europe is trying to start war with Russia because they're collapsing so bad. need a war to develop their economies. They're literally that's that's last straw. And I said that Japan and Europe when I wrote the book in 2009, I said Japan, Europe, which started off one of those who collapsed first, the currency, and then it would take the rest of the world with it. And

And with the unwinding of the carry trade with the yen last year, the collapse of China, the collapse of Europe economies, and the US in a panic trying to save the dollar, which is unsavable, gold is sitting here. It's like a tennis match of gold. Gold's sitting over here watching Wimbledon, the ball going back and forth saying, yeah, this is all good for me. I'm just, I'm doing good, you know? And that's why you see.
That's what's going on. we're in the era of where gold is going to go down. And gold could come down. could come down a couple hundred bucks. in the long term, gold's going to go bonkers. We're going to see stupid, ridiculous numbers in the next four five years between it's all said and done. It's going to be 10,000, 15,000, infinity, whatever you want to call it. It's going to be where you could take 10 wheelbarrows full of money to your coin dealers of dollars, and they will not take that for an ounce of gold. That's where we're headed.

And we're in maybe like the second ending of that ball game, right? The early stages are where you see the signs, people are freaking out, but we haven't really got to the fun part yet. And by fun part, I mean, if you own gold, it's fun. If you don't own gold, it ain't going to be any fun because you're going to be in trouble. And now's the time. If you're not into gold, I can't tell you what to do. I'm not your financial advisor, but I would be into gold, like hardcore into gold at this point because

Craig Hemke (19:14)
Right.

Robert Kientz (19:27)
This is not 2008 where you have another 15, 16 years. We're way past that. That's not this economy. This economy is on gas and it's on fumes, I should say, and it's all kabuki theater. It's all a big giant mess waiting to collapse. And it's just gonna take one more little thing and it's just gonna go bam.
We're so close that Craig, we're so close. That could happen tomorrow and it may not happen for another year or it could happen tomorrow. That's how close we are. It's everybody's just trying to keep stuff from going collapsing and going to crap and it's panic. It's panic. The PBOC is panicking. The Fed is panicking. The US administration is panicking. Europe is in a full there. I don't know what's going on with Europe. They're passing laws that don't make sense.

That just like they're they killed themselves with the whole energy thing in arena that was a dumbest thing they ever did the UK is arresting 30 people a day for speaking out online this is what happens when governments collapse they do crazy stuff and you're seeing it in the European UK you're seeing it in China and you're seeing it in the US

Craig Hemke (20:41)
And like we've always said, your ultimate protection against the madness of all this stuff is your physical metal. And so we've kind of brought it full circle, you You wouldn't want to keep accumulating it because it protects you, but we need Rob on the front lines.

Craig Hemke (20:58)
It's to where within, know, it really does protect us, and you can use it for something. So thank you, Rob, for all that you do. Thank you for your time to visit with me today. I know you're a great follower. You're active on Twitter X. That handle is just at Freedom Report.

Robert Kientz (21:05)
Absolutely.

Yeah, I'm also on YouTube. I hadn't done a video for a while. I'm doing one tomorrow. my followers, I've been on YouTube solidly for five years and then I haven't been on for a month and everybody's like, where's Rob? I haven't disappeared. I was down trying to get these laws passed and traveling and it takes such an incredible period of time. I'm talking to senators, I'm talking to House reps, I'm talking to people in the governor's office, I'm talking to Office of Finance. It takes a lot of work, but I'm back and I'll do a video tomorrow. You can find me on YouTube or Twitter on the Freedom Report.

Craig Hemke (21:18)
Hey. Ready to go.

Robert Kientz (21:43)
And of course, I'm also head of US Bullion Operations for Kinesis. So kinesisbullion.com for your bullion needs. That's not the digital side of house, more the physical. So you're into physical gold and silver, we have those products you can visit us there.

Craig Hemke (21:48)
Mm-hmm. You help acquire that and make sure logistically that works here in the US, correct? Well, keep up the good work, my friend. And again, it's been great to visit with you. And I want to thank everybody for watching again. Hey, if anything, send a thank you to Sprout Money for all this great content that you get every month. If anything, just hit the like button.

Robert Kientz (22:04)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Craig Hemke (22:20)
Or the subscribe button that helps him, the algorithms pick up on that stuff. It allows him cast a wider net. And geez, at times like this, we got to cast as wide a net as we can. We got to help as many folks as we can while we can. And Rob, you do a great job of that. Again, Rob Kintz of the Freedom Report. Rob, thank you so much for your time.

Robert Kientz (22:37)
Thank you, Craig. Appreciate it.

Craig Hemkek (22:39)
All of us are here at Sprout Money News, SproutMoney.com. Hey, keep an eye on this channel. You may be getting late in April. We got more to come. So subscribe and be sure you're notified next time something shows up. Again, for now, though, thanks for watching, everybody.