The Julia La Roche Show

In this episode of The Wrap with Chris Whalen, Chris breaks down the 777 Partners bankruptcy — a sprawling collapse touching insurance, reinsurance, soccer clubs, and airlines that he says is a preview of how private credit ultimately unwinds: slowly, messily, and with fraud along the way. He explains why the contagion risk to insurance matters most for ordinary people, since firms like Apollo, Brookfield, and Blue Owl use insurance balance sheets to fund private credit strategies, leaving annuity and life policyholders exposed. Chris also digs into United Wholesale Mortgage, arguing the real problem wasn't the Two Harbors hedge but years of cash extraction and overvalued servicing assets — and what Oaktree's $1.5 billion rescue means now that "the grim reaper of Wall Street" is in the building. On markets, he describes a manic tape where cycles no longer exist, questions whether AI valuations survive Chinese competitors offering the same functionality at a tenth of the cost, and wonders whether Kevin Warsh will finally let the market take a hit. He then makes the case that the cooler CPI print is masking a genuine inflation problem: diesel is up roughly 35% since February, key industrial chemicals and LNG capacity was destroyed in the Iran conflict, and those input costs are rippling into food, housing, construction, and packaging. Finally, Chris explains why he thinks the gold and silver bull markets remain fully intact, and what the Byzantine Empire taught him about what happens when gold runs short.

Thank you to our sponsor, Monetary Metals. Learn more at https://www.monetary-metals.com/THEWRAP/

Links:    
The Institutional Risk Analyst: https://www.theinstitutionalriskanalyst.com/ 
777 Partners blog post: https://www.theinstitutionalriskanalyst.com/post/theira879
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/rcwhalen    
Seeing Around Corners book: https://www.theinstitutionalriskanalyst.com/product-page/seeing-around-corners-achieving-success-in-business-and-life-hardcover

Use the code TheWrap2026 for 25% off your first year of The Institutional Risk Analyst https://www.theinstitutionalriskanalyst.com/plans-pricing

Timestamps:
0:00 - Intro
1:37 - 777 Partners bankruptcy: what the demise of private credit looks like
3:56 - Does this accelerate the slow-motion train wreck?
5:45 - Contagion risk to insurance: annuities, life policies, and private credit balance sheets
7:36 - United Wholesale Mortgage, Mat Ishbia, and the Oaktree rescue
10:44 - Oaktree, the "grim reaper of Wall Street," and stress in mortgage lending
11:00 - DSCR loans and the rental-property workaround
12:13 - Monetary Metals: earn a yield on your gold
13:22 - Markets at records: "the numbers are too big"
15:20 - The Warsh Fed: will bailouts end?
16:05 - AI valuations, the price war, and Chinese competition
17:36 - Inflation beneath the surface: input costs are exploding
18:08 - Diesel up 35%, heating oil, chemicals, and the fall squeeze
20:02 - Food prices, farmers, and the Iran war fallout
22:39 - Spillover into housing, construction materials, and packaging
24:19 - Gold's run higher and Chinese buying
25:13 - Silver: a commercial trade, and the supply problem
26:44 - The WGA precious metals top 25 list
28:14 - Lessons from Byzantine monetary history
29:38 - Parting thoughts: private credit surprises, the Middle East, and the midterms
30:39 - Closing

Jim Rickards returns for a wide-ranging macro conversation on a world where geopolitics and economics have fully merged. He lays out the US–Iran standoff as a global game of chicken — Trump betting Iran's economy breaks first, Iran betting the midterm elections break Trump first — and explains why he thinks Tehran holds the stronger hand, why regime change was always a fantasy, and how a handful of drones a week is enough to keep the Strait of Hormuz bottled up. From there he turns to gold: how he used Jim Rogers' 50% drawdown rule and fractal scale invariance to call the bottom, why central bank buying puts a floor under the market, why gold works as a deflation hedge as well as an inflation hedge, and why he stands by his $10,000 target. He also dismantles the popular "debasement trade" narrative, explains what Kevin Warsh's less transparent, market-following Fed means for investors conditioned to expect a rescue, and walks through the unwinding of the Japanese yen carry trade — which he calls the most important story in the world right now, and the one most likely to make 2027 messy. The episode closes on the darker side of AI: increasingly sophisticated voice-cloned scams aimed at older Americans.

Thank you to our partners
Augusta Precious Metals — To learn more, visit https://juliabuysgold.com/ or text “Julia" to 35052
Monetary Metals - learn more at https://www.monetary-metals.com/julia/

More about Rickards:
Rickards is a New York Times bestselling author of Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis and several other best-sellers, including The New Great Depression, Aftermath, The Road to Ruin, Death of Money, The New Case for Gold, Sold Out: How Broken Supply Chains, Surging Inflation, and Political Instability Will Sink the Global Economy, and his newest book MoneyGPT: AI and the Threat to the Global Economy. An investment advisor, lawyer, inventor, and economist, Rickards has held senior positions at Citibank, Long-Term Capital Management, and Caxton Associates. He is also the Editor of Strategic Intelligence, a widely-read financial newsletter.

Links:  
http://www.jamesrickardsproject.com/
https://x.com/RealJimRickards
Visit CallFort.io  or download the app https://apps.apple.com/us/app/callfort/id6752949954

Timestamps:
0:00 – Intro: welcome back, Jim Rickards
1:04 – Geopolitics and economics have merged: chokepoints and economic warfare
3:30 – The US–Iran game of chicken: what each side is betting
6:13 – Regime change isn't happening — and why killing leaders backfired
10:42 – Lost credibility and the Iran–Oman deal the US wasn't part of
14:41 – The midterm clock, and how Iran keeps the Strait closed
17:23 – [Sponsor: Augusta Precious Metals]
19:04 – Gold's drawdown: the Jim Rogers 50% rule and fractal math
24:04 – Why gold goes much higher — and the $10,000 call
25:03 – What's driving gold: central banks, deflation, flat mine supply
31:15 – Why the "debasement trade" narrative is wrong
33:00 – Inside the primary dealer world and the old Fed
35:00 – Kevin Warsh, killing the dot plot, and a whole new Fed
38:16 – [Sponsor: Monetary Metals]
40:03 – The Fed's only real job — and what Friedman got wrong
44:13 – The yen carry trade: the most important story in the world
48:55 – The petrodollar, Japan's Treasuries, and the Bessent bailout
51:43 – Why currency defenses always fail, and why 2027 gets messy
52:50 – AI, sophisticated scams, and the Callfort app
59:10 – What's next: climbing Kilimanjaro

Michael Howell, CEO of CrossBorder Capital, an investment advisory firm, and author of Capital Wars, returns to explain why the global liquidity cycle peaked in late Q3/early Q4 of last year — and what that means for the rest of 2026. His core argument: money is fungible but finite, and a booming real economy is now pulling liquidity out of financial assets, which compresses P/E multiples even as earnings look fine. That puts us in what he calls the speculation phase: rising bond yields, strong commodities, pressured crypto, and low-quality equity returns where index gains mask widespread underperformance. He also pushes back hard on the popular "debasement trade" explanation for gold, arguing the real driver is the People's Bank of China injecting liquidity to devalue the yuan internally while holding it steady externally — with Chinese retail locked out of crypto and the Shanghai Gold Exchange now setting the marginal price. On the bond side, he lays out how the Treasury is quietly monetizing through front-end issuance and buybacks — private-sector QE under Treasury direction — a strategy that works until it doesn't, with Japan's move from 50bps to nearly 3% as the cautionary tale. His bottom line: range-bound Wall Street, no bonds, gold and silver on weakness, and watch commodities for the first sign the boom is ending.

Thank you to our partners
Augusta Precious Metals — To learn more, visit https://juliabuysgold.com/ or text “Julia" to 35052
Monetary Metals - learn more at https://www.monetary-metals.com/julia/

Links: 
Website: http://www.crossbordercapital.com/
Twitter/X https://x.com/crossbordercap
Substack: https://capitalwars.substack.com/
Book: https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Wars-Rise-Global-Liquidity/dp/3030392902

0:00 The call: range-bound market, own gold
0:20 Welcome back, Michael Howell
1:19 Two pools of money: markets vs. the real economy
2:30 The liquidity cycle has peaked
3:20 What this phase looks like
4:48 Why a booming economy is bad for stocks
5:22 The P/E multiple is where liquidity shows up
6:34 Late cycle, explained
7:38 Augusta Precious Metals
9:29 Global liquidity vs. the world business cycle
10:45 Atlanta Fed nowcast near 6%
11:54 The K-shaped economy is global
12:45 Monetary inflation vs. Main Street inflation
14:45 Speculation now, turbulence next
15:15 The cycle map
17:55 Monetary Metals
19:49 Gold: it isn't the debasement trade
20:30 It's China: PBOC liquidity
22:15 Why gold and not crypto
23:14 Inside the PBOC balance sheet
25:00 Yuan gold and the 27,000 line
26:15 Bond yields track nominal GDP
27:40 NGDP at 7-8% vs. a 4.7% ten-year
28:18 Treasury QE: funding at the front end
30:20 Who's actually buying the debt?
30:51 The beach ball under water
32:35 The two-year note leads the Fed
34:30 The 2022 analogue
36:00 Why MOVE matters more than VIX
37:08 Treasury buybacks and the volatility cap
38:30 Margin debt and the 2026 range call
39:31 Parting thoughts: commodities as the warning
40:30 Gold, silver, and the ratio to watch

In this episode of The Wrap with Chris Whalen, Chris breaks down the week across mortgages, rates, and precious metals. He opens with United Wholesale Mortgage, explaining why he believes Matt Ishbia should resign after the company hedged the balance sheet of an acquisition target it didn't own and never won — a misstep that produced a six hundred million dollar loss and forced a rescue from Oak Tree on onerous terms that leave common shareholders at the back of the line. Chris contrasts that with Rocket's standout quarter and lays out his broader housing view: investment banks hold this market together until the IPO fees are booked, then step back, setting up a potential correction next year and a general decline in home prices of ten to twenty percent by 2028. From there the conversation turns to the return of financial repression — short-end yields pushed down while the long end reacts to deficits and inflation — and why, with debt approaching forty trillion, he considers Fed independence a fiction and the Treasury the dog to the Fed's tail. Chris also unpacks the Bank of Japan's thirty-day repo with the Fed, why it lit a fire under gold and silver, and David Kotok's idea of using euro-denominated US credit default swaps to benchmark gold. He closes on taxing wealth over income, the erosion of fiscal credibility, and his gold book research into thirteen hundred years of Byzantine monetary stability.

Thank you to our sponsor, Monetary Metals. Learn more at https://www.monetary-metals.com/THEWRAP/

Links:    
The Institutional Risk Analyst: https://www.theinstitutionalriskanalyst.com/ 
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/rcwhalen    
Seeing Around Corners book: https://www.theinstitutionalriskanalyst.com/product-page/seeing-around-corners-achieving-success-in-business-and-life-hardcover

Use the code TheWrap2026 for 25% off your first year of The Institutional Risk Analyst https://www.theinstitutionalriskanalyst.com/plans-pricing

Timestamps:

0:00 — Intro
1:08 — Why Matt Ishbia should resign from UWM
2:30 — The Oak Tree rescue and what it means for shareholders
3:31 — Mortgage earnings: PennyMac, loanDepot, Rocket
4:23 — Is UWM going to be sold?
5:43 — Health of the broader mortgage industry
6:50 — Seven percent rates and where volume is coming from
7:30 — What the Fed does next, and the long end
8:20 — "Misery on the eights" — is the timeline accelerating?
9:20 — Housing correction: 10–20% by 2028
10:40 — The return of financial repression
12:00 — Why the Treasury benefits, and the shift to T-bills
13:06 — "The Treasury is the dog, the Fed is the tail"
13:40 — The dollar, foreign central banks, and gold reserves
14:20 — The Bank of Japan repo transaction explained
15:14 — What Warsh does if the FOMC wants a hike
16:30 — Inflation, diesel exports, and the energy squeeze
17:34 — David Kotok on benchmarking gold with credit default swaps
18:40 — Why fiscal fear flows into gold
19:30 — How far away is a US debt restructuring?
21:04 — Taxing wealth instead of income
22:42 — What cutting the deficit would actually do to rates
25:15 — Back to the BOJ: why it forced gold and silver higher
28:00 — What if Japan doesn't take the bonds back?
28:48 — Foreign central banks are selling Treasuries
29:47 — Does the US care about gold the way the rest of the world does?
32:10 — Bessent and the K-shaped economy
33:12 — Housekeeping: viewer question episode
33:50 — Parting thoughts

Dr. Marc Faber editor and publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, returns to argue that we are witnessing the first phase of the piercing of the greatest global investment mania. He explains why central bank money printing has inflated asset prices far beyond economic reality — enriching asset holders while ordinary people face a cost of living he estimates is rising 7–12% a year, not the official 3–4%. Faber walks through the cracks already visible: collapsing commercial property values, falling home prices, meme stocks and SPACs that never recovered their 2021 peaks, a narrowing market advance, the semiconductor unwind, and the speculative blow-off in Korea. He argues the 10-year Treasury should yield at least 6.5%, that the Fed should have been hiking rather than cutting, and that the US may already be in recession. With interest costs on federal debt above $1 trillion a year, he says more money printing isn't a choice but an inevitability — and warns that bubbles typically end with the revelation of a massive fraud. His advice is blunt: this is not a market for making money, it's a market for losing the least. He makes the case for broad diversification across cash, bonds, precious metals, and real estate, explains why he refuses to own index funds, shares why Thailand is his largest position, and closes on gold, hyperinflation, and why he thinks the price should already be far higher.Thank you to our partners Augusta Precious Metals — To learn more, visit https://juliabuysgold.com/ or text “Julia" to 35052Monetary Metals - learn more at https://www.monetary-metals.com/julia/Links:The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report: https://www.gloomboomdoom.comTimestamps:00:00 Intro: Marc Faber returns
01:06 The macro picture: money printing and record wealth inequality
03:33 Why capitalism made the world rich, and who got left behind
05:21 The stock market is in the sky, but ordinary life isn't
06:58 First signs the investment mania is being pierced
07:35 Why printed money doesn't lift everything at once
09:55 Commercial and residential property prices roll over
10:45 Meme stocks, SPACs, Mag 7 and the semiconductor unwind
11:30 Korea: the biggest bubble nobody's talking about
12:15 The missing link: a massive fraud is coming
13:48 Nominal vs real: how money printing masks the damage
14:45 Real inflation is 7-12%, not 3-4%
15:49 Where rates should be: 6.5% on the 10-year
16:27 Government debt, $1T interest, and why the deficit can't shrink
17:56 The situation is hopeless
18:39 Where Faber puts his own money
20:20 More money printing is inevitable
21:27 Assessing Kevin Warsh at the Fed
22:33 The Fed should have hiked, and the US is already in recession
23:23 Intervention and the death of free markets
25:52 The contrarian bond call and the case for diversification
28:17 The government has become the mafia
28:42 Why a debt crisis is unavoidable
29:55 Sell early, but where do you hide?
31:34 Thin ice: why ordinary people are forced to speculate
31:59 Affordability at the worst level ever
32:25 The passive investing problem
35:10 Index concentration vs the other 493 stocks
36:13 Lessons from 1987: down 21% in a single day
37:26 One year from now: a lot of people will lose a lot of money
38:35 Hong Kong war stories: the traders who lost everything
40:11 The contrarian buy: Thailand, the failed state
41:30 Food self-sufficiency, safety, and life in Asia
43:56 Where to find his work
45:11 Gold, and why he says it should already be $100,000
46:07 Hyperinflation, Zimbabwe, and central bank role models