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2017-01-19 - Transcript of the Podcast Interview between Erik Townsend and Raoul Pal
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Erik: Real vision founder Raoul Pal is back with us this week and of course Raoul gave us a fantastic interview back in September.
Raoul before we get started, I just like to thank you publicly for being such a perfect gentleman which is so rare in the finance world. You guys have hired Aaron Chan our former co-host and producer and you have just been fantastic about it. You understood that would put me in a bind and you've allowed Aaron even when working on your payroll to continue to host the show until we could get Patrick on board in order to replace him. So I just want to thank you for that.
Raoul: Thank you I mean Aaron is such a great guy and you gave him such a great opportunity to learn so many things. He’s going to be a real asset to us at Real Vision. So thank you again for your help in that.
Erik: It's my pleasure, I’m very pleased to see that Aaron's involvement with Macro Voices led to a career opportunity for him and I wish him all the best he's a super guy. What I'd like to do is borrow from a format you guys use on Real Vision called rewind where you have clips of what a guest said last time and kind of compare how the world has changed.
Now I don't have a Real Vision production budget so I don't have clips but let's go back to our interview from September 15th first thing we talked about was the U.S. dollar rally, you said at the time that it was paused but set to resume you thought and of course it has begun to resume although in the last week or so it's maybe taken a little bit of a nosedive in reaction to Donald Trump saying that the dollar's too high. So did Trump's comments change your views at all?
Raoul: No, not necessarily because what he says and what he does it two different things and we've known that from the beginning that Trump campaign. So he might say that the dollar is too high but it's very difficult to not allow the dollar to appreciate if you’re doing certain things such as walking back from globalization, putting up tariffs, which generally mean there's less dollars out in circulation.
So the amount of dollars available for world trade fall therefore people who need the dollars because they’re potentially in dollar shortfall that we've talked about before that the B. I. S. have identified, those guys need to cover their dollar positions because there's not enough dollars and the dollar keeps going up. So the less dollars in circulation the more problematic it is for the global economy.
So on one hand he's saying look we want less of this globalization, we want to make sure that trading is fair amongst nations, we want less of a trade deficit, now when you are the world's reserve currency and you have a smaller trade deficit with the rest of the world it means you're starving the rest of the world the dollars. So it's almost impossible to get what he wants. So he either has to have a weaker dollar or he can have the protectionist measures that he wants for the U.S. domestic economy.
