Hey, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Current Yield.

This is Grant's interest rate observer of the air, and I am Jim Grant.

With me today, as always, Eric Whitehead, our engineer who turns dials.

And across, sitting on definitely across, is Evan Lorenz, the great deputy editor of Grants. And joining us today

is George Friedman, who is the principal of something called geopolitical futures, a subscription

service that sees into the future and tells you about it before it comes to pass. Now,

we at Grants actually have trouble sometimes figuring out what happened in the past, but here

comes George Friedman, tells what's going to happen, which is a very new thing around this office.

So George, welcome.

Before, however, we get any further, it falls to me to mention the names of the companies

without whom or which this podcast would be not a profit maker.

And they are a zip recruiter, which shows you how to hire people,

and everybody's hiring these days. And CENPro is likewise a sponsor. So thank you,

CEMPRO. Thank you, ZipRecruiter. And George Friedman, welcome.

Good to be here.

George, we have been reading your geopolitical futures with great interest and with gratitude.

Thank you for sending a few sample issues. Tell us, if you would please, some of your thoughts on what is turning out to be a most

emergent and topical topic, namely Germany and its most peculiar banking system.

Well, Germany is, from our point of view, far more than Italy, the danger point in Europe.

It exports 50% of its GDP. 5% drop in exports is 2.5% drop in GDP. Its largest

customer right now is the United States. The United States is now, shortly in the future,

going to go into recession, normal one. And Germany is extremely vulnerable in terms of dependency on exports. In addition to that,

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