Friday Wrap-up with Bob: April 11, 2025 (Transcript)

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO BOB BARNEY’S MIDDAY BROADCAST: Friday Wrap-up with Bob: April 11, 2025

Hi, Bob Barney here with The Plain Truth Today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com. It’s that time again, Friday wrap-up, and we have quite a bit of things to talk about today, but I wanted to start out by saying that all of last week, starting on Wednesday night, Passover, and then Thursday until Wednesday was the Feast of Unleavened Bread, which we covered on this show, and then yesterday, of course, was the Feast of Firstfruits, which represents Christ being the firstborn of the dead, the first person to ever become God again, and be born out of the grave in spiritual form, and we went over that yesterday, and if you didn’t listen to that, I really wish you would, because these holidays of God are very important, and I hope people do take the time to listen to them.

 That being said, I want to also go into a different topic today. We want to get into all of the things happening during the week, and on Passover night, it seems every year my wife says, what’s going to happen on Passover this year, and she says the same thing when the Feast comes along, and that’s in the fall, what’s going to happen when the Feast of Tabernacles happens, because it seems like every year some major event always happens during one of these two holy days on our calendar as well as not just the Jewish calendar that’s not following what we do, and of course, Wednesday night of last week, not this Wednesday night, but of last week, Passover night, Trump announced his tariff plan, which sent Wall Street Thursday, Friday, then Monday, and Tuesday into a tailspin where it just lost thousands of points every day to the point where by Wednesday morning, it was down some $11 trillion, and I want to get into this because I think there’s so many people out there who support Trump, and I want to tell you, I know it doesn’t sound like it, but I still have hope for Trump because I need him to turn this economy around, and I don’t believe he’s doing it the right way right now, and I think somebody has to stand up and point out errors that are being made to the trillions of dollars, so $11 trillion on Wall Street was lost up until Wednesday, and then Trump, Wednesday morning, and it started going down again Wednesday, this last Wednesday, last day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and he announced there would be a pause on the tariff, and the stock market went up 2,900 points, or I think they said three and a half trillion dollars in one day, and then that night, he gets back, Wednesday night, he gets back and he goes, but I’m going to raise China’s tariff to 145%, which is just ridiculous, and I’m still going to keep the 10% baseline, and I may have to negotiate each country by themselves, and maybe we’re going to, he gave such an unsure answer to all the reporters’ questions that I said to my wife last night at dinner, well, tomorrow, everybody’s going to have a bloodbath again, and sure enough, the stock market went down almost a thousand points yesterday, and so $1.4 trillion was back added, and it reminds me of a charlatan one time, and I’m not calling President Trump a charlatan, but I just want to show you what his enemies are going to say, and these enemies are going to convince a lot of people to vote their way in just a year and a half, which is the election for Congress.

All of the House members go up for election in 2026, and he’s got a one-seat, two-seat majority right now. He can’t fool around with politics, but this charlatan one time came in and he stole 10 million dollars from someone, and then when the person really hoot and hollered, he says, I’m going to help you, and I’m going to make you rich, and he gives the guy back seven million dollars, and the guy went away counting his money, and he was quite happy. He only lost three million dollars, but he lost three million dollars, and that’s what casinos do. You put in a thousand dollars into the one-armed bandit, and you win back 990, but you want to know what? You’re going to constantly lose that 10, 20 dollars for every thousand dollars, and that’s what the casino makes, and the idea that people, I’ve listened to all kinds of people, I read all of the comments on the Daily Mail or other sites or even our own paint site where people say, he’s got a plan, don’t worry about it, we’re not on Wall Street anyway, we don’t have stocks. People just do not understand that most of the money on Wall Street comes from two sources. One is going to probably really surprise you, and the other is probably, you understand it, but you don’t care about it if you’re a working man or a woman, but the majority right now of our stocks are held by what we would call IRAs, 401ks, those kind of investors to the tune of probably, I don’t know, 20, 25 trillion dollars, and they are people like you and I who have retired and want to have a good life.

I haven’t retired, by the way, and I never will. When you own a business, it’s like murdering somebody, it’s a life in prison sentence, you never can leave, or like being in the mafia, you can’t leave alive anyway, but these people work their whole life, did their 401ks, their IRAs, they played the game as the government told them to play it, and now when it’s time to maybe get that money out of their 401ks, they’re looking at it and it’s 25% lower than it was the day before they retired, and they are panicking because now they’re saying, I’ve lost so much of my income, and everybody says, oh, it’s going to come back, it’s going to come back. It will come back, most likely, I don’t think we’re going to be in the crash of crashes, though that is going to eventually happen when you are monkeying around with the economy like all of these politicians have done, not just Donald Trump, they all have monkeyed around with our destiny in their hands, and they all have messed up terribly. And so that’s the first people, and when they go to vote, they’re going to have a problem. They’re going to have a problem voting for the person that took away this kind of money from them, even if most of the money comes back, or even if all the money comes back and a little more, because they’re going to say to themselves, wait a minute, I would have done better, though, if I didn’t lose that $45,000, I would have been $45,000 better than I am today. Yes, I made it all back, but it took me a year and a half, or whatever it took, and so just think of where I would have been if we didn’t have this nonsense.

And they’re going to remember this come Election Day. It’s only a year and a half away, mark my words. But do you know who else is a major holder of U.S. stocks? Foreign countries and foreign corporations and foreign citizens. Why is that? Because America has always been the one place you invest your money and see a great return and a protected return at that. This country has been stable its whole life. Everybody can guess where it’s going to go. Everybody watches the markets. They all look at America as the most stable economy in the world. That just blew apart. So President Trump is saying to people that these people have stole trillions from us, but he doesn’t understand. And I think I might put up on the message board this scene from Network, which was a 1976, I believe, movie about populism and about Fox News before there was a Fox News that accurately portrayed what Fox would be all about. That’s another story, but it’s a very good movie if you haven’t watched it. And there is a scene where, well, we won’t get into that. I will put that up because we’ll take too much time talking about that. But the thing of what I wanted to say is this. Those same countries that have robbed, and I agree there’s been unfair trade practices and something should be done, maybe in a more calculated way. But they have stole, if you want to put it Donald Trump’s way, trillions upon trillions of dollars from us. But where does that was trillions and trillions of dollars go? Believe it or not, that goes right back to America, not in trade, but in investment. So when the Chinese, which is, I believe to this day, the single biggest holder of American debt, American bonds to the tune of, I believe, three or four trillion dollars. I haven’t looked that up, I think it’s probably in that area. They take the money. They don’t put it in the Chinese economy, honestly. They don’t put it in the Euro. They don’t put it in Russia. They don’t put it with the Hong Kong stock market. No, they take those trillions of dollars and they invest in American businesses and American bonds that pay good money back to them. And they know it’s stable.

They know they put a trillion dollars into an American bond. They’re going to get the interest that was promised to them and they’re going to be paid back in due time. And that is something that Donald Trump’s not talking about. And I’m afraid too many Americans just simply are economically not informed, do not realize that the trillions of dollars that pour in. The last report I saw Monday afternoon was that all foreign investment in just Wall Street, we’re not talking about bonds, just in Wall Street, all foreign investments is 11 trillion dollars. Think about that. Then when they have to talk about the bonds and the price of bonds going up, they were saying that foreign investment, China, Japan are the two biggest, but England’s big there, Europe is big there, and the Arabs are big there, especially like Kuwait and places like that. Those people invest in U.S. bonds, long-term bonds that pay very low interest for the most part, which has been a blessing for the United States debt. You have to understand that because they are putting in trillions of dollars at two and one and two and up to two and a half percent interest rate.

You would get, you would complain if you only made a two percent payback on your money, but these people around the world have no safer place to put their money. You have to understand that that money is coming back to bail out our debt. Now one of the things happened when Wall Street crashed, well I’m going to say three things happened when Wall Street crashed this week. When people sold off, where did they put their money? Well they put their money, if they were foreigners, in Europe. Swiss, the Swiss franc went up great, Swiss investment went up great, the European markets went up great, and so they pulled their money out of this country to the tune of probably at least eight to ten trillion dollars out of this country, and they put it back in their own countries, which they didn’t want to ever do. The other thing that we don’t realize, and I don’t think Donald Trump has actually been informed about by his treasury secretary, is we have 36 I’m sorry, 36 trillion dollars in debt. What’s not being reported, even in the left-stream media, and I don’t know why, because they have a big thing here, maybe because they want to just act like an ostrich and keep their head in the sand, but this year in 2025, seven trillion dollars of that debt has to be paid off. It’s over. The maturity ends on seven trillion dollars.

Now what happens year after year when these trillions of dollars come due? Do those countries get paid off? No, because they know there’s a rate of return, they know it was safe, and they reinvest at the two or two and a half percent, or maybe even lower during the times of COVID, but they know their money is safe. Well, when this seven trillion comes due, guess what else happens? The bond interest rates have been rising ever since Wall Street’s been crashing, and there are people out there projecting that by summer, the bond rate will be six to seven percent, and if the Chinese, the Japanese, the Europeans, and the Arabs then demand they’ll take that seven trillion dollars home, and we have to pay on the barrel, which we don’t have, or they will reinvest it, but they want six percent or seven percent. What does that do to our debt? Then the interest of the debt doubles. Do you realize right now the interest of the debt is 1.3 or 1.4 trillion dollars a year just goes to pay the interest. We pay more money right now with a low interest rate on the interest of the debt than we do for the military, for example. The military, I think, is 800 million billion, 1.4 trillion. So now that 1.4 trillion, if it doubles, becomes 2.8 to 3 trillion dollars a year, and if it goes up even more to 10 percent, as some doomsdayers saying that the bond rate will have to be in order to coax people to buy our bonds, then we’re going to have a five trillion dollar a year interest rate payment. Think of that. Four to five trillion dollars a year to pay our interest debt. Our total budget’s five trillion dollars a year, and we’re falling behind and going in debt at that level. So there are things happening here that I’m afraid that this administration is just not paying attention to. This 145 percent tariff on China sounds good to the people who are pro-Trumpers and who think this is getting even, but China is a country that doesn’t have elections every two years.

They have a guy in power, and unless somebody assassinates him, and I don’t think that’s going to happen, he can knuckle down and he can fight a war that Donald Trump cannot fight back. They’re kind of in the driver’s seat. It’s like Russia and Ukraine when Donald Trump was trying to explain, rightfully so, we really don’t have bargaining power with Ukraine, I mean with Russia, because they have nuclear weapons and we could have World War III. Well, China can hunker down, and there’s another statistic that I’m afraid so many Americans do not know. Who is the largest customer of Chinese goods? And I would say most of you listening right now is going to say the United States of America. Well, that’s not true. I was surprised myself to find this fact last weekend. The largest people who buy Chinese goods are fellow Asians in Vietnam, Thailand, all around Asia. That’s the first. They buy more than all of America buys. Second, the EU buys as much and slightly more Chinese-made goods than does America. Think about that.

So America is not the only ones being hosed by China. China is selling the rest of the world. So they have two, probably two-thirds of their sales are not going to go away with no tariffs. Hey have no tariffs in Asia, and they have a very small 20% VAT tax, which everybody pays. That’s all it is, is a sales tax, and I believe a four and a half percent actual duty or tariff on Chinese goods. So China will just take the American products that were going to America and ramp them up, discount the living heck out of them, and flood the European markets, flood the markets in Asia, and guess what? They will also flood the poor people in Africa and the poor people in South America who do not have the money to pay China. And you would say, well, why would China want to do that? Because China will say to, let’s say, for example, Iran, we’ll take all of your oil in exchange for the goods you owe us. They’ll go to South America, to Venezuela. You know, Donald Trump is going to go to war with Venezuela, and he has a 25% tariff on Venezuelan oil, and any country that buys Venezuelan oil will get a 25% tariff. Do you think that’s going to bother China? They’ll take all the oil out of Venezuela to give them what Venezuela needs for products. You’re not going to win a trade war. We played Ronald Reagan all week long for a reason. He is, in my opinion, to this day, still the greatest president. Made mistakes, but he admitted them when he made them. Made mistakes, yes, but he broke the back of communism, and he did so without a Republican House, without a Republican Senate, without Fox News and Newsmax. He did it without a Rush Limbaugh on the radio or any other conservative radio host at the time. He did it by himself through his perfect, and I mean perfect, communication to the American people. He kept everything simple, and he explained simply what he was doing, why he was doing it, and what the results would be. And the American people, just like the Chinese people, would fight the American people if they understand what they have to do and what the results are. And this is not people saying, oh, Donald Trump’s promising this, promising that, promising that. Well, so does communism.

Communism says, just give us another 10 years and we’ll have it all saved. They’ve done that for 90 years now. But we all know communism doesn’t work. Neither does liberal Democrat policies work. And what we are seeing today is no different than the liberal Democrat policies of the 1960s and 70s that Ronald Reagan had to get rid of. Do you know who passed all the tariff acts in the 1970s and the 1980s? It was Democrats in Congress protecting unions, unions that one time had a purpose. And I’m not anti-union. My own brother was a member of a union, which unions can be great. But unfortunately, a lot of these unions, when they had so much support from the Democrats in the Senate and the House and the presidency, gave them a blank check to do whatever they wanted to do and then protect them with tariffs from any foreign competition. You know what happened? You had Dodge cars that wouldn’t work. You had GM cars that fell apart in three years because they were protected. And finally, Americans, even with the tariffs, said, I want a Jap car.I want a Japanese car because they’re going to last eight to 10 years. And this junk I’m driving around brand new two years ago is ruined. It can’t even get 50,000 miles. And so what you got when Ronald Reagan became president, you had Detroit in ashes. People forget this. Lee Iacocca took over Chrysler Corporation and had to pay himself a dollar.And without a government bailout, which Jimmy Carter did, but not Ronald Reagan, but without a government bailout, there would not have been a Chrysler. And that’s what has to happen here. We want a pharmaceutical industry back in America.

This is how you do it. You have government build, pay 100% of a pharmaceutical plant and for Lilly or whoever it is going to be, and you tell them exactly what they can make in that plant, which is antibiotics and products that you need in case of war. The same thing with the steel industry. You rebuild the steel industry as FDR did. And you do it with American money, not tariffs, which is still American money that does nothing but causes trade wars. And you build steel plants. You, you open up naval yards and you open up shipbuilding again. You don’t allow cruise ships to come into Miami with foreign registry of boats that’s built overseas. And you don’t even know the quality of those boats, but you can’t outlaw these cruise ships unless you can build your own, which we cannot. Last year, China built 1000 ships. I’m not talking about boats. I’m talking about big ships, 1000 and not, we’re not talking about military. We’re talking about commercial ships. They built 1000 ships. Do you know how many ships American shipbuilders commercially built last year? One In World War II, we were delivering one Liberty cargo ship a day, 365 days a year. We were producing hundreds of thousands of Jeeps, tens of thousands of airplanes, probably 25 to 30,000 tanks a year or more. This is the manufacturing ability we had then. We lost it. Donald Trump is a hundred percent right. We lost it, but we can’t go to war when we can’t win. A good general picks his battles. I would have picked Vietnam because they capitulated. I would have picked all the little countries that you could send message to put some tariffs on them, win some battles.

But at the same time, I would go to Congress and make a declaration of war against trade imbalances. And, but the main thing I would say is this declaration of war is for America to rebuild if it’s infrastructure of wartime materials, not play text factories and bra factories and, and, uh, but computer chips, steel, aluminum airplanes, and, and stop, uh, this attack on Boeing because it’s the last airplane company we got, um, uh, steel mills, you name it, build an infrastructure with us dollars. It’ll be cheaper than the 11 trillion dollars we just lost in one week, $11 trillion in one week, $11 trillion would build a lot of plants, would build a lot of steel mills, would build a lot of pharmaceutical plant, uh, uh, factories. This is what we did in the past when we needed to do something, the government gave all kinds of incentives for private enterprise to do it. You know, um, my brother has told me for so many years now that if the future of energy is not clean energy, clean coal or solar, not even nuclear as it is though, it’s the best we have, but it’s the power of the sun, which is not fission, but fusion. And it can be done. There’s been, uh, labs that have proved that it can be done where literally something the size of a golf ball could power a city for a hundred years. It’s the power of the sun. Why aren’t we investing in that? Why aren’t we? It would cost probably two, $3 trillion, but that’s something worth investing in.

Why don’t we invest in all kinds of things that you have to have to survive? We should be investing in our farmers. We should be investing in our ranchers and we should be investing in all of the items and goods that you need if you go to war. And I don’t believe right now America is still the strongest military and has the most nuclear weapons in the world. I don’t think anybody is going to actually go to war with us physically. They’re going to go to war with us economically, but worse than economically, they’re going to go to war with our minds. They’re going to get into our schools through liberalism. They’re going to get into our politics through bribery and they’re going to use mind control over our children. So by the time they take over and run this country, there are going to be soft targets and like Rome, fall, fall to the Huns, fall to the barbarians which happened to Rome, which is the Bible predicting is going to happen to America. But we could forestall that. First of all, we could go back to God in prayer and we can say, God, give us the ability, give us the people, give us the strength to rebuild this country. We don’t need to steal money from other countries that stole from us. They’re already investing in us.

I have news for you.

If we started a fusion operation, you would get money from Germany, you’d get money from China, you’d get money because they would know that it’s the most lucrative thing that will, it will make the internet look like, like baseballs, the profit off of a baseball when you’re done, if you could come up with fusion to power the world. Nikolai Tesla was working on things like that. No one knows what he achieved. He claimed he did, but the FBI took all his files. But these are the things we have to do. And a good president will realize that our answers lie within, with God first, and then within our own people. Explain to them the problem, explain to them the terrors of what could happen if China continues to dominate. Then ask them to help rebuild the infrastructure and the manufacturing capability of America. Take away welfare from anyone who’s able to work and doesn’t work. The apostle Paul said, if you don’t work, you don’t get fed. And that was, that was in Christian circles.

It was, oh, we’re just going to forgive and feed these people. Even, even the early New Testament church were not communists. Like people try to, I’ve heard communists say, oh, the early Christians were nothing but socialists and communists. No, they weren’t. If you didn’t work, Paul said you didn’t eat. That’s what I say.If you’re an ape, there’s 7.2 million able-bodied workers, male workers in the United States now not working. How are they living? Well, I can tell you how you can stop them from living. Do away with the income tax. Like I said, do away with the income tax, do a VAT tax like Europe did, a sales tax nationally, and get where drug dealers and illegal aliens and all foreigners in this country on vacation or not are paying the same amount of tax everyone else is. And for the poor people who couldn’t afford such a tax, the government gives them every month money back in a form of a check coming from the IRS. That’s all they would be doing is sending each person $500 a month to offset his taxes. Because the amount of money, what a 20% sales tax on everything in this country would bring in more money than the income tax could ever bring in, and it would unleash all kinds of entrepreneurship. When people could fix costs, the one thing anybody who wants to invest in a business wants to know is they want to be able to know the future and fix their costs. Then they can do the planning they need to get ahead. That’s my two cents. That’s the Friday wrap-up. And I believe if people understand the problems we are facing with this trade war, listen to those Ronald Reagan videos that I put up this week. There’s, I think, five of them. Listen to them. Some of them, they’re mostly five minutes long.

Take the time to go back on this site and listen to his idea on a trade war. He had a great quote. He said, a trade war is like two people in a boat, because we’re in a world which is one boat. It’s like two people in a boat, and one guy takes a shotgun and blows a hole in the bottom of the boat. And to get even, you take your shotgun and blow another hole in the bottom of the boat. Does that do anything? You both drowned. And that’s what trade wars give you. And he did say there were times when you selectively did a tariff, but not against the world. Don’t try to do what Adolf Hitler tried to do and fight a mini-front war. You can’t win it. Good generals pick and choose their battles that they know they’re going to win. And that’s what we have to do to turn this country around, or we’re in for real bad times coming soon.

Well, that’s about the end of the show for today, and I will see you again Monday. Tomorrow we have our Sabbath show. We’ll have a… I haven’t picked anything yet.

We’ll have our Sabbath show tomorrow, and then tomorrow night we’re going to have a short story or a short video or a movie. I’m not sure. I haven’t done any of the whole weekend yet. Sunday we’ll have our 7-11 a.m. show, and then Monday we’ll be back again with a 7-11 short, which I already do have. It’s not me. And I’ll do the noontime show, and then the rest of the week, keep listening to theplaintruth.com and theplaintruthtoday.com. This is Bob Barney saying thank you for listening. I do appreciate you. Please take what I say seriously, because I think we are in trouble if we do not act as a country and protect ourselves. Have a good weekend. Stay safe. Bye-bye.