Rebuilding Economic Prosperity and Opportunity for Ukrainians Act or the REPO Act
Jim Rickards discusses the dangers in the REPO Act (Rebuilding Economic Prosperity and Opportunity for Ukrainians Act) that was passed as part of the recent foreign aid package.
Transcript
Host: Jim Rickards. How deadly is this thing we just passed, that Mike Johnson and Mitch McConnell allowed to pass?
Jim Rickards: It’s awful, Steve. We’re talking about the the REPO Act. You know, this bill came along, Johnson, Mike Johnson broke it into five parts. Well, forget the border part. That wasn’t going anywhere. But he had Taiwan, Israel, Ukraine, and then they said, there’s this, like, odd lot, you know, bunch of stuff thrown together. And they talked about TikTok and all that. Well, buried in that was this REPO Act. And everyone was talking about the $61 billion of military aid to Ukraine. I looked at that. I can, I can talk about that. But I was entirely focused on the REPO Act.
The $61 billion doesn’t matter. Russia’s going to win the war. They’re very far along. The Ukrainian front is just collapsing right now. the $61 billion is just to kind of get Ukraine to the election. That’s all the White House cares about. I didn’t focus very much on that because it doesn’t matter. Russia’s going to win the war. But the REPO Act has ramifications that go way beyond that.
So what it does, it authorizes the President of the United States to seize any Russian assets in the U.S. jurisdiction. Now, seize means steal. We already had a freeze. The freeze came on in February 2022. Seizing is, is stealing in and basically taking them. So it’s confiscation. Now, there’s a lot of really interesting sub parts of it.
One is when you steal it, when you take the money, it goes into something called the Ukraine Support Fund, Okay. Who runs the Ukraine Support Fund? Well, they specifically say the State Department, but the agency for International Development Aid, AID. Everybody who knows anything about Washington, AID has always been a propaganda and financial front for the CIA. They went around like they’re the Peace Corps. And they say, you know, pro Americans. So, AID is the propaganda and financial front, one of them for the CIA.
Who’s the head of AID? Samantha Power, who was Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations? Well, she’s married to Cass Sunstein, who was the head of the regulatory office in the Obama administration. So, it’s one of these typical, you know, Washington progressive power couples.
She was born in London. She grew up in Ireland, finally made her way to the United States. She’s exactly as you describe, Steve. She is a, you know, she’s got all the right credentials, you know, Harvard and all that stuff. But she’s, she’s a warmonger. She is, just as you say, one notch below Victoria Nuland. But fronting for the Obama administration at the United Nations. During what? Benghazi. You know, how many fiascos did the Obama administration have? Red line in the sand in Syria? Hey, if you guys use chemical weapons, we’re coming in strong. That’s a red line. Almost the next day, Assad uses chemical weapons. Biden doesn’t do anything. You know, etcetera, sorry, Obama doesn’t do anything.
So that was her track record under Obama. With Biden again, she’s back. She’s had, as I mentioned, AID, but it’s just, it’s just a front for the CIA. So it’s more of the same for her, which is a very seasoned, you know, kind of an ultra left wing progressive embedded now in the Biden administration.
Host: It’s one thing to freeze the assets. It’s a whole other thing to seize the assets, which essentially means stealing the assets, convert them into dollars, and then use them for other purposes. To your knowledge, have we done that before?
Jim Rickards: We don’t steal the assets business. There’s too much damage to our credit rating, too much damage to our reputation, to the market, to sellers. That is highly unusual.
Not only that, you might do it from gangsters or a cartel or something like that. In a criminal case with due process of law, you still get, you still have the Constitution, still applies here. Here there’s no, there’s no due process for violating the Sovereign Immunities Act. And these are assets that were owned by the Central Bank of Russia. It’s not some oligarch where we’re taking a yacht. Yeah, we’ve done that, too.
This is the central Bank of Russia. Russia is the 11th largest economy in the world, the largest nuclear power, the largest landmass, ninth largest population, major producer of, you know, strategic minerals, etc. it’s a huge power.
This act, this REPO Act which talked about stealing the assets is bad enough, and we can talk about the implications of that. But there are two anti-Trump landmines buried in the statute that, whoever wrote knew what they were doing, but I haven’t seen any reporting on it. One is section 103. it says this freeze, this confiscation, will stay in place until the President certifies two things. Number one, an end to hostilities. Well, that’s never going to happen, because they’ll say unless you leave Ukraine. I’m sorry, unless you leave Crimea, the hostilities are still going on.
But the second one is that Russia has, you know, visibly and demonstrably paid for all the damage in Ukraine. Well, that’s not going to happen either, because, since when does the winner pay reparations? It’s usually it’s the loser who pays reparations. They’ve got that backwards as well.
So the point is no president, including President Trump, if, you know, he wins a second term, can offer that certification, which means that the freeze activity never goes away.
There’s another provision, section 104. This I found fascinating. It says the confiscation power that we’re talking about has a five year sunset. Now, its not unusual have sunset provisions one year, three years. You know, because Congress likes to revisit these things. Why five years? It goes to August 2029. Sorry, April 2029, which is after the Trump administration. So they have tied Trump’s hands. Lets say Trump wins in November. He’ll be out in January 2029. This thing doesn’t expire till April 2029. It’s engineered in such a way that Trump can’t do anything about it during his entire term.
And by the way, there’s a lot of this going on. Everyone talks about the transition. I would say Trump probably bungled the transition in 2016. There’s a lot of effort underway, Heritage and others, and yourself, to to make sure they do a much better job. Get the plum book out, get the 3000 top jobs that’s underway.
But the elites in the Davos crowd, they’re looking ahead. They see that Trump could very well win. So there’s, they’re not waiting until he wins to start sabotaging. They’re sabotaging him right now. So, Jens Stoltenberg, who is the general secretary of NATO, he’s proposed a five year, $100 billion fund to keep funding the war in Ukraine. Why five years. Once again, the five years is the magic number because it goes beyond the end of the second Trump administration.
So he wants a $100 billion fund. He wants weapons moved from U.S. control to NATO control. So now even if Trump’s the commander in chief, he’s not the commander in chief of NATO, he’s Commander and Chief of the U.S. military. So they want the weapons put in in a NATO bucket. They want $100 billion that goes for five years. This REPO Act, we just talked about, the sunset provision is five years.Tthere, they see that Trump could very well win and their setting up all these landmines that last for five years, so that even if he’s president, he can’t do anything about it.
Now, here’s my question. Mike McCaul, who’s the, the chairman, This bill was written in the House. There was a version of it in the Senate, came over. The House controlled this. Leaving aside the fact that Mike Johnson could have just said, we’re not voting on it. He didn’t do that, clearly. But this bill was written by Republicans, because they control the committees that control the drafting, etc.. So the Republicans, or at least a large subset of them, are out to sabotage Trump.
And this is the kind of thing, sorry to be a lawyer about this, but I am, and I read these things very closely. These things are what I call Trump landmines. The the Davos crowd, the elites and the RINOs in Congress, the Republican ones, and certainly the Democrats, They’re out to Trump proof the world. In other words, rig the game, today. Not, not next January, but today, so that Trump’s hands are tied before he’s even sworn in.
Host: This was a Republican bill, written by Republican House, written by guys like McCaul, and approved by Johnson and his leadership team. Is that correct, sir?
Jim Rickards: That’s absolutely correct. Even if you want to push the bill, you could have struck those, provisions or had a one year sunset. There’s lot you could have done. This is, this is Trump proofing against the fact that Trump might win, we’ll tie his hands in advance.
Host: How dangerous is what they just did with this REPO Act?
Jim Rickards: It’s extremely dangerous and far more dangerous than the $61 billion. The $61 billion is a waste of money, and you’re going to have hundreds of thousands of additional dead Ukrainians that no one in Washington seems to care about, you know, starting with Lindsey Graham. But this REPO Act is more dangerous. Let me let me be specific.
This will diminish and undermine trust in the U.S, respect for the rule of law and the U.S. Treasury market. I’m not saying the Treasury market collapses the next day. I mean, I guess the president signed it today. But at the margin, if you’re a country with a large surplus and you got to decide where to put your money, you’re going to fade Treasury bills and get into gold. Again, I’m not that being a gold bug, I’m just saying gold is something you can’t freeze. It’s physical, you put it away, you can’t touch it. This is going to give a significant boost to the BRICs. I call BRICs plus because they’ve got new members, the BRICs effort to introduce a new, start as a trading currency, and then in time become a reserve currency alternative to the dollar. Again, it doesn’t mean the dollar disappears, but it’s going to have very strong competition. This is playing out over a couple of years.
The third one, and this is much more immediate if, if the U.S. goes ahead and steals these assets, and there’s, the U.S. only has our hands on about $10 billion, most of it’s in Europe, but $290 billion in Europe, $10 billion in the US. But there are members of Congress, say the still the 10 billion now, don’t wait for the Europeans to come along. if they do. But sorry, this is all being set up, by the way, for, the G7 conference. The G7 conference is on the, check the today, June, June 13th. Okay. So, so Yellen and, and Biden want to get this done, and Blinken, want to get this done before the G7 conference because there’s another fund called the Common Ukraine Fund. We the U.S. is going to say, well, we’ll take the $10 billion, put it in this fund, but there’s this bigger fund, the Common Ukraine Fund, we want the 290 billion in that fund.
You have to, you the Europeans, have to steal from Euroclear, Which is the biggest clearing firm in, in Europe, has, they have the $290 billion that, that’s the big prize right there. They’re going to steal from Euroclear. You know, if this goes forward and it is as of now, Russia is going to seize the assets, Western assets in Russia. So BP, Siemens, you know, Total Oil and France, major European countries, have huge energy infrastructure, mining, technology and communications investments in Russia. Putin is going to steal those. My estimate is Putin’s going to make a profit on this. They’ll take his 300 billion of Treasury securities, but he’ll take a far larger amount of infrastructure and other technologies that are in Russia that they haven’t touched so far. It’s it’s still owned by the Europeans. He’ll take that I think Putin and make a profit there. One other thing no one said anything about, So you’re clear, that’s this large clearinghouse based in Belgium, is owned by 78 banks, but the Europeans will be able to put pressure on the banks to steal the assets. Well, Euroclear has offices in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Beijing and Dubai. All Russia has to do is go into any one of those jurisdictions and sue Euroclear for $200 billion, because they’ll have jurisdiction, because they have offices there. You could throw the entire global clearance and financial system into chaos, because what Euroclear going to do? Those juries, and courts, and judges will be much more sympathetic to Russia. You don’t go sue in New York. Thoey’ll sue in Hong Kong which is part of Communist China. So, so the point being that Russia will counter, will sue Euroclear for the damages and throw the system into turmoil.
And, finally, this is, to me, the best irony, is that, well, while the West has been talking about this, what’s been happening to the price of gold? It’s up $600 an ounce. Russia has 3000 tons. Russia has made a $50 billion profit on the price of gold without lifting a finger, because the West is so threatening. Everyone’s like, get me the gold.
