Hidden Forces Demetri Kofinas

In Episode 303 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with economist David Rosenberg. David is the founder and president of Rosenberg Research, an economic and financial market consulting firm that provides advice to thousands of retail and institutional clients across 40 countries.
Demetri and David spend the first hour of their conversation discussing Rosenberg’s economic philosophy. David also shares lessons from his experience working in the finance industry since the early 1980s and what that experience taught him about markets, investing, and the economic cycle.  
The second half of their conversation is much more investment focused. Demetri asks David about specific sectors of the economy like the resource sector, housing, and commercial real estate. They also discuss the impairment of bank balance sheets that has resulted from the Fed’s dramatic tightening of interests rates and how that impairment resembles the crisis that hit the savings and loan industry in the late 80s and early 90s.
You can subscribe to our premium content and gain access to our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports (or Key Takeaways) at HiddenForces.io/subscribe.
If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces genius community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, you can also do that on our subscriber page. If you still have questions, feel free to email info@hiddenforces.io, and Demetri or someone else from our team will get right back to you.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io
Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas
Episode Recorded on 03/20/2023

In Episode 302 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Jeff Snider. Jeff is Chief Strategist for Atlas Financial and co-host of the Eurodollar University podcast where he untangles the inner workings of the global monetary and Eurodollar reserve currency system with implications for policymakers and investors.
Jeff Snider has been ringing the alarm bell in anticipation of a panic inducing event like the bank failures we experienced last week for more than a year. In his last appearance on the show he pointed to what he called an “increasing sense of dread” that he felt was reflected in credit and derivatives markets. Markets were “in a very technical sense,” according to Jeff “hedged for something,” perhaps even a deflationary event in the monetary system like a bank panic that would lead the Fed to prematurely pause its rate hikes and possibly even reverse its policy entirely to stave off another financial crisis.
Whether or not the Fed reverses course this week is less important than how the system itself  — the banks, brokers, and other financial intermediaries who make up the international financial system — changes its own behavior as a result of recent events. What this means for asset prices, the prospects for economic growth, inflation, and government policy are all topics that Demetri and Jeff explore in depth during today’s episode.
In the second hour they zoom out to look at the bigger picture, specifically what the system itself ends up looking like coming out the other end of this crisis. Do we get more consolidation, centralization, and government control or is there a path for something else? And how does the international security environment make today’s crisis and its potential resolution look very different from what we experienced in 2008?
Join our HF Genius community Live Q&A w/Jeff Snider & Brent Johnson (Thursday, March 23 @ 5pm EST): RSVP HERE!
You can subscribe to our premium content and gain access to our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports (or Key Takeaways) at HiddenForces.io/subscribe.
If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces genius community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, you can also do that on our subscriber page. If you still have questions, feel free to email info@hiddenforces.io, and Demetri or someone else from our team will get right back to you.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed
Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify
Subscribe to our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/
Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io
Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas
Episode Recorded on 03/17/2023

In Episode 301 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Steven Kelly about the government's decision to bail out depositors at Silicon Valley Bank and what this decision means for monetary policy and the Federal Reserve’s fight against inflation.
This conversation was recorded on the morning of Monday, March 13th less than 24hrs after the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department, and the FDIC came out with a joint statement assuring depositors at Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank that their deposits would be fully protected irrespective of FDIC deposit limits. While this stems the immediate fears of a bank run, the manner in which this was done creates further complications for the Federal Reserve and raises more questions than it answers about the direction of monetary policy.
The goal of today’s episode is to provide you with the most up-to-date recap of what has happened thus far, why it happened, how it happened, what the government’s response has been, and the implications of that response for monetary policy, financial markets, and the economy.
You can subscribe to our premium content and gain access to our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports (or Key Takeaways) at HiddenForces.io/subscribe.
If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces genius community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, you can also do that on our subscriber page. If you still have questions, feel free to email info@hiddenforces.io, and Demetri or someone else from our team will get right back to you.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed
Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify
Subscribe to our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/
Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io
Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas
Episode Recorded on 03/13/2023

In Episode 300 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Dr. Iain McGilchrist. Most people know Dr. McGilchrist for having authored “The Master and His Emissary” a book about what we popularly refer to as “the Divided Brain” and its role in the making of the modern world.
It is Dr. McGilchrist’s view that we have systematically misunderstood the nature of reality, because we have depended on the aspect of our brains that is most adept at manipulating the world in order to bend it to our purposes. It’s the same part of our brains that is most proficient at constructing models or representations of the world and doubling down on them even in the face of falsifying evidence.
In the conversation that follows you will learn how the brain is divided into two hemispheres: the left hemisphere, which is designed to help us apprehend the world and thus manipulate and control it, and the right hemisphere, which is designed to help us comprehend the world — to see it for all that it is in its richness, nuance, and glory.
The problem, according to McGilchrist, is that the very brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world so as to make it more responsive to our ambitions for power and control have become the primary obstacles to our understanding of it. The consequences of this imbalance can be seen all around us in our ecosystems, our systems of government, our economies, and within the fabric of our very own societies. The rise of narcissism, paranoia, our obsession with categories and discrete identities, the rise in depression, the policing of language, and the panopticon of surveillance and control are all symptoms in Iain’s eyes of the tyranny of the left-hemisphere made manifest in the world around us.
The first hour of our conversation is devoted primarily to understanding the physiology of the divided brain and how to recognize each hemisphere’s contribution to the synthesized world-picture that we call reality. In the second hour, which is available to premium subscribers, we examine the various ways in which the dominance of the left-hemisphere is manifesting itself in society, as well as the deeper philosophical questions that have concerned humanity since time immemorial. We look at the ‘stuff’ of which the cosmos is made – time, space, motion, matter, and consciousness, – as well as why we might see it as divine in nature. We also explore its apparent paradoxical nature—a paradox that McGilchrist suggests has generally resulted from the clash between the ways in which the right and left hemispheres construe reality.
This was an absolutely wonderful conversation and despite some of the audio challenges that we dealt with on Demetri’s end of the microphone, we are confident that you will walk away from it with a sense of enlightenment, inspiration, and perhaps, even a new perspective on the world and our place in it.
You can subscribe to our premium content and gain access to our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports (or Key Takeaways) at HiddenForces.io/subscribe.
If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces genius community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, you can also do that on our subscriber page. If you still have questions, feel free to email info@hiddenforces.io, and Demetri or someone else from our team will get right back to you.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed
Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify
Subscribe to our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/
Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io
Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram,

In Episode 299 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Jon Askonas a professor of politics at the Catholic University of America where he works on the connections between the republican tradition, technology, and national security. Jon is the author of a new series of essays for the New Atlantis titled “Reality: A Postmortem,” where he looks at the forces that have conspired to break consensus reality, and what it means for humanity and the world.
The last few years in many Western countries have been characterized by a growing sense of bewilderment, anger, and distrust. Distrust in mainstream institutions, in each other, and in ourselves—in our own capacity to apprehend reality and come to consensus about the nature of the world around us.
Jon and Demetri spend the first hour of their conversation discussing the sources of this fragmentation, the disembodied self, and the ways in which the modern age shares more in common with the enchanted world of the middle ages than it does the secular age that has defined consensus reality in the Western world for most of the last 500 years.
In the second hour, which is available to premium subscribers, they look at the pervasive effect of social media on the news business, the problem of truth and how to find it in this world of fractured realities, and what can be done to fix the problem.
You can subscribe to our premium content and gain access to our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports at HiddenForces.io/subscribe.
If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces genius community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, you can also do that on our subscriber page. If you still have questions, feel free to email info@hiddenforces.io, and Demetri or someone else from our team will get right back to you.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed
Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify
Subscribe to our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/
Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io
Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas
Episode Recorded on 02/27/2023

In Episode 298 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Boston College, Jonathan Kirshner. Dr. Kirshner belongs to the school of international relations known as “classical realism,” which places a unique emphasis on the role played by uncertainty and the need to grapple more seriously with the nuance of historical context, the governing ideologies and perspectives of different states, the quality of leadership, and the character and harmony of a nation’s people.
Demetri and Jonathan spend the first hour of their conversation applying the framework of analysis that Kirshner puts forward in his latest book “An Unwritten Future” toward three distinct historical conflicts: the Peloponnesian war, the war in Vietnam, and the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. All three of these wars had ruinous consequences for the aggressor state. In the case of the Iraq war, the conflict badly damaged public perceptions of (and trust in) the competency of America’s foreign policy elite, the credibility of its press, and the state of its finances.
The legacy of the Iraq war, as well as the prolonged occupation of Afghanistan and the consequences of the 2008 financial crisis, are the subjects of the episode’s second hour. In it, Demetri and Jonathan compare the divisions present within contemporary American society to those present within the Third French Republic in the years leading up to its stunning defeat and subsequent collaboration with Nazi Germany. What was it about French society that made it so susceptible to co-optation and what lessons can we draw from the French experience when devising public policy meant to serve the national interest?
The goal of today’s conversation is to help advance a framework that partially explains the divisions currently present in American society so that we can advocate more thoughtfully for solutions that heal our national wounds by bringing our citizens closer together rather than pushing each other further apart. Demetri believes strongly that this healing is necessary and that it will require putting the national interest ahead of our own more immediate material concerns.
You can subscribe to our premium content and gain access to our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Key Takeaway at HiddenForces.io/subscribe.
If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces genius community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, you can also do that on our subscriber page. If you still have questions, feel free to email info@hiddenforces.io, and Demetri or someone else from our team will get right back to you.
If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following:
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed
Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify
Subscribe to our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/
Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io
Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas
Episode Recorded on 02/13/2023