Keynote: Apex Capital

Hi, everybody. My name is Nuri Katz. I'm the president of Apex Capital Partners, and I want to talk very quickly about the illusion we have here in America of America being a safe haven, and how some diversification in our lives may be a good idea.

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To start, my company has been around for 34 years. We've been in the business of advising high net worth individuals from all over the world to invest in various different countries. We also advise sovereign governments on how to attract foreign direct investment. We manage government agencies for a number of governments, helping them attract foreign direct investment.

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We consider ourselves one of the global authorities in the second citizenship space, and we work with people on a lot of personal wealth management planning. What I want to point out right now is something that I think people in America don't take seriously enough.

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I grew up in Canada, but in 1990, in my last year of college, I moved to the Soviet Union, and I ended up living in Moscow for 23 years. In 1990, the Soviet Union was falling apart. In 1991, it fell apart completely and broke up into 15 different countries. We all remember our history, and it happened quite suddenly. It was something nobody would have expected just a few months earlier. Nobody would have expected that the great Soviet Union, or the evil empire, or whatever you would want to call it, would just disappear and break up into 15 different sovereign countries.

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The reason that happened was that it was overburdened by debt. Ronald Reagan outspent the Soviet Union and basically destroyed it. Today, America reminds me of the Soviet Union in 1990 and 1991. We are burdened by debt. I guess we're the poorest country in the world because we're the most indebted nation in the world, and we're not really talking about how one gets out of this situation.

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The way they got out of the situation in the Soviet Union was that the country broke up into its different states. Also, what happened was hyperinflation. Most Americans have never really seen hyperinflation. Hyperinflation is a pretty scary thing. It's really weird to go into a supermarket and there's no food in the supermarket because industry and the economy just aren't working.

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We're at that point, in a way, here in America, where we've got to figure out what to do with this debt. There are only really two ways to pull ourselves out of this. One is by printing a lot of money, which creates a lot of hyperinflation. That hyperinflation would look a lot worse than the little bit of inflation we've been crying about since Covid happened.

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The other way, which might be even simpler, is simply defaulting on debt. If you default on the debt, in many ways, it's sort of the end of the country as you know it, because we've been brought up to believe in the strength of the US government. That would mean the US government doesn't really exist in the way we thought and can't manage itself. But something is going to have to happen.

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Everybody here is thinking about the risks involved with holding dollar assets or the currency itself. That's what Bitcoin is here for, because it's a store of value. But it's a store of value versus the US dollar. Everybody here calculates their Bitcoin as, okay, I've got one Bitcoin, so I've got about $76,000. We don't really think about the fact that Bitcoin has gone down by, what, 35% in the last little while. Well, the dollar has gone down by 35% in the last little while as well.

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It's funny, but I speak about Russia a lot. Last year, the dollar went down versus the Russian ruble by 30%. If you think about it, if Bitcoin has gone down by so much, it has actually gone down by a lot more versus all the other currencies. Your $76,000 today can buy you a lot less in Canadian dollars, Israeli shekels, or other currencies.

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Bitcoin offers a certain store of value, but it's a store of value related to the dollar, not related so much to other currencies. Maybe Bitcoin prices are going to go way up, but there might be hyperinflation, and $200,000 or $1 million will buy you chewing gum. We don't know that. So if Bitcoin is worth a million, that's great, but still.

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I think we are all here stuck in a geographic trap where our assets are US dollar based and our lives are US dollar based. I think it's time to think about diversifying not only our financial assets, but our personal assets. We need to be thinking more about the big world out there, how it works, and how we work within it.

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Most Americans are trapped under this one government that we live with and believe in. But as we see with the way the world is working, we can't count on what governments are going to do, especially now with what this government is going to do and what the next government is going to do.

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There is a lot of concern about the backlash against this government becoming a very radical leftist government that will come in and start nationalizing things. That's one of the reasons we're talking about Bitcoin as well. But it's also us personally. We're stuck in one country without the ability to really get out.

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We've seen in a lot of other countries where borders can close or the value of your passport can suddenly drop. If you remember during Covid, the value of the US passport dropped down. You weren't allowed to travel anywhere with a US passport, and you weren't allowed to get out of here. It was quite an interesting thing. Nobody would have ever imagined that.

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We talk a lot about how to diversify yourself personally and how to prepare for what may be coming. Maybe nothing is going to come, and I don't want to be a scaremonger and say the world is going to fall apart. But we do know that the United States is in a really tough situation.

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Even if you think about the geopolitical issues that are going on now, we're dealing with Russia and Iran, and a few little boats are able to change the way the world economy works because of the Strait of Hormuz. Oil prices have skyrocketed and may still double or triple. We don't know where that's all going.

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Being stuck in one country and not being able to go to others or live in others in case things really change is something for all of us to start thinking about. We need to think about how to diversify our currency, our assets, and our personal passport portfolio, as we call it, and think about having options in life if America isn't able to get out of this really tough situation going forward.

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Thank you all. I appreciate it, and I'm done. Have a good one.