Transcript of the above video: 

The thrust of this video is going to go into analysis - it is going to be a short video. I am getting into way deeper analysis in our paid news service. If you are interested in that, [email protected]. You can email us and we will get you into the mailing list for the deeper videos I do on these type of topics. But long story short, 2025 may be looked at as a watershed moment especially in expat Thailand. I'm seeing a number of trends that lead me to believe we are entering a different era if you will with regard to Thailand, and the expat community may be deeply affected by these changes. 

That said, as odd as it sounds, the nightlife, a recent article from Pattaya Mail, pattayamail.com, I was reading it and I said, the last time I saw developments similar to this was going back into 2010 and '11 when we started seeing similar trends and then it reversed itself due to basically economic policies maintained by countries outside of Thailand that then had knock-on impact for expats in Thailand, but let me let me dig into this. I actually thought of making this video and I thought, when people would read an article like this, they would definitely probably most 99.9% of people would not be thinking about exchange rates and international geopolitics and how that is impacting the Expat community in Thailand, they would just sort of take it at face value. Unfortunately my brain is weird so that is where I sort of went. That said, the article is titled: Pattaya's Soi 6: Still sparking curiosity, but value now comes with a caveat. Quoting directly: "Pattaya Soi 6 keeps its spark alive with affordable drinks and attractive faces, despite baht swings reads one travel blog headline -- prompting sharp reactions across online forums. One commenter quipping, "Affordable? Has the commentator been hiding in a cave?". 

By the way, as a side note, for affordable farang food here in Thailand, if you're interested, if you're in Bangkok in downtown Bangkok, my better half and I have set up a restaurant. It's called Pancake Palace. As the name implies, breakfast anytime including pancakes, American style breakfast, and American style diner food. We have got cheeseburgers, hamburgers, hot dogs chilli dogs; we've got bowls of chilli, we've got buffalo wings, we've even got grilled cheese, bratwurst type sausage, that kind of thing. So if you are interested in diner style food, we've got pork chops as well, diner style food here in downtown Bangkok. Come check us out. There's a link in the description below to Pancake Palace, but going back. 

Again, what caught my eye was "affordable? Has the commentator been hiding in a cave?" I did a recent video debunking this notion that Thailand's policy makers have some axe to grind against expats here, that they were purposely trying to get rid of the expat Community. Most of it was kind of a nonsensical video where they were conflating in my opinion, multiple different policies being made for a conspiracy against expats. That said, something was mentioned in there that I think is worth noting and I think this may be of a special concern to British expats, but it has broader implications, and that is look, the world is shifting okay? Jim Rickards talked about this in one of his books that he called The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; I think it was called the Death of Money, where he was talking about the phenomenon from 1997 until now, Thailand has wildly changed its posture in terms of currency policy. From 1997 until roughly, not exactly 2007 - but in my mind that is where the sort of pendulum began to swing - from 1997 for about a decade, Thailand had to have a very open policy especially regarding Immigration and allowed a lot of folks in that even today, they would not allow in and to remain here, because they needed the foreign exchange, they just needed to bring in foreign money to keep the baht liquid enough on the international markets so that it could be freely exchanged - they needed the foreign exchange from 1997.

Around about the time I got here in 2007-2008, that pendulum began to swing and we saw it fully come to a very different place around about 2017-2018. So this occurred over about a 20-year period and I get into this and further detail in the paid new service, again [email protected], email us. But long story short, basically from that point forward, countries began trying, especially after Trump's first term, he first came in to office, he wanted a weaker dollar because the thinking was. and in my opinion Trump is very much underestimated by many in the sort of establishment presses of the world insofar as they view him as "stupid" or they view him as some sort of a boorish lout, in terms of politics and he doesn't know what he's talking about. That is not entirely true. Trump is a very astute guy in many, many ways but I think he has a little bit of a not exactly simplistic mindset, but it's very centred on the American perspective and he can't see outside looking back in where he wanted a weaker Dollar in the first term. And the result of that was, he started weakening the dollar. Well other countries that depended on the United States as an export market began then playing the game of "beggar thy neighbour" if you will and weakening their own currencies to try to get back under the Dollar to make their exports effectively desirable to the American market. That was basically what is happening. This is happening again now, and this time it is not like Trump's first term. 

The last time we saw the swings and roundabouts that I am seeing in the currency markets and that I am sort of seeing in terms of the relationships between like Thailand and the US in a trade sense - and I am not going to go too deep into the tariffs and things because really that has yet to be sort of shaken out and I don't exactly know where that plays out - but from a currency standpoint, things are shifting. We saw this in 2010, and '11, especially when we saw the Baht go to like 28 and change against the dollar, which that was a hard time to be in business out here, but in the past that was rectified when basically liquidity under Obama was shoved into the system, and in the late George W. Bush Administration too by the way, it was not just Obama started doing that, started shoving liquidity into the system, and the ship began to right and the wealth effect kind of took over again, there was confidence in the economy, and we got on with it for roughly another decade. Then under Trump there was a jolt, but that jolt was sort of rectified because certain trade arrangements were made and then Biden came in and for good or ill there was just sort of a lull basically with regard to all of this; we were just sort of on a holding pattern. And then Trump has now come back and he is sort of reimplementing certain aspects of this, but it is not about Trump, there are bigger forces at play and they are having an impact on just the economics of coming to Thailand and spending money in Thailand and how far foreign currencies go, I think especially with regard to the Pound and the Euro, this is having a massive impact. 

Meanwhile, the demography is shifting as well and that demography is going into a direction that is not like what we have seen in the past. What do I mean by this? Well affectively we are seeing less Westerners, and we are seeing less Westerners of the demography that went to venues like Soi 6 in Pattaya and things. The new folks that are coming, one big change is we are seeing lots of women, foreign women, farang if you will, Western women coming to Thailand as tourists. Some of them travel alone, some of them travel in groups; they are a totally different demography than we have seen in the past. That said I get into much deeper analysis on the economics of all of this and of the sort of geopolitics and even the demography of all this in our paid news service, [email protected], you can email us for that. That said I will be keeping you updated on this channel with regard to these details as the situation evolves.