Animal Spirits Podcast - Buy the Dip is Dead (EP.288)

Episode Date: December 21, 2022

On today's show we talk about why the stock market is getting crushed this month, what one year's returns mean for the next year, why retail investors are still buying tech stocks, 3 scenarios for next year's market, the Fed's 2% inflation target, why there will never be a perfect economy, the Avatar sequel and much more.   Find complete shownotes on our blogs...  Ben Carlson’s A Wealth of Common Sense  Michael Batnick’s The Irrelevant Investor  Like us on Facebook  And feel free to shoot us an email at [e-mail] with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation.      (Wealthcast Media, an affiliate of Ritholtz Wealth Management, received compensation from the sponsor of this advertisement. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. The information provided on this website (including any information that may be accessed through this website) is not directed at any investor or category of investors and is provided solely as general information.)  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's Animal Spirits is brought to you by our friends at Y Charts. Michael, one of the charts have been going to, more than any other this year on Y Charts, is the U.S. inflation rate. I think they have it going back to like the 1920s, 1910s, and it's all over the place. But the great thing about it is you can take out one period of time and then you can export the data. So you can play around the data too, which I've done. So I pulled up the 1980s here.

Coming off the 1970s, we had double-digit inflation. And then I looked at, okay, what happened in the 1980s? How long did it take for inflation to come down? Because Powell last week said, under no circumstances, am I going to get off of this 2% target? That's it? No. 2%. That's it.

We're staying there. So I had to look at the extra inflation rate in the 1980s. How often did it get there? Below what? 2%. Did it ever get below 2%? 2%? It didn't go below 3% until 1983.

So that was after peaking in about 1980. Didn't go below 2% until 1986. It was actually 4% or higher, almost 60% of the time. 3% or lower, just 14% of the time. time. Now, you can say, well, the Fed's looking at PCE or core or whatever. I don't know, but my point is, no one looks at the 1980s as this inflationary hellscape, because the inflation rate averaged 5.6% of the 1980s. Is that all because it was high in the early? A little bit, but I'm saying it was only 3% or lower 14% of the time. So 85%. But here's the thing. As we've discussed,

an nauseam, it's not the number. It's the direction. And it was high, but it was falling. But my point is, right now the direction is going in the right way, but the Fed keeps saying we want the number. I don't know if they're lying, but they keep sticking to this number. And my point is no one looks back at the 1980s as this awful economic period. Everyone thinks it was like a great time for the economy. And inflation was over 5% on average. My point is that if the Fed is really wedded to this 2% number, maybe they just need to chill out. Just a thought. If you want to look at this inflation chart and more, go to Ycharts.com, tell them Animal Spirits sent you and get 20% off that initial subscription. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life,

Investing. Join Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. Michael Battenick and Ben Carlson work for Ritt Holt's wealth management. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben or any podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Ritt Holt's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions. Clients of Ritt Holt's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben, what a difference a week makes. It is Tuesday at 9-10. Last Tuesday, the stock market was significantly higher than it is today. Market opened up close to 3%. That was the inflation

day, correct? It was kind of like the roaring 20s. It lasted for like 15 minutes. So credit to us, because we hedged it a little bit. We said, listen, if the market closes here, it might roll over. It did roll over. It certainly did. Unbelievable. When we talked last week, inflation came in under expectations, the market was flying, and ever since then, it's been downhill. And also, I feel like the two days after that, we did have a few people say, like, why is the market falling? Which is a rare question to ask us, because usually the market is, I don't want to say the market is going up for good reasons, but this was, I thought, an odd situation. I really don't know why the stock market has declined as much as it did

over the last week. I don't have a great explanation for it. You're not just going to blame the Fed? Wasn't that the easy case that when the Fed minutes came out? that was it the next day? They said, we don't care. We're going to wait until inflation it's 2%. And that's it. Yeah, but there was also some stuff in there that suggested that certainly the pace of rate hikes were going to dramatically slow. We're not doing 75 again. I don't know. I had all my retirement savings banked on seasonality, and that didn't work. So I don't know what to do now. Well, not funny. You should mention it. Now we're entering the strongest period of the year. So listen, we'll check back next week and maybe you'll eat your sarcastic words, you jerk.

I'm just saying sometimes it's not that. The other thing is, I guess it's not even seasonality. It's like the presidential cycle. Like once we get the uncertainty out of the way of the elections, then the market can take off. I guess sometimes it's just not that easy, even though it kind of makes sense. Yeah, it's not easy when you just make up statistics. You just make it up. Listen.

Me? You got to give it 12 months. The data was, it was 12 months after, so there's never been a 12-month period. So, yeah, I can make stuff up and say it doesn't work either, but that's not what we do here. Well, granule. I feel you made that word up. Just made it up. Get off it.

Last week, we talked about how often the market is down two years in a row, and I decided to run the numbers. And the quants came after me on Twitter in my inbox. Okay, so here's the data. Going back to 1928 to 2021, the S&P 500, 91% of the time is not down two years in a row. So that means 9% of the time it is. It's a very low probability. But then people said, what about conditional probability, which I guess I haven't heard that term since statistics class in like eighth grade?

But the thing was, well, how many times when the stock market down, is it then down the next year. That does make sense. Which was a fair point. So what are the numbers then? So there's been 26 down years since 1928. Eight out of those 26 years saw down year the next year, which is roughly 30% of the time, which is essentially the stock market's long-term average.

It's up 70 to 75% of the time. So it's up three out of four years on average. So basically, if the stock market's down one year, it tells you nothing about what's going to happen the next year. I think that's the point. If it's up one year, it tells you nothing what it's happening in the next year. or if it's down one year, it tells you nothing about what's going to happen the next year. Why don't we get out of the way right now?

Will the stock market be down next year? 40% chance. 40% chance. I don't give you yes or no. 40% chance. Come on. Well, don't you think that there's three scenarios? Hard landing, soft landing, no landing.

And I feel like you could ascribe a stock market value range to all of those. The hard landing obviously would be down. I'm curious about this no landing thing that you mentioned. What exactly do you mean? I think it would just still be in no man's land where it feels like we're very close to a recession and inflation comes down but not as much as people wanted to. We're kind of just stuck in the middle in no man's land and people can't tell if we're going to have a soft landing or it's going to be a recession.

I think that would be the no landing situation. I unfortunately find it very easy to see both sides of the argument with why the stock market ship or should it be down, but at the risk of arguing with myself for the next five minutes here about which way it's going. I will pick aside. Let's keep going. The good thing is you don't have to pick a side. That's true. But for the purposes of this show on entertainment, I will pick aside. What was the Adam Smith guy's name? What was his real name? George Goodman or something? George Goodman. The stocks don't know that you own them. The stock market doesn't care if you think it's going to be up or down. It's going to do it. But our listeners care about being entertained.

Come on. True. Try and have some fun here. That's what I said, 40% chance. That's entertaining. 40% chance. So what? Stock market being down next year. You can't go wrong with that prediction. That's why economists do it. All right. You know what? I'm not going to get off it. I'm going to stand this topic. We did a live podcast on Friday with the guys that on the tape, Guy Adami, Dan, Nathan, and Danny Moses.

And thank you to everyone who came out to support it. We had a great time. We did the podcast. We got drinks after. I had to leave early because I saw Jerry Seinfeld, which I'll talk about later. And it was a great time. It was really a great time. So thank you everybody.

And people traveled to see this. People came far and wide. And I guess New York is a good excuse. You could always find things to do there. But thank you. to everyone who came. New York and the holidays is amazing. Actually, as a New Yorker, not quite. You don't think so? I was in the city yesterday. I was like, huh, the train station was fairly empty, but the city was bumping. Getting to Penn Station stunk. It was absolutely mobbed.

This is the problem with, you can't appreciate stuff anymore if you've been there for a while. It's like living in California, not caring what the weather. I go to New York in the holidays, and I think the city is amazing. It's bustling. It's lively. People are shopping. There's decorations everywhere. You see it all the time. Get out of my way. Yeah. So we were talking at the event, and I posed a question to the audience, how many of you think we're going into a recession?

And 90% of the room, I mean, pretty much everyone raised their hand. Then I said, how many of you think the market takes out new lows? I can't remember if I phrased it how many of you think that was at the low. I don't raise your hands. I can't remember. But let's just say I said, how many do you think the market takes out new lows? Everyone raised their hand. So I am of this thing that I think earnings will get worse in 2023.

I think probably the excess savings that's been making the numbers not square. I think that does run a little bit dry. And so for that reason, and because the Fed is still talking tough, I don't think it's a big leap to say that the market will be down next year. I have no prediction that it'll be down 10%, 15%, 6%, I don't know. The funny thing is, though, that we could go into recession and still not do new lows. That's the thing that would get everyone is we go into recession, but the market says, all right, we got the recession.

Now I'm taking off. So that's the other thing. That would be the confusing part. So we've also posed that question. Is it possible that the bare market bottom before the recession began? And so I could also easily see a scenario where, yeah, we do go into a recession and earnings do fall, but not as much as everybody thought. And because most people are expecting something pretty bad, maybe what we get is just

just mildly bad, and it's already baked in. I feel like that's kind of being a little bit too cute. But here's the thing. If you wanted to get cute, though, here's the scenario. Things can obviously get worse, but the junk and the highest speculative stuff has already gotten crushed. So obviously, it would be the rest of the market would have to come down in the stuff that's held up well, then would have to roll over. Amazon's down 55% you were telling me yesterday. Yeah, Apple looks terrible. Yeah, a lot of these big companies have already gotten shellacked pretty good. Obviously, Again, it can always get worse. I guess what I will say is this, to put an optimistic spin on this, if you survive this year,

you can survive another bad year. This is a tough year. And the good news is that if you're a balanced investor with stocks and bonds, like a lot of our listeners are, the bonds will be much better for you next year, barring something very unforeseen, like inflation ramping up again. For a recession, it would be hard to see bonds not performing their old stability thing that they didn't do this year. If the tenure goes from wherever it is, I'd like that.

I can't remember where it is, three, six. Whatever, it comes down to three. Yeah, you're going to get price appreciation on your bonds as well as a decent total return to boot. And then the other thing is that for people that are still contributing to their future investment accounts, which is a lot of you, this is fantastic. I know it hurts now, but the opportunity to continue to buy stocks lower, and I'm not saying that they can't go lower or that this is like some generational buying opportunity, but this is a good thing. This is a good thing, even though it might I feel like it. If your time horizon is measured in years and not days and months, you want another down

year if you're contributing. So if you're still in that saver. Sam Rowe tweeted, by the way, I saw Sam at the event. Great to see him. He thanked us for our shoutouts. And I thanked him for his content. Great to see Sam as always. Sam tweeted the depth of recessions are not massively correlated to the scale of the S&P 500

declines. The 1970s and 2001 recessions were very bad for stocks. I'm sorry, 2001 was the mildest recession. This is work from Deutsche Bank. We'll throw this chart up here. Basically, it's all valuations based on. Valuations are a lot of it. In early 70s, you had the nifty 50 stocks that all these huge conglomerates and

blue chip stocks were trading at nosebley levels. And even though it was a mild recession, the stock market got crushed. Same thing in 2000. And that's the other thing is that, man, the risk-free rate is like really stiff competition for stocks. True. But we'd get a recession and it goes right back down. That's true.

Probably. There's a lot of on the one hand, on the other hand. I think stocks are fairly valued. I don't think they're ludicrously valued at all. All of the froth has been more than cleaned away. But are stocks like a screaming buy? We had 15 minutes last week of, ah, this was awesome. Yeah.

You're great. And then, nope, we got rugged. We got rugged. We all got rugged. Bespoke tweeted. The number of 1% declines. Wait, to end the week. What does this mean?

It says SMP 500 number of 1% declines to end the week. to end the week. Does it mean on a Friday? I think that would mean on a Friday. Or I guess Thursday, if it's coolest, on a Friday. Okay, that is an interesting data poll. But I guess it's indicative of how people feel. People just sell on Fridays.

Get me to cash. And so we've had the most selling to end the week, whether that be a early Thursday, end the week or Friday, since 1950. Rough. It's put a shit year. That should mean, like, alcohol sales should be high this year. If everyone's selling on Friday, people should be buying more booze. I think my alcohol consumption has in an all-time high this year, fortunately.

Really? Even higher than the pandemic? I should know, it can't be. That's a good point. My memory is short. That was another chart that was ruined by the pandemic, Michael's alcohol consumption. John, make a chart of that. Every chart was ruined by the pandemic. Apollo is an interesting chart. S&P 500 performance in the 12 months following a Fed pause. And as you would expect, it's good. Once they do what they have to do and get out of the way or stop hiking.

If we're making predictions for next year and putting probabilities on it, what month does the Fed stop raising rates? February is the last month, and then it's done. I'm embarrassed to ask this question aloud. Do they do these meetings every month? I don't think so. I think February is the next one. Listen, I'm not embarrassed to admit it. Maybe I am a little bit, but I don't think they do this every month.

Okay. The next meeting is March. Okay. Wait, then that's 2022. No, the next meeting is the end of January or early February, then March. All right, I'm going to say March. There's no April. This is a weird sketch.

schedule. Hold on. Let's just see what the probabilities are. CME Fedwatch tool. I'm saying that February first meeting. That's it. Fed's done hiking. So it's February and March. Yeah, I didn't think it was every month. Okay. They go February, 50, and then 25 March, and then they're done. By the way, there's three more inflation prints in between there. What if inflation is at 5% by then? 4%. Could be. Moving on. Eric Boucherun has tweeted BTFD, which still stands for by the bleeping dip is finally dead. By the freaking dip. By the freaking dip.

Okay. Tom SeraFegas wrote this article. This is interesting. ETF investors have stopped chasing the worst performing equity strategies, hinting at an end to the by the dip approach that fueled rallies. Flows have varied widely among ETFs this year when broken out by performance deciles. The worst performing 10% of equity ETFs have outflows exceeding $11 billion, while the top two deciles. I've taken an 140 billion dollars combined. We've got this arc stuff later

in the dock. I'm going to move this up right now. Jeffrey Patak had a tweet show, This is a true story. It happened right here in my town. One night, 17 kids woke up, got out of bed, walked into the dark, and they never came back. I'm the director of Barbarian. A lot of people die in a lot of weird ways. We're not going to find it in the news because the police covered everything we'll love. On August days. This is where the story really starts. Weapons.

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After all, you're in your small space era. It's time to own it. Shop now at IKEA.ca. The percent of U.S. stock funds that ARC. Innovation has outperformed or out lasted since inception. And starting in 17, it was 100 percent. And they went on a sick run. Did you see this chart? Yes, for the much money they brought in?

No, the outperformance. Oh, the outperformance. Okay, yes. So they outperformed every other fund in existence from their inception through 2017 to 21. It's hard to see where that stops. Anyway, it's been a crazy run.

However, needless to say, we're on the other side of that. And this is not a joke. Somebody tweeted Kathy Wood doing a TikTok, unless it was like one of those deep fakes. Did you see the Morgan Freeman thing? Yeah, I saw.

I don't know. I don't know what to think about those. I just feel like everyone is going to have to not believe anything anymore. You have no reaction to that? That video didn't blow your face off. No, it's pretty cool. Here's a thing.

I want to change my AI take from a couple weeks ago a little bit. It's not that I don't believe AI is going to be like this crazy thing. I'm just sick of trying to get ahead of trends. I'm sick of like talking about what's going to happen in the future, and I'm just going to wait until it happens. It's happening, dude. I really don't like this take of yours. It's happening.

It's right in front of your face. What are you talking about? How is an AI chatbot changed your life? It's happening. It's here. I know it's here, but like, what is it done? Besides people putting out tweets and making funny, ha-ha, look what I did to the AI chatbot? What else has it done?

It makes it easier for college kids. It's weird that you're pooping this. I'm not pooping. I'm just saying I'm not going to do anything until it actually impacts me personally. Okay. I don't care. I don't know what that means. I'm like a middle-aged man now.

I'm stop caring about what's going to happen in the future. This is when I get off my lawn take. I don't care until it really impacts me. Okay. So we'll throw this in the YouTube video for viewers. There's a video of a dude talking on like the lower pain. And on the upper pain, it's Morgan Freeman. Morgan Freeman is mimicking

exactly what this guy is saying in real time and it's Morgan Freeman's voice and it is insane. The ramifications for this are pretty mind-bending. But my point is no one's going to trust anything anymore. That's my point. Oh, great. If you're smart, you're not going to

until you'd like verify 12 times. We don't have an abundance of trust these days, so that's great. All right. So Kathy would really and truly, if this was not a bot or some AI simulation, she said, we believe that the market cap

associated with truly disruptive innovation will go from $7 trillion now to $210 trillion in the next eight to 10 years. That's a 30-fold increase. Now, I don't really love to like talk badly about people directly, but this is crazy talk. In 10 years, to go from $7 to $210 trillion would imply 41% compound annual growth rates. That would jump to 46% if it happens in nine years, and 53% compounded annual growth rate if it happens in eight years. There is no way this is impossible. Do you know how it happens?

How? AI. Well, that's what... No, but this is impossible. I know. Could you really believe this? Here's the thing, though. During a bull market, these kind of things sound smart, and during a bear market,

they sound crazy. More people are willing to suspend disbelief during a bull market than a bear market. And during a bear market, everyone goes, are you nuts? And in a bull market, some people go, well. All of a sudden, a lot of people called out her Tesla, bare case $2 trillion. I think base was five. Whatever. You can't talk like this.

Apparently, when you get so wildly successful and you have no one telling you no anymore, you just say whatever you want, apparently, these days. I think that's what we've learned these last couple of years is that once you reach a certain point of success and wealth, no one's going to tell you no anymore. So you just say wild crap and hope something works. I think that's the stage of society we're at. Don't love it. Nicarossi with a wild data point.

Record, $1.5 trillion gap between money flowing into ETFs and out of mutual funds this year. So, ETFs had inflows of $588 billion. Most of that was stocks and bonds. Mutual funds had outflows of $950 billion. Most of that, or the majority of that, was bond funds. So you're saying that what accounts for the difference? Is that you're asking? Why is there more money coming out of mutual funds than going in TTF? Is that what you're asking or not? No, I'm not asking. I think we know. This is what Eric Boutchunis has been saying for years, that a bear market is going to be really bad for active management, even though this has been a good year for active. My point is that more money came out of mutual funds and went in TF, so there's a big huge gap there.

Oh, money market funds. Cash. I think this is probably going to continue. There's going to be a gap for a long time. Boomers are going to be spending their money. eventually. Some of them are going to have to just sell, people are going to be selling stocks. But that's going to be gradual. I think the reason for this specifically is cash. That could be it. I think it's very easy. So the Wall Street Journal did an article talking about the wild year that was. The headline was individual investors hanging on wild deer for stocks. This is catnip for Ben and I. So Brian Wilkinson. They obviously interviewed regular people for this. Yeah. Brian Wilkinson, 60 years old, said he has seen worse in the markets. He witnessed the 1997 stock market crash, remained invested after the attacks of September 11, 2001 and

right at the 2008 financial crisis. The market always bounced back. With inflation high, he still thinks he has a better shot at earning high returns from stocks and bonds, never a big spender on such things as eating out or entertainment. Mr. Wilkinson has continued contributing cash to his church and stashing away money toward retirement funds. This year, he increased his exposure to stocks to roughly 70 percent of his portfolio, paying down the mortgage on his home, has given Mr. Wilkinson, who lives near Nashville, Tennessee, extra firepower to keep investing. Now, here's the quote from Mr. Wilkinson. Stocks are really the only game in town to ultimately be in inflation. Still watching his investments, Tumble has been trying. Quote, it's painful,

but it's mistakes people make in the downturns that hurt people the most. You know what, Mr. Wilkinson? I could not agree more. That's a pretty good take. This is a take that is tried and true. Way to go. This man, Mr. Wilkinson, is saying the course, he's probably, if he's done what he says he's done, which has remained invested over the last 30-odd years. Guess what? This man has seen this and worse and has seen the downs and the ups and. Kudos to Mr. Wilkinson. My only advice for Mr. Wilkinson.

My only advice. Spend a little money eating out and having some entertainment. Enjoy yourself a little bit. There's good fried chicken. You say for 30 years, spend some of that money. Is it a good fried chicken in Tennessee? Isn't the Nashville chicken sandwich a thing? That's right.

One bite for me and I'm heartburned for a week. I cannot eat spicy stuff. The reason why I said fried chicken, I couldn't remember where it came from. You're right, Ben. When we go to Mexico, remember we had that the Nashville spicy chicken taco? Oh, yeah. That's pretty good. Very good.

I can't do spicy. Again, kudos to Mr. Wilkinson, doing it right. So Vanda Research, who we've mentioned on the show before, I don't know how they do it, but they track retail flows. And people are buying the snot out of Tesla. This is the most retail money going in. It's all tech stocks. People still believe in tech stocks, I guess.

The net retail purchases, now this data is, I think, from a week ago or so, but a lot of money going into Tesla. What is Tesla down now? 60% from the highs? It's the biggest drawdown since they went public by a lot. And a market cap, destruction, forget about it. For a lot of these companies, obviously, but yeah. It hasn't quite round trip yet, but it's getting there.

So yeah, 64% from the highs. We're going to talk in a little bit about stocks that are at their March 2020 lows. We spoke about stocks. Wait, hang on. So in the last three years. Tesla has had two 60% declines. It did? And the pandemic was down 60%.

Oh, I didn't realize that. So what do you think the total return is for sitting through two 60% declines if you would have held that whole time? I know it was up 10x in 2021. What's the three-year return for Tesla? Still up 440% despite 260% drawdowns. Just a tad bit of volatility there. I apologize because I don't know who I'm taking this from.

I have these charts. I can't read the print because my eyes are busted. I saw this in an email, and they had some good charts in here. We talked about the foam. Credit to you for thinking about the sources here. I'm very sensitive to sources. You don't want to get source shamed. No, I give credit where credit is due.

We spoke about the foam being wiped off the top of this market. Total market cap of Russell 3,000 members with a 20x price to sales ratio. It looks like it was like 450 down to 180. Ben, is that roughly right? A 60% decline? Yeah. And it's almost a round trip to 2019 levels. So it had a huge spike in 2020 and 2020, and now it's getting back to where it was in.

Oh, boy, Tesla's down three and a half percent at the open. Oof, oof, oof. Other good charts, the relative valuation of the all country world index XUS versus U.S. They're looking at the valuation, a blend of price to earnings, price book, price to cash flow, price free cash flow, and it's as low as it's been at any time over the last, I don't know, 25 years or so. The hard part about relative valuations is we've probably been talking about this since 2016. True. And it keeps going lower.

Very true. However, eventually, there's going to be a, is it a slingshot or a coiled spring? We've had this discussion before. Call it what you want. We know what you're talking about. So you combine that with the fact, look at this chart of the dollar. You combine that with the blow off top in the U.S. dollar, we could be set up for a run of international stocks, which seems hard to believe.

but if we are on the other side of growth versus value and the U.S. dollar pulls back, it is very easy to see a year finally in which U.S. stocks underperform international stocks by more than a little. It's possible. Which no one is positioned for. It was really hard to envision a scenario where U.S. stocks underperform because you would think in a bull market, U.S. stocks do better and in a bare market, they do less bad. Possible that is no longer the case. That makes sense. I want to talk about the Fed and inflation a little bit. So, Paul, again, I mentioned in the opener, Powell said, we're not going to consider that, meaning changing the Fed's 2% inflation target under any circumstances.

Here's my question for you. I don't believe him. Under any circumstances, why would he back himself to a corner that way? Is that an actual quote? Yes, this is from Fed Woj. Do you think the Fed is basically lying about their forecast right now just because they don't want the markets to rally? To your point about backing yourself into a corner, don't they lose more credibility if they pound the table? We're not going to change this.

And then they change it in 12 months. Doesn't it kind of feel like the Fed is lying about their forecast just because it's like a parent lying to a child? You know, in Willy Wonka, where he says to Charlie, I can't remember the exact end, but he like tells Charlie to get out of here, that whatever. And then at the end, he hugs him and says, like, sorry, I had to do it to make sure that you were true. Maybe that's what the Fed is doing. That's a decent hypothesis. Some people say, listen, don't fight the Fed, you idiots. They're telling you exactly what they're going to do.

And I have some sympathy for that argument. but I also feel like maybe they know it's a psychology game and the Fed knows if we back off of this a little bit, the markets are going to take off and it's going to ruin everything we're trying to do here. I was speaking about this. I don't know, three months ago, I think the reason why he was talking to office because they're so close to accomplishing their target. I don't mean getting to 2%. I just mean crushing inflation. And the minute they start to ease up on the rhetoric a little bit, the market flies undoing a lot of the work that they've done. I think you're right. A lot of this is psychological. We've talked about their projections before, but they say that their projection for

the unemployment rate, which is 3.7% right now, their projection for 2023 is 4.6, 2024 is 4.6, and 2025 is 4.5. I wish they would just say, we don't know. Because also the Fed funds rate for that is 5%, 4% and 3%. And I'm sorry, but if the Fed had the ability to keep the unemployment rate, to let it go up 1% and keep it there for three years, they really would be the Wizard of Oz. They can't do that. I wish they would just say, we really don't know. And that's as far as we're going to go. Those projections are essentially worthless. All right, here's one more from the Fed, which is kind of crazy because I looked, there was a magazine cover five years ago showing robots, basically doing everyone's job and showing people on the corner begging for

money, saying that the robots are going to take our job. This is 2017. Now it says, this is Powell from his press conference. It feels like we have a structural labor shortage out there where four million fewer people, a little more than four million who were in the workforce available to work than there's demand for workforce. So the fact that there's a strong labor market it means that companies will hold on to workers, basically saying he said there's a structural labor shortage. And guess what that means? We need to let more people in this country. That's the solution to all of our ills right now in the labor market and the Fed and inflation. Let in three million people right now who are willing to work these jobs that apparently some

other people don't want to work. Is that not this solution? The Fed can't do that, obviously. So they're doing what they can't. But isn't that what he's more or less saying to Congress, let more people in the country? Yes. And obviously it's probably not going to happen. I think that's right. Before we move off this topic, somebody threw out a chart of central banks number of rate hikes per year around the globe. This is the year. Oh, wow.

Yeah, you're right. 200 hikes, a sample of 38 central banks. It is interesting to be living in this moment of time where we have entered a completely new investing landscape. I'm not saying that the secular bull market is dead and buried and reasons to be scared, but this is a fundamentally different investment environment. Howard Marks had his letter last week where he basically said, this is a new regime, it's higher inflation. And I could see that scenario, but I could also see the scenario where we look back and we say, this was a one-time

rise in rates to kill off inflation. And then we kind of went back to where we were, not zero, but just lower bound, 2%, 3%, whatever. And maybe it's not quite a new environment. It's just, it's not zero. But even not zero is a new environment. Well, but think about how much the pandemic forced our hand for going beyond zero in certain ways. I think things would have been way more normal had the pandemic not happen. I think the pandemic forced the hand of everyone on this. Oh, absolutely. On that point, Lindsay was talking about this. We work should have been the top. Yes. And then the pandemic happened and SoftBank, Tiger, Zoom deals, free money. In the pandemic, we don't get the blow off top that we had.

Definitely not. Robin Hood, Reddit. None of that happens without the pandemic. None of it. I don't know if you've been paying attention. The meme stocks. No one really talks about them anymore. AMC is back down to four or something a share.

Bad Bath and Beyond, the long-term chart looks like the VIX. It just has like these crazy spikes and crashes. It's under three bucks. AMC's down 92% from the highs. Game stops down 77%. These are the kind of things that you only hear about them when they're doing good. Once they start doing bad, you never hear about it anymore. That's right.

People painting AMC on their garage doors and whatever they were doing. All right. Last week we mentioned goods versus services in the economy, how the economy is different than the stock market. Callie Cox from E. Toro, friend of the show, sent us over a chart that she created. It's money spent on goods versus money spent on services. I've never seen it like this before, but you can see they're both increasing over time, but the money spent on services is going way up.

Can we just mention that you have your, how old is your son now, three? Yeah, Scott. Come here. Come here. He's being very good during a podcast. I don't even know what he's doing. He's got treats. He can't truck to Buffets. All right, go play.

This kid is an angel. He's being very good. What is Callie showing in this chart? Money spent on goods versus money spent on services, both increasing, but services looks like it's increasing a lot more. It's just to the point of the stock market not being the economy. I'd never seen it broken out like this before. Very cool chart.

All right. Headline from Bloomberg. Highest interest rate in 15 years are derailing the American dream. And my whole takeaway from seeing this is there is never going to be a perfect economy. It's not going to happen because 12 months ago, this would have read highest inflation in 40 years is derailing the American dream. Of course. Josh had this perfect post about the economy. The economy is made up of winners and losers.

It can't be any other way. Josh's point, when everyone is winning, an economy ceases to function normally. In the 2010s, it was rising inequality and slow growth and slow wage growth and savers are being punished. The thing is, something is always going to be killing the American dream, unfortunately. One thing on crypto that I thought was interesting and probably the least surprising thing ever, J.P. Morgan did a report showing that the share of the population that had, if ever, transferred funds to a crypto-related account triple during the pandemic, 3% prior to 2020 to 13%. They've got a nifty chart showing that the majority of new crypto users made their first transactions

in a set of days spanning less than five months, all of which coincide with the trailing monthly price change exceeding 25%. In other words, the TLDR, and look at this chart, is in crypto especially and certainly true for other assets, but crypto especially, people were price chasers, which at some point will happen again. If you have a behavioral psychology, college course you're teaching, you show this chart. Price rises, people come in. Price falls, not as many people come in. Real estate. Nick Mainz tweeted, home sales are down nearly 15% month over month in Detroit, but that's not leaning to much, by the way, of price relief. And I think we had mentioned this, that there's a gigantic gap between where buyers are

at price-wise and where sellers are at. And I think sellers move very, very slowly. Because guess what? Unless you need to move, you don't panic selling your house. You don't need to be a home expert to know that. Jonathan Miller quote tweeted said, these are limit orders, not market orders. There we go. This is a U.S. phenomenon.

Chronically low inventory levels keeps a firmer base under prices than we have seen in other downturns. And I'm going to double down on my call that if mortgage rates continue to come down, activity is going to V. It is interesting. He said this is a U.S. phenomenon. We get a lot of questions from international listeners in our inbox saying, I'm going to be one of these people in Canada or Great Britain or whatever in Europe where my mortgage rates are going to reset in two years. So do you think that those mortgage rates resetting because they don't have 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, they reset every like two to five years, that the losses in other countries are going to be greater than the United States. Does that make sense? At that point, you don't have

the appeal of staying in a 3% mortgage anymore, house. Because then you are a four-seller? Because then it doesn't matter. The mortgage rate's going to be the same at one house to the next. More of a clearing of the market. Yeah, that sounds really scary to be tied to the whims of why can't they just be like, you know what? Well, we'll do a 15 year. We're going to lock you in. The Wall Street Journal had a great piece on why this housing downturn isn't like the last one. So they say a 28% decline in home prices between 2006 and 2009 sent the value of some 11 million homes below their mortgage balances, meaning debt was more than equity, which was widespread defaults and a collapse of the financial system and recession that everyone knows.

Home prices this time would have to fall between 40 and 45% from their peak to put the same proportion of mortgage homes underwater today, according to a core logic analysis. Now, imagine you have a DeLorean. You can get it up to 88 and travel back, but you can only go back to 2010. You go back to 2010, and 2010, Michael is reading Michael Lewis's The Big Short. You're reading about all the crap that happened in the real estate market. Imagine showing this chart. 2010, Michael was a very depressing Michael.

Okay, that was not a good year for you. It was a terrible year. It was balding. All bad things were happening to me. Wait, what year did you bick it finally? I don't know if I ever told this story. It was 2013. So I had been begging my girlfriend, now wife, to shave my head.

And listen, balding is, like, very traumatic, especially for a young man. It's not something that, like, oh, no, big deal. No, it's everything. It's like the only thing. It was horrible. I never took my hat off. It was terrible. And so I had been asking her to let me shave my head.

And she was like, not now, not now. Wait till the wedding, which is fair. But when I finally did shave my head, I had no idea what my head looked like. I don't know if there was, like, moles or craters. I had never seen my head before. And so she was out, and I took the buzzer to my head, and I was like, thank God. Okay, I don't look like Frankenstein. And I facetined her.

And I'm like, not bad, but she was, yeah, not bad, got to go. And I was like, what? That's it? That's it. Got to go. You do have a nice shaved head. Thank you. I finally did shave it, shave it in 2015 with the razor blade.

But again, back to Ben's imagined scenario. You got Doc Brown's Delorean, you take this chart of the housing bubble and then what happens next to equity and debt and show it to yourself in 2010. There's no way you believe this happened, where you see that difference between equity and debt in the housing bubble in what happened now. That's wild. It blows it off the chart. No way you would have ever thought this would happen back then. Obviously, we know the reasons why, but this chart to me is absolutely insane in a decade of crazy charts. That is a good one.

Prior to Elon buying Twitter and going absolutely insane, I don't think I really had like strong opinions on him. Obviously a great showman and I'd done brilliant things in his career. The miracle of doing what he did with Tesla when the cards were stacked against him and doing what he did. Is Ashley Vance book about Tesla making it through the financial crisis? Honestly, is one of the better books I read. It's an amazing story. He had done some brilliant, brilliant things. But now it's a train wreck.

I mean, it's an absolute train wreck. And if I was a Musk fanboy and, listen, they've been treated very well as Tesla shareholders, I'd be beyond livid. And it looks like the tide is turning on him. And how could it not? I'd be livid with what he's doing and how he's behaving. So just some of the stuff that happened on Twitter this week. And I'm not even talking about activity on Twitter, the platform, just literally how he's behaving.

He's in over his head. And he finally tweeted, should I step down his head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll. And then he said, actually, only Twitter blue subscribers will be allowed to vote in policy-related polls. I can't keep track of the timeline. Earlier in the week, he's taking journalists off Twitter. He took Lynette Lopez off Twitter for reasons that are not exactly clear. And he had been doing nasty shit to Lynette for years, and he just removed it from platform.

And the idea that he bought this for free speech is really hilarious when he's removing people. He's removing journalists that have said nasty things about him. What else did he do? He said, oh, you cannot talk about other social media platforms on Twitter. Free speech. What are you talking about? And the list included Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, whatever, and conspicuously absent was TikTok, because we know the relationship that Tesla has with China. It's just awful to watch. Unfortunately, he's going to alienate a lot of Twitter people to be like, find him out. And that's the thing that's upsetting to me is like, I still use the service. I like the service for getting news and analysis. And if he alienates enough people to leave, he's just going to run this thing

into the ground. It'll still be fine and people will still show up. I'm of the opinion that it's either Twitter or bust. There's no other platform that's going to come along and do the same thing. Nothing's going to step in and fix it. Unless Facebook said, we're going to do a text-only version of Instagram, I just don't see another Twitter happening. I think it's Twitter or nothing. Maybe there's like micro-twitters where it's like, you know what, this whole bringing everyone together thing, I want to live in an echo chamber. I don't know if that's healthier either, but I think maybe people are done with the nastiness. And then there was this thing where a lot of the journalists who were suspended, somehow

were able to get out to spaces because there was some sort of breakage of the code. I don't know how it works. And so he shut down spaces. I mean, this is an absolute train wreck. He's trying to raise money now. The bonds are selling at, I don't know, 50 cents on the dollar. Somebody tweeted Paul Graham founder of Y Combinator and someone who was supportive of Elon since the Twitter takeover, announced he's taking a break from Twitter and suggested people

can find his Mastodon account on his website. He was banned a few hours later. I cannot believe it. Again, he bought Twitter because he thought free speech, police, wokeness had run amok. You and I were talking about this offline the other day. Let's say he gets an audit and someone has to value his $55 billion, $54 billion investment. That's down, what, 90% right now? Well, what's Snapworth? I don't know. Good question. I'm making this up. Twitter's worth $3 billion right now. probably. I think the biggest thing is it's impossible to be that successful and powerful and

famous and rich and still hold on to self-awareness. That's the big lesson. You can't be self-aware anymore when you have that much success and power at such a young age. And if you're still supporting Elon Musk, I mean... Obviously, it's become political. That's the bad thing is that like if you are against something he does, you'd be on this team or this team. How is this even political? He's just behaving like an asshole. What does this have to do with politics? Because everything has to do with politics these days, unfortunately. Everything is viewed through the lens of politics, and you can't just view something on its own about being. His behavior is that of a sociopathic child. This is crazy

behavior. And you could say that he's done great things in other areas of his life and also acknowledge that this is a fucking train wreck. It is crazy, though, that landing a rocket ship is probably easier than running Twitter, at least for him. That's equations. They can figure that stuff out. But what's interesting is that there was an article in the information as well. I think I came was the timbers of the journal, that people are like, you know what? This guy's onto something. Not how he's running Twitter, but in terms of just going in and cleaning out the fat. So here's the lead to the article.

Some might call Elon Musk's leadership style, toxic, others consider it heroic. It's certainly influential. A quote, if Elon did it, we should do, describing startup leader's perspective on Musk cut Twitter push job cuts. What we saw with Musk and Twitter is going to be commonplace. These are all quotes. I have to imagine. Founders are thinking, oh shit, this guy had to like go 60 to 70% of the team.

the plane is still flying, do we really need to have that many people? And I think that firing people like that is obviously really tough for those involved. But I think maybe there is something to this, that there is a lot of overemployment in tech companies. Tech people obviously overhired. But the thing is, Elon Musk obviously doesn't really care about the recourse from his actions, and a lot of other people do. So I think that's the thing with him being like a sociopath. He can do that and not really care how it impacts people because that's the sort of leader he is, other people wouldn't be able to do rule of such an iron fist, I feel like. It also depends on the size of the team.

There's a big difference between a company with 27 employees that only needs 20 versus a company with 5,000 employees that only needs 1,500. If you're at that size and you let go 60 to 70 percent of your workforce, doesn't that poison everyone's like, oh, am I next? Yeah, do I still want to work here? All right. So, Ben, we were talking about this yesterday. companies that are round-tripping to the March 2020 lows, Disney, is where it was at the lows of March 2020, which is pretty freaking nuts, considering all the success of Disney Plus, then, where would Disney be without Disney Plus? Those conversations in 2020-21. And then, of course, Iger said...

With as busy as their park stuff has been, they're raking in the money there. Yeah, Iger said, all right, and it doesn't matter. I'm back. Get out of my way. I still have a lot of stock. I'm losing a lot of money. I'm back. Amazon, also, back to March 2020 lows. When does Jeff Bezos come back to run the show? Amazon was only down 22% from the highs during the pandemic. It was easily one of the best performing stocks than besides some of the Moderna and that stuff. But he's only, what did we say yesterday? 58 or something, he's not that old. I wouldn't doubt it. If they're down 70% if he comes back. Calsh, hook this up. I would bet on like a long shot. I don't know what the odds I would need. 15 to 1. Maybe that's even too high. I don't think it's that much of a long shot even. I would actually bet on lower odds in that.

Bezos is coming back in the next 12 to 24 months. How about this? You put up this chart of Amazon and Disney side by side here, top to bottom. Amazon should buy Disney. Amazon should buy Disney. How's that? What's Disney's market cap? Is it under 150?

I know Amazon's down to like 850, I think. Disney is 160. A little less than 160. Amazon should buy them. Let's look at the debt. All right, so an enterprise value of $200 billion. dollars. That's not happening, but interesting nonetheless. All right, the transcript pulled some stuff from Microsoft going into the pandemic where 20 million monthly average users, our most recent public statement

on teams, we're talking about teams, has been 270 million monthly active users. About six months ago, we finally saw the number of minutes spent in chat and teams surpassed the number of minutes that people spend in Outlook. How about that? That's another thing that's never going away. Another thing that's been fundamentally changed by the pandemic. By the way, I can't talk on the phone anymore. I never like talking on the phone. As you know, I'm not really a small talker. But if I'm going to talk to somebody, I much prefer doing a Zoom.

Okay, see, I was going to go the other way. I would much prefer a conference call, like the old days. You don't have to look at everyone. I want to look at somebody when I talk to them. Every call that we have now is a Zoom. I'd be happy if someone sent me a conference call line with a passcode. I just want to look at somebody when I talk to them. This is from the LinkedIn.

Pre-pandemic, around 1% of all jobs posted on LinkedIn were remote. as of today, the number is 14%, but that's not the fascinating part. What's fascinating is north of 50% of all job applications on a daily basis on LinkedIn go to that 14% of remote jobs. That's good.

I didn't realize LinkedIn still had a CEO since Microsoft owns them. So I thought that was very interesting. I've got a few random observations of the week, Ben. I need to hear about this bald guy with earmuffs.

I should we start there? So I took the trade yesterday. It was freezing. It's like very cold. And on the train, platform, you're, I don't know, 50 feet in the air. So it's extra windy. It's cold. I bundle up. I put on my winter hat. I put on my hood. Well, that's the best part about being a bald. You can wear a hat and it doesn't mess your hair up. Fantastic. It's the best. I feel for those

poor, full-headed bastards who have that nice, beautiful quaff that they can't get it ruined and they need to put... I wear a hat and my hair is just... I got like bedhead. You need to put the earmuffs on. But I saw a full-headed bald with earmuffs on. I almost wanted to tap him on the shoulder. You should have said to him to like, hey, man, what's going on? I need to hear more. What do you do here? Why would you expose your entire dome to the brutal cold and just cover your ears? That's true.

Does all the head that gets released through your head get released through your ears? That's true. You've got to keep the head warm, head and feet. So it is funny when you're putting toys together for kids. You're basically an elf. Kobe got like a big Mario cart. He's obsessed with Mario. He had a big Mario cart thing.

So he's going to love that movie. Yeah, he can't wait. He got a big Mario Kart thing where it's got like an on switch and there's things that spin to propel the thing. It's pretty great. Yeah, she can write it. Yeah. So I felt like a Hanukkah elf putting that thing together. And in the morning, I woke up to it being on. I'm like, how the heck did you figure this thing out? Because once you pass a certain marker, the flagpoles go down until you're the winner. And it's like pretty sophisticated. And he said, Daddy, I saw this video on YouTube a couple months ago. Wow. It's pretty impressive. And lastly, I just want to make a comment on some unintended consequences. So, for example, I'm talking about Starbucks. I don't know how much of their coffee is now done through the mobile app.

It feels like it's got to be over 50%. So now, at certain points of the day, it's faster to just go in and order. It's faster to go in and wait online because oftentimes there's a backlog on the mobile stuff. The new thing is, and this is not really new, but it's new around. here is there's a store on Summers Highway, a Starbucks drive-thru that's new, and it is causing traffic jams because people are so lazy that they're spilling out onto the highway. And I'm thinking, who are these maniacs? Would you really wait in your car for 20 minutes or however long it takes? I see like five cars in a drive-thru, for me is max,

and I'm, nope, I'm going to the next place or I'm out. I think about time I've saved by not drinking coffee, not going to Starbucks. I've got so many extra minutes in my life. What are you doing with them? I don't know. All right, let's talk about Carvana real quick. There's a lot of contenders for chart of the pandemic, but this is up there. So it had a market cap at its peak of $31 billion. It's under $500 million right now. I remember there was a story in Bloomberg saying that the father and son who created it worth like $20 billion or something. Yeah, it's got 47% of the float is short. Is that right? There's a chart from Ehor Duce and Nuski. I'm likely butchering that. I apologize. Nailed it. Nailed it. But it is heavily shorted. I don't know

anything. I don't know how this company avoids bankruptcy. Car dealership guy who's a good follow did a whole threat on Carvana. And he said, Carvana website visitors are down 45% month over month. You don't just lose 45% of your web traffic without shutting off your marketing. This tells me that they are likely in severe cost cutting and downsizing mode. I keep hearing their podcast ads, though. Why are they still doing podcast ads? Well, that's, I guess maybe that's already paid for. How much of the rise and used car prices was driven by Carvana. Oh, that could be.

You know, it's an all-time low. Airbnb, we were probably talking about Airbnb as an extra potential trillion-dollar company, and I'm still bullish on Airbnb, but oof, not good. I own that one still. New all-time low. This is why I don't pick stocks. It's fun but hard. Oh, last week we spoke about the success of mutual funds, whatever it was.

It came out, was like, that's actually pretty good. Well, Jeffrey Battak cleaned it up for us. He said, one quick clarification. The reason those success odds seem high is because it only accounts for funds that lived at least five years. It exclusives that died before hitting the five-year mark. So, and a lot of funds died. That should have been obvious to us, but oh, well. Let's skip the recommendations. Okay. We both saw Avatar, what is it called, the wave of the water. I saw it yesterday. Kids were at the in-laws, and my wife and I, instead of going out to dinner date,

decided to go see Avatar. I really liked the first one. The first 45 minutes or so, I was a little worried. I'm like, this is kind of like the last one, and then it completely changed and went a different direction, and the visuals of the movie are just absolutely stunning. I don't know how Cameron does it. It really was a spectacle. People are saying it's too long. It probably is too long, but it didn't feel that long when I was there. I really liked it. I'm pretty sure I only saw Avatar once.

I saw it on Blu-ray. It was the first movie I saw on Blu-ray, and like everyone else, I was completely blown away. I've probably seen bits and pieces since, but it was so burned into my memory that experience and I never felt the need to revisit it. I remember exactly what happened. I saw it in 3-day, and I texted you guys after. I felt like I was just watching Magic. The underwater stuff in 3-D must have been awesome.

I don't know how any movies are made, but this one in particular, the way that the creatures looked, the water coming off of them, and then being next to the humans, it was such a spectacle. Absolutely, if you're even on the fence, yeah, it is too long. There's no doubt about it. But it was so good. That's one that you have to see in the theater, too. But paradoxically, I don't really need another. So they're saying that there's going to be three more. I feel like this movie is such an epic thing that I think I can only take one every five years.

I'm going to definitely watch them, but I'm curious to know what else there is, how much more meat is left than the book. Yeah, I'm pretty good. I thought that the final fight scene, like the last hour of the movie. Oh, it was incredible. Get out of years. It was an amazing, amazing fight scene. It was so good. So I got tickets in Farmingdale, and Robin goes, oh, Farmingdale, because it was at 7.30.

She's like, why? So I learned on Google Maps, and I saw it was 30 minutes away, and I was like, oh, I don't know. I guess I thought it was closer. And as I'm driving there, it happened to only be 24 minutes away. And it's kind of interesting, psychologically, how... You anchored. A 24-minute drive felt like nothing but 30 minutes feels like the other end of the world. I do have one hot take from the movie.

Jake Sully and his wife, whatever, however you pronounce it, tough hang. Like, if you had to go in a double date with them to dinner, four kids. Very tough hang. Well, no, just the two of them, because they're always arguing. They're always really mad and angry. They were mad at their kids a whole movie. That's important.

So Kate Winslet held her breath for over seven minutes in that movie. Did you see that? I didn't know which one she was. She was the wife of the C. Okay. Whatever. Before the movie started, they showed a 10-minute clip from Mission Impossible of him motorcycling off the bridge with the... Well, I didn't see that. I saw it on the Internet, though.

Did you watch the whole thing? TC is amazing. I can't wait for that movie. Lastly, so I saw Seinfeld on Friday, and spoiler, he's good. He did amazing crowdwork, and he's just so relaxed, and it was very funny. There you have a chance to see Jayfell. He's funny. All right, I loved, there was a two-part fly-on-the-wall to Chris Farley tribute with Dana

Carbine David Spade. They had Sandler on, they had Kevin Nealon on, they had John Lovett's on, Chris Rock. They had all these people just telling Farley stories. They had some of his family on, his brothers. It was so well done. And everyone agreed, like, this is the funniest guy. All these funny people are like, no, no one is funny than Farley.

And I totally agree. I loved it. Our new show is the English on Amazon Prime. Easily the highest quality show on Amazon Prime I've ever seen. It's a six-part mini-series of Emily Blunt. I'm in. Oh, and I love Emily Blunt. Say no more.

Yeah, I love Emily. It's a Western, but it's also kind of like far and away where they're trying to get land in the West and the late 1800s. You kind of have to work for it a little bit. They don't hold your hand for the plot, but by the time you get to the plot by like episode four and it all comes together, you're like, oh, and it's a really good Western scene. I saw far and away in the movie theater. I was seven years old. I have no idea what the movie was about. I can't remember.

I know it was TC and Nicole Kim in, but I'm pretty sure I had no business seeing that movie. Probably not at that point. He was a bare knuckle boxer, though, which is not bad. One more. Trapped in Paradise. Total 90s movie, Nicholas Cage, Dana Carvey, and John Lovitz. And it's a dumb plot. And for whatever reason, it's got a million 90s like that guys.

Wait, I've never heard of this. Christmas one. Where do I see this? Trapped in Paradise. It was on Showtime anytime, if you got that. It's a dumb plot from the 90s, but for some reason, 90s movies, they just get me. Great movie, Christmas, Snow, dumb plot, but I liked it. John Lovitz, Dady Carvey, Nicholas Cage?

I never heard of this. Yeah, I'm in. Perfect 90s, Nicholas Cage. It's pretty good. It's like a bank robbery movie. and there's a mobsters in it and a small town, it's great. All right, listen, Merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, happy New Year. We will obviously be with you through the end of the year

because there's no breaks on Animal Spirits. So if you're around, we'll see you next Wednesday. If you're taking the week off, enjoy. Thank you for listening. Animal Spiritspod at gmail.com. Thank you.