Animal Spirits Podcast - The Lender of Last Resort (EP.300)

Episode Date: March 22, 2023

On today's show we discuss the latest from the banking crisis, the market's reaction to bank runs, what the Fed should do next, why service inflation is higher than goods inflation, why crypto is rallying this year, how much money it takes to be rich 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 I've been pulling up a lot, lately, two-year treasury rate. I can see here I got it going back over the last 10 years or so. And I don't know. I know this has been a crazy time, but you know the meme of the dog. I have no idea what I'm doing. I don't know that one. Look at the picture and scroll on a little bit on our dock here.

I'm sure you've seen that before. Yeah, of course, of course. And I don't know who's more to blame, whether it's the bond market of the Fed. the two-year treasury rate is basically a proxy for the federal funds rate. A lot of people say it leads the Fed funds rate. Just the crash we saw in the last, I don't know, 10 days or so, that looks like the stock market crash almost, doesn't it? How quickly that happened? It seems like that's not supposed to happen for rates. I mentioned this on a recent podcast, so we've done so many, I don't know which one it was, that going into a Fed meeting for the last year,

there was no mystery. There was no suspense. We knew what they were going to do. do. Jim Bianco had this great chart showing the probability of where the Fed funds rate is going to be either three days, four days, whatever it was before the Fed meeting. Nobody knows right now. 50-50. Pause. They're going to go more. So there is complete indecision. The market is confused. I guess it is a confusing time. Oh, you guess? You guess? A little bit. We're going to talk more about the two-year and some other stuff. We did a nice little prep meeting yesterday with Y charts. This Thursday, so I guess if people listen to those on Wednesday morning, tomorrow, Thursday, March 23rd, we will be doing my birthday also. Oh, it's your birthday. The 2020 bottom, no big deal. Credit to me.

Okay. The bottom of the bottom. So we'll be going through an nice little webinar with Y charts. It'll be like a live podcast with Rushi from Y charts going through some charts, some of our type of stuff we'd like to look at. There will be a link in the show notes if you want to join. It told us there's already plenty of people there, but it's on the web, so there's plenty of room. Not like Madison Square Garden where you need to get a spot like you right in the front. Your hair is looking good today. Did you do something different? I don't know. Thank you. You're welcome.

I feel like coming home with a haircut and you notice. So thank you. Anyway, nice compliment. If you want to learn more, go to whitecharts.com. Tell them Animal Spirits, then you'll get 20% off your first subscription. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and 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 Holtz 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 Ritthold's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions. Clients of Rithold's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Okay, Michael, if 2008 was Robert De Niro getting in the car in casino and it blowing up.

Oh, time out, time out. Did you see somebody posted the video of Scorsese? film me that scene? Yes, that's kind of what I thought about it. That's pretty good. That was insane. Holy moly. All right, go ahead. I'm sorry. If that was 2008, the car blowing up, doesn't it feel like this current banking crisis? Granted, we're 10 days into it. This is just going by feel of what it seems like to me. Oh, you're going with another De Niro movie? I wish I had another one, but it's kind of like you get in the car and you're worried and you turn the key a little bit, but nothing happens. Or we need new break pads or something. It feels like there was this really

scary weekend, and now the Fed and the Treasury are like, listen, we're going to swat away anything that comes our way, and it's going to be fine, and we're going to take care of this. Jesse Livermore, the pseudonymous... But if they didn't do what they did... But I'm saying, I feel like they've kind of learned from 2008 that Jesse Livermore said, Takeaway, fixing a banking crisis is a lot easier than fixing inflation. I think they've kind of proven that, because the Fed's job from the start was the lender of last resort. and that's kind of what they've proven that they're going to do.

They could make a mistake, but it kind of feels like they've just snuffed out any chance of this becoming something that is really systemic. We just got an email, just got an email two seconds ago from a listener. This is a great, Ben, open this up, this is a great meme. Do you remember the Mike Myers character, Linda Richards from S&L? This is gone way back. This is not for you in Gen Ziers.

Mike Myers played a character. I think he was dressing up as his mother-in-law. That was the inspiration for the character, if I remember correctly, and he would make a statement and then would say, discuss. So somebody sent us a meme that said, the Federal Reserve is neither federal nor have reserves discuss. Well done. Not bad. I like it. That was cute. He was playing like the most Jewish women in the world, right? Yes. Okay. Yeah. That was a pretty good one. To your point, this could have been bad. So the Washington Post had kind of like a postmortem of saying that people getting their

paychecks. There was like a million workers that had their paychecks that could have been delayed at SVB and could have missed pretty big deposits if it wasn't rescued. They did say that there were tons of withdrawal requests, like large cash withdrawal requests. The Fed can obviously track this at banks that didn't really appear to be connected to any of these regional banks. So people were that weekend getting pretty nervous. So you're right, it could have been bad. They stepped in. Now, did you see this Felix Salmon chart about the largest banks with uninsured deposits? Yes. This is one of those stats to me that I never would have known this stat beforehand if this didn't happen.

I never would have thought about it. There was no reason to think about this. I guess don't these numbers seem higher than you would have assumed? Are we just assuming that because these banks are so big, these are all just business accounts or really wealthy individuals? Do they have just a ton of business accounts that are uninsured? The fact that pretty much all the banks have, I don't know, 50% are uninsured deposits. There was no reason.

Let's just say you had $4 million in a bank account, which is an absurd amount of money. in 2019, what was the incentive to not leave $4 million in JPMorgan, assuming that you have a gazillions of dollars? My point is, there was no interest rates in treasuries or any other yielding security. There was no reason for it not to be in a bank. You probably didn't think, uh-oh, I'm only covered up to $250,000 at J.P. Morgan of a Bank of America. But now that you can get four plus percent risk-free, it is head-scratching that there is still so much money in these banks, and this is one of the issues. What if people wake up to the fact that they are uninsured above 250? What if they move it out of banks? What if they move it into treasuries? What effect does that

have on everything? It does feel like there was some complacency in regards to cash management. People are just now waking up to it, and they probably should have woken up a few months ago. We talked about this forever. We had so many questions from people saying, I'm saving for a down payment or I'm saving for a baby or a wedding or whatever. I have no yield. So people were worried about cash management, but now it feels like people are finally waking up to it. And yeah, that does seem like the risk to the banks that people all of a sudden say, well, I'm not my money in money markets. And you're screwed. Yeah. So what happens to banks and what happens to lending if depositors in droves leave? Now, I don't necessarily think that's going to happen. I think inertia is

still a very, very powerful force. I don't think that there's going to be tons of money leaving Bank of American, James Morgan, going into money market. It'll go with the money markets and CDs at the banks, though, and that still kind of screws them. It does. If they have a 3% mortgages on their books, and they're paying four or five in CDs. Absolutely. So we have some numbers in the doc later that we're going to get to that show the stampede

into money market funds. It's big numbers, no doubt. As a percentage of total deposits, I'm not sure how big it is. Let's keep going. Jason's Wye had a really interesting piece on what happens when you rescue deposit. Did you read this? Yes. He said, of the nation's roughly 10,000 national banks between 1864 and 1913,

5001 failed with cumulative losses to depositors of only $44 million, someone more than $1 billion in today's money. That was less than 1% of U.S. gross domestic product and economist estimates. In later banking crises, when modern regulators were on the case, losses were much greater. Professor White estimates that the cost of the savings and loan and banking failures of the 1980s was at least 3.4% of GDP, and the losses from the 0809 crisis may have exceeded 7% of GDP.

Difference between now and then is the speed at which you can have a bank run. So I take Jason's point, I really do, that I think what he was trying to say is that the perceived stability is somewhat of an illusion. There's no easy answers here, right? There's no right or wrong. Don't you think there's also just more people with bank accounts as well? Like back then, more people probably did just bear. their money in their backyard or keep it in a safe in like the 1800s. Yeah, literally.

It's easier to bank now. Munger said, I'd prefer to live in a world where nobody did anything undisciplined or stupid and so forth, but we don't live in that kind of a world. And therefore, the decisions have to be made for the way the world is, not the way we'd like it to be. To me, that perfectly sums up that people are pissed off. It seems like Silicon Valley Bank was getting special treatment. And I am definitely sympathetic to those people who feel like the rich people are getting special to me. I really am. I think had the government not stepped in, it would have been, and I don't want to use these words lightly, I do think there could have been chaos. And so there's no right answers. There's no good position. This is not good. This is

not a good situation. Munger said the way the world is, the government had no alternative but to back all deposits or we could have had the biggest goddamn bunch of bank runs you ever saw. I believe that. I believe that too. Where do we go from here? It just means, again, that everything's going to be bailout in the future. I think people just have to get used to that, that if something happens to a big enough financial institution, it's going to get bailed out. And that's the world that we live in. And I think the people that want to see the system burn to the ground are probably not going to get their wish. I think the Fed and the Treasury have enough powers at their disposal and they know how to do it now very swiftly that they're going to take care of stuff. Do you think,

though, that there's been a lot of shade being thrown at the Fed lately for saying, if you knew you were going to do these interest raises and you're telegraphing them, why didn't you pay more attention to the bank's loan books and understand some of this exposure? I do think that they deserve a lot of flack for that. Absolutely. That was in our blind spot. I'm not thinking about this stuff. I'm not a fucking regulator. It's not my job to be worrying about this. It's their job. Did this not occur to them? I'm not a banking analyst. They should be. That's the worrisome part of it is that they were doing this. What are those regional banks doing? Isn't that what their job is to pay attention to this stuff? Let's talk about money market funds. So $93 billion on Monday and Tuesday,

which is the biggest two-day surge. I mean, in a while. We have some more charts in this. Look at this. This chart shows the weekly money market fund flows, and it is by far the highest since the pandemic. And then here's one that goes back a little bit farther. Sorry, I'm just grabbing this for one dock to go to another. So this is from Goldman's, I guess it's Goldman Sachs, GBMD. what does that stand for? I don't know. But it's showing one week money market flows. And this goes back to 1992. Outside of the COVID crash, it was the biggest week ever. Look at that 2008 spike down when money flowed out of money market funds. That's a financial panic. Crazy. That is nuts. Probably when the prime fund broke the book. But again, it's surprising though that this money

didn't flow into money markets beforehand. These are not just people with $5,000 in a bank. And I think if you say I have $5,000, I'm going to move from making 2.5% to 2.7% that's not going to move the needle. But these people have more than $250,000 in cash, and they just let it sit in a checking account, which really does push the limits of the term smart money. I made this point in a blog post last week that just because you have more money doesn't mean that you're better at managing your finances. And I think a lot of it was complacency, neglect and people getting used to the 0% interest rate world. But it's surprising to me that people just all of a sudden woke up and realize like, oh, yeah, that's right. There's places to find yield right.

now. And we probably should be doing it, even if it's not going to, like, move the needle a ton. It's going to help a little bit. Here's Apollo via Sam Rowe. Since the Fed began to raise interest rates a year ago, the amount of money and money market funds has increased by roughly $400 billion. And the inflows increased by more than $100 billion last week, because we've mentioned three times that. The other funny difference about the early banking world, this was in Jack Bogle's last book that money markets basically saved Vanguard in the 70s and 80s. Yeah, it was their first, like, big product. Money markets were started in like the 1970s and 80s. They didn't exist in the 30s. It's $400 billion, it's a lot of money, $400 billion since the Fed started raising

rates to get onto money market funds. In terms of how much money could be in money market funds, it doesn't sound like that much. Is that ridiculous? I think the number I read was $5 trillion total in money markets. That was from ICI. So you're right, that kind of a drop in the bucket. Bank deposits fell by $54 billion to $17.6 trillion in the week, end in March 6, according to the Federal Reserve data. There's a great chart from Bloomberg showing U.S. banks have

seen deposits shrink. Over the past year, deposits held that 25 largest banks are down 5%. So there you have it. There was also a huge uptick in deposits throughout the pandemic as well as people were hoarding cash. So from March 22 through March, 2003, it shows deposits at large domestically chartered commercial banks, deposits down 6 percent versus small banks, only down 0.4%. That sounds like nothing. We've run into this in the wealth management industry where there's a certain clientele, usually older, that says, I want to work with a financial advisor who lives down the street for me in the same town as me, and I can sit across the desk from them.

Obviously, the big banks have branches ever, but maybe people just do trust these community banks more, even though their balance sheets might not say so. Did you see this one from New York County to put in here? Before we move on to this, I have a question for you. I'm asking rhetorically because I don't think I'll ever know the answer. As we learned, the sliver of equity that banks have relative to their deposit base could be very slim. So banks can have, in these creative credits, I don't know what these numbers are. Let's say they're directionally right. $800 billion and only $3 billion worth of equity.

So if you net out like the assets and liabilities, that's all that was left for shareholders. So how sensitive are smaller banks to deposits? Because I just said, oh, 0.4%. That actually doesn't sound like that much. But I don't know. Would 5% of deposits leaving wipe out all the equity? I really don't know the answer to that. I think this chart in here about going to the discount window for the Fed and borrowing,

that's these small banks, I think, borrowing to cover those deposits. So they're having to. This is a wild chart. Yeah, so that's a big one. This is from zero hedge. We're looking at the discount window borrowing, and obviously it's spiked in 0809. It's spiked in 2020, and it really spiked last week, much bigger than either of those two previous episodes, which is kind of nuts.

That's the lender of last resort kind of thing. The funny thing to me is, you know, when you first started getting into books, You read your first book where like the light bulb clicked and you thought you had the world figured out. For me, it was like reading about behavioral psychology. The first time read Conneman or one of those people like that, you kind of go, oh, it's behavior. And you think you have the world figured out because you read one book. Can I tell you? I was so excited.

The thing was 2008. When I read The Intelligent Investor, I was so excited and inspired that I remember reading a passage to my mother. Right. You think like, I have the world completely figured out because I read one book. That's kind of what it felt like with people. learning about the banking industry these past two weeks where they go, wait a minute, did you know that banks don't have enough money if everyone tried to pull it out at the same time, the system is going to fail? And it's like, yes, that's how the banking system works. If the

banks literally held all that cash on hand for people to take out at once, nothing would happen. There would be no credit creation. There would be no loans. It doesn't work like that. I asked chat, GBT, and we're going to talk about it later on the show, what is fractional reserve banking? And just seeing it do its magic, it's pretty sweet. Fractional Reserve banking as a banking system, which banks hold only refraction the deposits made by their customers as reserves. This means that banks lend out the rest of their money deposited by customers with the assumption that not all customers will withdraw their money at the same time. This allows banks to create new money through loans and other forms of credit. And it keeps

going. But Ben, you're 100% right. People that first found out about this as week is like, it's all a scam. No, no, no, no, no. This is literally how worse. Yes. This is another number that I never would have to thought to care about. But the New York time broke out the biggest banks by assets. And J.P. Morgan's at the top of $3.2 trillion. You go down the list here, Bank of America City Group and Wells are the only ones that are over a trillion. Doesn't it just feel like these are the fang stocks of banks now that those trillions have to go up in the future? And these other ones are just sort of hanging on. Oh, shout to Roundhill. Did you see their new ETF launch? No. They launched an ETF today. Good timing. It's only the biggest banks.

I don't know. Don't quote me on this. Oh, yeah. They talked about this. I think it's six banks, just the mega caps. Because it is weird that there's no pure play on big banks. Excellent, off is definitely not a pure play by any stretch of the imagination. That's true. Also, we can't say anything about it yet, but we gave round to an awesome ETF idea over Miami vices in Miami. We got to see if that comes to fruition. We even gave them a ticker.

We can't say anything about it yet because it was a great idea. Wait, do you want to tease? What's the ticker? Oh, shoot. Oh, yeah, we had a couple of them. Omaha? I can't remember what, yeah, I don't remember the ticker, but it was a good one. So Credit Swiss, I got to admit, I can't get as worked up about Credit Swiss as I did about SVB

because to me, this feels like a manufactured crisis. This is the chart of Credit Swiss share price going back to, this is the drawdown profile. Coming into 2022, this stock was down 96% since 2007 when it peaked for the bank crisis. So doesn't it kind of feel like the Swiss National Bank just... You know what it feels like. It feels like you're very complacent. That's what it feels like. I'm sorry, I can't get up with this one because this to me feels. feels like this was going down anyway, and they caught astray because we had a regional bank

crisis in the U.S. The Swiss National Bank decided, you know what, let's just do this now and just get it over with. That's kind of what it felt like. They knew this was going to happen at some point. Let's just do it now. We're in the midst of a crisis. Let's just make it happen. When I hear the word Swiss, what are like those, the fake yodels? There's like a knockoff brand. It's like... Yodels? You know yodels from hostess? Like the Rikola? Yodels. Oh, I don't what you're talking about. The pastry. Oh.

There's a dessert? You didn't know what a long job was, so I'm not going to take your advice on pastries. Yodels over ding-dongs, that's all I'll say. Or is it ring-digs? Ding-dongs, it's ring-degs. He lost me. All right.

Sorry. Okay, so you put this in here. I want to object to this. So this is from Chris Powers. The majority of America has no idea about the banking crisis happening on Twitter. And I completely disagree. So I was at my daughter's soccer game this weekend And an old friend who I haven't seen

I went out from college comes up here it is Here it is here it is where it was Little Debbie Swiss rolls Remember that sketch from Will Phyllis Oh, the Swiss rolls, okay The Swiss rolls What's a yodel? A yodel is a real Swiss roll

Okay So the Swiss rolls is the knockoff Okay Yeah Swiss rolls are okay They're not as good as the oatmeal cream pies If we're doing Little Debbie oatmeal cream pies Yeah

I'm a yodel's guy All right, keep going out. This guy in Twitter said the majority of America has no idea about the banking crisis happening on Twitter. This, to me, seems like a cross-orvent. I've heard from a lot of regular people who don't follow the markets very often, don't follow the economy, who've reached out to me and asked me about this. I was at my daughter's soccer game this weekend, and an old friend from college came up, and you and I were on plain English with Derek Thompson last week talking about the banking crisis.

My friend is a ringer listener, and he heard us on plain English. She said, hey, thank you for going on plain English with Derek Thompson, explaining this bacon crisis to me because I had no idea what was going on. So I do feel like this is one of those crossover events that regular people outside the world of finance are paying attention to. Fair, but like one out of eight regular people. It's more than we're paying attention to like the bear market.

I never heard about the bear market from anyone last year. That's for sure. Or even bonds getting killed. I heard a lot more about the banking crisis than I did about what was happening in the markets last year. The Silicon Valley guys, the tech guys were getting dunked all over in the aftermath of the Silicon Valley Bank debacle. I wanted to get your take on.

Wait, before you get into this, hypothetical for you, would you rather be a billionaire and get dunked on all day or have like a couple million dollars and live life in anonymity and be okay? that's not my question. I would take the million. I do think that the rich people who want like the adulation and be out there, maybe for them they can just say, you know what, half of people are going to love me, half people are going to hate me, and I don't care about the half that hate me. But it is way easier to be hated on these days when you have a big voice and you have a bunch of money and a bunch of power. I don't know what's worth it. No, I don't want all that smoke. For what? An extra car? Not for me. So David Sachs tweeted, the media's position on bank runs. They're reporting of huge. huge, unrealized losses at a bank in no way contributes to a run. If you react to their reporting by wanting to withdraw your money, you're panicking. But if you stay in the bank and it fails, you deserve to lose your money. I don't think that's entirely unreasonable. Okay. So because some people in the media are saying, this is crazy, why are we billing them out?

But they also cause the run in the first place. People are saying that their hysteria, all caps over the weekend, caused the bank run. His point is, what are you talking about? Silicon Valley Bank did this thing. They announced that they were raising equity. It lit a spark. Everyone's reporting on it. If we withdraw our money, now we're panicking and causing a run.

But if we stay in the bank and it fails, then it's on us too. This is a chicken and the egg problem, though. I think it's reasonable. This is Schrodinger's bank run because if the Silicon Valley Bros didn't cause the bank run, Silicon Valley Bank doesn't need to be billed out. But who caused the bank run? They did. Who's they?

The big VCs, they could have said, keep your money here. It's safe. We're going to stand by our banking partner. I don't want to name names. I don't know exactly who sent the first round of letters that lit the spark. But once the spark was lit, that was it. Sacks and Calcanus and whoever. If they would have all said...

They could have said, listen, calm down. This is overblown. And there still could have been a stampede. But couldn't they have also said, Sequoia and A16 Z could have said, we're all putting a billion dollars into SVB. We're investing in their equity because we believe in them as a partner. True.

Bank run is not happening in that case. My point is... Maybe that's not a good investment, but... I don't necessarily think... It's one-sided. That's all. That's fair. I agree. I don't get mad at the bailout stuff anymore because I just know it's going to happen regardless. It's getting mad about something that you just know is going to happen.

The lion's losing every year. I know they're going to lose every year. I don't get mad about it anymore. One aspect of the bit that I think is dangerous is trust in our institutions is already at an all-time low. And we see that in politics and everywhere else. And shit like this only makes it worse. So I'm not saying that we let the depositors fail. It's tough. It's a really shi-situation. Getting back to the bond market, bespoke has this really great chart. We mentioned how confused investors are.

They show a chart. The consecutive daily moves is 20 basis points in the two-year treasury yield. It's been like six or seven straight days at this point. That's never happened before. And when I say never, we're going back to 1977. So this sort of volatile in the bond market, not great. Obviously, some of it can say, well, this is confusion about the Fed. Is it also just momentum traders who are getting caught off sides here and it's hedge funds and algos and you don't think it's like CTAs and well yeah it's not retail pushing this around for sure fair hedge funds are getting wrecked big money is definitely getting whipsaw to smithereens we got an email from a silicon valley bank employee that i want to share commented on some of the stuff that we discussed last week number one

you did say bonuses were set in advance that is true but they were set way in advance last november SVB always pays bonuses on the second Friday of March, a bad look and unfortunate coincidence, but nothing sneaky. Fair. I do think that we mentioned that. Nevertheless, I don't know if they should have been paid the day that the bank was going on there. In fact, I'm going to say they shouldn't have. Number two, of course, Greg Becker's stock set was scheduled. All executive scheduled them for exactly these reasons, particularly in Q-in to pay taxes on their enormous incomes. Also fair. It is true that SVB had no chief risk offices for eight months. They took their time to find the right person. There are also a thousand risk employees working.

throughout this period. I'm one of them, though I work in non-financial risk. Okay, this is important. They actually did not anticipate a run in the bank. I said, how could they not? But apparently they didn't. Here's how we know. On Wednesday night, they announced the bonds had been sold and said they were working on closing the capital raise. Had they anticipated a potential run of the bank, they would have finalized the equity sales, then sold the bonds, and then announced. They felt that their community would understand and stick by them for a few days while it got finalized. Obviously, you know what happened, and that was another error in judgment. This person who emailed us, I wrote them back, they just said all this stuff and I said,

how are you doing personally? And they said, it sucks. And so, I mean, people think you're just dealing out rich people, but this is just a regular person who working at the bank. They weren't in like the C-suite. And they were concerned about their livelihood over this. It is more than just these rich tech people who are dealing with this. It's regular people, too. It is true that the biggest investors in these 40,000-some-odd companies were rich tech investors. It's also true that the rich tech investors are backed by pension funds and regular people. And it's also true that the 40,000 companies represent hundreds of thousands of employees who are not rich tech people. So it's not as simple as tech pros got bailed out.

We heard from people who said, I was supposed to get paid on Friday from SBB, and I didn't. They'd like work all over the weekend to get my paycheck figured out. That's scary stuff. I got a couple takes real quick before we get into the economy stuff because I think the bigger impact is on the economy potentially than the markets. What if this banking crisis leads to a soft landing? Because it felt like soft landing was on, then it was off again because he kind of was a reheating. That's literally my take from last week. You said that last week?

Hello. Your sublimity stealing my takes. Let's rewind the tape. What did you say? I don't remember you saying a soft landing. I said this could be a reverse Minsky moment where all this instability leads to the Fed, long rates and leads to stability. I thought you were saying that more for like, that was more a market thing.

I'm talking about the economy. I thought your call was the Fed's going to lower rates. That's going to help the market. It's going to stabilize like the stock. stock and bond markets. Oh, I did a specify. I meant, I do think this could help with a soft landing a little bit if it causes the Fed to just chill out. And even if they raise 25 baseball points, they just chill out for a while. I'm like, let's just see what happens here. I think that's actually better than them going full bore and just trying to throw us into a recession and keep

raising rates. I'm as confused as I've ever been. I feel like the wheels are in motion for a recession. I think that lending is going to pull back. I don't want to see, I don't see how we avoid it because that's, like, absurd. I don't know that pausing rates necessarily does anything at this point. This is why right now, you're not pounding the table on anything, though, because these discussions that we have on a weekly basis, the narrative shifts from our thinking and from the market's thinking, it seems like every other week now between soft-landing hard-lady. Guilty is charged. And it's true, because it's hard. So here's the economy. So Edward Harrison tweeted, this is from Apollo. Small banks account for 30% of all loans in the U.S.

economy and regional and community banks are likely now to spend several quarters. repairing their balance sheets, which it does seem like even if these banks survived, to your point about the equity, I would not touch the stocks with a 69-foot pole. There's no way that like the stocks are going to be okay, even if the banks are okay. Maybe. Fair? Fair. Oh, the car guy. Who's the car guy, auto guy that we talk about? Car dealership. Car dealership guy. Okay. He tweeted today that one in nine auto loans are getting rejected, which is the highest level. I don't know when its chart went back to. The lending standards are going to Titan, and credit is what the economy runs on. So JP Morgan said, slower loan growth by mid-sized banks could deduct half to a full

percentage point off the level of US GDP over the next year or two. That's really hard to pinpoint, I would imagine, but it could be. Commercial real estate, did you listen to the podcast with Joe and Tracy yesterday? Not yet. Was that a $20 trillion market? I don't know if I made that up, but it's a giant number, that is in a world of pain. And it seems like everyone knows this. There's not breaking news. So I guess everyone seems to be in like, well, just the depth of the recession is what's in question now. How bad is it going to be? Or how mild is it going to be? So you don't think that consumers can hold on and be the thing that keeps this ship slowly moving forward, just rolling the ball up the hill? I'm not going to say it's impossible. You were just arguing for a soft

landing. You said that last week you said a soft landing. I'm saying what if? What if? Okay. Listen, am I arguing with myself? Yeah, probably. Okay. This week on Talk Your Book, we had on the U.S. benchmark series, which allows you to buy treasuries at the targeted maturity. So there's no drift.

You want the tenure, boom, you're getting the tenure. On the run, every month, on the run. I say this because Ben Johnson of Morningstar tweeted, Target maturity bond ETFs are getting more popular by the day and have brought in more than $15 billion in cumulative inflows over the past year. I am bullish on this trend continue in terms of companies like this being able to gather assets quickly. And it was one of those ones where we even asked them, why did no one do this before? There are bond fund ETFs that do one to three years or three to seven

or seven to ten or twenty. I only think because nobody cared. Interest rates were at zero. That's the only reason why. Yes. But we've gotten tons of questions from people saying, how do I buy T bills? It's not easy to do. If you want to do it through your broker or through Treasury Direct, it's hard. So the ability to buy it in an ETF is nice. If you're a business next week on Monday, we're having Brandon Overnagi, who we've had on, his company, Mia was in news a bit last week. They were a beneficiary of money coming out, of deposits leaving the banks and going into Treasury's Direct. They make it incredibly easy. So a little teaser there. Yeah, companies that are realizing, oh, wait, we need a cash management strategy. We can't just

Let $25 million sit in a bank account or anything. All right. So I don't know what in the world to make of this, Ben. There was an article, a post from Bloomberg last week, biggest arc inflow since 2021. Investors jump in as expectations for rate hikes collapse. Is it that simple? I really don't know.

Banks are collapsing. Let's buy Zoom. But they've been getting money in for so long. It seems like people aren't giving up on that. No, the flows have been. They brought in a billion dollars last year, didn't they? That's not a lot. But anyway, how do you explain this? What is happening?

Banking crisis leads to interest rate drops, which leads to... There was a tweet from Delta 1, Walter Bloomberg, of ChatGBT, fame, saying something that Powell would, they would see what the market would do to determine how they're going to respond on Wednesday. So the market has done fairly well, held up reasonably well. I think that's what they're afraid of. The market is ripping and just anticipation of the Fed. maybe pulling back. If everyone stopped buying risk assets, then maybe the Fed could pause. But doesn't it come down to the fact that the Fed should not care about the stock market?

Why does the Fed give a crap about the stock market? Their mandate is price stability and employment. And the lender of last resort, why do they need to care what the stock market does? Well, because when you look at financial conditions, the stock market is a huge component of it. I think the wealth impact of the stock market is overblown. It's not just the wealth impact. Higher stock market leads to lower credit spreads, leads to more lending, leads to more money. It's the whole thing. It's one and the same.

The knee bone is connected to the leg bone, Ben. But we just talked about the fact that lending is going to pull back. If the stock market is up 20% this year and all these banks pull back their credit standards, it doesn't matter what the level of rates are. If people aren't allowed to take loans out, who cares what the stock market is doing? So I think the Fed should care more about the banking crisis right now than the stock market. I agree. It does seem somewhat ludicrous to raise rates in the midst of a banking crisis.

If the Fed hired me back after firing me last year for talking smack about them, here's what I would say. Let's pause and give this a couple months to see what happens. And if inflation is still a problem, we can hike in three months. Three extra months are not going to make or break this cycle. That sounds reasonable to me. I'm on board. I think that's what they should say.

They should say, listen, if we haven't beat inflation, we're going to go harder in the future. But right now, let's just chill out for a bit and see what happens so we don't break anything else. All right. You've seen the chart from AEI before that shows price changes since 2000, and it shows the price of stuff we need going up exponentially and the price of stuff we want going down. Hospitals, college, tuition, medical services, childcare. And all the other stuff is dropping. Clothes and cars and houses and cell phones are all down, well below the rate of inflation.

So Mike Consol writes a substack, and he looked at this in a different. way. He said, well, that chart is kind of cherry-picking in some ways, even though I do think it's a great chart. But he said, we have to break this down even further. And he put it in for goods and services. And this is, again, from January 2020 through February 2023, and he breaks it down, the red bars are services, the green bars are goods. And services inflation is off the charts. Goods are basically mostly in deflation. And it's funny, the highest one is delivery services, which he says is like UPS and FedEx and hospital services and pet services, which I totally agree with. Going to the vet is one of the most expensive things you can do, correct?

Yeah, it's just like- So expensive. You know what else? My pet insurance is getting insane. I have a boxer. She's 11 years old, and I love her so much. But her pet insurance is so much money. It's expensive, right? Every time you go, it's like you can't get out of there for like under her.

a thousand dollars if you have something actually to do it's so expensive when you have a pet i know you didn't get a new dog ever think about it we have a deposit down and it's like 2024 story for us okay we're getting you got in the same type is similar probably small dog i don't know smaller dog yes my son is has allergies we have to be like hypoallergenic okay in the post he doesn't really give a reason what do you ascribe this to the fact that all the good stuff is getting cheaper and better, and the services are getting more and more expensive. All right. My knee-jerk answer is just technology. Services is human labor and goods. It's much easier to make TVs than it used to be.

It costs a lot less. That's a great take. You're right. You can make this other stuff more efficiently, and you can't do it with services. Until we have robots operating on us and at the hospitals, I guess that makes sense. Is that what Chad GPT is going to fix for us? Is this going to be a doctor for us someday? Like, remember when you first had a baby? Chris was telling me. Okay, and you had a baby,

the first time they get a little runny nose, you run them off to the doctor, and the doctor says, it's fine, don't worry, the baby's going to be fine. Those little visits, can we just have an AI do that for us someday, hopefully? Sure, why not?

Chris, he went to a doctor, got some test on, and he said, he uploaded it to chat, and the computer said, yep, it's normal, you're good. Okay. By the way,

do you want to walk back your knee jerk take that wake me when this does something? It's not too late. Not yet because I honestly have not used it yet. I haven't even tried it. I'm waiting until I have Scarlett Johansson in my ear as my personal system. Then I'm going to use it. It's a very narcissistic view of the world. Why? I only have bandwidth for a certain amount of things in my life and I'm just going to wait again until it's personally impacting me. I'm not going to be the ear to the ground on anything ever again at my age. It's already here. It's here for certain people to use, but from other people, it's, I'm going to type something interesting and post it on social media and look at how

smart I am. That's what it's being used for. Obviously, there's people who are using it for software engineering and stuff and like, that's cool, but what have you actually used it for in your life? Derek Thompson did a podcast that I listened to this week about it, and I think I'm explaining this right. Somebody said, like, come up with a business idea, and it came up with a business idea, and then, like, it, like, built a website. It could, like, build websites for you. Did you see the Microsoft video of how it's going to be integrated with Doc and PowerPoint, and it is insane. I don't want it for anything else besides just be my personal assistant someday. When that happens, I'm going to use it. That's going to credit to us, by the way. So chat

GBT was not able to ace all of these standardized tests. GBT4 can, the LSATs, whatever other standardized tests, the bar, except did not do well on the CFA, only answered 8 out of 24 questions right. Credit us. I don't know why, because the CFA questions, three out of every four answers could be right. Those questions are ridiculous. Horrible tests. It really is the worst. Let's talk about layoffs.

We haven't done this in a while. Amazon did 18,000 layoffs in the beginning of the year. They just announced another 9,000. They still are way above trend in terms of their employees. Their head count is ludicrous. We've got a few charts. If you're watching on YouTube, you can see this. Here's a quote from, I think Jassie put out this letter.

The overriding tenant of our annual planning this year was to be leaner while doing so in a way. that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers' lives in Amazon as a whole. Does that not sound like cookie cutter nonsense? Did Chatsubit you write that?

Did he make a statement saying, despite reports Jeff Bezos is not coming back for my job, despite the analysts who predicted a correction last year? Facebook did another round of layoffs last week that we were too busy to get to. But it seems like layoffs, the tidal wave of layoffs has slowed a little bit. So speaking of the AISO,

let's go back to an alternative universe where Mark Zuckerberg doesn't say we're going to go full into meta, the metaverse. What if instead, however long ago that was 15 months ago, he would have said, Facebook is going fully into AI. We're going to be Facebook.AI from now on. How much more would they be worth? Would they be the biggest company in the world right now? If they would have said, instead of sinking billions of dollars into the metaverse,

which is going to be a failure, we're going to go full head of steam into AI. They'd be the biggest company in the world. They're spending billions of dollars on AI on reels trying to compete with TikTok. So they're there, they are just not in the same way that Microsoft, Bing, Google, chat Chbtea is. What's this labor market thing? This is a good stat from CNBC. 80% of job openings are at small businesses with fewer than 250 employees right now up from 72% in 2019. 50% of those are with fewer than 50 up from 41% in 2019. That's surprising. I guess this is a perfect example of the stock market is not the economy, especially the S&P 500 is the biggest, baddest, best

companies in the world and that does not pick up these small businesses. Did you see this Wall Street Journal article? I did. It was good. Ghost. Okay. I'm not sure because it is a survey. The record job openings thing that we've been talking about for the last two years is complete bullshit. I don't think it's complete bullshit. Here's why. Let's look at the stats. So hiring managers said in a survey more than 1,000 hiring managers, 27% report having job postings up for four months. Among those who said they keep advertised job postings that they weren't actively trying to fill, close to half side, they kept ads up to give the impression that the company was growing. But here's the thing. And on the flip side, they don't want to take them down to give the

impression that they're not growing. But why did it all of a sudden go in 2020 from less than six million job openings to almost 12 million? Part of that has to be true in terms of a tight labor market. And I think that's like people are going to. No doubt. So it's mostly bullshit. It's somewhat. But the other part was they were saying, listen, if someone really talented comes along for this job, we don't want to let them get away. So we're going to keep them up. I guess it makes sense, but I still think it shows how tight-lid market got the fact that they would still keep those up just in case. You've probably read this before. John Maynard Keynes said in 1930, the biggest problem facing future generations is going to be what to do with other leisure time.

And people have said for years, Keynes was wrong. Look what happened. People work more than ever. This New York Times article, did you see this about golfing at 3 p.m? They call it the afternoon fun economy. That's ramp capital's life. So they said all these places, hair salons and bars and golf. outings and rock climbing walls, like Thursday afternoon at 3 p.m. These places are packed.

And they're calling the afternoon fun economy. Isn't remote work the John Maynard Keynes? Didn't remote work fulfill his dream of leisure time? How you can do stuff that you want to do during the day because you're working remotely. You can see your personal trainer in the morning. You can go to the gym. You can do some errands. I think remote work for the people who have it is the leisure time Keynes was looking for. Speaking of my exercise, I want to give two plugs this week. When I spoke earlier in the year about exercising or turning over, which, by the way, I've been exercising, but my diet's gone to shit since we went to Chicago.

Just can't get back on the horse. I had a company reach out to me. He's like, hey, my CMO or somebody there is a huge fan of yours. And it was a company called Fount, F-O-U-N-T-Bio, I believe is the site. Are you making a push to be a fitness influencer right now? I spoke to the guy. he's like, hey, if you were interested, we'll, like, do some light work with you.

So they sent me, like, a bunch of supplements and stuff, but this is hardcore. This is for, like, executives that, like, need personal fitness training. So, listen, I mean, that's a bit excessive for my taste. I like the idea of it, but they do, like, blood work. They're, like, hardcore. Anyway, if you're looking for something like that, like one-on-one type of stuff, good people there.

The other plug that was, like, sort of non-solicited at all, is, you know what I did last night, Ben? For the first time, I think this is probably like a very 20-20 thing to do. So I'm late to the party here. I cooked a meal that was delivered to my door. I guess sort of like Blue Apron. You ever do that before? Where they delivered the ingredients?

I think the company is called Home Chef. Yeah, yeah, Home Chef. I thought all those places went out of business. Dude, it was great. What do we get? Rice, beef, and bok choy. It was excellent. You know what's even better than that?

I'm bullish. Just getting takeout that's already prepared for you. I know, I know. But don't you get tired of getting the same shit every week? Not really. No? That's a key to a good diet, eating the same stuff over and over again. That was my fitness influencer tip of the day.

All right, I got a question for you. I've got some thoughts, but I want to hear your thoughts. So Bitcoin is up almost 70% this year. Why is crypto rallying? I want to hear your thoughts for why it's rallying so hard this year. Two things. Why is it rallying so hard this year? Or why is it rallying so hard over the past two weeks?

Those are very different things. Let's do both. Okay. Why is it rallying so hard this year? I don't know, because it felt. so much. I don't mean to be like flip it. I don't know. Is it front running a Fed pause? Could be. I really don't have an answer for you there. Why is it rallying in the last two weeks? I think that when we think about crypto, and I hate the shit that's going on right now with Bellagie and the hyperinflation

propaganda, that makes me sick. But we think about crypto from a U.S.-centric point of view, because we're from the U.S. Is your money really not safe of J.P. Morgan? Of course, to save for JPMorgan. But the rest of the world doesn't necessarily have our financial institutions and our relative political stability and a government that will bail out their deposits in every turn. So having an alternative form of money that is yours that can never be taken from you, that can never be, I would say never, that you know there's a finite supply. I get the global appeal. Of course I get it. I think it's that simple. Or it's just a risk on asking. that's front-running a Fed pause.

I don't think so. The NASDAX up like 18% this year, NASDAQ 100. I think it's mostly risk on. I don't really buy the banking stuff. Wait, what do you mean you don't buy it? That directly was the catalyst. As soon as this shit started happening, crypto started to go bonkers.

Don't you think that was because people thought the Fed is going to cut or stop raising? And that's good for a risk on assets. The S&P's up like 2% over that time. And Bitcoin's up like 40%. The NASX is up like 70% this year though. I don't know. I don't know.

The funny thing to me about the banking crisis, though, is that it being a global thing, The two places where there's a banking crisis are two of the biggest and most developed and oldest banking financial centers in the world, Switzerland and the U.S. There's not like there's a bank run in the emerging markets or something. There was no other countries that happened to, which is kind of funny. I'm working on a post. This is the first time in the history of Bitcoin or crypto, as far as I could tell,

that it truly was, I'm using the words carefully, like a safe haven, a flight to whatever, a risk off asset. It was a macro hedge, right? Yeah, like, for the first time. Because think about during the pandemic, it fell 50% in a day. It didn't hedge it. And the run-up to inflation, it didn't hedge anything. During the Ukraine invasion, didn't hedge anything.

It didn't hedge anything. It didn't hedge any risk-off event until just recently. Will that be a one-time thing? I mean, I don't know. Definitely different vibes this time around. First time, the median year-over-year price of homes fell. I suspect that we're going to be seeing more of this. It only fell 0.2%.

Medium price is 363, down from 413. This trend will continue. You agree? I wonder how they do the calculations on these, because Mike Simonson has his weekly update, and he said the median home price is 429. It could just be the data sources, but his data is showing that...

I asked him once, by the way, I forget his answer, but they are looking at something slightly different. It's directionally the same, of course. But it is tough for people who have been waiting for a crash that at this point, I just don't think it's coming. I don't think, like, the huge crash

people wanted like a fair market in housing. I just don't think it's happened. All right. Here's a good one for money market stuff. Then we'll get into New York thing. CDs went from $36.5 billion in April 22 to 418.4 billion in January, according to the Federal Reserve. These are FDIC insured up 250. This is actually a great hedge because short-term rates fell so fast. You could get 5.25% or 5.2 in a quarter in Michael Batnik speak at some banks recently and lock it in for six, 12, 18, 24 months or something. The first investment I ever made my life was in a CD. I could put $5,000 I made from us. You are such a dork. High school. I've had like $5,000 in my savings account from like my whole life and I put it into a CD. Honestly, putting in $5,000

and then like two years later getting $5,100 or something, whatever it was, was not that exciting. The first investment that I ever made, is it when you turn 18 or 21 you could legally invest? Got to be 18, right? That's a good question. We should know this. I opened up an account to the Ameritrade, and my mother bought me options on a stock. That was what I asked for. And then I hit it, and I rolled it into new options, then went to zero. That sounds about right. All right. A bunch of people sent this to me, and you're probably ready to take your victory lap here, but the story was in Bloomberg. In New York City, a $100,000 salary feels like $36,000. Here's how they did this. That number seems absurd. 36. It's not quite that. I mean, that sounds nuts.

They said adjusting for taxes and spending and the cost of living and all this other stuff. That just seem a little absurd because, again, the median salary in New York City is still like $71,000. So does that imply that $200,000 is like $72,000? Come on, I don't buy that for a second. That does seem a little ridiculous to me. Nevertheless, my point stands, at least in New York, $200,000 certainly isn't rich. Still a nice income. The one thing I underestimated was it's not only the cost of living.

I think the taxes are a big part of it. People in New York City pay so much more in taxes. How about this? The day camp for my 60-year-old and, I guess, soon to be a 4-year-old, it's $9,000 each. For how long? Seven weeks? Oh, my gosh. You're paying college tuition.

For seven weeks? Holy cow. That's ridiculous. Oh, my gosh. If you pay it in one shot, you get $500 off, which is don't even get me started on that one. Wow. Yeah. I'm a little annoyed about that one.

Per 2020 IRS figures, this is from George Papadopoulos, the top 1% of individual filers, to be in the top 1%, you need an adjusted gross income of $548,000. And that's nationally in 2020. Okay, 1%. Do I rest my case? It depends what you think.

I still think top 5% or top 10% is. Rich, if you make more money than 90%, Rich, rich, Hello, I'm sorry, when I hear rich, I think, rich, you can, buy whatever you want. You could sit courtside of the Knicks games. Money's not an issue. That's not top 10%. Then you're to send me a picture of you sitting courtside of the Knicks game last weekend? That was a birthday present.

Okay. From a rich person. But I guess when I look at it, I think of more like well off. If you're making more money than 90 or 95% of the population, maybe we're talking past each other. I think so. Because well off and rich are miles apart. Just because I do think that to your point of being a billionaire someone that's a few million dollars, I think there's diminishing returns. Obviously, there's a lot of stuff that would be awesome at being a billionaire, but I think there's diminishing return. Are you moving the goalposts? Are you moving the goalposts or what? This is not the discussion that we had. I wouldn't argue with you about what you just said. I was looking for an

income that makes you well off. And I said $200,000 makes you well off because you're making more than 90 some percent of the population. You would have no argument if you put it that way for me. But you said rich. That's what I said last week. You said rich. All right. What's this a review for the Hoxton Bar. This killed me. Somebody sent this to us. This is on Google. The person who left to the Google review is MB. However, it's not me. It's not me. This is three months ago. This is three months ago. This is a review for the Hoxton Hotel. Bar, I should say, bar. $120 for two whistle whiskey shots. What's a whistle whiskey shot? I don't know. I'm not a bourbon guy. Unreasonably priced. No heads up. Even in Manhattan, it's half the price.

In fact, it's only $60 for an entire bottle. Maybe Whistle is the type of brand. spoke to manager about the prices to see if it was maybe a mistake, and he was incredibly rude. Victory for me. This guy was indeed. He was very rude to me, too. We are always in Chicago for business and will never return. Only go to the bar if you want to pay 10 times a regular price of alcohol. Now, I will say again, said in the record street, Hoxton Hotel, Great Hotel, Hawkson Hotel, separate entity, never go there. All right, I think we're done with the Hoxton Hotel. All right, recommendations, what do you got? You know what? You should have told the guy when you were talking to him. Listen, I have multiple podcasts.

I have a blog, and I have hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. Give me a discount now. Would that have done it? That I will never say. No, I'm kidding. Hunt for the Red October. I probably hadn't seen this movie. I think it came out in 91.

I had not seen it since I was... You might be right. Isn't it just Hunt for Red October? Oh, it's not Hunt for the Red October? Okay. I had not seen this since I was probably 11 or 12 years old, just for whatever reason, never rewatched it. Awesome movie.

It really is good. And I never realized that this movie was like the original... for every time there's a CIA movie and someone is trying to they know what's really happening and the guy in the ship or the plane has orders to shoot down that ship or shoot down that plane there's a guy from the CIA saying don't do it this movie's the original of that the best scene of that is ed harris when he has the high ground in the rock oh yes they all shoot i mean what a scene that was by the way hunt for about october is good crimson tide is better denzil and jean hackman okay versus sean connery and elk baldone that's a pretty good face up okay

Lockstock and two smoking barrels is on Amazon Prime, I think. I don't think I saw this one. Guy Ritchie. Yes. Guy Ritchie's original one, I think, or one of them. I feel like Jason Statham is a bald hero for you, though, because that guy's been bald forever. He was bald in that movie that was made in like, I don't know, 97, 98 or something?

I'll watch it this weekend. He has to be a hero for the bald, right? He's great bald. Oh, what was a movie with him? Oh, Crank. Yeah, that guy rules. Yeah, not bad. Also, I keep recommending old movies because there's no new good movies out.

every weekend I look for new releases. There's never anything good coming out anymore. You know what I rented this weekend? What? Cocaine Bear. Ugh. What do you think I thought of it before I give my review? I feel like people only like movies like that ironically.

People don't really like movies like that. Well, what do you think I thought of it? You probably thought it was a lot of fun. Zero fun. Okay, really? Zero fun. It was horrible. And my expectations of this movie, I was not expecting the Godfather 2.

I knew what I was getting into. It was incoherent nonsense. It was really terrible. And again, my only metric for are these movies good or bad is fun, was I entertained. I wasn't even entertained. It was terrible. The original one for that was snakes on a plane. It was a gimmicky, but then you watch the movie, and oh yeah, the movie stunk. Same thing, probably. This is truly awful. Zero, no redeeming qualities whatsoever. You know what I did watch the first time? The sequel to Sicario. Josh Rollin is amazing. I don't know what took me so long. The sequel might be better than the first.

No, no, no, no. Okay. However, quite good. worth watching. Very good. I think I've spent this before. I'm not a scroll type of guy. I don't scroll on the channels. However, once in a while, if I wake up early, my wife leaves for work at like 5.45.

So if I get off and I don't feel like getting out of bed, I will scroll a little bit. I turn the TV on. Oh, Ferris Bueller. I cut that one the other day, too. I watched a few minutes. Remember when the telephone rang and you literally didn't know who was on the other end of the line?

Yeah, and you jump up. Be so excited. Oh, mom, it's Jane. Damn it. I thought maybe this for me. I was thinking that, too. All right, that's about it. Yeah, cocaine bear. God, what a bad movie. Young people these days don't know what a prank phone call is. You can't prank phone call someone.

Prank phone calls are the best. I guess you could, I don't know, mess with someone's social media, but there's no such thing to prank phone call anymore. Doesn't exist. Oh, well. All right. Remember, if you want to, check us out on Thursday, sign up for the webinar with Y charts. Anything else? Any other housekeeping items? No, there's not housing. I'm just so excited for succession. That's all. I'm too. Yellowjackets comes back, too.

I'm ready for some more TV. All right, Animal Spirspot at gmail.com. time.