We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP324: The Great Reset w/ Luke Gromen (Business Podcast)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hey, everyone. Welcome to today's show. Our guest today needs no introduction because he's a fan favorite macroeconomist Luke Roman. Luke is the founder of the macro thematic research firm, the Forest for the Trees, and he's one of the leading experts on everything happening in the global economy today. We're titling this discussion, The Great Reset.

Starting point is 00:00:20 It appears we're upon some very difficult circumstances moving forward, and we want to try to pick through what some of these events might be and how they could potentially play out. So without further delay, here's our conversation with the thoughtful Luke Roman. You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. Hey, everyone, welcome to The Investors podcast. I'm your host, Preston Pish, and as always, I'm accompanied by my co-host, Stig Broderson.

Starting point is 00:01:03 And we've brought back Luke, welcome back to the show. Thank you for having me back. I'm excited to be back. It's always great talking with you guys. Hey, so you know on SNL how like Alec Baldwin holds the record for the most times hosting SNL, you're kind of becoming that person for the Investors podcast. There's a joke in there somewhere, but I don't think I'm witty enough at the moment to come up with the appropriate Alec Baldwin metaphor and somehow tying it back in a non-offensive way. That's not our forte, Luke. Totally for the best. Hey, so I know where I want to start this conversation, and it starts with Warren Buffett

Starting point is 00:01:41 because, man, he changed some stuff up here in this last filing. Yeah, I guess he sold some banks, right? He sold a little bit of his Barrett Gold as well as the headlines I saw, and maybe he was doing some other stuff, but those are the ones that seem to jump out in terms of what I saw coming across my feed. Somebody forwarded me some type of article. it's not based on any kind of facts. It was just some hearsay that he's looking at PayPal,

Starting point is 00:02:09 which I find really interesting. He's moving away from the JP Morgan's and Wells Fargo's and looking at some of these other folks that are in the space, but from a tech standpoint. Yeah, let's hear some of your thoughts on the banking in general. To me, the banks seem like they're in a bit of a tough spot. And the reason I say that is it's a little bit of, And banking industry for a long time in this country was a heads they win and a tails they win kind of a thing.

Starting point is 00:02:36 They did, you know, they did well and for a long time. And I think they're in a bit of a tough spot. And the reason I say that is if the government does enough in terms of stimulus, the banks look like they are being regulated into being basically utilities that buy treasuries at negative real rates. And so if things go fine, they are in their balance sheet, the percentage of their balance sheet that is in. Treasury is yielding negative real rates is likely to increase over time. And if the government doesn't do enough, then we have a big economic problem and they have credit problems. And so it's sort of like the best case for them is they increase their holdings of treasuries at negative real rates. And it's not a terrible deal for them. The funding costs are very low.

Starting point is 00:03:22 They, you know, they changed the SLR rules a year ago or eight months ago, I should say now. And so it's very low funding cost. It's positive carry for them. But they're likely to be negative real rates over time. And so to me, it's not to say the banks can't go up, but I think it is a case where over the course of the next cycle, banks as a percent of total, call it S&P market cap, if you will, I think are likely to shrink relative to other sectors because their balance sheets are growing in terms of treasuries and treasuries are very likely, in my opinion, to be negative

Starting point is 00:03:59 real rates over the course of the cycle. They need to be for the U.S. to basically earn its way out of what we've just gone through. Yeah. Whenever we look at the triple P loans that went out here in Q2, that was big for the banks. They're some of the highest bottom lines. And also if we look at the top line, let's just say JEP Morgan here for Q2, the top line, or in other words, the revenue hit $32.9 billion. And that was up from, what, Q1, 28 billion? Yeah, I would, you know, for me that when I look back, we hear a lot that, hey, if you look at the Fed's H.8 report for aggregate banking, commercial banking sector lending. And it has been declining loans, declining C&I loans. There's been one line item that's been growing spectacularly for the past four or five

Starting point is 00:04:45 months. And that's it's loans to the government. That's U.S. Treasury Holdings, Treasury and agency holdings, which I think in June, we're up 48 percent in July, up 37, of August 24. I think in September, I think it's the latest date. I think they were up 17 or 20 percent. And so the portion of their loan book that is represented by treasuries and agencies is growing meaningfully relative to the overall loan book, which I think is now positive again for most of those four months. I think it was negative. But essentially, when you look back to the April timeframe as we were just coming out of the very bottom of the COVID crisis, the Treasury Barrowing Advisory Committee talked about that the U.S. banking sector looked to be a very good place and a sector that could buy a lot more

Starting point is 00:05:31 treasuries as they were looking for areas of potential balance sheet capacity that could buy treasuries. And they specifically cited that, hey, right now, the banking system in the U.S. in total, about 5% of assets are in treasuries. Last time, the U.S. debt to GDP was as high as it is, was 1946. And back then, you saw the U.S. banking system balance sheet get as high as 50% of the total balance sheet in treasuries. And so I've just from a macro perspective kind of thought about that the price target for what percentage of the U.S. banking system balance sheet that could be taken up with treasuries over coming years, I think at the high end is that 50% range, just from a very top-down level of saying, hey, last time we were in the same type of

Starting point is 00:06:18 situation, which is to say very high debt to GDP, very low foreign purchasing of treasuries as a percent of total issuance, you sell the banking system take a lot of that up. You've seen the regulations changed between April and now in terms of those SLR regulations to make it a very attractive positive carry for the banks. And so for me, I think the banks are a little bit of a tough spot is I think there's the share of their assets that are in treasuries that are likely to be negative real rates over the course of this cycle, probably on their way from 5%, you know, as of earlier this year. I don't know where they are now. They're probably modestly higher towards something meaningfully north of that. And that's just, that's not a bad thing. It's just

Starting point is 00:06:59 I think there's going to be more attractive higher ROIs returns on capital within the economy. And that just implies, like I said, a shrinking of bank share of total equity market cap of in the United States, if you will. You know, it's fascinating. While you were talking there, I was pulling up some of the figures for various banks. And how I had mentioned earlier, J.P. Morgans went up. Their top line went up in the second quarter of 2020 when COVID hit. Wells Fargo went from in the previous quarter before COVID was at $13.7 billion on their top line. COVID hits.

Starting point is 00:07:34 Second quarter was $8.3 billion. Wow. They got hammered. And then it came back in the third quarter back to kind of where they were at prior to COVID. Now, Bank of America, completely flat, they basically retained their $22.3 billion. So it's really fascinating to me that you're seeing these permutations in these banks that are all too big to fail, right? Every one of these banks are too big to fail. But yeah, you're seeing a pretty wide divergence in performance through that event.

Starting point is 00:08:04 And I guess the reason I'm bringing it up is because there is more triple P loans on the way. There's like those are not going away. And if we think that we understand how that performance played out during those previous event, now it might not be as, oh, who knows, it could be exactly like the liquidity crunch we saw during COVID. But do you see that as a barometer for the way that they might perform moving forward? To me, that's the $64,000 question. You got me speechless.

Starting point is 00:08:31 My wife would tell you that that rarely happens. It could be too late, I suppose, but the challenges is that we've seen, for me, it could be too late if you're a very nimble trader. And that's why I sort of, you know, if you're running a big portfolio, we've seen they are not going to let you twist in the wind for very long. Now, that said, it could be, you know, painful for a period of time, days, weeks. I don't think we're talking about months anymore, even like we were in the fourth quarter of 18, let alone quarters like we were in 2011 or 2008, just given where we are in leverage. And I think that's really, really, the maybe the biggest legacy of the COVID crisis that we've been talking about a lot is that a number

Starting point is 00:09:18 of the metrics we were talking about in 2018 where you'd say, okay, the big three U.S. expenditures, entitlements, defense, and interest expense, gross interest expense. We were watching that in early 2016 and we were saying, all right, it could be over 100% of tax receipts by 2021. And lo and behold, 18 months later, because the Fed raised rates and because the economy slowed, those three actually went above 100% of tax receipts by 3Q18. And they've continued to trend higher. Well, those big three coming out of the COVID crisis as of 3Q20 were 140% of tax receipts. So entitlements, defense and gross treasury expense, which was primarily. Marily is a gross interest expense before, but it jumped enormously during the COVID crisis,

Starting point is 00:10:11 according to the Treasury TBAC data. So I think there is gross treasury expense plus some of the treasury stimulus stuff or backstopping stuff they were doing as part of COVID. So I don't know that that's purely apples to apples, but at the same time, we can also say if they took it away, GDP would be shrinking even faster and tax receipts would be shrinking faster. The point is, those three line items in the TBAC went from call it 85% of tax receipts in 2016 to 140% of tax receipts in third quarter of 2020. And the point is that COVID took what was an incipient fiscal problem, balance of payments problem, and made it irrecoverable. I mean, they are in the full Europe pilot, the top gun flat spin. There's no pulling out of it.

Starting point is 00:11:02 There's some things you can do, but it's irrecoverable. And, People say, well, look, if there's a bounder, the U.S. is a reserve currency, it can't have a balance of payments problem. Well, you're right. And that's what we've been seeing for the last 12, 14 months. And I think we're going to see more of that. So as a person who likes to just look at patterns, right? I suspect that the more that you step in and start manipulating the market, and there's a

Starting point is 00:11:25 pattern that kind of shows up. Everyone that's watching this is saying, oh, well, this is what worked last time when they stepped in and did this. So now I'm just going to hit the copy paste button here. and do this all over again. And if there's one thing we learned from COVID, it's that tech was a major winner coming out of the debasement of the currency. So let's just play out the scenario where they wait too long and they don't provide enough stimulus. And they have to step in because there's just a major liquidity crunch like we saw previously with the COVID. I mean, I would think that

Starting point is 00:11:59 a person is looking for some type of technical limitation or they're looking at how much the government arrives to the table, I suspect they're going to arrive in a form that triumphs anything that we have seen historically as far as the basement goes. I mean, if they did five last time, I guess I'd naturally think they're going to do double that. Enormous numbers. Like numbers, you can't even fathom. So do you step into that trade again, into the tech, Google, Amazon, Apple, companies that you know are just going to continue to perform? Do you buy that equity? I buy that equity.

Starting point is 00:12:37 I buy in U.S. industrial's equities. I buy gold. I buy Bitcoin. I buy all those things. I do step into it again. Because again, the thing that gives me the comfort to do that is the big gears of what we're talking about, which is debt to GDP is now 135%.

Starting point is 00:12:56 You cannot allow GDP to fall for very far for very long because you get into a debt, death spiral. you have the three big years of your government entitlements, defense and interest expense, 140% of tax receipts. Tax receipts are falling sharply as a result of all this, if they don't do enough, fast enough. Your entitlement bill doesn't go down. It goes up. Your defense bill isn't changing. If anything, it's going up.

Starting point is 00:13:26 And your interest expense isn't really going anywhere per se. But as we saw in COVID, if Treasury does some special stuff, they're going to do some. And so when you look at that, you're 40% short relative to tax receipts on those expenditures, which are non-negotiable. You can't skip any of those things. And I think that's a key point that the listeners should really pay attention to. Because you're talking about these three items, they're just so important to understand. They're non-discretionary expenses.

Starting point is 00:13:58 So entitlements, defense, and interest expenses. And they have to be paid no matter what. And right now we have a 104% of tax receipts and tax receipts are falling. Let's pretend they don't do enough. How quickly will the Fed step in? Well, you can say, okay, 140% of tax receipts. If you did nothing, that you've got well less than a year before you default on one of them, right? You literally don't have the money if you're just paying hand of us.

Starting point is 00:14:24 So then you say, okay, well, I'll just borrow the money. And you say, okay, well, who's buying the treasuries? The U.S. Net International Investment position is negative 60% of GDP. So foreigners own and gross 40 trillion in assets, net 12 trillion in assets, dollar assets. If you don't do enough, the dollar is going to be going up. The dollar debts they owe are going to be squeezing them. They are going to be liquidating dollar assets for dollars. And they're going to be selling what they can, not what they want to.

Starting point is 00:14:51 And when they sell that they can is the quote unquote, deepest most liquid market in the world treasury. So the government now needs to sell treasuries to finance this 140% of tax receipts, three big three items. So they're selling treasuries. Foreigners who have a, you know, own $11, 12 trillion in U.S. assets are going to be selling treasuries for dollars. Mom and pop are going to be selling treasuries for retirement. Businesses who are holding treasuries going to be selling treasuries. Banks who own treasuries for high-quality liquid asset purposes for regulatory reasons.

Starting point is 00:15:25 for regulatory reasons so that they have proper liquidity in a crisis are going to be selling treasuries. So there's trillions of treasuries for sale. Where's the bid? Who's the bitter? The Fed's the bitter. That's it. And so that's why I say I step into that trade is it's going to be uncomfortable as heck possibly. If they don't do enough, you could absolutely see this sharp sell off, this sharp dollar spike, and it is going to feel terrible, just like it felt in March. But my bet is, the U.S. government will not be the first government to allow itself to be shut down for lack of printed fiat currency in history that I'm aware of. Yeah, I think that the scar tissue from the early 1930s is so deeply entrenched into policymakers' minds as we're never going to go down that path again.

Starting point is 00:16:16 And when you look at how that played out initially from 1929 up until they basically relinquished themselves off of this gold standard in 33, I mean, it was a deflationary spiral because policymakers were, well, if you're not competent enough to run your business appropriately and have savings for rainy days, well, then you deserve to fail, right? And you literally have the exact opposite line of thinking from policymakers today than what you had during that period of time. And so I see folks on Twitter from time to time that are posting these charts that are analogous to the 1929 Great Depression and it coming down and all that kind of stuff. And I'm looking at that and I'm saying, yeah, you might see like liquidity shocks that are somewhat mind blowing how quickly they drop 30% percent or whatever. But the policy response to that is going to be so drastically different that I just don't see it playing out as a one-to-one kind of scenario like what happened back then. I agree. It's different. So 29 to 33, the market was falling in dollar terms, but it was really falling against gold because it was a gold-backed dollar. And if you look at,

Starting point is 00:17:32 for example, the equity market since 3Q18, it is down versus gold. It is. It is. fallen versus gold. You look at the equity market since 2000. It is down tremendously in gold terms. I think that's one important thing. I think the other thing that is really kind of stuck in my chart that I saw. It's a brilliant chart by Dan Oliver at Murmican Capital. He gave a presentation on Real Vision back in March, if you haven't seen it's excellent. And I've had dinner with him before. He's brilliant. He's a gentleman. One of his investment letters back in May had this tremendous chart and it showed the price of gold in German Reichs marks from 1914 to 1923. So the beginning of World War I when the Germans went off gold and said, you know,

Starting point is 00:18:17 we're just going to print the money to pay for the war and we're going to make the losers pay for it, which is what everybody said in World War I. And through 1923, so 14 to 23 is one of the particularly 18 to 23, 20 to 23, one of the great currency hyperinflations of all time, complete currency destroying hyperinflation. And Dan's chart shows the price of gold in Weimar German marks go from 14 to 23. And it does what you think it does. On a annualized basis, it's a hockey stick up, currency gone. But the fascinating thing that I didn't know until I saw this chart was, I think he has it month over month. And what it showed, the month over month returns on gold as the yearly return was as the currency was hyperinflating at zero,

Starting point is 00:19:05 the month over month returns on gold, if you were levered, if you were because you would think, okay, well, the currency is going to hyperinflate. I want to borrow as much as I can and buy as much gold as I can and I'm going to be rich. And the reality is if you look at how gold traded in a hyperinflating currency, if you were levered, you lost all your money four or five different times because there were periods where you, like you just said, these air pockets you hit, and there's any number of reasons that that happens. A lot of them in these situations are very political. A certain leader gets elected. A certain leader in Germany's case gets assassinated. Whatever the case was, I mean, there were times when the German mark, the Reichs mark,

Starting point is 00:19:46 rose significantly against dollars for a few months and gold got killed and then sort of the longer So the point is, I think, very supportive of what you just said, which was that you get these countertrend moves, but I just don't think when you're in this purely Fiat system that you're going to get these, when I see the analogs of, hey, this is 1929 and we're going to have this four years down of equity markets. I just don't think that's going to happen because we're not, it's an apples to orange comparison. It was comparing against gold then versus dollars now. and the equity market effectively is the economy now. And we're highly indebted. So it is the economy. It's a circular doom loop they've created by policy over the last several decades

Starting point is 00:20:29 where they've got to have stocks rising to be able to keep the wheels on the card as it relates to the fiscal situation. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible. food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is. From June 1st through the 3rd,

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Starting point is 00:24:47 Back to the show. I just want to tell the audience, so while you were talking there and your comment about gold, if you price the S&P 500 in gold, it's down significantly since 2000. So I went and I plotted this out. I priced the S&P 500 in gold. It is down 65% in terms of gold since the year 2000. I had no idea it was that much throughout that period of time. If you go to, let's see here, the 2008 time frame, the top.

Starting point is 00:25:17 Wow, that is just crazy. I had no idea it was that much, Luke. Yeah. And from 2008 till now, it's pretty much flat. The S&P 500 has not even gone up at all. In nominal terms you're saying in dollar terms. In gold terms, yeah. Luke, so you mentioned about pension plans there before.

Starting point is 00:25:37 You have the baby boomers who are about to retire. The investment managers have them in a ton of bonds with no years. How is this going to be played out? You've got a highly indebted government who needs negative real rates and a retirement populace who wants to own these bonds. And so it's really these two, the power of the government against the individual pensioner. I think I saw Russell Napier's quote saying, it's, it's robbing old people slowly. It's how he phrased it.

Starting point is 00:26:08 And I was reading it literally laughed out loud when I saw him say that. When you go back to, again, the last time the U.S. was in this position fiscally, which was right after World War II, debt to GDPs higher this time, entitlements are higher this time. Medicare, Medicaid didn't even exist then. And foreigners are not buying nearly enough treasuries. U.S. real rates were negative for the majority of the next 35 years. And when you look at how the U.S. delivered from, you know, we were at probably, I think I want to say, 120, 125% of GDP, maybe 130% of GDP in 46. And by 1980, we were 30, 35% debt the GDP.

Starting point is 00:26:50 And that was made up of, if you look over those 35 years, U.S. nominal GDP consistently ran at a 500 to 800 basis point premium to the 10-year treasury yield. And during recessions, real rates would go positive for like a cup of coffee. and then they would shoot right back to this. And some of that was tremendous productivity growth to tremendous demographics, tremendous technological growth. But it was in the end also massive financial repression. If you are a bondholder and your GDP is nominally growing at 500 to 800 basis points above your coupon,

Starting point is 00:27:27 you're making a donation on a real basis every year in terms of your purchasing power. And so I think that's where this movie's going. There are things that are very different this time in terms of the use of treasurer as collateral and some of this, this inherent demand for treasuries, regardless of the coupon, that it's not all about mom and pop and pensions drawn a coupon on this.

Starting point is 00:27:51 But I think ultimately the broader lesson holds, which is one way or another, they're going to get their nominal GDP to make real rates relative to nominal GDP in particular significantly negative to de-lever their way out of this. You know, Luke, I don't think of it helps that when you look at this older population, being in bonds for the last 40 years,

Starting point is 00:28:15 especially long-duration bonds, has been one heck of a trade. You really could not get a more slam-dunk trade. I mean, when you look at Bill Gross and the fact that he left during that era that he was doing what he was doing, it really, I think I could put a mannequin up against him and it probably would have had a similar amount of performance. It would have been stellar performance. I don't know if I go that far. He was pretty darn good. When you really look back at what he did, especially with the size of the fund he was

Starting point is 00:28:50 running later in his career, he put up some numbers. And I was always on the equity side. It was one of these sort of that kind was over there. But you'd look at his numbers and the size of his fun sometimes, you'd go, man, but your broader point, I get it. You're in trouble. some fixed income investors feathers. Okay, so a couple hours ago I posted that you and I were going to have a conversation. I think I had a hundred comments within a couple hours of people wanting to pick your

Starting point is 00:29:18 brain. There was one person that asked about student loan forgiveness. I'm kind of curious to hear your thoughts on this one. I think it's coming. I think it makes sense. I did a tweet thread last week, and I said, if I was tasked with ensuring that the United States stayed in secular stagnation, as Larry Summers called it, said, Luke, we want you to set up economic policies and make sure we continue to underperform as a nation, as a national economy, and you continue to remove the dynamism we were once known for. What would you do? I said, well, one of the things I would do is I would load up our most productive generation with as much college debt as possible. And then I would make it non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. And then I would have as much as of the wealth as possible with

Starting point is 00:30:11 the older class of citizens who have an extraordinarily low marginal propensity to consume. And so I've got my high marginal or a marginal propensity to consume or high MPC generation loaded with that so they can't afford to buy anything, houses, cars, get married of kids, et cetera. And I would have my low MPC generation with all the money and benefiting from all the monetary stimulus, et cetera, just getting richer and richer. And so to me, when you hear these policymakers, whether it's Powell, other central bankers saying, we need more fiscal, we need more fiscal, we need more fiscal, and you hear other pundits policymakers saying, we need a policy that gets money into the hands of people that will spend. And then you hear other people say, well, gosh,

Starting point is 00:30:55 with the divided Congress, how are we ever going to do that? All of these are valid points. And to me, when you sort of, you know, if you do a Venn diagram of all this stuff, the thing that's right in the middle are student loans. You've got 1.6, 1.5 trillion in student loans. I don't know the exact number, but the vast majority are owned by the government. And so it's literally a balance sheet entry. You cross it out. You tell them stop paying. They don't have to pay anymore. And you immediately have put hundreds, if not thousands of dollars per month, every month,

Starting point is 00:31:30 into a generation of people with a very high marginal propensity to consume. They're going to get married. They're going to buy cars. They're going to make houses. They're going to have kids. They're going to reinvest in the economy. GDP's going to grow. Velocity and money is going to grow.

Starting point is 00:31:42 There's a whole bunch of positive things. The negatives are some dogmatic view of, okay, well, that's, socialism and I paid my loans and they didn't have to and they shouldn't have. And to be fair, that is a, that's a real discussion. My view is it needs to be weighed off against, well, is that worse than continuing the secular stagnation where we're starting to have riots in the streets and people burning stuff down? And in my view, that's a lesser evil of the two at this point. And then beyond that, it's really, it stinks if you're a bondholder. It stinks if you're long dollars. And that was where I was going to go. Really, the way you're paying for that would be

Starting point is 00:32:21 something along the lines of a 5% debasement of the currency for debt forgiveness? It's a big number because you assume I'm only a multiplier on that monthly nut. It could be big. Well, and I think that that's a really important point. So let's transition into this term, quote unquote, inflation, because you bring up the multiplier on top of the base money, because I'm talking base money inflation of 5%. But when you account for the, you account for the, the multiplier on top of that, are we still talking about 5% more currency or spendability into the system? Or are we talking more than that? Well, it could be more than that. And, you know, they can really be more than when you start talking about a vaccine, right? Is think about they've

Starting point is 00:33:03 created all this base money. And how often have you heard it? I've heard it a lot this year. All this M2 money supply has been created. It's okay because they're just filling in a hole. It's not inflationary because they're just filling in a hole created by COVID. And that's 100% correct in my view. And then the next line is, well, as long as velocity doesn't pick up on that M2, it won't be a problem. They won't create inflation. Well, what do you think is going to happen when they get a vaccine? Velocity's going to take off. So now you're looking at a situation where you could have velocity picking up from, I mean, you've had Warren, Schumer saying they can get student loan forgiveness. They're encouraging the presumed President Biden to do it via executive

Starting point is 00:33:39 order in his first hundred days. So to me, you're looking at some things that could be extraordinarily primarily stimulative slash inflationary, I think it'd be really good for GDP growth when you're talking about an economy that desperately needs nominal GDP growth and inflation to start trying to earn, you know, de-lever this record debt to GDP. And by the way, you're still high unemployment. You still have record social tensions. This checks a lot of boxes. It's going to be really hard to sit there with whatever unemployment still is, six, seven percent, and with the tension we have between young and old and the wealth inequality to not sign off on this. It's easy to do. And yeah, I think it would be, it's interesting because I do think it could be very inflationary.

Starting point is 00:34:25 And it introduces a new, you know, when you push one thing in, it's like the balloon, something pops out on the other side. And all of a sudden, you're going to get the yield curve back up further. And as we know, I don't know what the number is, but there's a level in my view on the bond market where the Fed's going to have to come in and basically say that's it. The yield is not going any higher than this no matter what. That student debt forgiveness is enough to take the yield over that number. We won't know till it happens or were it to happen. But that then would turn around.

Starting point is 00:34:54 Now you've taken one inflationary thing and you've turbocharged it because now the Fed's balance sheet is just going to grow and real yields will be significantly negative. So for the person listening to this, we're seeing the same. same problems as you are, Luke. How should they position themselves, first of all, to protect their portfolio, but also to compound their wealth? So I think it's super important for anybody listening to this to understand, I think, a couple really big pieces of context. The big piece of context, number one, is we are, I think, without a doubt, in the first bursting global sovereign debt bubble in 100 years. So nobody alive that is,

Starting point is 00:35:37 trading today has ever lived through one of these things to trade it. With that said, the last time one burst, the real value of the sovereign debt relative to gold of the six biggest industrial powers in the world, the U.S., the U.K., Germany, France, Japan, and Russia, oh, from From 1918 to 1933, the sovereign debt relative to gold fell anywhere from 50 to 100%. So Germany and Russia went to zero against gold. They hyperinflated to Japanese. I want to say we're 75%. U.S. was 75%.

Starting point is 00:36:16 France, I think, was 75 or 80%. The U.K. was, I think, only 40 or 50% as the reserve currency of the world. So the point is, when you get here to this point, it becomes the sovereigns, they're going to do whatever they can to keep themselves invisible. business, so to speak, and the release valve is the currency. And so I think it's super important to understand that within these trading moves, this, I think, is the big gear and you don't want to get crushed up by this big gear. And so when you talk about these types of things, you need to be overrepresented in your portfolio to things like gold, like Bitcoin, I think like high quality

Starting point is 00:36:51 equities, things that will preserve your purchasing power if, as I think they will, currencies do what they did the last time a global sovereign debt bubble burst. And this isn't about, hey, this quarter's performance or this month's performance. This is about two years, five years, ten years from now, currency debasement over those periods of time. So I think that's the first big one is this is the first bursting global sovereign debt bubble 100 years. The second big

Starting point is 00:37:16 thing I think is that we are in a currency, the first major currency system changeover in 50 years, really since the petrodollars system and you're seeing these the tensions between the U.S., between China, between the U.S. and Europe. And nobody knows how it's all going to work out other than to say it's changing. And you know what the winners and losers were in the old system. And so you can sort of infer that. And I guess if I, you know, I said only two big things, but I think there's probably a third that's worth noting is we've never had a demographic situation like this at a time when social democracies, you're basically, I think, having sort of this

Starting point is 00:37:58 social democracy promise bubble bursting as well. You're in rundown mode on these entitlements and what have you. And that, too, I think, is important. So really is supportive of the first point in terms of the bursting global sovereign debt bubble. So I think these things are the big gears that are really driving things. And they're driving both the domestic economics. I think they're driving in the international geopolitics. And so I think to protect yourself, I think you need to be conservative in your leverage. I think you need to be conservative in your finance. I think you do want to have some leverage, but I think it needs to be smart leverage.

Starting point is 00:38:30 And by smart leverage, I mean, not overly levered, ideally in productive assets or in a house where the loans can't get called, they can't get repriced. You can be locked in for long periods of time. and then being whatever the model says you should be in in bonds, I would take the under on that just pretty systemically over the next two, five, ten years. Again, this is not, hey, this is this month, this quarter. But I think these are the big gears that are really turning faster and faster now. How do you see residential real estate playing out through this?

Starting point is 00:39:07 And I'm going to use this term because somebody had a question about this, but you just kind of addressed the question, which was the World Economic Forum using the term the Great Reset. What does that mean to you? I think you just described it perfectly what that means to you. So back to my original question, which is the residential real estate, the homes that people are living in. What does this mean for property values if you go through a quote unquote great reset? I think it depends where you are. I have a very dear friend who is down in Hilton Head, South Carolina, who owns one of the bigger architecture firms down there. And they have been jammed all year. I mean, the real estate number, even in the depths of the corona crisis, the region,

Starting point is 00:39:50 he would send me the MLS listings and sales and dollars numbers year over year. And they were beating the numbers by like 40 or 50 percent as the world was coming unhinged. And I said, what is going on, man? And he said, oh, said, I had another one last week. Someone from New York, They just came, they have a house down here or they, they've rented down here historically. They came down. They bought a house. They called back to Connecticut, called the agent, said, sell it all, pack up the furniture, send it down whenever coming back.

Starting point is 00:40:19 And he's like, this has happened in every week. Real estate's always been a local game. But I think unless some really big things change relatively soon, I think this migration out of cities into more rural or semi-rural areas and probably in the south. I mean, there was an article this week in the Wall Street Journal on App Ed. I don't remember the gentleman's name, but he runs a big VC fund in San Francisco. And the App Ed in the Wall Street Journal was California, love it and leave it. And he just said, my wife doesn't feel safe walking in San Francisco anymore.

Starting point is 00:40:58 and sometimes the power outages are like a third world country. So I'm packing up my family and I'm packing up my firm and we're going to Austin. And so these two stories I think are just anecdotally, but I think it's going to depend where you are. I think there's this what we are seeing this year could very well be an early stage of a reprioritizing of what people really value, particularly if these big trends of sovereign, municipal, you know, what I'm implying is, you know, if you keep the promises to all of your pensioners in Chicago, you might not be able to pay new cops as well, or you may not be able to hire as many, or you may disenfranchise them. And I'm picking on Chicago, I shouldn't.

Starting point is 00:41:46 It could be Cleveland as well where I live. But the point is, is that there's tradeoffs that have to happen. And as those tradeoffs start to happen, you get sort of this entropy throughout. about the system. And suddenly the things that people that I love being in a city, they go, maybe I don't like being in a city as much. Maybe I want to go live on, you know, outside of Hilton head, or maybe I want to go live down in South Carolina, or maybe I want to go live in Texas. And you're seeing these movement patterns. You can see them in the U-Haul rates and in the destinations, et cetera. So long-winded way of saying is I think some of it, I don't want to get

Starting point is 00:42:21 carried away with it because some of it could be. I think this trend is real because of these big gears. I think it may have gotten turbocharged to a certain extent or maybe overshooting the trend, if you will, because of COVID this year. But on current course and track, I think these big gears are likely to drive sort of a re-prioritizing of what people, where they want to live. And so I think it's just going to depend where you are in terms of resi real estate. So I agree with you on this trend.

Starting point is 00:42:49 I think that this trend is going to continue to persist. Now, whether it stays as aggressive as it has over the last six months, this is the rationale that I think you're seeing it is local governments, state governments, can't print, right? And the policies of some of these various locations, these local governments, have policies of spending as if they can print. As far as tax implications go, it's getting obscene. and absurd to continue to pay such a ridiculously high tax rate for local municipalities or states that you're in. And I think that that trend is absolutely going to keep getting worse. And if true, these migration patterns that we've seen of people moving to areas that have more favorable local and state tax considerations are going to continue to trend in the direction that they've been trending. So I'm going to throw this out to the audience because I know we have people that are real estate investors. If you have a really good chart that shows which regions

Starting point is 00:44:00 have gone up and which regions have gone down in the past six months, please, I beg you, share this with Luke, myself, and Stig on Twitter. And I will retweet it out to everybody to see because I think that you're really on to something here, Luke. I think it's part of the tax consideration. I'm curious, do you agree with that? Do you think that that's maybe what's driving it? Yeah, I think it is. I think it's primarily a tax thing. I mean, I think that's been it. I think this year's been the first time where there's been a little bit of the safety, which is unfortunate, but I think it's primarily taxed. I think that's right. Yeah, I agree with you. I think that the fact that you've seen some social unrest on top of the issue that the person probably

Starting point is 00:44:44 already had with living in the area was simply the icing on the cake and they're just like, I'm out of here. I'm not dealing with this anymore. Hey, so online, a lot of people are wanting to know your thoughts on the Judy Shelton fallout. First, explain who she is for people that aren't familiar with who she is. Sure. So, Judy Shelton was a Fed nominee from Trump. She's the most well known for her. They're considered unconventional or controversial views regarding gold, the gold standard.

Starting point is 00:45:13 And in particular, she's written at least one, maybe two op-eds about that having a neutral reference point or gold-backed bonds to settle trade would go a long way in increasing actually the dynamism of the U.S. economy and sort of undoing some of these imbalances that have accrued and that have caused some of the problems we're seeing in terms of wealth inequality in terms of de-industrialization of the U.S. and that de-industrialization now a bit of a problem as it relates to the U.S. and China relations. So at any rate, Trump nominated her. They brought it up, tabled it, and today they tried to get it through and it didn't go through. My understanding is there's still a chance that it could happen in the next few

Starting point is 00:45:58 days, maybe depending on who's there. But to me, it was somewhat disappointing only because of my longstanding view, our research suggests that really if you don't change the currency system in a way so that you're settling trade in a neutral reserve asset, so whether that's gold-back bonds that, you know, or gold at a floating rate or some sort of neutral reserve asset, the U.S.'s role in the world increasingly gets relegated to us supplying the dollars to China for China to buy up finite assets and grow their own military and grow their global economic influence and reduce our role in the world. And so it is, I was a bit disappointed because I thought it was an interesting potential new voice that maybe she could communicate

Starting point is 00:46:46 and there'd be some cross-pollination of some ideas with the people at the Fed currently of here's what this system has wrought, but it's not meant to be apparently at this point. There's this great article from the FT, early 2019, called How to Diagnose Your Own Dutch Disease. And the United States has Dutch disease. It has Dollar Dutch disease. Dutch disease has came up when the Netherlands found oil or gas. I forget which it was. but the gist of it was is when you have this resource endowment, if managed improperly, it leads the rest of your economy to atrophy because you become, it's so easy to get rich using that and exporting that, that's what you do and everything else goes away.

Starting point is 00:47:25 And this article makes the point, the U.S. is the Saudi Arabia of money. We can produce dollars with a couple keystrokes. And so why would we produce anything else? Let's just produce dollars and have the rest of the world make stuff for us. And at first, it's the greatest deal in the world. And it helped us win the Cold War. And it's helped us drive and get very powerful. But the point is that the U.S. military, late in 2018, said, look, our industrial supply chain is falling apart.

Starting point is 00:47:53 Because for 40 years, you know, we don't, I mean, I saw an article today. We built this new crane in Florida for our containerships built in China. They built a giant container ship crane in China and sent it here. Because presumably because we don't do that anymore. And so when on one level, it's like, okay, I guess that sort of makes sense. But then you go to the guys in the military and say, you know, the politicians say, well, we need to really crack down on China. And the guys in the military are going, are we going to send them dollars to make our stuff

Starting point is 00:48:20 for us? And, you know, in the COVID crisis, hey, China, send us some PPE, please, pretty please. And it's happening across Taiwan. We've outsourced all this stuff to Taiwan, which was all made a whole bunch of sense until the Chinese had the ability to easily take it over and we couldn't do a thing about it, which is the case right now in all likelihood. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination.

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Starting point is 00:51:52 found in the income fund fund's prospectus at fundrise.com slash income. This is a paid advertisement. All right, back to the show. So one of the things that you and I talk about a lot online is gold and Bitcoin. I mean, the price in Bitcoin has just been explosive in 2020. When you look at gold, it was explosive as well, but then it's fizzled out here in the third, going into the fourth quarter, when Bitcoin has really started to perform. I mean, it's been the strongest part of the move in 2020. When you and I have some engagements online, you talk.

Starting point is 00:52:29 Talk about gold having this levered derivative kind of explosive piece to it potentially if it gets to a certain point. Explain this to the listener. I'm just, I'm more interested in just kind of hearing your general thoughts about both of these two forms of holding value. I like them both a lot. So the gold market was allowed to expand in a lot of different ways. Settled futures are a small part of the problem. When you have a cash settled futures contract,

Starting point is 00:53:04 it means you don't have to have the gold. You can settle in cash. Most of them are settled in cash. But once you're settling something with a high stock to flow ratio like gold in cash, the high stock to flow ratio means you can separate physical fundamental, supply demand fundamentals from the price for a very long period of time, which means the cash settlement aspect of it turns into a balance sheet contest. And so I think gold supplies are being bought, and they're getting very tight. And so I'm going to own some gold futures. And that might very well be right.

Starting point is 00:53:33 But if JP Morgan's trading desk comes in with $2 billion notional for sale or whoever that is that comes in in the middle of the night, it doesn't matter. Your stops get run. You create this waterfall effect. Right. And so that's a short term type of aspect in terms of the futures. The bigger deal in my view and as I had it explained to me is the unallocated gold market out of London or the credit gold market out of London where it's, it's, hey, I want to own $100 million worth of gold, done.

Starting point is 00:54:01 And it's not like they found the gold, produced the gold, any, right? So contrasts that with what Michael Saylor is on the tape saying what he had to, what he had to do to buy his 400 million in Bitcoin, it was like a Navy seal rate in terms of trading to make sure he didn't squeeze the price up. And the difference in that amount of liquidity is this credit gold market. And so when I say ultimately, the credit. The gold market can go on and on and on as long as there are no leverage restrictions in terms of that.

Starting point is 00:54:35 There's always been sort of this mythical or conceptual, maybe the better way to put it, something could break that market or force and unwind in that market. They would have to be big. They would have to probably have nukes because they are, gold is not a free market. It has never been a free market. It is a political medal. And that is, I don't think, fully appreciated by everybody. But in theory, if that happened, then the de-leveraging of that system would have to be settled via price.

Starting point is 00:55:06 And, you know, the Komex guys, you know, when they said, hey, we've got one or three percent in the vault. So they took Kyle Bass. Kyle Bass talked about it maybe three, five, seven years ago when he owned some gold for the Texas university system, et cetera. But he went on the vault tour at Comax and he said, what happens if, you know, you guys are three percent reserve? what would happen if someone came in and said, I want it all. They said, oh, no one, that never happens, Kyle. Yeah, but what would happen? Price would settle everything.

Starting point is 00:55:33 And that's the point. Now, it's, again, it's a political medal. The Hunt brothers tried to do that, and they just shut down the exchange, went sales only and squeezed them out, and they lost big. Any average size hedge fund could go into the Comex and clean it out today.

Starting point is 00:55:50 There's a reason why they don't. I don't fully know why they don't, but I've got my suspicions. it's a political metal. It is not a pure market. And so in summary, you're saying that if you really wanted to take it home, it might be an issue. Even if it was a fraction resource situation or how it had to bid the price. However, in that situation, the prices globally play into a factor of what's happening locally.

Starting point is 00:56:14 Well, it would have to be some sort of structural event, right? It would have to be, you know, the one I've used a lot because I think it's maybe the cleanest way you could see it happen. And so things get chippy with the U.S. and Russia and China. And Russia and China get together with Saudi and say, we are only accepting physical gold for our oil at a value of 1,000 barrels of oil per ounce. And immediately everyone in America in the paper market is going, oh, my God, what a great arbitrage opportunity. I'm going to go buy an ounce of paper gold, and I'm going to turn around and again, a thousand barrels of oil. And I'll turn around, sell the 1,000 barrels of oil, and it'll be worth $40,000. And everyone will show up at the paper markets, which will promptly close. You'll be cash settled with the prior days close, and it'll be physical only. And so your paper will, you'll get paid in your paper, but unless you own the physical, that's how you could break that. That's the type of thing that it would have to happen. So let's say we fast forward into August of 2021.

Starting point is 00:57:16 And let's just say for critical thinking drill here, the price of Bitcoin is punching through 100,000 in August 2021. Does this narrative start to run on Wall Street and cause concern as to the utility of gold being a store of value? Is this something that the people that own gold start trying to actually sell it in order to start buying Bitcoin? Or do you see that these are just two totally different worlds? I think it depends on the level you are.

Starting point is 00:57:49 I think if you are, you're the average millionaire, you're the average, you know, 10 millionaire. Yeah, you probably sell some gold. Maybe you get real aggressive, sell all your gold. The market's telling me this. If you are a giant, right? If you are Russia, if you're Saudi, the Russians are not going to dump their gold to buy Bitcoin. Yeah, I completely agree with you. I don't think that would ever happen.

Starting point is 00:58:15 If they wanted to buy Bitcoin but they didn't just print more money, They could conceivably. And as it is, I think they've banned it. I think it's illegal. Not that that's worked per se for them or the currency. But I think I saw some, they were looking at making it illegal. Not that that's, I think, the right thing to do or any of the risk. But the point is, I think the super giants in the system, and I tweeted about this today, at some point, if Bitcoin's punching through these bigger and bigger levels, you're starting to talk about this sort of institutional threat. You are disintermediating the banking system. What do you need a central bank for? Bitcoin's a million dollars a coin, a billion dollars a coin. Who needs a central bank? And that's where I think the higher it goes. At some point, I think there starts to be some institutional pressure for these guys

Starting point is 00:59:08 to defend their franchise. All right. What do we have on our balance sheet that can compete with Bitcoin? Well, look around, guys. We've got mortgages for mom and pop in, you know, Poughkeepsie. Oh, gold. Okay, let's raise the price of that. There's things they can do there. Now, this is, to be clear, this is speculative on my part. It's based on a view that if Bitcoin does what I think it could do as to what you're hypothesizing it could do, which I think is entirely possible, what the stock to flow charts and what have you that are out there suggest it could do. To me, the wild cards in it are that don't get as much airplay that I'm trying to raise. is what do the super giants, so to speak, and that's a term from FOFOA,

Starting point is 00:59:55 what are the super giants in the system and the status quo? Do they just sit there and watch that all, that whole central banking, fiat, senior age franchise, just get taken away like Amazon did to Walmart and K or Walmart may be a bad example, the entire, you know, they bought of these brick and mortar stores, or do they say,

Starting point is 01:00:18 what are we going to use to defend our franchise? What are we going to do? And there's only one thing on their books they can use to defend that franchise that has unlimited upside price. And that's gold. And they have a printing press. So in theory, they could come out and say, Bitcoin's a million. Okay, gold's 100,000.

Starting point is 01:00:37 We'll make a market right there. I don't think that's going to happen. But I'm just saying conceptually, it could. And I'm just thinking in terms of the institutional motivations as Bitcoin. continues to be more and more successful and really sort of stick their nose in it, right? I mean, I had a drink with one of the biggest physical gold traders in the world three years ago. So it would have been like August of 17. We were in New York City and Bitcoin was doing sort of its first.

Starting point is 01:01:07 It wasn't really getting to the heights of that year yet, but it was starting to really ramp up. And unsolicited, we're talking, he goes, you know what Bitcoin is doing what gold would be doing if it didn't have this giant paper market attached to it. And that was exactly what I thought of it. Because I do agree the stock to flow dynamics in terms of the happenings and the supply. They're superior Bitcoin versus gold. They are because you do have the mine supply increases. I disagree with sailors 2% number.

Starting point is 01:01:33 I don't think that's the right number. Gold supplies haven't risen for a couple years actually. And at current prices, I think his supply numbers are overstated. But to his point, they are generally positive over time. And unlike Bitcoin, they're price sensitive, right? So if we woke up tomorrow in gold's 5,000, those supply numbers are going to adjust according to, et cetera. So I think he makes it a very valid point. But I think the price response could be very nonlinear in gold.

Starting point is 01:01:57 And I think I said that to you today where I think there are periods of time where gold could outperform. And I think those periods of time are probably going to be very compressed and probably around political events or just the system being Bitcoin doing so well that it starts to sort of threaten these guys. their franchise. All right. Well, Luke, I know I've learned a ton from you through the years. And one of the things that I think I've learned the most from you is the books that you've written. These two books that you've written, they go by the title, Mr. X interviews, if people want to look it up on Amazon. And we'll have links in the show notes. But your books are fantastic. They're so easy to understand. I know one of the first times I talked to, I was, I was like, wow, this guy has a lot more behind the discussion points and the depth of knowledge

Starting point is 01:02:52 that's there that I wish I could tap into. And I'm telling you, folks, if you do want to tap into that, read his two books. Luke, if people want to learn more about you, give him a handoff where they can learn more about you. Sure. So thank you for those kind words. I appreciate it. Yeah, if you want to learn more about what we're up to, you can check us out at fFTT-LC.com. and I've got a, as Preston will testify,

Starting point is 01:03:15 a fairly active Twitter feed at at Luke Gromman, L-U-K-K-E-R-O-M-E-N. Luke, thanks so much for your time. Absolutely. Thanks for having me on. It's always great catching up. All right, guys, as we're letting Luke Gromman go, we're going to play a question from your audience, and this question comes from Jeff.

Starting point is 01:03:33 Hi, my name's Jeff. I'm from Toronto, and I have a question, I guess, which would be appropriate for Preston. you've made a compelling case for investing in Bitcoin, but having never done it before, I'm just wondering if you could explain to listeners in some detail how we go about safely buying Bitcoin and equally importantly,

Starting point is 01:03:58 how do we store it securely so that we don't become another one of these high-profile hacks that takes place. Thanks very much. And great podcast, guys. So, Jeff, great question. This is something that I get asked a lot on Twitter. It's something that I normally don't respond to because it really comes down to the person and their technical expertise as to how they want to take possession of Bitcoin. I would put this into two different categories. You can take physical possession of the Bitcoins yourself or you can outsource it and you can have somebody else take possession of the Bitcoins. Early on, there was a hack. There was a really famous hack. of an exchange, not Bitcoin, but of an exchange, this was the Mount Gox hack. I think this happened back in 2013. Ever since that event, there's been a lot of folks, especially folks on Twitter that

Starting point is 01:04:53 have been in the space for a very long time, that strongly suggests that everyone should take physical possession of their Bitcoins and not outsource it to some other entity that manage their private keys for them. So there's a riff between those two community. I'm one of the people that would encourage you to take the physical possession of your Bitcoins if you're technically capable of doing it. If you're not good with computers and you're somebody who would lose your private key and just not comfortable with those kinds of things, well, then maybe having somebody else manage that for you that's a reputable source might be a better solution. I can't answer that for you. You've got to answer that one for yourself. So if you're going to take physical possession of your

Starting point is 01:05:38 Bitcoins. There's a couple hardware wallets that I would recommend. The first one would be ledger, another one would be cold card, and the third one would be Trezer. Those are very reputable hardware wallets. And all that that hardware wallet's doing is really holding your private key. It's holding the 24-word mnemonic that makes up your private key. And if that sounds like a bunch of technical gobbly gook for a person listening to this, think of it like this. Think of your Bitcoin is really just being a key to an address. So you've got your house and you've got a key to get into your house. Everybody knows your address to your house, your mailing address, but they don't know what the key looks like in order to get into your front door. And I would explain Bitcoin in a very

Starting point is 01:06:28 similar way where everyone has a public address. Like if I want to send somebody some Bitcoin, I just have to know what their public address is. I have to know what their address is, right? And in order for me to send it, I have to have that key to unlock the Bitcoins to leave my address to go to their address. That hardware wallet that we're talking about is the thing that manages or has that private key inside of it, which is the 24-word mnemonic. So if you've got that and you know what the public addresses that's associated with it, well, that's how you store your bitcoins. So there's another, there's one more hardware wallet that I want to mention. And it's actually on your smartphone and it's by a company called Blockstream and the name of the app is

Starting point is 01:07:13 the green app. This, because it's connected to the internet at all times and people might be, people might want to try to take a picture of their private keys because it's on their smartphone. They might do it like a screenshot with their with their smartphone. I would highly encourage you to not do that. You don't want any type of digital records of your private keys if you're taking physical possession of them. One final note that I would tell you if you're taking physical possession of your bitcoins is think about getting what's called a metal seed storage. This is just a piece of metal in which you would engrave your 24 word mnemonic onto. And in the event that you would have a house fire or you would lose your smartphone or you'd lose your

Starting point is 01:08:03 treasure or whatever it might be, that 24 word mnemonic will always be able to. And in the event that you would have a housefire, restore your account if you haven't. And if you have it saved on a piece of metal, there's probably nothing better than that. All right. So for people who don't want to go through all of that and they don't want to take possession of their private keys, which is my recommendation if you have the technical skills to do it, there's a lot of other options. So you can own a thing called GBT. This is just a stock ticker. Like you go into whatever trading account you've got, type in GBT. It'll come up just like you would an Apple stock. And you can buy GBTC. And this is a trust where somebody else is buying physical bitcoins. They're storing them for you. It's a company

Starting point is 01:08:46 called Gray Scale. I think they have $10 billion worth of Bitcoin under management. And you'll get total access to the price action, but you will not have physical possession of the Bitcoins. And I think that's a really important point. I can't make that decision for you. It's a personal decision. PayPal recently announced that they're doing something similar where you can gain access to Bitcoin, but they're going to continue to hold the private keys at PayPal. Cash app by, this is Jack Dorsey's company. They're doing it. Robin Hood. You can do it on Robin Hood. I recently saw that JP Morgan was doing something with the Winkle Voss's exchange. There's all sorts of businesses, fidelity, I'm sure is going to have access to this shortly. So if

Starting point is 01:09:33 people want to buy it, but they don't want to manage their private keys because they don't feel like they have the technical prowess to do it. These are other options for you to gain access to Bitcoin. So here's what Stig and I have decided to do. We're going to release a show every Wednesday that talks specifically about Bitcoin. This way we're able to keep the stock investing conversations on Saturday. And we can talk about this new and emerging technology that so many people have an interest in on Wednesdays. if this is something that does not interest you, I highly encourage you to not listen to the Wednesday show.

Starting point is 01:10:08 Just skip over it. And then on Saturday, the normal show, the normal stuff that we cover is going to come out then. If it is something you want to learn more about, please download the show on Wednesdays. We're going to bring in some of the most impressive, technically skilled guests that can talk this stuff in so much detail,

Starting point is 01:10:25 way more than Stig and I can do. But we're going to be the ones asking the questions. And hopefully pulling this information and just, the best resources for you to learn right along with us as to what in the world this is all about. Our first show is actually going to come out this Wednesday right before Thanksgiving. It's already recorded and it is one heck of a conversation. My mind was blown at the end of this conversation and I would highly encourage you to check it out if you do have an interest in this stuff. If you don't, no big deal. We'll see you guys again on the following Saturday.

Starting point is 01:10:59 So Jeff, really appreciate you asking this awesome question for asking this. We're going to give you free access to our TIP finance tool. It's got all sorts of things on there like being able to do intrinsic value assessments, momentum tools, portfolio tools to help manage your correlation between your various picks. And we're really excited to be able to give that to you. So thanks for asking a great question. And if anybody else wants to get a question played on the show, go to AsktheInvesters.com and record your question there.

Starting point is 01:11:24 And if it gets played, you get free access to our TIP finance tool. All right. That's all we have for this week's show. Be sure to check out the new release on Wednesdays, and we look forward to bringing that content to you. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for listening to TIP. To access our show notes, courses, or forums,

Starting point is 01:11:42 go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decisions, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permissions must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

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