We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP331: Inflation w/ Cullen Roche
Episode Date: January 10, 2021On today's show, we bring back investment expert, Cullen Roche, to talk about inflation, the state of the economy, and whether there is a rational argument for stocks trading at 50x earnings. IN THIS... EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN: Why money supply expansion is not equal to inflation Understanding the new rules of bond investing in today’s inflation and interest rate environment How to protect your portfolio against inflation Whether there is a rational argument for stocks to be trading at 50 times earnings BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. Preston and Stig’s interview with Cullen Roche about equities and COVID-19 impact Preston and Stig’s interview with Cullen Roche about contrarian investing Cullen Roche’s website, Pragmatic Capitalism Cullen Roche’s comprehensive resource, Understanding Money Ray Dalio’s “Ask me Anything” on Reddit Preston: Twitter | LinkedIn Stig: Twitter | LinkedIn NEW TO THE SHOW? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Stay up-to-date on financial markets and investing strategies through our daily newsletter, We Study Markets. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: Hardblock AnchorWatch Cape Intuit Shopify Vanta reMarkable Abundant Mines HELP US OUT! Help us reach new listeners by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! It takes less than 30 seconds, and really helps our show grow, which allows us to bring on even better guests for you all! Thank you – we really appreciate it! Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm
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You're listening to TIP.
On today's show, we have a good friend Colin Rhodes with us.
Colin has managed hundreds of millions of dollars for the past two decades,
and is always a wealth of information.
During the 2008 financial crash,
Colin's private investment partnership was up 15% for the year.
He's the founder of Pomeratic Capitalism,
the author of multiple investing books,
and a regular guest on Bloomberg and major financial news outlets.
On today's show, we talk about inflation, the state of the economy,
and whether there is a rational argument for stocks to be trading in 50 times earnings.
So with that, let's go ahead and get started.
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.
Welcome to the show. I'm your host Dick Broderson.
Today I'm here with one of our good friends of We Study Billionaires.
Thank you so much for joining me here today, Colin.
Thanks for having me on.
So, Colin, let's jump right into the first question.
And that question is about money supply.
What you previously said here in the show is that it doesn't tell you anything that the
money supply is going to grow because that's just an operational reality of the way we
structure a debt-based financial system.
And you also said that the amount of deposits and the amount of loans are always going to
grow in the long term. So going into this, really also to preface this conversation with you,
could you please elaborate more on that and how the money supply impacts the economy?
So obviously money is an extremely important component of what goes into the economy, how we
measure blation and things like that. One of the, I think, problems that I have with,
for instance, some people might be surprised to hear this. I used to be a pretty strict adherent
of the Austrian School of Economics, kind of coming out of college, I read a lot of Mises
and Hayek. And I think that one of the problems I eventually ran into working in the financial
industry and working specifically with a lot of bankers and people that were literally
the money creators in the economy was that the Austrian school defines inflation as an
increase in the money supply. And I started to find this problematic because if you look at the
money supply over the course of history, it basically always expands. Over any really long time
horizon, the money supply will always expand. And the reason for that is basic in that essentially,
when you look at what really creates money, a lot of people think that the central bank is the
money creator. And really, what we kind of found coming out of the financial crisis, especially
with like quantitative easing, was that when the Fed makes reserves, so the Fed makes, the Fed makes,
It makes reserves, which is money for banks, and it's only in the banking system.
The reserve money or money as reserves doesn't get outside of the banking system.
So we kind of know like this whole concept of the money multiplier is misleading it best
in that when the Fed creates $1 of reserves, this doesn't necessarily multiply into
$10 of deposits or $10 of loans.
And that's the kicker is that loans create deposits, okay?
So when a bank makes a loan, they're creating a new deposit liability for the bank.
That's an asset for the borrower, basically.
The real kicker with this is that as the economy grows over time and expands, people want more
money.
They need to borrow more to produce things.
And the banking system is just sort of the liquidity provider that they create the deposits
it's through a loan agreement, essentially, that literally liquidates the economy.
It creates the liquidity that makes it possible to go out and, say, invest in new technologies
that we think might create a return on investment or to build a new home or to purchase
existing homes or there's a lot of bad uses for credit.
I mean, you could argue that, for instance, a high rate credit card is, you know,
that you're just buying frivolous nonsense with is a really bad use of credit. But even that is an
expansion of the money supply. And that's just kind of a function of growing population and
growing demand for goods and services over time. And so if you look at the quantity of loans
and deposits over any long historical period, they're always trending up. I mean, always
virtually over any really long time period. And that, in a way, is actually a good thing. Because
it means that there's more demand in the economy. There is more output being created because
people are using a lot of this. And this is the big kicker, is that a lot of the borrowing that's
done is done for real investment. It's done to innovate. It's done to build homes. And a lot of
this is just accounting. So when the money supply expands, they're not creating liabilities. We like to
talk in the sort of binary ways where people will tend to focus on only one half of the equation.
They'll sort of demean debt in a way that has a very negative connotation.
And the reality is that, yeah, debt can be really bad, but debt can also be really good
because the side of a liability is an asset.
When somebody takes out a new loan, there are not just liabilities.
There isn't just the debt.
There are the assets that are created.
And those assets are potentially good.
They're potentially bad.
There's no like this or that when someone takes out.
a loan. And the result of borrowing really depends on, well, what ends up being done with the loan?
When I go to a bank, let's say I want to build a new home or something and, you know, I go to
the bank to take out a new loan, I get an asset deposit that is mine. I have a liability in the
loan. The bank has an asset that is the loan and the deposit liability. So the balance sheets
are just completely balanced right there. The financial balance sheets are completely balanced.
But if I then take that money and I take those deposits and I go out and with just sheer will
and hard work, I go out and I build a home and I, let's say, then repay the loan at the end of the
terms by selling that home, the balance sheets compress.
The balance sheets go right back to where they were when I repay the loan because loans
create deposits, but repaying loans destroys deposits.
So the balance sheets compressed right back to where they were and from the start.
But what's left over?
We have a house.
We have a real asset.
So we are demonstrably better off after all of this because I borrowed and used the debt in a way that was productive.
And that's the ultimate kicker with inflation and money supply and all these things.
It's not just about how much money is being produced, but it's more important to understand
Well, what is the money really being used for? And are we creating more output? Are we creating more
goods and services that create demand essentially for future money that makes the whole economy
viable in the long run? I guess the follow question to that would be now that we've seen,
say, from November 2019 to November 2020, we've seen the money supply expansion of 25%. Does that
mean that we have 25% inflation?
You know, what is money?
I like to think of money on a, I call it a scale of moneyness because money to me is
really a medium of exchange.
It is just the thing that is most liquid that gives you access to goods and services
essentially.
But there are different things that are good for that in different environments.
I mean, for instance, I mean, let's say that COVID ravages the whole economy.
We very well could be in an environment where gold, for instance, is really good for instance,
literally the best form of money because it's the thing that people will accept essentially for
barter as money. In a modern technologically advanced economy, deposits are basically the
ultimate form of money because they're the thing that is most widely created and acceptable
across the entire economy. You can use deposits for virtually anything to purchase any goods
and services in a modern technology-based economy. So the problem with the way that a lot of
of people define money is, for instance, a lot of professional macroeconomists will define real
money as the stuff that the government creates, the actual physical currency, the reserve
currency, as in literally bank reserves that the Federal Reserve creates, things like that,
that they would argue are the real forms of money. And so you have all these sort of conflicting
definitions and narratives about what is not only real money, but how that will actually
filter into causing inflation. And so that's a big issue. I've seen, for instance, in recent weeks,
I've seen a lot of charts about how M1 has increased by some huge amount in the last few weeks.
And if you actually dig deeper into it and you look at something like M2 in the United States,
M2 hasn't actually changed. And the reason why M1 increased and M2 didn't change is because
what essentially happened was you had something that is included in M1, which is basically
savings deposits and it was converted into demand deposits, which at the M2 level, there was no
change because there was just a conversion. But because the demand deposits aren't in M1,
you had this sort of like technical increase in M1 that a lot of people would look at and say,
oh, this is going to cause huge inflation. And really, it was just sort of an accounting chain.
You have all these sorts of competing narratives and definitions of things.
And ultimately, I think when we look at COVID, there is no denying that COVID has increased
the money supply by virtually any definition.
The response to COVID was colossal.
We talked last time about how I'm a lot more concerned about future inflation than I was
coming out of 2000. I was actually pretty much a not a deflationist coming out of 2008,
but a disinflationist, meaning that I believe that the rate of inflation was going to continue
to decline. So the positive rate of inflation would continue to decline. I'm much more concerned
at this time that you could see real inflation just because the response has been so humongous.
For instance, I mean, we're talking about the latest stimulus in the United States here,
which was roughly $900 billion, that's bigger than the entire fiscal stimulus that we enacted
in 2008. And people are complaining that this was tiny, that this wasn't big enough.
So putting things in perspective, and this is in addition to the CARES Act, which was, you know,
$2 trillion plus not including all the Fed policies and things like that. So the response here
has been humongous. There has been, you know, by any technical definition, there has been,
you know, let's just rather than using the term money, let's just say there's been a lot of
financial assets created. And those financial assets, they are being held by the private sector
and they've enriched the private sector in financial terms. You know, my big concern with
inflation going forward is not just you've created a lot of financial assets in the last year,
but that we've seen a lot of real disruptions in supply chains that we're seeing filter
through the real economy in a meaningful way that in the next two to three years could,
I'm not worried about a hyperinflation, but I think you could easily be at an environment
where we're at the 2018, 2019 levels of inflation or much higher than that, say three,
four percent inflation by that point where the Fed is really backtracking.
They're really on their heels jawboning about having to potentially raise rates.
and concerned that all these big policies worked and maybe worked a little better than they had hoped.
So let's continue talking about inflation and some of your thoughts on that, because if we look at
the five-year swap rate in the UK, United States, and also in continental Europe, it seems
like the inflation expectations have turned upwards. How do we as investors persist ourselves
accordingly if we agree with you and agree with the market that this trend of rising inflation
continues?
I think that from a domestic currency perspective, you just want to be somewhat hedged against
that risk because you, I mean, for instance, in the fixed income markets, I mean, the problem
with low interest rates when you're a bond investor is that when you have low rates, the percentage
increases and interest rates impact your bond investments a lot more just because the math
is so much dirtier about it. For instance, when you have an interest rate that's 10%,
and interest rates rise by 1%, well, you only had a 10% principal impact. So in terms of a 1%
interest rate, when interest rates rise 1%, you've had a 100% principal impact. So mathematically, you know, you're
not earning the same amount of interest, which basically means you're not earning the same amount
of coupon protection from your fixed income payments as interest rates are rising. So that 1% increase
in rates has a much bigger impact on your principal because over the course of the year,
you're not earning that high interest rate that you would have been, for instance, when interest
rates are 10%. So you have less interest rate protection when interest rates are low because you're
just naturally earning a lower coupon from your starting point. So fixed income investors are
sort of exposed in an unusually negative way to rising interest rates in a low interest rate
environment if they're exposed to very long duration instruments. So in the fixed income markets,
you know, if inflation is your worry, you're eventually worried about interest rates increasing.
And so you would want to be for certain shorter on the maturity.
curve if you're a fixed income investor, I like to think of stocks very similarly to bonds
in that I like thinking of all financial assets as having sort of a duration. And to me,
stocks are just, they're an instrument that basically has either a perpetual duration or at
minimum of very, very long duration, 30, 40, 50 years. And that's part of what makes them so
volatile is that they, by definition, because they're such long-term instruments, they are more
volatile because their income streamer are less predictable. They provide the investors or the underlying
financial asset owners with so much less protection from the way that they earn their income over
time because corporations are just naturally long-term entities. The way they earn their cash flows
is very long-term by nature. And so from a stock market perspective, if you're worried about
rising interest rates, well, you're worried about the way that those cash flows are going to
ultimately be repaid. And the kicker with that is that if you have rising interest rates,
you have probably rising inflation. And inflation makes managing a corporation very difficult
because it disrupts supply chains, or you could argue that inflation is evidence of a supply
chain disruption. And so by definition, when you have high inflation, you just have a lot more
uncertainty inside of a corporation. And so this makes the whole management and cash flow management
of a corporation much more difficult to predict over time. And so the cash flow streams become
less predictable. So stocks should become not only more volatile, but they should become more
volatile in specific types of sectors. And so if you're worried about domestic inflation,
I think the obvious answer is that you'd want to be globally allocated. So allocating outside
of the domestic economy is generally going to be one way to protect against a higher rate of
inflation. The obvious one is to own real goods and services. You want to be the owner of stuff.
So if you can't be the owner of a corporation itself, you'd want to be the owner of physical assets,
whether it's real estate or even things like precious metals. And then going looking kind of within
the domestic stock markets, you're someone that say you still want to own a piece of your
domestic economy, I would argue that you're probably better off owning or at least diversifying
into something like a value type of stock versus a growth stock because typically what we find
with value stocks is that they tend to be safer businesses by nature. So for instance, you
You know, you might argue that the typical sort of, you know, the classical sort of Warren Buffett
type of value stocks, the old brick and mortar, the boring, reliable types of businesses,
maybe the ones that aren't quite as sexy as the, you know, the peloton's and the Facebooks
of the world, that those are going to do better a rising inflation.
They're more boring businesses.
They have more predictable cash flow streams.
And so something like a Facebook, you know, potentially becomes a lot less.
attractive in a high inflation environment just because their cash flow streams are somewhat
unpredictable. They're dependent on things that are not necessarily based on the real economy,
but based on sort of this, you know, internet-based economy and whether or not the demand is there
for those things consistently in a high inflation environment versus are people going to continue
to pay their utility bill? It becomes a less certain bet. So value versus growth becomes sort of
way to diversify within the domestic economy if you're worried about inflation.
Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
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Back to the show.
It's interesting that you would say that, Colin, because last time we did,
talked about how growth stocks typically perform better than value stocks in a low inflation environment.
Now, if we continue this train of thought, growth stocks also perform better than value stocks
with interest rate being so low, since the discount rate is correspondingly low.
And this is also giving the assumption that you don't discount with something like the money
supply or something like that, but you would discount with something like the treasury rate
or similar to that.
And I've been really trying to wrap my head around this.
Can we really consider future earnings being almost equivalent earnings today because of the low
interest rate?
And how should we as investors look at the valuation between value?
And let's just call that earnings now and then growth stocks and let's call that earnings later,
giving this way of discounting back with something very close to zero.
It's always kind of confounded me that the way that I think people tend to, for instance,
they think of the equity risk premium as something is.
being at least highly impacted by the discount rate with a zero percent interest rate. A lot of people
would argue that the equity risk premium, basically the premium that equities deserve to earn
over bonds is vastly superior than it is when interest rates are high. And to me, I've always
found that using interest rates as the kind of central component of a valuation metric can be
misleading because interest rates are a function of future inflation expectations. So, you know, I would
say that I prefer to use the term the equity inflation premium, that when interest rates are low,
it really means that inflation is low and that future inflation expectations are low.
So the Fed, for instance, they have interest rates at zero because they expect inflation to remain
really low. If inflation was to rear its head in the next few years, the Fed would start
raising interest rates over time to try to get ahead, to try to create more demand for money by
getting people to basically earn an interest rate that makes them want to hold more money,
in essence, to kind of oversimplify things. So to me, this really isn't about interest rates.
This is about really understanding what is the future rate of inflation going to be. And there's
no ironclad rule that says that when inflation rises and let's say interest rates rise,
correspondingly, there's no ironclad rule that says that equities have to earn more or less
premium inside of those environments. I mean, if you were an investor in Zimbabwean corporations
when their inflation was raging out of control and the Zimbabwe and central bank was raising
interest rates, well, you know, no one was talking about an equity risk premium in that
environment. You know, the rate of profit is for most corporations inside of an environment.
that because your economy is just being completely ravaged by the rate of inflation that's going on.
And so we kind of have this privilege of in the United States having, you're not just low
inflation, but very stable inflation, where we have a great amount of predictability.
So to me, you know, to kind of answer your question, I think people would be better off
looking at inflation rates in the future. When you make an interest rate bet of any type,
you're really making an inflation bet.
And if you think that inflation is going to remain low in the next five to 10 years,
well, you're really making a bet that the Fed is right, basically,
that the Fed is going to keep interest rates low and that you're not going to really see
a high rate of inflation.
And if that's the situation, then, well, I mean, all the trends that have been in place
basically for the last, you know, 20 years are going to continue.
Values are going to continue to be terrible versus growth.
The U.S. domestic economy probably continues to outperform foreign stocks, just especially on a domestic
currency basis. And real assets do okayish versus everything else. So if you believe in the
opposite, if you believe that inflation is going to be high, then you go out and you kind of diversify
into all the things we talked about in the previous segment. But to me, interest rates kind
of confuse the whole narrative because the interest rate is just set based on what the future
inflation expectations are going to be.
So keeping that in mind what you just said, I have to ask, one of the billionaires that we
follow closely here on we studied billionaires is billionaire Red Alio.
And he was recently doing an Ask Me Anything on Reddit.
And we will, of course, make sure to link to that in the show notes.
And so he was asked whether he thought that the current equity prices were a house of cuts.
He answered with bond interest rates where they are, bonds are trading at roughly 75 times
earnings. With the amount of money out there and cash being such a bad alternative, there is no good
reason that stocks shouldn't trade at 50 times earnings. And just to give the list of some
context, we're trading around 33 times earnings in the U.S. right now. So do you agree with that
assessment? You're essentially arguing that this paradigm that we're in is sustainable and going to be
prolonged. So you're basically arguing that this environment of very low inflation,
with really poor demographic trends and rapidly changing technological changes, you're basically
arguing that that is the dominant macro paradigm that we're not just in, but that we're going to
continue to be in that paradigm. People have been saying, for instance, with like the CAPE ratio,
they've been saying, oh, valuations are too high, they've got to come down, you know, and people
have been saying that for 20 years. But the real fact of the matter is that as long as we're in this
sort of alternative, an economist would call it an alternative equilibrium, basically, that
the economy has shifted into a new equilibrium where now the current equilibrium is this
low rate of inflation and this sort of stagnant growth period where certain types of firms
just do really, really well inside of that type of environment. And growth stocks, obviously,
are the big beneficiaries of something like that because their cash flow streams because
this becomes so predictable to a large degree. But if we're in this new paradigm of permanently low
inflation, a sort of Japanification of the entire developed world economy, there's a justification.
You could argue that there's a rational argument for why valuations are the way they are in that
environment. And you could argue that if we were to, let's say the rate of inflation was to go
lower. Let's say that we become more Japanese in the next 10 or 20 years. Inflation falls to
zero or interest rates go negative like they are in a lot of European countries. Yeah, you could argue
that the corresponding valuations are going to be even higher because the demand for these really
high-flying, crazy expensive stocks become more attractive versus everything else because the rate of
inflation is so low that corporate cash flows are just, they're the obvious beneficiary of all of this.
You know, they become the hot potato that everybody wants to own because there's kind of nowhere else
to earn such a reliable, relatively low risk type of return. Is that the environment that is
going to continue? I mean, me personally, I think that we are in an environment where you're not
likely to go back to the 1970s. So I just don't think that there's the dynamics for, say,
double-digit high inflation. But would I be comfortable being at, let's say, the 10-year
treasury right now is at 1%. Would I be, from a risk management perspective, would I be more
comfortable betting on a three-year treasury bond versus a 0.5 or 0% 10-year treasury bond in the next
10 years, I would certainly want to be hedged against the 3% outcome because I view it as such
an asymmetric bet in my mind, given the way that the politics and the government response seems
to be changing. And to me, that's one of the big kickers here is that we do seem to be
entering this different paradigm where, and this is the thing where Dahlio might be wrong about
this, is that from a political perspective, you're seeing a real serious sea change, especially
the way that economists view inflation and fiscal policy. And, you know, coming out of the financial
crisis, you will never see fiscal packages that the likes of what Europe has agreed to recently.
Austerity was the name of the game. You had to, you know, suffer a little bit to be able to grow.
And that was the way that macroeconomists, a lot of macroeconomists viewed the policy response
in 2008, 2009, the current environment is completely different. I mean, we just spent,
I can't even keep track of the numbers, three, four, five trillion dollars this year in the
United States. And hardly anyone is batting an eyelash at that. You know, the numbers are just
so big that the way we've seen just a huge sea change in the mentality in the way that people
perceive fiscal policy and government spending relative to the risk of inflation is, you know,
is such a huge sea change that that to me feels like a trend that is not only just starting,
but is going to continue into the next 10, 20 years. We just had one of the biggest recessions
ever in economic history. And all we did was we slammed a ton of money at it. And what happened?
The economy just snapped right back. What do you think policymakers are going to do the next time
we have a big recession, they're going to do the same exact type of thing. So fiscal policy is going
to be front and center. And the worrisome thing, the reason I say this is such an asymmetric
bet to me is that no one knows what really causes inflation. I mean, there's sort of general
theories about, oh, well, more money chases more goods. But, you know, that theory to some degree
has been debunked in that, you know, we printed a lot of money coming out of 2008. And what did we
get. We got even lower rates of inflation over time. No one really knows all of the moving parts that
really contributes to a high inflation. And this is just a much more confusing phenomenon than
most people have made it out to be, and certainly the way that economic textbooks have made
it out to be. And that's worrisome in that let's say we had this huge explosion in fiscal policy.
Well, let's say we do find out that to avoid the term money, more financial assets is really
the way to create more inflation in certain types of economies.
Well, we're going to find out whether or not that's true in the coming five to 10 years
potentially.
So that, to me, the political sea change makes this a really somewhat asymmetric bet that
if you're betting on the permanently low inflation, you are to a certain degree.
you're betting that the politics aren't going to change.
And I don't know, I feel like the politics are starting to change.
The sort of the MMT advocates of the world and the Bernie Sanders of the world are going
to become more vocal types in creating this, I think, sort of perception that fiscal policy
doesn't have a lot of downside.
And I've been a big advocate of actually fiscal responses for the last 10 years, but there's
something about the C change here that it starts to make me a little uncomfortable. And from
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All right.
Back to the show.
So let's continue talking about inflation here because inflation is seen by many as the savior
of the growing public debt to GDP ratio.
And many countries have in the past deliberately used this.
and this meaning inflation as a tool to reset the debt situation.
Do you think that using inflation to erase debt or at least minimize debt is a viable solution
in Europe and in the US and what would be the potential negative consequences if that was the
approach that was taken?
The first thing I would say is that the debt to GDP ratio, I don't know if there's anything
about that number that is really meaningful. You know, we use it as kind of a general barometer
of what's going on, but I don't know what this number really tells us. You know, there was a
famous study back in, I can't remember 2009 or 2010, Reinhard and Rogoff came out with a paper,
and then they later released, I think, the Excel spreadsheet that they used. And they had argued that
something like a 90% debt to GDP ratio was kind of like the breaking point for government
and debt basically. And a lot of people had a problem with that because there's, I mean,
first of all, there's a lot of evidence that that's just empirically wrong. I mean, Japan has
a, what, something like a 250 or 300 percent debt to GDP ratio. And they have crazy
low inflation and have for, you know, 20 years. So there doesn't seem to be anything magical
about this line. But the funny thing with the Ryan Hart Rogoff study was that it ultimately
had a spreadsheet error, like a basic math error in the spreadsheet where they,
had come up with this number, not in just a sort of phony theoretical way, but they made a basic
math mistake within it. So I don't know that there's anything about this number that is really
that meaningful to begin with. And kind of, again, going back to the balance sheet accounting
of it, to me, people just, I think, talk about debt in a sort of lazy way where they say,
oh, well, more debt is bad. And, well, again, more debt. It doesn't just,
mean more liabilities. It also means more assets. And there's, I'm by no means a believer in the
idea that the government necessarily creates financial assets and does so efficiently,
but there's nothing necessarily negative about creating more debt. And if you have an economy
where the underlying private sector is just super, super productive, well, you know, if you're
creating more debt, in theory, you might have a big multiplier effect within that economy where
more assets actually, they liquefy the domestic economy in a way where that economy might
actually become even more productive because it hasn't an underlying inherent level of
productivity already in it where maybe you just didn't have enough liquidity to begin with.
Maybe there were tons and tons of entrepreneurs out there that had great ideas that were
going to change the world in really big, meaningful ways. And they just didn't have the liquidity
to be able to enact those ideas. There's a chance.
that what we're seeing here with a lot of this government stimulus and the way that it hasn't been
really explosively inflationary, there's some evidence that that's actually what's happening,
that like you're adding liquidity to the economy, which is just, you know, in a lot of ways,
I think creating a little bit of a multiplier effect where you're giving liquidity to people
that really just needed it and that the domestic economy might just benefit from having that
greater amount of liquidity, but there's nothing, you know, again, kind of trying to hammer home
the point that there's nothing necessarily good or bad about debt in and of itself. And that,
you know, the other thing is that I think when people look at government finances, they'll have a
tendency to think of them in sort of household terms. And so a lot of people talk about, for instance,
repaying the national debt. And this is basically just a big fallacy of composition in that
the national debt will never get repaid. You literally cannot repay the national debt without,
again, reducing the size of the balance sheet correspondingly on the asset side. And the kicker is
is that the government debt is a humongous portion of the private sector's financial assets in
that people who have social security or government pensions or even just bond investors
broadly who own all of these assets. These are assets that they own. And in order to repay the
government debt, you're not just repay the liability side of the balance sheet. You'd have to
shrink the asset side of the balance sheet. And at an aggregate economic level, really financial
assets, they don't get repaid. And you actually don't want them to be repaid over the long term.
I mean, going back to the household sector, for instance, when I talked about that example earlier,
or building the home where I borrowed money to build the home, you don't want people to just
be repaying all those loans.
What ends up happening over time is that, especially as the population grows, you just
have more and more debt.
But again, you not only have more liabilities, you have more assets.
And over the course of any really long economic period, you're just going to see a natural
growth in both the assets and the liabilities, mainly because the other component of the
balance sheet is equity. So the equity component is going to grow over time. Our net worths are going
to grow because ultimately the value of our assets should in a healthy economy expand versus the
value of the liabilities, which creates net worth, which ultimately is the real and non-financial
capital that makes all of the economy sustainable over very long periods of time. So to me,
I think people are, you know, kind of going back to the confusion and the question marks around
what causes inflation. I think a lot of people look at government debt and they automatically
say, well, more government debt is bad. And so this or that ratio will contribute to inflation.
And I think the sort of scary thing about inflation is that no one knows what level of government
debt causes inflation or causes, you know, the economy to start performing worse or,
not. And that's the problem with big ratios, like a debt to GDP ratio or this idea that you
want to inflate your way out of debt because ultimately we don't know the actual relationship
between government debt and inflation. And so to specifically answer the question of whether
inflation you can really grow the inflation rate to retire or to kind of erase debt over
time. Well, inflation is not a good thing. I mean, in a perfect world, you would have basically a
zero percent inflation rate. You know, you'd have growing money supply over time because
people would be borrowing more money and creating more things. We'd be so innovative and so
productive that, you know, our technology would put a downward pressure on the rate of inflation
to the point where there was virtually zero inflation. Our economy is not perfect like that
because there really is scarcity in the economy, especially on the real side of things. And we see that,
you know, anyone who's tried to buy things during COVID knows, you know, how true that is. I mean,
I've looked at the price of a two by four sort of jokingly over the course of the last few years as I've
been building my house here and just watch the price explode during COVID because of the
scarcity of a two by four during the last year. So these dynamics are real and you're likely to pretty much always
have some positive rate of inflation just because real resources really are scarce.
And so that's going to create dynamics where we've created this technology that is sort of
a double-edged sword in that we create money from nothing, but we can't create the corresponding
goods and services from nothing. But you would never use inflation to grow your way out of debt
because very high rates of inflation are a sign of huge economic problems. I mean, when you have
an economy where you go from, say, 10% to 100% inflation, your economy is essentially broken.
I mean, people talk about the problems that we have in the United States where we have
very low rates of inflation and low growth. But boy, those things are a blessing compared to
very high inflation because very high inflation, it will ruin everyone's life. You know,
we talk about the problems that you have with low inflation where there's inequality
and things maybe aren't quite as good as they could be, but it very, very high inflation ruins
everyone's life. It doesn't just ruin the poor people's lives or, you know, certain components
of the economy. And so the whole idea that you'd want to inflate your way out of debt,
it's just sort of, I don't know, it seems sort of nonsensical to me. And, you know, why would you
blow your whole body up to save yourself from what you view as sort of a miserable life?
It just doesn't make any sense to me. Because once you've destroyed it.
the domestic economy, yeah, you might be able to come out and say, oh, we reduced our,
you know, our real debt levels, but we did so by blowing up the whole system. It doesn't make a lot
of sense to me. So I don't think that's what policymakers are trying to do. I think policymakers are,
you know, when they're enacting these policies, I think they're really trying to grow their way
out of debt. They know that inflation is going to be a byproduct of increased demand to some
degree, just because of the basic dynamics I was talking about earlier, but they're really
trying to grow their way out of debt.
Let's talk about that strategy, because another way for a country to repay its debt is
to grow this economy.
And as long as the economy grows at a higher nominal rate than the normal interest rate,
meaning the debt, in time, debt will be repaid.
And so that really takes me to the next point about productivity.
We often hear productivity mentioned in various debates.
and read about the need to increase productivity.
So let's first start by defining what is productivity?
Well, this is one of those sort of macroeconomic debates that nobody really knows the answer to.
So, I mean, productivity at the most basic level is just output per hour.
You know, how much stuff are we creating per unit of work, basically?
So one of the things that a lot of people find disconcerting about the last 20 to 30 years,
really since the 1970s is that the rate of productivity has declined and nobody really knows why.
And I don't know how much of this is a just sort of a natural sort of basic trend that's
occurring in the economy because of, I'll give you my personal view on the whole productivity
debate is that basically, sure, people have become slightly less productive in terms of
the amount of real stuff we produce, but that the way we quantify whether or not that's really
impacted our lives positively or negatively is very, very subjective. And a lot of people use
this as sort of a measure of our living standards over time. And I would argue that since the
1970s, for instance, the BLS, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, releases a survey every like 10 years.
it shows the household share of income expenditures as a percentage of total necessities.
And the basic, we're talking very basic necessities.
And the three big metrics that they use are food, housing, and apparel.
And if you look at the three of those, the housing component has obviously increased.
But the apparel and food component as a share of household income expenditures has declined
really significantly.
In total, the share of that has declined since 1970 from.
from about 58% to about 45%.
So the amount of money that we spend on what we deem as very basic necessities has declined
substantially.
And sure, even if we've become less productive, our living standards haven't necessarily
declined over that period of time.
And a modern home is a technological miracle from top to bottom.
The insulation is magnitudes better.
the things you can't even see.
The drywall is better.
You know, when I was building my house here, I couldn't believe how different every single
material was all along the way.
I mean, I used things in our foundation construction that epoxyes that have been invented
in the last 10 years, that these things, you couldn't blow them up with dynamite.
I mean, these are things that are just leaps and bounds superior to everything that existed
in the 1970s.
And so when people talk about, you know, our living standards and productivity, you get
a lot of very subjective ideas that go into this.
And the BLS, they come under attack a lot because they, you know, like hedonic adjustments
and things like that.
This is all very subjective.
You know, you could argue they're very somewhat sloppy necessarily so about the way
they sort of subjectively, you know, attribute gains to a lot of these things.
But the world's just become really, really complex in the last 10, 20 years, where I think that
the idea of productivity gains and whether or not we're better off as an entire economy
has become so subjective.
And to a large degree, a lot of this is great in that, for instance, in today's economy,
people would argue that a college education and health care are now necessities.
100 years ago, you would never make that argument.
Nobody went to college 100 years ago.
Very, very few people did.
Nobody had good access to good health care 100 years ago.
But objectively, we now consider those things to be necessities in a modern economy.
That alone is evidence that regardless of how productive we are or how much stuff we create,
our living standards have increased over this time.
I'm not making excuses for things like inequality.
There's definitely been a lot of winners and losers over the course of time.
But in the aggregate, I don't think you can make a really convincing argument that our living
standards have declined over the last 30 or 40 years, regardless of productivity.
So in the way we measure these things, because a lot of it's just so subjective.
And I think that we just have a very hard time objectively analyzing these things.
because living standards to a large degree, they're like beauty to some degree. I mean, you know, back in the Roman
empire, a big overweight woman was considered beautiful. And today, we look at runway models, these,
you know, pencil thin women, and that's the essence of beauty in today's economy or today's
society. And so there's so much subjectivity about the way we perceive these things. And I think
living standards are very, very similar.
So let's go back to this theme of corona and it's on everyone's minds.
Assuming that we use 2019 as the benchmark and that the world will have somewhat normalized
in 2022 and we can always talk about what a normalized world would look like today.
But which countries and regions do you expect that would have whether the pandemic best
measured in economic growth. And how should we as investors position ourselves accordingly?
Yeah, so this is kind of the big question coming out of really since the financial crisis
was the whole monetary policy versus fiscal policy response. I think one of the things that people
missed, you know, I was saying I was really vocal in April about this idea that a lot of people
thought the stimulus was going to be really bad for the economy. And my argument was basically
the economy was going to be really good for whether or not it was good for households,
whether or not it was targeted really efficiently was meaningless for a stock market investor
because the basic math of corporate profits is that when the cover spends more money,
where does that money go ultimately? Well, if you assume, for instance, that the personal
savings rate during a recession, it increases. Okay, so if the government's sending checks to
households, households are saving that. But as the economy heals over time, and let's just say
that regardless of what the government is doing, that the economy heals naturally over time.
Let's say we get a vaccine, COVID slowly goes away. Well, all that spending went to households.
They saved the money. What ultimately happens with it? If the savings rate declines, all else equal,
that money ends up going to corporations.
That's where the money flows.
Okay.
So my ultimate argument was basically that when the government spent all that money back in April,
that eventually you were going to see,
assuming that COVID goes away and that the economy normalizes to some degree,
you were going to see all this money hit corporate balance sheets at some point.
It was all going to flow down to the bottom line of corporations
because that's the basic math of the profits equation.
when you look at the aggregate economy.
And of course, I'm assuming that the savings rate will decline,
but that's pretty much, you know,
if I had to bet the farm on something happening,
it would be that Americans will not save money in the future,
that they will spend, spend, spend,
and they ultimately, the personal savings rate will decline
as the economy heals over time.
And that money just all flows to corporations in the end.
So, yeah, I think that, you know,
measuring things from sort of a basic metric like that,
You'd want to be exposed to the countries that were just throwing money at this thing because
that ultimately, those are the countries where corporations within those domestic economies
are going to perform really well.
And from a fiscal stimulus perspective, the countries that have thrown the most money at this
thing are Japan, Canada, Australia, and the United States.
I don't know what the updated numbers are with the U.S. after the most recent.
But those are the four who have thrown the most money at this thing.
And so you could make a strong argument that if you're a stock market investor, those are the
four economies where the underlying corporations are likely to perform the best over not just
the COVID period, but the post-COVID period because as the savings rate declined,
the money will ultimately flow to those corporate coffers.
And so, you know, again, you're making a bet on the virus to some degree, but I don't
know, there seems to be some evidence. I was also really vocal in April that I thought life would
largely return to normal or that I thought the GDP would at least recover within 18 to 24 months. It
looks like that might be pretty much dead on. Whether or not life will have normalized,
I mean, again, that's kind of a subjective term, I guess. We've kind of been knocked into a different
paradigm to some degree. I think the COVID trends kind of accelerated a lot of the trends that were
already happening. And so, you know, that's probably a whole different discussion. But if you're
looking at this just from a really top down macro perspective, it's all about fiscal stimulus.
You know, looking at the central bank policies, ignore the central bank policies because the central bank
policies as much as people like to focus on them as the real money printers. You know, I always
described, for instance, quantitative easing as being an asset swap. But the kicker with quantitative
easing is that if the Fed creates a bunch of reserves and swaps them with treasury bonds,
okay, so they expand their balance sheet, they issue new reserves, which creates deposits in the banking
system. The bank swaps a treasury bond with a household for a deposit. So the household now holds a
deposit. The bank temporarily owns a treasury bond, which sells it to the Fed.
What does the Fed do with that treasury bond?
It basically buries it in the backyard.
It's not in the real economy.
It has no monetary impact at all on the economy, except for the remuneration that the Fed ultimately
ends up paying to the Treasury, which are pretty insignificant in the long run.
But the kicker is that this is a clean asset swap.
But the big component there is, well, what if the Treasury expands their balance sheet by
$3 trillion like they did this year. Well, that changes the way we have to view QE because QE in a
vacuum with just the monetary policy side of it, it's just a clean asset swap. It's not money printing
in any meaningful way because all you've done is you've created a reserve that's 0% interest
bearing and you've swapped it with a treasury bond in the private sector. That to me actually
has the potential to be slightly disinflationary or deflationary because the household
now has a lower interest-bearing government asset, basically. And the government has, for all practical
purposes, retire the treasury bond from circulation. But if the treasury is actually expanding their
balance sheet, well, that's a whole different dynamic. So you have to look at all these other
dynamics. And looking at COVID, I think that was the big thing that a lot of people missed,
that when people were calling the Fed's policies money printing, they missed the fact that the real
money printing was occurring from all these treasuries and that the basic math of it was that
as much as you might hate the results of all of this government spending, the ultimate beneficiary
of it was going to be corporate America. And I've had big long debates with people about
why, you know, whether or not QE causes asset inflation and things like that. And I always say,
you've got to look at the underlying fundamentals. And is there an underlying fundamental rational
for why asset prices have increased. In this case, I would argue definitively there has been
because, you know, mark my words on this, you're going to see record corporate profits next year
and probably in 2022. And so, yeah, asset prices have gone up and you could argue that's all
government policy, but you could also argue that there's an underlying rationale for why that has
occurred. And so if you're pinpointing the countries that are the kind of parts of the
global economy that are likely to weather best had nothing to do with whether or not you did
shutdowns or not. I think one thing we've found with COVID is that nobody knows how to fight
this thing from like the management perspective of can we manage the shutdowns and openings
and people at times were saying, oh, Sweden's doing so great and now they're doing terrible.
At times people were saying, oh, look, the United States is doing so great and now they're doing
terrible.
This thing seems like it's going to get you eventually and you either ride it out until the vaccine comes
and save the day or not.
You can shut down your economy and tell everybody to stay home.
But at the end of the day, the thing that really matters is how much fiscal policy is being
pumped into the domestic economy and how much is that going to ultimately filter down to
corporations in the long run.
So, Colin, I would like to shift gears here at the end of the interview.
As anyone can tell, we'll love speaking with you here on the show because you do such
a great job explaining and simplifying advanced macroeconomic concepts.
For someone listening to this who is super interested in becoming as knowledgeable as you,
but perhaps also feel it's a little overwhelming to start on this journey.
Which three steps do you recommend they take to get started right away?
It's funny. I'm mostly self-taught on all this stuff. It's so complex, I would argue, that no one
knows a lot of these great big answers. Nobody knows what causes inflation. Nobody knows for certain
whether Fed policy causes an asset price inflation, things like that. I think a lot of it requires
just a super, super open mind. And one of the things that I think has been interesting over the
kind of learning process that I've gone through is that I've managed, and I think part of this is
the fact that I'm directly involved in managing people's money is that I have to try to be somewhat
objective. I can't fall victim to political narratives and falling into, you know, kind of tribal
mentality where I align myself with a group of people that just have a generally a political
narrative and they just, you know, through any type of environment, they have to promote that
narrative. And that sort of, I think, really curious, open-mindedness is so useful because there's
lots of good components of all different economic theories. You know, MMT is under a lot of
attack these days and I attack it a decent amount, but there's actually a lot to like inside of
MMT. There's a lot of good components that are really eye-opening and somewhat useful.
The same is true of any economic theory. And I would argue any financial theory, too, you know,
you don't have to be only a value investor. You don't only have to be a growth investor. You don't
only have to be a domestic technology investor. You can be open-minded about all these different things
and understand that there's a lot of good in a lot of different aspects of all of these things.
And I think you just have to explore these things in a very open-minded way. I did create a page on the Orcam group website
So it's orcam, O-R-C-A-M group.com.
And under the education page, there's a tab called Understanding Money.
And I kind of just collected a whole bunch of links in there that are things like my big
paper on understanding the modern monetary system.
I linked to the Ray Dalio came out with a famous video back in 2013 called How the Economic
Machine Works.
And there's a link in there to like Bill Ackman's video on everything you need to know about finance in 30 minutes.
And there's so much to learn.
I think one of the daunting things, especially with macroecon and macrofinance, is that the more you learn, the more you learn how little you know.
And if you're not open-minded and you're really, I think, sort of, you know, politically driven into certain boxes,
I think you just expose yourself to the potential that you're going to end up being wrong about big,
big things.
And you need to be more open-minded and just really curious and have this voracious appetite to try
to understand other people's perspectives because there's almost always something useful.
Even all of the people's views that you disagree with, there's usually some rationale.
You might think I'm the biggest idiot in the world.
But I guarantee you there's at least some little bit of rationale.
in the way that I'm approaching the world from my specific perspective and that there is some
rationale for the way that everybody's sort of navigating the world. And, you know, I'm not an
efficient market hypothesis believer, but I do believe there's at least shades of gray in
the idea of efficiency in that you're better off trying to understand why people either
promote a certain theory or the things that they're teaching because there's usually
tidbits of truth in there. So I think you just have to be really open-minded and try to really
understand all of these different theories from all of these different perspectives.
Well said, Colin. Thank you, as always, for coming here on the show. I would also like to give
you the opportunity to tell the audience where they can learn more about you, pragmatic capitalism,
and the Orcombe Group. Yeah, so pragmatic capitalism is my blog. It's kind of just where I have
over the course of the last 10, 15 years, I've just sort of, you know, vomited all of my
thoughts and knowledge or stupid ideas onto the website. That's pragcap.com, P-R-A-G-C-A-P-com.
I've listed a lot of different pages over time. Again, there's an education tab there,
recommended reading, understanding money. I have some research papers on there. It's very top of the page.
there's a new here, a welcome mat that just shows kind of the big, big, broad topics that I think
are kind of the most important things to probably understand. You can get pretty wonky and, you know,
it takes time to digest and understand a lot of these very, very big macro concepts. And it takes a lot
of time and effort. And the idea is change over time. So you've got to keep up with the changing
technologies and the changing paradigms and all this.
But I think having a good sort of objective first principles-based mentalities, it creates a really
good foundation for being able to navigate these things, especially because it will help you,
I think, avoid a lot of the politics that naturally get intertwined in a lot of these discussions
where biases exposes to big, big risks. And so kind of create that foundation. And I have
a forum on my website. I would love to answer questions there if people have any. You can also
email me at Cullen Roach at orcamgroup.com if you have questions. And I'm always happy to help.
I love, you know, so many people have been so helpful to me over the years learning all this stuff
and answering my stupid questions that I really, I really love helping people learn and
educate people where I can. So, fantastic. And we will definitely make sure.
sure to link to all of that in the show notes.
Colin, once again, it's been an absolute pleasure.
As always, we always have so much fun.
We always learn so much from you.
I really hope that we can bring you back on the show another time.
All right, guys, that was all that I had for this week's episode of We Study Billionaires.
On Wednesdays, remember Preston is back with a specific episode about Bitcoin,
and then weekends, we're doing traditional We State Billionaires episodes.
Next weekend, Tray and I will be back with our interview with Tom Gainer, CEO of Markell.
Thank you for listening to TIP.
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