#1223 Jeff Weniger On State Of The 2023 Macro Economy

Jeff Weniger is the Head of Equity Strategy at WisdomTree Asset Management. In this conversation, we talk about the federal reserve, inflation, bitcoin, housing market, bank crisis, and the insanity that has ensued since 2020. Jeff helps break down all the chaos in the markets. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 250,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Jeff Weniger is the Head of Equity Strategy at Wisdom Tree Asset Management. In this conversation, we talk about the Federal Reserve, inflation, and the insanity that has ensued since 2020 and 2021. We had high inflation and now we've got all sorts of chaos in markets

• 0:47Anthony Pompliano?

  and Jeff is here to help us think through it all. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you guys do as well. Here is my conversation with Jeff Weniger.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  The action's on the court and as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting fans closer to the game with a chance to win courtside seats, merch, and more. Visit michelobultra.com/courtside to enter. Michelob Ultra Courtside, 26 to 27. No purchase necessary. Open to U.S. residents 21+. Begins on October 1st, 2026 and ends on June 30th, 2027. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes, and details.

• 1:26Speaker 02

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:50Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Jeff here. Jeff, I saw one of your tweets that I thought would be a great place for us to start. You previously were talking about home prices and the fact that they exploded higher and then they would go lower and then they would explode higher again. And you were essentially insinuating it is nearly impossible for the average American to plan their life when markets are going up and down and the cost of some of these assets are going up and down so much. What's driving so much oscillation between the bull and the bear cycles of various assets?

• 2:18Speaker 03

  Oh, wow. We're getting right with the punch in the face to start. Look, think about what is a how? I mean, a house.

• 2:29Speaker 03

  It's an asset that with time, with the productivity of humankind should be depreciating in price. I mean, if you think about pulling copper out of the ground a thousand years ago, what the labor intensity of that may have been, as opposed to today with a massive industrial process. This is why, over the course of centuries or millennia, you should have structural deflation in the cost of copper mining, just to take that example. The same thing should be the situation with a home, in that as we develop the technology,

• 3:09Speaker 03

  we should be able to erect these things virtually costlessly, fifty or a hundred years hence. I mean, this is, if you, you, you look at something like a corn production chart from the Great Depression till today, how efficient we've gotten in producing these types of things. And so you have this asset that seemingly goes up every single year, home prices, US home prices, Canadian home prices, British home prices, you name it, solely because of the monetary mechanism, really, because they keep printing money. And we have these boom and bust cycles. I mean, what, what we had in, in the situation fifteen years ago with home prices should never occur, that shouldn't be an asset that does this ebb and flow.

• 3:53Speaker 03

  How do you engage family planning or retirement planning when you have a, I don't know, $500,000 house and you don't know if next year it's going to be worth $300,000 or $700,000? This is, the whole point of having these central banks was pitched to us a hundred years ago as it was going to smooth out these economic cycles. And it's, how many booms and busts do we have to have between the stock market, the housing market, various other markets? I mean, it's, if we want to have stock market booms and crashes, we could just go back to 1929, the Federal Reserve was still in its infancy at that point. So it's, it's kind of silly season, and this particular housing market is, um... I mean, the best word to describe it is dysfunctional.

• 4:38Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you look at kind of this boom and bust cycle, this is literally a story as old as time, right? And I say that and people was like, oh, yeah, that's our saying I've heard before. But one of the things that people don't know is that time was literally invented because of the church and they were trying to actually use measurement and kind of do all this stuff. At that same moment in human history, they also were debating boom and bust cycles of economies, the price of interest, like all these different components that were kind of going on. And we're still debating that stuff today. Is your belief that the solution would be just get rid of all the central banks, get better central banks? Like if to understand the problem, maybe sometimes it's best to like identify what would the solution be? And kind of what do

• 5:21Anthony Pompliano?

  you see as a way to actually avoid so many boom and bust in an economy?

• 5:27Speaker 03

  Well, and can you just get rid of them tomorrow after they've penetrated every facet of the system over the course of the last 100 years? It's almost one of those things you can't really rip the Band-Aid off, but you need to at least attempt over time to defenestrate them. I mean, this is, you know, you take this example in the last, what, 15 months or so? Is the cost of overnight money supposed to be zero? Or is the cost of overnight money supposed to be five percentage points? Why is this moving by 500 basis points in the course of 15 months? One of those two numbers was incorrect. Zero or mid-five. I mean, heckens,

• 6:06Speaker 03

  at some point, we may, by the time this year's out, get to a six handle on Fed funds. And with each passing cycle, these central banks are becoming more and more, I gotta make sure I don't knock this coffee off the ledge here. These central banks are becoming more and more powerful. I mean, what happens is is your your brain starts to

• 6:30Speaker 03

  Repaint pictures from prior times. If you look at the old Federal Reserve from the 1970s, people didn't know who these people were. If you went back to 1980 and pulled some guy off the street and said, "Who's Paul Volcker?" That guy didn't know who Paul Volcker was. Like, your brother, your sister. They didn't know who Paul Volcker was at the time. And, you know, you think about like the 87 crash, that's when Greenspan decided with Reagan to form the plunge protection team. And I remember with my misspent youth around the turn of the century saying like, you know, there's this thing, it's called the plunge protection team. And their point

• 7:13Speaker 03

  is to come in and prevent another 87 crash. What are you even talking about? What's the Federal Reserve?

• 7:20Speaker 03

  You could speak to an educated person 20 or 25 years ago, say Federal Reserve, and they didn't know what you were talking about. That, that, I remember, that was the situation. And we thought Greenspan was powerful. Greenspan took rates down to 1%, that was considered outlandish. When Greenspan went to 1% to try to save the NASDAQ, turn of the century, that was a wild situation in terms of central banking circles. And you know what? Everybody who vilified him for doing that was right. That created, what did it not create? Think about what that did. You were lining up to purchase

• 8:05Speaker 03

  condominiums sight unseen in 03, 04, 05, because Greenspan went to 1% to try to save the NASDAQ, because Greenspan was allowed to create the PPT 10, 15 years before that. And then we get into all the experiments with then Bernanke. You know, Bernanke wanted to study the Japanese situation and the Great Depression, so they gave even more power to Bernanke than Greenspan. And now here we're in this situation.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  People are frozen in their houses. Mortgage rates are 7%. We're now suddenly this guy wants to be the reincarnation of Paul Volcker. And it's like, well, 0% policy, the right rate. Now we're in the mid-fives, wants to keep going. Inflation ran out of hand. It's just, how do you structure a society when you have the cost of money being determined by committee like this? It's, it's a mess.

• 8:57Anthony Pompliano?

  So one of the things I find fascinating is the Fed doesn't just set the rate of money. It also gives forward guidance and it will tell you, we believe it's going to be at X. There's two schools of thought. One is if they say it's going to be at X and they don't put it there, they lied. They knew they were going to do it right and they lied. I think that's probably a little extreme. On the other hand, it is, they thought it was going to be at X and they were off. And so it ended up being at Y. Now, if that is a 25 or 50 basis point difference, so be it. When it's a 500 basis point difference, that seems like a pretty big miss.

• 9:40Anthony Pompliano?

  And so if you worked at a company and you were off by 500 basis points in something so important, many would consider the single most important metric at your job, you'd be fired.

• 9:52Anthony Pompliano?

  And so like, help me understand in terms of like, do you think it is malicious? Do you think it's just incompetence? Is it actually just maybe a third option, which is like, this stuff is hard and economies are complex? And like, humans are ill-equipped to be accurate in any sort of prediction? Like, how do you think through this?

• 10:10Speaker 03

  You notice your own confidence level decline as the years go on. You could see it in the comments section on your replies on Twitter. You can kind of sometimes feel, oh, this, this person's 20 years old. This person's 25 years old. Their confidence of what the future will hold, they don't have a large experience of being woefully incorrect on those forecasts. I do, I've been wrong on stuff. I remember, you know, years ago, oh, inflation's around the corner. Interest rates are going to rise and it was the exact opposite. Well, we always had inflation, they manipulated the numbers, but I would have never sold negative interest. 19 trillion in negative bond yields, for example.

• 10:54Speaker 03

  I was thinking rates were going to rise. Get out of your twenties, get into your thirties, get a little bit more humble. I'm only in my forties. With each passing day, I'm more humble than the prior day because you look at things, you go, oh, man, this is really gonna happen. I think next year, such and such is gonna happen to the economy. And then next year rolls around and it's incorrect. And so is the word incompetence to describe central banks more like impotence? The act of saying four, six quarters from now, I expect the economic situation to look like X is an extremely difficult task. And we hang our hats on this.

• 11:36Speaker 03

  I mean, you would think a laissez faire system would be a better path for the cost of money. I mean, what we've just spent five, what, five decades doing rightly? Is saying, okay, well, wait a minute, the wage and price controls in the early 1970s. Um, boy, that was a fool's errand. Can't have the state determine the price of wages. Better determination is, is let's negotiate our wages. You and I, you're my employer, let's say, and I'm your employee, let's negotiate wages. Or the price of gasoline, that was a mess. From the first oil embargo, that was a total mess trying to put price controls on gasoline. But then we turn around

• 12:19Speaker 03

  and we say, no, it's, let's put this committee together and determine the cost of overnight money. It doesn't make any sense. How is it? And the bizarre thing about it is, is we have a, for all intents and purposes, a 100% universal consensus that gasoline price controls of the early 1970s is bunk economic quackery. 99 out of 100 economists. But don't dare say that the committee at the Federal Reserve of appointed economists, when anybody with some humility says this stuff is really difficult. They, you know, maybe we shouldn't have, give them so much power. I mean, it's, it's really, it's really bizarre to me, um, the existence of this situation.

• 13:04Speaker 03

  And now we've got. Messes all over and what do you do with the with the situation where you're in the stock markets, it's something like 19 times forward earnings and now suddenly the old Tina concept, right? There is no alternative. This was the rationale behind buying, let's say, the S and P in 2021 was there is no alternative. What am I going to do? I'm going to take all this name, I'm going to take negative yielding German boons. Ah, give me the S and P, something like that. Well, now there is an alternative. You could just go into cash. And so now do you create this situation because of all of these, the ridiculousness of it, keeping policy at 0% rates when home prices were zooming like that, when we had

• 13:45Speaker 03

  a raging bull market that commenced in the first quarter of oh nine? I mean, you were 11, 12 years deep into a bull market and you were still keeping money at 0%. And now there is this alternative. And now you have a society where you're entering 2024 and at the margin, somebody who's in the interest in the business of deploying capital may say, I do not see as much appeal deploying capital into the equity, into the, into the common equity of corporate America as to, as opposed to just parking it over here in that money market fund. That's problematic. That's problematic. And, and if there needs

• 14:27Speaker 03

  to be a happy medium and I, that, that would be the concern. That would be the concern. Like, you know, give me five, five and a quarter, five 50 on a two-year treasury and I just wake me up in a couple of years from now. So it's, we'll see how it ends up playing out.

• 14:39Anthony Pompliano?

  So one group that did that is the banks. And what is interesting is that these banks mistimed their purchases. They essentially were buying, you know, 15 basis points to 50 basis point type debt, and they were buying it on mid to long duration, kind of treasuries or, or assets. Now, as we've seen, when depositor showed up and said, give me back my money, they were underwater on that. And so I think that there's a strong argument that there was risk mismanagement by the executive teams of those banks. But can we also point to the central bank and say that maybe the central bank, whether through incompetence, malice, or just the complexity of doing their job, actually put the banks in the position

• 15:23Anthony Pompliano?

  to buy the debt, which then led to the banks imploding?

• 15:27Speaker 03

  And it's the basic business model of the bank, right? Is you you essentially have no choice but to purchase these long dated securities. And remember, the action in 2022 in terms of the, you know, like an aggregate bond index or the long end of the yield curve was some of the most brutal

• 15:47Speaker 03

  fixed income returns that they had since 1994. And so you you essentially

• 15:56Speaker 03

  mess things up. I mean, what is it $600 billion in mark to market losses that that need to be accounted for in the banking system? I mean, the issue at hand is, and we'll see how this plays out. I had been more concerned at the end of the third, well, third quarter, the third month around March.

• 16:14Speaker 03

  You know, with this concept that I've been calling the bank walk. And pump, I don't know if you've heard me say this, the, you know, the bank walk. Some people say, you know, the the risk is that it becomes the bank trot. I mean, for example,

• 16:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain that.

• 16:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, OK. Well, I have a lot of fears on the bank walk. And this is the this is the issue where it's it it kind of feeds upon itself. And the other that the other thing in the background, of course, is that what we had here was a mismatch of of short and long duration securities. The question is, does it end up deteriorating into a situation where it's a your your credit book goes kaput in in 2024? But you know, I've given this some some good thought. This is the way I kind of lay this out is that we are numerical

• 17:11Speaker 03

  beings. I mean, round numbers matter to people. You have your 50th wedding anniversary. It's more important than your 49th wedding anniversary and your 51st. But is it only because we just think in tens? And Your stock hits a hundred dollars and that's a 1% move from 99 to a hundred dollars. You kind of notice it more and Treasury is like 3% and they say broke through 4% today. Well, what was the difference between yesterday when it went from 380 to 390? Goes from 390 to 4, it's more important to us? It's the psychology of it.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  And I think what happened or is happening, we'll have to see with the banks. I think this is critical to note is you have your number in anything and that number is what prompts you to act. And when your bank account is paying you 0.01% and a lot of them are. And well, okay, here's Jay Powell at 0%. So you're just, what am I going to do? And that's 0.01%. And then the Fed takes money market rates up to 1. You know, it's 1% of it, but you don't really notice. And one of the reasons I say this is because maybe you notice and I notice.

• 18:36Speaker 03

  But to the rest of the people in society that aren't living this every day, do they notice? They don't. They got their own jobs. They're doing their own thing. They're an optometrist. They're in lawn care, whatever they do for a living. They're not living money market rates like me. And so at 1% money market rates, all right, you just keep it over here at Bank of America earnings 0.01% or at your regional bank. And then next thing you know, it's 2%. But oh, there's 199 basis points gap between the 0.01 that they're paying me and the 2% I could get if I actually bothered to click the button. Now, over here off screen, this is my screen with my to-do list sometimes.

• 19:20Speaker 03

  I've got like 90 things on this to-do list.

• 19:26Speaker 03

  What are we gonna do? Oh, I gotta go get the oil changed at some point. That's on the to-do list. Ah, you know, the kid kicked the soccer ball in the house, broke the window. I gotta get a window guy in. Call the window guy next week. I don't have time to call this window guy. I don't have time to move this checking account into a money market fund because I've had this banking relationship for 10 or 20 years. I'll do it next week. Next week comes around and that optometrist does not move that money or that small business owner or that CFO of the mid-sized business. At 3%, the money's still not moving. At some number, some psychologically critical number,

• 20:11Speaker 03

  between the 0.01%, there becomes a spread that moves that thing from number 77 on the to-do list to number 1. Where you say, whatever it is you got in there, $10,000, $10 million. All right, money market rates are now 4. I need to get it out of First National Bank of my local city. And that money moves. That's the bank walk. And the reason it's the walk and not the run is because when SVB and Signature were going under, that's the run. This money needs to move now. I don't have time to eat this sandwich. The money needs to move now. The bank walk is, what am I doing here? I've got this checking account. They're paying me, you know, screw them. I'm moving the money.

• 20:56Speaker 03

  That's the bank walk. And then at 5%, the bank walk really accelerated. And the next thing you know, we'll see. I mean, Jay Powell might want to go to 6%. There's a lot of these banks. I think the national average savings account rate, it's 0.5 something. It goes up like a basis point a month. It's like 53, 54 basis points at this point. You could drive a truck through that gap. So we're gonna have an issue here where a lot of this money's gonna shift into the money market funds. That is a, well, because there's gonna be a lot of debt issued by the federal government, so that's people buying the treasuries. But at the margin, does that...

• 21:38Speaker 03

  Local bank or that mid-sized bank have the capital to give you the marginal loan on your restaurant venture that you want to engage in, or big question mark, your office building, that's its own issue, right? Just don't have the deposit base. Maybe my marginal propensity to lend you on your small building or your house or your personal loan, that stuff starts to get cramped and we're going to see that. We're going to see if the, if the bank walk ends up perpetuating itself. I mean, it's kind of evened out, truth be told, in the last month or two, but that's one of the issues.

• 22:19Speaker 03

  And that's one of those, I think, unintended consequences when you ratchet up rates by 500 basis points in 15 months.

• 22:27Anthony Pompliano?

  What's fascinating to me about this is as the rates went up, people got frozen, their businesses got frozen, they got frozen geographically. Like the rate definitely created friction in an economy. So if you think low rates, tons of liquidity, lots of greasing of transactions, people are doing all kinds of crazy stuff. The opposite is now true. Talk about this freezing of people in their homes where they can't sell their homes. They can't buy new homes, they can't move. It just feels like across the United States, there's this great freeze that has occurred. What's driving that?

• 23:09Speaker 03

  There's, and, and the word freeze applies to that and also applies to your willingness to spend on discretionary items in 2024, partly because a lot of that money was, I was doing a tweet storm on this earlier, where a lot of the money has been spent from the COVID money. And so it's not only a freezing in place on the housing, which is one of my favorite issues, but a freeze in place on whether or not you're going to buy a washing machine in 2024. Because you bought it, remember Pop? They were giving out, there's so many stimulus programs, you forget this stuff. There was at one point, it was something like, let's say you were a husband and wife and two kids.

• 23:53Speaker 03

  And it was $1,200 for the husband, $1,200 for the wife, $500 for the kid, the kid's in diapers, and $500 for the other kid. And, you know, you talk about freezing. Well, if that couple had like a seven-year-old functioning dishwasher during COVID, like, you know, this thing doesn't clean these dishes, there's spots on these dishes, I hate this thing. In a normal world, you hate the dishwasher, but you're middle class, you ride that dishwasher out until the thing conks out on you, then, when you wake up, hey, why is this button dead on me? Or it's leaking onto my flooring? All right, fine, I'll buy another dishwasher.

• 24:35Speaker 03

  That's the way, that's the middle-class mindset. Heck, that's the upper-class mindset too. I mean, you don't replace something that's generally functioning. And, but if you suddenly had three grand coming in, or whatever the number is, in the middle of COVID, and you knew that dishwasher was the bane of your existence, then you are scrapping a functioning dishwasher and purchasing a new one in 2020 or 2021. And so the freeze on that side is, well, now you've got a two-year-old dishwasher, and so does an inordinate mass of society. And that group of people are not in the market naturally for a 2024 dishwasher, and that

• 25:18Speaker 03

  applies down the list. You know, the vacation you always wanted to take to some location that tickles your fancy, you took that vacation. The, um, you know, like, my wife might, you know, she might say, I really want a, a nice watch. You know, well, maybe that watch was purchased, and so you wonder about discretionary spending. Now, that's one kind of the freeze. Now, I think what you were referring to was the, the golden handcuffs on housing, and this is one of those, oh, this is such an interesting topic, and, and...

• 25:59Speaker 03

  It parlay's into so many other topics of, you know, in a situation where where labor mobility is is rigid on account of people stuck in their homes. Is that the type of world where you want to buy forty and fifty times multiples on stocks? Um, in a, in a grinding and put a stick in the gears type of, maybe it's not a depression, maybe it's not even a deep recession, just, just a muddling through, and it could be a multi-year muddling. And what I don't think people fully realize because they're not in it yet, is that more and more people will realize it. And what is it is that

• 26:42Speaker 03

  mortgage rates got up into the into the unknown zone here, where it's a rate of change situation. It's not that mortgage rates got to five, got to six, got to seven, and that we compare that to historical mortgage rates. What's important is that we compare it to to where they were at the trough, sub-three percent on a conforming mortgage in this country. And I think people are passively aware, but if they're not in the market to be moving

• 27:15Speaker 03

  or shifting their life circumstances, they only know what they're hearing secondhand on this. And

• 27:22Speaker 03

  with each passing day, somebody else gets divorced, somebody else has a baby, somebody else dies. And these are catalysts among many to move homes. If you leave

• 27:39Speaker 03

  state A, whatever, you're in New York and there's a job offer next door in Pennsylvania. How are you going to do that? You're locked in at two and seven eights. You're locked in at two and seven eights. If you want to move from New York to Philly, here's your seven percent mortgage. How are you going to do that? So there's a labor mobility issue. It goes much deeper than that, but it doesn't end tomorrow.

• 28:09Anthony Pompliano?

  How does it end?

• 28:10Speaker 03

  Well, you wonder if at something like a thought, well, who knows what the number is, but at some lower rate, do these stuck sellers finally get to the point where they can liquidate? And this is, you know, I mean, if they keep short money anywhere up here in the fives. All right. So you're looking at what's where are we on a 10 year T note? Three eighty, three ninety. Normally, the mortgage should be like 150 ish over a 10 year treasury. So let's say it's three ninety. I gotta, I gotta look at the quote here. I don't know. Three ninety plus one fifty. So it should be about five forty in a normal

• 28:49Speaker 03

  market. But we've got a skittish market and we know that money is tightening. And we'll see if it tightens further. And so, you know, mortgage news daily is like seven oh eight on a, on a mortgage. So you're several hundred basis points higher. In fact, the level, the level of spread from a 30 year mortgage to a 10 year T note, and that is the comp because 30 year mortgages don't last 30 years. People move, people pay them off. So the comp is a 10 year T note. That spread is as wide as it was during the global financial crisis. And the issue that I think you're going to increasingly see is you're going to see old people, retirees in five bedroom houses, they'd prefer to be in a two bedroom apartment

• 29:34Speaker 03

  in Fort Lauderdale, but they're stuck in a five bedroom place in Minneapolis. And young people with kids that in a normal world may have the means to be purchasing a three or four bedroom, single family home stuck in a one or two bedroom apartment because either they have the two and two and three quarters, two and seven eights mortgage, or they're renting. Now, there is some trigger number where the math starts to work better for you to list the house and then you get that increase in labor mobility. But I just don't know that it's fully appreciated. And I, I worry that the societal dissatisfaction, I mean, we all see these statistics, X percent of Americans think the country's going the wrong direction. That will rise with each passing day.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  And and kind of the theory I've said to this is like, okay.

• 30:24Speaker 03

  Let's say it was 2022 and and the thing happened. That thing is a baby got born or you've reached retirement. The thing that catalyzes the move. He said, well, I can't do it. We got to wait around where you can't even list this house. We can't buy another house. And that affects this percentage of the public. Be ready to move in 2022, but can't do it cohort. As the days go on, somebody else is having a baby. Somebody else is dying. Now you have the 2022 cohort. They're angry. And then also, and then it's 2023. They're still in that cohort because they can't do it now either. And now these new people are arising or are rising to the occasion of can't move totally stuck.

• 31:09Speaker 03

  And I don't think a 6% mortgage gets it done. I mean, it's literally, it's literally if you just go to a mortgage calculator.

• 31:19Speaker 03

  If you're in something like a typical three, let's say you're in a three bedroom home and you want to move to a four bedroom home and leave the old mortgage and go to a new one. You're looking at tripling your payment. Tripling because everybody refi'd during COVID. And so, you know, you think about like these issues where.

• 31:39Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, a company wants to move its headquarters to another state.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  Well, I'm in Chicago. I know that story well. And everybody's been taking the stuff out of the loop, moving it, moving it to another state.

• 31:56Speaker 03

  Well, you're going to have to pick up new staff. Once you're in that other state, once you're in Florida, wherever it may be, because you. My case, these Illinois people, they can't pick up and leave. They're locked in at 3%. So it's, it's, it's, it's weird and it's wacky and it's, it's a problem for hiring. In that if we still have a demand for workers and you really have the ideal candidate. They need to be 100% virtual worker because you're not going to be able to get them to move. A large distance unless you pay them so handsomely so as to justify the job transfer. And I'm not sure that that concept is fully appreciated.

• 32:36Anthony Pompliano?

  When you see the Fed sitting on the sidelines, watching all this happen, do they care? Do they care if asset prices are crashing? Do they care that people are frozen in their homes? Do they care that they've essentially created this destruction? Or are they just looking at a tight labor market and an inflation number that seems to be coming down on the headline, you know, trailing 12 months? And they're saying, we should, we deserve a trophy. Get, get out a birthday cake for us because we're doing a great job.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  The action's on the court. And as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting fans closer to the game with a chance to win courtside seats, merch, and more. Visit michelobultra.com/courtside to enter. Michelob Ultra Courtside, 26 to 27. No purchase necessary. Open to U.S. residents 21 plus. Begins on October 1st, 2026 and ends on June 30th, 2027. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes, and details.

• 33:33Speaker 03

  Well, one of the weird things is that this, this, they want to create unemployment. That is a major communication disconnect. Um, well, it's like, well, I, you know, I can't get in the minds of Jay Powell and what, whether or not he cares or, I mean, I, guy, guy's probably a decent guy. Who knows? But it, it's, I, I just don't understand what was it that you were witnessing that would have kept you in quantitative, quantitative easing for so long? We were at full employment. Um, you know, we've been sub 4% unemployment for quarters and quarters and quarters at this point, and the inflation was readily apparent.

• 34:17Speaker 03

  I don't know whether or not it's just living in a, in this silo where you don't like, maybe, like maybe Jay Powell just doesn't go to this, a guy probably doesn't go to the supermarket on his own.

• 34:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you remember when he said, uh, somebody asked him at a, uh, press conference about income inequality? And the only reason I remember him saying this is because we had a field day with it on the internet. He said, no one has come into my office and told me that they're falling behind because of our policies. Like I'm paraphrasing, but like something like that. And so of course, it's like, hey, man, I'm like a educated person who knows what the Federal Reserve is, and I know the power that you have both to create and destroy wealth. I don't know where your office is. If I wanted to come tell you that, I don't think they'd let me in the building. Like, like, what do you mean that you're not creating income and quality just

• 35:10Anthony Pompliano?

  because no one told you it? Like, the people who are suffering at the, you know, kind of the feet of your policies, they don't even know who you are. All they see is the grocery store prices are going up, right?

• 35:21Speaker 03

  You know, if you put yourself in the shoes of like a 2021 situation where, I mean, it's not even like, you know, before dot com, in terms of speculative excesses, you really got to go back to 1929. And so, you know, imagine if we're living in a parallel universe where it's 30, 40, 50 years after 1929, you can forgive, well, maybe you can forgive because they've forgotten about a mania that occurred within the span of their own adult

• 36:02Speaker 03

  lifetimes. Now, I've told you, I'm not very old, but I was paying attention and I was on top of the dot com bubble. That happened when I was a teenager. And so I've had a spidey sense for bubbles and speculative excesses ever since then, that I would hypothesize a central bank governor would too. I mean, for crying out loud, for crying out loud, what?

• 36:36Speaker 03

  Is someone whose job is to manipulate the monetary mechanism?

• 36:44Speaker 03

  What is someone doing as a, this person, whoever this person may be, a, a, a, you know, a central bank, a, a governor of one of the 12 regional banks or something? What are they doing on a daily basis as a matter of their hobby?

• 37:00Speaker 03

  In 1996, 1997, 1998, before they reach this current state of their career where they are at the pinnacle of their career?

• 37:09Speaker 03

  My guess? They were watching CNBC.

• 37:14Speaker 03

  Like I was. And watching eBay rip and watching Yahoo rip and watching pets.com. And, and truth be told, back then, watching Coca-Cola and Pfizer and General Electric and all these other ones that were just absolutely zooming on previous pie in the sky type concepts of the era. This is when I was a teenager, because I'm a, because I'm a geeky guy that's interested in the stock market. And that's what I did. And that's what you do if you have aspirations of being a extremely high ranking person in a central bank by the time you're 40 or 50 or 60 years old like these people. Okay, so now that's how you spent your late 1990s.

• 37:58Speaker 03

  All right, and then

• 38:01Speaker 03

  turn around from the, from the NASDAQ high in March of 2000, and it's only five years later, you see the most legendary housing bubbles. Now you've got two under your belt

• 38:12Speaker 03

  that you would think would be gut punching.

• 38:18Speaker 03

  Because you really kind of have to think about like these things just, you know, booms and busts, and, and maybe if you're of the older variety, you know, you know, Japan in 89, 90, maybe you've got three under your belt, who knows? And I'll give a little hat tip to the 87 crash too. Maybe that was something that would be forming in someone's psyche. And then now here, 2021 rolls around. It's like meme stocks? And these, you saw this stuff on Twitter with these, with these, these knuckleheads, you know, purchasing 50 properties and they're out there by the pool with champagne

• 38:57Speaker 03

  and, and all this stuff and they don't, they don't have, they don't have two nuggets of wisdom in their head. They're making their money solely because of, of a low cost of of debt on a levered asset. And on and on it goes. I mean, what was the Rivian IPO? Hundred billion?

• 39:18Speaker 03

  And so you're sitting there ostensibly having watched dot, a dot com on CNBC in your afternoons from your dorm room or from the comfort of, of your, you know, your office where you were working in money management in the 1990s. And then you watch the housing bubble of which it may have affected your own personal properties because you're an established player in global finance and maybe you own properties in Southern Cal or South Florida where that was the pinnacle of the housing bubble. It's like, what's going on here? How many SPACs needed to launch?

• 39:59Speaker 03

  In 2020 and 2021, for you to take money off of 0%.

• 40:03Anthony Pompliano?

  My favorite part of this whole situation was that the stock market was ripping. Inflation was at 7%. They were still suppressing interest rates to zero and they were buying assets in the market. And they were surprised when it went to nine. Because I believe at the end of 2021, they were still saying, uh, they thought that it was going to be transitory. It was like only right at the very end did they start to give up on the transitory stuff. And so in some way, 7% inflation still did not convince them that maybe let's take the foot off the gas.

• 40:36Speaker 03

  Well, and then there's a hole and this is, here's the problem. With this is that, and I've said this in the past, I mean, I went off to school to study things like interest rates and stock market valuations. And as the years went on, and this has always been the case with, you know, macro type things is that at one point it had to be become an amateur expert in Greek politics, right during that during that saga with Gregxit. And then you have to become a amateur expert in British politics for Brexit. And then you have to become an amateur epidemiologist and so on. And the truth of the matter is,

• 41:18Speaker 03

  is that because of the existence of these committees that determine the cost of money, we have to be psychologists in that, can you imagine, I mean, you don't know me,

• 41:33Speaker 03

  but imagine if your job was for you to assess the fears and aspirations of Jeff Weniger and how that may affect what Jeff Weniger is going to do to interest rates in six weeks.

• 41:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Or what tie color you wear, or how long you talk, or whatever other nonsense thing that people have invented to try to identify if he's giving signals to the market.

• 41:58Speaker 03

  Well, and then here's, so here's my theory. I mean, it's like, what if this could be so wrong? In fact, it's, the odds are that this theory is wrong. But here's the theory. You're Jay Powell, the SPAC boom, the Rivian IPO, the speculative excesses, GameStop. It's unbelievable. It's unbelievable that they were engaging not only not QT, but active QE during all this. And now there's egg on their face. I can't believe I did this in retrospect, you know, SPACs and all this.

• 42:41Speaker 03

  Now, I don't want to go down in history as the person that led inflation rip. Now I need to go to the complete opposite extreme to redeem myself, Jay Powell, as the new coming of Paul Volcker. And, you know, it's, it's kind of like, um, I, I think it's kind of like the way you say, oh, oh, you know, my, my, my father never spent any time with us as kids. Therefore, I'm going to spend so much time with the kids. You, you, you know, or like these 180 degree things. This, this, this occurred to me.

• 43:24Speaker 03

  And so now I'm going to make sure that I do the exact opposite. Or, or the other one is you do exactly like your father did, right? You, it's, there's nothing in between.

• 43:36Speaker 03

  And I think that there's some of that going on. Well, I messed up on the inflation thing. Now I'm going to take it to the other extreme and crush this. Even though the disinflationary portents are already in the system, they're, they're myriad. Um, you know, people often say, well, you know, what, what do you like? Uh, you're a shill for a deflation thesis or a disinflation thesis. Well, actually quite the opposite. I'm just at this stage in the economic cycle, the liquidation of the cycle.

• 44:07Speaker 03

  I mean, I, the logic of Medicare and social security situation is that it will inflate out of it. But that's one of the disconnects when you're tweeting stuff like, hey, I'm tweeting a 12 month thesis here. It's clear in the tweet, it said 2024, that type of thing. You know, 2030, 2040, I mean, yeah, they're going to have to inflate themselves out of this stuff. But in the here and now, they've already crushed inflation. This, and here's one of the things that's tough, tough to communicate in 280 characters, that's for sure.

• 44:40Speaker 03

  When I say crush inflation, I mean keeping ridiculously high prices on even keel or no longer rising at a rate of change. Right, so you still go to the supermarket and it's still, what? I mean, I got a pastrami sand, I walked down the street here, I got a pastrami, what did I get? A pastrami sandwich, chips and a drink, it was 22 bucks from the, from the deli. What?

• 45:09Speaker 03

  But it's, that it stays at 22 bucks. So on a rate of change basis, I think that near term, they do end up hitting the target because you have the, you know, the global supply chain pressure indexes come off the boil.

• 45:23Speaker 03

  You know, you're seeing in things like, like the Empire State survey, you know, prices paid, Texas manufacturers from the Dallas Fed, that's, they're basically saying, um, deflation over there. There's many of these portents and, and truth be told, the other thing that, well, this goes back to the, the CPI calculations. CPI, it's so important for people to understand the lag effects of the, of the CPI situation where CPI, no doubt about it, when we got to nine on CPI, the real number was higher than that. And the difference is, is the dentist and the plumber, and what was the example we were using earlier, the optometrist, they all know that.

• 46:07Speaker 03

  It's the economist that doesn't know that.

• 46:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Do they not know it or did they know it and they were lying? Because I find it so hard to believe that an intelligent economist can look at the CPI metric and all of the coverage that's out there, critiquing it and say, nope, I think CPI is correct.

• 46:30Speaker 03

  I think that, I think that the, that the street knows the CPI is incorrect. But what happens is, is, I mean, you think about what I do for a living. I open up my charts, I'm looking at my charts, writing research for Wisdom Tree.

• 46:48Speaker 03

  You just look at it so often, you're so used to saying the CPI is this?

• 46:51Anthony Pompliano?

  If everyone else is looking at it, then you kind of have to use it because it's the metric that everyone uses.

• 46:57Speaker 03

  Right, it's a data feed. It's literally a time series. And you're looking at it and CPI is 4% right now and that's the number. Well, that number doesn't really reflect reality. Sometimes it's too high and then it's too low. Most of the time, it's underestimating inflation. Or the overwhelming majority of the time, it's underestimating inflation because of the so-called hedonic adjustments. And I've picked on these hedonic adjustments on the automobile side at great lengths. And I say, here's my deal. I mean, you've got to kind of know me a little bit, but here's my deal on autos. Here's what I want you to sell me. The safest car that you can manufacture.

• 47:41Speaker 03

  That's going to get me from point A to point B. With the highest probability that we will survive a car crash. And give me Sirius XM radio. And give me heating and cooling.

• 47:54Speaker 03

  Sell me that car.

• 47:57Speaker 03

  You can't sell me that car. Because now the darn thing comes with some video screen for the kids to watch movies in the backseat, which I don't want. In fact, that's the antithesis of what I want. It comes with heated seats. That's going to really help you in Phoenix. It comes with, well, I could deal with those. These automatic windows are pretty nice. It's got 37,000 buttons in the center console that I don't want to push. And not only that, but those buttons are flat screen stuff, so I have to divert my eyes from the road, which is not what I want to do because I... What I want from this discretionary purchase is, again, the safest thing that will get me from point A to point B. I don't need to impress people with my vehicle.

• 48:42Speaker 03

  I got kids back there. But you must purchase all of these things that come with the vehicle and you must pay for it. And in so doing, they say, well, when you look at a 2023 model of a vehicle and compare that to something in 1993, look at how much better all these things are. And I'm okay with the hedonic adjustments for the safety, the onset of the anti-lock brake, the onset of the airbag, the better seat belts, the crash tests, all that stuff. But you're paying for all these things that you don't really want. And then what you do is when you run a time series on what's actually happened with cars, we're like $48,000 on the average new car in this country. You run a time series on it, the price of the

• 49:25Speaker 03

  new cars goes like this, and the price of the CPI goes like this. I'm looking at my screen so I can see myself like this. And we say, oh, auto inflation is X percent every year. It's not like that at all. And, you know, they messed up. I mean, the BLS, the housing calculations in there are just so weird. You know how they do the cost of ownership with the owner's equivalent rent?

• 49:57Anthony Pompliano?

  My favorite is that they still send people physically into the store to find the thing on the shelf and write down the number.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  The action's on the court, and as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting fans closer to the game with a chance to win courtside seats, merch, and more. Visit michelobultra.com/courtside to enter. Michelob Ultra Courtside, 26 to 27. No purchase necessary. Open to U.S. residents 21+. Begins on October 1st, 2026, and ends on June 30th, 2027. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes, and details.

• 50:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, you can't, you ask any man or woman in America, if they can send their significant other to go to the fucking grocery store and get exactly what they told them to get. It's impossible. And then do it with a whole list of things and expect it to have 100% accuracy? There's no way.

• 50:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. Wow. And then, I mean, it's, things have changed through the years. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but, and maybe this is where the hedonic adjustments come in, but when I was a kid...

• 51:10Speaker 03

  I could be so wrong in this, but when I was a kid, I feel like ground beef was ground beef. Here's the ground beef.

• 51:17Speaker 03

  Take it. And now it's like, well, there's grass-fed ground beef, and there's 95% lean and all this. And then they've got that like impossible burger stuff. I don't know. That's, oh, that's a nightmare. Nobody wanted to eat that. Um, not me. I don't want to eat that. Um.

• 51:34Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think about Bitcoin? You think Bitcoin could be the solution to all this? In terms of a programmatic monetary policy without a central bank driven by humans all trying to guesstimate what's going on and just say, screw it, we're not going to respond to the rest of the world. We're just going to do our thing. Or do you think that's a nightmare as well?

• 51:51Speaker 03

  You know, here's my problem. And I, here's, here's the thing I keep coming back to with, with Bitcoin. And this, you know, I feel like I need to, to give a, a, a background here. I was, when I was getting really into this stuff as a teenager, I mean, the early books that I was reading, uh, were like silver and gold bug books.

• 52:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 52:17Speaker 03

  In the nineties and I, you know, is the inflation of the 1970s going to come back? Uh, deficit spending perpetually entitlement programs and these types of things.

• 52:29Speaker 03

  What I worry about Bitcoin is, I mean, it does have this limitation as to how many can be created. But if the issue is with fiat currencies, that the dollar is backed by nothing. Bitcoin is also backed by nothing. That's, that's going to be, you know, it's.

• 52:45Anthony Pompliano?

  So let me, let me throw a, um, an idea. Cause I think that this is, uh, this is my response. And I think people in the Bitcoin community, but it is a theory, just like anything else. Because to your point, gold is something that is physical. You can pull it out of the ground. You can touch it, you know, all, all the benefits of, of gold, et cetera.

• 53:07Anthony Pompliano?

  If you think about the world that we're heading into, and I was to ask you, what is the most valuable commodity in the world? Some people would argue oil or wheat or, you know, whatever. I would argue computing power is the most valuable commodity. Now, there's a lot of intricacies and nuances. How do you measure it? What's the cost? Who's the supplier? All that stuff. But just if you hold constant and say, okay, computing power is at least going to be very valuable, if not the most valuable commodity in the world. Bitcoin in some way, that's what is backing it, right? It's the strongest computer network in the world. Now, most people think of backing, and I put that in air quotes, as like the security of the network. You can't hack it because it's got this strong computing network, et cetera.

• 53:48Anthony Pompliano?

  But I have this theory that like, maybe Bitcoin's price is actually just putting a value on what is the strongest computer network in the world worth? Right? That the immutable kind of public ledger, like what is that worth? Well, that's, maybe that's just the market cap of Bitcoin. And right now, we think it's worth, you know, 500 to 600 billion dollars. It was worth more, now it's worth less. And like, that's the game.

• 54:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:14Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know.

• 54:15Speaker 03

  And it's, and it's such a difficult question because it's new, right? I mean, we've only had it in this cycle. It's what, you know, 10 or 15 years old. Well, I guess it's 10 or 15 years old at this point. And we have, clearly, it's, you know, and from the ETF shops, that we have a ton of Bitcoin exposure in the British business, the American business and so forth. You know, in terms of figuring out if it's going to hold a place in an asset allocation or in people's spending patterns, you almost need to prognosticate whether or not they're going to come forward with these central bank digital currencies, which it's very

• 54:56Speaker 03

  diff- well, I have trouble conceptualizing why some people are on board with a lot of public policy initiatives that make zero sense to me. I also struggled as to why anybody would want a central bank digital currency. So I want these people to monitor my bank accounts more than they already are in the event that I fall into the, into the trap of being considered an enemy of the state. One of the things that cannot be conceptualized by people is...

• 55:32Speaker 03

  You might not be an enemy of the state in the year 2023, but some viewpoint that you have in 2033 or 2043 could be considered extremely radical. And are you sure you want to CBDC? So that's the bull case.

• 55:47Anthony Pompliano?

  There are things you cannot say today that you could definitely say five years ago and no one would have blinked. And I think that's kind of what you're getting at is it's not because of anything that you do or say that you intentionally are trying to be malicious or have an alternative viewpoint. It's that culture and society can change. And therefore, if you don't change with it, you kind of, you know, you were in bounds to start and now you're out of bounds, but it's not because you ever took a step. You didn't move. It's just that society.

• 56:17Speaker 03

  And I think that's been a lot of the, I think that's been a lot of the appeal with crypto. You know, you just think everybody's got their thing that pushes their buttons. And the other thing is, is you know, it's

• 56:31Speaker 03

  kind of on the tail end of, of, well, it's, a lot of it's a function of when you kind of reached adulthood, when you got into the system, when, when these critical life events occurred for you.

• 56:45Speaker 03

  And I was too young to be a homeowner during the housing crash. Fortunate for me, you know, because I was in my mid twenties. And what if I was five years older and I had to climb out from underneath that thing?

• 57:02Speaker 03

  In the state of Florida, in California, that, you know, Nevada, some of the worst hit states of the housing bubble. What would my perception have been?

• 57:11Speaker 03

  On the system. Right? And I mean, I've, you know, as you can see from my earlier comments, a lot of my perceptions were formed in the 1990s, watching Alan Greenspan mess things up.

• 57:23Speaker 03

  It's, I'm just a product of when I was born and came of age. And so the, the the thing that I suspect would be advisable for the 20 year olds and for the 60 year olds is to both investigate, well, why is 60 year olds so much talking about gold? Why is this person so much talking about crypto? Maybe I can learn something from this person. Maybe, and it's hard when you're, when you're so much hubris when you're 20 years old.

• 57:55Speaker 03

  Maybe, just maybe, the 60-year-old has seen a lot of things and knows something about the world. And maybe, just maybe, your 60-year-old perception of this snot-nosed kid that doesn't know any better, well, maybe this kid can run circles around you on tech. Maybe you should learn what the kid has to say, too. And I think that there's a lot of that going on. We're so siloed. Social media, you could see it in your feeds. People won't listen to anybody. They, you know, they're like on the total attack. I think for investment success, whether it's in crypto or any one of these alternatives to the dollar, this type of concept, you gotta be willing to open it up a little bit and read different perspectives.

• 58:40Speaker 03

  Listen to what a lot of different people have to say because, like I said, forecasting is not easy. Um, and, you know, we've got, we've got issues here with respect to the, the, the dollar long-term. I don't know how we're gonna get out from underneath this wanton spending. And, you know, when I look at it at the municipal level, I don't really know what I'm getting. I got potholes everywhere. I don't get snowplow removal. Snow removal. What am I, why are we spending all this federal, state, and local money? Like a Nordic region. And what are we getting for it? And then how do we get out from underneath this burden?

• 59:25Speaker 03

  I mean, here in Chicago, I mean, what's the number? Tens of billions of dollars on funded pension liabilities. Well, what am I getting for that? Is the federal government going to bail that out? If so, it's more money that must be mustered up. I mean, it's, it's, you, you, you almost have to inflate away these fixed obligations long-term. So I think that's probably one of those things that's a little bit of a disconnect when you know, we're tweeting this disinflationary 2024 stuff because that's where we are in the cycle. And some of these long-term effects and, you know. We've had inflation my whole life. We just, that's the other thing. That's the other thing that's fascinating.

• 1:00:11Speaker 03

  We all talk about, let's say, the 2010s, for example, there was no inflation in the 2010s. Well, no, no, no, no, no. It was just lower than normal. I assure you, your rent went up every single year in the 2010s. But we, we actually, this is, this is where words change minds. We have people who believe we didn't have any inflation. Take the Japanese. The Japanese have been in deflation since 1990. No, they haven't. No, they haven't. They're just running 1% or 2% inflation. They're destroying their money at the pace of 1% or 2% per year. It's just not the 3% or 4% that the Americans do. But man, the semantics will change your worldview. You gotta be careful with the semantics.

• 1:00:56Anthony Pompliano?

  When you look out over the future, my last question is,

• 1:01:01Anthony Pompliano?

  what do you anticipate happens over the really long term? Does the United States dollar lose global reserve status? Are Americans' lives better or worse than they are today in terms of like the quality of life? Is there just more bifurcation and like income inequality? Like, what are some of the things that you feel maybe most confident over the long term, without having to put a timeframe on them?

• 1:01:23Speaker 03

  The most difficult question. All right, look. To lose dollar reserve status, you need to have a breakdown in your rule of law. Now, I think we've, we've had that. It's just, what is the order of magnitude of that breakdown? And, and there's the rule of law in terms of the order of civil society, that type of law, finding criminals, punishing criminals, that type of thing. And then there's the rule of contract law. And contract law is absolutely critical. We, we broke contract law day after day after day during the global financial crisis.

• 1:02:11Speaker 03

  The General Motors bailout, for example.

• 1:02:14Speaker 03

  You know, is the company insolvent or is it not insolvent? Um, but the bank bailouts, the insurance company bailouts, the homeowner bailouts back then. We had a, we had a, we had a societal contract. You purchase this home, you pay this debt off. You speculated down in Bel Ray, Lauderdale, Boynton, that type of thing. Well, you need to own that. We broke contract law as a society back then. I think that that was a, uh, something that brought forth essentially, you know, a lot of the, the, disconnect between the, the public and the government back then. And I don't think that was good for the dollar long term.

• 1:02:54Speaker 03

  Now, over the long haul, you know, it's like you, you leave a bad boyfriend or girlfriend, but you need to have one that's better lined up. And so what are you supposed to go? Oh, the Euro. I mean, we were talking 10 years ago, well, even recently about the Euro breaking up. That's a risk long haul. So I don't think you lose your reserve set status to the Euro. It wouldn't be the yen. I mean, that's an economy, the, the Japanese economy hasn't been able to get it together for something like 30 years. So it wouldn't be that. It wouldn't be the, you know, the, the Chinese, it wouldn't be the renminbi. Because, well, who wants to move capital towards China? Um, in terms of havens?

• 1:03:37Speaker 03

  I think that we should be heartened long term about the quality of life in general. Throughout all of history, we've only ever seen quality of life improve. There's periods of time where it will devolve wars. You know, during wars, your quality of life declines, but it's an inexorable pace forward. With time, I mean, you know, I think, I think you ask a typical person what might be their concerns with respect, whether or not their children will have it better off than them. I would think that maybe their concern would be their individual rights. Uh, you know, the, the growth of the surveillance state, that type of thing. But generally speaking.

• 1:04:18Speaker 03

  You go back to the depression in the 1930s and you know, the guy, you know, FDR, his whole thing was getting a chicken in every pot. Like that was a big dinner if you could get a chicken in every pot. Well, now it's like, my wife went to Costco, a chicken was five bucks. You know, there were two, three chickens, five bucks. Um, so you could put a chicken on the table for five bucks in this country and that's because of technological advancement. Um, you know, we've, we've, for the most part, made leaps and bounds globally and certainly in the United States in terms of eradicating hunger or intense poverty, these types of issues.

• 1:04:58Speaker 03

  So I suspect on net, the future is positive, but you gotta make sure that we have so many unknown technologies that I think could really restrict individual freedoms in the future. And I don't know that I fully understand those technologies. I think one of them would be the CBDC. I don't know how anybody could be in favor of that. Um, and that would be something that would be top of my mind in terms of risks.

• 1:05:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Where can we send people to find you on the internet or learn more about the work you're doing at Wisdom Tree?

• 1:05:29Speaker 03

  Well, I'd say most of the stuff that you would see, it's a lot of, I do a lot of macro work on Twitter. The Twitter stuff is really how we get the message out because Wisdom Tree is a mid-sized asset manager. We specialize in dividends primarily, but we have businesses across asset classes. Um, I do some posts on LinkedIn as well. We have the Wisdom Tree blog. I write white papers. Um, and then I do, you know, I do pods like this. I do a lot of TV spots, but I'd say if you want to get your everyday dose of Whanniger, I'd say hit me up on Twitter and if you like macro, that's what you'd find there.

• 1:06:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Jeff, I've learned so much today. I really appreciate you taking the time to do this. We definitely will do it again in the future. Um, and I just appreciate, I think, kind of, uh, your humor, your, uh, understanding of the nuances of the macro environment, but also your willingness to just kind of say it how you see it, which is increasingly rare in today's society. So thank you so much and we'll definitely do it again.

• 1:06:28Speaker 03

  Thanks, Anthony. All right, take it easy, man.