The Fed's Latest Move Just Changed Everything | Darius Dale

Darius Dale is the founder and CEO of 42 Macro. In this conversation, we break down what the Fed should do next, how money printing quietly erodes your purchasing power, Kevin Warsh's plan to reshape the Fed, what history says happens to economies as K-shaped as ours, and what gives Darius hope for the future. ==================== Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates investment strategies across Stocks, Commodities, ETFs and Crypto. Whether you’re rotating into AI & Gold, allocating to the S&P 500, or accumulating Bitcoin, Arch Public executes your plan 24/7 without ever taking custody of your assets or funds. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com, and start your FREE automated trading strategy! ==================== Uphold is the easiest way to buy and sell crypto unlike any other platform allowing you to trade in just one step between any supported asset. Check them out at https://www.uphold.com/pomp/This video includes a paid sponsorship with Uphold. I’m compensated by Uphold for promoting its products and services and may receive commissions from referrals. Terms apply. Not available in all jurisdictions. Digital assets are risky and may result in the total loss of your capital. ==================== Simple Mining makes Bitcoin mining simple and accessible for everyone. We offer a premium white glove hosting service, helping you maximize the profitability of Bitcoin mining. For more information on Simple Mining or to get started mining Bitcoin, visit https://www.simplemining.io/pomp ==================== 0:00 - Intro0:56 - What the Fed should do vs. what they will do7:19 - Dollar debasement: pricing assets in "units of dollars"11:29 - Kevin Warsh, ending forward guidance, & AI-driven disinflation18:29 - Red states vs. blue states: fixing the K-shaped economy26:53 - Explicit vs. implicit socialism & the Wealth Pump theory32:01 - What gives Darius hope for the future

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:00Speaker 02

  And so when you start to invert things and start pricing them in units of dollars, like instead of saying price of S and P in $1, what's $1's ability to purchase one share of the S and P? What is $1's ability to purchase one banana at the grocery store? Or one gallon of gas? And you invert those prices, you really see the structural, multi-decade decline in our purchasing power that's been masked by these academic arguments that money supply has no impact in the real world. Which, again, sorry for me using this word again.

• 1:30Speaker 03

  What's going on, guys? Today, we've got a very special treat. We've got my friend Darius Dale. He's the founder and CEO of 42 Macro. And in this conversation, we talk about the plight of the people. How there's so much socialism going on, both implicitly and explicitly, and why that impacts your portfolio. And then last but not least, he gives some really nuanced, insightful thoughts about what's going on at the Fed, how Kevin Warsh is changing things up, and what he thinks that Kevin Warsh should be doing, that he's not. All that in this conversation with my friend Darius Dale. All right, Darius, we are recording this right before the Fed's decision here for July. But I want to understand from your perspective, before we know what they do, what is your read as to what they should do? And what is the data that's backing up that thought process?

• 2:10Speaker 02

  Ooh, that's a deep question, man. And thanks again for having me. Always a pleasure to be with you and your audience, my brother. So what they will do, in our opinion, is very different from what they should do. What they should do is tighten with the balance sheet, shrink the balance sheet, scare the market into believing that they are serious with regards to their price stability mandate, but ultimately leave the policy rate alone. And the reason we say they should leave the policy rate alone is because we have this big, multi-dimensional model that essentially tries to ascertain what the Fed should do over the near term and over the medium term, based on its, you know, the trends in key economic variables, as well as the deviation from the Fed's, you know, various mandates.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  And that model is essentially saying the Fed should, on net, remain on hold now, and stay on hold over the medium term. Now, the read, going back to where I started this answer, the reason we think the Fed should tighten monetary policy over the near term, it has nothing to do with what's happening from an economic standpoint. So in our opinion, we think this is all about signaling. We think the Fed, as we talked about the last time I was on your show, we think the Fed needs to play action pass to set up the run, with play-action passing being tightening cyclically and setting up the run, with the run being easing structurally. It's our belief that the, once we get the advent of the five task force findings later this year, early next year, that the net recommendations from those task forces will be extremely dovish, and that it's not priced into financial markets.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  And so if the Fed pivots from today's inflation problem to a series of extremely dovish policy recommendations, ultimately, that has risk, that poses significant risk to the bond market, the long end of the curve. And so ultimately, we think they should take a step in between of tightening policy just to regain some credibility on inflation fighting.

• 3:54Speaker 03

  What's fascinating to me is, I think if you go back to 2019, inflation has been compounding at about 4% a year. So if you include all the ups, downs, so there's about 4% compound annual growth rate to inflation over, you know, six, seven years. At the same time, inflation has been all over the place when it comes to the last, I don't know, eight months or so.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 4:12Speaker 03

  During that period, even with the inflation spike, the Fed continues to expand their balance sheet, which kind of feels like it's the opposite of what you're saying. So what is their logic? Or what would they defend themselves by saying that that was the right thing to do?

• 4:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, look, there's two schools of camp on the balance sheet, and one school of thought is a very self-serving, Wall Street-focused, quite frankly, I would say insidious school of thought, which is the balance sheet has no impact on monetary policy or on the real economy. It only matters from the perspective of financial plumbing, which is the repo market and all the transactions that take place in the overnight, near overnight cash market. In our opinion, we think that market is the very backbone of a market, you know, a modern market economy. And so to suggest at all that, you know, what's happening in the repo market, you know, the Reserve Management Purchase Program that the Fed is currently engaged in has no real impact on the real world economy or inflation, in our opinion, in the context of a $7 trillion balance sheet,

• 5:08Speaker 02

  in my opinion, I think that's, you know, for lack of a better word, it's bullshit. It's bullshit, you know?

• 5:14Speaker 03

  When you see that, what is the data that they're looking at, that they would use on the defensive side? Like, part of this, to me, is not just like, they're not licking their finger and sticking it in the air. Like, they have all their academic theories and all this stuff, right? So like, is there anything that they're looking at that you're like, "Okay, I see where they're coming from, I just disagree"? Or do you think the whole thing is just they've lost their minds?

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's even, so where I would point you to is, you know, the concept that money supply has been de-anchored from the real economy and inflation. And that is largely true, because we've seen so much growth of money supply not go into the real economy in recent decades. That's part of the reason why, you know, labor share of national income has declined so much, is because we're finding more and more clever ways to, you know, extract rent from the economy. Not we, the corporate sector, has found more and more clever ways to extract rent from the economy, whether you think about globalization, whether you think about, you know, forcing, busting, union busting, you know, pushing people to define contribution pensions as opposed to define benefit pensions.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  There's been all these sort of, you know, regulatory, you know, dynamics that have caused, you know, sort of the growth rate of money to wind up less and less in the hands of small businesses, less and less in the hands of median households, and less and less in the hands of sectors, you know, emerging sectors in the economy. It's really all going to, you know, high gross margin, high-profit companies, where most of that income winds up in the capital markets. It doesn't wind up in the real economy. The velocity of money has slowed tremendously in recent decades. And so that's kind of the academic argument that they would make, which is saying, "Hey, we can take our balance sheet up to an infinite number", because the reality is, most of this money is just going to wind up in the stock market. They won't say what I just said about the stock market, but that's the truth, right?

• 7:01Speaker 02

  We're just, this money's just going to wind up inflating assets over the long term. It's not going to have a material impact on inflation. But as we talked about, you and I talked about last time, that is not a costless exercise. There's something called the Cantillon Effect that no academic wishes to touch, because they understand that if they bring the phrase Cantillon Effect into the public sector lexicon, then everyone will realize that when the stock market goes up 20% year after year after year, and your income as a median consumer, you know, a regular, everyday, main street worker only goes up, you know, 4% to 5% year after year, and oh, by the way, inflation in some years is greater than that, then you just get left behind, because their purchasing power,

• 7:41Speaker 02

  the purchasing power of people like us, who have, along those assets, rises exponentially, whereas their purchasing power does not rise, if at all, you know, does not rise exponentially, if at all. Sometimes it declines. And so ultimately, that gap winds over time, over time, over time, so that when you and I show up to go buy a new car for our family, or show up to buy a new house for our family, or show up to buy groceries for our family, we have a lot more money that we can demand these goods and services with, whereas they don't. And so that Cantillon Effect is a real big issue from the perspective of inflation, because it ultimately means that inflation is really only impacting the people who can least afford to have it impact them.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  So if I look right now, overall grocery prices since early 2020, so call it six-ish years or so, has increased roughly 29% according to the government data. So let's just say that they're accurate, which I think you and I probably got questions about. But let's give them credit and say, okay, they're right. 30% in six years is bonkers, increasing grocery prices.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  Bonkers. Well, it's not like we forgot how to make food, by the way. You know, like, the thing about this is the supply-demand dynamic. So like, we didn't run out of arable land. We didn't run out of, you know, clever techniques to extract more, you know, crop yields. And so the only reason grocery prices can possibly be going up is because the unit of measurement that we are pricing the groceries in is going down. That's it. That's the only way. You know, the Bloomberg was one of my favorite analyses that I've did, and I'll tweet it out when you publish this, I'll attach it to the post when we publish this discussion. One of my favorite analyses that I did, because I think it is going back to this kind of insidious, Wall Street, you know, Jack O'Lantern-type, you know, dynamic that we see with central banking here in this country.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  If you go to Bloomberg and just type in US dollar currency, which is the ticker, the time series history for the dollar, you know, not against any currency, just the dollar, just what is a dollar worth? And it just says one every single day since Nixon broke the gold standard back in August of 1971. But the reality is, is we know the dollar has declined in price. Heaven forbid, we have a CPI index, we got a stock market index that goes up over time priced in dollars. So the dollar has declined in prices relative to the stock market. It has declined in prices relative to the CPI index. It's declined in prices relative to what the real cost of goods and services is in the economy, because we know the government is highly incentivized to under-report that stuff. And so when you start to invert things and start pricing them in units of dollars,

• 10:10Speaker 02

  like instead of saying price of S and P in $1, what's $1's ability to purchase one share of the S and P? What is $1's ability to purchase one banana at the grocery store or one gallon of gas? And you invert those prices, you really see the structural multi-decade decline in our purchasing power that's been masked by these academic arguments that money supply has no impact in the real world, which again, sorry for me using this word again, is bullshit. And thank God for Kevin Warsh to come in and into the Fed and kind of hopefully change the mindset around this. Stephen Moran was on CNBC the other day talking about this as well. You know, the reality is, is this, you know, the academics, they want to exclude anything that could be potentially inflationary via the Cantillon effect

• 10:54Speaker 02

  from discussions about inflation and the balance sheet and ultimately monetary policy, because they want carte blanche to continue implementing those policies for the bankers and the masters that they serve, which is not the ordinary Main Street American households. And so hopefully, it's my hope as a, as someone who understands these dynamics at a very high level and someone from the bottom of that K, I'm hoping from based on everything he's saying in his testimony a couple of weeks ago, that Kevin Warsh understands what I'm talking about and will go there and fight for the people in terms of changing the mindset.

• 11:25Speaker 03

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• 12:10Speaker 03

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• 12:55Speaker 03

  Do they like this idea or do they not like this idea? And the reason why I'm interested in that is because it kind of is changing the way that people analyze the Fed's potential impact on the market over the next, you know, six or 12 months.

• 13:06Speaker 02

  Oh, that's a phenomenal question because we have two types of clients. First specifically as relates to this question. We have global fixed income clients, folks who manage hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars. We know we have a couple of clients who manage trillions of dollars of global fixed income. But then we also have, you know, non-fixed income clients, which are equity investors, portfolio managers, people who invest across asset classes, credit, et cetera, crypto clients, crypto hedge funds, et cetera. And so I would say the clients in the fixed income space are annoyed as heck by this change. You know, they're so used to making easy money by gaming what the Fed is going to say next and what they go, and as a function of their legacy forecast, we know that what they're going to say next, there's a sort of high auto-correlation between what they previously said.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  Well, now we're moving to an era where the auto-correlation between what the Fed previously said and what they say and do next is declining. And so that ultimately makes it harder for the fixed income investors to make money, but it makes it easier for the rest of us who can forecast accurately to make money. And here's why. By injecting volatility into the interest rate curve, particularly on the short end of the interest rate curve, by not over-communicating, which is what Kevin Warsh is seeking to do, by injecting that volatility, you ultimately allow the financial markets to price in, the better price in, more accurately price in, changes in the R star, which is the real policy rate, or changes in the neutral rate better,

• 14:31Speaker 02

  as opposed to just the, as opposed to what the markets have previously been doing, which is anchoring on previous Fed forward guidance. And so by allowing the markets to price in changes, real-time changes to the R star and the neutral rate, you ultimately create an economy that doesn't deviate too far in one direction or the other. Right? That is a massive, important change from a sociological and economic standpoint that ultimately shrinks the distribution of probable outcomes. It reduces the probability of having significant left-tail events like the global financial crisis. It reduces the probability of having significant right-tail events like what we saw in early 2021. You know, you're just basically compressing the range of probable outcomes, which is actually better for the economy long-term because you ultimately, businesses can plan better,

• 15:13Speaker 02

  households can plan better, we ultimately can get to a much better sequence of outcomes.

• 15:18Speaker 03

  When we look at Kevin Warsh's comments, right? I'm going to read to you kind of a summary of one of the important things, the part maybe that I'm most interested in of his understanding that seems like the old Fed administration did not. Warsh has described the artificial intelligence boom as a heavily productivity-enhancing and structurally disinflationary wave. Again, that's, he describes the artificial intelligence boom as a heavily productivity-enhancing and structurally disinflationary wave, though he maintains that immediate rate decisions depend strictly on broad economic readings rather than just tech sector growth. The thing I take away from this is this guy knows there's this tsunami coming of all of the robotics and automation and AI and all this kind of stuff.

• 16:03Speaker 03

  At the same time, he seems to be pretty rational, saying, you can't start trying to extrapolate what we think is going to happen in five or 10 years and pull it to the future, and then all of a sudden say, let's make policy decisions based on a maybe. So have we had a Fed chairman who has this balance between understanding a technology trend and direction of travel, but still seems pretty rooted with their feet on the ground? Like, I don't know if we've seen someone kind of talk like this before.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  Look, I mean, you have to go back to Greenspan, right? Greenspan is the last time we saw, you know, significant, you know, capital deepening in the economy that led to as meaningful productivity boom. We had 150 basis point, you know, trend acceleration and productivity growth from the mid 90s to the mid 2000s. And so, you know, that was obviously part of the, part of that was the function of the diffusion of internet technology, technology throughout the economy. But, but it wasn't just that, it was other things as well. And so, you know, anchoring on that, on that, on that legacy, you know, yes, I'm answering you. The answer to your question is, yeah, it's been, it's been a while since we've had a Fed chair that understands that the sequence of outcomes is just as important, if not more important than the destination. And here's why. I just said, R star has been gravitating higher, neutral rate has been gravitating higher

• 17:14Speaker 02

  according to our, you know, market implied estimate of the neutral rate. It's our, we built a model that essentially tries to extract from various market pricing what the market's estimate of neutral is. And, you know, it's basically gone up by about, you know, two rate hikes in the last couple of months. And so what that ultimately means is the market is signaling to the Fed, the market is telling the Fed, hey, we are running out of money at the margins. And so in order for you to attract this increasingly limited supply of capital, Mr. Treasury Market, you need to raise your interest rate. You need to raise the X ante return on this security. Otherwise, I'm going to go buy a piece of Nvidia hyperscaler debt

• 17:56Speaker 02

  or I'm going to go buy, you know, this stock that's going up, you know, 10x what a fixed income return would be. And so that, that's the whole concept of our, our star and neutral. That's the market's ability, that's the market's, you know, communication mechanism, either through our star, neutral or interest rates or inflation expectations, rather. That's the way the market communicates to the Fed to tell them to do stuff. And so the market is telling the Fed that, hey, if you want, if the Treasury Department wants more of my money, you need to make the interest rate higher because I have alternate uses for this capital and/or the supply of capital is dwindling at the margins. Fun fact, if you look at the growth rate of global savings on a trailing 10-year basis, it's about 55%.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  That's one of the lowest readings in the history of the time series. The long-run mean of the trailing 10-year percentage change in global savings is about 90%. Right now, we are currently at 55%. So we've had a tremendous deceleration in the growth rate of global savings. At the same time, we're having a tremendous acceleration in the demand for capital. Obviously, we have an AI capex bubble. We obviously have a bubble in sovereign deficits all across the world. If you look at the US's latest value, it's, you know, close to 6%. That compares to a long-run mean of 3% in terms of our budget deficit. The global budget deficit on an aggregate basis is about 5%. That compares to a long-run mean of about 2.5, 3%. And so you have this bubble in sovereign deficits

• 19:23Speaker 02

  that is increasingly demanding capital at a time where capital is starting to become scarce at the margins. And we can see it in AI stocks.

• 19:29Speaker 03

  Now, when we go and we look at the average person, I think that they're complaining about, and rightfully so, gas is high, groceries are high, they can't afford a home, credit card interest rates have exploded higher. I mean, student loan debt, I mean, just all this stuff is just going crazy. Now pull that back and Mom Donnie in New York, he's got a plan. He gonna have five grocery stores run by the, by the government. Go out to California, they got a plan. Seems like, you know, kind of blue states are saying, hey, we hear you. We're going to help fix it. Red states, I think are saying, we hear you. But they're kind of saying like, that's for the private sector to solve. That, that's, we're not going to get involved there.

• 20:15Speaker 03

  If you put aside all of the nasty, like bipartisan politic stuff and just say, look at the economic policies, we essentially are going to run two different experiments in this country based on the current situation.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 20:32Speaker 03

  If you had to pick one positive from both the red states and the blue states, how would you look at like, what are the things they're doing that you like in both of those experiences?

• 20:43Speaker 02

  Boy, that's my favorite question I've had in probably a podcast in history. I've known this for almost two decades. Yeah. Oh my God. Uh, sorry, not to digress, but I would say, and again, I'm to have someone with political aspirations, you know, I've, you know, obviously went to Yale. So that, you know, going to Yale.

• 20:59Speaker 03

  Flex.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  No, no, I'm, I'm saying this like, you know, having been in the, the president's room at the Yale Club, you realize like, these are people who will just like me. They're just on the wall now. You know what I mean? And so like at some point, you know, these, you know, it's not incon- it's not inconceivable that Darius Dale could be the president of the United States someday. It's not inconceivable that Anthony Pompliano could be the president of the United States someday. In fact, I fully intend to run for, for a political office with you, uh, at some point in the future. Uh, you, I hope, I don't know if you know that, but you, you know, now, uh, because I believe that you and I, and I'm really, I'm really grateful you asked this question because I believe that you and I can, again, I'm going to use the word again for the fourth time. I almost never curse, by the way.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  Uh, you and I can see through the bullshit. We understand that this game the politicians are playing is a game designed to gamify our angst. They're designed to, they're weaponizing our angst so that they can gain more of our resources and, and stay in power and or acquire incremental units of power. That's why it's so violent Republican versus Democrat in this country, because the people who control the system understand that if you divide, you can conquer and, and, and, and administer power, uh, and into greater degrees and for longer periods of time. This has been tried in every society throughout human history, but you and I are smart enough to recognize that game and, and, and knock it over.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  They, they might kill us before that happens, but that's neither nor there. I'd rather die trying than, than say, than stand silent. But going back to answer your, uh, answering your question. What I like from the Democrats side of thing, or the, the blue state side of thing, whatever we want to call it, is that they're actually listening to the people who've been left behind by this sort of, the, the, the, the evolution of this K-shaped society. Now, where I strongly disagree with them is in their solutions. We know socialism doesn't work. You don't have to go to college to figure that out. You can just go on YouTube at this point. And so, you know, any policy that is designed to restrict prices and/or supply will ultimately cause more inflation and cause more problems longer term.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  And you won't, you won't solve the underlying problem, which is people don't have enough money to afford a quality lifestyle. That is the underlying problem we're trying to solve. The issue with the red state side of things is that they want to do more of the things that are causing the K-shaped economy to begin with. We have K-shaped monetary policy. We know if you look at the Fed, uh, relative to a baseline Taylor rule estimate, its policy has gotten easier and easier and easier and easier and ridiculously easy over time. If you look at the Fed's balance sheet or the monetary base relative to the economy or relative to the stock market has gotten easier and easier and easier over time. So that is, gets contributing to that Cantillon effect by inflating asset prices at rates that are far exceeding the median wage growth.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  We've, I mean, we've left the median wage in the dust like by hilarious degrees in, in recent decades. And so monetary policy has been a key contributor to that. K-shaped monetary policy has been, been a key contributor to the K-shaped economy crisis. K-shaped fiscal policy has been a key contributor to the K-shaped economy crisis. If you want to look at, you know, all the money that the government spends on, uh, poor people, um, you aggregate all the, um, the means tested programs. It's about, you know, 1.2, 1.3 trillion dollars currently. That compares to about 2.6 trillion dollars that the government spends on rich people in the form of national defense and in net interest on the debt. When the government has a contract, it goes to Alex Carper Palantir, Elon Musk, or whoever makes, you know, manufactures all these bombs and missiles and drones.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  It doesn't go to poor people who are lining up at the food bank. So with that's, you know, we're basically spending double the amount of money on rich people as a federal government than we do on poor people. So that's K-shaped monetary policy that dynamic's been going on for years. And lastly, as we started the conversation, K-shaped regulatory policy. We've allowed big business to take over the Supreme Court in this country in the past 50, uh, five decades, to the degree that we no longer have, you know, trust busting. We have union busting to the degree that we no longer have defined benefit pensions. We have defined contribution pensions. You know, we have all these things, offshoring, globalization, uh, uh, uh, you know, the, the AI race, you know, the, the race to replace white collar labor with, you know, quote unquote, low cost, you know, uh, bits and, and tokens.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  You know, all these things that are basically, you know, great for generating profits and higher stock prices, which is great if you're on the top part of the K like us. But they are contributing to the problem. They're causing the problem of the ordinary person cannot afford to live a quality life. And so you have to find a middle ground between listening to the people and understanding the drivers of why those people are upset and why those people, why we need to, you know, basically walk them off the ledge before we lose our society. Cause that's the word, that's where this is at.

• 25:32Speaker 03

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• 27:43Speaker 03

  If it sounds interesting to you, you can get it for free at simplemining.io/pomp. That's simplemining.io/pomp. Go check it out today and see if you should get into the mining game. I wrote a piece, um, earlier this week, and I talked about how socialism is one of the biggest threats to, uh, investors' portfolios. But I talk about explicit and implicit, and that's basically what you're talking about here. There's explicit Mombani grocery stores. There's implicit. We're printing cash and we're giving it to somebody, right? And it's two different forms, two different, you know, kind of avenues for money to go from the federal government into people's hands. And really the fight now in politics is over who gets to be the recipient of the socialism.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  Amen.

• 28:28Speaker 03

  And I think that there's a huge challenge with the number of people who believe that we should have a small government. That number is disappearing. I mean, I talked to a lot of folks. There's red and blue. I don't see a lot of libertarians. I don't see a lot of, you know, folks who are saying, get both of these parties away from me. And I think that those folks who do have those beliefs, they feel like they're kind of outcasts when it comes to the US political system now. And the reason why I'm so interested in it is because I do believe that those folks tend to have the best understanding from the economic policies that are being implemented to what portfolios are likely to work.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  And also probably have some of the best returns in their portfolio if you go, because they understand what both parties are doing and how it affects the investment assets.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  Amen. Amen. Uh, you nailed it, man. You absolutely nailed it. And, and, and part of the reason, like, you know, when I first started, my first joint Wall Street, I was a card carrying member of the Von Mises Institute and, and, you know, School of Austrian Economics. And, you know, that's part of my core belief system because ultimately I understand from, you know, Studying literary works like the greatest literary work of all time, the Bible, and studying many other literary works throughout my academic career and then post-college deliberate study process is that none of this stuff works over the long term. It always winds up getting corrupted. It all, if you, the bigger government gets, no matter if it's big government to make Alex Karp and Elon Musk rich, or big government to make people at the food bank less hungry.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  If, no matter how big the, if it's big, the bigger the government gets, the worse outcomes are in society. And part of the reason for that, I believe we talked about this the last time I was on your show, part of the reason for that is this dynamic called the wealth pump. And the wealth pump, Peter Turchin, you know, his colleagues at the Crisis DB and the Complexity Science Institute in Vienna, you know, they've done a tremendous amount of academic research on this, is quite possibly the most well-researched social, socioeconomic, you know, kind of database that I've ever seen in my, you know, two decades of doing this and even throughout my scholastic experience. And basically what they found is that like, the bigger the government gets, the more it gets weaponized to create, you know, disparate outcomes for certain groups relative to other groups.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  The more the divvying up of the pie starts to get, you know, bad, basically, it starts to create more conflict and violence in society. And so, you know, if I can just end with this, you know, part of the data that they presented in this, in this, in this Crisis DB database and Complexity Science Institute, and again, this is like hundreds of PhD researchers from universities all over the world have combined to, you know, kind of contribute to this over the past few decades, a couple of decades. And so now that they are finally starting to publish a lot of their work, you know, I'll just leave you with seven numbers. If you look at economies that share the US's current K-shaped dynamics, and part of the reason we have current K-shaped dynamics is because of K-shaped monetary policy, K-shaped fiscal policy, and K-shaped regulatory policy that's been, you know, used to, you know,

• 31:31Speaker 02

  extract rent and wealth from the lower classes of society to the upper classes of society. When you have those types of K-shaped dynamics that are being driven by what they call the wealth pump, you tend to have very bad outcomes. So let me just go through seven numbers here. If you look at the historical probability of these outcomes, and thus far, they've done this across 100 different societies, expanding millennia, obviously all the big ones in there, the Chinese, Rome, US, French, you know, all these other big societies, I think they're currently studying another 200, if I'm not correct. But the first 100, the first main ones that they had the best data for, this is the historical probability of select outcomes. Seventy, 17% of these societies that have the US's current K-shaped crisis dynamics

• 32:13Speaker 02

  end with systemic violence against elites like us. 20% of those outcomes wind up with recurrent civil wars lasting for at least 100 years. 40% of those societies wind up with assassination of their rulers. 50% of those societies wind up with substantial population decline. 60% of those societies wind up with state collapse via conquest or disintegration into multiple states, which is very much could be happening right now in the United States of America. 67% of those societies wind up featuring systemic downward mobility of elites. And then 75% of those societies end with revolution, civil war, or both.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  Again, this is the historic frequentist probability of the outcomes that economies that share our current K-shaped dynamics wind up into.

• 33:01Speaker 03

  What are you most excited about over the next four or five years? If you had to point, you know, we talked a lot about the challenges, I think that people are feeling that, what gives you hope?

• 33:10Speaker 02

  What gives me hope is that things are going to get bad enough for us to fix it. Yeah, that's what, that's what gives me hope. And that's, that anchors on my former colleague, one of my mentors, work, Neil Howe, his foreturning work, he sees this as more of a reflexive, you know, cyclical process. And we have to go through, we have to go through these seasons of disintegration and violence and conflict to kind of right the ship. Because ultimately, human beings are, you know, we are easily tempted. You know, human beings are very greedy, creatures are easily tempted, resources are scarce. And so ultimately, we wind up trying to, not we, but you know, human beings in general, particularly people who don't have a core belief system like being Christian, et cetera. If you don't have a core belief system that says, the herd is better than me, is more important than me, and you just operate with my, my, mine, give me mine, selfish, give

• 33:55Speaker 02

  me mine, I gotta get mine, I gotta get mine, and that's how most human beings operate, you're ultimately going to wind up with these really harsh outcomes. And so I'm very, I'm most excited about things getting bad enough for us to finally fix these problems so that, you know, your children, my children can grow up in a world that's much more socially cohesive and a lot less, you know, anxious.

• 34:14Speaker 03

  I, I think there's a lot of people who want to see that future come to, come to fruition. Where can we send people to find you or find more about 42 Macro?

• 34:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I appreciate you, man. Again, like I said, I'm here to, I'm here to educate and learn and learn from you. You know, folks want to come check us out, check us out at 42macro.com. You know, having these types of conversations is maybe 1% of what we do. The number one thing we do for all of our clients is, is helping them stay on the right side of market risk, whether we're maximizing upside capture in a bull market, minimizing downside capture in a bear market, and we do it through the lens of some of the best, you know, quantitative risk management systems that you're going to be able to access at price points that regular people can pay for. You know, again, I cut my teeth designing systems like this for the global buy side. And now we sell them to regular people because I think that's the right thing to do.

• 34:54Speaker 03

  I think you guys do a fantastic job. Obviously, I'm a fan of you and 42 Macro, so I appreciate the time to do this and we'll do it again next month.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, God bless you, brother. And thank you again for this, this opportunity to educate, man. We need to have these conversations as a country.