Kenneth Rogoff - Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider's View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead

30:54And also, it's very interesting how the outward facing part of China is just so formidable. The inward facing part of China's much more complicated story. It's a much larger part of the economy. And they're having a massive real estate crisis, which I've written about for a decade. You've written a lot about that. You talk about the book, how you prescriptively had laid that out, obviously, a long time ago. And to your point, and again, for our listeners, and you can comment on this too, Dr. Rogoff, but in 2009, I mean, there were articles being written in the New York Times while you're doing your writing and your work that are arguing, you know what?

31:35Maybe we should be ran by a nine-person Politburo. It seems to me that they are doing a lot better things. We're still having that again, maybe. Yeah, there was that debate in the public square. that maybe we should more be like China. And you and others were saying, like I know Chano from an investment perspective was arguing this is massive overinvestment. It's gonna be miserable. You were making that case too in the longer run context. And yet here we wake up with today and it's not like anyone runs around and says, hey, Ken, you were right, by the way. Everyone else was wrong. Why has that not been more focal of look at how bad government allocation can be in the economy at times.

32:18It's a really important point, I mean, and you'd think people would look at it. I started talking about it a little over 10 years ago. The New York Times featured something I wrote because it related to real estate, something I said saying, oh, this guy thinks there'll be a real estate crisis, but they didn't take it very seriously. And I talk about it in the book when I got to address the China Development Forum, which has all the leadership except for the president and every conceivable tech finance investor from around the world. And I went off script and said, look at your housing prices. You're going to have a real estate problem.

33:02And I mentioned some other problems. And I wasn't supposed to say that. But I thought, I'm here. I don't know what's going to happen, but what's the point of my being here if I'm not honest? I'm an academic. I'm not trying to make money out of China. And I relate how I stepped off the stage at the end, and maybe the vice premier came up to me and said, Professor Rogoff, we really appreciated your comments. And I was thinking, is that what they say just before they arrest you? I don't know. But it was a couple years later I started developing this more. And had a lot of statistics showing why that was going to happen.

33:49And I think people, you know, everyone was in love with the Chinese method, not just some Americans, but Africans, Asians thinking, you know, they're so competent. They're so good at doing things. And they are. I mean, they're amazing people. But, you know, when you have the government do something and you tell it, you know, you want a million nails, you might get 100 million nails. Yeah. And that's what happened. Their housing, they have more housing than much richer countries than France, than the United Kingdom. And they've got a problem for a long time. Unfortunately, that doesn't protect us at all because it's a giant country and the export sector is strong, the tech sector is strong.

34:39And so although the economy overall is struggling, there are these very competitive sectors we have to deal with. Sure. And you also point out the difference between, call it the national party and the local politics. Like there's a big spread. We had done a book on the history of China. And you just think about the warring factions of China to get to what we know as modern China. Like, you know, and the Qing dynasty, for example. You think about all that. And that really is still at play, as you point out. There is the national party and there's what goes on locally. And they might have very little in alignment with each other because in some respects, they all know that they want to keep effectively the party in power.

35:22But yet things have to run. Money's got to move. And there's a way to facilitate government locally that might be different than the national scene. Well, think of how much problem we have running our country with 350 million people. There are lots of debates, lots of stuff going on. imagine 1.4 billion people you're somehow trying to govern. And I think someone once said to me, you know, when I asked about, doesn't the center know what's going on in the Western provinces? And he said, they haven't known for 2000 years, you know, what's going on. Like, it's just very hard to control something.

36:03So it's not just a matter of differing incentives. It's also just such a behemoth to run something like that. And at some level, you have to let each city run itself a little bit. And yeah, there are a lot of tensions, a really odd one. For Americans, especially, there's no real estate tax in China. Imagine that. The local government, the province could be broke. But if you talk about putting in a housing tax or a housing real estate tax, forget it. I mean, look at New York these days. And why? Why do they do that? Because the center decided it raised too much money for the local governments. It gave them too much power, and they said too much corruption.

37:00And so they have a lot of tensions in their system that have to do with the size of it. There are a lot of progressives who greatly admire Denmark, and a lot to admire, but forget the population, six million people. I mean, it's like running like, you know, a little franchise compared to running China. Yeah, no, I totally agree. We hope you're enjoying the podcast. You know, we work hard putting together this show, but we work even harder for our investors at Smead Capital Management. At Smead, we believe in disciplined investing, which is why the Smead funds have a proven track record of long-term outperformance.

37:38If you're an investor who plays the long game and want to invest in wonderful companies to build wealth, we invite you to visit SmeadCap.com. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Investing involves risks, including loss of principle. Please refer to the prospectus for important information about the investment company, including objectives, risks, charges and expenses. Read and consider it carefully before investing. Smead funds distributed by Smead Funds Distributors, LLC, not affiliated. I agree with you on this. So I just kind of want to use your writing on it as a picture of it.

38:13And while I'm asking this, I'll have our production team put up table three, which I'll be asking here. So your view of crypto is one sentence. No private currency wins a game in which governments make the rules. You talk about Kublai Khan and how his subjects use tree bark money. You can see crypto has real value in the global underground economy. but it's the size of the informal or underground economy relative to GDP in Europe, which you have here in the book and we'll have it up here in a second. You looked back and just said, hey, let's look at the underground economy because that's effectively what you're saying is kind of the trough for that in effect.

38:59Is that fair? Yeah, that's the base use. So I have to say when When Bitcoin first came out, I did not fully appreciate what its final use was. There are these people who say it's valuable if everybody thinks it's valuable. It's money. There's a long chapter in Sapiens, which is a wonderful book by Yuval Nohorari that looks at cigarettes and prisoner of war camps and stones in the island of Yap and says, it's just the same. Bitcoin is money because people believe it's money. That is so misconceived. It's very eloquent, he writes beautifully, but the government has a lot of control. Where they don't have control is in the underground economy.

39:52They don't have control there of what people use. by the way, a lot of the underground economies, tax evasion. That's the monster part of the global underground economy. It's huge. Actually, it's smaller in the US than in Europe, because the VAT tax is easier to avoid than income tax. And if you go to India and stuff, it's even higher. But the underground economy is an eventual use. It's already, cryptocurrencies are very widely used. Stablecoins more than Bitcoin at the moment, very widely used. So I came to realize that we have an underground economy that I and the World Bank come to similar estimates of about 20 % of global GDP.

40:38So think 20 to$25 trillion. And cash has been very big, but cryptocurrencies have become very big. And so it doesn't mean, If you think about the numbers, it doesn't mean Bitcoin can be worth$10 million. Sure. But I think it does put a floor. I have no idea what it is, although I put a back of the envelope of$50 ,000. Sure. Who knows? But yes, no, the underground economy provides a use. I'm surprised how many people to this day, we won't name them. You probably had them on your show, have said it's worthless. It's never going to be worth anything. It's just totally mirage. That's not true. I mean, people are always going to be trying to avoid the government.

41:27If taxes get bigger, if regulation gets bigger, that's good for Bitcoin. Sure. Well, to your point, if you think about that, there's a cost to move money for illegal transactions or black market, whatever we want to call that, evasion, et cetera. And as long as there's counterparties willing to help you with that, there's value in that. Absolutely. Exactly. Right? So if I'm a speculator and you have a money movement issue and we can align on something in the middle, you will gladly attribute a value to that for me to hold. So I totally agree with you. Now, you point out the real problem in all this, which is if the government decides to change the rules tomorrow, it could be all over.

42:09In other words, like, great, you're not allowed to own that. Okay? So then it would be like a purge in a way, which is a bigger, higher order question. But I do want to pivot, though. Stablecoins, you give a kind of pragmatic view to stablecoins in some respects. I guess my question is, are stablecoins just a money market fund with less interest? Yeah. I mean, we haven't hit the endgame of this yet. It is a work in progress, and I mean the regulation. So right now, Tether is very, very widely used because it's really not traceable. I had a Chinese regulator who I've known for years very, very well, who's basically the czar of digital currencies in China, explained to me that there are 80 million stablecoin users in China.

43:03They don't want them, but they can't stop them. Yeah. They use VPNs and whatever. China and Russia trade with stablecoins. China and Russia and India trade with stablecoins. Iran famously has been trading with stablecoins. So the question, and this is too much of a deep dive to get into, but with the Genius Act, which is going to try to regularize them, is what information do you have to report and to who, what do I have to know about you? Do you have the same kind of requirements, know your customer requirements. And the questions, if you had those, what's the demand going to be if it doesn't pay interest?

43:50You don't care if it doesn't pay interest, if you're avoiding 50 % taxes or doing something illegal. But yeah, you were right. I'm constructive about it. I'm not dismissive of stable coins, but I don't quite know where everything's going to end up. So these numbers, like Scott Besson says, it's going to be$3 trillion. I don't know. It kind of depends on how the regulation evolves, whether it'll be like a money market fund. You said with no interest, I don't know that it'll have no interest. That's not fully settled. Sure. I kind of touched this earlier. I know you had kind of touched this idea a little bit on the bankruptcy comment you made in Europe.

44:35I want to ask you about the idea of American exceptionalism. This has been something that's been talked about the last few years. I'll give you my view, and I'd love to kind of get your take. I look at the idea of American exceptionalism. It's kind of like throwing a parade after everyone knows you won the prior era, like in the stock market and the global economy and things like that. Now, whether we did, as measured by debt and other things you talk about in your book, we could also debate the finer points of that. I just say that because I look at all of life as a game of copycat, right? If you do something really well, I'm going to figure out what you're doing well, and I'm going to adopt it, adapt to that, et cetera.

45:11It's a complex organism that's adaptive in this world. And so I think of like exceptionalism comes and goes. And so if we want to say that, as soon as we say it, it comes out of our mouth. It's probably fading already. How do you think about the idea of American exceptionalism? Well, that was very eloquent. No, I mean, there is American exceptionalism at the moment. But coming to something I said earlier, not with the interest rates we pay anymore. It's hard to detect that we're being given a privileged position. Now, to be fair, we borrow a lot. So, you know, controlling for our borrowing, there's something.

45:54But, you know, it's not something that you own. It's something you have to earn all the time. It comes from our rule of law, from our constitution, from our formerly stable political system, from our markets, from many, many things. and you know it's something we constantly have to work for i mean we it is the greatest country in the world i'm not saying anything otherwise but i think sort of anyone i think you know you might have said to this to me before we started recording anyone who thinks it everything's just going to continue in every way the way it is that's very naive i've sort of uh made my life of the last 30 years, pointing out if, why don't you look at 200-year averages instead of just looking at the last 10 years, whether it's interest rates, debt, what have you, and don't just extrapolate what's going on.

46:55Now, the dollar has been around a long time. AI seems to be good for the dollar, but I think there's a lot of undercurrents going on that are likely to weaken our grip, not eliminate it, but weaken it. And if we don't adjust to that, it could be very painful. Sure. In the book, you talk about swap lines. And what I appreciated about your section on swap lines, even though it wasn't a big part of the book, I think it's just very helpful for average people to understand what is a swap line. So I want to put up a slide while we're doing this. It'll be your figure 14. And it's a chart showing the foreign central bank use of Fed dollar swaps from 03 to 2024.

47:41Here's a picture of it right here on the screen. It shows you that it's exceptionally used in times of crisis. You explain the reasons for swap lines. In some respects, as I was thinking about all your writing of pegs and fixed currency and all that kind of stuff, at those moments and times, they are kind of a peg. We're providing a lot of liquidity in a fixed way to counterparties that need dollars. Is that a fair way of thinking about swap lines in crisis? No. The idea originated at the end of the 50s and the early 60s when we were on gold. And the Europeans were accumulating dollars. That's what Robert Triffin, I alluded to earlier, was complaining about.

48:24And we didn't want them to come and take our gold. So we offered these swap lines whenever there was stress, particularly in the UK market where a lot of Europe traded. So that's when it was invented. And then it was brought out big time in the pandemic and the global financial crisis. So if we want everyone to use the dollar, we want to make them able to deal with a panic. If we, the US, we can't have a run on the dollar that makes us default because we can just print it. I mean, we can have inflation because of it. We can have high interest rates, but we don't have to default. But if you're somewhere else, not just Argentina, you're in Japan, you're in the UK, and you have big dollar markets.

49:20And suddenly there's this demand to everyone wants dollars. It expresses itself in violent interest rate movements, violent exchange rate movements. And if we didn't do something to smooth it over, they wouldn't want to allow this. They would start banning the dollar markets. So we're not the only ones who do it. China has swap lines out to, I think, 39 countries. The euro system has swap lines out. A thing that I mentioned about swap lines is it's not free. It's not riskless, even if Fed testimony says it is. You're making a loan to Korea in the middle of a disaster that we've never seen before.

50:08The pandemic, the global financial crisis. You know, not every time it's going to work out. We are actually taking a lot of risk when we do that. It's worth it. It's a business decision, but it's risky. And so sometimes people forget that. And they say, well, why don't you just do swap lines all the time? Why don't we give swap lines to every developing countries? Why don't we democratize swap lines? You can imagine the kind of people giving those speeches. But you strategically, and I think as we have, it supported the dollar. You mentioned copying people, your copycat. China saw that. Europe saw that.

50:49And now they're doing the same thing to try to expand use of their currencies. They say that the best form of humor is self-deprecation. You talked about mission creep at the Fed. You said it's not the EPA and that the interest rate cannot do surgical redistribution. As the old saying is, interest rates are a very blunt tool, as has been said in the past. you were talking about a friend of yours who was the head of research at one of the regional feds and and i don't have this in my notes but the line i remember from your book is it wasn't an east coast reserve bank right in other words it wasn't one of those regions um but i think you mentioned that they were interested in inequality and climate and he was joking to you that he's one of the last people doing he was the last person working on monetary policy at that at that regional Fed.

51:44You know, what does it say? You know, this is it's all very human thing. We just get misguided by the wrong needs and outcomes and incentives, things like that. My crazy idea is like I live in Phoenix. We're like the fourth largest metro area in America. You know, we don't have a federal reserve. I didn't know that. So we don't have a regional bank sitting around us. Right. Do you ever think that the regional aspects of the Fed ever need to be rethought because the Federal Reserve in San Francisco dominates the West Coast, and yet people in San Francisco have very little in common today in some respects with Phoenix, Arizona.

52:22Well, concretely, the New York Fed president always gets to vote at the meetings of the Open Market Commission, Federal Open Market Committee, which determines interest rates. And the California Fed, the San Francisco Fed, does not. That's ridiculous. Like, that's ridiculous. I mean, it should, especially with tech, this is an absurdity. So I would certainly quickly agree with that. It's a complicated question. Sure. You know, there were a lot of pressures on the Fed to solve everything because they seemed competent and Congress didn't seem competent. So just as sometimes people go to the Supreme Court to get something done they really ought to get Congress to do, but they can't.

53:16People will go to the Fed. That's been particularly going on in recent years. And obviously, there's a lot of theater about Trump's pressures on the Fed. But there were certainly pressures from Obama and much more from the Biden administration of caring about inequality, caring about the environment, and stressing those points. And I only mentioned that everyone's trying to use the Fed to their ends. And so what happened bizarrely almost is the research conferences, I'm going to Jackson Hole, the big central bankers conference in a couple of weeks, that conference had special editions of this inequality, social justice, environment, because that was something that some people want to talk about.

54:11Those are really important issues. But the Fed doesn't have the competence. It doesn't have the instruments. It doesn't have anything to deal with that. And so I used that San Francisco Fed, my friend's line, which was true, that he sent a letter to me to try to illustrate that, that everyone's trying to use the Fed to their purposes. And I'm very sympathetic, frankly, to what Kevin Warsh is doing in trying to streamline what they do in order to have a better focus. Sure. Um, you use the Dick Cheney line that deficits do not matter, which is being co-opted by everyone and their brother on either side of the aisle to your point.

55:01Um, just stepping back, you know, do you look at this as just who wants to tell people that they're going to, you know, cut spending? I can't find anyone on either side of the aisle. So I don't think this is like a single party problem. This is a big American problem. I think you would agree. And I think – in fact, while we're talking about this, we could throw up figure 16, which is the gross debt and the advanced economy. It's just kind of a picture of this. But I look at this as our incentive is to please people politically. We have our largest population group doing Medicare and Social Security, two of our largest spending categories.

55:39Is there any way to get away from this except for in a crisis? Because as Churchill said, the United States always does the right thing after exhausting the avenues. Are we just going to have to exhaust the avenues on debt? So that was a central theme of my book was that we would need a crisis to slap us to reality and how it worked. There are a lot of different directions it could take. Most other countries are not really debating this. They've seen it. And the United States, even though we have as much government debt as all the other major advanced economies combined, that's the figure you were going to show.

56:21That's what it illustrates. Our interest rate's creeping up, but we haven't yet reached a point where it went up to where it just dominated the conversation. Mind you, interest payments now are more than defense spending. The Congressional Budget Office has them on track to be our number one expenditure. But it's certainly... So that was my thesis. The book's about many things, but my overarching thesis of the final part is we've been using sanctions on everyone. We've been spying on everyone. China's going to react. Europe wants to keep Greenland. They're going to react. But that the biggest problem is the inside, exactly what you said, Cole, neither party thinks it can get ahead by talking about what they call austerity, which I take it to mean not running a 6 % or 7 % budget deficit.

57:24And yeah, even though it seems impossible for something to happen, I think we're just going to keep both feet on the accelerator until it does. And, you know, we'll see.

58:03look, or better yet, reach out at smeadcap.com. And don't forget to mention your fan of the podcast. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Investing involves risks, including loss of principle. Please refer to the prospectus for important information about the investment company, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. Read and consider it carefully before investing. Smead funds distributed by Smead Funds Distributors, LLC, not affiliated. I'm going to add a little theory that we've been talking about, and I haven't had anybody disprove this yet, so I'm very glad to say that in some respects, but Charlie Munger, he said often he told people to invert things, always invert them and think about them from the other perspective.

58:47So if we just go back and look at economic history, and to your point about the deficits, and we say, okay, how often have we ran 6 % to 7 % you know, deficits as a percentage of GDP. And when did we do those? Well, history argues we do those in deep recessions or economic problems. Wars. Okay. And we're doing that in the middle of economic growth. So I jokingly, I say this tongue in cheek, but there's a lot of truth to the joke is it's like economists and investors have been running around, look, running, looking for this big game animal called a recession. And we might not be able to produce a traditional recession with this largesse.

59:32That's my view. And we're like, we're four years into talking about that. And no one's disproven the view. And to your point, I'm not saying we can't have a technical recession. I'm not saying we can't have a slowdown, but a traditional recession seems very far away based on the spending is kind of my take on it. Well, I mean, I would agree that we don't seem anywhere near having a recession, but I think it's the political dynamic underlying this debt problem. It's on both sides. It doesn't matter who wins in 2028. We're going to have massive deficits until there's a problem, which is why I think there'll be a problem.

1:00:11And when I think the traction hits is when there's a shock and we find our interest rates already high, our debt's phenomenally high, we're passing any level that we've ever seen, our political system's paralyzed, unable to deal with anything, those interest rates are going to start moving up and investors are going to look at us not reacting. And I think that's when I give, there's a whole bunch of ranges of things that can happen from inflation to what I call financial repression, which is sort of welcome to all your treasury bill holdings at a low rate that you didn't know you wanted. That's another form of tax that Japan has done and Europe actually, to some extent.

1:00:59Something's going to happen. And I think in the United States, it'll be very traumatic when that happens. But yeah, I mean, both parties will spend whatever it takes to not have a recession. They don't want to, they think, well, that'll happen tomorrow. And I give a forecast in the book of 10 years that I think something will happen. I think a shock will hit. I move that up a little bit, you know, since I've written the book. Yeah. I want to ask you a couple other quick things before we wrap up. And this doesn't really come up your book, but I just love to get your take on it because it's a Western problem, not just an American problem.

1:01:38But take what you just said there and add to the fact that the Western world is not reproducing children, for better or for worse. It's just what we're not doing. Do you think about that as an added filter in that view? And then I think the other thing I would bring up while we're talking about that, I think we've got so up in the American exceptionalism. Our debt is pretty cheap. deep, we're so successful kind of discussion in our own head that this Iran oil flow problem looks very problematic at a basis issue. In other words, you know, 73 was problematic because of the shock it caused. Is there a potential that this causes a shock that could then kick off the kind of problem that you're talking about?

1:02:22Because some would argue that energy costs are really ultimately the long-run driver of interest rate costs? Well, there's a big debate about where interest rates are going, and I spend a chunk of the book talking about it. I debated many prominent economists in the 2010s, Paul Krugman, Larry Summers, who was talking all about secular stagnation. He was nuanced eventually about it. Olivier Blanchard. I mean, I'm not saying they're the same. I debated Peter Thiel actually about this and they were all insistent, you know, this is just going to go, you don't go on forever. And I think to be fair to Larry, he said, well, just in case use long-term debt and not short-term debt, which the others absolutely did not say.

1:03:12So I said, look at history again, look, just look at a graph over a longer period. interest rates are low until they're not low. But where they're going from here, I have brilliant young colleagues who say they're going to go back to zero because old people have all the money, they're not going to spend it, and the interest rate's going to go to zero. And we can see that. Or rich people are going to keep getting richer, and they're not going to spend all their money, and the interest rate's going to go down, et cetera, et cetera. Well, if you look at the history of interest rates, not easy to pinpoint what's going on.

1:03:53I'm talking about real interest rates, wars, populism. And I mean, I would guess that interest rates are as likely to go up as down going forward. because even though, again, my brilliant young colleagues have the most elegant model of this one factor. So the theories that they have is that the aging population will bring down interest rates, which there are people on the other side of that. Charles Goodhart's a very distinguished professor who used to be at London School of Economics. He says, hold on. These people are now living forever and they cost so much when they get old. You're looking at the old life expectancy tables and not the new ones.

1:04:47We'll see. Yeah. Well, to your point on that, I mean, we also see, I'll give you some statistics. This is Federal Reserve FRED data, the Z1 report, as they call it. Love that one. Great, great report. The whole thing has got massive amounts of great data. But if you look at equities as a percentage of U.S. household financial assets, it's never been higher. Except that when that metric goes high, it tends to be pretty cyclical at heights. So the prior highs were 69, 99, 2021, but actually today is higher today. today. And so I point out to people, the wealth that we think we have tends to be something that we talk about at the time.

1:05:29And then you wake up to your point, things change five years later and, oh, we don't like stocks anymore for a period of time, as an example. And so I think people are overcompensating for the, I'll call it their anchoring into wanting to own stocks in a good market versus we could wake up in a world in five years where they hate stocks and interest rates could be higher. And everyone's like, you know what, the government's paying me five and a half percent. Why would I take risk? And we get kind of the crowd out effect from too much government debt. So I agree that for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction like Newton's third law.

1:06:03And we're all treating it like it's very rote and it's very known and the future is foreseeable, to your point. No, I mean, I don't, I have no idea. You have a much better idea of what's going on with the stock market, it's so hard to know. But the fact that we're, as a country, we're rich does not mean we don't go bankrupt. Over history, when Spain was super rich, it went bankrupt. France, when it was super rich, went bankrupt, and on and on and on. Argentina, I was the chief economist in 2001 to 3 when Argentina defaulted. Argentine citizens had more money in Miami alone than the Argentine government owned, but they just couldn't get their hands on it.

1:06:47And in our case, yeah, we could raise taxes or cut spending, but nobody wants to. And that's why I kind of feel there needs to be blood in the street before you're going to see action. The voters just won't believe it. They haven't, they've had such a long lull. We'll see. There's certainly other areas of the world I worry about, But in terms of US exceptionalism, the dollars, tremendous dominance that I think has been fading for 10 years by many measures, but still remarkable. It will take quite a leg down when that happens. It won't end, but our market share will drop and there'll be a big price to it.

1:07:33It's actually a phenomenally big deal. When you're paying 1 % less on your interest rate or even half a percent less and you owe$40 trillion, that's real money every year. And so that'll be painful. We'll find the sanctions don't work so well. So there's plenty we can do. I mean, nobody needs my book to see what we could do about it, but I don't think we will. So I'm going to part with a hot take and I'll just want like one or the other on this one because I agree with your framework. If I put a gun to your head and said, you know, Ken, here's the deal. We have two ways out of this. We are going to cut spending and we're going to pay off our debt successfully.

1:08:25Or you're just going to pay back in cheaper dollars in the future. What is the easiest fix of those two? We're never going to do the first one. So it would only be the second. Yeah. I mean, we might raise taxes too, right? Yeah, we could. But to your point, that's what the Monarchs paid you back in lesser coins. That's what they did too. I mean, that's my hot take. Obviously, there's a lot to be said. Yeah. Well, I appreciate your time. I was going to ask you. So obviously, you're going to be at Jackson Hole. You mentioned you're going to be doing Bloomberg. Where else can people follow you going forward?

1:09:03Where do you regularly write and publish? Well, I mean, I write a book every eight or 10 years. I'm going to try to be a little faster to the next one. I have a column every month in what's called Project Syndicate. It's actually published in 50 countries. That's pretty easy to find. I go through periods where I'm in the media a lot. I was a tremendous amount in the media the last two years because of my book. I've been hiding, trying to finish something, but there'll be a lot around Jackson Hole, I imagine. And yeah, I mean, you just check out my name. I don't have a social media presence that's very big.

1:09:48I am planning to launch a podcast through the Manhattan Institute with Alison Schrager on a few select topics, probably a limited series. And we're very excited about that, of looking at how looking at history and global issues can help us understand what's going on in our country. Well, that's wonderful. So I want to thank you for your time today. Dr. Rogoff, your book reminds me that the ground every investor stands on was built by decisions someone made and it can't can be also be unbuilt like you discussed the same way the dollar position was won and has been kept as much by the failures of others europe china etc as by anything america did on purpose that is worth remembering when we are tempted to believe the last 50 years are simply how the world works our listeners should go and buy a copy of our dollar your problem if you enjoyed this podcast go to apple spotify youtube wherever you listen to A Book With Legs, give us a review, tell others about the books and great authors like Dr.

1:10:54Kenneth Rogoff that we have the opportunity to understand and study the world with and through. For our tribe, if you have a great book that you'd like to recommend, email podcast at smeadcap.com. That's podcast at smeadcap.com. You can also send your suggestions to us on X. Our handle is at smeadcap. Thank you for joining us for A Book With Legs podcast. We look forward to the next episode. Thank you for listening to A Book with Legs, a podcast brought to you by Smead Capital Management. The material provided in this podcast is for informational use only and should not be construed as investment advice.

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