The interest rate crisis has just begun

35:47But people who don't have any assets suffer. They suffer in particular because the less well off you are, the more money you're likely to hold in cash, in deposit on the bank, in part because, but not just because you don't have access to venture capital or private equity or hedge funds, whatever. And also, you need, if you're going to lose your job... It's your emergency fund. You need the money. You need some precautionary savings. Those precautionary savings will be or should be in cash. And so you are targeting. The ultra-low rates target inadvertently the least well-off savers in an economy.

36:36And because the interest rate is the rate at which savings accumulate, then you're also making it harder to retire, harder to buy a house. If what I'm saying about productivity growth and income growth is true, you also mean that the person's not actually going to see such strong real income growth going forward. So what are they going to think? They can think, hey, I don't like this system. I'm going to be a communist or whatever. I mean, little do they know that actually one of the reasons that the Soviet Union fell is that it didn't have interest rates to determine the allocation of capital.

37:14And that allocation of capital was so absolutely appalling in the Soviet Union that it collapsed. But I completely understand, I think, why people would be aggrieved by a system that is beginning to fail. And I don't think it's generally, you know, this point I'm making, that this distortion of the interest rates is in part responsible for failure. I don't think that's generally recognised. In part because there's always been the main narrative on interest for five millennia has been that interest, that charging of interest is unfair and it's exploitative. Shylock, is it? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's true that in the ancient world, people, in the ancient world and in the modern world, you know, particularly in poor rural economies, you will get exploitative usurers who are driving people into debt bondage, who are taking their property and so on and so forth.

38:35And that's also true of payday lenders. Loan sharks, payday lenders. Archbishop of Canterbury did his war on Wonga. I worked in the debt management industry at the time that payday loans were prevalent. And I think the bad thing about them was that their business model relied on people defaulting. So they didn't want you to pay the loan back, and they made it very easy for you to not roll it over for 50 quid. And if you fail, oh, it's five times a loan instantly. You know, it was predatory in that sense. Like you say. Yeah, I mean, what we call usurers. And actually, I mean, this is another interesting thing, if you remember, that I point out in the book, is that these ultralay rates were meant to, you know, after the financial crisis.

39:20If you ask the central bank, oh, we're intended to reduce unemployment. As Janet Yellen, who was chair of the Federal Reserve, now US Treasury Secretary, we're trying to help Main Street. But in fact, after the financial crisis, the banks will tighten their lending standards. So, you know, the subprime was out. They gave birth to that industry. Yeah, but also the rates charged. Yeah. Credit card rates didn't come down. I think they sort of just chug along at 25%. So in that sense, as you say, the ultra-low rates fed loan sharking and actually meant if you were poor and had a low credit score, you didn't benefit at all.

40:07As I say, and I will repeat, if you were very rich, you could go and invest in leverage type of investments and make a huge amount of money, in private equity in particular. Property even, like for the more normal person, they could leverage a portfolio quite aggressively, whereas you're saying that people with no money were exposed to really high interest rates in a really low rate environment. And that bred more inequality, essentially. That's what I would argue, that very high rates, so these user rates, we're talking about payday length, that breeds inequality. So you've got some bunch of scoundrels making a lot of money from these payday loans.

40:49And they're sucking money and capital from the borrower. So that's an inequality. But there's this other inequality, which is relatively new, and it's the type of inequality that happens in a modern financialized economy, which is what we've talked about, the haves having more when interest rates are low, and the have-nots having less. You talk about good and bad inequality or we've seen quotes around that can you explain what you mean by that? Yeah I think so so good inequality is when people like us What?

41:31When we get filthy rich and everyone else can't beans and toast for the rest of the country What I mean is this is that if you do something that adds value and that value is, if you will, sort of beneficial to society,

41:57then it's not just fair that you should get a reward, some share of that value, but also if you get some share of that value, perhaps it's an inducement to other people to also, so to speak, add value. And then what's your bad inequality? So I think bad inequality comes about when you're not creating value, when you haven't really done anything positive to have that, to have great wealth. And this can come in various ways. Corruption, yeah? That's, you know, not very nice.

42:49Exploiting your monopoly power. Yeah. Now, one of the points I make in the book is that actually with very low rates, it's much easier to sort of bring, you know, to merge companies together. And so we've got a much, we've got a growth in monopoly power. So that's one form, you know, of bad, you know, a bad inequality. This inequality that is just created through, you know through monetary policy uh in particular i'd say this is you know the financial sector does some useful things but you know after a certain point And it actually consumes more, takes more than it produces. And if you have very low interest rates, what we see is it tends to feed the growth of the financial sector.

43:58And that's particularly true of Britain and the US, where the US financial sector, what we sometimes just call Wall Street for short, used to be around sort of 3.5 % of US GDP historically. And then it sort of grew to sort of 10 % or 11%. And the same is roughly true here. I mean, and why is that so? Well, because, you know, bankers will lend more when interest rates are low. And they will get, particularly they get fees on their corporate lending. When interest rates are low, you get incentive for what I call financial engineering. Companies go out and borrow and buy back their share. And bankers get a transaction fee on it.

44:49The bankers get... The mergers, like you say. They get fees on mergers. IPOs. And then the investment world with assets, basically the investment world, professional investment world. Their fees are roughly a proportion of the assets that they're managing. I mean, in principle, they're meant to be about adding value, about outperforming markets. In reality, in aggregate, they don't do that. So where's their money coming? Their money is coming from change in overall market capitalization. Now, if the market capitalization is just being driven by low interest rates and they are, as a result, getting richer and richer, I would call that a bad inequality.

45:36And in particular, if you get a financial sector that becomes horribly bloated and actually attracts people who might otherwise be doing something of genuine value in some other activity. so sort of brain drain into finance and really frankly you know for all my um you know i graduated in 86 and and you know frankly since that period it's been a tremendous brain drain into finance and and it slightly feeds off you know we talked about how um you know the lower falling interest rates pushed up house prices and you're living in london you think well, how the hell am I ever going to be able to afford a house?

46:19I'd better go into finance. And rather than be a doctor, I'll be a finance professional because I can earn what a doctor does. Yeah, it's not so much. I don't think it's so much dollars. I think it's genuine engineers. I mean, you actually get engineers who've done, you know, degrees in how to build bridges and put up skyscrapers going off into the sort of nebulous area of financial engineering. And politicians as well, like a lot of politicians going to finance because they can make more money. Oh, well, that is another for, I mean, this is, if this gets back to the bad inequality, is a bloated financial system is one also in which it's attractive for politicians to earn money.

47:02And so, yes, you get, you know, and perhaps it's just coincidental that we live in an era in which politicians now monetize their skills much more than they used to. They want to feed into the other, do you think, that finance professionals become politicians and politicians lean on the finance industry for reward, you know? Well Rishi Sunak seems to You know have skirted in both worlds quite heavily Yes Jacob Rees-Mogg was very much that way inclined as well They're mistaking shots at everyone today No I'm just These are just recent examples right You get these Former hedge fund managers that enter into politics Or people that have worked in that world You know Have they benefited from low interest rates They've skimmed their fees And then they go Let's go create some real influence in the political world Sunak was a sort of junior analyst at a hedge fund.

47:58I don't think he was... He married well, though. Sunak was what we call a grunt. A grunt. Well, we then... A grunt. So, okay, we've spoken about... That's fallen over. We're a bit like the economy. We've spoken about the blow, the inflation it creates in asset prices and the way it distorts the economy. I want to talk about now what you think that will lead into. I think you had a way of describing it as it kind of seeps into the cracks of the economy, inflation. And now interest rates rise. Do you think that that will expand those cracks? Yeah, that's what I thought. I mean, the question then is, you know, am I correct?

48:45I was going to ask you that in a minute. We'll come back to that. Put it there, mate. Put it there. It's good. What can I think? So sometimes, you know, we talked about these long and monetary policy with long and variable lags.

49:04And so far, interest rates started to rise in Britain. It's sort of mid-2022, just a bit earlier, roughly when my book was published. And initially, we saw this huge sell-off in the bond market. And the gilts market, as we call it, these long-dated inflation index bonds, linkers, they lost 80 % of their value. So this is a huge bond market crash. They're quite significant. We've seen, we talk in finance about something called duration. and duration is the sensitivity of an acid to a change in interest rates. If you have a long dated bond with very low interest rates and interest rates then start to rise, that bond has a lot of duration risk.

50:05And that was clearly seen in 2022. And I would say that that is sort of feeding through into all sorts of assets that are not bonds, but have a similar sensitivity to interest rates, similar duration rates. And here, I know one that comes to mind is we have, you may have noticed, for all this talk of energy transition and so forth, The, you know, the operators of wind farms, of wind turbines, their stock prices completely collapsed. And when I last looked, you know, the index of alternative energy producers were, it was down about 60%. And I think that that's because if you build a wind turbine, all your costs are up front.

51:01and your payoff, relatively low operational costs, your payoff comes over the 20, 30 year span. Now think what I was saying earlier about this discount rate. Well, obviously, if you have very low cost of financing and a stream of income over 30 years, you're going to be worth more or you'll be economically viable when interest rates are low. And when interest rates rise, you'll become less valuable. And I mean, OK, here's a sort of a troubling thought, which is that this whole, this accelerated move towards net zero with huge upfront capital costs in whether it was in electric vehicles, again, more expensive than conventional vehicles, because the battery is a capital cost that pays off over the 15, 20-year life of the vehicle, that perhaps that whole move to net zero was accelerated because interest rates were ultra low, because capital seemed more affordable.

52:10So you think we're seeing these cracks now. One pushback would be, why haven't we seen the consequences? You know, go on. Yeah, I mean, a friend of the show, Martin Wolf, a very sharp, sharp mind, he disagrees with you. And he's not often wrong. So he made some valid, valid arguments. So has anything made you change your mind or change your views? Or do you still believe that a recession is loading?

52:37So Martin Wolf, you know, writes the FT. And he gave my book a sort of bad review of the FT, which is fair enough. I mean, because Martin Wolf's journalism over the last 15 years have been very supportive of these policies. So it would be a big deal for him to shift position and change. His argument, in a nutshell, is that we would have had much higher inflation, a much higher unemployment after the global financial crisis. And these extreme monetary policies mitigated the unemployment and lowered the recession. And there must be other causes for all this, you know, for the inequality or the low productivity, whatever.

53:25It is, I debated Martin Wolf last year. and yeah I know you know they didn't properly count at the end of the debate you know hands up but it was sort of fairly tightly um it was fairly evenly balanced I like to think I won but I didn't count it he told us he won yeah it's a bit like it's a bit like Donald Trump versus Kamala, like both sides think they want. Yeah, yeah. So, and I think it is, so to be fair, if the world stopped now and we had no new information and this was, there was never a great recession and the economies started going back to their, you know, to their old levels of growth and that, then I would say, I would say that, if you will, the critical or polemical aspects of my book were over-egged.

54:29I still think the book's interesting just for what it says about the nature of interest. I don't think, if you will, the sort of criticism of the lower rates are 100 % of the import of the book.

54:47However, I'm still sticking to my guns. And there is this fellow called American political scientist called Philip Tetlock, who wrote a book, I didn't even come across it, called Expert Political Judgment. And it's actually an amusing book because it points out something that, of course, we all know, which is that experts are constantly wrong about everything. And what he says is that they have these sort of reflex defenses when they're pointed out that they're wrong. And among those reflex defenses are, it hasn't happened yet. Give it another 10 minutes. Marilyn, my brother-in-law says I'm a stopped clock.

55:32And so I'm suggesting that the way I put it is that the ultra low interest rates were the determining factor in finance and the economies of the 15 years after the global financial crisis. And the move towards normalized interest rates will be the determining factor of what happens over the coming years. I still think that because we mentioned earlier that quite a lot of borrowing in the modern world is fixed for short periods of time. UK mortgages are fixed for three years. American mortgages are fixed for 30 years. So corporates borrow, they might borrow floating rate, but they can get, they can use derivatives or interest rate swaps to swap their floating obligation into fixed.

56:36And those tend to last about three years. And three years ago, you could ensure, in effect,$100 million of borrowing against any rise in interest rates, in other words, fix your rate, for$56 ,000. dollars. So that's, you know, pretty small charge. And I haven't seen the data on it. But what I would have thought is that when the debt resets at higher levels, and in particular, if inflation is not under control, and interest rates, as we say, not a very clear relationship between inflation and interest rates, however, you can be pretty sure that the authorities will move to raise interest rates when inflation takes off, if it takes off.

57:26If inflation takes off at the time when these fixed rate loans start to become floating or loans have to be reissued, then I'm pretty sure that bad things will happen. What I mean when I say bad things will happen is probably some, you know, what we call a sort of stagflationary bust, again, as we saw in the 1970s. And that would be characterized by a recession, by higher interest rates, creating both a financial problems, the banking system, and also in the property markets. So that would a period of sharp recession, a crisis, another crisis. And I suppose my view has always been that the consequences of the last crisis were postponed, the day of reckoning pushed off by these ultra low rates.

58:34And I never believed that you could do that artificially, that I was, you know something biblical in me said that that some or other there would be a payback day at some stage and i i suppose i still believe that i mean it makes sense doesn't it like you know i think you and martin obviously there's a disagreement but you're you're similar in a lot of ways we sat here and talked to him about inequality and he i'm taller than martin yes that's a my i'm taller than damien us tall guys gotta stick together typical that if you if you're not sure you want the debate you just bring it down to physical qualities do you think do you do you think there's a way that we could navigate out of it do you know just outside of your own argument yeah i mean for instance you know where it affects in particular your listeners um one of the things is to look for is, are nominal incomes growing faster than the rise in mortgage costs or borrowing costs?

59:41So we've had relatively strong nominal... A brief period of it. Yeah, brief period. So if you can keep up, that also staves off problems. So yes, you know, you're paying more on your loan, but your income has risen slightly faster, then actually in terms of affordability, you're actually more affordable. Real wage growth to improve. No, nominal wage growth. Nominal. Yeah, that's another. I perhaps didn't make this point strong enough in the book. People distinguishing nominal, which is what we deal with. On paper. On paper. And real, which is after inflation. But the idea of real is itself an artificial construct.

1:00:25What we pay is that no one, your bank doesn't say, oh, well, I was going to charge you 10%, but inflation was 5%, so I'm now going to charge you 15%. No, you pay nominal. You don't pay real. Real is unreal. And what matters is strong nominal wage growth and strong corporate profits would keep things going, have been keeping things going. I know you say real is not real, but it is a good measure of, say, spending power over time, right? So, you know, we can see that from 2008 that in real terms wages did not have sunk or they've gone backwards. And I do think that that's an important measure for people, because otherwise you get a situation where people are being handed tenors and they've got more money and they can buy less stuff.

1:01:16Yeah, no, no, I understand it as a measure of spending overtime. It's just people think that when we're talking about transactions and loans, this and that, that they talk in, they sometimes talk in real terms when actually it's the nominal that matters. Think back to when inflation is very high and interest rates are very high. Interest rates, well, nominal rates are very high. They may actually be negative or flat. But that doesn't mean that they don't hurt. So a zero real interest rate and a nominal interest rate of 15 % on your house may force you to sell your house. And will actually also bring down the value of the house.

1:02:00So in that sense, it's all very theoretical. I can agree with you there. The nominal price does have a place, and people do get a bit obsessed with the real. But like you say, that's the money that's entering your life, right? Yeah. Can we talk about individuals to wrap this up a bit, just because I think we talk about the economy. I want to know what our audience should be doing to navigate this period of changing rates and changing returns landscape. And I'd like to look at investing in the stock market and maybe how we view property, if you don't mind. You know, the trouble is that the most sensible thing to do is to get a sort of global index fund.

1:02:40But the trouble is that the US is very inflated. It's now more than, I don't know where it is. 65%. Yeah, I was going to say 58%. It depends on which way you're looking. And the currency shifts in the currency. Yeah, it's large. And then what, you're buying, given that NVIDIA was around 6%, when you buy a global index, you're actually putting 3 % into an AI chipmaker. Yeah,£5 goes into Microsoft, I think, every time. Yeah, and so it's very, very, so the US market is very expensive.

1:03:21And it hasn't come down. I mean, it came down a bit, it came down bear market 22 and then bounced back with this sort of AI bubble. You said that very quickly, AI bubble involved. We're not going to talk about it at length. And then, you know, we measure the valuation stock market by looking at its price to earnings ratio. but we averaged earnings over 10 years to get a sort of more reliable data. And it looks expensive. You know, the US market is more expensive than 1929. They've looked expensive for a long time. It has looked. And it's part because of the super profitability of the likes of Google and Microsoft and so forth.

1:04:04And this is never seen before. So is it expensive then if they're backing it up with the revenue or the cash flows? If they're, you know, people are like, oh, it's expensive, the PE, blah, blah, blah. But actually these guys are making a share of cash. Again, this is a longer conversation. There are a number of things. Big tech is now having to spend a splurge lot of money on AI. So typically, during bubbles, even if the bubble is in a technology that eventually works, typically the spending during the bubble phase is loss-making. Those companies are also under pressure from... Monopolies. For monopolies to break.

1:04:47I think you get to a certain point where monopolies become sort of onerous to the public. And you say, hang on a second, why should you, why is likes of Google and Facebook and so on allowed to buy up? I mean, you've got, I mean, with Facebook, you've got, you know, you've got schools banning social media. You've got Google being threatened with a breakup in the US. You've got Apple being under the cosh with the EU. So people are quite complacent about the sort of big tech, given that it's had such a good run. But then, you know, also you've got higher rates, and that higher rates should feed through to make them, you know.

1:05:37Any day now. When the bubble bursts. their stocks will come down yeah i mean but there's always been these high periods of concentration within within the indexes no no no i mean they they again general motors was a bigger i mean so make it clear to your to your listeners what we mean by concentration constant high concentration means that more and more of the stock market is in a limited number of names like 50 names for instance we used had something called the nifty 50 bubble in 1972 three and was 50 stocks that dominated market. Then in the late 1990s during the tech bubble, that was again limited.

1:06:21I don't know. Let's say a ran 50. It wasn't quite as strong as a nifty 50 bubble. Very, very concentrated market. So you see as the bubble, as the stock prices go higher and higher, the concentration of the market becomes more and more extreme. And then this year, we had, you know, the so-called Magnificent Seven, you know, seven stocks, large capitalization stocks, more and more concentrated. So if you go down to sort of concentration of market in five stocks, it's far more concentrated than ever before. And that is undoubtedly risky. What you can do to mitigate that is instead of buying a market cap weighted, Equally weighted.

1:07:11You can buy an equally weighted one. So you get sort of, instead of putting 3 % or 6 % of your money into NVIDIA, you're just getting a small, and that picks up the value compared. Equally weighted indexes are weighted towards value. But then you're not backing the runners, right? If you'd have done that over the... I don't know what the returns are, to be fair. I think we looked at it equally, and they did okay. So the trouble with... Whatever works in investment is most likely to be what hasn't worked over the last 10 or 20 years. The winners are always shifting, and that's what actually makes investment quite interesting.

1:07:57So just buy the index and forget about it. Well, no, I'm not saying, I'm saying, I actually think that the, you know, I think the index, a broad market cap weighted index is a riskier proposition than it was 10 or 15 years ago. Do you think there was other periods, say, where they were concentrated, they were risky? And when you talk risk, you mean potentially a bubble bursting imminently? A valuation of loss of value. No, I'm thinking of it just, I mean, more prosaically, just of low expected returns. Lower expected returns. What people don't always get their head right is that the higher valuation of an asset, everything else being equal, the lower return you're going to get on that asset.

1:08:45And I mean, that's clearly true, say, with a bond. it's not necessarily so true these tech companies with fast growth and monopoly positions but by and large it holds true I think my preference perhaps I'm a bit more sophisticated having worked in the investment world that I prefer to buy pockets of the market that I think particularly cheap I think that the emerging markets It's ex-China, it's relatively cheap. I think the Japanese smaller companies are relatively cheap. I think that UK smaller companies, value companies are relatively cheap. I think value is relatively cheap to so-called growth stocks.

1:09:34And I think the US stock market index is probably going to have, you know, very low returns over the next 10 years. Have you beaten the market in the last 10 to 15 years? That's a good question

1:09:53So I run I'm very I'm very conservative It's a yes or a no, isn't it? It's not Because the thing is One runs a portfolio According to your own And I do my feeling is this Is that When I've earned income And pay tax on it I really hate losing that money. Okay, yeah. And I run relatively, and I'm actually, because I'm probably overly cautious of my own money, I give most of my own money to other people to manage. What I find, I look after some family money, which is not mine, and I'm not so risk-averse for that. I don't care, Lucy. In that sense, and actually, and there I have, yeah, I think, it doesn't sound like a great thing.

1:10:59There I have actually sort of compounded over 15 years at roughly the index return, which sounds like, yeah, like a huge amount of, here's a guy, relative amount, and he's a relative amount, and he's just equaled the index. But actually, again, I'd say I've done it with much lower risk. So had the world fallen to pieces, I know that because I've sort of navigated through global financial crisis, through the COVID crash, and I haven't lost money in those periods. So I think to run, yeah, I think, and I, yes, I think I'm reasonably, not a great performance. I love your honesty. It's brilliant. And the audience will love that as well.

1:11:41Martin Wolf outperformed the market. Did he? Yeah, yeah. I have no idea. Whatever you got, he did 1 % better. Yeah, I mean, one has to understand that the time when interest rates were falling and bonds, I mean, it's a bit technical, but bonds and equities were negatively correlated. So when losses on one were offset by profits on another, and the stock market was rising higher and higher and higher, Then the benchmark passive portfolio of 60-40 was very powerful. But in 2022, it blew up. And it's recovered a bit since then, although the bonds have not recovered. But it probably is still vulnerable.

1:12:29So you shouldn't be going for 60-40 anymore? Well, I'm not saying... Not investment advice. Of course. Not investment advice. No, no, first of all, but I'm not even saying, because, you know, you can, it's probably better than nothing, yeah? I mean, if your money, if your alternative is to keep your money in cash, then that's probably better. But in the 1970s, a period of inflation, you had, you know, bonds being marked down and you had exits marked down. And the so-called, you know, the safe benchmark port for asset allocation portfolio of 60 % equity is 40 % bond lost half its value. In real terms.

1:13:14In terms of spending power. So, yeah, whereas if you'd had your money in gold or commodities, this and that, you know, you could have probably done a lot better. I'm not saying that one would necessarily do a lot better. But I think that, to go back, we have been through a period in which passive investment has done extraordinarily well. So you've not got long left, and I want to let you go and get your flight to Amsterdam. I just want to finish on property, because the problem with the UK is we have an obsession with bricks and mortar. And I think there's a large part of our audience understand investing.

1:13:56And there's a large part who just think the best thing I could possibly do is buy a home. Do you think that narrative is going to change now? Or how do you think people should think about buying, owning and investing in housing? What we've seen in London is that house prices, nominal, have been relatively flat. Whereas in real terms, I must mention this in real terms, they have actually declined by about 35%. So actually the houses are, they've got cheaper. And it's conceivable that, you know, when you have a period of inflation, the sort of best outcome, again, you know, we were talking about sort of best outcomes, you know, best outcome is you don't have a housing crash in nominal terms.

1:14:39This is what we had in the early 1990s. But slowly inflation. Like a silent crash. A silent crash. And that's what we've had. I mean, people would be up in arms. You know, they bought a house for a million and a half, you know, five years ago, and it was worth a million today. In fact, that's in effect what's happening, given that inflation has eroded the value. I think, I mean, the trouble with housing in Brittany is you've got, you know, these other variables. You've got, you know, now there's sort of a war on the landlords, whether it's going to come in the form of more tax on landlords or some type of rent control or some type of stronger protection.

1:15:23protections for tenants, well, all those will feed through to lower supply of rental housing. So we'll push up rents, as well, as I mentioned, higher interest costs. So in that sense, you can't just sleep in Queen's Park, can you? So you've got to have a roof over your head. And so the rental, supply rental houses is, I think, going to be constrained. and then there's talks of you know of increasing the supply of new housing but we'll see what comes they promise that every time don't they and it never happens yeah and then you've got sort of indeterminate immigration and how much that impacts on our aggregate supply I mean one of the things I found and I actually started off as a sort of housing analyst in the city of London is that what really crashes the housing market is a combination of higher interest costs and new supply, massive new supply.

1:16:21And that's actually what we saw in the US up to 2008. And what we haven't seen in the UK since the early 1990s, you know, big crash in the early 1990s, in part induced by the fact that the home builders in those days actually used to build homes, believe it or not. You need the motivated sellers as well, right? Don't you that they've got to come to the market? Because it feels like at the minute, transactions have probably slowed a lot, but People just start, they're just sat waiting. They're not like, I don't need to sell. So the market just sits like this, doesn't it? Yeah, and I think that, I mean, it's also true in commercial real estate, I think, that these markets, you know, it's like, is Martin Wolf right?

1:17:04Come in full circle. And the market is like, it's balanced on this fulcrum and doesn't quite know. But it hasn't cleared, it hasn't cleared yet. and we'll see. Let's revisit this in, say, like two, three years and then, like, you know, we can definitively say, you know, who's taller? I was right. And who was right? We'll give, like, a little trophy to whoever was right. We'll have a little fight. That'll be good. We'll get the Saudis involved. We'll get a big ticket fight. Get a live audience and, yeah, it'll be lit. I know. I think Martin Wall's probably pretty scrappy. He's got a lot of balance.

1:17:39Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get it under my reach. thank you so much i really enjoyed that yeah thanks no worries excellent

1:17:50please remember this is not financial advice like we say a lot on the podcast investments can fall and rise in fact it's pretty much a guarantee past performance is no guarantee of future results so your money is at risk with investing and other fees may apply as with everything financial please do your own research we really encourage that because no one cares more about your money than you. I'm Damo. And T. This was an episode of Making Money from our company Most. It was filmed and edited by the team at Flowspire, Jack and Ben. It was produced by Ruth Edwards and brought together by Will Stollerman.

1:18:21What about Ruth and Toothless a Dog? Yeah, shout out them too.