 Well good evening. I thank you Jeff. I thank you Ludwig. I thank you Lou Rockwell, and I thank Joe Mattarisi for sponsoring me. So congratulations to Lou of the Mises Institute, to Ludwig himself, and to Murray Rothbard, and to all of you who support this wonderful organization on this fine and festive occasion. So ladies and gentlemen, after 50 years on the job, that's me, 50 years on the job, it is a dull journalist who has not stumbled across even one sturdy, bankable truth. And I think I have found mine. It is this. Money is not humanity's best subject. Money is not humanity's best subject. Maybe our financial genome is missing. So for the evidence of this humble conjecture is stamped in the cyclical record for all of us to see. And you will recognize it when I tell you. As investors, we tend to buy high and sell low rather than the other way around. As lenders and borrowers, we tend to overdo it in a boom and underdo it in the predictable, succeeding bust. And we are pro-cyclical creatures. It's just the way we are. And we are this way in constitutional monarchies and republics and democracies, statism, capital. That's just who we are. So theorists talk about efficient markets. They assume rational investors and costless transactions and prices that instantly incorporate every scrap of available information. And you might as well talk about efficient romance as efficient markets. Yes, there do exist the steely-eyed money makers who build wealth by adapting to circumstances and learning from mistakes. They do exist. But if the average investor learns from one cycle to the next, it's news to me. For all I can see, they, that is, we, keep stepping on the same rakes. So the last thing, the very last thing, our fallible species needs is a monetary system that leads us into temptation. Yet that is precisely the system in place. A dozen years of suppressed interest rates have misdirected money, waylaid judgments and turned the switch marked financial gravity to the off position. You've heard and read stories about UFOs. No, that's not UFO. They are stocks and bonds and cryptos and stuff floating in air. So I am going to tell you in the four hours given to me this evening, I mean to tell you about, I don't know. I'll tell you about interest rates. Oh, my publication is named Grants Interest Rate Observer and I am in clover because interest rates were barely perceptible. But now there's something to watch. So if I seem a little bit manic, it's because my business model has been validated. So I am going to, my plan is to talk about the source of the zero gravitational environment we live in. I have touched on the nature of the human material that does the investing. I'm going to project or rather suggest to you that the Fed is the agent of entrapment. The interest rates and their absence has been the key to the everything bubble. I'm going to touch on the consequences of this experiment. I'm going to mention the hypothetical theoretical insolvency of the Federal Reserve. Let's see, what else? I'm going to delve into the extraordinary losses in financial markets, especially bond market losses, unseen in 4,000 years. And I'm going to propose a solution to these difficulties. Thank you. Think nothing of it, madam. All right, so, you know, an interest rate is a price. It's, most think of it as the price of a loan and it is that, but it is more to borrow from the title of a new book by Edward Chancellor in a superb book it is. Interest rate is the price of time, the price of time. So Jeff Bezos knew something about the human condition when he created Amazon Prime. What he was banking on was the people's impatience, their impetuosity. When we want something, we want it now. Murray Rothbard described this condition in a few short well-chosen words and they were this. So future satisfactions are always at a discount compared to present satisfactions. So you pay less for something that's promised than something you possess. So you hear it said that the rate of interest discounts expected future cash flows. We all say yes, yeah, quite true. But the words are somewhat opaque. So what does that mean? It means that interest rates connect the future with the present. They adjust an investor's expectation of the timing of tomorrow's rewards. So very low rates of interest seem to reel those nuggets into the present. And very high rates of interest seem rather to push them further out over the horizon. So imagine you are mining your business when your financial planner calls and he says, I have a stock for you. The stock is called Uber some years ago. And Uber is going to revolutionize the taxi cab business. And you happen to be a student of Graham and Dodd and a value investor. You say, wow, what might this company called Uber be earning? Well, it says the sales were nothing just yet. But you wait in the fullness of time. It's going to earn the profits that its foresight and its vision have gifted it. That's what the salesman will say. Now you have a choice. You can invest in that future promise or you can take the here and now. If the here and now is priced at nothing, that is to say a 0% interest rate, you might be inclined to leap at the chance of getting in on the ground floor of a great thing that's going to happen, says he. But if the present day is offering you say 10% on a treasury bill, you might be inclined to hang up the phone. So that is the, that's what we mean by we say with this, the interest rates discount future, discount future cash flows. They calibrate our expectations about the future. If they're low enough, they kind of, they subsidize fantasy, right? Where do you think this great levitation and tech stocks came from? Well, it came in one way from the objective improvement of technology of human ingenuity. That was one source of levitation of tech stocks. But another source was the lack of competition in the here and now. When interest rates are pitched at nothing, the future looks ever so glistening. So interest rates, they are a thing, as I mentioned, and that thing is a very potent force. The book that you have perhaps not spent much time with by your bedside is called The History of Interest Rates by Sidney Homer and Richard Silla. And 2000 BC to the present, 4,000 years of interest rate history. It goes by in a flash. But I will compress that narrative for you in a few words. How does, well, interest rates have never been lower in 4,000 years than they have been in the past dozen. Zero percent, actually in some respects was a high rate of interest because in 2020, as many as $17 trillion worth of fixed income securities were priced to yield in nominal terms, not adjusted for anything. Less than nothing. So think about it. So you as a lender paid the borrower to accept your currency. Swiss francs, Japanese yen, Swedish kroner, so forth on, mostly European. But $17 trillion worth. So remember what Murray Rothbard, he said, he said that this would be impossible because future things were always priced lower than present things. And don't you remember the theories that respond to explain the extraordinary seemingly inexplicable phenomenon of negative nominal yields. People would say, yes, they are just where they ought to be because central banks are fighting the battle against deflation, against everyday low prices, which we implore. America spends half of Saturday seeking out the things that central bankers want to stamp out. But facts are facts. $17 trillion is a lot of money, even when you say it fast, and that much money was devoted to paying people to take your money on loan. And so the question that we at Grants always have, did interest rates fall or were they pushed? Is this extraordinary alignment of rates? Zero, slightly more than zero, less than zero. Is this a force of nature? Is it a turn in the history of financial affairs? Or is it just another manipulation by the Thimble Riggers at the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank? And it went on for long enough that many people came to doubt the theory that central banks were behind this. So how has this worked out, this experiments in extra low interest rates? Have you been reading the Wall Street Journal in recent years? And have you noticed, if so, have you noticed the line that precedes often that modifies the term Treasury bond, that descriptor is super safe, the super safe Treasury securities? Well, here is the way that the super safe securities have comported themselves in the first nine months of this year. Long investment grade bonds down 28.4%. The preceding worst result over 12 months occurred in 1841 when states were defaulting on their debts and that was only 22%, 22.9%. So this was worse than 1841. In many respects, it was the worst in 1228 years. And I'm referring now to long dated indeed perpetual English sovereign securities called GILTS, G-I-L-T-S. And British consuls were these perpetuals in the nine months were down 37.4%. The preceding, the runner up worst occurred during the Napoleonic Wars when the English Channel was a very, very fraught place. And the worst of that period in 1803 was down 23%. So this year, through nine months, down 37% during the Napoleonic War darkness down 23%. So in that case, the worst in 269 years. And unprecedented two is the tempo of the rise and bond yields, the fall and bond prices. Bond prices tend to trend over the course of generations. It's a unique feature of the fixed income security from 1900 to about 1920. Bond yields rose and it took them 20 years to rise about one or two percentage. It's a very, very slow rate of rise. The second generation of occurrence and the rise of interest rates occurred from 1946 to 1981. And it took from 1946 to 1956 for the bond yield to rise one percentage point. Ten years, one percentage point from two and a quarter to three and a quarter. So by way of contrast, in August of 2020, ten year treasuries were priced to yield one half of one percent. And recently they touched four percent, that's up eightfold, up eightfold in slightly less than two years, never before seen. So the ferocity of this bear market, the speed of the decline in price and rise and yield is a new thing under the sun. And to me it shines a bright light on the power of the central banks for ill and on the snapback, the power of the snapback to reverse the evident error and monetary policy at low these many years. So this business about the essential security of government debt, I want to treat you to the wisdom of a man named Samuel Seabury, who was a Massachusetts judge on the Supreme Court. And Judge Seabury presided over a case called Harvard College versus Amory. And the details of the laws that were not so very important that concerned the nature of prudence in finance. It concerned the nature of the so-called prudent man. Today we would say prudent man or woman. But in the day it was the prudent man and the prudent man had to do with how do you conserve the capital that is entrusted to you as a trustee. And Harvard sued a trustee called Amory because he had the temerity and the lack of perception to invest in these new fangled industrial enterprises rather than in government bonds. So here is what Judge Seabury said about the nature of risk and about the nature of sovereign government guarantees and credit. Concerning the nature of risk, quote, it will not do to reject those stocks as unsafe, which are in the management of directors whose well or ill directed measures may involve a total loss. Do what you will, the capital is at hazard. If the public funds are resorted to what becomes of the capital when the credit of the government shall be so much impaired as it was in the close of the war of 1812. When the State Department could not raise the money to buy stationary. And here's what Judge Seabury said about the nature of sovereign credit risk. It may well be doubted if more confidence should be reposed in the engagements of the public than in the promises and conduct of private corporations which are managed by substantial and prudent directors. There is one consideration much in favor of investing in the stock of private corporations. They are amenable to the law. The holder may pursue his legal remedies and compel them or their officers to do justice. Right Elon Musk? But the government can only be supplicated. So them's interest rates and they are back. So I promised you and will now deliver some speculations on the consequences of the manipulation and suppression of the price of time. Well you know some of them are quite obvious the big draw down in the prices of equities especially those listed in the Nasdaq exchange. Tech stocks have taken a great big beating. Bond market losses you know about. What is less remarked upon are the unseen disturbances that interest rates so these long level rates have induced in what the Austrian economists call the structure of production. And this has to do with the way with Hurricanes. So there's a Hurricane Andrew which preceded the devastating Ian and this was in the mid 80s I guess Hurricane Andrew was a long time coming and very ferocious when he or it arrived. In fact so long had the interval been between the preceding bad hurricane and Andrew that building codes had gone slack and builders had become a little bit inattentive to the details of their craft. And the losses dealt by Andrew for that reason were extraordinarily were extra extraordinarily devastating because the world had become accustomed to the absence of truly horrific storms. And much the same thing I think pertains in the realm of finance. A muscle memory is a powerful force I think a much underrated force in finance interest rates until two years ago had been falling for 41 or so years 41 years. You had to have had one and a half Wall Street careers to have lived through and navigated a bear market in bonds meeting a time of rising interest rates. The 12 years following the financial crisis of 2007 to nine were time of a very low rates and very easy credit and a time of great opportunity for the promoters of what used to be called leveraged buyouts. But now have been rebranded owing to the difficulties of LBOs as private equity. And something like three trillion dollars worth of private equity three trillion or so a venture capital has come into the world securities that are not quoted on public exchanges. But their coming has been facilitated by the same zero rate. So if you're a venture capitalist what you hope and expect is the stock market will be prepared to buy your unicorn at a properly fancy multiple when the time comes to launch it into the world. Similarly with private equity you buy a company you borrow money with the proceeds of those borrowings. You pay the stockholders of the company that you are buying and with the extra proceeds that you have borrowed you pay yourself a big dividend. Now in so borrowing the money and so leveraging the company you are betting on smooth sailing in the macro world and you are betting on as are the venture capitalists with an opportunity to exit in the public markets. But what happens if an unscripted inflation arrives what happens if that unscripted inflation loosens the grip of the central bankers on the interest rates they have suppressed and the public markets no longer welcoming. Well we are looking at just that set of risks in a not small segment of the national economy. Now until fairly recently the Fed was talking about a so-called soft landing meaning that it artfully would raise the rates of interest that controls just enough to crimp demand supply chains would snap back into operation. And before you know it we would resettle into the realms of 2% inflation and satisfactory growth and we would live happily and profitably thereafter. I thought then and I think now that the degree of difficulty in the soft landing can be compared to that of the fraternity initiation trick. Jeff please stand for a second and help me with this. Please stand Jeff. And get a grip on the tablecloth. See the trick is to pull if you go to WikiHow you will see that the trick is to pull it straight down and you must be decisive. And WikiHow also suggests for novice practitioners that you use plastic plateware and but we can't do that in this economy. We are stuck with crystal and with silver and with bull market champagne flutes. And the Fed unaccustomed as it is to this particular difficult trick is going to yank straight toward itself. And the sound you hear may just prove to be the shattering of the aforementioned crystal now. I hear myself verging into dogmatism with so many birthday candles have I blown out. I'm not going to predict that. I'm going to keep open minded especially before this august company and only propound the idea that the consequences of suppressed interest rates are both seen and registered and unseen and latent. With the latent ones are the ones you have to watch out for. One could observe apropos of this evening's change of setting that climate is what you expect but weather is what you get. So up until early this year as the title of my force I talk I suggest nearly everything was floating in air and we seem to have lost gravitational force. You know the public debt bulged and credit creation accelerated and asset prices became disconnected not only from the touchstone of value but also in some cases seemingly for reason itself. It was only last year ladies and gentlemen about this time. This is something called ether rock number 42 went on the auction block. Now ether rock is number 42 is a non fungible token. Now even with the four hours given to me I haven't got time to explain but think of it as a digital beanie baby. It is a collector's item ether rock number 42 is a digital image of a rock. And if you were driving in from the Phoenix airport you looked at these outcroppings of maces or rocks. I thought of ether rock number 42 which a year ago commanded a price at auction equivalent to one million three hundred and thirty thousand dollars. Now mind you this was not something for you to own. You the buyer didn't own it. You got bragging rights on the world on the on the blockchain to say that you bought it. But the detachment of investing from ownership I took and still take it as this kind of a disturbing trend. I mean it's it's not really capitalism right. Something else it is. I don't know it's a fancy isn't it. And it's a fancy that could be traced I do trace it to the absence of gravity the absence of interest rates. The zero price of time so that one point three three million dollar investment in the thing you can't own. That is down 90% from that price to date. And it was last autumn two in the price of Shibu Inu which is a cryptocurrency. And again time constrains me from explaining exactly why people buy things they can't see for money they possess for the hope of that thing appreciating on the thing that they can't touch. But they do and three trillion dollars did a lot of talking in the day. If you are a libertarian let us say hypothetically you're inclined to trust the the judgments of individuals that come together and discover something in price. You can't scoff at them even if you're shall we say a baby boomer of a certain age you really shouldn't but I couldn't help myself. This Shibu Inu is a satire of Dogecoin which itself was a send up of Bitcoin. It's like yesterday's canceled flight to the New York airport with the judge at me that canceled one there's a delay of the other the delay of the third on the delay. So Shibu Inu last year October registered a gain of 1000%. No that was just in October because Elon Musk said he liked it a little bit before he didn't like it much. So that sprint to the upside in October brought the year to date gain to an even 40 million percent. Of course that's before tax. Well at least one could lay ownership claimed the ownership of this immaterial monetary unit that bears the image of a cute little Japanese hunting dog. And for nonce enjoy the sponsorship of the fickle CEO of Tesla. So here's what our little journalistic lemonade stand grants said a year ago. Quote with neither the discipline of a gold standard nor the coherence of market determined rates of interest. We investors operate in a state resembling zero gravity where nothing is anchored and things that aren't nailed down go up. So perhaps the zero gravity phase of American finances over or ending you know about ether 42 was down a 90% Shibu Inu was given up 67% of its peak value. And the not so amusing results in stocks and bonds are not quite so grim. But the standard 60% stock 40% bond Schwab branded retirement portfolio has suffered unusual drawdowns this year. Of course in the years done over they might recover they might not. But they are down are these portfolios as much as the worst of the same portfolio would have been down in the some years in the 1930s. So there are other consequences of this bizarre cycle of interest rate suppression and the this beach ball as it were is held under the surface of the water and now is bobbing up bouncing up other consequences. One of these things is the is the kind is the hypothetical theoretical insolvency of the Federal Reserve system. Now I choose my words carefully I say hypothetical because it's it if a certain set of rules were not in place it would be true but it's not exactly true. And theoretical because in theory one's capital ought to be in excess of one's losses but to the Fed through June had suffered a markdown in its net worth of a substantial amount. The Fed owns many trillions of dollars worth of fixed income securities which of course as you know now I've taken a big loss this year and the Fed only holds 41.9 billion in capital. So the ratio of assets to capital at the Fed is well over 100 times to 200 times I guess. So the Fed is not exactly leading from the front with respect to safety and soundness in the banking system in New York Fed is the most leveraged financial institution in New York City. But the curious thing is is what the the feds kind of slipped into its financial statements in the first week of 2011 January 2011. It was a little recondite note in the balance sheet the footnotes the balance sheet saying that here to for now on losses if any born in the income statement will be in effect journaled through the Contra asset and will be deferred and the Treasury will backstop it. So what the Fed is doing it's has suffered a drawdown in the value of its fixed income securities in excess of $700 billion it has 41.9 billion in capital. It is hypothetically theoretically broke except those losses are treated on its balance sheet as a deferred asset which the Treasury in the fullness of time will make good. In the feds not the only central bank in the world with this particular striking set of financials the Reserve Bank of Australia is similarly looking at negative net worth on this same basis did oh the Bank of England. And as the news of the Bank of England's difficulties difficulties the pound unreal in the past 10 days I thought to myself that here is a demonstration of the inherent vulnerability and indeed I submit to you the absurdity of the fiat standard carried to its nth degree of intervention. So way back when in gold standard days the pound was $400 and what 87 cents to the dollar. The central bank of Britain Bank of England was a private institution earning a profit that became nationalized in 1946 but in the heyday of the gold standard the Bank of England was a private institute. So we now have is is a central bank that is the property of the state that still talks about its independence from the Treasury the British Treasury although its solvency is the hands of the Treasury and the pound is a dollar and small change. And the bank is obliged to intervene in the guilt market in the public debt market in Britain to bail out a pension system that was leveraged to the Hilt to try to compensate somehow for the for the long level interest rates that the Bank of England in concert with the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve had imposed in the world. So it's a you know it's a it's a thing it's a scrape and one thinks if one is an old-fashioned liberal libertarian of a certain stripe I sometimes wonder if I am not being overly nostalgic and thinking about the gold standard. I think I know it's there are there are no people proof monetary regimes as we all know. But you know I wouldn't mind the return of the Brooklyn Dodgers to Brooklyn I wouldn't mind if Count Basie were up in the stage of Birdland I would not mind if Murray Rothbard were among us not at all. Nostalgia must be the least repaying line of thought or musing on Wall Street it won't do one can't be nostalgic for the past it's about the future. And there is something on the face of things anachronistic about a monetary standard that resolves and devolves of the digging of something material from the earth and refining that thing and sending it off to be storied. It doesn't sound like the 21st century does it? There's something undeniably anachronistic about it given the world's preoccupation with monetary assets so-called you can't see or touch or own. And yet it is the very tangibility of money which in the day sustained the value of money and the structure of credit and acronyms. I was 20 years old and I got a job just out of the Navy got a job in Wall Street and I was a clerk on a bond desk and I was laid off in 1968 because Wall Street could not process the business that it was doing at the New York Stock Exchange. 15 million shares a day and the stock exchange closed down on Wednesday afternoons to sort out trades. Extraordinary. The United States landed on the moon one year later so they say. But here was this paper, this landfill they called Wall Street and I lost my job, $78 a week and was founded in consequence of the scandal administrative botching on Wall Street. Wall Street was founded something called the depository clearing corporation, depository trust and clearing corporation, DTCC. And DTCC came into the world to facilitate the rapid and efficient administration of financial flows and has it ever succeeded. Wall Street could not process 15 million shares a day. Now the DTCC does 200 million plus over the 12 months of 2021 it settled securities transactions in the grand sum of $152 trillion. I see a trillion and oh, that number was quadrillion. Your quadrillion is, it is 1,000 trillion. Trillions, billions. So a trillion, yeah, so that we're doing trillions now, many trillions of securities process. So that speaks a little bit, is it not, to the financialization of things. There's a wonderful phrase that a friend of mine said that the optimization of the economy with regard to finance and asset prices. The optimization of the economy with regard. And that a little bit to me evokes the central problem of 4,000 year low in rates of persistent intervention in markets. And I wonder if our finances were not grounded, were not, were not hauled back into the reality of tangible things. If there were not something like an element of the periodic table of the elements that defined the value of money that could support a superstructure of credit. This would not be a step forward and not an anachronism. Well, I have asked the kind of question that the speaker asked when he wants you to know that he has the answer. The answer is yes. But we really must do something about this institution, this Federal Reserve. Ron Paul has convinced me of this. And I have been thinking about, and I think I have a couple of answers. But first of all I want to remind you of the sheer willful ignorance of the PhDs at the Fed. There are 800 of these creatures who have earned the doctorate in economics. And I will deal with them in a moment. But first we were talking about our table at the St. Louis Cardinals. Apparently there's a church in St. Louis having to do with the baseball team. And I want to recall to you a story from 1968, Bob Gibson's great year that speaks exactly to the Federal Reserve, lest you get impatient with the telling. Here it is. All right. So this is great Bob Gibson, the imperious, powerful pitcher that St. Louis Cardinals is going to win 20 odd games. He's mad because he lost three or something. And there's an infield named Ducky Schofield, utility infield, good glove, no stick. Lifetime batting average 227. That's Ducky. So Ducky was a bat and as was his wad, he strikes out. So he slams down his bat, same with his batting helmet, comes back to the bench, breaks the water cooler, cusses up a blue streak. Gibson can't stand it. Summons him over to hear what he, Bob Gibson, has to tell him Ducky Schofield. So Ducky goes over and Gibson says, pointing to his batting average, he says to him, what did you expect? What did you expect? So Federal Reserve, when you subsidize consumption, when you shut down production and when you gun the money supply, what would you expect? So that's inflation. So what we need to do, ladies and gentlemen, let us say that the dawn of a new gold standard is for tomorrow. What do we do in the meantime? So as I say, I've given this some thought and I've got a couple of things I would like to propose to you. One is the shambles, they call a balance sheet the Fed. I mean it will not do that 41.9 billion supports 9 trillion in depreciating assets. This will not do. So how about, ladies and gentlemen, if the Fed were encouraged to conform its financial practices to the rules and regulations laid down bank examiners themselves at the Fed and at the Basel record in Switzerland. How about if the Fed had to tow the mark on regulatory standards that it itself imposes on other banks? It would be unable to implement quantitative easing, so-called. So that's, if I submit this to Rand Paul by Iran. So let's get the Fed on board with a little bit of solvency. And my other suggestion for the improvement of our finances is that there ought to be a department of common sense at the Fed. I know it's crazy, but so I envision this as an office with direct access to the chairman's office. We just down the hall. And the personnel would comprise, I don't know, maybe you can help me with this. I'd say first of all a stay-at-home mother who knows what things cost and who is not going to buy transitory if it goes on for a year and a half. It might be a financial historian. I myself am engaged, but there might be someone who is available for this job. And I don't know if I'm a business owner or somebody from this, I think somebody from this audience might round it up. And the Department of Common Sense would have veto power over the pronouncements of the Board of Governors. That's my suggestion to you. Thank you. That's the thought. So I think, ladies and gentlemen, something tells me, I think my New York time zone tells me that my four hours are complete. But I have, so at a grants conference many years ago, T. Boone Pickens gave a talk. And he gets up. He gets up and then he says, well, you know, I haven't, he had 40 minutes, 40, 40. He says, I haven't really prepared anything and I'm not very good at this kind of thing. So I am the sponsor of this event and I'm wondering what have we filled the other 38 and a half minutes. And is there any questions? And it carried through very nicely. So I promised the authorities at Mises that if you were of a mind, I would stand for a couple of questions. Not that I had the answers, but I would certainly welcome them. So if you do, I will be entertaining. If not, I'm going to go and sit right over there and nurse my wine. So your call ladies, they'll be happy to accommodate you. All right, so let me drink that wine. Oh, for crazy. I wanted to know what you made of the Biden administration. I'm against it. Not quite threatening, but almost threatening the OPEC with their deep dissatisfaction. With their decision to cut two million barrels a day of production. What possible good outcomes could occur? Well, I think no good outcome. I think that maybe the administration was trying to save face by saying something, you know, some of the insults you don't want to necessarily walk away without saying, so is your old man. Maybe that was the point of it. But this is really not my subject. I mean, we all know that if the Biden administration were truly concerned about the emission of greenhouse gases, it would not offshore fossil fuel production. It would simply invite us to make do with our sweaters, right? That would be the principle. But they are not concerned with that. Hence they want others to emit those gases. So I think it is less than noble for us to be following this. There's a famous story about Guadalcanal during the very darkest days after the invasion. And there wasn't much to eat. And the commanding officer told the brain, there's plenty of chow on this island. You find it. There's plenty of oil and gas in this country. And we have found it, right? So again, this is not my subject, but that's my take on it. Dead jubilies. Well, it's no longer a theory, is it? That's right. Well, you know, it's not a new thing. There is a biblical precedent, and there is an American precedent. James Madison found it necessary to denounce dead jubilies in one of the Federalist papers called Wicked Projects. And he linked dead jubilies with paper money. So what is new now is, I guess, the pending or contingent precedent of wide-scale forgiveness of student debts. And once you get into a bidding contest for that, of course, it's hard to tell where it ends. So this speaks, I think, to Samuel Peabody. Samuel, what was he? Joe Biden. I just read you the Harvard versus Amory Seabury. Samuel Seabury take on the nature of public credit. And is it necessarily so superior? And, you know, as Adam Smith said to approximately these words, there's a whole lot of ruin in the nation. And I, you know, I began at Grants, we began producing prospectuses on the financial condition of the United States in the 1980s. When, if you recall, Ronald Reagan got up and I think he gave a TV address on the occasion of the public debt crossing. The billion dollar, was it the trillion dollar mark the first time in 1981? I think that was it. And he said, this is all you have to know, a trillion dollars. Well, now it's, was it 31 today? So I would say that this, the United States is now a split-rated investment-grade enterprise. It is AAAAA+. And this business with the student loans, I think, is very disturbing for the public credit. And the whole phrase, the integrity of the public credit, has never heard. And I think that that stems this indif, a seemingly indifference to the public credit, the strength of the public credit, stems from the many years in which anyone who worried about it, simply missed a great bond rally. You know, under Reagan, the public debt tripled and interest rates were chopped in half. So he needn't have given that, that talk because it was going to be fine, right? And it's still fine a little bit in that the United States dollar, the embarrassment of the dollar is not as weakness but as strength. That's the cause of the anxiety. The world is rallying to it. It's better than the Japanese yen, whose central bank is still more aggressively interventionist and whose idea of interest rate suppression is still more radical and unbending. But, so I would call this just another example of the termites in the House of Public Credit. You can hear them chomping a little bit but the house is still standing. People are going to find out they don't own it, right? Yeah, they didn't seem to mind not owning NFTs while they were going out. Jim, is the euro going to survive? I'm sorry, Sagan? Is the euro going to survive? No. Wait, wait, no paper currency survives, right? None ever has. I mean the dollar is extant. It's down 99 points, you know, it's one of these functions where the rabbit hops ever closer to the wall. But all these currencies lose their value. The British pound is, of course, is laughing, is derisory compared to its power value of the last year and the euro is certainly, I would say certainly, that sounds also like dogmatism. I would say probably is tracing a speedier path to extinction because of the political organization of the European Union. I'd say that the PhD standard under a social democracy, it's not a place that a prudent person would put his or her money for a store of value, I would say. All right. Thank you.