 And what I want to do is just say a couple of things briefly about so-called fiscal stimulus and then monetary stimulus. In fact, I think I'll actually do them in the reverse order to show that, of course, we should expect these things are only going to prolong the agony of a depression. Now, for the monetary part, let me not assume that everybody in the room knows Austrian business cycle theory. A lot of people are coming to this for the first time in recent months or in the past 18 months or two years. And so I don't want to assume that you know that, or if I say there have been misallocations of resource. So how did that happen? So let me give the really, really stripped down reader's digest version. And for those of you in the room who are experts who are saying, I can't believe he didn't talk about the, well, you're right. And I deserve that rebuke. But I'll happily take an extra 15 minutes, but Doug French will never let me speak at one of these again. So just please just be patient with me. Let me just give the stripped down version. It basically goes like this. What Hayek was arguing in his important writing in the 1930s was that interest rates actually play a role in the economy. They're not just arbitrary numbers. They play a coordinating function. And when they are permitted to play this coordinating function, what they do is they coordinate production across time. So that is to say, when we save more and that an interest rates consequently decline, that is the very time that it makes sense for businesses to produce goods and to engage in projects that are going to bear fruit in the future. Because when we save more, we're basically saying, I'm going to consume this portion of my income in the future. Well, that's the future that businesses are investing for. And why are they investing now? Because the interest rates are low. And the longer term their production project is, the more interest rate sensitive it is. So it's going to give a disproportionate stimulus to longer term types of investments. So the interest rate then coordinates this, my desire to consume in the present versus the future, and businesses' production processes oriented toward the present versus the future. Secondly, the very fact that I'm saving, that I've earned my money and have not returned back into the economy to take that money and claim all the resources to which in a sense I'm entitled, I'm actually leaving some of those resources out there in the economy. Well, my deferral of consumption, my releasing of resources into the economy provides the material wherewithal to see all the new business projects undertaken by investors through to completion. So again, now the interest rate is coordinating this as well, in effect, the supply of real saved resources in the economy. And what Hayek said is that when you tamper with the structure of interest rates as the market sets them, you are introducing discoordination into this coordinating structure. So now, if the central bank like the Federal Reserve simply says, we're going to force interest rates down through our open market operations. The problem here is that in this case, the public has not necessarily indicated they want to consume in the future, they want to consume right now. They might want to consume even more right now. But yet, businesses are still being encouraged to engage in long term investment. So people are demanding more of existing goods right now, but yet investors are being misled into engaging in long term product development for new products in the future. It's a time mismatch. Likewise, if just because Ben Bernanke or Alan Greenspan says, hey, we're going to force interest rates down, that doesn't release any more resources into the economy. So you have an unchanged resource pool to fund a whole bunch of new investment projects. Well, how are you going to do that? They can't all be completed. So there's going to be a bust that comes. So this is the super duper really fast overview of this. So that's why simply saying let's create more money and let's jolt that money into the banking system and keep interest rates down. That's not a solution to a depression. That's the cause of the depression. That's what gets people onto these unsustainable investment trajectories. And if you continue to do it, all you're doing is encouraging people to continue building things that ultimately can't be finished or won't be profitable. Or there won't be sufficient consumer demand to in effect rationalize these investments at the end. So that's a super duper, duper stripped down version of the theory. So there are implications here about what you should do during a depression. Again, stop the money creation. Now Mises example that he uses in human action of the master builder who's building a house, but he's under a misleading impression of how many bricks he has. He thinks he's got 20% more bricks than he has. And let's say he can't buy anymore. He starts building the house, but he's building a different kind of house than he would have built if he had known the real supply of saved resources in his micro economy. So he's building a house that he won't be able to finish. So if we say to him, well, in fact, let's think of it this way. What would be the best way to get this builder out of his predicament? It would be to alert him you're building a house that you won't be able to finish and alert him as soon as possible. Don't wait till he's at the last brick and say, ah, that was the last brick. Because now he's got to demolish the whole building. Now he's squandered all those resources. Now he's wasted all that labor time and he has made society poorer. So we see first of all from this example that the boom period, the period where he's building the house, he's got employment, everything looks great. That's where the damage is done. The recession period when he realizes, whoa, whoa, I'm doing something unsustainable. I'm wasting resources. I'm wasting labor time. That's the return to health. And so likewise, now let's think of that in terms of the economy as a whole. If producers are engaged in projects, the economy as a whole is on a series of investment trajectories that are unsustainable in the long run. It's better that it find that out right now and that it not find it out in the distant future. So in effect, the analogy I've used is when people say the solution is let's pump more money in the economy. Let's put interest rates way down. Let's put them down to zero. In fact, zero is too high. We're even hearing from some people. Zero is too high. Whatever that means, whatever they want to do with that. But when they say that what they're really saying is that the way out of the master builders dilemma is that we should just get this guy drunk. You know, just liquor him up so he doesn't notice the dwindling supply of bricks. He just keeps on. He's having a great old time. But does that hold off the bust? The bust is inevitable. So likewise by saying, oh, just keep pouring in more money. That doesn't change the fact that you've got an unsustainable structure. And when Alan Greenspan did exactly this in 2001 when he started, you know, with all these rate cuts and we're going to just get things going again. And he refused to let that recession take its course and that healthy process whereby these unsustainable investments are stopped and they stop impoverishing us. And those resources are reallocated into sustainable projects. He wouldn't let that happen. And that's the first recession on record in which housing starts did not decline. And it's right at that time that people therefore drew the false conclusion, the fed fueled conclusion that, you know, everything goes bust in a recession, apparently except housing. Housing prices never go down. A house is the best investment you can make. You should make a living flipping houses because that's an easy way to make money. All those myths get started right at that time because Greenspan is trying to hold off the recession by keeping the master builder liquored up. But now the master builder is on the last brick. And so the recession is all the worse. So we shouldn't look back at 1920 and say, what a big surprise. The Fed didn't try to keep the bubble going. And yet somehow the economy get out of it. No, no, it's because the Fed didn't try to do that that the economy recovered. It's precisely for that reason that the economy recovered.