 Hello, this is Mark Thornton at the Mises Institute, and this is minor issue number six. When I was on Radio Rothbard at the end of January, I mentioned that one of the key things to understanding the future is to understand the past. And so that's what we're going to do today is a quick review of the recent past in order to get a better handle on what's in our future. And one of the first things I want to do here is look at stock markets from the post crash housing bubble in 2008-2009 and compare that with the peaks in our major stock markets in 2021 and then look at it today. So in going from the housing crash to the peak in 2021, that's a long time of more than 12 years, whereas from the peak in 2021 to the present is less than two years. Looking at the S&P 500, a measure of the biggest and broadest measure of the US stock market, it increased from the housing crash to the peak in 2021 by over 4,000 points. And in the roughly year and a half since then has fallen 681 points. Now if we look at the Dow Jones industrial average in 08 to the peak in 21, the Dow Jones increased by almost 30,000 points. And since the peak in 21, it has declined by about 2,600 points. And finally, the tech heavy growth oriented, more leveraged NASDAQ stock index increased by an amazing 14,700 points from the housing crash to the peak and has since lost about 4,200 points. So in all three cases over that long period from the housing bubble to the peak, the markets increased significantly for a long period of time, including the downturn in 2020 taken into consideration. And then since the peak in 21, markets are surely down, but nowhere near the amount that they previously increased. Now let's take a quick look at the real variables. What was really going on in that point? Well, from 2008 to 16 and from 2020 to 2022, we had a zero interest rate policy by the Federal Reserve. That's untried, unheard of, never happened in history. If you look at the Fed and its balance sheet, in 2008, it was less than a trillion. In 2022, it was 9 trillion and it's currently 8.5 trillion. In terms of the money supply, we begin at about 3.5 trillion in 2008. Jumping to 7.7 trillion in 2022 and today it's down to 7.1 trillion. And finally, the national debt in 2008 was about 9.5 trillion. And in 2022, the debt by the federal government was up to 28.5 trillion and today it's 31 trillion. So in all three of those cases, we've also seen that on the part of the Federal Reserve and the government itself, there was an enormous expansion in paper, but not necessarily an enormous expansion in productivity, which economists greatly lament. And with that, I have to conclude that by and large, the prosperity that we've been experiencing over this longer period of time, from 2008 to the present, has been in large part a paper prosperity.