 It is an absolute pleasure to be here today, to be with all of you here in Boston and especially because Boston was really the launching pad for the American Revolution. And the American Revolution, as you all know, was not just a revolt of one group against another. It was a logical and intellectual revolt that succeeded in undermining the world's number one military and economic superpower. So I think this location has a lot of meaning for me. And it's very ironic that the event occurs right now at a time when politics is really threatening to undermine American society. It's breaking us apart. And I think if you really understand the Austrian understanding of politics, it all makes a lot of sense. And if you want to understand the Austrian meaning of politics, you just have to break it down. In Polly, what does Polly mean? It means many. It means numerous. A bunch of something. In tics, well, tics are blood-sucking parasites. And if you keep that definition, that is a scientific definition, if you keep that definition in mind, you'll know how to interpret things like the presidential race, the primaries, the debates, and ultimately the election. It's also a great pleasure to be here because I was kind of a last-minute addition to the program, not actually last-minute, but I insisted with Jeff Deist that I get onto this program because most of you probably don't know this. But in Auburn, it's been kind of warm and sunny and dry. We've got sort of wonderful summer-like conditions in Auburn. Not really any rain at all, and I insisted that I go to someplace where it's cold, rainy, and overcast to get a better feel for the great weather that we've been experiencing in Auburn, Alabama. And as a bonus, I've had an opportunity to use my first multi-gender bathroom here. I saw the sign in it. I didn't know what to do. Should I stay or should I go? So thank you. Is another skyscraper curse coming, is the talk I'm going to be giving here today. How many people in here have heard of the skyscraper curse? Wow, that's the first time that's ever happened. Well, I'm going to tell you what the skyscraper curse is and tell you is another one coming. But first, I want to lay some groundwork because the skyscraper curse is known to many individuals as a forecasting device. And that's not the most important reason for you understanding what a skyscraper curse is or the economics behind it because the skyscraper curse tells us a lot about what's going on, not just in a single building, but what's going on throughout the economy and what's causing those changes, which will ultimately lead to a skyscraper curse, but it's not just one building. It's something that's happening throughout the economy. It's happening in my hometown. It's happening here in Boston. It's happening in Asheville, North Carolina. It's happening in Toronto, Canada. Every place I've been, I've seen the same thing happening. So it's happening throughout our economies. And hopefully you'll be able to better recognize it as a result of my lecture. And it's also something that helps you understand the difference between the real economy and the perception of our economy. So a lot of people out there, including mainstream economists and the mainstream media, are telling us one thing about our economy. They're talking about the unemployment rate. They're talking about GDP. They're talking about economic growth. And then on the other hand, what we look and see in the economy and what other people are telling us is that things are really not that great, that things are really quite negative in many respects, that a lot of people are really, really upset. And that in turn helps us explain why does somebody like Donald Trump have such a message and have that message resonating with so many people who weren't even involved in the political process? And Bernie Sanders too, a socialist, something that Americans are like, no, no, no, no, no. But all of a sudden he has an appeal with millions of Americans, where he got just as many real delegates as Hillary Clinton, where millions of young people are saying, you know, I supported Bernie, I like Bernie because of his anti-establishment message, and I'm not going to turn over and go to Hillary Clinton. So that tells us that economically and politically that a lot of people are very upset and that that real economy that the other group is talking about really does not exist. So the skyscraper curse analysis is going to tell us a whole lot about why there is a difference between that mainstream message and that upstart Donald Trump Bernie Sanders message. Okay, the skyscraper curse. Currently the skyscraper curse is an historical association between the building of a world record-setting skyscraper and the coming of a world economic crisis. That's the association. Now that's not directly causation. In other words, the building of a skyscraper does not actually cause an economic crisis. Now you know, I hear you laughing, but three economists from Rutgers University spent an enormous amount of time collecting an enormous amount of data to refute the hypothesis that building a skyscraper causes an economic crisis. And not only did they come up with some empirical results, but those results were published in a widely respected academic economic journal. Well that really hurt me. But what was worse was that they sent their publication to the Economist magazine which is one of the flagship mainstream economics magazines, and they agreed. They said, yep, I guess skyscrapers don't really cause these economic crises based on this empirical information. But of course skyscrapers don't cause economic crises. The real causation which I've been writing about and talking about is that monetary policy in the form of artificially low interest rates is what actually causes things like an expansion in the economy. So it's stimulative at first to expand the economy. It also leads to people making investments in things like housing, retail, wholesale, technology. So those interest rates do have those effects and ultimately once they get the economy revved up enough, people have expectations of those profits and that growth continuing. And so they start to undertake projects like world record setting skyscrapers. So it's interest rates that cause an expansion of GDP. It's those artificially low interest rates that ultimately cause the building or lead to the building of world record setting skyscrapers. And ultimately that whole process is what brings about an economic crisis. So it's not construction leading to crisis. It's interest rates leading to both construction and economic crisis. And what hurts me even more is that those three economists from Rutgers University, that's what their results actually said. It's just that their interpretation, so their equations, their empirical, their statistics all validate the theory of the skyscraper curse, but their narrative, what they wrote in their article said the opposite. Okay, the history of the curse. Andrew Lawrence is a financial analyst in real estate, put together the skyscraper curse in 1999. That's when I found out about it, was very excited about it and been writing about it ever since. He showed that the panic of 1907 was surrounded by the building of the Singer building in New York and the Metropolitan Life building in New York, both of which were new record setting skyscrapers. The Metropolitan Life building is now named the Trump building. In 1929, the building of 40 Wall Street set a new record. The Chrysler building in the following year set another record. The, of course, the Great Depression started at that time and in 1931 the Empire State building opened up. So we have, in the case of the panic of 1907, two records. In the case of the Great Depression, we have three records. And then fast forward to the late 1960s and early 1970s. World Trade Tower One set a new record in 1970. World Trade Two set another record the following year. And the Sears building in Chicago set a record, I think, in 1972. So that preceded the stagflation of the 1970s where we had both, for the first time, we had both high unemployment and high inflation. Things were so bad that we had to go off the gold standard, impose wage and price controls on the American economy. Fast forward to the late 1990s where we had the Asian contagion in places like Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, which was a tech bubble. And then later, of course, we had a tech bubble here in the United States. And we also had two new record-setting skyscrapers in the form of the Petronas Towers and also Taipei 101. So again, multiple records associated with world economic crises. And then fast forward to 2007, we have the housing bubble in the United States, record-setting stock markets in the United States, ultra low unemployment in the U.S. And also we had the building of the Burj Khalifi Tower in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates setting a new record. It officially got to the height of a new record in July of 2007 at a time when everything was seemingly great. But by the time the building opened, of course, we were in a worldwide financial crisis. And there are others too, you can look at national records, you can look at continental records. As a matter of fact, many of the tall buildings in Boston were built during these same boom times so that if you look at a list of tall buildings in Boston, you'll see a very large number of them were open for business in 1970 and 1971. Right before the stagflation of the 1970s going off the gold standard and all of that. Right now, in Saudi Arabia, which is in a lot of economic trouble these days with low oil prices, but they are building out in the middle of the desert the Kingdom Tower. And it's being built by the Saudi royal family. And they have one of the largest construction firms in the world. And they are building this Kingdom Tower. It's going to be one kilometer tall. Now they wanted to build it one mile tall, but when the construction engineers got done with their survey, they told the king that we think that this thing would be so heavy that it would just plunge into the middle of the earth because the bedrock underneath it couldn't hold that much. So they brought their plans down from a mile to a kilometer, which is still going to be a record. And if you see pictures of this, all these buildings are very secretive. And the Saudis have an advantage in secrecy because instead of building this record in downtown Manhattan or downtown Boston, they're building it in Jeddah, which is a relatively small city, and they're building it north of Jeddah out in the middle of the desert. So the place that's least likely where you would want to build really tall is out in the middle of the desert. Where you really want to build tall is typically where land is very scarce. So the Kingdom Tower is coming. It clearly tells us the type of economy that we're in, that this is not real sustainable economic growth, but it's an economic expansion based on male investments. And that's M-A-L, it's not men investments, it's bad investments. So it's coming and we've got to be worried about that. We've got to be looking at our economy in a whole different way. Because again, the skyscraper curse fundamentals tell us that it's not just the one building out in the middle of the desert, but it's permeating the entire worldwide economy. So this is an indicator. It's an indicator of trouble. And I think it agrees with fundamental analysis on the ground, on the street, what's actually going on. It's a train wreck waiting to happen. And we shouldn't be the least bit surprised. Central Bank monetary policy has been unprecedented, radical even by mainstream standards, and it's really been reckless. Zero interest rate policies. Well, that might be conceivable for a very short period of time in a normal economy, but not for seven or eight years. That's never happened ever. And that didn't work, so they used quantitative easy. So typically they'll buy bonds from banks to reduce interest rates. They did that, they got them down to zero and it wasn't good enough. So then they just started buying more bonds. They started buying mortgage-backed securities. They inflated, for example, the balance sheet of the Fed from less than $1 trillion to more than $4 trillion in a very short period of time. And it's not just our Fed. It's the European Central Bank, it's the Bank of Japan, and it's virtually all other central banks keeping up with the Joneses, basically buying more securities. The Japanese are actually buying Japanese stocks, which is unprecedented and beyond the pale. I mean, central banks, the old lessons about buying short-term government securities, which were absolutely almost a gold standard in terms of being able to be sure that they're going to hold their value, now they're buying long-term government bonds and the Japanese are buying Japanese stocks. And they're a big holder of most of Japanese companies now. So that tells us there's also trouble ahead. So what we have is massive mail investments driving up GDP in our economy. So that tells us why the mainstream perspective and our perspective, how they match up. Our perspective is that the Fed is generating massive amounts of mail investments, and that explains why GDP is going up. And it's not just these mail investments driven by the Fed and other central banks, it's also government debt. Government has been spending beyond its means for years. I think we're borrowing over $600 billion to finance our deficits in the U.S. this year, and that's a record low since the financial crisis. We've doubled our national debt since the financial crisis. We've gone to less than $10 trillion in debt to almost $19 trillion in debt. So government has been spending about a trillion extra dollars each year. Well, when government spends a trillion dollars extra more than it takes in, that's going to add to that number of GDP. So we see national debt as a problem, is mortgaging our future, as literally throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Future generations, mainstream economics says, we're just raising GDP, we're just putting people to work. So again, the stories can be solved or resolved using those analysis. And there's nothing to suggest that government has used this opportunity to reform itself. It's made healthcare much worse with Obamacare, it's made banking and finance much worse with Dodd-Frank. Obviously the national debt is much worse, entitlements are much worse, war is much worse. We find ourselves in a quagmire in the Middle East, locking horns with Iran, with Turkey, with Russia, with Syria. So they haven't solved anything, they've only made things much worse. I'm working on a book on the skyscraper curse, and I just wanted to conclude with a paragraph that I tapped out of the manuscript because this problem is now baked in to the cake, unfortunately. There's really nothing Mr. Trump or Secretary Clinton can do about it. It's in all likelihood going to happen. I suppose if we made Lou Rockwell president and made Congressman Ron Paul, Speaker of the House, and we put Jeff Deist in charge of the Federal Reserve, we could probably make it turn out a little better than it's probably going to turn out. But we've already made those male investments, we've already weakened our economy, we've already increased the national debt by an enormous amount. And so this paragraph addresses my mainstream critics who say that everything is really doing okay. We've gotten ourselves out of the hole, we've prevented a great depression. So get off of our backs. So I did a little calculation, and I'll quote myself, however, as a best case scenario, let us make the heroic assumption that all the government spending was really valuable. In other words, all of that additional government spending that they borrowed the money for was really worth the money they spent it on. So there are no bridges to nowhere. There are no baby-killing bombs being made. It's all really good stuff that they're spending that money on. Let's make that assumption. And that all those investments made between 2008 under these low interest rate policies and the present will turn out perfectly well. In other words, all this construction is going to be used. It's going to be great. We're going to be great again. If we take the government's measure of the economy, that is gross domestic product, and adjust the government's measure for their measure of price increases, CPI, Consumer Price Index, or the GDP deflator, and then we adjust that figure by the increase in population. So we'll adjust the government's measure of the economy by inflation and by population. So it's their measure of how well we are doing on a per-person basis. We find that the U.S. economy grew at less than 4 percent over the entire period from 2008 to the last quarter in 2016. So that's 4 percent over that entire period. So 4 percent over eight years, maybe a half of a percent. And if we compare that to previous experience where GDP overall grew at 3 percent, or if we go back to the antebellum period where we had a free market economy and a free banking system, we didn't have any government regulation of banking or money or anything, and we adjust that economy for inflation and population, GDP growth per year per person was growing at over 3 percent per year. We get a more truer picture of what we are experiencing versus what we could be experiencing if we had an economy based on Austrian economics and free markets, and that is stark reality. Thank you very much.