 So, before we adjourn, I just wanted to ask some of you sort of a personal question. What do you think about the state of the United States today? Is this guy falling? That's really what I spent a lot of time thinking and talking and writing about. And if you follow markets, gee whiz, since Trump won, it seems like things are going gangbusters. Just earlier this week, the S&P 500 had its highest level, about 2,400 ever. And that's, I think, almost three or four times its most recent low during the crash of 0809. So by that metric anyway, the U.S. economy is doing great. But here's the catch. It turns out that almost all the growth in the past 10 months in the S&P 500 belongs to just five particular stocks on that index. And those are the infamous fangs. I'm sure some of you have heard of these Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google. Those five stocks account for virtually all the growth in the S&P 500. Which means that the other 495 companies on that exchange lost almost as much market capitalization as the fangs gained. And included in those, of course, since we're in Seattle, is this very peculiar company known as Amazon. I don't know if any of you have read David Stockman, but David Stockman has written quite a bit about Amazon and recently celebrated his 20th anniversary of going public in the 1990s. Like any measure, Amazon's a blue chip stock in the new economy, right? I mean, this is a large, well-established, dominates its sector household name, all the things you want in a blue chip. But there's just one little catch with Amazon. It doesn't make money, or at least not much. It's had some very thin profitability years, but for the most part, Amazon has lost money. How can this be? And Jeff Bezos, its founder and one of its big owners, isn't even really concerned with this. He actually likes to pour a lot of Amazon's revenues into one of its less-than-profitable segments, which is its cloud business, instead of trying to improve its bottom line. So Peter Thiel, a name I'm sure many of you are familiar with, maybe he's right. He says, well, don't worry about that. Don't worry about PE ratios and profitability. The value of a company is how much money it's going to make in the future, out to infinity. How to measure the value of a company, discounted to its present value because of the time value of money. But a company is worth all the money it's going to make in the future. And right now, the market tells us that's $460 billion for Amazon. Of course, we can't know how much Amazon's going to make down the road. That's an if. That's a what if. So maybe Peter Thiel's right, but maybe David Stockman's right. Maybe Amazon's just wildly overvalued. David Stockman calls it the greatest cash burn machine ever created. And we have to remember, this isn't some startup, this is a 25-year-old company. And so David Stockman says, in an honest free market, real investors would never give a quarter trillion dollar valuation to a business that refuses to make a profit, never pays a dividend, and is a one percenter at best in the free cash flow department. That is the very thing capitalist enterprises are born to produce. So my point here today is not to pick on Amazon or any of these amazing tech companies like Facebook and Netflix that do these amazing things for us that we all rely on, but never make much profit. Maybe there really is, in Peter Thiel's mind, sort of a new corporate paradigm in America. We're going to have long-term outlooks, finally. And if you recall, some of you in the audience might know that Sony Corporation, for example, used to have 50-year plans for what Sony would do. And that kind of sounds good, right? We're not just worried about the next quarter's bottom line. But I'm kind of old-fashioned. I think there's something unsettling about companies that make lots and lots and lots of money for their founders and their major shareholders without generating a profit. And when they do this, I think we're venturing into territory that David Stockman calls a casino rather than a market. And we're in a casino like at the track. Everyone has to find a horse to invest in. Everyone has to find the next Amazon. But the problem we see this in the S&P 500 is that there's a lot more, hundreds more losers for every winning horse. And what it makes me think, as a simple-minded guy, is that Amazon is this sort of uneasy symbol of what seems artificial and unsustainable about our economy. And when something feels or seems artificial and unsustainable, maybe that's because it is. And this leads me to the title of this little talk here, is whether the sky has fallen. Well, whether it's fallen or whether it is falling really depends on who you ask. And it's more a matter of perspective than any objective metrics we'd like to think we have with apologies to the people who compile what I consider the almost useless GDP figures. So whether the economy is good or bad, growing or crashing, it depends very much on whom you ask. I suspect most people in this room today have the good fortune to work in the knowledge economy to have a job that's well-paying, or at least opportunities for a job that are well-paying if you're a young person, or perhaps maybe enough personal wealth to see you through. So a lot of us in this room probably see the glass as half-full, but we certainly shouldn't ignore the sky really has fallen for millions and millions of Americans, especially since the crash of 2008, 2009. If you're a 50 or 60-something who lost your job in that crash, you're very unlikely to ever have the kind of salary or career prestige you ever had. If you're a blue collar worker who works in a coal mine or a factory or an auto plant, maybe the sky has fallen for you. If you're a retiree who lost, let's say, 40 to 50% of everything you had in that crash of 2008 and you were too scared to stay in the market, especially if you're a millennial and you sort of have to accept this new mindset that you're going to be the first generation in US history to have this new normal of starting life out with huge amounts of debt and maybe even having to accept a lower material standard of living than your parents. And I think the sky really has fallen, especially for just a huge and amorphous number, probably millions of Americans who just simply feel kind of lost in this new economy, with constant disruptions. We talked about this in Silicon Valley, disruptors, with no job security, fewer benefits, people who fear outsourcing and offshoring and automation and people who aren't comfortable or ready or nimble enough to just say, hey, I'm going to drop everything and move every three years to be part of a gig economy. So for these people, the sky has fallen and hopelessness in and of itself, I think, is a form of poverty. It's a severe form of poverty and it's one that's spreading higher up into the middle class than at any time in this country since the Great Depression. So while most of us are big believers in capitalism and free markets and global trade, it's sort of facile to just assume or imagine that everybody else sees things the same way. There are winners and losers, even if the world is getting richer. The sky doesn't fall for everyone at the same time, and it can actually fall in sort of slow motion ways that might profoundly affect our grandchildren. So obviously, none of us knows what the future economy is going to look like in three years or five years or 10 years. We can't know, per se, if we did, we'd probably be out shorting. We'd be at our E-Trade account shorting Snapchat or Sears or whatever it might be to get rich off this malaise. But let me just throw out three quick assertions that I think can help us all understand a little bit better what's going on. And the first is that, look, whatever's happening, the Fed and other central banks, they can't make it better, but they sure as hell can make it worse. Okay, creating new money and credit doesn't create any new jobs or services or Honda Accords. We shouldn't care so much about the quantity of money. We should care a lot more about the quality of money. And even the Janet Yellens of the world admit this. Second, again, I'm a big David Stockman fan that shows, we can't really know what anything costs or should cost. I mean, as Stockman tells us, interest rates are the most important prices in the economy, and they have been absurdly and supremely manipulated. Really, for decades, but certainly since the tech stock crash of 2000, 2001, when Alan Greenspan really got going. So when you manipulate interest rates, it's impossible to know the true, real price of the honest price, which is to say the free market price of almost anything, whether that's oil or real estate or tech stocks or Amazon or even, I don't know, milk and bread at the grocery store. So when the cost of borrowing money is artificially cheap, when money and credit are cheap, lots and lots of businesses look good on paper that wouldn't otherwise. And when safe investments like Treasury bonds and CDs and money market funds don't pay very much, we're all forced into riskier investments and going out there and chasing yields. Even older people who ought to be at a stage in life where they're just trying to have their money outlast them. So I think activists, central banks are really, really dangerous right now. And I think if you're looking for a canary in a coal mine, if you're looking for a sign over the next couple of years, I would say this. If central bankers stay active and they're forced to go into more rounds of QE and low or even negative interest rates, meaning the Fed or the ECB or whatever, I think that's a really sure sign for you in your own life that the emperor has no clothes and that central bankers have just made a political decision, really, more than anything else to sort of kick the can down the road. And the last point I'll leave you with is that we have to understand the laws of economics eventually apply to governments just as they apply to the rest of us. You know, at some point, economics is almost like gravity. You know, interest rates of just, let's say, 3.5% on Treasury notes, 10-year Treasuries would be absolutely disastrous for the federal budget over the next few decades. By some measures, that would, within 10 or 20 years, become the single largest item in Congress's budget every year. And Western governments have really done this to themselves. I mean, they have spent the last 100 years creating a debt bubble. And when I said that the sky can fall in slow motion, it can fall in really slow motion if you look at Social Security and Medicare, which are now decades old. Social Security, actually, about a century old. But Congress willfully or not, when it passed these programs, set into motion an unsustainable fiscal situation. It just sort of took us this long to get here and understand the economy, the economics of it. So in any sort of sane or lawful world, Spenthras get punished, right? The rest of the world knows that the United States is never going to get its fiscal house in order. There's no accounting standard, which would allow the US federal government to keep trillions of dollars, trillions with a T, probably hundreds of trillions of dollars in entitlement promises just off its balance sheet. Wouldn't that be a neat trick if you were a private company and you could do that? So if we think about this rationally, with an eye towards the future, in a rational world, our creditors would start to cut us off entirely or at least start to demand junk bond interest rates. It would mean haircuts and means testing for programs like Social Security and Medicare. It would mean selling off federal assets, especially Western lands. It would mean significant cuts here and now to the federal budget. And of course, Congress will do none of these things. Congress can't do any of these things. It's politically completely unfeasible. So that I think it leads us to understand that we're sort of past the point of political solutions. But let me close out the day with some good news because we have to remember that when we say the economy, the economy is when we're talking about the US economy is 320 million people. When we're talking about the world, it's seven and a half billion people. The vast majority of whom get up every day motivated to try to improve their economic and material circumstances. So this is a huge and powerful motivation and it's so strong. It's so powerful that it can actually overcome a lot of the biggest screw ups of governments and central banks. It's a very powerful force. And really the only thing that can stop it entirely is outright authoritarianism. And so at least on paper, America still has absolutely the raw materials for success. As I mentioned earlier, we have a currency that at least in the short term is the least dirty shirt in the laundry. And on certain times, you know, maybe some more shocks in Europe or Asia, a flight to the relative security of the dollar is likely. For all of our crappy educational system, we still have the best universities in the world, the best and brightest foreign kids flocked to them from all over. We still have an unbelievably abundant amount of energy in this country. We have with the Bakken formations and sort of the Dakotas down to Colorado, we have twice the amount of oil and three times the amount of natural gas we imagined we had just a few years ago. We have more arable farmland than any other country on earth. About 17% of America can be farmed. We can easily feed ourselves and be a bread basket to the world. We obviously have two huge oceans which provide defense, but they also give us access to European and Eastern markets. And I think most of all, we have this undefined, but I hope for the moment and it was still unshakable sense of optimism. There's something uniquely American about this. It's almost a form of entitlement of the term we hear a lot, right? We're the country where when there's five people in line in the grocery store, we start to grimace and bitch a little bit and they rush to open another line, right? Because we're Americans. We have that sort of entitlement. And, you know, we're the country that comes up with, you know, the air conditioning coming out of the vents of your $65,000 monster Ford F-150 isn't enough. You've got to have the air conditioning come up through the seat, too. It's hot. Okay? And to a lot of the country, that looks almost like a sense of entitlement. They're used to just sort of, sort of, you know, accepting what their governments or what their economies give to them. But we want more. So with that note, I'll just say, look, we're libertarians. We believe in liberty not fate. So whether the sky is falling is up to us. It only falls if we let it. So with that, thank you so much for coming.