 Well, welcome everyone, and I have a few preliminary remarks before I get into the gist of my topic, which is pretty lengthy. The oil price, stock market connection, the next hundred-year financial crisis, and the next crash. That's the bad news. I've got some good news at the end also. First, I'd like to thank Florence Sabron and her wonderful husband of 55 years for sponsoring this event. Three and a half years ago, I retired from Ramapo College, and since then I've been very apprehensive of speaking in public because I do not have my teleprompter. During the 2020 campaign, Joe Biden borrowed it and hasn't returned it. But I did speak to him recently. He said he would return the teleprompter if I admit the cocaine in the White House is mine. So I said the only thing I'll admit to is I drink Manichevitz wine during Passover. So that's as far as my inviting goes. Two and a half years ago, we moved from Fort Lee, New Jersey to Fort Myers, Florida, where we're here today. And I thought the next logical move would be to Fort Knox because I really want to see if the gold is really there. And so instead, we moved to Naples, which is not a bad place to live. Anyway, let me get started because there's a lot to cover. Jonathan has laid the foundation for some of the things I want to cover. This is a wonderful quote I use. What do we think we know? It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so. Anybody know who said that? Because you do, you'll get a free lunch today. No, no. He gets an extra portion for today's lunch. This is what the problem is in D.C. and on the talking heads on TV. They think they know what's going on in the economy, but they really don't. And I'll go through that right now. I wish I could say I created this, but this is from Murray Rothbard's book, The Case for 100% Gold Dollar, which I had my students read when I taught financial history and other courses. And this was published, I guess, the essay was originally published in 1962. So it's been around for 61 years. And on page 23, he does something similar to this. I just embellished it. Most economists will tell you that the economy is all about consumption. You hear this line, 70% of the US economy is consumption. Well, from an accounting perspective, that's true. But how do we get to consumption? First, you have to produce stuff, goods and services that we, the consumer, desire. And why do people produce stuff? Because they can sell it for money. They purchase money with the stuff that they produce. So in my classes, I would tell students, I couldn't be a consumer when I was teaching unless I first provided what? Teaching services. So for me to be a consumer, I had to be a college professor. Easy enough to understand. Even Joe and Kamala can understand that, I think. So this is what I call the natural economy, or as Rothbard called it, the unhampered economy. This is what we would have if we didn't have a Federal Reserve. We didn't have a $7 trillion federal budget and all the regulatory agencies that make life miserable for the producers and the consumers. So this is the economy that is what? Growing every year. Because there's nothing here that suggests that there'll be what? A downturn in the economy. Now we know that companies sometimes misread the market. That's why they suffer losses, as Macy's wrote about. We are a profit and loss economy. Profits are good, because it's the way consumers tell producers, you're doing a great job, keep on doing it. Losses tell producers you're doing a lousy job. Either get better or go out of business. So this is the economy we need to get to soon. Otherwise, as Jonathan pointed out, things will happen, which will not be very pleasant. So what's missing from the original flow chart? Well, what we need are entrepreneurs and labor, money, banking, financial markets and insurance, free trade, property rights and the rule of law, police courts and national defense and non-profit social services. I originally was gonna speak today about the forgotten Austrian. He was sort of a contemporary of Macy's, even though he was born about 30 years later, Peter Drucker, and I was gonna refer you to one of the most important articles I ever read in the Wall Street Journal or in any other publication. And I'll tell you exactly when it was published, December 19th, 1991, where he demolishes the case for the welfare state, lock, stock and barrel. It's entitled, it profits us to strengthen non-profits. This is the alternative to all the entitlement programs that the federal government has, every single one of them. And it's a short, succinct piece, and I urge you to read it because you could use it in your debates with your fellow neighbors, colleagues. Republican club members, democratic club members, anyone who thinks that the welfare state is the way to go, he just demolishes it. From a management perspective, not from a philosophical perspective, from a very practical management perspective. So these are the things that we have in a free market. Now I put down police and courts. Now some people think only the government can provide police and courts, but we know there are gated communities all across the country that have their private security. Downtown's higher private security to take care of peace and tranquility in their neighborhoods. And the courts, I had a colleague of mine around Paul College, an attorney. He was an arbitrator, a mediator. You could have private mediation and arbitration, so you don't need a government court system. And of course, national defense, the answer is everyone is armed, okay? Everyone is armed. Who's gonna invade a country with 340 million people or 150, 180 million people who are armed, okay? So that is the structure of a free market economy. There's no business cycle here. I dare you to articulate why there would be a business cycle in this type of an economy. It's just not there. So to understand the structure of production, which is what Rothbard put, Leonard Reid, the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education, wrote probably one of the most important little monographs called iPencil. It's the autobiography of a pencil. It's just a brilliant presentation of how an economy works from a free market perspective, from production to fabrication to consumption, a pencil. Think of a pencil, probably what? The least high-tech item we use. Do you know how much money has to be invested to get one pencil through the marketplace? Billions and billions of dollars. Yet it's done seamlessly by the free market, by entrepreneurs, men and women across the country. So again, the wonderful thing about the Mies Institute, you can read this for free online. Just go to the URL and you can read it free online. So you'll save yourself a few bucks. Okay, now, here's the good news. This is real GDP. In other words, the output of goods and services from the end of World War II to the present. And what does it show? We went from $2 trillion of real GDP to about $22 trillion. That's the really good news. The gray bars, if you can see them, are the periods of recession. And what's interesting about this is that we've had a recession at every year ending in zero, starting from 1920. 1920, 1930, 1940, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 2000, 2001. 2010, we didn't have it, it came earlier. 2007, 2008, the housing bubble. And 2020, we really didn't have a business cycle or recession. We have a COVID implosion where the economy was locked down, but it's considered a very short recession. So, and then of course you have these little downturns. That's where the economy contracted because of the recession, which is caused, as I point out in my book, both books on monetary policy and the economy by the Federal Reserve's monetary policy, pumping money in and pumping money out of the economy. So this is the real good news. And of course this is COVID. This is the COVID implosion, which is greater than anything we've seen in the post-war period. This is the housing bubble bursting, the contraction in the housing market, and the affiliated industries with that. And then the other recessions were relatively mild, except of course, if you lose your job. Everyone knows the difference between a recession and a depression. A recession is when your neighbor's out of work and the depression is when you're out of work. Okay, so that's the difference. Now, this is the idealized version of the economic cycle. This doesn't explain it, it just shows you. We have peaks and troughs and peaks and troughs and peaks and troughs. The good news is the economy keeps on growing. And it's growing because of, quote, the natural economy. The way I like to explain it to students is that we have a layered economy. We have the natural economy that we all participate in through production and consumption. We have the juiced up economy from the Federal Reserve's easy money policies driving interest rates down to zero. And then we have the spending part of the economy. Government-induced economy of the government spending money on all sorts of boondoggles, like green new energy and all the other things that they've come up with. Somebody is sitting in a room, I don't know in the basement of the Congress or the White House thinking up of crazy programs that we have to pay for or don't pay for, they just borrow money for it. So this is the idealized version of the cycle, okay? So why do we have the cycle, okay? This is the economy, you can see, this is not the ups and downs of the economy. The COVID implosion, the housing bubble burst and the mild recessions we've had in the post-war period, okay? So the question is, as Jonathan pointed out, the Federal Reserve was created in 1930 to quote stabilize the economy. This is anything but stable, okay? The economy expands, contracts, expands and contracts and the good news is it keeps on expanding. So the question is why? Why do we have these ups and downs of the economy? And all we have to do is go to human action, MISI's 900 page treatise, you can read online at MISI's. It's not something you can read in a day or a week or a month, it's a pretty heavy book. The other book you could read is Murray Rothbard's Man's Economy and State, which is just a magnificent exposition of the economy. And what did MISI's write? The cyclical fluctuations of business are not in the currents originating in the sphere of the unhampered market, but a product of government interference with business conditions designed to lower the rate of interest below the height at which the free market would have fixed it. In other words, the Federal Reserve are price fixers. They're interferers in the natural economy. You never hear that spoken on CNBC and some of the other places. In other words, the Federal Reserve, as Jonathan pointed out, does incredible damage to the economy and we're seeing it unfold right now, which I'll get to in a little bit. More recently, William Fleckenstein, who's based out in I think Washington State, who wrote a wonderful book called Green Span's Bubbles, The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve, and he takes Greenspan to task for his tenure at the Federal Reserve from 1987, just before the market crashed on October 87, he came into office until he left in 2006. And I first became introduced to Greenspan in 1969 when I read his essay in Ein Rans book called Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal, his little essay called Golden Economic Freedom. This was a year after I graduated from college and I was a history major, I took a couple courses in economics, but that really opened my eyes about the Federal Reserve and how it caused the Great Depression. It's a very short essay, you could read it online. And what does Fleckenstein say? Central bankers are actually central planners. They pick an interest rate to within two decimal places. They guess is the right one and then they proceed to cram it down the throat of the banking system. In other words, the Federal Reserve has no idea what they're doing. They think they know what they're doing, but as we, and I'll show you, they are really clueless. And that's the book that I wrote, why the Federal Reserve sucks. I went through the testimony of both Greenspan and Bernanke to Congress, twice a year after testifying Congress. And I went through their testimony and looked at what the economy was doing and they totally missed what was happening in the economy because of their policies. The way I describe the Federal Reserve, it's the arsonist that then tries to sell you fire insurance. They create the problem by printing money. Remember, the Federal Reserve has something we all wish we had since the holiday season's coming up. When I learned about this, my head exploded. They have an unlimited checking account. Think about that. Imagine having an unlimited checking account. You would be the most popular person in what? Lee County or Collier County or Florida. Because you literally could buy anything. In fact, in 1980, when I was a staff economist at the American Institute for Economic Research, I did an article on the Monetary Control Act of 1980, long time ago. And in it, it said that the Federal Reserve now has the authority to buy any asset. Think about that. They were only buying government securities. The 1980 Monetary Control Act gave them the legal authority to buy any asset. You know what that means? They can come into your neighborhood and buy up all the houses in the neighborhood. They could buy any condominium in the country, any real estate project in the country. Where do they get the money to do that? Well, we have to earn the money, right? Unless you're Sam Bankman-Fried, and you just take the money from his investors, right? And he just got his comeuppance, 110 years in prison. He could have gotten life, right? So I urge you to read this book because this is a wonderful little booklet that you could probably read in an afternoon. It's just a wonderful booklet, Greenspan's Bubbles. Now, this is the legacy of the Federal Reserve. This is the rate, the federal funds rate, that the Federal Reserve impacts by buying and selling government securities to pick the interest rate that they think the market needs in order to generate low employment and high growth. Well, this doesn't look like stability to me, does it? This looks like somebody's EKG gone astray, right? And I refer you to those of us that were around. This is Paul Volcker's attempt to break the back of double-digit inflation in the late 70s, early 80s, when the rate went to what, over 20%. It crushed the automobile industry. It crushed the housing industry. But the good news was that inflation was at 12% here. And it went down to 3% two years later. So it did its job of getting the inflation rate down and setting the stage for the 1980s boom. By the way, the 1980s boom has more to do with the prior president than Reagan. Are you familiar with that? The regulation began under Jimmy Carter, and he doesn't get enough credit for that because he called upon economist Alfred Kahn from Cornell University who went through the federal bureaucracy and said, all these regulatory agencies that we have have to be done away with because it's stifling all the major industries in the country. And that's when deregulation began. So Jimmy Carter does not get enough credit. And he should because he set the stage for the boom of the 1980s. So you can see I'm not making a very partisan presentation here. Now, here is the problem. The housing bubble burst, interest rates came down, and the Fed kept interest rates at close to zero. Think of a beach ball as interest rates, right? Everyone has used a beach ball in a swimming pool or the beach. It's floating on the water very nicely without anyone disturbing it. That would be stable interest rates. What if you push the beach ball down? That's what the Fed did right here and over here. It kept the interest rate down. The beach ball down. And when it lets it go, what happens? Rates start going up. That's the analogy between interest rates and the beach ball. The beach ball naturally belongs on the top of the water, not below the water. It can only stay there if you keep on putting pressure on the water, on the ball. So this is the long-term look at the interest rate that the Federal Reserve impacts by buying and selling government securities. Now, here is the really interesting chart that explains why the Fed is totally clueless. Even though they speak in very nice tones, we just heard Chairman Powell Wednesday give his presentation. And the red line is the interest rate, federal funds rate. The blue line is the CPI. And in past decades, the interest rate was above the CPI. So we would get a real rate of return on our short-term savings, money market accounts or savings accounts. And especially here, interest rates, I remember March of 1981. Some of you were not around March of 1981. Money market funds were very popular. 16% annual rate on our money market fund in March of 1981, well above the rate of inflation of around 12%. Now, look what that's happened in the last 10, 15 years because of the ideology of the Fed. Prices, the consumer price index is above the interest rate. That means we have negative real interest rates. In fact, there was a wonderful article on the MISI's website a couple of years ago to show you the pernicious consequence of this action. The article was entitled. $4 trillion has been transferred from savers to Wall Street. In other words, because of zero interest rates, people on Wall Street were able to borrow money at close to zero interest rates. That's speculate in the stock market, the bond market. And we, if you had a money market account or a savings account, we got zero interest rates for several years. And if inflation is running 3%, we're losing 3% of perusing power on our money. That is what? Grant theft. That is grant theft. And no one has been indicted for that. So what I proposed in an article I wrote is that interest on our savings should be tax exempt to give us some relief from the Federal Reserve's disastrous policies. Now, look what's happened recently. This is the spike in inflation in 2022 when the CPI went to 9% from June of 21 to June of 22, the highest inflation we had in 40 years. Look where the Fed funds rate was. It was still at zero when inflation was accelerating. And what was the excuse? Inflation is transitory. Well, it depends your time horizon. If it's 50 years, yes, it's transitory. If it's five, if it's three years, it's not transitory. So good news is inflation has come down from 9% annual rate to around 4%. And now, for the first time, the interest rate is above the inflation rate. The Fed was so clueless back then it was shocking because if inflation's accelerating, they kept the interest rate at close to zero. So what was the signal to the markets? Borrow, speculate, because you're getting virtually free money to invest in financial assets or other assets. And you've seen the price at Christie's and other auction houses, they've gone through the roof. And I don't have to tell you about Southwest Florida real estate prices. They've basically doubled, I think, in the last three, four years and rents have gone through the roof as well. This chart, I could teach the whole financial history of the post-World War II period just by using this chart. It's very simple. Next one. And this is zooming in to the last 20 years. You can see rates were low, well, they're close to zero, well above the inflation rate. And the same thing happened here. So again, the amazing thing is, and again, I watched the financial news to get a sense of what people are saying. And you have people like Warren Buffett, very smart person who applauded Jerome Powell for his handling of the Federal Reserve and other people have applauded Jerome Powell. This tells me he's a total disaster as are his colleagues in the Federal Reserve, keeping interest rates below the rate of inflation. That's stealing from the public. So this is the economic, philosophical, ideological, political issue that we're facing domestically, one of them, the major one. And of course, it's all outlined in my book, okay? It was a lot of fun writing this book because you get to read the testimony of Greenspan and Bernanke and you really scratch your head, especially Greenspan. Greenspan gave a very hard money, pro-free market analysis and golden economic freedom, criticizing the Fed for keeping interest rates slow in the 1920s. So when it becomes the Fed chairman in 1987, what did he do? Keep interest rates low. In other words, he did exactly what he criticized the Fed for doing in the 1920s. It's really remarkable. Okay, now, here's what I want to get to. There was a question about the financial markets. I want to try to integrate the financial markets with economic analysis. Okay, none of this should be construed as any investment advice. I'm not here as an investment advisor. Go check with your investment advisor. But there's some interesting relationships that I've uncovered in doing the research for my financial history class that I thought I would bring into this presentation so you can get a sense of what is really going on and the relationships we have in the markets. Okay, let's start with one. Okay, prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future. So anything I say about the future you could take with a grain of salt, okay? That's a, and that's Niels Bohr who's a Nobel Laureate in physics. Probably one of the smartest people ever on the planet. So let's continue. I saw this chart the other day and I said, I've got to present this chart because as we know, history repeats itself. Not exactly, but in this case, it is really close. The blue line is the inflation cycle from the mid-60s, Vietnam War, the Great Society, the Money Printing to fund all these programs. We had an acceleration, then a deceleration, an acceleration, deceleration till we got to the peak in 79, 80, 81 with Carter and Reagan at 12% inflation. Okay, and then of course inflation came down as Volcker spike interest rates to squeeze the inflation out of the economy. Interestingly enough, the yellow line is the current cycle starting in 2014. And guess what? It's tracking virtually perfectly the cycle that we saw in the 60s, 70s, and early 80s. Does that mean here we are right now where inflation has come down from its peak? What this suggests is that inflation, the rate of inflation will bottom out next year, then start accelerating and reach a peak in 2028 and then come down after that. That's what this is suggesting. This is not a predictive model, it's just showing you a correlation that is incredibly close fitting and have some other charts that show even more close fitting relationships. So what this is telling us is that the inflation cycle may be on a downward move now, but according to this analogy, it may be going up next year. Now this is an idealized version from stockcharts.com which has a lot of free content and subscriber content. This is one of the free articles and it shows the relationship, again a very idealized version of the stock market. Okay, that would be the red curve and the economy which is the green curve and you have the different sectors which ones do better during a boom, which ones do better during a bust, the so-called defensive sectors, healthcare, staples, consumer staples and utilities, okay. And which sectors do well during a boom, that'd be the industrials, technology, basic materials, energy and cyclical stocks. Again, this is an idealized version. You can go to stockcharts.com and Google it, you can find the article related to this, but there's great content here, podcasts of some very smart people about the stock market. So having said that, I put a lot of detail in my book on navigating the boom-bust cycle which is addressed for entrepreneurs, how they can see where we are in the economy and what actions, if any, they should take. And I'll get to that in a bit because there's some really interesting things going on in the labor market that we should be attentive to. Okay, now, this is a chart that Tom Bowley who is one of the bloggers at stockcharts.com in an article he wrote several years ago. Now you're talking about long-term, this is a 100-year stock market data. Going back to the bull market of the 20s, the crash of the, from 29 to 32. And then the market basically goes sideways for many years, then breaks out after World War II. Then we have the great bull market, the boom of the 1950s and early 60s. Then we get the stagnation of the 60s and 70s and the market basically goes sideways. This is the 73-74 crash where the market went down on nearly 50% in two years. This was related to the oil crisis of October of 73 with the Yom Kippur War. And then the market breaks out and then we have the big bull market of the early 80s to the dot-com peak. And the market had this tremendous run-up. And look what do you see here? The 87 crash is just a blip in a long-term cycle. So the moral of this story is if you're a young person in your 20s and 30s, you put your money away in your 401k every month paycheck and you just let it ride for 40, 50 years. That's the moral of the story. Then we get the dot-com bubble bursting. We get the downward move here and then we get the housing bubble bursting and then we're off to the races again. So here we are today. So according to this analysis that Bolius put together, the stock market should peak roughly 18 years from what he considers the breakout in 2013 to roughly 2031. This is his, if history repeats itself, this bull market should last another, what, seven, eight years, nine years. Now, these are secular markets. In other words, long-term trends. Within these trends, there are bull phases and bear phases. So you have cyclical bull markets and bear markets but the long-term trends last about 18 years, roughly. Okay. So keep that date in mind, the early 2030s. Again, you can Google this and when I saw this and I showed it to my class, I said, again, we could, I could do the whole history, financial history of the country, going back to the 1920s to the present using the stock market as the backdrop to where the economy is given its relationship to the stock market. So the next one is predicting a recession. I expect the Fed to raise the Fed funds rate sometime in 2022, which happened. This was from, this was written in December, 2021 and to continue tightening in 2023. Thus, the next recession could begin in the fall of 23 but no later than, but no later than a year later. If the recession does not begin on schedule, it only means it has been postponed and not eliminated. That's what I wrote in Fortune magazine nearly two years ago and so forth were on track and I'll explain. We may be in a recession right now. We won't know till after the fact but I think there's some key evidence that the economy is really starting to slow down. Okay, now how do we know a recession's coming? The yield curve is one of the best predictors of a recession because the yield curve means short term rates or above long term rates because the Fed is contracting the supply of credit in the economy and therefore companies scrambled to borrow money and therefore we get a recession. So every time the yield curve inverted before the 1990 recession, the SNL crisis, the yield curve inverted. This is the dot com bubble bursting. This is the housing bubble bursting and this is the interesting things. Most people don't know this. The yield curve inverted in 2019 and if you recall, there was an interesting president at the time, Donald J. Trump. And when interest rates started going up, Trump castigized the Federal Reserve for raising interest rates which a president that I know has never done in public before. Lyndon Johnson did it privately in 1966 when he called William McChesney Martin, who was chairman of the Federal Reserve, down to his Texas ranch. Johnson was six-four. I think William McChesney was like five-six. He stood over him and he said, Bill, what are you doing with interest rates? And we had a mini recession in 1966. Rates went down and then that led to the acceleration of inflation in the late 1960s. So presidents do get involved. Nixon in 1971 imposed wage price controls. His buddy Arthur Burns was chairman of the Fed. He juiced the money supply and we had a boom in 1972. So the economy was roaring and Nixon won in a landslide in 1972, but then we had the oil crisis in 1973. The recession was gonna happen anyway. So what happened? Trump criticized the Fed for raising interest rates because Trump being a real estate man loves low interest rates. Real estate people love low interest rates. So what did the Fed do? It immediately started lowering interest rates instead of raising them because the yield curve suggested that there was inflationary pressures in the economy. So what happened? The yield curve steepened, which means that short-term rates went down, long-term rates stayed the same. And then of course we get the implosion in the economy because of COVID. And then the Fed gets very nervous in 2021 and starts raising interest rates and now we get an inverted yield curve. So this is suggesting that we're right on target for a recession somewhere down the road. If it's starting now or in 2024 and I'll show you a chart that suggests that 2024 could be a recession every year. Okay, now here's another one. This is my, I was not drinking when I drew this. This is the unemployment rate. What the unemployment suggests when the unemployment rate gets to these levels, that's when the recession begins. So guess where we are? Historically at the same level when recessions begin because when you have speculation, what do employers do? They hire as many people as they can in order to be more competitive to get the goods and services out that they think the public wants. So this is suggesting, and yesterday the unemployment numbers were reported and it crept up one tenth of one percent. What doesn't sound like a lot, but the unemployment rate reaches a trough and stays there for several months and then starts creeping up. So again, this is suggesting that next year could be a recessionary year, which is not very good for the incumbent party in the White House. Okay. All right, this is one that is fascinating. Talk about correlation and fit between one asset class, the price of oil and the stock market. This was written by Tom McClellan, whose website is mceoscillator.com. This was a public article he wrote in 2019. You can go to his website, you can find it. He also has articles at stocktrots.com. He's one of the bloggers there. And one day he wrote in his essay that he was looking at a long-term chart of the stock market and a long-term chart of the oil market. And he said, boy, they look awfully similar, but they don't fit in terms of time. So he did some manipulating and what he came up with, the price of oil leads the stock market by 10 years. He says, I have no clue why this happens, but it's repeated over and over again for the past hundred years. So we've got to pay attention to a relationship that has pretty strong consequences. And you can see in 1920, right after World War I, the price of oil peaked, then what, nearly 10 years later, 1929, the stock market peaked. Okay. And you just go back and see this happening over and over again so what is this implying? The price of oil peaked in 2014, 10 years forward, roughly, is 2024. So he's suggesting that 2024 could be a down year, both in the economy and the stock market. Again, this is one of the mysteries of finance is why do these things occur in such a time lag? And if anyone wants to investigate, this is a PhD topic, go right ahead because there's something going on in the economy where the price of oil leaves the stock market. And of course, what did we have the past two years? The price of oil went up. So, and then again, look at 2030. The price of oil came down in 2030. I'm sorry, 2020. That means the stock market should be down in 2030. Again, roughly. All right. Now, I taught Financial History of the United States where we went from the colonial period to the present. It was a survey course of, usually finance majors took the course and a lot of the material that the Mises Institute and their economists have put out over the last hundred years was part of the reading material plus other conventional reading material from the course. And then one day I was going through all the dates that we covered, a financial crisis in American history. The first one occurred in 1792 so what did I uncover? Similar to what Tom McClelland covered with the price of oil and the stock market. Hundred year cycles, 1792, the Panic of 1893, the SNL crisis of 1990. Then we have the Panic of 1818, which is Mer Rothbard's doctoral dissertation. Again, available free at the Mises website, the Panic of 1819, which is by the way considered the most definitive explanation of the Panic of 1819. Magnificent book, it goes through primary sources, newspaper articles, editorials and it shows the development of the Panic of 1819. Hundred years later, the so-called forgotten depression of 1920, that was the title of a book by James Grant and Tom Woods that a wonderful presentation which I showed my students. And then a hundred years later, we get the COVID implosion of 2020. The Panic of 1873, that was the railroad panic. A year later, a hundred years later, we got the oil crisis of 1973. The Panic of 1907, which was the impetus for creating the Federal Reserve. The secret meeting in Jekyll Island in 1910 where the Wall Street bankers got together with a couple of people from Congress and laid out the blueprint for the Federal Reserve and sold it to the American people as an anti-bank bill when in fact it was what? To create a cartel for the banks, which is the backstop of the Federal Reserve, the lender of last resort, that was one of the missions, it still is, to bail out the banks. Remember, banks have a flawed business model, right? We all know the famous scene at the end of It's a Wonderful Life where there's a bank run on the Bailey savings loan and George Bailey portrayed by Jimmy Stewart says, your money's not here, it's in Joe's house because he got a mortgage from our bank. The banks borrow short and lend long, that's the gist of it. So these banking panics throughout the 19th century and early 20th century, maybe because people got nervous about the money in the bank. So 1907, 100 years later, the housing bubble, 2007, 2008. So you know what's coming next, don't you? 2029 could be the confluence of the oil price, stock market, Tom Bowley's secular cycle for the stock market, the 100 year cycle that we've seen in American history. So we're entering what possibly could be one of the most volatile periods in economic and financial history of the United States. Plus we have something now we haven't had except for wartime, we have, as Jonathan pointed out, this huge debt that's occurring with interest expense really increasing exponentially. I mean, it's gone from two, 300 billion dollars a year, annual interest expense to nearly a trillion dollars a year. So the question is, who's going to buy the debt of the federal government down the road? We know the Chinese and the Russians and maybe even the OPEC nations are not too thrilled about the United States foreign policy these days. Will they come bail out the US government by buying our debt with all these $2 trillion deficits as far as the eye can see? But we have a $2 trillion deficit and supposedly a great economy according to Joe Biden. Magic, $2 trillion deficit, okay? So, I'm just on schedule here, which is fantastic. So the 2029 depression, give or take a year or two could occur because of all the confluence of monetary policy, fiscal policy, geopolitics. And if the savers don't buy the government debt down the road, then we could see a situation like we've seen in other countries that have gone into hyperinflation. Again, I'm not predicting this, where the Federal Reserve buys most of the government debt by printing money. And that will add liquidity, demand in the economy and drive prices through the roof and wages will lagging. That's what we're facing because of the 100 year plus of the Federal Reserve policy and as Rothbard called it, the welfare warfare state for the past 100 years as well. So let me finish on an upbeat note. I said I'd give you an upbeat note. The case for optimism, this is from Berkshire Hathaway's annual report, I think of 2013, his letter to shareholders. Who has ever benefited during the past 237 years by betting against America? If you compare our country's present conditions with that existing in 1776, you have to rub your eyes in wonder and the dynamism that embedded in our market economy will continue to work its magic. America's best days lies ahead. And even Buffett's worried about the debt because he's a student of financial history. He knows this can't last forever. And he's read Rothbard's material because his father Howard Buffett, a congressman and Rothbard were good friends in the 1940s and 50s and 60s and Howard Buffett asked Rothbard to send him material so he could give to Warren. So the good news is entrepreneurs will not be deterred. The question is, will the people in Washington get the message that what they're doing is not working? And so with the Mises Institute out there providing sessions like this with young scholars coming up and doing more research, I am, as they say, optimistic and realist about what's happening. So thank you for being here. Enjoy the rest of the day and I'll see you later.