 The stuff I'm gonna be talking about rather than you know, I'd consider should I just go through some of the highlights from the book and I thought probably what would be most useful to you folks is it'll be sort of a Current events through the lens of the book so things that you know You would know more about current events on these issues if you read the book, right? So that's what I'll try to do and So my dad is here my mom and dad are here with me And my dad always told me for giving a talk first tell them what you're gonna tell them tell them and then Told them what you told them now time is short. So I think I'm gonna tell you what I'm gonna tell you I'll tell you and then that's it. That's all you get. All right, if you donate to the Mises in suit Then I'll remind you what I said. Okay, so what we're doing We're gonna first talk about inflation of course and then I'm gonna talk about you know as a recession coming and some of the the conventional indicators and so you know in terms of the timing and This thing called the yield curve inversion That's gonna be the more technical one because it's tricky for us to give talks to groups like this because some people You know have been immersed in the Austrian literature and they come to this and you know They don't want to just hear something that they knew about ten years ago But then we know there are new comers here, too We don't want you to feel overwhelmed. So if you feel a little bit Intimidated in this part of the talk don't don't worry that you know that the next one is more fun We talk about Putin. Okay, so everyone can identify with that one Okay, so in terms of consumer price inflation what this is showing it's going This is 1950 all the way up to the present So this is just showing a graph of the 12 months percentage increase in the consumer price index So when the government comes out and says oh inflation over the last 12 months was such and such This is the number they're talking about and so you can see here that this really is you know a Very high level going back with good 40 plus years the early You know it had peaked in the early late 70s early 80s and then came down And so you have to go all the way back to as it was falling from that you know historic high to see inflation That's been at this level. It is some of the speakers have alluded to that number is definitely understated All right, so if you're curious it's interesting So in economics as in some other fields you can mislead people and you're not technically lying right and so here The sort of tricks they do and in of themselves It's it's not that any one of these things is is crazy Any like these these moves they make statistically to make the reported inflation number it for the interest of brevity I'm gonna keep saying inflation about what we mean in the Austrian community is price inflation, right? Because there's a distinction they make between Monetary inflation and price inflation so for those who don't know this might be interesting to you that Way back originally the word just inflation if people talked about inflation They meant that the money and credit supply was expanding and then over time in the 20th century The the meaning of that term morphed to mean oh prices are getting higher, right? And so now when someone talks about oh inflation is pretty bad you think yes stuff's getting more expensive You don't automatically think oh you mean that you know the amount of dollar number of dollars is expanding and that that change happened over time and a lot of Austrians are cynical and they think that's You know that was some sort of deliberate shift because that it's harder to blame the culprit, right? If you're just if it's the symptom rather than the cause and so we'll see in a minute in this talk that you know It did that connection is still there that it's the the money supply increasing That's what's what's driving this but just to finish that original train of thought so you can see the year-over-year changes is Up at about 8.5 percent. Those were the numbers before the recent one came out of the way 8.3 percent And so again some of the tricks they use in case you're curious And the point I'm making here is that it's actually misleading to say oh this number is bad But it was worse here because the way they calculated this number that the techniques they used was different from how they're Calculating this number and if they use the same techniques this number would be you know bigger than it is now So people argue about whether it would be as high as it was back then but still it there It's closer to you know the late 70s early 80s now The numbers would suggest and so got some of the techniques of things like they make what's called a quality adjustment or the year The term they use is hedonic And the idea is okay. Yeah, like you say oh how much is it as a new car year after year and that number Gets higher over time right the amount you would spend on a new car now is a lot bigger in terms of number of dollars Then in 1950 but if you said is a new car now the same thing is a new car was in 1950 obviously no the new car now like the tires go a lot more before blowing out some air conditioning power windows Power steering right so it's it's a much better thing now than it was in 1950 And so arguably it would be overstating price inflation to just look at how many more dollars now Make a quality adjustment So that's one technique that they use to keep this number lower than it otherwise would be all right But again, you can kind of you know It's it's not an objective fact of the world to say how much better is a computer now than it was five years ago Okay, so what I'm going into now is to show you the people up here on the panel and Jeff You know we had been alluding to the Federal Reserve's actions and how that's driving That's why stuff's more expensive right that yes corporations are greedy, but they were also greedy in 2012 so why is it that all of a sudden prices surged so much? It's not merely corporate greed because that explanation has been true It's like if there's a plane crash and they send in the inspectors and they come back and they're waiting at the news Media on the grieving families and what caused the what caused you look at the black box and they say it was gravity Right that yes that was involved But the question is how come gravity caused that plane to crash on this flight, but it doesn't happen typically So again corporate greed is always there But the issue is why is it that the companies were able to get away with raising prices so much over the last two Years compared to you know previous times so one thing to look at is How much the Federal Reserve has the assets they've bought and put on their balance sheet So this is 2004. This is the present and this is total assets on the feds balance sheets You can see typically you know up in the early 2000s It was it was increasing but relatively small and then That was QE one this right here Now because we had to be able to fit the whole graph in that doesn't look like it's that big but at the time Right when if I had done this chart like as of this point, this would be a shocking unprecedented Jump for those of you who are familiar with Glenn back at this point He was on his TV show He had that chart on the back wall and he was in a forklift And so he would drive along the timeline and then at the forklift would have to lift him up to show That he was lighter back then so it was easier so it was You know he was freaking out look are you kidding me looking with the fit and now you see that's that's child's play right that That's so called QE to this little thing there and then they said well that didn't work So what are we gonna? Let's do it again. Let's do QE three with this time We mean it and so this was the third round of so-called quantitative easing and then they They actually did under Janet It started right the tail end of Bernanke's tenure and then Janet Yellen presided over it was flat and then It started coming down and then Powell came in and they really did actually When Powell first came in the Fed was not only Refraining from buying more assets, but they were actually letting you know as existing assets matured They were rolling it over somewhat, but not as much like so they were shrinking their balance sheet and Then of course You see what happened during COVID where it just shot up Tremendously and then also too it's been continuing to do that. So it's a little bit truncated on this chart unfortunately So you can't see it. It's getting a little cut, but this just keeps going straight Okay, so despite and I'll reinforce this in a few minutes But my point is that with all the talk right now of the Fed tightening in how they're doing it And the markets are coming down hard because of all the feds tightening finally they're turning off the monetary spigots All they've really done if you want to use a car metaphor is they've taken their foot off the gas They haven't even tapped the brakes really and you might say well, didn't they raise interest rates? And I'll show you in a minute that even that is Perhaps not as as tight as you think it is Okay, but in terms of just the the overall size and some of these numbers So going into the fall of 2008 right before you know the crisis really hit in September there The Fed's balance sheet was about like eight hundred and fifty billion dollars something like that assets of the Fed held And they were mostly Treasuries right that's what the central banks of the world did is they bought and sold government debt and partly they did that For reasons I mean you could be cynical and say yeah That was the whole point is the the central banks were given their privileges to fund the government's deficits And that's true, but on the flip side they typically were either not allowed or it was just customary They wouldn't be buying and selling more mainstream private sector assets because of the temptation for corruption That you wouldn't want central bankers having the ability to buy specific asset classes that all went out the window with the financial crisis in particular the Fed just started loading up on mortgage-backed securities, okay? And I explain it more in the book But that was not only I would say bad policy in terms of economics like you know bailing out the people that made bad decisions And how can a profit and loss system function if if you make an investment in housing? Let's say and things go well you get to keep your profits But if it blows up in your face the Fed comes in and bails you out because you're too big to fail That's not a that's not a good system. It's not really that it's unfair to regular people But it encourages these institutions to make riskier bets if they know we keep the upside and on the downside You know the Fed bails us out, but beyond that it was arguably illegal what they did and I get into this in the book But the Fed was is allowed to lend freely But in terms of the assets that could buy there was a lot of restrictions And so what they did is they created these maiden lane LLCs and technically What was happening is the Fed would lend money to the LLCs who would then go out and buy mortgage-backed securities And so the Fed could say we're not we're not buying mortgage-backed securities. That'd be illegal We're just lending money this firm when they happen to be buying a bunch, but that's not our business, right? So that's what was going on there But you can see so that went up to above two trillion and that was again Why people like Glenn Beck were freaking out because the Fed more than doubled its assets So acute what does that mean one way of putting it is in the few months after the financial crisis the Fed Created more high-powered dollars than it had up to that point and you know since it's founding in 1913 Right, that's what it means to double something is to say you did more in that short period than you did earlier Qe2 Qe3 and then you see though with COVID it just dwarfed what they did back then so at this point Again right before the financial crisis the Fed had about eight hundred and fifty billion dollars in assets And now it's sitting on over nine trillion Okay, so the question though is Okay, you Austrian types you're blaming the you know now prices are rising the public is upset and you're telling him Oh, it's not corporate greed. It's not Donald Trump. It's not even Joe Biden really it's the Federal Reserve That's who you should be mad at and take your pitch pitch forks and go that way and So a cynic could understandably say well wait a minute You just got through showing us that the Fed was pumping in money buying assets After the financial crisis and yet, you know, we didn't have a six dollar gallon gasoline in 2010 So what's what's going on? Surely there's more to the story and there is and What I will say is that if you look at the the money supply in the hands of the public Then the story really does fit and it's not that there's some weird thing that oh, yeah We're not really sure why there wasn't big price increases in 2010 2011 but now there is but We do we do know right so that M2 is it's a monetary aggregate. That's why they use the letter M and Loosely speaking you could say it's money in the hands of the public Okay, so the earlier chart I showed you that was sort of like what the Fed does in a high level But that's not directly going into people's checking account balances All right, so M2 is a broader measure that includes things like not just physical currency like Benjamin Franklin's in your wallet But also you're checking account balance retail money market funds things like that And so what this chart shows is the year over year increase in M2 Which is I got a particular measure of the money supply in the hands of the public this right there Make sure I'm not lying to you. Yeah, that's 2020 and so that's you know That's when the pandemic hit and so you can see that M2 growth, you know bounces around. This is 1985 So yeah, right after the financial crisis, which is right here This was the so-called great recession this gray bar you can see oh, yeah M2 growth was kind of high in there and then it dropped then it jumped up again But it wasn't like it was historically high right that M2 growth Right after the financial crisis right when the Fed was doing those rounds of QE Was no higher than it had been in the early 2000s or even in the mid 1980s, okay? And so in retrospect even though the Fed was pumping in a bunch of money It wasn't actually spilling out into the broader measures of the money supply and in the book I give some reasons well why might that have been but I'm just showing you know that is the case So the story that we tell that oh, yeah, if you want to understand how come prices are going through the roof Yep, corporate corporations are greedy things like that Wall Street shenanigans But ultimately it's because there's more dollars floating around and that the public's able to spend that story does Still hold up so you can see that it this that figure of M2 growth really shot up way above the historical norms Going into the pandemic and so that it's not surprising now that prices are rising so much and also even though it has come down notice It's still Pretty high. Okay, so again when we say is the Fed Slamming on the brakes. No all it's really doing is not pumping in as much as it was before but in terms of Growth in money supply in the hands of the public That's still up it historically, you know the highest, you know tied for highest levels It's been over the last several decades though. It's not as high as it was six months ago Let me do a real quick technical point for the purists in the crowd. I actually Was hesitant to say this what I just told you because M1 which is a more narrow measure did shoot way up after the financial crisis And so I was open to the idea that maybe there, you know, there's is more nuance here And we shouldn't just say oh money supply explains everything But what happened is that I'm in preparation for this talk when I saw the M2 figure is People were panicked after the financial crisis of 2008 So they changed the way they were holding, you know Their cash and they moved it out of money market funds into like literal checking account balances And if you remember FDIC bumped up I think it went from a hundred and thousand to two hundred and fifty thousand was the insured amount for your checking account balances And so so you know it's safe, right? and so people were panicked and because of the carnage in 2008 if you remember that and And so that's that's partly what people did and so because M2 includes both Checking account balances and money market funds it largely offset. So that's why M2 Isn't doing anything too special right there. Whereas M1 did shoot up. Okay, so again, that's just kind of a technical point So looking at M1 you would have thought how come there's not severe price inflation in 2010 But it's because oh, that's really just getting moved away from money market funds Whereas Since the pandemic it's like by any measure all of them put together. They're not just moving money around There's a lot more money that's in everybody's possession Okay, so let me just talk a little bit. So now I'm transitioning to okay, we were talking about inflation Let's talk about recession. Is there gonna be a recession risk? That's something I talk about in the book and you say well, you know the book supposed to be about money Well in the Austrian school this guy literally von Mises. He looks like a fun guy doesn't he? He's a snappy dresser there apparently there was a story where you know Mises led this private seminar and Richard Ebling told me the story that you know, he was always dressed like this and it was really hot This was before they had air conditioning. I think they had electricity, but they didn't have air conditioning and the students showed up And they were all expected to dress like this and they said professor me It was really a hot day and they said professor Mises Can we at least take our jackets off for your seminar and he said no he did not allow them to do that He continued the lecture So in his theory of what causes the business cycle, right? So a lot of even main mainstream free-market economists like Milton Friedman others of that sort They will sometimes say things like If you don't want to have a business cycle go live in the Soviet Union Right meaning that a business cycle is sort of the and I'll I'll get more specific about Friedman's particular views But in general it's sort of like yeah I mean freedom is messy But it you know the benefits are outweigh the costs that if you you know if you want to have all entrepreneurial innovation Shumpeters view of creative destruction and you got you know factors if you open up a new store If it were guaranteed to succeed that would mean you know people don't have the freedom to not shop there right so with freedom comes the possibility of failure and That sometimes leads people to think that oh, yeah the business cycle is a normal feature of the market economy But according to me says it's not it's government intervention in money in particular how money gets into the markets to the banking system That's what causes the regular ups and downs of the business cycle. So yes in general under capitalism Somebody opens up a pizza shop. It could fail that the people might have misgaged customer preferences Maybe they just they're not good at negotiating prices with the wholesalers. Who knows what you could fail But why is it under capitalism? It seems like there's periods of general prosperity where every business almost is doing well Unemployment drops to real loves and then there's a crash and everybody says oh, we were too optimistic Why do these waves happen and so Mises had a particular theory of that? Let me just summarize that for you and then I'll apply it to what's going on right now So first what happens is that the banking system especially if there's a central bank which sort of coordinates this process and exacerbates it floods the market with unbacked credit So because the central bank can effectively create money out of thin air and notice And this is what's critical for the Austrian theory of the business cycle. It's not that the central bank Just gives the money to people and it's not even that it goes and directly at least, you know in modern times It's not that it goes and directly buys fighter jets or you know hands out The food stamps that with newly created money all that new money it goes through the credit markets And so the the prices that get distorted the most and initially before the rest of the system responds are interest rates And so they get they get pushed down to artificially low levels And then it's those you know those the combination of those two things with this new money coming in through the credit markets Pushing interest rates artificially low levels that creates this feeling of prosperity the boom the upswing But it's built on an illusion. Okay, and so in the Austrian view Prices serve a function they it means something right people need to know What's the price of a barrel of oil and the government wouldn't be doing anybody any favors at the price of oil It's supposed to be a hundred dollars a barrel and the government comes in and somehow makes it that it's only thirty dollars a barrel But they haven't increased the amount of crude production That doesn't mean there's more gasoline for your car, right? It just means they changed the the price on it And so it's not getting more gasoline in the vehicles and so whatever Information that that hundred dollar price was conveying to the system that people were responding to if you keep it artificially at 30 That causes problems right and so Some of the panelists were talking about I think I think Patrick in particular was talking about the price controls in the 70s That's a perfect example of what happened that It's it's not that all of a sudden there was more gasoline to go around it just meant by keeping the price artificially low Instead of the high price being the the lever the signal that made people say, you know what? I don't need to go to the gas station today. I'm you know, I still have some left in my tank I'll wait until Tuesday or when you get to the pump to say, you know I don't need to fill it up. I really just need five gallons because look how expensive it is by keeping the price artificially low When everyone's trying to get there to the pump and do that It would run out the first few cars that were there And so that's why they had to have that rationing scheme in place That's why they would limit how much each car could buy or that you know depending on where you were There could be rules like your license plate has to start with an odd number or an even number If it's this day of the week because they weren't letting prices serve that function, okay? so back to Mises Interest rates serve a function in a market economy and it helps Coordinate things over time right people save what does it mean when you save it means you could buy stuff now But you're deferring it to the future Right and so entrepreneurs need to know that because there's different things you could make We could the way we could use resources right now. We could build more factories Which doesn't help us right now We don't have more TVs right now if we use our resources to build a new factory But down the road we're more productive because now workers can go to that factory that didn't exist before and so there's like Inter-temporal trade-offs that can be made we can produce more now for the immediate present or we can Make things now that make us more productive down the road So in a sense, it's like transferring production from today to the future in that interplay Between producers knowing what to do and consumers saying this is how we'd like you to you know direct resources Interest rates help coordinate that in a market economy and so Mises point was if the interest rate is pushed artificially low You're not doing anybody any favors. It's not that there's more machinery to go around There's not more minerals that have been discovered. There's not more farmland. We're not actually richer it's just that signal is not doing its job anymore and Just like if the government comes in and gas is supposed to be six dollars a gallon But they just say it's illegal to charge more than three That might seem like it's a good idea, but it's actually not doing anybody any favors It's just gonna cause shortages and lines So with this a low interest rate if it doesn't actually reflect how much the public is saving Doesn't really make us wealthier it screws things up in the particular way it gets screwed up Is it causes this boom where entrepreneurs start longer projects than they have the resources to complete? so it lasts for a couple of years, but then When for various reasons the central bank gets skittish the banks get worried because of you know the loan quality and they tighten Now all of a sudden there's this wave of failures where a bunch of businesses say wow We were too optimistic we should have hired so many people and they start laying people off and closing down You know operation and that's what we think of as the crash Okay, so if that's the background of the theory Let me just apply that quickly to the Austrians versus Chicago school on the Great Depression So Murray Rothbard is a representative of the Austrian school The his quick explanation of what happened the Great Depression was in the 1920s The Federal Reserve was too liberal it allowed for an expansion of the money supply That's why you know there was the boom in the stock market that I'm sure you all learned about in the late 1920s Again in school. You probably learned. Oh, it's because we didn't have the SEC We didn't have people could just borrow money and put it in the stock market. It was crazy back then it was wildcat But it was like that in the 1910s also How come what we think of as the boom in the stock market and the 29 crash that led to the Great Depression? Why didn't that happen earlier in US history things were even more Liberal and unregulated back then right so that's the issue and Rothbard says it's because the Fed was formed in 1913 after the war they tightened and then the 20s they allowed for this huge boom that eventually led to a crash And so it was the boom of the 20s that made the crash in the 30s necessary And then in case you've never heard Herbert Hoover actually was not a free-market guy He actually had a New Deal light and then FDR had the real Neil deal And so that's why what should have been a bad crash in the early 30s lasted for the Great Depression in contrast Milton Friedman said oh, it's because the Fed Uh foolishly tightened in the 19 late 1920s when they didn't need to Okay, so even among free-market schools of thought Chicago and Austrian there are important differences when it comes to money and banking Okay, so again loosely speaking the Austrians would say it's the boom that causes the bust Where's even the Chicago school type will often say as long as the Fed doesn't tighten too much We don't need a recession So the reason I'm bringing this up is because this is even relevant today With certain economists like Steve Hankie for example and others that you know real good guys solid on a lot of issues But Hankie was giving Remarks saying oh, yeah, the feds still could get a soft landing They just have to keep money supply within this certain band Whereas in the Austrian school at this point a recession is inevitable there have been years of artificial monetary expansion artificially low interest rates Male investments have been made right so people have invested in the wrong things That's already done. You can't just flip a switch and turn that off so yeah, the If the Fed and the government did better policies going forward It would not be as bad, but the point is you can't avoid a recession at this point And so I would agree with Some of Powell's critics who are saying he's he's just you know trying to ease the public into this He's being unrealistic Okay, so just to summarize what I've said to you Think of the the carnage that we've seen in the stock market recently And that's when the Fed hasn't even started selling off assets and M2 growth is still pretty high And so then you might say though You might say but what about the yield curve didn't that recently invert and isn't the Fed tightening by raising interest rates Okay, so like I said this next part it'll be just a few minutes It's the most technical of what I'm gonna say today So hang in there folks and but I think I don't know if I bring a dessert yet, but maybe you need it right now Okay, but but this is you know, this is important stuff if you want to know about a recession So that's why I decided this was worth getting into So you may have heard this so this is not an Austrian Talking point. This is standard stuff. That's the financial sector knows about some guy Harvey Campbell did his dissertation in the 1980s on this that a so-called inverted yield curve has correctly predicted Eight out of the eight of the last recessions going back to right after World War two and it has never given a false positive Okay, so I won't get in the nuances here in the in the book I do if you're if you're curious you got it correctly defiled What do you mean by an inverted yield curve and how long does that signal have to be enforced before you say? Yep, that's a go. It's a signal, but this is a way I can intuitively show you what I'm talking about so what this chart is showing It's the yield on the 10-year treasury minus the yield on the three-month treasury So normally the yield curve is Upward sloping right so if the y-axis is the interest rate on government debt and the x-axis is showing the maturity So like three months six months one year and so forth up to 30 years Normally the yield curves like this meaning if you're going to lend your money to the government for a long time They have to give you a higher interest rate It measured like per annum, right? It's not just that you get a higher interest rate total. It's that even per year It's implicitly they're giving you more, but when the yield curve inverts It flips meaning the interest yield rate yield on short-term treasuries is higher than on long term So that's unusual at least since World War two But as this chart shows so on this chart that would mean it's below this black because this is the zero point Right, so if the 10-year minus the three month is negative that means the three month is bigger than the 10 Right, and so you can see and these gray bars are recessions. So this is 1985 This pattern like I said goes back to World War two But this chart I could grab pretty easily from the Federal Reserve's website just to show you the pattern so you can see every time That difference goes below zero meaning the yield curve inverted soon after there's a recession Right it happened for the other ones here and also notice it doesn't go below and then there isn't a recession Right, so there's no false positives or false negatives if you calibrate it, right? and so With that then if the question is okay if we're gonna you and by the way In the book I explain how that lines up with Mises theory, okay with the time we have here I can't get into it, but it's not merely that this happens to have predictive success And so hey, we don't know why it works, but it looks like it does so let's run with it It actually lines up with The theory I just told you a minute ago in other words if you believe that in the Sassian theory of what causes the business cycle This pattern actually isn't surprising. Okay, so if that's partly why I like this Is it makes sense to me that why this would be the case besides the track record? So if that's your framework, and then you wonder is a recession imminent Interestingly so it might be right none of this stuff people tomorrow could just stop going to work Well, they probably will because it's Sunday people on Monday could just not go to work And then measure GDP would collapse and you might call that a recession or not But you know so people have free will they can do whatever they want. It's not these lines Control human behavior, but I'm just saying if you're asking is this pattern in the cards right now. It actually isn't It's going the wrong way right in other words So this this one here that already happened that was the yield curve inversion before The 2020 recession right that happened in 2019 this this one So if we thought there was going to be a recession in the next 18 months The yield curve here should have already gone below this black line again, and yet you see not only didn't it go down It's going the wrong way. It's going up And so what's happening there? Why is that going up? It means That's the yield on 10-year treasury debt is rising more than sure the yield on three-month treasury debt So the Fed has more control over short-term rates the long rates and so what that means I would say my interpretation of that fact is that as inflation Expectations are affecting investors and they're realizing the Fed doesn't have this under control I think you know high inflation is here for a while They're insisting on higher rates for like 10-year loans to the government because they're building in the fact that Prices are rising at 8% a year. Even if it gets down to 6 or 5% in a few years I need a higher yield if I'm going to lend you my money for 10 years So that increase is more of a jump that what the Fed is doing by raising short rates right now So I would say in a sense the fact that the yield was going like that Means the Fed is behind the curve that the Fed Actually, so yeah, it's raising rates and so that's tighter than if they didn't raise rates But if you ask are they even just keeping pace with the public's moving expectations of just price rises? No, they're not just like in to give you an example what I mean in interwar Germany, right? You might be the famous things about wheelbarrows of cash and everything interest rates skyrocketed But they didn't keep up pace with the prices were rising so much And so there was a sense in which real interest rates were very loose and low During that period even though on paper it looked like wow the central bank in Germany was really jacking rates But they weren't anywhere close to keeping pace with their inflation So I would say you got something like that on a smaller scale happening now So again my point being the Fed really isn't tightening It's just they're not as loose as they were if you will but it's not like they've switched to a hard tight posture by any stretch Okay, I just got a couple more minutes here so Some of the issues and I know Peter alluded to this It's been hot recently where this all comes from. I think most you probably know this but Because of you know when Russia and we say when Russia invaded as good Austrian accounts We know it's Russia doesn't do anything its individual soldiers obeyed orders from a person and then they did such and such Right the countries don't do anything So when we say So the the US and its allies, you know punished Russia by shutting down bank payments and things like that and targeting those oligarchs and So one of the things that the Russian government did is the two things one is they linked the rubble to gold Ostensibly and then they also insisted on oil and gas payments be made in rubles or at least gas So just real quickly let my comments on these so the first thing Actually what they did and Peter knows that he sort of said it They didn't really link to it officially the way it wasn't the classical gold standard all the Russian government or bank did is it announced? We will buy gold at a fixed rate of 5,000 rubles per gram Okay, they were not saying if you turn in rubles We will give you gold and that's really the critical thing to link your currency to gold is to say We have stockpiles of gold if you hand in our currency will give you the gold That's what gives the currency strength So what they did was like the one half of it But that really if anything would put a floor under the gold price It wouldn't put a floor into the rubble price right if the world price of gold and measured in rubles had jumped to 8,000 The Russian banks and we're prepared to give 5,000 rubles if you sell us your gold The people owning gold would say well no thanks because we can get more in the market, right? So that was a tepid step that didn't actually you know formally do things the way they were in the classical gold standard And then they even abandoned that pretty soon after where if they announced it they went they went to a variable payment system And then this thing about gas payments and rubles Traditionally Purchasers of Russian exports would use either dollars or euros and so then Russia was insisting that you got to pay us in rubles and by itself again, I don't think that's that big of a deal because Originally all it's really doing is just changing the sequence So originally someone if they have euros and they buy you give it to gas prom Gas prom can take the euros go to the foreign exchange market and buy rubles with it If instead you're saying to the foreign, you know the German importer. No, we need rubles Okay, they would take their euros go the foreign exchange market trade the euros for rubles and then buy the gas that way So we're just changing the sequence of the transactions, but ultimately I think if anything all it means is Russian companies that used to have stockpiles of euros or dollars now have rubles so if anything I think this really is just Affecting Russian firms not so much affecting what the rest of the world has to do okay So with that thank you for your attention and I'll turn it back over to Jeff