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So in cards, we know the cards that we have. We can make inferences regarding what cards are remaining, what cards we see our fellow players have, investing. We can make inferences about management. We can deduce from the facts that we already know to infer about the remaining possibilities. And then there's uncertainty about the next card or what's going to happen next in the economy to prices and production. Now in the free market, there is what we know tends to be more stable. And we actually know less about our business because there are no regulatory disclosures to disclose information by competitors and so forth about their status. In terms of inference, again, the economy is more stable and there's less to infer and there's less need to infer because one bad bank doesn't destroy the banking sector. One bankruptcy is not looming news of economic catastrophe, but it's actually good news for everybody else, namely their competitors. So when Best Buy goes bankrupt, is that really a sign of retail problems as it is today or would it be in a free market just good for others, new opportunity for entrepreneurs? Uncertainty in the free market is also less, primarily because there's less macroeconomic instability. And there's also very fewer wild cards in the free market economy. Now what are these wild cards? What I'm really referring to here is not wild cards in the sense that it will improve your chances of winning, but it's an anti-wild card in the sense that all players will lose as a result. So in Blackjack, if the dealer gets 21, Blackjack, all the players lose and the dealer wins. What are these anti-wild cards in the real world of investing? Well there's many examples, but the two I'll mention today are the rating agencies. Rating agencies were started as a business that rated assets for the buyers of assets such as bonds or government bonds. Now those same rating agencies rate those assets for the sellers of those assets due to regulatory requirements. So it's a wrong side bias. Instead of working for the buyers, they're working for the sellers and have a natural inclination to overrate those assets. Regulatory agencies are also a wild card. Supposedly set up for consumer protection and investor protection, agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve and many, many other federal and state agencies are supposed to protect us. But what we found is a systematic pattern of failure on their part. So we can go back nearly a quarter of a century to the tech bubble and Enron, which was the darling energy company that was supposed to set new standards moving forward with regulatory agencies all over their company and their company books and so forth. And yet, lo and behold, we find that the company was absolutely bankrupt and investors lost everything. Then there's the Bernie Madoff scandal where the SEC regulators and other regulators actually had offices inside that firm. And lo and behold, again, due to a private journalist investigating the facts, they found out that the company was actually completely bankrupt with investors losing virtually everything. The financial crisis, pretty much the same thing. Lehman Brothers being the best example, highly regulated by multiple federal agencies, one of the big financial firms of Wall Street. And lo and behold, the company was actually completely bankrupt, completely underwater with investors losing everything. And these are not just one-off things. These are all systematic patterns of regulatory failure and of rating agencies' failures. Of course, the rating agencies famously failed to alert anybody about the mortgage-backed securities and all of those other assets, those new assets, which they were supposed to be protecting consumers, institutions, and investors. So these systematic patterns of failure led to enormous uncompensated losses, massive taxpayer bailouts, and whole new, enormous regulatory regimes. The regulators were rewarded rather than punished. And this is the wild card that nobody seems to be talking about today. Like in Blackjack, if the dealer gets 21, everybody loses. In the game of investing, the house or dealer or government never goes bust on a hand and always seems to get Blackjack a little too often. At the Minor Issues podcast, we're wondering what the next wild card will be.