1698 FBF: A Force for Good, How Enlightened Finance Can Restore Faith in Capitalism with RBC Wealth Management's John Taft

Welcome to this week's edition of Flashback Friday. Your opportunity to get some good review by listening to episodes from the past that Jason has hand picked to help you today in the present and propel you into the future. Enjoy.

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Welcome to the Creating wealth show. Episode number 628. 628. Thank you so much for joining me. This is your host, Jason Hartman and today we are going to be talking with John Taft. He is the CEO of the Royal bank of Canada's Wealth Management division and that's RBC Wealth Management. His book is entitled A Force for How Enlightened Finance Can Restore Faith in Capitalism. Well, that's for sure. I mean, why would you ever lose faith in capitalism? First of all, remember I told you about that book Sapiens, and forgive me, I can't remember the author's name, but it's such a great book in there. The author talked about, you know, it's a brief history of the human race, Right. And he talked about how the most pervasive religion in quotes ever, that of capitalism, it's money. And you know, it is just such.

An accepted thing throughout the world. Everywhere you go, people can relate to the concept. Now, this may sound really kind of dumb that I'm even saying that, right? But to some it is not obvious. I mean, look at all these people who support someone like Bernie Sanders, for example. Now Bernie, I think is a nice guy. I like Bernie. I like him better than Trump. But I mean, he's a foolish old man. He does not know what he's talking about. Do you know he never earned a steady paycheck until he was 40 years old? And when he did that first steady paycheck, you know who it was from? Yep. The government.

I mean, some people live their life in a womb and they don't understand how markets work. They don't understand how capital works. And they don't understand that when the government hands down all these edicts to redistribute wealth and say things like, look at all of Bernie Sanders socialist populist, communistic ideologies, right? Well, we gotta make them do this and make them do that. Well, duh. People react. People don't just sit there. These regulations don't just happen in a vacuum. I mean, it is amazing to me that mature adults can be so naive. It really is amazing. I mean, it's like fun to watch. It's so incredible. It really is. So here's an example from my own life and it's what I did last week, okay? So I, again, I did this five years ago, four and a half years ago, I guess in 2011, I voted with my feet. Yes, with my feet, metaphorically. I decided to leave California because it was just so burdensome to be so over taxed living in that state. I mean, here's someone who doesn't even have a library card, okay? For God's sake, I don't even have a library card. I use virtually no government services beyond roads and, you know, an occasional call to the police or the fire department over the years. I mean, like nothing, you know, and plus income taxes don't pay for a lot of this stuff, Right? It's paid for in gasoline taxes and other taxes, car registration taxes, et cetera, et cetera.

Right?

So even my example there, you know, isn't a cohesive example if you think about it. So I voted with my feet. I left the high tax jurisdiction of California in favor of a much lower tax jurisdiction of Arizona. And I then, as you know, moved back to California in June of last year to capture a tax deduction that I had in that state. And I had to live there for over six months, which I did. And last week I again became a resident of Arizona. I moved back. Now, listen, Arizona is not tax free, okay? But the taxes are reasonable in Arizona. At least they're not obscene. And this is the example. This is what people like Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders just. They're clueless. They're either clueless or they just think you're clueless. They think we're clueless, right? They think we're so dumb that we would just believe what they say without questioning it. You know, that you can just punish the big evil corporations. And I believe, listen, I don't like the corporatocracy. I think they've bought off the government and, you know, I think basically Wall street owns the Senate. I mean, it's absurd. You know, I think that. But.

You know, their ideas of forcing on businesses all these regulations, the businesses will vote with their feet the same way I did as an individual. They won't just sit there and take it. They'll either not hire, they'll replace people with robots if you tell them they got to pay $15 an hour ridiculous minimum wage, or they'll raise prices on their customers. And then, you know, it just, I mean, who in their right mind thinks any restaurant chain is going to sit back and say, well, now that we've got to pay $15 an hour minimum wage, I'll just take a pay cut. You know, do you think the executive is going to sit there and say, well, let's just cut the salaries of all the executives.

Right? Oh, sure, yeah, yeah. Because now we got to pay more to our low level workers, right? No, that's not what happens. They're simply going to say, what do we do? Okay, here's our reaction. We're going to automate, we're going to use robotics, we're going to raise prices, we're going to cut quality. You know, there are so many forms of inflation as we've talked about over the years on the show in the last 627 episodes. One form, of course, is the form of where they don't raise the prices, they just reduce the size of the item. You know, the bag of potato chips, for example, and the Campbell sou can. We've talked about this stuff before. These examples of where, you know, all of this stuff, the product, it's getting smaller where you get less food, there are fewer ounces in the item and the price will stay the same or the price will rise, but not as much as it might have if they didn't shrink the size of it. So, you know, look at all of the stuff in our lives that we didn't have to do before. Here's another form of it. And in some ways this is good, you know, because it's kind of handy to us as consumers. But a lot of the stuff we do in our life we have to do ourselves nowadays. We have to go onto some website, we got to figure things out, we got to place our own orders, we've got to manage our own travel. We don't, you know, hardly anybody uses a travel agent anymore. So, you know, these are all reactions to these kind of really imbecilic Bernie Sanders type ideologies. Okay? And I only say Bernie, I mean, Hillary is a criminal. We Know that, right? I mean, she's just, you know, about, hopefully about to be indicted. If they don't indict Hillary Clinton, it will be mind boggling. It will show you the privilege of the elite class in our society and how disgusting it is in the way they abuse power. If Hillary Clinton is not indicted, I mean, she has been a criminal for so many years, it is just mind boggling that she can get away with it. But maybe her reign of criminality has come to an end. Okay, enough of that. So, yes, we'll talk about enlightened finance and capitalism and so forth and, you know, hopefully the world will see that that is the way to go. It is good for society. It is good for everybody in society. You know, results will never be equal. You know, opportunity should be equal, but results will always be unequal because some people are more ambitious, some people are more talented, some people are just more lucky. And I, you know, listen, I believe luck is something that exists. You know, as I've said many times, I'd rather be lucky than good any day of the week. But unfortunately, you can't depend on luck. So you better just try and be as good as you can at whatever it is. Equal opportunity but not equal results. There is no guarantee of equal results, obviously. And so capitalism, you know, it's not perfect by any means. There are many unfairnesses in the world. Of course there are. I mean, lots and lots of unfairnesses. It is dangerous how powerful these big corporations have become. I agree with that. But you know, they don't exist in a truly capitalist market either because they buy off the government with lobbyists and campaign contributions. And that's why, really. One area I agree with good old Bernie is that we need to get the money out of politics. If we make the government smaller, then there will be less lobbying, there will be fewer special interests, there will be less influence. I mean, if money didn't matter.

Or.

The size of government didn't matter, then why would all the money be chasing government and trying to influence government? If government was smaller and regulations were fewer, less money would be chasing government. The reason the money chases the government around and all these politicians to buy off all the crooks in Congress, okay, is because that's where the money is. It's where the treats are. It's where the, you know, the favoritism lies. So make government smaller and you'll have less of that. It's really quite simple. But amazingly, you know, everybody wants their little special interests, their little corner of the world, so that's what we have. We have what we have. And listen, folks, I understand we talk about real estate investing on this show, but it's an election year. We got to talk about this stuff. It has a huge impact on all of our lives. It has a huge impact on the way we invest. Because fiscal and monetary policy determined by the government, okay. By all governments around the world. Okay? Yes. Not just fiscal policy, but monetary policy too. You know, the Federal Reserve or the European Central bank does not act without lots and lots of influence from government. If you think those are independent entities, think again. I mean, they are. Well, in the case of the Federal Reserve, it is a private corporation. We know that. But there's lots of cronyism going on. And that's really the word. It's crony capitalism. Right? That's the phrase of the day. That's really what I've been talking about here. So we'll get to that in a moment. But a couple quick things. Go to jasonhartman.com/m a t R I X and grab those investment matrix slides that I talked about several episodes ago on a couple of different episodes. Because, because I think they'll be very helpful to you. I know a lot of you have already gone and got those just from my last announcement about them, but those will be very helpful to you in understanding the way different asset classes react to different economic scenarios. And that is a very, very important thing as we move into this election year. So those are free. Just go to jasonhartman.com/m a t R I X and get the investment matrix slides and also go to jasonartman.com and click on Events and join us in Salt Lake City, Utah. By the way, this is a Jason Hartman University event, JHU Live and it is only our second time doing this. We did it last year in San Diego in August and we have improved a whole bunch of stuff about it. We made the math a lot more challenging. Okay, because of you are far too smart. You outdid my math. My math was not hard enough. So we've made the math a lot more challenging. That'll challenge your your minds in this event. And it's a, it's going to be just a one day event. We decided we can do it all on a Saturday because many of you want to go skiing on Sunday. And if you want to join me for skiing, this is only tentative, but I plan to go skiing either Thursday or Friday before for the event. You know, let me know if you, if you want to meet up. Maybe we can do that. The event is March 12, Salt Lake City, Utah. There's no property tour with this event. This is not a property tour. It's just a JHU live event. Jason Hartman University live event. And again, this is the practical course where we go through math equations. We look at how to build a portfolio, how to allocate that portfolio, which properties should be financed, which properties should be purchased with cash, which ones should be in a qualified plan like an ira, and which one should be outside of it. So lots of different things. Jason hartman.com Click on Events and we've got early Bird pricing for that. JHU Live in Salt Lake City, Utah. And why isn't there a property tour with this? Well, because Salt Lake City is not one of the markets we can make work. You know, it's, it's too expensive. Many years ago, I did a decent amount of business in the Salt Lake City area, but the prices just, they just won't make sense anymore. We can't make it work there. This is just the live event. And come out and meet us. We're going to have at least one of our property providers flying in for that event, and we will announce that soon. And they'll be there with their team talking about their market. And so you get to do that and go through the real practical stuff on how to use software, how to evaluate stuff, how to do the math on your investments, how to analyze them. And I think you'll really enjoy that. Okay, without further ado, let's get to our guest, John Taft, a CEO of RBC Wealth Management.

It's my pleasure to welcome John Taft. He is CEO of RBC Wealth Management, former chairman of the securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. He's author of A Force for How Enlightened Finance Can Restore Faith in Capitalism and Lessons Learned from the Lost Culture of Wall Street. He's also the great grandson of President and Chief Justice William Howard Taft, and he's coming to us today. From Minneapolis to John, welcome. How are you?

Good, thank you. Glad to be on your show, Jason.

It's good to have you. So tell us, why is Wall street important to society?

You can't even begin to imagine a modern economy without a financial system. And.

It'S integral in so many ways to the system of.

Financial capitalism that today, and not just during our lifetimes, but let's say since the start of the 20th century, has become the dominant socioeconomic model in the world. It relies on. It's powered by finance and all the things that we want to get from our economic system require a financial system that supports it. So that's why the financial services industry and financial markets and the financial system is important to us.

Right, right. Yeah, it certainly is. And I don't think anybody who's really thinking about that question would deny that. I guess people just get so discouraged with all of the scandals and the crookery going on on Wall street and, and you address that in the lost culture. I seem to think that really changed in the 80s. I don't know where you would put that change, but you know, maybe you can speak to that.

Well, if you look at the history of Wall street, if you will, let's remember Wall street is just a word people use to describe the financial system. I mean, most of what people mean when they say Wall street isn't on wal. Financial institutions in our country are outside of New York state, spread across the country, you know, tens of thousands of community institutions. But when people say Wall street, they mean the financial system. And throughout its history it has strayed from time to time from its underlying mission, purpose and values, which should be to support economic growth in a way that makes everybody better off than they would be without the financial system. So the most recent example of that, of course, was the financial crisis driven by excessive leverage, most of it in the housing sector. But as you point out, there have been other examples, but maybe every 10 to 20 years where Wall street gets off the track, forgets what it's supposed to be doing for society and starts focusing on things that lead to.

Dysfunctional behavior. Why does that happen? Well, there are many books written about that and you know, but I think what it all comes down to fundamentally is that the opportunities to make life changing amounts of money in the financial services industry are probably greater than in almost any other sector in our economy. And that just seems to lead people to lose their moral and ethical bearings periodically. And that's why we keep seeing these financial market driven crises in our economies.

Yeah, yeah, very interesting. And when I make this comment, John, I understand that I am most certainly a dyed in the wool capitalist. I don't think Wall street is very capitalistic, oddly, in a way, because with all of the regulation that goes on that is ostensibly to protect the little guy, what that really does is limit the playing field. It keeps new entrants out and makes the market less free and more monopolistic. But you know, with all the, I mean, I don't think anybody goes to Wall street thinking they're going to help society. Maybe you're the only one.

Well, actually that's not true. And, you know, in the course of writing my books, in the course of 35 years in this industry, you know, if you go to the quote unquote, old timers, and I'm starting to become an old timer, they will talk about the reasons they went to work.

On Wall street. Let's use that phrase. And it was about.

Making the world a better place, helping corporations raise money so they could grow and create jobs. Or in my case, I started by working with state and local governments. Not for profit organizations, public agencies to raise money for projects like building schools, bridges, convention centers, redeveloping commercial districts in blighted downtowns. Those were the things I worked on for more than a decade in my career. And that's the reason I went to Wall street, to help make the world a better place. That seems like a quaint, antiquated and outdated notion today. And that's part of the problem. One of the things you need to know, though, is there's. There's a lot of, you know, talk these days about too big to fail and the fact that the market's gotten too big. And you say, well, maybe regulation is protected. The firms that are already there. All you have to do is look north of the border. I happen to work for a Canadian bank, and north of the border you have a financial system that's really dominated by five or six banks. So it is much more concentrated than the financial system in the US which, as I say, has tens of thousands of financial institutions. And yet in Canada, you had a financial system that, going into and through the financial crisis, behaved exactly the way we would want our financial system to behave. They were true.

Centers of stability. The banks now, all of them made money during the financial crisis. None of them even cut their dividends, much less went out of business. So concentration in size isn't the problem. The problem is this stewardship concept, which is why do financial services institutions exist? Do they exist to make money for their employees? No. Do they exist to make money for their shareholders? Well, yes, but that takes second place actually to serving a social purpose. Canada, they remembered that. In the US we forgot it. And the Big Short and other movies that have been made too big to fail and so forth. There have been dozens of them. Are all about the fact that we forgot why we exist or should exist. That's the core problem.

Yeah, very interesting. And I mean, you know, Wall street and the old joint stock company, which is, I guess, how it all started, you know, that that is so important because if we don't have this system that aggregates capital and, you know, allows companies to do ginormous. That's a, that's not an actual word, I'm sure. But, you know, huge, huge projects. You know, technology would never have advanced if we didn't have the kind of capital formation required for companies like intel and Boeing and Airbus. And, you know, that's so important. And I love, I will tell you, I admit, and, you know, you probably haven't heard me do this, but I love to bash Wall Street. I do that. And I say it's like the modern version of organized crime. I get so cynical about it. But conceptually, you're right, it's absolutely critical. I mean, if we don't have this kind of thing, you know, it would be a very small world of a bunch of mom and pop everything. And the evidence of this is, and I've traveled to 78 countries now, the evidence of this is you just go to other countries, you know, go south of the border, go to Mexico, and of course there's massive graft and corruption and, you know, huge crime problems. But over the course of decades, you know, you look at these countries and the, the big thing that's missing is capital formation. And I would also say a secondary mortgage market. Those two elements are giant for creating an advanced economy. You know, you've got, you've got the guy selling tacos on the street in Mexico, whereas, you know, in the US you've got the SBA or, you know, I mean, I'm no fan of government doing it, but you've got ability to get capital to open a store and do things right, you know, and open that restaurant and have, you know, good systems and good equipment. You don't have that in most other countries, or at least not developing countries.

You're right. Picking up on what you said, two points I would make. First of all, you know, the fundamental function of financial institutions is to take the money.

From people who have it, savers, investors, and make it available to people who can deploy it. Corporations, governments, not for profit organizations, manage the risk of that intermediate function and do so in a way that everybody is better off. And one of the things that keeps getting lost today, as you hear all the talk about.

Income disparities in the United States, which are worth paying attention to because they are the source of political unrest, which isn't good for growth. But one of the things that gets lost is that around the world, as capitalism powered by finance has become the dominant economic model, is how much better off vast portions of the world's population are today versus a quarter of a century ago. Even capitalism has improved standards of living. Capitalism has moved, you know, billions of people out of poverty. And if you didn't have the financial system to power capitalism, that never would have happened. But we don't hear that narrative today, certainly not in the political debate currently.

No, we certainly don't. It's the big evil rich people and the thing. But, you know, let's just dissect that a little bit more if we can, because, you know, none of my listeners would be. I mean, we got a few socialists, I'm sure, out there, but they're just, just, you know, they're just lost. Okay? They've, they've been bathed in the leftist university system for too long. Right? And, and watch it.

My father was the dean of Yale University, I think.

But I would hardly, I would hardly view Yale as far left. Okay? So, all right, you know, but, but, and, and it's progressively become, you know, more that socialist direction because, you know, these are people that work 12 hours a week. They're not in the real world. I'm talking about the people, professors, you know, they're not in the real world. Most of them, certainly business schools have people that run companies teaching their classes. But by and large, you know, that, you know. Anyway, that's a different argument. But going back to my point, is Wall street really capitalistic or is it an insider's club? No one's going to disagree in their right mind that capitalism is, is good. I mean, it's great, it's fantastic. But do we have capitalism? That would be my question.

I would frame the question, which is an important one, a little bit differently, and point you to the writings of a guy named Roger Martin, who is one of the contributors to my book A Force for Good. Roger Martin is one of the most respected business school deans now, former Rotman School in Toronto. And he writes about real markets and expectations markets, which are really the markets in the real world where companies are making things for real people to use, charging them for that, receiving revenues. And then there's the expectations market, which is the stock market, which are people betting, if you will, on financial securities. And what happens from time to time is that the financial system and financial companies move away from what should be their focus on helping real players in real markets and get wound up in transacting in expectations markets. Now once you do that, you lose your bearings because we're not about the expectations market. We should be about facilitating activity in the real market. And what happens is or happened going into the financial crisis, this is my perspective, is that the businesses that actually helped real people, like believe it or not, investment banking, like asset management, you know, helping pension funds manage money for their, for their beneficiaries, or wealth management, helping individuals manage their wealth, those business businesses lost ground and lost credibility to the more profitable businesses which became trading businesses who had nothing to do with clients. Just give a trader some of the bank's balance sheet and let them trade it. For what purpose? To make money for shareholders and make money for themselves. Once those traders started to dominate the financial institutions. Now you had the disconnect between what we should be doing and what they were doing. And that's what led us into the financial crisis. The good news is that since the financial crisis, for a whole bunch of reasons, A, because investors are demanding it, and B, because regulators are requiring it, financial institutions are moving away from activities that are purely about making money in expectations markets and they are going back into businesses that are about helping real people in the real world. And the more we do that, the more likely it is we are grounded in reality and the more likely it is we can be a force for positive social outcomes which ultimately leads to how credible are we to the extent we do that, people will like us. People we trust will trust us. To the extent we're off making money for ourselves, they won't.

Where are all the clients? Yachts, as the saying goes.

Right, Exactly. That's a, that's a very pithy way to phrase it.

Yeah. So what do we do about this? You can't legislate morality, as the old saying goes. What's going to ever fix the problem? I mean, is it more regulation or is it less regulation or something else altogether?

Well, part of it is better regulation. I mean, one of the problems we had going into the financial crisis was that a lot of the regulatory infrastructure was built and then just kind of remodeled over many, many decades from the Great depression, you know, 1930s. And the world obviously has changed dramatically. And so regulators were dealing, just didn't have the tools to do what was necessary to create guardrails for 21st century financial institutions. So that's been. We've been in the process of the single biggest rewrite and rebuilding of regulatory infrastructure in our lifetimes. Now, like everything, the pendulum is swinging too far. I think we're in the process of going from too little and outdated regulation to too much regulation and it will swing back. Eventually we'll get the balance right. So that's one thing, but the second Thing, as you point out, no amount of legislation, and you can't possibly write enough rules or make them complicated enough or extensive enough to get at the core issue, which is that do you have people who go to work every day in the financial system and focus on their mission, purpose and value, which is about helping real people in real markets, in the real world? How do you make that happen? I've written two books about that, and there is a growing literature about what needs to happen in order to do that. For people who want to go to one place and get some of the best thinking about what it takes, I would point them to the website of the CFA Institute. CFA is a. Is a gold standard of professional certification in the financial services industry. If you get a CFA, it's like.

A PhD, and that's a charter financial analyst.

It's a chart that's hard to get.

It's not. It's not like a CFA three years.

But on their website.

Are a whole series of tangible, practical measures they have been sponsoring and supporting. And I'm a member of the CFA Institute, but I'm not a cfa. But nonetheless, I look to them and I say they are doing better thinking and they are doing more impactful stuff to keep the focus of our industry on what we our proper role in society. Everything from codes of ethics for individual participants and firms. So they went out to their, you know, hundreds of thousands of members and said, give us a list of what we can do to improve integrity in the financial services industry. They sponsored a whole initiative I was very, very fortunate to be part of called the Future of Finance Initiative, which is all about how do we make finance a force for good in the world? And that was the impetus for my second book. So you have to have leadership and you have to have committed leadership.

Talking about doing the right thing. And that means reconnecting the businesses they run to mission, purpose and values. I believe more of that is going on today than at any time since the financial crisis. But we see over and over and over again how easy it is for Wall street as you. You know, again, that phrase, to lose sight of what's really important, and it just requires. It's like a daily renewal, and that's what we have to be involved in.

Yeah, good points. Whenever I hear the phrase financial innovation, I want to run for the hills. It scares me.

Well, actually. Okay, so now on that point, that's a great point. But the Nobel laureate, again, a contributor to my book, the last one in economics, Robert Shiller, you know, the Case Shiller Index.

Yeah, sure, of course.

Okay. Wrote a book called.

I'm forgetting the title of his book, but at any rate, it's about irrational exuberance.

No, that was one of his books.

This one was about, I think it was called Finance and the Good Society. And it was about the role of financial innovation in making the world a better place. The point being. His point being that innovation per se is neither good or bad. It's what is the purpose to which innovation is put. And he would point out, as you did earlier, that let's take the modern system of mortgage finance in the U.S.

It'S one of the miracles in the world. Another contributor in my book, Jay diamond, wrote about that. And yet it was used for dysfunctional purposes when, you know, actually the mortgage finance market has been one of the drivers of improved standards of living around the world. So innovation per se, it can be a good thing, but it has to be applied appropriately. And it's been, you know, there have been lots of financial weapons of mass destruction created over the years, but there have also been. I'm going to take insurance, there's an innovation, or Paul Volcker's famous, the atm, you know, simple, low tech, but it's made the world a better place.

Yeah, it sure has. It sure has. Okay. Hey, before we wrap up, I just want to ask you, you do some great surveys that could give us some insight into the direction of the economy, you know, consumer savings spending, anything you want to share? Everybody wants to know what your crystal ball says. And sitting in your chair as CEO of RBC Wealth Management, you've got good information. What should we know? What can we learn from you?

Well, I do have access to good information. We have a legion of very smart, well informed, knowledgeable analysts. And I, for your audience, I'd probably just leave you with one sort of uber thought, and that is that we believe that we are still in a secular bull market for equities. It's a slow, ugly growth scenario. We're in the middle of a correction that doesn't feel very good right now. But we believe the bull market in equities still has room to run maybe for many years. And one thing we look at, that's.

A pretty stellar prediction, by the way.

It is, right? Well, no, it is right now. And you know, I.

People would take issue with that one, but go ahead.

I just. Well, that's why I bring it up, because I thought it would be noteworthy. I just put money into the market and I. Because I believe that. And I think that the prices right now are a whole lot more attractive than they were a couple of months ago. But the point is, the danger signal for investors should be do you see a recession on the horizon? If you see a recession, that's a bull market killer. We don't see a recession, at least not in the United States. So that's the one big point I would.

Make. The other is, you know, interest rates are going to go up. Don't extend out too far in terms of maturities and don't go too far down in terms of quality. Stay relatively short and stay in high quality fixed income. Don't be afraid to invest in the equity market. You will get paid over time if you do so today. Those are my crystal ball thoughts for today.

You are definitely an optimist. I mean, so does that parallel the economy in general?

Yeah, we're still in the middle of one of the slowest, but also the longest lives and steadiest recoveries in our lifetimes and it still has.

Room to go. And that is why we don't see a recession. We don't see a recession. We see equities continuing to deliver attractive returns.

Good stuff. Give out your website, John.

Oh, it's www.rbcwealthmanagement.com.

Fantastic. Well, John Taft, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you.

I've never really thought of Jason as subversive, but I just found out that's what Wall street considers him to be.

Really? Now how is that possible at all?

Simple. Wall street believes that real estate investors are dangerous to their schemes because the dirty truth about income property is that it actually works in real life.

I know. I mean, how many people do you know, not including insiders who created wealth with stocks, bonds and mutual funds? Those options are for people who only want to pretend they're getting ahead.

Stocks and other non direct traded assets are a losing game for most people. The typical scenario is you make a little, you lose a little and spin your wheels for decades.

That's because the corporate crooks running the stock and bond investing game will always see to it that they win. This means unless you're one of them, you will not win.

And unluckily for Wall Street, Jason has a unique ability to make the everyday person understand investing the way it should be. He shows them a world where anything less than a 26% annual return is disappointing.

Yep. And that's why Jason offers a one book set on creating wealth that comes with 20 digital download audios. He shows us how we can be excited about these scary times and exploit the incredible opportunities this present economy has afforded us.

We can pick local markets untouched by the economic downturn, exploit packaged commodities investing and achieve exceptional returns safely and securely.

I like how he teaches you how to protect the equity in your home before it disappears and how to outsource your debt obligations to the government.

And this set of advanced strategies for wealth creation is being offered for only $197.

To get your Creating Wealth Encyclopedia Book 1, complete with over 20 hours of audio, go to jasonhartman.com store if you.

Want to be able to sit back and collect checks every month just like a banker, Jason's Creating Wealth Encyclopedia series is for you.

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