CW 1054 - Wage Increases, Interest Rates, Slowing Home Prices, Jobless Claims

Welcome to the Creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You're about to learn a new slant on investing, some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world's most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multimillionaire who's actually been there and done it. He's a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who's owned properties in 11 states, had hundreds of tenants and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to your financial Independence Day. You really can do it. And now here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Welcome and thank you so much for joining me today. This is episode 1054. 1054. This is your host, Jason Hartman. So here we go. Let's dive in first to a couple of economic update things. The White House says that wages are growing faster than traditional measures indicate. Wage inflation can contribute to rising interest rates. And that is exactly what is happening. Yes. You know, I interviewed John Williams from Shadow Stats on the show and he keeps a great website that keeps track of the statistics behind the statistics. And you know, it is amazing how easy it is to spin things and to lie about things. The statistics that, that the government is putting out are not the whole story. So they're a guide. Okay? They're a benchmark. Well, they're not even a benchmark sometimes because remember when I did that episode quite a few years ago on how the government really put a lot of pressure on various agencies including a non governmental agency, the Federal Reserve, but in the 70s. And we're going to hear something about the 70s, which is a very interesting decade from an economics perspective today. I'm going to play you a little clip about the 70s that I think you'll be interested in. I talked in that interview about how Federal Reserve chairs were changing the definition on how they measured inflation. And of course, you know, they do this in these three major ways. Weighting, substitution and hedonics. Talked about that many times before. If you are new to the show, just type that in@jason hartman.com any of those keywords and you'll find my episodes about that. By the way, if you are new to the show or you would just like a review, check out our hand picked episodes. I know with 1054 episodes it is a little bit tough to know what to do. I know many of you, thank you so much for spending so much time with us. You go back and you listen to all the episodes and some of you listen to all of them two and three times. I love it. Thank you. I'm honored. But, but if you'd like sort of some hand picked episodes, especially if you're new to the show, go to jasonhartman.com/jasonhartman.com start those are some handpicked episodes that can help you get some of the basics down. Can check that out there. Okay, so what else is going on? Well, trade issues continue to keep mortgage rates a little lower than they might otherwise be. Right. You know, there's this trade war going on and I think the trade war is frankly long overdue. It had to happen. It needs to happen. I know I can hear all my libertarian friends out there saying, and hey, I bill myself as a libertarian, but like I've said before, when you don't have a level playing field, you can't have completely free open trade. So hey, look, what do you want? Do you want jobs? Do you want high paying jobs or do you want cheap stuff at the store? You know, you can't have it both ways. We've got to trade one for the other. So as they talk about how well the trade war, like I saw an article today, I think it was Wall Street Journal, it said the trade war could hurt Apple. Sure, of course it could hurt Apple. Apple makes a lot of stuff in China. The price of their products may likely increase. But folks, compared to what? Compared to what? Look it, consumer products are so incredibly cheap. They are so cheap that I think we really need to kind of check our expectations at the door, don't you? Look, if you've been around a while like I have, you know that stuff is cheap. I remember. You know, I've only really in my adult life had maybe two times in my life where I financially struggled a little bit. One was in the early 90s when I overextended myself a little bit and we were going right into a recession. I remember I bought this at the time, expensive home in Turtle Rock in an area in Irvine, California. And I think I paid. I know this is going to, you're going to think, Jason, this is no big deal. Why were you stressed about that? Well, interest rates were much higher at the time. I think I paid 425,000, which back then was an expensive home. I mean, look, Turtle Rock is the most prestigious area or at least was at the time the most prestigious area in a very expensive city, Irvine, California. And I remember I did that and I got a new BMW 740i at the same time. And, you know, my eyes were a little bigger than my stomach. I was buying a bunch of fresh furniture and I had a property that wasn't performing that well. And, you know, business wasn't great because we were in a recession. I had a lot of listings that weren't selling. I told you when I was in traditional real estate, and this was about that time, by the way, I had 38 listings at one time, and exactly half of them were vacant as people were leaving California to find jobs elsewhere. Like I say, the best thing you can have on a resume is mobility. Mobility is the best thing to have on a resume. You need to be able to go to where the jobs are. And interestingly like that. I believe it was Time magazine, could have been Newsweek a few years back. I've talked about this article. It was the COVID story. It was pretty famous. It talked about how home ownership, oddly, I mean, most people think, hey, homeownership is good. It's good for society. It's good for people to put down roots. It's good for people to invest. Whenever anybody buys a home, or not even buys a home, just moves into a new home, they spend money like crazy. Hey, that's what I was doing in about 1994, give or take. I'm not exactly sure of the year. It's been a while, but around 1994, and I remember I struggled then a little bit, but, you know, made it through just fine. And then the other time I struggled was in the early 2000s when I had purchased this real estate company. I was turning it around. I was spending a lot of money. We moved in to a big, beautiful new class A office, and I spent about $60,000 on cubicles and office furniture and all this stuff. And then guess what happened? Well, two bad things happened. Number one, the franchisor of our real estate company sold to another bigger company that just kind of decimated the whole franchise network. So that was bad. But wait, there's more. Then guess what happened after that. You know what I'm going to say? 9 11. The terrible tragedy of 911 happened. And I remember business was so slow, you could roll bowling balls down the aisleways of my offices between the cubicles. And that was the other time I really struggled. But one, one of the things that can and, you know, made it through that one just fine ultimately, but. And it turned out to be actually quite good, but that was probably the hardest eight years of my life was that real estate company that I owned before the traditional real estate company that I ultimately ended up selling to Coldwell Banker. It was hard. That was a really, really tough period. Probably the toughest thing I've ever done is turn that company around, keep it afloat through the business changes, through 9, 11, and through all the normal challenges you have in business. Right? But one of the things that is interesting is when you look back on those times. I remember when I was buying furniture for my house in Turtle Rock, when I was furnishing that real estate office, when I was buying things for it, consumer products were so much more expensive. I mean, look, how much would an iPhone a cost you in 1994? How much would an iPhone cost you in 2001? As Buzz Lightyear says, to infinity and beyond, right? Because it didn't exist. Technology has gotten so much better and so much cheaper. The first cell phone I ever owned weighed 14 pounds and cost $3200. Okay, let's be a little grateful. You know, people talk about the thousand dollar phone. I mean, my iPhone cost 1,200 bucks. Okay? I don't think that's very expensive, frankly, in inflation adjusted dollars. My first $3200 phone that weighed 14 pounds and strictly was a phone. That's all it did is make calls and receive calls. And then the phone bills. Oh yeah. Remember how expensive cell phone bills used to be? I remember one month I had an $800 cell phone bill. Now everybody gets upset if their carrier charges them 130 bucks versus 110 bucks. I mean, folks, let's be grateful a little bit, right? Stuff is cheap. We can afford. I know you think I'm crazy. We can afford to pay a little bit more for stuff to have high quality jobs in the United States. And it's not a complete trade off. I get that. I understand the complexities and intricacies of this, but by and large, when you back up, you can't have both. You gotta give something up to have those good high paying jobs. And as we know, Americans have not had a raise in real dollar income for decades until just recently. Finally, we're seeing real dollar wage growth adjusted for inflation. Real dollar wage growth, interest rates probably a little bit lower. As we see rates are going up now, probably a little bit lower than they would otherwise be. The compared to what? Question because of the trade war. Okay, so Redfin, that real estate company that's sort of in the techie space, you know, they said that the mortgage interest rate increases aren't really scaring buyers away yet. Only 2.6% of the buyers in their survey, who knows how many people they surve? Maybe it was 10. And 2.6 of them said they decided to postpone their home search because of rising interest rates. Harvard Business School says that the Starbucks effect, remember we've talked about this before. This is the idea that when you have a Starbucks in a neighborhood, there actually is, and it's not because of Starbucks. Starbucks is simply a, it's a measuring stick. Right. They're usually in areas that are a little bit more upscale, a little bit more swanky. And so the Starbucks effect actually does increase home prices by about a half a percent in a given zip code. Now that's pretty good considering that according to CoreLogic, the home price index reports that in July shows home prices on a year over year basis rose by 6.2%. Okay. However, these price increases are definitely slowing. We are definitely seeing a slowdown in price increases. No question about it. Divide it up though. You got to divide it up. You've got to segment things because in the low price properties, prices are still rising. In the high priced properties, prices are softening. Will they meet in the middle? Now what does high price and low price mean? Well, it depends on the market, but in any given market you can stratify that market and segment it into low, medium, high. Right. And ultra high end. I was looking at homes today here in Florida as I am house hunting for a permanent residence. And I cannot believe how much wealth is in this state. I was out with a friend of mine, she's a realtor, and we were looking around and the amount of money in the state of Florida is truly mind boggling. The yachts, the mansions, it's incredible. This coastline is so long on the eastern coast of Florida and there is, there's just gobs of money here. Now there's definitely some bad areas too that aren't, aren't very nice at all. But boy, you get on in some of these areas and they are like Beverly Hills, another Beverly Hills, A Bel Air. A Bel Air. You know, I'm comparing it to Los Angeles, California, my hometown. And Beverly Hills and Bel Air, these very high end areas. I probably don't need to tell you that, you know why? Because everyone around the world has probably heard of the show. 90210, right? Beverly Hills. And I bet you all know also, and I wonder how many people have actually called. I think I called this number once, this phone number, a famous number in a famous song. 867-5309. Jenny. Yeah, you can, you can call Jenny at that number, 867-5309. Do you know the reference to that song? Well, there you go. So 90210. High end area, obviously. And lots of money in the state of Florida. Why? Well, it's a very business friendly state. It's a state that has no state income tax and it's very friendly to business. So all of these wealthy hedge fund people, they make their money on Wall street and they always get a second home down here and they probably try to claim Florida residency of course, if they're smart or if they can get away with it because I'm sure the Socialist Republic of New York has their claws out just like California does. These states are building, as I have coined the term many years ago, economic Berlin Walls, okay. When I visited Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin the first time in the early 90s, boy, I tell you, with my morbid fascination, and it is morbid, my morbid fascination about communism. You know, I wish I would have gone there before the wall fell because it just would have been so fascinating to see how people could live in such a different world and you'd still be on planet Earth. I mean going to a place like North Korea would be fascinating if I wasn't so chicken, you know, going even to Myanmar, Burma. Right. You know, that would be fascinating too. Now I have been to Cuba about 12 years ago. I guess that was quite fascinating. Now that I'm here in South Florida, I'm going to take another trip to get Cuba real soon. And we're probably going to take our Venture Alliance Mastermind group to Cuba. We were talking about that last year and never got around to it. So we'll probably do that in one of these upcoming trips for the Venture Alliance Mastermind. By the way, if you're interested in the Venture alliance, join us in Kauai after our Profits in Paradise conference the first week of November on Waikiki beach at the most iconic resort on Waikiki Beach.

So.

So you can join us. Check out more details on those two events@jason hartman.com and if you register for Profits in Paradise, we are for the first time ever, we have never done this in all of the many, many events we've had for many years. For Venture alliance we are actually offering a 25% discount if you want to do both events. If you wanted to go to the Venture alliance event in Kauai right after the Profits in Paradise event in Waikiki. Okay, so join us for that Jason hartman.com check that out. The jobless claims. Now this Is interesting. This is amazing. The jobless claims fell to. Are you sitting down? This is how strong the economy is. At least for now. At least for now. And it's not going to stay this way forever because what goes up must come down, as we know. And we are already, already talking to you, our listeners and our clients about preparing for the next cycle. That's one of the things we're going to talk about quite a bit in Hawaii, by the way, so be sure to come to Prophets in Paradise and we'll talk about that. So a 49 year. Whoa, 49 year low. 50 years basically. Right. As private payrolls increased in August. That's just amazing. Wow. Times, they are booming, aren't they? The sustained labor market strength should continue to drive economic growth. Definitely, definitely. So it's pretty amazing how incredibly strong the economy is as we talk about investing in income property. You know, we've held some contests over the years and we've asked for your participation. We send you surveys, we do things like this. And I love your commentary, all of you listeners, you just have great insights, great commentary, great ideas, different ways of thinking of things. And I love hearing that from you. So look for another survey if you're a client of ours. It's coming your way soon. Check that out. Definitely. And please, please answer the surveys. I read every single response myself. Okay. Just like the evaluations at our live conferences, I read every evaluation myself. Most of them are extremely positive. So we appreciate that. I always make a few people angry, usually with political comments. Yep. Sorry, sorry, sorry. But you know, hey, it's entertaining. Some of this stuff I do say for entertainment value, right? So not just education, but here's a couple comments from some of our listeners and I just thought you would like to hear them. So here we go.

This is Blake Bauman. What motivated you to take action and purchase your first income property? Number one, passive cash flow, number two, tax savings and number three, the stock market. Other forms of saving for retirement peddled by financial advisors are rigged. What long term goals have you set for yourself? How will income property help you get there? My goal is to have 10 to 20 single family houses by the time I retire so that I would have a stream of income that will match what my monthly income would have been while still working.

Blake, those are. That's awesome. I mean, great response. And when you say Wall street or the stock market motivated you to get into the income property investing world, well, hey, I can see why, because it is rigged.

From Craig Bellinger. What motivated you to take Action and purchase your first income property. Learning more about real estate investing, I decided it was the best investment for me and my family to secure a financial future. I believe that making the right investments and managing them wisely will give me a better retirement than the usual retirement plan plans employers provide. What long term goals have you set for yourself? How will income property help you get there? I want to have more freedom when it comes to my finances. My long term goal is to have 15 to 20 properties by the time my son graduates College in about 16 to 17 years.

That's a great goal. You noticed instead of reading these myself, I had someone voice them so they sound a lot better than me, right? But awesome goals. I mean those are awesome, awesome goals. You know, a lot of people come to us buying maybe their first property or you know, they've got a couple income properties already and they want to buy some more and they've got these giant goals and hey, nothing's wrong with giant goals. Of course, I mean that's fantastic. You know, you want to buy 50 or 100 or 200 properties, that's great, right? But you know, you don't need to, right? Just get yourself a dozen properties, okay? Have a dozen income properties and have them for several years and you will be very, very well off. Ultimately, it's the most historically proven asset class in the entire world. Who says that? Oh, that Jason Hartman guy says that. Thank you for the great comments. We'll play some more on a future episode. I want to play another little clip and comment on it from that fantastic book I recommended several episodes ago. It's Entitled the First 5000 Years by David Graeber. It's fantastic. Now he definitely has, well, at least my perception, a left wing perspective, as most authors do. Frankly, it seems like the vast majority of books have a left leaning perspective politically. But the guy is fascinating. The book is fascinating. You've got got to get this book. It's really, really good. And here he talks a little bit about how the Keynesian bargained, right? You know, John Maynard Keynes, very famous economist, probably the second most influential economist in all history. The first most influential and I hate to say it because I mean his ideas ultimately created tons of human tragedy. I think Keynes ideas create a lot of human tragedy too, but not to the extent the number one economist of all time. You know who that is? It's Karl Marx. Yeah, sadly, isn't it Karl Marx? I mean his ideas, you read Das Kapital and I remember studying that years ago. His ideas, they make a lot of sense on paper, but the fact is they are opposed to human nature and they fall apart practice. And sadly, Karl Marx is. You could even say he's responsible for the deaths of maybe 150 million people. Okay, indirectly, of course, he was just the idea man. He didn't do any of this, at least not that I'm aware of. But all these things were carried out by people like Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Chairman Mao. You know, these were the people that carried out the very bad strategies of socialism and communism. You know, socialism is just a minor player version of communism. It's ugly, Big brother. But anyway, check out what happened here. As we were in the late 60s into the 70s, as the book the First 5000 Years describes it. Fascinating. Listen.

And with the disappearance of its rentier aspect, Senate, besides, will suffer a sea change. It will be, moreover, a great advantage of the order of events which I am advocating, that the euthanasia of the rentier, of the functionless investor will be nothing sudden and will need no revolution.

By the way, rentier is a word I had to look up because I didn't know what he meant. But every time you read or listen to a book, you learn a few new vocabulary words, hopefully. Well, the rantier, that's a Marxist term. And basically it is a sort of a capitalist that hogs things, right? That monopolizes industries or access to any financial, physical or intellectual asset, right? And without contributing to society. Now, the capitalist is a little different than the rentier because, you know, and these words, by the way Wikipedia says, were never actually used by Marx, but they became Marxist. You know, they were part of the Marxist lexicon. Ultimately, the capitalist has to contribute something back because the capitalist is forced to take at least some of his or her profits and reinvest them. Why are they forced to do that? Competition forces them to do that because they've always got to keep up with the competition. And so that competitive free market forces them to reinvest or ultimately they just become irrelevant, right? We've seen that happen so many times.

When the Keynesian settlement was finally put into effect after World War II, it was offered only to a relatively small slice of the world's population.

And remember, Keynes was the one who was all about probably priming the pump. The John Maynard Keynes philosophy, Keynesianism was about prime the pump. In other words, saying, hey, look, you know, the government should spend in advance and spend to kind of get things going to prime the pump. You know, we need the government to do that because the free market can't do it by itself, which of course is not really true. But the Keynesians, they tend to control governments because when you're a Keynesian, you have more power because you're controlling the purse strings. And then you've got crony capitalism. You've got Elon Musk smoking pot on a podcast. We got to talk about that, by the way. Elon Musk. I, as the guy lost it, I mean, he's just really, I don't know, another discussion for a different episode. But wow, Elon, come on, man. I mean, you're, you're really getting a little crazy. You know, when he did that, Tesla lost, I think, what was the number? It was like 4.6 billion with a B dollars in market value. Because he was on that podcast smoking a joint, I think it's fair to say the investors should be suing him. I mean, that is. The guy is just being very irresponsible, if you ask me. Okay, let's keep listening. Tangent alert. Let's get back to business.

As time went on, more and more people wanted in on the deal. Almost all of the popular movements of the period from 1945 to 1975, even perhaps revolutionary movements, could be seen as demands for inclusion, demands for political equality that assumed equality was meaningless without some level of economic security. This was true not only of movements by minority groups in North Atlantic countries who had first been left out of the deal, such as Those for whom Dr. King spoke, but what were then called national liberation movements from Algeria to Chile, or finally, and perhaps most dramatically in the late 1960s and 1970s, feminism. At some point in the 70s, things reached a breaking point. It would appear that capitalism as a system simply cannot extend such a deal to everyone. Quite possibly it wouldn't even remain viable if all its workers were free wage laborers. Certainly it will never be able to provide everyone in the world the sort of life lived by, say, a 1960s auto worker in Michigan or Turin with his own house, garage, and children in college.

Back when auto workers used to make a lot of money before automation, before the whole deal came along that caused stagnation in American wages. Right. And it wasn't just automation, of course, it's government policies, it's globalism. I mean, I'd say globalism has probably hurt the American worker more than anything. Yeah, I know. Everything's cheap at the store, right? But you're gonna pay for it by not having high paying jobs. So which one do you want? I say you gotta. We gotta shift the balance a little more toward the high paying jobs. And more jobs. Both. Both of those things. Now, remember what I also say. He's talking about how people were disgruntled because in the late 60s and the 70s they felt that they were left out of the deal. I always say capitalism is the most popular religion in all human history. Capitalism. Yeah, because it's so natural. It is totally natural for people to trade. Capitalism is a very natural thing. Okay, let's just wrap this up here. We gotta go.

And this was true even before so many of those children began demanding less stultifying lives. The result might be termed a crisis of inclusion. By the late 1970s, the existing order was clearly in a state of collapse, plagued simultaneously by financial chaos, food riots, oil shock, widespread doomsday prophecies of the end of growth and ecological crisis. All of which, it turned out, proved to be ways of putting the populace on notice that all deals were off. The moment that we start framing the story this way, it's easy to see that the next 30 years, the period from roughly 1978 to 2009, follows nearly the same pattern.

I want to point something out, by the way. Consumer prices, of course, were much higher in the 70s. We had the Jimmy Carter misery index. We had stagflation. People had less and paid more. And it was a pretty bad deal. I mean, the 70s is potentially one of the most interesting economic decades to study. But I want you to notice something. If you could gauge the price prosperity of the world by one thing, one thing. And you maybe all have seen these satellite pictures. The Earth from outer space at night over China and South Korea and the Korean peninsula and Japan. And you see that North Korea is just dark. It's dark, right? And there's light all around it. I want you to think back to the 70s. I mean, I remember the 70s as a kid. I remember how dark it was. Literally dark. No light, not much light. I remember being on the 405 Freeway, the San Diego Freeway, as mom was driving the car and thinking, all these streetlights are out and there weren't even that many streetlights. And I remember the first time I ever went up to Hollywood Boulevard where they had these like triple, double and triple streetlights. It was really well lit. The world used to be really dark, okay? And it's very brightly lit now. That is a measure, I say, of prosperity. It's kind of like these funny measures like the Skyscraper Index. How they talk about how the Skyscraper index is a sign that a bubble is coming when all these countries are building really record breaking skyscrapers, right? It's a sign that the bubble is near. Maybe that's true. We've talked about it before. Okay, let's wrap this up.

Except that the deal, the settlement had changed, certainly when both Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the UK launched a systematic attack on the power of labor unions, as well as on the legacy of Keynes. It was a way of explicitly declaring.

But labor unions were becoming irrelevant at.

That time, that all previous deals were off. Everyone could now have political rights. Even by the 1990s, most everyone in Latin America and Africa. But political rights were to become economically meaningless. The link between productivity and wages was chopped a bit. Productivity rates have continued to rise, but wages have stagnated or even atrophied. This was accompanied at first by a return to monetarism, the doctrine that even though money was no longer in any way based in gold or in any other commodity, government and central bank policy should be primarily concerned with carefully controlling the money supply to ensure that it acted as if it were a scarce commodity, even as at the same time, the financialization of capital meant that most money being invested in the marketplace was completely detached from any relation to production of commerce at all, but had become pure speculation. All this is not to say that the people of the world were not being offered something, just that, as I say, the terms had changed.

So the deal, this, if you will, New Deal. Right. He's not talking about globalism, yet that's what really did it. That was the nail in the coffin for the American worker. Right. Is globalism. Automation had a part in it, inflation had a part in it, Everything had a part in it. You know, the attack on the labor unions, sure, but the labor unions were largely becoming irrelevant by then. They certainly had their place when they were created. I mean, workers were just treated horribly back in the days, but they did their thing and that wasn't a problem anymore. You know, it's a little thing, it's a minor thing. There certainly are problems. Of course, of course there's problems. But what ultimately happens with a lot of these groups, labor unions, many of the civil rights groups, they started for a very good reason. They had a very good culture cause in the beginning. But then the problem was largely solved and they were just sort of looking for something to do. And so they would become corrupt, they would steal money from their members, their donors, the members of the labor union, etc. Etc. So let's go on with this and I'll wrap it up in a moment.

In the new dispensation, wages would no longer rise, but workers were encouraged to buy a piece of capitalism rather than euthanize the rentier everyone could now become. Rentiers effectively could grab a chunk of the profits created by their own increasingly dramatic rates of exploitation. The means were many and familiar. In the United states, there were 401k retirement accounts and an endless variety of other ways of encouraging ordinary citizens to play the market, but at the same time encouraging them to borrow. One of the guiding principles of Thatcherism and Reaganism alike was that economic reforms would never gain widespread support unless ordinary working people could at least aspire to owning their own home. To this was added, by the 1990s and 2000s, endless mortgage refinancing schemes that treated houses whose value, it was assumed, would only rise like ATMs, as the popular catchphrase had it, though it turns out, in retrospect, it was really more like credit cards. Then there was the proliferation of actual credit cards juggled against one another here. For many, buying a piece of capitalism slithered undetectably into something indistinguishable from those familiar scourges of the world. Working poor, the loan shark and the pawnbroker. It did not help here that in 1980, US federal usury laws, which had previously limited interest to between 7 and 10%, were eliminated by act of Congress, just as the United States had managed to largely get rid of the problem of political corruption by making the bribery of legislators effectively legal, called lobbyist. I love that it was redefined as lobbying. So the problem of loan sharking was brushed aside by making real interest rates of 25%, 50%, or even in some cases, for instance, for payday loans, 120% annually.

My friend that I talk about, Quinton Carney, started a payday loan company. Talk about a way to rip people off. He said he never got into the business, but he started a company. He and I think, Ken Logan, they're the folks in Missouri I talk about once in a while. What they did is they basically legalized theft, right? They push mountains of debt on people. And listen, debt is great when it's investment grade debt and it's used properly, of course, right? A debt's like a nuclear missile, right? It's convenient to have in case of emergency, but you got to be careful with it and you got to respect it. You got to respect it, right? And so it's interesting how they. They created the cure, if you will, through a different kind of Keynesianism. I'm going to coin a new phrase right now. I just thought of this, we'll call it personal Keynesianism. Instead of the Keynesianism that we saw at the government level where the government would prime the pump, this is the Keynesianism where the person themself would prime their own pump by access to easy credit. That's another kind of Keynesianism, right? They would prime their own pump with debt. And some of that debt was used properly, but most of it was consumer grade debt or it was student loan debt and it wasn't used properly. But it gives the illusion of prosperity, the illusion of prosperity because it's spent that debt. Once it's borrowed, it's spent on the appearances of wealth, not real wealth creation. Anyway, let's wrap it up. You got to get this book, debt the first 5,000 years. It's really excellent. I highly recommend it. And go to jason hartman.com join us in Hawaii and we will talk to you on the next episode. Happy investing.

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