• 00:00:23 How did Jared’s path from Lehman Brothers to Internet personality develop?
• 00:05:06 How did the finance industry develop during the last 20 years?
• 00:08:18 Jared’s experience on writing a novel (and how it compares to his other book)?
• 00:11:29 What is Jared’s view of the deflation/ inflation debate?
• 00:17:03 Is productivity growth really as low as we assume? What role do stock buybacks play?
• 00:22:01 Is individual risk taking the key to increase productivity growth?
• 00:25:01 What are great areas of investment according to Jared?
• 00:30:01 Will DeFi eradicate banks and most of the financial industry?
• 00:34:01 Is the banking industry a good indicator for the health and competitiveness of an economy?
• 00:38:36 How consistent should financial commentators be?

Jared Dillian is the author of Street Freak: Money and Madness at Lehman Brothers, named one of the top business books of 2011 by Businessweek magazine.

Jared runs The Daily Dirtnap, LLC, which provides daily market commentary and insight to a range of institutional clients.

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Torsten Jacobi : Jared, thanks a lot for coming unto the Judgment Call Podcast, I really appreciate that.

Jared Dillian: Yeah.

Torsten Jacobi : Hey, thanks for taking the time.

And you know, you have a really interesting history, and it’s something that’s becoming a bit of a theme though, is you started in an investment bank, and you worked for Lehman Brothers, then you wrote a book, you became an author, and now you’re an internet personality, you run your own internet business, your own content business. Maybe you can tell us a little bit more about this transition, how this came upon, and how do you feel, was it the right choice looking back, or do you feel like, well, no, I want to go back to an investment bank?

Jared Dillian : No, it was absolutely the right choice.

It was funny because I was talking to my old boss at Lehman, this is the guy that I worked for 2001, 2002, and he told me a story of, you know, when I worked for him, we used to get the Garmin letter.

I don’t know if you know Dennis Garmin, but we used to get the Garmin letter at Lehman Brothers, and he had probably the biggest financial newsletter. It was a daily letter, and I used to get this stuff, and you know, I liked it. I didn’t, you know, I didn’t think his writing was the best, but I said, this is an amazing business. I was like, you can just get paid to write about finance, you know, I’d never heard of this before.

So around 2003, you know, I had this idea in my head that I wanted to write a financial newsletter, so I had some ideas, and my initial idea was it would be sort of a retail newsletter.

I would charge a very small amount of money, about $150 a year, and I would do personal finance stuff, and then I would do seminars and stuff like that.

And I figured if I had 1,000 subscribers, I would make $150,000 a year, and that would be enough.

And then what happened was, while I was at Lehman, I was put in charge of the ETF desk, and I was told to just grow the business, because the business was very small. They said grow the business, so my idea was to do that through writing.

So I started writing market commentary and sending it out to people, and it was very popular, and it grew, and it grew, and it grew. So by the time the bankruptcy came around, I had several thousand people on my list, and I said, you know, I can easily monetize this, so the day the bankruptcy, I sent out a message.

I said, I’m going to start a newsletter, and you know, hundreds of people said I’ll sign up.

So I quit Lehman Brothers, and I started the business, you know, I formed an LLC, and I got some office space, and about six weeks later, I started sending out content again, and I got a few hundred people to sign up, and that was the beginning of the newsletter.

So that was in 2008, and about that time, I was also approached to write a book about my time at Lehman Brothers.

There was a literary agent that found me and asked me to write a book about it, and initially I said no, but six months later, I came around and I said yes.

So while the early days of writing the newsletter, I was writing this book, and that came out in 2011.

So there’s just been a bunch of stuff since then, I started writing from Alden Economics in 2014, I wrote another book in 2016, I’m an op ed columnist at Bloomberg, I’ve taught finance at the undergraduate level and graduate level at school, and I just, I know I had a radio show for the last two years, which is coming to an end tonight, but we’re going to convert that into a podcast, and my goal is to make this the number one finance podcast.

Torsten Jacobi : So that’s really ambitious.

Jared Dillian : Yeah, I mean, you’re really all in on becoming not just an internet personality, but really making this content machine work, right?

Torsten Jacobi : A lot of people, you know, from the VC business, they go into a Substack, right?

Jared Dillian : That seems to be the technology platform to use, and also the idea that you pay a relatively small amount, and it’s geared towards consumers.

Torsten Jacobi : Is that still the model that you’re using, or you switch to a B2B model, where you basically do it for hedge funds and other investment banks, small investment banks, from the office?

I do both. You know, my customers, I have institutional customers, and I have retail customers. So in terms of substack, I don’t use substack, I use a different proprietary system.

You know, a substack takes 10% of revenue, so that’s a little bit much for me.

The nice thing about substack is that they do handle all the payments and stuff like that, so I do that myself now, which is a little bit time consuming.

Torsten Jacobi : When you look back, do you feel like the world of finance has changed quite a bit, and thatt here’s more knowledge, or people are more aware of what’s going on out there, or do you think we’re still looking into a similar perplexing environment, as it was 10 years ago?

Jared Dillian : Well, I think more people are engaged in finance. But I would say that a lot of people have learned a lot of bad ideas and bad habits.

The meme stocks are a pretty good example. I have a Coast Guard friend on Facebook who trades the meme stocks, he’s always posting about AMC and stuff like that, and he says these words like I’ve never heard before.

He talks about holding the line and ladder attack and stuff like that. I don’t know what this is, but it’s not finance. I don’t know what you’re doing, but this isn’t the right way to learn things.

So I formed this entity two years ago called Jared Dillion Money, and that was where the radio show came from.

I did the radio show under Jared Dillion Money.

This is a personal finance platform. So really teaching the basics, not just about investments, but also about debt and credit cards and mortgages and stuff like that. So that’s what I’ve been doing for the past two years.

Torsten Jacobi : Well, I think what a lot of people are looking for, and I think this is where the meme stocks came from, is this call option.

Jared Dillian : So this is really high, is it beta?

Torsten Jacobi : You want something that moves very much, even if the stock doesn’t move so much.

Jared Dillian : It’s more of a big gambling, right?

Torsten Jacobi : But gambling not in that sense that the hedge funds always win.

It’s something where you can actually, we have a weapon that works seemingly enough.

We’ve seen this earlier this year, where you as a 20 year old have a big enough weapon.

You can become a millionaire overnight, and the hedge funds give you that money.

That’s pretty rare, right?

Jared Dillian : I don’t remember many of those situations in the last 10 years, when it seemed like the hedge funds are at a disadvantage at least momentarily.

Torsten Jacobi : No, I think that’s a narrative that got put forth after the GameStop incident.

Jared Dillian : I don’t think, I mean, look, there were a couple of hedge funds that were harmed by that moving GameStop, but I can tell you that retail investors, if you’re trading call options on GameStop through Robinhood, people are making money off of you.

The market maker behind those trades is Citadel. They have some very sophisticated people who understand volatility, who know how to model a volatility surface, like, I mean, yes, like if you buy a call option on GameStop and it goes up very quickly, you’ll make money, but you’re at a huge disadvantage.

Torsten Jacobi : So it isn’t something you can actually win at least, I mean, the odds are definitely against you, right?

Jared Dillian : This hasn’t changed I think there was a short period of time about four or five months ago, six months ago, when you could win at it, but I think that window is closed.

Torsten Jacobi : When you wrote two books by now, you wrote first something that is more of a description of what happened at Lehman, and then it’s a novel that you wrote later on that is complete fiction, I assume.

Was it harder to write a novel than the accounts that you gave for Lehman, or do you feel it’s the same amount of effort?

Jared Dillian : Oh, it was much harder to write a novel.

I mean, just to put this in perspective, you know, Street Freak, my first book, the memoir, it was 135,000 words, and I wrote it in eight months.

All the evil of this world, which is my novel, is 70,000 words, and I wrote it in five years. It was much, much harder, much harder.

Torsten Jacobi :  Is that because you just wanted to do it perfect? Like, we noticed some Jordan Peterson and his first book took him 20 years to write because he rewrote it literally every week. Do you want it to get the narrative perfect, or because there were so many layers you had to go through?

No, I mean, I was a perfectionist about it, but the creative process when it comes to actually dreaming up events and places and people you’ve never seen before, it’s just a lot slower and it’s a lot harder.

I tell people that book is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I never want to write fiction again, like it’s too hard, but at the same time, I’m the most proud of it. I really think All the Evil of This World is an amazing book, and it’s the best thing I’ve ever done.

Torsten Jacobi : What is it about? What story are you illustrating?

Jared Dillian : So it’s about a trade that takes place March 2, the year 2000. It’s about when 3Com spun off Palm, I don’t know if you remember Palm pilots, but from 20 years ago.

So it was a spin off trade, and it’s an options trade that takes place on 3Com, but it involves seven different people from a clerk on the exchange to a broker on the exchange, to a market maker in a bank, to a hedge fund portfolio manager, seven different people, and it’s just each chapter is their story, and they’re all interconnected.

And each chapter is written in a different voice as to that person’s personality.

So each one is written completely different.

It was the most ambitious thing that I could possibly do, and the engineering behind it was very difficult, but it worked out.

Torsten Jacobi : What’s your own personal opinion or something you’ve learned over time about inflation?

Jared Dillian : It’s this big debate, and we had deflation versus inflation was actually a big topic, and we now feel the majority has shifted to some form of inflation, and we know how much it is.

Torsten Jacobi : What is your personal opinion? Where will this end, and how high will inflation go, or will we just see inflation disappear?

Jared Dillian : I’m very much in the inflation camp. Actually, on my radio show last night, I interviewed Peter Atwater, who is at Financial Insights.

He really studies behavior and psychology and stuff like that in the markets.

And I said to Peter, I was like, I think inflation is 90% a psychological phenomenon.

And he says, I disagree with you.

I think it’s 100%.

So what’s happened in the last year is we’ve had a reversal of 40 years of disinflationary psychology, and we suddenly switched to an inflationary psychology. So this is how this works.

If you think that there is going to be inflation, if you think prices are going to rise, if you think there are going to be shortages, then you accelerate economic activity.

You buy more of things.

You buy faster.

And everybody doing this together drives prices up.

So what happened when Volcker became Fed Chair back in 1979, it was about reversing the psychology.

And he had to raise interest rates a lot and crush the economy in order to reverse that psychology.

So there’s no appetite to do that right now.

So inflation is 5% in change.

It’s undoubtedly going to go higher.

I don’t know how fast it’s going to go higher, but it will go higher.

Torsten Jacobi : What I find mesmerizing, and I agree with you, it’s definitely, there’s a lot of psychology in there, what I find mesmerizing is that we see bond yields that haven’t moved at all right there, like 10 year bond is what, 0.2%.

If you are somewhat rational investor, how can you, with 5% projected inflation per year, right, so that’s at least 30%, 40% of your bond that goes away after a five year period of 10 years, even worse, how would you even think about accepting this rate?

Like why does this market even exist? Everybody should have gone away, right? This money should be gone.

Jared Dillian : Yeah, I mean, rates should be higher, interest rates are a function of a couple of things, he supply and demand for loanable funds.

They’re also a function of the supply and demand for treasury securities.

I mean, ultimately, like if there’s more demand for bonds and like it, it doesn’t necessarily have to come from US investors, it can come from overseas or wherever, also from the Fed.

I mean, the Fed is still buying $120 billion a month. So I mean, that’s where the demand’s coming from.

Torsten Jacobi : Yeah, we has Harley on and his ETF is kind of a call option for increasing interest rates over the next couple of years and it’s a slow moving, like you don’t lose a ton, you don’t have a huge negative carry, so to speak, where you only lose a little bit every year. And I think everyone agrees with this, but obviously it’s down so far, right?

Torsten Jacobi : But do you feel like we see much lower rates in the yields first, I mean, effective rates before we see higher inflation price in or we will definitely see interest rates going up?

Jared Dillian : I have pretty high conviction that interest rates have bottomed and I think they will go higher. I just, I don’t know when that’ll happen or how fast it’ll happen. I also don’t know what the catalyst will be. But I do think rates have bottomed.

Torsten Jacobi :  When you look into another topic that a lot of people are kind of worried about and I’ve been very worried, workily on the podcast is we’ve seen GDP growth relatively slow over the years and we’ve really seen a population isn’t growing as much as the GDP growth via population growth and via productivity growth.

Folks have way more information, they have all these entertainment options, but we don’t feel like we get much more for the same amount of investment and that’s the lacking productivity growth.

So you feel like A, this is real and B, is this something we can do about it and should we do something about it?

Jared Dillian : No, I think it is real. I heard something interesting and I’ll remember who said it, but if we had this, we had these massive productivity gains 20 years ago, back when the internet first came around and it dramatically increased productivity. We were having productivity growth of like 6%.

And that’s gone down over time and you’d say, well, technology has gotten so much better.

Well, the way people use technology has changed.

For example, you used to work an eight hour day and you would work for eight hours and now people work for four hours and they’re on Facebook and Twitter for four hours. So they work the same amount of time, but the internet has created diversions where they’re actually not being as productive.

And if you think about GDP, all it really is is the number of people working times how many hours they work times the productivity.

And if GDP growth is slowing, I mean, one of the things you identified as population growth is slowing down, number two, how many hours they work, people are simply working less, average hourly earnings has gone down.

You hear these discussions about working four day weeks and stuff like that.

People work way less than they did 20 years ago and we just talked about the productivity part of it.

So yeah, I mean, we used to have a consistent GDP growth of about 4% a quarter.

And now it’s about 2% to 3% a quarter.

And if you look at Europe and Japan, it’s lower than that.

And that’s where we’re going.

Torsten Jacobi :  Do you feel like there’s something that policy wise we could do? I mean, I always feel like capital allocation is broken.

That’s why we have such low productivity growth because we put it in enterprises already have way too much money and we give them almost interest free money and it is almost interest free.

We kind of price out all the other businesses, small to medium sized companies, basically anything that’s not in the S&P 500 doesn’t have a chance as a life anymore.

Everyone is into this big trend following bigger, bigger, bigger, which makes sense to an extent,

But it’s like this, the stock market is trend following the venture market is trend following nobody tries something new, it seems from time to time.

Jared Dillian : I mean, you’ve seen some crazy stuff because big tech companies, like you said, basically have these zero cost of capital. And by the way, when companies, if they have a zero cost of capital and they don’t have any attractive investment opportunities, then they buy back stock. And that’s another thing that’s been going on for the last 10 years.

Torsten Jacobi : I feel like, and I don’t know if you read Nassim Taleb, he came out with this thesis and said, well, we really have to look into individual entrepreneurship in the sense of risk taking, right?

So we have to take a risk, do something useful for society, and then we scale it up so everyone in the world can use this advantage that you’ve come up with, right?

It doesn’t have to be an actual business, but it’s a personal risk that people take.

Do you feel like, and he makes it sound like this is a big part of the missing productivity growth that is not enough distributed risk taking, but obviously his book is about fragility.

Do you feel like that’s something where, when you look at people and you just mentioned your friend from Facebook that you follow on Facebook, do you feel like we’re returning the corner there as well, where we see this individual risk taking is really carrying on in the 20 to 30 year old group, or that’s something that’s still kind of alien?

Jared Dillian : I mean, I think it’s just a function of the capital markets, because I saw this before. I saw this in the dot com bubble, and you had a bunch of people trading and participating in the markets, and that was a short period of time that lasted for a year or two, and then it disappeared. So I think the same thing is going to happen.

 Torsten Jacobi : So we have a bunch of people who go out there, slay the dragon, but we have lots of dragons out there, and then they come back and give us gold. I think that’s kind of the metaphysical idea, how we can fix productivity growth.

I don’t know if there’s more or less risk taking now than 10 or 20 years ago.

Jared Dillian : I mean, if you go back to like, I mean, I think it’s actually gotten better. I think in 2018, you saw some pretty crazy valuations of startups.

The scooter company, so Bird and Lime had multi billion dollar valuations.

You saw the dog walking app, WAG have a billion dollar valuation, that’s kind of come down over time.

You know, a lot of this was driven by a Russian to VC funds and also SoftBank, SoftBank alone is probably about 50% of the VC market and push valuations higher.

Torsten Jacobi : Well, when you look at stuff that’s not crazy overvalued where you feel like this is an opportunity to go long, where would you look right now? Is it energy stocks for instance that seems to be, well, when I talk to investors, they keep telling me about energy stocks and seems to be very undervalued, but where are there opportunities where you feel like people should take a look at?

Jared Dillian : Energy, basic materials, agriculture, real estate, any inflation sensitive stuff. Energy’s had a nice little pullback in the last month or two, which provides a pretty good entry point.

Torsten Jacobi : A lot of people like the uranium trade.

Jared Dillian : I think that’s got a lot more legs in it, trying to think of what else.

Financials look pretty good. If you think that rates are going to go up, which I think they are, the curve will get a bit steeper, banks, insurance companies, stuff like that.

….

Jared Dillian  : And, you know, there are very few good financial innovations, and if you go back over the last

100 years, probably the biggest one is the 30 year fixed rate mortgage, right?

That enabled 70% of people in the country to own a house.

That was a good innovation.

Just when the mortgage market, you know, the mortgage backed security was a good innovation.

Securitization was a good thing for the mortgage market, it made the mortgage market more liquid, it lowered rates, so I think that was a good thing.

When you start talking about, you know, things like CDOs and complex derivatives, I like to call that unicorn piss.

You know, that’s just complexity for the sake of complexity, and I think when it comes to financial innovations, like complexity is really the enemy, and I really, you know,

I don’t know, I mean, I hesitate to say this, but I think in the last 100 years, I think we’ve thought of everything.

I don’t think there’s any more ways to slice and dice what we already have.

I don’t think there’s going to be much in the way of financial innovation, and I think that’s kind of reflected in the stock prices of the banks, you know, which haven’t really, you know, they’ve done okay, but they haven’t really done all that well since 2007, 2006.

Torsten Jacobi : When you look into a world of DeFi, decentralized finance, right, crypto, do you think it’s, I think we both will agree that it’s a bubble, but do you think it’s a crazy bubble, it’s, but it or it has the potential to really basically get rid of all the banking out there, right? It’s all the banking become computers, right, that run in the cloud and run on the blockchain. Do you think that’s realistic?

Jared Dillian :  I think it’s realistic 20 years from now.

Torsten Jacobi : And this is the cycle that all new technologies follow, right? So you have a new technology like the internet back in the late 90s, and you have this massive investment bubble, and then it deflates, and then you have this period of time over the next 10 or 15 years where people forget about it.

Jared Dillian :  And if you look at a chart of the NASDAQ over the last 20 years, that’s what happened.

It peaked in 2000, it bottomed in 2002, and then it didn’t do anything for 10 years. So I think Bitcoin is going to, not just Bitcoin, but crypto and DeFi is going to follow the same pattern.

I think we are in the midst of a bubble right now, I think two or three years from now, people will have kind of forgotten about it, but these are important innovations.

And yeah, 20 years from now, we might have the ability to do this.

…

Torsten Jacobi : So when you go to Europe, you have the regulations that you see in the financial markets are

extremely, well, I would say comprehensive, right? So banks are basically a piece of the government that is to an extent true in the U.S. as well with certain credit unions, but I think investment banks shows that there’s another wall to this.

Do you think finance is a good indicator of how well an economy does? Say we compare different countries, would you feel like we can begin analysts just the financial industry and then see, well, this is what we see in the financial industry and that’s why we feel like this country is relatively developed, relatively free market, or that’s not a good indicator?

Jared Dillian : I think it’s a good indicator. I mean, I can’t think of too many times in history when the economy has done well, but the banking system is not.

The banking system has always been an indicator of the health of the economy.

Torsten Jacobi : Well, one more thing that I had, and we can make a few cuts here, personalities, and I

think finance is really driven by major personalities, who are people that you admire, right?

People that you listen to, but you also admire because they’ve done something incredible

in the industry.

Jared Dillian :  I had a boss at Lehman Brothers, who was very, very smart and also very, very ruthless and very, very focused, and he’s been very successful in the industry.

He was a mentor to me.

He put me in charge of the ETF desk.

He gave me complete freedom to run it, and he was a terrific guy, and I have a lot of respect for him.

Torsten Jacobi : I’m curious from how you, when you look at commentators, there seems to be a part of that market that is very stable, very static in their opinions, you know, they have a similar prediction whenever you ask them, and then there’s people who change their prediction on the other end of the spectrum, like in an instant, there’s this, I think it’s an analyst, I forgot which bank he was working on, he literally made within four weeks the prediction that Bitcoin, when it was still going up hit 150,000, and then four weeks later, he changed his mind, so I know it’s going to go down to 15,000, because the market, and I’m not sure what changed, and the market actually changed, right, the movement there, the basically trend following, the trend where Bitcoin started to change.

Jared Dillian :  I have some thoughts on this, you know, what’s interesting, so, you know, as you said, I’m sort of a financial personality on the internet, and, you know, it’s a competitive market, you know, there’s a lot of people offering commentary and advice, and the people who are most successful financially, doing what I do, never change their minds, never change their minds, take a guy like Lacey Hunt, okay, he’s been saying interest rates are going lower forever, he’s been saying we’re having deflation forever, he hasn’t changed his mind, he has followers, he has disciples, he has people who hang on his every word, because it’s this one view that they believe in, you know, and I’m more in the second camp, like I changed my mind all the time, I can believe one thing one day, and a couple of weeks later I can believe the exact opposite thing, and in terms of my business, in terms of writing a newsletter and getting subscriptions, it’s actually not that good of a thing, because you know, people want you to be consistent over time, but you know, the markets, they have this property called non stationarity, it’s a game where the rules are constantly hanging, okay, so you can do one thing in the markets, and it works for a while, but then the rules are going to change, and you have to do something different, so you have to be very adaptable, but it’s not, it’s not really conducive to selling commentary or advice.

Torsten Jacobi : So would the answer be that if you come to a certain conclusion, and let’s assume you’re right with that, you just have to like wait out the trade, and as longer you can wait out the trade is better, and obviously with Warren Buffett, I think a lot of people overlooking that fact, he didn’t do much in his youth, right, in his 20s and 30s, I mean he did stop, he educated himself, but he wasn’t like a magical investor, and he started investing and nothing happened for like, what, 10, 15, 20 years, and then suddenly it really became a bigger number, and numbers are massive, but what I think is so unique about him is hat he basically has one similar, it has changed over time and morphed, but he has one similar investment style, but he’s seeing the returns now compounded over 50 years, and that’s what’s giving him, what’s giving him these big numbers, and he had to be very consistent to execute this, so is that the right theory, you come to a certain conviction and then you just wait for it to come true, and hopefully it’s all alive when it comes through?

Jared Dillian : So there’s two parts to that, and one part of it is you need a lot of patience, and Warren Buffett has, that’s his one virtue more than anything, he has a lot of patience, and you also have to manage risk and conserve capital, so that when your trade is out of favor, which it inevitably will be, you can manage your drawdowns and stay in the trade.

Torsten Jacobi : Yeah, but psychologically so hard, right, because that might mean for 20 years you don’t see anything in your P&L, the only losses.

Jared Dillian : He was, what was the name of the firm he ran, International Value Advisors, I think, IBA, he was a value manager, a deep value guy, almost a stress, but like a deep value guy, and you know, back 20 years ago, he had assets of 20 billion, and it went down to 1 billion, and after 20 years, he climbed to the top of a building and jumped off, and he committed suicide.

Yeah, I mean, basically right when value just started to outperform.

So I mean, it’s, yeah, I mean, it’s brutal, like you, it takes an incredible amount of patience and an incredible amount of conviction to say that, you know, I’m right, and I’m going to stick through this no matter what happens, you know, just on a micro level, you know, I’m in the inflation trade, and that’s been out of favor for the last couple of months, and that’s been a little bit difficult.

I’ve taken a drawdown of about 6%, which is pretty manageable, you know, but you, you know, price determines your mood, and it’s very difficult to hold that kind of conviction when you’re sustaining losses like that.

 Torsten Jacobi : Yeah, it’s kind of a buy and forget, right, you should almost never look at your portfolio again, if that’s your strategy, right, but you accept massive drawdowns, if you feel you’re going to be vindicated once that day comes, it’s unpredictable when it comes.

I think, well, when I see, you know, Eric, we now had that book about the dead philosopher, the most famous philosopher, the dead, and unfortunately, it’s, you know, it takes a long time for your fame to become, to outlive yourself.

I feel like this is what very convicted investors in a similar position, right, they built their philosophy, they hang on to it, and they’re probably right, but during, in their lifetime, they rarely see, they only see the negatives in terms of social recognition, because they don’t get any, right, everyone hates them, and they’re outlaw, but then they really have to wait until the end, or often they don’t even see it in their lifetime to see being vindicated and being right.

There seems to be a connection that people don’t really make, so I feel like there’s a religion, there’s a connection between religion and the VCs, very stoic investors in, in the industry that, as you said, haven’t really changed their mind and are willing to sit it out forever.

Jared Dillian : I, you know, I don’t like taking drawdowns, I’m a little bit of a wimp, so, you know, I can, you know, I can, I have the ability to change my mind, you know, but with regard to the inflation trade, I mean, I think this is, I think this is a secular trade.

And in the context of a couple of months, I think that’s a, that’s a pretty short time around the wait, so I’m willing to stick through it.

 Torsten Jacobi :  But we print so much money, it needs to go somewhere, right? So for me, it’s really mesmerizing versus black hole. We can say, yeah, as the price is certainly, but it’s just a massive amount of money that we printed 60% of all the dollars ever in the last, what, 18 months?

But where did they go? It cannot be 5% deflation. That’s, that’s, that’s nothing.

Jared Dillian : It’s not about productivity or China or anything.

It’s about psychology.

It’s, it’s 100% about psychology.

Torsten Jacobi : I’m going to start finding a way to, to spend money. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. That was really interesting.