Regime of Uncertainty | Steve Hanke on Money Supply Shock, Tariff and Current Account, and Why Recession Remains Base Case For 2025
45:11 Share

The ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. And believe me, it will be enough. Thank you. Just close the f***ing door.

This episode of Monetary Matters is brought to you by VanEck, a global leader in asset management since 1955. You'll be hearing more about VanEck ETFs later on, but for now, let's get into today's interview. I'm extremely pleased to be joined today by Steve Hanke, Professor of Applied Economics at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Professor, thanks so much for coming on. Welcome to Monetary Matters.

Great to be with you, Jack. And I love the title, Monarch Rayman. I appreciate that. Professor, how are you assessing the current policy regime that's coming in Washington? Earlier in the spring, we had tariff policy announcements that the stock market didn't like at all. Now we have some bills passing through the Congress in the House that will be quite stimulative that the bond market doesn't like at all, perhaps slightly too stimulative.

How do you when you look at the markets, at the fiscal policy, at monetary policy, how are you assessing financial stability at this current juncture? OK, there are kind of two parts to this. One part is stability.

is what I call the, shall we say, the monetary regime and the state of the money supply. And when we look at the state of the money supply, the growth rate has been very anemic for the last two and a half years. I mean, the stock of money measured by M2, which is the broadest measure the Fed has, is almost exactly where it was in 2008.

the summer of 2022 and actually in april if you go back to april of 2022 and look at the stock of the money supply today versus april 2022 they're almost exactly the same and in addition to that jack the growth rate in the money supply currently is 4.1 percent per year

That is significant below Hanke's golden growth rate, applying the quantity theory of money and the equation of exchange and working out the numbers. The golden growth rate for the money supply consistent with hitting a 2% inflation target is about 6%. It's a little over 6%. Actually, it's 6.3%. So we're growing.

at a rate that's below a rate consistent with hitting a 2% inflation target. And the stock of money is basically flat line since, you know, this middle, let's say of 2022, just to keep it into perspective. Now, what that means is that, again, based on the quantity theory of money,

This means that the nominal GDP, which has a real component plus an inflation component, that's going to slow down. And that has nothing to do with what's going on in Washington, D.C. today. That's baked in the cake because changes in the money supply with a long and variable lag will lead to changes in asset prices, changes in real economic activity, and changes in inflation.

So that's why I say it's baked in the cake. And it doesn't matter who won the election, who's in Washington, what's going on. Now, let's move to Washington. Well, let's go to this year's forecast.

I would anticipate, given changes in the money supply that occurred a couple years ago, that we'd have a slowdown in the economy and probably a recession this year. And the inflation would drop from its current 2.3% per year down to the inflation target or maybe even a little below.

Now, let's add the new element, the new gang in town, the Trumpites, Trump and Trumpites. And what's going on with Trump is that they're basically changing the rules of the game pretty much across the board. Tariffs are one thing. The average tariff rate will go up from 3% prior to

the election to 18% average across the board now. But that changes from day to day. As we speak today, that 18% would be the average number, but maybe it'll change tomorrow. So that's the tariff picture. And there are many other changes going on in Washington, D.C., and that creates what I call regime uncertainty.

where the regime itself is changing. It isn't uncertainty associated with one little pinprick someplace. There's always uncertainty, always little pinpricks, but now we're getting everything changing. And the only time we've had this, to put it into context, is during the Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. We had regime uncertainty then. The New Dealers were changing everything.

And speaking of money, you know, it became illegal for Americans to hold gold. The gold clauses were rejected. So if you had something with a gold clause in it, a contract with a gold clause, it became null and void. So those were big monetary changes. There also was a monetary change going on.

in the Great Depression, and that is that the money supply contracted by a fantastic 38% from '29 to '33. So money was changing.

it was going down, it was contracting. Now it's just flatlined and growing very slowly. So there's some similarity there on the monetary side, but you had the regime uncertainty that I just mentioned with Trump. You had it with Roosevelt with new dealers. Now what that did, it made the Great Depression

Last a lot longer than it would have otherwise been the case. And and we can see that by looking at what happened to investment investment. Just tank it went to 0 and it never came back until World War two started.

So that drugged the Great Depression out a long way. You're seeing symptoms of this kind of thing in the United States because a lot of corporations aren't even putting out forward guidance anymore on their earnings because they don't know. They just don't know what the ballgame is. So I see the probability of a recession this year to be quite high, actually.

I've said before, I think it's probably around 90%. And this comes in, by the way, to the stock market action. And I think earnings, my estimate of earnings growth is zero. It could even be negative, but zero. And the consensus now, consensus keeps coming down. It started the year in low double digits.

Fantastic growth was anticipated in earnings. And now it's down to around 6.9% the consensus. So the consensus keeps revising down, but they're not revising down as fast as Hanke's revising down. So that's a summary of things. We can talk a little bit more about tariffs, I think. That would probably be worth talking about.

Right. So it sounds like you're somewhat less concerned about the level of tariffs than the uncertainty it caused. Oh, it'll be 10%. Oh, 20%, 145%, 20%, back to 20%. That uncertainty causes investors, businesses, and consumers just to put a little bit of a pause on spending. And that is what can cause a recession. Do I have that right? And also, just to talk to you, you said FDR, to change the quote a little bit, all we have to fear is uncertainty.

Yeah, well, yeah, right. So that's true. What you just said is true. Everything you said is true, except one thing, and that is going, if the average tariff rate goes from 3% to 18%, which today would be the average, that's bad. That's bad.

So we got two bad things going on. The absolute level of tariffs, they're going up. That's bad. That's a tax. And a tax increase like that will do what? If you tax trade, the gains from trade are eliminated. Let's assume that this is from like an economics textbook.

Trade generates gains from trade. But what is that? Jack, if you sell me something, you gain because you sold it. And you wouldn't have sold it if you hadn't had gain, surplus. I buy it because I gain. There's some surplus generated. If you put a tariff in between Farley and Hankey,

You've cut the surplus. You've taken away part of that surplus, and that goes to the government. And by taking it away, we probably won't trade as much either. So there'll be fewer transactions, and there'll be fewer gains from trade that are left on the block to retrade. So tariffs are just bad by definition.

The uncertainty associated with whether you're going to end up with an average of 18 or maybe 25 or maybe 30 or some other number, that's another bad thing. Uncertainty is always bad. The nonsensical thinking behind Trump's tariffs.

Trump and his advisers, or his courtiers, actually, he's more or less operating, you know, it's Louis XIV in Washington. It's not the President of the United States. And everybody filling in around the king, they're more like courtiers than, you know, independent advisers and so forth.

Now, what's their thinking? What's their mantra? Their mantra is that trade deficits are a policy variable that we should be focusing on, which is nonsense. It's a bad policy variable. We shouldn't be focusing on the trade deficit. So that's point number one. Point number two is that the trade deficit is bad. No, the trade deficit, it turns out to be good, which I'll explain in a minute.

good for Americans. The third thing is that those bad trade deficits are caused by foreigners ripping off Americans. Now all of this is nonsense, these three points. And let's start with foreigners ripping off Americans. No, the trade deficit is caused by Americans. Americans are spending more

than they're producing. Or to look at it in terms of national income accounting, if you have consumption plus investment plus government spending, that spending, if it exceeds GDP, will be made up by a negative number for the international transactions, the trade deficit.

So we have plus consumption, plus investment, plus government spending. You add all three of those things up and end in 2024, that exceeded GDP, that spending exceeded GDP by $903 billion. And magic, what was the trade deficit?

Yeah, this is an accounting identity. Consumption plus investment plus government plus.

the net figure for foreign trade is equal to GDP. You learn that in principles of economics, but no one knows how to use it or what it means. And what it means is that exactly what I said, our trade deficit is a result of Americans spending more than GDP. It's a simple game.

And it's made in America. And it turns out that I said the trade deficit's good. Why is it good? It allows Americans to consume more than they produce. And it's very easy to finance because of what? Because everybody wants to be in the U.S. dollar.

contrary to all the propaganda, everyone wants to pile into the dollar and have assets that are denominated in US dollars, whether they're equities or bonds. And we have huge, thick capital markets for bonds and equities. Bingo. That's the game. So another way to put it, by the way,

everybody gets all excited when the word deficit has a negative connotation but what what we you you can flip that around and say no what what we're doing we're we're exporting american u.s dollar denominated assets and and we run a surplus in those sports of those american u.s dollar denominated assets and and that surplus of course

is what the trade deficit is. It's just the other side of the coin. So put it this way, we're running a surplus. We're exporting more assets, financial assets than we're importing.

By the way, we're also exporting. We have a surplus in our services account. We export a lot of accounting services, financial services, and so forth, and run quite a significant surplus. I can't remember the exact number. I think it's over $300 billion. But you never hear the Trumpers talk.

talking about that surplus. They only talk about the trade deficit. Hey, Monetary Matters listeners, tariffs are shaking global markets and gold is responding, hitting all-time highs as market uncertainty fuels a surge in demand for physical gold.

The VanEck Merck Gold ETF, ticker OUNZ, is the only ETF that lets investors convert their shares into physical gold delivered directly to you. Now that's a standout feature. Visit vanek.com slash OUNZJack to learn more about OUNZ today.

Please click the link in the description to view the OUNZ prospectus. Thanks for listening. Let's get back to today's interview. We have a massive trade deficit, a somewhat smaller services surplus. So put that together as well as some other things. We do have a negative current account. Professor, I want to ask you at what level is, is a per,

is a very negative current account deficit for year after year after year. Is that sustainable? Because, you know, you and I perhaps would agree that when there's a recession in the economy, it's fine for the government to run a deficit and perhaps it should run a deficit to fill that gap.

gap. But if the government runs a huge deficit year after year after year, I think perhaps you would say that that's unsustainable. The modern monetary theorists that we were talking about before we started recording, they would say, "No, no, deficits are fine. Fiscal deficits are fine." Are you basically, and a lot of mainstream economics, basically MMTers would accept you're not MMTers about fiscal deficits, you're MMTers about trade deficits? And going to your intellectual forefathers, whether it's

you know, von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Felix Somery, you know, what does the people who you were reading when you were in your 20s, what did they say about trade deficit year after year after year? Did they think it was sustainable?

You're talking about two different kinds of deficits. You started, you're talking about trade deficit, and then you talked about the current account, which is yet another account. And then you talked about the fiscal account. And the thing you were leaning on was the fiscal account. Now, let us talk about the fiscal account for just a moment. I think that large fiscal deficits are

bad and not sustainable, number one. And I advocate, and so to fix that, we've tried to fix it with different statutory fixes that are kind of short-term band-aids because they eventually get turned off and are ignored. So that's one point. So how do you fix it?

how do you control the fiscal deficits? You control it by changing the Constitution. And what I advocate, I'm on the board of the Fiscal Sustainability Foundation, and we are advocating to use Article 5 of the Constitution, have a Constitutional Convention on exactly this fiscal

problem. And we changed the constitution. And the constitution now says, in simple terms, they have to balance the budget, number one. And government spending in Switzerland can't grow any more rapidly than real growth in the economy. And that means, Jack, is that the size of the government

relative to the total economy in Switzerland can't grow. And the budget year after year has to be more or less in balance. They give a little leeway on that. It isn't precisely each year, but over kind of the intermediate term of a few years, it has to end up being balanced. So I think that's the only way to fix this problem in the United States, because otherwise,

We've tried statutory fixes, Graham Rudman and various other pieces of legislation, statutory pieces of legislation, and the bright boys and girls in Washington always figure out a way around things.

Now, so that's my view of how to fix it. And I'm advocating this, and I think we will have, by the way, enough states, we'll have two-thirds of the states that have signed up to have a constitutional convention and address this problem. So that's the fix. In the meantime, let's talk about the...

Current fiscal deficit just last night they they passed this new budget the house did anyway It's not past past the big beautiful bill Is going to have a big deficit with increases in government spending on the tax side it won't everybody keeps talking about the tax side includes a tax cut and

No, it doesn't include a tax cut. It includes a provision that will allow the current tax regime to continue into the future. So that part's good. What's bad is that they haven't controlled government spending. And what's doubly bad is that the government's big increases go into the Defense Department, which is a formula for waste, fraud, and abuse.

I mean, the Department of Defense has never been audited even. It's such a mess they can't even audit the thing. And now they're going to pour more money into that rat hole. So the spending is a big problem.

And as I say, the only way to really control it is to change the US Constitution. And the only way that is to invoke Article 5 and have a constitutional convention. But let's talk about this deficit. There's another identity in economics. That's a savings investment identity. And savings and investment, that gap

between savings deficiency and the investment level is what? It's the trade deficit. It's equal to the trade deficit. And what's the big contributor to the savings deficiency in the United States? It is the federal government.

and state and local government, if you add them all together, which Ed Lee and I have done, by the way, in a 2019 Journal of Applied Corporate Finance article, it's the first time anyone actually disaggregated and figured this thing out and got the numbers straight. The efficiency is largely accounted for. The elephant in the room is the government deficit. So if Trump really was interested in

And in the trade and said, it's but it's bad. And we should get rid of it. It, he should realize that it's made up of. Americans and the fact that they invest more than they save. And to correct that you could balance the budget and all of a sudden. The trade deficit would shrink.

And that isn't foreigners. Foreigners aren't causing the fiscal deficit. It's Americans in Washington, D.C. who are causing it. And a big, beautiful bill that Trump loves, Trump is causing it, to be more precise. So this is kind of ironic. If the trade deficit was a policy variable that we should be...

that we should be paying attention to. Now, you asked earlier, you said sustainable. Is this sustainable? Well, so far it's been quite sustainable. The trade, the foreign imbalance, not the fiscal. I'm talking about the foreign imbalance. Is that sustainable? And the question is, yeah, it's been very, we've had it ever since 1974. It's been very easy to finance.

and very sustainable, and very good for Americans. It allows them to consume more than they produce. And they consume more than you can produce forever. You can consume more than you produce. Your children can, your grandchildren, great-grandchildren, that can go on forever. As long as you can finance it, it depends on whether you can finance it. Whether the importation of capital

and our export of assets associated with that importation of foreign capital, whether that can be sustained or not. And by the way, if something can't be sustained and go on forever, it won't go on forever. The market will adjust. So I'm not worried about sustainability because if for some reason the foreign capital

account and ledger is not sustainable on this deficit basis that we've been running for many years since 1974, what would happen is that foreigners wouldn't be as willing to buy U.S. assets. They wouldn't be as willing to get in U.S. dollar-denominated debt and equity, and they'd require

a higher rate of return to do so, to get into it. And that would slow the whole thing down. Is that what you think is happening right now? No. No. Okay. I think, I think right now there is,

these trade imbalances, that's a longer term or intermediate term kind of thing. What's happening right now is that there has been some portfolio readjustment. Everyone was very overweighted in the US market and they're rebalancing a little bit. So some of these funds have come out and gone back to Europe

and the flow of new funds coming from Europe into the United States has slowed down, as well as Asia, by the way. But that's a minor rebalancing tinkering around simply to adjust for the fact that they were so overweighted in the United States.

And countries that run consistent, persistent current account deficits, does economic theory say that with all things being equal, that country's currency should weaken? And therefore, because we run these current account deficits for so long, and you think that will continue, are you a bear on the US dollar? Why or why not? And I should also say, you have many, many decades of experience as a commodity and currency trader. So I'm curious your views here.

So the one thing you have to, on these international imbalances, you have to separate the United States from essentially all the other countries in the world, especially emerging market countries, because these external imbalances are a problem in emerging market countries. As you know, you can get what's called in economics a sudden stop of the capital going in to finance

a current account deficit in an emerging market country. And when that happens, all hell breaks loose because you end up with huge currency crisis and tremendous economic instability. So the external account in an emerging market country is totally different than in the U.S. They're just a different breed of cat. By the way, you did ask about the...

My view on the dollar, the most important price in the world is the dollar-euro exchange rate. And for some time, I've thought that the fair value for that exchange rate is between about 120 and 140. That's where my comfort level is. The dollar now, you know, it's trading, what, about 113, something like that.

It's very strong. Everybody is going on and on about the dollar, how it's weakening and the regime uncertainty that I talked about earlier is causing problems for the dollar. And that is true.

it does make it more vulnerable. And if you put sanctions and weaponize the dollar, which we've done, that makes it more valuable, but more vulnerable, more vulnerable. So there is this vulnerability aspect that comes into play with sanctions, tariffs, quotas, all these things make...

the dollar more vulnerable. The reality is that the dollar is extremely strong right now and has been for several years. And

Where do I think it's going? I don't have a strong view right now and we have to put this thing in historical context too. The dollar is the international currency, and you can forget about crypto. The Chinese Chinese one, which has capital controls associated with all all the substitutes.

are not that great. The dollar, the best way to put it, it's still the best dirty shirt around. And Professor, how do you assess the claims, not just of the Trump administration, but of some, you know, well-respected economists as well, that China is intentionally keeping its currency weak so that it stimulates exports? For example, you and I, for people who are not on YouTube, but on, you know, Apple Podcasts or something, we're wearing some nice suits

If we bought these in China instead of the United States, they probably would be half the price, maybe one third of the price because the Chinese yuan is so weak, as well as other productivity factors and wages and the like. But, you know, how can American manufacturers compete if the Chinese currency is so weak? Tell us your views on that, as well as, you know, if you don't accept the premise, then by all means, please challenge that. Well, I don't accept the premise. So, you know,

Let's look at the money supply and getting back to basically the book that Matt Sekurki and I authored, Making Money Work, which just came out on May 6th while he released it. It's getting the quantity theory. There are many aspects to this book. It's kind of a new chapter, shall we say, in money and banking and monetary economics. So there's a lot new in it. But the basic idea is that

the quantity theory of money, we're putting it back in the picture. It's been taken out for the last 30 years. Post Keynesian economics has dominated macroeconomic thinking and money doesn't appear in the models.

And we're saying no, the centerpiece should be the quantity theory of money and the importance of the changes in the quantity of money that make the world go around. And we're also putting commercial banks back in the center of things because they are the elephant in the room. Commercial banks produce most of the money that's produced.

about 80 percent of the stock of broad money produced in almost all countries is produced by commercial banks it's not produced by the central bank it's produced privately by by commercial banks so uh china china's inflation target now the new inflation target is

2%, and to hit that 2% inflation target, Hanke's golden growth rate, applying the quantity theory of money and working out the arithmetic in the thing, is about 10% per year. Their growth in the money supply has been very anemic. It's growing only at 7% per year, and they have no inflation. They have essentially zero inflation. Why? Because the money supply is growing too slowly. So

So this comes back into the idea about the exchange rate. And the exchange rate, I don't think, is artificially too low.

So that gets back into the premise. The money supply is growing too slowly in China. That leads to a nominal rate of growth in GDP that's too slow. Their nominal target, by the way, is 7% because their target for real growth in the economy is 5% for this year, and the inflation is 2%. You add 5 and 2 is 7. And to hit that,

They should be growing the money supply at least at 10% per year, and they're growing it only at 7%. Thank you, Professor. Go ahead. They won't hit their target. Now, let's bounce back to the U.S. dollar for a second. If you go back 2,500 years, there have only been 14...

dominant international currencies. And there always is only one, by the way. Always only one dominates. And there have only been 14. At present, the US dollar is on the throne. It is the international currency. It has become more vulnerable because it's been weaponized by sanctions and the tariffs and so forth. But

as I say, it's still the best dirty shirt around. And given the history of international currencies, it's very hard to knock the king off the throne. My final question for you, Professor, is about the quantity theory of money. I could pull up a chart of M2, the money supply, and you're absolutely right what you said in the beginning. We are now exactly where we were pretty much over three years ago in the spring of 2022. How is it that the quantity

quantity of money in the system has declined and then went up a bit, but over three years has been flat and we haven't had a recession. And also, if we just put up a chart of the money growth, it typically is somewhat stable, but really in 2020, you had a huge surge and then a flat lining. So just tell us your thoughts on this. And also just to put a point on it, that I guess there were times during 2023 when the decline in the money supply was the

It was contracting and it was contracting worse than any single time since the Great Depression. So why didn't we have a Great Depression? OK, that's that's a great question. So what happened in February of 2020, COVID hit and the Fed goosed the money supply tremendously. And at its peak, it was growing at 18 percent, a little over 18 percent.

per year actually M2 was. That's the highest rate of growth since the founding of the Fed in 1913. So the money supply shot up.

And there were, what happened with the quantity theory of money, John Greenwood and I said, well, look, the quantity of money is shooting up. And eventually we said the inflation will reach 9%. Well, it reached 9.1% when it peaked out. So we got that right. Then

everything went into reverse and the feds started contracting the money supply as you said and the inflation started coming down we predicted

Last year that it would end at 2.5 to 3%. It ended at 2.9%. This year, we'd say it'll probably go down to 2%, maybe even slightly below. And it has come down from the December of 2024. It was 2.3%. And now it's 2.3%. So all of that's fine.

But you ask about the recession part of the thing and the quantity theory, and why haven't we had a recession? Now, early on, I actually got this thing wrong. I thought we would have a slowdown last year. We didn't. I think we will have it this year. I got a little ahead of my skis. And the reason for that is that

This huge increase in the money supply, it created an enormous overhang of excess cash balances.

And it took a long time to work. Those came into the system. So that excess of cash balances that was built up and accumulated actually was fueling the economy. And that's why we didn't have a recession occurring as rapidly as I thought we would. I thought the thing would drain out faster than it did. It took it until...

The end of last summer before the drain had occurred before everything had drained out. So basically you had a lot of excess money in the bathtub and it took it longer to drain out than I thought. And that situation,

slow seepage of that excess into the system kept things going for longer than I thought. Now the tub is empty and we're basically running on fumes.

And how much of that has to do with quantitative tightening, the Federal Reserve reducing its balance sheet? Because what I was taught in undergraduate economics is the reserve ratio, that the Federal Reserve controls all the money and then banks lend based off of a ratio of that reserves. But it's my understanding, now I've delved into it a little deeper, that really I think the constraint upon bank lending is whether the bank thinks it's profitable, but really the real constraint is capital reserves.

ratios. So how much does the Federal Reserve reducing its balance sheet actually impact the money in the real economy? Because as you said, commercial banks create money that we can, people and businesses can touch and feel and do stuff with, not the Federal Reserve. Right. Well, so the two things going on, one is that the quantitative tightening has, shall we say,

eliminated the Fed's contribution. The Fed's contribution has gone down, but the commercial banking contribution has continued to go up. It's only growing now, loans at commercial banks are only growing at about 3.2%. I said the overall rate of growth at 4.1%, if you add the Fed's contribution and the commercial banks together,

You end up with 4.1, but the commercial banks contribution, by the way, is pretty slow right now. And as you say, the capital requirements are a key thing. And that's what we get into, Kirky and I in our book, Making Money Work. And that is bank regulations. People don't realize that is a major issue.

element of monetary policy. And think about it this way. Remember in the great financial crisis when that started in 2008, what happened?

Bankers were deemed as the devils, and the Dodd-Frank regulations came in. They tightened the noose around banks. And at the same time, you had Basel III, the capital asset ratios went up, capital requirements went up. And as a result of that, what happened? Banks actually contracted their contribution. Their contribution went from positive to negative.

growth rates. And as a result, that's why we got quantitative easing one, two, and three, and this huge expansion of the Fed's balance sheet. They were trying to mitigate the fact that commercial banks, the elephant in the room, had basically left the room. And they left the room because the bank regulations coming from Washington and Basel, Switzerland, had tightened the noose on banks.

Now, by the way, the supplementary liquidity ratio, it looks like they're going to get rid of that, fortunately. Scott Besson, the U.S. Secretary of Treasury, said that's the top priority in the Trump administration, is to get rid of the supplemental liquidity.

liquidity ratios. And when they do that, that'll be a good thing, by the way. And it will allow banks to loan, I think, prudently. And we should see an increase in the potential supply of loans coming from the banking system. Now, whether that...

comes to fruition and they actually use the potential they have is another issue because if the economy slows down, the demand for loans will slow down. So you have supply and demand both working here. On the one hand, in a supply and demand diagram, if you take the supplementary liquidity ratios off, the supply curve would shift for loans, would shift to the right,

But at the same time, if the economy is slowing down and the demand for loans is retarded, the demand curve will shift to the left. And where the intersection is in terms of the actual quantity of loans being emitted, I don't know.

But you're going to have two forces going in opposite directions. Potential supply will go up if they take these supplementary liquidity ratios, capital ratios off. And I think with a slowdown, the demand will abate and not be as strong.

Professor, thank you so much. That's all the time we have. We could talk for another hour, but we'll leave you go. I just want to say for people who don't know that you did work in the President Reagan administration. So that is your background when you're criticizing these tariffs from the

Republican administration currently. Professor, people can find you on Twitter at Steve underscore Hankey. And your new book is Making Money Work, How to Rewrite the Rules of Our Financial System. I'm going to check that book out and people listening should as well. Thank you everyone for listening. A reminder to subscribe to the Monetary Matters YouTube channel and to leave a rating and review for Monetary Matters on Apple Podcast and Spotify. It really helps the show. Thanks again. Until next time. Thank you, Dre.

Thank you. Just close the f***ing door.