Ed Yardeni Says It’s Not as Bad as You Think
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Welcome to Merrin Talks Money, the podcast in which people who know the markets explain the markets. I'm Merrin Somset-Webb. This week, I'm speaking with Ed Yardeni, president at Yardeni Research. Ed is the economist and investment strategist who coined the term bond vigilantes in the 1980s.

It's made quite a comeback since Donald Trump's re-election, most recently around the question of whether an extended bond sell-off will make it difficult for Trump and his allies in Congress to push through their big, beautiful tax bill. We're going to get into this, talk about how the bond market is pressuring governments across the board. We're going to talk about equity markets. We're going to talk about gold, Bitcoin, and what Ed is writing about at the moment. Ed, welcome to Merrin Talks Money. Thank you for joining us again. Very kind.

Thank you very much. Now, we should probably start with exactly what I said in the introduction. We should start with what is going on with developed world bond markets, yields rising all over the place, obviously, particularly in Japan, but quite a lot going on in the U.S. as well.

The global bond market, particularly in developed countries, is seeing some stress, clearly. I think there's mounting concerns about fiscal excesses, unsustainable fiscal policies that need to be addressed politically, and there's not any confidence that the politicians have the willingness to tackle these things. Now, I think we're seeing it most clearly and immediately in Japan right now, where the

20-year bond auction went off rather poorly. The 30-year and the 40-year yields rose along with the 20-year. So that was kind of the beginning of the alarm bell being sounded in the Japanese credit markets. The ratio of their debt to GDP is over 200%. The central bank has purchased much of the bonds issued by the treasury in Japan. And now the

Bank of Japan has recognized that they have an inflation problem. So that policy basically terminated two years ago. And now it's all coming back to haunt them. Here in the United States, things are still going relatively well. The 10-year yield has been remarkably stable around 4.5%, which seems to be fine. It's just that 30-year treasury yield, the spread has widened over the 10-year and we're getting closer to 5%. And so there is a

An unease that the bond market, the bond vigilantes in the United States are watching what's going on with the budget negotiations very closely. And if they're not happy with what the results are, there's a potential here for something similar to what's going on in Japan, kind of a protest, if you will, by the bond vigilantes. And that raises the question of whether the politicians will recognize that and respond appropriately to it.

But it's interesting, isn't it? This pops up periodically, doesn't it? And it's obvious to everybody that levels of Japanese debt, levels of US debt, of course, they're not sustainable. This is not sustainable long term. You can't have 100% of your debt GDP ratio. You can't have 200%. And sure, maybe you can net out a little bit with what the central bank holds, etc. But you've still got a major problem. But it pops up and it goes away. It pops up and

up and it goes away. It's never actually dealt with. And we know there aren't really very many ways to deal with it. So we just put it off, put it off. But is this time any different? It's a good question. I've been doing this for over 45 years.

And for that entire period, on a regular basis, naysayers, pessimists, doomsayers saying this time we're finally going to have to pay the price for our sins. You know, borrowing is sinful and eventually you have to pay the price for that.

And yet here we are with a stock market almost worldwide at a record high. Economy is still growing in the United States. It's slowed down in Europe. It's had a little negative quarter in Japan. But all in all, the economies have done quite well. You have some very smart people today like Ray Dalio walking around telling us that a debt crisis is imminent and that

Well, it looks like he may be getting it right in Japan. It really just hasn't happened yet in the United States. We had a glimpse of what it could look like in 2023 when the bond yield went from 4% to 5%. We had a minor little glimpse of it on April 8th of this year, 2025, when the bond yield rose from 4% to 4.5% on April 8th. And that was basically in protest of Trump's tariff turmoil. And the response was very quick by the administration to postpone the

reciprocal tariffs anyway. So the bond vigilantes are still out there. They're still interested in maintaining law and order. They prefer that fiscal and monetary policies are disciplined so that they don't have to take on that role. But they're ready if they have to

assert their concerns. The only question is if they do is whether the politicians will respond. And of course, this is a great opportunity for the bond vigilantes to get the attentions of the politicians in the United States because we are negotiating a budget.

Yeah. Let's go back to Japan briefly. It may be that there is a genuine crisis brewing there, although I know I've written that article myself quite a lot of times over the last couple of decades. But maybe it's real this time. You do have this phenomenally high ratio and you have very long-term yields, well over 3% now when we were used to them long-term knocking around 1% or below. It is quite a big deal. It's huge, yeah. If that does develop into a genuine crisis, what does that mean?

You know, I tend to be an optimist at heart. So the notion that the pessimists have been promoting that one day there'll be auctions in the United States and now maybe in Japan where nobody will show up or that Japan or the United States will

will default on their payments. I think that's nonsense. We saw in 2023 a mini debt crisis with a yield going from 4% to 5%, as I mentioned. And at 5%, there was just a ton of buying. So there's always going to be some yield at which there'll be investors saying, you know what, this is pretty good. This will probably slow the economy down and bring inflation down. And who knows, maybe it'll even cause the politicians to get the message that

But the bond vigilantes are not the only players in this game. The central banks are involved. The treasuries are involved. In the United States, on November 1st, 2023, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen basically told the bond vigilantes, if you don't like my bonds and my notes, you know what? I won't issue any additional ones. I'll just issue the usual bonds.

load, but I'll do what I need extra in the bill market. And that worked like a charm. There's ways that the central banks and the Treasury can still buy time and to avoid a day of reckoning. But if there is a day of reckoning, the deficits are a man and woman made problem. They can be easily fixed.

All we have to do is slow down the pace of outlays and increase the pace of receipts. It's the political challenge of getting that accomplished that has stymied any progress on deficits. It's just, you know, Americans and maybe Japanese and Europeans and others don't do pain very well. And we were just as soon pay for entitlements.

by issuing debt rather than raising taxes. At some point, that could come back to haunt you, and it may very well be at this point. But it doesn't have to be doomsday, kind of like what happened in 2008. There was a financial crisis, all hands on deck, and we did respond to it. The politicians responded to it. They came up with a program called TARP to bail out the banks. The first round, the

Stock market hated and took a huge dive on it. One week later, they came up with a new improved tarp that fixed things. So this could be a process that lasts a few weeks if we do, in fact, get something that feels very much like a debt crisis. It doesn't have to be the end of the world. Would it maybe not be such a bad thing?

get it over with. It's that thing we all know is coming, right? Hanging over us for decades. In a way, it'd be quite nice to get it out of the way, have a bit of a reset, force everyone to rethink their fiscal priorities and just get moving again in a better way. The way I've dealt with that uncertainty is I've said, look, I'll worry about it when the bond market worries about it. And that's been a useful way to watch it because people have been worrying about it all the time of

missed a great equity market. There was opportunities in the bond market. You don't want to get too pessimistic about it because there's...

pretty straightforward solutions. They just require some political will. And you're optimistic on the U.S. economy as a whole, right? Lots of conversation about coming recession over the last few months, and you now think it's about a 35% chance. And I love the way you describe this recession. You call it the Godot recession, the one that we're always waiting for and never, ever arrives. And your view there hasn't changed, has it?

The past three years, we've had the most widely anticipated recession of all times. It never happened. As you said, the Godot recession, the no-show recession. And I bet on the resilience of the consumer. I'm a baby boomer. I'm still working for a living, but a lot of my friends are retiring. And collectively, the baby boomers have $80 trillion in net worth.

That's half the net worth of the household sector. The savings rate is probably going to turn negative here because they're not earning money, but they have a ton of assets and they are spending that money. In addition, the fears of capital spending,

was going to take a dive because of the uncertainty with tariffs now and with monetary policy over the past three years. I don't think that's playing out. While some capital spending is going to be postponed, 50%, more than 50% of capital spending is now in technology. And technology capital spending is something that's almost imperative. You have to spend on technology in order to stay competitive. And to give Trump some credit, because everybody focuses...

on the fact that it's created a lot of turmoil, which you would think is basically bad for capital spending. At the same time, you know, he keeps collecting these IOUs from foreign governments and foreign companies saying that they intend to spend hundreds of billions in the United States for onshoring. Onshoring has been going on over the past four years since Biden created some legislation that stimulated it. And I think it will continue to go on.

Okay. So relatively confident about the U.S. economy. Yes. And as a result, still confident about the U.S. market. And there's one thing you said that it's the kind of thing that makes me a tiny bit nervous about the U.S. market is that you mentioned the savings rate going negative and the baby boom is moving very firmly from their accumulation period into their decumulation period. And that changes the flows.

It does. But I'm also thinking that there's going to be younger generations that are increasingly investing in the stock market. As I said, the baby boomers are sitting on a record $80 trillion of net worth. We've never had a retiring generation.

generation this rich, but it's the nature of the beast. Young folks don't have much in net worth, and over the years they accumulate it. And so the younger ones are in that process now.

And I don't think the baby boomers are going to be able to spend $80 trillion. I think there's going to be a lot of inheritances. And based on my own experience and my discussions with my fellow baby boomers, I think there's a lot of intra-generational income and wealth transfers going on right now. So I think that's what's been missing in the discussion of the consumer. Everybody's been talking about as though there's only kind of one kind of consumer experience.

In fact, there's many, and the baby boomers are doing very well. The younger folks aren't doing as well. That's where you're seeing delinquency ratios going up, but the parents are definitely helping out. In my next life, Ed, I'm going to be the child of an American baby boomer.

That's what I'm aiming for. Yeah, it's a good position. Yeah, everyone who believes in reincarnation should definitely be aiming for exactly that. So one of the, what comes, what backs up what you say is that the buyers of the dips all the way through this volatility of the last few months, the buyers have been retail investors, ordinary people picking up on the dip, haven't they? They haven't seen any of those kind of U-shaped dips that you might've got maybe in the old days. Now everything is very V. Market goes down, retail buyers come in, market goes up.

Absolutely. I mean, the fund flows data that is available showing that retail investors are the ones that are keeping this market going. They're in a good position because I think it seeped into their consciousness that stocks really have to be held for the long run. Somehow, I think they appreciate that more than the baby boomers really appreciated it.

And I think that they're viewing sell-offs as opportunities to buy stocks. And I think they have a long-term mentality. Again, I may be generalizing from my kids and some others that I've talked to. But with my limited sample that I've talked to, I'm surprised by their steadfastness and how they didn't freak out with the market selling off. Whereas my baby boom generation, I remember lots of freak-out situations where

As a matter of fact, I'm pretty proud of my forecasting record in calling bottoms. And one of the reasons I'm so good at it is I've got a relative who always calls me up right at the bottom and says, Eddie, should I get out?

So I've witnessed more of that among my peers. Okay. Interesting. I think we've all got one of those relatives, but maybe the rest of us don't recognize it as well as you do. Yeah. So you think they're right to be buying in now. There is still, I would say, from the other side of the Atlantic, you look across to the U.S. and certainly we feel a lot of concerns about the U.S. market. And valuations are still very high. There's an enormous amount of uncertainty. Anything could happen from here. The idea that America is

permanently exceptional. That spell seems to have broken a bit. And so we would wonder if those retail investors pouring money into the U.S. market might not be wiser to be looking overseas.

I've been promoting the idea of stay home rather than go global since 2010. That doesn't mean I'm telling people not to invest overseas. I've just been recommending over waiting the United States. And I may overstay my welcome with that concept, but I'm sticking with it. We do have seven exceptional companies here, the Magnificent Seven.

And this recent correction was basically led by them. They had more than just a correction. They had a bear market. They were down like 25 percent. The overall market was down 18 percent for the S&P 500. And there was a lot of concern that they were spending too much on AI and would never get a return on that.

And they came back and said, we're still going to spend that kind of money because we'd still think we're going to get a return on it. You know, some of these are cloud companies and the demand for computing is only going to increase in this, what I call a digital revolution that started decades

in the mid-60s. If that's the case, these are continuing to be exceptional companies, not much debt, a lot of cash flow, tremendous innovations, and they are uniquely Americans. It doesn't mean that there aren't great companies overseas, but everybody seems to recognize the exceptionalism of these companies, which does reflect many aspects of the exceptionalism of the U.S. economy.

And are you worried about earnings in the near term? I'm reading a couple of your notes. I see that you've been writing a bit about earnings consensus forecast softening slightly. Yeah, in the near term, there's certainly concerns. The Trump tariff turmoil has been moderated somewhat, but there's still plenty of it out there. Still plenty of uncertainties related to where this is all going to lead. The tariff itself, certainly the basic tariff of 10%,

is in effect a tax on corporations. So it's got to hurt. We recently saw the president respond to a big retailer by saying, don't dare raise your prices. And if they do raise, don't raise their prices, that'll affect their profit margins. And there's bound to be some kind of stagflationary

scenario unfolding here in the next few months with higher inflation and slower growth. But I think the market's looking past all that. I think the market has come to conclude that the president needs to get this behind him as soon as possible. The midterm elections are coming next year. You can't really afford to have a recession occur now or certainly not early next year.

And so I think the market perceives that he will continue to blink and that along the way he'll declare victory and move on to this big, beautiful tax bill, which the jury's out on that, whether it's big and beautiful or big and ugly. I'm waiting to see how the bond market votes on all that.

But it's a volatile time right here. And I think retail investors are right to see it as opportunities to buy, let's say, buy on the dips. I think that will continue to work. So a bit of a melt up into the end of the year, maybe? Well, you know, I'm struggling with the question of whether we're going to have a melt up in the stock market or a melt down in the bond market. Obviously, if we have a melt down in the bond market, we're not going to get a melt up in the stock market.

I've told my accounts that I reserve the right to change my forecast as often as the president seems to change his mind. But I do try to maintain some objectivity and stability in my forecasting. And I think the market's right. This too shall pass.

And we've got a tremendous amount of technological innovations ahead of us, whether it be humanoid robotics, more automation, autonomous driving, artificial intelligence. All these technologies are not pie in the sky. They're here.

and they're being implemented, I think they're going to have a tremendous impact on productivity. So I've been talking since 2019 that this decade could turn out to be the roaring 2020s. First half of the decade worked out great so far. Then it looked like things started to slip up here for a roaring 2020 scenario. But I think it's making a comeback here. And it's based on the idea that technological innovations will boost productivity because there are shortages happening.

of skilled labor. And productivity means better economic growth, lower inflation, better profit margins, and higher real wages. It makes everything better. And so I'm still counting on that. And I'm trying to get positive feedback from the stock market.

And I have been until this correction. But we thought it would be a correction. We didn't think it would be a bear market. So far, so good. And we think the market's kind of back to signaling that the roaring 2020 scenario might still be very much intact.

Yeah, although I suppose it is possible. In fact, history shows us this over and over again. I was doing a financial walking tour of Edinburgh yesterday, and we walked around the railway station and all that kind of thing and talked about the various booms and busts and how often it is that you have an amazing technological revolution. Yep.

alongside disastrous investing environment. These two very often go hand in hand. So the assumption that because you have a decade or two decades of astonishing technological advancement, it is not a given,

that alongside that, an awful lot of people make money. Generally, a lot of people lose money, and it's in the second wave, when the productivity gains really come through, that the next lot make the money. Yeah, I guess it's Sean Pater's notion of...

Creative destruction. Yeah, creative destruction. Thanks for the help. The idea that capitalism by its very nature is constantly innovating and coming up with solutions. You know, when I studied economics, like a lot of

For first-year students, I read Samuelson's book on economics, and he defined economics as the study of how you optimally allocate scarce resources, which sounds like a very depressing concept. You go, oh my God, there's only so much, and we have to figure out how to divvy it up. And then you get into these debates of whether the government should do it through Marxism or socialism.

state-run economies or should it be done by the marketplace? I think economics is all about technology solving the problem of scarce resources. The way we know resources are scarce is because the prices go up and then some entrepreneur says, I can do this better, cheaper with these kind of technologies. And that's what makes it so exciting, but it's very dynamic.

And while you're creating, you're also destroying. And that's where a lot of the tensions come in. But I think we're very much in that kind of environment right now.

Okay, I like the idea that economics should not be about allocating scarce resources. We've been talking about that a bit on the podcast recently, saying that the whole aim should be to find, create, offer more and more resource so that we consume more and more rather than constantly working towards trying to consume less. We should be open to the idea that we should always consume more energy, more resources, more land, etc.,

Just take autonomous driving. We're not going to have to own cars anymore. We can own them and rent them out, but that'll make the whole auto industry much more efficient. We're all driving to work and the car's sitting there for hours on end. We're all coming back home at night and the car's sitting there in the driveway or garage hours on end. Now, imagine if we actually use these vehicles, these digital devices more efficiently than we will be using fewer resources, certainly in that area.

I don't know. My car is almost an extension of my house. I currently see myself giving it up. Ed, you're very optimistic. We appreciate that. We don't get it often on the Meron Talks Money podcast, particularly about the U.S. market. So it's good to hear. But...

What would make you change your mind? What would happen? What confluence of events or ideas or changes is it that would make you say, actually, do you know what? I've got this wrong. There's going to be a recession. This market's going to correct. It doesn't look good anymore. What should we be looking out for?

I'd watch out for when the pessimists become optimists, then my contrarian instincts will come out and say that something's got to be wrong here. As you said, I tend to be a loner on these podcasts. There aren't too many of us optimists out there. So from a contrarian perspective, it works. I've been accused of

of being a permable, which I view as a compliment. I want my tombstone to say, "Ed Yardeni was usually bullish and usually right." And I'm not saying that bragging, I'm saying the stock market's a permable. It tends to go up. Technology tends to solve problems that people think are going to bring us down. The debt crisis, I welcome it. I hope we get a debt crisis in the next few months because it'll probably be resolved in the next few months as we scare the living daylights out of the politicians.

I hope the Bonavigilantes show that they're more powerful than ever. After all, there's more debt than ever, so they must be more powerful than ever. I do tend to see things more optimistically, but that's a contrary instinct because being a pessimist is, what should I say, conventional.

It's so easy to say how things are going to go wrong. So as long as the pessimists keep coming up with ideas of what could go wrong, I don't have to work as hard on that side. So I keep looking at what they're saying could go wrong. And yeah, I think right now you've got people like Ray Dalio, who are very credible. He's a billionaire. By the way, I don't know what it is about these billionaires that makes them pessimists. A lot of these billionaires just...

Keep telling the masses that they can't be even billionaires because we're going to have a crisis any day. It's interesting because you're right. We get that a lot, that the miserable billionaires, the world's going to end, everything's awful, et cetera, et cetera. And they must have been optimistic on the way up because it's not really possible to become a billionaire by being a miserable old git, is it?

That's the way I'm looking at it. But I would say right now, the most credible pessimistic scenario is a debt crisis. But you can pretty much count on me to tell you why this is not going to be the end of the world as we know it and why it might actually be a good thing and might resolve this issue once and for all. Yeah, although it will break various things in the financial markets that we didn't even know that were to be broken. And that always happens. There'll be stuff that breaks. There'll be

All sorts of things that we wouldn't have expected would come out of a property crisis. I'll respond to that by saying that was very true in 2008, but we've made a lot of progress in creating all kinds of shock absorbers in the capital markets. People were certain that the tightening of monetary policy over the past three years was going to cause a financial crisis and a recession, and it didn't happen. And now they're certain that the tariffs are going to cause some sort of crisis and a recession.

We have a very resilient economy and a very resilient capital market in America. So it is resilient. Maybe Japan will turn out to be the main poster child for what happens when you borrow too much and at some point it comes back to haunt you.

Yeah, maybe. Okay, so in this giant equity market that is the U.S. market, obviously you're very keen on big tech, but for an ordinary investor looking at the market, not wanting to buy a passive fund, where should they be looking? What sectors are interesting? You know, I've been recommending overweighting information technology, communication technology.

services, industrials, financials, all the good stuff, all the stuff that does well during good times, growth kind of companies, not cheap. They were cheap on April 8th, not as cheap anymore. But I would stay with them. It's not to say that the defensive stocks are cheap. They're also very expensive because there are a lot of pessimists out there who

who still want to be in the market, but they don't want to be in the gamey stuff, which is what they would say my recommendations are focusing on. But yeah, I would I would overweight those sectors and I would continue to overweight the United States. I don't think the US dollar is going into a major decline.

I don't see how that's possible when we have the world's largest capital market and the most liquid capital market. So I think that just doesn't make sense. What about smaller companies in the U.S.? We keep being told that's where the value is. Well, they've been frustrating. The mid-caps, the small-cap, mid-cap stocks, particularly small-caps, they've been cheap for a long time, and they just can't seem to get a sustainable rally going. Definitely look more attractive on a valuation basis.

But maybe the problem is in the small cap arena is all the good stuff doesn't go public very quickly. And before it does go public, it gets bought out by the Magnificent Seven or some other large cap companies.

company. And then the other frustrating thing is if you happen to come up with the next Microsoft, then you're sure it's going to be the next Microsoft. And you buy it and you see this thing going up double, triple, and then all of a sudden somebody comes in and buys it from you. Well, that's great. You're going to have a good one-day

return on your money when the takeover is announced. But then you got to go back to the drawing board and try to find the next Microsoft. So it's a very frustrating kind of game to be playing right now because you're competing against the investment banking department of some pretty big companies. Which is very bad for listed markets overall, isn't it? Yeah. Is it?

It's possible that another reason why small caps aren't getting the traction that you might expect smaller mid-sized companies because of the shift towards passive. And of course, the bulk of passive money goes into index funds that float around the larger cap level. Very good point. Yeah. Active managers are almost always limited by what percent of their portfolio they can put in any particular stock. Sometimes it's

2% max, 3% maximum. You got to have a certain diversification in the numbers of stocks you own. The ETFs, there's no restraint. Whatever the magnificence of it are in the S&P 500 is what they're going to be in the ETFs that track the S&P.

Now, I know you've said definitely that you definitely favor the U.S. and everyone should really be overweight the U.S. But are there any other markets that you look at and you think, you know, that looks kind of interesting? You know, there's lots of talk about rebalancing towards Europe because of Germany's fiscal splurge, because of rising fiscal spending across the board. There are lots of talk about how China is no longer an uninvestable market and one should be there as well.

I'm in China's uninvestable camp. Are you still? Why is that? I still am. I don't think that's changed. It's still an authoritarian regime that can change the rules of business very quickly. More fundamentally, the government's destroyed the demographic profile of China. It's very geriatric. I've described China as the world's largest nursing home operated by Maoists. Before that, I used to call Japan the world's largest nursing home.

nursing home operated by the mob. So I don't know that they'll let me into China. I don't know. Probably not. But that is the really interesting thing about China is that the population is actually falling by a million plus a year. Yes, and the same with Japan. And now we can see that Japan has a lot of debt. China has a huge amount of debt. Their property market is a disaster. Now I've got

no interest in China. And for a while, there was a... It's a great vehicle for trading, but I don't think you can... India, I keep looking at saying, I wish I'd thought about that one earlier. But we just had a sell-off there that now is followed by a recovery. It seems to trade in tandem with what happens in the United States. I

I would say there's probably opportunities in India, particularly in the banking sector and the retailing sector. I think there's certainly opportunities. Other than that, it's catch as catch can around the world. Mexico has some opportunities, but...

It's a state with questionable political stability. Brazil has some opportunities, clearly, but a lot of them tend to depend on a strong global economy pushing up commodity prices, and that doesn't seem to be what's happening right now. Okay. What about gold? Do you ever look at gold? I've never been a proponent of gold. Well, it's not an optimist's investment, is it?

It's not that. It's got no income. It's got no dividend. I can't come up with the present discounted value of gold. I haven't really studied the market that carefully from a supply-demand standpoint. But about a year ago, I said, you know what? It looks like we're crossing above $2,000 an ounce. I think it looks like it's got some upside here. And the explanation from a fundamental standpoint was real simple. As long as

foreign central banks of countries that don't like us decide that they don't want to see what happened to Russia happen to them. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the United States froze the foreign exchange reserves of Russia. And so these central bankers have decided they want to have more gold than dollars or even euro or yen.

as reserve assets, just go with the flow. If that's what they're going to do, then that means gold's going to continue to move higher. And to the extent that along the way, there's more geopolitical concerns, there's more debt concerns, that's all positive for gold. So yeah, I would recommend actually holding gold and maybe overweighting gold relative to whatever, you know, if you thought 5% was enough, maybe 10%.

So I'm actually a gold enthusiast. That is not the answer I expected, but I like it. I try to be open-minded. Good. And...

Bitcoin. Oh, Bitcoin. I came up with an amazing insight a few years ago that I should have listened to. And the insight was that Bitcoin is kind of like digital tulips, which sounds very critical, right? Because then the implication is that it's just a bubble, a bubble in Holland. But I did point out that the difference is that the...

Tulip bulb was geographically just in a very tiny little town called Holland many centuries ago, and that people did go to sleep at night. It wasn't open 24 by 7. Bitcoin is global. The market's open on a global basis 24 by 7. So there's a lot more potential buyers than there ever was in the Holland tulip market.

And at least for Bitcoin, there does seem to be a digital mechanism that's limiting the supply of these things. So I have no problems owning a Bitcoin. I don't personally, but I have no, I'm not pounding the table and telling people that they shouldn't be.

buying Bitcoin. But the way you've just described it there makes it sound like the reason to own it is because it can be a bubble significantly bigger than the tulip bubble ever was, as opposed to because you think it's a reasonable asset class. Yeah, I have no problems with bubbles. I just have to remind myself to get out at the top. Yeah, we'd all like to be able to do that, in at the bottom and out at the top. Thank you so much for joining us today, Ed. I really appreciate it. I've enjoyed our chat. Very welcome. Thank you.

And of course, special thanks to Eddie O'Denny.

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