LEI Says Recession & Concentration Says Stock Market Crash

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Hello everybody, Kirk Spano here tonight and this is our monthly macro call.

[00:00:05]First a little bit of housekeeping. For anybody who's missed it so far, I am merging fundamental trends into my margin of safety investing service over at Seeking Alpha. And this is your last chance to get in with a super deep discount. If you're not already a member, through Mother's Day and maybe one or two days extra, but basically through Mother's Day, this $999 a year service and compare that to a hire me to manage a a half a million dollars, you know, that would be, you know, about five grand a year. So, you can basically get all my research not for $9.99, but for just the low low price of $499.

[00:00:46]So, if you sign up now, uh you can lock in your rate at $499 a year. That's all the stocks, that's all the ETFs, that's all the options selling for income, that's the macro, that's me being in the chat room, that's Teresa's charts and the team that I'm building cuz I am going to add two or three more analysts as we mature with Seeking Alpha. Uh I have some interesting conversations with them that are going on right now. You will really like what we're what we're doing over there. Better tech stack, better investment resources. Right now, if you sign up for my service at Fundamental Trends, and this is the only way that I can get you this big of a discount because Seeking Alpha only allows a 50% first year discount and that's it. They don't do any forever discounts, they don't do lifetime services.

[00:01:39]So, your first year actually is only 99 bucks. So, if you're new and you want to sign up, you get the first year for 99 bucks. All right, let's go to presentation. So, first announcement here today is that I will be at the best income ideas online summit with George Noble. George Noble was a was mentored by Peter Lynch. And for a while, Noble had the best of the top-rated in the world international mutual fund. And that's going to come into play later in today's broadcast because I have some international investing ideas for you. So, for 99 bucks, you can get all these analysts.

[00:02:25]Uh I actually suggest that you subscribe to his Substack. If he ends up on, you know, I give it a month though. Uh Give it up until right at the deadline.

[00:02:34]There's a possibility that he launches a uh Seeking Alpha service. If he does, it'd be easy to keep everything there.

[00:02:40]Although, I think everybody has Substack by now. So, uh I am a founding member of this. I paid him the $950 a year so that I could go to all the investing uh uh summits. And then he invited me. I was like, "Ah, probably didn't have to pay the whole 950 bucks." But, the $950 a year subscription to his service gets you all of these investing summits that are normally 99 bucks a piece.

[00:03:04]And my stock was a very innovative stock. The kind of stock that can help take your portfolio higher. It happened to be up about what, 7 or 8% this week?

[00:03:16]And by the way, pays, you know, a double-digit dividend return. So, if you don't know what I'm talking about, get industrious and innovative. And think about what could take your portfolio higher. Let's talk macro. So, here we are. The US national debt versus the GDP. What relationship looks a little bit not so good here right now?

[00:03:40]What has changed since about the financial crisis? Somebody go out and say it in the chat. What do you notice is growing more than something else?

[00:03:50]What What What does that look like over there? On the left-hand side of the chart, GDP was always growing more than debt except for this little speed bump called World War II, right? Not a speed bump, it was a horrible thing. But then, as we rebuilt the world because we hadn't been bombed and the rest of the world had to be rebuilt, the United States did really well. And then, in 1981, we had a change in the way the government regulated basically everything. Started breaking the unions.

[00:04:21]Uh started to run bigger deficits in order to fund tax breaks for the richest people in the country. And you can see how that worked for years is the GDP and the debt were actually pretty close to each other. Then we had the financial crisis right in here at the end of the Bush term. And you can notice another inflection in debt under Bush because he did massive tax cuts for the wealthy as well. And I know everybody says, "Well, I got a little bit, too." Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:04:53]You you didn't get much, right? If you're not making a million dollars a year or more, you didn't get much, right? The people who got the most are absolutely the top 1% of the population.

[00:05:05]I'm a I'm a healthy 2%er.

[00:05:07]Uh so, I get 20, 30 grand a year from the uh latest round of tax cuts. And you know, my taxes weren't so bad to be before that. But again, I was just I was just a 10%er before that.

[00:05:18]In any case, under Bush, we really really started ramping up the debt. And then we had the financial crisis. And since then, the debt has actually grown faster than GDP. This is bad, folks. It is bad when the debt grows faster than GDP. Think about that in terms of your household. If every time you borrowed a dollar, you were only able to spend 95 cents of it cuz the rest of it was debt service, that'd be pretty rough. You just perpetually accumulate debt. That's essentially what the United States been doing since the financial crisis and it was all set up from two different bills, one in 1999 under Bill Clinton and the Republican uh Congress that allowed the deregulation of the financial industry, basically allowed them to do anything.

[00:06:04]Citigroup pushed for it, they went bankrupt. Uh They got bailed out. So, they technically avoided bankruptcy, but they got bailed out in 2009. Then George W. Bush came in and said, "Well, I'm going to do what Ronald Reagan did, but I'm going to supercharge it." So, this was Ronald Reagan's tax cuts for the wealthy fueled by deficit spending. And Bush said, "I can do better, right?" And we had the financial crisis and we spent our way out of it. And really nobody has really gotten a hold on it. You know, anytime even the Democrats say, "Well, we've done better than the Republicans on debt." That's just like saying, "We suck less." You know, uh you know, just don't buy into the rhetoric. We have a massive problem. A lot of this is demographic driven, but most of it is tax cuts for the richest 1% driven uh without cutting any spending. So, we increase spending in particular on military endeavors in the last 25 years and we give tax cuts to the super wealthy. And I know that some people are like, "Ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah Uh I'm not saying the taxes should be higher for 99% of the people. In fact, I think taxes should be lower for 90% of the people, about the same for 99% and then uh 1% should be a little bit more. All right. So, what does that lead to? This guy, Kevin Warsh. What does Kevin Warsh want to do? Kevin Warsh wants to shrink the Federal Reserve balance sheet. Okay, let's think about that from a theoretical standpoint. If the Federal Reserve balance sheet shrinks, what does that do to the money supply? That will shrink the money supply. We were shrinking the Federal Reserve balance sheet from the end of 2001 into 2025.

[00:07:51]And what did we get right when that all started? We got a bear market. We got a slowdown in the economy that everybody thought would roll over into a recession. Not me. I said there's just too much money out there to have a recession. And we did not have a recession. We had all that COVID money that was printed that even though they started to take some of it back, there was still all kinds of money in private hands, at the hedge funds, and private equity firms, as we've learned in private credit, that the fact that the banks were a little bit tighter didn't matter because all the private equity and all the private credit and all the hedge fund money that was out there. The hedge funds, in fact, are funding most of the national debt. Did you know that? Did you know that the number one holder of US Treasuries now is the Cayman Islands?

[00:08:35]The Cayman Islands. Because they have a huge population that's hugely wealthy. Oh, wait. They don't.

[00:08:43]There's like 12 people that live there.

[00:08:45]What it is is all the hedge funds that are domiciled there and they do what's called the basis trade. So, they're trading Treasuries and futures on Treasuries and trying to capture a couple of basis points. And that's why, with $10 trillion parked in the Cayman Islands, they can scrape off just enough to make their hundreds of millions or billions.

[00:09:04]Meanwhile, what happens if this guy, he looks smug. He looks like he thinks he's smarter than he is. And I've heard him speak. I think that's exactly what he thinks because he's not that smart. Now, he understands how to feather his own nest and he married well. So, that helps. But, I think that this guy is going to cause a big, big, big problem.

[00:09:26]He believes in the Austrian approach to managing money, which you have heard me rip on over and over and over again. Not that I like the bastardized Keynesian approach that all the politicians use.

[00:09:39]However, the Austrian approach to managing money and the economy was captured by politics way before the Keynesian approach got abused. What he's talking about doing is lowering interest rates, right? On the short end, cuz that's all he can affect. The short end, Fed funds rate, and shrinking the Fed balance sheet at the same time.

[00:10:00]And the argument is, well, if we lower interest rates, then the shrinking of the balance sheet won't have that much impact. Let's really think that through.

[00:10:09]Because there are knuckleheads on Substack and on X and everywhere else who are buying into that baloney, that malarkey, as I would I think would be appropriately called. What he's going to try to do is shrink the Fed balance sheet because he doesn't think it it should be as big as it is. But let's ask why. We've covered this, I mean, umpteen times. I'm going to go through it again.

[00:10:30]The Federal Reserve balance sheet was used to fund the government and get us out of what could have been a depression in 2008, a depression in 2020. Now, I think they overspent in 2020 deliberately so they'd have all this extra money to spend. I think they knew pretty early on that we didn't need all the bailouts that we got. Ended up causing inflation. Warsh's arguments is that the inflation was entirely monetary, very Milton Friedman approach, and there's some merit to that. But like any rhetorical argument, you have a a grain of truth to make people believe it, but really it's it's the wrong approach if you really break it down to not just theory or practice. Thank you, Immanuel Kant. If we take a look at what he's planning to do, what happens in a world where the US Treasury yield has started to go back up. Why has the US Treasury yield gone up? It's a pretty easy question to answer. It's because we have so much debt. And we're running a two trillion dollar deficit right now. So we'll be at 40 trillion dollars of debt here soon. And again, if you go back a couple of slides, boink boink, whoop, that money that we're borrowing isn't growing the economy as much as what we're borrowing. So at some point, the debt has has to be paid. If we shrink the Fed balance sheet, the money that's helping to fund keep this even here goes away. We've talked about how the international markets fund about a third of US debt. The Federal Reserve has been a big hunk of the rest of it. So if the Federal Reserve starts to not lend to the US government, what necessarily has to happen? There's only a couple of things. Either we grow the economy just suddenly grows a ton because you cut the short end of the interest rates, and maybe that can be true for two, three, four, five years, maybe. Maybe it can be. Maybe they can juice it for a little while. But ultimately, your international investors will demand a higher rate of return on what they're lending to us. And what if they decide to invest more in their own countries, which certainly seems to be the case all of a sudden. When our private equity firms start to lend a lot of money to Europe, which is what's going on right now, do you think that maybe the Europeans will not send as much money our way? China's been cutting what they have invested in the United States since 2014. Japan hasn't been increasing theirs. What if suddenly Japan, because of their aging problem and the fact that they don't have a lot of immigration, what if suddenly they have to repatriate a lot of money?

[00:13:05]That's part of what's going on with the currency issues and the interest rate issues in in Japan. You have a resource poor country that always did well because of manufacturing, and their three biggest car companies just came out and said they can't compete with China. That means that there has to be protectionism. What do we know from protectionism? Ultimately, that's bad for for the global economy. And while we can argue, well, if we protect ours, it's okay. They're on their own. The more of that that happens, and we've seen it before, this is not theory, and we have historical examples, eventually you have trade wars that get out of control. Some archduke gets shot, and there's a world war. Some guy comes to power in some socialist, nationalist, racist party, starts a different world war. And not saying that we're going to get a world war, but I think we are entering a period where there's more and more things like Iran that are going to go on, and Ukraine that are going to go on, and maybe Taiwan soon going to go on, cuz everybody's becoming less global.

[00:14:08]And while the in vogue thing to say for the last 5 years is globalism is killing everything, no, globalism pretty much gave everybody a pretty good standard of living, even if you were poor. Billions of people got pulled out of poverty.

[00:14:22]Now, the problem in the United States really wasn't globalism. It's the corporate executives who are making whatever it is, 5,000 times more than the average worker, because they're worth it. But I digress. If international markets can't support what's going on here with the national debt, and the Federal Reserve isn't going to support it anymore, where is that money going to come from?

[00:14:46]We are potentially looking at draconian cuts to government spending, way more than what President Trump has already done, cuz they're just going to bankrupt the government. That is their goal. I'm telling you right now, their goal in the Republican Party is to bankrupt the government, and people who are cash rich are going to do really well. Because ultimately, this interest rate goes up, that's good for cash, and the price of assets goes down. Suddenly, you have one of those buy low opportunities. But the only people that can buy low are the people with a lot of cash. The problem with this whole scenario is you don't know how long it's going to take to play out. Is it going to take a year? Is it going to take three or four or five years. I have said for what about a decade now since I brought up the slow growth forever theory on MarketWatch. I said between 2026 and 2029 we're going to get a financial crisis. Depends on a lot of different political factors and chance and the way that money moves. The first chance for this to happen is this year because if the international markets are so pissed off at us that they just start pulling the checks, probably within about 90 days of them doing that they can cause at least a mini financial crisis here. I think there's a lot of discussions going on and President Macron of France made it clear that those discussions are going on of what it's going to take for other countries be a less dependent on both China and the United States. And I think they all know that it's going to take a little bit of pain on their side, but I think they already found their traders that are going to support them. The money guys, private equity funds are all about the money. I have told you over and over and over again they're the smartest guys in the room when it comes to money.

[00:16:22]They're ruthless and it's all about the bottom line. It's not about national borders. They can talk a good game, but when they're writing gigantic checks to European countries so that they can compete with the American companies, you decide who's really in charge, who's really a patriot. I don't know, maybe it's good for us to get our teeth kicked in for a little while so we don't go down this path ever again. I understand the rhetoric. I understand what people want on Main Street because I was poor most of my life. I've had a ridiculous run the last decade. Literally from wondering if I could retire to, you know, going to France for 3 weeks and spending way more money than I should have because I still like think that way. I don't know if they can juice this economy for 3 years until Trump is out of office and push the financial crisis onto the next guy and then they can say it was his fault. I don't know if they can pull it off. I think it depends mostly on if Kevin Warsh really shrinks the balance sheet, and if the international markets continue to support our deficit. I don't think that they will unless they're gutless. If they're gutless, then they'll keep financing us. If I were President Macron, and I was the rest of the the Europeans and Asians, I'd stop sending us so many checks. I'd invest the money at home and just take the short-term knock. That's what I would do, but again, I don't have to get elected. So, here is the chart of the ratio of leading coincident economic indicators. I would just like you to take a look at what happens every time it gets down here. What are those gray lines? Those are recession. Over here, over here, double dipper. This is the one that was formative in my lifetime.

[00:17:58]Kevin Warsh idolizes idolizes Fed Chairman in here. So, here we have him coming into power, coming to Federal Reserve Chairman, as the economy's leading economic indicators are all starting to fall apart. The only thing that is supporting the economy right now is AI. Because they're building data centers that are demanding a lot of energy, so you get infrastructure spending, but I've been in a number of major cities in this country in the last 18 months. I mean, really, it's pretty much non-stop for me. I move around. And I can tell you, whether it's downtown Dallas or Chicago or Minneapolis, you know, Arizona, various cities in the in the Phoenix area, Vegas in particular, you know, San Francisco, you go city to city to city, and you are seeing what used to be vibrant downtown areas not so vibrant. Where the problems that we like to say are somebody else's problems are really kind of everybody's problems. In Dallas, you can get an app on your phone that tells you where the poop is on the ground. I mean, come on, man. So, here we have the leading economic indicators already indicating that we're probably on the edge of a recession, but we have a guy coming in who says he wants to shrink the Fed balance. At the same time, cost of living is not getting cheaper. Now, the inflation rate has fallen just a little bit, not much, over the last year or so. But that's about to start going up again cuz the cost of healthcare has gone up dramatically. When you take a look at all the different components, they add up to a higher cost of living in the last year. Not a lot, but it's not falling. So, do you think it's the consumers who are going to bail us out?

[00:19:36]If it wasn't for people in the top 10% of the economy spending money, we'd already be in a recession. And that is much different than in the past where you had 30 to 40% of the population that supported us in a way that kept us out of recessions. We are so narrowly supported at this point that you literally have 90% of the population that can barely do anything without sacrificing something else, usually their potential retirement. Or they take on a lot of credit card debt, which is at a record high. This chart right here, every time the gains in the stock market are this concentrated, there has been a crash all over the world. Not saying it's going to happen, but it seems like the odds are pretty high. If I'm broadly bearish on the economy and the stock market, particularly the large caps, all right? I keep telling you the large caps are the place to be careful. The small caps and the micro caps, the mid caps, can't think of them as a group. You have to think about each and every company individually and whether or not their catalysts are going to create a low beta. What's a low beta? Just a less correlated to the broader market. So, the S&P 500 sets the bar for correlation. That's why the beta for a spy is one. Now, a stock with a beta of 1.5 much more volatile, and a stock with a beta of 0.5 is much less volatile.

[00:20:58]And some stocks will have a negative beta, which means they actually do pretty well when the market gets beat up. Not many of those out there. But the smaller the company, the more driven it is just by their own business cuz less people are involved with it. There's less analysts, there's less investors, right? There's not a big sucking sound of money out of their stock price cuz the market goes bad. Most of the people who own a small mid-cap stock know the company. The indexes and the funds don't impact them very much, which is why I keep telling you, find a basket of small and mid-caps where you know these companies very well and you understand the catalysts that are coming so that even if the Magnificent Seven or the mega caps get blown up, you think to yourself, okay, that money didn't just evaporate. Somebody made all that money.

[00:21:47]And usually it's 10% taken from 90%.

[00:21:50]That's about how it works. The top 1 or 2% of traders making most of it. Well, they have to go out and invest their money somewhere else once they've made it. A lot of them will go out and buy small and mid-cap companies that are dirt cheap because they know when a recession hits and when stock market hits, what happens? This guy gets a lot of pressure from Congress to expand the Fed balance sheet, to print money. It happened during COVID.

[00:22:14]It wasn't just Jerome Powell who printed money. Congress told him to print money.

[00:22:19]There was actually a bill to basically enable them to print money in conjunction with the Treasury. President Trump signed it.

[00:22:26]Then Biden did one, too.

[00:22:28]Then Biden did another one. All roads lead to QE, but first we're going to get a crisis because that's what Worst believes. And at the end of the day, inflation comes back cuz they will print too much money and they won't do it the right way. The right way is to use the debt to fund Social Security and have it trickle back into the economy over 30 or 40 or 50 years, rather than having it all jam into the economy in 2 years and cause inflation. Why not offset the deflationary impact of aging cuz their spending goes down and everything filters through the medical system. Why not support the social security system by taking the US debt, jamming it into social security, and then having it paid off over a very long period of time, and only pay social security 2 or 3%?

[00:23:14]Theoretically, you can do that because that's in line with inflation. And then, if you're smart, you say, "Hey, we're going to take a quarter of the payroll taxes and buy the S&P 1500." I said that right. The large cap S&P 500, the mid cap 400, and the small cap 600. All profitable companies. That's how you get onto an S&P index is you have to be profitable. So, what if the US population started investing in the 1500 profitable companies, the biggest 1500 profitable companies? That would incentivize all the private companies to go public. And you get a better stock market because of it. You get more competition. The monopolies and oligopolies that have developed since 1981 will start to go away. Small business and mid-size business, which has always been the driver of employment in this country, would pick up. These are not just my ideas, right? I've just said, "Oh, yeah, that's a good idea. I'm going to adopt that one." I mean, I am a fairly original thinker, but I'm not that original. I just understand that there are ways to do things right, and we've been avoiding it for a pretty long time full Winston Churchill mode.

[00:24:18]Americans always get around to doing the things the right way, but after they've tried everything else. And what we're trying right now is to loot the country and bankrupt it. I have never been this strong on how bad things are about to get because I never thought we'd really get here. And then we voted for a guy who probably has about a 95 IQ. He's emotionally unstable. He worries about his dick being too small. We're in a bad, bad, bad place here right now. And I understand that I'm going to alienate some of you who say, "Well, I'm Republican." I I I I have lots of Republican friends. I voted for Republicans. I worked for a Republican. There's this guy named McKean that I worked for for a hot minute. Just telling you that's not what we have in office right now. We have criminals in office right now who are calling themselves Republicans. And that's enough to get a third of the votes, and then they just got to get 17% more by promising things that are irrational or playing on racism or whatever. If the Republicans wanted their party back, they'd vote for honest people. But, you know, that's tough. Because there are a lot of things that the Republicans used to stand for, even, you know, just going back to Newt Gingrich as only not that long ago, three decades. It actually made some sense. Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex. I would say that that has morphed into not just the military-industrial complex sucking money out of the US economy, but the finance class aided by politicians who are all on the take, you know, probably 80% of them, getting bought off. So, when I show you these charts and I intersperse it with the rhetoric of what people might think is ideology, really it's just math and not wanting to get ripped off. Understanding that, you know, I've been playing the game pretty well here for a decade. Yeah, I took me a long time to learn, get over what I wanted to be and just dealt with what is. I said, "Okay, let's just follow the numbers. Let's follow the money." And when you follow the money, charts like this really start to jump out at you.

[00:26:11]Where can you invest? I think this is one of the places, and I talked about it before. I really like Latin America long term. I like Brazil in particular, but probably want to be diversified across the region. Probably will use the ETF ILF again at some point, but the valuations in Brazil are pretty beat up.

[00:26:31]And I think that we might get a chance to buy Brazilian assets soon and cheap.

[00:26:36]But because the dollar is weak right now, what we want to see is a moment where the dollar gets strong. And if Kevin Warsh really starts to shrink the Fed balance sheet, that'll happen really fast. Take about 90 days. So, from the time Wurst was appointed to the time he stops doing the not QE QE, right? We talked about that last year that it was coming. And in December we got it. The Fed has been bailing out the repo market periodically in a way that has the impact of quantitative easing, but they don't call it quantitative easing. So, it's not QE, but it's QE. And the Fed balance sheet has actually gone up for the last few months. Basically, so that Powell didn't have to handle a crisis.

[00:27:16]Cuz he probably shouldn't have done it, but I don't think he wanted to deal with anything anything serious this last 6 months. Now he's out. Wurst will be approved next week, I think. He'll be in a week after that. So, when the dollar gets stronger, there will be a strong dollar moment before they come back to QE. And I don't know how long the crisis will last. On one of the charts I showed you earlier today, 6 to 18 months is usually how long it lasts. I would err on the side of shorter than longer because I don't think that they can hold off that long. So, I think temporarily you're going to get the money printer not going for. They'll cut interest rates. It won't have much impact. The people who support the deficit, your international investors are going to pull back just a few percent, just a few. They don't have to dump it all, just just stop buying as much, and the dollar will get much stronger because that'll mean a shortage of dollars around the world. And even though the rest of the world wants to use dollars a little bit less, they can't move that fast. So, you'll get a pinch. You get a choke point. Dollar gets stronger as prices come down. Again, will it happen this year? I think so, but I don't know that. You don't know until you start to see the Federal Reserve balance sheet start to roll over a little bit, and you start to see the US Treasury auctions under some stress. And that has happened a few times this year, but it hasn't been consistent yet. Next place. And we're going to finish up with this one, and then I'll take some questions. I have told you that I have started to buy the China tech fund. Just a little bit so far cuz I think that there might be one more wave to the downside with the Chinese investments, but I want to start dollar cost averaging in because I wasn't sure. I know we're closer to the bottom than the top. I just don't know if we're absolutely at the bottom.

[00:28:53]Teresa put a chart up into the chat room today or yesterday, and she showed exactly what I was talking about. So, I have sold some cash secured puts on KWEB, and I have bought a little bit of KWEB.

[00:29:06]The other fund that I want to own is TAN, the Invesco Solar ETF, cuz that also has China exposure, and it is second fastest growing industry on the planet, I think. If it's not second, it's third. Solar is the no-brainer answer for the amount of electricity that we need. I had a McKinsey report that I'm not going to show, but they have a chart uh if you get a chance, go to rethink. I know I'm looking away, so I'm looking at another screen. The McKinsey & Company report, Rethink: Global Infrastructure's Inflection Point. Look for that report.

[00:29:38]And you'll see that over the last decade up until last year, spending on infrastructure had actually shrunk for electricity. So, electrical infrastructure shrunk for a decade.

[00:29:48]Think that through. And now suddenly has a growth rate year over year of over 20%. Constrained only by the fact they can't get all the parts. Can't get the transformers. Can't get all the things that they need to build out the grid, and they don't have the people to install it any faster. I have friends that work for the companies that are doing the construction for Wisconsin Electric and some of the other utilities in the Midwest, and they're telling me that they don't have five-year backlogs. They don't have 10-year backlogs. They have 15-year backlogs for upgrading the grid.

[00:30:20]Unless a whole bunch of 15-year-olds start to become, you know, electricians, it's not going to happen fast. Nuclear is not an answer. The small modular reactors are a joke. China, why did I bring that up with China? They're the world leader in solar and batteries, along with Korea. So, what you're going to see is countries all over the world are going to say, you know, we don't like the United States much more than we don't like China, right? We don't like either one right now. So, we're just going to go where the product is good and cheap. And right now, China has us on cheap on the solar, maybe even a little bit better on the technology, not quite as good, but quite a bit cheaper.

[00:30:58]So, between Chinese renewable energy assets and Chinese tech assets, I think Donald Trump has opened up the world to their markets. And the valuations are low on the tech side. And if we get a strong dollar moment, they'll get your retrace on TAN, and you'll want to buy TAN. So, keep an eye for out for the signal. We'll put the charts up. We'll tell you when it's time.

[00:31:19]But for right now, I do think that if you want to have 20 or 30% of your money in international assets, which you should long-term, Americans don't, but realistically, you should have 20 to 30% of your money regularly international.

[00:31:33]And given the mess that we've got ourselves into and the fact that we probably won't fix it right the first time, that the whole process is probably going to play out over 8 or 12 or 15 or 20 years, and it's going to take some time.

[00:31:44]You know, you're going to get your spots. In the meantime, you pick out your small and mid-cap stocks that have catalysts that are going to overcome the economy cuz their market is that good.

[00:31:53]Stock that I'm pitching in the George Noble conference is that kind of stock.

[00:31:56]It's not something the economy really impacts. One change in legislation and how their particular product is scheduled, right? A product that's been around forever, suddenly all the companies become better off. And the company that I'm investing in rents real estate all of them. All right, questions and answers. Debt growth exceeds GDP growth. Yes, that was the point I was making earlier. That's been true since 2008. And it's it's worse now. So, I will provide the chart book. I know that it wasn't super easy to read. Kind of the point. Want people to sign up and get the chart book. Any other questions before we call it a night and watch NBA basketball? Cuz this is the only time of the year that you really should. Somebody asked what the background was again. That's uh Blue Mound State Park. This is from a bluff on the east side of the park where I took my kids a long time ago. This is about a 20-year image from a very early No, actually I think I actually had a camera. But this is a picture.

[00:32:58]There.

[00:32:59]So, I have the winding road there cuz I think the winding road is a good analogy for what we do. I love this picture. I took it. There's probably a hundred like it on the internet, but this is I took this one. I think it's been copied. I think people have just stolen the picture. I don't care. What other questions do we have? Go Pistons, yeah.

[00:33:16]One of my uh very good friends is a huge Pistons fan. He drove out to the first game, Orlando versus Detroit, when they lost. Oh, was he sad. I just texted him at the end of uh game seven against Orlando. I said, "Looks like they woke up." He goes, "Yeah, thank goodness."

[00:33:31]Detroit's a good team, man. I tell you what, Cade Cunningham, oh man, is he a player. He is a player. All right, that's it. Time for basketball.

[00:33:38]Uh Jolene is celebrating her birthday this weekend without me.

[00:33:43]Uh just kidding. She'll be back on her birthday, but I set her up and a half a dozen of her friends at a at a spa and hotel. So, for next 3 days I get to work. Although, I am going to hang out with Dominic on Friday afternoon. So, all right, everybody.

[00:33:57]Have a good uh night and I hope I wasn't too overbearing, but at some point the right ends.

[00:34:04]And Kevin Warsh might be the inflection point.

[00:34:08]Have a good one.