MICHAEL SHEDLOCK | from MishTalk

What does Austria have to do with economics and why should investors be keeping an eye on the macroeconomic weather radar? I'm joined today by Michael Shedlock from Mishtalk to look at the tidal forces of the Financial System and how they can affect our investments. Michael or Mish Shedlock is a highly acclaimed macro economic writer who typically posts several articles a day on his Mishtalk website, he talks about interest rates, central bank policy, gold and precious metals, jobs, and economic reports typically from an Austrian economic perspective.

He's also a wonderful photographer check out his work here.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Chloe (1s):

Stocks for Beginners, Phil, Muscatello and FinPods are authorized Reps of MoneySherpa. The information in this podcast is general in nature and doesn't take into account your personal situation.

And if somehow the Fed accidentally tips attitudes into this range where consumers all of a sudden just decide to go on a buyer's strike of everything and that happened in 2007, then we are headed for a long and nasty recession. And the problem the Fed faces is they won't exactly be able to step on the gas pedal and lower rates for fear of blowing even bigger bubbles in housing and the stock market. So the Fed is in a very tight spot. So it's kind of no wonder they keep promising this nirvana that they do. It's more of a hope than anything else. You know. Do they really believe it or is this the attitude that they want people to believe?

Phil (36s):

Hi and welcome back to Stocks for Beginners. I'm Phil Muscatello. What does Austria have to do with economics and why should Investors be keeping an eye on the macroeconomic weather radar? I'm joined today by Michael Mish Shedlock from Mish Talk to look at the title forces of the Financial System and how they can affect our investments. Hello, Michael.

Mish (58s):

Hey, it's a pleasure to be on the show. I, I really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you.

Phil (1m 3s):

Thanks for coming on. Michael or Mish Shedlock is a highly acclaimed macro economic writer who typically posts several articles a day on his Mish Talk website, he talks about interest rates, central bank policy, gold and precious metals, jobs, and economic reports typically from an Austrian economic perspective. Now, this is something a lot of people don't know about, that there is actually a school of economics called Austrian, and it's not to do with a schnitzel index by any means. Is it?

Mish (1m 34s):

The Austrian economic view is that the economy is determined by the decisions of individuals to spend money now in the future. And how it's interesting here, I'm reading a description from in Investopedia and it says that the Austrian school holds interest rates are determined by the decision of individuals. Well, ideally that should be the case, but unfortunately we have a bunch of central bank planners across the world who think that they are wizards enough to be able to determine what the right interest rate should be.

Mish (2m 19s):

The Austrian view would be that this should be left up to the market. It certainly isn't right now, and that is one of the reasons why we have such a big mess going through these enormous boom bust cycles of increasing magnitude because the wizards think they know how to set economic policy and they don't. That's,

Phil (2m 48s):

That's really interesting to hear that description of Austrian economic, is it Friedrich Hayek is seen as being one of the the progenitors of this?

Mish (2m 56s):

Yes, I listened to or read Hayek Mises, Rothbard You know some people have a favorite one over the other. Rothbard has a number of books out there and you can pick them up for free actually off the Mises Institute. One of 'em is called What has the Fed done to us essentially is what it amounts to. I don't remember the exact title, but there's a number of them by Rothbard that are free on mises.org. And I would recommend people interested in this school of thought to look at that free literature and take a look at it.

Phil (3m 36s):

And some listeners may remember Milton Friedman in the eighties during the Reagan administration and he was one of the disciples of this school of economics. He's since also been a bit discredited.

Mish (3m 48s):

He's been a little bit discredited and a lot of it has to do with his view of monetary velocity. Milton Friedman came out with an equation that you could determine interest rates and policy by looking at velocity. The problem with his formula was that it assumed that velocity was either a constant or a near constant and it wasn't. And people make all kinds of errors reading You know where inflation is headed on the assumption that velocity is a constant.

Mish (4m 31s):

Now they realize that it's not a constant, but unfortunately his equation makes it an implied constant. And few people take that into consideration when they look at, oh my God, look at all the money that the Fed is printing here. And they looked at QE and they thought inflation was going to soar. Inflation didn't soar until it was the free money handout from Congress to under President Trump. A huge one, totally unwanted under President Biden. For the record, I don't like either of them. Neither of them is fiscally conservative.

Mish (5m 14s):

Both of them interfered in the markets. Trump wanted the Fed to cut rates. He wanted a bigger stimulus than what he got. And when we got this big stimulus under Biden, that's when inflation took off, not because of what QE did, at least as far as it comes to figuring consumer inflation.

Phil (5m 36s):

But to give Milton Friedman his due, he did point out that the only thing that does cause inflation is the amount of money that comes out of government printers or it's not printers these days, it's more of an accounting bookkeeping situation. But he was right in that, isn't it? It's really, that is the only lever that can be pulled to stimulate inflation. Is that correct?

Mish (5m 58s):

I think so. I mean the, let's give you the formula of velocity so we can You know, talk about it. It's velocity is GDP divided by money supply. It's actually velocity equals the number of transactions times the price, which equates to GDP divided by money supply. The thing about velocity is it's an output. It's not an independent variable. It can't be measured on its own accord. It's defined as those two. And when Friedman put that together, he thought velocity was constant. If velocity was constant, then a lot of the assumptions that people made when the Fed did all of this QE and soared the money supply and this went on from 2012 to 2020 before it was ever a problem.

Mish (6m 49s):

And this also gets into some other issues. You know, how do we measure inflation? The Fed and all the economists measure inflation by looking at PCE, which is a measure of personal consumption expenditures. Or most analysts look at the CPI, which is Consumer Price Index. The problem with both of them is the run. It's hard enough to say we can even measure them in the first place. I don't believe we can, at least not accurately. But the best example I can give is both equations do not have housing prices directly in them.

Mish (7m 35s):

They do have rent in them but not housing prices. And the reason why they exclude them is on the basis that home prices are a capital expense, not a personal expense. My counterargument is so what? What is it that matters? Inflation matters not just consumer inflation. So this leads to all sorts of errors like the Taylor Rule and the Phillips Curve and all these other kinds of things that make predictions based of consumer prices. When it's not consumer prices that matter, it's inflation that matters.

Mish (8m 16s):

The Fed had loose money too big, too long, twice, at least twice. The first one blew the housing bubble and we had a crash they ignored as inflation, huge rises in the price of housing. The Fed did it again the second time holding interest rates too low, too long, zero. Even after inflation had started to spike, they kept their quantitative easing program increasing the money supply home prices soared out of sight. The Fed finally realized it made a mistake and started cutting interest rates.

Mish (8m 58s):

All that inflation was baked in the cake, especially when we had these three rounds of fiscal stimulus coming from Congress. And on top of that, Biden had all these rent abatement policies. A lot of renters didn't pay their rent, they took this money, they spent it on, well, literally anything. We had student loans that were halted. Those students kept that money and spent that. And on top of it we had the supply chain shocks from Covid. All three of those soared interest rates caused the measure of inflation to soar to the most since like 1972 or something like that.

Mish (9m 47s):

And the Fed never saw it coming. They never issued a error statement. They never said we were wrong. The Bernanke Fed didn't say they were wrong. The Fed never apologizes for any of its mistakes and those mistakes are still ongoing. Now, the only thing the Fed said today and this FOMC meeting today, the Fed held rates constant and about the only thing they said that made any sense is essentially we don't know what's going on. And at least that was an honest statement, but you won't hear the media phrase it that way, but you will hear me say it that way.

Mish (10m 30s):

They're talking about uncertainty. This, that well, would the free market have done any worse than the Fed in blowing the last two economic bubbles we've seen? I highly doubt it. That's the problem with a bunch of economic wizards who don't know what they're doing, setting interest rate policy. It's like if Russia announced tomorrow that they were going to set the price of orange juice and recall that Russia did do this, they had all of these targets for how much steel should be produced, how much wheat should be produced, how much whatever should be produced, and what the prices of those would be.

Mish (11m 11s):

Well, I would tell you that it's probably a lot easier to set the price of orange juice than to set the price of interest at a rate that is going to keep the economy on an even keel without causing an inflationary boom or a recession. So we don't know. We can't say for sure what the market would've done, but I hazard a guess. It wouldn't have done any worse on its own accord than having a bunch of wizards try and set interest rate policy. And it's happening not in the United States. It happened in Japan, it happens in China, happens in Europe with the ECB where they actually had negative interest rates for a number of years as if you can, it makes any sense at all to pay people money, to borrow money you, you earn negative interest on your money deposited.

Mish (12m 12s):

They were trying, the ECB was trying to stimulate bank lending but didn't stimulate anything because these guys don't know how the economy works. Wow.

Phil (12m 23s):

It's such a bracing view. And we're talking today on September 20, which is, and it's just after Jerome Powell has made his FOMC speech. So let's talk about that a little bit. And I, just wanna put this a little bit in the, the context in that markets seem to have a very pollyannaish view that we're going to have some sort of soft landing that's been successfully engineered by these people in central banks. So tell us a little bit more about what Jerome Powell said today and your view on it.

Mish (12m 53s):

It was actually an interesting FOMC statement for a change. Mostly they put a boiler plate out there that's the same month after month after month. This one, the market perceived as hawkish. I read it as hawkish. Here's a couple of statements in their statement. Powell said, inflation remains elevated. You know I I would agree with that. He said Tighter credit conditions for household and businesses are likely to weigh on economic activity, hiring and inflation. And I would agree with that. He said the extent of these effects remain uncertain.

Mish (13m 35s):

I would agree with that. The committee remains highly attentive to inflation risks. And I would agree with that. So I agree with all of those statements, but they were true. At any point in time, the Fed has been quite confident on where the economy was going, where interest rates should be. And you should recall just going back to even 2019, four years ago, every one of the members of the Fed, the Fed presidents and chairs were worried that inflation was too low because they didn't know how to measure it.

Mish (14m 16s):

They weren't looking at housing prices and that they wanted to make up for lost inflation, lost inflation. They wanted to make up for the lack of inflation. Well, it's pretty clear now that they made up for the lack of inflation in spades and now they have the counter problem. This all stems from the fact that they didn't know how to measure inflation in the first place. They failed to look at asset bubbles and they failed to look at housing prices twice. So they blew economic bubbles by not understanding what inflation is.

Mish (14m 57s):

And meanwhile they claim to be inflation fighters without even knowing what it's, but my take on the FOMC meeting was these statements, those four that I just read to you is a warning shot about uncertainty and that it's a clear warning shot that the fed's going to hike more if warranted. And what happened? I did an analysis, I've not published it yet here. The market had been expecting a lot of rate cuts priced in for next year. Well, Powell did what he wanted to do. The market expectation which has actually been marching higher all year was for higher for longer.

Mish (15m 42s):

And if we look at policies from Biden administration, I think we have another hike coming at least. I

Phil (15m 52s):

Think one of the interesting things that he said as well was that I'm paraphrasing, but he suggested people should be investing in Bitcoin in gold, in silver, and in real estate. This is quite an extraordinary statement to make, isn't it?

Mish (16m 6s):

It's hard to know what to do with this actually because of actually something the Fed said, And I could see. We've got a strike going on from the U A w, we don't know the impact of that. And let's just discuss the next election. There's going to be a huge difference between who wins. And I'm telling you, I don't know how to handicap this right now and neither do the markets. Trump versus Biden is about 50 50. That's You know what the markets seem to say. There's not enough information right now or dispute that one way or another. But the economic policies from Biden are absolutely horrendous.

Mish (16m 50s):

He's pushing unions, which is inflationary. His energy policy is totally maddening. We don't have infrastructure in place to handle all of the EVs that he wants everyone to buy. Where we get all of the minerals needed to make batteries certainly is uncertain. Some of the minerals come from places like Indonesia that are now talking about export controls. About 80 to 90% actually of of the manufactured minerals that we need. Rare earth elements that we need to produce cell phones, guidance systems in the military, magnets, EVs for cars, all of that stuff is produced in China.

Mish (17m 37s):

And we have a monster trade war with China right now that both Trump and Biden have maintained, Biden even escalated it. And if Trump were to win, I'm quite certain he is going to roll back all of this ev madness. Now EVs are coming. So when I say madness it it's just, I mean they're, we're forcing EVs down people's throats before they're ready for 'em. EVs are quite fine for somebody who only wants to drive around in the city. But as soon as you want to go and you have fears about being trapped out in the desert or wherever, getting from place A to place B on vacation, you have to all of a sudden be worried about where you're going to charge your car, where you're gonna find it.

Mish (18m 30s):

Some recent studies show 25% of the locations that claim they have these car charges for batteries don't work at all. Why anyone would want to put up with that unless they don't ever drive anywhere is beyond Maine. And the infrastructure is certainly not in place. All of that is highly inflationary. We're gonna need more deficit spending to build the infrastructure. We're pushing people via subsidies into EVs that they don't want right now. We're going to pay the unions something to produce them, even though it takes fewer people to produce an EV because there's only 10 moving parts to an electric motor and there's 2000 parts to an internal combustion engine.

Mish (19m 18s):

Now You know these things are good and we're going to get to EVs over time, but when you push them, when we don't have the supply of minerals, we don't have the infrastructure and we're in a trade war for China, all I can do is look at that up and see inflation, inflation and more inflation. So You know who's gonna win the election in 2024, I don't know. And what happens in the meantime? We could have a strike that's crippling. Attitudes can change at any time. No one knows what attitudes are going to be. I called it right in the housing bubble exactly on time, but we don't know what's gonna happen.

Mish (20m 2s):

And the housing bubble in 2007 was quite interesting. We went from people standing outside of condo developments for the right to enter a lottery, to buy a condo to no lines and no one wanting any condos one month later. That's how fast attitudes can change. And if somehow the Fed accidentally tips attitudes into this range where consumers all of a sudden just decide to go on a buyer's strike of everything and that happened in 2007, then we are headed for a long and nasty recession.

Mish (20m 48s):

And the problem the Fed faces is they won't exactly be able to step on the gas pedal and lower rates for fear of blowing even bigger bubbles in housing and the stock market. So the Fed is in a very tight spot. So it's kind of no wonder they keep promising this nirvana that they do. It's more of a hope than anything else. You know. Do they really believe it or is this the attitude that they want people to believe?

Phil (21m 25s):

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Phil (22m 7s):

That's five zero. By using this promo code. You can subscribe for six months for only a hundred dollars or check it out for a month for only $25. That's deep knowledge investing.com and use the promo code Stocks for Beginners 50 by using this code. You'll be helping to support this podcast, deep Knowledge Investing, helping you to beat the market. Do you think that there will ever be an urge to change the way government deals with money? Because at the moment there is no incentive for a government not to print money. If a policy was suggested by a government, but a alongside of it, it said, well, okay, are you willing for us to use your taxpayer dollars to pay for this program?

Phil (22m 59s):

You would get a very different answer to one where the government can just simply print the money and there's no responsibility, no consequences.

Mish (23m 8s):

That gets at the heart of the debate foreign against Bitcoin. Now doesn't it the true believers in Bitcoin believe that Bitcoin is money? Well, it's not right now for a whole number of reasons, but they think that countries are going to You know turn to Bitcoin because they don't have any other alternative. I don't think that Bitcoin will ever be adopted as money by any major central bank or any major government simply because they do not want to give over control of money supply to an algorithm.

Mish (23m 52s):

They all want to print at will. This is what happened when Nixon in August of 1971, took the US, killed the last VS of a gold standard by taking the US off of the gold standard. We got into a debate with, not a debate, but an argument with France and John Conley, Nixon's Secretary of State told France, it's our money supply, but your problem exactly like that. Well that unleashed a situation where everyone followed suit and now central banks have the ability to inflate at will and did.

Mish (24m 43s):

And they're not going to relinquish that to Bitcoin or anything else. I think we're headed for a major currency crisis. I've been saying this for a decade, unfortunately, I've never put a time on it. And. I never will put a time on it. It's pretty clear that we're heading to that point based off of what we've done and where we're going. But I hear all of this nonsensical talk of the US going into hyperinflation over what we're doing when virtually every central bank is doing the same kinds of things to the same degrees, manipulating money and and interest rate policy for whatever reason.

Mish (25m 29s):

So that automatically rules out hyperinflation. Hyperinflation is a complete collapse of currency where the currency in questions say the dollar goes to zero against everything else. How likely is the dollar going to go to zero against the Euro, against the Yen, against the Yuane when all of these countries have their own economic problems and China state owned enterprises, SOEs and demographic problems, all of that is actually worse than anything here that happened in the United States.

Mish (26m 9s):

They've got an imploding property bubble here right now. So to say, suggest that the US is gonna go to hyperinflation and Bitcoin is the only way out, is just simply wrong for all of those reasons.

Phil (26m 23s):

Should we talk about the R word for a moment? Recession. Oh,

Mish (26m 27s):

Recession. Do

Phil (26m 28s):

You think it's inevitable?

Mish (26m 30s):

I think we've we're in one and debated. We might be out of one. We won't know that until we see the next set of GDP numbers, but there's actually two sets of numbers and they're supposed to equal gross domestic product or GDP and gross domestic income. GDI are two measures of the exact same thing. Now unfortunately, if you look at the two of them, they are the widest apart in history. And the reason why they're supposed to match is you add up all the products that we produced and what we sold them at You know that results in income to individuals and companies, individuals as salary, corporate income to corporations.

Mish (27m 19s):

So You know income should match products. Now it seems to me that income is a little bit easier to measure than summing up all of the products produced and income. The last three quarters, gross domestic income annualized numbers were minus 3.3% minus 1.8%. And preliminary for the second quarter of 2002 plus 0.5. Now the GDP estimates, those were off the top of the GDI estimates were off the top of my head, but I'm, I'm certain they're accurate.

Mish (27m 59s):

Very, very impressive. DP numbers were something like plus 2.0, plus 2.8 and plus 2.1 You know those are not exact, but they're approximate. So we have income saying recession at least for the two quarters where we had negative and we had GDP that isn't anywhere close to it. So which one of those sets of numbers do you believe there's historically, when one goes back and look at economic turns, GDI produces a much better number and the Philadelphia Fed has an alternate number to either GDP or GDI.

Mish (28m 47s):

They call it GDP plus. It's probably really more like GDI plus because it's closer to gdi I, it's a blend of the two. But from what I can see weighed much more heavily to GDI. It's certainly not an average of those two. And dating all the way back to 1960 time GDP plus was negative for even one quarter, let alone two. The economy was either in recession or would head there within two quarters. There was one tiny instance where GDI went negative 0.1% that I'm ignoring, but that is a far better, far more accurate with no false signals measure of the state of the economy than things like the inverted yield curve and industrial production and all sorts of other numbers.

Mish (29m 51s):

You look at them and they give all kinds of false signals dating to 1960. This GDP plus has never issued a false signal and it's always been timely within two quarters. Now the thing one has to take into consideration here with this GDP plus is that GDI is often heavily revised. Now the last revision to GDI, however went from negative to deeper negative. So I think that tells me where things are going. And then the first measure of GDI for the second quarter of 2 0 2 3 went from something like 1.8% all the way down to 0.5%.

Mish (30m 42s):

So I think we need to watch and see where the next measure of GDI is. These numbers tend to converge over time, typically with revisions. And if you look at revisions in industrial production, if you look at revisions in jobs, you look at revisions in housing numbers, new home sales, almost all of these revisions lately have been negative. And that's another thing that you see around recessions, around You know economic turns. And it's the other way around. When we come out of recession, the numbers are tend to be understated and tend to be revised higher.

Mish (31m 25s):

So You know people look at the economy and say, gee, it was great, it was great, it was great. Look at all these jobs and say, well go, what's the revisions going to be and what are the incomes? And if you look at measures of full-time employment from the household survey, it's falling, it's really kind of amazing and there's a lot more part-time work. And if you look at that and you say, Hmm, okay, if the household survey is right and not the establishment survey, then that gives credence to the GDI look of things. And if you look at inflation adjusted spending, that's another topic.

Mish (32m 5s):

People say, oh my god, You know the consumer is really strong. And in a recent economic report, I I said, is the consumer really strong as inflation adjusted? Retail sales have hardly gone anywhere and chart card credit card usage is back near an all time high. So You know what do those measures say? Those measures say that the consumers struggling. And if you ask the consumer You know how they're doing. Consumer attitudes are certainly struggling. And Paul Krugman just came out and blamed that on negative news reports in the media. I'm sorry, I I I gotta laugh. I I don't, I don't buy it.

Phil (32m 46s):

Well, has eVet been right about anything?

Mish (32m 48s):

Oh yeah, certainly. I I've actually agreed with no one's ever perfectly right or wrong because then if they were, they they would be a perfect contrarian indicator. It's just as valuable if someone's always wrong about meaningful things as if someone's always right about meaningful things. I've actually agreed with Krugman about You know 20% of the time over time. So people have stopped following me and it's a sad state of affairs actually. People have You know as well. You know, I, I don't agree with your last post, so I'm gonna stop following you what You know, especially when it comes to politics. And three times in the same day, I've been accused of being extreme right and extreme left.

Mish (33m 30s):

Now obviously that's impossible.

Phil (33m 33s):

That's a badge of honor that however

Mish (33m 35s):

You know and it happens because, okay, you say something negative about Biden, well You know you're a M A G, a extreme Trump fan and you say something bad about Trump. You know you. Well You know you have Trump derangement Center You know you're extreme left. I told you before, I don't like any of 'em because none of them are fiscally conservative. They all wanna spend more money somewhere. The Republicans wanna spend more money on military and they even go and and to get that this is the way Washington works. We'll spend more on this and return for more on that. And so the compromise in Washington is as it always is, Republicans get more money for military spending in turn for more money for social spending from Democrats.

Mish (34m 24s):

The Republicans only want to be fiscally responsible when they're not in control. They wanna blame it on the Democrats and the Democrats never wanna be fiscally conservative. But the result is we're never fiscally conservative because the Republicans never want it when they're in total control of everything. So we can expect deficit spending as far as the eye can see.

Phil (34m 53s):

So I've met you, we were introduced by Gary Brode from Deep Knowledge Investing and he's a regular guest on the podcast and good friend of the podcast and you're on the board of advisors of D K I. Tell us about your role there.

Mish (35m 6s):

I appreciate that from Gary and actually my understanding is he reached out to you to invite me on this show, And I. Appreciate that from both of you. And Gary's a very bright guy. We see things a little bit different about Bitcoin and that's okay. He sees an arbitrage opportunity right now based off of what the SEC is doing and they're probably going to be forced to allow a Bitcoin ETF and that's certainly You know quite possible. And it's also possible that I'm wrong about where Bitcoin is ultimately headed.

Mish (35m 47s):

So this is the kind of discussion that You know you throw out there in a post and people stop reading you for when You know Gary And I did a recent podcast on this and we just calmly talked through, we each had our point of view. And I agree that there's an arbitrage opportunity. I do think that the SEC had no business stopping the Bitcoin ETF from getting out there. We both agree that most of these all coins are total trash and we should stay away from them. You know our disagreement is You. know the future of Bitcoin.

Mish (36m 28s):

And I gave you my view that if that no central bank or government's ever going to adopt it, and this is where I disagree with most of the Bitcoin crowd is I think that governments actually can squash it. And if the Fed or government came out flat out and Bitcoin conversion to fiat, in other words, you could not sell your Bitcoin and buy anything with it at stores, guess what would happen to it? The Bitcoin crowd tells me, well, we still have our Bitcoin And. I say, yes, that is correct. You still have your Bitcoin, but what is it worth if you can't trade it in?

Mish (37m 12s):

Because if the Fed said no Bitcoin transactions at US merchants, guess what? There wouldn't be any. And the fundamental flaw of Bitcoin is that it requires conversion to fiat to do anything with it. Now people tell me I'm wrong about that. People will say, well no, I can buy things directly with Bitcoin. No, you're not. In 99.99% of the time, you're only buying something directly with Bitcoin, with true barter as if you went on, let's say Amazon took Bitcoin for some reason and you could buy stuff on Amazon with Bitcoin.

Mish (37m 56s):

Amazon is not going to hold Bitcoin. They hold US dollars. People in Europe are going to hold. Merchants in Europe are going to hold Euros. They have to pay their bills and they have to pay their taxes in Euros in Europe and in the US it's dollars. So until that cycle is broken, Bitcoin requires conversion to fiat. It's the vulnerability to Bitcoin is that conversion either stops or is simply taxed to death. So I always thought wrongly, actually And I was wrong, that governments would act on Bitcoin before they did and they haven't.

Mish (38m 47s):

And now I think they won't. So what does that mean for Bitcoin? Well, governments will act if they feel threatened. If the price of Bitcoin never gets high enough, then they won't act. So I'm wondering if Bitcoin just kind of stabilizes here, floats down or goes up and down in a range, maybe goes back up and back up to 64,000 and falls back to 30,000, the more stable it is, the less threatened governments are by it. But in turn, that takes these million dollar projections and you can throw them out the window. Anyway, these are the kinds of things that Gary And, I can discuss and we do on our podcasts without anyone getting bent outta shape.

Mish (39m 33s):

Because You know they don't agree with us. And you see too much of that on Twitter where people stop reading other people. They're in this mindset of their looking for reinforcement of their own ideas and don't want any others. And that's what we're discussing here. Now, I said, You know I don't like Trump, I don't like Biden. I gave you my reasons why I don't like either of them, but as soon as you say that on Twitter or in a podcast, I'm sure I've offended some of the listeners of this audience. Either on Bitcoin, on Biden or on Trump.

Phil (40m 12s):

We love equal opportunity offense. Mish,

Mish (40m 16s):

I'm an equal opportunity bashier.

Phil (40m 19s):

So mish, tell us about Mish Talk Your your blog, which I've been really enjoying reading over the last couple of days.

Mish (40m 25s):

I started it in 2003. The title then was Mission's Global Economic Trend Analysis. I started out on blogger and believe it or not, I have written at least one post every day, 365 days a year since March of 2003 on something. Now Christmas might have just been Merry Christmas, new Year's might have been Happy New Year with maybe some pictures of fireworks display. But I've been doing this nonstop 24, 355 or 356 days a year. However it may be since 2003.

Mish (41m 7s):

My best claim to fame, I think on all of this, every year at the New York Times comes out with their 10 best ideas of the year. It could be ideas on anything, healthcare, education, science, anything. Their number one idea of the year for 2009 was called Do It Yourself Macroeconomics. It was about people who called the stock market better than any of the economists did. And I was named along with two other bloggers by name Calculated Risk. His real name is Dave McBride and Barry Ritholtz. So Barry Ritholtz, me and Calculated Risk were named in the number one idea of the year for our economic blogging and I'm still at it.

Phil (41m 51s):

And the the web address is mishtalk.com, is that correct?

Mish (41m 55s):

It is, yes. mishtalk.com. By the way, if I can give myself another plug, I, I've got a, a photography blog. I believe I have world class photography. It's another one of my passions. Please check out mish moments, mishmoments with an ss mish moments.com if you wanna see some really spectacular photography images. And there's a section on top. The link I just gave you will take you to my homepage, which is my stuff for sale. But if you want to see what I write about, I tell people how I took the shots I did, where to go, when to be there, time of day, all the conditions, what lenses I used. If you click on the menu, there's a M's articles, And I, discuss in detail how I got all the pictures that I got.

Mish (42m 41s):

So please check out mishmoments.com in addition to mish talk.com.

Phil (42m 47s):

Fantastic. Well, we'll put all the links in the blog post in the episode notes. So mish, thank you so much for joining me today. I've got so many more economic questions I wanna ask you, so we'll have to get you back on again.

Mish (42m 58s):

I I, I think I talked too much, so I hope this wasn't too long. But anyway, I enjoyed being on the show and you might want to get Gary back in. He's a great guy, And I. Certainly appreciate the fact that he introduced me to you.

Phil (43m 12s):

We can't keep him off the podcast. Ishish, thank you very much.

Mish (43m 17s):

Thanks. My pleasure.

Chloe (43m 18s):

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