Joel Bowman and Bill Bonner discuss How Economic Policies Are Eroding Two Millennia of Progress

“I've come to see only late in life that the whole idea of democratic government is a fraud, really. That it doesn't work and it never did work and the ancient Greeks told us it wouldn't work and they were right.” ~ Bill Bonner

TRANSCRIPT

Joel Bowman:
Welcome to the Bonner Private Research Podcast. I'm your host, Joel Bowman. Each week we bring you exclusive conversations with members of Bill Bonner's private research team, as well as some special guests we'll meet along the way. We're trying to connect the dots from high finance to lowly politics, private investments, to public follies, from Wall Street to Main Street, at home and on the road. We're into sound money, personal freedom, classical books, and great wines, not always in that order. So join me and the rest of the Bonner Private Research team as we pack our bags and follow the money.

Bill Bonner has penned millions of words since he started opining about money, politics and that fascinating nexus where the twain do twine back in the 1970s. His missives are translated into multiple languages and reach millions of readers around the world daily, folks who look to Bill to try and make sense of the upside down, back to front world they find themselves living in. Where big gov runs up trillions of dollars in debt annually, but insists on its agents monitoring every private transaction of $600 or less. Where people are paid stimmy checks to sit on the couch while the working man's wage has gone nowhere in the last 30 odd years. And where the miserable failures of 20th century collectivism are now held up as beacons of ingenuity for us all to follow into the future.

Over his four decades in the idea business, Bill has launched dozens of businesses in countries as far flung as Brazil, Australia, China, the UK, France, Nicaragua, South Africa, and of course, down here in Argentina, where Bill spends part of his year up on his ranch in Salta. A true citizen of the world, Bill sees both America's past and her future in terms of geography. What's coming, he reckons, is Japan like deflation in the stock and bond markets followed by Argentina style money printing, and the rampant inflation that inevitably follows such folly. Bill was kind enough to share an hour of his busy schedule with us earlier in the week. The two of us talked about everything from vaccine mandates to USSR style central banking, coming soon to the USA, to how to destroy 2000 years of progress in a single generation. All that, and plenty more my conversation with Bill Bonner up next.

Joel Bowman:
Mate, where are you? Are you at your farm or?

Bill Bonner:
Yeah, I'm down in the country in Maryland.

Joel Bowman:
Oh, okay. You had the big wedding, what was it a week ago?

Bill Bonner:
Two weeks ago. Almost two weeks ago. Yeah, that was a big, big event. They take a lot of preparation. And you have a daughter, so you can start saving for it now.

Joel Bowman:
Yeah. Any words of advice? I've maybe got 20 years or something to save my pennies.

Bill Bonner:
Yeah, I think that's probably the only advice.

Joel Bowman:
The only advice we'll put on record.

Bill Bonner:
Ask her to elope.

Joel Bowman:
Right. So I've been reading your diaries as usual. Are you planning a literal tour down to the Pampas or is this just an intellectual exercise to see where we go from here.

Bill Bonner:
No, this is an intellectual thing. I am going to the Pampas, but not until next year.

Joel Bowman:
Oh, okay. So we'll have to organize a bit of a catch up when you get down here.

Bill Bonner:
I'm enjoy the Pampas news, I guess that's the point. There's a lot going on in Argentina right now, and it's kind of fascinating to see how it plays out.

Joel Bowman:
Yeah. Never a dull day down here in Argentina.

Bill Bonner:
No, not a dull day.

Joel Bowman:
I remember we spent the last four and a half or so months up in the US hearing people complaining about whatever the official inflation rate was, four and a half, five and a half percent, something like that, and saying, "Well, you ain't seen nothing yet. Wait till we get to 50%."

Bill Bonner:
It's amazing how well people adapt to it. You'd think that a currency that loses half its value every year means in two years, you're wiped out. You would think, how can you do businesses in such a place? But the Argentines are so well equipped for that. I think they do math in their heads much faster than American do.

Joel Bowman:
Yeah. Well even the shopkeeper has to update his price twice before lunch on the cash register. So one of the ongoing themes that we've been, I guess, investigating in this podcast with yourself and Dan and Chris Mayer, who I spoke to just last week, was this idea that at over the past 18 months or so during this big black plague that has beset the world, we've seen an acceleration of lots of trends that were already in motion. These trends aren't new. When we look at things like government surveillance and snooping, or borrowing and spending, or even the trends toward people sort of migrating professionally online or into the so-called Zoom towns and that kind of stuff. But one of the things that you've been writing a bit about lately, and that seem to have gone into just real hyper-drive, is that trend I mentioned just now, borrowing and spending. And we would've seen just this week that the house of representatives passed an approval to raise the debt limit by, whatever, half a trillion dollars or 480 billion, whatever it was. You have described what you think the fallout of that is likely to be as first stop Tokyo, second stop Buenos Aires. Do you want to elaborate a bit?

Bill Bonner:
Well, I've been wrong about a lot of things, and wrong about that too, because I kind of saw that coming in the year 2000. And it hasn't played out like that, but the US market has been much more receptive to money pumping because of lots of things are going on. It's the reserve currency of the world, people want to buy into the US, they want US bonds, they want US dollars. Japan is a much more ice study case. But in any case, what the point of that was two decades ago that I saw the US following basically the Japanese model, big boom, big bust. And it didn't quite work out that way, but it did generally, because the US economy slowed down. And now the growth rate in the US economy over the last 10 years is about half of what it was before in the 1990s, 1980s and so on, even less if you go back to the '60s and '70s.

So we've seen the slow down like Japan, but what we haven't seen is the market reaction. In Japan, stocks went down 80% after the bust in 1989. And since then, never recovered, they're still down like 50%. It's just been a terrible time for a Japanese investors. We haven't seen that, and I suspect we haven't seen it simply because of the status of the US, the size of its market, the way in which people are programmed to believe that stocks never go down in America. But I think we will. And I think the first stop on this tour is probably still Japan, where a crash occurs and it occurs because we're at the crash level that always occurs. Stocks go up and then they go down, they can't go up forever.

So when we see that, most likely we're going to see a lot of wailing and a gnashing of teeth as people worry about the country going down the tubes. But it's already going down the tubes, it's just going down the tubes in a different way. So what will happen, most likely, is at this period of deflation, because that's what happens as the primary beneficiary of US inflation, and that inflation took the fed holdings from 400 billion in 1999 to 8.4 trillion, that's inflation. And that inflation has gone mostly into the stock market, which is up like 30 trillion above what it was at that previous level. So what we're seeing, that huge inflation typically followed by huge deflation. So we would expect the main deflation in the US market to occur in the stock and bond market. And I think that should be coming up as soon as somebody gets rattled by, as something happens, whatever. The fed could try to taper off of its funding. But in any case, probably something will happen. And then the stock market will crash.

But then what happens next is where we get to Argentina. And the Argentines have been through this so many times. It's like a 10 year cycle in Argentina where things go crazy. All of a sudden apartments are selling for huge prices. I remember I was in Argentina in the 1990s, I think it was, and it was more expensive than New York. And then I went back in like 2003 and it was so cheap, I couldn't believe it. We went out to a restaurant, about 12 of us, went to a restaurant, sort of an impromptu thing, and we all had steak and wine and salad and dessert and everything. And the waiter brought the bill, which I calculated that's about $25. So I went back to the waiter, I said, "I think you left a zero off of that." He said, "No, no, that's right."

But anyway, the Argentine's are very, very much accustomed to this sort of cycle. Americans are not, but we're going to see most likely an Argentine kind of response. And in the last few days, I've been taking headlines from Argentina and suggesting that those are probably headlines for the future. For example, there was one which was Argentine government spending more in advance of elections. Wow. I'd say that's a no brainer, that is going to happen in the US. And it went on to say that the Argentines were being reckless with their spending and it was going to cause inflation. But already the rates are 50%, so how much more inflation is it going to cause?

The other interesting thing is that Argentina's fiscal deficit is much, much lower than the US for a combination of reasons. But the main reason is that Argentina can't borrow money. Nobody going to lend any money to the Argentines. So either they print it, which everybody knows about, and everybody starts selling their pesos and selling their Argentine stocks. It's very painful for them now to print money, not to say they won't do it, but it's still very painful and very obvious. In the US, it's not painful or obvious, so they're printing a lot more money, and for the same reason, to buy votes, basically.

And so anyway, what I've been focusing on lately, and I think I've got an angle on it, or at least a way of explaining something, which is fairly interesting. And to understand how could it be, this was the question that met me this week was, how could it be? I was just looking out at the trees or something thinking, "Isn't this amazing?"

This is 2021. This is, since the birth of Christ, that's 2021 years of progress in which people have learned to make progress. They've learned what it takes to make progress. And the ones that didn't make progress have been left aside, they're wandering around the jungles of Amazonia or New Guinea or something. The people who have made progress know how to make progress. And they know what it takes to make progress. It takes hard work, saving property rights and all the other things that we know it takes to make progress. And by the way, in those 2,000 years, and especially in the last hundred years, there have been just a flowering of innovation, so that now we have all sorts of financial innovations, there are the cryptocurrencies, of course, and there are the hedge funds and so on. It's just amazing.

And so that now, if you start a company, you can borrow millions of dollars, usually very easy, very quickly. The markets are flush with cash, flush with investors who think they're going to make a lot of money on your next disruptive technology. So anyway, this whole tech technological thing is just huge. It's just technology, you can't keep up with it. You can't figure out how to do turn your car radio on anymore, it's got some kind of fancy thing on it. But the point of this is that in these 2,021 years, so much progress has happened, and so much clearly showing how to make progress. You know how many college graduates there are now in the science, in physics engineering, chemistry, and so on compared to a hundred years ago? Well, I don't either, but it's a big number. A lot of them are in China. Just a huge flowering of capital innovation, just unbelievable.

And so in the face of that, we used to see that growth rates are going down. And this latest innovation, the technological communications revolution where AI and all this stuff was supposed to make decisions so fluid and the data was available to everybody and they had all these guys programming computers, and yet growth rates have gone down. I don't don't know what to make of that either. But I think that's the question we have to be asking ourselves, how is it possible that with all these smart people working so hard, innovating, starting new businesses, entrepreneurs, geniuses at technology, and yet things not getting better?

And by the way, I'm not just talking about, say, GDP rates going down, that's not the only thing. You've probably noticed more than I how our world is getting smaller. Now it's harder, it's like driving on the freeway in Los Angeles, you used to be able to drive faster. Well, things haven't gotten better, they've gotten worse. And then about 10, 20 years ago, all of a sudden airline travel changed, and not for the better. Suddenly you had to stand in line to get frisked and all that sort of stuff. Didn't get better, it got worse. And now all these things like that, when we going to go to New York, I was going with a friend of mine, my friend is not vaccinated, we decided not to go because everything's closed to people who aren't vaccinated. So that put the kibosh on that. Our horizons are becoming more constrained.

And it's just the opposite, because, excuse me for going on so much, but the point I'm coming to is that one of the things that we learned over those 2,021 years since the birth of Christ, is that what makes progress is the ability of people to decide what to do themselves. It's that freedom, really. Because you only know progress when you see people choosing it. If you say, "Oh great, I've got a great invention. I've learned how to turn wine into water."

Joel Bowman:
Got to write a book about that.

Bill Bonner:
How much demand would be there be for that? None. Is that progress? It might be technological progress in the narrower sort, but it's not real progress because nobody wants to turn wine into water, they want to do it the other way around. That's the hard part.

Joel Bowman:
Right.

Bill Bonner:
So we found out over these thousands of years that people working as slaves were not as productive as people working as free people. And we found that businesses and enterprise is run by people who had skin in the game, who could create and keep their winnings, because we protected capital, we protected property rights, that was a much better system. We found out all that stuff. And then in the 20th century, humans, bless their hearts, ran three huge experiments. Three, they're sort of like back testing. And they did it in China, did it in Russian, and did it in Germany, in which three of the biggest economies in the world with the biggest populations, and Germany being the most enlightened, probably most civilized country in the world, ran these experiments back testing the whole proposition, where they decided, "Well, we're going to forget about those rules. We're going to forget about everything we've learned over the last 2000 years. Instead, we're going to tell people exactly what to do." And guess what happened? Well, they were all dismal failures. They were terrible failures, and they were judged failures by their own people completely by 1991 when the Soviet Union went out of business.

And so what did we learn? We know hat you need for progress. It's not a matter of conjecture anymore, it's pretty well settled. And yet, what we see happening is not only are GDP growth rates going down, but also the very thing that we need for human progress is being curtailed. We find ourselves being told what to do. We find camps of people arguing with each other, trying to get the other one to do something, when we know perfectly well, you're better off letting people decide for themselves. So anyway, that's what I see happening. And it helps me understand what I think is the way the world works and where it's headed.

Joel Bowman:
Well, you put a lot on the table there, I'll have to say. But let's start with the idea that we've had, through this process of trial and error and millions of different people with their own hopes and their own dreams, their own expectations and their own aspirations, just sort of tinkering around the edges, and over time making marginal improvements to the things that serve them or that they perceive serve them better. This takes a millennia, of course, as a kind of big macro process. And then we have on the other side, the other side of free people making decisions without coercion, on the other side we have another subject that is, I know, near and dear to your heart. We have, again, I hope I'm pronouncing this professor's name correctly, but I think it's Saule Omarova. She comes along and says, "Hold on a second. Don't worry about banking and usury laws and all the kinds of things that private citizens have spent hundreds of years, if not thousands of years, perfecting and molding into something that they feel serves them, she's going to come along and she is, as comptroller of the currency, she's going to top down tell everybody how it's going to be better and "end banking as we know it." What do we make of this?

Bill Bonner:
Right. Forget all those lessons learned by the Genoese bankers. Forget all those lessons by the bank of England over hundreds of years, and the bank of France, the whole south sea bubble, Mississippi bubble, forget all those lessons, she's got the truth. And by the way, where did she get the truth? The University of Moscow. She's a graduate of the University of Moscow. She's am immigrant to the United States from Kazakhstan.

Joel Bowman:
On a Lenin scholarship, I believe she attended the Moscow University.

Bill Bonner:
Something like that, yeah. The Lenin scholar.

Joel Bowman:
Yeah. I've just got one quote from her here because, I mean, we could do a whole episode just on the hubris of this particular individual. But she came out in the Financial Times today talking about how she's being unfairly targeted because she's a female and a minority, not because her ideas are terrible, but it has to have something to do with her gender and her race, not what's in her head ... or what's not in her head. But this is something, a snippet from a forthcoming Vanderbilt Law Review article in which Omarova envisions "an ultimate end state whereby the central bank accounts fully replace rather than compete with private bank deposits." So it doesn't sound like she's any kind of meet you halfway, mixed market kind of gal, this is all the way, my way or the highway.

Bill Bonner:
She's got the truth. And she, like her whole cast, are foreclosing our options, and they don't want us to have the option of taking our money and putting it into account at the PNC bank or into Bitcoin or whatever, it's got to go where she can keep an eye on it. And that's the whole drift of modern government, and it's a fascinating thing, because as we know, it is contrary to the whole concept of and the foundation of progress. You need people to compete. You need banks to compete in order to find which one will provide the best service. And her idea is to eliminate all the banks and make sure everybody is under control.

Joel Bowman:
So we have deposits, I guess, under her new USSR or USSA, whatever it is, federal reserve deposits. But this kind of dovetails into another story. And that's, the hypocrisy is really underscored when you see two stories next to each other in the newspaper or on the television. One's saying that the house of representatives has voted for, "Just increase spending another half trillion guys. That'll be fine." Seemingly, not seemingly, but extremely profligate with taxpayers' money, present and future taxpayers that is. But then on the other hand, they're very, very stingy when it comes to monitoring private citizens' money, down to 600 bucks, is apparently the latest transactional limit that they're going to be keeping an eye on. So how does that feed into the narrowing of our horizons in your estimation?

Bill Bonner:
Well, I, I think it's just part of the whole program. I've come to see only late in life that the whole idea of democratic government is a fraud, really. That it doesn't work and it never did work and the ancient Greeks told us it wouldn't work and they were right. It only works at a very small level. So if you have a town meeting in a small town in New England, then it works plausibly well. People can get together and they can vote on where to put the town dump, and they'll do pretty well with that. But it's like everything else, it's subject to the law of declining marginal utility. So the more people who vote, the less each vote is worth. And now in America, there have been many studies of this, the actual value of a vote in America's day is approximately zero, maybe less than zero if you take into account the work you have to do to do it.

But citizens don't control the government at all. The government is controlled by people like miss Ms. Omarova, who, by the way, you could argue, "Well, how'd she get to be a citizen anyway, she's a Kazakhstan person." So anyway, but she and her whole cast, because there's a global cast, it doesn't have to be somebody born in the US or American or anything like that they all agree that their cast should rule the world. And they have a whole system and a setup. And that's why they love this democratic government, because under democracy, the people don't rule, they rule. And they know perfectly well that they want the most people to vote as possible. They want to give away as much money as possible, especially in small amounts, so that they will buy the favor and the dependence of the voters.

And now I think that's true in Argentina as it is in America. Most people, the majority of people, get some or all of their funds from the government. And so they like the government. They want it to do more. And they vote for whoever promises to give them plausibly the most money. So this whole elite class is really a parasitic class. They're not what they might have once been. In American mythology, we have the founders, the founding fathers, and they were wise beyond measure. And they were also major property owners, the richest people in America at the time. And their idea of democracy meant that they voted but nobody else voted. And that worked, it worked because they were property owners and they wanted to find a system to control what they saw as the major threat to property owners, and that was the government.

And so they set up a system designed specifically to control, to limit, to make sure the government couldn't get too big, too big for its britches. But over the years, of course, the government did get too big for its britches. And now people like Ms. Omarova And a lot of other people are all out there finding more and more ways. And one of them by the way, is to eliminate the debt ceiling. After they got the funny money in place, they could print money, so they didn't to go to taxpayers and ask for it. And they didn't have to go to the bond market and borrow it. Now they can print it. And so after that, the only limit that Congress still had was the debt limit, the debt ceiling. It gave them another opportunity to shirk their duty and vote for an increase in the debt ceiling. But it was the only thing left.

And now, of course, Ms. Pelosi and Ms. Yellen and all the other powers that be are talking about eliminating the debt ceiling so they don't have to deal with that anymore. They don't want anything to get in the way. And the other big thing they've done recently, which they're very proud of, is they've set up this whole international tax minimum. It's minimum tax on corporations so that nobody gets away. It's all part of the same thing of narrowing your options. Countries, at least on the corporate tax, can't really compete on corporate tax rates anymore after this thing gets in place. And so the companies lose another option of the way they do business.

So that's what we're seeing. We're seeing a closing in of the options, a closing in on freedom, and this is closing in on progress. And we're seeing that playing out in lower and lower GDP growth rates. And we're seeing some other spectacular things too, like in Argentina where you now have people at each other's throats, mobs in the streets, things like that is developing, people getting very angry about things. Because the key to democracy, by the way, the thing that makes it tolerable, is that it's consensual democracy. And it's the consensus part of it that makes it tolerable, not the democracy. If people vote, and let's say 51% vote to take away all the property of the other 49%, that wouldn't go down well, that would not be a good government, that would not play out favorably. But in a consensual democracy, you don't do that everybody kind of has to agree.

And so there's been a lot of discussion about this because the people who want to force everybody to get the vaccine say, "Well, it's just like traffic rules. People have to give up a little bit of their freedom in order to use the highway." But that is consensual. Almost everybody, I've never even met somebody who thought there shouldn't be any traffic rules. Most people just go along with it because it just seems reasonable, it's consensual. But the mandates don't seem reasonable. And there are a lot of people with a lot of different opinions about them. And nobody, as far as I know, I don't know who has the final whole and ineluctable truth on it. As far as I know, that doesn't exist.

Joel Bowman:
Whoever has the gun…

Bill Bonner:
But people are willing to press the issue. And that's what, again, limiting our freedom, limiting our options, and effectively slowing down the rate of progress in the world. Because progress is found by competing ideas, and the competing ideas on the vaccine are all over the place. And yet, there was this renegade whistle blower from Facebook at Congress this week, also telling members of Congress that they should not allow ideas to compete on Facebook. They should shut them down because they are misinformation, they're lies, et cetera, et cetera. But it's totally a point of view which was looked upon favorably by almost every member of the ruling elite.

Joel Bowman:
Yes. Makes you wonder what kind of a whistleblower this young lady is when she goes in and every single member of the regulatory committee to which she's of blowing loves her ideas.

Bill Bonner:
Yes. Very suspicious. By the way, in the military, there have been a couple whistleblowers. So far, in all those torture issues, all the use of torture overseas and rendition and all the crimes committed by the US, including blowing up whole families attending weddings and things, the only person who's gone to jail for any of those was the whistleblower.

He went to jail. Nobody else has gone to jail. Instead, the generals and the people in charge end up working for major defense contractors.

Joel Bowman:
Indeed. Indeed. Yeah. It's interesting that we're witnessing this narrowing of our optionality, both with regards to our capital and the way that we spend our money, with whom we transact, in which manner we choose to do our business. But I don't know, and maybe you have a historical precedent for this, but I think, if I'm not mistaken, we're in novel territory with regards to mandating individual or body sovereignty. That is something that I don't know that we've really ... Maybe we go back to India and there's kind of forced sterilization of certain casts under.

Bill Bonner:
Well, there had been forced sterilization in the United States of America, too. Famous Supreme court decision, and I can't remember which justice it was, but he said three generations of idiots is enough.

Joel Bowman:
That was all Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Bill Bonner:
Oh, that was who it was. Well, anyhow, they approve all kinds of things. And right now, we saw an article in the New York times, naturally, where we said, "We work for the ACLU," the American Civil Liberties Union, "and here's why we think mandates are legal." And of course what they did is they cited all these cases, which are the worst cases in Supreme court history because they effectively yielded Americans' liberty to the government. So nothing really new. You talked about something new, the new part is the scale of it, the way in which it's just so overwhelming. It's overwhelming now, and my guess is that it's part of this degeneracy that we're seeing.

It's like somebody made this comparison, going back to the traffic lights, that the traffic lights are consensual, the light turns green and you go, it turns red and you stop. And everybody kind of agrees that that's okay, that works. It's not favoring any particular group over another group or any ideology. It just that's the way it works best. Well, imagine if you screwed up the lights and they blinked and they gave you false signals or something, and pretty soon people wouldn't know whether to go or stop. The lights would cheat you, they'd turn red and then they'd turn green and green and then red all of a sudden. And what would happen is you would lose confidence in the lights. You would lose confidence in the system. And then you'd approach an intersection, you wouldn't know, so you'd have to approach it slowly. You would slow down to make sure nobody else was coming any the other direction. The whole system would fall apart. And I think that's really what's happening. The rules of a consensual democracy are like those traffic lights and they're just not working anymore. People are not slowing down, they're not stopping at the right time. They're going at each other's throats over things that should be just matters of personal choice. So we're seeing, I think, a degeneracy of the whole system.

I think that if you had to find one specific cause of it, you would look at the way in which the dollar has been so corrupted that it doesn't give fair signals anymore. And it favors one class, the elite, by the way, the people who own stocks and bonds, over everybody else. And it gives these price signals that are totally wrong. Savers get nothing and borrowers make out very well. And Wall Street does beautifully well. Anyway, so that's what I would say. I'm elaborating on this next week because I think it's important. But it looks to me that the system is headed down and there's nothing can be done to stop it. You have to take it with a little bit of amused distance, I think

Joel Bowman:
The traffic lights are blinking, but it is interesting to note that, to bring it full circle back to Argentina, the traffic lights haven't been working down here for so long that I think people just take matters into their own hands. They assume that they're going to be broken and they take personal responsibility, which is something good to see. But just a quick little anecdote on top of the curtailment of freedoms with regards to these vaccine mandates. I'm sure you've seen my country of birth, Australia, has been leading the way in trialing all the very worst ideas. And I was not shocked, but ashamed, to see today that the Northern Territory have imposed vaccine mandates for anybody who deals with a member of the public. So I don't know how many people are escaping that. And they have something like one month to become vaccinated. This is anybody who deals with a member of the public by the way of their profession. Or they'll face being fired from their position and incurring a $5,000 fine.

So I can't imagine if that goes through in Northern Territory, that'll roll around Australia. And then I've been calling Australia the canary in the COVID coal mine since the beginning, because they were swooning deep down in the minds shaft. And I think that some countries around the world are looking at Australia and they're saying, "Hey, this isn't the Congo," or you mentioned Papua New Guinea or something like that, this is these people look like us, they sound like us, they live in houses that are like us, they have televisions like us. If they can fall so quickly and capitulate so rapidly, then what's to stop that from coming home to roost?

Bill Bonner:
We're all doomed. And up in the Northern Territories, there aren't any people up there anyway, are there?

Joel Bowman:
I think there's about six or seven at last census.

Bill Bonner:
That’s very funny.

Joel Bowman:
You would seem to be fairly socially distanced just from a population density standpoint anyway. But, Bill, tell us, I know I've been encroaching on your time here coming up on 40 odd minutes, but tell us what we've got in the pipeline for Bonner Private Research over the next couple of months. I know you're getting together with Dan and Tom in a week or so.

Bill Bonner:
I'm elaborating on this idea that I have, which I think helps explain and helps us understand what's going on. I'm relying heavily on my experience in Argentina, which I think is some odd way ahead of the curve here. And not necessarily, that's not a good thing. And Dan and Tom, we're meeting actually next week in Baltimore, and they are working on specific portfolio recommendations, what should you do. Dan is out in Laramie, Wyoming, and he's very serious about keeping yourself, your person, in some position or some place where it's not so exposed to the kind of social turmoil that we expect to come. And Tom has his own agenda, he's traveling around, a permanent traveler. And he lives on his investment, so he is investing his money in a way that produces gains enough to keep him going. It's all very interesting. So we're meeting next week to talk about the big picture and the little picture and actual portfolio recommendations.

Joel Bowman:
All right. Well, I'll include some information links and things like that where people will be able to catch your insights and insights from the rest of the team. So you mentioned down here in March, Bill, if I don't see you down here before then, hopefully we can catch up at Lo De Jesus for one of those $12.50 lunches for us and our families again.

Bill Bonner:
Yeah. Good. Well, looking forward to it.

Joel Bowman:
Wonderful. Thanks a lot, bill.

Bill Bonner:
All right. Thank you, Joel.

Joel Bowman:
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Bonner Private Research podcast. You can find more conversations like this in the members only section of our website at bonnaprivateresearch.com. We look forward to hearing from you either way. Until next week.