Bogleheads® on Investing Podcast 022 – Dr. Ed Yardeni, host Rick Ferri (audio only)

00:00:00.000 | [music]

00:00:10.000 | Welcome to Bogleheads on Investing, episode number 22.

00:00:14.000 | Today, my special guest is Dr. Ed Yardeni, a longtime economist

00:00:19.000 | who has been analyzing the Fed and the Federal Reserve Board chairmen for 40 years.

00:00:24.000 | Today, we'll be discussing Dr. Yardeni's new book, "Fed Watching for Fun and Profit."

00:00:29.000 | [music]

00:00:38.000 | Hi, everyone. My name is Rick Ferry, and I'm the host of Bogleheads on Investing.

00:00:43.000 | This episode, as with all episodes, is sponsored by the John C. Bogle Center for Financial Literacy,

00:00:49.000 | a 501(c)(3) corporation.

00:00:52.000 | Today, my special guest is Dr. Ed Yardeni.

00:00:56.000 | Dr. Yardeni received his undergraduate degree in economics and government from Cornell University in 1972

00:01:03.000 | and then went on to receive his Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in 1976.

00:01:08.000 | He then joined the Federal Reserve and later moved to Wall Street and became a famous Wall Street economist

00:01:15.000 | and now has his own consulting firm.

00:01:17.000 | Dr. Yardeni learned early on to watch the Federal Reserve.

00:01:22.000 | By controlling interest rates and other key variables, the Fed has enormous impact on financial markets and the economy.

00:01:30.000 | Today, we're going to be talking about just that.

00:01:34.000 | I'm happy to have with us Dr. Ed Yardeni. Welcome, Doctor.

00:01:39.000 | Thank you very much. Just call me Ed.

00:01:41.000 | Thank you. I'm very pleased to have you on the show, Ed.

00:01:44.000 | I've been following you basically my entire career for more than 30 years

00:01:48.000 | and really fascinated by the work that you do and your background.

00:01:53.000 | I really appreciate that. Every day I go and I read your morning notes on your website, Yardeni.com.

00:01:59.000 | That's great. Thank you.

00:02:00.000 | A lot of great commentary there.

00:02:01.000 | Before we get into your book, "Fed Watching for Fun and Profit,"

00:02:06.000 | I wanted to have our listeners learn a little bit about you.

00:02:09.000 | Well, I started out my college years as an engineer, actually, for the first semester.

00:02:16.000 | After a course in differential calculus made me realize that I just wasn't going to be an engineer,

00:02:23.000 | I transferred over to the government department in the Arts and Science School.

00:02:29.000 | Subsequently, I wound up double majoring at Cornell in government and economics.

00:02:35.000 | That was my undergraduate years.

00:02:37.000 | Then I went to Yale and more or less did the same.

00:02:40.000 | I took an MA, Masters of Arts in International Relations for two years.

00:02:46.000 | I managed to take enough courses in economics that I could, after my MA, move over

00:02:51.000 | and in the next two years complete a PhD in economics.

00:02:55.000 | My education was very much focused on politics, international relations, and economics.

00:03:01.000 | Then I wound up getting a job at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

00:03:04.000 | That was sort of the beginning of my educational background and the beginning of my career.

00:03:10.000 | I understand that you worked for Paul Volcker when you were at the Fed.

00:03:14.000 | He was the president, and I was just a lowly economist in the research department.

00:03:20.000 | Every now and then, we'd have a meeting where Volcker would be there,

00:03:23.000 | and research economists like myself would make presentations.

00:03:27.000 | I wouldn't want to characterize it as I worked directly for him, but he was the president,

00:03:32.000 | and I was one of his many employed economists.

00:03:35.000 | After you left the Fed, you went to work for Wall Street?

00:03:39.000 | Yeah. I got a call from a headhunter about a year at the Fed.

00:03:44.000 | I had no intention of leaving. I did enjoy my day there.

00:03:48.000 | On the other hand, I had long admired Henry Kaufman,

00:03:53.000 | who had been the chief economist of Salomon Brothers for many years.

00:03:56.000 | In many ways, he pioneered the concept of a Wall Street firm having an economist and a strategist.

00:04:03.000 | When I got the call from the headhunter, he offered me the opportunity to interview at EF Hutton.

00:04:10.000 | Remember that firm? When EF Hutton talks, people listen. That was their motto.

00:04:16.000 | It was a very classy firm. It was catered to wealthy individuals as well as institutional accounts.

00:04:24.000 | I went for the interview and it worked out great.

00:04:28.000 | The chief economist at the time, Ed Searing, hired me to do the work on the financial side of the economy,

00:04:34.000 | and there was another fellow who focused on the real side, on the GDP side of the economy.

00:04:39.000 | From there, you started to create quite a name for yourself.

00:04:42.000 | You were on Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser, and you became quite famous right away.

00:04:49.000 | One of the things that I did early on is I put a lot of financial reporters on my distribution list.

00:04:57.000 | I produced a monthly at first, then a weekly, and subsequently I went for a daily.

00:05:04.000 | I'm fairly opinionated, but I always try to back up my opinions with the facts and the data,

00:05:10.000 | and answer my own phone.

00:05:13.000 | Reporters have found it very easy to get a hold of me and to get an analysis of whatever they're interested in.

00:05:18.000 | I guess that kind of open communication with the financial media helped.

00:05:24.000 | I think that's part of it.

00:05:25.000 | The other part is I do write a lot and comment on issues that everybody is concerned about.

00:05:31.000 | My job is to help institutional and, back then, retail accounts try to make money in the financial markets

00:05:39.000 | and at least avoid losing money.

00:05:41.000 | Those are issues that are relevant to a lot of people, and certainly in the financial press.

00:05:47.000 | Back in 2007, you decided to go out on your own and start your own company.

00:05:52.000 | Right.

00:05:53.000 | I had been on Wall Street and a few firms, and then I went off to a money management firm out in Akron, Ohio,

00:06:00.000 | for a couple of years.

00:06:02.000 | Then I decided that I really wanted to do what I'd been doing all along,

00:06:07.000 | which was economic and investment strategy research.

00:06:10.000 | I had the opportunity to start my own firm, leveraging up the account base that I had had on Wall Street.

00:06:18.000 | Many of them signed up when I reached out to them and told them that I'd hung out a shingle

00:06:23.000 | and that I was in business on my own.

00:06:26.000 | You're a very good writer, by the way.

00:06:27.000 | It's easy to read what you write.

00:06:28.000 | I can understand it.

00:06:30.000 | There are so many times at the PhD level you start reading this stuff, and they simply want to impress each other.

00:06:34.000 | Right.

00:06:35.000 | Here, the way you write is to me, like you're talking with me, which is very good.

00:06:41.000 | You've written a lot of books.

00:06:42.000 | One of the books you wrote recently was "Predicting the Markets of Professional Autobiography" back in 2018,

00:06:49.000 | which is an in-depth book.

00:06:52.000 | As you were writing that book, you decided that book probably could have been three or four books.

00:06:57.000 | It could have been a series of books, which in a way did become a series.

00:07:02.000 | You wrote another book called "Stock Buybacks, the True Story," which I read your research on stock buybacks.

00:07:08.000 | It really changed my opinion about it, by the way.

00:07:10.000 | It was very fascinating to read.

00:07:13.000 | Then the yield curve, what is it really predicting in 2019?

00:07:17.000 | Most recently in the book that I want to talk about today is "Fed Watching for Fun and Profit."

00:07:23.000 | I really enjoyed this book and wanted to have you on the show to talk about the Fed

00:07:29.000 | because you stated right at the beginning of the book that you need to watch the Fed.

00:07:35.000 | You need to know who the Fed chairmen are and what their biases are and what their beliefs are

00:07:40.000 | and how important that is to your role, which is trying to anticipate what's going to happen in the markets next.

00:07:47.000 | This is such a thorough investigation, history, if you will.

00:07:53.000 | I just found it fascinating as I read through it.

00:07:55.000 | I really wanted to go through this book with you because I think the audience would really love to hear

00:08:01.000 | exactly what is this thing called the Federal Reserve and how does it work?

00:08:06.000 | Let's just start at the beginning.

00:08:08.000 | Well, the Fed was created in late 1913.

00:08:13.000 | It was created mostly because there was a concern that we just kept having these financial crises.

00:08:20.000 | The previous crisis occurred in 1907, and J.P. Morgan, the famous banker,

00:08:27.000 | stepped in and managed to calm things down in the financial markets.

00:08:31.000 | He was, in a sense, the Fed at the time. He was the power in the financial markets.

00:08:37.000 | But there was a sense that we were getting too many of these financial disruptions

00:08:41.000 | and creating too much havoc in the economy, and that the money supply just wasn't elastic enough.

00:08:48.000 | It wasn't responding to the cyclical needs of the economy for farming, for example, commerce, international trade.

00:08:56.000 | And so some politicians and Wall Street types got together and started to map out a central bank for the United States.

00:09:04.000 | And by the late 1913, Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act, which created the Fed.

00:09:11.000 | Back then, the key mandate was to provide a currency that accommodated the needs of the economy,

00:09:18.000 | but in the context of what happened in 1907, but to avoid financial instability.

00:09:25.000 | In our conversation, we'll see how that mandate has changed into something completely different

00:09:30.000 | and how that may have kind of led to some of the issues that confront us today.

00:09:35.000 | The Act kind of left things in the hands of 12 regional banks.

00:09:40.000 | These regional Fed banks are essentially owned through stock ownership by other banks, by private sector banks.

00:09:46.000 | So it's a quasi-private and governmental organization, but it clearly is very much a regulatory agent in our economy,

00:09:55.000 | responsible for regulating the banks.

00:09:58.000 | But it also has become very important in managing the monetary system, the financial system.

00:10:04.000 | Now, most of the power originally rested with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York under Benjamin Strong,

00:10:10.000 | who was the president of that bank.

00:10:13.000 | He was a financial conservative.

00:10:15.000 | He believed in the gold standard, and he did a pretty good job.

00:10:18.000 | Unfortunately, he passed away in the late '20s just before the Great Recession hit,

00:10:23.000 | and the Feds just did a horrible job during the Great Depression.

00:10:28.000 | And as a result, in 1933, the Federal Reserve Act was amended to create the Federal Open Market Committee,

00:10:35.000 | which includes the governors of the Federal Reserve Board

00:10:39.000 | and the regional presidents of the Federal Reserve Banks around the country.

00:10:44.000 | And the power shifted away from New York to Washington, D.C.,

00:10:48.000 | and that kind of created a new version of the Fed, much more powerful than it had been before,

00:10:55.000 | much more centralized and located in Washington rather than New York.

00:10:59.000 | So it really became part of the Washington government and became a little less beholden to the financial system,

00:11:06.000 | which was epicentered in New York City.

00:11:10.000 | And so after that change, we did start to see that the FOMC became much more important in our economy,

00:11:19.000 | but that really didn't occur until after World War II. With World War II, what happened, of course,

00:11:25.000 | is we wanted to win the war, as we all do in those kind of situations,

00:11:31.000 | and the Fed basically provided very low interest rates to the Treasury to borrow money to finance the war.

00:11:38.000 | And then in the early '50s, the Treasury and the Fed came up with an agreement

00:11:42.000 | where the Fed basically got its power that it has today to manage monetary policy independently of the Treasury

00:11:51.000 | and other government pressures.

00:11:54.000 | So since the early '50s, the Fed's been running monetary policy more or less independently.

00:12:01.000 | I mean, there's been a lot of criticism that sometimes that's not quite the case,

00:12:05.000 | but for all practical purposes, the Fed determines interest rates,

00:12:09.000 | determines the amount of reserves that banks have in the monetary system.

00:12:15.000 | So that's kind of a really brief overview of where the Fed originated,

00:12:20.000 | what its original mandate was, and how it evolved until today.

00:12:24.000 | I should just mention that in the late '70s, its mandate changed to a dual mandate,

00:12:29.000 | which is to focus on keeping unemployment as low as possible and to keep price inflation extremely low as well.

00:12:36.000 | So we went from an originally promise of financial stability to managing the business cycle,

00:12:43.000 | and I think that created a lot of problems that have come to haunt us to this very day.

00:12:48.000 | What I found interesting when you gave the history of the first Federal Reserve presidents prior to Arthur Burns

00:12:57.000 | was a lot of them were business tycoons. They weren't banking people.

00:13:02.000 | And then Richard Nixon appointed Arthur Burns. He was the first academic.

00:13:07.000 | When that occurred, was there a big shift in the way in which the Fed operated?

00:13:13.000 | I think there was. Right before Arthur Burns, William McChesney Martin had been the Fed chair from April 1951 to January 1970,

00:13:24.000 | so he was in there for quite a long period of time.

00:13:28.000 | And he was a financial conservative, and he warned a few times, and I highlight it in my book a few times,

00:13:35.000 | that he warned that the Fed really shouldn't try to manage the business cycle,

00:13:40.000 | that there was something kind of natural about business cycles.

00:13:44.000 | During booms, you wanted to take away the punch bowl in the famous speech he gave.

00:13:48.000 | But I think with Arthur Burns, with economists increasingly coming into the Fed,

00:13:54.000 | replacing bankers and lawyers, business people, that macroeconomics became more important in the way the Fed was run.

00:14:04.000 | And Arthur Burns was a macroeconomist. I don't know that he particularly was the originator of the idea of managing the business cycle,

00:14:14.000 | but I think the criticism that many have had about Burns is that he wasn't independent enough of Richard Nixon

00:14:21.000 | and that he let inflation rise a bit too much.

00:14:26.000 | Burns was in there from February 1970 to January 1978, so he was there when we had the first oil shock.

00:14:36.000 | And he did raise interest rates, but not enough to really bring inflation down,

00:14:41.000 | and it just remained on an upward course that was only exacerbated by a fellow who was there for a very short period of time.

00:14:49.000 | And his background was business, not economics. That was G. William Miller.

00:14:55.000 | And G. William Miller was there from 1978, March '78, to August 1979.

00:15:01.000 | And he also was a little bit too lax about dealing with inflation.

00:15:08.000 | And sure enough, we got hit by another energy crisis in 1979.

00:15:13.000 | The problem with the inflation of the 1970s is that it went straight from oil prices into wages

00:15:19.000 | because the labor markets were fairly rigid and there were these large unions that had cost-of-living adjustments in their contracts,

00:15:28.000 | so that an increase in the price of oil really became a general inflation problem.

00:15:33.000 | And that's when Paul Volcker came on the scene in August of 1979.

00:15:39.000 | He was there until 1987. Volcker was not an economist. He was a financial conservative,

00:15:45.000 | and he really felt that he couldn't let this inflation problem continue.

00:15:50.000 | And at the time, people were pretty convinced that inflation was kind of stuck in the system,

00:15:55.000 | that you couldn't really get it out.

00:15:57.000 | And what Volcker demonstrated is that you could if you were willing to tolerate a really bad recession,

00:16:02.000 | which he was, until it became so bad that he had to relent.

00:16:06.000 | But by then, he'd achieved his goal of bringing inflation down.

00:16:10.000 | Early in 1971, when Arthur Burns was named as Fed Chairman,

00:16:16.000 | one of the first things that happened was the Bretton Woods Agreement,

00:16:20.000 | or the Bretton Woods System of International Currency Management, was dissolved by Nixon.

00:16:26.000 | He basically, what we say, closed the gold window.

00:16:30.000 | And that led to price controls and led to food, oil, labor shocks, and so forth under Burns.

00:16:41.000 | And this is what caused this high inflation during the 1970s.

00:16:48.000 | And I want you to compare and contrast the concern that people have right now.

00:16:52.000 | And I'm going to jump ahead a little bit here.

00:16:54.000 | But we see, you know, the Fed is just printing money, and people say it will become extremely inflationary.

00:17:02.000 | But in history, when looking back at the 1970s and comparing that to today and what's going on,

00:17:09.000 | I know I'm jumping ahead a little bit in our conversation here, but it is different.

00:17:13.000 | I mean, it's not automatic inflation.

00:17:15.000 | Right, right.

00:17:16.000 | Well, that's the thing is the sort of knee-jerk approaches to understanding what the Fed is doing

00:17:23.000 | and what the consequences of its actions are.

00:17:26.000 | Many of these things are just kind of based on a perception that history repeats itself.

00:17:32.000 | And sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't.

00:17:34.000 | I think in the '70s, I think the '70s was really a unique period, a highly inflationary period.

00:17:40.000 | And it was pretty traumatic.

00:17:42.000 | I mean, people are still looking back there and saying it could happen again.

00:17:46.000 | And my spin is that I don't think that's the case.

00:17:50.000 | We don't have union power that used to be in the private sector.

00:17:54.000 | There's still lots of unions in the public sector.

00:17:57.000 | But we had cost-of-living adjustments back then so that an oil price shock went straight into wages

00:18:03.000 | and was passed through into higher prices.

00:18:06.000 | During the subsequent decades, we saw several forces coming into play that have kept inflation down,

00:18:14.000 | brought inflation down.

00:18:16.000 | One of them was globalization, which may very well be at risk here,

00:18:20.000 | may be challenged by the way the world is evolving away from globalization.

00:18:25.000 | But globalization, with the end of the Cold War in the late '80s,

00:18:28.000 | with China joining the World Trade Organization in 2001,

00:18:33.000 | I argued that globalization was fundamentally deflationary

00:18:37.000 | because the reality was that manufacturers could manufacture anywhere in the world

00:18:42.000 | where labor was particularly cheap.

00:18:44.000 | The result was relatively attractively priced goods and some services that Americans could benefit from.

00:18:51.000 | But many Americans did, in fact, lose their jobs to countries with low wages, particularly China.

00:18:56.000 | But that's not the only deflationary force we've had occurring in recent decades.

00:19:02.000 | Technological disruption is a very deflationary force.

00:19:07.000 | We just have ongoing technological innovations that are all designed to produce better goods

00:19:13.000 | and services at lower and lower prices with technologies that are extraordinarily productive.

00:19:19.000 | In some ways, we may very well be at the beginning of another technology revolution.

00:19:25.000 | You don't have to imagine it.

00:19:27.000 | We know about 3D manufacturing.

00:19:29.000 | We know about artificial intelligence, robotics, automation.

00:19:33.000 | They're all there, and they're getting very rapidly implemented into our lives,

00:19:37.000 | and they're inherently deflationary.

00:19:39.000 | Another important force of deflation, which has evolved since the '70s

00:19:45.000 | into a very powerful force of deflation, I think,

00:19:48.000 | is geriatric profiles of more and more populations around the world.

00:19:54.000 | The reality is, in many places, fertility rates have plunged,

00:19:58.000 | so we're not having as many babies and people are living longer,

00:20:02.000 | so we're seeing populations, on average, getting older.

00:20:06.000 | Older populations, I think, for a lot of reasons, are less prone to inflation.

00:20:12.000 | That includes young people today who tend to be minimalists.

00:20:16.000 | A lot of them are not getting married early in life, or if they're getting married at all,

00:20:21.000 | and they're not having children.

00:20:23.000 | So that's deflationary, and that's ongoing.

00:20:26.000 | There's no sign that that's going to change.

00:20:29.000 | Then debt.

00:20:30.000 | We're used to thinking of debt as being inflationary, as being stimulative,

00:20:34.000 | and I think that's one of the problems we have with the central bankers.

00:20:39.000 | They still believe that if you lower interest rates,

00:20:41.000 | you'll stimulate people to borrow more, and that'll stimulate the economy.

00:20:46.000 | I think they've been doing that for so long that they don't realize

00:20:49.000 | that a lot of us have already got more debt than we can handle,

00:20:53.000 | and that a lot of the easy money has actually allowed what I call "zombie companies" to exist,

00:21:00.000 | meaning companies that should be out of business are staying in business

00:21:03.000 | because they can get financing so cheaply.

00:21:06.000 | So the '70s was the '70s, and the 2020s, history repeats itself to a certain extent,

00:21:14.000 | but there are so many structural changes in our economy.

00:21:18.000 | In other words, the Fed isn't the whole story.

00:21:20.000 | The Fed's part of the story, a very important part of the story,

00:21:23.000 | but just knowing what the Fed's going to do isn't sufficient to really understand

00:21:28.000 | how our economy works and how that all influences the financial markets.

00:21:33.000 | So the four Ds, right?

00:21:35.000 | Yeah, the four Ds are the four forces of deflation.

00:21:40.000 | Globalization starts with a G, so let's call it détente, same concept,

00:21:45.000 | and then technology starts with a T, so let's call it technological disruption,

00:21:50.000 | and then it's easier, it's demography and debt.

00:21:53.000 | All right, perfect.

00:21:55.000 | So let's go back to how Volcker fought inflation by creating a different model

00:22:00.000 | that basically tracked money supply and basically automatically reset interest rates

00:22:07.000 | based on where the money supply was.

00:22:09.000 | Correct.

00:22:11.000 | That was really something quite radical.

00:22:13.000 | A few months after coming to run the Fed, he realized that he was having a problem

00:22:19.000 | with the Federal Open Market Committee in getting an agreement

00:22:22.000 | on raising interest rates to break the back of inflation,

00:22:25.000 | so he was worried that the Fed would lose its credibility in bringing down inflation.

00:22:31.000 | So he, on a Saturday night, came up with a press conference

00:22:36.000 | and basically said that he had met in an emergency session with the FOMC

00:22:43.000 | and that they had agreed that they would adapt a new approach to managing monetary policy,

00:22:49.000 | which was to really just focus on the growth of the money supply

00:22:54.000 | and let interest rates fall or rise wherever they would.

00:22:58.000 | It was basically a way to let the markets determine where interest rates had to go

00:23:05.000 | in a highly inflationary environment,

00:23:08.000 | and the markets immediately realized that the Fed was letting interest rates go to where they should go,

00:23:14.000 | which is a lot higher as a result of inflation.

00:23:17.000 | And that meant that the FOMC was no longer targeting interest rates

00:23:22.000 | but was letting interest rates rise high enough to break the back of inflation.

00:23:26.000 | And, of course, the way that happened, the higher interest rates created a credit crunch,

00:23:31.000 | which historically has really been the way that we've gone into recessions.

00:23:35.000 | We've had these credit crunches very often caused by the Fed raising interest rates

00:23:40.000 | when they perceived that inflation was becoming a problem.

00:23:42.000 | And at some point, interest rates got high enough that credit conditions tightened up,

00:23:47.000 | and when that happened, we'd have a recession.

00:23:50.000 | So in many ways, a lot of these legacies are still with us today, right?

00:23:54.000 | We talked about people believe that inflation is coming back because the money supply is increasing.

00:23:59.000 | Right.

00:24:00.000 | And then, well, if inflation comes back, then interest rates have to rise,

00:24:05.000 | and therefore you should sit on your 0% yielding money market fund and wait for interest rates to go up.

00:24:13.000 | But I remember back in 2018, as the Fed was increasing interest rates,

00:24:19.000 | people believed that they were going to continue to go higher back to a normal rate.

00:24:22.000 | Right.

00:24:23.000 | They didn't last very long.

00:24:25.000 | No, you're right. We're all only humans and very much influenced by history,

00:24:31.000 | particularly the history that we've lived through, which is kind of one of the reasons I wrote the book.

00:24:36.000 | There are a lot of things that have happened over the past few decades that people really don't know,

00:24:41.000 | and I think it's very important to have sort of a continuous historical perspective on how we got to where we are today.

00:24:51.000 | So Alan Greenspan comes in after Paul Volcker, and he is the great inflator of asset prices.

00:25:00.000 | Yes, right. That's what I called him in my book, correct.

00:25:04.000 | And a believer in financial engineering, derivatives, you know, hands-off approach.

00:25:10.000 | Yes.

00:25:11.000 | Could have created what occurred in 2006, 2007, 2008 with financial derivatives.

00:25:19.000 | Yeah, I think Paul Volcker was probably the greatest chair of the Fed that we had.

00:25:26.000 | He was very conservative.

00:25:29.000 | He was still true to the original mandate of the Fed, which was financial stability.

00:25:36.000 | And in his mind, keeping inflation down was a much more important mandate, implicit mandate, than having full employment.

00:25:45.000 | Alan Greenspan was a macroeconomist.

00:25:49.000 | I mean, Arthur Burns was a Ph.D. economist, but in terms of sort of the run of economists here,

00:25:56.000 | the most relevant one for us is Alan Greenspan, then Ben Bernanke, then Janet Yellen,

00:26:02.000 | all basically kind of following the same underlying macroeconomic assumptions and using the same models.

00:26:11.000 | Alan Greenspan was very different from Paul Volcker.

00:26:15.000 | Volcker was a conservative and believed that the financial system had to be regulated

00:26:20.000 | and that you had to be very careful not to let the banks run wild.

00:26:25.000 | Again, that was the original mandate of the Fed, don't let 1907 happen all over again.

00:26:30.000 | But Alan Greenspan, as you said, he was a laissez-faire, he was a deregulator.

00:26:35.000 | He believed that Wall Street had to compete with London and Frankfurt and other international markets,

00:26:43.000 | and if we didn't let Wall Street do what they do best without a lot of regulation,

00:26:48.000 | that we would lose competitiveness relative to other financial centers.

00:26:53.000 | So he was all for letting Wall Street do its thing, and particularly in the area of credit derivatives.

00:27:00.000 | There was a debate that didn't last very long where there were a few officials

00:27:06.000 | who really wanted to regulate credit derivatives, the folks who were regulating the commodity markets.

00:27:13.000 | But Greenspan, along with a few others, totally resisted that and supported laws

00:27:21.000 | that allowed Wall Street to create these credit derivatives without any regulation whatsoever.

00:27:27.000 | His basic assumption was, you know, these are smart people, they know what they're doing,

00:27:32.000 | and we should let them do it.

00:27:34.000 | But that really set the stage for, I think, much of the problems we're confronting today.

00:27:42.000 | There was sort of a warning shot, right, with the collapse of long-term capital management?

00:27:46.000 | Yes. Well, when Greenspan came in, a few months after he came in, he came in August 1987.

00:27:53.000 | By October 1987, we had a crash in the stock market.

00:27:58.000 | And at the time, I think there was recognition that some of it had to do with

00:28:02.000 | what were then basically derivatives.

00:28:05.000 | Some of Wall Street's geniuses created this concept of portfolio insurance,

00:28:10.000 | which promised that if we ever got into a crash,

00:28:13.000 | that the insurance policies created by these derivatives would protect you from the downside.

00:28:19.000 | Instead, they just really made things much worse.

00:28:23.000 | And Alan Greenspan jumped in and provided, at the time, easier credit conditions

00:28:28.000 | and helped to relieve the pressures on the financial markets.

00:28:33.000 | And that experience was viewed as being the beginning of the Greenspan put,

00:28:38.000 | which is the Fed, under Greenspan, suddenly cared about the equity markets,

00:28:44.000 | had the backs of equity investors, whereas, as we saw with Paul Volcker,

00:28:48.000 | he couldn't care less about what the equity market was doing.

00:28:51.000 | He just cared about bringing inflation down,

00:28:54.000 | and if that caused a recession in the bear market and the stocks,

00:28:57.000 | he was willing to accept that, whereas Alan Greenspan comes in,

00:29:01.000 | and at the first hint that the market's got a problem, he jumps in and supports the market.

00:29:07.000 | And that's really been the modus operandi, not just of Alan Greenspan,

00:29:11.000 | but the subsequent Fed chairs, like Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, and certainly now Jerome Powell.

00:29:17.000 | So now that we're up to Jerome Powell, what is going on right now?

00:29:22.000 | You wrote a great commentary about no assets left behind.

00:29:28.000 | You come up with all these great acronyms, by the way.

00:29:31.000 | But, boy, it just seems like I guess the only thing left is for the Fed to just outright go and buy stock.

00:29:37.000 | Well, that's the thing, is we started out with Alan Greenspan being very laissez-faire

00:29:43.000 | as long as the stock market was going up, but then when it took a dive in 1987 and then in 2000,

00:29:51.000 | he was clearly willing to provide stimulus to try to support the stock market.

00:29:59.000 | But under Greenspan, it was really all focused on interest rates,

00:30:04.000 | and for the benefit of hindsight, it seems like he kept interest rates way too long in 2000 through 2006.

00:30:14.000 | He left in January 2006, so really at the end of 2005, interest rates were kept low for too long.

00:30:23.000 | When he started raising them, he raised them in a very predictable fashion,

00:30:27.000 | 25 basis points per meeting for a couple of years,

00:30:30.000 | and just wasn't tough enough the way Volcker was with regards to keeping things in check.

00:30:36.000 | And the result, I think, was creating the housing bubble, the credit derivatives calamity that befell us,

00:30:42.000 | and that's what Ben Bernanke inherited.

00:30:45.000 | I don't think Bernanke realized what Greenspan had left him.

00:30:49.000 | Bernanke came in on February 1, 2006, and by 2007, Bernanke realized he was having a problem

00:30:57.000 | with the subprime mortgage market, didn't quite appreciate how big the problem was,

00:31:01.000 | but by 2008, it became very apparent that things were falling apart.

00:31:06.000 | And then I think Bernanke's big mistake was allowing Lehman to fail.

00:31:10.000 | I mean, they could have restructured Lehman, they could have fired the folks who ran the place into the ground,

00:31:16.000 | but by letting it go under, he took a financial crisis, which was bad, and turned it into basically a disaster.

00:31:24.000 | And then he turned right around and tried to save the day, came up with bringing interest rates down to zero,

00:31:30.000 | came up with quantitative easing in late 2008, and then three programs of quantitative easing under Bernanke

00:31:38.000 | where they're buying bonds.

00:31:41.000 | Now, Janet Yellen came in on February 2014, and she was committed to keeping all this stimulus in the system,

00:31:51.000 | but she started to recognize that the economy was in an expansion for a few years,

00:31:57.000 | and it was time to start gradually raising interest rates.

00:32:01.000 | But even she laid in her first term, and she only served one term.

00:32:07.000 | She left on February 2008, but in 2017, in one conversation, in one conference,

00:32:15.000 | she was actually talking about maybe the Fed should have the power to buy equities and corporate bonds,

00:32:21.000 | but she said maybe that's not a good idea, but we should think about it.

00:32:24.000 | But Jerome Powell was the fellow where everything that had been -- the stage had really been set

00:32:31.000 | for everything that he's had to deal with by his predecessors, Greenspan, Bernanke, and Yellen.

00:32:39.000 | With Powell, we went from QE1, QE2, QE3, you know, these quantitative easing programs of buying bonds,

00:32:47.000 | to gradually raising interest rates early on in his term.

00:32:52.000 | So he came in February 2018, and so he continued what Yellen was doing.

00:32:59.000 | But by late 2018, he was backing off already because the stock market took a dive,

00:33:04.000 | and here was another example, this time of the Powell put, where he backed off,

00:33:09.000 | started to lower interest rates in 2019.

00:33:12.000 | And then the virus hit us, and suddenly on March 15th, it was a Sunday,

00:33:18.000 | he had his own Saturday night special conference, press conference, after meeting with the FOMC,

00:33:25.000 | where, you know, the parallels got interesting because Volcker had his press conference

00:33:31.000 | to announce that he was going to raise interest rates,

00:33:34.000 | allow interest rates to rise to whatever levels it needed to be to break inflation.

00:33:38.000 | Powell on March 15th on a Sunday said that he was going to provide QE4,

00:33:43.000 | $700 billion of purchases of bonds in order to do whatever was necessary to cushion the economy

00:33:51.000 | from the effect of the virus crisis.

00:33:54.000 | He also lowered the Fed funds rate to zero.

00:33:56.000 | And the next day, which was March 16th, it was a Monday, the stock market dropped 12%,

00:34:03.000 | clearly suggesting that the Fed was no longer impressed.

00:34:06.000 | You know, central bankers are very much into shock and awe,

00:34:11.000 | and some of these QE programs were shocking and awesome.

00:34:16.000 | This QE4 on March 15th, the message from the market the next day was, "Aw, shucks.

00:34:22.000 | Is that really the best you can do? Is that all you got?"

00:34:25.000 | And so there was clearly a message from the markets that maybe the Fed had run out of ammo

00:34:29.000 | and couldn't do anymore.

00:34:31.000 | And that's when Powell really shocked and awed everybody because basically a week later,

00:34:35.000 | on March 23rd, it was a Monday, he announced what I call QE4ever,

00:34:39.000 | which is no limit whatsoever on the amount of bonds that they would buy,

00:34:43.000 | no time frame for how long this program would last other than we'll do it until the economy

00:34:49.000 | shows signs of recovering from the virus crisis.

00:34:53.000 | And then along the way, a few days later, it became clear that the Fed was also going to be

00:34:58.000 | buying corporate bonds, which according to the Federal Reserve Act, they're not allowed to do,

00:35:03.000 | so they finagled it.

00:35:04.000 | They went around asking permission from Congress,

00:35:07.000 | and they probably could have gotten it from Congress,

00:35:09.000 | by creating these special purpose vehicles that were funded by the Treasury

00:35:15.000 | so that the Fed wouldn't assume any risk if there were losses.

00:35:19.000 | It would be all up to the Treasury, which by the way means us, the taxpayers.

00:35:23.000 | But the Fed would be able to buy corporate bonds that way.

00:35:26.000 | So as you mentioned before, what's left?

00:35:29.000 | I guess we could think about the possibility that at some point the Fed might go and buy

00:35:33.000 | corporate equities.

00:35:35.000 | That's what the Bank of Japan's been doing.

00:35:37.000 | But I don't really think that's necessary.

00:35:39.000 | I think just by being the lender of last resort in the corporate bond market,

00:35:43.000 | and we're talking about even junk bonds, triple B bonds,

00:35:47.000 | which are the lowest investment grade bonds,

00:35:50.000 | accounted for 50% of the investment grade bonds before the crisis.

00:35:56.000 | After the crisis, many of those bonds turned into junk,

00:36:01.000 | and the Fed announced that many of those securities would in fact be part of their program

00:36:06.000 | for supporting the market.

00:36:09.000 | The fallen angels.

00:36:10.000 | Yeah, right.

00:36:12.000 | And it was funny because not only were they going to buy existing fallen angels,

00:36:16.000 | bonds that went from investment grade to non-investment grade,

00:36:19.000 | but they were also going to buy new issues from the companies that became fallen angels,

00:36:25.000 | which I found really interesting.

00:36:27.000 | Right.

00:36:28.000 | Well, it's disturbing.

00:36:30.000 | You know, the Fed started out with a mission of financial stability,

00:36:35.000 | and look where we are now.

00:36:37.000 | We certainly don't have financial stability.

00:36:39.000 | We have way too much debt.

00:36:41.000 | We have way too many junk bonds, leveraged loans, weak covenants,

00:36:47.000 | and the Fed's known about all these things.

00:36:49.000 | As a matter of fact, we had a financial crisis in 2008,

00:36:53.000 | and it wasn't until 10 years later that the Fed started writing financial stability reports

00:36:59.000 | to assess that very subject.

00:37:01.000 | In their reports, they acknowledged that things weren't all that good in the corporate bond market

00:37:07.000 | and the corporate leverage market.

00:37:09.000 | They said the households are in better shape than they were in 2008,

00:37:13.000 | and the banks were in better shape,

00:37:15.000 | and they said that they are aware of the problems in the corporate debt markets

00:37:19.000 | and are addressing them without ever saying exactly what they were doing.

00:37:23.000 | Then the virus crisis hits, and now we know what they're doing.

00:37:26.000 | They're supporting the corporate bond market by basically buying these securities outright

00:37:32.000 | and allocating capital to corporations now by doing so.

00:37:39.000 | Do we really want an economy where the central bank is allocating capital as opposed to the markets?

00:37:46.000 | Let me ask you something that I've been thinking about,

00:37:51.000 | and that is if you have this safety net or the Powell put where equity investors know

00:37:56.000 | it's going to be fed to the rescue if you get volatility in the equity market,

00:38:01.000 | why wouldn't the valuations of equities just continue to go up over time to $25,000, $35,000, $45,000,

00:38:10.000 | and we get to look an awful lot like Japan looked in the late 1980s?

00:38:15.000 | Is that a feasible scenario?

00:38:18.000 | It's a possible scenario.

00:38:20.000 | I hope we don't get there.

00:38:23.000 | That's the problem you have when the Fed provides ultra-easy monetary policy,

00:38:29.000 | a lot of that easy money goes to push up valuations and financial assets

00:38:35.000 | rather than going into the real economy.

00:38:38.000 | I think the Fed has crossed a lot of lines, which made it impossible to kind of go back.

00:38:44.000 | It's kind of one thing led to another and bringing us to this point.

00:38:49.000 | If I could rewrite history, I'd kind of clone Volcker

00:38:54.000 | and make sure that whoever replaced Volcker was replaced by Volcker 2,

00:38:59.000 | then Volcker 3, and Volcker 4,

00:39:01.000 | and that I would have insisted that the mandate of the Fed first and foremost

00:39:06.000 | should be financial stability and not managing the business cycle.

00:39:10.000 | Once it got into the business of managing the business cycle,

00:39:14.000 | I think that was the beginning of lots of the problems we have now.

00:39:19.000 | The reality is in a capitalist system, occasionally there will be downturns

00:39:24.000 | and companies that are aware of the downside risks

00:39:28.000 | and don't feel that there's a Fed put that'll save them from disaster,

00:39:33.000 | they're going to deal with that by having enough liquidity,

00:39:36.000 | by not doing excessive things that create speculative booms that lead to busts.

00:39:42.000 | Now we're in the twilight zone of monetary policy.

00:39:46.000 | I mean, it's surreal. It's almost science fiction

00:39:51.000 | to imagine that the Fed's balance sheet is going to just expand without limit

00:39:57.000 | and that the Fed this year will probably wind up financing the entire federal deficit,

00:40:03.000 | which is projected to be something like $3.7 trillion.

00:40:07.000 | So the Fed's already at $7 trillion on its balance sheet,

00:40:10.000 | up from $3 trillion from a few months ago.

00:40:15.000 | And I think it's probably headed to $10 trillion.

00:40:18.000 | And the consequences of that, nobody knows for sure.

00:40:21.000 | I think the scenario you laid out,

00:40:23.000 | where all that stimulus creates another financial asset bubble

00:40:28.000 | with forward PEs for the stock market already in the low 20s going a lot higher,

00:40:35.000 | that would be very unsettling

00:40:37.000 | because I think that would indicate that the markets are not really functioning.

00:40:41.000 | They're not operating the way they should be.

00:40:44.000 | And that's because the central bank has become the market.

00:40:47.000 | I mean, they've become the bond market.

00:40:50.000 | And indirectly, by keeping bond yields near zero,

00:40:54.000 | they're forcing a lot of investors to rebalance out of bonds and into stocks,

00:41:01.000 | so they don't have to buy stocks.

00:41:02.000 | Just by buying bonds and keeping bond yields close to zero,

00:41:08.000 | in effect, they're supporting the stock market.

00:41:12.000 | Even in your research, you recently have had to expand your forward earnings

00:41:17.000 | from 12 months to 18 months to come up with PEs that are reasonable.

00:41:24.000 | That makes sense.

00:41:27.000 | What do the other countries, central banks, think about what we're doing?

00:41:33.000 | Or is everybody in this together?

00:41:35.000 | They're all in it together.

00:41:37.000 | The major central banks, the European Central Bank, the ECB,

00:41:42.000 | the Bank of Japan, the BOJ, they're all doing it together.

00:41:47.000 | They're all run by macroeconomists, and macroeconomists are do-gooders.

00:41:51.000 | They think they have the power to solve a lot of our problems with our policies,

00:41:57.000 | and I don't think that's correct.

00:41:59.000 | For example, back in 2010, when Ben Bernanke implemented QE2,

00:42:05.000 | I was arguing that, you know, the Fed funds rates down to zero.

00:42:09.000 | Maybe they should just say that's all we can do, folks.

00:42:11.000 | We can't do any more.

00:42:13.000 | Instead, they said, well, we're not going to push interest rates

00:42:16.000 | into negative territory, but we could in effect do that

00:42:19.000 | by buying $600 billion worth of Treasuries.

00:42:23.000 | So they just keep coming up with more examples of how they believe

00:42:28.000 | they can surmount all difficulties with their ability to, in effect, print money.

00:42:35.000 | And what that just seems to do is get us from one problem to the next.

00:42:41.000 | I don't know if this all ends badly, but I don't know what we're going to do

00:42:46.000 | with a Fed that's got a balance sheet that's a lot bigger than it is today

00:42:52.000 | and owns corporate bonds and has really made it very difficult for markets

00:42:59.000 | to operate in a competitive manner where market prices reflect the true value

00:43:06.000 | of stocks and bonds as determined by investors who can make money and can lose money.

00:43:15.000 | Having this huge Fed put now is something we've been working ourselves up to

00:43:23.000 | ever since Greenspan started it.

00:43:25.000 | But where it all goes, no one knows for sure.

00:43:28.000 | With regards to inflation, the nightmare scenario would be that we get something

00:43:32.000 | like Weimar hyperinflation and interest rates going up.

00:43:37.000 | After we've accumulated all this debt, the impact on the deficit would be

00:43:42.000 | that it would be huge and most of it would be just interest payments.

00:43:46.000 | I don't think we're going to go that route.

00:43:48.000 | I think we're more likely to go down the road that Japan's been going down

00:43:51.000 | for quite some time, and that is a lot of fiscal stimulus financed by the central bank,

00:43:58.000 | and yet it's not inflationary because of underlying aging demography,

00:44:03.000 | underlying technological innovations, but it could very well create another bubble

00:44:10.000 | in the stock market, and then what?

00:44:12.000 | And as you said, well, I mean, you can't rule out the possibility that at some point

00:44:17.000 | they'll give us the ultimate put, which is to buy stocks directly.

00:44:21.000 | I hope that never happens, but I certainly can't rule it out.

00:44:25.000 | It's interesting that you have all of these defined benefit plans

00:44:30.000 | that have to get a certain rate of return to meet their actuarial.

00:44:34.000 | Right.

00:44:35.000 | And you can't get it from bonds.

00:44:37.000 | You can't get it from bonds, so you're forced to get into stocks.

00:44:40.000 | You know, March 25th in the morning, I'm proud to say that we wrote a piece

00:44:47.000 | saying that we thought the bear market was over, that it made it slow on March 23rd,

00:44:51.000 | and I think that insight came largely from having written my book on the Fed.

00:44:57.000 | It said that the Fed matters, and having the Fed shock and awe me,

00:45:03.000 | and I'm not easily shocked and awed, but I was floored by what they had done on March 23rd.

00:45:10.000 | I called it QE forever, as I said.

00:45:13.000 | I concluded that the Fed had made the low, so the Fed matters a lot.

00:45:17.000 | I have to tell you something.

00:45:19.000 | By the way here, in early March, I was depressed like everybody else was by the virus,

00:45:26.000 | by what this implied for the economy.

00:45:28.000 | I mean, early March was a nightmare.

00:45:31.000 | We had illiquidity in the credit markets.

00:45:34.000 | It really looked just horrible, and I just had posted my book on Amazon,

00:45:42.000 | and I was wondering to myself, "Oh, my God, I just spent all this time writing this book,

00:45:46.000 | and who could possibly be interested in the Fed?

00:45:49.000 | I wish I had written a book on virology."

00:45:52.000 | But March 23rd, it was like, "Oh, the book's relevant again."

00:45:57.000 | I have to admit, even I thought, "What can the Fed possibly do to make a virus go away?"

00:46:03.000 | And the answer is nothing, but on the other hand, a credit crunch created by the pandemic of fear

00:46:10.000 | related to the virus, the Fed could do something, which is what they did,

00:46:14.000 | which was no acid left behind, QE forever.

00:46:19.000 | I also call it launching B-52 bombers to carpet bomb the economy with cash.

00:46:25.000 | Remember, people used to talk about the Fed's bazookas,

00:46:28.000 | and then they thought maybe they were out of ammo,

00:46:31.000 | and there was some speculation that they'd go to helicopter money,

00:46:34.000 | and they didn't even bother with helicopters.

00:46:36.000 | They just went straight to B-52s.

00:46:39.000 | I have to ask this question about negative interest rates before we finish up today.

00:46:44.000 | Tell me, it's happening in other countries, Japan, Germany.

00:46:49.000 | Why not the U.S.?

00:46:51.000 | Well, you know, as I've been thinking about the Fed over the years,

00:46:56.000 | I've been writing about the Fed in this book,

00:46:58.000 | and starting to increasingly piece together, show the relevance of history,

00:47:03.000 | of what the Fed's been doing and how the Fed's ideas have changed,

00:47:08.000 | and all leading to where we are today,

00:47:12.000 | I can certainly see how history has been extremely relevant to the mess we're in now.

00:47:18.000 | And in recent weeks or months this year,

00:47:21.000 | I've been increasingly saying that we've never been in anything like this.

00:47:25.000 | And it's surreal, and you have to think differently

00:47:28.000 | and not get too closed off in your thinking.

00:47:31.000 | So things that you just can't imagine would ever happen,

00:47:34.000 | you have to think, well, maybe they could.

00:47:36.000 | So, yeah, could negative interest rates happen here in the United States?

00:47:39.000 | They could.

00:47:40.000 | They've got slightly negative interest rates in Europe and in Japan,

00:47:45.000 | so it certainly could happen here.

00:47:47.000 | I hope it doesn't.

00:47:48.000 | I think that the concept of investing your money and getting less back,

00:47:53.000 | well, you know, some of us are used to that when it comes to inflation,

00:47:56.000 | and that's why people fear inflation as investors,

00:47:59.000 | is that, you know, even if you get a nominal yield,

00:48:03.000 | it may not be enough to cover inflation,

00:48:05.000 | so you wind up in real terms making less.

00:48:08.000 | But there was an uncertainty about that,

00:48:10.000 | and that presumably in a relatively free market,

00:48:13.000 | investors could get the kind of yield that they think was appropriate

00:48:17.000 | to get a real return.

00:48:19.000 | If you start out investing with a negative nominal yield

00:48:23.000 | where you know you're going to lose money,

00:48:25.000 | well, it only works if you actually have deflation.

00:48:28.000 | They actually are willing to buy securities with a negative rate

00:48:33.000 | if you think deflation is coming.

00:48:34.000 | But other than that, you know, it's a guaranteed losing proposition.

00:48:38.000 | And I'm not sure that in a free market environment that that would be the case,

00:48:42.000 | and it certainly leads to a tremendous misallocation of capital, I would think.

00:48:47.000 | I don't know how retirees who are getting Social Security

00:48:50.000 | are going to take getting less, the actual dollar amount being less.

00:48:56.000 | Well, it's a very distorted environment we live in.

00:49:00.000 | You know, pensions have promised their pensioners

00:49:03.000 | that they're going to get them something like 6%, 7%, 8% returns,

00:49:07.000 | and you can't get that in the bond market anymore,

00:49:10.000 | and that forces them into the stock market

00:49:13.000 | and forces them to take junk bonds and dicier kind of credits.

00:49:19.000 | And it just distorts the economy beyond recognition,

00:49:24.000 | and that's where the Fed's brought us.

00:49:28.000 | Things look very odd right now, like you said, the twilight zone,

00:49:31.000 | and maybe that's why on every dollar bill there's this saying,

00:49:35.000 | "In God we trust."

00:49:37.000 | Well, look, at the end of the day, you have to have faith

00:49:40.000 | that things are going to get better.

00:49:42.000 | I mean, that's really been the case.

00:49:44.000 | I've been doing this for over 40 years,

00:49:46.000 | and I think that the future is actually going to be fine.

00:49:50.000 | The Fed is not the whole story.

00:49:52.000 | The point of my book was to make people understand how important the Fed really is,

00:49:56.000 | but at the same time, I think it's important not to lose sight

00:49:59.000 | that the Fed doesn't run the whole economy,

00:50:01.000 | that there are a lot of us that are going to work or working from home

00:50:05.000 | on a regular basis trying to make things better for ourselves,

00:50:08.000 | our families, and our communities.

00:50:10.000 | And I think that kind of push by us running the economy

00:50:14.000 | will offset some of the excesses that have been actually created by the policymakers.

00:50:19.000 | And so problems are meant to be solved is kind of one of my mottos

00:50:23.000 | that I've tried to teach my children.

00:50:25.000 | And there are a lot of problems here.

00:50:27.000 | Right now the most immediate one we have is the virus crisis,

00:50:30.000 | but there's a lot of technology being focused on solving this problem,

00:50:34.000 | and who knows, maybe we'll come up with something that you take one shot

00:50:38.000 | and it kind of protects you not just from this virus,

00:50:40.000 | but from a whole bunch of other viruses.

00:50:42.000 | So things always look dark just before they get better,

00:50:45.000 | and I'm optimistic that things will get better,

00:50:48.000 | and hopefully so much better that the Fed could just kind of be less important

00:50:53.000 | and not continue with these excessive policies

00:50:56.000 | and just become less a factor in our lives.

00:51:00.000 | The name of the book is "Fed Watching for Fun and Profit" by Dr. Ed Yardeni.

00:51:05.000 | Well, thank you so much for joining us on "Bogleheads on Investing."

00:51:08.000 | Great to have you.

00:51:09.000 | Thank you very much.

00:51:11.000 | This concludes "Bogleheads on Investing," episode number 22.

00:51:15.000 | I'm your host, Rick Ferry.

00:51:17.000 | Join us each month to hear a new special guest.

00:51:20.000 | In the meantime, visit bogleheads.org and the Bogleheads Wiki.

00:51:25.000 | Participate in the forum and help others find the forum.

00:51:29.000 | Thanks for listening.

00:51:31.000 | [music playing]

00:51:37.000 | (upbeat music)

Bogleheads® on Investing Podcast 022 – Dr. Ed Yardeni, host Rick Ferri (audio only)

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