Hello, my friends. And welcome to another episode of Passive Real Estate Investing. I’m your host Marco Santarelli today. We have a returning guest, someone who I follow and pay attention to because whether you think about it or not, what he has to say and what he studies and the information he passes along does impact each and every one of you directly or indirectly. And if you don’t think it does, it will. And you’ll understand why today. My guest is Richard Duncan. He’s the author of four books on the global economic crisis, including the international best seller, The Dollar Crisis, a book I’ve had for a very long time. And in that book, he forecasted the global economic crisis of 2008 with extraordinary accuracy. Richard has served as a global head of investment strategy at ABN AMRO asset management in London, probably a company that many of you haven’t heard about, but he’s worked as a financial sector specialist for the world bank in Washington, DC. And he’s headed the equity research department for Solomon brothers in Bangkok. And he also worked as a consultant with the IMF, the International Monetary Fund in Thailand during the Asia crisis. He’s now the publisher of a video newsletter, which I am a subscriber to called Macro Watch, and he can be found at richardduncaneconomics.com, brilliant content and information. And with that, Richard, welcome back to the show.
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Thank you so much, Marco. It’s great to be back. Thanks for having me back on.
It’s my pleasure. I’m glad you’re back. It’s been approximately 14 months since we had you on the show. And the last time I had you on, we took kind of a deep dive into the looming inflation. I mean, it was already happening, but it just got worse and worse. And I think you had lot to say about that and predicted that and sure enough, you know, we’ve had a couple years of pretty high inflation. So in hindsight, I mean, how off were you, were you pretty spot on with your predictions?
Well, honestly I did not have any idea that the inflation rate would go as high as it is now, but of course the world has changed so dramatically in the last 14 months. I mean, first of all, I was too optimistic about COVID. I had assumed it would, you know, eventually stop, but instead we’ve had two more big waves of COVID since then Delta and now Omicron. And each of these waves have continued to disrupt the global supply chain. The latest when we spoke 14 months ago, COVID had not really affected a Asia very much, but when Delta got here, it did, it started shutting down factories all across this region and Omicron has been equally bad or even worse because now spreading all around China, China’s shutting down entire cities. Shanghai was shut down for practically two months. Beijing is partially shut down now. And so this is just an ongoing disaster in terms of global supply chain bottlenecks. And then on top of that in February Russia, invades Ukraine and causes a huge spike in oil prices and food prices and metals and chemicals and many other commodities. So that was unforeseeable. I would, I would argue, but so the inflation has gone very much higher than I had ever imagined that it would.
Yeah. I, I mean, a lot of these things have been a huge impact on the global supply chain, which has disrupted supply and pushed inflation because we didn’t lose the demand, you know, creditism and consumers were still spending, but we lost a lot of that supply and that just, you know, just fuel on the fire for inflation. I mean, a lot of this stuff is hard to predict. I mean, you can’t predict a black swan event or anything like that. So of course, you know, what you thought was bad, just got worse.
So what we were seeing, what we’re experiencing is the partial reversal of globalization, and I’ve spent most of my career living and working in Asia. I first moved to Hong Kong when I was 25 in 1986 and found a job as a securities analyst. And very soon I started making trips across the border, into Southern China. And there I saw factories as far as the eye could see full of 19 year old women earning about $3 a day. And it became immediately clear that this was going to radically change the world. If we had free trade with China and, and other low wage countries, then this was going to result in the significant de-industrialization of the United States. But it was also going to put very significant downward pressure on the products of manufactured goods and also on wage rates in the United States. And it would be very disinflationary.
So in the three and a half decades since then up well, up until a couple of years ago, this has been the main theme I would say, running through my career. Globalization has expanded, has been extraordinarily disinflationary, keeping the inflation rate below the Fed’s 2% inflation target for most of this century up until the time COVID hit. And with the extremely low interest rates that in enabled the us government to have very large budget deficits whenever they wanted to or needed to, to stimulate the economy. And it also enabled the fed to get away with creating trillions of dollars through quantitative easing on a number of different times and all of this without leading to high rates of inflation, because globalization was so deflationary, but suddenly. And so this is really transformed the world as interest rates came down, this allowed credit to explode. So total credit, for instance, in the United States, which is the flip side of total debt, you can think of this as all the debt in the country, the government debt, the household sector debt, the corporate debt, the financial sector debt, all the debt.
It has absolutely exploded. It first went through 1 trillion in 1964. And by the time the crisis of 2008, it had expanded 50, more than 50 times to 54 trillion in just 43 years. And now total credit is about 90 trillion. So since 1964, total credit has expanded 90 times. And most of this was only possible because inflation was so low and therefore interest rates were so low making, borrowing more affordable. And so this is shaped the world that we live in it it has created enormous global economic boom. That’s pulled hundreds of millions of people around the world out of poverty, but suddenly we are experiencing a partial reversal of this. And the repercussions could be very severe. In fact, they’ve already been quite severe. You can see that NASDAQ is down a third S&P is down more than 20%. And it looks like things are going to get worse from here because the fed is now tightening monetary policy quite aggressively. And they’re, they’ve got a long way to go before they stop with the inflation rate. Now at 8.6% in the US.
Yeah, I think there’s gonna be at least six months of pain, at least before we start to see, you know, the magic word from the Fed, which is pause, you know, when they start to pause quantitative tightening and restore some confidence in people and the markets. And we see a turnaround, something that was interesting that you just said is that globalization, we talked about this in our previous interview, you know, globalization is a deflationary thing and that’s pretty clear to me and most people, which is a great thing, but you just mentioned that we are de globalizing. Can you explain to me how we are de globalizing and isn’t that creating the perfect storm for a very bad or very inflationary environment? Because if we’re losing globalization, it’s just adding another layer on top of all the other layers that are moving us towards a highly inflationary environment, which is to me a downward spiral, because then the fed has to step in even more so and create an environment where they have to strong arm the economy to prevent a highly inflationary environment, which causes problems for people, the citizens who are trying to save money or protect the purchasing power of their dollar, or invest in an environment where they really can’t invest.
I know that’s a mouthful right there.
Well, let me put this in a bit of historical context up until 1980, the US trade was in balanced with the rest of the world. And in fact, under the Bretton Wood System, which broke down only in 1971 trade between countries had to balance because dollars were backed by gold. And if the us had a big trade deficit, it would have to pay for that deficit by sending dollars overseas. But the other countries had the right to convert those dollars into the gold held by the us government. And since gold was money that would result in the money supply in the us contracting. And that would lead to a very severe recession. And that would cause the us to stop buying so much from other countries and trade would come back into balance. But once the, once we stopped backing dollars with gold, then suddenly it became far, far easier for the us to start running very large trade deficits.
So only in the early 1980s, did the us trade deficit become significant. And it happened very rapidly by the mid 1980s. It, the trade deficit was three and a half percent of GDP. And by 2006, it was 6% of GDP that was 800 billion in just that one year alone. Now the significance of this was this enabled the United States to, to suddenly buy things from all over the world, including countries with extremely low interest rates. And once they started buying things from very low wage countries, this was extraordinarily deflationary. You put extreme downward pressure on inflation and on interest rates. The inflation rate fell from double digits down to sometimes into negative territory and the inflation rate followed it down. And this reshaped not only the us economy, but the global economy, because of course, as the us ran very large trade deficits that allowed the rest of the world to have very large trade surplus with the us, meaning they were able to sell the US far more than they could have produced and sold otherwise.
And this is a thing that’s completely transformed Asia. The US ha being able to have a big trade surplus with the us is the thing that created the Asian miracle. First. It was Japan and then Taiwan, and then Korea. And later on, when I got to Asia, it was Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and more recently Vietnam and China, and all of these countries have industrialized on the back of their ability to have an enormously large trade surplus with the United States, which only became possible once we could pay for that deficit, not with gold, but we could pay with paper dollars, our treasury bonds denominated in dollars. And so the entire global economy has been restructured around this trade deficit of the US. And it was, as we keep saying, it was very, very deflationary, but now we’ve gotten to the point where we’re experiencing a double crisis.
First, the COVID has created such global supply chain bottlenecks that it’s causing difficulties in getting goods in the US most notably, perhaps semiconductors driving up car prices and used car prices, but many other materials as well. And now this invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the US and the Western powers have tried to essentially cut Russia out of the global economy. And that has sent oil prices, spiraling higher and wheat prices and therefore food prices and combined all of these upward pressures are spreading throughout the economy now and including into higher wages. And so this is represents a partial reversal of globalization. Globalization brought about a paradigm shift in the way our economic system works, and that created an explosion of credit that drove economic growth. It also created an explosion of wealth. The low interest rates pushed up asset prices. So just, just for example, the household sector net worth of the Americans.
In other words, all of the assets minus all of the debts of the, of all the Americans has increased by 90% from 2009, it’s increased from 60 trillion to 150 trillion at the end of last year. So this is an extraordinary explosion of wealth in the us. That was the direct result of extremely low interest rates combined with very aggressive monetary policy that involved the creation of roughly $8 trillion by the fed a ninefold increase in the amount of money that the fed had created. So this created an extraordinary bubble of wealth. And now that we’re experiencing this partial reversal of globalization, that’s sending up the inflation rate, it started to send up interest rates, and now the wealth is starting to evaporate as a direct result of this. And the economy is about to go into a significant recession as well.
Yeah, if we’re not already there now, so question about your 90% increase in the average citizens wealth, it begs the question. And I’m curious to know, is that in nominal terms or is that in real inflation adjusted terms?
So that is in nominal terms. Okay. And it’s not the average citizens wealth, it’s the total wealth. So of course the wealthy benefited by far the most, they have most of that wealth.
Sure. So, okay. So I don’t know if you know this, but I’m just curious if, if you were to adjust for inflation, do you think that 90% over the course of those, whatever 12 years or so would’ve essentially zeroed out or would it still be an increase in the total wealth?
No, that’d be a very massive increase in total wealth because until just now the inflation rate has been very low during that period and sometimes negative. Okay. So until just this year, this is the first time we’ve had high rates of inflation. Okay. So this would represent a massive an unprecedented explosion in wealth. That was the direct result of extremely low interest rates, which was the direct result of extremely low inflation. And now all that’s going into reverse. And so a lot of that wealth is going to be destroyed now.
Before we get into your new book, the money revolution, let me kind of tie a knot on this loop. Where do you foresee the next few years in terms of inflation, particularly in the US and the economy, particularly in the US over the next 1, 2, 3 years, if you were to predict.
Well. So the thing that makes this current environment so frightening is that it’s uncertain, which way it’s going to go. You can paint two different scenarios or, and many in between, I suppose, but on the most optimistic scenario, we would have an end of COVID sometime very soon so that the COVID related supply chain global bottlenecks go away in the not too distant future. And we would have an end in of the war in Ukraine immediately. And hopefully with the Russian troops withdraw so that the global sanctions on Russia are removed. And then we would more or less be back in the sort of environment we were in before COVID started with globalization back in full swing, being very disinflationary and putting a lot of downward pressure on inflation on us. Interest rates would essentially be back in a Goldilocks environment. On the other hand, though, it, we don’t know what’s going to happen.
So far we’ve had three big waves of COVID. We may have three more or nine more. It may never end within the foreseeable future. So the global supply chains could be disrupted indefinitely for years to come and, and painting a very bleak picture. The war in Ukraine could spread further all around Europe, which of course would be disastrous that would essentially bring globalization to a, to a standstill or a complete reversal. In which case we would have much higher rates of inflation than we do now. So those are the two extremes, you know, I hope for the best, but the reason the markets are so on edge is because there’s no certainty about which way this is going to go. Now looking at where we are at the moment, though, the Fed has suddenly become much more aggressive in its monetary policy. It at its most recent FOMC meeting, the fed was expected to increase the federal funds rate by 50 basis points, which was already quite a lot, but they increased it by 75 basis points and they indicated that they might do that again at their next meeting.
So right now, right now, the, the inflation rate CPI headline number is 8.6%. But the federal funds rate is only 1.5% or a range between 1.5 and 1.75. That’s very, very low relative to a 8.6% inflation rate. And if you look, if you compare the two, put it on a chart, put the, the CPI and the federal funds rate. Well, the federal funds rate should be very much closer to the inflation rate. In other words, it should be somewhere approaching 8%, but it’s one and a half percent right now. And the same is true for the, you know, the, the 10 year government bond yield is really the interest rate that matters most in the world because it affects all of the other interest rates in the US. The mortgage rates are priced off the 10 year government bond yield. So our consumer credit card rates and auto auto rates, they’re all priced off the 10 year government bond yield.
Well today, the 10 year government bond yield is 3.3%, but the inflation rate is 8.6%. You know, if you look back history suggests that the 10 year bond yield should be much closer to 8% rather than 3.3%. So there’s a very real possibility that we are going to see very significantly higher interest rates, both at the federal funds rate level and at the 10 year bond yield level. And at therefore in the 30 year fixed mortgage rate level than we’re seeing currently. And of course, as interest rates go higher, asset prices are going to go lower. And that includes stocks. And that includes property.
Yeah. I wanna believe that we can’t continue to raise rates because there’s a point where you reach a breaking point and you put the economy into a tailspin, a deep recession, or maybe worse. So there’s gotta be a point a magic number if you will, where rates will increase to the point where inflation is put in check and is under control. But at the same time, you’re walking a fine line. So you don’t crush or cripple the economy and put it into a recession. And I think, I believe that’s what the Fed is trying to do. They’re trying to get to that point where inflation’s under control, but they still have enough credit out there available for businesses and consumers to purchase and expand their business and do whatever they need to do to keep the economy moving forward. Do you feel the same way or do you see it differently?
Well, they would love to for that to happen, but it’s going to be extremely difficult because the world is experiencing such adverse supply shocks. Now the Fed can’t do anything on the supply side. It can’t plant anymore wheat and it can’t drill anymore oil, right? So the only thing it can do to bring down inflation is on the demand side. And that means it has to increase interest rates high enough, so that a very large number of Americans lose their job. And the unemployment rate goes up significantly. So they’ll have less money to spend and they’ll be less demand. And secondly, they can increase interest rates enough. So that stock prices and property prices fall significantly. So they’ll be much less wealth and much less purchasing power and demand comes down. So what the fed has to do is destroy demand. And what that means is they’re going to have to invoke a recession and, you know, they hope that it is a mild recession or no recession, ideally, but that’s unrealistic almost everyone now expects there to be a recession because the situation we’re in with such high inflation rates and the in, in interest rates are going to have to move very substantially higher.
And that’s why the stock market has sold off. That’s why the cryptos have been destroyed. And it’s going to spread through other sectors of the economy and it’s not going to end until the unemployment rate is much higher than it is now.
So I’m gonna ask you a question that I know is very, very difficult to answer, but I’m sure many of our thousands and thousands of listeners are probably wondering this, but I’m gonna ask the question for everybody’s benefit. If you were to pull out your crystal ball and make an educated prediction of how long the recession might last, what would you say? What would you think?
So the New York fed has a better crystal ball than I do. Okay. And what they’ve said overnight is based on their models, they think that the US economy will contract this year and again, next year, so two years.
Okay. So we’re looking at like an 18 month to possibly a 24 month recessionary period, and then hopefully we’ve hit bottom and bounced out of it.
Hopefully COVID is goes away and hopefully the war in Ukraine ends, but just over the last couple of days, Russia is now cutting off gas supplies to Western Europe cause natural gas causing. I think it’s caused the natural gas price in Europe to go up 50% over the last week is now four times what it was a year ago. So it’s uncertain, you know, these, these, what we’re experiencing now is, is so unprecedented and so difficult to forecast. Yes. That it is really difficult to know, but you know, trying to look on the brighter side or for some bright elements, so oil prices have shot up. Now, the thing about inflation is prices have to keep going up a lot every year for the inflation rate to stay high oil is now what $120 a barrel, $110 a barrel. It’s moved up from $75 a barrel a year ago.
That’s a huge increase. If it flattens out now at this level, then there’ll be 0% inflation in oil one year from now. So because of the base effect, in other words, the oil price would have to keep going up to $150, a barrel $160 a barrel to have the same sort of impact on inflation one year from now as it has had over the past year. So just because the base effect alone, we should see the inflation rate start coming down from the very high level. It is at the moment, 8.6% to something closer to between four and a half and 5% by the end of the year, just through base effects alone, unless things become worse, right. But still even with four and a half percent inflation, that’s more than twice the Fed’s inflation target. But so they’d still be in a position where they would be under pressure to keep hiking interest rates for some time further.
Yeah. Interesting. It seems like there was a time not too long ago where we had all tailwind and now we’ve got more and more headwind and there’s all these variables in play that make it more like a game of chess, trying to figure out, you know, what’s gonna happen and what the next move should be versus something a little more simplistic, like a game of checkers.
That’s right. There’s so much more complicated than they were before for decades enjoyed this environment of extremely low inflation and extremely low interest rates. And that was very beneficial in general, to both for the us economy, the global economy, and also wealth accumulation. Yeah. Now it’s going into reverse.
Right. And so tied in with all that, and this is a perfect segue, you know, to your new book, The Money Revolution. It kind of took me back. I mean, it’s, it’s a brilliant book. It’s titled The Money Revolution, How to Finance the Next American Century. And when you pause to think about that title, you’re wondering, what are you talking about? It’s a big book. It’s like 500 pages. You’ve got like 250 charts in it. And one of your arguments in the book is that the United States needs to invest massively for its future. And what I found surprising is that this can be, as you put it safely funded by the federal reserve. And then you further argue that more investment is actually necessary, not optionally, but you’re arguing necessary to improve the stability in the future of the us economy. And that it’s the federal reserve that should be financing, what you call an investment and you lay out a plan in the third part of the book, as far as what that quote unquote investment should be.
I, you know, I, I have a hard time calling government spending an investment, but, you know, that’s just, you know, my perspective. And like I said, you made me pause with your book to rethink what the government can do. Maybe not necessarily directly, but be a catalyst for. And so with that, maybe start off by briefly telling us why did you write this book? Because it really an interesting mind bender it. Wasn’t what I expected. It makes a very interesting and compelling case as to why we should not pull back and scale down the amount of quote, unquote money printing that we are doing here in the US and actually that’s happening around the world, but we should double down.
Well. So it is a very long book. It has three parts. It covers a span of time, 120 years, 110 years in the past and 10 years into the future. It starts from the creation of the federal reserve in 1913, 1914. So there are three parts. The first part is the history of the federal reserve. The second part is a history of, of the explosion of credit over the last 50 years or more that transformed the world. And the third part is a recommendation on how we can take advantage of this new economic environment. We find ourselves in to bring about a better future. So, so let me explain why is it called The Money Revolution. We’ve touched on this a bit, but the, the catalyst that sparked off this revolution was when the United States stopped backing dollars with gold in 1968. Up until that time, the fed was required by law to, to own gold, to back all of the dollars that it created.
And this was more or less the way the world had worked through the 19th century. And up until 1968, where we were either on a gold standard or a quasi gold standard Brett and wood system, right. Money had to be backed by gold. And this created a set of conditions within which the economy worked in a particular way and all of classical economic theory, as it’s still taught in universities was based on this assumption that gold is money and, but gold is no longer money when gold stopped being money. This radically changed the way our economic system works and unleashed what I call a money revolution. And the one of the key elements of this I’ve already discussed it a bit. So I won’t go into great detail, but when gold was money trade between countries had the balance when gold stopped being money, and we could pay for our trade deficit with paper dollars or treasury bonds denominated in paper dollars that allowed us to buy things from very cheap countries cheap countries with very low wages.
And that is the thing that brought down the inflation rate and that brought down interest rates and so very low interest rates. That was one of the main elements of what’s occurred over the last 50 years, very low interest rates. And a second element is of course, when gold had to be backed by money, the Fed and other central banks were not free to create as much money as they wanted. They were very constrained in how much money they could create, but, but after 1968, they no longer were. So following the crisis of 2008, the fed had three rounds of quantitative easing over the next seven years, expanding their total assets. By five times, they created three and a half trillion dollars in seven years. And then once again, starting in 2019, they had another fourth round of quantitative easing in September, 2019 in response to the repo crisis.
And then COVID started. And since then they’ve created about 5 trillion more. So their total assets representing the amount of money they have created during their history expanded from around 900 billion in total in 2007. Now it’s nearly 9 trillion. So it’s practically a tenfold increase in the amount of money the fed has created in total since 2008, that would not have been possible under a gold backed monetary system, which ended in 1968. And also the ability for the Fed to create so much money has enabled the us government to spend far more money than it could have done otherwise be for instance during the COVID pandemic, the government borrowing has gone up by about 7 trillion. Now, normally under normal circumstances where the fed couldn’t create any money, such a huge increase in government borrowing would’ve driven interest rates up to an extremely high level. I mean, if there’s only certain amount of money in the, in the, in the world, in the US economy and the government suddenly borrows 7 trillion of it over a two year period that would push interest rates up just the supply and demand for money would push interest rates up into the double digits.
But that didn’t happen because the fed created $5 trillion during that time and bought government bonds, enabling the government to borrow and spend that money and stimulate the economy without pushing up interest rates. So all of those things combined in addition to the explosion of credit that occurred at the same time and also something that would not have been possible. If we’d remained on a gold backed monetary system, this completely transformed the us economy and the global economy, it changed the way our economic system works completely. It, I say we evolved from capitalism into creditism. Capitalism was a economic system driven by businessmen who would invest and save, or in other words, accumulate capital hence capitalism. And they would repeat investment saving investment saving. That was the dynamic that drove economic growth under capitalism, but that’s not the dynamic that drives our economy anymore. The dynamic that drives our economy for many decades now has been credit creation and consumption and more credit creation and more consumption.
And that has been a lot easier in terms of creating economic growth and creating wealth. The problem is, is the economy has grown addicted to credit. And if we don’t have credit growth, the economy goes into recession. And if credit actually contracts, we go into a depression. So our economic system has radically changed. A money revolution has occurred that has transformed the nature of our economic system and how it works. So going back to the book, this book, I started writing this book in 2018 and it was more or less finished by the end of 2019. And what the world I was looking at then was one where after the crisis of 2008, in response to that crisis, the US government in 2009 had a 1.4 trillion budget deficit. I think the previous largest budget deficit before then was 400 billion, but the government ran trillion dollar budget deficits for four years in a row.
And over seven years, the budget deficit was something like 7 trillion. And at the same time, during those seven years, during through three rounds of quantitative easing, the Fed created three and a half trillion from nothing. And they used that to buy government bonds financing, half of all of the money that the government borrowed borrowed to stimulate the economy. And despite this massive fiscal and monetary stimulus, the highest rate of inflation we saw after that period was in 2011. The inflation rate CPI peaked at 3.8%. That was the highest rate of inflation. And then just a few years later by the early months of 2015 prices were falling again, we literally, we had deflation in the first few months of 2015. So when I set off to write this book, my thinking was this all right, well, if the us government can borrow trillions of dollars and the fed can finance this by creating trillions of dollars, and we can get away with this with very, without having significant rates of inflation, because globalization is so deflationary and we need to take advantage of this new economic environment we find ourselves in.
And the best way to do that would be for the government to fund a multi-trillion dollar investment program, targeting the industries and technologies of the future over the next decade in partnership with the private sector and my, and the industries we’re talking about are things like artificial intelligence, quantum computing, genetic engineering, biotech, nanotech robotics, neurosciences, and renewable energy in the industries of the future. And so that’s what the part three of the book is all about advocating this sort of government funded investment. Now, this sort of projects, as I recommend in the book, I propose that the government form joint venture companies with the private sector, with the government selecting the 10,000 most promising entrepreneurs and scientists in the country, for instance, setting up joint venture companies with them, with the government funding, these companies very lavishly and in exchange for the funding, keeping a 60% equity stake and with the entrepreneurs and the scientist, managing these companies and exchange keeping a 40% equity stake.
And so when one of these companies invents a cure for cancer, for instance, the value of that would be in the trillions of dollars and the American taxpayers would own 60% of it. So this would pay for itself many times over very quickly, because just to put this into perspective right now, the National Cancer Institute, which is the main government agency charged with finding a cure for cancer. This annual budget is 6 billion a year. Well, up until just a few months ago, the fed was creating 20 billion every month. So the national cancer Institute’s budget was just five, 5%. This is their annual budget. There’s just 5% of one month of quantitative easing. So $6 billion is not curing cancer. So why not increase that by about 10 times and see if that does it, if, so, it seemed to me that we had a once in history opportunity to invest on a multi-trillion dollar scale over a 10 year period, as I’ve just described the government, borrowing the money, but in effect, the fed, creating money and financing, the government borrowing as it did following the crisis of 2008 and over the last two years.
And it appeared that we could get away with this without having high rates of inflation. So that’s where things stood when the book was about to go to print at the end of 2019, and then COVID struck and with COVID, everything changed, we got global supply chain bottlenecks and inflation started moving up. Then we got this Russian invasion of Ukraine and inflation is moved up much higher. And so it’s no longer certain if if we are going to return to a time when inflation will once when globalization will re exert itself and will once again have very low rates of inflation, if we do, which we probably will a few, few years out, then it will once again be possible for us to invest on the sort of scale that I’ve described in the book. On the other hand, maybe that age is over. Nothing lasts forever. If it turns out that globalization breaks down or remains very impaired for years into the future, then perhaps what I’ve described will in term recommended in terms of government investment on the scale that I’ve recommended, perhaps that won’t ever be possible. We’ll have to wait and see.
Well, in wrapping up here, there’s just a couple things I want to touch on. We went really long with this interview and I literally could have gone on for hours more. In fact, after I stopped recording with Richard, we ended up talking for another 15 minutes and I just had to let him go, cuz I was feeling bad for taking up so much of his time, although we were enjoying our conversation so we could have gone on for hours, very interesting stuff, and a fascinating guy and his books are so, so good. I strongly recommend picking up his book or at least the audio book and just sifting through it. So anyway, because we went so long, I am going to break this interview up into two parts. So this is the end of part one. And I will release part two soon or maybe just the following week and a couple quick things I want to thank those that expressed interest in attending as a guest, our power room mastermind event that just happened a few days ago here in Nashville, Tennessee.
It was a great event. We had a great turnout, great speakers, including Brandon Dawson. Who’s the lead for Cardone Ventures. And Cardone’s right hand person, I believe is he’s the chief operating officer. If I’m not mistaken for Grant Cardone, we also had Michael Hyatt very, very interesting topics and a great speaker, very, very, very successful person. He’s had multiple 250 million businesses and he talked about scaling your business and scaling your personal productivity and how to do that. Very tangible, tactical information and all that stuff is presented there and recorded for our members. So if you’re a member of the power room mastermind, you have access to all the recordings of all of our guests and speakers and presentations and breakout rooms available to you on the power room app. And as a member, you have access to all of that, as well as the historic information.
Anyway, if you can’t make it out to our next event, we have another one. Well, first of all, our next event is in Lake Tahoe. And I believe that’s September 13th to 15th. Again, if it’s something you’re interested in and you’re looking for a great high end mastermind group to be a part of, and it’s not just the content, remember it’s the community. So you’ve got content and community lake Tahoe, I believe is September 13th, 15th. That’s gonna be a really good event. We have some couple of great speakers that have been confirmed. And we also have a lot of very, very successful members that are gonna do presentations as well and help the community and teach their knowledge and pass that along. So after that, we have our grand finale, if you will, our final event of the year, which is always in Las Vegas, Nevada, I believe that’s December 5th through the seventh.
I’m not sure who we’ve invited for guests and speakers there, but that event will be just as good as all the others. You know, we always have great speakers that come and help educate our members. And a lot of these events also have photo opportunities with some of the people that we bring on. For example, like Mike Tyson.
Anyway, that is it for today. Remember to subscribe if you haven’t done so already. So you’re notified of future episodes and part two of this episode. And that is a thank you for listening. We will see you all on our next episode.
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