#17 – Please Won’t You Be My Financially Prohibitive Neighbor?

Wes Moss [00:00:56]:
Is that a tomahawk on your.

Jeff Lloyd [00:00:58]:
It’s a tomahawk on my shirt.

Wes Moss [00:01:00]:
It’s probably from some golf course that I played. Did you get a hole in one there?

Jeff Lloyd [00:01:04]:
I did not, and I’ve never had a hole in one in my life. Have you?

Wes Moss [00:01:07]:
No, but it’s funny. I have. It’s funny. I know a lot of golfers that have had, they’ve played for 20 some years and they have no hole in ones. And then I’ll talk to, I was talking to a family the other day who’s their golfers, and the wife has had eleven hole in ones. Eleven.

Jeff Lloyd [00:01:27]:
My sister in law who, you know, got a hole in one, I think, on her, like third or fourth round of golf ever. Like topped the drive, just scolded it and hit some rock, bounced off a tree, rolled in the hole.

Wes Moss [00:01:39]:
And she barely, she’s probably played golf how many times?

Jeff Lloyd [00:01:43]:
Maybe five in her life.

Wes Moss [00:01:44]:
And she.

Jeff Lloyd [00:01:44]:
Her life and she has a hole in one.

Wes Moss [00:01:47]:
It’s only for those who just don’t care anymore.

Jeff Lloyd [00:01:49]:
So she likes to say, stop caring.

Wes Moss [00:01:51]:
About getting a hole in one.

Jeff Lloyd [00:01:52]:
She likes to say she’s the best golfer in the family and she may be so.

Wes Moss [00:01:56]:
Welcome to money matters. This was a big earnings week. We had earnings from Tesla and Meta and Facebook and IBM and Ford and Boeing and Merck. And it’s just a long, long list of earnings. And yes, as a reminder, we mentioned specific companies here. But remember, we’re not telling you to go out and buy her, sell any of these stocks. We’re just looking at what’s happening in the market in general, how we’re faring earnings matter. That is the fuel that if you had to point to one thing over the course of economic and stock market history, it comes down to that.

Wes Moss [00:02:30]:
That’s it. Net profits, if they’re growing, that underpinning is what has supported market growth for the last forever, since the beginning of time. Now, there’s a difference between how much people want to pay for those earnings. That’s called the multiple markets are usually languishing. If that’s low at ten or 12% or get a little expensive anytime we go above kind of 18, 1920. But earnings, that is the fundamental foundation of everything we’re trying to look at here as investors. Yeah.

Jeff Lloyd [00:03:01]:
And when you talk about kind of higher multiples, some people in the market call that these stocks are priced for perfection. So when they announce earnings results and maybe they don’t meet Wall street expectations, they get punished in the market in the form of lower stock prices.

Wes Moss [00:03:18]:
And we saw that this week. We saw some winners, we saw some losers. In general, earnings have been pretty solid, but it doesn’t mean that big macro headlines don’t carry the day. And that really was, I would say, probably the biggest story of the week. Even though again, these numbers, the market has been so hypersensitive this year, a little bit too much inflation, a tick higher, and all of a sudden the markets go nuts and they’re worried that the Fed’s not going to cut. Remember, we started last week, we started calling it mommy and daddy fed because it’s almost as though there was no discipline for a long period of time. Mom and dad were off in Cancun. Kids, you’ve got the house to yourselves.

Wes Moss [00:03:57]:
No discipline. And then they came back in the form of, everyone clean your room, everyone eat your vegetables and spinach, no more candy. And that’s where we’ve been in the last, call it year and a half. As they’ve cranked up rates higher and higher, they’ve been on pause. The marketplace is just so intensely focused on when are we going to get a break? When is the discipline going to stop? When are mom and dad going to go back?

Jeff Lloyd [00:04:24]:
When are they going back on vacation?

Wes Moss [00:04:26]:
Get out of the house. Get out of it.

Jeff Lloyd [00:04:28]:
Enough rules.

Wes Moss [00:04:29]:
Lower the lower rates a little bit, please. So I want to do a little bit of a treatment on where rates have come. But this week the economic data was that Q one GDP, if there’s any big comprehensive number for the US economy, macroeconomics, of course, GDP, gross domestic product, it’s consumption, business investment, what the government is spending, and of course, net exports, which, by the way, came in kind of a negative number, it took almost a full percent off of GDP. And instead of coming in at, call it 2.42.5%, which the market was expecting or economists were expecting came in at only a little over 1.5% for the first quarter. So we have 1.6% growth in gross domestic product in Q one. If there’s any number that’s ultra backwards looking, it’s GDP. It takes forever to compute. And as you might imagine with a call it nearly $30 trillion economy, it takes a little while to add up all those numbers and all those sectors and all those different pieces of the equation, but it came in lighter than expected.

Wes Moss [00:05:33]:
And so that’s the bad news. On a normal day this year, a little bit of a lighter economic read might mean the market would be excited about that because that means the Fed can then eventually start to lower rates. However, the fly in that soup PCE, which is another one of the inflation numbers, and there’s lots of different inflation numbers. That’s personal consumption expenditures. It’s the Fed’s favorite measure of inflation over CPI. That came in a little hotter, a little warmer than expected as well. So the economy a little cooler, the inflation a little warmer. We go back to this thought of cotton candy like inflation, a little warmer than we want, a little stickier than we would like, and we get to the point where markets reacted pretty significantly to that number, down a bunch, down over 600 points at one point of the Dow because of this thought.

Wes Moss [00:06:27]:
That just pushes out the reign of fiscal discipline. Mom and dad looks like they’re going to be home for a little while. Their trip away just keeps getting delayed. And that’s what the market didn’t like this week. Yeah.

Jeff Lloyd [00:06:39]:
And if you kind of look at Fed cut expectations, let’s just call it at the beginning of the year, there was, there was almost a 99% probability that we would have fed rate cuts starting in March. And actually the expectations for about six cuts throughout the year. Now that expectation is for below two cuts through the end of the year.

Wes Moss [00:06:59]:
And we’ll be surprised. And I believe now there’s even a 20% chance that we could see a race or 20% chance that where there’s no cut. So I don’t know if we’re, there’s still not a whole lot of talk that rates are going to go up. I don’t think that’s going to happen, at least this year, so far in 2024. But we will see. Now here’s the discipline we speak of, Jeff Lloyd. And you hear that the fed raised rates. Okay, that makes, but I don’t pay the fed funds rate.

Wes Moss [00:07:27]:
That’s not my mortgage rate. It’s just the anchor rate that kind of tries to wag the tail of where other interest rates have gone. And here’s that. And this is if you want to read into that GDP number again, I think a lot of that had to do with we imported a lot more than we exported. Believe it or not, that’s a negative when it comes to the GDP equation, by the way. That doesn’t necessarily mean that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The other thing is that we look at business inventory sometimes that number, even though it may look bad, it could be a sign of strength. So it’s still a little bit to be determined.

Wes Moss [00:08:04]:
But here’s why it would make sense that things have cooled at least a little bit. We know the Fed funds rate went up and up and up 1112 times up to the about five and a half percent. So here’s what that’s impacted. Before they started raising us, mortgage rates were floating in the two to 3% range today, over seven. So that hike, that fiscal, that discipline. Mommy and daddy came home and said, look, everyone cleaned your room. We’re only eating spinach now. Mortgage rates are over seven.

Wes Moss [00:08:35]:
NFIB small business interest rates. What are those? That’s the National Federation of Independent Businesses. This is a small business tracker. What are small businesses getting loans at? What’s the rate for small businesses? Again, you go back to the zero. The days of rates being pegged essentially at zero as it’s a new breakfast food. Zeros at zero. The small business loans were in the four to 5% range. Pretty cheap capital to borrow money, even for small businesses.

Wes Moss [00:09:12]:
Where is that today? Over or right around 10%. That’s a big move. Imagine being a small business. You could borrow money for four or 5% a couple of years ago. Today it’s double digits. What does that do? Probably means businesses are taking out less loans. What does that mean for the economy? Again, brake, pedal, break, pedal. And then credit cards.

Wes Moss [00:09:33]:
You think that credit card rates are already. You think they’re already 25%? That’s not the case. If you go back to when rates at the Fed level were at essentially at the basement, they were almost at zero. Average credit card rates in the United States were in the 14% range, still exorbitantly high, but 14% nonetheless. Where are they today? Q. One of 2024 22% is the average interest rate right now on credit cards. So we have that untethering from zero. No fiscal discipline.

Wes Moss [00:10:10]:
Money was essentially free to borrow in a lot of cases around the world. It was essentially cost us money. It was costing us. We had zero interest rates. So we were getting paid almost to stick money. We were having to pay to stick money in the bank. That’s what a zero interest rate means. And now, because the Fed has gone on this long campaign, everything is a lot more expensive when it comes to the borrowing money.

Wes Moss [00:10:37]:
And we’re seeing it in these rates. 7% mortgages, 10% small business loans, 22% credit card rates. That puts a wet blanket on the economy. And Jeff, Lloyd, this week you found an interesting statistic that kind of chronicles what that means for the median home price in America when it comes to the cost of that. Yeah.

Jeff Lloyd [00:10:59]:
Not only have you seen the 30 year mortgage rates tick up, you’ve also seen the median price tick is light.

Wes Moss [00:11:07]:
It’s more than a tick, right? Yeah.

Jeff Lloyd [00:11:08]:
And I think the median home sale prices right now is right around like $420,000. So if you were to go back four years, April of 2020, call it, the average monthly mortgage payment you need for the median home was about $1,500. It’s almost doubled in four years to about 2800. So that’s about. That’s about 88, 90% higher monthly mortgage payment just to afford the median home in the US. That’s. That’s painful for some consumers.

Wes Moss [00:11:42]:
So it’s almost this war of attrition with mommy and daddy fed, that and fiscal discipline, the game they’re playing, they’re pressuring all of us, Americans, consumers, almost at every turn, at every corner they can press. So at some point, something’s got to give. Is it going to be the unemployment rate? Is that going to start going up today? We’re at 3.8. It’s still ultra low. Is that going to go higher? Is it maybe the final mile of inflation this week? So far, it doesn’t really look like it. We still haven’t made a whole lot of progress getting to that 2% over the last several months. Now it’s been almost six months that inflation has been kind of stuck or sticky in that same range. After making a lot of progress last year, the question is, and again, we’re running at about three and a half percent on inflation from the CPI inflation numbers and 2.8% on the PCE inflation number that we just saw on Friday, which is for the past year.

Wes Moss [00:12:43]:
So the inflation data is more than the Fed would like to see. We’ll see what gives. Maybe it’s a little of both. Maybe we end up with the unemployment rate ticking to four, maybe it’s four and a quarter and we see the rate of inflation fall to a solid sub 3% level. And at that point, maybe the Fed does calm down and we can all relax a little bit on the economic pressure that they’ve been putting on the economy and that I think that so many people are really feeling, Mister Rogers, won’t you be my neighbor? Or in this case, turns out you can’t don’t be your neighbor. Now, that’s coming from one of our producers, Ryan Doolittle, who loves to say that I hope you like your neighbor, because you may be stuck and you’re not going anywhere. And this is a new survey from Redfin. 38% of current homeowners believe they just would not be able to afford a similar home in their same neighborhood in today’s market, which just speaks to how high interest rates have gone and the effect of interest rates on those mortgage payments.

Wes Moss [00:13:46]:
I look at it this way. We’ve got, what, 20? This is really almost 60% of folks, if I look at this data, and this is, I might be able to afford in my same neighborhood, possibly couldn’t afford, or definitely could not afford all those categories, about 20%, meaning that about 60% of America doesn’t think that they can afford a similar house in the same neighborhood. And Jeff Floyd, that would be because, yes, they’d get more money, but because their house is appreciated. Median home prices, and this is Redfin’s number at 420, median median home price in America now $420,000. But which means that we know that we’ve had massive housing inflation. So you could probably sell your house for a lot more than you bought it for. However, you can’t take your mortgage rate with you. Now.

Wes Moss [00:14:37]:
That can’t is actually a strong word. There are some ways to take your mortgage rate with you. I’ve read about that several times, and it’s possible. However, it’s unlikely, and it hasn’t really been happening all that much. It’s something like, it’s a small fraction of mortgages have been able to be ported to the next home. So that’s where we stand. Jeff Floyd right.

Jeff Lloyd [00:14:59]:
And remember, we looked at some data a couple of weeks ago that was showing how many people are locked into six or 7% plus mortgages. And it’s a, it’s a low percentage of the economy right now. So most people are still in that, that sub 5% range. But this is just showing today. If you were having to move, would you be able to afford a similar house? And the answer is a resounding no at the, the higher house prices and the higher interest rates for a lot.

Wes Moss [00:15:29]:
Of people, particularly new homebuyers. And then, of course, those looking around their same neighborhood, about 60%, are pretty doubtful that they could afford it. Again, the culprit is not just rising home prices. It’s more expensive capital, more expensive mortgage rates going back to 1981. This is hard to even remember. I think that some of us probably remember mortgage rates at 18% to 19%. October of 1981 was kind of the peak. What was the median home price back then?

Jeff Lloyd [00:16:02]:
Jeff Lloyd, we did some digging, and it’s right around $70,000. Was the median home price back in 1981 called when we had, like, peak interest rates in that 18% to 19% range.

Wes Moss [00:16:16]:
All right, so have we done a mortgage calculator on what that would be?

Jeff Lloyd [00:16:20]:
We did, and it was about $70,000.

Wes Moss [00:16:24]:
Let’s say you finance the whole median home price now, by the way, at 4%, it would be. Let’s see. Let’s put our down payment at zero. So $70,000 home, we’ve got a down payment of zero and an interest rate today. That payment would be, my goodness, it would be $400 at 4%. Now, that’s in the good old fashioned interest rate world. But at 18%, that payment would have been $1,100. So even back then, inflation adjusted, nowhere close to how expensive housing is here in the United States today.

Wes Moss [00:17:06]:
More money matters. Straight ahead. We keep hearing that inflation is coming down, but the past three years, the common man inflation gauge is still up over 20%. That’s necessities like food, gas, utilities and shelter. How can you possibly keep up? Well, one option is income investing. That’s using a combination of growing stock, dividends, bonds for more cash flow, and other areas that can be a hedge against inflation. Look, inflation is tough. Let us help you overcome it.

Wes Moss [00:17:35]:
Schedule a time directly with our team@yourwealth.com. Dot. That’s y o u rwealth.com. We had a fun podcast this week. We’re talking about real estate. Before the break and the membranes of back in 1981, even though rates were so high, mortgage rates are 18 19%, and the median home value was only 70,000. If you go back, and even if you adjust that for inflation, the payment back then was about $1,000, $1,100 for the median home price in the United States. Today, it’s closer to $3,000.

Wes Moss [00:18:12]:
So it’s a two x three. It’s actually a three x three x higher. The question would be, do we ever see any relief in housing. And it reminded me of this podcast we did with Jeffreet Singh, who is a kind of a younger. I don’t know if he’s a millennial or not, but he’s got a massive audience. I think he gives out really practical financial advice. He’s been on YouTube for many years, and we brought him onto the retire sooner podcast. And it’s funny, he told a story about 2000, and after the financial crisis, he was still in college, and he was in the Michigan area, outside, somewhere outside of Detroit.

Wes Moss [00:18:53]:
And I remember Michigan getting really hit. I mean, housing in general is hit all across the United States. It was the great financial crisis, and at the epicenter of that crisis was real estate. The subprime mortgage loans were what kind of blew up in the United States. And we realized that people had been made loans that weren’t able to afford them, and they were almost betting on homes like stocks. Even if they couldn’t make a payment, they could turn around and sell a house. And it really led to a lot of bad behavior, led to the great financial crisis. We had a real estate disaster pretty much every city in the United States.

Wes Moss [00:19:31]:
Some were hit harder than others. So the places where you had the sprawl and huge overbuilding, I think of places like Phoenix, those prices were down 60 70%. Las Vegas, Nevada, condos down 60 70%. But as we were talking it through, he was talking about the first real estate purchase that he made. He was still in college, and this was a little bit, this is called 2010 to 2011. And even though the financial crisis was 20070 eight, and to some extent ended in 2009, housing prices didn’t get any better for a while. They were kind of knocked down on the mat. Didn’t get any better for a long time.

Wes Moss [00:20:10]:
And he told a story about a condo that he bought that was $150,000 when it had been first purchased, not by him, but the previous owner outside of the city of Detroit sold for $8,000. He bought it for $8,000. And that was. And I said, oh, wasn’t, wasn’t Detroit real estate down 40 or 50%? He said in some cases it was down 90%. And this one had been foreclosed. The bank couldn’t sell it. It was 8000. The price tag was $8,000.

Wes Moss [00:20:45]:
He offered four and ultimately paid almost eight grand for it, but rented it out, was able to make his money back within about a year and a half. Now, there’s a whole nother horror story that if you want to hear it, it’s the retire sooner podcast episode with Jespreet. She but, or saying, but it is. The question is, does that happen now? And we were talking about this through the break. It is, can housing do that again, is the question. Jeff Floyd, and what’s your opinion on that?

Jeff Lloyd [00:21:18]:
We don’t think so. Like you just said, you saw housing prices go down 40, 50% back in zero eight and zero nine. And I don’t think that’ll be the, we don’t think that’ll be the case. If there’s any pullback. You’ve just had such a lack of inventory, and the home builders never really regained how many new houses they were building back in that timeframe.

Wes Moss [00:21:43]:
And it really goes back to that. If you really think about the housing market today, the issue we have in the housing market is an undersupply of homes. The one thing that you don’t really see very often, it’s just once in a while you’ll see a house that gets torn down very infrequently. You’ll hear about a house that, let’s say, because of a fire, over a million homes a year just go into disrepair. They’ve gotten to the point where you can’t live in them anymore. Then you think about how many new homes that need to be built. And we were underbuilding for the better part of 15 years. So we got to, we had this slow build of undersupply.

Wes Moss [00:22:25]:
It was just more and more undersupply over the, over the last, call it 15 years. And then here we are. We had everyone, we had 80% of America lock in a really low interest rate, adding to the problem of fewer homes on the market, because people don’t want to give up, give up their interest rates. So to go back to a financial crisis where housing drops, it’s really hard to see a path to that. Not that housing prices can’t drop five or 10%, and we never know what. You could certainly have a move like that. But to go back and see 50% drops in real estate, 90% drops in real estate, that, at least in the foreseeable future, that just doesn’t seem to be in the cards. Very difficult to predict what happens in the economy.

Wes Moss [00:23:14]:
I would say housing is just as difficult as trying to prognosticate what’s going to happen in the stock market. But there’s much more stability if you look at the big variables. Higher interest rates, people have locked in low inventories, underbuilding for over a decade. It’s really hard to recreate that oversupply issue we had back in 2007. Eight, nine. So I still see stability in real estate, particularly residential real estate. I’m not talking about commercial, but residential real estate for really the foreseeable future.

Jeff Lloyd [00:23:47]:
Yeah. And with the low inventory, just kind of driving around Atlanta, at least in my opinion. April used to be one of the hottest months for houses going on sale, and you just don’t see as many houses for sale as you did four, five, six years ago.

Wes Moss [00:24:02]:
You see very few real estate signs is the reality. Very few for sale signs, which goes back to, does it get better? And I think that’s really why we started talking about this. Is it going to be a point when housing becomes more affordable for people that have been kind of shut out of the housing market? And I don’t see a lot of that correction coming in prices. It’s probably more in rates. And if you just do the simple math today, at today’s rate, meaning home price, 420,000 in the United States, it’s almost a $3,000 payment. If rates do come down and they go back to 4%, which may be a little bit of a stretch, but just the lowering of interest rates now drops that payment from about 3000 all the way down to 2000. And that’s a big difference. So I think that.

Wes Moss [00:24:49]:
Could we see a little backup in real estate prices? Maybe? Are we going to see interest rates get better? Probably not overnight or anytime too soon. But we go back to mommy and daddy. Fed are still in spinach mode here, at least for this year.

Jeff Lloyd [00:25:04]:
But are we going to go back to 0% interest rates? So that means, you know, a sub 330 year mortgage? I just, I don’t think so. I mean, we were, we were there, what, about three years ago? And I don’t.

Wes Moss [00:25:16]:
We don’t want that to happen again.

Jeff Lloyd [00:25:17]:
No, that would be a bad sign for the overall economy if, if rates had to go that low.

Wes Moss [00:25:24]:
I also had someone ask me this week, why are future interest rates a little bit lower?

Jeff Lloyd [00:25:29]:
Right.

Wes Moss [00:25:29]:
We know that the Fed is at five and a quarter, five and a half. But longer term interest rates, the ten year and further out treasury is lower than that. And that is a sign that the market, the bond market, the financial markets think at some point we’re going to get a slowdown and the Fed will have to lower. And that would justify these slightly lower longer term interest rates. So the market is looking for, the financial markets are looking for rates to come down. So here we are in a week where we saw, the first time we’ve seen this word pop up in a long time. And that stagflation, higher inflation than we want and lower growth than we want, all at the same time. The first quarter GDP number came in at only 1.6% growth.

Wes Moss [00:26:17]:
That was, that was pretty far below what the market wanted and expected. Also in the same day, I think this is what, Wednesday or Thursday of this past week, the same day we got a PCE, personal consumption expenditures. That’s another inflation gauge, and it’s the preferred inflation gauge for the Fed. That came out hotter than expected, 3.7% for the quarter. And then Friday’s pc reading showed a rise of 2.8% year over year, both of these readings slightly above what the market and what the Fed would like to see. That’s why we’ve been calling this cotton candy inflation. Now, we’ve seen this now for a couple of weeks, really all year, a couple of months. Inflation, that final mile, getting back to the Fed’s 2% number or 2% range, just hasn’t happened.

Wes Moss [00:27:03]:
So there’s always something to worry about. Here we are, and Jamie Dimon was talking about this this week, people, Jamie Dimon listens. People kind of, or Jamie Dimon talks from JPMorgan Chase. People listen. And now to some extent, I’m not discounting what Jamie Dimon says, but he’s coming out and saying, we’re having stagflation. This economy could get a lot worse. Well, he also two years ago said, we’re in for an economic hurricane. Remember that? Yeah, economic hurricane.

Wes Moss [00:27:33]:
And that made headlines for a couple of weeks.

Jeff Lloyd [00:27:34]:
He’s one of the people. When he speaks on financial markets, people listen. He’s probably not as important as Jerome Powell. When he speaks. Everybody listens. But yes, when Jamie Dimon speaks, he makes headlines. And he certainly did this week, bringing up the s word.

Wes Moss [00:27:51]:
The s word, as in stagflation. When you get into an environment where even though you don’t have a whole lot of economic growth to push prices higher, prices stay higher. Anyway, I don’t know about that. Again, one of the things I wanted to talk about today is productivity. There’s an interesting, well, we’ll talk about it right now. If you’re looking at what has happened with productivity, we went, I almost, I look at it as we had this kind of economic boom for a long period of time, and then we haven’t set a new productivity. We haven’t had a new productivity jump or boost in a long period of time. We had one around when, let’s call it the late 1990s, when we had the Internet come to fruition, every company, every industry got more efficient because of the web.

Wes Moss [00:28:47]:
Then we went on a productivity strike for a while, and things didn’t get more productivity. We didn’t get more productivity. It’s only been the last couple of months that we’ve seen revenue per employee, if you go back to adjusted for inflation, start to kind of break out higher. And I don’t know if that is because of artificial intelligence. I don’t know exactly what that is, but we’re starting to see more productivity from the same input. And productivity is perhaps the most important thing when it comes to the economy, earnings and markets. It’s kind of the magic juice for economic productivity in the United States, and that seems as though it’s breaking out higher. The level of productivity is perhaps the most fundamental factor that helps raise our standard of living.

Wes Moss [00:29:37]:
So if an assembly line and ten people can make 100 widgets, and then next year the same assembly line and the same amount of people can make 200 widgets, everyone gets wealthier. There’s this productivity effect. It’s a standard of living goes up, and we saw a rise in productivity that was pretty dramatic from essentially the early 1990s all the way through the financial crisis. A big part of that is the web. So we connected the world for the first time ever in a more meaningful way than we had done before. It kind of, that tide lifted all boats then. Since the financial crisis, we’ve had essentially no productivity growth. In fact, it’s gone backwards for the last 15 years.

Wes Moss [00:30:20]:
And we’re waiting, and we’re waiting. Wait a minute, aren’t there companies getting smarter? Amazon’s delivering 7 billion packages to your door. They pack those within eleven minutes. Aren’t we more productive? The answer has been no. If you look at holistically around the economy, we haven’t seen big productivity gains until. Drum roll. Jeff Lloyd. Until the last couple of months.

Wes Moss [00:30:47]:
And I don’t know exactly where it’s coming from. You can I think of artificial intelligence today a little bit like the Internet in 1990, call it 798, where it was something that we knew could be useful and start to connect and make everything more efficient and effective, raise profits, raise productivity. But it took a while to do that, and we saw that play out over the course of call it ten or 15 years. I think we’re just in those early stages of the new tailwind artificial intelligence. It’s not just chat GPT, but it’s AI and data analytics that can help almost every industry be a little bit more productive, perhaps a lot more productive. And that’s what we’re looking for, productivity. The army, what do we love here to be a tomorrow investor?

Jeff Lloyd [00:31:38]:
Because we believe in the army of american productivity.

Wes Moss [00:31:42]:
It’s finally getting a little more productive. Where were we headed here this morning? I think we just start out by looking at some of these. This is just the state of play when it comes to retirement in the United States. Two thirds of peak baby boomers, two thirds of boomers not financially prepared for retirement. So it’s just a, it’s, and we’ve looked at some studies over the last couple of weeks here. More than half of the 30, it’s 30.4 million peak baby boomers will rely primarily on Social Security for income. Women have 30% less in savings than men. 10% of workers exiting the workforce will depress us GDP and consumer spending, causing double digit turnover in key.

Wes Moss [00:32:33]:
I don’t know if I believe that headline. I don’t like that one at all. That doesn’t make any sense to me. I think that what we’re getting is economic productivity starting to increase. And even though listen, there are always red flags, there are always things to, I saw an interview this week from the economists and fund manager that says we’re going to go into a great depression. The first thing you need to know about this interview is that he said we’re going to go into Great Depression 20 years ago. And he also said it 18 years ago and he said it 15 years ago. And he said it ten years ago and he said it five years ago.

Wes Moss [00:33:11]:
And guess what? No great depressions. Now, we did have a great financial crisis, but when you hear these dour economic statistics and some of these statistics are just fact. And we know that, we know the population, we know the demographics, and we know that most people don’t have a whole lot of savings. So those numbers are real. But to say that we’re going to continue to go into the next big great depression or financial crisis, most people saying that are the same people that have been saying it over and over and over again. Now in a more measured way. This week, Jamie Dimon, who we do listen to now, he runs one of the largest banks in the world. Bankers are already have a propensity to be a little bit more cautious and worry about the economy.

Wes Moss [00:33:58]:
And he’s saying we may be going into stagflation, we could see a 1970s economy. But he’s also the same, he’s the same guy that two years ago said we were headed into an economic hurricane and that, I remember the day that happened. Jeff Lloyd, I don’t know when that exactly was. I know you’re looking it up right now, but the week we heard that JP Morgan headline from Jamie Dimon, we’re headed for an economic hurricane. And I think it was not too long after Sandy, the hurricane had hit the northeast. So we were, the world was very nervous and gun shy around hurricanes and that it never, it didn’t come to bear.

Jeff Lloyd [00:34:36]:
So, yeah, this was about two years ago, the summer of 2022.

Wes Moss [00:34:41]:
Yeah. We haven’t had an economic hurricane at all. Now, we’ve had inflation, but we haven’t had an economic hurricane at all. And that’s what that was.

Jeff Lloyd [00:34:48]:
That’s kind of when we saw inflation peak and that 9% level in the summer of 2022. Right.

Wes Moss [00:34:55]:
It is. And this goes back to, we see, we had, let’s call it a volatile week. This past week in markets. We got some economic data that we didn’t love. Still not terrible economic data, but we saw markets react to that and get volatile. And it kind of goes back to this thought that there’s always a reason to sell. We go back to just over the past, call it ten or 15 years. I go back to 2009, worries about economic recovery.

Wes Moss [00:35:27]:
2010, China’s lending curves and Obama bank regulation plan. 2011, February through March, the libyan civil war, japanese earthquake. Remember Fukushima? That was unnerving. That was scary. Remember the taper tantrum of 2013? Fed tapers. Markets react down 7.5% in a very short period of time. So there’s always some sort of headline that knocks us away from our comfort zone. It knocks off the hope of the future because today looks a little bit scary.

Wes Moss [00:36:04]:
And then we end up recovering. And then markets end up recovering because those are all really easy to point to and they’re concrete and we know what happened. And it’s easy to point to when we know that auto loans today have jumped higher or delinquencies on auto loans have jumped higher. We know delinquencies on credit card rates. These are numbers we can measure. And it’s easy to tell the story, to foretell doom. Well, that means, doesn’t that mean we’re headed off a cliff and we’re going into recession? Easy to make that argument to say, sure, that’s lots of not good news, but it misses the harder to read and the harder to quantify tailwind. That’s that productivity that’s getting pushed forward every single day.

Wes Moss [00:36:52]:
That’s the army of american productivity. It’s the slow and steady improvement in the United States and really around the world. Jeff Floyd, you found this who doesn’t love world in data from PLoS One? PLOS ONE, which is a, which is a peer reviewed, open access journal published by the Public Library of Sciences. And this is a visual. It’s a really fun visual that just shows what’s happened if the world had 100 people. What has happened in these different categories over the last two centuries? So we’ve got poverty, democracy, basic education, vaccination, literacy, child mortality. And the numbers here really speak for themselves. Jeff Lynn, I’ll let you take a couple of these.

Wes Moss [00:37:39]:
What about poverty? Yeah.

Jeff Lloyd [00:37:42]:
So going back 200 years, 100 people living. You had 79 people that were living in extreme poverty. Fast forward 200 years, you got nine that would be living in extreme poverty. So I would call that significant progress.

Wes Moss [00:37:56]:
And really, even if you go back 100 years or so, it was something like 65 or 70 people live in the extreme, extreme poverty. Today, it’s only nine. Basic education. You go back to 18, call it 20 out of 100 people. Only 17 people, or 17%, had a basic education or more. Today, it’s 86 out of 100 literacy. Twelve people could read out of 100 in 1820. Today, 87 are able to do so.

Wes Moss [00:38:27]:
Vaccination, go back 200 years. There was virtually. There was none of that even. You go back to 1950, essentially, when vaccinations really started, call it at the zero bound. Today, 81 out of 100 people around the world vaccinated. And then child mortality, 43 out of 100 children died before they were five years old, going back 200 years. Today, 96% survived the first five years. So these are just slow, steady, big ticket items that have continued to get better.

Wes Moss [00:39:03]:
These are the big ticket items in the world. Education, mortality, vaccination, poverty, literacy, these are all things, by the way, that point towards an increased productivity. The healthier we are, the smarter we are, the more security we have around health and our finances, the more productive we can be in the world. So this has all led to this increased productivity around the world, but particularly here in the United States. And that, let’s call it more ethereal. Tide tailwind is a little harder to see on a day to day basis. Much easier to see these scary headlines which have, by the way, gotten way worse over the last 20 years.

Jeff Lloyd [00:39:50]:
Yeah. So you have all those good stats, and over the same timeframe, world population has grown sevenfold. So you got even more people being more productive. It just increases that productivity we’re talking about this morning.

Wes Moss [00:40:05]:
And it’s another important point, is that out of the developed countries. So think of Europe, many of the european countries, the United States, we’re one of the few developed, not developing or emerging markets, one of the few developed countries that has real population growth. Now, it’s not huge. We’d love to see two, three, 4% population growth. That’s not going to happen because our fertility rates and the number of children families are having obviously has continued to decline, but it’s still positive. So we’re still having more children than we are, have people passing away. And of course, you’ve got the impact of immigration. I know that’s economic, that’s a political hot button.

Wes Moss [00:40:50]:
But in the United States, we’re seeing the population continue to grow at a better clip than most developed countries. Now, the question is, even though we have all these big economic numbers, that really should matter if you’re trying to read the economy. So GDP, unemployment rate, these numbers are better than we’ve seen over the course of economic history. These are really good numbers. The unemployment rate of under 4% is a really good number. Whether you look back the last 15 years, 20 years, 80 years, 100 years, that’s a really strong labor economy, means people are working. And if you want a job, you can go find a job. The question, though, and every poll you look at, is that sentiment is not good.

Wes Moss [00:41:35]:
Sentiment is bad. When people don’t feel great about the direction of this country. And I don’t know, and there’s no exact one thing I would say today you could point to inflation that hits the household wallet. That is a frustrating thing we have to live with. Doesn’t feel like the economy is great when we’ve now been pummeled over the head with higher interest rates and higher prices everywhere return. So perhaps part of that sentiment is inflation. Perhaps part of that sentiment is it’s an election year, and we’ve been politically very divided as a country. Maybe that sentiment is weighing.

Wes Moss [00:42:15]:
However, if you go back and study sentiment in the news and in headlines, we found a study this week that shows that it’s gotten decidedly worse. And this is a, this was published. Jeff Lloyd in this was a study of a whole group of researchers, and they looked at 2000 to 2019, an analysis of emotion and sentiment in 23 million headlines from 47 different news outlets in the United States. These are the most popular news outlets, and they looked for basic emotions in these headlines, anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise. And what we have seen is a 314% decline in sentiment. Or look at it another way, a 300% increase over the past. Call it 20 years, 20 plus, years in headlines that make you nervous and scared.

Jeff Lloyd [00:43:22]:
So you’re being bombarded with negative, scary headlines.

Wes Moss [00:43:27]:
And to your point, you think what happened around that period of time, the rise of the Internet and the 24.

Jeff Lloyd [00:43:37]:
Hours news cycle, the 24/7 news cycle.

Wes Moss [00:43:40]:
And if there’s anything that contributes to perhaps this, continue to be beat over the head with bad news. And the media is great at it. They’re really good at it. And we can tell they’ve gotten more formidable about it. 24 hours news cycle, cable, Internet, web, iPhones, hard to get away from scary headlines. And they’re getting better and better at it as time goes on. Do we have any good headlines or do we have any positives from the week? Jeff floyd I think we do. Here, here’s one.

Wes Moss [00:44:15]:
And this is good news for inflation. Looking at the year over year change for the national rent index, it’s actually essentially it’s zero. And you could even, well, it’s actually negative. Us rents are down eight tenths of a percent during the last twelve months ending March of 2024. Let’s call that a positive headline. Not only does it mean rents are getting a little bit more affordable because they’re actually negative. So this was a negative rate. So call that a little bit of deflation, but it’s a huge part of inflation.

Wes Moss [00:44:50]:
And even though we haven’t seen this come through just yet, I think at some point over the next couple of months, I don’t know if it’s next month or if it’s three or four months from now, I think we’re going to start seeing that shelter number contribute to getting to what the Fed wants so they can go back on vacation, right? Mommy and daddy fed their home, standing over us, making zeta spinach, cleaning up your room, no fun in the house. You’re all grounded, ground to grounded. Hey, when are they going to calm down? When’s the discipline going to calm down? It’s only when inflation gets closer to what they’re looking for. And we’re not going to get that inflation number that everybody’s looking for until these numbers start to really come through the data. I just, I don’t know when it’s going to happen. But unless this rental chart from apartment list rental estimates goes higher, we haven’t seen that happen yet. These good numbers should come into the inflation data eventually.

Jeff Lloyd [00:45:47]:
Yeah, and we keep talking about that last mile of inflation two years ago. In the summer it was nine plus percent. Now we’re in that three to three and a half, three and four range and we’re trying to get back below the fed target of, of 2%. We’ve mentioned a couple of times on the show, we don’t know if that actually means 2.0, but just maybe somewhere.

Wes Moss [00:46:07]:
Yeah, just something with two in front of it. I think if we get to 2.9, the Fed’s going to be ecstatic and then go back on and go back out of town. The american satisfaction with their personal lives and direction of the United States. Again, this is what we were talking about, scary headlines that has kind of taken american sentiment low. And this is satisfied with the way things are going in the United States Gallup poll. Now, if you go back to call it 1999, we were at 70% of Americans were satisfied with the way that things are going. The way things are going in the United States. And that has slowly declined over the last, call it 20 years.

Wes Moss [00:46:52]:
And here we are with only 17% of Americans satisfied with the way things are going.

Jeff Lloyd [00:46:58]:
I’m looking at the same chart and I would argue it’s not going slowly. I would argue it’s going pretty quickly down from 70 to 17 today. That seems like a double black diamond. Downhill.

Wes Moss [00:47:11]:
It does. It looks like, it looks like a double black diamond. But the good news is in people’s personal lives, they think of it as a little bit better. Satisfaction with the way things are going in personal life. Now that’s 85%. That’s a good news. I’ll take that side of the chart. So people like where they are in their families.

Wes Moss [00:47:33]:
They just don’t like the direction of the country. Well, we’ll see how that goes. It is an election year. We’ll see if sentiment gets better. Election years are usually good for equities, particularly re election years. More money matters. Straight ahead. The big headline of the week has to be GDP coming in less than expected and inflation coming in a little bit more than expected.

Wes Moss [00:47:59]:
And there’s been talk now of this stagflation that means an economy that’s not all that good and interest rates that not interest rates, but inflation that doesn’t get tamed. And we know this last mile problem, by the way, the last mile, if you’ve ever run a race, it’s the last mile is not always the hardest mile. Jeff Lloyd, I know it makes sense. Like if you’re running a marathon, it’s that last mile, but it’s not necessarily the hardest mile. I think. I think the last mile is usually a little easier because you’re only have a mile left. But not working for the Fed, maybe.

Jeff Lloyd [00:48:33]:
Not the case for the Fed, but I understand. It’s like, hey, if you’re running a marathon, hey, mile 25 to 26, like, oh, my God, I’ve already run 25 more mile.

Wes Moss [00:48:44]:
I get it. The last mile is the hardest mile, by the way. I’ve never run a marathon, so how, why would I know? I’ve run a, I did a half marathon, did that thanksgiving half marathon here in Atlanta.

Jeff Lloyd [00:48:56]:
Is that kind of like a turkey trot?

Wes Moss [00:48:57]:
It was that. What wasn’t a trot? Well, it was. Turkey trot’s probably like 3 miles marathon. I wouldn’t say it was a. I guess I did maybe trot a little bit.

Jeff Lloyd [00:49:06]:
That’s a turkey run.

Wes Moss [00:49:07]:
I’d like to do that again.

Jeff Lloyd [00:49:08]:
Turkey running. Thanksgiving, our kids school just had a fun run about a week ago.

Wes Moss [00:49:12]:
Fun runs.

Jeff Lloyd [00:49:13]:
And it was, it was 1 mile.

Wes Moss [00:49:15]:
Is that an oxymoron?

Jeff Lloyd [00:49:15]:
Plenty of fun.

Wes Moss [00:49:16]:
Is that an oxymoron?

Jeff Lloyd [00:49:18]:
Fun run? Yes. There’s nothing, there’s no fun in running.

Wes Moss [00:49:22]:
I do, it’s just like, I don’t know. It’s like a lot of things to me. It’s one of those things that I really do love once I get over.

Jeff Lloyd [00:49:30]:
To, actually, once I get started, I’m the same way. You gotta make yourself lace up your tennis shoes, get out there, go swimming.

Wes Moss [00:49:36]:
I still run every day, every week, don’t you?

Jeff Lloyd [00:49:39]:
A couple times, yeah, I’m about three or four times a week, so I wouldn’t call that an avid runner, but maybe a regular.

Wes Moss [00:49:46]:
That’s avid.

Jeff Lloyd [00:49:47]:
Okay.

Wes Moss [00:49:48]:
How far do you run? You do a fun run?

Jeff Lloyd [00:49:50]:
I do some days. Some days it’s 1 mile. No, about three to 5 miles. On average.

Wes Moss [00:49:56]:
Three to four times a week. That’s pretty solid. All right, I’m inspired. We’re going to go running after this.

Jeff Lloyd [00:50:03]:
Let’s do it.

Wes Moss [00:50:03]:
We’re going to running after this. So the news really this week is that the economic numbers aren’t as good as we want, the inflation numbers aren’t as good as we want, and it’s to some extent, you’ve got to think that it is. What the Fed’s been trying to do is starting to at least work a little bit on one piece of the equation. They’re trying to bring down inflation. They don’t want the economy to come down. Now, the reason there has been so much talk of inflation, or, I’m sorry, there’s been so much talk that we will slow down this economy over the last couple of years is that it makes sense. It makes sense when the Fed has to push up rates. They’ve got to throw.

Wes Moss [00:50:45]:
It throws a wet blanket on everything. Here’s some of these rates. Fed fund targets rate was essentially. Well, it was at zero from. It happened right as soon as COVID hit and went all the way through early 2022. Well, we know we started to get massive inflation. So they raised rates 1112 times to five and a half from zero. What did that do to mortgage rates? We went from sub 3% on the 30 year mortgage rate all the way up to over 7%.

Wes Moss [00:51:14]:
Where we stand today, NFIB, which is the National Federation of Businesses, essentially, this is the small business interest rates on average, paid by short term loans, by borrowers. That was in the low four, mid 4% range. Again, through that zero interest rate world that we lived in today, it’s essentially 10%. So we’ve gone from sub five. We think mortgage rates have gone up a lot. How about loans for small business owners? And then, of course, credit card rates. Jeff. Lloyd, where is that gone and where has that gone to?

Jeff Lloyd [00:51:52]:
They were kind of in that 13, 14% range, and last measurement was about 22%. So take those three examples. You got mortgage rates and small business interest rates effectively doubling over the last four years, and us credit card rates at over 20%.

Wes Moss [00:52:12]:
So it’s got to be taking a toll. And we’ve seen some economic numbers start to. I wouldn’t call these, these are not giant red flags, but they’re kind of little warning signs. Auto loans have started to have higher delinquency levels. Credit card delinquencies have started to happen a little bit more than we’ve seen in the past. People have borrowed from their 401 ks. And I think this goes back to, though, Jeff, the thought around we had a lot of excess savings in the US economy. It’s hard to even fathom.

Wes Moss [00:52:45]:
And it was hard to fathom just how much money got dumped onto the system. And it was dumped onto the system to pave over a huge pothole that was created. Created by COVID. Right. We locked down the economy. People didn’t work. And then it took a long time to get back to some semblance of normalcy, but during that period of time, the fed bazookaed money onto the economy. It’s hard to even fathom today.

Wes Moss [00:53:09]:
It doesn’t seem like this could have ever happened, but it did. Remember, the federal government was just literally mailing checks out. The people. If you were making, you made under a certain amount of money that the year prior, you just got a check stimulus checks. Remember that?

Jeff Lloyd [00:53:26]:
You got the stimulus check, and then you remember you had the PPP loans going out to the businesses and PPP loans.

Wes Moss [00:53:33]:
It was a giant amount of money that was just dumped on the economy. Stimulus.

Jeff Lloyd [00:53:38]:
Economic bazooka. Right? Economic bazooka. Absolutely.

Wes Moss [00:53:42]:
So we saw this massive decline in stocks, but the minute that we saw the Fed stepping up with their money printing artillery, if you will, money printing artillery, if I can get that out. The stock market rebounded dramatically. Now, it took a while for the economy to get back to normal, but we saw the stock market boom and we saw this massive amount of excess savings. Remember, we saw something like $2.2 trillion in not normal savings, but in excess beyond normal savings. And for a long time, our estimates were that we were wearing that down at the clip of $60 to $80 billion a month, and it looked like it would start to really run out. At the end of last year. It was the end of 2024 or the fall of 2024. We could see that starting to run out.

Wes Moss [00:54:33]:
That didn’t happen. And it didn’t look like, it looked like it would maybe be around forever. Last forever. Maybe we were six months off or so, and now we’re starting to see that.

Jeff Lloyd [00:54:45]:
Yeah, but you remember back four years ago with the stimulus coming in, and then people are kind of stuck in the house. They’re not spending money at restaurants, they’re not spending money going on vacations. They had that buildup of savings, and they had that pent up demand where once the economy was back up and running, they wanted to get out and go.

Wes Moss [00:55:06]:
The other thought here is that we talked a lot about housing today. We talked about how productivity is something you can’t really see. You get a week with a bad economic headline, the market immediately reacts. We get a war. We had an attack in the Middle east. Immediately we get a market reaction. Immediately we’ll see something happen to interest rates. We’ll immediately see the Dow Jones down 500 points.

Wes Moss [00:55:30]:
Happens very quickly, and it reminds us that there’s always some sort of reason to be nervous about being an investor and being in the stock market. It happens constantly. If you go back, I think it was you that put this out or you found this, but if you go back, remember the european debt crisis, 2012? That was a pretty scary time. We had all this debt in Europe. Remember Greece? Greece, remember greek interest rates were, it was 20% on greek bonds, and then they ultimately defaulted. And we thought all of Europe was going to default. And we had this really scary period of time from April through June, it was the early summer of 2012. Market was down 11%, just like that.

Wes Moss [00:56:18]:
Then in 2013, in May, we had the Fed starting to talk about tapering interest rates and wham. Markets were down seven and a half percent. In September of 2014 through October, global growth, falling oil. And remember Ebola? There was a worry about an ebola spread. In 2014, markets were down, call it almost 10%. Very, very quickly. And then it was. We had to fast forward until 2015, May through May of 2015 through May through February of 2016.

Wes Moss [00:56:56]:
Greece then defaulted on his debt. Not his debt. The debt defaulted on their debt. China. The stock market in China crashed. Emerging market currencies fell. Oil fell, worries around North Korea. And then with all that, and the list goes on, there was always a reason to sell.

Wes Moss [00:57:20]:
So it might be that we have inflation, it might be that we have deflation. Today, what’s popped up? Stagflation, wars, politics. But just because the tone in the United States doesn’t feel all that good, and we know we’re down to, according to Gallup, what we’re down to, 17% of Americans say that we’re headed in the right direction as a country, even though that people don’t feel that good. That’s what 83% of Americans don’t feel like we’re headed in the right direction. That’s kind of. That’s not a great number. We can now blame it, though. I think I can point to the 24 hours news cycle is I don’t think it’s a coincidence that sentiment in America started to drop the minute that the 24 hours news cycle kicked in.

Wes Moss [00:58:10]:
And studies show that headlines have gotten progressively scarier and more fear mongery ever since 2000 as well. You put all that together, no wonder everybody, they’re reminded that things aren’t great today. Today. Good thing for us here on money matters is that we are tomorrow investors. And we’re looking beyond today’s scary headlines because there’s something and a reason to sell and not a good news story. Scary headline every single day. What you don’t see in the news is something like productivity, which has not plowed new higher ground in a very long time. Just started to, we just started to see some productivity numbers come, come through pretty dramatically to the good.

Wes Moss [00:58:59]:
That just doesn’t get reported on a whole lot. It’s hard to just see the collective of the United States being a little bit more productive than today that it was yesterday. That’s something you’re not going to see in the headlines. So when it comes to investing, even though there’s always a reason to sell and hard to find a reason to stay when it comes to investing for the long haul, aka tomorrow investing, I’m still in the camp. Jeff Lloyd of stay the course. I’m still in the stay the course camp. I think things will be better in a year from now and two years from now and five years from now. Jeff Floyd, what were what’s your big takeaway from today, besides being a tomorrow investor? American productivity.

Wes Moss [00:59:40]:
Everything’s getting better, even though it doesn’t sound like it. And Americans don’t feel good, things are good. Besides all of that, what was your takeaway from this Sunday morning?

Jeff Lloyd [00:59:49]:
I think it’s just as investors, we got to be we got to remind ourselves about discipline, discipline in the market. We got the Fed putting a little discipline in the market in the form of higher interest rates. We have a bunch of mega companies reporting that reported this week, and if they don’t meet or exceed expectations, they get disciplined in the form of a lower stock price. And as investors, we need to remain disciplined. Regardless of a scary headline or a market pullback, we need to know as disciplined investors to stay invested in the market and stay diversified and both equities and bonds and just maintain that discipline.

Wes Moss [01:00:34]:
Wow. I didn’t know that you had, like, a real answer for that. I was just asking you what stood out to you, and you, you’re like, chat GPT. You had an entire theme around the simple question, but you’re right, I like this theme.

Jeff Lloyd [01:00:46]:
I think that was the theme of the show today.

Wes Moss [01:00:48]:
Yeah, I think I think it was. We’ve got fiscal discipline from the fed, zero to five and a half percent on federal funds. Fiscal discipline when it comes to mortgages, from two and a half or three to seven. Small business loans now have gone from 4% to 10%. Credit card rates have gone from 14% to 22%. The imposition of fiscal discipline because of higher rates, it’s a very different equation when money’s free to borrow, for the most part. Interestingly, this is a stat we didn’t get to today, but I think the average savings rate in the United States is something like 0.57% still.

Jeff Lloyd [01:01:28]:
Yeah, I saw that, and I was like, wait, surely that can’t be right. But it’s it is below 1% now. That’s just a normal savings rate. Obviously. You know, you can get normal savings account for a normal savings account, yes, but under 1%, that’s just in today’s higher interest rate surprised me a little.

Wes Moss [01:01:44]:
And I think that we’ve seen less capital flow from the big banks, maybe because of Silicon Valley bank. That issue. It was what, March of 2023? The world very quickly got scared of smaller banks and we’ve seen stickier money when it comes to the big banks and they don’t feel as though they have to pay a whole lot in interest on those savings accounts because people are not leaving those big banks because they want the safety and security of that. I would just encourage people to think about that and make sure that you don’t have giant balances sitting around at a bank not giving you a whole lot because we still have money. Money market rates have been really strong and stayed strong so far this year you can get approximately 5% in a money market fund without having to look too far. Where can we find Jeff Lloyd throughout the week? Can we find you@yourwealth.com?

Jeff Lloyd [01:02:39]:
Dot that’s why you are wealth.com dot.

Wes Moss [01:02:44]:
We’ve got a new and improved, highly searchable yourwealth.com launching. Very soon. You’re going to be able to find podcasts, articles with a new search function that really works all that content in one place. And again, you can find me and the money matters team and Jeff Lloyd all@yourwealth.com that’s y o u rwealth.com. Have a wonderful rest of your day.

Mallory Boggs [01:03:14]:
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Mallory Boggs [01:04:02]:
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