2025: A Year of ‘Heightened & Elevated Uncertainty’ (Uncut) 02-07-2025

2025: A Year of ‘Heightened & Elevated Uncertainty’

I’m the superstitious type, and it’s the year of the wooden snake, and the wooden snake happens only every 60 years. And that’s the way that I would describe what’s going to happen this year, which is going to be a year of, I think, unremitting volatility. And that’s all we’ve seen.

We’ve seen volatility across all asset classes. Welcome to Speak Up on the Wealthion Network. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci, and joining me today is a fan favorite, a three-peat, I think.

It could be a four-peat. David Rosenberg. David is the founder and president of Rosenberg Research.

And as many of you know, it’s an economic consulting firm. But more than anything, David has a pulse, several decade, four decade-plus pulse on the markets. What’s going right in the economy? What’s going wrong? What stocks we should be looking at? So, David, thanks again for joining us.

We always love having you on. Let’s get right into it, if you don’t mind. Sure.

How did we start the year, sir? The first month of the year is about to end. Are things going as expected? Well, you know, we published our year-ahead outlook, which was all about heightened and elevated uncertainty for the year. Of course, generated principally by your good friend Donald Trump, and couched it in the terms of the Chinese Zodiac, because I’m the superstitious type.

And it’s the year of the wooden snake, and the wooden snake happens only every 60 years. And that’s the way that I would describe what’s going to happen this year, which is going to be a year of, I think, unremitting volatility. And that’s all we’ve seen.

We’ve seen volatility across all asset classes. And DeepSeek has added more uncertainty and volatility into what people thought was a sure thing, which is this generative AI trade. But I think generally speaking, the rollercoaster ride, and of course, you can argue, well, the stock markets ended January in pretty good shape.

But it has been a meat grinder of a market, and it’s been extremely volatile. I would expect that volatility to continue up until we get clarity on what trade policy is going to look like. I guess we’ll find out very soon, about 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico.

But we’re not going to know until the back half of the year about fiscal policy. And that is the elephant in the room, especially in terms of what it means for the Fed and what it means for the Treasury market, interest rates, and then back to what it could mean for the stock market in terms of multiple contractions, so on and so forth. So yeah, call it a UV, uncertainty, volatility.

That’s what we have in store. And that’s what January was all about. So let’s go to the tariffs for a second, because I’m a trained economist, I’ve been studying markets for 37 years.

And I honestly don’t know the answer to this question, so maybe you can answer it for me. We have two of our closest allies that are in the Western Hemisphere with us. They’re actually both on the North American continent, that would be Mexico and Canada.

Tell me the benefit of imposing longstanding allies. We don’t have military on either of those borders, unlike China, Russia, et cetera. And the imposition of 25% tariffs on these countries, tell me the economic benefit of the United States or the strategic benefit.

Well, I don’t know. Well, firstly, I think that Donald Trump wants to impose tariffs globally, and that is to bring into the United States foreign investment. It’s a great way to entice companies to avoid the tariff by setting up shop in the U.S., creating jobs.

But in looking at, let’s say, Canada, for example, which is where I live and I work in Toronto, when you’re taking a look at what globalization did to Canada, and you look at industrial production, manufacturing, employment and output, it’s far worse in Canada than it is in the United States. Canada got gutted by globalization more than the U.S. did. I look at Canada, you know, Canada has an effective tariff rate of 1.7 percent.

It’s two and a half percent in the United States. Canada is not, you know, Donald Trump points to Canada’s bilateral trade surplus, but that whole trade surplus is in metals and minerals and energy and wood products, the stuff that America needs. That surplus is all basic material, which is Canada as the home of rocks and trees.

And there is no trade imbalance whatsoever in everything else. Canada is a huge buyer of a lot of the manufacturing stuff that the U.S. makes. So it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

People say to me, well, how else is he going to pay for the tax cuts? He needs the tariff revenue. It’s just too small. It all just doesn’t really make any sense.

I don’t know if this is a message to China, which is that, look, look what we’re going to do to our friends and you’re next and you’re not our friend. None of it makes sense to me. You know, I saw I saw, you know, I think it was Lutnick who told Congress that when he was asked about it, that Canada should respect the United States.

Well, I don’t know, I watched the Montreal Canadiens play, you know, the Minnesota Wild and a hockey game last night in Montreal. They did play the U.S. national anthem, you know, so I don’t know where the disrespect comes from. This view that Canada is that we’re a big problem for fentanyl when one percent of the fentanyl illegal coming through the U.S. comes across the Canadian border, one percent.

That is a bigger problem with Mexico. And of course, enormous problem with China, how Canada gets tarred and feathered over fentanyl is like when one percent, it’s not zero that much is true, but, you know, 90 percent of the illegal firearms in Canada come north from the United States. I don’t see Canada saying, well, we’re going to slap on a big tariff on you.

It’s basically, I don’t know, is this all Trump with his big, bold initiatives and the disruptor? Why he’s coming after Canada and Mexico and especially Canada, at least, you know, we can talk about Canada. Remember, Canada and the U.S. had a free trade agreement in the in the late 80s before Mexico showed up to the table. Canada and the United States is we speak the same language.

We have the same values. You know, we basically all come from the British Empire. We have so much in common.

It’s and Canadians, I got to tell you, they are just mystified. There’s no benefit to the U.S. economy whatsoever from these tariffs. And I’ll just tell you that the risk is that he will plunge the U.S. into a recession because I’m not so sure, despite all the smart people that he has, I mean, Besant, for example, how they don’t understand that basically 50 percent of the U.S. automotive sector is reliant on the whole North American supply chain, 50 percent, 50 percent.

Think of what’s going to happen with these blanket tariffs if they come to fruition to the manufacturing sector. It’s going to be utter chaos. Think of think of the fact that at least a third of the of the of softwood lumber for the U.S. housing market comes from Canada, mostly British Columbia.

Think of the impact that’s going to have on the whole building industry. So, you know, Donald Trump’s going to roll the dice and I don’t know how Canada is going to respond, but this is going to create absolute chaos with the North American supply chain and it’s going to drive production and investment down. Canada and the United States will get crushed.

The U.S. economy being a large, large, closed economy won’t be crushed. But let me tell you something. This is the big risk for the U.S. economy, is that these tariffs through the disruption of the supply chain and manufacturing is finally going to cause the recession in the United States.

It might be a malprocession. It’ll be a recession. People don’t see it.

And the problem is that everybody is so ingrained to believing that the business cycle has been repealed. This is actually a very big deal. And I don’t find that despite that some of these people in this cabinet, you know, they’re very smart, but they’re smart, but it seems to be ideological and very protectionist in nature.

They seem to think these tariffs will cause an inflow of investment in the United States before that ever happens. There’s going to be a massive disruption to the supply chains and manufacturing, and that’s going to have all sorts of spinoff effects. So, you know, I think it’s a it’s an unnecessary gamble that the Trump administration is taking on.

Thanks so much for watching our discussion here on Wealthion, if you would like help with your wealth efforts, please head over to Wealthion.com slash free for free portfolio review. Well, I mean, I hope you don’t mind me letting you go like that because I, you know, I agree with everything you’re saying and I want you to expound upon it. But I. I just have a follow up question and we’ll go we’ll go to more macroeconomic stuff, but you and I are both students of the markets, we’re students of human behavior, which is also being part of the market.

I guess in the first grade I read The Emperor Has No Clothes and it was a story, of course, about the emperor’s walking around naked and everyone was telling him how beautifully wardrobed he is. These guys know better. Percent knows better.

Lutnick knows better. Maybe Peter Navarro doesn’t know better. But make make the case for me for Donald Trump for a moment.

Let’s be Donald Trump, you and I. What is he thinking? Because those guys are not going to tell him what David Rosenberg just said to the Wealthion network. What what is he thinking? What is Donald Trump? What’s the pushback on your or my argument or history’s argument about these tariffs? Go ahead. Be Donald Trump.

Channel Donald Trump for a second. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. What is he thinking? Look, there’s a I’m going to separate Mexico and Canada here, if you don’t mind, because I think the Mexican border has always been a problem.

I don’t remember seeing that the Canadian border was some sort of big problem. It just came out of nowhere. I don’t know.

I think that people were telling me that he did not get along at all with Justin Trudeau. And this was a way of. Trying to get rid of Justin Trudeau or impairing Justin Trudeau’s political future, and of course, Justin Trudeau and his entourage go, you know, on hand in need of Mar-a-Lago, and it was rather embarrassing.

And Trump ends up calling him Governor Trudeau, the 51st state. I mean, I could throw the question back to you. Why would he call Justin Trudeau Governor Trudeau? No, I’m no big Justin Trudeau fan, but he’s prime minister.

So I would ask you, I can ask you the question. You know, Donald Trump, personally, I don’t. I know people that know him.

You actually know him. What would be his motivation to call Justin Trudeau Governor Trudeau? And so I think that the reality is that he’s a very good looking guy, Trudeau. Trump is an old, insecure guy, fairly gelatinous.

Trudeau gets a lot of attention for his looks and his demeanor. I’m not talking about his politics. I’m just telling you what Trump thinks.

And so for Trump to embarrass him or Trump to find a way to excoriate him or demean him is the viciousness that Donald Trump represents. He will do that to Pete Hexeth eventually. He will do that to JD Vance.

He won’t be able to help himself. So he’ll he’ll eat his own. But but going after Trudeau was an easy thing for him to do.

Well, let me say something that, well, people were telling me that. But Trudeau, he’s history. And now there’s a leadership race in the Liberal Party.

So that problem has been solved. And he’s still saber rattling about 25 percent tariffs, which would decimate the Canadian economy. Is this is this a way to weaken the Canadian economy so much that he would actually want to include Canada as part of the United States? Would we be part of the Louisiana Purchase or Alaska? So look what he’s doing.

The Panama Canal, Greenland and what makes especially Greenland so attractive beyond just the shipping routes is the vast critical minerals that the US needs. What does Canada have? Canada has critical minerals. It has oil and gas.

You know, it could well be that he’s got some master plan that I will do my best to destroy the Canadian economy, have them go down and bend a knee. And then at some point we’ll renegotiate something where the US will have more dominance over Canada. It sounds rather Machiavellian.

And but, you know, we’re dealing with, you know, I mean, something that is much different. This is Trump 1.0 on steroids. He put on tariffs selectively, as we saw, selective country, selective industries.

This would be a blanket 25 percent tariff. It would create a recession in Canada of the likes that we had in the early 80s and early 90s. And so maybe there’s some in his mind, some political benefit.

Towards that, weakening Canada so much that it’ll increase his bargaining power because it looks as though, look, I’ve got you got friends in the Republican Party. So do I. And a recent dinner, a few of them told me that in Trump 1.0, the mantra was take him seriously, but not literally. And now they tell me the mantra within his own team is take him both literally and seriously.

So, you know, maybe this is step one of American takeover of Canada. You know, is it it’s not impossible? I’m not really sure. Or maybe basically he just does not like Canada.

I could tell you why. One personal reason why he wouldn’t like Canada was about 10 years ago. He opened up the Trump Hotel.

Now, we never know how much of these properties he actually has any money in. He seems to always emerge unscathed when there’s a foreclosure. You notice that in his history, right? I don’t think I’m wrong on that.

You can correct me. Other people might get hurt, but not him. And the Trump Hotel in Toronto, I don’t know if you were ever there.

I was at the corner of Adelaide and Bay. Nobody went to it, despite the luxurious Trump Hotel, people avoided it. And ultimately, they had to change the name.

It’s now this now I think it’s called the St. Regis. And they had a grand opening for the Trump Hotel. Nobody really came.

The thing is that Donald Trump is very popular in the United States and I mean, maybe outside of California and New York state. In Canada, Trump is not at all popular. I think that might bother him.

I think what happened with this hotel in Toronto, considering that he takes things so personally, that might bother him. The bottom line is that Canada is America’s best friend. But I think he hates Canada emotionally.

So this might be one way to get back at us. So that that comes to mind. You had to you had to be here to see it.

The Trump Hotel, the only luxurious hotel that at peak season would have like a 40 percent occupancy rate. So think of how you would feel about in Toronto is really the financial. And and when it comes to arts and theater and politics and business, it’s the financial center.

It’s an embarrassment. So maybe, you know, the thing is that that could be on his mind, too. All right, well, I’m going to go to questions in the audience in a second.

But before I go there, you said something in one of your newsletters that struck me. And I’m going to paraphrase it. But you more or less said that you may have underestimated the impact of artificial intelligence and the overall market resilience.

And so, yes, we both agree that the business cycle is not over. We both know that it isn’t because it’s just not. We know that.

But what’s going on in the market that surprised you? Based on your four decades plus of experience. Look, I wrote this piece and I’m glad you read it called Lament of a Bear. I’m glad you read it because most people just skimmed it and they had this ridiculous idea that I threw in the towel when I specifically say in the report, I’m not throwing the towel.

It’s in a it’s a it’s a it’s a self accounting and introspection as to why did I get the call wrong on the U.S. stock market? I think we should all do that. It’s a cleansing experience. I could have written this in 1998 or 99 with the Internet when I saw a bubble forming and I got out of the stock market too early, but I didn’t participate in the implosion that much.

I can tell you because. I have a history of keeping people out of trouble, but the price you pay is that you’re not going to make a killing as the bull market morphs into a mania and then a bubble. So what I said was we have we had an inflection point in the innovation curve in late 2022 with JATCPT and then these NVIDIA and the general AI chips, and it was a big deal.

I just underestimate what I underestimated. What I underestimated was the investor response to the shift in the innovation curve. And when we go and take a look, for example, so what I said was that it looks as though and this happens when you get a shift in the technology curve.

It’s not unusual that investors will lengthen their time horizons. And this is exactly what happened with the Internet. So there’s some people that believe that actually JATCPT and all the stuff happening with AI and all the spinoffs is bigger than the Internet.

I’m not quite there. The Internet to me was like electricity. It was like.

However, just like back in the late 1990s, what happened was that you see at the time of NVIDIA and JATCPT, and it was all like late 2002, early 2023, the embedded five-year earnings growth rate in the S&P 100 was just under 10%. The historical norm over five-year cycles averaging out the smooth earnings growth in the S&P is 7-8%. So what did I miss? I miss the fact that investors would take their five-year earnings estimates embedded in the valuations in terms of what they anticipate earnings growth to be in the next half decade to 20%.

20%. The embedded valuations, the earnings estimates for the next half decade doubled, doubled, and is running three times what the historical norm is. And that’s exactly what happened.

I did not anticipate that not just for this year, but for the next five years, the markets would say that this is such a massive productivity game changer and will impinge the corporate cost curve to such an extent that we’re going to have five years of earnings growth. They’re about triple the historical norm. So that’s what I tell people.

There’s people that say to me, 20%. I think it’s so big, it’s going to be 30% per year, to which I say, well, to you at the stock market, it must be cheap. To me, it’s rich.

But that’s what happened. It’s not that I missed. I wrote about AI last year.

I had AI panels. It’s not like, oh, Rosenberg missed the AI. You’re telling us.

No, I missed the extreme investor emotion of greed. There’s greed and there’s fear, the two primal emotions in the market. And we saw this with the internet.

And the internet changed our lives. And the internet radically improved productivity. And all that was happening from the winter of 2000 to the spring of 2023.

And the NASDAQ still went down 80%. All this stuff was happening. And it’s because the markets are not GDP.

The markets are animal spirits. Animal spirits, the term coined by John Maynard Keynes. I really missed.

I missed the extent of the animal spirits driving the market higher. That was the story for me and for Mr. Market in 2024. That’s what prompted me to write that report.

So I want to go to I want to go to questions, but I hope you don’t mind me bringing all that up because I think it’s a I think your research to me, I always learn something from your research. It makes me a better investor. And I always tell people, it’s not the things that we think we know with great certainty that don’t get us in trouble.

They do. I thought Lehman Brothers was going to the moon. I was long it.

It went bankrupt. But if you had asked me, I would have said with great certainty, it was a healthy and good company. So so we have we always have to have the counter to what we’re thinking.

Let let let let’s take some questions or debt levels of debt levels keep rising at the current pace. Do you foresee a sovereign debt crisis in the U.S. or other developed economies? This is Douglas from New York. Well, let’s deal with the U.S. because I mean, we could talk globally, but, you know, much of core Europe, especially France.

We know the U.K. But I mean, the the really big deal is the U.S. The U.S. drives the bus in the global economy. And it’s not so much the debt bomb, it’s the debt servicing bomb. That’s the problem.

And I have to admit that I am disappointed. Well, look, we’ll give it time. There’s 38 Freedom Caucus members and we’ll know in due course whether or not they’re yes men or whether or not they truly are fiscal conservatives.

You’d be amazed to see what happened with Barack Obama. Once the what we call the Tea Party back then, once they took over the reins under Barack Obama, we had a dramatic multi-year decline in the deficit GDP ratio that nobody thought would ever happen with the quasi-socialists in the White House. But Congress, that’s where the bills get passed.

You would not have believed that you would have had the U.S. government go into surplus in the late 1990s. But we’re not going to thank Bill Clinton for that. Maybe Bob Rubin, we can give some thanks, but it was really Newt Gingrich.

Congress matters. Congress matters more than the president. It’s a matter of does the Congress stand up to the president or are they all yes men? When it comes to fiscal policy, we are in a different kettle of fish now than we were with Trump 1.0. Trump 1.0, the deficit was 3% of GDP.

Now for three years in a row, it’s going to be over 6% of GDP. The debt to GDP ratio under Trump 1.0 was 100%, as if that’s good. Now it’s 130%.

And the biggest difference is that when Trump took over in 2016, what I call the government interest coverage ratio, how much are interest charges absorbing out of the revenue pie? Well, that was 8%, pretty benign. And now it’s flirting with 20%. So it’s like what you look at as an analyst looking at a corporate balance sheet and income statement, what’s happening with interest charges in relations to your revenues? It’s going up perniciously because the debt is going up, but also interest rates are just staying where they are.

They don’t seem like they’re coming down, at least the Fed’s not cutting them on a near term basis. The experience in other countries, and I’ll take, I’m not going to take banana republics, we’re going to take, once again, Canada, a modern developed country, almost defaulted back in the early 1990s. And can you imagine that? At that point, a G7 country defaulting came very close.

Canada came within a whisker of a failed auction in 1993. I don’t think a lot of people know that. If it happened in the United States, it would be front page news.

When that ratio crosses 25% on its way to 30, when that debt service ratio gets into that 25 to 30% range, what happens is that the deficit becomes structural and intractable. And that’s when investors really wake up to default risk. So we’re not there yet.

If left unchecked, however, we’ll be talking about this before Trump’s term ends. So in the next four years, so it’s not just the debt bomb. You can have a debt bomb like in Japan, but when rates are close to zero, your capacity to service that debt is reasonable.

We don’t have that situation in the United States. The debt service ratio is going up inexorably. And there’s no attempt to curb the debt.

And now the Fed is not playing ball. Maybe Jay Powell’s got one year left in his term, and we’ll see what Trump does with the next chairperson who will play ball. But remember, it’s the entire Treasury curve, not just the Fed funds rate.

The Fed does not control the whole curve. It’s complicated, but I think it’s a great question. But what I would say, if you’re going to ask me, the one metric to pay attention to is the debt service ratio.

And the day it hits 25%, I’ll become even more vocal on this in my daily. Amen. Now, let’s go to the next question.

Gold is back. It’s back or near all-time highs. David, what’s your outlook for this precious metal? It’s Maria from Florida.

You know, gold, well, firstly, I’m very bullish on gold. I’ve been bullish on gold for years. We put out a special report a year ago saying gold was going to get to $3,000.

I mean, we’re almost there. And once we get there, I’ll reevaluate. I still think there’s upside.

I am most impressed that gold has done this with this ripping bull market in the US dollar. Because remember, the gold is priced in US dollars. It means that gold is hitting even bigger highs against all the other major currencies in the world.

And that’s a big story. That’s a big story because when gold is going up in every currency terms, including the greenback, it’s telling you something important, which is that gold is no longer trading as a commodity. It’s trading as a currency, trading as a currency that has no government’s liability.

So you can say the same thing to me about Bitcoin. I’m not, I don’t own Bitcoin. I’ve not been advocating it because I’m a conservative individual.

And to me, Bitcoin is more correlated with the Nasdaq 100 than it is really with hard assets. It’s a hard asset currency, but it trades like the Nasdaq 100. It’s gold with 20 times the volatility.

And there’s only so much volatility I’m willing to stomach. I’m not 20 years old anymore. So gold, I think, is going to do very well.

Imagine what it does if the U.S. dollar ever cracks, if gold can get to where it is with a bull market in the U.S. dollar. But I think it’s a great, look, as I say this, including treasury securities, other safe assets to have as a hedge and your risk on portfolio as a ballast. I like gold.

I think that at some point the U.S. dollar bull market will break. At some point, the Fed will start cutting rates again. I think in the second half of the year, they’ll be cutting rates pretty hard and the dollar will end up coming down.

At that point, the tariff file hopefully will be behind us. That’s one of the things propping up the U.S. dollar. Just imagine if the U.S. dollar goes down, where gold’s going to go.

So I’m very bullish on bullion. And the gold miners, by the way, the gold miners, which have lagged woefully behind, Warren Buffett is sitting on $325 billion in cash. The world’s value investor can’t find value.

But I agree that there’s not a lot of place around the world you can find value. Low mining stocks, way underpriced relative to the price of gold right now. So something to put on your radar screen.

Well, I appreciate you bringing it up. That’s why we love having you on. And you look 20 to me.

Although I’m not 20, but you do look 20 to me. I’m going to give you the number to my ophthalmologist, OK? Maybe I need to ask this. But let’s go to the next question.

David, 60-40 portfolio. Is the 60-40 portfolio still viable? And if not, what is the recommended alternative? This is Martin from Florida. Well, you know, I haven’t abandoned it.

However, it is losing its allure to a whole lot of people. And it’s not even, I don’t call it 60-40. I always call the 60-30-10, because cash is paying you 4.5%. So you’re getting paid to be in cash right now.

I think that we’ll look back. You know, 2022, we had a cyclical bear market in equities. The bond market was behaving badly because of inflation.

But you couldn’t be in cash because it was zero. What if we have another 2022? Now you’re getting 4.5%. I think 4.5%. We’ll look back. You know, Anthony asked me about 2025.

I think we’ll look at 2025. If you bagged 4 to 5% this year, you’re going to be a very happy investor. And cash with no duration risk, no capital risk is giving that to you.

So I would say, firstly, 60-40. Let’s say 60-30-10. And then within that, I mean, I don’t know.

How do you treat… Let’s say you’re investing in a hedge fund. So the hedge fund is going to be… What is it? The hedge fund could be net short or it could be net long. I think that I’d want to be in an actively managed hedge fund that isn’t market neutral, that can actually short the market.

How do you treat that? How do you treat the 60… You see, how do you treat the 60 in that 60-40 or 60-30-10? How do you treat that if an equity hedge fund is in there and it goes net short? So all of a sudden, it’s not 60, it’s 50. And actually, I would advise people out there to seek out non-market neutral equity hedge funds that can actually short the market when it’s a certain skill to do that. But in that sense, I guess I’m answering my own question, which is that I think you want to take a more sort of eclectic and broader approach towards 60-40, 60-30-10.

And I’ve always said that, but I haven’t abandoned it totally. But I can understand that there’s other things. The other thing is that we talked about gold, for example.

60-30-10, where would gold fit in? Where would alternatives fit in? Bitcoin is viewed not just as a currency, but as an asset class. Anthony’s been bullish and right on Bitcoin. And let’s face it, I’ve not owned it, I’ve not promoted it, but it’s becoming a bona fide asset class.

And there’s no doubt about that. And Donald Trump’s reinforcing that, but it’s happening anyways. So where do you put that in your bucket? It’s not in your 60-30-10.

And what about the fact that I think that in this world of uncertainty and the world of debt, it was the very first question, what do you do? What do you do? What do you do? Well, you want to have in that bucket hard assets. You want to have commodities, right? You want to have Uranium. You want to have farmland.

You want to have base metals. You want to have real assets in a period of heightened uncertainty. Could be deflation, could be inflation.

The one thing we do know is that the big instability comes down to one of those questions, which is government debt globally. How does this end? Will it end in our lifetime? But maybe it ends in our children’s lifetime. You will want to have hard assets.

So I guess I’ll come back and say that I have an abandoned 60-40, 60-30-10, but I don’t know what, when we talk about 60-40, it’s where’s the 40? Where’s the 40? Maybe the 40 is not just treasuries, but maybe in high-yield, high-quality, high-yield bonds, or maybe Jeannie Mae bonds. Jeannie Mae bonds at 5.4% pay you right now what you’ll get in the investment-grade market. So I would say that that’s the answer to the question is 60-40, I’d add 10% cash in there, probably more.

I’d want to follow Warren Buffett and sneak in hard assets into that portfolio. All right, let’s go to the next question. What are some of your favorite books on finance or economics? This is Walter from Canada, David.

Well, I would say that… You can mention here the little book of Bitcoin by Anthony Scaramucci, and then you can mention the other ones. I mean, I would promote the book, but I don’t own the asset class. There’s a couple of books I would recommend for the time that we’re in.

I think that The Ascent of Money, I think that was Neil Ferguson, The Lords of Finance, another one. I would say that for the time we’re in right now, I would say Mania’s Panics and Crashes by Charles Kindleberger. I’m thinking of the 1864 classic by Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds.

I think that’s a must. Those are on top of mind right now. Thinking Fast and Slow by Kahneman.

I actually, by the way, at the end of last year, anybody who wants to get it, let’s go through Anthony, but I published my top 10 reads of the year in December. So I went through four or five of them. The other four or five, I don’t know, they’re swirling around in my head somewhere, but I’m happy to send that out to the folks out there.

Top of mind, those are the books that I’d be recommending to read. Well, you’ve been incredibly generous with your time, and I want to say thank you, and hopefully you’ll come back, and maybe we can get at least a mid-year review from you, if not a quarterly one. But I want to say thank you on behalf of the Wealthion Network, David, and I know you’ve got to get to lunch, so I’m going to let you eat.

We’ve got to keep you. Do I look malnourished to you? No, we’ve got to keep that 20-year-old body of yours well fed. It’s an engine of metabolism that you represent.

I think that you should come. We should do this in person in Toronto, and you’re going to get your nice 50% discount on the currency. And there’s actually a restaurant in Toronto called Scaramouche.

Did you know that? Have you been there? I’ve been to Scaramouche many times. Scaramouche is almost 40 years old, and when I go to Toronto, it’s got a beautiful view of the city from its location, and I’ve spent a lot of time in that restaurant over the years. Those guys like me.

Yeah, they do, and then you’re going to look at the price on the menu and say, God, when did they cut their prices? And I’m going to say to you, no, when did the Canadian dollar get a 50% discount with the greenback? But happy to come on the show. There’s always a lot of fun, and the time goes by too quickly. Well, great to be with you.

Enjoy the weekend, and we’ll see you soon. All the best. That’s a wrap on another discussion here on Wealthion.

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