Join Jason Hartman and coauthor of Aftershock, Robert Wiedemer as they discuss the fundamental underlying problems of printing money, the inevitable results, and how investors can still profit as the world heads toward yet another global economic crisis. Robert talks about the effects of the government bubble and the dollar bubble, when we can expect these to pop once again, and how these events will affect our government and the world.
Mr. Wiedemer is a Managing Director at Absolute Investment Management and co-wrote the landmark book that predicted the current downturn in the economy in 2006, America’s Bubble Economy, published by John Wiley. As Paul Farrell, Senior Investment Columnist at Dow Jones MarketWatch recently said, “In short, America’s Bubble Economy’s prediction, though ignored, was accurate.” Kiplinger’s chose it as one of the best business books of 2006.
His following book, Aftershock, was published by John Wiley in November 2009. It was chosen by Smart Money magazine as one of the five best investment books of 2009. Aftershock and America’s Bubble Economy have been the subject of articles in the major press including the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Hedge Fund Journal, Euromoney, Barrons, Reuters, AP, Bottom Line and others. Aftershock is in its 16th printing and has sold over 250,000 copies. He speaks to groups of investors, financial analysts and economists including the New York Hedge Fund Roundtable, Association for Corporate Growth, The Turnaround Management Association, the World Bank, the CFA Societies of Chicago and San Francisco, and the National Press Club. He is a frequent commentator on TV including CNBC’s Squawk Box and Fox Business News.
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ANNOUNCER: Welcome to Creating Wealth with Jason Hartman! During this program Jason is going to tell you some really exciting things that you probably haven’t thought of before, and a new slant on investing: fresh new approaches to America’s best investment that will enable you to create more wealth and happiness than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self-made multi-millionaire who not only talks the talk, but walks the walk. He’s been a successful investor for 20 years and currently owns properties in 11 states and 17 cities. This program will help you follow in Jason’s footsteps on the road to financial freedom. You really can do it! And now, here’s your host, Jason Hartman, with the complete solution for real estate investors.
JASON HARTMAN: Welcome to the Creating Wealth Show. This is your host Jason Hartman, and this is episode #218. Thank you so much for joining me today. Today, we have a show where we’re going to talk about aftershock, and I originally saw a video online, and heard about this author, and then I’ve heard some commercials, which have kind of made me, I don’t know, possibly changed my thoughts about some of it. And so, listen to the interview, and we’ll talk about it in later shows. But see what you think.
As far as the Meet the Masters event, we are confirmed for the Hyatt Regency in Irvine, California, and that is starting Friday night with a fun event. And we haven’t totally decided what we’re going to do for our fun event. But it’ll either be—well, you know what? I’m just gonna keep you in suspense. But it’ll be a fun social networking event on Friday evening. And then on Saturday, we will have a big, long day of education starting at about 9AM, and then Sunday from 9-6. And you can book your rooms—we got a special rate at the Hyatt Regency, Irvine, for $119 per night. And so go ahead and call the hotel to book your rooms. The phone number’s on our website at www.jasonhartman.com. And by the way, we have simplified the website, and given it a new look, and let us know your feedback on it! Because we’d love to hear what you think.
Also as you know, you regular listeners know, every tenth show we do something that is not in the realm of the usual financial and economics talk. And on show #220, we’ll have Gary Chapman coming up, and we wrote a book that you may have heard of, and we’ve never really done a tenth show yet on the subject of relationships. So, he wrote the book, actually, that my ex-girlfriend told me about, called The Five Love Languages. And he’s written several other books too. He’s quite a well known, very renowned author. So, I’ve already recorded that interview; that’ll be show #220. And we’ve got another really interesting show about longevity coming up, and we’ll probably publish that one as episode #230, so stay tuned for that.
Also, thank you for all of you who have joined as members recently. We’ve had quite a few new members, and that’s our special password required members only premium section on the www.jasonhartman.com website, where we have the Garrett Sutton interview on asset protection, which is I believe the best plan out there on that topic. And we have a whole bunch of other content. In fact, we have some real specials coming up for members, where you’re gonna get a gift certificate, or a nice free product or something, and it’ll be pretty, pretty darn cool. So, look for that, and your membership will continue to increase in value as we start to really focus on building the membership section. And anyway, stay tuned for that. And show #220, and if you’re not a member already, please go listen to the Garrett Sutton interview. I think you’ll really enjoy that. The Brian Tracy interview’s on there as well.
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So, without further ado, let’s get to today’s interview, and we will be back with that, in just a minute.
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JASON HARTMAN: It’s my pleasure to welcome Robert Wiedemer to the show! He’s the author of Aftershock, and he talks about America’s bubble economy, and I think you’ll find this to be very interesting, as he has made several very accurate predictions, and will talk to us today about what the future may hold. Bob, welcome! How are you?
ROBERT WIEDEMER: I’m doing great!
JASON HARTMAN: Good, good. So you’re coming to us from Bethesda, Maryland, from the Washington, D.C. area, and it’s good to have you! Boy, this has been a crazy roller coaster few days, or really couple of weeks, on Wall Street. What are your thoughts on the economy in general, from a macro level nowadays?
ROBERT WIEDEMER: Well, stepping back from all the chaos that S&P created, and so forth, and that’s been created by the debt ceiling circus, I think if you step back from it a little bit, which is important, because day-to-day activity can be overly negative, and sometimes overly positive. I think what we’re really in is a suspended recession. And what I mean by that is, we’ve been in recession since 2008. In 2009, the government worked furiously to borrow massive amounts of money, and then to print massive amounts of money, to help basically keep the economy from falling further. It wasn’t able to boost the economy that much with all the stimulus, but it certainly was able to keep it from collapsing and falling further. So we’re in a kind of suspended recession. As long as they keep stimulating the economy we’ll be okay, but as that stimulus slows down, we’re gonna have problems. Meaning, when you stop printing money, just like last year, we stopped printing money in—excuse me, we stopped printing money April 30th, and we had a horrible stock market that basically took a 360 point plunge in four or five weeks, after we stopped printing money. This year we stopped printing money end of June, and we had a big plunge within four, five, six weeks of that happening.
JASON HARTMAN: This begs the question, though, of why—and of course, I don’t agree with it philosophically, but—why would they ever stop creating money out of thin air? It helps people win in the short term, and it helps make things look better for short term elections and such, and it just sort of kicks the can down the road.
ROBERT WIEDEMER: And you’re absolutely right. And that’s why they print money, and from a short term standpoint, is it helps everything short term and it doesn’t really cause a lot of problems. And long term, you know, if it never created inflation? We should just keep printing money, right?
JASON HARTMAN: Right.
ROBERT WIEDEMER: Right. But that’s the point—it does create inflation at some point. Otherwise, absolutely. And I think what we’re gonna do, is we see so little harm from inflation. We see no connection between printing money and inflation, that I think we’re going to keep printing it until it appears. And once it appears, strongly, it’s very, very hard to put that genie back in the bottle.
JASON HARTMAN: Well, that’s an interesting point. Because when Bernanke gave his first 60 Minutes interview, I remember him sort of casually saying, when inflation comes, and we know it will as a result of these current Fed policies, we have other tools, and we’ll use those at that time to rein it back in. As if it’s some easy thing to do, as you say; to put that genie back in the bottle. It’s not! I mean, history has proven that over and over. Why is he so cavalier about that? Is he just basically lying? What do you think about that? I mean, why is it so hard to put that inflation genie back in the bottle?
ROBERT WIEDEMER: Well, let’s answer two questions. Why so cavalier is I think in reality, Ben’s up against the wall. I think if he doesn’t print money, we’re gonna have huge problems in our stock market. I think we would have had huge problems. I think we’d have problems selling our bonds. That’s clearly why this all started March of 2009, is there were issues with selling bonds, government bonds. There were issues with the stock market, clearly. And so I think he felt up against the wall. I don’t think it’s something he likes to do. Contrary to popular belief. Why does he think he can put that money back in the bubble? Because what’s the alternative? In other words, if you say he can’t, you’re gonna have inflation. So, I think Ben’s gotta believe that he can do something about it, because he’s really forced into doing it, in his mind. He really doesn’t have any choice. And so he’s hoping, and it’s certainly gonna make the case, that he can solve the problem later. And I might add, there are things the Fed can do, such as paying more interest on excess reserves, that can keep the inflation genie from getting out there. But once it’s out there, it’s very hard to put back in.
JASON HARTMAN: The only Fed chairman that’s really been willing to make America take that hard pill was Paul Volcker. And that was pretty ugly, pretty nasty, putting inflation back in the bottle, if you will. Since we’re using that metaphor. Is that what our future holds? Or is it going to be a hyper-inflationary type of future?
ROBERT WIEDEMER: Well, I wish it were that easy to solve the problem at this point, in the same way that Paul Volcker did. But it’s not. And the reason is because we have a bubble economy now. that means our stock market and our real estate prices are far higher than they were in 1980. So, we really can’t take the Volcker treatment of the early 80s, simply because if we had 10, 20% interest rates, what would that do to your local real estate market? It’d be devastating. What would that do to the stock market? Devastating. Our prices are all very, very high; we have bubble prices. They cannot handle high interest rates. So, that’s the reason we can’t do the Volcker treatment now, is you’re in a bubble economy. And that’s a huge difference from where we were 30 years ago.
JASON HARTMAN: So, in the book Aftershock, I mean, you’ve got a very interesting video about that, and such. I mean, what does the future look like?
ROBERT WIEDEMER: Well, I think you mentioned hyperinflation. The future certainly doesn’t look like hyperinflation. Even if you had 20, 30% inflation—that’s enough to basically destroy stock markets, real estate, and so forth. Even if you take the dollar and turn it into $5, essentially. That’s hardly wheelbarrows full of cash, but that’s enough to basically destroy your bond market, everything. So, it doesn’t have to be hyperinflation, and I don’t think it will be. Could it get as high as 100%? Sure. But not for very long. At some point, the government will take the standard inflation-fighting practices that all governments have had to take that get into that situation, and it’s really very straightforward. Cut spending, raise taxes, get everything in balance—guess what? Your inflation will go. Countries have done this frequently, and it works great. It’s just painful.
JASON HARTMAN: That’s interesting though. I don’t know that there’s actually an academic definition for hyperinflation. The numbers you just quoted sound pretty hyperinflationary to me. Whether it be 20, or 30, or 100% annually—I mean Bob, think about the implications of that! Which I know you have, it’s a rhetorical question. But, 100% inflation in any given year? If that just happens one time, people that have massive amounts of debt will just have those debts basically debased and paid off by inflation! I mean, it’ll be like a blessing to them, but people who have savings—they’ll just be wiped out, won’t they?
ROBERT WIEDEMER: Exactly. So those people who have lunch money at a fixed rate are wiped out. Anybody who’s given out a mortgage at 4 or 5% will obviously be completely wiped out. Anybody who’s taken a mortgage for 4 or 5% is doing great. So, that’s exactly what inflation does. The consequences are enormous. Clearly that’s one way the federal government can get rid of its debt, is anybody who bought its bonds at a fixed rate will essentially have all that money wiped out. But then the government has it wiped out. So that’s part of the restructuring process, if you want to think about it for the government—it makes it easier to get the budget under control. It’s kind of like General Motors. You get to wipe out all that debt, you sort of get to restructure a lot of agreements, effectively, and you will be able—you will be forced into real budget cutting. Right now we don’t have to cut our budget, because we can always borrow more. I mean, there’s no issue. We can raise our debts and then get the debt. So, that’s why there’s no pressure now. People say there is, but there really isn’t. It’s once you have that kind of inflation that you have real pressures to cut. And we will.
JASON HARTMAN: And give us your thoughts—and I know this is an impossible thing to predict, but the timeline on this. I mean, is it—are we gonna start seeing this type of inflation in 2013, 2015? We’ve got a $60 trillion and some say it’s even much higher than that, time bomb, as I call it ahead. Which, all these unfunded entitlements, the most politically expedient way out of this mess that we’re in is to inflate away the problem. Because any given president in any four year term has to completely take all of that burden at one time. I mean, and just say, look, we can’t pay Social Security, we can’t pay Medicaid, we can’t pay Medicare, we can’t pay for a million other entitlements that we’ve overcommitted to. but, how does it look, in terms o when will it happen?
ROBERT WIEDEMER: Well, we’re looking to see inflation go over 5% within the next year or two. We’re already seeing an increase from one to about three. We expect to go over give within the next year or two. And then fairly quickly thereafter, head over 10%. Fairly quickly, meaning within another year or so, after that we would see it go over 10%. Inflation tends to pick up steam as it gets going. So that’s what we would see. And that’s gonna be the break point. 10% is what people think when they are, you know, when they’re gonna start worrying about printing money causing inflation. At 10% it’s pretty clear to us, and it’s pretty clear that you can’t keep printing money forever; you can’t keep printing money. We’re gonna have problems. So, that’s pretty much what it looks like. In a sense, it takes a long time to get there. But when you get there, it’s gonna start to move very quickly. And again, I’m emphasizing that it’s not hyperinflation, which I think of—and you’re right, there’s no academic definition, but I think of that as like 1,000% inflation. The kind of thing that means, you’re paying a million whatevers. A million lira for a bottle of Coke. That’s hyperinflation. But if it’s 100% for a couple of years? Honestly, that’s really not that bad compared to many countries. But for the United States? It’s devastating.
JASON HARTMAN: Yeah, it sure is. And, what is your opinion on the CPI, and the accuracy of 3 and 5% inflation in the first place? I would say that inflation is much more severe, even now, for the poor and the lower-middle income people who base most of their life in food and energy. Whereas wealthier people can buy distressed assets, and they have all sorts of opportunities in this type of environment, that most do not have.
ROBERT WIEDEMER: Well, I don’t think there’s any question about that. I think the real inflation rates are higher. There’s a group called Shadow Stats, that says if we calculated inflation the same way we did in 1990, or I should say 1980, it’d be closer to 10% today. But I’m willing to take the CPI. This is gonna be big enough inflation that you can finagle it for a while, in the measurements. But any kind of measurements are going to show the kind of inflation that I’m talking about. Ultimately, from a financial standpoint—not from a pain at home standpoint, but from a financial market standpoint, the only inflation I’m worried about is inflation that ultimately pushes up interest rates. So, it’s gotta be strong enough, to show enough, that it’s gonna push up interest rates. Until then, you don’t have much inflation, from a financial market standpoint.
JASON HARTMAN: And, what about the outlook in terms of the dollar as the reserve currency? I mean, do you think that’s going to be the future? Or are other nations just going to kind of get fed up, finally, with our spendthrift mentality over here?
ROBERT WIEDEMER: Well, I think it will be the reserve currency. But people, when they think of reserve currency, they think it’s sort of an honor, that it’s a prestigious thing. A reserve currency really is something that people hold because it’s a widely traded currency. So, even if the dollar’s value dropped enormously, we’re still gonna be heavily trading currency, hence it’s a good reserve currency. Right now there are only two reserve currencies. Of all the reserves out there, 60% are in the dollar, 30% in the Euro. So, if we fall, well, the Euro will naturally become a larger reserve currency. But does that mean the US will fall to 5% of reserves? I don’t think so. We might switch places with the Euro, we’ll be 30% and the Euro will be 60%, but the Euro’s got some issues too. So I’m not sure. I think we’ll certainly remain a reserve currency, but is our currency going to be valued highly? No. Is our currency going to be respected? No. But just by the nature of our economy, and the size of it, we will certainly still be a highly traded currency. And by default, it’s either us or the Euro, and I think we’ll certainly share the stage of reserve currency just as we do with the Euro.
JASON HARTMAN: The subtitle of Aftershock is Protect Yourself and Profit from the Next Global Financial Meltdown. What is the next meltdown?
ROBERT WIEDEMER: Basically, it’s the popping of the dollar bubble. As we said in the America’s Bubble Economy, there are four bubbles: stock market, housing, consumer credit, and private credit. Those bubbles all work to boost the economy up. When they pop, that’s gonna put pressure on the government debt bubble and the dollar bubble. And we’re already seeing that. Government debt’s way up. What is that forcing? That’s forcing the dollar bubble to be pumped up through massive money printing. So basically, that’s what keeps the debt bubble alive. So the last bubble—I mean the government debt bubble. So the last bubble to fall in this domino effect really is the dollar bubble. And as long as we can keep that dollar bubble from popping, we can keep the previous five bubbles from popping fully. Once that dollar bubble pops, you have the financial crisis. The real financial crisis. And again, that’s not gonna be until we hit 10% inflation. At that point, we’re gonna start to see that final dollar bubble pop, and with it go the other five bubble as well.
JASON HARTMAN: We’ll be back in just a minute.
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JASON HARTMAN: In terms of any other predictions as to how that looks, Bob, does that look like civil unrest? Does it look like maybe potential for wars between countries? The US and China? I mean, China’s holding so much of our debt. What does it look like?
ROBERT WIEDEMER: Well not at all. Not at all. What it looks like is morel like a wealthy family that has been very irresponsible, and it has gone ahead and it’s blown its credit card debt sky high. It’s had its house value go way, way up. And it’s been a good life! And what’s happened is, it all blows up. The credit card debt blows, the house isn’t worth much—you still get to keep the house, but it’s not worth much. Oh, gee. The wife lost her job, the husband’s income’s cut maybe 20%. But, you know, right now they can afford the house, because it’s, you know, it’s not worth much, they’re not doing much to keep it up, but they can certainly afford to pay the electric bill and stay there. They can certainly keep their cars. They can’t really afford new ones. But, you know, life goes on. They’re not worth much anymore, in terms of assets, but they certainly can make enough money to live a reasonable life. But it’s not much fun. That’s what it really looks like. It’s more like a wealthy family, which we are, that’s behaved very irresponsibly. It’s not gonna go under. China’s a different matter. China’s not gonna go to war with us, but what’s gonna happen is its people are gonna go to war with its government. There will be an overthrow, a Tiananmen Square successful, the Chinese dictatorship, the Communist dictatorship, will be overthrown, and they will [unintelligible] more democratic government. I say more democratic government. I’m not gonna say it’s gonna be democratic by our definition, but it’ll be more democratic than a Communist dictatorship.
JASON HARTMAN: From the point of view of commerce and capitalism, though, I would almost submit to you that China is more free and democratic than we are nowadays. Just from that point. Not from a human rights perspective.
ROBERT WIEDEMER: I think if you were there, there’s an awful lot of state influence in their businesses. There’s an awful lot of control of what people say, and they don’t really have a two-party system. But certainly they’re not maybe a Stalinist—in any way a Stalinist, Communist dictatorship. They’re much more free and open than that. And that’s one reason they’ve been successful, right? And we’ll find there’s gonna be a lot of pressure just to move along that path, if you want to say. And I think it will be the full multi-party system, and there will be a lot less repression of freedom of speech and freedom of gathering and so forth, which we certainly really didn’t see in Tiananmen Square. They weren’t real open to that.
JASON HARTMAN: Yeah, that would be nice, if that happened in China. And I think ultimately it’s going that direction. I have a friend who’s there, and he just loves it. He’s been there for a couple of months, opened a new business there. It took a long time to open a company there, and he’s constantly saying how great it is, and this and that, and I’m like, you’re forgetting about this little thing called civil rights, which is one of the things I really like about the US.
ROBERT WIEDEMER: Well, you know, when the economy’s good, people don’t worry about that. But when the economy turns bad, all of a sudden people get real grumpy about corruption. They get real grumpy about civil rights. And you take that economy and you blow it apart, which is what’s gonna happen, and you put that economy to the point where they have trouble feeding their people, and you can bet they’re gonna get real upset at stuff that they didn’t care about at all right now when the economy’s great.
JASON HARTMAN: Yeah, no, money hides a lot of problems, and that rising tide does float a lot of ships, that’s for sure. You know, when you look around the world, Bob, what countries do you think are just the abject disasters? I think probably most people listening actually know who those are. But what countries do you think have a good future? Like, was kind of particularly wanted to get your take on Brazil. But just looking around the world, what’s going on in your eyes?
ROBERT WIEDEMER: What are disasters? Well, the dominos will fall pretty much as follows. The US will do the best, Europe will be number two, Japan worse, China very badly, and countries like Africa and so forth, and to some degree South America, will do even worse, because they’re far more dependent upon the rest of the world economy for their growth, and so they get hit the hardest. And they also have the weakest fundamental economies, although they’re all improved a lot. Especially South America. But they’re still gonna be the most vulnerable to this kind of fallback. Just like China’s going to be extremely vulnerable as well.
JASON HARTMAN: Now why is China so vulnerable, in your eyes? Because they haven’t created their own consumer class yet, and they’re dependent on exports?
ROBERT WIEDEMER: They’re very dependent on exports. It is an export-driven economy. The only reason it looks a little better now is because they printed all that money to build infrastructure and real estate, which they’re not going to need or use. It’s all going to be vacant buildings and vacant infrastructure, and it’s going to be sort of a shame when people look around having trouble finding money for food, and they’ve got these beautiful high-speed trains that nobody’s using, and maybe don’t even have the money to run. So, that’s what’s going to happen to China. The export market falls, and that’s basically the end of China. They will come back, they will make changes, they’ll make changes to the government, and I think China long term will come back and do very well. But it’s got a lot of changes to make before it gets there, and we were just talking about a few of them.
JASON HARTMAN: So I have—and we’ll wrap up here. But I have to say that I’m a little surprised at your take on that, that you were pretty bullish on the US and Europe? Most people would say Europe is just an abject mess right now. No? Not so much?
ROBERT WIEDEMER: Well, parts of it really are. And there’s two Europes. I mean, France and Germany are still doing reasonably okay. The Pigs and the Spain—Pigs are not, clearly. So you’ve got sort of a two-Europe situation. And I think we’ll find—there’s Norway, Sweden, and so forth, could potentially do okay. So looking at it at sort of two Europes would I think be a better way of looking at it. But they are—don’t get me wrong. Lots of problems. I mean, what if the US GDP fell by 40 or 50%? Which could happen. That’s a big hit. But we’re still in much better shape. Our economy is by far the most flexible, in terms of running businesses, starting businesses, we have the most flexible labor markets. The reason Europe does worse is, they’re a pretty flexible economy too, compared to South America, or Africa, or even Japan or China, which have a lot more intervention in their economies. We don’t think about that, but they do. Europe is a relatively free market economy, so they’ve got a lot going for them. But they’ve got a lot of—what would you call…difficulties. Or, there’s a lot of things in Europe that make it harder to do business. There are labor laws and so forth. Obviously high taxes. All those can be reformed, and once they reform those, they’ll get back on the track towards growth as well. But fundamentally there’s a lot more rigidities in Europe than there are here, but there’s a lot less rigidities in Europe, than there are in China or Japan. That’s one reason that Europe has vastly higher incomes than China or Japan.
JASON HARTMAN: Right, right, yeah.
ROBERT WIEDEMER: I shouldn’t say vastly higher than Japan, but vastly higher than China, certainly.
JASON HARTMAN: Well Bob, what would you like to just say in conclusion? And tell listeners where they can get the book, and find out more?
ROBERT WIEDEMER: Sure. The book is available on Amazon; it is now the #1 selling personal finance book on Amazon, the #1 selling economics book on Amazon. So, it’s easy to get. You can get information about our money management services, where we manage and protect your wealth and so forth. A little bit of commercial there, but we’re—we do manage money with the upcoming Aftershock in mind, but trying to make money now, even before it happens, and you can get information on that at www.absolute-im.com. That’s Absolute-IM, IM for invested management, dot com. And you can read a little bit about what we said on that. Some of our newsletters and so forth would be good. You can also look at the book website, which is www.AftershockEconomy.com. And you get the book on Amazon. And that second edition is, I think, I real improvement over the first edition. Authors shouldn’t criticize their first; I’m not, I think the first edition was a good book, but the second edition is really a whole lot better. I’d certainly recommend getting it.
JASON HARTMAN: And just final thoughts on any advice for listeners—what actions should they be taking now to protect themselves from the next meltdown?
ROBERT WIEDEMER: Be careful about your exposure to stocks, at this point. And bonds are too longer term. Not that you have to sell out, and certainly the time to sell out stocks or anything like that is not when they’ve stopped printing money, but ultimately when they start printing money again, and stocks are rolling upwards. But be careful about your exposure in stocks and bonds. They could keep the run going for another year or so, but I think we’re gonna find that the next round of money printing, in the fourth round—I think there will be a third round coming, and they’ll try a fourth—I think it’s gonna be tough to get stocks moving up next year. So, be thinking about lowering your stock positions, and eventually even your bond positions. Bonds have done well, and certainly at my money management firm we’ve done very well in our bonds. But we’ll be getting out of those positions over the next year. Have a part—have gold in your portfolio. I certainly don’t think it’s reached its height by any means, so I’d certainly have some gold.
That would give you some nice growth in your portfolio. And maybe look at some foreign currencies, although that’s a trickier market. So if you do that, you protect yourself by trying to limit your stock and bond exposure over time, over the next year, no panic. And then I’d also try to get up your gold exposure. I’ve even seen—well, I’ll just say, I’d increase your gold exposure. How much you have as a percentage depends a bit on exactly where your financial situation is, and your risk tolerance. But I would certainly have it as a significant part of your portfolio.
JASON HARTMAN: Good. Well, thank you so much! Bob Wiedemer, the book is Aftershock, and thanks for joining us today!
ROBERT WIEDEMER: Absolutely. Thanks so much, Jason.
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Transcribed by David
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