On today’s Creating Wealth Show, host Jason Hartman talks to financial maven and author, Bill Bonner, about his new book, Hormegeddon, how to create money out of thin air, the situation in Japan and whether you really can have too much of a good thing. Bill’s company, Bonner & Partners, is a leading marketplace for advice and talking points about everything to do with investing so he’s perfectly placed to assist those looking to increase their investment prowess.
Ahead of the interview, Jason addresses the Elon Musk announcement of semi-autonomous cars and their inevitably disruptive impact on everything – including real estate.
Takeaways
– The title for Bill Bonner’s latest book, Hormegeddon, comes from the term for specific biological experiments which went awry: hormesis.
– With many of these things they can start out as beneficial but the more you use them, the more issues arise.
– The notion of creating money is so difficult for even experts to understand – how can real money be created from absolutely nothing? From thin air?
– The trade of the decade assessment is not a prediction; it’s all about analyzing what’s up and what’s down.
– The situation that Japan is currently in is terrible, and it doesn’t look to be improving in the immediate future.
– Indeed, there’s every possibility that the US could follow suit and end up in a similar situation to Japan, especially with ever-increasing Chinese trade agreements using Chinese currency clauses.
– One potential option could be ‘direct monetary funding’ which is the act of giving money, rather than lending it, in an attempt to bring the economy back up by consumer spending.
– If you borrow money long-term for real estate purposes and it’s on a low-rate basis, inflation can eventually come along and pay off your debt for you.
– Too much of a good thing is only too much. We view security as a good thing, but consider the money the Germans were spending on their own security during the war and that just can’t be justifiable.
– Declining marginal utility is where you invest too much into one thing and it all backfires.
– Decades ago, the huge houses used to be owned by people who made things and had a real role in society and manufacturing; now they’re just owned by hedge-fund guys.
– With all of the technological advances now occurring, this is an amazing time to be alive.
– Agora exists as a marketplace to collect together everyone’s questions and answers about investing because no one knows who’s going to have the right answer.
– For more information, head to www.AgoraFinancial.com or for an entertaining read, check out www.DailyReckoning.com
Tweetables
We spent 200,000 developing our sentiments and our bodies as humans, but now we’re so unequipped to deal with quantitative easing. Tweet this!
Empires get to impose their currency, but over time, they lose that ability – the dollar could seriously fall. Tweet this!
Transcript
Introduction:
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:
It’s my pleasure to welcome one of the most distinguished financial writers of our time, and that is Mr Bill Bonner. He’s a big favorite of mine; I’ve been following his work for many years, and he’s co-author the New York Times’ Best-selling Books Financial Reckoning Day; Surviving The Soft Depression of the Twenty-First Century; Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis; Mobs, Messiahs and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle and Finance and he’s founder and President of Agora Publishing and writes the daily financial newsletter, Diary of a Rogue Economist. His daily letter is published in four countries and reaches more than 250,000 subscribers, and Bill, I have a feeling those stats are a little bit old. I’m just getting that feeling, but welcome, how are you?
Bill:
I’m fine, thank you. It’s good to be with you.
Jason:
Yeah, it’s good to have you on the show. Tell us about your newest book, and pronounce the name and tell us about the name.
Bill:
Well, the title is Hormegeddon, and when I say that to people they think it’s about some terrible disaster that’s about to befall the prostitute community, but it really has nothing to do with that – there’s no ‘w’ on there. It comes from a phenomenon that was observed about a century ago in biochemistry, where they would take an organism and give it a little bit of something (it could be something good, could be something bad, like bacteria in a dish), and they would notice that a little bit did wonders. It really helped the colony of bacteria grow, for example. And then they’d give it a little bit more and they’d all die. They called that process hormesis, and it was really Nassim Taleb in his book Antifragile, who suggested that maybe this process or phenomenon ought to be examined in public policy matters. So based upon that, I did, and I started thinking about it.
Jason:
That would make a lot of sense. It is too much of a good thing, I mean the state has become giant – probably an understatement. We’re just making people apathetic, aren’t we?
Bill:
Yeah, well I think a lot of the time when we have these left-right debates, you say ‘Gee, they ought to do away with that agency’, and the people come back and say ‘Well, what are you? Some kind of anarchist? Without a government, we’d all be dead’ or something or other.
Jason:
Right.
Bill:
But that’s not the issue. That’s the whole principle of hormesis – like everything else, a little bit is a good thing. It can provide order and whatever they do.
Jason:
Yeah, whatever they do. I love it!
Bill:
Yeah, but almost every institution and almost everything in life is subject to this rule that the economists saw many many years ago. They called it the rule of declining marginal utility when they noticed that you take something and you start using it – investment, water systems, roads, whatever – and the first use of them is very beneficial. When they put in the highway system in California in the 1950s, it was so beneficial. Everybody was out driving around. They were even making up songs about driving down the freeway in California in the 1950s and 60s, but then as more and more people got on the roads and they built more and more roads, now it’s a perfect nightmare! You start with a little bit of something – take anything; take dessert. You eat some dessert and it’s plainly good for you; everybody needs food. But if you eat too much dessert then it’s not good for you and it turns bad. That’s true of almost everything. I’ll say there’s one exception, and even that I’m not sure about, but the one exception is what Mae West had in mind when she said ‘too much of a good thing is wonderful’.
Jason:
Right, I love that quote, by the way! That’s a great Mae West quote. Maybe take us back a little bit. Your writings are so great, Bill, because you just mix in really interesting history and just tell things in such a great story. I love reading your work. Tell us how we got here, if you would. I mean, post-World War Two and the great society and all the rest.
Bill:
Well, as the Italians say, I’d like to go back to the egg in order to understand how we got where we are, but I think the interesting part of it is something that I’ve just been aware of only recently, and that is that most of humankind and most of our life on earth as humans (and that’s only 200,000 years – we evolved from some other species, but we’ve only been on earth for about 200,000 years) – during that time that it took to become fully human and after we became fully human, our lives on Earth had really almost nothing to do with our lives today. We were living in tribal societies and in small groups, and so in all those years in which our brains and our muscles and our opinions, our attitudes, our sentiments, our emotions – all of those things, we never had to deal with quantitative easing. It comes up and most people – I’m not saying this to criticize people because people are what they are and they’ve adapted to breathe air, to walk on earth, to do all those things, but we’re not adapted to deal with quantitative easing. So you tell the man on the street about quantitative easing and how it works with the credit cycle or any of those things and it’s not that he can’t understand, it’s just that they’re going to be too foreign for him. What happens is you get a great mass of humanity who are just incapable of dealing with these things. Then what happens is that some people find that they can deal with them to their own advantage and so they are actually taking advantage of the fact that most people don’t have any idea what this is all about, but the people who control the system and right now the system is a system of money created out of nowhere by the federal reserve and by the central banks, broadly, and fed into the financial community. We end up having a huge huge interest in both government, finance and a lot of other things too, in keeping the system going, feeding more and more credit, more and more money – nobody knows what this money is because it’s just electronic notations, but we’re not adapted to that either! You tell somebody that the Fed is creating money and the guy’ll say ‘Well, how so?’ You say ‘Well, they’re just creating it on their computers’ and he’ll say ‘What do you mean? What is this stuff?’ It’s just very hard to understand.
Jason:
When they do create this money, I’ve always wondered: they must go to a corner of the room at the Federal Reserve and there’s like a big computer on a table – do you think it’s a Mac or a PC? And then someone’ll sit there and move the mouse and poof! Money is just created out of thin air, right?
Bill:
It’s just an amazing phenomenon. You can study all of your life and you could try to figure it out but you really just can’t put your finger on what is this stuff that they’re creating? They call it money, but where does it come from? Is money real? If it’s real, how can the real thing be created out of nothing? It’s not possible. It’s really a philosophical challenge to try to figure out what it actually is.
Jason:
Oh, it really is. It’s a symbol and it’s a fluctuating dynamic moving target – it has its exchange and its value, obviously. It’s just a crazy concept and to really get one’s head around the idea of fractional reserve banking is not easy. It took me years to understand it and I don’t know that I do even now. The way money’s lent into existence..
Bill:
I don’t know if I do, and I’ve spent years trying to understand it, trying to puzzle it out. I know there are some people that benefit a lot from it. I don’t know what it is, but ask your listeners – do they get any of this? The QE goes through channels and those people get a lot out of it.
Jason:
They do get a lot of it, but they’ll always say. And whenever the G20 meet, or the G8 meet, or whatever they’re calling them nowadays – maybe it’s 7, I can’t even remember anymore! That’s also a moving target – all they’re talking about really is money creation. That’s all they can do is just create money.
Bill:
Yeah, that’s all they do. That’s the only thing they have.
Jason:
It’s their only arrow. And I should say currency creation, obviously. Bill, tell us about the trade of the decade. You called that right in the early 2000s, and then you called another trade of the decade and I’m kind of curious. I want to get a report card on the one that was from 2010.
Bill:
Well, I’ve got to say that the trade of the decade is not a prediction. I don’t predict anything because I really have no idea what will be coming in the future. All I do for the trade of the decade is I look and see what’s up and what’s down. I look at what’s up and I want to sell it. I look at what’s down and I want to buy it. It has no predictive qualities. Back in 1999 I looked at the stock market, which was way way high and gold was way way low and I said ‘Well, I don’t know, this is probably not going to continue for another 10 years so I’ll bet that at some time in the next 10 years this is going to reverse and that the best trade now is probably to sell the stock market and buy gold’, and that turned out to be the very best trade you could do. It was phenomenally successful. Then 2010 came and people asked me ‘So what’s your trade of the decade now?’ and I had to think real hard about it because it wasn’t so obvious. Gold had already gone up for the last 10 years so I couldn’t stick with gold.
Jason:
Was it like Japanese bonds? I can’t remember.
Bill:
So then yeah, I looked at Japan and I thought ‘Wow, over in Japan they have a funny situation where their stocks have been going down for the last 30 years, which is kind of interesting’ and their bonds had all been going up. They’d been trying their damnedest to get it to reverse so I thought ‘Well, probably at some point in the next 10 years, they’ll be able to work that out and this will probably go the other way’. So my trade of the decade in 2010 was to buy Japanese stocks and sell Japanese bonds. So far, the stocks part of that has gone pretty well. The bonds haven’t really cooperated, but we still have a few years left of this decade.
Jason:
So you don’t think Japan will default? I mean, talk about debt, wow! They’ve got real debt problems.
Bill:
I think they will default by printing. For that money there are almost no foreign buyers of Japanese debt so what they did was take the money from their Japanese goods savers and they were earning a lot of money by selling their Toyotas etc overseas, mainly through America, so they took that money and the Japanese government borrowed the profits from that whole generation. They were trying to stimulate the economy so they would build a new road or bridge or do something or other, but the result of it was that they took that money from a generation of savers, people putting their money way for their retirements, and they spent it. Now those savers have Japanese government bonds and because they’re retiring in huge numbers (they had the same kind of baby boom that we had, if not even more pronounced).
Jason:
Oh, it’s terrible because they didn’t make up for it with any immigration like we did.
Bill:
No, and they didn’t have children. The birth rate in Japan is the lowest in the world next to Italy, I think, so they don’t have any new generation coming along that’s very big, all the savers and all the people getting ready to retire or have already retired have these Japanese government bonds. They’re going to present the bonds to the government and they want money for them, and so far, using their trade surplus and very low interest rates (almost 0), they’ve been able to keep this financing going, but now their reaching the end of that because now this trade surplus has turned into a trade deficit and they’re running out of money. This guy currently in charge of it all came in with this 3-arrow approach – he’s shot the damn 3 arrows and it’s only made things worse. In the last quarter, they had the worst collapse in the growth rate that they’ve had in many many years, so they’ve had a negative growth of 6% which is terrible. So I think we’re going to see some big big problems in Japan, and those big problems are probably going to be a company buying lots of money printing.
Jason:
Right, lots of money printing, and it’s not like they haven’t been doing that for a while, but not an outright default, so the idea of shorting Japan debt would not be the thing to do.
Bill:
It might be. It’s hard to know. Of course in this trade I am sure of Japan’s debt, but I don’t really like to speculate on things like that. I think somehow, probably through inflation, the debt is going to be worth a lot less in the future than it’s worth now, and probably because of this inflation, the Japanese are probably going to turn to stocks as a way to protect themselves. So the stock market will probably have a big run up and I think the bonds will probably crash, but that’s just guessing about the future, which I don’t like to do. Still, I think that’s probably what will happen. By the way, I think we should be watching Japan. Japan is like the US, just a little ahead of us. I suspect that we’re going to be in that trap, too, where we have more and more people retired and with fewer people supporting the expense of government, the expense of all these wars overseas and that will mean that we have to continue borrowing and who will we borrow from? We don’t have a trade surplus. We’re talking about all this Shell gas that we’re exporting but we’re going to need every penny of that money to support this thing.
Jason:
That’s the interesting thing, Bill, and this is where I sort of part with the goldbugs and the people who believe that the dollar’s going to collapse. I can understand that, most definitely, when you just do the math, but there’s so much more to that equation than math. Please poke holes on my theory, that’s what I want you to do. So I sit here and I look and I think that the US has massive debt, there’s no way we can pay for it, there’s no way we can fund these mandates and entitlements that we’ve promised over the next 15-20 years. It’s a timebomb, and everyone’s got a different estimate but it’s a huge number, nonetheless. I’m just wondering. Can’t we just kick this can down the road for a long, long time because we have reserve currency, because we have the biggest military, because we have the biggest brand? And of course, I’m talking about the USA when I say this. It shouldn’t be this way – I’m not saying it’s fair or right – it just is. We’re going to keep that reserve currency status with aircraft carriers and whatever the newest, hottest, greatest plane is. I don’t think we’re going to let that go.
Bill:
Yeah, I think you’re basically right. I think that’s the worrisome thing, in a way. It’s worrisome in the sense that you want things to clarify themselves. What should happen, you want it to happen so you can go on with your scheme of things, but I think that the US is in a situation and in a position where we could see many years of this kind of Japan-like slow growth, people retiring, very low interest rates. Japan shows us that this could last for many many years, but it doesn’t last forever, and the US may have aircraft carriers, but aircraft carriers cannot keep a reserve currency. They can try to keep even a few Arab nations in line, but right now every time China has some sort of trade agreement, they’re putting in a Chinese currency clause. They want more and more trade to shift to the Chinese currency, and since China is the largest trading nation, over time we’re going to see more and more transactions taking place globally that don’t involve the dollar, and some time sooner or later, the US is going to lose its reserve currency status, I think. I’d be very surprised. It happens all the time. Each empire gets to impose its currency and then it loses that ability over time.
Jason:
And the famous last words of the investor who’s about to go bankrupt are: “It’s different this time”, right? The only thing I think about that – the ‘it’s different this time’ concept, is the concept of scale. When you have this massive amount of technology, whether it be military technology or otherwise, even communication technology, maybe the window really can close and it’s almost impossible to unseat an empire. I suppose the Romans thought that too – I guess none of us really know. Your thoughts?
Bill:
Everybody thinks that for a while, and then it turns out to be true. The question is: How long does it take? Nobody knows of course, but what I see is the US trying to speed up the process in a way. I think that’s the real meaning of all this involvement in the Middle East where we’re spending enormous amounts of money and getting more and more drawn into these wars. Remember, a few years ago, we had absolutely no enemies. Zero! But that didn’t suit the interests of the Pentagon very well so they’ve been working to create enemies. Then they had these shoe bombers and people like that which were not very effective as enemies, and they sent all this material (equipment etc) in going and invading Iraq and now that’s in the hands of enemies. Now we have enemies with tanks!
Jason:
It’s ridiculous. It seems like we always make these guys our friends and then 20 years later they become our enemy. That keeps the money in the pocket of the military industrial complex and the Central Banking cartel who finances both sides of the war! It’s unbelievable. It’s a terrible business plan.
Bill:
It’s just like the whole system of money creation: overall it’s not good but it is good for some people. It’s hard to stop. That’s the point of my Hormegeddon book is that once you get going in a certain direction it’s almost impossible to stop it because you end up with so many people who have an interest in seeing it go on. On the simplest level, when people start retiring, they definitely want to see the system of public benefits (health and pensions) survive, and if it means printing money, then they’re perfectly happy for the government to print money, and if it means high youth unemployment, they don’t seem to care about that very much either. We’re seeing that all over the world now, and in developed economies in Europe and America particularly where the youth unemployment and underemployment is very high. What they do is lend them some money so they can go to school.
Jason:
I know, and then they make the loans not dischargable in bankruptcy and they’ve got a whole generation of indentured servants or slaves, really. So from your reading, I think you believe – probably, don’t let me put words in your mouth – that we’re going to have some pretty significant inflation in the future, ultimately. Would that be correct?
Bill:
Ultimately, yes. Not necessarily in the short-term. I think that’s the big issue because in the short run, we’re looking at very low interest rates, and with the QE coming to an end, as it’s doing so, the Fed is buying less paper and it buys less with cash so it’s not putting so much money into circulation anymore. Even so, we’re seeing bond yields go down. For me, this means that the economy really is in a very slow growth mode and so nobody is borrowing. We’ve seen this in Europe and of course in Japan too. I think this slow growth – and remember it’s a situation where people are getting older, there are fewer new businesses starting up and there’s less demand for money – so when we get into that stage, it could last for a long time. While it lasts, we’re not going to have any inflation – that’s going to be very low. I think that what happens to get us to inflation is that at some point, the Central Banks decide that they’ve got to do something and they just can’t let this go on. We’re seeing that in Japan already, where they’re trying to take more and more aggressive policies and so what we’re probably going to see here, there and in Europe eventually is when they start what they call ‘direct monetary funding’, where instead of lending money, they give money. Everyone will get a tax credit, for example, and that money will put the economy finally into the consumers’ hands. They will spend and they will begin that inflation period.
Jason:
Ultimately it’s just got to happen. If you think about it from a governmental perspective, inflation is really a pretty good business plan. The government gets to reduce its debt through what I call ‘inflation-induced debt-destruction’ and consumers get to do that too. If you borrow long-term money on real estate and it’s low fixed-rate, inflation basically just comes along and pays your debt off for you. It’s an amazing miracle.
Bill:
It’s almost perfect as long as you can control the rate. They, of course, have been trying that for years – that’s what Central Banks do, they try to control the inflation rate to an acceptable level, which they regard as 2%.
Jason:
It amazes me that rates are this low and for this long. How much longer can they defy gravity? I predicted higher rates a long time ago and I’ve been wrong about it.
Bill:
Yeah, so have I, but things can go on longer than you think they should, and then when they finally do turn, they turn faster than you think they should. It’s all a mystery and it could go on much longer. Japanese experience is 30 years of very low rates, so we could see a few more years of this.
Jason:
Yeah, it’s amazing. So back to the book a little bit. I appreciate all your commentary there but I just wanted to ask you about some of your chapter subheadings as we get towards wrapping up here. I love how you start out: “Too much information. Too much economy. Too much security. Too much government. Too much energy”. Tell us what you mean by those.
Bill:
Well, in every case, each one of those things which we regard as good things, security for example, but you run into the declining marginal utility where you spend more and more money to get it and then it backfires on you. In my chapter on security, for example, I show how this was the way in which the Germans operated up into and through World War Two, where after World War One they were convinced that they just needed more security. Adolf Hitler came along and he had a whole business plan; he was the man with the plan and his plan was that Germany could only be richer if it had more foreign land, because after World War One, Germans were starving because the English had proposed a blockade. It’s a long story.
Jason:
Inflation.
Bill:
But he came forward and said Germany must have more security, we need more land to produce our food and we need an army strong enough to protect us. That argument really really connected with the German people at the time.
Jason:
Yeah, it resonated with them.
Bill:
And part of it was correct, but only a part. So they increased security spending in Germany to more than any nation ever spent on security. At one point they were spending 50% of GEP on the military. Of course, that was in the middle of the war but it really was an amazing thing, and the result of this security spending, which was supposed to make Germany more secure and richer, was that Germany was totally bombed out and occupied by foreigners. It just totally blew up in their faces, but you see that even in things where you think ‘You can’t have too much of it’. Okay, that’s one thing where with security, people spend too much on the military and then they get in trouble, but take health and education. You wouldn’t think those things could backfire on you, but they do!
Jason:
Education certainly has, and healthcare is such a murky one. Education is a disaster. What about energy, though?
Bill:
Energy is tougher to understand, and in my chapter I had a hard time dealing with it because what happens with energy is you think that the more energy, the better off you are, but in fact, a little bit of energy is a good thing, but you get a lot of it and you start to waste it. The next thing you know, you’ve wasted a lot of energy doing all kinds of crazy things that really don’t pay off. The amounts of energy is more difficult because energy is part of everything, and so you could say ‘Putting energy into education’, or that money is energy, time, resources – it could all be described as energy and putting energy into something. The energy analysis is that energy invested too much into any one place – you have to put it into something – you end up with this declining marginal utility that eventually blows up on you.
Jason:
Right. I think that’s what happens – too much energy maybe makes us undisciplined, and if we look at what happened during the first .com bubble, we saw these overfunded companies with lame ideas because the sock puppet says ‘Let’s give you $100 million’ or something.
Bill:
We’re seeing that now too. We’re seeing what happens when you give too much money. That money is probably the key to the whole thing, but if you’re a .com company and you go public and get $20 billion and you have no real idea, that money’s going to be wasted.
Jason:
Yeah, it sure will. I want to ask you, also Bill, about the financial services industry. You’ve written some great stuff about it, and recently with the release of Michael Lewis’s latest book Flash Boys about the high frequency traders. One of these high-frequency traders, however, has a mansion in Houston which just went up for sale for $43 million! What a rigged game. I like to call Wall Street the modern version of organized crime, and I just wanted to ask you if you had any thoughts on high-frequency trading, or just any of the Wall Street scandals and things.
Bill:
Well, I don’t have any particular thoughts on that, but Wall Street, like any industry, has gotten rich, and it’s gotten rich on a phenomenon which has been the expansion of credit. All these things come together. It was only in 1968 when they took the dollar off the gold standard and took the gold completely out of the dollar, and then in 1971 they took it out for international purposes, but once they did that it made it possible to expand credit almost without any limit. So who made money on that? There were a lot of people who were in a position to lend out money and those were the big banks and the big Wall Street institutions. They made a lot of money, and people have written whole books about this financialization of the US economy – it went from an economy where the big houses in Houston and New York were owned by people who made things. That was the economy of the 1920s, 30s, 40s and even into the 50s. But then beginning in the 60s and 70s with this new money that they had, the economy shifted to an economy not of people who made things, but of people who traded things and people who lent money. So you have these Wall Streets and now you can go to Connecticut and the banks of the ocean there and you have these houses which used to be owned by people who made mattresses and people who ran railroads. Now they’re almost all owned by hedgefund guys or bankers – people like that. The economy has shifted to a financial economy and it’s shifted because the money was phony, and the phony money allowed the financial industry to take a bigger percentage of the output of the whole nation. It was absolutely amazing. That was what really was in danger in that meltdown of 2008. Who cared if one bank went bust or another, who cared if it all went bust, for that matter? But the whole thing was in danger because they had all profited so enormously from this big run-up of credit that they had to be saved – the system had to be saved, and that was why they bailed them out.
Jason:
Yeah, it’s amazing. And I’m going to say sarcastically “But Bill, that’s financial innovation!’
Bill:
[Laughs] It is financial innovation, it’s entirely financial innovation.
Jason:
Run for the hills!
Bill:
Innovation is just not necessarily a good thing.
Jason:
It’s not always good, no question about it. Look at all of the good things that are going on. Technology is just blowing my mind, when I look at what’s coming and in the area of nanotech and biotech. Even more electronics – it is an amazing time to be alive in so many ways. I sort of wonder, and I know it’s a wildcard, if with all this financial malfeasance that’s going on, if technology might just not rescue us all. Maybe technology will save us all. I don’t know. Your thoughts about that? There’s some pretty amazing stuff happening.
Bill:
I don’t know; you’re talking to somebody who can’t figure out how to turn his radio on because it’s gotten too complicated!
Jason:
Yeah, but you can read and write about it.
Bill:
I have three remote controls in my hands and I can never figure out which one to use so I’m probably not the best person to ask.
Jason:
Great stuff. Well, Bill, thank you so much for joining us. Just tell us a little bit about Agora Financial for a moment if you would, before you go. You’ve got an amazing company with offices all over the world, hundreds of employees, many brands…
Bill:
We’ve learned a lot over the years. I was the first publisher of the Hulbert Financial Digest when we started to analyze what investment analysts did and who made money, how they made money and what was really going on. We realized that – and this was a long time ago – that these guys, these independent analysts who are out there and working only for the customers; they charge $99 or $49 for a newsletter and that’s all they get. They go out and try to find a company and they have no ulterior motive. That is a pretty good way to get information and ideas, and that’s what we’ve been doing every since. We’re kind of like an alternative to Wall Street in a way, for the Do-It-Yourself investor, we have somebody who will give advice. Is the advice good? Well, you don’t know until after the fact, but if the advice is well researched and honest and so forth, then there’s a fair chance that it’s a good way to learn more about investing, to get investment ideas and so on, so that’s really the industry that I’ve been in for my whole career. It’s fascinating and it’s changed a lot in the last few years because now everything is electronic, and once we figured out what we were doing, we took it on the road, and now we’re in about 10 different countries around the globe.
Jason:
And a whole bunch of different brands. It seems like an amazing business model where you partner with these people – I’ve had Harry Dent on the show a few times and I know you guys did a deal with him.
Bill:
Yeah, that’s right.
Jason:
It seems like a really good match – a win-win arrangement.
Bill:
We don’t claim to know the answer to questions like ‘What’s the best way to invest? Where should I put my money?’ We as a company don’t claim to have that answer. What we do, and that’s why the company’s name is Agora, is we try to provide a marketplace for those answers, so if anybody’s got a good idea, we want to put it out there. We don’t know who will have the right idea or who will have the right advice.
Jason:
Good stuff. Give out whatever website you think people should have; I know you’ve got a bunch of them. Tell people where they can find out more.
Bill:
I think the best they can do is go to www.AgoraFinancial.com or come to my diary of a rogue economist, is what I call it. I write every day and I’ve been writing every day for the last 15 years.
Jason:
Are you still writing for the Daily Reckoning?
Bill:
That’s a separate website, but I do occasionally write for them too. You could try that one: www.DailyReckoning.com
Jason:
That’s the one that I read for so many years. It’s just awesome, it’s very entertaining to read, so that’s it. Well, Bill Bonner, thank you so much for joining us today.
Bill:
Well thank you, it’s been a pleasure.
Outro A:
I’ve never really thought of Jason as subversive, but I just found out that’s what Wall Street considers him to be.
Outro B:
Really? Well how is that possible at all?
Outro A:
Simple, Wall Street believes that real estate investors are dangerous to their schemes because the dirty truth about income property is that it actually works in real life.
Outro B:
I know. How many people do you know, not including insiders, who created wealth with stocks, bonds and mutual funds? Those options are for people who only want to pretend they’re getting ahead.
Outro A:
Stocks and other non-direct traded assets are a losing game for most people. The typical scenario is you make a little, you lose a little, and spin your wheels for decades.
Outro B:
That’s because the corporate crooks running the stock and bond investing game will always see to it that they win. This means, unless you’re one of them, you will not win.
Outro A:
And, unluckily for Wall Street, Jason has a unique ability to make the everyday person understand investing the way it should be. He shows them a world where anything less than a 26% annual return is disappointing.
Outro B:
Yup, and that’s why Jason offers a one-book set on Creating Wealth that comes with 20 digital download audios. He shows us how we can be excited about these scary times and exploit the incredible opportunities this present economy has afforded us.
Outro A:
We can pick local markets untouched by the economic downturn, exploit packaged commodities investing and achieve exceptional returns safely and securely.
Outro B:
I like how it teaches you how to protect the equity in your home before it disappears and how to outsource your debt obligations to the government.
Outro A:
And this set of advanced strategies for wealth creation is being offered for only $197.
Outro B:
To get your Creating Wealth Encyclopaedia Book One, complete with over 20 hours of audio, go to www.jasonhartman.com/store.
Outro A:
If you want to be able to sit back and collect cheques every month, just like a banker, Jason’s Creating Wealth Encyclopaedia series is for you.
Outro:
This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company, all rights reserved. For distribution or publication rights and media interviews, please visit www.hartmanmedia.com or email [email protected]. Nothing on this show should be considered specific personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own and the host is acting on behalf of Empowered Investor Network Inc. exclusively.
