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- [00:00]
A
The following podcast contains explicit language.
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B
Hello and welcome to the Call in edition of Slate Money, the long awaited Call in edition. We've been teasing this one for a while now, but this is finally your opportunity to get your questions answered. We have a whole bunch of really good questions and we're going to try and run through as many of them as we can. We're going to save one just for the Slate plus listeners at the end because you guys are special. You get an extra cue and an extra a. But yes, I'm Felix Salmon of Fusion. I'm joined as ever, by Jordan Weissman and Anna Shyman.
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A
Hey there. Hey everybody.
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B
Shapps. And let's go to the questions. Mr. Dan Schrader, producer of Slate Money, can you queue up for us? Question number one.
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C
Hi. I'm wondering about the safety of my 401k and pension. We have a lot of money stored in there and I'm just waiting for the world to explode any second. And I don't know if I should take it out now and spend it on something, not all of it, but like, you know, enough to, like, do some stuff around the house.
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D
Or if.
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C
I should just hang on. I just feel like the stock market is out of control. It's just, we're gonna, we're in a bubble and it's gonna explode and I just don't know when to start selling. So it'd be really helpful to know what you think. Thank you. Bye.
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B
So I really love this question. I love a couple of great things about this question which we can talk about a little bit. The first bit is where you talk about how you have Money in your 401k in your pension, which kind of implies it's retirement money. But then you're like, should I take money out to spend money around the house and when should I start selling? The. We can talk about the details, but the first thing is don't. If this is retirement money, it's not designed to be spent around the house, it's not designed to be sold. You don't try and time the markets. You just keep it in there. And then eventually come retirement, you'll have some money for your retirement. But yeah, you're right. I mean, the stock market is looking pretty bubbly. And if you have a lot of money in there, and if you're going to feel bad if you didn't sell when the stock market goes down, because the stock market will go down at some point, then maybe it, maybe you should be taking some money out and doing something useful. With it instead of just watching it fall.
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E
Well, again, if you this is long term money, then you are going to expect to go through multiple market cycles. And also ideally, actually when the market goes down, that creates buying opportunities. So that's not a bad thing. And again, I would argue that of course the markets are going to come down. The question is just how much they'll come down. If this were money that you didn't really need, then maybe you could argue you could take some of it out and potentially do something else with it that would have a higher return. I'm not sure exactly. Right.
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B
We're talking about spending it around the house, actually. Like if you've made a bunch of money in the stock market by putting it in the stock market and the stock market rising. Yeah. Is there a case for taking some of those profits and buying a new kitchen?
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E
Yeah. I mean, I could argue again, if it's not money you need, if this was just like money you were kind of playing with, then sure, why not? I mean that actually you could probably say that's what a lot of investment firms are doing right now. They're sitting on a lot of cash because they made returns and they're taking it out and holding it because there's nothing to invest in.
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A
So I just kind of want to jump in here. She's talking about taking money out of a 401k because she's worried about the market dropping. If you do that, you pay penalties and taxes and you may end up losing as much just from that as you would from a market. Correction. I wouldn't do that. I would just keep that money there. Theoretically, if you were talking about just taking money out of an E Trade account that was, like you said, your play money, that would be a different story. I think in general, there are doomsday preppers out there hoarding gold and whatnot because they think the world's going to explode. But if you're not going to go all the way, I don't know. Plan for the future is if there's going to be a future. I think that's my general take on these things.
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B
I would say there is a middle ground here that you sound to me like someone, everyone has a different risk tolerance and you sound to me like you're scared and your risk tolerance is quite low. And that's fine. It is normal and reasonable and absolutely fine to have a relatively low risk to risk tolerance. That doesn't mean you shouldn't have a 401k. You should have a 401k. But maybe it means that your 401k shouldn't be as heavily invested in the stock market as maybe yours is. So let's. I think Jordan is right. Don't take money out of a 401k and spend it on your kitchen because that will incur penalties. These are called retirement accounts for a reason. You are meant to keep them through to retirement. But if you can't afford to lose say 30% of the money in there, if that's going to cause you a whole bunch of grief and you aren't willing to accept that, then by all means start moving money out of stocks and into something a bit safer. You can move into like short dated bond funds or something like that, which are not going to lose nearly as much of their value if and when the stock market crashes. And if you have a low tolerance for risk, if you can't afford the large drawdown, if you don't want to see your investments fall in value, then yeah, you can move out of the stock market and into something else that's different from spending it in cash.
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A
Yeah, I guess I'd add one other thing which is if you really do have immediate needs, like you know, your stove is broken or something like you really need to fix something in your house if you not crazy to take some money out of your paycheck and spend on that rather than saving it right now just because right now asset value, as we talked about this on the show all the time, are really high. The stock market is bubbly, yields on bonds are low. At moments like this, you don't typically expect money put in the market now to have a great return later on. I don't think your fear there is crazy. If you're thinking about maybe, you know, making a slightly smaller 401k contribution this year because there is something you really need to do that's not nuts. That's a reasonable decision, I think. But don't go raiding your 401k. That's all I do what Felix says, like, you know, change the allocation.
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B
Okay, Mr. Dan Schrader, who's next?
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F
Hi, Felix and team. This is Peter from Westchester. My question for you all is about the national debt. On this week's show, Jordan mentioned that he wasn't too worried about deficits. But it seems to me deficits have been adding up over the years and debt shows no sign of going south. So with debt continuing to grow and GDP growth being projected to be slow and government spending likely to grow, my question is when do we start worrying about deficits and the debt. When public debt is 100% of GDP, 120%, it seems a bit like global warming to me and it's going to get serious and if we don't start to do something about it soon, it's going to be very hard to tame. Anyway, love the show. I'm a happy Slate plus member. Thanks a lot.
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G
Bye.
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B
Thanks Peter. Thanks for listening to the November 4 episode. And yes, you're right that the debt to GDP ratios look like they're rising. Anna, do you remember the debate about Reinhart and Rogoff?
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E
I feel like this, this time is different.
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B
I feel like this is, this is the classic Reinhart and Rogoff question. So for the purposes of Peter, who may not have heard of Reinhardt and Rogoff, who are they and what did they say about debt to GDP ratios?
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E
There are economists who wrote a very well regarded book called this Time is Different and have written quite a bit about the significance of debt to GDP and the point at which it becomes a problem and becomes unsustainable. They are often talking about markets that aren't quite as developed.
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A
Well, there's a specific paper, so there was a very famous paper around the time around like 2010, right after recession, like got a lot of attention which was it said that when a country crosses the 90%, I believe debt to GDP ratio, the economy starts to suffer and slow down. And this was cited often as a rationale for austerity in the US and Europe around the world. And a lot of there were two issues. One was the Excel error heard around the world. It turned out that they had screwed up some of their spreadsheet and that had sort of altered some of their findings, which was kind of a sad slapstick way for this paper to end up because they are two very good, well regarded economists regardless of what you thought of this paper. And they've made a lot of interesting contributions. But the second thing was just whether or not they were confusing correlation with causation, no matter how many, you know, fancy regressions they ran in controls to some extent it seemed like a lot of these countries may have been piling up more debt because their economies were slowing, not vice versa. And so there's been this, I guess, long running existential question that Peter asks, how much debt is too much debt? Do we know? And I think there's definitely one school that says there's really no point where debt ever matters. You can go full on MMA theory, modern monetary theory, or there's another school which is very concerned about it. I think the answer is we just don't know. We know there are countries like Japan that, that can have like a 250% debt to GDP ratio and their economy doesn't seem to be suffering from the, you know, from that. It doesn't seem to be suffering. They can't even get enough inflation, which is something that you would expect to associate with high debt levels. You expect higher interest rates? You know, I think so insofar as when I said I'm not worried about deficits. It's just like if there is a magic threshold, which it's not clear there is for any country that prints its own currency, because you can always print your own currency. It just doesn't seem like we're, you know, I find it hard to believe we're close to it.
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E
Again, I think it's important to remember that it depends on the. Develop, the stage of development of the economy, because that's going to then relate to the confidence that other countries and foreign investors have in that country's ability to pay their debt.
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A
Yes, I think so. That's so right on. And you see these, like, hyperinflation issues in these, you know, developing countries that I think a lot of it is institutions. If you have a functioning government, people are going to think you're going to make good on what you owe if you do not. If you're Venezuela right now or Zimbabwe.
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E
I mean, that was why you had the exact same thing happen again. Because people lost confidence in the monetary policy, in the government's ability to run its own economy.
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A
Exactly. So it's like it's a political economy question. It's not just, is there some magic line?
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E
Exactly. And I also think it's important to remember that when you're thinking, thinking about debt, people often think about it in relation to, like, a person, like the amount of debt that a person has. And that's a problem. And I think it's very important to remember that countries are very different than people. Again, people cannot, in fact, print their own currency. It is, it is quite.
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A
You can have an ico.
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E
That's true. That's true. Maybe you can print your own currency.
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A
Now you can't, Anna.
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E
Yeah, that's true. But no, I do think this is just important to remember that there's nothing wrong with having deficits and there's nothing wrong with having a debt. I mean, traditionally, you want to have cyclical deficits. Having structural deficits may be a separate issue, but it's part of this cycle of the economy. It actually helps economies run more efficiently in a lot of ways.
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B
And I mean, where would we be if we couldn't point to sovereign yield curve?
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A
Exactly. So I just want to say one thing which, you know, Peter and some of the listeners, and I find it kind of remedial, but people always say, you know, we're going to become the next Greece, right? You know, oh my God, if we keep piling it up, we're going to become the next Greece. And what you always have to remember is just that these individual European countries do not print their own currency. They are on the euro. And that makes all the difference. It's why countries that are pegged to the dollar, for instance, often have issues with, you know, fiscal, I mean, financial scares. And in the case of Europe, why people really thought Greece might run out of money because it could not create more. That is just not a situation you run into if you print your own currency.
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B
Then trader.
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G
Let's have number three, isolate money.
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D
This is Michael in Colorado. I know that the US stock market's recently switched from T3 trade settlements, where your trade is actually officially done three days after you make it to T +2 settlement. My question is, why is it that in this day and age of everything being electronic, there's no more paper stock certificates? Why do we have anything other than t plus 0 or I guess maybe t plus 1 at the worst? Why do we need those couple extra days for trades to really settle? Is somebody making money off of that or is it really that hard to make it all work out? Thanks.
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B
Okay, I'm going to take this one.
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E
I'm really going to take.
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B
So excited. I wanted to answer this, but I'm happy to give it to Anna.
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A
I'm sitting back for this question. Go.
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E
Okay. I think it's important to remember, okay. A few things. One, it used to be way back in the day, trades actually settled more quickly. It wasn't until the 60s, actually, that you really started to expand to like T +5 because you had so much paperwork. But now we've, we've been shortening that span. But I think it's really important to remember that even in this day and age where you think everything is electronic and it's really easy to settle, it is not easy as you think it is, especially depending on. Depending on the type of securities that you're trading. Also, I think it's important to remember that when you're trading, you're often trading on money you may not immediately have. By which I mean like say You're a private equity firm, and you have $1 billion of commitments. You don't have $1 billion sitting in your bank account. You do capital calls. And how quickly your client's fund can range from two days to 10 days. So it can make it very complicated to manage your cash when you're trading. And if states, if trades settle very quickly, that can make managing your cash quite a bit more complicated.
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B
Okay, So I find that answer not particularly satisfying to Michael in Colorado, because he's talking about the stock market. He's talking about liquid public equities, not weird private equity capital calls. And let me make my own stab at this one, because there's this general feeling that, I mean, clearing and settlement has always been the most boring bit of the market, and you can more or less ignore it. And it's good if it's boring, and it's good if you can ignore it. More recently, there has become this idea that faster is better, and if you can settle these trades more quickly, that would be a good thing. And shouldn't we try and do everything faster? And I guess my question is, why is faster better? I don't see a problem. If you are trading in the stock market, I'm perfectly happy to assume that you're basically a rich person. You can wait a couple of days to get your money. If you want to sell your stocks, I think you should be able to wait a couple of days. And you probably shouldn't have stocks if you can't wait a couple of days. And more to the point, things happen in the stock market. You get weird flash crashes. You get obscure, like glitches in the way that things trade. And you want to be able to reverse those trades. You want to be able to have enough time if something completely crazy happens, to step in, go back to the stock exchange, work out what went wrong, cancel out trades which were bad, and just keep on going. So. So I personally am perfectly happy with relatively slow settlement just because it gives people a bit of time to sort out the inevitable mistakes, and also because no one needs money that quickly.
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A
Can I ask. I want to actually just reiterate a part of his question, though, because it seems like Michael is concerned that this might be some sort of inefficiency, that there are some middlemen just skimming money off the system because we haven't gotten better at it. Is that the case? Or is there some valuable service, or is it just not adding much?
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E
Yeah. So it used to be called playing the float, where you were kind of making money off of this, but because of the way kind of fees and rates are right now, it's really negligible. You. You aren't making a ton of money by, like, holding assets that technically should have already settled. It's really not that big of a deal anymore. The reason it hasn't changed is. Or it's only changed to two plus two is really more because of inertia. And also, I agree with Felix. I think part of it is, is to keep a more, like, stable market because, again, things do happen. Also, trades don't always match. I mean, there are a lot of problems that I think people outside of the market don't understand that these things aren't quite as simple as it might appear on the outside.
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B
And I'll just jump in and say that, yeah, the thing about T +2 is that you agree to a trade on Monday at a certain price, $75 a share, and then the settlement happens on Wednesday at $75 a share. But the actual transfer of the money from the buyer to the seller happens on Wednesday. It's not like the buyer pays on Monday and then the seller gets on Wednesday, and there's some intermediary sitting on the money for two days and making interest. The settlement happens on Wednesday. See, I wouldn't worry too much about some greedy intermediary making money in the middle. Okay, let's do something more fundamental and like spiritual. Spiritual. Do you have a spiritual question for us?
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A
Quite a question. I want.
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G
Hi, guys. So my question is about financial reporting in general. I get this vibe sometimes when I'm listening to not just your podcast, but other financial news, or when I read a story about Chipotle being downgraded because they pay their employees too much. When I hear a story like that or see a story like that, I think of what kind of ghoul could write this without completely condemning the entire system? And the same thing when I listen to on your podcast, you talk about unemployment being low but not talking about the types of jobs. Those are absolutely abysmal. I guess my question is, are these moral questions something you guys talk about before the mic turns on, or is it completely eliminated from the discussion to begin with? Do you have to be a ghoul to be a financial reporter? Or is that something they kind of feed into you once you get in there? I'm not saying everyone there at Slick Money is a ghoul. I'm saying there's just a lot of humanity that's completely removed from financial reporting. Much like how after Trump was elected, the stock market. Shut up. So I guess my question is how do we change it without nationalizing everything? Thank you very much, and I hope you answered this question.
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B
And that's an awesome question. And the answer is no, you can't change it without nationalizing everything. So, yeah, if you want to move to a world where you have a perfect alignment between sort of labor and capital and human happiness and profit, then, yeah, you want common ownership of the means of production.
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E
And I'm going to disagree with that.
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A
Says the I'm not saying that that.
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B
World would be better than the world we live in, but I'm just saying that, yeah, I think that nationalizing everything is one solution to this problem.
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A
So I think this is interesting because I don't consider myself a financial reporter. You know, I'm on this show as we talk a lot about finance. But, you know, my day job is kind of a policy and econ writer. And I think most people other than Slate Money listeners think of me as sort of a lefty pundit at this point. Like, I mean, that's, that's how I get quot and so I spent a lot of time ranting and raving about inequities in the world and in politics and policy and finance, whatnot. But I think, yeah, to some extent, when you do, if you want to talk about these issues on a granular level, especially when you are writing for, if you're writing for a Wall Street Journal audience, if you're writing for a business audience, you can't spend every other paragraph talking about how ordinary families are getting screwed. You can try and work that in a little bit, but I don't think you have to be a ghoul. You just have to know who you're writing for and who you're talking to. I like to.
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B
And also what the story is, because it is absolutely possible and legitimate to look at every story in America through a kind of human interest lens of like, what does this mean for the worker? And that's not what we do on this show because I feel like there are other lenses which are also interesting, not least the sort of flip side of that coin, which is what does this mean for the. For capital, for the investor? Like, we had a question just earlier in this show about someone who was worried about her 401k going down in value, which is, you know, what you could say, I suppose, was you should hope that your 401k goes down in value because that will be a sign that labor is finally having primacy over capital. And that workers are being better traded, better treated and that companies are paying their workers better or something like that. But I don't think that's a very satisfying answer.
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E
No, I agree. And I, I guess I'll say I probably come at this from a slightly different angle just in the sense that if you think people are ghoulish and how financial reporters talk about these things, you should see how it happens, like really behind the scenes where sometimes it's more that it is true that you, especially if you're in like emerging markets where you're often dealing with areas where there is potentially war and famine and you are in meetings where you have people entirely talking numbers. Yeah, I, I do think that there actually can be sometimes certain people who, who are troubled by that. And I do think that there is also a problem, I think sometimes in the market right now where you're very much encouraged not to think about the larger ramifications. That's just not what you're encouraging. That's not your job. Your job is to make money for your clients. And so I, I think when you're talking about financial reporting, I think if anything in a lot of the financial news they very often talk about the larger ramifications in the industry. Not so much.
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A
Yeah. I think also I almost want to throw this back at the questioner a little bit because if you are writing for the Wall Street Journal or Reuters and about the markets or companies and.
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B
But no, he's talking about us.
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A
He's talking about the whole, he's talking about the whole financial.
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B
But let's keep it to Slate money for the time being.
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A
Well, no, what I just want to say is if you, if you try to turn everything into a commentary on class inequity, the guys who run companies aren't going to listen to you. They're not going to read what you have to say. Instead they're just going to sit there and listen to cnbc. And I think CNBC is actually kind of ghoulish because they aren't just sort of morally neutral on a lot of this stuff. They are just like, they are like, yes, capital must fucking prevail. That is not all, obviously. Like John Harwood is not like that. But if you watch their morning shows, for instance, it often feels that way. And so, so I guess a little bit of remove and being able to just discuss what's actually going on in the world. And even on our show when we kind of step back and focus on sort of the high, the 10,000 foot take on how all these pieces are moving is important for getting people to listen to you, but also, yeah, like Felix said, for actually understanding what's happening. Because if you just focus, if you only focus on the human carnage, you might actually miss the kind of fundamental forces at play.
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B
And then the other thing which is absolutely worth adding is that, you know, I mean, just speaking personally, I don't actually believe in common ownership of the means of production. And I don't think that is necessarily the right solution to whatever ails this country. And I think that often the profit motive and the, you know, treating your people well motive are not in conflict with each other. And if you look at the most successful companies in America right now, if you look at Google and Facebook and Apple and Netflix or whatever, you don't hear a lot of stories about how, you know, they're based on slave labor. And the people, contractors, some of them have contractors, but the employees of those country companies are doing well. The people who are happily buying iPhones are getting value out of those iPhones. There's a lot of value being created by those companies, not just for shareholders, but also for the country and the world as a whole. And I think that's worth celebrating occasionally.
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E
I agree. And I think that sometimes there's a tendency to act as though like business is kind of a necessary evil and capitalism is a necessary evil and we kind of deal with this, but wouldn't it be better if we didn't have to? And I guess I just pretty thoroughly disagree with that. I mean, I'm someone who's a big believer in having kind of a healthy dialogue between capital and labor, between business and government. And sometimes one is a little bit more in the forefront. One is, sometimes is the other. But I think that if you look historically standard of living globally has improved because of the profit motive. That is, I think, pretty universally affected. Of course, I realize you could argue the environmental devastation, that's a separate issue. But I do think it's important to sometimes remember that the simple story that I think we sometimes think about capitalism is not always the only story.
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B
And the one story which we come back to over and over again on Slate Money, which is the biggest story, biggest financial and economic story in the world is China. And the fact is that when China had common ownership of the means of production, there was mass immiseration of the population. And when China moved to capitalist system, that did amazing things for the wealth and well being of the Chinese population. And you have, you've seen spikes in health and body weight and life expectancy and literacy and all of the things that we like, not just in China, around the world, but like China is a great example of how capitalism can create these things. And so while it's possible to be ideological about these things, I think you also have to be empirical, too.
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E
Slate Money, Capitalism is good.
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A
I mean, I think subcap 2/3 of slate Money says capitalism is great. One third is like, you know, appropriate amount of capitalism.
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B
But that's an excellent segue, actually. To question number five.
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G
Hi there. Alexander Hoffman, longtime listener, first time caller. I have a question that I would like each of the crew to answer about the others. That is, what are differences in values or perspectives that the three of you bring to your view of these topics? And how do you think that the others differ from you? Thank you very much. I'll take my answer off the air.
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B
You'll get your answer on the air. So this is a great question and I'll go first. Why not?
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A
I'm put one rule, Felix, you cannot use the word millennial.
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B
I was not going to use the word millennial.
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A
I'm preempting it, though.
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B
I was not going to use the word millennial. So, yeah, Jordan is the. So I'm a technocrat at heart, I think, and I basically rely on Jordan to care about politics because I kind of hate politics. And as we have seen increasingly over the past couple of years, politics, especially American politics, becomes increasingly important. And I just have no appetite for caring about the minutiae of congressional whatevers. And so as what happens in Washington becomes increasingly important financially and economically for America and the world, I find Jordan's ability to care about that stuff rather useful. And the really great thing about Anna is that I is that she comes out of the trading world, out of the buy side, out of people who actually need to make money by buying and selling securities and things in the world. And in that world, you can't be ideological. If you walk into that world with a preconceived notion of what the world should be and you try and place bets accordingly, you will lose all of your money very quickly. You rapidly realize that the conventional wisdom is nearly always right and that you need to understand why the world is. Is as it is. And for all that we can. We all have our priors and we all, like, love to talk about how things are broken and they're easy to fix. The fact is that mostly things are as they are for a reason. And I find Anna very good at sort of being unideological about these things. And Just reminding us all of the sort of inconvenient facts of the market. But anyway, I'd love to hear from you both.
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A
So I think that actually sums up, I think a lot of the basic dynamic on this show, I would say. I think I've also sort of maybe changed the way I approached these issues since we started this three and a half, four years ago. I think I used to sort of be like a. Just kind of wonky and academic about a lot of stuff that was like, the joke was like I would always give some answer about the natural rate of unemployment when something came up and Felix was like no, it's like a fucking momentum trade or something that would be like. And that was sort of fundamentally. I'm not someone who cares about finance qua finance. I'm sort of someone who cares about politics and the economy and how you make it run and how you make. How we can all kind of get along in this world. And as a result I care a lot about what goes on in Washington. I'm sort of provincial in that sense. I've always thought of Felix as someone who actually like enjoys both the art and folly of finance as sort of on an aesthetic level, but at the same time has a very high low view of the like, likes like kind of 10,000 foot views of what's going on globally and actually likes thinking, kind of synthesizing all of that. Whereas I'm sort of in the middle kind of trying to figure out what the hell's going on in Congress. And I think that dynamic, it's useful to have both of those. And I agree that Anna is actually the person who knows how the shit works. And that's like, like actually, like really, really important because you know, I remember I one time had a conversation with, you know, I went to, had a conversation with Kathy about what it would take to get a really in depth discussion like understanding of a finance like just a granular level. Is it possible as an outsider to really do it? And her an answer as someone who had been sort of in and out was no, you really can't. Like it's almost impossible to have that like just be even. She, she had said that having been out of it for a while, she felt like she didn't know anything anymore. It was just like, you know, it moves too quickly and people are too willing to lie to you all the time. And so actually having someone who kind of is there in the trenches and smarter than most people who are in the trenches and actually thoughtful about it is I Think a important dynamic.
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E
Well, appreciate that. Yeah. And I would say again, I, I've really enjoyed this year being on the show and it's been very interesting. I mean, I feel like I've definitely appreciated. I feel like Jordan has a kind of depth of understanding about US politics that I really appreciate. And also in a way that I think, although obviously comes I think from is a liberal, but I think is also not kind of knee jerk. And just believing the kind of consensus is really also thoughtful.
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A
Yeah, I am getting closer to full communism. I'm like after the tax bill, I'm just like, I'm mentioned there. But that's.
- [33:51]
E
Anyway, and, and I've also really enjoyed again, because I do come from a background where there is like, there are, I mean, look, I'm someone who, I like structure, I like spreadsheets, I like order, I like rules. And it's been kind of fun to sometimes have discussions with Felix where he'll often come at things from an angle that frankly just never would have occurred to me. And it's been really interesting to be like, oh, because, because it is true when you're in a certain world, not that everybody thinks exactly the same. I mean, you, you call yourself a contrarian investor, but at the end of the day, like, again, there are certain just things you assume and then when people question those, you're like, well, that's actually a very good question. And so I think that that's been a really interesting dynamic that we've had on the show.
- [34:31]
B
I will say, do those endowments always need to go up in value?
- [34:35]
A
I will stop saying, still going to hold that.
- [34:37]
E
I'm right about that one.
- [34:38]
A
I will say, politically, we obviously span a fairly narrow band of the left, but like, honestly, I don't think that's necessarily a problem. If you want, you know, if you want right wing people talking about finance, their entire TV networks devoted to that. So.
- [34:54]
E
Yeah. And I also though would. Just a side note, but that like a lot of people in finance are actually not quite as conservative as I think sometimes people on the outside think that they are.
- [35:04]
A
That's. That's true. I've even met like Rentech people like who literally make money for Robert Mercer, who are actually pretty liberal. So.
- [35:13]
B
So yeah, that is it for us this week. Thank you for listening to Slate Money. Keep on sending us those emails. Slate moneylate.com Listen to Lexicon Valley, which is hosted by John McWhorter, comes out every other Tuesday. It's a podcast about language and syntax and pet peeves. And etymology and neuro linguistics and all manner of sexy stuff like that. So that's@slate.com Lexicon Valley Many thanks to Dan Schrader for producing. We will talk to you next week on Slate Money. Sam.