August 29, 2025 • 43 mins
Could Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith make sense of the economic world that exists today?
In this episode of Merryn Talks Money, Merryn Somerset Webb speaks with Alec Cutler, portfolio manager of the Orbis Global Balanced and Cautious funds, Tom Slater, manager of Scottish Mortgage and Bloomberg senior reporter John Stepek about how portions of Smith’s bestsellers The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations relate to today’s issues in global trade, technology, renewable energy and investment strategies.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Hey you and gentlemen
and feaz Welcome Marin's Somerset Web. Hello, Maren Talks Money Listeners,
It's Maren Sunset Web. Before we get back to our
(00:24):
regular programming in early September, we are bringing you something
very special, recordings of the conversations I had at Pania
House for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Now, for those of
you who don't know, the Fringe is a three week
arts and culture festival that began in nineteen forty seven
and it takes place in Edinburgh in Scotland every August.
For the past few years I have been hosting conversations
about markets, economics and investing from one of the most
(00:48):
special locations in Edinburgh as part of this festival. I
do it from Panmia House, which is the last home
of Adam Smith, philosopher and father of modern economics, is
where he completed the last editions of his best sellers,
The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations.
This year we did a three day run was the
end of August, and we are bringing you the slightly
edited conversations from those three days. The panel I hosted
(01:12):
on the first day, featured Bloomberg senior reporter John Steppek,
Alex Cutler, who's portfolio manager of the August Global Balanced
and Cautious Funds, and Tom Slater, who's the manager of
the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Right, thank you all very very much for coming.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
I think in some cases again who's been before, new jokes,
new jokes.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Everything differently.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Thank you, and I'm particularly grateful to you because you know,
we sold out again this year. We sold out incredibly quickly.
The tickets were gone in a matter of weeks. And
that allows me and John and me in particular today
to everybody, I have a sold out show at the
Fringe over and over every year, and we say that,
and we never ever tell anybody how small this venue is.
And so one thing I would have appreciate from all
(02:00):
of you, you do not tell people that there are
only six y of you, because spread the general view
that you're in something akin to the McEwan Hall would
be greatful, right, Okay, brilliant, Thank you right onwards. You
probably all know how this works. What we do is
we choose an Adam Smith quote each not me obviously,
because I'm not doing the actual work here today, these
three each choose their favorite Adam Smith quote. I asked
(02:22):
them to tell us the quote, which they will all
read from their phones because they no longer have the
attentions pan to memorize them, and.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Then we will discuss the quote, right my guess.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Farst side, I have Tom Stater, who is the manager
of Scottish Morge's Investment Trust, who holds that an airport failure. Sean, yeah, yes,
I don't.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
We'll get onto that my loft.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
Alec Cutlow is the manager of the Aubist Global Balance
Fund and the multi asset funds there. You've been on
the podcast several times before, so those of you who
listen to the podcast will already know Alec well and
Tom quite well actually. And on my right of course,
John Steppek, who is what are you now?
Speaker 2 (03:03):
John?
Speaker 3 (03:03):
I am a senior reporter at Bloomberg, and I'm the
author of the Money Distilled newsletter, which I think may
have mentioned already at some point based excellent and you.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Should say not for it, but it is behind the paywall,
but the subscription is very very very good, valuable.
Speaker 4 (03:17):
I wanted to see who who owns the orbiscool balanced fund.
I saw all kinds of hair.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Who owns the almost global balanced fund?
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Trust me by the end of today, rushing out, rushing
out wealth, managing the audience. Be ready, right, We're going
to start with as I can't remember who's going to start.
You're going to start, Tom, Let's have your quote.
Speaker 5 (03:39):
Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production,
and the interest of the producer ought to be attended
to only so far as it may be necessary for
promoting that of the consumer. And I thought, maybe pick
four or five points as to why that's relevant to today.
Smith obviously insists that producers exist to serve consumers and
(04:05):
not the other way around. And yet in much of
global trade policy today, the focus is squarely on the
on the producers. So I guess the headlines have been
dominated by Trump's tariff policy and generally global trade barriers.
You see it in subsidization of certain industries. I guess
(04:29):
EU farming subsidies would be another great example of that.
Yet Smith was was single mindedly focused on the idea
that production only exists insofar as it makes consumers lives better.
So I think just a very very clear difference of
view from the one that policy makers have taken today.
(04:51):
I think you see it in big tech. I think
the reason that these these companies have been so successful
this because and they've they've made consumers lives easier. If
it's if it's Amazon, it's it's price selection, convenience. They've
they've given consumers better prices, they've given consumers greater selection,
They've they've given consumers greater convenience, and and and being
(05:14):
extraordinarily successful on the back of it. But obviously the
debate today is whether these technology companies have become too big,
whether their ability to generate profits from all different parts
of their business is no longer aligned with that you
know what Smith would focus on in terms of just
producing that sort of consumer surplus. Even see it in
(05:35):
the pharmaceutical industry and healthcare and drug pricing, and how
do you get the balance between and maximizing the value
for consumers there, who are of course patients, versus giving
for giving the company's sufficient profits to invest in R
and D and in developing new drugs, And how is
that burden shared. I think climate change and climate policy
is is almost an extreme example of this that you know,
(05:57):
if if we were you know, us focus on consumers.
Then we would of course take these the extremely low
price solar panels from China, extremely low priced electric vehicles
from China, and consumers will be deploying this technology and
incredibly rapid rate. Again, Smith would to say, you focus,
(06:21):
the only reason we're doing all of this is to
make consumers lives better.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
But I suppose that what policymakers would say to today
is that it's inconceivable that Adam Smith could have imagined
the type of world that we have today, interconnected in
the way that it is. And policymakers would say that
by protecting producers and by putting up security walls around
various industries, they are protecting consumers much longer term. And
(06:45):
by having productive industries inside their borders, they're creating the
incomes that then create consumers. And without those walls and barriers,
you may end up with countries that have consumers with
no actual to consume it. So you can look at
it from the other side as well, that that Smith
this quote was both designed for a different world.
Speaker 5 (07:08):
Yeah you could, I guess one. So, So I was
here three months ago, four months ago, and Sir John
ka was was talking and He made the point that
we sort of have come to fetishize manufacturing or heavy
industrial manufacturing, and actually, do we do we really do
(07:28):
we really need it? Do we really want it? You know,
if you take the COVID vaccine as an extreme of that,
you know, this, this this tiny, almost microscopic product which
had extreme value. You should we not be focusing on
on those, you know, the intellectual property, intellectual production. And
(07:50):
yet you know we government policy is so focused on
you know, heavy industrial making, machines, manufacturing.
Speaker 4 (07:59):
You know why it seems like be able to answer
that question, Well, it seems like where the where it
comes out is when when one country is effectively attacking
you using subsidies to kill off your industrial base and
then have an amazing gain in the future after they
put you out of business and you can't get it back.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
And I suppose you could take it back to Tom Wadge,
you said about you know, why would we not use
all the cheap solar panels coming out of China. But
that's the most mrcintilis country that we've seen in many,
many decades, and they now have their own very difficult
problem which they have a very low level of consumption
which they're not desperately trying to fix. So does it
make sense for us to absorb all the products from
(08:45):
such a hugely mrcantilis country.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Long time.
Speaker 5 (08:50):
Well, on the specific one, it depends how worried you
are about climate change, I guess, and how quickly you
think we should be going through that transition. But there's
there also has to be a degree of realism about this,
that that they have an industry producing, producing all the
equipment that you need to generate energy from renewable sources
that's on a completely different scale and a completely different
(09:11):
cost base from everybody else. Now we can we can
debate where we've got to, but if that there is
no part of the supply chain and in most form
of renewable energies that the Chinese don't dominate some part of,
so you know, we have to accept that trade off.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
It is interesting though, because I do weirdly enough, I
was looking at the chapter on tariffs a couple of
days ago because I was acused to see if you'd
said and he didn't say any quite pathy enough for
an actual quote with the Chapter's quite interesting because the
issues that he raises, although he is the kind of
free trade guy, and he's kind of anti cantialism, where
(09:49):
he says it might be okay, he talks about defense,
So there's a bit we're just talking about how basically
I didn't kind of fully understand it, but Britain's kind
of navy was protected, and what they were doing was
basically trying to avoid the Dutch from having a monopoly
on the kind of various sea trades. And he said
that this isn't very helpful for effective for consumers, but
(10:14):
it's a really good policy because it stops the Dutch from,
who are enemies, basically from you know, getting a strangle
hold on this important trade route. And the other issue
he did bring up interestingly was employment, which this kind
of surprising me actually, but he did talk about almost
exactly the thing that people in Middle America and in
you know, bits of Britain, post industrial bits of Britain
(10:36):
like Glasgow and Liverpool, talk about where you demolish an
industry so rapidly by opening it up to competition that
you create social uphaval. Now, I mean, Smith didn't really
kind of make a big deal of that. He didn't
think it was going to be a big problem because
he assumed that there'll be a lot of other employment
for most people to go into. And I think probably
(10:58):
either there was at the time, or or or probably
people just didn't really care as long as the lower
orders were, you know, involved in employment in some way,
even if it was FAMI labor. And but just think
it's really interesting that the same qualms even then are
basically the exact same ones that we've got today, and
we kind of still haven't found a solution or a
(11:19):
satisfactory solution. But I think if you look at China
as an enemy, I don't mean an enemy enemy, but
I think you know that threat, you know that's threat.
It's sort of like Coldish War type thing, then maybe
some you know, retreat from globalization is I guess justified
from from that point of view.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
It's a wonderful scart stories recently about renewable energy product
coming from China. I'll be able to turn off the turbines,
shut down the panels.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
Is that possible? I don't know.
Speaker 4 (11:50):
If you put have you put Chinese kit in the system, sure,
transformers and switches, you can do it. That's why you
need to buy German from Zemens. Energy needed by Germans.
They would never know. Germans have always been our friend.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
I'm going to take that as a perfect time to
move on to your quote I say I was.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
Going to change my mind.
Speaker 4 (12:13):
Okay, sure, science is the greatest antidote to the poison
of enthusiasm and superstition. And I love that quote because
it says to me that Adam Smith was the first
contrarian where you're looking for from the investing context, what
(12:35):
we do every day is try and find where society
is just run off in a direction, using their imagination,
not weighed down by facts or physics, to come up
with something that we should all be doing.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Give us an example.
Speaker 4 (12:51):
It's really hard to think of one, but I think
the war on carbon might be a good one. And
if you invest into that, or you search that and say, well,
this is impossible. You can't have a grid that's entirely
dependent on wind and solar, it's not going to work physically.
You can invest against that, and then when the physics
(13:12):
finally determine that your superstition and enthusiasm aren't really working out,
you can make money doing that. What was interesting about
this quote is superstition made sense, particularly in his time.
They were still burning witches for the first half of
his life, so that kind of he was probably followed
(13:34):
enough logic to think that probably wasn't a good idea.
But enthusiasm seemed like a really weird word. And Laura,
my wife, was sitting in the front row. We were
at lunch yesterday with Sir David Edward, who's a lawyer
in town, and he said, in the during the Scottish Enlightenment,
(13:57):
enthusiasm was code for zelotry tree. That's that's unbounded by logic.
So I don't know why they just didn't call it,
tell it try, but enthusia, enthusiasm was the word they used.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Okay, so you are now saying, I sit with the
renewable energy as your example. You now feel that the
enthusiasm for it has hito a rule of physical physical
reality when it comes to the grid.
Speaker 4 (14:23):
Well, who has a power bill here in the room?
Who pays a power bills? Have you seen it hit
the limit yet? And you're by the way, you're you're
being subsidized more and more and more because the politicians
don't really want you to see that the physical constraints
on the grid impacting you in your pocketbook. But I
think we're certainly seeing it, and we're seeing the governments
(14:45):
react as you would expect them to. The one thing
that we as contrionce can can count on is politicians
changing their mind and that's when we kind of get
the big payoff. But there is a governor in Maryland
who passed edicts saying we need to shut down all
the coal fired power plants in Maryland and then about
(15:06):
and that was three four years ago. Last month the
power bills all went up thirty forty percent over the
ensuing couple of years in Maryland, and he started getting
heckled because of.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
The coast of subsidizing tabines and because.
Speaker 4 (15:20):
The grid had too much has now too much renewables
and not enough spinning reserve in it to keep the
nurse in the system. And he said, well, it's not
my fault, because that's what politicians say. And they say, well,
whose fault is it? And he said, it's the utilities
for shutting down the power plants, so they can change.
It will never be their fault. But they can go
(15:40):
to bed one night saying that it's all about renewables.
We need to shut down biomass and coal fired plants,
and then they can wake up the next morning and
you could have your Prime minister come up the next
morning and say I am the champion of north sea
natural gas. There are no limits to what politicians can do.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Okay, so what's the solution?
Speaker 1 (16:01):
I mean, Tom, Tom says, what really matters here is
how much you care about climate change, how much you
how much you think we should effectively suffer in order
to attempt to mitigate it.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
What would you say the solution is?
Speaker 4 (16:12):
I'd say the solution is what we're seeing now, and
that's a that's the physicists and grid engineers and chemists
and quite frankly, the oil companies and the utilities finally
getting their seat at the table. No one's no engineers
are invited to the seat at the platitude table. They
(16:34):
didn't get They get invited afterwards when the platitudes blow
up in our face. And they're now being invited to
the table, and they're they're starting to craft an appropriate
grid that has diverse energy sources feeding into it so
you can actually have reliable, attractively priced energy.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
Okay, I have got another example of yours.
Speaker 4 (17:00):
This is what we do for a living. So ten
years ago in Europe, we don't need defense to the
point where and we won't remember this because our memories
aren't long enough. Europe wanted to pass a thing called
social taxonomy. Doesn't ever remember what social taxonomy was. It
was following on the heels of green taxonomy, which still
(17:21):
exists in Europe, where they said we're going to charge
anybody who produces carbon and extra tax so that they're
incentive not to produce something that makes carbon, which of
course makes all your industry leave and go to China,
who then take over and they'll charge you whatever they
want when they're the only one who can make ass
turbans or something. So they were going to follow that
(17:42):
huge success with social taxonomy, which would be applying a
tax to companies that produce social ill the top of
the list. Sob Ry Mattal Leonardo Talas, Bae system defense companies.
This is not I'm not making this up. We're going
(18:04):
to apply a massive tax on those companies so that
they decide to produce less. How is that based in
any kind of rational thought with regard to how the
world works. And we've seen when Russia invaded Ukraine for
the second time, people at that time were thinking they
never invaded them because they didn't have a patch on
their green suits that had a Russian flag on it,
(18:26):
so they really didn't invade crimea uh, And now there's
a we've gone it completely one hundred and eighty degrees
the other way. We're selling our defense stocks. Oh, by
the way, just rolling back.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Because defos because you've had a great rum with them,
and now they're expensive.
Speaker 4 (18:42):
They're because everyone wants to own them. Yeah, and the
social responsible funds. Everyone remembers those that slap sustainable on
the end of your fun name. When they did that,
they were no longer allowed to hold defense contractors back
then because they were evil. They've all now decided to
(19:02):
change their mandates such as that they can on it.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
So we now know that we now know that defense
is the social good, right, Yes, it comes right down
to it. There is no more social good than the
ability to defend yourself. So defense is now elevated from
the worst thing in the world to the greatest thing
in the world.
Speaker 4 (19:15):
And ESG has become ESG D. You can't have ESG
without D. So now we can all own defense contractors
and we're now selling have been selling those off for
a couple of years now.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
And replacing them with.
Speaker 4 (19:31):
Right now, we're replacing with biotech. Still have quite a
bit of.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Nuclear eating with tom If we're getting into biotech.
Speaker 4 (19:40):
It's fascinating. Biotech is really cool and quite frankly, a
lot of ourdea our ideas come from the incredible research
that the the Bailey Diifferts of the world do. It's
super high quality, and that means that we don't have
to do it because we're not really small. We're just contrurions.
(20:01):
We're the ones that we'll run into a burning building
and check out the art, see what we can get out.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
With gorgeously symbiotic relationship between baches, bus the contreating a
go on.
Speaker 3 (20:13):
The biotech stuff just is that just because it's.
Speaker 4 (20:15):
Cheap, it's just pure deep value at this point, so
not thematic you could if it, if it comes big enough,
then we'll craft a theme around it so we can
tell a story and people can understand it. But we're
able to buy biotechs that we're selling at one hundred
times earnings two years ago for mid teens or in
some cases single digit multiples.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
What are your big ideas in biotech at the moment.
Speaker 5 (20:38):
Tom, Yeah, it's very kind of say we're very smart,
But the implication of what you're saying is we've owned
these stocks that have gone down a very long way
in the plast couple of years, which is true. But
I'm one of the things that I think is really
interesting in biotech is the idea that some of the
(20:58):
tools that we talk about moreen really things like ai
I just offer a real hope of addressing some of
the big challenges in biotech. We're really just scratching our
scratching the surface of our understanding of, you know, the
molecular basis of disease, and if we can actually use
(21:22):
these tools to ingest the huge volumes of information, if
we can use these tools to automate some of the
processes which you know today involve a PhD at a
lab bench with perpettes. If you if you can actually
start to bring robotics and they into these processes, then
that you offer out the prospect of massively lowering the
(21:43):
cost and massively increasing the speed at which you can
do this research. And I think that's that's the piece
of it that's most exciting to.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
Me, and that that that's exactly the kind of thing.
There is this ongoing conversation going on around the AI
bubble and the extent of cap expending inside AI, and
the extent to which this is all going to be
hardby disappointing. But that's kind of that's the kind of
theme that would suggest there may be not so much
disappointment in there.
Speaker 5 (22:10):
I think you could be excited about AI without having
a particularly strong view on that. But if you to
give you some idea of the scale of what's happening here,
I think gross fixed capital formation, so all capital investment
by all companies in the UK is of the order
of six or seven hundred billion dollars. Microsoft, Apple, Meta
(22:34):
and Google between the four of them, will spend four
hundred billion next year. So those four companies will spend
two thirds of the total capital expenditure of the UK.
And they're doing that because they get really strong demand signals.
You know, it's a game we're not playing in and
(22:54):
you know, is it too much, Well, to them, it
doesn't really matter. You know that those numbers are big
in re context accept the profitability of these online giants,
so you know they can use that kit in other ways.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
So I think they will, there will there be you
will three of those four names find.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
That they've wasted their money?
Speaker 1 (23:14):
I don't.
Speaker 5 (23:15):
I don't think any of them will find that they've
wasted the money. Whether they've gone too fast or too slow,
we don't know. But what you can see at the
moment is more and more applications of this technology because
it has such huge potential. And now it's maybe not
you know, sitting you know, chatting to your to your phone,
to your new AI friend, but actually, you know, like
(23:36):
in areas like drug discovery or managing energy grids or
there's just there's so many applications where just about everything
we do as a society is short of intelligence. It's it's,
you know, if you can provide machine intelligence at low cost,
it will make everything better.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
You're nodding.
Speaker 4 (23:55):
I think there there is an existential risk element to
their spending. I don't think it's all about, look what
we can do and we can make a ton more money.
It's geez, this might be a winner take most type
of deal, which is the type of deal that they
all were born on and succeeded in. What happens if
(24:18):
this new thing, this next thing that comes is going
to be dislike the thing that we won, but it's
going to be a tsunami over what we want. So
Google's the easiest one to see. In search. They dominate search,
they have ninety percent market share and search are they
going to have ninety percent market share? And answer? Which
is replacing search? So I think that there's that, and
(24:44):
you know, from our perspective, we and looking over your portfolio,
it seems like you've come up with the same answer.
You rather feed them Ammo. You rather own the AMMO
providers like an Nvidia, or the suppliers to Nvidia like
Taiwan Semi, or the suppliers to them like ASM. Then
you would try to pick between is it Google or
Amazon or Microsoft or Meta or now new ones. So
(25:07):
you're supposed to these are supposed to be the best
industries in the world because there's no new competitors. Seven
Ai brand new and x Ai funded by the richest
man in the world, brand new competitors, and the Chinese
all coming in at attacking the same problem. So you've
gone from having a monopoly like Google has in search
(25:28):
to being one of seven or eight players trying to
attack this next winner, make winner get most market we
feel much more comfortable providing the ammoing.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Away from the very very high valuations.
Speaker 4 (25:43):
Predictives in a win and I'm not sure if you
look at the way they're spending, they're not sure who's
going to win either. They're freaking out.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
In part John, what does it mean for the ordinary
investors in the run with.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
This place or what they I think? I mean, I
think the things do interesting, But long story shot, I'll
say the thing that I've been saying for probably far
too long, which is that arguably US stocks are overvalued
relative to the rest of the world. And also, you know,
if you if you're based in the UK, but you've
(26:15):
been shunning UK stocks for obvious reasons, then actually they're
they're pretty cheap. And certainly there was recently a piece
of research that Schroeders put out that everyone's talking about,
which is that Americans are actually because Americans are now thinking, actually,
I'm not sure that I should be quite as exposed
(26:35):
to the US exactly, particularly the Magnificent seven, which is
the big A I stocks. They're moving out of US
assets and one of the things that they are buying
in quite significant amounts is the UK stocks.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
Believe finally we've been waiting, so yes to stop buying us. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:55):
All we're waiting for now is maybe some consecutive inflows
from actual UK investors in the UK equity funds, because certainly,
according to the data, they've been selling consistently every month
for I think it's three and a half years now.
You've got to think at some point the selling's got
to speak exhausted.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Original rage comes to a rescue with you who still
have some pension as.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
We get the British eya going.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
That's what that, right, John, This is a This is
a long win.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
Otherwise I promise I would have memorized it.
Speaker 4 (27:34):
Right.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
The man's system is often so enamored with the supposed
beauty of his own ideal plan of government that he
cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it.
He goes on to establishment establish it completely and in
all its parts, without any regard either to the great
interests or the strong prejudices which may oppose it.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
He seems to.
Speaker 3 (27:53):
Imagine that he can arrange the different members of a
great society with as much ease as the hand arranges
the different pieces upon a chess board. He does not
consider that the pieces upon the chess board have any
other principle emotion beside that which the hand impresses upon them,
but that in the great chess board the human society,
every single piece is a principle of motion of its own,
(28:15):
altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to
impress upon it.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
One of Seth's relation and happy ones is nearly there.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
Nearly there, hang in, hang in, there's not as long
as we go. If those two principles coincide and act
in the same direction, the game of human society will
go on easily and harmoniously, and it's very likely to
be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different,
the game will go on miserably, and the society must
be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
We're going to have a new role form.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
I'll make it a.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
Short one tomorrow.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
This is a quote from the Theory of Moral Sentiments,
which was Adam Smith's first book, and I sort of
think it as been the first self help book of
a published really, because it's all about human psychology and
why we are the way we are and how we
think and what that means about how we should say,
shape society. And the thing I think is important about
this quote particularly is that it sums up his approach
(29:12):
to economics and why personally speaking, I think it's superior
to the other kind of big names. So I would
say that both Marx and Kanes, who are probably two
other major economy economic schools are thinking. They take a
very top down view. So Marx is very much the
kind of grand scale of history, class war. It's not
(29:33):
really about people, it's about what group you are in.
And Cain's is kind of thinking about society and the
economy as a machine with inputs and outputs, and you
can tweak this and you can tweak that. But Smith
isn't doing any of that. He's actually starting from individuals
and what they want and understanding that everyone who's got
(29:55):
their own desires, everyone's got their own motivation, and so
the best thing you can do is to kind of
just provide an environment that just basically lets people get
on with it. So that's an argument for a kind
of it's not an argument for no government at all,
absolutely not, He's not a radical libertarian at all, but
(30:16):
as an argument for a smallish and simple state, one
that we can all understand, and I think more than
anything else. That's second bit. And obviously we've got a
massive state. But I think the real problem is that
we now have governments that are full of people. We
are surrounded by men and women of system. Now everybody
(30:37):
wants to dictate what everyone else can do. I mean
one reason that I mean, one of the biggest kind
of employment areas of growth in the UK over the
past twenty years has been in HR. The proportion of
workers in the UK who work in HR has quadrupled
in the last twenty years, and the UK now has
(30:58):
more HR people per head of staff than anywhere except
for the Netherlands. So you've got all these people. And
then this is before we get to the legal profession.
And this is before we get to i f as
and tax advisors. Yeah no, I'm just thinking, I mean,
how many HR people are in the room. But yeah,
(31:23):
and this this is all part partly because we've made
the system so complicated because of a desire to dictate
and push people into doing various ways of behavior, rather
than stepping back and saying, actually, you know, things could
be much better if we just within a narrow framework
of defending property rights and you know, preventing kind of
(31:44):
you know, violence in the streets. We just let everyone
get on with what they wanted to do and make
the best of their own lives without trying to dictate everything.
And so I think that's where we kind of need
to get back to. I mean, I saw sort of
that nice Rachel Raves.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
I think.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
I think Adam Smith would see it as a kind
of final boss of a kind of gradual deterioration over
a long period of time that probably started with Gordon
Brown is the one who I blame most for the
way the governance and the kind of budget side of
things has deteriorated into a steady stream of stealth taxes
(32:26):
with the kind of aim of socially engineered and different
chunks of society and you know little boxes.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
I mean, we were talking earlier in saying that Adam
Smith would simply not have been able to conceive of
a world filled with this much debt, of a state
that took up forty percent plus of GDP, with debt
to gypay one hundred percent, with a yet another black
hole of fifty our billion coming up in ten minutes.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
Et cetera.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
This is he couldn't have understood it so far removed
from the world in which he left that we have
no quotes for levels have stated it.
Speaker 3 (33:01):
Well, that's to be fair, we do because he does.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
That was the test.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
There's a point, isn't that what he talks about how
France and England both at one hundred percent to GDP thing.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
About it in seventeen, Yeah, it was.
Speaker 3 (33:17):
It was war related. But and his point about that was, Look,
when a state gets that indebted, it never ever pays
it back. They either default on it overtly or the
default on it by debasing the currency. And the funny thing.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Is that's basically what we still do.
Speaker 3 (33:33):
It's much easier now because we don't have gold and
silver underpinning the you know, the monetary system. And it
used to be that if you wanted to debase the currency,
you had to tell everyone to bring their coins back
to the Mints. The Mints would then stamp them and
say they're only worth this now and then give you
back you know, maybe like one in one in kind
of one in thirteen or one in twelve. We kept
(33:55):
back the king and that's how he would make the
money from everyone kind of you know, from deep in
the currency but just now you can just you know,
do it by printing more money and interest rates and
you can keep it going as well. You can extend
and pretend for longer.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
John, I know we're having a chat at breakfast this
morning that you two would have loved this.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
I'm sorry weren't there.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
We're having a chat about how Rachel Reeves could raise
more money and we're trying to think of things in
the UK that are not yet taxed. I can't tell
you how hard it is. Don't have any ideas. Anyone
can think of.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
Anything anything you want to do public We figured she's
she's going to get there anyway. She's going to get
there anyway. From the podcast, you know, thinking guilt, but
she can't go for that.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Anyone got any ideas there's something you can think of
that isn't yet taxed at all. I'm not saying I advocated.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
But they are.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
Every single financial transaction is tax we have every now
we have we have that the highest stamp duty in
the world apart from Ireland, had fifty basis points and everything.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
But a transaction that's megatax. I mean that's a wealth tax.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
That's an actual wealth tax in action.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
Every single time you buy us all shares. So yeah, nope,
not that anything else.
Speaker 4 (35:08):
If you think, if you think about the government particularly,
I don't know, can I say this government will always
endeavor to shoot themselves in the foot. They can tax childbirth.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
We haven't got very much of that. We need more
of that.
Speaker 4 (35:25):
No, well we'll get less, of course, we don't want less.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
We are.
Speaker 4 (35:29):
I just you told me to find something.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
That we could catch, although we've further do contact child
because everything round.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
That's a great idea. Everyone's got one of those. But
isn't that council tax? Well yeah it is, it is.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
I mean one of the things that that we that
you and I have discussed and we discussed for is
that you know, every mistake in the UK is effectively
policy driven.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
We can fix it all.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
We get very doom story about it, but absolutely everything
is fixable, and we get this vague when we took that.
We're getting close to the bit where there is no
longer a choice but to change policy so as to
fix it.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
There we have a massive crisis, or we have massive
crisis and then we fix it. We're getting quite close
to that.
Speaker 3 (36:13):
Then, yeah, well I suppose it's because that the whole
thing about the Laugher cuve, and I know that people
obviously there's a kind of backlash against.
Speaker 2 (36:20):
The ideas doing what the leve a cove is.
Speaker 3 (36:22):
So laugher cuve is basically, see, if you put a
tax it's zero percent, obviously you'll collect no money. But
if you put it at one hundred percent, you'll also
collect no money because nobody will do the thing that
you're taxing one hundred percent. So basically, logically there must
be a peak point somewhere between those rates that collects
more revenue. And it might be at forty, it may
(36:43):
be at sixty. If you go above that, the amount
you get will start going down, even though the tax
rate is higher. And it sort of feels as if
Britain as a whole is that the peak of its
laugher cuve, because the tax take is a percentage of
GDP is what with thout eight percent?
Speaker 2 (37:01):
Now, why has this ever been?
Speaker 1 (37:02):
Every time we've nudged up to thirty eight percent historically
we immediately.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
Sort of collapsed back down again.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
There's a sort of weird dynamic globally where every country
seems to have its own level of tax relative to
GDP that it's prepared to pay. So Scandinavian countries are
prepared to pay more than we are. Generally, it doesn't
matter what you do to tax rates. In the UK,
you can't get it above thirty eight percent, So we're.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
Hitting it as much lower in the US, isn't it. Well, yeah,
you've got your own level lower.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
It's lower than us, and you know, Germany are happy
with forty four percent.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
You know.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
I think that's part of the way that you pay
for public services as well, because obviously one reason the
Americans tax takers are percentage of GDP is so low
is because the medical course is so high in the
coverupment privately. And I think one of the people always
say that, oh yeah, but Britain doesn't have a high
tax take compared to other European countries. But state pension
is very different to most countries. A lot of people
(37:59):
keep saying it's very it's very low.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
It's not.
Speaker 3 (38:02):
And it's also it's consistent as a whole. It's everyone
gets the same state pension basically, assuming you know you've
paid in the sort of paid in is the wrong word,
assuming you have ticked the n I box enough. But
you know, in Frans you don't automatically get a specific
amount of state pension, and I think in most Eurozone
countries it's graded based on you know, what you got
(38:23):
paid when you were working in various other measures. So
all of these things are really hard to compare. But
I actually don't think the British taxpayers or even American
taxpayers are that different to European ones. It's just to
pay for more stuff out of fair enough.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
Tom, what's you then investing at the moment. What's your
favorite stock on your portfolio?
Speaker 5 (38:45):
Well, they're all my favorites.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
No, no, no, that's not true. I know that's not true. Okay,
let me help you.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
Let me have you what did you most recently buy
for the portfolio?
Speaker 5 (38:59):
So my most recent spreending expree was in private companies,
which is not particularly helpful. But I guess on the
public side, one of the things that I think is
really quite exciting, and it's a trend that has been
going for twenty years now, which is that we've been
spending more and more and more of our money online.
(39:23):
And I think that trend is far from exhausted, and
there are companies in lots of different parts of the
world where they're not replacing established formal retail, but they're
giving the consumers their first opportunities to get access to
goods and services at reasonable prices. So see Limited in
(39:44):
Southeast Asia, Coupang in South Korea, Mercado Libre in Latin America.
But they are also moving from just providing goods and
services online to providing financial services online. And these consumers
have never had access the high quality financial services. The
banking sectors in their respective countries were not set up
(40:05):
to serve individuals, and so the opportunity is not just
in retail, but it's all the financial services. So there's
there's three fee that I think have these opportunities that
will run for at least the next three decades.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
Excellent, Thank you. See that's the kind of question. Look
what you got.
Speaker 4 (40:24):
I can't think in decades as a contrarian inventor, but
UK industrials in midcaps back yourselves and you get paid
absolutely all right.
Speaker 1 (40:38):
I really hope you caught that old video the still
of that letter.
Speaker 4 (40:41):
So we drove from the ilsky down to here and
we stopped at tracks Crew Chin Crooking Pumped hydro Station,
a marvel of British Engineering built in commission in nineteen
sixty five, a great year it. Laura and I were
born in nineteen sixty five and then arrived and walked
(41:02):
up to go to see the tattoo and went by Balfour.
Bad signs everywhere because stuff's going wrong here in the
city and it needs to get fixed. Any kind of
foundation work that's done in the world usually a thirty
percent chance. So you're going to use Keller, which are
the companies that build the foundations for any project. And
the cool thing about Keller is they get paid first,
(41:23):
so we all know that every major development goes busted.
You want to invest in the foundation company because the
PowerPoint financing scheme works really well and at least until
the foundation guy gets paid. But Keller sells for seven
times earnings and a four percent of a an yield.
This is an amazing company that's lasted forever. And if
(41:44):
you believe in AI, if you believe in onshoring reshoring,
if you believe in that we're in a cold war
and that AI is the new arms race, you're going
to build a lot of infrastructure. So why is there
a company in the UK selling it seven times earnings
that's involved in every one of those sink things. You
can't build a single thing without a foundation, and here's
(42:06):
a company that leads in the world in that. And
part of it is that it just happens to be
on the London Stock Exchange and no one wants to
own it because it's there and the money keeps flowing out.
But we'll just keep buying it and buying or buying
it today. We were buying it a year ago, we
were buying it two years ago, we were buying it
three years ago.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
One day it'll come good.
Speaker 4 (42:24):
One day it'll come good for a buds up in
three years and we'll just keep plugging away at these
British midcaps that are really cheap and oh really well.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
Man, we appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Thank you, Alec John, you've got anything to add quickly?
Two seconds, gold gold, gold, gold, gold mine has been
the real.
Speaker 3 (42:45):
Have been stunning this after that very very long periods of.
Speaker 2 (42:48):
Intail, and we did tell you so, didn't.
Speaker 3 (42:51):
We much doubled this ship?
Speaker 2 (42:53):
Did?
Speaker 5 (42:54):
Okay?
Speaker 1 (42:54):
I think we have to stop and this is anything
absolutely urgent from you, and beyond that, just say thank
you so much to my wonderful panel. Listen to all
of you for helping us sell out this huge room
over and over. Thank you, thanks for listening to this
(43:15):
week's Marin Dogs Money. If you like our show, rate review,
and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, I keep sending
questions or comments to Marrior Money at Bloomberg dot net.
You can also follow me in John on Twitter or
x I'm at Mariness w and John is John Underscore STEPEC.
This episode was hosted by me Marin Zumset Web was
produced by some Sidi sound designed by Blake Maple's Special
(43:36):
thanks to my guests, to Blairbarrows and to all the
rest of the team at Paniel House.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Hey you and gentlemen
and feaz Welcome Marin's Somerset Web. Hello, Maren Talks Money Listeners,
It's Maren Sunset Web. Before we get back to our
(00:24):
regular programming in early September, we are bringing you something
very special, recordings of the conversations I had at Pania
House for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Now, for those of
you who don't know, the Fringe is a three week
arts and culture festival that began in nineteen forty seven
and it takes place in Edinburgh in Scotland every August.
For the past few years I have been hosting conversations
about markets, economics and investing from one of the most
(00:48):
special locations in Edinburgh as part of this festival. I
do it from Panmia House, which is the last home
of Adam Smith, philosopher and father of modern economics, is
where he completed the last editions of his best sellers,
The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations.
This year we did a three day run was the
end of August, and we are bringing you the slightly
edited conversations from those three days. The panel I hosted
(01:12):
on the first day, featured Bloomberg senior reporter John Steppek,
Alex Cutler, who's portfolio manager of the August Global Balanced
and Cautious Funds, and Tom Slater, who's the manager of
the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Right, thank you all very very much for coming.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
I think in some cases again who's been before, new jokes,
new jokes.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Everything differently.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Thank you, and I'm particularly grateful to you because you know,
we sold out again this year. We sold out incredibly quickly.
The tickets were gone in a matter of weeks. And
that allows me and John and me in particular today
to everybody, I have a sold out show at the
Fringe over and over every year, and we say that,
and we never ever tell anybody how small this venue is.
And so one thing I would have appreciate from all
(02:00):
of you, you do not tell people that there are
only six y of you, because spread the general view
that you're in something akin to the McEwan Hall would
be greatful, right, Okay, brilliant, Thank you right onwards. You
probably all know how this works. What we do is
we choose an Adam Smith quote each not me obviously,
because I'm not doing the actual work here today, these
three each choose their favorite Adam Smith quote. I asked
(02:22):
them to tell us the quote, which they will all
read from their phones because they no longer have the
attentions pan to memorize them, and.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Then we will discuss the quote, right my guess.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Farst side, I have Tom Stater, who is the manager
of Scottish Morge's Investment Trust, who holds that an airport failure. Sean, yeah, yes,
I don't.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
We'll get onto that my loft.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
Alec Cutlow is the manager of the Aubist Global Balance
Fund and the multi asset funds there. You've been on
the podcast several times before, so those of you who
listen to the podcast will already know Alec well and
Tom quite well actually. And on my right of course,
John Steppek, who is what are you now?
Speaker 2 (03:03):
John?
Speaker 3 (03:03):
I am a senior reporter at Bloomberg, and I'm the
author of the Money Distilled newsletter, which I think may
have mentioned already at some point based excellent and you.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Should say not for it, but it is behind the paywall,
but the subscription is very very very good, valuable.
Speaker 4 (03:17):
I wanted to see who who owns the orbiscool balanced fund.
I saw all kinds of hair.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Who owns the almost global balanced fund?
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Trust me by the end of today, rushing out, rushing
out wealth, managing the audience. Be ready, right, We're going
to start with as I can't remember who's going to start.
You're going to start, Tom, Let's have your quote.
Speaker 5 (03:39):
Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production,
and the interest of the producer ought to be attended
to only so far as it may be necessary for
promoting that of the consumer. And I thought, maybe pick
four or five points as to why that's relevant to today.
Smith obviously insists that producers exist to serve consumers and
(04:05):
not the other way around. And yet in much of
global trade policy today, the focus is squarely on the
on the producers. So I guess the headlines have been
dominated by Trump's tariff policy and generally global trade barriers.
You see it in subsidization of certain industries. I guess
(04:29):
EU farming subsidies would be another great example of that.
Yet Smith was was single mindedly focused on the idea
that production only exists insofar as it makes consumers lives better.
So I think just a very very clear difference of
view from the one that policy makers have taken today.
(04:51):
I think you see it in big tech. I think
the reason that these these companies have been so successful
this because and they've they've made consumers lives easier. If
it's if it's Amazon, it's it's price selection, convenience. They've
they've given consumers better prices, they've given consumers greater selection,
They've they've given consumers greater convenience, and and and being
(05:14):
extraordinarily successful on the back of it. But obviously the
debate today is whether these technology companies have become too big,
whether their ability to generate profits from all different parts
of their business is no longer aligned with that you
know what Smith would focus on in terms of just
producing that sort of consumer surplus. Even see it in
(05:35):
the pharmaceutical industry and healthcare and drug pricing, and how
do you get the balance between and maximizing the value
for consumers there, who are of course patients, versus giving
for giving the company's sufficient profits to invest in R
and D and in developing new drugs, And how is
that burden shared. I think climate change and climate policy
is is almost an extreme example of this that you know,
(05:57):
if if we were you know, us focus on consumers.
Then we would of course take these the extremely low
price solar panels from China, extremely low priced electric vehicles
from China, and consumers will be deploying this technology and
incredibly rapid rate. Again, Smith would to say, you focus,
(06:21):
the only reason we're doing all of this is to
make consumers lives better.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
But I suppose that what policymakers would say to today
is that it's inconceivable that Adam Smith could have imagined
the type of world that we have today, interconnected in
the way that it is. And policymakers would say that
by protecting producers and by putting up security walls around
various industries, they are protecting consumers much longer term. And
(06:45):
by having productive industries inside their borders, they're creating the
incomes that then create consumers. And without those walls and barriers,
you may end up with countries that have consumers with
no actual to consume it. So you can look at
it from the other side as well, that that Smith
this quote was both designed for a different world.
Speaker 5 (07:08):
Yeah you could, I guess one. So, So I was
here three months ago, four months ago, and Sir John
ka was was talking and He made the point that
we sort of have come to fetishize manufacturing or heavy
industrial manufacturing, and actually, do we do we really do
(07:28):
we really need it? Do we really want it? You know,
if you take the COVID vaccine as an extreme of that,
you know, this, this this tiny, almost microscopic product which
had extreme value. You should we not be focusing on
on those, you know, the intellectual property, intellectual production. And
(07:50):
yet you know we government policy is so focused on
you know, heavy industrial making, machines, manufacturing.
Speaker 4 (07:59):
You know why it seems like be able to answer
that question, Well, it seems like where the where it
comes out is when when one country is effectively attacking
you using subsidies to kill off your industrial base and
then have an amazing gain in the future after they
put you out of business and you can't get it back.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
And I suppose you could take it back to Tom Wadge,
you said about you know, why would we not use
all the cheap solar panels coming out of China. But
that's the most mrcintilis country that we've seen in many,
many decades, and they now have their own very difficult
problem which they have a very low level of consumption
which they're not desperately trying to fix. So does it
make sense for us to absorb all the products from
(08:45):
such a hugely mrcantilis country.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Long time.
Speaker 5 (08:50):
Well, on the specific one, it depends how worried you
are about climate change, I guess, and how quickly you
think we should be going through that transition. But there's
there also has to be a degree of realism about this,
that that they have an industry producing, producing all the
equipment that you need to generate energy from renewable sources
that's on a completely different scale and a completely different
(09:11):
cost base from everybody else. Now we can we can
debate where we've got to, but if that there is
no part of the supply chain and in most form
of renewable energies that the Chinese don't dominate some part of,
so you know, we have to accept that trade off.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
It is interesting though, because I do weirdly enough, I
was looking at the chapter on tariffs a couple of
days ago because I was acused to see if you'd
said and he didn't say any quite pathy enough for
an actual quote with the Chapter's quite interesting because the
issues that he raises, although he is the kind of
free trade guy, and he's kind of anti cantialism, where
(09:49):
he says it might be okay, he talks about defense,
So there's a bit we're just talking about how basically
I didn't kind of fully understand it, but Britain's kind
of navy was protected, and what they were doing was
basically trying to avoid the Dutch from having a monopoly
on the kind of various sea trades. And he said
that this isn't very helpful for effective for consumers, but
(10:14):
it's a really good policy because it stops the Dutch from,
who are enemies, basically from you know, getting a strangle
hold on this important trade route. And the other issue
he did bring up interestingly was employment, which this kind
of surprising me actually, but he did talk about almost
exactly the thing that people in Middle America and in
you know, bits of Britain, post industrial bits of Britain
(10:36):
like Glasgow and Liverpool, talk about where you demolish an
industry so rapidly by opening it up to competition that
you create social uphaval. Now, I mean, Smith didn't really
kind of make a big deal of that. He didn't
think it was going to be a big problem because
he assumed that there'll be a lot of other employment
for most people to go into. And I think probably
(10:58):
either there was at the time, or or or probably
people just didn't really care as long as the lower
orders were, you know, involved in employment in some way,
even if it was FAMI labor. And but just think
it's really interesting that the same qualms even then are
basically the exact same ones that we've got today, and
we kind of still haven't found a solution or a
(11:19):
satisfactory solution. But I think if you look at China
as an enemy, I don't mean an enemy enemy, but
I think you know that threat, you know that's threat.
It's sort of like Coldish War type thing, then maybe
some you know, retreat from globalization is I guess justified
from from that point of view.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
It's a wonderful scart stories recently about renewable energy product
coming from China. I'll be able to turn off the turbines,
shut down the panels.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
Is that possible? I don't know.
Speaker 4 (11:50):
If you put have you put Chinese kit in the system, sure,
transformers and switches, you can do it. That's why you
need to buy German from Zemens. Energy needed by Germans.
They would never know. Germans have always been our friend.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
I'm going to take that as a perfect time to
move on to your quote I say I was.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
Going to change my mind.
Speaker 4 (12:13):
Okay, sure, science is the greatest antidote to the poison
of enthusiasm and superstition. And I love that quote because
it says to me that Adam Smith was the first
contrarian where you're looking for from the investing context, what
(12:35):
we do every day is try and find where society
is just run off in a direction, using their imagination,
not weighed down by facts or physics, to come up
with something that we should all be doing.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Give us an example.
Speaker 4 (12:51):
It's really hard to think of one, but I think
the war on carbon might be a good one. And
if you invest into that, or you search that and say, well,
this is impossible. You can't have a grid that's entirely
dependent on wind and solar, it's not going to work physically.
You can invest against that, and then when the physics
(13:12):
finally determine that your superstition and enthusiasm aren't really working out,
you can make money doing that. What was interesting about
this quote is superstition made sense, particularly in his time.
They were still burning witches for the first half of
his life, so that kind of he was probably followed
(13:34):
enough logic to think that probably wasn't a good idea.
But enthusiasm seemed like a really weird word. And Laura,
my wife, was sitting in the front row. We were
at lunch yesterday with Sir David Edward, who's a lawyer
in town, and he said, in the during the Scottish Enlightenment,
(13:57):
enthusiasm was code for zelotry tree. That's that's unbounded by logic.
So I don't know why they just didn't call it,
tell it try, but enthusia, enthusiasm was the word they used.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Okay, so you are now saying, I sit with the
renewable energy as your example. You now feel that the
enthusiasm for it has hito a rule of physical physical
reality when it comes to the grid.
Speaker 4 (14:23):
Well, who has a power bill here in the room?
Who pays a power bills? Have you seen it hit
the limit yet? And you're by the way, you're you're
being subsidized more and more and more because the politicians
don't really want you to see that the physical constraints
on the grid impacting you in your pocketbook. But I
think we're certainly seeing it, and we're seeing the governments
(14:45):
react as you would expect them to. The one thing
that we as contrionce can can count on is politicians
changing their mind and that's when we kind of get
the big payoff. But there is a governor in Maryland
who passed edicts saying we need to shut down all
the coal fired power plants in Maryland and then about
(15:06):
and that was three four years ago. Last month the
power bills all went up thirty forty percent over the
ensuing couple of years in Maryland, and he started getting
heckled because of.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
The coast of subsidizing tabines and because.
Speaker 4 (15:20):
The grid had too much has now too much renewables
and not enough spinning reserve in it to keep the
nurse in the system. And he said, well, it's not
my fault, because that's what politicians say. And they say, well,
whose fault is it? And he said, it's the utilities
for shutting down the power plants, so they can change.
It will never be their fault. But they can go
(15:40):
to bed one night saying that it's all about renewables.
We need to shut down biomass and coal fired plants,
and then they can wake up the next morning and
you could have your Prime minister come up the next
morning and say I am the champion of north sea
natural gas. There are no limits to what politicians can do.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Okay, so what's the solution?
Speaker 1 (16:01):
I mean, Tom, Tom says, what really matters here is
how much you care about climate change, how much you
how much you think we should effectively suffer in order
to attempt to mitigate it.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
What would you say the solution is?
Speaker 4 (16:12):
I'd say the solution is what we're seeing now, and
that's a that's the physicists and grid engineers and chemists
and quite frankly, the oil companies and the utilities finally
getting their seat at the table. No one's no engineers
are invited to the seat at the platitude table. They
(16:34):
didn't get They get invited afterwards when the platitudes blow
up in our face. And they're now being invited to
the table, and they're they're starting to craft an appropriate
grid that has diverse energy sources feeding into it so
you can actually have reliable, attractively priced energy.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
Okay, I have got another example of yours.
Speaker 4 (17:00):
This is what we do for a living. So ten
years ago in Europe, we don't need defense to the
point where and we won't remember this because our memories
aren't long enough. Europe wanted to pass a thing called
social taxonomy. Doesn't ever remember what social taxonomy was. It
was following on the heels of green taxonomy, which still
(17:21):
exists in Europe, where they said we're going to charge
anybody who produces carbon and extra tax so that they're
incentive not to produce something that makes carbon, which of
course makes all your industry leave and go to China,
who then take over and they'll charge you whatever they
want when they're the only one who can make ass
turbans or something. So they were going to follow that
(17:42):
huge success with social taxonomy, which would be applying a
tax to companies that produce social ill the top of
the list. Sob Ry Mattal Leonardo Talas, Bae system defense companies.
This is not I'm not making this up. We're going
(18:04):
to apply a massive tax on those companies so that
they decide to produce less. How is that based in
any kind of rational thought with regard to how the
world works. And we've seen when Russia invaded Ukraine for
the second time, people at that time were thinking they
never invaded them because they didn't have a patch on
their green suits that had a Russian flag on it,
(18:26):
so they really didn't invade crimea uh, And now there's
a we've gone it completely one hundred and eighty degrees
the other way. We're selling our defense stocks. Oh, by
the way, just rolling back.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Because defos because you've had a great rum with them,
and now they're expensive.
Speaker 4 (18:42):
They're because everyone wants to own them. Yeah, and the
social responsible funds. Everyone remembers those that slap sustainable on
the end of your fun name. When they did that,
they were no longer allowed to hold defense contractors back
then because they were evil. They've all now decided to
(19:02):
change their mandates such as that they can on it.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
So we now know that we now know that defense
is the social good, right, Yes, it comes right down
to it. There is no more social good than the
ability to defend yourself. So defense is now elevated from
the worst thing in the world to the greatest thing
in the world.
Speaker 4 (19:15):
And ESG has become ESG D. You can't have ESG
without D. So now we can all own defense contractors
and we're now selling have been selling those off for
a couple of years now.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
And replacing them with.
Speaker 4 (19:31):
Right now, we're replacing with biotech. Still have quite a
bit of.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Nuclear eating with tom If we're getting into biotech.
Speaker 4 (19:40):
It's fascinating. Biotech is really cool and quite frankly, a
lot of ourdea our ideas come from the incredible research
that the the Bailey Diifferts of the world do. It's
super high quality, and that means that we don't have
to do it because we're not really small. We're just contrurions.
(20:01):
We're the ones that we'll run into a burning building
and check out the art, see what we can get out.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
With gorgeously symbiotic relationship between baches, bus the contreating a
go on.
Speaker 3 (20:13):
The biotech stuff just is that just because it's.
Speaker 4 (20:15):
Cheap, it's just pure deep value at this point, so
not thematic you could if it, if it comes big enough,
then we'll craft a theme around it so we can
tell a story and people can understand it. But we're
able to buy biotechs that we're selling at one hundred
times earnings two years ago for mid teens or in
some cases single digit multiples.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
What are your big ideas in biotech at the moment.
Speaker 5 (20:38):
Tom, Yeah, it's very kind of say we're very smart,
But the implication of what you're saying is we've owned
these stocks that have gone down a very long way
in the plast couple of years, which is true. But
I'm one of the things that I think is really
interesting in biotech is the idea that some of the
(20:58):
tools that we talk about moreen really things like ai
I just offer a real hope of addressing some of
the big challenges in biotech. We're really just scratching our
scratching the surface of our understanding of, you know, the
molecular basis of disease, and if we can actually use
(21:22):
these tools to ingest the huge volumes of information, if
we can use these tools to automate some of the
processes which you know today involve a PhD at a
lab bench with perpettes. If you if you can actually
start to bring robotics and they into these processes, then
that you offer out the prospect of massively lowering the
(21:43):
cost and massively increasing the speed at which you can
do this research. And I think that's that's the piece
of it that's most exciting to.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
Me, and that that that's exactly the kind of thing.
There is this ongoing conversation going on around the AI
bubble and the extent of cap expending inside AI, and
the extent to which this is all going to be
hardby disappointing. But that's kind of that's the kind of
theme that would suggest there may be not so much
disappointment in there.
Speaker 5 (22:10):
I think you could be excited about AI without having
a particularly strong view on that. But if you to
give you some idea of the scale of what's happening here,
I think gross fixed capital formation, so all capital investment
by all companies in the UK is of the order
of six or seven hundred billion dollars. Microsoft, Apple, Meta
(22:34):
and Google between the four of them, will spend four
hundred billion next year. So those four companies will spend
two thirds of the total capital expenditure of the UK.
And they're doing that because they get really strong demand signals.
You know, it's a game we're not playing in and
(22:54):
you know, is it too much, Well, to them, it
doesn't really matter. You know that those numbers are big
in re context accept the profitability of these online giants,
so you know they can use that kit in other ways.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
So I think they will, there will there be you
will three of those four names find.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
That they've wasted their money?
Speaker 1 (23:14):
I don't.
Speaker 5 (23:15):
I don't think any of them will find that they've
wasted the money. Whether they've gone too fast or too slow,
we don't know. But what you can see at the
moment is more and more applications of this technology because
it has such huge potential. And now it's maybe not
you know, sitting you know, chatting to your to your phone,
to your new AI friend, but actually, you know, like
(23:36):
in areas like drug discovery or managing energy grids or
there's just there's so many applications where just about everything
we do as a society is short of intelligence. It's it's,
you know, if you can provide machine intelligence at low cost,
it will make everything better.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
You're nodding.
Speaker 4 (23:55):
I think there there is an existential risk element to
their spending. I don't think it's all about, look what
we can do and we can make a ton more money.
It's geez, this might be a winner take most type
of deal, which is the type of deal that they
all were born on and succeeded in. What happens if
(24:18):
this new thing, this next thing that comes is going
to be dislike the thing that we won, but it's
going to be a tsunami over what we want. So
Google's the easiest one to see. In search. They dominate search,
they have ninety percent market share and search are they
going to have ninety percent market share? And answer? Which
is replacing search? So I think that there's that, and
(24:44):
you know, from our perspective, we and looking over your portfolio,
it seems like you've come up with the same answer.
You rather feed them Ammo. You rather own the AMMO
providers like an Nvidia, or the suppliers to Nvidia like
Taiwan Semi, or the suppliers to them like ASM. Then
you would try to pick between is it Google or
Amazon or Microsoft or Meta or now new ones. So
(25:07):
you're supposed to these are supposed to be the best
industries in the world because there's no new competitors. Seven
Ai brand new and x Ai funded by the richest
man in the world, brand new competitors, and the Chinese
all coming in at attacking the same problem. So you've
gone from having a monopoly like Google has in search
(25:28):
to being one of seven or eight players trying to
attack this next winner, make winner get most market we
feel much more comfortable providing the ammoing.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Away from the very very high valuations.
Speaker 4 (25:43):
Predictives in a win and I'm not sure if you
look at the way they're spending, they're not sure who's
going to win either. They're freaking out.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
In part John, what does it mean for the ordinary
investors in the run with.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
This place or what they I think? I mean, I
think the things do interesting, But long story shot, I'll
say the thing that I've been saying for probably far
too long, which is that arguably US stocks are overvalued
relative to the rest of the world. And also, you know,
if you if you're based in the UK, but you've
(26:15):
been shunning UK stocks for obvious reasons, then actually they're
they're pretty cheap. And certainly there was recently a piece
of research that Schroeders put out that everyone's talking about,
which is that Americans are actually because Americans are now thinking, actually,
I'm not sure that I should be quite as exposed
(26:35):
to the US exactly, particularly the Magnificent seven, which is
the big A I stocks. They're moving out of US
assets and one of the things that they are buying
in quite significant amounts is the UK stocks.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
Believe finally we've been waiting, so yes to stop buying us. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:55):
All we're waiting for now is maybe some consecutive inflows
from actual UK investors in the UK equity funds, because certainly,
according to the data, they've been selling consistently every month
for I think it's three and a half years now.
You've got to think at some point the selling's got
to speak exhausted.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Original rage comes to a rescue with you who still
have some pension as.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
We get the British eya going.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
That's what that, right, John, This is a This is
a long win.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
Otherwise I promise I would have memorized it.
Speaker 4 (27:34):
Right.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
The man's system is often so enamored with the supposed
beauty of his own ideal plan of government that he
cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it.
He goes on to establishment establish it completely and in
all its parts, without any regard either to the great
interests or the strong prejudices which may oppose it.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
He seems to.
Speaker 3 (27:53):
Imagine that he can arrange the different members of a
great society with as much ease as the hand arranges
the different pieces upon a chess board. He does not
consider that the pieces upon the chess board have any
other principle emotion beside that which the hand impresses upon them,
but that in the great chess board the human society,
every single piece is a principle of motion of its own,
(28:15):
altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to
impress upon it.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
One of Seth's relation and happy ones is nearly there.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
Nearly there, hang in, hang in, there's not as long
as we go. If those two principles coincide and act
in the same direction, the game of human society will
go on easily and harmoniously, and it's very likely to
be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different,
the game will go on miserably, and the society must
be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
We're going to have a new role form.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
I'll make it a.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
Short one tomorrow.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
This is a quote from the Theory of Moral Sentiments,
which was Adam Smith's first book, and I sort of
think it as been the first self help book of
a published really, because it's all about human psychology and
why we are the way we are and how we
think and what that means about how we should say,
shape society. And the thing I think is important about
this quote particularly is that it sums up his approach
(29:12):
to economics and why personally speaking, I think it's superior
to the other kind of big names. So I would
say that both Marx and Kanes, who are probably two
other major economy economic schools are thinking. They take a
very top down view. So Marx is very much the
kind of grand scale of history, class war. It's not
(29:33):
really about people, it's about what group you are in.
And Cain's is kind of thinking about society and the
economy as a machine with inputs and outputs, and you
can tweak this and you can tweak that. But Smith
isn't doing any of that. He's actually starting from individuals
and what they want and understanding that everyone who's got
(29:55):
their own desires, everyone's got their own motivation, and so
the best thing you can do is to kind of
just provide an environment that just basically lets people get
on with it. So that's an argument for a kind
of it's not an argument for no government at all,
absolutely not, He's not a radical libertarian at all, but
(30:16):
as an argument for a smallish and simple state, one
that we can all understand, and I think more than
anything else. That's second bit. And obviously we've got a
massive state. But I think the real problem is that
we now have governments that are full of people. We
are surrounded by men and women of system. Now everybody
(30:37):
wants to dictate what everyone else can do. I mean
one reason that I mean, one of the biggest kind
of employment areas of growth in the UK over the
past twenty years has been in HR. The proportion of
workers in the UK who work in HR has quadrupled
in the last twenty years, and the UK now has
(30:58):
more HR people per head of staff than anywhere except
for the Netherlands. So you've got all these people. And
then this is before we get to the legal profession.
And this is before we get to i f as
and tax advisors. Yeah no, I'm just thinking, I mean,
how many HR people are in the room. But yeah,
(31:23):
and this this is all part partly because we've made
the system so complicated because of a desire to dictate
and push people into doing various ways of behavior, rather
than stepping back and saying, actually, you know, things could
be much better if we just within a narrow framework
of defending property rights and you know, preventing kind of
(31:44):
you know, violence in the streets. We just let everyone
get on with what they wanted to do and make
the best of their own lives without trying to dictate everything.
And so I think that's where we kind of need
to get back to. I mean, I saw sort of
that nice Rachel Raves.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
I think.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
I think Adam Smith would see it as a kind
of final boss of a kind of gradual deterioration over
a long period of time that probably started with Gordon
Brown is the one who I blame most for the
way the governance and the kind of budget side of
things has deteriorated into a steady stream of stealth taxes
(32:26):
with the kind of aim of socially engineered and different
chunks of society and you know little boxes.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
I mean, we were talking earlier in saying that Adam
Smith would simply not have been able to conceive of
a world filled with this much debt, of a state
that took up forty percent plus of GDP, with debt
to gypay one hundred percent, with a yet another black
hole of fifty our billion coming up in ten minutes.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
Et cetera.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
This is he couldn't have understood it so far removed
from the world in which he left that we have
no quotes for levels have stated it.
Speaker 3 (33:01):
Well, that's to be fair, we do because he does.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
That was the test.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
There's a point, isn't that what he talks about how
France and England both at one hundred percent to GDP thing.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
About it in seventeen, Yeah, it was.
Speaker 3 (33:17):
It was war related. But and his point about that was, Look,
when a state gets that indebted, it never ever pays
it back. They either default on it overtly or the
default on it by debasing the currency. And the funny thing.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Is that's basically what we still do.
Speaker 3 (33:33):
It's much easier now because we don't have gold and
silver underpinning the you know, the monetary system. And it
used to be that if you wanted to debase the currency,
you had to tell everyone to bring their coins back
to the Mints. The Mints would then stamp them and
say they're only worth this now and then give you
back you know, maybe like one in one in kind
of one in thirteen or one in twelve. We kept
(33:55):
back the king and that's how he would make the
money from everyone kind of you know, from deep in
the currency but just now you can just you know,
do it by printing more money and interest rates and
you can keep it going as well. You can extend
and pretend for longer.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
John, I know we're having a chat at breakfast this
morning that you two would have loved this.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
I'm sorry weren't there.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
We're having a chat about how Rachel Reeves could raise
more money and we're trying to think of things in
the UK that are not yet taxed. I can't tell
you how hard it is. Don't have any ideas. Anyone
can think of.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
Anything anything you want to do public We figured she's
she's going to get there anyway. She's going to get
there anyway. From the podcast, you know, thinking guilt, but
she can't go for that.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Anyone got any ideas there's something you can think of
that isn't yet taxed at all. I'm not saying I advocated.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
But they are.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
Every single financial transaction is tax we have every now
we have we have that the highest stamp duty in
the world apart from Ireland, had fifty basis points and everything.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
But a transaction that's megatax. I mean that's a wealth tax.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
That's an actual wealth tax in action.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
Every single time you buy us all shares. So yeah, nope,
not that anything else.
Speaker 4 (35:08):
If you think, if you think about the government particularly,
I don't know, can I say this government will always
endeavor to shoot themselves in the foot. They can tax childbirth.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
We haven't got very much of that. We need more
of that.
Speaker 4 (35:25):
No, well we'll get less, of course, we don't want less.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
We are.
Speaker 4 (35:29):
I just you told me to find something.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
That we could catch, although we've further do contact child
because everything round.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
That's a great idea. Everyone's got one of those. But
isn't that council tax? Well yeah it is, it is.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
I mean one of the things that that we that
you and I have discussed and we discussed for is
that you know, every mistake in the UK is effectively
policy driven.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
We can fix it all.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
We get very doom story about it, but absolutely everything
is fixable, and we get this vague when we took that.
We're getting close to the bit where there is no
longer a choice but to change policy so as to
fix it.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
There we have a massive crisis, or we have massive
crisis and then we fix it. We're getting quite close
to that.
Speaker 3 (36:13):
Then, yeah, well I suppose it's because that the whole
thing about the Laugher cuve, and I know that people
obviously there's a kind of backlash against.
Speaker 2 (36:20):
The ideas doing what the leve a cove is.
Speaker 3 (36:22):
So laugher cuve is basically, see, if you put a
tax it's zero percent, obviously you'll collect no money. But
if you put it at one hundred percent, you'll also
collect no money because nobody will do the thing that
you're taxing one hundred percent. So basically, logically there must
be a peak point somewhere between those rates that collects
more revenue. And it might be at forty, it may
(36:43):
be at sixty. If you go above that, the amount
you get will start going down, even though the tax
rate is higher. And it sort of feels as if
Britain as a whole is that the peak of its
laugher cuve, because the tax take is a percentage of
GDP is what with thout eight percent?
Speaker 2 (37:01):
Now, why has this ever been?
Speaker 1 (37:02):
Every time we've nudged up to thirty eight percent historically
we immediately.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
Sort of collapsed back down again.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
There's a sort of weird dynamic globally where every country
seems to have its own level of tax relative to
GDP that it's prepared to pay. So Scandinavian countries are
prepared to pay more than we are. Generally, it doesn't
matter what you do to tax rates. In the UK,
you can't get it above thirty eight percent, So we're.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
Hitting it as much lower in the US, isn't it. Well, yeah,
you've got your own level lower.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
It's lower than us, and you know, Germany are happy
with forty four percent.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
You know.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
I think that's part of the way that you pay
for public services as well, because obviously one reason the
Americans tax takers are percentage of GDP is so low
is because the medical course is so high in the
coverupment privately. And I think one of the people always
say that, oh yeah, but Britain doesn't have a high
tax take compared to other European countries. But state pension
is very different to most countries. A lot of people
(37:59):
keep saying it's very it's very low.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
It's not.
Speaker 3 (38:02):
And it's also it's consistent as a whole. It's everyone
gets the same state pension basically, assuming you know you've
paid in the sort of paid in is the wrong word,
assuming you have ticked the n I box enough. But
you know, in Frans you don't automatically get a specific
amount of state pension, and I think in most Eurozone
countries it's graded based on you know, what you got
(38:23):
paid when you were working in various other measures. So
all of these things are really hard to compare. But
I actually don't think the British taxpayers or even American
taxpayers are that different to European ones. It's just to
pay for more stuff out of fair enough.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
Tom, what's you then investing at the moment. What's your
favorite stock on your portfolio?
Speaker 5 (38:45):
Well, they're all my favorites.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
No, no, no, that's not true. I know that's not true. Okay,
let me help you.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
Let me have you what did you most recently buy
for the portfolio?
Speaker 5 (38:59):
So my most recent spreending expree was in private companies,
which is not particularly helpful. But I guess on the
public side, one of the things that I think is
really quite exciting, and it's a trend that has been
going for twenty years now, which is that we've been
spending more and more and more of our money online.
(39:23):
And I think that trend is far from exhausted, and
there are companies in lots of different parts of the
world where they're not replacing established formal retail, but they're
giving the consumers their first opportunities to get access to
goods and services at reasonable prices. So see Limited in
(39:44):
Southeast Asia, Coupang in South Korea, Mercado Libre in Latin America.
But they are also moving from just providing goods and
services online to providing financial services online. And these consumers
have never had access the high quality financial services. The
banking sectors in their respective countries were not set up
(40:05):
to serve individuals, and so the opportunity is not just
in retail, but it's all the financial services. So there's
there's three fee that I think have these opportunities that
will run for at least the next three decades.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
Excellent, Thank you. See that's the kind of question. Look
what you got.
Speaker 4 (40:24):
I can't think in decades as a contrarian inventor, but
UK industrials in midcaps back yourselves and you get paid
absolutely all right.
Speaker 1 (40:38):
I really hope you caught that old video the still
of that letter.
Speaker 4 (40:41):
So we drove from the ilsky down to here and
we stopped at tracks Crew Chin Crooking Pumped hydro Station,
a marvel of British Engineering built in commission in nineteen
sixty five, a great year it. Laura and I were
born in nineteen sixty five and then arrived and walked
(41:02):
up to go to see the tattoo and went by Balfour.
Bad signs everywhere because stuff's going wrong here in the
city and it needs to get fixed. Any kind of
foundation work that's done in the world usually a thirty
percent chance. So you're going to use Keller, which are
the companies that build the foundations for any project. And
the cool thing about Keller is they get paid first,
(41:23):
so we all know that every major development goes busted.
You want to invest in the foundation company because the
PowerPoint financing scheme works really well and at least until
the foundation guy gets paid. But Keller sells for seven
times earnings and a four percent of a an yield.
This is an amazing company that's lasted forever. And if
(41:44):
you believe in AI, if you believe in onshoring reshoring,
if you believe in that we're in a cold war
and that AI is the new arms race, you're going
to build a lot of infrastructure. So why is there
a company in the UK selling it seven times earnings
that's involved in every one of those sink things. You
can't build a single thing without a foundation, and here's
(42:06):
a company that leads in the world in that. And
part of it is that it just happens to be
on the London Stock Exchange and no one wants to
own it because it's there and the money keeps flowing out.
But we'll just keep buying it and buying or buying
it today. We were buying it a year ago, we
were buying it two years ago, we were buying it
three years ago.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
One day it'll come good.
Speaker 4 (42:24):
One day it'll come good for a buds up in
three years and we'll just keep plugging away at these
British midcaps that are really cheap and oh really well.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
Man, we appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Thank you, Alec John, you've got anything to add quickly?
Two seconds, gold gold, gold, gold, gold mine has been
the real.
Speaker 3 (42:45):
Have been stunning this after that very very long periods of.
Speaker 2 (42:48):
Intail, and we did tell you so, didn't.
Speaker 3 (42:51):
We much doubled this ship?
Speaker 2 (42:53):
Did?
Speaker 5 (42:54):
Okay?
Speaker 1 (42:54):
I think we have to stop and this is anything
absolutely urgent from you, and beyond that, just say thank
you so much to my wonderful panel. Listen to all
of you for helping us sell out this huge room
over and over. Thank you, thanks for listening to this
(43:15):
week's Marin Dogs Money. If you like our show, rate review,
and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, I keep sending
questions or comments to Marrior Money at Bloomberg dot net.
You can also follow me in John on Twitter or
x I'm at Mariness w and John is John Underscore STEPEC.
This episode was hosted by me Marin Zumset Web was
produced by some Sidi sound designed by Blake Maple's Special
(43:36):
thanks to my guests, to Blairbarrows and to all the
rest of the team at Paniel House.
Host
Merryn Somerset Webb
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